The Purple Decades (11 page)

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Authors: Tom Wolfe

BOOK: The Purple Decades
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Eyes averted, happy burghers. On Monday the ads start appearing—for Ford, for Plymouth, for Dodge—announcing that we gave it to you, speed such as you never saw. There it was! At Darlington, Daytona, Atlanta—and not merely in the Southern papers but in the albino pages of the suburban women's magazines, such as
The New Yorker,
in color—the Ford winners, such as Fireball Roberts, grinning with a cigar in his mouth in
The New Yorker
magazine. And somewhere, some Monday morning, Jim Pascal of High Point, Ned Jarrett of Boykin, Cale Yarborough of Timmonsville and Curtis Crider from Charlotte, Bobby Isaac of Catawba, E. J. Trivette of Deep Gap, Richard Petty of Randleman, Tiny Lund of Cross, South Carolina; Stick Elliott of Shelby—and from out of Ingle Hollow—
And all the while, standing by in full Shy, in alumicron suits—there is Detroit, hardly able to believe itself what it has discovered, a breed of good old boys from the fastnesses of the Appalachian hills and flats—a handful from this rare breed—who have given Detroit … speed … and the industry can present it to a whole generation as … yours. And the Detroit P.R. men themselves come to the tracks like folk worshipers and the millions go giddy with the thrill of speed. Only Junior Johnson goes about it as if it were … the usual. Junior goes on down to Atlanta for the Dixie 400 and drops by the Federal penitentiary
to see his Daddy. His Daddy is in on his fifth illegal distillery conviction; in the whiskey business that's just part of it; an able craftsman, an able businessman, and the law kept hounding him, that was all. So Junior drops by and then goes on out to the track and gets in his new Ford and sets the qualifying speed record for Atlanta Dixie 400, 146.301 m.p.h.; later on he tools on back up the road to Ingle Hollow to tend to the automatic chicken houses and the road-grading operation. Yes.
Yet how can you tell that to … anybody … out on the bottom of that bowl as the motor thunder begins to lift up through him like a sigh and his eyeballs glaze over and his hands reach up and there, riding the rim of the bowl, soaring over the ridges, is Junior's yellow Ford … which is his white Chevrolet … which is a White Ghost, forever rousing the good old boys … hard-charging! . . up with the automobile into their America, and the hell with arteriosclerotic old boys trying to hold onto the whole pot with arms of cotton seersucker. Junior!
“I got this supervisor where I work—these middle-age people, man, they're like children. All they think about is sex and dope. He's always coming around with this little grin on his face, talking about amyl nitrite and PBD. I mean, that's what you do in the fuckin' ninth or tenth grade, man.”
“H
ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!”
O, dear, sweet Harry, with your French gangster-movie bangs, your Ski Shop turtleneck sweater and your Army-Navy Store blue denim shirt over it, with your Bloomsbury corduroy pants you saw in the
Manchester Guardian
airmail edition and sent away for and your sly intellectual pigeon-toed libido roaming in Greenwich Village—that siren call really for you?
“Hai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-aireeeeeeeeee!”
Obviously Harry thinks so. There, in the dusk, on the south side of Greenwich Avenue, near Nut Heaven, which is the intersection of Greenwich Avenue, Sixth Avenue, Eighth Street and Christopher Street, also known as Village Square, Harry stops and looks up at the great umber tower at 10 Greenwich Avenue. He can see windows but he can't see through them. He gives a shy wave and thereby becomes the eighth man in half an hour to get conned by The Voices.
Half of them, like Harry, look like the sort of kids who graduated in 1961 from Haverford, Hamilton or some other college of the genre known as Threadneedle Ivy and went to live in New York City. Here they participate in discussions denouncing our IBM civilization, the existing narcotics laws, tailfins and suburban housing developments, and announce to girls that they are Searching. Frankly, they are all lonesome and hung up on the subject of girls in New York. They all have a vision of how one day they are going to walk into some place, usually a second-hand bookstore on Bleecker Street west of Sixth Avenue, and there is going to be a girl in there with pre-Raphaelite
hair, black leotards and a lambskin coat. Their eyes will meet, their minds will meet—you know, Searching, IBM civilization and all that, and then———
“Hai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-reeeeeeeee!”
All of a sudden old Harry is waving away from down there on Greenwich Avenue, out front of the Casual-Aire shop and yelling back: “Hey! who is it?”
“Hey, Harry!” the girl yells.
“Hey, Harry!” another girl yells.
“Hey, Harry!” still another girl yells.
Four girls, five girls, six girls yell, “Hey, Harry!”
Then one of them yells, “Hai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-aireeeee! Have you got a——————for me?”
