by Alan Coren
Nowhere, actually, could be less like a blasted heath than Harlem; it is perhaps the most undeserted area in the world, if you know what I mean. Sixlane avenues are whittled down to alleyways by the permanent overflow from the pavements, solid, sluggish streams of people, whose reasons for being there at all seem incomprehensible – they walk too slowly to be actually going from A to B; they are too far from the shops and bars to have any possible interest in them; and they never appear to cross from one side of the street to the other; instead, they roll on, as if on some enormous conveyor-belt, with no apparent purpose, and no pause. Naturally, this sort of jay-walking would be treated in downtown New York as an offence located somewhere on the books between child-rape and dope-addiction; but here, a crack regiment would be needed to enforce the laws; it’s left to the motorist to keep up a constant cacophonous alert to save himself from being devoured. It’s an odd sensation to stand in the centre of one sidewalk looking across the slowly passing heads towards the other; the mass of humanity makes the traffic invisible, so that one seems to be cut off from the opposite bank by an open chasm filled with a perpetual honking moan, on either side of which the silent souls trudge on. Once, I thought I saw, across the gorge, Beatrice waiting in the crowd; but I must have been mistaken.
I find Harlem extremely disturbing, this sort of set-aside Negro metropolis, a sophisticated ghetto; although one rarely sees a white face, one constantly thinks one has, due to the fanatic attempts to approximate to the White Condition, through dress, and make-up, and hairstyling, and accent; the shops are stacked with advertised encouragement – with bleaching-creams and hairstraightening preparations and almost-white plaster models in tennis clothes. And the billboards flash products whose saleability depends upon the obvious air of success exuded by the figures depicted; and these are, without exception, the palest of negroes, often with blonde wavy hair, since these, in the hierarchy of shades which operates here, are the Top People. Constantly, the Madison Avenue stage-whisper is: This product will help you pass for White. Everything is angled towards the dispossession of the negro, towards making him a racial and cultural mongrel, towards offering him, in packet-form, an unrealizable dream. One knows that these techniques were developed to work within the tension of class-difference; but this is not the same thing at all.
I had decided to live in Harlem partly because of its proximity to Columbia University, partly to my eviction from my Greenwich Village broomcupboard, an eviction supposed to be temporary, but as the period stated was to allow the Exterminator to rid my room of cockroaches, I decided to forego the option. (I waited to see The Exterminator. I imagined a long cadaverous Kafka-esque terror with a stovepipe hat and a little black bag and an Instrument. He turned out to be two squat toughs from Brooklyn in green overalls, who were, without question, Steiger and Brando down on their luck.)
Anyway, I was tired of the Village; as in Hampstead, or Chelsea, rents rise relative to the immigration of wealthy non-artists hunting for charm, or social cachet, or whatever it is. But here there is no Belsize Park to retire to. I was getting pushed nearer and nearer the Bowery, and since I can do without this sort of pressure to follow my natural predisposition, I determined to get out for good. Harlem is cheap.
After I left the papershop, I tried five of the addresses. I was met with the same responses at each. Surprise (one woman laughed through the gap in the door, and vanished, and wouldn’t come back; but I could hear her laughing in the hall); suspicion (‘Look, fellah, thanks anyway, but we got so much goddam detergent in this house, we use it to stuff pillows!’); and finally, refusal. The room, sorry, was taken. Just this minute.
The sixth address was a tall brownstone, hung with black balcony-rails and fire-escapes, an external skeleton, like a scorpion’s. The door was opened by a tall, slim, grey-haired, well-dressed negro. In his lapel was a N.A.A.C.P. button. He smiled, and it was the first straight smile I’d had all morning.
‘I’ve come about the room,’ I said.
‘Oh!’ He looked past my shoulder into the street. ‘Afraid it’s taken. Guy just left.’
‘Are you sure?’ He looked back at me. ‘Yours is the sixth place I’ve tried, and they were all dated this morning, and they’ve all gone. Odd that, isn’t it?’
‘Kind of.’ He shifted his weight, leaning on the door-jamb. ‘Big demand for rooms, though.’ He looked at me, hard. ‘You English?’
‘That’s right.’
