The Bonfire Of The Vanities Part 3

Kramer climbed the stairs and came out onto 161st Street. The sky was clearing. Before him, right there, rose the great bowl of Yankee Stadium. Beyond the stadium were the corroding hulks of the Bronx. Ten or fifteen years ago they had renovated the stadium. They had spent a hundred million dollars on it. That was supposed to lead to "the revitalization of the heart of the Bronx." What a grim joke! Since then, this precinct, the 44th, these very streets, had become the worst in the Bronx for crime. Kramer saw that every day, too.

He started walking up the hill, up 161st Street, in his sneakers, carrying his A&P bag with his shoes inside. The people of these sad streets were standing outside the stores and short-order counters along 161st.

He looked up-and for an instant he could see the old Bronx in all its glory. At the top of the hill, where 161st Street crossed the Grand Concourse, the sun had broken through and had lit up the limestone face of the Concourse Plaza Hotel. From this distance it could still pa.s.s for a European resort hotel from the 1920s. The Yankee ballplayers used to live there during the season, the ones who could afford it, the stars. He always pictured them living in big suites. Joe DiMaggio, Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig...Those were the only names he could remember, although his father used to talk about a lot more. O golden Jewish hills of long ago! Up there at the top of the hill, 161st Street and the Grand Concourse had been the summit of the Jewish dream, of the new Canaan, the new Jewish borough of New York, the Bronx! Kramer's father had grown up seventeen blocks from here, on 178th Street-and he had dreamed of nothing in this world more glorious than having an apartment...someday...in one of these grand buildings on the summit, on the Grand Concourse. They had created the Grand Concourse as the Park Avenue of the Bronx, except the new land of Canaan was going to do it better. The Concourse was wider than Park Avenue, and it had been more lushly landscaped-and there you had another grim joke. Did you want an apartment on the Concourse? Today you could have your pick. The Grand Hotel of the Jewish dream was now a welfare hotel, and the Bronx, the Promised Land, was 70 percent black and Puerto Rican.

The poor sad Jewish Bronx! When he was twenty-two, just entering law school, Kramer had begun to think of his father as a little Jew who over the course of a lifetime had finally made the great Diasporic migration from the Bronx to Oceanside, Long Island, all of twenty miles away, and who still trundled back and forth every day to a paper-carton warehouse in the West Twenties, in Manhattan, where he was "comptroller." He, Kramer, would be the lawyer...the cosmopolitan...And now, ten years later, what had happened? He was living in an ant colony that made the old man's Tract Colonial three-bedroom in Oceanside look like San Simeon and taking the D train-the D train!- train!-to work every day in...the Bronx!

Right before Kramer's eyes the sun began to light up the other great building at the top of the hill, the building where he worked, the Bronx County Building. The building was a prodigious limestone parthenon done in the early thirties in the Civic Moderne style. It was nine stories high and covered three city blocks, from 161st Street to 158th Street. Such open-faced optimism they had, whoever dreamed up that building back then!

Despite everything, the courthouse stirred his soul. Its four great facades were absolute jubilations of sculpture and bas-relief. There were groups of cla.s.sical figures at every corner. Agriculture, Commerce, Industry, Religion, and the Arts, Justice, Government, Law and Order, and the Rights of Man-n.o.ble Romans wearing togas in the Bronx! Such a golden dream of an Apollonian future!

Today, if one of those lovely cla.s.sical lads ever came down from up there, he wouldn't survive long enough to make it to 162nd Street to get a Choc-o-pop or a blue Shark. They'd whack him out just to get his toga. It was no joke, this precinct, the 44th. On the 158th Street side the courthouse overlooked Franz Sigel Park, which from a sixth-floor window was a beautiful swath of English-style landscaping, a romance of trees, bushes, gra.s.s, and rock outcroppings that stretched down the south side of the hill. Practically n.o.body but him knew the name of Franz Sigel Park anymore, however, because n.o.body with half a brain in his head would ever go far enough into the park to reach the plaque that bore the name. Just last week some poor devil was stabbed to death at 10:00 a.m. on one of the concrete benches that had been placed in the park in 1971 in the campaign to "provide urban amenities to revitalize Franz Sigel Park and reclaim it for the community." The bench was ten feet inside the park. Somebody killed the man for his portable radio, one of the big ones known in the District Attorney's Office as Bronx attache cases. n.o.body from the District Attorney's Office went out into the park on a sunny day in May to have lunch, not even somebody who could bench-press two hundred pounds, the way he could. Not even a court officer, who had a uniform and legally carried a .38, ever did such a thing. They stayed inside the building, this island fortress of the Power, of the white people, like himself, this Gibraltar in the poor sad Sarga.s.so Sea of the Bronx.

