The Bonfire of the Vanities

by Tom Wolfe

  On the subway, the D train, heading for the Bronx, Kramer stood in the aisle holding on to a stainless-steel pole while the car bucked and lurched and screamed. On the plastic bench across from him sat a bony old man who seemed to be growing like a fungus out of a backdrop of graffiti. He was reading a newspaper. The headline on the newspaper said HARLEM MOB CHASES MAYOR. The words were so big, they took up the entire page. Up above, in smaller letters, it said “Go Back Down to Hymietown!” The old man was wearing a pair of purple-and-white-striped running sneakers. They looked weird on such an old man, but there was nothing really odd about them, not on the D train. Kramer scanned the floor. Half the people in the car were wearing sneakers with splashy designs on them and molded soles that looked like gravy boats. Young people were wearing them, old men were wearing them, mothers with children on their laps were wearing them, and for that matter, the children were wearing them. This was not for reasons of Young Fit & Firm Chic, the way it was downtown, where you saw a lot of well-dressed young white people going off to work in the morning wearing these sneakers. No, on the D train the reason was, they were cheap. On the D train these sneakers were like a sign around the neck reading SLUM or EL BARRIO.

  Kramer resisted admitting to himself why he wore them. He let his eyes drift up. There were a few people looking at the tabloids with the headlines about the riot, but the D train to the Bronx was not a readers’ train…No…Whatever happened in Harlem would have exactly no effect in the Bronx. Everybody in the car was looking at the world with the usual stroked-out look, avoiding eye contact.

  Just then there was one of those drops in sound, one of those holes in the roar you get when a door opens between subway cars. Into the car came three boys, black, fifteen or sixteen years old, wearing big sneakers with enormous laces, untied but looped precisely in parallel lines, and black thermal jackets. Kramer braced and made a point of looking tough and bored. He tensed his sternocleidomastoid muscles to make his neck fan out like a wrestler’s. One on one…he could tear any one of them apart…But it was never one on one…He saw boys like this every day in court…Now the three of them were moving through the aisle…They walked with a pumping gait known as the Pimp Roll…He saw the Pimp Roll in the courtroom every day, too…On warm days in the Bronx there were so many boys out strutting around with the Pimp Roll, whole streets seemed to be bobbing up and down…They drew closer, with the invariable cool blank look…Well, what could they possibly do?…They passed on by, on either side of him…and nothing happened…Well, of course nothing happened…An ox, a stud like him…he’d be the last person in the world they’d choose to tangle with…Just the same, he was always glad when the train pulled into the 161st Street station.

  Kramer climbed the stairs and came out onto 161st Street. The sky was clearing. Before him, right there, rose the great bowl of Yankee Stadium. Beyond the stadium were the corroding hulks of the Bronx. Ten or fifteen years ago they had renovated the stadium. They had spent a hundred million dollars on it. That was supposed to lead to “the revitalization of the heart of the Bronx.” What a grim joke! Since then, this precinct, the 44th, these very streets, had become the worst in the Bronx for crime. Kramer saw that every day, too.

  He started walking up the hill, up 161st Street, in his sneakers, carrying his A&P bag with his shoes inside. The people of these sad streets were standing outside the stores and short-order counters along 161st.

  He looked up—and for an instant he could see the old Bronx in all its glory. At the top of the hill, where 161st Street crossed the Grand Concourse, the sun had broken through and had lit up the limestone face of the Concourse Plaza Hotel. From this distance it could still pass for a European resort hotel from the 1920s. The Yankee ballplayers used to live there during the season, the ones who could afford it, the stars. He always pictured them living in big suites. Joe DiMaggio, Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig…Those were the only names he could remember, although his father used to talk about a lot more. O golden Jewish hills of long ago! Up there at the top of the hill, 161st Street and the Grand Concourse had been the summit of the Jewish dream, of the new Canaan, the new Jewish borough of New York, the Bronx! Kramer’s father had grown up seventeen blocks from here, on 178th Street—and he had dreamed of nothing in this world more glorious than having an apartment…someday…in one of these grand buildings on the summit, on the Grand Concourse. They had created the Grand Concourse as the Park Avenue of the Bronx, except the new land of Canaan was going to do it better. The Concourse was wider than Park Avenue, and it had been more lushly landscaped—and there you had another grim joke. Did you want an apartment on the Concourse? Today you could have your pick. The Grand Hotel of the Jewish dream was now a welfare hotel, and the Bronx, the Promised Land, was 70 percent black and Puerto Rican.

