This was the era of the battery-operated boom box, and the first of the hip-hoppers, in their wraparound black shades, long-tailed T-shirts, and volcanic Afros, and with their concomitant, mega-amped, portable self-intensification systems, had gotten the word loud and clear. Undoubtedly, the street kids were hastening to take advantage of their moment in the dark.
I would never have presumed just how fast they were able to operate. It was as though they were working from a blueprint. The tires of idle police cruisers were slashed. Trash cans were ignited up and down the streets, hydrants were opened, and the guerrilla saboteurs phoned in thousands of fallacious reports concerning old ladies being ritually raped in Central Park and Russian subs having been sighted out along the Hudson, so as to divert the police from the main stage of the action. I knew on sight hundreds of welfare hotel kids from around the Deuce, but I didn’t see many familiar sets of features out there that night. I kept Sabbath’s Nikon beneath my shirt.
The Morgan and Chase banking branches were protected by reinforced steel and armed watchmen within, but all the other storefronts along the square were protected only by flimsy tin shutters. Kids closed ranks and wedged in on Sneaky Peter’s, a three-tiered tennis shoe outlet on Broadway. With the battering ram of an iron garbage pail, they opened a chasm in the front of the grate and then peeled away the tin plate as though unbinding a book. The store alarm melded with the cacophony of the car horns and the encroaching police sirens. The kids ran in and fought their way back out moments later, wearing layers of team jackets and with leis of plush white sneakers draped by the lacings around their necks. They shucked their own ordinary sneakers and put on their gleaming new shoes, many of them instantly regretting that they had not bothered to take the size of their feet into proper consideration. They traipsed about in outsized Weary Willy gunboats, contemplating whether or not to attempt a return trip. The spirit of camaraderie soured as the boys at the back of the crowd, blocked off from the action, attempted to separate the thieves from their booty. Tugs-of-war, fisticuffs, and simulated Kung Fu balletics ensued. Black smoke began to issue from the smashed-in shop window. The last of the stragglers came romping out with the tails of their shirts on fire.
Nine full years had passed since the Columbia disturbances. In our youthful naïveté, we thought of utopia as a continent, a landmass that had been slowly migrating our way since the beginning of time and due to report for duty before our youths had been spent. We rebelled so as to hasten its arrival. As it had turned out, utopia was not late in coming; it had only managed to elude our generation’s hospitality. Utopia had splintered into unanimous seven-and-a-half- to twelve-inch rubber-and-canvas increments, suitable for encasing the chaotic footsteps of the generation succeeding ours.
The next establishment that the crowd broke into was a pharmacy. The kids husked the grate from its moorings and smashed the glass with their trash barrels. Ladies in curlers and floral housecoats had suddenly appeared in the crowd. They came with shopping bags in their hands and, in pleading and reverential tones—some of them even kneeling— petitioned for certain brands of toiletries, just as though they were praying to an Avon lady. They were roundly ignored, although one guy wearing six Yankee caps, with the bills staggered so that it appeared as though he had a propeller upon his head, expeditiously dismantled a Charmin pyramid displayed in the window, hurling the white rolls at the shopping ladies.
A bullhorn voice interjected that the gathering was unlawful and that everyone had five minutes in which to lay down all purloined materials and disperse. We looked down the street and saw that the police cavalry had arrived. To the rear of the horsemen, a brigade of fire engines was idling with their sirens being held in reserve. The outrider in front, at least a captain to judge by his carriage in the saddle, made a dramatic show of holding up his arm and following closely the stagecraft of his wristwatch. He would see to it that we got our full five minutes. I’m quite sure that we would have all run for our lives, but for the fact that the horses appeared skittish and almost fainthearted. It looked like they were dying to run, but, strangely, like they were dying to turn tail and race the other way. The trash fires in front and the cherry chasers behind, not to mention the white foaming gush of the cracked-open hydrants, must have been tautening the stallions’ famously capricious temperaments. The looting party, sensing lily livers behind those fibrous equine muscles, spread out across the expanse of the street with wreathes of shoes around their necks and pill vials stuffed into their trouser pockets. Traffic had been shut down, but sheepish Algonquin Hotel types, lost literati barred from their rooms by the new electronic locks, and Broadway theatergoers who had sat through three-quarters of The Wiz, Your Arm’s Too Short to Box with God, or For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf were congregating along the sidewalks, eager now for any sort of theatrical climax.
