As soon as they got inside the Sheik let one go. It cracked against Sammy’s nose, and blood spurted. Sammy’s nose felt bigger than his whole face and he couldn’t see, but he moved in swinging. Sheik caught him on the nose again. Sammy went down with Sheik on top of him, kicking and swinging, spitting into the bloody face under him, his whole body quivering in a frenzy of hate, shrieking until it became a chant, “You killed Christ. You killed Christ”
When Sammy finally stopped fighting back, Sheik left him there and went to eat his lunch. Sammy tried to stay there until he stopped bleeding, but it wouldn’t stop, so he had to walk back to the schoolyard that way. Miss Can ran over and dragged him into the ladies’ room. While she washed off the blood he stood there terribly white and terribly silent. No tears. Just his mouth set hard and his eyes ugly.
“I think your nose is broken,” she said.
“It don’t hurt much,” said Sammy.
“You’d better come into the office and lie down.”
“Jeez, look where I am! The guys better not see me in the girls’ can.”
She didn’t know how to treat him. She was new here and she had never seen kids like this before. If he would only cry she could comfort him like an injured child. But he would not let her.
“Hey, what the hell’s the matter with that guy sayin I killed Christ? The dirty bastard.”
“You must not talk like that,” said Miss Carr. “Christ died so that everyone should forgive each other and live in brotherly love.”
“Yeah?” said Sammy. “How about Sheik? Don’t he believe in Christ?”
“Well, yes,” said Miss Carr, “but…”
“I gotta sit down,” said Sammy, “my head’s spinnin.”
Miss Carr tried to put her arms around him but he drew away. He was like a little injured animal snarling at the hand that is trying to help it.
“You won’t have to worry from now on,” she said. “I’m going to have a talk with Sheik. And I think I’ll ask some of the bigger boys to look after you.”
His voice made her sympathy sound patronizing. “Who ast ya to? I’m no sissy. I c’n take care-a myself.”
Sheik felt called upon to avenge Christ every day. Sammy accepted his beatings as part of the school routine. He never tried to avoid them, to sneak off after school. He just absorbed it with the terrible calm of a sparring partner. He would come home every night with his eyes swollen or his lip cut and his mother would hold him in her arms and cry, Sammele, Sammele, but he never cried with her, only held himself stiff in her arms, a stranger to her.
After a while, there was no satisfaction left in it for Sheik any more. It had become manual labor, slaughterhouse work. Sheik began to look around for more responsive victims. It even left Sheik with a strange kind of fear for Sammy. Somewhere along the line it had become the victim’s triumph. Sammy would talk back to Sheik any time he liked. There was nothing Sheik could do but beat him up again. All the suffering that Sammy had swallowed instead of crying out had formed a hard cold ball of novocaine in the pit of his stomach that deadened all his nerves.
Life moved faster for Sammy. He was learning. The Glicksteins’ poverty possessed him, but in a different way from Israel. He was always on the lookout to make a dollar. The way the little Christians put on Jewish hats and mingled with the Jewish boys to get free hand-outs in the synagogue on the holy days gave him an idea. On Saturday he went down to the Missions on the Bowery and let the Christ-spouters convert him. At two bits a conversion. He came home rich with seventy-five cents jingling in his pockets. His father, struggling to maintain his last shred of authority, the patriarchy of his own home, demanded to know why he was not at cheder. Sammy hated cheder. Three hours a day in a stinking back room with a sour-faced old Reb who taught you a lot of crap about the Mosaic laws. You don’t go to jail if you break the laws of Moses. Only if you got no money and get caught stealing, or don’t pay your rent.
“I hadda chance to make a dollar,” Sammy said.
“Sammy!” his father bellowed. “Touching money on the Sabbath! God should strike you dead!”
The old man snatched the money and flung it down the stairs.
Sammy glared at his father the way he had at Sheik, the way he was beginning to glare at the world.
“You big dope!” Sammy screamed at him, his voice shrill with rage. “You lazy son-of-a-bitch.”
The old man did not respond. His eyes were closed and his lips were moving. He looked as if he had had a stroke. He was praying.
