The Star-Spangled Future Page 11

  At which point, they started taking each other for marks. Why not? To the Scientologists, the Hare Krishnas were just more crazy citizens in need of what they call it, “processing,” and to the Hare Krishnas, the Scientologists were just more unenlightened citizens who by rights oughta be wearing orange robes, shaving their heads, chanting, and jumping up and down like jungle bunnies. I think the main reason they started really glomming onto each other, though, was that both brands of loonie were heavy into staring.

  You must’ve been in staring contests when you were a kid, you know, first kid to blink or laugh or say something is the loser. Silent staring contests, we used to call ’em. Well, the Scientologists and the Hare Krishnas got themselves into jabbering staring contests, nothing silent about ’em, let me tell you, Charlie.

  The rube drags his wife up the street away from them, and they’re left alone giving the heavy staring act to each other, close enough to smell pastrami on each other’s breath.

  “Come on, chant with us and experience the pure joy of—”

  “—seem to be fixated at a very low energy level, but the Church of Scientology—”

  “—Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna—”

  “—possible to reach a high pre-clear level in only eight weeks of—”

  “—Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare—”

  “—come on, stop this suppressive behavior and—”

  “—Hare Rama, Rama Rama, Rama Rama, Hare Hare—”

  “—you’re really in desperate need of the help only Scientology—”

  “HARE KRISHNA, HARE KRISHNA—”

  “—reach beyond your natal engrams to—”

  “KRISHNA KRISHNA, HARE HARE—”

  All the while staring at each other, and the Krishna freak jumping up and down finally, and clapping his hands in time with his goombahs.

  At this point it was that the northeast corner of Broadway and 34th Street became something of a hassle for the traffic detail. Because sometimes these contests would really go on and get heavy. The Hare Krishnas would come in behind their boy like sidemen, and the whole bunch of them would practically surround the poor Scientologist, bouncing up and down, playing their drums and bells, chanting, and giving him the collective goggle-eye. Now if it was you or me in there, Charlie, we would instantly remove ourselves from such a hard-sell television commercial, right, I mean it’s like having an armpit shoved in your face. Not your Scientologist. To him, it’s a challenge or something. He stands there staring right hack, clutching his clipboard of personality tests and playing to the crowd.

  Because by now there is a real crowd, and they are all watching the contest to see who flinches. I mean, after all, here you have a dozen crazies dancing up and down, playing their instruments, and chanting at the top of their lungs, giving their all to put this one guy on their trip, and him a beady-eyed character who’s giving them the Big Stare right back. Even for New York, this is pretty good Street Theater stuff, right, so the crowd grows and grows and pretty soon it’s slopping over into the gutter of 34th Street and they’re not paying attention to the traffic lights any more and traffic trying to turn right onto 34th gets blocked and ties up Broadway and cabbies start leaning on their horns and pick-pockets start working the crowd and truck drivers are turning the air brown with their months and a poor son of a bitch traffic cop has to run over and break it up before some old fart in an Oldsmobile has a heart attack and really screws traffic up.

  Who knew who would win? Every time it really got going, we had to step in and break it up. And it was always a somewhat surly crowd to move along, because they wanted to see how the show would end. Hard to blame them. After busting up these weirdo contests two or three times a day for half a week, I got to wondering how it would come out too. Sergeant Kelly, in his gentle way, told me later that this was my downfall, my ticket to my present beat up here in Fort Apache in the wilds of the East Bronx, where patrol cars have to travel in pairs. Like what they say about curiosity and the cat…

  Not that I was crazy enough to do anything more than think about it. I don’t care what Kelly says, I didn’t purposely create the “Holy War on 34th Street,” as the Daily News called it. You think I wanted a thing like that to happen on my beat? You think I wanted to be up here in yehupetz dodging bricks and rousting savage junkies? Sure, I admit I had this fantasy about letting the Heavyweight Staring Championship of the World go on till a KO, but I had no intention of letting it actually happen, no matter what Kelly says. All that happened was that this curiosity slowed me down a little, that much I will admit.