The stalemate was dispersed with a whimper rather than a bang. The longest five minutes of my lifetime ended when some malcontent in a plywood efficiency above tossed their pet mongrel cat out the window. The little coal-striped feline made not a sound, but it attracted all eyes as it steadily closed in on the ground with a magisterial calm, although its claws were out and its little back was arched to absorb the force of the landing. I expected at least a thud of contact, but whatever sound there might have been was absorbed into the greater ambience. The mutt cat turned to instant tomato product and the horses, which zoologists tell us share with the human animal a mortal fear of death, responded by hoisting themselves up onto their hind legs, ridding themselves of their riders, and running madly into the night. Later that evening, cop wranglers would track them, with the aid of German shepherds, down to the Hudson River. Most would submit to the lasso, but a dozen or so turned tourist and attempted to visit Jersey. The current took them out to sea, and a countercurrent would return them to the Hudson. Garbage scow crews were forking them out of the river for months afterward.
The looters presently held their positions, still as statues. Then they turned, all of them in succession, with gloating smiles directed upon the riot cops. They knew that this would be a battle on foot now and that the PD would be going against the All-City Ring-a-Levio Champs, most of them shod in spanking-new treads as well.
The cops knew what was in store for them, but nonetheless their exasperation fueled their wrath. They charged the kids, torsos inclined toward the pavement, feet splashing in the hydrant deluge, and doing their level best to muster the impetus of cannonballs. In many cases, the rioters merely waited until the last possible moment before turning slightly sideways. Other kids shied and feint-danced like James Brown, bugalooing so that their pursuers found themselves unsteady upon stilt legs and combating the terror of gravity. I saw those kids pound their chests like primates. I saw them whirlybird their sneaker clusters over their heads and slowly levitate onto their tiptoes. I saw them fall to their knees and bay at the moon in triumph. Then the officers got on their radios and solicited assistance, and called in air strikes, no less, imagining that the department had an airborne deputation held in surreptitious reserve for emergencies such as this one. To judge from their bodily vocabulary, they were informed of the obvious, that the system was operating on overload as it was and that they were on their own. They had leave to use their weapons upon individual looters, but they were strictly prohibited from firing indiscriminately into the crowd. The kids were crowing, stomping in the puddles, and some of them were parading around in the service caps that they had snatched from the heads of their pursuers. The cops were breathing hard, bent at the waist, their hands upon their hips. Those kids might have gone home right then. Or they may have stashed their spoils in a safe spot and gone off and robbed the rest of the dark city blind. And they would have but for one thing. They were too young to know when to quit.
The policemen had turned their backs on the looters. They were telling onlookers to go inside. We had pretty much forgotten about the fire engines. They had become a par
t of the bedazzled scenery, their lights twinkling on and off, their sirens mute. From down the street, we heard their engines rev in unison. The orchestral sirens came on. In the oscillating light, the rioters, standing up to their cuffed ankles in municipal water, holding their pillaged gym shoes, and backlit by the fires kindled by their own hands, turned slowly to see what all the racket was.
The fire engines advanced single file like a tank column. We saw men in rubber cosmonaut suits standing upright in the flatbed backs of the trucks, as motionless as figures on a wedding cake. They held the nozzle heads of boa constrictors in their hands. We were all thinking the same thing. There had been stories in the news. For a variety of reasons, the water pressure of the city’s waterworks system was fluctuating, and it was thought inadequate to handle the worst of the summer’s prospective blazes. Barometric heavy artillery had been ordered from a hydraulics firm in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. These new water cannons, it was said, were capable of snuffing Vesuvius at even their most temperate settings. We had all heard that they had been tried out in the Republic of Pyromania, the borough of the Bronx, New York. They had excised fires but not before caving in the sides of buildings.
