Tales of the Out & the Gone Page 2

  Touch down: 6 p.m. Streets clear all the way to the hotel. Motorcade convoy. Five hundred overtime cops. Quick call to Chambers. “Roger? Yeh, how’s it look? Uh-huh. Uh-huh. OK. Yeh. What about the Ray thing, is that set up? The ACLU? Oh yeh? Fuck ’em. I don’t give a shit about their rights, nor those people they got frontin’ for them. Yeh … Ha ha ha … Yeh. OK, check you at noon, huh? OK.”

  Yesterday, ate, worked a usual day. No, that was his day off. He slept most of the day. Called the office, called Roger. Checked all the preparations. Rode by the hotel where the president would speak. A banquet. Goddamn, a Republican banquet. Thousand dollars a plate. Goddamn Republicans raising a quick million in Finland Station. Be here four hours, tops. He’d talked to the president a couple of times. He had called him Tim. “How are ya, Tim? How’s everything in Finland Station? You’re doing quite a job, Tim. Quite a job. Ever think about getting on the team all the way? I mean, leave the jackasses and join the big elephants?”

  “I’m on the team now, Mr. President.” (Couldn’t call him Jer …) “Just a different wing of the old bird.”

  “Wrong wing.” They laughed. Plastic cover somewhere, at a press conference just before a press conference. A group of black leaders. A group of mayors from all over. A lunch. Different salads, white wine. Tim burped, caught it in his hands. Fuckin Ray wrote a story about Tim, “Burping for His People.” Fuck him. I’m the …

  Yesterday. No, the day before. Up early, ran around the lake the right way. Seeing these people going uphill the other way, struggling up them hills. Tim went the right way where it was mostly downgrades. This goddamn Sloane there, coming down the wrong way. The goddamn Checker cab made them get the hell off the road. Tim was running around the lake with two policemen riding in front of him in a big Checker cab, rather than the Cadillac that came with the office. The Cadillac would’ve drawn a little too much fire. This way, a Checker, that’s offbeat and looks a little humble, dig?

  At City Hall, a lot of Muslims got jobs now too. We give them jobs to be cool with everybody. A little here, a little there. “Just fire Sloane’s people wherever you see ’em. Anybody you think is hooked up at all with that Revolutionary Congress, burn ’em! Nowhere, no way!” Tim was screaming at Ethan Montgomery one morning. “These R.C. people are never on time, never there.” Some of them were demonstrating against Tim the same morning in front of City Hall. “Then they want to come in here and get paid. I ain’t going for that. Burn them niggers.”

  S.O. Hares, the first black President of the City Council, meets Tim. Gray sideburns tinted red, slightly. (Could dig it if you checked close.) Burned russet wire sunglasses. Light-brown and dark-brown big checked jacket and pebble texture rust pants. “Hey, your boy is burning the hell outta you, Mr. Mayor.” He laughs. “Half a one of them goddamn poverty programs is out there too. Ha ha ha.” Hares would run next year, the bastard. Next year. He had the Dons to put up the money for him. See, it’s a fight between the different groups. But Tim knew he had it made, ’cause he had the biggest group. Gratitude Insurance controlled the whole state. Every major institution and corporation in the state had to check off with or was controlled or heavily influenced by Gratitude. And they had invested early in Tim.

  “Me and the people at Grat., Laird Conroy and the rest of the folks, we very tight. But you understand, they’re the real controls. What power do I have?” (The rap would change according to who it was.) “The real power is with the economic boys. Laird Conroy is the man.” Up in the white marble tower, with Gratitude spelled out in blue steady lights—the first thing the airplanes see.

  “The Negro that runs with the Republicans can’t get up too tough a head of steam, because Rocky and them know these mostly nigger voters ain’t going for no Republican— black or not. But then you got the Cosa Nostra, with S.O. trying to push their luck. If S.O. looks too good, he’ll get busted straight out for sticky fingers or a morals charge.”

