The Vulture (3 page)

The name on the small label read ‘
Bambú
,’
and under that was: ‘Sobrinos de R-Abad Santonja. Alcoy.’

I lifted the protective flap and read the inscription.

‘El papel marca
Bambú
es el mejor – fino y mas aromático.’

I hadn’t had any Panamanian Red in a long time. It had given me sort of a festive idea, and instead of the Top brand of paper that I usually rolled with, I skirted the neighborhood to 23rd Street to secure some of the stronger, more expensive
Bambú.
I tore open the small manila folder and peeped in at the red and green leaf mixture. I took a good lungful and then poured it all into an ashtray to separate the seeds from the grain. These are the seeds that pop from the heat in the middle of your smoke and scare the hell out of you.

I pulled out two sheets of
Bambú
and folded them, forming a neat trench. Then I tapped the fine powdery grains into the paper and leveled it off. I licked the glue on the corner and stuck the sides together. Then, using my key chain, I sealed the ends of the paper off. Presto! A perfect joint. It took a lot of practice to roll a joint like that every time.

I rolled the entire bag and marveled. Six joints, and any one of them could get a man high. No wonder all the cats quit drinking once they got hip to smoke. I looked at my watch. Eight-thirty already? Time to take a shower and shave before I
got dressed to go to John’s party. I knew that the niggers would be out in full force. Gig time on a Friday night!

John Lee’s Party / 10:15 P.M.

There’s something about Friday night that reminds me of a starter’s pistol. It seems to release everybody from their week-long hangups. They feel a freedom that they wish they could feel all the time. Stay up all night and get high if they want to. Stay up all day the next day and get higher if they want to. Go and praise God on Sunday if they see fit. Or ignore Him if that’s what they feel like doing. You can see a whole lot in seventy-two hours in New York City. All you have to do is know what you’re looking for.

Friday night in the neighborhood has always been a gas. There is always somebody throwing a private gig, or some organization willing to inhibit your delinquency for a dollar. These groups had started to flourish once it was no longer the thing to run the block with your main men and roll over anybody who didn’t dig what you were into.

The parties in our area, the Chelsea district, are notoriously wild. When we had all been fifteen or sixteen, there had been a gang for every block and a chick for every gang member. The big gang fights had been often and bloody, but rarely fatal. It was a chance for every cat to go out and swing a chain with little chance of being the major concern at a Sunday funeral. That was a passing fad. As the gang members grew older, their turf and their women became more and more a part of their pride and what they symbolized. It was a
something
to hold on to. That was when the knives, razors, and guns turned up on the weekend and people started searching you at the door when you came to a dance. All of a sudden the fun of ambushing a whitey became a serious topic. Most of the gangs started to dissolve
when killing became reality, but the ones who decided to stick it out were hell. Everything was for keeps. The whiteys battled the P.R.’s and the blacks, and it went the other ways around too. The gangs all wore their jackets and insignias. The Easter suits stayed in the closet. They were reserved for your burial.

The Dock Battle of 1966

I had made my reputation early. At sixteen, I was already out in the street by myself. Spade, gravedigger for all bad niggers
and
spics. I wasn’t a gang member, and I fought anybody I had to. In doing a thing like that, you set yourself up as a quick target the minute you beat up a gang member. Even a punk will try to back you up if he knows he has a follow-up and you don’t. It just so happened that before I became a serious problem I had a break. A friend of mine from school named Hicks, who was the leader of a Chelsea Houses group called the Berets, called on me one evening to invite me to a party. He had been trying to convince me that I should hook up with his gang for protection. They were supposed to throw this beer-and-reefer gig on the docks at 20th Street on a Friday night. I took myself for a look-see.

I went to the party, and there were perhaps thirty of us, girls and guys drinking beer and roasting hot dogs over an open fire. The girls that the Berets had invited were primarily Puerto Rican chicks. This was a guarantee that everybody would get some leg, even if a few trains had to be engineered. All of these babes were notorious for drinking like fish and screwing everything that wasn’t nailed down.

Out of the darkness behind us we were attacked, caught completely by surprise. I was sitting on the edge of the rotting dock with my feet hanging over the water. Before I could even turn around, I was pushed or kicked and was plunging into the murk that lapped up around the decaying columns.

