by Nathan Hill
“Excuse me!” Faye yelped, for it was one of those girls—Alice was her name. Faye’s neighbor. Long-haired, mean-looking Alice, silver-framed sunglasses settled halfway down her nose so at this moment she stared over them directly and curiously and terribly at Faye.
“Excuse you for what?” Alice said.
Faye shut off the water and wrapped herself in her robe.
“Man,” Alice said, smiling, “you are too much.”
She was the craziest of them all, this Alice. Green camo jacket and black boots, wild brunette Buddha girl seen in the cafeteria sitting cross-legged on a table chanting gibberish. Faye had heard stories about Alice—how she hitchhiked to Hyde Park on weekend nights, met boys, scored drugs, entered strange bedrooms and emerged more complicated.
“You’re so quiet all the time,” Alice said. “Always alone in your room. What do you do in there?”
“I don’t know. I read.”
“You read. What do you read?”
“Lots of things.”
“You read your homework?”
“I guess.”
“You read what your teachers tell you. Get good grades.”
Faye saw her up close now, her eyes bloodshot, hair tangled, clothes wrinkled and reeking, that funky cocktail of tobacco, pot, and perspiration. Faye understood now that Alice had not yet slept. Six in the morning and Alice had just returned from whatever free-love odyssey these girls chased at night.
“I read poetry,” Faye said.
“Yeah? What kind?”
“All kinds.”
“Okay. Say me a poem.”
“Huh?”
“Say me a poem. Recite one. Should be easy if you read so much. Come on.”
There was a splotch on Alice’s cheek that Faye had never noticed before—a trace of red and purple gathered just beneath the surface. A bruise.
“Are you okay?” Faye said. “Your face.”
“I’m fine. Great. What’s it to you?”
“Did someone hit you?”
“How about you mind your own business.”
“Fine,” Faye said. “Never mind. I gotta go.”
“You’re not very friendly,” Alice said. “Are you down on us or something?”
Those lyrics again. “Down on Me.” They played that damn song every night. “Everybody in this whole round world!” They sang it four or five off-key times in a row. “They’re down on me!” As if the girls needed them—all these other people in the world—needed them to be down and thus give a reason for singing.
“No, I’m not down on you,” Faye said. “I’m just not going to apologize to you.”
“Apologize for what?”
“For doing my homework. Being good at school. I’m sick of feeling bad about it. Good day.”
Faye left the bathroom, flop-flopped back to her room, put on her clothes, and felt so full of poison and abstract anger that she sat on her bed and held her knees and rocked. She had a headache. She pulled her hair back and put on her big round glasses that looked to her suddenly like some elaborate Venetian disguise. She frowned into the mirror. She was gathering her books into her backpack when Alice knocked on the door.
“I’m sorry,” Alice said. “That wasn’t in the spirit of sisterhood. Please accept my apology.”
“Forget it,” Faye said.
“Let me make it up to you. I’ll take you out tonight. There’s a meeting. I want you to come.”
“I don’t think that’s necessary.”
“It’s sort of a secret. Don’t tell anyone.”
“Really, it’s okay.”
“I’ll be here at eight,” Alice said. “See you then.”
Faye closed the door and sat on her bed. She wondered what Alice had seen her doing, back there in the shower, when Fay had been thinking about Henry: his hands on her. What a treacherous thing a body was, how it so blatantly acted out the mind’s secrets.
Henry’s letter was hidden in her bedside table, in the bottom drawer, way in the back. She had tucked it inside a book. Paradise Lost.
2
THEY ASSEMBLED in the office of the Chicago Free Voice, a small, irregularly printed handbill that called itself “the newspaper of the street.” Into a dark alley, through an unmarked door, up a narrow set of stairs, Alice led Faye to a room with a sign at the entrance that read: TONIGHT! WOMEN’S SEXUALITY AND SELF-DEFENSE.
Alice tapped the sign with her finger and said, “Two sides of the same coin, eh?”
She had not made any effort to hide the bruise on her cheek.
The meeting had already begun when they arrived. The room, crowded with maybe two dozen women, smelled of tar and kerosene, old paper and dust. A warm mist of ink and glue and spirits hung in the air. Odors drifted in and out of perception—shoe polish, linseed oil, turpentine. The sting of solvents and oil reminded Faye of the garages and toolsheds of Iowa, where her uncles spent long afternoons fiddling with cars that hadn’t been driven in decades—hot rods bought cheap at auctions and slowly restored, part by part, year by year, whenever the uncles could find time and motivation. But whereas her uncles decorated their garages with sports logos and pinup girls, this office had a Vietcong flag on the largest wall, the smaller nooks covered with broadsides of past Free Voice editions: CHICAGO IS A CONCENTRATION CAMP said one headline; IT IS THE YEAR OF THE STUDENT said another; FIGHT THE PIGS IN THE STREET and so on. A fine dark soot coated the walls and floor, a sheath of carbon that turned the light in the room to a gray-green smog. Faye’s skin felt clammy and covered with grit. Her sneakers quickly stained.