Then another one yells, “Hey, Harry, come on up and————————————!”
Harry looks like a poleaxed lamb in that wobbly moment just before the cerebral cortex shuts off for good. Old Harry has been searching all right, and he has had some lubricous thoughts about what would happen after his and Dream Girl's eyes and mind met, but this laying it on the line like that, right out in the middle of Nut Heaven—it was too
gamey
or something.
So Harry walks away, west on Greenwich Avenue, with the cellblock horselaughs following him, and by now, of course, he knows he has been had.
So the girls take up new names to see if anybody will bite:
“John-n-n-n-n-n-n-ny!”
“Hey, Bil-l-l-l-l-l-l!”
“Frankie!”
“Hi, Honey!”
“Sammy!”
“Max!”
For some reason, a name like Max breaks everybody up, and all the girls start the cellblock horselaugh even before they find out if there is anybody down there named Max who is going to look up with the old yearning gawk.
The girls, these Sirens, these Voices, are all up in the cellblocks of the Women's House of Detention, 10 Greenwich Avenue, overlooking Village Square, and, well, what the———, as the girls like to say, these yelling games are something to do. The percentages are in their favor. There are thousands of kids trooping through the intersection all the time, and eventually a girl is going to get somebody named Harry, Johnny, Bill, Frankie, Sammy or, affectionately, Honey.
The Women's House of Detention is, no doubt, a “hellhole,” as even the Corrections Department people speak of it every time they ask for
an appropriation to build a bigger one. It is a mess: 600 women in a space meant for 400. Teen-age girls, first offenders, some of them merely awaiting trial, are heaped in with “institutionalized” old puggies who feel like bigger shots inside than out. The place is filthy. It is so bad that a convicted prostitute, narcotics user and peddler, Kim Parker, combining, at age 35, the sins that land 80 per cent of the girls inside 10 Greenwich Avenue, pleaded guilty to a felony rather than a misdemeanor last October. The felony sentence might be five years at the state prison farm, which to her was a happier prospect than one year in the Women's House of Detention.
Yet there is probably not another large prison in the country that is in such intimate contact with the outside world. The building, twelve stories high, was built in 1932 as a monument to Modern Penology. The idea was to make it look not like a jail at all but like a new apartment building. There are copper facings with 1930's modern arch designs on them between the floors. In the place of bars there are windows with a heavy grillwork holding minute square panes. The panes are clouded, like cataracts. Actually, the effect is more like that of the power plant at Yale University, which was designed to resemble a Gothic cathedral, but, in any case, it does not look like a jail.
So here is a jail that looks like a Yale power plant with cataracts standing out in the middle of a community that has become a paradise for kids in New York, Greenwich Village. The girls in the House of Detention can stand up on the toilet bowl or something and look out the couple of hinged window panes they have out onto all that Life among the free kids. Right down there, off the intersection, are all the signs, Trude Heller's, the twist and bossa nova place, Burger Village, Hamburger Train, Luigi's, Lamanna Liquors, Foam Rubber City, the Captain's Table, Nedick's and the swingingest Rexall drug store in New York City. Skipping across Sixth Avenue and screaming every time the lights change are all the bouffant bohemians, with bouffants up top and stretch pants and elf shoes down below, and live guys in Slim Jims and Desert boots, and aging bohemians in Avenger boots and matching plaid poncho and slacks sets, and Modern Churchmen, painted lulus, A-trainers and twenty-eight-year-old winos who say, “All right, you don't have a quarter, but if you had a quarter would you give it to me?”
Also junkies. The same night they conned Harry—“Hey! Who is it?”—the girls could see a kid known as Fester stumbling out of the Rexall wringing one hand and holding his stomach with the other. For a while Fester had folded his sweater up into a square and knelt down in the entrance to the Rexall with his head on the sweater, moaning. Everybody just stepped around him. But then Fester jumped up and ran to the cigarette counter and with a stifled shriek clouted a total stranger in the back of the neck with his open palm. The guy just
wheeled around, still holding onto his Marlboros, shocked, and Fester started wringing his hand, saying in his elfy voice, “My hand stings!” and then stumbled out, holding his gut with the other. Fester is a junky; a lot of the girls know him. There was a time when a girl could hoist a fix up into the House of Detention on a “fishing line” with the help of a guy like Fester.
Well, Fester is in bad shape, but there he is, at least, out there on the loose in Greenwich Village, where everybody goes skipping and screaming across Sixth Avenue. The girls have to yell to all that life down there. The girls in one cellblock will all start yelling down there until the girl who is the lookout gives the warning signal, sometimes “Dum-da-dum-dum” from the old Jack Webb TV show, meaning that the turnkeys are coming. The girls will even yell to somebody they have just been talking to in the visitors room on the first floor on visiting night. It is one thing to talk to somebody inside the jail. It is a better thing to know you can still talk to them when they are back out there on the street in the middle of things.
