I snorted. I told my parents they were naive.
“We’re naive?” my father said, snorting back at me. He was losing patience. “You are the utopian, my daughter.”
“Uh-uh.” I wasn’t. I was extreme in my loathing of the current government, besotted by my notions of the possibility of right action. But I thought people who believed America was ripe for socialist transformation were like religious freaks—wankers, delusional.
“You’re not going to get a revolution, Karen,” my father said. “And if by some chance you do, you are not going to like it.”
I agreed with him, which I didn’t say. “Actually,” I said, stealing a quote from a book I’d read by a former national president of SDS, “the fundamental revolutionary motive? Is not to construct some kind of paradise. It’s to destroy an inferno.”
Two nights before Christmas, my parents and Peter and I were watching the news. The TV, now color, had finally been allowed into the living room. Eleven-year-old Peter sat as close as he possibly could to the semicircular pile of beribboned boxes under the tree, so close that his face was bathed in red and yellow from the hot Christmas lights. My mother always started her shopping early, so there were several gifts for Sabrina that would go to Catholic Charities after the holiday.
The top story was from South Vietnam. The correspondent said that “as 1967 ends, the U.S. has dropped almost a million tons of bombs on North Vietnam—more than in the entire Pacific theater during World War II, seventy pounds of explosives for every man, woman, and child in the country. Yet they struggle on.”
President Johnson was paying a holiday visit to the U.S. Air Force and Navy base at Cam Ranh Bay.
“All the challenges have been met,” the president said.
“I so despise him,” I said. His Southern-hick accent made him even easier to hate. During my entire childhood, whenever I’d watched the news and seen a squinty middle-aged white man talking in a Southern accent, he had been some loathsome enemy of decency and freedom.
“The enemy is not beaten,” the president said, “but he knows that he has met his master in the field.”
“He is such a lying, evil pig,” I said.
The correspondent came on and said that Johnson was “recommitting himself more strongly than ever to his war policies.” Then came a shot of Air Force One taking off for Rome.
“Maybe he’ll crash,” Peter said.
Even I was shocked. No one said a thing.
Peter realized his faux pas and said, “I’m sorry.”
The president, according to the TV newsman, was heading to the Vatican …
“Maybe he wants to get a pep talk from Cardinal Spellman,” I said.
… where he would meet with Pope Paul VI to discuss the war.
“Good,” my mother said, “good. Karen, did you see the latest thing Pope Paul said about Vietnam?”
“That it’s ‘Christ’s war for civilization against the Vietcong and the people of North Vietnam’?” I was quoting Cardinal Spellman’s remarks from when he visited the U.S. troops.
“That America,” my mother said hopefully, “had ‘tragically aggravated’ the ‘atrocious severities’ of the war. The pope!”
“Oh, great—that ought to take care of it, then. I guess tomorrow Johnson will agree to peace talks and the war will be over by New Year’s. Let’s celebrate.”
My mother sighed.
“See, Dad? I haven’t lost my sense of humor.”
At Harvard and Radcliffe, January consisted of a month of unsupervised self-obsessed hunkering, a two-week reading period and then a two-week exam period, a whole month without any classes or supervision or organized diversions. In other words, January 1968 was perfectly constructed to let us slide off the deep end.
Buzzy had returned from Christmas vacation with a white container the size of a peanut butter jar, still in its Smith, Kline & French Laboratories seals, that contained a thousand little white tablets, each a ten-milligram dose of amphetamine—“phamaceutical bennies,” he said proudly as he shook his plastic container. He planned to sell a hundred for a dollar apiece to cover his costs, but the rest were for us. Alex and Chuck and I had never tried speed. I knew about bennies from On the Road and from Moonraker—“‘Benzedrine,’ said James Bond. ‘It’s what I shall need if I’m going to keep my wits about me tonight. It’s apt to make one a bit overconfident, but that’ll help too.’” Alex mentioned that during the war in the Pacific, his dad’s B-29 bomber crew called themselves “the Benzedrine-29 boys.” Chuck said his mom, a devotee of pep pills, was annoyed when she’d had to start getting a prescription for them. In other words, bennies seemed modern and benign as well as cool.