  Tim saw Maureen that early evening and they went to New York right after she got off work, for two Gibsons apiece and some pretzels. He was “working late” again. She was a librarian and a real positive step up from Ruthie. Ruthie cried and swelled up in her yellow bulk. But his wife Madeline was hip to Ruthie, and had been for a few years. Ruthie was on the board of everything and was his assistant campaign manager. She was a good campaigner, and pushed the campaign heavy all the time. Talked to a lot of people, sold a lot of tickets, set up a lot of coffee klatches at people’s houses. Ruthie knew a lot of people. Plus she was especially in charge of “prone candidate orientation,” but had now swelled up to damn near 300 pounds. Big and yellow with flat sticky red lips. She had her boards and titles and a couple of good salaries. What would she need now with Tim? So Tim reasoned, and now slid with Maureen. She woke him up to the Times Book Review’s List of Best Sellers. Jaws. Ragtime. CIA: Coup in America, the true story of John Kennedy’s murder. He got a chance to deal with a couple of pages now and then. Jaws was a better movie than book. So would the rest be. Be better as TV programs.

  He never missed Roger K. Smith or the Channel 13 weekly news review. It’s a heck of a lot of work running a big city. Especially one like Finland Station, with a half-million people—almost 400,000 of them black or Puerto Rican. With a bunch of big mouths floating around on the edge of that, playing like leaders, always stirring some bullshit up.

  Like this president thing. The man’s just coming here to speak, raise some funds for the Republican Party. So we gotta have a whole lot of demonstrations and bullshit like that, just to build one of these people’s names. Tim marched in picket lines. He knew when stuff was on the up and up and when it was BS. This was BS. Why? Because the president wasn’t going to do anything. There was nothing that could be accomplished by demonstrating in front of the hotel where the president was. What’s that gonna do? It ain’t gonna get nobody no jobs. I’ll fix these simple niggers tho, they won’t even see the president. And he won’t see them either—I’ll fix them.

  Tim made this statement in the newspaper, and immediately the ACLU and some other bleeding-hearts called him up to protest, saying that they would sue if he violated the democratic rights of the R.C. By the time that stuff even gets to where somebody will look at it, everything will be got up and gone. Ha.

  By 12:00, the staff meeting began. Reports. The police ready. Five hundred overtime. Cost of $30,000 to the city. “Do the newspapers have that?”

  “They got it, alright, and are blowing it all over. And our friends are at it on the radio. The R.C., your friend Sloane, and the others. Putting down the whole business.”

  “Yeh, but what the hell we gonna do? The president comes—he gotta get security. And the city gotta pay for it. It’s a hell of a thing, him a Republican and this city full of black Democrats.”

  “Most of them not no Democrats, neither,” shot in Augie Bond, the drunk PR man.

  “But what you gonna do?”

  “I ain’t no goddamn Democrat either, Boss. You know that.” (The staff called Tim Boss. He cherished that.) “The bastards at least oughta contribute to the city for the security at a Republican fundraiser. What the hell?”

  “Yeh, they oughta, but what will an oughta buy?” Rachel Mooney now sat in such a way that the talcum she put on her drawers was visible on the hairs of her upper thigh. Tim smiled and caught another burp, stifling this one completely. They finished the meeting. The usual.

  Goodson’s collection: old Italians from the former administration, young whites from the Ivy League who wanted to “help” (at 25 Gs a shot), Tim’s friends in his “Association” serving as the enforcers of what passed for “policy.” These were the only loyalists. Some blacks with high side degrees, mostly from out of town. The young whites and the out-of-town blacks had a quick and consistent turnover. As soon as they got their resumes filled with a year in the jungle counter-insurgency funk, they took off for slicker pastures, wherefrom to sideburn their way into whatever they thought was hip. In the real world, outside
the discotheque-like interiors of the new City Hall. (It wasn’t new, it just means that now there was Bloods inside; a black bureaucratic elite, complete with Pierre Cardin suits, humpback high heels, beards, sideburns, Mercedes Benzes, Porsches, and Lincoln Continentals—it bugged the boss that he couldn’t get one, but he had to give off an image like he wasn’t just high in a hog.)

