COINTELPRO is the acronym for the FBI’s secret counterintelligence programs, which started infiltrating agents into SDS and other New Left groups in the 1960s. When I was in law school in the ‘70s and the existence of COINTELPRO had just been revealed, my constitutional law professor one day in class posed a hypothetical about entrapment. “Miss Hollander,” he said, “let’s say you work for the FBI, you’re part of COINTELPRO posing as a member of a radical antiwar group …” In my answer, I managed to paraphrase the due process clause of the 5th Amendment and make some quasi-witty reference to the fact that the FBI had only recently started allowing women to become agents. But I was shaking and breathing so heavily afterward that a 3L sitting near me, a bearded and extremely cute Southern boy, gallantly asked if I was okay and needed any help. There weren’t blood glucose meters back then, so to this day I’m not sure if I was hypoglycemic, or just panicky about the secret I was newly keeping.
And “DoJ” stands for Department of Justice, which vetted me in 1997.
3) No OGA material yet, except indirectly, Out-Damned-Spot-wise—i.e. per my earlier, looks like they scrubbed & purged up the wazoo.
When I was with Stewart, he would also never say “CIA,” and he almost cringed whenever I did. I thought it was like an actor who won’t say “Macbeth,” or a Jew who spells “God” “G-d,” or a Skull and Bones member who refuses to hear the club’s name uttered. But he said it was because he “just can’t stand how civilians get such a boner from hearing it or saying it. Like they’re a character in some fucking James Bond movie.” This was before I’d told him about my childhood Bond fixation. He sometimes says “the Agency” or “Langley,” but usually, he calls it OGA, which is short for Other Government Agency—one of those things that starts as a joke but then becomes normal nomenclature. I was new to federal acronyms the first time I heard him use the phrase, and I guessed that it meant Original Gangsters of America, which he found hysterically funny.
4) SS/DHS files have a 4/1/68 phone call, untraced, from a stray—dorm pal? family member? weapon vendor?—re Levy, Charles A. But no record of you & 2 others.
Stewart had said before that he thought the files kept by Homeland Security—DHS—would be the easiest nut to crack.
Without any help at all from me, he now knows there were four of us, and he knows the names. I find this simultaneously chilling and comforting.
5) Macallister, Alexander G. III’s correspondence w/ comandante en jefe in 1965 via Canadian mail drop + 1967 Comecon student junket made him (minor?) OGA subject of interest. Nothing post-1971.
I remember Alex’s letter from Fidel Castro—the comandante en jefe—that he kept and had framed, and the cultural exchange program to Budapest and Zagreb—COMECON is short for Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, the Soviet bloc countries—that he went on the summer between high school and college.
6) Don’t recall if you FOIAd INSCOM. But your infiltrator smells army to me. (Moderate confidence).
I have indeed sent Freedom of Information requests to INSCOM, the army’s Intelligence and Security Command.
7) Freeman, Bernard L. “Buzzy”, USCG PO3 1965-67, son of AEC lifer w/ right-wing politics & D.C. connections now: sure looks like your fink.
In college we were slightly suspicious of Buzzy at first because he was a Vietnam vet, a U.S. Coast Guard petty officer third class, and also because his father had spent his career working for the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. But then we came to trust him for the same reasons—because he wasn’t a coddled suburban wuss like the rest of us, because he’d seen and done terrible things in Vietnam and was single-mindedly seeking redemption. Although I grew suspicious of Buzzy once again in the ‘70s, after he became a conservative, surely it can’t be personal loyalty to the rest of us that’s made him keep our secret all these years.
I’m desperate to email Stewart and discuss all this, add my hunches and caveats here, fill in a gap there. But he’s determined to discover as much as he can on his own, and given the precautions he’s taking—last time we talked, he said he wished we “had a cutout,” which turns out to mean an untraceable way of passing information—I maintain Internet silence with him.
