Manchild in the Promised Land (23 page)

I said that was weak stuff and went on down the hall, mopping. Then I saw some guys coming up to him. I paid it no attention, but he got up, and I heard his voice raised. I turned around. Some cats had him up in a corner and were punching him. There were three of them, and they were runners from A4. It sounded like they were kicking his ass for giving them such a hard time catching him. I thought that was crazy. If a guy is running away, the reason he's running away is to get away, and why should he stop just because somebody is coming for him?

He started going down, and they started kicking him. I knew that in a little while they were going to stomp him. So I ran up there with the mop in my hand. I guess I just didn't do too much thinking. The first thing I knew, I was lashing into those cats with that mop handle, and everybody was hollering and going on. We were raising hell out there in that hall. Skylo, the area man, came out, and he said, “What are you doing, Brown? What's wrong with you?”

Then Mrs. Washington came down the hall, all excited, hollering, “Good God, what is going on here?”

So I told them that the cats had been jumping on this one boy and that I was trying to help him.

Skylo looked at me, and he said, “He's a friend of yours, isn't he?”

“Yeah, in a way.”

“Well, take some advice from me, Brown. You stay away from him, because this guy is heading for trouble, and he's not gonna be around here long, and I wouldn't want to see you get yourself into any trouble on account of him.”

I pretended to appreciate his advice, then I walked away. But the main thing was that I'd gotten those cats off Minetti. At the same time, I had made them enemies of mine. But that was all right, because I didn't like those cats anyway. I thought they were all jive. The way I saw it, those niggers weren't so crazy. They were just acting like they were crazy. And they'd only act like that with cats who didn't know any better. Now I knew that if I was to breeze and they came after me, one of us would get hurt—me or whoever it was. But I just couldn't get too scared of them. I'd seen cats like that just about all my life.

There were a lot of real hip young criminals at Warwick. It wasn't like Wiltwyck. For one thing, Wiltwyck only had about a hundred guys, and Warwick had five hundred. And Warwick had guys from all over New York City. They had cats from Brooklyn, the Bronx, Manhattan, Queens, and Richmond—everywhere. There were even cats from small towns upstate and from suburban areas of New York City. And Warwick had real criminals. Nobody at Wiltwyck was there for murder, and they didn't have any cats up there who knew how to steal a car without the keys. But it seemed like just about everybody at Warwick not only knew how to pick locks but knew how to cross wires in cars and get them started without keys. Just about everybody knew how to pick pockets and roll reefers, and a lot of cats knew how to cut drugs. They knew how much sugar to put with heroin to make a cap or a bag. There was so much to learn.

You learned something new from everybody you met. It seemed like just about all the Puerto Rican guys were up there for using drugs. They had a lot of colored cats up there for using drugs, but most of them were jive. Most of these guys were just using drugs to be down and to have a rep as a junkie. You could tell that these cats were jive by the way they went around saying, “Yeah, man, do you shoot stuff?” and all this sort of nonsense, as though they were bragging about it. They would start talking about how much stuff they used a day. I'd look at them and say, “Yeah, like, that's real nice,” but they could never make me feel bad or anything, because all I had to do was say my name was Claude Brown. I didn't have to use drugs. I already had a reputation.
I'd been other places. I knew people from here, I knew people from there.

Cats had heard about me when I was in Brooklyn gang fighting with K.B. and the Robins. And when I got shot, it was something that everybody seemed to respect me for. I'd only gotten shot with a .32, but the word was out that I'd gotten shot in the stomach with a .38. Cats didn't believe it. They'd come up to me and say, “Man, did you really git shot wit a .38?” and I'd either joke it off or act like they were being silly. I'd say, “Shit, people have gotten shot with .45's, so what?” They would go away marveling.

When we were in the dormitory getting ready to take a shower, the cool guys would say, “Hey, Brown, could I see your scar?” or they would just say, “Man, is that your scar?” I'd say, “Yeah, that's it.” If they were hip cats, they might just say something like, “Yeah, man, those bullets can really fuck you up.” And I'd say something like, “Yeah, but you can keep gittin' up behind 'em.”

