The Children of Hamelin

by Norman Spinrad

  Figaro’s was the cornerstone of the Village in space and time: fronting on Bleecker and looking up MacDougal toward Washington Square Park, it was the southwest pivot of the street scene that boiled along MacDougal—the flow of motorcycle gangs, Jersey hoods in hot-rods, teenyboppers, locals, rubbernecking tourists, that promenaded down MacDougal to Bleecker, turned east at Figaro corner, then north up Sullivan back to West Fourth, meeting itself again at the West Fourth head of MacDougal and back into the cycle again. Existing as it did as the materialization of an image that belonged to no real Village era, Figaro stood outside all eras, timeless and unchanging, projecting into the nows of all Village time-loci but contained by none of them like the Rock of Eternity. Because it was always an anachronism, it would never be an anachronism.

  And standing there in its nontemporal aura, all my MacDougals, past, present, and future, were one, existing in memory and anticipation, outside of time.

  “This is the space-time navel of the Village,” I told Robin, trying to explain the inexplicable.

  She looked at me with warm but opaque eyes. “Oh yeah,” she said.

  Could she really understand what I meant that I had found a place to stand on this corner, some kind of common ground with the strangers in the street, with the kids from the Bronx and the tourists and the local Siciliani and even new generations of junkies yet unborn; that all this corner was a Hollywood Village set on which we were all extras. I could stand here forever and never get older like someone in a twenty-year-old stock shot of the Village reincarnated in a hundred B-movies....

  After a second or a century, I felt Robin tug at my hand. “Let’s go to the circus,” she said. She pulled me across Bleecker and back into the time-stream, the now of MacDougal Street that unfolded like a carnival midway before us as we seemed to float up the street on our private magic carpet past savory hero-and-pizza stands, poster shops, timeless Italian groceries, the Kettle of Fish, tiny candystores selling Zig-Zags and poisonous black Italian cigars, the Caricature, feedback whining and shrieking from hole-in-the-wall rock joints, a clot of skeletal speed freaks outside Rienzi’s, Japanese sailors gawking at two sixteen-year-old chicks freezing their tight little asses off in out-of-season miniskirts, two old Eighth Street fags walking arm-in-arm, a bull dyke in a motorcycle jacket, a man in porkpie hat being walked by a shaggy brown Irish Wolfhound as big as a pony, an uptight Irish cop rousting three stoned heads off a tenement stoop, a Bowery bum bugging a bearded 1950’s Village poet, four savage spades with port-reddened eyes: Villageland. The Disney version. Prop reconstructions of colorful old buildings.

  A street scene in which at least half of the people weren’t real. You could tell by their eyes, by the way they held themselves. They were part of the set, costumed extras: teen-age chicks in hippy costume courtesy of Fifth Avenue or girls whose faces reeked of uptown bread in last year’s Levis and raincoats from Army-Navy stores; soulful CCNY students with long hair and beards down on weekend pass from the Bronx; Harlem spades carrying bottles of cheap wine in paper bags who had been told they could come here and fuck a lot of crazy white chicks; the aforementioned crazy white chicks who came from posh private high schools or had run away from Scarsdale for the weekend and had worms in their heads and Cuban Superman notions about black dick. The local color.

  And digging these quaint natives in their accurately simulated natural habitat were the tourists: gringas from Moshulu Parkway and Flatbush with enormous asses; sailors from the Bolivian Navy; genteel retired ex-hookers; feed and grain salesmen from Council Bluffs; Herbert Hoover’s third cousin; inebriated specimens of the Loyal Order of Moose; several Dirk Robinson fee-writers and the Vice Chairlady of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Dope Fiends. Welcome to Disneyland East! See Teenybopperland, Junkieland, and the Needle Park of Tomorrow, folks! Watch the Fearsome Nigger make the Beautiful White Girl two pm every afternoon, extra performance on Sunday! Lookit all the creeps walking around STONED ON DRUGS!! The clientele.

