Everyone is Watching (10 page)

But residents are being cleared off the streets to make way for traffic, and Jane is worried. She knows that when the city planner looks down from his high tower he does not see a community; he
sees only buildings blocking his way. To him, a city is just a problem to be solved. Jane thinks that the growth of a city should be slow and organic, its development as natural as the growth of a
leaf.

She closes her notebook and sits back. In her mind is an image of an empty city. She sketches the outline of Manhattan Island on the cover of her notebook – a diagram devoid of life.

Everyone is watching Bucke and Whitman as they walk through the dining car. Of course, they recognize Whitman. Or perhaps it is because Walt is wearing no overshirt, which is
his custom on vacations. Bucke supposes this is all it is for him, just a vacation on a train.

Their accommodation is basic, a private room with two bench seats over which, at night time, are suspended two sleeping hammocks. While Bucke and Whitman are eating dinner, someone comes to hang
and furnish the beds. While they are eating breakfast someone folds the beds away. Walt wants to know who performs these tasks. Bucke explains that the porter must do it. As soon as they sit down
to eat, Walt dashes off. He returns an hour later. You were right, he says. There is a man who does it.

Bucke is struck by the darkness, the fading light. No one yet has come to light the lamps. A shadow has fallen across Whitman’s face. The sky is a darkening blue.

Tell me about the war, Bucke says.

It is through war that we understand our true capacity to love, says Walt. After witnessing horror one is filled with such an energy and sense of being alive – love spills from you –
and something is formed from this. It is like building something very tall and wide. It is like building something that fills all space. You feel you could live for ever because the truth of it is
that your body will not.

I love my brother very much, says Walt. And I loved the soldiers. When I saw the soldiers in that camp, I loved them more because they were all my brother. Love includes all things and all
people, Bucke.

I spent many nights in the camp. I wrote out letters for the soldiers. They told me great stories of their youth. There were many soldiers from Brooklyn and Long Island. Their past became my
past, and mine theirs. I sat beside them as they lay dying. The light was darkening in my eyes too. The blood that ran through my veins and spilled from theirs was the same. The sound of the men,
the groans and screams, laughter too, was the same. All people who are and who have ever lived and who would ever live existed in that tent. I slept in their beds. When they died I died. I have
died more than a thousand times through my connection with these men, yet I continue to live. This is how I know that life is eternal. Other people will continue to live even when I don’t.
The light has grown dim, hasn’t it, Bucke? We are sitting in darkness.

The interior of a Hudson River pier is a vast space. Shafts of light cut through the darkness, streaming in through openings in the roof. The Hudson is visible through holes in
the floor.

Back home in Jackson, Tennessee, Milton Moore knew his place. He was anonymous, his family large, his future uncertain. He looked for other places to go. Eventually, exchanging
one confinement for another, he joined the US Navy. He sailed the ocean on a ship filled with men. He dutifully wore his uniform. He manned and scrubbed the deck. He drilled and followed orders,
not knowing who the hell he was. He bided his time waiting for the ship to dock, and made his escape through the Hudson River piers.

Now, Milton is swept along on a brand-new tide, the surf of 42nd Street. He passes the men who holler the plots of movies outside the movie houses. Bright posters depict oiled
and bronzed women shrieking in horror, fear, desire, their mouths are wide open, red, black hollows for throats, heaving chests, long legs, nails. Men grimace in the cold: the taut lines of their
faces crack. Raw hands clutch admission tickets. He looks at the hang-low, slung-back featureless faces of boys too young to know any better.

Milton passes through the movie lines, breaks the crowd apart, cuts through the laugh and talk, the steamy breath of strangers intent on looking. The movie is about to begin.
They wave dollar bills, a mere formality for the night they will have, their bodies sitting in a dark room filled with other bodies, watching bodies fucking on a screen. Milton is not inconspicuous
here. He stands right out. Predators look. They do it quickly, clocking this guy then that guy. Milton is both the competition and the prize. On this street, he walks a little taller.

