Going Down Fast

by Marge Piercy

  White tower after white tower with lots of green space: he had learned that from the professors’ attacks on the first part of the Plan to go into construction, those middle-income high rises, Prairie Gardens. You spent green space lavishly, you surrounded your towers with parks. He had learned, hadn’t he? The easy symbol. Grass was affluence and nicety. Learn their symbols. He had been doing that since college. Symbol of tie, symbol of cufflink, symbol of right restaurant for lunch. Mistakes like starting to paint the house himself when he’d first moved his family to Skokie, he made only once. Learn or die. Unless you were a lucky parasite like Fern or his ludicrous sons.

  About shops he had his own ideas. You had a floor in the high rise, yes, but only small shops. Like the old corner grocery, expensive. Pay for the privilege of convenience. You also had a shopping plaza for each complex because women did want to get out and run into each other. Each shopping plaza was different: it would have a catchy name and a different motif. One would have big outdoor animal figures and cartoon characters. Another would have fountains. Another, a covered mall with hanging plants and benches. People would stroll in the plazas: no sharp dividing line between plaza and park. No line between leisure and consumption. Outdoor cafes, glassed in seasonally. People would circulate into the plazas, strolling, pushing babies, windowshopping and spending. Each plaza was different and they would spend in each. A woman’s shopping was her business but also her play, her recreation. The more idiots men like his brother-in-law Sol with his dismal schlock shoestores. Put in a coffeebar and business goes up twenty percent.

  Sol understood zero. Sol still acted as if people came in once every six months for their pair of shoes, and you had to cram it on them and get them out. People all had shoes. They wanted to buy entertainment and pleasure. Women wanted to buy youth and attractiveness and distraction and sex appeal.

  In the White City lights would play over trees in the parks at night. Everything lit up. No dark corners. Light was better, cheaper than police. His other basic idea was a modular approach. Each complex would handle its own waste disposal, own maintenance, own road repair. Cut down on crippling strikes. Cut down on municipal graft by taking it out of the public sector. The University community had its own police force already, and used a private pickup service and its own snow disposal to supplement the city. Increasingly the contractor provides a life package for his client. Client would know what he was getting in the way of schools, shopping, neighborhood, life style. In some developments the housing package would include lawn, trees, barbecue pit, swimming pool, carpeting, furniture, appliances and even car. By the time most people were twenty to twenty-five, you could figure out their lifetime earning expectancy.

  Suppose someone had thought they could figure him out? But if he were starting out now, if he were twenty-five and where he was now. It took so long to reach a point where you could see the long view. There was his boy Sid the kid, an old man at twenty-five. If they were to trade ages, the brat would never notice. What a loser, what a whiner. Every time he saw him he felt like asking him what rock he had crawled out from under. Been that way since four, five. Fern always acting the big protective buffer, getting between him and the boys. Sometimes he thought she’d done it intentionally, brought up those two idiots to mock him. Then Leon turning up with that big sullen slut, always some woman, always, always. He had no respect for his family, no respect for anyone. Her suddenly up and dragging him out of there in the middle of the conversation. Before he’d had a chance to say half of what he meant. Leon was always like that, explosive and slippery and gone. Leaving him raw with anger, hot with words.

  No, don’t think, don’t think. The quickness of his own mind, the orderliness and mastery of details, the skill with people, all that he owed to his years of law: but never until he had moved into renewal had he felt his own scope. It was the breadth of the job that pleased him.

  The trustees of the great and little institutions he had to work with by and large had the minds of caretakers. They saw nothing bigger than the far side of the ledger. They pinched pennies, they were afraid of planning as creeping socialism. They planned for their corporations and used computers for everything from taking inventories to mixing steel, yet they were scared witless, they held on to their balls at the idea of city planning. The timidity of institutional trustees about sinking money into anything they might be held liable for made him feel like wringing their necks. Longterm development needs made them quake in their boots. They had to be wheedled along and diddled with a step at a time. Big men, men with vision didn’t think that way. Take a man like David Rockefeller. He thought and operated big. Now he was pushing down part of Morningside Heights, now he was clearing a whole neighborhood for Lincoln Center, now he was expanding Rockefeller Center or shooting up a huge hotel, now he was moving into piers on the riverfront. Well, if he personally had that sized piece of just Standard Oil, just Jersey, he would think big too.

