"The
high council of Gor is a council of spiritual warriors that are part of the
Hierarchy of Light. They’re spiritual beings. And that is the council that
I am a Ritual Master on."

Talking
here with Sondra Shaye, founder of Park Slope’s Archangel Healing Light
Center, where she offers a number of services and classes: DNA activation, astral
travel, channeling, sacred divine geometry, ritual magic and more. Shaye’s
a slender, upbeat woman in jeans, heavy-soled black shoes and dark bobbed hair
who’s prone to giggle at her own assertions, as if she’s aware of
how they might sound to the skeptical. The effect is more of a bright-eyed class
president than of a demon-fighter who occupies a position on a celestial council.

A former
corporate lawyer and actress, Shaye is an Initiated Adept and Teacher in the
Rocky Mountain Mystery School, which is based in an unspecified sacred location
in the Utah portion of its namesake mountains, and is led by a gentleman named
Gudni Gudnason, a Utah resident of Icelandic birth, about whom more in a bit.
Our planet, Shaye explains, hosts seven mystery schools. But the RMMS, which
Shaye discovered when she attended the New Life Expo at the New Yorker Hotel
somewhat more than a year ago, is the only one that doesn’t cultivate secrecy–that
labors to disseminate its teachings to the masses in generous fashion.

"The
other six schools are closed to the public," she says. "They’re
secret. You can hardly even find them. I mean, you could die getting to them.
They’re in the middle of a rainforest, or you have to pass over a huge
abyss…"

As for the
Rocky Mountain Mystery School: "Our system of knowledge comes in a direct
lineage from King Solomon. He was an incredible metaphysician and magician in
the highest sense, and he actually…gathered all of the highest healers and
shamans and metaphysicians from all over the planet, and gathered all of the
highest knowledge that existed. He went to ancient Egypt, he went to Tibet.
He went to India. He gathered all the shamans from South America, which was
a crazy thing to do back then."

Solomon’s
mysteries eventually passed, by oral transmission, to a certain American Indian
chief, who gave them to Gudnason. "Finally, Gudni had all the knowledge,"
Shaye explains. "He and the Native American met one time, either in a park
or a graveyard–I don’t remember which. They hugged, and that was it.
That was the transfer."

Gudnason,
who is in his 40s, possesses intimidating spiritual energies. "He was born
without any veils, which means he can see all the dimensions. He was born with
a twin brother who died 30 minutes after birth–because the brother was
so advanced that he only needed 30 minutes on the planet." But Gudnason
stayed in contact with his dead sibling. "He grew up with his brother.
And his brother brought him all of these ascending masters to teach him, his
whole life." Gudnason also used to "sit with Merlin, in physical form,
and Merlin would teach him all of these amazing metaphysical things."

When I stupidly
referred to the Rocky Mountain Mystery School as a new-age phenomenon, Shaye
gently corrected me. It’s not new age. It’s at least as old
as Solomon–who, were he alive today, would be roughly 3000 years of age.
Besides, as Shaye makes clear, "There’s a lot of new-age stuff that
has no accuracy. It may be helpful to people, and I guess that’s why it’s
here, and that’s wonderful, and I support that. But it doesn’t mean
that it’s accurate, necessarily."

What, I
wanted to know, is the story with DNA activation? Shaye explained that it’s
a sacred inheritance from the ancient Egyptian priest class.

"We
all have 24 strands to our DNA structure. Those 24 strands are contained in
12 codons. Each codon has two strands. So we go in with a special instrument
that has a very powerful crystal on the end of it, that can put a great deal
of light into a small space. We go through the etheric body–we don’t
touch the physical body. It’s behind the neck area. And we light up each
of the codons… And it’s just an incredible thing. At that point you get
all of the benefits that are contained within your DNA, which is improved health.
You use more of your brain, you actually become smarter, the chatter in your
head goes away, the drama in your life disappears."

What about
channeling?

Through
channeling, Shaye said, "You can go to any dimension that you want. You
can go to what’s called the Akashic Records, which is a place in higher
dimensions that contains the records of your whole life. And everybody’s
life–but you can’t read anybody’s records who’s still alive,
except your own. And then, combining that with astro travel, you can go to other
parts of the physical world. You can go to other universes, you can go to other
galaxies."

And the
war? I was interested to know if the Hierarchy of Light could indicate how we
were going to make it through this ordeal.

"There
are many nonhuman beings on the planet right now, from the other dimensions
and other galaxies, because of how important the planet Earth is, and how far
into a state of crisis we have allowed ourselves to get. We have already avoided
a lot of crises that would have happened because of the amount of lightwork
that’s being done on the planet."

Lightwork?
I was struck by the image.

"Lightwork,"
Shaye repeated. "There is so much positive energy being poured onto this
planet by people like me… There was enough of that lightwork being done that
we have avoided a lot of catastrophes. Metatron predicted that there would be
further attacks after the World Trade Center on cities all over this country,
and that we were able to avoid because of all the positive energy that so many
people poured onto the planet."

Metatron,
for the record, is an archangel.

Thus, the
spiritual warrior in New York City, at a time during which we could probably
use as many of them as possible. Shaye says that Ritual Masters are "God’s
SWAT team"–quick-strike forces against the interdimensional demons
that generate bad energy. She points out that "New York is built on limestone,
which amplifies everything. That’s why New York is what it is. All of the
positive and all of the negative of everything that occurs in New York is amplified
many times. That’s why it’s such an incredible vortex of power."

"I
tried to leave New York," she says, "but apparently higher forces,
higher beings, want me to work here. It’s funny, because I was about to
move to Northern California after the attack." But she was compelled to
stay. "Because this is the place where I can do the most good right now.
This is where I’m needed."

You can
reach Sondra Shaye and the Archangel Healing Light Center at 718-398-7560.

Oh the rain
keeps a-fallin’, as the great Freddy Fender sang…

The point
was Jersey coastal exploration. Alan Cabal had heard somewhere about a ghost
town called Seabreeze, full of stray dogs, down there on the far side of the
state of New Jersey, along the Delaware Bay. That part of the Garden State has,
in places, a Lost World loneliness about it. There are saltwater bogs, and amidst
them squat shacks sun-bleached into a sullen grayness that huddle amidst cattails
at the ends of roads. (You can theorize about what goes on in these cockeyed
shelters. Madwomen stare out from the windowpanes and commune with the flashing
buoys offshore. Fishermen stomp in with shotguns on windy mornings, and blast
their fathers-in-law, and no one ever knows.)

So we tumbled
downstate like a marble in Cabal’s vile old Chrysler. Cleared, first, the
Lincoln Tunnel, then ground in serious rainy traffic along the turnpike, both
of us muzzy after a Friday night. Gathered steam south of Metuchen when the
traffic started to flow through the spittle, and finally there we were–Cumberland
County, on the other side of the Great Egg Harbor River and Atlantic City and
the Pine Barrens and the world. New Jersey in my experience is like a pool table
with a bad tilt. If you’re a smart ball, you tend to roll down to the southeast
corner and south-central flank, where the land grows damp with the thought of
all that surrounding water. There’s the bay, first of all, which funnels
up toward the north and the west to narrow into the Delaware River. But also
there’s the Atlantic Ocean beyond Cape May, and on the other end of the
scale of magnitude, there are the Stow and Back and Cedar and Nantuxent Creeks
and the Cohansey and Maurice and Manumuskin Rivers, which you’ll see on
your map as scrawls of blue penetrating up into the mass of Jersey. Sometimes
when you’re down there you’re also breathing air that not long ago
hovered over the Chesapeake, which isn’t far to the west. It’s on
the Maryland side of Delaware’s narrow throat, the part of the state that
contains Saint Georges and Delaware City.

Rattled
off the turnpike, Cabal bunched over the wheel and sucking cigarettes into his
unshaven face and grinning and bobbing his head and chortling yah hah hah
hah hah hah hah! in anticipation.

"So
if there’s fucked-up dogs in Seabreeze, don’t make any sudden motions,"
Cabal instructed as he drove. "Just get sloowwwly back into the
fucking car. And if, as soon as we drive in, the beasts surround us, the hell
with it. Do not leave the fucking vehicle."

Seabreeze
sits at the end of a tiny spur that spins off Rte. 601 east of Fairton and wends
through swamps after you ride through the flats around places like Vineland
and Millville–through the radish and turnip and corn fields, glorying in
the rain.

And after
you ride, also, through the new autoparks and shopping trashscapes that replace
the fields. Orchards staked out with surveyor’s tape, transforming themselves
into subdivisions: a stupid, and quintessentially American, variety of extinction.

•

Cabal and
I are both fans of H.P. Lovecraft, the great New England horror writer of the
early 20th century, and we had on our minds that weekend his great story "The
Shadow over Innsmouth." It’s about a tourist–the narrator–who’s
compelled to visit the Innsmouth of the title, an isolated coastal Massachusetts
town he’s been warned to avoid. But he can’t help himself. He’s
got to see the place for some reason; he’s got that crazy Innsmouth feeling
in his bones. He hops a bus and wanders the mostly abandoned, decaying and fantastically
creepy municipality, occasionally running into baleful and vile-looking natives.

Lovecraft
fans will be familiar with the tale’s great premise. Apparently, Innsmouth’s
good country people took, generations ago, to mating with the immortal "Deep
Ones" who live underwater, beyond the reef off the town’s coast. Our
narrator, in the course of the day in Innsmouth, learns more about the place’s
secret than he should, and makes a narrow escape. He subsequently discovers,
after leaving, something very disconcerting about–

But enough
said. Read the story yourself. There’s a lot going on in "The Shadow
over Innsmouth": fear of miscegenation and tainted bloodlines and a lot
of sexual anxiety. I don’t want to give too much away–you should
read this tale–but Lovecraft’s working a serious Freudian theme,
too. The idea of the death impulse comes into play–that desire to return,
in death, to the sheltering womb, to the watery timeless eternal oblivion that’s
approximated by the Deep Ones’ underwater lair. And you’ve got the
fear of the Other (as the sophomores love to put it), and the concomitant fear
that one’s infected by the Other.

