Chapter Two
The worst times for me were the holidays when I was a little kid, not having toys on Christmas, not getting toys even from my older brothers. I would have to go out in the street the next day and all the kids were gonna say what they got for Christmas and I was gonna say, “I didn’t.” I was gonna have to do some kind of a diversion to not tell them what I got because it didn’t compare to what they got and it made me feel terrible. I always felt less than them, it was very hard for me to deal with. I kind of hid inside myself a lot, just doing bad things.
The police would go from house to house to see who needed anything. They’d knock on the door and ask my mother, “Do you need anything, any toys for the children?” and she would say, “Yes, we need something.” I would get a fire truck or something like that, but it only added to my embarrassment and my shame because a lot of the other kids on the block didn’t have to do that. They would say, “We saw the guys go in your house, what did you get from them?” and I’d say, “No nothing, we didn’t take anything.” I would lie about things that I had because a couple of days later I would never have to show it to them. It would be all over unless somebody got a bike. I never got a bike, I always wanted a bike. I built my own bike eventually. Actually I went out and stole stuff and I made my bike.
The one thing my mother used to let me do is steal. She would always say, “Just don’t get in trouble.” She used to take me with her to the A&P twelve blocks away on Prospect Avenue when I was about nine or ten. I would steal records, the 45s, and cigarettes. We would have my niece in the baby carriage, my older sister’s baby, and she would be a decoy. I would stick the stuff underneath her mattress, cartons of cigarettes, some records, anything, and my mother would say, “When you’re leaving the store just make sure you walk right out, go up the block and wait for me.”
What I had to live up to was my brothers, meaning my four older brothers. I had to live up to their reputation in this neighborhood. It was bad, fucking bad. They were drinkers, they were fighters, they robbed, they got into a lot of trouble. By the time I was fourteen, fifteen I was already in jail, but I had to live up to their reputation, and before I was eighteen and in the bars, everybody knew me as “one of the Powers brothers.” My mom would do the best she could, but she had no control over them. I mean I know that she tried to do things, she was down at the police station with me from the time I was nine or ten years old, until I was fifteen. The cops brought me home a hundred times because they knew me. The Seventy-second precinct knew the whole family. They knew my brothers, and no matter where I went in the neighborhood, they’d pick me up if something happened.
I was bad. I was a bad kid. I would break people’s windows, I would steal money off of kids. I ran with a gang. It started by just hanging out, we’d be sitting on this stoop, this step by the factory, and we‘d sit there for maybe a half hour and get bored and say, “Let’s go to a certain block and see if we see anybody and take their money.” We would go up to Ninth Avenue and Windsor Place, or Terrace Place, or Tenth Avenue, or Twenieth Street, and we would see somebody we’d describe as “not like us,” maybe walk up and surround them and say, “What are you doing, you got any money on you?” They’d say, “No,” we’d say, “Let me see,” and it just wound up that we’d rough them up. Sometimes they gave it up and sometimes we took it. We didn’t care, we just told them, “You’d better not tell your mother or anybody because you know we’re gonna come and get ya.” The truth is, I was always scared to fight, but would never not fight. If I had to fight, I had to fight, win or lose, but when we were with the gang, with the crew, if I was losing bad they would jump in and stop the fight.
We did a lot of hitching on cars, trucks, trolleys, and buses. It was a big thing when we were eleven and twelve to get up at six on Saturday morning and go hitching on Tenth Avenue and McDonald Avenue. “What are you doing Saturday? Let’s go hitching.” The buses were just coming in at that time but the trolleys were still there. We used to hook up on them and pull the electric cords to make them stop. Then the driver would have to get out and reconnect it. When we were older and lights turned red and the trucks stopped, we jumped on the back of a truck and would ride it for miles, not knowing that you could get killed or knocked out when the gasoline trucks used their airbrakes. We were wild, taunting the bus drivers, they used to stop the bus and chase us and if they caught us they’d beat the shit out of us. There were men we couldn’t stop from beating the hell out of us, but the percentage of us getting caught was very slim. Every once in a while we did get caught and got a beating, but then we knew the driver would be on that bus line again and we’d wreck the bus. We’d break the windows or throw eggs all over it, so they were better off chasing us and not catching us because then we didn’t do nothing to them on Halloween. Sometimes we’d go out of the neighborhood a few blocks to see who was getting a delivery of doughnuts or bread so we could get some breakfast and a quart of milk.
My mother used to send me down to the Salvation Army on Fifth Avenue to get clothes out of the bin. She sent me down with three bucks and I had to come back with two pairs of pants, sneakers, socks, a shirt, the whole thing. They had boxes with different prices, shirts for twenty-five cents, pants fifty cents, and I would have to pick out some pants. Most times you’d never get the size you wanted. My mother would cut, hem or fix ’em. She was good at sewing things and taught me how to sew and how to cook, but I didn’t really like being with my mother. She kept me home from school and I saw my mother hustle, manipulate, lie, take money from Peter to pay Paul, she had her beer, she was a provider, a survivor.
Easter Sunday when all the kids would be dressed and we’d come out of the house, once again it’s another holiday that I didn’t get no candy and I didn’t get no new clothes, I didn’t wanna come out of the house, I didn’t feel a part of that. I came out in dungarees and I would tell the other kids, “What are youse doing with your clothes on, go change your clothes so we can go play, or so we can go hang out over in the lots,” and they would say, “No, my mother won’t let me.” Some kids annoyed me, some kids made fun of me and some kids didn’t. As I got tougher and ruthless less kids made fun of me. By the time I was fourteen, I wouldn’t think nothing of taking a bat and just whacking somebody across the face and splitting their whole head open if they as much as said anything about me.
