The Bonfire of the Vanities (5 page)

Kramer had that vision comfortably in place when just up ahead, from the swell-looking doorway of 44 West Seventy-seventh Street emerged a figure that startled him.

It was a young man, almost babyish in appearance, with a round face and dark hair, neatly combed back. He was wearing a covert-cloth Chesterfield topcoat with a golden brown velvet collar and carrying one of those burgundy leather attaché cases that come from Mädler or T. Anthony on Park Avenue and have a buttery smoothness that announces: “I cost $500.” You could see part of the uniformed arm that held the door open for him. He was walking with brisk little steps under the canopy, across the sidewalk, toward an Audi sedan. There was a driver in the front seat. There was a number—271—in the rear side window; a private car service. And now the doorman was hurrying out, and the young man paused to let him catch up and open the sedan’s rear door.

And this young man was…Andy Heller! No doubt about it whatsoever. He had been in Kramer’s class at Columbia Law School—and how superior Kramer had felt when Andy, chubby bright little Andy, had done the usual thing, namely, gone to work Downtown, for Angstrom & Molner. Andy and hundreds like him would spend the next five or ten years humped over their desks checking commas, document citations, and block phrases to zip up and fortify the greed of mortgage brokers, health-and-beauty-aid manufacturers, merger-and-acquisition arbitragers, and re-insurance discounters—while he, Kramer, would embrace life and wade up to his hips into the lives of the miserable and the damned and stand up on his feet in the courtrooms and fight,
mano a mano
, before the bar of justice.

And that was the way it had, in fact, turned out. Why, then, did Kramer now hold back? Why didn’t he march right up and sing out, “Hi, Andy”? He was no more than twenty feet from his old classmate. Instead, he stopped and turned his head toward the front of the building and put his hand to his face, as if he had something in his eye. He was damned if he felt like having Andy Heller—while his doorman held his car door open for him and his driver waited for the signal to depart—he was damned if he felt like having Andy Heller look him in the face and say, “Larry Kramer, how you doing!” and then, “What you doing?” And he would have to say, “Well, I’m an assistant district attorney up in the Bronx.” He wouldn’t even have to add, “Making $36,000 a year.” That was common knowledge. All the while, Andy Heller would be scanning his dirty raincoat, his old gray suit, which was too short in the pants, his Nike sneakers, his A&P shopping bag…Fuck that…Kramer stood there with his head turned, faking a piece of grit in his eye, until he heard the door of the Audi shut. It sounded like a safe closing. He turned around just in time to catch a nice fluffy little cloud of German luxury-auto fumes in his face as Andy Heller departed for his office. Kramer didn’t even want to think about what the goddamned place probably looked like.

On the subway, the D train, heading for the Bronx, Kramer stood in the aisle holding on to a stainless-steel pole while the car bucked and lurched and screamed. On the plastic bench across from him sat a bony old man who seemed to be growing like a fungus out of a backdrop of graffiti. He was reading a newspaper. The headline on the newspaper said
HARLEM MOB CHASES MAYOR
. The words were so big, they took up the entire page. Up above, in smaller letters, it said “
Go Back Down to Hymietown!
” The old man was wearing a pair of purple-and-white-striped running sneakers. They looked weird on such an old man, but there was nothing really odd about them, not on the D train. Kramer scanned the floor. Half the people in the car were wearing sneakers with splashy designs on them and molded soles that looked like gravy boats. Young people were wearing them, old men were wearing them, mothers with children on their laps were wearing them, and for that matter, the children were wearing them. This was not for reasons of Young Fit & Firm Chic, the way it was downtown, where you saw a lot of well-dressed young white people going off to work in the morning wearing these sneakers. No, on the D train the reason was, they were cheap. On the D train these sneakers were like a sign around the neck reading
SLUM
or
EL BARRIO
.

Kramer resisted admitting to himself why
he
wore them. He let his eyes drift up. There were a few people looking at the tabloids with the headlines about the riot, but the D train to the Bronx was not a readers’ train…No…Whatever happened in Harlem would have exactly no effect in the Bronx. Everybody in the car was looking at the world with the usual stroked-out look, avoiding eye contact.

