Trance

by Christopher Sorrentino

  And here were the real consequences. The real consequences were, Lionel Congreaves was an educated and well-spoken black man who didn’t spout the I-am-a-victim pieties of Movement theology, and the next thing you know he was putting masking tape on his windows so that the broken glass didn’t fall onto the rug when the rocks started sailing. A man who looked old enough to know better just walked up to him while he was standing there outside a store and told him to “eat shit.” White guy, middle-aged, with a shopping bag in his hand from Macy’s. Eat shit.

  And what a festival for the reporters. The reporters would set him up like the proverbial straw man: First they’d outline the so-called accounts of his overseas activities, then suggest that someone had insinuated that it was plausible that he might have possible connections in the intelligence community. None of which Lionel Congreaves was willing to deny outright because any man working at even the most innocent of jobs in a locale like that—a hotbed, as the term had it, of intrigue—was likely to make “connections” with God knew what. But they’d set him up. Then what fun they had, the reporters. Lionel Congreaves was “fat.” Lionel Congreaves was “sulky.” Lionel Congreaves was like a “nightclub comic.” Lionel Congreaves wore “weird goggles.” And Lionel Congreaves didn’t have enough fingers to count the number of pieces that mentioned his knit cap. He meant, Your cap impeached your credibility? This was journalistic objectivity?

  But Lionel Congreaves didn’t have time to worry about his own personal feelings when it was his own personal safety that was most compromised by all this. Which was one reason why he was making himself abundantly available to the ladies and gentlemen of the press, and decidedly not because he was a “publicity hound,” as some had labeled him. To set the record straight.

  This was as good a time as any to bring up everybody’s favorite party girl, Mae Brussell, the conspiracy queen. Lionel Congreaves rated a flattering thirty-three references in her seminal, so to speak, document covering the kidnapping, the SLA, and the proverbial kitchen sink. Forty-five thousand words by the I. Magnin princess, explaining it all to you.

  Everyone made fun of Mae, yet for some reason they all repeated her crap as if it were gospel. “CIA agent Lionel Congreaves.” Lionel Congreaves, “trained in the psychological warfare unit of the CIA.” Lionel Congreaves “headed an experimental behavior modification unit, called the Afro-American Cultural Exchange.” Lionel Congreaves “ran the AACE classes and decided who would be in the program.” Lionel Congreaves “aroused the anger of black inmates against Foster.” Mae Brussell, who thought Charles Manson was a patsy, thought that Charles Manson “might have interesting stories to tell.” Thus spake Mae, cueing the heavy organ chord that should have accompanied most of her corny proclamations.

  Manson. A patsy. So now the CIA (Lionel Congreaves’s employer, remember) maintained a sinister interest in blood-drinking rituals on the beaches and in the deserts of California. To Lionel Congreaves, that kind of claim took a lot of chutzpah.

  And any and all accusations concerning himself and the Marc Foster murder, in particular, gave Lionel Congreaves acid stomach. He grieved for the brother, he really did. Speaking of which. Lionel Congreaves was reminded of some more or less widespread rumors to the effect that Marc Foster and his deputy, Robert Blackburn, were CIA officers. As was, purportedly, Lionel Congreaves. Ergo what? Internecine war within the CIA?

  Now, did it ever occur to anyone lofting these irresponsible propositions into the air that their sacred sources, the jailbirds of the California Medical Facility at Vacaville, were mentally disordered? That Vacaville was not merely a prison but a loony bin? That maybe that was the reason for the head-scratching anomaly of Donald David DeFreeze’s mysterious transformation into the mighty Cinque Mtume, the Fifth Prophet? Unstable minds were notorious for their refusal to treat potent ideas strictly academically. He meant, What did they expect a man being pumped full of militant notions to do? Aspire to work in a car wash? He meant, You go with what you know. The guy was a career criminal, so he sort of tinseled it up, trimmed it with the bright baubles of revolutionary rhetoric. Didn’t need any “control agent” for that. A few of the cons he’d taught were actually working their way toward college degrees, but did you ever hear about that? No, you heard about the CIA and blond pussy in miniskirts and electrodes in your brain and the Symbionese Liberation Army. If Lionel Congreaves had offered up a program in fry cookery and janitorial science, they would have scalded him as a Tom. But instead he’d opted, like a damned fool, for the high-minded approach, and so he’d become a “control agent,” a useful label to stanch the flow of unintended consequences.

