The Swing Voter of Staten Island

by Arthur Nersesian

  “This is the best chow you’re going to find floating in this toilet bowl,” she said as she approached. “I felt bad watching you eat those corn dogs.”

  He tried hiding his dismay. “What exactly is it?”

  “A cactus burrito. I only got one since Pogo obviously relishes the shit they serve here.”

  The bus moved at a snail’s pace over the low bridge and Dianne launched into some weird tangent: “Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, you can prove—light bends, zing! Ha ha! But Darwin’s Theory of Evolution is a whole nother story! What are you gonna do? Wait around till the next monkey talks, right?”

  Oric nodded nervously in agreement. To pacify him, Uli handed over the rest of the corn dogs and opened the wax paper containing the cactus burrito. The tortilla shell stuffed with local vegetables and topped with a spicy chipolte sauce was heavenly.

  “Remember when the Crappers started a school in the Village? They didn’t teach Johnny reading and writing, you know why? Cause they’d teach him fisting.” She shoved her clawlike hand in Oric’s face. “A word every bit as ugly as it sounds, ha!”

  Uli tasted something acrid. Dipping his fingers into the sauce and holding it up to the light, he detected a powdery substance and felt a wave of fatigue. She had slipped some kind of narcotic into the food.

  “Blist bags!” Oric shouted furiously through the food in his mouth.

  “Big breasts?” Dianne asked, modestly covering her own flat chest.

  “Big blast! Big blast!”

  Dianne turned to face Oric. Though Uli was on the verge of passing out, he tossed the remainder of his burrito out the bus window.

  Oric’s fingers digging into his side awakened Uli to the fact that they were slowly descending off the bad imitation of the Brooklyn Bridge. Rather than hooking into City Hall like the original bridge, this new one tilted onto 14th Street. After several minutes, the bus pulled up at the northeast corner of Second Avenue. The driver stood up and called to the back of the bus: “We ain’t going one more stop till lil’ Miss Miniskirt pays her damn fare. I couldn’t pull over on the bridge, lady, but I ain’t moving another inch till you pay up just like everyone else.”

  “Oh damn,” Dianne said, “I got on so quickly I forgot.” She rose and angled her way through the crowd to the front of the bus.

  “Come on,” Uli said, and punched open the rear emergency window. Uli helped his heavy companion down to the pavement. Before Uli could join him, Oric waddled toward a large pastry shop with a sign that said, Veniero’s. The bus turned south on Second Avenue as Uli hit the ground.

  Checking a wall clock through the shop window as he caught up to Oric, he saw it was already 2:00. Too late to drop off Oric first.

  “Blig bast!” Oric said nervously.

  “We’re getting as far away from that scary lady as we can,” Uli explained.

  “Blast, big boom!” Oric repeated as they walked west.

  “Where blast?”

  “I’ll never know.”

  “Why won’t you know?”

  “You know, you’re me.” He touched Uli’s forehead.

  Still concerned that they were being pursued, Uli took the challenged man’s hand and hastily led him westward along 14th Street. They joined a stream of young hippie types heading in the same direction. A growing crowd was visible several blocks down.

  Onion Square, declared a psychedelic hand-painted sign at the corner of Fourth Avenue. Just as Mallory had said, all the buildings in the area had a distinctly European flavor. A small German restaurant called Luchow’s was the only establishment here that triggered a distant memory from old New York.

  The crowd of longhaired kids was centered around a large makeshift wooden stage in the middle of a barren field—Onion Square. Old-fashioned bullhorn speakers were blasting a speech: “… If these bastards aren’t going to end this war, we’ve got to end it for them!”

  All cheered.

  Glancing up at the stage, Uli saw a slim Mediterranean man with a springy Afro wearing an American flag on his shirt.

  “Remember, it takes two eyes to spell FBI and CIA.” He spoke with a slight lisp. “And they’re always watching!” All cheered once again.

  “Do you know where Rockefeller Center is?” Uli asked some post-adolescent with peach fuzz and pimples standing next to him.

  “Up that way,” the guy replied, throwing his arm northward.

  “Who’s that speaking?”

  “Abbie Hoffman.”

