Five years ago, Collins-Hathaway could do no wrong. Now the customers were going Argent, with those clean lines and jet-set emanations. Take that Airform core, zip it up in the new Velope stain-resistant fabric—they really knocked it out of the park. “You know the Manhattan Project, where they brought in the world’s top scientists?” Carney asked his customers. “That’s what Argent did, but with stain-resistance instead of the A-bomb.” That was usually good enough for a sample bounce on the cushions.
Carney told Rusty to go home early. Now that Rusty had two kids he was less eager to lock up, and the nocturnal stakeouts had made for a long week. On Tuesday, out of riot-night boredom, Carney gave him a new title: associate sales manager. Knowing his boss wouldn’t get around to it, Rusty went ahead and ordered the name tag. While he awaited its arrival, he taped an interim version onto a Pan Am Junior Captain pin he’d obtained somewhere.
“What do you think?”
It looked okay. “It looks great,” Carney said. Business was slow anyway.
Elizabeth had bought some books for Rusty’s little ones and Carney handed them over. “What’d you, loot these?” Carney had asked when she pulled them out of the shopping bag. That would be a sight: Elizabeth climbing into the window display, stepping over broken glass to grab some shit. Wouldn’t put it past her, if she’d been born a few blocks over.
Rusty thanked him for the gift and then it was a dead two hours except for cop cars drifting by like slow death out there.
Carney settled at his desk after he locked up to work on a pitch for the new Amsterdam News advertisement. The old one was getting hoary and on riot watch he’d ruminated.
The Argent sectional…Carney preferred to be hands-on with advertisements, but there was resistance. The newspaper’s in-house man Higgins laid out the ads and he was a stubborn sort, with an imperious streak one associated with the lowest rungs of New York City civil service. “Is this the message you want to send to the public?” As if Higgins were acquainted with the whole history and contemporary reality of home furnishings. One time Carney used the word divan and it turned out Higgins had a cousin named Devon, and the assistant accounts manager had to break up the scuffle. Bottom line: A man has a mind to place an ad and possesses the means, you run the ad. Save the censorship for the front page.
Carney grew punchy.
Designed with today’s Rioter-on-the-Go in mind…
After a long day of fighting the Man, why not put your feet up—on a new Collins-Hathaway ottoman.
Presenting the new Collins-Hathaway Three-Point Recliner—finally a sit-in we can all agree on!
Someone thumped on the Morningside door. None of his regulars had arranged a meet, but it was Saturday evening and a fellow might want some money in his pocket for the night ahead. Carney slid back the cover and looked out the keyhole. He let his cousin in, making sure that no one came up behind.
“What’s up?” Freddie hadn’t been this scrawny since seventh grade—he had existed as a chicken-armed creature until puberty. His skin was sheened, his red-and-orange-striped T-shirt sweated through. He clutched a leather briefcase with gold-tone hardware and a tiny clasp lock.
“Where you been?” Carney said. He put his arm on Freddie’s shoulder to test that he was actually there.
Freddie wriggled loose. “I wanted to check in and see how you were doing—how all you were doing.” He claimed the club chair and leaned back. “People up to some madness the last few days.”
“We’re fine,” Carney said. “The kids. You talk to Aunt Millie?”
“I’m heading there right after I see you. Surprise her.”
“She’ll be surprised all right.”
Freddie cradled the leather briefcase to his chest. Gentle, like he kept a rooftop coop and the briefcase was his prize flier. Carney asked him what it was.
“This? I know, right! Listen, I have to tell you how I found out what was going down—I was in it! It was Saturday night, you know, the big one.”
Freddie had trekked to Times Square to see The Unsinkable Molly Brown—his partiality for Debbie Reynolds was durable and verified—and on the ride uptown a weird vibe swallowed up the train. Everyone jumpy, looking around. The heat sent people barking at one another. Since the murder, the news had been running stories about flocks of youth rampaging through the subway, harassing white people, threatening motormen.
“It was nine o’clock,” Freddie said. “I get out of the subway to look for a sandwich and the streets are full of people. Raising their fists, waving signs. Chanting, ‘We want Malcolm X! We want Malcolm X!’ and ‘Killer cops must go!’ Some of them hold pictures of the killer cop like, Wanted: Dead or Alive. I’m hungry—I don’t want to deal with all that. I’m trying to get me a sandwich.”
The Congress of Racial Equality had been out in front since the boy was killed, organizing a rally on Friday, and another on Saturday at the 28th Precinct. “Someone said they were at the station house doing speeches, and I thought to myself—maybe I’m an activist. Why not? You know I like those little CORE girls, all serious and shit, talking about change. Last time I was in Lincoln’s I started rapping with this girl from CORE. Looked like Diahann Carroll? Could have been her sister. But she wasn’t having it. Says she wants herself a college man and I said, I went to college—”
“UCLA,” Carney helped out.
