City of God

by E. L. Doctorow

  Once a week, the bus to Union City. A woman of a late childbearing age marching around a stage under a pink light. Jewish braying, Mario punching my arm at a particularly exquisite moment of the choreography, Slapsy muttering holy shit over and over again in a display of his powers of articulation, and I sink down in my seat suffering a complex and not remotely pleasurable excitement. I actually worry that she will see me watching, the stripper. There is such female contempt coming off that stage. And swinging her ass so expertly, ba-da boom, ba-da boom—well it was of a vulgarity, believe me, that in all my years of saloon life, and the indulgence of women, I have never seen topped. This was a low-down dirty use of pulchritude, confirmed by the cretin in the checked suit and floppy shoes and derby who staggers from the wings with a three-foot pink rubber prong sticking out of his pants. At the same time of my case of nauseatingly aching balls, I am angry at the fat dancing slut’s representation of the abilities of women. I didn’t want it to be that way.

  Another one who got to me, a vapid skinny stripper as slender and titless as a boy, who drifted across the stage in such a drug-induced torpor not even Buddy Rich could have kept time.

  How did I get onto this? Why am I thinking of this? Maybe—and I am after the fact by some seventy years—maybe I believed what went on in a theater should be different from the street. I don’t pretend the boy I was could think it through. This nothing kid, who would not finish two years of high school, tries to harmonize with the other Fools on the street corner—he decides performance is another realm? What the fuck did I know about show business to think it should give you something you couldn’t find outside? But by Christ I swear that is exactly the conviction that came to me, like I was a student of the performing arts, poo-poo pa-doop, and where it came from I will never know.

  So in the same custom we have of thanking this one or that one in the awards ceremonies, I thank Jewish for helping me perceive, by way of its negating sleaze, my own way out. His way out, incidentally, I won’t go into here, except that it was abrupt and premature, my poor Achilles-tendoned pal.

  But in the meantime I am trying, right? Always, no matter how confused, navigating by my sight of the alabaster city. How much better for me if I was shy like in the song, if I only shyly imagined kissing Angela Morelli under the boardwalk in Asbury Park. Slipping my hand under her wool bathing suit. I can’t be your girlfriend anymore, she says. It’s not that I don’t like you, I do, but I can’t take the chance something happens and that’s my life. I want to do something with my life. Dark eyes shining, a wonderful serious girl. She pushes my hand away: You got no prospects. No job. You quit school. Don’t you want to make something of yourself? It’s like you got no self-respect, hanging out on the corner singing stupid songs with those others have nothing better to do. So what are you crying, Angela, if I’m the one with no self-respect—and what else does your mother say? It’s not just my mother says that, I got eyes that see for myself you don’t do nothing. I got ears that don’t hear about no ambitions of yours.

  No ambitions, Angela, no ambitions? I had the ambition to fuck you, shouldn’t that have been enough? I had the ambition to fuck you and the world with you!

  So, now you think you know who’s the song?

  He smokes three-for-a-penny cigarettes, works on his pompadour in the bathroom and, like the little girl said, leads the Fools in the latest hits in front of the candy store: I wanna be loved by you, just you, and nobody else but you. I wanna be loved by you a-lone, poo-poo pa-doop.

  First career move, an act of self-distinction, to go solo. Brick, my man, you got a tin ear, why don’t you give up, go punch a door or something. And you, Slapsy, you can’t even remember the fuckin words. Words are the song, asshole, they are the meaning of the notes, they are what the fuckin song is about. Riding them like that, killing their joy, which was to croak the tunes of our culture on the street corner, stick it to the old world cockers upstairs: Here we are do me something. Killing all that, killing the Fools of Song forever. Whatayou the director all of a sudden? You think you know everything, who made you the leader. You guys are shit, you don’t know how to sing. Maybe not but I can bust your fuckin face. So I throw myself at Shithouse, the only way, hoping they pull us apart before he snaps me in two.

