Sleepers

ONE

Labor Day weekend always signaled the annual go-cart race across the streets of Hell's Kitchen, the mid-Manhattan neighborhood where I was born in 1954 and lived until 1969.

Preparations for the race began during the last two weeks of August, when my three best friends and I would hide away inside our basement clubhouse, in a far corner of a run-down 49th Street tenement, constructing, painting and naming our racer, which we put together from lifted lumber and stolen parts. A dozen carts and their teams were scheduled to assemble early on Labor Day morning at the corner of 50th Street and 10th Avenue, each looking to collect the fifteen dollars first prize money that would be presented to the winner by a local loan shark.

In keeping with Hell's Kitchen traditions, the race was run without rules.

It never lasted more than twenty minutes and covered four side streets and two avenues, coming to a finish on the 12th Avenue end of the West Side Highway. Each go-cart had a four-man team attached, one inside and three out. The three pushed for as long and as hard as they could, fighting off the hand swipes and blade swings of the opponents who came close. The pushing stopped at the top of the 50th Street hill, leaving the rest of the race to the driver. Winners and losers crossed the finish clothesline scraped and bloody, go-carts often in pieces, driver's hands burned by ropes. Few of us wore gloves or helmets and there was never money for knee or elbow pads. We kept full plastic water bottles tied to the sides of our carts, the fastest way to cool off hot feet and burning wheels.

The runt of the litter among my team, I always drove.

John Reilly and Tommy Marcano were spreading black paint onto thick slabs of dirty wood with color-by-number brushes.

John was eleven years old, a dark-haired, dark-eyed charmer with an Irishman's knack for the verbal hit and run. His clear baby face was marred by a six-inch scar above his right eye and a smaller, half-moon scar below the chin line, both the results of playground falls and home-made stitches. John always seemed to be on the verge of a smile and was the first among my friends to bring in the latest joke off the street. He was a poor student but an avid reader, a mediocre athlete with a penchant for remembering the batting and fielding statistics of even the most obscure ballplayers. He loved Marx Brothers and Abbott & Costello movies and went to any Western that played the neighborhood circuit. If the mood hit him the right way, John would prowl the streets of Hell's Kitchen talking and walking as if he were Ralph Kramden from The Honeymooners, proclaiming 'Hiya, pal,' to all the neighborhood vendors. Sometimes, in return for his performance, we would each be given free pieces of fruit. He was born with a small hole in his heart which required regular doses of a medication his mother often could not afford to buy. The illness, coupled with a frail frame, left him with a palpable air of vulnerability.

Tommy Marcano, also eleven, was John's physical opposite. He had his Irish mother's carrot-colored hair and his father's ruddy, Southern Italian complexion. Short and flabby around the waist and thighs, Tommy loved sports, action movies, Marvel Comics and adventure novels. Above all else, Tommy loved to eat – meatball heros, buttered rolls, hard-cherry candy barrels. He collected and traded baseball cards, storing each year's set in team order inside a half-dozen Kinney shoe boxes sealed with rubber bands. He had a natural aptitude for math and built model ships and planes out of raw wood with skill and patience. He had a sensitive nature and a feel for the underdog, always cheering on teams and athletes that were destined to lose. He was quick to laugh and needed prodding to lose the grip on his temper. A botched surgical procedure when he was an infant forced him occasionally to wear a pad and brace around his right leg. On those days, Tommy chose to wear a black eye patch and tie a red handkerchief around his head.

Michael Sullivan, at twelve the oldest of my friends, was quietly hammering nails into a sawed-down Dr. Brown's soda crate.

The best student among us, Michael was a smooth blend of book smart and street savvy. His black Irish eyes bore holes through their targets, but his manner was softened by a wide, expansive smile. He kept his thick, dark hair short on the sides and long on top. He was never without a piece of gum in his mouth and read all the tabloids of the day, the only one among us to move beyond the sports pages to the front page. He was also never without a book, usually a rumpled paperback shoved inside the rear pocket of his jeans. Where we still favored the tales of Alexandre Dumas, Jack London and Robert Louis Stevenson, Michael had graduated to the darker domain of Edgar Allan Poe and the chivalry and romance of Sir Walter Scott. He initiated most of our pranks and had a cutting sense of humor that was doused with a wise man's instinct for fair play. He was our unofficial leader, a position he valued but never flaunted and one that required him to care and maintain our collection of Classics Illustrated comics.

I was busily applying biker's grease onto two stroller wheels taken off a baby carriage I'd found abandoned on 12th Avenue.

'We need a better name this year,' I said. 'Somethin' that slicks in people's heads.'

'What was it last year?' Tommy asked. 'I forget.'

'The Sea Hawk? I reminded him. 'Like the movie.'

'Seaweed woulda been more like it,' Michael said. That was his subtle way of reminding us that we hadn't done so well in the previous race, finishing next to last.

'Let's name it after The Count of Monte Cristo,' John said.

'Nanh,' I said, shaking my head. 'Let's name it after one of the Musketeers.'

'Which one?' Tommy asked.

'D'Artagnan,' I said immediately.

'To start with, he's not a made Musketeer,' Michael said. 'He jus hangs with them.'

'And he's only cool 'cause he's got three other guys with him all the time,' Tommy said to me. 'Just like you. Alone, we're talkin' dead man. Just like you. Besides, we'll be the only ones with a French guy's name on the side of our cart.'

'That oughta be good enough to get our ass kicked by somebody,' Michael observed.

'Go with The Count,' John said. 'He's my hero.'

'Wolf Larson's my hero,' Tommy said. 'You don't see me bustin' balls about gettin' his name on the cart.'

'Wolf Larson from The Sea Wolf?' I asked. 'That's your hero?

'Yeah,' Tommy said. 'I think he's a real stand-up guy.'

'The guy's a total scumbag.' Michael was incredulous. 'He treats people like shit.'

'Come onnn, he ain't got a choice,' Tommy insisted. 'Look at who he deals with.'

'Scumbag or not,' Michael said. 'Wolfs name would look better on the cart.'

'They'll think we named the friggin' cart after our dog,' John muttered.

'We don't got a dog,' Tommy said.

'Okay, it's settled,' I told everybody. 'We name the cart Wolf. I think it'll bring us luck.'

'We're gonna need more than luck to beat Russell's crew,' John said.

'We may lose this race,' Michael announced. 'But we ain't gonna lose it to Russell.'

'He's always there at the end, Mikey,' I said.

'We always look to block him at the end,' Michael said. 'That's our mistake.'

'He stays away till then,' Tommy said. 'He's no dope. He knows what to do.'

'Maybe,' Michael said. 'But this time, we go and get him outta the race early. With him out, nobody comes near beatin' us.'

'How early?' I asked.

'Right after Tony Lungs drops the flag,' Michael said. 'Near the hill.'

'How?'

'Don't worry,' Michael said. 'I got a plan.'

'I always worry when you say that,' I said.

'Relax,' Tommy said, putting the final paint strokes on the wood. 'What could happen?'

A dozen go-carts were ready to go, four to a row. I was behind the unsteady wheels of Wolf, on the front line, next to Russell Topaz's cart, Devil's Pain. The crowd of onlookers, drawn out by the heavy September heat, was larger than most years, standing two deep behind rows of illegally parked cars. Thick-armed men in white T-shirts held kids atop their shoulders, wives and girlfriends at their sides, red coolers filled with beer and soda by their feet. Tenement windows were opened wide, old women leaning out, stubby arms resting on folded bath towels, small electric fans blowing warm air behind them.

I looked over at Russell, nodded my head and smiled – as friendly a way as I could manage.

'Hey, Russell,' I said.

'Eat shit, greaseball,' he said back.

Little was known about Russell or the three other boys who were always with him, each as sullen as their leader. We knew he went to St. Agnes on West 46th Street, which meant he wore knickers. That alone was enough permanently to ruin his mood. He lived with foster parents on West 52nd Street, in a building guarded by a German Shepherd. There were two other foster children in the family, a younger boy and an older girl, and he was as mean to them as he was to everybody else.

He liked to read. Many times I would see him in the back room of the Public Library on West 50th Street, his head buried in a thick book about pirates loose on the high seas. He played basketball on the playgrounds for pocket money and was never without a lit cigarette. He had no girlfriend, always wore a brown leather vest and hated baseball.

I couldn't help but stare at Russell's cart. It was made of fresh wood and was unpainted, except for the name stenciled on both sides. The rear wheels were thick and new and the brakes were molded from real rubber, not the blackboard erasers we used on ours. His crate seat was padded and the sides were smooth. He had on black gloves and a Chicago Bears helmet. His three teammates were in sweatpants and sneakers, had handkerchiefs tied around their heads and also wore gloves.

'You a Bears fan?' I asked him, waiting for the starting flag to drop.

'No, asswipe,' Russell said. 'I'm not.'

Russell was chubby with a round face, soft, pudgy hands and a practiced sneer. A small scar decorated his right brow and he never smiled, even in victory.

'They got a great coach,' I said. 'My dad says he's the best football coach ever.'

'Who gives a shit?' was Russell's always pleasant response.

'What's goin' on?' Michael asked, leaning next to me.

'We were just wishing each other luck,' I explained.

'Never mind that,' Michael told me, lowering his voice. 'You all straight on what you have to do?'

'No,' I said.

'Just remember, at the hill, don't swing away,' Michael said. 'Go right at him. It'll knock him off balance.'

'What if it doesn't?'

'Then you're on your own,' Michael said.

Tony Lungs, our local loan shark and the benefactor of this yearly event, stepped forward, facing the carts, wiping his brow with the starter's flag. Below his checkerboard shorts were black loafers, no socks, and he also wore no shirt. The folds of his belly hung over the beltless loops of the garish pants. He ran a hand over his bald head, scanning the crowd: 'What say we get this thing started?'

Tony lifted his right arm, holding the starter's flag high enough for all to see. The crowd began to chant and applaud, eager for action. I moved the go-cart a couple of inches forward, leaving only elbow room between Russell and myself.

'Remember,' Michael whispered. 'At the hill, make your cut. The rest is pure race.'

Tony Lungs moved his head from left to right, checking to make sure the carts were in proper position.

'Get ready!' he shouted. 'Get set! And remember, any fuck runs over my toes gets their ass kicked. Now, go!'

I ran over the starter's flag as Tommy, Michael and John pushed our cart up the street.

'How are the pedals workin'?' Tommy asked, his face red from the effort.

'Good,' I said.

'Watch yourself,' John said, looking at the other carts. 'I seen three zip guns already and you know Russell's got something in his cart.'

'Don't worry,' Michael said. 'Just get to the hill.'

The crowd noise grew louder as the carts made their way past Fat Mancho's Candy Store, where all the betting action took place. The people of Hell's Kitchen would lay bets on anything and go-cart racing was no exception. To the working poor of the neighborhood, gambling was as time-honored a tradition as church on Sunday morning, boxing matches on Friday nights and virgin weddings all year round.

Devil's Pain was listed on the large blackboard outside Fat Mancho's store as the 3-1 odds-on choice. Wolf, our cart, was down as second favorite at 5-1. John Rad-man's cart, Eagle's Anger, was the longshot in the field, going off at 35-1. That was primarily because in the three years Radman had bothered to enter the race he always quit half-way through, abandoning his vehicle and walking away. 'You gonna waste a whole lotta time bettin' on Radman,' Fat Mancho said. 'Might as well set fire to your money.'

We were coming up to the edge of the hill, Tommy, Michael and John sweaty and breathless from the hard pushing. We were in the middle of the pack, Russell still on our left, a Puerto Rican crew from Chelsea, driving a purple cart, on our right.

'More speed,' I told the guys. 'We're not getting there fast enough.'

'Relax,' Michael said. 'We're right where we're supposed to be.'

'If I go any faster, I'll have a heart attack,' John muttered between wheezes.

The brake pads by my feet flapped against the sides of the cart and one of the front wheels started to wobble.

'I don't know if these brakes are gonna hold,' I said.

'Don't think brakes,' Michael hissed. 'Think speed.'

'How do I stop?' I asked with a hint of panic.

'You'll hit somethin',' Michael said. 'Don't worry.'

'That's what I love, Mikey,' I told him. 'You just think of everything.'

At the top of the hill I was on my own, two feet from Russell's cart. We quickly glanced at one another, the sneer still on his face. I locked my cart against his, the spin of my wheels chipping at his wood, trying to move him over to the hard side of the curb.

'Don't, man,' Russell shouted. 'You're gonna lose a wheel.'

A cart driven by a pock-faced redhead in goggles was up behind me, pushing me even closer into Russell. My hands were raw and my legs stiff. We came down fast, the carts bunched together, my hopes of knocking Russell from the race diminishing with each wobbly spin of my front wheel.

At the south end of llth Avenue, a few feet from a Mobil Gas Station crowded with on-lookers, the front wheel finally gave way and snapped off. The cart tilted down, breaking pace with Russell, small sparks shooting from the pavement.

'You're lookin' at a wheelchair,' Russell yelled at me as he zoomed past, snarl locked in place, not even the slightest hint of pity in his voice.

I was heading straight for a street divider, the eraser brakes my feet were pumping now as useless to me as the rest of the cart. The remaining carts had gone straight down the street, toward 12th Avenue. The skin on my hands was split and streams of blood ran through my fingers. Holding the ropes as tight as I could, I used my weight to steer away from the divider.

The cart was starting to lose some speed, but still moved with enough force to do damage. My arms were tired and I couldn't hold the ropes any longer: the nylon ridges were cutting in too deep. I let go and braced myself against the sides of the Dr. Brown case. The cart veered wildly left and right, bounced across llth Avenue, past a double-parked station wagon, jumped the curb and slammed against the side of a corner mail box.

I got out, kicked it angrily over onto its side and sat down on the fender of a parked Chevy. I put my face up to the sun and my elbows on the trunk and waited for Michael, Thomas and John to make their way down the hill toward me.

'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 level: 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.

I waited until the priest at the altar, white-haired and stooped-shouldered, folded his hands and bowed his head in silent prayer. I squeezed the clacker twice, the signal for the girls to stand. Sister Timothy Morris, an overweight nun with tar-stained fingers and a crooked smile, shot up in her seat as if hit by a bolt. She quickly clacked once, returning, the confused girls to their seats. I clacked four times, getting them to genuflect. Sister Timothy clacked the girls back into position, shooting a pair of hateful eyes across the rows of pews filled with boys.

I gave the clacker three quick hits and watched the girls stand at attention. The priest at the altar cut short his prayer, casually watching the commotion before him, listening as the echoes of the dueling clackers bounced off the walls of the church. The boys kept their eyes rooted to the altar, holding their smiles and silencing their snickers. Sister Timothy clacked the girls back to their seats, her cheeks visibly red, her lips pursed.

Father Carillo slid into my row, one hand holding onto my left elbow.

'Let me have the clacker,' he said without turning his head.

'What clacker?' I asked, doing the same.

'Now,' Father Carillo said.

I took my hand out of my jacket pocket, moved the clacker across my knees and palmed it over to Father Carillo. He took it from me without much body movement, each of us glancing over toward Sister Timothy, hoping she had not noticed the quick pass-off.

The priest spread his arms outward and asked all in attendance to rise. Sister Timothy snapped her clacker three times and watched as the girls rose in unison, nodding her head in approval at the two nuns to her left.

'Let us pray,' said the priest.

Father Carillo, his back straight, his eyes focused on the altar, his face free of emotion, gave the clacker in his hand one soft squeeze.

The girls all sat back down. Sister Timothy fell into her pew. The priest at the altar lowered his eyes and shook his head. I looked over at Father Bobby, my mouth open, my eyes unable to hide their surprise.

'Nuns are such easy targets,' Father Bobby whispered with a wink and a smile.

Hell's Kitchen was a neighborhood with a structured code of behavior and an unwritten set of rules that could be physically enforced. There was a hierarchy that trickled down from the local members of both the Irish and Italian mobs to a loose-knit affiliation of Puerto Rican numbers brokers and loan sharks to small groups of organized gangs recruited to do a variety of jobs, from collections to picking up stolen goods. My friends and I were the last rung on the neighborhood ladder, free to roam its streets and play our games, required only to follow the rules. On occasion, we would be recruited for the simplest tasks, most of them involving money drop-offs or pick-ups.

Crimes against the people of the neighborhood were not permitted and, on the rare occasions when they did occur, the punishments doled out were severe and, in some cases, final. The elderly were to be helped not hurt. The neighborhood was to be supported not stripped. Gangs were not allowed to recruit anyone who did not wish to join. Drug use was frowned upon and addicts were ostracized, pointed out as 'on the nod' losers to be avoided.

Despite the often violent ways of its inhabitants, Hell's Kitchen was one of New York's safest neighborhoods. Outsiders walked its streets without fear, young couples strolled the West Side piers without apprehension, old men took grandchildren for walks in De Witt Clinton Park, never once looking over their shoulders.

