HOW TO TURN ORDINARY OBJECTS against the system that produced them: “Take a wet paper towel and pour some flour in the center. Then wrap it up tight with a rubber band. It’ll throw like a softball, but anything it hits will be covered in what, as far as your victim is concerned, is a strange white powder.” Or: “Pick up the phone. Call a politician to have a rumor confirmed or denied. Call another politician to have him confirm or deny the first politician’s confirmation or denial.” Or: “Take a needle and poke a hole in the top of each of a dozen eggs. Let them sit in a warm place for about a week. Then go up on a roof and do what comes naturally.” Not exactly likely to unshackle the species, right? But there are many things that are beyond your understanding. Sol Grungy, who’s come in at some point during this little practicum, will be sneering, as if sensing your reservations, but Nicky will reach up to smack him on the back of the head. Now watch out a window as the two of them disappear into the little house out back. Or rattle off in the van toward points unknown. Wonder: If you’re not ready now, in your yearning to go there with them—how will you ever be?
HOW? You’ll work your ass off, is how. They’ll leave you with orders to staple more tinfoil over the Phalanstery’s front walls and windows. Sol has stolen this foil, too, thirty or forty rolls—From each according to his means—for reasons no one bothers to explain. Maybe it’s supposed to drive the pigeons away? In any event, you roll out great sheets, staple them with a staple gun. Tucking it into crannies where the floor has pulled away from the wall … there’s something kind of sexual in the motion. Something rhythmic, something angry, like the Stooges record on the turntable behind you. You should be sitting in Trig right now in Nassau County, but no one out there cares, not even the hall monitors. Your suburban life is closing down like an aperture, while the city swells to fill the sky. It occurs to you that it’s been an hour since you thought of Sam.
At some point, as you work on the walls, Sewer Girl will bring you pills and a beer; her tread on the floorboard makes “Gimme Danger” skip. Now imagine the warmth of her big white body raising the air temperature near your neck a few degrees, just before she touches a cold can to the skin. The fact that the two of you are here alone signifies they’re starting to trust you. You can complete this part of the revolutionary program without direct supervision, assuming that Sewer Girl hasn’t been left behind in a supervisory role—that she’s as clueless about the big picture as you are. In fact, it’s tempting to think she’s been sent just to tease you, to swell your ’nads beyond the limits of endurance, but such thinking is self-regarding, neo-Humanist. Look: Isn’t she already retreating to work on her own little patch of unfoiled wall? The lath there looks naked, like bone.
But back home, in the mirror, the muscles of your arms will have gotten a little bigger. How surprised Mom would be, if she found out you’ve been doing chores. Voluntarily!
HOW TO MARK YOURSELF AS DIFFERENT: Grab a Sharpie from the coffee can on your desk and copy, to the best of your memory, the tattoo everyone seems to have—the one Nicky has, the one Sol has, the one Sam has. The mark of the Post-Humanist Phalanx that proliferates on the cornices of apartment buildings, on housing-project handball courts, on the notebooks of the grad students, on the sides of parked cars, on subway station entrances, scratched into the plexiglass of a phone booth, as if mechanically reproduced all over the East Village, stamped out in some factory of the image. Once, on your way to Penn Station to catch the LIRR home, you’ll see it inked on a stranger’s forearm, someone you don’t even think knows what it means. Maybe you’ll look now and see you’ve gotten it upside down. There are still things to learn, obviously; you aren’t ready yet. But the capital you do have, Nicky would say, is time.
WHAT WILL MOVE YOU DECISIVELY CLOSER is spraycans. Bombing, they call it. They tell you to dress all in black: black sweatshirt, black jeans, black watchcap. You would think your mom would notice this, but she’s just pleased your Ziggy Stardust phase is over.
You work in teams of two, one to spray, one to look out for cops, and at first you’re the lookout, lingering on the corner in a posture of forced nonchalance. No sweat. Your entire life, or anyway the last few years of it, has been a posture of forced nonchalance. No one but Sam has ever guessed at the tensed interior, the turmoil in your guts. Down the block, in profile, green-haired D. Tremens moves his arms in front of a tenement building, as if doing tai chi. He’s not a big fan of yours, you can tell. But maybe it’s not personal; D. Tremens is not a big fan of anything. What he is is committed. And he trusts you to be ready, at the first sign of cops, to skitter off into the darkness, letting loose your war-whoop. Here is the bloop of a siren. Do it, Prophet. Run.
