No Country for Old Men

THE LAST time I went to New York City, I became a communist. That was five years ago when Rocky, Ron and I- fresh from our Southern California ranch homes- decided to interrupt our first trip to Harvard with five days of skyscrapers, fashions, and museums. Those were the days before youth fare, so we travelled by train- three days of sleeping in our chairs by day and trying to sleep in them by night. As we got off the train in Grand Central Station, our arms were still tired from doing push-ups for exercise in the standing room between cars.

The first night in New York, I couldn't sleep in the creaky beds at the YMCA, so I woke up at six in the morning. I put on my yellow shirt, sport coat and tie, and walked down 42nd Street. Times Square was the only part of New York I had heard about. My father was born in Brooklyn, near Myrtle Avenue, and from him my brother and I learned about the push carts, the subways, and the City: "As you walk up Broadway, it's Washington Square, Union Square, Herald Square, then Times Square, boys."

I had dreamed of both New York and Cambridge. I was certain that in both places I could walk down broad, tree- lined avenues, watch elegant nineteenth-century women in long white dresses and parasols walk into carefully constructed three-story brick apartment houses, and see presidents and artists shake hands on the sidewalks.

But in New York, I was also ready to be on my guard against any suspicious underworld person who might try to steal my wallet, which had fallen out of my pocket by accident the night before- a little too easily for me to trust the city. And above all, I would become literally catatonic at the sight of anyone or anything black, from a janitor to a cat. After all, didn't they have good reason for keeping all of the black people in San Diego away from the highways and south of Division Street?

But the New York I walked into that morning, down 42nd Street from 9th Avenue, choked me with the smell of garbage and smoke. There was dog shit, even a little horse shit, all over the sidewalk, and there were kids- at six in the morning- there were kids huddling in doorways, watching me as I passed.

Mostly, I think, I was afraid of losing my wallet. A black man passed me in the early morning, and I decided that New York was certainly too dangerous a city to live in, what with black people and ragged kids on the streets and all. I stood on a street corner thinking that I had better go back to the Y and wait for Rocky and Ron.

But my father had also told me about the lights that circled the Times Building, spelling out the news, and the giant ball that dropped on New Year's Eve. No sixteen-year-old worth this three-day trip across the country would ever give up a chance to see the news blink around the Times Building and be able to describe it to two unworldly friends before breakfast.

I turned up the collar on my sports jacket and dug my hands into my pockets as far as they would go to look as tough as I could possibly look, and marched, head down, three blocks, almost to Times Square. I was watching the cracks in the sidewalk and swinging quick glances from side to side to make sure that I wasn't about to be knocked off, when suddenly I stopped and shook my head to clear it. Two feet away I saw a grown man, maybe as old as my father and the other members of the Lion's Club. He was sleeping in the gutter. A little water passed under his body to the drain at his feet. He didn't so much have a beard as straight white course hairs growing all over his face and head. He was wrapped in a super-large suit coat that didn't match his tattered pants. His stomach was enormous and there were red sores on his ankles. And two kids were sitting in a doorway with a blanket, looking at me.

I remembered that I had read in school that communism is where everyone has to wear the same thing and everyone has to eat the same thing. All that I knew about revolution was from the two pictures in my eleventh grade history textbook: the first of a vicious, almost horned Robespierre squeezing the blood from a human heart into a cup, and the second of an elegant, repentant, white-haired Louis XVI, praying before the guillotine. I also remembered the "World" section of the Sun Diego Union-Evening Tribune from one Sunday in 1957, when I was eight. On the front page was a color map of the world and a banner headline in big red letters that read "We Will Bury You!" I was so frightened that I hid the paper under the sofa and ran into my little brother's room with the comics.

