John Henry Days (25 page)

“It’s not what I thought it would be like,” J. told Winslow Kramer on Tuesday, and Kramer told him that’s what everybody said: They think everybody’s smoking Humbolt joints in the bathroom. He explained that these were the new offices. The
News
had recently moved into this space after thirty years on Fourteenth Street and things were different. Becker Distilleries owned the property and had forced the paper into the building because they had trouble finding tenants, despite the recent blossoming of the economy. Now they were finally collecting rent on the place.

“He’s a real bastard,” Kramer said, “but he leaves us alone.” J. remembered the boycott two years earlier, called by the staff on the eve of the sale. At the tail inches of the columns and reviews, the writers urged the readers not to buy the paper the following week if the sale went through, to show Management that they didn’t want to read a paper published by a liquor manufacturer who engineered ad campaigns to urge underage drinking and put
up big billboards in minority neighborhoods, just bad vibes any way you looked at it, who knew what kind of changes this supporter of various conservative groups might impose on this vanguard of the left. The sale went through, and newsstand sales dropped the next week, but nothing major, comparable to certain heatstroke weeks in the summer when the folks still in town were too weak to read, or when January blizzards kept the citizens indoors and uninformed about city hall’s sundry machinations.

J. had noticed no change in the paper over the last few years. He was a diligent reader of the
News;
he rushed out to buy the paper every Wednesday, turning first to the music reviews in the early days of his education, then to the movie reviews, and then after a time finding himself with a flashlight in the subterrain of the front of the book, discovering in bits and pieces the covert scheme of democracy and how it kept the people in check, in ignorance, in obeisance, etc. This was stuff he didn’t find in the papers his parents read: puppet governments below the equator, kickbacks to the mayor’s pals, lead paint potato chips for the kids in the projects. Stuff in the drinking water, a chemical whose name J. always forgot, the
News
reporter had discovered secret documents. Journalists were getting assassinated in Central America and the intellectuals of Pan-Africanism died in plane “accidents.” His parents were in on it, J. had come to realize, by their deep middle-class sin. They were complacent and a fascist government needed people to be complacent, to turn a blind eye. So he read.

He listened. He was on the inside now. Word around the office, murmured along the labyrinthine cubicles, held that Reagan was sure to be re-elected next week; the paper had done all they could for Mondale, but it was a lost cause, the country overflowed with simpletons who refused to see. But that wasn’t going to stop J.; he was turning eighteen on the very day of the election, and he was going to vote for the first time. J. had read with deep anger the statistics of voter turnout among young adults and minorities in an article published by the organization he was now a part of, he clucked at the sorry numbers, recognizing that apathy was a major tool of the oppressors down in Washington, he said amen to the condemnatory tone of the article, he shook his head solemnly when the writer pointed out that the numbers were caused, surely and sadly, by the effects of disenfranchisement, institutional racism, the sheer failure of the country’s education system. Amen.

The writer’s name was Andy Halloran and J. hoped to meet him in the coming months. There was no telling who he might be. No one in the office looked like what he thought they would. Winslow Kramer, for example, did
not wear the black leather jacket and dirty jeans in which J. had attired him after reading the man’s music reviews for years. J. had clipped the article Kramer wrote about a crazy night in CBGBs with the Ramones, when Dee Dee was too fucked up to play, passed out in the middle of a song, and Kramer climbed on up, grabbed the man’s bass from the tacky stage, and filled in for the rest of the set. The
News
had the best music section of any mag he’d read, and Kramer had a byline J. always searched for on the contents page. Or used to. He hadn’t written for a while. When Kramer called to tell him he got the internship, he was surprised that the rocker was covering the Metro desk, the post J. had requested, where the real battles lay. More surprised when Kramer asked him not to wear aftershave or cologne; since his overdose a year and a half before he was sensitive to chemicals, he explained, the bouquet of modern life left him faint and panting and grasping for his inhaler. In person that first day, Kramer sported the bowl haircut of a penitent, and wore new dark blue jeans and a faded green T-shirt without a slogan or a band’s name. Brown freckles dotted his sunken cheeks, a swarm of bugs eating their way out from within. On the desk there was a picture of Kramer and a bleary Patti Smith, taken in some downtown alley, but nothing else to link the man with J.’s notions.

