You said—
And here a white beam from the police cruiser makes a wound in the night. It rolls across strangers in varying degrees of dishabille who stand around waiting to see what will happen, as bits of charred paper drift through from somewhere, paraffin-thin. Meanwhile, the imaginary interviewer flips back through his notes. He apparently has a record of every stray thought Mercer’s ever had. There must be two dozen legal pads stacked in his corduroy lap. An amplified voice from behind the light says something that includes the word “disperse.” Mercer can’t quite hear it over the interviewer. Who has chosen, admittedly, a strange time to return.
You said that for you, the poet’s job, “preeminently” was the word you used, was to find things to praise, but that the praise had to have a background, a canvas to exist upon. And here you say that this background has to be, quote, “a sense first-hand of the overwhelming probability of there being nothing at all.” A.k.a. the tragic sense. Whereas what you had was merely “adolescent self-pity.” End quote.
I said that?
I can give you a date, if you like. This was late October of 1977.
But it’s only July.
Hmm …
The interviewer withdraws into an archival fog. Still, Mercer wonders, does he have it now, this tragic sense? When he looks at the crowd dispersing here, is the loneliness he feels really an aberration, or is it the norm? Except the crowd has stopped dispersing. In fact, one of the onlookers is marching toward the police cruiser: the lone woman, the one he thought was in disguise. Her posture is grim, resolute, like a celluloid cowboy’s, and if there remains something covert about her, he can’t place it; that beer has gone straight to his head. “Hands up! Hands up!” the squad car says. And now in its polished hood her reflection can be discerned, backed by liquid flames from the trashcan. Tall in life, she looks impossibly small when doubled in light, the blue, the orange. She reaches down to hike up her miniskirt. Or rather, he does. Mercer sees what’s next a beat ahead of its actual happening.
Then the first splash of urine hits the cruiser’s hood, and with all due respect to the engine, the ABBA, and the murmur of the men around him, it is the only sound. It positively thunders. Mercer can see the precise look on his mother’s face when the vice squad calls to say her son has been picked up in a dragnet. Public lewdness, possession of a controlled substance, resisting arrest … No, not that son; the good one. Still, he cannot help admiring what’s happening. The transvestite is patiently waggling off the last drops in full view of the faceless black windshield. Then, from somewhere under the trees, someone wings a bottle at the cop car. It goes wide of the mark and shatters on the path, but the next one hits square-on, knocking out a light. And you have to hand it to the man in the miniskirt. Even when the siren bloops, even when the megaphone sizzles to life again, s/he stands his/her ground. A fusillade of further bottles makes effervescent bursts all around.
Whereupon the cop car reverses in a hurry, engine whining, misery lights still a whirl. People salute with middle fingers, and when they are gone break into cheers. And as the vacuum the cops have left draws people in, the applause does not die, but becomes general, rhythmic, gathering strength as those who have fled into the bushes return. Someone climbs on top of a bench and clasps hands like Muhammad Ali, and a roar goes up that can probably be heard for blocks.
“They thought the old rules still applied, but they fucked up, didn’t they?” Voices shout unintelligibly in response. Mercer can’t quite tell which is his own—only that the one now exhorting the crowd is not the transvestite, whom he’s lost track of. There’s something about power. Something about belonging. And ultimately: “Tonight, we’re taking this city back.”
Already a formation is flowing toward the park gates, as though there might be other cops out there to confront. Or formation is the wrong word, it’s more like a force of nature, pressure bursting from an underground spring. The guy is right: the streets out here belong to them now, if they didn’t already. And it’s not just the queens of the East Village; when Mercer looks he sees punk rockers, shorn of head, and some Latinas from around the way, and even a couple of insalubrious old hobos falling into line, howling at the moon.
