Street Scene

By Jose M. Ferrer II

JONES: PORTRAIT OF A MUGGER

by JAMES WILLWERTH

251 pages. Evans. $7.95.

A book about a mugger. The subject brings various expectations. A certain horror-fascination at getting in on the other side of urban America's living fear; the noncerebral prospect of a bloody how-to guide; perhaps a fast freak-show visit into the mind of an animal. The one thing a reader does not ex, pect is a troubling, memorable encounter with a human being. Yet that is precisely what James Willwerth produces. To enter this mugger's world means that inexorably, as one of the mugger's friends put it, "you don't think about laws. The way he thinks is as natural as turning on the TV. The laws of the land don't apply."

What does apply, as it does for everyone, is the way life works. Jones is a pseudonym, but he is no stereotype. He is the son of a white Italian nurse --whom he adores--and a black postal worker whose struggle to break into the middle class prompts bitter wrangling. Jones grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. At 13, he hoped to be a professional singer. Instead, he followed the lead of older ghetto kids and got into drugs; by 17 he was stealing in earnest. Now 25, Jones is a bright street hustler who stutters in frustrated rage at his tantalizing inability to outdistance self-defeat. He managed to kick heroin during his only prison term and has stayed off it since he got out three years ago. But he takes in coke, pot and wine as naturally as most people breathe. He is also a clothes junkie, and whenever he is flush after a few muggings, the money goes in an endless effort to look "fly." Platform shoes are a hazard to his trade, since fast getaways are critical, but he wears them even when mugging because "they are the style."

When Willwerth found him, his two main girls (one white, one black) were both pregnant, and the pressures on him to make choices and settle into a job were intense. His dreams of making a big score and getting off the street are like jail bars. They hold him in an extraordinary blend of fantasy and reality. "I'd have a country home," says Jones, "but I would never go there, of course, because I don't like the country." He thinks of mugging "like chess." He remembers each victim precisely and prefers to work in the daytime because other "people are always rushing somewhere." In his private code, attacking women and old men is out. A middle-aged man going to fat is best, especially if he is "looking everywhere"--as people tend to do when carrying a lot of cash. Jones uses a knife rather than a gun. He watches in banks for big withdrawals, trails a storekeeper a few times to see when he goes to deposit the day's take. "What I do is wrong," he admits. "Deep, deep down I believe this. But man, it gives me life."

Willwerth is a TIME correspondent and the author of a Viet Nam book, Eye in the Last Storm. He intensifies his work with a sharp eye for the rat sitting boldly in the entrance of a flophouse or the menacing sense of the street he feels on his way to the subway after a late-night interview. He has also made the sensible decision not to deny his own presence; he straightforwardly records the fears, anger and liking he feels for his troubled subject--even after Jones tells him, perhaps in a mood of false boasting, that he has committed two murders for hire.

This technique banishes any tendency toward generalized moralizing. It makes the book worth a dozen sociological treatises. Feeling first trapped and then at home in Jones' existence, the reader is left with the enraging conclusion that for society only the extremes will really work--either the liberal view that the world of the poor must be fundamentally revamped or the conservative insistence that such men must all be locked up for life. Nothing less will really reach the Joneses, and nothing like either course seems immediately possible. Meanwhile, Jones has temporarily laid aside his life as a mugger and is working as a hospital orderly as he did once before. How long he will continue neither Willwerth nor Jones himself can guess. sb Jose M.Ferrer II

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