Oh, Christ. During the last decade, I’ve grown unaccustomed to worrying about teenagers under my care.
I turn on the TV to watch the live coverage. It’s on three national and four local channels. Bank windows have been smashed, U.S. mailboxes filled with gasoline and set on fire, tear gas fired, microwave stun weapons deployed, two hundred protesters arrested, more than two dozen injured—one breaking both legs when the fifteen-foot-tall Uncle Sam puppet he was operating collapsed on him, another when a driver, under the influence, pulled a pistol and fired a shot at a group of protesters in white makeup and ripped-up American flags splattered with fake blood, pretending to be zombies, who had surrounded his Mercedes.
I mute the TV. The orchestra of helicopters and sirens is as loud as ever. I call Waverly’s cellphone again. She doesn’t answer. I text her. Still no reply.
Should I go outside and try to find her among the ten thousand kids playing revolution all over Miami Beach? In order to, what, make myself feel better because I would be pointlessly acting instead of pointlessly fretting? And if by some impossible chance I do spot her, then what—cross the police line and threaten to spank her if she doesn’t come with me right this second?
“Guests of the Raleigh,” a man’s nervous voice suddenly says over the hotel’s public address system, “we are in a temporary lockdown situation. For the duration of the disturbances, no one will be allowed to enter the hotel. If you leave the grounds, reentry is not guaranteed. We apologize. These are circumstances beyond our control.”
I smell tear gas.
Jesus. I feel responsible. I enabled this.
The zombie girl shot by the drunken Mercedes driver is in critical condition.
Three and a half hours pass, and I have no word from Waverly. I pray she’s all right.
“She’s here in my room, in bed.” Using my laptop and enjoying the free Wi-Fi and the four-hundred-thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets, spending the night at the most luxurious anarchist safe house in history. “She’s sort of conked out.” Although not asleep: she’s mouthing Thank you.
“Yes, she threw up,” I say into the phone, “and she’s got a bit of a rash or something on her neck, and her eyes are watering, but she’s perfectly fine … Tell Jungo there’s no ‘permanent record’ to worry about, since she wasn’t arrested.” She’s so fine that she’s shaking her head and rolling her bloodshot eyes.
“Yes, room service, a big bowl of vichyssoise and a cheese plate and a piece of carrot cake … I don’t know what RADS is … And has this pediatrician ever encountered a case of ‘reactive airways disease syndrome’ caused by exposure to tear gas?.… This was tear gas, Greta, not the dust and smoke from the World Trade towers collapsing … I’m sorry, it’s been a very intense day, I know you’re concerned, but—I know … No, Waverly didn’t get pepper-sprayed, only Sophie … The emergency room doctor was mistaken, my friend’s surgeon said he will definitely keep his thumb.” It turns out Scott Norquist, with whom I hadn’t had any contact for the last four decades until this afternoon, has a golfing buddy who is also one of Miami’s top hand surgeons.
“No, a stun grenade, not a hand grenade, and the police didn’t ‘attack’ him … Because Sophie didn’t tell me she was planning to use the hotel’s bike to commit a level-seven felony, that’s why, and I’ll pay for the bike, but honestly, you’re acting like I was the mastermind or something … What do you mean, Sophie’s mother is ‘counting on’ me? … Honey, I am not going to call Janet Reno, and besides, I don’t think she’s got any pull in Dade County these days … The ‘finest possible legal representation’? I appreciate that, Sophie’s Mother, as I’ll tell her when she gets here, but A, I haven’t been in a courtroom since 2004; B, I haven’t done a criminal defense since you were in first grade; C, I’m not admitted to practice in Florida; and D, this is not the fucking Chicago Seven, honey. I will be very surprised if the U.S. attorney doesn’t file a motion to dismiss the federal charges against Sophie.” What the elected state attorney for Miami-Dade County might decide to do to a New York kid with a multicolored FUCK IT tattooed above her left breast, however, I can’t pretend to predict. Under Florida law, I learned this afternoon, possessing a “hoax weapon of mass destruction” is a level 7 felony, which, even with no injuries and no priors, could mean a two-year minimum sentence. “Okay. I love you, too, Greta.”
