The day was set, April 17th, a Wednesday. Trains and buses, even airlines offered free tickets for the publicity it gave them, and many people who had cars took drifters in their towns to the nearest bus terminal or airport. The White House had expected a few thousand, perhaps five thousand, and intended to deploy plainclothes guards as well as the National Guard and the police to keep the crowds in order. But Washington, DC had had only some twelve hours’ notice that fifty to sixty thousand would probably arrive.
To make matters worse, it was raining. Tent-like roofs were put up over the long tables of sandwiches and soft drinks on the White House lawns, but a couple of tents collapsed before noon, causing panic among the men and women caught underneath. Many thought they had been invited to live in the White House, and were angry at learning, after having come all this way, that all that was being offered them was cold food and iced tea out in the rain. Hundreds began drifting toward the White House—where was the President, after all?—and, when the guards took a stand against them, fights broke out, bullets rubber and real began to fly. The National Guard lost its temper, and bashed some heads with rifle butts. Helicopters dropped armed reinforcements by rope ladder close to the White House, and these descended on to the heads of people.
Meanwhile yet more were arriving by bus or on foot, because of the congestion of vehicles and troop carriers.
“Let us in our home!” some shouted, and this became a chant.
There were screams, female and male, as people were trampled.
Helicopters and White House door guards released tear gas bombs, with an idea of driving the horde away from the White House but, due to the wind, the gas affected the troops as much as anyone else. Then the White House doors yielded. All this was seen on TV across the nation, and viewers yelled, “Look!—Good!” or “How horrible!” or merely laughed wildly, depending on their turn of mind.
The tear gas, invisible but smarting to the eyes, seemed merely to animate the masses on the wet lawns. Machinegun fire came from within the White House. A TV news helicopter collided with a military helicopter and both fell on the crowd, but did not burst into flame.
“Welcome—welcome—and be calm, please!” the President’s voice said for at least the fourth time on a recorded message boomed out from the White House balcony, where only armed soldiers stood ready to fire. The President at that moment was hiding in a steel vault in the White House basement. The vault was specially made for such an emergency, with inside controls for opening, and food and water for two or three people for a week. He had been hidden away like a Queen Bee in the center of her hive, and a hive it was with derelicts, the mentally deranged, the half-blinded from tear gas, creeping up and down the fine staircases, opening the doors to every room. Despite the flying bullets and the falling figures, more pushed through the main doors.
The National Guard and the Marines, having shot up all their ammunition, became scared for the good reason that they were outnumbered and seemed to be fighting suicidal masses. They were now using their rifles as battering rams against the people and as staves to defend themselves. TV crews in their helicopters overhead were filming, reporting: “It looks like a battlefield here! The fallen—the fallen are mostly around the White House front porch, but—Yes! More National Guards are coming up from the streets now, trying to push forward and steer people off the lawn. We’ve never seen anything—anything like it, not even the hunger march in the Hoover Administration—surely! . . .”
The White House lawn activities, when they became rough between 2 and 3 p.m., interrupted an after-lunch show that Miss Tiller and Bert were giving in a large Boston hotel. In a way, the laughter that these two had started continued, as the people at the tables were treated to a big-screen TV viewing.
“These are the—the—” yelled the emcee, at a loss for words.
“The loonies!” someone supplied, and there was loud laughter, because the march today to Washington had been well publicized.
“The Moonies, the zombies, the muggers—”
“Let’s hope!” cried a woman.
“At least they won’t be hanging around our neighborhoods tonight!”
“Yee-hoo!” Applause!
“Where’s the President in all this?”
“Bet he’s hiding in the wine cellar!” someone yelled back.
Miss Tiller and Bert were equally rapt, eyes on the big screen.
“Isn’t it shocking!” Miss Tiller said to Bert, despite the fact that he couldn’t hear her. “People behaving like that! The rabble!—They consider themselves unemployed, I suppose. What this country needs is slaves!” Her voice rose as she realized that she wished to address her audience, which happened to be a real estate dealers’ convention, She stepped into the center of the floor, and the spot man put the light on her. She said in a loud and elegant voice: “Look at that rabble! What this country needs is slaves—as in my country—Egypt! This could never happen in Egypt!—I’d put them to work building pyramids!”