It was a place of innocence ruled by corruption. There were no drive-by shootings or murders without reason. The men who carried guns in Hell's Kitchen were all too aware of their power. Crack cocaine had yet to hit and there wasn't enough money around to support a cocaine habit. The drug of choice when I was a child was heroin and the hard-core addicts numbered a handful, most of them young and docile, feeding their needs with cash hand-outs and petty thievery. They bought their drugs outside the neighborhood since dealers were not welcome in Hell's Kitchen. Those who ignored the verbal warnings, wrote them off as the ramblings of pudgy old men, paid with their lives.

One of the most graphic images I can recall from my childhood is of standing under a street light on a rainy night, holding my father's hand and looking up at the face of a dead man, hanging from a rope, his face swollen, his hands bound. He was a drug dealer from an uptown neighborhood who had moved heroin in Hell's Kitchen. A packet of it had killed the twelve-year-old son of a Puerto Rican numbers runner.

It was the last packet the dealer ever sold.

Friendships were as important as neighborhood loyalty. Your friends gave you an identity and a sense of belonging. They afforded you a group you could trust that extended beyond the bounds of family. The home lives of most of the children in Hell's Kitchen were unruly and filled with struggle. There was little time for bonding, little attention given to nurturing and few moments set aside for childish pleasures. Those had to be found elsewhere, usually out on the street in the company of friends. With them, you could laugh, tell stupid jokes, trade insults and books and talk about sports and movies. You could even share your secrets and sins, dare tell another person what you thought about important childhood issues such as holding a girl's hand.

Life in Hell's Kitchen was hard. Life without friends was harder. Most kids were lucky enough to find one friend they could count on. I found three. All of them older, probably wiser and no doubt smarter. There is no memory of my early years that does not include them. They were a part of every happy moment I enjoyed.

I wasn't tough enough to be part of a gang nor did I care for the gang members' penchant for constant confrontation. I was too talkative and out-going to be a loner. I lived and survived in a grown-up world, but my concerns were that of a growing boy – I knew more about the Three Stooges, even Shemp, than I did about street gangs.

I cared more about a trade the Yankees were about to make than about a shooting that happened three buildings down. I wondered why James Cagney had stopped making movies and if there was a better cop in the country than Jack Webb on Dragnet. In a neighborhood where there was no Little League, I worked on throwing a curve ball like Whitey Ford. Surrounded by apartments devoid of books, I pored through the works of every adventure writer the local library stocked. Like most boys my age, I molded a world of my own and stocked it with the people I came across through books, sports, movies and television, making it a place where fictional characters were as real to me as those I saw every day. It was a world with room for those who felt as I did, who hated Disney but loved Red Skelton, who would take a Good Humor bar over a Mister Softy cone, who went to the Ringling Brothers circus hoping that the annoying kid shot out of the cannon would miss the net and who wondered why the cops in our neighborhood couldn't be more like Lee Marvin from M Squad.

It was a world made for my three friends.

We became friends over a lunch.

Word spread one afternoon that three pro wrestlers -Klondike Bill, Bo Bo Brazil and Haystacks Calhoun – were eating at a Holiday Inn on 51st Street. I rushed there and found Michael, John and Thomas standing outside, looking through the glass window that fronted the restaurant, watching the large men devour thick sandwiches and slabs of pie. I knew the guys from the school yard and the neighborhood, but had been too intimidated to approach them. The sight of the wrestlers eliminated such concerns.

'They don't even stop to chew,' John said in wonder.

'Guys that big don't have to chew,' Tommy told him.

'Haystacks eats four steaks a night at dinner,' I said, nudging my way past Michael for a closer look. 'Every night.'

'Tell us somethin' we don't know,' Michael muttered, eyes on the wrestlers.

'I'm gonna go and sit with them,' I said casually. 'You can come if you want.'

'You know them?' John asked.

'Not yet,' I said.

The four of us walked through the restaurant doors and approached the wrestlers' table. The wrestlers were deep in conversation, empty plates and glasses the only remnants of their meal. They turned their heads when they saw us.

'You boys lost?' Haystacks Calhoun asked. His hair and beard were shaggy and long and he was wearing bib overalls large enough to cover a banquet table. The wrestling magazine stories I had read about him put his weight at 620 pounds and I was amazed that anyone that big could slide into a booth.

'No,' I said.

'Then what do you want?' Klondike Bill asked. His hair and beard were darker and thicker than Calhoun's and he was half his weight, which made him the second biggest man I'd ever seen.

'I've watched you guys wrestle a lot,' I said. I pointed a finger to the three behind me. 'We all have.'

'You root for us to win?' Bo Bo Brazil asked. He was more muscular than his cohorts, and looked like sculpted stone leaning against the window, his shaved black head gleaming, his eyes clear and bright. Bo Bo's one noted move, the head-crushing co-co butt, was said to be a weapon harsh enough to leave an opponent paralyzed.

'No,' I said.

'Why not?' Calhoun demanded.

'You usually fight the good guys,' I said, my palms starting to sweat.

Haystacks Calhoun lifted one large hand from the table and placed it on my shoulder and around my neck. Its weight alone made my legs quiver. He was breathing through his mouth, air coming out in thick gulps. 'Your friends feel the same way?'

'Yes,' I said, not giving them a chance to respond. 'We all root against you.'

Haystacks Calhoun let out a loud laugh, the fat of his body shaking in spasms, his free hand slapping at the table top. Klondike Bill and Bo Bo Brazil were quick to join in.

'Get some chairs, boys,' Calhoun said, grabbing a glass of water to wash down his laugh. 'Sit with us.'

We spent more than an hour in their company, crowded around the booth, treated to four pieces of cherry pie, four chocolate shakes and tales of the wrestling world. We didn't get the impression that they made a lot of money and, judging by their scarred faces and cauliflowered ears, we knew it wasn't an easy life. But the stories they told were filled with exuberance and the thrill of working the circuit in arenas around the country, where people paid money to jeer and cheer every night. To our young ears, being a wrestler sounded far better than running away to join the circus.

'You boys got tickets for tonight?' Haystacks asked, signaling to a waitress.

'No, sir,' John said, scraping up the last crumbs of his pie.

'Get yourself over to the box office at seven,' Calhoun said, slowly squeezing out of his side of the booth. 'You'll be sittin' ringside by seven-thirty.'

We shook hands, each of ours disappearing into the expanse of theirs and thanked them, looking up in awe as they smiled and rubbed the top of our heads.

'Don't disappoint us now,' Klondike Bill warned on his way out. 'We wanna hear you boo loud and clear tonight.'

'We won't let you down,' Tommy said.

'We'll throw things if you want,' John said.

We stood by the booth and watched as they walked out of the Inn and onto 10th Avenue, three large men taking small steps, heading toward Madison Square Garden and the white lights of a packed arena.

I was the youngest of my friends by three years, and yet they treated me as an equal. We had so much else in common that once I was accepted, my age never became an issue. A sure sign of their acceptance was when, less than a week after we met, they gave me a nickname. They called me Shakespeare, because I was never without a book.

We were each the only child of a troubled marriage.

My father, Mario, worked as a butcher, a trade he learned in prison while serving six years of a five-to-fifteen-year sentence for second degree manslaughter. The victim was his first wife. The battles my father fought with my mother, Raffaela, a silent, angry woman who hid herself in prayer, were neighborhood legend. My father was a con man who gambled what little he earned and managed to spend what he never had. Yet he always had time and money to buy me and my friends ice cream cones or sodas whenever he saw us on the street. He was a man who seemed more comfortable in the company of children than in a world of adults. Growing up, for reasons I could never put into words, I was always afraid my father would disappear. That one day, he would leave and not return. It was a fear fed by his separations from my mother, when I would not hear from him for weeks.

Michael, twelve, was the eldest of my friends. His father, construction worker Devlin Sullivan, had fought in Korea and, for his trouble, earned a steel plate in his head. Always angry, Mr. Sullivan had a foul mouth and great thirst. Tall and strapping, muscular from the work, he kept his wife at a distance, living for weeks with an assortment of mistresses, who soaked his money and then sent him packing. Michael's mother, Anna, always took him back and forgave him all trespasses. Michael never spoke about his father, not in the way I always did about mine, and seemed uncomfortable the rare times I saw them together.

His parents' marriage fed in Michael a distrust about the strong neighborhood traditions of marriage, family and religion. He was the realist among us, suspicious of others' intentions, never trusting the words of those he didn't know. It was Michael who kept us grounded.

His stern exterior, though, was balanced by a strong sense of honor. He would never do anything that would embarrass us and demanded the same in return. He never played practical jokes on those he perceived as weaker and he always rose to defend anyone he believed unable to defend himself. That rigid code was reflected in the books he read and the shows he watched. The only time I ever saw him on the verge of tears was near the end of a Broadway production of Camelot, affected by Lancelot's betrayal. His favorite of the Three Musketeers was the more troubled Aramis and when we played games based on TV shows or movies, Michael always sought out the role of leader, whether it was Vic Morrow's character on Combat or Eliot Ness in The Untouchables.

It was harder to make Michael laugh than the others. He was big brother and as such had to maintain a degree of maturity. He was the first among us to have a steady girlfriend, Carol Martinez, a half-Irish, half-Puerto Rican girl from 49th Street, and the last in our crew to learn to ride a bike. He was called Spots when he was younger, because of the dozens of freckles that dotted his face and hands, but not often since he hated the name and the freckles had begun to fade the closer he got to puberty.

It was Michael who kept the older, explosive boys of the neighborhood at bay, often with nothing more than a look or movement. That ability reinforced his position as our leader, a title he accepted but never acknowledged. It was simply his role, his place.

In the years we spent together as children, Tommy Marcano's father was away in Attica in upstate New York, serving a seven-year sentence for an armed robbery conviction. Billy Marcano was a career criminal who kept his wife Marie out of his business affairs. Like most of the neighborhood mothers, Marie was devoutly religious, spending her free time helping the parish priests and nuns. During the years her husband was in prison, she remained a devoted wife, working a steady job as a telephone receptionist for an illegal betting parlor.

Tommy missed his father, writing him a letter every night before he went to bed. He carried a crumpled picture of the two of them together in his back pocket and looked at it several times a day. If Michael was the brains behind the group, Tommy was its soul. His was a gentle goodness, and would share anything he had, never jealous of another's gift or good fortune. His street name was Butter, because he spread it across everything he ate and he seemed happiest when he had a fresh roll in one hand and a hot cup of chocolate in the other. He was shy and shunned any chance for attention, yet he played the dozens, a street game where the key is to out-insult your opponent.

I can never think of Tommy without a smile on his face, his eyes eager to share in the laugh, even if it came at his expense. The only time I saw a hint of sadness to him was when I was with my father, so I made an effort to include him in whatever we were planning to do together. My father, who liked to eat as much as Tommy did, usually obliged. When that happened, the smile was quick to return.

While Michael seemed older than his years, Tommy seemed far younger than eleven. He had a little boy's affability and eagerness to please. He had a fast tongue, was swift with a comeback and never forgot a joke. His pranks were tinged with innocence. Tommy would never want to be leader of the group, never would have been comfortable with the burden. It was more in keeping with his personality to go along, to watch, to listen and always, to laugh.

He also had a natural ability to build things, working away on a discarded piece of wood or an old length of pipe from which would emerge a wooden train or a makeshift flute. He never kept his creations and never took money for his work. Many of the pieces he made were mailed to his father in prison. He was never told if his father received them and he never asked.

John Reilly was raised by his mother, an attractive woman with little time to devote to anything other than church, her work as a Broadway theater usher and her boyfriends. John's father was a petty hood shot and killed in a foiled armored truck heist in New Jersey less than a week after his son was born. John knew nothing of the man. 'There were no photos,' he once told me. 'No wedding picture, no shots of him in the Navy. Nobody talked about him or mentioned his name. It was as if he never existed.'

John earned his discipline from the hands of his mother's various suitors, an endless stream of men who knew only one way to handle a boy. He seldom spoke about the beatings, but we all knew they took place.

Even though he was only four months younger than Michael, John was the smallest of the group and was nicknamed the Count, due to his fascination with The Count of Monte Cristo, which was also my favorite book. John was brash and had the sharpest sense of humor of any of us. He loved comedy and would spend hours debating whether the Three Stooges were gifted comedians or just jerks who beat each other up.

He was our heart, an innocent surrounded by a violence he could not prevent. He was the most handsome among us and often used a smile and a wink to extricate himself from trouble. He loved to draw, etching sketches of sailboats and cruise ships onto thin strips of fine paper with a dark pencil. He would spend afternoons down by the piers feeding pigeons, watching waves lap against the dock and drawing colorful pictures of the ocean liners in port, filling their decks with the familiar faces of the neighborhood.

He was a born mimic, ordering slices of pizza as John Wayne, asking for a library book like James Cagney and talking to a girl in the schoolyard sounding like Humphrey Bogart. Each situation brought about its intended smile, allowing John to walk away content, his mission accomplished. He concealed the ugliness of his home life behind a shield of jokes. He never set out to hurt, there was too much of that in his own everyday moments. John, more than any one of us, was always in need of someone else's smile.

Together, the four of us found in each other the solace and security we could not find anywhere else. We trusted each other and knew there would never be an act of betrayal among us. We had nothing else – no money, no bikes, no summer camps, no vacations. Nothing, except one another.

To us, that was all that mattered.

THREE

The Catholic church played a large part in our lives. Sacred Heart was the center of the neighborhood, serving as a neutral meeting ground, a peaceful sanctuary where problems could be discussed and emotions calmed. The priests and nuns of the area were a visible presence and commanded our attention, if not always our respect.

My friends and I attended Sacred Heart Grammar School on West 50th Street, a large, red brick building directly across from PS 111. Our parents paid a two dollar a month tuition fee and sent us out each morning dressed in the mandatory uniform of maroon pants for boys and skirt for girls, white shirts and clip-on red ties.

The school was rife with problems, lack of supplies being the least of them. Most of us were products of violent homes, and therefore prone to violence ourselves, making playground fights daily occurrences. The fights were often in response to a perceived slight or a violation of an unwritten code of conduct. All students were divided into cliques, most based on ethnic backgrounds, which only added tension to an already tight situation.

In addition to the volatile ethnic groupings, teachers were faced with the barriers of language and the difficulties of overcrowded classrooms. After third grade, students were divided by sex, with the nuns teaching the girls and priests and brothers working with the boys. Each teacher faced an average class size of thirty-two students, more than half of whom spoke no English at home. To help support their families, many of the children worked jobs after school, reducing the hours they were free to concentrate on homework.

Few of the teachers cared enough to work beyond the three o'clock bell. There were a handful, however, as there are in all schools, who did care and who took the time to tutor a student, to feed an interest, to set a goal beyond neighborhood boundaries.

Brother Nick Kappas spent hours after school patiently helping me learn the basic English I had not been taught at home, where both my parents spoke Italian. Another, Father Jerry Martin, a black priest from the Deep South, opened my eyes to the hate and prejudice that existed beyond Hell's Kitchen. Still another, Father Andrew Nealon, an elderly priest with a thick Boston accent, fueled my interest in American history. Then there was Father Bobert Carillo, my cohort in the clacker escapade, and the only member of the clergy who had been born and raised in Hell's Kitchen.

Father Bobby, as the neighborhood kids called him, was in his mid-thirties, tall and muscular, with thick, dark, curly hair, an unlined face and an athlete's body. He played the organ at Sunday mass, was in charge of the altar boys, taught fifth grade and played basketball for two hours every day in the school playground. Most priests liked to preach from a pulpit; Father Bobby liked to talk during the bump and shove of a game of one-on-one. He was the one priest in the neighborhood who challenged us to do better, and who was always ready to help when a problem arose.

Father Bobby introduced me and my friends to such authors as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Victor Hugo and Stephen Crane, further instilling in us a passion for written words. He chose stories and novels by authors he felt we could identify with, and who could, for a brief time, help us escape the wars waged nightly inside our apartments.

It was through him that we learned of such books as Les Miserable!, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and A Bell for Adano and how they could provide a night-light to keep away the family terror. It was easy for him to do so, because he had been raised in the same manner, under the same circumstances. He knew what it meant to find sleep under the cover of fear.

Sacred Heart Church was quiet, its overhead lights shining down across long rows of wooden pews. Seven women and three men sat in the rear, hands folded in prayer, waiting to talk to a priest.

My friends and I spent a lot of time inside that small, compact church with the large marble altar at its center. We each served as altar boys, working a regular schedule of Sunday and occasional weekday masses. We were also expected to handle funerals, spreading dark clouds of incense above the coffins of the neighborhood dead. Everyone wanted to work funeral masses, since the service included a three dollar fee and a chance to pocket more if you looked sufficiently somber.

