At first, as the 1960s turned into The Sixties, nothing political I thought or said amounted to rebellion. I was the daughter of people who thought Mayor Daley was creating a police state in Chicago, who paid dues to the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, who belonged to a local cell of integrationist parents. I liked knowing Esperanto for the same reason Chuck knew phrases in Tolkien’s Middle Earth languages—because we were geeks—but to my mother, Esperantists were virtuous fellow travelers speaking a language that Hitler and Franco had outlawed. When I attended the big memorial in Evanston for the three young voter-registration volunteers murdered by the Klan in Mississippi, my mother was doubly pleased, because I was safely playing my little part in Freedom Summer and entering a Catholic church for the first time in a year and a half. When she asked if I’d crossed myself, I lied and said no. Lefty politics were the family religion I had not rejected.
Until Alex and Chuck turned sixteen, somebody’s mom usually drove us to and from New Trier, but one day in October 1964, the beginning of sophomore year, we’d all stayed late after school and walked the two miles home together.
It was one of those fall afternoons—great shafts of sunlight beaming between tall trees, startling indigo sky, leaves turning, neither warm nor chilly, every fifth breeze smelling of smoke—when old suburbs are ravishing and suburbanites are most convinced they’ve made the right choices in life. The three of us were a little hyped up: Chuck from swimming, Alex from acting, me from rehearsing my Model UN speech condemning the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.
On Abbotsford Road in Kenilworth, we came upon a group of kids, two crew-cut boys wearing cardigans and neckties, and two goody-goody-looking girls, one of them wearing a suit and an old-fashioned straw boater. They were carrying clipboards and sheaves of mimeographs and going door-to-door. As we got closer, we saw the girl’s hatband was a bumper sticker that said Au H2O ’64, the smarty-pants campaign slogan for Barry Goldwater, the Republican nominee for president.
The blond girl without the hat, a little older than the rest of us, asked for directions. “Excuse me—which way is Woodstock?”
“That way,” Chuck said, nodding in the direction we were headed, “two blocks. Where you from?”
“Maine East,” one of the boys said.
Maine Township High School East was somewhere out beyond the expressway, almost to O’Hare. Our ideological disapproval was reinforced by a sense of social superiority.
The head girl offered us flyers and urged us to attend “a really fun Goldwater pep rally” on Saturday. Something in me snapped.
“So,” I said, “I guess you’re over here because you ran out of warmongers and racists who wanted your propaganda back in Park Ridge?”
The girl pushed up her thick glasses—I was so glad I’d just gotten contact lenses—planted her black-and-white saddle-shoed feet and folded her arms around her stack of papers. She was fierce. “Senator Goldwater supports civil rights.”
“So, what,” I said, “he voted against the Civil Rights Act by mistake?”
“Come on,” one of the Goldwater boys said to his pals, “let’s go, we’ve got three more blocks to do.” He seemed embarrassed. The other boy and the younger girl in the hat looked scared.
My boys, galvanized by my girl-on-girl bullying, were ready to rumble.
“How many Negro delegates did they have at the Republican convention,” Alex asked, “fifty?”
“Forty-one,” I said, “out of twenty-six hundred.”
“He’s going to lose, you know,” Chuck said.
The Goldwaterites formed a tight cluster as they turned and walked away from us across Abbotsford toward Woodstock Avenue.
Alex grinned at me, shaking his head.
“Whoa, Hollaender,” Chuck said, “I thought the chick in the polio boots was gonna sock you!” He put out a hand for me to slap him five, then slapped mine back.
I thought of the Crystals song “He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss).” A year had passed since my recommitment to being Just Friends, but moments like this always threatened to revive my passions.
I smiled and lit a cigarette. “Like the man says,” I said, quoting Goldwater’s nomination speech, “extremism in the defense of liberty’s no vice, and moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue. Come on, let’s follow them—they’ve got three more blocks to do.”
At the next house, we paused on the sidewalk as they rang the doorbell and started giving their spiel to the white-haired lady who answered the door. They realized we were behind them on the porch only when the woman looked past them at us.
