The Purple Decades - a Reader, Page 29

  The lobby is officially known as the great central court, and it’s like some Central American opera house, marble, arches, domes, acanthus leaves and Indian sandstone, quirks and galleries, and gilt filigrees, like Bourbon Louis curlicues of gold in every corner, along every molding, every flute, every cusp, every water-leaf and cartouche, a veritable angels’ choir of gold, a veritable obsession of gold … and all kept polished as if for the commemoration of the Generalissimo’s birthday … and busts of great and glorious mayors of San Francisco, perched on top of pedestals in their business suits with their bald marble skulls reflecting the lacy gold of the place … Angelo Rossi … James Rolph … cenotaphs, pediments, baroque balusters, and everywhere marble, marble, marble, gold, gold, gold … and through this Golden Whore’s Dream of Paradise rush the children of the Youth of the Future.

  By now the guards are asking the Dashiki Chief what he thinks he’s doing. City Hall functionaries are asking him what he wants. The Dashiki Chief informs them that his name is Jomo Yarumba, and the Youth of the Future are now here, and he wants to see Mayor Joseph Alioto.

  Meanwhile, the childstorm is intensifying. A little girl carrying a soft-top beer-style container of Fresca is about to collide with a little boy holding a double-dip Baskin-Robbins strawberry rhubarb sherbet cone, and the City Hall lifers can envision it already: a liver-red blob of sherbet sailing over the marble expanse of the City Hall lobby on a foaming bile-green sea of Fresca, and the kids who are trying to rip the damned paper off the ice cream in the Drumstick popsicles, which always end up inextricable messes of crabbed paper and molten milk fat, mixing it up with the kids whose frozen Kool-Aids are leaking horrible streaks of fuchsia and tubercular blue into the napkins they have wrapped around them in their palms and mashing it all onto the marble bean of Mayor Angelo Rossi … and now Jomo Yarumba and his childstorm are swooping up the great marble stairs of the great central court toward the first gallery and the outer office of the Mayor himself, and the City Hall functionaries are beginning to confer in alarm. By and by a young man from the Mayor’s office comes out and explains to Jomo Yarumba that the Mayor regrets he has a very tight schedule today and can’t possibly see him.

  “We’ll wait for the cat to get through,” says the Dashiki Chief.

  “But he’s completely tied up, all day.”

  “Hell, man, we’ll stay here all night. We’ll see the cat in the morning.”

  “All night?”

  “That’s right. We ain’t budging, man. We’re here to tend to business.”

  The young guy from the Mayor’s office retreats … Much consternation and concern in the lobby of City Hall … the hurricane could get worse. The little devils start screaming, wailing, ululating, belching, moaning, giggling, making spook-show sounds … filling the very air with a hurricane of malted milk, an orange blizzard of crushed ice from the Slurpees, with acid red horrors like the red from the taffy apples and the jelly from the jelly doughnuts, with globs of ice cream in purple sheets of root beer, with plastic straws and huge bilious waxed cups and punch cans and sprinkles of Winkles, with mustard from off the hot dogs and little lettuce shreds from off the tacos, with things that splash and things that plop and things that ooze and stick, that filthy sugar moss from off the cotton candy, and the Karamel Korn and the butterscotch daddy figures from off the Sugar-Daddies and the butterscotch babies from off the Sugar-Babies, sugar, water, goo, fried fat, droplets, driplets, shreds, bits, lumps, gums, gobs, smears, from the most itchy molecular Winkle to the most warm moist emetic mass of Three Musketeer bar and every gradation of solubility and liquidity known to syrup—filling the air, choking it, getting trapped gurgling and spluttering in every glottis—

