City on Fire (47 page)

“This is important, and I need you to listen. When you meet with the lawyers on Monday, I think you should tell them you want to push for a deal.”

“I want to push for a deal.”

“That’s right.”

“But sweetheart, Regan, why would I push for a deal, unless I’d done something wrong?”

Oh, what wouldn’t she have given to have her mother back? Or the next best thing, which since she was eleven years old had been her brother? It should have been William sitting in all those Board meetings. William fending off Amory. And it was William, she felt now, who could have explained to his namesake this sense of foreboding. No matter what he’d believed when he’d taken off all those years ago, he’d always been the one Daddy loved best. But then she remembered Andrew West. “It’s complicated,” she said.

34

HOW YOU SKIP SCHOOL IS, you lie. You shower like it’s any other morning, or run a wet comb through your hair for lifelike simulation. At a quarter to seven, you turn off “Dr.” Zig—this city is not a machine, it’s a body, and it’s ly—and with your army-surplus bookbag full of Marx and Engels and the moldering remains of yesterday’s uneaten lunch, you trudge upstairs. You pour your brothers their Lucky Charms, making sure neither bowl has more marshmallows than the other. (The oaty bits don’t matter; they’ll end up all over the table anyway, or crushed to calcium-fortified powder on the floor. Incidentally, when did you ever get Lucky Charms as a kid?) To test your invisibility, try grumbling about the sleety wait awaiting you at the bus stop. Your mom could offer to drive you, torpedoing your plans: far harder to escape from the hall monitors at school than from this defenseless little house. But this assumes Mom will be listening to you, which she won’t. Instead, she’ll be circling in and out of the kitchen, trying to figure out where she left a) her keys, or b) the other earring that looks like this (holding up earring), or c) both. Her eyes are puffy. She’s been up late again. On the phone, again. You may want to ask her who that was on the other end of the line, but remember that at a time like this, her attention is unwelcome, and nowadays, it is always a time like this; her attention is always unwelcome. As is its lack. In any case, you already know who she’s been talking to. You are the Prophet Charlie, after all: seer, teen visionary, adept of noumena. Everything that is to unfold has done so already in your head.

When the Lucky Charms are just lurid milk, your mother still waiting for the babysitter, head out the door. After a couple of minutes at the bus stop, start walking, ostensibly to keep warm, ostensibly just to the next bus stop. No need to look to see if your former home has vanished yet into the humdrum gray behind you; you’ll be able to feel it, the sudden eclipse of the tractor beam the house puts out. Of its forcefield of sadness.

HOW TO MAKE A REVOLUTIONARY CONSCIOUSNESS IS: educate yourself. On the train, for example, read the same two pages of Das Kapital over and over, willing them to make sense. Or give up and flip back through dog-eared pages in the Bible you’re still not quite ready to abandon. Behind the closed doors of the Phalanstery, the four core phalanges and various hangers-on are already murmuring in ardent exegesis, or prepping for secret missions that will someday (once you’re ready) include you. How will you know you’re ready? You’ll just know, Nicky says. Meantime, he lets you sit in with the little clique of grad students that gathers weekly to talk Nietzsche with him. He’ll even let you stick around for a private lesson after he sends the other novices back toward dorms and classrooms. Still, you’ll get left behind when he and S.G. take off in the battered white van Sol stole from a gig he used to have as a window-washer. Sol steals anything not nailed down—meaning, you suppose, that he has already achieved revolutionary consciousness. You, you’re still fighting your way free of Thou shalt.

HOW TO TURN ORDINARY OBJECTS against the system that produced them: “Take a wet paper towel and pour some flour in the center. Then wrap it up tight with a rubber band. It’ll throw like a softball, but anything it hits will be covered in what, as far as your victim is concerned, is a strange white powder.” Or: “Pick up the phone. Call a politician to have a rumor confirmed or denied. Call another politician to have him confirm or deny the first politician’s confirmation or denial.” Or: “Take a needle and poke a hole in the top of each of a dozen eggs. Let them sit in a warm place for about a week. Then go up on a roof and do what comes naturally.” Not exactly likely to unshackle the species, right? But there are many things that are beyond your understanding. Sol Grungy, who’s come in at some point during this little practicum, will be sneering, as if sensing your reservations, but Nicky will reach up to smack him on the back of the head. Now watch out a window as the two of them disappear into the little house out back. Or rattle off in the van toward points unknown. Wonder: If you’re not ready now, in your yearning to go there with them—how will you ever be?

