American Gangster

by Mark Jacobson

  Under the fifteen-watt glare in the Ninth’s arrest room, Harrington books Ernest James. This is nothing new—Harrington has arrested Ernest James before. In fact, Ernest has six busts for pills this year already. Too bad, figures Dennis Harrington: Ernest James is not a bad guy. In fact, Dennis thinks, most of the guys he busts aren’t real bad. Just a bunch of losers. Ernest James had $84 on him, but that had to be his life savings. Most guys have about $30. “Sometimes it is that ‘there but for fortune thing,’” says Dennis, who is haunted by the memory of his brother, who was “into junk.” He also thinks about that same picture they always show of Karen Quinlan. Dennis wonders if she got her downs on Fourteenth Street.

  Asked where he got all the pills, Ernest James is cool. “I’m qualified to have as many pills as I want,” he says. Asked about all the different IDs, Ernest says, “I’m qualified to have as many names as I want.”

  While the cops count up the rest of Ernest’s stash, I ask him if he thinks the businessmen and cops can clean up Fourteenth Street. He says, “I dunno ’bout no cleanup. All I know is I wanna get to St. Louis. I can do security over there. I can’t sell these pills no more. But if I don’t, I got bread and water. My philosophy is that if the city put the clean in the street, they put the dirt in the street, too. Goes both ways. There is one thing that’s sure. Ain’t no way to clean up this. Cops come fuck up with Fourteenth Street, people just gonna go somewheres else. If they want to get rid of the dirt, they gonna have to shoot those motherfuckers. Line up those mother-fuckers and kill them. All of them. Dead.”

  Woe is Ernest James. He got caught in the cleanup. Usually Ernest winds up with one of those mumbo-jumbo raps like time served or adjournment contemplating dismissal. In other words, he gets off. Not bad, considering pill-pushing is a class-D felony worth up to seven years. This time, however, Ernest James is taking the fall. The D.A. is making an example of him. A special grand jury on soft drugs is indicting him. Instead of the usual weekend at Rikers, they’re offering Ernest a year. And that’s if he pleads.

  Tough shit, Ernest James. Add insult to injury: When Ernest got picked up on September 30, he claimed it was his birthday. No one believed him. But it was true. Happy birthday, Ernest James.

  Another thing Ernest James was right about: If you move a sleazo, he’ll just go somewhere else. You got to kill the motherfuckers … dead. Down in Chinatown, they say that’s what Mao did with the opium addicts. Hopheads can’t drive tractors, so Mao’s guys just put them up against the wall and blew their brains out. Bet there ain’t no sleazy corners in Peking.

  For a society stuck with half a million sleazoids (conservative metropolitan-area estimate), this could be an eminently modest proposal. Discussing this alternative with liberal city councilman Henry Stern, he says, “Of course, I’m not in favor of killing these people.”

  But Stern admits that he can’t figure out what to do with them. “It’s a dilemma,” he says, “maybe it’s one of the biggest dilemmas in the city today.” Miriam Friedlander, another liberal councilperson who has been working closely with Sweet 14, also does not favor wholesale annihilation. She takes a more conventional tack, saying, “It’s my primary function to break up that situation and get them out of the neighborhood.”

  In place of execution, the politicians offer “redevelopment.” “Redevelopment” is a coming concept in the city-planning business. A modification of the pave-it-all-over-and-start-from-scratch school of urban studies, “redevelopment” essentially means taking over “depressed” areas and transforming them into middle-class shopping and residential areas. The best-known example of “redevelopment” is on Forty-second Street between Ninth and Tenth Avenues. A civic group came into possession of several “tax-arrears” buildings and redid them into boutiques. Henry Stern, Miriam Friedlander, Koch, and the rest feel that “redevelopment” is at least worth trying on Fourteenth Street and Third Avenue. And with economic biggies like Charlie Luce, Helmsley-Spear, Citibank, and Restaurant Associates around, you know the job will get done right. Oh, boy, will it.

  Of course, “redevelopment” stops short of final solutions. So Ernest James’s philosophy holds up. Due to the hard-nose police work by the “Fourteenth Street Task Force,” the sleazos have begun a minor migration. Routed from parts of Fourteenth Street, they camped in Stuyvesant Park on Second Avenue and Fifteenth Street. According to the locals, who say they pay extra rent to live near the park, the situation is becoming disgusting. Methadone addicts are leaving their bottles all over the place. Pill-pushers are dealing. The other day two of the he-shes got into a little mutual around-the-world.

