I SAT AT the center of the small kitchen table, wedged in between John and Virginia Webster, the three of us sharing a fried steak and tomato dinner. We ate in silence, our eyes focused on the new white portable television set in the corner that was tuned to the evening news. The Watts section of Los Angeles had erupted into a full-scale riot as ten thousand African-Americans burned and looted a five-hundred-square-block area and caused more than forty million dollars worth of property damage. Fifteen thousand cops and National Guardsmen were called in to bring a halt to the rage, and by the time it was brought under control there would be thirty-four people left dead, four thousand arrested and two hundred businesses whose doors would never again open.
The scene played out before us like an eerie horror movie as the TV cameras panned angry black faces shouting slogans or tossing rocks and bricks into burning buildings. On the other side were stoic white faces desperate to do whatever was necessary to stop the killing of a neighborhood. I sat there, riveted to a moving portrait of an America I could never imagine, listening to the muted commentary of the off-camera reporters, wondering what could drive an entire section of a city to such a level of hate.
“Only a damn nigger would go out and set fire to his own home,” John mumbled, chewing on a mouthful of steak, staring at the TV screen. “And then they go after the stores and shops right where they live. They don’t care and they never did. You give them half a chance, they’ll burn the whole damn country down and blame us for doing it.”
“Who’s us?” I asked, turning away from the set to look across the table at my foster father. John Webster was a big man, two hundred forty pounds packed solid on a six-foot frame, with a quiet manner and a perpetually sullen demeanor. His outlook on life was mostly negative, finding blame for his own economic plight not on his lack of education or initiative but on the encroachment by various ethnic groups into what had once been an all-white workforce.
“Who do you think us is?” he said. “White people. They do all the burning and we get all the blame. Like it’s my damn fault they were born the way they were.”
“Maybe they got good reasons for being as angry as they are,” I said. My eyes were on the small screen as I watched a supermarket get swallowed up by the flames of lit torches, as young black kids in T-shirts and jeans ran from the police, smiles of victory on their faces. “You just don’t do what they’re doing without holding in a lot of hate.”
“I don’t want to hear any sorry talk about those people at my table,” he said, an angry jolt in his voice. “They were born no good and that’s how they’ll die. You want to come up with excuses for them, do it someplace else. I won’t allow it under my roof.”
I turned away from the set and stared at my foster mother who, as usual, stayed quiet and distant, locking whatever thoughts and feelings she might have deep inside her sad and shriveling body. I pushed my chair back, stood and began to clear my place at the table. John lifted his mug of beer and downed it to the suds and looked at me and smiled. “If you’re that fond of them, maybe I can make a call down to social service and see if they got a family of niggers that’s willing to take in a white trash boy who spends all his spare time running errands for gangsters. I bet even a dumb nigger’s got enough sense to stay clear of a loaf of poison like that.”
I saw Virginia grimace at her husband’s harsh words, but still she stayed silent. I placed my dishes in the sink and ran cold tap water over them, my back to the simmering anger of John Webster and the relentless violence that was still exploding off the small television screen. I thought it best, for the moment at least, to try and ignore both since there wasn’t much I could do about either. I had no respect for John Webster and, in the months I lived in his apartment, under his forced care, he never gave me reason to show him any. He was a bitter and angry man, using the hardships of his life to justify the bubbling hatred he only occasionally allowed to surface. I never saw any of those emotions in either Angelo or Pudge. They seemed at ease with who they were and looked no further than themselves to solve the problems they confronted. Unlike John Webster, Angelo and Pudge didn’t have the time or the wasted desire to break the world down into a black and white confrontation. Instead, they glimpsed it from a distance, allowing access only to those few they could trust and putting up barriers to all outsiders. They didn’t look to the color of a man’s skin to decide whether or not he could be trusted, but rather they sought out the tone of his intentions before they even bothered to acknowledge his existence.
“It’s not smart to be a racist, especially in the rackets,” Pudge once told me. “In fact, it’s just the opposite. The bulk of organized crime, at least when me and Angelo first got in, was made up of Italians, Irish, Jews and blacks. Four groups that were forced down this country’s throat at one time or another. And there are still a lot of people who wish we would just disappear. We know what it’s like not to be wanted, to get tossed aside. The difference is, when you’re a gangster, people may still hate you and want you dead, they just don’t say it out loud. They shut up because they’re afraid of what we’d do to them. So believe me, little man, if you’re looking for a racist check out the banker down the corner or the guy taking in millions on Wall Street. Don’t look to us. On that score, more often than not, we plead not guilty.”
As I scrubbed my dishes clean, I also wished I could better comprehend the reasons for the riots, find some justification for the destructive actions that were taking place, but I didn’t quite know how to put into words what it was that I felt in my heart. I understood what it was to be weighed down with excessive amounts of anger and resentment and to be deemed insignificant by those around me. I didn’t know if I would ever let my inner hatreds take me down the same road the rioters were now embracing, but I did know that if I didn’t find my way out of the Webster household, that I, too, was capable of a violent explosion.
