Billy Bathgate

TWO

It was juggling that had got me where I was. All the time we hung around the warehouse on Park Avenue, and I don’t mean the Park Avenue of wealth and legend, but the Bronx’s Park Avenue, a weird characterless street of garages and one-story machine shops and stonecutter yards and the occasional frame house covered in asphalt siding that was supposed to look like brick, a boulevard of uneven Belgian block with a wide trench dividing the uptown and downtown sides, at the bottom of which the trains of the New York Central tore past thirty feet below street level, making a screeching racket we were so used to, and sometimes a wind that shook the bent and bowed iron-spear fence along the edge, that we stopped our conversation and continued it from mid-sentence when the noise lifted—all the time that we hung out there for a glimpse of the beer trucks, the other guys pitched pennies against the wall, or played skelly on the sidewalk with bottle caps, or smoked the cigarettes they bought three for a cent at the candy store on Washington Avenue, or generally wasted their time speculating what they would do if Mr. Schultz ever noticed them, how they would prove themselves as gang members, how they would catch on and toss the crisp one-hundred-dollar bills on the kitchen tables of their mothers who had yelled at them and the fathers who had beat their ass—all this time I practiced my juggling. I juggled anything, Spaldeens, stones, oranges, empty green Coca-Cola bottles, I juggled rolls we stole hot from the bins in the Pechter Bakery wagons, and since I juggled so constantly nobody bothered me about it, except once in a while just because it was something nobody else could do, to try to interrupt my rhythm by giving me a shove, or to grab one of the oranges out of the air and run with it, because it was what I was known to do, along the lines of having a nervous tic, something that marked me but after all wasn’t my fault. And when I wasn’t juggling I was doing sleight of hand, trying to make coins disappear and reappear in their dirty ears, or doing card tricks of trick shuffles and folded aces, so their name for me was Mandrake, after the Hearst New York American comics magician, a mustached fellow in a tuxedo and top hat who was of no interest to me any more than magic was, magic was not the point, it was never the point, dexterity was to me the point, the same exercise as walking like a tightrope walker on the spear fence points while the trains made their windy rush under me, or doing backflips or handstands or cartwheels or whatever else arose to my mind of nimble compulsion. I was double-jointed, I could run like the wind, I had keen vision and could hear silence and could smell the truant officer before he even came around the corner, and what they should have called me was Phantom, after that other Hearst New York American comics hero, who wore a one-piece helmet mask and purple skintight rubberized body garment and had only a wolf for a companion, but they were dumb kids for the most part and didn’t even think of calling me Phantom even after I had disappeared into the Realm, the only one of all of them who had dreamed about it.
The Park Avenue warehouse was one of several maintained by the Schultz gang for the storage of the green beer they trucked over from Union City New Jersey and points west. When a truck arrived it didn’t even have to blow its horn the warehouse doors would fold open and receive it as if they had an intelligence of their own. The trucks were from the Great War, and still the original army khaki color, with beveled hoods and double rear wheels and chain-wheel drives that sounded like bones being ground up; the beds had stakes around the sides to which homemade slats were affixed, and tarpaulin was lashed down with peculiar and even gallant discretion over the cargo as if nobody would know then what it was. But when a truck came around the corner the whole street reeked of beer, they carried their gamy smell like the elephants in the Bronx Zoo. And the men who got down from the cab were not ordinary truck drivers in soft caps and mackinaws but men in overcoats and fedoras with a way of lighting their cigarettes in their cupped hands while the teamsters on inside duty backed the trucks into the black depths we were desperate to see into, that made me think of officers returned from a patrol across no-man’s-land. It was the sense of all this purveyed lawless might and military self-sufficiency that was so thrilling to boys, we hung around there like a flock of filthy messenger pigeons, cooing and clucking and fluttering up from the ground the minute we heard the chains grinding and saw the sneering Mack hood nosing around the corner.
