"She Thought the Russians Was Coming"
Mailer, Norman
I first went down to Brooklyn to see the gang on a bonecold February afternoon this year. They were waiting for Bruce Davidson and me in a candy store about a half mile from their turf, a parlor...
...Although he was the smallest of the Juniors, a thin, brooding kid of sixteen with clean, proud features, he seemed the natural leader...
...A ten-year-old kid was sitting across the aisle, and Ricky waved the gun at him through the open door...
...Like I know, man, you got to think," he told me with a grin...
...It was a good night...
...Then talk shifted to the Dealer's account of a rumble they had been in last summer, a big rumble which made the newspapers...
...Whitey had taken fifteen saccharine tablets once...
...But talk of the rumble had stirred them up...
...Since that rumble, the Dealers have been cooling it...
...Conversation began to go, and before fifteen minutes we had found a common ground...
...It may be that when one gets to know them well, some of the Dealers are bad pieces of work, but I would gamble that most of them are rather good pieces of work, bright, sensitive to what is true and what is not true in what you say to them, loyal if they like you, and in congress together they are as alive as a pack of monkeys...
...If street robbery were a trade, this could serve as apprenticeship, for one might learn quickly which types will freeze and which will not when an adolescent is pointing a gun at them...
...I'd like to make her right on the floor while she's singing...
...And vague talk of pot...
...It was going in the wrong direction, but it was the right kind of diversion...
...I met Terry that night, a big one, twenty as I mentioned, with a black leather jacket, good features, blank face, and a string of bon mots...
...You guys think I'm not tough...
...For a year he had been friendly with these kids and the sight of him with the Leica up to his face had come to seem as natural as lighting a cigarette...
...Talking of the past and past happiness he said, "She had a set of knockers on her would choke a mule—she was boss, man...
...For the first minute, a bit of tension: nothing all-out hostile, more an air of stony curiosity, studied on their part, studied on mine...
...Man, that's a drag...
...I first went down to Brooklyn to see the gang on a bonecold February afternoon this year...
...This is from the Dealers," Whitey had made the mistake of saying, and the kid who had been left by the gang which lost gave the message to the cops when they arrived on the scene at the park...
...I had a water pistol in my pocket, a small model of a short-barreled forty-five which I had taken on impulse earlier in the day from Bruce Davidson who had been about to drop it in a trash barrel...
...Two and a half bucks...
...Did I carry a gun now...
...Johnny, one of the best fighters in the Dealers, about eighteen, good-looking, a little taller than the rest, rushed him, and they scuffled on the stairs, Ricky at a disadvantage because he had to put down the knife...
...They were picked up by it...
...In the air, it looked real, and Ricky had a natural look of dismay, not knowing whether to catch or to drop it, and if it were loaded would it go off...
...I'll put her name under it...
...What's your lawyer charging you...
...So the Dealers had been staking out their claims in the candy store for star roles in the gang legend of the battle...
...Or was it a gag...
...But the best I remember was the tale of his evening with a society girl: "When I came up to her door in my hopped up '50 Mercury, va va, hoo hoo, hmmm, she thought the Russians was coming...
...If we are to speak of shadows which haunt America today, the great shadow is that there is a place for everybody in our country who is willing to live the way others want him to, and talk the way others want him to, with our big, new, thick, leaden vocabulary of political, psychological, and sociological verbiage...
...I'm Al Capone—you watch out for me...
...One of the seniors was with them, Terry, a big kid about twenty who had done some boxing in the Army and had natural military ability...
...You're all dead...
...The Juniors, beefed by Terry the Senior, beat up on the Puerto Ricans...
...Two and a half," said the other...
...There were jokes about hitting the third rail, and when they got to the point of saying what Ricky would lose, and how little he would lose, he turned to the others, about five of them, and pulled out a Japanese knife, one of those small, sharp, steak knives which are inserted into a wooden scabbard and cost about a dollar, and he waved it at us, and ran up the platform stairs about ten steps...
...IT OCCURS TO ME, as I read over what I have written, that this piece is anti-climactic...
...They would have new cartel with the chicks...
...Their imagination is too vivid, and so they spend the days and nights of their adolescent years waiting for the apocalyptic test which almost never comes off...
...I'd like to drill her...
...Ricky, a short, heavy Italian kid went out to the very end of the station, and urinated on the tracks...
...He would collect two pounds of pot, and then he would go away for a couple of years and travel around the country—there were a lot of things he wanted to do once he got on the road...
