Trance
Page 53
She’s looking at a copy of Silver Screen that the girl she’s replacing for two weeks left behind. On Sara Jane’s first day, the girl had sort of shown her around the desk. “Training her,” as she put it. She’d introduced her to her collection of stuffed animals perched and roosted here and there on her desk and in the empty spaces of her bookshelf, making the introductions with solemn formality. “This is Sir Jenkins,” she’d said, “this here is Daisy.”
She’s reading about The Tragic Truth Behind Peter Duel’s Suicide. “He was an actor on the way up, with money in the bank and his clean-cut cowboy image in just about every young girl’s heart.” Sara Jane doesn’t really remember the young man’s show, Alias Smith and Jones. Happy western buddy-buddy stuff, men patting the hindquarters of horses?
Lois Kane of Silver Screen just doesn’t understand what could lead such a young man to shoot himself. The roots of his mad act simply are not visible. To Sara Jane this is hardly a matter of mystery of the week. It is so easy to feel hemmed in, unappreciated, underutilized, taken for granted.
The young man was crazy about ecology and hated pollution. “He would not use plastic cups on the set—only glass ones. He would not use anything that would not dissolve and go back into the earth.”
Sara Jane tosses the sandwich into the wastepaper basket. She speculates that the young man probably felt that he’d thrown in his lot with the wrong people. It can be a very difficult situation. Someone seems to want you, to need you, and it is natural for a warm and friendly person to respond to that in kind. And then you find out it was all a put-on.
Speaking of guns, Sara Jane has one right here. She’s been carrying it in her purse lately. She hasn’t needed it so far but you never know. People are still mad about Popeye. But he had put her on. Thomas Polhaus had put her on. But you needed protection.
Five minutes later she’s on the street, getting into her car. Mrs. McCarthy had sneaked up behind her, Do you need something to do, Are you looking for something to do. If you need something to do just speak right up. Whatever she’d said. Office manager drivel.
Speak right up. “Train” her. Like she is a spaniel or hound, begging for dinner table scraps.
Just looking at that gun gave her the courage, the nerve, to tell that McCarthy bitch off and walk out, past all the dumb faces of those drones working there. She forgot to get her time card signed, but that’s OK. The gun makes her feel better about that too. Money becomes so abstract, the nitpicky refuge of the chickenhearted, at the uplifting sight of a gun, its pure power to convert whatever you need or desire into something you actually have.
NIETFELDT HAS A ONE—BEDROOM apartment on Lupine, a little spur off Geary. The building is built into the side of a hill, so that his third-floor apartment is reached by entering the building’s lobby and walking down a flight. The whole building is low ceilings, long corridors, right angles, dark corners, and the thin institutional smell of ammonia. Utterly claustrophobic.
Gradually he’s turned into one of those men with great bundles of dirty laundry piled in the corners, leftover pizza in the refrigerator, old newspapers on top of the stove. For someone else the rooms would be a rebuke, the embodiment of his seclusion, the measure of his digression from the norm, but for him this is the norm. So his wives had discovered. Anything else would be cosmetic, a disguise. Still, he avoids the apartment as much as he can. Checks in long enough to get the mail, put it on the table.
Tonight he takes the time to open a beer and have another look at Joan Shimada’s file. Here’s a new wrinkle. Susan Rorvik’s logged eight trips to Soledad over the last three years for the purpose of visiting William Clay, Joan Shimada’s former lover and comrade-in-arms. He finds that in the Shimada file, right in front of his face all this time. If that were the only connection between Susan and Joan, Nietfeldt wouldn’t be all that impressed; a steady stream of pilgrims from the East Bay have gone to call on Willie Clay. What has impressed him is the discovery that working side by side at the Plate of Brasse with “Susan Anger” is a certain Meg Speice. Speice is a Jersey girl who was a dead end in the Shimada investigation three years ago. She admitted then that she and Joan were friends but that Joan had long since gone on her way and she hadn’t seen or heard from her. No reason to think Speice was lying in 1972. But now she pops up here in San Francisco right around when the summer hidey-hole had to have been abandoned, working side by side with a known SLA sympathizer with links to Guy Mock. His chain is looking longer and stronger.