Sammy went down and searched for the money until he found it.
His mother came down and sat on the stairs above him. She could never scold Sammy. She was sorry for Papa but she was sorry for Sammy too. She understood. Here in America life moves too fast for the Jews. There is not time enough to pray and survive. The old laws like not touching money or riding on the Sabbath—it was hard to make them work. Israel might try to live by them but never Sammy. Sammy frightened her. In the old country there may have been Jews who were thieves or tightwads and rich Jews who would not talk to poor ones, but she had never seen one like Sammy. Sammy was not a real Jew any more. He was no different from the little wops and micks who cursed and fought and cheated. Sometimes she could not believe he grew out of her belly. He grew out of the belly of Rivington Street.
When Papa Glick found out how Sammy made his seventy-five cents, he went to shul four times a day instead of twice. He cried for God to save Sammy.
Sammy remained a virgin until he was eleven. But no storks ever nested in his childish fancy. When he was still in his cradle he could hear the creaking of bedsprings and his parents’ loud breathing in the same room. Cramped quarters forced sex into the open. When Sammy ran to find a place to hide from the Jew-hunting gangs with rock-filled stockings who roamed the streets on Hallowe’en, he bumped into a couple locked together in the shadow of the tunnel-like corridor behind the stairs. On sticky summer nights he used to trip over their legs as he raced across the roofs. The first day in the street he learned about the painted women who called out intimate names to men they didn’t know. When he was ten he used to turn out the light to watch the lady across the court get undressed. She was fat, and when she let her great flabby breasts ooze out of her brassiere they flopped down like hams as she bent over. Curiosity and then desire began to creep into Sammy’s wiry, undeveloped loins.
He even went up to one of the women around the corner and offered her the quarter he had been given to buy groceries, but she just looked down at him, put her hands on her hips, and laughed.
“Send your old man around, sonny, you’d fall in.”
A couple of days later Sammy was hanging around Foxy’s shop when Shirley Stebbins came in. Shirley was several years older than any of them, maybe sixteen or seventeen. She was tall and thin and only needed a little more flesh to have a voluptuous figure. People said her family was having a tough time because she was going to high school when she should be working. She wasn’t hard the way the other girls were hard, boisterous and suggestive. Everybody on the block called her Sourpuss because her mouth was always set in a sullen expression of contempt. Foxy Four Eyes had advanced the theory that she was frigid. He said it happened when her father climbed into her bed one night when his wife was in the hospital.
“Foxy, I’m in a jam,” she said. “I need ten dollars bad.”
“Bad, huh?” he said, managing to give it an off-color inflection as he put his hand on her. “A guy can do an awful lot with ten dollars.”
He winked at the kids as if he had said something witty. A guy called Eddie who was fifteen and knew his way around got it first.
“I’ll get in for a buck,” he said.
The expression on his face left no doubt about the pun. It had started as a gag, but Foxy egged them on until the nine of them had subscribed six dollars. Foxy’s cheeks burned with excitement and his cockeyes looked out at his proteges proudly.
“All right, sister, I’ll be a sport, ” he said. ?
??I’ll throw in the other four—just to see ya oblige the boys.”
She looked at all of them. They were jumping around her like frantic little gnomes. Sammy hardly reached her shoulder.
“All right,” she said in a tired voice. “Let’s see the money, you cheap bastards.”
In the back room, when it came his turn Sammy was scared. He was sprawled across her, fidgeting foolishly. Foxy Four Eyes could hardly talk, he was laughing so hard. “Hey, fellers, lookit Sammy tryin’ to get his first nookey!”
Sammy could feel the blood flushing his head, and her silent contempt, and his panicky impotence.
While he still clung to her ludicrously, she half-rose on her elbows and said, “Somebody pull this flea off me. I’m not going to make this my life’s work.”
Foxy and Eddie laughingly dragged him off, still struggling for her, like a little puppy pulled from its mother’s teats.
Shirley counted the money carefully and left a little more bitter than she came. “Thanks, you cheap bastards,” she said.
Sammy ran after her. “Hey, that ain’t fair! I oughta get my four bits back.”
