Familiar. Except for the details …those flat details told us that this particular father, who had only recently arrived in New York from the American Midwest, had grown angry when his six-day-old son urinated on him. The man threw the infant to the floor (naturally, the child had to be punished for such effrontery). According to the police, the father then chopped up the infant and threw him to the German shepherd. When the cops arrived, there was nothing left of the boy except the blood on the floor. But even those terrible details weren’t sufficient to cause a loss of faith in an entire city. It was the reaction of New Yorkers that settled a swampy chill in my old bones and confirmed a deepening belief that we were doomed. There was no reaction at all. No angry protests. No masses offered in the churches. No memorials planned. Nothing. As the Russian writer Aleksandr Kuprin once wrote, “Do you understand, gentlemen, that all the horror is in just this: that there is no horror!”
In the barbarized city of New York, there is no horror these days. We no longer seem capable of that basic human emotion, which is why so many of us have begun to lose all hope for a more decent future. The cause of this municipal numbness is simple: We have seen too many atrocities. On the day the story broke about the baby who was fed to the dog, exactly two people mentioned it to me. By the following day, this tale of horror had vanished from the newspapers and from our collective consciousness, with an assist from Saddam Hussein. In the next week, various journalistic generals rallied for war in hysterical defense of the noble democrats of Kuwait, while George Bush was sending troops, tanks, helicopters, airplanes, and crates of thirty-screen sun block to Saudi Arabia, at a cost of billions of dollars, to protect Our Way of Life. It was much easier to locate the world’s beasts in Baghdad than to mourn the brief life of an American child fed to a dog by an American father, in a city that claimed to be the center of American civilization.
In the month before Bush rose to defend Our Way of Life in the wadis of the Arabian desert, five children were shot dead in the streets of New York, and another six were wounded. All were indirect casualties of the drug wars in this brutalized city, where two million illegal guns are brandished by the citizens as symbols of faith in the creed of the National Rifle Association. Each death was noted in the newspapers, of course, and briefly smothered in the wormy sentimentalities of local television news. Each was then almost instantly superseded by a fresh outrage and instantly forgotten.
And of course, there was no horror.
The desperate truth is that millions of New Yorkers have been as emotionally immobilized as anyone who lives too long in the presence of violence and death: emergency-room doctors, soldiers, Mafia hit men. And at the heart of this grand refusal to feel lies something else: They have come to believe that New York itself is dying.
In many ways, I’ve begun to agree. Reluctantly. With a sense of grieving sadness; I’m a New Yorker, after all, born and bred. New York made my life possible. As a son of immigrants, I’ve subscribed to its tough, romantic myths and have spent a half century in thrall to its dazzling and infuriating ways. In the 1970s, when we were afflicted by a great fiscal crisis, there was much talk of doom and collapse; I scoffed then at such drastic predictions. New York, after all, is America’s city, the way that Paris is France’s city, and Tokyo is Japan’s city. It belongs to all Americans. New York couldn’t simply collapse into degradation and anarchy; the country wouldn’t allow it.
But the fiscal crisis was one big crisis and therefore amenable to one big solution. The current crisis is a dearh of a thousand cuts. As in virtually every one of America’s drug-drowned cities, crime is the most obvious problem; but as residents of the largest city, New Yorkers are overwhelmed by the sheer weight of numbers. The steady grinding force of menace is a texture of daily life here now. When Time did its cover story on the collapsing city, some 59 percent of those polled said they would move somewhere else if they could. Nobody in New York was surprised. “I’m sick of looking over my shoulder,” one old friend said to me, explaining that he was moving to the Southwest. “I’ve done it year after year, every year worse than the one before. Just once more, before I get old, I want to walk down a street on a summer night without looking behind me.”
That enervating sense of menace isn’t mere paranoia. New York is more dangerous now than at any time in its history. Last year, there were a record-breaking 1,905 murders in New York (compared with 305 in 1955); in the first six months of 1990, homicides were running 19 percent ahead of last year, without counting the 87 killed in the Happy Land Social Club fire. We are averaging five murders a day. It is no consolation to be told that, per capita, other American cities are even more dangerous. We live here, where the bullets are killing children. Sometimes the mayhem attracts wide public attention: A family of tourists from Utah is attacked in the subway by a pack of kids looking for disco money; one of the tourists is stabbed to death while defending his mother. “They didn’t know the city,” one of my friends said. “They just weren’t streetwise.” But a few days later, in the Bronx, an eighteen-year-old, a son of the city, streetwise and smart, is approached by a panhandler demanding a dollar. The young man refuses. The panhandler jams a knife in his heart and kills him. Headlines, as usual, scream for two days. But there is no horror.
The rich, of course, live well-defended lives. But for millions of others, there is never any relief from the dailiness of menace. Every New Yorker knows one big thing: Nobody is safe. In a recent month, one of my friends was mugged at ten in the morning as he was walking into the building where he works; another was robbed at noon while packing luggage into his car for a summer vacation. Everybody I know has been touched in one way or another. My own mother has been mugged four times; she came out of the last mugging with Parkinson’s disease, which has ruined the final years of her life. Nobody is safe. Nobody.
The increasingly casual mayhem of the street has made all New Yorkers adjust. Older people who can’t afford retirement in Florida or Arizona have become prisoners of their apartments. It doesn’t matter to them that New York is host to such glories as the Metropolitan Museum and the Broadway theater; they can’t risk the journey to visit them because predators wait in subways and alleys or the lobbies of their apartment buildings. On Madison Avenue, shopkeepers keep their doors locked through the day, afraid of roaming gangs of teenagers, opening only for customers they feel can be trusted. Larger establishments are patrolled by platoons of private police. The security business is booming, as New Yorkers buy thousands of locks, metal screens, alarms, attack dogs, bulletproof vests. They go to karate classes. They apply for permission (almost always denied) to legally carry guns. And still nobody feels safe.
The leading cause of job-related deaths in New York is now homicide. The victims are usually shopkeepers or taxi drivers (by mid-August this year, twenty-one taxi drivers had been killed, and cabbies were demanding the right to arm themselves). Every day’s paper brings fresh news of slaughter. A young Bronx district attorney stops near the courthouse to buy some doughnuts and he’s killed in a burst of automatic-weapon fire from a druggie who shot at the wrong group. A guy in Brooklyn is refused entrance to a social club; he comes back with an automatic weapon and shoots ten people. “You don’t have to come from Utah to get killed here,” a young man says to me in Brooklyn. “You just walk out the door and Bang! You’re dead.”
The ghettos are most dangerous of all, as blacks kill other blacks at a rate that would make the Ku Klux Klan envious. Black youths are killing or being killed over sneakers, jackets, over the choice of songs on boom boxes, over women and attitude and casual quarrels. And, of course, over drugs. The old Mob has lost control of the drug business in New York. But the resulting decentralization has led the hardened young entrepreneurs to slaughter one another over the right to sell crack or heroin outside individual bodegas. Now New York must deal with the babies born to crack addicts. They are a peculiar mutation: children who won’t respond in any way to normal human affection. There are tens of thousands of them in the care of the city government now (their mothers dead, in prison, or peddling themselves for more crack on the streets of the city). Thousands of crack babies are born each year; what sort of teenagers will they grow up to be?