On the third day, though, Teeny handed Joe a canister of gasoline and a pack of matches and told him to set fire to a Traveler newsstand on Dover Street. When Joe refused, Teeny didn’t argue. He just took the can and the matches back. Then he beat Joe in front of the other newsies, many of whom laid down bets. There was no fury to the beating, no emotion. Every time Joe looked into Teeny’s eyes as he brought another fist down onto Joe’s face, it was clear that Teeny could beat him to death if he chose. That, Joe realized, was the only outcome the other newsies were betting on. Whether Teeny did or not was an issue to which Teeny himself seemed indifferent.

It took him a few months to get over the coldness with which the beating had been delivered. The beating itself was almost forgettable by comparison. But now, knowing that the city was coming alive—and even coming apart—in a way it might not do again in his lifetime, any pains or lessons from that day receded and were replaced by his appetite for the night world and his possible place in it.

Once he left the house, he cut over two blocks and walked up H Street toward the noise. He’d heard it all last night from his bedroom—West Broadway making even more of a racket than usual. West Broadway was where the saloons were and the rows and rows of boardinghouses and the gambling dens and the boys playing shell games on the corners and whistling to the women who stood in the windows of rooms lit red or orange or dark mustard. East Broadway ran through City Point, the respectable part of South Boston, the section where Joe lived. But it was just a matter of crossing East Broadway and making one’s way down the hill until you reached the intersections of East and West Broadway and Dorchester Street. There you found the rest of Southie, the vast majority of it, and it wasn’t quiet and respectable and well tended. It jumped and exploded with laughter and quarrels and shouts and loud off-key singing. Straight up West Broadway until you hit the bridge, straight down Dorchester Street until you hit Andrew Square. Nobody had a car around these parts, much less a driver, like his father. No one owned a home; this was renters’ territory. And the only thing rarer than a car was a yard. Boston proper had Scollay Square to provide its release, but Southie had West Broadway. Not as grand, not as brightly lit, but just as dense with sailors and thieves and men getting a load on.