True Believers

by Kurt Andersen

  “Is that what they do in Junior Achievement these days?” Chuck’s roommate said when I told them the story. Buzzy Freeman was nice to me from the get-go—like him, I was a lapsed Catholic; also, I was interested in Vietnam, I cursed, and I injected myself with drugs. He was premed. I liked him because he was so graceful and mature concerning Chuck and me, unembarrassed and embarrassing about popping out to the library whenever Chuck and I wanted to use their room to make out or have sex. Buzzy liked Chuck because they were both outdoorsy and athletic and male—the hunting and fishing, the leather jackets, the firecrackers, the Morse code, the radio-controlled airplanes. And Alex was fond of Buzzy because he was attractive, “a civilized cowboy or something,” and recently had, like Alex, read Winston Churchill’s Memoirs of the Second World War. Buzzy Freeman was almost twenty-one. He had short blond hair but a full beard, and he’d tacked a dirty, tattered red, yellow, and blue National Liberation Front flag to the wall over his bed. He was the coolest person my age I’d ever met. “Buzzy isn’t circumcised,” Chuck told me our first week in college.

  He’d grown up in Las Vegas, where his father worked on the government’s nuclear bomb tests. “You could feel it like an earthquake when they’d blow one at night,” he told us the first time we all smoked grass together. “From our backyard, you could see the flash on the horizon. It was like a thunderstorm with lightning but all compressed and shot in slow motion.” Mr. Freeman had become an alcoholic after the government rejected his plan to explode an atomic bomb on the moon to collect lunar samples, and he committed suicide the day President Kennedy signed the nuclear test ban treaty in 1963. Buzzy joined the Coast Guard in order to pay for college, and said he “was in country September sixty-five to November sixty-six, on a cutter out of Danang.” Beyond the basic details of his tour—”Coastal Surveillance Force, Squadron One, cruising the seventeenth parallel”—he didn’t much discuss his experiences in Vietnam. “Boarded junks, fired on sampans. Interdicted NVN supply lines to the VC. It was heavy. So I owe the people.” I knew “VC” meant “Vietcong,” and I found out later that “NVN” stood for “North Vietnamese Navy.” And by “the people,” we understood that he meant the beleaguered Vietnamese struggling for liberation from the vicious American Moloch and its puppet regime in Saigon. Buzzy was our tragic antihero who had been to hell and back and done terrible things but seen the light, an apostate filled with remorse and seeking to make restitution for his imperialist crimes.

  All of this we’d learned by our third week in Cambridge. Buzzy had gone to a crappy high school and was excited about being among fellow intellectuals at last. Late one September night in the Hayes-Bickford cafeteria, when the four of us were discussing Malcolm X, Buzzy ran back to his room and returned to lay a tattered, underlined copy of Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth on the table. Another night, all of us taking turns playing pinball at Tommy’s Lunch, Buzzy said we had to read Antonio Gramsci’s prison notebooks—that “Gramsci on the ‘masks of consent’ in liberal bourgeois society is mind-blowing.” That’s the way we talked in the fall and winter of 1967. It didn’t sound stilted or ridiculous to us.

  One Saturday afternoon in October, we lounged together in the sun on the grass by the river, eating potato chips. We teased one another—Chuck for his striped bell-bottoms, Alex for describing a passing rowboat as “that yellow punt,” Buzzy for liking the Beach Boys and me for calling the band we’d just seen perform in a Boston parking garage the Cream instead of Cream. We created an impromptu quiz show in which we had to recite passages from the left-wing philosopher Herbert Marcuse—mine was “people recognize themselves in their commodities, they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home.”

  “Or in their television sets,” Buzzy added with a smile, looking at Alex. Alex was probably the only kid in Harvard Yard who had a TV in his dorm room.

  Hearing the thirty thousand fans across the Charles chanting and singing and cheering louder and louder as Harvard’s football team beat Columbia, Alex said it reminded him of the Nuremberg rallies in Triumph of the Will, which he’d just watched in his freshman seminar.

