Public Burning (27 page)

Well, only Uncle Sam knows why this or that receptacle is chosen to receive the Host, but one thing is clear: Uncle Sam moved toward Dwight Eisenhower with more conviction and gusto than toward any other Incarnation since the Father of the Country himself. The new President was packaged and sold by BBD&O as “Strictly a No-Deal Man Clean as a Hound's Tooth Who Will Go to Korea Restore Faith in God and Country and Carry On a Crusade to Clean Up Creeping Socialism Five-Percenters the Mess in Washington Crooks Cronies Mink Coats Deep Freezers and Rising Inflation,” but the true source of his power was summed up more simply in the big badge Uncle Sam wore last fall on his blue lapel:
I
LIKE
IKE
. Uncle Sam seemed to
want
Eisenhower like a child wants happiness. Perhaps it was because he was nostalgic for the old days, the time of his childhood when life was simple and causes were clear, the days of the Minutemen and Bunker Hill, of cracker barrels and hayrides and old-time religion. A “crusade” Eisenhower called his political campaign, and he told stories about his old Uncle Abraham Lincoln Eisenhower galloping his goofy gospel wagon through prairie villages, shouting “This way to heaven!”, and he told about selling hot tamales three for a nickel and riding a raft in a flood with his brother Ed while singing “Marching Through Georgia,” learning to fire old muzzle-loading guns with powder and shot, about seeing a real cowboy shootout on Texas Street in Abilene. He conjured up the crackle of a campfire, the taste of country fried chicken and thick potato salad at church picnics and the thump and clank of a game of horseshoes, lamented the passing of the old country store, and recalled the time during the Spanish-American War when the whole town ran out in the streets on hearing the rumor: “There's a Spanish airship over Abilene!”—it turned out to be a box kite advertising a sale of straw hats. Straw hats! Box kites! Airships! Wow, it felt so
good
to think about these things again! The early 1950s has been a time of great national prosperity but also a time of great national malaise: things seem to have gone sour somehow. Uncle Sam is running half the world and scaring the pants off the rest, but it's not as easy or as much fun as people had thought it would be. So maybe Uncle Sam just wanted to get inside all those old memories again, experience for himself once more the dusty heat of a lazy summer day on the prairie, the excitement of hearing the C. W. Parker Circus parade coming down Main Street, the romance of a young happy-go-lucky officer in a Mexican border town on a Saturday night, even the old-fashioned sting of a hickory stick on his fanny. It may be so.

“Behind the dingy walls inside cramped rooms,” his Man of Destiny is declaiming now, “and airless, ah, there are thousands of homes let me say in which parental love and care burn as brightly as, as intensely…” He spies his wife's personal secretary, presses an Eisenhopper down on her desk, pokes his finger in his ear as though absently cleaning it. “As in the homes of, uh, Abilene…” She pretends to be startled when it pops up and Eisenhower roars with delight. Mamie, staggering half-blind out of her bedroom, fumbling with trembling hands for a wake-up fag, asks him what the hell's so funny this morning, what's got into him? He grins, that effortless affable grin that has brought him to these premises (what's got into him? well, for one thing, he woke up a short while ago with the handsomest hard-on in a dog's age, dreaming of his old Irish WAC girlfriend, they were both stark naked, running around in France somewhere in the middle of the war, he wasn't even sure which side of the lines they were on or who was winning or losing, but they were balling the jack something fantastic, out in the open fields, in tents and bivouacs, village streets, in the mud of the trenches, and the only thing spoiling the fun at all was a weird little runny-nose private—he looked foreign or Jewish or something—who kept wandering by looking miserable and threatening to tattle on them…but somehow even this was exciting in its way), and says: “Hey, listen, Mamie, what do you think of this: Hemmed in by masonry and, uh, by masonry walls confined to thin streets, boys, let me assure you, in New York even as in Kansas they have found ways to enjoy themselves without hurt to property or to their elders, the farm boy and the tenement boy are one, ahem, at heart. That's what I'm trying to get at.” He smiles. His wife stares at him for a moment through squinting eyes. Then she grunts, shrugs, and shuffles back into her bedroom. “I should say, or remind you,” he calls after her, “that does not mean that we can forget about the unforgenate, uh, FORTCH-inut circumstances growing up—which many young per—people grow up in trusting that good will! Ah, will flower out of evil! At least that is my opinion!” He has meanwhile pressed down another Eisenhopper, having glimpsed his own secretary coming in the door behind him: the hopper leaps with a loud BO-I-I-ING!, the secretary squeals, Ike's laughter booms.

