Chapter Nine

Prospect Park at ten minutes to eleven was pitch-black. They had broken most of the street lights. It was really dark. And the Park was teeming with gang kids. I had laid out my particular section of the battle plans, using a simple expedient of skirmishers right and left, with an advance force holding back center, just slightly, to allow the men on either side to encircle the Flyers coming at us. Pence had his flare gun and he was in the first rank with me. I had a feeling that weapon would be highly useful in lighting up the fighting area, once we'd engaged the enemy.

We had come into the Park on foot, by a devious path, and I hadn't been settled in the bushes for more than two or three minutes before a church bell began chiming the hour. The longest, slowest, fastest eleven strokes of a chime I'd ever heard.

I can't quite think of any other way to say it, except to reiterate that I was really scared. I'd come out here to write about this thing… not get killed in the middle of it.

Fence was right beside me, belly-down in the dirt under that bush, the Very pistol held out stiffly before him, his hand steadying it, and its large round canister muzzle black against the darkness. Most of the others were together, save the skirmishers I'd sent out on either side. It was good gang psychology; not only did it keep the weaker wills from sprinting, but it buoyed up morale. Might is right, superiority in numbers. And yet, we had no idea how many the Flyers had been able to recruit.

There were very nearly a hundred Barons spread out through that end of the Park, all hunkered down, waiting, waiting for something to happen. I scuttled around to look behind me, out across the Avenue, and saw the main part of the fighting force coming from behind a line of parked cars. This was how the War Counselors had set it up: plant the first wave in the Park ahead of time, and let the Flyers think the main batch was all we had.

The chime struck for the last time, and the huge gang of Barons broke across the street.

The Puerto Rican Flyers were ready for them.

I had heard nothing till that moment, but now, even as the slap-slap of sneakers sounded on the street, the first shots exploded off to my right and I heard a high, adolescent voice scream in pain. Someone was a damned good sharpshooter. It has started.

The pitch-black of the park was suddenly firefly alive with gunbursts and sparklers of flame. Most of the shots were going wild, but occasionally I could hear a thrashing and a coughing in the trees. Blood seemed to be drenching me, not sweat.

Apartment windows had flown up at the first shots and cries, screams, bellows of rage floated through the bushes. The main force had taken to the underbrush. Someone in the buildings was shouting for the fuzz.

Someone else was lying under a tree, clutching his chest and "Hail Mary's" with bloody fingers and a swollen tongue.

Beside me, Fence rasped, "Now? Now I do it? Huh, now?"

I laid a hand down on his back to shut him up.

Not yet.

Let's live a little longer. Don't attract attention to us, for Christ's sake. My eyes were filled with pinpoints of light. Shots, from everywhere. The night was alive with sound. Everywhere.

I was consumed with a wave of panic. I was sorry I'd ever wanted to write about how street gangs operated. I was going to find out, in the field, but I might never live to write about it. It was no holds barred, and they liked that, as long as it was someone else who caught the slug in his throat.

Fence leaped up and started running. I tried to stop him, but he was gone, into the dark, between the trees. And my legs were under me, too, and I was running, without mind, without thoughts, just running, with that bayonet hard between my fingers and my left hand covered by the steel knucks. But I hung back, and heard movement all around me as the main force went streaming and screaming past, right into the face of horror.

First boy through the trees was caught in the eye by a long pole with a piece of glass taped to the end. His screams brought the rest running. A Deb dropped beside him and got a good look; it was her stud; she started screaming, trying to cram her fist into her mouth. I felt the adrenalin go squirting through me. I wanted to run with the pack!

I wanted to kill, too!

Like sharks smelling blood.

Go!

The zips came into play. Their sound was not as sharp and slight and clean as the rifles or hand guns. They had no accuracy, thank God, but even so, the danger was there. And I didn't know what I was doing there, just running among them, swinging that bayonet and connecting with air, just air, but wanting flesh, wanting to carve someone up, seeing myself as a dark knight in the battle, doing the most basic thing a man can do…fighting. It took no brains to fight, and less to die, but I had no brains…I was a dark knight!