...The siren of a squad car sounded outside the door of the candy store...
...For all the talk of broken homes, submarginal housing, overcrowding in the schools and cultural starvation, the other root is more alive, and one kills it at one's peril...
...A couple of Dealers were going to get tattoos...
...Conversation turned back to the rumble...
...I never found out what the act had been...
...Bop"—mowing us down...
...I could hear how their voices must have sounded, because in combat, after a fire-fight, we would all be a little hysterical, and would all be laughing and singing out at once about what had happened to us and how, and where we had been...
...Of necessity...
...It had seemed close enough, but when the Puerto Rican gang attacked, they struck so suddenly that the decoys were dropped hard...
...Then one of the other Dealers pushed him from behind and scared him royally because he was only two feet from the side of the moving train, and the distance was halved before he recovered...
...We had a car almost to ourselves, and all the way to Coney Island they asked me questions about combat...
...Medical science has come to the tattoo parlor, and the inner sanctum was in surgical white with sterilizers and antiseptic procedure...
...But the Dealers' cavalry took the day...
...The kids began to put on a production for me...
...Not a member of the Royal Dealers, he had gotten into trouble for something else...
...Johnny went over and whispered something to him...
...And a good imitation it was, of Rod Steiger as Al Capone...
...That flooded the floor, and in disgust the bartenders closed the dance down early...
...I wonder if that is not right...
...All too inaccurately according to the Dealers...
...Come up here and I'll kill you...
...Ricky broke loose from Johnny, ran down the stairs back to the platform, and approached the open door of the train...
...It was a dull, hot, newsless day in summer, so it made the newspapers...
...one of them had even heard of a way to find some juice in lighter fluid...
...I don't know...
...Bop, bop, bop...
...Back to their turf by separate ways, they had all collected in the candy store...
...Because I sometimes think the drama of the rumbler, the would-be rumbler, and the adolescent along for the ride is not too far away from the sweat of any artist, any salesman, any adventurer, any operator...
...So the stories went...
...It seems somebody had offered marijuana to the kid with the aspirin and he had punked out...
...After forty seconds the other gang was in flight...
...The Dealers had been cutting through the park last summer when they saw a Puerto Rican gang which had eyes for them...
...One cannot get around it—there are situations which belong more to the movies than to life, and all of us were obeying an archetypal scene in a gangster movie or a Western—a stranger had come to visit...
...He was reading The Beat Generation And The Angry Young Men now, and he liked Kerouac...
...one of those jazz singers...
...He didn't hesitate a minute...
...The last trip I took my wife, and a friend and his girl, to one of their dances, but the evening never came off right, because the air of decorum was heavy...
...No...
...What'll you get...
...Now a few of them had been let in on the new information that a writer was here today to write them up, and this explanation for my presence passed around quickly...
...No, man, that aspirin is a boss kick...
...All right," he said, lining us up with the gun, waving it like a movie murderer, "this is the St...
...What'll your wife say when you get married...
...He was unconscious by the time Terry led the charge...
...We'll never know...
...Terry picked up the decoy with the bleeding head, and carried him under his arm all the way out of the park...
...But love of the tattoo is a subject in itself, and I don't know that I am the one to write about it...
...were now on probation...
...I had been promised in advance that a fight would start that night, but it never did...
...Not long afterward, we went out of the candy store into the iron-grey cold, and took the subway down to Coney Island...
...A sneer...
...I flipped it up the subway stairs to Ricky, shouting, "Quick, man, here's a gun...
...He had been trying to read my piece, The White Negro in that anthology, but it was too hard...
...Ricky had time for four or five close, quick studies before the train picked up too much speed...
...You deserve a year...
...Had I ever heard of ground aspirin being mixed with tobacco and rolled in a cigarette...
...The new place had a juke box, and three booths to the rear, and when we entered five or six girls and a dozen boys were milling around in the back...
...Those were some of the few good moments in the war...
...They suffer from only one disease, the national disease—it is boredom...
...The longer we drank, the faster they came...
...You know who I'd like to make," he told me...
...Johnny had a dream...
...As Ricky bent over to listen, Johnny backhanded him in the belly, and then ducked back as Ricky tried to slug him on the arm...
...The fear of making a mistake is heavy, because a coiled serpent on the arm demands that you develop the strength of a serpent or else you're a phony, and a Betty Boop on the calf—well, you might end up marrying Betty Boop...
...That much went over his face, and then he dropped it, and the gun made a tinny, clanking little sound, the inimitable sound of a toy, and the other Dealers roared in mockery...
