The Bonfire of the Vanities

by Tom Wolfe

  The Dead Mouse and Highridge tried to choke back their laughter, since after all it was a lot of unfortunate poor people they were talking about. The Dead Mouse sat down on the edge of Fallow’s desk, which indicated that he was pleased enough with all this to settle in for a moment. Fallow’s soul expanded. What he saw before him was no longer…the Dead Mouse…but Sir Gerald Steiner, the enlightened baron of British publishing who had summoned him to the New World.

  “Apparently it’s worth your life just to go down the stairs at all,” he continued. “Mrs. Lamb told me I shouldn’t use them under any circumstances.”

  “Why not?” asked Steiner.

  “It seems the staircases are the back streets of the council flats, so to speak. The flats are stacked up in these great towers, you see, and the towers are set this way and that”—he motioned with his hands to indicate the irregular arrangement—“in what are intended to be parks. Of course not a blade of grass survives, but in any case there are no streets or alleys or byways or pubs or whatever between the buildings, just these open blasted heaths. There’s no place for the natives to sin. So they use the landings of the stairways. They do…everything…on the landings of the stairways.”

  The wide eyes of Sir Gerald and his managing editor were too much for Fallow. They sent a surge of poetic license up his brain stem.

  “I must confess, I couldn’t resist a look. So I decided to retrace the route Mrs. Lamb and her son had taken when they first moved into the Edgar Allan Poe Towers.”

  In fact, after the warning, Fallow hadn’t dared go near the stairway. But now lies, graphic lies, bubbled up into his brain at an intoxicating rate. In his intrepid trip down the stairs he encountered every sort of vice: fornication, crack smoking, heroin injection, dice games and three-card monte, and more fornication.

  Steiner and Highridge stared, agape and bug-eyed.

  “Are you serious?” said Highridge. “What did they do when they saw you?”

  “Nothing but slog away. In their sublime state, what was a mere passing journalist?”

  “It’s bloody Hogarth,” said Steiner. “Gin Lane. Except that it’s vertical.”

  Fallow and Highridge both laughed with enthusiastic appreciation of this comparison.

  “The Vertical Gin Lane,” said Highridge. “You know, Jerry, that wouldn’t make a bad two-part series. Life-in-a-subsidized-slum sort of thing.”

  “Hogarth Up and Down,” said Steiner, wallowing a bit in his new role as phrasemaker. “Or will the Americans have the faintest familiarity with Hogarth and Gin Lane?”

  “Oh, I don’t think that’s any great problem,” said Highridge. “You remember our story on the Bluebeard of Howard Beach. I’m sure they didn’t have a ghost of an idea who Bluebeard was, but it can be explained in a paragraph, and then they’re pleased about what they’ve just learned. And Peter here can be our Hogarth.”

  Fallow felt a slight stirring of alarm.

  “On second thought,” said Steiner, “I’m not sure it’s such a good idea.”

  Fallow felt greatly relieved.

  “Why not, Jerry?” asked Highridge. “I think you’ve really hit on something.”

  “Oh, I think it’s intrinsically an important story. But, you know, they’re very sensitive about this sort of thing. If we did a story about life in the white council flats, that would be all right, but I don’t think there are any white council flats in New York. This is a very delicate area and one that’s causing me some concern just now. We’re already getting some rumblings from these organizations, accusing The City Light of being anti-minority, to use their term. Now, it’s all right to be a white newspaper—what could be more pure white than the Times?—but it’s quite another thing to pick up that reputation. That makes a great many influential people uneasy, including, I might say, advertisers. I received a dreadful letter the other day from some outfit calling itself the Third World Anti-Defamation League.” He dragged out the term Anti-Defamation as if it were the most ludicrous concoction imaginable. “What was that all about, Brian?”

  “The Laughing Vandals,” said Highridge. “We had a picture on page one last week of three black boys in a police station, laughing. They’d been arrested for destroying the physical-therapy facilities in a school for handicapped children. Sprayed petrol and lit matches. Lovely fellows. The police said they were laughing about it after they brought them in, and so I sent one of our photographers, Silverstein—he’s an American—brazen little man—to go get a picture of them laughing.” He shrugged, as if it had been a routine journalistic decision.

