Sleepers

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 llth Avenue, past a double-parked station wagon, jumped the curb and slammed against the side of a corner mail box.

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 10th Avenue and Fat Mancho's Candy Store to get some ice and clean rags for my bloody hands.

TWO

My 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 red-brick tenements. The average rent for the typical six rooms was thirty-eight dollars 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 i

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 llth 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, i

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.

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 ru

Michael scored a bullseye 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.