Chapter 1
LUIS SCALICI:
"I grew up on the west side. My father was a stone mason. I was the third of eight children, three boys and five girls.
Both my older sisters became whores. That's how I learned about the racket young. My older sister, Veda, was the wildest of all; Rosina, the next oldest, was very placid. They didn't even look like sisters.
Veda was what they called a tomboy then. She was always getting into trouble, and getting me into it too. I liked running and playing with her because she got so many wild ideas. I think she would do anything-if it was exciting.
There was a lot of Commie talk then, it was sort of a fad-spouting Red ideas. Somewhere Veda heard them, how the rich were oppressing the poor and how all the wealth should be split up, and that kind of thing.
Veda and I were all for that. We liked the idea of splitting up all the dough in the world. We used to talk about it, in a hideout we had. How we'd buy this and that, and what a pocketful of jingling coins would feel like. We never had any dough.
She was three and a half years older than me, and when she got it into her head that having dough was a good thing, I just wanted the same. Veda was a kick in the head.
On Saturdays we'd go out and do a little shoplifting. We'd steal lipsticks, toys, candy, anything that wasn't nailed down. Then we'd trade for other stuff. Me and Veda did all this, not Rosina. She was too lazy.
We kept stuff in the hideout, things that we couldn't get rid of. They would come in handy on later trades. This hideout was in a half torn down building. There were a lot of such buildings then, not now. Now the taxes won't let that happen. Anyway, we had a sort of room that we found in what was once the top basement. We fixed it up a little and made it strong enough and tight enough to keep out wind and snow. We had a half dozen ways to get to the place, so we never did have adults poking around. Which was good, because sometimes Veda wanted to experiment.
Like I say, she was pretty wild. Living in a big family, we both saw all our brothers and sisters all the time, but Veda heard things. She wanted to know what it felt like to put one thing into another. You know what I mean? We heard about screwing, and she wanted to find out. She experimented with me because we were always together.
I never felt funny doing it to Veda, somehow. I think I would have with Rosina, but Veda was different. Anyhow, Rosina never wanted to.
Veda would sit on a box or something and I would stand in front of her with the thing hanging out and she just stuck it in and I would pump at her. We were pretty damn crude at first.
"Do me," Veda would say. And I knew what she meant. We always called it 'it.' Like: "I wanna do it," or "Do it to me," and so on. We did a lot of crazy things in those days, but the things we did that stand out are the times that Veda wanted me to 'do it."
Naturally we could hear the old man and Ma doing it at home. The old man got into her once a week, regular as clockwork, on Friday night. They didn't particularly wait for us to go to sleep, either. Sometimes I thought it was their casual attitude about screwing that made me and Veda kind of casual about it too. We aped them, you know?
Another funny thing. Me and Veda never played around before we did it the first time. Other guys have told me they fooled around the girl a long time when they were at it the first time. You know what I mean? Scared to do it.
"Let's do what Ma and Pop do," Veda said to me one afternoon when we're sitting in the hideout. I knew what she meant right off. She didn't have to explain.
"OK," I said, but I didn't know how to begin.
She laid down on the floor and I got on her, but that was a bust because the floor hurt her fanny and my knees. It took us a while to realize it would work with her sitting and me standing in front. She was the one who took it out of my pants, and she guided it in and told me to push.
It went in easy though, because she was wet. "It feels good," she said, "push harder."
It felt great to me too, the first time. Maybe it wouldn't have with somebody else, but with Veda, she was fun. I was nine then, and she was almost thirteen. We knocked off two cherries that day. Hers and mine.
"Don't tell anybody," Veda warned me when we finally stopped. "And for crissake don't tell the priest."
By the time I was twelve I knew about a lot of things, you know, what goes on. We'd play hookey, go to the movies or hustle bets, and if nothing else was happening we'd go up and toss bottles into an alley somewhere.
I even knew a couple of the big guys by their first names. You know, guys in the mob. One of them got Veda her first job. A guy named Reddy. He was thin as a hacksaw with arms like a gorilla, you know, long.
