ABOUT

CONTENTS

EDITORIAL

ARCHIVE

LAGNIAPPE

MAST

SUBMISSIONS

4.

Red leaves to go set some sleep. He walks down the nearly vacant Harlem street. Toward him stumbles the man who saluted Jack earlier, now the worse for wear, head down, steps short. Red is to the inside of the sidewalk and as the man comes closer something impels him to cock back his arm and, timed perfectly as the man passes without glancing upward, throw an elbow square to his jaw. There's an audible crack in the air and a second thud as the man reels away and his head smashes full into the top of a parking meter. His eyes roll back into their sockets and he's out cold. Red never breaks stride. To run might alert someone.

A man walking a nearly empty sidewalk, another crumpled in a heap in the gutter—nothing notable here. Harlem awakes to a new day.

Throughout the city, truck engines are cranked into motion to make their gray early morning deliveries. They load at the downtown harbors and bring the goods uptown. At the enormous green coffee warehouse down on Houston Street there's always been bums laying about, alcoholics, criminals who when the morning doors get opened scurry out of the light. But these past few months there's been a new type of cat—hipsters are carelessly sleeping off their long nights in mounds of beans while lorries back in and out to the four storeys of half-moon doors, loading. Half the time it is nearly empty, as the cargo gets trucked to West Side roasting factories. So it's a good place to crash until, one day without warning shipments start coming in, stir the cats from their sleep lest they get buried in tons of green coffee. The sky outside now a light gray, workmen heavily dosed with caffeine work to take back the streets. Gray men awake to lead their gray lives. But within gray you don't see gray. A whole Technicolor consumer future unfolds before them and their pregnant new brides. Televisions, electric mixers and home freezers, two car garages on tree-lined drives in the suburbs, stores filled with cheerful music putting them at ease while they make their purchases—music you don't listen to, nor made to be listened to, creating an ethereal, consumer heaven—these fulfill the vision. And large, well-heeled police armies form to keep it secure.

Louis Armstrong writes a letter to President Eisenhower asking him to consider legalizing marijuana. To the knowledge of scholars of this period, Eisenhower never responds.