Hells Kitchen

inside? There was something they had to tell her.
    Hatake continued in a calm voice, “You feeling good?”
    “I’m okay,” Ettie said, looking uneasily from one woman to another.
    “Bet you feeling better than that boy, Mother.”
    “What boy?”
    “That little boy you killed. Juan Torres.”
    “I didn’t do it,” Ettie whispered. She drew back, against the wall. “No, I didn’t do it.”
    She looked again toward the door but she was completely hidden by the line of women.
    “I know you done it, bitch. You kill that little boy.”
    “I didn’t!”
    “An eye for an eye.” The large woman stepped closer. She had a cigarette lighter in her hand. The woman next to her, Dannette, had one too. Where had they gotten those? Then understood. Dannette had purposely gotten arrested again and smuggled in the lighters.
    Hatake stepped close.
    Ettie shrank away then suddenly lunged forward, swinging her cast into Hatake’s face. It connected with her nose, a loud thud. The woman screeched and fell back. The other women gasped. No one moved for a moment.
    Then Ettie took a deep breath to scream for help and found herself tasting sour cloth. Someone had come up behind her and flipped the gag over her face. Hatake was on her feet, wiping blood from her nose, smiling cruelly.
    “Okay, Mother, Okay.” She nodded to Dannette, who lit a cigarette and tossed it onto Ettie’s shift. She tried to kick it off but two other women held her down. She couldn’t move. The ember began to burn through the dress.
    Hatake said, “You shouldn’t be smokin’ in here. ’Gainst the rules, Mother. An’ accidents happen. Them lighters, they spill sometimes. Get that stuff inside, that gas, all over you. Burn up yo hair, burn up you face. Sometime it kill you, sometime it don’t.”
    Hatake stepped closer and Ettie felt the icy spray of the butane on her scalp and cheek. She closed her eyes, trying to twist away from the women who held her.
    “Lemme,” Hatake snapped, snatching the lighter outof Dannette’s hands. She muttered something else but Ettie couldn’t hear it over her own squealing and muttered pleas. There was a snap and a hiss and the huge woman walked closer and closer, holding the lighter like a beacon.

FOURTEEN
    A star can make a movie open.
    Open.
    The classic, revered Hollywood verb defined as: “to make enough people plunk down their hard-earned bucks on opening weekend so film company execs don’t have to spend all Monday thinking up excuses for their wives, mistresses, bosses and Daily Variety reporters to explain why they’ve just spent millions of other people’s dollars to make a flop.”
    Bankable stars can make a movie open.
    So can a drop-dead story line.
    Nowadays even special effects can do it, particularly if they involve explosions.
    But nothing in the universe can make a documentary open. Documentaries might be enlightening or touching or inspiring. They can represent the highest form of movie-making art. But they don’t do what people go to feature films for.
    To escape from their lives, to enjoy themselves for a few hours.
    Walking through downtown Manhattan, toward thesooty carnival of the courts and prisons, Pellam was reflecting: He had directed four independent films, all of them cult classics, two of them award winners. He had degrees in film making from NYU and UCLA. He’d written dozens of articles for Cineaste and Independent Film Monthly and he could recite the dialog from most of Hitchcock’s films. His credentials were impeccable.
    Of the eighteen studios and production companies he’d approached with the idea for this documentary all had rejected him.
    Oh, everyone had been full of praise and enthusiasm for West of Eighth: An Oral History of Hell’s Kitchen. But not a single dollar from a big studio was forthcoming to back it.
    As he’d pitched the idea he explained that the neighborhood offered a wonderful mix of crime, heroism, corruption, beauty.
    “Those are all capitalized words, Pellam,” a friend, a VP for development at Warner Brothers, had told him. “Capitalized words do not good movies make.”
    Only Alan Lefkowitz had expressed any interest and he didn’t have the foggiest notion what the film was about.
    Still, Pellam had great hopes for the flick and believed it had a shot at an Oscar—confidence founded largely on an encounter that had occurred on West Thirty-Sixth Street last June.
    “Excuse me,” he’d asked, “you live in this