Milton stops for a drink in a dive bar, fresh off the ship, hot off the press. Men try on his hat. Men reach for his uniform, the space where medals should go. The bar is very
loud. He cannot distinguish music from speech. He walks through to the back of the bar and into the restroom. He catches his reflection in the mirror. His suit is already sullied and ridiculous,
this white uniform with this black body underneath. The guy at the urinal looks a second too long. Milton locks himself into a stall. He climbs on the toilet bowl and pushes the window open. He
shifts and shimmies out.

Milton sticks to the dark side of the street, walks east. He throws away his hat and his medalless coat. He wants it all to fall away from him, the whole of him. He walks all
night and all day. He thinks: Milton Moore was born. One day he was produced. His hands are the same. His heart and his head are the same. They have not been exchanged. This is the body he will
have for the rest of his life.

Milton hangs out at a bar on West Street in the Village where he enjoys the closely pressed bodies, which obscure his own, the loud music and low light. The men there are
shadows, nothing more, and the drinks are cheap. One night, after leaving the bar, as he is walking down the street, he hears footsteps running in his direction. He quickens his pace, hurries
towards the subway.

Wait! a voice calls. Wait!

He glances over his shoulder and sees a slim white man wearing a black leather jacket running after him, waving his arms in the air.

Wait! the man shouts again, and Milton stops.

The man halts and tries to catch his breath.

Please, he says. I’m Robert Mapplethorpe. I’m a photographer. I think you’re perfect.

Back at Robert’s studio, Milton strips.

Milton is perfectly in proportion, ribbed, tight torso, hard muscles, gigantic cock hanging there, partly erect.

Milton is nervous.

He is cold. The coldness only extenuates the hardness of his muscles. His nipples are hard. His cock is getting harder.

How would you like it if I photographed you? Robert says.

Robert takes a photograph of his head and his chest, his dick, his ass, and his hands.

Do you still have your uniform?

Milton shakes his head.

Robert tosses him another. He wears it for Robert. Then he takes it off, garment by garment, exposing himself in parts.

I don’t want my face and my body to be photographed at the same time, says Milton. I don’t want it to get back to my parents; I don’t want them to see.

So Robert will never show Milton’s face and his body in the same photograph and he will never tell anyone his name. From now on, Milton is never Milton, just a list of body parts.

Milton soon develops habits. He writes complex words on his hands in black marker pen. When he has covered his left palm, he covers his right. Robert doesn’t like it. He
says it’s like being rubbed down with the inside of a book. He gets Milton to clean his hands before they do it, but sometimes he doesn’t. There is also the handwriting, the awkward,
childlike scrawl, which Robert hates, though it is no worse than his.

Robert introduces Milton at parties but it is clear these people cannot understand why Robert is with a man like Milton because Milton is not articulate and he is not very
charming.

Robert says he mustn’t worry. This is not an English lesson. He is not a school kid. This is not a test. Milton doesn’t think this is true. Everything is school.
Everything is a test.

When Robert goes away he locks Milton in the apartment. A man called Edmund comes to check on him. Milton pours him a drink. Edmund tips his glass and asks him questions.
Milton thinks he is a psychiatrist, the way he talks and tips his drink, but he says he is a writer. He asks if Milton has ever read anything by him and Milton says no. Edmund walks over to the
bookcase and pulls a book down from the shelf. He looks at the spine then flicks through its pages. Milton rubs the palm of his hand on the couch, scrubs the words off. Suddenly, they seem
absurd.

Milton sees his own reflection in the fishes and the vases of Robert’s glass collection. His face is distorted in bulges and elongations. He is black, green, blue. He is
the head of the fish and the body and the tail. What else is he supposed to do all day? Robert has told him to stay inside. He looks at the glass. Milton surveys the room. It is a fucking museum.
Here is the picture,
Man in Polyester Suit
. A cheap grey suit with matching vest and a white shirt. The man’s stance is active. He looks like he is strolling somewhere. His fly is
undone and his cock is sticking out. The long vein that extends down the black shaft is the only part that really seems alive.

