The Bonfire of the Vanities

by Tom Wolfe

  Sherman tried to pay attention to both things at once, but the Frenchman’s words quickly became a drizzle, a drizzle by satellite, as he devoured the print visible below the skull of the shoeshine man:

  But the Rev. Reginald Bacon, chairman of the Harlem-based All People’s Solidarity, called this “the same old story. Human life, if it’s black human life or Hispanic human life, is not worth much to the power structure. If this had been a white honor student struck down on Park Avenue by a black driver, they wouldn’t be trifling with statistics and legal obstacles.”

  He called the hospital’s failure to diagnose Lamb’s concussion immediately “outrageous” and demanded an investigation.

  Meantime, neighbors came by Mrs. Lamb’s small, neatly kept apartment in the Poe Towers to comfort her as she reflected upon this latest development in her family’s tragic history.

  “Henry’s father was killed right out there six years ago,” she told The City Light, pointing toward a window overlooking the project’s entry. Monroe Lamb, then 36, was shot to death by a mugger one night as he returned from his job as an air-conditioning mechanic.

  “If I lose Henry, that will be the end of me, too, and nobody will care about that either,” she said. “The police never found out who killed my husband, and they don’t even want to look for who did this to Henry.”

  But Rev. Bacon vowed to put pressure on the authorities until something is done: “If the power structure is telling us it doesn’t even matter what happens to our very best young people, the very hope of these mean streets, then it’s time we had a message for the power structure: ‘Your names are not engraved on tablets that came down from the mountain. There’s an election coming up, and you can be replaced.’ ”

  Abe Weiss, Bronx District Attorney, faces a stiff challenge in September’s Democratic primary. State Assemblyman Robert Santiago has the backing of Bacon, Assemblyman Joseph Leonard, and other black leaders, as well as the leadership of the heavily Puerto Rican southern and central Bronx.

  “…and so I say we let it sit for a few weeks, let the particles settle. By then we’ll know where bottom is. We’ll know if we’re talking about realistic prices. We’ll know…”

  It suddenly dawned on Sherman what the frightened doughnut Frog was saying. But he couldn’t wait—not with this thing closing in on him—had to have a print—now!

  “Bernard, now you listen. We can’t wait. We’ve spent all this time getting everything in place. It doesn’t have to sit and settle. It’s settled. We’ve got to move now! You’re raising phantom issues. We’ve got to pull ourselves together and do it! We’ve thrashed out all these things a long time ago! It doesn’t matter what happens to gold and francs on a day-today basis!”

  Even as he spoke, he recognized the fatal urgency in his voice. On Wall Street, a frantic salesman was a dead salesman. He knew that! But he couldn’t hold back—

  “I can’t very well just close my eyes, Sherman.”

  “Nobody’s asking you to.” Thok. A little tap. A tall, delicate boy, an honor student! The terrible thought possessed his entire consciousness: They really were only two well-meaning boys who wanted to help… Yo!…The ramp, the darkness…But what about him—the big one? No mention of a second boy at all…No mention of a ramp…It made no sense…Only a coincidence perhaps!—another Mercedes!—R—2,500 of them—

  But in the Bronx on that very same evening?

  The horror of the situation smothered him all over again.

  “I’m sorry, but we can’t do this one by Zen archery, Sherman. We’re going to have to sit on the eggs for a while.”

  “What are you talking about? How long is ‘a while,’ for God’s sake?” Could they conceivably check out 2,500 automobiles?

  “Well, next week or the week after. I’d say three weeks at the outside.”

  “Three weeks!”

  “We have a whole series of big presentations coming up. There’s nothing we can do about that.”

  “I can’t wait three weeks, Bernard! Now look, you’ve let a few minor problems—hell, they’re not even problems. I’ve covered every one of those eventualities twenty goddamned times! You’ve got to do it now! Three weeks won’t help a thing!”

  On Wall Street, salesmen didn’t say got to, either.

  A pause. Then the doughnut’s soft patient voice from Paris, by satellite: “Sherman. Please. For 300 million bonds nobody’s got to do anything on hot flashes.”

  “Of course not, of course not. It’s just that I know I’ve explained…I know I’ve…I know…”

  He knew he had to talk himself down from this giddy urgent plateau as quickly as possible, become the smooth calm figure from the fiftieth floor at Pierce & Pierce that the Trader T doughnut had always known, a figure of confidence and unshakable puissance, but…it was bound to be his car. No way out of it! Mercedes, RF, a white man and woman!