In addition, we went to mass once a week and sometimes more, especially if Father Bobby needed someone to escort the elderly of the parish to weeknight services. Other times, I would just stop inside the church and sit for hours, alone or with one of my friends. I liked the feel and smell of the empty church, surrounded by statues of saints and stained glass windows. I didn't go so much to pray, but to relax and pull away from outside events. John and I went more than the others. We were the only two of the group to give any thought to entering the priesthood, an idea we found appealing because of its guaranteed ticket out of the neighborhood. A Catholic version of the lottery. We were much too young to dissect the issue of celibacy and spent most of our time fretting over how we would look wearing a Roman collar.

John and I were intrigued by the powers a priest was given. The ability to serve mass, say last rites, baptize babies, perform weddings and, best of all, sit in a dark booth and listen to others confess their sins. To us, the sacrament of confession was like being allowed inside a secret world of betrayal and deceit, where people openly admitted dark misdeeds and vile indiscretions. All of it covered by an umbrella of piety and privacy. Confession was better than any book we could get our hands on or any movie we could see because the sins were real, committed by people we actually knew. The temptation to be a part of that was too great to resist.

There were two confessional booths on both sides of Sacred Heart lining the walls closest to the back pews, each shrouded with heavy purple curtains. The thick wood door at the center of the confessional locked from the inside. Two small mesh screens, covered by sliding wood panels, allowed the priest, if he could stay awake, to sit and listen to the sins of his parish. Every Saturday afternoon, from three to five p.m., a handful of parishioners would head into those booths. There, every affair, every curse, every transgression they made during the week would be revealed. On those days, there was no better place to be in Hell's Kitchen.

John and I sat in that church every Saturday afternoon. We knew Father Tim McAndrew, old, weary and with a hearing disorder, always worked the first hour in one of the booths closest to the altar. Father McAndrew had a penchant for handing out stiff penalties for the slightest trespass, whether he heard it confessed or only thought he did. He was especially rough on children and married women. Self-abuse was worth a dozen Hail Marys and a half-dozen Our Fathers.

On a few occasions and always at my urging, John and I would sneak into the booth alongside McAndrew's, shut the door and hear the sins we had only read about. We couldn't imagine what the penalty would be for getting caught, but whatever it was it couldn't possibly surpass the joy of hearing about a neighbor's fall from grace.

I was inside the second booth, squeezed onto the small wooden bench, my back against the cool wall. The Count, John Reilly, sat next to me.

'Man, if we get caught, they'll burn us,' he whispered.

'What if our mothers are out there?' I asked. 'What if we end up hearing their confessions?'

'What if we hear somethin' worse?' John said.

'Like what?' I couldn't imagine anything worse.

'Like a murder,' John said. 'What if somebody cops to a murder?'

'Relax,' I said, as convincingly as I could. 'All we gotta do is sit back, listen and remember not to laugh.'

At ten minutes past three, two women from the back pew stood and headed for the first confessional, ready to tell their sins to a man who couldn't hear them. They moved one to each side, parted the curtains, knelt down and waited for the small wood doors to slide open.

Seconds later, the sides of our booth came to life.

'Here we go,' I said. 'Get ready.'

'God help us,' John said, making the Sign of The Cross. 'God help us.'

We heard a man's low cough on our right, as he shuffled his way to a kneeling position and leaned his elbow on the small ledge facing him. He chewed gum and sniffed in deep breaths as he waited for the door to open.

'We know him?' John asked.

'Quiet!'

There was a woman's sneeze from the other side of the booth as she searched through an open purse for a tissue. She blew her nose, straightened her dress and waited.

'Which one?' John asked.

'The guy,' I said and moved the small door to my right. The man's thick lips, nose and stubble faced us, separated only by the mesh screen, his heavy breath warming our side of the booth.

'Bless me Father, for I have sinned,' he said, his hands folded in prayer. 'It has been two years since my last confession.'

John grabbed onto my shoulder and I tried to keep my legs from shaking. Neither of us spoke.

'I done bad things, Father,' the man said. 'And I'm sorry for all of them. I gamble, lose all my rent money to the horses. Lie to my wife, hit her sometimes, the kids too. It's bad, Father. Gotta get myself outta this hole. What can I do?'

'Pray,' I said in my deepest voice.

'I been prayin',' the man said. 'Ain't helped. I owe money to loan sharks. A lot of it. Father, you gotta help me. This the place you go for help, right? I got nowhere else to go. This is it.'

John and I held our breath and stayed silent.

'Father, you there?' the man said.

'Yes,' I said.

'So,' the man said. 'What's it gonna be?'

'Three Hail Marys,' I said. 'One Our Father. And may the Lord bless you.'

'Three Hail Marys!' the man said. 'What the hell's that gonna do?'

'It's for your soul,' I said.

'Fuck my soul!' the man said in a loud voice. 'And fuck you too, you freeloadin' bastard.'

The man stood up, pulled aside the purple drapes hanging to his right and stormed out of the booth, his outburst catching the attention of those who waited their turn.

'That went well,' I said to John, who finally loosened his grip on my shoulder.

'Don't do the woman,' John said. 'I'm beggin' you. Let's just get outta here.'

'How?' I asked.

'Don't take anymore,' John said. 'Let 'em all go over to the other booth. Have 'em think no one's in here.'

'Let's do one more,' I said.

'No,' John said. 'I'm too scared.'

'Just one more,' I pleaded.

'No.'

'Only one more.'

'One,' John said. 'Then we're outta here.'

'You got it,' I agreed.

'Swear on it?'

'You can't swear in church,' I said.

The woman's voice was soft and low, barely above a whisper. The edge of a veil hung across her face, her hands curled against the darkness of the booth, the tips of her fingernails scraping the base of the wood.

'Bless me Father,' she began. 'It has been six weeks since my last confession.'

We both knew who she was, had seen her more than once walking the streets of Hell's Kitchen, arm in arm with the latest man to catch her fancy. She was a woman our fathers smiled about and our mothers told us to ignore.

'I'm not happy about my life, Father,' she said. 'It's like I don't want to wake up in the morning anymore.'

'Why?' I asked, my voice muffled by the back of John's shirt.

'It's wrong,' she said. 'Everything I do is wrong and I don't know how to stop.'

'You must pray,' I said.

'I do, Father,' she said. 'Believe me, I do. Every day. It's not doing any good.'

'It will,' I said.

'I sleep with married men,' the woman said. 'Men with families. In the morning I tell myself it's the last time. And it never is.'

'One day it will be,' I said, watching her hands curve around a set of rosary beads.

'It's gonna have to be soon,' the woman said, holding back a rush of tears. 'I'm pregnant.'

John looked at me, both hands locked over his mouth.

'The father?' I asked.

'Take a number,' the woman said. The sarcasm could not hide the sadness in her voice.

'What are you going to do?'

'I know what you want me to do,' the woman said. 'And I know what I should do. I just don't know what I'm gonna do.'

'There's time,' I said, sweat running down my neck.

'I got lotsa things,' the woman said. 'Time just isn't one of 'em.'

The woman blessed herself, rolled up the rosary beads and put them in the front pocket of her dress. She brushed her hair away from her eyes and picked up the purse resting by her knees.

'I gotta go,' she said, and then, much to our shock, she added, 'Thanks for listening, fellas. I appreciate it and I know you'll keep it to yourselves.'

She knocked at the screen with two fingers, waved and left the booth.

'She knew,' John said.

'Yeah,' I said. 'She knew.'

'Why she tell us all that?'

'I guess she had to tell somebody.'

John stood up and brushed against the wall, accidentally sliding open the small door to the confessional. A man knelt on the other side, obscured by the screen.

'Bless me Father for I have sinned,' the man said, his voice baritone deep.

'So?' John said. 'What's that make you? Special?'

John opened the main door and we both walked out of the booth, our heads bowed, our hands folded in prayer.

Summer 1964
FOUR

We were well-schooled in revenge.

Hell's Kitchen offered graduate workshops in correcting wrongs. Any form of betrayal had to be confronted and settled. Our standing in the neighborhood depended on how quickly and in what manner the reprisals occurred. If there was no response, then the injured party earned a coward's label, its weight as great as that of any scarlet letter. Men, boys, women, girls were shot, stabbed, even killed for a variety of motives, all having to do with the simple act of getting even.

When my friends and I were young, Hell's Kitchen was run by a man named King Benny.

In his youth, King Benny had been a hit man for Charles 'Lucky' Luciano and was said to have been one of the shooters who machine-gunned 'Mad Dog' Coll on West 23rd Street on the night of February 8,1932. King Benny ran bootleg with 'Dutch' Schultz, owned a couple of clubs with 'Tough Tony' Anastasia and owned a string of tenements on West 49th Street, all listed in his mother's name. He was tall, well over six feet, with thick dark hair and eyes that never seemed to move. He was married to a woman who lived outside the neighborhood and had no children of his own.

'He was fourteen when I first met him,' my father told me one night. 'Wasn't much of anything back then. Always getting the shit kicked out of him in street fights. Then, one day, for who knows what reason, an Irish guy, about twenty-five years old, takes him and throws him down a flight of stairs. King Benny breaks all his front teeth in the fall. He waits eight years to get that Irish guy. Walks in on him in a public bath house, guy soaking in a tub. King Benny looks in a mirror, takes out his front teeth, lays them on a sink. Looks down at the guy in the tub and says, "When I look in a mirror, I see your face." King Benny pulls out gun and shoots the guy twice in each leg. Then says to him, "Now when you take a bath, you see mine." Nobody ever fucked with King Benny after that.'

His decisions were never rash and were always final. His words were, in Hell's Kitchen, respected as the law. It was the only law never broken.

King Benny used diplomacy when called for, force when necessary. He earned his money from old fashioned mob enterprises – policy running, loan sharking, truck hijacking, swag sales and prostitution. These crimes were quietly condoned by a police department warmed by weekly payoffs and supported by a neighborhood addicted to illegal action. King Benny ruled with a tight fist and lashed out with deadly purpose against any threat to his domain. A lot of people tried taking over his business during his reign and a lot of people ended up dead.

He would do favors for those he liked and ignored the financial requests of those he considered liabilities. He would listen to people with problems and offer opinions on how those problems could be solved. He was a Father confessor without a conscience.

The large room was wrapped in darkness. Three men in black jackets and black sports shirts sat at a table by an open window, playing sette bello and smoking unfiltered cigarettes. Above them, a dim bulb dangled from a knotted cord. Behind them, a jukebox played Italian love songs. None of the men spoke.

At the far, end of the room, a tall, thin man stood behind a half-moon bar, scanning the daily racing sheet.

A large white cup filled with espresso was on his left, a Kenmore alarm clock ticked away on his right. He was dressed in black shirt, sweater, shoes and slacks, with a large oval-shaped ring on the fourth finger of his left hand. His hair was slicked back and his face was clean shaven. He chewed a small piece of gum and had a thick, wood toothpick in the corner of his mouth.

I turned the knob on the old wood door that led into the room and swung it open, thin shafts of afternoon sunlight creeping in behind me. No one looked up as I walked toward King Benny, the heels of my shoes scraping against the wood floor.

'Can I talk to you for a minute?' I asked, standing across from him, on the far side of the bar, my back to the three men playing cards.

King Benny looked up from his racing sheet and nodded. He reached out for his coffee, raised it to his lips and took a slow sip, eyes still on me.

'I would like to work for you,' I said. 'Help you out, do whatever you need.'

King Benny put the cup back on the bar and wiped his lower lip with two fingers. His eyes didn't move.

'I can be a lot of help to you,' I said. 'You can count on that.'

One of the men playing cards slid his chair back, stood up and walked toward me.

'You the butcher's kid, am I right?' he asked, his three-day-old beard growing in gray, the bottoms of his teeth brown and caked.

'Yeah,' I said.

'Well, what kind of work you lookin' for?' he asked, leaning his head toward King Benny.

'Whatever,' I said. 'It doesn't matter.'

'I don't think we got anything, kid,' he said. 'Somebody musta steered you some wrong info.'

'Nobody steered me wrong,' I said. 'Everybody says this is the place to come to for jobs.'

'Who's everybody?' the man said.

'People from the neighborhood,' I said.

'Oh,' the man said. 'Them. Well, let me ask ya', what the fuck do they know?'

'They know you guys got jobs,' I said, moving my eyes from the old man and back to King Benny.

'Smart ass,' the old man said, turning away, heading back to his chair and his game.

King Benny and I looked at each other, the coffee by his side growing cold.

'Sorry I wasted your time,' I told him, looking away and heading toward the door.

I pulled the knob and opened it, letting in some gusts of air, letting out wisps of smoke.

'Hold it a minute,' King Benny finally said.

'Yeah?' I said, turning my head to face him.

'Come back tomorrow,' King Benny said. 'If you wanna work.'

'What time tomorrow?'

'Anytime,' King Benny said, his eyes back on the racing sheet, his hand reaching for the cold cup of coffee.

My first job for King Benny paid twenty-five dollars a week and ate up only forty minutes of my time. Twice a week, on Monday mornings before school and Friday afternoons after dismissal, I went to the large room on 12th Avenue where King Benny conducted his business. There, one of the three men would hand me a crumpled paper bag and direct me to one of the two nearby police precincts for its delivery.

It was a perfect way to handle payouts. Even if we got caught with the drop money, there wasn't anything the law could do about it. Nobody was going to jail for simply handing somebody a paper bag. Especially a kid.

Not long after I began work for King Benny, I was walking across 10th Avenue, a paper bag filled with money nestled under my right arm. The spring afternoon was warm and cloudless; a mild threat of rain had disappeared with the lunchtime traffic. I stopped at the corner of 48th Street, waiting while two trucks drove past, leaving dust and fumes in their noisy wake.

I didn't notice the two men standing behind me.

The shorter of the two, dressed in tan slacks and a brown windbreaker, leaned across and grabbed my elbow, pulling me closer to him. The second man, taller and stronger, locked one of his arms into mine.

'Keep walkin',' he said. 'Make a sound, you die.'

'Where are we going?' I asked, trying to disguise my panic.

'Shut up,' the shorter man said.

We had shifted direction and were moving toward the waterfront, walking down 47th Street, past a car wash and an all-night gas station. The shorter man tightened his grip on my arm as we walked, his foul breath warm on my neck.

'Here we are,' he said. 'Get in there. C'mon. Stop stallin'

'You guys gotta be nuts,' I said. 'You know who you're takin' off?'

'Yeah, we know,' the tall man said. 'And we're scared shitless.'

The tall man ripped the paper bag from under my arm and pushed me crashing through the front of a tenement doorway. The inside hallway was dark and narrow, blood red walls cold to the touch. A forty-watt bulb cast the stairs and cement floor in shadow. Three garbage cans, lids on tight, were lined up alongside the super's first-floor apartment. Down the far end of the hall a wood door, leading to a cluttered back yard, creaked open.

I was on my knees, watching the two men count the money from the paper bag. They stopped when they saw me staring.

'This is a lot of money for a kid,' the tall man said, smiling. 'Don't know if I would trust a kid like you with this much money. What if you lose it?'

'It's only money,' I said, looking behind me, at the door which led out the back way.

'Whatta ya' get outta this?' the short man asked me. 'What's your cut?'

'Don't get a cut,' I said.

'Then you ain't nowhere as smart as you think,' the short man said.

'Lots of people tell me that,' I said, getting to my feet, rubbing my hands against my pants legs.

The tall man rolled the money back up, rubber bands holding the two bundles in place, and put them in the paper bag. He crumpled the bag again and shoved it inside the front pocket of his jacket. The short man had turned his back to me, checking out the street traffic through the open doorway.

Then the super's door clicked open.

The super, an old man in a sleeveless T-shirt and brown corduroy pants, stood in his doorway staring at the three strangers in his building.

'What you do?' he said in a husky Italian accent. 'Answer me. What you do here?'

'Relax,' the tall man said, his words tight, controlled. 'We were just leavin'. Okay with you?'

'What you do to the boy?' the old man asked, stepping out of the doorway, his arms by his side, walking closer to me.

'They took my money,' I said to the old man. 'They followed me and took my money.'

'You take money?' the old man asked, his voice an angry challenge.

'Kid's talkin' trouble,' the tall man said. 'Don't listen to him.'

'It's in the bag,' I said. 'The money they took is in the bag.'

The super's eyes moved to the paper bag, stuffed inside the tall man's jacket.

'Lemme see the bag,' the old man said.

'Fuck you,' the tall man said.

The old man brought a hand to the small of his back, his manner calm, his eyes steady. The hand came back holding a cocked.38 caliber pistol, its shiny silver cylinder pointed at the tall man's chest.

'Lemme see the bag,' the old man said again.

The tall man took the bag from his jacket pocket and handed it to the old man, careful not to make a sudden move. The old man tossed the bag to me.

