A Matter of Conviction

“Because I know that if they get me down, they’re gonna kick me. You ever been stomped, mister?”

“No.”

“Well, it ain’t so much fun. Unless maybe you like getting stepped on all over. Me, I don’t like it. So I do it to the other guy first. This way, when he’s down, he stays down, and he can’t hurt me. Reardon hit me with a ball bat once, you know that? He almost broke my leg, that bastard. Man, I got a thing for him, believe me. If you don’t kill that son of a bitch, I’m gonna do the job for you some day.”

“And get busted?” Hank asked.

“Not me. Besides, if I got busted it wouldn’t be such a bad thing. Then I could stop all this gang bopping. Maybe getting busted is the only way out. Or else getting drafted in the Army. ’Cause, man, this bopping is strictly sheeeeeeet.”

“Then why do you do it?”

“You got to live, don’t you? You got to protect your rights.”

“Which rights?”

“Your turf, man, your territory. Otherwise they be coming in here all the time — like they done with Ralphie. You got to stop them, don’t you? You can’t let them step all over you.”

“They seem to feel that you’re the intruders,” Hank said.

“Yeah, big intruders,” Frankie said. “All we try to do is get along, so all we get is trouble. With guys like Reardon around, you can’t even blow your nose. He’s a real troublemaker, that bastard. All the time. Right from when he first joined the Birds. You remember that time at the pool, Gargantua?”

“Yeah, I remember that time, all right. They almost drowned Alfie.”

“When was this?”

“Last summer,” Gargantua said. “There’s a pool on First Avenue. The Jefferson Pool. It’s open in the summertime, you know? It’s near the school — only the school’s on Pleasant Avenue. This is on First, around a Hun’ Thirteenth. So we used to go over there sometimes. It gets pretty hot around here in the summer, you know.”

“Yeah, but we don’t go there no more,” Frankie said. “They made sure of that. We go over there, it’s like taking our lives in our hands. Even if we didn’t have to pass through their turf to get there. That pool is like a battleground. We step in there, man, there’s fireworks. Like that day last summer.”

“Di Pace was there, you know that?” Gargantua said to Frankie. “I remember that was the first time I seen him. He just moved in the neighborhood that winter, I think. Yeah, he was with Reardon that day.”

“I don’t remember him,” Frankie said. “Aposto was there, I know, because I remember he threw the first punch. But I don’t think I ever seen this Di Pace kid. It don’t matter, anyway, because it was Reardon started it all. He was the one.”

“What happened?” Hank asked.

“Well, it was a real hot day,” Frankie said. “Hotter even than today. We were hanging around doing nothing and somebody said let’s go over to the pool. So we got our trunks and towels, and we grabbed a cab to take us—”

“You took a taxi?”

“Sure, there was six guys, so what did it cost us, a dime each or something? Including the tip? We hopped in the cab and went right to the pool. Then we changed in the locker room and went outside. All we had on our minds was getting in that water...”

(The temperature on this August day is going to break all records previously set for the city of New York. It is now noon, with the sun at its apex directly overhead, and the thermometer on the brick wall of the bathhouse reads 100.6. As the Puerto Rican boys emerge from the locker room to the pool area, they are assailed by the hum of voices which seems to hover over all bathing places, indistinct, a rumble like the ocean itself, interspersed with the clearer sounds of water splashing, laughter, the reverberating deep click of the diving board.

The pool, a glistening blue rectangle, ripples with reflected sunlight. It is crowded on this Saturday, but then it is usually crowded on weekends. Most of the people in the pool and surrounding it are young. There is the usual amount of horseplay, the duckings, the shrieking girls being tossed into the water, the water fights with young girls sitting astride the shoulders of their mock stallions.