I check my email and see that Greta has sent me a second apology, now even sorrier for suggesting the other night that I had dementia, and for believing Alex. But also wondering, perhaps, when I get home, no rush, if I might want to submit to an autobiographical memory interview conducted by a disinterested medical professional, maybe take a confabulation battery test. “Just to reassure *yourself* that your remote memory is totally shipshape,” her email says.
“Oh … fuck you.”
“What, Grams?” Waverly’s warm head rests against my shoulder, her eyes closed.
“Nothing, honey. Thinking out loud.”
“Where are we?”
“Georgia, almost Florida. Go back to sleep.”
She wriggles and readjusts and cuddles back into me. Her right hand rests on the head of the tiny stuffed dog, made of upcycled cashmere, that pokes out of her backpack, its snout pressed against the top of the encircled A.
Another email from Greta, this one much briefer. Waverly has already filed a report to her mother about the incident at Stuckey’s. “You almost got ARRESTED?!?” Greta and Jungo had been dubious about my abilities as a chaperone. Now they’ll be imagining Thelma and Louise 2.
I consider various replies to Greta. Completely bogus dope charge. Stop. In Sumter County lockup. Stop. Please post bail, ten large, ASAP. Stop. Or maybe Almost arrested? Really? Sorry, I have no memory of that happening. Instead, I write, “It was really nothing. The poor cop was just doing his job. Talk soon! Love from I-95, Mom.”
I Google-search “confabulation battery”—it consists of two hundred questions. Fuck you, I repeat, this time only in my shipshape mind.
Sunday afternoons make me contemplative even when I’m not staring out the window on a long-distance bus trip. Time’s arrow slows down, and its path is no longer so simple and straight from past to present to future. Sophie, reading the movie tie-in version of Howl, asks if a line in the poem is a reference to Absolut vodka ads: “on Madison Avenue … run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality.” He says he doubts it, so I don’t point out that Ginsberg’s poem preceded Absolut vodka by twenty-five years. Since lunch, we’ve passed nothing but the green interstate exit signs for off-ramps into the 1960s and ‘70s—Daytona Beach, Disney World, Cocoa Beach, Cape Canaveral, John F. Kennedy Space Center.
“Chilling?” Waverly asks.
“What?”
“You’ve been looking out the window a long time,” she says, looking down at her pad. “Are you just chilling?”
“You know, I remember when the very first interstate opened.” She smiles, thinks that I’m joking the way good-natured elderly people do about having known Abe Lincoln personally. “Our family made a special trip just to drive on it the first time.”
“No way,” she says, reacting not to my interstate origin tale but to a news story on her iPad. “There are a thousand undercover cops in Miami, including federal agents, and like a million new surveillance cameras all over Miami Beach. To monitor us!” She’s excited to be entering the Big Brotherscape.
“So I’ve heard.”
Around Hollywood we start stretching, powering down, gathering up. The kids consent to join me in my taxi, but when we get to South Beach, Waverly asks the driver to drop them a block away from their hostel, as if for convenience’s rather than appearances’ sake.
Two hours later—they’ve agreed to let me buy them dinner—we order locally harvested crabs and fried fair-trade bananas. When some older kids they know from New York appear from the restaurant’s back room, each of the young people hug each of the others. This new obligation to hug mere acquaintances reminds me of the new obligation to give standing ovations to mediocre plays—a thought that makes me feel like an old crank.
My granddaughter tells me that even though one o
f the boys “seems like a total bro, I know” (Dartmouth rugby shirt tucked into khaki shorts, backward “99%” baseball cap surmounted with sunglasses), he has organized something called Occupy Christmas that is awesome. I tell her I once knew a boy like that—Rob Norquist, the nice jock from New Trier, who came to Miami Beach in 1972 as a Yippie protester at both the Democratic and Republican conventions. “And then never left,” I say. I do not say that he made a fortune as a redeveloper of real estate in the Art Deco district.
Hunter is immersed in texting, and in the dark restaurant with his phone illuminating his face and neck and front dreads, he looks like a Georges de La Tour painting.
“I wish we’d had texting when I was your age,” I say. “Talking to a boy on the phone, I always felt so nervous. Texting would’ve given me time to figure out the next thing to say.”