HOW? You’ll work your ass off, is how. They’ll leave you with orders to staple more tinfoil over the Phalanstery’s front walls and windows. Sol has stolen this foil, too, thirty or forty rolls—From each according to his means—for reasons no one bothers to explain. Maybe it’s supposed to drive the pigeons away? In any event, you roll out great sheets, staple them with a staple gun. Tucking it into crannies where the floor has pulled away from the wall … there’s something kind of sexual in the motion. Something rhythmic, something angry, like the Stooges record on the turntable behind you. You should be sitting in Trig right now in Nassau County, but no one out there cares, not even the hall monitors. Your suburban life is closing down like an aperture, while the city swells to fill the sky. It occurs to you that it’s been an hour since you thought of Sam.

At some point, as you work on the walls, Sewer Girl will bring you pills and a beer; her tread on the floorboard makes “Gimme Danger” skip. Now imagine the warmth of her big white body raising the air temperature near your neck a few degrees, just before she touches a cold can to the skin. The fact that the two of you are here alone signifies they’re starting to trust you. You can complete this part of the revolutionary program without direct supervision, assuming that Sewer Girl hasn’t been left behind in a supervisory role—that she’s as clueless about the big picture as you are. In fact, it’s tempting to think she’s been sent just to tease you, to swell your ’nads beyond the limits of endurance, but such thinking is self-regarding, neo-Humanist. Look: Isn’t she already retreating to work on her own little patch of unfoiled wall? The lath there looks naked, like bone.

But back home, in the mirror, the muscles of your arms will have gotten a little bigger. How surprised Mom would be, if she found out you’ve been doing chores. Voluntarily!

HOW TO MARK YOURSELF AS DIFFERENT: Grab a Sharpie from the coffee can on your desk and copy, to the best of your memory, the tattoo everyone seems to have—the one Nicky has, the one Sol has, the one Sam has. The mark of the Post-Humanist Phalanx that proliferates on the cornices of apartment buildings, on housing-project handball courts, on the notebooks of the grad students, on the sides of parked cars, on subway station entrances, scratched into the plexiglass of a phone booth, as if mechanically reproduced all over the East Village, stamped out in some factory of the image. Once, on your way to Penn Station to catch the LIRR home, you’ll see it inked on a stranger’s forearm, someone you don’t even think knows what it means. Maybe you’ll look now and see you’ve gotten it upside down. There are still things to learn, obviously; you aren’t ready yet. But the capital you do have, Nicky would say, is time.

WHAT WILL MOVE YOU DECISIVELY CLOSER is spraycans. Bombing, they call it. They tell you to dress all in black: black sweatshirt, black jeans, black watchcap. You would think your mom would notice this, but she’s just pleased your Ziggy Stardust phase is over.

You work in teams of two, one to spray, one to look out for cops, and at first you’re the lookout, lingering on the corner in a posture of forced nonchalance. No sweat. Your entire life, or anyway the last few years of it, has been a posture of forced nonchalance. No one but Sam has ever guessed at the tensed interior, the turmoil in your guts. Down the block, in profile, green-haired D. Tremens moves his arms in front of a tenement building, as if doing tai chi. He’s not a big fan of yours, you can tell. But maybe it’s not personal; D. Tremens is not a big fan of anything. What he is is committed. And he trusts you to be ready, at the first sign of cops, to skitter off into the darkness, letting loose your war-whoop. Here is the bloop of a siren. Do it, Prophet. Run.

The slap of combat boots will echo in the mazelike grid for seconds after you’ve stopped. Your laughter will surprise you. When was the last time you laughed? (Don’t answer that.) Here you are, deep in Alphaville, where even the cops won’t follow at this time of night. But you’re a part of the lawlessness now; it can’t hurt you. Your partner, having caught up, hands you a tallboy. You raise it in the air. “Here’s to Mickey Sullivan,” you say, because you’ve used him as an alibi again tonight. D.T.’s eye-roll can be made out even here, under the busted streetlight. “Famous revolutionary,” you say, and the laughter pumps out of your chest like blood, great almost painful spurts of it splashing up the building faces toward the marquee moon.

