The Cross and the Switchblade

AS SOON AS we got our workers settled I took them into the chapel and, standing before the bas-relief of the harvested wheat, I gave them a briefing on the make-up of a New York fighting gang.

“ ‘Violence’ is the key word to remember about these gangs,” I told the young workers. “It can express itself directly by a war in which boys get killed, or by rape or street murder or muggings. Or it can express itself indirectly by sadism and homosexuality, lesbianism, promiscuity, narcotics addiction, drunkenness. These ugly things are the rule, not the exception, among the jitterbugging gangs in New York.”

It was important, I thought, for our young workers to know the reason for this pathetic state. “We preachers are likely to use words a little too glibly,” I said, “but some of our professional vocabulary is wonderfully descriptive if you think about its real meaning. For instance, we speak of lost sinners. As I got to know these gang members, I couldn’t escape the feeling that they were literally acting as if they were lost. They wandered around scared and they looked furtively over their shoulders. They carried weapons against unknown dangers, ready at a moment’s notice to run or to fight for their lives. These lost boys group together for protection, and there you have the making of a gang.”

There was one all-important fact that came out of my work with street boys. Virtually without exception they had no real home. Their slang words for home were “prison” and “horror house.” I wanted our workers to know this situation from personal experience, so I took a few of them into the home of one of the street boys I knew.

“You can see why they call it a horror house,” whispered a young girl worker from a Missouri farm. And it was true. A family of five lived in this single room. There was no running water, no refrigeration, no stove except for the single-burner hot plate with its frayed wire that sat on a chest of drawers. There was no toilet: down the hall in a single, stinking stall was a toilet and a faucet which served eight families on the floor. The ventilation in the apartment was poor, and a strong odor of gas hung permanently in the air. The room’s one window looked out onto a blank brick wall, eight inches way. For light the family had the use of a single forty-watt bulb which hung naked from the center of the ceiling.

“And do you know what these people have to pay for their horror house?” I asked. “Twenty dollars a week: eighty-seven a month. I figured it up once: the landlord here makes just over $900 every month on this single tenement, and that is almost all profit. It isn’t uncommon for a slum landlord to get a twenty per cent net return on his investment each year.”

To answer this question we got in the car and drove a mile away to a great complex of apartments. These projects, many people thought, were the answer to New York’s slums. Bulldozers moved into an overcrowded area, like the one we had just visited; they tore down the old tenements and built towering light new buildings in their place. In theory, you housed in these apartments the old tenants, and also the old corner grocer and neighborhood lawyer and family doctor. Actually, it did not work out this way. The old tenant, and the storeowner, and one professional man couldn’t wait two years for the new building to be finished, so they moved away. Then when the project was completed, who was shoved to the top of the priority list? The most desperate people, of course: the relief cases.

The result was twofold. First, there was a completely uprooted neighborhood. Everybody in it was lost. None of the old institutions were left, none of the older and more stable population of professional men and businessmen. Second, because relief cases had priority, the projects in effect created mammoth eddies in the city into which floated all the people of New York who, for one tragic reason or another, could not take care of themselves.

The project we visited was not more than a few years old, but already serious signs of disintegration were evident. We walked past desolate lawns that had long ago been abandoned. Several of the windows on the ground floor were broken and unrepaired. There was obscene writing on the walls. The halls smelled of urine and cheap wine.

Here, too, we visited a family I knew. The mother had been drinking. None of the beds in her house had been made; dishes from several meals lay on the kitchen table. The boy we had come to visit sat on a torn hassock staring, never speaking. apparently not even aware that we were there.

“I’ve known that boy in other moods,” I said, once we were outside again. “He can be just as overactive as he is overquiet now. Usually he’s out on the streets. Thrown out. He can only come home when his mother has passed out, drunk.”

And this, I pointed out again, was the making of a teen-age fighting gang. Lump a thousand tortured families together in a single neighborhood and you have a floating population of teen-agers who are hostile and afraid, who flock together looking for security and a sense of belonging. They will create a home for themselves by fighting for a “turf” which is theirs, and which no stranger can violate. This is their fortress. It is marked out with military precision. The northern boundary is the firehouse, the southern boundary the superhighway, the western the river, and the eastern Flannigan’s candy store.

There isn’t much these boys can do with their time. Many of them are degradingly poor. I met one fourteen-year-old who had not eaten a real meal in two days. His grandmother, who took care of him, gave him twenty-five cents each morning and chased him out of the house. For breakfast he had a seven cent Coke, for lunch a fifteen cent hot dog from a street vendor, and for supper he laughed and said he was going on a diet. All evening he nibbled on penny candy.

“It really frightens me to see how much drinking these young people do,” I said to our workers. “Many of the street boys drink wine all day long. They are seldom really drunk—they can’t afford it—nor are they quite sober. They start drinking just as soon as they meet, at ten or eleven in the morning, and continue until funds run out.”

