Piecework Page 12

  “Well, you know why it would be,” Gotti answered. “Ah — because it would be right. Maybe after thirty years it would deteriorate, but it would take that long to fuckin’ succumb, you know….” Then, like De Gaulle or Mao, he quoted a third party in reference to himself. One of the men he’d asked to join the grand new coalition of the Mob, its version of the Popular Front, had said to Gotti: “You were our last hope. …”

  The last hope was soon part of the texture of the popular imagination. The tabloids labeled him the Dapper Don. He was followed by TV crews. He starred in the gossip columns. But mobologists were also talking about his troubles. Like most Americans, the major problems he had were within his own family. His brother, Gene, was convicted of peddling heroin at a time when the Boss was telling his infantry to get out of the smack racket. Then his son Little John got in trouble. Last winter, the young man and some friends beat up a man in a diner in the neighborhood where Gotti lives. The guy turned out to be a cop. Gotti apparently ordered the kid to do his drinking out of the neighborhood. So Little John, who dresses like his father right down to the pinkie ring, went to the next county. There he and his friends got into a fight in a club and punched out a woman.

  “The old wise guys don’t like this stuff,” one mobologist told me. “There’s two laws: one for everybody, one for John’s relatives. And who could imagine Frank Costello punching out a woman?”

  The grumblings about the Boss were not, however, in evidence at the twentieth annual Fourth of July block party thrown by Gotti’s Bergin Hunt & Fish Club this year. Like any decent American politician, Gotti had long ago learned the importance of securing a local base; every year since 1969 his club had donated hamburgers, sausages, and fireworks to celebrate the birth of the country that has allowed the club’s members such affluent and leisurely lives. In return, the locals spoke of Gotti with a certain affection. “If he does bad things,” one said, “he doesn’t do them around here.” But great fame, alas, also brings great scrutiny. Under pressure from editorial writers, the cops told Gotti he could cook sausage but he couldn’t blow up firecrackers. Ah, fame: the two-edged sword.

  Gotti threw the party anyway. As reporters, cops, and kids looked on, homemade barbecues were set up in the street (they were made from split fifty-five-gallon drums, of the sort sometimes used for disposing of stool pigeons). A Mister Softee truck arrived early and stayed late; an inflated rubber Kiddie Kastle filled IoIst Avenue, and one corner was occupied by a ride called Ernie’s King Kong. Gotti himself slipped quietly into the club in the afternoon; on the street, orders were barked by Little John, dressed in a sleeveless undershirt, trim Guido haircut, Bermuda shorts.

  As daylight faded, the crowd grew to about four thousand. And the assembled jackals of the press wondered about only one matter: Would the Boss defy the law and set off fireworks? Some of Gotti’s neighbors complained about the injustice of life under the embattled American flag. “It ain’t fair,” said one. “They’re blowing up firecrackers all over the city and we can’t do it here, because the newspapers say all those rotten things about John.”

  After a while, as the TV lights brightened the street, a group of young men started chanting, “We want the Boss!” But members of the wise-guy directorate whispered to them, and the chant became “We want John!” and then was transformed once more into “We want the works!” And then suddenly, from the rooftop of the building housing the Our Friends Social Club (a branch of the Bergin), the sky exploded with fireworks. The cops moved to seal off the building, and from another direction, a gigantic volley went off on the rooftop of Ozone Electric Inc. The crowd roared. The rockets now seemed to come from everywhere: rooftops and backyards and a railroad trestle down the block, spiraling through the summer night. The crowd was delirious with triumph and defiance. The cops looked timid in the face of … the aura.

  Then the door of the Bergin Hunt & Fish Club opened. Inside, where the Italian flag was hung on the wall and another door led to the inner sanctum where his dead son’s picture is on the wall, John Gotti could be seen laughing. He came to the door, engulfed by ten sides of Mob beef, and stood on the doorstep. The Boss then nodded at the cheers of the exultant populace, but he did not smile. He just stood there, solemn and dignified, staring up at the rockets’ red glare. John Gotti, American.

  ESQUIRE,

  October 1989

  ON THE RUN

  DAYTONA BEACH, FLA.

