Sleepers (3 page)

T
ONY
L
UNGS, 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.”

T
HE 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. Freddie Radman’s cart,
Eagle’s Anger
, was the long shot in the field, going off at 35-1. That was primarily because the three years Radman had bothered to enter the race, he always quit halfway 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.”

W
E 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.”

A
T THE TOP
of the hill I was on my own, two feet from Russell’s cart. We quickly glanced at each other, the sneer still on his face. I locked my cart against his, the spin of my wheels chopping 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 11th Avenue, a few feet from a Mobil gas station crowded with onlookers, 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 11th Avenue, past a double-parked station wagon, jumped the curb, and slammed against the side of a corner mailbox.

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 Tenth Avenue and Fat Mancho’s candy store to get some ice and clean rags for my bloody hands.

2

M
Y 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 redbrick tenements. The average rent for the typical six rooms was $38 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 pastimes 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 cutoff 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 11th 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.