“Totally,” Sophie says. “I hate phone conversations. It’s impossible to do anything else. And ending a call? I always feel like such a bitch. I can’t do it.”
“If you treat it like theater,” Waverly tells her, “like a speech in a play, and sort of figure out what the point is ahead of time, it’s easier. Beginning, end, scene. Goodbye.”
Sophie says her parents have “LoJacked” her—installed software on her phone that lets them know her whereabouts within fifty feet. I say I know people my age who track their elderly parents the same way.
Hunter reenters the conversation, smiling, even as he continues thumbing his keypad. “My dad had this car with big-ass control knobs that he bought because he skis all winter, and it’s easier to operate with ski gloves? This hot hitchhiker he picked up thought it was some special old person’s thing, for arthritis or whatever. So he traded in the car like a month later.” He finishes texting and closes the phone. “Dad says hi.”
Hunter has been texting with his father for the last five minutes? How sweet. How unlike parent-teenager relations in the old days.
“He’s going to be here on a layover on Wednesday,” Hunter says, “and wants to get together.”
“Your dad’s a pilot?”
“Flight attendant.”
“That’s interesting,” I say.
“Biological father,” Hunter adds, no doubt realizing what I find interesting is how on earth a flight attendant could afford New York private school tuition. “My mom’s husband works on Wall Street. She hates it when I hang out with my dad. She thinks he’s a bad role model.”
“How so?” I ask.
“Because he only makes fifty-one thousand a year. And because he has too many girlfriends.”
A middle-aged heterosexual male flight attendant: another stereotype refuted.
Sophie says she’s “developing a crush” on a boy with whom she’s been having sex for two months. The conversation turns briefly to porn, and its effects on female behavior. When I say there’s probably more cleavage on display today than any time since late-eighteenth-century London, Sophie seems a little self-conscious about her spectacular half-naked bosom, so I add that I think late-eighteenth-century London was a swell time and place.
“The thing is,” Hunter says, “people always think the way things happen to be right now, the styles, everything, are the way they’ve always been and will always be.”
“My mom,” Sophie says, “stopped shaving her legs and armpits in the seventies? She thought it would be that way forever, but like five years later, she started shaving again.”
I pray that we are not headed into a discussion of the modern history of female pubic depilatory custom, about which I was clued in by Stewart in 1997 when he pronounced me “old-school.”
“That’s a great point,” I say. “Did you all know that when I started school, ‘under God’ wasn’t in the Pledge of Allegiance at all?”
“What’s the Pledge of Allegiance?” Sophie asks.
“Right, right,” Hunter continues, on a tear, ignoring Sophie, “one day Social Security and Medicare are socialist plots, and the next day they’re these sacred American rights, now they’re socialism again. Everything can change, kaboom—not just fashion crap but mindsets, everything, like overnight. The media and the corporations want you to think everything is locked in. That we aren’t allowed to make real choices. “
“Some things need to be locked in,” I say.
“But it’s like what you talk about in ‘The Trouble with the Constitution,’” Hunter says, then recites my words from The Atlantic: “‘Rethinking precedent and moving beyond the status quo is impossible until, suddenly, it isn’t anymore.’ Like when you were young.”
“That’s why Occupy was so cool at first,” Waverly says, “because it was actually different from what’d been done before. But protests now mostly seem like cover versions of old songs. Like we’re all in a sixties tribute band.”
“We live in the Matrix,” Sophie says.
“You think it might happen again now, Grams? Everything melting, all at once? Like in the sixties?”
“Maybe.” But I doubt it. “Although don’t forget, when everything’s up for grabs and everything’s in flux, people get nuts. And the nuts can wreak havoc.”
“What happened back then,” Sophie asks, “in the sixties, to make everyone like, ‘Whoa, what’s going on is totally fucked up’?”
“I don’t know. The good guys won World War II and America was unstoppable, and then came this suddenly gigantic mob of teenagers shouting that the emperors had no clothes, and their parents didn’t have any good answers?”