But on this morning, one block from Times Square, I was looking at the first man I had ever seen who didn't have a place to sleep. I had never even imagined before that people like that existed. Maybe I was afraid that someday I might be in the same situation- and from my present possibilities- for employment that was extremely perceptive- or maybe I had always thought that everyone lived in a house pretty much like the one I lived in. In any case, I could see no reason why I should sleep in a bed while he was sleeping in the gutter. I decided that I would be a communist. I turned around and hurried back to the Y, completely forgetting the news and the lights and the Times Building. I would go to school, I thought, and read Karl Marx and no one would have to sleep in the street ever again.

AS I WALKED down the streets of New York last week, I decided that

I had changed a little, since I now felt safer in Roxbury than in New York. But I wasn't any happier about seeing drunks sleeping in the streets. And maybe my memory isn't as vivid as I had always thought it was, but this time New York seemed like rivers of filth flowing down one way streets between canyons of concrete buildings.

About thirty T-shirted freight men carried heavy packages from the side door of Saks Fifth Avenue into delivery trucks. I watched for a while as they sweated and swore, and finally I walked inside with a friend. My eyes went blurry for a second as my body had to change from a wet 85 degrees outside to an air-conditioned 70 degrees inside. "It's not so bad once you get used to it." my friend said. She explained that she used to work there ("That's the stock room we used to call the refuge from the glue factory") and showed me the multi-colored ??? and the eighty-dollar boots. I began to realize why, in Cub?, they hand you clothes as you need them, cut pretty much like everyone else's. No one in any sane country would spill quarts of sweat on the sidewalk to load delivery trucks with the stuff they sell in Saks.

The pomp and baroque decoration of the jewelry, guise and clothing stores in downtown New York may in fact be one of the images of paradise for those who shop there. All of the air-conditioned interiors seem to be consciously designed as the escape from the horrors of the facades of the buildings. Or could there be some unconscious desire to make the outside so inhuman that the insides, the real heart of middle-class life, the dressing room and the cash register, will look all the more comfortable? Maybe our real rituals are the ones between customer and sales person in Saks, the trips to the dressing room, the little dance in front of the mirror, the inquiries about price, the should-l-or-shouldn't I with the spouse, and the final "Well, we might as well because you can't take it with you."

Ritual usually develops out of unsatisfied material needs, and the subsequent desire to transcend want. Tribal rain dances were a plea to whatever controlled the material welfare of the people. The Mass represents a similar dissatisfaction with mundane needs, if only because they have been left unsatisfied, and the desire to build a larger world where such want is insignificant.

The modern bourgeois world has convinced itself that it has conquered all need- all you need is money. Money- the mysterious element- and its transfer thus stimulate the real rituals of our civilization. The most deeply felt ceremony in today's churches is not the Communion but the collection. It is in money that people find their meaning.

Some of the most essential needs, like love and friendship, are ignored because they are not material and can not be purchased by money. Or they are considered real only to the extent they can be purchased by money.

So then we agree, we have conquered all need, and we can purchase everything we want, provided we work hard enough. Of course, the things we want the most will cost more, so we will have to work harder for them, like jewels and cars. There is no longer any need to transcend the material because we have conquered it. Everyone agrees this is "The Greatest Nation On Earth."

We are not yet, though we are soon to be, at a place where everybody, oh everybody, can enjoy riches. But at least for now, the fact that some have permanently conquered want shows that everyone will very soon. But until that time, until pie-in-the-sky, which is not too far off, if we are to believe Lyndon J. and Richard N. and Time and Life and maybe the Good Lord Himself, some of us will have to undergo ultimate purchase vicariously.

We will get to go into Saks and watch a fluffy, fur-covered, fifty-year-old divorcee hand lots of green across the counter. The more she pays and the smaller her purchase, the happier we can be. That proves that she has almost conquered need for good. Just a little, ever so little more and it will be done. Ten million trillion zillion dollars for a jeweled silk-and-leather nail file case. Phew! We're almost there. Very soon we'll never need anything more ever again. We have solved necessity and in those very stores, the richest and the plushest ones, we are about to become God Himself.