He has the vague feeling that he’ll regret it, but what he needs is to have an agent in Southern California head out to Palmdale to pay the Rorviks a visit. He could go himself, but Gary Haff was extrasensitive about getting his toes stepped on. Brilliant work he’d done on the case last May. Just brilliant.
Summer Chronicle
The women’s collective meets, possibly for the last time as such. The members have decided to set aside their work for the time being to pursue more absolutely the goal of revolution, in keeping with Teko’s intense desire to begin blowing things up.
On the agenda is the matter of prostitution. They are attempting to decide if sexual entrepreneurialism is liberating, oppressive, or simply retrograde. Tania, “troop scribe,” as Joan has dubbed her, jots down the minutes.
Susan suggests that a woman who is in business for herself, who controls the means of production, is more correct, politically, than one who’s been turned out by a pimp. Cf. her own experience as an actress v. her experience waiting tables; oh there are some quite long reminiscences.
Joan speculates that in the socialist or barter economy that might exist in an emerging postrevolutionary state, such “entrepreneurs” might then be politically obliged to stop seeking payment for their services and thus be placed in a position of slavery all over again, trading sexual favors for subsistence. She seems to enjoy lobbing such near paradoxes into their midst.
Yolanda says that all sex workers will receive training in the manual art of their choice, be it auto repair, locksmithing, air conditioning and refrigeration, or computer programming.
At some point they agree that all men are pimps. In theory. Meeting adjourned.
Tania sits on the floor in her panties, topless. She leans against the couch, her legs extended under the scarred coffee table. Her paint-spattered clothes are piled on the floor. She feels grimy, bone tired: two units today, at a complex up in Diamond Heights, a mixed neighborhood as they say, with black families trudging home from the Safeway, laden with grocery bags, beneath clean modern houses built into the bluffs overlooking the city. She’d felt safe enough venturing out, but the landlord, a friendly old guy with a limp, someone’s good grampa, had brought them lunch and then stuck around to argue good-naturedly with Roger, Giants versus Dodgers stuff, so she’d withdrawn from sight, actually putting in a day’s work, finishing off the first unit in the hot bare sun streaming through the western windows and then doing the hated bathroom of the second. In a daze of ennui and fatigue, she sits holding an unlit cigarette in one hand and a paperback book in the other, staring blankly at one smudge among many on the wall.
The book is The Collective Family: A Handbook for Russian Parents. Teko found it while prowling around Moe’s—a stupid move, his going there; Tania doesn’t even want to know if he pocketed it—and he presented it to her casually one day, almost like a joke, after Tania had mentioned offhandedly that she wanted children eventually.
“This here’s like the Soviet Dr. Spock,” he said.
As she might have known, whereas someone normal might expect a thank-you note, what Teko requires is a full report on A. S. Makarenko’s tome, and she has barely cracked its spine.
Makarenko says, “Such parents never command discipline. Their children are simply afraid of them and try to live out of range of their authority and power.”
Fuck Teko. She gets up and walks into the dark kitchen to drink cold milk out of the container, standing in the light of the fridge.
She returns to the living room and flips on the Philco, stands watching, right hip jutting out and her weight resting on her left leg, as the old set warms and the image spreads gradually across the surface of the picture tube. And here’s the Miss Universe pageant. The girls strut their stuff down the runway in the ballroom of the National Gymnasium in San Salvador, each of these hardworking beauty queens appearing in what Tania gathers is traditional native garb. Misses Sri Lanka, Sweden, Switzerland, Thailand, Trinidad and Tobago, Turkey, Uruguay. Bob Barker’s narration of the procession skillfully combines both veiled lecherousness and false reverence for the honored customs each elaborate outfit represents. “Miss USA,” he announces casually But wait. The pretty brunette sauntering across the screen appears to be wearing combat fatigues, a beret, and an automatic rifle. She arrives at the edge of the stage, like all the milkmaids, priestesses, and native dancers going before her, and, flashing a gorgeous smile to acknowledge the sustained applause that has greeted her appearance, lifts the weapon to her hip, and trains it on the members of the audience, swinging slowly to the right and then to the left, as she might if she were to clear the room, firing full auto.
