If I’d grown up in another city, I almost certainly would have become another kind of writer. Or I might not have become a writer at all. But I grew up in New York in the 1940s, when New York was a great big optimistic town. The war was over and the Great Depression was a permanent part of the past; now we would all begin to live. To a kid (and to millions of adults) everything seemed possible. If you wanted to be a scientist or a left-fielder for the Dodgers, a lawyer or a drummer with Count Basie: well, why not? This was New York. You could even be an artist. Or a writer.

As a man and a writer, I’ve been cursed by the memory of that New York. Across five decades, I saw the city change and its optimism wane. The factories began closing in the late 1950s, moving to the South, or driven out of business by changing styles or tastes or means of production. When the factories died, so did more than a million manufacturing jobs. Those vanished jobs had allowed thousands of men like my father (an Irish immigrant with an eighth-grade education) to raise families in the richest city on earth. They eagerly joined unions. They proudly voted for the Democratic ticket. They put paychecks on kitchen tables, asked their kids if they’d finished their homework, went off to night games at the Polo Grounds or Ebbets Field, and were able to walk in the world with pride. Then the great change happened. The manufacturing jobs were replaced with service work. Or with welfare. One statistic tells the story: In 1955, there were 150,000 New Yorkers on welfare; in 1995, there were 1.3 million.

With the jobs gone, the combined American plagues of drugs and guns came to the neighborhoods. New York wasn’t the only American city to be so mauled; but because it was at once larger and more anonymous, a sense of danger bordering on paranoia became a constant in the lives of its citizens. This wasn’t a mere perception; it could be measured. Throughout the 1950s, New York averaged 300 murders a year; by 1994, the city fathers were ecstatic when the number of homicides dropped to 1,600 after years hovering around the 2,000 mark. In my time, even the poorest New Yorkers learned to triple-lock their doors and bar the windows against the relentless presence of the city’s 200,000 heroin addicts. The middle class (children of all those factory workers) began to hire private cops to patrol their streets. They avoided subways late at night. They paid for parking lots to protect their cars against the patrolling junkies. They bought very large dogs. After a while, they stopped sending their kids to the public schools, which had begun adding metal detectors to their doors. Finally, many of them began to move away.

These pieces reflect the yearning of an entire generation of New Yorkers for the city that changed forever when we weren’t even looking. We’re the New Yorkers who remember the city when it worked, in every sense of that word. No matter how we live now, we are hostages to that time when each of us lived in a neighborhood that was an urban version of the American hometown. My hometown was in Brooklyn, across the East River from haughty Manhattan; there are men and women who remember their hometowns in the Bronx and Queens and parts of Manhattan the way I remember mine. Some live on in the city. Others have scattered around the country. I know from my mail that they still measure all places by the New York they knew when young.

As I write, New York seems to be reviving again. The engine of this latest revival is the wave of new immigrants. We are in the midst of the greatest immigration wave since the turn of the last century, and the new arrivals have one huge advantage over old New Yorkers: they are free of the curse of memory. They might yearn for the countries they left behind, but they couldn’t care less about the Dodgers or Luna Park or the street games of 19 51. In their New York, they live in the present tense, working at the hardest jobs, but they have visions of the future. Everywhere a New Yorker turns, he encounters Koreans, Pakistanis, Dominicans, Palestinians, Russians, Mexicans, Haitians. And it was the places they remember that propelled them to New York. Back in their hometowns, the hope of a decent life was insupportable and so they chose exile. In New York, they drive the city’s cabs. They wash the dishes of the city’s restaurants. They sell the city oranges at midnight. They empty bedpans in the city’s hospitals. They open little stores and small businesses and at night, exhausted, drained, they ask their children if they have finished their homework. Someday, the children of the newest immigrants also might write pieces like these, full of inconsolable memories. I hope I last long enough to read them, just to see what I had missed.

Once there was another city here, and now it is gone. There are almost no traces of it anymore, but millions of us know it existed, because we lived in it: the Lost City of New York.

It was a city, as John Cheever once wrote, that “was still filled with a river light, when you heard the Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner stationery store, and when almost everybody wore a hat.” In that city, the taxicabs were all Checkers, with ample room for your legs, and the drivers knew where Grand Central was and always helped with the luggage. In that city, there were apartments with three bedrooms and views of the river. You hurried across the street and your girl was waiting for you under the Biltmore clock, with snow melting in her hair. Cars never double-parked. Shop doors weren’t locked in the daytime. Bus drivers still made change. All over town, cops walked the beat and everyone knew their names. In that city, you did not smoke on the subway. You wore galoshes in the rain. Waitresses called you honey. You slept with windows open to the summer night.

That New York is gone now, hammered into dust by time, progress, accident, and greed. Yes, most of us distrust the memory of how we lived here, not so very long ago. Nostalgia is a treacherous emotion, at once a curse against the present and an admission of permanent resentment. For many of us, looking back is simply too painful; we must confront the unanswerable question of how we let it all happen, how the Lost City was lost. And so most of us have trained ourselves to forget.

And then suddenly, you hear a certain piece of music and you are once again at the bar of the Five Spot on St. Marks Place. You are listening to Monk, of course, and working hard at being hip. On another afternoon, you see the slanting yellow light on 125th Street, and abruptly you are again leaving Frank’s restaurant in the early sixties after lunch with a politician and you walk down to Michaux’s bookstore to find that rare poem by Countee Cullen or read the news from Africa. You flick on the television set late on an exhausting night, and in the silvery images of some forgotten forties movie, you glimpse the Brevoort Hotel on Fifth Avenue and 8th Street and then you are at one of its sidewalk tables again with an impossibly beautiful girl on a cloudless summer afternoon. All the wars are over, you have an entire $30 in your pocket, and the whole goddamned world seems perfect. Who then resident in the Lost City could dare imagine a day when the Brevoort would be gone, along with the Five Spot and Monk, Frank’s and Michaux’s, and even that impossibly beautiful girl?

Every day, we move through the giant city on the sad or preposterous or exhilarating errands of our lives. Most of the time, we see little. We are New Yorkers, after all, and I it is our pride that we think we know the city. Certainly each of us is outfitted with an interior map, a template of the city’s geography. The sun rises in Brooklyn and sets in New Jersey. The Bronx is up and the Battery’s down. We know where the bridges are, and the tunnels; we understand how they lash together the stony islands of the New York archipelago. We are aware of the great markers — the Empire State Building and Central Park, the Brooklyn Bridge and City Hall, Wall Street and Yankee Stadium, all those and a few dozen more. We are filled with information about our restaurants, theaters, museums, bookstores, music, scandals, celebrities, gangsters, and home-run hitters. We are from here. We know.

And yet, if we stay around long enough, if we try to see without the blinders imposed by work and fear and habit, we discover one terrible fact: We know almost nothing. New York can serve as home, workshop, prison, or bazaar. It can dazzle or defeat us. But it never yields up all of its secrets. In the end, the only thing the true New Yorker knows about New York is that it is unknowable.

Obviously, all attempts at imposing symmetry are doomed. But it can be said with some modest confidence that for each of us there are two New Yorks: the city we think we know and the Secret City. The first is inhabited by friends and enemies, relatives and acquaintances, and to some extent by the public figures of the time; we understand its rules and protocols; we discuss it at dinner or on the telephone or in bed.

But the Secret City is barely glimpsed. Often it is as different from the familiar city as the New York of Louis Auchincloss is from the New York of John Gotti. There are some doors in this city that are forever closed to strangers; some are among the satrapies of the Upper East Side; some are in Ridgewood. You see a New Yorker who has established dominion over one of the great Wall Street firms; he has done his work with honor and responsibility, and now he and his family lead gilded lives. In the precincts where he works, he is treated with respect, a certain awe, and even, among those who depend upon him for advancement, a small amount of fear. But his accomplishments, his reputation, his existence mean nothing at all to this other New Yorker, a good carpenter from Fort Greene, who makes objects of wood that might be around long after the first man is dead. For each man, the other lives in the Secret City.

Each day, the citizens of these hidden worlds pass one another in the street and almost never connect. Here we are on West 47th Street on a Tuesday afternoon plump with spring. Out on the sidewalks are the grandees and supplicants of the world of diamonds, gold, precious stones; they deal, trade, bargain with one another; they decode fresh news from Antwerp and the Urals. And moving among them is a professor of Romance languages, now turning, abruptly adjusting his stride, then angling through traffic toward the Gotham Book Mart. He sidesteps the elated young accountant from Forest Hills who is carrying on his shoulder a brand-new VCR from 47th Street Photo.

As he enters the splendid old bookstore, he is brushed by the messenger from the commercial-art studio, rushing to pick up photostats. He doesn’t even see the professional wrestler who is going to consult his back doctor. All inhabit separate worlds, different cities. And if it’s impossible even to know 47th Street between Fifth and Sixth, how could anyone ever hope to know the great sprawling anarchic city itself?

One can’t. Sometimes I wander the city without plan or destination, cooling out after a prolonged bout of work. And if I’m now too old to be surprised, I can be intrigued. More than once, I’ve found myself on West End Avenue, staring up at the old pre-war buildings. They are like vertical neighborhoods, the most obvious symbols of the vertical city, with their penthouses snug and distant at the apex. And I try to imagine the lives lived within their walls.

Who is the man with the white hair and the grave manner standing at that sixth-floor window? His hands are behind his back. He looks down into the avenue, but occasionally his mouth moves, he glances behind him. I imagine the air thick with Freudian orthodoxies, and some troubled human being supine upon a couch, while lacerated murmurs beg for peace.

Two floors above, there are four windows so filthy that the glass resembles membrane. I conjure an atmosphere of retreat and withdrawal, some final decision to avoid all further disappointment, to move until the end through loveless rooms full of shrouded furniture, dusty books, and old newspapers, like the Collyer brothers when I was young. On such days, I never investigate; sometimes the most terrible thing of all is to confirm what you have only imagined.

This was at two in the morning on Columbus Avenue, with a cold wind blowing from the river. I came out of an all-night deli with some coffee and the papers. On the corner, a black man in a filthy down jacket was poking around in a garbage can. There was a large brown plastic bag beside him on the sidewalk. He found a piece of uneaten bagel and four empty Diet Pepsi cans. He slipped the bagel in his jacket pocket. The cans went in the plastic bag. He glared, his yellow eyes peering at me from above a mask of thick wiry beard. Then he spit toward me. At last, I was home.

“Choo lookin’ at, man?” he said. “Never seen no homeless person before?” He glanced at the window of a boutique. “Miss Ethel sprayed the sink,” he said, lifting his bag, rattling the cans. “They all down by the creek, where the ballfield be.” Then he was off, talking to himself as he loped toward Broadway, carrying a bag of cans whose redemption would be easier than ours.

I was back in the New York of the ’80s. And, of course, that hostile man with the plastic bag on his shoulder and the split screen in his head wasn’t alone, wasn’t some municipal oddity. If you have been away for a while, as I have been, such people are the first you see: without jobs or families or shelter. This defeated army of mendicants seems made up of winos and junkies and the quite literally insane, but many of its unwilling recruits have simply run out of luck.

There are other signs of barbarism here too: the scarred lumpy streets (the great civic monument of the Koch administration might be the steel plate covering the hole in the street); the need for the stupefaction of drugs among all social classes; fear and tension in the subways; and the continuing scandal of housing. Shelter is one of the most elemental human needs but in New York now it is largely beyond the means of many people. Some end up homeless. Others must settle for less than they need. God help the man or woman grown old in this city, heavy with books, records, the valued accumulations of a lifetime, and forced suddenly to move. There is nowhere to go.

What is extraordinary is that the general population hasn’t risen in outrage. A major reason for this passivity in the face of torment is the deepening cynicism and fatalism of most New Yorkers. Again, this is most clear if you have been away awhile. The administration of poor Ed Koch has been the most corrupt since Jimmy Walker, but not a single figure has risen from the general muck to challenge him, as La Guardia rose from the Seabury investigations. For the last decade, our politicians cheated, lied, plundered the town; now a few of them are on the way to the pen. But who would turn to another politician for aid against the corrupt flood? Not a New Yorker.

But for a returned pilgrim, the worst single change in the last year is the racism — black and white — unleashed since a black man was chased to his death by a young white mob in Howard Beach. In subways, on buses, in casual encounters on the street, I’ve seen more antiwhite hostility than at any time since the months following the murder of Martin Luther King in 1968. Many young blacks seem to be spoiling for a fight; to some extent this need to strike back is understandable; but the level of racism isn’t lowered by such collisions. This form of the black response is itself racism; nobody wants to be beaten or killed because of the color of their skin. It’s disgusting when whites do it to blanks; it is equally disgusting when blacks do it to whites, and to recite the history of slavery and oppression in America to justify it is itself a condescending form of racism.

In this city, racism is not an abstraction to be discussed in a sociology class; usually the virus comes from concrete experience. Many blacks can cite a catalogue of insults and injuries, from the refusal of a cab driver to stop on a rainy night to the white policeman using his baton as if he were judge, jury, and executioner. But this is also true of those who are victimized by blacks. The other day I saw four well-dressed black teenagers coming along Broadway. It was midafternoon. School was just out. They went past a Korean fruit and vegetable store, and then, all at once, darted back. Each stole something: an orange, a cantaloupe, an apple, some grapes. They began to run, and a Korean man in his forties ran after them in vain. But when he came back he was still seething with fury.

“I work, I work!” he shouted in a thin, high, frustrated voice. “I work all day, all night. And they steal They just steal. They don’t work. It’s not fair!” The man said he just didn’t understand. This happens three, four times a week; never the same young men; always blacks. Would four Koreans come down the street and steal from a black grocer? “Why don’t they work?” After six years in this country, and two years in business, “they” had become a loaded word in his vocabulary. And probably a permanent one.

Driving through central Brooklyn one afternoon, through mile after mile of men clustered together on street corners while women without men were engulfed by children, driving through blasted streets smelling of defeat and abandonment, I remembered a scene I had witnessed many times last year in the cities of the American South: black families dining together in restaurants. Children. A mother. A father. I’ve been back in New York now for five weeks and haven’t seen such an event yet. Thirty years after the freedom rides, the North might now have much to learn from the South.

Squalor is, of course, only part of the city. This remains a city of enormous energy, great museums and theaters, generosity and wit, splendid architecture. But in my half-century here, I’ve never seen social disparity as violently drastic as it is now. In the evenings in Manhattan, you often pass among people who look like drawings by George Grosz. Suddenly and ferociously rich, the men eat their way through the city, consuming food, wine, art, real estate, companies, stores, neighborhoods. They are all appetite and no mind, no heart. During the day the women prowl Madison Avenue or 57th Street as if searching for prey, buying clothes, buying breasts, buying paintings, buying status. In a city where human beings struggle for the privilege of sleeping over subway grates, these people even have money to hire “art advisers”; this is like hiring a fuck adviser.

One day, soon after I was back, I wandered around Wall Street to look at the inhabitants. Every other person seemed high, either on cocaine or the platinum roar of the stock market. In one of the restaurants, I struck up a conversation with a broker. I asked him if any of the immense transactions in the bull market would produce either goods or jobs. “No, just money,” he said and laughed. But when I asked him if the sight of the homeless disturbed him, the grin turned to a sneer: “Hey, man, there’s nothing I can do about that. That’s an old movie. That’s the ’60s, pal.”

Well, no, not the ’60s. The ’80s. But for all of that it was good to be home.

The wonder is that there is any beauty left at all. The century’s assault has been relentless. Every year, another fragment of grace or style or craft is obliterated from New York, to be replaced by the brutally functional or the commercially coarse. Vandalism is general. I don’t mean only those morons with spray cans, whose brainless signatures now mar even the loveliest old carved stone. There are corporate vandals, too, political vandals, and vandals equipped with elaborate aesthetic theories. They never rest, and when they strike, their energy is ferocious.

And yet, beauty persists — scattered across the city, the beauty of nature, and of things made by men and women. There is beauty above as people hurry through the city streets. It nestles behind the fortress walls of banal structures, and sometimes stands unrevealed before our eyes. In recent years, the Landmarks Preservation Commission, the Municipal Art Society, and other groups have done splendid work preserving what remains of the past, but much is already lost, and everywhere there are valuable and beautiful creations under threat. Still, there are places whose value need not be ratified by a committee; they are hidden islands of the marvelous, capable of evoking emotional, even mysterious, responses.

I don’t know the name of the sculptor whose flowers, cupids, and ornamental letters adorn the façade of the Stuyvesant Polyclinic, on Second Avenue between St. Marks Place and 9th Street, but I love his excess, the showering extravagance of his talent. The man who wrought the iron steps and balconies of the townhouse at 328 East 18th Street is unknown to me, but although he did his job in 1852, his work is here today to pleasure the eye. The Montauk Club, in Brooklyn, has always been part of my life; as a child, I’d gaze up at the frieze of Indians around the top of the building and invent tales to go with those faces and figures; today, I marvel at the audacity of the men who made the building, shamelessly lifting the basic design from a Venetian palace and then localizing it with a narrative of the first Americans.

All such places have a personal meaning. Why do the sprawling Victorian houses in Clinton Hill seem so melancholy now? Powerful men once lived in this Brooklyn neighborhood, in the area around Pratt Institute, raising huge families far from the congestion of Manhattan; in summer now I expect to see Mark Twain emerge onto a porch in a white suit to hector the millionaires who are his hosts, or I envision Jack Johnson walking defiantly on these streets with his white wife. The Billopp House, on Staten Island, can summon a more remote era; built in 1680 by the British military man who won Staten Island from New Jersey in a boat race, this austere and serene building stands at one end of Hylan Boulevard like a reproof. In front of such a house, or on Grace Court, in Brooklyn, or along some of the elegant streets of Bedford-Stuyvesant, there comes the urge to be still.

Stillness, in fact, is probably the only condition that will allow the city’s beauty to reveal itself. You can’t experience it from the window of a careening taxi, or rushing from subway to office. Time must be taken, imagination engaged. I’m convinced that one of this city’s greatest architects was a Brooklynite named Ernest Flagg, who died in 1947 at age 90. He designed the old Mills hotel, on Bleecker Street (the Village Gate is on the ground floor), St. Luke’s Hospital, and the Flagg Court housing complex, in Bay Ridge. He had a long, productive career, living in a house of his own design at 109 East 40th Street and on an estate on Staten Island.

Today, he is almost completely forgotten — except for two masterpieces. One is the “little” Singer building, at 561 Broadway, near Prince Street, complete with wrought-iron railings, its façade sheathed in orange and blue terra-cotta. The other is the Scribner bookstore, at 597 Fifth Avenue. His greatest masterpiece, however, is gone. This was the Singer tower, at 149 Broadway, a Beaux-Arts extravaganza full of decoration and briefly the tallest building in the world when it went up in 1908. I used to visit there when I worked downtown at the old New York Post; the building was a romantic affront to all the reigning dogmas of the Bauhaus. I loved it. Then it fell into the hands of United States Steel and was, of course, demolished.

And yet the eclectic, imperialist confidence of that old building made it part of New York in a way that many newer buildings will never be. Sometimes I go downtown to look at the “little” Singer building (now the Paul Building), which is a more handsome example of Flagg’s work than the tower, and I wonder what New York would be like today if his vision (and those of his contemporaries) had prevailed, instead of the bullying blankness of the International Style. Certainly this would be a more visually interesting city. Flagg’s buildings have detail, ornament, proportion, and, most important, surprise. The eye can move from floor to roof of the Singer/Paul building and be at once assured by the proportions and surprised by the decoration. Are Flagg’s buildings functional? I don’t really know; I’ve never worked in one of them. But if the function of a bookstore is to sell books, then the Scribner shop is certainly functional; I can never enter that store without buying a book.

The great triumph of the International Style gave us an architecture of planes, textures, proportions, devoid of ornament. Form must follow function, we were told, over and over and over again. Conveniently, this message coincided with the desire of real-estate men to get maximum bang for the buck. Ornament, stonework, detail cost money; get rid of them, create an aesthetic that makes such cost cutting appear to be a form of modernism, and the result could be an instant fortune. In schools of art and architecture after World War II, an entire generation was instructed to bow before the creations of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius. Today, I’m convinced that the entire movement was a gigantic mistake. No wonder that the graffiti artist gazes at the dull, blank, almost totalitarian surfaces of the International Style and begins to decorate. His decorations may be ugly, acts of vandalism, but the urge to impose a human presence can be understood.

This is how a life can end: It is the tail end of the lunch hour, Tuesday, March 4, and I’m in a taxi with my daughter, moving downtown on Seventh Avenue. The sky is sullen, the color of gruel. In the garment district, traffic inches along, blocked by double-parked trucks, men pushing carts, buses heaving their great bulk across lanes. Horns blare; men curse. A tractor-trailer stands across 34th Street like a wall.

This is how a life can end: The huge truck moves, and the blocked downtown traffic begins at last to move. Usually, it’s like water rushing from a burst dam. Today, the rush doesn’t happen. The lights are blinking green all the way to 23rd Street, but there is no clear passage for traffic. On every street, pedestrians are crossing the avenue, ignoring red lights, jaywalking in the center of the block. A mustached young man comes close, allows the taxi to pass within inches, performs a capeless veronica, matador of Seventh Avenue. A black man snarls angrily as if the taxi were challenging his right to jaywalk. A sockless man with a Jesus beard stands in the middle of the avenue looking at the sky. Our taxi is at the front of the knot of traffic; the driver is in his thirties, lean and dark, anxious. He is beeping his horn, riding his brake pedal.

This is how a life can end: We slow down at 31st Street as a dozen jaywalkers hurry to safety. “These people are nuts,” I say. The cab driver shakes his head: “Now you know why cab drivers go crazy.” Dark laughter. A man eating a hot dog in the middle of our lane jumps back and curses. Then up ahead, we see a dense group of people crossing against the red light at 28th Street. The taxi driver crosses 29th, still riding the brake, clearing a path with his horn. We are in the second lane from the right. Most of the jaywalkers are young, and they hurry to the safety of the corners. But there’s a second group beyond the corner, in our lane. A tractor-trailer is illegally parked at a bus stop and these people are waiting for the bus. The driver slows, still making staccato bursts with his horn.

And then directly in front of us, oblivious to everything, looking straight ahead as he walks west against the red light, is an older man. Until this moment, he has been screened by those who have hurried to the corner, and now he is suddenly, vulnerably, alone. The driver blares the horn, hits the brakes, tries to move left, finds that lane blocked by another car, and then there is a hard socking thump, metal smashing into bone, and a blurred image of the man as we go by, the man rolling, brakes screeching, my daughter’s scream, and we are stopped.

I look at the older man, who is on his back. Blood pumps from his mouth. He is shoeless. His body doesn’t move. And then the crowd, frozen in horror, comes alive. The driver is breathing shallowly, his head on the wheel, holding the wheel with both hands, gripping it. “No,” he says. “No. No.” He taps his head on the wheel. “Shit.” He gazes to his left, away from the fallen man, and then slowly turns, sees the smear of blood. “No,” he says. “No.”

My daughter is sobbing now, and I try to comfort her, and I hear people shouting, “Don’t move him” and “Call the police, you asshole, call the police.” And then part of the crowd turns ugly. A suety young man in a zipper jacket comes to the door on the driver’s side. “You doin’ sebenty miles an hour, man! You murder the guy!” Another shouts: “Fuckin’ cab driver, runnin’ the yellow light, yeah, that muthafucka!”

I get out of the cab. There are no police on the scene yet and all of this has happened in a couple of minutes. I try to calm down the angrier people, explaining I was in the cab, that the driver wasn’t speeding, that the old man simply had not responded, that he was clearly walking across the red light. “Still, he should go slow! Look, that’s an old man!”

That’s the way most of us are in New York these days; we have been trained by television and politics to retaliate. An old man is knocked to the ground by a cab, his life spilling onto the dirty tar, and people want to hurt someone back. The driver starts out of the cab. The suety man screams at him. The cab driver explains with some heat about his speed, about his horn, about the red light, but the suety man’s eyes are blazing and others are behind him. The passions of a mob are stirring in the cold damp air. “Mothafucka, you drive like a crazy man …”

I tell the driver to get back in the cab and keep quiet. Then behind us, pushing through the clotted traffic, comes a police car. The crowd abruptly ends its transformation into a mob. More sirens in the distance. The sense of time slowed is replaced by time become swift. Cops and medics work expertly on the stricken man; his body is covered with rubber sheets for warmth; they press down on his chest. Younger cops move the crowd onto the sidewalk, others try to get the traffic moving. An older cop with a sad, grave face picks up the man’s brown loafers.

“I’m through,” the driver says. “I can never drive a cab again. I can’t even drive this one today.” He says he was born in Spain and his family moved to the Dominican Republic when he was six; he has lived in New York since his teens. That night, after months of waiting, he was to see La Cage aux folles. “How can I see something like that after this?”

This is how a life can end: The cops take statements. An ambulance arrives from St. Vincent’s and the bloody-faced man is placed on a stretcher and into the back; it moves off with siren screaming, slowing behind jammed traffic at 23rd Street. From the lofts of the furriers above the avenue, people gaze down at the scene. Beside the tractor-trailer, there is a two-foot strand of blood, bright red against the dirty tar, and some plastic tubes that had been slipped down the stricken man’s throat. His gray plaid hat has rolled under the truck and lies beside the curb. I see a policeman’s hand reach down, circle it with chalk, pick it up. A pause. Then he drops it back in place.

