The Bonfire of the Vanities

by Tom Wolfe

  He took one hand off the wheel and made a grand gesture toward the mighty island.

  “There it is, babe!”

  “We’re back to babe again?”

  “I just feel like calling you babe, babe. New York City. There it is.”

  “Do you really think I’m the babe type?”

  “You’re as babe as they come, Maria. Where do you want to have dinner? It’s all yours. New York City.”

  “Sherman! Aren’t you supposed to turn there?”

  He looked to the right. It was true. He was two lanes to the left of the lanes that led to the off-ramp to Manhattan, and there was no way he could cut across. By now this lane—the next lane—the next lane—every lane—was a train of cars and trucks, bumper to bumper, inching toward a toll plaza a hundred yards ahead. Above the plaza was a huge green sign, lit up by yellow lamps, saying BRONX UPSTATE N.Y. NEW ENGLAND.

  “Sherman, I’m sure that’s the turnoff to Manhattan.”

  “You’re right, sweetheart, but there’s no way I can get over there now.”

  “Where does this go?”

  “The Bronx.”

  The trains of vehicles inched forward in a cloud of carbon and sulphur particles toward the toll gates.

  The Mercedes was so low-slung, Sherman had to reach way up to surrender two dollar bills at the booth. A tired-looking black man stared down at him from the window of a very high perch. Something had made a long gash in the side of the booth. The gully was corroding.

  A vague smoky abysmal uneasiness was seeping into Sherman’s skull. The Bronx…He had been born and raised in New York and took a manly pride in knowing the city. I know the city. But in fact his familiarity with the Bronx, over the course of his thirty-eight years, was derived from five or six trips to the Bronx Zoo, two to the Botanical Gardens, and perhaps a dozen trips to Yankee Stadium, the last one in 1977 for a World Series game. He did know that the Bronx had numbered streets, which were a continuation of Manhattan’s. What he would do would be—well, he would get on a cross street and take that west until he reached one of the avenues that take you back down into Manhattan. How bad could it be?

  The tide of red taillights flowed on ahead of them, and now they bothered him. In the darkness, amid this red swarm, he couldn’t get his bearings. His sense of direction was slipping away. He must be heading north still. The down side of the bridge hadn’t curved a great deal. But now there were only signs to go by. His entire stock of landmarks was gone, left behind. At the end of the bridge the expressway split into a Y. MAJOR DEEGAN GEO. WASHINGTON BRIDGE…BRUCKNER…NEW ENGLAND…Major Deegan went upstate…No!…Veer right…Suddenly another Y…EAST BRONX NEW ENGLAND…EAST 138 BRUCKNER BOULEVARD…Choose one, you ninny!…Acey-deucey…one finger, two fingers…He veered right again…EAST 138th…a ramp…All at once there was no more ramp, no more clean cordoned expressway. He was at ground level. It was as if he had fallen into a junkyard. He seemed to be underneath the expressway. In the blackness he could make out a cyclone fence over on the left…something caught in it…A woman’s head!…No, it was a chair with three legs and a burnt seat with the charred stuffing hanging out in great wads, rammed halfway through a cyclone fence…Who on earth would jam a chair into the mesh of a cyclone fence? And why?

  “Where are we, Sherman?”

  He could tell by the tone of her voice that there weren’t going to be any more discussions of Christopher Marlowe or where to have dinner.

  “We’re in the Bronx.”

  “You know how to get outta here?”

  “Sure. If I can just find a cross street…Let’s see, let’s see, let’s see…138th Street…”

  They were traveling north underneath the expressway. But what expressway? Two lanes, both heading north…To the left a retaining wall and cyclone fencing and concrete columns supporting the expressway…Should head west to find a street back to Manhattan…turn left…but he can’t turn left because of the wall…Let’s see, let’s see…138th Street…Where is it?…There! The sign—138th Street…He keeps to the left, to make the turn…A big opening in the wall…138th Street…But he can’t turn left! To his left are four or five lanes of traffic, down here underneath the expressway, two going north, two going south, and another one beyond them, cars and trucks barreling in both directions—there’s no way he can cut across that traffic…So he keeps going…into the Bronx…Another opening in the wall coming up…He hugs the left lane…Same situation!…No way to turn left!…He begins to feel trapped here in the gloom beneath the expressway…But how bad could it be?…Plenty of traffic…

  “What are we doing, Sherman?”

