The Bonfire of the Vanities

by Tom Wolfe

  The telephone exploded again, and Fallow was terrified at what he might hear if he picked up the receiver. He could remember nothing from the time they all went crashing out onto the sidewalk until this moment. He swung his feet out of the bed, and they were all still roaring and boiling inside his skull, and his whole body felt sore. He crawled across the carpet to the exploding telephone and lay down beside it. The carpet felt dry, metallic, dusty, filthy against his cheek.

  “Hello?”

  “Aaaayyy, Pete! How wahya!”

  It was a cheery voice, a Yank voice, a New York voice, a particularly crude sort of New York voice. Fallow found this Yank voice even more jarring than the Pete. Well, at least it wasn’t The City Light. Nobody at The City Light would be calling him with such a cheery voice.

  “Who is it?” said Fallow. His own voice was an animal in a hole.

  “Jeezus, Pete, you sound terrific. Any pulse? Hey. This is Al Vogel.”

  The news made him close his eyes again. Vogel was one of those typical Yank celebrities who, to an Englishman reading about them in London, seemed so colorful, irrepressible, and morally admirable. In person, in New York, they always turned out the same way. They were Yanks; which is to say, crude bores. Vogel was well known in England as an American lawyer whose specialty was unpopular political causes. He defended radicals and pacifists, much the way Charles Garry, William Kunstler, and Mark Lane had. Unpopular, of course, merely meant unpopular with ordinary people. Vogel’s defendants were certainly popular enough with the press and intellectuals in the 1960s and 1970s, especially in Europe, where anyone defended by Albert Vogel grew wings, a halo, a toga, and a torch. Few of these latter-day saints had any money, however, and Fallow often wondered how Vogel made a living, especially since the 1980s had not been kind to him. In the 1980s not even the press and intellectuals had any patience for the sort of irascible, seething, foul-humored, misery-loving, popped-vein clientele he specialized in. Lately Fallow had been running into the great defender at the most extraordinary parties. Vogel would go to the opening of a parking lot (and Fallow would say hello to him there).

  “Oh, hi-i-i-i,” said Fallow in what ended up as a moan.

  “I called your office first, Pete, and they said they hadn’t seen you.”

  Not good, thought Fallow. He wondered when, if, why, where he had given Vogel his home telephone number.

  “You still there, Pete?”

  “Ummmmmmmm.” Fallow had his eyes closed. He had no sense of up or down. “It’s all right. I’m working at home today.”

  “I’ve got something I want to talk to you about, Pete. I think there’s a hell of a story in it.”

  “Ummmm.”

  “Yeah, only I’d just as soon not go into it over the telephone. I tell you what. Whyn’t you come have lunch with me. I’ll meet you at the Regent’s Park at one o’clock.”

  “Ummmm. I don’t know, Al. The Regent’s Park. Where is that?”

  “On Central Park South, near the New York Athletic Club.”

  “Ummmmm.”

  Fallow was torn between two profound instincts. On the one hand, the thought of getting off the floor, of shifting the mercury yolk for a second time, for no other reason than to listen to an American bore and has-been for an hour or two…On the other hand, a free meal at a restaurant. The pterodactyl and the brontosaurus were locked in mortal combat on the cliff over the Lost Continent.

  The free meal won, as it had so often in the past.

  “All right, Al, I’ll see you at one o’clock. Where is this place again?”

  “On Central Park South, Pete, right near the New York A.C. It’s a nice place. You can look at the park. You can look at a statue of José Martí on a horse.”

  Fallow said goodbye and struggled to his feet, and the yolk was yawing this way and that way, and he stubbed his toe on the metal frame of the bed. The pain was terrific, but it focused his central nervous system. He took a shower in the dark. The plastic shower curtain was suffocating. When he closed his eyes he had the feeling he was keeling over. From time to time he had to hold on to the shower head.

  The Regent’s Park was the sort of New York restaurant favored by married men having affairs with young women. It was grand, glossy, and solemn, with a great deal of marble inside and out, a colossal stiff neck whose hauteur appealed mainly to people staying at the nearby Ritz-Carlton, Park Lane, St. Moritz, and Plaza Hotels. In the history of New York no conversation had ever begun with: “I was having lunch at the Regent’s Park the other day and…”

  True to his word, Albert Vogel had secured a table beside the great window. This was not a hard ticket at the Regent’s Park. Nevertheless, there it was, the park, in its springtime glory. And there was the statue of José Martí, which Vogel had also promised. Martí’s horse was rearing up, and the great Cuban revolutionary was leaning perilously to the right in his saddle. Fallow averted his eyes. An unsteady park statue was too much to contend with.

