His eyes sparkled with a message of hope, and the smallest, quickest smile told me to have courage. All in a rush and for the first time in my life, I felt like someone over the age of fifteen truly gave a good goddamn about my existence. You don’t really know that you’ve been living without that commodity until someone makes you aware of the possibility of it; and when they do, it’s a very peculiar sensation.
The Doctor’s face went straight and stern again as he snapped back around to the judge: “You have said that this boy is a ‘congenitally destructive menace.’ I demand that you prove that assertion! I demand that he be given a new hearing, conditional upon the findings of at least one qualified alienist or psychologist!”
“You can demand anything you like, sir!” the judge responded. “But this is my court, and my ruling stands! Now kindly await the call of the case for which you have been retained, or I’ll hold you in contempt!”
A bang of the gavel, and I was on my way to Randalls Island. But as I left the courtroom, I looked again to the mysterious man who had appeared-out of thin air, it seemed to me at the time-to take up my cause. He returned the look with an expression what said the matter was far from settled.
And so it was. Three months later, inside my leaky brick cell in the main block of the Boys’ House of Refuge, I had that “encounter” with a guard what I’ve mentioned. Now, the simple truth is that you can find a bit of lead pipe almost anywhere if you look hard enough, and I’d found one pretty quick after my arrival on the Island. I kept it hidden inside my mattress, figuring the day would eventually come when one of either the boys or the guards might force me to use it-and the particular bull that finally did will be forever sorry for it. While he was busy trying to hold me down and undo his pants I laid hold of my pipe, and inside of two minutes he had three fractures in one arm, two in the other, a busted ankle, and a mass of bone chips where his nose used to be. I was still going at him, to the encouraging shrieks of the other boys, when a couple more guards finally pulled me off. The superintendent of the place asked for a hearing to decide whether or not I should be transferred to an insane asylum, and word of the incident got out to the press. Dr. Kreizler caught wind of it and showed up at the hearing, once again demanding that no sentence be pronounced without a proper psychological assessment being done first. The judge this time around was a lot more reasonable, and the Doctor got his way.
For two days, he and I sat in an office on the Island, doing little more than talking-and for most of the first day we didn’t even talk about the specific facts of my case. He asked me questions about my childhood and, even more important, told me a lot about his, which went a long way toward easing my discomfort at being in the presence of a man what I was grateful to but who nonetheless filled me with a kind of nervous awe. During those first hours, in fact, I learned many grim facts about the Doctor’s life that almost nobody knew or knows-and I can see now that he was using his own past as a way to coax mine out of me.
It was peculiar: as we talked, I began to comprehend-to the extent that an uneducated young boy could-that I might not just be doing things at random, that maybe I’d decided on a life of crime and mayhem as much out of anger as out of necessity. This wasn’t an idea that the Doctor planted in me; he let me come to it myself by showing sympathy for all I’d been through and even a kind of admiration for my attitude. In fact, he seemed to find the fact that I’d survived what I had and was doing what I was doing not only remarkable but in a way amusing; and I quickly got the feeling that I was providing him with something more than statistics-the man was enjoying himself.
That was the real secret of his success with kids: it wasn’t charity work to him, it wasn’t the kind of wooden-nickel generosity you’d get from mission types. What made troubled children, rich and poor, trust the Doctor so much was the fact that he was getting something out of helping them. He loved it all, really loved spending time and effort on his young charges, in a way that was at least partly selfish. It was like they made the miserable parts of the adult world what he inhabited so much of the time-the prisons, madhouses, hospitals, and courtrooms-easier to take: gave him hope for the future, on the one hand, and pure and simple amusement, on the other. And when you’re a kid, you look for that, for the kind of adult who isn’t giving you a hand just to get in good with Jesus Christ but is doing it because he enjoys it. Everybody’s got an angle, is all I’m saying, and the fact that the Doctor’s was so obvious and uncomplicated made it all the easier to trust him.
At my sanity hearing the Doctor used all the things that we’d talked about to make short work of the idea that I was crazy, backing his claims up with a little theory he’d worked out over the years, one he called “context.” It was the core idea behind all the rest of his work, and the basic gist of the thing was that a person’s actions and motives can never be truly understood until the full circumstances of his or her early years and growing up are brought to bear on the discussion. Straightforward and harmless enough, you might think; but in fact it was no small job to defend this notion against the charge that it ran counter to traditional American beliefs by providing excuses for criminal behavior. But the Doctor always maintained that there was a big difference between an explanation and an excuse, and that what he was trying to do was understand people’s behavior, not make life easier for criminals.
Luckily for me, on that particular day his statements found a receptive audience: the members of the hearing board bought the Doctor’s analysis of my life and behavior. But when he went on to propose that I be enrolled at his Institute, they balked, apparently still feeling that so notorious a young hellion as “the Stevepipe” needed to go someplace where he’d be kept on a shorter leash. They asked Dr. Kreizler if he had any other ideas; he thought about the matter for some two minutes, never looking at me, and then announced that he’d be willing to take me into his employ and his home and assume personal responsibility for my actions. The members of the board grew a little wide-eyed at that, and one of them asked the Doctor if he was serious. He told them that he was, and after some more consultation the deal was set.
For the first time, I felt a little unsure; not because I’d seen anything in the Doctor to distrust but because the two days I’d spent with him had set me to thinking about myself and wondering if I’d ever really be able to change my ways. These doubts nagged at me as I cleared my few belongings out of my cell and headed off through the grim old courtyard of the House of Refuge to meet the Doctor at his carriage (he had his burgundy barouche out that day). My confusion wasn’t eased by the sight of an enormous black man sitting in the barouche’s driver’s seat; but the man had a kindly face, and as the Doctor stepped out of the carriage, he smiled and held a hand up toward his companion.
“Stevie,” he said. “This is Cyrus Montrose. It may interest you to know that he was on his way to the penitentiary-and a fate far worse than yours might’ve been-before we crossed paths and he came to work for me.” (I later learned that Cyrus had, as a younger man, killed a crooked Irish cop who’d been beating the life out of a young colored whore in a brothel where Cyrus played piano. Cyrus’s parents had been killed by an Irish mob during the Draft Riots of ’63, and at his trial the Doctor’d successfully argued that, such being the context of his life, Cyrus had been mentally incapable of any other reaction to the situation in the brothel.)