CRode - John McPhee's "The Search for Marvin Gardens" lyrics

Go. I roll the dice-a six and a two. Through the air I move my token, the flatiron, to Vermont Avenue, where dog packs range. The dogs are moving (some are limping) through ruins, rubble, fire dam­ age, open garbage. Doorways are gone. Lath is visible in the crumbling walls of the buildings. The street sparkles with shattered gla**. I have never seen, anywhere, so many broken windows. A sign-"Slow, Children at Play"-has been bent backward by an au tomobile. At the lighthouse, the dogs turn up Pacific and disappear. George Meade, Army engineer, built the lighthouse-brick upon brick, six hundred thousand bricks, to reach up high enough to throw a beam twenty miles over the sea. Meade, seven years later, saved the Union at Gettysburg. ......... I buy Vermont Avenue for $100. My opponent is a tall, shadowy figure, across from me, but I know him well, and I know his game like a favorite tune. If he can, he will always go for the quick k**. And when it is foolish to go for the quick k** he will be foolish. On the whole, though, he is a master a**essor of percentages. It is a mistake to underestimate him. His eleven carries his top hat to St. Charles Place, which he buys for $140. ....... The sidewalks of St. Charles Place have been cracked to shards by through­ growing weeds. There are no buildings. Mansions, hotels once stood here. A few street lamps now drop cones of light on broken gla** and vacant space behind a chain-link fence that some great machine has in places bent to the ground. Five plane trees-in full summer leaf, flecking the lighc­ are all that live on St. Charles Place. Block upon block, gradually, we are cancelling each other out-in the blues, the lavenders, the oranges, the greens. My opponent follows a plan of his own devising. I use the Hornblower & Weeks opening and the Zuricher defense. The first game draws eight, will soon finish. In 1971, a group of people in Racine, Wisconsin, played for seven hundred and sixty­ eighc hours. A game begun a month lacer in Danville, California , lasted eight h undred and twenty hours. These are official records, and they stun us. We have been playing for eight minutes. le amazes us chat Monopoly is thought of as a long game. It is possi ble to play co a complete, absolute, and final conclusion in less than fifteen minutes, all within the rules as written . My opponent and I have done so thousands of times. No wonder we are sitting across from each ocher now in chis best-of-seven series for the inter­ national singles championship of the world. On Illinois Avenue, three men lean our from second-story windows. A girl is coming down the street. She wears dungarees and a bright-red shire, has ample breasts and a Hadendoan Afro, a black halo, two feet in diameter. Ice rattles in the gla**es in the hands of the men. "Hey, sister!" "Come on up!" She looks up, looks from one to another to che ocher, looks chem flat in the eye. "What for?" she says, and she walks on. I buy Illinois for $240. It solidifies my chances, for I already own Kentucky and Indiana. My opponent pales. If he had landed first on Illinois, che game would have been over then and there, for he has houses builc on Boardwalk and Park Place, we share the railroads equally, and we have can­ celled each other everywhere else. We never trade. In 1852, R. B. Osborne, an immigrant Englishman, civil engineer, surveyed the route of a railroad line chat would run from Camden to Absecon Island, in New Jersey, traversing the state from the Delaware River to the barrier beaches of the sea. He then sketched in the plan of a "bathing village" that would surround the eastern terminus of the line. His pen flew glibly, fram­ ing and naming spacious aven ues parallel to the shore--Medicerranean, Baltic, Oriental, Ventnor-and narrower transseccing avenues: North Caro­ lina, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Connecticut, States, Virginia, Tennessee, New York, Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois. The place as a whole had no name, so when he had completed the plan Osborne wrote in large letters over the ocean, "Atlantic City." No one ever challenged the name, or the names of Osborne's streets. Monopoly was invented in the early nineteen-thirties by Charles B. Darrow, but Darrow was only transliterating what Osborne had created. The railroads, crucial co any player, were the making of Atlantic City. After the rails were down, houses and hotels burgeoned from Mediter­ ranean and Baltic to New York and Kentucky. Properties- building lots­ sold for as little as six dollars apiece and as much as a thousand dollars. The original investors in the railroads and the real estate called themselves the Camden & Atlantic Land Company. Reverently, I repeat their names: Dwight Bell, William Coffin, John DaCosca, Daniel Deal, William Fleming, Andrew Hay, Joseph Porter, Jonathan Pitney, Samuel Richards­ founders, fathers, forerunners, archetypical masters of the quick k**. My opponent and I are now in a deep situation of