But that was the initiation fee Sammy had to pay to be inducted into the mysteries of life.
After the war, prices went higher, but there was no change in the pushcart business. The talk at meals was always money now. The Glicksteins were behind in their rent. A newsboy’s take was no longer enough to complement the old man’s income. The boys had to find regular jobs.
Sammy and Israel both answered a call for messenger boys. There were hundreds of others. For hours they cussed and fought each other for places near the door because their parents had sent them all out with the same fight talk, spoken in English, Yiddish, Italian, and with a brogue—Sammy, Israel, Joe, Pete, Tony, Mike, if you don’t get that job today we don’t know what we’ll do.
Israel was just ahead of Sammy. They had been waiting since six in the morning for the doors to open at eight. They were chilled outside, nervous inside.
When the doors opened at last and Israel was finally standing before the checker, he was told:
“Sorry, kid—ain’t hirin no Hebes.”
As Israel hesitated there, crying inside, Sammy suddenly threw himself at him and knocked him down.
“What the hell you do that for?” said the checker.
“That dirty kike cut in ahead of me,” Sammy screamed.
The checker looked at Sammy curiously. Sammy stood there, small, spiderlike, intense, snarling at Israel.
“Fer Chris’sake, you look like a few-boy yerself.”
“Oh, Jesus, everybody’s always takin’ me for one of them goddam sheenies,” Sammy yelled. Then he broke into gibberish Italian.
At twelve years of age Sammy made one bat out of hell of a messenger. For the first few months he just did a good fast routine job. Then he began to catch on to ways of branching out. He started dropping in at the cat-houses on his way home. He would ring the bell—any bell—and tell the maid:
“Willya find out who rang for a messenger boy?”
In a couple of minutes the maid would return and say, “Can’t find nobody who says they called you, sonny.”
Then he’d put up his squawk. “Mean to tell me I hadda come allerway down here for nuttin ’? Somebody in here musta called—the boss sent me down here on the double-quick. Whatta you wanna do, get me canned?”
He’d keep this up good and loud until the madame came out. The kid is probably right, she’d figure. Maybe one of the men did it for laughs or got drunk and forgot.
The gag was almost always good for two bits anyway. And lots of times the madame would yell, “Anybody want the messenger boy before he goes?” Then some of the customers would remember to wire their wives or the girls would want to send out for ice cream or a magazine.
After Sammy got inside he had another stunt that nearly always worked. He would stand in the middle of the main room and start singing a song. His voice was lousy, but he wasn’t shy about using it and he usually sang something with a gulp in it, like “You made me what I am today—I hope you’re satisfied,” which always got the girls. So the guys would toss him something to please them—or to shut him up. Sometimes on Saturday nights he’d take in more that way than from his regular weekly wage.
It made Sammy feel pretty good hanging around with the guys on the corner Sundays with a little dough in his pocket. One Sunday morning Sheik singled him out. Sheik already had the secretive, mannered poise of a racketeer.
“Follow me over tuh the park,” Sheik said. “ I wanna talk tu ya.”
Two years before when they had been the heads of rival gangs, Sammy’s men had cornered Sheik on a roof. Everybody knew what Sammy had taken from him and they were all ready for Sammy to tell them to send the Sheik back to his block with a hole in his head. But Sammy just looked at Sheik kind of funny and said, “Go on, get runnin’, you bastard, get the hell outa my block.”
It meant that Sammy was beginning to understand the secret of power. Having Sheik beaten to a pulp would only have evened the score. Without ever having thought it out, Sammy seemed to know intuitively how this gesture would leave him one up on Sheik.
Over in the park Sheik said, “Listen, Sammy, I watched you a long time. You got balls. You’re O.K. with me.”
“Come on, what d’ya want?” said Sammy. “What’s on ya mind?”
“I’m fed up with this stinking hole,” Sheik said. “I’m gettin’ outa here. I’m gonna pull off one little job and head west. And I wanna cut you in.”
