Sutton

by J. R. Moehringer

  No, Reporter says, stay on surface streets.

  Why?

  Buildings, stores, statues—there’s stuff on the streets that might jog Mr. Sutton’s memory.

  While Reporter and Photographer debate the best route to their next stop, Thirteenth Street, Sutton rests his eyes. He feels the car stop short. He opens his eyes. Red light.

  He rolls his head to the right. Tumbledown stores, each one new, unfamiliar. Is this really Brooklyn? It might as well be Bangkok. Where there used to be a bar and grill, there’s now a record store. Where there used to be a record store, there’s now a clothing store. How many nights, lying in his cell, did Sutton mentally walk the old Brooklyn? Now it’s gone, all gone. The old neighborhoods were just cardboard sets and paper scenery, which someone casually struck and carted off. Then again, one thing never changes. None of these stores looks to be hiring.

  What’s that, Mr. Sutton?

  Nothing.

  Sutton sees an electronics store. Dozens of TVs in the front window.

  Stop the car, stop the car.

  Photographer looks left, right. We are stopped. We’re at a red light, Willie.

  Sutton opens the door. The sidewalk is covered with patches of frozen snow. He steps carefully toward the electronics store. On every TV it’s—Willie Sutton. Last night. Walking out of Attica. But it’s also not him. It’s Father. And Mother. He hadn’t realized how much his face has come to look like them both.

  Sutton presses his nose against the window, cups his hands around his eyes. On a few screens closer to the window is President Nixon. A recent news conference.

  Reporter walks up.

  Did you ever notice, kid, how much presidents act like wardens?

  I can’t say as I have, Mr. Sutton.

  Trust me. They do.

  Have you ever voted, Mr. Sutton?

  Every time I took down a bank I was voting.

  Reporter writes this in his notebook.

  Tell you one thing, Sutton says. I’d love to have voted against President Shifty Eyes here. Fuckin criminal.

  Reporter laughs. I’m no Nixon fan, Mr. Sutton—but a criminal?

  Doesn’t he remind you of anybody kid?

  No. Should he?

  The eyes. Look at the eyes.

  Reporter moves closer to the window, looks at Nixon, then back at Sutton. Back at Nixon. Now that you mention it, he says.

  I wouldn’t trust either of us as far as I could throw us, Sutton says. Did you know that Nixon, when he worked on Wall Street, lived in the same apartment building as Governor Rockefeller?

  I’m not really a Rockefeller fan.

  Join the club.

  Personally, I liked Romney. Then, after he dropped out, I rooted for Reagan. I was hoping he’d win the nomination.

  Reagan? God help us.

  What’s wrong with Ronald Reagan?

  An actor running the world? Get a grip.

  When the river is too cold for swimming, the boys take their fishing poles to Red Hook. They buy tomato sandwiches wrapped in oil paper, two cents apiece, and sit on the rocks along The Narrows, dangling their lines in the slimy water. Even with no jobs, they can at least contribute something to their families if they catch a striper or two.

  One day, the fish not biting, Eddie paces the rocks. Whole fuckin thin is rigged, he says.

  What thing, Ed?

  The whole thin.

  Behind him a tug plows through the silver-green water, a barge glides toward Manhattan. A three-masted schooner heads for Staten Island. The sky is a chaotic web of wires and smokestacks, steeples and office towers. Eddie gives it all the evil eye. Then the middle finger.

  Eddie’s always been angry, but lately his anger has been deeper, edgier. Willie blames himself. Willie took Eddie to the library, persuaded him to get a library card. Now Eddie has books to support his darkest suspicions. Jack London, Upton Sinclair, Peter Kropotkin, Karl Marx, they all tell Eddie that he’s not paranoid, the world really is against him.

  Some fuckin system, he says. Every ten or fifteen years it crashes. Aint no system, that’s the problem. It’s every man for his-fuckin-self. The Crash of ’93? My old man saw people standin in the middle of the street bawlin like babies. Wiped out. Ruined. But did those bankers get pinched? Nah—they got richer. Oh the government promised it wouldn’t happen again. Well it happened again didn’t it fellas? In ’07. And ’ll. And when them banks fell apart, when the market did a swan dive, didn’t them bankers walk away scot-free again?

  Willie and Happy nod.

