The Voices of Village
Square
HAI-AI-AI-AI-AI-AI-AI-AI-AI-AI-AI-AI-AI-AI-AI-AI-AI-AI-AI-AI-AI-AI-AI-AI-AI-AI-AI-AI-AI-AI-AI-AI-AI-AI-AI-AI-AI-AI-AI-AI-AI-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!”
O, dear, sweet Harry, with your French
gangster-movie bangs, your Ski Shop turtleneck sweater and your
Army-Navy Store blue denim shirt over it, with your Bloomsbury
corduroy pants you saw in the Manchester
Guardian airmail edition and sent away for and your sly
intellectual pigeon-toed libido roaming in Greenwich Village—is
that siren call really for you?
“Hai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-aireeeeeeeeee!”
Obviously Harry thinks so. There, in
the dusk, on the south side of Greenwich Avenue, near Nut Heaven,
which is the intersection of Greenwich Avenue, Sixth Avenue, Eighth
Street and Christopher Street, also known as Village Square, Harry
stops and looks up at the great umber tower at 10 Greenwich Avenue.
He can see windows but he can’t see through them. He gives a shy
wave and thereby becomes the eighth man in half an hour to get
conned by The Voices.
Half of them, like Harry, look like the
sort of kids who graduated in 1961 from Haverford, Hamilton or some
other college of the genre known as Threadneedle Ivy and went to
live in New York City. Here they participate in discussions
denouncing our IBM civilization, the existing narcotics laws,
tailfins and suburban housing developments, and announce to girls
that they are Searching. Frankly, they are all lonesome and hung up
on the subject of girls in New York. They all have a vision of how
one day they are going to walk into some place, usually a
secondhand bookstore on Bleecker Street west of Sixth Avenue, and
there is going to be a girl in there with pre-Raphaelite hair,
black leotards and a lambskin coat. Their eyes will meet, their
minds will meet—you know, Searching, IBM civilization and all that,
and then—
“Hai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-reeeeeeeee!”
All of a sudden old Harry is waving
away from down there on Greenwich Avenue, out front of the
Casual-Aire shop and yelling back: “Hey! who is it?”
“Hey, Harry!” the girl
yells.
“Hey, Harry!” another girl
yells.
“Hey, Harry!” still another girl
yells.
Four girls, five girls, six girls yell,
“Hey, Harry!”
Then one of them yells,
“Hai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-aireeeee! Have you got a——————for
me?”
Then another one yells, “Hey, Harry,
come on up, and————————————!)”
Harry looks like a poleaxed lamb in
that wobbly moment just before the cerebral cortex shuts off for
good. Old Harry has been searching all right, and he has had some
lubricious thoughts about what would happen after his and Dream
Girl’s eyes and mind met, but this laying it on the line like that,
right out in the middle of Nut Heaven—it was too
gamey or something.
So Harry walks away, west on Greenwich
Avenue, with the cellblock horselaughs following him, and by now,
of course, he knows he has been had.
So the girls take up new names to see
if anybody will bite:
“John—n—n—n—n—n—n—ny!”
“Hey, Bil—l—l—l—l—l—l!”
“Frankie!”
“Hi, Honey!”
“Sammy!”
“Max!”
For some reason, a name like Max breaks
everybody up, and all the girls start the cellblock horselaugh even
before they find out if there is anybody down there named Max who
is going to look up with the old yearning gawk.
The girls, these Sirens, these Voices,
are all up in the cellblocks of the Women’s House of Detention, 10
Greenwich Avenue, overlooking Village Square, and, well, what
the————, as the girls like to say, these yelling games are
something to do. The percentages are in their favor. There are
thousands of kids trooping through the intersection all the time,
and eventually a girl is going to get somebody named Harry, Johnny,
Bill, Frankie, Sammy or, affectionately, Honey.
The Women’s House of Detention is, no
doubt, a “hellhole,” as even the Corrections Department people
speak of it every time they ask for an appropriation to build a
bigger one. It is a mess: 600 women in a space meant for 400.
