by Nik Cohn
‘We played half-court.’
The cops broke up the game. Detectives started stalking the cage, asking questions, taking names. ‘They ax me where I been, ax me what I seen,’ Shaquille said.
‘So what did you tell them?’
‘Said I wasn’t there.’ His wizened eye stared down at his hands, idly flexing in his lap. The fingers were long and supple as a cellist’s, with pale-blue cuticles, almost silver. This was strange, for blue cuticles were normally a symptom of recent electrocution. ‘I didn’t see nothing,’ Shaquille mumbled. ‘Was an accident, anyways.’
‘But you saw Money. You saw Money with a gun.’
‘I guess.’
‘So how was it an accident?’
Shaquille shrugged. ‘We only be hangin’,’ he said.
The cafeteria was hot and fetid, as airless as a holding pen. Creaseless in her dove-gray suit, her matching hat, Enid sipped gray coffee from a plastic cup, fanned herself with the Daily News. ‘So why are you here?’ she asked.
‘Mistake-A-DNT.’
His brother Darnell was on trial for armed robbery, some stuff about a gold chain and a crackpipe, and their mother couldn’t attend in person, she was busy working in the beauty salon, so Shaquille had been sent to substitute. He did not complain, he would perform his family duty. But he was not thrilled: ‘Sugar roll be stale,’ he said.
When he left, Enid bought herself a red apple, began to peel it in one continuous loop. ‘Same old story,’ she said. ‘Only the names and the shoe brands change.’
All about us, sweat dripped off chins, oozed down the backs of necks. Stocky, square-built, Enid was a woman who did not tell her age, and she was afflicted by a trembling, which made her fight to control her movements. The joints on her fingers, heavy with rings, were swollen, out of true. Still, she looked like a lady who lunched.
A few yards away was Judge Solomon’s court, AR-1, in which arraignments were processed and Enid served as a court-appointed counsel at forty dollars an hour. It was a large, high room, a seat of majesty, with mahogany paneling and more fine echoes. In its well, yawning clerks shuffled papers and guards chewed gum, lawyers scratched where it itched, Judge Solomon practiced patience and the prisoners sat waiting, waiting, ranged in line along one wall, IN GOD WE TRUST, said the sign.
The procedure was simple. Each prisoner, brought forth from the holding pens, would consult briefly with counsel, then stand up before Judge Solomon, a youngish man already marked by a look of ageless sufferance. Charges ranged from vagrancy to homicide, and they could either plead guilty and be sentenced on the spot, or elect to go to trial. Five times in six, they chose the former. It was less fuss.
I’d first heard of this court from Stoney Bisonette, for whom AR-1 had long been a second home. There was no sign of him or the Liberty Boosters this day. Even without them, however, the caseload was gargantuan.
Anyone who could not afford his or her own lawyer qualified. The favorite crime seemed to be drug dealing. But this, Enid said, was deceptive: ‘They’re just junkies. They go stumbling round the night streets, too strung out to watch themselves, and the cops pick them up with a pooper-scooper, claim that they’re big-time dealers. That way they bolster the arrest slates and look good, too. I mean, you bust a street junkie and it sounds picayune. But you bust a druglord, and you’re a prince of the city.’
The first five names called were Jesus Gutierrez, Robert Mandela Smith, Al Gross, Jamaal Chatman, Shinique Star Wilson. On average, their cases took up two minutes, twenty-three seconds.
Mercedes Purissima Vargas sat third from the right. Her lank black hair, shoulder-length, was streaked orange and blue and green, and she sat folded double from the waist, so that the hair fell sheer in a curtain. From time to time, she would gather herself to a convulsive effort, straighten up. Then the curtain would fly back to reveal a face of wax, a death mask, yellow-white and guttering.
She was here for possession of heroin with intent to distribute. Also, for selling her baby. At two in the morning, strapped for a fix, she’d been picked up in a doorway on Eighth Street near Avenue A, attempting to auction off her year-old daughter, Dynasty, who lay uncovered in her baby carriage. On being charged, she had said, ‘I could not sleep.’
She still couldn’t. Every time that she tried, a female guard would shake her, force her to sit up. Then again the scrim of her hair would be torn away and the death mask exposed, staring sightless at the white light. This was her forty-third arrest.
