SHORT STORIES: BROOKLYN BRIDGE – ARCH NO. 6

By Gaither Stewart

 

A chilling north wind blew in the faces of the two men as they walked down a steep block of Lexington Avenue toward 103^rd Street. Snow had fallen feather-light on the streets of East Harlem that morning. But after lunch the wind blowing across the river from Queens and the ocean had dissipated the black clouds and the winter sun had returned.

They stopped to watch a bride in white and a man in a black tuxedo emerge from a church in a side street and run toward a limousine at the curb. Merengue rhythms echoed from an alley. From time to time Manuel nodded to people huddled in the doorways. Smells of cooking corn emerged from a street-level window. A trio of Latinos standing nearby grinned at them malevolently.

“Christ all mighty!” Harold said. “I wouldn’t walk around here alone at night.”

Manuel grinned, glad his friend thought the neighborhood dangerous. “You Wasps are so provincial – and you don’t even realize it. With all your Sunday brunches and casual Fridays! Hispanics here’ve never been provincial, not even in their villages in the Dominican. But if you live in this neighborhood the rest of the city seems like abroad.”

Near the subway station Harold paused over two sidewalk graffiti. “In the theater of life you will always have your moment,” he read aloud. Then, “Tomorrow is the mystery of your destiny.”

“Yours, of course!” he said to his best friend. “Why do you do it anyway?”

Manuel shrugged and said, “Everybody needs a forum…. Over there’s my newest mural.” He pointed toward a huge painting on the side of a commercial building—four Latinos sitting on a park bench, blank looks on their thick faces, their eyes staring off into nothingness.

“Do you see what’s missing in their expressions? It’s the sense of security and expectation that marks you Anglos. All of you convinced you’re about to get rich, you in your journalism, another in day trading. People in the Barrio aren’t bothered by all that.”

The skinny, long-legged journalist laughed embarrassedly and read the text underneath the mural, “Why does this feeling of emptiness occupy so much space???”

“You ought’a be the journalist,” Harold said staring at the huge mural. “You might not be provincial … but Manny, you still live in loneliness, eh” It was an old story. Every one of the heavy figures in Manuel’s wall paintings all over north Manhattan was the reflection of his solitude.

“You exist in company,” Manuel said, a speciously sad note in his voice. “But I’m always alone. Alone in the studio, alone on the streets. Even isolated here in East Harlem. It’s an ache. Even my subjects abandon me.”

“Come on, Manny, admit it. You live to shock society. You’ll do anything to create a scandal. Your idea of the mural on the bridge is the proof. And at your age! Manny, Manny!”

At thirty-two, Manuel Sanchez Rivera was a handsome man, six feet tall, slim, and athletic. He had worn a full dark brown beard for as long as anyone could remember. Amiable and well-loved, yet, despite all his resolves, he was consciously off center in everything. Firm about qualities like honesty and punctuality, he was eccentric in appearance and behavior.

Hispanics of East Harlem said Manny only looked Latino; they treated him as a Norteamericano. But Anglos thought of him as Dominican or Puerto Rican. His best friend, the journalist Harold Beacon, with whom he had once shared an Upper West Side apartment, called him a chameleon.

Manuel’s character was shaped by his resolves not to be like his parents – resolves about speaking proper English, boyhood resolves about escaping the East Harlem ghetto, never playing baseball like half the Dominicans, overcoming his complexes toward Anglos, resolves about conquering the swaggering of his Latin pride—the “strutting,” he called it—and by a need of accomplishing feats so as to stand out from the crowd.

Yet Manuel was proud to be Hispanic. He said it helped him to appreciate better his place as a man. But since he was a boy he had been determined to overcome the limits of the Latin-ness that afflicted his parents. He used to blush when his Mexican mother and now deceased Dominican father spoke their funny English in front of his American friends. Therefore at his East Side high school and later Hunter College he had acquired better English than most Anglos in New York.

Yet he felt he didn’t belong anywhere. “I’m a stranger in a strange land,” he liked to say. Nothing seemed solid in his life. He didn’t know to which New York he should belong—he rejected both the melting pot and the ghetto. Both the rich and the poor. Belonging meant attachment, and that bewildered him. If he didn’t belong, then he had to be extraordinary.