  Lionel Congreaves moved heavily toward a desk piled with folders, accordion files, and loose papers. He set down his mug on a colorful ceramic tile he’d salvaged from some place or another. Actually he knew exactly where he’d salvaged it from, the leaky john in a French colonial mansion housing a brothel on the outskirts of Saigon. A little conversation piece that, for one reason or another, he didn’t feel like talking about right then. Savoring the irony.

  Now. Lionel Congreaves had in his hand a copy of a letter written in 1970 by Donald David DeFreeze to a Los Angeles Superior Court judge, one William Ritzi, in an attempt to preserve his probation. Lionel Congreaves was not sure what, exactly, he intended to demonstrate with the introduction of this pathetic document. A coda to this most recent long and curiously unsatisfying interview? A glimpse of what had lain within the popped kernel of the SLA, the desperation of its leader, the sheer scarcity of character, that had perhaps seen its best chance in an appropriate setting, a fantasy revolution, where only the charisma of the radical insurgent could obtain? It rambled on and on, the unformed script revealing and concealing in equal measure.

  … I am going to talk to you truthfully and like I am talking to God. I will tell you things that no one has ever before know … I had Just gotten out of a boys school in New York after doing 2½ years for braking into a Parking Meter and for stealing a car … I was sixteen at the time and didn’t have home, life in the little prison as we called it, was nothing but fear and hate, day in and day out, the hate was mading, the only safe place was your cell that you went to at the end of the day. I had only two frights, if you can call them frights. I never did win. It was funny but the frights were over the fact that I would not be part of any of the gangs, black or white. I wanted to be friends with everyone, this the other inmates would not allow, they would try to make me fright … they even tried to make a homosexual out of me … After 2½ years I found myself hated by many of the boys there. When I got out of jail, people just could not believe I had ever been to Jail. I worked hard, I didn’t drink or any pills nor did I curse … I had a few girld friends but as soon as there mother found out I had been to Jail, that was the end … Then one day I met my wife Glory, she was nice and lovely, I fell in love with her I think … I asked Glory to marry me and she said Yes. We had just met one month before we were married. My wife had three kids already when I met her. We were married and things were lovely all the way up to a few months. Then seven months later I came home sooner than I do most of the time for work and she and a old boy friend had just had relationships. I was very mad and very hurt … I really put faith in her, but somehow, little stories kept coming to me, one was that my boss had come to my home looking from me and that my wife had come to the door in the nude. I thought that if we had kids or a baby we would be closer, but as soon as the baby was born it was the same thing … I was trying to put up with her and hope she would change. But as the years went by she never did and she told me … she wanted a divorce because I was not taking care of her and the kids good enough, I was never so mad in my life … I through her out of the house and I got a saw and a hammer and completely destroyed everything I ever bought her and I mean everything! For months later she begged me to take her back and she said she had made a mistake and that she really loved me … I took her back but I couldn’t face anyone any more … I started playing
with guns and firer works and dogs and cars … I finely got into trouble with the Police for shoting off a rifle in my basement and for a bomb I had made out of about 30 firer works from forth of July. After I went to court and got Probation I was really ashamed of myself. I had not been in trouble with the police for years and now I had even lost that pride … All of my friends and family knew of my wife’s ways and of my foolishness in believing her and forgiving her, it was just too much to face, I had to get out. I moved all over New Jersey but everywhere I went someone knew me or my wife or about my kids, I just couldn’t take it anymore, I was slowly becoming a Nothing. I decided to move to California for a new start … I put my age up so no one would think about me having so many kids. I hoped it would be a new start for both of us, no one would know me or her or anything about my family. But more and more I was unhappy with everything. I started playing with guns, drinking, pills but this time more than I had ever before did. I was arrested again and again … I don’t really understand what I was doing. She wanted nice things and I was working and I was buying and selling guns and the next thing I know I had become a thief. You sent me to Chino … They think I am nuts. I thought you would really send me to jail and Glory would go to New jersey … I started to tell you to send me to jail and that I didn’t want to go home. But you should not have never sent me back to her. The day after I got home she told me she had had Six relations with some man she meant on the street when I was in Chino.

