Robert Coover - Public Burning

As far as the old panhandler can tell, it has already arrived. He has made it back into the Square, dressed now in his winter overcoat and stocking cap, newspapers stuffed round his feet in his old brogans. He works his way sweatily down a long line of tourists, who are evidently waiting to get into some picture show or something. They all want to take his picture, but that’s all right, he’s used to that — many’s the time he has poked in a wastebasket or curled up on a park bench under newspapers out of sheer narcissism — and anyway it tends to loosen the bigger coins. Dumb tourists are all underdressed, he notes, mopping his face with the frayed ends of his tattered muffler. Not all of them are friendly either: some are parading around gloomily, shouting for justice and shouldering provocative placards. Not only do these types never give him a nickel, they have a way of souring the trade. But luckily they are being shunted out of the area by police and pushed to the south. The old panhandler nearly gets swept up in this net when somebody on the run thrusts a sign in his hand, but fortunately the sign reads CHRIST SAVE US FROM A DEATH LIKE THIS, and the police assume the old man’s a walking advertisement for Alcoholics Anonymous. “Hottest goddamn New Year’s Eve in living memory!” he’s heard to mutter as he bulks along in his thick wraps. One thing about it, though: people are generous this afternoon. Part of the ancient year-end superstition about wasting your goods to ensure a fat year. His pockets are heavy with jangling coins; he hopes he lives long enough to spend them.

The disk jockey, cooling his bop patter and moving toward the center, has slipped sentimentally into his hayseed act, giving a recipe for crawfish pie, telling a joke about a girl who got run over on the tracks of history (“The track was juicy, the juice was Lucy!”), and loading up his turntable with hillbilly hits by the late and great Hank Williams, tunes appropriate to the occasion like “I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive” and “I’m a Long Gone Daddy” and “Sundown and Sorrow” and

Hey, good lookin’!

Whatcha got cookin’?

How’s about cookin’ somethin’ up with me?

Williams, just twenty-nine, died mysteriously on New Year’s Day, about the time the Rosenbergs were granted their stay of execution for the Clemency Appeals, and many wondered at the time whether or not his death in the back seat of one of Uncle Sam’s convertible Cadillac super-mobiles might not have been a long-planned Phantom counterattack which had somehow gone off prematurely. “Ever since the coming to this world of the Prince of Peace, there has been peace in the valley!” the Montgomery Baptist Church preacher said at the funeral, standing beside the huge white floral piece that carried the legend I SAW THE LIGHT, and most folks assumed he was talking about Hank Williams. After all, he’d died even younger than Jesus. His small ghostly voice now flows thinly, sweetly, from a hundred amplifiers, filling the warm streets, singing the sun down, drawing the Square and indeed all of midtown America into a kind of hypnotic trance with its doleful messages from the other side…“There’ll be no teardrops tonight,” he sings. “Rootie tootie…!”

The trance is broken by the sudden arrival of the city mayor Vincent Impellitteri with a burst of glad tidings: he has just signed into law a bill permitting the sale of liquor in public theaters, and, the whole Times Square area being proclaimed one, booze is on the way! Amid the wild cheering, makeshift bars are thrown up by the boys from City Hall, bottles are broken out, orders taken. Tension has been mounting all day, and most everyone can do with a few snorts right now. It is impossible to get within two miles of Times Square by car or van, so ice and paper cups are dropped in by helicopter. The whiskey is replenished by a kind of bucket brigade from the periphery, and in the jubilant and prodigal mood of the moment, there’s no need to watchdog the supplies: what some people take for nothing, others gladly pay twice for. The old panhandler can’t believe his luck. Not only is he beginning to feel like the Bank of America, but people are setting him up faster than he can toss them down. “Thank ye, son! Need a little somethin’ to ( burp! ) warm the ole innards, tain’t easy sleepin’ out nights in a blizzard, not at my age! God bless!” But this is just the old litany, blizzards be damned, he’s in fact sweating like a stoat, his coat weighs a ton and scratches his poor hide, and he’s beginning to wonder if somebody is finally out to get him for good, cutting the years in half. He starts to lift a tourist’s watch, then decides to ask what time it is first, lift it after. “Howzat? Just past five? Well, well, thank ye, sir! Long life!” That’s it, then, another six hours and then some before the ball drops — if he doesn’t get soused and blow it all, he could leave here a rich man. The watch is gold, but very lightweight — don’t make them like they used to. The tourist buys him a whiskey. “Here’s spit in your eye, son!” he chortles with a sideways wink at the bartender (one born every day, ain’t it the truth!), and tips back his cup. There’s a crush around the bar, and a kid behind him buys him a refill. The bartender scratches about for another fifth. “Hey, ye still got almost seven hours to go, johnny!” the old man says cheerily. “Y’ain’t gonna have enougha that ( wurp! ) sneaky pete to last!”

The bartender glances at his fob watch. “Naw, just three hours now, old-timer, and it’ll be all over.”

“Wha—?!” Now he’s sure they’re finishing him off. Sonuvabitch, just when he was striking a real seam at last! He throws down the drink, stuffs the paper cup in his pocket, and decides to work his way out in the general direction of his digs, so he can at least die in his own bed like a proper gent. If he can get through — whew! his pockets are so heavy he can barely move, and he wonders confusedly if he’s being treated to some unpleasant moral on the accumulation of capital. This is the worst he’s ever seen it!

It’s true, they’re really piling in now, everybody jamming up together, old and young, great and small, of all creeds, colors, and sexes, shoulder to shoulder and butt to butt, missionaries squeezed up with mafiosos, hepcats with hottentots, pollyannas with press agents and plumbers and panty raiders — it’s an ingathering of monumental proportions, which only the miracle of Times Square could contain! And more arriving every minute: workers in dungarees, millionaires in tuxedos, pilots, ballplayers, sailors, and bellboys in uniform, brokers in bowlers, bakers in white aprons tied over bare bellies. Certainly this is the place to be, and anyone who’s anyone is here: all the top box-office draws and Oscar winners, all the Most Valuable Players, national champions and record holders, Heisman Trophy and Pulitzer Prize winners, blue ribbon and gold medal takers, Purple Hearts and Silver Stars, Imperial High Wizards, Hit Paraders, Hall of Famers, Homecoming Queens, and Honor Listees. The winners of small-town centennial beard-growing contests have all come, the year’s commencement speakers, class valedictorians, and quiz-show winners, the entire Social Register, the secretariat of Rotary International. The Sweetheart of Sigma Chi. Yehudi Menuhin, Punjab, Dick Button, who isn’t here? Gary Cooper hoves into view up in the Claridge, wagging his shiny new Oscar from High Noon and doing his much-loved toe-stubbing aw-shucks Montana grin for all his admirers, both on the House Un-American Activities Committee and off — he’s been one of the top ten box-office draws for thirteen years running now — only Bing Crosby has been loved so long so well. Uncle Sam has provided Coop a special position tonight in a third-floor window of the Claridge where he can both see and be seen, along with other Hollywood stars friendly these past years to HUAC’s efforts to shrive and scour Movieland — good Americanists like Jack Warner, Elia Kazan, Bob Taylor, Ronnie Reagan and Larry Parks, Budd Schulberg, Ginger Rogers, George Murphy, Adolphe Menjou. Others, more suspect, like Bogie and Bacall, Lionel Stander, Zero Mostel, and Edward G. Robinson (his true identity, after all, is Emanuel Goldenberg of Bucharest!), are shunted off to the periphery, where they’ll be lucky, standing on tiptoes, to see a few distant sparks fly.