AS I watched the construction workers eat lunch in downtown New York. I began to understand why they wanted to beat up college students. They have to build buildings that no one wants, and then they have to eat lunch on the smelly, steaming tar and blacktop. Or they have to sit on concrete steps, eating a mushy egg salad sandwich about two feet from blaring car horns and smoking exhaust pipes. It they work near Fifth Avenue, they may have to watch women- the models that TV has told them to call beautiful- parade in front of them. Magazines, TV, and Fifth Avenue stimulate, over and over again, a sexual desire that they can never satisfy. It grows in them until it kills their insides, overwhelming the more subtle need for companionship. They turn into mindless animals, hungry hyenas looking for a kill.

When these same construction workers try to bury a monkey wrench in some peacenik's head, they're trying to expel some frustrated sexual energy, and it comes out in pure class hatred. They see an affluent generation of college kids who never had to make any money on their own, and whose education, in fact, the workers themselves are paying for. They see these kids screaming about how hard life is, and the workers are furious. As far as they can tell, they certainly wouldn't be where they are now if they had had a chance to go to college. And to their minds, college is just a place where everyone sleeps together anyway. Kids nowadays get to romp and stomp for four years and then slip into some easy manager's job while they have to build these hideous monsters in the stinking city.

The luxury and privilege gnaws at them even more because of the lack of any real life around them. The textures and rhythms of human existence are nowhere to be found. Unable to find any real life around them, and needing something to relate to, they are forced to find what life they can in the cement, glass and steel. They lavish eight hours a day, a quarter of their life, on those structures, forcing part of themselves into the buildings. But the part of their personalities they invest in the buildings, and the part they pull out for sheer companionship, begin to stare back at them through every window. If you hate what you create, then you hate yourself, but trying to love the skyscrapers of New York must be like kissing a rock. So unlike Pygmalion, the construction workers cannot even fall in love with their work- which is, in part, themselves- and therefore they must either hate themselves of try to become ever more like their creations- hard, faceless, and unfeeling.

WHEN I was a freshman, I thought that I didn't have many friends at Harvard because people in the East were just different from people in the West. Later, with my more sophisticated radical consciousness, I decided that it couldn't be true, since all of us suffer under the same brand of advanced corporate capitalism. But in New York this time, I understood that it really is different in the West. You just don't have to turn off as much to stay alive. All of my friends from New York are either sick or weary or impregnable, and mostly cynical. If you still respond personally to the ugliness and the sadness and the poverty in New York, if you don't seal off every entrance into your emotions, then you are driven out of the City by the spectacle. If you live in New York, then you have

to develop a certain kind of self-containment, and you either turn off your nerve endings or you turn them inside and let them play with your mind.

Kurt Vonnegut tells about some secretaries he knows who live in New York, alone, somewhere in the jungle, and carry around Valley of the Dolls. (imagine 900 pages of Jaqueline Susan), in the hope that some man will walk up to them and say. "Wow, you're reading that too. huh? Where do you want to go for lunch?" I guess you just don't accidentally bump into someone twice in New York.

And then other friends of mine tell me about the Lower East Side where half the people on the street are just leaning against some boarded-up store front, expressionless, shooting heroin into their arm through a dirty needle. Or a woman yelling at her husband on the third floor of some tenement. "Jesus. I gotta seventy-dollar-a-week habit. How do you expect me to live on that?"

I've tried to purge myself of everything I remember of New York. I'll certainly never go back. But as hard as I try, I still have one image left. It's a view from the Staten Island ferry. Just as our boat passed in front of the Statue of Liberty, two little tugs pushed four barges over laden with trash through the iridescent, oil covered water in front of the Statue. I looked back at Manhattan and saw some awful, mysterious yellow cloud gobbling up most of the buildings in the City. It had already devoured the George Washington Bridge and it was biting off the top of the Empire State Building. New steel towers reared up crane-covered heads along the waterfront, ready to nourish the cloud in their turn.