cla**ical Monopoly. The torsion is almost perfect-Boardwalk and Park Place versus the brilliant reds. His cash position is weak, though, and if I escape him now he may fade. I land on Luxury Tax, contiguous co but in sanctuary from his power. I have four houses on Indiana. He lands there. He concedes. Indiana Aven ue was the address of the Brighton Hotel, gone now. The Brighton was exclusive-a word chat no longer has retail value in the city. If you arrived by automobile and cried to register at the Brighton , you were sent away. Brighton-cla** people came in private railroad cars. Brighton­ cla** people had ocher private railroad cars for their horses--dawn rides on the firm sand at water's edge, skirts flying. Colonel Anthony J . Drexel Biddle-the sort of name that would constrict throats in Philadelphia­ lived, much of the year, in the Brighton. Colonel Sanders' fried chicken is on Kentucky Avenue. So is Clifton's Club Harlem , with the Sepia Revue and the Sepia Follies, featuring the Honey Bees, the Fashions, and the Lords . My opponent and I, many years ago, played 2,428 games of Monopoly in a single season . He was then a recent grad uate of the Harvard Law School, and he was working for a downtown firm, looking up law. Two people we knew-one from Chase Manhattan, the other from Morgan, Stanley­ tried to get into the game, but after a few rounds we found that they were not in the conversation and we sent them home. Monopoly should always be mano a mano anyway. My opponent won 1,199 games, and so did I. Thirty were ties. He was called into the Army, and we stopped just there. Now, in Game 2 of the series, I go immediately to jail , and again to jail while my opponent seines property. He is d um bfoundingly lucky. He wins in twelve minutes. Visiting hours are daily, eleven to two; Sunday, eleven to one; evenings, six to nine. "No MINORS, NO FOOD, Immediate Family Only Allowed in Jail." All this above a blue steel door in a blue cement wall in the windowless in­ terior of the basement of the city hall. The desk sergeant sits opposite the door to the jail. In a cigar box in front of him are pills in every color, a ban­ quet of fruit salad an inch and a half deep-leapers, co-pilots, footballs, truck drivers, peanuts, blue angels, yellow jackets, redbirds, rainbows. Near the desk are two soldiers, waiting to go through the blue door. They are about eighteen years old. One of them is trying hard to light a cigarette. His wrists are in steel cuffs. A military policeman waits, too. He is a year or so older than the soldiers, taller, studious in appearance, gentle, fat. On a bench against a wall sits a good-looking girl in slacks. The blue door rattles, swings heavily open . A turnkey stands in the doorway. "Don't you guys k** yourselves back there now," says the sergeant to the soldiers. "One kid, he overdosed himself about ten and a half hours ago," says the M.P. The M.P., the soldiers, the turnkey, and the girl on the bench are white. The sergeant is black. "If you take off the handcuffs, take off the belts," says the sergeant to the M.P. "I don't want them hanging themselves back there ." The door shuts and its tumblers move. When it opens again, five minutes later, a young white man in sandals and dungarees and a blue polo shirt emerges. His hair is in a ponytail. He has no beard . He grins at the good-looking girl. She rises, joins him . The sergeant hands him a manila envelope. From it he removes his belt and a small notebook. He borrows a pencil, makes an entry in the notebook. He is out of jail, free. What did he do? He offended Atlantic City in some way. He spent a night in the jail. In the nineteen-thirties, men visiting Atlantic City went to jail, directly to jail , did not pa** Go, for appearing in topless bathing suits on the beach. A city statute requiring all men to wear full-length bathing suits was not seriously challenged until 1937, and the first year in which a man could legally go bare-chested on the beach was 1940. Game 3. After seventeen minutes, I am ready to begin construction on overpriced and sluggish Pacific, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. Noth­ ing else being open, opponent concedes. The physical profile of streets perpendicular to the shore is something like a playground slide. It begins in the high skyline of Boardwalk hotels, plum­ mets into warrens of "side-avenue" motels, crosses Pacific, slopes through church missions , convalescent homes, burlesque houses, rooming houses, and liquor stores, crosses Atlantic, and runs level through the bombed-out ghetto as far-Baltic, Mediterranean-as the eye can see. North Carolina Avenue, for example, is flanked at its beach end by the Chalfonte and the Haddon Hall (908 rooms, air-conditioned), where, according to one biog­ rapher, John Phili p Sousa (1854-1932) first played when he was twenty-two, insisting, even then, that everyone call him by his entire name. Behind these big hotels, motels-Barbizon, Catalina-crouch . Between Pacific and At­ lantic is an occasional house from 1910--wooden porch, wooden