We slept when we slept and awoke when we awoke, leaving our dorms only to go to one another’s rooms or out to eat. We occasionally watched TV on Alex’s set, but we exclusively smoked cigarettes, not pot, and the only movie we went to see all month was Inside North Vietnam, a documentary about the dauntless peasants pushing their wheelbarrows and riding their bikes to rebuild the dams and schools that U.S. bombs had wrecked. We studied some, but mainly, we read the harrowing news out of Vietnam and Washington and talked and talked and talked, wallowing in our anxiety and horror, stewing in our own bitter juices, feeling more and more as if America had gone mad and time was running out.
It was a wide-awake month of deepening nonstop doom and gloom but also of four-way thrills and chills. Every couple of days, almost always between midnight and dawn, we would achieve some breakthrough moment of insight and confidence and solidarity, followed by a celebratory snack of coffee and cold pie at the Hayes-Bickford, sharing the all-night fluorescence and Formica with taxi drivers and glowing, twitching hippies.
I stopped writing to Sarah after she told me I sounded “Chicken Little-ish” and that I should “go to New Hampshire and work for McCarthy instead of just bumming yourself out deeper and deeper with those bullshitting boys.”
The boys’ and my unspoken project that month was to temper and fortify ourselves, to leave childhood behind and turn ourselves into consequential radicals clear-eyed enough to help stop the war and somehow reduce the misery in the world. Unlike the SDS Walter Mittys, we never called one another brothers and sisters and mother-country radicals, or talked about creating liberated zones and a culture of total resistance, offing the pigs, smashing the state. “Sloganeering BS” was our phrase for all that. Which isn’t to say we were embracing nonviolence. “Bring the war home” was a New Left slogan we didn’t ridicule. Buzzy had said that was what we were doing with the homemade M-80s we planted at the ROTC building.
Late one night I said it seemed as if we had “reached this critical turning point in American history for better and for worse.”
Everyone nodded.
“At some moment,” Buzzy said, “armed chaos becomes preferable to fascist order. Political consciousness comes from action, from struggle—not just the other way around.”
Everyone nodded.
Buzzy turned to Chuck. “What’s that line of your uncle’s, the Israeli, the thing on his tombstone?”
“ ‘Making a more beautiful world can be an ugly business.’”
Everyone nodded.
The next morning I phoned Chuck to tell him I hadn’t slept but that I had a good head of steam going on my Borges paper.
“I’m in a nightmare,” he said. His voice was small and squeaky.
“What do you mean? I’m sorry I called so early.”
“I feel like like I’m trapped in a nightmare I can’t wake up from. Like life is nothing but crisis, some kind of unending surreal lie.”
“You mean the war? And everything?”
“Everything. When I woke up just now, I thought I was in a nightmare. Literally. I feel … I feel like … I don’t know.”
“What?” He didn’t answer. “You sound like you’re feeling how I feel when I’m really low and need sugar. Maybe you should go eat breakfast.”
“It’s like I’m, li
ke, holding myself hostage. Like I’m torturing myself to make myself talk. It’s horrible.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. I didn’t ask what he meant, because I assumed he didn’t mean anything much except that he was a sleepless, speedy, freaked-out kid, like the rest of us. “I’m going to write until I finish, and then I’ll come down and we can get a late lunch?”
It was already dark when I got to Chuck’s room. Buzzy answered the door, and I was startled. He’d shaved off his beard. He looked like a man.
“Karen?” Buzzy said quietly. “Not to be paranoid, but we should all probably stop having important conversations on the phone.”
When Chuck came out of the bathroom, I could see he’d been crying.
I hugged him. “I’m okay,” he offered. “I’m exhausted, but I’m going to be okay. I’m going to stop taking the speed.”
Buzzy rolled his eyes and his entire head.
“Do you want me to stay?” I asked Chuck.
He nodded. Buzzy popped out to give the two of us privacy, as always, and we lay in Chuck’s bed, but we didn’t do anything, and he fell asleep.
