Steve Erickson - Tours of the Black Clock

I’M LIVING LIKE THIS a week and a half or so, it’s hard to tell, when I start getting work. Let’s say that in a crowd I stand out. The trucks pull in and the foremen are looking for big guys who can do some serious labor, and I’m made to order. For another three weeks I’m loading freezers in the packing companies downtown, where every thirty minutes they have to let you break because the cold robs your arms and fingers of feeling. This work goes from seven in the morning until nine at night. I can afford to buy food in a store and I could afford to buy a bed in a flophouse except all the beds are taken by the time I get off. I have the bright idea of just reserving a bed for a week with the money I’m saving but somehow it doesn’t seem right, having a job and a meal and a bed all at once. Then the packing company lays a bunch of us off. I get another job delivering packages in the garment district, this lasts about eight days when the customers start complaining that I always look like someone who’s come to put the rub on them.

So I’m back hanging around the streets, this time for something like a month. The federal projects pass me over as someone who can get a job somewhere else because I’m big, and the foremen in the trucks start looking right through me when they’re picking their crews in the morning. It’s funny. The only thing I can think of is that someone my size just can’t be counted on to submit to everything there is to be submitted to these days, or maybe it’s that these days anything big is immediately on the wrong side of things, at least down here in the street. I guess I understand it. It’s like this city itself that’s hovering over you everywhere you go and anytime you go there, but only the part of it that exists at eyelevel below the watermark is the part of the city that’s on your side. The rest of it’s your enemy, or dead to you. Sometimes I get the urge to stand still and look up at this huge city hovering for what seems miles above me, and wonder who the hell is really up there on all those floors far away behind windows most of us will never see through. I can’t imagine the buildings anything but empty up there, or maybe a stray soul wandering room to room wondering where everyone else went. The whole top of the city isn’t even here. It isn’t even now. It’s another city from years ago, the image of its life only now reaching us, the light of its extinction having taken place sometime since, and which we can only now wait to witness. Maybe that’s the way the guys in trucks see me, as a bigness that they know has died even though the vision of its death is still busy traveling up through time to the moment all of us, including me, can see it. I say bullshit. I say they’ve got a long fucking time to wait.

NOW IT’S THE SPRING of 1934. And one day one of those things happens, one of those small things that when it happens no one could possibly know will be important. I’m standing around a newsstand up at 49th and Broadway, a number of us are there trying to bum cigarettes off the customers who just bought some. The man who runs the stand is Jerry. He isn’t happy about us being around and he’ll come out sometimes and shoo us like cats, and the boys just stand there with their hands in their pockets. I’m less interested in the cigarettes than the newspapers and magazines, but if I so much as touch one, Jerry goes berserk. So I stand reading the front page of the papers in the racks, actually I only get to read the top halves and am left to wonder at the bottom. The magazines I can only stare at, with these black and red and blue covers, amazing women in shredded clothes and gangsters whose faces are always shadowed with someone else’s dying. I sometimes actually consider the luxury of buying one of these magazines for a dime or fifteen cents or whatever it’s going for. But I never do. I just stand around with the others watching life there on the corner of 49th and Broadway, and most of it is life that’s not so unlike me, but sometimes it’s the life of theater people going by in taxis, actresses on their way to rehearsals in the day and patrons on their way to the shows at night, and financiers and office workers and men in suits in black cars.

The small thing that happens is one day someone comes running up to Jerry with news that his wife has had a stroke and been taken to the hospital. Jerry’s frantic. “I’ll watch things for you if you want, Jerry,” I say, and maybe if he’d been thinking straight he’d have just closed up the stand and I’d have just wandered off to another corner, and the rest of my life would have been different, and the world and the Twentieth Century would have been different. But he isn’t thinking straight and these are times when closing up work just for a day constitutes a sacrifice, and so my proposal that seemed nuts ten seconds ago is quickly evolving into a hopeful longshot. He breathes deeply and runs back into the stand and collects most of the money, leaves me some change and gives me a nod. Then he just runs off to his wife in the hospital without a word about when he’ll be back or what to do if he doesn’t come back. Maybe he’s thinking it doesn’t matter, the odds are I’m going to steal him blind anyway, and if he comes back later and anything of his life is still salvageable at all, he’ll be lucky. As it happens he’ll be luckier than even that. His wife will pull through and I don’t have any plans at all to steal him blind, I don’t even care much what he pays me, I just want to read one of those magazines and anything behind the top half of the first page of a newspaper, like this Philly paper I’m reading that has this story back around page eleven about how in Pennsylvania they’re looking for this crazed kid who killed one brother, crippled the other, paralyzed the father, terrorized the mother and burned down the house. He sounds like one insane son of a bitch to me. Then I get to the part where they say his name and it’s only then it occurs to me who they’re talking about.

I’M WORKING AT THE stand three days, never leaving but sleeping behind the counter, before Jerry comes back. He couldn’t be more amazed to find me and the money still there. “How’s the wife,” I say, and he answers she’s doing better but he’s going to have to stay with her awhile. “So you want this job for a time?” he asks and I say all right. I have the job a couple of weeks and I don’t mind it. Mostly I read the magazines.

One of the customers who rolls by in his Packard every day is John “Doggie” Hanks, who runs a big part of uptown Manhattan all the way to Harlem. He was a gangster up until a year ago when Prohibition ended and gangsters were either legalized out of business or frozen into legitimacy. Hanks is legitimate now more or less, or at least as legitimate as he can stand to be. He wears a nice suit and sits in the back seat of the car while someone else drives. In his early forties he has curly blond hair and a face shaved as smooth as a swimmer’s legs except for the pockmarks around his temples. His driver has hair that stands up like a brush and a nose that points like a compass, except his brain tilts in the south direction as far as I can tell. “What happened to Jerry?” Hanks asks the first day, and I tell him his wife’s sick. He gives me some money for her. “I hear Jerry didn’t get it,” he says, “and I’ll come looking for you. You don’t look so difficult to locate either.” I give the money to Jerry the next time he comes by. As with a lot of people, Jerry’s feelings about someone like Doggie Hanks tend to be a bit confused. He’s too awestruck and terrified to be purely grateful. “You tell Mr. Hanks,” he instructs me very carefully, “that I say thank you very, very much. You got that?”