One of the
things I like most about the story, though, is Lovecraft’s preoccupation
with the town’s geography. Consider this passage, which occurs when the
narrator encounters, to his relief, another out-of-towner, in this case a boy
who’s employed by an Innsmouth grocery: "Warning me that many of the
street signs were down, the youth drew for my benefit a rough but ample and
painstaking sketch map of the town’s salient features. After a moment’s
study I felt sure that it would be of great help, and pocketed it with profuse
thanks… My programme, I decided, would be to thread the principal streets,
talk with any non-natives I might encounter, and catch the eight o’ clock
coach for Arkham. The town, I could see, formed a significant and exaggerated
example of communal decay; but being no sociologist I would limit my serious
observations to the field of architecture."

Everything
about Innsmouth screams GET OUT–but this guy doesn’t care. No, what
he wants is to traipse around as if with a Baedeker, an aficionado appreciating
a handsome facade here, a well-wrought cornice there. The fact is, he’s
fascinated with the town’s mystique, by Innsmouth as a unique–if uniquely
unsettling–physical place. "Recrossing the gorge on the Main Street
bridge," he relates, "I struck a region of utter desertion which somehow
made me shudder. Collapsing huddles of gambrel roofs formed a jagged and fantastic
skyline, above which rose the ghoulish, decapitated steeple of an ancient church.
Some houses along Main Street were tenanted, but most were tightly boarded up.
Down unpaved side streets I saw the black, gaping windows of deserted hovels,
many of which leaned at perilous and incredible angles through the sinking of
part of the foundations…

"Fish
Street was as deserted as Main, though it differed in having many brick and
stone warehouses still in excellent shape…"

And so on.
The physical descriptions of the town go on and on. Joyce once, in discussing
Ulysses, remarked that if Dublin burned to the ground you could rebuild
it on the basis of Joyce’s descriptions. Maybe, but you’d have an
easier time building Lovecraft’s Innsmouth from scratch. A place can hum
with power, Lovecraft’s suggesting. Each singular place has its own holy
energy, offers its own unique resistance to the human consciousness, which is
incapable of mastering it, of comprehending the mysterious extent of its meanings.
You wonder at the extent to which Lovecraft had absorbed–in order to invert
into something pessimistic and dark–the lessons of his New England forebears,
the Transcendentalists. The world vibrates with energy, even if a ghastly one–sinister
warehouses and deserted hovels as well as blades of grass. No less than Walden,
"The Shadow over Innsmouth" takes its place in the canon of reverent
literary treatments of place.

I guess
Cabal and I sought an experience of place similar to the one Innsmouth offered
Lovecraft’s narrator. Naively, we hoped to find a place that thrummed with
singularity and power and meaning.

•

The trouble
was, Seabreeze wasn’t really there. We drove through bogs. Every
couple minutes rain lashed the windshield, slowing us to where our progress
assumed a ritualistic significance. We were acolytes approaching an altar. We
saw no other cars or people, which was remarkable after the festering turnpike
and the suburban slums through which we’d passed. Finally, Cabal brought
the car to a halt, because our progress was blocked by a tree that sprawled
over the two-lane roadway. We stepped out into the day, which was acrid with
the smell of vegetation, and inspected. It was hard to see why the tree was
there. The trunk disappeared into the woods, so we couldn’t see whether
it had been cut, or split by lightning or uprooted in a windstorm.

Cabal bopped,
squinted, pointed, smoked. "That’s weird, man. That’s fucking
weird. That tree should not be there. I’m getting the distinct
sense that someone does not want us coming to this town. That is weird."
Alan’s other theory–besides Seabreeze being overrun by Deep Ones–was
that South Jersey hillbillies maintained a meth lab there. Such people can be
prone to enforce a certain level of seclusion. "There’s no way you’re
gonna tell me someone didn’t put that tree there on purpose. No way."

Cabal mashed
out his cigarette and we climbed back into the car and drove on the shoulder
of the road around the obstruction. Crawled along for another couple hundred
yards, with woods to the left of us and a crop field to the right, separated
from the road by a margin of lime-green grass. We had the sense that we were
intruding here on many varieties of solitude. (There is, in fact, a horrifying
solitude about an empty tilled field.) Soon the pavement ended and we inched
up to a fork in the road. A gate blocked the right fork–so we took the
left, and wallowed at 4 mph over dirt, the Chrysler pigging in mud puddles and
bottoming out, brush whipping the windows.

We hit Seabreeze
eventually. Big anticlimax. Couple beach shacks and a strand on the far side
of marshes, and that’s about it. The cabins perch on stilts, and several
of them seem to have been abandoned to rot. Where were the semi-amphibious natives,
where was the evil stink of fish? No one’s around but some woman on a raised
porch, stolid and wide-hipped and eternal, sucking dirt off a floormat with
a Handi-Vac. Also some houses overgrown with weeds–FOR SALE. Also a cur
straining at a chain. Delaware’s visible through the mist on the other
side of the estuary. Delaware’s no picnic, but where were the "endless
avenues of fishy-eyed vacancy and death"? We’d have settled for a
meth-twitching hillbilly.

We parked
the car so we could look over the beach. Cabal slouched around to the trunk
and began to download warm and vaguely melancholy beers from the vicinity of
the wheelwell. Seabreeze was another meaningful place that, in a culture that
needs them and that’s destroying them, didn’t exist.

•

Rolling
along southern Jersey in the rain, through Cabal’s old haunts–he’s
from southern Jersey, a 47-year-old orphan child of Camden, that horror city
(one might reasonably choose to live in Innsmouth rather than in Camden) that
at some point in the last generation slouched out to the shed, wrapped its lips
around the barrel of a shotgun and blew itself away.

We stopped
in biker bars in the few still-unspoiled margins of this suburbanizing coast.
The point was to have a drink and give Cabal a chance to crawl in his rheumatic
splay-footed gait past the bruisers on their stools and go yah hah hah hah
hah hah hah! as he scratched his way over to the juke. Piled back into his
car to drive through sheets of rain, and we couldn’t read the road signs,
and we lost ourselves in the villages, and Cabal pulled U-turns as the beer
signs glowed from the groceries, as comforting from our perspective under the
rain as a nightlight is to a child. (Lear should have had a beer sign out on
the heath–he wouldn’t have carried on so.)

We passed
through the village of Bridgeton, where Cabal was born to the mother who abandoned
him. He suspects he’s the product of a date-rape, or worse.

"I’m
a fucking Deep One! You can tell! I’m half fucking fish! You can tell from
my unblinking fucking eyes! My mother fucked a Deep One! Yah hah hah,"
and etc.–degenerating into a smoker’s cough, Cabal’s chest vibrating
with phlegm, his bloodshot eyes squinting behind those tinted eyeglasses that
he wears that are worn exclusively by Lebanese pimps, old stoners like himself
and schoolteachers who like to spend a lot of time in the boys’ room. You
choose at random one of Bridgeton’s houses, and imagine that there took
place within it, almost half a century ago, Cabal’s lonesome nativity.

Driving
in southern coastal Jersey, you have to deal with the juxtapositions: the margins
of the good old towns up against the strips, the malls killing off the old commercial
centers. In the name of what? So much of being an American these days is mourning
an irrecoverable loss, for the way they’re wiping from the continent the
last resistant nodes against the obliterating sprawl, the last places where
your body can fit itself comfortably into a humane geography. It’s conceivable
there might have been a time when you could have imagined, despite everything,
something redemptive about the idea of American "progress," and allied
your will with it. You think of Whitman, captivated by the energy of American
commerce and industry, equating capitalist vitality with the liberty and the
deeply meaningful vernacular culture of the cities he loved–Brooklyn, Manhattan
and even his adopted hometown of Camden. There might have been a time when to
think of America was to think of the possibility of an urban civilization–to
think of the sort of fecund city culture in which Boston and Philadelphia artisans
could grow the seeds of a revolution. Now you think of a lumbering suburban
empire, spreading its carceral blight across a continent and a world.

•

I was stunned
by Asbury Park–that fantastic desolation. In my innocence, I had expected
a tawdry but viable working-class seaside carnival town, not unlike Coney Island.

"Naw,"
Cabal shrugged when we pulled in to the bombed-out shore city the next day.
We’d spent the night near, and breakfasted in, the wonderful beach community
of Ocean City. "You’ll see. It’s bad news. Camden by the sea."

He was right.
Shells of buildings jut from the rubble. You might as well be standing in some
precinct of postwar Stalingrad. Asbury Park, that once-magical crystallization
of lights, that city that must have been one of the great repositories for American
dreams–you wonder what must it have been like to sail, generations ago,
off Asbury’s shores, and see the merry explosion of glittering neon, the
pulsing carnival lights, glowing and hissing and throbbing in the distance,
there on the land, on the far side of the lavender swells. How many places like
Asbury Park does a civilization have to kill before it’s no longer possible
to consider it legitimate?

I’m
fascinated by the ghostly disembodied bits of information you can find shooting
around in the void of the Web. You can trace the arc of a city’s history
by culling orphaned data. You’d start with historical certainties:

"It
all started in 1871 when James A. Bradley, a New York manufacturer, bought an
uninhabited 500 acre tract of woodland for $90,000. In poor health, Bradley
sought refuge and peace in this restful place. After a short stay in Asbury
Park and with his health restored, Bradley threw all his energies into building
a seashore resort that would be ‘second to none.’ The city was named
in honor of Bishop Francis Asbury and Asbury Park was incorporated as a City
on March 25, 1897."

And: "Once
a staple in Asbury Park’s downtown, the famous multi-level Steinbach’s
Department Store on Cookman Avenue. The store was located in the heart of Downtown
Asbury Park and served as the pillar of the retail community. The store opened
in 1912."

And: "Palace
Amusements at Lake Ave. & the Boardwalk. Built 1887, an addition added in
1958."

And: "Albion
Hotel & Motel… It’s Modern… It’s Luxurious… A New Luxury
Motel… Each Room Has Its Own Private Terrace… A Fabulous New Catering Hall
Just Completed… Open All Year…"

Next you’d
collect those passages that address the juxtaposition of a remembered Asbury
Park with the disaster the city represents right now:

"My
grandmother lived in Asbury Park from 1950 to 1978. I visited her each summer.
My visits were filled with rides on the Swan Boats, Skip-bo games, salt water
taffy, sandy feet and wonderful walks on the boards. When I [t]ook my husband
back to see the shore in 1990 I was shocked. I cried. He never got to see even
a glimpse of the childhood joys."

And: "I
was born (1948) and raised in Asbury Park. I have such fond memories that I
cry every time I go home and see the depressed state of my beloved city. It
was a wonderful, safe place to grow up. Its (not it’s, which means it is)
1.2 miles created a buffer from the rest of the world.

