by Philip Roth
“And the girl?” Michelle again.
“The girl’s good. The girl says, ‘Hey, leave him alone.’ And the cop says, ‘You trying to interfere with this arrest?’ ‘Leave him alone!’ she tells him.”
“This is Debby,” Michelle laughed. “Absolutely Deborah.”
“Is it?” Sabbath asked.
“To a T.” She’s proud.
“The cop grabs me because I’m starting to be a real pain in the ass. I say, ‘Hey, I’m not going in. This is silly,’ and he says, ‘You are,’ and the girl says, ‘Leave him alone,’ and he says, ‘Listen, if you keep doing this, I’ll take you in also.’ ‘This is crazy,’ the girl says, ‘I just came from my physics class. I didn’t do anything.’ Things get out of control and the cop pushes her out of the way, and so I start shouting, ‘Hey, don’t push her.’ ‘Oh,’ he says to me, ‘Sir Galahad.’ In 1956 a cop could still say something like that. This was before the decline of the West spread from the colleges to the police departments. Anyway, he takes me in. He lets me get all my apparatus together and he takes me in.”
“With the girl,” Michelle said.
“No. Just took me. ‘I want to book this guy,’ he tells the booking officer. The precinct station on 96th Street. I got scared, of course. When you walk into a station, there’s a big desk up front with a booking officer, and this big desk scares you. I said, ‘This is absolutely bullshit,’ but when Abramowitz says, ‘This guy should be booked for vending without a license, disorderly conduct, harassment, assault, and obscenity. And resisting arrest. And obstruction of justice,’ when I heard this, I think I’m going to serve for the rest of my life and I went nuts. ‘This is all bullshit! I’ll get the ACLU! This’ll be the end of you!’ I tell the cop. I’m shitting my pants but that’s what I’m shouting. ‘Yeah, the ACLU,’ Abramowitz says, ‘those Red bastards. Great.’ ‘I’m not going to say anything till I get a lawyer from the ACLU!’ Now the cop is shouting, ‘Fuck them. Fuck you. We don’t need a lawyer. We’re just going to arrest you now, shorty—you bring a lawyer here when you got to be in court.’ The desk sergeant is listening to all this. He says to me, ‘Tell me what happened, young man.’ I don’t know from shit what it means, but I just say again and again, ‘I’m not going to tell you till I get a lawyer!’ And Abramowitz is now deep in the fuck-you mode. But the other guy says, ‘What happened, son?’ I think, Tell him; he’s not a bad guy. So I said, ‘Listen, this is all that happened. And he went crazy. He went crazy because he saw a breast. It happens all the time. Kids are making out on the street. This guy lives in Queens—he doesn’t know what’s happening. Does he ever see the way girls walk around here in the summer? Everybody on the street knows except this guy who lives in Queens. An exposed breast is no big deal.’ So Abramowitz says, ‘It’s not just an exposed breast. You don’t know her, you never met her, you unnippled it, you unbuttoned it, she really didn’t know what was going on, you were distracting her with the finger and you hurt her.’ ‘I didn’t hurt her—you hurt her. You pushed her.’ The desk sergeant says, ‘You mean to say you totally undressed a woman on Broadway?’ ‘No! No! All I did was this.’ And I explained again. The guy was fascinated. ‘How could you, on an open street, with a woman you never met before?’ ‘My art, Sergeant. That’s my art.’ This breaks him up,” said Sabbath, seeing it breaking Michelle up, too. And Norman, so happy! Watching from a foot away while I seduce his wife. This Prozac is some drug.
“‘Harry,’ the desk sergeant says to Abramowitz, ‘why don’t you leave the kid alone? He’s not a bad kid. All he did was his art.’ He’s still laughing. ‘Finger painting. Baby shit. What’s the difference? He has no record. He’s not going to do it again. If the kid had seventeen molestation charges . . .’ But Abramowitz is furious now. ‘No! That’s my street. Everybody knows me there. He was abusive to me.’ ‘How?’ ‘He pushed me away.’ ‘He touched you? He touched a police officer?’ ‘Yeah. He touched me.’ So now I’m not up for touching the girl; now I’m up for touching the cop. Which I never did, but of course the desk sergeant, after trying to placate Harry, switches and goes over to Harry’s side. To the arresting officer’s side. And so they charge me with all this stuff. The cop makes out an affidavit as to what happened. And a complaint is issued against me. Seven charges. I can get a year for each. I’m commanded to appear at Sixty Centre Street—that it, Norm? Sixty Centre?”