  “The police were very cooperative. They brought them out of the lockup, out by the front desk, so our man could get a picture of them laughing, but when they saw Silverstein with his camera, they wouldn’t laugh. So Silverstein told them a smutty joke. A smutty joke!” Highridge began laughing before he could finish. “It was about a Jewish woman who goes on a safari to Africa, and she’s kidnapped by a gorilla, and he takes her up in a tree and rapes her, and he keeps her there for a month, raping her day and night, and finally she escapes, and she makes her way back to the United States, and she’s relating all this to another woman, her best friend, and she breaks into tears. And the friend says, ‘There, there, there, you’re all right now.’ And the woman says, ‘That’s easy for you to say. You don’t know how I feel. He doesn’t write…he doesn’t call…’ And the three boys start laughing, probably out of embarrassment at this terrible joke, and Silverstein takes their picture, and we ran it. ‘The Laughing Vandals.’ ”

  Steiner exploded. “Oh, that’s rich! I shouldn’t laugh. Oh my God! What did you say the chap’s name was? Silverstein?”

  “Silverstein,” said Highridge. “You can’t miss him. Always goes about with cuts on his face. He puts scraps of toilet paper on the cuts to stop the bleeding. Always has toilet paper stuck to his face.”

  “Cuts? What sort of cuts?”

  “From a razor. Seems his father left him his straight razor when he died. He insists on using it. Can’t get the hang of it. Cuts himself to pieces every day. Fortunately, he can take pictures.”

  Steiner was breathless with mirth. “The Yanks! Dear God, I love them! Tells them a joke. Dear God, dear God…I do like a fellow with sand. Make a note of this, Brian. Give him a rise in pay. Twenty-five dollars a week. But for God’s sake, don’t tell him or anyone else what for. Tells them a joke! Raped by a gorilla!”

  Steiner’s love of yellow journalism, his awe of the “sand” that gave journalists the courage to try such stunts, was so genuine, Fallow and Highridge couldn’t help but laugh along with him. Steiner’s little face was far from that of a Dead Mouse at this moment. The outrageous zest of this American photographer, Silverstein, lent him life, even radiance.

  “All the same,” said Steiner, sobering up, “we’ve got this problem.”

  “I think we were perfectly justified,” said Highridge. “The police assured us they had been laughing about it. It was their lawyer, one of these Legal Aid people, I think they call them, who made a fuss, and he probably got hold of this Anti-Defamation whatever-it-is.”

  “The facts aren’t what matters, unfortunately,” Steiner said. “We have to alter some perceptions, and I think this hit-and-run case is a good place to start. Let’s see what we can do for this family, these poor Lamb people. They already seem to have some support. This man Bacon.”

  “The poor Lambs,” said Brian Highridge. “Yes.” Steiner looked puzzled; his turn of phrase had been inadvertent.

  “Now, let me ask you, Peter,” said Steiner, “does the mother, this Mrs. Lamb, strike you as a credible person?”

  “Oh yes,” said Fallow. “She makes a good appearance, she’s well-spoken, very sincere. She has a job, she seems very neat in her habits—I mean, these council flats are squalid little places, but hers is very orderly…pictures on the walls…sofa-with-end-tables sort of thing…even a little-table-inside-the-front-door sort of thing.”

  “And the boy—he
’s not going to blow up in our faces, is he? I believe he’s some sort of honor student?”

  “By the standards of his school. I’m not sure how he would fare at Holland Park Comprehensive.” Fallow smiled. This was a school in London. “He’s never been in trouble with the police. That’s so unusual in these council flats, they talk about it as if one’s bound to be impressed by this remarkable fact.”

  “What do the neighbors say about him?”

  “Oh…that he’s a pleasant…well-behaved sort of boy,” said Fallow. In fact, Fallow had gone straight to Annie Lamb’s apartment with Albert Vogel and one of Reverend Bacon’s people, a tall man with a gold ring in one ear, and had interviewed Annie Lamb and departed. But by now his status as an intrepid explorer of the lower depths, Bronx version, was so exalted in the eyes of his noble employer, he didn’t care to back off just yet.