“Excuse me, ma’am,” I said, “we’re your neighbors, from just over in Wilmette? And I wanted to let you know that the Ku Klux Klan are enthusiastic supporters of Senator Goldwater.”
“What?” she said.
“Also,” Chuck added, “Senator Goldwater wants to get rid of Social Security. In case you didn’t know.”
“Oh!” she said. “I—I didn’t know that.”
“No,” the head Goldwater girl said, “he thinks it should be voluntary.”
“Also,” I said, “Senator Goldwater wants to bomb North Vietnam with atomic weapons.”
The woman’s confusion had turned to alarm.
“You have such a beautiful home,” Alex said, which reassured her.
“Thank you, dear.”
As the other boy flipped Chuck the bird, the woman shut her door.
“Come on,” the angry Goldwater squad leader commanded. We followed. They stopped briefly for a huddle in front of the next house, and we stopped five paces behind, but they didn’t go up to the door, and then they headed into the sunset without stopping. We taunted them some more—Alex called Goldwater “the fascist gun in the West”—until they climbed into a car parked on Green Bay Road and drove away.
The three of us were ecstatic the rest of the way home. As we walked down Green Bay, Alex started singing “The Jet Song” from West Side Story and swinging on lampposts. Until that day, politics for us had been a matter of polite pro-and-con discussions, we junior citizens standing up for decency and fairness, all another nice student activity conducted according to the rules. What we’d just done, on the other hand, would horrify our teachers and probably even my parents. We’d been bad in service to the good, and it felt great.
Chuck proposed that we go out late some night to tear down Goldwater yard signs. That gave me a different idea.
We mimeographed posters that we spent a weekend taping up all over Wilmette and Winnetka. VOTE GOLDWATER! the signs said. AGAINST SOCIAL SECURITY! AGAINST THE UN! FOR ANOTHER INVASION OF CUBA! FOR NUCLEAR BOMBS IN VIETNAM! I felt as if I had invented irony. Alex took a picture of two freshmen looking at the poster we’d taped to a telephone pole in front of New Trier, and I got the school paper to run the photo on the front page. We had discovered the power of an incestuous self-serving left-wing media elite.
You know how teenagers always think the universe revolves around them, as if they’re the only ones who really get it, as if they’re the first young people to feel the awful ecstasies and sweet agonies of youth? Those years we turned fifteen and sixteen, the universe did start revolving around us, affirming our adolescent monomania, making our fantasy of self-importance real. Practically overnight, we and everything we thought and did—our new music, the new ways we dressed and talked, our libertine sensibilities, our real and fake idealisms—became Topic A among the grown-ups. Television, radio, magazines, books, movies, the whole culture slavishly turned its full attention to us. We were sexy and terrifying, the shock troops of a new age. We were America’s cool kids by virtue of simply being kids, even if we weren’t cool.
The same month we ambushed the Goldwater volunteers, Alex gave me a copy of Esquire in which Norman Mailer had an article about the previous summer’s Republican convention in San Francisco. I recall one line in particular: “There’s a shit storm coming like nothing you ever knew.” I knew that lots of people, older people, my parents,
would read that and shudder. But the distant thunder of the coming shit storm was nothing but thrilling to us, a coming attraction, like a trailer for a movie in which we could perform as extras simply because we were fifteen.
The next summer, 1965, my summer of being sixteen, was the blindingly bright dividing line between Before and After. A year earlier, Vietnam had been another one of those obscure, fractious foreign places in the news. A year earlier, it seemed as if the Civil Rights Act had finally taken care of the Negro problem, and the War on Poverty would now take care of the poverty problem. A year earlier, girls were wearing their hair big and poufy, and only the Crawford twins wore miniskirts. A year earlier, rock and roll seemed like a fad. The summer of 1965 was when the term of art changed from “combo” to “band,” and when Chuck and three other boys started one. A year earlier, there had been only one New Trier, but now there were so many teenagers that a second campus had to be built on the other side of the expressway, New Trier West. In the summer of 1965, everyone suddenly understood this was only the beginning of something, not the middle or the end.
