"Hey, guys." Smokey the Fighter, near sixty now, pushed through the people behind and poked in a face with a grizzled stubble of beard, the tip of his nose missing from a historic knife fight in his teens with local gangsters. He couldn't place Gold. "I know I'm getting old now," he related to the others in his deep, gravelly voice. His eyes twinkled and his cheeks were shining. "I feel like nineteen until I look in the mirror, and then I'm surprised. Last summer I was peddling ice cream on the beach and this Italian kid in his twenties tells me tr
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keep out of his territory if I know what's good for me. I couldn't believe it. 'Hey, kid, take care of yourself,' I tried to warn him. 'You know who you're talking to?' I'm still pretty quick with my fists. We moved under the boardwalk and had a fight and he beat the shit out of me—so easily." Smokey put his head back and basked in the memory. "I didn't see a single punch coming. Then I knew I was getting old. And I'm the guy who used to beat up all the other peddlers."
"Not my brother Sheiky," Fishy Siegel contradicted him tersely. "You couldn't beat him up."
"I could beat him up if I caught him," said Smokey. "He was always running."
"But you never caught him, did you?"
"All you guys are doing pretty good, ain't you?"
Fishy wouldn't buy him a drink, so Gold did. Smokey still couldn't place him. Weinrock gave him a cigar.
A pasty, small, sharp-featured man a few places down said, "They're even dumping those welfare families into Sea Gate now, in those big houses there. I guess there are just too many of them and they don't know what to do about it."
"I know what to do," growled a hugely obese man on the seat next to Gold in a harsh, deep voice that seemed to emanate from his stomach and move to his lips without vibrating a single vocal cord. Hip flesh overflowed the bar stool on both sides. "Concentration camps. I mean for them" he explained with dainty politeness and a delicate change of tone to Gold and his group.
The bartender reached forward. "Be a good boy, Ant'ony, and don't make trouble."
"Ant'ony, you prick," said the large man's thin friend, "they're white. That's what I'm trying to tell you. They got lots of little kids in those welfare families too, and they don't know what's happening to them."
"Let's get out of here," Fishy Siegel decided abruptly with an air still starkly devoid of friendship or civility, and Gold was impressed by the consistency and sustain-
% power of that unsociable personality: never in his
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life had Fishy Siegel evinced human feeling for anyone outside his family. "I want to go home."
"Can I pay?" said Gold quickly. "If you don't mind."
"My name is Mort, not Sport."
Gold was halted a moment by the bleak, charged darkness when he stepped outside alone. The smell of old fires was thick as fog. He had nearly half a block to catch up with the others at the cars. Four springy, dark-skinned bloods in sneakers were coming his way, and he knew in a paralyzing flash of intuition that it was ending for him right then and there, with a knife puncture in the heart. He visualized the newspaper clipping someone else might be interested enough to collect:
PERSONABLE
PRESIDENTIAL APPOINTEE
DIES OF KNIFE WOUND
TO THE HEART
ON CONDESCENDING VISIT
BACK TO NEIGHBORHOOD OF BIRTH
Society Fiancee Grieves
Further Details Inside
Help the Neediest!
They passed without bothering him, deciding to let him live. His time had not yet come. Where was progress? he wondered. When he was young, there were lots of poor people and the rich were his enemy. The rich were still there and now the poor were his enemy too.
Gold had noted earlier all the boarded-up, ruined shops on the three major lateral avenues of Coney Island and wondered where all the people went now to buy food, have their suits and dresses mended and dry cleaned, their shoes and radios fixed, and their medical prescriptions filled. In his rented car, he drove alone one more time the desolate length of Mermaid Avenv
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to the high chain-link fence of the private residential area of Sea Gate, where owners of the larger houses were now accepting welfare families, turned left toward the beach and boardwalk, and made his way back slowly along Surf Avenue. He did not see a drugstore. Behind the guarded barriers of Sea Gate, which once grandly sported a yacht club and was restricted to well-off Christians, younger Jewish families now congregated for safety and sent their children to whatever private schools they could. Elderly men and women, as always, probably still crept forth from secret places each morning and prowled the streets and boardwalk for patches of warming sunshine, conversing in Yiddish, and Raymie Rubin's mother had been killed one day on her return. Gold did not pass a single Jewish delicatessen. There was no longer a movie house operating in Coney Island: drugs, violence, and vandalism had closed both garish, overtowering theaters years before. The brick apartment house in which he had spent his whole childhood and nearly all his adolescence had been razed; on the site stood something newer and uglier that did not seem a nourishing improvement for the Puerto Rican families there now. Gold remembered the summer the city widened the beach and trucks loaded with sand rolled past the house on Surf Avenue all day long from early spring on. In summer on scalding days his mother cautioned each child in her fused vocabulary: "It brent a fire in street." Each fall she had a fervent admonition she repeated: They must always go to temple on Yom Kippur no matter where they were in later life; otherwise, people would think they were a "Comminist." She would sit at the window exchanging nods with women at windows across the street and watch for dirigibles, and she told of a time not far back when whole families ran down into the street for sight of an airplane in the sky. She could sing the start of two of the first songs she had learned in America, "Don't Go in the Park After Dark" and "I Didn't Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier." ^oth were timelier now. The frail, mothering woman
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with the bandage around her neck never learned to read or understand much English, but she could identify arias from Carmen, Tosca, Faust, Aida, and Madame Butterfly on the big old Atwater-Kent radio in the living room—bought for her by Sid, Gold remembered now, with money he'd saved secretly from his afternoon work in the laundry and his weekend work Saturday nights and Sunday afternoons at the catering halls. Now how the fuck was she able to learn that?
