Prologue

      On October 6, 1938, in Wildwood, New Jersey, a lion, part of a ‘Wall of Death’ motorcycle act, escaped from his cage on the boardwalk and killed a man.

      On that day, Neville Chamberlain was negotiating with Adolf Hitler, giving him a large part of Czechoslovakia called the Sudetenland. It was Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Jews throughout the world prayed, fasted, repented, atoned. They had little idea how, during the next seven horrible years, there would be much for all to atone.

      Ann Sheridan sued for divorce and Martha Raye prepared to marry David Rose.

      There was much labor unrest. The Great Depression was slowly lifting, and working men, though glad to be working again, were asking for a fairer share in profit and a promise of more job security. The A.F. of L. was preparing to shut down auto plants. The C.I.O. in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, was battling company police at the steel mills. There was a garbage and trash collectors’ strike in Philadelphia, involving police intervention, violence and labor retaliation.

      The day that lion escaped, I was one month short of my twelfth birthday. The previous summer I’d seen the ‘Wall of Death’ motorcycle act. It was the summer, also, when I first experienced a sexual as compared to a religious ejaculation.

      There are some events that mark watersheds or cusps in life. The escape of that lion was one for me. It became a subconscious symbol, a foreboding, of all the violence and violation possible in life.

      I began having a recurring nightmare. It haunted me for more than six years and lasted until W.W. II, when I went off and gathered material for worse nightmares.

      In my ‘lion nightmare’ I’m living on a street much like the one described by Dickie in this book. I stand behind the front door to our house and look out through the glass panes, across our porch, down our front steps. Lions are strolling, stalking the streets, the lawns; they lurk silently between porches.

      My mother and father, my sister, my grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, friends and neighbors are walking around. They pay no attention to the lions.

      With great trepidation, I dash out to warn them of the danger, their peril. But they ignore me, laugh, insist the lions are only friendly kittens.

      In despair, I scamper back behind the security of my impervious front door. I watch as those I love are mauled, killed, destroyed by these marauding beasts.

      Invariably, I woke from this dream sobbing uncontrollably, swallowed in a deep sense of loss.

      This novel, despite the factual reality of the original tragedy, is a work of fiction. The characters, situations, sequences and events are products of my imagination. Any relationship to real events is purely coincidental.

      Perhaps, in writing this, I am trying at last to exorcise my lions in the night, my personal succubi, or perhaps I’m still helplessly attempting to warn people of hidden dangers from behind my seemingly secure front door. I don’t know; it doesn’t matter.

      But let us now begin, as Dickie Kettleson tells us about his pride, his territory.

      WILLIAM WHARTON