  The neighborhood forces rallied, led by one Jeanne Pryor, a right-minded lady who loves a firm grip on the bullhorn (who last week opened a cleanup storefront at Fourteenth and Third). They decided that the Thirteenth Precinct was not providing adequate protection from the sleazos. They demanded police guards in the park.

  One night last month a protest march was organized. About 150 people showed up to carry signs saying things like OUR CHILDREN ONCE PLAYED FRISBEE IN THIS PARK. Others carried shopping bags full of empty scrip bottles they said were collected in the park. These were a present for Captain Joseph Neylan of the Thirteenth, who, Ms. Pryor kept shouting, “has been out to lunch for the past six months.”

  The march, accompanied by a man in a kilt playing a bagpipe, began at Fifteenth Street and headed up Third Avenue toward the precinct house on Twenty-first Street. Ms. Pryor had planted stories in the Daily News, so the local television stations sent out crews to cover. Arc lights flooded the streets as Ms. Pryor led the chant of “junkies out of the park.”

  As the march reached Seventeenth Street, it started to get interesting. A messed-up black guy bounded in front of the marchers and held up his hands like he was stopping a runaway team of horses.

  “Stop!” he said, the TV lights glaring in his buzzed eyes. Stunned, Ms. Pryor halted in her tracks. The whole march bumped to a stop. There was a silence. Then the guy started chanting, “Junkies out of the park. Junkies out of the park.” The marchers stepped back. The guy kept screaming, “Junkies out of the park. Junkies out of the park.” Then he stopped and looked the bagpipe player right in the eye and said, “I’m a fucking junkie. I’m a fucking junkie. I’m a fucking junkie. Get me out of the park. Get me out of the park. Get me out of the park.”

  The mock turned to a plea.

  It was then that Jeanne Pryor should have acted. She should have taken out a 12-gauge shotgun and blown the creep’s head off.

  9

  Terror on the N Train

  A strange adventure of youth, recalled. From the Village Voice, 1977.

  I spied my old fat friend Bart the other day. Like old times, he was sitting in a snot-green foreign car eating a brownie and swigging milk from the quart container in front of Cakemasters on Thirty-fourth Street. For eight years of no see, Big Bart could have looked worse. The car was an improvement. Big Bart used to drive a Corvair that had holes in the floorboards. He heard that Ralph Nader said Corvairs were killer machines, moving time bombs, that they could go off the road, smash right into a crowd of unsuspecting shoppers, with a single nudge of the wheel. So Big Bart went out and got one with no front alignment. He was that kind of guy.

  Big Bart was one of those bald-spot-in-the-middle/long-greasy-hair-on-the-sides type of hippies. Now the bald spot has grown like a spreading Rorschach blot, but the grease remains the same. So did the chub. We had some info that Big Bart was married to a woman who had a snake tattoo on her tummy who put him on a yoga diet. You’d never be able to tell.

  Back then, in 1969, when we shared a seventy-dollar-a-month pad on Hillside Avenue and Sutphin Boulevard in Queens, there was a saying that Big Bart either had the lowest-cut pants or the highest-cut ass in town. The crack was always visible. Big Bart used to come out of his room naked. (The room was painted orange and black: Mr. Rotherstein, our landlord, railed, “You painted this wall psychodeckic. Psychodeckic is not in your l
ease.” But we were the only whites in the building, so we got over.) He’d lay that hairy ass on me and my former wife. Moon over Miami, Big Bart called it. We hid under the covers hoping it would go away. But every time we peeked out it would still be there, shining on.

  I was with Big Bart the last time I took acid.

  Those days Big Bart played drums in bar bands on Long Island. If the joint was past Exit 51, Big Bart played it. For a sweating slob in a flannel shirt, Bart was immortal, in that Island rocker kind of way. He twirled his sticks better than Sal Mineo in The Gene Krupa Story. He knew the Young Rascals’ greatest hits better than Dino Danelli. When Big Bart beat out “Can’t Turn You Loose” on his meaty thighs, it could be magic.