On the street he was about to cross, Walton Avenue, three orange-and-blue Corrections Department vans were lined up, waiting to get into the building's service bay. The vans brought prisoners from the Bronx House of Detention, Rikers Island, and the Bronx Criminal Court, a block away, for appearances at Bronx County Supreme Court, the court that handled serious felonies. The courtrooms were on the upper floors, and the prisoners were brought into the service bay. Elevators took them up to holding pens on the courtroom floors.

You couldn't see inside the vans, because their windows were covered by a heavy wire mesh. Kramer didn't have to look. Inside those vans would be the usual job lots of blacks and Latins, plus an occasional young Italian from the Arthur Avenue neighborhood and once in a while an Irish kid from up in Woodlawn or some stray who had the miserable luck to pick the Bronx to get in trouble in.

"The chow," Kramer said to himself. Anybody looking at him would have actually seen his lips move as he said it.

In about forty-five seconds he would learn that somebody was, in fact, looking at him. But at that moment it was nothing more than the usual, the blue-and-orange vans and him saying to himself, "The chow."

Kramer had reached that low point in the life of an a.s.sistant district attorney in the Bronx when he is a.s.sailed by Doubts. Every year forty thousand people, forty thousand incompetents, dimwits, alcoholics, psychopaths, knockabouts, good souls driven to some terrible terminal anger, and people who could only be described as stone evil, were arrested in the Bronx. Seven thousand of them were indicted and arraigned, and then they entered the maw of the criminal justice system-right here-through the gateway into Gibraltar, where the vans were lined up. That was about 150 new cases, 150 more pumping hearts and morose glares, every week that the courts and the Bronx County District Attorney's Office were open. And to what end? The same stupid, dismal, pathetic, horrifying crimes were committed day in and day out, all the same. What was accomplished by a.s.sistant D.A.'s, by any of them, through all this relentless stirring of the muck? The Bronx crumbled and decayed a little more, and a little more blood dried in the cracks. The Doubts! One thing was accomplished for sure. The system was fed, and those vans brought in the chow. Fifty judges, thirty-five law clerks, 245 a.s.sistant district attorneys, one D.A.-the thought of which made Kramer twist his lips in a smile, because no doubt Weiss was up there on the sixth floor right now screaming at Channel 4 or 7 or 2 or 5 about the television coverage he didn't get yesterday and wants today-and Christ knew how many criminal lawyers, Legal Aid lawyers, court reporters, court clerks, court officers, correction officers, probation officers, social workers, bail bondsmen, special investigators, case clerks, court psychiatrists-what a vast swarm had to be fed! And every morning the chow came in, the chow and the Doubts.

Kramer had just set foot on the street when a big white Pontiac Bonneville came barreling by, a real boat, with prodigious overhangs, front and back, the kind of twenty-foot frigate they stopped making about 1980. It came screeching and nose-diving to a stop on the far corner. The Bonneville's door, a gigantic expanse of molded sheet metal, about five feet wide, opened with a sad torque pop, and a judge named Myron Kovitsky climbed out. He was about sixty, short, thin, bald, wiry, with a sharp nose, hollow eyes, and a grim set to his mouth. Through the back window of the Bonneville, Kramer could see a silhouette sliding over into the driver's seat vacated by the judge. That would be his wife.

The sound of the enormous old car door opening and the sight of this little figure getting out were depressing. The judge, Mike Kovitsky, comes to work in a greaser yacht practically ten years old. As a Supreme Court judge, he made $65,100. Kramer knew the figures by heart. He had maybe $45,000 left after taxes. For a sixty-year-old man in the upper reaches of the legal profession, that was pathetic. Downtown...in the world of Andy h.e.l.ler...they were paying people right out of law school that much to start. And this man whose car goes thwop thwop every time he opens the door is at the top of the hierarchy here in the island fortress. He, Kramer, occupied some uncertain position in the middle. If he played his cards right and managed to ingratiate himself with the Bronx Democratic organization, this every time he opens the door is at the top of the hierarchy here in the island fortress. He, Kramer, occupied some uncertain position in the middle. If he played his cards right and managed to ingratiate himself with the Bronx Democratic organization, this-thwop!- was the eminence to which he might aspire three decades from now. was the eminence to which he might aspire three decades from now.