His sense of nonbelonging, an art lover friend had once suggested, caused in him the hopelessness that infected his art. He came to believe that his loneliness was the chief source of his creative energy; therefore he cultivated his outsider image. The result was a life-long tugging in both directions, his desire to belong to something and his isolation from everything.

“That’s another reason for doing the mural on the Brooklyn Bridge!” he answered. He had visions of fame and renown, of newspaper articles about him the East Harlem artist, TV interviews, the New York muralist on the lips of public opinion. Fame would save him from displacement. Fame would make him part of the city.

“I once wrote on a sidewalk on Third Avenue that in the theater of life you will have your moment,” he said. He saw it clearly before him—the chimera of celebrity, the promise of the final treasure.

Harold laughed. “Yes, but you also wrote that the pressure of survival in the big city will make you lose sight of your dream.”

 

“Hombre, they’ll destroy it, I know,” the painter whispered like a conspirator, “but not before you get it into every newspaper in New York!”

“It has to be on the Brooklyn Bridge, eh?” Harold said loudly as they waited for the light to change at 105^th Street. Pedestrians looked at them curiously.

“Will you keep quiet!” the artist whispered, looking around furtively and pulling Harold across the street. “This is top secret. Not on the bridge, genius. On the wall of one of the arches.”

“So what’s the big deal, man?” Harold was used to the excesses of his eccentric friend whose wall paintings marked buildings all over East Harlem. Why not one on the Brooklyn Bridge?

“Not just any mural, Harry. This will be the mother of my wall paintings, my political statement. And besides, since they say the bridge can stand for another 5000 years, my name will live forever, part of its history!”

“Eternal life, eh! And Diego Rivera!” Harold wagged his finger. Manuel called the Mexican muralists his masters. “Maybe you just want to transplant Diego’s destroyed murals to the Brooklyn Bridge!”

“No, Cristo, nothing like that. The only thing I have in common with Rivera anymore is my mother’s name. He did real frescoes. I’m just a wall painter. Not even a radical. I’m not going to put Lenin in it. But we’ve got to stand up and condemn the police shooting down people on the streets.”

“The muralist movement is dead. Why do you keep doing them? Why don’t you just paint paintings? Why your Diego Rivera fever now?”

“Well, I do want to celebrate him. Today, loyal friend, is the anniversary—they destroyed his Rockefeller Center mural with the Lenin portrait in it on the night of February 10, 1934.”

“But Manny, why not paint whatever it is you wanna paint where it can last more than a day? What’s wrong with another building here in the Barrio? And why not do more of your own art?”

“You sound like Roger!”

“Forget the parrot.”

It was true. His portraits of East Side wives and West Side children was lucrative work. In his exhibits the scenes with the neighborhood characters sold well.

“This is special. Sanchez Rivera realism. A mural of contrasts! Black subway workers and super-rich basketballers, Dominican baseball players and Puerto Rican doormen and Senegalese supermarket cashiers. The Puerto Rican Parade.”

“That’s what you already do here in the Barrio, ain’t it?”

“Yes, but this time there’ll also be the usual repression. The Mayor’s cops will be there, too. That’s the story—cops gone berserk. The ones on TV every day. The same things you write about.”

Manuel respected highbrow art but he loved doing his murals for the people of East Harlem, scenes of children playing and men working against the New York landscape. It told stories to people who seldom read but, he’d begun thinking, it was too transient.

“I get the picture, Manny. The mural won’t last long but you’ll become a celebrity. You got a name for it yet?”

“Yeah, I’ll call it ‘A Hymn to the City.’”

 

They turned into 106^th Street and stopped in front of a four-story red brick building where Manuel occupied the ground floor. A west wind was blowing, smelling of drains. At one end of the wide street, the railroad. At the other, the Triborough Bridge. Distance was in the offing. Manuel’s East Harlem was open and international compared to the high-rise, encapsulating West Side Apartments where he and Harold had lived on the 20^th floor. Where he couldn’t hear the rain and never knew what the temperature was outside. Where he had to turn on the TV to find out what was happening around him.