  “I’m trying to turn left, but there’s no way you can turn left off of this goddamned road. I’m going to have to turn right somewhere up here and make a U-turn or something and come back across.”

  Maria had no comment. Sherman glanced at her. She was looking straight ahead, grimly. Off to the right, above some low decrepit buildings, he could see a billboard that said

  Tops In The Bronx

  Meat Warehouse

  Meat warehouse…deep in the Bronx…Another opening in the wall up ahead…He starts bearing to the right this time—a tremendous horn!—a truck passing him on the right…He swerves left—

  “Sherman!”

  “Sorry, babe.”

  —too late to make the right turn…He keeps going, hugs the right side of the right lane, ready for the turn…Another opening…turns right…a wide street…What a lot of people all of a sudden…Half of them seem to be out in the street…dark, but they look Latin…Puerto Ricans?…Over there a long low building with scalloped dormer windows…like something from a storybook Swiss chalet…but terribly blackened…Over here a bar—he stares—half covered in metal shutters…So many people in the street…He slows down…Low apartment buildings with windows missing…entire sashes gone…A red light. He stops. He can see Maria’s head panning this way and that…“Ooooooaaaggggh!” A tremendous scream off to the left…A young man with a wispy mustache and a sport shirt is sauntering across the street. A girl runs after him screaming. “Ooooooaggggh!”…Dark face, frizzy blond hair…She throws her arm around his neck, but in slow motion, as if she’s drunk. “Ooooooaaggggh!” Trying to strangle him! He doesn’t even look at her. He just rams his elbow back into her stomach. She slides off his body. She’s down on the street on all fours. He keeps walking. Never looks back. She gets up. She lunges toward him again. “Ooooaagggh!” Now they’re right in front of the car. Sherman and Maria are sitting in their tan leather bucket seats staring right at them. The girl—she has her man by the neck again. He gives her another whack in the midsection with his elbow. The light changes, but Sherman can’t budge. People have come out into the street from both sides to watch the imbroglio. They’re laughing. They’re cheering. She’s pulling his hair. He’s grimacing and whacking her backward with both elbows. People all over the place. Sherman looks at Maria. Neither has to say a word. Two white people, one of them a young woman decked out in a royal-blue Avenue Foch jacket with shoulders out to here…enough matched luggage in the back seat for a trip to China…a $48,000 Mercedes roadster…in the middle of the South Bronx…Miraculous! No one pays any attention to them. Just another car at the light. The two combatants gradually edge off to the other side of the street. Now they’re grappling like Sumo wrestlers, face to face. They’re staggering, weaving. They’re worn out. They’re gasping for breath. They’ve had it. They might as well be dancing. The crowd’s losing interest, drifting away.

  Sherman says to Maria, “True love, babe.” Wants to make her think he’s not worried.

  Now there’s no one in front of the car, but the light has turned red again. He waits it out, then heads down the street. Not so many people now…a wide street. He makes a U-turn, heads back the way they came…

  “What are you gonna do now, Sherman?”

  “I think we’re okay. This is a main cross street. We’re heading in the right direction. We’re heading west.”<
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  But when they crossed the big thoroughfare under the expressway, they found themselves in a chaotic intersection. Streets converged from odd angles…People were crossing the street in every direction…Dark faces…Over this way a subway entrance…Over there low buildings, shops…Great Taste Chinese Takeout…He couldn’t tell which street went due west…That one—the likeliest—he turned that way…a wide street…cars parked on both sides…up ahead, double-parked…triple-parked…a crowd…Could he even get through?…So he turned…that way…There was a street sign, but the names of the streets were no longer parallel to the streets themselves. East Something seemed to be…in that direction…So he took that street, but it quickly merged with a narrow side street and ran between some low buildings. The buildings appeared to be abandoned. At the next corner he turned—west, he figured—and followed that street a few blocks. There were more low buildings. They might have been garages and they might have been sheds. There were fences with spirals of razor wire on top. The streets were deserted, which was okay, he told himself, and yet he could feel his heart beating with a nervous twang. Then he turned again. A narrow street lined with seven- or eight-story apartment buildings; no sign of people; not a light in a window. The next block, the same. He turned again, and as he rounded the corner—

