Old Glory (44 page)

Twenty minutes later I had an answer, of a kind, to all these questions. We had left the city behind and arrived at the wooded campus of a religious college with its own radio station on the grounds. The receptionist was knitting at her desk, a stout woman in her fifties with frizzy hair and bifocals. She immediately started to talk about murder. Two women students had been killed on the campus. One had been out jogging, one returning from the college Laundromat. Both had been raped, then knifed.

“I walk in fear of my own shadow,” the receptionist said. “One in every four women is a target for rape. You don’t have to be young or pretty.”

She feared downtown St. Louis even more than she feared the campus. She hadn’t been into the city in two years. It was now just a place that she read about in the newspapers, a lurid theater of slayings, stabbings, holdups and rapes.

“You know why we got all this now?”

It was the question on which whole conventions of sociologists and criminologists get wrecked, but the receptionist had the light of salvation dancing behind her glasses.

“It’s nutrition. I’m a believer in the nutrition theory. It’s fast food. The junk they raise kids up on now, it’s doing things to their brains. It’s changing the molecular structure of the human brain! I’ve been reading up on the evidence. They got me convinced, those scientists. You look at the statistics. Did they have crime like this before dogs and
burgers and French-fries and high cholesterol? They’ve done analysis on what rapists
eat
. Junk food! They got these concentrations of it in the
body
. I mean to tell you, it’s like passing gas into the head. They go crazy on it, and then they go out and do these terrible things.…” My face must have given me away.

“That’s a scientific theory. That’s not what I say, that’s what scientists all over America are saying: it’s in the
diet.
”

I saw Cassius Parker, 33, with his .357 Magnum, his stomach distended with a mess of chewed burger, frozen pizza, tacos, ketchup, mustard, French-fries, buns and relishes.

The studio receptionist and the witches who advertised in the
Whirl
were on exactly the same path. They lived in a society so baffling and so bad that only magic could explain it. Mother Taylor sold bottles of “blessed oil” to cure the ills of St. Louis. The receptionist had bought her “nutrition theory,” complete with its okay status words like
evidence, statistics, analysis, molecular
. What kind of city was this, where people had been reduced to the practice of helpless witchcraft?

Having no one else to call up on the phone, the man dialed Room Service. Asked to identify himself, at first he couldn’t remember who he was, then saw that his number was on his telephone. He read it off into the mouthpiece. It was way up in the 1800s; probably the date of some battle in the Crimean War. At least it gave him what the hotel no doubt regarded as a privileged view. From his window he could see six clogged freeways, a line of giant electricity pylons, and the bald, oily levee at the edge of the river. The blue-brick factories below had names in scabbed lettering which meant nothing to him:
CRUNDEN MARTIN, NOOTER BOILERMAKERS, CORNELL SEED COMPANY, PEABODY COAL
. On the flight that had brought him here, the words of an old Judy
Garland song had been going around in his head like a repeating loop of tape. They contained more or less all he had ever known of the city.

Yet in St. Louis itself, even its own song didn’t work. Everyone called it
Lewis
, not
Louie
, and the grinding off-rhyme had been annoying the man since his arrival. He’d searched his head for a better-sounding alternative, but all he’d come up with so far was
Meet me in St. Louis, do, Miss
, which made the words read as if they were addressed to the call girl whom he didn’t dare call. He sat aggrievedly by the phone, staring at his fingernails and waiting for the daiquiri that he didn’t want. What the hell.
Suez? Who is? Where the zoo is?

He was, perhaps mercifully, ignorant of one important fact. In this city of desperate magical remedies, he had himself been set up as one of the saviors of St. Louis. He and all the other solitary men in their hotel rooms were supposed to be revitalizing downtown. Almost all native St. Louisans who could afford to had left the city long ago, moving west to Forest Park, Clayton, Ladue and the other suburbs out “in the county” where the tax base was rich, schools were good and trees grew thickly on every street. The city, stripped of all but its very poorest residents, was trying to bring itself back to life with passing tourists, conventioneers, the Saturday ball-game trade, visiting electricians from India, and me.

The city had “rehabilitated” La Clede’s Landing for us, installing fake gas lamps on the cobbled streets of wine bars, gift shops and novelty restaurants where we could do inspiriting things like “eat in the authentic atmosphere of an old-time political convention”—rooting for Calvin Coolidge over our Delmonico steaks and swinging to Herbert Hoover with our ice cream. It had built the giant ribbed shell of the Busch Stadium and the great Convention Center on the corner of Seventh and Martin Luther King. The hotels in which we were adrift were part of the plan, and so was the Gateway Arch.

The plan, so far as I could perceive it, struck me as crazy. It seemed on much the same level as Nutrition Theory and Mother Taylor’s Blessed Oil. Our gang of well-heeled transients was likely to bring only more miseries to the city. Temporarily uprooted, unfamilied, not even knowing each other, we were hopeless material for citizenship. We didn’t know which streets were safe and which weren’t. With time and
money heavy on our hands, we were natural bait for every crook in town. The only industries that really flourished on our presence were crime and prostitution.

I could see no sense in it at all. Baffled, I went to police headquarters and talked to a captain there.

“It’s just like chickens and chicken hawks,” he said. “How can you tell a guy who comes to a convention with his wife that if he goes north of the Convention Center he’s taking his life in his hands?”