I went under immediately, taking in a great mouthful of the slimy water. The shock of the cold blasted my brain, and tears stung my eyes. As I went under, I could hear the foghorns from the drifting barges of garbage farther up the filthy Hudson. As I came to the top, I could see a fire starting to grow on the dock about twelve feet above me, and I could hear all the broads screaming and the yells of surprise and pain coming from the other Berets.

My blue jeans felt like weights around my thighs. They had somehow come loose during my fall and now were binding my legs together and hindering my attempts to tread water. I went under once more and struck my head against something. Pain flashed across the length of my mind. I grabbed out in front of me and managed to get a hold on one of the pillars that supported the dock. All of the noises that had previously been so frightening to me now attracted me. I wanted to see someone and be with some people. The wet, mossy wood felt like a snake’s belly, cold and alive. The knit sweater that had been my pride and joy was ripped open, exposing my quivering skin to the snake’s bosom. I started to cry, I know, but at the same time I started climbing, hoisting myself up the column.

The scum and murk of the water irritated my eyes, but still I could see the smoke rising above me in great balls. The sweet odor of the reefers had been replaced by the stink of burning wood. When I peeped over the platform, I could see the battle. My man Hicks, the leader of the Berets, was on his knees trying to fight off an attacker. He was dressed only in his bathing suit, and blood poured from a slashing razor cut on his shoulder. The towel he was kneeling on was dripping with the fluid from the head of the Puerto Rican girl who had been in his arms short minutes ago. Without really being aware of what I was doing, I seized a beer bottle and began to raise and lower it on the head of the fallen leader’s attacker’s skull: over and over I hit him
until I felt his blood splatter against my chest and I was sure he was dead.

Hicks’s eyes sought mine, but I was dazed and unsure of reality. Everything had happened so fast. The Beret that Hicks held in his hand was soaked with blood too. I watched without moving as he rolled the distorted figure of his woman over and pulled a revolver from beneath the towel.

‘BAM! BAM! BAM!’ Three times the sound of dynamite split the night in half. Twice it seemed that the noise had been the gun’s greatest effect, but the third time Hicks had aimed at the body I had beaten into a pulpy mass. The form jerked, hung on the edge of the pier, and then dropped into a coffin of water.

The sound of sirens registered for the first time. Much of the screaming had subsided. There were no enemies left; few of the Berets remained. They had either chased the P.R.’s back toward Tenth Avenue or fled from the Man. Hicks collapsed back onto the towel with the revolver curled under him.

I touched the girl next to him. She was barely breathing, and the warmth that her body had seemed to possess before had faded as she lost more and more blood. Hicks too was in trouble. I ignored the girl completely and lifted Hicks over my shoulder. I threw the gun, which dangled from his limp fingers, over my head into the river. Blindly I started trotting, running, stumbling toward Chelsea. I was familiar with many of the back alleyways that made up the neighborhood. We would be safe if I made it east of Tenth Avenue.

I turned under the West Side Highway exit ramp at 20th Street. It seemed that the sirens were coming from every direction at once. I started thinking that Hicks and I would never make it out of there alive. The cops would beat us and say that we died in the gang fight. I thought we had escaped death, only to find it all over again.

‘Hey, kid! Kid! C’mere!’

The words came out of the shadows of the storefront next
to me. It was an old black man, nearly invisible in the inky darkness of the entrance to the shoddy store.

‘I wuz lookin’ atcha comin’ down the street,’ he croaked. ‘C’min an’ I’ll hidja.’

I didn’t raise any objection at the time, but I wondered why he would do this. All of the old people I knew wanted the hoods dead and all gang members lined up against a wall and shot. I got to the partially open doorway, and the old man lifted Hicks from my shoulders. His strength amazed me. I started to protest that I could make it, but I wasn’t really sure that I could.

‘Close de do’,’ he said back over his shoulder.

I reached back for the door, but the sound of the sirens drove me to the threshold again for a final look. Fire engines and prowl cars and ambulances made red a dominant color beneath the shadows of the highway overpass. The acrid smell of the flaming pier was still wedged in my nostrils, painting my mind ugly.

‘Jus’ hi’ long you think you kin stan’ inna do’ lookin’ like de wrong enda hell?’ the old man asked.

‘I’m sorry, pop . . .’

‘I ain’cha pop . . . wouldn’t be pop fo’ no young hoods an’ thugs like you.’

He was shuffling around in the darkness with a clarity of movement. I couldn’t even begin to recognize any of the hazy forms that presented themselves in the no-light of the store.

