Sweet Sunday

by John Lawton

  ‘Upper West Side?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Brooklyn.’

  ‘Where in Brooklyn?’

  ‘Menora Temple in Borough Park.’

  I dearly wanted to be able to say no. That was worse than Queens—halfway to Coney Island. The coward in me won hands down.

  ‘OK,’ I said.

  ‘Fine. Meet me at Michel’s on Flatbush Avenue. I’ll buy you dinner.’

  He hung up. Should have smelled a rat. Mel is the kind of guy who waits for you to buy dinner. When I got there I found an entire entourage in the restaurant. Mel hanging on Mailer’s every word. I guess I should of written it all down. If I’d known it was part of history I’d of written it down. Norman said hi and shook hands like he remembered me. I can’t remember a tenth of what he said. Just the moment when he was knocking ‘fuckin’ phony Manhattan liberals’ and Mel looked at me and I looked at Mel. A ‘does he mean me?’ look. Both of us wondering if he included us in the put-down.

  But he played the temple like an old pro. If politics is show biz—and Menora Temple is surely a theater with its plastic palm trees and red-flocked wallpaper—then Mailer deserved to win. On the way over Mel said, ‘You may not recover the soul of America, but you are about to see the great beating heart of New York. And it is named Mailer.’ I would have to concede that he was right—on that night if on no other.

  I had picked up fragments of the manifesto. You had only to read the campaign buttons to get the gist. Mel had pinned a cute one on me the minute I arrived. It said, plainly, ‘No More Bullshit’—I wondered how long they’d go on giving that one out before someone complained. I saw other people wearing ‘Mailer/Breslin/Vote the Rascals In’ and ‘Power to the Neighborhood’. I liked that—it was the anarchist core of Mailer’s message—‘property is power, we have none, Washington and Albany own us’. Ditch Washington, quit Albany and devolve power to the most fundamental level, the boroughs. Let Queens be a city, let Staten Island rule itself. And there was the absurdist, the near-poetic ‘I Would Sleep Better Knowing Norman Mailer Were Mayor’, probably the longest campaign button slogan in history. The message could get quirky to the point of eccentric—someone asked Mailer if he were in favor of legal abortion. He replied, ‘Only if you let me outlaw the pill.’ Was that a yes or a no? And quirky to the sharp point of truth—crime will persist as long as it’s the most interesting thing to do.

  But, that night—after he had stomped the stump of declaring the 51st State and throwing down the gauntlet to Albany—out of this rag bag of ideas he pulled a notion so off-the-wall, so sane and so original he had New York, and me, eating out of his hand. Let us, he said, keep Sunday sweet.

  It’s fifty years since T-Bone Walker gave us “Stormy Monday” (and I’ve lost count of the number of Black Tuesdays and Thursdays in that time) and a couple of years before this some guys down at the University of Texas had had themselves a Gentle Thursday—which speaks for itself—but nothing, nothing compared to the sublime idea of Sweet Sunday.

  When Mailer was Mayor, one Sunday each month in New York City would be ‘sweet’—that is no cars would run, no buses, no ships would dock, no planes would land. The subway, which any other time ran round the clock day and night, would be silent. So would the apartments, because Norman meant to cut off the electricity too, so no radio, no TV, no washers washing, no driers tumbling . . . and, as Mel cynically whispered in my ear, no refrigerators freezing, no elevators elevating and no air conditioners doing whatever it was they did.

  I didn’t care. Let the ice in my icebox melt. For once I shared Mailer’s vision. Shut down the city. Who knows maybe people would talk to each other again? Suddenly I could see a life worth living, if only for one day a month. I had a vision of a peaceful populace, playing chess in Washington Square, walking the dog up a 5th Avenue free of traffic . . . sitting in Battery Park watching Liberty to see if she winked . . . whatever. It was a redundant religious idea pushed into the secular and boosted back to meaning. I cheered Mailer for this. So did a couple of dozen freaks. But not Mel. Mel said, ‘Are you nuts? This’ll never work. This is just word-spinning. He’s thinking on his toes and talking through his ass. Wait till he sits down.’

  Norman did not sit down, he took questions from the floor.

  What will happen if you get elected?

  ‘Washington would fall to its knees.’

  What will happen if you really put Sweet Sunday into practice?

