The Bonfire of the Vanities

by Tom Wolfe

  “Well, I guess you’re right. I didn’t see anything. But I heard something, and I felt something.”

  “Sherman, it all happened so fast, you don’t know what happened, and neither do I. Those boys aren’t going to the police. You can be goddamned sure a that. And if you go to the police, they won’t find them, either. They’ll just have a good time with your story—and you don’t know what happened, do you?”

  “I guess I don’t.”

  “I guess you don’t, either. If the question ever comes up, all that happened was, two boys blocked the road and tried to rob us, and we got away from them. Period. That’s all we know.”

  “And why didn’t we report it?”

  “Because it was pointless. We weren’t hurt, and we figured they’d never find those boys, anyway. And you know something, Sherman?”

  “What?”

  “That happens to be the whole truth. You can imagine anything you want, but that happens to be all you know and all I know.”

  “Yeah. You’re right. I don’t know, I’d just feel better if—”

  “You don’t have to feel better, Sherman. I was the one who was driving. If I hit the sonofabitch, then it was me who hit him—and I’m saying I didn’t hit anybody, and I’m not reporting anything to the police. So just don’t you worry about it.”

  “I’m not worrying about it, it’s just that—”

  “Good.”

  Sherman hesitated. Well, that was true, wasn’t it? She was driving. It was his car, but she took it upon herself to drive it, and if the question ever came up, whatever happened was her responsibility. She was driving…and so if there was anything to report, that was her responsibility, too. Naturally, he would stick by her…but already a great weight was sliding off his back.

  “You’re right, Maria. It was like something in the jungle.” He nodded several times, to indicate that the truth had finally dawned on him.

  Maria said, “We coulda been killed, right there, just as easy as not.”

  “You know something, Maria? We fought.”

  “Fought?”

  “We were in the goddamned jungle…and we were attacked…and we fought our way out.” Now he sounded as if the dawn were breaking wider and wider. “Christ, I don’t know when the last time was I was in a fight, an actual fight. Maybe I was twelve, thirteen. You know something, babe? You were great. You were fantastic. You really were. When I saw you behind the wheel—I didn’t even know if you could drive the car!” He was elated. She was driving. “But you drove the hell out of it! You were great!” Oh, the dawn had broken. The world glowed with its radiance.

  “I don’t even remember what I did,” said Maria. “It was just a—a—everything happened at once. The worst part was getting over into the seat. I don’t know why they put that gearshift thing in the middle there. I caught my skirt on it.”

  “When I saw you there, I couldn’t believe it! If you hadn’t done that”—he shook his head—“we’d’ve never made it.”

  Now that they were into the exultation of the war story, Sherman couldn’t resist giving himself an opening for a little praise.

  Maria said, “Well, I just did it on—I don’t know—instinct.” Typical of her; she didn’t notice the opening.

  “Yeah,” said Sherman, “well, it was a damned good instinct. I kind of had my hands full at that point!” An opening big enough for a truck.

  This one even she noticed. “Oh, Sherman—I know you did. When you threw that wheel, that tire, at that boy—oh, God, I thought—I just about—you beat them both, Sherman! You beat them both!”

  I beat them both. Never had there been such music in the ears of the Master of the Universe. Play on! Never stop!

  “I couldn’t figure out what was happening!” said Sherman. Now he was smiling with excitement and not even trying to hold back the smile. “I threw the tire, and all of a sudden it was coming back in my face!”

  “That was because he put up his hands to block it, and it bounced off, and—”

  They plunged into the thick adrenal details of the adventure.

  Their voices rose, and their spirits rose, and they laughed, supposedly over the bizarre details of the battle but actually with sheer joy, spontaneous exultation over the miracle. Together they had faced the worst nightmare of New York, and they had triumphed.

  Maria sat up straight and began looking at Sherman with her eyes extra wide and her lips parted in the suggestion of a smile. He had a delicious premonition. Without a word she stood up and took off her blouse. She wore nothing underneath it. He stared at her breasts, which were glorious. The fair white flesh was gorged with concupiscence and glistening with perspiration. She walked over to him and stood between his legs as he sat in the chair and began untying his tie. He put his arms around her waist and pulled her so hard she lost her balance. They rolled down onto the rug. What a happy, awkward time they had wriggling out of their clothes!

