Chuck was picking out a song on his guitar, and nobody said anything for a while. He and Alex were months away from turning eighteen, when they would have to register for the draft, too.
Alex reached into the pocket of his chinos. “Flip gave me a present last night.” He grinned and held up and jiggled a crumpled Baggie with two hand-rolled cigarettes inside.
One afternoon that summer I thought I’d spotted two of the guys from the JOIN office sneaking a joint in an alley, but I had never tried pot. None of us had.
We smoked a joint. I felt nothing, and Alex and Chuck admitted they didn’t, either. We lit the second one, and Chuck took the first hit.
“When my dad went down to the Amazon to study those Indians for Searle,” I said, “the drug company? In seventh grade? He asked the old medicine man, ‘Why do you chant after you chew your special bark? What’s the purpose of your chanting?’ And the Indian guy stares at him a long time and finally says, ‘Because the bark requires half an hour to take effect, and waiting gets so boring.’”
Chuck violently exhaled a cloud of smoke as he began laughing, then kept laughing, then Alex and I joined in. At last we stopped, got our breath, and wiped our eyes.
“We are real hepcats,” Alex said, “smoking reefers.”
Chuck started laughing again, then Alex, and then, after abandoning a sudden urge to exercise control, me. I’d learned about grass when I was twelve, from Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl, but Chuck and Alex didn’t know about it until they read Live and Let Die. In the novel, at a restaurant in Harlem, Bond smells “marihuana,” and Felix Leiter tells Bond that “the real hepcats smoke reefers.”
“God, I feel like I just swam a mile,” Chuck said, out of breath.
Now that the Macallisters owned two color TVs, their old one was in the basement. Alex turned it on.
“Wow,” I said.
“Yeah,” Chuck agreed.
It was so … colorful. We were staring at a new game show we’d never seen.
There was a category, and you had to name something in it that began with the letter of the last thing named. “Venezuela,” said David McCallum, who played Illya Kuryakin on The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
“Algeria,” his teammate replied.
“Better say Afghanistan, Illya!” Chuck warned. “Only ‘A’ country that doesn’t also end in ‘A’! Only escape from the perpetual loop!”
“That’s really interesting,” I said to Chuck, thinking of perpetual loops.
“Austria,” said the actor on TV.
“How old do you think he is?” Alex asked.
“Thirty-one,” I answered immediately.
Chuck turned to look at me. “You know that Illya Kuryakin is exactly thirty-one?”
“No,” I said, “no, but, you know, he—he’s probably—I mean, you know, he looks thirty-one. To me. He looks like someone I know who’s thirty-one.”
“Who?” Alex asked.
“Who?” My face felt sunburned.
“The guy at your community-organizing office, your boss?”
“No. No.”
“That guy who taught us the chant?” The previous Saturday we’d gone into Chicago for an antiwar demonstration, where we’d learned to shout “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” as we marched along Hyde Park Boulevard.
“Uh-uh.”
“Don’t be such a girl, Macallister,” Chuck said.
“You are really at sixes and sevens, Hollaender,” Alex said. “You’ve got a crush on David McCallum!”
“No, I do not. He looks the same age as my literature professor at Northwestern. Who’s thirty-one.” The sunburned feeling swept my body.
Chuck got up and turned the channel, first to an Andy of Mayberry rerun—
“Not black and white,” Alex commanded, and I said, “Goober looks kind of like the star of the new Godard movie.”
—and then to a game show in color on channel 7.
“You saw Alphaville?” Alex asked.
“Uh-huh, at the Wilmette last night.”
Chuck was apparently paying no attention to Alex and me. Was he ignoring our dangerous conversational tangent on purpose? “This is incredible,” he said. “I’ve never seen this. This is really crazy.”
Cameras were following a feverish-looking man as he huffed and puffed up and down the aisles of an empty supermarket, grabbing and throwing packages and jars into his grocery cart. He squatted to sweep off every can of sardines on a shelf. A clock on the screen ticked down. He had forty-eight, forty-seven, forty-six seconds left.
“It’s like—it’s like he’s pretending to be a looter,” I said.
