In the murky darkness of his father's railroad flat on Warren Street Tony Conn's eager eyes scanned the shadowy Brooklyn rooftops from his third floor window. Careful not to wake his father because Sunday was his day off, the boy dressed hastily in the gloom and scrambled onto the cluttered fire escape.
Climbing two flights silently on bare feet to the overhanging parapet, he gripped it with his fingertips. Gathering all his strength, then with one magnificent acrobatic backflip that could have cost his life in a five-floor plunge to the filthy street, the 15-year-old catapulted his supple body to land safely on the roof edge.
Breathing heavily, he crouched, imagining himself a young wolf, bristling, alert, white teeth gleaming, gazing apprehensively at the dawning sky. From the direction of Red Hook, a fragile pastel pink and pale blue backlighted by the sun's strengthening rays was beginning to glow and lighten the shadowy facades of the dark and forbidding tenements.
Already the boy could feel the heat of the sun preparing to blister the decaying slums. He wiped his eyes. It would be another scorcher, like the long days before and the ones to come. As the tantalizing smells of a new day ripened to mingle with the cool crispness of dawn, rare and fleeting moments that always stiffened Tony Conn's spine, he stole silently across the tarred surface to the stairwell housing.
Inching open the heavy firedoor to the wide landing at the top of the stairs, he stepped in and kneeled next to a rolled up mattress. It still smelled brand new. He and Rice with two of the Little Kids from the Manor Lords, acting as lookout had stolen it from a nearby discount store whose Jewish owner robbed his customers blind. In the dead of night they lugged it up the five flights. Hidden behind was a small wooden cheese box. Here Tony kept his knife, a slick shiny blade that more than once tasted human blood, a weapon he was never without. To get trapped on the streets with no protection was idiocy.
Finding his sneakers, he pulled these on. Then he unhooked three large safety pins from one corner of the mattress. His money was here, an amount at which his father would have raised his eyes just as he would have been shocked at the several tin Trojan condom boxes containing the neatly folded five-dollar bills.
Replacing the safety pins, Tony sniffed the new mattress.
He licked his tongue 'over the smooth naked surface. His imagination soared. He felt suddenly aroused until he shook the sexy thoughts away and went back out onto the roof. By now the air had grown heavier with sticky humidity and the fiery hot sun was already silhouetted between two smoke stacks on the horizon.
It was time to give the whistle to Bucco. Tony knew his pal would be waiting nervously for the gang signal that within minutes would be relayed on and on through the canyon of Warren Street between first and second avenues until the young pounding heart of every Manor Lord was thundering in his chest, blood running cold.
Probably Bucco had been lying awake for hours. Tony hadn't been able to sleep either, the wild crazy excitement of the Lord's plans for revenge that quiet Sunday was churning closer and closer to realization as the silent dawn widened over the restless city.
The Manor Lords were just one of several tightly knit street gangs, aggressive, antagonistically hostile but vulnerable, belligerently defending their precious turf with the brooding ferocity of enraged beasts when they weren't attacking equally vicious street foes, gangs calling themselves the Apaches, the Stompers, Renegade Bishops, or untamed cripplers like the deadly Chaplains who ruled the evil housing projects at Ft. Green like medieval warriors.
Gangs like these were as common in Brooklyn neighborhoods as cockroaches in the crumbling tenements. As each generation of kids swept like a tidal wave into the nasty streets each summer, the sizes of the street gangs multiplied. Peer pressure within them was cold-blooded and competition keen. Church, school and family life, what little of this existed, took second place.
To be rejected, ostracized by any gang for any reason or for any length of time, was an unimaginable fate, a punishment so terrible, it was unthinkable.
But to be initiated and accepted in a gang, to be given a role to play, to be acknowledged as Tony Conn was, a member in good standing, gave a warm cozy, snug feeling. The wonderful sensations of well-being that accompanied .the act of belonging had so powerful a meaning; the grimy streets became verdant pastures of rural tranquility, apple blossoms and bird song.
So far during that summer of Tony's fifteenth year, he'd fought in fifty-eight street clashes, battles, some lasting for hours, one for two days. Others took ten minutes. Young kids got their faces knifed, scarred for life; skull fractured by bricks and clubs, noses bloodied and eyes blackened, genitals smashed and tortured.