...Valentine's Day massacre...
...This mood shifted quickly enough...
...We took Terry, Johnny and Whitey back to the Village to hear some jazz, but they were off their turf and subdued that night...
...How many would they let you carry...
...The kid took it well, half-scared, half-grinning, and then the door closed, and Ricky began to walk along the platform, rapping on windows in order to study the expression of the people who turned around to see a gun about three feet from their mouth...
...Yes, there is a place for everybody now in the American scene except for those who want to find the limits of their growth by a life which is ready to welcome a little danger as part of the Divine cocktail...
...Ten vicious juvenile delinquents beat up a cripple, went the jazz...
...Whitey, who has heart in a rumble, was the last to leave— he gave a final clout to the casualty he had been fighting, and said, "This is from the Dealers...
...Leave it that the kids covet and worry every choice of a tattoo the way a bride picks each piece of furniture for her bedroom...
...I'll kill the first one...
...I was throwing up all afternoon," said Whitey...
...They were waiting for Bruce Davidson and me in a candy store about a half mile from their turf, a parlor they had begun to use lately because their own was too small...
...But then some of the Dealers have a gone wit when they're drunk...
...It turned out he was the reader in the Dealers...
...Much later that night, at three in the morning, we took a race through the park in my no-longer-hopped-up '53 Studebaker, Bruce Davidson, Terry, Johnny and myself, and Terry led me to the historic ground where the Dealers had their apocalyptic rumble and he went over the terrain with me, the two of us reconsidering the problem like old Civil War generals warm with nostalgia...
...Had I ever killed anybody...
...We had just missed a train and it was empty on the subway platform...
...But Ricky had talent and for a young actor he can use a prop with the best...
...Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists...
...Whitey asked...
...Two and a half cents...
...Just then a train came in...
...Ten of them had been brought to court for beating up a kid in the park, and they • Reprinted from Esquire, June 1960 © 1960 by Esquire, Inc...
...One of the kids was talking now about his case...
...They were home from the war, and full of charge...
...We discussed dried leaves, and nutmeg, and Sterno...
...Since none of them were going to school any more, they were using up a good part of the money they had made at work to pay off their various lawyers...
...It is the root for which our tongues once found the older words of courage, loyalty, honor and the urge for adventure...
...One of them got a baseball bat on the side of his skull, and bled badly...
...Laughter...
...A year, you bastard...
...Then Whitey, Johnny, and the first Dealer took hold of Ricky and made a play of pushing him into the train, but Ricky broke loose—six inches from contact with the moving side wall of the subway car—and started to shoot again at all of us...
...Bruce had already told the Royal Dealers, which is the fictitious name we might as well use, that Esquire magazine had bought his pictures...
...Altogether I saw the Dealers three times...
...It's deep...
...That's the most, man—I was out of my skull for two hours...
...Hell, man, it wasn't like that at all," one of them said, "it was a fair rumble...
...that one I hadn't heard of...
...He collected the Dealers in a nest of bushes at the peak of a small hill, and sent four of the Juniors down to serve as decoys on the paved path in the draw below, a run of thirty or forty yards down the hill...
...It is common in any editorial about juvenile delinquents to speak of wasted lives and growing blight, but what junk these editorials are, for there is not one root to juvenile delinquency, but two...
...In one minute you're all gonna get it...
...we were passing back and forth our prescriptions for odd kicks...
...Our train came in...
...Now it was February, a quiet scene...
...But the police have the Greek sense of Nemesis...
...How many grenades had I carried...
...The gun went into his right hand, the knife into his left, and the brown scabbard for the steak knife went into his mouth like a cigar...
...Bee-owww—" offering us ricochets as well...
...A couple of nights later in a bar Ricky said "I'm going to put a naked dame on my arm...
...General derision...
...If their conversation runs the predictable riverbed of sex, gang war, drugs, weapons, movies and crazy drunks, well, at least they live out a part of their conversational obsession, which is more than one can say for the quiet, inhibited, middle-aged desperadoes of the corporation and the suburb...
...That day, Davidson and I stayed with them at the tattoo parlor while Whitey and another bought new tattoos...
...The dance was given by another club in a veterans' hall, and the Dealers were only one of four or five gangs present so everybody had to be on best behavior, and the evening ended early—a couple of kids pulled out the rubber plugs in the tanks on the water closets in the men's room...
...You creep, you're a fag," said one of the kids to the kid who had been out of his skull...
Vol. 8 • July 1961 • No. 3
