The Flamethrowers (48 page)

*  *  *

One overcast July evening when the heat and humidity became unbearable in my top-floor walk-up on Kenmare, I filled my tank at the Gulf station on Lafayette under a low and heavy sky and went north, not looking in the windows of the Trust E Coffee Shop, a place I now avoided. I didn’t hate Giddle for sleeping with Sandro. It was one more performance, a performance of betrayal. You couldn’t hate someone who saw the world so differently. And I knew she must suffer. I had never encountered anyone so alone as Giddle. Really alone, no audience
to what she was doing, since it was so much like life, and no real friends, since they were merely an audience to her performance.

On Twenty-Third Street, traveling west, big humid gusts blew against the bike. Lightning flashed, the city sky clicking from off to on to off. Pedestrians scattered as the thunder cracked. I went north, up Sixth Avenue, and at each light wondered if I should turn south, go home, and avoid the downpour. I kept going north.

At Forty-Second Street, I headed west toward the orange colors of Times Square, so bright against the blue-gray of storm clouds. There was another flash, a distant rumble. Drops began to fall.

I pulled the Moto Valera up on the curb, thinking I’d find someplace to wait it out. I rolled the bike onto its centerstand, took out the ignition key, and there I was, under the face of the soap-flakes model.

Behind the Green Door

I looked at her and at the old ticket vendor, the showtimes. The next viewing was in twenty minutes. I traded two dollars for a stub.

No one buys popcorn for a porn film. They didn’t sell it. I passed through the lobby curtains into what looked like a regular movie theater, red vinyl seats, slightly sloped floor, a stained screen, smaller than I expected. Sparse audience, all male, each with a safety buffer of empty seats around him. A few glared at me, rustled bags, which lone people were for some reason required to do in movie theaters, to rustle paper bags no matter what genre of film, Chinese opera or Mature Audience Only.

I sat on the aisle in the last row, close to the exit.

*  *  *

In the beginning, a truck, a truck stop diner. A woman who could have been Giddle, gray uniform with crisscross-backed apron. But unlike Giddle, who was, in essence, a crypto-bohemian pouring coffee, this woman was just a dour-faced waitress, not ironic.
This
woman, I thought, was what Giddle impersonated. It somehow did not occur to me that the waitress in the film was even more of an actress than Giddle was. She was
acting
. In a
movie
.

The daytime television voices of porn actors.

A man in resort wear, white shoes and yellow socks, saying, Sour cream, borscht, herring, chicken, and bananas. Gimme a break. Sour cream, borscht, chicken—

Cut to the soap-flakes model driving a Porsche 356 cabriolet up winding mountain roads. Not with a dubious clandestine, a Gianni. On her own. In a ski hat, maxing the gears on hairpin turns. Smiling, private, solitary, in her cutely boyish wool hat, red like the car.

These things were behind the green door:

Rules and codes.

Crotchless white stretch-Lycra tuxedos. Somehow not funny, not meant to be.

Fat people in masquerade ball masks. The people in masks seemed to believe they were hidden, like a baby who hides its face. “When baby Kotch covered his own eyes,” Nadine had told me, “little thing thought he’d disappeared to everybody else.
Where’s Kotch?
” The fat people up on the movie screen acted hidden, leaned back in their chairs with the unselfconscious posture of watchers, their hands unzipping their own zippers and pulling up their own skirts, shifting in their chairs for maximum access to self. Efficient hand flicks.

What the masked masturbators behind the green door watched:

Live sex, the soap-flakes model and a man in tribal makeup. She and the man both seemed deep in the moment but also hyperalert to how they looked deep in the moment. There was something stoic about them, a shared feeling between them that sex was miraculous, that it was a strange and incredible thing people did to each other, that it never lost this strangeness, its thrill. They had that reverence, she and the man in tribal makeup. It remained, even as the sex became pure repetition, gliding and hardness and softness and pushing, their faces up close, his beads swinging, the masked voyeurs who surrounded them, the small and obscene movements of their hands,
local
movements, and we, the Times Square voyeurs, in the theater, and who knew what the men seated sparsely around me were up to, their own local movements, and then the screen went dark.

Paper bags rustling. Someone saying, Hey.
Hey
.

