Sleepers Page 23

  I do know the dreams and nightmares I’ve had all these years are born of the nights spent in that cell at Wilkinson. That the scars I carry, both mental and physical, are gifts of a system that treated children as prey. The images that screen across my mind in the lonely hours are mine to bear alone, shared only by the silent community of sufferers who once lived as I did, in a world that was deaf to our screams.

  I couldn’t sleep, anxious for morning to arrive. It was still dark, the early hours offering little more than thin blades of light filtering into my cell from the outside hall.

  I wondered what it would be like to sleep once again in a bed not surrounded by bars, to walk in a room not monitored by alternating sets of eyes. I was anxious to eat a meal of my choosing without fear that the food had been toyed with or tainted.

  I thought about the first things I would do once I was back out on the familiar streets of Hell’s Kitchen. I would buy a newspaper and check the box scores and standings, see how my favorite players had fared while I was away. I would walk up to the Beacon on West 74th Street and see whatever movie was playing, just to sit once more in those plush seats and breathe air ripe with the smell of burning popcorn. I would go to Mimi’s and order two hot slices with extra cheese, stand at the counter, and look out at the passing traffic. I would go to the library next to my apartment building, find an empty table, and surround myself with all the books I loved, running my hands across their pages, holding their torn binders, reading the fine old print.

  It was my way of life and I wanted to get back to it.

  I never heard the key turn in the latch. Never heard the snap of the bolt. I only saw the door swing open, a crowd of shadows washing across the floor of my cell.

  “You should be asleep,” Nokes said, his words slurred. He was the first to enter, his uniform shirt off, an empty pint of bourbon in his right hand. “Need all your rest for the big trip back home.”

  “Told you he’d be up,” Addison said, walking in behind Nokes, just as drunk, face, neck, and arms wet with sweat. “These fuckers are like rats. They never sleep.”

  “What do you want?” I asked as calmly as I could manage.

  “I just want to say good-bye,” Nokes said. “We all do. Let you know how much we gonna miss havin’ you around here.”

  “We’re friends, right?” Styler said, entering the cell, sober and in full uniform, holding John and Tommy by his side. “All of us.”

  John looked at me with dead eyes, as if he knew what was going to happen and was trying to shut it out of his mind. Tommy was crying, full tears running down the sides of his face, afraid more for me than for himself.

  “Must be hard to leave your friends,” Ferguson said, walking in with Michael and locking the cell door behind him. “We’ve been together for so long.”

  “Can’t leave your friends without a party,” Nokes said. “It just wouldn’t be right.”

  Michael, as always, stayed silent, his face, his eyes, his entire body, coiled into one large mask of hate. John and Tommy may have lost their heart, but Michael was in danger of losing his humanity. Everything that was done to him, everything that was said, served only to fuel his hate. By now he had enough fuel to last a lifetime.

  “It’s over, Nokes,” I said, standing up in the crowded room, the heat strong, the air rancid. “Please let it go.”

  “It ain’t over till morning,” Nokes said. “It ain’t over till the party’s over.”

  “I don’t want a party,” I said.

  “That’s too bad,” Styler said. “I even went out and got you a gift.”

  “A special gift,” Nokes said. “One you ain’t ever gonna forget.”

  Ferguson and Addison stood next to me and held my arms while Styler reached into his pocket and pulled out a few feet of nylon cord. He tied the cord around my arms, knotting it secure at the back. Styler shoved a wad of tissues into my mouth and held my face as Addison ran thick yellow tape across my lips. Nokes walked over, a wide black belt dangling in one hand.

  “Tie his feet too,” Nokes said, handing the belt to Styler. “I don’t want him to move.”

  My three friends stood before me, as still as the air, only their eyes betraying their terror. John’s lips were trembling and Tommy kept his head tilted to the ceiling, his mouth mumbling a secret prayer. Michael was a silent statue, his rage at rest.

  “We got a full house tonight,” Nokes said, leaning over and whispering in my ear, his breath bourbon-coated. “First we take care of your friends. And then we take care of you.”

