Also, to commence a bombing campaign. Teko insists. No more fucking around! They must have action! Let Yolanda, Tania, Susan, and Joan puzzle out the solution to anatomical supremacy, build their little ship in a bottle, but Teko’s still General Field Marshal.
Though some things have changed. The feminism thing may be total bullshit in theory, but in practice Teko hasn’t tried to hurt Tania in months.
She’d taken a leaf from Joan’s book: pointed a .38 at his head one day when he raised a fist to her and threatened to pop him in the skull. They were alone together, and she bore the full weight of his pedantry. It had been the usual argument. Tania why did you leave the dishes in the sink. Tania what is this mess here. Tania didn’t I tell you to. Her response—insolent contempt—was well within the boundaries they’d established for dealing with each other after the incident in the creamery, but for some reason she managed that day to infuriate him and he’d grabbed a belt from where it was hanging over the back of a chair and made for her. And automatically, without a single moment’s deliberation that she could trace afterward, she lifted her revolver out of her purse and aimed it at his head. He froze, an astonished expression on his face, the belt in his hand swinging limply.
“Better put that down now,” he said.
She just smiled at him.
“I mean it, Tania. That’s an order.”
“Kiss my cunt, Adolf.”
“You couldn’t kill me. What’ll you tell the others?”
“You’ll never know, will you?”
He breathed heavily, looked irate—then backed off. It felt good.
She thinks she’d like to try Boston. Joan’s mentioned it, repeatedly, as the place she’s most likely to go, and Tania would be happy to accompany her.
She talks to Roger; she holds his hand. She wants to plant a seed, put him where he can see the change that’s coming. She’s familiar enough with the routine; she’s always been pretty direct when it comes to breaking up with a boy. But she feels a little guilty in this case: She wants to get rid of him, but she wants to keep him in reserve too. He’s getting all funny over her though. Brings her little gifts, arrives bearing flowers or whatever wearing his paint-spattered overalls. Flecks of paint in his hair, his eyelashes. In Sacramento it was sweet; he was the bright spot to her days in that lonely burg. Here, home, he’s just another person looking to her to heat up the soup.
Boston. She has a stash of two thousand dollars wrapped in aluminum foil in the freezer. She has a stolen BankAmericard and a valid California driver’s license. Anywhere she wants, she can go. For now, that’s enough.
WHEN YOUR BROTHER CONTACTS law enforcement authorities and suggests to them that you have been involved in the commission of a federal crime, elect to smoke a joint.
When your father, in a near—apopleptic rage, begins breaking the camera equipment of hardworking members of the press, though not enough of it to prevent the nationally syndicated appearance of a photograph of the old man, wearing a torn pair of cutoff shorts and an old oxford shirt with holes in the armpits, attacking a tiny woman reporter, combine the over—the— counter analgesic of your choice with the sort of opiate informally offered for sale on a nearby street corner.
When your mother’s blood pressure consistently rises to levels at which her physician feels it prudent to utter diagnoses like “You really should be dead,” prior to placing her on a medication that has hair sprouting from her chest and has her darting through her home at 11 p.m. vacuuming, washing, and waxing the floors, drink a bottle of fortified wine and gently rest your head on a curbstone. (What’s the word? Thunderbird! How’s it sold? Good and cold! What’s the jive? Bird’s alive! What’s the price? Thirty twice!)
When your wife refuses to have intercourse with you, to touch your penis, to let you stroke her breasts, to kiss you on the mouth, to put her arms around you, to meet your eyes when she speaks to you, to speak to you at all unless absolutely necessary, to be in the same room with you except when socially requisite, to spend time in the same state with you, the oft—feared occasion has arrived for you to publish a depraved novena to St. Jayne Mansfield in the back pages of a magazine and then hire a scantily clad woman found walking in the vicinity of Taylor and Pine streets to serve as a “surrogate.”
When your funds have diminished to nearly nothing, when your friends refuse your phone calls and slam the door at the sight of your face on the doorstep, when you are rejected, rebuffed, and snubbed at every turn, consider eating peyote and then walking, backward, with your eyes closed, on a busy freeway …
Guy sits at a table in Senor Pico’s, waiting for the Galtons to show, keenly aware that this is his last shot. He finally talked to Susan Rorvik after spending weeks chewing his nails down to the quick, and she explained that they needed to meet, to talk. He half expected her to stipulate someplace picturesquely subterranean, a cafeteria on lower Mission maybe, packed with bleak souls, fruitless lives, and botulism. He was pleasantly surprised when she suggested that they meet the next day at Aquatic Park.