  But even that would’ve been okay if the damn Mitzvah Mobile hadn’t been the first vehicle to get caught trying to make a right turn from Broadway onto 34th. Picture this crummy old rented truck, a covered delivery type, the back of which is filled with these characters in black hats and long black coats. I mean coats made out of horseblanket material—in June, with the thermometer hitting 85! And they’ve all got scroungy beards and long scruffy sideburns—Hassidim, Jewish hippie holy rollers from Williamsburg, something called the “Lubevitch Society,” which I know on account of this is written on the side of what is also labeled the “Mitzvah Mobile,” along with a lot of Hebrew graffiti and a picture of a mezzuzah which is also some kind of ICBM.

  There I am, standing on the Herald Square island halfway across the intersection, pausing for just a minute, honest Charlie, to watch the show before I break it up. The whole width of 34th Street is blocked with people and the crowd is starting to spill into Broadway. I can see the shaved heads of at least a dozen Hare Krishnas bouncing together above the crowd, and the chanting is shriller and louder than I’ve ever heard it before, even over the sounds of horns and the screams of cabbies. There’s a little gang of street hoods in the crowd and they’re starting to cheer and yell, they seem a little loaded. Hippies are clapping their hands in time to the chanting. Even some ordinary citizen types are cheering and applauding.

  I cross over to the edge of the crowd, but instead of waving my nightstick, blowing my whistle, and telling them to get their stupid asses moving, I elbow my way quietly through them. All right, all right, I admit it, 1 wanted to see what all the excitement was about before I broke it up this time.

  In the middle of the crowd, a dozen Hare Krishnas were dancing and chanting at the top of their lungs, as expected, but what wasn’t expected, Charlie, was that there were six Scientology nuts standing there with their arms folded and staring at them. And I mean, those boys were staring! Shoulder to shoulder like statues of the Rockettes, making like Bela Lugosi on methadone, you could hang your clothes out to dry on the lines between the Krishna freaks and their spaced-out eyeballs. Let me tell you, like the hippies say, the vibes there were really strange. The Scientologists just stood like fireplugs and stared, and that just made the Hare Krishnas jump up and down faster and faster and chant louder and louder.

  “HARE KRISHNA, HARE KRISHNA, KRISHNA KRISHNA, HARE HARE…”

  And the crazier the Hare Krishna freaks went at it, the harder and colder the Scientologists stared. It got so heavy that the crowd was lining up between the silent starers and the jumping jacks, and something was going to give pretty soon.

  At this point, let me tell you, I unfroze fast, and started to move in, but, damn it, I was about a second too late, All of a sudden comes this incredibly loud blast of incredibly tinny hora music to the tune of which a chorus line of weirdos in beaver hats and long black coats dances in between the Hare Krishnas and the Scientologists.

  “What’s this goyisha mishegas?” says a Hassid who looks like a fullback for Yeshiva University.

  Another of the beards accosts a thin pimply Scientologist. “Are you Jewish?” he demands.

  “All right, move it along!” I shout, waving my billie and stepping right into the fruitsalad. Bnt it’s too late, the loonie bin has hit the fan.

  Everyone is shoving their literature in everyone else’s faces. Half of the Hare Krishnas are jumping up and down and chanti
ng half-heartedly while the others are trying to brush away Hassids who are trying to reach down the front of their robes to see if they’re wearing mezzuzahs. The Scientologists have seized the main chance and are pushing their free personality tests on the crowd that has now moved right into the middle of everything.

  “—Krishna Krishna, Rama Rama—”

  “—Tsalis and Tvillen are the strategic deterrent of the Jewish people—”

  “—it’ll only take an hour of your time, and it could change your whole life—”

  “—Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna—”

  “—Bal Shem Tov—”

  “—L. Ron Hubbard—”

  I try my best to break it up, but I ask you Charlie, what could I do? It’s wall to wall people now, and everybody is screaming at the top of his lungs, and the horns from the clogged traffic on Broadway sound like a dinosaur convention, and Scientologists keep pushing their clipboards under my nose, and the Yeshiva University fullback even has the nerve to frisk me for a mezzuzah. Who can hear me blowing my whistle like an idiot? Who can tell a goose-along from my billie from somebody’s elbow in his back? What was I supposed to do, start hitting people over the head and firing my pistol into the air? How was I to know that the Mitzvah Mobile had a bullhorn?