A black shape heaved up out of a bush as I passed and murmuredmiera , come here, as I felt a blast of pain that numbed my right arm completely. I don't know how I held onto the bayonet. I suspect Ihad to, that was why! I pulled up and swung, smashing my steel knuckle fist into the face of the guy with the heavy club. I felt his head snap around the blow, and he crumpled past my legs.

I must have kicked him a dozen times.

I grabbed the club with my left hand, awkwardly, for the knucks were still wrapped around my fist. I pulled them off and shoved them in my side pocket, hefting the club. It was a sawed-off chair leg of ironwood with a hunk of lead in the business end. It was heavier than a couple of bricks, and deadlier. It gave me range as well as effectiveness.

One of the Debs was squawking in a broken wail, and I saw two Flyer bitches working her over. One of them had a long Italian stiletto, and she was slicing up the girl with all the cool aplomb of a butcher.

I jumped them, not thinking, really, smashing at the hand that held the knife with my billy club. The girl bellowed and screamed something in Spanish. I hit the other one in the stomach, a long flat-out swing in the breasts, and then half the Flyer club was down my shirt.

Those chicks got their kicks. On me.

I went straight down and they did a rain dance on my head. I didn't wake up for quite a while.

When I did, the first thing that shot through my head wasWhy am I still alive?

I was a ball of pain, lying under a bush where someone had kicked me and not taken the time to finish me off. There must have been too many things shaking to worry about one downed Baron. I lay there, with the howling and swearing and screeching floating over my head, and the blood running down the side of my face, and my right arm useless. But I was still alive.

I could see, though I was crying from the pain and there was stickiness in them, mostly blood, and my sockets were burning, but I watched the rumble from the safety of that bush. Gone to ground, all the fight out of me, so call me chicken if you will, but I wouldn't, couldn't move.

They were like wild animals. All over the place. They had been turned loose, with no one to check them, and it was Jeezus,slaughter!

I tried to get to my knees. I don't know why, I suppose I wanted to run away. I managed to hunker up onto one knee, and then POW! the Very pistol went off almost in front of me. The Barons were coming back the other way. They'd been routed, or were mopping up, or the damned fight was just getting sloppy, I don't know.

But that red glow lived in the sky for a minute and I saw terrified faces turned toward it. It died after a time and the trampling went on unabated. It seemed as though this thing had been going on for hours, but I knew it couldn't be. The police would have been there before that much time had elapsed. My thoughts were crazy, devoid of rationality. That socking-around I'd gotten had jazzed my brains completely.

All I could do was stare, like a nut, as they fought back and forth around me. I saw a bunch of girls, tight jeans somehow concealing vicious knives and straight-edge razors, fighting like wildcats. One girl smashed another in the breasts with a lead pipe, and kept beating her with it even after the other had fallen moaning among the leaves.

No one abroad in the Park that night would have been safe.

A body tumbled through the bushes and went sprawling, its arms and legs at funny angles, and tried to get up. It was a Flyer. He couldn't make it. He just lay there, down.

Fence was shouting something to Samson, yelling, "Hey, Sams', hey, man, hey Sams'n, help willya!"

I couldn't see them, but then the flare gun went off again, except this time it didn't explode into the sky. I saw a pulsing crimson light in among the bushes and a second later a boy came shrieking through the brush, his arms going in all directions, and his shirt-front blazing. Fence had shot him squarely in the chest with the thermite flare. Oh, God, it was unbelievable. The kid went crashing past me, still burning, and out onto the Avenue, and out of sight behind the cars…except for the glow, which kept illuminating his passage.

He disappeared down the street and in between two buildings, an erratic journey that may never have ended, or ended only when the flesh was burned away.

I felt myself clogging in the throat, and a moment later I upchucked what little I had in me. I sat there in it, and everything went grey and swam and boiled and dipped around me. It was like nothing else in this life… totally without reason or pattern.

