Piecework

by Pete Hamill

  The ghettos are most dangerous of all, as blacks kill other blacks at a rate that would make the Ku Klux Klan envious. Black youths are killing or being killed over sneakers, jackets, over the choice of songs on boom boxes, over women and attitude and casual quarrels. And, of course, over drugs. The old Mob has lost control of the drug business in New York. But the resulting decentralization has led the hardened young entrepreneurs to slaughter one another over the right to sell crack or heroin outside individual bodegas. Now New York must deal with the babies born to crack addicts. They are a peculiar mutation: children who won’t respond in any way to normal human affection. There are tens of thousands of them in the care of the city government now (their mothers dead, in prison, or peddling themselves for more crack on the streets of the city). Thousands of crack babies are born each year; what sort of teenagers will they grow up to be?

  Alas, notions of redemption are generally exercises in self-delusion. Most of the druggies are simply incapable of doing anything else; they come out of generations of welfare, from social groupings that can’t really be described as families. They’ve spent more time practicing their walks than they ever did studying, so they are too ignorant to make their way in the real world. They get into the drug business for a few brief years before joining the many thousands who have died or are in jail.

  “Crime isn’t a job,” one wise older cop told me a few years ago, “but it is an occupation. So these guys make it their life for a while and then get slammed into the prison system. They’re more or less happy there. It’s the way they grew up, the state paying everything. Lock-in welfare. In the joint, they don’t have to care for women, raise children, open bank accounts, plead for mortgages, bust their asses to make ends meet. Instead of helping a kid with biology homework, these assholes would rather stand around the yard in Attica and horseshit each other about how they are really victims. …”

  If some New York cops are especially bitter these days, it’s because they are obviously losing the struggle with the bad guys. The army of New York drug addicts spends most of its time roaming the city, in an anarchic pursuit of money for drugs. They have little to fear from the forces of the law. New York has twenty-seven thousand police on the payroll. But when divided into three five-day shifts, and then depleted by vacation and sick time, along with court appearances, there are only 1,500 cops on the street at any given time. In New York, crime pays. And the criminals know it.

  In addition, the city has been overrun by endless regiments of the homeless. Again, there are so many that nobody can truly count them. But they are everywhere: rummies and junkies, most of them men, their bodies sour from filth and indifference. They sleep in subways and in parks, in doorways and in bank lobbies. Some chatter away with the line of con that’s learned in the yards of prisons. Others mutter in the jangled discourse of the insane.

  But these derelicts are not all the sad and harmless losers of sentimental myth. Some are menacing and dangerous, their requests for handouts essentially demands. The squeegee brigades appear at all major intersections, holding rags to clean auto windshields, grabbing windshield wipers to force compliance. Refuse to pay for the unsolicited window cleaning, your wiper might get snapped off. Few New Yorkers are willing to leave their cars to fight with these people, and the cops ignore them. Every night, the homeless rummage through thousands of plastic garbage bags left out for pickup. They are looking for soda cans, which can be exchanged for cash, which then can be used to buy dope (food can be obtained for nothing at the many soup kitchens around the city). Often, they don’t seal up the bags when they’re finished and the garbage flies away on the city’s streets. New York was never a model of cleanliness. But it has seldom been dirtier than it is now.

  This enrages those who pay taxes — the price of living here. New Yorkers pay federal, state, and city income taxes, along with an endless array of sales and other taxes, to help meet the city’s incredible $28 billion budget. Many of the middle class get virtually none of the services they pay for. The police don’t protect them. They have far fewer fires than ghetto areas. They don’t often use the public hospitals and seldom send their children to public schools, which are perceived as dangerous and drug-ridden. Since the rich pay very little in taxes (they write the laws), the middle class is supporting the non-working underclass, which, of course, pays no taxes at all. So it is the middle class that now speaks of leaving New York behind. They want to live in places that are safe. They want to feel normal human feelings, including horror in the face of the horrible.