With the first fragrant, balmy days of March or April, the peddlers would come with their trucks of fruits and vegetables and continue hawking their freshest, ripest produce all through summer. Long Island potatoes were twenty-five pounds for a quarter. The peddlers, all brawny, browned Italians, many with Gypsy sweat-bands tied to brows and neck, would fill the air with a special din of raucous shouts among which one of singular mockery always predominated in the echoing aftermath:
If you've got money, come out and buy. Got no money, stay home and cry.
Gold had been hearing that same peddler's cry daily ever since from financial firms, manufacturers, and governments.
If you've got money, come out and buy. Got no money, stay home and cry.
His mind was a ferment of heresies as he turned from the Island and headed home, heresies he knew would not find the light of expression in print or speech from him, and his brain was pumping with fragments of ideas he thought he might use for a lively article on blight or rubbish. Nationalize Rockefellers and extirpate all Houses of Morgan. Rubbish. Rubbish was accumulating along byways throughout the country, and all but demented eccentrics dropped litter anywhere with
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utmost peace of mind. The Half Moon Hotel in Coney Island was a skyscraping nursing home now, and enterprising teen-agers were murdering old people casually in the normal course of their youthful depredations. Gold had the clippings to prove it. The nation had nothing better to do with its forsaken aged or unenraptured young. Gold knew something no one else did, but was not going to reveal it: he
knew there was no longer anything legal to be done under the American system of government to discourage crime, decrease poverty, improve the economy, or nullify the influences of neglect, and when he got to Washington he would not even try. Why should he be the exception? And he knew something else as a social evolutionist that he might stress someday in his "Every Change Is for the Worse" should he ever find time to write it: Gold knew that the most advanced and penultimate stage of a civilization was attained when chaos masqueraded as order, and he knew we were already there.
Office buildings rose as spectacles where there was no lack of office space, and organizations with Brob-dingnagian names were sprouting like unmanageable vines and spreading like mold with sinecures and conferments for people of limited mentality and unconvincing motive. Gold knew several by heart from pieces he had clipped:
Irving Kristol is Resident Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research.
Sidney Hook, professor emeritus of philosophy at New York University, is a Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution of War, Revolution, and Peace.
Colleagues report that Senator-elect S. I. Hayakawa, the former head of San Francisco State College, has been sleeping through seminars cosponsored by the Harvard Institute of Politics and Library of Congress Research Division.
Former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger has agreed to be consultant at the University of Southern
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California's new Center for the Study of the American Experience. His salary was not disclosed.
Every good place has always been deteriorating, and everything bad was getting worse. Neighborhoods, parks, beaches, streets, schools were falling deeper into ruin and whole cities sinking into rot. They were putting Coney Island welfare families into Sea Gate now. There were just too many people. Italians, Jews, Blacks, Puerto Ricans—it was not unlike the great Caucasian migrations, except there was no place left to go. Assimilation was impossible, upward mobility a fantasy. Multitudes witnessed the avalanching decline. Gold's spirits were improving tremendously as this vocabulary of degeneration and decay coursed through his head. It was the Shoot the Chutes into darkness and dissolution, the plunging roller coaster into disintegration and squalor. Someone should do something. Nobody could. No society worth its salt would watch itself perishing without some serious attempt to avert its own destruction. Therefore, Gold concluded, we are not a society. Or we are not worth our salt. Or both.
Gold had his article.
By nightfall the next day he was secluded in his study at the apartment with his notepaper and typewriter and his folders of newspaper and magazine clippings that might prove apposite.
The liar Richard Helms, former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, had finally been brought to justice for alleged acts of the felony of perjury and was permitted to plead "no contest" to trivial misdemeanors instead. In a departure from long tradition, no notice of the hearing was given to the press. The Attorney General of the United States angrily denied there had been any agreement between the Justice Department and Mr. Helms's lawyers to conceal the courtroom proceeding from reporters.
"It is my understanding that there is to be no jail sentence, that I will be able to get my pension from the
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U.S. Government, and there will be no further prosecution," the transcript reflects Mr. Helms as telling the judge.
"This court does not feel itself bound by any Justice Department agreement with Mr. Helms," said Federal District Judge Barrington D. Parker at a court session attended only by Mr. Helms, his lawyers, Justice Department officials, and court officers.