“I know this man,” a white-haired man whispers. “I saw him 20 minutes ago.” I ask him for his name and the name of the man who has been carried away. He is reluctant to give either, and drifts away. The police are also careful; they first want to notify next of kin. The cab driver (still waiting for formal questions) hears this: “Is he — is the man dead?” The cop shrugs sadly. The driver leans on his cab, his body wracked with dry heaves.

This is how a life can end: All the questions have been asked, the forms filled in, names given, witnesses questioned. About an hour has passed. Traffic now moves quickly down the avenue. There is tape where the taxi’s wheels had come to a halt, darkening blood and chalk marks and a hat where the old man had come to the end of his life. A woman moves between two parked cars, waits for a break in traffic, hurries across the street. She never sees the blood. A gust of wind lifts the dead man’s sporty little hat and rolls it back against the curb.

In all years and all seasons, the bridge was there. We could see it from the roof of the tenement where we lived, the stone towers rising below us from the foreshortened streets of downtown Brooklyn. We saw it in newspapers and at the movies and on the covers of books, part of the signature of the place where we lived. Sometimes, on summer afternoons during World War II, my mother would gather me and my brother Tom and my sister, Kathleen, and we’d set out on the most glorious of walks. We walked for miles, leaving behind the green of Prospect Park, passing factories and warehouses and strange neighborhoods, crossing a hundred streets and a dozen avenues, seeing the streets turn green again as we entered Brooklyn Heights, pushing on, beaded with sweat, legs rubbery, until, amazingly, looming abruptly in front of us, stone and steel and indifferent, was The Bridge.

It was the first man-made thing that I knew was beautiful. We could walk across it, gazing up at the great arc of the cables. We could hear the sustained eerie musical note they made when combed by the wind (augmented since by the hum of automobile tires), and we envied the gulls that played at the top of those arches. The arches were Gothic, and provided a sense of awe that was quite religious. And awe infused the view of the great harbor, a view my mother embellished by describing to us the ships that had brought her and so many other immigrants to America — the Irish and the Italians and the Jews, the Germans, the Poles, and the Swedes, all of them crowding the decks, straining to see their newfound land. What they saw first was the Statue of Liberty, and the skyline, and The Bridge. The Brooklyn Bridge.

My mother would tell us these things and then lead us down to the Manhattan side and show us Park Row, where the newspapers were, and City Hall, where a wonderful man named Fiorello worked as mayor, and the Woolworth Building, gleaming in the sun. Near dusk we’d take the trolley car back across to Brooklyn. I remember on one of those trips wanting to jump out and climb The Bridge’s cables and wrap my arms around those stone towers; nothing that immense could be real. The impulse quickly vanished. I had already walked the promenade and touched the stone and run my hands along the steel; I was from Brooklyn, and to me The Bridge was not a ghost, a painting, a photograph, or a dream. It was a fact. In the years that followed, everything changed, including me, but The Bridge was always there.

It has been there now for a hundred summers. Fiorello is gone, and so are the newspapers of Park Row. The last trolley crossed The Bridge in 1950. The Bridge has been altered, cluttered with the ugly advancements of the twentieth century. But it is as beautiful to me today as it was when I was young and had more innocent eyes. I was a teenager before I realized that all those puny, misshapen other bridges across the river even had names.

Summer, when I was a boy in Brooklyn, was a string of intimacies, a sum of small knowings, and almost none of them cost money. Nobody ever figured out a way to charge us for morning, and morning then was the beginning of everything. I was an altar boy in the years after the war, up in the morning before most other people for the long walk to the church on the hill. And I would watch the sun rise in Prospect Park — at first a rumor, then a heightened light, something unseen and immense melting the hard early darkness; then suddenly there was a molten ball, screened by the trees, about to climb to a scalding noon. The sun would dry the dew on the grass of the park, soften the tar, bake the rooftops, brown us on the beaches, make us sweat, force us out of the tight, small flats of the tenements.

And if dawn was a tremendous overture, endlessly repeated, the days were always improvisations. How did we decide what to do with our time? We didn’t; the day decided. The day had its own rhythms. I don’t remember ever drawing up plans, or waiting for some agent of the state to arrive and direct us. Usually, the day would tell us to meet on the corner, with a pink spaldeen and a stickball bat. All through the war, there had been no spaldeens, and the few survivors had been treasured or replaced with those gray furry tennis balls we all despised, because we had never seen tennis played, had no idea what it was about, worshiped no tennis players. When spaldeens returned, stickball entered a golden age. Two blocks away, on 14th Street beside the Minerva Theater, the Tigers played gigantic money games, with pots as large as $300 and audiences jamming the sidewalks. Our games were smaller. We were still amateurs. Literally lovers. Lovers of that simple game with its swift variations on baseball: one strike and you were out, no bases on balls, six men on a team, sewer tops for bases, scoreboards chalked on tar. We made bats from broom handles, and there was an elaborate ritual of transforming broom to bat: clawing away the wire that held the straw by jamming the broom on a picket fence; then burning away the end of the straw; then sanding off splinters and taping the handle. Those brooms made beautiful bats, thin at the handle, thicker at the end. Today, commercially made stickball bats are sold in stores, products of Super Glut; they are terrible bats, as straight and untapered as poles. Playing with them is like playing with a mop handle.

Stickball wasn’t always a team game. We played variations called catchaflyerup (or, more literally, catch a fly, you’re up), in which a batter kept hitting until someone caught a batted ball on the fly; roly-poly, where you rolled the spaldeen, after it was hit, toward the bat, which lay flat across home plate (if the ball hit the bat, bounced, and the batter missed it, the player who rolled it became the new hitter); and, most simply, tenhitsapiece, in which each batter was allowed to hit ten times. The simpler variations were played early in the morning, before everybody showed up on the court. When there were enough players, we started the full games, with their elaborate, specific ground rules: Off the factory wall was a home run, off the diner was a hindoo (a do-over). Around the city there were dozens of other variations.

We didn’t play much baseball because the equipment cost too much money, but we lived and breathed the game. Most of us were Dodger fans, from territorial loyalty, but also because it was one of the greatest of all baseball teams. In all of that neighborhood, I knew one Giant fan and one guy who unaccountably rooted for the Cincinnati Reds. Nobody rooted for the Yankees.

That was before television’s triumph, before so many children were turned into passive slugs, before the relentless tides of Super Glut had jammed or pacified so many imaginations. We didn’t have those giant $350 radios you see everywhere now (the radio in our house was shaped like a cathedral, and you had to hold the aerial in the back to hear clearly). But somehow we always knew The Score. Red Barber narrated the Dodger games on WHN, and we would shout into the bars — into Rattigan’s, Fitzgerald’s, Quigley’s, Unbeatable Joe’s — “Who’s winnin’ and who’s pitchin’ and who got the hits?” We knew; we always knew. The Score was like some insistent melody being played in another room, parallel to our own lives and our own scores.

But we also saw a lot of games at Ebbets Field. The Police Athletic League gave away Knothole Club tickets, and so — reluctantly, fearful of the taint of betrayal — we would go into the 72nd Precinct each spring and sign up for the PAL so we could get Dodger tickets. They were almost always in the bleachers, when the worst teams (and poorest draws) were in town against the Dodgers, but we didn’t care. There was Dixie Walker, over in right field, and Pete Reiser, playing out the shattered autumn of his career, his brilliant talent broken against the walls of the great ballpark. And on different days in different summers, Reese, Snider, Billy Cox, Stanky, Furillo, Hodges, and the rest, HIT SIGN WIN SUIT, said Abe Stark’s sign under the Scoreboard in center; the sign was three feet off the ground, and it would have required three simultaneous outfield coronaries for any batter to bounce a baseball off that sign, but it was a crucial part of the furnishings. And there, jittery and wonderful, dancing off third base, ready to steal home, rattling the pitchers, was Jackie Robinson. That was part of being a Dodger fan then: You were forced to take a moral position. To be a Dodger fan in those days was to endorse the idea that a black man had a right to steal home in the major leagues.

Ebbets Field became our second home. We knew how to scale the fence if there were no PAL tickets; we knew where we could rob programs and scorecards. We developed a variety of techniques for getting in; we had one crippled kid in the neighborhood whom we carried out like a prop, telling the guards he had three days to live, or had been hit by a car driven by a Giant fan, or had been caught in Europe during the war and bombed by the Nazis. The guards always let us in. We knew where to wait for the ballplayers when they came out, and which one signed autographs and which didn’t. Tell me I’m fourteen and I’ll tell you I just saw Cookie Lavagetto.

We collected baseball picture cards, which came with bubble gum, and there was an elaborate system of games and trading that revolved around the cards. We hated the Yankees so much that we despised the entire league that housed them, so there was no value at all to most players from the American League. If a National League player wasn’t a Dodger, he had to be good to be valued; if he was good, we feared him, and that meant we saved Stan Musial, Enos Slaughter, Sal Maglie, Johnny Mize, and, later, Willie Mays.

For me, all hope for New York died on the day I read about the arrest of a young man out in the borough of Queens. A special kind of murder, DAD HELD IN KILLING, said the page-three headline in the Daily News. Another neat summary of a familiar New York story, reported in the matter-of-fact tone of an aging war correspondent. You know: the cops say this, the neighbors say that, and, uh, pass the jam, will ya, honey?

Familiar. Except for the details …those flat details told us that this particular father, who had only recently arrived in New York from the American Midwest, had grown angry when his six-day-old son urinated on him. The man threw the infant to the floor (naturally, the child had to be punished for such effrontery). According to the police, the father then chopped up the infant and threw him to the German shepherd. When the cops arrived, there was nothing left of the boy except the blood on the floor. But even those terrible details weren’t sufficient to cause a loss of faith in an entire city. It was the reaction of New Yorkers that settled a swampy chill in my old bones and confirmed a deepening belief that we were doomed. There was no reaction at all. No angry protests. No masses offered in the churches. No memorials planned. Nothing. As the Russian writer Aleksandr Kuprin once wrote, “Do you understand, gentlemen, that all the horror is in just this: that there is no horror!”

In the barbarized city of New York, there is no horror these days. We no longer seem capable of that basic human emotion, which is why so many of us have begun to lose all hope for a more decent future. The cause of this municipal numbness is simple: We have seen too many atrocities. On the day the story broke about the baby who was fed to the dog, exactly two people mentioned it to me. By the following day, this tale of horror had vanished from the newspapers and from our collective consciousness, with an assist from Saddam Hussein. In the next week, various journalistic generals rallied for war in hysterical defense of the noble democrats of Kuwait, while George Bush was sending troops, tanks, helicopters, airplanes, and crates of thirty-screen sun block to Saudi Arabia, at a cost of billions of dollars, to protect Our Way of Life. It was much easier to locate the world’s beasts in Baghdad than to mourn the brief life of an American child fed to a dog by an American father, in a city that claimed to be the center of American civilization.

In the month before Bush rose to defend Our Way of Life in the wadis of the Arabian desert, five children were shot dead in the streets of New York, and another six were wounded. All were indirect casualties of the drug wars in this brutalized city, where two million illegal guns are brandished by the citizens as symbols of faith in the creed of the National Rifle Association. Each death was noted in the newspapers, of course, and briefly smothered in the wormy sentimentalities of local television news. Each was then almost instantly superseded by a fresh outrage and instantly forgotten.

And of course, there was no horror.

The desperate truth is that millions of New Yorkers have been as emotionally immobilized as anyone who lives too long in the presence of violence and death: emergency-room doctors, soldiers, Mafia hit men. And at the heart of this grand refusal to feel lies something else: They have come to believe that New York itself is dying.

In many ways, I’ve begun to agree. Reluctantly. With a sense of grieving sadness; I’m a New Yorker, after all, born and bred. New York made my life possible. As a son of immigrants, I’ve subscribed to its tough, romantic myths and have spent a half century in thrall to its dazzling and infuriating ways. In the 1970s, when we were afflicted by a great fiscal crisis, there was much talk of doom and collapse; I scoffed then at such drastic predictions. New York, after all, is America’s city, the way that Paris is France’s city, and Tokyo is Japan’s city. It belongs to all Americans. New York couldn’t simply collapse into degradation and anarchy; the country wouldn’t allow it.

But the fiscal crisis was one big crisis and therefore amenable to one big solution. The current crisis is a dearh of a thousand cuts. As in virtually every one of America’s drug-drowned cities, crime is the most obvious problem; but as residents of the largest city, New Yorkers are overwhelmed by the sheer weight of numbers. The steady grinding force of menace is a texture of daily life here now. When Time did its cover story on the collapsing city, some 59 percent of those polled said they would move somewhere else if they could. Nobody in New York was surprised. “I’m sick of looking over my shoulder,” one old friend said to me, explaining that he was moving to the Southwest. “I’ve done it year after year, every year worse than the one before. Just once more, before I get old, I want to walk down a street on a summer night without looking behind me.”

That enervating sense of menace isn’t mere paranoia. New York is more dangerous now than at any time in its history. Last year, there were a record-breaking 1,905 murders in New York (compared with 305 in 1955); in the first six months of 1990, homicides were running 19 percent ahead of last year, without counting the 87 killed in the Happy Land Social Club fire. We are averaging five murders a day. It is no consolation to be told that, per capita, other American cities are even more dangerous. We live here, where the bullets are killing children. Sometimes the mayhem attracts wide public attention: A family of tourists from Utah is attacked in the subway by a pack of kids looking for disco money; one of the tourists is stabbed to death while defending his mother. “They didn’t know the city,” one of my friends said. “They just weren’t streetwise.” But a few days later, in the Bronx, an eighteen-year-old, a son of the city, streetwise and smart, is approached by a panhandler demanding a dollar. The young man refuses. The panhandler jams a knife in his heart and kills him. Headlines, as usual, scream for two days. But there is no horror.

The rich, of course, live well-defended lives. But for millions of others, there is never any relief from the dailiness of menace. Every New Yorker knows one big thing: Nobody is safe. In a recent month, one of my friends was mugged at ten in the morning as he was walking into the building where he works; another was robbed at noon while packing luggage into his car for a summer vacation. Everybody I know has been touched in one way or another. My own mother has been mugged four times; she came out of the last mugging with Parkinson’s disease, which has ruined the final years of her life. Nobody is safe. Nobody.

The increasingly casual mayhem of the street has made all New Yorkers adjust. Older people who can’t afford retirement in Florida or Arizona have become prisoners of their apartments. It doesn’t matter to them that New York is host to such glories as the Metropolitan Museum and the Broadway theater; they can’t risk the journey to visit them because predators wait in subways and alleys or the lobbies of their apartment buildings. On Madison Avenue, shopkeepers keep their doors locked through the day, afraid of roaming gangs of teenagers, opening only for customers they feel can be trusted. Larger establishments are patrolled by platoons of private police. The security business is booming, as New Yorkers buy thousands of locks, metal screens, alarms, attack dogs, bulletproof vests. They go to karate classes. They apply for permission (almost always denied) to legally carry guns. And still nobody feels safe.

The leading cause of job-related deaths in New York is now homicide. The victims are usually shopkeepers or taxi drivers (by mid-August this year, twenty-one taxi drivers had been killed, and cabbies were demanding the right to arm themselves). Every day’s paper brings fresh news of slaughter. A young Bronx district attorney stops near the courthouse to buy some doughnuts and he’s killed in a burst of automatic-weapon fire from a druggie who shot at the wrong group. A guy in Brooklyn is refused entrance to a social club; he comes back with an automatic weapon and shoots ten people. “You don’t have to come from Utah to get killed here,” a young man says to me in Brooklyn. “You just walk out the door and Bang! You’re dead.”

The ghettos are most dangerous of all, as blacks kill other blacks at a rate that would make the Ku Klux Klan envious. Black youths are killing or being killed over sneakers, jackets, over the choice of songs on boom boxes, over women and attitude and casual quarrels. And, of course, over drugs. The old Mob has lost control of the drug business in New York. But the resulting decentralization has led the hardened young entrepreneurs to slaughter one another over the right to sell crack or heroin outside individual bodegas. Now New York must deal with the babies born to crack addicts. They are a peculiar mutation: children who won’t respond in any way to normal human affection. There are tens of thousands of them in the care of the city government now (their mothers dead, in prison, or peddling themselves for more crack on the streets of the city). Thousands of crack babies are born each year; what sort of teenagers will they grow up to be?

Alas, notions of redemption are generally exercises in self-delusion. Most of the druggies are simply incapable of doing anything else; they come out of generations of welfare, from social groupings that can’t really be described as families. They’ve spent more time practicing their walks than they ever did studying, so they are too ignorant to make their way in the real world. They get into the drug business for a few brief years before joining the many thousands who have died or are in jail.

“Crime isn’t a job,” one wise older cop told me a few years ago, “but it is an occupation. So these guys make it their life for a while and then get slammed into the prison system. They’re more or less happy there. It’s the way they grew up, the state paying everything. Lock-in welfare. In the joint, they don’t have to care for women, raise children, open bank accounts, plead for mortgages, bust their asses to make ends meet. Instead of helping a kid with biology homework, these assholes would rather stand around the yard in Attica and horseshit each other about how they are really victims. …”

If some New York cops are especially bitter these days, it’s because they are obviously losing the struggle with the bad guys. The army of New York drug addicts spends most of its time roaming the city, in an anarchic pursuit of money for drugs. They have little to fear from the forces of the law. New York has twenty-seven thousand police on the payroll. But when divided into three five-day shifts, and then depleted by vacation and sick time, along with court appearances, there are only 1,500 cops on the street at any given time. In New York, crime pays. And the criminals know it.

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.

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.

The American slide into urban barbarism has yet to find its Gibbon. But someday a great historian must try to answer the most persistent question: What happened to us in the last third of the twentieth century? It’s too easy to say that the sixties happened, or Vietnam happened, or Watergate happened. But they are surely part of the story. The apparently endless Cold War — which was their context — insisted on the doctrine of massive retaliation; overwhelming force became essential to our politics and permeated our popular culture. On television news shows, gray-haired statesmen and men from think tanks spoke with icy seriousness about MIRVs and throw weights and the use of force. American governments spent many billions on weapons; our engineers designed amazing new ways for killing people while the Japanese devoted their energies to consumer goods. We killed uncountable Vietnamese. We bombed Cambodia until the Khmer Rouge rose from the ruins to widen the horror. We invaded the Dominican Republic and Grenada, landed troops in Lebanon, armed and paid counterrevolutionaries in Nicaragua, and killed at least 500 human beings in Panama while making the bloodiest drug arrest in history. The leadership of the country obviously believed in the use of violence. Why was anyone surprised that Americans in the worst parts of large cities shared their beliefs? The Crips and the Bloods are Americans. And for more than forty years, Americans were taught that pacifism was a dirty word.

The current violence in American cities has a number of obvious components: poverty, drugs, guns, and race. They can’t be easily separated. The poverty caused by the collapse of the urban manufacturing base has been compounded by racism and a failed welfare system. Thousands of young men and women in the ghettos used drugs to obliterate or enhance reality and then some decided to make big scores in the drug trade itself. Why not? Cocaine was fashionable among many people who were not from ghettos: musicians, movie stars, Wall Street brokers. Then some evil genius invented crack, and suddenly this drug of the elite was available to the poor. It was cheap; it could be snorted instead of injected, thus eliminating the fear of AIDS; it was almost instantly addictive. The market boomed.

The shift from heroin to cocaine in the 1970s coincided with the decline of the old American Mob, forged during Prohibition. The crude second-generation hoods couldn’t make contact with the Cubans and Colombians who were running the wholesale trade in Medellin, Cali, and Miami. Their own parochialism and racism kept them out of the black and Latino ghettos. The wholesalers built condominiums and office buildings in Miami; the retailers battled over street corners. Decentralization of the drug trade led to endless turf wars and these were made even bloodier by the easy availability of high-powered automatic weapons. This too was endorsed by higher authority; very few politicians would dare to oppose the Great American Gun Cult and its Holy See, the National Rifle Association. They all endorsed the notion, unique in the industrialized world, that every real American had the right to carry a gun and protect himself.

I’ve included here only a few of the many pieces I wrote on these subjects during this desperate period. There were too many accounts of the deaths of innocent bystanders, of young men shot down for nothing, and widows and mothers and children assembling for funerals. The repetition was numbing. The chosen pieces don’t pretend to tell the whole story of what happened to New York, Miami, and other cities; although the use of crack cocaine is declining, the story has not ended. These are situation reports, and though the situation has shifted, its details have altered, its players have been replaced, the basic situation remains. Today, more than a million men are jammed into American prisons (including John Gotti). Thousands of others are in graveyards. The drugs keep coming. So do the guns.

The slow and tedious processes of justice brought Bernhard Hugo Goetz last week to a fifth-floor courtroom at 111 Centre Street and there, at least, the poor man was safe. Out in the great scary city, the demons of his imagination roamed freely; across the street, many of them were locked away in the cages of The Tombs. But here at the defense table, flanked by his lawyers, protected by a half-dozen armed court officers, the room itself separated by metal detectors from the anarchy of the city, Goetz looked almost serene.

By design or habit, he was dressed as an ordinary citizen: pink cotton shirt and jeans over the frail body, steel-rimmed glasses sliding down the long sharp nose. His hair looked freshly trimmed. You see people like him every day, passing you on the street, riding the subways, neither monstrous nor heroic. From time to time, he whispered to the lawyers. He made a few notes on a yellow pad. His eyes wandered around the courtroom, with its civil service design and the words In God We Trust nailed in sans-serif letters above the bench of Judge Stephen G. Crane. Goetz never looked at the spectators or the six rows of reporters. In some curious way, he was himself a kind of spectator.

So when it was time to play the tape-recorded confession that. Goetz made to the police in Concord, New Hampshire, on New Year’s Eve, 1984, he, too, examined the transcript like a man hoping for revelation. The text itself was extraordinary. Combined with the sound of Goetz’s voice — stammering, hyperventilating, querulous, defensive, cold, blurry, calculating — it seemed some terrible invasion of privacy. We have heard this voice before; it belongs to the anonymous narrator of Notes from Underground, that enraged brief for the defense.

Goetz furrowed his brow as he listened to this much younger, oddly more innocent version of himself that had ended the long panicky flight out of the IRT in the second floor interview room of police headquarters in Concord. He started by telling his inquisitor, a young detective named Chris Domian, the sort of facts demanded by personnel directors: name, birth date, social security number, address (55 West 14th Street, “in New York City, and that’s, uh, that’s zip code 10011”). But it’s clear from the very beginning that he realized these would be his last anonymous hours.

GOETZ: You see, I’ll tell you the truth, and they can do anything they want with me, but I just don’t want to, I just don’t want to be paraded around, I don’t want a circus… I wish it were a dream. But it’s not. But, you know, it’s nothing to be proud of. It’s just, just, you know, it just is.

Exactly. It wasn’t a dream, certainly not a movie; it just was. On December 22, 1984, at about 1:30 in the afternoon, Bernie Goetz boarded a southbound number 2 Seventh Avenue IRT train at 14th Street and his life changed forever. So did the lives of Darrell Cabey, Troy Canty, James Ramseur, and Barry Allen. Within seconds after he boarded the train, they were joined together in a few violent minutes that changed this city. And when you listen to Goetz making his jangled confession, you understand that on that terrible afternoon, there were really five victims.

DOMIAN: Okay, let’s start with the person that was, uh, on the right, so to speak, laying down.

GOETZ: Yeah, I think he was the one who talked to me; he was the one who did the talking.

That was Canty. He is now 20, finishing an 18-month drug rehab treatment at Phoenix House. Before he ran into Goetz, he had pleaded guilty to taking $14 from video games in a bar. In his confession, Goetz is trying hard to explain to Domian (and to officer Warren Foote, who joined Domian) not simply what he did, but its context. The resulting transcript reads like a small, eerie play: the man from the big city explaining a dark world of menacing signs and nuances to the baffled outlanders.

GOETZ: I sat, I sat down and just, he was lying on the side, kind of. He, he just turned his face to me and he said, “How are you?” You know, what do you do? ‘Cause people joke around in New York a lot, and this and that, and in certain circumstances that can be, that can be a real threat. You see, there’s an implication there … I looked up and you’re not supposed to look at people a lot because it can be interpreted as being impolite — so I just looked at him and I said “Fine.” And I, I looked down. But you kind of keep them in the corner of your eye…

DOMIAN: Did he say anything else to you?

GOETZ: Yeah, yeah …the train was out of the station for a while and it reached full speed.…And he and one of the other fellows got up and they, uh — You see, they were all originally on my right-hand side. But, uh, you know, two stayed on my right-hand side, and he got up and the other guy got up and they came to my left-hand side and.…You see, what they said wasn’t even so much as important as the look, the look. You see the body language.…You have to, you know, it’s, it’s, uh, you know, that’s what I call ít, body language.

That’s what started it off: “How are you?” and body language. It just went from there. Goetz remembered: “He [Canty] stood up and the other fellow stood up. And they very casually walked, or sauntered — whatever you want to call it — over to my left side. And the fellow …uh, he said, ‘Give me five dollars.’”