“Are you finished eating?” I asked John Webster, reaching over to scoop away his dinner plate. While I had washed my dish and the cooking pans, he had finished another beer and changed the channel on the television away from the riots, tuning instead to the week’s choice for The Million Dollar Movie, Godzilla with Raymond Burr.
He pushed the plate toward me and gave me a hard and angry look. “Those hoods you waste your time with,” he said, letting a stomach full of beer help fuel his desire to talk, “you ask me, that bunch is just as bad as the niggers.” He snapped the can opener down on a fresh Piels, a small white bubble of foam creasing over the top. “They get to live the easy life by stepping on the backs of hard workers like me. What they want they just go out and take. That’s the only way they know how to live. If you’re not too careful, you’re gonna turn into one of them before you know it. If you haven’t done it already.”
“Since when do you care how I turn out?” I picked up his plate, walked it over to the sink.
“I never have.” John Webster shrugged his shoulders and poured the beer into his empty mug. “I never made it a secret that we took you as a foster because it was nice to have some extra money. Neither one of us wanted kids and we still don’t.”
“That’s enough, John,” Virginia said, speaking her first words of the night, her worn face flushed red. “There’s no need to be cruel. Maybe you should just finish your beer and watch the rest of the movie.”
John sat across the table and stared at his wife, drinking his beer, his temper doing a slow simmer. “I was just trying to be honest with the boy. Just trying to give him some idea of where his real place in the world is. Out there and in here.”
“From what I heard, you did that just fine.” She slid a Marlboro out of its pack and put it up to her lips, then shifted sideways in her chair, leaned back and turned on one of the gas burners on the stove and lit her cigarette. “But now it might be a good idea to let it all drop.”
“Looks like you got the lady in your corner,” John said to me with a nod toward his wife. “Which doesn’t surprise me too much, since it was her idea to take
you in. That was back in the days when she wanted to see what it was like to be a mother. What she didn’t count on was in hating it as much as she does. Am I talking the truth here or not?”
“You’re doing nothing but running your mouth,” Virginia said, blowing a thin line of cigarette smoke across the table. “And I’m asking you to please stop it. It’s not something we should be talking about in front of the boy.”
I dried my hands on a dish towel and rested my back against the edge of the sink. “I haven’t heard anything I didn’t already know,” I told them, placing the towel on top of the stack of drying dishes. “What I don’t know is why you kept me here as long as you have.”
“That’s not a question for me to answer,” John said, pushing back his chair and walking toward the bedroom in the rear of the apartment. “That’s something you need to ask your gangster friends about. Maybe they’ll be up front and tell you the truth. But I wouldn’t go and bet a paycheck on it.”
My emotions ran through a rinse cycle of anger, confusion and relief. I didn’t know exactly what he was talking about, what Angelo and Pudge had to do with my staying with them, but I did know that I had long overstayed my lukewarm welcome. While we were both aware of our feelings for one another, it was still an awkward silence that fell upon us as we stood in the center room of the railroad apartment. I walked away from the sink and past the shadows of my foster parents, reached a hand up to the coat rack, pulled down my Yankees warm-up jacket and unlocked the cracked wood door. “You can keep the clothes,” I said as I opened the door and left.
I walked slowly down the flight of tenement steps, turning my back on an old life and heading out to begin a new one.
• • •
I HAD FINALLY found a home. It was a place where I belonged, where my actions would not be scrutinized or questioned daily, where I was never viewed as an outsider forced to exist under the care of a pretend parent. I had my own room, the freedom to come and go as I pleased and a clear understanding that I would be held responsible for my actions. I was a child living life in a land filled with adults and I eagerly embraced all the implications of such an adventure. I was also made privy to a slice of the world that few as young as me would ever be allowed to see, and its influence would forever skewer the way I viewed society and my place in it.
That night, as I walked from the Websters’ apartment building down to Angelo and Pudge’s bar, I knew the current course my life was on was in desperate need of a change. I was also aware of my limited options. If the two of them had turned me away, I knew I would eventually be found by state authorities and placed in an upstate orphanage for the next seven years. Few, if any, come out of such places sound, and I knew I would not likely be one of them. I was not mentally equipped for a street existence, and the handful of kids I knew who had that life had either ended up hooked on drugs or were found dead in an alley. Knowing that, it was clear that my only hope rested on the whims of the two most dangerous gangsters in New York City.
I spoke to both of them together and I spoke quickly. “I’ll do whatever you ask,” I said, still wearing my windbreaker inside the air-cooled bar. Angelo and Pudge sat at a back table, their faces lit by candles and the glow from an overhead television, looking up at me, their hands folded in front of them. “And I won’t ever be a bother to you. I’m not even around for most of the time, anyway, and I can run errands to pay for the food you give me.”
Angelo lifted a glass of milk to his lips and took a slow sip. His olive-colored eyes glowed in the flame from the candle and his thin, unlined face betrayed no emotions. He placed the glass back down on its coaster and wiped his mouth with the edge of a folded napkin. “I have a wife and two children,” Angelo said, his voice as always low and rich. “I only see them when I have to. Why do I need to see you every day?”
“I didn’t know you had a family.” I tried to hide the surprise in my words. “You never said anything about them before.”
