The Bonfire of the Vanities

by Tom Wolfe

  Just then the intercom buzzer sounded again, and the secretary’s voice said: “There’s a Mr. Simpson on the phone, from the Citizens Mutual Insurance Company. He wants to talk to the president of Urban Guaranty Investments.”

  Reverend Bacon picked up the telephone. “This is Reginald Bacon…That’s right, president and chief executive officer…That’s right, that’s right…Yes, well, I appreciate your interest, Mr. Simpson, but we already brought that issue to market…That’s right, the entire issue…Oh, absolutely, Mr. Simpson, those school bonds are very popular. Of course, it helps to know that particular market, and that’s what Urban Guaranty Investments is here for. We want to put Harlem in the market…That’s right, that’s right, Harlem’s always been on the market…see…Now Harlem’s gonna be in the market…Thank you, thank you…Well, why don’t you try one of our associates downtown. Are you familiar with the firm of Pierce & Pierce?…That’s right…They brought a very large block of that issue to market, a very large block. I’m sure they’ll be happy to do business with you.”

  Urban Guaranty Investments? Pierce & Pierce? Pierce & Pierce was one of the biggest and hottest investment banking houses on Wall Street. A terrible suspicion invaded Fiske’s ordinarily charitable heart. He cut a glance at Moody, and Moody was looking at him, and, it was obvious, wondering the same thing. Had Bacon shifted $350,000 into this securities operation, whatever in the name of God it actually was? If the money had entered the securities market, then by now it could have vanished without a trace.

  As soon as Reverend Bacon hung up, Fiske said: “I didn’t know you had—I’d never heard of—well, perhaps you—but I don’t think so—what is—I couldn’t help but hear you mention—what is Urban Guaranty Investments?”

  “Oh,” said Reverend Bacon, “we do a little underwriting, whenever we can help out. No reason why Harlem should always buy retail and sell wholesale…see…Why not make Harlem the broker?”

  To Fiske this was pure gibberish. “But where do you get—how are you able to finance—I mean something like that—” He could think of no way to put this particular lit firecracker into words. The necessary euphemisms eluded him. To his surprise, Moody spoke up again.

  “I know a little about securities firms, Reverend Bacon, and I know they require a lot of capital.” He paused, and Fiske could tell that Moody was thrashing about in the swollen seas of circumlocution, too. “Well, what I mean is, ordinary capital, capital in the ordinary sense. You’ve—we’ve just been talking about capital north of Ninety-sixth Street and controlling…uh, the steam, as you mentioned…but this sounds like straight capitalism, basic capitalism, if you see what I mean.”

  Reverend Bacon looked at him balefully, then chuckled in his throat and smiled, not with kindness.

  “It don’t require capital. We’re underwriters. We bring the issues to market, so long as they’re for the good of the community…see…schools, hospitals—”

  “Yes, but—”

  “As Paul knew, there are many roads to Damascus, my friend. Many roads.” Many roads hung in the air, humid with meaning.

  “Yes, I know, but—”

  “If I were you,” said Reverend Bacon, “I wouldn’t worry about Urban Guaranty Investments. If I were you, I’d do like the old folks say. I’d stick to my knitting.”

  “That’s what I’m trying to do, Reverend Bacon,” said Moody. “My knitting is—well, it amounts to three hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”

  Fiske slumped down in his seat again. Moody had regained his fool’s courage. Fiske cut a glance at the fool killer behind the desk. Just then the intercom buzzed again.

  The secretary’s voice said: “I got Annie Lamb on the line. Says she’s got to talk to you.”

  “Annie Lamb?”

  “That’s right, Reverend.”

  A big sigh. “All right, I’ll take it.” He picked up the telephone. “Annie?…Annie, wait a minute. Slow down…Say what? Henry?…That’s terrible, Annie. How bad is it?…Aw, Annie, I’m sorry…He did?” A long pause, as Reverend Bacon listened, eyes cast down. “What do the police say?…Parking tickets? That don’t—…That don’t—…I say, that don’t—…Okay, Annie, look here. You come on over here and you tell me the whole thing…Meantime, I’m calling the hospital. They didn’t do the right thing, Annie. That’s what it sounds like to me. They did not do the right thing…What?…You are absolutely right. You’re right as rainwater. They did not do the right thing, and they’re going to hear from me…Don’t worry. You come right on over here.”

  Reverend Bacon hung up the telephone and swiveled back toward Fiske and Moody and narrowed his eyes and looked at them gravely. “Gentlemen, I’ve got an emergency here. One of my most loyal workers, one of my community leaders, her son’s been struck down by a hit-and-run driver…in a Mercedes-Benz. A Mercedes-Benz…He’s at death’s door, and this good woman is afraid to go to the police, and do you know why? Parking tickets. They’ve got a warrant out for her arrest for parking tickets. This lady works. She works downtown at City Hall, and she needs that car, and they’ve got a warrant out for…parking tickets. That wouldn’t stop you if it was your son, but you’ve never lived in the ghetto. If it was your son, they wouldn’t do what they did. They wouldn’t wrap up his wrist and send him packing when what he’s got is a concussion and he’s at death’s door…see…But that’s the story of the ghetto. Gross negligence. That’s what the ghetto is…gross negligence…Gentlemen, our conference is adjourned. I’ve got some serious business to tend to now.”

