A different rhythm too. Some Oriental kids haunt the libraries— others fondle their automatic weapons and visit the restaurants, asking for contributions. Hispanic hit-men, pretty in pastel, posture like blood-hungry peacocks in the discos while their brothers and sisters work double-shifts in the sweatshops to afford an education for their children that their ancestry will bar them from using. Some white kids plot their privileged futures in prep school while skinheads join the only club that will have them. Black doctors on their way to the hospital walk past children of their color spending their lives on concrete, going to the hoop, the crack-monster patiently waiting for their dreams to die. The baddest of the B-Boys form sidewalk posses, naming themselves after video-game killer-machines. They rat-pack citizens, taking them down like wild dogs, ripping, snatching. Gotta Get Paid. Rustling, they call it. Nitrous oxide and amyl nitrite have parties with never-connected kids who think devil-worship is something you can do part-time.
Only the names change. Nothing deadly ever really dies. Crank makes a comeback at rock concerts— Jello-shots are invited to all the right parties. Fatal fashions.
And the kids go down. Gunfire in the ghettos— cluster suicide in the suburbs.
Welfare hotels: crack dens with security guards, where residents rent out their babies as props to beggars. The older kids can't get library cards from those addresses, but they're welcome in the video arcades in Times Square. Where even the night is bright. And where it's always dark. Like in the subway tunnels, where the rats fear the humans who stalk the platforms, muttering their secret codes, looking for women to push onto the tracks.
Back alleys where abandoned babies in garbage cans are the lucky ones.
The sun shines the same on them alclass="underline" yuppies on their pristine balconies, working on their tan; below them, winos on their urine-stained cardboard pallets, working on being biodegradable.
This isn't a city— it's a halfway house without a roof. Stressed to critical mass.
I was driving with camera eyes, taking snapshots. Three young men wearing silk T-shirts, their hair cut in elaborate fades, short on the sides, long in back. Lounging against a black Eldorado, the sparkling car resplendent in gold trim right down to the chains framing the license plate. Two decals on the trunk lid… USA and Italia. So nobody would mistake their ride for one of the moolingiane.
Dark-skinned vatos refuse to speak English when they're busted, protecting against the same fatal mistake.
The Chinese have a word for Japanese…means something like snake.
Only our blood is all the same color. And you can't see that until it's spilled.
Fear rules. Politicians promise the people an army of blue-coated street-sweepers for a jungle no chemical could defoliate.
And behind the doors, breeder reactors for beasts. The walls of some buildings still tremble with the molecular memory of baby-bashing violence and incestuous terror.
I know all this. And more. But it was the bag in the trunk that shuffled the fear cards in my deck.
37
I stowed it in Mama's basement. She watched me unwrap the poncho.
"You know what this is?" I asked her.
"Spirit bag— bad spirits."
"Yeah. You smell money, Mama?"
"No," she said.
I worked the pay phones upstairs, reaching out my probes for the Prof, leaving word.
38
Driving back, I exited Chinatown, turned right at Pearl Street. A pair of guards stood in their blue vinyl jackets, BOP in yellow letters across the back. Bureau of Prisons. Pistol-grip shotguns on slings over their shoulders. The MCC, the federal jail, sits on that corner. As blank-faced as the guards.
It looks the same inside.
39
I tried Mama from the hippies' phone a little before six the next morning. The Prof had called in, left word to see him anytime before ten.
I found him explaining the scam to Agatha. The Prof has organized more domestics than any union ever could. Newspapers were covered with red circles, I looked over his shoulder. All ads for lawyers. You had a car accident? Slip and fall in front of a supermarket? Your baby born brain-damaged? Give us a call. No fee unless successful. The stuff about "expenses payable at conclusion of case" was in much smaller type. He was running the game down, Agatha nodding her head, focusing, getting her act together.
"You want this to last, you got to move fast," he was saying to Agatha. "Fiona's gonna be at the hospital. Say what you got to say, don't let them play. One call, that's all. Got it?"
She nodded. He gave her a handful of quarters and she waddled off to the pay phones.
I lit a cigarette, sipped the cup of hot chocolate the waitress brought over, waited.
"Here's the slant on the plant, brother. You know Fiona? Works the trucks in the meat market? She's in the hospital. Some psycho chased her right up on the curb with his car. Broke her leg, ripped up some stuff inside. She's gonna need operations for days."
"So she needs a lawyer?"
"For what, man? The citizen who hit her, he disappeared. It'll go as a hit-and-run…those ain't no fun."
"Where's the money?"
"Agatha calls up about a dozen of these lawyers…the ones who advertise, dig it? She tells each one that Fiona is her daughter, okay? Sixteen years old. Tells them she was hit by an Exxon truck on her way to school. Ain't a shyster in town wouldn't grab that one, right?"
"Right."
"So Agatha tells them some sleazy lawyer got tipped to the case by one of the ER nurses, right? And the lawyer came to the hospital, signed up the case. Now Fiona, she's only sixteen, okay? Agatha wants to know if this is legit, see? She don't like the idea of vultures moving in on her poor baby. Wants a new lawyer."
"So?"
"So the lawyer, he calls the hospital. Verifies that Fiona's a patient, had some real harm done to her, vehicle accident. The boy thinks he got money in the bank. Agatha tells him she'll sign the retainer, no problem. Sweetens the deal a bit— tells the lawyer that Exxon already sent a guy over to the hospital, offered her a hundred grand to sign a release, see?"
"Okay, so she gets fifty different lawyers on the case. So what?"
"Here's where we score. Agatha tells the lawyer she needs some cash to tide her over. Got to quit her job, spend every minute with her baby-child in the hospital, needs cab fare to visit her, buy her some presents, keep her spirits up, all that. Some get the message, some don't."
"So what could she get, couple a hundred bucks?"
"Yeah. Couple a hundred bucks. Maybe ten, fifteen times before today's over. Not so shabby."
"Does it bounce back on the kid?"
"What kid? Fiona's twenty-five if she's a day. Been turning tricks since she came in from the sticks. They come around, ask her some questions, she don't know nobody named Agatha. Her poor mama been dead a long time."
"It's a lot of work for a little piece of change."
His eyes went sad. "Thought you'd dig the play, man. Stinging lawyers. And no risk."