by Peter Wild
radical adults lick godhead style
peter wild
For maybe three weeks, morning, noon and night, all I listened to was ‘Radical Adults Lick Godhead Style’. Odd lyrics (I am dead by the beauty of strangers) lodged in my head (in horror my eye-head transforms them) at random angles (into smiling, beatific room-mates) like shards of glass (from dust to dust they create rock n roll). You see. The thing about Sonic Youth, for me, is this: they’re, like, the last great hoary bastion of countercultural rock. There’s a line from certain sixties bands (like, say, the MC5) right to their door. But that’s not all. There’s something quantum about their sound. They really get to the root of things. So. I was listening to the song and the words and the guitar squall were pinging about like photons and, somehow or other, the story you’re about to read bubbled up…Any external or social action, unless it’s based on expanded consciousness, is robot behaviour.
Tim Leary
It takes five seconds, brothers and sisters.
One…
Alfie Vedder became untethered shortly after stepping out of the Highland-green Ford Mustang parked askance, motor running, on Warren and Forest.
Two…
He looked up once at the nearest street light, which wasn’t a street light any more given that it’d been smashed out in the riots, and he shook his head, even as he fumbled in his pocket for the Zippo.
Three…
He retrieved the bottle from the interior of the car, his partner Tuck saying Getonwithit from the shadows on the driver’s side, sparked up the lighter and lit the rag shoved like a gag in the bottle’s neck.
Four…
Rag lit, he stepped and he jogged and he stepped and he jogged and he grunted and he hurled the flaming bottle across the street, a glorious clumsy parabola that he didn’t stay to watch, too busy was he climbing back into the Mustang, sense drowned out in the engine roar.
Five…
The bottle struck the window of the Detroit office of the Committee to End the War in Vietnam, bottle and window shattering as one, the petrol igniting with the whoomph of a shaggy, jowly dog, the office lit, momentarily, as if it was daytime, only for the sudden lick and tickle of flame to dispel any such misconception.
Four…
He steps and he jogs, his head and his shoulders moving backwards even as he jerks forwards, building momentum, ready to throw but not yet, one more step and one more jog and still one more step and still one more jog–but then, there he was, left behind like a shoe sucked up in the mud, his socked foot still moving forward even as he remained behind.
And there he stood, if he could be said to stand, rooted in the middle of Warren and Forest, untethered in the heart of Detroit, sometime approximately tennish, on this, the 31st of December in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and sixty-eight.
He was aware of himself, splinters of himself, moving off in different directions as if it was he who had suddenly shattered and not the window. Where once there had been a single Highland-green Ford Mustang, there were now two: one leaving north and one reversing south, both departing, albeit one into the future and one into the past.
His future self, his future self and Tuck, his partner of thirteen years, were on their way to the Grande Ballroom, on the corner of Boulevard and Joy, the intention being to plant evidence in the car of John Sinclair, poet, firebrand and MC5 manager, to implicate him in the firing of the office on Warren and Forest, the idea being that if Sinclair were seen as someone who was looking to create dissent from within, if Sinclair was discredited, all the better for the forces of law and order, dissenting voice that Sinclair was, thorn in their side. The MC5 were playing the Grande Ballroom that evening and Sinclair was bound to be there. Sinclair and all his White Panther cronies, all the radicals, all the Motherfuckers, all the Weathermen, all the students, all the hippies and the deadbeats and the bikers and the losers, they would all be there, in the Grande Ballroom when they took Sinclair down. The plan was to plant incriminating evidence in his car and then, as soon as that was done, take him down, through fair means or foul, whatever it took. So they were driving, his future self and Tuck, and Tuck was talking about how he planned to ask Josie, his girlfriend of eight years, to marry him, how he was going to go ask his future father-in-law for her hand at the weekend, on Sunday, he had it all planned out, what he was going to say, how the old man would take it, everything. The old man was a cancerous bastard, so Tuck said, but it didn’t hurt to do things right, now, did it? You did things right, you set yourself in good stead for the future. That was how he saw it. His future self didn’t speak, felt nauseous, kept repeating, in his mind, what he’d done, firebombing the Detroit office of the Committee to End the War in Vietnam; was surprised by himself, because he’d done much worse in his time, much worse, but for some reason he was troubled, felt like there was a line and he’d just stepped over it. He was over the line now and, as they moved farther and farther away from Warren and Forest so he, the future self, drew farther and farther away from the line and thereby farther and farther into uncharted, uncomfortable territory.
