The Years of the City

by Frederik Pohl

  He got off the phone and turned to see a young man with a wispy beard and a sheepskin jacket over a wool turtleneck; he must have been sweating in this overheated room. “Are you Shire Brandon? My name is John Harvey and I’m in charge of hooking up your broadcast.”

  “My broadcast?”

  The young man nodded. “Come on down to the studio. See if you like the way I’ve got it fixed up.”

  He tugged Brandon out of the room, snapping a plastic ID badge on his coat. He kept on talking, but it was always over his shoulder and there was so much noise in City Hall that Brandon could catch only occasional words. John Harvey didn’t wait for elevators. He led Brandon two steps at a time down the fire stairs, past police guards, through a passageway that smelled as bad as any other New York cellar these days, for City Hall’s garbage wasn’t picked up either.

  The City Hall television studio was in what had once been the press room. It had none of the amenities of the big broadcasting networks. One corner was made into a sort of talk-show set, with a peeling mural of the New York City skyline on the wall and two chairs before the backdrop. Cameras and lights on teetery metal stands faced the chairs. “This is for the Mayor and his guest,” Harvey announced. “We feed to the WNYC studio over in the Municipal Building, and from there the video goes to Two, Four, Five, Nine, Eleven and Thirteen, and the audio goes by telephone to the simultaneous translators—we’ve got eight of them, including Japanese, Chinese and Arabic. Air time is ten o’clock tomorrow morning for the Mayor, but we’re going to have bulletins on all the stations, AM, FM, TV, the works, starting right now. How do you like it?”

  “My God,” said Shire Brandon.

  How did he like it? It was not easy to say. How had he liked it when Blanche Ehler, wandering away with him from the high-school picnic, had let him know that it was all right if, for the first time in his life, he wanted to go all the way? Thrilled, scared—mostly unbelieving. Harvey didn’t wait for an answer. He only grinned and led Brandon over to tap on a door. Was it really happening? Would the Universal Town Meeting really get its first full-scale trial—in circumstances like these, where the eyes of the world were on New York’s agonies, and no one anywhere could fail to see it happening?

  The door led to—surprisingly—what looked like an ordinary Holiday Inn hotel room. The only unusual things about it were the police lieutenant at the door, who nodded to Harvey and let him knock, and the fact that, once the door was open and Brandon could see inside, he observed there were no windows. There were four or five people inside. Brandon recognized the Mayor, Saul Wassermann and the lone woman, Jocelyn Feigerman…and at once his mood changed. Nervous expectancy disappeared. Thudding comprehension drove it away.

  They didn’t go in. The door closed and Harvey drew Brandon a few yards down the hall. “He’ll be right with us,” he promised. “Now. Do you have the picture? Did I tell you about the remotes? We’ll have mobile-unit vans from the commercial stations at the TWU headquarters, and the hotels where the firemen and the police unions are meeting. We short-hop the signals by microwave to the collection point, then by wire to the studios. We’re covering all the major municipal unions, and—what’s the matter?”

  “What does Jocelyn Feigerman have to do with this?” Brandon demanded.

  John Harvey’s face changed. The lips drew closed, the corners of the mouth drew down, the eyebrows lifted. “Oh, yeah,” he said after a moment. “Saul said you might give us a hard time about that.”

  “I asked you a question!”

  Harvey said patiently, “She’s your rabbi, Brandon. Why do you think we’re doing this? It goes by clout, and she’s got it.”

  Brandon had time to get his thoughts together. He nodded. “Right, I understand that, but what are we doing?”

  “What? What’s the matter, Brandon, don’t you pay attention? It’s this Universal Town Meeting thing—”

  “But for what purpose? Are you figuring some public-relations thing like a telethon for outlawing abortion, or a real UTM. Why do you want remotes at the union headquarters?”

  “Shit, man! They’re the ones that speak for the municipal workers!”

  “But the whole point is to let people speak for themselves. What about remotes from the citizens at large? What about—” He broke off as Saul Wassermann came out, talking over his shoulder, and looking like a man who had no time to waste. “I think you’re doing it all wrong!” said Brandon, now to Wassermann. “You’re missing the point of the whole thing!”