  On the drive back downtown the two young Yale men didn’t say much until they were almost at Ninety-sixth Street. Fiske was happy enough to have found the car where he had left it, with the tires still inflated and the windshield in one piece. As for Moody—twenty blocks had gone by and Fiske hadn’t heard a peep out of Moody about being a linebacker at Yale.

  Finally, Moody said, “Well, you want to have dinner at Leicester’s? I know the mattre d’, a big tall black fellow with a gold earring.”

  Fiske smiled faintly but said nothing. Moody’s little joke made Fiske feel superior. Part of the presumed humor was the implausibility of the notion that either of them would be dining at Leicester’s, which was this year’s most fashionable restaurant of the century. Well, it just so happened that Fiske was going to Leicester’s this very evening. Moody also didn’t realize that Leicester’s, although fashionable, was not a formal restaurant featuring a starched regiment of maître d’s and captains. It was more the British bistro-out-Fulham-Road sort of thing. Leicester’s was the favorite hangout of the British colony in New York, and Fiske had gotten to know quite a few of them—and, well, it was the kind of thing he could never explain to a fellow like Moody, but the British understood the art of conversation. Fiske considered himself essentially British, British in ancestry and British in…well, in a certain innately aristocratic comprehension of how one conducted one’s life, aristocratic in the sense not of the richest but of the best. He was like the great Lord Philbank, wasn’t he?—Philbank, a pillar of the Church of England who had used his social connections and his knowledge of the financial markets to help the poor of London’s East End.

  “Come to think of it,” said Moody, “I never have seen a black waiter in a restaurant in New York, except for lunch counters. You really think Bacon is going to get anywhere?”

  “Depends on what you mean by that.”

  “Well, what will happen?”

  “I don’t know,” said Fiske, “but they want to be waiters at Leicester’s about as much as you and I do. I kind of think they just might settle for a contribution to the Reverend Mr. Bacon’s good works in Harlem, and then they’ll move on to the next restaurant.”

  “Then it’s just a payoff,” said Moody.

  “Well, that’s the funny thing,” said Fiske. “Things do change. I’m not sure he cares whether they change or not, but they change. Places he never heard of, and wouldn’t care about if he had, they’ll start hiring black waiters
rather than wait for Buck and all those characters to turn up.”

  “The steam,” said Moody.

  “I suppose,” said Fiske. “Didn’t you just love all that about the boiler room? He’s never worked in any boiler room. But he’s discovered a new resource, I guess you could call it. Maybe it’s even a form of capital, if you define capital as anything you can use to create more wealth. I don’t know, maybe Bacon is no different from Rockefeller or Carnegie. You discover a new resource and you take your money while you’re young, and when you’re old they give you awards and name things after you, and you’re remembered as a leader of the people.”

  “All right, then what about Urban Guaranty Investments? That doesn’t sound like any new resource.”

  “I wouldn’t be too sure. I don’t know what it is, but I’m going to find out. I’m willing to bet you one thing. Whatever it is, it’s going to have some kind of weird angle, and it’s going to drive me a little bit farther around the fucking bend.”

  Then Fiske bit his lip, because he was in truth a devout Episcopalian and seldom swore and regarded foul language not only as wrong but as common. This was one of quite a few points on which, even at this late date, he happened to agree with Reginald Bacon.

  By the time they reached Seventy-ninth Street, securely in White Manhattan, Fiske knew that Bacon was right once more. They weren’t investing in a day-care center, were they…They were trying to buy souls. They were trying to tranquilize the righteously angry soul of Harlem.

  Let’s face facts!

  Then he snapped out of it. Fiske…you idiot…If he didn’t manage to retrieve the $350,000, or most of it, he was going to look like a most righteous fool.

  7. Catching the Fish

  The telephone blasted Peter Fallow awake inside an egg with the shell peeled away and only the membranous sac holding it intact. Ah! The membranous sac was his head, and the right side of his head was on the pillow, and the yolk was as heavy as mercury, and it rolled like mercury, and it was pressing down on his right temple and his right eye and his right ear. If he tried to get up to answer the telephone, the yolk, the mercury, the poisoned mass, would shift and roll and rupture the sac, and his brains would fall out.

  The telephone was on the floor, in the corner, near the window, on the brown carpet. The carpet was disgusting. Synthetic; the Americans manufactured filthy carpet; Metalon, Streptolon, deep, shaggy, with a feel that made his flesh crawl. Another explosion; he was looking straight at it, a white telephone and a slimy white cord lying there in a filthy shaggy brown nest of Streptolon. Behind the Venetian blinds the sun was so bright it hurt his eyes. The room got light only between one and two in the afternoon, when the sun moved between two buildings on its trip across the southern sky. The other rooms, the bathroom, the kitchen, and the living room, never got any sun at all. The kitchen and the bathroom didn’t even have windows. When one turned on the light in the bathroom, which had a plastic tub-and-shower-stall module—module!—a single molded unit that deflected slightly when he stepped into the tub—when one turned on the light in the bathroom, a ceiling fan went on up above a metal grille in the ceiling to provide ventilation. The fan created a grinding din and a trememdous vibration. So when he first got up, he no longer turned on the light in the bathroom. He depended solely on the sickly blue dawn provided by the overhead fluorescent light in the passageway outside. More than once he had gone to work without shaving.