  “What’s he talking about?”

  “The war,” the kid answered.

  “What war?”

  “Vietnam!” the fuzzy-faced youth replied, then walked away in disgust. “It’s an antiwar rally.”

  Uli had this strange feeling that he had already served in Vietnam. Something told him that he was in favor of the war, but he had no clue as to why.

  Next, an older, wild-bearded man with black-framed glasses, a top hat, and a waistcoat took the stage. He began reciting rhymes: “Communism’s / shooting jism / on top’a Asia / We’ll invade ya / Napalm bomb / And all is calm / It’s a mock, you see / our Democracy …”

  “Who’s that?” Uli asked another unsuspecting youth whose neck was ringed with turquoise beads.

  “Ginsberg!” the youth shot back, not wanting to miss a single word of the rant.

  “Beware / she’s there!” Oric pointed at a thick shag of blond hair on the western edge of the crowded square.

  A beat-up city bus was turning onto Park Avenue through the tangle of longhaired war protesters. Uli impulsively grabbed Oric’s hand, raced across the square, and flagged it down. The driver pulled past them to the curb and opened the doors.

  “You go by Rockefeller Center?”

  “Rock & Filler Center,” the driver corrected as Uli paid their fares.

  “Rock and Filler?” Uli asked. “Sorry, I just got to Rescue City so I don’t know my way around.”

  “By Crapper decree, all the names in Manhattan and Brooklyn have been corrupted.”

  “Why?”

  “To remind us that this is not the place they want us to think it is. It’s word protest.” That explained Onion Square.

  “How about in Queens and the Bronx?” Uli asked.

  “The Piggers are proud to be here, so they’ve kept most of the original names intact in their areas.”

  As the bus sped up Park Avenue, Uli and Oric sat down behind the driver, who took the opportunity to keep playing tour guide.

  “Many of the buildings you see around here have been rebuilt two, even three different times. The Air Force held multiple bombing exercises here. The Army Corp of Engineers would repair buildings, like restacking bowling pins, then the Air Force would knock them down again. They were initially modeled after Gropius’s Weissenhof houses. This gray building coming up to your left was bombed and rebuilt at least four times; it’s based on a famous building designed by the Taut Brothers.”

  Reaching 51st Street, the bus made a left and came to a halt on a low-rent stretch of Fifth Avenue, before a small gothic European church with a missing spire. A smattering of worshipers were entering it.

  “This is the stop for Rock & Filler,” the driver said.

  Uli and Oric got off along with a handful of others. Uli began heading down toward Rock & Filler Center, but Oric dashed into the church. Uli raced after him.

  Inside, he was surprised to find that the house of worship was actually a hollowed-out brownstone. Its upper floorboards had been removed, revealing only unmilled crossbeams and a high, peeling ceiling. Rows of benches faced forward to a large fold-out picnic table. Behind it was a big wooden cross. Clean holes at the ends of the tall crucifix suggested that the Jesus had been set free.

  Oric was staring at some lady photographing a colorful mural on a large wall that looked like a little girl riding a dog. On a tray in front of the image was a coffee mug that said, DONAT, behind which was a row of unlit, half-melted votive candles. Off to the side of the dog-riding
girl were sketches of three homeless men, and above them, a yellow starfish. When Uli stepped back, the tableau pieces all locked together.

  “Oh, it’s the manger scene,” he declared. The little girl was actually a boy, and the dog was a donkey. “That’s God,” he explained to Oric.

  “Huh?”

  “That’s who your mom and dad are with,” he elaborated.

  “In there?” Oric said, looking at the unevenly plastered wall.

  “No, they’re with the kid in the painting—the baby Jesus.” Uli reached into his pocket and took out a sixteenth-stamp. He instructed Oric to light a candle for his murdered parents, then asked him to stay put. “I’ll be right back.”

  “I wait for my brother.” Oric pointed to the wall.

  Uli asked someone outside where Rock & Filler Center was. He was pointed to a traffic jam of cars and people squeezing around an empty mall between two large buildings. Instead of Saks Fifth Avenue, Uli noticed a six-column archway across the street. Approaching the plaque affixed to it, he found himself standing before a quarter-scale replica of the Brandenburg Gate.

