Great Jones Street

by Don DeLillo

  When I woke up, Azarian was at the window looking out at the snow. I had no idea how long I’d slept. There were noises on the street, men unloading a truck. The woman leaned against the door frame, coat opened. I sat up in bed and stared at her, knowing it wasn’t Azarian’s security she was responsible for, nor mine. It seemed she was part of the pressure they were putting on him. Hair worn short. Caved face. Slender imperial neck. Hurdler’s fused body. All in all a well-crafted piece of smoked glass and chrome. Azarian opened the window, scooped some snow off the ledge and tasted it.

  “Needs seasoning,” he said. “Want a bite?”

  “Close the window.”

  “Epiphany used to sing in supper clubs, according to the data on her. Did I tell you that? Supper clubs. I didn’t know places like that existed anymore. Must have been a weird scene. She acted in exploitation movies for six or seven months. A real professional. She did some modeling here and there. It’s been a hard road. All that professionalism. It does things to people. Makes them hard.”

  “It don’t faze Piffany,” she said. “Nothing faze Tiffany.”

  Azarian looked at her a while longer, then turned to me.

  “So nobody knows where the product is.”

  “True.”

  “Including the people who were holding it.”

  “True again.”

  “I believe you, Bucky. You wouldn’t mislead me in a situation like this. At least I can report back with a definite answer. No more skip-this and wait-on-that. I was tired of the whole thing. No more now.”

  “Are you afraid?” I said.

  “Of everything. More than ever. Constantly.”

  Into boiling water I dropped the plastic pouch lumpy with beef chunks and frozen noodles. I watched it slide down the side of the pot as the water stilled for a moment before resuming its furor. There was no clock that worked, no way to measure the fourteen minutes deemed necessary for thawing and the regeneration of flavor. I counted to sixty a total of seven times, then multiplied by two and removed the pouch, cutting it open with a pair of rusty blunt grooming scissors found protruding from a beer can, one blade in each triangular incision. I waited for the long-dormant odor of goulash to be broadcast to my nose, smoke of herdsman’s meat, but the air held little more than a limp whiff of carrots. I plopped contents into cornflake bowl and set to eating, eyes off the food, teeth working mechanically. I tried in fact to close off all my senses to this dim experience. Abused longhorns stuffed in pouches. Ceremonial flesh injected with cursed preservatives. Eating myself: lessons in the effects of auto-cannibalism. I tried to erase taste-memory from my lips with a two-ply paper towel, floral bordered. Then I got up and answered the telephone, chilled by the feel of the earpiece.

  “It’s your manager, who loves you. Don’t ask where I am. They tell me you’ve been on my trail, telephonically speaking. What I would call a sudden turn of events. You looking for me.”

  “Where are the tapes?”

  “What tapes?”

  “You had somebody go through this apartment. Transparanoia owns a key. I remember that. And I know you’ve got the tapes.”

  “What tapes?” he said. “I want to hear you say the whole thing. What tapes? Tell me in my ear.”

  “Mountain tapes.”

  “So those tapes. So those are the tapes you’re referring to when you say I have the tapes.”

  “Where are they, Glob?”

  “I don’t have them.”

  “Of course you have them.”

