Great Jones Street (Contemporary American Fiction)

by Don DeLillo

“What for?”

  “I know what’s ahead. Some dumb instinct made me hit you. No reason though. I walk step for step with you, Bo. It was an animal thing. I know what’s ahead. I agree to it. But this animal urge made me hit you anyway.”

  “You get the faggot violence going. That’s the only thing you accomplish with a move like that. The old faggot violence comes raging out of me. I turn bleary. I strike at anything that breathes. That’s the meaningless inner faggotry everyone possesses. You roused my faggot-laden soul. Bad stuff, Bucky. No should do. Make nice-nice. No hit people. Heap big trouble.”

  “I agree to everything.”

  “It’s a nice day,” he said. “Let’s go for a walk.”

  We went south on the Bowery without a word. Gray cats slept in the sun among men thawing against the sides of buildings, seated there for a parade of visored riot cops and their whores in snowshoes, or asleep as if in baskets, their bodies shaped against the revolt of bone. I had a yawning seizure then. It was fear, I knew, that caused it—the mechanism in the body that covers up fear in this whimsical way, yawn after yawn. The seizure lasted all the way to the Salvation Army Memorial Hotel, accompanied by popping sounds in my cheekbones. I was suddenly hungry. We stopped at a frankfurter cart on Chrystie Street and I ate three chili dogs and drank Coke and orange soda. I felt sick and tossed the empty Coke bottle over my shoulder, hearing it break politely in the gutter. Bohack never spoke or touched me. People seemed to know him here, although no words were exchanged. We went east into the market streets. I vomited on a parked car. Bohack waited at the distance deemed correct in the etiquette of vomiting. There were no metaphysical testimonies to be made in clarification of this episode. I was traveling a straight line to the end of an idea. It seemed simple arithmetic. For years I’d been heading this way, moment by moment, along a perfectly true line. We reached Essex Street and walked south past the basement companies that manufactured skullcaps. We entered a tenement and started to climb stairs. There were no lights in the hallway. I smelled babies and lush garbage. The tile steps were worn at the edges. Bohack climbed behind me, about three steps back, breathing evenly into the dimness. Great Jones Street, Bond Street, Chrystie Street, Essex Street. It was sixteenth-century London we’d been slouching through in our hands-in-pockets way. I reached the final landing. Puke. Vomit. Splat Bohack slipped past me and unlocked one of the four metal doors on the top floor, using three keys in the process.

  Inside he led me along a narrow hall to a large kitchen. A man and two young girls were painting the walls a gun-metal color, using pans and rollers. Bohack gave me a glass of water and told one of the girls to clean up the mess on the landing. I followed him through another room where two men with sledgehammers were knocking down a wall. They stood in sunny ruins, clothes and bodies chalked with plaster. The third and last room looked east. It was a small room, filled with plants, feverish in the heat of three floodlights. The lone window had no curtains or blinds. Steam came clouding out of an adjacent bathroom where hot water ran in the shower. Bohack placed me in an unpainted blocklike chair and then left the room.

  Plants covered the floor around the perimeter of the room and were crowded together on shelves and grew in white plastic pots hung from the ceiling and in clay pots attached to the walls with metal clips. I noted many kinds, those huge and hooded and furled on long sticks, enclosing the springs of their own alertness, or drowsy and pouched, nocturnal orchids, vines and ivies, showering ferns, palms in their rectitude, or those murky and velvet, or redolent of the limpness of old summers, or pale as lizards. A small man entered the room. He said his name was Chess. He wore flannel trousers, glazed with age, and a matching vest over a striped shirt and tie. Vest lacked a button and the tie was not centered.

  “Plants are scary things,” he said.

  He carried an old briefcase. His hair was blondish, combed sideways almost ear to ear. He closed the door behind him, wincing at the sound of the sledgehammers.

  “It’s like a prison here,” he said. “I don’t know why they stay. People leave and then come back. Some leave twice and come back twice. You watch, I say to myself. So-and-so will leave for good next time. But they’re all right here. Just like I’m right here. I’m in this room same as you. I’ll tell you something about Bohack. He’s not smart and he’s not stupid. He doesn’t have any special magnetism. His ideas just miss being interesting ideas. For a long time I couldn’t figure out what made him so indispensable. Why him? What’s so special? I finally figured it out. It’s because he’s so big. He’s the biggest one. People respond to his bigness.”