The first day J. said, “I liked that piece you did about the Gang of Four show a while back. I thought you really got it. The atmosphere.”

Kramer looked at J. distantly, a bit fearfully. “Thank you,” he whispered.

“I was there, at Danceteria that night.” The age limit was eighteen, but J. and Freddie followed in the wake of some beautiful older girls in platinum Warhol wigs and got through the front door. They weaseled up to the front of the stage, in the front of the jaded crowd, and rescued the song list taped to the microphone stand when the band finished playing. J. and Freddie fought over who deserved the night’s distilled essence more, who was the bigger fan, but J. walked home with it.

Kramer said, “Yeah?” and took some papers to the Xerox room.

Still, the place was pretty fucking cool. There was a little chair next to Kramer’s desk, and they sat close together in the tiny cubicle. Kramer talked in low, mellow tones, and had an appointment outside the office every afternoon, with the acupuncturist, with his analyst, with Narcotics Anonymous, which left J. alone with the daily papers to mine for promising stories, or to find holes in the mainstream version of events that they might excavate. He answered the phones and told writers and sources that Kramer had stepped out but would be back soon. People stopped by the cubicle to look for
Kramer and J. wondered, was that Lynn Fields, was that Ron K. C. Speath, was that skinny guy Billy Pagels, who had written the excellent piece about Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. J. was a lucky man, so he believed, and so his friends seconded, telling him as much from their college dormitories between keg parties. The
Downtown News
was the only paper that covered rap music in any way, reviewed Whodini and Run DMC singles. James Baldwin had editorialized in these pages, Lorraine Hansberry had essayed a few words about the direction of black theater. J.’s parents were glad he was doing something beyond working at that electronics store; they wanted him to become a lawyer and didn’t like the fact that he had deferred from college for a year. They thought he would never go and get a degree, follow the plan, that he’d lay around their house and watch television until he was thirty, never get beyond working the record counter at Crazy Eddie’s. The internship showed them that he wasn’t just fucking around, even though he did go out every night with friends; sometimes forgot his keys and woke his parents up at two in the morning with Budweiser on his breath. Or he hoped it would show them.

He put on a song and dance for them Tuesday night at dinner. “Have you heard about Eleanor Bumpurs?” he challenged his parents, in between mouthfuls of Lake Tung-Ting Shrimp, which had been delivered to their door just minutes earlier from their local favorite. Free fortune cookies and an orange.

“Of course,” his father said, “it was in the
Times
today.”

“It’s another example of a larger pattern of police attacks against the black community,” J. said.

“I thought she was mentally ill,” J.’s mother said, tearing the corner of a plastic packet of soy sauce.

J. had discovered the article when Kramer disappeared early in the morning to go to the allergist. Eleanor Bumpurs was a sixty-nine-year-old Afro-American woman who had been killed by the Emergency Services Unit as they tried to evict her from her city-owned apartment. The piece was a few pages into the Metro section of the
Times,
a small and terse square of type. Six cops had gone in, warned in advance that the woman had mental problems. According to the police, after they broke down the door, the three-hundred-pound Mrs. Bumpurs came at them with a knife, and the men who had received certificates from a program that taught them how to deal with the mentally ill killed her. Officer Sullivan shot her twice with a shotgun.

“Yeah, she was sick, but the cops knew that when they went in,” J.
pointed out. “They were
Emergency Services,
that’s their job to handle this stuff.”

“That’s terrible,” J.’s mother said, as a ball of gray meat rolled out of dumpling sheath. “Can you pass the salt, Andrew?” J.’s mother said, gesturing toward her husband.