  —astonishing. Utterly empty, a vast open terrain. Block after block—how many?—six? eight? a dozen?—entire blocks of the city without a building left standing. There were streets and curbing and sidewalks and light poles and nothing else. The eerie grid of a city was spread out before him, lit by the chemical yellow of the street lamps. Here and there were traces of rubble and slag. The earth looked like concrete, except that it rolled down this way…and up that way…the hills and dales of the Bronx…reduced to asphalt, concrete, and cinders…in a ghastly yellow gloaming.

  He had to look twice to make sure he was in fact still driving on a New York street. The street led up a long slope…Two blocks away…three blocks away…it was hard to tell on this enormous vacant lot…There was a lone building, the last one…It was on the corner…three or four stories high…It looked as if it were ready to keel over at any moment…It was lit up at the ground level, as if there was a store or a bar…Three or four people were out on the sidewalk. Sherman could see them under the streetlight on the corner.

  “What is this, Sherman?” Maria was staring right at him.

  “The southeast Bronx, I guess.”

  “You mean you don’t know where we are?”

  “I know about where we are. As long as we keep heading west we’ll be all right.”

  “What makes you think we’re heading west?”

  “Oh, don’t worry, we’re heading west. It’s just, uh…”

  “It’s just what?”

  “If you see a street sign…I’m looking for a numbered street.”

  The truth was, Sherman could no longer tell which way he was heading. As they drew near the building, he could hear thung thung thung thung thung thung. He could hear it even though the windows of the car were up…A bass violin…An electrical cord looped down from the light pole on the corner through the open door. Out on the sidewalk was a woman wearing what looked like a basketball jersey and shorts, and two men in short-sleeved sport shirts. The woman was leaning over with her hands on her knees, laughing and swinging her head around in a big circle. The two men were laughing at her. Were they Puerto Rican? There was no telling. Inside the doorway, the doorway where the electrical cord went, Sherman could see a low light and silhouettes. Thung thung thung thung thung…the bass…then the tops of some trumpet notes…Latin music?…The woman’s head went around and around.

  He glanced at Maria. She sat there in her terrific royal-blue jacket. Her thick dark bobbed hair framed a face that was as frozen as a photograph. Sherman sped up and left the eerie outpost in the wasteland.

  He turned toward some buildings…over there…He passed houses with no sashes in the windows…

  They came upon a little park with an iron railing around it. You had to turn either left or right. The streets went off at odd angles. Sherman had lost track of the grid pattern altogether. It no longer looked like New York. It looked like some small decaying New England city. He turned left.

  “Sherman, I’m beginning not to like this.”

  “Don’t worry, kid.”

  “It’s kid now?”

  “You didn’t like babe.” He wanted to sound nonchalant.

  Now there were cars parked along the street…Three youths stood beneath a streetlight; three dark faces. They wore quilted jackets. They stared at the Mercedes. Sherman turned again.

  Up ahead he could see the fuzzy yellow glow of what seemed to be a wider, more brightly lit street. The closer they came to it, the more people…on the sidewalks, in doorways, out in the street…What a lot of dark faces…Up ahead, something in the street. His headlights were soaked up by the darkness. Then he could make it out. A car parked out in the middle of the street, nowhere near the curb…a group of boys standing around it…More dark faces…Could he even get around them? He pushed the button that locked the doors. The electronic click startled him, as if it were the beat of a snare drum. He eased by. The boys stooped down and stared in the windows of the Mercedes.

  Out of the corner of his eye he could see one of them smiling. But he said nothing. He just stared and grinned. Thank God, there was enough room. Sherman kept easing on by. Suppose he had a flat tire? Or the engine flooded? That would be a pretty fix. But he didn’t feel rattled. He was still on top of it. Just keep rolling. That’s the main thing. A $48,000 Mercedes. Come on, you Krauts, you Panzer heads, you steely-brained machinists…Do it right…He made it past the car. Up ahead, a thoroughfare…Traffic was going across the intersection at a good clip in both directions. He let his breath out. He’d take it! To the right! To the left! It didn’t matter. He reached the intersection. The light was red. Well, the hell with that. He started through.

