Great Jones Street (Contemporary American Fiction) Read online

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  GREAT JONES STREET

  Don DeLillo published his first short story when he was twenty-three years old. He has since written thirteen novels, including White Noise (1985), which won the National Book Award. It was followed by Libra (1988), his bestselling novel about the assassination of President Kennedy; Mao II (1991), which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction; and the bestselling Underworld (1997), which in 2000 won the Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters for the most distinguished work of fiction published in the prior five years. Other novels include Americana, End Zone, and Great Jones Street, all available from Penguin. His most recent novel is Cosmopolis. In 1999, DeLillo was awarded the Jerusalem Prize, given to a writer whose work expresses the theme of freedom of the individual in society; he was the first American author to receive it.

  Acclaim for Great Jones Street

  “A major work of fiction…edifying, entertaining…. DeLillo does just about everything a novelist can do, with a sureness and an undiminished freshness.”

  —William Kowinsky, The Boston Phoenix

  “A real novel of ideas, bursting with colorful inventions and enriched by a subtle groundwork of language and imagery which DeLillo brilliantly turns to the making of intricate abstract statements, and penetrating observations on the culture.”

  —Library Journal

  “DeLillo is a powerfully disturbing writer…a full-grown talent, swift and tricky…. [Great Jones Street] is moving evidence of a writer stretching himself, accomplishing things he hasn’t done before.”

  —Walter Clemons, Newsweek

  “Chill atmosphere, satiric caricature and witty dialogue.”

  —Time magazine

  “DeLillo spins his web, creates his own worlds, and has built the figure of his introspective, illogical, all-questioning anti-hero into a special kind of voice in a special kind of fiction.”

  —The Irish Times

  Also by Don DeLillo

  AMERICANA

  END ZONE

  RATNER’S STAR

  PLAYERS

  RUNNING DOG

  THE NAMES

  WHITE NOISE

  LIBRA

  MAO II

  UNDERWORLD

  DON DeLILLO

  GREAT JONES STREET

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in the United States of America by

  Houghton Mifflin Company 1973

  Published in Penguin Books 1994

  Copyright © Don DeLillo, 1973

  All rights reserved

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  DeLillo, Don.

  Great Jones Street

  Originally published: Boston:

  Houghton Mifflin, 1973.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-65987-8

  I. Title

  PS3554.E4425G7 1983 813’.54 83–6928

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Table of Contents

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  1

  FAME REQUIRES every kind of excess. I mean true fame, a devouring neon, not the somber renown of waning statesmen or chinless kings. I mean long journeys across gray space. I mean danger, the edge of every void, the circumstance of one man imparting an erotic terror to the dreams of the republic. Understand the man who must inhabit these extreme regions, monstrous and vulval, damp with memories of violation. Even if half-mad he is absorbed into the public’s total madness; even if fully rational, a bureaucrat in hell, a secret genius of survival, he is sure to be destroyed by the public’s contempt for survivors. Fame, this special kind, feeds itself on outrage, on what the counselors of lesser men would consider bad publicity—hysteria in limousines, knife fights in the audience, bizarre litigation, treachery, pandemonium and drugs. Perhaps the only natural law attaching to true fame is that the famous man is compelled, eventually, to commit suicide.

  (Is it clear I was a hero of rock ‘n’ roll?)

  Toward the end of the final tour it became apparent that our audience wanted more than music, more even than its own reduplicated noise. It’s possible the culture had reached its limit, a point of severe tension. There was less sense of simple visceral abandon at our concerts during these last weeks. Few cases of arson and vandalism. Fewer still of rape. No smoke bombs or threats of worse explosives. Our followers, in their isolation, were not concerned with precedent now. They were free of old saints and martyrs, but fearfully so, left with their own unlabeled flesh. Those without tickets didn’t storm the barricades, and during a performance the boys and girls directly below us, scratching at the stage, were less murderous in their love of me, as if realizing finally that my death, to be authentic, must be self-willed—a successful piece of instruction only if it occurred by my own hand, preferably in a foreign city. I began to think their education would not be complete until they outdid me as teacher, until one day they merely pantomimed the kind of massive response the group was used to getting. As we performed they would jump, dance, collapse, clutch each other, wave their arms, all the while making absolutely no sound. We would stand in the incandescent pit of a huge stadium filled with wildly rippling bodies, all totally silent. Our recent music, deprived of people’s screams, was next to meaningless, and there would have been no choice but to stop playing. A profound joke it would have been. A lesson in something or other.