So WHEN New York puts on an exhibition about American architecture, it should be like a prostitute talking about male sexual fantasies- she's seen them as bad as they can be. But, unbelievably, the exhibition at the Met seems to have missed the whole point of living in the City, Seventy years ago, what they've set up could have passed for myopic. No one could have been expected to fore-see the horrors that would develop from the humble beginnings. But now, in 1970, only someone who has never been to New York could construct such a vision of dreams-come true. I would have set up an exhibit pretty much like it five years ago, from my dreams of the East before I got here.

The exhibit communicates through large posters somehow illuminated from the back. It introduces itself:

"In earlier ages, architecture in the Western world was evolved to suit Church, State and aristocracy. In America, it turned to new tasks:

Buildings for commerce

Small homes for middle-class families

Parks and squares to make the cities habitable."

That's the first omnibus admission. Architecture, traditionally the grand representation of the spirit of a people, had, in America become separated from any public-inspired or culturally-attractive purposes, and had begun to lick the heels of business.

The bourgeoisie of any country, the ruling classes of any culture, have a perfect right to leave for posterity examples of their conception of beauty. That may be history's only consolation. But that art, like most of their business, begins to be criminal when millions of people have to suffer because of it.

The Met's exhibit tries to examine the main representation of American commercial architecture, the skyscraper. New York's monsters, the illuminated posters tell us, are the grandchildren of the Babylonian ziggurats, medieval siege towers, Notre Dame, and Christopher Wren's churches.

THE MET stresses that artistic tradition which gave birth to the first American skyscrapers- and the Met uses New York's Flatiron Building as the prototype. Certainly the Flatiron's architect was at least partly conscious of the heritage. He modeled the building after traditional towers and columns, separating it into three discrete sections: base, shaft and capital. Similarly, America's earliest settlers made a conscious effort to tap the main streams of Western architecture. Doric, Ionic and Corinthian pillars grace the front of many New England homes.

But the tradition did not grow from the soil. It was simply laid on the newly-discovered ground with the hope that it would take root. Mean- while, the kingdoms of production- Iron and steel among them- dug into the dirt and took over the garden like weeds. American business became extremely pragmatic, and consequently could no longer find purpose in the tradition.

Indeed, in very few places was the tradition ever more than mimicked anyway. The Western architectural conventions were transferred intact, without any thought to modify them to suit the environment. The only exceptions are relatively small, like the Spanish missions in California. Buildings were built like Greek temples and were used as banks: Gothic cathedrals grew up in downtown Manhattan.

Without any thought about purpose, buildings were transferred mindlessly to the New World, So behind the stylized show of solidarity with the conventions of centuries of Western culture, behind the false facades

of cast iron Greek columns that are displayed in the exhibit, America's real values began to take root insidiously. Corporate pragmatism was about to usurp the throne.

The Met's exhibit shows a picture of the newly-completed Flatiron Building meekly poking its head out of downtown New York at the turn of the century- somewhat like a shy, prematurely tall sixth grader. A proud New York in 1903 might well have boasted of the Flatiron Building and the subjugation of business to beauty. Just a little myopic, we would say.

Because even the Flatiron was largely determined by business considerations. It barely displays the tripartite divisions, and very clearly the building's owners, the Fuller Construction Company, wanted to squeeze as much business space as possible from the small triangular lot they owned.

And now the cousins of the Flatiron Building, like the new Trade Commission Building, sit like gigantic boxes on their square lots. They would never fit into any environment. The only reason the new ones are not totally ridiculous is that they take their place beside older, slightly smaller models of the same thing. Trans planted in any other city, they'd look like the Pru in Boston. For an experiment one day, look at Boston as you cross the Charles on the MTA, Cover the four or five skyscrapers with your hands and see how much closer to the land the red brick looks, clustered around the State House's gold dome.