  On this particular night Big Bart was moving uptown. He had a gig in a church basement on Lexington Avenue and Twenty-second Street, borough of Manhattan. The City! Man, this was the big time. But the show wasn’t until ten o’clock. We had eleven hours to kill and Big Bart had two yellow pills shaped like pumpkin seeds he said would do the trick. I had my doubts. I had just returned from California and was skeptical of what the potent combo of pumpkin seed acid and the Big Apple might foment in my increasingly pock-marked brain pan. Up in Tilden Park in Berkeley you could look at a tree for six hours, say “Oh, wow,” and incur minimal permanent damage. New York was another story.

  But after Bart dropped, there wasn’t much choice. What was I gonna do, spend eleven hours watching him take acid? Everything was cool as long as the sun stayed up: we made faces at the gorilla in the Central Park zoo, acted unruly on Park Avenue, stared at the guy blowing smoke on the Times Square Camel ad, watched the buildings weave like in a Stan Van Der Beek underground movie. For a kick, we bought some Gypsy Rose, the cheapest rotgut available, and went looking for our buddy, George Washington Goldberg.

  G.W.G., as he called himself, spent the majority of his time in Washington Square Park, where he had achieved a modicum of fame for once making his way up into an NYU biology lecture room. Pushing his way by the professor, George erased the diagrams on the blackboard and told the hundred students, “Okay, now G.W.G. is gonna tell you what biology is really all about.” The Wackenhuts carried him out. A star, G.W.G. He’d see you from a distance, stand up, bow, and say, “Oh, finally, a better class of people … would you guys like a job, Sonny Liston is looking for sparring partners.” This time, though, we blew G.W.G’s mind, pulling out our bottle of Gypsy Rose from the brown paper bag and handing it to him, as a present.

  “Unopened,” George said, tears welling up in his eyes. “The seal not even cracked. No tooth marks. I’m overcome.”

  Later Big Bart and I went to Hong Fat on Mott Street to giggle over the bacon-wrapped shrimp with the rest of the hippies. Bart ordered his usual: curry beef, superhot extra sauce, five Seven-Ups. He ate the slop in sweaty spasms, banging his chest like a doctor gunning a pacemaker. And said, “Good!”

  What a day we were having! Big Bart said there was only one hassle. For Big Bart, any time you had to do anything, it was a hassle. The hassle was that Bart had to call Ben the bassist to tell him where the gig was. Bart went off to find a working phone booth while I sat on the curb of Elizabeth Street staring at the streetlamp. It could have been the moon. Bart returned with a look of horror on his face. He was pasty white. Ben the bassist couldn’t make it. He was sick. The only other bass player Bart knew was Lou, the crazed 650-Triumph freak who lived in Bensonhurst. There was something wrong with Lou’s phone. We’d have to go out there.

  Oh shit.

  The N train, what the fuck do we know from the N train? We’re from Queens. Brooklyn is a dark and scary thing. The subway map. Fuck. Some Puerto Rican wrote on it. In, like, Spanish.

  Journey to the end of the Nightsville. Drunk on the subway, okay. Glue on the subway, ride it out. But acid on the subway, yaaahhh. Big Bart and I held on to each other. All we knew was: Bay Ridge Parkway, get off. The train is packed. Across the way a pizza-faced white guy in a pea coat is playing 45s on a portable turntable. Like life or death, Big Bart dives at the guy’s leg and asks, “Do you have any Chuck Berry?” The kid pulls “No Particular Place to Go” out of his pocket. Saved. Thank you, Lord! Saved again. The people on the train are going nuts. Half of them want the kid to turn it up, the rest want to kill him.

  Somehow we found Lou, a husky weight-lifting type, communing with the television in his mother’s living room. The mother, a Jewish-Italian widow lady, came to the door, took one look at our faces, and almost broke out crying. It was easy to see why. Lou was taking acid too! He was nearly catatonic. Big Bart and I breathed relief: Here, at last, was someone we could talk to.

  Lou indicated, sure, he could play the gig. Only problem was he worked for Grand Union on Eighty-sixth Street and had to make his deliveries first. He said it would go faster if we came along. Eighty-sixth Street has an elevated train running over it. Lou shot that Dodge Tradesman between the subway pilings like an amphethamined slalom skier. Big Bart broke into a box of Oreos as we rolled around in the back of the van trying not to barf into the bags of groceries. How Lou had a nice smile for all those Italian ladies when he brought them their Ronzoni is an unsolved mystery. How we got to the gig is another event lost in the mists.