  And it was here that Bill Jackson proved himself to be a brilliant man and a true artist, a rare artist, of the mau-mau. One of the few things that could stir every bureaucrat in City Hall, make every bureaucrat rev up his adrenaline and quicken his pulse and cut the red tape and bypass the normal channels and get it together by word of mouth, by jungle drum, by hoot and holler from floor to floor, was just what Bill Jackson was doing now. Even an armed attack wouldn’t have done so much. There’s already an 84-page contingency paper for armed attack, emergency guidelines, action memos, with all the channels laid down in black and white for bucking the news up the chain … But this! Sixty black hellions and some kind of crazy in a dashiki wreaking creamy wavy gravy through the grand central court of City Hall … This lacerated the soul of every lifer, every line bureaucrat, every flak catcher in the municipal government … There are those who may think that the bureaucrats and functionaries of City Hall are merely time servers, with no other lookout than filling out their forms, drawing their pay, keeping the boat from rocking and dreaming of their pension like the lid on an orderly life. But bureaucrats, especially in City Halls, have a hidden heart, a hidden well of joy, a low-dosage euphoria that courses through their bodies like thyroxin … Because they have a secret: each, in his own way, is hooked into The Power. The Government is the Power, and they are the Government, and the symbol of the Government is the golden dome of City Hall, and the greatest glory of City Hall is the gold-and-marble lobby, gleaming and serene, cool and massive, studded with the glistening busts of bald-headed men now as anonymous as themselves but touched and blessed forever by The Power … And in an age of torrid sensations, of lust, gluttony, stroke-house movies, fellatio-lipped young buds jiggling down the street with their hard little nipples doing the new boogaloo through their translucent nylon jerseys, an age of marijuana, LSD, THC, MDA, cocaine, methedrine, and motels where the acrid electric ozone of the central air conditioning mixes with the sickly sweet secretions oozing from every aperture—in the midst of such cheap thrills and vibrating nerve ends, who is left to record the secret, tender, subtle, and ineffable joys of the line bureaucrat savoring the satin cushion of City Hall? Who else is left to understand the secret bliss of the coffee break at 10:30 a.m., the walk with one’s fellows through the majesty of the gold-and-marble lobby and out across the grass and the great white walkways of City Hall Plaza, past the Ionic columns and Italian Renaissance façade of the Public Library on the opposite side and down McAllister Street a few steps to the cafeteria, where you say hello to Jerry as he flips the white enamel handle on the urn and pours you a smoking china mug of coffee and you sit down at a Formica table and let coffee and cigarette smoke seep through you amid the Spanish burble of the bus boys, knowing that it is all set and cushioned, solid and yet lined with velvet, all waiting for you, as long as you want it, somewhere below your consciousness, the Bourbon Louis baroque hulk and the golden dome of City Hall, waiting for you on the walk back, through the Plaza and up the steps and into the great central court, and you stop and talk with your good buddy by the door to the Registrar’s or by the bust of Mayor Angelo Rossi, both of you in your shirtsleeves but with your ties held down smoothly by a small-bar tie clip, rocking back on the heels of your Hush Puppies, talking with an insider’s chuckles of how that crazy messenger, the one with the glass eye, got caught trying to run football-pool cards off on the Xerox machine because he couldn’t see the Viper standing there on his blind side for five minutes with his arms folded, just watching him … while your eyes play over the lobby and all the hopeless wondering mendicants who wander in off the street, looking this way and that for some sign of where the Assessor’s office is, or the Board of Supervisors’, or the Tax Collector’s, probably taking their first plunge into the endless intricate mysteries of The Power, which they no more understand than they could understand the comradely majesty of this place, this temple, this nave and crossing of the euphoria of The Power—and suddenly here are these black ragamuffins! neither timorous nor bewildered! On the contrary—sportive, scornful, berserk, filling the air, the very sanctum, with far-flung creamy wavy gravy, with their noise, their insolence, their pagan vulgarity and other shitfire and abuse! And no one can lay a hand on them! No one can call in the Tac Squad to disperse sixty black chi
ldren having a cotton-candy and M&M riot for themselves … The infidels are immune …

  The incredible news was now sweeping through City Hall. The Mayor’s number-three man came out and took a look and disappeared. The Mayor’s number-two man came out and took a look and disappeared. The Mayor’s press secretary came out and took a look … it was rumored that The Media were heading over … and the press secretary disappeared, and the kids dervished through it all, spinning their inspired typhoon up to the very architraves, and Bill Jackson orchestrated the madness in his whirling dashiki …

  And in no time at all here was the Man himself, Mayor Joseph Alioto, advancing into their midst, attended by the number-four man, the number-three man, the number-two man, and the press secretary, and with his bald head gleaming as gloriously as Angelo Rossi’s or James Rolph’s, heading toward Jomo Yarumba with his broad smile beaming as if he had known the famous youth leader all his life, as if nothing in the world had been weighing more on his mind this morning than getting downstairs promptly to meet the inspiring Youth of the Future … And as the Mayor shook hands with Jomo Yarumba—there! it was done in a flash!—the Youth of the Future were now home safe …

  Thereafter Bill Jackson could get down to the serious business, which was to use his official recognition to raise money for the sewing machines for his organization’s dashiki factory … black-designed, black-made, black-worn dashikis to be manufactured by the youth themselves … There were no two ways about it. Bill Jackson and his group were looking good. That particular scene gave a lot of people heart. It wasn’t long before an enterprising brother named Ronnie started his own group. The New Thang.

  “The New Thang?” said Mayor Alioto, after they had put in their own unique and confounding appearance at City Hall.

