The Swing Voter of Staten Island (6 page)

The extent of Shub’s animal magnetism was fully evident to Uli when he saw Oric suddenly break loose and dash toward the mayor, knocking down others.

“Oric, no!” Uli shouted. “Wait! No!”

“Terrorist with a bomb!” someone screamed, and all hell broke loose. Within seconds everyone had retreated in panic. Shub was huddled off to his armored car and a phalanx of beefy security guards pushed forward, slamming Oric to the pavement.

“No! Please be careful, he’s got something coming out of his skull,” Uli called out. Oric’s curly hair obscured the strange metallic cross.

The thin young woman rushed over and watched as the men pinned Oric’s chubby arms up against his fat back, cuffing his wrists together.

“This is what happens to those who try to interfere with God’s plan!” the woman announced victoriously. “Take him away, boys!”

“No! Please!” Uli appealed to her. “He didn’t mean anything. He’s got the mind of a child.”

A security guard took Uli into custody, checking his fingerprints and asking exactly how he knew the would-be assassin. Two other bodyguards frisked Oric, pulling his pants down and shirt up, while a third inspected his head-cross. Another fingerprinted him to verify his identity. Discovering that Oric was a registered Crapper, they rushed him into a black van to interrogate him about his gang loyalties and possible terrorist ties.

After an hour of Oric continuously weeping and finally wetting himself, they realized Uli wasn’t kidding and released the mentally deficient man to his custody.

“We can still have you arrested for not controlling him,” the girl threatened Uli, who noticed fresh bruises along Oric’s face and neck.
REELECT SHUB!
announced a brochure now protruding from Oric’s back pocket. The tagline read,
A Vote on Earth Is a Win in Heaven.

Once they were alone, Uli apologized to Oric and led him back toward a line of food carts on Jackie Wilson Way.

“So hungered,” Oric whimpered.

Some meat on a skewer called
God Be Ways
seemed to be as predominant as hot dogs in Rescue City. A maimed vendor was standing before his homemade cart with a crude sign,
ONE-ARMED BANDIT
, alongside a picture of a slot machine with a jackpot of hot shish kebabs. Inspecting the charred chunks of fat and muscle speared on a wooden stick, Uli asked exactly what it was.

“
Be Ways
means
backwards
, so the question you want to ask is what’s
God
spelled backwards.” The vendor held up one of the barbecued meat skewers. Uli thanked him and kept walking.

The various other deep-fried objects crammed into pita pockets seemed better options than man’s best friend. Still, there were few fresh fruits or vegetables on offer. Uli told Oric to get what he liked most, and the oval man waddled hastily toward the corn dog cart. Uli bought four dogs on sticks and selected two baked yams with butter instead of some sugary dessert. The vendor bagged it all and handed it to him.

As they crossed the street to return to the bus stop, they passed an older woman with a basket of bananas on her head.

“I’ll take some of those, if you’re selling,” Uli said.

“An eighth of a stamp for three,” she replied, as he selected the fruit. When he handed her the eighth-stamp, she reached up and snatched the sunglasses right off his face. “Oh shit! It
is
you!” She stumbled backwards as though she were looking at a ghost.

“Tell me,” he appealed, grabbing her, “who am I?”

“Let go,” her voice became soft. Uli could see that she was so terrified that her diaphragm wouldn’t contract. People started looking over, so Uli grabbed Oric and vanished into the crowd.

Uli and Oric cautiously returned to the B17 bus stop, where Uli noticed an unusual blond woman across the street checking him out. In addition to a raccoon-like application of eyeliner and stiff golden hair, she wore a black miniskirt.

He casually peeled a banana as she walked over and asked if he was who she was looking for.

“Sure,” Uli replied. She seemed too fashionable to be a prostitute.

“I’m Dianne Colder.” She shook his hand with a firm grip. “I have been waiting for you since yesterday. That’s when Underwood said you’d be here.”

“I got stuck in Sunset Park,” he said. Oric immediately started getting fidgety, so Uli added, “Dianne, this is my pal—”

“Kid!” Oric shouted out before Uli could utter his name.

“So, I heard you tried taking out the mayor, Kid,” she replied with a grin.

“—nap,” Oric blurted.

“He wants to take a nap,” Uli added weakly.

“What’s that thing sticking out of the back of his skull?” Oric’s hair was matted down with sweat, so the strange object protruded like a tiny TV antenna.