Kramer was halfway across the street when it began: "Yo! Kramer!"

It was a huge voice. Kramer couldn't tell where it was coming from.

"You c.o.c.ksucker!"

Whuh? It stopped him in his tracks. A sensation-a sound-like rus.h.i.+ng steam-filled his skull. It stopped him in his tracks. A sensation-a sound-like rus.h.i.+ng steam-filled his skull.

"Hey, Kramer, you piece a s.h.i.+t!"

It was another voice. They- "Yo! f.u.c.khead!"

They were coming from the back of the van, the blue-and-orange van, the one closest to him, no more than thirty feet away. He couldn't see them. He couldn't make them out through the mesh over the windows.

"Yo! Kramer! You Hymie a.s.shole!"

Hymie! How did they even know he was Jewis.h.!.+ He didn't look-Kramer wasn't a-why would they-it rocked him! How did they even know he was Jewis.h.!.+ He didn't look-Kramer wasn't a-why would they-it rocked him!

"Yo! Kramer! You f.a.ggot! Kiss my a.s.s!"

"Aaayyyyyyy, maaaaan, you steeeck uppy ya.s.s! You steeeck uppy ya.s.s!"

A Latin voice-the very barbarism of the p.r.o.nunciation twisted the knife in a little farther.

"Yo! s.h.i.+tface!"

"Aaaayyyyyy! You keesa sol! You keeeesa sol!"

"Yo! Kramer! Eatcho muvva!"

"Aaaaaaayy! Maaaan! Fokky you! Fokky you!"

It was a chorus! A rain of garbage! A Rigoletto Rigoletto from the sewer, from the rancid gullet of the Bronx! from the sewer, from the rancid gullet of the Bronx!

Kramer was still out in the middle of the street. What should he do? He stared at the van. He couldn't make out a thing. Which ones?...Which of them...from out of that endless procession of baleful blacks and Latins...But no! Don't look! He looked away. Who was watching? Did he just take this unbelievable abuse and keep walking to the Walton Avenue entrance, while they poured more of it all over him, or did he confront them?...Confront them? How?... How?...No! He'd pretend it wasn't him they were yelling at...Who was to know the difference!...He'd keep walking up 161st Street and go around to the main entrance! No one had to know it was him! He scanned the sidewalk by the Walton Avenue entrance, which was close to the vans...Nothing but the usual poor sad citizens...They had stopped in their tracks. They were staring at the van...The guard! The guard at the Walton Avenue entrance knew him! The guard would know he was trying to get away and finesse the whole thing! But the guard wasn't there...He'd probably ducked inside the doorway so he wouldn't have to do anything himself. Then Kramer saw Kovitsky. The judge was on the sidewalk about fifteen feet from the entrance. He was standing there, staring at the van. Then he looked right at Kramer. s.h.i.+t! He knows me! He knows they're yelling at me! me! This little figure, who had just emerged This little figure, who had just emerged-thwop!-from his Bonneville, stood between Kramer and his orderly retreat.

"Yo! Kramer! You yellow s.h.i.+tbird!"

"Hey! You bald-headed worm!"

"Aaaaaayyyy! You steecka balda ed uppas sol! Steeecka balda ed uppas sol!"

Bald? Why bald? He wasn't bald. He was losing a little hair, you b.a.s.t.a.r.ds, but he was a long way from being bald! Wait a minute! Not him at all-they'd spotted the judge, Kovitsky. Now they had two targets. Why bald? He wasn't bald. He was losing a little hair, you b.a.s.t.a.r.ds, but he was a long way from being bald! Wait a minute! Not him at all-they'd spotted the judge, Kovitsky. Now they had two targets.

"Yo! Kramer! What you got inna bag, man?"

"Hey, you bald-headed old fart!"

"You s.h.i.+ny ol' s.h.i.+tfa brains!"

"Gotcho b.a.l.l.s inna bag, Kramer?"

They were in it together, him and Kovitsky. Now he couldn't make his end run to the 161st Street entrance. So he kept walking across the street. He felt as if he were underwater. He cut a glance at Kovitsky. But Kovitsky was no longer looking at him. He was walking straight toward the van. His head was lowered. He was glaring. You could see the whites of his eyes. His pupils were like two death rays burning just beneath his upper eyelids. Kramer had seen him in court like this...with his head lowered and his eyes ablaze.