Sometimes we would treat the storekeepers with respect, we’d just steal something and not curse at them. “Mitchie, don’t worry about it. Relax, relax, relax.” We knew that he would never leave the store; maybe run ten feet, twenty feet, but never come after us. He couldn’t leave the store even if he had somebody else in there. Sometimes Mitchie would say, “I know it’s you, Powers, and I’m gonna tell your mother.” He and my mother were very good friends. I knew a lot of times my mother paid him for some things that I took, like potatoes that we used to cook in the vacant lots on Nineteenth street. We did become little terrorists in the neighborhood. When we were little kids all the neighbors would yell at us, “I’ll tell and you’ll get a whack off your mother or your father.”
We had a little gang called “the Renegades” or “the Night Riders” and on Halloween we would go around to all the people who were mean to us all year long. We would do these “clothesline raids,” steal all their clothes off the clothesline and rip them up. We’d break windows if they lived in the basement, or we’d throw paint. When we got to be teenagers we used to have Chester Appanel string up a dummy in the cemetery with a big knife in its hand. He used to make a full-length dummy of a man with a hat and clothes. If somebody came walking up the block in the evening or walking their dog, we’d be over on the stoop watching. Chester would be behind the bush, behind the hedges watching for us and the minute we whistled, he’d let the rope go and this dummy would come swinging down with its big knife and people would get scared to death. They used to have fits.
We used to go up on the roof of my building and as the Seventh Avenue buses came around the corner going to the bus stand up the block, we would throw a watermelon on top of the bus. It would explode on the bus like an atomic bomb. The poor driver would jump out of the bus, the passengers would run away and we would laugh.
Another time on Halloween, we would be sitting around the corner with the dummy behind a truck. There’d be ketchup all over the face of this dummy and as the bus turned the corner we would throw it up in the bus driver’s face onto the big windshield and the driver would think that he had hit a person because the dummy had a head, arms, jacket, and everything. He would actually get terrified because when the thing hit the windshield of the bus, as he came around the corner very slowly, maybe two to three miles an hour at night, all this ketchup, which he would think was blood, would be all over the window. I remember we once had a bus driver who came out of the bus and took his badge off screaming at us, almost crying one night. He says, “I ain’t doing this no more, youse guys are bad!” The bus driver quit the job.
We used to sit on the stoops at night and play games. Our parents would let us out if we stayed on the stoop, if we stayed within their eyesight. Sometimes we did it, we just said, “Yeah, okay, sure.” We’d sit there and we’d name cigarettes, all the different kinds of cigarettes, from all over the world. You couldn’t name one twice. If you named it twice you were out, and last one out was the winner. We would do the same thing with cars, naming all the different makes of cars. And a lot of cars did come down the block, down Twentieth Street. We played a lot of Monopoly. At night we used to sit under the lampposts. There were two of them, one on Nineteenth and one on Twentieth Street. We’d sit there and we’d play Brisk and Casino. We had signals, hand signals with our partners, and we would cheat with each other. Touching your nose and your ears were trumps. When the neighbors complained about our noise under the light, we’d have to move for a while, back to Twentieth or Nineteenth Street because we couldn’t play where it was dark.
In the summer we would eat the cherries off a big cherry tree. We knew what time the cherries were coming and we’d have to sneak, like Mission Impossible, up on the roof so the people wouldn’t throw rocks or bricks at us or chase us or hit us with a bat—all to get a handful of cherries or a peach or something off a tree. We used to jump off these two-story buildings like we were fucking Spiderman. That was our fun. We hung out, we played a lot of stickball, cards, and we developed a gang right on the block.
On the 4th of July, we would collect all the dead fireworks and make bombs out of the gunpowder. I remember making a pipe bomb with Norman, Anthony, and a whole bunch of us. This guy Norman was pretty smart, really smart. He read it out of a book and knew how to use the charcoal and the sulfate and all these chemicals to make gunpowder for the bombs. Like a little Arnold Stang he would make this shit, and he would tell us that we could do this or that. I would say, “Yeah, wow, this is good, let’s make a bomb, a pipe bomb!”
Another time I was on the factory steps looking right at “the bomb.” All of a sudden this thing exploded and the dirt made a big-ass hole in the cemetery, because we’d planted it over the fence and into the dirt about a foot away from the bars. We ended up making an explosion so strong that it bent the bars on the cemetery fence and boy did we run. It was in the dirt, luckily. We dug a hole and stuck it in and we didn’t even know that it was the right thing to do. Me and Anthony and couple of other kids would collect a whole bunch of gunpowder from firecrackers and we sat right on the stoop, on two little steps, and we had a pile about six inches high of gunpowder because we broke open all the firecrackers. We were gonna make something. What we did was just lit the match, thinking we were going to light a little bit of it about a foot away, but then the whole pile just flared up and Anthony got burnt. It took the skin right off his hand. He jumped up screaming and went running to his mother, “Oh, my hand!” and we were almost laughing. We didn’t know what to expect but he got himself a good burn. And that wasn’t the first time. One of the Olsen boys, Gregory, blew up his whole chest one time, a big hole in his chest. He almost died from fireworks.
We used to say, “Let’s have a Vietnam fight!” and we would throw packs of regular inch-and-a-half firecrackers up in the air in each other’s face and just keep lighting them off. About ten of us stood around in the streets, one person in each square, and you couldn’t move out of your square. Whoever jumped out of their square box was “out.”