  “Oh,” groaned Wassermann, “shit. Harvey! Get this monkey out of here!”

  But Brandon shook off the bearded man’s hand. “You didn’t listen!” he shouted. “The UTM isn’t an exercise in brain-washing! It’s a way to give the people real control over what’s happening! Not a chance to hear more bullshit from the Mayor. Not a way for the special-interest people to divide up the public treasury. Free give and take, with every human being in the city getting an equal chance to say what he wants to say and vote on what he wants done…that’s the Universal Town Meeting, and that’s the only way it can make a difference!” He knew that he was shouting. He enjoyed shouting. He enjoyed the fact that heads were turning all up and down the hall, that the cameramen had popped out of the TV studio to listen and the police lieutenant, frowning, was coming a step or two closer. He did not know that the Mayor himself was among them until he turned and saw His Honor standing there.

  You could not tell anything from the Mayor’s expression. You couldn’t tell much from his tone, either, because neither one varied much—the half-smile at the worst of times, the fumbly, school-teacherly inflections of the voice even at the best. He wasn’t looking at Brandon. He was not looking at Saul Wassermann, either, although his words were addressed to him. “Tell me, Saul,” he said to the air, “what did we get this man down here for?”

  It was a rhetorical question, but of the special kind that required a rhetorical answer. Wassermann obliged. “Because Mrs. Feigerman suggested that he might be able to help us with this Universal Town Meeting. Because you said we couldn’t be any worse off, and we might as well try anything. Because the Governor says the National Guard can’t get into the city with the roads the way they are, and because you’re running for re-election next year.”

  The Mayor nodded. “All of those things are still true, Saul,” he observed. “If we try this thing out, we don’t want somebody saying later that we didn’t give it a fair chance.”

  “No,” Wassermann agreed. He only glanced momentarily at Brandon, but Brandon’s heart jumped. He knew, but could not believe, what was coming next. It came.

  “So give the son of a bitch what he wants,” said the Mayor.

  I was John Barrett, ship’s chandler, fearing God and loving the King. We sold stores from a shop in South Street, my nigger and me, and it was good business. Two cargoes in three for North America came to South Street. I treated him good, but he didn’t appreciate it. He tried to run off. He left the stove unbanked. The chimney touched off the laths and the building burned to the ground. I was ruined, and the city worse than I for my nigger was not alone. Yet two weeks later they rounded up him and the other rebel slaves. That day I went up to Collect Pond to see, and they burned him, too.

  It was true that the city had never been in worse shape. Nothing unprecedented had happened. There was not one of the things that had gone wrong that hadn’t gone wrong before—even often before. But never before had it all hit the fan at once. Strikes and storm, bureaucratic muddling and individual citizens’ stubborn resentments, terrorists and hoodlums had all combined to stretch the strength of the city as far as it could go. Farther. In places it had snapped. The fire in Hell’s Kitchen, only blocks away from Times Square and Broadway, would have been a bad one at any time, but the few working firemen could not get their equipment past the clogged streets unplowed by the few working sanitmen, and the winds fanned it and the flames spread. And in Bedford-Stuyvesant eight kids ventured out of a housing development
to crack the windows of a liquor store, and on Fifth Avenue a shivering Puerto Rican with fury in his heart tried to set off a package of dynamite in front of a bank but succeeded mainly in blowing himself away—almost completely; and in one of the city’s most fashionable hotels a woman from West Palm Beach was raped, robbed of her jewels and murdered. Almost. Both tourist and terrorist actually retained a spark of life.

  And so did the city. There was looting and robbery, oh, yes! But only small groups or individuals did it in scattered places. It was too cold for mobs to form. There were crimes committed and no police to stop them; but not too many victims ventured forth, and business was bad for the muggers and stickup men.