  “Sherman, you’re going through a red light!”

  “Good. Maybe the cops’ll come. That wouldn’t upset me too much.”

  Maria wasn’t saying a word. The concerns of her luxurious life were now tightly focused. Human existence had but one purpose: to get out of the Bronx.

  Up ahead the vaporous mustard glow of the streetlights was brighter and more spread out…Some sort of major intersection…Wait a second…Up there, a subway entrance…Over here, shops, cheap food joints…Texas Fried Chicken…Great Taste Chinese Takeout…Great Taste Chinese Takeout!

  Maria was thinking the same thing. “Jesus Christ, Sherman, we’re back where we started! You been around in a circle!”

  “I know it. I know it. Just hold on a second. I tell you what. I’m gonna take a right. I’m gonna head back down under the expressway. I’m gonna—”

  “Don’t get under that thing again, Sherman.”

  The expressway was right up above. The light was green. Sherman didn’t know what to do. Someone was blowing a horn behind him.

  “Sherman! Look over there! It says George Washington Bridge!”

  Where? The horn kept blowing. Then he saw it. It was on the far side, beneath the expressway, in the decrepit gray gloaming, a sign on a concrete support…95. 895 EAST. GEO. WASH. BRIDGE…Must be a ramp…

  “But we don’t want to go in that direction! That’s north!”

  “So what, Sherman? At least you know what it is! At least it’s civilization! Let’s get outta here!”

  The horn blared. Somebody was back there yelling. Sherman gunned it, while he still had the light. He drove across the five lanes toward the little sign. He was back under the expressway.

  “It’s right over there, Sherman!”

  “Okay, okay, I see it.”

  The ramp looked like a black chute stuck up between the concrete supports. The Mercedes took a hard bounce from a pothole.

  “Christ,” said Sherman, “I didn’t even see that.”

  He leaned forward over the steering wheel.
The headlights shot across the concrete columns in a delirium. He shifted into second gear. He turned left around an abutment and gunned it up the ramp. Bodies!…Bodies in the road!…Two of them curled up!…No, not bodies…ridges in the side…molds…No, containers, some kind of containers…Trash cans…He’d have to squeeze to the left to get around them…He shifted down into first gear and turned to the left…A blur in his headlights…For an instant he thought someone had jumped off the guardrail of the ramp…Not big enough…It was an animal…It was lying in the road, blocking the way…Sherman jammed down on the brake…A piece of luggage hit him in the back of his head…two pieces…

  A shriek from Maria. A suitcase was on top of her headrest. The car had stalled. Sherman set the brake and pulled the suitcase off her and shoved it back.

  “You okay?”

  She wasn’t looking at him. She was staring through the windshield. “What is that?”

  Blocking the road—it wasn’t an animal…Treads…It was a wheel…His first thought was that a wheel had come off a car up on the expressway and it had bounced down here onto the ramp. All at once the car was dead quiet, because the engine had stalled out. Sherman started the engine up again. He tested the brake to make sure it was secure. Then he opened the door.

  “What are you doing, Sherman?”

  “I’m gonna push it out of the way.”

  “Be careful. What if a car’s coming?”

  “Well.” He shrugged and got out.

  He felt strange from the moment he set foot on the ramp. From overhead the tremendous clanging noise of vehicles going over some sort of metal joint or plate in the expressway. He was staring up at the expressway’s black underbelly. He couldn’t see the cars. He could only hear them pounding the road, apparently at great speed, making the clanging noise and creating a field of vibration. The vibration enveloped the great corroded black structure with a hum. But at the same time he could hear his shoes, his $650 New & Lingwood shoes, New & Lingwood of Jermyn Street, London, with their English leather soles and heels, making tiny gritty scraping sounds as he walked up the incline toward the wheel. The tiny gritty scraping sound of his shoes was as sharp as any sound he had ever heard. He leaned over. It wasn’t a wheel, after all, only a tire. Imagine a car losing a tire. He picked it up.