You've heard the stories, you've seen the news. Perhaps you've watched the unofficial documentary, the 60 minutes special, the tv film.
But no one knows who I really was.
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New York, 1906
In those days New York in the summer was an oven. Perhaps some days a literal one. The metal of the buildings and stones of the roads would make one feel like he were a shepherd's pie. His innards the cooking morsels in the summer dry heat. But in those days we didn't complain, especially the poor. We knew no one was listening.
My mother had died- of consumption the doctor said. Though unless it was consumption of male dispose I suspect the more likely verdict to be death by rape and beating.
Never the less she was gone, and I was alone on the streets. Child labour was drying up as new laws were enforced. A seven-year-old on the streets of an American city, an immigrant that hadn't shaken his accent then at that, was forced to do many a thing an honorable man might deem...dishonorable.
It began innocently enough as a simple avatar of information, couriering it between my employer and the men he deemed necessary to weild it. My frail and dirty frame would stand in prespecified areas and wave a newspaper, shouting titles that were not on the page, stories that only interested certain men. But I'd never actually sell them to anyone who didn't know the return signal. These pages held stories not meant for mass digest. Eventually, I moved up from there to smuggling drugs, opium mainly, from Chinatown out into the boroughs for the upperclass horse fiend.
My employer appreciated my, gumption as he called it. He was a large man of mostly muscle and what space was left, hair. Built not in the way men are now of bars and plates, but steeds and plow. Hammer and anvil. A worker, a survivor. It was no wonder he took to this young rapscallion with the affection of a father to his son.
New York 1912
The Titanic had gone down , woe was the world for losing a basket full of rich bastards. The amount that sunk to the Atlantic that night died of starvation on a weekly basis in the city she cast off from, the city casting them off from her. But no one would miss them was the difference.
I had gotten too cocky in my time as courier. My favor from my employer clouded my judgement to the point of cavalier candor. I spoke with a fresh mouth one time too many to my employer's beneficiaries and eventually even to him. What was once welcome was now overstepping. He allowed me to sit in on small councils with local hands and I had challenged his decision. So he had to make a choice I now realize was necessary, lest the entire organization crumble.
I was thrown in a ring with boys with twice the years and weight on them, my fresh mouth forced shut with old dirty knuckles. He would watch. The other men would laugh and cheer and throw bills around betting, but the employer would simply watch with a deep focus, hands clasped ahead of his mouth. The one still hand in a rambunctious field of fisticuffs and gambling. I was broken many a time, left for dead. It took weeks to heal, one time months. At times on my hospital bed however my employer would throw in a wad of greenbacks. I'd turn my neck slowly, he'd wink at me and then leave.
It went on like that for a year. Until something interesting happened to a very interested child.
He became a man.
New York 1913
Fourteen years old I was, my accent had faded into something of a New Orleanean drole due to my english accent coupled beside that of my employers southern one. My close proximity to him made it rub off on one another like the paint of two carriages shearing one another on the open street.
In the ring I was untamable. My skills had become something like a prize fighter. A jab, a hook, a cross. Those weren't thoughts anymore to be designed, they were feelings to be acted on. Sensations that only required me to abide by my instincts. I was a champion. But then one night, the unexpected happened.
My employer entered the ring. Without his shirt on he was even more intimdating than usual. His hands wrapped in dirty leather. His feet bare and kicking up dust. I remember they had long nails, like an animal. Sharp to a point as though by natural design rather than personal.
All my training went out the window, as he quickly and methodically began to decimate me.
But as I laid there, my teeth scattered across the floor, blood painting the dusty concrete canvas, he kneeled down, looked me in my one good open eye, and he whispered something that confused me,
After he stood and kicked me hard, over and over again sinking his clawed toes into my stomach until the small holes began to become one and only the thinnest of flesh held me together. Just then, as death entered my domain. I felt a surge of unknowable energy. Blood felt like warm wine in my veins. My wounds like the cutting motion that had opened them were reversing. Zipping back up one cell at a time (I say cell now because I've grown to understand such things, then not so much), he carried me out on his shoulder before anyone else could see.
I awoke the following week, more lean, faster, even more intelligent. I understood what he meant. Alone, in a cottage beside what appeared to be a castle, I understood.
A man needs to be tried before he can be true. A man needs to be torn out of the old, before he can be born anew.
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