It was when he lowered his hands that he saw the punk. He was out there among the gravestones, maybe four hundred feet away, a muscly kid with tattoos and what looked like little Trotsky glasses. He was underdressed, too, his crewcut soaked wet, but he didn’t seem to care about getting dry. Or avoiding being seen. Richard didn’t recognize him, but he recognized Richard. His gaze was naked, ominous. (And was this not what Richard had wanted? To know how it felt inside the story?) When he started to back out of the far end of the folly, the punk moved, too, as if some signal had passed between them. And it almost didn’t matter anymore who was the origin point of the signals, giving these various hoplites their orders. Of the last two people to draw their attention, one had been shot and one disappeared.
Richard turned, made to run, but found his feet heavy from liquor and the wet ground. He was out of shape. At the top of the next rise, he stopped to crouch behind a memorial, panting. Looked back. The boy was coming on, implacable, slipping from marker to marker without seeming at all hurried. Richard slid back down, leaned against the stone. The groundskeepers’ carts had all disappeared. They must have gone when the rain came, meaning he was on his own here, surrounded by empty acres, no outside witness against whom to judge his sanity. Unless you counted the punk himself. And when Richard peeked again, he saw nothing but other graves. Someone could have been hiding behind any of them. Then a hand was on his shoulder.
A dark-skinned man about his own age held a shovel. Soil on his boots. He wore a transparent plastic slicker, a matching hood over his hat. “Everything all right, mister?”
“You didn’t notice …” But Richard was struggling for breath, and saw how he might have looked. “Yes, I’m fine.” He allowed the man’s big hand to pull him to his feet. Ahead, directly downhill, was a muddy parking lot, a payphone box. Something occurred to him. “Bit wet for digging, though, isn’t it?”
“Better wet than frozen. It’s supposed to get down to thirty tonight.”
“I’ll leave you to it, then.” Richard walked off, too embarrassed to look back. Down in the valley, he stayed tethered to the payphone. If the punk showed his face again, Richard would alert the cops, maybe even Pulaski, but for ten minutes or more, the only sign of movement was that little speck up on the ridge, rainproofed and solitary, bending and straightening over a hole. A gravedigger, digging a grave. Still, Richard wasn’t going back for his bike, on the far side of the mausoleum. Not today. The safest thing was to call a cab.
By the time it arrived to collect him, he was shivering. He hadn’t dressed heavily enough either, and had tapped out the warming potential of the booze. Nor could the car’s dryness touch him. They inched back toward the ferry in the early rush. Donna Summer on the radio. Between warehouses and carwashes loomed the towers of the Battery, swallowed halfway up by bleary crowns of snow. He turned to check they weren’t being followed. “You all right, buddy?” the cabbie said. Why did everyone keep asking him the same question? Then the cabbie cleared his throat. “You throw up in my cab, you pay to get it cleaned.”
There was, thank God, a liquor store by the terminal, and it seemed only prudent to secure a couple of airplane bottles while watching out the window for that buzz-cut, those glasses. At twenty-nine minutes past the hour, he made a sprint for the gangway. The gate banged shut behind him, the engines rumbled below, and he went to put the spare bottle in his jacket’s inner pocket, which reminded him: the ’zines, the fucking ’zines. He’d never taken them out of the satchel. It wasn’t even a complete set—Issue 3 was still missing. And hadn’t he known when he’d frozen the other two, really, that Pulaski, who might have made sense of them, wasn’t aware they existed? Now they were no good to anyone, bungeed to a Schwinn on Staten Island. Or rather, in the hands of the punk who’d run him off—who’d obviously come to steal them. For fuck’s sake, Richard. This one thing, this one simple concrete thing you could have done to protect Billy, to help Sam. And as with the writing, you’d failed.