He pushed open the door with his shoulder, and stepped back into the dark hallway.
‘Look, come in for a minute, anyhow. Maybe I can help you.’
I followed him into his living-room. On one wall, a huge photograph of Martin Luther King, and a daguerrotype of John Brown. On a side-table, the latest issues of The Southern Patriot and Ebony. I sat down, and at eye-level in the bookcase were volumes of Baldwin, and Ellison, and titles like ‘The Negro Vanguard’ and ‘The Truth Shall Make Us Free’. The man sat down on the arm of the chair opposite.
‘Look here,’ he said. ‘I lied. I got a room. It’s still free. Only I’m not so sure I can let you have it.’
‘How come?’
He picked up one of the magazines, and fiddled with its pages.
‘Look, don’t get me wrong – you’re a foreigner, otherwise I wouldn’t have to explain. I don’t want you to go thinking I’m – well, prejudiced, or anything like that.’
‘You mean you don’t take whites?’
‘Don’t say “you” like that.’ He frowned, and put down the magazine. ‘It’s not just me. If I had my way, why, sure, I’d take you in. But I got other things to consider.’
‘Such as?’
‘Well, like I said, it’s not me. It’s the neighbours.’ He looked at me, eyebrows raised in appeal. ‘How’re they going to feel about it? A man doesn’t live alone, y’know. And this isn’t just any old neighbourhood. No offence meant – but this is a pretty good-class street.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘That’s why I like it.’
He shook his head.
‘Man can’t always have everything he likes. Take me – I get on fine with you people. I was in the war with white boys, fought right alongside ’em; you couldn’t wish for better soldiers. I work with white people right now. They pull their weight same as the rest of us. I got white acquaintances – why, I count them among my closest friends. They come here all the time, we sit around, chew a lot of fat; you know the sort of thing.’
‘Only you wouldn’t have one living in your house?’
He sighed.
‘I’m gonna level with you. Suppose you were to come and live here. You got white friends, right?’
I nodded.
‘Okay. Pretty soon, they’re gonna start visiting here regular. Maybe some of ’em’ll get to like the area; why not? What then? Maybe they’ll take it into their heads to move in. What the other people in the street gonna do? I’ll tell you. They kinda respect me, know what I mean? I do a lot of work for them, address meetings, all that stuff. So they see I got a white boy living here. They’ll reckon it’s okay. So maybe they’ll let your buddies move in. Pretty soon, we’re gonna have us a – you’ll excuse me – a white neighbourhood. I mean, let’s face it, that’s the way you folks are, am I right? Soon as a couple of you take hold, next thing you know there’s a whole colony.’
‘Well, would – I mean, is that so terrible, after all?’
He looked at me as if I were a child who’d misspelled ‘cat’.
‘Don’t stop there, though, does it? I’ve lived in white areas, see? Like Greenwich Village. Now, I don’t like those people who say that white men are all no-good drunks and loafers – but I’ve seen ’em on paynights down there, blind drunk, shouting and singing, running after women. I don’t say there aren’t good and bad, nor that coloured people don’t behave that way sometimes. But there’s no point, far as I can see, in having a lot of people like that coming in and raising hell.’ He leaned forward. ‘Lot of white men find coloured girls pretty attractive, h
uh?’
Caught either way. All right.
‘Some. Like any other girls, I suppose.’
‘That’s just it! They’re not. See what I mean? Pretty soon they’re gonna start walking out together. Maybe even get married.’
‘Well, even if things go that far, would that be so bad?’
He pursed his lips.
‘Look, I’m liberal, like I say. I know all the reasons, too, and about love and all that, and skin not mattering, and the same blood, and so on. Except –’ he shook his head, and gave a small laugh, ‘– it still kinda goes against the grain, thinking of a coloured girl going to bed with a white man. No offence?’
‘No offence,’ I said.
‘If I had my way, I’d like to see everyone getting along together, next door to one another. But – I can see you’re a man of the world, an intelligent human being – you don’t expect me to be the first, do you? A man has to live.’
‘I suppose you’re right. I don’t expect you to be the first.’