  It was almost midnight. The girl on the beach had a thick, chunky body encased in denim shorts and a dark blue T-shirt. There was a man in front of her, kissing her violently, and another man behind her, running his hands over her body. Above them, the people on the pier at the foot of Main Street were watching, some of them smiling, as the girl struggled. She pushed one of the men back and then darted away among the parked cars on the beach.

  “Come back here, girl,” one of the men shouted. He was wearing a pair of dirty white jeans, his hair tied back in a ponytail. The thick little girl looked to her left and saw the signs of Big Daddy’s Lounge, the Saxony Motel and The Seahorse; she saw the lights of the Skylift and the Skyneedle. She dashed between the parked cars to her right, then in front of the slow-moving cars that are allowed to drive on the beach here, then she ran into the surf. The two men were behind her, running hard. The people on the pier just watched.

  The two men caught her in the surf. One of them pulled her hair back while the other fondled her. The traffic moved along slowly.

  At one end of the pier was a place called The Pit Stop, a dark little saloon, with pinball machines, aging hippies nursing drinks, the Rolling Stones singing “Miss You” on the jukebox. I went down there to find a cop. I saw a fat special standing on the steps to the right of the saloon.

  “Hey,” I said, “you got a little girl in trouble down on that beach.”

  “There’s lots of little girls in trouble down on that beach,” he said, walking away.

  When I got back to the pier, the girl was running under the dance hall that was halfway to the end of the pier. I leaned out over the edge of the Solarcaine sign and saw the two men tumble her into the surf.

  The chunky little girl squealed and laughed as one of the men yanked at her T-shirt. Then she got up, soaking, and walked slowly away with them, like a prisoner.

  Late the next afternoon, I saw her sitting alone at a yellow table in front of McDonald’s, a block behind the boardwalk. Her dark brown hair was dirty and matted and there were grease stains on her bare feet. She was wearing the same clothes she had on the night before. Her skin looked coarse in the late afternoon sun. She was tearing greedily at a Big Mac, and I went over and sat down across from her. She was about 16.

  “How’d you make out last night?” I said.

  Her eyes were suddenly jittery and scared and she stopped chewing.

  “I’m not a cop,” I said. “I just wondered how you got through the night alive.”

  “I’m here, ain’t I?” she said. She had a hoarse, small, girl’s voice.

  “How’d you get here?” I said.

  Her eyes became icy nuggets. “I don’t know you, Mister. I don’t have to say nuthin’ to you.”

  “You’re right,” I said, and went into the main room of the McDonald’s and ordered a milk shake. I paid for it and went outside and sat at another table. Pick-up trucks lumbered down the street, waiting at the light to turn on Main Street and go out to the beach.

  Two 4 5-year-old hippies with scoured eyes walked into McDonald’s, shirtless and shoeless, and looked blankly at the chunky girl. She had finished eating, and was sipping a soda. One of them went inside and the other stared at her. She got up and came over to sit across from me.

  “You got a dollar?” she said.

  “Sure,” I said, and gave her a dollar. The second hippie went inside. “What’s your name?”

  “Kathy.”

  “Where you from, Kathy?”

  “Up North. Albany, N.Y. You’re not a cop?”

  “
Do I look like a cop?” I said, laughing. She smiled then, and said, “Yeah.”

  “Well, I’m not. I’m a reporter.” I showed her a press card. She looked at the picture on the card and then at me, and handed it back. It was starting to get dark now and I asked her how she’d come to Daytona Beach.

  “I ran away last May,” she said. “I couldn’t take them no more. I couldn’t take my mother, always naggin’, always on me, you know? So I just took off one night, me and a girlfriend. She quit on me in New York City and went home, but I kept goin’.”

  Somewhere in New Jersey, she was picked up by a truck driver. They went all the way to Virginia together.

  “I thought he was a nice guy,” she said. “He was doin’ a lot of pills, reds and stuff, and he’d sing the songs right along with the radio, and he knew every word. We come to some place, a truck stop they call it. They had a separate restaurant, just for truck drivers. He gave me some pills and I took them. I didn’t care, and we drank some beer.”