With the boat in motion, the light around him had gone a sickly white. No one huddled on the other benches was going to meet his gaze, tell him it was all right. They were like one of those medieval crowd paintings. The White Death, everywhere. And here was another thing it was about time he admitted: Samantha Cicciaro was going to die. Maybe she would wake up first, maybe not, maybe it would be fifty years from now, but article or no article, she would at some point die, and so would Richard. Cosmically speaking, then, what had he even been running from? As an acolyte at Tulsa’s First Episcopal Church, waiting for the moment to toll the consubstantiating bell, he’d thought of death as one of those revolving bookcases that led to secret corridors in comic books. You lay down, crossed arms over chest, closed your eyes, and when you opened them again, it was to new and unending life. Shazam! It wasn’t really like that, of course, but if right-thinking people were right, and there was nothing at all after you died—nothing—well, how was he supposed to imagine that? As blackness? As emptiness? These were also metaphors, as fanciful in their way as a false-bottomed coffin. A true nothing had no precedent in this life. Yet he could feel it now, just behind his fellow passengers: the nothing that couldn’t be put into words. And maybe this had been the flaw in his writing all along. He’d wanted it to be about losing, about the things we’re born into loving and then lose. But if the things he’d written about were not called up out of nothing but willed up from the page, their loss was more like the loss of a well-tailored shirtsleeve than, say, of the arm inside it. Which was how real Richard, for better or worse, had always needed it to be. Had he honestly believed that, if he could make Samantha real enough on the page, he might trade one life for the other, ransom free the Sam captive in her metal bed?
Then he spotted the punk again, killing time behind a pillar. And Richard was indeed going to vomit. As the engines churned up the harbor, he fled out onto the deck. The freak April snow was now heavy enough to hang a porous screen a few yards to starboard, and had driven off anyone else who might have been out here. Yet he couldn’t feel the cold. The door behind him took too long to shut. The punk had passed through, though he remained in shadow. Why didn’t these Posthumans just come for him already? The notional little banister that had been welded here for safety was slick from snow. He made it over without incident, onto a lip two or three feet deep. It seemed reasonable this might give him an advantage. He was taller, after all. Once the struggle was joined, he’d only need to move his opponent that little distance. Or maybe he was trying to draw them out. Nothing happened. In windows, people stared at newspapers or the floor. The tattooed boy was no longer visible. Nor were the waterfowl that usually worked the wake at the back of the boat. There was only Samantha, watching from the safe side of the rail a few feet away. Any second, the punk would take her place; right now, though, she was as she’d been in that picture of his, the one she’d clipped inside the third issue, dark dye, porkpie, what had he done when he’d taken the photo out? Her face was drawn and sad and silent. Or was this his neighbor Jenny Nguyen, reproaching him for what it might do to her if Richard went down? He saw again the state he’d left his desk in that morning. At the center of the Groskoph mess sat a neat sheaf, thirty-three sheets of 28-lb. bond. Were this struggle to end with him being pushed off the boat, they might form an X-ray of the inside of his head. Jenny might read them and see why he was the way he was, and they might have a future. But this was a fallacy, another form of literary wishful thinking, and anyway, there was a paradox in there somewhere. She could almost have been his own kid. Assuming it was a girl. He always had. Leave me alone, he thought. Get out of the way of what has to happen. As ever, though, there was hesitation. Never to face your own offspring. Never to touch the black silk of Jenny’s hair. Never to feel again the heat rising off a woman, or off the summer pavement. The sidewalks he’d run along on his way home from church with his arms outstretched and a spitfire stutter he’d made with his mouth, like the one he made now when he’d had too much. Which h
e had, he was lurching pretty badly here with the movements of the boat and all the strife and indecision erupting in his head. The punk continued not to come, but now a voice like “Dr.” Zig’s was sounding under everything: fuck it. Fuck cabbies and neighbors and plutocrats and social engineers and Capote and the Pulitzer Committee and rent control like a Chinese fingertrap. Fuck fighting this so hard for so long. Fuck it, Richard. Fuck it fuck it fuck it. The boat hit another swell, and he felt an ancient tug—a promise of some final decision being taken from his hands. An answer or the lack of one. This is just the booze, something in him said. You should lie down and take a nap instead. There’s no one out here with you. There isn’t even any snow. But the hands hanging on to the rail could have been someone else’s. The feet could have been someone else’s. The strip of lit windows on the side of the boat was a ribbon threading through black water. He was standing now on the lip’s very lip, unfolding himself, as if anyone could read the end of his own story. What had happened, what was happening? Was there really no one else besides himself who would come to hurt him, or help him? Was there even a difference anymore? But this was New York. All those tightly wrapped lives. And for a moment, just before the next wave hit and Richard Groskoph let go of the rail, this city he loved and hated spread before him on the horizon, all his again, so that contrary to what anyone might have thought, he was feeling nothing like alone at the instant he began to fall.
