The Bonfire of the Vanities

by Tom Wolfe

  “Just fixing a hubcap, champ. Got nothing to do with you.”

  Before he got to the word you, he was already moving away from Martin with what was supposed to pass for a saunter. He opened the door of the Camaro and tossed the wrench in the back seat and sauntered around to the driver’s side and got in and started up the car and maneuvered it out of the parking place and headed off. The Camaro gave a great throaty roar. Martin returned to the Dodge and got behind the wheel.

  “I’m putting you in for a community relations commendation, Marty,” said Goldberg.

  “Kid’s lucky I didn’t run a check,” said Martin. “Besides, that’s the only parking place on the fucking block.”

  And they wonder why people hate them in the ghetto, thought Kramer. Yet in that very moment he marveled…marveled! He, Kramer, was big enough and strong enough to have fought the boy with the wrench, and conceivably he might have beaten him. But he would have had to do that. If he had confronted the boy, it would have reached the fighting stage immediately. But Martin knew from the beginning that it wouldn’t. He knew that something in his eyes would make the boy sense Irish Cop Who Don’t Back Off. Of course, it didn’t hurt to have Goldberg sitting there looking like the Original Cruel Thug, and it didn’t hurt to have a .38 under your jacket. Nevertheless, Kramer knew he couldn’t have done what this outrageous little featherweight champion of the breed had done, and for the five hundredth time in his career as an assistant district attorney in the Bronx he paid silent homage to that most mysterious and coveted of male attributes, Irish machismo.

  Martin parked the Dodge in the space the boy had vacated, and the three of them sat back and waited.

  “Bullshit reigns,” said Martin.

  “Hey, Marty,” said Kramer, proud to be on a first-name basis with this paragon, “you guys find out who gave that printout to The City Light?”

  Without turning around, Martin said, “One a da brothers,” giving an Irish rendition of a black accent. He turned his head slightly and twisted his lips to indicate it was about what you would expect and that there was nothing to be done about it.

  “You gonna check out all 124 cars or whatever it is?”

  “Yeah. Weiss has been on the C.O.’s case all day.”

  “How long will it take?”

  “Three or four days. He’s assigned six men. Bullshit reigns.”

  Goldberg turned around and said to Kramer: “What’s with Weiss? Does he really believe this shit he reads in the newspapers or what?”

  “That’s all he believes,” said Kramer. “And anything with a racial angle drives him crazy. Like I told you, he’s up for reelection.”

  “Yeah, but what makes him think we’re gonna find witnesses at this demonstration, which is pure bullshit?”

  “I don’t know. But that’s what he told Bernie.”

  Goldberg shook his head. “We don’t even have a location where the goddamned thing happened. You realize that? Marty and me been up and down Bruckner Boulevard and I’ll be goddamned if we can establish where it happened. That’s another thing the kid forgot to tell his mother when he came up with the bullshit license plate, where it’s fucking supposeda’ve happened.”

  “Speaking of that,” said Kramer, “how would a kid in the Poe project even know what a Mercedes looks like?”

  “Oh, they know that,” said Martin, without turning his head. “The pimps and wiseguys drive the Mercedes.”

  “Yeah,” said Goldberg. “They won’t look at a Cadillac anymore. You see these kids with these things, these hood ornaments from the Mercedes, hanging around their necks.”

  “If a kid up here wants to think up a bullshit car for a bullshit story,” said Martin, “the Mercedes is the first one he’s gonna think of. Bernie knows that.”

  “Well, Weiss is all over Bernie’s case, too,” said Kramer. He looked around some more. The huge project was so quiet it was eerie. “You sure this is the right place, Marty? There’s nobody here.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Martin. “They’ll be here. Bullshit reigns.”

  Pretty soon a bronze-colored passenger van pulled into the block and stopped up ahead of them. About a dozen men got out. All of them were black. Most of them wore blue work shirts and dungarees. They appeared to be in their twenties or early thirties. One of them stood out because he was so tall. He had an angular profile and a large Adam’s apple and wore a gold ring in one ear. He said something to the others, and they began pulling lengths of lumber out of the van. These turned out to be the shafts of picket signs. They stacked the signs on the sidewalk. Half the men leaned up against the van and began talking and smoking cigarettes.