  They stayed there all night, and the driver passed her around to five other drivers.

  “I didn’t mind,” she said flatly. “It was better than Albany. But when I woke up in the morning in the woods beside that place, they were all gone, every last one of them. I left my shoes in one of the trucks, and I only had $4. So I had to hitchhike. Some old farmer picked me up. He wanted to take me someplace, but he was so old, man. I said no, and he got mad and left me out on the road in the middle of the night.”

  It took her six days to reach Jacksonville. She stayed there for a while, living on the beach. There were a lot of sailors in town, she said, and they liked her. “Nobody liked me in Albany,” she said. “They used to laugh, I was too fat.” One of the sailors took her to Daytona on the Fourth of July weekend, then left without her. She had been here ever since.

  “It’s nice here,” she said. “The dudes here are nice.”

  A few more beach rats arrived, and she seemed nervous.

  “I gotta go,” she said. “There’s a guy over there I don’t wanna talk to.”

  Her eyes were bright with panic. She got up quickly, and we walked together back to the boardwalk. An enormous fat man in green shorts lay on a bench, his hair cut short, his eyes pinwheeling, fanning himself with a pocket mirror.

  It was dark now. Two scrawny men with junkie eyes stood in front of Lacey’s Beachware, watching the evening’s arrivals from the small towns of Florida and Georgia.

  “Why don’t you go home, Kathy?” I said.

  “I don’t ever want to go home,” she said, her voice rising. “I don’t want to go home ever again.”

  She ran across the boardwalk, down the steps to the powdery sand, rushing toward the lights of the passing cars, and the dark Atlantic beyond. I stayed two more days, but I didn’t see her again.

  NEW YORK TIMES SYNDICATED SALES CORP.,

  September 8, 1978

  CRACK AND THE BOX

  One sad rainy morning last winter, I talked to a woman who was addicted to crack cocaine. She was twenty-two, stiletto-thin, with eyes as old as tombs. She was living in two rooms in a welfare hotel with her children, who were two, three, and five years of age. Her story was the usual tangle of human woe: early pregnancy, dropping out of school, vanished men, smack and then crack, tricks with Johns in parked cars to pay for the dope. I asked her why she did drugs. She shrugged in an empty way and couldn’t really answer beyond “makes me feel good.” While we talked and she told her tale of squalor, the children ignored us. They were watching television.

  Walking back to my office in the rain, I brooded about the woman, her zombielike children, and my own callous indifference. I’d heard so many versions of the same story that I almost never wrote them anymore; the sons of similar women, glimpsed a dozen years ago, are now in Dannemora or Soledad or Joliet; in a hundred cities, their daughters are moving into the same loveless rooms. As I walked, a series of homeless men approached me for change, most of them junkies. Others sat in doorways, staring at nothing. They were additional casualties of our time of plague, demoralized reminders that although this country holds only 2 percent of the world’s population, it consumes 65 percent of the world’s supply of hard drugs.

  Why, for God’s sake? Why do so many millions of Americans of all ages, races, and classes choose to spend all or part of their lives stupefied? I’ve talked to hundreds of addicts over the years; some were my friends. But none could give sensible answers. They stutter about the pain of the world, about despair or boredom, the urgent need for magic or pleasure in a society empty of both. But then they just shrug. Americans have the money to buy drugs; the supply is plentiful. But almost nobody in power asks, Why? Least of all, George Bush and his drug warriors.

  William Bennett talks vaguely about the heritage of ’60s permissiveness, the collapse of Traditional Values, and all that. But he and Bush offer the traditional American excuse: It Is Somebody Else’s Fault. This posture set the stage for the self-righteous invasion of Panama; Bush even accused Manuel Noriega of “poisoning our children.” But he never asked why so many Americans demand the poison.

  And then, on that rainy morning in New York, I saw another one of those ragged men staring out at the rain from a doorway. I suddenly remembered the inert postures of the children in that welfare hotel, and I thought: television.

