E. Doctorow - The Book of Daniel

Fourteenth Street Daniel Lewin boarded the West Side subway and rode downtown to 42nd, and then took the shuttle to Lexington Avenue and continued downtown on the Lex. He came up into the late summer evening of pizza and peanuts and hot dogs lying heavy in the neon of S. Klein on the Square. Despite the looming up of the red Avenue B bus he chose to walk. He walked past the record joints and the cheap goods stores, and past Lüchows, and the Spanish movie house, and the keymaker, and the porno bookstore. Fourteenth Street was the most dismal street in the world. Everything about it was cheap and hopeless, perhaps because it touched Union Square, all the stores of cheap shoes and cheap clothes going past Union Square like an assembly line of cheap hopes in lights of red and yellow and green; and the shoppers with their single dollar bills folded carefully in change purses, the almond-eyed Slavic mothers with their daughters slightly mustached looking for the outfit to get married in, to get carried away in, and black people shining in their pastel cottons and in hopelessness which makes a person glow like a burning ember, and the Spanish spoken like the pigeons pecking the crumbs off the hot sidewalk — all of it shuttling past Union Square without looking, the way you don’t look at a graveyard as you pass. He was walking east, away from the Square. Ahead the smokestacks of Con Edison lay against the windless evening sky like smoking cannon. When Daniel turned into Avenue B, a narrow street, the evening immediately darkened. He began to feel better.

Tompkins Square Park. The Park is crowded. This is not 14th Street, this is the community. There is a music phenomenon coming out of hundreds of transistor radios. There is a mambo phenomenon. There is a dog phenomenon — there are dogs in the dog run taking craps, dogs on the leash, dogs roaming free in packs. Men and girls play handball in the fenced-in handball courts. The girls are good. They shout in Spanish. Dogs jump for the ball in the handball courts. On the benches of the park sit old Ukrainian ladies with babushkas. The old ladies have small yapping dogs on leashes. Old men play chess at the stone tables. The old dogs of the old men lie under the stone tables with their tongues hanging. On the big dirt hill in the center of the park, a kid and a dog roll over each other. A burned-out head drifts by, barefoot with his feet red and swollen. A dog growls at him. Down the path from the old ladies in babushkas sits one blond-haired girl on the pipe fence. Her ass, in jeans, hangs over the pipe fence. Four black guys surround her. One talks to her earnestly. She stares straight ahead. Her radio plays Aretha. Her dog sleeps at the end of its leash. In the center of the park is the open paved area with its movable benches and its bandshell protected by a steel mesh curtain. There is no performance tonight. Benches are turned over, a group of hippies huddles around the guitar, dogs streak back and forth under the bandshell with the zigzag propulsion of pinballs. Two cop cars are parked on ioth Street. Mambo, mambo. A thousand radios play rock.

Avenue B. “Yeah, I know your sister. How is your sister.” “She’s sick.”

“Yeah, well I’m sick too. I got hepatitis, don’t get too close.”

Five people are in the room, including a girl interviewer doing a story for Cosmopolitan. The girl interviewer moves back and her photographer moves back.

“He’s just shitting,” Artie’s girl says. “He’s been out of the hospital for two weeks.”

“My liver’s bad,” Artie says flopping down on his mattress. “I’m yellow. I’m yellow-livered. I’m chicken.” Everyone laughs because of Artie Sternlicht’s reputation. “Chicken liver. Hey, baby, why don’t you ever make me chicken liver.”

“I will, baby.” She kneels at his side and holds his hand in her lap. “He got hepatitis because of me.”

“How is that?” the girl interviewer says.

“The best pigs are very creative,” Artie says. “This new thing they laid on me was a blood test. I said to them, ‘You don’t give me a blood test. I’ve been busted fifty times and nobody’s ever taken my blood. You touch me with that needle and I’ll kick your balls in. My friends have instructions, unless they hear otherwise from me in twenty-four hours they are going to raid this station. Then they are going to bomb Murphy’s.’ Murphy’s is the bar they all go to after work. So they laugh and this pig says, ‘Artie, we’re going to take some of your blood or we’ll bust your girl friend. We’ll get her for possession. Well put her in Women’s Detention in a cell with all bull dikes. You want that to happen?’ So I let the fuckers stick their dirty needle in my arm and that’s what they want, that’s all they want. I mean what do police have to know about blood. That it’s red? Fucking vampires — if they got lucky maybe I’d die.”

“You’re saying the police deliberately gave you hepatitis?”

Sternlicht doesn’t answer but turns his head and looks at me. “Sit down, man. I’ll talk to you but come down here to my level. Get down here with the proles.”

Sternlicht wears dungaree shorts and sandals. No shirt. He has a long foxlike chin and sly good looks. He may be sick but his body looks strong and supple. His nose is flat and wide and his mouth is wide and his teeth are bad. He wears a beaded headband that bunches his shoulder-length hair and makes him look like an American Indian. His eyes are light grey, like Daniel’s wife’s, and they’re a shock because they’re so vivid and clean-looking in the impression of dirtiness that Sternlicht conveys. He is stretched out on this bare mattress on the floor, lying on his side with his head propped in his hand. The photographer walks around the room shooting him from every angle.

“What is the future for the Lower East Side? What’s happening?” the girl writer says.

“Well, the hippie thing turned bad and the whole community is uptight. The spies don’t like the heads. Nobody likes the pigs. I don’t know — what is it like, Baby? You’ve got PLP down here, and a W. E. B. Du Bois, and the neighborhood reformers, and Diggers like me, and some black destruct groups, and every freak thing you can think of. Eventually we’ll put it together, we’ll get all our shit together. All the freaks will get it together. Then we won’t be freaks anymore. Then we’ll be a clear and present danger.”

“Yes?” The girl waits for him to continue.

Sternlicht looks at her. “The first thing we’re going after is women’s magazines,” he says. “Liberate those girls who write about sex and dating. We’re gonna pull off their pants and place daisies in their genitals.”

“Oh sure,” the reporter says. “Is that the kind of remark that makes people say the peace movement can’t afford you?”

“What people? The question is can the revolution afford the peace movement. You mean these dudes who march down the street and think they’re changing something? Peace marches are for the middle class to get its rocks off. The peace movement is part of the war. Heads or tails it’s the same coin. The Indian or the buffalo, it’s the same fucking nickel. Right? And they’re both extinct.”

“Not so fast, I don’t have shorthand,” the girl says. She’s a honey-haired blond, very skinny, in false eyelashes and a jumpsuit. While she bends over her pad, Artie looks at his friends who sit on the floor near the windows. He draws a whistling breath and shakes his hand in the air as if he’s burned his fingers. They laugh.

“Hey,” the photographer says, “do you have the strength to stand up? I want to shoot you against this wall.”

Sternlicht immediately jumps up and spreads his arms against the wall, like Christ, and lets his head fall to the side. His eyes bug and his tongue lolls from the corner of his mouth.