Occasionally from somewhere, usually from a purse-snatching or from extorting lunch-money from younger children, enough money comes into the common till to afford stronger stuff, and on more than one such occasion in our neighborhood this has led to tragedy.

When we got back to the Center, I took our workers into the chapel again and told them the story of Martin Ilensky. Martin was a high school senior who worked part time to help support his invalid mother. One day when he was not working he went to a vodka party at the “horror house” of another high school boy. Ten teen-agers were there, six boys and four girls. After an hour of drinking vodka and dancing to rock ’n’ roll, the vodka ran out. The boys took a collection for beer, but Martin refused. A fight followed. A twelve-inch German sword appeared from one of the boys’ waistbands. There was a swift jab and Martin Ilensky lay dead on the kitchen floor.

“Now them...” I knew the words I was about to say would bother some of our workers, fresh from the seminary as they were. I leaned back with my hands locked behind my head. “Suppose you could have talked to Martin Ilensky on some street corner for a few minutes. Remember: it is his fate to die if he goes to that party. What would your first words to him be?”

“We’ve got to be very careful,” I said, “that we don’t become parrots. I try to keep my ear tuned for phrases—religious terms—that I’ve heard before. Then when I’m on the street I never use such a phrase without first saying a prayer that I can give it all the power it had when it was spoken for the very first time.

Of course these boys and girls knew the answer to that—they weren’t just mouthing often-heard answers now; they were talking about something that had happened to them.

Still, the words had a pat sound to them. They didn’t have that ring of freshness we had to capture if we were going to touch Martin Ilensky before he was stabbed with a twelve-inch German sword.

“What happened to you when you were born again?” I asked this girl. And as soon as I did the young lady grew quiet. She hesitated a moment before she answered. In a voice that caught the attention of the entire room she told about a change that had come into her life one day. She talked of how she had been lonesome, and afraid, and of how her life didn’t seem to be going anywhere.

“I’d heard about Christ,” she said, “but the name was just a word. Then one day a friend told me that Christ could take away my lonesomeness and my fear. We went to church together. The preacher invited me to come forward, and I did. I knelt down in front of everybody and asked this ‘Christ,’ who had just been a name, to work a change in my life. And nothing has been the same since then,” she said. “I really am a new person, which is why they say you’re ‘born again,’ I suppose.”

By late Spring, 1961, Teen Challenge Center was in full operation. Every day—even on Mondays when they were supposed to be off—our young workers were out on the streets of Brooklyn and Harlem and the Bronx, looking for teen-agers who needed them. They went to hospitals and jails, to schools and courts. They held street meetings in Greenwich Village and in Coney Island and in Central Park. And as they worked, the flow of young kids coming through our Center grew from a trickle to a flood. During the first month of operation, more than five hundred boys and girls had been saved, if I can give that word its fullest meaning. Five hundred boys and girls had been gripped by the message of the Spirit; their lives had been radically changed; they left the gangs; they sought jobs; they started going to church.

Of this five hundred, perhaps a hundred came to the Center for special counselling. And of this hundred, only a handful were in such trouble that they needed to live at the Center, absorbing directly its atmosphere of love.

One of the first boys to experience a healing of personality at our Center was George. George was a handsome boy of nineteen—too handsome, in fact, for his own good. George had no home. He had been kicked out of his natural home by parents who were disgusted by his behavior with older women: the young boy was constantly getting himself involved with women twice his age. His methods were always the same. He would strike up an acquaintance with a lonesome older woman. He would intrigue her with a tale of the hard life he led, gain her sympathy and ask to see her again, “just to talk. It does me so much good.”

These conversations usually turned into deeper involvements, and soon George had a new friend. He would move into her apartment, where the woman would treat him like a son. George was a jeweler by trade. As soon as he made his way into the woman’s house, he managed to bring up the subject of jewelry and offered to repair her gems for her. George would leave the house with the jewels, supposedly taking them to a friend’s shop, but actually heading for the nearest receiver of stolen goods.

It was a pretty shoddy life for a virile, healthy young man. But one day all that changed. George stumbled onto one of our street meetings. Although he would not talk with our workers at the time, a few days later he appeared at the Center. He came in “just for kicks.” He felt a strange sensation of warmth the minute he walked through the doors. One of our workers, Howard Culver, saw him and struck up a conversation. Before the morning was over, George decided he wanted to start a new life. He prayed for a change to happen to him, and in that miracle we never get accustomed to, precisely that did happen.

“It was just like a great burden was suddenly lifted off my back,” George told me later. He was excited about the change that had happened to him. He couldn’t stop talking about it; he kept turning it over and around to examine it in every detail.

As the days passed, George began to feel the need to repay all the money he had stolen. He got a job: a good one, for George is quite a capable young man. Every penny above what it costs him to live goes toward these debts. When they are all paid, George wants to go into the ministry.

As the summer wore on and more and more boys passed through the Center, we began to face a moral problem. At one time or another, all of our boys have broken the law. What should they do about that?