  I watched Styler walk over to John and lock a handcuff around one of his wrists. The other half of the cuff was put on Tommy’s wrist. Addison did the same to Michael and Tommy, locking the three together.

  “Move them up closer,” Nokes said, sitting on the cot, one arm hanging over my shoulder. “We wanna get a good look.”

  Styler pushed the three forward with one hand, lighting a cigarette with the other. Ferguson wiped sweat from his face and forehead with the sleeve of his shirt. Addison stood with his back against the door and giggled.

  “Best seats in the house,” Nokes said to me. “You won’t miss a thing from here.”

  There was no place for us to go, nowhere for us to run. Our screams would go unheeded. Shouts for the warden would be ignored. No one would listen. No one would care. Fear ruled the night and fear controlled this place.

  My friends were facedown on the floor, their pants stripped off and tossed to the side, the three guards on their knees behind them, laughing, sweating, hands rubbing flesh, glazed, watery eyes looking at Nokes, waiting for the nod of his head.

  “Everybody’s ready,” Nokes said to me, squeezing me closer to his side. “Time to drop the ball.”

  Nokes pushed my head to his shoulder and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, sweat pouring out of both of us like a light, steady rain.

  Styler was slapping John’s back, playful taps that echoed off the walls of the small room.

  Addison hovered over Tommy, fondling himself and staring at me.

  “I’m gonna fuck your friend,” he said in a shaky voice. “Every night. Every night you ain’t here, I’m gonna fuck your friend.”

  Ferguson rested his body on top of Michael’s, his eyes wide with anticipation.

  “Let’s go, Nokes,” he said. “Stop wastin’ time. Let’s give ’em what they want.”

  Nokes pushed us both back against the wall, one of his hands holding my face to the scene before me.

  “Go to it,” Nokes said, his eyes, his breath, his body on me. “Make it party time.”

  They tore at my friends, attacked them as if they were animals freed from a cage. The cries, the screams, the shrieks, were all a valued part of their beastly game. I sat there, sweat running down my body and onto the sheet beneath me, and watched three boys be ripped apart, living playthings lost in a garden filled with evil intent.

  “You gonna think about this when you’re gone,” Nokes said, rubbing his arms over my body. “Ain’t ya, you little fuck? Ain’t ya?”

  Nokes leaned over and pushed me facedown on my cot. His hands tore at the few clothes I was wearing, stripping me naked, my arms still bound by the nylon cord. He undid the belt around my legs, folded it, and began to lash at my back and rear with it.

  “You’re gonna remember this little party, all right,” Nokes said as he continued to hit at me with the thick edges of the belt. “You gonna remember but good. I’m gonna see to that. Don’t worry, fucker. I’m gonna see to that.”

  Nokes tossed the belt to the floor and lowered his pants, his breath coming in heavy waves, sweat slicing down off his body. His mouth rested against my ear, his teeth chewing on the lobe.

  “This is so you don’t forget me,” he said again, the weight of his body now on top of mine. “Can’t let you do that, sweet thing. You gotta remember me like you gotta remember this night. Forever.”

  I heard John cry, pitiful moans coming from a well deep inside his soul
. I saw Tommy’s head bounce like a rubber ball against the cement floor, blood flowing from dual streams above his forehead, his eyes blank, the corners of his mouth washed in foam. I saw Michael’s left arm bend across the side of his back until the bones in the joint snapped, the pain strong enough to strip the life from his body.

  I felt Nokes pulling at me, hitting me with two closed fists, his mouth biting my shoulders and neck, drawing blood. The front of his head butted against the back of mine with every painful thrust, my nose and cheeks scraping the sharp edges of my cot. One of his knees, the pointy end of his belt now wrapped around it, was wedged against the fleshy part of my thigh, stabbing into it, blood coming out in spurts.

  A part of all of us was left in that room that night. A night now far removed by the passage of time. A night that will never be removed from my mind.

  The night of July 24, 1968.

  The summer of love.

  My last night at the Wilkinson Home for Boys.

