the driver. The huge fossil-fuels monster turned from the parade barricades and slowly headed towards the East Side. As it moved away, Sister Sledge rode by on a float shaped like a huge turkey.
Vixen, standing near the curb, knew about Sister Sledge. She remembered their song, “We Are Family,” the theme song of the Pittsburgh Pirates. “We Are Family.” It never occurred to her that it was sung in march time. She wished she and her husband, Sam, were a family. They were drifting apart. During the holidays, she began to yearn for the old values. Of home and hearth. Maybe it was her New England background. The white steeples, the cemeteries, and the fir trees of New Hampshire and the white birch of Vermont. She’d cooked a Thanksgiving feast for herself and Sam. Turkey, corn, pumpkin pie. That’s how much the holidays got to her. She would always get the blues during the holidays. But Sam hadn’t come home. He had said he was going down to one of the East Side piers to hear a jazz concert, but he hadn’t returned. Maybe there was another woman. She caught him once with another woman and he said that he had to do it because the creative drive is connected to the libido and that he had a painter’s block. She wondered was he fucking that dark-haired slinky-looking waitress down on Prince Street. She wondered if he knew she was fucking Romeo, his best friend. Unlike Sam, who sometimes made her feel like a human doughnut, Romeo took his time. He looked like Julius LaRosa and did it elegant like Marcello Mastroianni.
This marriage was the pits. She was tired of the painters coming over to her house, smoking pot and drinking beer and referring to painters who weren’t present as prostitutes and faggots. She wanted to have Sam’s baby but he’d smoked so much dope that his sperm, instead of containing the population of a small town, held that of a bus stop in Oakland. Plus, he had a chronic cough now. She’d read that marijuana contained some kind of fungus similar to that one finds in the damp dark corners of a house. She was tired of working as a busgirl and ticket taker while he painted. She was better educated than his friends were and if they’d listen to her she could tell them why nobody would give them a show. The stuff they were heralding as new was done thirty years ago in Belgium. She was tired of New York. She didn’t have any girlfriends she could relate to. New York was grimy and the sky always had the color of an embalmed oyster. In her elevator, they’d found a woman who had been brutally raped and murdered; she had been stabbed thirty-two times. Drunks urinated at the entrance to their loft. They were three months behind in their rent because Sam had quit his shipping-clerk job in order to, as he put it, devote full time to his “art.” He was in bad shape. He wouldn’t even clean underneath his nails. He was always scratching his scalp. He gave her the crabs, and his belly was beginning to drop over his belt, and all he did was lie around or talk a lot of feverish incoherent meaningless jargon full of “O Wow.” He used to say “heavy” a lot but he met a French painter at a party and now he was saying formidable a lot. She was having fun today watching the Macy’s parade.
The parade looked like an illustration by a well-known American illustrator who smoked a pipe and owned a prominent Adam’s apple. Melba Moore sang atop a float sponsored by the Daily News. It was made of a miniature skyline of New York dominated by a huge apple. Melba sat on the apple singing “I Love New York.”
Sam’s friends would ridicule Vixen for taking delight in this Thanksgiving Day Parade. She was wearing the same black bear coat she’d worn in college. She had blown hair. Her hands were shoved into her pockets. She had a feeling of well-being because she was close to a decision. She always had this feeling when her mind was being made up and she was about to take another step. She’d been dreaming of her father recently. He’d died of a heart attack a few years ago. Her mother was smart and glamorous and didn’t have much time to be a mother. She’d run away to New Mexico and, when last heard, she was drinking herself to death.
Her friend Jennifer had moved to Alaska. Jennifer had written that there were lots of jobs and men available in Alaska. A poet, Ed Dorn, had said that Alaska reminded him of Raquel Welch. She wondered what he meant by that. Perhaps one day she would find out.
The Rockettes marched by. They towed a swan-shaped sleigh whose passenger was none other than Santa Claus himself. He was waving and wishing everybody a Happy Thanksgiving and a Merry Christmas.
3
One of the marching bands was so loud that Bob Krantz asked his secretary to close the window. He is seated in his office at Whyte B.C. busily conversing through a custard-colored pushbutton telephone with his boss, the network’s owner, James Whyte. “I’m sorry, Mr. Whyte, but I had to close the window. They’re making a big racket downstairs. The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, you know. As I was saying, Mr. Whyte, you won’t have to worry about Reverend Jones and those Texans. When ‘20 Minutes,’ our newsmagazine, finishes with him, his name won’t be worth a hamper full of dirty underwear.”
“His direct-mail campaign against violence and homosexuality on television is worrying our sponsors. What do you plan to do about it?” boomed the patrician voice on the other end of the phone.
“We have some leaks from the I.R.S. As soon as they finish with the Reverend, he’ll be put away for about ten years.”
“You don’t say.” Krantz could hear Mr. Whyte’s broad smile on the other end. “You have the goods on him. Good fellow, Krantz, good fellow.”
“I knew I had to protect my tush, Mr. Whyte. I anticipated that the fundamentalists would be upset with our new lineup and so I have enough evidence, about forty pounds, to close down Jones’s empire for a long time.”
“How are the inauguration plans coming?”
“We plan to have live coverage from the time the President-elect and first lady greet the Carters on the steps of the White House until the last of the eight balls is over.”
“I’ll tell the President-elect. His friends are shelling out eight million dollars for this thing and the taxpayers are contributing four. It should be quite a show. Quite a show. There will be Marine Guards standing at attention all over the place.”
“When you see the President, will you do me a favor, sir?”
“What’s that, Krantz?”
“Would you tell him to go easy on the makeup? One night he came on the tube and he resembled one of Count Dracula’s wives, he was wearing so much paint. And tell him, if you will, sir, to avoid as many right profiles as possible. His right jaw? Shadows hang there. It looks like the entrance to a lagoon.”
“Krantz, you sound as if you don’t approve of the President. What’s eating you?”
“O, no, no. I want to make the President look good. Why, it was me who directed the cameramen to do full shots of him during the debates. That way he looked big, commanding, superhuman. It feels good to be a white man again with him in office. One hour after the election results were known, we made all the black employees get rid of the cornrow hairstyles. I’m mellowing, Mr. Whyte. I’ve come a long way from S.D.S. and Woodstock. Why, this morning I went out and bought some cowboy boots.”
“Cowboy boots, huh. Krantz, how do you think I’d look in some of those boots?”
“You’d look fine, Mr. Whyte.”
“Then why don’t you order some for me. Have them put some spurs on them.”
“I certainly will, Mr. Whyte. It’s as good as done.”
“Who do you think is going to win that game?”
“I think the Raiders might give Philadelphia a hard time. They might even win. Oakland has a good team, but if they can penetrate