  “I think one reason Marcuse is so persuasive,” Chuck said, “is because he saw Nazism firsthand.”

  “Did you know,” Buzzy asked, “that he worked for U.S. intelligence, not just during the war in Europe, total Oscar Sierra Sierra man, but also afterward, in the fifties, in Washington?”

  “Wow,” I said, “Herbert Marcuse was in the OSS? Which became the CIA, right? Did you guys know that?”

  Alex and Chuck shook their heads, said nothing, and ate more chips.

  “Also?” Buzzy continued. “William Sloane Coffin: CIA in the fifties, in West Germany, a genuine secret agent.”

  Coffin, Yale’s chaplain, was a national antiwar leader.

  “I knew that,” Alex said.

  “Not to be paranoid,” Buzzy said, “but it makes you wonder. I mean, do people ever really, completely quit the CIA?”

  I almost never skipped my classes, loved them more than I was comfortable admitting. In my freshman seminar, I discovered the stories of Jorge Luis Borges, which I told Chuck were “like jewels from another planet,” and I got to meet Borges that fall—he was a visiting lecturer. “What is this ravishing scent?” he asked when he walked into the North House lounge to have tea with fifty Radcliffe girls. I blushed but said nothing; it was my patchouli. The physics course I took became especially interesting on weekends at night, when we got high and I’d tell Chuck and the other guys what I’d learned that week—about this new notion of “black holes” in space, about the “quantum weirdness” that makes certain impossible things happen, about Kurt Gödel’s idea that time was an infinite closed loop like a Möbius strip.

  Except for an introductory history course covering the last half millennium, none of my classes was remotely political. Which didn’t stop me from inferring politics. When I read about the scientists who said “everything not forbidden is compulsory,” I took it as a law of history as well as quantum physics. When I’d encountered that very line at age nine in The Once and Future King—young Arthur, transformed by Merlin into an ant, sees it on a sign over an anthill—it confused and disturbed me. Now, at eighteen, hearing it from a Harvard professor, I understood it as a kind of coded command to take action, fulfill my destiny. “The Might is there in the bad half of people,” King Arthur had said to his comrades. “Why can’t you harness Might so that it works for Right?”

  I was stoic about my diabetes, never complained or whimpered. Buzzy joked about it, which I enjoyed, asking if I’d packed my “works” so I could “shoot up” when we all went out for a late-night snack, offering to “score some fresh insulin” for me when he was heading to the pharmacy. Because I was always urinating into cups to test my urine, and comparing the colors on each pee-dipped test strip to a little printed rainbow—dark blue meant low glucose, chartreuse was higher, bright orange was highest—and noting each result and everything I ate in a little Moleskine notebook, calculating dosages, filling syringes from vials—Buzzy said I should apply for independent-study credit to satisfy my natural-science requirement. And when I started injecting myself semi-publicly, in dining halls and restaurants, my coolness quotient went up a notch.

  I’m sure diabetes helped keep me chronically pissed off that first year, even though I considered my anger entirely a function of my political awakening and the escalation of the war. The mental effects of low blood sugar complemented the peculiarities of that era. Especially if you were new to coping with the disease and unaccustomed to finding yourself rereading a paragraph three times uncomprehendingly, or not contributing to a conversation for ten minutes, or feeling worried and suspicious without any good reason, or, when your blood sugar dropped very low, imagining your best friends were pestering and pitying and maybe somehow deceiving you. Even though scarfing down a Coke or a Snickers snapped you right back, hypoglycemia amplified the weirdness of late adolescence and of late 1
967 as it turned into 1968.

  Not that hypoglycemia was all bad. I discovered a sweet spot that the doctors never mention, somewhere south of normal and north of uncomfortable, where my energy was upped and my alertness tweaked, my focus sharpened, my ideas more original and interesting. And this wasn’t the way other kids had epiphanies when they got high but which, in the cold light of day, didn’t seem so brilliant. If I felt sluggish or uninspired, I’d sometimes deliberately overshoot my insulin by a hundredth of a millileter or two, and the next few hours of mild hypoglycemia actually turned B papers into A papers.