Skyscraper design soon lost any pretense of art for man's sake, and bowed only to art for business' sake. But the Met's exhibit confidently denies the obvious. After reminding us, without the least touch of irony, that "Skyscrapers are acknowledged to be the most striking American innovation in architecture," the illuminated poster defends the style:

"It has been said that skyscrapers arose because land in the business districts of big cities became so expensive that ways had to be found to make it more 'productive' by piling more people- executives and office workers- onto each lot."

Right, that seems obvious.

"Yet the technical skills that made skyscrapers feasible also revolutionized communications."

And the technical skills that made the atom bomb possible also revolutionized power production.

"In sober fact, only a portion of those who work in business districts need to be so near to one another."

But then wouldn't businesses find it cheaper to build their buildings somewhere else? The exhibit tries to dismiss the economic argument quickly, in the hope that we'll find something else to ascribe those buildings to. The Met is trying to say that there were no greedy practical considerations behind the buildings, and the only other reason for building them would be because they are attractive.

"People are employed in skyscrapers in order to make good, practical use of buildings constructed in the first place to proclaim the glory of the chief tenants."

Is the exhibit trying to explain that business considerations have given way to matters of individual ego in America, and that this kind of ego is different from that kind of business? Throughout the exhibit there seems to be a conscious effort to cover up the contradictions that arose in putting it together.

AMERICA has always had two contradictory desires, two tendencies in opposite directions. The first is to build a new paradise on virgin land. The second is to seem a part of the acknowledged grandeur of Western culture.

Americans fought for the privilege of establishing a bourgeois society. America grasped at the Old Tradition because it was indeed part of it. It found it difficult to learn from the native inhabitants, the Indians, and the more it massacred the Indians, the harder it was to learn from them.

The land was so fertile, plentiful and beautiful, that it seemed to sanction almost any kind of development. Bourgeois America pushed West, and those who suffered its encroachments, especially in the cities, could always move out West too. The point is that the purely practical, and therefore inhumane roots of America were allowed to grow strong before it was necessary to fight against them. There was simply so much faith in the prophecies of America's future that few even bothered to question them.

American business took over in its strongholds, the cities, and boards of directors were more interested in profit than beauty. The first skyscrapers, perhaps even the Flatiron, felt some kinship to public interest. After all, it was a tower in the great tradition, and its architect had decorated it a la greque. With the proliferation of towers, though, skyscrapers were no longer a symbol, except, for example, the Empire State Building, for its sheer height. They eventually could be constructed simply to provide the

maximum amount of room.

At the same time that commercial architecture began to acquire its new shape-solid and rectangular- those who profited from it began to feel a little debt to society. They contributed part of their fortunes to the new "public" buildings. The Metropolitan Museum itself is an example. By the time the Met was built, the City's sky and air had ceased to be public property, and were in fact the property of whoever built its buildings. Individual enclaves- museums and churches- were carved out and set aside to the public domain.

The Met's elaborate Neo-classic facade, the medallions of Michelangelo, Rafael, and Velasquez, show that the bourgeoisie needed very much to think that it was fulfilling the old humanist roles. They were unable to see how silly it was to build inhuman beehives at one end of the City at the same time that they were copying French palaces at the other end. Seen together, the Met and the skyscrapers show the perversely contorted development of the American city.

AWORD about solutions. First, of course, it is important to understand that the only reasonable response to modern American cities is to want to escape them. The parks are certainly escapes from intolerable congestion and pollution. In a way, skyscrapers are a kind of escape themselves, an effort to get out from the bottom of the canyon, to escape into the sky away from the sordid misery below.

Second, we must understand that the current means of production are destroying the environment. In his book Arcology, Paolo Soleri explains that the expansion of American suburbs is decreasing drastically the amount of breathing space left to the earth. Since green plants provide a lot of the oxygen we breathe, that is important for both the plants and us. Los Angeles smog has reportedly killed over a million of the Ponderosa pine in the hills outside the city. That destroys both watershed and forest.