Mercedes wore Nikes. So did Son Johnson, twenty-two, whose case came to Enid. A security guard at Food City, he was accused of boosting five cases of canned cling peaches in syrup, a charge he denied, though he had been caught in the act. ‘Racism! Police brutality! Amandla!’ he kept crying out, regardless of the question. ‘I have no right to be here.’
‘Me, too,’ said Enid Gerlin.
She had been working this building for thirty-five years. She’d made herself a lawyer in an age when women attorneys were widely viewed as freaks against nature. She had defended gays before Stonewall, sweet-talked torpedoes, been jailed for talking back to judges, and pilloried for pleading in floral hats. Now she looked along the row of metal chairs, at Mercedes Purissima Vargas and Son Johnson, at Jesus Gutierrez and Shinique Star Wilson and Robert Mandela Smith, at the Nikes and Converses and Pumas, the Pump Reeboks and the scuffed Pro-Keds: ‘I’d rather be in Philadelphia,’ she said.
Her father had been a toy manufacturer, the creator of Sleepy Head and the Flapper Doll, and in her childhood she’d been as pampered as a doll herself, so cosseted and protected that New York’s realities never touched her. When she grew up, and they did, all she wanted was out. She traveled, she took a business degree in Ohio, she went to work in air-traffic control. When she felt ripe, she came back to Brooklyn Law School.
She wanted newness, challenge, risk. ‘I was not a person who was ever much afraid,’ she said. ‘I was brought up to fight my own battles. To be a lady always, except when I was not.’
This taste for combat had been richly gratified. In her first years at 100 Centre, threatened males stood in line to test her, try to break her: ‘I got knocked down so many times, I couldn’t count the ways. My revenge was to buy more hats.’
Her hats had made her famous. One judge, a Justice Irving Saypol, had called them offensive and tried to ban them from his court. In a written opinion, he bemoaned a ‘grotesque hat situation, some kind of flamboyant turban with the many colors of Joseph’s coat, misplaced in any courtroom’ and another ‘large picture hat, more appropriate for a lawn party or some such social, like Eliza Doolittle’s in the second act of My Fair Lady, depicting her at the Ascot Races.’ When Enid failed to kowtow, he cited her for contempt, and the Post headlined the story ‘Judge Blows His Top Over Lady Lawyer’s Lids.’
The harassment had helped shape her practice. In the early sixties, gay sex was still illegal, gays routinely framed and entrapped. Established lawyers ran shy of such cases, gay lawyers shyest of all. Enid, who had nothing to lose and wouldn’t have cared if she had, filled the vacuum.
Her tactic was simply to drown cant in absurdity. Police assigned to the gay detail, known as the Flying Fag Squad, kept the world safe from perversion by twin maneuvers, either picking up men in bars or spying on them in public bathrooms. On the first dodge, Enid would cross-examine in minute and excruciating physical detail – whose hand was where, what did it touch, how big was it, did it then get bigger, how much bigger, would the officer care to show the court? – till the cop either fainted or cried mercy. On the latter, she’d have a model toilet constructed and the cubicle wheeled into court, then make the wretched lawman crawl inside and try to spy what he claimed to have spied, a physical contortion, she knew, that would have defeated Houdini: ‘I had them standing on their heads, climbing up the cistern, knee-deep in the pan. And once I had them going, I wouldn’t quit till the judge pulled me off them, stopped the fight.’
Those were heroic ye
ars. Her record was one long string of TKOs, and she ran a big office right across from the courthouse, secretaries and flunkeys on twenty-four-hour call, thirty new clients a week, supplicants waiting in line. Every Christmas, she sent out four thousand cards: ‘I was bouncing with judges and cops, with gays and hustlers, every kind of highlife and lowlife, and I never even paid bribes. Lots of judges would make a contract, take money for a quick dismissal, but I didn’t believe in paying. I was too aggressive, too feisty, I guess too honest. I had too much chutzpah for my own good. Just say I had too many laughs.’ Then she fell in love.
Romance was never her strength. ‘There was something out of whack somewhere.’ She was a woman so constructed that she must always spurn the men who pursued and adored her, crave only those who caused her pain. ‘Same with food, same with love,’ she said. ‘If it wasn’t bad for me, I couldn’t stomach it.’
