A Gang-Shy Kid Has Me Stymied but Good

    On his way home from playing hooky a 15-year-old city boy named Tony stopped by my office yesterday.  He wanted to interview me, he said, for a paper he was doing at school on juvenile delinquency.

    To appreciate Tony's request fully you'd have to have seen him in person.  The kid looked like a gold-braid authority on the subject already.

    He had the sideburns, the slouch, the don't-give-a-damn swagger.

    He slumped into a chair in front of my desk, dragged professionally on a cigarette which he had brought along for company, and began our little chat by lying, "I'm doing this paper on delinquents for extra credit.  What do you think of them?"

    Before I answered he reached across my desk and lifted a pencil from in front of  me.  Then, apparently noting the confusion on my face, he explained:

    "I'll write down some of the things you say."

    We talked for half an hour but he didn't take a note because, after his first question, he ran out of things to ask.

    So to make the situation a little more bearable for both of us, I did the asking.

    Right away I learned that Tony's "essay" on delinquents was something he'd thought up on the spur of the moment.  I also learned that he was in the tenth grade of one of our city's more troubled schools, and that he'd been ditching since the middle of last week.

    "I'll get away with it," he said.  "I write my own notes saying I got the flu and sign my mother's name.  I'm a pretty good forger."

    There was nothing wrong with Tony's family background.  Nor did he have any particular objection to the work at school.  He got B's and C's, he said.  He had no police record.  In fact, he liked cops.

    "What bugs me,"  he continued, "is the gangs. I get weary of getting beat up."

    So we talked about gangs.  Off the top of his head he listed 11 that were active in his school.

    "I'll fair-fight anybody,"  he said.  "That way you either win or lose and that's it.  But about three-fourths of the guys in school are in gangs and you can't fair-fight them.

    "You deal to meet one guy after school and five or 10 show up.  Soon as the fight starts, they all jump you."

    I asked Tony why — especially against those kind of odds — he didn't steer clear of trouble.

    His reply was an incredulous stare.  "I don't like to fight," he said finally.  "I swear I don't.  I run.  A lot of times, I run.  I don't like bike chains in the mouth or half a dozen guys jumping on me.

    He pointed his borrowed pencil at me.  "You sound like my mother.  She says, 'You leave them alone.  They'll leave you alone.'

    "In some schools — like Hollywood and Marshall — that's the way it is.  I wish I could go there.  But in my school there are too many gangs.  If one doesn't get you, another one will.

    "You don't have to do nothing wrong.  They'll jump you anyway."

    I asked Tony why and he just shrugged.  "They do it to everybody."

    "Did you ever ask any of the kids in gangs why they do it?"  I said.

    Tony shook his head, almost meekly.  "You don't go saying things like that to them."

    The kid came out of his slouch, sitting erect for the first time.  "You know what I'd like.  I'd like to go to one of them schools — the kind you read about in magazines.  Where everybody knows everybody and they get along fine.  Everybody's the same.

    "Country schools, I guess they are," he added.  "Small towns.  Not big cities.  I bet they're nice."

    When somebody tells me that he doesn't look for trouble, that it looks for him, I'm the worst kind of skeptical listener.  but the more I talked to Tony about the jumping, about the fights around his school and about his and other "neutral" kids' attempts to avoid them (by taking the long way home or — like now — by ditching), the more I believed him.

    Apparently, in certain of our gang-infested city schools, even a "neutral" can't avoid an occasional bike chain across the face.

    "I won't join no gangs.  That's no protection.  They beat up each other, too."  Tony told me with frightening sincerity.  "But I don't want to lose an eye or get a knife stuck in me."

    "Then the kid asked:  "How do you keep it from happening"  If you were in my shoes, what would you do?"

    The question was an unfortunate one, because I couldn't give him an answer.  I don't know what I'd do.