Great Jones Street (Contemporary American Fiction)

by Don DeLillo

  “When do I leave?”

  “We drink to the tour now. The tour. Day after tomorrow, Bucky. Zap, you’re gone. Drink up, everybody. It’s all set. Day after tomorrow. We inaugurate the greatest record promotion in history. In fact I’m leaking word about the mountain tapes starting today. Tomorrow I begin co-opting the rumors behind the reason for your comeback. You’ve got an incurable disease. One year to live. You want to spend it with your fans.”

  “Other rumors are bound to arise.”

  “Will they compare?”

  “I guess not,” I said.

  “For sheer bad taste, will they compare? Will they even come close? I appropriate all other potential rumors. I sponge them up. They belong to me by divine right of bad taste. I come out of a tradition, Bucky. I’m not new money, new culture, new consciousness. I emerge from a distinct tradition. Bad taste. Michelle softens the edges of it but nothing can kill it completely. It’s there to stay and I’m proud and delighted. The dynamics of bad taste is something they should investigate with a research grant. A fantastic subject. My whole life is a study in bad taste. Bad taste is the foundation for every success I’ve ever had. I’m a self-made mogul in an industry that abounds in bad taste. Look at me. Mogul is written all over me. How did I get there? Aggressiveness got me there. Massive double-dealing. Loudmouthedness. Insults beyond belief. Little white lies. Farts and belches. Betraying a friend and then bragging about it. These are the things that give you stature in the industry. Not just respect or clout or notability. Stature. It’s not enough to betray a friend. That gives you respect at the very most. You have to supply the extra touch. You betray a friend and then you brag about it. That’s star quality. That gives you stature. Do you know what I have on top of bad taste? I have self-starting entrepreneurial instincts. The combination is unbeatable.”

  “I like your suit,” I said.

  “Chemical-stretch three-piece herringbone. Factory outlet. Clifton, New Jersey. Twenty per cent less than wholesale.”

  “Quietly assertive.”

  “I sold the movie rights for two hundred thousand.”

  “To your suit?”

  “It goes before the cameras in late summer.”

  “You’re in a good mood,” I said.

  “Do you know what this suit has that other suits don’t have? Want me to tell you?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Star quality,” he said. “This suit has star quality.”

  “You’re really happy, aren’t you? You’re all puffed up with it. Action. You can’t wait to send me off.”

  “But this isn’t my favorite suit. Far from it. My favorite suit is the suit I bought at Simon Ackerman in the Bronx in nineteen hundred and fifty-four. Revolving credit was just starting then. And I’ll tell you a funny thing if you want to hear a funny thing. That suit didn’t fit me then but it fits me now. That suit did not fit me in nineteen fifty-four. You should see it now. But what they should do, they should date suits the way they date automobiles or fine wines. You could say I got a nineteen fifty-four Simon Ackerman. Shoulder fins and fully pleated. I got a nineteen sixty-eight Klein’s basement. Forty-four dollars, wear it off the rack, turns purple when it rains. But you should see that suit now. Tell him, Michelle, Is it a fit or isn’t it? Am I exaggerating or not? Are we here or aren’t we?”

  “Seen Hanes lately?” I said.

  “Hanes is back at work. Hanes? He’s back at work. Why do you ask, Bucky?”

  “No reason.”

  “We power our way up the charts,” Globke said. “We reach the break-even point. We determine our allocations. We gross and outgross. We work out test cities versus chart cities. We refill the record racks. We confer with our senior people. We climb and grab. We yell over the telephone. We sell and outsell. We display perpetual bad taste.”

  “The epics teach us that all work is equal to all other work,” Michelle said. “Once we have freed ourselves of fear and desire, no act we perform is more important than the act that precedes it or the act that follows. Non-attachment is the path to beyond-reality. Beyond-reality is where our true nature indwells. The body is an illusion. The epics teach us that men cannot leap across time to the eye of the absolute. Men must proceed in stages across many boundaries. Free of fear and desire, we find our true nature. Good. Goodness. God. Godhead. Evil is nothing more than attachment. Evil is attachment.”

