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needed to know how he would feel ahead of time, he had the trick. Where he clicked over to knowing where everything was—head over here, guts over there in a box—and kept only what he could manage. It was like looking at himself under glass.
    When he had learned the trick is hard to say, but he had known it already when he had come to New York. The point is that he used it.
    It was the worst in him, he felt for a while, and then he felt it was the best, for being so useful.
    When he came to New York he lived with a relative whom he had never grown to know and who never knew him. The relative was an old woman and Jordan was no longer a child, and if they wanted anything from each other, it would not have been easy. He slept and he ate at her house and on Saturday, if he had money, he gave her some of it. He and the old woman never had any friction, which was the way Jordan managed it.
    He worked on the East Side loading boxes in somebody’s shipping department, and later he set pins in one of the nine alleys at Bandstand Bowling. Sandy had hired him and was somebody who always wore a hat. And an overcoat, most of the time.
    After work, Jordan hung around the way it was done. They did not hang around the candy store, which was the place for younger ones, but outside a bar. As if they might all have come out of the bar or were thinking about going in, though not anxiously. They were six or seven, looking bored, even about Jordan who was new and when it was not clear yet how he fit in.
    Jordan seemed no different from the others except the bully thought Jordan might be different. Who’s who was important to the bully, because of his constant worry over matters of prestige.
    “California, wasn’t it?” said the bully.
    “Yes.”
    “But you didn’t say why you lammed out of there.”
    “I didn’t lam. I just left.”
    “You left a long way. Why New York?”
    “It was a place to go,” said Jordan.
    “Always wanted to see the bright lights, huh?”
    That was not what Jordan had meant. New York was a place to go and so it just happened that way.
    “So how do you like the bright lights?” And the bully spat in the street. As he spat he saw two men coming out of the night club, so he did it again.
    “I don’t know,” said Jordan and looked at all the steps coming down out of the brownstones.
    “Not good enough. That what you mean?”
    “I wasn’t….”
    “You got uptown habits, huh?”
    “Which?”
    “You cop a feel or a lay or a candy bar, ain’t good enough for you, is what I mean.”
    It was not good enough for the bully, which was what he had meant, but Jordan was only concerned with having no friction.
    “It’s all right,” he said. “I got no kicks.”
    “That you don’t,” said the bully and laughed. “That you don’t.” They all laughed with him, at Jordan, but it did not lead anywhere because Jordan did not take it up.
    This meant to the bully, Jordan was going to be easy, though the puzzlement was that Jordan did not seem to care how he looked. The bully did not understand this. It needed demonstration.
    “Except for that job you got,” he said. “That’s great kicks, isn’t it? I mean, you set ‘em up and somebody keeps knocking them down.”
    Jordan did not answer. Maybe he could leave.
    “And working right up alongside the boss. Yessir,” said the bully and laughed.
    “You don’t have to act that way,” said Jordan.
    They saw that he wanted to leave and all of a sudden there was a ring around him.
    “You know Sandy, don’t you?” said the bully.
    “Yes.”
    “But he don’t know you.”
    “Why should he?” said Jordan, but the evasion made the bully that much more insistent.
    “Why? Don’t you watch the breaks?”
    “All I’m doing there….”
    “Is working up to setting two alleys instead of one, right? I mean, ambitious.”
    “Sure,” said Jordan. “Sure.”
    “You know Jay?” asked the bully. “No. He left before you come in. That boy now, there was