But then at the corner of Houston, they encounter a howl equal and opposite to their own, and headed in the other direction. It’s that law-and-order demonstration from earlier today, and it’s ten times as large. Candles and flashlights and torches, tee-shirts soaked in kerosene and tied around broomhandles, bob like little boats on a sea of darkness. Or one big boat, a Flying Dutchman, aimlessly haunting downtown for the last however many hours, waiting for something to collide with. Here, in the middle of backed-up Houston, they’ve found it. From one side of the boulevard or the other, a chant arises. TAKE IT BACK! Which half of the crowd it’s coming from is hard to say, because the other half picks it up, more echo than answer. TAKE IT BACK! TAKE IT BACK! Mercer is not so intoxicated as not to notice the ambiguity around just who is supposed to do the taking, and from whom. But maybe this is a virtue, because by the fifth or sixth iteration, mirabile dictu, the opposing crowds have merged. It’s hard in the darkness to tell anymore the boho hobos from the petit-bourgeoisie—or to know which camp he might fall into himself. It’s as if the two halves are aligned at last, and oriented, as most hive-minds are, toward restoration.
93
MIDTOWN—2:23 A.M.
THE THING IS, SHE NEVER MEANT TO DO ANY OF IT. She is a good person you have to believe her—this is all stuff she’d wanted to tell the reporter guy that day. She remembers the words filling up her mouth like gumballs she couldn’t bite down on fast enough: You take a good person, stir in childhood, then puberty … Okay, she gets it now, this is the classic play for sympathy, you could say the same about ax murderers, but as late as that first winter after hitching to New York, when she’d met Sol and they were living out of the back of the van, she literally wouldn’t hurt a fly. Even the dumb little ants she’d find lumbering over his shoulders in the morning she used to scoop up and drop out the back window instead of squashing, because life is life; her mom taught her that. Later, she and Sam would bond over the flakiness of hippie moms. Camped out at Lenora’s, nursing coffees until the waitresses shooed them away, they played Top This. Sewer Girl always won, sure, but who was keeping score? Every Post-Humanist had at least one crazy parent—at least until the Prophet Charlie came along, who had a dead dad. A crazy parent in Sewer Girl’s experience provoked one of two reactions, rebellion or identification. Her own mom had had a burning desire to get right with the universe, whatever that meant any given week, and she handed it right on down. So Sewer Girl was a good person, basically.
And honestly, for all his grouchiness, Sol had been, too. Though God, were they poor that winter, the winter of ’74. They had to sneak into the Vault through a bathroom window, or sometimes the Angel who guarded the door would let them work off the cover charge by filling in as bouncers for a half-hour or so. They’d stay until the lights went on and the push-brooms came out and Bullet yelled his line about how you didn’t have to go home but you couldn’t stay here. (It pretty much saved everyone who heard it a semester’s worth of Being and Time, Nicky later said.) Aside from the music giving them something to get through the day for, the club was sweaty and alive and the alternative was the van, where they had to put on all the clothes they owned and huddle together under a pile of dropcloths for warmth. Sometimes she would hear people poking around outside, despite the sheet of paper taped to the window clearly reading . Sol would lie awake for hours cradling her protectively, with his Saturday Night Special at his side. No one ever went so far as to break in, which was lucky, she thought, because Sol definitely had it in him to pull the trigger. (She didn’t know then that everyone has that in them.) And in the morning they had to clean everything up, because Sol’s boss would fire him if he found out they were sleeping in the van. Business was slow then, the whole city falling apart on the front pages of newspapers, free
zing as if the sun were burning out. Even if Sol had been getting paid per hour instead of per window, it wouldn’t have been enough to get an apartment of their own, and he refused to go back and live with his mom in the projects. Mrs. Greenberg was horrible. Polish, originally, and jealous, and a nasty drunk. No one knew where Mr. Greenberg had gone. So there was all that, for extenuation. The churchmouse poverty and the struggle and the science-fictional cold of that time before Post-Humanism—whose aftertaste now seems almost sweet.
And there was this, too: Nicky Chaos, and the debt she owed him. He alone had noticed how pale she and Sol were, and how they needed about twenty minutes after entering the club to stop shivering, and he had taken them into his home. Okay, maybe it wasn’t quite a home, or even his—he was squatting, right?—but at least he’d arranged for the heat to stay on, or someone had. Nicky never said a word about a patron back then. He would spin these stories instead about the already-legendary Ex Post Facto, and his eyes would flash, and his perfectly imperfect white teeth, and all the misery S.G. had endured would just fade away. It was as if a bit of the legend had already worn off, dusting Nicky’s spiked hair with gold. And when he began to talk about trying to join the band, and grokked all the shop-class stuff Sol had picked up at P.S. 130 (Sewer Girl herself had dropped out at fifteen, when her mom became convinced she was being brainwashed) and parked him behind the soundboard in the garage out back, Sol started to stand a little straighter, as if he’d been given back his pride.
