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By Root 1229 0

his job and did not know where he could get some more money. He was legally a fugitive from the orphanage, and in that sense “wanted.” He did not feel “wanted”—he felt very unwanted. He had desires, and nobody was going to drop out of the sky to satisfy them. He tried to milk a little self-pity out of this thought, but it did not work: he had to recognize that he preferred his singularity, his freedom. All right. He knew what he wanted. He wanted some money. He wanted a piece of ass. He wanted a big dinner, with all the trimmings. He wanted a bottle of whiskey. He wanted a car, in which he could drive a hundred miles an hour (he had only recently learned how to drive, and he loved the feelings of speed and control, the sharpness of the danger). He wanted some new clothes and thirty-dollar shoes. He wanted a .45 automatic. He wanted a record player in the big hotel room he wanted, so he could lie in bed with the whiskey and the piece of ass and listen to “How High the Moon” and “Artistry Jumps.” That was what he wanted. So it was up to him to get these things. Already he felt better, just making a list of his desires. That put limits on them. And he knew that every single one of his desires could be satisfied with money. So what he really wanted was lots of money. Say, ten thousand dollars.

He was really in a good humor when he got to the poolhall which was one of his three hangouts (the other two were a street corner and another poolhall), and he ran down the stairs cheerfully, and when he saw his friend Denny Mellon he called out, “Hey, daddy, have you got ten thousand dollars you can loan me?”

Denny frowned and said, “What do you need it for?”

“Houses and lots,” Jack chanted.

“Well, okay. I thought you was going to waste it on war bonds or somethin.”

A few minutes later Jack was involved in a game of tencent nine-ball, and he had forgotten all about his troubles.

Jack was not friendless. Shortly after coming to Portland he found the location of the local hard kids and joined them, and in the gang he had a certain status as one of those who would stop at nothing, one of the really tough boys, like Clancy Phipps and his brother Dale, a leader because (so it seemed to the rest of the boys and girls) there was no proposition too dangerous for him. In Portland the hard kids were called “the Broadway gang” and they hung out at the corner of Broadway and Yamhill. The gang started during World War II, and still goes on. These were the kids who were not liked or wanted enough at their high schools, or who despised school themselves, and who wanted the excitement Downtown promises; the ones who were in trouble with the schools, the police, their parents—nearly everybody—and so gathered together into one loosely knit gang. There were perhaps fifty of them, boys and girls both, and the makeup of the gang was in a constant state of flux; members would vanish into the Army or jobs, or get married, or make friends at their own schools, or go to the reformatory in Woodburn, or leave the state and go to New York or San Francisco; and new members kept coming along, many like Jack, to be recognized and admitted to the group on the criteria of toughness, a lack of conventional morals, a dislike of adults, and a hatred of the police.

Most of them were like Jack Levitt in that they wanted a lot of money and wanted to do anything they pleased, at least for a while; but most of them saw it differently: they wanted to enjoy themselves now, because they knew in their hearts that soon they would get jobs and get married and start having families (like their own), and the fun would be over. If they seemed too noisy, too wild, too defiant, perhaps it was a little out of desperation, because lying before them were endless years of dull existence, shabby jobs, unattractive mates, and brats with no more future than themselves. Jack did not see things this way, and there was no reason why he should have. He did not know who his parents were, and he did not expect the future to be a repetition of the past because that was unthinkable—he at least