That was what I’d talked myself into during the elevator ride. But when we stepped out to the street and I saw that white Alfa Romeo illegally parked by the fire hydrant in front of the building, dealer plates wired on and greenshirted driver from the dealership waiting there to hand me the keys, I knew I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t lie to myself about victory and defeat, I couldn’t con myself into wisdom or acceptance, and I goddamn well couldn’t take any airplane to any island in any Caribbean.
The street was its usual workday derangement of activity. The garment district is New York’s version of the Baghdad marketplace, with trucks instead of camels, wheeled garment racks instead of burros, and taxis taking the place of the vizier’s horsemen. A ferment of tongues is heard, all of them degradations of one or another major language: spic, yid and black predominate, but wop, wog, and various variants of chink are also featured, plus other rarer spices in this or that section of the stew. (What the fellas in the turbans speak I don’t know, but it sounds like warm shit being stirred by wooden spoons.)
“This way,” one of my teammates said. “We’re parked around the corner.” So the three of us turned right and moved away from the building and the lovely white Alfa (I knew better than to look back at it, though I wanted to) and walked off along the buckled sidewalk into the dishevelment of the garment district.
We walked three abreast, of course, which wasn’t easy in that crowd, and several representatives of society’s disadvantaged races gave us dirty looks as they stepped off the curb to go around us; three white men taking up the whole damn sidewalk.
Soon we found ourselves moving slowly behind a drove of slow-moving garment racks, propelled by a rabble of spics and spades. The former spoke Cockroach, their version of Spanish, and the latter spoke Harlem, a bastardization of English composed principally of the noun muhfur and the adjective muhfun.
We were almost to the corner, walking closely behind this shuffling shoal, when I suddenly raised my head and yelled, “You fuckin’ niggers move your fuckin’ black asses out of the way!”
The number of eyes that turned in my direction was gratifying. Linking my arms with my bewildered comrades, marching forward, I loudly announced, “We’re comin’ through, jigaboos, so move it!”
The first punch was thrown by a musclebound black whose T-shirt fit him like Saran Wrap, turning his ripply chest and shoulders into a snowbound anatomical study. The punch was thrown at me, but I was no longer there to catch it. The instant I saw that arm rear back I turned and ran.
There was yelling behind me, some of it in actual English. Racing at top speed, skipping sideways between garment racks, hopping over fire hydrants and cardboard cartons, lunging through clusters of dolly-wheeling trolls, sliding along the plate glass windows of the button factory, I didn’t look back until I was parallel with the Alfa, and even then I didn’t stop. I took it for granted I’d have to leave the neighborhood for a while, and running would be faster than the stop-and-go single lane of taxi-truck-tourist traffic oozing along the middle of the street.
Yes, I would have to depart. Here they came, running along after me, bowling over the pedestrians I’d skirted, creating secondary fist fights and shouting matches in their wake, and even from here I could see the murder in their eyes.
Not my friends of the airline ticket; they were way back where I’d left them, barely discernible in a whirling frenzy of pummeling arms and legs. It was a flying squad of jigaboos, led by my friend in the form-fitting T-shirt, that was pounding after me now, and I really doubted St. Martin was the destination for me they had in mind. Facing forward again, knocking down a pair of fat female Puerto Rican sewing machine operators starting out for an early lunch (spic-ettes? spic-esses?), I bounded over their barrelly bodies and ran for daylight.
39
After the ceremony I kissed the bride and she got into the Lincoln with the best man and left for parts unknown. The other witness, or maid of honor, was the JP’s ugly daughter, and so remained in her original setting: picket fence, sagging sofa, black-and-white television set the size of the mouth of the Holland Tunnel.
My escape from the race riot I’d started had been accomplished with the help of a taxi ride up Sixth Avenue. When I’d come back twenty minutes later, police cars were clustered at the end of the block where the fight had begun, and much shouting was taking place back there. The green-shirted auto dealer man, unaltered, continued to lean on the Alfa’s fender, one fixed point in a disintegrating age, until I identified myself. With neither small talk nor surprise, he handed me the keys and the provisional registration and an envelope containing instructions on where to meet Liz for the taking-out-the-license ritual in Stamford, and then he faded away while I entered my Alfa.
Life. It can be sweet. This creature smelled not like an ordinary new car but like the world’s most expensive new glove. Starting the engine (a snarling purr), waiting while a police car full of bloodied blacks went by, I joined the ebb of vehicles, edged my way cautiously through the miserable traffic of midtown to the West Side Highway, then opened it up and just had a wonderful time on the Henry Hudson Parkway, the Cross Bronx Expressway, and the Connecticut Turnpike to Stamford. I got there first and hung around outside in the sunlight until the familiar black Lincoln rolled to a stop by a fortuitous fire hydrant. Liz got out of the back, with somebody she described as “the best man.”
I looked at him. “Are you sure?” This creature was alleged to be a rock musician from Toronto, but appeared to be almost entirely rock, with little left for musician. The only word he knew in English was, “Yuh.” I didn’t try him on any other languages, but I doubt he would have shown much proficiency no matter what the tongue.
“Let’s go get it over with,” Liz said, and I handed her my three new speeding tickets, saying, “I suppose you have people who can take care of these.”
She glanced at them, put them away in her shoulder bag, and said, “Don’t make me a widow before the lawsuit’s over, okay?”
“Your concern,” I told her, “inspires me to greater heights of self-protection.”
“Mm,” she said, and we went inside to get the legal papers. Thence to the JP for a scene out of a thirties comedy — except that the old farmer marrying us wasn’t wearing a ratty bathrobe and didn’t have his false teeth out — and by three o’clock the deed had been done. “So much for that,” Liz said.
“Just think,” I said “We’re Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Drew Dodge.”
“Sure,” she said, got into the Lincoln with Yuh, and off they went. The JP, Missis JP, and Daughter JP stood on the porch by the glider and waved and waved, till they noticed the groom was still right here. “Well, so long folks,” I said, hopped into the Alfa, and spurred away. Behind me, they formed a tableau, lined up along the porch rail, mouths open, hands up to wave but not quite waving. Not what you’d call waving.