  “Very well,” said Steiner. “What do we have as a follow-up?”

  “Reverend Bacon—that’s what everybody calls him, Reverend Bacon—Reverend Bacon is organizing a large demonstration for tomorrow. It’s to protest—”

  Just then Fallow’s telephone rang.

  “Hello?”

  “Ayyyy, Pete!” It was the unmistakable voice of Albert Vogel. “Things are poppin’. Some kid just called Bacon, some kid down at the Motor Vehicle Bureau.” Fallow began making notes. “This kid, he read your story, and he took it upon himself to get on the computer down there, and he claims he’s got it narrowed down to 124 cars.”

  “A hundred and twenty-four? Can the police handle that?”

  “Nothing to it—if they want to. They can check ’em out in a few days, if they want to put the men on it.”

  “Who is this…fellow?” Fallow detested the American habit of using the word kid, which properly referred only to goats, to mean “young person.”

  “Just some kid who works there, some kid who figures the Lambs are getting the usual raw deal. I told you that’s what I like about Bacon. He galvanizes people who want to challenge the power structure.”

  “How do I get in touch with this…fellow?”

  Vogel gave him all the details, then said: “Now, Pete, listen to me a second. Bacon just read your story and he liked it very much. Every newspaper and TV station in town has been calling him, but he’s saving this Motor Vehicle Bureau angle for you. It’s yours, exclusive. Okay? But you gotta push it. You gotta run with the goddamned ball. You understand what I’m saying?”

  “I understand.”

  After he hung up, Fallow smiled at Steiner and Highridge, who were all eyes, nodded knowingly, and said: “Yesssss…I think we’re rolling. That was a tipster at the Motor Vehicle Bureau, where they keep records of all the license plates.”

  It was just the way he had dreamed it would be. It was precisely that way, it made him want to hold his breath for fear something would break the spell. She was looking into his eyes from just a tiny table’s width away. She was absorbed in his words, drawn into his magnetic field, so far into it that he had the urge to slide his hands across the table and slip his fingertips under hers—already!—just twenty minutes after he’s met her—such electricity! But he mustn’t rush it, mustn’t destroy the exquisite poise of this moment.

  In the background were the exposed brick, the mellow highlights of the brass, the pubby carved cataracts of the etched glass, the aerobic voices of the young and swell. In the foreground, her great mane of dark hair, the Berkshire autumn glow of her cheeks—in point of fact, he realized, even in the midst of the magic, the autumnal glow was probably makeup. Certainly the mauve-and-purple rainbows on her upper eyelids and occipital orbits were makeup—but such was the nature of contemporary perfection. From her lips, swollen with desire, glistening with brown lipstick, came the words:

  “But you were so close to him and practically yelling at him, and he was giving you such murderous looks—I mean, weren’t you afraid he was just going to jump up and—I don’t know—I mean, he did not look like a nice person!”

  “Ayyyyyyyyy,” said Kramer, dismissing mortal danger with a shrug of his shoulders and a distention of his mighty sternocleidomastoid muscles. “These characters are 90 percent show, although it’s a good idea to keep your eye out for the other 10 percent. Hah hah, yes. The main thing was, somehow I had to bring out Herbert’s violent side, so everybody could see it. His lawyer, Al Teskowitz—well, I don’t have to tell you, he’s not the greatest orator in the world, but that don’t—doesn’t”—it was time to shift gears in the third person singular—”necessarily make any difference in a criminal trial. Criminal law is a thing unto itself, because the stakes are not money but human life and human freedom, and I tell you, that sets off a lot of crazy emotions. Teskowitz, believe it or not, can be a genius at messing up the minds—manipulating a jury. He looks so woebegone himself—and it’s calculated—oh, sure. He knows how to work up pity for a client. Half of it is—what’s the term?—body language, I guess you’d call it. Maybe just ham acting is what it is, but he knows how to do that one thing very well, and I couldn’t let this idea that Herbert is a nice family man—a family man!—just hang there in the air like some kind of pretty balloon, you know. So what I figured was—”