The man she chose to love was a furniture salesman turned limousine driver. Her mother took one look at him and said, ‘He’s gorgeous, and he’s not for you.’ So Enid was hooked. For fourteen years, she lived with him, in him, through him, till he had consumed her utterly. When he left, there was not enough left of her to rekindle, ‘not even to strike a match on.’
By then, 1975, consenting adults had finally been licensed: ‘So the bottom dropped out of the gay trade.’ She had to start over, and she couldn’t. She was tired of socializing, tired of the bars and the cocktail parties, tired of running, and tireder still of dancing. Love and Broadway had used her up: ‘Destroyed my femininity. Left me short somehow,’ she said.
She found herself taking cases of violence, homicides and armed robberies, sick and ugly and just plain filthy things. Formerly, she wouldn’t have touched them with a hatstand. ‘Sex was one thing, evil another.’ But what choice did she have? ‘Sex had stopped paying the bills.’
So evil it was. She still handled private cases that stemmed from her gay contacts. Just the year before, she’d defended an Irish-German boy, very cute, well spoken, and polite, who was accused of stabbing his Hispanic boyfriend to death. They had been walking to the subway in Jackson Heights, Queens, when an argument broke out. Before it was resolved, the boyfriend had been stabbed seventeen times. But he had been high on cocaine, and cocaine may promote violence. So Enid had argued self-defense and the Irish-German boy, very cute, well spoken, and polite, was acquitted in ninety minutes: ‘A sound upbringing, a liberal education,’ she mused. ‘You just can’t beat good breeding.’
That had been a rare treat. Much more frequently, her cases were repulsive, the rewards minimal. When she went to visit her clients in jail, she was afraid to enter their cells. Enid Gerlin, who was never afraid of anything. But that had been in another world: ‘Before it became a garbage barge,’ she said, ‘there used to be a city here.’
Used to be, used to be – the chorus never changed. ‘We had a system. We had corruption, perjury, prejudice, stupidity, but we had rules. Now the system is, there is no system,’ she said. ‘You have judges on the bench don’t know the law, still less the street. You have prosecutors, all they know are arrests and convictions, forget procedure, forget the citizen’s rights, don’t even mention Justice. And the defenders, they put more people in jail than the government. You have college boys and girls playing games, you have both the cops and the DA’s department unscrupulous, unethical, barefaced liars. People dying out there every minute, the whole metropolis up in flames, and the law just watches and warms its hands, time to time gives the ashes a poke. And you ask me how I’m feeling. Ask me about my health.’ She paused for breath; she twisted her painted mouth. ‘A lady does not expectorate. But she sure as hell can spit.’
Outside in the hallways, lunch recess served merely to back up the traffic. The great soaring spaces of the lobby were clogged with straining flesh. Only the dark youths strutting seemed relaxed. They were the plaintiffs, the accused, yet they traveled 100 Centre as if on their home turf, while the white men in suits, their accusers, walked on eggshells.
White men in suits, but not Enid Gerlin. A sawed-off shotgun, she might tremble but she did not quail. With jaw outthrust, she cut a swathe dead-center through the crush and any dark youth that pimp-rolled in her alley was blown away, impaled on the spikes of her snakeskin boots.
Back in the well of AR-1, she leaned close above a twitching body loosely wrapped in rags. Its name, no lie, was Justice; Lionel Ward Justice. ‘What happened?’ Enid demanded.
‘I took sick.’
‘Sick? How sick?’
The rags jerked and jumped, but the wizened brown face above them was perfectly still. It sported a toothbrush moustache, the remnants of a quiff, three teeth. ‘Just sick,’ it said.
According to the charge sheet, Lionel Ward Justice, while under the influence of a controlled substance, had taken a crowbar and used it to smash up a parked Lincoln Continental, inflicting damage estimated at some fifteen thousand dollars. He had then resisted arrest, assaulted an officer. On his way to jail, he had also attempted to harm himself with a corded length of string. ‘Why?’ Enid persisted.
‘I was lonesome.’
He would say no more. When his case was called, the rags jerked again, but the body remained inanimate. Limp and shapeless, propped up between two guards, it was bundled like a coalsack before Judge Solomon. When its name was read out, there was forced laughter in court. But Lionel Ward Justice seemed not to hear. Indeed, he seemed oblivious to the whole proceeding. Only, on his remand, a leprous hand sneaked out from a burlap sleeve, plucked weakly at Enid’s wrist.