It is not a simple question to answer. It would be relatively easy for a boy who had really become strong in his new life to take his punishment in jail. But to become strong usually takes time. There are many crises to pass, many dry periods to ride out, much to learn about the art of being a Christian. If a boy confesses to the police too early and is put in jail, isn’t there the risk of losing him? On the other hand, he has offended society’s law and it will also hold him back spiritually if he harbors guilt.

I have come to feel that there is no answer that will cover all cases. Often I am puzzled as to what recommendation to make. Pedro, for example, had been living in the Center for several days when he came to me complaining:

I listened to him for a while and came to the conclusion that he really did have to confess to the police ... sometime. Pedro didn’t detail his crimes for me because he had too much trouble with English and I could speak very little Spanish. But he was agitated and confused and it did seem that a police confession would be the right thing. The only problem was one of timing. Pedro was so new to his changed life that jail sentence would almost surely set him back. I recommended to Pedro that he consider waiting.

So, to act as an interpreter, I contacted my old friend, Vincente Ortez. Together we took Pedro down to the police. The sergeant was sitting behind his desk eating a sandwich when we came in. He looked up and said, “Yes, sir?”

“I’m Reverend Wilkerson, director of Teen-Age Evangelism,” I said. “I have a young boy here who was a member of the Dragon gang and he has some things he wants to confess.”

The sergeant looked at me stonily and asked me to repeat that. When I did, he put down his pencil and called me to his side and said, “Reverend, is he a crackpot?”

“We have people coming in all the time to confess things they never did. But if you think the boy’s in his right mind, take him upstairs to the detectives’ room.”

So the detective got out some yellow paper and licked his pencil and settled back. He was very kind and he was very much impressed. “All right, Pedro. Suppose you tell us what you want to confess.”

“Well,” said Pedro, through Vincente Ortez, “do you remember that stabbing ... ?” and he proceeded to describe a knifing that had taken place in Central Park two months earlier. The detective put his pencil down and called in another officer. They remembered the incident, and their interest picked up considerably. Pedro detailed the events that led up to the knifing. He was on drugs and he needed a fix. He was with two other boys. They spotted a young man sitting by himself on a bench, circled him, robbed him and then put a knife in his stomach.

Pedro then went on to confess two robberies. The detectives kept him there from six o‘clock until twelve o’clock, checking and rechecking facts. They found the boy who had been stabbed, but he had a record at the station, too, and wouldn’t press charges: he didn’t want to get involved. The store which Pedro had robbed twice also refused to press charges. “I know that place,” said Vincente Ortez. “I think they’re making book on the side; they probably don’t want to get involved.”

So in the end the police couldn’t find anyone to press charges. They were willing to release Pedro in our custody. We went back to the Center, and the next morning, Pedro was up before anyone. He woke the entire house with his singing. He sang at the top of his lungs, and he greeted everyone with such cheeriness that we couldn’t complain. Pedro was a different boy. His heart was filled with a truly amazing joy.

Not all of our boys have stories as dramatic as this. In fact, most of the young men who come to the Center and find an emotional home here are just plain lonesome kids. Their lives never amounted to a thing. They missed any sense of welcome in their natural homes because, in fact, they weren’t welcome. They got into trouble but it was the petty kind of trouble that was mostly just a symptom. We have a wonderful boy, for instance, who really counts the Center as his home. He is a simple young man named Lucky.

Lucky has had a great deal of trouble coming to grips with life. He has a great smile, and a twinkle in his eye, and a warm handshake, but so often in the past, he has had difficulty getting down on the job at hand. When Lucky was eleven years old he started cutting classes and running wild all over the Bronx with a gang called the Crowns. His favorite sport was to smash the window of a patrol car and then run. He would dash across rooftops making the cops puff after him, taking daring leaps and only laughing if he missed and had to grab for life itself to the nearest fire escape.

Lucky started running with another gang, the Dragons, and at the age of fifteen he was elected their president. His term of office was rather short, because one day Lucky found himself in jail for beating up his high school home-room teacher. Six months later he was released, but still he was unable to find roots. He attended bakers’ school but was incompatible with the teacher. He attended cooks’ school but was incompatible with the teacher. He attended butchers’ school and this time when he got into still another argument with his teacher he was told he had to leave school.

Teen Challenge Center is the only place on earth where Lucky has stayed overnight of his own free will. The moment he walked in our doors he felt as if he was coming home. “The thing I like specially,” he says to newcomers, whom he greets with his broad smile, “is here they don’t care what your race is or what your nationality is. Look here, they’ve got white boys and colored boys and Spanish boys and they’re all mixed up in God.”

Lucky has had an amazingly deep religious experience. He associates the new warmth and outgoingness with the Center so strongly in fact that we’re having trouble getting him to move on into the next step of his career. He doesn’t want to do anything but stay right here and help us. So ... we let him stay. Lucky is our maintenance man, and a dependable one too. He earns his ten dollars a week many times over. Some day, when he is ready, Lucky will move on, as all of our boys do.