the mayor’s office. Sitting at his desk was Hugh Addonizio, a bald, bulging, pear-shaped man in his mid-fifties, ex–war hero, six-time congressman, in his second term as mayor, and the big man was utterly lost, sitting at his desk with tears pouring down his face. What am I going to do? he said, looking up at Gil. What the hell am I going to do?
An indelible picture, undimmed after all these years: the sight of that pathetic figure paralyzed by the pressure of events, a man gone rigid with despair as the city exploded around him. Meanwhile, Gil calmly went about his business, calling the governor in Trenton, calling the chief of police, doing his best to get a grip on the situation. At one point, he and I left the room and went downstairs to the jail on the bottom floor of the building. The cells were crammed with prisoners, every one of them a black man, and at least half of them stood there with their clothes torn, blood trickling from their heads, their faces swollen. It wasn’t difficult to guess what had caused these wounds, but Gil asked the question anyway. Man by man, the answer never varied: each one had been beaten by the cops.
Not long after we returned to the mayor’s office, in walked a member of the New Jersey State Police, a certain Colonel Brand or Brandt, a man of around forty with a razor-sharp crew cut, a square, clenched jaw, and the hard eyes of a marine about to embark on a commando mission. He shook hands with Addonizio, sat down in a chair, and then pronounced these words: We’re going to hunt down every black bastard in this city. I probably shouldn’t have been shocked, but I was. Not by the statement, perhaps, but by the chilling contempt of the voice that uttered it. Gil told him not to use that kind of language, but the colonel merely sighed and shook his head, dismissing my brother-in-law’s remark as if he considered him to be an ignorant fool.
That was my war. Not a real war, perhaps, but once you witness violence on that scale, it isn’t difficult to imagine something worse, and once your mind is capable of doing that, you understand that the worst possibilities of the imagination are the country you live in. Just think it, and chances are it will happen.
That fall, when Gil was put in the untenable position of having to defend the city of Newark against scores of lawsuits from shopkeepers whose businesses had been destroyed in the riot, he quit his post and never worked in government again. Fifteen years later, two months short of his fifty-third birthday, he was dead.
I want to think about Betty, but in order to do that I have to think about Gil, and to think about Gil I have to go back to the beginning. And yet, how much do I know? Not a lot, finally, no more than a few pertinent facts, gleaned from stories he and Betty told me. The first of three children born to a Newark saloonkeeper who supposedly could have passed as Babe Ruth’s double. At some point, Dutch Schultz muscled in on Gil’s father and stole the business, how or why I can’t say, and a few years after that his father dropped dead of a heart attack. Gil was eleven at the time, and since his father died broke, the only thing he inherited from him was chronic high blood pressure and heart disease—which was first diagnosed at age eighteen and then blossomed into a full-blown coronary when he was just thirty-four, followed by another one two years later. Gil was a tall, powerful man, but he spent his whole life with a death sentence circulating in his veins.
His mother remarried when he was thirteen, and while his stepfather had no objections to raising the two younger kids, he wanted no part of Gil and kicked him out of the house—with the mother’s consent. Talk about the unimaginable: to be exiled by your own mother and sent off to live with relatives in Florida for the rest of your childhood.
After high school, he came back north and started college at NYU, strapped for money, forced to work several
An indelible picture, undimmed after all these years: the sight of that pathetic figure paralyzed by the pressure of events, a man gone rigid with despair as the city exploded around him. Meanwhile, Gil calmly went about his business, calling the governor in Trenton, calling the chief of police, doing his best to get a grip on the situation. At one point, he and I left the room and went downstairs to the jail on the bottom floor of the building. The cells were crammed with prisoners, every one of them a black man, and at least half of them stood there with their clothes torn, blood trickling from their heads, their faces swollen. It wasn’t difficult to guess what had caused these wounds, but Gil asked the question anyway. Man by man, the answer never varied: each one had been beaten by the cops.
Not long after we returned to the mayor’s office, in walked a member of the New Jersey State Police, a certain Colonel Brand or Brandt, a man of around forty with a razor-sharp crew cut, a square, clenched jaw, and the hard eyes of a marine about to embark on a commando mission. He shook hands with Addonizio, sat down in a chair, and then pronounced these words: We’re going to hunt down every black bastard in this city. I probably shouldn’t have been shocked, but I was. Not by the statement, perhaps, but by the chilling contempt of the voice that uttered it. Gil told him not to use that kind of language, but the colonel merely sighed and shook his head, dismissing my brother-in-law’s remark as if he considered him to be an ignorant fool.
That was my war. Not a real war, perhaps, but once you witness violence on that scale, it isn’t difficult to imagine something worse, and once your mind is capable of doing that, you understand that the worst possibilities of the imagination are the country you live in. Just think it, and chances are it will happen.
That fall, when Gil was put in the untenable position of having to defend the city of Newark against scores of lawsuits from shopkeepers whose businesses had been destroyed in the riot, he quit his post and never worked in government again. Fifteen years later, two months short of his fifty-third birthday, he was dead.
I want to think about Betty, but in order to do that I have to think about Gil, and to think about Gil I have to go back to the beginning. And yet, how much do I know? Not a lot, finally, no more than a few pertinent facts, gleaned from stories he and Betty told me. The first of three children born to a Newark saloonkeeper who supposedly could have passed as Babe Ruth’s double. At some point, Dutch Schultz muscled in on Gil’s father and stole the business, how or why I can’t say, and a few years after that his father dropped dead of a heart attack. Gil was eleven at the time, and since his father died broke, the only thing he inherited from him was chronic high blood pressure and heart disease—which was first diagnosed at age eighteen and then blossomed into a full-blown coronary when he was just thirty-four, followed by another one two years later. Gil was a tall, powerful man, but he spent his whole life with a death sentence circulating in his veins.
His mother remarried when he was thirteen, and while his stepfather had no objections to raising the two younger kids, he wanted no part of Gil and kicked him out of the house—with the mother’s consent. Talk about the unimaginable: to be exiled by your own mother and sent off to live with relatives in Florida for the rest of your childhood.
After high school, he came back north and started college at NYU, strapped for money, forced to work several
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