This was at two in the morning on Columbus Avenue, with a cold wind blowing from the river. I came out of an all-night deli with some coffee and the papers. On the corner, a black man in a filthy down jacket was poking around in a garbage can. There was a large brown plastic bag beside him on the sidewalk. He found a piece of uneaten bagel and four empty Diet Pepsi cans. He slipped the bagel in his jacket pocket. The cans went in the plastic bag. He glared, his yellow eyes peering at me from above a mask of thick wiry beard. Then he spit toward me. At last, I was home.
“Choo lookin’ at, man?” he said. “Never seen no homeless person before?” He glanced at the window of a boutique. “Miss Ethel sprayed the sink,” he said, lifting his bag, rattling the cans. “They all down by the creek, where the ballfield be.” Then he was off, talking to himself as he loped toward Broadway, carrying a bag of cans whose redemption would be easier than ours.
I was back in the New York of the ’80s. And, of course, that hostile man with the plastic bag on his shoulder and the split screen in his head wasn’t alone, wasn’t some municipal oddity. If you have been away for a while, as I have been, such people are the first you see: without jobs or families or shelter. This defeated army of mendicants seems made up of winos and junkies and the quite literally insane, but many of its unwilling recruits have simply run out of luck.
There are other signs of barbarism here too: the scarred lumpy streets (the great civic monument of the Koch administration might be the steel plate covering the hole in the street); the need for the stupefaction of drugs among all social classes; fear and tension in the subways; and the continuing scandal of housing. Shelter is one of the most elemental human needs but in New York now it is largely beyond the means of many people. Some end up homeless. Others must settle for less than they need. God help the man or woman grown old in this city, heavy with books, records, the valued accumulations of a lifetime, and forced suddenly to move. There is nowhere to go.
What is extraordinary is that the general population hasn’t risen in outrage. A major reason for this passivity in the face of torment is the deepening cynicism and fatalism of most New Yorkers. Again, this is most clear if you have been away awhile. The administration of poor Ed Koch has been the most corrupt since Jimmy Walker, but not a single figure has risen from the general muck to challenge him, as La Guardia rose from the Seabury investigations. For the last decade, our politicians cheated, lied, plundered the town; now a few of them are on the way to the pen. But who would turn to another politician for aid against the corrupt flood? Not a New Yorker.
But for a returned pilgrim, the worst single change in the last year is the racism — black and white — unleashed since a black man was chased to his death by a young white mob in Howard Beach. In subways, on buses, in casual encounters on the street, I’ve seen more antiwhite hostility than at any time since the months following the murder of Martin Luther King in 1968. Many young blacks seem to be spoiling for a fight; to some extent this need to strike back is understandable; but the level of racism isn’t lowered by such collisions. This form of the black response is itself racism; nobody wants to be beaten or killed because of the color of their skin. It’s disgusting when whites do it to blanks; it is equally disgusting when blacks do it to whites, and to recite the history of slavery and oppression in America to justify it is itself a condescending form of racism.
In this city, racism is not an abstraction to be discussed in a sociology class; usually the virus comes from concrete experience. Many blacks can cite a catalogue of insults and injuries, from the refusal of a cab driver to stop on a rainy night to the white policeman using his baton as if he were judge, jury, and executioner. But this is also true of those who are victimized by blacks. The other day I saw four well-dressed black teenagers coming along Broadway. It was midafternoon. School was just out. They went past a Korean fruit and vegetable store, and then, all at once, darted back. Each stole something: an orange, a cantaloupe, an apple, some grapes. They began to run, and a Korean man in his forties ran after them in vain. But when he came back he was still seething with fury.
“I work, I work!” he shouted in a thin, high, frustrated voice. “I work all day, all night. And they steal They just steal. They don’t work. It’s not fair!” The man said he just didn’t understand. This happens three, four times a week; never the same young men; always blacks. Would four Koreans come down the street and steal from a black grocer? “Why don’t they work?” After six years in this country, and two years in business, “they” had become a loaded word in his vocabulary. And probably a permanent one.
Driving through central Brooklyn one afternoon, through mile after mile of men clustered together on street corners while women without men were engulfed by children, driving through blasted streets smelling of defeat and abandonment, I remembered a scene I had witnessed many times last year in the cities of the American South: black families dining together in restaurants. Children. A mother. A father. I’ve been back in New York now for five weeks and haven’t seen such an event yet. Thirty years after the freedom rides, the North might now have much to learn from the South.
Squalor is, of course, only part of the city. This remains a city of enormous energy, great museums and theaters, generosity and wit, splendid architecture. But in my half-century here, I’ve never seen social disparity as violently drastic as it is now. In the evenings in Manhattan, you often pass among people who look like drawings by George Grosz. Suddenly and ferociously rich, the men eat their way through the city, consuming food, wine, art, real estate, companies, stores, neighborhoods. They are all appetite and no mind, no heart. During the day the women prowl Madison Avenue or 57th Street as if searching for prey, buying clothes, buying breasts, buying paintings, buying status. In a city where human beings struggle for the privilege of sleeping over subway grates, these people even have money to hire “art advisers”; this is like hiring a fuck adviser.
One day, soon after I was back, I wandered around Wall Street to look at the inhabitants. Every other person seemed high, either on cocaine or the platinum roar of the stock market. In one of the restaurants, I struck up a conversation with a broker. I asked him if any of the immense transactions in the bull market would produce either goods or jobs. “No, just money,” he said and laughed. But when I asked him if the sight of the homeless disturbed him, the grin turned to a sneer: “Hey, man, there’s nothing I can do about that. That’s an old movie. That’s the ’60s, pal.”
Well, no, not the ’60s. The ’80s. But for all of that it was good to be home.