“Look, look,” Alex said, pointing at the TV screen, “one of the TV cameras is in the picture. I love when that happens.”
Supermarket Sweep was a new show, and none of us had known about it until that morning.
Chuck shook his head. “Incredible. I mean, for a second it was hard to believe that was real.”
“It’s great,” Alex said. “It’s hilarious. It’s like the best satire of America ever.”
I shivered. “This country is grotesque.” It was a sincere insight, given emotional oomph by my annoyance at Chuck’s obliviousness to the new me. I lit a cigarette.
“You went to see Alphaville,” Alex asked, his nosiness pleasing me for the first time ever, “with who? Your dad?”
“No. With my professor from the class at Northwestern.”
Now Chuck was paying attention. And right after Supermarket Sweep, The Dating Game came on, with its swingin’ Bozo theme music.
“That’s cool,” Chuck said. “It was like a class field trip?”
“Uh-uh.” It would be too coy to let it hang there. “It was like a date.” I forced myself to keep looking at the TV and not at Chuck.
Alex was electrified. “Hollaender. What happened? Are you, like, seeing the guy?”
I smiled a little and took a drag on my cigarette and shrugged. “He’s going home to West Germany.” And: “He thinks I look like Julie Newmar.”
Chuck put aside his guitar, stood, and brushed against my knee as he headed for the stairs. “Okay if I go make some cinnamon toast?”
Was he surprised, confused? I thought so. I hoped so.
“Make pieces for Catwoman and me, too.”
For the long Labor Day weekend, I went with my family up to my aunt and uncle’s lake cabin in Wisconsin. On Sunday just before twilight, when the surface of the lake looked perfectly still, Uncle Tom rowed his motorboat a little ways out, emptied two big cans of gasoline onto the surface, and lit the gas on fire. At which point the kids, my brother and sister and I and our two cousins, all dove off the end of the dock and headed out to the blaze, swimming beneath the aquatic bonfire. The idea was to go as deep as possible and then look up at the fire from underwater. And then surface somewhere beyond the ring of fire.
I went deep and got maybe a ten-second-long glimpse of the spectacle. It was fantastic, otherworldly, a hundred shifting, flickering rods of bright yellow fire-light extending down through the murky water all around me, the silence and beauty and fear making it feel like some kind of religious rite. If I hadn’t in the previous two weeks made love with a thirty-one-year-old German and gotten high for the first time, swimming beneath fire on Oconomowoc Lake at dusk would have been the single most awesome moment of my seventeen years on earth.
The next night, back in Wilmette, my summer boss phoned to tell me that the Chicago cops, pissed about JOIN’s involvement in the protest over the shooting of the neighborhood boy, had raided the office, roughed people up, and busted some of my former coworkers “on a completely bogus dope charge.” The reason I hadn’t seen anything about it in the newspaper was “because the Establishment media prefers it that way.”
I was lucky to have missed the raid, but instead, I felt entirely unlucky, removed prematurely from the action, snatched by North Shore privilege out of revolutionary harm’s way.
19
Who knew
bus travel had gotten so spiffy? I’m going to start evangelizing on behalf of buses, and not just to amuse people at Santa Monica dinner parties. No arriving two hours before departure, no extra charges for bags, no frantic removal of shoes and belts and bracelets and laptops, no child-size tubes and bottles and jars jammed into Baggies, no delays or cancellations. Fourteen hours into our trip, I haven’t had that moment when I attempt to reconcile myself to imminent death, the way I do on half the flights I take. I’ve got as much space as I would in an airline business-class seat, with TV and free Wi-Fi. The air is fresher. I slept, Ambien-free, from Silver Spring, Maryland, to a rest stop near Lynchburg, South Carolina. (Question: why are all the towns with “lynch” in their names in the South?) The pecan-studded French toast at this Stuckey’s is far superior to any breakfast I’ve eaten on a commercial airliner. And there’s no such thing as bus lag.
“Ms. Hollander, I have a question.”
“I told you to cut that out, Hunter.”
“Okay, but I really don’t think I can bring myself to call you Karen.”
“There, you just did. Anyhow, Mr. Phelan, what’s your question?”
“Do you use a pump?”
