Chronic City

CHAPTER Twenty-four

It might have been three or four AM before I thought to ask Richard to explain the sense of the French slogan he’d hurled at his moment of fleeting pugilistic triumph and then cried two or three more times until the enraged policemen muffled him with their own shouts and grunts and pinned us both to the floor of the St. Ignatius Rockefeller ER, to bind our wrists and also bind us together with a double butterfly of plastic cuffs, much like the twist ties uselessly enclosed with certain varieties of garbage bags. By this time we’d accepted the fact that we weren’t going to be released despite the ritual palliative lies (“Don’t worry, you’ll be out in four hours”) that greeted each of our serial attempts to conduct a serious and reasoning conversation (our attempts, that is, to give them adequate chance to note our distinguishing difference from their milieu, and of the comic in-appropriateness of our circumstantial passage through it, therefore to send us forth into the night with hearty apologies and no further ado, etc.) with one or another of our captors and handlers. These included, first, the young and bruised arresting policemen, who could be excused any grudge against us but actually seemed to revert to generic and jovial carelessness in our regard once we’d been added to the van full of other arrestees; next the detectives, milling in the station as we were initially processed, our wallets and wristwatches vouchered, our shoelaces also confiscated, those detectives who appeared so worldly and approachable in their plain clothes and worn faces (yet these were duplicate souls to the younger policemen, only graduated to a more or less adult mien); and last, the weary and marginally humane janitorial types presiding over the actual cells in that station-house basement, who after several rounds of complaining stuck their own quarters in the vending machines to provide us with the cheese-and-peanut-butter crackers that became our only nourishment through our whole ordeal, out of some apparent base sense of human dignity or justice-yet perhaps also with the dull yet inexhaustible curiosity of those pushing snacks through the monkey-cage bars at the zoo. Check it out, the white guys in fancy coats, they eat! Having had no dinner or even snack through our afternoon and evening hours in the hospital, we ate unashamedly, licking our fingertips for the monosodium glutamate crumbs.

Richard and I had pleaded to be placed together and been refused, had instead been housed in proximate cells, each designed for one man but holding two-a short bench for the one, the filthy floor for the other-with others who’d been plucked off the snowstormy streets under suspicion of possession of something or another and gathered in our own van full of fresh arrestees before we’d been unloaded here. Neither venue, bench or floor, invited sleep, but in Richard’s cell and in my own our cell mates seized the bench and curled into an angry self-cuddle. My cell mate, Darnell, had already played a variety of roles in our confused epic: in the van, where we’d all been uncuffed, then threaded together into a daisy chain, he’d whisperingly badgered and threatened me until I accepted a fingerprint-filthy baggie of some loose leaves (presumably pot, though compared to Watt’s steroidal buds this resembled lawn clippings) in order to shift it from the elastic at the back of his underwear where he’d had it hidden, to pass down the line for some unclear purpose. I’d finally taken the contraband behind my back, fumbling it from his fingertips to mine, only to have it refused by the next in line. After some squabbling between Darnell and this uncooperator, and a little more failed negotiation between Darnell and myself (Richard turned his head, disgusted at what I’d gotten myself into), the baggie fell to the floor of the van between us, to be discovered there by one of the officers.

Darnell’s next hijink occurred after processing while we waited for removal to the basement cells, in the care of the senior detectives. Here, lined up at a wall facing the second-story window, we prisoners contemplated in silence the snow falling to earth with punishing steadiness. We couldn’t, however, see over the high window sill to chart its accumulation, which we judged instead by the inches piling improbably atop a streetlight at eye level. Making conversation to no one in particular, Darnell declared that he sold stock by telephone. “No shit?” said one of the detectives. When Darnell lavished a series of investing tips on the earnestly listening cops, he persuaded them. A few even took notes. When he promised he’d make the detectives wealthy if they called their brokers in the morning, one deadpanned, “Fuck that, in the morning I’m firing him, and you got the job,” and we all laughed, Darnell too. Yet he seemed to feel he’d earned no special treatment from the police. The credit Darnell had earned was with us, his natural peers, for having been entertaining.

He entertained us, too, during the interminable wait for fingerprinting in the windowless basement, before we’d even seen our cells, let alone been disbursed to them. He narrated what he’d been doing when arrested, cut loose due to his “call center” having closed early for the storm, he’d been going from one nightspot to another in the snow, trying to get laid-looking for some strange, was how he put it. Then he reassured us, mentioning the worse scrapes he’d been in in his days, the actual prison time he’d shrugged off. We should be happy to know we were in for nothing so bad tonight, we were so obviously just a load of fools harmless to one another and to society. We’d only been arrested to make numbers, to keep the mayor’s lifestyle imperatives satisfied. But we weren’t going home, we should be certain of that, too. No matter what they told us we’d still be here in the morning, and lucky to be seen by a judge before tomorrow afternoon. Like Darnell’s stock tips, this was, alas, persuasive.