  BOOK THREE

  “Lazzaro erased with his hand anything Billy Pilgrim might be about to say. ‘Just forget about it, kid,’ he said. ‘Enjoy life while you can. Nothing’s gonna happen for maybe five, ten, fifteen, twenty years. But lemme give you a piece of advice: Whenever the doorbell rings, have somebody else answer the door.’”

  —Kurt Vonnegut,

  Slaughterhouse-Five

  Fall 1979

  1

  HELL’S KITCHEN HAD changed. The streets were no longer swept daily and graffiti marred many of the buildings. A scattering of low-income high-rises had replaced stretches of run-down tenements, and storefronts now needed riot gates to guard against the night. Many of the Irish and Italian tenants had left the area, heading for the safer havens of Queens and Long Island, and the Eastern Europeans had deserted the neighborhood altogether, moving to Brooklyn and New Jersey. Replacing them were a larger number of Hispanics and a mixture of uptown blacks and recent island immigrants. In addition to these groups, young middle-class couples flush with money arrived, buying and renovating a string of tenements. The young and rich even set about changing the neighborhood’s name. Now they called it Clinton.

  The old order was in turmoil, guns and drugs replacing gambling and stolen goods as a criminal’s best route to a fast dollar. Cocaine use was rampant and dealers dotted the area, openly selling on corners and out of parked cars. Residents fell asleep most nights to the sounds of police sirens. There were many gangs, but the deadliest was Irish and numbered close to forty sworn members.

  They called themselves the West Side Boys and they controlled the Hell’s Kitchen drug trade. The deadliest gang to invade the neighborhood since the Pug Uglies, the West Side Boys would do anything for money, both within the area and beyond. They hired themselves out to the Italian mob as assassins; they hijacked trucks and fenced the stolen goods; they shook down shopkeepers for protection money; they swapped cocaine and heroin with uptown dealers for cash, and then returned to shoot the dealers dead and reclaim their money. Heavily fueled by drugs and drink, the West Side Boys considered no crime beyond their scope.

  They even had their own style of dress—black leather jackets, black shirts, and jeans. In winter they wore black woolen gloves with the tips cut off. They also left their signature on every body they discarded: bullets through the head, heart, hands, and legs. Those they didn’t want found were hacked up and scattered throughout the five boroughs of New York City.

  HELL’S KITCHEN WAS not alone in the changes affecting its streets. Similar sounds were being heard in cities and neighborhoods throughout the country and the world. In Atlanta, a serial killer was on the loose, preying on young black children. Eleven people were crushed to death at a Who concert in Cincinnati. Sony introduced the Walkman. The first test tube baby, Louise Brown, was born in a London Hospital. The Camp David Peace Accord was signed and England’s Lord Mountbatten was killed by IRA terrorists. Chrysler was saved from bankruptcy by an act of Congress and John Wayne died of cancer.

  During all these changes, a few familiar faces remained. King Benny still ran a piece of Hell’s Kitchen, working out of the same dark room where I first met him. He openly ignored the drug and gun trade, content with his profits from less violent, if equally illegal, enterprises. He was older, a little wiser, and still as dangerous as ever. Even the West Side Boys conceded him his turf.

  Time had not mellowed Fat Mancho either. He still stood in front of his bodega, snarling and screaming at all who passed. But time had also brought him another wife, a new social security number, one more apartment, and another monthly disability check.

  Bars and restaurants still dotted the neighborhood, though many were new, designed to draw an uptown clientele. But the best establishments were old and frayed, and among them, the Shamrock Pub on West 48th Street, with the sweetest Irish soda bread in town, was the finest place to eat in Hell’s Kitchen. It was a joint that kept true to the past, where a local could run a tab, place a bet, and even spend the night on a cot in the back. It was also a place where a secret could still be kept.

  The Shamrock Pub was unusually crowded for a late Wednesday night. Two men in outdated suits, ties undone, sat at the center of a wooden bar that ran the length of the restaurant, each clutching a sweaty Rob Roy, arguing about the economic policies of President Jimmy Carter. An old, raw-faced Irishman in a heavy wool coat sat at the far end of the bar, nursing his third beer, pointedly ignoring their conversation.