  He moved tentatively toward Rock & Filler Center, looking around for the blond stranger from the cemetery. At 50th Street, he spotted a familiar figure down by 49th, but it wasn’t the blond guy. His body clenched up as he realized it was the Flatlands pursuer, the one who resembled Oric. The man’s clothing was singed and wrinkled.

  No sooner had Uli turned away, when he heard, “Hey! Wait a sec—”

  A loud explosion knocked Uli and a dozen others backwards to the ground. As he rose to his feet several moments later, he saw a large plume of black smoke suspended in the air before him. It appeared that the goateed pursuer, along with a cluster of others, had been blown to smithereens.

  “Fuck a duck!” one of the seniors behind him shouted.

  Once the ringing in his ears had subsided, Uli limped through the smoke to the edge of a small crater. Smoldering body parts from at least a dozen victims were strewn about the twisted frame of a destroyed minitruck. Gasping for breath, he heard others screaming in shock, and realized that he must’ve seen a lot of this kind of thing, since his heart hadn’t so much as skipped a beat.

  With the Flatlands pursuer dead, Uli resumed his search for the blond stranger. Rock & Filler Center had two paved walkways on either side of a raised stone garden that ended at a drop-off. Walking to the edge, still gasping for breath, Uli found himself standing on the precipice of a large empty ditch. It was roughly thirty feet deep by thirty feet wide, with a muddy puddle at the bottom. At the far side of the hole, a man was taking a piss on a pile of white stones.

  “What the hell happened over there?” the urinator called out to him.

  “A truck bomb.”

  “Pigger faggots!”

  “Yeah,” Uli replied tiredly. Behind the urinator was a narrow four-story office building that looked nothing like the surrounding structures.

  “Do you know what that building is?” Uli asked.

  “Yeah. Number 30.”

  As Uli walked over, he saw that the front of the building looked like it had been chiseled down. Inside the lobby, two men in dark-blue blazers were checking people’s IDs and whatever bags they carried. A sign read, Manhattan Municipal Government Offices—hence the bomb blast?

  Uli headed back to Fifth Avenue where arriving EMS workers triaged the injured as a growing crowd watched. Uli wondered if perhaps the goateed man had killed his nameless blond friend before being blown up. How else would the Flatlander know I’m here? he pondered. I should’ve gotten off the bus after that cemetery in Brooklyn. When the first gangcops finally arrived and started rounding up witnesses, Uli decided to leave before he could be detained.

  He found Oric back at the church, rubbing the wall frantically, while other worshipers stared at him.

  “What are you doing?” Uli asked, trying to pull him away.

  “I saw him! He’s with them.”

  “Who is?”

  “My brother, but he said … he said they ain’t mine, so …” Oric looked confused and then distressed.

  “I think maybe you had a bad dream.”

  “No dreams. My brother, he just came here, see, and … he said you take me to him.”

  Uli gently led Oric outside the church and across the street. As Oric continued with his nonsense, more emergency vehicles came to take care of the wounded. Uli led him to the bus stop at the corner of 51st. Glancing eastward, he could see a row of towers across the slim waterway separating Manhattan from Queens. There was something odd about them. It was as though a Hollywood producer had shot a big-budget film there and left this elaborate set behind.

  “What exactly are those?” Uli asked a tall man wearing a pointy bamboo hat who was also waiting for the bus.

  “Just backdrops,” the guy replied. “They’re nicer than the ones across from Wall Street.”

  A southbound bus eventually pulled up. With his mission to meet the blond man a failure, Uli’s next move was to drop Oric off at the Crapper headquarters.

  Uli paid their fares and watched as a balding gangcop waved all traffic past the explosion site. Oric started whimpering again, and then murmurred, “See you soon.”

  The buildings down Fifth Avenue, though occasionally singed and almost all run down, looked occupied. Small-business owners had loaded piles of merchandise onto the cramped sidewalks, forcing pedestrians into the street.

  Growing impatient, the driver angled the bus along the far right side of the street. Straddling one tire on the edge of the curb and the other in the gutter, she drove down a new lane of her own creation.