For one or all of these reasons, anything Nicky said automatically carried weight with Sewer Girl, and he took a pretty hard line that the hippies’ quasi-Kantian imperative to do and be good without nailing down any definition thereof led to a kind of moral paralysis. Like, what if a train was speeding down a track threatening to kill two people, and if you yanked a lever it would go onto another track and kill only one? Or, like, what if the numbers were bigger? A million, say, versus a couple hundred thousand? What if the train was the system underwritten by liberal humanism? What if the lever was? What if moral paralysis was its whole end and raison, a bait-and-switch, a three-card monte? The system kept all threats to itself in sealed compartments. Hide away the possibility of action, and you could be guilty without ever having been responsible, or responsible without ever having been free, or free only in the sense of not copping to your own guilt. Over months, these terms—guilt, responsibility, freedom—became part of the air Sewer Girl breathed. But it didn’t occur to her then that action meant anything other than starting a few fires. She liked just to hear Nicky talk. She would have listened to whatever he had to say.
Only after the link was made between Nicky and Sam did she start to wonder if she was in fact such a good person after all. Because frankly, she was livid. Watching him pull her friend aside for private debates on the theory and praxis of Post-Humanism, she had the thought that Sam was not actually her friend, which was how her deeper feelings about Nicky came to light. Not that she shouldn’t have seen this coming. It was like her decision to run away to New York, even though Mom, crazy as she was, kept a roof over their heads and food on the table, and even though Sewer Girl’s prospects on her own were manifestly dire. Did putting the doomed thing ahead of the dependable count as rebellion, or identification? Tough to say, because her mom was not one person. Half the time she was going around with her little whisk-broom; the other half she was waiting for the Martians. In any case Sewer Girl wanted Nicky’s dark eyes to burn in her direction once in a while. That first big explosion in the Bronx last fall, the fact that people might actually get hurt … this didn’t deter her. If anything, her physical longing quickened with her sense that something real was at risk. She wanted Nicky’s hedgehog hair prickling the insides of her thighs all the time. She wanted to rub his come into her skin like a transfiguring lotion. When she woke, and the glaze cracked, she would be powerful and unitary and pure. But whenever they did fuck now he always seemed to be somewhere else. And when she found out, once Loverboy had gone away, that Nicky was also fucking Sam, it cored her, essentially, gored and quartered, jammed the blade down into the soft white flesh and ran it around in there until almost nothing of the person she’d thought she was was left. As it had done for Sol, she knew (though, as Nicky would say, mutatis mutandis. Sol had had like cartoon wolf-eyes for Sam ever since they first started seeing her at shows). That didn’t mean there wasn’t still love between the two S.G.s. There is a bond that forms between people who have had to depend on each other to survive, and Sol was nothing if not loyal, in the sense of never letting go. In fact, she’d come to see this as the heart of his attachment to Nicky, a loyalty not ideological but instinctive. And in his own brute way, Sol sensed she was suffering. He asked her a few times in the dark, in bed—or, more precisely, on floor—if she was okay, to which she said of course, obviously, what was he talking about? But the atmosphere in the house now felt unstable, as if everyone already had a weapon aimed at everyone else.
It was into this atmosphere that Sol had returned on Christmas Day with the Rangers jersey and the bulging gear-bag. It was his habit to steal anything not chained to something else, but even minus his shoddy disguise, she would have known from the way Nicky grilled him that this particular theft was premeditated. And in a similar way, she figured out the secret inside the bag long before Sol spilled the facts. As a tool for reversing what had happened with the Blight Zone, it was brilliant, but also predicated on Sam’s not snitching—on a loyalty Nicky should have known from the fanzines didn’t exist. Sure enough, Sam then fell out of pocket. Granted, it was the holidays, but this felt like a confirmation, and Sewer Girl couldn’t complain to Nicky, because when it came to Sam he couldn’t be trusted either. Among the Post-Humanists, D.T. had always seemed the most ambivalent—when he said “revolution,” you could almost hear the scare quotes—but he was the one she ended up confiding her fears to, and to her surprise, he shared them. They’d both seen Sam photographing their early-December bombing runs. Between what was in her camera and what they’d just liberated from her dad, she probably had enough to send them all away for a long time. Or at least Nicky and Sol.