The President's assistant, Sherman (The Abominable No-Man) Adams, is in the Oval Office laying out the President's agenda for the day, which includes a Cabinet meeting, a therapy session with the stricken Bob Taft, and a possible address to the nation after the Supreme Court meets at noon. Adams, hearing all the shrieking and laughter and seeing the President promenading out on Harry's Balcony in his pee jays, wonders if, by coincidence, Eisenhower woke up this morning in the same state of oddly disturbing excitement that he'd experienced himself. It's impossible, of course, for Sherm Adams to know, but were a poll to be taken, he would discover that not only he and the President, but also most of Congress, the Supreme Court, lesser courts and commissions, the Fourth Estate, Cecil B. De Mille and Cardinal Spellman, the Holy Six, the Vice President sacked out on his living-room couch, and the entire Cabinet—even old Ezra Taft Benson of the Council of Twelve Apostles—have all awakened this morning from the foment of strange gamy dreams with prodigious erections and enflamed crevices. Some, like Irving Saypol, have wisecracked about it. Others, like Foster Dulles, have felt furtive and guilty. It has made Joe McCarthy boisterously reckless, Felix Frankfurter confused, the Boy Judge grumpy, Emily Post gay. Edgar Hoover has taken a cold bath. But none, curiously enough, has used his or her aroused sexuality on a mate, it's as though, somehow, that's not what it was all about, and all are left in a state of suspended agitation, feeling itchy and faintly irreverent, giddy and bemused yet unsatisfied, somehow detached and isolated, but gregarious at the same time, and with an unwonted appetite for risk and profligacy. Which makes them nervous. Hoo-eee! have to take it easy today or things could go haywire. Few, however, can put their finger on what it is that's disquieting them. One who has no such difficulty is the Sing Sing Executioner Joseph Francel. Brushing his teeth in his bathroom in Cairo, New York, Joe winces at himself in the mirror (his is frankly hurting him) and says: “Hmf. (
Spit.
) Better get down to Times Square this morning.”

Times Square, the Crossroads of the World: it is said that half the people on Forty-second and Broadway at any given moment are from out of town—and the other half are Armenians. Shabby by day, luminescent by night, it is the most paradoxical place in all America, and thus the holiest. Historians have written that everything that happens in the Western World originates in Times Square and—to judge by the souvenir shops, auction galleries, gutter debris, and panhandlers—dies here as well. The Heart and Cock of the Country, it is called. Sin City U.S.A. The Entertainment Capital of America. The United States is the first electric nation of the world, and this is its luminous navel. The Diamond Stickpin in New York's Shirtfront. The Brightest Ten Blocks in the World. Here pilgrims come to kiss the holy stones, the despised second sons of the world to seek their fortunes, mystics to walk the Great White Way.

There is an ancient tradition for this. Nomadic tribes crisscrossed the island for centuries, and transience is the profoundest element in the American Spirit. Broadway itself, as legend has it, is an old Indian trail—certainly this would explain its erratic polestar course down through the island. It's said the last to use it were the Mana-hatta tribe, who departed by it after nicking gullible old Peter Minuit, first of the tourist yokels, for twenty-four dollars. Many Italians have come here, more than there are Italians in Italy, but the first was a navigator named Verrazano, who claimed the island for the French. Next came an Englishman named Henry Hudson on behalf of the Dutch, who named it Niew Nederland and commenced to settle it. The English wrested it from the Dutch in the name of the Duke of York, then lost it to their rebellious colonials a century later (even then, the inhabitants of Medcef Eden's meadows, eventually to become Times Square, stayed out of it, played both sides, and raked what profit off the Revolution they could). By the time it had become the Capital of the United States of America and seen in its streets the Incarnation of General George Washington as Superchief I, there were more than thirty thousand people, heterochthonous the lot of them, passing through the borough's precincts, and half that many again in nearby Breuckelen, Bronck's Land, Queens, and Staaten Eylandt.