Reddy got a big hump for Veda. She was a good looking shicksa, almost sixteen and tits like a movie star. She had been screwing for dough for two, three years. She took guys to our hideout where we had stole a mattress for her to work on.
Anyway, Reddy got it in lumps for Veda, so he took her uptown and him and her split the profits. She would let guys boot her in his car. He went in the clubs and got her Johns. She made ten, fifteen bucks a night that way.
I know goddam well that Reddy kept the most of the foldin' stuff, but she thought she was doing great. I mean I know it now. I didn't know it then.
The year I was twelve was the year the old man got his on the job. A block of concrete slipped and pinned him under it, and that was curtains. What they took to Skinner's Mortuary they could of smeared on the slab. That was a big thing to us. It broke the family all to hell.
Mama wasn't strong enough to cope with us. She just sort of gave up and let us run. My younger brothers and sisters mostly did what me and Veda told them. Veda ran the house, because she had the dough. Mama used to scream and rant about taking dirty money from Veda, but the rest of us didn't mind. Veda handed it out all right. Easy come, easy go. There was lots more where that came from.
She told me once, "Baby, my snatch holds out, we'll be rich."
She didn't know the percentages.
She worked the trick with Reddy for about a year as I remember. She pulled out of school and went uptown with him on weeknights too.
I sat with her in a drugstore one Saturday, I remember, and I was real surprised to see, in the daylight, how tired she looked.
"They're beatin' me," she said. She was dark and sparkle-eyed, but the sparkle was going fast, and she looked older than seventeen. "Man, they're beatin' me down."
She was beginning to wonder about the gravy train she was riding.
"Eight Johns las' night," she said. "Seven of 'em in that goddam car and one in a hotel. Man, that's workin'."
"You said it was fun."
"Listen, it ain't fun. Sure, it was fun for a while. But man, they're beatin' me. I mean really beatin' me."
She pulled down her blouse and I could see the marks on her shoulders. Somebody had been taking a strap to her. That astonished me. "What for?"
"They pay more for that," she said with a funny look.
It took me a long time to figure guys who wanted to beat dames. And to get whipped. I had to believe it because Veda told me and showed me the marks. But I couldn't figure it. Maybe I still can't. I just know about it, I don't try to figure guys no more. There's a lot of sick guys around.
One of them was Reddy.
I never did like him much. He was in the mob, but he was makin' Veda hustle on the side. Of course they found out about it later and put the screws on, but he got away with it for a while. That's the kind of dumb he was. All muscle, no bright.
He used to come for Veda, showing up in a fancy boiler with chrome horns on the outside, acted like he was the Ace and we was deuces. Mama was scared to death of him. I think Veda was too, a little. The rest of us got the hell out of his way because he was mean and we never knew what kind of a mood he was in.
One night he come for her, and I saw him go right in her bedroom. She shared it with Rosina and a younger sister, Aurelia. Veda was there alone and he just pushed her onto the bed and jumped on her. With the door open and all. He didn't give a shit. Everyone in the house knew what he was doing to her. It was silent as a goddam grave, except for the bed bouncing.
I looked in the kitchen and Mama was crying. I could have killed Reddy, but I was scared of him too.
Veda just shrugged it off. She looked at me and made a face like: "What you gonna do?" when they went out.
Of course we all knew what Veda was doing. She couldn't keep it a secret She had been screwing too many guys at school before she dropped out So, about the time that she began showing up with fists full of green stuff, Rosina got the idea that the primrose path had its points.
Rosina went out and set up in an apartment with a guy. She was sixteen when she left. It like to killed Mama. But we couldn't talk her out of it. She wouldn't even listen to Veda.
"You're doin' it"
"Yeah," Veda said, "but maybe I wouldn't Christ, you oughta see the guys you gotta take on."
Rosina only shrugged her ample shoulders. Rosina was bigger and a lot less shapely than Veda. She moved in with a pimp named Veral. He was a seedy little guy who looked about fourteen till you got up close to him and saw the lines in his face. Then he looked like a year old apricot.
