The Bonfire of the Vanities

by Tom Wolfe

  “Fallow?” said Robert Corso. “You’re the one who wrote the stories?” He held out his hand and shook Fallow’s with enthusiasm.

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “You’re the reason we’re up at this goddamned place?” He said it with an appreciative smile.

  “Sorry about that.” Fallow felt a glow inside. This was the sort of tribute he expected all along, but he hadn’t expected to get it from a TV person.

  Robert Corso turned serious. “Do you think Bacon is really on the level about this one? Well, obviously you do.”

  “You don’t?” asked Fallow.

  “Aw hell, you never know with Bacon. He’s fairly outrageous. But when I interviewed Mrs. Lamb, I was impressed, to tell you the truth. She seems like a good person to me—she’s bright, she’s got a steady job, she has a nice, neat little apartment. I was impressed. I don’t know—I believe her. What do you think?”

  “You’ve already interviewed her? I thought you were getting ready to interview her here.”

  “Well, yeah, but that’s just for the wraparound. We’ll wrap around live at six o’clock.”

  “Wrap around live…I don’t believe I know about wrapping around live.”

  The irony was lost on the American, however. “Well, what we do is, I came up here with a crew this afternoon, after your story came out. Thanks a lot for that! I really love assignments in the Bronx. Anyway, we interviewed Mrs. Lamb and we interviewed a couple of the neighbors and we got some footage of Bruckner Boulevard and the place where the boy’s father was killed and all that stuff, and some stills of the boy. So we’ve already got most of the story on tape. It’ll run for about two minutes, and what we do now is, we go on live during the demonstration, and then we’ll roll the tape, and then we’ll cut back in live and wrap it up with a live segment. That’s wrapping it up live.”

  “But what will you show? There’s no one here but this lot. Most of them are white.” Fallow motioned toward Buck and Reva.

  “Oh, don’t worry. There’ll be plenty of people here as soon as our telescope goes up.”

  “Your telescope.”

  “Our remote transmitter.” Robert Corso looked toward the van. Fallow followed his eyes. He could see the two crewmen in blue jeans inside.

  “Your remote transmitter. By the way, where are your competitors?”

  “Our competitors?”

  “The other television stations.”

  “Oh, we were promised an exclusive.”

  “Really? By whom?”

  “Bacon, I guess. That’s what I don’t like about the setup. Bacon’s so fucking manipulative. He’s got a pipeline to my producer, Irv Stone. You know Irv?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t.”

  “You’ve heard of him.”

  “Ummm, actually I haven’t.”

  “He’s won a lot of awards.”

  “Ummm.”

  “Irv’s—well, Irv’s all right, but he’s one of these old bastards who was a campus radical back in the 1960s, when they were having the antiwar demonstrations and everything. He thinks Bacon’s this romantic leader of the people. He’s a fucking operator, is what I think. But anyway, he promised Irv an exclusive if he’d put it on live at six o’clock.”

  “That’s very cozy. But why would he want to do that? Why wouldn’t he want all the stations to be here?”

  “Because that way he might get nothing out of it. I bet you every day there’s twenty or thirty demonstrations going on in New York, and they’re all competing for coverage. This way he knows we’ll play it big. If we go to the trouble of sending out the remote van, and if we go live, and if we think we have an exclusive, then it’ll go at the top of the news. It’ll be live, and it’ll be a big deal, and tomorrow 5 and 7 and 2 and the rest of them’ll figure they better cover the story, too.”

  “I see,” said Fallow. “Hmmmm…But how can he guarantee you, as you say, an exclusive? What will prevent the other, uh, channels from coming here?”

  “Nothing, except that he won’t tell them the time or the place.”

  “He wasn’t so considerate of me, was he?” said Fallow. “I notice the Daily News seems to have the time and the place.”

  “Yes,” said Robert Corso, “but you’ve had exclusives for two days now. Now he has to let the other newspapers in on it.” He paused. His handsome young fluffy-haired American face looked melancholy all of a sudden. “But you do think it’s a legitimate story, don’t you?”

  “Oh, absolutely,” Fallow said.

  Corso said, “This Henry Lamb is—was—is a nice kid. An honor student, no police record, he’s quiet, the neighbors seem to like him—isn’t that the way it strikes you?”