Soleri's solution to all of this is to build gigantic complexes that would float on the ocean just offshore, or hang on cliffs, or sail around the earth out in space. Soleri thinks that if the structures are planned well enough, natural recreation areas could be integrated into humanely constructed working and living spaces. People would no longer have to travel interminably to get to their jobs. These complexes, each of which would house about a million people, would be connected by extensive networks of rapid transit facilities. The earth could then cover itself with forest once again, and men could build structures that would relate to the environment.

I have questions about what Soleri proposes. For one, how many people can live together without duplicating New York, no matter how good the planning? Are there optimal or maximum numbers of people who can live together constructively? Is the idea to create smaller, more personal communities within the grander complexes? New York has a few real communities, like the Village and near Columbia, Paris, with three million people, packed four times as closely together as are New Yorkers, still seems a large village. In each quartier the people know one another and seem fairly close together. Most of the sections of Paris, in fact, are quite disinter from the rest of the city. Would communal living and working facilities for a hundred or a thousand people, inside the giant complexes give people the kind of community they need Or will we have to give up cooperation on a large seale altogether and move back to the farm, where we can get close to the land and close to one another?

Architecture has now grown to where its responsibility is to consider any information that relates to people. The planning that a loveable city will require is beyond the capacities of the society we live in even if those who control it were disposed to aid in the changes.

I HAVE a notion where to begin looking for the answer, but it is only a notion. A week or two ago. I took a couple of long walks in Roxbury, where I talked with a lot of black people from the community. Sometimes I talked with three or four kids my ago in park, drinking wine and joking a lot. Sometimes I talked with ten-year old kids about the Panthers. Sometimes with forty or fifty-year-old factory workers. Sometimes with the women who were sitting on the broad sidewalks talking to the kids and each other. The Panthers say that black people are together as a nation because they are oppressed as a nation. They are together because they are forced together by the system, and because they have an entirely different cultural heritage.

What I found was exactly what the Panthers said I'd find. One day I'll have to write a piece about how easily people relate to each other in the ghetto, and how few barriers are between one person and another. But almost all the black people I talked to explained that they have a community that they value highly. They don't have enough to eat, many don't have a job, and the white cops beat them up all the time, but at least the competitive nature of the system has not permeated their personal relationships. They live in a world where people will help each other. That is the kind of consciousness we will have to develop before we can begin to create livable worlds.

The same kind of understanding of community in New York is helping to stop the destruction of many of the Third World communities in the City. On Eighth Avenue, around 90th St., tennants have been evicted from blocks of three and four-story apartment buildings. The city plans to destroy the buildings to put up high-rise urban renewal projects at twice the rent, breaking up the communities and driving people out of the City.

Most of the tenants are black or Puerto Rican. About three weeks ago, the Young Lords, a Puerto Rican radical group, the Panthers, and a lot of people in the community organized Operation Move-In. They took over the empty buildings, and moved homeless or crowded families into them. The project takes care of the buildings with volunteer labor, fixing the pipes, and assigning apartments to the families so that each one has enough room.

The City can't tear down the buildings with families living in them, and it can't evict the families, because every time they try, thousands of people surround the buildings to protect the new residents. The project has established a representative community council to make decisions, and cultural education programs for the kids, including classes in black and Puerto Rican history and a cultural resource center.

One of the leaders of the project, Tony Martinez, explained to me that they wanted to keep the community together, and besides, "Look at the buildings they're building." I looked outside as he pointed to the nearest one. "Can you imagine living in something like that?"

It takes a lot of dedication. Tony explained to me how he had tried to move a refrigerator from an unused apartment building to a family's apartment. He carried the refrigerator down five flights of stairs by himself, when the building's superintendent caught him. He argued with the superintendent about taking it, since the super admitted that no one was using it. Finally Tony turned his back to take the refrigerator anyway, and the super stabbed him twice in the back.

I'm pretty certain that most of the black people I've talked to would build cities far differently from any that white architects could design. Black people have had experience in living together. Our cities will continue to be the worst kind of Hell until we learn to live together as well.