And then fined Helms only two thousand dollars for lying under oath about the CIA's secret contributions to the undermining of the democratic constitutional government in Chile. Justice was done.
Federal District Judge Barrington D. Parker told Mr. Helms before sentencing, "You dishonored your oath and you now stand before this court in disgrace and shame."
"I don't feel disgraced at all," Mr. Helms later told reporters outside the courtroom after the sentencing.
His lawyer, Edward Bennett Williams, gave exemplary display throughout of that special probity and that commitment to justice and light for which the members of his profession have historically been famed:
In the courtroom, Mr. Williams had told Judge Parker that Mr. Helms would "bear the scar of a conviction for the rest of his life." Outside, however, he told reporters that contrary to what Judge Parker had said, Mr. Helms would "wear his conviction like a badge of honor."
A political columnist for the New York Daily News called the disposition of the case "an establishment fix, pure and simple." The Attorney General of the United States was understandably sensitive to the charge he was party to a fix and replied as best he was able: it was not credible to Gold that there should appear in his lifetime still one more U.S. Attorney General with the stultified brain of an ox and the psychology of a
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corkscrew, but the evidence now before his eyes was lamentably persuasive.
BELL DENIES DOUBLE STANDARD ON HELMS
Attorney General Griffin Bell angrily denied yesterday that the Justice Department had used a "double standard" in handling the case of former CIA Director Richard M. Helms, Bell insisted that the Justice Department recommendation that Helms spend no time in prison and be allowed to keep his government pension was "fair and just." He denied any double standard of prosecuting rich and poor. "Only the well-to-do go to prison," he said.
This was news to Gold. It was news from which he recoiled in disgust to absorb more about this establishment public servant who had kept his government pension and magically escaped the discriminatory incarcerations systematically meted out in the criminal courts to other members of the well-to-do.
Richard McGarrah Helms (he prefers not to use his middle name) was almost the epitome of the establishment figure. His father was a corporate executive and his maternal grandfather, Gates McGarrah, was an international banker. He spent two high school years in Switzerland and Germany, where he learned French and German as well as the social graces.
Gold would almost rather be a Jew.
He brushed Richard McGarrah Helms aside for what use he could make of him later in his book on Kissinger or the Jewish experience and turned to the task at hand with a concentration that was diluted almost at the start by the regretful wish that he were already writing his book. David Eisenhower was writing a book:
DAVID EISENHOWER WRITING BOOK ABOUT GRANDFATHER'S CHARACTER
David Eisenhower is writing an intimate character study of his grandfather. "I will include the impressions
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I had of him," Mr. Eisenhower said, "but the more I leave myself out of the book the better."
The timing of the book is just right for him, Mr. Eisenhower explained. "I just got out of law school, and IVe always been ambitious in the writing field. The idea sort of occurred to me."
John Ehrlichman, Spiro Agnew, and H. R. Halde-man had written books. Gerald Ford was writing a book:
TALENT SCOUT
He still has 17 days in office, but President Ford has quietly signed up with the William Morris talent agency to represent him when he returns to private life. He will have the same agent who represented Olympic swim champ Mark Spitz and the racehorse Secretariat.
William Morris will get 10 percent on any books the President may write, any lectures he may give, any television deals he makes.
If Gerald Ford could write a book, was there any reason Secretariat could not? An engaging screenwriter named Nancy Dowd was not writing a book:
Although a Smith College classmate once predicted that Nancy Dowd would be "our generation's James Joyce," Miss Dowd seems quite content writing screenplays in Hollywood. "I wouldn't mind writing a novel," she said. "But the way you can show behavior in films is so exciting."
Gold warmed to Miss Dowd and thought of sending a fan letter because she w
as not writing a novel.
Richard Nixon had written a book.
The President of the United States had written a book about his one year in the White House and might secretly be writing another about his second.
A popular fashion model named Cheryl Tiegs had overcome considerable misgivings and decided to write a book:
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In addition, Tiegs just negotiated a deal with Simon & Schuster giving her $70,000 plus royalties to collaborate on a book. "The problem with writing," she sighed, "is that there's not much money in it."
Even that fat little fuck Henry Kissinger was writing a book! He was writing his memoirs, after Gold fiacf done most of the work, and, according to separate stories in The New York Times, had negotiated for the publication rights with the same frantic subtlety and intrigue of which he had given such striking illustration in public office. Said the first of these stories in the Times:
A NEW SHUTTLE FOR KISSINGER, TO PUBLISHERS WITH MEMOIRS
Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger is about to embark on one of his most challenging diplomatic journeys—the selling of his memoirs. How skillfully he maneuvers for the rights to his life story could mean the difference between merely a large advance and the biggest advance in book publishing history. The figures being totted up range from $1 million to $3 million, plus extras.
Mr. Kissinger, who negotiated his own contracts in the past, has never used a literary agent and, according to a well-known knowledgeable source at the State Department, probably will not employ one.
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