“It’s a skull plate,” Uli replied. “He was wounded in Nam.”

“That explains a lot.” She sniffed at him and wrinkled her nose.

“Who exactly are you?” Uli inquired.

“I’m a lobbyist for the Feedmore Corporation,” she said, handing him a click pen with some sort of corporate logo on it. “I come to Rescue City about once every six months to make sure everything is as it should be. That way, when I go to Washington, I can tell them all is well.”

She knows the way out of here
, Uli thought.

“So hungered,” Oric said again. Uli opened the bag of food and handed him a greasy corn dog. Oric gobbled it down while staring at Dianne like a wild animal. When Uli took one out for himself, Dianne made a disgusted expression and asked, “You’re not really going to eat that, are you?”

“Manhattan—
boom!
” Oric shouted through his mouthful of corn dog.

“What?” Dianne asked, startled.

“Big boom bang!”

“Hmm … I’ll be right back,” she said, then abruptly dashed down the block. The Manhattan-bound bus immediately pulled up and opened its flapped door. It took a few minutes for everyone to board. Uli and Oric grabbed seats at the very rear. Others behind them crowded into the aisles. To Uli’s relief, the driver closed the door and they began rolling.

In a few minutes the bus was crawling over a causeway supported by two narrow stone towers. Those structures, along with the faux span webbing overhead, were a sad homage to the original Brooklyn Bridge.

With his first real view of multiple boroughs, Uli could see how they were graded and contoured. Brooklyn and Queens seemed to be built on one level; Manhattan was slightly lower, allowing for water to spill around it; and Staten Island was the lowest. The water level was oddly higher around Staten Island than Brooklyn. A lengthy wall of what appeared to be slick brown stones was constructed around the lower lip of Manhattan.

A blond head suddenly emerged through the wall of standees. Uli’s heart sank as Dianne Colder smiled at him and held up a brown paper bag.

“This is the best chow you’re going to find floating in this toilet bowl,” she said as she approached. “I felt bad watching you eat those corn dogs.”

He tried hiding his dismay. “What exactly is it?”

“A cactus burrito. I only got one since Pogo obviously relishes the shit they serve here.”

The bus moved at a snail’s pace over the low bridge and Dianne launched into some weird tangent: “Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, you can prove—light bends, zing! Ha ha! But Darwin’s Theory of Evolution is a whole nother story! What are you gonna do? Wait around till the next monkey talks, right?”

Oric nodded nervously in agreement. To pacify him, Uli handed over the rest of the corn dogs and opened the wax paper containing the cactus burrito. The tortilla shell stuffed with local vegetables and topped with a spicy chipolte sauce was heavenly.

“Remember when the Crappers started a school in the Village? They didn’t teach Johnny reading and writing, you know why? Cause they’d teach him
fisting
.” She shoved her clawlike hand in Oric’s face. “A word every bit as ugly as it sounds, ha!”

Uli tasted something acrid. Dipping his fingers into the sauce and holding it up to the light, he detected a powdery substance and felt a wave of fatigue. She had slipped some kind of narcotic into the food.

“Blist bags!” Oric shouted furiously through the food in his mouth.

“Big breasts?” Dianne asked, modestly covering her own flat chest.

“Big blast! Big blast!”

Dianne turned to face Oric. Though Uli was on the verge of passing out, he tossed the remainder of his burrito out the bus window.

Oric’s fingers digging into his side awakened Uli to the fact that they were slowly descending off the bad imitation of the Brooklyn Bridge. Rather than hooking into City Hall like the original bridge, this new one tilted onto 14th Street. After several minutes, the bus pulled up at the northeast corner of Second Avenue. The driver stood up and called to the back of the bus: “We ain’t going one more stop till lil’ Miss Miniskirt pays her damn fare. I couldn’t pull over on the bridge, lady, but I ain’t moving another inch till you pay up just like everyone else.”

“Oh damn,” Dianne said, “I got on so quickly I forgot.” She rose and angled her way through the crowd to the front of the bus.

“Come on,” Uli said, and punched open the rear emergency window. Uli helped his heavy companion down to the pavement. Before Uli could join him, Oric waddled toward a large pastry shop with a sign that said,
Veniero’s.
The bus turned south on Second Avenue as Uli hit the ground.

Checking a wall clock through the shop window as he caught up to Oric, he saw it was already 2:00. Too late to drop off Oric first.