  “That’s right, The New Thang.”

  The Mayor looked wigged out, as if the lights had gone out in his skull.

  “Thang,” said Ronnie. “That’s Thing in African.”

  “Oh,” said the Mayor. There wasn’t even the faintest shade of meaning in his voice.

  Lillian Carter

  THE TRUEST SPORT: JOUSTING WITH SAM AND CHARLIE

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  Down a perfectly green tunnel, as cool and quiet as you can possibly imagine—no, it’s not a tunnel, it’s more like a hall of mirrors—but they’re not mirrors, those aren’t reflections, they’re openings, one after another, on and on—just a minute! it’s very familiar!—out of this cool green memory comes a steward, a tiny man, in uniform, a white jacket, perfectly starched and folded and creased like an envelope over his crisp little bones. Who doesn’t know him! Here comes Bye Borty-bibe—

  “Bye borty-bibe!”

  He’s saying it!

  Dowd wakes up and it’s 5:45 on the button, as always, and he looks across the stateroom at the steward. The steward is a little Filipino in a white jacket who hesitates, so as to make sure Dowd actually wakes up at bye borty-bibe, as he always pronounces it, and then he disappears down the passageway.

  There is something eccentric in the way the day begins. It’s terribly genteel!—having a little servant in a white jacket come by and respectfully summon you into consciousness so you can go hang your hide out for human skeet and sweat horribly. More servants will come in after Dowd leaves and make up his bed and clean up the stateroom and dust off the TV and the safe and clean off the desk and take out the laundry. Only your laundryman knows for sure! That was the usual joke, but there were some men who came aboard for the first time, and after a couple of hops north they would actually wonder whether it could get so bad—whether a man could get so frightened that he would literally lose control—only your laundryman knows for sure!— and whether later, in the bowels of the ship, in the laundry room, there might actually be some little laundry humper, some sweatback, some bye-bye steward of the soul, who would, in fact, know.

  In the first moments, when you wake up, it’s as if you’re furiously scanning, painting all the stray trash on the screen, although usually that begins to fade as soon as you’re on your feet. In a moment Dowd would be out in the good green passageway. The passageway is a very cool and immaculate green, not luxurious, you understand—in fact, every twenty feet there is a hatchway with a kneeknocker you have to step over, and as you look on and on through these hatchways, one after the other, it’s like a hall of mirrors—but it is green and generally pleasing to the nervous system. Actually … that is not all there is to it. It is also good because, if the truth be known, being on this good green passageway means that you are traveling first-class, sleeping in a stateroom, with only one roommate, and you have the aforesaid servants standing by. It is not even a subject that one thinks about in so many words. And yet the ship is constructed in such an obvious fashion, in layers, that one can’t help but know that down below … they are living in quite another way, in compartments, with thirty to forty souls to a compartment, and they wake up to a loudspeaker and make up their own bunks and run along to a loudspeaker through gray-and-beige tunnels and eat in a gray-and-beige galley off trays with scullion gullies stamped into them, instead of in a wardroom.

  A wardroom!—also genteel in its way. Like the rest of them, Dowd is usually doing well if he gets up in time to make it to breakfast with his guy-in-back, Garth Flint, in the smaller wardroom, where they eat cafeteria-style. More than once he hasn’t even managed that and has departed with nothing in his gullet but a couple of cups of coffee, notwithstanding all the lectures about the evil consequences this has for your blood-sugar level. But when they come back, Dowd and Flint and the others can enjoy the offerings of a proper wardroom, the formal one. They can take off the reeking zoom-bags, get dressed, sit down at a table with a white tablecloth on it, write out their orders on club slips, after the fashion of a men’s club in New York or London, and more little Filipino stewards in white jackets will pick up the orders and serve dinner on china plates. The china has a certain dignity: it’s white with a band of blue about the rim and a blue crest in the center. The silverware—now, that’s rather nice! It’s ornamental and heavy, it has curlicues and a noble gravity, the sort of silverware one used to see in the dining room of the good hotel near the railroad station. So they have dinner on a field of white and silver, while little stewards in white jackets move about the edges. The bulkheads (as the walls are known here) are paneled with walnut rectangles framed with more walnut; not actual wood, which is forbidden because it is inflammable, but similar enough to fool the eye. Off to the side are clusters of lounge chairs upholstered in leather and some acey-deucey tables. Silver and heavy glass wink out of a manly backdrop, rich as burled wood and Manila cigars; for here in the wardrooms of the Coral Sea the Navy has done everything that interior decoration and white mess jackets can do to live up to the idea of Officers & Gentlemen, within the natural limits of going to war on the high seas.

