Cities of the Red Night

A bestial roar goes up. The patrons are four-deep around the bar, brandishing clubs and crowbars. The little green man leaps down from the bar.

'What are we waiting for? An invite from City Hall? Let's go!'

About fifty blood-mad men and boys and a few screaming harpies troop out after him screaming: 'Kill! Kill! Kill!'

'How did the riot start?'

'Well, you know how it is with riots. Things build up and up—then something sets it off.' He tosses a chipped glass twenty feet into a trash can. 'The dogcatchers start raiding out of fair-game areas and there is a move by the Hanging Fathers in the City Council to extend fair-game areas. Then two foreign Countesses they call themselves—yeah, Countess de Slutville—buy villas on the mountain and set up something they call the Genetic Institute and there are rumors about transplant operations carried out by this sawbones they have brought in from Yass-Waddah.'

'That would be Van ...' I put in.

'It would. Next thing these two boy-eating sows move in their own Special Police with firearms and pressure the Council into passing an I.D.-card law so anyone who doesn't have an I.D. card stamped and updated can be arrested and hanged in the Institute. So all the boys have to apply for these cards or risk getting picked up anywhere.

'One night five SPs come in here checking I.D.s and they start to drag some kid out. They have guns of course. Doesn't do them much good. The kids is on them with broken bottles, knives, chairs, feet, knees and elbows. Four kids is killed but they take the SPs apart. You can see the bloodstains right over there. Then some little Irish kid I'd never seen before jumps up on the bar screaming: 'What are you waiting for? Waiting to get milked by these foreign bitches like randy cows? Kill! Kill! Kill!'

'The SPs and dogcatchers are barricaded in the Garden of Delight, ready to defend the richies with their last drop of blood, and it comes to that quick enough. They open up with machine guns but the boys just spread out and keep coming, throwing cobblestones and Molotov cocktails.

'Better than a hundred are killed in the few seconds it takes for the rest to swarm over the barricades and cut the guards to hamburger. Then they charge up the mountain screaming.

''Death to the Foreign Sows!'

'Well, the Countesses and their sawbones got their asses out to Yass-Waddah in an autogyro. Their villas were looted and burned to the ground along with most of the other villas. The Hanging Fathers were thrown into the fires along with all the Sirens that could be found. Some of the rich kids was with the mob, so a few big villas are still left. But the richies sure got a new look since then.'

I soon see that there is more here than just a spontaneous explosion of overcrowded poverty-ridden slums. The whole scene has been staged from above to point up the need for a strong police force, and some of the mob ringleaders turn out to be agents of big money.

'A young man in dirty overalls who fought valiantly with the mob was killed by the police and was found to possess aristocratic features, well-cared-for hands and a fair white skin. Though dressed as a laborer in dirty overalls and a filthy shirt, underneath there were fine cashmere pants, a handsome rich vest and a fine linen shirt. His identity was never learned.'

—Herbert Asbury,

Gangs of New York, p. 154

Through the havoc and wreckage of the burning and looted city, through streets littered with the dead and dying, street boys dance and caper like gay insouciant sprites, many of them wearing Halloween masks. A boy in a skeleton suit flops beside a stiff corpse in grotesque imitation.

'You're dead and you stink.' He jumps and capers away.

They prance around a dying policeman and mimic his death throes. 'Whydon'tcha get up and stop the fight?' They snatch his hat and badge, chasing each other.

'Stop in the name of the law,' they mock.