“Hunter!” says their friend Sophie, whose parents allowed her to come along because of me. “Are you high?”
“I mean an electronic insulin pump,” he tells her. “She’s a Type 1, too.”
“Oh, right,” says Sophie. “Sorry.”
I wonder what embarrassing pump device she imagined he was asking me about. “I don’t use a pump,” I told him. “I never have. Don’t like the idea of a thing poking into my body all the time. Do you have one?”
“No. But you didn’t go to the bathroom, and I didn’t see you inject on the bus, either.”
“I did it sitting here, ten minutes ago, in my thigh. Through my pants.”
“Really?” he asked, astounded. “Right here? In public?”
“I’ve had a long time to learn to do it discreetly. I’m sneaky.” I pause, waiting for the waitress to finish refilling our water glasses. “I shoot up anywhere.”
“You use a pen, huh, dial in the dose?”
“Nope, just a regular syringe.”
“But,” he says, his voice a half-octave higher, “but what if people, you know, see you, see the needle and freak out?”
“First of all, they don’t. Second of all, fuck ‘em.”
“Rad,” Sophie says.
Although it wasn’t my main intention to impress the seventeen-year-olds, Waverly is smiling proudly. “What do I always say?” she tells Hunter, then turns to me. “I always say he shouldn’t be embarrassed about it. That you’re not, at all.”
“In fact,” I tell them, “since I ate a lot more of this delicious sugar-coated fried bread than I’d planned, I need to shoot some more.” I reach into my bag, take out my little black kit, and, far more brazenly than is my custom, suck precisely four units of insulin into a fresh syringe and then plunge it through my blouse into my belly. “Voilà.”
“Awesome,” Sophie says.
There are television sets suspended from the restaurant ceiling. The three screens I can see, including one right over our table, are all tuned to FOX News.
“Hey, look,” I say, “they’re talking about you guys.”
One of the FOX morning anchors is wondering why “the mainstream media doesn’t want Americans to know that these ‘occupiers’ in Miami, a lot of them, are connected with groups supportive of terrorist organizations, like Hamas.”
“What the mainstream media doesn’t want Americans to know,” Waverly says, “is that there are millions of Americans who don’t think the big banks and the multinational corporations and these governments should get together and rig the system for themselves.”
“Word,” Sophie says. Until now, I’ve only heard characters in movies and TV shows say that.
“They’re sort of peas in a pod,” another of the FOX News people says, “all the G-20 folks and these protesters. Right? Young anti-Americans in tie-dyed T-shirts getting ready to scream and yell at middle-aged anti-Americans in suits and ties. And the mainstream media’s in love with both sides. It’s ironic, is what it is.”
It’s ironic, all right. Everybody agrees, my left-wing traveling companions and the right-wingers on TV: the liberal mainstream media are in a conspiracy with the political elites and international capital to befog and oppress the regular people and squash freedom.
Earlier, Sophie had showed me a tattoo on her lower back, a line of dialogue from The Matrix, IF YOU ARE NOT ONE OF US, YOU ARE ONE OF THEM, lettered in perfect Helvetica with the first half in red ink, the second half in black. Now she asks me, since I run a law school, if I think she should include photos of her tattoos as part of her application to college.
“Are you applying to art schools?” I ask.
“Good morning, ma’am.”
I swivel. A very tall policeman is standing right by our booth, addressing me. His partner, standing a couple of yards away, has his right hand on the grip of his automatic pistol.
“I’m Deputy Thigpen from the Sumter County Sheriff’s Office? I need to go ahead and take a look in your pocketbook?”
“What?” I’m startled—doubly so, because for some reason, his name sounds familiar.
“Can y’all go ahead and hand that pocketbook to me, ma’am, please, now?”
Even as I ask, “Why, Officer?” I realize why.
“Ma’am, we have a reliable report indicating probable cause to suspect a possible violation of South Carolina narcotics laws.”
“Aha,” I say, and force a smile as I reach into my bag for the zippered black nylon pouch that holds my diabetes gear.
“No, ma’am, stop—I need you to remove your hand right now from inside the pocketbook.” His partner takes a step closer to us.
