The Other
The Other
Warriors of a Lesser God
June 16, 2022
March 11, 2022
The Long Walk Home
The Warriors (1965)
It starts in a cemetery. At night. After shots have been fired.
Six warriors crouched in the shadow of a tomb…
Thus begins Sol Yurick’s The Warriors, his 1965 novel about young gang members in New York City. Young punks. Jerks. Ne’er-do-wells. Thieves. Muggers. Murderers. Family members. Rapists. Lost souls. Children.
The warriors depicted in The Warriors, are all these things. And let us remember each of them. Are they very bad people? Or just young kids searching for acceptance, searching for belonging, who make terrible choices?
Can they be both? When you are confronted by a young person late at night, or a group of them, approaching you menacingly, do you care where they came from? Do you want their story?
The gang members we travel with in The Warriors are from Coney Island, a celebrated outpost of New York City—from the outside looking in—but on the inside is a place of poverty and desperation that breeds young people who need a place to go, and only find more desperation. And a dead-end of violence.
The gang, whose members refer to it as a Family, are called the Coney Island Dominators and they, like gangs from all over New York City, have been summoned by a Beatles song on the radio to the Bronx which, being from Coney Island, feels about as foreign as Iceland, for a summit of henchmen of the city’s underground.
At the gathering, the gang members consider a plot to take on the Other. The Other. It sounds like a demon. Or an alien. And to these young men the Other is indeed those things because the Other is everyone else; police, schools, society, everyone who is not them. The leader of the Delancey Thrones, the largest gang in New York City, tells the assembled warriors “…hard work is not rewarded.”
The meeting, as far as the warriors, gang members, are concerned, starts off promising but does not end well. Fights break out, shots are fired. Chaos. ….as if only terrific motion could make them less frightened.
Yurick never forgets to reminds us that these kids are frightened. Even when they commit their horror.
Police descend, the warriors run, pandemonium dictates the hour, late at night on the 4th of July, as fireworks explode all over New York City, all over America, as the young and the dangerous make a frenzied sprint for home. And, for the Coney Island Dominators, the first stop on that journey is a graveyard.
Something rustled in the grass…a rat maybe. Rats eat corpses. That made them feel better; they all knew and understood rats.
They escape the insanity of the gang summit but then the true test begins, the journey home. Whose Motherland was this anyway?....The Junior took out his comic book and started to read…it was about ancient soldiers, Greeks, heroes who had to fight their way home through many obstacles… Yurick reaches back to 370 BC to the Anabasis, by the Greek soldier and writer Xenophon, as a metaphor for this modern day crossing through savage lands.
The comparison is not needed, but is still welcome. Here, Yurick is almost showing off his intellect but that’s acceptable because Yurick, who worked as a time as an investigator for the New York City Department of Welfare, has more than done his true homework, gathered vital empirical material. We see this on every page, in nearly every sentence, of how these kids make their mad dash to their Motherland.
And along the way, as we’ve alluded, they not only encounter trouble, they invite it. They create it.
About midway through The Warriors we almost stopped reading it because this epic adventure, this tale of tragic protagonists in New York City in 1965, gives us murder. Not self-defense, not combat, not a conflict that escalated, but murder. It is outright, cold-blooded murder, the worst urban nightmare imaginable. An innocent person walking down the street is set upon by a gang of thugs who kill without mercy, without hesitation, without conscience. And almost worst of all, without even great satisfaction. They take a human life as if swatting at a nagging mosquito on a hot summer night.
And then what follows a vicious murder? A gang rape.
And not long after that, another gang rape and mugging.
And these are the good guys.
It’s a challenge to keep reading, keep caring, for characters who do these things but Yurick is no poet, and certainly not an apologist. This is the world of The Warriors. These are things they do and the view from here is that while such a world can be asked for an apology, it does not call for an explanation.
The explanation for such violence unfolds without exposition from Yurick, but rather is conveyed in extraordinarily vivid detail. The subway, the people, Times Square, the noise, the night, the darkness, the anguish. The odyssey of spectacle, of poverty, racism, rape, addiction, pedophilia, human trafficking. Terror.
We are glad we did not stop reading, because damn, what a ride this brilliant and blunt writer takes us on. And good God, what a payoff.
Where do these punks come from? How does this sadness get such troubling energy? We read. We learn.
He wanted to say something, but it was too hot and smelly, and he didn’t know what to say and if he talked, he was sure he’d cry.
The Warriors is a recital of lunacy. A study of frustration and defeat dripping with Technicolor tumult. It’s a subway ride as 4th of July fireworks illuminate an America struggling to find everyone a seat at the table.
It’s a reminder to be wary when you walk the streets alone. --TK
Thursday, June 23, 2022