The current violence in American cities has a number of obvious components: poverty, drugs, guns, and race. They can’t be easily separated. The poverty caused by the collapse of the urban manufacturing base has been compounded by racism and a failed welfare system. Thousands of young men and women in the ghettos used drugs to obliterate or enhance reality and then some decided to make big scores in the drug trade itself. Why not? Cocaine was fashionable among many people who were not from ghettos: musicians, movie stars, Wall Street brokers. Then some evil genius invented crack, and suddenly this drug of the elite was available to the poor. It was cheap; it could be snorted instead of injected, thus eliminating the fear of AIDS; it was almost instantly addictive. The market boomed.
The shift from heroin to cocaine in the 1970s coincided with the decline of the old American Mob, forged during Prohibition. The crude second-generation hoods couldn’t make contact with the Cubans and Colombians who were running the wholesale trade in Medellin, Cali, and Miami. Their own parochialism and racism kept them out of the black and Latino ghettos. The wholesalers built condominiums and office buildings in Miami; the retailers battled over street corners. Decentralization of the drug trade led to endless turf wars and these were made even bloodier by the easy availability of high-powered automatic weapons. This too was endorsed by higher authority; very few politicians would dare to oppose the Great American Gun Cult and its Holy See, the National Rifle Association. They all endorsed the notion, unique in the industrialized world, that every real American had the right to carry a gun and protect himself.
I’ve included here only a few of the many pieces I wrote on these subjects during this desperate period. There were too many accounts of the deaths of innocent bystanders, of young men shot down for nothing, and widows and mothers and children assembling for funerals. The repetition was numbing. The chosen pieces don’t pretend to tell the whole story of what happened to New York, Miami, and other cities; although the use of crack cocaine is declining, the story has not ended. These are situation reports, and though the situation has shifted, its details have altered, its players have been replaced, the basic situation remains. Today, more than a million men are jammed into American prisons (including John Gotti). Thousands of others are in graveyards. The drugs keep coming. So do the guns.
NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND
The slow and tedious processes of justice brought Bernhard Hugo Goetz last week to a fifth-floor courtroom at 111 Centre Street and there, at least, the poor man was safe. Out in the great scary city, the demons of his imagination roamed freely; across the street, many of them were locked away in the cages of The Tombs. But here at the defense table, flanked by his lawyers, protected by a half-dozen armed court officers, the room itself separated by metal detectors from the anarchy of the city, Goetz looked almost serene.
By design or habit, he was dressed as an ordinary citizen: pink cotton shirt and jeans over the frail body, steel-rimmed glasses sliding down the long sharp nose. His hair looked freshly trimmed. You see people like him every day, passing you on the street, riding the subways, neither monstrous nor heroic. From time to time, he whispered to the lawyers. He made a few notes on a yellow pad. His eyes wandered around the courtroom, with its civil service design and the words In God We Trust nailed in sans-serif letters above the bench of Judge Stephen G. Crane. Goetz never looked at the spectators or the six rows of reporters. In some curious way, he was himself a kind of spectator.
So when it was time to play the tape-recorded confession that. Goetz made to the police in Concord, New Hampshire, on New Year’s Eve, 1984, he, too, examined the transcript like a man hoping for revelation. The text itself was extraordinary. Combined with the sound of Goetz’s voice — stammering, hyperventilating, querulous, defensive, cold, blurry, calculating — it seemed some terrible invasion of privacy. We have heard this voice before; it belongs to the anonymous narrator of Notes from Underground, that enraged brief for the defense.
Goetz furrowed his brow as he listened to this much younger, oddly more innocent version of himself that had ended the long panicky flight out of the IRT in the second floor interview room of police headquarters in Concord. He started by telling his inquisitor, a young detective named Chris Domian, the sort of facts demanded by personnel directors: name, birth date, social security number, address (55 West 14th Street, “in New York City, and that’s, uh, that’s zip code 10011”). But it’s clear from the very beginning that he realized these would be his last anonymous hours.
GOETZ: You see, I’ll tell you the truth, and they can do anything they want with me, but I just don’t want to, I just don’t want to be paraded around, I don’t want a circus… I wish it were a dream. But it’s not. But, you know, it’s nothing to be proud of. It’s just, just, you know, it just is.
Exactly. It wasn’t a dream, certainly not a movie; it just was. On December 22, 1984, at about 1:30 in the afternoon, Bernie Goetz boarded a southbound number 2 Seventh Avenue IRT train at 14th Street and his life changed forever. So did the lives of Darrell Cabey, Troy Canty, James Ramseur, and Barry Allen. Within seconds after he boarded the train, they were joined together in a few violent minutes that changed this city. And when you listen to Goetz making his jangled confession, you understand that on that terrible afternoon, there were really five victims.
DOMIAN: Okay, let’s start with the person that was, uh, on the right, so to speak, laying down.
GOETZ: Yeah, I think he was the one who talked to me; he was the one who did the talking.
That was Canty. He is now 20, finishing an 18-month drug rehab treatment at Phoenix House. Before he ran into Goetz, he had pleaded guilty to taking $14 from video games in a bar. In his confession, Goetz is trying hard to explain to Domian (and to officer Warren Foote, who joined Domian) not simply what he did, but its context. The resulting transcript reads like a small, eerie play: the man from the big city explaining a dark world of menacing signs and nuances to the baffled outlanders.
GOETZ: I sat, I sat down and just, he was lying on the side, kind of. He, he just turned his face to me and he said, “How are you?” You know, what do you do? ‘Cause people joke around in New York a lot, and this and that, and in certain circumstances that can be, that can be a real threat. You see, there’s an implication there … I looked up and you’re not supposed to look at people a lot because it can be interpreted as being impolite — so I just looked at him and I said “Fine.” And I, I looked down. But you kind of keep them in the corner of your eye…
DOMIAN: Did he say anything else to you?
GOETZ: Yeah, yeah …the train was out of the station for a while and it reached full speed.…And he and one of the other fellows got up and they, uh — You see, they were all originally on my right-hand side. But, uh, you know, two stayed on my right-hand side, and he got up and the other guy got up and they came to my left-hand side and.…You see, what they said wasn’t even so much as important as the look, the look. You see the body language.…You have to, you know, it’s, it’s, uh, you know, that’s what I call ít, body language.