Common Ground (85 page)

One humid evening in early July, Richard and his friend were ambling down Holyoke Street, sipping 7-Ups, when they noticed the crowd around the Harriet Tubman House gleefully pointing in their direction.

“Oh shit!” his friend exclaimed. “Looks like it’s our night.”

By the time they reached the steps, the rest of the gang were shifting impatiently, eager for the chase.

“Hey!” cried Richard, playing for time. “Give me a chance to finish my soda.”

“No way,” said a kid named Ray, already consulting his watch. “You got fourteen minutes twenty seconds and counting.”

Turning tail, the pair fled up Holyoke Street to Columbus Avenue, where they separated, his friend heading north toward the Hancock Tower, Richard south toward the brick spire of Union Methodist Church. Dodging right on West Newton Street, then right again on a narrow alley by the railroad tracks, Richard found a corrugated-tin shed containing two garbage cans. Pulling the pails apart, he wedged himself in between, and for nearly half an hour he squatted there, inhaling the stench of sour milk and rotting vegetables. When his legs cramped and none of his pursuers appeared, he decided to risk a different strategy. Part of Columbus Avenue had been blocked off that week for a street fair sponsored by “Summerthing,” a mayoral program designed to keep the city cool through the long, hot summer. Under a canopy of colored lights, vendors sold ethnic food and soft drinks, while jugglers, clowns, and a black rock group called Soul on Ice provided entertainment. Seeking protective camouflage, Richard plunged into the youthful crowd around the bandstand.

As he was congratulating himself on his cunning, he felt a tap on his shoulder. Wheeling around, he confronted two grinning members of the gang. “Hi there, Rich,” they chortled. “How ya doing, fella? Why don’t you come along with us.” Grabbing him by the elbows, they propelled him down Holyoke Street to Tubman House, where the rest of the gang quickly assembled. Pinning him against the building, his friends pummeled him on the arms, shoulders, and legs—hard knuckle chops which left painful bruises. Ray finished him off with a rabbit punch to the biceps.

The game was a grotesque parody of black aggression. As in the ghetto riots of the sixties, when blacks burned and pillaged their own communities, the gang members had been venting their rage on each other. But there was nothing to be gained from that, they realized, so gradually they turned their anger outward, seeking satisfaction—and profit—in the white world.

By then, Richard was at English High School, caught up in the turmoil of the Afro-American Society, seeking to extract reforms from the white administration, sometimes even coming to blows with white boys in the corridors. Often in those years he could feel a hatred for white people welling up within him, and every confrontation only heightened that feeling. One evening, coming
home through the Boston Common, a gang of whites chased him all the way to Dartmouth Street, shouting racial epithets. There was something very wrong in America, he thought, if a black kid couldn’t even walk the streets of his own city. If that’s the way it was going to be, then maybe his street skills would come in handy, earning him a measure of revenge.

Richard had robbed white people long before that. When he was only twelve, growing up in the Orchard Park project, he began snatching purses on the Elevated. His friends took black and white women’s purses indiscriminately, but even then Richard hadn’t liked stealing from blacks—the money he took might be all they had to feed their children. It wasn’t until he moved into Methunion Manor and joined the Holyoke Street gang that he began branching out, turning his talents to a skein of street “hustles.” In the black world, “hustling” covered a multitude of minor crimes—from snatching purses and picking pockets to gambling and drug pushing—all informed by the hustler’s conviction that he could get something for nothing.

Money remained scarce in the Twymon household. For some years, Rachel’s Aid to Families with Dependent Children grant had averaged about $500 a month (supplemented monthly by $178 worth of food stamps, for which she paid $105). Even after she went to work full-time in Methunion’s office, taking home $108.95 per week at the start, the family’s economic situation scarcely improved, for her AFDC check was simultaneously reduced to $154.30 a month, leaving her about $580 a month to feed, house, and clothe herself and six children. The kids helped out now and then. One summer Richard worked on a
Globe
delivery truck, earning ten dollars a week. But well-paying jobs were virtually impossible for a black teenager to find. Any hustler with a modicum of skill and daring could do much better on the street.

That fall of 1971, the Holyoke Street gang adopted a song which encapsulated the hustler’s ethos. On cassette decks and stereos, they played the O’Jays’ “For the Love of Money” so often they knew it by heart and could sing it in unison:

The mean green was all around them then, fluttering in the breeze, ripe for the plucking. It was over on Boylston and Newbury streets, where the rich folks did their shopping at those cute little boo-tiques. It was up at the Sheraton-Boston, where conventioneers waddled through the lobby, wallets bulging in their pockets. It was along Massachusetts Avenue, where white Johns came looking for a little black action. And it was just across Columbus Avenue, where white couples had bought up the old rooming houses, pushed poor folks into the streets, then built their own little suburb in the heart of the city. Everywhere they looked, Richard and his friends saw money, white money, just waiting to be ripped off by bad dudes who knew how to hustle.

The gang which began on Holyoke Street and later hung out in the Soul Center was never closely knit. Around a core of four or five regulars assembled another dozen or so teenagers, from as far afield as the Castle Square housing project. Rarely operating as a unit, they split into two-man teams for their forays into the white community.

Richard and his partner prowled the white perimeter, seeking targets of opportunity. They might trail a likely looking mark for several blocks, waiting for a dark, deserted stretch, only to have him enter a crowded store or restaurant. Once, as they were about to strike, their target turned and glared at them as if he knew exactly what they were up to. Startled, they abandoned the chase.

One cold November evening on the Prudential Center plaza, they pulled off their first successful holdup. Lurking in the darkened shopping arcade, they noticed a white businessman gazing into a store window. They were so nervous they shouted simultaneously, “Give me your money!” Fortunately, the businessman was even more terrified than they were. His voice quavered as he begged them not to hurt him, his hands shook as he handed over a wallet containing eighty dollars. It was all so absurdly easy the boys had to laugh.