Tony Conn fought as savagely, as mercilessly as the others in his gang. When he and Bucco or Big Zero or the seldom smiling Rice bloodied their enemy in free-for-alls, each watched over the other but when this wasn't necessary and the Lords were winning, inflicting horrible pain, wielding his knife or slugging viciously with the heel of his fist, Tony Conn was usually the first to crush his victim. Invariably, it was himself and trackstar Bucco, who raced first into any fray, chopping and flailing, screaming and yelling their gang's name, employing every dirty tactic known until dozens of reinforcements arrived. The every day philosophy of this Brooklyn street gang was easily understood, accepted and shared by every kid in the Lords. The gang identity of each in the click, as the brothers thought of the busy hive of which they were a part, was welded not as much by the act of belonging but by the comforting sensation of having a womb, a warm, moist place to cultivate and nurture one's own unique personality and proudly watch it grow in a lively, dangerously competitive environment.
By the time Tony Conn was absorbed, this incestuous street society had founded its own government. Its history dated back almost fifty years. The current gang lord was a man named Pepo and from some mysterious, clandestine lair in a burned-out tenement he enforced the gang's laws and rules of street behavior.
None of this was written down just as nobody ever saw a photo of Pepo's face. But nobody questioned these laws or doubted that Pepo lived and breathed. Neither could anyone escape the dire punishment of exclusion, banishment ordered by Pepo when disobedience was the issue on trial.
Belonging to the Lords by a blood oath, and taking a daily ritualistic part in the gang's vast activities, fired Tony Conn's vivid imagination day and night-in school, in church on Sunday, roaming Brooklyn deep in thought on Saturday or listening to music alone upstairs where he shared the neat, tidy railroad flat with his father.
Unlike all the other kids in the Lords, Tony lived with only his father. He had no brothers. No sisters. His old man was never home except for the few hours he slept between midnight and five-thirty when he began his second job as chef in a busy Manhattan restaurant chain. This gave Tony dozens of opportunities other kids in the Lords didn't have.
It gave Tony an awareness of an abiding privacy that was almost religious; a sense of the value of aloneness in an alien jungle he understood every inch of; where he collected day sounds and night noises and catalogued each like captured butterflies. Tony's acute sense of hearing was a talent.
Being by himself so often gave him a sense of freedom not even Rice or Bucco enjoyed, and these two toughs were reckless with rules laid down by their always squabbling parents.
Tony could come and go as he saw fit, no one to report to, no one to make up excuses for as the other kids were compelled to do.
Tony could stay over night with other kids, sit up on the roof until dawn smoking a reefer and daydreaming, or he could sleep the day away if he wished and when he had a good reason not to go to school, the responsibility was his and he knew how to deal with it.
This sense of early independence gave Tony a kind of power he began to use and appreciate more and more. When Tony would compare himself to other gang members, he could easily see the differences widen as they became more and more pronounced.
Making decisions came easy to him because he discovered he could afford to be more dangerous and make more mistakes than other kids. When he did, he had his own time to repair the damage. He also had the time and the place to make his own experiments and if the results weren't those he expected, no one observed his failures. This was a luxury.
Alone with a good reefer and his music, he would study his naked body in the bathroom mirror, admiring how beautifully made he was, proud of his lengthening cock and how sensitive it was to the slightest sensual suggestion. As he learned more and more about his own sexuality, he began to notice how important a role his cock played-as if it were some kind of barometer that measured the intensity of his interest in mostly everything vital in the streets.
He discovered that if his cock wasn't turned on, the rest of him wasn't interested either, but once hot blood began to churn through his veins, his entire body would react to the adrenalin and he would have to temper the needs of his cock, fighting it back down mentally when it wanted to stiffen so he could take care of different business at hand.
On this particular Sunday morning as he prepared to leap the wide space between Bucco's roof and his own, peering down five floors into the dark alley for a long moment, he had to wait patiently for the electric energy throbbing in his excited genitals to subside before he could dare take the dangerous jump.
Laughing aloud, the sound of it clattering and echoing like a stattaco drum beat in the black emptiness between the buildings, ricocheting off the grimy windows and the eroding bricks, he flew through space like Superman, landing safely on his balanced toes as the yawning chasm seemed to be reaching out for him. Tony hadn't given a split second's thought to his body torn and bleeding, crushed in a fall to the smelly dark cluttered alley below.