'Get out,' he said. 'Use the back door.'

'What about them?' I asked.

'You care?'

'No,' I said.

'Then go.'

I turned around, shoved the bag under my arm, and ran out the building. I jumped the short back fence, cut through a small alleyway and came out on llth Avenue.

I never looked back, not even when I heard the four shots that were fired.

'I need somebody with me,' I said to King Benny. 'What if that old guy hadn't showed?'

'But he did,' a man to King Benny's left said. 'And he took care of it.'

'Maybe next time we don't walk into the wrong building,' I said, sweat lining my face.

'There ain't no next time,' the man said, lighting a cigar.

'Maybe you just ain't up for the work,' another of King Benny's men said. 'Ain't as easy as you was thinkin'.'

'I'm up to it,' I insisted.

'Then there's no problem,' the man behind me said.

King Benny brushed a stream of cigar smoke away from his eyes. His look was cold and steady, his black jacket and slacks sleek and tailored, a large-faced Mickey Mouse watch strapped to his left wrist.

'Whatta ya need?' he asked me, his lips barely moving as he spoke.

'My friends,' I said.

'Your friends?' the man behind me asked, a laugh to the question. 'What do you think this is?'

'It won't cost you extra,' I said. 'You can take the money out of my end.'

'Who are these friends?' King Benny asked,

'From the neighborhood.' I looked directly at him. 'You know their families, just like you know mine.'

The guy behind me threw his hands up in the. air. 'We can't trust no kids.'

'These kids you can trust,' I said.

King Benny brushed aside a fresh stream of cigar smoke, pushed his chair back and stood.

'Get your friends,' he said, then turned and walked toward the rear of the room. 'And Tony,' King Benny continued, without looking back, his shoulders straight, his walk slow, his damaged right leg sliding across the floor.

'Yeah, King?' the man with the cigar in his mouth asked.

'Never smoke in here again,' King Benny said.

FIVE

Fat Mancho was the meanest man in Hell's Kitchen and we loved him for it. He owned a candy store sandwiched between two tenements in the middle of 50th Street. His wife, a dour woman with a thin scar across her right cheek, lived on the second floor of one building. His mistress, who looked to be older than his wife, lived on the third floor of the other. Each woman collected monthly social security checks based on false disability claims. Both checks were signed over to Fat Mancho.

In the back room of the candy store, Fat Mancho ran a numbers operation, keeping for himself a quarter off every dollar that was bet. The store was owned, on paper, by Fat Mancho's mother, who allegedly lived in Puerto Rico and was never seen by anyone in Hell's Kitchen. Fat Mancho, who collected monthly welfare checks, also owned a piece of an open-air parking lot on West 54th Street, near the theater district. Fat Mancho was only in his mid-thirties, but because of his large bulk and unshaven face looked at least ten years older. He cursed at anyone he saw, had trust in only a handful, and made it his business to know everything that went on in the streets around him. Fat Mancho lived the American dream, without ever having to do a day's work.

In Hell's Kitchen, the fast way was the preferred way.

We were standing in front of Fat Mancho's Candy Store waiting to turn on the johnny pump. I had the heavy wrench hidden halfway down the back of my pants; my T-shirt hung out, covering what the jeans could not. John was next to me, an empty can of Chock Full O'Nuts coffee in his hand, both ends cut out. Behind us, two Puerto Rican rummies were giving Fat Mancho heat over the price of a can of Colt.45 Malt Liquor.

While it could safely be said that Fat Mancho hated most everyone he met, for some reason he tolerated us. To him, we were harmless street rats, out for nothing more than a good time. He liked to joke with us, poke fun at everything we did and insult us whenever he felt the urge. We had known him all our lives and felt that he trusted us. We would never steal from him or try to deceive him in any way. We never asked for money and never caused trouble in front of his store. He liked our company, liked it when we gave back as good as we got from him, his eyes gleaming on the rare occasions we bested his taunts. We always felt that Fat Mancho had a good heart and that he liked kids. He just never wanted anybody to know that.

'What is that shit, anyway?' John wanted to know, pointing to the Colt.45s.

'Beer mixed with piss,' Tommy told him, one foot resting on the fire hydrant in front of the store.

'Then the drunks are right,' John said. 'Mancho is chargin' them too much.'

'When you gonna open up the pump?' Tommy asked.

'Cops are due for one more pass around,' Michael said, standing behind him. 'After that.'

'Hey, Mancho,' John yelled into the back of the store.

'What?' the Fat Man said.

'Can I use your bathroom?' John asked.

'Fuck you, punk,' Fat Mancho said, laughing. This was his idea of major fun. 'Wet your pants.'

'That a no?' John asked me.

'I think so,' I shrugged.

'Hey, Mancho,' Tommy said. 'Give the guy a break. He's really got to go.'

'Blow me,' Fat Mancho said, having a great time.

'That's it,' Tommy said. 'We're never gonna buy from your store again.'

'Kill yourself,' Fat Mancho said.

'C'mon,' I said to John. 'You can go at my place. I gotta pick something up anyway.'

'You sure?'

'It's either there or the back of Fat Mancho's car,' I said.

'Where's he parked?' John said.

Apartment doors in Hell's Kitchen were never locked during the day and ours was no exception. John and I took the two flights at full throttle, chasing Mrs. Aletti's black alley cat up the stairs ahead of us. We scooted past the large potted plant outside Mrs. Blake's and rushed to my door. I turned the handle and walked into the kitchen, John right behind me. The bathroom was on the left, next to the kitchen table, a Padre Pio calendar tacked to the wooden door which, for reasons known only to the previous tenant, locked from the outside. I could hear my mother whistling an Italian pop song from one of the back rooms. A fresh pot of espresso was on the stove and two cups and a sugar bowl were on the table.

'Didn't think I was gonna make it,' John said, reaching for the bathroom door.

'Hurry,' I said. 'Before you pee on the floor.'

The door swung open and both John and I stood as still as ice sculptures.

There, on the bowl, in full white habit, sat Sister Carolyn Saunders, my second grade teacher and one of my mother's best friends. She stared back, as motionless as we were.

She had a wad of toilet paper bunched up in one hand.

'Holy shit!' John said.

'Oh my God!' said Sister Carolyn.

We were back on the street in seconds, John nearly tripping down the final steps in his rush to get out of the building. Michael and Tommy were pitching pennies against a brick wall.

'That was quick,' Michael said. 'What'd you do, start in the hallway?'

'I'm dead,' I said. 'Dead and buried.'

Tommy looked confused. 'Because John took a piss in your house?'

'We saw a nun.' John was bent over, hands to knees, trying to catch his breath.

'Where?' Michael asked. 'In the hall?'

'On the bowl!' John said. 'She was sittin' on Shakes' toilet! Takin' a piss!'

'No shit,' Tommy said. 'You never think of nuns doin' stuff like that.'

'Which nun?' Michael asked.

'Sister Carolyn,' I said, still shaking from the memory.

'Good choice,' Tommy said. 'She's really cute.'

'Did you see her snatch?' Michael asked.

'A nun's snatch!' John said. 'We're gonna burn like twigs for this, Shakes!'

'Relax,' Michael said. 'Nothin's gonna happen.'

'What makes you so sure?' I asked.

'She's a nun, right? So she's not gonna tell. If people find out, it's more trouble for her than it is for you.'

'Maybe,' John wailed. 'But we still shouldn't've seen what we saw.'

'Are you kidding me?' Tommy said. 'It don't get better than nun snatch.'

'I only saw skin,' John said. 'I swear it. White clothes and white skin. Nothin' else.'

'She say anything?' Tommy asked.

'Ask her yourself,' Michael said, looking over John's shoulder. 'She's coming this way.'

'My heart just stopped,' John said, his face pale, his voice cracking.

'She's coming for us,' I said, turning my head in Sister Carolyn's direction, watching her walk down the steps of my apartment building, check for traffic and make her way to where we were standing.

'What the fuck's that nun want?' Fat Mancho said, slurping a Yoo-Hoo and scratching at his three-day growth.

'Stay quiet, Fat Man,' Michael said.

'Eat my pole,' Fat Mancho said, walking back behind the bodega counter.

'Hello, boys,' Sister Carolyn said, her manner calm, her voice soft.

She was young, her face clear and unlined. She was Boston big-city bred and had spent three years in Latin America working with the poor before a transfer brought her to Sacred Heart. Sister Carolyn was popular with her students and respected by their parents and, unlike some of the other nuns of the parish, seemed at ease among the people of Hell's Kitchen. Though she spoke no Italian and my mother hardly a word of English, they had formed a solid friendship, with Sister Carolyn visiting her an average of three times a week. She knew the type of marriage my mother was in and was always quick to check in on her after my father had administered yet another beating.

'Hey, Sister,' Michael said casually. 'What's goin' on?'

Sister Carolyn smiled and put one hand on top of John's shoulder. Nothing but fear was keeping John in his place.

'The bathroom's free now if you still need to use it,' she said to him softly.

'Thank you,' John mumbled.

'We're very sorry,' I said.

'I know,' she said. 'Forget it happened. I already have.'

'Thank you, Sister,' I said.

'I'll see all you boys in church,' she said, turning to leave.

'Bet on it,' Tommy said.

'What a peach,' John said, watching her as she walked up the street back to the Convent on 51st, her long white skirt swaying at her feet.

'And not a bad lookin' ass, either,' Michael said, winking at me.

'Fuck do any o' you know about ass,' Fat Mancho said from behind his counter.

'I'm gonna go pee,' John said, running back across the street. 'Can't hold it in anymore.'

'Watch now,' Tommy said to me. 'This time he walks in on your mother coppin' a squat.'

'That happens,' Michael said. 'He might as well just throw himself out a window.'

'He should throw himself out a window anyway,' Fat Mancho said. 'Useless fuck.'

'Go wash your mouth out with shit, Fat Man,' Tommy said.

'Set yourself on fire,' Fat Mancho said. 'All of you. Burn till you die.'

We all looked over at Fat Mancho and laughed, walking away from his store, toward the fire hydrant and a dose of wet relief from the heat of the day.

SIX

Father Robert Carillo was a longshoreman's son who was as comfortable sitting on a bar stool in a back alley saloon as he was standing at the altar during high mass. Raised in Hell's Kitchen, he toyed with a life of petty crime before finding his religious calling. Carillo left for a midwestern seminary three weeks before his sixteenth birthday. When he returned ten years later, he asked to be assigned to the Sacred Heart parish.

As far as we were concerned, he wasn't like a priest at all. He would spring for pizza after an afternoon pick-up game or twist a few neighborhood arms and raise money for new sports equipment for the gym. He was a friend. A friend who just happened to be a priest.

Like us, Father Bobby had an extensive comic book and baseball card collection, was an avid boxing fan and favored James Cagney over any other actor. He had a small office near the back of the church, lined with books and old blues albums. At its center was a huge framed picture of Jack London standing on a snowbank. If I was ever tempted to steal something from Father Bobby's office, it was that picture.

Despite the criminal bent of the neighborhood, the church exerted considerable influence and its leaders were visible members of the community. Priests openly recruited boys for the priesthood, presenting the clerical life as a way out of Hell's Kitchen. Nuns often took girls aside to talk to them in frank terms about sex and violence.

The priests, nuns and brothers of the neighborhood knew they served a violent clientele and they were there to tend to our physical and psychological wounds. They listened to battered wives who came to them for solace and gave words of comfort to frightened children. They helped when and where they could, careful not to stray outside the established framework of the neighborhood and always aware that there were a number of situations over which they held no control.

The clergy knew the rules of Hell's Kitchen. They knew some people had to break the law in order to feed their families. They knew the clothes many of us wore were bootlegged and the meat most of us ate came from stolen trucks. And they knew not to butt heads with someone like King Benny. But in the ways they could, they helped us. If nothing else, they offered a quiet room, some hot coffee and a place to talk when you needed it. Few people in the neighborhood would have asked more from any religion.

Father Bobby cared for us in a significant way and as much as we were capable of loving an outsider, we loved him for that care.

He knew the problems my mother and father were having, of the beatings she was handed and the debts he incurred. He tried to balance that by talking to me about books and baseball and verbally guiding me away from the fast money and easy times offered by King Benny and his crew.

He understood Michael's instinctive resistance to any outsider, even one from the neighborhood. He saw in Michael a boy who was given very little reason to trust. He sensed the loneliness behind his tough talk and the fear hidden by his swagger. Father Bobby knew that Michael was a boy who merely longed for a father who did more than lash out at his only son. He gave Michael distance, leaving a book he would like at his desk rather than handing it to him after school. He fed his streak of independence instead of fighting it.

He joked with John, keying in on a sense of humor built around insults and fast comebacks. He traded comic books with him, giving up valued Flash editions for mediocre Fantastic Four exploits, ignoring the sucker snickers after the deals were completed. On John's tenth birthday, he gave him a Classics Illustrated edition of The Count of Monte Cristo, a gift that moved John to tears.

He encouraged John's quiet desires to be an artist, sneaking him an endless supply of pencils and paper. In return, John would give Father Bobby original illustrations from a comic book series he was working on. John was also his favorite altar boy and Father Bobby made it a point to work as many masses with him as possible, even if it meant pulling him out of an early class.

'John would have made a good priest,' Father Bobby told me years later. 'He was filled with goodness. He cared about people. But he had a knack, like all you boys did, of being in the wrong place at the worst possible time. A lot of people have that knack and seem to survive. John couldn't.'

But of all of us, Father Bobby was closest to Tommy.

Butter never adjusted to having a father away in prison and, while he never talked about it, we knew it gnawed at his otherwise happy nature. Father Bobby tried to fill the paternal void, playing one-on-one basketball with him on spring evenings, taking him to James Bond movies on winter nights, helping him manage the pigeon coop Tommy kept on the roof of his building. He made sure Tommy was never alone on Father's Day.

Father Bobby had the soul of a priest, but the instincts of a first grade detective. He was a vigilant neighborhood presence, the first to take our class on outings and the first to question our outside involvements. He knew my friends and I did work for King Benny and was not pleased by that fact. But he understood the need for table money. In his time, Father Bobby had helped augment his own family's income by running errands for 'Lucky' Jack and the Anastasia family.

He wasn't worried about the pocket money. He worried about the next step. The one where they ask you to pick up a gun. He didn't want that to happen to us. He wanted to get to the damage before it got started. Before we saw too many-things we shouldn't be seeing. Unfortunately, there were things even Father Bobby couldn't prevent.

The school auditorium was filled to overflow with balloons, poker tables topped with pitchers of beer and bowls of pretzels. Paper banners wishing the bride and groom luck lined the walls. A bald disc jockey in a wrinkled tux stood on a small stage, focused on a large stereo, four speakers and three piles of records.

It was a neighborhood wedding reception, open to all.

The bride, a tall, dark-haired girl from 52nd Street, was five months pregnant and spent most of her time locked inside a bathroom off the main stairwell. The groom, a Mobil mechanic with bad teeth and a black beard, drank boilermakers and munched peanuts from a paper bag, well aware of the talk that said the child his wife carried belonged to someone else.

Outside, the night was rainy. Inside, large corner fans did nothing to still the heat.

'You know either one of 'em?' Tommy asked, chafing at the starched collar and tight tie around his neck.

'The guy,' I said, drinking from a bottle of Pepsi. 'You know him too. From the gas station. Lets us drink from his water hose.'

'You're not used to seeing him without grease on his face,' Michael said, filling the pockets of his blue blazer with salt pretzels.

'You think it's his kid?' Tommy asked.

'Could be anybody's kid,' Michael said. 'She's not exactly shy.'

'Why's he marrying her?' I said. 'I mean, if you know all about her, how come he doesn't?'

'Maybe it is his kid,' Tommy said. 'Maybe she told him it was. You don't know.'

'That's right, Tommy,' Carol Martinez said. 'You don't know.'

Carol Martinez, twelve, was as much our friend as she was Michael's steady. Carol was a Hell's Kitchen half-breed. She inherited her temper and dark good looks from her Puerto Rican father, while her sarcastic wit and sharp tongue came courtesy of a strong-willed Irish mother who died in childbirth. Carol read books, worked after school in a bakery and, by and large, stayed to herself.

She ignored the pleas of the girl gangs to join their ranks, never carried a weapon, loved Westerns as well as sappy love stories and went to church only when the nuns forced her to go. Except for her father, Carol wasn't close to any members of her family and always appeared saddest around the holidays. The mothers of the neighborhood were fond of her, the fathers looked out for her and the boys kept their distance.

Except for us. She was always comfortable in our company. She stood up to Michael's quiet authority, was conscious of my youth and Tommy's sensitivity and fretted like a nurse over John's various illnesses. John had asthma and was quick to panic when caught in closed quarters or in any place he felt at a disadvantage, such as swimming far from shore. He also had a digestive defect and could not eat dairy products. He would get severe headaches, strong enough at times to make him drowsy. While John never complained about his health problems, including his minor heart condition, we were very much aware of them and considered them whenever we planned a prank or an outing.