Waverly obeyed the police order to leave Dade Boulevard, and she swears she didn’t even see the looted Publix supermarket or the FedEx truck that was set on fire.
Hunter admits that he was stupid to pick up the unexploded stun grenade, but he told his father and me in the emergency room that he’d watched so many YouTube videos of so many young protesters around the world picking up smoky canisters off pavements and throwing them back at cops dressed like Star Wars storm troopers that it was kind of an automatic response, the stage direction he was supposed to follow in that scene.
And Sophie didn’t think of herself as transporting a hoax weapon of mass destruction. She had no idea that after she took a wrong turn on the Raleigh Hotel bike I lent her, and stopped to ask for directions, that she was near a 9/11 memorial. In Sophie’s mind, she was heading for her star turn on the protesters’ stage at Flamingo Park, where she was going to perform her multimedia performance art piece called “Eve of Destruction.” That’s why Sophie was wearing a flesh-colored catsuit with two hundred real dollar bills safety-pinned all over it, and why she had a rubber snake, an apple, some kind of electronic hourglass, two hundred black gumballs, and twenty red sticks of realistic-looking fake dynamite in her backpack.
All day I’ve been thinking of my favorite line from Karl Marx, about how historical events happen twice, the first time as tragedy and the second time as farce. Now the thought occurs to me that when we were young, playing secret agents with licenses to kill and then playing antiwar radicals, exactly the reverse happened.
“I feel sort of guilty,” my granddaughter tells me as I hand her two more Advils. “That Hunter got hurt and Sophie got busted and nothing really happened to me. You know?”
As I settle in for my flight back to L.A., the blonde in the next seat, Becky, thirtyish with a ponytail, recognizes me from television and says she attends Pepperdine’s law school in Malibu part-time. Maybe she’s sitting in business class because she’s an off-duty flight attendant. Ordinarily I’m not a big conversations-with-strangers person, but she reminds me of my sister, who dreamed of becoming a stewardess when they were still called stewardesses. So we talk. I tell Becky that UCLA has indeed accepted transfers from Pepperdine, that “maybe a couple” of our J.D.’s during my tenure have become FBI agents, that assistant U.S. attorneys are seldom hired right out of law school, that practicing in a big firm is doable but tough if you want to have kids.
When I ask how she earns a living now, she says, “data entry clerk at Glendale Federal Savings & Loan.” But after a few seconds she leans in close and whispers, “You were a bigwig in Justice, right, so fuck it, you get the truth—federal air marshal.”
She tells me that “every flight in and out of Miami this week and last is crawling with FAMs.” I tell her about the Tibetan terrier fiasco scare over Omaha, and ask, now whispering myself, what would happen if she ever had to fire a gun in flight.
Her big “weapon discharge” choice, she says, would be “head shot versus center-mass shot,” the downside of the former being the risk of the bullet “overpenetrating” and hitting an innocent passenger. “Although our rounds are frangible for exactly that reason.” Meaning, I know, the bullets are designed to break up when they hit something.
“And what if you fire and miss—”
“I wouldn’t miss.”
“Okay, but if the bullet overpenetrates and shoots through the window, the fuselage …?”
Becky smiles. “What, like in Goldfinger? Where he fires at Bond and the cabin depressurizes and Goldfinger gets sucked out? Doesn’t work that way.”
“I know, although in th
e novel, it’s Bond who punctures the hole, deliberately, with a knife, and it’s Oddjob who gets sucked out of the plane, not Goldfinger.”
“Whoa, dude! James Bond for a thousand, Alex! You’re like a Bond super-geek, huh?”
“I was. Once upon a time. One more question for you, if you don’t mind.”
“Shoot.” She smiles.
“When you said at first you’re a data clerk—do you tell that same lie every time?”
“A few different ones. The boringer the better, so people don’t get interested and start quizzing me. That one’s my stepfather’s actual job.”
Becky starts texting. I can never keep track of which airlines do and don’t allow in-flight electronics. When I power up my phone to check in with Waverly, whom I put on the bus for New York this morning, I find I have a text message from Stewart.
Update: Definitely no feebs among yr pals in 68, and no COINTs in end game. And Macallister most def OGA-controlled.
