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The Bold Saboteurs

A Novel

OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA

The cops caught me only once, and it took those disgusting hyenas a remarkably long time to do it too. They caught me through Bobo, who squealed. I knew I should never have tied up with the guy. True, he was big and strong but at bottom, he was really quite yellow.

It was the summer when I was sixteen. I had been hanging around Monroe Park with the older drifters and drunks and thieves. You might say that I was their protégé. They let me shoot crap and play cards and take a drink from a pint they chipped in to buy and passed around until it was killed. And in turn I let them in on some pretty neat tricks. I knew where all kinds of stuff could be stolen and how to go about it. We all got on very well. Bobo was the toughest guy around the park; he was a redheaded Irishman and he had a body like a heavyweight prize fighter. He loved to roll up his dirty sleeves and show off his bulging muscles to anybody who expressed even the slightest interest. These fine muscles were the reward of years of laboring in construction gangs. God only knows how many buildings and roads his Irish sweat had helped juice together.

Everybody was scared of Bobo. When he was drunk he would slug you in the mouth for almost no reason. He was a wee bit off his noodle, you see. I was the only one Bobo did not get hard with, and I guess that was because I was so much smaller than he was, and also because he had a fuddled kind of respect for me. I read books and he thought I was very smart. He never read anything except the comics and the sport pages; that's all his orange cranium could take care of. We pulled a few good jobs together, just the two of us, before this time that I was caught. But, all that will come later, in its place.

One night, after we had been sitting around the park all day with nothing to do, just waiting, time smothering us like an evil black smog, Bobo asked me if I wanted to go along with him to visit a nurse he had just met. She was a fat, thick-witted broad and he was sure he could get something out of her, that is, besides a piece of tail. The dumb ones went for him, he was their dream boat. I had nothing better to do that night. None of the other boys were around at the moment to go to the bars with, and there was nothing more thrilling for me at home than my old lady and maybe my big brother Roland. There would probably be just about zero for me to eat at the house, and on top of that I would undoubtedly quarrel with the old lady. So I said all right, I would go with him. I was trying to figure out something I could get from this fat dumb nurse too.

"Tell me if you see any good angles," Bobo said to me on our way to her house.

"Sure," I replied. But actually I was not so sure. I was getting a bit tired of him after an entire summer, and I really did not relish cutting him in any more. If he wasn't smart enough to figure out his own angles, then to hell with him. I had myself to look after.

This new pig of his lived nearly halfway across town, as you would expect, but we had so little dough between us that we could not afford to hop a streetcar, so we hiked it to her place. Neither of us had had dinner, and my stomach was roaring with anguish that I had betrayed it. Just before we got to the nurse's house, we stopped in a diner and had a greasy hamburger and a cup of coffee. That revived me and I felt ready for just about anything.

"She has a terrific ass," Bobo informed me, as we started up the stairs of the brownstone rooming house where our nurse lived "A piece of art," he went on, and described with his arms what this object looked like. "I like women big, something you can get a grip on. I don't go for this skimpy stuff. You get all cut up on the bones."

Big, little, skinny, plump, I thought I liked them all and I told Bobo that. I had not yet reached the discriminating stage. The mere thought of sex was enough to catapult me into a fantasy of wild action.

I stopped at the door and looked over the front of the huge rooming house, casing it. Looking for entrances and exits, fire escapes, the nearness of the next building. You did this sort of thing automatically when you lived as I did. It had become second nature to me.

Bobo knew where Marie's—the nurse's—rooms were and went right to them without having to collar anybody for directions. In the downstairs rooms little women clerks were entertaining little men clerks, striving desperately for some bleak pleasure. They giggled at everything that was said. Ugh.

The house was decorated like a Masons' lodge. On the stairs the head of a moose challenged me from the wall, and I barely restrained myself from spitting into its glassy eye. Bobo was flushing and rubbing his hands in anticipation of the pleasure he was going to have with his Queen of the Bedpans. He kept up a running speculation on how many things she would do with him and how great her capacity might be. I was coldly excited about what I could steal. I wondered how much the moose head might bring, but I decided that it would be too awkward to get away with. I could discipline myself about such matters.

"Play it safe now," Bobo cautioned me. "Don't let her suspect anything. I don't want her to know I'm trying to do her."

Shove it, Bobo! I wanted to say. I knew how to handle myself. I could think rings around that lout. What did he mean by advising me?

Marie was a cow. She greeted us dressed in a loose red housecoat. She could not control her big red face. It kept smiling and smiling and her mouth opened and closed, opened and closed. I looked immediately around her room for her purse and anything else of value. I saw nothing and this depressed me.

