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'Take it outside!' Mimi screamed.
John chewed on the man's ear, his bite hard enough to draw blood. Tommy started pounding at his kidneys. I took a red pepper shaker and rammed it against his face.
'My eyes!' the burly man said, trying to shake us off. 'My fuckin' eyes.'
Michael picked up a counter stool and started ramming it against the front of his legs. John had grabbed his thick hair and was knocking his head on the edge of the front door. I kept hitting him with the red pepper shaker until it broke above the bridge of his nose. Shards of glass mixed with blood down the front of his face.
The pain brought the man to his knees, one hand reaching for the counter.
'Never come in here again,' Michael said, kicking at his crumpled body. 'Hear me? Never!'
Mimi ran from behind the counter and grabbed Michael around the waist, pulling him away.
'You no wa
'Don't be too sure,' Michael said.
Our lives were about protecting ourselves and our turf. The insulated circle that was life in Hell's Kitchen closed tighter as we grew older. Strangers, never welcome, were now viewed as outsiders bent on trouble. My friends and I could no longer afford to let others do the fighting.
It was our turn to step up, and we were led, as always, by Michael.
Outside events meant little. In a society changing radically by the hour, we focused on the constants in our own small, controlled space.
It was the sixties, and we watched the images scattered nightly across TV screens with skepticism, never trusting the players, always suspecting a scam. It was the way we were taught to look at the world. Life, we had been told, was about looking out for number one and number one didn't waste time outside the neighborhood.
On television, the young protesters we saw spoke about how they were going to change our lives and fix the world. But we knew they didn't care about people like us. While they shouted their slogans, my friends and I went to funeral services for the young men of Hell's Kitchen who came back from Vietnam in body bags. That war never touched those angry young faces we saw on TV, faces protected by money and upper-middle-class standing. They were on the outside yelling about a war they would never fight. To me and my friends, they were working the oldest con in the world and they worked it to perfection.
Civil rights had become the battle of the day, but on our streets, it was a meaningless issue. There, gangs of different ethnic backgrounds and skin colors still waged weekly skirmishes. A growing army of feminists marched across the country, demanding equality, yet our mothers still cooked and cared for men who abused them mentally and physically.
Students would be killed on the campus of Kent State University in Ohio. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Senator Robert F. Ke
Whole sections of American cities were about to burn to the ground.
The summer of love was set to bloom.
Drugs would go beyond the junkie.
The country was on a fast-ticking timer, ready to explode.
For me and for my friends, these developments carried no weight. They might as well have occurred in another country, in another century. The mating call of a new generation, one whose foundation was to be built on peace, love and harmony, simply floated past us.
Our attention was elsewhere.
The summer Senator Ke
The week the students at Kent State were shot down, Tommy's father was stabbed in the chest in Attica prison and was put on a respirator for three months.
Michael's mother died of cancer during that summer and Carol Martinez had an uncle who was shot dead in front of an llth Avenue bar.
While thousands of angry war protesters filtered into Washington, D.C., we sat with Father Bobby in a third floor hospital ward, praying for John to recover from a punctured lung, a gift from one of his mother's overzealous boyfriends. The man had had too much to drink and John said more than he should have about it and was given a severe beating as a result. He also suffered an asthma attack and was lucky to escape the night with his life.
One of the earliest lessons learned in Hell's Kitchen was that death was the only thing in life that came easy.
Summer 1967
ELEVEN
The temperature topped out at ninety-eight degrees on the day our lives were forever altered. It was the middle of a summer when the country's mood plunged into darkness. Race riots had already rocked 127 cities across the United States, killing seventy-seven people and putting more than 4,000 others in area hospitals, and neither side seemed ready to give up the battle.
Along with the turmoil came change.
Thurgood Marshall was appointed to the Supreme Court by President Lyndon Johnson after Justice Thomas C. Clark resigned. In return, Ramsey Clark, the son of the retired Justice, was named to the Attorney General's post.
The Six-Day War was fought in the Middle East.
The New York World-Journal & Tribune folded and Rolling Stone published its first issue. Bo
We had spent our morning in the cool shadows of a second-floor pool room on West 53rd Street, watching a craggy-faced lug in a T-shirt and torn jeans rack up a dozen games against four different opponents. As he played, he smoked his way through two packs of Camels and finished off a pint of Four Roses.
'Bet this guy could even beat Ralph Kramden,' Tommy said, watching the man side-pocket the six ball.
'Ralph Kramden doesn't play pool,' I said. 'He drives a bus.'
'Not on The Honeymooners, Tommy said. 'In that movie.'
'The Hustler,' Michael said. 'That the one you mean?'
'The one where they break Fast Eddie's thumbs,' John said.
'You need directions to figure out the way you think,' I said to Tommy.
'It wasn't Kramden?' Tommy asked.
'Let's get outta here,' Michael said, looking around the smoke-filled room. 'We're startin' to smell as bad as this place.'
We made a right out of the pool room, late morning sun warming our shoulders, our attention jointly fixed on lunch. We ran a red light crossing llth Avenue, dodged a school bus and two cabs, then eased back into a fast walk in front of old man Pippilo's barber shop. At 51st Street and 10th Avenue we turned left, side by side on the silent streets.
Between us, we had less than two dollars in our pockets.
'Let's go get some pizza,' John said. 'We can tell Mimi we'll pay him down the road.'
'Mimi charges for water! Tommy said. 'He ain't go
'We can grab something at home,' I said. 'Leftovers.'
'The only leftovers in my house are dirty dishes,' John said.
'And week-old bread,' Tommy said.
'Why not hot dogs?' Michael asked. 'We haven't hit the cart in a couple of weeks.'
'I don't know, Mikey,' Tommy said. 'That cart guy ain't like the others. He gets pretty crazy when you take him off.'
'Tommy's right,' I said. 'Last week, he chased Ramos and two of his friends all the way to the piers. Almost cut one of 'em.'
'A hot dog ain't worth bleedin' over,' John said.