Then I heard the siren wail of a police growler. It was coming up the Avenue…no, it was over there on the other side of the Park…no, it was…they were coming from all sides. It had taken them long enough!

I heard screams, "Leech out! The fuzz! Cut! The nabs are here!" The shouts rose up over the wails of filth and agony of the combatants. Joined in a common bond—hatred of authority, fear of apprehension and the terror of jail—they broke and ran, scattering back the way they had come, leaving their friends and brothers lying on the dew-fresh ground.

I saw Pooch, a rifle slung across his back, hanging low and scuttling through the bushes toward the Avenue.

Suddenly I was brought back to a terrifying sense of reality: I remembered my own position. I was as liable to arrest as anyone else lying there. I had to get away myself.

I dragged myself erect, clinging to the bushes, and took a step. I went right down again, flat on my face. But this time I couldn't allow myself the luxury of unconsciousness. I struggled to my feet again, and without even feeling my feet moving, ordered them to carry me away. Reflex took over. I limped through the trees, stumbling over rocks and brush and other things, keeping to the edge of the Park till I was a block down. Then I scanned the Avenue, saw nothing dangerous, and sprinted across, falling only once, scraping my hands badly on the asphalt. I gained the safety of a building's side and looked back. Patrol cars had drawn up to the curb in threes and fours, like great land-creatures, and their headlights as well as spots were flooding the darkness of the Park.

I could see the cops running into the Park and bear them dragging kids out. As I watched a cop broke out of the trees with a body over his shoulders in a fireman's carry, and another kid wrapped in his hand, by the collar. He tossed them both unceremoniously into the back seat of the growler, and shouted something to another vehicle down the line.

I heard an ambulance coming from down the Avenue.

It was going to be bad.

I slithered along the face of the building, away from the action, my arm hanging limp, burning terribly, my head filling fast with grey clouds of pain and confusion.

I ducked into the first alley I came to, between two modern apartment buildings, and followed it to its end, then over a fence and down another alley onto another street.

I don't know how long I wandered, but eventually I got back to my fleatrap room, and took a look at myself in the mirror. I had never been beautiful, but I was less so now. Half my face looked like putty, and the other half was devoid of emotion or expression.

I changed clothes after showering, and rolled up the apparel that had belonged to Cheech Beldone. As far as I was concerned, he had been killed back there in Prospect Park. I cleaned out every little thing in the room that might lead anyone back to me. I packed it all in a paper bag and left the room and the neighborhood. I caught the subway uptown, and changed at Times Square.

Eventually, years later, ages later, a whole lifetime later, I got off the subway at 116th Street across from Columbia University, and dragged myself to 611 West 114th. I got upstairs and unlocked my room, and threw the paper bag under the bed.

Then I fell down on the bed and slept.

When I woke, after hours of terrible dreams and restless tossing, I was not purged, but Cheech Beldone was gone. I was Harlan Ellison again, and I was out of Brooklyn, and off the streets. I did not know what had happened to Pooch, or Filene, or Fish or Fence or any of them. All I knew was that I was safe, and hadn't been hurt, and would never, never go back.


TRANSITION


That was the end of my first journey through hell. I was unable to write about it coherently for several months thereafter. And when I did, it was to find that I had been too completely involved for rationality. I used many of the incidents from my time with the Barons in stories, and once even attempted a complete telling of the ten weeks. It came out very badly.

Finally, I wrote a novel about it. My first novel. I called it "Web Of The City" and eventually it came out, under the title "Rumble." But it wasn't a very solid book, though the reviewers were kind to it, and in its own way I suppose it said what I wanted to say,had to say, at that time. But there was still a feeling that I had somehow gone wrong with the concept; it hadn't been a true re-creation of the kids. Filene was not Filene, Pooch was not Pooch, and Candle came off as some sort of mongoloid, which he had never been.

Prosaically enough, time passed and things happened. I had brought away from the Barons some implements used by the kids—the set of knucks I'd used in the rumble, the billy club, a .22 revolver, the bayonet, the Italian stiletto without a switch I had used in the stand with Candle—and these were to become visual aids in lectures and panels on juvenile delinquency for PTA groups, YMCA gatherings, high school classes, youth organizations.

