The Book of Daniel (20 page)

Avenue B.
“Yeah, I know your sister. How is your sister.” “She’s sick.”

“Yeah, well I’m sick too. I got hepatitis, don’t get too close.”

Five people are in the room, including a girl interviewer doing a story for
Cosmopolitan.
The girl interviewer moves back and her photographer moves back.

“He’s just shitting,” Artie’s girl says. “He’s been out of the hospital for two weeks.”

“My liver’s bad,” Artie says flopping down on his mattress. “I’m yellow. I’m yellow-livered. I’m chicken.” Everyone laughs because of Artie Sternlicht’s reputation. “Chicken liver. Hey, baby, why don’t you ever make me chicken liver.”

“I will, baby.” She kneels at his side and holds his hand in her lap. “He got hepatitis because of me.”

“How is that?” the girl interviewer says.

“The best pigs are very creative,” Artie says. “This new thing they laid on me was a blood test. I said to them, ‘You don’t give
me
a blood test. I’ve been busted fifty times and nobody’s ever taken my blood. You touch me with that needle and I’ll kick your balls in. My friends have instructions, unless they hear otherwise from me in twenty-four hours they are going to raid this station. Then they are going to bomb Murphy’s.’ Murphy’s is the bar they all go to after work. So they laugh and this pig says, ‘Artie, we’re going to take some of your blood or we’ll bust your girl friend. We’ll get her for possession. Well put her in Women’s Detention in a cell with all bull dikes. You want that to happen?’ So I let the fuckers stick their dirty needle in my arm and that’s what they want, that’s all they want. I mean what do police have to know about blood. That it’s red? Fucking vampires—if they got lucky maybe I’d die.”

“You’re saying the police deliberately gave you hepatitis?”

Sternlicht doesn’t answer but turns his head and looks at me. “Sit down, man. I’ll talk to you but come down here to my level. Get down here with the proles.”

Sternlicht wears dungaree shorts and sandals. No shirt. He
has a long foxlike chin and sly good looks. He may be sick but his body looks strong and supple. His nose is flat and wide and his mouth is wide and his teeth are bad. He wears a beaded headband that bunches his shoulder-length hair and makes him look like an American Indian. His eyes are light grey, like Daniel’s wife’s, and they’re a shock because they’re so vivid and clean-looking in the impression of dirtiness that Sternlicht conveys. He is stretched out on this bare mattress on the floor, lying on his side with his head propped in his hand. The photographer walks around the room shooting him from every angle.

“What is the future for the Lower East Side? What’s happening?” the girl writer says.

“Well, the hippie thing turned bad and the whole community is uptight. The spies don’t like the heads. Nobody likes the pigs. I don’t know—what is it like, Baby? You’ve got PLP down here, and a W. E. B. Du Bois, and the neighborhood reformers, and Diggers like me, and some black destruct groups, and every freak thing you can think of. Eventually we’ll put it together, we’ll get all our shit together. All the freaks will get it together. Then we won’t be freaks anymore. Then we’ll be a clear and present danger.”

“Yes?” The girl waits for him to continue.

Sternlicht looks at her. “The first thing we’re going after is women’s magazines,” he says. “Liberate those girls who write about sex and dating. We’re gonna pull off their pants and place daisies in their genitals.”

“Oh sure,” the reporter says. “Is that the kind of remark that makes people say the peace movement can’t afford you?”

“What people? The question is can the revolution afford the peace movement. You mean these dudes who march down the street and think they’re changing something? Peace marches are for the middle class to get its rocks off. The peace movement is part of the war. Heads or tails it’s the same coin. The Indian or the buffalo, it’s the same fucking nickel. Right? And they’re both extinct.”

“Not so fast, I don’t have shorthand,” the girl says. She’s a honey-haired blond, very skinny, in false eyelashes and a jumpsuit. While she bends over her pad, Artie looks at his friends who sit on the floor near the windows. He draws a
whistling breath and shakes his hand in the air as if he’s burned his fingers. They laugh.

“Hey,” the photographer says, “do you have the strength to stand up? I want to shoot you against this wall.”

Sternlicht immediately jumps up and spreads his arms against the wall, like Christ, and lets his head fall to the side. His eyes bug and his tongue lolls from the corner of his mouth.

“Great,” the photographer says, and shoots.

“Up against the wall!” one of the friends calls out. Artie slips his headband over his eyes and stands with his arms stiffly at his sides. His girl sticks a cigarette between his lips.

“Great,” the photographer says, and shoots kneeling, standing, close up, and across the room.