“You never said anything about living here before,” Angelo said. “At least not to me.”
“You both have been real good to me,” I told them. “And I know I came in here asking a lot. So, if you say no, it won’t change the way I feel about you and about this place.”
“Where’s no take you?” Pudge asked. His voice was much softer than Angelo’s, his body less rigid. “Other than not here.”
“On my own for as long as that lasts,” I said with a shrug. “Then probably up to a home.”
“And does something like that scare you any, having to live in one of those places?” Pudge asked, leaning closer in to the table.
“I try not to think about it too much,” I admitted. “But when I do, then it does.”
“I hope you’re not afraid of dogs,” Angelo said, finishing his glass of milk and looking down at the white pit bull nuzzled against his leg. “Because any spare room we might have, you have to share with Ida. And she likes to have people around her even less than I do.”
I looked down at the dog whose eyes were as dark and distant as her owner’s and turned back to Angelo. “Does she bite?” I asked.
“She sees an opening, she takes it,” Angelo said with a certain pride.
“She’s also used to getting her own way,” Pudge said. “Wouldn’t surprise me much to see her take the bed and leave you sleeping on the floor.”
“Hands down, I’d take her floor over the bed I just left,” I said.
Angelo slid his chair back and stood, stepping over the dog and turning his back to me. “You’ll need to get a leash,” he said looking at me over his shoulder. “She walks with me without one, but I don’t think she’ll do the same for you. Which means she might get lost and if that happens then you’d need to do the same.”
Pudge watched Angelo open the back door and disappear into the darkness of his small office, then turned to me. “You got any clothes with you or stuff you want to bring up to the room?” he asked.
“Just what I’m wearing,” I said, trying to contain the relief I felt at being accepted into their company.
“That should make your moving in a snap, then,” Pudge said, pouring himself a fresh glass of grappa.
“The Websters are probably going to call social services in the morning,” I told him.
“They’re not going to call anybody.” Pudge waved his hand dismissively. “On paper and as far as anybody else is concerned, you’re still staying with them. Me and Angelo stay invisible. All it means for you is that every once in a while you may have to scoot over there, whenever one of the social welfare people come bopping by. They’ll keep your room the way it is, make it look like you still live there.”
“Why would they do that?” I asked. “They couldn’t wait to get rid of me.”
“You they can live without,” Pudge said. “But money is something they need and if they want to keep it coming in, they’ll play along with whatever we ask.”
“John Webster said the only reason the two of them kept me long as they did was because of you two.”
“Drunks never lie,” Pudge said.
“When can I move in?” I looked around the bar, fighting back the urge to both cry from happiness and smile out of relief that what I had wished seemed ready to come true.
Pudge stood, walked over to me and put an arm around my shoulders. “Soon as you go out and get her a leash,” he said, pointing down to Angelo’s sleeping white pit bull. “The quicker you make Ida your friend, the better off you’re gonna find yourself. Don’t expect it to be easy. Who she doesn’t know, she doesn’t trust. Just like us.”
• • •
“I NEVER DID figure out why he took me in the way he did,” I said to Mary. She was standing in a corner of the room, staring down at the busy streets below, her arms folded around her chest.
“He probably looked at you the same way that Ida the Goose had looked at him,” she said, her eyes not moving from the bump and shove of the teeming traffic. “You needed someone to take care of you, ju
st like he once did. I don’t think it was any more complicated than that.”
“I can figure why Ida did it,” I said, walking over closer to Mary. “She had no one else in her life. Angelo had a wife and two kids and, from the way he acted, he couldn’t care one way or the other if he ever saw them.”
“The family he had just wasn’t the family he wanted. His wife lived in a big house on Long Island and the two children were sent to the best schools. They had plenty of friends and activities to occupy their time. And that’s what made them happy. Angelo had Pudge, those horrible dogs he loved having around and, then, he added you. And that’s what made him happy.”
“He never talked about his wife,” I said. “I met her a few times before she died. She was nice enough and didn’t seem upset that he wasn’t around her much. They just didn’t have anything going on between them. She might as well have been another customer in the bar.”
“What they had was once called a marriage of convenience,” Mary said, in an accepting tone of voice. “A business deal of sorts. Her father was an Irish gang boss in Nassau County and Angelo and Pudge were looking to expand into his area.”
“So they made a deal, that part’s easy to understand,” I said. “What I don’t get, if one of them needed to get married, then why not Pudge instead of Angelo?”
Mary placed a hand on my arm and smiled. “Pudge would never agree to it,” she said. “He loved life too much to settle down on a business deal, regardless of the circumstances. Angelo saw it for what it was and that’s the way he dealt with it.”
“And the kids? Why bother having any?”
“It was all part of the agreement,” Mary said. “If her father was going to hand over half his business to Angelo, he wanted more than a married daughter in return. He wanted grandchildren playing in his backyard.”
“I don’t even remember her name,” I said. “It’s been so long since I even thought of her.”
“Gail,” Mary said. “Gail Mallory and she was a good woman who deserved better than to have a father who bargained her off to a husband who didn’t love her.”