By then all the hopeful rhetoric he’d peddled a year ago had turned into a psalm of maltreatment and neglect, the money I spent, the time I wasted, the risks I took.
He told her about his deeply disillusioning experiences with publishers.
He told her that The Athletic Revolution was going out of print and that he’d arranged to buy three thousand extant copies before they were pulped and have them shipped from a New Jersey warehouse to his place on the Upper West Side.
He told her how his landlord there wanted to evict him because he was running a business out of his apartment.
He told her that his mother was on the verge of a nervous breakdown and his father was reeling. Reeling.
He told her Randi was about to leave him.
He told her about the legroom problem on the flight from New York.
He told her that the Portland weather was causing a fungus to grow on his private parts.
Great talking to her, and he’d see her tomorrow.
The next day he waited for her at the edge of Fisherman’s Wharf, eating clam chowder from a hollowed-out loaf of sourdough, wearing a Mets cap and a creased corduroy sports jacket with a folded newspaper stuffed into one of the pockets. He looked thin, tired, unshaven, grimy, travel-weary, like a man awakening from uneasy dreams at a YMCA or aboard a Trailways bus. He saw her approaching from the direction of the Wharf, cutely dressed in her waitress costume.
He’d done it. It had been fucking hard to get a decent hearing for a book proposal in the present environment; apparently the field of Symbionese Studies was rapidly growing very crowded. Quite an existing library had sprung up in the last year or so, and firsthand reflections didn’t necessarily mean you’d cornered the market. They might have missed their moment. But he’d done it. He showed up, he sat down, he talked. He ate a lunch that required four separate forks. He pretended he’d read Steal This Book. He shared a cab with a man who rejected Gravity’s Rainbow. There was interest. They’d definitely showed an interest.
They were walking through Fort Mason along a footpath on an embankment overlooking the enormous vacant docks and empty warehouse streets below when Susan had advised him that Teko had changed his mind about the book, again. Just a breezy whim that first blew him to one side of the issue and then back to the other? The money I spent, the time I wasted. “What does he want to do then?”
“What does he want to do then?”
“I sometimes think the only thing he really believes in is the revolution.”
Oh, Jesus, please. Teko? Revolution? Come on. Had he sent Guy to Havana? Hanoi? The jungles of Central America? Is that where he’d wanted to make contact, establish relations? No, Guy had been dispatched to Rockefeller Center. Teko wanted what every kid snug under the blankets with his secret wishes wanted, the cover of Rolling Stone. If Guy lifted up that serving wench skirt, would he find Susan’s head stuck up her ass? He actually reached for it, grabbed the material betw
een thumb and forefinger. She snatched it away angrily.
He underhanded the hollow crust of bread down the embankment. It bounced and rolled. For whatever reason, he’d gotten hooked on the SLA: couldn’t stop helping them, flaunting them, bragging about them, denying them, scolding them; trying to manipulate them, reform them, fold them into his peculiar reality. They’d seen it; they’d conned him, gotten more and more and just a little bit more out of him.
Susan kept the meeting short and sweet, wouldn’t explain a thing. She said goodbye on the Marina Green, surrounded by people with Frisbees, dogs, and wicker picnic baskets. Overhead, a seaplane climbed, ungainly on its fat pontoons, astonishing as always.
Drove them himself. Laid out all that dough. Smashed up his own car with a sledgehammer to get Allstate to pay for their trip home. Now they were jerking the last post out. He felt the vertigo of his sudden plunge.
Now he waits. While he does, he drinks two frozen margaritas. Actually, what he orders each time is a margarita and a shot of Cuervo, taking a head-throbbing slug from the frozen drink and then dumping the shot in to strengthen it. Well, so, this is how he’s been feeling lately. A person is entitled. He has a drumming headache, he’s extremely photosensitive these days, one of his kidneys is making him feel as if someone’s hit him in the side with a baseball bat, his anterior cruciate ligament is on the cusp of saying “¡adios!” and his nose seems to be rotting from the inside out. In addition to which he’s noticed that the angle at which his erection hangs from his naked body has increased markedly, from a taut twenty-five degrees to a droopy forty-five degrees.