  I’m not saying the man who shot McKinley was right in his head, I only say I understand what drove him to it.

  Get yourself pinched talking like that, Ed.

  Eddie wings a rock at the water. Blunth—a sound like a fat man gulping. We’re on the losin team, boys. We’re Irish blunth and broke blunth and that makes us double fucked. Just how the rich want it. You can’t be on the top if there aint no one on the blunth bottom.

  How come you’re the only one talking about this stuff? Happy says.

  I aint the only one, Happy. Read a goddamn book, willya?

  Happy frowns. If he reads he won’t be happy.

  Of all the evil rich, Eddie thinks the evilest by far are the Rockefellers. He scans the horizon as if there might be a Rockefeller out there for him to peg with a rock. He’s obsessed with Ludlow. Last year J. D. Rockefeller Jr. sent a team of sluggers to put down the mine strike there, and the sluggers massacred seventy-five unarmed men, women, children. If anyone else did that, Eddie often says, he’d get the chair.

  Tell you what I’d like to do, Eddie grumbles, winging a rock at a seagull. I’d like to go uptown right now and find Old Man Rockefeller’s mansion.

  What would you do, Ed?

  Heh heh. Remember that Judas sheep?

  Photographer circles Grand Army Plaza, swings right on Thirteenth Street. He pulls over, double-parks. It’s gone, Sutton says, touching the window. Fuck—I knew stuff would be gone. But everything?

  What’s gone, Willie?

  The apartment house where we moved in 1915. At least the apartment house next door is still standing. That one right there, that gives you an idea what ours looked like.

  He points to a five-story brownstone, streaked with soot and bird shit.

  That’s where I saw my parents grow old before their time, worrying about money. That’s where I watched the lines on their faces get deeper, watched their hair turn white. That’s where I learned that life is all about money. And love. And lack thereof.

  That’s it, Mr. Sutton?

  Anyone who tells you different is a fuckin liar. Money. Love. There’s not a problem that isn’t caused by one or the other. And there’s not a problem that can’t be solved by one or the other.

  That seems kind of reductive, Mr. Sutton.

  Money and Love kid. Nothing else matters. Because those are the only two things that make us forget about death. For a few minutes anyhow.

  Trees line the curb. They nod and bow as if they remember Sutton. As if beseeching him to get out of the car. My best friends were Eddie Wilson and Happy Johnston, Sutton says softly.

  Photographer yanks a loose fringe off his buckskin jacket. You mentioned that.

  What was Happy like? Reporter asks.

  Broads loved him.

  Hence the name, Photographer says, starting up the car, pulling away. Where to next?

  Remsen Street, Reporter says.

  Happy had the blackest hair you ever saw, Sutton says. Like he was dipped in coal. He had one of those chin asses like yours kid. A smile like yours too. Big white teeth. Like a movie star. Before there were movie stars.

  And Eddie?

  Strange case. Blond, real All-American looking, but he never felt like an American. He felt like America didn’t want him. Fuck, he was right, America didn’t. America didn’t want any of us, and you haven’t felt unwanted until America doesn’t want you. I loved Eddie, but he was one rough sombitch. You did not want t
o get on his wrong side. I thought he’d be a prizefighter. After they banned him from the slaughterhouse, he hung out in gyms. Then the gyms banned him. He wouldn’t stop fighting after the bell. And if you crossed him in the streets, Jesus, if you did not show proper respect, God help you. He’d give you an Irish haircut quick as look at you.

  Irish what?

  A swat to the back of the head with a lead pipe wrapped in newspaper.

  Their luck changes in the fall of 1916. Eddie lands a construction job at one of the new office towers going up, and Happy’s uncle arranges jobs for Happy and Willie as gophers at a bank. Title Guaranty.

  The bank job will require new clothes. Willie and Happy find a haberdasher on Court Street willing to extend them credit. They each buy two suits—two sack coats, two pairs of trousers, two matching vests, two silk cravats, cuff buttons, spats. Walking to work his first day Willie stops before a store window. He doesn’t recognize himself. He’s delighted not to recognize himself. He hopes he never recognizes himself again.

  Better yet, his coworkers don’t recognize him. They seem not to know that he’s Irish. They treat him with courtesy and kindness.