Just then there was one of those drops in sound, one of those holes in the roar you get when a door opens between subway cars. Into the car came three boys, black, fifteen or sixteen years old, wearing big sneakers with enormous laces, untied but looped precisely in parallel lines, and black thermal jackets. Kramer braced and made a point of looking tough and bored. He tensed his sternocleidomastoid muscles to make his neck fan out like a wrestler’s. One on one…he could tear any one of them apart…But it was never one on one…He saw boys like this every day in court…Now the three of them were moving through the aisle…They walked with a pumping gait known as the Pimp Roll…He saw the Pimp Roll in the courtroom every day, too…On warm days in the Bronx there were so many boys out strutting around with the Pimp Roll, whole streets seemed to be bobbing up and down…They drew closer, with the invariable cool blank look…Well, what could they possibly do?…They passed on by, on either side of him…and nothing happened…Well, of course nothing happened…An ox, a stud like him…he’d be the last person in the world they’d choose to tangle with…Just the same, he was always glad when the train pulled into the 161st Street station.

Kramer climbed the stairs and came out onto 161st Street. The sky was clearing. Before him, right there, rose the great bowl of Yankee Stadium. Beyond the stadium were the corroding hulks of the Bronx. Ten or fifteen years ago they had renovated the stadium. They had spent a hundred million dollars on it. That was supposed to lead to “the revitalization of the heart of the Bronx.” What a grim joke! Since then, this precinct, the 44th, these very streets, had become the worst in the Bronx for crime. Kramer saw that every day, too.

He started walking up the hill, up 161st Street, in his sneakers, carrying his A&P bag with his shoes inside. The people of these sad streets were standing outside the stores and short-order counters along 161st.

He looked up—and for an instant he could see the old Bronx in all its glory. At the top of the hill, where 161st Street crossed the Grand Concourse, the sun had broken through and had lit up the limestone face of the Concourse Plaza Hotel. From this distance it could still pass for a European resort hotel from the 1920s. The Yankee ballplayers used to live there during the season, the ones who could afford it, the stars. He always pictured them living in big suites. Joe DiMaggio, Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig…Those were the only names he could remember, although his father used to talk about a lot more. O golden Jewish hills of long ago! Up there at the top of the hill, 161st Street and the Grand Concourse had been the summit of the Jewish dream, of the new Canaan, the new Jewish borough of New York, the Bronx! Kramer’s father had grown up seventeen blocks from here, on 178th Street—and he had dreamed of nothing in this world more glorious than having an apartment…someday…in one of these grand buildings on the summit, on the Grand Concourse. They had created the Grand Concourse as the Park Avenue of the Bronx, except the new land of Canaan was going to do it better. The Concourse was wider than Park Avenue, and it had been more lushly landscaped—and there you had another grim joke. Did you want an apartment on the Concourse? Today you could have your pick. The Grand Hotel of the Jewish dream was now a welfare hotel, and the Bronx, the Promised Land, was 70 percent black and Puerto Rican.

The poor sad Jewish Bronx! When he was twenty-two, just entering law school, Kramer had begun to think of his father as a little Jew who over the course of a lifetime had finally made the great Diasporic migration from the Bronx to Oceanside, Long Island, all of twenty miles away, and who still trundled back and forth every day to a paper-carton warehouse in the West Twenties, in Manhattan, where he was “comptroller.” He, Kramer, would be the lawyer…the cosmopolitan…And now, ten years later, what had happened? He was living in an ant colony that made the old man’s Tract Colonial three-bedroom in Oceanside look like San Simeon and taking the D train—the D
train!—
to work every day in
…the Bronx!

Right before Kramer’s eyes the sun began to light up the other great building at the top of the hill, the building where he worked, the Bronx County Building. The building was a prodigious limestone parthenon done in the early thirties in the Civic Moderne style. It was nine stories high and covered three city blocks, from 161st Street to 158th Street. Such open-faced optimism they had, whoever dreamed up that building back then!

Despite everything, the courthouse stirred his soul. Its four great façades were absolute jubilations of sculpture and bas-relief. There were groups of classical figures at every corner. Agriculture, Commerce, Industry, Religion, and the Arts, Justice, Government, Law and Order, and the Rights of Man—noble Romans wearing togas in the Bronx! Such a golden dream of an Apollonian future!

