True Believers

by Kurt Andersen

  But for various unspoken reasons, we conducted ourselves discreetly. We were discreet because we were twelve-year-olds—two boys and a girl—devoted to books that depicted sadism and boozing and nakedness and unmarried amoral strangers (including women with strippers’ names—Pussy Galore, Honeychile Rider) having sex. And, of course, committing cold-blooded murder. As junior high began, we were already considered geeky—especially Alex and I—so why advertise this peculiar new strain of oddness to classmates already primed to be suspicious?

  But our secrecy wasn’t mainly about avoiding ostracization, either.

  It pleased us, in those days before we had many important secrets to keep, that our devotion to this fictional world of conspiracies and ciphers and agents and weapons remained unseen and shadowy.

  We had reached a new level of obsessiveness the summer before eighth grade, right after The Spy Who Loved Me was published. I loved it because the narrator/heroine is an ordinary twenty-three-year-old American girl who happens to meet Bond (and then has screaming orgasmic sex with him). Alex hated it because its narrator is an ordinary American girl, not a foreign spy or killer; Bond doesn’t appear until halfway through, then disappears; the villains are run-of-the-mill thugs; and the whole thing takes place at some crummy American motel. Chuck was torn: he approved of the realism (ordinary girl, ordinary crooks, chance encounter, motel), but the romantic stuff seemed to him so entirely un-Bond, he argued for weeks that maybe Ian Fleming had paid someone else to write the book for him.

  “Hollaender, I mean seriously, come on,” he said the first afternoon after we’d all read it. We were at Bob’s, our burgers-and-ice-cream place on Wilmette Avenue. Chuck put his palms on his chest and tried to coo girlishly. “ ‘Every smallest detail would be written on my heart forever.’ Don’t tell me you take that kind of crap seriously. I thought the tough chicks were your heroes, like Gala Brand.” Chuck’s use of “chick” was one result of Bond immersion.

  “I just think the first-person point of view is really interesting. Like in On the Road.”

  “Oh, I see, Miss Maynard G. English Teacher,” Chuck said, “let me take some notes on that.” He went to get his french fries.

  Alex was smiling. “I figured one of the things you liked about Gala,” he said softly, “is that she, you know, isn’t a slut.”

  Alex was right, which I hadn’t realized until that moment. Gala Brand and Solitaire (in Live and Let Die) were the only major female characters who didn’t have sex with Bond. I liked Gala Brand for her seriousness and professionalism, and now I liked Vivienne Michel because of her shameless capacity for both lust and love. Which, needless to say, I couldn’t say.

  “Do you think,” Alex asked, now in a whisper, no longer smiling, “that women really do like to imagine they’re being raped when they’re having intercourse?”

  He was referring to Vivienne’s theory of female sexuality. “All women,” she says in the book, “love semi-rape. They love to be taken. It was his sweet brutality against my bruised body that had made his act of love so piercingly wonderful.” Until that moment at Bob’s, our group discussions of the books’ sex had been vague and glancing.

  “How would I know?” I said.

  “But what do you think? Seriously, like imagine if you and Rob Norquist were taking a shower together—”

  “Stop, Alex.” Smiling giant tanned blond Rob Norquist was the smartest and nicest of the jocks, and Alex had delighted in telling me that his pubic hair was the most luxuriant of any boy’s in gym class. In The Spy Who Loved Me, Vivienne’s first sexual encounter with Bond takes place after he surprises her in her shower. “James saved Viv from being raped by the bad guys, okay?”

  “James?”

  We always called Bond “Bond.”

  “What Viv likes about Bond,” I said, hoping I wouldn’t blush, “the ‘sweet brutality’ or whatever, is because he isn’t really raping her. It’s a make-believe thing, only in her mind. And I guess maybe his mind, too.”

  “But which is it, the feeling, make-believe or real? That’s what I don’t get.”

  “It’s both. I guess it’s both. I mean, soldiers in war probably have all kinds of make-believe ideas in their heads while they’re fighting, imagining they’re John Wayne or something. Okay, so with Viv, when she’s, you know … with Bond, she’s herself, doing what she’s doing, but in her mind, she also turns it into a make-believe scene.”