mullions, old yellow paint-and two churches, a package store, a strip show, a dealer in fruits and vegetables . Then, beyond Atlantic Avenue, North Carolina moves on into the vast ghetto, the bulk of the city, and it looks like Metz in 1919, Cologne in 1944· Nothing has actually exploded. It is not bomb dam­ age. It is deep and complex decay. Roofs are off. Bricks are scattered in the street. People sit on porches, six deep, at nine on a Monday morning. When they go off to wait in unemployment lines, they wait sometimes two hours . Between Mediterranean and Baltic runs a chain-link fence, enclos­ ing rubble. A patrol car sits idling by the curb. In the back seat is a German shepherd. A sign on the fence says, "Beware of Bad Dogs." Mediterranean and Baltic are the principal avenues of the ghetto. Dogs are everywhere. A pack of seven pa**es me . Block after block, there are three-story brick row houses . Whole segments of them are abandoned , a thousand broken windows . Some pans are intact , occupied .A mattress lies in rhe street, soaking in a pool of water. Wet stuffing is coming our of the mattress. A postman is having a rye and a beer in rhe Plantation Bar at nine-fifteen in the morning. I ask him idly if he knows where Marvin Gardens is. He does not. "HOOKED AND NEED HELP? CONTACT N.A .R.C.o." "REVNAL NOW GOING ON, CONDUCTED BY REVEREND H. HENDERSON OF TEXAS." These are signboards on Mediterranean and Baltic. The second one is upside down and leans against a boarded-up window of the Faith Temple Church of God in Christ. There is an old peeling poster on a ware­ house wall showing a figure in an electric chair. "The Black Panther Manifesto" is the title of the poster, and its message is, or was, that "the fas­cists have already decided in advance to murder Chairman Bobby Seale in the electric chair." I pa** an old woman who carries a bucket. She wears blue sneakers, worn through. Her feet spill out. She wears red socks, rolled at the knees . A white handkerchief, spread over her head, is knotted at the corners. Does she know where Marvin Gardens is? "I sure don't know, " she says, set ting down the bucket. "I sure don't know. I've heard of it some­ where, but I just can't say where. " I walk on, through a block of shattered gla**. The gla** crunches underfoot like coarse sand. I remember when I first came here-a long train ride from Trenton, long ago, games of poker in the train-to play basketball against Atlantic City. We were half black, they were all black. We scored forty points, they scored eighty, or some­ thing like it . What I remember most is that they had gla** backboards-glittering, pendent, expensive gla** backboards, a rarity then in high schools, even in colleges, the only ones we played on all year. I rum on Pennsylvania, and start back toward the sea. The windows of the Hotel Astoria, on Pennsylvania near Baltic, are boarded up. A sheet of unpainted plywood is the door, and in it is a triangular peephole that ow frames an eye. The plywood door opens. A man answers my quesnon. Rooms there are six, seven, and ten dollars a week. I thank him for the infor­mation and move on, emerging from the ghetto at the Catholic Daughters of America Women's Guest House, between Atlantic and Pacific. Between Pacific and rhe Boardwalk are the blinking vacancy signs of the Aristocrat and Colton Manor motels. Pennsylvania terminates at the Sheraton­ Seaside-thirty-two dollars a day, ocean corner. I rake a walk on the Board­ walk and into the Holiday Inn (twenty-three stories). A guest is registering . "You reserved for Wednesday, and this is Monday," the clerk tells him. "But that's all right . We have plenty of rooms." The clerk is very young, female, and has soft brown hair that hangs below her waist. Her superior kicks her. He is a middle-aged man with red spiderwebs in his face. He is jacketed and tied. He rakes her aside. "Don't say 'plenty,' " he says. "Say 'You are for­tunate, sir. We have rooms available.' " The face of the young woman rums sour. "We have all the rooms you need ," she says to the customer, and, to her supen.or, "How's that." Game 4. My opponent's luck has become abrasive. He has Boardwalk and Park Place, and has sealed the board. 'I' & 'I' Darrow was a plumber. He was, specifically, a radiator repairman who lived in Germantown, Pennsylvan ia. His first Monopoly board was a sheet of linoleum . On it he placed houses and hotels that he had carved from blocks of wood. The game he thus invented was brilliantly conceived, for it was an uncannily exact reflection of the business milieu at large. In its depth , range , and subtlety, in its luck-sk** ratio, in its sense of infrastructure and socio­ economic parameters , in its philosophical characteristics, it reached to the profundity of the financial community. It was as scientific as the stock mar­ ker. It suggested the manner and means through which an underdeveloped 16 ]O H N McPHEE world had been developed. It was chess at Wall Street level. "Advance token to the nearest Railroad and pay owner twice the rental to which he is