Loud hand-clapping and laughter! “Yee-hoo-o! You tell ’em, Cleo!”
Miss Tiller now wore an asp partly in and partly out of the top of her gown at her somewhat flat bosom. The asp was of rubbery plastic, but very lifelike, moving its head about with Miss Tiller’s movements.
The restaurant patrons did not realize how serious Miss Tiller was in her remark about slaves.
Slaves, real slaves might be out of the question just now, Miss Tiller thought, America wasn’t ready for them yet, but she had no complaint about the services she enjoyed. She and Bert now had a manager, whom Miss Tiller preferred to call their Public Relations Officer, a young man of twenty-eight whom they had met in San Francisco on their first trip. Miss Tiller had pulled him into line once, she was good at figures and kept an eye on the books, and maybe Harvey Knowles—that was his name—had made an honest mistake, but in the future he was not going to make any more mistakes, honest or not. They had played in Chicago, Dallas and New Orleans. She and Bert stayed in good hotels, which made an impression upon journalists, and Bert wanted to be near her because of his communication problem, so they always took a suite. Miss Tiller was now doing impersonations, Gloria Swanson, for example, Garbo. She loved to pretend to be someone else, loved to act self-assured, and in fact she was, with no worries at all about her future or that of her devoted Bert.
Miss Tiller and Bert had not connected the surging, milling crowds on the White House lawn with any people they had ever known. They had both entered a new and better world in the past months. Miss Tiller had much expanded her repertory, while Bert had invented pantomime skits with real little stories to them, some involving Miss Tiller and some not. Bert’s props were a bouquet of flowers, sometimes an ashcan, an imaginary window toward which he directed his attention while he danced and mimed. They were going to England soon with a six-week contract starting in Manchester and ending in London.
In the next days, the President cluck-clucked over the White House mishap, which had cost nearly five hundred lives. The President somberly stated that the government would do all in its power to house those homeless and “mentally challenged” individuals, but that it was up to their families and their communities to lend a hand too. “There but for the grace of God go I—and you and you,” the President intoned with sad and thoughtful mien.
The left-wing press suggested that the right-wing government was delighted at having eliminated half a thousand of what it considered undesirables, and to have terrorized thousands more. A story about the President hiding in a vault in the White House basement was bandied about, some swearing it was true, but unlike the people-walking-on-all-fours story, no one had photographed the President in the vault, so it became a joke that just might be true.
“I bet a couple of thousand got killed,” said a Washington, DC resident. “I heard a lot of machinegun fire. No mistake!”
Fred Wechsler, the raper, saw some of the Washington, DC uproar on the TV in his motel room in Florida, and shook his head. Those
people just didn’t know how to live, hadn’t adjusted to freedom. Fred had raped a girl of about thirteen that day. Now he was eating a sandwich in comfort and security, he had a roof over his head and a car. He recalled some of his friends in the Illinois prison where he had spent thirteen years, one called Willy Armstrong, in for breaking and entering, a nice fellow but simple-minded, easily led astray, and Fred wondered if Willy had been dumb enough to go to that phony picnic on the White House lawn and get shot?
Trouble at the Jade Towers
“Live—in luxury and security at the Jade Towers,” said the discreet advertisements for the posh eighty-eight-story apartment building on Lexington Avenue in the 1970s. The stone-floored lobby, the elevators and the corridors were all of the same light green, the most restful of colors. The entrance doors of bullet-proof glass could be opened only by doormen who stood between the first pair of glass doors and the second which gave on to the lobby. On the ground floor, there was a small beauty parlor and a barber shop, a florist’s, a coffee shop, a cozy piano bar, a tiny but elegant delicatessen, and an automatized post office, all for resident patronage. Philodendrons and rubber plants almost hid the entrances to these little service spots. On the eighty-seventh floor, below the penthouse apartments, was a heated swimming pool lined with jade-colored tiles. On the roof, twin towers with domed tops of light green hue suggested ageing copper, yet unmistakably marked the Jade Towers, which rapidly became the finest place to live, if you could afford it.
