jukebox, cigarette machine, a sign saying NO PUNKS ALLOWED

epub or mobi

"I got a double score to settle with you. How do you want it? With this?"

He drew a button-knife and flicked it open. Candlelight streaked the deadly blade. Buck shivered. A hand pressed against his. Something hard rested in his palm. He raised his hand, saw the knife and flung it aside.

Johnny Lip laughed in his face. "Like I thought," he said. "'You're a punk. All your generations are punks."

His followers laughed. Those who sided with Buck stood silent, waiting.

"You're a real punk, a twenty-four carat punk," Johnny Lip went on, sure of himself.

Buck found his tongue at last. "Fists talk. Put the knife away," he said.

"You scared of the stabber?"

"No, I'm thinking of your mom. If you die, she'll have to catch another pimp."

He stepped into the room. The light was dim, the shade drawn. A figure lay on the couch, face up, like a corpse. Orange peels littered the floor, four pop bottles stood on a table - the debris of an addict's sugary appetite.

Flash didn't move. "You hear that sound?" he said, listening to the music. "That's the best."

"You don't get tired of the same piece?" Left-Hand said, nodding dubiously.

"Tired? Man, that's divine. That's Lionel Hampton with his own sound. I go for him."

Left-Hand shrugged. "It's just music."

Got big eyes, a mean wiggle, looks at me like she's going to eat me.

 

epub or mobi, with thanks to the original sharer

JUKEBOX IN the candy store is thumping away. I can hear it from my room through the house. All the windows is open. It's dark already, Saturday night. The whole neighborhood goofed, everybody. Yeah, it's payday. Bottles'll be busting in the street all night, winos brawling, whores walking around and standing in doorways.

Yeah, a crazy night, everybody rich. Tomorrow they'll be poor again, but that don't matter now. Ask my old man. Yeah, if you can find him. Midnight he'll be laying in the gutter. Four in the morning he'll be coming up the stairs. Moms'll be waiting. She going to bust him good. Some day she going to split his head in half.

Who cares?

my old lady'd faint & never come out of it, she knew half the things I done

epub or mobi 

They ate hamburgers, drank coffee and kept talking. It was mostly of Times Square, the penny arcade, the movies. They forgot where they were and what they really belonged to, that dark, bleak world outside, a world of crowded tenements and dirty cheerless streets where drunks brawled in bars and lay in hallways, a world of bickering harassed women who carried the fear of poverty always with them, an area, which in spite of its desolation, knew the threatening pressure and growing pains of another on its border where a darker people lived and brawled yearning to break down the walls of its ghetto.

it's a real rat-trap,but rats live better

                                                                                     

 pdf scan (130 pages/47MB) new link 14/2/12

“It was a time when the New York neighborhoods were filled with these teenage gangs,” Ellson recalled for this author. “Terrific hostility between them, lots of violence, killings. I saw all kinds of mixed up and crazy things at that job, and I took my notebook everywhere I went. I made lots of notes and a lot of the stuff in my topics was just writing down what these young people said.” He wrote the novels in longhand while traveling to and from work on the subway. He wrote 1,200 words a day, 600 on the way to the job and 600 on the way home.

Ellson said many of the kids looked at him as a father confessor and would tell him everything. They knew he could be trusted not to repeat anything to the cops. “After Duke came out they’d be lined up waiting to talk to me, kids accused of a couple of murders, saying ‘Want to hear a good story?’ I got all kinds of shocking stuff from these kids. I had earned their respect, they believed in me, and I never gave them away. If they were in serious trouble I would try to steer them to a psychiatrist I trusted, but I never gave them away.”