This is the moment that helps explain the intensity of the public response to the Goetz story. It is one thing to read with detached amusement about Jean Harris or Claus von Bulow; such tabloid soap operas have little to do with our lives. But for millions of New Yorkers, what happened to Goetz is a very real possibility. Being trapped on the subway by four bad guys demanding not a dime or a quarter but five dollars is similar to the nocturne about the burglar beside the bed in the dark. A quarter is panhandling; five dollars is robbery. Such scenarios don’t often happen, but you wonder what you would do if they did. For Goetz, it happened.

GOETZ: One of the other fellows, he had in his fur coat, he had his hand or something like this and he put a bulge… And even that isn’t a threat. Because the people, you see, they, they know the rules of the game, the rules of the game in New York. And you know, they’re very serious about the rules… You see you don’t know what it’s like to be on the other side of violence. It’s, it’s like a picture. When it happens to you, you see, you see it. … People have the craziest image; they see, like Captain Kirk or someone like that, getting attacked by several guys and boom, boom, boom, he beats ’em up and — and two minutes later, he’s walking arm and arm in, with a beautiful woman or something like that. And that’s not what it is.…

Goetz was not Captain Kirk. He was a frail bespectacled young man living in New York and he had learned the rules of the game. He knew what was meant when one of four young black men told him he wanted five dollars.

GOETZ: I looked at his face, and, you know, his eyes were shiny, you know. He, he, he was, if you can believe that, his eyes were shiny, he was enjoying himself… I know in my mind what they wanted to do was play with me.…You know, it’s kind of like a cat plays with a mouse before, you know…

After you got that impression, what did you wind up doing?

GOETZ: That’s not an impression, that’s not an impression.…

Throughout the confession, Goetz struggles with what he clearly believes is an impossible task: to explain to his rural auditors the terrors of New York.

GOETZ: …You have to think in a cold-blooded way in New York. … If you don’t …think in what society’s going to brand it, as being you know, cold-blooded and murderous and savage and monstrous … I feel it’s irresponsible. …How can you understand that here in New Hampshire? How, how, how can you?

He explains to the two New Hampshire cops that he began, in his mind, to lay down “my pattern of fire.” He would shoot from left to right. That was the only thing he could do, he insists, because this act wasn’t premeditated: “I never knew those guys were on the train, you know, and like I said, I’m, I’m no good guy or anything like that. But if they had acted a little differently, if they hadn’t cornered me…” Clearly what he feared most from them was humiliation. And so he decided to shoot them with the unregistered nickle-plated featherweight .38 caliber Smith & Wesson Special that he had shoved inside his pants.

DOMIAN: Your, your intention was to shoot these people?

GOETZ: My intention, at that moment, let me explain: when I saw what they intended for me, my intention was, was worse than shooting.

DOMIAN: Okay. Was it your intention to kill these people?

GOETZ: My intention was to do anything I could do to hurt them. My intention — you know, I know this sounds horrible — but my intention was to murder them, to hurt them, to make them suffer as much as possible.

No, he explained, he didn’t have a pistol permit, because the New York police department had turned him down. And then, recalling all this to the cops in New Hampshire, the core of his rage began to burn. The reason he wanted a pistol permit was because he had been attacked three years before and was left with permanent damage to his knee. The cops caught the man who did it, Goetz said, and two hours and 35 minutes after his arrest, he was back on the street without bail, charged with malicious mischief; Goetz himself claimed he spent six hours and five minutes filing the charges and talking to the bureaucrats in the victim aid program.

“That incident was an education,” he said, his voice beginning to tremble. “It taught me that, that the city doesn’t care what happens to you. You see, you don’t know what it’s like to be a victim inside.”

And he began to explain what it’s like to live in an almost permanent state of fear. This can’t be sneered away; thousands, perhaps millions of New Yorkers live with this most corrosive emotion. Most of us have adjusted to the state of siege. We are tense, wary, guarded; but most of us function and do not explode. Goetz was different.

GOETZ: … I kind of accept my life, as I know it, is finished. But, but, boy, it would be just — to lead a normal life. If, if you can’t, I mean, is it too much to ask?… To live being afraid is unbearable, you know? It’s too much to ask, goddamn it…”

All over the tape, Goetz talks about fear and its denial. “I’m not afraid of dying instantly,” he says at one point. “I don’t have a family or anything like that. What I’m afraid of is being maimed and of, of these things happening slowly and not knowing what’s going to happen from moment to moment. The fear, in this case, the fear is a funny thing. You see, this is really combat.’” He then becomes even more analytical, sounding like a man who had mastered the theory before engaging in practice. “The upper level of your mind, you just turn off. That’s, that’s the important thing. And you, you react …your sense of perception changes, your abilities change. Speed is everything, speed is everything.”

And so, with speed, he shot Canty, Allen, Cabey, and Manseur. “They had set a trap for me,” he tells the cops, “and only they were trapped. It was just so bizarre. It was — I know this is disgusting to say — but it was, it was so easy. I can’t believe it. God.” He insists that he knew exactly what he was doing when he was doing it. “I don’t believe in this insanity stuff. Because you know what you’re doing. You cannot do something and not know it. I mean how could I do it and not know it? This is, this is all bullshit… But if you can accept this: I was out of control.… Maybe you should always be in control. But if you put people in a situation where they’re threatened with mayhem, several times, and then if, then if something happens, and if a person acts, turns into a vicious animal — I mean, I mean, you know, how are you supposed, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s, what, what do you expect, you know?”

After firing the first shots, dropping Canty, Ramseur, and Allen, he saw Cabey sitting down.

GOETZ: I wasn’t sure if I had shot him before, because he just seemed okay. Now, I said I know this sounds, this is gonna sound vicious, and it is. I mean, how else can you describe it? I said, “You seem to be all right. Here’s another.” Now, you see, what happens is, I was gonna shoot him anyway, I’m sure. I had made up, I mean, in my mind, that I was gonna pull the trigger anyway. But he jerked his right arm. And on reflex, he was shot instantly. You see, that’s the whole thing. You’re working on reflex. You don’t think.…

Scattered through the confession there are many other examples of Goetz’s fury and rage, which sound as if they too had become reflexes. “If I had more [ammunition] I would have shot them again and again and again.” He says that “I wanted to hurt them as much as I possibly could.” But even in his rage, he could recognize the fallen men as humans: “I wanted to look at his eyes, I don’t even want to say what may have been in my mind. And I looked at his eyes …there was such fear.” It was as if Cabey’s fear was the only sign to Goetz of their common humanity. “You know, the, the, the look had changed. And I started — it was kinda like slowing down. All of a sudden it’s like putting on the, screeching of the brakes, and you just start slowing down. …”

He talked about the reactions of other passengers, the train slowing down, a conductor coming in and asking what was going on. He talked about jumping out into the tracks after the train stopped in the tunnel, and coming up at Chambers Street and taking a cab home, and then a long drive that night in a rented car to Vermont because “instinctively, somehow I kinda feel like heading north is the way to go if there is a problem.”

Goetz stayed in Vermont for a week. And if you can believe the confession, he seems actually to have been happy. What he did in the subway, he thought, would be considered just another New York crime. “… When I got back to New York, the stuff was still on the news and people were talking about it. You see, up here people have just forgotten about it. It was one more piece of, excuse me for using the word — one more piece of shit that happened in New York.”

Hearing himself say those words, Goetz massaged his temple, and then lifted his glasses and rubbed his eyes. In the end, the eruption that Saturday afternoon on the IRT wasn’t just another piece of shit that happened in New York. It was a lot more than that.

Late one night a few months ago, a man named John Gotti walked into a jammed Manhattan restaurant called Columbus. This is a New York hangout favored by actors, models, ballplayers, agents, reporters, and second-string hoodlums. On this night, the big corner table was filled by Steve van Zandt, most of the E Street Band, and some beautiful women. As usual, nobody paid any attention. Then Gotti walked in with two very large associates. The room hushed.

Impeccably dressed, his body thick and powerful, a diamond ring glittering on the pinkie of his left hand, his small eyes searching the room for friends or danger while a thin smile played on his face, Gotti was pure Mob. Not just a soldier. Not just some strong-arm boy who muscles people tardy with payments to the loan sharks. John Gotti was bigger than all of that. In fact, at this moment in the long, dark history of American organized crime, he was the Boss.

There was only one empty table, and Gotti and his friends were led there by the maitre d\ As the gangsters sat down, the hum of conversation resumed. Gotti’s eyes drifted to the corner table. The musicians were dressed with the calculated raffishness of rock ’n’ rollers: headbands, bandannas, leather vests over bare skin, earrings, beards. Gotti called the maitre d’ over.

“Tell me something,” he said, looking down at the corner table. “Who are these guys dressed like fuckin’ pirates?” He was told about the E Street Band and how they were the musicians for the great Bruce Springsteen.

Gotti smiled.

“You see,” he growled, “everybody wants to work for the Boss.”

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 us 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.

In short, television works on the same imaginative and intellectual level as psychoactive drugs. If prolonged television viewing makes the young passive (dozens of studies indicate that it does), then moving to drugs has a certain coherence. Drugs provide an unearned high (in contrast to the earned rush that comes from a feat accomplished, a human breakthrough earned by sweat or thought or love).

And because the television addict and the drug addict are alienated from the hard and scary world, they also feel they make no difference in its complicated events. For the junkie, the world is reduced to him and the needle, pipe, or vial; the self is absolutely isolated, with no desire for choice. The television addict lives the same way. Many Americans who fail to vote in presidential elections must believe they have no more control over such a choice than they do over the casting of L.A. Law.

The drug plague also coincides with the unspoken assumption of most television shows: Life should be easy. The most complicated events are summarized on TV news in a minute or less. Cops confront murder, chase the criminals, and bring them to justice (usually violently) within an hour. In commercials, you drink the right beer and you get the girl. Easy! So why should real life be a grind? Why should any American have to spend years mastering a skill or a craft, or work eight hours a day at an unpleasant job, or endure the compromises and crises of marriage? Nobody works on television (except cops, doctors, and lawyers). Love stories on television are about falling in love or breaking up; the long, steady growth of a marriage — its essential dailiness — is seldom explored, except as comedy. Life on television is almost always simple: good guys and bad, nice girls and whores, smart guys and dumb. And if life in the real world isn’t that simple, well, hey, man, have some dope, man, be happy, feel good.

The doper always whines about how he feels; drugs are used to enhance his feelings or obliterate them, and in this the doper is very American. No other people on earth spend so much time talking about their feelings; hundreds of thousands go to shrinks, they buy self-help books by the millions, they pour out intimate confessions to virtual strangers in bars or discos. Our political campaigns are about emotional issues now, stated in the simplicities of adolescence. Even alleged statesmen can start a sentence, “I feel that the Sandinistas should …” when they once might have said, “I think. …” I’m convinced that this exaltation of cheap emotions over logic and reason is one by-product of hundreds of thousands of hours of television.

Most Americans under the age of fifty have now spent their lives absorbing television; that is, they’ve had the structures of drama pounded into them. Drama is always about conflict. So news shows, politics, and advertising are now all shaped by those structures. Nobody will pay attention to anything as complicated as the part played by Third World debt in the expanding production of cocaine; it’s much easier to focus on Manuel Noriega, a character right out of Miami Vice, and believe that even in real life there’s a Mister Big.

What is to be done? Television is certainly not going away, but its addictive qualities can be controlled. It’s a lot easier to “just say no” to television than to heroin or crack. As a beginning, parents must take immediate control of the sets, teaching children to watch specific television programs, not “television,” to get out of the house and play with other kids. Elementary and high schools must begin teaching television as a subject, the way literature is taught, showing children how shows are made, how to distinguish between the true and the false, how to recognize cheap emotional manipulation. All Americans should spend more time reading. And thinking.

For years, the defenders of television have argued that the networks are only giving the people what they want. That might be true. But so is the Medellin cartel.

For almost forty years, I’ve been going to Mexico. I’ve lived, gone to school, and worked there. It’s the country I know better than any other except my own. As a gringo in Mexico, I’ve learned much about the feelings of all immigrants: the initial strangeness of language, food, music, culture, the uncertainty of legal rights, the unfair legacy of historical stereotype. I’ve tried hard to understand the history of Mexico; I’ve made friends with Mexicans of varied trades and backgrounds; I’ve come to comprehend some basic Mexican myths. But whenever I return to Mexico, I remain a foreigner, a man standing on the margin of Mexican life.

Even as an outsider, I know that Mexico is part of me. Without the experience of Mexico, I wouldn’t be the same man. Mexicans have taught me much about work, honor, and pride, about courage, about the need to keep on going after common sense tells you to give up. In my attitude to the world, Mexican fatalism has been grafted onto the Irish fatalism inherited from my father; that mestizo fatalism tempers the American optimism that was so powerfully encouraged by my mother. As a writer, I’ve been enriched by the work of Carlos Fuentes, Octavio Paz, Juan Rulfo, and Carlos Monsivais. I get great pleasure from the poetry of Homero Aridjis. I have been entertained and enlightened by the crime fiction of Paco Ignacio Taibo II. Where I live, Mexican folk art is everywhere, masks and surrealist altars and mirrors made from tin. My library contains almost 500 volumes on Mexican history, art, music, and culture. On the wall above my desk, there are showcards featuring the stars of the Golden Age of Mexican cinema from the mid-1930s to the late 1950s: Pedro Infante, Jorge Negrete, Pedro Armendariz, and Arturo de Cordova. If they’d been French instead of Mexican, every critic in New York would know their work. Ní modo, as the Mexicans say. It doesn’t matter. Life goes on, and I’m still looking for posters of Maria Felix and Dolores del Rio.

On other walls, there are framed photographs by Agustin Casasola, the great photographer of the Mexican Revolution, and posters by such artists as Rufino Tamayo, Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Jose Luis Cuevas, and Alejandro Colunga. My friends think this is all very strange. Other people’s passions always are. But in my small part of New York, and in my consciousness, Mexico lives.

Obviously, these pieces can’t express my complicated feelings about Mexico and Mexicans; that would require a book. But I hope they make clear that at least one old gringo is thankful to the Mexicans for their grace and tenacity. As I write, ten years after the terrible earthquake, Mexico is deep into another crisis. This one seems worse than any other, because so many hopes and expectations were raised during the presidency of Carlos Salinas de Gortari. Mexico, everyone said, was about to move from the Third World to the First World. Not in some distant future, but now. That didn’t happen. Once more, there are grave predictions that Mexico will plunge into bloody revolution.

Perhaps.

But I wouldn’t bet a centavo on it.

We opened the drapes in the hotel room and there before us in the brilliant winter sunshine lay the Z6-calo. Everything was in its familiar place: the great wheezing pile of the cathedral to the left with the smaller chapel called the Sagrario beside it, starlings and sparrows darting gaily around their somber rooftop crosses. On the far side of the vast square was the low, scalloped outline of the National Palace, a building begun by Hernán Cortés in the 1520s beside the ruins of Montezuma’s palace. To the right: the City Hall, from which the largest city in the Western Hemisphere is governed.

And directly below us was a panorama from the continuing history of Mexican surrealism. More than a thousand high school students in leotards were dancing to the sounds of “La Bamba.” The steel framework of a portable stage was climbing four stories above the ground, to be filled, in a few days, by hundreds of performers celebrating the Day of the Revolution. Over on the side, workmen were hammering together the numbered sections of a plywood pyramid. Three teenage boys, balanced precariously on an upper rung of the framework, perfectly mimicked the movements of the dancing schoolgirls. And at their feet, appearing from behind a work shed, there was a man gazing up at me and my wife. He was Mexican. He was holding a blanket. I backed away from the window and gazed at the blue roof of cloudless sky.

For more than thirty years of traveling in Mexico, I’ve been seeing the Man with the Blanket. I came here first in 1956, twenty-one years old and wanting to be a painter. I enrolled at Mexico City College on the GI Bill, and every month the Veterans Administration sent me $110 to pay for tuition, housing, food, and supplies. I was never happier. I just never could afford the wares of the Man with the Blanket. Still, in one guise or another, sometimes young and other times old, he has pursued me. When I came back to Mexico in the early sixties, my easel abandoned for a Smith Corona, he signaled to me from the darkness outside the Hotel Maria Cristina on Río Lerma. I saw him at the 1968 Olympics, appearing suddenly from behind the last ahuehuete tree on Insurgentes Sur. He trailed me for a week during the first giddy year of the seventies oil boom. He never says anything. Not a word. Just holds up the blanket, his eyes full of insatiable hope. A few years ago, after surviving a terrible car accident on the Toluca Highway, I retreated to my room in a fancy Zona Rosa hotel, soaked with rain, my ribs and back bruised and aching. I opened the blinds. And there he was. Eight stories below me on the rain-lashed street. Staring up at my silhouette in the small yellow rectangle of my room. The Man with the Blanket.

“Why does he look so sad?” my wife asked, gazing down at his lonely presence.

“Because he is,” I said.

For days, the sirens never stopped. The ambulances came screaming down the Paseo de la Reforma, the sound preceded by cars packed with young men waving red flags, honking horns, demanding passage. The ambulances went by in a rush. And then more came from the other direction, cutting across town on Insurgentes, grinding gears at the intersection. In the ambulances you could see doctors, nurses, tubes, bottles, a dusty face with an open mouth and urgent eyes. And then they were gone, heading for one of the hospitals in the great injured city of Mexico.

“Somos los chingados,” a man named Victor Presa said to me, standing in the crowd in the Plaza of the Three Cultures in the district called Tlatelolco. We are the fucked. Presa, 41, a tinsmith, didn’t know if his wife and three children were alive or dead. He lived with them in the 13-story Nuevo Leon building of the Nonoalco-Tlatel-olco housing complex (one of 96 buildings erected in the ’60s to make up the largest public housing development in the country). When the terremoto hit at 7:19 on the morning of September 19, Victor Presa was coming home with friends. “We were up all of the night. Yes. I don’t have work, you understand? Still, no excuse. I was out, yes, we were drinking, yes …”

The residents of Nuevo Leon had been complaining for eight months to the project’s officials about the dampness of the concrete, seepage of water, unrepaired fractures, the feeling of instability. The housing bureaucrats ignored them. And at 7:19 a.m., when Victor Presa was still almost a mile from home and thick with pulque, the building seemed to rise up, swayed left, then right, then left again, and all 13 stories went over, reeling down, slab upon slab, concrete powdering upon impact, pipes and drains crumpling, steel rods twisting like chicken wire. Within the gigantic mass, smashed among beds and stoves, sinks and bathtubs, among couches and cribs, bookcases and tables and lamps, ground into fibrous pulp with the morning’s freshly purchased bread, boxes of breakfast cereal, pots of coffee, platters of eggs, bacon, tortillas, there were more than a thousand men, women, and children.

“Somos los chingados,” said Victor Presa, sore-eyed, his hands bloody, voice cracked, smoking a cigarette, staring at the ruins, as a small army of firemen, soldiers, and residents clawed at the rubble. A woman kept calling for a lost child: Ro-baiiiiiiir-to, Ro-baaaaaiiiii-irrrr-to. The scene seemed almost unreal; surely some director would now yell “cut” and everyone would relax, the calls to the dead and dying would cease, the special effects men would examine their masterpiece. But this was real all right, and Victor Presa stared at the building, summoning whatever strength he had left to join the others who had been smashed by what was being called El Gran Chingon. The Big Fucker.

“This was all we needed,” said an exhausted, hawk-nosed 24-year-old doctor named Raul Tirado. “Things were bad enough. Now this, the catdstrofe. Pobre Mexico …poor Mexico.”

Before the catastrophe was the Crisis, always discussed here with a capital C, a combination of factors that were at once political, economic, social. The %$6 billion foreign debt. The incredible $30 million a day that leaves Mexico just to pay the vigorish to the banks, never denting the debt itself. The accelerating slide of the peso (for years, 12.5 pesos were pegged to the dollar; last week you could get 405). The collapse of the price of petroleum. All these were intertwined with a wide-ranging cynicism; a loss of faith in the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) that has ruled Mexico without interruption since 1929; contempt for the obesity of the state, where almost four million Mexicans are employed by federal, state, and local governments out of a total work force of about 20 million; despair at the monstrous growth of Mexico City and its transformation into a smog-choked, soul-killing crime-ridden purgatory; fatalism about the daily, hourly arrival of more and more and more children; and above and below everything, touching every level of the national life, persisting in the face of exposure in the press and President Miguel de la Madrid’s oratory about “moral renovation”: the rotting stench of corruption.

“There will be a Mexico when this is finished,” said Dr. Tirado. “But if they only clean up the physical mess, then we are doomed.”

So the cranes will soon arrive to remove the top four floors of Continental Hotel on the corner of Reforma and Insurgentes, but neither the building nor Mexico will be easily healed. In 1957, when an earthquake measuring 7.3 on the Richter scale rolled through the city, killing 51 people, the Continental was a year old, a proud new member of the Hilton chain, with a blue-green mosaic mural rising from street level to the roof. That quake split the mural and fractured the building, but repairs were made and business went on. There were only 3.5 million people in Mexico City that year, and the city brimmed with optimism. But Hilton’s name was long ago removed from the building, and the mural torn away, and when I walked around the corner to Calle Roma to look at the aging weather-stained edifice from the rear, the top floors seemed to have been mashed by some gigantic fist. Business there will not go on. Not after El Gran Chingon. Across the street from the Continental there’s a statue of Cuauhtehmoc, the valiant Aztec prince who fought Cortez after Montezuma had failed; Cuauhtehmoc survived 1957 and survived September 19. But his pollution-blackened face now seemed sadder than ever.

“There’ll be nothing there next year,” said a 31-year-old insurance executive named Maria Delgado, staring at the Continental. “Who would build there again? Who would grant insurance? Who would build in many other parts of the city?”

Walking the city in the days after the quake, much of the damage did seem permanent. On the corner of Hamburgo and Dinamarca, a gallery called the Central Cultural de Jose Guadalupe Posada had been compacted from five floors into two; the art work had been removed, the building cordoned off behind a string of sad dusty pennants, but it didn’t matter now: there was nothing left to steal. Across the street, rescue workers combed the rubble of an apartment building: cops, soldiers, doctors in Red Cross vests, university students, men with flat brown Indian faces, all lifting broken concrete, smashed furniture, calling for sounds of life, hearing nothing. Such groups would soon be familiar all over the ruined parts of the city, and they helped compile the statistics of disaster: nearly 5000 dead, another 150,000 hurt, an estimated 2000 trapped in the rubble, dead or alive. Some bureaucrats, afraid of permanently losing tourist business, rushed to minimize the effects of El Gran Chingon; Mexico is a large city, they said (ít sprawls over 890 square miles); only 0.1 per cent of its buildings were destroyed. And that was true.

But you couldn’t minimize what happened to the people who’d been directly affected. On Calle Liverpool, a blue moving van from Romero’s Mudanzas was parked in front of Shakey’s Pizza y Polio, loading furniture from a damaged apartment house; in middle-class areas, moving vans were part of the scenery, like salvage boats after a shipwreck. A few doors down, the tan cement skin had peeled off the facade of another apartment house, revealing cheap porous concrete blocks underneath. On Calle Londres, two buildings to the right of the Benjamin Franklin Library tilted to the side like drunks in a doorway; cops warned pedestrians not to smoke because there was gas in the air. At the corner of Londres and Berlin, tinted windows had been blown out of a building, its walls sagged, the street was piled with broken glass and rubble; but in one window you could see the back of a spice rack, its jars neat, orderly, domestic, suggesting life in a place where nobody would ever live again.

The contrasts from one block to another, one building to the next, seemed baffling. Why did this house survive and that one collapse? Of the more than 450 colonial-era buildings listed with the Mexican equivalent of the landmarks commission, not one had been destroyed. But more than 100 new government-owned buildings had fallen, including three major hospitals and many ministries; hundreds of others (including many schools) were mortally wounded. Fate had never seemed more capricious. But every Mexican I spoke to offered the same basic explanation and it had nothing to do with God, faith, subsoil erosion, fault lines, the Cocos Plate, or the superiority of the 19th century to the 20th. Their answer was simple: corruption.

“Today, more than ever, it has been shown that corruption is a very bad builder,” said the Committee of 100, a group formed last March to combat the environmental disasters of Mexico (its members include writers Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Octavio Paz, artists Rufino Tamayo and Jose Luis Cuevas). “It is no casual thing that the historic center of the city, made to last, has survived the two tremors …”

Senator Antonio Martinez Baez, a professor emeritus of the National Autonomous University, said that corruption was widespread in the building industry, particularly in the 1970s, when Mexico was booming with oil money. Martinez Baez said the corruption involved more than government bureaucrats, who looked the other way when shoddy materials were used; it included contractors, engineers, building owners and their intermediaries, usually hustling lawyers.

“They should not be allowed to clear these areas until a thorough examination has taken place,” said an engineer named Rafael Avella-nor. “Concrete, steel, everything must be tested, measured against the original specifications. And then the guilty should be jailed for murder.”

Corruption is, of course, one of the oldest, saddest Mexican stories; didn’t Montezuma first offer Cortez a bribe to go away? But corruption doesn’t explain everything. If the earthquake toppled many modern buildings, if it seemed a horrible act of architectural criticism to enrubble the Stalinoid fortresses of the permanent bureaucracy, well, El Gran Chingon also rolled into Tepito.