  The poor sad Jewish Bronx! When he was twenty-two, just entering law school, Kramer had begun to think of his father as a little Jew who over the course of a lifetime had finally made the great Diasporic migration from the Bronx to Oceanside, Long Island, all of twenty miles away, and who still trundled back and forth every day to a paper-carton warehouse in the West Twenties, in Manhattan, where he was “comptroller.” He, Kramer, would be the lawyer…the cosmopolitan…And now, ten years later, what had happened? He was living in an ant colony that made the old man’s Tract Colonial three-bedroom in Oceanside look like San Simeon and taking the D train—the D train!—to work every day in…the Bronx!

  Right before Kramer’s eyes the sun began to light up the other great building at the top of the hill, the building where he worked, the Bronx County Building. The building was a prodigious limestone parthenon done in the early thirties in the Civic Moderne style. It was nine stories high and covered three city blocks, from 161st Street to 158th Street. Such open-faced optimism they had, whoever dreamed up that building back then!

  Despite everything, the courthouse stirred his soul. Its four great façades were absolute jubilations of sculpture and bas-relief. There were groups of classical figures at every corner. Agriculture, Commerce, Industry, Religion, and the Arts, Justice, Government, Law and Order, and the Rights of Man—noble Romans wearing togas in the Bronx! Such a golden dream of an Apollonian future!

  Today, if one of those lovely classical lads ever came down from up there, he wouldn’t survive long enough to make it to 162nd Street to get a Choc-o-pop or a blue Shark. They’d whack him out just to get his toga. It was no joke, this precinct, the 44th. On the 158th Street side the courthouse overlooked Franz Sigel Park, which from a sixth-floor window was a beautiful swath of English-style landscaping, a romance of trees, bushes, grass, and rock outcroppings that stretched down the south side of the hill. Practically nobody but him knew the name of Franz Sigel Park anymore, however, because nobody with half a brain in his head would ever go far enough into the park to reach the plaque that bore the name. Just last week some poor devil was stabbed to death at 10:00 a.m. on one of the concrete benches that had been placed in the park in 1971 in the campaign to “provide urban amenities to revitalize Franz Sigel Park and reclaim it for the community.” The bench was ten feet inside the park. Somebody killed the man for his portable radio, one of the big ones known in the District Attorney’s Office as Bronx attache cases. Nobody from the District Attorney’s Office went out into the park on a sunny day in May to have lunch, not even somebody who could bench-press two hundred pounds, the way he could. Not even a court officer, who had a uniform and legally carried a .38, ever did such a thing. They stayed inside the building, this island fortress of the Power, of the white people, like himself, this Gibraltar in the poor sad Sargasso Sea of the Bronx.

  On the street he was about to cross, Walton Avenue, three orange-and-blue Corrections Department vans were lined up, waiting to get into the building’s service bay. The vans brought prisoners from the Bronx House of Detention, Rikers Island, and the Bronx Criminal Court, a block away, for appearances at Bronx County Supreme Court, the court that handled serious felonies. The courtrooms were on
the upper floors, and the prisoners were brought into the service bay. Elevators took them up to holding pens on the courtroom floors.

  You couldn’t see inside the vans, because their windows were covered by a heavy wire mesh. Kramer didn’t have to look. Inside those vans would be the usual job lots of blacks and Latins, plus an occasional young Italian from the Arthur Avenue neighborhood and once in a while an Irish kid from up in Woodlawn or some stray who had the miserable luck to pick the Bronx to get in trouble in.

  “The chow,” Kramer said to himself. Anybody looking at him would have actually seen his lips move as he said it.

  In about forty-five seconds he would learn that somebody was, in fact, looking at him. But at that moment it was nothing more than the usual, the blue-and-orange vans and him saying to himself, “The chow.”

