Vintage Didion (13 page)

The narrative comforts us, in other words, with the assurance that the world is knowable, even flat, and New York its center, its motor, its dangerous but vital “energy.” “Family in Fatal Mugging Loved New York” was the
Times
headline on a story following the September 1990 murder, in the Seventh Avenue IND station, of a twenty-two-year-old tourist from Utah. The young man, his parents, his brother, and his sister-in-law had attended the U.S. Open and were reportedly on their way to dinner at a Moroccan restaurant downtown. “New York, to them, was the greatest place in the world,” a family friend from Utah was quoted as having said. Since the narrative requires that the rest of the country provide a dramatic contrast to New York, the family’s hometown in Utah was characterized by the
Times
as a place where “life revolves around the orderly rhythms of Brigham Young University” and “there is only about one murder a year.” The town was in fact Provo, where Gary Gilmore shot the hotel manager, both in life and in
The Executioner’s Song
. “She loved New York, she just loved it,” a friend of the assaulted jogger told the
Times
after the attack. “I think she liked the fast pace, the competitiveness.”

New York, the
Times
concluded, “invigorated” the jogger, “matched her energy level.” At a time when the city lay virtually inert, when forty thousand jobs had been wiped out in the financial markets and former traders were selling shirts at Bergdorf Goodman for Men, when the rate of mortgage delinquencies had doubled, when fifty or sixty million square feet of office space remained unrented (sixty million square feet of unrented office space is the equivalent of fifteen darkened World Trade Towers) and even prime commercial blocks on Madison Avenue in the Seventies were boarded up, empty; at a time when the money had dropped out of all the markets and the Europeans who had lent the city their élan and their capital during the eighties had moved on, vanished to more cheerful venues, this notion of the city’s “energy” was sedative, as was the commandeering of “crime” as the city’s central problem.

3

The extent to which the October 1987 crash of the New York financial markets damaged the illusions of infinite recovery and growth on which the city had operated during the 1980s had been at first hard to apprehend. “Ours is a time of New York ascendant,” the New York City Commission of the Year 2000, created during the mayoralty of Edward Koch to reflect the best thinking of the city’s various business and institutional establishments, had declared in its 1987 report. “The city’s economy is stronger than it has been in decades, and is driven both by its own resilience and by the national economy; New York is more than ever the international capital of finance, and the gateway to the American economy.”

And then, its citizens had come gradually to understand, it was not. This perception that something was “wrong” in New York had been insidious, a slow-onset illness at first noticeable only in periods of temporary remission. Losses that might have seemed someone else’s problem (or even comeuppance) as the markets were in their initial 1987 free-fall, and that might have seemed more remote still as the markets regained the appearance of strength, had come imperceptibly but inexorably to alter the tone of daily life. By April of 1990, people who lived in and around New York were expressing, in interviews with the
Times
, considerable anguish and fear that they did so: “I feel very resentful that I’ve lost a lot of flexibility in my life,” one said. “I often wonder, Am I crazy for coming here?’” “People feel a sense of impending doom about what may happen to them,” a clinical psychologist said. People were “frustrated,” “feeling absolutely desolate,” “trapped,” “angry,” “terrified,” and “on the verge of panic.”

It was a panic that seemed in many ways specific to New York, and inexplicable outside it. Even later, when the troubles of New York had become a common theme, Americans from less depressed venues had difficulty comprehending the nature of those troubles, and tended to attribute them, as New Yorkers themselves had come to do, to “crime.” “Escape From New York” was the headline on the front page of the
New York Post
on September 10, 1990. “Rampaging Crime Wave Has 59% of Residents Terrified. Most Would Get Out of the City, Says Time/CNN Poll.” This poll appeared in the edition of
Time
dated September 17, 1990, which carried the cover legend “The Rotting of the Big Apple.” “Reason: a surge of drugs and violent crime that government officials seem utterly unable to combat,” the story inside explained. Columnists referred, locally, to “this sewer of a city.” The
Times
ran a plaintive piece about the snatch of Elizabeth Rohatyn’s Hermès handbag outside Arcadia, a restaurant on East 62nd Street that had for a while seemed the very heart of the New York everyone now missed, the New York where getting and spending could take place without undue reference to having and not having, the duty-free New York; that this had occurred to the wife of Felix Rohatyn, who was widely perceived to have saved the city from its fiscal crisis in the midseventies, seemed to many a clarion irony.