  ‘On the first hot day the populace would impeach me.’

  Always leave ’em wanting more.

  Always leave ’em laughing.

  I got the joke. Sure it could be a joke, but it had that hint of . . . there is no other word for it so I say again . . . the sublime. And I could not remember when I last felt the cool hand of sublimity on my brow. Sunday, Sweet Sunday. And just a whisper of mischief.

  §

  1966. I was a failure as a journalist—gently fired by the Village Voice with ‘Sorry Turner, but you are crap’—and it bothered me not one bit, but all the same I had a living to make. I was a law-school dropout who’d never practiced. I had oddjobbed my way into a dead end in less than three years. I’d worked for the East Village Other (looking back, was it news or pornography? Hindsight will not tell me), for Liberty House over on Bleecker, selling Deep South goods in the Deep North—which was where I first came across Abbie Hoffman, long before he invented the Yippie (Q: what’s a Yippie? A: a hippie who’s had his head busted by a cop), both of us then just former civil rights workers alienated by the shift to “Blacks Only”. And I’d worked for the War Resisters League and the Peace Eye Bookstore over on Avenue A and blahdey blah . . . but all of that put together hardly amounted to an income. Half those places were volunteer stuff, paid nothing. To go back to the law was not exactly my preference, but I had rent to pay, a landlady dropping unsubtle hints such as ‘You’re five months behind, why don’t you get qualified and earn some real money?’, a block on asking my father for more money, and a block on my imagination that led me inexorably to the easy option. I was yawning my way through it one day in the fall, when my sharer and landlady Rose asked, ‘Would you do me a favor?’

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘Remember that woman used to clean for us. Mrs Kosciuscko? She rang me at work yesterday. Her son’s being drafted. He won’t go. The old man won’t speak to him and she’s terrified.’

  ‘Why’d she call you?’

  ‘I’m a professional. Probably the only one she knows. It hardly matters to her that I’m not a lawyer. I use long words and go to work in an office—that’s all she sees.’

  ‘What is she? Polish? Why doesn’t she talk to her priest?’

  ‘The Catholic Church has but one line on the war—duty.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I thought you might have a better line. You know the law. And you’ve been in jail. Maybe you could talk some sense to her. Perhaps reassure her.’

  I saw Mr and Mrs Kosciuscko. It set a pattern for the way I worked for the next four or five years. They came round to the apartment. A short, fat woman in her forties who could hardly keep from weeping and a short fat man in his forties who maintained a near-total silence. Would I just talk to Mikey Jr? I was an educated man, she could see that. At the mention of his son’s name Mikey Sr grunted. With each repetition he seemed to push nearer the point where that angry silence might explode.

  Mikey Jr gave me two minutes of his time in a diner out in Queens the next night.

  ‘The old man got shot up on Omaha Beach on D-Day. He keeps his medals in a velvet box on the dresser next to the bed. He expects the same of me. I say, fuck ’im. No fuckin’ medal’s gonna make me feel any better about losing one of my balls. I got better uses for ’em.’

  Mikey was no college student—he stacked pickle jars in a warehouse in Essex Street, a block off De
lancey on the Lower East Side. Smelled of vinegar at fifteen feet. I doubted he was any kind of conscientious objector—and if he were it took brains to prove it to the draft board and somehow ‘fuck my old man’ didn’t strike me as the most constructive argument ever assembled. This kid was going to get inducted. If he’d been middle-class, brains, money and a slick lawyer could all be factors in an exemption, but this was an acned, greasy-haired, blue-collar punk who smelled of vinegar. He was perfect cannon fodder.

  ‘So. Mikey. What’s your plan?’

  He looked at me as though I was a mind-reader. Real surprise on his pocky face. But he told me all the same.

  ‘Canada, man, I’m goin’ to Canada. I was wonderin’ how to tell the old woman. I was going to mail her this.’

  He took an envelope out of his trousers pocket. The handwriting looked more like that of a ten-year-old than an eighteen-year-old. It said ‘Mrs M. Kosciuscko’ in pencil.

  ‘But I was wonderin’—maybe they could trace me from a postmark. Would you give it to her? Not now, not today. Like in two or three days?’