The slap of combat boots will echo in the mazelike grid for seconds after you’ve stopped. Your laughter will surprise you. When was the last time you laughed? (Don’t answer that.) Here you are, deep in Alphaville, where even the cops won’t follow at this time of night. But you’re a part of the lawlessness now; it can’t hurt you. Your partner, having caught up, hands you a tallboy. You raise it in the air. “Here’s to Mickey Sullivan,” you say, because you’ve used him as an alibi again tonight. D.T.’s eye-roll can be made out even here, under the busted streetlight. “Famous revolutionary,” you say, and the laughter pumps out of your chest like blood, great almost painful spurts of it splashing up the building faces toward the marquee moon.
Then it’s your turn. You are the one crouching before the metal security gate of what during daytime is a dimestore. You are the one shaking the can. The liquid thunk of the ball inside the cylinder seems deafening; you are tensed, listening for any hint of trouble. But everything has been teed up for you. There are still other levels, you’re becoming aware, whole echelons of activity beyond those you’ve encountered: the milk-crates, the foil, the whispers in honeycombed rooms; the heavy-looking duffelbag you saw Sol and Nicky lugging through the dusk toward the little house out back; the changes under way out there, where only the two of them go, plus wherever they’ve all been disappearing to in the van … but you know that you are here tonight for a reason, locking into your fate. The rush of paint sounds like the blast of a hot-air balloon. THE SYSTEM IS A CRIME, you write. THEY DON’T DESERVE A DIME. Then the logo, blooming out of nothingness, the symbol you’ve perfected in the margins of tests and in Wite-Out on your boots’ steely toes: the five slashing strokes. The little crown of flame. Like this:
35
THE WONDERS OF THE MAGAZINE began with its title: a nod to the R&B magus Wilson Pickett, himself nodding back to Chris Kenner. Though perhaps “fanzine” was the better word, as its formal debts were less to any national glossy than to the small-batch booklets that had started cropping up in head shops and record exchanges at the dawn of the 1970s. Cheap xerography blurred the images, and Samantha’s prose was likewise loose, a trying on and discarding of styles. Yet with these crude tools, she’d managed to fix to the page a story far richer and stranger than anyone back in Flower Hill could have imagined for her. It was as if she’d been afraid her life might otherwise fly away, and knowing the fear was justified—wanting to reach in somehow and warn her—was surely part of the compulsion Richard Groskoph felt in the waning days of January, sinking deeper into Land of a Thousand Dances.
The greatest part, though, was just the intimacy of the thing. Reading it was like subletting a small apartment in someone else’s head, right down to the cryptic signifiers she assigned to her friends: S.G., Sol, N.C.—Iggy? To an outsider, they meant nothing. There was, however, a subscription label on the back of one of the issues, and on the third night, after his fifth or sixth read-through, Richard had let the name there carry him to the phone book, and then to the Upper East Side. He should have guessed Keith Lamplighter would be just another white-shoe midlifer clinging to splinters of the rock ’n’ roll cross. By his name, by his neighborhood will you know him. But the degree of tangency almost didn’t matter; for a few minutes, Richard was connected to someone who was connected to
Samantha. It was only later, back at the desk, that he began to worry the guy might really for some reason get in touch with the cops, tipping them off that Richard had secured his own copies of the fanzine. Or no—wasn’t the worry really that he’d now divulged to a stranger the very name he’d been trying to protect?
Probably not, he decided, pouring himself a drink. The victim’s continued anonymity had done little to quell the tabloid fascination with what had happened in Central Park that night. Maybe the fascination and the anonymity were even related, in a way that belied everything Richard knew about what made arrangments of ink on paper come alive for readers. Given the number of unsolved shootings in the city, it was at any rate striking that this one had now migrated from the police blotter to the op-eds, which from a scant few details—female, white, seventeen—had conjured up a sense of her as a symbol.