  Now they were stretched out on the floor, on the rug, which was filthy, amid the dust balls, and who cared about the dirt and the dust balls? They were both hot and wet with perspiration, and who cared about that, either? It was better that way. They had been through the wall of fire together. They had fought in the jungle together, hadn’t they? They were lying side by side, and their bodies were still hot from the fray. Sherman kissed her on the lips, and they lay like that for a long time, just kissing, with their bodies pressed together. Then he ran his fingers over her back and the perfect curve of her hip and the perfect curve of her thigh and the perfect inside of her thigh—and never before such excitement! The rush ran straight from his fingertips to his groin and then throughout his nervous system to a billion explosive synaptic cells. He wanted to have this woman literally, to enclose her in his very hide, to subsume this hot fair white body of hers, in the prime of youth’s sweet rude firm animal health, and make it his forever. Perfect love! Pure bliss! Priapus, king and master! Master of the Universe! King of the Jungle!

  Sherman kept both his cars, the Mercedes and a big Mercury station wagon, in an underground garage two blocks from his apartment house. At the bottom of the ramp he stopped, as always, beside the wooden cashier’s hut. A chubby little man in a short-sleeved sport shirt and baggy gray twill pants came out the door. It was the one he disliked, Dan, the redheaded one. He got out of the car and quickly rolled up his jacket, hoping the little attendant wouldn’t see it was torn.

  “Hey, Sherm! Howya doin’?”

  That was what Sherman truly detested. It was bad enough that this man insisted on calling him by his first name. But to shorten it to Sherm, which no one had ever called him—that was escalating presumptuousness into obnoxiousness. Sherman could think of nothing he had ever said, no gesture he had ever made, that had given him the invitation or even the opening to become familiar. Gratuitous familiarity was not the sort of thing you were supposed to mind these days, but Sherman minded it. It was a form of aggression. You think I am your inferior, you Wall Street Wasp with the Yale chin, but I will show you. Many times he had tried to think of some polite but cold and cutting response to these hearty pseudo-friendly greetings, and he had come up with nothing.

  “Sherm, howawya?” Dan was right beside him. He wouldn’t let up.

  “Fine,” Mr. McCoy said frostily…but also lamely. One of the unwritten rules of status conduct is that when an inferior greets you with a how-are-you, you do not answer the question. Sherman turned to walk away.

  “Sherm!”

  He stopped. Dan was standing beside the Mercedes with his hands on his chubby hips. He had hips like an old woman’s.

  “You know your coat is ripped?”

  The block of ice, his Yale chin jutting out, said nothing.

  “Right there,” said Dan with considerable satisfaction. “You can see the lining. How’d you do that?”

  Sherman could hear it—thok—and he could feel the rear end of the car fishtailing, and the tall skinny boy was no longer standing there. Not a word about that�
�and yet he had a terrific urge to tell this odious little man. Now that he had been through the wall of fire and survived, he was experiencing one of man’s keenest but least understood drives: information compulsion. He wanted to tell his war story.

  But caution triumphed, caution bolstered by snobbery. He probably should talk to no one about what had happened; and to this man least of all.

  “I have no idea,” he said.

  “You didn’t notice it?”

  The frosty snowman with the Yale chin, Mr. Sherman McCoy, motioned toward the Mercedes. “I won’t be taking it out again until the weekend.” Then he did an about-face and left.

  As he reached the sidewalk, a puff of wind swept the street. He could feel how damp his shirt was. His pants were still damp behind the knees. His ripped jacket was draped over the crook of his arm. His hair felt like a bird’s nest. He was a mess. His heart was beating a little too fast. I have something to hide. But what was he worrying about? He wasn’t driving the car when it happened—if it happened. Right! If it happened. He hadn’t seen the boy get hit, and she hadn’t, either, and besides, it was in the heat of a fight for their very lives—and she was driving, in any case. If she didn’t want to report it, that was her business.

  He stopped and took a breath and looked around. Yes; White Manhattan, the sanctuary of the East Seventies. Across the street a doorman stood under the canopy of an apartment house, smoking a cigarette. A boy in a dark business suit and a pretty girl in a white dress were strolling toward him. The fellow was talking to her a mile a minute. So young, and dressed like an old man in a Brooks Brothers or Chipp or J. Press suit, just the way he had looked when he first went to work at Pierce & Pierce.

