The American Shore - Samuel R. Delany

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of group therapy with other jejune eleven-year-olds was going to get him his stripes in the major leagues of suffering, crime, and resurrection. Only a bonafide crime would do that, and of all the crimes available16 murder certainly carried the most prestige, as no less an authority than Loretta Couplard was ready to attest, Loretta Couplard being not only the director and co-owner of the Lowen School17 but the author, as well, of two nationally televised scripts, both about famous murders of the 20th Century.18 They’d even done a unit in social studies on the topic: A History of Crime in Urban America.19

      The first of Loretta’s murders was a comedy involving Pauline Campbell, R.N., of Ann Arbor, Michigan, circa 1951, whose skull had been smashed by three drunken teenagers. They had meant to knock her unconscious so they could screw her, which was 1951 in a nutshell.20 The eighteen-year-olds, Bill Morey and Max Pell, got life; Dave Royal (Loretta’s hero) was a year younger and got off with twenty-two years.21

      Her second murder was tragic in tone and consequently inspired more respect, though not among the critics, unfortunately. Possibly because her heroine, also a Pauline22 (Pauline Wichura), though more interesting and complicated, had also been more famous in her own day and ever since. Which made the competition, one best-selling novel and a serious film biography, considerably stiffer.23 Miss Wichura had been a welfare worker in Atlanta, Georgia, very much into environment and the population problem, this being the immediate pre-Regents period when anyone and everyone was legitimately starting to fret. Pauline decided to do something, viz., reduce the population herself and in the fairest way possible. So whenever any of the families she visited produced one child above the three she’d fixed, rather generously, as the upward limit, she found some unobtrusive way of thinning that family back to the preferred maximal size. Between 1989 and 1993 Pauline’s journals (Random House, 1994) record twenty-six murders, plus an additional fourteen failed attempts.24 In addition she had the highest welfare department record in the U.S. for abortions and sterilizations among the families whom she advised.25

      “Which proves, I think,” Little Mister Kissy Lips had explained one day after school to his friend Jack, “that a murder doesn’t have to be of someone famous to be a form of idealism.”26

      But of course idealism was only half the story: the other half was curiosity.27 And beyond idealism and curiosity there was probably even another half, the basic childhood need to grow up and kill someone.28

      They settled on the Battery29 because, one, none of them ever were there ordinarily; two, it was posh and at the same time relatively, three, uncrowded, at least once the night shift were snug in their towers tending their machines. The night shift seldom ate their lunches down in the park. And, four, because it was beautiful,30 especially now at the beginning of summer.31 The dark water, chromed with oil, flopping against the buttressed shore; the silences blowing in off the Upper Bay, silences large enough sometimes that you could sort out the different noises of the city behind them, the purr and quaver of the skyscrapers, the ground-shivering mysterioso of the expressways, and every now and then the strange sourceless screams that are the melody of New York’s theme song; the blue-pink of sunsets in a visible sky; the people’s faces, calmed by the sea and their own nearness to death, lined up in rhythmic rows on the green benches.32 Why even the statues looked beautiful here, as though someone had believed in them once, the way people must have believed in the statues in the Cloisters, so long ago.33

      His favorite was the gigantic killer-eagle landing in the middle of the monoliths in the memorial for the soldiers, sailors, and airmen killed in World War II. The largest eagle, probably, in all Manhattan.34 His talons ripped apart what was surely the largest artichoke.35

      Amparo, who went along with some of Miss Couplard’s ideas,36 preferred the more humanistic qualities of the memorial (him on top and an angel gently probing an enormous book with her sword)37 for Verrazano,38 who was not, as it turned out, the contractor who put up the bridge39 that had, so famously, collapsed.40 Instead, as the bronze plate in back proclaimed:41

       IN APRIL 1524THE FLORENTINE-BORN NAVIGATORVERRAZANOLED THE FRENCH CARAVEL LA DAUPHINETO THE DISCOVERY OFTHE HARBOR OF NEW YORKAND NAMED THESE SHORES ANGOULEMEIN HONOR OF FRANCIS I KING OF FRANCE 42

      “Angouleme” they all agreed, except Tancred, who favored the more prevalent and briefer name, was much classier. Tancred was ruled out of order and the decision became unanimous.43

      It was there, by the statue, looking across the bay of Angouleme to Jersey,44 that they took the oath that bound them to perpetual secrecy. Whoever spoke of what they were about to do, unless he were being tortured by the Police, solemnly called upon his co-conspirators to insure his silence by other means. Death.45 All revolutionary organizations take similar precautions, as the history unit on Modern Revolutions had made clear.46

      How he got the name:47 it had been Papa’s theory that what modern life cried out for was a sweetening of old-fashioned sentimentality. Ergo, among all the other indignities this theory gave rise to, scenes like the following:48 “Who’s my Little Mister Kissy Lips!” Papa would bawl out, sweetly, right in the middle of Rockefeller Center (or a restaurant, or in front of the school), and he’d shout right back, “I am!” At least until he knew better.49

      Mama had been, variously, “Rosebud,” “Peg O’ My Heart,” and (this only at the end) “The Snow Queen.”50 Mama, being adult, had been able to vanish with no other trace than the postcard that still came every Xmas postmarked from Key Largo, but Little Mister Kissy Lips was stuck with the New Sentimentality willy-nilly.51 True, by age seven he’d been able to insist on being called “Bill” around the house (or, as Papa would have it, “Just Plain Bill”).52 But that left the staff at the Plaza to contend with,53 and Papa’s assistants, schoolmates, anyone who’d ever heard the name.54 Then a year ago, aged ten and able to reason, he laid down the new law—that his name was Little Mister Kissy Lips, the whole awful mouthful, each and every time. His reasoning being that if anyone would be getting his face rubbed in shit by this it would be Papa, who deserved it. Papa didn’t seem to get the point,55 or else he got it and another point besides, you could never be sure how stupid or how subtle he really was, which is the worst kind of enemy.56

      Meanwhile at the nationwide level the New Sentimentality had been a rather overwhelming smash.57 “The Orphans,” which Papa produced58 and sometimes was credited with writing,59 pulled down the top Thursday evening ratings for two years. Now it was being overhauled for a daytime slot.60 For one hour every day our lives were going to be a lot sweeter,61 and chances were Papa would be a millionaire or more as a result. On the sunny side this meant that he’d be the son of a millionaire.62 Though he generally had contempt for the way money corrupted everything it touched, he had to admit that in certain cases it didn’t have to be a bad thing. It boiled down to this (which he’d always known): that Papa was a necessary evil.63

      This was why every evening when Papa buzzed himself into the suite he’d shout out, “Where’s my Little Mister Kissy Lips,” and he’d reply, “Here, Papa!”64 The cherry on this sundae of love65 was a big wet kiss, and then one more for their new “Rosebud,” Jimmy Ness. (Who drank, and was not in all likelihood going to last much longer.)66 They’d all three sit down to the nice family dinner Jimmyness had cooked, and Papa would tell them about the cheerful, positive things that had happened that day at CBS, and Little Mister Kissy Lips would tell all about the bright fine things that had happened to him. Jimmy would sulk.67 Then Papa and Jimmy would go somewhere or just disappear into the private Everglades of sex,68 and Little Mister Kissy Lips would buzz himself out into the corridor (Papa knew better than to be repressive about hours),69 and within half an hour he’d be at the Verrazano statue70 with the six other Alexandrians,71 five

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