The voices inside the van tried to drive him back.

"What you looking at, you shriveled little p.e.c.k.e.r?"

"Yaaaaggghh, come on! Come on, wormd.i.c.k!"

But the chorus was losing its rhythm. They didn't know what to make of this wiry little fury.

Kovitsky walked right up to the van and tried to stare through the mesh. He put his hands on his hips.

"Yeah! What you think you looking at?"

"Sheeeeuh! Gon' give you something to look at, bro'!"

But they were losing steam. Now Kovitsky walked to the front of the van. He turned those blazing eyes on the driver.

"Do...you...hear...that?" said the little judge, pointing toward the rear of the van.

"Whuh?" says the driver. "Whaddaya?" He didn't know what to say.

"Are you f.u.c.king deaf?" said Kovitsky. "Your prisoners...your...prisoners...You're an officer of the Department of Corrections..."

He started jabbing his finger toward the man.

"Your...prisoners...You let your prisoners your prisoners pull...this pull...this s.h.i.+t... s.h.i.+t...on the citizens of this community and on the officers of this court? this court?"

The driver was a swarthy fat man, pudgy, around fifty, or some gray-lard middle age, a civil-service lifer...and all at once his eyes and his mouth opened up, without a sound coming out, and he lifted his shoulders, and he turned his palms up and the corners of his mouth down.

It was the primordial shrug of the New York streets, the look that said, "Egggh, whaddaya? Whaddaya want from me?" And in this specific instance: "Whaddaya want me to do, crawl back in that cage with that lot?"

It was the age-old New York cry for mercy, unanswerable and undeniable.

Kovitsky stared at the man and shook his head the way you do when you've just seen a hopeless case. Then he turned and walked back to the rear of the van.

"Here come Hymie!"

"Unnh! Unnnh! Unnnhh!"

"Chew my willie, Yo' Honor."

Kovitsky stared at the window, still trying to make out his enemy through the heavy mesh. Then he took a deep breath, and there was a tremendous snuffling sound in his nose and a deep rumbling in his chest and throat. It seemed incredible that such a volcanic sound could come from out of such a small thin body. And then he spit spit. He propelled a prodigious gob of spit toward the window of the van. It hit the wire mesh and hung there, a huge runny yellow oyster, part of which began to sag like some hideous virulent strand of gum or taffy with a glob on the bottom of it. And there it remained, gleaming in the sun for those inside, whoever they might be, to contemplate at their leisure.

It stunned them. The whole chorus stopped. For one strange feverish moment there was nothing in the world, in the solar system, in the universe, in all of astronomy, but the cage and this one gleaming, oozing, pendulous sunlit gob of spit.

Then, keeping his right hand close to his chest so that no one on the sidewalk could see it, the judge shot them the finger and turned on his heels and walked toward the entrance to the building.

He was halfway to the door before they got their breath back.

"Yeggghhh, f.u.c.k you, too, man!"

"You wanna...sheeeeuh...you try that..."

But their hearts weren't in it anymore. The grisly esprit of the prison-van uprising had fizzled in the face of this furious blazing little steel rod of a man.

Kramer hurried after Kovitsky and caught up with him as he was going in the Walton Street entrance. He had had to catch up with him. He had to show him that he was with him all along. It was the two of them out there taking that insidious abuse. to catch up with him. He had to show him that he was with him all along. It was the two of them out there taking that insidious abuse.

The guard had reappeared at the door. "Good morning, Judge," he said, as if it were just another day at the island fortress of Gibraltar.

Kovitsky barely looked at him. He was preoccupied. His head was down.

Kramer touched his shoulder. "Hey, Judge, you're too much!" Kramer beamed, as if the two of them had just been through a great battle, shoulder to shoulder. "They shut up! I couldn't believe it! They shut up! shut up!"

Kovitsky stopped and looked Kramer up and down, as if looking at someone he had never seen before.

"f.u.c.king useless," said the judge.

He's blaming me for doing nothing, for not helping him-but in the next instant Kramer realized that Kovitsky was in fact talking about the driver of the van.

"Well, the poor sonofab.i.t.c.h," said Kovitsky, "he's terrified. I'd be ashamed to have a job like that if I was that f.u.c.king terrified."