A few minutes later, the film started up again, the sound warbling to life, and then almost immediately it shut off once more. No image, just the projector’s insect rattle.

An usher’s flashlight bounced down the aisle, his voice next to me, intimate in the dark, echoless against the carpeted wall.

“Movie’s over. Save your ticket. We’re having a power short. Exit slow and calm.”

I felt my way up the sloped aisle, moving through the curtain into what I expected would be light, but it was only more darkness. The men who’d parked themselves far from one another in the theater were all crowded together, finding their way to the exit. Emergencies bring people together. The porn theater was not a place for that. The men dispersed like rats, fleeing through the theater doors into the dark.

No lights shone or jumped in Times Square. There was no skyline of gridded, glowing windows, no blazing billboards, no silken glide of LED.

A half-full moon, egg-shaped, glowed up above, polished and white, the dull white plastic of dark theater marquees visible in its light.

People flooded the sidewalk. It was dense with the heat of them, clustered in large groups but speaking in hushed voices.

Taxis and trucks moved slowly and did not use their horns. Not a single car honked. Traffic edged along in caution and doubt. Horns were about the opposite, righteousness behind the wheel.

The vehicles passing through Times Square were the only light sources, except for the prostitutes who had flashlights, which they swung around, calling from doorways, It’s good in the dark.

It’s everywhere, someone said. Cigarette cherry zigzagging as he spoke.

Lightning knocked it out.

The murmur of a transistor. Wait, I’m tuning it in.

Shit. I thought the Russians nuked.

I wove through the crowd, crossing the sidewalk to my motorcycle. A woman brushed by. I felt but didn’t see her, a body moving past, and
when I looked again I saw only white short shorts. A black woman whose body melted into the darkness, her short shorts hip-height and bodyless, the leg openings stretched wide like rigatoni.

I could have stood there watching and deciding for hours. There was no city actively guiding me, the shops and walking masses and traffic lights giving their deep signals of what to do, where to go, who and what to see, what to buy, how to feel, what to think. All flow and force as a city had been suspended. People on the sidewalk talked in quieted tones as if darkness called for a new level of discretion. Some of it talk of the moment, the blackout, but most of it just life.

She’s already committed herself.

The thing I learned was I’m my own worst enemy.

Well, I tried writing her a letter.

I started the bike, flipped on the headlight, stupidly amazed for a moment that it worked, as if all units of power were directly connected to the city’s grid.

I popped from the curb and joined the shy traffic inching south on Seventh. We were like those vehicles that roll along the floor of the ocean, marking out volume with their headlights against a dark void. Everyone drove haltingly and slow. An eerie echo of sirens, louder the farther south I went.

At Union Square, women were pulling shopping carts out of Mays, multiple carts tied together and crammed with merchandise, their metal wheels making the clattering bright sound of poured money as the women dragged them along the street.

Merry Christmas, motherfuckers! a man shouted. Then he shouted it again.

Merry Christmas, motherfuckers!

Satin sheets, one woman called to another. Always wanted them.

Satin sheets, a fantasy cooked up for the poor. Rich people slept on cotton, dried in the sun, ironed and fresh like at the Valera villa.

I was on Fourteenth, going slowly, when I heard the sound of security grates forced up. Plate glass broken. It was a Thom McAn store. People pulling boxes and boxes of Jox tennis shoes out onto the sidewalk, bouncy brand-new tennies tumbling from the boxes, glowing
white in the dark. You couldn’t get from A to B in New York without an ad for Jox or its redoubling, someone wearing them.

I heard the short whoop of a police siren, but there was something impotent about it, that single, short whoop.

Traffic was almost at a standstill. I could have gone between lanes, but I had no place I was trying to get to. A group of people wheeled racks out of Says
Who
? Plus-size Styles. Farther down the block, two men backed through the broken window of an Orange Julius, each lifting one side of an industrial juicer. They struggled along the sidewalk with it and then swung one two three through the plate glass of a pawnshop.

WE BUY GOLD ANY CONDITION

People knew what they were doing. Like they’d been waiting for the lights to go out.

You had to believe in the system, I thought, to feel it was wrong to take things without paying for them. You had to believe in a system that said you can want things if you work, if you are employed, or if you were just born lucky, born rich.