Of course this was just one of Mr. Schultz’s beer drops, and we didn’t know how many he had though we knew it was a fair number, and the truth was none of us had ever seen him though we never stopped hoping, and in the meantime we were honored to know that our neighborhood was good enough for one of his places, we were proud we enjoyed his confidence, and in our rare sentimental moments when we weren’t sassing each other for our pretensions, we thought that we were part of something noble and surely had a superior standing among other kids from ordinary neighborhoods that could not boast a beer drop or the rich culture it brought with it of menacingly glancing men who needed shaves and a precinct house of cops whose honor it was never if they could help it to breathe the air out-of-doors.
Of particular interest to me was that Mr. Schultz maintained this business in all its prohibitional trappings even though Repeal had come. I thought that this meant beer like gold was by nature dangerous to handle however legal it might have become, or that people would buy better beer than his if he didn’t continue to frighten them, which meant, breathtakingly, that in Mr. Schultz’s mind his enterprise was an independent kingdom of his own law, not society’s, and that it was all the same to him whatever was legal or illegal, he would run things the way he thought they ought to be run, and f*ck woe to anybody who got in his way.
So there you see the heart and soul of what we were, in that moment in the history of the Bronx, and you would never know from these dirty skinny boys of encrusted noses and green teeth that there were such things as school and books and a whole civilization of attendant adults paling into insubstance under the bright light of the Depression. Least of all from me. And then one day, I remember it was particularly steamy, so hot in July that the weeds along the spear fence pointed to the ground and visible heat waves rose from the cobblestone, all the boys were sitting in an indolent row along the warehouse wall and I stood across the narrow street in the weeds and rocks overlooking the tracks and demonstrated my latest accomplishment, the juggling of a set of objects of unequal weight, a Galilean maneuver involving two rubber balls, a navel orange, an egg, and a black stone, wherein the art of the thing is in creating a flow nevertheless, maintaining the apogee from a kind of rhythm of compensating throws, and it is a trick of such consummate discipline that the better it is done the easier and less remarkable it looks to the uninitiated. So I knew that I was not only the juggler but the only one to appreciate what the juggler was doing, and after a while I forgot those boys and stood looking into the hot gray sky while assorted objects rose and fell through my line of vision like a system of orbiting planets. I was juggling my own self as well in a kind of matching spiritual feat, performer and performed for, and so, entranced, had no mind for the rest of the world as for instance the LaSalle coupé that came around the corner of 177th Street and Park Avenue and immediately pulled up to the curb in front of a hydrant and sat there with its motor running, nor of the Buick Roadmaster with three men that came next around the corner and drove past the warehouse doors and pulled up at the corner of 178th Street nor finally of the big Packard that came around the corner and rolled to a stop directly in front of the warehouse to block from my view, if I had been looking, all the boys slowly standing now and brushing the backs of their pants, while a man got out from the front right-hand door and then opened, from the outside, the right rear door, through which emerged in a white linen double-breasted suit somewhat wilted, with the jacket misbuttoned, and a tie pulled down from his shirt collar and a big handkerchief in his hand mopping his face, once a boy known to the neighborhood as Arthur Flegenheimer, the man known to the world as Dutch Schultz.