Milton cannot get out of Robert’s apartment. The door is locked and bolted on the outside. He presses his body against the door as if his body will again provide the
answer. He shoulders the door. He studies the smudged words on his hands. He presses them against the door. He tries the handle but the door is locked. He looks at the glass collection for an
answer. He is trapped. He is surrounded by glass too precious to break, much more precious than him.

Milton opens the window and climbs down the fire escape. He runs all the way to the Hudson. He stands there on the edge of the abandoned pier looking into the black water, the
swirls and eddies, the random movement of the water against the posts, hurried and frenetic. He jumps in. The water is warm. Forever the sailor, he swims to New Jersey.

Edmund White is standing in the huddle on the sidewalk, sheltering from the rain under the awning of an executive midtown hotel. He is forced along the sidewalk by the crowd
and forced down the slippery subway steps, through the ticket barrier, down the escalator. He enters a long tiled tunnel where a man is playing a saxophone. He presses himself against the wall.
Music echoes in this underground chamber. He sees a mosaic depicting the roots of a tree plunging down from the ceiling. The brown roots reach outwards. Beside the mosaic are the words of Goethe
– ‘The unnatural – that too is natural’.

Oh God.

He remembers.

The club lay buried deep underground. The deeper he descended, the more it resembled his subconscious. The floor was sticky with drying blood and semen. He wore nothing but his shoes. Men were
phantoms in the dark. Rooms were furnished with slings for fisting, meat blocks, chains and whips. Rooms were divided into separate cubicles. Here was one room. Here was another. Here was one body.
Here was another. Each room and each body had its own place there. Every space was filled to its internal limit. He wandered through the busy corridors. These men were no more real to him than the
dreams he had at night. He passed displays of dicks. As whole men they were unreachable but the individual segments of their bodies were OK – he could deal with parts. The dick was the part
he wanted most. It does not represent anything else.

The photographs appear all over the city. Where one is posted, hundreds soon follow. They are stuck onto lampposts, fences and walls. They are protected from the rain by
plastic wallets. Despite this precaution, the rain has turned the bold ink into cascading rivers. Each poster displays a collection of individual instances. There is the instant the person was last
seen alive, and the instant of the first collision, the instant of the second collision, the instant of the first fall, and the instant of the second fall, the instant of the rescue, the instant
the rescue was over and the instant the rescue became a recovery.

From 1941 right through to the ’60s, Robert Moses wants to build the Lower Manhattan Expressway, a ten-lane elevated road over Broome Street in the Lower East Side, built
forty feet above the ground. It will link the Holland Tunnel on the west side of Manhattan with the Williamsburg Bridge on the east. A branch will separate south along Mott Street, across Canal,
and connect to the Manhattan Bridge, cutting through SoHo and Little Italy.

Moses says this is the only way to ease congestion. Manhattan is missing vital cross-town roads. Streets like Spring, Prince and Bond have had their day. The factory buildings there are no
longer used. The Lower East Side is a slum where the children play out in the streets. Better to build new housing blocks on the outskirts of the city, build gardens and playgrounds, move these
people out.

Jane Jacobs storms down Broome Street with fliers in her hand. She points to the elegant cast-iron buildings and describes in detail to passers-by the intricate mouldings and
the history of its inhabitants – all this will be lost, she says, and all for a highway. The homes and businesses you see around you will disappear. We will lose our city. Is this what you
want?

She arranges to meet an artist on the corner of the Bowery and East Houston Street.

As they walk through the neighbourhood, up the Bowery, across Bond Street, Jane is thinking: Let the businesses reflect the local community. Let the blocks be short and low. Improve public
transportation. Stop people from getting into their cars. Listen to the women who live in this city. They are the ones who understand how it works.

She looks around her and imagines industrial workers going in and coming out through the heavy factory doors, the grind of machines, soot-heavy, rank air. Today, a different activity has taken
its place.