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plate and downthe-hall toilet.
    Steve had stomped on three and a half years of our lives. I would soon be fourteen.
    On August fourth, my birthday, our old friend Steve, with diabolical timing, made that event unforgettable. Since that chilly dawn in April he had searched the slum streets for his escaped dupes, thirsty for revenge.
    I waited eagerly in the hotel room for Mama who had promised to bake a cake in her white woman’s kitchen. She said she would be home early at six o’clock to celebrate my birthday.
    Well, she came home all right on the seventh of August, from a hospital, with her broken jaw wired, and her body covered with bruises.
    Steve had stalked her and attacked her with his fists and feet and then escaped through the grimy catacombs of the Ghetto.
    All that night and all the next day I crouched in the dark shadows beneath his stairwell gripping a gleaming ice pick. He never came back. He had moved.
    Twenty years later, while idly looking from the window of a plush hotel suite I would see something familiar in the white-haired stooped figure of a garbage collector on the street three stories down.
    I blacked out, when reason returned I was down there on the street in the bright morning sunlight, clutching a pistol, wearing only a pair of red silk pajamas.
    As the garbage truck turned the corner a block away out of range, a small crowd of passersby stood bug-eyed watching the strange scene as Rachel, my main whore, tugged at my arm, pleaded with me to get off the street.
    That was the last time I saw Steve, but I just don’t know, even now, what I would do if our paths crossed.
    Perhaps that beating Mama took was good, as painful as it was. I remember how it worried me in that cruddy hotel room when the hotel’s neon sign outside our window would flash on her face. Her eyes would be bright, riveted on the ceiling, she would be in a trance, remembering, still hot for him.
    As worthless as that bastard was otherwise, he sure must have been a son-of-a-bitch in the bed.
    After all he had done to us, she still had a terrible itch for the bastard. That beating was good for her, it cured the itch.
    Mama had learned a bitter lesson the hard way. The country girl had rolled in the hay with the city slicker and now I saw all of her sorrow and guilt in her eyes.
    We couldn’t go back to the peaceful, green hills of Rockford. She had destroyed a good man back there, a native son. Henry died a year after we left him. Until the grave claimed her, Henry would rise from his own to haunt her in the lonely gloom.
    Mama was desperate to save at least fragments of her image, to hold fast the love and respect I had for her in Rockford. I had seentoo much, had suffered too much. The jungle had started to embalm me with bitterness and hardness.
    I was losing, page by page, the fine rules of thought and deed that I had learned in church, from Henry to the Boy Scout Troop in Rockford. I was sopping up the poison of the street like a sponge.
    I had begun to play Steve’s favorite game, craps, in the alleys after school.
    Dangerously, I was frantic to sock it into every young girl weak enough to go for it. I had to run for my life one evening when an enraged father caught me on his back porch punching animal-like astraddle his daughter’s head. I had become impatient with the unusual thickness of her maidenhead.

2
FIRST STEPS INTO THE JUNGLE
     
    T he slide was greased. I was starting my long plunge to the very bottom of the grim pit. I guess my trip downward really was cinched when I met a petty hustler who was very likeable and we became pals.
    My hustler pal was called Party Time. By the time he was twentythree he had done four bits in the joint. On each fall he had been jacked up for either strong-arm robbery or till tapping.
    He got his moniker hung on him because as soon as he scored for scratch he would make fast tracks to the nearest underworld bar.
    When he got inside the door he would shout, “All right you poor ass