Of course I am lying that I did not see it happening because I saw it all, being gifted with extraordinary peripheral vision, but I pretended I was not aware he stood there with his elbows on the car roof and watched with a smile on his face a juggling kid with mouth slightly open and eyes rolled skyward like a beatific boy angel in adoration of his Lord. And then I did something brilliant, I glanced out of my orbit across the hot street and let my face register ordinary human astonishment, to the effect of omigod it’s him standing there in the flesh and watching me, and at the same time continued the pistonlike movement of my arms, while one by one my miniature planets, the two balls, the navel orange, the egg, and the stone, after a farewell orbit, plumed out into space, and went soaring in equidistant intervals over the fence to disappear down into the New York Central chute of railroad tracks behind me. And there I stood with my palms up and empty and my gaze transfixed in theatrical awe, which to tell the truth was a good part of what I felt, while the great man laughed and applauded, and glanced at the henchman beside him to encourage his appreciation, which duly came, and then Mr. Schultz beckoned me with his finger, and I ran across the street with alacrity, and around the car, and there, in a private court chamber composed of my gang of boys watching on one quarter, and the open Packard door on another, and the darkness of the warehouse depths on the third, I faced my king and saw his hand remove from his pocket a wad of new bills as thick as a half a loaf of rye bread. He stripped off a ten and slapped it in my hand. And while I stared at calm Alexander Hamilton enshrined in his steel-pointed eighteenth-century oval I heard for the first time the resonant rasp of the Schultz voice, but thinking for one stunned instant it was Mr. Hamilton talking, like a comic come to life, until my senses righted themselves and I realized I was hearing the great gangster of my dreams. “A capable boy,” he said, by way of conclusion, either to his associate or to me, or to himself, or perhaps to all three, and then the meaty killer’s hand came down, like a scepter, and gently held for a moment my cheek and jaw and neck on its hot pads, and then was lifted, and then the back of Dutch Schultz was disappearing into the dark depths of the beer drop and the big doors flattened out with a screech and locked with a loud boom behind him.
What happened now showed me all at once the consequences of a revolutionary destiny: I was immediately surrounded by the other boys all of them staring, as I was, at the mint ten-dollar bill lying flat in my palm. It dawned upon me that I had half a minute at most before I became a tribal sacrifice. Someone would make a remark, someone else would jab the heel of his hand against my shoulder, and the rage and resentment would flare, and a collective rationale would arise for sharing the treasure and administering a punitive lesson—probably to the effect that I was an asslicking brownnose whose head was going to be broken for thinking he was better than anyone else. “Watch this,” I said, holding forth the bill but really extending my arms to hold the circle, because before the attack comes there is a kind of crowding movement, an encroachment on the natural territorial rights of the body; and taking the crisp bill in my fingers I folded it once lengthwise, and once again, and then tightly twice more to the size of a postage stamp and then I did a hocus-pocus pass of the hands over each other, snapped my fingers, and the ten-dollar bill was gone. Oh you miserable f*cking louts, that I ever needed to attach my orphan self to your wretched company, you thieves of the five-and-ten, you poking predators of your own little brothers and sisters, you dumbbells, that you could aspire to a genius life of crime, with your dead witless eyes, your slack chins, and the simian slouch of your spines—f*ck you forever, I consign you to tenement rooms and bawling infants, and sluggish wives and a slow death of incredible subjugation, I condemn you to petty crimes and mean rewards and vistas of cell block to the end of your days. “Look!” I cried, pointing up, and they tracked my hand, expecting to see me pluck the bill out of the air, as I had so often their coins and steelies and rabbits’ feet, and in the instant of their credulity, as they stared upward at nothing, I ducked under the circle and ran like hell.
Once I was running no one could catch me, though they tried, I cut down 177th to Washington Avenue, and then turned right and ran south, with some of them right behind me and some chasing me in parallel on the other side of the street, and some of them fanning out down side streets behind me in anticipation of my cutting back toward them, but I ran a straight course, I was really getting out of there, and one by one they pulled up panting, and I made one more change of direction for insurance and finally I was truly alone. I was in the valley of the Third Avenue El. I stopped in the doorway of a pawnshop, unlaced my sneaker, flattened the bill, and slid it down as far as it would go. Then I laced up and resumed running, I ran for the joy of it, flickering like a movie in the alternations of sun and shadow under the elevated tracks, and feeling each warm stripe of sun, its quick dazzle in my eyes, as Mr. Schultz’s hand.
For days after I was my uncharacteristic self, quiet and cooperative with the authorities. I actually went to school. One night I tried to do my homework, and Mama looked up from her table of glass tumblers which held not water but fire, this being the condition of mourning, that the elements of life transform, and you pour a glass of water and hocus-pocus it is a candle burning, and she said Billy, my name, Billy, something’s wrong, what have you done? That was an interesting moment and I wondered if it would hold, but it was only a moment and then the candles caught her attention again and she turned back to her enameled kitchen table of lights. She stared into the lights as if she was reading them, as if each dancing flame made up a momentary letter of her religion. Day and night winter and summer she read the lights, of which she had a tableful, you only needed one once every year but she had all the remembrance she needed, she wanted illumination.