  So that’s the end of that, I’m alone, only Slapsy hangs in there, follows me around, does things for me, cops a Philco radio and gives it to me, that kind of thing. And he’s been with me since, all these years, not too much upstairs, but loyal unto death. What I like. We have grown up together, my life an epic of change, his always the same, narrowly fixed on me, my personality, my career, I fill his mind. A very narrow bandwidth, old Slaps. If he were a wife, I would have dumped him long ago. He got out of there, though, didn’t he, on my coattails, but out is out and who will say he could have any other way? Peculiar way to live, though. When anything good comes along, an honor, an album makes platinum, medal from the president, whatever, Slapsy likes to think it’s happened to both of us. This calls for a drink, boss, we deserve it, we are the best!

  But don’t take it too hard, Slaps—you know I love you.

  Paul Whiteman is who I hear on the Philco, tuned in low late at night with my ear to the cloth, and Rudy Vallee, and Russ Columbo and Jack Leonard. Picked up stations as far away as Pittsburgh, Billy Wynne and his orchestra playing the Pocono Room at the Three Rivers Hotel. It was not just music, it was class. Here is the Drag, See how it goes; Down on the heels, Up on the toes. That’s the way to do the Varsity Drag. Rudy Vallee a Yale man which he somehow always let you know. Jolson, a good voice but he oversold everything he sang. He was not it, Jolson. Cantor, beneath contempt, a clown, no music in him at all. I didn’t like comedians who also sang. I wanted singers who were serious about what they did. I wanted performers to be purely who they were and nothing else. Style was what I listened for, elegance, a good lyric connoting taste and showing wit. You understand, by such homemade discriminations this punk of nothingness from New Jersey was instructing himself. I copied down the Gershwin songs, the brother’s lyrics, kept a notebook, he was the pinnacle for me, George, high style, sophistication, no idea he came out of the Lower East Side, a little Hebe kid no more to the manor born than I.

  My serious singing was alone on the dock, bringing the voice through the nasal passage, testing it, hearing it, finding it, all the while looking at the city across the river, singing to it with the resonance I could hear in my skull, my thick skull. I wanted to hang my voice on the city of white stone, weave my voice line by line up and down back and forth, wrap the whole fucking city inside my voice. And now you know it, don’t you? The song is you, big town, you were always my song across the oily wide river, the gulls riding the wind, dropping the crab shells at my feet, the black men fishing with eternal patience off the end of the dock for a decent meal.

  Another year before I would actually get on the ferry a block away and make it across. Paying for it with a messenger-boy day job in Newark. And the island of Manhattan rising up before me as a human place, coming into focus: liners at the piers, smoke from stacks, smells of the West Side stockyards. Down the ramp and into the life. Horns, lights, streetcars, buses, trucks, police whistles, the flow of mayhem. Who had organized it, how did they make it work? How people knew which door to enter. How they found themselves at home in buildings forty floors off the ground. I walked the streets wanting to hug the lampposts. Sopped up the noise, the important noise of the city. Studying the way people walked, the figures that caught my eye, male and female, their clothes. People of all walks pooling at the lights. Horses still clopping along then. Like a scientist, experiment, take a cab, tell him where you want to go, pay the fare and the right tip, without giving it away what a rube you are. Take a look at some of those hotels where the bands played. Get the confidence to walk in of an evening, sit at the bar with your cigarettes, and look old enough. Watch the band, picking up on the sense among them of their control of the room, their inner circle of performing
knowingness.

  All of that, without its being mine. I am still this punk kid staring in the store windows. But I swore somehow I would bring it down, seduce it, conquer it. How? With the lyrics of romance! I would use the common coin, the pop tune. Can you beat it? All the enfranchisement in the world, the education, the genius, the power and politics and money, and—what?—this kid like that story of the juggler, I would sing my heart out if I would ever learn to sing, and the Blessed Virgin herself would come down in full color from her marble pedestal and wipe my sweaty brow with the hem of her robe. Did I know there was enough longing in the world to make it work? Callow, I was a callow kid, so insular in my dreamt Manhattan while the world was blowing apart, Nazis goose-stepping, tearing Jews from their homes, Stalin icing millions in the gulags, the Japs practicing beheading techniques on Chinese coolies, the Burmese with their loaded carts jamming the roads out of Rangoon, Italians dive-bombing the Ethiopes waving their spears at the sky, whole fucking world showing its true humanity, screaming baby on the railroad track, blood pouring down the mountains, irrigating the deserts, reddening the seas, the world a big bloody circus of human mutilation, with a degree of murderous, insane rage to blast the planet off its axis. . . and here I am crooning in bel canto:

  Why can’t I let her know the song my heart would

  sing

  What beautiful rhapsody of love and youth and

  spring

  The music is sweet, the words are true. . .

  The song is you!

  (tearful shouting loving standing ovation)

  —Ex-Times guy, now a self-certified killer, is holding his head up a bit more these days. Less slouchy, doesn’t look at the ground as he walks, shoulders not so rounded. You can tell if a man’s been defeated in this world by the way he walks in the streets of the city. There are a thousand walks of defeat, each one tailored to a specific morphology, but all very clearly what they are. Ex-Times guy now elevated out of the shuffling class of the disgruntled, unappreciated, betrayed, embittered, or catatonic. It’s not that he has forgotten the accident factor in his closure of the S.S. sergeant’s story, but he has worked it out to his credit: He thinks now he had seen the old Nazi killer from the corner of his eye and recognized him before he lost control of his bicycle and bounced up on the sidewalk and ran him over. He thinks now his body took control of his mind, there was a conflict resolved by the reversal of control systems wherein not his conscious thought was the directing intelligence but the electric buildup of intent in his skeletal and musculature systems. He had crossed over, gone right through the transom of his freedom, how beautiful that the moment could be so explicit.

  Ex-Times guy feels now there’s nothing he can’t do, nothing too bold, too outrageous for his contemplation. Has his hair trimmed short, works out in the gym, buys some new, well-tailored outfits. This shlumperer of the past sixty years is now, if not elegant, at least sartorially passable. Finds himself a woman to treat with manly inconsideration. She is a publisher’s copy editor in her forties, a thin little blond woman with whom he has in common prescriptive views of grammatical usage and loyalty to the old Second Edition of Webster’s Unabridged. But beyond that she exhibits a disappointing gullibility when he fantasizes over dinner now and then and alludes to mysterious professional affiliations.

  The former Guatemalan death squad commander who is next on the list owns a restaurant in a mall in Queens, just off the Long Island Expressway. Presumably this is a story whose closure is more conveniently accomplished, involving a short cab ride from the F train at Queens Plaza. But ex-Times guy is alarmed in spirit by the sociological complexity of a mall restaurant in Queens. He stands in front of the restaurant looking out on the thousands of parked and parking cars, the shopping hordes, the chain megastores, he hears the shouts of mothers, observes the bitter staring ahead of children gripping the chrome railings of their strollers. The air vibrates with the continuous whine of unending traffic going in opposed directions on the adjoining L.I.E., suggesting to him a mindless mimicry of purposiveness. Masses of terraced red-brick tenements filling the sky, filthy fluttering pigeons homing in on scraps of junk food, children darting on their in-line skates between the parked cars, cruising packs of fashionable teenagers with their floppy jeans, unlaced Air Jordans, and reversed baseball caps. . . could any clear moral distinctions be drawn, or principles acted upon, in this bedlam of free people? This was not an appropriate venue for high seriousness, nothing ethically important could happen here.

  But when he steps inside the restaurant itself, his spirits immediately revive. The room is lit in permanent evening. Haciendic decor, with latticed alcoves behind each banquette. The tables are covered in starched white cloth and at each setting is a crystal water glass. The waiters wear bolero jackets. A pleasing unlocatable sound of falling water erases any errant sound of the out-of-doors. It is the lunch hour and perhaps two or three tables are occupied by men in suits—no women or children anywhere. Sitting at the bar talking to the underworked bartender, a man in a blue blazer turns to look at him as he enters: Ex-Times guy’s heart kicks in, it is the Guatemalan colonel of the clips, a trimly built man with a good tan, a hairline beginning well back on the crown, and a thick black mustache. Not recognizing the patron, he leaves the welcoming ritual to a waiter and turns back to the cigarette in his ashtray.