That night she was wearing a blue ruffled dress with a small white flower pinned at the waist. She had on ankle socks and her Buster Browns were shiny and new. Her hair was in a pony tail.

'Everybody's here,' John said when he saw her.

'I'm a friend of Janet's,' Carol said.

'Who's Janet?' John said.

'The bride, asswipe,' Michael said, and led Carol by the arm off to dance.

The three men came in just as the bride and groom started slicing the three-tiered wedding cake. They stood off to the side, their backs to the front door, their hands nursing long-necked bottles of Budweiser: one of them had a lit cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth.

We were standing in the shadows next to the disc jockey, Michael and Carol holding hands, Tommy and John sneaking beers. I held a Sam Cooke 45, 'Twistin' the Night Away', which was next on the play list.

'You know 'em?' Michael asked, putting his arm around Carol's shoulders.

'The one with the cigarette,' I said. 'I've seen him in King Benny's place a few times.'

'What's he do for him?'

'He always passed himself off as a shooter,' I said. 'I don't know. Could be nothing more than talk.'

'Why's he here?' Tommy asked.

'Maybe he likes weddings,' John said.

The three men walked toward the center of the room, their eyes on the groom, who was eating cake and sipping champagne from the back of his wife's spike-heeled shoe. They stopped directly across the table from the couple and rested their beers on a stack of paper plates.

'What do you want?' the groom asked, wiping his lips with the back of his hand.

'We come to offer our best,' the man in the middle said. 'To you and to the girl.'

'You just done that,' the groom said. 'Now maybe you should leave.'

'No cake?' the man in the middle said.

The crowd around the table had grown silent.

'C'mon, guys,' a middle-aged man said, his speech slurred, the front of his white shirt wet from beer. 'A wedding's no place for problems.'

The man stared him back into silence.

'Maybe your friend's right,' the man said. 'Maybe a wedding's no place for what we have to do. Let's take it outside.'

'I don't wanna go outside,' the groom said.

'You got the money?'

'No,' the groom said. 'I ain't got that kind of money. I told you that already. It's gonna take a while.'

'If you don't have the money,' the man said, nodding toward the bride, 'you know the deal.'

She had not moved since the men approached, paper plate full of cake in one hand, empty champagne glass in the other, heavily-made up face flushed red.

'I ain't gonna give her up,' the groom said in a firm voice. 'I ain't ever gonna give her up.'

The man in the middle was quiet for a moment. Then he nodded and said, 'Enjoy the rest of your night.'

The three men turned away from the bride and groom and disappeared into the crowd, making their way toward the back door and the dark street.

We sat braced against the thin bars of the first floor fire escape, staring at the alley below. Four garbage cans and an empty refrigerator carton stood against one wall; the shadows of a forty-watt bulb filtered across the auditorium's back door. The rain had picked up, a steady Hudson River breeze blowing newly laundered sheets across the dirt and empty cans of the alley.

Michael had positioned us there. He was positive something was going to happen and he'd picked the most strategic place to observe the action.

We watched as the bride and groom stood in the narrow doorway, arms wrapped around each other, both drunk, kissing and hugging. The harsh light from the auditorium forced us to move back toward the window ledge.

The groom took his wife by the hand and stepped into the alley, moving toward 51st Street, holding a half-empty bottle of Piels in his free hand. They stopped to wave at a handful of friends crowding across a doorway, the men drunk, the women shivering in the face of the rain.

'Don't leave any beer behind,' the groom shouted. 'It's paid for.'

'Count on that,' one of the drunks shouted back.

'Goodbye,' the bride said, still waving. 'Thank you for everything.'

'Let's go,' the groom now said to his new wife. 'It's our wedding night.' With that, a grin stretched across his face.

The first bullet came out of the darkness and hit the groom just above his brown belt buckle, sinking him to his knees, a stunned look on his face. The bride gave out a loud scream, hands held across her chest, eyes wide, her husband bleeding just inches away.

The group by the door stood motionless, frozen.

The second shot, coming from the rear of the alley, hit the groom in the throat, dropping him face first onto the pavement.

'Help!' the bride screamed. 'Jesus, God, please help! He's gonna die! Please help, please!'

No one moved. No one spoke. The faces in the doorway had inched deeper into the shadows, more concerned with avoiding the shooter's scope than with rushing to the side of a fallen friend.

Sirens blared in the distance.

The bride was on her knees, blood staining the front of her gown, crying over the body of her dying husband. A priest ran into the alley, toward the couple. An elderly woman came out of the auditorium holding a large white towel packed with ice, water flowing down the sides of her dress. Two young men, sobered by the shooting, moved out of the doorway to stare down at the puddles of blood.

'Let's get outta here,' John said quietly.

'So much for getting married,' I said, just as quietly.

Michael, Tommy and Carol said nothing. But I knew what they were thinking. It was what we were all thinking. The street had won. The street would always win.

Fall 1965
SEVEN

My friends and I were united in trust.

There was never a question about our loyalty. We fed off each other, talked our way into and out of problems and served as buffers against the violence we encountered daily. Our friendship was a tactic of survival.

We each wanted a better life, but were unsure how to get it. We knew enough, though, to anchor our hopes in simple goals. In our idle moments, we never imagined running large companies or finding cures for diseases or holding elected office. Those dreams belonged to other places, other boys.

Our fantasies were shaped by the books we read and reread and the movies we watched over and over until even the dullest dialogue was committed to memory. Stories of romance and adventure, of great escapes and greater tastes of freedom. Stories that brought victory and cheers to the poor, allowing them to bask in the afterglow of revenge.

We never needed to leave the cocoon of Hell's Kitchen to glimpse those dreams.

We lived inside every book we read, every movie we saw. We were Cagney in Angels With Dirty Faces and Gable in The Call of the Wild. We were Ivanhoe on our own city streets and the Knights of the Round Table in our clubhouse.

It was during those uninhibited moments of pretend play that we were allowed the luxury of childhood. Faced by outsiders, we had to be tough, acting older than our years. In our homes we had to be wary, never knowing when the next violent moment would come. But when we were alone we could be who we really were – kids.

We never pictured ourselves, as adults, living far from Hell's Kitchen. Our lives were plotted out at birth. We would try to finish high school, fall in love with a local girl, get a working man's job and move into a railroad apartment at a reasonable rent. We didn't see it as confining, but rather as a dramatic step in the right direction. Our fathers were men with sinful pasts and criminal records. We would not be.

I loved my parents. I respected King Benny. But my friends meant more to me than any adult. They were my lifeblood and my strength. Our simple dreams nourished by a common soil.

We thought we would know each other forever.

'It's simple,' Michael said.

'You always say it's simple,' Tommy said. 'Then we get there and it ain't so simple.'

'It's a new store,' Michael explained. 'Nobody knows us. We walk in, take what we need and walk out.'

'What do they have?' John demanded to know.

'At least fifty different titles,' Michael said. 'Flash, Green Lantern, Aquaman, you name it. Just wailing for us.'

'How many work the store?' I asked.

'Two, usually,' Michael said. 'Never more than three.'

'When?'

'Afternoon's the best time.'

'You sure?'

'Follow the plan,' Michael said, looking at us. 'It'll work if we just follow the plan.'

My friends and I were thieves who stole more for fun than profit. We took what we felt we needed but could not afford to buy. We never went to our parents for money, never borrowed from anyone and never walked into a situation armed.

We hit candy stores for their comic books, toy stores for games, supermarkets for gum. And we were good at it. The few times we were caught, we either talked, fought or cried our way out of trouble. We knew that nobody was going to send a kid to jail for rounding out a Classics Illustrated collection.

We kept our escapades from our parents. Though most of them were involved in small-time scams of their own, none would have been pleased to know their children were chasing fast on their heels. Still, Thou Shalt Not Steal carried little weight in Hell's Kitchen. The neighborhood was a training ground for young criminals and had been throughout most of its history.

Time spent in the company of made men, their allegiance sworn to a life of crime, led to a desire to flex our own criminal muscles. Where once we were content to walk out of a store with a handful of Green Hornets, we now felt the need to empty entire racks, from Sgt. Rock to The Fantastic Four.

In the neighborhood, the gaze on us intensified with each small job we pulled. The old-line hoods would glance our way, an acknowledged nod toward a new generation, as active in their recruiting methods as any Ivy League head hunter. We were the promise, the raw rookies who could one day hold the neighborhood together, score the deals and keep the illegal traffic moving.

There were many roads a young man could travel on the streets of Hell's Kitchen. None promised great rewards. The majority turned into dead ends.

Career criminal was simply one such option.

Michael was the first one in the candy store.

I followed soon after. John and Tommy – Butter and the Count – waited outside, close to the front door. The entry was curved and narrow, a hardwood candy stand running down the length of the counter. Two men worked the place, both middle-aged, both smoking. A small electric fan, pennant strips attached to the rim, whirred in a side corner.

Michael walked to the comic book racks, reached for a Batman and handed it to me.

'Read that one yet?' he asked.

'No,' I said, looking over my shoulder at the two men cutting open candy cartons. 'It's new.'

Want it?'

'Not today,' I said.

'What is it, Shakes?' Michael asked, racking back the Batman.

'Let's not do this,' I said, lowering my voice to a whisper.

'Why not?'

'It just doesn't feel right.'

'We're here now,' Michael said.

'And we can leave now.'

'Don't crap on me now, Shakes. We can do this. You and me.'

'It feels different this time,' I said.

'It feels different every time,' Michael said.

'You sure?' I asked.

'I'm sure,' Michael said.

I hesitated, then I nodded my compliance. 'Make your move,' I said.

Michael pulled three comic books from a top rack, well aware that the two men were staring in his direction. I took four Sgt. Rock comics from a lower shelf, put them under my right arm and followed Michael further down the aisle. Behind me, one of the men lifted the counter top and began to walk toward us. He was tall and thin, thick dark hair sitting in clumps on the sides of his head and a large, circular scar resting below his left eye. He had a small iron pipe in one hand.

Tommy and John came into the store, pushing and shoving as per the plan. The man behind the counter stared at them between puffs on a fresh cigarette.

'No trouble. No trouble in here,' he said, his voice thick with a Middle Eastern accent, his cigarette filter clenched between stained teeth.

'I don't want trouble,' John said to him, pushing Tommy against the newspaper trays. 'I want candy.'

'That's the last time you push me,' Tommy said, picking up a paper and throwing it at John.

'Stop it!' the man behind the counter shouted. 'Outside. You like a fight? Go outside.'

The thin man facing us turned and walked away, moving toward Tommy and John and the front of the store. He walked slowly, slapping the base of the pipe against the palm of his hand.

'Get out, punks,' the man said, giving John's shoulder a shove. 'Get out!'

John turned and faced the store owner. Angrily, he put both hands on the man's shirt front and pushed him back.

'Don't touch me,' he said, watching the man tumble backwards, the pipe falling on top of discarded editions of the New York Post.

Things immediately got out of hand. The man jumped to his feet, his face red with embarrassment, and rushed John, catching him around the chest and dropping him to the ground. He straddled John's upper body and gripped his face with one hand, while the other formed a fist.

Tommy ran up from behind. He threw one arm around the man's throat and shoved a knee into the base of his spine,

Michael and I made our way to the front of the store, the sides of our jackets filled with dozens of comic books. We kept our eyes on the man behind the counter, watching for him to make a move. He never looked our way, frozen by the sight of his partner in a scrap with two boys.

John now freed one arm and landed two short blows to the man's stomach. Tommy scored with a steady torrent on the side of the man's head, causing his ear and temple to flush. The man fell to one side, tumbling off John, the bulk of his weight resting against the candy counter. One arm was dangling, free, inches from the iron pipe he had moments earlier dropped.

'We ain't ever comin' here again,' John said, back on his feet, shouting at the man behind the counter. He reached over, picked up a copy of the Daily News and threw it down on the head of his fallen enemy.

Michael and I moved past Tommy, John and the two men and walked out of the store, our stolen gains snug in their place.

John turned and followed us out. That left Tommy alone with the two men.

And before any of us knew what was happening, the man on the ground grabbed the iron pipe and came to his feet swinging, mouth twisted in rage. 'I kill you, punk!' he shouted. 'I kill you!' The blows landed in rapid succession. The first blow glanced off Tommy's shoulder. The second found a spot above his right eye, drawing blood. The third landed on the hard edge of Tommy's left wrist, the bone immediately giving way.

Tommy, his knees buckling from the pain, inched his way out of the store. A fourth shot caught him on the back of the neck, sending him crashing against the door and out to the street. Tommy fell to the cement, his eyes lifeless, his body limp.

John was the first to reach his side. 'I think he killed him,' he said, staring up at me and Michael.

'Then he's gonna have to kill us too,' Michael said. 'I no fight you,' the man with the pipe said, his anger receding, his arms by his side. 'No problem with you. No problem!'

'Yeah you do,' Michael said as he nudged his way forward. 'Your only problem is with me.'

Michael opened the front of his blue denim jacket and reached a hand into one of the inside sleeves. He pulled out four folded, stolen comic books and dropped them to the ground. Then he yanked four more books from his other sleeve. Then he reached both hands into the back of his jeans and took out three more, dropping them all at his feet. The man moved toward him, stepping over Tommy's body.

'I kill all of you,' he said with teeth clenched.

'You're gonna have to,' Michael said, balling his hands into fists, an arm's length from the pipe.

'This is bad,' I remember saying. 'This is so bad.' The man left his feet and swung the pipe, missing Michael's head by inches.

My eye caught John, his arms around Tommy, sweat streaking down his forehead, concern etched on his face. As a crowd collected, I looked at the faces surrounding me, the men focused on the action, most of them smoking, a few offering Michael free advice.

No one ever broke up a fight on the streets of Hell's Kitchen, no matter who the combatants were, regardless of the weapons used. A street fight was a respected ritual and no one dared step in.

Fights took place for any number of reasons, from unpaid debts to three-way love affairs gone sour, but the overwhelming majority occurred because they were the fastest and easiest way to settle a dispute.

Great street fights were talked about in the same nostalgic manner in which old boxers were recalled. The more street fights somebody had, the higher the esteem in which he was held.

Short of murder, nothing proved manhood more. Michael swung a sharp right and missed, grunting loudly as the punch sailed over the man's head. A fast follow-up left also failed. Large sweat circles formed on the back of his jacket and under both arms. As the crowd drew closer, the man moved to narrow the gap between the two. He took three steps forward, flashing the pipe, holding it low, squinting against the overhead sun, staring at Michael's face.

He swung the pipe, short, fast and hard, landing one across Michael's hip. A second blow caught him on the side of the face. Another quick swing, this one grazing Michael's jaw, sent him backwards, hands reaching for the ground, his head just missing the side of a fire hydrant.

The man walked to where Michael lay and raised the pipe over his head.

'You no steal from me again,' he said in a voice meant for everyone to hear. 'Nobody steal from me again.'

Michael's arms hugged the hydrant, his eyes cloudy, thin streams of blood streaking down his lips. John stood next to Tommy, his face emptied of all emotion other than fear. Butter still had his back to the candy store wall. There were tears running down his face.

I couldn't move. I stood there, shivering in the afternoon sun, my legs heavy and numb, my stomach queasy, looking down at the beaten body of my best friend.

The crowd sensed a finish and closed the circle even tighter, breaking off any chance of a quick escape.

The street wanted someone to die.

'Drop the pipe!'

The voice came out of the shadows.

It was confident and webbed with the threat of violence. The man with the iron pipe took two steps back when he heard it, panic invading his macho veneer. I turned my head and saw King Benny standing there, a cup of espresso in one hand, a copy of II Progresso in the other. He was flanked by two men, dressed in black, arms at their sides.

'Didn't hear me?' King Benny asked.

'Yes,' the man said, his voice breaking. 'I hear.'

'Then do it,' King Benny said.

The pipe fell to the ground, loud enough to echo.

'You wanna finish this?' King Benny asked, looking down at Michael.

'Yeah,' Michael said, pulling himself up against the side of the hydrant. 'I do.'

'Then hurry,' King Benny said. 'It's gettin' late.'

Michael was up on shaky legs. He turned and faced his opponent.

'Fight me,' Michael said to him.

'No,' the man said, his eyes on King Benny.

Michael charged the man, both of them falling to the ground, arms and legs in full swing. He landed two hard punches against the side of the man's head and then threw a crushing elbow to the base of his nose.

The man swung once and missed, a steamless punch thrown more in frustration than anger. Michael answered with two more closed blows to the face, the second drawing blood. The men in the crowd whistled and applauded each landed punch.

'Kid's got him now,' a fat man in an oil-stained work shirt said. 'Couple more, the bastard'll be done for good.'

