Young and Violent by Vin Packer Page A

do that. And when it hurt, I thought they must be doing it wrong. But when that guy said that, I couldn’t say anything back, or move, or anything. I felt like dying. That’s where I got my inferior complex from.”
    “I’d never go in a line-up,” Babe says. “Never! Not for anything!”
    “I didn’t even get the four bucks. Al gave me fifty cents of the money.”
    “Whatever made you do it?”
    “Geez, Babe, you don’t ask yourself that, you know? You don’t ask yourself that. You’re just a kid and things happen. Geez, I don’t know why.”
    “Yeah, yeah. Things happen,” Babe says. She says, “I didn’t know you had an inferior complex.”
    “From that day on.”
    “Yeah?”
    “I never forgot it.”
    Babe bends down and drops her cigarette in a half-filled cup of cold coffee on the floor beside the bed. “You ought to take some exercises — massage — you know? You can send away a quarter and get a book that tells all about it.”
    “I tried that.” Marie Lorenzi yawns. “They don’t do any good. Geez, it’s ten after one. Here, put my butt out, will you? Let’s get some sleep.”
    “Pleasant dreams!” says Babe.
    “Good night,” Marie answers, “Sleep tight. Don’t let the bed bugs bite.”
    • • •
    Sitting around the coffee table in the living room of the Roans’ apartment up in Morningside Heights, are Dan and his wife, and the Mannerheims.
    “It’s one-ten,” Enid Roan says. “I vote we call it a night.”
    “No, wait — just let me make my point, honey. Look, Nat, I’m not a fanatic. It’s just that I’ve seen these kids — ”
    “Kids!” Nat Mannerheim exclaims. “Kids!”
    His wife says, “Dan, Nat and I just don’t have your zeal. It’s a fine thing to treat youngsters individually; in fact, it’s the only way they can be treated. But to expect to accomplish anything with a gang of reluctant hooligans who don’t even want to be helped — I draw the line there!”
    Dan Roan leans forward and knocks the dottle out of his pipe, holding it in his hand as he talks. “Martha, you and Nat are both psychologists. Child psychologists. I’m just a social worker, more or less. My only point is that all of us should work side by side to tackle this problem.”
    “Why, Dan? It isn’t the only problem in the world. Give me a nice complicated schizophrenic child any day, but save me from a bunch of characters straight out of ‘Blackboard Jungle.’ I wouldn’t know where to begin, and as Martha says, I don’t have your zeal, so I’d probably not get anywhere. No, no, Dan — I’m a Freudian, a real party-line Freudian. One at a time, individually; analysis — that’s the only answer. Otherwise you have bedlam!”
    “We have it now, Nat. Have you ever seen a rumble?”
    “Well, perhaps that’s the answer. Remember the Malthusian theory, Dan? If the population increases more than the means of increasing subsistence does, in time many must starve, or be ill fed — or
rumble.
Rumble and finish one another off. It’s not exactly the Malthusian theory, but it may be nature’s way of taking care of these young hoods. They’ll destroy one another in rumbles. Hmmm?”
    “It’s late,” Enid Roan says. “Let’s call it a night.”
    “Enid’s right!” Martha Mannerheim agrees. Her husband stands up and slaps Dan Roan across the back. “Buck up, old man. You have the weight of the world on your shoulders tonight. These kids are getting you down. Why, they’re probably all home right now, tucked in their beds, dreaming of zip guns.” Nat Mannerheim chuckles. “To say nothing of bims, ah, Dan? Do I have the jargon right?”
    “You have the jargon down pat, Nat.”
    “That’s what would be of interest to me,” Martha Mannerheim muses, “this lingo of theirs. Its origin. It would be interesting to speculate how many of those terms have oral allusions. Somebody ought to do a paper on it.”

V
    Walking cool is importint. For if someone shuld walk by you