‘Sure you don’t.’ He smiled comfortably now, relieved. ‘It’s been interesting talking to you.’ He stood up, and we went into the dim hall. ‘Good to see you understand. About the room and all. But I guess that’s nothing new to you; a man who’s been around must’ve run into this sort of thing from time to time?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It all sounds pretty familiar.’
We shook hands on the step, and he closed the front door. I walked down the stone stairway, and two little coloured boys chasing one another down the street sidestepped to dodge out of my way. I took the list of addresses out of my pocket, and screwed it up, and threw it in the gutter.
4
It Tolls for Thee
Manhattan’s largest fallout shelter, the New York Telephone Company Building rising near the Hudson River, will have 21 storeys without a single window. The vertically striped fortress will house 3,000 workers, who will be capable of surviving a near-miss atomic attack for two weeks.
Life Magazine, November 9th, 1962
For the first few moments, I was convinced that some joker had directed me to the sanctum sanctorum of one of California’s more esoteric sects. The doors sighed shut, sealing me into a huge pastel-coloured hall; on the facing wall was etched the outline of a bell, beneath which stood a long low table flanked by two gently revolving plastic bushes hung with pink, blue, olive and yellow telephones. A row of multi-coloured phones, doubtless freshly picked, garnished the table. Behind these sat a motionless young woman, smiling fixedly. In order to approach her, it was necessary to pass between two long rows of identical desks, on each side of which stood a telephone of a different colour, and a rack of pamphlets. No one sat at the desks, and, apart from myself and the votary at the far end of the hall, the place was empty. It is almost impossible to walk down a long aisle towards someone who has been trained to smile. I committed the miserable error of starting my own smile as I began to walk; consequently, by the time I reached the table, I had considerable difficulty in speaking through the grinning death-mask into which my face had been turned.
‘Good morning,’ I gritted. ‘I should like to have a telephone installed in my apartment.’
‘Yes, sir,’ she murmured, softly. ‘If you’ll wait over there by the lavender instrument, I’ll have someone help you with your problem.’
‘I haven’t got a problem,’ I said. ‘I want a phone. Can’t I just leave my name and address with you?’
‘I’m sorry, sir.’ The same monotone coming through the glazed smile. ‘Bell Telephone has found that the most efficient way of dealing with clients’ problems is through the instrument.’
I sat at the desk, looking at the Instrument, wondering whether I ought to smile at it. I heard the girl murmuring on her own telephone. I casually opened one of the bright pamphlets in front of me, and found the familiar catechismal layout prescribed by PR departments of the great industrial organisms. I turned the pages with waiting-room languor, impervious by now to the frenetic hyperbole; after all, I had known before coming here that the net worth of Bell Telephone approximates to that of England, that it is wealthier than the five wealthiest states in the Union, that soon it will have a satellite all to itself, and so on. I was beyond surprise by Bell. And then, on the last page of the pamphlet, I came on this: ‘At present there are more than 85 million phones in the U.S., and by 1975 there will be more than 160 million.’ I went back and re-read it. And realised that the telephone was reproducing at approximately three times the rate of the population of China. This in itself, all other implications aside, had a staggering effect on me. Until then, I had, like almost everyone else, accepted as the two yardsticks by which all other quantities were to be measured, the distance to the Moon, and the population of China. (I have never needed any others, since, at fourteen, I spent two weeks in bed on glucose following a maths master’s attempts to conceptualize infinity for me. We cornered it at one point, and had it belittled to the ignominy of one-over-nothing. I thought about this for a few moments; then I cracked.) Told that: ‘The 1962 model was driven 250,000 miles on two quarts of oil and one tyre-change. This is the distance from here to the Moon’, I am happy. Or that: ‘In 1961, we manufactured one billion ballbearings, or enough to give every man, woman, and child in China two ballbearings each’, I know where I stand. Or knew. Not any longer. Now that small fund of conversation-stopping statistics that I have hoarded for bad moments at parties will have to be completely revised in terms of telephones, lengths of cable, warehouse-loads of dials. I shall have to teach my sons that every fifth child born is destined to become a telephonist. Stuff like that.
The Instrument cut through this morbid reverie. A voice of metallic silk introduced itself, and elicited a file-full of irrelevant personal information before asking, finally:
‘Now, sir, how large is the apartment?’