And people came, signed leases or bought apartments. Would-be buyers and renters were screened, and a famous female pop singer and an Atlantic City casino owner got turned away, facts which were reported in People magazine and gossip columns of some New York newspapers.
Near the end of the Jade Towers’ first five months, the management was able to boast that there had been no house robbery, no mugging, no violence of any kind on its premises, and the building was now ninety-five percent occupied.
Sidney Clark, the day-shift manager at the reception desk, was quite surprised one morning, when a tenant in apartment 3 M telephoned down to complain about cockroaches in her kitchen. She had seen two, she said.
“We just moved in yesterday, and I haven’t even bought a loaf of bread as yet,” the woman said. “I did bring in some tonic water and a container of milk this morning, but they’re not even opened.”
“We’ll look into it at once, Mrs. Fenton, and I am sorry,” said Mr. Clark.
“Finlay. I’m shocked, because everything’s so new and clean in the building.”
The desk manager smiled. “Yes, Mrs. Finlay, and we’ll keep it that way. I’ll report this to our exterminator, and he’ll look in some time today, certainly tomorrow. We’ll telephone you first and won’t enter the apartment unless you’re there.”
Sidney Clark had a second cockroach complaint an hour later from a couple on the tenth floor. He had already called up Ex-Pest, the exterminating firm with which the Jade Towers had contracted, Ex-Pest was coming that afternoon, and he made a note of the tenth-floor apartment. Then he decided to visit the Jade Cup, the coffee shop in one of the two side galleries on the ground floor. Its jade floor and counter looked shiny and clean, with not a crumb in sight. He told the woman manager about the two cockroach complaints, and asked to have a look at the kitchen. The kitchen looked as clean as the counter and tables, apart from the slight disorder normal for kitchens. Mr. Clark stared at the wrapped and unwrapped loaves of bread, at the danish pastries.
“Odd to have two complaints in one day,” he said to the manageress who had accompanied him.
“Oh, cockroaches,” the middle-aged woman replied, wrinkling her nose with distaste. “Can’t do much about ’em, you know, even in the best of buildings. Wherever there’s people and water, let alone kitchens, there’s roaches no matter how clean you are.”
Mr. Clark gave her a grim smile. “Well, not in the Jade Towers, Miss—”
“Mrs. Donleavy”
“Mrs. Donleavy. The Jade Towers has got to be perfect and stay perfect, because we’ve filled this building on a promise of perfection. So I’ll expect you to keep your end up by seeing that the Jade Cup is immaculate.”
“Do you see anything wrong now, sir?—And I haven’t seen a cockroach down here, not one,” said Mrs. Donleavy.
“Let me know right away if you do,” said Mr. Clark, departing.
Two Ex-Pest men came around 4 that afternoon, and visited the two apartments from which there had been complaints. Ex-Pest reported to Mr. Clark an hour or so later that they hadn’t seen any cockroaches in the two kitchens in question, but that they had fumigated both kitchens, and advised the tenants to keep the kitchen doors closed for an hour.
“We’re using a new agent, Ex-Pest Unique, practically odorless. Our own labs made it and we’ve got a patent on it. Here—I’ll leave you this.” With a smile, the reddish-haired Ex-Pest man, in dark green cap and work uniform, laid a brochure on the chest-high reception desk top, and gave it a slap.
“Thank you,” said Mr. Clark, annoyed that the Ex-Pest men had entered the lobby from the rear service elevator, each with Ex-Pest embroidered in white on the left pocket of his dark green shirt. “Would you leave by the back entrance, please?”
“Oh, sure,” said the smiling man, with a cheery wave.
A couple in rather fancy dress were entering the lobby at that moment. Mr. Clark knew that Hiram Zilling, a wealthy Texan, was giving a cocktail party starting at 6 p.m. in his penthouse apartment. Mr. Clark directed the couple to the proper elevator, an express for the penthouses.
