We went to Our Lady of Lourdes Grammar School on Aberdeen Street. On the next block, one block past Bushwick Avenue, was Aberdeen Park. We went up there and basically we started hanging out and we became the Railroad Boys. The gang was started around 1955 by the older guys. I joined around 1960, when I was 13. We had a lot of guys in the gang—sometimes we had 40, sometimes we had 60, sometimes we had 100. It was a crazy neighborhood. A lot of shit went on. We quit school at 16, and we went up to the park, we drank wine, and we ran up and down the street beating each other up. A lot of guys got hurt, and a couple a guys got hurt really bad. We had no real guns, just the ones that we made, which were a joke. It really wasn’t a good way to come up, but that’s just the way the neighborhood was. You lived in the neighborhood, you joined a gang. That was it. When you left your house you had to worry about somebody grabbing you and kicking your ass. You usually carried a knife, something to protect you.
I lived on Fulton and Rockaway, which was home to another crew, the Fulton and Rockaway Boys. There were a bunch of white gangs fighting each other. Then, you know, the blacks started coming in and naturally there was tension and we banded together. They banded together too, and that’s the way it went. It was an opportunistic thing.
I got stabbed in the head one day with an umbrella. Wasn’t too much of a fight. There were six of them and two of us. I got my head split open with a piano leg one night too. Wrong place, wrong time. You’re walking down the street, you see somebody that you don’t like, who isn’t in your gang. He might have been black, he might have been Puerto Rican, and then that was it, the shit started. If we caught someone, we gave ’em a beating.
We didn’t have rules or initiations. There would be a fight set up, and we told you to be there at seven o’clock. You showed up at the park at seven and we walked down Bushwick Avenue and we’d do what we had to do. In the back of the park there were freight trains that ran underneath and there was one tunnel that was closed off due to an explosion. A couple times, we’d take somebody down there and leave ’em, maybe tied up, and he had to get out by himself. But that was once in a while, you know? There were no real initiations. You came, you hung out, you drank a bottle of wine, you went crazy like everybody else. That’s the bottom line. It was just fighting all the time. You know what beer muscles are, right? Once you drink a couple gallons of that wine, you’re ready to go. We went for the cheap wine. After a few of them you could do anything. Take on the world.
One time we were having a fight and we had a couple of guys up on a roof. This guy Georgie Grout, he had a car antenna and he threw it down and this guy must have been, I dunno, 40 feet away? It went right through his forearm. You just couldn’t believe it. It was just a lucky shot and it went right through this guy’s arm. This was from a roof maybe four stories up.
You could also take a chimney apart—grab a couple bricks and throw those. We had a riot on Fulton Street one time, and that’s what we did. We ran up there, disassembled a few chimneys, and took some bricks and some bottles. We went to the roof above this nightclub and when they started coming out, we just rained bottles and bricks down on their heads. This was on Fulton and Rockaway, a half block from my house. I got locked up with another friend of mine. We spent a couple nights in jail. We were the two stupid guys that got caught. Everybody else ran.
When you got caught doing something, they handcuffed you, took you down to the precinct, beat the shit outta ya’, then took the information down. What they had at that time was called the Youth Squad. It was a bunch of detectives whose primary job was to try and keep tabs on the gangs and see what was going on. They gave you your JD card, which means juvenile delinquent, so that was the label you carried, you know what I mean? Then you were on file. But like I said, yeah, the cops beat your ass. By today’s standards, there would have been a lot more lawsuits. But that’s the way they did it in those days. Did it help? Sometimes. And sometimes it didn’t.
There were real gangsters around too. They ran books, they stole, they shylocked money… They ran the neighborhood, whatever they did. These are the people that we grew up with. You see it firsthand, and it’s all bullshit really. Big car, big wallet, and next thing you know they’re doing fifty years in jail. Or you find them in a car, dead. That’s the way the neighborhood was. That was East New York.
I went into the service in ’66. A lot of my buddies went in. The ones that didn’t go in are the ones that died along the way. Overdosed, stuff like that. Heroin was a big thing in the 60s. It took a lot of people out. Eventually, if you hung out in that neighborhood you tried pills or pot, or whatever other crap came into town. So a lot of guys OD’d. Lot of guys went to jail. I only see a couple guys from the neighborhood now. The rest of them are scattered to the wind.
CONTINUED:
FASHION | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | Next>