And while the camera crews faithfully assembled each day at the Children’s Hospital, at the Medical Center, at the Juarez housing project, where dramas of rescue and redemption were played out with touching regularity; while cameras for three hours followed Nancy Reagan in her yellow jacket and professionally concerned mask; while journalists sought out Placido Domingo, bearded and dusty in the ruins of Tlatelolco, working alongside ordinary citizens, searching for four of his lost relatives “until the last stone is lifted”; while cameras at the airport recorded the arrival of volunteers and aid from 43 countries; while all of that was happening, almost nobody went to Tepito.

There seems always to have been a Tepito in Mexico City; it’s perhaps the city’s oldest slum, maker of thieves and prizefighters and entertainers. For most of this century, the Tepito poor have crowded into tiny dollar-a-month, one-room flats in vecindades (apartment houses assembled around damp central courtyards, described in detail by Oscar Lewis in The Children of Sanchez). They built houses for themselves too, of scraps of wood, homemade brick, parts of cars, discarded advertising signs. Boys from Tepito became toreros and football players; they went to the great gym called Baños de Jordan and fought their way onto page one of Esto or Ovaciones, the city’s daily sports papers; at least one, Raton Macias, became a champion of the world. Some became musicians and worked in Plaza Garibaldi, not far away, singing, playing horn or guitar for lovers, tourists, and each other in the Tenampa Club or the Guadalajara del Noche; some became cops; a few went on to become lawyers, doctors, teachers; many ended up a dozen blocks away in the notorious Black Palace of Lecumberri, the city’s major prison, until it was torn down a few years ago.

The women of Tepito had harder lives. They married young, bore children young, suffered young, died young. Most were faithful to the code of machismo, imposed upon them by the men; those who violated the code often ended up in the pages of Alarma, a weekly crime journal that specializes in the mutilated bodies of the dead. Too many became prostitutes, working in the three famous callejones, or alleys behind the Merced marketplace, alleys so narrow that men stood with their backs against the rough walls while the women sat on stools and performed for a dollar. They started there when young, las putas de Tepito, and many ended up back in the callejones when old. Along the way, perhaps, there were stops in the houses and cribs of Calle de Esperanza (now lost to reform), or if they were pretty enough, smart enough, tough enough, they’d move up to the dance halls on San Juan de Letran, or the more expensive whore houses beyond the Zona Rosa, where the politicians and generals arrived each night with their sleazy cuadrillas. They might hook up with a married man and be installed in a casa chica. Some went off to the border towns. But they were always men and women “de Tepito,” a phrase said with the tough pride of someone from Red Hook or the Lower East Side.

And now, a few days after the earthquake, Tepito was gone. In the cerrada of Gonzales Ortega, all of the houses were destroyed. Vecindades were in rubble along Brasil Street, on Rayon, Jesus Carranza, Tenochtitlan, Fray Bernadino de Las Casas, Florida, and Las Cardidad, all the way to the Avenida del Trabajo. This had always been a barrio whose true god was noise. A mixture of blasting radios, shouts, laughter, rumors, deals, quarrels, jokes, screaming children, imploring mothers, furious husbands. You could hear young men playing trumpet in the afternoons. You could hear lovers careening into melodrama, while dealers hawked contraband radios, hot jewelry, used clothes, drugs.

Now Tepito was silent except for one lone radio somewhere, playing a tinny mariachi tune. A drunk of uncertain age, grizzled and dirty, sat on a pile of broken brick, talking intensely to himself. A tinsmith poked at the ruins of his shop, a small boy beside him looking grave. An old man who had run a small antique record store trembled as he looked at his smashed collection. “I have great treasures here. Jorge Negrete. Carlos Gardel. Lara. Infante. Treasures. Of the old style. Ahora …”

Ahora. Now. Now the men, women, children, and dogs of Tepito had moved by the thousands to the open spaces around the Avenida del Trabajo. They had improvised tents. They’d formed teams to search for water. Old women had set up charcoal mounds to boil water and cook. Together, they consoled each other, fed each other, cursed at politicians, cops, fate, God. They passed along news: the Bahia movie house was wrecked (“Ay, chico, where will we go now to get fleas?”) and on San Juan de Letran all six stories above the Super Leche cafeteria had collapsed, killing many people having breakfast (“Cuate_y the coffee killed more…”) and more than one hundred government buildings had been wrecked, including the Superior Court, with all the city’s criminal records (“There is a God …”). They joked, as most jokesters do, because they are serious men.

“We want to go home,” said a white-haired wood finisher named Jesus Torres. “But we have nowhere to go…”

He was standing with a crowd of men among the tents. Someone said that the government estimated the homeless at 35,000. Torres said, “That means there must be one hundred thousand on the street.”

A young man named Eloy Mercado arrived with a copy of Esto. A story in one of the back pages said that Kid Azteca was among the missing. When I first came to Mexico in 1956, to go to school on the GI Bill, Kid Azteca had been fighting since the 1920s. He had been the Mexican welterweight champion for 17 years, an elegant boxer, good puncher, and in his forties he kept having one six-round fight a year to extend his record as the longest-lasting Mexican fighter in history. Now he and his two sisters were missing in Tepito, perhaps dead. Jesus Torres shook his head: “He’s not dead.” An old man leaned in, his face dusty, teeth stained with tobacco, smelling like vinegar. “You know how to find Kid A’tec’? Go in the street and start to count to 10. Then he’ll get up…” He and Torres laughed, two men as old as the lost Kid Azteca who had managed to remain true to their origins. Somos de Tepito, hombre…

The novel was, of course, Under the Volcano. Lowry began writing it in December 1936, when he was twenty-seven, and finished the final draft on Christmas Eve 1944. He finished almost nothing else in his life, certainly no other major novel, as he lurched through the United States, Mexico, Tahiti, Italy, and the emptiness of British Columbia, forever a long way from home. He was by his own account an alcoholic, often falling into delirium tremens, sometimes collapsing into Mexican jails or charity wards; he was a terrible husband to both of his wives; he was by most accounts the sort of drunk who would pass a certain point and become a disgusting bore. But about one thing he was certain, and so are we: With Under the Volcano, he made a masterpiece.

When the book at last was published in 1947, critical praise was virtually unanimous (one notable exception was Jacques Barzun, who felt Lowry’s novel was “derivative and pretentious”). The critics marveled at its classical structure, its dense, layered texture, its feeling for history, its use of myth and symbols, and its powerful examination of an alcoholic’s descent into damnation. Lowry’s language was baroque, intense, difficult — a style in direct contrast to the many neo-Hemingways who flourished at the time.

But there was more to the novel’s reception than Lowry’s literary accomplishment. There was also the legend of Lowry, the man. In many ways, he was a throwback to the romantic tradition of the artist consumed by his art to the point of self-destruction. Tales of his drunken escapades were common knowledge in literary circles; such a man was no isolated inhabitant in an academic ivory tower; he was down there carousing with the bandits and groveling with the cockroaches on the floor of the cantina, passing through paradise on the way to the inferno. The novel was not a huge popular success, selling only thirty thousand copies in its first ten years of existence, but that, of course, helped feed the legend; nothing enhances the romantic agony better than neglect. And later the legend was made complete by the squalid facts of Lowry’s death.

Eight years after Volcano’s publication, Lowry and his wife, Margerie, were finally home in England, living in a cottage in Sussex. But home didn’t provide peace; in 1955 and 1956, Lowry was committed to two different London hospitals for psychiatric treatment, in an attempt to combat his alcoholism. By this time, Lowry had failed three times to kill himself, twice to kill his wife. At one point, a lobotomy was even considered. The psychiatrists and the hospitals eventually gave up. After these failures, Lowry returned to the cottage in Sussex, where he wrote sporadically. On June 26, 1957, he had one final row with Margerie and threatened to kill her. She ran to a neighbor’s house for refuge and spent the night. Lowry was found the next morning in his bedroom, a plate of dinner scattered on the floor, along with an almost empty gin bottle and a broken bottle of orange squash. He’d swallowed more than twenty tablets of sodium amytal. It was a dingy way to die. He was forty-seven and was buried in the appropriately named town of Ripe.

Each day after lunch, we walked under the hot, scoured Mexican sky to the center of the town of Tepoztlán. Off to the left were the sour remains of old cane fields where shirtless kids played soccer in the dust. Down the broad valley behind us, we could see men riding horses and the sudden glint of sun on a machete. In the town’s graveyard, tiny cones of dust whirled among the headstones. On both sides of the valley were the mountains of Morelos.

Those mountains, surrounding this town about 60 miles south of Mexico City, are a spectacular sight: sheer cliffs, sudden crags, rocky formations that seem split by some cosmic ax. Behind them, other mountains rise, big and broad-shouldered, with the dark purple silhouettes of still more beyond — all part of the Sierra Madre, the primordial spine of Mexico. Each day, as my wife and I walked to town, they became as familiar as the road itself.

A half mile from the house where we were staying, the modern two-lane blacktop abruptly gave way to 18th-century cobblestones and rose steeply into the town. Here, visiting automobiles slowed to a crawl in a tenuous and losing negotiation with the colonial past. At the top of that steeply terraced hill, sitting in doorways, wearing the familiar white pajamas of the campesino — the countryman — their eyes cloudy with the past, their faces gullied by time, were the last old soldiers of the man who once was the revolutionary master of these mountains: Emiliano Zapata.

“Si, fue un Zapatista,” an old man told me one afternoon. Yes, I was a Zapatista. Then he paused, in modest clarification: “We all fought. In Tepoztlán, we were all Zapatistas.”

The sight of these old men moved me in complicated ways. I’ve been going to Mexico since the mid-1950s, when I was a student there on the GI Bill. In 1956, on the Transportes del Norte bus heading south from Laredo, I carried Zapata in my psychic baggage, or at least the version of the great revolutionary leader that Marlon Brando played in Viva Zapata! In that fine, tragic 1952 movie, directed by Elia Kazan, Brando gave Zapata a muted and melancholy grandeur. For once, the movies got it right; over the years, as I studied the history of this great, tormented country, it became clear that Viva Zapata! might be of limited use as literal history, but was absolutely true as legend.

Out on Fifth Avenue, the crowd is unusual for an urban evening in the last decade of the American century. Nobody fires a gun. Nobody plays a giant radio. Nobody speaks at full moronic bellow or offers dope for sale or screams in utter loneliness for help. But the people here are as excited as any group in thrall to the usual New York distractions of noise or violence. They are gathered outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art to hear a talk by Octavio Paz.

Paz is seventy-six, Mexican, a poet, an essayist, a critic, and an editor. Naturally, most Americans have never heard of him. Not even on this evening, a few days after Paz has been awarded the 1990 Nobel Prize for literature.

“What’s the line for?” a young American asks me, outside the museum. “Who they waitin’ to see?”

“Octavio Paz.”

“Who?”

In Mexico, of course, Paz is a gigantic, luminous star. So it was no surprise that the Mexican newspapers carried the story of the Nobel award in type sizes usually reserved for declarations of war or victories in the World Cup. Paz is not the first Latin American to win, but he is the first Mexican. And though he has directed the energies of a long lifetime against dumb nationalism, Paz did not defuse the surge of Mexican national pride by turning down the award or the $700,000 that goes with it. And why should he have? In a time of slick frauds, Octavio Paz is an authentic world-class writer; nobody can say of him that he did not deserve the Nobel Prize. And nobody knows this better than Paz.

It was dusk in Puerto Vallarta, and we were in a restaurant called El Panorama, dining with a Mexican woman we’d met that afternoon. The restaurant was on the top floor of the Hotel La Siesta, rising seven precarious stories above the ground on a hill overlooking the town. For once the name of a restaurant was accurate. From our table, while the mariachis played the aching old songs of love and betrayal, we could see a panorama of cobblestoned streets glistening after a frail afternoon rain. We saw the terra-cotta patterns of a thousand tiled rooftops, along with church steeples and flagpoles, palm trees and small green yards, and little girls eating ice-cream cones. The aroma of the Mexican evening rose around us: charcoal fires, frying beans, fish baking in stone ovens. Over to the left in the distance was the dense green thicket where the Rio Cuale tumbled down from the fierce mountains of the interior. And beyond all of this, stretching away to the hard blue line of the horizon, there was the sea, the vast and placid Pacific.

“It’s so beautiful,” the Mexican woman said, gesturing toward the sea. My wife followed her gesture to gaze at the rioting sky, which was all purple and carmine and tinged with orange from the dying sun. The woman’s face trembled as she talked about her husband and her son. They had died within six months of each other, the husband of a heart attack after many years in the Uruguayan foreign service, the son in a senseless shooting at a party in Mexico City.

“When those things happened,” the Mexican woman said, “I couldn’t live anymore. I didn’t want to. I sat at home in the dark.” She sipped her drink. “My daughter was the one who told me to come to Vallarta. She said I had to heal myself. I had to go away and get well. And she was right. Beauty heals. Don’t ever forget that. Beauty heals. I hurt still. But I am healed.”

Not all the stories we heard in Puerto Vallarta contained such elements of melodrama and redemption. But there were other tales of healing — the woman from Minnesota, broken by a difficult divorce, who wandered south with a vague hope for escape. Now the gray years were erased by the sun and sea and the sound of children laughing in the still hours of the siesta; she worked in a clothing store and was catching up on two decades of lost laughter. There was a man broken by the culture of greed during the American eighties; back in Boston he had left a bankrupt company, a ruined marriage, a defaulted mortgage; now in the mornings he took a boat out on the blue water to fish for shark. Another man had lost a much loved son to drugs; another had lost a career to whiskey; a third had postponed an old dream of becoming a painter. All had come to Puerto Vallarta to live a little longer or, perhaps, for the first time.

For centuries it was a fishing village, a few huts thatched with palm dozing along the shore of the great natural harbor called the Bahia de Banderas, which is 25 miles wide. The town was built around the Rio Cuale, one of the four streams that now traverse the city. It never became a major port, because the merchants of Mexico preferred to greet their Manila galleons in Acapulco, 800 miles to the south and a much shorter journey to the capital, Mexico City. For years no roads connected the tiny village to the large cities of the interior; mule trains labored for weeks to travel the 220 miles due east to Guadalajara. And Mexico City, 550 mountainous miles to the southeast, was beyond reach.

In 1851 a man named Guadalupe Sanchez settled his family on the edge of the Rio Cuale, which divides the present Vallarta into north and south, and he is usually credited with transforming the cluster of fishing shacks into a town. But it did not prosper, and the locals apparently preferred it that way. They lived out their lives in its quiet cobblestoned streets to the familiar rhythms of day and night, rainy summers and balmy winters. Even the great upheaval of the Mexican revolution had little effect on the fishermen and small farmers who lived on the adjoining coastal plains. Occasionally cruise ships or tramp steamers would drop anchor in the empty bay, and locals went out in dugout canoes to sell chili and beans. The ships would vanish and leave Vallarta in its solitude. After World War II some of the Guadalajara upper classes discovered the town. A rough road was built, followed by a small airstrip. By the end of the 1950s the population was about 5,000.

Then, in 1963, everything changed. That year John Huston arrived with a crew of 130 to direct the movie version of Tennessee Williams’s The Night of the Iguana. This produced one of the most amusing scenes in movie history and the true beginning of modern Puerto Vallarta. The star of the movie was Richard Burton, out of Wales and Shakespeare. His female costars were Ava Gardner, Deborah Kerr, and Sue Lyon. Miss Gardner had abandoned Hollywood for Europe after disastrous marriages to Mickey Rooney, Artie Shaw, and Frank Sinatra. She arrived with a personal entourage and her Ferrari and soon became interested in a beachboy named Tony. Miss Kerr was married to Peter Viertel, who had written a scathing novel about Huston and was once involved with Ava. The 17-year-old Miss Lyon, who had become a star as the nymphet in Lolita, was there with her boyfriend, while the boyfriend’s wife shared quarters with Miss Lyon’s mother. The cinematographer was the splendid Gabriel Figueroa, who burst into operatic song while drinking, and Huston was supported in his work by the Mexican director Indio Fernandez, who had shot his last producer. For good measure, Tennessee Williams was there with his lover and his dog.

The movie set leaped into fantasy with the early arrival of Elizabeth Taylor, who was not in the movie. She and Burton had begun their great love affair on the set of Cleopatra the year before, and when she showed up, presumably to protect Burton from his female costars, a media riot broke out. Taylor was a gigantic star in the Hollywood galaxy, and her presence was a monument to the old style. She brought with her dozens of trunks and suitcases, an ex-fighter to serve as bodyguard, her own secretary and one for Burton, a British cook, a chauffeur, and three children by two ex-husbands. One of these ex-husbands, Michael Wilding, was also on hand, reduced to working as an assistant to Burton’s agent. And back in the States her current husband, the singer Eddie Fisher, was pouting and working on a divorce. The film’s producer, Ray Stark, loved it (a few years ago he told me, “It was the greatest single movie location in the history of movies”). And Huston had grand fun. At one point he gave each of the players — Burton, Taylor, Gardner, Kerr, Lyon, plus Stark — a gold-plated derringer, laid in a velvet-lined box. Each box contained five golden bullets, engraved with the names of each of the others. He left his own name off the bullets.

You move through the hot, polluted Tijuana morning, past shops and gas stations and cantinas, past the tourist traps of the Avenida Revolution, past the egg-shaped Cultural Center and the new shopping malls and the government housing with bright patches of laundry hanging on balconies; then it’s through streets of painted adobe peeling in the sun, ball fields where kids play without gloves, and you see ahead and above you ten-thousand-odd shacks perched uneasily upon the Tijuana hills, and you glimpse the green road signs for the beaches as the immense luminous light of the Pacific brightens the sky. You turn, and alongside the road there’s a chain link fence. It’s ten feet high.

On the other side of the fence is the United States.

There are immense gashes in the fence, which was once called the Tortilla Curtain. You could drive three wide loads, side by side, through the tears in this pathetic curtain. On this morning, on both sides of the fence (more often called la linea by the locals), there are small groups of young Mexican men dressed in polyester shirts and worn shoes and faded jeans, and holding small bags. These are a few of the people who are changing the United States, members of a huge army of irregulars engaged in the largest, most successful invasion ever made of North America.

On this day, they smoke cigarettes. They make small jokes. They munch on tacos prepared by a flat-faced, pig-tailed Indian woman whose stand is parked by the roadside. They sip soda. And some of them gaze across the arid scrub and sandy chaparral at the blurred white buildings of the U.S. town of San Ysidro. They wait patiently and do not hide. And if you pull over, and buy a soda from the woman, and speak some Spanish, they will talk.

“I tried last night,” says the young man named Jeronimo Vasquez, who wears a Chicago Bears T-shirt under a denim jacket. “But it was too dangerous, too many helicopters last night, too much light…” He looks out at the open stretch of gnarled land, past the light towers, at the distant white buildings. “Maybe tonight we will go to Zapata Canyon…” He is from Oaxaca, he says, deep in the hungry Mexican south. He has been to the United States three times, working in the fields; it is now Tuesday, and he starts a job near Stockton on the following Monday, picker’s work arranged by his cousin. “I have much time. …”

Abruptly, he turns away to watch some action. Two young men are running across the dried scrub on the U.S. side, kicking up little clouds of white dust, while a Border Patrol car goes after them. The young men dodge, circle, running the broken field, and suddenly stand very still as the car draws close. They are immediately added to the cold statistics of border apprehensions. But they are really mere sacrifices; over on the left, three other men run low and hunched, like infantrymen in a fire fight. “Corre, corre,” Jeronimo Vasquez whispers. “Run, run.…” They do. And when they vanish into some distant scrub, he clenches a fist like a triumphant sports fan. He is not alone. All the others cheer, as does the woman selling tacos, and on the steep hill above the road, a man stands before a tar-paper shack, waves a Mexican flag, and shouts: “Goll” And everyone laughs.

We’ve all read articles about the 1,950-mile-long border between the United States and Mexico, seen documentaries, heard the bellowing rhetoric of the C-Span politicians enraged at the border’s weakness; but until you stand beside it, the border is an abstraction. Up close, you see immediately that the border is at once a concrete place with holes in the fence, and a game, a joke, an affront, a wish, a mere line etched by a draftsman on a map. No wonder George Bush gave up on interdiction as a tactic in the War on Drugs; there are literally hundreds of Ho Chi Minh trails leading into the United States from the south (and others from Canada, of course, and the sea). On some parts of the Mexican border there is one border patrolman for every twenty-six miles; it doesn’t require a smuggling genius to figure out how to get twenty tons of cocaine to a Los Angeles warehouse. To fill in the gaps, to guard all the other U.S. borders, would require millions of armed guards, many billions of dollars. And somehow, Jeronimo Vasquez would still appear on a Monday morning in Stockton.

Those young men beside the ruined fence — not the narcotraficantes — are the most typical members of the peaceful invasion. Nobody knows how many come across each year, although in 1988 920,000 were stopped, arrested, and sent back to Mexico by the border wardens. Thousands more make it. Some are described by the outnumbered and overwhelmed immigration police as OTMs (Other Than Mexican, which is to say, Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Nicaraguans, Costa Ricans fleeing the war zones, and South Americans and Asians fleeing poverty). Some, like Jeronimo Vasquez, are seasonal migrants; they come for a few months, earn money, and return to families in Mexico; others come to stay.

“When you see a woman crossing,” says Jeronimo Vasquez, “you know she’s going to stay. It means she has a husband on the other side, maybe even children. She’s not going back. Most of the women are from Salvador, not so many Mexicans. …”

The work, and my own curiosity, carried me to many places. I’ve paid rent in Rome and Barcelona and Dublin. I’ve written pieces from hotel rooms in Paris and Belfast, Brussels and Managua, Helsinki and Havana and East Berlin. I’ve been to Saigon and Panama, to Vienna and Tangier. Over the years, pages of my passports grew lacy with the rubber-stamped graffiti of visas and departures. I wanted it that way; the world was out there and I wanted to see it. In 1967, on a long, comical diplomatic journey with Lyndon Baines Johnson to Asia, we stopped for fuel in the middle of the Pacific and I wrote a story in twenty minutes just to get the dateline into my resume: Pago Pago. It was a long way from Brooklyn.

For almost ten years, Vietnam was the foreign place above all others for most Americans. I spent very little time there, but the presence of the war informed almost everything I wrote. After 1973 -the ominous year of Watergate and OPEC and the beginning of the steady decline of the American economy — the war was lost. It should have been the task of statesmen to arrange its conclusion with some dignity. They could not bring it off.

There were other wars too: a long, grieving drizzle of a war in Northern Ireland; a dirty little war in Nicaragua; the horrendous civil war in Lebanon. In Belfast and Beirut, the killing was entangled with the dark certainties of religion. In Nicaragua, a similar impulse was in play: adepts of the Marxist faith fought against the hired acolytes of the anti-Communist faith, Sandinista against Contra, sometimes brother against brother. The warring creeds were everywhere in those places, each driven by visions of Utopia, each prepared to kill or die to bring them into existence. In all three parts of the world, the common result was more human misery. On my visits, I tried to understand the aims of the various players, but most often I found myself in agreement with E. M. Forster’s famous remark: “I do not believe in belief.”

In 1989, the Cold War finally ended in a kind of mutual exhaustion. Mikhail Gorbachev still claimed to believe in the socialist ideal; but he was also a man of sanity, lucidity, and common sense. More than any other public figure on the planet, he acknowledged, at last, that something had to change. In a major way. He knew that the Soviet Union was a gigantic, bankrupt lie, sick with poverty, corruption, and the memory of terror. Only terror could keep it going. The Americans had suffered, too, in the long ideological struggle with the Communists. More than a hundred thousand Americans had been killed in Korea and Vietnam. American cities were a shambles. The United States had been transformed from the largest creditor nation in the world to the world’s largest debtor. Ideologues on both sides resisted change, but after Vietnam, most Americans wanted nothing to do with dying over abstractions. Gorbachev made it possible for everybody to surrender the chilly certitudes of belief. Of all the public men of my time, only he changed the world.

I saw some of the great change in the streets and squares of Prague in 1989. Those defiant days and boisterous nights made up the most thrilling story I’d ever covered. In a matter of days, the brave men and women of Civic Action, led by a writer named Vaclav Havel, brought down the Communist regime. They did it by speaking truth to power. They did it with cartoons and jokes and music. They did it by placing their bodies in the line of fire and daring their opponents to shoot. The Communists did not shoot. They did not shoot because Mikhail Gorbachev had made clear that he would not maintain Czech communism with Russian tanks. At the end, the Czech Communists looked like archbishops who had ceased to believe in God.

The world soon learned that the end of the Cold War did not bring an end to man’s invincible capacity for folly. From Bosnia to the Persian Gulf, human beings still killed each other over belief. But nations no longer wave hydrogen bombs at each other. Missiles are no longer aimed at the homes of distant strangers. In a lot of places, from South Africa to South America, human beings are free at last. No small thing. And I’m glad I had a ticket to the show.