  Weeks fly by. Months. Willie loses himself in his work. He finds the whole enterprise of the bank exhilarating. After the Crash of 1893, the Panic of 1907, the smaller panic of 1911, the Depression of 1914, New York is rebuilding. Office towers are being erected, bridges are being laced across the rivers, tunnels are being laid underneath, and cash for all this epic growth comes from banks, which means Willie is engaged in a grand endeavor. He’s part of society, included in its mission, vested in its purposes—at last. He sleeps deeper, wakes more refreshed. Putting on his spats each morning he feels a giddy sense of relief that Eddie was wrong. The whole thing isn’t rigged.

  They pull up to the former home of Title Guaranty, a Romanesque Revival building on Remsen Street. Sutton looks at the arched third-floor windows where he used to sit with Happy and the other gophers. In one window someone has taped a sign. NIXON/AGNEW. This is where I had my first job, Sutton says. A bank robber whose first job was in a bank—imagine?

  Photographer shoots the building. He turns the camera, dials the lens, this way, that. Sutton shifts his gaze from the building to Photographer.

  You like your work, Sutton says. Don’t you kid?

  Photographer stops, gives a half turn. Yeah, he says over his shoulder. I do, Willie. I dig it. How can you tell?

  I can always tell when a man likes his work. What year were you born kid?

  Nineteen forty-three.

  Hm. Eventful year for me. Shit, they were all eventful. Where were you born?

  Roslyn, Long Island.

  You go to college?

  Yeah.

  Which one?

  I went to Princeton, Photographer says sheepishly.

  No kidding? Good school. I took a walk around the campus one morning. What did you study?

  History. I was going to be a professor, an academic, but sophomore year my parents made the fatal mistake of buying me a camera for Christmas. That was all she wrote. The only thing I cared about from then on was taking pictures. I wanted to capture history instead of reading about it.

  I’ll bet your folks were thrilled.

  Oh yeah. My father didn’t speak to me for about three months.

  What do you like so much about taking pictures?

  You say life’s all about Money and Love? I say it’s all about experiences.

  Is that so?

  And this camera helps me have all different kinds of experiences. This Leica gets me through locked doors, past police tape, over walls, barbed wire, barricades. It shows me the world, brother. Helps me bear witness.

  Witness. Is that so.

  Also, Willie, I dig telling the truth. Words can be twisted but a photo never lies.

  Sutton laughs.

  What’s funny? Photographer says.

  Nothing. Except—that’s pure horseshit kid. I can’t think of anything that lies more than a photo. In fact every photo is a dirty stinking lie because it’s a frozen moment—and time can’t be frozen. Some of the biggest lies I’ve ever run across have been photos. Some of them were of me.

  Photographer faces straight ahead, a slightly miffed look on his face. Willie, he says, all I know is, this camera took me to the bloodbath in Hue City. Tet Offensive—those aren’t just words in a book to me. It took me to Mexico City to see Tommie Smith and John Carlos raise their fists. It took me to Memphis to see the chaos and the coverup after they shot King. No other way I would’ve gotten to see all those things. This camera lets me see, brother.

  Sutton looks at Reporter. How about you kid?

  How about me?

  Did you always want to be a reporter?

  Yes.

  How come?

  I’m a yeshiva student from the Bronx—in what other job would I get to spend the day with America’s greatest bank robber?

  FBI agent.

  I don’t like guns.

  Me neither.

  I admit, Mr. Sutton, some days I don’t love this job. No one reads anymore.

  I do nothing but read.

  You’re the exception. TV is going to make us all extinct. Also, a newsroom isn’t exactly the happiest place on earth. It’s sort of a snake pit. Politics, backstabbing, jealousy.

  That’s one nice thing about crooks, Sutton says. No professional jealousy. A crook reads about another crook making off with millions, he’s happy for the guy. Crooks root for each other.

  Except when they kill each other.

  True.

  Tell him about editors, Photographer says to Reporter.

  What about them? Sutton says.

  They can be a real pain in the ass, Reporter says into his lap.

  Sutton lights a Chesterfield. What about your editor? In what way is he a pain in the ass?

  He says I have a face that begs to be lied to.

  Ouch. And what did he say when he sent you off to spend the day with Willie?

  Photographer laughs, looks out his window. Reporter looks out his.

  Go on kid. You can tell me.