  Sir Don’t send me to prison again, I am not a crook or a thief nor am I crazy. I hope you will believe me …

  Yours truly,

  Donald DeFreeze

  A portrait of the Field Marshal as a young man.

  PART THREE

  Revolutionary Pastoral

  We had all simply wandered into a situation unthinikingly, trying to protect ourselves from what we saw as a political problem. Now, suddenly, it was like a Rorschach inkblot: others, looking at our actions, pointed out a pattern that we ourselves had not seen.

  —RICHARD M. NIXON

  TANIA STANDS TRANSFIXED BEFORE the three-card monte hustler working on Broadway near the 103rd Street station. The cards are folded in the middle the long way, and he flips them with easy fluid motions of the wrists so that they dance across the top of the upended cardboard box he’s using as a surface. His patter is meaningless and as precisely rhythmic as the movement of the cards, “what you got you see, where you see it, here and here, what you see, where, here and there you got you see, where it at, here? or here? or where it at? come on and tell me here or here or where?” Players carelessly drop money in the hustler’s direction as if they knew ahead of time they were never going to see it again. Tania’s companion, Joan Shimada, stands with her back to the scene, taking in Broadway, until Tania is finished watching.

  Whatever this city may have been it has now turned a corner to greet the spoor of world destruction that has been drifting through the air, a placeless anger, for sixty years. It’s Charles Bronson’s city now. All the froth of the Lindsay years has condensed and gathered in the corners like the scum of a rabid foam. To every street corner its screaming prophet. To every bench its unemployed habitué. Moving walls of thunder, colored with savage petroglyphs, beneath the sidewalks. Smoke rising, rising from the Bronx, visible from the high old terraces cut from the Harlem bluffs, from downtown, from Brooklyn, from Staten Island and the ironwork expanses of North Jersey.

  The tabloids speak! The Post says: Boys take sledgehammers to pound through the walls of tenement buildings, tearing through the crumbling plaster and splintered lathe with their delinquent fingers to murder crippled grandmas, to snatch their meager purses, to toss babies from rooftops scarred with flashing cement. The News says: Girls are having sex at fourteen, at thirteen, at twelve and eleven; with their brothers, their fathers, with anyone; and for money. The Post says: Saturday night specials are turning the streets into a bloodbath of horror. The News says: Rats crawled into a baby’s crib in Bed-Stuy and stripped him to the bone in the time it took his mother to make herself a cup of instant. The Post says: Feral dogs are roaming the streets in packs, scaring away even the rats. And both agree on the subways: Hold tight to your tokens. Boys wait behind you to suck them right back up out of the slot. Then they snatch your chain off your neck. Cut your finger off for your high school ring. Take your keys and break into your apartment to rape and strangle you in the comfort of your own living room. Abandon all hope.

  So they’re all a little edgy here, out of their element. Tania’s own knowledge of New York begins around Thirty-fourth Street and ends at Central Park South. So this bankrupt city is something of a revelation. The place is locked down, yet everyone seems to be outside, both in and of the tumult. It’s like going to a sporting event where you root for yourself. Yet when she turns off Broadway, she’s struck by the muffled quiet, the solid old apartment buildings, their floors rumored to be packed with dirt from the excavation of Central Park, reaching back from the corners to bracket rows of brownstones in various states of cheerless dilapidation. Men settle on the stoops, working at brown-bagged beers and flat pints of blackberry brandy, wearing the burden of their involuntary leisure lightly, scanning her with a sharply sexual interest informed more by boozy fraudulent nostalgia than by predatory intent. When she dares to look into their faces, she recognizes poverty’s gray-scaled nuance, which her revolutionary reading, not to mention her life, has been scant preparation for. These are the People: starving, hysterical, naked. The cataloging of their pettiest transgressions could atomize the sensibilities of a nice girl like her. But there are always hints of the city’s larger elegance just a few years, or blocks, away. She recognizes it. A girl like her can smell it.