Teen-age girls, first offenders, some of them merely awaiting
trial, are heaped in with “institutionalized” old puggies who feel
like bigger shots inside than out. The place is filthy. It is so
bad that a convicted prostitute, narcotics user and peddler, Kim
Parker, combining, at age 35, the sins that land 80 per cent of the
girls inside 10 Greenwich Avenue, pleaded guilty to a felony rather
than a misdemeanor last October. The felony sentence might be five
years at the state prison farm, which to her was a happier prospect
than one year in the Women’s House of Detention.
Yet there is probably not another large
prison in the country that is in such intimate contact with the
outside world. The building, twelve stories high, was built in 1932
as a monument to Modern Penology. The idea was to make it look not
like a jail at all but like a new apartment building. There are
copper facings with 1930’s modern arch designs on them between the
floors. In the place of bars there are windows with a heavy
grillwork holding minute square panes. The panes are clouded, like
cataracts. Actually, the effect is more like that of the power
plant at Yale University, which was designed to resemble a Gothic
cathedral, but, in any case, it does not look like a
jail.
So here is a jail that looks like a
Yale power plant with cataracts standing out in the middle of a
community that has become a paradise for kids in New York,
Greenwich Village. The girls in the House of Detention can stand up
on the toilet bowl or something and look out the couple of hinged
window panes they have out onto all that Life among the free kids.
Right down there, off the intersection, are all the signs, Trude
Heller’s, the twist and bossa nova place, Burger Village, Hamburger
Train, Luigi’s, Lamanna Liquors, Foam Rubber City, the Captain’s
Table, Nedick’s and the swingingest Rexall drug store in New York
City. Skipping across Sixth Avenue and screaming every time the
lights change are all the bouffant bohemians, with bouffants up top
and stretch pants and elf shoes down below, and live guys in Slim
Jims and Desert boots, and aging bohemians in Avenger boots and
matching plaid poncho and slacks sets, and Modern Churchmen,
painted lulus, A-trainers and twenty-eight-year-old winos who say,
“All right, you don’t have a quarter, but if you had a quarter
would you give it to me?”
Also junkies. The same night they
conned Harry—“Hey! Who is it?”—the girls could see a kid known as
Fester stumbling out of the Rexall wringing one hand and holding
his stomach with the other. For a while Fester had folded his
sweater up into a square and knelt down in the entrance to the
Rexall with his head on the sweater, moaning. Everybody just
stepped around him. But then Fester jumped up and ran to the
cigarette counter and with a stifled shriek clouted a total
stranger in the back of the neck with his open palm. The guy just
wheeled around, still holding onto his Marlboros, shocked, and
Fester started wringing his hand, saying in his elfy voice, “My
hand stings!” and then stumbled out, holding his gut with the
other. Fester is a junky; a lot of the girls know him. There was a
time when a girl could hoist a fix up into the House of Detention
on a “fishing line” with the help of a guy like
Fester.
Well, Fester is in bad shape, but there
he is, at least, out there on the loose in Greenwich Village, where
everybody goes skipping and screaming across Sixth Avenue. The
girls have to yell to all that life down there. The girls in one
cellblock will all start yelling down there until the girl who is
the lookout gives the warning signal, sometimes “Dum-da-dum-dum”
from the old Jack Webb TV show, meaning that the turnkeys are
coming. The girls will even yell to somebody they have just been
talking to in the visitors room on the first floor on visiting
night. It is one thing to talk to somebody inside the jail. It is a
better thing to know you can still talk to them when they are back
out there on the street in the middle of things.
“Willie!”
It is not long after Harry has
disappeared west on Greenwich Avenue, and Willie has just come out
of the front door at 10 Greenwich Avenue after visiting a girl
whose name one never learns. One only hears her shrieking across
Greenwich Avenue from somewhere up there in the great cataracted
building.
“Willie! Are you gonna sell the
pants!”
There are trucks bouncing along
Greenwich Avenue and Sixth Avenue and cutting across into Greenwich
from Ninth Street, but she can make herself heard. Willie, on the
other hand, is the last of the great shoe buyers. He has on a pair
of tan triple-A’s that won’t quit. He is not ready for yelling
across Greenwich Avenue up at the Women’s House of Detention. He
gives a look at all the people walking his way past Tucker’s Cut
Rate Florist, Hamburger Train and the Village Bake
Shop.