  The administration functioned by having people come to work in the city. Most of the good city jobs (most of the real jobs in Finland Station) were held by whites from the opulent suburbs—Livingston, Short Hills, Forest Hills, Essex Fells, Madison. In fact, New Jersey had the second highest per capita income in the United States. But in cities like Finland Station, Newark, Jersey City, Camden, and Trenton, where the niggers lived, the people who came in made the dust and ran back to the suburbs, while the urbs went to the outskirts of town and worked in shoestring factories or auto factories, iron works, paintbrush factories, breweries, and toy factories— when they could get gigs. That’s why Tim had to come on not too sparkly. It was bad enough already. Old folks still smiled at him, but some of these loudmouths were beginning to blow their bad breath heavy his way. “Look, I do what I can. What can I do? We just don’t have the money. The federal government sends no more money. We do what we can.”

  But mostly it seemed, especially to the loudmouths including Tim’s ex-friend Ray Sloane, like Stevie Wonder’s tune, “You Haven’t Done Nothin’.” And they kept saying that every time Tim surfaced.

  “Like when those bitches from Redspear Health Insurance were demonstrating, Sloane brings these goddamn women down through the streets to City Hall. Then, when I went out to dedicate the park across the street, he gets on a bullhorn and starts to shout me down, and sics these freaking women on me. I had to get back inside.”

  Somebody was passing around red cigarettes with gold filters. “Boss, you want one?”

  But sometimes it brushed him further than he wanted to go. He was there, on top. He knew presidents, kings, and had been halfway around the world. The State Department sent him to Poland to tell those people how black people are really living, so they wouldn’t believe the propaganda.

  “According to those guys, the Klan’s still taking people out they house! But Jesus, I’ve done something, something any one of these guys would give their left and right nut to do. Me. The Mayor. [Caught it.] And still, you got these jealousass niggers wanting to try to show me up. But it won’t work. They can’t beat me.”

  The time Jerry Lloyd, the preacher and radical councilman, led students down to City Hall to dump garbage that wasn’t picked up in the 3rd Ward, Tim had them busted. He knew them—they’d initially campaigned together in the big push in ’70 that sent old Mayor Bucarillo to prison. But “Lloyd was wrong.” A couple of black cops got busted that day too, trying to protect the women. Cops arresting cops, white and black cops fighting in the street.

  “He was in with that Sloane. That’s why he got beat in the elections too. Trying to tear my ass and got his own ass torn.”

  Also, the AFL-CIO, Teamsters, Democrats, and Republicans backed Lloyd’s opponent, “Rip” Dalton. Sloane said he was one of the original Daltons, and came to the council meetings with a bandana around his face so people would be hip to him. S.O. should wear a mask and an all-black suit and big ten-gallon hat. At least then you’d be clearly hip to who and the others there: two liberal blacks—one a college professor on the slightly trembly side, the other an overweight used-to-be-good-guy back in the Civil Rights days, who passionately wanted to be a councilman, and then one day he was, but he’d by then promised his whole 700- pound behind to Tim for backing him. A blushing prostitute, therefore. And five white folks—three ex-cops, a storekeeper, and the wife of a dead man, who got in on his rep and mostly his name.

  All the contradictory motions of the place, cross-currents in this here “democracy,” where whatever wants to bite you can bite. Its teeth could look like anything; you might even vote for them to bite you. Sloane running it down outside City Hall to the pickets: “Whatever mob wants to bite you. Gratitude owns Tim Fatson. That’s Manufacturers Trust and them. Rockefeller owns Jisholm & Bangel and them. Morgan owns them Kennedy-chasing Bloods. The mafia own people like S.O. Hares and Rip-Off Dalton. One mob or another. These politicians are lieutenants, the big ones and the lackies—the small rip-offs peeing on us around here.”

  Tim listened through the windows. Made himself a cup of tea in front of the big picture windows. The sound boomed in. “That bastard.”

  Ethan squinted down and Augie made a straight face, trying to joke with Tim about it. “That bastard is gonna bite off more than he can chew one day. Somebody’s gonna come runnin’ down here to cry how some of them cops blasted him.”

  Outside: “And what we got here in this town? Niggers in high places, black faces in high places, but the same rats and roaches, the same slums and garbage, the same police whip-pin’ your heads, the same unemployment and junkies in the hallways muggin’ your old lady. What is it? What is it? We strained to elect this nigger mayor, and what we got to show for it? Nothing but a burpin’ black bastard slippin’ his way around the city, sleepin’ with fat ladies.”

  Sloane raved on. Loza laughed, hearing him in the crowd, and noted that the last statement wasn’t politically educational. He thought it seemed unprincipled. Too abrasive, he decided. It was not analytical enough.