"Who's your cute young friend?" she asked Bobo.

"Yogi," he told her, calling me by a nickname that had been slapped on me in the park because I could do somersaults and stand on my hands.

"Are you a Hindu or something?" she said, smiling lewdly at me.

I told her I could be. I never gave my real name if I could help it. I always made one up, it was safer that way. Never let anybody know who you really are; you will live to regret it if you do. I had already learned that. I had hundreds of disguises and tricks to fool the unwary, and at a moment's notice I could become a personality chamber of horrors.

We chewed the fat for a while and then Bobo persuaded Marie to go into an adjoining room with him. He told me to run downstairs and get some cigarettes, making it very plain that I should not rush myself. The itching bastard! When was I going to get my share? I shuffled downstairs and bought the cigarettes at a garish drugstore, whose walls were plastered with suave advice about your bodily functions, and walked leisurely around the block three times, and then returned to Marie's.

In a few minutes she and Bobo came out of the adjoining room, looking as though they had been wrestling on the floors and walls and on the ceiling and under the bed. She was still smiling that uncontrollable stupid cow smile. She seemed deliciously proud of herself. She was whorishly quite desirable, but all my thoughts were on stealing. Bobo flopped on the couch and smoked a cigarette, and I talked to Marie about blood banks and operations; I knew I could have her if I wanted her. She kept smiling at me.

Finally I managed to maneuver jewelry into our conversation, and after a bit I asked her about hers. I said I had heard she had a fine collection, and wouldn't she display it.

"Why do you want to see it?" she asked me, drawing back.

"I'm studying jewelry-making in trade school," I lied. "I like to see new designs."

This creamy explanation relaxed and flattered her. Cellini himself was in her drawing room! She brought out her meager collection. Cheap school rings, graduation presents, signifying advancement to new levels of mediocrity; necklaces, fraternity pins bought with the quick prone position so dear to her ilk. The usual triumph of sordidness, those jewels. I examined each item carefully to determine whether it was worth stealing. The stuff barely made the grade.

Then Marie related to me the stifled, sweaty experiences behind each shiny piece. She must have thought I was compiling a world history of frustration. I felt it was the least I could to listen to these tales of love and success, but it was hard on me, I'll tell you that.

"Now are you satisfied?" she asked me, putting the stuff away.

"Completely," I replied, watching where she put the stuff.

"He's a real connoisseur," Bobo said from across the room. "He knows more about jewelry than a lot of jewelers."

Marie thought this was funny, but I feared she was unconsciously beginning to sniff a nigger in the woodpile. This would be a good time for me to pull out. I went into the little kitchen and made myself a ham sandwich while Marie and Bobo grappled some more, and coming out, munching, I said I had to go home. They didn't want me there anyway; they could hardly keep themselves from going at it full speed right on the couch in front of me. Marie said to come back and see her sometime. That's just what I had in mind, dearie.

The next morning, shortly after everyone else in the world had committed themselves to their daily death chambers of office work, I returned to Marie's rooming house. The place was deserted except for an old hag of a cleaning woman who was down on her knees polishing the stairway banister. She asked me what my business there was.

"I left a letter in Marie's room last night," I said. "I've come back for it."

She examined me and decided I was passable. That was the big thing in my favor! I did not look in the least like a thief. I looked more like a choirboy. Mothers' bosoms yearned for my curly head.

"The door's open," she said, resuming her life's cleaning. "Make it snappy. Don't you fool around in there."

I told her not to worry. Inside Marie's room I quickly picked out the few solid gold pieces of jewelry and put the jewel box back in its place. Maybe she would not notice the robbery for a few days. On my way out I noticed one of Bobo's dirty socks on the floor, at the foot of the bed. So the big slob had slept with Marie all night. I tried to imagine what she would be like in bed. All that blubber! It was sort of exciting in a stinking way.

Downstairs I thanked the old hag for letting me in, and we threw each other loving grimaces. She smelled of floor wax and sweat and old age and anxiety, an almost overpowering blend. From the way she smiled at me, I knew she ached to get her stained unfulfilled paws on me, on my sweet youth, but I slipped past her too fast, and got outside safe.

I beat it out of that district and to the fringe of the Negro district, to money's pimp, the pawnbroker. In the first shop I explained to the proprietor that I was not interested in selling the jewelry, I only wanted to find out how much it was worth, how much its gold was worth. He weighed the pieces in the palm of his hand, and told me about fifteen dollars. I walked around the block to another pawnbroker's. I knew now how much I should get for the stuff, so I could not be cheated too badly. Pawnbrokers never tell you right when you say you want to sell. Cheating is their business.