  All at once a wonderful feeling swept over Sherman. For Christ’s sake, what was he worried about? He stood there on the sidewalk, stock-still, with his chin up and big grin on his face. The boy and girl probably thought he was a lunatic. In fact—he was a man. Tonight, with nothing but his hands and his nerve he had fought the elemental enemy, the hunter, the predator, and he had prevailed. He had fought his way out of an ambush on the nightmare terrain, and he had prevailed. He had saved a woman. The time had come to act like a man, and he had acted and prevailed. He was not merely a Master of the Universe; he was more; he was a man. Grinning and humming, “Show me but ten who are stouthearted men,” the stouthearted man, still damp from the fray, walked the two blocks to his duplex apartment overlooking the street of dreams.

  5. The Girl with Brown Lipstick

  On the mezzanine of the sixth floor of the Bronx County Building, near the elevators, was a wide entryway framed in two or three tons of mahogany and marble and blocked by a counter and a gate. Behind the counter sat a guard with a .38-caliber revolver in a holster on his hip. The guard served as a receptionist. The revolver, which looked big enough to stop a florist’s van, was supposed to serve as a deterrent to the random berserk vengeful felons of the Bronx.

  Over this entryway were some large Roman-style capital letters that had been fabricated in brass at considerable expense to the taxpayers of New York and cemented to the marble facing with epoxy glue. Once a week a handyman got up on a ladder and rubbed Simichrome polish across the letters, so that the legend RICHARD A. WEISS, DISTRICT ATTORNEY, BRONX COUNTY blazed away more brightly than anything the building’s architects, Joseph H. Freedlander and Max Hausle, had the nerve to put even on the outside of the building in its golden dawn half a century ago.

  As Larry Kramer got off the elevator and walked toward this brassy gleam, the right side of his lips twisted subversively. The A stood for Abraham. Weiss was known to his friends and his political cronies and the newspaper reporters and Channels 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, and 11 and his constituents, most prominently the Jews and Italians up around Riverdale and the Pelham Parkway and Co-op City, as Abe Weiss. He hated the nickname Abe, which he had been stuck with when he was growing up in Brooklyn. A few years back he had let it be known that he preferred to be called Dick, and he had practically been laughed out of the Bronx Democratic organization. That was the last time Abe Weiss ever mentioned Dick Weiss. To Abe Weiss, being laughed out of the Bronx Democratic organization, being separated from it in any fashion whatsoever, for that matter, would have been like being thrown over the railing of a Christmas cruise ship in the middle of the Caribbean Sea. So he was Richard A. Weiss only in The New York Times and over this doorway.

  The guard buzzed Kramer through the gate, and Kramer’s running shoes squeaked on the marble floor. The guard gave them a dubious once-over. As usual, Kramer was carrying his leather shoes in an A&P shopping bag.

  Beyond the entryway, the level of grandeur in the District Attorney’s Office went up and down. The office of Weiss himself was bigger and showier, thanks to its paneled walls, than the Mayor of New York’s. The bureau chiefs, for Homicide, Investigations, Major Offenses, Supreme Court, Criminal Court, and Appeals, had their share of the paneling and the leather or school-of-leather couches and the Contract Sheraton armchairs. But by the time you got down to an assistant district attorney, like Larry Kramer, you were looking at Good Enough for Government Work when it came to interior decoration.

  The two assistant district attorneys who shared the office with him, Ray Andriutti and Jimmy Caughey, were sitting sprawled back in the swivel chairs. There was just enough floor space in the room for three metal desks, three swivel chairs, four filing cabinets, an old coat stand with six savage hooks sticking out from it, and a table bearing a Mr. Coffee machine and a promiscuous heap of plastic cups and spoons and a gummy collage of paper napkins and white sugar envelopes and pink saccharine envelopes stuck to a maroon plastic tray with a high sweet-smelling paste composed of spilled coffee and Cremora powder. Both Andriutti and Caughey were sitting with their legs crossed in the same fashion. The left ankle was resting on top of the right knee, as if they were such studs, they couldn’t have crossed their legs any farther if they had wanted to. This was the accepted sitting posture of Homicide, the most manly of the six bureaus of the District Attorney’s Office.

