Old Glory (43 page)

The man with
The New Yorker
sat at a table a little away from the bar. He had stirred his highball with his purple plastic cocktail stick. He had looked at his watch three times in a quarter of an hour. He had cast the obligatory number of glances at the door. He had turned the pages of his magazine. Considering how things were, he was doing fine.

He thought: If I’d been here a few years back, I would have hunted out a jazz club, a singles bar—anywhere I might have drifted into conversation with a stranger. Now, though, he felt too old for that sort of adventuring. He would be a marked man among the men and women in their twenties, busy with still being young. If they noticed him at all, they would see him as a wrinklie, wearing his pathos on his sleeve. Just that morning he had found himself inspecting his own excrement for traces of blood. No special reason; he had simply come to a point at which it would not have surprised him greatly to learn that he was dying, and his first terminal symptom would be something that he’d notice, more or less idly, one of these days, with a kind of dull recognition, like spotting an unpleasant old acquaintance on the street.

He supposed that if he were someone else, it would be in a mood like this that he would visit a call girl. He had never met a call girl. He believed that the proper thing to do was consult a hotel desk clerk or a cabdriver. After that, he assumed, things sort of took care of themselves. The idea was laughable, though. One, he counted himself as a male fellow traveler with the Women’s Movement. Two, he expected that only humiliation could come from such a loveless gymnastic coupling. Three, he was a good deal more terrified of talking to either the desk clerk or the cabdriver than he was of the call girl herself. Four, he had spent the last forty-eight hours in the same pairs of socks and shorts. Q.E.D. Call-girl option closed.

He could try phoning his wife again. On the other hand, he couldn’t stand the thought of listening to those long electronic trills, paranoia’s own authentic sound; the sound of infidelity and wrecked cars on rainy highways. He looked again at what he had been reading. He had covered the listings of every theater on Broadway. He’d taken in the names of the stars and the belittled, silly plots of all the plays. He never went to New York, and the last time he had been inside a theater was in the 1960s.
Jesus
, he thought;
Jesus!
There must be some part of his mind from which he could take an ironical view of his own self-pity; but he felt that his solitude had paralyzed him as effectively as if he’d had a stroke.

•   •   •

He and I were kinfolks. At least, the copy of
The New Yorker
had been bought by me, and I had been sitting at his table in the coffeeshop/bar. The hotel must have held a good three hundred of us, and we were all loosely in the same bag. We were attending a convention, trying to make a sale or just
in transit
, keeping in pointless motion through the hotel’s flesh-colored interior, afloat between floors in the glass-walled elevators, checking with the desk for messages that hadn’t come through. On these elevator rides we would make a nervous show of conversation.

“You with A.R.T.M.S.?”

“No, I’m on my own.”

“I’m with Harmless Radium Testers. Fred Spacks. From Baton Rouge.”

“How do you find St. Louis?”

“St. Louis?” Fred Spacks from Baton Rouge looked surprised by the question. He’d quite forgotten that we were actually supposed to be in St. Louis. “Oh, it’s a dump.” The words came out in a musical phrase: a long semibreve followed by a careless triolet of descending quavers. The phrasing said everything. St. Louis was a place about which one was expected to have no opinion at all; it was just a conveniently central site for everybody’s convention. Sure, it was a dump—but it had an airport, hotels, a conference center. So what else do you want? The Taj Mahal, for godsake? The Latin Quarter? Wake up, man: this is
St. Louis
.

I had spent a miserable Sunday. The only people on the streets had been conventioneers, recognizable by the way in which they wandered, uncuriously, like well-dressed mental patients on the grounds of a hospital. I had stared at the blank wall of the Tums factory, at the deserted football stadium, at the Old Courthouse. Obediently, as if I had swallowed my dose of Lithium and were following the instructions of the head nurse, I had ridden to the top of the Arch.

