Don DeLillo - Great Jones Street

"How do you get into something like blackness? Do you have to shed your whiteness first? Or do you just go hurtling forward, bang, and risk all kinds of injury, mind and body?"

"How do I get into blackness? Is that what you're asking?"

"Can you put it in words?" I said.

"It's a street thing. Blackness is a street thing. It's the self-identification of the people on the street. Watts is a whole big bunch of streets. Same with Bed-Stuy. Harlem, it's not so much the streetness of Harlem, it's more the history and the badness of the vibes. Black is baddest in the best sense. I mean that's where you have to go to make sense of the magic of existence. You pass through all that streetness and weight and terror and you come out a more dimensional person."

"But how do you get into blackness, being nonblack?"

"I can't put it in words," he said.

I pointed toward a chair but he said he preferred to stand. He seemed to avoid looking directly at me. The curse in the eyes of the bereaved. I watched puddles form under his boots as a series of tiny ice slides occurred.

"How's the band?"

"We're laying down vocals," he said. "Still plenty of contract problems though. I don't know at this point who we're recording for. People come in screaming at us. When are you making it back out?"

"Not yet. I've been set back. Have to reassemble myself."

"Bucky, these people I represent. They're real interested in getting their hands on the product we spoke about last time I was here."

"Talk to Happy Valley."

"I'm afraid to, Bucky. It's not just fear of being physically hurt or maimed for Me. It's the whole idea of who they are that scares me."

"Who are they?"

"You know that better than I do. You've been in touch with them. They hired Opel to deal for them. At this late date you know more about them than I do. In other words you're the one that should talk to them. I know you're in mourning or whatever the hip equivalent of mourning is. So obviously you've got other things on your mind and I appreciate the fact that if you don't want to do business right now, there's a time and place. But if I go in there and talk to Happy Valley on my own, anything and everything might and can happen, especially since there's been a split in their own ranks."

"That makes things more interesting," I said. "You can play one side against the other."

"Are you crazy? I wouldn't get involved in anything like that. Are you crazy?"

"Why don't you stick to music then?"

"I am sticking to music, Bucky. Being into blackness the way I am, I'm getting interested in root forms of rock 'n' roll. I'm beginning to delve real deep in that area. But I also have this other part of my life that I'm trying to find a place for. There's so much to be afraid of in contemporary society. I'm establishing a permanent relationship with these people I've mentioned on the Coast in order, among other things, to examine and find the sources of my own fear. Together we've come up with a plan whereby you with your influence and mystique can make an offer to the Happy Valley Farm Commune, this or that faction, flip a coin, whoever's got control of the product, and you can do it without letting on that I'm involved or my people on the Coast are involved or anybody's involved except who you say the involved party is. Do you want to hear the details?"

I shook my head and once again pointed out a chair. Azarian wanted to stand, remaining in a far corner, apparently trying to avoid the center of the room, an area he seemed to regard as dangerous, if not totally unapproachable, Opel's deathly fumes still clinging to furniture and choice belongings, and he talked of the old days, his uncomplicated fame, the girls who walked in and out of his bed, several every night, coming and going like popcorn vendors at a circus. We shook hands again. Then he went uptown to be interviewed on stereo FM.

Nothing changed, altered or varied. There were no plants in the room to climb or die. I saw no insects. Sleet struck the window with sparse fragile impact and all demolition in the area was halted by weather. Time did not seem to pass as much as build, slowly gathering weight. This was the sole growth in the room and against it hung the silence, peeled back to reveal the white nightmares voiced on the floor below. I tried to remember places and things. Rain on the runway of the international airport. Rain on the simulated hamlet. Rain in the terminal province. Rain at vespers in the heliport near the river. Rain in the abstract garden. Rain in the boots of the bitch in Munich. Rain on the nameless moor. I returned to the radio, to watching the firehouse, to becoming fixed in place. The artist sits still, finally, because the materials he deals with begin to shape his life, instead of being shaped, and in stillness he seeks a form of self-defense, one that ends with putrefaction, or stillness caught in time lapse. But I wasn't quite at that point in my career. I dreamed a return to the old palaces, the great jaded hulks of rock 'n' roll, boarded up but still standing, as far as I knew, in this city and that, always on the edge of comatose slums.

A man came to see me. He was wrapped in a double-breasted suit and high tight shirt collar. His custom-styled hair was rigid and thick, sprayed into place and fitted trimly over his forehead – a work of Renaissance masonry, it seemed. He stood in the doorway, coat over his arm, earnest hand waiting to be taken.

"Who are you?"

"ABC," he said.

"Forget it."

"Nothing big or elaborate. An abbreviated interview. Your televised comments on topics of interest. Won't take ten minutes. We're all set up downstairs. Ten minutes. You've got my word, Bucky. The word of a personal admirer."

"Positively never."

"I've got a slot on the local mid-morning news. In case you didn't catch the face. I do youth events and youth personalities. Sure, it's the same old commercial brainwash that we've all been fighting against but on the other hand the only way we can get exposure for certain voices is to slip them into little scheduling cracks here and there. It's a question of easing the pressure the different slots exert on each other and then slipping in there with the visionaries, the prophets if you will, the authentic non-bullshit voices. Ten minutes of televised question and answer. Frankly I've been researching hell out of you."

"No."

"I haven't done this kind of massive research since I've been in the glamour end of the business. I used to be in the ass end. But there's a softening in the market as old faces crumble and new slots become available. I'm trying to fill some of these slots with youth-oriented con-ceptuals. Bucky, just your unrehearsed comments on the rumors, the whereabouts, the future plans if any. What I'm making is really a small demand on your time. Frankly it barely qualifies as a demand, considering the demands I'm accustomed to making."

"Maybe later in the decade."

"Your power is growing, Bucky. The more time you spend in isolation, the more demands are made on the various media to communicate some relevant words and pictures. We make demands on you not because we're media leeches of whatever media but frankly because proportionate demands are being made on us. People want words and pictures. They want images. Your power grows. The less you say, the more you are. But this is an obvious truism of the industry and I didn't come down here to present my credentials as some kind of theorist or moneychanger in ideas. I'm an on-camera entity. I do my thing and go to black. It's a complicated way to live. Let me tell you in ten words or less what I've got downstairs."

"Can it wait?"

"I've got camera and I've got sound," he said. "They're down there in the street. Cameraman, soundman, both top people, artists if you will. We'd like to do the interview directly in front of the building. We do a vertical pan down the building right to you and me. We're standing there in the sleet. I'm holding an umbrella over both of us as we talk."