  “I’ve seen that tall asshole somewhere,” said Martin.

  “I think I seen him, too,” said Goldberg. “Oh, shit, yes. He’s one a Bacon’s assholes, the one they call Buck. He was at that thing on Gun Hill Road.”

  Martin sat up straight. “You’re right, Davey. That’s the same asshole.” He stared across the street at the man. “I’d really love to…” He spoke in a dreamy fashion. “Please, you asshole, please just do one stupid thing, you asshole…I’m getting out.”

  Martin got out of the Dodge and stood on the sidewalk and very ostentatiously began rolling his shoulders and arms about, like a prizefighter loosening up. Then Goldberg got out. So Kramer got out, too. The demonstrators across the street began staring at them.

  Now one of them, a powerfully built young man in a blue work shirt and blue jeans, came walking across the street with a cool Pimp Roll and approached Martin.

  “Yo!” he said. “You from the TV?”

  Martin put his chin down and shook his head no, very slowly, in a way that was pure menace.

  The black man measured him with his eyes and said, “Then where you from, Jack?”

  “Jump City, Agnes,” said Martin.

  The young man tried a scowl, and then he tried a smile, and he got nothing with either one but a face full of Irish contempt. He turned around and walked back across the street and said something to the others, and the one named Buck stared at Martin. Martin stared back with a pair of Shamrock lasers. Buck turned his head and gathered four or five of the others around him in a huddle. From time to time they stole glances at Martin.

  This Mexican standoff had been going on for a few minutes when another van arrived. Some young white people got out, seven men and three women. They looked like college students, with the exception of one woman with long wavy gray-blond hair.

  “Yo, Buck!” she sang out. She went up to the tall man with the gold earring and held out both her hands and smiled broadly. He took her hands, although not all that enthusiastically, and said, “Hey, how you doing, Reva?” The woman pulled him toward her and kissed him on one cheek and then on the other.

  “Oh, give me a fucking break,” said Goldberg. “That skank.”

  “You know her?” asked Kramer.

  “Know who she is. She’s a fucking Communist.”

  Then the white woman, Reva, turned around and said something, and a white man and a white woman went back to the van and hauled out more placards.

  Presently a third van arrived. Nine or ten more white people got out, male and female, most of them young. They hauled a big roll of cloth out of the van and unfurled it. It was a banner. Kramer could make out the words GAY FIST STRIKE FORCE AGAINST RACISM.

  “What the hell’s that?” he said.

  “That’s the lesbos and the gaybos,” said Goldberg.

  “What are they doing here?”

  “They’re at alla these things. They must like the fresh air. They really get it on.”

  “But what’s their interest in the case?”

  “Don’t ask me. The unity of the oppressed, they call it. Any of these groups need bodies, they’ll show up.”

  So now there were about two dozen white and a dozen black demonstrators, lolling about, chatting and assembling placards and banners.

  Now a car arrived. Two men got out. One of them carr
ied two cameras on straps around his neck and a saddlebag with the printed logo THE CITY LIGHT taped to it. The other was a tall man in his thirties, with a long nose and blond hair that flowed from a narrow widow’s peak. His fair complexion was splotched with red. He wore a blue blazer of an unusual and, to Kramer’s eyes, foreign cut. For no apparent reason he suddenly lurched to his left. He appeared to be in agony. He stood stock-still on the sidewalk, tucked a spiral notebook under his left arm, closed his eyes, and pressed both hands to his temples, massaged them for a long time, then opened his eyes and winced and blinked and looked all about.

  Martin began to laugh. “Look at that face. Looks like a working vat a rye mash. Guy’s so hung over, he’s bleeding into his squash.”

  Fallow lurched to his left again. He kept listing to port. Something was seriously wrong with his vestibular system. It was absolutely poisonous, this one, as if his brain were wrapped in membranous strings, like the strings of the membranes of an orange, and each contraction of his heart tightened the strings, and the poison was squeezed into his system. He had had throbbing headaches before, but this was a toxic headache, poisonous in the extreme—

  Where were the crowds? Had they come to the wrong place? There seemed to be a handful of black people and about twenty white students, just standing about. A huge banner said GAY FIST. Gay Fist? He had dreaded the thought of the noise and the commotion, but now he was worried about the silence.