  Chuck returned with a steaming cardboard basket and scooted back into the booth next to Alex, as always. In junior high, any other public seating configuration for the three of us—me with either of the boys across from the other one—might have implied a coupling. We were best friends, but just friends.

  “Hey,” Chuck asked as he dribbled ketchup over his fries, “you know who that new grill guy looks exactly like? Scott Carpenter! I mean exactly.”

  Carpenter was the astronaut who’d orbited Earth three times the previous week. In order to let us to watch his splashdown, the assistant principal wheeled TVs into the cafeteria and made us whisper while we ate lunch, which was sort of exciting, as was the fact that Carpenter had landed hundreds of miles off-target. But John Glenn’s single-orbit flight three months earlier had been the big deal, so this latest flight struck me as an anticlimax. The space program was the first time I ever experienced sequel boredom.

  “The astronauts all seem the same to me,” I said. “Like gym teachers.”

  “What?” Chuck replied, aghast. “They’re real-life James Bonds!”

  We all badly wanted to be cool, but at thirteen, Chuck was finding it difficult to grow out of his space-program excitement. His main nonmusical hobby, apart from reading the Bond books and swimming, was making and flying giant radio-controlled model airplanes with his dad, what he called “RC aerobatics.”

  Alex was ignoring us. Chuck waved a french fry in front of his face. “Alex Macallister, this is Cape Cap Com on emergency voice, do you read me, over?”

  Alex sighed and finally reengaged with us. “I have an idea for us to do this summer. A cool idea, I think.”

  “Is this the smuggling-explosives idea?” I asked. The previous summer, Chuck got some serious firecrackers from his cousin in Milwaukee, and ever since he had talked about pooling our money and taking the bus to Wisconsin to buy a gross of cherry bombs or M80s that we’d import to Wilmette and sell for five times what we paid. “Because if so,” I went on, “no—I hate selling things.” When I was in Camp Fire Girls, I’d made my mother buy my entire case of candy, and we still had unopened boxes of Almond Caramel Clusters and P-Nuttles in the pantry.

  “Uh-uh,” Alex said. “Remember last fall, Hollaender, when you thought we should make up and then act out our own scenes playing characters from the books”—by which he meant, naturally, the Bond books—”and film them with my parents’ movie camera?”

  “And you said, ‘That’s retarded, Hollander, who wants to make silent James Bond movies?’ Yeah, I remember.”

  “Well, so I was thinking,” Alex explained, “that we could do, you know, theater.”

  Chuck grimaced and made an elaborate choking sound.

  3

  “Wow, Grams, for real?” Waverly, my only grandchild, age seventeen, is visiting me for Christmas and New Year’s and lying prone in front of the fireplace as I write. It’s late. She’s in her nightgown playing My Little Pony: The Runaway Rainbow on my antique Game Boy as she sips her glass of tonic water. I just told her that when I was about her age, I’d once gone rainbow hunting with two boys. “That is so gay,” she says.

  “It wasn’t ‘gay’ at all. We flew in our own little airplane, bouncing around on the edge of a thunderstorm for an hour. It was completely terrifying.”

  Waverly continues poking at the tiny Game Boy buttons with her fast-motion thumbs and fingers. “Was it a hippie thing? Were you, like, high?”

  “No! We weren’t hippies. Although it was the summer of 1967.”

  “Whenever you talk about th
e past, it’s funny how you make such a big deal out of the exact year. ‘It was 1967—the summer of 1967.’ I mean, 1964, 1967, 1973, whatever. Like when we went to see X-Men: First Class? And you were all, ‘There were not miniskirts in 1962!’”

  I smiled. “I know, but—I bet you’ll be the same way when you’re older.”

  “Uh-uh,” she says, “because how is right now any different than 2007 or 2002? I’m seventeen instead of eleven or six, but in terms of the way people act and talk and dress and style their hair, and music and movies and everything? Everything’s been the same forever. It’s like everything’s stuck.”