"We
went to Asbury Park on Friday. We knew that Asbury Park and the boardwalk were
pretty much deserted, but nothing could have prepared us when we walked up to
the boardwalk…the desolation. We both cried. It was very sad. We took photo’s
[sic] of all the p[l]aces we remembered."

You’d
end with stunned evocations of a present degradation:

"The
boardwalk is deserted and in decay. Many beaches are closed and unsafe for bathers.
The buildings still standing are boarded up or falling down. With few exceptions,
the city is truly a ghost-town. Though closed through most of the 1980s, the
Berkeley-Carteret Hotel still stands and continues to operate as a first-class
hotel in what appears to be a war-torn third-class country."

And: "How
can a community just disappear right off the map? Asbury Park reminded me of
Havana, or even war-torn Sarajevo."

And: "Asbury
Park is the Beirut of NJ and normally should be avoided at all costs."

Asbury Park was filled with
gays for the Jersey Pride festivities, which are presumably held in that grand
ruin because–because why? Was Newark unavailable? They strolled hand-in-hand
amidst heaps of crumbled rebar, like streamlets of dye dispersing through sewage.
Did they know where they were? Grease smoke poured from the kitchens of the
bars. You can walk right out the back doors of saloons in Asbury Park and into
gardens strewn with wire, bottles, chunks of motors, twisted furniture, snarls
of rope. Hard local whites, the last men standing, sit there on wrecked chairs,
standing sometimes to walk over and peer at the degraded world through the fencing.

A hardcore
punk matinee thundered through the air from the Stone Pony. Since few buildings
are still standing in Asbury Park, there’s no spatial context to the place,
no demarcations. You don’t need to turn corners in Asbury Park, and that’s
somehow monstrous. Your body wanders on unnatural diagonals through the weed
fields, but the mind requires right angles for its sanity. A seaside bowl filled
with wreckage.

Later that
day, up on the beach at Sandy Hook, we gazed up toward the city: the World Trade
Center towers to the distant north, taller than life, the poles around which
the wet world revolves. We stood there near the high-tide line, Cabal and I,
and watched hippies wade into the surf, clutching their bodies as they staggered
from the undertow, and we felt the world whip along under the cold diamond stylus
of the sun.

Back in
the parking lot, an undercover officer glares from his parked chromed SUV: a
bullheaded black guy, windows open, doing surveillance. I don’t approve
of this entrapment thing. Some underage kid innocently opens a beer in the parking
lot, and next thing he knows the SUV will be on his back, he’ll be hauled
in for exercising his birthright under the American sky.

"I
just know that’s a cop," Cabal’s saying, opening the trunk.
"I’ll bet anything that guy’s a cop." Cabal has a
ravenous appetite for marijuana, and so was disappointed by the policeman’s
presence. He had wanted to smoke some before driving home. "There’s
no way that guy’s not a cop."

An empty
lot in the middle of the Jersey Nowhere, with the smell of salt and the seabirds
whipping through the huge day–and you’re under surveillance. Incredible.
The huge SUV orders the world around it, it draws the parking lot’s lines
up around itself to make a net to ensnare you with. We leaned against the car,
Cabal drinking his warm beer.

"Gimme
the keys and let me drive out of here."

"Hold
on. Just hold on. If he comes over I’ll put it in my mouth and eat it.
I never carry more than I can eat."

Finally–we
couldn’t wait the guy out–I drove Cabal’s car back to the turnpike
and joined the parade home.

"I
just know that’s a cop."

In parts
of America, near the beach, here’s your precise mathematical ratio, here’s
what the ratio is on some days: one policeman for every two citizens. A two-for-one
deal in some of the corners of this surveilled America. You won, sir. You waited
us out. Congratulations.

You won.

QUIK DRAW
HOMELESS ARTIST 5 MIN. I DRAW YOU HELP HELP ME HELP. Check out the fallout
from the New Economy meltdown. Get a load of this San Francisco youth begging
for change on 7th St. in the South of Market neighborhood, cringing on the pavement,
pop-eyed, clutching his sign: HELP HELP ME HELP. It’s one of those cold
Bay Area evenings, with the wind making the chill worse, so there’s a special
pathos to the wreckage. His back’s up against a garbage can, his mess is
scattered all over the sidewalk: bunch of colored pencils, chunks of cardboard,
assorted trash.

"C’mon,
man, three dollar, I draw you…"

He’s
not a bad-looking kid. Slim, shaved bald, nice jeans, nice square-toed shoes,
v-neck sweater.

"C’mon,
man, give me a break, man, three dollar–I draw your sweetie, then!"

Thus, South
of Market, West Coast epicenter of the dotcom phenomenon, in the winter of the
New Economy–a time in which, by way of an example of the changes that have
occurred, South of Market commercial vacancies have risen from 0.6 to 20 percent
in 18 months, according to The New York Times last week. In SoMA, as
in the Tenderloin and other San Francisco neighborhoods, there’s a residual
Walker Evans quality that reminds you that the city’s in some ways an old
Okie city. And now the dotcom kids join the skid-row parade. You pause to throw
them an odd respectful dime, they’re the lost aspiring angels of the mournful
American night…

•

What a bunch
of nonsense. Actually, the homeless guy sitting on the pavement against the
trashcan was precisely who he’s supposed to be in America: a black guy,
scrawny and desiccated like a sausage left to the wind, old enough to have been
strafed in Vietnam.

Meanwhile,
I’m hanging with our bald white friend up against the wall. He hops from
one shoe to the other against the cold, his hands in his pockets. Once in a
while he peers around the corner–because we’re in this long line,
wrapped around a brick wall, waiting to get into a serious hipster club, this
place called Cloud 9, the facade of which pulses with sky-blue light, and that
floats pure white above the surrounding neighborhood’s squalor like a big
creampuff. Anyway, once in a while he peers around the corner to see how much
progress we’re making toward the door, and then he pops his head back and
looks all goony and ironical and gets all up in your face and moves his head
back and forth as he steps from foot to foot and bunches and unbunches his shoulders
and puts his hands, palms forward, on either side of his head in order to frame
his latest profundity, all very clever and sarcastic and ironical, and every
comment he gives you–"Uh, yeah, I guess there’s a lot of out-of-work
dotcommers here. I guess"–comes in a little black box, as if
at the core of it there’s an insult for you to take home with you to enjoy
later, in your bedroom, alone. Bobs in and out of your airspace, in and out,
all up in your face. It’s like, I’m here, I’m not here, I’m
here, I’m–

It’s
24 hours until the Webby Awards, which are the Internet equivalent of the Grammies
or the Oscars, and we’re lined up, trying to get into the FuckedCompany.com
party. The guy’s big white egg of a head bounces around, it’s a bouncing
light-ball, it bops along the line, it whips back and forth, yes, he stands
on the balls of his feet, he bobs and weaves, he’s here, he’s not
here, he’s in, he’s–

"I’m
looking to get back on living paycheck to paycheck," a guy from
Rhode Island’s saying, a big friendly collegiate-looking guy.

What?

"I
said, I’m looking to get back on living paycheck to paycheck, get
it? I mean, instead of trying to get away from living paycheck to paycheck…"

The guy
lives in the neighborhood, in South of Market. He’s been out of work since
last fall. People all over the line are forming little groups to talk it all
over.

"I
got laid off in November, and just started looking two weeks ago. Sure was nice
laying out in Golden Gate Park all day, though."

"I
just got laid off two weeks ago," someone else says.

Across Stevenson
Alley you look past empty lots to low buildings on Market St. in the distance,
and in the near-view there’s a construction site, or at any rate a razed
lot, rimmed by fencing. You can stick your face up against the chainlinks and
look down into the foundation and get off on the sight of rats, dragging stuff
around, performing tasks, even working together and waiting their turns in a
foul rat way. And then occasionally–because the whole bunch of us standing
in this hundred-yard-long line represent an incredible haute-bourgeois explosion
amidst urban nastiness–occasionally we’ll be approached by creatures
from the Other Side. Crackwhores in sailors’ caps plant themselves where
Stevenson Alley debouches into 7th St., spread their legs and sway like they’re
on a heaving deck, either cackling or moaning wordlessly. Hustlers sidle up
and issue vague threats, then wait around in that hard, patient Beggar Triumphant
way while annoyed dotcom hipsters dig in the pockets of their Paul Smith stovepipe
trousers for loose change.

Aging fellow–leather
jacket, stubble, earring–nodding in the direction of the front of the line:
"Kind of sucks when a group of six just comes up and cuts in front of you."

"Life’s
not fair, as you can read on a little website called Fucked Company," someone
jokes.

Some DJ’s
bossa nova-inflected beats seep out into the alley through the pores of the
club’s wall. Beggars stumble along the gutter, groaning uggggggggghhhhhhh.

"It’s
bad, man. Wait’ll Oracle and Lucent start laying people off."

"Yeah.
Wow."

Whores bray
on the far side of 7th St., in front of the dirty bookstore.

"I
heard there’s a two-month wait of U-Hauls in San Francisco right now."

"Yeah?
And I heard San Francisco’s lost a hundred thousand in population."

"Foreclosure
rate in San Francisco’s the highest it’s been anywhere in 18 years."

"The
people who really got screwed were the H1B’s. Came over and bought houses
and everything. Now, 30 days, leave the country."

Get a load
of the slick leather jackets, the pumps, the skinny dudes in the cowboy hats,
the cellphones, the Palm Pilots, the Kate Spade bags, the sharp three-button
suits. And all the other accessories typical of extreme impoverishment and economic
victimization.

"All
right, here’s what I’m thinking, and don’t tell me I’m wrong,
because I don’t want to hear it. I’m thinking that with Greenspan’s
aggressive interest rate cuts, we’re gonna see a pickup in Q3."

"Yeah,
right."

"Ramen
and pasta, man. I did it in college. I can do it again."

"Shit,
man. You could work tomorrow. Tomorrow 8:30 a.m. you could be working. For 40K.
Shave off 30 percent of your salary and you could be working tomorrow."

Homeless
woman slobbers yaaaaaaaaaggggggghhhhh, and shakes her head, and slides
along the curb. It’s extraordinary. We’re all standing here in line,
knocking at the gates of heaven, while huge numbers of the underclass moan about
the block. We’re like people at a picnic, ignoring the bees. Seventh St.,
and up to Market–everywhere around here, beyond the boundaries of the shiny
light we exude, you’ve got the walking dead: hustlers hanging around overlit
storefronts, guys weaving with bottles.