Now, a little over a century and a half later, there are seven and a half million people living in 116 villages around Times Square, these in turn surrounded by another 574 suburban communities of millions more, and half of them are foreign-born or one or more of their parents were. The huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse, getting processed for destiny now in Uncle Sam's melting pot. Lithuanians, Thais, Persians, Jamaicans: this is the place of their initiation into Americanism, the Great White Way. The heaviest migrations come west from Italy and Russia, but there are thousands upon thousands of Germans and Czechs, too, and Irish, Austrians, Hungarians, English, and Welsh. And it is these, the tired, poor, and tempest-tost, more American, as they say, than the Americans, who each year play host to the summer inswarm of country boobs, come east to Mecca like flies drawn to a pig's ass.

From planes, cars, trains, ships, and buses, they debouch upon the city in a breathless rush and scatter, squealing in awe and umbrage, clicking cameras, streaming through the narrow streets in their patterned sport-shirts and J. C. Penney dresses like blind and anxious ants, hot on the trail of the unknown. There are bright clusters of them at Rockefeller Plaza, Greenwich Village, Fifth Avenue, crawling all over each other, going where the others go, seeing what the others see. The Battery. The United Nations. The Waldorf-Astoria. Scurrying about, chasing temptations, ogling heights, asking directions, bumping into each other, dropping parcels, taking bus tours, panicking at intersections, getting lost. Some find themselves on the subway while looking for the men's room. Some try to leap off the Empire State Building or photograph the burlesque shows, others get off at the wrong stop on the Third Avenue El and miss everything. They consume staggering quantities of egg rolls, shish kebab, knishes, French doughnuts, Hungarian goulash, oyster stew, and pizza pie, lick millions of postage stamps, trample hotel carpets to shreds, and wrinkle, stain, and burn holes in enough sheets to tent the nation. They get aroused by streetwalkers, maligned by cab-drivers, lectured in Union Square, sunburned at Coney Island, and raped in Central Park.

But wherever they go, sooner or later they will come to Times Square. Today, of course, this is required of them, even the locals will be here tonight, but even without the public electrocutions, they would gather here. Partly because of the sex: this is the home of the G-string, the cut-rate hustler, the dirty book and naughty record, the bedroom comedy and cheap condom, and the American tourist is well-known—and far beyond his own shores—as the horniest creature this side of the Bronx Zoo. Whatever he needs, he can find here, from an orchestra view of famous movie stars onstage in their skivvies to a quick blow job in a subway John, but this is not in the main why he is drawn here. For if sex is dirty, it is also, at its dirtiest, cleansing; if it defiles, it also sanctifies: the principal reason for the traffic into Times Square—this place of feasts, spectacle, and magic—is that it is the ritual center of the Western World.

Is this really the ground the storied ancestors trod? Is this the actual place where Peter Minuit invented the American Way of Life with his twenty-four dollars? Is this hole, now a subway entrance, really the one from which Uncle Sam sprang in all his glory—full-grown, costumed, and goateed—from the belly of Mother Earth? Who knows? It hardly matters. Tradition has hallowed it and investment has certified it. The nation's dramas are enacted here, its truths tested and broadcast, its elections verified, its material virtues publicized—who has not stood in awe before the famous Wrigley chewing-gum sign, the giant smoke rings and waterfalls, the tipped whiskey bottle that never empties? In Saint Augustine's words:
et inhorresco, et inardesco!
It is here where one might have slept with the Yankee Doodle Boy, George M. Cohan, in the Knickerbocker Hotel, got soused on the New Amsterdam Roof with Florenz Ziegfeld, kissed the hand of Sarah Bernhardt, and gone to confession after with Father Duffy, the Fighting Chaplain, at the Holy Cross Church on Forty-second Street—and even today one can still break bread with Milton Berle and Phil Silvers at Lindy's on Tin Pan Alley, sneak a smoke with Rosalind Russell behind the Winter Garden. This is the site of the world's largest New Year's Eve party, where hundreds of thousands gather to watch the ball drop on the Times Tower, exercising its perennial charm against death and entropy. The oracle that “he who circles Times Square will end by falling inside” only inspires greater feelings of awe and desire in the people: “Far from fleeing, we draw nearer…!” The American Showcase, Playland U.S.A., the Electrical Street of Dreams—it was inevitable that Uncle Sam should choose it as the place to burn the atom spies.