We and the upperclassmen who lived in our dorms, the proctors, were pretty much ignoring parietals by then. Chuck and I were mainly violating the letter rather than the spirit of the rules, because we were having sex as often as, say, married people do.
I watched him sleep, and I wondered if my secret four-year-long adoration had made my idea of Chuck Levy too wonderful for the actual Chuck Levy to sustain. Although he was still sweet, his sweetness now seemed a little soft. We were all upset and angry all the time, but he was morose. Maybe the reality of being with him could never measure up to the fantasy, the bedoozled virgin’s hopeful fiction of someday becoming his girlfriend. “America was more amazing from across the ocean, before I’d ever been here,” my dad once told me. I wondered if maybe the half-life of my love for Chuck wasn’t a lifetime, like uranium-232’s, but closer to californium-248, 333 days.
When Buzzy returned an hour later, Chuck mumbled that he was down for the count, so Buzzy and I went out, got a pizza to go, and headed over to Alex’s.
Alex’s math-prodigy roommate had decided to drop out when he was home for Christmas, and the hockey-player roommate stayed mostly at his girlfriend’s Boston apartment, so Alex’s empty suite became our cigarette-stocked, TV-equipped January clubhouse, the way his parents’ basement had been in Wilmette. Spending so much time in that neutral zone, instead of in my room at Radcliffe or in Chuck and Buzzy’s across the Yard, also enabled the flowering of my infatuation with Buzzy Freeman.
Even though we had all become deadly serious, I appreciated Buzzy’s humor even as I argued that jokes and entertainment amounted to self-indulgent folly. He was both the adult and the mischievous child among us. He insisted on watching the Super Bowl and the premiere of Laugh-In, which he said would “keep us in sync with real Americans.” He accused us of “refusing to laugh” at his new record by a comedy group called the Firesign Theatre, which Alex derided as “countercultural pastiche” and “hippie burlesque.” Back in the 1920s, I said, the fun and games of the Dadaists and Berlin cabarets had done nothing to stop the rise of fascism. “And maybe they greased the skids for the Nazis,” I said, “since the people who should’ve risen up to stop them looked at everything as a big joke.”
“Can’t we can have a little fun and resist?” Buzzy replied.
By the middle of January, the jar of Benzedrine was a third empty. I discovered a side benefit—when a hit of speed didn’t have any effect on me, it meant my blood sugar was high and I needed to inject insulin. “I’m telling you, man,” Buzzy said, “it’s an all-round revolutionary wonder drug, gives you fucking superpowers. We are the Justice League of America!” He rechristened each of us—Chuck was Aquaman, Alex was Batman, I was Wonder Woman, and Buzzy made himself the Flash.
“Karen is Catwoman,” Chuck said without smiling, as if making an important factual correction.
“Somebody’s grumpy and needs his go pills,” Buzzy said.
“Sorry. I don’t want to become an addict,” Chuck said.
“Oh, you’re fine with smoking two packs of butts a day,” Buzzy said, “but a tablet that makes you smarter and better and doesn’t kill you is a terrible thing?”
“Hollaender injects insulin twice a day to make her brain operate better,” Alex pointed out.
I never liked two or three against one, even when I was in the majority. “That’s not the same,” I said. “I’m not addicted, it’s a rational choice I make every day to stay alive.”
“And taking bennies,” Alex said, “is a rational choice we’re making every day to feel alive.”
Buzzy left the room without a word and returned a half hour later from the library with a photocopy of a medical journal article. “ ‘Subjectively,’” he read, “ ‘Benzedrine produces increased confidence, initiative and ease in making decisions,’” etcetera, etcetera, ‘thinking processes appear to be speeded up without impairing attention, concentration, or judgment.’”
“Yeah, ‘subjectively,’” Chuck said.
“What else is there but subjectively?” Alex asked.
“‘And,’” Buzzy continued quoting, “ ‘intelligence scores are improved.’ Is that objective enough for you, man? ‘Among mildly obsessional personalities there were some who responded extraordinarily well, especially hesitant individuals who show a tendency to obsessional doubt and difficulty in making up their minds.’” He paused and theatrically popped his eyes at Chuck. “See? It cures Hamlet syndrome! And here you go, from doctors: ‘Addiction will be rare.’”