Darnell’s final guise was as an angry sleep-talker, from his huddle on that bench. When Richard and I found we could sit together at the shared bars of our two cages, our backs to the wall, to talk, we did so, despite the crud on the floor and the disgruntled chorus coming from those on benches or with their heads propped in their hands, those wishing to soak quietly in their defeat. As my conversation with Richard became the only sound and our keepers even damped the lights, as if guiding a planeload of Atlantic crossers into one of those false, foreshortened overnights to London or Paris, Darnell began adding a keening commentary, his limbs twitching with each exclamation. These nightmare fragments seem to issue from his prisoner’s id. “Clock start the minute you walk in the place,” he warned. Then, “Boy don’t need a life preserver, boy need an ass preserver.” Once, he screamed, “Attica! Attica!”

Richard and I spoke of Perkus Tooth without mentioning his name. Richard’s rage was gone, worn or arrested out of him. He told me a few things I’d been unable to imagine, about Perkus in high school and the single year of NYU he’d managed, and about the birth of Perkus the broadsider, the invisible overnight fame he’d created for himself when the city had still been open to Beat or punk self-invention, that city Perkus had always chided me for failing to know: Frank O’Hara and Joe Brainard, Mailer and Broyard and Krim, Jane Jacobs, Lenny Bruce, Warhol and Lou Reed, all of it, including Patti Smith and Richard Hell and Jim Carroll, poets declaring themselves rock stars before they even had songs, Jean-Michel Basquiat writing SAMO, Philippe Petit crossing that impossible distance of sky between the towers, now unseen for so many months behind the gray fog. Richard left Perkus’s name unspoken but he named a lot of others, threw in a few of his own heroes, too, and if he didn’t mention Perkus’s the reason might be that it would have seemed too complete a processional, the sound of a door being quietly but firmly shut forever.

“Les Non-Dupes?” Richard repeated when I asked, then laughed to himself. “A joke. One day he told me it was the basis of our friendship: we weren’t dupes. The Two Non-Dupes of Horace Mann, he called us. Really he’d only flatter me to set up another teardown session, I’m guessing you know what I mean. He used to mock me for airing out my high-school French, so I insisted we call our gang Les Deux Non-Dupes. We’d shout Les Non-Dupes refusé! at boring assemblies, stupid bullshit like that. Or write it on our homework.”

Richard spoke of himself as much as of Perkus. In return I reminisced, too, of my life before I came to New York City, such as it was. I talked about Bloomington, about becoming an actor in junior high, my emancipation. (I only didn’t mention Janice Trumbull, for I found myself confused about her whenever I tried.) The two of us memorialized Perkus by talking of ourselves, talking simply, as we’d never done before. Murmuring through the bars of those two cells, we were careless about which ears might listen, for we each made certain to say nothing to betray him. Perkus was dead and we protected him the only way we still could, by not offering his secrets in this ashtray of human freedom, littered as it was with stubbed-out ends.

It was close to four when a weary detective came downstairs and began whispering to the pair of keepers that had been stationed here below. I caught a tone of sarcastic delight in their exchange. Then, without raising the lights, the keepers came to our two cells and curled a summoning finger at us where we sat.

“You really got some pull to go with your camel-hair coats,” said one of the cops, impressed despite his chafing tone. “I’d have sworn you was just another pair of bozos.”

“What’s going on?” asked Richard.

“Somebody got a judge out of bed,” said the cop. “So now, you tell me, who are you guys?”

“I’m not sure,” said Richard. “Let me see who got the judge out of bed and I’ll get back to you on that.”

In the booking area we discovered Arnheim’s short aide, the blonde I’d seen maneuvering the mayor at his party. She carried such an air of machinelike destructive efficiency that they should have set her to digging the Second Avenue subway tunnel and saved themselves a lot of heartache. She wore a comically practical parka, snow glistening in the furry unibrow of its hood, and creamy leather boots engulfing her tucked slacks to her knees. When she saw us coming, shuffling moronically, toes curled to keep our feet inside our laceless shoes, she shoved a BlackBerry into her purse, rolled her eyes at Richard, and stuck out her hand to me. “I’m Claire Carter,” she said, and before I could speak, added, “Believe me, I know who you are.”

“Sorry to have woken you. I appreciate your getting us out of here.”

“My driver’s waiting,” she said. “I’d give you both a lift uptown, but I’ve been informed you’ve got about half an hour’s worth of paperwork before they can decommission your shoelaces, so you’re on your own. I spoke to your pregnant common-law wife, Richard, she knows you’re not dead.”