In other words, Guy is exhausted. Again. Knowing what he knew, no sensible person would have touched the SLA again with a ten-foot pole, but Guy just couldn’t lay off. Saw himself signing his name to a contract, saw fame, saw respect, saw another popeyed portrait leering out from the dust jacket of a book. Saw commercial potential harmoniously wedded to radical credibility. Saw six (!) figures (!!)—winged, already aloft, and heading out the window in the manner familiar to all readers of the funnies, though how the hell could he have known that? He himself flew hither, he flew yon, and when all was said and done, the undertaking was worthwhile even if it had come to naught. Because what is life if not an adventure? What is achieved if nothing is risked? Huh? Now all he has to do is convince himself of that, but first and foremost he is exhausted.
He sees them moving toward him through the dark and he rises, slightly unsteady on his feet. All he’s had to eat are a couple of bowls of tortilla chips. Not a problem. The menu at Senor Pico’s is so heavy with cheese, beans, and ground beef he’ll have sopped up all the booze by the time they take the troughs away. This is his first eyeful of Lydia, and he sizes her up as she walks over. Sees the mom who’d give you a pretzel stick and a glass of tap water when you came over after school. The lady who knows the levels of all the bottles in the liquor cabinet, who knows offhand exactly how many crescent rolls are in the bread basket, who’s been keeping an eye on things no less vigilantly than any old Amsterdam Avenue housewife leaning on a dirty pillow set up on a front room windowsill.
“Hello!” He waves.
Hank comes across as the same old hail-fellow-well-met type, but Lydia fixes Guy with her eyes and extends a hand in his direction as if there were a loaded .45 in it. So naturally he grabs it and gives it an eager yank like the slick little bastard she already thinks he is. (Of course, he and Tania had some pretty good chats about old Mom. Tania had used adjectives like suspicious, bigoted, selfish, rude, intolerant, self-righteous, narrow-minded, rigid, hidebound, authoritarian, punitive, and unforgiving. Sounded to Guy like a malignant version of the Scout Law.)
“Well, I have some good news,” Guy begins. What’s the good news? The usual hearsay, secondhand rumors, and idle gossip, combined with raw conjecture on his part. From what he has managed to learn, he infers that their daughter is feeling homesick and nostalgic. That the group is fragmenting. That its personal conflicts have started to become overwhelming. That ideologically the group makes less sense than ever. That a philosophical split has devolved into a dualism as simple as NO GURLS ALLOWED / BOYS KEEP OUT, so he’s pretty certain that he’ll be able to restore to the Galtons a young lady who is a feminist but not a Maoist.
Even to someone like Lydia, this has got to be a big distinction. Take your choice: You want a daughter who sticks a gun in a utility executive’s face, or her pussy? “Eat me now, bourgeois man-pig!” It has a nice ring to it, no? Better than “Death to the Fascist Insect.” You recuperate from cunnilingus. You definitely pull through. Though Guy has a feeling Lydia may disagree with him on this. But this is really all good news. She wants to see them. She misses them. OK, she hates everything they stand for, but as sentiments go, this is pretty standard issue nowadays. They can probably work around it.
But Guy doesn’t articulate a word of this. His sense is that were he to utter a word such as pussy within the hearing of Lydia Galton, he would instantly transform into a wizened piece of rock, some pre-Cambrian formation, ancient and eternally silent. Plus, in the instant that he takes to gather his thoughts before plunging into his spiel, Lydia leans forward and addresses him.
“I want you to know that my husband places a great deal of faith in you. He is a very gullible man. I haven’t seen anything to indicate that his faith is justified other than your assurances that you’re in touch with our daughter and that she’s all right. That would be the sum of it.”
“I haven’t got any reason to lie, Mrs. Galton.”
“Oh, yes, you have. That’s why I’ve come along to this event. Hank never will out and ask what it is that you want. But I won’t hesitate. I’ve had a bellyful of you people over the last year and a half. You’ve each wanted something. You lecture us about how corrupt we are, and then you hold out your palm for our money. Now we haven’t heard from you in three months, and suddenly you’re in touch. Clearly you have something in mind.”
“I just. More information has come to light.”
“And what would you like in exchange for this information?”
“Lydia. Guy freely offered information to us last time.”
“Isn’t that how pushers work? The first time’s always free?”
“Apparently you know more about that than I.”