Everyone was running. I got hip-checked and then spiked with bowling-ball kneecaps as I was going down. I got to my knees, winded, and several runners used me as a vaulting horse. In the condition I was in, I thought it might be expedient to lie down on the sidewalk, in fetal surrender if need be. The water current sucked me slowly toward the rain gutter, but the cannon streams passed over my head, quaking instead the brick wall above me. When I looked up, I saw the white currents from the hoses reconfiguring the bodies of kids caught in the line of fire, collapsing their spines and disjoining their necks. Released from the magnetic jets, they hit the ground and lay there with their legs still pedaling. The captain who had earlier led the raiding party was walking down the middle of Broadway. The theatergoers and the Algonquineers trailed behind him, accompanying him on his victory lap. Distracted by the hubbub behind, he turned at one point and, with a funereal expression, started politely asking people individually if he could see their licenses to parade.
In exchange for occasional fellatio and the promise not to ply their trades beyond the perimeters of the Deuce, Times Square prostitutes went for the most part unmolested, except on sweep nights when the department was looking to meet its monthly arrest quotas. Oma had been taken in on a number of occasions, and usually she pled down to the fine that she would pay before leaving the courthouse. She complained that it was like giving the judge a tip for bawling her out. On one occasion, however, a lady judge smirked and asked her where she had gotten her fishnets. With the sass that had seen her valorously from Kingston with little else but rare looks and a passable singing voice, she said that the magistrate’s husband had given them to her. Hadn’t the judge noticed a pair missing? The judge gave her a month in the Women’s House of Detention. I visited once, expecting it to be one big sorority house. It was more like the gulag. The women walked around with their eyes focused on their flaptopped shoes. Oma, sick with her jones, came into the reception room, half carried by the housemother whom she had “married” for the duration of her stay. I slipped her her contraband cookies and her favorite fragrance, and then I abandoned her to serve out her debt to society. She returned on the first of the month and did not speak to me until the twenty-sixth. She kept clean for half a week.
On this night, I saw her wedged in with a trammel of other prostitutes in lingerie or pseudo-beachwear, sitting on the curb awaiting transport. The sight of them reminded me of the stripped and fettered Mandinka chattel in the recent TV series Roots. I turned and walked the other way so that she wouldn’t get a glimpse of me. I expected that she would be released in the general clemency that would come within the next few days in order to clear the jails. She never came back at all.
2.
Ted
He had twenty publishable poems. He had hundreds of others in varying states of incompletion. The gestation period of a single poem had become so lengthy and intensive that he had come to think of his psyche as a womb.
Abdiel, increasingly resentful as Ted grew wealthier, his pride chafing every time Ted picked up a dinner tab or stood his old friend to a night of drinks, had looked over a batch of his poems recently. Ted’s friend wrote upon the front page, “Poet is attempting an epistolary sign language. What is expressed here, for the most part, is the mechanical amplification of the poet’s own sensory deprivation.”
“That’s not a review,” Ted said, smiling, trying to absorb the blow with a measure of bonhomie, for it was he who had asked Abdiel to look in on Assia and the baby at Court Green now and again, and he knew that Assia had a way of getting under a man’s skin. “That’s an infanticide.”
Abdiel shook his head, the bloody tassel of his fez wriggling. “The litter arrived stillborn,” he said. “Kill the stork, why don’t you?”
But these twenty poems, not written so much as salvaged, were seasoned veterans, although they were a touch compromised by crude field surgery. They were well turned out in their regimentals. They would, as Ted had every confidence, pass through the firing squad of their critical reception quite smartly. They would leave no blood upon the wall. He had drained the blood from these poems before he allowed them to break training.
He rang up and told his editors that the manuscript was ready to be delivered. It used to be that he dealt with a single editor, but he was the breadwinner over there now, or rather, in truth, Sylvia Plath was the breadwinner, delivering up the manna from her grave. The joint Plath/ Hughes account was now too pivotal for a single lector to handle.