  The fire raged inside his skull. The black man stropped away on his shoe. The sounds of the bond trading room closed in on him like the roar of beasts:

  “He’s seeing them at six! Your offering is five!”

  “Bid out! The Feds are doing reverses!”

  “Feds buying all coupons! Market subject!”

  “Holy fucking shit! I want out!”

  All was confusion in Part 62, Judge Jerome Meldnick presiding. From behind the clerk’s table, Kramer gazed upon Meldnick’s bewilderment with amused contempt. Up on the bench, Meldnick’s large pale head resembled a Gouda cheese. It was bent over next to that of his law secretary, Jonathan Steadman. Insofar as the judgeship of Jerome Meldnick had any usable legal background, it was lodged in the skull of Steadman. Meldnick had been executive secretary of the teachers’ union, one of the largest and most solidly Democratic unions in the state, when the governor appointed him as a judge in the criminal division of the State Supreme Court in recognition of his jurisprudential potential and his decades of dog’s work for the party. He had not practiced law since the days when he ran errands, shortly after passing the bar, for his uncle, who was a lawyer who handled wills and real-estate contracts and sold title insurance out of a two-story taxpayer on Queens Boulevard.

  Irving Bietelberg, the lawyer for a felon named Willie Francisco, was on tiptoes on the other side of the bench, peering over and trying to get a word in. The defendant himself, Francisco, fat, twenty-two, wearing a wispy mustache and a red-and-white-striped sport shirt, was on his feet yelling at Bietelberg: “Yo! Hey! Yo!” Three court officers were positioned to the sides and rear of Willie, in case he got too excited. They would have been happy to blow his head off, since he had killed a cop without batting an eye. The cop had apprehended him when he came running out of an optician’s with a pair of Porsche sunglasses in his hand. Porsche sunglasses were much admired in the Morrisania section of the Bronx, because they cost $250 a pair and had the name Porsche etched in white on the upper rim of the left lens. Willie had gone into the optician’s with a forged Medicaid prescription for glasses and announced he wanted the Porsches. The clerk said he couldn’t have them, because Medicaid wouldn’t reimburse the store for glasses that cost that much. So Willie grabbed the Porsches and ran out and shot the cop.

  It was a true piece a shit, this case, and an open-and-shut piece a shit, and Jimmy Caughey hadn’t even had to breathe hard to win it. But then this weird thing had happened. The jury had gone out yesterday afternoon and after six hours had returned without reaching a verdict. This morning Meldnick was plowing through his calendar session when the jury sent in word they had reached a verdict. They came filing in, and the verdict was guilty. Bietelberg, just doing the usual, asked that the jury be polled. “Guilty,” “Guilty,” “Guilty,” said one and all until the clerk got to an obese old white man, Lester McGuigan, who also said “Guilty” but then looked into the Porscheless eyes of Willie Francisco and said: “I don’t feel absolutely right about it, but I guess I have to cast a vote, and that’s the way I cast it.”

  Willie Francisco jumped up and
yelled “Mistrial!” even before Bietelberg could yell it—and after that all was confusion. Meldnick wrapped his forearms around his head and summoned Steadman, and that was where things stood. Jimmy Caughey couldn’t believe it. Bronx juries were notoriously unpredictable, but Caughey had figured McGuigan was one of his solid rocks. Not only was he white, he was Irish, a lifetime Bronx Irishman who would certainly know that anyone named Jimmy Caughey was a worthy young Irishman himself. But McGuigan had turned out to be an old man with time on his hands who thought too much and waxed too philosophical about things, even the likes of Willie Francisco.

  Kramer was amused by Meldnick’s confusion but not Jimmy Caughey’s. For Jimmy he had only commiseration. Kramer was in Part 62 with a similar piece a shit and had similar ridiculous catastrophes to fear. Kramer was on hand to hear a motion for an evidentiary hearing from the lawyer, Gerard Scalio, in the case of Jorge and Juan Terzio, two brothers who were “a couple of real dummies.” They had tried to hold up a Korean grocery store on Fordham Road but couldn’t figure out which buttons to hit on the cash register and settled for pulling two rings off the fingers of a female customer. This so angers another customer, Charlie Esposito, that he runs after them, catches up with Jorge, tackles him, pins him to the ground, and says to him, “You know something? You’re a couple of real dummies.” Jorge reaches inside his shirt, pulls out his gun, and shoots him right in the face, killing him.