As Richard himself was conjuring, he realized, when he should have been finishing his article, his book. In the past, bouts of procrastination had tended to anticipate a more total block. He wasn’t sure he could bounce back from another one. And he still felt ethically iffy about the fanzines—especially now that, amid the mess of his desk, the third issue, the one he’d taken uptown, could not be found. So the next morning, when the booze wore off, he sealed the other two in a weighted plastic bag, sunk it in a bucket of water, and stuck the whole package in his freezer.
Where it should have remained forever, really, amid boxes of frozen veggies and pizza slices gray with frost. But as the specifics faded from memory, the fanzines’ general mise-en-scène came into sharper relief. It was with him at night as he fell asleep and in the morning when his eyes opened: the scuzzy rock clubs, the unlocatable brownstone she’d discovered in the middle of 1976. There seemed to be a whole secret city out there, reached through hidden panels and swinging doors. The only points of congruity between it and the New York he thought he’d returned to were an air of abandonment and the omnipresent graffiti.
It wasn’t long before Valentine’s Day that one of his p.m. rambles took him downtown—and that he realized the two New Yorks had flipped. Punk had picked all the locks, sluiced out into the grid. Tatterdemalion kids crowded St. Mark’s Place, their clothes held together by dental floss and wishful thinking. And from all around, rooftops and stoops and passing cars, came that other adhesive: the music. Had music not delivered Richard, too, on more than one occasion, from a life he’d believed himself trapped in? The tempos had changed, but that almost didn’t matter. The point, now as then, was to tune in to something bigger than yourself, and to feel around you others who felt as you did.
He ended up at a record store on Bleecker Street. It was where he’d bought nearly every long-player put out by Blue Note Records in the 1950s, and countless Stax/Volt sides in the ’60s. Where he’d acquired the collected works of Hank Williams and all those bubblegum 45s that twanged his auditory sweet tooth. Highway 61 Revisited, the day it came out. Let It Bleed, the day it came out. But now face-out on the wall were sleeves he didn’t recognize. At the counter, a furry young man rang him up. Let’s see. Rock n Roll Animal. Agharta. “Anarchy in the U.K.”?
“I’ll take this other forty-five, too.”
But any perplexity the clerk felt at Richard’s choices dissolved when he saw the credential. He was from Missouri, he offered, unbidden. He’d come here to study photography. He held up one of the records, flipped it over to reveal a black-and-white shot of three guys in leather jackets and a woman a head taller. Backed up against an alley wall somewhere, they looked ready to take on all enemies and not fight fair. “Used to hang out with this one here a little bit, actually,” the clerk said, tapping the smallest of the four, who shot the camera the bird. “Billy Three-Sticks.”
It was the other kind of name that had come up in Samantha’s fanzine: Rotten, Vicious, Hell & Thunders, like some firm of malign lawyers. But the devotional context had made Richard forget that the musicians these handles attached to had lives independent of her needs. Maybe you were supposed to forget; maybe this was the point of a pseudonym. Apart from the fact that Billy Three-Sticks had fronted her favorite band, Richard hadn’t thought to find out the first thing about him. Until now.
“Well, far as I know,” the clerk said, “he’s still living up in Hell’s Kitchen. Hell, my boss probably owes him some dough for these records. I could scare up an invoice, if you want.”
THE PLACE IN QUESTION WAS A SOOTY FACTORY in the old industrial district west of the Port Authority; from street level, you could see the tops of rusty letters spelling out Knickerbocker Mints welded to a scaffold on the roof. As with the surrounding buildings, there was nothing to suggest that it had gone residential, or was in use at all, save for a pair of gleaming Harleys on the sidewalk out front, the only vehicles in sight still in possession of their chrome. Indeed, the cars lining the street seemed not so much parked as aborted. All this Richard took in through the sheer plastic sheeting hung from a bodega awning on the corner of Tenth Avenue to protect the flowers underneath. Or rather, the empty flower pails. He’d walked straight up from the Village in the cold, stopping only here, at this last outpost of civilization before dystopia began. Theoretically, he was waiting for the coffee he’d bought to warm him up, but it was equally possible he just wasn’t ready to discover that there were no buzzers in the vestibule, that it was bad information, and so surrender once more the sense of higher purpose now flowing through him. And if there were no such purpose, then why, within minutes of his watching, did a small, pale man who was unmistakably the one on the record sleeve emerge from the building’s entrance and head this way?