  “Where is he?” I said.

  “He’s making the four o’clock check. He checks the whole floor three times a day. Tells people what to do and how to do it. Somebody has to give orders and he’s the biggest. Let me ask you something. That bridge out there. Is that the Brooklyn or the Williamsburg? I’ve never been able to muster enough courage to ask anyone. But I feel comfortable somehow with you. There’s a chemistry with you. Let me rub away some of this steam on the window and you can get a better look.”

  “It’s the Manhattan.”

  “Scary,” he said. “I didn’t know there was a bridge called the Manhattan Bridge. All this time not knowing. Oh that’s so scary. What do you think of my plants? People are usually surprised by the plants. People forget we started out as an earth-family in a completely rural and rustic environment. Interdependence of man, plant and animal. That idea still has beauty for me. So what do you think of my plants? It’s dry out today so I’ve got the hot shower going to get some humidity in here. Plants need that. Usually I just turn on the humidifier but Spot keeps peeing in it so I’ve had to put it away until Bohack gets him re-toilet-trained. That’s the power of names. People act in response to their names. There’s a tiny sector of the human brain where the naming mechanism is located. Spot pees in my humidifier and Rex plays with a little rubber Santa Claus that goes squeak-squeak a mile a minute. Dog behavior and dog play. But don’t worry, this room is sacrosanct. We don’t have to be concerned about anybody coming in here who isn’t authorized to do so. The orchid is a cuntlike plant. Don’t you think? Menacing in its beauty. Some plants just stand there. The orchid lures a person. It draws a person inward. This room is a good room for meditation and inward thinking. It’s the most inward room we have. That’s as good a reason as any as to why you’re here.”

  The door opened and Longboy stood there, left hand in his back pocket, all his weight on one leg, the left, his body slack against the door frame. Chess raised his eyebrows and Longboy responded with a series of gestures too complex to unravel. Then he backed out of the room, pulling the door closed. Chess took some clippings out of his briefcase. The window was fogged to the point of total opaqueness. I felt a sickly light sweat all over my body.

  “Where’s Bohack?” I said. “Is the package with him? I know you’ve got the damn thing.”

  “Pepper told us you were going on tour. Hanes told us where the record plant is.”

  “Hanes also turned over the product. You wouldn’t have guaranteed his safety without that.”

  “Hanes turned over the product and Pepper agreed to test it for a straight fee. He’ll probably never get paid but I doubt if he cares. He was overjoyed at this late date merely to find out what’s been in that package these many weeks that’s reduced us all to such deviant behavior. That begonia needs cutting back. Funny I hadn’t noticed earlier.”

  I picked up the plant he’d indicated and threw it against the wall, using a windmill motion. Chess looked briefly at the cracked clay, leaves still embedded in lumps of earth. Then he leaned over in his chair and spread the newspaper clippings on the floor between his feet.

  “Everybody’s searching, you know. Everybody’s trying to make the journey. But they’re going about it wrong. They’re seeking the wrong kind of privacy, the old privacy, never again to be found. Now here’s an item about a seventy-year-old man who’s sailing from Cape Hatteras to En
gland in a skiff that’s only nine feet long. It says he plans to practice yoga at sea. This one is about a Bloomington housewife who’s flying from Minnesota to Australia in a balloon. Evidently she has relatives in Australia. That’s the ostensible reason for the journey. We both know the real reason. A group of Methodists from Pittsburgh are setting out next month for the Sinai Desert where they intend to pray and fast for forty days and nights. It says they’re being urged by their bishop to take along some kind of rations besides water but it says the group thus far has resisted the idea. Woman, sixty-two, circles world in single-engine plane. Now here’s a Norwegian man who sat for two hundred and two hours in a window box on his terrace, breaking the world record by thirty-some-odd hours. We both know he wasn’t interested in records. A man in Missouri spent a hundred and sixty-one days in a deep cavern. Missouri abounds in caverns. He ate canned food, he drank water, he burned over nine hundred candles. He said it’s the first time in his life he wasn’t bored. Sensory overload. People are withdrawing from sensory overload. Technology. Whenever there’s too much technology, people return to primitive feats. But we both know that true privacy is an inner state. A limited environment is important. Yes, yes. But you can’t fly off in a balloon and expect to find the answer. The will has to urge itself to this task. The mind has to level itself across a plane of solitude. Were painting this whole floor of the building a dark gray. Not the plant room. No, no. The plant room stays white. Everything else gets painted gray.”

