I Was a Dancer - Jacques D'Amboise [33]
Growing up, we all had moments of juvenile delinquency, but by our teens, the consensus was that Farel was advanced. We imagined he had graduated into the camp of serious criminals.
Rumor on the block had Farel running with the Famwoods, a gang known for toughness, but recently, he had been ostracized. So he formed his own gang, a cluster of flunkies. You never saw them at Mass, Confession, or Communion. At our block games or school activities, they never participated, instead hovered, lurking at the edge of your eye, sort of a bevy of crows clustered on a ridge, sneering at the lesser animals cavorting in the meadow below.
On our block, when you were eight, nine, ten years old, you could join the Guerillas, who acted as lookouts for the Panthers (an older group into petty crimes). As a Guerilla, you blew the whistle and yelled, “Chickie! Chickie!” if you saw a cop or a cop car. Why “Chickie! Chickie!” was chosen as a signal I never knew; it was probably code for “Be scared!” “Danger!” or “Scatter! Make like a chicken!”
At eleven, twelve, and thirteen years old, you could become a Panther and perpetrate petty crimes—shoplifting, rifling through the glove compartments of parked cars, stealing into abandoned houses, warehouses, or boarded-up buildings. Or, down at the railroad tracks, breaking into railroad cars.
Then in early teens, you had a choice, the Vampires, Victory Boys, or Famwoods. Now you left misdemeanors behind and rose to felonies and battles with other gangs in street wars. Handguns were rare, so we made our own. We called them zip guns, and they were dangerous to the user.6
For several years, I managed to fit in some of these gang activities and still make my School of American Ballet classes after school. But by age fourteen, I was taking up to ten classes a week and gang activities faded away.
From the beginning of time, teen years have been difficult, frightening—breaking away from your family, making it on your own, finding your place in society. What will you do? be?
In elementary school at St. Rose’s, the nuns programmed us to believe that when we reached our teens, we had two choices: aim for a secular life (a topic they rushed over quickly) or a religious life (dwelt on with rapture). “Maybe, God will choose you for a special vocation, to join His Church and be one of His.” For girls, this higher calling was to become a nun (married to Jesus). Boys had a chance to become brothers or priests (“Little Jesuses here on earth”). The married life, if one was to choose it, existed solely for the procreation of children, to be brought up in the bosom of the Catholic Church. The nuns implied that being single and secular was fraught with danger and a lesser and unlikely path to heaven.
However, by high school, most of us weren’t thinking about God anymore. Our parents worried about our future and old age. “Security—get a pension.” Their words went in our ears and out again, leaving no mark.
Sex and money occupied all our thoughts.
Outside my schedule of dance classes, I always found time for sports. I would run from my house down to the handball courts in Riverside Park, and play with anyone who was there. I loved swatting viciously the hard rubber ball, and never used gloves, so my hands would bruise and swell. I imagined it made me tough, and it was a small price to pay for the strength of my swings. I was good at handball, right up there at the top, almost equal to our block’s star athlete, Abie Grossfeld.
Late one summer afternoon, heading home from the handball courts, I arrived at a place where Riverside Park abutted the street’s apartment houses—around 160th Street. Farel, surrounded by five of his henchmen, was lurking on the corner.
“Hi Farel, hi fellas,” I said as I went by.
Farel ignored me. He didn’t want to be interrupted; he was busy victimizing one of his crew, a pudgy and awkward red-faced boy with stubby arms. Farel had brought him to tears and was humiliating