  “Karen,” Chuck whispered one night in his bedroom in Pennypacker Hall, his lovemaking breathlessness switching from desire to horror as his face hovered a few inches above my naked middle section, “what the fuck did you do?”

  I sat up and looked down. High on my right thigh near the hipbone was the darkest, largest bruise I’d ever had, deep purple and the size and shape of a coaster, made even more disgusting and leprous by the yellow-gray mercury-vapor streetlight gloam. I was frightened for a second, then understood the problem. I’d been injecting myself too often in that easily accessible bit of flesh. I had never felt so miserably naked. Chuck kissed the bruise and afterward started treating me even more like a saint on her slow, heroic march to martydrom. The next morning I began a new injection regimen: I made a sketch of my legs and midsection in my Moleskine, recorded each injection site with a dated dot, and never again stabbed the same spot twice in one week. Buzzy called me a “conscientious injector.”

  One night in bed after we’d made love, as the parietal deadline approached, Chuck turned and asked in a low voice if I thought “monogamy is a pathological form of bourgeois individualism.”

  I should have laughed, but Chuck was taking two sociology courses, and “bourgeois” was a word we’d all started using with completely straight faces. At first I thought it meant he wanted to sleep with somebody else, the way he had brought up oral sex as a way for us to engage in the “polymorphous perversity” that Marcuse writes about.

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “Why?”

  “Alex was saying that today. He and Buzzy saw Jules and Jim in their freshman seminar, and he says that’s why Jeanne Moreau kills herself and one of the guys in the end—that she was a victim of ‘bourgeois individualism.’ And Buzzy sort of agreed. Buzzy kind of has the hots for you, I think.”

  “Well, I don’t have the hots for Buzzy.” That wasn’t entirely true. “Having a relationship with more than one person at a time would be too complicated for me. Maybe after the revolution,” I said with a smile but not entirely as a joke, “I’ll feel differently.”

  “You’re not ready to be Tatiana Romanova?”

  “Huh?”

  “Colonel Klebb telling Tatiana she has to sleep with Bond.” He pursed his lips and did his terrible European accent: “‘Tanya, your bow-dee belongs to ze state.’”

  When I got out of bed, he sat up. “In sixth grade? At a sleepover at Alex’s? The two of us sort of … fooled around. Sexually.”

  “Really?” Maybe this was Chuck’s guilty secret that Sarah had intuited over the summer. “Who started it?”

  “Who do you think? We did it a few more times over the next few months. But then Alex ejaculated—his first time ever, and I never had. It was completely shocking. To me, anyhow. After that, we never did it again. Fooled around with each other.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I mean, kids experiment.”

  “Did you ever mess around with a girl like that?”

  We were supposed to tell the truth always and hold back nothing. “Uh-huh, once. Mary Ann Stalnaker from St. Joseph’s, that girl in my confirmation class.”

  “Really? In eighth grade?”

  “Fuck you,” I said, smiling.

  “Do you think there’s anything I could tell you about myself that would make you hate me?”

  “I don’t know—theoretically, I suppose, yeah. If you’d done something really terrible. But it’d have to be something a lot worse than jerking off Alex.”

  “Don’t tell him I told you.”

  “Duh.” It was almost eleven. I put on my sweater and shoes and kissed him good night.

  We smoked dope most weekends, and Chuck grew a beard. Chuck and I took mescaline a second time, with Alex and his fifteen-year-old math-prodigy roommate. But we were definitely not hippies. Alhough hippies were part of the Movement, and we felt more simpatico with them than the straight kids, they seemed childish, self-indulgent, soft. Buzzy was more charitable. When the mayor of Cambridge declared an official War on Hippies, busting a row of druggie crash pads just off campus, Buzzy said they were “the rodeo clowns of the revolution,” diverting the authorities’ attention, his implication being that we were the revolutionary cowboy stars, riding the broncos and roping the cattle. Hippies and their Halloween lifestyle, we told one another over numberless coffees and cigarettes, were so easily coopted, turned into tools of repressive tolerance, zany decoration on the masks of consent.