“Are you, Willie!”
Willie tries. “I don’t know where they
are, I told yuh!”
“What!”
Willie puts a little lung into it this
time. “I told yuh! I don’t know where they are!”
“You know where they are, Willie! You
gonna sell ’em or not?”
Willie wants to get out of there. He
doesn’t want to be yelling across Greenwich Avenue to some unseen
gal in the Women’s House of Detention about selling a pair of
pants. So he gives the first guy who comes by a weak, smiley,
conspiratorial look, as if to say, Women! But the guy just stares
at him and walks slow, so he can hear more. This makes Willie mad,
and so he gives the next few people the death ray look—What you
looking at!—which starts his adrenaline flowing, which in turn puts
him in fuller, better voice.
“Aw, I don’t know where the pants are!
What you bother with the pants for!”
“You gonna sell’em,
Willie!”
“All right!”
“All right!’”
She yells it very sarcastically. “All right, Willie, all right, you
do what you want!”
“Aw, come on, honey!”
Willie wishes he hadn’t yelled that.
Now it seems like about a thousand nuts are scuttling through Nut
Heaven laughing at him and sidling looks at him standing in his tan
triple-A’s yelling at a blank building.
“Naw, you do me like you did Maureen!
Go on!”
“Listen—”
“Naw, you so fine,
Willie!”
There is a lot of laughing from the
cellblocks after that. Willie wants to vanish. All these damned
faces around here gawking at him.
“All right!” Willie yells.
“You mean it!” she yells from somewhere
up there. “You gonna sell the pants!”
“I told yuh!” Willie yells, right over
the garbage trucks, the Vespas, the Volkswagens, the people, over
the whole lumbering, flatulent mess.
“And then you coming
back!”
“All right!”
“When!”
“Soon’s I sell’em!”
“They in the closet,
Willie!”
“All right!” Willie yells, and then he
turns and walks fast down Christopher Street.
“Willie!” she yells.
“Goodbye!”
There is a kid down there wearing a big
black Borsalino hat and a George Raft–style 1930’s double-breasted
black overcoat who has got to find out what it is all about. He
runs after Willie and just asks him, straight out, and Willie blows
up and suggests by means of a homey colloquialism how he can
dispose of the whole subject, and selling the pants remains a
private affair.
And inside the Women’s House of
Detention, the girls are gathering spirit. It is eventide in a
holiday season. On the Sixth Avenue side, about four girls begin
the old song, and then, gradually, more join in:
I’m dreaming of a
white Christmas!
Just like the ones I used to know!
Where the treetops glisten!
And children listen!
To hear sleigh bells in the snow …
Just like the ones I used to know!
Where the treetops glisten!
And children listen!
To hear sleigh bells in the snow …
How touching are these words as they
drift over Sixth Avenue from the cataracts of the Women’s House of
Detention! Villagers, laden with bundles, stop over there in front
of the Kaiser clothing store and look up and listen,
silently.
“ … with every
Christmas card I write!”
By now maybe twenty or thirty people
have stopped on the avenue in a bunch, and they all have their
heads cocked, rheumy eyes turned up in the attitude that says, I am
already deeply moved and ready for more.
… may your days be
mer-reeee and bright! …
How the sound rises! Every girl on the
east side of the Women’s House of Detention, it seems like, has
joined in and taken a gulletful of air for the final line, which
comes out:
… And may all your
Christ-mases be bla-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-ack!
ONLY SOME OF THE GIRLS DON’T EVEN SAY BLACK,
THEY USE adjectives such as———,———,———and————. Others have already
given themselves up wholly to cellblock horselaughs, and soon they
all have, and now the horselaughs come shrieking out across old
Sixth Avenue to where all the obedient epopts of old-sampler
sentiment are bunched in front of Kaiser’s. That was a good hit!
Twenty or thirty of them, free squares of New York, bunched
together and all conned! gulled! faked out! put on! had! by The
Voices of Village Square.