And so on New Year’s Eve, when the Prophet Charlie let slip that he was supposed to meet his best friend Sam Cicciaro uptown, she’d caught D.T.’s eye across the dingy basement of the Vault. He’d pretended to be too drunk to go back out and play the second set, which meant there would only be drums, bass, and a handful of malfunctioning flashpots to cover Ex Nihilo’s awful secret—the fact that Nicky was clinically tone-deaf—but the band was already almost an afterthought.
She remembers passing a Hamilton-Sweeney soiree on the far side of an Upper West street. Nearer the corner, pressed into the unshoveled snow, was a lacework of footprints, as of many people crossing each other’s paths. Or of a single person reversing course over and over, unable to decide whether to go in. Then it was S.G. and D.T. backtracking, looping around through the park, just in case, and when they neared the street again, the Prophet’s first prophesy proved accurate. There was Sam on a bench. Waiting for someone who’d be at that party—there was no other reason to be so far uptown. And who knew what Sam might disclose? Who knew what anyone might do anymore?
It had been D.T.’s idea to take the pistol from the van, in case Sam needed convincing they were serious. But there in the Park, the punks ended up passing the gun back and forth as in a silent movie while Sam told them to knock it off, they were being silly. “I mean, we’ve all made our choices already, have we not?” You could hear here an echo of Nicky, of their whispered colloquies in the basement, only changed into the opposite of whatever he meant. And something changed in that second for Sewer Girl, too. The gun happened to land in her hands, while Sam’s own hands flew up in front of her like birds in the moonlight. “Easy,” she said. “I’m still your friend.”
It seemed to go off on its own, she thought the safety was on, these were things Sewer Girl would tell herself later, but really, Sam was always a th
reat. She claimed everything, when S.G. had practically nothing—except, contrary to what everybody seemed to think, volition. In spades. So had she known what would happen when she pulled the trigger? Maybe what she’d wanted all along was to find out. And there her friend was, on the snow, blood pumping out of her, a rasp like she was dying. There was just enough light to see D.T. take the gun and bring it close to Sam’s ear and, turning his head away, fire the second round. This was because the first one had done such a crappy job, he would say, and sometimes you had to be cruel to be kind. It turned out D.T. had done a crappy job himself, but they didn’t know that then, as they took off toward the subway, counting on the snow to fill in their tracks. As it would, provided all that lay between it and the tunnels below was grass, concrete, a little dirt. But Sewer Girl was already coming to understand the true substance she’d left her mark on. Or wasn’t this city really the sum of every little selfishness, every ignorance, every act of laziness and mistrust and unkindness ever committed by anybody who lived there, as well as of everything she personally had loved?
And all this she had come within a whisker of blabbing to the reporter guy on the loading dock. Something about the face beneath the beard said he knew a thing or two about survival. She’d looked down at the piece of greasy wax paper turning around and around in her hands. Wanted to tell him about that instant of almost joy, feeling the gun jump, knowing it was too late to undo. It was possible even now she didn’t totally believe that … but when her mouth opened, it was to find a reason to go.
Her confessional urge would swell throughout what followed. When the reporter turned up dead, she knew in her bones it was Nicky who whacked him. Which made two lives she was responsible for, two not very happy lives, it seemed, but still. And his black powder was going to destroy what was left, when nothing that could have driven him to it was worth the cost. But the night the two sevens clashed, something had changed again. The Prophet Charlie had seen, she thought, what she’d been going through. She’d gone up to the attic meaning to take his virginity, as a kind of apology, and then she would rob him of his cluelessness, too, and maybe together they could do something to stop the Demon Brother. Or Brothers.
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