“That’s right—University of the Corner of Lenox Avenue!” The old joke.
Freddie followed the crowd to the station house on 123rd, where a CORE field secretary with dark horn-rimmed glasses and a red bow tie listed demands: Police Commissioner Murphy must resign; set up the long-requested civilian review board. “Got these Negroes out there yelling ‘Killer! Killer! Killer!’ this way, over that way this young brother has a bullhorn going, ‘Forty-five percent of the cops in New York are neurotic murderers!’ It was a ruckus—I should have stayed in the subway, all this going on up here. And you know those cops ain’t having it. They got barricades up, herding people. Wearing those helmets because they know people are going to fuck over them. Fucking cop pulls out the special cop bullhorn and tells us, ‘Go home! Go home!’ And everybody shouted back, ‘We are home, baby!’
“This old lady elbows me in the stomach, we’re packed in. Hot. All these angry Negroes in one place, and they are pissed—but all I want is a sandwich. I start heading back up to 125th and people are all buzzing, saying the police have beat up and arrested some CORE people. That was that! Boom—it was on! Knocking over the barricades. Niggers on the roof raining down shit on the cops—bricks, soda bottles, pieces of roof. Rocking cars, throwing shit through windows.
“I’m like, how am I going to get my sandwich in all this mess?
“On 125th, everybody’s closed or closing up early because of the unrest. That Cuban place with the pickle they put on the meat is closed. Jimmy’s, the Coronet’s got its lights out. That’s when I really got hungry—you know how you want something more when you know you ain’t going to get it? Negroes are wrapping chains around those security gates and then pulling the gates off with their cars. Then they break the glass and step inside. I’m a simple man. Put something between two slices and I’m happy. But how am I supposed to get a motherfucking sandwich with all that going on? People running up and down, screaming. I’m like, damn, this riot stuff will cramp a brother’s style.”
Freddie had no recourse but to split uptown and hit Gracie’s Diner. “Got my ass a turkey sandwich, finally. And it was good, too. But that was some wild shit, man,” he said. “You don’t want to be out in that, hell no. Me and Linus decided to ride it out at our place.”
“Ride it out.” Drop out of the world and get high for a few days.
“Beats getting beat upside the head. What’d you do?”
Carney said, “Elizabeth and the kids stayed inside mostly. Their day camp was canceled—it’s on the same block as the station house, so it was in a hot spot. I was here. Rusty was with me a lot.” He told Freddie about the vigil. A mob marched past going east, then returned into view stampeding in the other direction, followed by a gang of white cops. Back and forth. In the end, the store was unscathed, as Freddie could see. “So what’s in there?” Carney asked again.
“This? I need you to sit on this for a few days,” Freddie said.
“Freddie.”
“Linus and me, we pulled this rip-off and it got some people mad. These heavy dudes. And now we got to lay low for a spell. Can you do that for me?”
“What is it?”
“There’s a lot of heat, that’s all I can say.”
“You’re nuts,” Carney said. They had extra cops cruising the neighborhood to keep a lid on, prowl cars and cops on corners, and Freddie is walking around with a Madison Avenue briefcase that obviously wasn’t his. Was it drugs? He wouldn’t bring that into his place, would he? “What are you getting me into?”
“I’m your cousin,” Freddie said. “I need you to do it. I don’t have anyone else.”
You couldn’t hear the subway from 125th and Morningside, but Carney heard this train. Following its cursed schedule and already pulling into the station and opening its doors whether you were ready or not. “Okay.”
“What else is that thing for?” Meaning the safe.
“I said okay.”
“I’ll be around in a few days to pick it up.”
“I said okay.”
Carney spun the handle of the Hermann Bros. safe and slid the briefcase inside. He closed it and rapped on the dark metal for effect. “Where will you be?”
Freddie gave him the address of an SRO way uptown on 171st Street, room 306. “I’ll pick this up in a few days, Ray.”
“What if I open it?”
“You don’t want to do that. Something might fly out.”
Carney slammed the Morningside door behind Freddie. He regarded the safe.
It came to him: A comfortable sofa outlasts the day’s news—it’s built for a lifetime.
Carney knew Mr. Diaz, the owner of MT Liquors, from meetings of the 125th Street business alliance. He was a Puerto Rican immigrant, gentle-natured except on the topic of crime. He despised druggies, purse-snatchers, and muggers. Public urination was a personal crusade, arguing from the anti position.
When they smashed his front window on Saturday night, Mr. Diaz replaced it the next day. He replaced it when they smashed it the next night. Never mind that the store had been cleaned out and there was nothing to steal but the empty, busted cash register. They broke the window again. He replaced it. They smashed it four times and four times he replaced it. Was he a monument to hope, or to insanity? He was a man grasping after an impossible solution. How long do you keep trying to save something that has been lost?