  Ah, but while these shadows were chasing each other up and down the street, you could see the real Villagers skulking around the fringes: a little clot of young kids with wasted pimply faces and rotten teeth fawning over an older cat sitting on a stoop who was obviously their connection; a good-looking hard young waitress from Figaro’s who had just left her shift; a young longhair in Levi jacket and black chinos dragging his guitar and amplifier into the Blue Goo; The Old Dope Peddler Spreading Joy Wherever He Goes; Big Brown, world-famous pseudo poet; a real poet with a real beard; a bull dyke arguing with her fern; two tweedy old respectable faggots; Allan Block, the famous sandalmaker and fiddler; a cat smoking pot in a corncob pipe...

  And Robin and me standing on the corner of MacDougal and West Fourth looking back and digging it all stoned out of our minds on acid.

  “Hea-vy!” I sighed.

  “Yeah man, what a zonk!”

  She didn’t seem to get the point; how could she? She knew which scene was hers because she had known no other, but I had made it all three styles. I had first come to the Village as a CCNY student looking for Village Adventure and some of the fabled easy pussy and I had come out the other end of the long gold summer as an authentic Villager with a smack habit to prove it. And just now, today, hadn’t I started down at the other end of Clown Alley like one of the weekend costume extras: the Superannuated Village Expatriot out for a sentimental visit to the old country on Dr. Timothy Leary’s eight-hour round-trip excursion tour?

  So where did that leave me now?

  I could hardly become a tourist again after having been a native; could I really be a costumed extra after having paid junkie’s dues to the scene?

  Did that mean that once a real Villager, always a real Villager? Once a junkie, always a junkie? But I was off junk; had been for a long time and no urge to score. Yeah, but I was on acid, wasn’t I? Didn’t someone once say it came in all shapes and sizes? Wasn’t that someone me? Was this place, this street, this freakshow, something that got inside you like a tapeworm you couldn’t get rid of?

  Did I really want to blot out my past? If I did, why did I let Robin drag me here?

  Heavy, indeed! Like some Catholic spent his childhood in a Jesuit parochial school bummer, turned eighteen, got laid and gave the Church the back of his hand walking past St. John’s and feeling he wants to go in, knowing what was done to him, but wanting to go in anyway, and wanting not to want to go in, and so finding out that he’s got a need something outside him has put inside him that he’s no longer dumb enough to feed, but the monkey’s still there on his back whispering sweet nothings in his ear.

  Sure, baby, that’s what I needed, to see the Village with kaleidoscope eyes!

  Robin was tugging at my hand. The light was green. She gave me a warm, concerned look, maybe picking up the vibes of my feelings but certainly not what was really inside my head, said: “Don’t look back, baby.” And steered me across the street and up the next block towards Washington Square Park like a tug guiding a wallowing liner in a storm.

  Don’t look back—something may be gaining on you.

  Don’t look forward—you may be gaining on it.

  Don’t look now—you may be there.

  “And how many times can a man turn his head

  And pretend that he just doesn’t see...?”

  But where in the hell was that answer that was supposed to be blowin’ in the wind? Not here in the dead calm of the Horse Latitudes. How about on the path between the leafless trees across the next street in the Park leading, like all Washington Square paths, to the fountain at the center—was the answer there? What was the question?

  Staring up the path, gray concrete under a slating-over November sky, I clocked the contents of the benches under the bare spectral trees, got an awful flash: there they sat, young bodies in traditional Village garb—ponchos, old coats, war-surplus combat boots, faded Levis, brown chinos, sandals—young bodies with old faces, speed freaks with sunken cheeks and ruined eyes, skeletal
young junkies, chicks not out of their teens who had already fucked themselves into old hookers’ faces, the flotsam and jetsam of the Psychedelic Sargasso. And staring up the Desolation Row, I could see the puke-filed doorways, deadly bars and endless flophouse barracks of the Bowery and these same faces but now with bodies to match flopping in doorways with their flies open, lying maybe dead in the gutter unnoticed with the rest of the garbage, bumming quarters off each other, gibbering in the afternoon sun, pissing on parked cars, puking casually on stoops. Yeah, the same faces, the same clothes, and only the bodies aged an instant from today; their heads were already a million years old on Terminal Skid Row.

  I knew I had shuffled a long way down that road once; had I gone so far that I could never get off the Bowery Inside?