“Blig bast!” Oric said nervously.

“We’re getting as far away from that scary lady as we can,” Uli explained.

“Blast, big boom!” Oric repeated as they walked west.

“Where blast?”

“I’ll never know.”

“Why won’t you know?”

“You know, you’re me.” He touched Uli’s forehead.

Still concerned that they were being pursued, Uli took the challenged man’s hand and hastily led him westward along 14th Street. They joined a stream of young hippie types heading in the same direction. A growing crowd was visible several blocks down.

Onion Square
, declared a psychedelic hand-painted sign at the corner of Fourth Avenue. Just as Mallory had said, all the buildings in the area had a distinctly European flavor. A small German restaurant called Luchow’s was the only establishment here that triggered a distant memory from old New York.

The crowd of longhaired kids was centered around a large makeshift wooden stage in the middle of a barren field—Onion Square. Old-fashioned bullhorn speakers were blasting a speech: “… If these bastards aren’t going to end this war, we’ve got to end it for them!”

All cheered.

Glancing up at the stage, Uli saw a slim Mediterranean man with a springy Afro wearing an American flag on his shirt.

“Remember, it takes two eyes to spell FBI and CIA.” He spoke with a slight lisp. “And they’re always watching!” All cheered once again.

“Do you know where Rockefeller Center is?” Uli asked some post-adolescent with peach fuzz and pimples standing next to him.

“Up that way,” the guy replied, throwing his arm northward.

“Who’s that speaking?”

“Abbie Hoffman.”

“What’s he talking about?”

“The
war
,” the kid answered.

“What war?”

“Vietnam!” the fuzzy-faced youth replied, then walked away in disgust. “It’s an antiwar rally.”

Uli had this strange feeling that he had already served in Vietnam. Something told him that he was in favor of the war, but he had no clue as to why.

Next, an older, wild-bearded man with black-framed glasses, a top hat, and a waistcoat took the stage. He began reciting rhymes: “Communism’s / shooting jism / on top’a Asia / We’ll invade ya / Napalm bomb / And all is calm / It’s a mock, you see / our Democracy …”

“Who’s that?” Uli asked another unsuspecting youth whose neck was ringed with turquoise beads.

“Ginsberg!” the youth shot back, not wanting to miss a single word of the rant.

“Beware / she’s there!” Oric pointed at a thick shag of blond hair on the western edge of the crowded square.

A beat-up city bus was turning onto Park Avenue through the tangle of longhaired war protesters. Uli impulsively grabbed Oric’s hand, raced across the square, and flagged it down. The driver pulled past them to the curb and opened the doors.

“You go by Rockefeller Center?”

“
Rock & Filler
Center,” the driver corrected as Uli paid their fares.

“Rock and Filler?” Uli asked. “Sorry, I just got to Rescue City so I don’t know my way around.”

“By Crapper decree, all the names in Manhattan and Brooklyn have been corrupted.”

“Why?”

“To remind us that this is not the place they want us to think it is. It’s
word protest
.” That explained Onion Square.

“How about in Queens and the Bronx?” Uli asked.

“The Piggers are proud to be here, so they’ve kept most of the original names intact in their areas.”

As the bus sped up Park Avenue, Uli and Oric sat down behind the driver, who took the opportunity to keep playing tour guide.

“Many of the buildings you see around here have been rebuilt two, even three different times. The Air Force held multiple bombing exercises here. The Army Corp of Engineers would repair buildings, like restacking bowling pins, then the Air Force would knock them down again. They were initially modeled after Gropius’s Weissenhof houses. This gray building coming up to your left was bombed and rebuilt at least four times; it’s based on a famous building designed by the Taut Brothers.”

Reaching 51st Street, the bus made a left and came to a halt on a low-rent stretch of Fifth Avenue, before a small gothic European church with a missing spire. A smattering of worshipers were entering it.

“This is the stop for Rock & Filler,” the driver said.

Uli and Oric got off along with a handful of others. Uli began heading down toward Rock & Filler Center, but Oric dashed into the church. Uli raced after him.

Inside, he was surprised to find that the house of worship was actually a hollowed-out brownstone. Its upper floorboards had been removed, revealing only unmilled crossbeams and a high, peeling ceiling. Rows of benches faced forward to a large fold-out picnic table. Behind it was a big wooden cross. Clean holes at the ends of the tall crucifix suggested that the Jesus had been set free.