other­ wise entitled. If Railroad is unowned, you may buy it from the Bank. Get ut of Jail, free. Advance token to nearest utility. If unowned, you may buy It from Bank. If owned, throw dice and pay owner a total ten rimes the The Searchfar Marvin Gardens 17 power from across the state, on the Delaware River, in Deepwa er. States Avenue, now a wasteland like St. Charles, once had gardens runnmg down che middle of the street, a horse-drawn trolley, private homes. States Avenue was as exclusive as the Brighton. Only an apartment house, a mall motel, and the All Wars Memorial Building-monadnocks spaced widely amount thrown. You are a**essed for street repairs: $40 per house, $u 5 per apart-stand along States Aven ue.now. Pawnsos,. convalescent homes, hotel. Pay poor tax of $15. Go to Jail. Go directly to Jail. Do not pa** Go. Do not collect $200." The turnkey opens the blue door. The turnkey is known to the i nmates as Sidney K. Above his desk are ten closed-circuit-TV screens-a**orted viewpo_ints of .the jail. There are three cellblocks-men, women, juvenile boys. Six days 1s the average stay. Showers twice a week. The steel doors and the equipment that operates them were made in San Antonio. The prison­ ers sleep on bunks of butcher block. There are no mattresses. There are three prisoners to a cell. In winter, it is cold in here. Prisoners burn news­ papers to keep warm. Cell corners are black wi th smudge. The jail is three years old. The men's block echoes with chatter. The man in the cell nearest Sidney K. is pacing. His shirt is covered with broad stains of blood. The block for juvenile _boys is, by contrast, utterly silent--empty corridor, empty c.ells. There zs only one prisoner. He is small and black and appears to be thzrteen. He says he is sixteen and that he has been alone in here for three days. "Why are you here? What did you do?" "I hit a jitney driver." The series stands at three all. We have split the fifth and sixth games. We are scrambling for property. Around the board we fairly fly. We move so fast because we do our own banking and search our own deeds. My oppo­ nent grows tense. Ventnor Aven ue, a street of delicatessens and doctors' offices, is leafy with plane trees and hydrangeas, the city flower. Water Works is on the main­ land. The water comes over in submarine pipes. Electric Company gets and the Paradise Soul Saving Station are on V1rgm1a Avenue . The soul­ saving station is pink, orange, and yellow. In the windows Banking the door of the Virginia Money Loan Office are Nikons, Polaroids, Yashicas, Sony TVs, Underwood typewriters, Singer sewing machi nes, and pictures of Christ. On the far side of town, beside a single track and locked up most of the rime, is the new railroad station, a small h ut made of glazed fire­ brick, all that is left of the lines that built the city. An authentic phrenolo­ gist works on New York Avenue close to Frank's Extra Dry Bar and a church where the sermon today is "d**h in the Pot." The ch urch is of pink brick, has blue and amber windows and two red doors. St. James Place, narrow and twisting, is lined with boarding houses that have wooden porches on each of three stories, suggesti ng a New Orleans made of salt-bleached pine. In a vacant lot on Tennessee is a white Ford station wagon stripped to the cha**is. The windows are smashed. A plastic Clorox bottle sits on the driver's seat. The wind has pressed newspaper against the chain-link fence around the lot. Atlantic Aven ue, the city's principal thor­ oughfare, could be seventeen American Main Streets placed end to end­ discount vitamins and Vienna Corset shops, movie theatres, shoe stores, and funeral homes. The Boardwalk is made of yellow pine and Douglas fir, soaked in pentachlorophenol. Down beach, it reaches far beyond the city. Signs everywhere-on windows, lampposts, crash baskets-proclaim "Bienvenue Canadiens!" The salt air is full of Canadian French. In the Claridge Hotel, on Park Place, I ask a clerk if she knows where Marvin Gardens is. She says, "Is it a floral shop?" I ask a cabdriver, parked outside. He says, "Never heard of it." Park Place is one block long, Pacific to Boardwalk. On the roof of the Claridge is the Solarium, the highest point in town-panoramic view of the ocean, the bay, the saltwater ghetto. I look down at the rooftops of the side-aven ue motels and i nto swimming pools. There are hundreds of people around the rooftop pools, sunbath­ ing, reading-many more people than are on the beach. Walls, windows, and a block of sky are all that is visible from these pools-no sand, no sea. 18 }OHN McPHEE The pools are craters, and with the people around them they are counter­ sunk into the motels. The seventh, and final, game is ten min utes old and I have hotels on Oriental, Vermont, and Connecticut. I have Tennessee and St. James. I have North Carolina and Pacific. I have Boardwalk, Atlantic, Ventnor, Illinois, Indiana. My fingers are forming a "V." I have mortgaged most of these properties in order to pay for others, and I have mortgaged the others to pay for the