  Vogel was in his usual hearty mood. Fallow watched his lips move without hearing a word. The blood drained from Fallow’s face, and then his chest and arms. His hide turned cold. Then a million little scalding hot minnows tried to escape from his arteries and reach the surface. Perspiration broke out on his forehead. He wondered if he was dying. This was the way heart attacks began. He had read that. He wondered if Vogel knew about coronary resuscitation. Vogel looked like someone’s grandmother. His hair was white, not a gray-white, but a silky pure white. He was short and pudgy. In his palmy days he had been pudgy, too, but he had looked “scrappy,” as the Yanks liked to say. Now his skin was pinkish and delicate. His hands were tiny and had ropy old veins leading up to the knuckles. A cheery old woman.

  “Pete,” said Vogel, “what’ll you have to drink?”

  “Not a thing,” said Fallow, rather overemphatically. Then to the waiter: “Could I have some water.”

  “I want a margarita on the rocks,” said Vogel. “Sure you won’t change your mind, Pete?”

  Fallow shook his head. That was a mistake. A poisonous hammering began inside his skull.

  “Just one to turn the motor over?”

  “No, no.”

  Vogel put his elbows on the table and leaned forward and began scanning the room, and then his eyes fastened on a table slightly behind him. At the table were a man in a gray business suit and a girl in her late teens with long, straight, very showy blond hair.

  “You see that girl?” said Vogel. “I could swear that girl was on this committee, whatever they call it, at the University of Michigan.”

  “What committee?”

  “This student group. They run the lecture program. I gave a lecture at the University of Michigan two nights ago.”

  So what? thought Fallow. Vogel looked over his shoulder again.

  “No, it’s not her. But, Christ, it sure looks like her. These goddamned girls at these colleges—you wanna know why people go out on the lecture circuit in this country?”

  No, thought Fallow.

  “Okay, for the money. But not counting that. You wanna know why?”

  The Yanks constantly repeated introductory questions.

  “These goddamned girls.” Vogel shook his head and stared off distractedly for a moment, as if stunned by the very thought. “I swear to God, Pete, you have to hold yourself back. Otherwise, you’d feel so fucking guilty. These girls—today—well, when I was growing up, the big deal was that when you went to college, you could drink when you felt like it. Okay? These girls, they go to college so they can get laid when they feel like it. And who do they want? This is the part that’s really pathetic. Do they want nice-looking healthy boys their own age? No. You wanna know who? They want…Authority…Power…Fame…Prestige…They wanna get laid by the teachers! The teachers go crazy at these places now. You know, when the Movement was going strong, one of the things we tried to do on the campuses was to break down that wall of formality between the faculty and the students, because it was nothing but an instru
ment of control. But now, Jesus Christ, I wonder. I guess they all want to get laid by their fathers, if you believe Freud, which I don’t. You know, this is one thing the women’s movement has made no headway with. When a woman reaches forty, her problems are just as big now as they ever were—and a guy like me has never had it so good. I’m not so old, but, f’r Chrissake, I’ve got gray hair—”

  White, thought Fallow, like an old woman’s.

  “—and it doesn’t make any difference whatsoever. A little touch of celebrity and they fall over. They just fall over. I’m not bragging, because it’s so pathetic. And these goddamned girls, each one is more of a knockout than the last one. I’d like to give them a lecture on that subject, but they probably wouldn’t know what I was talking about. They have no frame of reference, about anything. The lecture I gave the night before last was on student commitment in the 1980s.”

  “I was dying to know,” said Fallow in the back of his throat, without moving his lips.

  “Pardon?”

  The Yanks said pardon? instead of what?

  “Nothing.”

  “I told them what it was like on the campuses fifteen years ago.” His face clouded over. “But I don’t know…fifteen years ago, fifty years ago, a hundred years ago…they have no frame of reference. It’s all so remote to them. Ten years ago…five years ago…Five years ago was before Walkman earphones. They can’t imagine that.”

  Fallow stopped listening. There was no way Vogel could be deflected from his course. He was irony-proof. Fallow glanced at the girl with the long yellow hair. Thrashing through the restaurant. Caroline Heftshank and the frightened look on her face. Had he done something just before they all went crashing out the door? Whatever—she deserved it—but what was it? Vogel’s lips were moving. He was going through his entire lecture. Fallow’s eyelids dropped shut. The beast broke the surface and thrashed about and eyed him. He eyed him straight down his filthy snout. Now the beast had him. He couldn’t move.

  “…Managua?” asked Vogel.

  “What?”

  “You ever been there?” asked Vogel.

  Fallow shook his head. The yawing motion made him nauseous.

  “You oughta go. Every journalist oughta go. It’s about the size of…oh, I don’t know, East Hampton. If it’s that big. Would you like to go there? It would be easy enough to set it up for you.”

  Fallow didn’t want to shake his head again. “Is that the story you wanted to tell me about?”