The wall is interesting. It is completely covered with a collage of pictures, movie stills, posters, and real objects. Babe Ruth running around the bases, Marlon Brando on his bike, Shirley Temple in her dancing shoes, FDR, a bikini sprayed with gold paint, Marilyn Monroe on her calendar, Mickey Mouse, Gilbert Stuart’s Washington with a mustache penciled on, a real American Legion cap, Fred Allen in front of a microphone, pinch-mouthed Susan B. Anthony, Paul Robeson, Sammy Baugh throwing a jump pass, Calvin Coolidge in Indian feathers, a World War One dogfight, a chain gang working on the road, an antique doll, a girl making it with a donkey, browned book jackets of
Gone with the Wind
and
One World
by Wendell Willkie, a diaphragm sprayed with silver paint, a cluster of cigarette butts, a
Death of a Salesman
poster, a young Elvis, a black man hanging from a tree, a white man selling apples for 5 cents—

“It’s marvelous!” the reporter says.

“You hear that?” Sternlicht says to his girl. It develops that she is the artist.

The reporter is really impressed. “You’re fantastic! How long did it take to do this?”

Sternlicht’s girl says, “Well, actually I haven’t finished yet. I go on a, y’know, collecting binge, and when I have a lot of stuff I plaster it up there. There’s stuff underneath you can’t even see anymore. I’m thinking of covering, y’know, everything, the whole house. See?” She has picked up a handful of clippings
and pictures from a table in the corner. She lets them drift out of her hands, through her fingers, and they flutter and swoop all over the place. Everyone laughs.

“You’re very casual about your work,” the reporter says, “but I think it shows immense talent. Have you ever had formal study?”

“Well see,” the girl looks at Sternlicht and starts to laugh, “actually if anyone deserves credit for my art it’s Mr. Magruder.”

Sternlicht breaks up.

“Mr. Magruder is our landlord, and that’s how I, y’know, started. Just to cover some holes in the wall. Paper is very good insulation.”

Sternlicht drops to the mattress, pulls the girl down into his lap and they laugh and hug each other. The photographer shoots.

“She’s not shittin’,” Sternlicht says. “You know how cold it gets here in the winter? All revolutions begin with tenants. All revolution begins with tenants freezing their asses off in the winter.”

“It’s marvelous,” the reporter insists, gazing at the wall. “It should have a name. What do you call it?”

Artie Sternlicht and his girl look into each other’s eyes. They answer in unison, and their friends chime in: “EVERYTHING THAT CAME BEFORE IS ALL THE SAME!”

The reporter looks at the photographer, and you know she has her lead now, the piece is writing itself. Everyone gets happy.

STERNLICHT RAPPING

    He talks fast in a gravel voice that breaks appealingly on punch lines. He jumps around as he raps, gesturing, acting out his words.

“Like you said the movement couldn’t afford us. OK. I went to this coalition meeting uptown to plan for the Convention next year? And these are good kids, New Left kids who know the score. And you should hear them spin out this shit: Participatory
democracy. Co-optation. Restructure. Counter-institutional. Man, those aren’t words. Those are substitutes for being alive. I got up and I said, ‘What the fuck are you all talking about. What is this with resolutions and committees? What kind of shit is this, man? I mean you don’t need the establishment to
co-opt
you, man. You are
co-opting
yourself. You see this chair? This is a chair, man.’ And I break this fucking chair to splinters—I smash it to the floor and I stomp on it and I really make a mess of the goddamn chair. And all the while I’m shouting, ‘See Sternlicht break the chair! I’m breaking this chair!’ And I hold up the pieces. ‘Let’s fuck. Let’s fight. Let’s blow up the Pentagon! A revolutionary is someone who makes the revolution. If you want to sit here and beat your meat, all right, but don’t call it revolution.’ Well, I started a riot! It was a gas! Everyone was mad as hell and that meeting came alive. You’ve got to put down anything that’s less than revolution. You put down theorizing about it, dreaming about it, waiting for it, preparing for it, demonstrating for it. All that is less than being it and therefore not it, and therefore never will be it. A revolution
happens.
It’s a happening! It’s a change on the earth. It’s a new animal. A new consciousness! It’s me! I am Revolution!”

“But even Fidel has a plan,” the reporter says. This remark is greeted with absolute silence. Sternlicht looks over at his friends sitting in the corner. One, a fat kid with a bushy beard, says, “That’s right, Mr. Sternlicht, what do you say to that?” They all laugh. The journalist flushes red.