“How far north does he have to go?”

“One block. Then you’re in the rat run. It belongs to the hoods. You can’t police it. The guys can disappear into any door. They just have to say the cops are on their tail, and the door will open for them, and it’s ‘Here, hide under the bed.’ They got it made.”

The conventions provided a game reserve which the natives treated as a free larder. We made easy pickings. Better still, we didn’t stay in town to give evidence against our attackers on the rare occasions when they were caught. The year before, a dancer in the Bolshoi Ballet had been raped.

“We got the guy. We got a signed confession out of him. And he’s walking free out there right now. Where was the girl when his case came up and we needed her to give evidence?”

“Moscow?”

“Well the one place she wasn’t was St. Louis. It’s the same all over. Guy has his wallet snatched, gets beat over the head, lands in City Hospital, and goes home to Washington State or someplace. We catch the thief. But by the time the case comes up, the guy’s saying to himself, ‘Hell, what was a hundred dollars and a headache?’ He’s not going to come back to St. Louis to testify. This is the last goddamn city in the world that he wants to make another visit to.”

The captain’s reasonable pessimism was lightened by one fact. Around Lafayette Square, on the South Side of the city, there was a cluster of airy brick Victorian houses. Many were in ruins, without windows and roofs; cheap to buy, expensive to knock into any sort of livable shape. Since the gasoline crisis, a lot of young couples had moved in from the county to the Lafayette Square district. While they were rebuilding their wrecked houses, they had had to mount twenty-four-hour guards on them. What was restored one day tended to be stolen or desecrated the next night.

“You need a lot of courage to move into Lafayette Square,” the captain said. “It could be a nightmare if you’ve got kids to worry about, but these folks are mostly too young for that. I admire their guts and I kind of feel relieved that nobody in my family’s tried it.”

These middle-class pioneers had not, at first, been much helped by the police.

“Again and again I was hearing the same line. My cops had been out on an attack or a burglary around Lafayette Square; all they’d said was ‘This wouldn’t happen to you if you lived out in the county.’ I told them, that’s the dumbest thing they can say. We need people to stay in the city. We need them to make the tax base bigger. Then we can have more cops, better schools, everything. I tell my guys, ‘It’s that tax base that’s paying your salary, so
listen
to these people. Keep ’em in the city. If they want protection, give them protection. If they want foot patrols or canine, give ’em foot patrols, give ’em canine.’ ”

“So if this goes on, how long d’you think it’ll take to make the city habitable again?”

“Well … if they raised the price of gas to ten dollars a gallon … if they gave me another thousand men … if …” He laughed. “I don’t know. Ten years. Maybe. With a big thick lucky streak thrown in.”

“Or magic.…” I told him about the other potions and theories that were being peddled around his city.

“Yeah. I reckon we ought to send out for a case of that Mother What’s’ername’s Oil. You know something? Next year, we got a national police convention coming up in St. Louis. I got to do a lot of the organization on that. You know what kind of convention brings more hookers into town than any other? Police conventions. That’s the kind of cleft stick I have to live in here in this office.”

Or Magic
.

I escaped a consultation with Madam Loraine by a hair’s breadth. Somewhere in the deranged alphabet of local radio stations I met a woman who asked me what I was doing for dinner that evening.

Her first word when she arrived was “Plus—” Sally lived in the middle of sentences to which she was making constant additions. She began with afterthoughts.

“Plus I had to stop for gas, which is why I’m late. Plus, I was late anyway.”

Her long fur coat looked as if she made a habit of going swimming in it. Her pale hair was making a successful jailbreak from the pins that she had jammed into it. She hadn’t yet removed the price tag from the neck of her scarlet cocktail dress.

“Plus … I don’t know. Oh, hell, just give me what you’re drinking, huh? What
are you
drinking?”

“Martini.”

“I
hate
Martinis. Yeah. Okay. No, that’s what I want. I’d like a Martini.”

She brought with her a buzz of static electricity. Tense, slender, she was all sparks and crackling filaments. Thinking, she scrunched up her narrow face as thoughts escaped from her in dozens like her unruly hair. Most of what I got was just the spin-offs and industrial waste of this complicated process. Scrunching, she said, “God!… like … because …” and her hand slapped at the air as if she’d seen a blowfly overhead. “… kind of … well,
you
know … right?” Somewhere in the dots between the words lay a whole succession of rejected ideas. It was hard to tell whether they were of the order of grocery lists or of Einstein’s relativity theory.

We ate at Anthony’s. The big, half-empty restaurant was unnaturally dark; its napery, by fitful candlelight, was unnaturally white. The waiter, insofar as I could clearly see his face, was Henry Kissinger.

“You’re not into
cars—
” Sally said, turning on me in a sudden bristle of angry boredom.

“No, not at all.” I felt stung.

“God.”

“Why?”

“What? Oh … I dunno. Yeah. I remembered. Sorry. No, the last
guy I dated here, he was into cars. You know what the conversation was? He was going on about
car washes
. I was pretty well switched off, not listening; then he leans over the table and says in this, like,
intimate
voice, ‘Which part do you like best? The washing or the waxing?’ That was our conversation, for godsake. I went into hiding in the powder room. God, he was a drag.”