  His head still on the pillow, Fallow kept staring at the telephone, which continued to explode. He really had to get a table to put by the bed, if one could call a mattress and springs on one of those American adjustable metal frames, good for cutting off knuckles and fingers mainly when one tried to adjust them—if one could call this a bed. The telephone looked slimy and filthy lying there on the filthy carpet. But he never invited anybody up here, except for girls, and that was always late in the evening when he had been through two or three bottles of wine and didn’t give a damn. That wasn’t really true, was it? When he brought a girl up here, he always saw this pathetic hole through her eyes, at least for a moment. The thought of wine and a girl tripped a wire in his brain, and a shudder of remorse went through his nervous system. Something had happened last night. These days he often woke up like this, poisonously hung over, afraid to move an inch and filled with an abstract feeling of despair and shame. Whatever he had done was submerged like a monster at the bottom of a cold dark lake. His memory had drowned in the night, and he could feel only the icy despair. He had to look for the monster deductively, fathom by fathom. Sometimes he knew that whatever it had been, he couldn’t face it, and he would decide to turn away from it forever, and just then something, some stray detail, would send out a signal, and the beast would come popping to the surface on its own and show him its filthy snout.

  He did remember how it started, namely, at Leicester’s, where, like many of the Englishmen who frequented the place, he managed to insinuate himself at the table of an American who could be counted on to pick up the bill without pouting over it, in this case a fat fellow named Aaron Gutwillig, who had recently sold a simulator-leasing company for twelve million dollars and liked to be invited to parties given by the English colony and the Italian colony in New York. Another Yank, a crude but amusing little man named Benny Grillo, who produced so-called news documentaries for television, had a head on and wanted to go downtown to the Limelight, a discotheque set up in what used to be an Episcopal church. Grillo was good for the bill at the Limelight, and so he had gone down there with Grillo and two American model girls and Franco di Nodini, who was an Italian journalist, and Tony Moss, whom he had known at the University of Kent, and Caroline Heftshank, who had just arrived from London and was absolutely petrified with fear of street crime in New York, which she read about every day in London, and she jumped at every shadow, which was funny at first. The two model girls had ordered roast-beef sandwiches at Leicester’s, and they pulled the meat out and dangled it above their mouths and ate it out of their fingers. Caroline Heftshank jumped a lot when they got out of the taxi in front of the Limelight. The place was practically ringed by black youths wearing enormous sneakers and perching on the old iron church fence, eyeing the drunks and heads going in and out of the door. Inside, the Limelight looked unusually grotesque, and Fallow felt unusually witty, drunk, and charming. So many transvestites! So many supremely repulsive punkers! So many pasty-faced little American girls with ortho-perfect teeth and silver lipstick and wet-night eye makeup! Such loud seamless endless metallic music and such foggy grainy videotapes up on the screens full of morose skinny boys and smoke bombs! Deeper and deeper into the lake it had all gone. They were in a taxi going back and forth across streets in the West Fifties looking for a place with a galvanized-metal door, called the Cup. A black studded rubber floor, and some loathsome Irish boys with no shirts on, or they looked Irish, spraying beer out of cans over everybody; and then some girls with no shirts on. Ah. Something had happened in front of some people in a room. Insofar as he had a true memory of it, he did remember that…Why did he do these things?…The house in Canterbury…the locker room at Cross Keys…He could see himself as he looked back then…his Victorian-picture-book blond hair, of which he had been so proud…his long pointed nose, his long slender jaw, his spindly body, always too thin for his great height, of which he had also been so proud…his spindly body…A ripple…The monster was heading up from the bottom of the lake! In a moment…its filthy snout!

  Can’t face it—

  The telephone exploded again. He opened his eyes and squinted at the sun-drenched modern squalor, and with his eyes open it was even worse. With his eyes open—the immediate future. Such hopelessness! Such icy despair! He squinted and shuddered and closed his eyes again. The snout!

  He opened them immediately. This thing he had done when he was very drunk—in addition to despair and remorse, he now felt fear.

  The ringing telephone began to alarm him. Suppose it was The City Light. After the Dea
d Mouse’s last lecture, he had sworn to himself to be at the office by ten o’clock every morning, and it was now after one. In that case—he’d better not answer it. No—if he didn’t answer the telephone, he would sink to the bottom forever, along with the monster. He rolled out of the bed and put his feet on the floor, and the horrible yolk shifted. He was thrown into a violent headache. He wanted to vomit, but he knew it would hurt his head too much for him to possibly allow it to happen. He started toward the telephone. He sank to his knees and then to all fours. He crawled to the telephone, picked up the receiver, and then lay down on the carpet, hoping the yolk would settle again.