  A true piece a shit.

  As the shitstorm grew louder and Jimmy Caughey rolled his eyes in ever more hopeless arcs, Kramer thought of a brighter future. Tonight he would meet her at last…the Girl with Brown Lipstick.

  Muldowny’s, that restaurant on the East Side, Third Avenue at Seventy-eighth Street…exposed brick walls, blond wood, brass, etched glass, hanging plants…aspiring actresses who waited on tables…celebrities…but informal and not very expensive, or that’s what he heard…the electric burble of young people in Manhattan leading…the Life…a table for two…He’s looking into the incomparable face of Miss Shelly Thomas…

  A small timid voice told him he shouldn’t do it, or not yet. The case was over, so far as the trial went, and Herbert 92X had been duly convicted, and the jury had been dismissed. So what was the harm in his meeting a juror and asking her about the nature of the deliberations in this case? Nothing…except that the sentence had not been handed down yet, so that technically the case was not over. The prudent thing would be to wait. But in the meantime Miss Shelly Thomas might…decompress…come down from her crime high…no longer be enthralled by the magic of the fearless young assistant district attorney with the golden tongue and the powerful sternocleidomastoid muscles…

  A strong manly voice asked him if he was going to play it safe and small-time the rest of his life. He squared his shoulders. He would keep the date. Damned right! The excitement in her voice! It was almost as if she had been expecting him to call. She was there in that glass-brick and white-pipe-railing MTV office at Prischker & Bolka, in the heart of the Life, still pulsing to the rogue beat of life in the raw in the Bronx, still thrilling to the strength of those who were manly enough to deal with the predators…He could see her, he could see her…He closed his eyes tightly…Her thick brown hair, her alabaster face, her lipstick…

  “Hey, Kramer!” He opened his eyes. It was the clerk. “You got a phone call.”

  He picked up the telephone, which was on the clerk’s desk. Up on the bench, Meldnick, in thick Gouda consternation, was still huddled with Steadman. Willie Francisco was still yelling, “Yo! Hey! Yo!”

  “Kramer,” said Kramer.

  “Larry, this is Bernie. Have you seen The City Light today?”

  “No.”

  “There’s a big article on page 3 about this Henry Lamb case. Claims the cops are dragging their feet. Claims we are, too. Says you told this Mrs. Lamb the information she gave you was useless. It’s a big article.”

  “What!”

  “Don’t mention you by name. Just says ‘the man from the District Attorney’s Office.’ ”

  “That’s absolute total bullshit, Bernie! I told her the fucking opposite! I said it was a good lead she gave us! It was just that it wasn’t enough to build a case out of.”

  “Well, Weiss is going bananas. He’s ricocheting off the walls. Milt Lubell’s coming down here every three minutes. What are you doing right now?”

  “I’m waiting for an evidentiary hearing in this Terzio brothers case, the two dummies. The Lamb case! Jesus Christ. Milt said the other day there was some guy, some fucking Englishman, calling up from The City Light—but Jesus Christ, this is outrageous. This case is fucking fulla holes. I hope you realize that, Bernie.”

  “Yeah, well, listen, get a postponement on the two dummies and come on down here.”

  “I can’t. For a change, Meldnick is up on the bench holding his head. Some juror just recanted his guilty vote in the Willie Francisco case. Jimmy’s up here with smoke coming out of his ears. Nothing’s gonna happen here until Meldnick can find someone to tell him what to do.”

  “Francisco? Oh, f’r Chrissake. Who’s the clerk there, Eisenberg?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Lemme talk to him.”

  “Hey, Phil,” said Kramer. “Bernie Fitzgibbon wants to talk to you.”

  While Bernie Fitzgibbon talked to Phil Eisenberg on the telephone, Kramer went around the other side of the clerk’s table to gather up his papers on the Terzio brothers. He couldn’t believe it. The poor widow Lamb, the woman even Martin and Goldberg had such pity for—she turns out to be a snake! Where was a newspaper? He was dying to get his hands on it. He found himself near the court stenographer, or court reporter, as the breed was actually called, the tall Irishman, Sullivan. Sullivan had stood up from his stenotype machine, just below the brow of the judge’s bench, and was stretching. Sullivan was a good-looking, thatchy-haired man in his early forties, famous, or notorious, on Gibraltar for his dapper dress. At the moment he was wearing a tweed jacket that was so soft and luxurious, so full of heather glints from the Highlands, Kramer knew he couldn’t have afforded it in a million years. From behind Kramer came an old courthouse regular named Joe Hyman, the supervisor of court reporters. He walked up to Sullivan and said, “There’s a murder coming into this part. It’ll go daily. How about it?”

