The Bonfire of the Vanities (39 page)

He opened his eyes and tried to keep them open. The Bronx, the Bronx, he was in the Bronx. He walked toward the man with the gold earring, Buck. He kept listing to port. He felt dizzy. He wondered if he had suffered a stroke.

“Hello,” he said to Buck. He meant it to be cheery, but it came out as a gasp. Buck looked at him without a trace of recognition. So he said: “Peter Fallow, from
The City Light
.”

“Oh, hey, how you doing, bro.” The black man’s tone was agreeable but not enthusiastic. The author of the brilliant scoops in
The City Light
had expected enthusiasm. The black man resumed his conversation with the woman.

“When does the demonstration begin?” said Fallow.

Buck looked up distractedly. “Soon’s Channel 1 gets here.” By the time he reached the word
here
, he was once again looking at the woman.

“But where are the people?”

He stared at Fallow and paused, as if trying to figure him out. “They’ll be here…soon’s Channel I gets here.” He used the sort of voice you use for someone who is blameless but dense.

“I see,” said Fallow, who couldn’t see at all. “When, uh, as you say, Channel 1 arrives, uh…what takes place then?”

“Give the man the release, Reva,” said Buck. An intense demented-looking white woman dug down into a big vinyl tote bag on the sidewalk by her feet and handed him two pieces of paper stapled together. The paper, which was Xeroxed
—Xeroxed! Radium-blue! The snout!—
bore the letterhead of the American People’s Alliance. A headline, typed in capital letters, said:
THE PEOPLE DEMAND ACTION IN THE LAMB CASE
.

Fallow started to read it, but the words ran together like goulash in front of his face. Just then a bouncy young white man materialized. He was wearing an appallingly tasteless tweed jacket.

“Neil Flannagan from the
Daily News
,” said the bouncy man. “What’s going on?”

The woman named Reva dug out another press release. Mr. Neil Flannagan, like Fallow himself, was accompanied by a photographer. The bouncy Mr. Flannagan had nothing to say to Fallow, but the two photographers fell in with one another at once. Fallow could hear them complaining about the assignment. Fallow’s photographer, an odious little man who wore a cap, kept using the expression “crock a shit.” That was all that American newspaper photographers seemed to talk about with any relish whatsoever, their displeasure at being asked to leave the office and take pictures. The dozen demonstrators, meantime, were clearly unmoved by the presence of representatives of two of the city’s tabloids,
The City Light
and the
Daily News
. They continued to lounge about the van, their rage, if any, about the injustices wrought upon Henry Lamb successfully contained.

Fallow tried once more to read the press release but soon gave up. He looked about. The Poe Towers remained peaceful; abnormally so, given their size. On the other side of the street stood three white men. There was a little man in a tan windbreaker, a big porcine man with a drooping mustache wearing a warm-up jacket, and a balding man with blunt features wearing a poorly made gray suit and a Yank striped necktie. Fallow wondered who they were. But mainly he wanted to sleep. He wondered if he could sleep standing up, like a horse.

Presently he heard the woman, Reva, say to Buck: “I think that’s them.” Both of them looked down the street. The demonstrators came to life.

Coming up the street was a large white van. On its side, in huge letters, was the inscription
THE LIVE
1. Buck, Reva, and the demonstrators began walking toward it. Mr. Neil Flannagan, the two photographers, and, finally, Fallow himself tagged along behind them. Channel 1 had arrived.

The van came to a stop, and out of the passenger’s side of the front seat came a young man with a great fluffy head of dark curly hair and a navy blazer and tan pants.

“Robert Corso,” said Reva, reverently.

The side doors of the van slid open, and two young men in jeans and sweaters and running shoes stepped out. The driver stayed at the wheel. Buck hurried forward.

“Yo-o-o-o-o! Robert Corso! How you doing, man!” Suddenly Buck had a smile that lit up the street.

“Okay!” said Robert Corso, trying to sound enthusiastic in return. “Okay.” He obviously had no idea who this black man with the gold earring was.

“What you want us to do?” asked Buck.

The bouncy young man broke in: “Hey, Corso, Neil Flannagan,
Daily News
.”

“Oh, hi.”

“What you want us to—”

“Where you guys been?”

“What you want us to—”

Robert Corso looked at his watch. “It’s only 5:10. We’re going on live at 6:00. We got plenty a time.”

“Yeah, but I got a seven o’clock deadline.”

“What you want us to do?” Buck insisted.

“Well…hey!” said Robert Corso. “I don’t know. What would you do if I wasn’t here?”

