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up reams of paper on the Black Mask's mimeograph machines and
went up to the rooftops bordering the streets and tossed them
into the air to float down to where the department of sanitation
men were working. The leaflets all said the same thing in big
black block letters: PICK ME UP, MOTHERFUCKER! And the sanitation
men did, just as they picked up the other symbol of the modern
slum, the mounds of broken glass which were everywhere. In the
contemporary nonreturnable world of the Lower East Side, bottles
were only good for throwing and not for the regular two cents or
nickel deposit they had been worth a few short years before.
The fire department was there too, giving out stuffed fluffy
animals to the children as an expression of their goodwill to the
innercity ghetto community. There were two types of small stuffed
animals packed by the gross in boxes. One set was small black
kittens with white faces and the other was a thousand or more
tiny gray mice with black button eyes. As if the children of the
Lower East Side didn't have enough real mice to play with in
their own kitchens! Was it just that the firemen were all so
blind dumb from their weekly whiskey-beer bashes in Staten Island
and strangers to the reality of the neighborhood they were paid
to protect, or was the giving away of the stuffed mice to the
children a conscious insult meant to demean the residents of the
community? The children didn't really care to figure it out,
assuming instead that the firemen knew what they were doing. When
the fire department officers sitting on top of their bright red
hook-and-ladders cheerfully handed the tiny gray cotton-stuffed
playthings to the children lining the sidewalk, the kids didn't
return the smiles, but simply stared blankly back at the men who
were supposed to be "public servants," and dropped the
little toy mice into the gutter where the water being used to
wash down the back alleys ran off the sidewalks and carried the
hundreds of make-believe rodents to the whirlpool over the sewer
at the end of the block. The last thing that could be seen of the
sinking toy mice was the glimmer of their shiny black button
eyes, as they congested at the mouth of the corner sewer, like a
rush hour crowd pushing and shoving and cramming together into
subway trains to get somewhere ahead of god-knows-who.
At first, Emmett had no idea who informed the mayor's office
of the planned Lower East Side cleanup on Saturday by the private
sanitation companies. But it didn't take him long to figure out
that it was one of the self-proclaimed leaders of the East
Village hippies who did it just to make Emmett look bad in the
eyes of the gentle [end page 338]
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