"Shit,
I got laid off at 85 thousand, and just got a new job for 40."

"Forty?"

"That
sucks."

Bossa nova
slinking, temperature falling, wind blowing, hipsters chatting, homeless gabbling.
And in addition, there’s–well, there’s a plume of piss-steam
shooting from a manhole cover on Stevenson Alley.

"Oh
shit, there’s a sewer under there," someone notes, and we all laugh.
Warm, atomized piss sprays up against the chassis of the Grand Am that’s
parked above it, to snickers from everybody in the line. Whoever owns the car’s
screwed: the stench is going to be in his upholstery for a year. If it were
warm out, instead of San Francisco summer-freezing, the smell would be overwhelming.
The homeless artist, kind of manic and comic-aggressive–which is to say,
humiliated–stands up from his seat against the trashcan and slinks from
group to group: "I can draw. I can draw one of y’all, just
to show you I kin draw."

Firecrackers
go off in the distance for some reason. He drags his sign and shoves it up in
people’s faces: MY NAME IS YANKEE ALL I CAN DO IS DRAW KIN I DRAW YOU TONIGHT
3 MIN.

"You
know that restaurant Aqua? I hear it’s closed on Monday nights now. Makes
better sense to close it than to try to sell food in this economy."

Couple of
well-dressed women, and one says to the other: "The shit has hit the fan.
We’re a thousand claims backlogged. We’re gonna get two-hundred-ten
thousand before we can see the sun again."

"Like,
is that all in-house? Because I know we outsourced most of it. The original
business plan…"

She trails
off. Her friend jumps up and down to keep warm and keens, "Come on, Pud,
let us in!"

Meanwhile:
"I kin draw you. Just give me chance. I kin draw you."

Blown-apart
VFW cripples, mendicants, slobberers, whores. A slattern wheels down 7th toward
Market, clutching a roll of carpet under her arm. Ming Kee Thrift Store. Used
and New Household Equipment. George’s Newsstand, Books, Magazines. (Smut.)
Economy Fine Food, Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner Anytime.

What was
that, miss? You were saying? About the original business plan?

•

I enjoyed
that: "Come on, Pud, let us in!" The "Pud" in question
is, as you might know, the proprietor of FuckedCompany.com, the website that
serves as a nasty clearinghouse for news about dotcom failures and disasters.
It’s where you would have gone, on the day of the Cloud 9 party, to read
sarcastic blurbs reporting about which of the Internet concerns that employ–or
used to employ–or are run or owned by–the people standing in line
outside Cloud 9 happened, in the last 24 hours, to lay off 40 percent of their
staffs. Or to get evicted from their offices. Or to shut down their Atlanta
and Dallas branches. Or to declare Chapter 11. Or to announce that, while it
was fun being, for 16 months, the leading facilitator of online strategic partnerships
between this and that, or that and this–or some other example of the prevailing
dotcom cant–you’ve decided to sell off all the equipment and, like,
maybe go back to grad school or something.

Thing is,
when you’re a South of Market dotcommer, in an era that’s exposed
your whole overhyped economic sector as what sensible people thought it was
from the beginning, which is to say, kind of a joke, and you’re standing
in line on a cold night trying to sidle your way into a party hosted by a guy
who every morning showers your world with scorn–who might tomorrow, in
fact, make fun of you specifically–then what you’re really
doing is letting yourself off the hook. You’re saying self-absolving
things, among them: I was never really one of those people.
And, You are so right, man, this whole dotcom thing was self-indulgent and
dumb. You’re assuming an ironic distance from the whole mess that you
possibly haven’t earned. There’s a shamelessness here, which reminds
you that the dotcom boomlet was one of the defining economic phenomena of the
Clinton era, sharing with Clintonism a certain genius for obscuring superficiality
and greed with "bohemian" or "countercultural" signifiers
and rhetoric. The "Rock ’n’ Roll" president, whose familiarity
with weed-smoking, blowing loads in his intern’s mouth and Fleetwood Mac
made it kosher for liberals to cheer his eager capitulations to various right-wing
brutalities, slides along the same greasy continuum as a money culture that
insisted that consumption could be liberatory and oppositional.

Back in
December of 1999, a prominent media critic wrote the following: "In the
fifties and sixties, creative types all had a novel they were working on, and
in the seventies and eighties, a screenplay. In the e-decade, you’ve got
a business plan."

The dotcom
era: a generation’s–my generation’s–complete capitulation
to the money culture. This will be the dotcom sector’s most lasting contribution
to the world, and will be as difficult to extricate from the strands of our
civilization, such as it is, as chewing gum is difficult to remove from hair:
the concept of a money-culture bohemia.

•

But I set
out to write about the Webby Awards, and got sidetracked. I
took my seat in the empyrean of the War Memorial Opera House’s dress circle
on the appointed night and watched the lights dim into that lavender-saturated
shadowiness appropriate to dotcom ceremonies, confessionals and Mexican brothels.
An electricity coursed through the young crowd: the gorgeous hall was tumultuous
and packed. Self-celebratory bayings emerged often throughout the ceremony:
waves of energy lifted from the joyous crowd. I heard it said after the awards
that this year’s Webbys were, for obvious reasons, restrained in comparison
with ceremonies during the dotcom boom years. But it was hard to believe. There
was electricity in the air; the atmosphere was crucial, fevered.

The dress
code for the event had been, it turned out, stipulated as "gutsy."
Conformity with it seemed to necessitate a familiarity with certain downtown
tailors. I think I could have cut quite an appropriately gutsy, not to mention
rather rakishly handsome, figure at the Webbys in a slim-cut three-button Agnes
B. suit, with perhaps an accompanying trilby and a walking stick held between
my gloved fingers, my eyes partially obscured by mascara and by yellow-tinted
Nipponese DJ glasses, light on my feet in smart Chelsea boots. Or else next
year I’ll follow the sartorial example of roughly 57 percent of the guys
in attendance and wear a goth-derived, Lux Interior-style ironic variation on
the standard awards ceremony tuxedo: that is, possibly an electric-green dinner
jacket over a pair of demoralized jeans and motorcycle boots, my hair dyed canary-yellow
and slicked back greaser-style over a pair of wraparound skater-kid Arnette
shades. I might top the ensemble off with a stylish hat from a quality haberdasher;
for instance, a bowler, a homburg or a virile Stetson. My porkpie hat, if I
choose to wear it, will match handily with my plaid jacket. I’m also looking
into the feasibility of a gold lamé cowboy outfit, possibly with spurs.
Kepis, soul patches, fezzes, boas.

My charming
wife (for you see, by this time next year I am determined to be wed) will either
play it straight in an evening dress that clings to her fine self, or will try
to out-gutsy even the gutsiest, and, taking as an example a number of the women
at the 2001 Webbys, will dress up as a post-apocalyptic ragdoll, petticoats
billowing over thick-soled moonboots, with eyelid glitter and weird runes scrawled
in face-pencil on her cheeks. I’m thinking I might also score her a pair
of gossamer angel’s wings, or an aigrette, or else a drum majorette’s
costume, half of which–she was missing the baton and the boxy hat–I
saw being worn by a woman who stood looking around with doe eyes in front of
the opera house before the ceremony, in shouting distance of a gentleman sporting
a Van Dyke.

•

Then, an
electronic sputtering. A round video screen that dominated the stage flickered
into life. We were peppered with a pretentious series of images: I was reminded
of the pompous Frenchy art film that Diane made for Woody’s parents on
that old episode of Cheers. Meaningless schizophrenic images in rapid
sequence, jejune film-school crap: amber waves of grain, windmills whipping,
waves breaking, irritated minnows, marigolds blooming, matrons a-hopping, Vietnamese
harvesting rice, outstretched hands through which cascaded torrents of spelt.
A barn burns down…and hark, now I espy the moon. All the while, blue and yellow
lights shot out to pulse across the crowd, from which there issued tidal, ecstatic
bayings and ululations. A young woman minced out in a furry pink top and Captain
America roachclip sunglasses, and then San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, that
smooth old criminal, emerged to gesticulate from a podium, welcoming the assembled
dotcommers–hustler to hustlers. Fog misted upward from stage left to mingle
with the general exuberance.

"Let
the show begin!" the Mayor announced.

Next we
were riddled with green light. The video screen slid to the side and, as the
auditorium twittered with synthesized bird noises, four figures presented themselves
in white hooded jumpsuits and writhed, like tumbling weisswursts, together in
a mesh cage. The spectacle unfolded in its glory and gradually achieved a certain
ripeness; the audience sat spellbound, riveted to its chairs. Now the vast stage
was populated by a man who crossed it, dressed mostly in black and alone, the
very image of the Modern Man, an isolato–actually, no, he was impish, smiling–more,
he resembled Alan Cumming–more, it was Alan Cumming, ladies and
gentleman, yes indeed, your host for the evening, who, achieving his position
there at the left of the stage, announced–

But enough,
enough. At one point I roused myself from a reverie–I was off in a warm
ideational space with Shannen Doherty, for some reason, which is strange, which
is atypical of my psychosexual aspirations, which is difficult to account for–to
find Sam Donaldson onstage in a tuxedo and a blond rug, carrying on with a chick
wearing tattoos and a fright wig. I recall a smirking self-referentiality, with
presenters and entertaining videoclips poking fun at the industry itself, copping
to the disaster, alluding to the crash, laughing it away. Shit. It wasn’t
their money. I recall circumambient sampled tweetings, and the pum-pum-pum
of synthesized bass drums and torrents of noise and applause and a deep atmosphere
of white-kid entitlement. We were playing dress-up in Daddy’s opera house,
and drinking his liquor, after we’d wrecked his Benz.

•

After the
show let out, the huge crowd spilled out through all the opera house’s
hallways. There was a party on every floor: bars set up, tables representing
San Francisco food purveyors doling out high-end snacks. Every once in a while
in the teeming, dim stone halls, you’d see a localized blaze of eerie white
light, and find tv cameras clustered around some dotcom celebrity. I saw the
guy in the Peter Pan suit getting interviewed: he was the best; his shoes bore
wee buckles. I saw Pud getting interviewed, too, wearing a Saturday Night
Fever suit and sweating under the lights, rubbing at his eyebrow, looking
a little sheepish. I heard a guy wearing Enlightened Skater garb look around
himself and say to his friend: "It’s the Webbys, so everybody’s
got to be a little bit wacky, a little bit crazy. It’s cool."