His previous, historical self grew happier the farther the car receded from Warren and Forest. Could be his previous self wasn’t looking forward to firebombing the Detroit office of the Committee to End the War in Vietnam. The greater the distance between where he was and Warren and Forest, the greater the weight that appeared to lift off the shoulders of his previous self. Back at the field office on Michigan Avenue, the two of them zipped through a briefing, just the two of them at first but then they were joined by various members of the team, other agents and operatives, the head of their team, briefly, in and out, flitting like a summer fly, the group of them immersed in various slides and files and tape recordings running backwards through a history of supposed insurrection, from the obvious solution through a counter-intuitive list of the various challenges and obstacles they all faced, as a team, as a department, as a function of the United States federal government. Earlier and still earlier, he was eating a PB&J at his desk, transcribing surveillance tapes wearing the cushiony cans, catching up with Sinclair’s movements for the previous week, and not just Sinclair, Kramer and Tyner too. Sinclair, Kramer and Tyner and all their little girlfriends and all their White Panther cronies, they were all being watched and followed and photographed and recorded and spied on and discussed, at the most senior levels, in intimate detail. He was sitting there, his previous self, at his desk in the office where everyone was dressed like it was 1955 despite the fact that out there, in the street that he could glimpse from the window beside his desk, it was 1968. The thirteen-year lag between where he sat and where he could see, the lag he spent much of his life considering when he wasn’t considering right and wrong, right and wrong occupying him both in the office and at home, when he got home, which wasn’t often, hiked out on jobs until late most evenings, relaxing in bars as much as he ever could relax, sleeping in his car when he could sleep or on Tuck’s couch, avoiding his narrow kitchenette when he could, denying the life he spent there, the loneliness, the silly mistakes.
Three…
The future self arrived, parking on Boulevard, shuffling along Joy past the line of black-and-whites, the Detroit police out in force, so many penguins huffing and chuckling, bristling as they went by, the two of them, his future self and Tuck, wanting to lay in and start something but knowing they couldn’t, wanting to lay everything from Belle Isle through to the riots at their door, at the door of the FBI, but not one of them having the guts to say anything. Russ Gibb, the proprietor of the Grande Ballroom, was poised in the doorway talking to the doorman, poised like he’d been waiting for them in his Harold Lloyd rims and his ridiculous pith helmet. Gentlemen, gentlemen, gentlemen, Gibb said, stepping towards them, arms outstretched like a confused dancer. Gentlemen. His shaken future self replied, stately, said, Mr Gibb, as if that was enough. Will you be partaking of our entertainment this evening? Gibb asked them. A look flashed between Vedder and Tuck.
Something along the lines of: Reconnoitre now, plant evidence later. Tuck nodded and wondered aloud if the Ballroom was busy. Gibb clapped his hands like a sugared-up child and cooed, said, Oh yes oh yes oh yes, very definitely, very definitely. Very busy indeed. At which point Tuck and his future self pushed by, Gibb raising his voice a notch to ensure they heard: You’ve missed the Psychedelic Stooges, I’m afraid, but you’re still in plenty of time for the main attraction…
Jolted from wakefulness to sleep, plunging into gunpowder dreams, gunpowder dreams haunted by the face of Viola Liuzza and the voice of Hoover saying, THE PURPOSE OF COUNTERINTELLIGENCE IS DISRUPTION; IT IS IMMATERIAL WHETHER FACTS EXIST TO SUBSTANTIATE CHARGES. His historical self grew lighter the greater the distance between the different versions of himself but still heaviness persisted. The gunpowder dreams offered a nightly record: a day here spent retrieving libel about the Republic of New Africa, a day there spent dismantling forged correspondence from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Campaign; his mouth enlarged, warm and wet against a telephone receiver, sucking back whispered treachery from the ears of parents and landlords, strong-arming police so they wouldn’t perjure themselves against dissidents, destroying fabricated evidence, confirming activists in their actions, repealing every push and shove, yanking words off arrest sheets, freeing people from the grinding machine of law, driving them away and plunging them, often violently, into the melee of protest; disorganising younger operatives, masterminding plots to dissipate infiltration in the Students for a Democratic Society and the Black Panthers; stirring up peace and social order, making sure activists were free to speak their minds, deleting hours of tape, blanking hundreds of pages of transcribed conversation, so many photographs dissolving, images whitening out in the darkroom glare. For days and weeks and months he rarely set foot in his home, putting in the hours to dilute the government’s case, listening excitedly through crackles and whispers for the report of revolution, for the threat and the promise, for the date and the time. But doubting. All the while doubting. Maintaining a strong front through all the hours of daylight, through all the hours of wakefulness and then sleeping and dreaming gunpowder dreams.