Sometimes, in odd places, it all comes back. You are walking a summer beach, stepping around oiled bodies, hearing only the steady growl of the sea. Suddenly, from over the horizon, you hear the phwuk-phwuk-phwuk of rotor blades and for a frozen instant you prepare to fall to the sand. Then the Coast Guard chopper moves by, its pilot peering down at the swimmers, but your mind is stained with old images. Or you are strolling the sidewalks of a northern city, heading toward the theater or a parking lot or some dismal appointment, eyes glazed by the anonymous motion of the street. A door opens, an odor drifts from a restaurant; it’s ngoc nam sauce, surely, and yes, the sign tells you this is a Vietnamese restaurant, and you hurry on, pursued by a ghost. Don’t come back, the ghost whispers: I’ll be crouched against the wall, grinning, my teeth stained black from betel root.

Vietnam.

Ten years have passed since the North Vietnamese T-54 tanks rolled down Thong Nhut Boulevard in Saigon to breach the gates of the presidential palace. Ten years since the last eleven marines climbed into a CH-53 helicopter on the roof of the United States Embassy and flew away from the ruined country, while thousands of compromised Vietnamese pleaded in vain for evacuation and thousands of others took to the sea. Ten years since the end of the war.

Across those ten years, a sort of institutionalized amnesia became the order of the day, as if by tribal consent we had decided as Americans to deal with Vietnam by forgetting it. Vietnam belonged to the parents, lovers, wives, and children of the 58,022 dead, to the maimed men hidden away in veterans’ hospitals, to the bearded young man you would see from time to time in any American town, with a leg gone as permanently as his youth. Vietnam? That was in another country, man, and besides, the wench was dead.

There was no large-scale congressional inquiry into the war, no major attempt to divine its bitter lessons. We had the assorted felonies of Watergate to entertain us, the injured economy to distract us, the Iranian hostage crisis to infuriate us. The war had shaken American society to its core, eroding authority, splitting families, setting generation against generation, forcing citizens to define basic beliefs.

During the war, thousands of draft-age Americans refused to serve in the armed forces, and left in unprecedented numbers for exile in Canada or Sweden, some never to return. Demonstrations grew in sound and fury, at first exuberant, then bitter, as protests increasingly ended with tear gas, mass arrests, violence, even death. Four were killed at Kent State in 1970 as Nixon expanded the war into Cambodia. Two died at Jackson State. There were others, their brains scrambled on acid, ruined with speed. Kids toppled over in crowded fields as the chants rose: Hey, hey, L.B.J., how many kids did you kill today? Some walked off rooftops in the Haight or on the Lower East Side, while others chanted, Ho, ho, Ho Chi Minh, the N.L.R is gonna win. The roads of America in those years seemed crowded with the young — guitar armies in advance and retreat, all of them hating the war, some of them hating America. And when they paused, stopped, turned down the volume on the Stones or the Dead, and looked at the news, they could see veterans home from ‘Nam, bearded and wild, unlike the neat, proud, dusty members of the American Legion, and they were hurling their medals over the White House fence. They could see body bags arriving at military airports. They could see the war going on and on and on.

But when it was over at last, it seemed like some peculiar television series that had been canceled. Some of us had hoped that defeat would create a healthy national skepticism, a communal refusal ever again to take innocently the sermons of our leaders. We would be a nation of adults, at last, having learned what Europeans had learned long ago: that defeat is the great teacher, that there are limits to power, that slogans are no substitute for thinking.

Ten years later, the anti-Communist sermon is again the dominant factor in our foreign policy. Those little men with the quartz eyes and pink hands who sit in safe Washington buildings are again signing papers that allow young men to go off and kill and die, in Beirut or Grenada or the hills of Nicaragua. The conquest of Grenada, which proved definitively that a nation of 235 million could overwhelm a country of 110,000, was greeted as a famous victory. The president was hailed as a firm leader, and medals dropped from the Pentagon like snow. Less than ten years after the end of the longest, most disastrous war in American history, we seemed to have learned nothing. Nothing at all.

Yet Vietnam will not go away. On the evening news, ten years later, we see General Westmoreland trying in a courtroom to win from CBS the victory that he could never wrest from General Giap. We see tearful ceremonies in the rain beside a generation’s wailing wall in Washington as those who lived through Vietnam come together to mourn those who did not. Occasionally we hear politicians, from President Reagan down, speaking of the war in the oratory of a Fourth of July picnic, attempting with porous language to transform disaster into victory, stupidity into wisdom, folly into glory.

But more than 2.6 million Americans passed through Vietnam, and they will carry with them until they die the psychic shrapnel of their time in that place. The names of the places are like beads in a bitter rosary: Khe Sanh, Pleiku, Ap Bac, Cam Ne, Qui Nhon, Tuy Hoa, Da Nang, Hue, Bien Hoa, Tan Son Nhut, the Iron Triangle, the Mekong, and a thousand others that evoke rain, helicopters, blasted trees, snake-colored rivers, the green watery light of forests, and the death of friends. They spoke a language that is now forgotten: incoming, L.Z., capping, medevac, Chinook, tree line, punji stick, spider hole, jolly green giant, trip wire, claymore, Huey, klick, body bag, pogue, Charlie, fragging, COSVN, in country, payback, slick, hootch, doo-mommie, gooks and dinks and slopes. These were the nouns of the war; the verbs didn’t matter, or the tenses; war is always present tense for the men who fight it, and combat is illiterate.

Year after year I’d see them in public places: on street corners in Chicago or in Washington parks or standing in the rain outside the United Nations in New York. It was always Captive Nations Week or some great date in a fading national history, and the exiles would chant their anguish and their protests in languages I could never know. The men were gaunt and moustached. The women were plump, with shiny pink skin. The languages in their leaflets had too many consonants, and in my life I was drawn more passionately to lands that were lush with vowels. Usually I sighed and walked on by.

After Hungary in ’56, there was a brief time when their existence was recorded in the public prints. This man had fought a Soviet tank with a Molotov cocktail and that man’s sister had died hurling a paving stone at a machine gunner; they made words and phrases like sacrifice and freedom and in vain sound like something more than Fourth of July oratory. But by the time we had plunged into our own anguished ’60s, most of us had ceased to care. We could do something about Vietnam. It was our war, waged by our politicians, fought by our armies. We could do nothing about Eastern Europe except exchange missiles with the Russians.

But the exiles kept coming on the appointed days to the United Nations. The numbers dwindled. The men began to look sleeker and were certainly grayer, and the women seldom came at all. Some of my friends in the reporting trade dismissed them with innuendo — their leaders were on the CIA payroll, some of them had collaborated with the Nazis, they were mere props for the addled legions of the American Right. I remember talking to some of them one drizzly morning (for the weather of Eastern Europe often seemed to have immigrated with them). I needed a column for the newspaper I then served, and tried to get them to tell me their solutions to the problems back in the old country. “Drive out the Russians!” they said. “Use the atom bomb!” Faces flushed, mouths contorted, they split the damp air with their slogans. One balding man literally screamed at me: “Better dead than Red!” I never wrote the column.

In ’68 we read about the changes in Czechoslovakia under Alexander Dubcek, the lifting of the heavy hand of Stalinism, the exuberant attempt to make “socialism with a human face.” In a way, this crack in the Stalinist ice pack seemed to further isolate the exiles outside the United Nations, particularly the Czechs and the Slovaks; they began to look like cranks. Then, on August 20 of that terrible year, one week before the American tribes gathered in Chicago for the Democratic convention, the Soviets and their Warsaw Pact allies invaded Czechoslovakia. The Prague Spring was crushed. In Chicago, through the billy clubs and the tear gas, some young American antiwar demonstrators held signs accusing Mayor Daley of running “Czechago.” That year, nobody cared much for exact analogy.

But after that brief flurry, Eastern Europe faded from the American consciousness. The Reagan Right, of course, used its existence to pander for ethnic votes; the fading American Left sometimes spoke wistfully about the Prague Spring. But neither seemed really to care very much. There were other matters to divert us: Watergate, abortion, Iran, drugs, various gurus, the religion of the Leveraged Buyout. Reagan railed at the Evil Empire, invented the contras (degrading the 1956 Hungarian resistance by calling these hired thugs “freedom fighters”), and directed the heroic invasion of Grenada. But there was never any talk about “rolling back” the Red hordes in Prague or Warsaw, Sofia or Bucharest, East Berlin or Budapest; and places such as Lithuania, Estonia, Armenia, and Latvia had long ago vanished from the map. The attitude was brutally simple: Eastern Europe was “theirs”; Central American was “ours.” Realpolitik uber Alles. And every year or so, I’d pass the old exiled stalwarts holding weathered signs and chanting in the streets, occasionally producing one of their American children to do a dance in a folk costume from the old country. If it was a slow news day, the papers maybe even ran a picture.

But while visiting Prague and East Berlin last December, I kept thinking about those angry and grieving exiles and felt increasingly ashamed of myself. I should have listened harder and learned more. In Prague, there were people like them everywhere, with the same gaunt faces and ill-fitting clothes, the same grievances against injustice, except that now the world was listening. Their uncontested leader was the fifty-three-year-old playwright Vaclav Havel, whose moral authority was based on the years he’d spent in the country’s prisons. But when I first saw him, at a basement press conference in the Laterna Magika theater, I realized that he easily could have been one of those men from the sidewalk opposite the United Nations.

He did not speak in slogans. Even when addressing vast crowds, Havel’s language is concrete, precise, nuanced; he does not rant; even in confrontations with his former jailers, he sounds most reasonable. But his mission was the same as that of his countrymen: to get the dead clammy hands of Stalinism off Czechoslovakia and allow its people to breathe freely. Within a month after Prague police had used bats, clubs, and gun butts on hundreds of student demonstrators, Havel and other members of the opposition umbrella group called Civic Forum managed to force the old hard-line leaders to accept the first noncommunist government in the nation since before the communist coup in 1948. Not a shot was fired, not a window broken. It was an amazing process to watch; I woke each morning charged with an exhilaration I had almost never felt in the minefields of politics.

This revolution was a triumph of human intelligence. Czechoslovakia, like all countries ruled by totalitarians, was an oligarchy of the stupid. After 1968 the country’s best writers, including such world-class talents as Milan Kundera, Josef Skvorecky, and Ludvik Vaculik, were silenced, jailed, or driven into exile. Rock ‘n’ roll musicians were thrown into dungeons. Only the corniest jazz (white Dixieland, for example, or moldy swing music) was officially tolerated. The brilliant Czech new wave of ’60s filmmakers was halted, the best people exiled or cast out of the industry, while the Barrandov film studios ground out witless comedies and historical epics that nobody went to see. Thousands of scientists, engineers, schoolteachers, and scholars were removed from their jobs because they were ideologically suspect, and were then forced to do the most menial labor. In all cases, they were replaced by mediocrities, ass-kissing careerists, and Stalinist hacks. It was the most sustained act of national stupidity since Spain expelled both the Jews and the Arabs within ten years of each other at the end of the fifteenth century, thus ridding itself of its most brilliant artists, architects, mathematicians, and merchants.

For an American, some of this was uncomfortably familiar. We, too, once had a blacklist that prevented writers, directors, and actors from working in movies or television — on ideological grounds. During the McCarthy era, we, too, lost scientists, schoolteachers, and scholars, on ideological grounds. Our religious Right continues trying to impose its party line on everything from abortion to the content of television shows. We have a free press, but the vast majority of our newspapers wouldn’t challenge the intelligence of a cocker spaniel. Certainly, in our mass media, we seldom read, see, or hear from American communists or socialists, who are dismissed as a disloyal opposition. In Prague, people showed me bound copies of samizdat, precious hand-typed books passed from person to person because they were banned from the bookstores. In East Berlin I saw a line of almost three hundred people waiting in a freezing rain to buy the first West German books to be sold in the East. But a glance at any American best-seller list, or the shelves of any bookstore in a shopping mall, will show you what most Americans have chosen to do with their freedoms.

Still, we have choice, and until last year, millions of Eastern Europeans had no choice at all. Those who protested, like Havel, were visited by the secret police and taken away in handcuffs. He was a writer, and writers are rememberers or they are nothing. And that made him dangerous. In Czechoslovakia people were told to forget the Prague Spring, to forget the country’s democratic past between the world wars, to forget the 1948 coup. The social contract was simple: Let the party make the big decisions and the individuals could make most of the small decisions. If they agreed to give up memory and a critical intelligence, citizens could indulge in small bourgeois pleasures: a cottage in the country, a car, skiing, clothes that made Czech women the most chic in Eastern Europe. In Moscow, citizens wait in line for potatoes; on Parizska Street in Prague, I saw a line outside Christian Dior.

But the basic neo-Stalinist demand was for national amnesia, and that, too, was familiar. It was at the heart of the Reagan era, when Americans were urged by the Great Communicator to forget Vietnam and forget Watergate, and use borrowed money to indulge in mindless pleasures.

This is not to say that the United States is the moral equivalent of a totalitarian state. That’s ludicrous. But all human beings, including Americans, are confronted every day by the temptation of the totalitarian solution. Wandering the streets of Prague and East Berlin, I never saw a homeless person, never ran into a junkie, never felt a personal sense of menace. The total state, after all, places order above all human values, including justice. But back home in New York and Los Angeles and other American cities, I’ve talked to many people over the years who demand those Good Old Draconian Measures to deal with our disorders. They would gladly surrender the Bill of Rights if that meant clearing the streets of drug addicts and gunmen. I even heard this argument from some of the Eastern European exiles on the rainy sidewalks outside the United Nations.

That taste for the draconian certainly hasn’t perished from the earth, as we saw in December in Romania and Panama. In the hardest of the old Stalinist states, the end came in blood and destruction, with the ruling family joining that of the czar on the casualty lists of the century’s revolutions. In Panama, an American soldier was killed, another soldier’s wife was insulted, and the great might of the United States was unleashed on the regime of Manuel Noriega. According to polls, most Americans loved this fierce spectacle. And while such peaceful and historic events as the collapse of the Berlin Wall drew poor television ratings, many cheered the brutality of the Romanian revolution. Apparently, nothing makes American blood quicken faster than the spirit of revenge. If it’s history, most of us yawn; if it resembles a movie, we snap to attention.

That was what was so special about the events in Prague. Over and over, Havel and the others sent out the message: We are not going to do to them what they’ve done to us. “That would be the worst corruption of this revolution’s ideals,” said a filmmaker named Antonin Masa, who had spent twenty years directing his movies only in his imagination. “We want a country that is generous and decent. And where every man can speak his piece. That’s all. Revenge is a debasing emotion.” Another quoted Albert Camus, saying how it should be possible to love one’s country and justice too.

There are lessons here for all of us. The American Right, after an initial period of bafflement, is claiming a triumph of capitalism over communism. “But that’s not what is going on here,” said Rita Klimova, who lived in New York as a child from 1939 to 1946, returned to Prague, became an economics professor, was blacklisted after the fall of Dubcek, and earned a marginal living as a free-lance translator. “If people here had to choose a model, it would probably be Sweden. A democratic socialist society, with freedom for the individual. This is a struggle for choice.” Others noted that in the places where the United States did use physical force in the crusade against communism (Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam), Stalinism was still in power, its authority reinforced by the need (real or imaginary) to resist an outside threat. In Eastern Europe, the more pacific techniques of trade, cultural exchanges, and communications helped bring about the great change. Stalinism eventually fell of its own dumb weight. One Czech friend said to me: “There were two specific factors. One was Gorbachev, who made it clear that he wouldn’t send the tanks. The other was the decision to stop jamming Radio Free Europe and the Voice of America. That allowed us to get hard news. We didn’t care about the propaganda or the oratory. Just the news. That was very important.”

He and the others were too modest to mention the one final factor: courage. Men like Havel, who began their lonely fight more than a decade ago, believed enough in their cause to place their bodies before the might of the state. They had no guns. They had no money. And in the end they won. They won for themselves and their families and their friends, for their country, for memory and history. But they also won for those lonely men and women who stood for so many years in the hard rain of strange cities. I wish I could find some of them and say that I am sorry for not listening to them in their separation and solitude. But they’re gone now. And that might be the happiest ending of all.

The fulfillment of talent is one of the enduring human mysteries. Nobody can truly explain why a mediocre baseball player can become a brilliant baseball manager. Nobody absolutely knows why a singer of enormous technique can’t move an audience or why so many gifted actors don’t become stars. At six, some children play the piano with the confidence of Mozart, and at twenty they are working as record store clerks. There were some splendid young painters in my art school classes; almost all have vanished. I’ve seen young writers arrive in New York, bursting with talent, full of swagger and hubris, and then witnessed their descent after a few seasons into permanent silence. In political clubs, I’ve met men and women with great political intelligence, wonderful gifts for oratory, and unusual clarity about issues; they didn’t make it out of the assembly district. For thousands of talented writers, painters, dancers, athletes, politicians, and actors, talent simply wasn’t enough.

Most of these pieces are about gifted people who lasted long enough to allow their talents to fully mature. They started with what Webster’s Third New International Dictionary describes among its definitions of talent as “the abilities, powers, and gifts” bestowed on certain human beings. At first, those abilities, powers, and gifts were crude and raw. But these people combined them with a vision of the future and then had time to refine them, strengthen them, push against their limitations. Such sustained growth is never easy, particularly in the arts. In my youth, self-destruction was a fashion. Whiskey and drugs carried too many girted people to early graves — Charlie Parker, Jackson Pollock, Fats Navarro, Montgomery Clift, and Billie Holiday to name only a few. Their aborted lives did not serve as useful guides to conduct for the generations that followed. Rock ’n’ roll heaven is jammed with everyone from Elvis Presley (we think) to Brian Jones, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Lowell George, and Jim Morrison, among hundreds of others; the latest young recruit is Kurt Cobain. The music didn’t kill them. The life did.

Now the plague of AIDS is slaughtering the talented young with the remorseless efficiency of the guns and drugs that destroy so many impoverished kids on the other side of town. On some mornings, the obituary page of the New York Times has a peculiar consistency; the dead are either eighty-five or thirty-five. The old have had their shot at life; we can only mourn the young dead. Those young people simply never had the time to go all the way down the road with their talents. We’ll never know what they might have added to our shaky civilization.

The talented human beings who do last are very rare. Each is an individual, but they share common characteristics. Most of them are very intelligent, including those without much formal education. Intelligence doesn’t guarantee a smooth ride; it certainly didn’t help Mike Tyson to sidestep trouble. But without intelligence, most raw talent has no chance at all to develop. The most intelligent people are never content to repeat what came before them; they constantly push against personal boundaries; they make their own discoveries, and are pleased to pass on the results to others.

To be sure, they are often self-absorbed, particularly when young, focusing their intelligence on the study of themselves. This is not empty, self-caressing narcissism; they often don’t like what they see in the mirror and struggle to change it, a process common to actors, novelists, and politicians. Most of them also grapple with personal emotions, particularly doubt, fear, and humiliation; that battle doesn’t always end with maturity. Most develop a mental toughness; instead of retreating from personal turbulence, they learn to control their emotions with their minds. The best of them obviously channel their emotions into the work. That’s why they can touch so many complicated emotions in strangers, emotions that range from hope to pity to absurd laughter.

In most of them, intelligence is annealed to will. Cus D’Amato would have called the latter quality “heart.” The word itself has an odor of the sentimental but when prizefighters use it they mean a peculiar kind of courage that accepts pain in order to reach a goal. That’s not always a simple victory over another human being; Floyd Patterson called his autobiography Victory Over Myself.

They also have a complex sense of time. They can surrender to the moment, forcing everything they know into one painting, one song, one dance. The moment is always charged by the lessons of the past. But they also seem capable of imagining a limitless future, full of things not tried, not even dreamed. The actor longs to play Lear, the politician wants to be president. They don’t talk about retiring. Not even the athletes. They have the World Series ring or the championship belt. They want more. To go on and on. To be remembered.

I’m aware that all but one of the subjects in this section are men. I wish that were not so. I wish I’d gone to see Rebecca West while she was alive, and had talked with Martina Navratilova while she was one of the greatest of all champions. I wish I’d somehow found my way to the doors of Katherine Anne Porter, Martha Gellhorn, Flannery O’Connor, or Dorothy Parker. In the early 1960s, before she became a star, I did a piece on Barbra Streisand for the Saturday Evening Post; we’ve remained friends and she, of all people, should be in this company. Over the years, I’ve written profiles of Jeanne Moreau, Sophia Loren, Brigitte Bardot, Linda Ronstadt, among other accomplished women; that they aren’t here is because of me, not them; my work just wasn’t worth preserving.

The pieces here are not briefs for the prosecution. In each case, I admired the subjects of my attention. In general, I wasn’t interested in showing that they also had feet of clay; every human being does. Besides, there is now an abundance of literary prosecutors abroad in the land to do that work. I’m glad I was around to see these gifted human beings exercise their talents. In the case of Bob Fosse, I was blessed by his friendship and will miss him all my days.

Here he comes, “the Great One,” in a maroon stretch limousine, its planes and curves glistening in the summer sun. The limousine moves in a stately way down a curving path and stops in front of a huge pile of stone, brick, and mortar that is the centerpiece of the Riverdale estate known as Wave Hill. The Great One steps out of the limousine, blinks in the bright sunshine, glances at the cables, massed trailers, busy extras, grips, and electricians who are part of every movie location. Then he steps into the huge Beaver 36 mobile home that is parked on the shoulder of the driveway.

“Come on in,” Jackie Gleason calls behind him. “Have a seat, I’ll be with you in a minute.”

He’s 69, and looks in good shape, given what he has done to the body over the years: the gorging and the pig-outs, the monumental drinking bouts, a broken arm in the forties, a broken leg in the fifties, the crash diets, careening horseplay, billions of cigarettes. He’s six feet tall, and large, but he doesn’t look fat. He goes to the back of the trailer with a valet, closes the door, and emerges in a black shirt and slacks. The face is now a draftsman’s delight: pouches, slashes, the large upper lip sliced by a thin mustache, eyes that alternately sparkle and grieve, a face made for expression. He lights a cigarette, sits back on a couch.

A production assistant leans in through the open door. “Can I get you anything, Mr. Gleason?”

“Yeah,” he says, “a couple of broads.”

Everybody laughs except Gleason. He blinks in a deadpan way and takes a drag on a cigarette.

New York was full of swaggering energy in the spring of 1958, when I was living over a secondhand bookstore on Fourth Avenue and Twelfth Street, still trying to be a painter. It was a town where everyone was working, nobody cared about politics, and all things seemed possible. Even for the likes of me.

During the day I studied art at Pratt Institute, and in the chilly evenings I would wander to the Cedar Street Tavern on University Place to nurse a few beers on the thin leftovers of my G.I. Bill money. This was the great bar of the action painters, and of poets too, and visiting cowboys and a few stray seamen and too many rich girls from Bennington who lectured you about Selling Out. I went there because I wanted to see painters in the flesh, to see how they walked and moved and ordered their drinks. I was still something of a kid, unformed and green, and this information was much more important to me than theories of push-pull, color fields, plastic depth, the vital gesture, or the idea of the sublime.

Some insisted, of course, that the Cedar wasn’t what it had been; they always say that in Village bars. But about the Cedar they might have been right. In 1958, Jackson Pollock had been dead almost two years; de Kooning was not around much anymore; other regulars were moving uptown, never to return. But look: down past the end of the bar, in the first rough booth in the brightly lit back room: that elegant, beautiful girl is Joan Mitchell. Sitting with Alfred Leslie. And Philip Guston. And in that other booth, laughing raucously, that’s Grace Hartigan, looking like fifty miles of trouble out of a film noir. She’s talking to David Smith. And that huge fellow with the Zapata mustache: Harold Rosenberg. And over there, that’s Larry Rivers — he draws figures! — jittery-eyed, junkie-thin, fingers drumming on the table as if in time to a melody nobody else can hear. All were engulfed in a blue nicotine fog, drinking hard, laughing, having a great old time. And among them, every night, was the painter I admired most in the world: Franz Kline.

With Pollock and de Kooning, Kline was the third glittering star in the Big Three constellation. He sat in a booth facing the door, dressed in a camel’s-hair coat, with his rough, lumpy slab of a face made oddly elegant by a carefully trimmed mustache. A spear of hair fell across his brow like a brushstroke by that other Franz, Mr. Hals. When women came to the booth he always tried to rise and bow in greeting, like a boulevardier from the French films we saw around the corner at the Eighth Street or the Art. Franz was one of those bulky men who look taller sitting down. But when he rose to go to the John, he moved with an athlete’s grace, giving off the same muscular aura that emanated from the paintings. We all knew the legend: back home in the coal country of Pennsylvania, he’d played baseball and football, he’d been a boxer. In the age of Hemingway, such credentials were more important than they should have been. As he went by, through the door that Pollock had once torn off its hinges, he had a word and smile for everybody. Everybody called him Franz.

It was not in me, then or now, to fawn over famous men; by the tough code of the ’50s, that just wouldn’t be hip. But the Bennington girls had no such restraints, and they went for Franz the way sharks go for drowning sailors. So it was hard to be alone with Franz Kline; I suppose that’s why he went to the Cedar. But one night a painter friend named Haig Akmajian (he lived in my building) brought me over and introduced me. The great painter smiled and welcomed me to the booth and ordered the first of many beers; he treated me as if I were an established member of The Club. And we talked. And talked. Or rather, Franz talked and I listened. I wasn’t a reporter then, I made no notes; but I can hear him now. He had an elaborate, writerly way of speaking, with that rare tone that combines irony with affection. Nothing he said ever sounded bitter, except his references to Walter O’Malley, who had led the Dodgers out of Brooklyn with the Giants following timidly in their wake. “That s.o.b. will find a private place in hell,” Franz said of O’Malley. And then laughed, embarrassed by his own bitterness. It was difficult to believe that Franz Kline would send anyone on earth to hell.