  And then we reached the big open space at the core of Washington Square Park: the dry circular concrete-and-stone fountain and around it a wide asphalt-paved clearing with the pseudo-Arch-of-Triumph (over what?) at the north entrance to the Park—the hub on which the Park’s radial paths converged.

  Yes, this was the core of the Hip Stellar Phoenix, the heart of the Village fission-fusion-fission reactor that powered it all. Young kids fissioning off from the Bronx and Brooklyn and the Midwest grooving on the flash of freedom seated on the curved lip of the fountain rapping with each other and full of high-energy hope; lurking spades from Harlem radiating hot gamma rays of madness; uptight old Sicilians walking quickly past with glances of the Evil Eye; innocent holy refugees from Bible Belt mindlessness; the hot unstable elements of American’s Periodic Table drifting into the imploding stellar heart of the Other America. Forming the rich nuclear soup of the Village in which a few dynamically stable elements—a tweedy couple tossing a frisbee back and forth, an old man with a neat white beard and cool calm eyes, a neat young Black and a sunny blond-haired chick pushing a baby carriage together—evolved and remained viable. But most of the human fuel finally ejected as radioactive waste-products, deadly, ashen, and leaden, spewed out of the central core through the sewer-pipe conduits to the Boweries of the mind.

  The whole Village was a big pulsing pump that sucked in youth and spit out derelicts and let a few of the lucky ones bask in the sun at its heart, warming themselves in the glow of burnt-out youth force-drafted from the husks crowding its peripheral slag-heaps.

  We crossed the open space headed northeast, and then up another path under more skeletal trees lined with still more burnt-out Village slag heaped on wooden benches.

  I couldn’t take the terrain inside my head much more; I tried to get outside by concentrating on the girl at the end of my arm who seemed off on some private head-trip of her own.

  “Where are you at?” I asked.

  “Just grooving,” she said dreamily.

  “Grooving! On what? This fucking garbage-heap? This sewer? This Bowery annex?”

  Robin seemed to snap back from somewhere far away; her glassy, dreamy eyes were suddenly rodent-bright, turned on me like a camera zoomed in to close focus. “Hey man,” she said earnestly, “what’s bugging you?”

  “I got one of those free roadmaps you promised me. I don’t like the way the land lies.”

  “Old tracks,” she said. “Don’t let it freak you.”

  But it hurt; it hurt because she seemed to have seen all the way inside me and put my inner being down with two short words. And she was wrong, she had to be wrong! I had to make her understand to stop the hurting; if I couldn’t make her understand, then may be she was right and I was old, old, old.

  “Look at this place,” I said. “It’s the Sargasso Sea. Everything that’s floating loose drifts down here and rots in the seaweed.”

  “It’s the world, baby,” she said with a softness older than anything inside me.

  “What’s the world, this freakshow?”

  “No man, it’s the world,” she insisted.

  “I don’t understand....”

  “It’s the world. Dig—I’ll show you. Just keep walking and don’t look back till I tell you.”

  We reached the northeast corner of the Park (don’t look back), crossed the street, continued east, and suddenly reality became cool and dark and echoing as we crossed the frontier into a new country: a deep canyon of huge empty gray buildings, the gray silent monoliths of some moldering necropolis, the flesh-dwarfing Stalinist architecture of a black and white film of East Berlin and up the ghostly street, the only three people in sight, two blocks further east, seemed like primitive savages scuttling at the feet of the giant enigmatic tombstones of the Pharaohs. Canyons measureless to man. Endless acres of dead city, stone upon gray stone—was this the New York of “nice place to visit but I wouldn’t want to live there,” was this what the tourists saw, was the uptight cliche of New York of dead gray concrete canyons and frantic scuttling gray people the real thing after all? Was this concrete deathscape a map of our inner territory?

  The drag of Robin’s hand brought me to a slow stop like the chain of a sea-anchor. “Turn around and dig it now,” she said.

  I turned and stared down a long gray corridor of lifeless stone and my viewpoint seemed to flash down the cold canyon of buildings like a camera zoom-shot on Washington Square Park shimmering like an oasis beyond a desert of frozen gray sand. I was staring at a vision of the Village, an impressionist painting, all feeling and no detail, from the bottom of some horrible stone-walled pit, and now the Village-image shone like the dream of youth’s awakening and I knew that no one ran away to the Village, you ran away from the gray void at the bottom of the city’s pit, towards that shimmering vision of the Promised Land at the other end of the tunnel. Clawed your way up the rock walls, inch by inch if you had to, crawled along the desert sands towards the oasis....