A guy I
talked to, who described himself as "an ex-analyst at an ex-dotcom,"
explained the level of hilarity like so: "The people who were really hurt
in the crash were on the commerce side. This is an arts crowd. They never really
thought they’d make money anyway."

Free to
go crazy in forbidden hallways: we must all have felt like we were 14 again,
and had snuck our way in to run wild in the halls of the middle school. You
could look past an invisible barrier on the box level and into a private lounge
in which dotcom VIPs, presumably, drank in brocaded luxury, white pashas from,
originally, the better suburbs. You could weave your way from level to level,
from maze-like hallway to maze-like hallway, pushing through gasping crowds,
past groups of boys and girls clustered together, leering into the flashbulbs.
Bottles were scattered across the floors and girls were barefoot. There was
a phantasmagorical aspect. There was a dance party on the basement level, and
DJ beats thumped the foundations, and throughout the whole place thousands of
celebrants milled, as if in a doomed royal ball that persists even while the
city’s getting shelled.

In the lobby,
Sam Donaldson stood on a podium under screaming lights as white as the Resurrection
morn, as white as the shirt under his tuxedo jacket, staring with an undertaker’s
smile into a camera, his microphone held up to his face as, I guess, they framed
the shot. You wonder how many minutes of his life Sam Donaldson’s spent
staring emptily into cameras, saying nothing, doing nothing, thinking nothing.
Outside, kids lounged on the opera house steps with drinks and cigarettes, like
Upper East Side kids on the Met steps on a summer evening, except here it was
chilly and you could see fog in the streetlights, rolling in off the Bay.

•

I love San
Francisco, and so spent my days there doing what any sensible tourist does in
a great city–walking around. For thematic reasons, I kept
getting drawn back to South of Market, especially the skid-row mid-Market area
around 6th and 7th Sts. and Market St. and Stevenson Alley. What can I say?
I was a tourist. There’s an old Times Square ambience there that’s
impossible to find these days in Times Square and that, for better or worse,
is hard to find these days in New York. Market and 6th: Grady’s bar, the
Seneca and Desmond and Windsor hotels (Reasonable Rates), the San Francisco
Barber College. A bunch of treacherous-looking guys hang outside Ginger’s
Too, straight out of Diane Arbus, circulating into and out of the bar, into
its depths and then out into the sun. A guy walking down the street said to
his female companion, "You want codeine? I got codeine." At number
26 7th St., by the way, just south of Market and north of Cloud 9, there’s
an Odd Fellows Hall, a real artifact of a lost America. "Commemorating
One Hundred Years of Odd Fellowship in California, 1849-1949," a plaque
near the door read. Old wiseguys with ties knotted as fat as your fist walked
out of the building, laughing.

Given that
I was spending time around mingy Stevenson Alley, it was a coincidence to find
that week, in the San Francisco Examiner, an article about exactly that
street. It was headlined "The Mess on Market: Smile! You’re live on
Webb’s Camera," and described a fellow named Jeff Webb who lives in
the Seneca Hotel a block away from Cloud 9. The well-named Webb’s rigged
his own personal Webcam to peer down onto the 6th and Stevenson corner and watch
the locals misbehave. His goal’s to "shame city government into cleaning
up the mess."

The Examiner:
"Guns, knife fights, people lighting up crack pipes and smooth-handed-dealers,
you name it, Webb’s seen it from his view on the corner for the last eight
years." More: "‘See,’ he points out, ‘there’s
a man stooping over in the alley, hoping he’ll find some crack droppings
on the sidewalk.’" And more: "Stevenson Alley is also known as
‘Crackhead Alley’ by the residents at the Seneca Hotel. The alley
is just one block from the Powell Street Cable Car turnaround where thousands
of tourists wait in line. It’s also a block from the San Francisco Shopping
Centre, where thousands shop at high-scale boutiques. Tracy Aubuchon, who works
at Eline.com further down Stevenson Alley, said she’s witnessed prostitution
and crack deals going on in tandem–an act she’s nicknamed the ‘Stevenson
special.’ Her company purchased the building they now occupy a year ago
and had to install an iron gate to keep crackheads from the front doorway. Besides
that, employees have witnessed urination and defecation. ‘It’s a health
issue not only for the employees but residents and people living on the streets,’
she said. ‘We have a fear of tripping and touching the sidewalk.’"

The article’s
unperturbed about the implications of setting up surveillance cameras in San
Francisco. "The City has cameras installed at dozens of intersections to
catch red-light runners, and Ana B. Arguello, manager of the Seneca Hotel, said
the surveillance camera installed at the back of the building deters offenders
once word gets out."

And Webb
himself is quoted as follows: "They don’t even try to hide it any
more. A lot of these people come over here from Oakland because they know they
won’t get prosecuted." The article closes with a note: "See the
live Webcam at…" A Web address follows.

Dotcommers
and guys with the cash to run serious Webcam setups, trucked into a rough neighborhood,
where they run surveillance on the people around them and mourn the insufficient
severity of drug-law enforcement. I merely note, without judging, the possibility
here of certain class issues, suppressed in the reportage.

•

I suggested
above that there was something doomed about the Webbys–the Last Dance in
the castle halls, like aristocrats in the moments before the revolution.

But that’s
not really true, at all. There’s no doom involved at all in this, at least
not for the people in question. You have to consider the whiteboy and whitegirl
arithmetic. A kid smashes up his father’s BMW, what happens? The old man
buys another one. With time, and after laying enough charm on the old man, maybe
the kid gets to drive the new one, too. Similarly, a bunch of white kids get
laid off from the tech sector, how truly bad is it, in real terms? Is there
any chance of them starving? The dotcom bubble bursts, and where’s the
human disaster? It’s hard to make a case that being a twentysomething who
has to earn 40 thousand dollars a year, even if he’s grown used to making
85 thousand, is an economic victim. And yet much of the media commentary about
the depths to which our economy’s fallen implies just that. You’d
think it was 1931, and white kids were reduced to waiting on soup lines, and
fighting over jobs as trolley-car drivers. Economically speaking, at least,
these kids probably live beyond the reach of tragedy. One does not fall off
the dotcom tree and land in the gutter.

Outside
Cloud 9, the Tech TV crew showed up and started sticking cameras into people’s
faces. "All right, here comes our big break," someone cracked. A starved-down
tv girl, made of tinsel and plastic, carried the microphone.

The camera
turns on a girl in red pants and a boa, along with a tieless guy with stubble
and a three-button suit, and films them walking out of the club, past the lined-up
aspirants and down the street across Stevenson Alley, shucking and jiving, holding
their hands in the air, wiggling their asses and their fingers. Take One. They
must have been shooting news-show filler or something. Cut! They stop, turn
around, break character, walk back. Homeless guy rushes up with his sign: I
DRAW YOU HELP HELP ME HELP. Guy in the suit looks down offhandedly:

"How
you doing?"

"Not
good, I’m drawin’ tonight. Hey, lemme draw your sketch tonight."

"Um,
I’m doing this, man."

And inside
the club there’re cameras, too, and people are sucking lollipops and air-kissing
under the bleached-out lights. After you get tired of looking at that you can
walk out and sit in the empty bar across the street, with the Jimi Hendrix playing
and smutty coasters. You can look out the open bar door at Cloud 9 on the opposite
corner, where life’s homeless losers hitch their saggy pants, standing
around in a daze, bewildered by the burst of youthful, moneyed joy that’s
just occurred in their midst, and wondering what they can sponge off it.

So when
you’re standing outside a club in South of Market and a curious pedestrian
comes up and asks you what you’re in line for, and you answer, laughing,
"It’s a soup kitchen for laid-off dotcommers," you’re right
to congratulate yourself on your quick wit. But hopefully a little voice in
the back of your head should be saying to you: not really, brother. Nay, brother,
it is not truly so.

Late summer
and I’m almost 10, and I’m messing around on the sidewalk, banging
with a brick on a roll of caps or something, and the silence that settles down
among the sagging houses gets blasted open by some scandalous noise at the end
of our shady dead-end block–there’s a sedan rolling my way under the
huge sticky oaks–and my eyes widen and the day’s pulse quickens, and
the boys are coming home from football practice, the late-summer preseason two-a-days.
ZZ Top’s blasting. Townie vans with lush shiny flanks. Big, fat, townie
secondhand land-yachts, so that you could ease back, your spine at a 40-degree
angle to the surface of the earth, your arms jammed straight out, almost yanking
themselves out of their sockets as they strain to reach the wheel, and your
eyes are rimmed red from the weed-smoke that salves your sore body after a day’s
worth of running into tackling dummies in the heat. Post-hippie station wagons
with Deadhead stickers and mag-wheeled Camaros.

Townies: dudes
in overalls and white stoner-pimp mustaches and Allman Brothers roadie hair,
and Marshall Tucker concert t-shirts with the arms hacked off, dressed like
they ran guitar rigs for Skynyrd–and big-ass cowboy hats, and canvas sneakers,
and, like, peacock feathers sweeping back from hatbands, and buzzed smirks and
smiles, and stoner bellbottom dungarees, and lines of speed to snort up before
football games, because fuck it. Lounging on porches in flannel shirts thrown
open, with headbands and shit, leather vests, untied workboots, and everybody
spilling down off the porch and onto the lawn, Little River or Live Rust
thumping and waddling out from living-room stereos through screen doors.

Anyway, the
song in question is "Powderfinger," by Neil Young & Crazy Horse,
and I mean the live version of the song, from the great live album Live Rust,
the greatest live rock album ever recorded. Huge shambling Crazy Horse power,
and Young spinning off into those gorgeous Les Paul solos that by the time I
was 10 had already been seared deep into my brain.

I loved the
whole frontier redneck ideology that became common during the late 70s: the
redneck stoner rock with its redneck stoner politics, the American Highway romance
that informed the pop culture, whether we’re talking about Southern rock
or the CB radio craze or the Smokey and the Bandit movies (and of course
you had Charlie Daniels drawling about how he gets stoned in the morning and
drunk in the afternoon, and kinda likes his ol’ blue-tick hound). I loved
that stuff. My jock townie older neighbors, wasted and loose-limbed after
football practice on their porches, at the end of a loose, ragged era in a ragged
village–that was the way they lived.