  “Oh, no question about it,” said the creator of the honor student.

  Reva approached them. “We’re all set. Just say when.”

  Robert Corso and Fallow looked to the sidewalk, where the three dozen pickets were now lined up informally. They held the shafts of the picket signs on their shoulders, like wooden guns.

  Robert Corso said, “Bacon’s ready? And Mrs. Lamb?”

  Reva said, “Well, you tell me or Buck. Reverend Bacon doesn’t want to come down here with Mrs. Lamb and just stand around. But he’s ready.”

  “Okay,” said Robert Corso. He turned toward THE LIVE 1 van. “Hey, Frank! You guys ready?”

  From inside the van: “Just about!”

  A heavy whirring noise began. Out of the top of the van rose a silvery shaft, a cylinder. Attached to the top of the shaft was a Day-Glo-orange banner or bunting. No, it was a cable, a heavily insulated cable, wide but flat, like an electric eel. The screaming orange eel was wrapped around the shaft in a spiral. The silvery shaft and the orange spiral kept rising, rising, rising. The shaft was in sections, like a telescope, and it went up, up, up, and the van whirred and whirred and whirred.

  People began emerging from the silent towers of the project, which was silent no longer. A boiling noise, the boiling noise of many voices, rose from the blasted heath. Here they came, men, women, packs of boys, young children, their eyes fastened to the ascending silver-and-orange lance and its Radiation Orange banner.

  Now the shaft had risen two and a half stories above the street, with its orange eel wrapped around it. The street and the sidewalk were empty no longer. A huge good-natured crowd gathered around for the beano. A woman yelled out, “Robert Corso!” Channel 1! The fluffy-haired man who would be on TV!

  Robert Corso looked toward the pickets, who had formed a lazy oval on the sidewalk and were beginning to march. Buck and Reva stood by. Buck had a bullhorn in his hand. He kept his eyes pinned on Robert Corso. Then Robert Corso looked toward his crewmen. His cameraman stood six feet away. The camera looked very small next to the van and the tremendous shaft, but the crowd was spellbound by its deep, deep cataract eye. The camera wasn’t even on, but every time the cameraman turned to talk to the soundman, and the great eye swung about, a ripple went through the crowd, as if the machine had its own invisible kinetic momentum.

  Buck looked at Robert Corso and raised one hand, palm up, which asked, “When?” Robert Corso shrugged and then wearily pointed his finger toward Buck. Buck lifted the bullhorn to his mouth and yelled: “Whadda we want?”

  “Justice!” chanted the three dozen pickets. Their voices sounded terribly thin against the backdrop of the crowd and the towers of the project and the splendid silver lance of THE LIVE 1.

  “WHADDA WE GET?”

  “Ra-cism!”

  “WHADDA WE WANT?”

  “Jus-tice!” They were a little louder, but not much.

  “WHADDA WE GET?”

  “Ra-cism!”

  Six or eight boys in their early teens were shoving and bumping one another and laughing, struggling to get into the camera’s line of vision. Fallow stood off to one side of the star, Robert Corso, who was holding his microphone but saying nothing. The man with the high-tech horn moved closer to the oval line of pickets, and the crowd heaved in resp
onse. The signs and banners came bobbing by. WEISS JUSTICE IS WHITE JUSTICE…LAMB: SLAUGHTERED BY INDIFFERENCE…LIBERATE JOHANNE BRONX…GAY FIST STRIKE FORCE AGAINST RACISM…THE PEOPLE CRY OUT: AVENGE HENRY!…QUIT STALLING, ABE!…GAY AND LESBIAN NEW YORK DEMAND JUSTICE FOR OUR BROTHER HENRY LAMB…CAPITALISM+RACISM="LEGALIZED" MURDER…HIT’N’RUN’N’LIE TO THE PEOPLE!…ACTION NOW!…

  “Whadda we want?”

  “Jus-tice!”

  “Whadda we get?”

  “Ra-cism!”

  Buck turned the bullhorn toward the crowd. He wanted to get their voices into the act.

  “WHADDA WE WANT?”

  Nothing came back. In the best of moods, they watched the show.

  Buck answered his own question: “JUS-TICE.”

  “WHADDA WE GET?”

  Nothing.

