The Cayuga Street Hooligans, they were a small
and determined group of kids, a gang, sort of, which tried to seize life early
on, and surrendered to their youth, their vices, prerogatives, and scratched
where it didn’t itch, and became donkeys so the police referred to us, and referred
to our neighborhood by calling it Donkeyland, a location within the city’s limits,
that being, the North End of the city of St. Paul, Minnesota. We being more
like a bowl-full of wild crickets, the main area being Cayuga Street. Now some fifty-years
later, their prototypes have advanced into a drug related neighborhood, more of
a lynching, pathless gang! The old gang has of course stepped down to
law-and-order side of life, for the most part, now resting as if in a kind of
comatose state. And many of the old ones are gone, but I can still remember at
least, in my time, we all felt safe in our homes, no longer is this possible
with the new breed! The new ones are bloodless, and darker souled, and
axe-minded, as if insurgents sprawled in various corners, trying to kick away
the old locks.
As for us, we were loyal to one another, there was an unspoken
code. No one disrespected anyone’s
parents at any time. No one stole from an affiliate; usually the stronger would
stand up for the weaker, if it was someone outside the gang doing the winning
in fight, and Larry the boxer seen to that, more often than not.
·
· ·
The era has
passed, but it didn’t pass without old lady Stanley, who lived next door to the
Old Russian’s house sitting on her patio witnessing it all, she lived long in
her old age into her 90s. So old she
was, it was hard for her to open the heavy door leading out onto her
patio. Engulfed in her house, watching
Mouse, and Gunner racing up and down Cayuga Street, as if it was a drag strip,
in their 1940-Fords. She was a fragile wisp of a woman. And the kids jeering at
her with their Rock and Roll, Elvis songs, and often times I’d myself
sing them on a guitar, as we proceeded to do whatever we were doing; a contempt
for possible despoilers, and Larry punching out the cops on top of Indian’s
Hill, and that was not all. Although Howie the cop, was respected, he was the
only police officer that was in our neighborhood. The only safe persons that
didn’t belong in the neighborhood who were left alone were: the mail carriers,
the milkman, the bread peddlers, and one black man whom nobody knew where he
lived but walked down Mississippi Street, onto Cayuga Street, who had
befriended the Old Russian, whose two grandsons were gang members, thus he got
safe passage.
The neighborhood was of the Irish,
Polish, Russian, German, Anglo-Saxon, and Native American (Ojibwa) stock.
It gives the impression for the most
part, all the girls in the neighborhood married all the boys in the neighborhood.
They were like to like. A few exceptions. Most went to Washington High School,
at one time or another. The gang was well-known as for being the Jackson Street
boys, to the Rice Street boys, whom were friendly with one another. Rice Street
being on one side of Oakland Cemetery, and Jackson on the other. A bizarre
twist at any corner of any night.
The empty lot
in the summers, —the weeds and grass got as tall cornstalks; old man Brandt,
who lived alongside the empty lot cut some of the grass and weeds down some and
got a few of the boys to do the rest, and thus, the gang had a place to play
baseball during the day, as if for once without alcohol; yet at night it turned
into a drinking area. It was one adjoined breathe within the gang, and for a
number of summers it was somewhat kept up. It wasn’t until they finished the
game often before they drank. Perhaps it was the catalyst, and sometimes
everyone played the game fast to get it done with quickly, as to get the
drinking cycle started, specifically on a keg of beer, where everyone had pitched
in to buy it, and Big Bopper did the buying at the nearby liquor store—;
fifty-years later that empty lot has vanished, leaving nothing but a dark
asphalt parking space for cars, where seldom any cars are ever parked.
Most of the houses are torn down now on
Cayuga Street, and half the gang has passed on. The 21st Century
teenager, from Cayuga Street over to Buffalo Street, or Granite Street, or
Acker Street, Sims, and all streets surrounding, and connecting to Cayuga
Street, it isn’t anything like it used to be— Rice School, on top of the hill
overlooking Cayuga Street, is gone too.
As
I start my story, let’s look at the human faces if only semi-consciously
noticed, and let the mind pick out the inexplicable actions of the members, the
vital circumstances, motives, dramas, experiences of this tiny world that only
a dreamer can show from old secrets and dreams; depicted as best the author can
do, and remember, in a striking way I hope.
Perhaps the style sometimes a little
careless, tending to give a little garrulousness to the whole picture. On the
other hand, there are only a few escapades here, not that I couldn’t have
written a 600-page version of Donkeyland and its gang or even a set of books on
it, for out of my 48-books, Donkeyland is in many segments of them, this is the
first direct try at pointing it out as a main item, Donkeyland and its
inhabitants, on its own! From my era. But I sense there is no need for a larger
book it is just for posterity I do what I am now doing, writing to preserve a
few of those lighthearted days. An observation on the life of a certain group
of people, at a certain period of time, to step beneath the surface of their
lives, and so this book is dedicated to them. For Donkeyland is like a wheel of
many colors, and fragments of mid-America of the late 1950s and ‘60s, which
carries the inescapable conviction of reality. There is more realism to the
surface than the eye meets. Dennis L. Siluk
6-29-2015