“Sixty Centre Street, in Part Twenty-two, at two-thirty in the afternoon. You remember everything.”
“So how did you get a lawyer?” Michelle asked him.
“Norman. Norman and Linc. I got a phone call, either from Norm or Linc.”
“Linc,” said Norman. “Poor Linc. In that box.”
Got him, too. And it’s only a box. Never seems to become clichéd.
“Linc said, ‘We understand you got arrested. We’ve got a lawyer for you. Not a little shmegeggy just out of law school but some guy who’s been around for a while. Jerry Glekel. He’s done fraud cases, assault and battery, robbery, burglary. He does organized-crime work. It pays very well but the work is not marvelous, and this he’s willing to do as a favor to me.’ Right, Norm? A favor to Linc, whom he somehow knows. Glekel says this is all bullshit and in all probability it’ll be dismissed. I talk to Glekel. I’m still hot on the ACLU, so he goes to the Civil Liberties Union and tells them this is a case he thinks they should support. I’ll represent him, he says. You should support him, submit an amicus brief. We’ll make it an ACLU-sponsored case. Glekel’s got it all figured out. What it deals with really is artistic freedom on the streets, arbitrary control by the police of the streets. Who controls the streets? The people or the police force? Two people doing something that’s innocuous, that’s playful—the defenses are all obvious, just another case of police abuse. Why should a kid like this have to spend X and Y and Z, et cetera? So we came to trial. About twenty-two people show up at the trial. Lost in the big courtroom. The civil rights student group from Columbia. About twelve kids and their adviser. Somebody from the Columbia Spectator. Somebody from the Columbia radio station. They’re not there because of me. They’re there because this girl, Helen Trumbull, is saying that I did nothing wrong. In 1956, this creates a tiny stir. Where’d she get the guts? This is still years before Charlotte Moorman is playing the cello bare-breasted down in the Village, and this is just a kid, not a performer. There’s even somebody sitting there from the Nation. They got wind of it. And there’s the judge. Mulchrone. Old Irish guy, former prosecutor. Tired. Very tired. He doesn’t want to hear this shit. He doesn’t care. There are murders and killings in the street, and here he is wasting his time with a guy who twisted a nipple. So he’s not in the best of moods. The prosecutor is the young boy from St. John’s, who wants to put me behind bars for life. The trial starts at two, two-thirty, and about an hour before, he has the witnesses down in his office running them through the lies. And then they get on the stand and they do their stuff. Three of them, as I remember it. Some old lady who says the girl kept trying to push my hand away but I wouldn’t stop. And the druggist, the Jewish druggist, humanistically outraged as only a Jewish druggist can be. He could only see the back of the woman but he testified that she was upset. Glekel cross-examines him, contending that the druggist couldn’t have seen it, because the girl had her back to him. Twenty minutes of his Jewish druggist lies. And the cop testifies. He’s called at the beginning. He testified, and I’m nuts—I’m angry, I’m squirming, I’m furious. Then I got up and testified. The prosecutor asks me, ‘Did you ever ask the woman if you could unbutton her shirt?’ ‘No.’ ‘No? Did you know who was in the audience at the time?’ ‘No.’ ‘Did you know that there were kids in the audience?’ ‘There were no kids in the audience.’ ‘Can you state under oath, as a matter of certainty, that there were no kids in the audience? You’re down there and they’re up here. Didn’t you see seven kids walking at the back there?’ And the druggist, you see, will testify that there were seven kids, and the old lady, too, al
l of them, you see, they all want to hang me because of the tit. ‘Look, this is a form of art.’ This gets a rise every time. The kid from St. John’s makes a face. ‘Art? What you did was you unbuttoned a woman’s breast, and that’s art? How many other women’s dresses have you unbuttoned?’ ‘Actually it rarely has ever happened that I’ve got that far. Unfortunately. But that’s the art. The art is being able to get them into the act.’ The judge, Mulchrone, the first thing he says, he says now. Flat voice. ‘Art.’ Like he’s just been wakened from the dead. ‘Art.’ The prosecutor won’t even get into the dialogue, it’s so absurd. Art! He says to me, ‘You have any kids?’ ‘No.’ ‘You don’t care about kids. You have a job?’ ‘This is my job.’ ‘You don’t have a job. Have a wife?’ ‘No.’ ‘Ever had a job that lasted more than six months?’ ‘Merchant seaman. U.S. Army. GI Bill in Italy.’ So he’s got me nailed. He delivers his shot. ‘You call yourself an artist. I call you a drifter.’ Then my lawyer calls the professor from NYU. Big mistake. This was Glekel’s idea. They had professors to argue the Ulysses case, they had professors to argue the ‘Miracle’ case— why shouldn’t we have a professor to argue your case? I didn’t want it. The professors are as full of shit on the stand as the druggist and the cop. Shakespeare was a great street artist. Proust was a great street artist. And so on. He was going to compare me and my act to Jonathan Swift. The professors are always schlepping in Swift to defend some farshtunkeneh nobody. Anyway, in about two seconds the judge learns he’s not a witness—he’s an expert witness. To Mulchrone’s credit, he is baffled. ‘What’s he an expert on?’ ‘That street art is a valid form of art,’ my lawyer says, ‘and what they were doing, this interplay on the streets, is traditional.’ The judge covers his face. It’s three-thirty in the afternoon and the man has heard a hundred and twelve cases before me. He is seventy years old and he has been on the bench all day. He says, ‘This is absolute nonsense. I’m not going to listen to a professor. He touched a breast. What happened is he touched a breast. I don’t need any testimony from a professor. The professor can go home.’ Glekel: ‘No, Your Honor. There is a larger perspective to this case. And the larger perspective is that there is legitimate street art and what happens in street art is that you can engage people in a way that you can’t engage them in a theater.’ And all the time Glekel is speaking, the judge is still covering his face. The judge covers his face even when he himself is speaking. The whole of life makes him want to cover his face. He’s right, too. He was a wonderful man, Mulchrone. I miss him. He knew the score. But my lawyer goes on, Glekel goes on. Glekel is sick of doing organized-crime work. He has higher aspirations. I think mostly now he is directing his argument to the reporter from the Nation. ‘It’s the intimacy of street art,’ he says, ‘that makes it unique.’ ‘Look,’ Mulchrone says, ‘he touched a breast on the street in order to get some laughs or in order to get some attention. Isn’t that right, sonny?’ So the prosecutor has three witnesses and the cop against me, and we don’t have the professor, but we’ve got the girl. We’ve got Helen Trumbull. The wild card is this girl. It was unusual that she should come down there. Here’s the alleged victim testifying for the perpetrator. Though Glekel is saying this is a victimless crime. In fact, the victim, if there even is one, is coming his way, but the prosecutor says no, the victim is the public. The poor public, getting the shaft from this fucking drifter, this artist. If this guy can walk along the street, he says, and do this, then little kids think it’s permissible to do this, and if little kids think it’s permissible to do this, then they think it’s permissible to blah blah banks, rape women, use knives. If seven-year-old kids—the seven nonexistent kids are now seven seven-year-old kids—are going to see that this is fun and permissible with strange women . . .”
“And what happened with the girl?” Michelle asked. “When she testified.”
“What do you want to have happened?” Sabbath asked her.
“How did she hold up?”
“She’s a middle-class girl, a nervy girl, a terrific, defiant girl, but once she gets in the court, how do you expect she held up? She gets scared. Out on the street, she was a good kid, she had guts—116th Street and Broadway is a young people’s world—but here in the courtroom, the alliance is the cops, the prosecutor, and the judge . . . it’s their world, they believe each other, and you’ve got to be blind not to see it. So how does she testify? In a scared voice. Goes there meaning to help me, but once she walks into the courtroom, a big room, big walls, JUSTICE FOR ALL written up there in wood—she gets scared.”
“Debby,” said Michelle.
“The girl testifies that she didn’t scream. The druggist said she screamed and she says she never screamed. ‘You mean to say a man is touching your breast in the middle of Manhattan, doing this, and you didn’t scream out?’ See, sounds like she’s a whore. That’s what he wants to establish, that Debby,” says Sabbath, altogether deliberately, but pretending not even to have heard his own error, “is a whore.” Nobody corrects him. “‘How often do men touch your breasts in the middle of the street?’ ‘Never.’ ‘Were you surprised, were you upset, were you shocked, were you this, were you that?’ ‘I didn’t notice.’ ‘You didn’t notice?’ The kid is getting nervous as hell but she hangs in. ‘It was part of the game.’ ‘Do you generally have men play games with your breasts in the middle of the street? A man you didn’t know, a man you’d never spoken to, a man whose face you couldn’t see?’ ‘But he testified I screamed,’ Debby says, ‘I never screamed.’”