  “Politics are different,” I say. “Crazier.”

  “Nine-eleven is my earliest memory—”

  “Really?”

  “—so America’s been at war but not really at war my whole life. At least when Mom was growing up, personal computers and video and the Internet got invented.”

  “A couple of days ago you told me you thought life was better before VCRs and DVRs and Hulu—when people had to make choices about what TV shows and movies they were going to watch at a certain time and commit to their choices.”

  “I’m just saying the Internet was something new and big that happened.”

  “I know what you mean. When I was a kid, it was as if the whole country—the whole world, everything—slipped into a wormhole and shot out the other end in some alien sector of the space-time continuum.”

  “Awesome.”

  There’s been nothing like it since. It’s hard for her and for my children to appreciate how different 1962 was from 1969. I think of each year of the 1960s as distinctly as they think of whole decades. My brother, Peter, born seven years after me, has never considered himself a baby boomer. Our experiences were so different, he thinks, because I’d been old enough to know the world as it was in the 1950s and early ‘60s, before everything changed, whereas he was still a child when the late ‘60s arrived. By the time he got to high school and college in the ‘70s, he says, the youth revolution had already cowed the grown-ups into doing away with all the old-fashioned codes of behavior.

  “All the digital stuff is all new,” I say to Waverly. “That’s what people your age have.”

  “No, that’s what people Mom’s age had. The new computer stuff today is just … a little faster than when I was a kid, and more unavoidable. I mean, this,” she says, nodding down at the Game Boy, “is really old and kinda clunky but not really that different than things now.”

  “I should buy some new games for it.”

  “No, no, I’m not saying that. The less stuff we buy, the better.”

  She loves the simple black rubber Armani raincoat I gave her for Christmas. I bought it on sale, but even so, she’d be grossed out if I told her how much I paid. At IKEA you could buy a sofa for the same price.

  “I mean,” Waverly continues, “I’ve paid for nothing except Christmas presents and food, locally grown food, for the last two months almost.”

  “Not including your airplane ticket here.”

  “We didn’t actually pay money for it. Mom and Dad used miles.”

  “Also: nice iPad Four.”

  “It was a birthday present from Mom and Dad, and I didn’t even ask for it. Anyhow, I actually like playing these old games, and—Oh, fuck!” She had made some Game Boy error. ”Buying new games for this would be kinda gay. To me.” She turns off the device and sits up in a lotus position. “I mean, I’ll be eighteen in less than a year! How weird is that?”

  “Super-weird,” says Grandma. “To me.” I put down my legal pad. “Wavy, I’ve got a question for you.”

  “I’m sorry I said ‘fuck’.”

  I make a “Phhhht!” noise and roll my eyes. “No, I mean ‘so gay’—I just wonder exactly what you mean, someone like you, when you say something is ‘so gay.’”

  “My LGBTQI friends don’t mind when I use it that way, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “Bingo.” I wonder when that I got appended to LGBTQI and what it stands for. As a university dean in 2013, I ought to know.

  “When I said it last fall in English when we were discussing Keats or Byron or one of those guys, the teacher reprimanded me, like, whoa, this truly mad beef. I mean, he stopped the class and everything. It was crazy. But the two gay kids in my class laughed at him.”

  I pick up Waverly’s empty glass on my way to make myself another gin and tonic—or maybe, since the tonic’s almost gone, a martini. (Stirred, not shaken, and I don’t buy Gordon’s or Beefeater, Bond’s brands.)

  Late-night cocktails at Christmastime with the one and only child of my children, high on a hill overlooking Los Angeles in an odd and perfectly cozy wooden house built in 1946: perfection, or close to it.

  When Greta, Waverly’s mother, was seventeen, her brother, Seth, was eight, and we were living in Brooklyn Heights. I was a litigation partner at a big law firm working twenty-four hundred billable hours a year, plus another several hundred pro bono that involved trips to Eastern Europe, as well as devoting Lord knows how many hundreds more, nonbillable, trying to jolly up the successful triathlete and increasingly unhappy composer whom I’d married for better and for worse. And also teaching at Yale. Which is to say, my life didn’t allow for much meandering, apparently purposeless conversation between teenage daughter and forty-two-year-old mother. We were not The Gilmore Girls.