  For hookers it was worse. Vanilla Fudge peered out of a coffee shop on Eighth Avenue and wished urgently that her pimp would show up. If he did there was the chance that he would bust her ass for hanging around the coffee shop when she ought to be out working. But there was also the chance that he would tell her to forget it, take the night off, go to a movie, maybe even stay home and watch television. Along with stage actors, teachers of college evening courses and maîtres d’hôtel, hookers were permanently deprived of prime-time TV. There were nights when Vanilla thought she would die for not knowing what was happening on Dallas and Hill Street Blues.

  After she had made up her mind and was pulling one foot after another out of the snow she thought she had made it up the wrong way. There were no cruising cars with Jersey licenses on the avenue, and certainly no pedestrians looking for a date. She could hear sirens from the big fire off toward Tenth Avenue and see the glow in the snowy sky; apart from that the city seemed depopulated. Down to the south she could see flashing green-and-white lights—a stray snowplow trying to keep the intersection clear at 42d Street, perhaps. A screeeep and whine from the next block showed where some trapped motorist was rocking his car on a slick—not successfully, it seemed.

  “Yay. Nillie!”

  Vanilla jumped and almost fell in the snow. “Gee, Dandy,” she panted, twisting around to regain her balance. “You really scared me.”

  “You too scared to hustle, girl?” Dandy’s voice was always growly; tonight it was so rasping she could hardly understand him.

  She offered: “There’s nobody around, hon, you can see that.”

  “What I see’s a lazy whore. You check out those bars, hear?”

  “Aw, Dandy, you know they’ll just chase me out—”

  “You going to worry about that? You worry about what I’ll do!”

  What Vanilla Fudge expected then was that he would hit her. So he did, but his hand was open, the blow landed on the small of her back; it was more of a playful spank than anything else. “You don’t do any good in the bars, you go work the bus terminal,” he ordered. “I be looking for you there.” But he wasn’t even looking at her.

  She stared after him as, holding up the skirts of his coat like a dowager, he waded through the drifts and turned the corner. Dandy’s heart wasn’t in his business tonight. That probably meant he had other business on his mind. Vanilla Fudge hoped it wasn’t anything too stupid—or too dangerous.

  Dandy wasn’t strong enough or maybe brave enough to do any good in more violent kinds of crime; every time he tried it he got hurt. Pimping suited him just right. He wasn’t really mean enough to be a great success as a pimp, either. He couldn’t hold much of a stable—had lost all but two to harder competition as soon as business began to pick up after Thanksgiving, had got rid of the only other girl when she began mainlining. Dandy wouldn’t put up with hard drugs; add him up altogether, and he was missing most of the skills his job usually entailed. But that was all right with Vanilla Fudge. Add her up altogether, and she was well enough content with her life—

  Except when the weather was this bad.

  The bars were crowded, but she wasn’t welcome in any of them. Anyway, nobody wanted to go out in the snow to score. It was going to be just the same in the bus terminal, of course, but at least it was going to be warm in there. Nillie turned south, looking forward to maybe a cup of coffee and a chance to slip her wet boots off.

  There were a couple of figures across the street.

  She hesitated, then decided to walk by them—Dandy would be a lot gladder to see her if she could turn at least one trick. Through the snow she couldn’t see anything much about them except that one was tall and one was short. As Nillie crossed the street with long, deep strides the tall one went inside the building, and left the shorter one standing there.

  By now the water inside Nillie’s boots felt like it was freezing. They were red leather, for looks, not for keeping cold and wet out, and the fake-fur jacket protected only the top part of her body. She slid and sloshed through the snow, wishing for jeans—even for red flannel underwear. God knew what Dandy would say if she turned up for work in that kind of clothes! Of course, it didn’t matter tonight, because there wasn’t going to be any call to get bare in a hurry—

  The remaining figure on the sidewalk was just standing there, and it was a child. A little girl.

  Nillie glanced at her enviously as she went by. Scarf, leggings, fat mittens—that was the way to dress tonight! “Hi, sweetie,” she said, and walked on a few steps before looking back.