I take out my hand and let it hover just over the open bag, as if he’d screamed Freeze! But then I worry that might come across as some kind of disrespectful joke, given that I’m still smiling. But if I stop smiling, I’m afraid I’ll look angry or nervous. I am nervous. We are in the rural South. I look like the city slicker I am. Sophie’s eyebrow and nose are pierced, and FUCK IT is visible on her left collarbone, each of the tattooed letters—F, C, I in green and U, K, T in red—slightly, alternatingly askew from the vertical. Hunter wears blond dreadlocks. The flap of Waverly’s backpack is imprinted with both the anarchist symbol and the peace symbol. One might note, too, that Hunter is wearing a T-shirt that says BAMN!, but I doubt the Sumter Counter sheriff’s deputies know that’s shorthand for “by any means necessary.” I could also introduce into evidence Waverly’s nonwhite racial mix, but—stereotype: denied—Deputy Thigpen is black.
I remember now when I first encountered that name. I wasn’t much older than these kids. It’s funny how some low-priority memories remain for so many years in cold storage, perfectly preserved.
“Please put both your hands on your lap, ma’am,” Deputy Thigpen’s white partner says loudly, trying to get in on the action.
Waverly to the rescue. “My grandmother has Type 1 diabetes, Officers. She was injecting insulin. If she doesn’t inject insulin, she dies. Okay?” Dramatically put but true. “By the way? She’s a lawyer and a former federal official. Just FYI.” Wavy, honey, don’t overplay our hand.
Officer Thigpen glances at his partner, who raises his eyebrows in a quick uh-oh gesture. Officer Thigpen leans in so close, I can smell that he’s a smoker—“Excuse me”—and grabs my purse, which he places on an empty table and starts pawing through. He unzips the diabetes pouch and looks at the syringe and finger pricker and insulin vials, immediately zips it up and sticks it back in my purse.
“If you’d like,” I say, “I could have my doctor fax you the prescriptions to your … station house.”
“Not necessary, and I sincerely apologize for the misunderstanding, ma’am,” he says as he hands back my bag. “Y’all have a great Sunday.”
I t
ry not to stare as he walks over to our waitress, who is cowering behind the front counter. He gets very close to her and very quietly gives her a very stern talking-to with his index finger jabbing in the direction of her chest.
“That was clutch,” Sophie says. She is delighted to have been in such close proximity to unjust hassling by a policeman.
“Well,” I say, “it certainly woke me up. I need a drink.” The children nod but don’t smile. “I’m kidding about the drink.”
“Are you all right, Grams? You want to test your blood?”
“Maybe not here, at this very instant.”
“You just seemed really … scared,” Waverly says.
“I was surprised.” Other diners are glancing over at us. “And embarrassed, I guess.” And scared, panicked, that the cop, as he rifled through my bag, would pull out the queer page of notes that Stewart gave me on Friday, and pass it along to the Sumter County sheriff, who would pass it along to the special agent in charge at the nearest FBI field office, and so on. Which is ridiculous, but that’s fear and secret-keeping for you.
Back on the bus, I unfold Stewart’s handwritten seven-point progress report once again. It’s on a single page in pencil, which might be an old-school affectation. Or maybe spook stuff—wouldn’t graphite be less traceable than ink or type fonts? Come to think of it, he was wearing gloves when he arrived at the restaurant. No fingerprints, literally.
1) Files (except SS/DHS) back-roomed & super-scrubbed, but my current moderate-high confidence assessment: your infiltrator (assuming existence) was not F Entity.
When I was getting to know him, I noticed that Stewart went out of his way to avoid saying “the FBI,” because it was too straightforward and respectful. He’d call it the F Entity, the feebs, the G-Men, oh-dee-envy (ODENVY being a CIA code name for FBI), the First Bunch (short for First Bunch of Idiots), but never simply the FBI. By “SS/DHS,” he means the Secret Service and Department of Homeland Security.
2) High-confidence assessment #2: YOU weren’t the feeb infiltrator. (Discredited theory: you, COINTELPRO junior G-chick from 1968, get special free pass for DoJ in 1997. But no.)
True Believers Page 20
