'You okay?' John wanted to know, pointing to my hands, which were bleeding badly.
'What happened?' Michael asked. 'We saw you locked in with Russell, then we lost you in the crowd.'
'Woulda taken a bulldozer to knock over Russell's cart,' I said.
'Next year we gotta steal better wood,' Tommy said. 'And maybe get better sets of wheels.'
'I'm sorry,' I said. 'I thought we'd do better.'
'That's okay,' Michael said. 'Not your fault. You just suck as a driver.'
'Mikey's right,' John said. 'You ain't exactly Andretti behind the wheel.'
'I ain't got a wheel, first of all,' I said. 'And Andretti's got brakes.'
'Little things,' Michael said sadly. 'You let little things get to you.'
'I hate you guys,' I said.
'Next year we'll get you a parachute.' John patted me on the back. 'Make your bailout a lot easier.'
'And gloves too,' Tommy said. 'Black ones. Like the real race drivers wear.'
'I really hate you guys.'
We walked together back to 10th Avenue and Fat Mancho's Candy Store to get some ice and clean rags for my bloody hands.
TWO
My three friends and I were inseparable, happy and content to live within the closed world of Hell's Kitchen. The West Side streets of Manhattan were our private playground, a cement kingdom where we felt ourselves to be nothing less than absolute rulers. There were no curfews to contend with, no curbs placed on where we could go, no restrictions on what we could do. As long as we stayed within the confines of the neighborhood.
Hell's Kitchen was a place where everyone knew everything about everybody and everybody could be counted on. Secrets lived and died on the streets that began on West 35th and ended on West 56th, bordered on one side by the Hudson River and on the other by the Broadway theater district. It was an area populated by an uneasy blend of Irish, Italian, Puerto Rican and Eastern European laborers, hard men living hard lives, often by their own design.
We lived in railroad apartments inside red-brick tenements. The average rent for the typical six rooms was thirty-eight dollars a month, gas and utilities not included, payment due in cash. Few mothers worked and all had trouble with the men they married. Domestic violence was a cottage industry in Hell's Kitchen. Yet there was no divorce and few separations, for Hell's Kitchen was a place where the will of the Church was as forceful as the demands of a husband. For a marriage to end, someone usually had to die.
We had no control over the daily violence that took place behind our apartment doors.
We watched our mothers being beaten and could do little more than tend to their wounds. We saw our fathers romance other women, sometimes dragging us along to serve as alibis. When their anger turned to us, our fathers were just as brutal. Many were the mornings when my friends and I would compare bruises, welts and stitches, boasting of the beatings we had taken the previous night.
A lot of the men drank, stomachs full of liquor fueling their violent urges. Many of them gambled heavily, large portions of their union paychecks making their way into the pockets of bookies. This lack of table money also contributed to the charged atmosphere of our private lives.
Yet despite the harshness of the life, Hell's Kitchen offered the children growing up on its streets a safety net enjoyed by few other neighborhoods. Our daily escapades included an endless series of adventures and games, limited only by imagination and physical strength. There were no boundaries to what we could attempt, no barricades placed on the quest for fun and laughter. While many were the horrors we witnessed, our lives were also filled with joy. Enough joy to fend off the madness around us.
In the summer months, my friends and I played games that ran the gamut of inner city past-times in the early 1960s: Sewer-to-sewer stickball, with sawed-down broom handles substituting for bats and parked cars used as foul lines; eighteen-box bottlecap tournaments, where a cap filled with melted candle wax was hit by hand into numbered chalk squares; Johnny-on-the-Pony; stoop ball and dodge ball; knock hockey and corner pennies. In the evenings, wearing cut-off T-shirts and shorts, we washed off the day's heat with the cold spray of an open fire hydrant.
In the fall, roller hockey and ash-can football took over the streets, while in the winter we would fashion sleds from cardboard boxes and wooden crates and ride them down the icy slopes of llth and 12th Avenues.
Throughout the year, we collected and hoarded baseball cards and comic books and, on Monday and Friday nights, walked the two long blocks to the old Madison Square Garden on Eighth Avenue to watch as many boxing and wrestling matches we could sneak our way into, innocently believing both sports to be on the same professional leveclass="underline" To us, Bruno Sammartino was Sonny Liston's peer.
We raced pigeons across rooftops and dove off the 12th Avenue piers into the waters of the Hudson River, using the rusty iron moorings as diving boards. We listened to Sam Cooke, Bobby Darin and Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons on portable radios and imitated their sounds on street corners late into the night. We started to think and talk about girls, hormones fueled by the cheap skin magazines handed down to us by older boys. We went to the movies once a week and saw the second acts of any Wednesday Broadway matinee that caught our fancy, allowed in by the ticket matrons who worked the theaters and were our neighbors. Inside those ornate and darkened halls, standing in the back or sitting on the top steps of the balcony, we laughed at the early comedies of Neil Simon, were moved by the truth of A View from the Bridge and admired the pure showmanship of My Fair Lady. The only show we avoided was West Side Story, insulted by its inaccurate depiction of what we thought of as our way of life.
There was also an active competition among the four of us to see who could come up with the best and boldest prank.
Tommy had his best moment when he set loose a small shopping bag filled with mice during a Saturday afternoon mass honoring a retiring nun. The sight of the mice sent the nearly two dozen nuns in attendance running for the front doors of Sacred Heart Church.
Michael scored a bullseye when he got a number of older kids to help him switch the living room furniture in the apartments of two men who had a decade-long feud raging between them.
On one hot summer afternoon, John climbed three floors of fire escapes to reach the crammed clothesline of the meanest woman in the neighborhood, Mrs. Evelyn McWilliams. Hanging upside down and shirtless, his legs wrapped around thin iron bars, he took her laundry off the line, folded the clothes neatly as he could, put them in an empty wine box and donated them to the Sisters of Sacred Heart Convent, to be distributed to the needy.
For the longest time, my pranks never measured up to those my friends managed with such apparent ease. Then, two weeks into the 1963 school year, I found a nun's clacker in a school hallway and was ready for the big leagues.
The girls sat on the left hand side of the church, the boys on the right, all of us listening to another in a series of inane lectures on the sacrament of confirmation. Three nuns, in white habit and cloth, sat behind the four rows of girls. One priest, Father Robert Carillo, sat behind the boys. It was early afternoon and the lights of the large church were still dark, votive candles casting shadows over the wall sculptures depicting Christ's final walk.
I was in the last row of boys, left arm resting on the edge of the pew, right hand in my jacket pocket, fingers wrapped around the found clacker. To a nun, a clacker was the equivalent of a starter's pistol or a police whistle. In church, it was used to alert the girls as to when they should stand, sit, kneel and genuflect, all based on the number of times the clacker was pressed. In the hands of a nun, a clacker was a tool of discipline. In my pocket, it was cause for havoc.