  “Of course I have them. I’ve been thinking about those things every day for over a year now. Once you walked off the tour, I stopped thinking and started lusting. I got itchy fingered. I got wild. You walked off the goddamn tour, Bucky. You took away my action. We needed product, see. You were failing to deliver product. Product is something that matters deeply. You owed us product. Contracts in our files specified what product you owed, when it was due, how it was to be presented. This was not a question of a few thousand dollars gurgling down the drain. We’re a parent corporation. We’ve got subsidiaries and affiliates all over the place. Do you know what they’re constantly doing? They’re yowling for their food. Feed me, feed me. Enormous sums of money were involved in your disappearing act. All these companies with their mouths opened wide for the worm breakfast, the worm lunch, the worm dinner. I needed the tapes to keep some kind of action going. Create demand for exotic product. Keep the public salivating. So I had a man hang around from time to time. Whenever you left the building he called me and I got down there quick-quick and snooped around hoping against hope to find the famous tapes. We also spent two days covering every inch of your mountain place. But I figured you were sitting on them. I figured they were right there in Opel’s apartment. Trouble was you never left for very long. I couldn’t give the place a professional Bogart-movie kind of going over. I entered on tiptoes and lifted up here and looked in there, dainty as a parakeet, covering my tracks before I even made any tracks. The night I finally got to the package was some terrific night because I don’t know how many guys go charging up and down the stairs making animal sounds and stomping with their feet. Doors being smashed open and all kinds of commotion below me and then above me and there I am on tippytoes in the middle of the room with this package in my arms which I know contains the mountain tapes and this Mongol horde is racing up and down the stairs making sounds of conquest. I thought sure they’d break in on me and confiscate the object. When they left I heaved three long sighs and blessed myself in the Russian manner, right shoulder first, which my original wife used to do almost constantly before she got pissed off at God and started drinking vodka gimlets. Three sighs of relief. Thank you, Jesus, for letting me find the mountain tapes and for not letting those cuckoos come in here and butcher me, a poor senior executive performing his humble task.” “That’s what amazes me,” I said. “The fact that you’d go to all that trouble. Your money, your position, your reputation. You more or less own this building, Globke.”

  “You don’t understand, Bucky. You never carried ob-noxiousness to its logical conclusion. Nothing is too personally distasteful for me to get involved in as long as it helps create a new product or extends the life of an existing product. Besides I don’t want to get detached. Middle age and overweightness. These are enemies you can’t fight from a swivel chair. Why do you think I don’t have a chauffeur when my counterparts in the industry on both coasts have chauffeurs? I don’t want to get detached. I want the challenge of traffic. I want to get down on my hands and knees and butt heads with the opposition. Action, action, action. It paid off, didn’t it? I got the tapes, right? It was worth the trouble, wasn’t it?”

  “I was about ready to hand them over,” I said. “I was ready to come back out.”

  “That pleases and delights me, Bucky. To think we’re back in the old synchromesh pattern.”

  “I had to figure something out before I handed them over. I knew the tapes were a perfect answer in one sense. They were something unexpected, undreamed of, a whole new direction. But I can’t go out before crowds and do those same songs. The effect of the tapes is that they’re tapes. Done at a certain time under the weight of a certain emotion. Done on the spot and with many imperfections. This material can’t be duplicated in a concert situation. So the tapes can be released, sure. But how do I get released? How do I get back out before crowds? I don’t know how to work that little trick.”

  There was movement to my right and I looked quickly in that direction. Something white. Paper under the door. Neatly folded sheet. I told Globke to hold on and I went to see who the latest bidder was for my tune, influence and the objects in my possession. There was a brief message printed in tiny letters on the lined sheet. It took me a while to read it and put all the parts together. Bohack of Happy Valley. I went back to the phone.

  “Somebody wants to see me. It concerns something I’d like to get out of the way. Let me call you back.”

  “You can’t call me back. I’m unr
eachable. I’m with the tapes and I don’t want to reveal any more of anything over the phone. I’m not giving out my number or my physical whereabouts. Ill be back at my desk tomorrow. We’ll talk then. Don’t worry about a thing. I not only know the answer to your question. I even know the question that follows the answer.”

  “Good. Very good. Terrific.”

  I went to the window as the message had specified. Three men crossed the street and came toward the building. I opened the door and waited. Two took positions against the wall behind the bathtub. The third was Bohack, an enormous man with a circular face and sparse beard. He leaned against the tub, smiling and slowly nodding. At a tangent to his easygoing manner was the barest trace of effort. The flesh near his eyes crinkled like rice paper and his lips were embalmed in that uninhabited smile of the world’s more polite races. It seemed possible to abstract a fifteenth-century Chinese poet from the center of his face.