“Helen,” Norman said.
“Trumbull,” Sabbath said. “Helen Trumbull.”
“You said Debby.”
“No, I said Helen.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Michelle said. “What happened to her?”
“Well, he really goes to work on her. For old St. John’s. For his father the cop. For morality. For America. For Cardinal Spellman. For the Vatican. For Jesus and Mary and Joseph and all the gang there in the manger, for the donkeys and the cows there in the manger, for the wise men and the myrrh and the frankincense, for the whole fucking Catholic schmeer that we all need like a fucking hole in the head, this kid from St. John’s really tears into Debby’s ass. He brutalizes her. He kicks her every fucking which way. I twist nipples out on the street, but this guy goes right for the cunt. Remember? Yeah, I remember, Norm. A real clitorectomy, the first I ever had the privilege to see. He cut her little fucking weenie right off her, right there, right under where it says JUSTICE FOR ALL, and the judge and the cop and the druggist ate it up. Yeah, he really broke her down. ‘Have you ever walked into class with your breasts exposed?’ ‘No.’ ‘When you were at Bronx Science high school, before you came to Barnard to become a defender of artistic freedom, did anybody at Bronx Science ever touch your breasts in full view of the other students?’ ‘No.’ ‘But weren’t some of those students friends of yours? Isn’t it less embarrassing to do it in front of friends than in front of strangers in the street?’ ‘No. Yes. I don’t know.’ Uh-oh—score this round for the gang in the manger. He’s finally got her thinking that she may be in the wrong. Have you ever exposed your breasts on 115th Street, 114th Street, 113th Street—and what about the little kids who were watching? ‘There were no little kids.’ ‘Listen, you’re standing here, this guy is performing there—this whole thing took a minute and a half. Did you see who was walking behind you during that minute and a half? Yes or no?’ ‘No.’ ‘It’s noon. Kids are on lunch hour. You have kids from the music school up there, you have kids from private schools. Do you have a brother or a sister?’ ‘Yes. Both.’ ‘How old are they?’ ‘Twelve and ten.’ ‘Your sister is ten. How would you like your ten-year-old sister, to know what you allowed a man you didn’t know to do to you in full view of 116th Street and Broadway, with dozens of cars passing, hundreds of people walking around? For you to be standing there while this man is twisting your nipple—how do you feel about telling that to your sister?’ Debby tries to brazen it out. ‘I wouldn’t mi
nd.’ I wouldn’t mind. What a girl! If I could find her today and if she would let me, I’d get down on 116th Street and Broadway and lick the soles of her feet. I wouldn’t mind. In 1956. ‘And how about if he did it to your sister?’ This gets her back up. ‘My sister’s only ten,’ she says. ‘Have you told this to your mother?’ ‘No.’ ‘Have you told this to your father?’ ‘No.’ ‘No. And so isn’t it true, then, that the reason you’re testifying for him is that you feel sorry for him? It’s not because you think what he did was right, is it? Is it? Is it, Debby?’ Well, by now she’s in tears. They did it. They’ve done it. They’ve pretty well proved that this girl is a whore. I went nuts. Because the basic lie in this case is that there are kids there. And what if there even were? I stood up, I screamed, ‘If there are so many kids, why aren’t there any kids testifying here!’ But the prosecutor likes that I screamed. Glekel is trying to get me to sit down but the prosecutor says to me, and the voice is very holy, he says, ‘I wasn’t going to drag kids in here and expose them to this. I’m not you.’ ‘Fuckin’ A, you’re not! And if kids wander by, what are they going to do—drop dead? This is part of the show!’ Well, shouting like that, I didn’t do my cause much more good than the girl did. She goes off in tears, and the judge asks if anybody has any more witnesses. Glekel: ‘I’d like to sum up, Your Honor.’ The judge: ‘I don’t need it. It’s not that complicated. You’re telling me that, if this guy is having intercourse with her in the middle of the street, that’s also art? And I can’t do anything about it because it has antecedents in Shakespeare and the Bible? Come on. Where do you draw the line between this and intercourse in the street? Even if she consents.’ So I got convicted.”