Then it’s your turn. You are the one crouching before the metal security gate of what during daytime is a dimestore. You are the one shaking the can. The liquid thunk of the ball inside the cylinder seems deafening; you are tensed, listening for any hint of trouble. But everything has been teed up for you. There are still other levels, you’re becoming aware, whole echelons of activity beyond those you’ve encountered: the milk-crates, the foil, the whispers in honeycombed rooms; the heavy-looking duffelbag you saw Sol and Nicky lugging through the dusk toward the little house out back; the changes under way out there, where only the two of them go, plus wherever they’ve all been disappearing to in the van … but you know that you are here tonight for a reason, locking into your fate. The rush of paint sounds like the blast of a hot-air balloon. THE SYSTEM IS A CRIME, you write. THEY DON’T DESERVE A DIME. Then the logo, blooming out of nothingness, the symbol you’ve perfected in the margins of tests and in Wite-Out on your boots’ steely toes: the five slashing strokes. The little crown of flame. Like this:

35

THE WONDERS OF THE MAGAZINE began with its title: a nod to the R&B magus Wilson Pickett, himself nodding back to Chris Kenner. Though perhaps “fanzine” was the better word, as its formal debts were less to any national glossy than to the small-batch booklets that had started cropping up in head shops and record exchanges at the dawn of the 1970s. Cheap xerography blurred the images, and Samantha’s prose was likewise loose, a trying on and discarding of styles. Yet with these crude tools, she’d managed to fix to the page a story far richer and stranger than anyone back in Flower Hill could have imagined for her. It was as if she’d been afraid her life might otherwise fly away, and knowing the fear was justified—wanting to reach in somehow and warn her—was surely part of the compulsion Richard Groskoph felt in the waning days of January, sinking deeper into Land of a Thousand Dances.

The greatest part, though, was just the intimacy of the thing. Reading it was like subletting a small apartment in someone else’s head, right down to the cryptic signifiers she assigned to her friends: S.G., Sol, N.C.—Iggy? To an outsider, they meant nothing. There was, however, a subscription label on the back of one of the issues, and on the third night, after his fifth or sixth read-through, Richard had let the name there carry him to the phone book, and then to the Upper East Side. He should have guessed Keith Lamplighter would be just another white-shoe midlifer clinging to splinters of the rock ’n’ roll cross. By his name, by his neighborhood will you know him. But the degree of tangency almost didn’t matter; for a few minutes, Richard was connected to someone who was connected to Samantha. It was only later, back at the desk, that he began to worry the guy might really for some reason get in touch with the cops, tipping them off that Richard had secured his own copies of the fanzine. Or no—wasn’t the worry really that he’d now divulged to a stranger the very name he’d been trying to protect?

Probably not, he decided, pouring himself a drink. The victim’s continued anonymity had done little to quell the tabloid fascination with what had happened in Central Park that night. Maybe the fascination and the anonymity were even related, in a way that belied everything Richard knew about what made arrangments of ink on paper come alive for readers. Given the number of unsolved shootings in the city, it was at any rate striking that this one had now migrated from the police blotter to the op-eds, which from a scant few details—female, white, seventeen—had conjured up a sense of her as a symbol.

As Richard himself was conjuring, he realized, when he should have been finishing his article, his book. In the past, bouts of procrastination had tended to anticipate a more total block. He wasn’t sure he could bounce back from another one. And he still felt ethically iffy about the fanzines—especially now that, amid the mess of his desk, the third issue, the one he’d taken uptown, could not be found. So the next morning, when the booze wore off, he sealed the other two in a weighted plastic bag, sunk it in a bucket of water, and stuck the whole package in his freezer.

Where it should have remained forever, really, amid boxes of frozen veggies and pizza slices gray with frost. But as the specifics faded from memory, the fanzines’ general mise-en-scène came into sharper relief. It was with him at night as he fell asleep and in the morning when his eyes opened: the scuzzy rock clubs, the unlocatable brownstone she’d discovered in the middle of 1976. There seemed to be a whole secret city out there, reached through hidden panels and swinging doors. The only points of congruity between it and the New York he thought he’d returned to were an air of abandonment and the omnipresent graffiti.