The Go-Go Years (28 page)

Faison found a pervasive mood of disappointment. The clerks would put up with unlovely and overcrowded working quarters, and even with overwork; such things they could understand and accept. What they could not understand or accept was the sense of not, after all, being where the important things were happening—the sense of being segregated out of sight, brushed under the rug; of never seeing, except indirectly through the ever-mounting work load, the excitement of the floor and the front office in the throes of a memorable and historic bull market. Sometimes, after the markets had closed for the afternoon, floor clerks would come into the back office to help straighten out mismatches—or merely to bask in adulation. These emissaries from the exciting world “outside” would be hungrily greeted by the back-office gnomes as people to be envied and admired, as deities descending to mingle briefly with the groundlings.

Meanwhile the back-office supervisors seem to have had no idea that it was a new ball game, and went on calling “safe” and “out” in the old way. They could not understand why their charges did not feel company loyalty or want to compete for advancement. Nor could they understand why the clerks felt an absolute right to joke and talk while working, or why measured praise for work well done was received with cynicism. Faison told later of a teletype man who was praised by his supervisor
for his fast and efficient work on the previous day. “That and a token will get me home on the subway,” the teletypist retorted and turned back to his work. When the supervisor had left, the teletypist turned to Faison, who was working next to him, and said, “Some day I'm going to give him an honest answer. The reason my figures were good was that we were talking the whole day. If you do nothing but this dum-dum job all day you make mistakes out of … out of … well, I don't know out of what, but you make mistakes.”

And the reverse was true; the loafers, the inevitable gold-bricks and time-servers, played scrupulously by the old rules of the supervisors, and got much of the credit. “Don't talk,” they advised each other and new recruits, “look busy, and no one will bug you.” Thus back offices became at times the image of a headquarters scene in some satiric movie about the old, preatomic army. Again as in the army, underlings' attempts to solve problems beyond their stated responsibility were greeted with indifference or hostility. Anyone who tried to find a better way of doing things was quickly labelled a wise guy. Soon would come the warning, friendly but unmistakable, from his supervisor: “Trying to put me out of a job?” Indeed, according to Faison's report there seem at times to have been positive inducements to make mistakes, which might be a way of attracting attention—even favorable attention if one played it right. Faison remembers Jim, a clerk who made a mistake and whose supervisor later came up and said, “I caught this and it's been corrected, but for God's sake, watch it next time.” Jim, following the grapevine wisdom of the back room, acted obedient and penitent; the supervisor grew expansive. It was a small thing, he allowed graciously, a mistake anyone could have made; it surely would not happen again; Jim was a good fellow. The supervisor preened, his self-esteem doubly raised—once because he had caught the error and again because now he was being so magnanimous about it. When the supervisor moved on, Jim's colleagues were quick to close ranks with him, commenting sarcastically on the supervisor and his lordly manner: “Big deal— the big noise from Nyack.” And Jim, warmed by appreciation,
smiled and said, “At least he knows now I'm alive.” So everyone involved felt better than he had before—everyone, that is, but the all unknowing owner of the stock certificates that had nearly been lost.

In their frustration and boredom, back-office employees found satisfaction in asserting their individuality through constantly discussed outside hobbies and eccentricities, through acquiring nicknames like Damon Runyon's Broadway characters: Surfin' Sally, Harry the Handicapper, Poolroom Marty. “I have borrowed a word from the hippies, and call these interests ‘things,'” Faison wrote. “When the subject came up for discussion, the final word belonged to the clerk who had this or that as his ‘thing.' The ‘thing' was more important than the job, the office, the company. It got the possessor status.… The clerk who attacked a ‘thing' made an instant enemy. If he wanted to stay inside the gang, he made amends and recognized his colleague's ‘thing' at the earliest possible opportunity. But what does this tell us of his job, if his major commitment is to some ‘thing'?”