He talked about Sugar Ray Robinson and Lester Young, Akira Kurosawa and Brigitte Bardot. He asked me about Pratt, where he had taught a few years earlier (as had Isamu Noguchi, George McNeil, Adolph Gottlieb, and Richard Lindner, among other stars of the New York art world). “You can help teach people how to draw,” he said, “but you can’t teach them to be painters. All you can do is let them know they better love it or get the hell out.”

At some point we started talking about cartoonists. His face brightened as he sipped his beer. “I wanted to be a cartoonist when I started out. I wanted that more than anything.” He loved the cartoons of Willard Mullin in the World-Telegram. (“I don’t know how he does it, day after day, on that level. The guy’s a genius.”) He was the first man to tell me he was a fan of the amazing Cliff Sterrett, whose surrealistic comic strip, “Polly and her Pals,” was usually overlooked by the solemn analysts of popular culture. And of course he paid homage to George Herriman, whose “Krazy Kat” was the highbrows’ favorite comic strip. “But you know,” he said, “I even like ‘Orphan Annie.’ The politics are neanderthal. But the man knows how to use blacks.”

I was astonished. This was years before pop art was proclaimed by critics as the successor to abstract expressionism. No painter’s vision seemed more distant from cartooning than the great bold abstractions of Franz Kline. But as he talked that night, I realized that it was comics that had made him want to be an artist. Born in 1910, he grew up in the ’20s with John Held Jr. as his hero. Held’s drawings in the old Life and Judge and Vanity Fair made him the most famous cartoonist of his time. In their way, Held’s short-skirted flappers and bell-bottomed college boys expressed the hedonism and silliness of the Roaring Twenties as powerfully as the stories of Scott Fitzgerald. But Kline saw form as well as content; he liked the way Held designed a page, placing a number of figures in the space but using blacks to establish a pattern that became the true structure of the drawing.

Kline also talked with affection of certain illustrators and figurative painters. He admired Jack Levine and praised John Sloan and Reginald Marsh, who in different ways had embraced the energy and tension of the city the way the New York School did with pure paint. (Kline once said to Irving Sandier, “Hell, half the world wants to be like Thoreau at Walden, worrying about the noise of traffic on the way to Boston; the other half use up their lives being part of that noise. I like the second half.”) As we talked, he was amused, perhaps even delighted, that I knew the work of the British pen-and-ink illustrators — men like John Leech, Donald Keene, and above all Phil May, who tried to turn the city into art.

“Phil May got me to go to England,” Kline said. “I wanted to draw like he did, that big open confident way.” Franz Kline in England? Yes: before the war. After two years at Boston University’s School of Fine and Applied Art, he moved to London in 1935 and enrolled in art school. He was apparently not much touched by the political fevers of the day: the Spanish Civil War, the threat of fascism, the romance of communism. Instead, he absorbed the look of architecture, trains, bridges, ships, theaters, music halls. He spent hundreds of hours drawing the figure and mastering the principles of composition. He walked the streets that once teemed with Phil May’s ragamuffins. He looked hard at the drawings of the Frenchmen: Daumier, Steinlen, and Forain. In London, the dream of a career as a cartoonist gave way to the desire to be an illustrator.

London also had a certain logic for the young man who became Franz Kline. With the grand exception of Turner, it had produced great draftsmen rather than colorists (Hogarth, Rowlandson, Tenniel, du Maurier, Gillray, Phiz). For Franz, London must have been a gloriously dark indoor city of black and white. I often wonder what his art would have been like if he’d gone instead to Venice or Mexico.

“I had a good time there,” he said of London. “I was never so hungry in my life. But I really did learn to draw.”

When I mentioned that I’d spent a year in art school in Mexico, his eyes brightened and he laughed. “When I came back from London, everybody around was trying to be Orozco or Siqueiros, except the guys who wanted to be Mondrian.” He and his wife (whom he’d met in England) moved to Manhattan in 1938, with Franz now determined to be a fine artist. He missed being part of the great brawling fraternity of New York artists who worked for the WPA, but he slowly got to know most of them in the bohemian bars of Greenwich Village. “Some of them liked the Mexicans because of the politics,” Kline said. “Some, like Jackson, for the size of the work.” He shrugged. “I didn’t care for all of them, but I liked the attempt, you know? They could all draw. They had power. They were trying to do something big.”

Listening to Kline talk at the height of his fame, in a voice whose confident baritone seemed to match the blacks of his paintings, I felt something else brewing under the polished, generous surface. I was too young to identify it, but I think now that he probably knew his own huge achievement was only provisional. He’d done Something Big too. But now there were dozens of kids at Pratt belting out “Klines” (or Pollocks or Rothkos or de Koonings) and talking in the opaque codes of the new art theorists. Rebellion was undergoing its familiar transformation into orthodoxy.

The young hadn’t struggled through the rigorous art schools of the ’30s, hadn’t been challenged by the Depression or the war, hadn’t been forced to support themselves by doing murals for bars (as Kline had done at Minetta’s and the Bleecker Street Tavern). Not one of them would have done a mural for an American Legion Post, as Kline had done in 1946 back home in Lehighton, Pennsylvania, four years before he broke through into the style that made him famous.

For Kline’s generation, the work of the artist could be defined not simply by what he did, but what he refused to do. They had struggled to make an art that was uniquely American: not pseudo-European, neo-Mexican, or some additional knockoff of Picasso. They wanted to be as American as the comic strip or jazz. The best of them certainly didn’t want to be rich or famous; if anything, they shared a romantic view of the clarifying power of poverty. They wouldn’t pander to an audience, or shape their work to please collectors or museum directors or even critics (although Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg did have an enormous influence on the artists who came right after the first generation). They hated glibness and facility; they thought the American artist had a special responsibility to be original (the worst epithet was “derivative”). They expected the artist to live or die in every brushstroke (they’d have hung the likes of Mark Kostabi from a lamppost on Eighth Street), to paint as if he or she might die before morning.

It was a heroic enterprise. Macho: yes. Self-destructive: sometimes. Safe, timid, conniving, calculated: never. And they’d accomplished much of what they’d set out to do, shifting the center of Western art from Paris to New York. But by 1958, other words were being spoken: exhaustion, repetition, mannerism. And Franz must have heard them too.

“It’s closing time, isn’t it?” he said one night, gazing around at the almost empty Cedar. And then he led a few of us up to Fourteenth Street for a nightcap at his studio. I’d never been in a real painter’s studio before. That dark loft was clearly a place of work. I could see rolls of canvas, buckets of paint, large house-painters’ brushes, cans of turpentine, baking pans caked with paint. The floor looked like a Pollock. There were small painted drawings scattered around, some of them on the floor, proof that Franz knew what he was going to paint when he approached the canvas. The public image of the action painters was, of course, a crude cartoon. In their work, they could express anger, serenity, anxiety, a contempt for the slick and the sentimental. But for men like Franz Kline, painting was never mere performance or raw therapy. They were making art.

Most of the sketches were on heavy paper, but about a half-dozen were done on classified pages of the Times. I was staring down at one, a shape like a machine gun, done in lavender paint, when Franz came over and handed me a beer. “I like the grayness, that texture,” he said of the Times. “It looks like a sidewalk. Besides, someday soon I might need a job.”

He laughed, handed out more beers, turned on a radio (in my beer-blurry memory, it was Symphony Sid on WEVD). I walked around the dark studio, the way I’ve since seen actors prowl on empty stages or young ballplayers walk into Yankee Stadium, imagining myself in this loft, struggling heroically with paint and canvas. Stacked against the walls were paintings tacked on frames. Someone asked to take a look. Franz smiled: “Sure, why not? But they’re not all finished.”

He switched on some lights. And then we saw them, all mauves and greens and yellows and blues, with great bold structures on this canvas, more delicate and lush coloring on that one. Some had matte surfaces, thinned with much turpentine, the color as layered and luminous as Tintoretto. Others were glossy, the voluptuous color pre-mixed before going on the canvas, scraped with palette knives or sticks. A few were bright, but most had a dark brooding power.

“The gallery doesn’t want me doing them,” he said. “They want the real Franz Kline. Black and white, black and white …”

He shook his head and smiled in a sad way and sipped a beer. He was pleased that we liked what we saw, but insisted that he wasn’t finished with many of them. He probably wouldn’t show them at the Sidney Janis Gallery show scheduled for May. “They’re not there yet,” he said. Then he turned off the lights and we went back to drinking beer and talked for a while about prizefighters before we all went home through the gray New York morning.

Some of the paintings in color were shown at the Janis show, but most people were impressed by the ferocious Crow Dancer, which was another version of the mounted machine gun, a picture that I think now was called Siegfried. In later years, I saw different versions of what I saw that night, the shapes altered or refined, the colors overpainted. Among them, I’m sure, were the great painting Shenandoah Wall, along with Horizontal Rust and Andrus. Franz certainly didn’t intend to move through the ’60s or ’70s repeating what he had done in the ’50s. He had added color to his artistic weaponry. Like Guston (and in different ways, Richard Diebenkorn and Wayne Thiebaud), he might have returned to the figure. Franz was a man who loved to draw.

But like the Cedar Tavern, Franz Kline didn’t make it very far into the ’60s. In the spring of 1962, Kline, along with Mark Rothko and Andrew Wyeth, was invited by President Kennedy to a dinner at the White House in honor of André Malraux. The date of the dinner was May 11, a Friday. Kline didn’t make it. A week before, he suffered a heart attack and was taken to New York Hospital. While he was there, Janis opened a group show that included Scudera, Kline’s last painting, all deep rich blues, with some red and a broken black square. On Sunday, May 13, Franz Kline died, just short of his fifty-second birthday.

That night, I was working at a newspaper when the word arrived on the AP wire. I was first shocked, then filled with a kind of remorse. In my few encounters with Franz, he’d offered the same hand of friendship that he’d given to so many others. But out of stubbornness or empty vanity, I’d never really taken it. He was too famous and accomplished for us to enter as equals that private conspiracy called friendship. And I was too proud to serve as anyone’s acolyte. By 1962, I’d put painting behind me, with sorrow but no regrets, and gone my own way, into the world of words.

But when the night shift was over, I didn’t go home. At eight in the morning I walked up Rector Street to a newspaper bar called Page One and starting drinking beer. Around eleven, I went to the pay phone and called the World-Telegram and asked for Willard Mullin. When the great sports cartoonist answered, I told him my name.

“I don’t know if you saw the paper yet,” I said, “but Franz Kline, you know? The painter? He died yesterday. And he was a fan of yours. I just wanted to tell you that.”

“No kidding?” A beat. “What was his name?”

“Kline,” I said. “Franz Kline.”

There was another pause, then: “Oh, yeah. Franz Kline. He did those big black and white things, right?”

“Yeah.”

“You know,” the cartoonist said, “I bet that guy could’ve learned how to draw.”

In those days, you had to pass a small candy stand to get to the door of the Gramercy Gym on East 14th Street. The door was heavy, with painted zinc nailed across its face and a misspelled sign saying “Gramacy Gym,” and when you opened the door, you saw a long badly lit stairway, climbing into darkness. There was another door on the landing, and a lot of tough New York kids would reach that landing and find themselves unable to open the second door. They’d go back down the stairs, try to look cool as they bought a soda at the candy stand, then hurry home. Many others opened the second door. And when they did, they entered the tough, hard, disciplined school of a man named Cus D’Amato.

“First thing I want to know about a kid,” Cus said to me once, on some lost night in the ’50s, “is whether he can open that door. Then when he walks in, I look at him, try to see what he’s seeing. Most of them stand at the door. They see guys skipping rope, shad-owboxing, hitting the bags. Most of all, they see guys in the ring. Fighting. And then they have to decide. Do they want this, or not? If they want it, they stay, they ask someone what they should do. Most of them are shy, for some reason. Almost all fighters. They whisper. You tell them to come back, and you’ll see what can be done. They have to spend at least one night dealing with fear. If they come back the second time, then maybe you have a fighter.”

I wasn’t a fighter, but I came up those stairs almost every day in the late ’50s and early ’60s, and in some important ways I learned as much from Cus D’Amato as the fighters did. I was living then on 9th Street and Second Avenue, working nights at the Post, and I’d wake up around three in the afternoon and walk to 14th Street and hang out with the fighters. My friend José Torres was then the hottest young middleweight in the city and one of Cus D’Amato’s fighters. He had lost by one point to Laszlo Papp in the finals of the ’56 Olympics in Melbourne, and when he came to New York from Puerto Rico he placed his career in the hands of Cus.

“I didn’t know anything about New York,” he said. “I didn’t know very much about boxing. Most of all, I didn’t know anything about life. So I learned about everything then from Cus.”

Cus, who died last week at JJ after a long struggle with pneumonia, was one of the best teachers I ever met. He was a tough, intelligent man who was almost Victorian in his beliefs in work and self-denial and fierce concentration. For years he’d lived alone in the office of the gym, accompanied only by a huge boxer dog named Champ; there were books on the shelves (he loved the Civil War and essays on strategy and tactics and almost never read novels, although he admired W. C. Heinz’s The Professional) and a gun somewhere and a small black-and-white TV set and a pay phone on the wall. After Floyd Patterson became champion in 1956, Cus took an apartment over a coffee shop on 53 rd Street and Broadway and bought some elegantly tailored clothes and a homburg; but, talking to him, I always sensed that his idea of paradise was that room and the cot in the office of the Gramercy Gym.

“You can’t want too many things,” he said to me one wintry evening, after the fighters had gone, the speed bags were stilled, and we stood at the large gym windows while snow fell into 14th Street. “The beginning of corruption is wanting things. You want a car or a fancy house or a piano, and the next thing you know, you’re doing things you didn’t want to do, just to get the things. I guess maybe that’s why I never got married. It wasn’t that I didn’t like women. They’re nice. It’s nice. It’s that women want things, and if I want the woman, then I have to want the things she wants. Hey, I don’t want a new refrigerator, or a big TV set, or a new couch. …”

Cus wanted his fighters to be champions, to have money and glory; but he truly didn’t seem to want much for himself. Once a bum made his way to the Gramercy from the White Rose bar across the street; Cus gave him a dollar; the next day, five bums showed up, and the day after that, almost 40. The fighters laughed, as Cus dispensed singles; and then Cus said, “That’s it, that’s all! You want to come back here, bring trunks!” He was a sucker for old fighters. Once when Cus had the shorts (he had to declare bankruptcy in 1971) Ezzard Charles came around to see him; the great light-heavyweight and former heavyweight champion was a broken man, confined to a wheelchair; he needed a thousand, and Cus borrowed the money, gave it to the old champion, and never heard from Charles again. When Patterson won the championship by knocking out Archie Moore on November 30, 1956, Cus used his share of the purse to make Floyd an elaborate $35,000 jewel-encrusted crown; a few years later, Patterson wouldn’t even talk to Cus. Cus once quoted Gene Fowler to me: “Money is something to throw off the back of trains.”

He loved style in fighters and in writers, too. His favorite sports writers were Jimmy Cannon, Dick Young, and Dan Parker, all of whom took shots at him in print from time to time (“I don’t mind, they gotta job to do and I’m not perfect”), but he also said that the sports writer who moved him most consistently was the elegant Frank Graham of the Journal-American. Later, when Torres became friends with Norman Mailer, Cus started to read his work, as if inspecting it for signs of moral decay. “The guy is really good, isn’t he? He’s like a Robinson, he can box, he can punch. …”

He cherished great fighters — Ray Robinson, Joe Louis, Muhammad Ali, Sandy Saddler, Willie Pep, Tommy Loughran — but sometimes, late at night, sitting over coffee, he’d talk about the fighter that didn’t exist: the perfect fighter, the masterpiece. “The ideal fighter has heart, skill, movement, intelligence, creativity. You can have everything, but if you can’t make it up while you’re in there, you can’t be great. A lot of guys have the mechanics and no heart; lots of guys have heart, no mechanics; the thing that puts it together, it’s mysterious, it’s like making a work of art, you bring everything to it, you make it up when you’re doing it.”

Toward the end, he thought perhaps that he had the perfect heavyweight at last in young Michael Tyson, who has now knocked out all nine of his professional opponents, six in the first round. “He’s strong, he’s brave, he’s in condition, and most of all, he’s got that other thing, the mysterious thing,” Cus said, the last time I saw him. “I have no doubt he’ll be a champion. But more than that, he might be a great fighter.”

There were a lot of good fighters at the Gramercy in the late ’50s: Joe Shaw, a fierce-punching 140-pounder; light-heavyweight Jim Boyd, who’d won the gold medal in Melbourne; two more light-heavyweights, named Sylvester Banks and Paul Wright; a wonderful southpaw featherweight named Floyd Smith; and some fine amateurs ranging from bantamweight Georgie Colon to light-heavyweight Simon Ramos. But as Cus became more involved managing Patterson and Torres, the day-to-day training was left to Joe Fariello (now educating Mark Breland). Cus was away at camp with Patterson; he was up at Stillman’s with Torres, to find experienced professionals for sparring partners. And during the same period, Cus was waging his wars with the International Boxing Club and Madison Square Garden. Some people thought he grew increasingly paranoid.

“If this goes down instead of up,” he said to me one day as we stepped into an elevator in a midtown office building, “we’re in trouble.”

He laughed, but Cus meant it, too. The Mob was all over boxing when Cus brought his first good fighters out of the Gramercy Gym. The hoodlums cut into fighters, arranged tank jobs, fixed judges. Frankie Carbo was called the underworld’s commissioner of boxing, a vicious punk who lived off other men’s sweat and controlled a number of managers. Carbo was friendly, sort of, with Jim Norris, a rich bum with a hoodlum complex who ran the IBC out of the old Garden on Eighth Avenue and 50th Street. There’s no room here to relate the details of Cus D’Amato’s sustained contest with Norris, Carbo, and the Garden. Certainly he was on the moral high ground, but the terrible thing was that his personal crusade also hurt his fighters.

We’ll never know how good Patterson and Torres might have become if they’d been fighting more often, battling those fighters who were controlled by the IBC and the Garden. Certainly Torres would have made more money. I remember one main event he had to take in Boston, when he was still a hot fighter in New York. The total purse came to $28.35. Joe Fariello said, “Joe, you take the $20, I’ll take the $8, and we’ll send the 35$ to Cus.” Patterson did get rich, and Torres did become champion years later than he should have, and in the wrong division (he was one of the greatest middleweights I ever saw, but had to settle for the light-heavyweight championship in 1965). But the competitive fire of Shaw withered from lack of action; the others drifted away.

“It breaks my heart sometimes, thinking about those kids not fighting,” he said to me once. “But I don’t see any other way.”

That was the problem. From 1959 on, Cus never worked a corner for any of his fighters; he didn’t even hold a manager’s license, as a result of the botched promotion of the 1959 Patterson-Johansson fight, when it appeared (but was never proved) that Cus helped bring Fat Tony Salerno in as a money man. The fighters did their best, and for some fights Cus would come to camp, work with them, talk strategy and tactics. But Patterson broke with him, and Torres was forced to go with another manager (Cain Young) to get his chance at a title. Around the time Torres retired, Cus moved upstate, far from the gyms of the city. “I like it up there,” he said once. “I like the clear skies, the lake, where I go fishing. It’s beautiful. Beautiful.” Did he miss the gym on 14th Street? “Yeah,” he said. “Sometimes…”

The last time I saw him was almost exactly a year ago, on the 57th floor of the World Trade Center. We were there to watch Torres be sworn in as chairman of the New York State Athletic Commission, the first professional fighter and the first Puerto Rican ever to hold the job. “I’m so proud of José, I can’t explain it,” Cus said. We talked about Tyson and other things. And then I asked him if he’d ever gone back to the Gramercy Gym since he sold it in the ’70s. “No,” he said, and looked up at José, who was standing with Mario Cuomo at the front of the room. “No, I don’t like to look back.”

And so I did the looking back, sitting in the packed, brightly lit conference room, remembering Cus talking to me when I was 20 about the uses of fear, the meaning of courage, the need to concentrate energy and purpose in all things, and how I’d tried and failed so often to follow his lessons. I’d modeled a character on Cus in one of my novels, and he’d liked the book but objected when he saw the TV movie; on the screen, John Cassavetes stood on a ring apron talking to a fighter and smoking a cigarette. “What manager would do that? What kind of example would he be showing to a kid?” I remembered that conversation, and after José was sworn in, I turned to Cus and said, “Listen, Cus, I want to thank you for everything.” He squinted suspiciously at me. “What do you mean?” he said, and I said, “For letting me climb the stairs.”

He nodded, turned away, and said, “You goddamned writers.”

I’m sorry I never got to explain.

An artificial Christmas tree stands in a corner of the waiting room, with a bunched-up bedsheet at its base feigning snow. Unmatched pieces of cheap furniture, some wicker, some plastic, are arranged awkwardly around the edges of the room. It could be the antiseptic lobby of a second-class motel except for the view through the picture windows behind the Christmas tree: two parallel steel-mesh fences topped with barbed wire and a slope of sour lawn rising toward blank walls and tan-brick buildings. The complex is called the Indiana Youth Center. But it’s not a place where schoolkids play checkers or basketball on frigid afternoons. The barbed wire makes it clear that this is a jail.

So does the posted rule against bringing drugs or alcohol on visits; so does the order to place wallets and handbags in a locker in the far corner, along with all cash in excess of five dollars, any pens, notebooks, tape recorders, books, all hats and overcoats; and so does the stamping of your hand with invisible ink, the emptying of pockets into a plastic tray, the body search, the passage through a metal detector.

The rules of entrance obeyed, I walk down a long, wide ramp into the prison, pause at a sign forbidding weapons beyond this point, and wait for a steel-rimmed glass door to be opened. Up ahead there are other such doors, with guards and a few prisoners moving languidly along a corridor that is lit like an aquarium. The door in front of me pops open with a click. I turn right to a guard’s booth, where I hand over my pass and am told to thrust my right hand into a hole in a wooden box. An ultraviolet light certifies the stamp. I am then instructed to go through the door to the left, into the visitors’ lounge, and give the pass to the guard behind the high desk in the corner. I do what I am told and wait. In the lounge a dozen couples sit facing each other on thick plastic-covered chairs, maintaining space and privacy, drinking soda bought from machines, trying hard to be loose, glancing tensely at the clock, conscious of time. Behind them a wall of picture windows opens upon a vista of gray grass and blank, tan walls. The Indiana sky is the color of steel.

Then, suddenly, from another door, Mike Tyson appears. He smiles, gives me a hug, and says, “How are ya, buddy?”

Twenty-two months have passed since he vanished from the nightsides of cities, from the bubble of champagne and the musk of women, from the gyms where he prepared for his violent trade, from the arenas that roared when he came after an opponent in a ferocious rush, his eyes hooded, gleaming with bad intentions. Twenty-two months have passed since he was convicted of raping an eighteen-year-old beauty-pageant contestant who consented to leave her own Indianapolis hotel room at nearly 1:30 in the morning, who moved around the streets for a while with Tyson in his rented limousine, who then went to Tyson’s suite in the Canterbury Hotel, where she sat on the bed with him, went to the bathroom and removed her panty shield, on the way passing the door that led to the corridor and the possibility of flight. Twenty-two months since the jury believed Desiree Washington lay helpless while Tyson had sex with her. Twenty-two months since the jury believed that it was perfectly normal for a rape victim to spend two more days taking part in the Miss Black America pageant of 1991. Twenty-two months since Michael Gerard Tyson, twenty-five-year-old child of Amboy Street, Brownsville, Brooklyn, was led away — refusing to express remorse for a crime he insists he didn’t commit — deprived of his freedom, his ability to earn millions, his pride.

But if there is anger in him or a sense of humiliation, neither is visible on this gray morning. He is wearing jeans and a white T-shirt — with his prison number, 922335, hand-lettered over his heart — and to a visitor who first met him when he was sixteen, he looks taller somehow. In the TV-news clip that plays every time his name is mentioned, Tyson weighs about 250 pounds, swollen and suety in a tight-fitting suit as he smiles in an ironic way and holds up his cuffed hands on his way to a cell. Now, a few days before his second Christmas in prison, he is about 220, the belly as flat as a table, the arms as hard as stone. He looks capable of punching a hole in a prison wall.

“Yeah, I’m in good shape,” he says, “but not boxing shape.” He works out in the prison gym every day, a self-imposed regimen of calisthenics, weights, running. “No boxing,” he says, the familiar whispery voice darkened by a hint of regret. “They don’t allow boxing in prison in Indiana.” He smiles, nodding his head. “That’s the rules. Ya gotta obey the rules.”

