“Once You Go In You Can’t Come Out”
Dangerous Reality and Dystopian Fantasy in 1980s New York City
An acute sense of fear and panic pervaded New York at the dawn of the Eighties, due to the elevated crime rate. So it’s no surprise that a dystopian science-fiction movie and a murder haunted my first summer in the city.
The summer movie sensation of 1981 was Escape From New York, a campy high-tech action film that traded on the city’s negative media image. This modern day B-movie cast Manhattan as a treacherous Alcatraz-esque prison island for no-hope convicts: a different kind of lockdown. Such was the city’s reputation at the time; Escape wasn’t considered too far over the top. The movie’s advertising tagline blared like a tabloid headline.
Once you go in you can’t come back out!
Lurid crime stories were a staple of the New York tabloid newspapers in 1981. I gingerly dipped into the Post and Daily News with detached fascination. One particular murder pierced my reserve, however, and not only because it occurred close to home, too close in both the literal and figurative sense.
It happened early on July 18, as Saturday gave way to Sunday morning, at the Bini-Bon, a scruffy 24-hour diner in the East Village. A tall man sitting at a table with two women got up and asked to use the restroom. He took issue when he was informed that the facilities were for employees only. The tall man challenged the night manager, asking to meet him outside. On East 5th Street, a few minutes later, the tall man fatally stabbed the restaurant employee. Another senseless act of violence in New York City: only this time, it was different.
The tall man was Jack Henry Abbott, a recently paroled ex-con. The dead man was Richard Adan, a 22-year old actor and playwright. His new widow was the restaurant owner’s daughter. Abbott was a true ward of the state. Between the ages of 12 and 37, Jack Abbott spent nine and one half months out on the streets. The rest of the time he was in jail. A convicted bank robber, Abbott had also killed a fellow inmate. While imprisoned he wrote, by his own count, nearly one thousand letters to author Norman Mailer in the late Seventies. Mailer lobbied for Abbott’s eventual release from prison. He also helped arrange the publication of a book, In The Belly of The Beast, its text culled from Abbott’s letters to the celebrity author.
The book met with high praise, impressing reviewers with Abbott’s brutal depiction of life behind bars, his searing indictment of the prison system and incendiary prose. In an unfortunately timed rave, The New York Times Book Review paid tribute to In The Belly Of The Beast on the very Sunday that Jack Henry Abbott murdered Richard Adan.
Eventually, justice was served. After a couple months on the lam, Jack Henry Abbott was apprehended in New Orleans. He committed suicide in a cell years later. But the loss remained. Richard Adan’s death beset me the rest of that summer and beyond; he wasn’t somebody I recognized, though I’d eaten at the Bini-Bon several times. But I considered him a kindred spirit, another young person trying to make it in New York. I read in the papers that he had toured and acted with a traveling theatre company just before the murder; his first play was about to be staged. His death was doubly unfair: Mailer’s crusade to give the hardened criminal Jack Henry Abbott a second chance at life deprived Richard Adan of his first chance.
After Richard Adan’s death, fairly or unfairly, I decided that the preceding generation of creative New Yorkers didn’t care about the next. We were on our own; they didn’t have our backs. It was unfathomable, to me anyway, that Norman Mailer, literary iconoclast and co-founder of The Village Voice, would defend the murderer rather than the talented, hard-working kid that Jack Henry Abbott killed. The loss of Richard Adan was much more than cautionary; it terrified me beyond words. I knew the bohemia that attracted me to New York in general and the East Village in particular was no utopia — but I was still naive. So I erected elaborate defenses; the drawbridge pulled up. In my rush to cultivate a thick hide, to protect myself against potential threats, a dense shell began to envelop my heart and perhaps my soul as well.
On an immediate level, Richard Adan’s murder made me more wary of strangers. In the city, you never knew who could turn violent, or deadly.
***
By the end of 1984, I felt at home in Manhattan. Still, as usual, I spent the holidays in Ohio, visiting my family. A near-paralytic hangover, courtesy of a pre-birthday celebration the night before, clouded my post-Christmas flight from Cincinnati to LaGuardia. If nothing else, my wretched condition made the early morning trip float by in a fog and I collapsed on my futon couch before lunchtime. Eventually, I emptied my suitcase and descended to the ground-floor diner on the corner of 14th Street and Ninth Avenue, where I ordered a therapeutic chicken soup plus two containers of coffee to go.
As usual, copies of the Post and Daily News rested on the counter and I perused the front pages while one of the two Greek-American countermen, both named Georgie, prepared my order. But on this particular day, December 27, the day before my 27th birthday, for once the tabloid headlines grabbed attention without resorting to morbid irony or puns.
A soon-to-be infamous event took place while I was on vacation. It dominated the front pages well into the new year.
Five days previous, a racially charged shooting occurred on the Downtown IRT number 2 train. Five pistol shots were fired by a white man, aimed at a group of four young black men, all of whom were seriously injured. Dubbed the “Subway Vigilante” in the media, the shooter turned out to be an electrical engineer named Bernhard Goetz.
The incident began as a common occurrence. Since the doors between subway cars were left unlocked back then, riders were free to roam and pass from car to car. As a result, a steady stream of beggars, assorted crazies and most often gangs of rowdy teenagers patrolled the trains, intimidating passengers for sport or worse. I once looked up from my book and saw a man flashing a smile at me — gripping a razor blade between his teeth. He moved on, but forever after I refrained from interacting with random people on the subway. Not all the kids who wandered through the trains were muggers or aggressive beggars, but some of them seemed to enjoy messing with people.
Bernie Goetz claimed his victims had attempted a shakedown on the train that infamous day. And he wasn’t having it, not on December 22,1984. Goetz later alleged that Darrell Cabey, Barry Allen, Troy Canty and James Ramseur (all in their late teens) approached and asked him for $5. “I have $5 for each of you,’’ he replied smoothly. Drawing a .38-caliber Smith & Weston pistol from his waistband, he shot them one by one, and then escaped into the darkness of the tunnel at the Chambers Street station.
In an era of rampant street crime and strained racial relations, Goetz was both celebrated as a hero and condemned as a cold-blooded killer. Ultimately, he was convicted of illegal firearms possession, and cleared of four counts of attempted murder. Two of the four men he shot remain paralyzed; James Ramseur committed suicide on the 27th anniversary of the shooting.
Though it would be almost another decade until crime statistics took a turn for the better, the “Subway Vigilante” incident arguably represents the nadir of public safety in New York City. Maybe Charles Bronson’s rampage in Death Wish was prescient, I reflected glumly, after watching the revenge-porn 1974 movie on TV shortly after the “Subway Vigilante” incident. But the real impact Bernie Goetz had on me was an electric shock of recognition when I finally realized why his picture in the newspaper looked so familiar. He was a regular at another diner I frequented, just a few blocks east on 14th. This cramped coffee shop was a haunt of my friend Jeff; he was the middle-aged and mega-eccentric superintendent at the building I lived in during the summer of 1981. Jeff introduced me to many cheap downtown eateries, including the Bini-Bon.
Then as now, despite all the changes, New York can simultaneously feel like the biggest of big cities and a small — even claustrophobic — world. The crime wave has long subsided yet as casualties mount from a new insidious threat, I wonder if our current status — isolation and social distancing — will take root and gradually mutate into a permanent fever state of wariness and alarm. Could New York City once again become known as Fear City? Let’s hope not.