Buck and Reva looked at him with funny little grins on, as if he must be joking.

“Where are Reverend Bacon and Mrs. Lamb?” said Robert Corso.

“In Mrs. Lamb’s apartment,” said Reva. Fallow took it badly. No one had bothered to apprise him of this fact.

“Hey, whenever you say,” said Buck.

Robert Corso shook his great fluffy head. He muttered, “Well, hell, I can’t run this thing for you.” Then, to Buck: “It’ll take us a little while to set up. I guess the sidewalk’s the best place. I want to get the buildings in the background.”

Buck and Reva went to work. They began gesturing and giving instructions to the demonstrators, who now went back toward their van and began picking up the picket signs, which were stacked on the sidewalk. A few people had begun drifting over from the Poe Towers to the scene.

Fallow gave up on Buck and Reva and approached Robert Corso. “Excuse me,” he said. “I’m Peter Fallow, from
The City Light
. Did I hear you say that Reverend Bacon and Mrs. Lamb are here?”

“Fallow?” said Robert Corso. “You’re the one who wrote the stories?” He held out his hand and shook Fallow’s with enthusiasm.

“I’m afraid so.”

“You’re the reason we’re up at this goddamned place?” He said it with an appreciative smile.

“Sorry about that.” Fallow felt a glow inside. This was the sort of tribute he expected all along, but he hadn’t expected to get it from a TV person.

Robert Corso turned serious. “Do you think Bacon is really on the level about this one? Well, obviously you do.”

“You don’t?” asked Fallow.

“Aw hell, you never know with Bacon. He’s fairly outrageous. But when I interviewed Mrs. Lamb, I was impressed, to tell you the truth. She seems like a good person to me—she’s bright, she’s got a steady job, she has a nice, neat little apartment. I was impressed. I don’t know—I believe her. What do you think?”

“You’ve already interviewed her? I thought you were getting ready to interview her here.”

“Well, yeah, but that’s just for the wraparound. We’ll wrap around live at six o’clock.”

“Wrap around live…I don’t believe I know about wrapping around live.”

The irony was lost on the American, however. “Well, what we do is, I came up here with a crew this afternoon, after your story came out. Thanks a lot for that! I really love assignments in the Bronx. Anyway, we interviewed Mrs. Lamb and we interviewed a couple of the neighbors and we got some footage of Bruckner Boulevard and the place where the boy’s father was killed and all that stuff, and some stills of the boy. So we’ve already got most of the story on tape. It’ll run for about two minutes, and what we do now is, we go on live during the demonstration, and then we’ll roll the tape, and then we’ll cut back in live and wrap it up with a live segment. That’s wrapping it up live.”

“But what will you show? There’s no one here but this lot. Most of them are white.” Fallow motioned toward Buck and Reva.

“Oh, don’t worry. There’ll be plenty of people here as soon as our telescope goes up.”

“Your telescope.”

“Our remote transmitter.” Robert Corso looked toward the van. Fallow followed his eyes. He could see the two crewmen in blue jeans inside.

“Your remote transmitter. By the way, where are your competitors?”

“Our competitors?”

“The other television stations.”

“Oh, we were promised an exclusive.”

“Really? By whom?”

“Bacon, I guess. That’s what I don’t like about the setup. Bacon’s so fucking manipulative. He’s got a pipeline to my producer, Irv Stone. You know Irv?”

“I’m afraid I don’t.”

“You’ve heard of him.”

“Ummm, actually I haven’t.”

“He’s won a lot of awards.”

“Ummm.”

“Irv’s—well, Irv’s all right, but he’s one of these old bastards who was a campus radical back in the 1960s, when they were having the antiwar demonstrations and everything. He thinks Bacon’s this romantic leader of the people. He’s a fucking operator, is what I think. But anyway, he promised Irv an exclusive if he’d put it on live at six o’clock.”

“That’s very cozy. But why would he want to do that? Why wouldn’t he want all the stations to be here?”

“Because that way he might get nothing out of it. I bet you every day there’s twenty or thirty demonstrations going on in New York, and they’re all competing for coverage. This way he knows we’ll play it big. If we go to the trouble of sending out the remote van, and if we go live, and if we think we have an exclusive, then it’ll go at the top of the news. It’ll be live, and it’ll be a big deal, and tomorrow 5 and 7 and 2 and the rest of them’ll figure they better cover the story, too.”

“I see,” said Fallow. “Hmmmm…But how can he guarantee you, as you say, an exclusive? What will prevent the other, uh, channels from coming here?”