  It was a historical moment, when the ride of decay was being rolled back in the cities, when great stewards of corporations and banks, men honed on the law and finance, turned their talents and vision into the rebuilding of the cities into proper setting for such men and such corporations. All the buzzards of gouging slumlords, those petty small thinking real estate hoarders and speculators—their day was over. The day of the smalltime ward politician with their payoffs not to enforce the building codes, to let in this saloon and close down that one: they were joining the other dinosaurs. Not that there wasn’t a lot of porkbarreling left, but the mayor kept it under control. It was rational, it served.

  Those hearings almost drove him crazy. A whole burnt offering of time on the part of some really valuable administration men and experts, for what? You couldn’t have the man on the street putting through a logical and rational plan. He couldn’t see farther than his shoelace. How could they rebuild a city without disrupting some individuals’ private plans? If they gave in to every group in the city that decided their toes were being stepped on, the city would come down around their ears before they got a move on. It was all windowdressing for what had been decided two years before, but it slowed them down, it wasted valuable men’s time. All those pathetic nobodies getting up to say their piece in public: “I’m Mrs. Homemaker and I don’t want to move, so you can’t build your expressway.” “I’m John Doe and I have eight kids I can’t support anyway, so I refuse to let you tear down the filthy shack I live in, because I am so attached to it, my home sweet home.” What an incredible ritual, all those nobodies getting up one at a time to say their piece and expecting the wheels of the world to stop turning. Like Leon, always expecting to be the exception, to get away with it, brazen as ever still, still. Persisting into the dirt, not one sign he had learned anything, that he felt what had happened to him, kicked out of the University, branded a common thief, judged in court unfit as father.

  To remain clearsighted. Beyond the business district, the groves of high rise. Beyond, the garden cities, and beyond that ring, the industrial and research belt, then fancier wooded suburbs for semi-country living. The black plain of Chicago was obsolete. Most people on it were unnecessary or soon would be, because cheap labor was no longer economical. Managers, men of ideas and vision, technicians who put things through, these were components of the future. Communications men, media men, men specializing in design research, engineering consumption, market analysis, systems analysis. But the great unwashed, those clods out there, the restless noisy lumpen, they were obsolete. Society no longer needed stupidity and brawn, brawlers and breeders. The proles belonged with the dinosaurs. Consumption was increasingly the job of the upper middle class. They had a more and more dominant share of the pie. Slum dwellers were economically extinct. No city would rot from the center to accommodate them. No city would need to.

  The city of the clean, the fit, the socialized, the acceptable, the good. An end to vulgarity and chaos and spoilers and those who spat on the right way. The White City would fill America to the
brim like a city set on a mountain, the New Jerusalem, the next Chicago. The city of his mind.

  Rowley

  Tuesday–Friday, December 30–January 2

  Rowley sat in his nearly empty livingroom against the wall, eyes halfclosed playing against the 78 he had taped. Last Friday he had done his show on blues singers who had been based in Chicago on and off: Bukka White, Leroy Carr, Ida Cox, Lonnie Johnson, Big Joe Williams, Memphis Minnie and Little Son Joe, James Wiggins, Brownie McGhee, Peatie Wheatstraw, Big Bill Broonzy, Blind Blues Darby … In the taping he had hit another Black Jack, property of a collector from Madison. That by now familiar voice older, harsher, sang:

  If all my sweet women were hangin’ on that tree,

  Yeah all my women hangin’ on that tree,

  Everyone would cry out loud, Jack baby, what you done to me.

  I was comin’ down the street and I saw my daddy there,

  Yeah I saw my old daddy there,

  Shadow turnin’ on the ground and his feet in the middle of the air.

  If I don’t hang for what I done, get hung for who I am,

  Yeah, I’m Jack, I’m black that’s who I am,

  I’m Black Jack, I’m keeping track, my life ain’t worth a damn.