  Back then I used to say that I despised the new coinage “quality time,” that it was yuppie parents’ smiley-face equivalent to lawyers’ “billable hours.” Which is true enough. But I’ve come to understand that my noisy aversion to the phrase was meant to hide (from me) my guilt about failing to give my eldest child enough quality time. My plan as a young woman had been to have my first kid around thirty-three. I had not intended to raise a one-year-old as a twenty-six-year-old clerk for the 7th Circuit in Chicago, or to raise a two-year-old while clerking eighty hours a week for the Supreme Court in Washington. To my friends at the time, going through with an unplanned pregnancy at age twenty-five had been the one unfathomable, shocking thing about me.

  Anyway, unlike my friends my age now, whose children’s children are mostly infants and toddlers, I’ve already got a granddaughter who takes birth control pills and calls herself “freeganish” and “a culture-jammer.” In other words, for a couple of weeks every year I am the guardian of a teenager with whom I enjoy hanging out the way I should’ve enjoyed hanging out with Greta when she was young. So my relationship with Waverly is kind of a do-over.

  “That’s the last of your brew,” I say, handing her a glass of tonic.

  “I can make some more.” She’s looking at her screen, which is a patchwork of five or six instant-messaging windows, several containing live video images of young faces. It looks like a wanted poster from the future.

  “Good,” I say, “because otherwise all that stuff will rot before you’re back.”

  Waverly has boiled up a batch of homemade tonic water. I think I’ve shown heroic restraint by not mentioning that the ingredients she made me buy (cinchona bark, allspice berries, citric acid) cost as much as a case of Schweppes, and also by not wondering aloud about the carbon-footprint cost of shipping cinchona from Peru to southern California. Our only two arguments during the last ten days were over my refusal to replace the low-water-use toilets, purchased three years ago at her insistence, with locally built dry-composting ones, and her discovery that I have a stash of incandescent lightbulbs in my pantry, which she thought were illegal to own as well as to sell. (“Oh,” she said after I explained, “so it’s sort of like weed.”)

  She turns away from her computer to face me. “My friend Hunter? He got diagnosed with diabetes in the fall, Type 1, and his doctor told him he shouldn’t drink alcohol.”

  “That’s probably good advice.”

  “How come you do?”

  “Because I never get drunk, and over the last forty years, I’ve learned how to manage my blood sugar around it.” And because it wou
ld be wrong—aesthetically, if not morally—for a sixty-four-year-old to smoke weed in front of her seventeen-year-old granddaughter. I live in Los Angeles, but I have not gone completely native.

  “Hunter and I are thinking of going down to Miami in March for Occupy the G-20.”

  The global economy is so screwed up that the overlords have decided to hold two G-20 summits this year, one in Australia and an extra in South Florida, as if more meetings and sunny photo ops will fix everything. Two falls ago Waverly attended the Occupy Wall Street demonstration in lower Manhattan for five weekends running, each visit chaperoned by her mother. I told Greta that instead of being a hockey mom, she’d become a protest mom.

  “Exactly why,” I ask, “do you want to go protest the G-20 summit?”

  “Are you kidding me? Because even though we live in a post-scarcity time, the World Bank and the IMF and all those smiling assholes are all about the rich white people and the giant corporations trying to stay as rich and powerful as possible at the expense of the poor dark people.”

  My friend Sarah Caputo, who went to Malawi for three years after college to work for the Peace Corps, runs the clean-water programs for the International Development Association, the arm of the World Bank that lends money to the poorest countries. During the G-20 summit in Canada a few years ago, some protesters dumped a tub of manure on her, then took smartphone videos of her, which they posted on the Web.

  “There are good, decent people who work for the World Bank, really trying to improve the lives of poor people.”