Chapter 2

Smells of sulfur and grease mixed together as Tim Huntley lit his cigarette. The chef scraped the grill, leaving Tim's barbecued beef sizzling, an isolated heap in the center of the grill. It deserves to be alone, Tim thought, who else would want to eat in this dive?

Tim had been eating in greasy diners, and hating it, for as long as he could remember, ever since the night he and his cousin, both thirteen years old, had stolen all those carburetors. It had been Tim's first arrest, he still remembered the cold, disgusted look on the cop's face as he had shone the flashlight in his eyes, but certainly not his last. He often wondered who was really to blame for that night, for all the nights afterwards. He had done it himself, he knew, although it had been his cousin's idea, but his father's attitude had not helped. "What'd ya go and get caught for?" his father had said. "Christ, you don't even have what it takes to be a good thief."

Always Tim had had to prove to his father that he was good at something, that he was worthy to be called his father's son. When he brought home good grades from school, his father wanted to know why he hadn't been valedictorian, or at least made the honor roll. When he pitched a one-hitter in Little League, his father wanted to know why it hadn't been a no-hitter. The work he did around the house was never careful enough for the old man, the girls he brought home never pretty enough. Everything Tim did his father could do better. There was no satisfying him.

So finally, after he had tried everything else, Tim tried stealing. The carburetor theft, although unsuccessful, had made him a hero at school, and he found that all the praise and support he had been missing at home was available in the schoolyard. It seemed that every boy in school was eager to hear the story of Tim's caper, of the arrest and the overnight stay in Juvenile Hall. Girls he didn't know would point at him in the halls and whisper excitedly to one another, and Tim did not fail to notice the exaggerated swishing of their small, firm buttocks as they passed by.

He tried to keep his head, tried to get on with his studies so that he could someday escape those Brooklyn slums, go away to college and become a doctor. That way, he would be able to help other people and help himself at the same time. But soon after the theft he found that the good students shied away from him, that the only friends he could attract were those who, like him, were on their way to delinquency. Without quite knowing how it happened, Tim became the leader of a gang.

At first, the gang's escapades were more like childish pranks: they reached the limits of their bravery when they spent a Sunday throwing eggs at cars on the throughway. Soon, however, the stunts and pranks took a criminal turn. Under Tim's leadership the boys had begun to steal, first only small items shoplifted from the grocery and variety stores, then on to hubcaps, and finally to cars.

Tim was arrested many times. In the beginning the police treated him well enough, taking him to Juvenile Hall and releasing him after a night and a lecture, but when they saw that their moralizing was having no effect on the boy, they began to turn nasty. The stays in Juvenile Hall became longer, beatings more frequent, and eventually there came the day when the Juvenile Judge looked at him and said, "Son, it doesn't look like you're going to learn." The judge had sent him to the reformatory for six months.

The sentence jolted Tim. He began to think about his life, something he had not done since he had taken over leadership of the gang. He remembered his original goal, his desire to become a doctor. He studied hard in the reform school, took no part in the conversations and plans of the other boys, the endless boasting about thefts and drugs and girls, kept to himself. His standoffishness cost him a couple of mild beatings at the hands of his jealous peers, but they soon stopped antagonizing him and left him alone. His good behavior won him the respect and friendship of several of the staff members, who helped Tim all they could. He was released two months before his sentence was up.

The cook placed the barbecued beef sandwich in front of Tim. As he took a bite, he remembered back to those first few months after reform school, the months just before his seventeenth birthday. Despite his hard work at the reformatory, Tim had found himself far behind his classmates, and he had studied night and day to catch up. His father, as usual, was disparaging of Tim's efforts: "I don't see why you bother trying," he had said, "you'll never make it." Tim simply shut his father's words out of his mind and kept on studying. His teachers took some notice of him, but in general they were far too busy to care--there were seventy- five to a hundred students in each class, and the teachers had time only to grade papers and to discipline the troublemakers, who were almost a majority in every classroom.