  “Tremendous apologies,” he said. “We never thought we’d have to infringe on Bucky Wunderlick like this. But here we are all the same. Goes to show you. This is Longboy and that’s Maje. At the outset all we wanted to do was pay tribute to a man who separated himself from the legend of his legend and went into seclusion. But the tribute’s gotten out of hand, causing x-amount of trouble. We came here to fill in the blanks because the sooner we do that the sooner we free Bucky Wunderlick from connection with the product. Do you know where Hanes is?”

  “No.”

  “We can’t locate Hanes. No trace of him. He’s out there peddling. He’s trying to make contact. It’s a question of who gets where first. Do you know where Dr. Pepper is?”

  “No,” I said.

  “First we couldn’t locate Pepper. Then we got him and made arrangements. Now we can’t locate him again. Do you know where Watney is?”

  “No idea.”

  “We can’t locate Watney to find out for sure if he was able to get his hands on the product. We know he was interested but we think he either failed to bid or his bid fell short. Okay — Azarian. Do you know where Azarian is?”

  “No idea.”

  “We can’t locate Azarian exactly. We know he was here and we know he flew to L.A. We figure he’s gone back to the community group he’s involved in that wants to rush new money into the ghetto and either rebuild from the ground up or destroy from the top down. But we can’t locate him exactly. We don’t know street name and house number.”

  “Does anybody know what the product is? I mean exactly.”

  “We won’t know exactly until Pepper gets his mitts on it and goes into the lab.”

  “Who was it who went crashing through this building one night? Breaking doors and stomping people. I mean exactly who was it? This one apartment wasn’t touched. I think that means it was some kind of Happy Valley operation. But who exactly?”

  “We’ve got a runaway contingent, Bucky. Their specialty is violence. Mindless violence. They talk about it all the time. When they’re not talking about it, they’re doing it. Mindless mindless violence. In a roundabout way that’s what got them interested in wholesaling dope. Mindless violence is getting expensive. They need money to keep going.”

  “I wonder how they define mindless,” I said.

  “It defines itself. Mindless. In a way I can see what they’re doing. Mindless violence is the only truly philosophical violence. They’re scrupulous in avoiding any and all implications, political and otherwise. They have no real program or rationale beyond what I said. Mindless. I guess they’re trying to empty everything out. Some of them have even taken new names. Bruno, Rex, Corky, Spot and King. They need money for mindless violence. We need money to maintain our privacy.”

  “You’re all living together, is that right?”

  “We’re the Happy Valley Farm Commune,” he said. “We still think that idea has a chance of working. We still talk to each other, group to group. We still live on the same floor of the same tenement. But now they’ve got two apartments and we’ve got two apartments and we’re in the process of putting up barricades just to play it safe. We’re not on bad terms with them. The rupture is a rupture in ideology. But since we’re dealing with mindlessness we think it’s a good idea to be extra mindful so we’re putting up barricades in the hall between their quarters and our quarters. Privacy has its risks. Monkeys raised in isolation grow up violent.”

  “Rhesus monkeys,” Maje said.

  “Rhesus monkeys isolated at a certain phase of their development grow abnormally aggressive when that phase ends and they’re exposed to other monkeys. They like to attack defenseless infant monkeys. Man the primate goes through similar phases. It may be that Happy Valley’s life-style of privacy, isolation and so forth has spawned this outbreak of violence in half its members. Man the primate has been violent for only forty thousand years. What started it was abstract thought. When man started thinking abstractly he advanced from killing for food to killing for words and ideas. Maybe with mindless violence we’re going into a new cycle. No more abstract thought and no more concrete thought. Violence for nothing.”

  “Nonviolence,” I said.

