It took four guys to get my sweater and T-shirt off me. I kicked one of them squarely in the groin and another in the shin and stomped on another one's instep, and used my free elbow in the throat of another one, and it did no good at all. The four of them stripped me to the waist, forcing me down on my knees between them, and one kid holding my neck so tightly I thought the s.o.b. would cut off my wind completely. Two of them held my arms behind me, straight out with one guy hunched over, his knee in the small of my back. I was contorted like the India rubber man, and they weren't being particularly gentle with me, either.
Suddenly it was no longer research.
Abruptly, I was not Stanley, presumably, the reporter, or Ernie Pyle, or Hemingway, or anydamnbody but me, and I was scared witless. These weren't kindergarten rompers playing pranks. These were teen-aged kids with more muscles than they had any right to have, bending me down like a sapling in a storm and ripping the clothes off me.
I wanted out of there.
No one will ever know how hard I wanted out of there.
I tried to yell at them, something logical and complete and round and tight like a ball bearing, something that would make them let go of my windpipe and my back (which was breaking) and let me bolt the hell out of there.
But I had said I wanted in, and that was the way it was going to be. If it killed me.
Crazy thoughts skimmed through my mind.
I won't relate them here, they don't count; I was half crazy with fear. Except that I really wanted out.
When they had the clothes off me, they shoved me away, and I went to my hands, as well as my knees. Instinctively I knew if I'd come this far, there were only two courses open to me. The first was to break and run and get rudely (if cadaverously) ejected from the turf; the second was to suck in my yellow streak and tough it out. I'm no braver than the next one, but six guys with belt buckles honed to razor sharpness were a pretty authoritative fighting force, and there was no telling how far they'd go. Bluff? Maybe? But there were a good many kids with scars across their faces, and their backs a tanned plane criss-crossed with white lines—scars—where the sun would never tan them. They might be knife wounds from rumbles, but on the other hand they might be belt buckle momentos.
Pooch decided for me.
"Get in line, you guys, c'mon, he's goin' through; get inline , willya for Chrissakes!"
They lined up, Indian gantlet style. All across the long room, about six feet apart, three on each side, alternately spaced diagonally across from each other perhaps seven feet. It was as deadly a row as I'd ever seen a guy have to hoe.
"What are you outta your goddammind?" I yelled to Pooch. "I didn't come down here to get my ass stripped off!"
"Either run or fold," he said.
It was as simple as that.
I knew what I was going to do.
But I had to do it right. Just right.
"No dice. To hell with you!" I said, half turning away, as though looking for the way out. They lowered the belts for an instant, and—
—I jumped like a scared rabbit and hit that gantlet going full blast before they knew I was coming. I got past three of them before they knew I was coming, and skimmed under a side-arm slash by the tallest kid, even as the ones I'd passed howled,"Foul!"
The fifth one was slightly smaller than the others, and he swung his big black belt in a wide S curve that I felt whistle past my back with barely an inch clearance. The sixth one was waiting, and he was grinning like Eichmann with a fresh furnace-load ready to be basted. I knew I'd never get past him. That bastard would level me with one swipe, probably open my skull or slit my throat or slice my back to the bone. Iknew I'd never make it.
I ducked sidewise, broken-field style, and grabbed the fifth one, the smaller one, around the waist, before he could draw back for another swing. I carried that fink on ahead of me with the force of my rush like he was a heavy load of kindling, and I hurled him into the sixth cat with all my might.
They went bumbling together, the belt caught the fifth guy across the shoulders and he howled as though someone had rammed a poker up his backside, and I was through the gantlet, panting like a steam engine, but clear and clean.
A couple of them started after me, and I crouched down, ready to hit the first one with everything in me, if he brought that belt up…but Pooch called time.
"Cool it!" he yelled across the room. We were in the shadows, and I was all Floyd Pattersoned to roundhouse the first creep that stuck his face within range. "C'mon, knock it off you guys, he made it…"
And I had, too.
Round one of The Initiation of Cheech Beldone was over.
There was a mild demonstration, at that point, chiefly from the Debs sitting on the tables and orange crates. Doug Fairbanks had come through once more.