hotels. I have seven dollars. I will pay off the mortgages and build my reserves with income from the three hotels. My cash position may be low, but I feel like a rocket in an underground silo. Meanwhile, if I could just go to jail for a time I could pause there, wait there, until my op­ ponent, in his inescapable rounds, pays the rates of my hotels. Jail, at times, is the strategic place to be. I roll boxcars from the Reading and move the flatiron to Community Chest. "Go to Jail. Go directly to Jail." The prisoners, of course, have no pens and no pencils. They take paper napkins, roll them tight as crayons, char the ends with matches, and write on the walls. The things they write are not entirely idiomatic; for example, "In God We Trust. " All is in carbon. Time is required in the writing. "Only humanity could know of such pain. " "God So Loved the World." "There is no greater pain than life itself." In the women's block now, there are six blacks, giggling, and a white asleep in red shoes. She is drun k. The others are pushers, prostitutes, an auto thief, a burglar caught with pistol in purse . A sixteen-year-old accused of m urder was in here last week. These words are written on the wall of a now empty cell: "Laying here I see two bunks about six inches thick, not counting the one I'm laying on, which is hard as brick. No cushion for my back. No pillow for my head. Just a couple scratchy blankets which is best to use it's said. I wake up in the morning so shivery and cold, waiting and waiting till I am told the food is coming. It's on its way. It's not worth waiting for, but I eat it anyway. I know one thing when they set me free I'm gonna be good if it k**s me." The Searchfor Marvin Gardens 19 How many years must a game be played to produce an Anthony J. Drexel Biddle and chestnut geldings on the beach? About half a century was the original answer, from the first railroad to Biddle at his peak. Biddle, at his eak, hit an Atlantic City streetcar conductor with his fist, laid him out wp ith one punch. This increased Biddle's legend. He did not go to p. t·1. While John Philip Sousa led his band along the boardwalk playing "The Stars and Stripes Forever" and Jack Dempsey ran up and down in training for his fight with Gene Tunney, the city crossed the high curve of its parabola. A1 Capone held conventions here-upstairs with his sleeves rolled , apportioning among his lieutenant governors the states of the East­ ern seaboard. The natural history of an American resort proceeds from Indians to French Canadians via Biddles and Capones. French Canadians, whatever they may be at home, are Visigoths here . Bienvenue Visigoths! My opponent plods along incredi bly well. He has got his fourth railroad , and patiently, unbelievably, he has picked up my potential winners until he has blocked me everywhere but Marvin Gardens. He has avoided, in the fifty-dollar zoning, my increasingly petty hotels. His cash flow swells. His railroads are costing me rwo hundred dollars a minute. He is building hotels on States, Virginia, and St. Charles. He has temporarily reversed the cur­ rent. With the yellow monopolies and my blue monopolies, I could proba­ bly defeat his lavenders and his railroads. I have Atlantic and Ventnor. I need Marvin Gardens. My only hope is Marvin Gardens. There is a plaque at Boardwalk and Park Place, and on it in relief is the leo­ nine profile of a man who looks like an officer in a metropolitan bank­ "Charles B. Darrow, 1889-1967, inventor of the game of Monopoly." "Darrow," I address him, aloud. "Where is Marvin Gardens?" There is, of course, no answer. Bronze, impa**ive, Darrow looks south down the Board­ walk. "Mr. Darrow, please, where is Marvin Gardens? " Nothing. Not a sign. He just looks south down the Boardwalk. ,....,. My opponent accepts the trophy with his natural ease, and I make, from notes, remarks that are even less graceful than his, Marvin Gardens is the one color-block Monopoly property that is not in Atlantic City. It is a suburb within a suburb, secluded. It is a planned com­ pound of seventy-two handsome houses sec on curvilinear private streets under yews and cedars, poplars and willows. The compound was built around 1920, in Margate, New Jersey, and consists of solid buildings of stucco, brick, and wood, with slate roofs, tile roofs, multi-mullioned porches, Giraldic cowers, and Spanish grilles. Marvin Gardens, the ultimate outwash of Monopoly, is a citadel and sanctuary of the middle cla**. "We're heavily patrolled by police here. We don't cake no chances. Me? I'm living here nine years. I paid seventeen thousand dollars and I've been offered thirty. Number one, I don't want to move. Number two, I don't need the money. I have four bedrooms, two and a half baths, front den, back den. No basement. The Atlantic is down there. Six feet down and you float. A lot of people have a hard time finding chis place. People that lived in Atlantic City all their life don't know how to find it. They don't know where the hell they're going. They just know it's south, down the Boardwalk."