The driver switched off the ignition and began speaking into the phone on his dashboard. Up and down the aisle people perked up with interest and agitation.
A woman in black leaned toward a man wearing horn-rimmed glasses and, one finger tapping the side of her forehead, stage-whispered, “Senile.”
“Hey,” a voice called out from the back. “Let’s get this show on the road, I gotta get downtown.”
Two people began discussing the legal and social ramifications of the case. “Ain’t no way that driver-man can keep goin’, he don’t pay the fare,” said one. “But what if the old man ain’t got the money?” said the other. “Baby, you ain’t got no money, you don’t get on no bus,” came the swift reply. “That’s the law, man, the law.”
The driver stood in the aisle and announced loudly, “Everybody off the bus. Sorry, folks, but this bus is not moving. I’ll give you all transfers.”
Stunned silence. Nobody could believe this was happening. Then everyone was yelling at once: “What the hell, I gotta get, you can’t do this to us.”
At the back of the bus, a wounded howl went up from a young man who until this moment had been dreaming out the window. Now he stood up, his slim body a glory of black leather and silver studs. He stalked to the front of the bus, planted himself before the silent old man, and spat out, “What-choo wanna make yourself so cheap for? For a lousy buck and a quarter. Man, for that you gonna put us through all this misery?”
The driver, a tall, well-built man, stood unmoving as the passengers streamed toward the doors, but in his face I thought I saw an accumulation of the insults that daily life flung at him. In thirty seconds we were all off the bus, milling about in the street. Interestingly enough, no one walked away and no one speculated on why not one of us had thought to simply pay the old man’s fare.
“Oh, this lousy city,” the man beside me crooned softly, “goddamn this lousy city.”
I looked back at the bus. The old man was still sitting in his seat, his hands on his walking stick, his eyes on the floor. Suddenly, as the confusion on the street was mounting, he stood up, climbed off the bus, and, like a figure in a dream, walked away into the crowded afternoon. I plucked at the driver’s sleeve. “He’s gone,” I said.
The driver’s glance followed mine, and without the flick of an eyelash, he announced, “Okay, everybody back on the bus.”
In silence, everyone filed back onto the bus. Each passenger sat down in the same seat he or she had occupied before. The driver took his seat, closed the doors, and swung expertly out into Fifth Avenue traffic. I looked at my watch. One hour had elapsed from the time the driver had first said, “Sir, you didn’t pay your fare.” I looked around at my fellow travelers and saw that each had quickly rearranged his or her face behind its compulsory mask of neutrality. It was as though, for them, nothing had ever happened. But even then I knew better.
* * *
In the early 1950s, a New York journalist named Seymour Krim yearned to be a maker of dissident literature at the same time that he wished to enjoy national celebrity — and on both scores felt himself a failure. Out of that sense of failure, Krim found a voice and a subject that spoke to the times. His persona was that of a manic-depressive, alternately ambitious, neurotic, self-mocking, and it spilled rivers of ink delivering an ongoing account of its breakdowns, its hungers, its shocking envy of those who had achieved the success that was both despised and longed for. That voice was also urban to the core. No place on earth other than New York City could have produced a Seymour Krim.
Making provocative use of a mad, inventive, somewhat stream-of-consciousness sentence structure, Krim developed a hipster prose style that allowed him, in spirit, to join a generation of emerging rebels for whom thought, feeling, and action were about to become one. For Krim, achieving such unity would mean bringing his own inner chaos under sufficient control that he’d be able to write the great work he knew he had it in him to write.
Fantasy was his middle name. He was forever fantasizing a future in which all would be magically pulled together and — of this he was certain — his own big-time promise would blossom into major accomplishment. The fantasizing saturated nearly every piece he ever wrote. A nervous braggadocio beneath the surface of the prose made his narrator sound as though he imagined himself the protagonist in a Broadway musical, calling out to the audience, “Just you wait and see! I’m gonna come out of this bigger, better, more important than ALL OF YOU PUT TOGETHER.”
But consolidation of thought and action remained beyond Krim’s grasp. All he could do was document the disability that tore him up every day that he awakened in the cold-water flat on the Lower East Side that he lived in until he died. At the height of his powers, Krim’s gift was to speak for all those like him who were also unable to convert fantasy into reality. Through the simple expedient of using this defiantly daydreaming self as an instrument of illumination, Krim sought to make a metaphor of the American inability to grow up and get down to work.
Too often Krim’s anxiety swamped the metaphor, and when it did the writing was reduced to a disheveled rant, tiresome and pathetic. In 1973, however, he wrote “For My Brothers and Sisters in the Failure Business,” a remarkable essay in which he at long last did pull together the subject he had spent years making his own. Here, he was able to capture brilliantly the American obsession with failure itself — the taste of it, the fear of it, the forever being haunted by it — and when he did, his message was delivered in language that made prodigious use of the New York vernacular:
“At 51,” he wrote,
believe it or not, or believe it and pity me if you are young and swift, I still don’t know truly “what I want to be.”… In that profuse upstairs delicatessen of mine I’m as open to every wild possibility as I was at 13 …
Thousands upon thousands of people who I believe are like me are those who have never found the professional skin to fit the riot in their souls. Many never will … This isn’t presumption so much as a voice of scars and stars talking. I’ve lived it and will probably go on living it until they take away my hotdog …
But if you are a proud, searching “failure” in this society and we can take ironic comfort in the fact that there are hundreds of thousands of us, then it is smart and honorable to know what you attempted and why you are now vulnerable to the body blows of those who once saw you robed in the glow of your vision and now only see an unmade bed and a few unwashed cups on the bare wooden table of a gray day.
The pleasure of this piece lies in the rich, sure speed of an idiomatic language that mimics the national preoccupation with youth as well as failure:
That profuse upstairs delicatessen of mine
The riot in their souls
A voice of scars and stars
Those who only see an unmade bed and a few unwashed cups on the bare wooden table of a gray day
Idiomatic speech always feels young — in any language it makes the adrenaline shoot right up — but never more so than in the edgy, street-smart version of it one hears on the pavements of New York, where middle-aged writers of American prose are free to cry out in voices forever young, “I’m no longer young!”
* * *
Leonard went away for a holiday weekend without telling me he was leaving the city, and he left his answering machine off.
“What was that all about?” I asked upon his return.
“Oh,” he said sheepishly, “I left the machine off accidentally.” But the laugh that followed was hollow. “I guess I didn’t want to know that no one was calling me.”