He seemed to be talking more to himself than to Kramer. He kept on talking about this f.u.c.king whatever and that f.u.c.king whatever. The profanity scarcely even registered on Kramer. The courthouse was like the army. From the judges on down to the guards there was one all-purpose adjective or participle or whatever it should be called, and after a while it was as natural as breathing. No, Kramer's mind was racing ahead. He was afraid the next words out of Kovitsky's mouth were going to be "Why did you just f.u.c.king stand there, doing nothing?" He was already inventing excuses. "I couldn't tell where it was coming from...I didn't know if it was from the van or..."

The fluorescent lighting gave the hallway the dim toxic haze of an X-ray clinic.

"...this Hymie business," Kovitsky was saying. Then he gave Kramer a look that clearly required a response.

Kramer didn't know what the h.e.l.l he had been talking about.

"Hymie?"

"Yeah, 'Here comes Hymie,' " said Kovitsky. " 'Wormd.i.c.k.' What difference does that make, 'wormd.i.c.k.' " He laughed, genuinely amused by the thought. " 'Wormd.i.c.k'...But 'Hymie.' That's f.u.c.king poison. That's hate! hate! That's anti-Semitic. And for That's anti-Semitic. And for what? what? Without the Yiddishe, they'd still be laying asphalt and looking up shotgun barrels in South Carolina, is what the f.u.c.k they'd be doing, the poor b.a.s.t.a.r.ds." Without the Yiddishe, they'd still be laying asphalt and looking up shotgun barrels in South Carolina, is what the f.u.c.k they'd be doing, the poor b.a.s.t.a.r.ds."

An alarm went off. A frantic ring filled the hall. It pounded Kramer's ears in waves. Judge Kovitsky had to raise his voice to be heard, but he didn't even look around. Kramer didn't bat an eye. The alarm meant a prisoner had escaped or some skinny little thug's brother had pulled out a revolver in a courtroom, or some gargantuan tenant had grabbed a 130-pound hearing officer in a hammerlock. Or maybe it was only a fire. The first few times Kramer heard the alarm on the island fortress of Gibraltar, his eyes jumped around and he braced himself for the clatter of a herd of guards wearing military-box-toed leather shoes and waving .38s, running along the marble floors trying to catch some nutball in supergraphic sneakers who, jacked up by fear, does the hundred in 8.4. But after a while he ignored it. It was the normal state of red alert, panic, and disarray in the Bronx County Building. All around Kramer and the judge, people were swiveling their heads in every direction. Such sad faces...They were entering Gibraltar for the first time, on Christ knows what sad missions.

All at once Kovitsky was motioning toward the floor and saying, "...is this, Kramer?"

"This?" said Kramer, desperately trying to figure out what the judge was talking about.

"These f.u.c.king shoes," said Kovitsky.

"Ah! Shoes," said Kramer. "They're running shoes, Judge."

"Is that something Weiss thought up?"

"Noooo," said Kramer, chuckling as if moved by the judge's wit.

"Jogging for Justice? Is that what Abe has you guys doing, jogging for Justice?"

"No, no, no, no." More chuckles and a big grin, since Kovitsky obviously loved this line, jogging for Justice.

"Christ, every kid who sticks up a Red Apple's in my courtroom wearing these G.o.dd.a.m.ned things, and now you guys?"

"Nooo-ho-ho."

"You think you're gonna come in my part looking like this?"

"Nooooooo-ho-ho-ho! Wouldn't think of it, Judge."

The alarm kept ringing. The new people, the new sad faces who had never been inside this citadel before, looked all about with their eyes wide and their mouths open, and they saw a bald-headed old white man in a gray suit and a white s.h.i.+rt and a necktie and a balding young white man in a gray suit and a white s.h.i.+rt and a necktie just standing there talking, smiling, yakking, shooting the breeze, and so if these two white people, so obviously a part of the Power, were just standing there, without so much as lifting an eyebrow, how bad could it be?

As the alarm rang in his head, Kramer grew still more depressed.

Right then and there he made up his mind. He was going to do something-something startling, something rash, something desperate, whatever it took. He was going to break out of here. He was going to rise up from this muck. He was going to light up the sky, seize the Life for himself- He could see the girl with brown lipstick again, just as surely as if she were standing right next to him in this sad grim place.

3. From the Fiftieth Floor