We walk over to the chairs, and Tyson sits with his back to the picture windows. His hair is cropped tight, and he’s wearing a mustache and trimmed beard that emphasize the lean look. Then I notice the tattoos. On his left bicep, outlined ir blue against Tyson’s ocher-colored skin, is the bespectacled face of Arthur Ashe, and above it is the title of that splendid man’s book Days of Grace. On his right bicep is a tattooed portrait of Mao Tsetung, with the name MAO underneath it, in cartoony “Chinese” lettering. I tell Tyson that it’s unlikely that any other of the planet’s six billion inhabitants are adorned with that combination of tattoos. He laughs, the familiar gold-capped tooth gleaming. He rubs the tattoos fondly with his huge hands.

“I love reading about Mao,” he says. “Especially about the Long March and what they went through. I mean, they came into a village one time and all the trees were white, and Mao wanted to know what happened, and they told him the people were so hungry they ate the bark right off the trees! What they went through. I mean, that was adversity. This …”

He waves a hand airily around the visiting room but never finishes the sentence; he certainly feels that the Indiana Youth Center can’t be compared to the Long March. I don’t have to ask him about Arthur Ashe. For weeks Tyson and I have been talking by telephone, and he has spoken several times about Ashe’s book.

“I never knew him,” Tyson said one night. “I never liked him. He was a tennis player, know what I mean? And he looked like a black bourgeois, someone I couldn’t have nothin’ to do with. Just looking at him I said, ’Yaaagh, he’s weak.’ That was my way of thinking back then.” A pause. “But then Spike Lee sent me his book, and I started reading it, and in there I read this: ’AIDS isn’t the heaviest burden I have had to bear …being black is the greatest burden I’ve had to bear.…Race has always been my biggest burden.…Even now it continues to feel like an extra weight tied around me.’ It was like wham! An extra weight tied around me! I mean, wow, that really got me, and I kept reading, excited on every page.”

On the telephone, with the great metallic racket of prison in the background, or here in the visiting room of the Indiana Youth Center, Tyson makes it clear that he doesn’t want to talk much about the past. He doesn’t encourage sentimental evocations of the days when, as a raw teenager from a reform school, he learned his trade from the old trainer Cus D’Amato in the gym above the police station in Catskill, New York. He doesn’t want to talk about his relationship with Don King, the flamboyant promoter whose slithery influence many blamed for Tyson’s decline as a fighter and calamitous fall from grace. He is uncomfortable and embarrassed discussing his lost friends and squandered millions. He has no interest in retailing the details of the case, like another Lenny Bruce, endlessly rehashing what happened on July 19, 1991, in room 606 of the Canterbury Hotel or the astonishingly feeble defense offered by his high-priced lawyers or his chances for a new trial. He wants to talk about what he is doing now, and what he is doing is time.

Of this we can be certain: Madonna is the greatest artistic force of the AIDS generation. As a sex symbol, she is all we have, but she is a lot more than that. It doesn’t matter that she can’t sing very well, that she’s an ordinary dancer, that there are many women of more refined beauty. She is the triumphant mistress of her medium: the sexual imagination. In an age when real sex can lead to horror and death, here is Madonna — reckless, bawdy, laughing and offering us all the consolation of outrageous illusions.

In almost every version of her public self, Madonna appears as a fearless sexual adventurer, sharing sex with strangers, colliding with rough trade, risking pain or humiliation to break through to pleasure beyond all conventional frontiers. With music, dance and, above all, image, she challenges organized religion, the middle class that spawned her, political hypocrisies and what George Orwell called “the smelly little orthodoxies.” Follow me, ye weak of heart, she says. Up ahead lies the big O! Nirvana! Fearless fucking! Just roll the dice.

What saves this performance from preposterous narcissism is a simple corrective: There’s a wink in the act. While Madonna presents her latest illusion, a hint of a smile tells us that we shouldn’t take any of it too seriously. She always hedges her bet with camp, elegant caricature and a style appropriated from the gay underworld on the eve of AIDS.

That style was part of the exuberant rush that accompanied gay liberation, when the doors of many closets flew open and out came leather and chains and whips, every variety of mask, anonymous multiple couplings and a self-conscious insistence on sex as performance. Before she became a star, Madonna moved through that world in New York. Today she presents it as a glossy nostalgia, tempered with irony and served up to everyone from suburban teenagers to aging baby boomers. They all seem to love it.

Without that ironic wink, of course, she would be as square as Jesse Helms. But Madonna is hip to something huge: AIDS made sexual freedom a ghastly joke. At the point where the sexual revolution had triumphed for everyone, the most ferocious sexually transmitted disease of the century arrived, wearing a death’s-head from some medieval woodcut. Every artist was forced to confront it, just as 19th century artists were hammered into dealing with syphilis. Some artistic responses to AIDS were moving and tragic; too many were runny with self-pity. But Madonna came roaring into the room in a spirit of defiance. She would not go gentle into that good night.

But she also knew that the only completely safe sex is the sex you can imagine — that is, an illusion. If you can’t have something you desire with every atom of your flesh and blood, you must be content with a gorgeous counterfeit. That insight became the armature of her work. And she elaborated on it with a shrewd understanding of sexual psychology: The most reliable erogenous zone is the human mind, and the libido feeds on images, not ideas.

Like Michael Jackson, Madonna vaulted to stardom with videos, a form thick with imagery that sometimes triumphs over the banality of lyrics. Jackson’s images were charged with rage, Madonna’s with frank and open carnality. But as the Eighties went on, as the graves filled with the young dead, as AIDS defied a cure, Madonna’s images became more obviously infused with a dark comic spirit. It was as if she were saying: I know this is a lie and you know this is a lie, but it’s all we have.

This surrender to illusion is at once daring and sad. Most American performers spend their careers trying to convince us that their lies are the truth. Madonna is braver than most and more original: She says openly that her lies are lies. She asks you only to admire the form of the lies. This was itself a breakthrough for a pop artist. Until Madonna, the basic task of any performer was to persuade the audience to suspend its disbelief. Frank Sinatra or Billie Holiday wanted us to believe that their grieving lyrics and aching tones expressed the pain and hurt of the performers themselves. A millionaire such as Mick Jagger wanted us to believe he was a working-class hero or a street fighting man. But Madonna says something else. Don’t suspend your disbelief, she implies. Disbelief is the basic point.

I went to the publication party for her book, Sex, and, like the book, the party was a celebration of the counterfeit. Scattered around Industria, the city’s hottest photo studio, were many extraliterary diversions: actresses dressed as nuns pretending to offer blasphemous pleasures; peroxide blond androids languidly flogging each other with strips of licorice; black dancers in chains and leather; writhing gym-toned bodies; many undulating bellies; much bumping and grinding. Everything, in short, except actual fucking. And that, of course, was the point: This wasn’t real and the audience knew it wasn’t real.

Madonna’s video Erotica was playing continually, shot in the grainy black-and-white style of Forties porno films. But it wasn’t a real porno film. It was fake porno. Ah, yes: I remember Paris. The Germans wore gray and you wore nothing. Nostalgia remains the most powerful of all American emotions.

Sex went on to become the number-one best-seller in the nation, assisted by the hype but also driven by the genius of Madonna. And that might tell us something about America.

Books have taught us that lpve is an illusion but sex is real. For millions of Americans, that old formulation appears to have been reversed. You can experience love, but anything more than the illusion of sex is too dangerous. The possibility of death is always a marvelous corrective to human behavior. But if such an immense change is, in fact, under way, its poster girl is Madonna. Sometimes life really does imitate art.

Fosse was dead and after the urgent calls and the logistics of death, there seemed nothing really to do about it except go for a walk along Broadway in the midnight rain.

This was the square mile of the earth Bob Fosse cared for more than any other. Up there on the second floor at 56th Street was the rehearsal hall where I’d met him years ago. Around the corner was the Carnegie Deli, where he’d have lunch with Paddy Chayefsky and Herb Gardner, trading lines, drinking coffee, smoking all those goddamned cigarettes. On the nth floor of 850 Seventh Avenue, he and Chayefsky and Gardner had their separate offices, and from Paddy’s they would often gaze in wonder across the back courtyard of the Hotel Woodward, at the man in underwear who was always shaving, no matter what the hour. A few blocks away was the building where Fosse lived the last decade of his life.

And down the rain-drowned avenue was the sleazy hamlet I always thought of as Fosseville: all glitter and neon and dangerous shadows. This wasn’t Runyon’s fairy-tale Broadway; it was harder, meaner, as reliable in its ruthlessness as a switchblade. Yet even in his most cynical years, Fosse insisted on seeing its citizens as human, observing their felonies and betrayals not as a journalist or a sociologist but as the fine artist he was. “I see a hooker on a corner,” he said to me once, “and I can only think: there’s some kinda story there. I mean, she was once six years old…” On this late night, I could see Fosse in black shirt and trousers, standing in some grimy doorway, looking out at his lurid parish; he had been young here and almost died here and sometimes fled from the place and always came back. In Fosseville the gaudiest dreams existed side by side with the most vicious betrayals; everything was real but nothing was true. And, of course, he believed in some dark way that all could be redeemed by love.

Nobody loved harder. He loved his wives: Mary Ann Niles, who danced with him in the last years of the nightclub era (and who died a year after Fosse), Joan McCracken, who died on him when they were both young, and Gwen Verdon, who was with him when he lay down for the final time on the grass of a small park in Washington. But Fosse wasn’t one of those men who can be married; the emotional core of his masterpiece, All That Jazz, is not so much the romantic attraction of death, but the impossibility of fidelity. There were simply too many beautiful women in this world, with their grace and style and intelligence and mystery; the demand of monogamy was like ordering a man to love only one Vermeer.

And so he loved many women; most were dancers and actresses, because in the world where he worked they were the women he met. He treated all of them with the same grace. I saw him most often when he was between women; he was then usually engulfed by a bleakly romantic sense of loss (although the only remorse he ever expressed was about Gwen). When he met a new woman, when he was swept away, he would vanish from his usual precincts; no male friends were as important as a woman or the possibility of love.

It was no accident that he always celebrated women in his work, although he was hardly an illustrator of feminist dogma. In the ’50s and ’60s, half the men I knew were in love with Gwen Verdon, who on stage combined humor, vulnerability, toughness, and sensuality in shows designed, choreographed, directed by Fosse. She always moved the tough guys most of all. “Every time I see her,” the sports-writer Jimmy Cannon said of Gwen, “I want to run away with her.” When Damn Yankees was in its long run, Paul Sann, the greatest newspaperman I ever knew, said of Gwen one night: “You better go see her now, kid, ’cause you ain’t gonna see anything like her again on Broadway for the rest of your fucking life.” About Gwen Verdon, as about so many things, Sann was absolutely right.

But if it’s forever impossible to separate Fosse from Gwen, he was also a fine director of other women. Liza Minnelli, Valerie Perrine, and Anne Reinking did their best work with Fosse. He was one of the few directors to see King Kong and recognize that Jessica Lange could be a superb actress; later they would become lovers, and he would cast her as the Angel of Death in All That Jazz. It was entirely appropriate, of course, that Fosse would imagine death as a woman, thus merging his two most passionate obsessions.

But he loved other things too: almost all forms of music; nightclub comics; cheap vaudeville jokes (Q. “Do you file your nails?” A. “No, I throw them away…”); the New York Mets; good food (he spent hours cooking in the huge kitchen of the house in Quogue, bringing his perfectionism to the details of the simplest meal); Fred Astaire (there were no pictures of himself in the Quogue house and two of Astaire); air hockey; children; New York Post headlines; boxing and football; his daughter Nicole; good wine, margaritas, and brandy; his cat, Macho, a stray discovered beaten-up and bloodied in the Quogue grasslands and nursed to plump domesticity; and, of course, those goddamned cigarettes.

After family and lovers, he admired writers more than anyone else. Among his friends were Gardner and Chayefsky, E. L. Doctorow, Peter Maas, and Budd Schulberg. Although he liked to affect the Fm-only-a-song-and-dance-man pose, Fosse was a careful, intelligent reader. His writer friends knew how high Fosse’s own standards were (whether he failed or succeeded, he never set out to manufacture crap) and they often responded to his subtle urgings that they do better. Some writers who worked with him were angry at the end, as he demanded from them what he could more easily demand from a dancer; those who didn’t work with him had easier friendships.

Yes, Fosse was competitive, and cared (perhaps too much) about the way he stood in relation to other directors. In 1974, after he had his first ferocious heart attack, Gardner and Chayefsky were summoned to Fosse’s hospital room to serve as witnesses to his will. There were two lawyers waiting. Fosse was in critical condition in his bed, silent and trapped in a ganglia of tubes and wires. The lawyers asked the two writers to sign the will; Gardner did so immediately. But Chayefsky insisted on reading the text. He discovered that Fosse hadn’t left him anything, so he turned to the silent Fosse and said: “Fuck you, live!” Fosse started to laugh; all measuring devices began to go wild; the lawyers blanched; a platoon of nurses arrived to save Fosse’s life. Finally, all was calmed down again. Chayefsky resumed reading the will, while Fosse lay silent. Then Paddy came to a provision that reserved $20,000 for a party for Fosse’s friends. Hey, that’s great, Chayefsky said, it’s just what Josh Logan did. For the first time, Fosse spoke.

“How much did Logan leave for the party?” he said, in a thin weak voice.

“Twenty thousand,” said Chayefsky.

“Make mine twenty-five,” said Fosse, falling back, as Chayefsky and Gardner dissolved into laughter. That visit probably saved his life.

Quite simply, Fosse wanted to be the best at what he did. In that impossibly romantic quest, he drove dancers hard (although never harder than he drove himself) and kept demanding more from his stars. He worked hard at understanding actors, studying with Sanford Meisner, reading the basic texts from Stanislavski to Harold Clurman. And he developed his own ways to get his actors to do their best work.

“He could act incredibly humble when he wanted something from you,” said Roy Scheider, who believes his own best work was in All That Jazz. “When he met someone he wanted for the first time, he knew everything about you. He’d done research, he’d seen your movies or plays. He’d say, ‘You know, you were very good in that part, hey, wait, you got a nomination, didn’t you? You won.⁹ And there’d be a pause, after he did all this praising. And then he’d say how that was nothing compared to what lies ahead in your work with me. And he made you believe it. And then he did it… After three, four meetings you’d be thoroughly convinced that you were not capable of giving him what he wanted. And then he would begin to build your confidence, making you feel that your reflowering would take place in his show.” Scheider laughed. “You see, for him, it was always being done for posterity. Every time out of the chute, it was for history.”

Because he worked so hard, and because he knew how much pain was involved in the making of a show or a movie, Fosse generally despised critics. He thought they saw too much and, as a result, their sensibilities were blunted, making them unable to respond to amazing theatrical moments in the way an audience might. They were all too glib, dismissing (or praising) two years of another’s work in a review dashed off in an hour. He thought critics were primarily responsible for the failure of Star 80 (based on Teresa Carpenter’s brilliant article for the Voice); when Big Deal opened to lukewarm reviews last year and then closed after 100-odd performances, he was disheartened.

“Maybe all they want are Eddie Murphy movies or sets that sing,” he said. “Maybe all they want is shit. Maybe it’s over for people like me.”

But he was still working at the end; trying to choose between a movie about Walter Winchell, a movie version of Chicago, probably with Madonna, or something completely new. During the summer, we talked a few times about his experiences during the Second World War, when he was a 17-year-old sailor working in an entertainment unit in the South Pacific; he was with the first Americans to enter Japan at the end of the war and was still horrified at the scale of the destruction in Tokyo and the stupidly brutal way so many American soldiers treated the Japanese, particularly the women. “It still makes me sick,” he said. “That was the first time I was really ashamed to be an American.” The contrast between the idealism of fighting the war and the morally corrosive realities of victory was a splendid setup for a Fosse movie, but Fosse was uneasy about it. “That world is gone, that music, the way people were.…Most of the country wouldn’t know what I was talking about.”

Now we’ll never know. The night after we all got the news, there was a small gathering at Gardner’s apartment, a kind of secular wake. Some wept; others told the old stories, with examples of Fosse’s dark humor; all were in shock, because Fosse had been looking better than at any time in years. Later, wandering through Broadway in the rain, I thought that for Fosse, who so perfectly expressed a certain vision of New York, the worst thing about dying in Washington might have been that he closed out of town.

These are pieces about certain aspects of American society in the last decade of the century. They were written by an American liberal who had come to distrust all dogma, including liberal dogma. For me, liberalism must be tolerant, generous, intelligent, and humane or it is no longer liberal. If social systems created by liberals — the welfare system, for example — no longer function for the good of human beings, it is stupid to defend them simply because they have been entered into some aging liberal catechism. They must be changed, gradually and humanely, and replaced with something better.

It is also foolish for liberals to refuse to recognize uncomfortable truths. They need to look at racism as it exists now, not as it did while Martin Luther King was marching in the streets of the American South. They must identify and condemn white racism and black racism. They must separate the race hustlers from those seriously concerned about growth and progress. They must move beyond habits of complaint and blame to the creation of enduring solutions.

Above all, they must reject grim sectarianism, whether practiced by radical feminists, the Christian Coalition, or Louis Farrakhan. They must be wary of exclusively legalistic solutions to deep societal problems. They must laugh at any insistence that an individual human being can be completely explained by the group to which he or she belongs. Liberals can’t be the thought police or the speech police or the gender police. They can’t go around all day telling strangers to put out their cigarettes. They can’t call the district attorney to solve problems of manners. They have to lighten up. They have to recover the confident, exuberant style of the liberal America that once believed we could have justice and the racetrack too. They have to do it soon. The other guys are at the three-quarter pole and pulling away.

PROVIDENCE, R.I.

When I was young and laboring as a sheetmetal worker in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, I sometimes imagined myself as a student on a college campus. This impossible vision of the Great Good Place was constructed from scraps of movies and magazine photographs, and was for me a combination of refuge and treasurehouse. The hard world of tenements and street gangs was replaced in my imagination with buildings made of red brick laced with ivy, and a wide, safe quadrangle where ancient oaks rose majestically to the sky. There was an immense library, offering the secrets of the world. The teachers were like Mr. Chips, at once stern, wise, passionate, and kind. And, of course, there were impossibly beautiful women, long of limb and steady of eye, talking about Fitzgerald or Hemingway, walking beside me on winter evenings with snow melting in their hair.

I never made it. I went to other schools of higher learning: the Navy, Mexico, newspapers. I had absolutely no regrets. But when I walked onto the campus at Brown University recently, that old vision came flooding back. There before me were the buildings, the trees, the open quadrangle that I had ached for as a boy. There were the lights, like molten gold, in the library. There were the fine young women. I wondered how anyone here could be unhappy.

But I knew that at Brown, and on many similar campuses around the nation, the malignant viruses of the outside world had proved impossible to resist. The worst of these was that ancient curse: racism. Last year, the Justice Department reported racial incidents on seventy-seven campuses, from state universities to the most elite academies, ranging from jokes to full-scale brawls. This was an increase of almost 50 percent over the year before, and Brown, the most liberal of the eight Ivy League schools, was not immune. This struck me as a heartbreaking phenomenon. I grew up believing that racism was a consequence of ignorance. But 8o percent of the students at Brown had finished in the top io percent of their high schools. If they were racist, the nation was doomed. I went to take a look.

At the Wriston Quad, everyone I saw was white. At the other campus, called Pembroke (it was once a separate school, for young women), blacks chose to “hang” with blacks. On a visit to a cafeteria, I noticed blacks generally sat with blacks, whites with whites. I heard tales (from whites) of pledges from one of the black fraternities marching around campus in paramilitary style (“They look like the Fruit of Islam, for Christ’s sake”). I heard blacks complain about white “insensitivity,” or outright racism (shouts of “nigger” from white fraternity houses, watermelon jokes). Whites who called themselves liberals complained about black separatism, symbolized by the hermetic clustering of blacks around the college’s Third World Center. One white student said, “It’s self-segregation, and they’ve chosen it, not us.” One black student said, “When the whites see more than two blacks at a time, they think about calling the cops instead of saying hello.”

None of this, of course, was like Mississippi in the ’50s, when the White Citizens Councils owned the night. But it wasn’t trivial, either. Many of the discussions here referred to two distinct series of events: The Incidents and The Attacks. The Incidents took place last spring. In April racist graffiti appeared in the West Andrews residence hall on the Pembroke campus. The message NIGGERS GO HOME was found in an elevator, MEN and WOMEN were crossed out on lavatory doors and replaced by WHITES and NIGGERS. Racist words were also written on the doors of minority students’ rooms and on posters.

Then, on April 28, a flyer appeared on a bathroom mirror, again in West Andrews. It said: “Once upon a time, Brown was a place where a white man could go to class without having to look at little black faces, or little yellow faces or little brown faces, except when he went to take his meals. Things have been going downhill since the kitchen help moved into the classroom. Keep white supremecy [sic] alive! Join the Brown chapter of the KKK today.”

Brown president Vartan Gregorian reacted the next day with righteous fury. He addressed a crowd of 1,500 students on the Green, threatened to expel anyone guilty of spreading racism or homophobia, and said, “There are many outlets for racism and bigotry in this country. Brown will not be one of them, I assure you of that.” By all accounts, it was a tough, persuasive performance. Students later presented Gregorian with that quintessential element of the ’60s, a List of Demands. He answered them the following week, and although his petitioners weren’t completely satisfied, the racist graffiti stopped. The identity of the faceless yahoo was never discovered.

That morning, my wife and I drove across the Brooklyn Bridge, listening to talk radio. We could have been in any of a hundred other cities in America because, on the radio, the Legion of the Invincibly Stupid was already hammering away at the remnants of our common civility. Whites slandered blacks and blacks returned their oratorical volleys, while the host fueled the ugly duel. As we plunged deeper into Brooklyn, news bulletins fed the talkers: The trials of two whites charged with killing a black youth in Bensonhurst moved toward verdicts; a black boycott of two Korean grocery stores continued into its fifth month; a Vietnamese man was in critical condition, his head broken by a black kid who called him a “Korean motherfucker” while beating him senseless with a claw hammer. Ah, the melting pot. O ye gorgeous mosaic.

We parked beside the second-oldest church in the city, its Dutch stolidity and simple, combed lawns summoning images of a time long gone, and then walked a few blocks to the boycotted Korean store. My wife, Fukiko, was uneasy. She is a Japanese writer; if Vietnamese could be mistaken for Korean, so could Japanese. There have been signs that Asians are increasingly becoming targets of various forms of American resentment. In 1982 two Detroit autoworkers beat to death a Chinese American named Vincent Chin, thinking he was one of those terrible Japanese who had “ruined” the American auto industry. All through the ⁵8os, other patriots burned crosses or tossed bombs at the homes of Vietnamese in Texas, Florida, and California. Cambodians have been attacked in Boston. Last year, in Stockton, California, a man walked into a school yard with a machine gun, murdered five children from Southeast Asia, and wounded many more. If you’re Asian, it can get scary out there.

But on this morning, there was more posturing and rhetoric than danger. About fifteen picketers were in the gutter outside the Red Apple grocery store. They were protesting because one of the Korean shopkeepers had quarreled with a fifty-two-year-old Haitian woman over the price of some plantains and limes and then — the woman claimed — assaulted her. The picketers occasionally chanted slogans (“Koreans out! Shut ’em down!”), screamed at blacks who were breaking the boycott (“Traitor! Traitor!”), glowered for TV cameras, and refused to speak to reporters, including my wife. “They think all reporters are racists,” said a black TV reporter. “Even me.” The racism charge was amusing — in a ghastly way. The black picketers had spent weeks shouting slogans about chopsticks and fortune cookies at their Korean targets; they had called them “yellow monkeys”; one of their major supporters was a race hustler named Sonny Carson, a convicted kidnapper who insisted last year that he wasn’t antisemitic, he was antiwhite. The Legion of the Invincibly Stupid is an equal-opportunity employer.

And yet none of this was surprising. Any student of American history knows that nativist and racist movements have been part of our social fabric since the mid-nineteenth-century heyday of the xenophobic Know-Nothing Party. And when “real” Americans didn’t blame Catholics, Jews, Italians, Greeks, or Irishmen for their own inadequacies, they blamed Asians. First the Chinese, then the Japanese. I thought of all those old hurts, insults, and humiliations as my wife and I talked to the Koreans about their lives. They told stories as old as the immigrant tradition: how they arrived without language, full of hope, first laboring for others in the same immigrant group, finally buying their own businesses, starting families, working. And working. And working.

“I buy a book, with English word,” a man named Kyung Ho Park said, after explaining that his average workday (before the boycott) was fifteen hours long. “No time for school. …”

When I was growing up, Italians, Eastern European Jews, and Greeks told these stories. There were resentments then too from the Legion of the Invincibly Stupid; ethnic quarrels; even more brutal racism than now. But well into the 1950s, cities like New York were still manufacturing centers, and there were jobs for almost anybody who wanted to work, including people like my father, an immigrant with an eighth-grade education. The city’s traditional liberalism was made possible by an economy in which more than 30 percent of the jobs were in manufacturing; that figure has dropped to 10 percent, and the town’s great generous liberal spirit is as frayed and tattered as an old coat.

One result: Immigrants like Kyung Ho Park are working in a city obsessed with fixing blame for its social and economic woes. New York is home to people of immense wealth, and they live well-defended lives in the gaudy canyons of Manhattan. But in spite of the Reagan-era economic boom, New York also contains 840,000 people who live on welfare, more than every man, woman, and child in San Francisco. They don’t often see millionaires in their neighborhoods; they do see immigrants. And in the American tradition, the wrath of some is falling upon the newest arrivals, of whom the Koreans are the most visible. Sadly, the Asian immigrants frequently look upon those customers who are welfare clients with more contempt than pity.