'Too bad he ain't got a knife,' a short man lighting a pipe said. 'He could cut him for sure.'

Michael landed three more punches, all flush to the man's face. He jumped to his knees, slamming an ankle against the man's throat. Two more punches to the neck and a quick kick to the chest brought it to an end.

Michael stepped over the man, ignored the pleas of the crowd to finish his foe, and walked to the comic books strewn on the ground. He bent down, picked each up and went back to where he had left the man. He stood over him, staring for a minute and then dropped the comic books across his face and chest.

'You can keep your comic books,' Michael said. 'I don't want 'em anymore.'

EIGHT

As we grew older, the violence around us intensified. The moment a boy's age hit double digits, he was no longer a mere nuisance to the older neighborhood kids; he was a potential threat. The most minor infractions could easily escalate into major street brawls.

We had now also reached an age where we were targeted by outsiders looking for quick scores.

Puerto Ricans coming down from San Juan Hill in upper Manhattan would jump a kid, lift his money and head back home. Blacks from Inwood, near the Heights, would cross the designated racial divide of Ninth Avenue. Traveling in packs of a half dozen or more, they would swarm, attack and leave before any retaliation could be mounted.

A number of the local street gangs attempted to recruit us, without success. The idea of being a gang member never held much appeal and neither did the idea that we had to kick back portions of earnings to the leader of the pack we joined.

We also weren't keen on the initiation process most gangs required: rubbing hot pieces of iron on your arm until all the skin came off; scarring you with strange, permanent tattoos; forcing you to pick a fight with the toughest guy from a rival gang, and if you beat him you were in. If you lost, you were a forgotten man. It wasn't for us. We stayed with who we trusted and we covered each other's backs. Just like in the western movies we admired.

The worst beating I ever got in Hell's Kitchen came not from my father or any other man or boy. It was at the hands of Janet Rivera, street leader of the Tornadoes.

Girl gangs had, throughout Hell's Kitchen history, been in many ways the most vicious. Unlike their male counterparts, the girls often attacked without warning or reason. They were also the more aggressive criminals, wantonly stalking passersby for street muggings and casing buildings for doorway robberies. They did not belong to any organized crime faction, but worked as independent operators, hired out for the best price.

In the sixties, these gangs could already trace their lineage back to the Lady Gophers, who terrorized the Manhattan waterfront at the turn of the century. The Lady Gophers had a special calling card: They left the amputated hands and fingers of their victims behind. A few years later, Sadie the Cat and her crew beat and mugged at will. Gallus Meg was a match for any man she came across, boasting till death of never having lost a fist fight. Hell Cat Maggie was said to have once beaten four of the toughest members of the Pug Uglies Gang into submission on a 10th Avenue street corner, then taken a fifth one home to her boarding house bed.

A number of the female gang leaders who lived long enough to survive their street battles opened saloons in their later years. Not surprisingly, many served as bouncers in their own watering holes.

'They demanded respect, those women,' one of King Benny's back room men once told me. 'They didn't take any shit, they were always ready for a fight. Knew how to run a business, too, turned a profit on most things they touched. They were tough and mean and everything they did, they made sure they did better than a man. They fought dirty, drank till they were drunk and slept with whoever they wanted. For a time there, they ran the Kitchen and they ran it well.'

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.'

'I think I'm gonna faint,' I said.

'Ugly sex is better than no sex,' John said.

'Anybody asks, tell 'em a gang from Inwood came down and kicked my ass,' I said.

'Which gang?' Tommy asked.

'The Cougars,' I said. 'They're pretty tough.'

'How about the gang from the School for the Blind?' John said. 'You could say they bumped into you on the street. You had no choice. You hadda fight 'em.'

'There was eight of them and only one of you,' Tommy said. 'The deck was stacked.'

'And they had dogs too,' John said. 'You didn't have a chance.'

'All I know is the Count of Monte Cristo never got his ass kicked by a girl,' Michael said.

'He was lucky,' I sighed. 'He didn't know Janet Rivera.'

Summer 1966
NINE

King Benny shuffled the cards, large espresso cup to his left, drawn window blind shielding his face from the sun. I sat across from him, chest near the edge of a small round table, hands folded, 7-Up bottle at my side, waiting for the game to begin. I was eleven years old.

'Sure you wanna play me?' King Benny asked.

'Why not?'

'I cheat.'

'Me too,' I said.

'Good,' he said and opened the deal.

The game was sette bello, Italian black jack, and the stakes were low, a penny a win, nickel on a two-card hit. We were in the middle of King Benny's club, three empty tables around us, the door behind us locked. White dust particles, heavy enough to hold, curled their way up toward the hanging overhead lights. A jukebox played Sinatra and 'High Hopes'.

'Hungry?' King Benny asked, tossing me two cards.

'No,' I said. 'Thanks.'

'Sure?'

'I'm sure,' I said.

'What's it gonna be?' he said, nodding toward my cards.

'Give a hit.'

King Benny flipped a card from the top of the deck, his eyes on me.

'You're over,' he said. 'You're into me for a penny.'

'Double or nothing,' I told him.

'A sucker bet,' he said, dealing out a fresh set of cards and sipping from his coffee.

I lost the first ten hands we played, King Benny picking up the pennies and piling them next to his cup. He kept the deck of cards in his right hand, dealing with one finger, his eyes always on me, never on the table. He shuffled the cards every other deal and ignored the phone when it rang.

'You always end up with a six,' I said. 'How is that?'

'Lucky,' he said.

'Got any pretzels?' I asked.

'Behind the bar,' he said. 'Help yourself.'

'Want anything?'

'What time is it?' he asked.

'Quarter to five,' I said, looking at my Timex watch, a swag present he had given me.

'Too early,' he said.

King Benny never ate before seven and only slept for two hours a night. He always carried a thousand dollars in twenties and singles in his pants pocket, never wore a gun and was said to have a brother in jail, doing natural life on a double murder charge.

I sat back down, picking at a bag of salt pretzels. He sipped his coffee, shuffled the cards and leaned back in his chair.

'I hear you got trouble at home,' he said, putting the cup back by his side.

'It's nothing.'

'If it was nothing,' he said, 'I wouldn't have heard about it.'

'My father owes money,' I admitted.

'Who this time?'

'The Greek,' I said. 'He's six months late on the payments.'

'How much?'

'Three thousand,' I said. 'As of yesterday. Goes up every day.'

'Yeah,' King Benny said. 'It does.'

'The Greek sent a coupla guys over late last night,' I said. 'Scare him a little.'

'It work?'

'Scared or not,' I said, 'he doesn't have the money and can't get it from anybody else.'

'No,' King Benny said. 'He can't.'

'He's hiding out,' I said. 'Until it blows over or he makes a big score.'

'Guys like your father never make big scores,' King Benny said. 'They just keep guys like me in business.'

'Will they kill him?'

'No,' he said. 'He'll just wish they did.'

'I got sixty bucks put aside,' I told him. 'My mother can come up with another forty. That should be good for something.'

'Forget it,' King Benny said.

'I can't forget it,' I said. 'He's my father.'

King Benny shook his head. 'The loan's been squared.'

'Who squared it?'

'You did. This morning. The Greek picked up an envelope with three grand and a note from you. Him and your father are even.'

I didn't show any real emotion. That wasn't allowed. All I said was, 'I can't pay you back right away.'

'You don't have to pay me back at at all,' I was told.

'Why'd you do it?' I wanted to know. 'You never liked my father.'

'Still don't,' King Benny said. 'He lives or dies, don't mean a thing to me.'

I took a drink of the 7-Up.

'Thanks,' I said. 'Thanks a lot.'

'Always watch out for men like your father,' King Benny said. 'They go down bad streets. And they never go down alone.'

'He tries,' I said. 'He just gets caught up.'

'There are other ways,' he said. 'Better ways. You should walk away from the table knowing that.'

'He wants to make money,' I said. 'Same as everybody around here.'

'Looking for easy money,' King Benny said. 'Every one of them. And guess what?'

'What?'

'Ain't no such thing,' he said.

'Does my father know?' I asked. 'About the payment.'

'Not yet.'

'Can I tell him?'

'Soon as you see him,' he said.

The room was turning dark, the sun's shadows giving way to early evening. King Benny's coffee cup was empty and my soda was warm. The jukebox had abandoned Sinatra and settled now on 'Don't Be That Way' by Benny Goodman. In a corner, an old steam radiator sizzled, despite the outside heat.

'He's down in a basement apartment on 47th Street,' King Benny said. 'Near Ninth Avenue.'

'I know.'

'He's not alone,' he said.

'I know that too,' I said.

'You want some dinner before you go?' he asked.

'What's it gonna be?'

'Pasta and snails,' King Benny said.

'Maybe not,' I said.

'It's good for you,' King Benny said.

'I should go.'

'One thing,' King Benny said. 'Before you go.'

'What?'

'The business with the Greek,' King Benny said. 'It stays between you and me.'

'He's gonna ask where I got the money.'

'Lie,' King Benny said.

'Can't,' I said.

'He lies to you.' King Benny pushed his chair back and stood up, cup clasped in both hands. 'All the time.'

'That's different.'

'How?' Now King Benny walked to the bar, his face free of emotion.

'He's my father,' I said.

'Think he cares?'

'Doesn't matter,' I said, 'I care.'

King Benny nodded and turned, walking behind the bar, his right leg dragging across the floor.

'See you tomorrow,' he said, his voice even.

'Only if I get to deal,' I said.

'We'll cut for it,' he said, washing his cup in the sink under the counter.

'You'll win the cut,' I said. 'You always do.'

'Can't trust a thief,' he said, drying off his hands. 'Or a liar.'

'Which are you?'

'Both,' King Benny said.

He folded a hand towel in half and laid it on the bar. Then he walked over to the small wooden door at the end of the hall, turned the knob and went into the kitchen, closing it softly behind him.

Winter 1966
TEN

The pizzeria was empty except for the four of us at a back table and Joey Retard at the counter, shaking black pepper on a hot slice. Mimi was working the ovens and the register, his white shirt and work pants stained red with sauce.

'I'm gettin' another slice,' I said, wiping my mouth with a napkin.

'Me too,' John said.

'Get me a soda,' Tommy said. 'Orange. Lots of ice.'

'You lose your legs in the war?' I said.

'I got no money, either,' Tommy said.

'Want anything?' I asked Michael.

'Half of Tommy's soda,' he said.

John and I walked to the counter and stood next to Joey Retard. Joey was fourteen, with an honest face and a ready smile. He was always well-dressed and was friendly with everyone in the neighborhood. He spoke slowly, stuttering his way through difficult phrases, his manner gentle, his eyes dark as olive pits.

Joey was adopted, taken out of a West Side orphanage by a childless Irish couple. He went to a special school on Ninth Avenue and earned pocket money washing cars for King Benny. He was shy around girls, loved pizza with extra cheese, cheap horror movies and sewer-to-sewer stickball. Every Halloween he walked the streets dressed as Stooge Villa from Dick Tracy.

'What's doin', Joe?' John asked him.

'Good,' Joey said. 'I'm good.'

'You want anything?' I asked. 'John's buyin'.'

'Where'd you hear that?' John said.

'No,' Joey said. 'Thanks.'

John ordered and I asked Joey how school was.

'I like it,' Joey said.

'Am I really payin' for this?' John asked me, watching Mimi take the pizza out of the oven.

'You got money?'

'I'll take the Fifth,' John said.

'I'll buy tomorrow,' I said, grabbing a paper plate with a slice.

'Swear,' John said, reaching a hand into his jean pocket and pulling out two crumpled bills.

'Swear,' I said, taking my pizza and soda back to the table.

'Grab the change for me,' John said, patting Joey on the shoulder, reaching for the second slice.

'Can I keep it?' Joey asked.

'Knock yourself out,' John said.

Joey was on his second slice when the burly man walked through the door.

He stood at the counter, hands in his pockets, ordered a large Coke and watched Joey dust his pizza with black pepper.

'That's not too smart,' the man said, taking a sip from his soda. 'It's gonna taste like shit.'

'I like pepper,' Joey said, shaking some more on the crust. 'I like pepper a lot.'

'There's enough on it,' the man said, reaching for the pepper shaker.

'No!' Joey said, pulling back, still holding the pepper in his hand. 'My pizza.'

'Lemme have the pepper, you fuckin' retard,' the man said, grabbing Joey's hand until the shaker came loose.

'My pizza!' Joey said, his voice breaking from the strain, his eyes blinking like shutters. 'My pizza!'

'There's your fuckin' pizza,' the man said, pointing to the counter. 'Nobody touched it.'

'I want pepper!' Joey said, his words coming in short bursts, his hands by his side. 'I want pepper!'

The burly man smiled.

He looked over at Mimi, frozen in place behind the counter, and winked. He unscrewed the top off the pepper shaker.

'You want pepper, retard?' the man said.

Joey stared at the burly man, his body quivering, his eyes filled with tears.

'Here,' the man said, pouring the bottle of pepper out over Joey's pizza. 'Here's your fuckin' pepper.'

Joey started to cry, full sobs rising from his chest, his hands slapping his sides.

'What's your problem now, retard?' the man asked.

Joey didn't answer. Tears ran down his cheeks and over his lips, snot ran out of his nose.

'Go on,' the burly man said. 'You fuckin' retards turn my stomach.'

Joey didn't move.

'Go,' the man said. 'Before I slap the shit outta ya' and really make you cry.'

Michael walked past Joey and stepped to the counter, next to the burly man. He reached for the salt shaker, loosened the top and poured the contents into the man's soda.

'You can leave now,' Michael said to him, stirring the drink with his finger. 'You and Joe are even.'

'A tough little punk,' the man said. 'Is that what I'm lookin' at?'

'A dick with lips,' Michael said. 'Is that what I'm lookin' at?'

Tommy put an arm around Joey and moved him from the counter. John stood behind the burly man, hands in his pockets. I was across from the burly man, arms folded, waiting for his move.

'Four tough little punks,' the burly man said. 'And a cryin' retard.'

'That's us,' Michael said.

The burly man lifted a hand and slapped Michael across the face. The blow left red finger marks on Michael's cheek and an echo loud enough to chill.

Michael stared at the man and smiled.

'The first shot should always be your best,' Michael said. 'And your best sucks.'

'I'll show you my best, punk,' the burly man said, moving off his feet and taking a full swing at Michael. 'Your fuckin' teeth are gonna be all over the floor.'

Michael ducked the punch, throwing his body against the burly man's stomach. Tommy and John jumped on the man from behind, pulling at his hair and neck. I grabbed the pizza slice with all the pepper on it and rubbed it into his eyes.

'Take it outside!' Mimi screamed.

John chewed on the man's ear, his bite hard enough to draw blood. Tommy started pounding at his kidneys. I took a red pepper shaker and rammed it against his face.

'My eyes!' the burly man said, trying to shake us off. 'My fuckin' eyes.'

Michael picked up a counter stool and started ramming it against the front of his legs. John had grabbed his thick hair and was knocking his head on the edge of the front door. I kept hitting him with the red pepper shaker until it broke above the bridge of his nose. Shards of glass mixed with blood down the front of his face.

The pain brought the man to his knees, one hand reaching for the counter.

'Never come in here again,' Michael said, kicking at his crumpled body. 'Hear me? Never!'

Mimi ran from behind the counter and grabbed Michael around the waist, pulling him away.

'You no wanna kill him,' he said.

'Don't be too sure,' Michael said.

Our lives were about protecting ourselves and our turf. The insulated circle that was life in Hell's Kitchen closed tighter as we grew older. Strangers, never welcome, were now viewed as outsiders bent on trouble. My friends and I could no longer afford to let others do the fighting.

It was our turn to step up, and we were led, as always, by Michael.

Outside events meant little. In a society changing radically by the hour, we focused on the constants in our own small, controlled space.

It was the sixties, and we watched the images scattered nightly across TV screens with skepticism, never trusting the players, always suspecting a scam. It was the way we were taught to look at the world. Life, we had been told, was about looking out for number one and number one didn't waste time outside the neighborhood.

On television, the young protesters we saw spoke about how they were going to change our lives and fix the world. But we knew they didn't care about people like us. While they shouted their slogans, my friends and I went to funeral services for the young men of Hell's Kitchen who came back from Vietnam in body bags. That war never touched those angry young faces we saw on TV, faces protected by money and upper-middle-class standing. They were on the outside yelling about a war they would never fight. To me and my friends, they were working the oldest con in the world and they worked it to perfection.

Civil rights had become the battle of the day, but on our streets, it was a meaningless issue. There, gangs of different ethnic backgrounds and skin colors still waged weekly skirmishes. A growing army of feminists marched across the country, demanding equality, yet our mothers still cooked and cared for men who abused them mentally and physically.

Students would be killed on the campus of Kent State University in Ohio. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Senator Robert F. Kennedy would be shot dead. Governor George Wallace would take one in the spine.