  All of a sudden over the squawking hora music comes this wheezy old voice in a thick Jewish accent, only loud enough to rattle your fillings: “Without study of the Torah, in the streets comes chaos!”

  And this old bird in a beaver hat and black coat gives me a knee in the butt as he pushes past me jabbering into his portable bullhorn. “A Mitzvah a day keeps der Teufel away!” He looks like Moses as played by Sam Jaffe, if you know what I mean, Charlie, and he makes straight for the line of chanting Krishna freaks, drowning them all out with his amplified grandpa voice. “—stop dancing around like a Minsky’s chorus line and dance for joy in the name of the Lord—”

  At which point, all the Hassids grab people at random—Hare Krishnas, Scientologists, hippies, street hoods, yuks from Keokuk—and start whirling them around in a hora. Whirl, whirl, whirl, then change partners like a square dance. One of them even grabs me, and I find myself spinning around like a yo-yo. Everyone is whirling around, then staggering into each other like drunks, then whirling again, orange robes, black coats, satin jackets, shirtsleeves and skirts.

  And then comes the moment when I know for sure that I have had it, when I can feel the pavements of Fort Apache slamming my size nines. Hoo-boy! Here comes the Jews for Jesus!

  These characters everybody knows about because they’ve stuck up their “Jews for Jesus” posters all over the city, and what flavor they are is self-evident. What is also self-evident, unfortunately, is that somewhere in Fun City is another crowd that doesn’t like their trip, because the city is also plastered with posters that read “Not Wanted: Jews for Jesus.” Lately, the phantom opposition has taken to spraypainting out Jews for Jesus posters, and the Jews for Jesus have taken to painting out the “Not Wanted” on enemy posters, cleverly converting them to more of their own.

  And here come a dozen Boy Scouts with five o’clock shadows in Jew for Jesus T-shirts chain-ganging through the fruitsalad hora like that Carrie Nation and her bad-ass biddies busting up a saloon. Can you imagine if it’s the Lubevitch Society that’s been fighting the poster war with them?

  “Accept the Lord Jesus Christ King of the Jews!” they scream, actually loud enough to make themselves heard, they must be in practice.

  “Bite your tongue, you should say such a thing!” Sam-Jaffe-in-the-black-coat lectures back through his bullhorn.

  “GOYIM!” shout the Hassids.

  I try to step in between the front lines, but there aren’t any front lines anymore, the Jews for Jesus and the Hassids are suddenly all over the place going at each other in groups of two or three.

  “—as Jewish as you are, bubelah, and don’t you forget it—”

  “—look at this mishegas and tell me the Messiah’s already come—”

  The Lubevitchers are trying to check the Jews for Jesus for mezzuzahs, who are trying to push them away, and the Krishna freaks have gotten their act back together again and are jumping up and down, and dozens of weirdos in the crowd are still homing on their own. The Scientologists have gone whacko or something; they’re handing out free personality profile tests to everyone within reach and trying to get them to fill them out right on the spot. A Salvation Army lady in her blue uniform appears playing a tambourine. Two black guys in white robes selling newspapers. Indians in turbans with signs in Hindu lettering. Hassids are whirling unwilling Jews for Jesus around by the wrists. Somehow I find myself dancing with a Hare Krishna. Somehow I find myself putting a quarter in a collection can shoved in my face. Somehow I find myself filling out a free personality profile test.

  Then I hear sirens—the riot squad to the rescue!

  But what pushes aside the mob like bowling pins and comes to a panic stop in front of me is not the riot bus but Sergeant Kelly’s squad car.

  And what comes howling up out of it is Sergeant Kelly, his face so red it’s purple, his eyes rolling like Groucho Marx, veins standing out like cables on his forehead—believe me, Charlie, a sight that would make Godzilla crap in his pants.