  The notion often crosses Dowd’s mind: It’s like jousting.

  Every day they touch the napkins to their mouths, depart this gently stewarded place, and go forth, observing a checklist of written and unwritten rules of good form, to test their mettle, to go forth to battle, to hang their hides out over the skeet shooters of Hanoi-Haiphong … thence to return, after no more than two hours … to this linenfold club and its crisp starched white servitors.

  One thing it is not good to think about is the fact that it would be even thus on the day when, finally, as has already happened to 799 other American aviators, radar-intercept officers, and helicopter crewmen, your hide is blown out of the sky. That day, too, would begin within this same gentlemanly envelope.

  Fliers with premonitions are not healthy people. They are known as accidents waiting to happen. Now, John Dowd and Garth Flint are not given to premonitions, which is fortunate and a good sign; except that it won’t make a great deal of difference today, because this is that day.

  To get up on the flight deck of the Coral Sea, Dowd and Flint usually went out through a hatch onto a catwalk. The catwalk hung out ov
er the side of the ship just below the level of the deck. At about midships they climbed a few feet up a ladder and they would be on the deck itself. A simple, if slightly old-fashioned, procedure, and by now second nature—

  —but what a marvelous low-volt amusement was available if you were on the Coral Sea and you saw another mortal, some visitor, some summer reservist, whoever, make his first excursion out onto that deck. He takes a step out onto the catwalk, and right away the burglar alarm sounds in his central nervous system. Listen, Skipper!—the integrity of the circuit has been violated somewhere! He looks out over the railing of the catwalk, and it might as well be the railing of the goddamned Golden Gate Bridge. It’s a sixty-foot drop to the sea below, which is water—but what conceivable difference does that make? From this height the water looks like steel where it picks up reflections of the hull of the carrier, except that it ripples and breaks up into queasy facets—and in fact the horizon itself is pitching up and down … The whole freaking Golden Gate Bridge is pitching up and down … the big wallowing monster can’t hold still … Christ, let’s get up on the deck, away from the edge—but it’s only when he reaches the deck itself and stands with both feet planted flat that the full red alert takes over.

  This flight deck—in the movie or the training film the flight deck is a grand piece of gray geometry, perilous, to be sure, but an amazing abstract shape dominating the middle of the ocean as we look down upon it on the screen—and yet, once the newcomer’s two feet are on it—geometry—my God, man, this is a … skillet! It heaves, it moves up and down underneath his feet, it pitches up, it pitches down, as the ship moves into the wind and, therefore, into the waves, and the wind keeps sweeping across, sixty feet up in the air out in the open sea, and there are no railings whatsoever—and no way whatsoever to cry out to another living soul for a helping hand, because on top of everything else the newcomer realizes that his sense of hearing has been amputated entirely and his voice is useless. This is a skillet!—a frying pan!—a short-order grill!—not gray but black, smeared with skid marks from one end to the other and glistening with pools of hydraulic fluid and the occasional jet-fuel slick, all of it still hot, sticky, greasy, runny, virulent from God knows what traumas—still ablaze!—consumed in detonations, explosions, flames, combustion, roars, shrieks, whines, blasts, cyclones, dust storms, horrible shudders, fracturing impacts, all of it taking place out on the very edge of control, if in fact it can be contained at all, which seems extremely doubtful, because the whole scorched skillet is still heaving up and down the horizon and little men in screaming red and yellow and purple and green shirts with black Mickey Mouse helmets over their ears are skittering about on the surface as if for their very lives (you’ve said it now!), clustering about twin-engine F-4 fighter planes like little bees about the queen, rolling them up a stripe toward the catapult slot, which runs through the deck like the slot in the back of a piggy bank, hooking their bellies on to the shuttle that comes up through the slot and then running for cover as the two jet engines go into their shriek and a huge deflection plate rises up behind the plane because it is about to go into its explosion and quite enough gets blown—quite enough!—quite enough gets blown off this heaving grill as it is, and then they explode—both engines explode into full afterburn, 37,000 pounds of force, and a very storm of flame, heat, crazed winds, and a billion blown steely particles—a very storm engulfs the deck, followed by an unbelievable shudder—kaboom!—that pounds through the skillet and destroys whatever may be left of the neophyte’s vestibular system, and the howling monster is flung up the deck like something out of a red-mad slingshot, and the F-4 is launched, dropping off the lip of the deck tail down with black smoke pouring out of both engines in its furious struggle to gain altitude—and already another plane is ready on the second catapult and the screams and explosions have started again and the little screaming-yellow men with their Mouseketeer ears are running once more—