  “It’s the world,” Robin said.

  “Yes....”

  She knew, somehow, on some gut-level, she had known all along that the real choice wasn’t between good and evil but between two different styles of reality and neither was Shangri-La. But down here, at the bottom of New York’s Stalinist-gray bummer, I could see, could accept the fact, that the break from this to the Village had been a move towards freedom, a tropism towards light, a flight from a reality of walls to a place of the possible, where evil was ranker and good was more luxuriant, where “humanity festers rich as rotting fruit,” life, is all.

  I didn’t like the game, but those were the cards, and it had been the only game in town. I had nothing to regret.

  “Time for another magic carpet ride,” Robin said.

  We got out of the cab at Forty-Second Street and Fifth Avenue: the cabbie had been giving us the “dirty hippie treatment” all the way, so I handed him a single and two quarters for the $1.50 meter, paused just long enough to let him wind up for a curse, then handed him another single and said: “And that for you, my good man.”

  Walking up Fifth Avenue from the gaping cabbie, Robin said: “Why did you do that? That cat was bumming us all the way.”

  “Precisely,” I said. Jesus, it had been the obvious move, hadn’t it? “Huh?”

  “I did it to teach the bounder a lesson,” I explained patiently. “Man,” she said respectfully but obviously uncomprehendingly, “are you stoned!”

  Ah, the poor child, I thought with a sudden surge of well-being.

  No sense of savoir-faire, no appreciation of true class, no instinct for the Grand Gesture. Jeez, it felt good to be walking up Fifth Avenue, posh gleaming banks, opulent shops, wide sidewalks, muted underplayed storefronts, great office buildings where the wheels of the world hummed, little touches of pure idiot elegance like the gilded lamp-posts and trash-baskets, all bathed in the Technicolor glow of a golden sunset.

  “Dig it, dig it, dig it...” Robin mumbled.

  “I dig, I dig,” I assured her. This was the real New York where, as Dickie Lee says, the Big Game is played. Here the huge buildings weren’t dead useless stone but great buzzing beehives, busy, busy, busy, fortunes won and lost, paper empires rising and falling, yeah
, this is where the action is. That son of a bitch Dirk had pegged it right; he knew his own turf, had to give him that.

  “Man, just so big, so big...” Robin said.

  “Oh yeah, big all right!” Fifth Avenue on a sunset Saturday was empty but not deserted, expensive chicks in expensive shops, mysterious cats bustling around on mysterious day-off missions, tourists gawking; but still not the weekday mob jamming the sidewalks, moving at double-time. No, now Fifth Avenue was like some smoothly-oiled racing-engine taking it easy, idling, not much really happening, but man, dig the power in that lazy throb!

  “Oh shit... wow...”

  We were on the corner of Fifth and Forty-Fourth now; two blocks north was the second-string office building that housed the Dirk Robinson Literary Agency. A weird feeling, walking around outside the old boiler factory on a Saturday, with the building closed, stoned on acid! Wouldn’t it blow old Dirk’s mind to see me? Or would it? It wasn’t blowing my mind; it was unblowing it. Fifth Avenue had a real reality, a sense of contact with the Great World Out There. Even my shitty job, stupid maybe, corrupt maybe, in that office on this street, put me in some kind of contact with the pathetic dreams of the losers and the Big Game of the winners; it was possible to sit behind my typewriter and sniff the goings-on in both realities of the office, to glide back and forth between the Big Game and the compost-heap of broken dreams....

  “Shit... shit... oh Christ...”

  Hey, Robin was babbling! Her free hand was balled into a fist, her hand in mine digging into my flesh like a claw. I put my free hand on her shoulder, spun her around to face me. Her eyes were wild, unfocused; her mouth was trembling. She was off somewhere and it obviously wasn’t somewhere good.

  “Hey, what’s the matter? Take it easy—”

  She seemed to come back from wherever she had been, but there was an awful look in her eyes, look of someone who has looked somewhere they shouldn’t and now they know it.