The giant feet of the Westward Expansion Memorial Arch stood on a stretch of ground so absurdly desolate that it did induce a momentary glow of good humor. It had been “landscaped.” A few million tons of Mississippi mud had been molded into the shape of a rolling hill and valley. Some of this area was covered with flapping sheets of polyurethane. Most of the mud, though, had been coated with some kind of bilious green slime. Its texture was thickly fungoid, its purpose quite inscrutable. A gardener might well have recognized it as the best and latest form of soil nutrient. My own guess was that the city of St. Louis had run out of funds, was unable to plant grass on its artificial hill, and had decided that the only affordable solution was to spray the whole
thing with the cheapest and nastiest green paint it could find. The coating might at least deceive a few inattentive passengers in high-altitude jets. At ground level, it gave the impression that the very earth on which St. Louis had been built was grotesquely diseased.

We were cranked up to the top of the Arch in a train of tiny vandalized cars. I was squashed opposite a woman from Sacramento. Since the size of the car forced us to interlock our legs, it seemed natural enough to talk on the bumpy journey up through the dark.

She said: “The Arch is supposed to be to St. Louis what the Eiffel Tower is to Paris.” She sounded like a tour guide. We gained another stair in the blackness with a terrific rattle and clank.

“Say that again?”

“The Arch is supposed to be to St. Louis …” her voice faltered. “The Arch is …” There was a sniff, and she started again. “The Arch is supposed to be to St. Louis what the Eiffel …” But she couldn’t manage it. She was helpless with giggles. I tried to say it, and nearly reached the word “Paris” before something broke in my solar plexus. There were five people in the car. By the time we were three-quarters of the way up, we were all trying to get the sentence out and falling, helpless with laughter, into one another’s laps. We tried to say it in chorus. I suggested that it might be easier if we sang it. When we reached the top, we were gurgling like maniacs. On the viewing platform, people shrank from contact with anyone from our car, and we in our turn shrank from each other. When I tried to grin at the woman who had started this riot of happy hysteria, she refused to catch my eye.

There was certainly something deeply sobering about the view from the top of the Arch. One had to peer out through tiny windows the size of building blocks. Had they been bigger, the Arch might have turned into the suicide Mecca of the Midwest; but as it was, one would have had difficulty in squeezing a newborn baby through one of these foggy little apertures. Pushing one’s face against the glass, one could see all that any human being could reasonably bear of St. Louis: mile after mile of biscuit-colored housing projects, torn-up streets, blackened Victorian factories and the purplish urban scar tissue of vacant lots and pits in the ground. It was The Waste Land. The city succeeded triumphantly in doing what Our Lady of Rivers had totally failed at: it made the Mississippi look puny, an open drain which had taken on the St. Louis colors of rust, soot and rotting brick.

Beside me, the conventioneers were identifying another city altogether. They were pointing out the fine new home stadium of the
Cardinals, Stouffers Riverside Towers, the tall glass office buildings. To me, though, the isolated sprouts of life in the surrounding blight were just objects of pathos: a few wan geraniums planted on a garbage dump don’t make a garden.

The Arch that we were standing in was quite the weirdest of these forlorn gestures of renewal. Eero Saarinen’s huge glittering loop might justifiably have been raised as the crowning splendor of some modernist utopia. Set over St. Louis, linking nothing with nothing, rooted in its own bizarre wilderness of green mud, it looked to me like an expensive practical joke.

Down on the ground again, I watched the flag on the courthouse dome flying in reflection on the cold green mirror slab of the Equitable Life building. Life didn’t feel equitable at all, and the Old Glory seemed to have a sarcastic emphasis built into the word
old
. The flag, magnified by the glass, snapped and juddered on its pole. Many stories below, the image of a slack-faced man stared back at me. He carried a
New Yorker
. “Sir? Mister? Please excuse me.…”

The man in the glass turned. He had been joined by a portly Indian who looked as displaced as he felt himself. The Indian had a checked woolen scarf wound around his throat and wore an old, heavy camel overcoat. Since the actual temperature was close to sixty degrees, the weather for which the Indian had dressed himself was the special, metaphysical iciness of the city. It had made me shiver too, and I thought how sensible the man had been to wrap himself up against it.