  At 42nd Street, Uli saw a big sandy mound where he had expected the stately New York Public Library. It seemed that not all of the city’s landmarks, or their German-inspired replicas, had made it into the final imitative plans.

  Passing 34th Street, Uli spotted a strange building soaring up six majestic flights with a sign that read, Vampire Stake Building. It didn’t have swastikas emblazoned on it like some of the other midtown buildings, but was instead covered with leering gargoyles and hieroglyphics that suggested powers of the occult. A string of sightseers cued up at the front door.

  At 23rd Street, when a group of people finally got off, Oric and Uli grabbed a pair of seats across from a cute girl with curly hair and glasses. She smiled, revealing a mouthful of black teeth.

  Uli greeted her with a smile of his own. “Hi, I just arrived yesterday from old New York and I’m totally lost.”

  “I’m jealous,” the woman replied with a chuckle. “Unlike everyone else here, I never really lived in New York. My name’s Kennesy. You guys go to the rally earlier today?”

  “Yeah,” Uli said. “How bout you?”

  “Yeah. Now I’m heading down to CoBs&GoBs for a benefit show.” She spoke with a slight Southern twang.

  “What’s that?”

  “A musical palace. I’m a deejay for a rock show on the local radio station.”

  “Where exactly are you from?” Uli asked.

  “Mississippi.”

  “How’d you wind up here?”

  “When I was a kid, we lost our place to Hurricane Camille and were offered temporary asylum in New York. No sooner did we arrive than the attack happened and we were offered refuge out here.”

  “So which gang are you with?”

  “That’s a rather indiscreet question,” Kennesy replied coyly, “but I’m still a Crapper. At least until they fragment into a half a dozen other parties.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Go to the next Crapper convention and see for yourself.”

  “What would I see?”

  “Well, recently they broadcasted the Pigger convention in Queens. It was like watching a high mass. Everyone talks softly, one at a time, and they all applaud politely. But the Crapper convention, wow! They held it at the Coliseum on Columbus Circle last year. I did a radio show from there, and I swear, I couldn’t hear myself think. Five thousa
nd screaming voices. Fistfights in the aisles.”

  “Amazing that they’ve been able to hold two boroughs together.”

  “Yeah, but in the last month they’ve lost three Brooklyn neighborhoods and one in Manhattan,” she said. “Inwood just elected its first Pigger Councilperson, Julie Rudian. And it was done by internal dissent. All the Crappers just voted for her.”

  “Sounds pretty messed up.”

  “That’s the wave of the future, and the Crappers don’t get it,” she said. “It won’t be gang warfare that’ll decide the future of this place, it’ll be the sentiment of the people. Folks in Manhattan are growing more and more Piggish.”

  “Why do you think that is?”

  “Pure-ile Plurality—they’re this quasi-evangelical outreach organization.” Uli thought he remembered seeing their headquarters in southern Queens. “A lot of Piggers work for them. They’re always hiring people. You know that expression, If you win their hearts and minds … Well, P.P.’s food trucks won the stomachs of Inwood, then they went down to Harlem. Now they’re going all the way to the East Village. They start with food, then it’s clothes and basic medical treatment. Soon it’ll be free movies in the park.”

  “So is P.P. an arm of the Piggers?”

  “Technically no. If any evidence is found showing they are swayed by any one gang, they could lose their government funding—”

  “Would you mind keeping your brilliant insights to yourself?” interrupted an older woman a few seats away.

  Kennesy rolled her eyes, and without lowering her voice she resumed: “The only thing I respect about the Piggers is their pro-life stand. They’ve accepted this as the life they are fated to, instead of always waiting for the day they get to leave—that’s the pro-choice position.”

  “How can someone actually want to live in this hellhole?” Uli said quietly.

  “Just ask anyone here what it was like being homeless. After being evacuated when Camille struck, we were given housing in Queens shelters. Then when the bombs went off, we were moved out into a hangar at LaGuardia Airport. Try living there on cots with thousands of people and tell me this isn’t better.” She took a deep sigh. “Besides, if you don’t like it here, you can always file an appeal.”