  “RA-CISM!”

  “OKAY! WHADDA WE WANT?”

  Nothing.

  “BROTHERS AND SISTERS,” said Buck, the red bullhorn in front of his face. “Our brother, our neighbor, Henry Lamb, he was struck down…by a hit-and-run driver…and the hospital…they don’t do nothing for him…and the cops and the D.A.…they can’t be bothered…Henry’s at death’s door…and they don’t care…Henry’s an honor student…and they say, ‘So what?’…’cause he’s poor, he’s from the project…’cause he’s black…So why are we here, brothers and sisters?…To make Chuck do the right thing!”

  That brought some appreciative laughter from the crowd.

  “To get justice for our brother, Henry Lamb!” Buck continued. “Okay. SO WHADDA WE WANT?”

  “Justice,” said voices from the crowd.

  “AND WHADDA WE GET?”

  Laughter and stares.

  The laughter came from six or eight boys in their early teens who were shoving and bumping one another, struggling to occupy a position just behind Buck. That would put them in a direct line with the eye of the camera, whose mesmerizing red light was now on.

  “Who’s Chuck?” asked Kramer.

  “Chuck is Charlie,” said Martin, “and Charlie is The Man, and speaking for The Man, I’d like to get my hands on that big shitcake.”

  “You see those signs?” asked Kramer. “WEISS JUSTICE IS WHITE JUSTICE AND QUIT STALLING, ABE!?”

  “Yeah.”

  “If they show that on TV, Weiss’s gonna fucking freak out.”

  “ ’S’already freaked out, if you ask me,” said Goldberg. “Look at this bullshit.”

  From where Kramer, Goldberg, and Martin stood, the scene across the street was a curious little theater-in-the-round. The play concerned the Media. Beneath the towering spire of a TV van, three dozen figures, two dozen of them white, marched about in a small oval, carrying signs. Eleven people, two of them black, nine of them white, attended them, in order to bring their thin voices and felt-tip-marker messages to a city of seven million: a man with a bullhorn, a woman with a tote bag, a fluffy-haired TV announcer, a cameraman and a soundman attached to the van by umbilical cords, two technicians visible inside the open sliding doors of the van, the van driver, two newspaper photographers and two newspaper reporters with notebooks in their hands, one of them still lurching to port every now and again. An audience of two or three hundred souls was packed in around them, enjoying the spectacle.

  “Okay,” said Martin, “time to start talking to witnesses.” He started walking across the street, toward the crowd.

  “Hey, Marty,” said Goldberg. “Be cool. Okay?”

  Took the words right out of Kramer’s mouth. This was not the ideal setting for trying to demonstrate Irish machismo to the world. He had a horrible vision of Martin taking the bullhorn from the man with the earring and trying to stuff it down his throat before the assembled residents of the Poe Towers.

  The three of them, Kramer, Martin, and Goldberg, were halfway across the street when the pickets and the crowd suddenly got religion. They began making a real racket. Buck was bellowing something on the bullhorn. The cameraman’s high-tech proboscis was weaving this way and that. From somewhere a tall figure had appeared, a man with a black suit and a terrific stiff white collar and a black necktie with white stripes. With him was a small black woman wearing a dark dress with a luster, like silk or satin. It was Reverend Bacon and Mrs. Lamb.

  Sherman was halfway across the marble floor of the entry gallery when he saw Judy, sitting in the library. She was sitting in the wing chair, with a magazine on her lap, watching television. She looked up at him. What was that look? It was surprise, not warmth. If she would give him even a hint of warmth, he would go straight in and—and tell her! Oh yes? Tell her what? Tell her…about the debacle in the office at least, about the way Arnold Parch had talked to him and, worse, looked at him! The others, too! As if…He avoided forming in words what they must have thought of him. His disappearance, the collapse of the gold-backed bond scheme—and then tell her the rest, too? Had she by now seen a newspaper article about a Mercedes…RF…But there was not a hint of warmth. There was only surprise. It was six o’clock. He hadn’t been home this early in a long time…There was only surprise in that sad thin face with the corona of soft brown hair.

  He kept walking toward her. He would go in the library, anyway. He would sit down in the other armchair and watch television, too. That had been silently agreed upon. The two of them could sit together in the library and read or watch television. That way they could go through the frozen motions of being a family, for Campbell’s benefit as much as anything else, without having to talk.