  On the sidewalk, just ahead of him, was the same tall black man with the gold earring who had driven him and Vogel up here two days ago. Vogel. He closed his eyes. Vogel had taken him to dinner at Leicester’s last night as a kind of celebration (payment?) for the article…He had a vodka Southside…then another one…The snout of the beast!—lit up by a radium-blue flare!…Tony Stalk and Caroline Heftshank came over and sat down, and Fallow tried to apologize for what had happened with her young friend, Chirazzi, the artist, and Caroline gave him a strange smile and said he shouldn’t worry about that, and he had another vodka Southside, and Caroline kept drinking Frascati and shrieking to Britt-Withers in a very silly way, and finally he came over, and she unbuttoned his shirt and pulled the hair on his chest so hard he swore, and then Fallow and Caroline were in Britt-Withers’s office upstairs, where Britt-Withers had a watery-eyed bull terrier on a chain, and Caroline kept looking at Fallow with her strange smile, and he tried to unbutton her blouse, and she laughed at him and patted him on the bottom, contemptuously, but it made him feel crazy, and—a ripple!—the beast stirred in the icy depths!—and she curved her finger and beckoned, and he knew she was mocking him, but he walked across the office anyway, and there was a machine—something about a machine and a radium-blue flare—thrashing! heading for the surface!—a rubbery flap—he could almost see it now—almost!—and she was mocking him, but he didn’t care, and she kept pressing something, and the radium blue flared from inside, and there was a grinding hum, and she reached down and she picked it up—she showed him—he could almost see it—no holding it back—it broke through the surface and looked at him straight down its filthy snout—and it was like a woodblock outlined in a radium aura against a black ground, and the beast kept staring at him down its snout, and he wanted to open his eyes to drive it away, but he couldn’t, and the bull terrier started growling, and Caroline no longer looked at him, even to show her contempt, and so he touched her on the shoulder, but she was suddenly all business, and the machine kept grinding and humming and grinding and humming and flaring in radium blue, and then she had a stack of pictures in her hand, and she ran down the stairs to the restaurant, and he kept keeling to one side, and then a terrible thought came to him. He ran down the stairs, which were in a tight spiral, and that made him dizzier. On the floor of the restaurant, so many roaring faces and boiling teeth!—and Caroline Heftshank was standing near the bar showing the picture to Cecil Smallwood and Billy Cortez, and then there were pictures all over the place, and he was thrashing through the tables and the people grabbing for the pictures—

  He opened his eyes and tried to keep them open. The Bronx, the Bronx, he was in the Bronx. He walked toward the man with the gold earring, Buck. He kept listing to port. He felt dizzy. He wondered if he had suffered a stroke.

  “Hello,” he said to Buck. He meant it to be cheery, but it came out as a gasp. Buck looked at him without a trace of recognition. So he said: “Peter Fallow, from The City Light.”

  “Oh, hey, how you doing, bro.” The black man’s tone was agreeable but not enthusiastic. The author of the brilliant scoops in The City Light had expected enthusiasm. The black man resumed his conversation with the woman.

  “When does the demonstration begin?” said Fallow.

  Buck looked up distractedly. “Soon’s Channel 1 gets here.” By the time he reached the word here, he was once again looking at the woman.

  “But where are the people?”

  He stared at Fallow and paused, as if trying to figure him out. “They’ll be here…soon’s Channel I gets here.” He used the sort of voice you use for someone who is blameless but dense.

  “I see,” said Fallow, who couldn’t see at all. “When, uh, as you say, Channel 1 arrives, uh…what takes place then?”

  “Give the man the release, Reva,” said Buck. An intense demented-looking white woman dug down into a big vinyl tote bag on the sidewalk by her feet and handed him two pieces of paper stapled together. The paper, which was Xeroxed—Xeroxed! Radium-blue! The snout!—bore the letterhead of the American People’s Alliance. A headline, typed in capital letters, said: THE PEOPLE DEMAND ACTION IN THE LAMB CASE.

