Stomping on Breslin's Ground

EVERYONE HAD WEIRD NICKNAMES, and they spent their afternoons conversing in bars, the talk often sentimental and always funny. He was kind to them--maybe he realized that his life could well have been spent behind a Seven & Seven, not a typewriter. But the paunchy columnist who wrote sad humor like no one else ever will could not bring himself to admit that even New York had its share of unredeemable scum, that bum was a nice word for derelict, that plenty of criminals were vicious, not loveable. And, in his whole menagerie, there was one character he never drew--the young punk who laughed at things that weren't funny, the punk who was tough because he liked it that way, needed it that way.

Dennis Hamill infringes on quite a few of the Breslin patents--there is a fat drunk named Fabulous Murphy who pirouettes every block to prevent the victims of his latest scams from sneaking up with blunt instruments. Murphy buys drinks from a bartender named Oscar, except everyone calls him Ocar because he once tatooed himself and left out a letter. There's a big-hearted oaf of a criminal who marries a hooker because he loves her, and there's his mother who thinks love is eggplant parmagiana. The local police force features a sentimental cop, name of 'Ankles,' because he keeps the peace by kicking transgressors in the ankles with his size 14's. This is, after all, what you'd expect; Hamill is, as they say at Aqueduct, out of Breslin by brother Pete Hamill, the barroom columnist for a "newspaper" called the New York Post.

But the Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight characters only make cameo appearances in Stomping Ground. They are the scenery Hamill uses to show off Tommy Ryan, a royal lowlife who took his business degree and put it to vicious use. Ryan uses his women--"A man needs sex, has to have his pipes cleaned"--and he uses his friends--saved from a service revolver-death by a giant sidekick, Ryan orders him and his fiancee killed the next day for fear they'll "sing." He is a nasty bastard--when his lover laughs at him, he leaves in a rage. "You'll make her crawl, Tommy thought. In time, she'll know you are the boss. Control. Be cool... You own her."

Hamill makes his peace with sociology by tracing most of Ryan's hate back to his childhood, when his father lost his shirt and his family lost their New Jersey manse. Instead of a bank vice-president, he became an elevator operator, and Tommy still dreams of the old days, when the rats would murder pigeons on the roof above his bed. No happy Miracle-on-34th-Street memories of his city childhood; instead, the central figure is one Dr. Frankfurt, the local dentist. "Frankfurt would just ram the ether mask over your puss and when you woke up there was enough metal in your mouth to set off the alarm at the airport. Then on the way out he'd hand you a lollipop to make sure you'd be back real soon. In fact, Frankfurt was the only dentist he had ever seen who had a sign on his door that read, 'Thank You, Call Again Soon.'"

But B.F. Skinner and bad memories can only excuse so much--Ryan waits 20 years and then goes back to the dentist's office, and beats the shit out of him with a blackjack. Normal guys don't do this, but punks do, the sort of people who rob for thrills, not money. "One day me and this guy...got us a couple of guns and we walked into a bank and we held it up... We couldn't believe how easy it was. And how good it made you feel. It's like they say about heroin. It's never as good as the first time, but you keep shooting to see if it will be. It's the same with bank robbery. The first time you walk in there, you are the judge and the jury. You are the boss. No one can tell you anything."

Characters are the most important element in the genre invented by Breslin, characters and setting. Hamill concentrates too much on people, not enough on place; his bars are just bars, cars only convenient devices for moving the plot around the city. But the scenery seems lush, an armchair travelogue, next to the attention given plot.

HAMILL'S ROBBERS DRESS UP as Hassidic rabbis to rob a bank, successfully. The heat starts to mount, and Ryan starts having people killed. Meanwhile, his girlfriend is slowly learning that Tommy is responsible for the death of her husband, his best friend. Everybody who is anybody and still alive shows up in the final scene for a Christmas Eve shootout; the novice gangster who had idolized Ryan only to watch him waste his girlfriend, the grieving widow who now knew for sure that her lover had done in her man, the size 14 cop. And Ryan, he dies a death fit for a B-School hoodlum: "Alley Boy squeezed the trigger again and again and again and again. Tommy Ryan's body made stupid drunken lurches all over the table. He reached out a hand and grabbed a dinner platter and pulled it with him to the floor. The big lobster lay next to Tommy Ryan on the thick Persian rug."

In other words, there is just enough crime and killing, just enough story, to give people excuses for jealousy and hate. The murders and the bank jobs don't take up more than ten pages total, and there aren't any interminable accounts of the planning. Motive is what interests Hamill--the need for power and control, the need for a stomping ground, consumes his character. He "swaggered through the bar and the mostly teen-age crowd moved out of his way. He smiled and thought of it as the parting of the Red Sea." Almost nobody loved Tommy Ryan, but most people feared him, till they started to hate him and then it was all over.

Hamill has a way to go before he writes like Breslin, but there's depth to his stories, and sides to his characters, that never crept into the columns of the New York Daily News. As the cop says early on. "Tommy Ryan is a slimy little punk who couldn't have sniffed your old man's socks."