No Beast So Fierce Read Online Free PDF Page B

hungry. I’d forgotten them. Now I was ashamed of our casual talk about crime and prison.
    â€œWe’ll be home soon,” Selma said.
    â€œWhere you living?”
    â€œEl Monte.”
    â€œWith your parents?”
    â€œGod, no!” she said. “Mom isn’t there anyway … and the house is as bad as on Court Avenue.”
    â€œGrandma’s in the nuthouse,” one of the boys piped from the rear, causing Willy to glance back and admonish him not to say it that way. “That’s the way you said it, dad,” the boy said, feelings hurt.
    â€œWhere’s Mary?” I asked.
    â€œShe lives a couple miles from us.”
    â€œI suppose your father’s still wrestling with lettuce and carrots.”
    â€œSure … and hoarding his money.”
    The family lived on Court Avenue in Lincoln Heights when I had met them, in a big, gray frame house. I’d run away from nearby juvenile hall with their older brother, Gino. Even then the house was run-down. Ten years later it had a stench that made one nauseous. The walls were coated with grease and grime, garbage rotted for weeks in the kitchen, trash littered the floors. An exterminator was brought in and removed two barrels of cockroaches. The deterioration had come after the children moved out, the girls to their sorry marriages, Gino to the gutter of dope and jail.
    The tragic aspect was that their father was wealthy. An uneducated, dull-witted immigrant, he’d gotten a two thousand dollar insurance settlement in 1932 for losing a thumb and two fingers. He’d bought a four-unit slum dwelling, meanwhile working the fresh produce stand of a market. Property values climbed; he borrowed on what he owned and bought more slum property and kept working. After the severe housing shortage during the war and the postwar boom in Southern California property, he owned three dozen slum buildings, duplexes, triplexes, storefronts.
    As he was lucky with money through no virtue (unless miserliness and tenacious drudgery are virtues), he was unlucky with his family through no fault, beginning with his wife, Jessica. Once pretty, she was already fading when I met her. Her husband refused to buy her anything—and she knew he could afford it. She took to barbiturates, then booze, and became a screaming, slovenly shrew, and sometimes withdrew into the private world of schizophrenia.
    Gino, the oldest son, had been prettyboy handsome, with a powerful physique and curly hair that fell over his forehead. He became a sneak thief junky who stole from friends and family. He once served a prison term for writing checks on his father. The old man had been given the choice of prosecuting his son or accepting the monetary loss. He prosecuted.
    Mary was next … my first girl friend and my favorite in the family—though my taste in women had changed since childhood. She had a tranquil, sweet disposition miraculously untainted by the sordid milieu. Narcotics and crime affected her life but not her basic sweetness. Her naiveté was also her curse, for she lacked the toughness to break clear of the morass. “Nice boys” had never come into the zone occupied by such violent delinquents as her brother, Joe Gambesi, and myself—and our friends. She’d married Joe when she was seventeen. At that time Joe wanted something else from life than crime—but he quickly became what destiny ordained: a dope peddler. It was the sole path he could see to get the material things he craved. His background, too, was bleak. He’d been raised on a pittance of county welfare by a religious-fanatic mother. They’d lived in a single windowless room. Rats sometimes scurried across the floor. The room was rancid from the candles always burning in his mother’s private altar. Joe escaped to the streets and never went to school; he could see no reason to. We met when we were fifteen and I was escaped from reform school.
    Selma had