Free Sleepers by Lorenzo Carcaterra

interested in
looking
in.
    Two nights before the show was scheduled to arrive, we would go up to the street-level windows and, using a ratchet screw Michael had taken from his father’s tool chest, would bore small holes into one of the windows. While we worked, Carol reluctantly stood watch. Within minutes, we had four holes in the window, one for each of us to press an eye onto.
    On opening night, while crowds of families lined the front of the Garden waiting to see the skaters perform, my friends and I stood outside, bent over the window, one eye in each hole we had made, our mouths open wide, our imaginations running at full throttle, watching two dozen beautiful women, almost naked, get into their skater’s outfits.
    “This,” Tommy said with assurance, “is what heaven must be about.”
    “In heaven they let you in,” Michael said.
    “Or at least give you chairs,” John said.
    For the three weeks of the show’s run, my friends and I never missed our chance to see the Ice Capades.

7
    W E WERE WELL schooled in revenge.
    Hell’s Kitchen offered graduate workshops in correcting wrongs. Any form of betrayal had to be confronted and settled. Our standing in the neighborhood depended on how quickly and in what manner the reprisals occurred. If there was no response, then the injured party earned a coward’s label, its weight as great as that of any scarlet letter. Men, boys, women, girls, were shot, stabbed, even killed for a variety of motives, all having to do with the simple act of getting even.
    The neighborhood had a long and proud criminal history.
    It was the birthplace of some of the more notorious gangs in America—the Gophers, the Gorillas, and the Parlor Mob Boys among them. It was also the home of Battle Annie Walsh, a chain-smoking, quick-tempered woman in charge of a band of female leg breakers. Walsh and her ladies were hired by downtown landlords to collect their past-due rents. On other days they would roam the streets and beat up anybody who caught their perverse fancies. The tabloids referred to Annie’s crew as the Battle Row Ladies’ Social and Athletic Club. The people in the area weren’t as kind.
    Hell’s Kitchen also gave birth to three of the more infamous men of the early twentieth century—Cotton Club owner Owney “Killer” Madden, baby-killer Vincent“Mad Dog” Coll, and Monk Eastman, a shooter who left our streets a wanted man and returned a decorated World War I hero.
    Once upon a time, early in its history, Hell’s Kitchen was one of the more peaceful areas of Manhattan, known for its scenic beauty, wide expanses of grassy fields, stately homes, and cobbled streets. Much of it was farmland. It was
the
place for the moneyed crowds of Greenwich Village to spend lazy summer days playing by the water, picnicking under the stars, watching ships sail across the Hudson. Back then, they called it anything but hell.
    The tenements and slaughterhouses arrived after the Civil War. Gangs, bringing with them the twin demons of graft and corruption, followed at the turn of the century. As the years passed and gangs grew in number, the violence spread. Riots were routine. Apartment doors were sealed shut with fear, the rattle of the newly constructed passing el trains helping to drown out the sounds of even the loudest gunshots. The neighborhood for which John Jacob Astor once, in 1803, paid a purchase price of $25,000, had, by the 1860s, turned into a dank and disreputable place, to be avoided by all but the desperate.
    Out of the rubble of each passing decade rose a leader with a past as colorful as his name.
    There was Dutch Heinrich, bossman of the Hell’s Kitchen gang and a forerunner of famed bank robber Willie Sutton. Dutch never used a weapon, oozed charm and sincerity, and stole only from places known to carry large sums of money and securities. He took the Union Trust Company for $99,000 in 1872, using his gifts of bluff and blarney.
    “One Lung” Curran was considered the