  He could hardly make out the guitar. A harmonica chirped now and then like a cricket. The voice was an insect from a dry year. He had been working on the song till he had a guitar part that fit, it snuggled in there under the voice and lifted. It was right. Then he started feeling bad. Here he was eating up the record and the man who made it was down in the bottom of Chicago getting nothing. He felt comfortable and very white. For months he’d been talking about the man, how he had to find him. He had leaned hard on the contacts in Welfare and got what little they had, including arrests for drunkenness and the curves that had not taken. Tomorrow he would work through the black flophouses, start on South State and see if anyone would listen. Carry his guitar. His face still looked messy. People would edge away from him in elevators. It was healing.

  He put bulbs in the fixtures and hung shades. At the Salvation Army he bought a double bed and a table and straight chairs. Otherwise his two rooms were empty except for boxes and suitcases. Basic necessities. One was lacking.

  Blues in my mealbarrel and there’s blues on my shelf,

  And there’s blues in my bed, ’cause I’m sleeping by myself.

  Nursing a hangover and bruises and thumps and great chagrin, he had come on his desire.

  The phone rang. It was Shirley Williams who’d got his new number from the studio. She got to the point pretty quick:

  “Do you know where Harlan is? I have to reach him. I thought, perhaps, you might’ve seen him, not for me but for the children …”

  She was staying with her folks with the younger kids. The oldest boy was with an aunt. Harlan was gone.

  He knew then that he was fooling himself with his guilt, going to do good to old down-and-out Jack. He needed him. The last touch, the last contact to his own adopted past. The roots of his own black identification. Go back and touch base. Find out what’s still real. Are you there? Will you know me? Blue-black old man who made the music that’s made me. Got to find you, talk to you. Last connection for my old sweet habit.

  Late Wednesday afternoon, last day of the dying year, he found Jack Custis in the Paragon, 350 Fireproof Rooms for Men Only. The staircase reminded him of Anna’s, going from landing to landing steep and straight up, but for four floors. The lobby was on the second floor with a small wan TV, some straight chairs and a big old spittoon. Every chair was occupied by old men. When he looked more closely they were not at all old, they just sat that way. Slow dull murmur of conversation. The white man in the teller’s cage gave him directions.

  After climbing two more flights he turned into an endless, windowless corridor with doors every few feet. Wee bulbs bleared the dark midway down from the black ceiling. Piss hung like fog between the defaced walls. The corridor felt like a passageway in the bowels of a ship. Numbered door after numbered door. Someone was vomiting. Finally 319. He knocked. His hand felt heavy. Jack Custis was about to turn flesh. He must be old. He knocked again. “Mr. Custis?” Somebody garbled a word or two inside, and he opened the door.

  A man lay on the cot as if he had fallen from a height, tall, black, wizened. His face was an oilcured olive that had shriveled into minute creases and puffy folds. The cot was narrow and tilted toward the wall stained with old puke. A grimy sheet and a dirty scrap of blanket covered him, lying in his shabby clothes. There was nothing else in the cubicle. In the ditch between the cot and wall Rowley squatted. No instrument visible. Must have pawned it long ago. He had brought his guitar, carried it partly as a peace sign, as a calling card, partly because he hoped to persuade Jack Custis to play. He stood it in the corner.

  “I’ve been looking for you a long time,” he began, “ever since I ran into one of your records in a secondhandstore.” He talked about his program and his search. This broken old man sprawled on the cot could be anyone, could be another Jack Custis down and out.

  But the bloodshot eyes opened and a lopsided grin pulled on the deep wrinkles around the mouth. “No shi! All ’is dime.” He was nearly toothless. His words came out in a rasping lisp from the broken sump of mouth. Maybe a stained chip or two far back. Rowley felt sick. But false teeth could be bought for a toothless singer. He had trouble understanding and moved closer to the head of the cot.

  “Sick,” Jack said urgently, and a spidery gray hand came skittering out of the covers and felt for his chest, his throat. “Sick for days. Since Tuesday.” His voice tore up in clots. “You like my old records, uh? How come, a white kid like you?”