The women sat in a circle—some on folding chairs, some leaning against the wall. White girls and black girls all wearing sunglasses and army jackets and combat boots. Faye sat down behind Alice and listened to the woman presently talking.
“You slap him,” she said, a finger pointed into the air, “you bite him, you scream as loud as you can and when you do you scream fire. You break his kneecaps. Box his ears to pop his eardrums. Stiffen your fingers and jab his eyes out. Be creative. Ram his nose into his brain. Your keys and knitting needles can be weapons if held tightly. Find a nearby rock and bash his head in. If you know kung fu, use your kung fu. It goes without saying that you should be kneeing him in the groin repeatedly”—and women in the circle nodded, clapped, encouraged the speaker with oh yeahs and right ons—“knee him in the groin and yell, You are not a man! Break his will. Men attack you because they think they can. Knee him in the groin and yell, You cannot do this! Don’t rely on other men to help you. Every man in his heart wants you to be raped. Because it confirms your need for his protection. Armchair rapists, that’s what they are.” And Alice shouted “Hell yeah!” and other women whooped and Faye didn’t know how to compose herself. She felt stiff and nervous, and she looked around at the women and tried to enact their casually bad posture while the speaker wrapped it up: “Since men have their potency and masculinity vicariously confirmed through rape, they will never do anything to stop it. Unless we force them to. So I say we take a stand. No more husbands. No more weddings. No more children. Not until rape is extinguished. Once and for all. A total reproductive boycott! We will grind civilization to a halt.” And to this the woman got great applause, the others standing and patting her on the back, and Faye was about to join the ovation when from a far dark corner of the room came a loud gnashing of metal. Everyone turned to look, and that’s when Faye saw him for the first time.
His name was Sebastian. He wore a white apron covered in pitch, smudged gray where he’d rubbed his hands, his shaggy bowl of black hair flopping in front of his eyes as he looked back sheepishly at the group and said, “Sorry!” He stood behind a machine that seemed built like a train—all black cast metal, shining with oil, silver spindles and toothy gears. The machine hummed and vibrated, the occasional tock of metal falling down chutes somewhere in its innards, like pennies dropped onto a table. The man—he was young, olive-skinned, a hangdog look—pulled a sheet of paper from the machine and
Faye realized the contraption was a printing press, the sheet a copy of the Free Voice. Alice called out to him: “Hey, Sebastian! What’s cooking?”
“Tomorrow’s edition,” he said, smiling, turning the paper to the light.
“What’s in it?”
“Letters to the editor. I had a stockpile.”
“Are they good?”
“They’ll blow your mind,” he said, loading more paper onto the bed of the machine. “Sorry. Act normal. I’m not even here.”
And so everyone turned back and the meeting began again, but Faye kept watching Sebastian. How he fiddled with knobs and cranks, how he lowered the head of the machine to smash ink onto the paper, how he pressed his lips together in concentration, how the collar on his white shirt had been stained a deep, dark green, and she was thinking about how he looked like some beautifully sloppy mad scientist and how she felt connected to him in the way outsiders feel a certain kinship with each other when she heard someone in the group say something about orgasms. Faye turned to see who was speaking—tall woman, blond hair like a waterfall down to her back, a string of beads around her neck, a bright red shirt with a deep neckline. She was leaning forward and asking about orgasms. Can you have them only in one position? Faye could not believe she’d said such a thing with a boy in the room. Behind them, his machine punched at paper, throbbing like a heartbeat. Someone suggested that you could have orgasms in two and perhaps as many as three positions. Someone else said the orgasm was a fiction. It was invented by doctors to make us feel ashamed. Ashamed of what? That we don’t have them like boys do. People nodded at this. They moved on.
It was suggested you could orgasm on weed, and sometimes acid, but almost never on heroin. Someone said sex on the natch was best anyway. One woman’s boyfriend couldn’t have sex unless he was drunk. Another woman’s boyfriend had recently asked her to douche. There was a boyfriend who, after sex, spent an hour cleaning the bedroom with a mop and germicide. There was another boyfriend who named his dick Mr. Rumpy-Pumpy. Another only wanted blow jobs until marriage.
“Free love!” someone said, and everyone laughed.
Because despite what the newspapers said, it was not the time of free love. It was the time of free-love writing, when free love was widely condemned, rarely practiced, and terrifically marketed. Photos of topless women dancing in public in Berkeley were greatly criticized and distributed. News of the oral-sex scandal at Yale reached every bedroom in the country. Everyone had heard of the Barnard girl who was living with a boy she wasn’t even married to. The imagination was seized by the pelvic regions of university girls—stories of once-chaste daughters turned to deviants in only one semester. Magazine articles condemned masturbation, the FBI warned against clitoral orgasm, and Congress investigated the dangers of fellatio. Never before had the authorities been so remarkably explicit. Mothers were taught the warning signs of sex addiction, kids were counseled against criminal and soul-destroying pleasure. Police flew helicopters over beaches to catch bare-breasted women. Life magazine said slutty girls had penis envy and were turning real men into pansies. The New York Times said excessive fornication caused girls to go psychotic. Good middle-class kids were becoming queers, dopers, dropouts, beatniks. It was true. Heard it on Cronkite. Politicians vowed to get tough. They blamed the pill, permissive liberal parents, the climbing divorce rate, raunchy movies, go-go clubs, atheism. People shook their heads, appalled at youth run amuck, and then set out looking for more tawdry stories, found them, and read every word.