The city was in the process of being looted. Chain stores and mom-and-pop stores that owners, families, tried to defend with baseball bats, tire irons, shotguns. People said it was despicable that looters would turn on their own, and target struggling and honest neighborhood businesses. Their own. But they misunderstood. It didn’t matter whether looters hit a chain or the local jeweler. To expect them to identify particular stores as enemies and others as friends was a confusion. We buy gold, any condition.

Looting wasn’t stealing, or shopping by other means. It was a declaration, one I understood, watching the juicer crash through the window: the system is in “off” mode. And in “off” mode, there was no private property, no difference between Burger King and Alvin’s Television Repair. Everything previously hoarded behind steel and glass was up for grabs.

Jox are lightweight. Built for speed.

*  *  *

I parked the bike in front of my building on Kenmare. The Italians were all outside, domino games and drinking and full-volume news radio.

We’re getting reports from all five boroughs, the announcer said. Commanding officers tell us the vandalism and looting are so dispersed they simply cannot prevent individual crimes.

Listeners were calling in to describe trouble in Harlem, the Bronx, Bed-Stuy, Crown Heights.

“Bushwick is being destroyed,” one caller said, “by niggers and spics.”

“This guy dies in custody and these animals go nuts, destroying everything on Broadway, but he was robbing a liquor store—”

The old Italians playing dominoes weighed in on this.

“They don’t know how he died. Probably he was on drugs.”

I left the Moto Valera securely locked where my bigoted neighbors could watch over it. No looting would occur in Little Italy, a self-governed fortress, armed, punitive.

I wanted to walk. It was a night to be on the street, where everyone else was, listening to radios, trading stories, marveling at the uncanny dark—natural, but not for a city. I crossed Kenmare and walked down Mulberry, which still reminded me of my arrival to New York, two years earlier, when the sight of a woman smashing a cockroach under her slipper was an exciting urban novelty. Every New York sensation, heat, firecrackers, the humid grit coating people and things, even the smell of chicken blood in the hall, meant possibility then.

At the corner of Spring and Mulberry, by the little park where I used to sit, I saw Henri-Jean. This was his haunt, his quadrangle. But he wasn’t in the park. He was standing in the street, directing traffic, using his striped pole like a semaphore, nodding and beckoning with dramatic enthusiasm at the cars. He smiled and directed as if he were a cheerful usher volunteering to put everyone in their rightful seat, the official host and steward of Mulberry and Spring. There was a type who came to life in a blackout, those who would use the suspension of normal life to finally become their full selves.

I went east down Houston Street. There were bright flames over the dark rooftops ahead of me. I heard sirens. The surging horns of emergency vehicles. They passed, heading toward the flames, a building on fire down by the river. As I approached First Avenue there were small fires burning in the street, from dumpsters rolled into the intersection and knocked on their sides.

I passed a little playground where a group of people, mostly children—boys, little ones and older ones—had sledgehammers. They were breaking concrete and scurrying around to pick up pieces of it as it ricocheted, putting heavy chunks of it into knapsacks and plastic shopping bags. One kid had bolt cutters and was using them to sever the seatless chains hanging from the swing set in the little playground. Every time I’d passed that playground on my way to visit Giddle, who lived nearby, I noticed those chains dangling, useless, no swings. The kid was making use of them. He wrapped the freed chain around his hand, with a loose end for swinging. Another took the bolt cutters and began tearing out pieces of the chain-link fence that bordered the playground. Other boys helped him drag out rectangular sections of fencing and toss them into the street.

A man was with them, his face covered with a black bandanna, the only adult, it seemed, caught up in their fury and even directing it a little, and for that, odd and somewhat out of place, because it was a youthful fury. He was dressed all in black, only his eyes showing. He held a long pole in one hand. The pole had something metal and sharp on the upward tip—it looked like a knife, maybe, duct-taped to the end of this pole, which towered over the man. He held it like a staff as he spoke to the kids, gave low-voiced instructions as they hunched and listened, self-consciously, almost vainly, pulling their own scarves and shirts and bandannas up over their young faces. I couldn’t hear actual words but his emphatic tone, his flattened and tough New York accent, was familiar.