Today, if one of those lovely classical lads ever came down from up there, he wouldn’t survive long enough to make it to 162nd Street to get a Choc-o-pop or a blue Shark. They’d whack him out just to get his toga. It was no joke, this precinct, the 44th. On the 158th Street side the courthouse overlooked Franz Sigel Park, which from a sixth-floor window was a beautiful swath of English-style landscaping, a romance of trees, bushes, grass, and rock outcroppings that stretched down the south side of the hill. Practically nobody but him knew the name of Franz Sigel Park anymore, however, because nobody with half a brain in his head would ever go far enough into the park to reach the plaque that bore the name. Just last week some poor devil was stabbed to death at 10:00 a.m. on one of the concrete benches that had been placed in the park in 1971 in the campaign to “provide urban amenities to revitalize Franz Sigel Park and reclaim it for the community.” The bench was ten feet inside the park. Somebody killed the man for his portable radio, one of the big ones known in the District Attorney’s Office as Bronx attache cases. Nobody from the District Attorney’s Office went out into the park on a sunny day in May to have lunch, not even somebody who could bench-press two hundred pounds, the way he could. Not even a court officer, who had a uniform and legally carried a .38, ever did such a thing. They stayed inside the building, this island fortress of the Power, of the white people, like himself, this Gibraltar in the poor sad Sargasso Sea of the Bronx.

On the street he was about to cross, Walton Avenue, three orange-and-blue Corrections Department vans were lined up, waiting to get into the building’s service bay. The vans brought prisoners from the Bronx House of Detention, Rikers Island, and the Bronx Criminal Court, a block away, for appearances at Bronx County Supreme Court, the court that handled serious felonies. The courtrooms were on the upper floors, and the prisoners were brought into the service bay. Elevators took them up to holding pens on the courtroom floors.

You couldn’t see inside the vans, because their windows were covered by a heavy wire mesh. Kramer didn’t have to look. Inside those vans would be the usual job lots of blacks and Latins, plus an occasional young Italian from the Arthur Avenue neighborhood and once in a while an Irish kid from up in Woodlawn or some stray who had the miserable luck to pick the Bronx to get in trouble in.

“The chow,” Kramer said to himself. Anybody looking at him would have actually seen his lips move as he said it.

In about forty-five seconds he would learn that somebody was, in fact, looking at him. But at that moment it was nothing more than the usual, the blue-and-orange vans and him saying to himself, “The chow.”

Kramer had reached that low point in the life of an assistant district attorney in the Bronx when he is assailed by Doubts. Every year forty thousand people, forty thousand incompetents, dimwits, alcoholics, psychopaths, knockabouts, good souls driven to some terrible terminal anger, and people who could only be described as stone evil, were arrested in the Bronx. Seven thousand of them were indicted and arraigned, and then they entered the maw of the criminal justice system—right here—through the gateway into Gibraltar, where the vans were lined up. That was about 150 new cases, 150 more pumping hearts and morose glares, every week that the courts and the Bronx County District Attorney’s Office were open. And to what end? The same stupid, dismal, pathetic, horrifying crimes were committed day in and day out, all the same. What was accomplished by assistant D.A.’s, by any of them, through all this relentless stirring of the muck? The Bronx crumbled and decayed a little more, and a little more blood dried in the cracks. The Doubts! One thing was accomplished for sure. The system was fed, and those vans brought in the chow. Fifty judges, thirty-five law clerks, 245 assistant district attorneys, one D.A.—the thought of which made Kramer twist his lips in a smile, because no doubt Weiss was up there on the sixth floor right now screaming at Channel 4 or 7 or 2 or 5 about the television coverage he didn’t get yesterday and wants today—and Christ knew how many criminal lawyers, Legal Aid lawyers, court reporters, court clerks, court officers, correction officers, probation officers, social workers, bail bondsmen, special investigators, case clerks, court psychiatrists—what a vast swarm had to be fed! And every morning the chow came in, the chow and the Doubts.

Kramer had just set foot on the street when a big white Pontiac Bonneville came barreling by, a real boat, with prodigious overhangs, front and back, the kind of twenty-foot frigate they stopped making about 1980. It came screeching and nose-diving to a stop on the far corner. The Bonneville’s door, a gigantic expanse of molded sheet metal, about five feet wide, opened with a sad torque pop, and a judge named Myron Kovitsky climbed out. He was about sixty, short, thin, bald, wiry, with a sharp nose, hollow eyes, and a grim set to his mouth. Through the back window of the Bonneville, Kramer could see a silhouette sliding over into the driver’s seat vacated by the judge. That would be his wife.