Richard half-expected him to tack across the street, to enter the bodega and walk right up and put out a hand, but there were no course corrections. Billy Three-Sticks must have been headed toward the subway. There was something furtive in his gait. Richard tossed the rest of his coffee back and was just about to go accost the subject when another figure, similarly furtive, appeared on the near side of the street: a black man in ill-fitting coveralls. This second man moved rapidly, keeping the lines of cars between himself and Billy Three-Sticks, yet glancing over at him frequently. What the hell was going on here? Richard shivered. He was a layman in the wings of a vast cathedral, waiting for his cue to step into the light. When he did he could see Billy Three-Sticks and the black man reach Ninth Avenue. Were the police running down the same lead? Unlikely. Anyhow, the way you knew an undercover was by looking at his shoes—and the pursuer’s, when Richard drew closer, were authentically battered, the canvas upper peeling away from a heel covered in ballpoint pen. Stenciled onto the coveralls was a stick figure washing a window. The man’s watchcap was riding up in back. Some tonsorial mishap had befallen the hair there; was it green? Before Richard could decide, though, hair, shoes, and coveralls were tailing Billy Three-Sticks around a corner onto Eighth Ave. And by the time Richard had caught up, both men had melted into the crowds around the bus terminal. So why did he feel like rejoicing?
36
MERCER USED TO PASS THE TIME, during his post-grad months of flipping burgers out on Route 17, by polishing his opinions on life and literature for that future date when they would grace the pages of The Paris Review. For an interviewer, he always pictured the same person: a tall, graying white man, neatly but casually dressed, with expressive eyebrows that offset a certain coolness of voice. He looked, come to think of it, like a bearded, less chesty Dr. Runcible. As Mercer imagined it, he sat in a folding director’s chair, notepad in lap, leg crossed at the knee. Whenever Mercer expressed an idea of particular promise, the knee would begin to jiggle up and down. Mostly, though, the pen raced over the paper, as if under its own power, hurling lariats of shorthand at the unfettered brilliance of America’s Preeminent Man of Letters—a title Mercer humbly disavowed.
Q: Your work seems to represent a qualitative break with some of the minimalist tendencies coming into vogue among younger writers at that time. Some might even call it old-fashioned.
Q: But it sounds like you’re almost in sympathy with the opposition, Mr. Goodman.
A: “I see that as my job, basically. To be in sympathy. But I’ve long felt, perhaps perversely, that when you hold theory up to experience and they don’t match, the problem must be with the theory. There’s the critique of the underpinnings of these institutions—justice and democracy and love—and then there’s the fact that no one seems able to live without them. And so I wanted to explore again the old idea that the novel might, you know, teach us about something. About everything.”
Later, though, when Mercer’s manuscript fell into neglect, his imaginary interviewer disappeared. And by the time he resurfaced, this January, he’d changed. For one thing, he was no longer content to remain in his chair, in the otherwise featureless studio of Mercer’s head. So strong now was the sense of someone hovering nearby, amassing footage of the loft and the world beyond, that Mercer had once or twice found himself peering out the front window for cameras on the street.
For another, the questions had grown uncomfortably personal. A month had passed since the Deputy Inspector had produced, as if by magic, a bag of heroin from the Coat of Several Colors. Mercer’s putative reason for not confronting William about this—that he was too traumatized by everything else that had happened that night—had meantime come to seem like an excuse. This wasn’t to say that when he closed his eyes at night he didn’t still see on the backs of his eyelids a bloody form spread-eagled in the snow. But a week had passed since he’d last jolted awake before sunrise with a gunshot in his ears and a sheen of fresh sweat on his skin. So why, his interviewer wanted to know, did he not now say something?
City on Fire Page 38