  “Evil is movement toward void,” I said.

  “One and the same,” she said.

  Before they departed she came to my chair and put her lips to my left temple. She had the kind of face that allows love or pain to rise immediately to the surface, unshrouded face usually belonging to older women, those who’ve forgotten what must be shielded and what disclosed. What now she revealed was not a longing for me but rather a need for what she took to be my suffering. In her eyes and warm lips was the wish to be burdened, to take whatever I could not bear. Globke waited at the door, oddly deferential to the moment’s solemnity. He held the empty champagne bottle under his arm, a souvenir (he’d said) of the day of my second birth.

  That evening I sat by the window, imagining tiny men in black booties scampering out of the firehouse, the house itself on fire, flames leaping and smoke pouring, the little men skipping about in glee, men in booties and stunted red helmets, men with bushy eyebrows, tiny men all in a circle holding hands.

  25

  IN ABUNDANT SUNLIGHT a man carried paintings from a battered panel truck into the loft building across the street from me. He took canvas after canvas, about a dozen, gray every one with a white line down the middle. I turned back to Bohack, who occupied the center of the room, nodding into his Chinese beard, one foot up on a chair, the rest of him collapsing toward that point of support. He wasn’t happy with me. His body showed it, swollen with exhaustion. He knew I was no longer content to remain in this room, leading his band of janissaries progressively inward, conceding motion to each hour that passed. His large open face seemed to beam his disappointment across the room. We were ten minutes into our second silence. Bohack took out a handkerchief and delivered mucoidal noises into it. He remained in his standing crouch, right foot set on the edge of the chair, elbow resting on right knee, his diffuse beard concealed by the handkerchief. He wasn’t at all happy with me. I had betrayed our convergent destinies, reading the leer in the silvery eye of the first child to beckon.

  “I wondered if you’d get here in time,” I said. “I’m due to leave in a matter of hours. They’re sending a car for me.”

  “If you knew I was coming over, why didn’t you leave ahead of schedule? Why didn’t Bucky Wunderlick get out when he had the chance?”

  “Dumb question,” I said.

  “I guess it is. Heck, I’m stupid sometimes. You half want this confrontation. You half want to go to Essex Street with me.”

  “Who cut Azarian’s throat? Did his people do that?”

  “Longboy.”

  “What for?”

  “Longboy’s our throat man. When he was a medic in the Airborne he performed many a tracheotomy out in the field. Man with broken jaw, blocked air passage, choking to death in the drop zone. Longboy would trake him right there. He traked maybe ten people all told. He got to know the throat. He’s developed a feel for it. So we sent Longboy after Azarian’s throat. We had a lot of trouble locating Azarian. We knew he was after the product but we couldn’t get him located right.”

  “He was just bidding,” I said. “He never had his hands on it. There was no point in killing him.”

  “We killed him because we found him,” Bohack said. “It was a heck of a job. We put a lot of time and effort into it. After all that time and effort, we obviously had to kill him. If we didn’t kill him, it would have been a total waste, all that time and effort. We knew he was in California, in L.A., most likely in Watts. Finally we got street name and house number. That’s when we sent out Longboy. He’s our throat man.”

  “Dr. Pepper told you I was leaving. Is tha
t right?”

  “Right, Pepper told us. Pepper wanted me to arrange a get-together with Rex, Brandy, King, Bruno and the others. He knew about Happy Valley’s interest in your retirement and he wanted to use the dog-boys to keep you permanently in this room. He was scared half to death of even approaching the dog-boys but he thought you’d cut him out of any chance at the product and this was his way of getting revenge. I was surprised, tell you the truth. I didn’t think Pepper was that vindictive. He came on like a spiteful kid who wakes up one morning and finds he has two poison fangs and it’s just a question of who gets the first nip. But I could tell he expected heap big trouble if he got anywhere near the dog-boys. Fear and trembling. It might have been halfway funny to see Pepper with those lunatics but I finally told him it wasn’t necessary. I told him we didn’t need the dog-boys. Don’t you want to know why? You’re just standing there without any look on your face. Isn’t Bucky interested? Doesn’t he care about these things?”