I sat out on the fire escape to wait for the night breeze and continued with my uncharacteristic thought. I had not intended anything by juggling outside the beer drop. The quality of my longing was no more specific than anyone else’s, it was a neighborhood thing, if I had lived down near Yankee Stadium I would have known where the players went in through the side door, or if I lived in Riverdale maybe the mayor would have passed by and waved from his police car on the way home from work, it was the culture of where you lived, and for any of us it was never more than that, and very often less, as, for instance, if one Saturday night years before we were born, Gene Autry came to the Fox Theatre on Tremont Avenue to sing with his Western band between showings of his picture—well that was ours and we had it, and it didn’t matter what it was as long as it was ours, so that it satisfied your idea of fame, which was simple registry in the world, that you were known, or that your vistas were the same that had been seen by the great and near-great. That they knew about your street. And that’s all it was, or so I had believed, and I couldn’t have been planning to juggle continuously every day of my idling life until Mr. Schultz arrived, it had just happened. But now that it had I saw it as destiny. The world worked by chance but every chance had a prophetic heft to it. I sat with my ass on the windowsill and my feet on the rusted iron slats and to the flowerpots of dry stalks I unfolded my ten-dollar bill and folded it and made it disappear all over again, but it kept reappearing for me to unfold.
Right across the street was the Max and Dora Diamond Home for Children, which everyone knew as the orphanage. It was a red stone building with granite trim around the windows and along the roofline; it had a grand curving double front stoop, wider at the bottom than at the top and the two halves of it joined at the front doors one floor above the basement level. Flocks of kids were sitting and sprawling all up and down both sets of stairs and they made a birdlike chatter and moved in a constant shifting of relationships up and down the steps, and some of them on the railings too, just like birds, city birds, sparrows or grackles. They clustered on the stone steps or hung on the railings like the building was Max and Dora themselves, out with their children for some evening air. I didn’t know where they put them all. The building was too small to be a school and not tall enough to be an apartment house and assumed in its design that it had the land to set it apart, which you just didn’t get in the Bronx even if you were the Diamond family of benefactors; but it did have a kind of hidden volume to it and a run-down majesty all its own, and it had provided me most of the friends of my childhood as well as several formative sexual experiences. And I saw now coming down the street one of the orphan incorrigibles, my old pal Arnold Garbage. He was pushing his baby carriage in front of him and it was piled with the day’s mysterious treasures. He worked long hours, Garbage. I watched him bounce the carriage heavily down the basement steps under the big curved stoop. He ignored the smaller children. His door opened on darkness, and then he disappeared.
When I was younger I’d spent a lot of time at the orphanage. I spent so much time there that I came to move around their wards like one of them, living as they lived with the orphan’s patrimony of tender bruises. And I never looked out the windows to my house. It was very peculiar how I came to feel one of them, because at the time I still had a mother who went in and out of our house like other mothers, and in fact I enjoyed something like a semblance of family life complete with door poundings by the landlord and weepings unto dawn.
Now when I looked behind me into the kitchen it was illuminated with my mother’s memory candles, this one room glittering like an opera house in all the falling darkness of the apartment and the darkening street, and I wondered if my big chance hadn’t a longer history than I thought in the proximity of this orphans’ home, with its eerie powers, as if some sort of slow-moving lava of disaster had poured its way across the street and was rising year after year to mold my house in the shape of another Max and Dora Diamond benefaction.