  In Houston I left the group, saying nothing, and boarded a plane for New York City, that contaminated shrine, place of my birth. I knew Azarian would assume leadership of the band, his body being prettiest. As to the rest, I left them to their respective uproars—news media, promotion people, agents, accountants, various members of the managerial peerage. The public would come closer to understanding my disappearance than anyone else. It was not quite as total as the act they need
ed and nobody could be sure whether I was gone for good. For my closest followers, all it foreshadowed was a period of waiting. Either I’d return with a new language for them to speak or they’d seek a divine silence attendant to my own.

  I took a taxi past the cemeteries toward Manhattan, tides of ash-light breaking across the spires. New York seemed older than the cities of Europe, a sadistic gift of the sixteenth century, ever on the verge of plague. The cab driver was young, however, a freckled kid with a moderate orange Afro. I told him to take the tunnel.

  “Is there a tunnel?” he said.

  The night before, at the Astrodome, the group had appeared without me. Azarian’s stature was vast but nothing on that first night could have broken the crowd’s bleak mood. They turned against the structure itself, smashing whatever was smashable, trying to rip up the artificial turf, attacking the very plumbing. The gates were opened and the police entered, blank-looking, hiding the feast in their minds behind metered eyes. They made their patented charges, cracking arms and legs in an effort to protect the concept of regulated temperature. In one of the worst public statements of the year, by anyone, my manager Globke referred to the police operation as an example of mini-genocide.

  “The tunnel goes under the river. It’s a nice tunnel with white tile walls and men in glass cages counting the cars going by. One two three four. One two three.”

  I was interested in endings, in how to survive a dead idea. What came next for the wounded of Houston might very well depend on what I was able to learn beyond certain personal limits, in endland, far from the tropics of fame.

  2

  I WENT to the room in Great Jones Street, a small crooked room, cold as a penny, looking out on warehouses, trucks and rubble. There was snow on the window ledge. Some rags and an unloved ruffled shirt of mine had been stuffed into places where the window frame was warped and cold air entered. The refrigerator was unplugged, full of record albums, tapes and old magazines. I went to the sink and turned both taps all the way, drawing an intermittent trickle. Least is best. I tried the radio, picking up AM only at the top of the dial, FM not at all. Later I shaved, cutting myself badly. It was strange watching the long fold of blood appear at my throat, collecting along the length of the gash, then starting to flow in an uneven pattern. Not a bad color. Room could do with a coat. I stuck toilet paper against the cut and tried with no luck to sleep a while. Then I put Opel’s coat over my shoulders and went out for food.

  It was dark in the street, snowing again, and a man in a long coat stood in the alley between Lafayette and Broadway. I walked around a stack of shipping containers. The industrial loft buildings along Great Jones seemed misproportioned, broad structures half as tall as they should have been, as if deprived of light by the great skyscraper ranges to the north and south. I found a grocery store about three blocks away. One of the customers nudged the woman next to him and nodded in my direction. A familiar dumb hush fell over the store. I picked up the owner’s small brown cat and let it curl against my chest. The man who’d spotted me drew gradually closer, pretending to read labels along the way, finally sidling in next to me at the counter, the living effigy of a cost accountant or tax lawyer, radiating his special grotesquerie, that of sane men leading normal lives.

  I got back to find Globke with his arm down the toilet bowl.

  “I dropped a dime,” he said.

  “The floor’s not very clean. You’ll ruin your new pants. What is that—vinyl?”

  “Polyvinyl.”

  “And the shirt,” I said. “What about the shirt?”

  He struggled up from the floor, then held his stomach in and adjusted his clothes. He followed me into the main room, not exactly a living room since it included a bathtub and refrigerator. Globke himself occupied a duplex apartment in a condominium building situated on the heights just across the Hudson River. His apartment was a model abode of contour furniture and supergraphics, an apparent challenge to the cultured indolence of Riverside Drive. His second wife was young and vaporous, a student of Eastern religions, and his daughter by his first marriage played the cello.

  “There’s a story behind this shirt,” he said. “This shirt is part of an embroidered altar cloth. Fully consecrated. Made by blind nuns in the foothills of the Himalayas.”

  “What’s that color? I’ve never seen a shirt exactly that color.”

  “Llama vomit,” he said. “That’s what they told me when I bought it. There’s a rumor you’re dead, Bucky.”

  “Do you believe it?”

  “I came here for the express purpose of letting you know, all kidding aside, that no matter what your intentions are, we’re determined to see you through this thing, irregardless of revenues, monies, so forth—grosses and the like. Your own intentions are uppermost.”