  Both had their jackets off and hung with the perfect give-a-shit carelessness on the coatrack. Their shirt collars were unbuttoned, and their necktie knots were pulled down an inch or so. Andriutti was rubbing the back of his left arm with his right hand, as if it itched. In fact, he was feeling and admiring his triceps, which he pumped up at least three times a week by doing sets of French curls with dumbbells at the New York Athletic Club. Andriutti could afford to work out at the Athletic Club, instead of on a carpet between a Dracaena fragrans tub and a convertible couch, because he didn’t have a wife and a child to support in an $888-a-month ant colony in the West Seventies. He didn’t have to worry about his triceps and his deltoids and his lats deflating. Andriutti liked the fact that when he reached around behind one of his mighty arms with the other hand, it made the widest muscles of his back, the lats, the latissima dorsae, fan out until they practically split his shirt, and his pectorals hardened into a couple of mountains of pure muscle. Kramer and Andriutti were of the new generation, in which the terms triceps, deltoids, latissima dorsae, and pectoralis major were better known than the names of the major planets. Andriutti rubbed his triceps a hundred and twenty times a day, on the average.

  Still rubbing them, Andriutti looked at Kramer as he walked in and said: “Jesus Christ, here comes the bag lady. What the hell is this fucking A&P bag, Larry? You been coming in here with this fucking bag every day this week.” Then he turned to Jimmy Caughey and said, “Looks like a fucking bag lady.”

  Caughey was also a jock, but more the triathlon type, with a narrow face and a long chin. He just smiled at Kramer, as much as to say, “Well, what do you say to that?”

  Kramer said, “Your arm itch, Ray?” Then he looked at Caughey and said, “Ray’s got this fucking allergy. It’s called weight lifter’s disease.” Then he turned back to Andriutti. “Itches like a sonofabitch, don’t it?”

  Andriutti let his hand drop off his triceps. “And
what are these jogging shoes?” he said to Kramer. “Looks like those girls walking to work at Merrill Lynch. All dressed up, and they got these fucking rubber gunboats on their feet.”

  “What the hell is in the bag?” said Caughey.

  “My high heels,” said Kramer. He took off his jacket and jammed it down, give-a-shit, on a coatrack hook in the accepted fashion and pulled down his necktie and unbuttoned his shirt and sat down in his swivel chair and opened up the shopping bag and fished out his Johnston & Murphy brown leather shoes and started taking off the Nikes.

  “Jimmy,” Andriutti said to Caughey, “did you know that Jewish guys—Larry, I don’t want you to take this personally—did you know that Jewish guys, even if they’re real stand-up guys, all have one faggot gene? That’s a well-known fact. They can’t stand going out in the rain without an umbrella or they have all this modern shit in their apartment or they don’t like to go hunting or they’re for the fucking nuclear freeze and affirmative action or they wear jogging shoes to work or some goddamn thing. You know?”

  “Gee,” said Kramer, “I don’t know why you thought I’d take it personally.”

  “Come on, Larry,” said Andriutti, “tell the truth. Deep down, don’t you wish you were Italian or Irish?”

  “Yeah,” said Kramer, “that way I wouldn’t know what the fuck was going on in this fucking place.”

  Caughey started laughing. “Well, don’t let Ahab see those shoes, Larry. He’ll have Jeanette issue a fucking memorandum.”

  “No, he’ll call a fucking press conference,” said Andriutti.

  “That’s always a safe fucking bet.”

  And so another fucking day in the fucking Homicide Bureau of the Bronx Fucking District Attorney’s Office was off to a fucking start.

  An assistant D.A. in Major Offenses had started calling Abe Weiss “Captain Ahab,” and now they all did. Weiss was notorious in his obsession for publicity, even among a breed, the district attorney, that was publicity-mad by nature. Unlike the great D.A.s of yore, such as Frank Hogan, Burt Roberts, or Mario Merola, Weiss never went near a courtroom. He didn’t have time. There were only so many hours in the day for him to stay in touch with Channels 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, and 11 and the New York Daily News, the Post, The City Light, and the Times.