  I could have said no. I didn’t. I kept my word to the kid. Mrs Kosciuscko wept when she read it. Through the tears I could see that it part was relief part new-worry. Mikey Sr tore the note into a thousand pieces, put on his purple heart and declared that he no longer had a son. A month or so later she called me. As long as he was safe. She could live with it, she could talk her husband round, as long as she knew Mikey was safe. Would I go to Canada and just check on him? She’d pay—she had a legacy from an aunt they’d never touched.

  I could have said no then—I didn’t. It wouldn’t be hard to find him. Odds were he was in Toronto and if he was in Toronto he’d gravitate to where all the other draft dodgers were. Took me less than three days to find him. I brought home a long letter from Mikey, a promise that he’d keep in touch, and best of all, a note to his father saying he was sorry but he had to do it and hoped his dad could find it in his heart to forgive him. I did not tell them how I dictated the note to Mikey and threatened to break his arm if he didn’t sign.

  I waived the fee—but out of it I got the beginnings of a job. I applied for a PI’s license. I’d been arrested more times than I could count, but never in New York state, and out of all those nights in jail I had only one charge and one conviction—from a civil disobedience sit-in in South Carolina in the spring of 1961. I was clean, I would pass muster, and tracking down the Mikeys was something I had discovered an aptitude for. And the word went out. If your kid goes missing Turner Raines can find him. I had clients coming to me from all over the tri-state area. I brought no kids home—that was stated up front, it was not the business I was in—but I brought peace of mind to worried women and warring families for fifty dollars a day plus expenses. Between times I spied on cheating husbands and trailed petty embezzlers and all the other shoe-leather wearing tasks that went with the job.

  My landlady Rose said, ‘Who would ever have thought there was a living in it? I mean, darling—anyone with a bit of clout and a good lawyer doesn’t have to fuck off to Canada, now do they?’

  Maybe she was right. Most of my ‘clients’ were blue-collar people defeated by the system, not knowing how to manipulate it for their own ends. The best scam I ever heard was a guy who took on the draft board by confusing their bureaucracy. They wrote to him. He wrote back, and every time they replied to him he replied more quickly than they did. Endless obfuscations and queries, anything to keep his file afloat, going from one desk to another, from one poor damned clerk to another—until, inevitably, one of them lost it. It worked. Came the day they stopped writing to him. He’d beaten the system. That took brains and patience. Not something I saw much of across the other side of my desk.

  By 1967 the trade was booming—all thanks to LBJ’s Selective (such an understatement) Service System aka the draft—and I was something of an authority on draft law. I even bought a suit just for court ­appearances—all neat in neutral colors and my hair slicked back with greasy kid stuff. I’d finally found my niche by becoming a private eye. If LBJ kept up the escalation (another understatement) I figured I could be the second self-made millionaire in the family by about 1982. I had enough business to open an office on Lafayette Street over the East River Savings Bank, twelve floors up with a view of the Williamsburg Bridge—not bad, better than facing a brick wall, pretty at night with the lights twinkling, but nobody’s favorite—at the end of a long corridor of frosted glass doors and black-stenciled lettering that never ceased to remind me of a scene in any Raymond Chandler novel. Down these mean corridors a man must go, so I went. I made it home from home. Coffee pot, kettle, an ancient, gurgling icebox, a brand new ice pick and a shelf of books for all those days when trade was slack.

  That May, the ‘Brooklyn spring’ of ’69, trade was slacker than usual and I was killing a morning. Eleven o’clock and the heat of the day was already up. Looked to be set for a blazing summer. Mel wanted me over in Greenwich Village in the evening for another shot of Mailer on the campaign trail. Nothing till then. Cup of coffee and a battered copy of Hemingway’s stories—the clean, well-lighted place. Nada y nada. A tap at the glass door brought me a Mr and Mrs DiMarco from Mott Street, around the corner and a block over. More often than not couples came as couples. Sometimes just the mother, never the father on his own. Joey DiMarco, aged nineteen, had burned his draft card and vanished two weeks ago. A script so routine I could have held it up as idiot boards and cued them. You really don’t need a weatherman.

  ‘He’s a good boy,’ Mrs D told me.

  ‘Yeah,’ Mr D chipped in. ‘Good for nothin’.’