I started believing I was grown up that summer. I let Channing Payne feel me up at that drive-in movie and attended an antiwar rally unaccompanied by my parents. Tatty No Man’s Land disappeared under rows of shiny new lakefront apartment buildings. My dislike of the new rock-and-roll TV show Shindig! grew into a general contempt for the Establishment repackaging and selling our contempt for the Establishment back to us. I played the Rolling Stones’ album Out of Our Heads many dozens of times, and it was “Satisfaction,” brutally pro-sex and anti-advertising, with which I convinced Chuck that the Stones were superior to the Beatles.
Although Chuck had given up his dream of becoming an air force pilot, Alex still teased him about it, calling him Lieutenant Levy after he started taking flying lessons. One day in the summer of 1965, Chuck made his first solo flight. “For the first time in my life,” he told us that afternoon, “I didn’t feel like a kid. I actually felt like—like a man,” which to my great surprise Alex did not turn into a smutty joke. In fact, he said, “Yeah, I know what you mean. I feel that way when I’m out shooting.” Alex was taking a filmmaking summer school course, for which he shot a short documentary about two boys from Skokie deciding whether to burn their draft cards. He also had his cousin in Canada mail a fan letter to Fidel Castro in Cuba and got a personal reply, and he started dating a large-breasted blonde named Patti who’d joined our chapter of the Student Peace Union.
By the summer of 1965 the single overt vestige of my Bond-enraptured girlhood was the Chesterfields I lit up wherever and whenever I wanted, even at home, and certainly that afternoon after Chuck’s first solo flight in the booth at Bob’s.
“You should switch to Gitanes,” Chuck said to me. “Or Gauloises.”
Two years earlier, I would’ve wondered if he was flirting; now I knew, and regretted, that he was not. I exhaled my stream of smoke just above his head and quoted the Stones—”You can’t be a man ‘cause you do not smoke the same cigarettes as me.”
Chuck bummed a Chesterfield. “Dick, my flight instructor, told me he once dropped a lit Lucky in his lap during a landing and just about flipped the plane.”
“Do you ever think about crashing?” I asked.
“All the time. Not, like, scared of the weather or running out of fuel or whatever. But I always think, I could bring this thing down any time I want. I’m choosing not to.”
“That’s very existentialist,” Alex said. He wasn’t being sarcastic.
Chuck exhaled and smiled and said, “Oui.”
Damn you, Chuck Levy, for being so cute.
“At that WMAQ thing last night,” Alex said, “I Spy was great.” The Chicago NBC station was one of Mr. Macallister’s legal clients, and they’d held a screening of highlights of the network’s new shows.
“It’s … funny?” I asked.
“More witty. But realistic. From now on it’ll be hard to watch a Bond movie without it looking ridiculous.”
“It already is,” Chuck said.
There had been two more Bond movies, From Russia with Love and Goldfinger, each more successful than the last and, to us, more stupid and wrong. I hated that in the movies, unlike the books, the girls were purely sex objects and Bond never showed the slightest regret for anything. When we were watching Goldfinger, and he tells the gold-painted girl that drinking warm champagne is “as bad as listening to the Beatles without earmuffs,” Chuck turned to me and whispered, “Okay, that’s it. I’m done.”
Then there were Bond’s unfortunate politics. On our missions we’d been agnostic, sometimes playing Bond and Leiter, sometimes playing Communist or criminal masterminds and killers. In high school the scales dropped from my eyes. I understood our Bond-mania had entailed a childish political cluelessness. By the summer of 1965 I’d come to see that the real CIA and MI6 didn’t consist of good guys occasionally obliged to do bad things to defeat evil, but bad guys routinely doing bad things to maintain power for the powerful.
“James Bond,” I said to Alex and Chuck that afternoon in 1965 at our table at Bob’s, “is just an imperialist thug in a sharp suit. He’s an evil robot. Period. End of story. I almost couldn’t finish the new one.” The Man with the Golden Gun, Fleming’s final novel, had just come out.
Alex screwed up his face. “Oh, I know.”