  “He cares deeply.”

  “The dog-boys aren’t an independent pack. I control them. I run them back and forth. They’re not a separate faction. They’re just a lunatic fringe that we use for our own purposes. They’re completely subordinate. There’s only one Happy Valley Farm Commune. The dog-boys are the lunatic fringe. We use them to sow fear and confusion. People think Happy Valley’s weak and disorganized when it’s just the opposite. A nice touch, what do you think? Broadcasting dissension, what do you think? Not bad, right? Sowing fear. Sowing confusion. What’s your opinion?”

  “I need time to think about it.”

  “I gave them the names,” he said. “Bruno, Rex, Corky and so on. What do you think? Nice touch, don’t you think? Sense of humor. You need that.”

  “How heavy are you?”

  “I go two forty-five. Is that too heavy? I’ve got a big frame. With a big frame you need considerable poundage. My face is a round-type face but the rest of me is packed pretty solid.”

  “Are your parents big people?” I said.

  “They’re both normal size except my mother has the biggest thumbs I’ve ever seen in my life.”

  “Any brothers or sisters?”

  “Only child.”

  “Where do you buy your clothes?”

  “Orchard Street.”

  “Do you pay your rent with cash, check or money order?”

  “Right now we owe four months.”

  “What are your plans for me?”

  “It’s a nice day,” he said. “Let’s go up to the roof.”

  We strolled among chimneys of various shapes and materials, crumbling brickwork, heavy metal painted black, aluminum peanut-whistles. The tar was hard. To north and south, towers grew out of crooked rooftops in the foreground. Bohack rested against the ledge, eyes closed and face thrust upward, although the sun was at his back. It was one of those electrically blue days when every tall building set against the sky seems to drip silver. Bohack was looking at me now. His arms were folded. He wore crushed dented clothing that made him appear to ripple upward, a fountain of automobile parts and bland expressions.

  “Your suicide should take place in a city like Tangier or Port-au-Prince or Auckland, New Zealand. Some semi-mysterious or remote place is probably best for your kind of suicide. That way the news is late, the news is garbled, the news is full of contradictions. A doubt always lingers that way. Even when they produce your body, there’s a doubt or a shadow of a doubt. Maybe it’s somebody else. Maybe it’s a look-alike provided by the local police. The perfect suicide is when people know you’re dead on one level but refuse to accept it on a deeper level. It’s the final inward plunge, Bucky. It’s what you owe us. It really is. We patterned our whole lives after your example. What happens? You decide to pull out. Just like that. You decide to step back into the legend. No good, Bucky. Not acceptable. Obviously it leaves us hanging. We’re in the midst of an inward plunge and you suddenly just like that decide to sneak out into the open. Zero acceptability. Suicide’s the best answer all around. I think you see that now.”

  “It’s a good answer. But not the best.”

  “There’s a definite second-best. But suicide’s the best. How can I tempt you further? Can I say it’s what everybody ultimately expects of you, right down to the littlest scribbler of fan mail? Should I say it’s a life-affirming gesture for someone in your position? Do I put the whole thing in perspective by arguing that your life and work will draw off additional meaning from an act of this kind? How can I tempt you, Bucky? We’re how high up—four stories? Not enough, is it? You want to be sure and I don’t blame you one bit. Istanbul, that would be ideal. Better than Auckland, New Zealand, where chances are they do things in a neat tidy manner and we wouldn’t have the proper mystery or doubt. Our building on Essex Street is five stories high. Add one for the roof. That’s six, which is probably high enough.”

  “I admit I’m tempted.”

  “It’s by far the best answer.”

  “Not by jumping though. That’s no good at all.”

  “Let’s discuss alternatives,” he said.

  “Many better methods.”

  “I’d be happy to discuss them with you. Anything you have to offer in the way of ideas is great with me. Gun’s not bad. It’s a right-there kind of thing. It’s got a brutal purity other methods don’t have.”