Sammy listened to the plan. It was just a glorified version of the old pushcart snitches. Sammy was to go into Levy’s and ask for something that would make Levy go back into the storeroom to look for it. Then Sheik would run in and lay one on him and tie him up while Sammy was rifling the cash register.
Sammy listened soberly.
“Not me,” he said. “That’s sucker stuff. Why the hell take a chance goin’ up the river when there’s plenty better ways, if you’re smart?”
“Like what?” said Sheik.
“Lookit Johnny Maloney,” Sammy said. “He’s off your block. His kid brother tol’me Johnny makes a couple a hundred smackers every election day—just for takin’ people around ’n’ votin’ ’em. And lookit Salica. He ain’t so much older ’n’ us. Salica must be gettin’ richer ’n’ a bastard. Every time a guy gets laid around here it’s dough in his pocket. What’s the percentage in havin’ the cops against yer when you can do something like that and have ’em with ya?”
Sheik succeeded in getting away from there all right. He got three years in the State Reform School. So did Leo Kaplan, the kid Sheik got to take Sammy’s place.
Three weeks before Sammy’s thirteenth birthday Papa came in too upset to eat.
“Tonight when I come out of shul the rabbi wants to talk to me. ‘Max, my heart is like lead to tell you this,’ he says, ‘but your son Samuel cannot be bar mitzvah. He never comes to cheder. He does not know his bruchas. The melamed says he knows no more about the Torah than a goy.’ ”
Bar-mitzvah is the Hebrew ceremony celebrating a boy’s reaching the state of manhood at the age of thirteen. He shows off all his knowledge and makes a speech which always begins, “Today I am a man …” and everybody gives him presents and congratulates the father and feels very good. It is as vital to the Orthodox Jews as baptism is to the Christians.
“Oy voy!” Papa cried. “That I should live to see the day when my own flesh and blood is not prepared to become a man.”
“Aw, what’s that got to do with becomin’ a man?” Sammy said. “Just a lotta crap. I been a man since I was eleven.”
“Oh, Lord of Israel,” Papa said,” how can You ever forgive us this shame? That I, a man who went to synagogue twice every day of his life, should have such a no-good son.”
“Yeah,” Sammy said. “While you was being such a goddam good Jew, who was hustlin’ up the dough to pay the rent?”
“Silence, silence,” P
apa roared.
“I guess I gotta right to speak in this house,” Sammy said. “For Chris ’sake I’m bringin’ in more money ’n you are.”
“Money!” Papa cried. “That’s all you think about, money, money …”
“Yes, money, money,” Sammy mimicked. “You know what you c’n do with your lousy bar mitzvah. It’s money in the pocket—that’s what makes you feel like a man.”
The day that Sammy was to have been bar-mitzvahed Papa went to the synagogue and prayed for him as if he were dead. He came home with his lapel ripped in mourning. He would have liked to lock himself in all week because he couldn’t face the shame of it. But the next day he had to be out in the street again, an extension of his pushcart.
People saw him push his cart through the street with his eyes staring dumbly at nothing. The driver who hit him said he sounded his horn several times, but the old man did not seem to hear.
When he was carried upstairs to his bed Israel and Mama sat there crying and watching him die.
Afterward, Israel didn’t know what to do, so he went up on the roof to look at the stars. He found Sammy there smoking a butt.
“Is it over?” Sammy said when he saw his brother.
Israel nodded. He had not really broken down yet, but the question did it. He cried, deep and soft, as only Jews can cry because they have had so much practice at it.
Israel was eighteen, but now he was a little boy crying because he had lost his papa. Sammy was thirteen, but he was a veteran; he had learned something that took the place of tears.
When Israel realized that he was the only one crying he became embarrassed and then angry.
“Damn you, why don’t you say something?” Israel said. “Why don’t you cry?”
“Well, what’s there ta say?” said Sammy.
“At least, can’t you say you’re sorry?”
“Sure,” Sammy said. “I’m sorry he was a dope.”
“I oughta punch you in the nose,” Israel said.
“Try it,” Sammy said, “I bet I c’n lick you.” Sammy sat there dry and tense. “Aw, don’t work yourself into a sweat,” he said.