  “I just can’t use my kids in a social experiment,” one friend said. “Yeah, I’d like to stay. But I have two children. I don’t want them to be killed coming home from school. I don’t want them to become drug addicts. Is that unreasonable? If so, then we’re completely insane.…”

  If all of this is by now familiar, there seems to be no way to turn it around with the oratory of optimism. It is certain now that no American city will cash in on the end of the Cold War. After a brief few months of hope, the macho adventure in Iraq, with the humiliating sideshow of the President of the United States panhandling for funds from our “allies,” indicates that the U.S. just can’t abide peace. It will certainly not begin transforming the military-industrial complex into a social-industrial complex at any point in the foreseeable future. Instead of using our treasure and intelligence to make goods (thus putting the bulk of the underclass back to work), we will keep making this military junk that only employs an engineering elite. And with his gift for syrupy platitude, the President promises us that nothing will change.

  Meanwhile, as this dreadful century comes to an end, poor New York will slide deeper into decay, becoming a violent American Calcutta. The middle class will flee in greater numbers, the tax base will shrink, the criminals will rule our days and nights. Drugs, crime, despair, illiteracy, disease: All will increase into the next century. If there are twenty-five bums in the corner park now, make way for another hundred. If there are two thousand murders this year, get ready for four thousand. New York is dying. And if New York dies, so will every other American city. We are feeding our children to the dogs. And nobody in Washington understands — do they, gentlemen? — that the horror is that there is no horror.

  ESQUIRE,

  December 1990

  PART II

  THE LAWLESS DECADES

  Paul Sann once wrote a book about the Prohibition era and called it The Lawless Decade. But the Roaring Twenties have an almost innocent charm when compared with American cities over the past quarter century. In Chicago’s famous St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in 1929, seven members of the Bugs Moran mob were shot down in a North Clark Street garage. Headlines screamed. Politicians bellowed. The shootings became enshrined in myth and figured in dozens of movies. In New York in the 1980s, we once had 25 murders on a single weekend. They were covered in the newspapers for two days and then forgotten.

  The American slide into urban barbarism has yet to find its Gibbon. But someday a great historian must try to answer the most persistent question: What happened to us in the last third of the twentieth century? It’s too easy to say that the sixties happened, or Vietnam happened, or Watergate happened. But they are surely part of the story. The apparently endless Cold War — which was their context — insisted on the doctrine of massive retaliation; overwhelming force became essential to our politics and permeated our popular culture. On television news shows, gray-haired statesmen and men from think tanks spoke with icy seriousness about MIRVs and throw weights and the use of force. American governments spent many billions on weapons; our engineers designed amazing new ways for killing people while the Japanese devoted their energies to consumer goods. We killed uncountable Vietnamese. We bombed Cambodia until the Khmer Rouge rose from the ruins to widen the horror. We invaded the Dominican Republic and Grenada, landed troops in Lebanon, armed and paid counterrevolutionaries in Nicaragua, and killed at least 500 human beings in Panama while making the bloodiest drug ar
rest in history. The leadership of the country obviously believed in the use of violence. Why was anyone surprised that Americans in the worst parts of large cities shared their beliefs? The Crips and the Bloods are Americans. And for more than forty years, Americans were taught that pacifism was a dirty word.

  The current violence in American cities has a number of obvious components: poverty, drugs, guns, and race. They can’t be easily separated. The poverty caused by the collapse of the urban manufacturing base has been compounded by racism and a failed welfare system. Thousands of young men and women in the ghettos used drugs to obliterate or enhance reality and then some decided to make big scores in the drug trade itself. Why not? Cocaine was fashionable among many people who were not from ghettos: musicians, movie stars, Wall Street brokers. Then some evil genius invented crack, and suddenly this drug of the elite was available to the poor. It was cheap; it could be snorted instead of injected, thus eliminating the fear of AIDS; it was almost instantly addictive. The market boomed.