  Fallow started to read it, but the words ran together like goulash in front of his face. Just then a bouncy young white man materialized. He was wearing an appallingly tasteless tweed jacket.

  “Neil Flannagan from the Daily News,” said the bouncy man. “What’s going on?”

  The woman named Reva dug out another press release. Mr. Neil Flannagan, like Fallow himself, was accompanied by a photographer. The bouncy Mr. Flannagan had nothing to say to Fallow, but the two photographers fell in with one another at once. Fallow could hear them complaining about the assignment. Fallow’s photographer, an odious little man who wore a cap, kept using the expression “crock a shit.” That was all that American newspaper photographers seemed to talk about with any relish whatsoever, their displeasure at being asked to leave the office and take pictures. The dozen demonstrators, meantime, were clearly unmoved by the presence of representatives of two of the city’s tabloids, The City Light and the Daily News. They continued to lounge about the van, their rage, if any, about the injustices wrought upon Henry Lamb successfully contained.

  Fallow tried once more to read the press release but soon gave up. He looked about. The Poe Towers remained peaceful; abnormally so, given their size. On the other side of the street stood three white men. There was a little man in a tan windbreaker, a big porcine man with a drooping mustache wearing a warm-up jacket, and a balding man with blunt features wearing a poorly made gray suit and a Yank striped necktie. Fallow wondered who they were. But mainly he wanted to sleep. He wondered if he could sleep standing up, like a horse.

  Presently he heard the woman, Reva, say to Buck: “I think that’s them.” Both of them looked down the street. The demonstrators came to life.

  Coming up the street was a large white van. On its side, in huge letters, was the inscription THE LIVE 1. Buck, Reva, and the demonstrators began walking toward it. Mr. Neil Flannagan, the two photographers, and, finally, Fallow himself tagged along behind them. Channel 1 had arrived.

  The van came to a stop, and out of the passenger’s side of the front seat came a young man with a great fluffy head of dark curly hair and a navy blazer and tan pants.

  “Robert Corso,” said Reva, reverently.

  The side doors of the van slid open, and two young men in jeans and sweaters and running shoes stepped out. The driver stayed at the wheel. Buck hurried forward.

  “Yo-o-o-o-o! Robert
Corso! How you doing, man!” Suddenly Buck had a smile that lit up the street.

  “Okay!” said Robert Corso, trying to sound enthusiastic in return. “Okay.” He obviously had no idea who this black man with the gold earring was.

  “What you want us to do?” asked Buck.

  The bouncy young man broke in: “Hey, Corso, Neil Flannagan, Daily News.”

  “Oh, hi.”

  “What you want us to—”

  “Where you guys been?”

  “What you want us to—”

  Robert Corso looked at his watch. “It’s only 5:10. We’re going on live at 6:00. We got plenty a time.”

  “Yeah, but I got a seven o’clock deadline.”

  “What you want us to do?” Buck insisted.

  “Well…hey!” said Robert Corso. “I don’t know. What would you do if I wasn’t here?”

  Buck and Reva looked at him with funny little grins on, as if he must be joking.

  “Where are Reverend Bacon and Mrs. Lamb?” said Robert Corso.

  “In Mrs. Lamb’s apartment,” said Reva. Fallow took it badly. No one had bothered to apprise him of this fact.

  “Hey, whenever you say,” said Buck.

  Robert Corso shook his great fluffy head. He muttered, “Well, hell, I can’t run this thing for you.” Then, to Buck: “It’ll take us a little while to set up. I guess the sidewalk’s the best place. I want to get the buildings in the background.”

  Buck and Reva went to work. They began gesturing and giving instructions to the demonstrators, who now went back toward their van and began picking up the picket signs, which were stacked on the sidewalk. A few people had begun drifting over from the Poe Towers to the scene.

  Fallow gave up on Buck and Reva and approached Robert Corso. “Excuse me,” he said. “I’m Peter Fallow, from The City Light. Did I hear you say that Reverend Bacon and Mrs. Lamb are here?”