“Nothing, except that he won’t tell them the time or the place.”

“He wasn’t so considerate of me, was he?” said Fallow. “I notice the
Daily News
seems to have the time and the place.”

“Yes,” said Robert Corso, “but you’ve had exclusives for two days now. Now he has to let the other newspapers in on it.” He paused. His handsome young fluffy-haired American face looked melancholy all of a sudden. “But you do think it’s a legitimate story, don’t you?”

“Oh, absolutely,” Fallow said.

Corso said, “This Henry Lamb is—was—is a nice kid. An honor student, no police record, he’s quiet, the neighbors seem to like him—isn’t that the way it strikes you?”

“Oh, no question about it,” said the creator of the honor student.

Reva approached them. “We’re all set. Just say when.”

Robert Corso and Fallow looked to the sidewalk, where the three dozen pickets were now lined up informally. They held the shafts of the picket signs on their shoulders, like wooden guns.

Robert Corso said, “Bacon’s ready? And Mrs. Lamb?”

Reva said, “Well, you tell me or Buck. Reverend Bacon doesn’t want to come down here with Mrs. Lamb and just stand around. But he’s ready.”

“Okay,” said Robert Corso. He turned toward
THE LIVE
1 van. “Hey, Frank! You guys ready?”

From inside the van: “Just about!”

A heavy whirring noise began. Out of the top of the van rose a silvery shaft, a cylinder. Attached to the top of the shaft was a Day-Glo-orange banner or bunting. No, it was a cable, a heavily insulated cable, wide but flat, like an electric eel. The screaming orange eel was wrapped around the shaft in a spiral. The silvery shaft and the orange spiral kept rising, rising, rising. The shaft was in sections, like a telescope, and it went up, up, up, and the van whirred and whirred and whirred.

People began emerging from the silent towers of the project, which was silent no longer. A boiling noise, the boiling noise of many voices, rose from the blasted heath. Here they came, men, women, packs of boys, young children, their eyes fastened to the ascending silver-and-orange lance and its Radiation Orange banner.

Now the shaft had risen two and a half stories above the street, with its orange eel wrapped around it. The street and the sidewalk were empty no longer. A huge good-natured crowd gathered around for the beano. A woman yelled out, “Robert Corso!” Channel 1! The fluffy-haired man who would be on TV!

Robert Corso looked toward the pickets, who had formed a lazy oval on the sidewalk and were beginning to march. Buck and Reva stood by. Buck had a bullhorn in his hand. He kept his eyes pinned on Robert Corso. Then Robert Corso looked toward his crewmen. His cameraman stood six feet away. The camera looked very small next to the van and the tremendous shaft, but the crowd was spellbound by its deep, deep cataract eye. The camera wasn’t even on, but every time the cameraman turned to talk to the soundman, and the great eye swung about, a ripple went through the crowd, as if the machine had its own invisible kinetic momentum.

Buck looked at Robert Corso and raised one hand, palm up, which asked, “When?” Robert Corso shrugged and then wearily pointed his finger toward Buck. Buck lifted the bullhorn to his mouth and yelled: “Whadda we want?”

“Justice!” chanted the three dozen pickets. Their voices sounded terribly thin against the backdrop of the crowd and the towers of the project and the splendid silver lance of
THE LIVE 1
.

“
WHADDA WE GET
?”

“Ra-cism!”

“
WHADDA WE WANT
?”

“Jus-tice!” They were a little louder, but not much.

“
WHADDA WE GET
?”

“Ra-cism!”

Six or eight boys in their early teens were shoving and bumping one another and laughing, struggling to get into the camera’s line of vision. Fallow stood off to one side of the star, Robert Corso, who was holding his microphone but saying nothing. The man with the high-tech horn moved closer to the oval line of pickets, and the crowd heaved in response. The signs and banners came bobbing by.
WEISS JUSTICE IS WHITE JUSTICE…LAMB: SLAUGHTERED BY INDIFFERENCE…LIBERATE JOHANNE BRONX…GAY FIST STRIKE FORCE AGAINST RACISM…THE PEOPLE CRY OUT: AVENGE HENRY!…QUIT STALLING, ABE!…GAY AND LESBIAN NEW YORK DEMAND JUSTICE FOR OUR BROTHER HENRY LAMB…CAPITALISM+RACISM="LEGALIZED" MURDER…HIT’N’RUN’N’LIE TO THE PEOPLE!…ACTION NOW
!…