  “Daddy!”

  He turned around. Campbell was coming toward him from the door that led to the kitchen. She had a glorious smile on her face. It nearly broke his heart.

  “Hello, sweetheart.” He put his hands under her armpits and swept her up off the floor and wrapped his arms around her. She put her arms around his neck and her legs around his waist, and she said, “Daddy! Guess what I made!”

  “What?”

  “A rabbit.”

  “You did? A rabbit?”

  “I’ll show you.” She started wriggling, to get down.

  “You’ll show me?” He didn’t want to see her rabbit, not now, but the obligation to seem enthusiastic overwhelmed him. He let her slither to the floor.

  “Come on!” She took him by the hand and began pulling with terrific force. She pulled him off balance.

  “Hey! Where are we going?”

  “Come on! It’s in the kitchen!” Towing him toward the kitchen, she now leaned so far over that almost the entire weight of her body hung from his hand, which held hers.

  “Hey! Watch it. You’re gonna fall down, sweetheart.”

  “Come…on!” He lurched behind her, ground between his fears and his love for a six-year-old who wanted to show him a rabbit.

  The doorway led into a short hallway, lined with closets, and then into the butler’s pantry, lined with glass-front cabinets containing sparkling battalions of crystal, and stainless-steel sinks. The cabinets, with their beadings, muntins, mullions, cornices—he couldn’t remember all the terms—had cost thousands…thousands…The passion Judy had put into these…things…The way they had spent money…Hemorrhaging money…

  And now they were in the kitchen. More cabinets, cornices, stainless steel, tiles, spotlights, the Sub-Zero, the Vulcan—all of it the best Judy’s endless research could find, all of it endlessly expensive, hemorrhaging and hemorrhaging…Bonita was by the Vulcan stove.

  “Hi, Mr. McCoy.”

  “Hello, Bonita.”

  Lucille, the maid, was sitting on a stool by a counter, drinking a cup of coffee.

  “Mr. McCoy.”

  “Why, hello, Lucille.” Hadn’t seen her in ages; hadn’t been home early enough. He should have something to say to her, since it had been so long, but he couldn’t think of a thing except for how sad it all was. They were proceeding with their routines, secure in their belief that everything was the way it always had been.

  “Over here, Daddy,” Campbell kept pulling. She d
idn’t want him to get sidetracked talking to Bonita and Lucille.

  “Campbell!” said Bonita. “Don’t pull your daddy like that!”

  Sherman smiled and felt ineffectual. Campbell ignored her. Then she stopped pulling.

  “Bonita’s gonna bake it for me. So it’ll be hard.”

  There was the rabbit. It was on a white Formica-topped table. Sherman stared. He could scarcely believe it. It was an astonishingly good rabbit, made of clay. It was primitive in execution, but the head was cocked to one side and the ears were set at expressive angles and the legs were spread out in an unconventional pose, as bunnies went, and the massing and proportion of the haunches was excellent. The animal seemed startled.

  “Sweetheart! You did this?”

  Very proud: “Yes.”

  “Where?”

  “In school.”

  “All by yourself?”

  “Yes. For real life.”

  “Well, Campbell—this is a beautiful rabbit! I’m very proud of you! You’re so talented!”

  Very timid: “I know.”

  All at once he wanted to cry. A startled bunny. To think of what it meant to be able to wish, in this world, to make a bunny rabbit and then to do it in all innocence, in all confidence that the world would receive it with love and tenderness and admiration—to think of what she assumed at the age of six, namely, that this was the nature of the world and that her mommy and daddy—her daddy!—made it that way and of course would never let it be any other way.

  “Let’s show it to Mommy,” he said.

  “She saw it.”

  “I bet she loved it.”

  The very timid voice: “I know.”

  “Well, let’s both show it to her.”

  “Bonita has to bake it. So it’ll be hard.”

  “Well, I want to go tell Mommy how much I like it.” With a show of gusto, he swept Campbell up into his arms and threw her over his shoulder. She took this as a great game.

  “Daddy!”

  “Campbell, you’re getting so big! Soon I won’t be able to carry you like a sack of meal anymore. Low bridge! We’re going through the door.”