“It’s a comfortable feeling,” he said. “This neighborhood’s a world. That’s why I came back … and the idea that I can easily leave again.”

“And never do!” Harry said.

“We’ll see about that. My problem is that crazy Roger. A bad traveler.”

“Held down by a parrot?” For years he’d kidded his friend about his relationship with his Dominican parrot.

“Roger hates it when I leave him at Mother’s because she keeps him in a cage. He says, ‘Can’t talk, can’t talk’. And it’s true, in the cage at Mother’s, he forgets everything he knows.”

“Knows? You mean he tells you why he doesn’t like it at your mother’s?

“That bird knows many things. He’s always asking, ‘Where’s Harold? Where’s Harold?’ Come on in an ask him something.”

The white sun shone like a spotlight through the patio doors illuminating the apartment behind the street-front studio. Manuel had removed doors and walls and cut out odd-shaped windows in order to capture light from between the surrounding buildings, and converted the ground floor into a loft. It was furnished eclectically with antiques and modern furniture, overflowing bookshelves, and walls lined with paintings. A large print of a Diego Rivera mural hung on the wall over a long oaken table. The room was warm and the smell of incense strong although a triangular window on a sidewall was wide open. A Manuel Sanchez Rivera maxim written in big black letters hung on a rear wall–YOU CAN SELL YOUR SOUL AND NOT EVEN KNOW IT.

Posed on a perch erected on an upright piano facing the patio, Roger’s red, green and yellow colors were resplendent in a shard of sunlight.

“Hola, Roger, how ya doin’ old friend?” Manuel called.

“I’m Roger Dodger. Hi, Yankee Doodle. Hi, Harold,” Roger answered in his high, clear voice. The parrot cocked his head to one side, seemed to think a moment, and added, “About time!”

“You see what I mean?” Manuel said. “He’s mad if I stay away too long. Mad if I don’t respect his privacy. It’s hard to know what he wants.”

“I want water,” Roger said, nodding in the direction of an empty bowl on the piano. As if in a sudden pique, he turned his back on the two men, muttering to himself and throwing glances at them over a fluttering wing.

“He’s pissed,” Harold said.

“Careful!” Manuel whispered. “He’s sensitive too.”

“Pissed!” Roger screeched. “I want water.”

“He’s as bad as your mother,” Harold said.

“I hate mother, I hate mother.”

“What? Why?” Harold asked. “Why do you hate mother?”

“Mother stupid,” Roger growled.

“Incredible! Why this is conversation. I thought you lived alone, Manny!”

“Alone,” Roger yelled, and cocked his head in contemplation. “Yankee Doodle, Roger Dodger, Diego Rivera. Together.” Then, after a pause, the bird added, “I hate murals.”

“What!” Harold yelled back. “Do you teach him all this stuff, Manny?”

“He’s got a memory like an elephant.”

“He doesn’t even sound like a parrot.”

“He’s an art critic in disguise.”

Manuel sat a bowl of water on the piano. Put out himself, he prodded Harry into his country-style kitchen-living room-study and closed the door. “I don’t want him to hear us talk. He hates to hear me say the word ‘mural.’”

“Why does he hate murals so much? You sure you didn’t teach him that?”

“Of course not! I taught him ‘I hate’ and he adds the rest. One day I took him up on a scaffold to watch me paint a mural, and so he could get some fresh air. I had him in a cage. He squawked and yelled for a while and then didn’t speak for days. Since then he says he hates murals.”

“Crazy! Does he hate your murals, or just the cage?”

“He hates my murals as he hates Diego Rivera. He thinks I should be a real painter. Oils on canvas! But we don’t agree on anything. I love black and rose colors. He turns his back on black and loves yellow and green. I hate the wind and love the rain. He listens to the wind like music and goes into black depression when it rains.”

 

Manuel sat down at the kitchen table. The familiar weakness was creeping up his legs. It would soon hit his stomach and the nausea would arrive. It was his fears. Fears of appearing contrived, fears of plagiarism, of insincerity, of provincialism.