Once they got the hang of it, they realized they had everything working in their favor. Like the Vietnamese jungles to the Vietcong, the streets of the South End were their natural habitat, a tangled wilderness from which they could launch deadly ambushes, in which they could quickly take refuge. Fleeing from the Back Bay into the South End, for example, they knew which
streets dead-ended at the railroad tracks, creating perilous cul-de-sacs, and which led to pedestrian footbridges, providing ideal escape hatches. Or, coming from the other direction, they knew which doors of Methunion Manor were usually left open, leading to a friendly apartment. They knew every corner and alley, fence and fire escape, for blocks around, while their white victims, like a clumsy army of occupation, stuck to the floodlit thoroughfares.

Again, like guerrillas, they kept their prospective targets under observation, learning their habits, and patterns of movement. Priding themselves on knowing far more about the interloper than he did about them, they cased the liquor and fancy food stores, watching the routes that whites took coming and going. They watched for men who drove foreign sports cars, wore suits, and carried briefcases, women with fur coats and gold bracelets. They kept an eye out for Chinese, who were said to carry lots of cash because they distrusted banks; they shunned Italians, who might be tied to the Mafia; they scoured the alleys for winos, whom they called “Irish,” as in “Let’s go rob Irish.”

Of all the whites who strayed onto their turf, the wealthiest were the season ticket holders at the Boston Symphony. Every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday night during the winter season, they paraded through the Greek portico of Symphony Hall in their Chesterfield coats and pearl necklaces. Extra police patrolled Massachusetts and Huntington avenues on those occasions, but Richard and his pals learned to linger in the deserted side streets, waiting for the concertgoers to return to their cars. You could strike it rich back there, as Richard and David did one evening when they relieved an aging music lover of his elegant gold watch and a butter-soft calfskin billfold containing $350.

Richard didn’t suffer greatly from remorse. Whites could always get more money, he reckoned; the guy he took $100 from probably had $50,000 stashed away in his safe-deposit box. Anyway, as every merchant knew, you couldn’t afford to have a heart in business. If ripping off white folks was your business, that’s what you did, you ripped off white folks.

The easiest targets of all were the white hunters who cruised Massachusetts Avenue looking for black prostitutes. Afraid to draw attention to themselves, they invariably surrendered their money with little protest. But the pimps on the avenue resented the holdup men, fearing they would drive away the white trade. One night, after Richard and his partner had moved in on a meek little hunter with a fat wallet, a pimp named Sweet Lou started hollering at them, “Hey, don’t do that shit around here!”

“What the hell you talkin’ about, man?” shouted Richard, who loathed pimps for selling black girls to white men. “Look at the stuff you’re doing out here. Don’t tell us what to do!”

“I’ll kick your ass,” blustered Sweet Lou.

“Kick whose ass?” Richard said, advancing on the pimp. “We do all the ass-kicking round here.”

“Hey, brother,” the pimp hollered, retreating down the sidewalk, “I didn’t mean nothing. Okay? No offense.”

Richard never carried a gun—that was for the professionals—but he often
came armed with a fruit knife, a sharp little shiv that scared the hell out of his victims. Working the side streets off Columbus Avenue, his partner would grab the mark around the neck, yoking him with his elbow, while Richard advanced on him with the fruit knife, whispering, “Give it up, man, give it up.” People usually complied with alacrity.

He had to be very careful, though. If the cops ever caught him with a weapon like that, his chances of a felony conviction would double or triple. One night, they’d held up a guy on Worcester Square and were sauntering down Massachusetts Avenue when a policeman yelled, “Hey you two, stop right there!”

With a reflexive jerk, Richard tossed the knife onto a grocery store roof.

The cop never noticed. “Okay,” he bellowed. “You know what to do. Up against the car. Spread those goddamn legs.”

Finding nothing, the cop let them go with a grudging apology. “Funny,” he growled. “You look just like some guys we’re out to get.”

As they stalked the South End in search of appropriate targets, their attention was inevitably drawn to the town houses which had recently replaced the rooming houses along many of its side streets. From the darkened sidewalks on a winter’s evening, their bay windows blazed with light, warmth, and un-imagined luxury: chandeliers, oil paintings, African carvings, French tapestries, Chinese vases, ivory chess sets, leather couches, marble fireplaces topped with silver candelabra, all the insignia of the new urban middle class. Richard and his friends had never glimpsed such finery before, except in the movies. It stirred complicated feelings—envy, resentment, anger, and desire. Before long, they set out to get some of it for themselves.

Having graduated from purse snatching to mugging, Richard now specialized in burglary. The gang’s best “B and E” man, he prided himself on his spiderlike agility and deft touch. Strictly a second-story man, he let the chumps have the first floor, where you ran the greatest risk of setting off a burglar alarm or being spotted from the street. He’d go up a fire escape or over a rooftop, jimmy a window or break through a skylight, and be in and out in five minutes, taking anything he could get into his canvas bag—cash, jewelry, silver, a television set, or radio. Occasionally, he and his friends pulled off something more ambitious. Once, they broke into a burned-out building and, with ropes and pulleys, removed an air conditioner from an upstairs window. Later, they even tried their hand at burglaries in the western suburbs. They’d borrow a friend’s car, ride into a preselected neighborhood, and break into a house which looked promising. Occasionally, somebody would be home and they’d have to run for it. On the streets of such overwhelmingly white communities, their black faces often drew curious stares and once a motorcycle cop demanded their driver’s license and registration. But, incredibly enough, Richard was never arrested.