‘Did the Knicks win?’ Justice asked.
10
Most nights Sasha and I would end up where we’d started, back at the Plum Blossom, to wallow in more duck soup. It soothed, it satisfied; it was an elixir. At our lowest ebb we need only plunge in its sour-sweet depths and all weariness, hurt, heartsickness washed away.
Canal Street was a sewer; always had been. In the eighteenth century, when the Collect was Manhattan’s trashcan, Canal had been its drainage ditch, and somehow the habit had stuck. So now it was synonymous with all things soiled. Spilled across its sidewalks was a sprawling, blaring bazaar – fake Rolexes and fake Cartiers, cut-price electronics, plated gold, New York souvenirs and posters, hardware, unmarked firearms and unregistered ammo, military surplus. For decades, Meatballs had disputed the turf with Guineas, Krauts with Kikes. But this was the Year of the Snake.
Chinatown, three blocks west, had burst its bounds. As if scattered by firebombs, its refuse had helter-skeltered down the hill and washed up, suppurating, in the pit of Broadway. Overnight, it seemed, stalls and arcades bulged with paper dragons and shot-silk fans. Upstairs, through steel doors, were floor upon floor of sweatshops. Signs announced Wong Choy Fashion and Sing Lei Sportswear, Kong Wing Kee Fast Food, Ken Cheng Construction. In the Pearl River, racks overflowed with Darkie Toothpaste.
The riot raged all day. Then came dark, and everything shut down dead: ‘Like curfew in plaguetown,’ Sasha said. Only the Plum Blossom did not close.
Midnight to dawn was the graveyard shift. From time to time, another taxi driver would stop off for coffee and an egg roll, or a drunk would come tapping on the plate-glass windows, supplicating for alms. Otherwise, we had the place to ourselves. Impersonal as it was, with its Formica and blank walls, its stale reek of disinfectant, it made me think of hospitals. But Sasha loved it. ‘Is hell. But clean, bright hell,’ he said.
From our table beside the window, we commanded the whole block between Broadway and Lafayette, spread out before us like a stage set. In these chill hours, few live bodies dared the sidewalks, but dark shapes loomed in the doorways of the Pearl River. They belonged to Gum Lan, the Vietnamese youth gang whose American name was BTK – Born to Kill.
They were newly raised to stardom. Only three months before, right in the middle of an evening rush hour, they had waged war with the Flying Dragons on this same block. The battle had lasted thirty seconds, maybe less. But wh
en the gunfire ceased, two Flying Dragons had been shot dead, the remainder routed.
It was an epic victory. The Flying Dragons were the enforcement arm of Hip Sing, the oldest and richest tong in Chinatown or all of Chinese America. No other gang, not the Tung On or the Fu Ching, not even the Ghost Shadows, had ever bested them. And Gum Lan were not even ranked contenders. They were sixteen years old, sometimes younger – shaggy-headed runts in black leather jackets. But they were possessed of a blind and lunatic passion. While the Dragons had grown slack from lack of challenge, and merely massacred by rote, the BTKs killed in blood exaltation. Now they held Canal Street from here to the Hudson River, and any gang member who impinged must pay them forfeit. Translated, their motto was Eat Shit or Eat Steel.
It could not last. Some night the Flying Dragons would come roaring back to reclaim their turf. Right of might, sheer weight of numbers and artillery, would prevail, and Gum Lan would be exterminated. No matter. All that Sasha requested was a grandstand seat when the showdown came.
‘Novokuznetskaya,’ he said.
The whole of his last Moscow winter, every dusk after school, he had sat in the Baikal, a white-tiled cafeteria on Novokuz and Arbat, glued to just such a plate-glass window, awaiting just such a massacre.
Only the titles were changed. In Moscow, the youth gangs that counted had all been named after English pop groups of the sixties, the more obscure the cooler. Wimp suburbanites chose the Beatles and Rolling Stones; inner-city stylists preferred the Yardbirds or Them. On Novokuz, which must always be hippest of all, prime icons included John’s Children, the Action, the Troggs.
Sasha himself had been a Fruit Eating Bear, but they were fragile goods and shattered at the first contact with the Pretty Things, who were the neighborhood kingpins. The Things had the deadliest weapons, the sharpest clothes; they looked the most Western. Only the Hi-Numbers dared challenge them.