“Harry, right now I need something special. Something … unifying. Justification for my mural. Maybe I oughta forget it. Forget all my wall paintings and concentrate on real art … as Roger advises. But the truth is, Harry, I’m afraid I’m just a neighborhood portrait painter. Besides, ‘political statement’ sounds pretentious.”

The mural could never bring him the satisfaction he’d imagined. Harry must be right. It was his childish sense of transgression. The dare of the forbidden. A silly mural they will erase as if it never existed.

“But what will I have risked if I do the mural? Nothing! Not even pride.”

“You still have to risk, eh! Manny, what do you expect? Life’s just not dangerous where we live. We’re not threatened. We’re not risking anything. We don’t have to.”

“You Anglos just don’t understand! Life is risk. I need risk like you need security.”

Harry was certain of the answers because he knew who he was. He felt secure. But he, Manuel Sanchez Rivera, neither Anglo nor Hispanic, needed risk to be himself. But did he mean risk with a net? Was he afraid to do it? Afraid not to do it? And anyway, like Harry says, what dangers would he ever encounter in his secure life in this secure society? Danger existed chiefly in his dreams, the dark bullies whose threat is their physical force, who menace his destruction if he disobeys on his wild nocturnal flights. On his flights from all his meaningless commitments.

Once commitment was fraught with real dangers. Theirs was real commitment—the desaparecidos in Santo Domingo, in Chile, in Argentina, dumped in the ocean to the sharks. In his daydreams he was one of them. But in his secure reality it was hard to imagine himself under fire for his origins, for his art, for his actions, for his beliefs, for his words written on the sidewalks of New York … for this mural.

During sleepless nights he conjured up terrifying images, veiled threats from a pitiless authority while shadowy assassins circle and friends desert him. A wonderful image, a man on the run.

An old image now isolated in his painting called Great Sadness– hanging on the wall near Roger’s perch passed before him. A blind black man, a Dominican, tapping the sidewalk with a yellow cane in one long thin hand adorned with pink nails, with the other hand guiding a pale white man hunched over a metal walker. He was that blind black man. He was the stroke victim too. He was his own father. It was the sadness of both the lost and the distance between them.

Manuel regretted he had no movement to join.

The faces of the mixed couples peopling his paintings filled Manuel with hope—a tall thin white boy and a squat black girl staring at each other with love in their eyes.

And there he is, Manuel Sanchez Rivera, the outsider, in the security of the arms of the North American Republic. Where the masses are less than masses. Where fashion rules. Where only faintly, like another’s heartbeat, the past struggles to exist. Where the present obliterates. Where fear is banned, where security reigns.

“No, Harry, Diego Rivera’s mural isn’t for me. Really! I have to depict real life in this real city.”

He had too much memory! Memory of his old fears of being in life only Hispanic. His fear of having only one life. Sometimes he tired of those youthful fears and put his hopes in a future time when he wouldn’t have to battle. Yet while he waited he would continue to narrate the history of a people, ghetto and melting pot, shorn of the rhetoric of a splendid future.

 

Silence reigned in the house on 106^th Street. His tail feathers pointed toward Manuel’s worktable, the bird refused to eat or drink, and again and again bitched, “I hate mural.” Then, “sell your soul, sell your soul, sell your soul.”

“Silenzio, hombre!” Manuel said to irritate the bird who abhorred foreign languages.

“You’re only a parrot,” he added, while Roger screeched, “shut up, shut up.”

That bird believes he’s my conscience!

“I’ll paint murals if I like! It’s not strutting. Hombre, I’m telling stories. Just because you hate Diego Rivera! I should give you to Mother!”

Hispanics are right. Parrots are supernatural. Maybe he’s Satan. Looking at me with those crazy crossed eyes. He seems to see right into me. As if he knew me better than I know myself.

“Only a parrot, only a parrot!” The bird’s voice was filled with venom and sarcasm. “I hate Mother. I hate mural.”

“Come on, Roger, let’s make peace.” Manuel said softly, on purpose using the word “peace,” a linguistic trick that always stumped the bird.

“Piece! I want a piece of cake. A piece of cake,” Roger said craftily, shifting around on his ugly oversized feet to face him.

“Cristo, I’m sorry I taught you that word! You just parrot it—want, want, want.”