“I’ve started The Spy Who Came In from the Cold,” Chuck told Alex, “and you’re right, it’s great. So realistic. So much better than Fleming. Everybody keeps secrets and lies. Everybody’s betraying everybody else.”
“Although,” Alex said, “you’ll see in the end that true love carries the day. Sort of.”
It was late. I slid out of the booth. “Maybe I’ll see you guys Sunday at the thing on Winnetka Green?”
“Will we get to meet the mysterious Charlie Chan?” Alex asked.
I shrugged. Chan (short for Channing) Payne, my first boyfriend, had told me he’d be working at the thing on Winnetka Green. We were both volunteers for the North Shore Summer Project, which entailed knocking on doors in Wilmette and Winnetka, especially those with for-sale signs, and asking the owners if they were racist or anti-Semitic. Actually, the question we posed—”Would you be willing to sell your house on a nondiscriminatory basis?”—was so polite and anodyne that half the time the women who answered the doors didn’t understand what we were asking. When we made ourselves clear—”Would you sell your house to a family of Negroes or Jews?”—they rarely said no, but most of them got embarrassed and nervous, which was the real point of the enterprise, it seemed, more than gathering data.
For me it was a watershed. The girl who couldn’t stand selling Camp Fire candy was now selling the idea of integration and practically relishing the awkwardness. After one man shut his door and went back inside, we thought we heard him say something—to his wife? one of his kids?—about “niggers buying our house.”
I can’t say the North Shore Summer Project experience “radicalized” me, exactly. Instead, my longstanding beatnik-y belief in the timidity and complacency and hypocrisy of grown-ups now had seven sweaty, exhausting weeks of empirical confirmation. I understood that important change and real progress would be grindingly slow.
I started to feel like the hero in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, as if I’d discovered that the people in my hometown were clones. That summer my sister, Sabrina, received the sacrament of confirmation at St. Joseph’s. When she and her fellow inductees repeatedly lowed “I do” on command—“Do you reject Satan? And all his works? And all his empty promises?”—it was one more confirmation of my growing sense that I was surrounded by pod people.
On the last Sunday in July 1965, after my dad and brother and I watched the Cubs lose on TV, the whole family drove up to the Winnetka Village Green and claimed a spot of grass. My mother spread out a Marimekko tablecloth printed with giant pink flowers. We got dinner from a North Shore Summer Project chuck wagon—Chan was serving slices of Wonder
bread; we said hi—and drank nonalcoholic sangria from a big plaid thermos that Mom had brought.
I spotted Alex squatting near the podium, holding his 16-millimeter movie camera, panning the crowd. We waved at each other. “And isn’t that Chuck,” my mother said too loudly, “over there, in line at the picnic wagon, with the Reichman girl?” It was. “Do you want to go invite them to come sit with us? Plenty of sangria left!” I did not.
Sabrina was reading a Laura Ingalls Wilder book, These Happy Golden Years, and Peter played with his favorite toy, a black plastic briefcase containing a fake passport and a cap pistol that could be converted into a sniper rifle. Violet was with us, too, more dressed up than I’d ever seen her, holding a handkerchief in one hand and her inhaler in the other, speaking only when spoken to. She and my mother were both self-conscious about her presence, Violet nervous and my mother proud. Every few minutes my mom or dad mentioned how perfect the weather was, sunny, dry, breezy, not too hot—except for a few chiggers, the ideal summer afternoon.
Everyone on the Green must have felt self-conscious. There were hundreds when we arrived and thousands by six o’clock, expectant and antsy, strenuously smiling at strangers and checking their watches as more people streamed in. Dozens of cops stood around the edges.
Suddenly, at the corner of the Green, fifty yards away, there was a commotion—first shouting, then a parked police car’s cherry top flashing. My parents exchanged a worried look, and Violet stared at her hands. People stood on tiptoe and craned their necks. Peter and I wanted to go see what was happening, my mother told us to stay put, I pooh-poohed her—”It’s Winnetka”—and as we took off, my father came along.
True Believers Page 16