Whole sections of American cities were about to burn to the ground.

The summer of love was set to bloom.

Drugs would go beyond the junkie.

The country was on a fast-ticking timer, ready to explode.

For me and for my friends, these developments carried no weight. They might as well have occurred in another country, in another century. The mating call of a new generation, one whose foundation was to be built on peace, love and harmony, simply floated past us.

Our attention was elsewhere.

The summer Senator Kennedy was killed, I found out my father was a convicted murderer, a wife killer who had served nearly seven years in upstate prisons for a crime of passion.

The week the students at Kent State were shot down, Tommy's father was stabbed in the chest in Attica prison and was put on a respirator for three months.

Michael's mother died of cancer during that summer and Carol Martinez had an uncle who was shot dead in front of an llth Avenue bar.

While thousands of angry war protesters filtered into Washington, D.C., we sat with Father Bobby in a third floor hospital ward, praying for John to recover from a punctured lung, a gift from one of his mother's overzealous boyfriends. The man had had too much to drink and John said more than he should have about it and was given a severe beating as a result. He also suffered an asthma attack and was lucky to escape the night with his life.

One of the earliest lessons learned in Hell's Kitchen was that death was the only thing in life that came easy.

Summer 1967
ELEVEN

The temperature topped out at ninety-eight degrees on the day our lives were forever altered. It was the middle of a summer when the country's mood plunged into darkness. Race riots had already rocked 127 cities across the United States, killing seventy-seven people and putting more than 4,000 others in area hospitals, and neither side seemed ready to give up the battle.

Along with the turmoil came change.

Thurgood Marshall was appointed to the Supreme Court by President Lyndon Johnson after Justice Thomas C. Clark resigned. In return, Ramsey Clark, the son of the retired Justice, was named to the Attorney General's post.

The Six-Day War was fought in the Middle East.

The New York World-Journal & Tribune folded and Rolling Stone published its first issue. Bonnie and, Clyde brought crowds to theaters and Rosemary's Baby kept readers up all night. The Beatles sang 'All You Need is Love', while 'Ode to Billy Joe' suggested otherwise, playing and playing on the radio. Mickey Mantle, limping toward the end of his baseball days, hit his 500th home run, and Muhammad Ali, at the height of his boxing achievements, was stripped of the heavyweight crown for refusing to fight in Vietnam.

We had spent our morning in the cool shadows of a second-floor pool room on West 53rd Street, watching a craggy-faced lug in a T-shirt and torn jeans rack up a dozen games against four different opponents. As he played, he smoked his way through two packs of Camels and finished off a pint of Four Roses.

'Bet this guy could even beat Ralph Kramden,' Tommy said, watching the man side-pocket the six ball.

'Ralph Kramden doesn't play pool,' I said. 'He drives a bus.'

'Not on The Honeymooners, Tommy said. 'In that movie.'

'The Hustler,' Michael said. 'That the one you mean?'

'The one where they break Fast Eddie's thumbs,' John said.

'You need directions to figure out the way you think,' I said to Tommy.

'It wasn't Kramden?' Tommy asked.

'Let's get outta here,' Michael said, looking around the smoke-filled room. 'We're startin' to smell as bad as this place.'

We made a right out of the pool room, late morning sun warming our shoulders, our attention jointly fixed on lunch. We ran a red light crossing llth Avenue, dodged a school bus and two cabs, then eased back into a fast walk in front of old man Pippilo's barber shop. At 51st Street and 10th Avenue we turned left, side by side on the silent streets.

Between us, we had less than two dollars in our pockets.

'Let's go get some pizza,' John said. 'We can tell Mimi we'll pay him down the road.'

'Mimi charges for water! Tommy said. 'He ain't gonna go for any IOUs.'

'We can grab something at home,' I said. 'Leftovers.'

'The only leftovers in my house are dirty dishes,' John said.

'And week-old bread,' Tommy said.

'Why not hot dogs?' Michael asked. 'We haven't hit the cart in a couple of weeks.'

'I don't know, Mikey,' Tommy said. 'That cart guy ain't like the others. He gets pretty crazy when you take him off.'

'Tommy's right,' I said. 'Last week, he chased Ramos and two of his friends all the way to the piers. Almost cut one of 'em.'

'A hot dog ain't worth bleedin' over,' John said.

'We can eat hot dogs or we can eat air,' Michael said. 'You guys choose.'

'Air's probably safer,' Tommy said.

'May even taste better,' John said.

'Whose turn is it?' I asked.

'Yours,' Michael said.

'You think he'll recognize me?' I asked.

'I hope so,' Tommy said. 'I'm really hungry.'

The scam was simple. We'd done it dozens of times before, with almost as many vendors. We picked it up from an Irish crew on 48th Street who used it every summer to score free Puerto Rican ices.

I was to walk up to the hot dog cart and order what I wanted. The vendor would then hand me my hot dog and watch as I ran off without paying. This left the vendor with two choices, neither very appealing. He could stand his ground and swallow his loss. Or he could give chase. This second choice forced him to abandon the cart, where my friends could feast in his absence.

The hot dog vendor at this corner was tall and slender and in his mid-twenties, with thick, dark hair and a round, bulbous nose. A recent addition to Hell's Kitchen, his English was as poor as his clothes, ragged blue shirts and jeans, front pockets frayed at the edges. He owned a Yankee warm-up jacket and soiled cap and wore them on colder days.

The vendor worked the far corner of 51st Street and 10th Avenue, standing under the partial shade of a red and yellow Sabrett umbrella, selling cold sodas, hot dogs and sausages to an array of passing customers – local merchants; longshoremen and truckers, school children.

Seven days a week, late morning to early evening, he was there, plying a trade that was all too easy for us to ridicule.

We never saw the vendor as a man, not the way we saw the other men of the neighborhood, and didn't care enough about him to grant him any respect. We gave little notice to how hard he worked for the few dollars he earned. We didn't know about the young wife and two kids he left in Greece and how he hoped to build for them a new foundation in a new country. We didn't pay attention to the tedious twelve-hour days he endured, slicing buns and sifting through chunks of ice through cold spells and heat waves. All the time stamping his feet on hard ground, to keep the blood flowing.

We never saw the tiny, airless fourth-floor room he lived in, a forty-minute walk from his station, its only comfort a tattered collection of pictures from home, crudely taped to the wall nearest the worn mattress of his bed. We never saw the hot stove, topped by empty cans of Campbell's Pork and Beans. Or the crumpled packs of Greek cigarettes, tossed in a corner trash bin, gifts from his wife, his only stateside pleasure.

We didn't see any of that.

We only saw a free lunch.

'Mustard and onions,' I said, avoiding the vendor's suspicious look. 'No soda.'

He nodded, wary, his eyes over my shoulders, looking for hidden shadows.

'I know you,' he said, accusation more than question.

I shrugged and smiled.

'Can I have two napkins?' I asked, reaching my hand out for the hot dog. 'Onions get messy.'

The vendor pulled a second napkin from its cannister and wrapped it under the bun. He hesitated for an instant, his hand out toward mine, our eyes fixed. We both sensed a wrong about to happen, though we were ignorant of its eventual weight. He shifted his feet and handed over the hot dog. I took it from him and ran.

I scooted past Tommy Mug's dry cleaners and Armond's shoe repair. The vendor, the anger behind his months of frustration broken beyond any reasonable point, gave chase, a wood-handled, prong fork in one hand.

As I ran, slivers of red onions flew off the top of the hot dog, dotting my cheek and the front of my white T-shirt. I cut past the P.A.L. entrance and turned the corner at 50th Street.

He was close on me, arms and legs moving in their own furied rhythm, the fork still gripped in one hand, his breath coming in measured spurts.

'Pay my money, thief!' he shouted after me. 'Pay my money now!

Michael, John and Tommy were on their second hot dogs, leaning casually against the side of the cart, faces turned to the sun.

'How long you think he'll be?' John asked, wiping brown mustard from his lower lip.

'Shakes or the hot dog guy?' Michael asked.

'You got one, you got the other,' Tommy said. 'That guy looked pissed enough to kill.'

'Gotta catch him to kill him,' John said. 'Don't worry.'

'These things are heavier than they look,' Michael said, standing now, hands gripping the cart's wooden handles.

'The heavy shit's underneath,' Tommy said. 'Where nobody can see it.'

'What heavy shit?' John asked.

'The gas tanks,' Tommy said. 'The stuff that keeps the food hot. Or maybe you thought the sun made the water boil.'

'Think we can push it?' Michael asked. 'The three of us?'

'Push it where?' John asked.

'Couple of blocks away,' Michael said. 'Be a nice surprise for the guy when he gets back from chasing Shakes not to find his cart.'

'What if somebody takes it?' Tommy said.

'You gotta be pretty dumb to steal a hot dog cart,' Michael said.

'Ain't we doin' that?' John asked.

'We're just moving it,' Michael said. 'Making sure nobody else steals it.'

'So, we're helpin' the guy out,' Tommy said.

'Now you're listening,' Michael said.

The vendor tired at 52nd Street and 12th Avenue.

He was bent over, hands on his knees, the fork long since discarded, face flushed, his mouth open and hungry for breath. I was on the other side of the street, against a tenement doorway, hair and body washed in sweat. My hands were still greasy from the hot dog I held for most of the run.

I looked over at the vendor and found him staring back at me, anger still visible, his hands now balled up and punching at his sides. He was beat but not beaten. He could go ten minutes more just on hate alone. I decided against a run toward the piers, choosing instead to double back and head for neighborhood safety. By now, I figured, the guys should have downed enough hot dogs and sodas to satisfy Babe Ruth's appetite.

I took three deep breaths and started running toward 51st Street, traffic moving behind me. I turned my head and looked back at the vendor, his body in the same position as it was a block earlier. I slowed when I reached the corner and allowed myself a smile, content that the chase, while not over, had drifted to my favor.

If I got to the cart fast enough I might even have time for a hot dog.

Michael, John and Tommy were standing at the corner of 50th Street and Ninth Avenue, tired from having pushed the cart up the one long block. They stopped in front of a florist, a short woman, her hair in a bun, clipping stems from a handful of roses, watching them with curiosity.

'Let's have a soda,' John said, sliding open the aluminum door and plunging a hand into dark, icy water. 'A Dr. Brown sounds about right.'

'I'll take a cream,' Tommy said.

John handed Tommy a sweaty can of soda. 'How about you, Mikey?'

'I don't want anything,' Michael said, looking down the street, arms across his chest.

'What's wrong?' Tommy asked, taking a slurp from his soda.

'Shakes is taking too long,' Michael said. 'He should've been back by now.'

I stopped at the light at 51st Street and 10th Avenue and looked for my friends and the hot dog cart.

The vendor was one avenue down, running again at a full pace, his stride seemingly stronger than ever. I bent over to tie my laces and caught a glimpse of him.

'Give it up,' I whispered. 'Let it go.'

I stood and continued to run, this time toward Ninth Avenue. My sides hurt and my legs were starting to cramp. I was light-headed, my throat dry and my lungs heavy. I ran past Printing High School, the yard empty except for two rummies drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes, thinking of ways to score their first drink of the day. I dodged past a heavy-set woman tugging a shopping wagon piled with groceries and jumped two garbage can lids tossed to the side by a passing sanitation crew.

Then, halfway up the block, the vendor still on my trail, I saw the hot dog cart being pushed toward Eighth Avenue by my friends. They were hunched low and moving easy, walking within the shadows of the arches of the old Madison 'Square Garden, as calm and steady as if they were out walking a dog.

The vendor saw them too.

'Stop them!' he shouted, not breaking stride. 'Stop them! Stop the thieves!'

In a neighborhood where silence in the face of crime is a virtue and blindness a necessity, no one moved.

I ran as fast as burnt lungs and tired legs would permit and reached my three friends as they went past a poster announcing the much-heralded rematch between World Wrestling Federation champion Bruno Sammartino and challenger Gorilla Moonsoon.

'You're only supposed to take the hot dogs,' I said when I got to them, my hands holding a side of the cart. 'Not the wagon.'

'Now you tell us,' John said.

'Just leave it here,' I panted. 'You guys are lookin' to push somethin', push me. I can't take another step.'

'No, not here,' Michael said, pointing to our right. 'Up there. Over by the subway station.'

'The guy's comin' fast, Mikey,' John said. 'I don't think we got time to make it to the subway.'

'I got a plan,' Michael said.

I turned around and saw the vendor gaining on us by the second. 'I'm sure he's got one too,' I said, helping to lift the cart onto the sidewalk, toward the top step of the IRT subway station.

'I don't even like hot dogs,' John said.

The plan, as it turned out, was as simple and as dumb as anything we had ever done. We were to hold the cart on the top edge of the stairwell, leaning it downward, and wait for the vendor. We were to let go the second he grabbed the handles and leave the scene as he struggled to ease the cart back onto the sidewalk.

To this day, I don't know why we did it. But we would all pay a price. Everyone. All it took was a minute, but in that minute everything changed.

People who've been shot always recall the incident as if it happened to them in slow motion and that's how I'll always remember those final seconds with the hot dog cart. The action around me moved at quarter speed and the background was nothing but haze – quick hands, fleeing legs, scattered bodies, all shaped in dark, nasty blurs.

That moment arrived for me and my friends on a day and time when Mickey Mantle was crossing the plate with a home run we would have all been proud to witness.

Michael held the cart the longest, his arms bulging at the strength needed to keep it from falling down the steps. John had slipped on his side, his back against the station's wooden banister, both hands sliced by the wooden handles. Tommy fell to his knees, desperately grabbing at one of the wheels, his knees scraping concrete. I held both my hands to the base of the umbrella stand, grip tight, splashes of hot water showering my arms and face.

The vendor was a few feet behind us, on his knees, his hands spread out across his face, his eyes visible.

'It's not gonna hold!' Tommy said, the wheel slipping from his grip.

'Let it go,' Michael said.

'Don't stop now!' I said. 'We can't stop now!'

'Let it go, Shakes,' Michael urged, his voice a surrender to the inevitable. 'Let it go.'

Watching the cart tumble down the stairs was as painful as trying to keep it from going down. The noise was loud, numbing and eerie, two cars colliding on an empty street. Hot dogs, onions, sodas, ice, napkins and sauerkraut jumped out in unison, splattering against the sides of the stairwell, bouncing and smacking the front of a Florida vacation poster. One of the rear wheels flew off halfway down the landing. The umbrella stand split against the base of the stair wall.

Then came the loudest noise, one that rocked the entire subway station. It was a sound no one expected to hear.

A crunching sound of wood against bone.

It is a sound I have heard every day of my life since.

James Caldwell was a sixty-seven-year-old retired printer. He had been married to the same woman for thirty-six years, had three grown children, all daughters, and four grandchildren, three of them boys. He had spent his morning in lower Manhattan, visiting with one of those daughters, Alice, newlywed to a junior executive working for a midtown accounting firm. He had stopped in a bakery in Little Italy to buy his wife a box of her favorite pastries, which he carried in his left hand. On doctor's orders, Caldwell had turned his back on a two-pack-a-day cigarette habit less than a week earlier. He refused to give up his scotch, however, a drink he liked straight up, ice water on the side, a bowl of pretzels at the ready.

He was chewing two pieces of Juicy Fruit gum and was digging into his front pants pocket for enough loose change to buy the late edition of the Daily News when the cart landed on him, barreling in at chest level. His hands reached out to grab the sides of the wagon in a futile attempt to ward off its runaway power.

The cart was a destructive missile, taking with it all in its wake. That wake now included the body of James Caldwell, who had no bigger plans for the rest of his day than reading the sports pages.

Together, both cart and man came to rest as one, slamming against a white tile subway wall. The cart crumpled, wheels rolling off in opposite directions, handles splintered, boiling water and pieces of ice crashing on top of Caldwell's bloody head, looking no bigger than a hairless tan ball, lodged against the sharpest edge of the wagon.

The silence after the crash was as numbing as the noise during it.

We held our positions, feet cemented in place. No one spoke and three of us choked back tears. We heard the wail of sirens and prayed they were headed our way. I looked down at the wreckage and saw the lower half of Caldwell's legs twitching under the weight. Thin lines of blood mixed with dirty hot dog water to form a puddle in one corner.

The smell of excrement filtered through the air.

Michael turned to me and, for the first time since I'd known him, I saw fear on his face.

John and Tommy didn't move, their bodies trembling, faces ashen, both unnerved enough to pass out. The four of us felt much older than we had less than an hour earlier, the ticking of our personal docks accelerating with the speed of the unfolding incident.

To our left, a thin, middle-aged woman, in a checkered house dress and white apron, strands of long, dark hair hiding the anger fanning her eyes, crossed the street in a run and stood at the top stair of the subway station. Hands on her hips, shoulders hunched in a tight pattern, she stared down at the scene.