  The shift from heroin to cocaine in the 1970s coincided with the decline of the old American Mob, forged during Prohibition. The crude second-generation hoods couldn’t make contact with the Cubans and Colombians who were running the wholesale trade in Medellin, Cali, and Miami. Their own parochialism and racism kept them out of the black and Latino ghettos. The wholesalers built condominiums and office buildings in Miami; the retailers battled over street corners. Decentralization of the drug trade led to endless turf wars and these were made even bloodier by the easy availability of high-powered automatic weapons. This too was endorsed by higher authority; very few politicians would dare to oppose the Great American Gun Cult and its Holy See, the National Rifle Association. They all endorsed the notion, unique in the industrialized world, that every real American had the right to carry a gun and protect himself.

  I’ve included here only a few of the many pieces I wrote on these subjects during this desperate period. There were too many accounts of the deaths of innocent bystanders, of young men shot down for nothing, and widows and mothers and children assembling for funerals. The repetition was numbing. The chosen pieces don’t pretend to tell the whole story of what happened to New York, Miami, and other cities; although the use of crack cocaine is declining, the story has not ended. These are situation reports, and though the situation has shifted, its details have altered, its players have been replaced, the basic situation remains. Today, more than a million men are jammed into American prisons (including John Gotti). Thousands of others are in graveyards. The drugs keep coming. So do the guns.

  NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND

  The slow and tedious processes of justice brought Bernhard Hugo Goetz last week to a fifth-floor courtroom at 111 Centre Street and there, at least, the poor man was safe. Out in the great scary city, the demons of his imagination roamed freely; across the street, many of them were locked away in the cages of The Tombs. But here at the defense table, flanked by his lawyers, protected by a half-dozen armed court officers, the room itself separated by metal detectors from the anarchy of the city, Goetz looked almost serene.

  By design or habit, he was dressed as an ordinary citizen: pink cotton shirt and jeans over the frail body, steel-rimmed glasses sliding down the long sharp nose. His hair looked freshly trimmed. You see people like him every day, passing you on the street, riding the subways, neither monstrous nor heroic. From time to time, he whispered to the lawyers. He made a few notes on a yellow pad. His eyes wandered around the courtroom, with its civil service design and the words In God We Trust nailed in sans-serif letters above the bench of Judge Stephen G. Crane. Goetz never looked at the spectators or the six rows of reporters. In some curious way, he was himself a kind of spectator.

  So when it was time to play the tape-recorded confession that. Goetz made to the police in Concord, New Hampshire, on New Year’s Eve, 1984, he, too, examined the transcript like a man hoping for revelation. The text itself was extraordinary. Combined with the sound of Goetz’s voice — stammering, hyperventilating, querulous, defensive, cold, blurry, calculating — it seemed some terrible invasion of privacy. We have heard this voice before; it belongs to the anonymous narrator of Notes from Underground, that enraged brief for the defense.

  Goetz furrowed his brow as he listened to this much younger, oddly more innocent version of himself that had ended the long panicky flight out of the IRT in the second floor interview room of police headquarters in Concord. He started by telling his inquisitor, a young detective named Chris Domian, the sort of facts demanded by personnel directors: name, birth date, social security number, address (55 West 14th Street, “in New York City, and that’s, uh, that’s zip code 10011”). But it’s clear from the very beginning that he realized these would be his last anonymous hours.

  GOETZ: You see, I’ll tell you the truth, and they can do anything they want with me, but I just don’t want to, I just don’t want to be paraded around, I don’t want a circus…. I wish it were a dream. But it’s not. But, you know, it’s nothing to be proud of. It’s just, just, you know, it just is.

  Exactly. It wasn’t a dream, certainly not a movie; it just was. On December 22, 1984, at about 1:30 in the afternoon, Bernie Goetz boarded a southbound number 2 Seventh Avenue IRT train at 14th Street and his life changed forever. So did the lives of Darrell Cabey, Troy Canty, James Ramseur, and Barry Allen. Within seconds after he boarded the train, they were joined together in a few violent minutes that changed this city. And when you listen to Goetz making his jangled confession, you understand that on that terrible afternoon, there were really five victims.