“But why doesn’t that happen now?” Waverly wonders, her hope and disappointment in perfect equipoise.
Because we no longer feel unstoppable? Because as long as they have enough nachos and sex, people prefer order and comfort to liberty and excitement? Because of prescription psychopharmaceuticals and a million TV channels? Because when I was seventeen, we were under the impression that we’d discovered intoxication and fucking and backbeat and injustice and refusal, whereas you, for better and for worse, are wiser? I don’t know.
“I really don’t know.”
“The world’s twice as rich as it was when you were our age,” Waverly says. “I mean, I know it’s naive to think everybody will agree to share everything equally. But as a way to think about what’s fair? If the average income of every person in the world is nine thousand dollars, I mean, that’s thirty-six thousand a year for each family on earth. That’s enough for anybody anywhere to live okay.”
It’s less than your annual school tuition. It wouldn’t cover even my mortgage, and I live alone. It’s what I earned in one week as a partner in a Manhattan law firm. “Well,” I say, “that is half again more than the U.S. poverty level.”
“Exactly,” says Hunter.
The waiter presents the check, equal to several months’ income of a Congolese or Malawian, and I hand him my Amex card. At least it’s a green one.
The kids walk south to their hostel, and I walk north to the Raleigh Hotel and meet my friend Sarah for a nightcap in the bar. She’s here to attend the G-20 summit.
“We really love love love the painting,” she tells me. My twenty-fifth-anniversary gift was a little Maira Kalman watercolor. “It actually looks like Victor and me! Really, Karen: you were such a good egg to come all the way out. Just for that.”
“Well, it wasn’t just for you.” I tell her I visited Buzzy Freeman. And got together with Stewart Jones.
“Is he still cute?”
I nod. “We spent the night together.”
“What?” she screams, and slaps the red leather banquette. “You are fucking incorrigible, Karen Hollander!”
I smile and shrug and tell her I didn’t intend for it to happen, that I was talking to him and to Buzzy for book research.
“Oh, right, ‘research,’” she says. “But seriously, you need to interview every old boyfriend you ever had? This is some crazy-detailed memoir.”
I explain that Stewart is helping me find certain government files that I need to finish the book.
“What, you can’t mail your own Freedom of Information requests?”
I’m tempted to tell all. I resist. “It’s more than that,” I say, almost whispering. “It goes lots deeper than that. It’s—if I’m going to tell the truth, I need his help. That’s all. I can’t tell you anything more. Trust me.”
She looks at me for a long time. “Is this why you got so weird at the end of freshman year? And then also what was going on that time in 1970-whatever, when I thought you’d decided you made a mistake by marrying Jack?”
What? I’m alarmed. I have no memory of the seventies conversation. “What did I say?”
“You called really late one night from Chicago, crying, but whispering so Jack and the baby wouldn’t wake up, and said you didn’t trust Buzzy, but then you wouldn’t tell me what that meant, but you made me promise to take care of Greta if anything ever happened to you. You said, ‘Sarah, she’ll need a mom.’ I think maybe you were a little drunk.”
“Uh-huh. That’s it.” I take a deep breath and another. “You’ve never told anyone about this, have you?”
She frowns theatrically. “Have you forgotten I’m Sicilian? Omertà: no joke, sweetheart.”
I laugh and wipe the wetness from my eyes. “I love you, Sarah Caputo.”
“Likewise, and I cannot wait to read this fucking book.”
Having lived in Los Angeles for seven years, I am (almost) accustomed to the sound of helicopters hovering a few hundred feet overhead for minutes or hours at a time. But that peculiarly modern noise, always serious, usually sinister, has been vibrating my hotel room windows since late this morning, and now that the choppers’ fat grime beats have been joined by an unending wail of emergency-vehicle sirens, I can’t stay in bed reading and picking at the remains of my room-service lunch. So I go out on my little balcony and tiptoe at the edge to look west and south toward the Convention Center and the anti-protester barricades. I see two black smoke plumes.
True Believers Page 21