  But Sloane raved on: “It is this system of monopoly capitalism that must be destroyed. The private ownership of the means of producing wealth, the land, the factories, the minerals, the mines … These must be controlled publicly and collectively by the masses of people, under the dictatorship of the working class. These black faces ain’t enough. It is a system that oppresses us.”

  “Now the creep is talking like a goddamn commie,” Ethan was saying. “Boy, they gonna carry his ass away from here.”

  There was a line of fifteen policemen on the stairs of City Hall that day as the women from the Redspear sang, with the R.C. people among them urging the singers forward.

  After the staff meeting, Tim inspected the hotel setup again, checked out the marked streets of the president’s route to the hotel. Talked to the newspapers at a press conference. He thought about Maureen and decided to stop by the library. Call from a phone booth—get her to come to a side entrance. But nobody answered. He pulled off, the car being driven by one of the cops, his bodyguard. And turning the corner, he saw Maureen and his wife, Madeline, standing in front of the library, talking. Madeline still worked for a real estate firm in the area, but it wasn’t that close. She wouldn’t give up her job—she said they needed to save all they could to get a house in the North Ward or Orange.

  He was going to ride on by, but Maureen spotted him and looked, and Madeline turned right away. They both looked. It seemed that the contradiction was going to soon become antagonistic. He waved out the car. Slowed. “Hey, what you all into? I’m on my way to the hotel. You want a lift?” Maureen and Madeline had cars.

  “How you doing?” Maureen tried smiling.

  Madeline stared. “The hotel?”

  “No, thank you,” they both said together.

  “See you back at the house then. We ain’t got a lot of time. It’s 3 now—he gets in at 6.”

  The car ran on, down through traffic. Stopping now at the police station, and checking with Chambers again. There was already a loose cordon being thrown around the general area of the hotel. A snow fence had been erected as well. There was to be an area in which no one was allowed but the police and the eaters at the thousand-dollar-a-plate dinner.

  “They say they’re gonna sue, Tim, if we don’t let them demonstrate. We figure we’ll let them demonstrate, but put them in the middle of the park or somewhere, OK?”

  “Yeh, what the hell. As long as they can’t make no trouble.” Really, he meant as long as they can’t get in the way of his future motion up the ladder to Colored Retainer Heaven. If that goddamn McGovern had won, he’d have alrea
dy made it. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. A cabinet member. That was the spot. Get cut in on some nice deals that way too, rather than the greasy stuff you had to pick up on the lower level. And that was even a little dangerous now, in these recent post-Watergate years. The take is allowed—everybody there does it. Tim let it roll through his mind. Everybody did that. Nixon did it. But the stuff upstairs is worth the risk. Not this greasy stuff where you got to be connected up with people like Wurlitzer Willie and the rest of the crew. So don’t get in the way of the big trip. The big rip.

  Sirens turned his head. They were normal for Finland Station every other minute. Sirens howling. It brought to mind the motorcade they would bring the president in with. There was talk all through the halls. And at every stop, people wanted to know and tell and speculate and myth-make.

  He spotted Foster Tarasso, the congressman from the Dent District, coming out of the Eldridge Club with his entourage. The club was near his district office. Tarasso was in town for the dinner—all his trips to his district were strictly and only political. Washington was Tarasso’s real home. He was the silver-haired orator symbolizing the Italians’ rise to semi-respectability in America, when they could keep the frig-gin’ Mafia headlines out of the newspapers and squash those reruns of The Untouchables. They exchanged oblique compliments. Tarasso thought Tim wanted his spot. Tim thought Tarasso wanted the HUD spot. Now that Tim had become an official Democrat, the elections in the Finland Station municipal government were nonpartisan. Tarasso felt a little safer, but still had to watch his back. Tim had to watch his front. They discussed the dinner and the demonstration. The fact of the assassination attempts. The tight security. The newspapers bombing Tim on the $30,000 being spent to protect the president. Tarasso had a young girl, his legislative assistant, in the car. She waved and kept talking to the other couple sitting in there. Tarasso’s law partner or his companion, another legislative assistant, or secretary, or reporter, or what have you. Tim wondered what they looked like naked.