  Kramer had reached that low point in the life of an assistant district attorney in the Bronx when he is assailed by Doubts. Every year forty thousand people, forty thousand incompetents, dimwits, alcoholics, psychopaths, knockabouts, good souls driven to some terrible terminal anger, and people who could only be described as stone evil, were arrested in the Bronx. Seven thousand of them were indicted and arraigned, and then they entered the maw of the criminal justice system—right here—through the gateway into Gibraltar, where the vans were lined up. That was about 150 new cases, 150 more pumping hearts and morose glares, every week that the courts and the Bronx County District Attorney’s Office were open. And to what end? The same stupid, dismal, pathetic, horrifying crimes were committed day in and day out, all the same. What was accomplished by assistant D.A.’s, by any of them, through all this relentless stirring of the muck? The Bronx crumbled and decayed a little more, and a little more blood dried in the cracks. The Doubts! One thing was accomplished for sure. The system was fed, and those vans brought in the chow. Fifty judges, thirty-five law clerks, 245 assistant district attorneys, one D.A.—the thought of which made Kramer twist his lips in a smile, because no doubt Weiss was up there on the sixth floor right now screaming at Channel 4 or 7 or 2 or 5 about the television coverage he didn’t get yesterday and wants today—and Christ knew how many criminal lawyers, Legal Aid lawyers, court reporters, court clerks, court officers, correction officers, probation officers, social workers, bail bondsmen, special investigators, case clerks, court psychiatrists—what a vast swarm had to be fed! And every morning the chow came in, the chow and the Doubts.

  Kramer had just set foot on the street when a big white Pontiac Bonneville came barreling by, a real boat, with prodigious overhangs, front and back, the kind of twenty-foot frigate they stopped making about 1980. It came screeching and nose-diving to a stop on the far corner. The Bonneville’s door, a gigantic expanse of molded sheet metal, about five feet wide, opened with a sad torque pop, and a judge named Myron Kovitsky climbed out. He was about sixty, short, thin, bald, wiry, with a sharp nose, hollow eyes, and a grim set to his mouth. Through the back window of the Bonneville, Kramer could see a silhouette sliding over into the driver’s seat vacated by the judge. That would be his wife.

  The sound of the enormous old car door opening and the sight of this little figure getting out were depressing. The judge, Mike Kovitsky, comes to work in a greaser yacht practically ten years old. As a Supreme Court judge, he made $65,100. Kramer knew the figures by heart. He had maybe $45,000 left after taxes. For a sixty-year-old man in the upper reaches of the legal profession, that was pathetic. Downtown…in the world of Andy Heller…they were paying people right out of law school that much to start. And this man whose car goes thwop every time he opens the door is at the top of the hierarchy here in the island fortress. He, Kramer, occupied some uncertain position in the middle. If he played his cards right and managed to ingratiate himself with the Bronx Democratic organization, this—thwop!— was the eminence to which he might aspire three decades from now.

  Kramer was halfway across the street when it began:

  “Yo! Kramer!”

  It was a huge voice. Kramer couldn’t tell where it was coming from.

  “You cocksucker!”

  Whuh? It stopped him in his tracks. A sensation—a sound—like rushing steam—filled his skull.

  “Hey, Kramer, you piece a shit!”

  It was another voice. They—

  “Yo! Fuckhead!”

  They were coming from the back of the van, the blue-and-orange van, the one closest to him, no more than thirty feet away. He couldn’t see them. He couldn’t make them out through the mesh over the windows.

  “Yo! Kramer! You Hymie asshole!”

  Hymie! How did they even know he was Jewish! He didn’t look—Kramer wasn’t a—why would they—it rocked him!

  “Yo! Kramer! You faggot! Kiss my ass!”

  “Aaayyyyyyy, maaaaan, you steeeck uppy yass! You steeeck uppy yass!”

  A Latin voice—the very barbarism of the pronunciation twisted the knife in a little farther.

  “Yo! Shitface!”

  “Aaaayyyyyy! You keesa sol! You keeeesa sol!”

  “Yo! Kramer! Eatcho muvva!”

  “Aaaaaaayy! Maaaan! Fokky you! Fokky you!”

