Young and Violent Read Online Free Page A

after his own tail. The other was a cat jumping up in the air trying to catch a rubber ball on a string that was too high for him to reach, see?”
    Marie snorts, “What an imagination!”
    “No, I mean, then he says to me, ‘Baby, if you were a cat which one you rather be?’ See? And I say the cat chasing his tail, cause it’s more like a game, you know what I mean? Lots of cats play that way. One we got in our building is always chasing his tail. So I told him I’d rather be that one than the other one, because the other one couldn’t get the ball he was after, do you see?”
    “So what did Mr. Picasso say to that?”
    “Well, he said, ‘That’s the difference between you and me, Baby. That’s what makes horse races!’ Then he gives me this whack across my rump, like he was being cute, only it was a hard whack, and he says, ‘Why don’t you clear out now, tootsie. Me and the boys got to huddle.’ “
    “You see!”
    “It was two things in particular, Marie, if you follow me. It was all that stuff about the cats, like I’d chosen the wrong one or something. And then, it was the way he came on with this tootsie business, like I was just another girl and he was finished with me for the night, and I could go on home or drop dead or something.”
    “I follow you,” Marie says. “Oh, I get the picture, all right.” She points her nail file at Babe and tells her, “Chuck Gober! Play up to Flat Head, Baby-O, and let ‘em rumble over you. That’ll show Señor Gonzalves. Maybe he’ll get a rock in his head!”
    “You think the Kings would rumble over this?”
    “Baby-O, they’d have to! It isn’t like Gober announced to the world he threw you over. You’re still Gober’s girl on the books, Babe!”
    “A rumble!” Babe Limon says thoughtfully.
    “Sure, Baby-O. They’d have to!”
    “A rumble,” Babe repeats. “A rumble over me!”

III
    They are children and they need our help. They are children and they need our love. Are our children so hard to help and love?
    — REV. ROBERT RICHARDS, ADDRESSING A FORUM ON JUVENILE DELINQUENCY.
    S O I SAYS who the Christ needs ta go ta a whore and take de chance gettin’ rolled when you can get a bim any night de week in a line-up for one skin!”
    “… and just when D.&D.’s got dis hub cap off the Caddy’s wheel, a lousy Friday shows and says you’re unner arres’!”
    “… tole me all dey do out on Nort Brudders Island for a hoppy is give ‘im de cold turkey treatment, f’Chrissake!”
    The smoke pall is heavy in this cellar on 102nd Street where the Kings are congregated. There are a dozen Kings here — sitting on broken chairs, orange crates, a moth-eaten couch with its springs popping from its insides, and a long board supported at each end by empty beer barrels. A naked, dinky electric light hangs on a cord from the ceiling, over a tottering card table at one end of the wide-brick-walled room. Comic magazines are scattered about, along with dice, cards, empty beer and pop bottles, and old blankets.
    This is their clubhouse, and it is not much, but they are lucky to have it. The cellar where the Kings meet is safe; and so are the goods of the newsdealer above them, who lets them use the cellar in return for their guarantee that his store will be “protected.” Still, though they have permission to be there, they are wary of the suspicious nature inherent in coppers, and so they post Owl Vasquez outside, as lookout.
    It is Owl who stills the room now.
    He sticks his head in the door and shouts, “Gobe’s here!”
    There is a scraping of chairs as the Kings pull their sundry seats up nearer to the card table; and the raucous hubbub diminishes to a murmuring undertone, silenced completely in seconds when Owl shouts again: “On your feet! The King of Kings!”
    Into the room Gober stalks, followed by Red Eyes de Jarro and Tea Bag Perrez. Gober looks neither right nor left, and at no one, but marches to the card table, while Eyes and Bag take