This question of crime was tricky. There were in fact eight American cities with higher homicide rates, and twelve with higher overall crime rates. Crime had long been taken for granted in the less affluent parts of the city, and had become in the midseventies, as both unemployment and the costs of maintaining property rose and what had once been functioning neighborhoods were abandoned and burned and left to whomever claimed them, endemic. “In some poor neighborhoods, crime became almost a way of life,” Jim Sleeper, an editor at
Newsday
and the author of
The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York
, noted in his discussion of the social disintegration that occurred during this period:

… a subculture of violence with complex bonds of utility and affection within families and the larger, “law-abiding” community. Struggling merchants might “fence” stolen goods, for example, thus providing quick cover and additional incentive for burglaries and robberies; the drug economy became more vigorous, reshaping criminal lifestyles and tormenting the loyalties of families and friends. A walk down even a reasonably busy street in a poor, minority neighborhood at high noon could become an unnerving journey into a landscape eerie and grim.

What seemed markedly different a decade later, what made crime a “story,” was that the more privileged, and especially the more privileged white, citizens of New York had begun to feel unnerved at high noon in even their own neighborhoods. Although New York City Police Department statistics suggested that white New Yorkers were not actually in increased mortal danger (the increase in homicides between 1977 and 1989, from 1,557 to 1,903, was entirely among what the NYPD classified as Hispanic, Asian, and black victims; the number of white murder victims had steadily declined, from 361 in 1977 to 227 in 1984 and 190 in 1989), the apprehension of such danger, exacerbated by street snatches and muggings and the quite useful sense that the youth in the hooded sweatshirt with his hands jammed in his pockets might well be a predator, had become general. These more privileged New Yorkers now felt unnerved not only on the street, where the necessity for evasive strategies had become an exhausting constant, but in even the most insulated and protected apartment buildings. As the residents of such buildings, the owners of twelve- and sixteen- and twenty-four-room apartments, watched the potted ficus trees disappear from outside their doors and the graffiti appear on their limestone walls and the smashed safety glass from car windows get swept off their sidewalks, it had become increasingly easy to imagine the outcome of a confrontation between, say, the relief night doorman and six dropouts from Julia Richman High School on East 67th Street.

And yet those New Yorkers who had spoken to the
Times
in April of 1990 about their loss of flexibility about their panic, their desolation, their anger, and their sense of impending doom, had not been talking about drugs, or crime, or any of the city’s more publicized and to some extent inflated ills. These were people who did not for the most part have twelve- and sixteen-room apartments and doormen and the luxury of projected fears. These people were talking instead about an immediate fear, about money, about the vertiginous plunge in the value of their houses and apartments and condominiums, about the possibility or probability of foreclosure and loss; about, implicitly, their fears of being left, like so many they saw every day, below the line, out in the cold, on the street.

This was a climate in which many of the questions that had seized the city’s attention in 1987 and 1988, for example that of whether Mortimer Zuckerman should be “allowed” to build two fifty-nine-story office towers on the site of what is now the Coliseum, seemed in retrospect wistful, the baroque concerns of better times. “There’s no way anyone would make a sane judgment to go into the ground now,” a vice president at Cushman and Wakefield told the
New York Observer
about the delay in the Coliseum project, which had in fact lost its projected major tenant, Salomon Brothers, shortly after Black Monday, 1987. “It would be suicide. You’re better off sitting in a tub of water and opening your wrists.” Such fears were, for a number of reasons, less easy to incorporate into the narrative than the fear of crime.