“Claire, have I told you lately to go fuck yourself?”

“You’re welcome.” The smile she brandished was no less convincing than any I’d seen her produce.

A sleepy half hour later Richard and I stepped out, in shoes with laces, onto the white-smothered pavement. The snowfall had eased to a trickle, having satisfied itself to barrage the city beneath a foot or so. The moon was gone, dawn not close, the pillowscape of buried cars and newspaper boxes and trash cans lit only by street-lamp and the red warning blinkers of the scarce passing plows, which seemed as much to be tunneling for their own survival as breaking a useful path for anything that might follow. Nothing tried. The notion of a cab was too forlorn to speak the word aloud. Perkus Tooth was dead and we didn’t deserve a cab and none was given. We trudged, plowing with our feet in our laced soaked salt-ruined shoes six long blocks to the subway, the Lexington line. I wouldn’t have known how to find it, but Richard did. That underworld was steamy and ferocious and constant and a spectral empty car of the 4 train drew us up to Eighty-sixth Street.

We set out walking together through the snow again, downtown to where we’d part, he going toward Georgina Hawkmanaji’s, on Park Avenue, myself east toward home. Or at least I let him take that impression. We didn’t speak. I meant to keep walking all the way to York and Sixty-fifth, to the Friendreth. I’d keep my promise to walk Ava, that hiccup assassin. Now that we were safely out of hospitals and jail cells and subterranean trains I could admire the night’s supreme reduced stillness, the storm now just dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s of its masterpiece. It might be my task to abide with this night until exhaustion killed me as hiccups had killed Perkus. Until I saw the vacated rooms I might believe he had somehow transported himself there, just to drop the needle on “Shattered” or “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner” one more time. I didn’t need Richard to know. I felt he was called home (for Richard now had a home, however improbably) as a baby is called to crawl the darkened line pointing through his mother’s navel. Richard Abneg had a head start on me, I now understood-he’d begun saying farewell to Perkus Tooth sometime just after high school. I’d only had a few months, or a few hours. I wasn’t sure when I’d begun, but it wasn’t enough.

At the corner of Eighty-fourth we came upon the giant escaped tiger, moving silently along the side street to cross Lexington there, heading east, away from Central Park. We froze when its long streetlamp-foreshadow darkened the intersection, so stood rooted like statuary in our deep footprints as the creature padded to the center of Lexington’s lanes, under the dangling yellow traffic lights which shaded the great burgeoning white-and-yellow fur of its ears and ruff now green, now red, the procession of timed stoplights running for miles beyond through the calming storm. The tiger was tall, a second-story tiger, though not as enormous as its legend. Still, it could have craned its neck and nibbled the heavy-swinging traffic light which hummed in the whispering silence that surrounded us. I found myself thinking the tiger should be measured in hands, like a horse, perhaps because I found myself wishing I could rush to it and grip its striped, smooth-ridged fur with both hands and also bury my face there, then climb into its fur and be borne away elsewhere, out of Perkus’s city, out of my own. This was a death urge, and I did nothing. The tiger had no remotely mechanical aspect to it, nor appeared in any sense to have emerged from underground or be about to return to fugitive excavations, seemed instead to be wholly of flesh and fur, leather-black nostrils steaming above a grizzly muzzle baring just the slightest fang tips and fringed with beaded ice, its own refrozen breath or drool. There seemed no reason to rub Richard’s nose in this fact, which he’d certainly be capable of observing himself. The tiger’s passage across the empty avenue was languorous, hypnotic, serene.

We weren’t hidden, and when the tiger leveraged that mighty head from one side to another, looking both ways before crossing, we were caught in the psychedelically deep-flat headlamps of its pale gaze for an instant and then released. The tiger either didn’t see us or didn’t care. We were beneath or beyond its concerns, wherever it was going, whatever it might be pursuing or, less likely, eluding. Fearless and splendid, the tiger seemed quite outside the scope of Tiger-Watch or of the tracking throngs that massed to rubberneck at its destroyings. Possibly there were two tigers, the famous and chaotic one that lit the tabloid frenzy, and this more dignified one, who showed itself to us alone. It was after all moving along Eighty-fourth Street, toward the block where Brandy’s Piano Bar and Perkus’s old apartment lay condemned. Perhaps this was the tiger that put things back together instead of destroying them. Its touch seemed light enough, unlike mine or Richard’s tonight. In that spirit it regarded us or didn’t, shone its light on us and then shut it off again, and was gone, leaving only claw prints and, with its tail, an inadvertent serpentine signature lashed into a parked Mayflower van’s snowy windshield.