Cats used to come up and offer me ins on reefers or horse or anything I wanted. I had two or three flunkies after I'd been there for a month. It was no sweat for me; I was ready to stay there for a long time and live real good. I knew how to get along there. I'd had a place waiting for me long before I came. If I'd known that Warwick was going to be as good as it turned out to be, I would never have been so afraid. As a matter of fact, I might have gotten there a whole lot sooner.

At Warwick, it all depended on you when you went home for a visit. The first time, you had to stay there twelve weeks before you could go home. After that, you could go home for a three-day visit, from Friday to Monday, every eight weeks. That's if you didn't lose any days for fucking up or fighting. This was pretty good, because some people were always going home, and they would see your fellows and bring messages back, and your fellows were always coming up every Friday. A new batch of guys would come up and drugs would come up. When you came back from a weekend home visit, you were searched everywhere. They'd even search in the crack of your ass. You had to go to the doctor and let him look for a dose of clap. But cats would always manage to bring back at least a cap of horse or at least one reefer. Everybody could always manage to smuggle in a little bit of something.

By the time Dunny came up to Warwick, I had a place for him. I
was there and ready, sitting pretty. I'd already established myself and was waiting for some of the fellows to come up. I'd been up there about eight weeks when Dunny came. He told me Turk was in the Youth House. They'd gotten busted robbing a hardware store on 145th Street, and for some reason—I guess because he had a worse record than Turk—they sent Dunny right on up, but Turk was still in the Youth House waiting to go to court.

When Dunny came up, I saw him passing by the reception crowd, and I stopped and said something to him before Mr. Jenkins, the cat in charge, told me to go on. Dunny said, “Damn, Sonny, we gon live up here, man; like we gon really run the place!” And I sort of had the feeling it was true, because Dunny was a crazy cat, and he had a whole lot of heart. But I wanted to get a chance to pull his coat about the place called the Annex.

The cats who had a little bit of sense but who were just general fuck-ups were sent to the Annex. At the Annex, you didn't get any visits home, and you could only have a visitor once a month. At Warwick, you could have a visitor every Sunday, if your folks wanted to come and see you. Not too many people actually came up there every Sunday, though. At the Annex, you had to do two years. For all that time, you weren't going to be back on the street, see any girls, go to the places you liked to go, or do the things you liked to do. They said the work was harder too.

Up at Warwick, the cats had never really served any time before. They might have been someplace like Wiltwyck, where you went home only every six months, but they could go home for a visit or could go someplace eventually. In places like Warwick, you find a lot of guys who never had any home to go to, so they didn't mind. One place was just as good as another. For them, Warwick was just one more place until the next stop, which would probably be Coxsackie or Elmira or someplace like that. But to the average cat who hadn't ever served any time, the thought of going to the Annex was something frightening. I hadn't served any time, and I wasn't about to serve any time. I wanted to get back on the streets.

My folks didn't come up too much. Dad would never come any place to see me, and Mama couldn't come often because she didn't have that much money. Dad wouldn't give her any money to come up and see me. The way he felt about it was, “Shit, he got his damn self in that trouble, so let him worry about it himself.”

We all came out of Warwick better criminals. Other guys were better for the things that I could teach them, and I was better for the things that they could teach me. Before I went to Warwick, I used to be real slow at rolling reefers and at dummying reefers, but when I came back from Warwick, I was a real pro at that, and I knew how to boost weak pot with embalming fluid. I even knew how to cut drugs, I had it told to me so many times, I learned a lot of things at Warwick. The good thing about Warwick was that when you went home on visits, you could do stuff, go back up to Warwick, and kind of hide out. If the cops were looking for you in the city, you'd be at Warwick.

One of the most interesting things I learned was about faggots. Before I went to Warwick, I used to look down on faggots like they were something dirty. But while I was up there, I met some faggots who were pretty nice guys. We didn't play around or anything like that, but I didn't look down on them any more.