In 1956 I was married and in 1957 was drafted. While serving two years with the Army at Fort Knox, Kentucky, I continued to write, and lecture on juvenile delinquency, using the weapons from Brooklyn. During this latter period I lived in Kentucky and continued writing. It was during this time that "Rumble" was published, and shortly thereafter another book, a collection of short stories about delinquents I had written for various magazines. It was called "The Deadly Streets." On April 1st, 1959, I was released from the service and went to Chicago to edit a magazine. I was divorced in 1960, and in the late summer of that year left Chicago, returning to New York. Wandering, really. Trying to find some way to talk about the things I felt, the things I'd seen, and being still unable to set it down properly. I had sold many more stories—some of them about the kids—and several books, but nothing seemed to come out properly about how they were doomed, so helpless there in the streets. And all the while I was getting older,they were growing older, and their kid sisters and brothers taking over the places of the ones I had known.

What had happened to Filene, whom I had known for so short a time, yet who seemed to be a person truly loved, I had no idea. Or Pooch, who had had a strength, despite his inability to communicate; who was undeniably a man in a world that had made him too old before he was ready. Or Candle, or Fish, or Mustard, or Flo…what had happened to them? I found my thoughts returning to them constantly, trying to imprint new images of them, older faces, new bodies, over my original pictures. I could not do it. I continued seeing them as children, looking at me, asking me to tell it already, to stop cheating them … now that I had duped them and used them, why was I denying them their voices? Why was I hiding what I'd seen, writing it as fiction and thus negating its truth? I had no answers.

I kept looking in the papers, to see if I recognized any names, but for the single exception of a Daily News squib about a boy named Arthur "Fish" Kohler who had stolen nine cars in two days and been apprehended on his tenth, there was nothing. It might have been the Fish I'd known; I had no way of finding out.

And I was afraid, too. If they had known who I was, and I had come back on the scene after having disappeared so effectively, it might have meant serious trouble for me. Uptown, hair cut normally, suited, carrying an attaché case, I was definitely not Cheech Beldone. I was someone else entirely, and it was better that way.

And it had been seven years. A long time.

In seven years I had lectured many times on the subject; had even gone on television and radio with my experiences. I had said, "You can't stop a rumble or a kid gang once it gets rolling. There isn't much you can do when slums take the place of football fields, or when alleys are more convenient for loving-up a date than taking her to a canteen for dancing and clean entertainment.

"But as long as there is a solid family unit that will recognize the kid as an integral part, that will respect his intelligence, his honesty, his status, a family he can run to when the city closes down on him and the world snaps and snarls, as long as the parents and the school and the church and the local government stop looking at delinquency as a recent cultural leprosy, get off their behinds, and try tounderstand the kid, try to aid him in helping himself grow up, not shove him the way theythink orhalf-think he should go, there's a chance.

"When everybody stops passing the buck and blaming it on girlie magazines or television or the H-bomb, then a start will be made toward solving the problem."

That's what I'd said, and showed the knives that had ripped, and the knucks that had smashed. That was what I'd said, though I'd known that wasn't the whole answer, perhaps not even the right answer.

But I'd known it was a start, and they had to startsomewhere .

Sometimes it came down to insulting the parents…

I told them they needed to be educated, like their kids. "Honor thy father and mother" was a sweet sentiment once, but what if the father is a lush and the mother is too lazy to notice whether the stains on her son's shirt are lipstick or blood? I said, "Get the adults trained! Rid them of the idea that just because they gave birth to something they are competent to bring it up. Most parents are so incompetent they wouldn't know their kid was Public Enemy Number One unless they saw his picture in the post office."