  Ah, no, I muttered to myself: too simple. Something as complicated as drug addiction can’t be blamed on television. Come on.…But I remembered all those desperate places I’d visited as a reporter, where there were no books and a TV set was always playing and the older kids had gone off somewhere to shoot smack, except for the kid who was at the mortuary in a coffin. I also remembered when I was a boy in the ’40s and early ’50s, and drugs were a minor sideshow, a kind of dark little rumor. And there was one major difference between that time and this: television.

  We had unemployment then; illiteracy, poor living conditions, racism, governmental stupidity, a gap between rich and poor. We didn’t have the all-consuming presence of television in our lives. Now two generations of Americans have grown up with television from their earliest moments of consciousness. Those same American generations are afflicted by the pox of drug addiction.

  Only thirty-five years ago, drug addiction was not a major problem in this country. Yes: There were drug addicts. We had some at the end of the nineteenth century, too, hooked on the cocaine in patent medicines. During the placid ’50s, Commissioner Harry An-slinger pumped up the budget of the old Bureau of Narcotics with fantasies of reefer madness. Heroin was sold and used in most major American cities, while the bebop generation of jazz musicians got jammed up with horse.

  But until the early ’60s, narcotics were still marginal to American life; they weren’t the $12O-billion market they make up today. If anything, those years have an eerie innocence. In 1955 there were 31,700,000 TV sets in use in the country (the number is now past 184 million). But the majority of the audience had grown up without the dazzling new medium. They embraced it, were diverted by it, perhaps even loved it, but they weren’t formed by it. That year, the New York police made a mere 1,234 felony drug arrests; in 1988 it was 43,901. They confiscated ninety-seven ounces of cocaine for the entire year; last year it was hundreds of pounds. During each year of the ’50s in New York, there were only about a hundred narcotics-related deaths. But by the end of the ’60s, when the first generation of children formed by television had come to maturity (and thus to the marketplace), the number of such deaths had risen to 1,200. The same phenomenon was true in every major American city.

  In the last Nielsen survey of American viewers, the average family was watching television seven hours a day. This has never happened before in history. No people has ever been entertained for seven hours a day. The Elizabethans didn’t go to the theater seven hours a day. The pre-TV generation did not go to the movies seven hours a day. Common sense tells us that this all-pervasive diet of instant imagery, sustained now for forty years, must have changed u
s in profound ways.

  Television, like drugs, dominates the lives of its addicts. And though some lonely Americans leave their sets on without watching them, using them as electronic companions, television usually absorbs its viewers the way drugs absorb their users. Viewers can’t work or play while watching television; they can’t read; they can’t be out on the streets, falling in love with the wrong people, learning how to quarrel and compromise with other human beings. In short, they are asocial. So are drug addicts.

  One Michigan State University study in the early ’80s offered a group of four- and five-year-olds the choice of giving up television or giving up their fathers. Fully one third said they would give up Daddy. Given a similar choice (between cocaine or heroin and father, mother, brother, sister, wife, husband, children, job), almost every stone junkie would do the same.

  There are other disturbing similarities. Television itself is a consciousness-altering instrument. With the touch of a button, it takes you out of the “real” world in which you reside and can place you at a basketball game, the back alleys of Miami, the streets of Bucharest, or the cartoony living rooms of Sitcom Land. Each move from channel to channel alters mood, usually with music or a laugh track. On any given evening, you can laugh, be frightened, feel tension, thump with excitement. You can even tune in MacNeil/Lehrer and feel sober.

  But none of these abrupt shifts in mood is earned. They are attained as easily as popping a pill. Getting news from television, for example, is simply not the same experience as reading it in a newspaper. Reading is active. The reader must decode little symbols called words, then create images or ideas and make them connect; at its most basic level, reading is an act of the imagination. But the television viewer doesn’t go through that process. The words are spoken to him by Dan Rather or Tom Brokaw or Peter Jennings. There isn’t much decoding to do when watching television, no time to think or ponder before the next set of images and spoken words appears to displace the present one. The reader, being active, works at his or her own pace; the viewer, being passive, proceeds at a pace determined by the show. Except at the highest levels, television never demands that its audience take part in an act of imagination. Reading always does.