“Eighty-nine dollars a month. That was her rent. Is that worth a human life? There’s a pattern here,” J. insisted. He clipped the article and showed it to Kramer when he returned, sniffing, pharmacy bag in his claw, from the allergist. Kramer called Noah Blumenthal, his point man on such matters, and by the end of the day, after negotiations in the editor in chief’s office (somewhere down the hall out there), the piece was out of the Metro section and into the feature well. J. felt he had discovered the outrage for the paper, he had contributed his first thing to the
Downtown News.
At dinner, he reiterated some of the dialogue from Kramer’s and Blumenthal’s conversations, to demonstrate to his parents the justice of his deferred education. “The cops are taking their cues from Koch and Reagan that black people don’t matter,” J. informed his parents. “Can you imagine what it will be like if Reagan gets reelected next week? It’s going to be a field day on black people.”

“Too bad that Mondale’s such a wimp,” J.’s father said.

“That’s going to be the message we send to the cops: That it’s okay. Eleanor Bumpurs killed in her own home! Michael Stewart choked to death by subway cops—anyone could be next,” J. protested, attacking the broccoli on his plate, saving the shrimp for last, his strategy with this particular dish.

“That’s why we always say save money for cabs home. It’s not safe on the subways at night,” J.’s father said.

“Right. But still—this is a police state we’re living in!” Cab fare cut into his bar money. He always took the subway home. Simple economics.

On Friday, Kramer looked pale and didn’t say much all morning. Less than usual. He spent a long time in the bathroom and when he came back he said that he had to visit the doctor immediately. (J. later recalled he had used an antifungal aerosal spray that morning.) There was a headline meeting at noon, so J. would have to go in his place. Jimmy Banks had seen the Bumpurs piece, but there might be some unforeseen questions, and if that happened J. was to give whatever information he could. Kramer rubbed his throat. “These meetings are pretty simple,” he wheezed. “You’ll probably not have to do anything, don’t worry about it. Just sit there.”

J. was going to enter the inner sanctum of the paper. On Thursday he had walked to the editor in chief’s office to deliver a reimbursement form for
one of Kramer’s writers but the door was closed, and the secretary said she’d take the form, it was all right. J. had read the Noah Blumenthal piece; as in all the man’s work, righteous anger reverberated between the quotes and facts, as if meticulous research and the journalistic method were all that kept the man from becoming a homicidal vigilante. With disregard for department policies, with seemingly premeditated intent. Blumenthal in person, when he came in to drop off some factchecking material, was quite and nervous. Kramer told J. later that he lived with his mother in Queens and had only recently conquered a phobia about the subway. J. read the piece again before the headline meeting to make sure he could answer any question that might come up, perhaps regarding the one or two missing quotes Blumenthal was supposed to insert on Monday, or the missing sentence that started the third paragraph, which Kramer and Blumenthal were still arguing about. Who knew what they might ask. He wanted to be prepared.

This was the kind of work he wanted to do, J. thought, squinting at the printout and underlining with his finger dot matrix outrage. These were real stories. He had been raised in a cocoon, programmed for achievement, but there was a whole city out there that was unruly and didn’t give a shit about plans. And he wanted to take his place in it. He wanted to know where reporters got their statistics about rates of crime, and how they requested secret files the government and big business didn’t want the public to know. The clandestine order that made things go. Blumenthal had read Emergency Services’ protocols on the use of deadly physical force and had interviewed Eleanor Bumpurs’s case counselor. The reporter had looked up Officer Sullivan’s record of nineteen years on the police force and had seen a pattern there. He found things that converged in one place and time from different parts of the city, like people on a subway car, and violence was the result. J. felt a part of the Bumpurs piece, he had turned Kramer on to it, and though it was a small step it was his first, and that’s how you learn to walk, he thought.

A few minutes before noon, Freddie called J. from his dorm room at NYU to give him the lowdown on the night. Sophie’s was the ticket: they’d spend the night on Avenue A, and Julia was going to bring some of her friends maybe, they were still negotiating, and then J. looked at the clock and saw he was late for the meeting.

He ran between the cubicles, left and right, skidded down the blue tile floor. The door to the editor in chief’s office was closed. He was too late. Kramer was going to kill him. The secretary looked up at him, and raised her eyebrows to say, yes? “I’m supposed to be in the meeting,” J. said.