Pete Hamill - Piecework

The increasingly casual mayhem of the street has made all New Yorkers adjust. Older people who can’t afford retirement in Florida or Arizona have become prisoners of their apartments. It doesn’t matter to them that New York is host to such glories as the Metropolitan Museum and the Broadway theater; they can’t risk the journey to visit them because predators wait in subways and alleys or the lobbies of their apartment buildings. On Madison Avenue, shopkeepers keep their doors locked through the day, afraid of roaming gangs of teenagers, opening only for customers they feel can be trusted. Larger establishments are patrolled by platoons of private police. The security business is booming, as New Yorkers buy thousands of locks, metal screens, alarms, attack dogs, bulletproof vests. They go to karate classes. They apply for permission (almost always denied) to legally carry guns. And still nobody feels safe.

The leading cause of job-related deaths in New York is now homicide. The victims are usually shopkeepers or taxi drivers (by mid-August this year, twenty-one taxi drivers had been killed, and cabbies were demanding the right to arm themselves). Every day’s paper brings fresh news of slaughter. A young Bronx district attorney stops near the courthouse to buy some doughnuts and he’s killed in a burst of automatic-weapon fire from a druggie who shot at the wrong group. A guy in Brooklyn is refused entrance to a social club; he comes back with an automatic weapon and shoots ten people. “You don’t have to come from Utah to get killed here,” a young man says to me in Brooklyn. “You just walk out the door and Bang! You’re dead.”

The ghettos are most dangerous of all, as blacks kill other blacks at a rate that would make the Ku Klux Klan envious. Black youths are killing or being killed over sneakers, jackets, over the choice of songs on boom boxes, over women and attitude and casual quarrels. And, of course, over drugs. The old Mob has lost control of the drug business in New York. But the resulting decentralization has led the hardened young entrepreneurs to slaughter one another over the right to sell crack or heroin outside individual bodegas. Now New York must deal with the babies born to crack addicts. They are a peculiar mutation: children who won’t respond in any way to normal human affection. There are tens of thousands of them in the care of the city government now (their mothers dead, in prison, or peddling themselves for more crack on the streets of the city). Thousands of crack babies are born each year; what sort of teenagers will they grow up to be?

Alas, notions of redemption are generally exercises in self-delusion. Most of the druggies are simply incapable of doing anything else; they come out of generations of welfare, from social groupings that can’t really be described as families. They’ve spent more time practicing their walks than they ever did studying, so they are too ignorant to make their way in the real world. They get into the drug business for a few brief years before joining the many thousands who have died or are in jail.

“Crime isn’t a job,” one wise older cop told me a few years ago, “but it is an occupation. So these guys make it their life for a while and then get slammed into the prison system. They’re more or less happy there. It’s the way they grew up, the state paying everything. Lock-in welfare. In the joint, they don’t have to care for women, raise children, open bank accounts, plead for mortgages, bust their asses to make ends meet. Instead of helping a kid with biology homework, these assholes would rather stand around the yard in Attica and horseshit each other about how they are really victims. …”

If some New York cops are especially bitter these days, it’s because they are obviously losing the struggle with the bad guys. The army of New York drug addicts spends most of its time roaming the city, in an anarchic pursuit of money for drugs. They have little to fear from the forces of the law. New York has twenty-seven thousand police on the payroll. But when divided into three five-day shifts, and then depleted by vacation and sick time, along with court appearances, there are only 1,500 cops on the street at any given time. In New York, crime pays. And the criminals know it.

In addition, the city has been overrun by endless regiments of the homeless. Again, there are so many that nobody can truly count them. But they are everywhere: rummies and junkies, most of them men, their bodies sour from filth and indifference. They sleep in subways and in parks, in doorways and in bank lobbies. Some chatter away with the line of con that’s learned in the yards of prisons. Others mutter in the jangled discourse of the insane.

But these derelicts are not all the sad and harmless losers of sentimental myth. Some are menacing and dangerous, their requests for handouts essentially demands. The squeegee brigades appear at all major intersections, holding rags to clean auto windshields, grabbing windshield wipers to force compliance. Refuse to pay for the unsolicited window cleaning, your wiper might get snapped off. Few New Yorkers are willing to leave their cars to fight with these people, and the cops ignore them. Every night, the homeless rummage through thousands of plastic garbage bags left out for pickup. They are looking for soda cans, which can be exchanged for cash, which then can be used to buy dope (food can be obtained for nothing at the many soup kitchens around the city). Often, they don’t seal up the bags when they’re finished and the garbage flies away on the city’s streets. New York was never a model of cleanliness. But it has seldom been dirtier than it is now.

This enrages those who pay taxes — the price of living here. New Yorkers pay federal, state, and city income taxes, along with an endless array of sales and other taxes, to help meet the city’s incredible $28 billion budget. Many of the middle class get virtually none of the services they pay for. The police don’t protect them. They have far fewer fires than ghetto areas. They don’t often use the public hospitals and seldom send their children to public schools, which are perceived as dangerous and drug-ridden. Since the rich pay very little in taxes (they write the laws), the middle class is supporting the non-working underclass, which, of course, pays no taxes at all. So it is the middle class that now speaks of leaving New York behind. They want to live in places that are safe. They want to feel normal human feelings, including horror in the face of the horrible.

“I just can’t use my kids in a social experiment,” one friend said. “Yeah, I’d like to stay. But I have two children. I don’t want them to be killed coming home from school. I don’t want them to become drug addicts. Is that unreasonable? If so, then we’re completely insane.…”

If all of this is by now familiar, there seems to be no way to turn it around with the oratory of optimism. It is certain now that no American city will cash in on the end of the Cold War. After a brief few months of hope, the macho adventure in Iraq, with the humiliating sideshow of the President of the United States panhandling for funds from our “allies,” indicates that the U.S. just can’t abide peace. It will certainly not begin transforming the military-industrial complex into a social-industrial complex at any point in the foreseeable future. Instead of using our treasure and intelligence to make goods (thus putting the bulk of the underclass back to work), we will keep making this military junk that only employs an engineering elite. And with his gift for syrupy platitude, the President promises us that nothing will change.

Meanwhile, as this dreadful century comes to an end, poor New York will slide deeper into decay, becoming a violent American Calcutta. The middle class will flee in greater numbers, the tax base will shrink, the criminals will rule our days and nights. Drugs, crime, despair, illiteracy, disease: All will increase into the next century. If there are twenty-five bums in the corner park now, make way for another hundred. If there are two thousand murders this year, get ready for four thousand. New York is dying. And if New York dies, so will every other American city. We are feeding our children to the dogs. And nobody in Washington understands — do they, gentlemen? — that the horror is that there is no horror.