‘Three rooms,’ I said.
‘So you should be able to get along with only one extension. Is that to be a wall-phone, or a Princess Bedside?’
‘I want one instrument,’ I said. ‘With a long cord.’
A metal snigger.
‘Oh, come, sir! Nobody has long cords any more. Our researchers found that so many accidents were caused by cords getting tangled up with children and pets and things of that nature.’
‘I haven’t got anything of that nature,’ I said.
‘Well, at least you’ll need a Home Interphone. So that you can communicate with the party in the other rooms.’
‘There aren’t any parties. I live alone.’
‘Don’t you ever have guests?’
Of course, since she lived at the end of a lavender cable, the idea that people actually indulged in the gross obscenity of talking face to face could hardly be insisted upon by me.
‘No,’ I said meekly, ‘No guests’.
A pause. I could see the inside of her brain visualising a banner headline: ‘ONE-PHONE RECLUSE FOUND STRANGLED BY ANTIQUE CORD. BODY DISCOVERED AFTER THREE WEEKS BY JANITOR’. I wanted to meet her, I wanted her to see that I was healthy, that there was a spring in my step, that I smiled. But this was impossible.
‘Oh, well,’ said the voice. ‘Of course, you can never tell when a party may drop by.’ I wondered whether she was human enough to be trying to console me. The voice sighed, and went on: ‘Well then, sir, perhaps we can decide on the colour of the Instrument’.
‘Black.’
A tin gasp.
‘Beige, green, grey, yellow, white, pink, blue, turquoise!’ A pause. ‘Nobody has black, sir. We couldn’t guarantee a new Instrument in black. What is the colour-scheme of your room?’
In fact, it’s pale-green. But I knew the consequences of my admitting this. So I joked. I thought.
‘It’s black,’ I said. ‘Black wallpaper, black ceiling, black fitted carpet. Black furniture.’ I waited for her laugh.
‘We-e-ell,’ she said, ‘Why not have a white Instrument to set it off?’
‘All right,’ I sa
id running my tongue over my lips. ‘All right, white.’
‘Wish I could persuade you to have a coloured Instrument. Everyone else does, you know. They’re so much more individual.’
‘Yes. Well, that’s all, I suppose?’
‘But we haven’t decided on the chime yet, have we?’
‘The what?’
‘The chime. You can have a conventional ring if you choose, but for the Discerning we are now able to offer a Gentle, Cheerful Chime Adjustable To Suit Your Activities Or Your Mood.’
‘But how do I know what mood I’ll be in when it chimes?’
‘But on some days, don’t you just long for a Gentle Chime?’
I closed my eyes. For three weeks I have carried on a running fight with my landlord over my request to change my door-chime for a buzzer. And two weeks ago I bought, or, rather, was sold, a Discount House Bargain which keeps perfect time all day, and, having been set for nine a.m., awakes me up at 4.17 by chiming crazily and hurling scalding coffee over the walls and carpet.
‘No, dear,’ I said wearily, ‘I’m something of a strident buzz man myself ’.
‘As you choose, sir.’ I could hear her hesitate. I knew she was cracking. Finally she murmured: ‘The Princess Bedside lights up at night.’
‘Quite possibly,’ I said, and replaced the receiver.
After I left the building, I stopped to buy the copy of Life from which I quoted at the beginning of this story. And suddenly I saw her, and her sad sorority, in their last hours, in their windowless concrete pillar above the rubble of New York. Three thousand telephonists, connected only by a web of lavender cable, frantically dialling and re-dialling, while the nightlights flash, and the bells chime gently, over a dead world.
5
. . . that Fell on the House that Jack Built
The bombing of North Vietnam has had little or no effect on the flow of men and materials from north to south.
US Secretary of Defence McNamara
Five miles south of the DMZ, Major-General Sam Kowalski, USAF, sopped up the last of his egg with the last of his ham, sluiced it down with the last of his coffee, and belched gently. It was good coffee. Not, he hastened to remind himself (nostalgia being the better part of valour) as good as the coffee in Topeka, Kansas, which was the best coffee in the world. But good. He watched the morning sun dissolve the white mists to the north, longingly: better flying weather than this, you couldn’t expect.