The little hunchbacked swine in the second cheatery offered me ten bucks for the lot, after disdainfully pushing it around on the counter as though it were dog offal. I demanded fifteen, shouting that I knew it was worth that much.

"It's junk," he said, almost spitting on the stuff. "I'll give you eleven dollars. I'm too tired this morning to argue."

"Fifteen!" I shouted.

"All right, all right. Twelve. You're hurting my eardrums."

"Fifteen!"

"It's almost not worth melting down. Thirteen."

"Thirteen-fifty!"

"Stop shouting," the man said. "All right, thirteen-fifty. I won't make a cent on it. I'm doing you a favor buying it."

I gave him a fake name and address, for the list he had to turn over to the cops on such deals as this, and left with the cash. It had been a profitable haul. I could live luxuriously for the next two weeks on the money. I could eat three good meals a day and gamble recklessly at the park. I felt now that I was coming up from a deep underground cavern where there was nothing but darkness and moist stone, to the bright wonderful surface of life. Thirteen-fifty! I could even give my old lady a couple of bucks. Bobo? Not a cent to that cretin! He had already got his share of the gravy. To each his own kind of ecstatic shudder. I would make my shudder last two weeks. I would copulate with life for that long.

The money made me anxious, put me in heat, and I could not wait to spend it. So instead of holding on until I was in white a section of town, I went into a Negro lunch counter and amid that rich tabu sensuality of color ordered a beef stew and rolls and coffee from a giant black man behind the counter who smiled at me and said, "That's a man-sized meal, son."

"That's my favorite dish," I said. I felt that he was my brother, and that all the others with their chain-gang color were my immediate family.

"All right," he said. "Don't let me see you leave none of the gravy." Several of the men laughed conspiratorially with him and me. They made me feel like Christ and I loved them all. I used two whole rolls wiping up the exotic juices on my plate, to please my friend the counterman. I felt so good in there that I wanted to tell him about the jewelry haul, but I finally turned thumbs down on that enthusiasm. You had to stop somewhere, even with brotherhood.

I made a lot of noise slurping up the coffee, and my black friend smiled appreciatively at me. I tipped him a dime and said so long.

"You take it easy now, boy," he said. "Don't you work too hard."

"Those are my exact intentions," I said, and waved good-bye to him and the other Negroes.

What a first-rate day it was! I thought I would like to see a movie before heading for the park, where I would confer with the gang. I went into the first double feature movie house I saw—and so to dreamland for three hours, with my stomach happy and full and my pockets loaded with cash. For three hours I was Oedipus in a cowboy suit, Achilles with a .45 Browning automatic in my hand and a scar on my cheek, Napoleon in a dive bomber. I watched my gargantuan dreams of love and conquest and betrayal and revenge and savagery come true, and I felt purged and happy.

This was life, not that Sahara Desert outside. That was for suckers.

Bobo was in the park with the gang when I got there later that afternoon. He was showing off as usual, this time by baiting the ancient, half-dead park policeman. "Make believe I'm Capone. Let's see how fast you are on the draw. Go on." He had been pulling this particular stunt ever since he was a nip. The boys had seen it too many times for it to interest them so they started a card game in the summer house. By society's standards, they were all of them failures of one kind or another, but they were the only kind of people I felt comfortable with. Their wounds magnetized my wounds and we were all sick together. A pretty lively bunch of chancres, I must say.

There was Renny, who was a loss both to himself and the world at large. But Renny was so good looking that both men and women paid him money for the pleasure of going to bed with him. One winter he had been kept simultaneously by a banker and the wife of a traveling salesman. Each of them thought he was theirs and theirs alone. Renny actually had sexual interest only in women, but the men were good business, when times were tough, and besides, it amused his warped ego to be what the queers called "rough trade." Renny was to be a great friend to me when all the others failed.

There was Sherry Calder, who had been a tennis champion when he was a boy and was now a disgusting, puking, hopeless drunk, and this particular afternoon he was passed out cold on the croquet field and had pissed his pants. He was a decent sort, but utterly disgusting physically. He sometimes begged on the streets for money. The only person who could stand very much of him was a one-armed bub named Scott. Scott came from rich people and could have been a society playboy, but he preferred the company of thieves and the underworld, a pool table to a cocktail bar, a three-horse parlay to a club cotillion. He always had a copy of the scratch on sheet him. He had once put a man's eye out with the claw on his artificial arm during a brawl over a parking space.

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Excerpted from The Bold Saboteurs by Chandler Brossard. Copyright © 1953 Chandler Brossard. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
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