Of course I had long since ceased to play there, having taken to wandering away down the hill to the other side of Webster Avenue, where there were gangs of boys more my own age, because I had come to see the orphanage as a place for children, as indeed it was. But I still kept in touch with one or two of the incorrigible girls, and I still liked to visit Arnold Garbage. I don’t know what his real name was but what did it matter? Every day of his life he wandered through the Bronx and lifted the lids of ashcans and found things. He poked about in the streets and down the alleys and in the front halls under the stairs and in the empty lots and in the backyards and behind the stores and in the basements. It was not easy work because in these days of our life trash was a commodity and there was competition for it. Junkmen patrolled with their two-wheeled carts, and the peddlers with their packs, and organ-grinders and hobos and drunks, but also people who weren’t particularly looking for scavenge until they saw it. But Garbage was a genius, he found things that other junkers discarded, he saw value in stuff the lowest most down-and-out and desperate street bum wouldn’t touch. He had some sort of innate mapping facility, different days of the month attracted him to different neighborhoods, and I think his mere presence on a street was enough to cause people to start flinging things down the stairs and out the windows. And his years of collecting had accustomed everyone to respect it, he never went to school, he never did his chores, he lived as if he were alone and it all worked beautifully for this fat intelligent almost speechless boy who had found this way to live with such mysterious single-minded and insane purpose that it seemed natural, and logical, and you wondered why you didn’t live that way yourself. To love what was broken, torn, peeling. To love what didn’t work. To love what was twisted and cracked and missing its parts. To love what smelled and what nobody else would scrape away the filth of to identify. To love what was indistinct in shape and indecipherable in purpose and indeterminate in function. To love it and hold on to it. I made up my mind of uncharacteristic thought and left my mother with her lights and swung myself over the fire escape railing and climbed down the ladder going past the open windows of people in their summer underwear, to swing for a minute from the last rung before dropping to the sidewalk, which I hit running. And dodging my way across the street and ducking under the grand granite steps of the Max and Dora Diamond Home for Children I went down into the basement, where Arnold Garbage maintained his office. Here the smell was of ashes, and in all seasons there was a warmth of ash and bitter dry air with suspensions of coal dust and also attars of rotting potatoes or onions that I preferred without question to the moist tang upstairs in the halls and lofts of generations of urinating children. And here Garbage was busy adding his new acquisitions to the great inventory of his life. And I told him I wanted a gun. There was no question in my mind that he could supply it.
As Mr. Schultz told me later in a moment of reminiscence the first time is breathtaking, you have this weight in your hand and you think in your calculating mind if they only believe me I will be able to bring this thing off, you are still your old self, you see, you are the punk with the punk’s mind, you are relying on them to help you, to teach you how to do it, and that is how it begins, that badly, and maybe it’s in your eyes or your trembling hand, and so the moment poses itself, like a prize to be taken by any of you, hanging up there like the bride’s bouquet. Because the gun means nothing until it’s really yours. And then what happens, you understand that if you don’t make it yours you are dead, you have created the circumstance, but it has its own free-standing rage, available to anyone, and this is what you take into yourself, like an anger that they’ve done this to you, the people who are staring at your gun, that it’s their intolerable crime to be the people you are waving this gun at. And at that moment you are no longer a punk, you have found the anger that was really in you all the time, and you are transformed, you are not playacting, you are angrier than you have ever been in your entire life, and this great wail of fury rises in your chest and fills your throat and in this moment you are no longer a punk, and the gun is yours and the rage is in you where it belongs and the f*ckers know they are dead men if they don’t give you what you want, I mean you are so crazy jerking-off mad at this point you don’t even know yourself, as why should you because you are a new man, a Dutch Schultz if ever there was one. And after that everything works as it should, it is all surprisingly easy, and that is the breathtaking part, like that first moment a little shitter is born, coming out into the air and taking a moment before he can call out his name and breathe the good sweet fresh air of life on earth.