Sometimes it came down to insulting the police…

"We need more beat cops. Get them out of the prowl cars. There isn't a thing they can do rolling along like conquering heroes, advertising their presence, blocks from trouble when it breaks. Let the paid servants of the people earn their pay instead of grousing about how many callouses they have on their backsides for the pittance they're paid. Pay them more. Then let the cops walk around. Then give him more cops to walk over the ground he's just covered. Blanket the rough sections. Stamp out the street mugger and the rapist and the lice that push junk to the kids. Stop the rumble by forming more youth groups, that want to let the kids help and grow, not keep them out of the way. Show them they're needed, not in the way."

Sometimes it came down to insulting the educators…

"You don't call what you're shoveling at kids these days education, do you? They go in stupid, and they come out stupid, if they bother going in at all. Most of them are fucking illiterate! They can't read or write or enjoy even a simple pleasure like thinking a new thought. Read a book? Like hell! Think straight enough to see through all the jingo-spouting phonies running for office or trying to sell them ass-wipe on television? Fat chance! Develop their cleverness enough to get a job that's better than sitting for eight hours a day in a windowless box making money for someone else? Don't make me laugh! You program them to be no-necks; to be nerds; to take what's fed them and make no noise. Behavior mod them, brainwash teach them, scare the authority into them. You get put in a classroom with a bunch of wild animals and all you can think about is keeping them from eating your heart and eyes out. That's teaching; sure it is. You people'd be better off serving the commonweal as bricklayers."

I tried to get across the idea of action on the part of parents too busy with churchkey and time-card action on the part of school boards too hypocritical and stingy to persuade good teachers to stay in education, action on the part of clergy and government too busy dredging up the proper indignant expressions and the proper flowery phrases for "the present outrageous situation" to get out in the streets where the kids play stickball.

I wanted them totalk to their kids, and tolisten .

Many lectures, many showings of the weapons the kids used, and in seven years—nothing. The same. No change, unless it was to get worse.

So my interest turned in futility to other things. I wrote about other things, saw different scenes, and the ten weeks in 1954 began to fade.

It was all to come back to me, much more forcibly, later that month … September, 1960.

I had gone to a party in the Bronx, and there met a fellow named Ken Bales, someone I'd known in 1955, a fellow I'd loaned a typewriter to. He had pawned it; he had been a deadbeat then, and in 1960 he was no better. I advised him if he didn't pony up the cost of a new typer, or get me that one back, I would lean on him. That happened early in September. It was to result in an experience I never want to relive, an experience that brought back my memories of the Barons so sharply I felt I had never left Brooklyn. It happened like this…

Bales, frightened by my determination to make him pay up, and aware of the weapons I had in my apartment (locked in a filing cabinet), which had never been a secret, as I had displayed them on television, anonymously phoned the police.

He told them I had an arsenal in my Greenwich Village apartment.

On Sunday, September 11th a hot summer day, I was doing nothing in particular, loafing around the apartment, when the bell rang. I answered it, and was confronted by two plainclothesmen of the New York Police Department. They asked if they might comb in. I thought it was a gag and asked to see their tin. They showed me their credentials and I admitted them.

They were pleasant enough, sat down, and asked me if I had any enemies. I answered with a grin, and said, "I lead a normal life; I suppose I've got as many as the next guy." They didn't smile back. They asked me how long I had been living at 95 Christopher Street and if I knew of anyone in particular who would like to do me harm. I told them how long I'd been in the apartment, since I'd come in from Chicago, and the only person I could think of at the moment who disliked me enough to fink on me was Ken Bales.

Then they asked if I'd ever used narcotics.

I didn't quite know what to answer them.

Friends who knew me often thought I was a fanatic, so opposed to junk was I. A young friend of mine, in fact, had been experimenting, and with another friend, a jazz critic named Ted White, we had threatened to knock his teeth in if he ever went near it again. Narcotics? Hell, no…I didn't even use NoDoz.

I told them I had never had anything to do with narcotics and felt this thing was going a bit too fast for me. I asked them what this was all about, and was I being charged with something. I noticed they were looking at me carefully, at my arms and my legs. I had been washing the bathroom sink at the time they had arrived and was wearing nothing but beach-boy slacks, rolled to the knees, with no shirt. They could see I had no needle marks on my body.