He means that in 1968 the FBI and its COINTELPRO agents were not involved in our scheme at any point.
And Alex was hooked up with the CIA. At age nineteen. Mary, Jesus, and Joseph. And maybe still today, I think: when he told me he was relying on influential American friends in the Middle East to help acquire bombed-out cars, I figured he meant business associates. The CIA makes more sense.
Wow, I text back. Wow. Thx. (But texting?!? Loose lips etc?)
Yeah. U shld get burners.
He means I should buy disposable cellphones with prepaid minutes, the kind the smart criminals use these days.
And he texts again: But 2 excited 2 keep quiet. J
James Bond, I’m pretty sure, wouldn’t use emoticons.
20
I turned sixteen having … slow-danced. So my sexual evolution was speedy, from never-been-kissed to sex-with-a-grown-man in fourteen months. Senior year we were smoking grass every couple of weeks, then every week, and “we” sometimes included the odd jock (Scott Norquist) and popular girl (both Crawfords), which reinforced our strong unspoken sense that all the old social demarcations were withering by the day. Getting high and going to see Fantastic Voyage with well-liked B students today, forging a new world with Negroes and factory workers tomorrow! But I had no wish to become a hippie. Nor did Alex or Chuck. Turn on, sure. Tune in, yes, to the extent that it meant listening to rock and roll, ignoring certain rules, pitying all the human hamsters on their treadmills, and despising the owners of the cages. But drop out? Mmm … no. We had places to go. We had things to prove.
“I’m not sure I want to go to an Ivy League school,” Chuck said one afternoon in the fall as Alex drove us home from New Trier in his parents’ old Cadillac. “Antioch sounds really cool.” By which he meant every student and faculty member was a radical, and considered the college an important branch office of the Movement.
Alex and I nodded.
“I could see it as a backup,” I said. “Maybe.”
“I’m sure it’s great,” Alex said, “but seriously? All the people in charge went to Ivy League schools. The Kennedys, Bundy, everybody in the cabinet, the guys who run corporations. Imagine if we were in charge!”
“We”? Women didn’t run anything. “Do we want to be in charge?” I asked.
“People like us, I mean. That’s how things are going to change. That’s the only way a revolution can happen. Don’t be so literal, Hollaender.”
“Don’t be so cynical, Macallister,” Chuck said.
“Not cynical, smart.”
“At Antioch,” Chuck said, “you go to classes for two months, then work for two months, in a factory or hospital or whatever.”
After a long silence, Alex said, “Southern Ohio?”
“Yeah, I know,” Chuck conceded. And that was that. Although we professed to loathe the very idea of elites, and we constantly ragged on snooty North Shore self-satisfaction, I never had another conversation about the desirability of going anywhere but one of the two dozen most selective colleges in America. Like Ginsberg said in Howl, I intended to pass through university with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war, but I wanted it to be a prestigious university.
As the Movement grew, and antiwar protests became regular biannual festivals of rage, and we learned from the Seed, Chicago’s new underground paper, that Negro riots were actually black rebellions, the adults grew less indulgent. I saw a poll showing that in the last two years, Americans’ support for civil rights demonstrations—civil rights!—had dropped from 42 percent to 17 percent. Which meant push was coming to shove. Alex had mentioned McGeorge Bundy, President Johnson’s national security adviser, because I’d just written an editorial for the school paper arguing that New Trier’s speaking invitations to him and the White House press secretary should be withdrawn. “These two men,” I wrote, “share responsibility for the deaths of eight thousand American soldiers and the murder of untold thousands of Vietnamese women and children. While freedom of speech is important, refusing to condone needless death can be more important. As Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once said, if words ‘create a clear and present danger [such] that they will bring about … substantive evils,’ they should be prohibited.” My mother called my article “extremely well written.” That was what she’d said about my editorial in the fall approving the assassination of South Africa’s apartheidist prime minister. But this time she said that my argument struck her as “nutty as a fruitcake. It’ll be your free speech and my free speech that get taken away.”
“But Mom, they’re murderers.”
“Bill Moyers is a murderer?” He was the young White House press secretary who looked like my father.
“What, Goebbels didn’t count as a murderer?” And so on.
