The prevailing image of the mid-twentieth-century Hell's Kitchen street gang comes from the musical West Side Story. While Leonard Bernstein's masterpiece contains traces of truth – the racial tensions, a sense of place, the fear of falling in love on forbidden turf, the inability to move beyond social labels – such elements weren't enough for neighborhood cynics.
West Side Story was the most hated film in Hell's Kitchen.
'That movie sucked,' Fat Mancho complained. 'Guys dancin' around like jerks, girls hangin' on to their boys for life, cops dumb as flies. All bullshit. Made the gangs look soft. Made everybody look soft. In real life, soft didn't last long. They buried soft in Hell's Kitchen.'
Janet Rivera stood in front of the monument at the entrance to De Witt Clinton Park and popped the lid of a can of Reingold. She was with three friends, all members of her street gang. One of them, Vickie Gonzalez, had a straight razor in the back pocket of her Levis. Janet swigged the beer and watched me walk into the park with John, both of us bouncing spauldeens against the ground.
'Hey!' she yelled. 'Get your asses over where I can see them.'
'Now what,' John muttered.
'They're just breakin' balls,' I said. 'We got no beef with them.'
'We got no time for this,' John said.
'Let's see what they want,' I said.
'C'mon,' Rivera said. 'Don't be draggin' ass on me.'
'She is one ugly girl,' John said as we made our way toward the monument. 'Her family must take ugly pills.'
'You pricks walk through the park like you own it,' Rivera said, pointing at us with the hand holding the beer. 'Where the fuck you think you're goin'?'
'We're gonna play some ball,' I said. 'I don't think there's a problem with that.'
'You're wrong,' Rivera said. 'There is a major fuckin' problem.'
'Fill us in, gorgeous,' John said.
We knew what the problem was. Two weeks earlier, Michael, rushing to Tommy's defense, got into a street brawl with a Puerto Rican kid named Hector from the West 60s. He won the fight and forced Hector to walk out of Hell's Kitchen buck naked. Unfortunately, Hector was Janet Rivera's cousin, and she was looking to us for a payback.
Vickie Gonzalez put a hand in the pocket that held the razor. The other two girls wrapped sets of brass knuckles around their hands. Janet Rivera tossed her beer can into a clump of grass behind her. None of them looked happy. What would make them happy would be to leave me and John the way Michael had left Rivera's cousin – beaten, bruised and naked. Neither of us was eager to see that happen and it left us with only one choice, one that any tough, street-savvy, Hell's Kitchen hard-case would have made. We decided to run.
'Through the fence!' I yelled to John as we started. 'Head for the candy store.'
'They catch us, we're dead,' John said. 'That ugly one wants to kill me. I can tell.'
'They're all ugly,' I said, looking over my shoulder. 'And what's worse is they're all fast.'
We ran through a circular hole in a fence on the 11th Avenue side of the fields, across the red clay pitcher's mound and out the other side, past the Parkies' way station and the sprinkler pool. We were crisscrossing around the black pool bars when I slipped on a sandhill and landed on my side against a cement edge.
John stopped when he saw me fall.
'Get up, Shakes,' he urged. 'They're right on us.'
'I can't,' I said.
'You better,' John said.
The pain in my side was intense, jolts sharp and sudden.
'You keep running,' I said. 'Go for Butter and Mikey. Get them here.'
'I can't leave you,' John said.
'You'll be back in five minutes,' I said a lot more bravely than I felt. 'What can they do to me in five minutes?'
I stayed on the ground, clutching my side, watching John run down the hills of De Witt Clinton Park.
It was not the fear of getting a beating that held me. It was the fear of catching that beating from a girl gang. As I lay there, watching Rivera and her crew close in, I imagined the taunts and ridicule that would come, from friends and strangers alike. A lot of boys in Hell's Kitchen took home cuts and bruises handed out by Rivera and her Tornadoes. Not one of them ever admitted to it, at least publicly, and I was not about to be the first.
Janet Rivera stood over me and smiled, exposing a thin row of cracked teeth. 'I knew a little fucker like you couldn't outrun us.'
'You didn't outrun me,' I said. 'I took a break and waited for you to catch up.'
Rivera walked over toward Gonzalez, putting one hand around her shoulder.
'I hate clowns,' she said. 'They're not funny, you know? They only think they're funny.'
'What they did to Hector, that ain't funny, neither,' Gonzalez said, brushing the heel of her sneaker against my leg. 'But I bet they laughed.'
'Gimme your belt,' Rivera said. 'We're gonna teach this clown to be serious.'
The park was empty, except for an old rummy sleeping under a pile of newspapers on a bench. My face and arms were glazed with sweat and my right leg twitched from tensions. One of my shoelaces had come undone and I couldn't breathe free of pain.
Gonzalez stood over me and opened her straight razor. She leaned down and grabbed the top of my white shirt and cut it in half, stopping just above my pants.
'This is for Hector,' Rivera said, swinging the belt above her shoulder.
'Hurt him,' Gonzalez said. 'Make him hurt.'
Rivera's lashes landed across my face and neck, the pain causing my eyes to well with tears. She then lowered the gate of her swing, my chest and stomach now taking the force of the blows. My chest was soon red, the sting as hard as anything I'd felt, a steady torrent of belt against flesh.
Rivera landed one last blow and stopped.
'You wanna piece?' she said to Gonzalez.
'He ain't man enough for me to whip,' Gonzalez said, looking at me with a smile.
'Thank you,' I mumbled.
The first rock landed next to Rivera's feet. The second hit her above the thigh. Gonzalez turned her head and caught one on the arm. The two girls who were holding me down let go and moved away.
'We're goin',' one of them said. 'No more of this.'
I looked past Gonzalez, at the fence behind the sprinklers and saw Michael and John climbing over. Tommy stood facing the fence, tossing rocks over the side.
Gonzalez looked down at me, her eyes filled with hate. She took a deep breath, bent closer to me and spit her bubble gum above my right eye. She took two steps back and let out two kicks to my groin, the hard rubber of her sneakers finding a mark both times.
'So long, fucker,' she said. 'Be seein' you again.'
When they got to me, Michael and John lifted me up, hands wrapped under my shoulders.
I was slow stepping my way out of the park, toward the bar on 52nd Street. The inside of my chest felt as seared as the outside. But more than anything, I was humiliated.
'I don't want anybody to know,' I said.
'Might be in the papers tomorrow,' John smirked. 'Not every day one of King Benny's boys gets his ass bopped by some girls.'
'It would've been better if they killed me,' I said.
'You're right,' Tommy said. 'Much easier to explain.'
'This only proves what we always knew,' Michael said.
'What?'
'You can't fight for shit.'
'I hear they make guys have sex with 'em,' John said. 'You know, force 'em.'
'Now I'm sorry we came along,' Michael said. 'You might have finally gotten laid.'