Alex turned on the news. Our acute sense of crisis was not just a function of being young and alarmed and cooped up in a room for a month in the middle of a gray winter with an endless supply of Benzedrine. The day before, the North Koreans had captured a U.S. Navy spy ship, the Pueblo—and if they didn’t return the ship and its crew immediately, the Democratic chairman of the House Armed Services Committee was saying on TV, President Johnson should fire a nuclear missile at them, see to it that “one of their cities would disappear from the face of earth.”
“Stupid squid spooks,” Buzzy said, referring to the captured navy men, and moved to sit right in front of the television so he could turn the dial back and forth among NBC, CBS, and ABC.
“This guy I met who works for the government,” Alex said, “told me that LBJ has three TVs in the Oval Office so he can watch the three news shows all at once. Also? A button on his desk he presses just to have a servant bring him a Fresca.”
“That’s gross,” I said.
“Yeah,” Alex said, “but cool, too. I’d like to have three TVs, all lined up.”
Buzzy turned to Alex. “What guy you met who works for the government?”
“In Europe over Christmas, in Zurich, an American official. An embassy official.”
“An embassy official? Bern is the capital of Switzerland. That’s where they have embassies. Not Zurich.”
“I don’t know, a consulate official, State Department or something. I didn’t ask for his ID.”
I’d started to suspect Alex had a secret romantic life, and I was unhappy that Buzzy had caught him in some kind of fib about his unspoken homosexuality.
The second story on the news was the nightly war report, about a huge new battle at Khe Sanh in South Vietnam, where the North Vietnamese Army was laying siege to a U.S. Marine base.
“This is big,” Buzzy said. “This is hellacious.” We watched footage of jungle exploding beneath American planes “like three hundred meters from the fucking perimeter … Fox Fours and Thuds and Big Ugly Fuckers”—the nicknames he used for F-4 Phantoms and F-105 Thunderchiefs and B-52s.
Watching and listening, I felt panic. Twenty thousand Americans had died in the war so far. The deaths had doubled between 1966 and 1967, but now the number was doubling every month.
The next story was about a Strategic Air Command B-52 that had crashed and burn
ed on an ice bank off Greenland. Its four hydrogen bombs had gone missing.
“Holy shit,” Chuck said, lighting a new cigarette off the one he was smoking.
At a press conference, the president assured a reporter that the missing bombs were nothing to worry about.
The wave of horror was unlike any I’d ever felt, panic on behalf of the whole world but with the additional voltage of personal threat. “The idea that that monster,” I said, “has a button he can push to destroy the world right next to the button he can push to get a fucking Fresca is—I mean, that is insane. Beyond his being a murdering redneck fascist prick, that is just terrifying.” I pointed at the TV. “The fate of mankind is in his hands, his insane senile brain. That is just wrong.”
“There’s not really one nuclear button like that,” my boyfriend said. “And people don’t get senile at fifty-nine.”
“Oh, Jesus Christ, Chuck, you’re not my fucking professor grading my paper!” I had never blown up at him. In front of other people, we’d never even bickered.
“It’s not like I’m defending—”
“I’m tired of you correcting me, always trying to calm me down, ‘Things really aren’t that bad, honey.’ Were you watching? Things are that bad. How could they be worse?”
No one made a peep. I wasn’t going to let my anger turn to tears, and I wasn’t through. “At the Dow thing that morning, you were the one who said this is a do-or-die moment like Germany in the thirties. You’re the one who says your relatives were liquidated because they refused to believe the Nazis were evil until it was too late. So either that’s all bullshit, and we should all go dress up nice and knock on doors and give out McCarthy buttons—or else it’s real.”
I lit a cigarette, and Alex bummed one of mine.
“Want a Coke?” Buzzy asked me after a little while. That was code for Do you think your blood sugar’s low? If it had been, I almost certainly would have snapped at Buzzy and denied it—and when I went to the bathroom, the test strip came out a perfect blue. My panic and anger were real.
True Believers Page 31