“Willie!”
It is not long after Harry has disappeared west on Greenwich Avenue, and Willie has just come out of the front door at 10 Greenwich Avenue after visiting a girl whose name one never learns. One only hears her shrieking across Greenwich Avenue from somewhere up there in the great cataracted building.
“Willie! Are you gonna sell the pants!”
There are trucks bouncing along Greenwich Avenue and Sixth Avenue and cutting across into Greenwich from Ninth Street, but she can make herself heard. Willie, on the other hand, is the last of the great shoe buyers. He has on a pair of tan triple-A's that won't quit. He is not ready for yelling across Greenwich Avenue up at the Women's House of Detention. He gives a look at all the people walking his way past Tucker's Cut Rate Florist, Hamburger Train and the Village Bake Shop.
“Are you, Willie!”
Willie tries. “I don't know where they are, I told yuh!”
“What!”
Willie puts a little lung into it this time. “I told yuh! I don't know where they are!”
“You know where they are, Willie! You gonna sell 'em or not?”
Willie wants to get out of there. He doesn't want to be yelling across Greenwich Avenue to some unseen gal in the Women's House of Detention about selling a pair of pants. So he gives the first guy who comes by a weak, smiley, conspiratorial look, as if to say, Women! But the guy just stares at him and walks slow, so he can hear more. This makes Willie mad, and so he gives the next few people the death
ray look—What you looking at!—which starts his adrenaline flowing, which in turn puts him in fuller, better voice.
“Aw, I don't know where the pants are! What you bother with the pants for!”
“You gonna sell 'em, Willie!”
“All right!”
“‘All right!'
” she yells it very sarcastically. “All right, Willie, all right, you do what you want!”
“Aw, come on, honey!”
Willie wishes he hadn't yelled that. Now it seems like about a thousand nuts are scuttling through Nut Heaven laughing at him and sidling looks at him standing in his tan triple-A's yelling at a blank building.
“Naw, you do me like you did Maureen! Go on!”
“Listen—”
“Naw, you so fine, Willie!”
There is a lot of laughing from the cellblocks after that. Willie wants to vanish. All these damned faces around here gawking at him.
“All right!” Willie yells.
“You mean it!” she yells from somewhere up there. “You gonna sell the pants!”
“I told yuh!” Willie yells, right over the garbage trucks, the Vespas, the Volkswagens, the people, over the whole lumbering, flatulent mess.
“And then you coming back!”
“All right!”
“When!”
“Soon's I sell 'em!”
“They in the closet, Willie!”
“All right!” Willie yells, and then he turns and walks fast down Christopher Street.
“Willie!” she yells. “Goodbye!”
There is a kid down there wearing a big black Borsalino hat and a George Raft-style 1930's double-breasted black overcoat who has got to find out what it is all about. He runs after Willie and just asks him, straight out, and Willie blows up and suggests by means of a homey colloquialism how he can dispose of the whole subject, and selling the pants remains a private affair.
And inside the Women's House of Detention, the girls are gathering spirit. It is eventide in a holiday season. On the Sixth Avenue side, about four girls begin the old song, and then, gradually, more join in:
I'm dreaming of a white Christmas!
Just like the ones I used to know!
Where the treetops glisten!
And children listen!
To hear sleigh bells in the snow …
How touching are these words as they drift over Sixth Avenue from the cataracts of the Women's House of Detention! Villagers, laden with bundles, stop over there in front of the Kaiser clothing store and look up and listen, silently.
… with every Christmas card I write!
By now maybe twenty or thirty people have stopped on the avenue in a bunch, and they all have their heads cocked, rheumy eyes turned up in the attitude that says, I am already deeply moved and ready for more.
… may your days be mer-reeee and bright! …
How the sound rises! Every girl on the east side of the Women's House of Detention, it seems like, has joined in and taken a gulletful of air for the final line, which comes out:
… And may all your Christ-mases be bla-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-ack!
Only some of the girls don't even say black, they use adjectives such as——,———,———and———. Others have already given themselves up wholly to cellblock horselaughs, and soon they all have, and now the horselaughs come shrieking out across old Sixth Avenue to where all the obedient epopts of old-sampler sentiment are bunched in front of Kaiser's. That was a good hit! Twenty or thirty of them, free squares of New York, bunched together and all conned! gulled! faked out! put on! had! by The Voices of Village Square.

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