Neil Young’s
music with Crazy Horse wasn’t "Southern rock," technically–but
with its organic, ruralist vibe, it was a close ideological cousin to it.
And "Powderfinger" especially–given how its amazing lyrics evoke
an ambiguous scene of frontier violence–fits into the shaggy, wasted, macho,
romantic spirit of the time. What’s that song about? I mean, specifically?
White boat comes up the river, and it’s a bad situation, Daddy’s gone,
my brother’s out hunting in the mountains, Big John’s taken to drink,
they’ve left me here to do the thinking, and I’ve just turned 22,
damn, Daddy’s rifle in my hands feels reassuring, but when the first shot
hit the docks–etc. And red means run, son, numbers add up to nothing. And
shelter me from the powder and the finger–etc.

What, in the
end, happens? Does the kid get shot dead?

Whatever happens,
"Powderfinger" was everywhere on my block back then, rollicking out
from screened windows, drifting out of the crowded porch hangouts from which
guys called out to each other across the street. Everybody was playing the song,
and so much so that it was almost our block’s theme song, and the reason
for that is because our block thought of itself that way: as a doughty clan,
an insular gang, poised against the assaults of interlopers, capable of violence
when it needed to be. All of which was true. Someday I’ll write a book
about feared, legendary townie royalty and how it can impact and dominate a
village. Because I lived among such royalty. It was amazing, and only a book
could do justice to it.

But if it was
true, it was also all a lie. In the end, people grew up (and some of them turned
into local cops, inevitably), and also a couple members of the gang were for
various reasons excommunicated, and the 1980s happened, and the music changed,
and everything fell apart. Besides, when you’re the youngest member of
a group you find out fast the limits of a group’s loyalty, because when
a 10-year-old’s not required, which is often, there’s nothing he can
do about it, except stand in the middle of the street and watch the taillights
of Lincolns and Camaros recede into the distance.

That slack,
townie civilization, that shining, slovenly, woolly summer moment in time–it’s
gone. This isn’t just nostalgia talking. It’s a sociological reality.
The rivertowns of southern Westchester aren’t as culturally distant from
the city as they used to be. Magazine editors move to the rivertowns now from
the city, attracted by the prospect of big, drafty ancient houses with grand
views over the Palisades, Haverstraw Bay and the Tappan Zee, and by a 35-minute
Hudson Line commute. The villages have become acceptable locales of bourgeois
bohemian aspiration. The townie world of summer is either dead or dying.

Those were
the days; those pastoral summers. I was reminded of them when I ate dinner with
a friend at Mary’s Fish Camp, in the West Village, the other night. We’re
talking the heart of the West Village, specifically the corner of Charles and
W. 4th Sts., one of New York’s most charmingly atmospheric locations. Mary’s
is a tiny place, crammed full of no more than a dozen tables, with a curving
metal bar at which you can also eat. The decor is simple: fish-house light blue
and tiley white, and a painting of a big, dopey fish hangs on the wall. A couple
light fixtures emit a flattering glow, soft music plays (an 80s mix tape made
the Gen-X customers happy on the night we were there), windows throw themselves
open so that you can feel the gorgeous breeze off the Hudson, and that’s
it.

All you need
after that is food, which seems to be extremely good here. (The story is that
this place spun off from Cornelia St.’s fine Pearl Oyster Bar. One of the
Pearl’s partners, who’s apparently named Mary, bailed and started
her own eatery.) We ordered tender fried oysters and clams; excellent new-potato
salad; and New England clam chowder that was heavy on the cream, which is the
way I like it, and that you could dredge with your spoon to pull up thick, salty
bacon chunks.

We also ate
a bouillabaisse, and roast cod served over a bed of the purest and most perfectly
cooked mess of corn niblets and lima beans. Eating all this stuff while drinking
Paulaner (there’s also a wine list) on a hot summer night is intensely
pleasant.

The wait for
a table can be long–we sat for 45 minutes. But you’re lolling on a
bench on W. 4th St. with a beer in your hand and the trees are rustling along
the block, so who’s complaining? Bring $50 per mouth.

Mary’s
Fish Camp, 64 Charles St. (W. 4th St.), 646-486-2185.

The way to
think about Artisanal is as a bad-vibe Balthazar. It’s a lofty, high-powered
and hyperreal bistro, but transposed out of the moody environs of Crosby St.
and into that barren northern edge of the Park Ave. S. restaurant corridor,
where the avenue inclines upward toward the severity and tunnels around Grand
Central Terminal, and where few walk the streets. The space itself is the one
in which you used to be able to find the overrated An American Place, if you
were interested in paying a large amount of money for an arrogantly substandard
dinner–and even given a redesign, Artisanal hasn’t been able to completely
expunge the drab atmosphere of that hustle that Larry Forgione used to call
a restaurant. Diners chew, holler, nibble, gulp, leer, cackle and circulate
in a huge, melancholy and tobacco-colored din.

The food’s
good, as it should be in a high-profile restaurant in New York City in 2001.
We ordered carpaccio of tuna off the handsome oversized menu (so oversized it
was burdensome; you couldn’t lay it down when you were done looking at
it). It was good and extremely fresh, but hard to fully enjoy, because the restaurant
was uncomfortably loud and the help was harried and slow (if well-meaning),
and it was becoming evident that the air conditioning was going to stay insufficient.
I started to think that Artisanal’s model was less Brasserie Lipp than
the Gare de Lyon–and on a summer afternoon, when the place is crammed with
a miserable, overheated bourgeoisie.

We also ordered
shrimp and avocado, which was clever enough to transcend the frenzied circumstances
(the maitre d’ here could use a bullhorn to pierce the noise). This dish
consisted of an avocado half that cradled a scoop of tomato-horseradish granite–that
is, an ice, essentially a tomato sorbet, grainy with huge chunks of what seemed
to be kosher salt. Atop the sorbet lay four big, enjoyable shrimp. So this dish
and I agreed with each other; I thought it adequate, and I venture to say that
it thought me so, as well; there was a satisfying emotional commerce between
us.

What else?
As entrees: grilled lamb chops, tasty as could be; and a fine Dover sole, served
on a white platter with asparagus sprouts and crushed fingerling potatoes. And
oh how I thrilled when, at tableside, the skillful server deboned the beast.
The menu, as you might have figured out by now, is crammed with appealing bistro
dishes. If I were ever to return to Artisanal, and the odds are against it,
I might order the skate wing a la grenobloise, the roast cod, the steak frites,
the seafood platter, the steak tartare, the escargots, the ribeye shmeared in
bordelaise sauce or any one of a number of rotating daily specials, such as
calves’ brains, sweetbreads, coq au vin or duck a l’orange. It’s
nice that Artisanal serves this hoary last dish, by the way. Someone’s
still got to serve duck a l’orange; I’m not sure that even the old
French bistros on Bistro Row do so anymore. Artisanal’s menu also offers
a number of fondues.

Which brings
me to Artisanal’s famous cheese selection, which is displayed in a special
cheese window on the other side of the room, and that’s maintained by cheese-wranglers
who wear poker faces and clinical white smocks and potter around with their
cheeses like chemists over their beakers. So seriously does Artisanal take its
cheese that you’re handed a yellow (that is, cheese-colored) newsletter
about the stuff when you’re seated. "What is Artisanal?" the
newsletter reads. "As you probably know, the name comes from the revered
art of lovingly crafting individual cheeses by hand rather than mass producing
them in factories. Here, we look forward to proudly offering a more extensive
selection of cheeses than any other restaurant in the United States."

Hey man, that’s
cool. The newsletter goes on to describe its "state-of-the-art" cheese
cave, which maintains "the ideal temperature and humidity for each group
of cheeses." And: "…[T]he cheeses rest on slatted beechwood shelves
imported from Europe. The wood for these shelves was cut down from an older
tree at the time of the month when the moon was ascending. Because the tide
is at it’s [sic] lowest then, there is less water in the wood. Then it
is dried for at least one year. Also, wood harvested during this time has less
sap circulating to the tree’s exterior. This creates a more porous surface
which aides in the aging process of the cheese."

I enjoyed the
cheese-and-wine flight I ordered for dessert: three cow’s milk cheeses,
each accompanied by a different nice wine, including a muscat. But if you want
to eat cheese in a hardcore way, visit Chanterelle, where they also take the
stuff seriously, and where your total dining experience is roughly 150 times
better. Artisanal’s too much: the crowds, the hiphop beating incongruously
out over the bar area, the way the sharp cat in the suit won’t seat you
until your whole party shows up even though your table’s right there, in
front of you, empty, longing for your presence.

It’s not
surprising, by the way, that Artisanal’s a spin-off of Picholine. I never
liked Picholine, either.

Artisanal,
2 Park Ave. (32nd St.), 725-8585.

Sadovska, 29,
is a Ukrainian singer who’s spending a year in New York as artist-in-residence
at the East Village’s Yara Arts Group, and when she blasts into Ave. A’s
alt.coffee on a torpid afternoon, it’s like someone’s just dropped
a ruby into a crate of onions. Alt.coffee on a weekday around noon is serious
abject hipster territory, I mean low, as in low-energy, as in
dispirited. Unshaven dudes in shower sandals peck at laptops, scowl into
space, pinch gummy cigarettes between weedy fingers–shuffle back, stooping
and irascible, to the john. The walls sweat. The upholstery teems with yeasts
and spores. Meanwhile, here’s gorgeous brown-haired Sadovska, this trilling
Slavic dramatic songbird confetti-bomb explosion in heels and a green dress
who glows, shines, pouts, coos, purrs, vibrates, hums–in all ways busts
up the humid stupor. Hipsters ogle. A ponce slides up, asks her for her phone
number in Russian, gets smacked right back. (She’s been in the place for
all of 37 seconds.) Alt.coffee: arguably the most unlikely place on the planet
in which to meet a Slavic diva. Cracks in the plaster smear and drip with lymph
and pus.

The stateside
history of Mariana Sadovska: "Last year I was here for private reason,
visiting my mama." My mahhh-ma. "In Ohio." Singsong and
melancholy and intensely charming: Eeen O-hiiii-o.

Um, did you
say your mother lives in Ohio?

"She moved
eight years ago for political–actually–reason. She used to be very
engaged in this problem of religion. Orthodox, Cahhtho-leek–it was
a time when it was–" Here her voice becomes conspiratorial and she
leans over the nasty table marooned in the vile floor. "–dahhngerous
actions…"

So where exactly
in Ohio?

"In Cleveland,"
she says, soulfulness softening her huge eyes.