‘How’s my man?’ I asked.

‘Thass whut I’z ‘bout to concern myse’f wit ni,’ was the reply. ‘I’m tryin’ t’fin some dry close fo’ you so you kin go git whut I need. He done los’ a lotta blud, joo know.’

I knew. Blood had poured from the wound on Hicks’s arm, all down his chest and into the waistband of his swimming trunks. A crimson blotch covered the damp knit on my back.

The old man raised from his slumped position long enough
to hand me a stiff flannel shirt and a pair of paint-stained overalls.

‘This all I got,’ he said.

‘Thass all right,’ I told him.

‘Gotta be . . . you got any money?’

‘Naw. I ain’ got nuthin’ but a wet ass.’

‘. . . an’ a dyin’ frien’. Mebbe we bettuh take ‘im to the hospital.’

‘We can’t!’ I shouted.

His old eyes regarded me with annoyance from their sunken caves. He shrugged and reached into the front pocket of his own tattered overalls and came up with a ten-dollar bill.

‘You go an’ git me a big box a gauze an’ some cotton swabbin’ things an’ some adhesive tape. I need some a them ice packets too. Evything else I need, I got . .. an’ git what-evuh you need fo’ yo’ own patchin’s. You don’ look like you ‘bout to fall out dead to me.’

I had been changing into the dry clothes, waiting for the instructions. The thought of Hicks laying in that back room was scaring me. More than the gang leader’s death was at stake. What to do about the old man would be a problem if Hicks died. Maybe he was willing to help me as long as Hicks lived, but death would change all that. What would I do with the body? What would I do to silence the old grocer? I was thinking that I would definitely be forced to kill my good Samaritan if Hicks couldn’t make it. I broke into a cold sweat and started running toward the drugstore.

The old man’s ten spot was squeezed tightly in my hand. Even the dampness of my body could not overcome the warmth that came with the fear that was now a part of me. Inside my head I was reviewing the store’s layout and making plans. There had to be a back way out. I had to convince Hicks when and if he recovered that he had been responsible for the death of the boy whose body the police had probably already seen floating in the
river. Once I had made Hicks believe he was the killer, and not me, I wouldn’t have to worry about any pressure that the Man would apply to Hicks when they caught him.

I played the part at the drugstore, listening to the druggist’s jokes about winos burning the docks down while high on Robutussin Cough Syrup. I bought the articles the old man had listed and started back down Eleventh Avenue. The commotion that had been in the streets fifteen minutes before was fading. Firemen remained to hose down the blaze, but ambulances were speeding away behind patrol cars. I returned to the store.

The old grocer was waiting quietly when I returned. He had left the door unlocked for me, and I went straight through to the back room, where he sat with a wet towel across Hicks’s forehead. He had ripped another towel into strips and was using it as a tourniquet. Hicks was twisting and moaning in a semicoma.

Without a word the weatherbeaten hands took the package from me and set things in order on a scratched nightstand next to the cot. A dim light cast shadows around the cubicle and distorted the crow’s feet about the eyes.

‘I useda be a medic back in prehist’ry times far as you concerned. I wuz a man noted fo’ steady han’s an’ allat.’ He was talking for me, not to me.

‘Why you doin’ this, old man?’ I asked him suddenly.

‘I dunno why,’ he said, without looking up. ‘I wuz jus’ askin’ me why I wuz doin’ it.’ He took a needle and thread from a pan of hot water on the nightstand. ‘I guess it’s cuz I knew them whitey police wuz gon’ ketch yawl an’ whup yo’ po’ l’il asses. I didn’ wanna see no white man beatin’ yawl.’

‘One cop like another,’ I said.

‘I wanned t’see yo’ poppas beatin’ yawl, not no cop,’ he said.

That was the last thing I remember hearing. He told me the next morning that I had passed out.

The thoughts of the Dock Battle party entered my mind as I hiked the three flights of stairs to John’s apartment. Four people had been killed that night, and no telling how many beaten or cut. As Hicks got better, I began to fill in the missing details in his mind, making sure he considered himself a killer. We stayed in the back of the old man’s store for almost five days recuperating, so that we would be ready when we hit the street again. The P.R.’s had been bragging that they had gotten rid of Hicks and me. When we came out on the block together almost a week later, all the black people in the area knew it within minutes.