  “Personally I look on it as faggot violence,” Bohack said. “Sexual connotation aside, something becomes faggot-laden when you remove all meaning from it. If there’s one thing I learned in the six wasted months I spent in junior college being groomed to play football at USC, it’s that violence without historical weight is basically faggot violence and basically ludicrous and a lot easier to ignore basically than the intense programmatic kind of violence that comes from having an idea to defend or some kind of historical impetus to support, like the idea of privacy or the impetus of privacy or the program of privacy. Rex and Spot and the others go flashing through buildings and careening off walls and shrieking at innocent victims and this demonstrates one of the possible results of the kind of intense inner-directed life we’ve been into, but not by any means the only result or the exclusive result. I played left tackle on defense until I realized my violence was faggot-laden.”

  “Laden with faggotry,” Maje said.

  I began to nod my head, trying to find a counterpoint to Bohack’s nonstop bobbing. His slight diffident voice, never cresting, seemed to belong to an alternate entity, a small man lodged in his chest cavity, the square root of Bohack, a chap who wore shabby three-piece suits and combed his hair to one side. There was a sound in the darkness outside, rainfall, a sudden tumult over the city, strange, coming down like fury released, the passion of a summer’s rain. Longboy scratched his straw head and then moused around in bulky pockets before coming up with a bent cigarette butt. He had the stale rangy look of someone who drives other people’s cars coast to coast. He wore jump boots and a field jacket. Maje wore a lumber jacket identical to my own.

  “What’s in that airline bag?” Bohack said. “Just out of curiosity.”

  “Bubble gum cards.”

  “I’ll tell you where we’re located on the spectrum,” he said. “Everybody misinterprets what Happy Valley is and where we’re at. We get nothing but faulty interpretation on these subjects. First, what is Happy Valley? Happy Valley is the Happy Valley Farm Commune. We’re defining ourselves as we go along. We’re seeking our identity. That’s why we came to the city. We came here to find ourselves. Second, where are we located on the spectrum? Okay, I have this to say. To heck with the environment. To heck with fresh vegetables. Heck with the third world. Heck with all idea of religion, God and the universe. We believe in the idea of returning the idea of privacy to the idea of American life. Man the primate has given way to man the mass transit vehicle. Mass man isn’t free. Everybody knows that who’s got one iota of common sense. Happy Valley is free. Free and getting freer. There’s no land left. You can’t go out West to find privacy. You need to build inward. That’s the only direction left to build. We’re building inward. We’re hoping to wholesale dope to make the money to build inward. This isn’t an easy concept to explain, understand or defend. But we believe you’re the
last person we have to defend ourselves to. We’re your group-image, Bucky. You’ve come inside to stay. You’ve always been one step ahead of the times and this is the biggest step of all. Demythologizing yourself. Keeping covered. Putting up walls. Stripping off fantasy and legend. Reducing yourself to minimums. Your privacy and isolation are what give us the strength to be ourselves. We were willing victims of your sound. Now we’re acolytes of your silence.”

  “What are your plans for Hanes?” I said.

  “Well find him,” Maje said.

  “Then they’ll find him,” Longboy said.

  “Belly up in shit’s creek,” Maje said.

  Longboy kept blowing on the gnarled butt to keep it lit. He never put it to his mouth to smoke. He merely whistled into its tip, forcing an occasional glow, man the primate making fire, a brown hem appearing on the paper as the heat bit in.

  “Whose picture is on those bubble gum cards?” Bohack said.

  “Watney’s.”

  “Mind if we take a look? Just out of curiosity. Maje, go look.”

  “I see bubble gum cards.”

  “Whose picture on them?”

  “Watney’s,” Maje said.

  “Tear one card carefully apart, separating front from back.”

  “I don’t know if they’re thick enough to tear that way.”

  “Tear,” Bohack said. “Pretend you’re tearing apart an English muffin. Gently. Little by little.”

  “Here we go.”

  “What’s in there?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Take five more cards and tear them the same way. Front from back. English muffins. Easy now.”

  “What are you looking for?” I said.

  “I’m not sure,” Bohack said. “But Watney is Watney, a man with a reputation for being unpredictable. I’m sorry we’ve had to encroach on Bucky Wunderlick like this. But at least it’s just about over now. We’re on the verge of freeing Bucky Wunderlick from connection with the product and we won’t have to encroach anymore.”