Sleepers (4 page)

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 bull’s-eye 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.

T
HE 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 stoop-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 on to 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.

H
ELL’S
K
ITCHEN 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 pickups.

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 handouts 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 streetlight 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.

F
RIENDSHIPS 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 outgoing 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 curveball 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 Softee 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.

W
E BECAME FRIENDS
over a lunch.

Word spread one afternoon that three pro wrestlers—Klondike Bill, Bo Bo Brazil, and Haystack 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.

“Haystack 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.”