  “I just had a thought.”

  “The concept of a captive lunatic fringe within an organization is mine alone, my concept alone, despite what you may have heard to the contrary. Irrationality can be managed to great effect. There’s power and intimidation behind every event the dog-boys are made to stage.”

  “Are you Dr. Pepper?” I said. “You’re not, are you?”

  “I’m Chess and these are my plants. Pepper is at least four inches taller than I am. You know that Voice aside. Color of eyes aside. The man is four inches taller than I am. Pepper’s feats in the realm of disguise are well known and well documented but the man can’t hide four inches of muscle, bone and tissue. I’m Fred Chess, ordinary American. I used to be a theatrical producer. I went into photo offset work after that. Nothing seemed to be panning out. Look, if I were Pepper, it would mean I knew all along what kind of drug was in the package. Any long-standing intimate connection between Pepper and Happy Valley would mean that I, as Pepper, had knowledge of the drug from the very beginning. You’d have to revise everything that’s happened. It would mean that I managed not only Bohack but also Hanes and Watney. If I’m Pepper, it means everything’s been a lie up to now. I managed the whole thing, it means. I guided the product from hand to hand. It was my circle, point by point, the product originating at Happy Valley and ending there. It would mean that you’ve been the victim of the paranoid man’s ultimate fear. Everything that takes place is taking place solely to mislead you. Your reality is managed by others. Logic is inside out Events are delusions. If I were Pepper, it would mean I knew the nature of the product, I had it delivered to you, I planned and followed its course, I fabricated a Toronto meeting between Hanes and Watney, I assigned the informer to Azarian, I planted Hanes in the subway, I had Watney leave the bubble gum cards, I had Bohack bring you over here—the straight line intersecting the circle. It would mean I managed Opel.”

  “But there’s the difference in height,” I said.

  “Of course there is,” he said. “There’s no feasible way a man can subtract four inches, is there? Not to mention eye color, voice, skin pigmentation, size of genitals and so forth. I’m Fred Chess is who I am. Fact is I have no particular respect for Dr. Pepper. The man’s always been a cunt-hair away from outright quackery.”

  He went into the bathroom and turned off the shower, saying ow twice, apparently because the tap was hot. Then he opened the door and stepped into the hall. Soon the pounding stopped. Chess came back inside, followed by Bohack, Longboy and three others, men at the beck of the strongest hand, two wearing lumber jackets like mine. Beyond these six, others were gathering in the hall, male and female, standing at rest, pardonably devoid of any sign of gloom. At the edge of every disaster, people collect in affable groups to whisper away the newsless moments and wait for a messenger from the front. A small wet belch, like a child’s, rippled from my lips. The window began to clear, gradually, in long vertical patches.

  “It’s a mind drug,” Chess said. “Mind drugs affect different people different ways. They’re notorious for that. Highly unpredictable. Dr. Pepper thought this stuff was atropine at first. Atropine diminishes the killer impulse. No market for that. No street market anyway. But by the time he was finished he knew it was something else. It’s a drug that affects one or more areas of the left sector of the brain. Language sector. Still no market for this product. Street or otherwise. It damages the cells in one or more areas of the left sector of the human brain. Loss of speech in other words.”

  “I know all this. This is boring.”

  “Pepper was nice enough to dissolve the chemical powder with a sterile something-or-other and prepare an ampule for us. But you know what’s hard to figure? Why U.S. Guv was fooling around with this stuff in the first place. Maybe they have a language warfare department. Maybe they think the best way to silence troublemakers is literally. That would be funny as hell if that were true. Glub, glub, glub. Or maybe Pepper was right the first time. Atropine. A tranquilizer for the killing site. But I doubt it. The man knows his dope. I give him that. Dope’s his home away from home. I’m sure he was right with his second analysis.”