“Roger Dodger!” The bird altered his voice in imitation of a parrot.

Spellbound by the beady eyes, Manuel stared at him and had the crazy thought that he didn’t know Roger at all. They looked at each other as if they shared secrets of behavior that neither wanted to bring out into the open. He knew the parrot provoked him on purpose.

“You know, Roger, the truth is, you’re just an extension of me. My alter ego. You can’t understand that, I know. Because you’re not autonomous, that’s your problem.”

“I hate mother,” Roger hissed, his unwavering eyes fixed in Manuel’s. “I hate mural.”

“What’s Mother got to do with it? This is between you and me. You don’t even know who you are. And you’re … you’re a nuisance.”

“Nuisance, nuisance,” echoed through the room, while Manuel wondered if he did teach Roger all that and why he stooped to quarreling with a cross-eyed, pigeon-toed beast … even if he was godlike. The bird had a demonic hold on him.

“Yankee Doodle paint mural,” Roger said. “Strutting, strutting,” he sang, and with a flap of his multicolored wings, turned back toward the wall.

 

On a late morning in March, after having made another inspection of arch no. 6, Manuel addressed a cop controlling traffic on City Hall Square.

“How ya doin’!” he said in his best New York accent. “Can you give me some information?”

“How can I help you?” the cop said diffidently. He was a big man, a red face and blue eyes.

“I’m writing a story about New York murals. I was just wondering if an artist could get away with painting a mural on the walls under the bridge? Would he be caught, do you think? Would the mural be destroyed?”

“Destroyed? Do you mean painted with or without permission?”

“Without!”

“A political statement or a personal statement?”

“Both.”

“Na, he could probably get it on the wall … during the night. Hardly anybody goes under the bridge after dark, but someone would notice it soon. It might last a day or two. “

 

He would have about four hours of work time, from about 1 to 5 a.m. Harry would drive him in his Cherokee, manage the materials and serve as lookout. And at dawn they would photograph the finished mural. Harry had rallied media friends for coverage of the story.

The clou would be the calculated destruction of his mural by the Mayor’s men. The “death of art” was the moment to record. Manuel Sanchez’ mural would get more play than Diego Rivera’s did.

Under the watchful eye of Roger who, Manuel knew, feared he was packing for a trip and from time to time repeated his undying hate for Mother and murals, he distributed sixty-four cans of spray paints in six canvas bags. He laughed toward the parrot as he stashed in the wide pockets of a fishing jacket two flashlights and extra batteries, two tape measures, turpentine and cloths for cleaning, spatulas and putty knives, and boxes of white and yellow crayons for tracing onto the wall the sketch he’d drawn on four thick sheets of cardboard representing the four surfaces of the 15’ x 10’ mural.

The parking space on the west side of the bridge behind City Hall was deserted and only dimly lit by scattered street lamps. They were dressed in black—black pants and sweaters, black New York Yankee baseball caps and black sneakers. They deposited their stuff at the fence around the arch, under a big No Trespassing sign. Manuel placed the ladder against the fence, ran up agilely, and jumped down inside. Propped against the center of the wall, he made his calculations. Harold held the mock-up and illuminated the wall. In long strokes Manuel traced the quadrangles of A Hymn to New York City.

As his narrative unfolded he began to feel his accustomed sense of possessiveness. Whatever the mural’s artistic value and despite Roger’s criticism, it came from him. His personal statement. This was his city. He could do with it as he liked. He hummed to himself as his desire grew, delighting and confusing him. His fears were passing. He would’ve liked to sing. He was on horseback. He was riding a girder high over the city. Here it all was, and the treasure was emerging there under arch no. 6. He didn’t care about effect, results, critique, resonance. Yet like all his East Harlem wall paintings this was to be his only for a short while. But for the moment all his art was centered here. He was distilling the real life of the city.

Mesmerized in the darkness under the arch, he hardly noticed the shadow of Harry handing him cans of spray or the thermos of hot coffee. He was unaware of the city lights, of the muffled sounds of traffic on the ramps above them or of the sirens from around police headquarters.