Guy gazes wistfully at the icy dregs in the bottom of his glass.
Lydia says, “Oh, don’t pretend to be embarrassed. You don’t have to put on a phony display of discomfiture.”
“If he’s embarrassed, it’s because you’ve done your best to embarrass him.”
“I think he’s shameless.”
“You’ve made that very clear. Why have you come?”
“Because you have always been the type to pick up strays, Hank. It’s not enough that you give them a job or money, whatever it is they want. You have to offer them a share of our lives. That girl. Alice’s friend from Crystal Springs.”
“Oh, God, no. Not Betty Azizi again.”
“Yes. That little Arab girl. Always at the house. Always picking things up. ‘Oh, this is so beautiful.’ Picking things up and turning them over in her hands. Searching for the price tag perhaps? Had nothing and wanted everything. Eyes lit up every time she came through the door.”
“If I remember correctly, her father was a lawyer who worked for the Iranian consulate. Big house in the San Carlos hills.”
“When they’re that close, they want it even more. Especially an Arab.”
“Um,” says Guy. “Iranians aren’t Arabs.” The couple ignores him.
“Even Eric Stump,” says Lydia. “You practically adopted him.”
“No, I did not. I tried to make him feel at home. It’s my nature to be friendly. How was I to know he would turn out to be such a cold mackerel?”
“Exactly.” And Lydia raises that .45-caliber hand again and points directly at Guy’s head. Nice well-bred lady like her, pointing.
“Look,” says Guy, “I helped your daughter when s
he was in need. I’m still helping her.”
“You call that helping her? If you’d wanted to help, you might have told her it was time to come home and face the music rather than arrange a summer retreat,” says Lydia.
Guy experiences the strange lighted calm he used to feel just before a meet against an opponent he feared. He continues. “She thought the cops were going to off her. Not too farfetched at that point.”
“As ye sow,” says Lydia.
“That summer retreat cost me about eight grand, incidentally. I’ve spent a lot of money.”
“Here it comes.”
“I don’t expect to see that dough again. But I could use a little help. I’ve got lawyer bills. I’ve got doctor bills. I’ve got phone bills like you wouldn’t believe. I’ve got bills from auto mechanics. Bartenders.” He essays a faint smile. He was going to say drug dealers. Joke falls flat anyway.
“Tsk, tsk. You may have heard that we made our own modest contribution to our daughter’s Wanderjahr.”
“Your daughter. Not my daughter. Listen. Hank here told me, and I quote, if there’s ever anything I can do for you, be sure and let me know. I need a hand. Not a payoff. A job as a sportswriter for the Examiner maybe. A columnist working for a paycheck every week.”
Lydia bursts out laughing, an awful, high-pitched laugh. Hank cringes.
Well, time for the chimichangas! Lydia has the taco salad, which she “picks at” in time-honored fashion. A pitcher of dark beer sits untouched before the couple. Guy orders another margarita, though he skips the Cuervo on the side. Lydia really fucked him, bringing up his motivations straightaway like that. Now he has to wade back in, deeper and deeper, reclaiming his position. What was it Hemingway said? Fly-fishing in the swamp is a tragic adventure? Lydia has his number, all right. Guy knows that Hank does too; the guy just doesn’t give a damn. Not going to nickel-and-dime his kid’s life at this point. Guy figures the best thing to do is to talk. He has nothing to lose giving up information. Or he does, but the thought of quantifying that loss makes his skull throb within the generous, taco-shaped space behind his forehead. So he goes ahead and says that Alice is thinking about leaving the group. That while it may not be practical for her to come aboveground, she’d like to be in touch with her family. That her urban guerrilla days are probably more or less over, that she and some of the others, the more normal others, have been talking in terms of a “small-scale revolution,” and no, he doesn’t really know what that means either, but he’s heard snatches about local activism, community gardens, the Equal Rights Amendment, and food co-ops; about boycotts of table grapes, lettuce, tree fruit, and other agricultural products; about marijuana decriminalization, mandatory recycling, antinuclear protests, nonpartisan elections, handicapped parking spots, and other such issues. Lydia’s expression is carved onto her face, and her ramrod posture does not slacken, but he can see Hank relax; who wouldn’t want to hear that these are the keynote issues of the armed opposition? It’s like being told that the editorial page staff of the Village Voice is massed outside the walls of the keep.
Trance Page 51