  “WHATDAHELLISDISGETYERASSESOUTAHERE!” Sergeant Kelly suggested to the crowd like King Kong on bennies. A division of Marines would’ve backed off from Kelly in this state, and instantly the war was over and the parties concerned were streaming away from Kelly’s squad car in every direction while Kelly continued to bellow like a bull moose in heat to encourage their cooperation.

  He was still in top form when he turned his attention to me. Me, standing there holding a half-completed free personality profile test.

  Fade out Broadway, fade in Fort Apache.

  But you know, Charlie, I got to admit it, I still kind of wonder how it all would have come out.

  Introduction to

  Blackout

  When the lights went out for days during New York City’s last fun-filled blackout, TV newspapers went too. The papers couldn’t print, and nobody could receive television transmissions. But some radio stations stayed on the air, and lots of people had battery radios.

  Even that much media-deprivation makes the modern mind a wee bit paranoid; we’re too used to knowing what’s happening out there, and we start to wondering what might be going on in all those suddenly dark corners. But if there were simply no news, none at all…

  Blackout

  In Orange County California, Freddie Dystrum took an afterdinner Coors into the living room and sat down in his favorite chair as his wife Mildred turned on the ABC nightly network news. While he preferred the authoritative dignity of Walter Cronkite, Mildred was addicted to the sophisticated folksiness of Harry Reasoner, and, in return for drawing a bye on the battleax bellowings of Maude, Reasoner it was. By such negotiated settlements was domestic tranquility maintained.

  After the station break, Reasoner’s calm smiling face came onto the screen and began talking about the latest governmental crisis in Spain or Nigeria or someplace like that—with his belly stuffed with Colonel Sanders’ finest, Freddie was drifting off into his customary python-like post-prandial stupor and one unstable foreign government seemed much like any other.

  Then it happened, jolting him wide awake.

  A hand suddenly appeared on camera from the left, shoving a piece of paper in Reasoner’s face. It seemed to have some kind of military cuff on its sleeve, and when the indignant Reasoner turned to glare at the off-camera personage, his face went pale, and for the first time in Freddie’s memory this man, who had reeled off every sort of world disaster for decades with professional calm and aplomb, seemed visibly shaken. The military hand silently shook the paper in front of Harry Reasoner’s face, and the newscaster finally took it in a quavering hand and read it aloud.

  “All television and radio newscasts and newspaper publication have been indefinitely suspended by government orde
r until… until…” Reasoner’s eyes bugged as if he couldn’t believe what he was reading. He looked off-camera quizzically, swallowed hard, then continued. “Until the Department of Defense has gotten to the bottom of the flying saucer phenomenon…”

  The screen abruptly became a hissing field of multicolored static. Then an announcer’s voice said: “In place of our regularly scheduled newscast, we bring you Antelopes of the West, already in progress.” And a scared-looking faun was bounding across the prairie.

  On 88th Street in Manhattan, New York, Archie and Bill sat on the edge of their bed pulling on their clothes, quite ready to believe that they were going to find Martians parading down Broadway in armored personnel carriers. Wasn’t that the way superior invading forces always made their appearance on the 7:00 news?

  “Can you believe this is happening?” Archie chortled. “Can you see the look on the President’s face?”

  “Lead me to your taker?”

  “My god, do you really think there are tentacle d monstrosities out there tearing the brass brassieres off Earthwomen?”

  “You’re assuming that they’re straight?”

  Out on Broadway, people were milling about, not so much in a panic as in a state of bleary stupefaction, rubbing the glaze out of their eyes and staring at the transformation of the sky from sunset violet to fathomless black.

  “It must be some kind of television stunt like that Orson Welles thing on radio,” a tweedy man was saying to his wife.

  “On all channels, Maxwell?”

  Archie walked up to a cop leaning up against his squad car and staring at the sky. “Have any flying saucers landed in New York yet?” he asked the rough-looking cop. Ten minutes ago, he would have gotten a snarl and a scowl or something worse, but now the cop simply said “Search me,” and studied the now-dark sky with undisguised dread.