Tania watches the pageant until the end. Miss USA ends up coming in third, behind the first runner-up, Miss Haiti, and the winner, Miss Finland. She is named Miss Photogenic, having tied with Martha Echeverry of Colombia for the honor.
They’re sitting in traffic one day, Teko and Jeff up front, Tania and Susan in back, the car like an oven, when Jeff and Teko begin to argue, then fight. They slap and shove each other across the sticky front seat, breathing hard, pausing for a moment so that Teko can throw the car into park. They struggle, aiming shots carefully across the short distance separating them, covering up, panting in the swelter, in the blare of horns.
More movies:
She sees Dark Star (isolated outer space explorers become bored, cynical, and out of touch with the original purpose of their mission, living only to wreak violence while arguing endlessly among themselves).
She sees The Stepford Wives (women who resist the stifling conformity demanded by their small town and the patriarchal group that runs it are replaced with compliant replicas).
Jeff Wolfritz brings an old friend around, a white man doing grad work in Afro-American Studies at Berkeley, the idea being for them to submit themselves to the guy’s scrutiny, become the subject of his fieldwork. But the man is perplexed and piqued. Where are my black people? he demands. The answer is, Hang on, any minute now. We’re doing the best we can.1
After going early one morning to firebomb the house of the day’s fascist, a construction company executive (the bombs, which explode at dawn, destroy a small greenhouse and kill a cat), Tania and Roger take a drive down Highway 1. It’s a brilliant day, the ocean sparkling below them, and they stop at Montara, sit on rocks overlooking the tidal pools, hold hands. Sweet Roger. A group of children, bundled up in sweatshirts and windbreakers, plays on the beach. Their parents, huddled on wind-ruffled blankets, watch benignly as the children pretend to shoot one another and to be shot, rolling on the sand in extravagantly enacted death throes. One of the kids, fresh out of murder victims, rushes up to them.
“Pougghhhh!” he says, pointing a reasonable facsimile of a snubnose revolver at them.
“Pow!” says Roger, who carries an automatic concealed in a camera case.
“You’re dead,” says the boy. There’s no heat to the remark, only a simple statement of fact. He stares at Roger, the snubnose held at his side, and Roger obliges him by toppling over into the sand.
“You killed him!” says Tania. She kneels and turns Roger over. He doesn’t move a muscle, doesn’t crack a smile. A thin dusting of sand coats his cheek and lips. “You’ve killed my husband!” She takes a crack at keening.
The boy, alert to the wit involved, cautious about becoming the butt of the joke, takes a wary step forward to examine Roger’s immobile form up close. This is something you want to check out. Tania recalls the childish thrill of playing so hard, pretending something so intensely, that you just about believe it if all the cards fall right, if everybody cooperates, your stupid friends don’t mess it up, call time, screw you out of the climax that is your due. Here comes the kid’s mom, looking halfway curious, halfway concerned.
“What’s going on here? Michael?”
She’s about thirty-two, wears black toreador pants greenish with age, a San Jose State sweatshirt, and sunglasses. Her hair is tied back in a scarf. She sips something from a Styrofoam cup.
“Don’t bother this man and lady,” she says.
Roger opens his eyes and sits up, brushing sand from his face. “It’s OK. We were just—”
“He was dead!” the boy screams, outraged at Roger’s resurrection. “You’re dead! I killed you!”
He runs to join the other kids in his group.