  Joan is really pretty, and self-possessed in a way that successfully combines artsy-fartsy la-di-da with poised confidence and a genuine delicacy that seems difficult to place outside the stale context of the Mysterious Orient. Tania wonders how Joan pulls it off; at this point she is conditioned to see nearly any manifestation of personality as a kind of pose. Whatever, she feels more comfortable around Joan than she has around anyone since Cujo and Gelina died.

  Men drift toward them, their approach taking the form of a sort of gliding sidestep. They remind her of the pigeons at Trafalgar Square in their wary, insistent aggression. They talk and burble, muttering low and unintelligibly or projecting like the authorized sales representatives of some unspeakable act. Joan tells them all, in her peculiar accent, “Fuck off!” They droop and fade back or windmill themselves away in a flurry of arms. One man follows them for more than a block, hollering at their backs from a distance of maybe thirty feet. Tania wishes she were packing her revolver in her purse, but Guy has been pretty firm about the No Guns. “Especially in New York,” he says. Which is pretty weird because from what she’s heard half the city is armed and ready to kill.

  Joan takes them on a roundabout route, walking north on Amsterdam a couple of extra blocks before circling, at 106th, to head back downtown on Manhattan Avenue. This maneuver is to avoid a couple of housing projects that stand between them and their destination. Tania wonders why they bothered: When they get there, the place has an appearance of such chronic destitution, with its gutted cars and scorched, boarded-up apartment buildings, that it makes the worst slums of East Oakland look inviting. In the middle of the block is a narrow storefront below a rusted sign that between two faded Pepsi-Cola crests reads STATIONERY CIGARS CANDY NEWSPAPERS. The lattice of a security gate is drawn across the plate glass window.

  “Variety store,” says Joan.

  The two of them stand at the threshold and try the door, which is locked. Joan finds a brass bell push, which has been inexpertly installed near a flaking decal for Camel cigarettes. Tania can hear the rasping buzz deep inside the store. There is no answering buzz, just a soft click as the latch is released from somewhere within. They enter.

  In the wall at the end of the narrow, dim space inside is a small window of thick Plexiglas
with a slot at the bottom. To the left of the window is a steel door with three locks. The only sign of merchandise in the store is a soda cooler containing a few bottles of Tab and with a handwritten sign taped to one of its sliding glass doors, DON’T TOUCH—NO TOQUE. Joan approaches the window.

  “Hi there,” she says.

  Tania can get only a vague impression of whatever it is that dwells behind the Plexiglas.

  “Yoo-hoo,” says Joan. “Customer.” The voice is affectless, the perfect accompaniment to what seems to be Joan’s persistent, depthless patience. Tania wants to say inscrutable. Finally there is a flurry back there, and what appears to be a face of some kind appears in the window.

  “Good morning,” says Joan, without evident sarcasm although it’s after two in the afternoon. “Two dimes, please.” She passes a twenty-dollar bill through the slot.

  “Should we be holding that much?” asks Tania, anxiously.

  “Give me a break,” says Joan, like that’s the least of their worries. Two fat alligator Baggies appear on their side of the window. “Thank you,” says Joan. She puts the Baggies in her purse.

  Outside she says, “That place gets on my nerve.”

  They walk and talk, taking the same meandering route back to Guy and Randi’s apartment. Since Guy returned to the Bay Area to get Teko, it’s just the girls, and it’s been fun. Tania hasn’t spent this much time hanging out with women since she was about sixteen, just before Eric Stump entered her life and she set up housekeeping with him like an imitation adult.

  Despite the agreeable atmosphere, Tania understands that she’s learning to live as a fugitive. So far it’s a curiously unstructured life, with the four of them—Randi, Yolanda, Joan, and herself—awaken—ing late and lingering over coffee, the TV blaring.