[click here to view a facsimile from the print edition]
BUT THEN, THERE WERE TWO OF EVERYTHING. TWO MIDNIGHTS, two Cicciaros, two bullets, two workshops … two charges for each shell bursting up in the sky, and technically, two fuses. It was a mystery I’d confront again and again in those months Carmine’s daughter lay in the hospital, and one that would complicate considerably my attempts to understand how she’d got there: every single thing that touched her seemed entangled with some ecliptic other half.
Toward the end of that January, for example, I would come into possession of a complete print run of the fanzine Samantha’s father had mentioned, Land of a Thousand Dances. Far from alluding to the legends of Southern soul, as I initially thought, the title turned out to be a tribute to the rock singer Patti Smith. And the essays and reviews and diaristic little fragments within tracked an acolyte’s search for a life large enough to sustain her––a search only hinted at, theretofore, by Samantha’s edgy haircut and those pictures on her bedroom wall.
She’d begun work on the fanzine during her senior year at a private high school in the city. By Issue 2, she’d fallen in with a group of kids on the fringes of the new subculture emerging nearby. “Punk rock” offered a lens through which to examine both herself and the wider world. The view was complicated, as views tend to be, by sex and class and ideology and attitude, but slowly, haltingly, Samantha had given herself over to the tumult of “Downtown.” While her father and I had sat on a patio in Flower Hill, speculating about her classes, the daughter was more likely smoking marijuana and listening to records somewhere in the East Village. In the period between Thanksgiving and Christmas of 1976, she seems even to have moved into a squat there.
The fanzine recorded no house number or street name; still, the first thing I did upon reading that winter of the squat’s existence was set out to find it. I spent the day after her birthday walking the length of every block between Houston and 14th Street, from Lafayette to the housing projects along the river. Like the house she’d grown up in, the one I was looking for would have an outbuilding behind it. There was also, reportedly, a one-foot gap between it and the next house. This was the sort of thing Samantha had found beauty in––guillotined parking meters, psoriatic postboxes, cars missing windows and wheels, the fact that behind the rhumb face New York turned to the world, nothing was quite in kilter––but it was hard to muster an aesthetic appreciation when the daytime high was 17 degrees Fahrenheit. I hoped instead to use the gap as an identifying mark, but it turned out such gaps were everywhere. Odd, that I’d never noticed this before. In the shops I stopped into for warmth, no one I mentioned the squat to seemed to speak English, or at any rate understand what I was asking. By nightfall, I gave up and headed back home.
Which isn’t to say I wouldn’t drift further in the weeks that followed. I began phoning anyone who might remember the fireworker’s daughter. One day, a former math teacher was describing her as just another sullen girl in the back row; the next, a photo instructor at NYU was telling me how sad he’d been to see this “promising artist” drop his class. Out in Flower Hill, I made fruitless inquiries about “C,” a boy she’d written about befriending the summer before she left for college. (I’d first heard of him in August, when I’d asked Cicciaro if she was dating anyone. “God, I hope not,” he’d said. “There’s one kid picked her up a couple times in a Buick wagon, but he looked like one of those weenies from the old Charles Atlas ads, getting sand kicked on them.”) I then spent hours in the East Village, searching for her other “droogs,” likewise identified mostly by initial. Samantha hadn’t always gotten along with her friends on the scene; they had a destructive streak, if Issue 3 is accurate, that both repelled and attracted her. But as I observed their habitat, recalled what she’d written, accosted punks on St. Mark’s Place who sloughed off all questions, I came to feel my own species of exasperated affection for these characters of hers, SG and DT and NC, sometimes called “Iggy.” When people asked why I was looking for them, I finessed the truth; Samantha’s name hadn’t reached the papers, and I hated to cloud the objectivity of a source. Yet despite my scruples, or perhaps because of them, I’d begun to feel that I knew less than I had on New Year’s Day. There had been two Samantha Cicciaros. And if there were to be answers––not about who had shot her, for that was a mugging gone wrong, I believed, but about what losing her might mean––then this other life, this second self, seemed to hold them.