The back office was an old story, then, told before by Dickens and Charles Chaplin, among others; a story of “young people risking what are to them the golden years,” as Faison put it, and getting their return chiefly in frustration. But the old story now had an entirely new twist. Its characters were different. The young people this time were the new breed of human beings born since World War II: born, that is, as no one had ever been born before, not knowing a world without television, or jet travel, or automation, or nuclear weaponry; and knowing only by hearsay, if at all, of a world with the shared standards, conventions, and assumptions that had been undermined and finally destroyed by too-rapid technological change. Margaret Mead suggested how profoundly different were the postwar young from anyone who had come before when she wrote, “Even very recently the elders could say, ‘You know, I have been young and you never have been old.' But today's young people can reply, ‘you never have been young in the world I have been young in, and you never can be.'” This special self-confidence,
this belief in having an understanding of the climate of the modern world that their elders could never share, was characteristic of the back-office people. As well expect them to feel loyalty to the company, or be sincerely pious about small errors in accounts, as ask a modern scientist to devote his life to alchemy.

6

Lunch time in 1968 Wall Street: the clerks, typists, and certificate-sorters of the back office pour out for an hour into the gray, mostly sunless canyon bottoms of the area, to eat sandwiches or exchange gossip or just sit and unwind, on the Subtreasury steps or in Chase Manhattan Plaza or in Trinity churchyard.

An extraordinary picture of that summer in those streets has been given by a man who prefers to be known simply as Blackie. He is a smallish man from Staten Island, a householder with a wife and children, who wears black-rimmed spectacles and has an alert, nervous manner. In 1968 he was thirty-six years old, and was a plainclothes detective of the New York Police Department.

Since 1962 Blackie had been an undercover man for the narcotics squad. His assignment was simple and straightforward: posing as an addict, to buy narcotics from sellers on the streets of the city, under observation by fellow members of his police team; after such outlaw sellers had thus been observed in action and arrested by the members of the team, to go to the precinct station and confirm the identification of the suspects (through one-way glass, to preserve Blackie's cover); to deliver the material he had bought in the street to a police laboratory for analysis to confirm that it was in fact contraband; and, finally, to appear before a county grand jury and give evidence as witness for “the people.” Between 1962 and 1968, Blackie had gone through this monotonous yet hazardous procedure hundreds
of times. At different periods, he had worked in Chelsea, in Harlem, in the West Eighties, in other parts of the city. Once, in 1967, working the Lower East Side, he had been mistaken for a seller by a group of men who wanted to steal from him. Unable to convince them that he had no narcotics, he had been badly beaten—a broken nose and a concussion. Another time he had had a narrow escape from death at the hands of an armed pusher who correctly suspected him of being a policeman; only Blackie's glib tongue had saved him that time. Early in 1968, when his superiors assigned him to work the Wall Street area, he thought he was being given a rest cure in recognition of his years of dangerous duty. He says:

“Narcotics in Wall Street? Some kind of a gag, I thought. Prior to that, they hadn't assigned a single undercover Narc Squad man to work down there. Nobody dreamed there was any action on Wall Street. Oh, once in a while there'd be a complaint from the Stock Exchange that some of the boys were blowing a little pot in the building. But it was considered an isolated thing, and it was believed that the pot had been bought outside the area.

“Well, in the summer of sixty-eight I began working there, along with an arresting team. As always, my colleagues would make themselves scarce while I worked, posing as an addict, trying to score. When we had evidence against somebody, my colleagues would make the arrest and my cover would be preserved. I was the only undercover man in the area. I thought it was a waste of time, but, what the hell, I'd enjoy myself. I used to eat lunch every day on the Subtreasury steps. It was a pleasure. I'd bring a big hero sandwich and sit there, looking around at the boys and girls. I talked to them. I got myself known—as Blackie. In this game, you wear a costume appropriate to the neighborhood. In a Puerto Rican neighborhood, Puerto Rican clothes. In Harlem, clothes appropriate to Harlem. In Wall Street I wore bellbottoms, a neat shirt, maybe even a jacket—like a securities runner, or a clerk. I'd carry a manila envelope. I'd sit down there on the steps and smoke a cigarette, and look around. It wasn't long before I realized how wrong I'd been
about the area. It was wild. It was like nothing I'd ever seen. Kids were just sitting there and smoking pot openly, as if they were smoking Chesterfields. I couldn't get over it, at first. I could sit there and look around and say, he's smoking pot, and so is he, and he, and she. All around me. They were so naïve, it was as if they were living in a dream world. Well, I wasn't out to arrest pot smokers—only sellers. But that was no problem. The kids hadn't bought the stuff outside the area. There were sellers right there—plenty of them. They'd get up behind the pillars at the top of the steps, and the kids would go up there to deal.