  Five leather booths faced the bar, each positioned next to a window and lit by lanterns hanging overhead. Four circular tables draped with white tablecloths lined the rear wall. Framed photos of champion race horses hung above them, along with tranquil Irish settings and a color portrait of the restaurant’s original owner, a sour-looking Dubliner named Dusty McTweed.

  The Shamrock Pub was a neighborhood institution known to all who lived or worked on the West Side. It catered to an odd assortment of locals, publishing types with a taste for ale, beat cops with a thirst, tourists, and, in recent years, to the volatile members of the West Side Boys.

  A young couple sat at one of the tables, their backs to the bar, holding hands, a half-empty bottle of white wine between them. Another couple, older, more friends than lovers, sat in a front booth, their attention fixed on their well-done lamb chops and second basket of Irish soda bread.

  Two waitresses in their early twenties, wearing short black skirts and white blouses, stood against a side wall, smoking and talking in whispers. They were actresses and roommates, earning enough in tips to pay the rent on a third-floor Chelsea walk-up. One was divorced, the other had a relationship with a long-haul trucker with a drinking problem.

  There was one other customer in the restaurant.

  A chunky man in his late thirties sat in the last booth. He smoked a cigarette and drank a glass of beer while the meal in front of him cooled. He had ordered the day’s special—meat loaf and brown gravy, mashed potatoes, and steamed spinach. He had asked for a side order of pasta, which was served with canned tomato sauce. On top of the sauce he had placed two pats of butter, turning the overcooked strands until the butter melted.

  The man had long, thick blond hair that covered his ears and touched the collar of his frayed blue work shirt. His face was sharp and unlined, his eyes blue and distant. The shirt of his uniform was partly hidden by a blue zippered jacket with Randall Security patches on both arms. A .357 Magnum revolver was shoved into his gun belt. A small pinky ring decorated his right hand.

  Putting out the cigarette in an ashtray lodged between the glass salt shaker and a tin sugar canister, he picked up his fork, cut into his meat loaf, and stared at the television screen above the bar. The New York Knicks and the Atlanta Hawks were playing their way through a dreary second quarter on the soundless screen.

  Outside, a crisp fall wind rattled the windows. The overhead sky threatened rain.

  It was eight-fifteen in the evening.

  At eight twenty-five P.M., two young men walked t
hrough the glass and wood doors. They were both dressed in black leather jackets, black crew shirts, and black jeans. One was bone-thin, with dark curly hair framing his wide, handsome face. He wore black gloves, the fingers on each cut to the knuckle, and a pork-pie hat with the brim curved up. He had a half-pint of bourbon stuffed in one back pocket of his jeans and three grams of coke in a cigarette case in the other. He was smoking a Vantage and was the first one through the door.

  The second young man was heftier, his black jeans tight around his waist, the open black leather jacket revealing the bulk of his neck and shoulders. His mouth was hard at work on a wad of chewing tobacco. He wore a longshoreman’s watch cap atop his light brown hair. His calf-length black boots had a fresh spit shine, and he walked into the tavern favoring his right leg, damaged in childhood.

  The bartender nodded in their direction. He knew their faces as well as most of the neighborhood knew their names. They were two of the founding members of the West Side Boys. They were also its deadliest. The thinner man had been in and out of jail since he was a teenager. He robbed and killed at will or on command and was currently a suspect in four unsolved homicides. He was an alcoholic and a cocaine abuser with a fast temper and a faster trigger. He once shot a mechanic dead for moving ahead of him on a movie line.

  The second man was equally deadly and had committed his first murder at the age of seventeen. In return, he was paid fifty dollars. He drank and did drugs and had a wife he never saw living somewhere in Queens.

  They walked past the old man and the couple in the first booth and nodded at the waitresses, who eagerly smiled back. They sat down three stools from the businessmen and tapped the wood bar with their knuckles. The bartender, Jerry, an affable middle-aged man with a wife, two kids, and his first steady job in six years, poured them each a large shot of Wild Turkey with beer chasers and left the bottle.