Of course I did not at the moment understand this in any detail, but the weight in my hand did give me intimations of a fellow I might become; just holding the thing bestowed a new adulthood, I had no immediate plans for it, I thought maybe Mr. Schultz could use me and I wanted to be ready with what I imagined he was looking for, but it was a kind of investiture nevertheless, it had no bullets and badly needed cleaning and oiling, but I could hold it at arm’s length and remove the magazine, and shove it back in the handle grip with a satisfying snap, and I could assure myself that the serial number was filed off, which meant that it was a weapon of the brotherhood, which Garbage confirmed by telling me where he found it, in a wet marsh off Pelham Bay, in the far reaches of the North Bronx, at low tide, with its snub nose stuck in the muck like a mumbly-peg knife.
And the name of it was most thrilling of all, it was an Automatic, a very modern piece of equipment, heavy yet compact, and Garbage said he thought it would work if I could find a bullet for it, he himself having none, and quietly without dickering he accepted my suggested price of three dollars, and he took my ten into the depths of one of his piled bins where he kept hidden his El Corona cigar box with all his money, and brought me back seven very wrinkled worn neighborhood dollar bills, and the deal was done.
I was in a wonderful generous and expansive mood that night with the weight of my secret ambition in the right pocket of my knickers where I had discovered, in a confirmation of the rightness of my intuition, that the hole there allowed the gun to be slung down discreetly, the short barrel along my outer thigh, the grip transverse in the pocket, everything neat and accommodated as if by design. I went back to my apartment and gave my mother five of the singles, which was about half her week’s wages from the industrial steam laundry on Webster Avenue. “Where did you get this?” she said, crumpling the bills in her fist and smiling at me her vague smile, before turning back to her latest chapter in the table of lights. And then, my gun stowed, I went back in the street, where the adults had taken possession of the sidewalks, having changed places with the children, who were now in the houses, there being some order in this teeming tenement life, some principle of the responsibility of mothers and fathers, and now there were card games on the stoops and cigar smoke drifted through the summer night, and the women in their housedresses sat like girls with their knees pointing up from the stone steps and couples strolled in and out of the streetlights and I was very moved by the sullen idyll of all this impoverishment. Sure enough when I looked up the sky was clear and a section of inexplicable firmament was winkling between the rooflines. All this romance put me in mind of my friend Rebecca.
She was a nimble little girl with black hair and dark eyes and a delicate thin black down above her pronounced upper lip. The orphans were inside now, the lights blazing in the windows of diamond-mesh translucence, and I stood outside and heard the din, louder on the boys’ side, and then one of the signal bells, and I went down the alley to the small backyard and waited there in the corner of their broken-down little ball yard with my back against their chain-link fence, and in about an hour most of the upper-story lights were out, and I rose and stood under the fire escape ladder and leapt up, catching the bottom rung, and hoisted myself onto the ladder and so, hand over hand and foot over foot, rose on the black ladder of my love and at the top, swung out to a window ledge without a net below me and entered the open hallway window on the top floor, where the oldest girls slept, eleven to fourteen, and found there in her bed my witchy little friend, whose dark eyes were open when I looked into them, and absolutely unsurprised to see me. Nor did her wardmates find anything remarkable enough to speak of. I led her through the aisle of their eyes to the door that led up a half flight of stairs to the roof, a kind of games park with ruled lines of skelly and shuffleboard glowing darkly in the summer night, and in the nook made by the roof screen and the kiosk of the stair door, stood and kissed Rebecca ardently, and stuck my hand in the neck of her nightdress to brush her breastbuds with the backs of my fingers and then held in my hands her hard little ass that gave its contours to my touch under the rub of her white cotton shift, and then, before I became too far gone beside myself, when I knew her bargaining position was at its strongest, I negotiated a fair price and peeled a one-dollar bill off my depleted fold, which she took and crumpled in her fist as she first hunkered and then sat on the ground, totally without ceremony, and waited, while I stood on one leg and then the other, to remove my sneakers and everything to the waist, with some trembling awkwardness for a wizard, reflecting how odd it was that whereas men like Mr. Schultz and me folded our money neatly, no matter if our wad was thin or thick, women like my mother and little Rebecca squeezed theirs in a ball and held it, forgetting to let go, whether they sat in a distraction of candled grief with a shawl over their heads or lay on the ground and were f*cked two times for a dollar.