  Ex-Times guy, his gorge rising, sees in that glance the same ranking arrogance that presumed to decimate the intellectual class of a country for the country’s sake while managing to murder villagefuls of peasants in the bargain.

  But this is just a surveillance visit. Twice more he will come for lunch by himself, and each time his death-squad restaurateur is there, at the bar, and each time he offers no more than an impassive glance before he turns his back to the room.

  Third time ex-Times guy is seated at what is now his table. In his breast pocket is a ten-inch Carborundum steel carving knife purchased from the Hammacher Schlemmer store on Fifty-seventh Street. Two young men in dark suits and rep ties join him. Neat young fellows with short, crop-eared haircuts. No trace of accents as they speak to him, ask him if he’s from around here, working here or living here. That’s none of your business, says ex-Times guy. And who the fuck are you? I don’t recall asking you to sit down. We have credentials, one of them says. Let’s see your fucking credentials. In due time, the other one says.

  The room is otherwise empty of diners and the waiters have disappeared. Owner at the bar crushes his cigarette, stands, saunters over, and sits down on the opposite side of the table. I am Guillermo your host, he says, smiling, a bright, blinding smile of capped teeth. And I am the avenging angel, ex-Times guy says. He is feeling bold, suicidal. The two young government men without appearing hurried are in an instant standing behind him, at either shoulder. Guillermo is laughing, tilting his chair back on its rear legs. You are not the first to make this claim, he says but certainly, of those, the least prepossessing. He is now even more amused by his own wit, genuine laughter cascades from his mouth of white teeth. Ex-Times guy can actually see the pink palate and the fleshy flap of the uvula. He cannot grab the knife in his breast pocket, because the two young men are pinning his shoulders to his chair. In a mindless rage he strains at their grip, half rises, lunges, and spits in the notorious death squad commander’s face. Who instinctively jerks backward. This carries him over, and for an instant ex-Times guy sees the new unscored leather soles of his shoes. Cacophonous chair splinterings, shouts. Lungfuls of breath basso-belched from a body. But the sound of a skull cracking against a mall restaurant floor of wood-grained plastic affixed to a concrete base, he would later reflect, is less resonant than the sound made by a skull cracking against a brick lawn-retaining wall. They are different sounds, of different pitch. Of course the quality of skull bone may have something to do with it. But whereas he knew immediately the old man in Cincinnati was dead, he did not know, running through the mall parking lot toward the L.I.E., that he had spit the Guatemalan colon
el to death. It wasn’t until he read his Times the next morning that he learned he’d struck again.

  —We were lining up Pem’s books, taking them out of the cartons and putting them in the shelves of the newly finished top-floor library of the EJ synagogue. Most of the volumes had been in storage since his departure from St. Tim’s.

  Everett, he said, try not to read each book before you shelve it, okay?

  Some good stuff here. How do I get a library card?

  He laughed, he is happier these days, but I meant it. I put aside a small stack of his guys I have to read: Tillich, Barth, Teilhard, Heschel.

  That’s about right, he said after glancing at my choices. But as you will see, all these brilliant theologians end up affirming the traditions they were born into. Even the great Kierkegaard. What do you make of that? I mean, when your rigorous search for God just happens to direct you back to your christening, your bris. . .

  —Up on the stage of the grand ballroom of the Waldorf, one actor after another extolling the evening’s lifetime-honoree film director. How he taught them, brought out the best in them, changed their lives, and so on. All to be expected. Directors hand out the jobs.

  But then two or three writers on the program come up to extol the evening’s lifetime-honoree film director, telling of the superior artistry with which he wrought movie magic from their humble books and screenplays. Not quite the same mechanism working here as with the dependent actors, because how many times can any author expect to sell movie rights to a particular director? No, this is something else, call it the denigration of the literary. A sacrament of the movie culture, the denigration of the literary is most satisfying when performed by the literary folks themselves.