“I’m sorry,” the mother says. “I don’t want him to play with guns, but he wouldn’t let up. The others. Look at them all! I’m so sorry.” She seems as distressed as if Roger really had been shot.
“It’s OK,” says Roger.
“It really isn’t,” she says.
“I didn’t mind.”
“It’s not OK.” She says it sharply this time and leaves.
Blowing things up becomes just another job. A routine is established. A workaday mood prevails. Owing to her past experience with Willie Clay’s Revolutionary Army, Joan is drafted as explosives expert. She’s a little rusty. Some of her bombs blow up; some don’t.
The actions are incoherent, like punctuating their rambling argument against the system with inarticulate screeches. A partial catalog of them is gnomic, imperspicuous:
GMC, San Jose
Pillar Point Air Force Radar Station
Vulcan Foundry, Oakland
KRON-TV, San Francisco
PG&E transmission towers, Oakland
PG&E substation, San Jose
PG&E installation, Sacramento
California DOC parole office, Sacramento
PG&E office building, Berkeley
Prison Guards’ Rifle Range, San Quentin
Bureau of Indian Affairs, Alameda
SFPD Mission Station
SFPD Taraval Station
Emeryville Police Station
Marin County Civic Center
They cram the bombings in amid continuing quarrels over strategy, philosophy, politics, over ever-keener edges of extremism that need to be explored, rejected, studied. The most persistent arguments have to do with revolutionary violence—i.e., “armed propaganda” versus murder, assassination, etc.—and black leadership, that enduring problem. Teko insists that they are mere stewards of the Black Revolution.
“And you’re the stewardess, right?” Joan asks Yolanda.
Yolanda lectures her. “You need to take this more seriously, Joan. You’re the one who’s refusing the moral responsibility of assuming minority leadership. You.”
The new development in the evolution of Teko’s revolutionary thought? He’s decided that only the members of a certain enlightened class of white—such as, say, himself—may participate in the class struggle. Other whites are worse than useless. Teko would simply put them up against the courtyard wall. Anyone exhibiting counterrevolutionary tendencies at any time would be eligible for such therapy.
“These aren’t terms you can present,” says Susan.
“I just presented them.”
“You can’t win this way. Nothing’ll change.”
“It’s got to be this way.”
“Teko, you’re not black.”
“I feel like, in many respects, I am black.”
“‘Woman is the nigger of the world,’” adds Yolanda.
Joan takes Tania aside. “Now’s the time, hon.”
Tania’s eyes widen; a smile spreads across her face. “Boston?”
“One step at a time. Out of here, for sure. This is final craziness. This is some sort of political puritism, not revolution.”
Joan gestures dismissively. “It’s all crap. The point is if Teko’s only interested in offing white people, then what’s left but dying? I mean serious martyr stuff. Even on the farm I was like screw that. But we’re here now, not out in some boondock. Pigs all around. Now I can understand what happened in L.A. That Cin-Q must have been some sweet talker, because I really think they died on his say-so. It dawns on me now that this fight to the death idea is the plan. No revolution, only suicide.”
“THE GIRL HAS SHOULDER-LENGTH blond hair.”
“Yes?” Rose Rorvik held a plastic laundry basket under her left arm and drew on the cigarette in her right hand.
“Lives in the Bay Area, with her boyfriend. Works as a waitress.”
“Ah?”
“Tell me if this sounds familiar: ‘Brings to the cloistered Nell a sort of irascible verve, making of her senile ramblings at Nagg lucid poetic sense.’”
That, she had no idea what he was talking about.
“Does any of this remind you of anyone you know?”
The two men stood on the porch, sweating beneath their suits in the August heat.
“Yes.”
“How about this? Does this sound like something you might have heard before? ‘Keep fighting! I’m with you! We’re with you!’” The man tried to restrain a malicious smile as he raised his right fist, a decidedly stunted little flourish, like a Nixon wave. His jacket was dark with sweat at the armpit.
“Yes, it does.”