Then they informed me that an anonymous tip had come in to the Charles Street police station that a writer named Ellison at 95 Christopher Street was having wild narcotics parties, had a storehouse of heroin secreted in the apartment, and also had an arsenal of lethal weapons.

I knew it had been Bales, but I couldn't prove it.

At that point I asked them please to search the place. They said they had intended to do it in any case, but they were glad I'd offered so they wouldn't have to go and get a search warrant.

They spent the better part of an hour searching my one-and-a-half-room apartment, and naturally found nothing. Then they came back into the living room and sat down.

The senior officer asked me if I had a gun in the place. I had to think a moment. It did not dawn on me to equate the empty .22 short revolver I had used for seven years as a prop, with a lethal weapon that should have been registered in the State of New York. After a moment I said, "Well, I have some weapons that I've used on lecture tours, in connection with talks about juvenile delinquency." I showed them my books.

They asked if they might see the weapons.

I went to the closet, found my keys in a pair of pants, and unlocked the bottom drawer of my filing cabinet. Far in the back, under a stack of papers (for I had not been lecturing for six or eight months), I found the gun, the knife, the bayonet, and two sets of knucks. (The second set had been given to me by a student at a high school in Elizabethtown, Kentucky, after a talk I had given there, thus proving to me that j.d. was not a big city disease, solely.)

I handed these items over, though the bayonet and the knife (without a switch) were both legal in New York City.

They took these and I added, "I have buffets for the gun, too, if you want them." They indicated they did, so I located the box of .22 rounds and gave them to the officers, also. They smelled the gun. "When was the last time this was fired?" they asked.

"It's never been fired while I've had it," I said. "And that's seven years. Before that, I don't know." The officer with the gun nodded to the other and said it smelled clean.

We talked for another half hour, and still the seriousness of what was happening did not reach me. I was a legitimate writer with a legal use for these tools, and the whole anonymous call was a hoax, used by a kook to get me in trouble. They agreed that such might be the case, and while they were satisfied that the narcotics charge was absolutely unfounded, they would have to arrest me on The Sullivan Act for illegal possession of a gun. I thought I'd fall over, it was so weird. I'd done nothing, as far as I was concerned, and yet I was to be arrested.

They apologized, said they had no doubt I was innocent, but a complaint had been lodged, and they were compelled to follow it up. I tried to reason with them, but they were adamant in the pursuit of their duties.

I could not argue with them.

Today, I still feel I was treated fairly and honestly by those two police officers, whose names I cannot and would not reveal, for they helped me as much as they were able, later.

They advised me to get dressed, for they would have to take me in. I got panicky. My mother, whom I had not seen in over three years, had come into town from the Midwest, and had gone out for the afternoon. She would be back to make dinner in a short time. The thought of her coming in, finding me gone and not knowing where I'd disappeared—who knew how long I'd be kept in detention?—all this whirled through my mind. I asked them if I might tell a friend where I'd gone. They said it was all right to do so.

I went downstairs in the building with one of the officers and told an acquaintance, Linda Solomon, what had happened to me. She thought it was a gag. "You're putting me on," she said, laughing. Then she opened the door a bit wider, saw the officer, and the smile vanished.

We made arrangements for her to tell my mother what had happened, and I went back upstairs, dressed, and left with the officers.

It was the beginning of twenty-four hours caught in the relentless mechanism of the N.Y.C. judicial system. A 24-hour period that so filled me with hopeless desperation that at times I thought I would crack.

But it was a fitting ending to my researches about the gang. For in the Tombs—New York's affectionate name for its jail—I was to encounter one of the Barons, seven years later, when I was someone else, and he was someone else, and it all tied together too terribly, too neatly, to even let me slip into the forgetfulness I'd known.

How ironic…that a guy who had wanted to tell the truth about the kids, should be arrested seven years later as a result of having run with them. It was like the second half of a book, tied inextricably to the first by sadness and desperation and the evil that seems never to leave someone who has experienced the filth and horror of the streets.

I was going back for another visit in hell.


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