  Talking in front of Cakemasters on Thirty-fourth Street, Big Bart and I agree that we can’t remember much more of that day—except that the priest at the church smoked pot to show he was hip. Outside of that and a couple of questions about how our respective parents were, there wasn’t all that much more to talk about, even if Bart did play “Can’t Turn You Loose” on his leg for old times’ sake. Bart has been in half a dozen bands since those days. Once he was supposed to go out on the road with Don Covay, author of Chain of Fools. But it fell through. Now playing in bands is just a job. Big Bart works in an auto parts store during the day. I remember when Big Bart slept all day. But what are you going to do when you’re married and have three kids? Bart hasn’t taken acid since that night either.

  10

  Re: Dead Letter Department, Village Voice

  They shoot old bohemian newspapers, don’t they? You know, when they can’t dance anymore. A personalized NY media story of a wound that never heals. From New York magazine, 2005.

  What a bittersweet little sojourn down memory lane it was, reaching into one of those nasty free boxes from which the Village Voice is dispensed these days to pick up a copy of the paper’s fiftieth-anniversary issue. A big, fat thing it was, too, the big five-oh, sporting a reproduction of a Voice cover from each year of its existence, 1955 on to now. There were reprints of old stories, rekindlings of famous, long-vanished bylines. Up front was Mailer’s, of course, the founding editor lambasting the paper’s nonexistent copy department for so many “obvious mis-spellings,” in his essay “The Hip and the Square,” and saying that he had no choice, given “the fairly sharp words—certain things said which can hardly be unsaid,” but to resign his column.

  Other hallowed names were invoked. There was Jane Jacobs, who stopped Robert Moses’s Lower Manhattan Expressway, thereby making Soho safe for Prada. And Jack Newfield, who sent crooked judges and land lords to jail, ten at a time. Noted too were Jonas Mekas, Andrew Sarris (how much us budding Queens auteur theorists owed him!), the beatnik John Wilcock, Howard Smith, jill johnston (only lowercase for her), Lucian Truscott IV, Alexander Cockburn, Ellen Willis, and dozens more, with pictures by Fred McDarrah and cartoons by Feiffer, one more dance to the newsprint fungibility of it all.

  The Voice: how to explain what it meant, in 1961, to plunk down a dime onto the counter of Union News on 188th Street and thumb through those mucky little pages—pages that opened a Cocteau-like portal to a whole other world. Here was the ticket from Mom’s pot roast, from Queens civil service and the neat six-foot square of lawn in front of the corner house on Fifty-third Avenue. Simply to be seen with the Voice set you apart: you were one of those people—hair too long, mouth too smart, not likely to go to the prom. Growing up in Flushing, the
dream felt good.

  Later on, as a freshman at the University of Wisconsin, I had a subscription. The guys in the hall, all aggie majors and barely closeted Jewhaters (I assumed), looked at the picture of LeRoi Jones on the cover and asked, “What’s this, a commie paper?” No, I tried to explain to these sons of McCarthy, it wasn’t a commie paper, it had a lot of stuff in it: politics, jazz, stuff about movies. I tried to tell them I read the paper because I was from New York and to me the Voice embodied the legitimate, indigenous clarion of what mattered. Really, I read it because I was homesick and the Voice was my lifeline; it kept me sane, and warm, in the middle of fucking Wisconsin, where the temperature hadn’t broken zero in weeks.

  My dorm mates looked over the paper again. There were some naked hippies in there, I think, maybe some piece about some judge who took money. “This is a commie paper,” they said again. “Yeah, right, it’s a commie paper, you pig farmers,” I said, slamming the dorm-room door.

  The Voice: it was an attitude, back then.

  This, and the fact that I would wind up writing for the paper during the seventies, made the fiftieth-anniversary issue a perfect nostalgia storm: Like, wow, look at that picture of Dustin Hoffman, I forgot he lived right next to that town house on Eleventh Street the Weather Underground blew themselves up in.

  What a long, strange proverbial trip.

  That was my frame of mind as I slipped past security at the current Voice office at 36 Cooper Square. I wanted to be there because it figured to be a special day, one that could only be conjured by the lords of irony that often hover over the paper. On this day, the same one that the fiftieth-anniversary issue hit the streets, the Voice management thought it would be an excellent idea to have the paper’s new owner come by for the very first time. And there he was, blown in from the Barry Goldwater–whelped precincts of Phoenix, Arizona, one Mr. Michael Lacey, a tallish fifty-seven-year-old with spiky gray hair, watery pale-blue eyes, and spreading shanty-Irish honker.