But I could tell I'd made a few enemies; there were kids in that group who were too chicken to fight it out in an open stand; they were the ones who had toprowl in groups, because they were afraid of getting caught alone, of laying their courage on the line. They were the ones with the deadly cruel little eyes, and the hard sets to their mouths (that became soft and white when they thought no one was watching). They got their kicks from organized brutality, and I'd robbed them of their kicks. Therefore I was a fink, and an enemy.
I could tell at once who they were. There were three of them. I marked them mentally, for watching. Never a back turned toward them. Never.
Yet I'd made it through the gantlet.
I thought the initiation was over.
I was wrong.
"You got two more parts to the initiation," Pooch announced. They all knew it, but I hadn't. I was too beat and too scared to realize what he was saying, but after a few moments I let it filter through, and my blood went dry in my veins. I wasn't sure I could take two more tests of endurance like the one I'd just come through.
I suddenly had a vision of some poor littleschmuck like Fish or Shit trying to make that gantlet. Yet I knew they must have, for they were in the gang, and I was only one-third of the way there. (I later found out the initiation rites were highly flexible; and that up until six months before I'd joined the gang, there had been hardly any initiation at all…merely a ritual of talking.)
I took in all the fares, and the looks on their faces made them something other than faces. They were masks, like theComedia del' Arte ; representations, rather than realities. They were a Roman Circus audience, waiting for a martyr to meet his lion.
They were a carny crowd waiting for the aerialist to take his dive, and kill himself. They wanted blood. They wanted to turn thumbs down on this particular gladiator, no matter who he was; they wanted blood.
"Well, come on, what's next?" I demanded.
It was getting to me, now. I was becoming light-headed and weak from the sprint and tackle through the gantlet; what the next part might be, I had no idea,but it had better be non-strenuous , I thought, wryly.
"Pick a chick," Pooch ordered. He made a negligent half-wave at the girls sitting around the room. There was no room for misunderstanding; he was telling me I was going to ball one of the gang Debs—either in full sight of the rest of them, or in private. But either way, I was now about to prove my masculinity to the group.
I cast a wide, slow look around the room. I knew, roughly, which girls belonged to certain studs. I also knew certainother girls—Flo was one of them—who were considered below-status for any sort of steady dating or affection, but who were perfectly acceptable for balling. But that wasn't the sort of chick I was being ordered to pick.
This was a test in many ways. They were gauging my good judgment, my critical sense, my coolness, in fact. I had to pick a good-looking girl who was not a bum, who was not strongly attached to any club member, who wouldn't give me a hard-time, but who would carry into her sexual meet with me all the qualities of a "good" girl, yet be hip enough to make me a steady chick.
I was, in effect, picking a gang-wife.
Of the fifteen or sixteen girls in the basement room, only five were known to me to be in the category—that tenuous, unspoken category—from which I would be wise to select.
There was a dishwater blonde named Midget (nickname derived from the size of her bosom) with whom I'd talked on several occasions. She liked me; I'd informed her it was my habit to call "dishwater" blondes, "sunshine" blondes, and one of God's most attractive creatures. It was a great deal of snow, but she liked me. Her legs were very thin.
Pam and Lou were friends, went to the same school, lived in the same tenement, and generally double-dated; both were moderately attractive, in that flashy, too-tight-looking way teen-aged girls look these days. Lou wore her hair back in a pony-tail, which became her; her hair was as black as any shadow in that room. Pam was a brownette, but she'd done a few tricks with bleach, and had a streak of blonde incongruously snaking through the mouse-brown. Both were abundantly endowed, and both were taller than me.
Lights was the fourth girl, and she was out of the question. Not that she wasn't good-looking, because if a person's taste happens to run to the Coleen Gray-type girl, with thin, heart-shaped face, pointed nose and slim mouth, then she was, indeed, good-looking. My taste happened to run in other directions. Lights…was out. My taste ran.
It ran in the direction of the fifth girl, Filene, who was slim and about a foot shorter than myself, with fine, long fingers and a carriage far more graceful than any of the other girls in the neighborhood sported. She had somehow failed to pick up the hideous habit of scuffling her feet as she walked, a trait common to almost every other teen-aged girl I'd ever encountered, and particularly prevalent in the Baron Debs. She did not chew gum, her complexion was clear, she spoke gently, almost musically,when she spoke, and I had a flitting hunch she was a virgin.
Which was probably why none of the other studs had gone for her. They were used to getting their bed-action without too much fuss and nonsense, and her naive purity stood out in that room like a light in the forest. She was in that class of girls known to easily-awed kids of the streets as "high-class."