The imposition of a sentimental, or false, narrative on the disparate and often random experience that constitutes the life of a city or a country means, necessarily, that much of what happens in that city or country will be rendered merely illustrative, a series of set pieces, or performance opportunities. Mayor Dinkins could, in such a symbolic substitute for civic life, “break the boycott” (the Flatbush boycott organized to mobilize resentment of Korean merchants in black neighborhoods) by purchasing a few dollars’ worth of produce from a Korean grocer on Church Avenue. Governor Cuomo could “declare war on crime” by calling for five thousand additional police; Mayor Dinkins could “up the ante” by calling for sixty-five hundred. “White slut comes into the park looking for the African man,” a black woman could say, her voice loud but still conversational, in the corridor outside the courtroom where, during the summer of 1990, the first three defendants in the Central Park attack, Antron McCray, Yusef Salaam, and Raymond Santana, were tried on charges of attempted murder, assault, sodomy, and rape. “Boyfriend beats shit out of her, they blame it on our boys,” the woman could continue, and then, referring to a young man with whom the victim had at one time split the cost of an apartment: “How about the roommate, anybody test his semen? No. He’s white. They don’t do it to each other.”

Glances could then flicker among those reporters and producers and courtroom sketch artists and photographers and cameramen and techs and summer interns who assembled daily at 111 Centre Street. Cellular phones could be picked up, a show of indifference. Small talk could be exchanged with the marshals, a show of solidarity. The woman could then raise her voice: “White folk, all of them are devils, even those that haven’t been born yet, they are
devils
. Little
demons
. I don’t understand these devils, I guess they think this is
their court.”
The reporters could gaze beyond her, faces blank, no eye contact, a more correct form of hostility and also more lethal. The woman could hold her ground but avert her eyes, letting her gaze fall on another black, in this instance a black
Daily News
columnist, Bob Herbert. “You,” she could say. “You are a
disgrace
. Go ahead. Line up there. Line up with the white folk. Look at them, lining up for their first-class seats while
my
people are downstairs behind
barricades
… kept behind barricades like
cattle
… not even allowed in the room to see their sons lynched … is that an
African
I see in that line? Or is that a
Negro
. Oh, oh, sorry, shush, white folk didn’t know, he was
passing
….”

In a city in which grave and disrupting problems had become general—problems of not having, problems of not making it, problems that demonstrably existed, among the mad and the ill and the underequipped and the overwhelmed, with decreasing reference to color—the case of the Central Park jogger provided more than just a safe, or structured, setting in which various and sometimes only marginally related rages could be vented. “This trial,” the
Daily News
announced on its editorial page one morning in July 1990, midway through the trial of the first three defendants, “is about more than the rape and the brutalization of a single woman. It is about the rape and the brutalization of a city. The jogger is a symbol of all that’s wrong here. And all that’s right, because she is nothing less than an inspiration.”

The
News
did not define the ways in which “the rape and the brutalization of the city” manifested itself, nor was definition necessary: this was a city in which the threat or the fear of brutalization had become so immediate that citizens were urged to take up their own defense, to form citizen patrols or militia, as in Beirut. This was a city in which between twenty and thirty neighborhoods had already given over their protection, which was to say the right to determine who belonged in the neighborhood and who did not and what should be done about it, to the Guardian Angels. This was a city in which a Brooklyn vigilante group, which called itself Crack Busters and was said to be trying to rid its Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of drugs, would before September was out “settle an argument” by dousing with gasoline and setting on fire an abandoned van and the three homeless citizens inside. This was a city in which the
Times
would soon perceive, in the failing economy, “a bright side for the city at large,” the bright side being that while there was believed to have been an increase in the number of middle-income and upper-income families who wanted to leave the city, “the slumping market is keeping many of those families in New York.”