We didn't see Rosina much after that. And Veda moved out too. She took a joint uptown and I saw her about once a week. I went up and she gave me money to give to Mama.
We weren't making out very good and we needed the dough, but Mama hated to take it. I guess if it hadn't been for the little kids she wouldn't have. "It's dirty money," she would say, and shake her head.
But it was dough. That's all that counts, when you're poor. It spends.
And Veda looked terrible. I sat around with her maybe an hour a week, because we had been pretty close once. But we weren't anymore. We tried to pretend that nothing much had changed, but it had. She looked about ten years older than her age.
"I'm stayin' up late," she would say. And she always had a drink or two while I was there. I could see her going to pot.
I never did ask her for anything, and she never offered it, you know what I mean. Screwing. She got enough during working hours. We had only done it because we were exploring, that kind of thing. Oh, maybe we had booted it a little sometimes when we had the hots, but it always seemed OK with Veda.
She was working out of the hotel now, and working for the mob.
"They got my contract," she said. "I'm doin' all the work and they give me a cut. Some deal." A lot of the old fire had gone out of her. But she didn't like me getting into the mob. Veda started to turn. I think she found out what the hell it was all about too late. She had lived so hard when she was a kid that she hadn't thought about anything else. When she got the years she was already past them without thinking where she was headed. The old path of least resistance. You know? Now she was getting the ideas she should have had ten years before. But me too. I was the same way. I thought the mob was the most. I hated cops and authority and school and everything but dough and muscle. God was I dumb!
I was on the fringes of the mob, doing all kinds of errands and odd jobs. I knew about the dames who worked the hotels and in houses. I knew about dope and what it did, and I never suspected that Veda was on junk. I didn't know about it for a couple of years. Then I found out that Reddy had put her on it.
I couldn't get my hands on Reddy then, because the mob had already disposed of him. Some shiv man had cut him into little slivers and slices and spread him over as wamp in the next county. It was too good for him.
Home wasn't big enough to hold me. I was making dough, had dames, and needed a place to bed them. I was making it steady with a waitress named Elinor who had a gash that wasn't easy to satisfy.
She was my first real girl, and I was nuts about her, in a way. I was buddying with a guy a year older than me, Kipper, and he kept saying: "Don't let 'em get to ya, pal. Keep 'em on the end of that long string."
Elinor hated it on a string. She liked it up close. As close as possible. So close it was inside her. We played that game every night I could get at her.
In between, me and Kipper laid quite a few in the Pickering Hotel which was a run-down rat trap that the street whores used. Nobody asked questions, you dig?
Elinor knew I was running with the mob. Looking back on it, I think all she cared about was the excitement. She liked to be taken places, dancing, dinner, a movie, you know.
Then she wanted to get in bed and screw.
She had long legs and a box with muscles in it, and when you buried your dong she squeezed it like a lemon rind. She was pretty. She had a big chin and she had to wear glasses to see a foot in front of her, but she was built like a brick shithouse, and she said she loved me. I was a wise kid, but pumping away on her, I was ready to believe it.
I met Otto Sunderland about that time too. Otto was a cop. He had a square face on a kind of skinny body, and he chewed gum all the time and looked at you like you were some sort of bug.
"He's poison," Kipper said. "Stay away from him."
Otto tried to get me to quit the mob, but hell, I wasn't going to listen to a cop. He should have known that. Maybe he did, and was just going through the motions. He knew all about me though, and Elinor. He was about six, seven years older than me and hardly ever raised his voice. He knew the neighborhood as good as anybody, and everyone in it. He knew who was collecting for the numbers and he was wise to most of the pushers and broads-I guess all the broads.
Now and then he bust somebody. And he always had the goods. I doubt if he ever made a bum pinch. The guys respected him, I tell you.
He had partners, but I'm talking about Otto. He was the one who counted. His partners just did what he told them. When Otto looked at you kind of sideways and chewed his damn gum, it made you sweat, man. You know what I mean?
He never looked at me but what I toted up what I had done that week. I was always guilty of something. He knew it too. But Otto wouldn't bust you without the evidence. Then look out.
He busted me when I was about twenty.