Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

Sir Don’t send me to prison again, I am not a crook or a thief nor am I crazy. I hope you will believe me …

Yours truly,

Donald DeFreeze

A portrait of the Field Marshal as a young man.

TANIA STANDS TRANSFIXED BEFORE the three-card monte hustler working on Broadway near the 103rd Street station. The cards are folded in the middle the long way, and he flips them with easy fluid motions of the wrists so that they dance across the top of the upended cardboard box he’s using as a surface. His patter is meaningless and as precisely rhythmic as the movement of the cards, “what you got you see, where you see it, here and here, what you see, where, here and there you got you see, where it at, here? or here? or where it at? come on and tell me here or here or where?” Players carelessly drop money in the hustler’s direction as if they knew ahead of time they were never going to see it again. Tania’s companion, Joan Shimada, stands with her back to the scene, taking in Broadway, until Tania is finished watching.

Whatever this city may have been it has now turned a corner to greet the spoor of world destruction that has been drifting through the air, a placeless anger, for sixty years. It’s Charles Bronson’s city now. All the froth of the Lindsay years has condensed and gathered in the corners like the scum of a rabid foam. To every street corner its screaming prophet. To every bench its unemployed habitué. Moving walls of thunder, colored with savage petroglyphs, beneath the sidewalks. Smoke rising, rising from the Bronx, visible from the high old terraces cut from the Harlem bluffs, from downtown, from Brooklyn, from Staten Island and the ironwork expanses of North Jersey.

The tabloids speak! The Post says: Boys take sledgehammers to pound through the walls of tenement buildings, tearing through the crumbling plaster and splintered lathe with their delinquent fingers to murder crippled grandmas, to snatch their meager purses, to toss babies from rooftops scarred with flashing cement. The News says: Girls are having sex at fourteen, at thirteen, at twelve and eleven; with their brothers, their fathers, with anyone; and for money. The Post says: Saturday night specials are turning the streets into a bloodbath of horror. The News says: Rats crawled into a baby’s crib in Bed-Stuy and stripped him to the bone in the time it took his mother to make herself a cup of instant. The Post says: Feral dogs are roaming the streets in packs, scaring away even the rats. And both agree on the subways: Hold tight to your tokens. Boys wait behind you to suck them right back up out of the slot. Then they snatch your chain off your neck. Cut your finger off for your high school ring. Take your keys and break into your apartment to rape and strangle you in the comfort of your own living room. Abandon all hope.

So they’re all a little edgy here, out of their element. Tania’s own knowledge of New York begins around Thirty-fourth Street and ends at Central Park South. So this bankrupt city is something of a revelation. The place is locked down, yet everyone seems to be outside, both in and of the tumult. It’s like going to a sporting event where you root for yourself. Yet when she turns off Broadway, she’s struck by the muffled quiet, the solid old apartment buildings, their floors rumored to be packed with dirt from the excavation of Central Park, reaching back from the corners to bracket rows of brownstones in various states of cheerless dilapidation. Men settle on the stoops, working at brown-bagged beers and flat pints of blackberry brandy, wearing the burden of their involuntary leisure lightly, scanning her with a sharply sexual interest informed more by boozy fraudulent nostalgia than by predatory intent. When she dares to look into their faces, she recognizes poverty’s gray-scaled nuance, which her revolutionary reading, not to mention her life, has been scant preparation for. These are the People: starving, hysterical, naked. The cataloging of their pettiest transgressions could atomize the sensibilities of a nice girl like her. But there are always hints of the city’s larger elegance just a few years, or blocks, away. She recognizes it. A girl like her can smell it.

Joan is really pretty, and self-possessed in a way that successfully combines artsy-fartsy la-di-da with poised confidence and a genuine delicacy that seems difficult to place outside the stale context of the Mysterious Orient. Tania wonders how Joan pulls it off; at this point she is conditioned to see nearly any manifestation of personality as a kind of pose. Whatever, she feels more comfortable around Joan than she has around anyone since Cujo and Gelina died.

Men drift toward them, their approach taking the form of a sort of gliding sidestep. They remind her of the pigeons at Trafalgar Square in their wary, insistent aggression. They talk and burble, muttering low and unintelligibly or projecting like the authorized sales representatives of some unspeakable act. Joan tells them all, in her peculiar accent, “Fuck off!” They droop and fade back or windmill themselves away in a flurry of arms. One man follows them for more than a block, hollering at their backs from a distance of maybe thirty feet. Tania wishes she were packing her revolver in her purse, but Guy has been pretty firm about the No Guns. “Especially in New York,” he says. Which is pretty weird because from what she’s heard half the city is armed and ready to kill.

Joan takes them on a roundabout route, walking north on Amsterdam a couple of extra blocks before circling, at 106th, to head back downtown on Manhattan Avenue. This maneuver is to avoid a couple of housing projects that stand between them and their destination. Tania wonders why they bothered: When they get there, the place has an appearance of such chronic destitution, with its gutted cars and scorched, boarded-up apartment buildings, that it makes the worst slums of East Oakland look inviting. In the middle of the block is a narrow storefront below a rusted sign that between two faded Pepsi-Cola crests reads STATIONERY CIGARS CANDY NEWSPAPERS. The lattice of a security gate is drawn across the plate glass window.

“Variety store,” says Joan.

The two of them stand at the threshold and try the door, which is locked. Joan finds a brass bell push, which has been inexpertly installed near a flaking decal for Camel cigarettes. Tania can hear the rasping buzz deep inside the store. There is no answering buzz, just a soft click as the latch is released from somewhere within. They enter.

In the wall at the end of the narrow, dim space inside is a small window of thick Plexiglas with a slot at the bottom. To the left of the window is a steel door with three locks. The only sign of merchandise in the store is a soda cooler containing a few bottles of Tab and with a handwritten sign taped to one of its sliding glass doors, DON’T TOUCH — NO TOQUE. Joan approaches the window.

“Hi there,” she says.

Tania can get only a vague impression of whatever it is that dwells behind the Plexiglas.

“Yoo-hoo,” says Joan. “Customer.” The voice is affectless, the perfect accompaniment to what seems to be Joan’s persistent, depthless patience. Tania wants to say inscrutable. Finally there is a flurry back there, and what appears to be a face of some kind appears in the window.

“Good morning,” says Joan, without evident sarcasm although it’s after two in the afternoon. “Two dimes, please.” She passes a twenty-dollar bill through the slot.