In the next days, Mr. Clark was the recipient of a few compliments, which he courteously acknowledged and promised to pass on to “the management.” The swimming pool was a great success, eliciting some verbal and one written word of praise. It had a raised and sloping middle section, where bathers could lie and “sun” at any time during the day or night under invisible sunlamps which directed their tanning rays downward. This feature was listed among the Jade Towers’ many “time-savers” in its advertisements, along with the day and night post office with photocopying machines and computers that gave information on air transport including prices, and enabled people to buy tickets with credit cards.
Mr. Clark, after ten days, thought the cockroaches a thing of the past, when he suddenly had three complaints in one day. These were from apartments on floors seven, eight and fourteen, which was actually thirteen, Mr. Clark always recalled, rather to his annoyance, because he disliked cluttering his brain with unimportant side-thoughts. Again he telephoned Ex-Pest.
On this visit, the Ex-Pest men were noticed, or the tenants with cockroaches had told other tenants about their problem, Mr. Clark never learned which, and it didn’t much matter. One man and two women rang Mr. Clark to ask him to ask the exterminator men to come to their apartments.
Mr. Clark and the reddish-haired Ex-Pest man had a talk in the service passage at the back of the lobby before the Ex-Pest men departed.
“If you ask me, the cockroaches are all over the building and it’s just a question of time—”
“All over it? Don’t be silly! This building’s hardly six months old! The start of occupancy was less than six months ago.” Naturally, Ex-Pest was trying to drum up a big contract for extensive fumigating, Mr. Clark thought.
“All right, sir, you just wait. You’ll see.”
“What were you proposing?” asked Mr. Clark. “Or going to propose?”
“Total,” said the Ex-Pest man. “Total once and for all with our new Ex-Pest Unique. Let’s say these cockroaches got here in the building material—”
“New building material?”
“All right, the old stuff was lying around on the ground before this Jade Towers was built, right? Old wood and stuff from the former building. Don’t ask me how, but I know roaches! You had a couple hundred men bringing lunch-boxes here, construction guys.” The Ex-Pest man shook his head. “If you want to go through with it, just give us a c
all, sir. Otherwise, you’re going to have trouble. These fancy people won’t put up with cockroaches—like the rest of us in our humble abodes, eh?” With a broad grin, he waved good-bye.
Mr. Clark was shocked, debated telling the jade Towers’ Board of Management, and decided not to for the moment. As the Ex-Pest man said, the Jade Towers people were a fancy lot, and maybe exaggerating. Cockroaches simply couldn’t be well-established in the jade Towers, with nests where their eggs had hatched for generations. Sidney Clark associated roaches with old tenement buildings, filthy dumb-waiter shafts down which people dropped garbage in paper bags, buildings with cracks. There were no cracks in the Jade Towers.
“Hey, look at this, Sidney!” said Bernard Newman, a Broadway theater owner and a tenant of the Jade Towers. He had plopped an afternoon tabloid down on the reception desk top, and was pointing to an item in heavy black type. “Cockroaches yet!” Bernard Newman grinned.
Sidney Clark read the lines in the “Town Talk” column, which alternated its paragraphs in normal and dark type. It said:
The much touted and poofed jade Towers on Lex has just received a custard pie in its face. Certain well-known tenants, who shall be nameless because they want it that way, are bruiting it about in supper-clubs that their expensive digs are plagued with cockroaches—even as yours and mine. One beautifully clad young lady said she was thinking of breaking her lease and clearing out.
Mr. Clark shook his head as if he had not heard of roaches in the Jade Towers. “Have you seen any roaches in your apartment, Mr. Newman?”
“No, but a woman asked me that same question yesterday in the elevator. She’s seen a couple and was amazed. Lives on a floor way up, she said, maybe a penthouse, I forgot. Crazy, isn’t it?” With a friendly smile, Mr. Newman picked up his newspaper and strolled off toward the elevators.