“Please—I am looking for
downtown.
”

“So was I. I’m afraid that this is it.”

“
This
is downtown?”

“It seems like it.”

“Good gracious,” he said, with admirable mildness. We held a one-minute silence of appalled wonder at this fact. “I am looking for Chinese restaurant.”

So gaunt was St. Louis that I did remember exactly where I had seen a grubby chop suey joint earlier that afternoon. It was three blocks away, and I said I would take him to it. His loneliness broke like a bubble in a sudden cascade of words. Had I seen Richard Nixon interviewed by David Frost on the TV? Frost came from England, yes? Very good man. Very good. He himself had visited London. Very good city. Did I know the Balls Pond Road? I did? What an amazing coincidence! He had spent one month in the Balls Pond Road. Most convenient for the buses. He had a cousin in Ealing. He was an electrical engineer.
No, not the cousin; he … 
himself—
and the Indian touched his throat as if he half-expected to find that St. Louis had rendered him an immaterial ghost.

I had assumed that he must have arranged to meet someone at the Chinese restaurant, but it turned out that he was going to eat alone. He had fixed on the notion of a Chinese restaurant—any Chinese restaurant—quite arbitrarily. He simply needed a destination, however contrived, to keep what was left of his identity intact. He pressed me to stay with him. I invented an appointment elsewhere. I thought that we might all too easily drive each other to tears.

Once in every half dozen carefully rationed visits, I would find a mes sage for me at the hotel desk. They all seemed to be in code. They said things like T
UESDAY
8:15
FXTN … KFUO … WPTZ … KHRB …
The unpronounceable clusters of initials sounded like business conventions, but if one applied the right sort of acid to them, or held them in front of a fire, they revealed themselves as local radio stations where I was supposed to go and talk to disc jockeys in two-minute intervals between pop records, Lutheran hymns and ads for laxatives and pre-owned autos. As hungry for talk as the Indian, I treasured these abbreviated opportunities for conversation. I hogged the microphone. In crappy single rooms over the tops of Laundromats, in wooden huts on the outskirts of junior-college campuses, in dark closets at the back of churches, I set off on a gibbering trail of free association. I liked the cab rides down long wet boulevards that took me to these assignations; I liked talking to the receptionists at the studios. When I had no radio station to go to, I had no society; and between trips I sat blankly in the coffee shop, an unperson, turning pages backward and sneaking glances at the door. Then another strange conjunction of consonants would turn up and I’d come temporarily to life again.

In one dawn raid on a gospel station, the black cabdriver said, “So, how do you like this city, man?”

“Not very much, I’m afraid; at least, not yet, anyway.”

“Not much, huh? Well, I’m telling you: don’t you ever go over the river to
East
St. Louis. St. Louis is bad, but East St. Louis … they ain’t people over there; they is
animals.
”

When I had hailed him on the street, he was deep in a newspaper. He passed it over to me. The
Evening Whirl
.

“You can scare the shit out of yourself with that
Whirl
. What they print in that paper is the truth. That’s the one paper in this city where they don’t tell no lies.”

It was smudgily printed on the cheapest sort of paper. Its headline
read:
HOMICIDE DECLARES WAR ON KILLERS AND ARRESTS
9
IN
3
DAYS
. Beneath it was a row of mug shots of local murderers, all of them black. The news stories were written up in hot boogie-woogie prose:

The inside pages were full of advertisements for clairvoyants and wizards.
HAS SOMEONE PUT A HEX, A SPELL, A VOODOO ON YOU? CONSULT: THE MAN WHO KNOWS
.

We were deep in the South Side of the city, at the heart of
Whirl
country. Looking out at this battlefield of garbage, ruined streets and housing projects, I was tempted to believe that the awfulness of the place could be accounted for only in terms of hexes and spells.

“You ever hear of Pruitt Igoe?” the cabdriver asked. “That was right there. It got so bad, that place, they had to dynamite it out. Bang!” he clapped his hands happily over the top of the steering wheel. “That was something else.”