Eeen Cleeeve-lahnd.
Sadovska makes that Rust Belt ruin sound as enchanting as Krakow or Prague.
Slavic cooing; the woman’s sure got a musical voice. It moans and quavers
like a lark through lovely octaves.

Okay, why Cleveland?

"That
was, you know, occasion, and actually it was big mistake, and now it’s
difficult to change."

Why a mistake?

"It’s
just, like, because that’s in Ohio! That’s pro-veen-shal! And
what’s going on there? Notheeng! What kind of people are there? Oh my
God. You know, so."

Makes a little
poofing sound with her lips, looses a delicate hand to flutter through stale
air.

"Mmmmmmmmmm…"
A lovely and slightly nasal purr issues from deep within her. And how long did
Sadovska inhabit the Jewel City of the Cuyahoga? She screws up her face, a child
in thought.

"Like,
one mont’? Eet’s pretty boring. I mean, you have nice museum there.
You cannot walk on the street there! You cannot meet people! There is no concert
there! There is nothing going on, so eet’s pretty boring. Eet’s pretty
pro-veen-shal a place."

Hands fly and
fall (and stick? they might even stick) to the table. Singer as enchanting perpetual
motion machine: hands play about the chopstick shoved through the baroque mass
of her brown hair. They form little fists and bop against each other in feisty
little battles. "I spent last 10 years in small veellage. In small veellage
close to the natura! Very concentrated in work–every day you have
een-cred-ible luxury of European thee-ah-ter, which is supported. So
we have money to develop ar-tees-tic ideas. So that’s big difference.
I feel like here is this concentrated everything from the world! You can say,
I want to find this–and you will find it in New York… Every night you
can find so many beautiful theengs."

And?

"When
I came here, first two months, I was incredibly fascinated and happy. Then after,
when I start to work–I never worked like that! So I was like–"
Makes fist of right hand, socks herself in the side of head, morphs face into
screwball expression– "So, mmmmmm, then it was just really
like crisis time! Because you have no time! You have no time to read! You have
no time to meet your people, because always you speak to answering machine–always
in New York! …So I passed through kind of depression. No! Not depression,
but very sad and very lost period, you know, like voo!"

Ah, but life
in New York can, in fact, improve.

"I met
people which immediately become your friends. I met a lot of craaay-zy
people, byooo-teeful people, and that’s New York. I think this creates
atmosphere of New York! All these people here! I don’t think it’s
city for people who want to get money, only, or for people who are weak. I think
only if you are strong enough or if you are crazy enough–or talented enough–you
can manage in New York." She performs an excruciatingly European shrug
of the shoulders. "That’s my feeling, I don’t know."

It’s appropriate
to point out here that Sadovska’s indeed managing in New York. The New
York Times enthused last March about her cabaret act, in which she performs
rural Ukrainian songs and accompanies herself on her harmonium, calling it "nearly
reckless but oddly perfect," and gushing, "…Ms. Sadovska’s
delivery was as wired, forthright and sexual as a rock star’s–Polly
Jean Harvey, perhaps. She could have been singing the same material in front
of a rock trio."

Sadovska on
Brooklyn, her temporary home:

"And then
you have Greenpoint, and Williamsburg, it’s real Poland… It’s
real, not touristic, Poland how it eeez. So then it is Greenpoint, then
it is Bedford Ave., you know. These funky people, artists, small galleries,
small cafes like that, which I really love. Then there is this Haseeedic
area, and I’m exactly in between! And there are, near, Puerto Rican people!
It’s fascinating, very alive place, and this meexture. Five minute
there, voo! Five minute there–like, totally different world!"

Purses her
mouth, manages to look at once impish and soulful, her brown mane tumbling around
her shoulders.

"I miss
to be back to Europe," she coos. "I miss to be back to that more calm
life."

What
are these progressive ideas, Bernie? Nervous enthusiasm: "Well, okay,
there’s a number."

That’s
Bernie–as in legendary subway vigilante Bernhard Goetz–over there folding
his lean body into his chair amidst the shadows of a 14th St. apartment. Postwar
tan brick building, one of those middle-class lux jobs on a still-dingy block,
a stretch that sweats and moils on a torpid early summer afternoon. Outside, crowds
slop around in front of the bargain storefronts and it’s possible to feel
that old urban nausea and loneliness, to feel like you’re out of time. It’s
as if the block belongs to the old, violent, degraded city that coughed Bernhard
Goetz up into notoriety back in the fearful 1980s, almost as a death reflex before
the wretched town shuddered one last time during the incredible slaughter of the
Dinkins years and finally, mercifully, died to be reborn. This is a tan brick
apartment complex of the sort they used to build in the 60s and 70s. Institutional
hallways smell of food, and the lobby mirrors intensify the brown, grainy light.
It’s the type of building that evokes the forlorn urban place and time you
see in Cassavetes movies, a place and a time that now seem an eternity away.

But
first, before all that, you meet Bernie in front of the building.
There he is, the famous man in the flesh. He’s slim, and tall, and looks
at least a decade younger than his 52 years, pale blond like you remember him
from the thousand newspaper photographs you looked at all those years ago, when
you saw that wispy, lean guy walking sheepish through the media gauntlet, and
you thought–him?

"Hi,
hi," he’s saying, and–breathily, gesturing down the street–"let’s…"
He wants to take you somewhere.

Leads
you across 14th St. and up 6th Ave., pulling you along on some mission that’s
still vaguely defined.

"Um,
are you a vegetarian?" he asks brightly. You’re making swift progress
up the avenue, you’re following his rapid splay-footed gait.

Then
you’re inside Village Yogurt, where a middle-aged Asian woman smirks behind
the counter, as if she’s been pickled into a state of suppressed hilarity
by the air conditioning. Gangly and cheerful Bernie approaches. The woman leans
near her juicer like a soldier near his howitzer, confident and self-contained.

Bernie’s
talking nutrition. "You know that drinking the juice of a vegetable is far
more nutritious than the vegetable itself…" He holds out his hands in a
crushing motion. "The violence of the machine breaks down the cell walls…"

Goetz
is a pleasant guy. His pale eyes are constantly taking in everything around him.
Now, as he stands here in the fluorescent light that decays downward in a million
bits–linoleum diner light, the ragged light of the old Taxi Driver city,
which Bernie Goetz put in the sights of his handgun one December night in 1984
and tried to blow away–he’s soaking in the tantalizing sight of fresh
nutritious veggies.

"One
for him," Bernie’s chirping at the Asian woman, ordering me a cup of
juice. "I want him to see everything that goes in."

Each
vegetable’s a little shell for the woman’s mortar. She starts stuffing
them down and in, an ornery look on her face as she mashes, mashes, mashes, mashes.
Bernie gestures with his finger, bopping, getting off on the progress of the edible
plants through the machine.

Pointing,
bopping.

"Now
look at this. A beet, that’s a little beet." Machine masticates beet.
Juice dribbles down spigot. Cellulose by-product (the violence of the machine,
you see, breaks down the cell walls) sprays out the machine’s refuse tube
and into a trash pail.

Celery
stick, down the hatch.

"Okay,"
Bernie’s saying, "now a couple of carrots."

His
eyes widen. Woman shoves down a carrot, which ratchets through the gears. Bernie’s
a little breathless now, enumerating vegetables–"carrot! a small beet!"–and
finally a tasty cup of wholesome vegetable juice materializes in my hand.

Awww,
Bernie, you didn’t have to do that. Because, see, it’s on Bernie. Bernie’s
like that.

"In
my building is the first vegetarian diner in the city, and this place does a much
better job of peeling their vegetables," he enthuses. "When you don’t
peel your cucumbers right, you get a–a bitter taste."

The
juice is toothsome, luscious, absolutely A-okay. And no doubt very nutritious.

Walking
in the street, I kept waiting for people to recognize famous subway shooter Bernhard
Goetz, cultural icon. I kept waiting for the construction workers to give him
a thumbs-up, the ol’ fuckin’ ay Bernie Goetz! Or, conversely,
for the middle-aged white women who run Greenwich Village to get in his face with
their fingers, to call him a fascist and scream that they wished he were dead,
that they could shoot him. But none of that happened. It was hot out and
people had other things on their minds, and the world has turned, and the city’s
changed, in some ways beyond recognition. No one’s scared anymore, at least
not where Bernie lives, or you live, or I live, not as a general rule. But there
was a time in this city–wasn’t there?–back in the dreary day when
everything was screwed, and fear was a constant thing. (That, by the way, was
when you heard a lot of bitter joking about how Bernhard Goetz should run for
mayor.)

We’re
back in the apartment building now. Rent-controlled old dames prop open their
doors to reveal their batty packrat scenes. You step through a door into someone’s
darkened apartment–not Bernie’s, it’s his friend’s, he seems
to have borrowed it for the interview. You sit there in the dark amidst the glowing
lacquered black and blood-red Oriental decor, and the air conditioner roars in
the vastness, and a snow-white cat is a smudge in the distance, camouflaging itself
against the wall. Bernie takes off his espadrilles and folds himself into a chair,
crosses his thin legs.

He’s
running for mayor of the City of New York, by the way.

So
tell me, Bernie, what are these progressive ideas of yours?

A
lean mantis in the dark, he says: "Well, okay, there’s a number."

"I
think if people–if society–solves the problem
of getting rid of pythons in Florida, that they can also maybe find a solution
for killer bees."

Goetz
exudes, believe it or not, a Zen calm. Sit in a darkened room with him on a hot
afternoon when the air conditioning’s humming, and you might feel yourself
drifting off into a sleepy torpor. You might be lulled by the man’s gentle
voice. It’s an amazing voice for a man associated with such huge violence
to have.

"There
are judgments in life," he’s saying into the darkness. "And I’m
not one of these people who says we have to respect all life. I believe that you
want to get rid of mosquitoes, you want to get rid of pestilences. I think it’s
perfectly all right to get rid of reticulated pythons in Florida, and mosquitoes
and killer bees. Et cetera."

"This
fellow was feeding a live chicken to his reticulated python. The python is a machine
that is designed to kill a mammal. You may have an 80-pound snake, and people
have to realize how dangerous that animal is. When that animal latches on you,
it can wrap itself around you in one second. And the snake killed him."

He
blinks like a happy cat. "I do not like snake people," he adds. The
contemplative tone leaves his voice now and he becomes impish. "By the way,
in the pet stores–because I spend a lot of time in the pet stores–I
generally find that the snake owners are, for lack of a better word, lower people.
For example, they have more tattoos, they speak more coarsely, they’re crasser
people." Beat. "You’re much more closely related to a squirrel
than you are to a snake."

