The Hoods by Harry Grey Page B

“I wasn't born a big brain. I developed it by reading this and that. I'll let you in on a little secret. Due to my reading a book now and then, you consider me a smart feller, right?”
    “Fart smeller,” he corrected.
    “Okay, okay, don't interrupt, so, compared to you, who don't read anything, I know all the answers, right?”
    “So?” he said.
    “But,” I continued, “compared to people who really read and have an education I am an illiterate, the same as youse guys. Everything is relative.”
    “Relative like Einstein's theory?” Patsy jibed.
    “Yeh,” I said, “like Einstein's theory of relativity.”
    “So you admit you're not the smartest guy in the world? Einstein is?” Cockeye asked.
    “Yes,” I modestly admitted, “I'm the second smartest guy in the world after Einstein.”
    “Okay, enough of that,” Maxie said drowsily.
    We sat for awhile longer, and then went to the next room where we were washed by an attendant.
    Afterward Maxie went into Lutkee's office for about ten minutes. When he came out, he nodded. “Everything is arranged okay.”
    We adjourned to our separate rooms down the hall. I took an uneasy catnap.
    At seven-thirty a.m. Maxie tapped gently on my door and whispered, “Okay, Noodles. Time to get up.”
    I got up with a start. I had a mixed-up dream. I guess I was still under the effects of the pipe. Funny, just a little while ago up in the hot room my head felt pretty clear. Now I felt a little high again.
    We dressed quickly and tiptoed out to the street, using the back way. No one saw us leave.
    We walked towards Yoine Schimmel's on Houston Street for a light breakfast.
    The morning sun was already well over the East River. Busy housewives were at work airing bedclothes from their windows. A woman was shrieking from a top floor. “Iceman. Iceman. Yoo-hoo, Iceman.”
    The iceman stopped his horse and shouted, “Yes, lady?”
    “Send me up for ten cents a big piece ice, please, yes?”
    He answered, “Okay, lady.”
    The garbage men were already dumping stinking refuse into their trucks and throwing the empty garbage cans noisily back to the pavement.
    A tenement door crashed open, and a young boy shot out. He clattered down the stoop. A woman flung open a window, her big breasts hanging loose and exposed.
    She shouted after the fleeing boy. “Jake, Jake darling. Don't forget and be a good boy in school today.”
    The kid didn't slacken speed as he shouted over his shoulder, “I'll be good—in dred.”
    Beaten, middle-aged men, old-looking before their time, trudged off to their sweatshops. An empty sardine can came sailing out of a window narrowly missing a retreating husband off to work. His virago wife at the window shouted after him, “Lieg in dred, Yankel. A broch zu dir.”
    He shouted just one word back at her, “Yenta.”
    Like beautiful flowers that grow in beds of dank earth, smartly dressed girls came trooping incongruously out of the dark, damp, stinking tenements, fresh and daintily groomed for the new day's work.
    Yeh, I was thinking as we walked along, these people are part of the docile element of the slums. Look at them. What a life, living cooped up together in these stinking pigsties. Now they're off to their jobs. Then back again to their ghetto. What a life. I felt sorry for them.
    Look at us. We were spawned here, too, Big Max, Patsy, Cockeye and I. We're part of the East Side, too, and we're starting a new day. Heh, heh, I was laughing to myself. But how different. We're not the docile kind. We're a small hoodlum mob, a unit in a powerful combine of mobs. Yeh, a mob of rebels.
    We walked casually through these dirty, busy streets on our way for coffee and knishes. Just as deliberate and almost as casual will be the grand larceny we are about to commit. I was arguing with myself and wondering, are we the consequence of these surroundings? Mobs don't hatch in the well-to-do sections of the city. Who the hell ever heard of a Fifth Avenue mob or a