He smiled when Harold said, “wait!” and turned off the flashlight. There were footsteps. A shadow passed on the street, stopped at the opening of the arch, and seemed to listen, lit a cigarette, and moved slowly back up the hill toward City Hall.

“I’m painting the history, past, present and future of the city,” he whispered.

From clouds and nocturnal mists of memory emerged outlines of arriving ships—they were the Anglo-Saxons and the Dutch. Ghostly silhouettes of Indians with their indistinct faces painted white looked toward the sea. Out of ocean mists came waves of blacks, with round faces and white frightened eyes. New houses crept up the island of Manahatta like waves of the sea. Blue and gray uniforms and cannons and flags and luxurious mansions rose from the ground. Layer after layer, boatloads of dark foreigners with cardboard suitcases and packed ships departing with soldiers, railroads like spokes of a wheel and subway tracks in tunnels, parks with mansions on one side, slums on the other, dandies and rag pickers. The colors were speaking, crying and screaming, brilliant under powerful searchlights from above, the colors of the skins, white, yellow, red, brown, black. Palaces, cinemas and vaudeville halls, beer parlors, art galleries, train stations and stadiums, ships on white rivers turning black, smoke and steam, pale women and silent girls seated in long lines of old urban factories.

In the night his story was exploding onto the walls of arch no. 6. The banks, the Stock Exchange façade shrouded in ticker tape and bands of strikers whose ranks are gradually transformed into homeless sleeping in doorways, in parks, in subway stations. And in the lower right corner highlighted by Harry’s flashlight ranks of policemen in blue face to face with legions of the city’s homeless.

He let his hands fall. The weakness crept up his legs. He leaned backward and reviewed the last scene. Again he examined his mock-up, and frowned.

“And the portraits?” Harold asked.

“I’ve got another idea,” he said, crawling down from the ladder. “Watch this!” He moved the ladder back to the center, gathered up his sprays and crawled back up.

With the dexterity of a dreamer he transferred to the wall a new scene, impromptu and unplanned—the Mayor himself surrounded by a phalange of policemen and, crouched in front, four bulky, hard-faced men with blazing guns in each of their hands, over the caption in white letters– “Killer cops.”

Across the bottom, the artist spayed in big red letters his signature—Manuel Sanchez Rivera.

 

Waiting for the dawn they drank draft beers in a café opposite City Hall in a room full of tired-faced cops. They readied their cameras and giggled constantly.

“We should do this more often,” Manuel said and laughed loud, regarding the policemen benevolently. His strength had returned.

“Do what?” Harold roared.

“Come downtown and stay out all night,” Manuel shouted, and they both laughed and slapped the white plastic table.

“Roger’s gonna be real pissed,” Harold said.

“Fuck Roger … you know!” Manuel paused, then frowned. Fucking conscience! His hilarity passed as quickly as it had arrived. He fiddled with his fingers and cracked his knuckles. “But maybe he’s right about me—this mural stuff is only strutting, you know.”

When the sun began rising from the oceans beyond Brooklyn they made the photos, Harold with great enthusiasm, Manuel now disinterested. The journalists, photographers and TV crews arrived and interviewed the now blasé artist on the spot. New York 1 carried the story all morning. At noon ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox reported the events. CNN would analyze the mural as a symptom of “winds of change in New York.” THE NEW YORK TIMES, NEW YORK POST, DAILY NEWS, THE NEW YORK OBSERVER, VILLAGE VOICE, WALL STREET JOURNAL and USA TODAY carried photographs of the mural and stories about A Hymn to New York City. One journalist compared it to Diego Rivera’s ill-fated Rockefeller Center mural.

A few days later, only Harold and a CNN cameraman were on hand for the destruction of Manuel’s mural. Only Harold published a photo of city sprayers at work.

From time to time Manuel came back downtown to look at arch no.6 where on the wall the distorted figure of the Mayor and the four cops and the faded word “compassion” remained visible the entire summer.

______________

Senior Editor GAITHER STEWART, veteran journalist and political observer, currently fills the post of European correspondent with The Greanville Post.  His critically-acclaimed espionage novel The Trojan Spy, part one of the Europe trilogy, is being published by Punto Press.

 

 

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