  “You’re not being serious,” I said. “If you were really bearing down on this, you wouldn’t make dumb suggestions. It has to be more passive. But not drugs and not gas. An exotic poison maybe. A snake in a basket. Something that harks back to the great days when excess was the style. But I’ll tell you the truth, Bo. We’re just making noises up here. I have no real intentions. I’m not innocent enough for suicide.”

  “You have to teach by example, Bucky. Otherwise you’re just a salesman.”

  “I’ve done things without understanding them fully. This would be one more such thing. Besides I’m not innocent. I’ve ass-licked around the edges of some mean conceits. You can’t kill yourself when you’re half-rotten with plague. Only the innocent are received. No suicide gets through unless he’s free of attachment. It’s murder I’ve been burning to commit. I’m way beyond suicide.”

  “Who you plan to kill?”

  “I guess nobody anymore. Not even in the vague way I meant it. Four ounces on the meat scale. That’s all I’m told I weigh. I was thinking about that while I waited for you to get here. Whether to bother at all with limousines and planes or just take what Bohack’s got in store.”

  “Second-best,” he said. “There’s a definite second-best.”

  He put his hands flat against his belly and slid them into his pants up to the knuckles. Under his jacket, opened to the mild afternoon, he wore broad red suspenders. We passed a yawn between us. To the east a drilling crew was blasting rock apart at a construction site. I heard but could not see them. Each blast was preceded by the sound of whistles and followed by pigeons angling in panic to other abutments.

  “You found Azarian,” I said. “You found Pepper or he found you. You didn’t find Watney. Did you find Hanes?”

  “Hanes found us.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “The kid finally got around to using his God-given intellect. He offered to do anything we wanted if we’d give him a guarantee for his safety. He couldn’t have called at a better time. There was one important service nobody else was in a position to render for us. Hanes was the right man at the right time. I look at your face and see nothing. Isn’t Bucky Wunderlick curious about these things? Doesn’t he care how the machinery functions? Maybe it’s just that the sun’s in his eyes. He seems to be blank but it’s only the sun.”

  “I thought I had you measured step by step,” I said. “I even awarded myself one extra step. But I have to admit I don’t know what service Hanes might be in a position to render Happy Valley. The sun’s in my eyes. Otherwise you’d see curiosity lighting up my face.”

  “We want your silence. You know
that. But even if you took your own life right now, we wouldn’t have what we want. Why? Because of the mountain tapes. Because the tapes are about to be released. New legends, new sounds, new confusions. In the last few days there have been rumors about the tapes being released. Then Pepper told us you were going on tour. It all fitted together. The only thing we didn’t know was how to get at the tapes. Where they were. Who had them. Silence is silence, Bucky. There’s no silence with the tapes on the market. It would hurt us. It would cause psychological pain. So Hanes was the right man. We gave him the guarantee he wanted. In return he went through the confidential files at Transparanoia. According to him, it was easy. He had the answer in no time.”

  “Pittsburgh.”

  “Cincinnati.”

  “Just testing,” I said.

  “Hanes seemed eager to give you maximum knifage. To put the blade in six inches, withdraw it two inches, stick it in three more inches. Seven inches. Maximum knifage among the primitive blood cults.”

  “I didn’t help him when he was in the subways.”

  “He remembered.”

  “I see that.”

  “So Maje and two others are in a car right now on their way to the record plant in Cincinnati. They’re carrying about twenty pounds of C-four. We have to play it safe. We don’t know what stage of production the record’s at. So we’re blowing the whole plant. Silence has to be total if it’s to be called silence. Am I right or not? In order to earn the name silence, the silence has to be total. I’d like to hear your views on that.”

  I took eight steps forward and hit him in the stomach, directing the blow at a point equidistant from his thumbs, which were still set against his belly, the only fingers outside his pants, about six inches apart, parallel to his belt line. I walked back to my spot at the brick chimney.

  “What was that?” he said.

  “Animal urge.”