OF COURSE, THE SIGNATURE EFFECT OF A GOOD FANZINE IS TO make even the most out-of-touch reader feel invested in the culture depicted therein. It’s a lesson some writers take a lifetime to learn: what makes us care about things is other people caring, too. And what Samantha cared about even more than school or friends or her new punk-rock home in the city was the music. For her, Patti Smith and Joey Ramone and Lou Reed weren’t voices from her stereo speaker; they were intercessory saints. And hovering slightly above them all in the margins of the fanzine, because more accessible (or more nakedly vulnerable), was a man named Billy Three-Sticks, lead singer for the early punk band Ex Post Facto.
About the band’s history, I could find very little: the punk rock of ’74 was even three years later like a lost colony, and Billy Three-Sticks a settler vanished into the interior. I tracked down and listened to the one LP he’d recorded, but despite an odd sense of having heard it before, I found the music dissonant, and the lyrics, for all their emotion, uninterpretable. “Kunneqtiqut / What the fuck / Connect the dots / Jumbled up / On a tilt / Around a bend / Alone, Atlantic / Antic end.” Nor could I crack that husk of a surname, Three-Sticks. From the store where I’d bought the record, however, I did manage to obtain an address. I went to pay a visit.
The old factory building I found in Hell’s Kitchen was so far from anything described in the ’zine that I wondered what I even hoped to find there. I was weighing what approach to take when, finally, I caught a break. Or rather, two. Before I could cross the street to look for a buzzer, a small, dark man in a motorcycle jacket stepped from the vestibule. This was Billy Three-Sticks. He moved, head down, toward the Eighth Avenue IND. Maybe it was just the cold making him withdraw into himself, but he looked so secretive I couldn’t help but follow.
Then, a block shy of the subway entrance, I noticed a second man, black and in some sort of repairman’s coveralls, keeping pace with Billy Three-Sticks across the street. Intent on his quarry, he seemed not to see me. By the time I turned back to Three-Sticks, he had gone into the subway. The coveralled man was descending, too, until there was only a stocking cap sli
pping up in back to show a fugitive bit of green. He was not a repairman at all, but a “punk”––perhaps even a friend of Samantha’s. And if so, then these “droogs” of hers weren’t simply the loveable fuckups of Land of a Thousand Dances, but also some other thing that accounted for his presence here: lurkers, watchers, spies.
I MADE SEVERAL MORE TRIPS UP TO THE OLD FACTORY, BUT each time I found the green man from the first day there ahead of me, watching. Or a nasty-looking lunk of a skinhead in matching coveralls. Or a girl in grimy fur idling on a loading dock. Or just the glary windshield of one of the graffiti’d white vans that had lately become ubiquitous as pigeons. Three-Sticks himself was a far rarer sight, keeping to a tight, even compulsive circuit: vestibule to train to vestibule, with occasional divagations toward an off-track betting parlor or the Automat in Times Square.
As for me, I was now light-years from whatever piece I’d set out to assemble. But I knew a story when I saw one. Samantha’s idol was obviously in some kind of trouble; had she been too? I would come home at night, have a drink with a neighbor, say nothing about the drama I was watching transpire. Yet the next day, when I rose from my desk for a constitutional, my steps tended toward Hell’s Kitchen. I had fantasies of slipping into the building behind another resident and going door to door. Or, failing that––because those residents all appeared to be bikers who could have snapped me in two––I would ring every buzzer. Once I’d warned Billy Three-Sticks he was being followed, simple gratitude would persuade him to talk. He could lead me down, perhaps, to the house where Samantha had been living before the shooting, or at least recall what it had been like to be a young punk himself. But the watchers were always there, and when they did finally withdraw and let me get as far as the buzzers, one Thursday morning in March, a biker’s tattooed face popped out of an upper window seconds after I rang. I explained that I was looking for Billy Three-Sticks, and got confirmation of what I already knew (if only from the absence of an audience) must be true: I wasn’t going to find him here anymore.
City on Fire Page 81