  Sullivan said, “What? C’mon, Joe. I just got through a murder. Whadda I want wit’ another murder? I’ll have to wagon-train. I got theater tickets. Cost me thirty-five dollars apiece.”

  Hyman said, “Awright, awright. What about the rape? There’s a rape that’s gotta be covered.”

  “Well, shit, Joe,” said Sullivan, “a rape—that’s a wagon-train, too. Why me? Why do I always have to be the one? Sheila Polsky hasn’t stayed with a jury for months. What about her?”

  “She has a bad back. She can’t sit that long.”

  “A bad back?” said Sullivan. “She’s twenty-eight years old, f’r Chrissake. She’s a goldbrick. That’s all ’at’sa matter wit’ her.”

  “All the same—”

  “Look, we gotta have a meeting. I’m tired of always being the one. We gotta talk about the assignments. We gotta confront the goof-offs.”

  “Awright,” said Hyman. “I’ll tell you what. You take the rape and I’ll put you in a half-a-day calendar part next week. Okay?”

  “I don’t know,” said Sullivan. He wrapped his eyebrows around his nose, as if facing one of the agonizing decisions of a lifetime. “You think there’ll be daily copy on the rape?”

  “I don’t know. Probably.”

  Daily copy. Now Kramer knew why he resented Sullivan and his fancy clothes. After fourteen years as a court reporter, Sullivan had achieved the civil-service ceiling of $51,000 a year—$14,500 more than Kramer made—and that was just the base. On top of that, the court reporters sold the transcripts page by page, at a minimum of $4.50 a page. “Daily copy” meant that each defense lawyer and the assistant D.A., plus the court, meaning the judge, wanted transc
ripts of each day’s proceedings, a rush order that entitled Sullivan to a premium of $6 or more. If there were “multiple defendants”—and in rape cases there often were—it might go up to $14 or $15 a page. The word was that last year, in a murder trial involving a gang of Albanian drug dealers, Sullivan and another reporter had split $30,000 for two and a half weeks’ work. It was nothing for these characters to make $75,000 a year, $10,000 more than the judge and twice as much as himself. A court reporter! An automaton at the stenotype machine! He who can’t even open his mouth in a courtroom except to ask the judge to have someone repeat a word or a sentence!

  And here was himself, Larry Kramer, a graduate of Columbia Law, an assistant D.A.—wondering if he was really going to be able to afford to take a girl with brown lipstick to a restaurant on the Upper East Side!

  “Hey, Kramer.” It was Eisenberg, the clerk, lifting the telephone toward him.

  “Yeah, Bernie?”

  “I straightened it out with Eisenberg, Larry. He’s gonna put the Terzio brothers at the bottom of the calendar. Come on down here. We gotta get something going on this fucking Lamb case.”

  “The way the Yanks build their council flats, the lifts stop only on every other floor,” said Fallow, “and they smell like piss. The lifts, I mean. As soon as one enters—great fluffy fumes of human piss.”

  “Why every other floor?” asked Sir Gerald Steiner, devouring this tale of the lower depths. His managing editor, Brian Highridge, stood beside him, similarly rapt. In the corner of the cubicle Fallow’s dirty raincoat still hung on the plastic coatrack, and the canteen of vodka was still cached in the slash pocket. But he had the attention, praise, and exhilaration to deal with this morning’s hangover.

  “To save money in the construction, I should imagine,” he said. “Or to remind the poor devils they’re on the dole. It’s all well and good for the ones who have flats on the floor where the lift stops, but the other half have to take it to the floor above and walk down. In a council flat in the Bronx it seems that’s a hazardous arrangement. The boy’s mother, this Mrs. Lamb, told me she lost half her furniture when she moved in.” The recollection brought a smile to Fallow’s lips, the sort of wry smile that says that this is a sad story and yet one has to admit it’s funny. “She brought the furniture up on the lift to the floor above their flat. They had to carry each piece down the stairs, and each time they returned to the floor above, something would be missing. It’s a custom! When new people move into an off-floor, the natives nip their belongings from beside the lift!”