  Vogel paused a moment, as if weighing the remark for sarcastic content.

  “No,” he said, “but it’s not a bad idea. About one-fiftieth of everything that oughta be said about Nicaragua gets printed in this country. No, what I was talking about is something that happened in the Bronx four days ago. It might as well be Nicaragua, if you happen to live there. Anyway, you know who Reverend Bacon is, don’t you?”

  “Yes. I think so.”

  “He’s a—well, he’s a—you’ve read about him or seen him on TV, haven’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  Vogel laughed. “You wanna know where I first met him? In this gigantic duplex apartment on Park Avenue, Peggy Fryskamp’s apartment, back when she was interested in the Geronimo Brotherhood. She gave a fund-raising party there. This must’ve been the late sixties, early seventies. There was this guy Flying Deer. He gave the soul talk, we used to call it. There was always the soul talk and the money talk. Anyway, he gave the soul talk, the spiritual talk. She didn’t know the sonofabitch was loaded. She just thought it was Indian talk, the crazy way he sounded. Fifteen minutes later he threw up all over this eighty-thousand-dollar Duncan Phyfe piano Peggy had, all over the keys and the strings and the hammers and everything. You know those little felt hammers? Oh, it was outrageous. She never got over it. That jerk blew a good deal that night. And you wanna know who really gave him hell? Reverend Bacon. Yeah. He was getting ready to ask Peggy to support some of the things he had going, and when this Flying Deer threw his cookies all over the Duncan Phyfe, he knew he could say good-bye to Peggy Fryskamp. He started calling him Flying Beer. ‘Flying Deer? Flying Beer, if I know anything about it!’ Jesus, it was funny. But he wasn’t trying to be funny. Bacon never tries to be funny. Anyway, he has this woman who works for him sometimes, Annie Lamb, from the Bronx. Annie Lamb lives in the Edgar Allan Poe project with this one son she has, Henry.”

  “She’s black?” asked Fallow.

  “Yeah, she’s black. Practically everybody in the Poe projects is black or Puerto Rican. By law, incidentally, all these projects are supposed to be integrated.” Vogel shrugged his eyebrows. “Anyway, this Annie Lamb is an unusual woman.” Vogel recounted the history of Annie Lamb and her family, culminating in the hit-and-run Mercedes-Benz that had left her promising son, Henry, at death’s door.

  Unfortunate, thought Fallow, but where’s the story?

  As if anticipating that objection, Vogel said: “Now, there’s two sides to this thing, and both of them have to do with what happens to a good kid like this if he has the misfortune of being black and growing up in the Bronx. I mean, here’s a kid who did everything right. You talk about Henry Lamb, you’re talking about the one percent who do exactly what the system tells them they’re supposed to do. Okay? So what happens? First, the hospital treats the kid for…a broken wrist! If this had been a middle-class white kid, they’d’ve gone over him with the X-ray, the CAT scan, the nuclear magnetic resonance, everything there is. Second, the police and the D.A. won’t move on the case. This is what really infuriates the kid’s mother. Here’s a hit-and-run, they’ve got part of the license number and the make of the car, and they’re doing zip about it.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, basically, it’s just some kid in the South Bronx who gets hit by a car, as far as they’re concerned. They can’t be bothered. But what they’re saying is, there were no witnesses, except for the victim himself, and he’s in a terminal coma, and so they wouldn’t have a case even if they found the car and the driver. Now, suppose this were your son. He’s provided the information, but they’re not going to use it because technically it’s hearsay.”

  The whole thing made Fallow’s head hurt. He couldn’t imagine having a son, and certainly not in some council flats in the Bronx section of New York City in America.

  “It’s an unfortunate situation,” said Fallow, “but I’m not altogether sure there’s a story in it.”

  “Well, there’s gonna be a story in it very shortly for somebody, Pete,” said Vogel. “The community is up in arms. They’re about to explode. Reverend Bacon is organizing a protest demonstration.”

  “What exactly are they exploding over?”

  “They’re tired of being treated as if human life in the South Bronx means nothing! And I’m telling you, when Bacon gets hold of something, things happen. He’s not Martin Luther King or Bishop Tutu. Okay? He’s not gonna win any Nobel Prize. He’s got his own way of doing things, and sometimes it might not stand close scrutiny. But that’s one reason he’s effective. He’s what Hobsbawm called a primitive revolutionary. Hobsbawm was a Brit, right?”

  “He still is.”

  “I thought he was. He had this theory about primitive revolutionaries. There are certain natural leaders of the underclasses, and the power structure interprets what they do as crime—they may even sincerely interpret it that way—but what that person is, is a revolutionary. And that’s what Bacon is. I admire him. And I feel sorry for these people. Anyway, I think there’s a hell of a story here, quite aside from the philosophical considerations.”