  Cue the next board. Mr D was like a younger version of Ed Begley in 12 Angry Men. All the fathers were variations on Begley or Lee J. Cobb. The Cobbs could be angry. Big men rising up out of their seats to stab fingers at me. The Begleys mixed the angry and the pathetic in equal measure. If they ever got out of the seat I could blow them back down.

  Joey had been working in his old man’s restaurant. I can’t remember its real name. It was smack in the middle of Little Italy at a time when Little Italy was a lot bigger than it is now and Chinatown hadn’t begun the inexorable creep north with Houston in its sights. I’d been there a few times myself—great aglio e olio, spaghetti swimming in the most pungent broth this side of Naples, you sweated garlic for four days ­after—and we all called the place Holy Joe’s. It was inadvertently accurate. The old man was holier than thou in all his attitudes. The kid had failed to graduate high school and the old man had stuck him in the cellar of the restaurant for the last three years, chopping onions, shredding lettuce, turning cabbage into coleslaw. He did this six days a week until nine in the evening. Where he went after that or on Sundays they didn’t know. That summed up a lot of the people I faced across the desk. They didn’t know their own kids. They couldn’t tell me the names of any of his current friends—those Mrs DiMarco named were the teen versions of the little boys who’d played in the street with her son eight or nine years back. If I were nineteen and spent my days and nights in a cellar, well aware that this was 1969, and that the world over my head had exploded into full colour with stereo two or three years ago, I’d’ve cut and run too. And I wouldn’t have waited on the Draft Board for my cue.

  I found Leonardo Lerici, childhood friend of the miscreant. He worked in an electrical goods store on 14th Street and studied double entry book-keeping at night. A kid out of his time. Determined to make good through the system—not that he would ever have called it that. His concession to his own generation was that his hair lapped his collar and the tie and shirt were in matching paisley swirls, the regular guy’s version of flower power.

  ‘Joey and I don’t see so much of each other any more,’ he said in answer to my enquiry. ‘You should tell Mrs DiMarco I’m sorry Joey’s gone. And what you shouldn’t tell her is she should pray he never comes back.’

  ‘Tha
t bad, eh?’

  ‘Joey was my best friend. We known each other since I don’t know when. We were christened the same day in the same church. Went to our first communion together. Difference being Joey’s first was also his last. You can’t keep a friend who lives like Joey does.’

  ‘Like how?’

  Leonardo looked at me as though he were weighing up the worth of telling me any more.

  ‘Like drugs?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Not Joey’s thing. He was happier with a bottle of Bud.’

  ‘And . . .’

  ‘Things . . . like . . . you have to tell me this won’t go any further . . . like it won’t get back to Joey.’

  ‘It won’t. Talking to me is like talking to a lawyer. I couldn’t tell even if the cops asked me to.’

  ‘Joey ran with a mean crowd. They were dealing in stolen stuff. I know this on account of he came in here once or twice offering me color TVs and stereos at a few dollars a pop. I blew him out. I haven’t seen him since Easter. Truth is Joey’s a punk. That’s what his old man made him.’

  Thank you, Dr Spock.

  ‘Were the cops onto him?’

  ‘Not that I heard. All I heard is he laughed off his draft notice. That was Joey all over. Reality didn’t apply to him. He’d’ve forgotten all about it until they issued the next one and told him to report for induction. Then I heard he’d split for Canada.’

  I spent that afternoon asking a few more kids the same questions—a quick tour of Italian–American youth in the age of Aquarius. The NYU student, brighter than all the rest, working his way through college, economics, pol sci and ‘You want fries with that?’—the young married, working double shifts, living in two rooms on Hester Street with an irresistibly fuckable wife and the inevitable, irresistible babe in arms, prisoner of his own cock—and the dope-smoking, effortlessly laid back hippie selling Afghan jackets, posters, Fugs albums and City Lights anthologies in a head shop on Tompkins Square. They all said the same thing. Joey had lit out for Canada. They hadn’t seen him. It was just what they’d heard in the old neighborhood, twixt Mott and Mulberry. And it was logical. It was what you’d do if you knew no better or no other. Of all the ways to dodge the draft it was the most drastic and the most simple. Kids like Joey DiMarco weren’t going to get college deferments, get commissioned in the Air Reserve, find a smart lawyer, cop a Rhodes Scholarship or land a non-combat posting in photography or information. They were always going to shout, cut and run or give in, grunt and die.