  He knelt beside the grisly cot in a position of infant prayer and told Jack why he’d tried to find him. The sound of a hack cough from the bottom of tubercular rotten lungs came through the chicken wire from the next cubicle or the next after that.

  Jack made a face. “Yeah, raise hell all day, all nigh’. Can’ get no rest. Bedbugs, roaches. You lay in your cage and they eat you live. Skinny old men in this place and fat cooties.”

  He bent close to hear. Some he couldn’t guess out of the toothless mumble. Reek of acid vomit. Jack seemed eager to talk. “Moochers, jackrollers always hangin’ aroun’. I pay by the week when I can, else they roll you and you out on the street. Got to keep walkin and scroungin around the Salvation Army or Union Station. Summer I don’ mind, but winner is so bad. I can’ take it like I used to. Just walk and walk. I go to places for work. Manpower places. They charge so much and half the time let you off right away. You stand around the state office all day.”

  Somewhere two thin voices yelled at each other.

  “I get so mad, fed up. I just can’ sit without a drink. I start thinkin and I get jumpy …” The corrugated metal wall behind him popped against his shoulders as Jack rose on his elbow to vomit.

  He leaped up and moved out of range. Just brownish curd. He looked again. “You been sick three days? You know … it looks like you’re bringing up blood.”

  Jack shook his head wearily and lay back on the stained pillow.

  “When was the last time you ate?”

  Jack shrugged, his eyes closing. He talked less and his words became harder to catch. Rowley began to get scared, feeling the man was fading out. “Maybe some food would help. And we should get a doctor to look at you.”

  Jack opened his eyes slightly. “You going?”

  “I’ll be back. I want to call a doctor.”

  Toothlessly Jack laughed. “Kid, you funny.”

  The man in the cage did not get excited. “The bleeding ulcers or one of them things old alkies get. They’re drunk every day and trying to scrounge money for a bottle. He’s not on General Public or they’d send a doctor. You won’t find one to come down here.”

  “I think he’s really sick. No joke.”

  “Listen, all winter the girl finds them in the morning, and the cops come and haul them away. There’s
always more where they come from. And I’ll tell you, a third of the men down here, they don’t drink at all, and they get just as sick.”

  He went along to the first lunchroom he saw and used the payphone. He couldn’t find doctors in the neighborhood, so he started with the Loop. Most doctors had closed up shop for the holiday. He tried doctors south, but those he got hold of backed out when he mentioned the address. He tried calling the city. Most offices were closed. When he did get connected with someone, they speedily assured him Jack was none of their department’s business. Jack was nobody’s client. He had a pretty good idea what would happen if he called the police.

  Afraid Jack would think he had disappeared he got some greasy soup in a paper cup, coffee and a limp sandwich and carried them back. Jack lay eyes closed while his hand moved uneasily on his chest. “Feel like jelly,” he mumbled. “Old runny jelly. Wouldn’t be bad but I feel so cold.”

  He touched Jack’s clenched hand. Cold as the pavement. He took off his coat and tucked it around. Jack felt cold all up his arms and legs. Insisting, he propped Jack up to taste the soup. A few minutes later Jack vomited that up with the brownish curds and blood that looked fresh. “The bastards won’t come. But I’ll get somebody. I’m going to call again.”

  “Put your guitar down under the bed, boy, fore you go down.” The spidery hand moved on the wide sunken chest. He had been a big man, as Rowley had imagined. “Sure as shit they come in and lift it. I can’t get up to lock the door. Put it under me, or you come back and find your box gone.”

  Rowley obeyed. Something scuttled from his hand. “I’ll get you out of this hole. I’ll get a doctor if I have to drag him. You’ll get teeth and you’ll record—record what you want to.”

  Deep in his chest Jack laughed. He winced then and as Rowley left, rolled to the edge of the bed to vomit new bright blood. Cursing, Rowley ran down the mountainside of rickety steps. On the sidewalk people moved out of his way. In the bleared mirror over the hashhouse counter, he saw his face red with anger, bruises inflamed, eyes glaring, hair on end. He got back on the phone. What he finally settled for was an ambulance from the county hospital.