Satin sheets, a fantasy cooked up for the poor. Rich people slept on cotton, dried in the sun, ironed and fresh like at the Valera villa.
I was on Fourteenth, going slowly, when I heard the sound of security grates forced up. Plate glass broken. It was a Thom McAn store. People pulling boxes and boxes of Jox tennis shoes out onto the sidewalk, bouncy brand-new tennies tumbling from the boxes, glowing white in the dark. You couldn’t get from A to B in New York without an ad for Jox or its redoubling, someone wearing them.
I heard the short whoop of a police siren, but there was something impotent about it, that single, short whoop.
Traffic was almost at a standstill. I could have gone between lanes, but I had no place I was trying to get to. A group of people wheeled racks out of Says Who? Plus-size Styles. Farther down the block, two men backed through the broken window of an Orange Julius, each lifting one side of an industrial juicer. They struggled along the sidewalk with it and then swung one two three through the plate glass of a pawnshop.
WE BUY GOLD ANY CONDITION
People knew what they were doing. Like they’d been waiting for the lights to go out.
You had to believe in the system, I thought, to feel it was wrong to take things without paying for them. You had to believe in a system that said you can want things if you work, if you are employed, or if you were just born lucky, born rich.
The city was in the process of being looted. Chain stores and mom-and-pop stores that owners, families, tried to defend with baseball bats, tire irons, shotguns. People said it was despicable that looters would turn on their own, and target struggling and honest neighborhood businesses. Their own. But they misunderstood. It didn’t matter whether looters hit a chain or the local jeweler. To expect them to identify particular stores as enemies and others as friends was a confusion. We buy gold, any condition.
Looting wasn’t stealing, or shopping by other means. It was a declaration, one I understood, watching the juicer crash through the window: the system is in “off” mode. And in “off” mode, there was no private property, no difference between Burger King and Alvin’s Television Repair. Everything previously hoarded behind steel and glass was up for grabs.
Jox are lightweight. Built for speed.
* * *
I parked the bike in front of my building on Kenmare. The Italians were all outside, domino games and drinking and full-volume news radio.
We’re getting reports from all five boroughs, the announcer said. Commanding officers tell us the vandalism and looting are so dispersed they simply cannot prevent individual crimes.
Listeners were calling in to describe trouble in Harlem, the Bronx, Bed-Stuy, Crown Heights.
“Bushwick is being destroyed,” one caller said, “by niggers and spics.”
“This guy dies in custody and these animals go nuts, destroying everything on Broadway, but he was robbing a liquor store—”
The old Italians playing dominoes weighed in on this.
“They don’t know how he died. Probably he was on drugs.”
I left the Moto Valera securely locked where my bigoted neighbors could watch over it. No looting would occur in Little Italy, a self-governed fortress, armed, punitive.
I wanted to walk. It was a night to be on the street, where everyone else was, listening to radios, trading stories, marveling at the uncanny dark — natural, but not for a city. I crossed Kenmare and walked down Mulberry, which still reminded me of my arrival to New York, two years earlier, when the sight of a woman smashing a cockroach under her slipper was an exciting urban novelty. Every New York sensation, heat, firecrackers, the humid grit coating people and things, even the smell of chicken blood in the hall, meant possibility then.
At the corner of Spring and Mulberry, by the little park where I used to sit, I saw Henri-Jean. This was his haunt, his quadrangle. But he wasn’t in the park. He was standing in the street, directing traffic, using his striped pole like a semaphore, nodding and beckoning with dramatic enthusiasm at the cars. He smiled and directed as if he were a cheerful usher volunteering to put everyone in their rightful seat, the official host and steward of Mulberry and Spring. There was a type who came to life in a blackout, those who would use the suspension of normal life to finally become their full selves.
I went east down Houston Street. There were bright flames over the dark rooftops ahead of me. I heard sirens. The surging horns of emergency vehicles. They passed, heading toward the flames, a building on fire down by the river. As I approached First Avenue there were small fires burning in the street, from dumpsters rolled into the intersection and knocked on their sides.
I passed a little playground where a group of people, mostly children — boys, little ones and older ones — had sledgehammers. They were breaking concrete and scurrying around to pick up pieces of it as it ricocheted, putting heavy chunks of it into knapsacks and plastic shopping bags. One kid had bolt cutters and was using them to sever the seatless chains hanging from the swing set in the little playground. Every time I’d passed that playground on my way to visit Giddle, who lived nearby, I noticed those chains dangling, useless, no swings. The kid was making use of them. He wrapped the freed chain around his hand, with a loose end for swinging. Another took the bolt cutters and began tearing out pieces of the chain-link fence that bordered the playground. Other boys helped him drag out rectangular sections of fencing and toss them into the street.
A man was with them, his face covered with a black bandanna, the only adult, it seemed, caught up in their fury and even directing it a little, and for that, odd and somewhat out of place, because it was a youthful fury. He was dressed all in black, only his eyes showing. He held a long pole in one hand. The pole had something metal and sharp on the upward tip — it looked like a knife, maybe, duct-taped to the end of this pole, which towered over the man. He held it like a staff as he spoke to the kids, gave low-voiced instructions as they hunched and listened, self-consciously, almost vainly, pulling their own scarves and shirts and bandannas up over their young faces. I couldn’t hear actual words but his emphatic tone, his flattened and tough New York accent, was familiar.
A grocery store nearby had been looted and people were streaming past with bags and shopping carts filled with goods. Another blaring fire truck headed toward the building burning near the East River. A Mister Softee truck parked at the curb and the driver opened his window to sell ice cream. People surrounded the truck, saying that it was a blackout and he should not be charging for his cones because they were giving it out other places for free. A teenage girl in cornrows, shopping bags on the handlebars of her white ten-speed, said, “Shit is going to melt anyhow.” The Mister Softee driver yelled back that his refrigeration was working just fine. He peeled out as the children with scarves over their faces began hurtling chunks of concrete at his truck.
The man dressed all in black was leading a chant, holding his weird pike or pole aloft, jabbing it upward, the children chanting with him,
“El pueblo! Armado! Something something something.”
He was chanting with the kids but his eyes met mine. He was looking directly at me, his face covered. I stared back, sure now of who he was.
I walked closer. The bright, sad eyes.
“What did I tell you, sister?”
Before I could answer, a boy was calling that he and the others needed Burdmoore’s help. A park bench had been unbolted from the ground and angled up, and they were trying to drag it to their elaborate pile of smoldering debris and fencing stacked in the street. Burdmoore went over to assist. They moved the bench onto the pile and squirted something flammable over it. The fire blazed up, its light bathing the boys’ masked faces. They looked to Burdmoore, who directed. It didn’t make sense to wait to speak with him. We were on different planes of existence. He was deep in his blackout self, activated.