The Stochastic Man

9

So early in ‘96 we set up our headquarters on the ninth floor of an old weatherbeaten Park Avenue tower with a really spectacular view of the swollen mid-section of the Pan Am Building, and we set about the job of making Paul Quinn mayor of this absurd city. It didn’t look hard. All we had to do was assemble the proper number of qualifying petitions — a cinch, you can get New Yorkers to sign anything — and give our man enough citywide exposure to make him known throughout the five boroughs before the primary. The candidate was attractive, intelligent, dedicated, ambitious, self-evidently capable; therefore we had no image-making to do, no plastic-man cosmetic jobs.

The city had been dismissed as moribund so often, and so often had shown new twitches of unmistakable vitality, that the clichй concept of New York as a dying metropolis had finally gone out of fashion. Only fools or demagogues raised the point now. New York was supposed to have perished a generation ago, when the civil-service unions got hold of the town and began squeezing it mercilessly. But the long-legged go-getter Lindsay resurrected it into Fun City, only to have the fun turn into nightmare as skeletons armed with grenades began emerging from every closet. That was when New York found out what a real dying city was like; the previous period of decline started looking like a golden age. The white middle class split in a panicky exodus; taxes rose to repressive levels to keep essential services going in a city where half the people were too poor to pay the costs of upkeep; major businesses responded by whisking their headquarters off to leafy suburbs, further eroding the tax base. Byzantine ethnic rivalries exploded in every neighborhood. Muggers lurked behind every lamppost. How could such a plaguey city survive? The climate was hateful, the citizenry malign, the air foul, the architecture a disgrace, and a cluster of self-accelerating processes had whittled the economic base alarmingly.

But the city did survive, and even flourished. There was that harbor, there was the river, there was the happy geographical placement that made New York an indispensable neural nexus for the whole eastern coast, a ganglionic switchboard that couldn’t be discarded. More: the city had attained, in its bizarre sweaty density, a kind of critical mass, a level of cultural activity that made it a breeder reactor for the soul, self-enriching, self-powering, for there was so much happening even in a moribund New York that the city simply could not die, it needs must go on throbbing and spewing forth the fevers of life, endlessly rekindling and renewing itself. An irrepressible lunatic energy ticked on and on at the city’s heart and always would.

Not dying, then. But there were problems.

You could cope with the polluted air with masks and filters. You could deal with the crime the way you did with blizzards or summer heat, negatively by avoidance, positively by technological counterattack. Either you carried no valuables, moved with agility in the streets, and stayed indoors behind many locks as much as possible, or you equipped yourself with space-positive alarm systems, with anti-personnel batons, with security cones radiating from circuitry in the lining of your clothing, and went out to brave the yahoos. Coping. But the white middle class was gone, probably forever, and that caused difficulties that the electronics boys couldn’t fix. The city by 1990 was largely black and Puerto Rican, dotted with two sorts of enclaves, one kind dwindling (the pockets of aging Jews and Italians and Irish) and one steadily expanding in size and power (the dazzling islands of the affluent, the managerial and creative classes). A city populated only by rich and by poor experiences certain nasty spiritual dislocations, and it will be a while before the emerging non-white bourgeoisie is a real force for social stability. Much of New York glitters as only Athens, Constantinople, Rome, Babylon, and Persepolis glittered in the past; the rest is a jungle, a literal jungle, fetid and squalid, where force is the only law. It is not so much a dying city as an ungovernable one, seven million souls moving in seven million orbits under spectacular centrifugal pressures that threaten at any moment to make hyperbolas of us all.

Welcome to City Hall, Mayor Quinn.

Who can govern the ungovernable? Someone always is willing to try, God help him. Out of our hundred-odd mayors some have been honest and many have been crooks, and about seven all told were competent and effective administrators. Two of those were crooks, but never mind their morals, for they knew how to make the city work as well as anybody. Some were stars, some were disasters, and they all, in the aggregate, helped to nudge the city toward its ultimate entropic debacle. And now Quinn. He promised greatness, combining, so it seemed, the force and vigor of a Gottfried, the glamour of a Lindsay, the humanity and compassion of a LaGuardia.

So we put him into the New Democratic primary against the feckless, helpless DiLaurenzio. Bob Lombroso milked the banking houses for millions, George Missakian put together a string of straightforward TV spots featuring many of the celebrities who had been at that party, Ara Ephrikian bartered commissionerships for support on the clubhouse level, and I dropped in at headquarters now and then with simple-minded projective reports that said nothing more profound than

play it safe

keep on truckin’

we’ve got it made.

Everybody expected Quinn to sweep the field, and in fact he took the primary with an absolute majority in a list of seven. The Republicans found a banker named Burgess to accept their nomination. He was unknown, a political novice, and I don’t know if they were feeling suicidal or simply being realistic. A poll taken a month before the election gave Quinn 83 percent of the vote. That missing 17 percent bothered him. He wanted it all, and he vowed to take his campaign to the people. No candidate in twenty years had done the motorcade-and-handshake routine here, but he insisted on overruling a fretful assassination-minded Mardikian. “What are my chances of being gunned down if I go for a stroll in Times Square?” Quinn demanded of me.

I didn’t pick up death vibes for him and I told him so.

I also said, “But I wish you wouldn’t do it, Paul. I’m not infallible and you’re not immortal.”

“If it isn’t safe in New York for a candidate to meet the voters,” Quinn replied, “we might as well just use the place for a Z-bomb testing sight.”

“A mayor was murdered here only two years ago.”

“Everybody hated Gottfried. He was an Iron Cross fascist if anybody ever was. Why should someone feel like that about me, Lew? I’m going out.”

Quinn went forth and pressed the flesh. Maybe it helped. He won the biggest election victory in New York history, an 88 percent plurality. On the first of January, 1998, an unseasonably mild, almost Floridian day, Haig Mardikian and Bob Lombroso and the rest of us in the inner circle clustered close on the steps of City Hall to watch our man take the oath of office. Vague disquiet churned inside me. What did I fear? I couldn’t tell. A bomb, maybe. Yes, a shiny round black comic-strip bomb with a sizzling fuse whistling through the air to blow us all to mesons and quarks. No bomb was thrown. Why such a bird of ill omen Nichols? Rejoice! I remained edgy. Backs were slapped, cheeks were kissed. Paul Quinn was mayor of New York, and happy 1998 to all.