  My editor said I had three jobs today, Mr. Sutton. Get you on the record about Arnold Schuster. Don’t let another reporter or photographer near you. And don’t lose you.

  Sutton blows a cloud of smoke over Reporter’s head. Then you’re fucked kid.

  Why?

  You’ve already lost me. I’m back in 1917.

  Willie standing in the vault. It’s larger than his bedroom on Thirteenth Street, and it’s filled, floor to ceiling, with money. He gazes at the tightly wrapped bills, the strongboxes of gold coins, the racks of gleaming silver. He inhales—better than a candy store. He never realized how much he loved money. He couldn’t afford to realize.

  He loads a wheeled cart with cash and coins, slowly rolls the cart along the cages, filling the tellers’ drawers. He feels all-powerful, a Brooklyn King Solomon dispensing gifts from his mine. Before returning the cart he cradles a brick of fifties. With this one brick he could buy a shiny new motorcar, a house for his parents. He could book a cabin on the next liner sailing to France. He slides one fifty out of the pack, holds it to the light. That dashing portrait of Ulysses Grant, those green curlicues in the corners, those silver-blue letters: Will Pay to the Bearer On Demand. Who knew the fifty was such a work of art? They should hang one in a museum. He slides the bill carefully back into the pack, sets the pack back in its place on the shelf.

  Evenings, after work, Willie sits on a bench in the park and reads Horatio Alger novels, devours them one after another. They’re all the same—the hero rises from nothing to become rich, loved, respected—and that’s exactly what Willie loves about them. The predictability of the plot, the inevitability of the hero’s ascent, provides a kind of comfort. It reaffirms Willie’s faith.

  Sometimes Alger’s hero starts as a gopher at a bank.

  Pedophile, Sutton says.

  Photographer is trying to get the
City Desk on the radio. Yeah, he says, yeah yeah, that’s right, we’re leaving Remsen Street, headed to Sands Street, near the Navy Yard.

  Goddamn perv, Sutton says.

  Photographer lowers the radio, turns. You say something, Willie?

  Sutton slides forward, leans across the seat. Horatio Alger.

  What about him?

  He’d cruise these streets looking for homeless kids. They were everywhere back then, sleeping under stairs, bridges. Street Arabs they were called. Alger would bring them home, interview them for his books, then molest them. Now he’s synonymous with the American Dream. Imagine?

  Malcolm X says there is no American Dream, Willie. Just an American nightmare.

  Nah, that’s not true. There’s an American Dream. The trick is not waking up.

  After six months at Title Guaranty, Willie is summoned to the manager’s office.

  Sutton, your work is exemplary. You are diligent, you are conscientious, never tardy or sick. Everyone at this bank says you are a fine young man, and I can only agree. Keep this up, my boy, keep on this path, and you are sure to go places.

  A month later Willie is laid off. Happy too. The manager, red-faced, blames the war in Europe. Trading has collapsed, the world’s economy is teetering—everyone is cutting back. Especially banks. Into a hatbox Willie folds his sack coats and matching trousers and vests, his cravats and cuff buttons and spats, then sets the box on the shelf of Mother’s closet.

  He buys five newspapers and a grease pencil and sits in the park. On the same bench where he used to read Alger novels he now combs the wants. He then walks the length of Brooklyn, filling out forms, handing in applications. He applies for bank jobs, clerk jobs, salesman jobs. He holds his nose when applying for salesman jobs. The idea of tricking someone into buying something they don’t need, and can’t afford, makes him sick.

  At the start of each day Willie meets Happy and Eddie at Pete’s Awful Coffee. Eddie’s been laid off too. The builders of the office tower ran out of cash. Whole fuckin thin is rigged, Eddie mutters into his coffee cup. No one at the counter disagrees. No one dares.

  Then, just around the start of the 1917 baseball season, on his way to meet Eddie and Happy, Willie spots a newsboy from half a block away, waving the extra. That one word, big and black and shiny as the badge on the newsboy’s shirt—WAR. Willie hands the newsboy a penny, runs to the coffee shop. Breathless, he spreads the newspaper across the counter and tells Eddie and Happy this is it, their big chance, they should all enlist. They’re only sixteen, but hell, maybe they can get fake birth certificates. Maybe they can go to Canada, sign up there. It’s war, it’s nasty, but Jesus—it’s something.