Her mother worked as a seamstress in the garment center of Manhattan, her father was a neighborhood hanger-on who did odd jobs, hauled ashes, drank sneaky pete and in general kept out of everyone's way, except for the nights he'd scoot back to their apartment and try to seduce Filene. Failing that, he would rough up and ball his wife with a thoroughness that was legend in the turf.
And somehow, she had come through it all reasonably untouched.
"I'll take Filene," I said.
There were great animal grins from all around the room, and I saw the girl pale noticeably. So that was it. This was as much an initiation for her as for me; she'd known it was to come some time, and she had no idea whether I'd be kind or a slob, as so many of the others had been. I knew for certain, then, that she was a virgin.
"You get that room over there," Pooch pointed, and for the first time I saw a door between two highboys. I moved toward it, and she joined me.
I had learned another lesson about morality in the gangs:
There was unbelievable laxity in the morality of the kids, but it was still tied up inextricably with the mores of the times. It was all right to ogle a naked photo of Jayne Mansfield, but it was not all right to ball your chick in sight of a bunch of grinning brother gang-members. It was okay to knock a chick up, as long as you did it on the sly, and only talked about it with adolescent braggadocio. It was permissible to get a little in the drive-in theatre, but on the street you don't hold hands. It was fine to rough up a guy's sister in the vestibule of their building, but not a word could anyone say aboutyour sister. Mothers were sacrosanct to the words of anyone else, even if Moms was a tosspot lush with a thirst bigger than her brain. You could do anything at all, sexually, under cover, but it wasn't decent to make it in public.
Orgies, mixed couples balling in the same room, sex with the lights on … all of it was taboo.
Filene moved toward me, and I opened the door. I went through first; it wasn't a mark of strength to let a Deb precede youanywhere —even to her defloration.
I closed the door behind me.
The room said one thing: You're here to make it.
There wasn't a chair, a table, a washstand, a picture, a rug, a window, wallpaper,anything in that cell of horror. There was only a bed.
Filene stood across the room, her eyes invisible in the darkness, but I knew they were wide with expectation and fear. I heard her move, rather than seeing her, and the bed springs creaked as she sat down. I walked to the spot where I thought the end of the bed must be, and reached out. It wasn't there. I moved forward till my hand touched the brass footboard. I could hear her breathing, deeply, regularly.
Okay, so there it was.
I had a choice. Either go all the way, and be Cheech Beldone, and get through this initiation, and write my book and forget I'd committed statutory rape…or fake out of it somehow and run the risk that every girl in that room had been briefed to report what happened in here, and if I didn't come through as was expected they would either bounce me from the gang, or start to suspect something was wrong.
After all, Iwas a perfectly normal, sex-hungry seventeen-year-old gang recruit. If I didn't make it with Filene, she might be grateful as all hell, but I'd be tagged a kook, or worse, intolerably in that set, a homosexual. I didn't really have much choice.
I moved around the bed. She stopped breathing for a long moment. "How old are you?" I asked.
"Sixteen," she said. How softly.
"Jeezus," I snorted, "Whyn't I pick somebody who knew what was happening?" I got up and moved across the room, slouched against the wall. I was scared worse than her.
"I'mmm sssorryy," she drew the words out, humming them, almost, as though they were impregnated with tears even as spoken.
"Forget it," I said, "it isn't your fault."
We both knew what we were talking about, though neither of us had mentioned it.
"Listen, I—uh—I don't mind. If it was Fish or Wally or Tarzan I wouldn't like it at all, but you don't look like them kids at all." It was the most pathetic rationalization I'd ever heard. I wanted to get out of thereimmediately!
"Listen," she said again, that pathetic twist in her voice, "I'm sorta in bad with them, too. I been in the Debs almost six months now and they, uh, they haven't, I mean nobody's—"
She left it hanging. What she was trying to say wasThey're getting impatient with my holding out. I've got to give it to someone and if it's going to you, please be gentle, please be kind. Please.
How do you equate morality, ethics, good or bad—in a pitch-black basement room with nothing but a bed and a pretty girl?
Sometimes the right things get done for the wrong reasons, and sometimes the wrong things get done for the right reasons.
I had a feeling she wouldn't be alone when she cried, later.