“We busted some of the sellers. It was our job. But that was only pot. Pot you can survive; I've never in all my experience seen anybody badly hurt by pot alone. What really shocked me was the heroin sold all over the place down there. As an undercover man, I bought it that summer in Chase Manhattan Plaza, in Trinity courtyard, even right on the Subtreasury steps. The sellers were everywhere. It even got so the sellers in other areas got the word that Wall Street at noon was a hot area. So they'd come down there to do two hours' fast business. There was one very popular area for dealing pot or skag or pills. For dealing anything. It was right in Trinity churchyard. Way up in the northeast corner there's a little spire with steps leading up to its base—a memorial to the patriot prisoners in the American Revolution. It can be reached only by a narrow path bounded by heavy privet hedges. Perfect protection—a cop can't approach except along that one path. I went up there and got introduced around—as a user, naturally. I was just Blackie to them. Everybody blew smoke there. You could buy hash. A guy who hung out there sold little balls of hash for a dime—ten dollars. I bought from him, and then we busted him. He was a problem though. He knew the ropes, and we finally had to chase him all the way up to City Hall to arrest him.

“I remember some of the other Wall Street pushers from that summer. They were almost local characters. There was one real slick dude, Slick I'll call him, who always wore a porkpie hat and a trim mustache. He looked like the average office
worker. He had one of the best bags in Wall Street—topnotch stuff, I mean, or at least that was his reputation. There was another guy who wore sneakers and green pants—Rudy. He stuck out like a sore thumb down there. He was easy. I bought from him twice, and we busted him. Two weeks later, he'd made bail and was out there again—‘Want to score, Blackie?' He still had no idea I was a cop. Naturally, I busted him again. Then there were two guys everybody called the Gold Dust Twins, one sold pot and the other heroin. They'd roam all over the area together, up and down Wall, through William down to Hanover Square, back to Trinity, everywhere. They were very square. When I went up to them and said I wanted to score, they'd bring everything out, like it was a candy store—‘Pick whatever you want, Blackie.' No experienced seller does that. We busted them. The sellers in the area weren't all addicts, like the sellers in Harlem. Some of them were just businessmen making a buck. Rudy might have been skin-popping, but nothing more. Slick definitely wasn't strung out on anything. On the other hand, some of the office workers I saw were really strung out, so bad they couldn't sit down at their adding machines without getting straight first.

“What disturbed me most was seeing young office girls on pills—Tuinal, Seconal, Blue Angels. They didn't look exactly like average office girls. Not exactly. They looked
almost
like average office girls. They were just a little more dishevelled, and they'd be scratching at themselves—using pills makes you do that. Once, I saw some of them using pills right in the foyer of Trinity Church. I went to the minister and asked for permission to stay there, with my team, during the noonday service. He said no, he threw us out. Maybe he was right.

“There was a guy on crutches selling heroin in the Street. Can you imagine it—a skag dealer on crutches? I tailed him, and lost him. I actually did. It was incredible. It was at noon and the streets were crowded, and somehow he ducked into the mass of humanity and got lost. It's been a classic joke in our office ever since, the only cop who ever lost a man on crutches in a chase. And I recall another guy I lost. He had a big black attaché case,
which he'd whip out and offer huge bags of smoke. When he offered them to me I was caught short. I didn't have enough money on me to pay for one of his bags, so I lost him.

“The users, the clerks and office workers, were all naïve. I can hardly believe it, looking back. They weren't people who were conditioned to the police—they acted as if it was a carnival or something. Mostly the users, even the heroin users, weren't strung-out hardcore junkies. I'd say many of them came from middle-class families. Maybe it's different now, I don't know—I don't work there any more. One thing I do know. Your average Wall Street security guard who stands around with his finger in his ear, in 1968 he didn't believe what he saw. He shut his eyes to what was in front of him. He just didn't believe it, and neither did I, until I came and worked there and found out.”