  It was a chorus! A rain of garbage! A Rigoletto from the sewer, from the rancid gullet of the Bronx!

  Kramer was still out in the middle of the street. What should he do? He stared at the van. He couldn’t make out a thing. Which ones?…Which of them…from out of that endless procession of baleful blacks and Latins…But no! Don’t look! He looked away. Who was watching? Did he just take this unbelievable abuse and keep walking to the Walton Avenue entrance, while they poured more of it all over him, or did he confront them?…Confront them? How?…No! He’d pretend it wasn’t him they were yelling at…Who was to know the difference!…He’d keep walking up 161st Street and go around to the main entrance! No one had to know it was him! He scanned the sidewalk by the Walton Avenue entrance, which was close to the vans…Nothing but the usual poor sad citizens…They had stopped in their tracks. They were staring at the van…The guard! The guard at the Walton Avenue entrance knew him! The guard would know he was trying to get away and finesse the whole thing! But the guard wasn’t there…He’d probably ducked inside the doorway so he wouldn’t have to do anything himself. Then Kramer saw Kovitsky. The judge was on the sidewalk about fifteen feet from the entrance. He was standing there, staring at the van. Then he looked right at Kramer. Shit! He knows me! He knows they’re yelling at me! This little figure, who had just emerged—thwop!—from his Bonneville, stood between Kramer and his orderly retreat.

  “Yo! Kramer! You yellow shitbird!”

  “Hey! You bald-headed worm!”

  “Aaaaaayyyy! You steecka balda ed uppas sol! Steeecka balda ed uppas sol!”

  Bald? Why bald? He wasn’t bald. He was losing a little hair, you bastards, but he was a long way from being bald! Wait a minute! Not him at all—they’d spotted the judge, Kovitsky. Now they had two targets.

  “Yo! Kramer! What you got inna bag, man?”

  “Hey, you bald-headed old fart!”

  “You shiny ol’ shitfa brains!”

  “Gotcho balls inna bag, Kramer?”

  They were in it together, him and Kovitsky. Now he couldn’t make his end run to the 161st Street entrance. So he kept walking across the street. He felt as if he were underwater. He cut a glance at Kovitsky. But Kovitsky was no longer looking at him. He was walking straight toward the van. His head was lowered. He was glaring. You could see the whites of his eyes. His pupils were like two death rays burning just beneath his upper eyelids. Kramer had seen him in court like this…with his head lowered and his eyes ablaze.

  The voices inside the van tried to drive him back.

  “What you looking at, you shriveled little pecker?”

  “Yaaaaggghh, come on! Come on, wormdick!”

  But the chorus was losing its rhythm. They didn’t know what to make of this wiry little fury.

  Kovitsky walked right up to the van and tried to stare through the mesh. He put his
hands on his hips.

  “Yeah! What you think you looking at?”

  “Sheeeeuh! Gon’ give you something to look at, bro’!”

  But they were losing steam. Now Kovitsky walked to the front of the van. He turned those blazing eyes on the driver.

  “Do…you…hear…that?” said the little judge, pointing toward the rear of the van.

  “Whuh?” says the driver. “Whaddaya?” He didn’t know what to say.

  “Are you fucking deaf?” said Kovitsky. “Your prisoners…your…prisoners…You’re an officer of the Department of Corrections…”

  He started jabbing his finger toward the man.

  “Your…prisoners…You let your prisoners pull…this shit…on the citizens of this community and on the officers of this court?”

  The driver was a swarthy fat man, pudgy, around fifty, or some gray-lard middle age, a civil-service lifer…and all at once his eyes and his mouth opened up, without a sound coming out, and he lifted his shoulders, and he turned his palms up and the corners of his mouth down.

  It was the primordial shrug of the New York streets, the look that said, “Egggh, whaddaya? Whaddaya want from me?” And in this specific instance: “Whaddaya want me to do, crawl back in that cage with that lot?”

  It was the age-old New York cry for mercy, unanswerable and undeniable.

  Kovitsky stared at the man and shook his head the way you do when you’ve just seen a hopeless case. Then he turned and walked back to the rear of the van.