Our attention was elsewhere.
The summer Senator Kennedy was killed, I found out my father was a convicted murderer, a wife killer who had served nearly seven years in upstate prisons for a crime of passion.
The week the students at Kent State were shot down, Tommy's father was stabbed in the chest in Attica prison and was put on a respirator for three months.
Michael's mother died of cancer during that summer and Carol Martinez had an uncle who was shot dead in front of an llth Avenue bar.
While thousands of angry war protesters filtered into Washington, D.C., we sat with Father Bobby in a third floor hospital ward, praying for John to recover from a punctured lung, a gift from one of his mother's overzealous boyfriends. The man had had too much to drink and John said more than he should have about it and was given a severe beating as a result. He also suffered an asthma attack and was lucky to escape the night with his life.
One of the earliest lessons learned in Hell's Kitchen was that death was the only thing in life that came easy.
Summer 1967
ELEVEN
The temperature topped out at ninety-eight degrees on the day our lives were forever altered. It was the middle of a summer when the country's mood plunged into darkness. Race riots had already rocked 127 cities across the United States, killing seventy-seven people and putting more than 4,000 others in area hospitals, and neither side seemed ready to give up the battle.
Along with the turmoil came change.
Thurgood Marshall was appointed to the Supreme Court by President Lyndon Johnson after Justice Thomas C. Clark resigned. In return, Ramsey Clark, the son of the retired Justice, was named to the Attorney General's post.
The Six-Day War was fought in the Middle East.
The New York World-Journal & Tribune folded and Rolling Stone published its first issue. Bonnie and, Clyde brought crowds to theaters and Rosemary's Baby kept readers up all night. The Beatles sang 'All You Need is Love', while 'Ode to Billy Joe' suggested otherwise, playing and playing on the radio. Mickey Mantle, limping toward the end of his baseball days, hit his 500th home run, and Muhammad Ali, at the height of his boxing achievements, was stripped of the heavyweight crown for refusing to fight in Vietnam.
We had spent our morning in the cool shadows of a second-floor pool room on West 53rd Street, watching a craggy-faced lug in a T-shirt and torn jeans rack up a dozen games against four different opponents. As he played, he smoked his way through two packs of Camels and finished off a pint of Four Roses.
'Bet this guy could even beat Ralph Kramden,' Tommy said, watching the man side-pocket the six ball.
'Ralph Kramden doesn't play pool,' I said. 'He drives a bus.'
'Not on The Honeymooners, Tommy said. 'In that movie.'
'The Hustler,' Michael said. 'That the one you mean?'
'The one where they break Fast Eddie's thumbs,' John said.
'You need directions to figure out the way you think,' I said to Tommy.
'It wasn't Kramden?' Tommy asked.
'Let's get outta here,' Michael said, looking around the smoke-filled room. 'We're startin' to smell as bad as this place.'
We made a right out of the pool room, late morning sun warming our shoulders, our attention jointly fixed on lunch. We ran a red light crossing llth Avenue, dodged a school bus and two cabs, then eased back into a fast walk in front of old man Pippilo's barber shop. At 51st Street and 10th Avenue we turned left, side by side on the silent streets.
Between us, we had less than two dollars in our pockets.
'Let's go get some pizza,' John said. 'We can tell Mimi we'll pay him down the road.'
'Mimi charges for water! Tommy said. 'He ain't gonna go for any IOUs.'
'We can grab something at home,' I said. 'Leftovers.'
'The only leftovers in my house are dirty dishes,' John said.
'And week-old bread,' Tommy said.
'Why not hot dogs?' Michael asked. 'We haven't hit the cart in a couple of weeks.'
'I don't know, Mikey,' Tommy said. 'That cart guy ain't like the others. He gets pretty crazy when you take him off.'
'Tommy's right,' I said. 'Last week, he chased Ramos and two of his friends all the way to the piers. Almost cut one of 'em.'
'A hot dog ain't worth bleedin' over,' John said.
'We can eat hot dogs or we can eat air,' Michael said. 'You guys choose.'
'Air's probably safer,' Tommy said.
'May even taste better,' John said.
'Whose turn is it?' I asked.
'Yours,' Michael said.
'You think he'll recognize me?' I asked.
'I hope so,' Tommy said. 'I'm really hungry.'
The scam was simple. We'd done it dozens of times before, with almost as many vendors. We picked it up from an Irish crew on 48th Street who used it every summer to score free Puerto Rican ices.
I was to walk up to the hot dog cart and order what I wanted. The vendor would then hand me my hot dog and watch as I ran off without paying. This left the vendor with two choices, neither very appealing. He could stand his ground and swallow his loss. Or he could give chase. This second choice forced him to abandon the cart, where my friends could feast in his absence.
The hot dog vendor at this corner was tall and slender and in his mid-twenties, with thick, dark hair and a round, bulbous nose. A recent addition to Hell's Kitchen, his English was as poor as his clothes, ragged blue shirts and jeans, front pockets frayed at the edges. He owned a Yankee warm-up jacket and soiled cap and wore them on colder days.
The vendor worked the far corner of 51st Street and 10th Avenue, standing under the partial shade of a red and yellow Sabrett umbrella, selling cold sodas, hot dogs and sausages to an array of passing customers – local merchants; longshoremen and truckers, school children.
Seven days a week, late morning to early evening, he was there, plying a trade that was all too easy for us to ridicule.
We never saw the vendor as a man, not the way we saw the other men of the neighborhood, and didn't care enough about him to grant him any respect. We gave little notice to how hard he worked for the few dollars he earned. We didn't know about the young wife and two kids he left in Greece and how he hoped to build for them a new foundation in a new country. We didn't pay attention to the tedious twelve-hour days he endured, slicing buns and sifting through chunks of ice through cold spells and heat waves. All the time stamping his feet on hard ground, to keep the blood flowing.
We never saw the tiny, airless fourth-floor room he lived in, a forty-minute walk from his station, its only comfort a tattered collection of pictures from home, crudely taped to the wall nearest the worn mattress of his bed. We never saw the hot stove, topped by empty cans of Campbell's Pork and Beans. Or the crumpled packs of Greek cigarettes, tossed in a corner trash bin, gifts from his wife, his only stateside pleasure.
We didn't see any of that.
We only saw a free lunch.
'Mustard and onions,' I said, avoiding the vendor's suspicious look. 'No soda.'
He nodded, wary, his eyes over my shoulders, looking for hidden shadows.
'I know you,' he said, accusation more than question.
I shrugged and smiled.
'Can I have two napkins?' I asked, reaching my hand out for the hot dog. 'Onions get messy.'
The vendor pulled a second napkin from its cannister and wrapped it under the bun. He hesitated for an instant, his hand out toward mine, our eyes fixed. We both sensed a wrong about to happen, though we were ignorant of its eventual weight. He shifted his feet and handed over the hot dog. I took it from him and ran.
I scooted past Tommy Mug's dry cleaners and Armond's shoe repair. The vendor, the anger behind his months of frustration broken beyond any reasonable point, gave chase, a wood-handled, prong fork in one hand.