“I work,” one Korean said to me on Church Avenue. “They don’t work. Why do I must feed them?”

That is to say, why must I pay taxes, why must I work long hours at a difficult job, while so many will not do what I do? For years, the children and grandchildren of older immigrants have sung the same blurry refrain: We made it, why don’t they? Now you begin to hear it from the Koreans too. “You don’t like my store,” one angry Korean immigrant said to me, “then go to your own store. But they don’t have store. Too hard. Too much work.”

Such complaints can’t be dismissed glibly as the latest examples of newcomers picking up the American racist virus. On the crudest level (down on the streets), they have a certain validity. In New York, as in other American urban centers, the Third World city within the larger city depends upon the taxes and energies of others for its food, clothing, housing, education, medical care, police, fire, and sanitation services. This year’s budget for New York City is more than $27 billion, and some estimate that fully half of that immense sum is used for servicing the poor. It’s inconceivable to think of this happening in Tokyo or Seoul or Singapore.

The persistence of the virtually permanent welfare-supported underclass is the most disgraceful measure of the decline of America’s once all-powerful manufacturing plants. But most Americans don’t want to talk anymore about root causes; they just see people sitting on the stoop while they go to work. Even the most orthodox liberals now understand that welfare degrades those who receive it and infuriates those who pay for it. So it is no surprise that some poor Americans mutter paranoid theories while others look for scapegoats. More and more these days, our favorite scapegoat is the Asian.

Cheap politicians blame Japan for the nation’s economic decline; they work too hard, they save too much money, they close certain markets. Lee Iacocca growls in commercials that Americans make better cars than they do. Idiots like Donald Trump bellow, “The Japanese are ripping us off!” In movies like Rambo, Asians are mowed down by the hundreds while audiences cheer. And as usual in this country, what we are describing as a race problem is really one of class.

On Church Avenue in Brooklyn, you could feel the seething class bitterness of the black demonstrators. Earlier, they claimed that their anger wasn’t simply about the incident that set off the protest. They told various auditors that Koreans-all Koreans!-were rude to blacks, suspecting them of shoplifting, acting curt with them, refusing to touch their hands when making change. “Fuckin’ people don’t know how to treat people,” one exasperated black man said to me. “They act like every African American is a thief.”

Even some Koreans will admit that this perception has some truth to it. A few will cite cultural differences as the heart of the matter (among Koreans, they say, smiling is discouraged, direct eye contact is considered aggressive, and women are taught not to touch strangers). Others blame bitter experience in underclass neighborhoods, which led them to make racial assumptions. A harder truth is that the success of the Koreans in New York is a form of humiliation for many African Americans. You can see a cartoon version of the relationship (and the problems with manners) in Spike Lee’s sad movie, Do the Right Thing. I hear it on black talk radio and in conversations with black friends. With amazing speed, the Koreans have become Haves, while too many blacks, born here, speaking English, remain Have-Nots.

The Koreans only began coming to the United States in significant numbers after the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act finally ended the racist restrictions against immigrants from Asia. Today more than two hundred thousand Koreans are believed to be living in New York, and they own 9,500 small businesses. The Korean greengrocer has become a widely admired (if stereotypical) figure in the city’s life. And in spite of language problems and immense cultural differences, the newcomers have leapfrogged over the city’s blacks on what used to be called the ladder of economic success.

“Don’t try an’ tell me that Koreans work harder than we do,” a black man named Virgil Hills said to me a few blocks from the boycott site. “They just got advantages we don’t have.” Again, some truth here. Certainly, it’s extremely difficult for American blacks to open their own grocery stores (or other retail businesses), because so many banks redline them, refusing to provide start-up loans. But the real advantages the Koreans have are not those talked about on the street. Back home, almost all of the Koreans were middle class; that is, urban, well educated, goal oriented, imbued with the Confucian ethic. In a 1987 essay on New York’s Koreans, the sociologist Illsoo Kim cited one survey of 560 Korean householders in New York showing that 86 percent were married and living with spouses. Some 67 percent had finished college back home. Another study showed that 40 percent of Koreans who arrived in the mid-1970s had professional or technical backgrounds. American blacks with the same backgrounds have no need to open grocery stores; they have access to higher levels of American society.

But these educated Koreans — blocked from American corporate or professional life by the language barrier — have made great use of their abilities. In the greengrocer business, they have analyzed the American systems of purchase, distribution, and marketing, and made their own improvements. In addition, they get up early and stay late, usually the only formula for success. The Koreans have also expanded the sense of family beyond the essential base. In New York alone, there are twelve Korean banks, six daily newspapers in Korean, several cable channels with Korean programming, and at least three radio stations. There are almost three hundred Protestant churches in the Korean community and a burgeoning number of business groups and “prosperity associations.” This network helps bind Koreans together, allowing them to learn from one another about the sometimes scary new world in which they are living. In a way, of course, this is another version of the old “self-help” philosophy that helped older immigrants become Americans. It had its failings; many immigrants were injured or exploited by their own kind. But that system worked a hell of a lot better than state welfare. Talk to Koreans, and they tell you they would rather starve than go on welfare; that would be a loss of face. They absolutely refuse to enter the dependency culture in which so many of the American poor find themselves trapped. Those blacks who sense a certain contempt from Koreans are probably reading the signals correctly. In the Korean grocery stores, all members of the family work; most often, the business itself was set up by the pooled savings of several family members. In underclass areas, where the Korean grocer is often paid with food stamps, the American family is in disarray or doesn’t exist at all.

As it is to most working people everywhere, pride is important to the Koreans; it also shapes their reactions to trouble. Because they work so hard, they are understandably furious when kids steal from their stands. “I pay for what I eat,” one Korean told me. “They don’t want to pay. Just take.” Since many of the stores are in ghetto or marginal areas, the kids are usually black, and that shapes the way some Koreans see all blacks. In a more perfect world, they would make finer distinctions; unfortunately, they live in this world. They are also frustrated by the lack of interest American police and courts have in such petty crimes. So they often deal with shoplifters themselves. In the past two years, I’ve witnessed three separate incidents of Korean grocers chasing kids through the streets. They didn’t catch them, but when I asked for their reactions, they just shook their heads, full of contained fury. I saw the same look on the Koreans who were objects of the boycott, as they gazed out at the protesters and the TV cameras.

“I don’t understand this kind of problem,” Man Ho Park (brother of Kyung Ho) told my wife that day on Church Avenue. “So much anger. So much time doing nothing. Why not work? Why not use time for, for … improve life?”

Later, driving back slowly from the boycotted stores, we passed many other Korean groceries, wedged among the video shops and record stores and fast-food joints. Black women shopped. Children cried in strollers or gazed at the colorful displays of oranges and mangoes, bananas and grapes, yams and tomatoes. On the corners, knots of young black men talked, laughed, watched passing cars, sipped from beer cans. As we stopped for a light, one of them saw my wife looking out the window. He stared at her for a long moment. The light changed, and then slowly, almost as a matter of duty, he gave her the finger.

One rainy morning this past spring, Colin Powell went home at last to Morris High School in the South Bronx. He had been gone for thirty-seven years. But now Powell was one of the most famous generals in recent American history, thanks to the crisp poise and tough intelligence he displayed on television during the seven months of Operation Desert Shield/Storm, and he was proving that, for at least a morning, you can go home again. He stepped briskly from a limousine into a tight cocoon of security men and school officials, wearing his new celebrity lightly. He smiled. He shook hands. He ignored the small crowd of black and Latino men across the street, huddled in front of a methadone clinic. And he didn’t seem to notice the abandoned hulks of gutted buildings down the slope of Boston Road. As a man tempered by Vietnam, he has taught himself to ignore the defeats of the past. He glanced up at the school entrance, shook his head in an ironic way, and went in. I walked across the street to talk to the junkies.

“What the hell he know about bein’ down?” said a man named Roderick. “I seen him on the TV. That man’s whiter than George fuckin’ Bush! Talk so pretty! Man got everything he want, college boy, all that shit.”

Another joined in, then a third and a fourth, and soon the familiar rap was flowing. They’d drawn the wrong hand in life; they were poor and black, or poor and Hispanic, or poor and luckless, and therefore never had a chance in a World They Never Made. Their fathers had run off when they were young, or their mothers, or their girlfriends. They’d been locked up by bad cops, beaten up or flunked out or sneered at by racist schoolteachers, abused by mean Army sergeants or heartless welfare investigators or cruel bosses. Look at us, they said: Look what has been done to us. By Vietnam or racism or capitalism. I stood there for a few minutes, listening to the old familiar litany, and then fled across the street to see Powell talk to some kids.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was impressive. The core of his twenty-minute talk, delivered in a gymnasium with a broken roof, was made of platitudes: Stay in school and get a diploma; don’t take drugs, because that’s stupid. But such bromides were given some renewed power because Powell now spoke with the authority of success. In addition, he was a black man who’d come from Kelly Street, down at the bottom of the broken tundra of the South Bronx, one of the worst slums under the American flag. Certainly Powell had arrived here with luminous cards of identity. But then, after the clichés, he delivered what was probably the morning’s most important message — and its most subtle.

“If you’re black, if you’re Puerto Rican or Hispanic,” he said, “be proud of that. But don’t let it become a problem. Let it become somebody else’s problem.”

Thus spoke a man who clearly has spent his life refusing to become a victim.

Though you are black and I am white, we have been friends now for most of our adult lives. All friendships are difficult, but until the last few years, ours endured some of the most terrible strains of the past three decades. Somehow, for all that time, it didn’t matter that I was the son of bone-poor Irish immigrants and you the descendant of African slaves; we usually saw the world the same way, were enraged by the same atrocities, amused by the same hypocrisies, celebrated together the often paltry evidence of human kindness or generosity.

Yes, the accident of race was always an unavoidable presence in our friendship; after all, I met you in 1955, the year that Emmett Till was murdered in Mississippi for the terrible crime of whistling at a white woman. As the years passed, there was even more awful evidence of man’s apparently infinite capacity for stupidity and murder. But for each of us, our racial and cultural differences were a mutual enrichment, uniquely American. The country was an alloy or it was nothing. And between us there was a splendid exchange: Yeats for the blues, Joyce for Charlie Parker, O’Casey for Langston Hughes; both of us claimed Willie Mays. Somehow, we remained optimists. As young men, we had read our Camus, and we believed that it was possible to love our country and justice, too. That simple faith, with its insistence on irony, was at the heart of our friendship.

But America is older now and so are we and something has changed between us. Now irony isn’t enough. Nor is bebop. Nor Camus. There is no longer any sensible way to avoid a bitter truth: in the past few years, a shadow has fallen on the once sunny fields of our friendship.

The heart of the matter is the continued existence and expansion of what has come to be called the Underclass. You know who I mean: that group of about five million black Americans (of a total of thirty million) who are trapped in cycles of welfare dependency, drugs, alcohol, crime, illiteracy, and disease, living in anarchic and murderous isolation in some of the richest cities on the earth. As a reporter, I’ve covered their miseries for more than a quarter of a century. Moving among them, from the rotting tenements to the penal corridors of public housing to the roach-ridden caves of welfare hotels, I’ve seen moral and physical squalor that would enrage even Dickens. I’ve spoken to the damaged children. I’ve heard the endless tales of woe. I’ve seen the guns and the knives and the bodies. And in the last decade, I’ve watched this group of American citizens harden and condense, moving even further away from the basic requirements of a human life: work, family, safety, the law.

Here they come, with their steel faces and inflamed eyes, their fearful visions and apocalyptic solutions: the New Victorians. The Cold War is over and Americans are desperate for a new enemy. The New Victorians have found one and, as usual, it is other Americans.

Look there, in a museum, there are photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe. Of naked men! Of sex! And in magazines and movies and video stores, nothing but smut and filth and degradation! The New Victorians tremble at the terrifying sight of the naked female breast, the curly enticements of pubic hair, the heart-stopping reality of the human penis. Disgusting. Degrading. Moral collapse! And if the republic is to be saved, the enemy must be cast into eternal darkness. Or at least returned to the wonderful iron hypocrisies of the 19th century.

The collective public face of the New Victorians is made up of the usual suspects: Senator Jesse Helms, Pat Buchanan, the television Bible-whackers. But in the past few years, these yahoo crusaders have increasingly found themselves marching with unfamiliar allies. For there, at the front of the parade, loudly pounding the drums, is a small group of self-styled radical feminists. Sexual crusades indeed make strange bedfellows.

The unlikely Lenin of the feminist wing of the New Victorians is a 46-year-old lawyer named Catharine MacKinnon. She is a tenured professor of law at the University of Michigan, but that is a blurry job description. Basically, MacKinnon is a professional feminist. That is to say that, like a priest, a theologian or a romantic revolutionary, she is exclusively dedicated to the service of a creed. MacKinnon’s feminist vision is not limited to the inarguable liberal formulas of equal pay for equal work, complete legal and political equality and full opportunity to compete with men. Like Lenin, she doesn’t want mere reform. She wants to overthrow the entire system of what she sees as male supremacy. During the past decade, when the country shifted to the right and millions of American women rejected the harder ideologies of feminism, MacKinnon labored on with revolutionary zeal.

That zeal was shaped by the social and sexual upheavals of the Sixties and Seventies. MacKinnon was born in Minnesota, where her father was a federal judge, a major player in the state’s Republican Party. Like her mother and grandmother, Catharine MacKinnon attended Smith College. In the Seventies she went to Yale Law School, worked with the Black Panthers and rallied against the Vietnam war. But when many of her classmates moved on to the real world and its dense textures of work and family, she stayed on in New Haven and found both a focus and an engine for her life in an almost religious embrace of the women’s movement. MacKinnon’s basic formulation was simple: “Sexuality is to feminism what work is to Marxism: that which is most one’s own, yet most taken away.”

At Yale, MacKinnon created the first course in the women’s studies program but was never given tenure. For a decade she served as an itinerant lecturer or visiting professor at the best American law schools, including Yale, Chicago, Stanford and Harvard, delivering sermons on the problems of women and the law. As a legal theorist, she is credited with defining sexual harassment and was frequently cited during Justice Clarence Thomas’ confirmation hearings. As a public speaker, dripping with scorn and cold passion, she was always in demand. The elusive guarantee of tenure was finally granted at Michigan in 1989.

But for all MacKinnon’s passion and occasional brilliance, even some feminists and legal scholars who applaud her work on sexual harassment find the rest of her vision indefensible. She dismisses them all, firm in her belief that she has discovered the truth. In a series of manifestos and lawsuits, MacKinnon has defined the legal agenda of the New Victorians. Their common enemy is that vague concept: pornography. MacKinnon’s basic legal theory is that pornography is a form of sex discrimination. She says that it’s made by men for men, but it is harmful only to women. Therefore, women should have the right to sue those who produce it and sell it. Pornography, in MacKinnon’s view, is a civil rights issue.

Andrea Dworkin (author of Intercourse and Pornography: Men Possessing Women) functions as Trotsky to MacKinnon’s Lenin, providing rhetorical fire to her analytical ice. Dworkin came to speak before one of MacKinnon’s classes at the University of Minnesota in 1983 and the women have been friends and allies ever since. Here’s an example of Dworkin’s style: “Know thyself, if you are lucky enough to have a self that hasn’t been destroyed by rape in its many forms; and then know the bastard on top of you.”

Together, MacKinnon and Dworkin have had some limited successes. Hooking up at various times with such odd fellows as anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly, local opponents of the Equal Rights Amendment or various mountebanks from the religious right, they drafted antiporn ordinances for Indianapolis; Bellingham, Washington; Cambridge, Massachusetts; and Minneapolis and supported them with articles, interviews and public hearings. These proposed laws were either defeated by the voters, vetoed by local politicians or ruled unconstitutional by the courts. But the New Victorians did not surrender.

Last February, Canada’s Supreme Court ruled that MacKinnon’s basic theory on pornography was correct. It upheld a law suppressing “obscene” material that “subordinates” women, stating that “materials portraying women as a class as objects for sexual exploitation and abuse have a negative impact on the individual’s sense of self-worth and acceptance.” Yes, the court admitted, this decision limits freedom of expression. But there was a superseding need to halt “the proliferation of materials which seriously offend the values fundamental to our society.”

This obviously was a major victory for the New Victorians and for MacKinnon herself; she had worked with a Toronto women’s group on the drafting of a brief that supported the Canadian bill. The Canadian court’s decision also provided a legal model for what the New Victorians want to see done in the United States. They are now trying to pass similar legislation in Massachusetts.

MacKinnon told The New York Times: “It’s for the woman whose husband comes home with a video, ties her to the bed, makes her watch and then forces her to do what they did in the video. It’s a civil rights law. It’s not censorship. It just makes pornographers responsible for the injuries they cause.”

That is the heart of this grim little crusade. They want pornographers to disappear under the threat of civil lawsuits. But Massachusetts obviously is a limited target, the focus of parochial attention. They have grander plans for us all. Like the wonderful people who brought us Prohibition (and the Mob), MacKinnon and her allies among the New Victorians want to impose their vision and their rules on the entire country. The likes of Orrin Hatch, Arlen Specter and Alan Simpson moved Senate Bill 1521 out of committee, thus urging their colleagues in the Senate to make the furious, fear-driven visions of MacKinnon and Dworkin the law of the land.

The bill is officially called the Pornography Victims’ Compensation Act, and it would allow victims of sex crimes to sue producers and distributors of sexual material if the victims can prove the material incited the crimes. The legislation has been nicknamed the Bundy Bill, after mass killer Ted Bundy, who claimed on the eve of his execution that pornography made him do it. If it passes and is upheld in the current right-wing Supreme Court, Bundy’s final victim will surely be the First Amendment.

MacKinnon believes that in America the law is the essential tool of social change. In a narrow sense, this is certainly true. The civil rights of blacks, for example, were more radically altered by Brown vs. Board of Education than by many years of prayer, argument and human suffering. But she goes on to insist that the law is not neutral but male, conceived by men to serve the interests of male power. Today, MacKinnon insists, the law serves the interests of male supremacy. And to change the present power arrangements in the United States, the law must be used against itself.

“Our law is designed to … help make sex equality real,” MacKinnon has written. “Pornography is a practice of discrimination on the basis of sex, on one level because of its role in creating and maintaining sex as a basis for discrimination. It harms many women one at a time and helps keep all women in an inferior status by defining our subordination as our sexuality and equating that with gender.”

Surely, that assigns far more power to pornography than it could ever have. But even if you agree with its claims, the question is whether more laws are needed. MacKinnon knows that if a woman is coerced into making a porno film, the people who abused her are subject to a variety of charges, including kidnapping, assault, imprisonment and invasion of privacy. But MacKinnon and Dworkin insist the present laws are not enough. In a discussion of Minneapolis’ proposed antiporn ordinance, they said of pornographic acts: “No existing laws are effective against them. If they were, pornography would not flourish as it does, and its victims would not be victimized through it as they are.” In other words, because the present laws don’t work, add another law. Maybe that will work.

The world as MacKinnon sees it is now “a pornographic place” and, as a result, women are being held down, tied up and destroyed. “Men treat women as who they see women as being,” MacKinnon writes. “Pornography constructs who that is. Men’s power over women means that the way men see women defines who women can be. Pornography is that way. … It is not a distortion, reflection, projection, expression, fantasy, representation or symbol, either. It is a sexual reality.”

Of course, common sense tells us otherwise. The vast majority of men simply don’t use pornography to “construct” women, because the vast majority of men don’t ever see much pornography. And the vast majority of men don’t spend their days and nights dreaming of inflicting cruelties on women and then carrying them out. If they did, Americans would be up to their rib cages in blood. There are violent men and there is violent pornography (estimated by one study at about five percent of the total produced in the United States). But MacKinnon isn’t attacking only the violence she says suffuses the “pornotopia”; she is after pornography itself, as she and her allies define it.

These are personal pieces, about living and about not dying. With any luck, they won’t be the last about either subject.

I have arrived at last in that peculiar zone where I am no longer young and not yet old. This stage of a human life is called, of course, middle age. Alas, even that familiar phrase is inaccurate; at fifty-two, I am not in the middle of my life, for there is little chance that I will live to 104. But I am certainly in the middle of my adult life, and this sometimes causes personal astonishment. In the course of my time here, I have seen much of the world, loved women, fathered children, worked at several trades, committed cruelties and engaged in folly, had fine meals and good times, drowsed through summer afternoons and heard the chimes at midnight. That is to say, I have lived a life. I am far from finished with that splendid accident, but there is one enormous fact attached to the condition called middle age: I know now that the path is leading inexorably through the evening to the barn. And not far away, up ahead, perhaps over that next lavender hill, lies death.

Above all, the acceptance of certain death is what distinguishes this age of man. For some, the imminence of death creates remorse about the waste of time and opportunities; for others, fear; for a few, relief; for many, a sense of urgency. This is the time of life when men throw over careers to try painting in the South of France; they leave wives for ballerinas; they hole up in mountain cabins to read Proust; they gaze at the shotgun on the wall of the den and see only the quarry of the self. / am going to die, the man whispers to himself. Sooner than later. This dramatic sense of the inevitable doesn’t resemble the fatalism of the combat soldier, who knows that if he lives, he will still be in command of his youth. Nor does the vision of death have the dark romantic glamour it has when you are young. If you have reached middle age, you have already chosen to live. But the warning signs of decline and decay are as unavoidable as sunset. The most obvious are physical.

One summer, after a grueling winter of work, I discovered I had grown a paunch. A bathroom scale told me that I had gained only ten pounds, but the suety paunch, noticed suddenly in the window of a store, made me look like another person, some chunky middle-aged stranger going about his mundane business. The paunch would not go away, and I have been unable to summon the force of my dormant adolescent vanity to work it off. At the same time, white patches appeared in my beard and a few white hairs mysteriously sprouted from my scalp. Because I do not shave, and thus don’t engage in morning ablutions, I see my face less frequently than I did when young; these changes were sudden reminders of the inevitable.

Three years ago, I awoke with a terrible pain in my left shoulder; the day before, I had been lifting free weights just to see what I could do; I was sure I had merely pulled a muscle. But the pain went on for months, ruining sleep, aching at all hours. I assumed comical positions in bed, searching for stillness. I found myself unable to pitch quarters into the receptacles at toll booths. I thought: I might live the rest of my life with this pain. I was wrong, of course; the pain was cured with a few shots of cortisone. But the hard, invincible body I thought I possessed when young is gone.

Sometimes I hear my own labored breathing and instantly remember the emphysemic sounds of my father’s final years. Fifteen years ago I discovered with alarm that I could not read a Scoreboard without glasses; now I don spectacles to watch the evening news. In my twenties, I once worked seventy-three hours straight without sleep, belting down waterfalls of coffee, smoking too many cigarettes, listening through the nighttime hours to Symphony Sid. What I then lacked in craft I made up for with energy. Now I take naps in the afternoon. I have been a fortunate man, free of diseases, with few physical injuries. But now I go each year for the physical examination by the doctor and dread the first appearance of blood in the stool or the spot on the X ray.

Some of the minor warning signs are mental. I cannot, for example, remember any additional names or numbers. I am introduced to a stranger at a dinner party and the new name breaks into letters and flies around the room like dead leaves in an autumn wind. In the past year, I have moved with my wife into a small city apartment and a house in the country; I must carry the telephone numbers and the zip codes in my wallet. Once I hauled around in my head the batting averages of entire baseball teams; now I must search them out each day in the newspaper. My memory of the days and nights of my youth remains fine; it is last year that is a blur. It’s as if one of the directories in my brain has reached its full capacity and will accept no more bytes.

None of these small events is original to me, of course. I’m aware that some variation of them has happened to all aging human beings from the beginning of time. As a reporter I’ve witnessed much of the grief of other human beings, the astonishing variety of their final days. And I knew, watching my father get old and then die, that aging was inevitable; it had happened to him, and I’d seen it happen to my friends. Still, it was a cause of some wonder to undergo changes that had not been willed, that hadn’t enlisted my personal collaboration.

That evening, when I returned to the hotel room in Miami, the message light was blinking on the telephone like an extra pulse. I sat down wearily on the edge of the bed and dialed the operator. My wife had called. And two sources for the story I was reporting. And my doctor… my doctor? Calling me from New York? The weariness vanished. In fifteen years, he’d never once called me anywhere unless I’d called him first. A week earlier I had submitted to my annual physical. All was normal. But here he was, calling me in a hotel in Miami. I glanced at my watch: a few minutes before 7:00. Probably gone home, but I called his office anyway. He was still there. And he went straight to the point.

“Last week’s chest X ray?” he said. “Well, we looked at it again and there’s something on it we don’t like. …”

I laughed out loud. I’d been expecting some variation of this sentence for years. After all, I was a three-packs-a-day man, and at fifty-something, each year’s physical was a kind of lottery. When it was over, and I was declared healthy, I always thought: Okay, got away with it again. Now, a few days after granting me my latest pass, the doctor was suddenly taking it back.

“What don’t you like?”

“It’s small, a dot really, on the upper part of your right lung.”

“What is it?” I asked.

A pause, and then the doctor said: “When are you coming home?”