You
oughtta meet my mother-in-law, Bernie, har har har…sleepy…that lulling, measured,
precise voice…

Goetz,
who makes his living buying and selling industrial electronics, says his candidacy–on
which he plans to spend no more than $2000–is motivated by a desire to perpetuate
the Giuliani administration. Goetz’s plan is to get himself elected, then
hire Rudy Giuliani as deputy mayor and entrust significant duties to him.

"I’m
not interested in living in Gracie Mansion or marching in parades or doing a lot
of ceremonial functions. I’d be willing to do some ceremonial functions…
I would actually be the legal mayor, but the first deputy would live in Gracie
Mansion."

"I
would talk to him," Goetz says of the mayor. "I would let him, again,
decide in what capacity, if any, he’d like to serve. Basically, the way you
approach people in a situation like that is you tell them–" He breaks
off. "Um, I’d rather not say." He smiles. "You don’t
tell them they can write their own ticket, but you work with them…"

Still,
Goetz wants to augment the Giuliani program with some of his own ideas. He calls
these "some of the most progressive ideas of our time."

So
what are these progressive ideas, Bernie?

"Well,
okay, there’s a number. The first one, for me–and I’m not going
to press this–I agree with what Albert Einstein said…he said, the most–um,
let me try to remember his exact phrase–the–oh, yes. There is nothing
that will further the course–hold on. There is nothing that will–let’s
see, that will–oh yes, here it is: There is nothing that will increase the
chances for human survival on Earth more than the evolution to a vegetarian diet."

Now
he’s caught a rhetorical groove, and he calms himself and folds his body
back into his chair.

"I
think that that would have a lot of impact. I don’t mean New York, but the
whole society. And so what I’d like to see is that in all public-funded food
facilities with a standard menu, that a vegetarian menu would be offered in addition.
And that’s something that should cost no additional money…

"By
the way, in the jails they say, well, you do have the right to a vegetarian
menu, but that’s not really–but that can be misleading… In practice
you don’t really have it… You know, when you first come into jail you only
fill in a few forms. One of the forms says, are you taking any medication, are
you allergic to anything. And then you check off one of three diets, and that’s
if you want to have a standard menu, or if you want a kosher menu, or if you want
a Muslim meal. And I just want a vegetarian menu added to the standard one."

How
long has Goetz been a vegetarian?

"Twelve
years."

So
when you were on Rikers, Bernie, you weren’t yet a vegetarian?

He
shoots me a cold look, and says: "No, I wasn’t."

Goetz,
despite his admiration for Giuliani, advocates relaxing drug-law enforcement,
and he’s in favor of rent stabilization. Another goal he’d like to accomplish
as mayor is to bring Rudy Crew back as schools chancellor. Doing so, he says,
would be "the best thing we could do for education." Even if he can’t
convince Crew to return, he’d like to "get his advice on how to run
the school system."

"And
before I go into details on that," he announces, "I want to go into
the history, so that your readers will understand. I’d like to say that I
think Chancellor Levy is an intelligent and dedicated man, but my own personal
opinion is that he’s going about things the wrong way. I’d like to see
him stay in city government, I think he has a lot to contribute, but I think if
he stays being the schools chancellor, then in two or three years he’s going
to be very unpopular and even deeply resented. I think the present system, where
they’re mandating performance on what they call the New York State Regents
exam–"

The
phone chirps into life across the room.

"–Wait,
wait, turn your machine off, kill that machine–"

I
turn off the tape recorder, and we listen as Bernie’s friend’s phone
message kicks in. A series of ominous beeps and phone-hums floats through the
dark. Bernie sits forward in his seat and cocks his head, listening. But it’s
nothing, and the tension passes.

The
schools, I remind him–we were talking about the schools. You can lure Crew
back? You can pull that off?

"I
might be able to," he ruminates. "I might be able to pull that off…"

One
of the troubles with this election is that some pretty unlikely candidates are
running.

"There’s
a lot of silly candidates that get on the ballot…" Bernie says, amusement
edging his quiet voice. "Grandpa Munster–he has no issues. Basically
he has very little issues, he’s not a serious candidate, he’s probably
gonna be on the ballot, or the head of the Marijuana Party. Then there’s
all these other little insignificant parties…"

Goetz
has bigger plans.

"I
personally am registered with the Independence Party," he explains. "I
wanted that nomination, and I still do. I hope that Bloomberg drops out, actually.
And if he drops out, there’s a good chance that I’ll get the nomination
of the Independence Party. That’ll get me on the ballot, and that way I can
avoid running as an Independent, which would save me a lot of work."

What
about the possibility of people saying the same thing about Bernie Goetz that
he’s saying about Lewis?

"Well,
prior to my incident I was one of the main community activists in this area. Yes,
I have a lot of name recognition from it. As a result of my name recognition,
most of the public in New York knows that I’m an honest person that can be
trusted. I do not consider that I am exploiting that incident. Those incidents–if
they’re exploited, they’re exploited mostly by some people in the media,
some lawyers, some politicians."

Goetz
thinks he has a chance.

"If
I can get on the ballot, I think I will win. That’s if I can get on
the ballot. WPIX did a survey [on June 4], and they did an interview with me,
and then they had on some comments from the public. They asked as their question
of the night to the public, where people could log on the Internet: after seeing
this, do you want Bernie Goetz to run for mayor? I was shocked at the results.
Eighty-one percent of the people responding–and that’s of over 900 responses–said
that I should run for mayor. That doesn’t mean that they’d vote for
me. But they said I should run for mayor."

It’s
no surprise that Bernhard Goetz
should be concerned with the way racial issues play in New York. "I’m
disgusted with how race is being used. The police department is not racist.
You have a police department which has between 30 and 40 thousand people on the
streets, and they have a gun. And when you have 30 or 40 thousand people on the
streets with a gun, not only will you have accidents, but you will also have misconduct.
It’s a fact of life, just like if you have 30 or 40 thousand people with
driver’s licenses… [S]ome people are going to make mistakes, and there
will also be some misconduct and you just have to accept it."

I
ask Goetz what it’s like for him on the streets of New York. You’ve
got to figure that, even if he’s a folk hero to a lot of New Yorkers, to
many others he’s an almost demonic entity. Again, you imagine what it’s
like for him to encounter the old-line Greenwich Village matrons–racist!
fascist! pig! In the grim midst of New York’s Koch-and-Dinkins-era suicide
attempt, in a city the political discourse of which was still defined by racialist
cant and the rhetoric of permanent black victimhood, Goetz pulled his handgun
in the subway and made himself perhaps the most controversial human being of his
era. Who even came close? Al Sharpton? Ivan Boesky?

"It
varies," he says of his public reception. "I don’t get unfriendly
responses. Oh sure, people still recognize me. This case–how old were you
at the time? But you lived in the city at the time? Okay, in the city it was a
super-hot political issue. The city had major problems, and I think on a deep
psychological level the incident made a lot of people–made people more–how
would I phrase it? The incident made people somewhat more aware of what was going
on in this society."

What
was going on appeared to be a spectacular social breakdown.

"Absolutely!
You had the city under Koch–Koch refused to talk about crime, to press the
issue of crime, he had no idea what to do about it. The city was accepting this
social deterioration…" He says, "Fifteen years ago there was a lot
of thugs on the street, just intimidating people and threatening people and doing
violence on people, and that’s almost unknown [now]."

And
it’s an indication of how much the world has changed that Goetz can these
days say with a shrug, "I think the subway system is a wonderful thing."

Yes,
but Bernie–why are you doing this?
Why are you running for mayor?

"If
you want a real progressive cause…" he’s explaining, "one of
the best ideas that I’ve heard is something similar to what the Romans used
to do. The Romans used to say, give people bread and circuses. That wasn’t
cynical, as you might think. Today people don’t need circuses. But in terms
of bread…you could actually give people bread, or you could give them surplus
government food, free.

"What
I advocate is a mediocre sandwich," he continues. "Something with basic
nutrition. The reason I advocate a mediocre sandwich is, it would be unfair
to compete with all the food businesses out there to provide food of the same
tasty level that the delicatessens and restaurants provide. All that animals need–and
human beings are animals–to survive are two things… You need food and shelter.
You don’t even need clothing. People can find that one way or another…
People should have access to food every day. So if there could be spots in the
city, perhaps the government could pay a small fee to the supermarkets so that
there could be a refrigerated counter where a sandwich, where surplus food, could
be made available for free to the public. Again, it would be mediocre quality,
but it would be continuously available and free…"

Goetz
bends his head to the side, and a feline self-satisfaction plays across his face.

"For
hundreds of millions of years–for billions of years on this planet–all
creatures were either hunters or prey… Not only were you hunter or prey, but
even if you were one of the hunters, even then you lived in fear of being prey.
People can break away from that cycle, because we’re the top animal
on the planet… We do our killing today in the supermarket, we do it while sitting
in a restaurant. When you sit there and order anything–chicken or fish or
steak or anything–you have the power of life and death over an animal. You
don’t have to kill it anymore with your bare hands, or with a weapon. You
kill with the power of your money.

"I
don’t have a problem with food anymore," he observes. "…[Y]es,
I think that eating less meat, or more vegetarianism, is very important to helping
advance civilization. In fact, I personally think if people would stop eating
meat it would solve–and I know this is going to sound outrageous to a lot
of people–but I think it would solve, just to give a rough figure, a third
of the problems on the planet…

"We
all know what we do," he almost whispers. "Whether at night in our dreams
or when we’re conscious, but we know. And for me personally–a rather
funny thing–prior to becoming a vegetarian, when I was looking into a mirror,
I couldn’t look into my eyes for any period of time, and now I have no problem
doing that. You know what you are. People tend to know what goes on."

Days
later, a follow-up conversation over the phone,
and Goetz is adding something to the record ("This is not a major issue at
all, in fact it’s a very minor thing"):

"I
think it would be a good idea, in a small city department, to allow napping. You
know, a nap on the job, and that people shouldn’t feel intimidated if they
take a nap. When I worked for Westinghouse, oh, that was about 30 years ago, there
were two things you could be fired for immediately. One was sleeping on the job
and the other was making a pass at a woman. I think that people function more
effectively if they’re allowed to take a nap… I think people will function
better if they’re allowed to take naps…

"Eisenhower
used to say, the trend of civilization is inexorably upward."