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.
But the worst part was the loneliness. Tim's former friends, the boys in his gang, wanted nothing to do with him – he had turned soft, they said, had become goody-goody. "Asskisser," they would whisper to him as they passed him in the halls. Having lost all his old friends, Tim had tried to make new ones, seeking out the best students, those who seemed to have some chance of escaping the ghetto, but the serious students mistrusted him as much as his old friends. It was strange, Tim thought: the people he wanted to associate with him saw nothing but the old Tim, while his former friends could see only how he had changed.
Eventually Tim gave up. The loneliness and lack of support was too much for him; he just couldn't do it all by himself, with no help from anyone. He returned to the gang, quickly asserting himself and regaining his leadership position. The boys were older now, and their criminal schemes became more elaborate, their techniques more sophisticated. Within a year they progressed from car theft and burglary to protection rackets and narcotics dealing, from pickpocketing to armed robbery, from knives to guns. On his twentieth birthday Tim was arrested for robbing a liquor store. An underworld friend of his bribed the judge to release him without bail, and Tim left Brooklyn the day before his trial, headed for the West Coast.
Tim's shrewdness and physical capability had attracted the attention of the Brooklyn syndicate. When he left for Los Angeles, one of the syndicate chiefs gave him five hundred dollars, and a telephone number. "When you get to L.A.," he had said, "call this number. Ask for Jay; he'll help you out."
The day he arrived in Los Angeles Tim called Jay Snyder. "I've heard about you," Jay had said. "Come around and see me at my office tomorrow morning." Tim had spent the rest of the day hitch-hiking around Los Angeles, going to the beach, even stopping at Disneyland. California was unbelievable, he had thought. There was ocean and sunshine and beautiful gentle mountains, trees and flowers everywhere. And the women! Every one of them, it seemed, was tall and tan and blond, with long golden thighs flashing out from beneath their mini-skirts. This, Tim thought, is definitely not Brooklyn. I think I'm going to like it here.
He took a room at the Beverly Hilton, went to see Jay Snyder the next morning. "They tell me you're smart and fast," Jay had said. "I'm looking for guys who are young and smart and fast. There's room for you here, absolutely." He had given Tim a job as a driver, promising him that if he did a good job and kept quiet he would quickly be promoted.
Within a few months Tim had found out all about Jay Snyder, all about his "organization". He fronted as a respectable businessman, owned several nightclubs on the Sunset Strip and several more in Torrance, was frequently seen on the society pages of the newspaper – "Jay Snyder Donates $50,000 to Symphony Fund", "Entrepreneur Jay Snyder and Mrs. Samuel Kruger at the Opening of the Kruger Pavilion", and so on. But behind this facade, Jay Snyder was one of the most vicious gangsters in America, and his specialty was white slavery and prostitution. He was particularly adept, Tim had discovered, at convincing young girls that he could help them get movie contracts, making them believe that if they just sold themselves for a few months, "to the right people, of course", that they would be assured of fat contracts and eventual stardom. In every case, of course, the months turned into years, and the starry-eyed girls turned into hardened professional prostitutes.
And Tim had fared no better. His salary as driver was small, almost pitifully small, and the promised promotions never came. When he threatened to quit, Jay had laughed at him, had told him that no one in town would touch him when Jay got through spreading the word. So Tim had stayed on, hopelessly, doing his job, living in a senior citizens' hotel in Venice, eating in run-down diners like this one.
The barbecued beef had grown cold. The cook stared at him: "Something wrong with your sandwich, buddy?" Tim shook his head. There bad to be a way out of this life, he thought. There had to be. He could never hope to become a doctor now, but at the very least he could quit Jay and get an honest job, save a little money, maybe find a girl and buy a house. Quit Jay? Tim laughed to himself. Just how was he going to do that? The gangster had him lock, stock and barrel. No, there was no way out, not with Jay around.
Not with Jay around…