“No, listen,” Artie says holding up his hands. “It’s a legitimate question. OK. Like in Cuba they find out what their revolution is by working it. They’re a bunch of crazy spies who try it first and then see what it is. If something’s no good they change it. But say Fidel has a plan. The lesson is not that our revolution must be like Fidel’s. The lesson is that it must be our own revolution. Dig? I’m gonna answer your question. Your question is tactical. Fidel bounced his revolution off some fifth-rate spic gangster and the United Fruit Company. But we are in revolution from this—” He points at the collage. “Corporate liberalism, and George Washington and the fag peace movement, and big money and hardware systems, and astronauts. We are in revolution from something with a pretty fair momentum of its own.
And you’re not going to bring it down by going into the hills with some rifles. OK? The only people in the U.S. who know they’re slaves are the black people. The spade kids today don’t have to be organized. I mean they are born with absolutely no tolerance for shit, they are born willing to die. And the white dropout children, the derelict kids, the whole hippie thing, the free store, is a runaway slave movement. It really is. So maybe they know it. But the rest—the kids who go to school for careers and the blue-collar sellouts and all the suburban hustlers in the land who make the hustle system work, who carry it on their backs and think they’re its beneficiaries—I mean it’s a doublethink system, it is not ordinary repression, right? My country knees you in the neck and you think you’re standing upright. It presses your face in the muck and you think you’re looking at the sky. I mean you cannot make connections between what you do and why they hate you in Chile. You are hung up on identity crises. You think you are a good guy. You’re not prejudiced. You believe in making money honestly. You believe in free speech. You have allergies. You have strokes. You have mortgages. Your lungs are garbage pails. Your eyes go blind with the architecture. You think the white folks are learning. You think the black folks are lifting themselves up. YOU THINK THERE’S PROGRESS. YOU THINK YOUR CHILDREN HAVE IT BETTER. YOU THINK YOU ARE DOING IT FOR YOUR CHILDREN!”

“Hey Sternlicht, shut the fuck up!”

“Hey Artie, blow it out your ass!”

“Sternlicht sucks!”

The voices come from the street. Sternlicht rushes to the window and climbs out on the fire escape. He raises his fist and jumps up on the railing. “EVERYONE IN THIS BLOCK IS UNDER ARREST!” There is laughter from outside. The people in the room crowd onto the fire escape. Badinage between the friends one flight up and the friends on the sidewalk. Avenue B is humming. Cars come through the narrow street, people are out in the hot night. Two blocks away is the park at Tompkins Square and from it emanates a pulse of energy composed of music and shouting and the heat of many people. The world came to America down Avenue B. The bar across the street is crowded and Daniel can see through its window the old polished
wood and tarnished mirrors, and the light of the TV screen. He suddenly sees the Lower East Side with Sternlicht’s vision: It is a hatchery, a fish and wildlife preserve. It seems created for him.
With the poor people of this earth I want to share my fate.

I tried to distinguish the sound from any one radio or record player, near or far. It was impossible. Music came from everywhere, it was like an electrification of the air, a burning up of it.

amazing grace, amazing grace, there is still in this evening on the fire escape floating in the potsmoke like an iron cloud over Avenue B someone who knows what he says or does is important With importance his life or self concerned, and the surroundings are suddenly not obscure and the voice is amplified and a million people hear and every paint chip of the rusted fire escape its particular configuration and archaeology is truly important

The friends leave and Artie picks up his rap as we stand at the fire escape railing in the hot September night. “So how do you bring change to something this powerful. How do you make revolution. The same way a skinny little judo freak throws a cat three times his size. You don’t preach. You don’t talk about poverty and injustice and imperialism and racism. That’s like trying to make people read Shakespeare, it can’t be done. Look there, what do you see? Little blue squares in every window. Right? Everyone digging the commercials. That is today’s school, man. In less than a minute a TV commercial can carry you through a lifetime. It tells the story from the date to the wedding. It shows you the baby, the home, the car, the graduation. It makes you laugh and makes your eyes water with nostalgia. You see a girl more beautiful than any girl you’ve ever seen. Giants, and midgets, and girls coming in convertibles, and knights and ladies, and love on the beach, and jets fucking the sky, and delicious food steaming on the table, and living voices of cool telling you how cool you are, how cool you can be. Commercials are learning units. So like when the brothers walk into the draft board down in Baltimore and pour blood all over the induction records—that’s the lesson. And the Yippies throwing money away at the stock exchange. And marching in the parade on Flag Day and getting the Legionnaires to chase you and the pigs to chase you and tearing up
your flags, American flags, on Flag Day! You dig? Society is a put-on so we put on the put-on. Authority is momentum. Break the momentum. Legitimacy is illegitimate. Make it show its ass. Hit and run. You got forty seconds, man. The media need material? Give them material. Like Abbie says, anyone who does anything in this country is a celebrity. Do something and be a celebrity. Next month we’re going to Washington and exorcizing the Pentagon. We’re gonna levitate the Pentagon by prayer and incantation and blowing horns and throwing magic invisibilities at the Pentagon walls. We’re gonna lift it up and let it down. We’re gonna kill it with flowers. Be there! We’ll be on television. We’re gonna overthrow the United States with images!”