These guys were young cats my age. It was the first time I'd been around guys who weren't afraid of being faggots. They were faggots because they wanted to be. Some cats were rape artists because they wanted to be, some cats were flunkies, some cats were thieves, and some cats were junkies. These guys were faggots because they wanted to be. And some of the faggots up there were pretty good with their hands. As a matter of fact, some of them were so good with their hands, they had the man they wanted just because he couldn't beat them.

At Warwick, there was even a cottage just for faggots. If a cat came up there acting girlish, they'd put him right in there. They had a lot of guys in there—Puerto Ricans, white, colored, everything—young cats, sixteen and under, who had made up their minds that they liked guys, and that's all there was to it.

When I first came up there, I had to go to school for half a day. They put me in a class, and there was a faggot in the class. The cat was about a year older than I was, a real nice-looking guy. As a matter of fact, he was so handsome, I guess it would have been hard for him not to be a faggot. He said that he just liked guys, and that's why he was a faggot. This was the first faggot I had ever talked to, except for Earl, Bucky's brother. His name was Baxter.

He used to give me things and offer me cigarettes. These were things you weren't supposed to have outside of the cottages—cigarettes and candies, stuff like that. One day, I had to talk to him. I said, “Like,
look, man, I been talkin' to you, and we been all right, and I like you, but I don't want you givin' me things, ‘cause that could be misunderstood. And I suppose sooner or later, you'd be wantin' me to give you somethin' or do somethin' for you, and it's, like, that's just not my way, man. Like, the way I hear it, cats who mess around wit faggots usually come out wit claps or somethin' like that sooner or later.”

He looked at me and laughed and said, “No, I don't want anything from you, Brown. I know how you are, but there aren't many guys around here who think they are down who would … you know, who I could talk to and who would treat me like I'm somebody or somethin'. It's like, I just like you, and I know we couldn't have anything goin' in that love vein, but, well, I just like you.”

I said, “Yeah, well, I like you too, man. And as long as we both understand how things are, there's no reason why we can't go on bein' friends. But, like, it's gotta be friends like this, man, everybody understandin' where he is.”

The cats up there I really disliked as a group weren't the faggots but the guys who were afraid somebody might think they were. Warwick made everybody very conscious of his masculinity, and there were a lot of cute guys up there, guys who were real handsome. They were so handsome that if they weren't good with their hands, somebody was liable to try to make a girl out of them. So these guys used to be brutal, dirty. They used to do a whole lot of wicked stuff to cats. They would stab somebody in a minute or hit a cat in his head with something while he was sleeping, all that kind of stuff, because they were afraid guys would think they weren't mean.

At Warwick, I got my introduction to jazz. Most of the older cats from Brooklyn and Harlem knew something about jazz, and even though I still liked to listen to rock ‘n' roll and the singing by groups like the Clovers, since I was swinging with the older cats and had to be in with them, I had to listen to jazz. At first, if cats were talking about Charlie Parker and then said Yardbird, I didn't know what they were talking about. I was only fourteen at the time, and I just wasn't that interested in jazz. I'd never heard about these things before.

Gus Jackson used to start talking about it all the time in class, and I'd talk with him as if I knew something about it. I'd heard a little bit of stuff about Charlie Parker, and I'd read some stuff, so one day when he asked me if I wanted to borrow some of his Bird records,
I said, “Yeah, man.” Since I was playing this part, I had to. Gus gave me a whole album of 78's by Bird called
Charlie Parker with Strings.

I took the things to the cottage and kept them for about a week before I played them. Gus kept asking me for them, and I figured that he was going to ask me something about them, so I knew I had to listen to them at least one time.

One day, I was going to my cottage, and I met K.B. He had some pot and gave me a couple of joints. I went to my cottage, got high, and started listening to these records. It seemed like something real different. It was something crazy … the music, it was the most beautiful sound I'd heard in all my life. I must have played “Summertime” over about twenty times.