Around the same time, Chuck had a terrible, terrible fight with his father. Professor Levy ran an electronics research firm with some other Northwestern professors. When Chuck found out that his dad’s company had started working on a project for the Defense Department, he accused him of “complicity in war crimes.” When his father replied that it was just a scheme for a new communications system, nothing to do with weapons or Vietnam, Chuck had said, using Sergeant Schultz’s catch phrase from Hogan’s Heroes, “Yeah, sure, ‘I know nutting!’” Even though Professor Levy’s aunt and uncle and two cousins had died at Majdanek and Auschwitz, he didn’t respond, so Chuck decided to go further. “That’s probably the kind of thing the Judenrats in Prague said, too, right? ‘Don’t worry about it, a little crowded, but trust me—it’s just a train trip.’” Professor Levy slapped him and then started sobbing.
“Because he knows you’re right?”
“I don’t know. Later on I cried, too.”
I wanted to hug Chuck. If I hadn’t found him more attractive than ever, hadn’t still been in love with him, I would have.
I’d started placing bets for Violet on horse races at Arlington Park. I told her I was using my savings, as gifts to her, but I was stealing money from my parents, five dollars a swipe. And at first Wilmore Toms placed the bets for me—the good-looking Appalachian shitbum I met the second week in Uptown going to my volunteer job. Violet would’ve been horrified if she’d known the source of my pari-mutuel stake, but those are the noble lies one must sometimes tell in the face of self-oppressing false consciousness. My little scheme was a perfect combination of earnest and noir. I was taking money from white liberals so well-to-do they didn’t even notice the thefts. I was employing a young white working-class man on behalf of an old black woman. Violet got all the winnings and suffered none of the losses. The bets were illegal and the income untaxed. Expropriation! Reparations! Working in the underground economy! Building interdependence across class and racial and gender and generational boundaries!
Meanwhile, I was going to high school, working as hard as ever during the final semester that counted for college admissions, but also writing screeds for the New Trier News and using the bonfire at homecoming as a backdrop for an
SDS puppet show about the U.S. Air Force napalming South Vietnam (after we were denied permission to burn LBJ in effigy). “License to Shill,” Alex and Chuck’s Lagniappe sketch, went over surprisingly well—thanks to a line of dialogue that incorporated the title of Ian Fleming’s final book (Octopussy), the surprise ending in which Che Guevara killed Bond by poisoning his martini, and the fact that lovable super-jock Scott Norquist played Che.
Apart from the evening news, by senior year I’d mostly stopped watching television. Like all the cool toys that came out right after I was too old for them, the new TV shows were geared to kids Sabrina’s and Peter’s age—The Addams Family, Lost in Space, The Munsters, Star Trek. My sister was also an I Dream of Jeannie fan, and she started wearing her blond hair in a ponytail updo in eighth grade, the year she turned from cute to beautiful.
There was one new show I loved. Inevitably and unfortunately, however, my parents also loved The Smothers Brothers. Because my mother and dad and Peter and Sabrina all smiled and chuckled at the jokes about Vietnam and the Pentagon and President Johnson and segregation, my own enjoyment was diminished. For them it was not just groovy and satirical, proof that progressives had a national platform, but also a heartwarming, generation-gap-bridging ritual. For me, the fact that the show aired on Sunday nights made watching it even more uncomfortably cozy.
My parents thought Tom Smothers’s boy-man shtick was cute, but I was fascinated by the serious lunatic rage smoldering beneath his smiling jacket-and-tie cuteness. His catchphrase, “Mom always liked you best,” turned the air in our TV room slightly acrid and electric until the next joke came along.
There is no question that Mom liked Sabrina best when we were teenagers. As I was heroically attempting to exceed the bounds of parental likability, my sister rushed in to bask in the maternal sunshine, bringing up Newsweek and Commonweal articles about the Second Vatican Council, waving away the smoke and pretending to cough whenever I lit a cigarette. As soon as she got to New Trier, Sabrina restarted the Esperantists with her new boyfriend, Jamie, the Esperanto boy I’d crushed the year before. That was the line in the sand for me, after which I started thinking of Sabrina as something more like an enemy than just an annoying, square, too-pretty little sister.
True Believers Page 22
