The Rat That Got Away: A Bronx Memoir

9. Gains and Losses

9 Gains and Losses Even as I was enjoying this new life that I’d never imagined, I was on the wrong road and going nowhere fast. My heart was down, my head had been turned around, and I’d lost the best friend I ever had. I felt I had turned my back on the Lord, and it hurt. Gone were the days of feeling good inside. They had been replaced by time spent in the pursuit of sex, another kind of high, one fueled by drinking and partying and the thrill of life on the streets. My mother tried to get me to start going to church again, urging me to go to confession so I could receive Holy Communion on Sunday. But I could not imagine having the courage to confess the truth: ‘‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. I just paid to get a blow job on 42nd Street, I liked it, and I have been chasing pussy ever since.’’ It was not so much losing the Church that broke my heart. It was losing my personal relationship with God. You see, whatever I was doing in the past, I felt He had always been there, a living presence within me. But now I felt dead inside. I was too proud—and too ashamed—even to tell Him I was sorry. My loss of faith, along with the Souza fight, made me feel truly alone. I wasn’t afraid. I just felt that something was missing in my life. I walked around the Projects at will now. Everybody had seen me around with Tiny Archibald, Ray Hodge, and Floyd Lane, so they knew that I was a serious ballplayer, and that carried weight in the Patterson Houses. You had to have something going for you in order to get respect. I was also shrewd enough to realize that hanging out with a crew of brothers has its drawbacks. They would always travel in a group and do shit together, 44 Gains and Losses 45 and there was always a leader or a person who ran the program. Instead, I decided to be my own boss and to come and go as I pleased. I would hang out with everybody, laugh and party, but I maintained my independence and made my own choices. As crazy as I was, I knew I wasn’t just an ordinary child of the streets. A constant battle between good and evil went on inside me, and my narrow escape from death in the window incident when I was a small child was always in the back of my mind. Deep down I believed I’d survived for a reason—that God was somehow behind my being alive. Meanwhile, what I was seeing on TV in 1963 during the early years of the civil rights movement was changing my attitude toward the Church and toward many other things as well. All around my house and in my new school, Clark Junior High, people were talking about the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., who was fighting for civil rights. Until that time, like most people at Patterson, I wasn’t paying much attention to color because around the block, everything was cool. But little by little black people in the Bronx were starting to get fired up about the way white people were attacking civil rights protesters in the South, and their anger was affecting the way they saw white people who lived and worked in their neighborhoods. After seeing television news footage of black children in Birmingham, Alabama, being attacked by police dogs and pushed against the walls with water hoses, we began to realize we had a problem on our hands. Of all the outrageous images I saw during that shameful era, the photograph that stands out most in my memory is one of a police officer holding a black boy by the shirt while letting his dog bite into the child’s stomach, all with the approval of Police Commissioner Bull Connor. I couldn’t help but think, ‘‘They all go to church, just like me, and they pray together every Sunday, yet they can treat a human being like that. Are there two Gods, a black and a white one?’’ I decided right then and there that if they planned to kill me, I would not let them do it in God’s name! On the streets of the Bronx and Harlem, this growing anger took the...