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FREEDOMWAYS    THIRD QUARTER 1973

these chewed up, burnt out metal cadavers on one side; on their backs, on their sides, completely flattened and impossibly twisted. And on the other side were these billboards saying "Baby, don't let this scene get you down. ALL YOU NEED is THIS gleaming 200 m.p.h. monster—and a countdown! EASY CREDIT TERMS AVAILABLE."

When we turned off the Triboro into 135th Street I knew that somebody up there had simply been hardening me up for the main event! That kaleidoscopic graveyard of mangled rubber tires and chrome, scorched lacquer, disemboweled hoods and rib-like door frames left behind us was only shadow boxing. Racing crosstown, turning up Lenox to 145th, turning again up the hill to Broadway with the car windows up was like flying at tree-top level through an utterly soundless nightmare. Harlem's harried crowds swirled across streets, streamed along sidewalks, through and around poverty's bomb craters of garbage and senseless debris. Brothers, sisters, children, all Black, scampered or teetered on the brink of constant and unseen disaster while the needle-scarred casualties lurched against plate glass or lay spread-eagled half in, half out of weeping doorways. Looming up on all sides were the mummies of slum buildings embalmed and wrapped in rusted sheet metal, street level openings sealed with planks. Staring up at one of these stone ghetto cadavers into its rows of black-windowed-empty-eye-sockets I felt the goose-pimples. It wasn't completely dead. High up in a blackened fifth floor window was a completely motionless figure in a floppy hat and threadbare overcoat. Both of its elbows were propped on the windowsill steadying a pair of binoculars trained, as far as I could see, on nothing! A once blue painted sign nailed up against a murky store front plaintively boasting THE WORLD'S MOST FASTEST BARBER quickly disappeared as Dorothy swung the wheel and we slid down the hill toward Riverside Drive and the Hudson. We stopped, doubleparked and I stared down through the canyon of brownstones to the river and across to the New Jersey cliffs crenelated with white-gleaming condominium giants where Charle and Miss Anne sat on their Babylonian terraces gleefully regarding the terrible revenge exacted against those who'd dared to hope. With the binoculars of my mind I imagined them sipping their six martinis and gradually sliding down their reclining chairs to the red tiles slowly turning amber. Charlie's overworked bladder released his stored-up piss to form a Rorschach easily identified as THE AMERICAN DREAM. Sure, Charlie had put the "niggers in their place," as he had put

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