  Vanilla Fudge wasn’t in the habit of stopping her patrol for kids. If there was one thing that Dandy would think worse than wearing red flannels, it would be to be seen talking to a child. But who was there to see? So Nillie turned around in her own footprints and stepped back to the little girl.

  “Hon, what are you doing out here this time of night?” she demanded.

  And the child began to cry.

  I’m Timothy Beyley, pumper-driver for McClanahan’s fire brigade. It was the week before Christmas, 1835. It was bitter cold. The North River froze over, the wells froze, the hydrants froze, the cisterns froze. The only way we could get water was to drive out on the ice of the river and chop a hole. So the ten of us pumped into the box of Nix’s pumper, and Nix pumped to Marion’s, and so on all the way to the fire, up around John and Broadway. But it wasn’t enough. We lost them all. Every house on Broadway burned, clear to the Battery.

  Jo-Anne knew what a prostitute was, more or less. That is, she knew what they did, though she didn’t really understand why anybody would pay them to do it. But Jo-Anne was a city kid, growing up with city smarts. However naive her father might think her, the jokes the older kids made about the women who hung around street corners on Lexington Avenue and down toward Cooper Square had stayed in her mind. She knew that this young woman in the stained red boots and short skirt was not a fashion model.

  But what she saw when she looked at Vanilla Fudge was her mother. Her mother had done it, whatever “it” signified exactly, in probably just the same way this young woman did it. The jokes and Sex Ed classes had not left in Jo-Anne’s mind any clear distinction between an unfaithful wife and a whore. This didn’t dispose her against her mother, it made her willing to bury her head in the fake-fur jacket and cry. “Aw, honey,” said Vanilla, patting her head through the knitted cap, and, “Come on, sweetie, tell me what’s the matter.”

  And then, when the child began to tell her about the school letting out early because of the storm, and going back to her apartment and wanting to find out the truth about her mother—mostly about herself—Vanilla Fudge said, “Hey, is this going to be a long story? Because we might as well go down to the Port Authority and get warm, all right? Sure. Now you take my hand—no, wait a minute. You mind taking off one of those pretty little mittens, hon? ’Cause then, see, I’ll put that one on here, and you keep the other one on there, and we’ll put our hands in my pocket like this, the ones that are left over—”

  “I’m a bastard,” said Jo-Anne, and began to cry again.

  So the bare hands had to come out of the pocket so that Vanilla could hug the little girl and let her cry a little while longer.

  When they got started again Jo-Anne began to talk. She didn’t stop. Scuffling and plowing throu
gh the snow, tripping over garbage-can lids and other bulky trash hidden in the drifts, she managed to get her story out a sentence at a time. And Nillie squeezed the hand in her pocket and nodded and listened. She could see the little girl doggedly searching till she found what she sought, but did not want to find. Bastard! Her daddy no daddy, and her mother filled with so much—hate? hate of the child who had wrecked her life?—of some passion, anyway, strong enough for her to kill herself to get away.

  So then there was nothing for Jo-Anne to do but flee the house she had no real right to be in.

  For hours she had wandered aimlessly through the suffering, storm-struck streets of midtown Manhattan. She didn’t think out her problem. She held it away from her. She was warm enough, in her bundled-up snowsuit; she had money enough, from the store she had begun to accumulate in the new piggy bank, to feed herself when she got hungry. A Big Mac and fries here, a Coke and a hot dog there—the things that Mommy had rationed out sparingly all her life, but what right did Mommy have to dictate to her now? She even had money for a movie, and sat through two showings of a film in which cops and dope dealers pursued each other all over the city. It didn’t matter that she saw it twice. Really, she hadn’t seen it even once, because she spent much of the time crying.

  When she came out, conscience and training took over from misery and she tried to call her father at home. The phone was busy. It kept on being busy, every ten or fifteen minutes as she wandered from booth to booth, and then it didn’t answer at all. She knew it was getting late—could he have gone out somewhere at this hour? Did he somehow know it was she who was calling, and if so was he punishing her by refusing to answer? She was wise enough to know that the second possibility was too bizarre to be true—but so was the first!