Carried it in one hand back to the car. Everything went into the trunk. I merged with the traffic, U-turned at the overpass, headed back to Manhattan.
36
Driving home against the traffic, feeling the heat of the voodoo bag behind me.
'When you're on the road, always look back cold.' The Prof. Talking to me on the prison yard years ago. Reminding me how suckers think they have to travel to see what they left at home. Prison even makes you miss hell.
Everything I'd had in Indiana— a short-term lease on belonging— it was gone now. I was home. Driving through the war zone, bombarded by imagery. I flicked on the all-news radio station. A human beat his baby to death, cut the kid up, fed the parts to his German shepherd. The authorities took charge. Killed the dog.
They say when a dog tastes human flesh, it'll always seek more. A dog like that, you have to put it down. When humans get the same way, we give them therapy.
Liberals always know what to name things. To them, graffiti vandals are ghetto expressionists. Probably think mugging is Performance Art too.
The mayor was saying something about the city being a gorgeous mosaic— all the lovely colors. Trying to govern from the fetal position, wearing shades. It looks different from ground zero.
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 all: 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
Dark-skinned
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