'My sweet Jesus,' she shouted, turning her gaze toward us, her voice a sharp, loud, high pitch. 'What have you boys done? What in God's good name have you boys done? Tell me, now, what have you done?'

'I think we just killed a man,' Michael said.

TWELVE

That afternoon, the police issued an order of immediate custody, a juvenile arrest warrant, against the four of us. We were charged with a series of crimes: reckless endangerment; assault in the first; possession of a dangerous instrument; assault with intent; misdemeanor assault; petty theft. We were each assigned PINS status, branding us persons in need of supervision. We were also tagged as youthful offenders, Y.O. on the streets. The label came with the luxury of keeping our records sealed and the knowledge that Y.O.'s were seldom dealt adult-length sentences, even by the harshest family court judge.

While James Caldwell lay in critical condition in the intensive care unit of St. Clare's Hospital, clinging to life on a respirator, we were remanded into our parents' custody. The shock of the day still had not worn away as we moved with great speed and little care through the system of arrest and booking, our eyes and ears closed to the sobs and screams surrounding us. We were in another world. Above the action. Our parents cried and cursed, the cops were stone-faced, Caldwell's family wanted us dead and the whole neighborhood, it seemed, was waiting for us outside the station house. We'd always been on the other side looking in at the guys getting busted. Now it was us. We were the ones they pointed at. The ones they talked about. We were the guilty ones now.

My father had just slapped me, hard, across my face. I stared at him; he was slumped on a chair next to the kitchen table, wearing only briefs and a T-shirt. His face was red, his hands were twitching, his eyes welled with tears. My mother was in a back room, face down on her bed, crying.

My parents had always granted me free reign, confident in my ability to steer clear of street jams, believing I was not the type to bring trouble knocking at the front door. This freedom also served to keep me out of view of their daily physical and verbal battles.

I lost that freedom the instant the hot dog cart crashed against the body of James Caldwell.

'I'm sorry, Dad,' was all I could manage to say.

'Sorry ain't gonna do you much good now, kid,' my father said, softening. 'You gotta face up to what you did. The four of you.'

'What's going to happen to us?' I asked, my voice breaking, tears falling down my cheeks.

'The old man lives, you might catch a break,' my father said. 'Do a few months in a juvenile home.'

I could barely ask the question. 'And if he doesn't?'

My father couldn't answer. He reached out his arms and held me, both of us crying, both of us afraid.

Over the next several days, Hell's Kitchen, which, in the past, never failed to embrace its criminals, seemed a neighborhood in shock. It wasn't the crime that had hands raised to the sky, but the fact that Michael, John, Tommy and I had committed it.

'You guys were different,' Fat Mancho told me years later. 'Yeah, sure, you fooled around, busted balls, got into fights, shit like that. But, you never went outta your way to hurt anybody. You were never punks. Until you did the job with the cart. That was an upstate number and that's something nobody figured on.'

By the day, two weeks later, when we stood before a family court Judge, we knew that James Caldwell was going to make it out of the hospital alive. The news had been relayed to us by Father Bobby, who counseled all the families involved.

During the time between our arrest and scheduled judgment, I was not allowed to associate with my friends, be seen in their company or talk to them by phone. We were each kept under close family scrutiny, spending the bulk of our days buried inside our apartments. Father Bobby visited each of us daily, bringing with him a handful of comics and a few words of encouragement. He always left a little sadder than when he arrived.

Our crime had not been terrible enough to make any of the papers, so our notoriety did not move further than the neighborhood. Still, we couldn't help but feel like public enemies. There were whispers behind my mother's back whenever she went for groceries or headed off to church. John's mother missed so many days of work she was close to losing her job. When Michael was sent out on a fast errand, a beer bottle was tossed his way. Tommy was denied entry to a local movie theater.

'Your kind ain't welcome,' he was told. 'Not here. Not in my place.'

'I didn't do anything to you,' Tommy said.

'You got a problem with what I done?' the theater manager asked. 'Call the cops.'

During those two long, frightening and tedious weeks, I left my apartment on just three occasions.

The first two, I went to church with my mother.

The third, I went to see King Benny.

I poured myself an espresso from a two-cup pot, King Benny staring across the table. It was late Sunday afternoon of the Labor Day Weekend, and a transistor radio resting against the window behind me was tuned in low to a Yankee game. Two men, wearing dark slacks and sleeveless T-shirts, sat outside the club on wooden chairs. I drank my coffee and listened to Phil Rizzuto call the game, taking it into the bottom half of the eighth inning,

Yanks down by three runs. King Benny's hands were spread flat on the table, his face a clean-shaven mask.

'They suck this year,' he said, lifting a finger in the direction of the radio.

'They sucked last year,' I said.

'Gets to be habit,' he said. 'A bad habit. Like going to jail.'

I nodded and lowered my head, averting his gaze.

'We didn't mean to hurt anybody,' I said.

'You didn't mean it don't make it not happen.'

'We didn't go out looking to hurt is what I meant,' I said.

'Few do,' King Benny said.

'How long do you think we'll get?'

'A year,' King Benny told me and it made my knees go weak. 'Maybe more. Depends on the mood the judge is in.'

'I hear the one we got is tough,' I said. 'Likes to set examples.'

'They're all tough,' King Benny said.

I drank some more coffee and scanned the room, framing it in my mind, not wanting to forget its look, its stench, its feeling of safety. King Benny's foul-smelling club was a second home to me and, like the library, had become a place to escape the harshness of the life I knew.

It was an escape to the quiet company of the single most dangerous man in Hell's Kitchen.

'Your father tell you what to expect?' King Benny asked. 'Tell you how to handle yourself?'

'He hasn't talked much,' I said. 'He's pretty upset. Most of the time, he and my mom just sit and cry. Or they fight. One or the other.'

'I can't help you up there,' King Benny said, leaning closer to me, his eyes tight on my face. 'Or your friends. You're gonna be on your own in that place. It won't be easy, Shakes. It's gonna be hard. The hardest thing you and your friends are ever gonna have to do.'

'My father thinks that too,' I said. 'That's why he's crying.'

'Your father knows that,' King Benny said. 'Only he don't think you're ready for it. Don't think you can take it.'

'Do you believe that?'

'No,' King Benny said. 'I don't. There's a part of you that's a lot like me. A small part. That should be enough to bring you back alive.'

'I better go,' I said, pushing the cup to one side. 'I'm not allowed to stay out alone too long.'

'When do you leave?'

'I see the judge on Thursday,' I said, looking at the man I had grown to love as much as my own father. 'That's when we find out where we go and for how long.'

'Your parents be with you?'

'My father,' I said. 'I don't think my mother can handle it. You know how she gets.'

'It's better that way,' King Benny said. 'She shouldn't see you in a courtroom.'

'Will you still be here when I get back?' I asked, my voice choked, my eyes focusing on the two men outside, trying not to let King Benny see me cry.

'I'll always be here,' he said. 'Doing what I always do.'

'What do you do here?' I asked, a smile at the center of my tears.

King Benny pointed to the empty espresso pot.

'I make coffee,' he said.

THIRTEEN

My friends and I stood behind a scarred oak table in the middle of a high-ceilinged, airless room, hands at our sides, staring straight ahead. We were dressed in the only good clothes we owned, our communion suits, the dark jackets, dark slacks, white shirts and sky grey ties standing out against the cream-colored courtroom walls of New York State's Division of Family Justice.

John and I were on the right side of the table, next to our lawyer, a short, doe-eyed man who had trouble breathing through his nose. His hair was slicked down with gel and the tail of his white shirt was popping out the back of his brown pants.

Michael and Tommy stood to his left.

None of us looked at him and none bothered to listen to a word he uttered.

Our families were behind us, held apart by a wooden barrier and two court officers. My father sat in the first row of benches, directly behind me, his sad, angry presence like hot air on my neck. We had talked very little on the subway ride downtown. He assured me all would go well, that no one beyond the neighborhood would know where I was and that, maybe, just maybe, all this was for the good, that it was a lesson waiting to be learned.

'Be like goin' to camp,' my father said as the train careened toward Chambers Street. 'Plenty of fresh air, lots of runnin' around, decent food. And they'll keep you in line. Maybe teach you and your friends some discipline. Do what I couldn't do.'

'I'm gonna miss you, Dad,' I said.

'Save that shit,' my father said. 'You can't think like that. You gotta be like a stone. Can't think about anybody. Can't worry about anybody. Except yourself. It's the only way, kid. Believe me, I know what I'm talkin' about here.'

We rode the rest of the way in silence, wrapped in the noisy company of the rattling car.

I was two months shy of my thirteenth birthday and about to leave home for the first time in my life.

'Have the defendants been made aware of the charges against them?' the Judge asked.

'Yes they have, your Honor,' our lawyer responded, sounding as low-rent as he looked.

'Do they understand those charges?'

'Yes they do, your Honor.'

In truth we didn't understand. We were told the night before our appearance that the charges against us would be lumped together under the umbrella tag of assault one, which constituted reckless endangerment. The petty theft charge would be dropped in everyone's case but mine, since my action was what precipitated all that followed.

'It's the best I could do,' our lawyer told us, sitting behind a cluttered desk in his one-room office. 'You have to admit, it's better than getting hit with attempted murder. Which is what the other side wanted.'

'You're a regular Perry Mason,' John told him, seconds before his mother cuffed the side of his face.

'What does it mean for the boys?' Father Bobby asked, ignoring the slap and the comment.

'They'll do a year,' the lawyer said. 'Minimum. Lorenzo may get a few months more tacked on since he initiated the action. But then, he may get less time since he was last on the scene. That's the only open question.'

'It wasn't his idea,' Michael said. 'It was mine.'

'The idea doesn't matter as much as the act,' the lawyer said. 'Anyway, I should be able to convince the Judge not to tack on any extra time given how young Lorenzo is.'

'They're all young,' Father Bobby said.

'And they're all guilty,' the lawyer said, closing a yellow folder on his desk and reaching for a pack of cigarettes.

'Where?' Father Bobby asked.

'Where what?' the lawyer said, a menthol cigarette in his mouth, his hands coiled around a lit match.

'Where will they be sent?' Father Bobby asked, his face red, his hands gripping his knees. 'Which home? Which prison? Which hole are you going to drop them in? That clear enough for you?'

'Wilkinson's,' the lawyer said. 'It's a home for boys in upstate New York.'

'I know where it is,' Father Bobby said.

'Then you know what it's like,' the lawyer said.

'Yes,' Father Bobby said, the color drained from his face. 'I know what it's like.'

I looked over my shoulder, to the left, for a quick glance at the members of the Caldwell family, sitting in a group in the first two rows behind the prosecutor's table. Old man Caldwell was home, recuperating from his numerous wounds. According to a medical statement filed with the court, he would never again gain full use of his left leg and would suffer from dizziness and numbness in his other limbs for the rest of his life. His hearing and vision had also been affected.

Each of us had written him a note, delivered by Father Bobby, telling Mr. Caldwell and his family how sorry we were.

Each note went unanswered.

'Do any of you wish to say anything before sentence is passed?' the Judge asked, moving aside a sweaty glass of ice water.

'No, sir,' each of us said in turn.

The Judge nodded, looking at his notes one last time. He was in his late fifties, a short, stout man with a head full of thick white hair and brown eyes that revealed little. He lived in a Manhattan housing complex with his second wife and two dogs. He had no children, was an avid poker player and spent his summer vacations fishing off the dock of his Cape Cod home.

He cleared his throat, sipped some water and closed the folder before him.

'I'm sure by now, you boys have been made aware of the severity of the crime you committed,' the Judge began. 'It was a crime which combined a careless disregard for one man's place of business, in this case a hot dog stand, with a criminal attitude toward another man's safety and well-being. The end result left one man ruined and another nearly dead. All for the price of a hot dog.'

It was hot in the room and I was sweating through my shirt and jacket. I kept my hands clasped in front of me while staring straight ahead. I heard the mumblings of those behind me, the people on my right fearful of the Judge's words, the people on the left anticipating the punishment to come. John's mother, sitting next to my father, whispered the prayers of the rosary, her fingers moving slowly down the row of beads.

'Mr. Kratrous has been forced to give up his business and his dream of building a home here. He returns to his native Greece, his belief in our way of life torn apart by the wanton and remorseless act of four boys intent on thievery. Mr. Caldwell is an even more tragic case. Left for dead by a prank gone asunder, his life will never be what it was prior to that fateful day. He will suffer each and every single moment he has left on this earth, drugged with medications to numb the pain, walking with the aid of a cane, fearful of leaving his house. And all this for what? So four boys could sit back and share a laugh, enjoy a joke caused by the pain of others. Well, the joke backfired didn't it?'

It was nine-forty in the morning when the Judge pushed back the sleeves of his robe, took another drink of water and sent us to what he called a home for boys and what everyone else called a prison.

He took us on one at a time, starting with the Count.

'John Reilly,' the Judge said. 'The court hereby sentences you to be remanded for a period of no more than eighteen months and no less than one year to the Wilkinson Home for Boys. In prior agreement with the attorneys for both parties, the term is to begin effective September 1 of this year.'

Behind me, John's mother let out a low scream.

'Thomas Marcano,' the Judge said, shifting his attention to Butter. 'The court hereby sentences you to be remanded for a period of no more than eighteen months and no less than one year to the Wilkinson Home for Boys. In terms agreed upon by counsel, your sentence is to begin on September 1 of this year.'

'Michael Sullivan,' the Judge said, his tone turning harsher, convinced he was addressing the group ringleader. 'The court hereby sentences you to no more than eighteen months and no less than one year to the Wilkinson Home for Boys. In terms agreed upon by counsel, your sentence is to begin on September 1 of this year. I might add, were it not for the intervention of Father Robert Carillo of your local parish, who spoke in glowing terms on your behalf, I would have sentenced you to a much stiffer punishment. I still have my doubts as to your inherent goodness. Only time will serve to prove me wrong.'

I wiped at my upper lip and forehead, waiting for my name to be called. I turned around and saw my father sitting with his eyes closed, his arms folded, the top of his bald head wet with sweat.

'Lorenzo Carcaterra,' the Judge said, the contempt in his voice no less than it had been for my friends. 'In your case, the court will take into account the fact that you are the youngest of the four and arrived on the scene after the theft of the cart had already occurred. With that in mind, the court hereby sentences you to serve no more than one year and no less than six months at the Wilkinson Home for Boys. In terms agreed upon by counsel, you will begin your sentence on September 1 of this year.'

The Judge rested his head on his high-backed chair and stared out at us in silence. He tapped the edge of a case folder with the fingers of his right hand, his face an empty canyon,.a small, nondescript man made large by the weight of judicial power.

'I hope,' he said in conclusion, 'you make good use of your time at Wilkinson. Learn a trade, perhaps, or further your education. If not, if you turn the other way and ignore the possibilities available to you, then I can guarantee you will stand before me again, guilty of another violent act. And I assure you, next time I won't be as kind as I was today.'

'Thank you, your Honor,' our lawyer said, sweat lines streaking the sides of his face.

'Look at the scumbag,' my father said to Father Bobby, sitting in the row behind him, his voice loud enough to reach the bench, watching the Judge head back to his chambers. 'Look at him smile. Puts four kids away for a year and he smiles. I oughta break his fuckin' jaw.'

Father Bobby leaned over and put a hand on my father's shoulder.

'Easy, Mario,' Father Bobby said. 'This isn't the place and now's not the time.'

'It's never the place,' my father said. 'And it sure as shit ain't never the time.'

Our lawyer reached over the barrier and put out a hand toward Father Bobby, his low voice barely audible over the din coming from the Caldwell family side of the courtroom.

'It went as well as could be expected,' the lawyer said.

'For you, maybe,' Father Bobby said.

'They could have gotten a lot more time,' the lawyer said. 'For what they did, a lot more time.'

Father Bobby stood and leaned on the barrier, his Roman collar off his neck and in his right hand.

'This isn't a game,' Father Bobby said. 'It's not about deals or less time or more time. It's about four boys. Four boys whose names you didn't even bother to learn. So don't be so quick to pat yourself on the back.'

'I did my job,' the lawyer said.

'The sworn oath of the mediocre,' Father Bobby said.

'You could have done better with them yourself, Father,' the lawyer said. 'Then you wouldn't have needed the services of a shit like me.'

Father Bobby sat back down, his eyes catching mine, his face ashen and pained.

'It won't be so bad,' the lawyer told him. 'After all, it's not like everybody who spends time at Wilkinson ends up a criminal.'

The lawyer turned away and cleared off the top of the defense table, shoving a handful of manilla folders inside his tattered brown bag and snapping it closed.

'Some of them even find God and become priests,' the lawyer said, turning again to face Father Bobby. 'Don't they?'

'Go to hell,' Father Bobby said.

Outside, a light summer rain began to fall.