  DOMIAN: Okay, let’s start with the person that was, uh, on the right, so to speak, laying down.

  GOETZ: Yeah, I think he was the one who talked to me; he was the one who did the talking.

  That was Canty. He is now 20, finishing an 18-month drug rehab treatment at Phoenix House. Before he ran into Goetz, he had pleaded guilty to taking $14 from video games in a bar. In his confession, Goetz is trying hard to explain to Domian (and to officer Warren Foote, who joined Domian) not simply what he did, but its context. The resulting transcript reads like a small, eerie play: the man from the big city explaining a dark world of menacing signs and nuances to the baffled outlanders.

  GOETZ: I sat, I sat down and just, he was lying on the side, kind of. He, he just turned his face to me and he said, “How are you?” You know, what do you do? ‘Cause people joke around in New York a lot, and this and that, and in certain circumstances that can be, that can be a real threat. You see, there’s an implication there … I looked up and you’re not supposed to look at people a lot because it can be interpreted as being impolite — so I just looked at him and I said “Fine.” And I, I looked down. But you kind of keep them in the corner of your eye…

  DOMIAN: Did he say anything else to you?

  GOETZ: Yeah, yeah …the train was out of the station for a while and it reached full speed.…And he and one of the other fellows got up and they, uh — You see, they were all originally on my right-hand side. But, uh, you know, two stayed on my right-hand side, and he got up and the other guy got up and they came to my left-hand side and.…You see, what they said wasn’t even so much as important as the look, the look. You see the body language.…You have to, you know, it’s, it’s, uh, you know, that’s what I call ít, body language.

  That’s what started it off: “How are you?” and body language. It just went from there. Goetz remembered: “He [Canty] stood up and the other fellow stood up. And they very casually walked, or sauntered — whatever you want to call it — over to my left side. And the fellow …uh, he said, ‘Give me five dollars.’”

  This is the moment that helps explain the intensity of the public response to the Goetz story. It is one thing to read with detached amusement about Jean Harris or Claus von Bulow; such tabloid soap operas have little to do with our lives. But for millions of New Yorkers, what happened to Goetz is a very real possibility. Being trapped on the subway by four bad guys d
emanding not a dime or a quarter but five dollars is similar to the nocturne about the burglar beside the bed in the dark. A quarter is panhandling; five dollars is robbery. Such scenarios don’t often happen, but you wonder what you would do if they did. For Goetz, it happened.

  GOETZ: One of the other fellows, he had in his fur coat, he had his hand or something like this and he put a bulge…. And even that isn’t a threat. Because the people, you see, they, they know the rules of the game, the rules of the game in New York. And you know, they’re very serious about the rules…. You see you don’t know what it’s like to be on the other side of violence. It’s, it’s like a picture. When it happens to you, you see, you see it. … People have the craziest image; they see, like Captain Kirk or someone like that, getting attacked by several guys and boom, boom, boom, he beats ’em up and — and two minutes later, he’s walking arm and arm in, with a beautiful woman or something like that. And that’s not what it is.…

  Goetz was not Captain Kirk. He was a frail bespectacled young man living in New York and he had learned the rules of the game. He knew what was meant when one of four young black men told him he wanted five dollars.

  GOETZ: I looked at his face, and, you know, his eyes were shiny, you know. He, he, he was, if you can believe that, his eyes were shiny, he was enjoying himself…. I know in my mind what they wanted to do was play with me.…You know, it’s kind of like a cat plays with a mouse before, you know….

  After you got that impression, what did you wind up doing?

  GOETZ: That’s not an impression, that’s not an impression.…

  Throughout the confession, Goetz struggles with what he clearly believes is an impossible task: to explain to his rural auditors the terrors of New York.