  “He’d fucking well better be right.”

  “Note this,” Chess said. “You’ll be perfectly healthy. You won’t be able to make words, that’s all. They just won’t come into your mind the way they normally do and the way we all take for granted they will. Sounds yes. Sounds galore. But no words. No songs. You watch, I said to myself. We’ll get him here and then he’ll refuse to cooperate. But so far you’ve cooperated beautifully. It took us a great deal of time and trouble to get the drug back into our possession. Therefore we’re compelled to use it. We have the drug so we’re forced to administer it. Anything to say? Last words? Oh yes, we hope you’ll continue to stay on Great Jones Street. We like having you nearby, yes, absolutely. Any last words?”

  “Pee-pee-maw-maw,” I said.

  Chess eked out laughter—a petty tremble of his lips that slowly grew into a radical whining body-sound, all parts surrendering themselves to glee. Soon we were all laughing, every one of us, those in the plant room and those in the hallway, all but Bohack who stood quietly amid the vegetation, one plant touching his shoulder at the crest of its ascent. His eyes were focused and perfectly clear but it was hard to tell what he was looking at. His presence was such that only stillness could fully accommodate the cavernous power his body engendered. The room seemed to contract about him, our laughter soaking dolefully into his skin, all becoming quiet now. A phone rang in one of the other rooms. Cincinnati, I thought. All gone my mountain songs. Something in Bohack shivered invisibly at the sound of the phone and I began to realize his captivity was stricter even than mine. The news of tapes in flames brought him no joy. As the phone was answered he chose in fact not even to remain for the final stifling, in motion suddenly toward the door, crashing past two men, the lumber jacket wearers, one of them doing a little roundelay at the end of Bohack’s lunge. All watched in unconnected manner this destruction of the placid air around us. He began wading through people in the hallway and soon was gone, metal door closing hard behind him as (in my mind) he stepped daintily over the vomit stain in the outer hall. Quiet returned then, a hurried calm accumulating in a kind of regional pattern, far hallway first, moving inward toward the center of the plant room. They were young, all those people gathered beyond the doorway, but haggard and slow to move, handymen, woodworkers, seamstresses, possessed of a rueful nostalgia, perhaps for the prairie womb c
ommon to them all, that land too bleak for song to live. Chess examined Longboy’s fingernails for dirt and then counseled him on the proper angle of insertion, according to Dr. Pepper, forty-five to sixty degrees. Manhattan, soberest of bridges, was restored to the window in dwindling mist, never less plain, arm and broadsword of the sky. Longboy opened his medic’s kit and lifted a hypodermic syringe to the pale light.

  26

  POLICE DOGS roamed the U-Haul trailer lots. In dock areas I found the packing houses, seeking to investigate perspectives pure as theorems, the self-mastery of these concrete structures, invulnerable to melancholy. The weather turned again, spring backing off for glassy distances of sleet, a cancellation of the body’s feast of seasons, hard to wake to darkness. I dressed in old sweaters, three or four, each sufficiently torn to offer views of the one beneath but not so torn that all were visible in one wearing. I took great care to vary the layers day to day. One sweater was Opel’s, a ski extravaganza, desperately out of place among the rock ‘n’ roll caftans at the back of the closet. I never ventured north of Cooper Square. Two deaf men had an argument near a construction shack, using their hands to curse each other, finally picking up boards and taking turns attacking. Never ventured north of Cooper Square but stood above the rivers east and west, wod-or, this double sound all I could fashion from the sight of sluggish currents in transit to the sea.

  This one day of late rain I saw a toothless man circle a cart banked with glowing produce. He bellowed into the wind, one of nature’s raw warriors, flapping around in unbuckled galoshes. A few people huddled nearby. One would now and then extend a hand toward the cart, finger-pricing, as the man wailed to the blank windows above him. It was a religious cry he produced, evocative of mosques and quaking sunsets.

  RED YAPPLES GREEN YAPPLES GOLDEN YAPPLES MAKE A YAPPLE PIE MAKE ALSO A YAPPLE STRUDEL YAPPLES YAPPLES YAPPLES BIG JUICY YAPPLES FROM THE HEART OF THE YAPPLE COUNTRY