  “I have no intentions.”

  “Contractual matters. Studio dates. Record commitments. Road arrangements. We go when you say go. Until then we sit with our legs crossed. What the hell, an artist’s an artist. Bookings. Interviews. Press parties. Release dates.”

  “How did you get in here?”

  “It wasn’t hard to figure out you’d be here. I knew you’d be here. Once we traced you to New York, I knew this was where you’d be. But look how hollow-cheeked. Look how ghostly. I had no idea. Who knew? Nobody told me.”

  “But how did you get in here?” I said.

  “I picked up the key on my way in from the airport. I’ve been in Chicago the past two days. First they tell me you’ve disappeared, so I make all the usual inquiries. Then they tell me there’s a riot in the Astrodome, so I make all the usual public statements. Then I catch a plane to New York and pick up the key on my way down here.”

  “Pick up the key where?”

  “At our lavish offices in world-famous Rockefeller Center.”

  “What was it doing there?”

  “Transparanoia owns this building,” he said.

  “I didn’t know we were in real estate. Since when?”

  “Two or three months ago. Modestly. We’re in very modestly. Lepp’s a cautious man. He picks up a piece of property here and there. Mostly related to the business. An old ballroom or theater. Shuttered property. Nothing big.”

  “What are we doing with a building like this?”

  “Lepp stays out of my sphere of influence and I don’t go messing in his. I’m not in love with what you look like, Bucky. You’re a morbid sight. A one-man horror movie. Where’s Opel?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “I thought she’d be here. I don’t see her all this time I figure she’s in her funny apartment shooting God-forbid some kind of terrible drug between her toes, the only skin left.”

  “I haven’t seen her in a while. She may be in Morocco, she may not. Then again she may.”

  “You plan to go looking?”

  “I’m staying right here,” I said.

  “That’s your right and your privilege, Bucky, with or without a studio-equipped house in the mountains. The first death rumor was in the evening paper. I could easily stop it here and now.”

  “I don’t think you could. But either way, don’t get into it. I want to see how long it lasts.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  “I haven’t asked about your wife. How’s your wife, what’s-her-name, your lovely and charming wife?”

  “Wife, companion, lover,” Globke said. “She’s all that and more. Mother, daughter, teacher, adviser, friend. But I’m keeping you two apart. Otherwise it’s instant sex karma. She’s got a beautiful soul but I don’t trust her body. See, oldness and fatness. They make me a bad person.”

  “What’s she do all day, stranded on top of that cliff?”

  “She curls up with the Upanishads. She’s been reading the Upanishads in paperback for the last three years. She feels the East is where the truth is, what she calls the petal of all energy. Non-attachment turns her on.”

  “And the little girl,” I said.

  “Still at it with the ce
llo. Appreciate your asking. To think my genes could produce this kind of classical talent. She’ll be concertized next year. Age of fourteen.”

  “Will it hurt?”

  “You attack even the things I hold dearest, Bucky, but I forgive you because I know you’re on the threshold of something extra-extra-ordinary or you wouldn’t be here in this cold dark room far from the hue and cry. Or am I wrong?”

  “Dead wrong.”

  “At least you could give me the mountain tapes. If you handed over the mountain tapes, I’d at least have something to play with.”

  “How’s my band?” I said.

  “The boys are confused. What can I say? The boys are confused, hurt and bereaved.”

  “Azarian’s not bereaved. He’s doing his little hip-flips right out front.”

  “With him everything’s on the surface. He doesn’t give it that extra level. I think they’ll break up.”

  “Not for a while.”

  “Who needs them?” he said.

  “They’re valuable as artifacts.”

  “Bucky Wunderlick. That’s what people want. In the flesh.”

  “I have to get some rest now.”

  “You’re kicking me out. Listen, why not? It’s been an emotion-packed twenty-four hours and you desperately need sleep. It stands to reason.”

  “Tell Lepp to get rid of this building.”

  “It’s a business thing,” he said. “Diversification, expansion, maximizing the growth potential. Someday you’ll understand these things. You’ll open your mind to these things. Someday you’ll be thirty years of age and you’ll have to go out and make an honest living, ho, like the rest of us.”

  “Never,” I said.

  “Ho, the ageless wonder. But what I wish you’d do is, talking of time and tide, is I wish you’d go back to writing lyrics, real lyrics the way you used to write them and sing them. That would amaze and delight the whole world, Bucky. A surprise return to your old self. There was nobody better at it.”

  “When are you leaving, Glob?”