Piecework

In addition, the city has been overrun by endless regiments of the homeless. Again, there are so many that nobody can truly count them. But they are everywhere: rummies and junkies, most of them men, their bodies sour from filth and indifference. They sleep in subways and in parks, in doorways and in bank lobbies. Some chatter away with the line of con that’s learned in the yards of prisons. Others mutter in the jangled discourse of the insane.

But these derelicts are not all the sad and harmless losers of sentimental myth. Some are menacing and dangerous, their requests for handouts essentially demands. The squeegee brigades appear at all major intersections, holding rags to clean auto windshields, grabbing windshield wipers to force compliance. Refuse to pay for the unsolicited window cleaning, your wiper might get snapped off. Few New Yorkers are willing to leave their cars to fight with these people, and the cops ignore them. Every night, the homeless rummage through thousands of plastic garbage bags left out for pickup. They are looking for soda cans, which can be exchanged for cash, which then can be used to buy dope (food can be obtained for nothing at the many soup kitchens around the city). Often, they don’t seal up the bags when they’re finished and the garbage flies away on the city’s streets. New York was never a model of cleanliness. But it has seldom been dirtier than it is now.

This enrages those who pay taxes — the price of living here. New Yorkers pay federal, state, and city income taxes, along with an endless array of sales and other taxes, to help meet the city’s incredible $28 billion budget. Many of the middle class get virtually none of the services they pay for. The police don’t protect them. They have far fewer fires than ghetto areas. They don’t often use the public hospitals and seldom send their children to public schools, which are perceived as dangerous and drug-ridden. Since the rich pay very little in taxes (they write the laws), the middle class is supporting the non-working underclass, which, of course, pays no taxes at all. So it is the middle class that now speaks of leaving New York behind. They want to live in places that are safe. They want to feel normal human feelings, including horror in the face of the horrible.

“I just can’t use my kids in a social experiment,” one friend said. “Yeah, I’d like to stay. But I have two children. I don’t want them to be killed coming home from school. I don’t want them to become drug addicts. Is that unreasonable? If so, then we’re completely insane.…”

If all of this is by now familiar, there seems to be no way to turn it around with the oratory of optimism. It is certain now that no American city will cash in on the end of the Cold War. After a brief few months of hope, the macho adventure in Iraq, with the humiliating sideshow of the President of the United States panhandling for funds from our “allies,” indicates that the U.S. just can’t abide peace. It will certainly not begin transforming the military-industrial complex into a social-industrial complex at any point in the foreseeable future. Instead of using our treasure and intelligence to make goods (thus putting the bulk of the underclass back to work), we will keep making this military junk that only employs an engineering elite. And with his gift for syrupy platitude, the President promises us that nothing will change.

Meanwhile, as this dreadful century comes to an end, poor New York will slide deeper into decay, becoming a violent American Calcutta. The middle class will flee in greater numbers, the tax base will shrink, the criminals will rule our days and nights. Drugs, crime, despair, illiteracy, disease: All will increase into the next century. If there are twenty-five bums in the corner park now, make way for another hundred. If there are two thousand murders this year, get ready for four thousand. New York is dying. And if New York dies, so will every other American city. We are feeding our children to the dogs. And nobody in Washington understands — do they, gentlemen? — that the horror is that there is no horror.

ESQUIRE,

December 1990

PART II THE LAWLESS DECADES

Paul Sann once wrote a book about the Prohibition era and called it The Lawless Decade. But the Roaring Twenties have an almost innocent charm when compared with American cities over the past quarter century. In Chicago’s famous St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in 1929, seven members of the Bugs Moran mob were shot down in a North Clark Street garage. Headlines screamed. Politicians bellowed. The shootings became enshrined in myth and figured in dozens of movies. In New York in the 1980s, we once had 25 murders on a single weekend. They were covered in the newspapers for two days and then forgotten.