A group of mothers from our neighborhood went downtown to the Board of Estimate Hearing and sang a song. They had contributed the facts and the tunes, but the idea for that kind of political action came from the clever head of a media man floating on the ebbtide of our lower west side culture because of the housing shortage. He was from the far middle plains and loved our well-known tribal organization. He said it was the coming thing. Oh, how he loved our old moldy pot New York.
He was also clean-cut and attractive. For that reason the first mother stood up straight when the clerk called her name. She smiled, said excuse me, jammed past the knees of her neighbors and walked proudly down the aisle of the hearing room. Then she sang, according to some sad melody learned in her mother’s kitchen, the following lament requesting better playground facilities.
oh oh oh
will someone please put a high fence
up
around the children’s playground
they are playing a game and have
only
one more year of childhood. won’t the city
come
or their daddies to keep the bums and
the tramps out of the yard they are too
little now to have the old men wagging their
cricked pricks at them or feeling their
knees and saying to them sweetheart
sweetheart sweetheart. can’t the cardinal
keep all these creeps out …
She bowed her head and stepped back modestly to allow the recitative for which all the women rose, wherever in the hearing room they happened to be. They said a lovely statement in chorus:
The junkies with smiles can be stopped by intelligent reorganization of government functions.
Then she stepped forward once more, embarrassed before the high municipal podiums and continued to sing:
… please Mr. Mayor
there’s a girl without any pants on they’re babies
so help me the Commies just walk in the gate
and put shit in the sand …
Raising her arms toward the off-white ceiling of our lovely City Hall, she cried out
stuff them on a freight train to Brooklyn
your honor, put up a fence
we’re mothers oh what
will become of the children …
No one on the Board of Estimate, including the mayor, was unimpressed. After the reiteration of the fifth singer, all the officials said so, murmuring ah and oh in a kind of startled arpeggio round lasting maybe three minutes. The comptroller, who was a famous financial nag, said, “Yes yes yes, in this case, yes, a high 16.8 fence can be put up at once, can be expedited, why not …” Then and there, he picked up the phone and called Parks, Traffic and Child Welfare. All were agreeable when they heard his strict voice and temperate language. By noon the next day, the fence was up.
Later that night, an hour or so past moonlight, a young Tactical Patrol Force cop snipped a good-sized hole in the fence for two reasons. His first reason was public: The Big Brothers, a baseball team of young priests who absolutely required exercise, always played at night. They needed entrance and egress. His other reason was personal: There were eleven bats locked up in the locker room. These were, to his little group, an esoteric essential. He, in fact, had already gathered them into his arms like stalks of pussywillow and loaded them into a waiting paddy wagon. He had returned for half-a-dozen catcher’s mitts, when a young woman reporter from the Lower West Side Sun noticed him in the locker room.
She asked, because she was trained in the disciplines of curiosity followed by intelligent inquiry, what he was doing there. He replied, “A police force stripped of its power and shorn by vengeful politicians of the respect due it from the citizenry will arm itself as best it can.” He had a copy of Camus’s The Rebel in his inside pocket which he showed her for identification purposes. He had mild gray eyes, short eyelashes, a smooth and perfect countenance, white gloves of linen, barely smudged, and was able, therefore, while waiting among the basketballs for apprehension by precinct cops, to inject her with two sons, one Irish and one Italian, who sang to her in dialect all her life.