  The words were just gushing out, in torrents, all the marvelous things about his bravery and talent for the fray that he had no one to tell about. He couldn’t go on like this to Jimmy Caughey or Ray Andriutti or, any longer, to his wife, whose threshold for crime highs was by now a stone wall. But Miss Shelly Thomas—I must keep you high! She drank it all in. Those eyes! Those glistening brown lips! Her thirst for his words was bottomless, which was a good thing, because she wasn’t drinking anything but designer water. Kramer had a glass of house white wine and was trying to keep from gulping it, because he could already tell this place was not as inexpensive as he had thought. Christ! His goddamned mind was double-tracking a mile a minute! It was like a two-track tape. On one track he was gushing out this speech about how he handled the trial—

  “—out of the corner of my eye I could see he was about to snap. The string was pulled tight! I didn’t even know if I’d make it to the end of my summation, but I was willing—”

  —and on the second track he was thinking about her, the bill (and they hadn’t even ordered dinner yet), and where he could possibly take her (if!), and the crowd here at Muldowny’s. Jesus! Wasn’t that John Rector, the anchorman of Channel 9 news, over there at that table up near the front, by the exposed-brick wall? But no! He wouldn’t point that out. Only space for one celebrity here—himself—victor over the violent Herbert 92X and the clever Al Teskowitz. A young crowd, a swell-looking crowd in here—the place was packed—perfect—couldn’t be better. Shelly Thomas had turned out to be Greek. Bit of a disappointment. He had wanted—didn’t know what. Thomas was her stepfather’s name; he manufactured plastic containers in Long Island City. Her own father was named Choudras. She lived in Riverdale with her stepfather and her mother, worked for Prischker & Bolka, couldn’t afford an apartment in Manhattan, wanted one badly—no longer could you find “some little place in Manhattan” (didn’t have to tell him)—

  “—thing is, juries in the Bronx are very unpredictable. I could tell you what happened to one of the fellows in my office in court this morning!—but you probably noticed what I’m talking about. I mean, you get people who come into the jury box with their minds—how should I say it?—set in a certain way. There’s a lot of Us versus Them, Them being the police and prosecutors—but you probably picked up some of that.”

  “No, actually I didn’t. Everybody was very sensible, and they seemed to want to do the right thing. I didn’t know what to expect, but I was very pleasantly surprised.”

  Does she think I’m prejudiced? “No, I don’t mean—there are plenty of good people in the Bronx, it’s just that some people have a chip on their shoulder, and some very weird things happen.” Let’s move off this terrain. “As long as we’re being candid, do you mind if I tell you something? I was
worried about you as a juror.”

  “Me!” She smiled and seemed to blush clear through the makeup glow, tickled pink to have been a factor in strategic thinking in Supreme Court, the Bronx.

  “Yes! It’s the truth! You see, in a criminal trial you learn to look at things from a different perspective. It may be a warped perspective, but it’s the nature of the beast. In a case like this one—you’re—well, you added up as too bright, too well educated, too removed from the world of a character like Herbert 92X, and therefore—and this is the irony of it—too capable of understanding his problems, and like the French say, ‘To understand all is to forgive all.’ ”

  “Well, actually—”

  “I’m not saying that’s fair or accurate, but that’s the way you learn to look at things in these cases. Not you—but someone like you—can be too sensitive.”

  “But you didn’t challenge me. Is that the term?”

  “Yeah. No, I didn’t. Well, for one thing, I don’t think it’s right to challenge a juror just because he’s—she’s intelligent and well educated. I mean, I’m sure you noticed there was nobody else from Riverdale on your jury. There wasn’t even anybody else from Riverdale on your panel during the voir dire. Everybody is always moaning over the fact that we don’t get more educated jurors in the Bronx, and then when we get one—well, it’s almost like wasting a resource or something to challenge one just because you think she might be sensitive. Besides…” Did he dare try it? He dared. “…I just…to be honest about it…I just wanted you on that jury.”