In the aftermath of the publication of Ariel, The Bell Jar, and those rabid biographies that presented Saint Sylvia as a martyr to her gender, the critics who considered Ted’s work tended to be feminists. This was understandable in that he could not expect old friends and supporters on the standard lit journals to deal with the genital lockjaw that their wives and girlfriends would inflict upon them for praising Ted’s poems. The girls had called for Ted’s tongue to be carved out of his head owing to his long years of silence. Could he, they wrote, truly be so uncaring and self-absorbed as to lack a perspective on his own deceased wife? And now that the news had gone around that he was intending to put out a new collection, and that the subject matter would not include Sylvia, they were calling for his tongue to be carved out of his head for the crime of committing a second killing.
It was raining when he arrived at the publisher’s. The raindrops boiled upon the bleached flagstones. The walkway looked like the topmost of a stockpot. He carried the manuscript in a manila envelope in the underside of his belt. He was losing his belly. He hated to curl pints of ale all alone at the bar. Increasingly friends had grown cautious of being seen in public with him. Many did not want to be implicated in the foregone conclusion of his upcoming suicide. They didn’t want it said that they had assisted in his self-murder by going out and oiling him with alcohol. What they did not understand was that Ted was already too familiar with death to consider it a viable alternative.
The doorman held his coat while he shook out his hat and pounded his shoes against the doorjamb. His stocking feet felt like he had run through a field of pudding. As he climbed the stairway, piano notes recapitulated the rain. He’d known that they had an old Bechstein in the offices upstairs, a “warloom” as people used to say. Although they were too dignified to pop out from behind the cabinets, flickering the lights and screaming surprise, the staff did relieve him of his coat and hat with alacrity, and they shook his hand as though expecting the winning sweep-stakes ticket to fall from his sleeve. A white-haired woman whom he hadn’t seen before was playing that old torment from his boyhood, Satie’s Premiere Gnossienne. A secretary dutifully went at Ted’s hair with paper loo towels, commenting that the drooling pomade had the feel of melting butter.
“Congratulations, Ted,” they all said in turn without having read a word of h
is new poems.
The gathering had the feel of a shipping company sending their star liner out onto the high seas or members of the Royal Society seeing off a safari with Godspeed and not without a measure of envy. Most of them talked around him, commenting on how “big” his book would be. How the infamously irresolute Americans were bound to afford Ted a fair hearing at last, owing to the quality of his new verses, the magnetism of his temperament, and the mettle that he would display in crossing the ocean, looking them dead in the lens, and announcing his continued existence.
America? True, he had given some thought to an American publicity tour, but he’d contemplated nothing in the near future. It wasn’t really necessary at the moment. In his own oblique way, he had answered the naysayers as best he was able upon the page. What would be the point of going about, from prairie to plain, calling his slanderers out of their lairs like a rat catcher? He no longer particularly needed the money. The Bell Jar was tops in the UK and the United States, and Ariel, oddest thing, was the gaping and gapingly public wound that served to nourish the anatomy of the Hughes family tree like a pot of sap. Even his ancestors planted in the soil of Yorkshire were now getting their wooden epitaphs upgraded in granite and their plots spruced with larkspur and columbine bimonthly.
His agents were sitting upon the celluloid rights to The Bell Jar while various film companies bid discreetly. He was a rich man now, and he could only get richer. Spring and summer were coming on. Ted had had thoughts of moving out of London. He couldn’t give up the Primrose Hill flat, of course. Once his name was off the rental deed, the landlord, who entertained no notion of selling out to Ted, would import P. T. Barnum and all his troupe. The oven area in the kitchen, that crucible of modern letters and gender relations, would be converted into a petting zoo for Sylvia’s ghost. Be that as it may, he did have his eye on a certain baronial fortress in the northern part of Devon. It was semi for sale at this point and not so very far from Dad and Mother, but not comfortlessly close, either. He could build a sheltering fence around the property. He could reclaim unrestricted rights to his own children—they’d been staying with their grandparents lately. He could salt the woods on the property and then stalk and kill his own invited guests. He could indulge both his boy and his girl in the life that would have been theirs had Assia not wiped the estate of Court Green cleanly from their inalienable birth-rights by bearing Ted a daughter whom he had not been expecting, and then demanding a free, unfettered hand in which to raise that child. Now he could once again afford a manor of his own wherein he could pour the sealant into his widening breach with the London literature community.
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