  “Look at this,” I said to Chuck and Buzzy one night at Café Pamplona, shoving my Boston Globe toward them. Next to an article about a battle in South Vietnam, there was an ad for Filene’s department store with the headline: TAKE A TRIP! BUY A PSYCHEDELIC DRESS!

  The war was fantastically hideous, getting bigger and deadlier every day. My sense of grievance was obsessive, and it was no longer theoretical. Chuck and Alex’s student draft deferments would end when they graduated—or, according to a shocking new Selective Service rule, if they demonstrated against the war. The crackdown, we all agreed, was a glimpse of the true face of fascism behind the mask of consent, the beginning of the end of civil liberties in America.

  The day Chuck sent in the form for his deferment, I asked if he was scared it could be revoked.

  “I’m angry,” he said, “but I’m not scared.”

  Later that fall a boy we knew, a sophomore, was reclassified from 2-S to 1-A as punishment for participating in antiwar protests. He faced immediate induction into the army.

  “You may not be scared,” I said to Chuck, “but I am. I don’t want you to go to Vietnam.”

  “I won’t. Don’t worry. Everything will be okay.”

  He seemed so cocky. But I knew the difference between Chuck Levy bluster and Chuck Levy self-confidence, and this was clearly the latter. His character was being tested, and it turned out he was brave, which made me swoon. More surprising was Alex’s sangfroid.

  “I’m covered,” Alex said when I asked if he was worried about being reclassified 1-A. “I’ve got a Plan B.” I assumed he meant escaping to Canada with the help of his relatives in Toronto.

  That I wasn’t subject to conscription made me feel like a girly bystander. The fact that Chuck and Alex seemed so resolute and unconcerned, devoted to the antiwar struggle and damn the consequences, made me redouble my own commitment. In our war against the war, I had to make myself hard and courageous, too.

  The hippies were young adults behaving like naughty children, and the liberal students—working within the system, collecting petition signatures, conducting symposia, engaging in meaningful dialogue—were children playing at responsible adulthood, like me at fourteen and fifteen. I had moved on.

  “Who’s Walter Mitty?” Chuck whispered, sitting between Alex and me at the first meeting we attended of the Harvard-Radcliffe Students for a Democratic Society. “Some right-winger?”

  “No,” Alex told him, “a Danny Kaye character in an old movie.”

  “From a short story by James Thurber,” I said, trumping Alex, even though I’d never read the story. “He’s this normal wimpy guy who fantasizes he’s a daredevil hero and outlaw.”

  The president of SDS was reading aloud from an official college report about the previous school year in which the university president, Nathan Pusey, referred to “our self-professed student revolutionaries” and “Walter Mittys of the left.” A year earlier, when the secretary of defense, Robert McNam
ara, spoke at Harvard, SDS demonstrators threw themselves in front of McNamara’s car and pounded on it, forcing him to get out, climb up on the hood for face-to-face hectoring by the mob, and finally, to run away through an underground tunnel. The SDS upperclassmen preened as they talked about the McNamara blockade, delighted at being (as one of them said that night) “bêtes noires here in the belly of the beast.”

  Because we’d already had our chapter in Winnetka, already learned the New Left catechism, already experienced the first high of denouncing liberals and calling ourselves radicals, I was jaded about SDS. It was too much like Model UN. And in some ways even dopier, since in Model UN, we knew we were engaged in a role-playing exercise and not actually determining the fate of the world.

  “Bêtes noires?” Alex said as the four of us walked through the Yard afterward. “Give me a break. They seem like wankers, a lot of them.” I didn’t know the word, but I knew what he meant, and I laughed.

  Buzzy looked around to make sure no one was nearby. “Not to be paranoid,” he said, “but I’ve got my doubts about that Li’l Abner in the cammies and the beard.”

  “The guy,” Chuck asked, “who talked about ‘mother country radicals’ developing ‘a guerrilla mentality’? Yeah, that was heavy.”