The barometer for the health of the country seemed to be what middle-aged men thought about the behavior of college girls.
But for the girls, it was not the time of free love. It was the time of awkward love, embarrassed and nervous and ignorant love. This is what nobody reported, how free-love girls gathered in these dark rooms and worried. They’d read all the stories, and believed them, and thus thought they were doing something wrong. “I want to be hip, but I don’t want my boyfriend fucking all these other women,” said many, many girls who found that free love was still tangled up in all the old arguments—jealousy, envy, power. It was a sexual bait and switch, the free-love trip not quite measuring up to its hype.
“If I don’t want to have sex with someone, does that mean I’m a prude?” said one of the women at the meeting.
“If I don’t want to strip at a protest, am I a prude?” said another.
“Men think you’re a hip chick if you take your shirt off at rallies.”
“All those nude girls in Berkeley holding flowers.”
“They sell lots of papers.”
“Posing with psychedelic paint on their tits.”
“What kind of freedom is that?”
“They’re just doing it to be popular.”
“They’re not free.”
“They’re doing it for men.”
“Why else would they do it?”
“There’s no other reason to do it.”
“Maybe they like it,” said a new voice, a small voice, and everyone looked to see where it had come from: the girl with the funny round glasses who had been unnaturally quiet up to this point. Faye’s face flushed red and she looked at the floor.
Alice turned around and stared at her. “What do they like about it?” she asked.
Faye shrugged. She’d shocked herself by saying anything, much less that. She wanted to take it back immediately, reach out and stuff it into her stupid mouth. Maybe they like it, oh lord, oh god, the girls looked at her and waited. She had the feeling of being a wounded bird in a room full of cats.
Alice cocked her head and said, “Do you like it?”
“Sometimes. I don’t know. No.”
She had forgotten herself. She had been caught up in the moment—all this talk of sex, all the girls so excited, and she imagined herself at home standing in front of her big picture window imagining some dark stranger walking by and seeing her, when this thing erupted, it just came out. Maybe they like it.
“You like putting on a show for men?” Alice asked. “Parading your tits so they’ll like you?”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“What’s your name?” someone asked.
“Faye,” she said, and the girls waited. They watched her. She wanted more than anything to run out of the room, but that would draw so much more attention. She sat in a tight ball, trying to think of something to say, and that’s when Sebastian stepped out from the shadows and saved her.
“I’m sorry to interrupt,” he said, “but I have an announcement.”
And as he talked the group mercifully forgot about Faye. She sat there boiling and listening to Sebastian—he was talking about the upcoming protest, how the city hadn’t given them a permit to occupy the park but they were going to do it anyway. “Make sure to tell your friends,” he said. “Bring everybody. We’re gonna have a hundred thousand people or more. We’re gonna change the world. We’re gonna end the war. Nobody will go to work. Nobody will go to school. We’re gonna shut the city down. Music and dancing at every red light. The pigs can’t stop us.”
And at the mention of the pigs, the pigs themselves laughed.
For they were listening.
They were packed into a small office several miles south called the “war room” in the basement of the International Amphitheater, where the detectives listened through static to Sebastian’s exhortations, the girls’ inane chatter. They wrote on legal pads and remarked on the stupidity of college kids, how they were so trusting. The office of the Chicago Free Voice had been bugged for how long now? How many months? The kids didn’t have a clue.
Outside the amphitheater were the slaughterhouses—the famous stockyards of Chicago, where the police heard the screams of animals, the last wails of cattle and hogs. Some of the cops, interested, peered over fences and saw carcasses torn off the ground by hooks and trolleys, pulled to death, dismembered, floors covered in entrails and shit, men hacking tirelessly at limbs and throats—it all seemed ap
propriate. The butchers’ curved knives offered the police a kind of clarity, a kind of purity of intent that gave their jobs a helpful, if unspoken, guiding metaphor.
They listened and wrote down anything, any indictable threat, calls to violence, outside agitating, communist propaganda, and tonight they were given something special—a name, one never mentioned before, someone new: Faye.
They glanced over at the new guy, standing in the corner, legal pad in hand, recently promoted from beat cop to the Red Squad: Officer Charlie Brown. He nodded. He wrote it down.
The Red Squad was the Chicago PD’s covert antiterrorist intelligence unit that was created in the 1920s to spy on union organizers, expanded in the 1940s to spy on communists, and concentrated now on threats to the domestic peace posed by radical leftists, mostly the students and the blacks. It was a glamorous job, and Brown was aware that some of the other officers, the older officers, were skeptical of him and his promotion: He was young, nervous as all hell, had a brief career that as yet lacked distinction—he had, so far, mostly busted screwed-up hippie kids for minor infractions. Loitering. Jaywalking. Curfew. The vague statute against public lewdness. His goal as a beat cop was to become such an annoyance they simply gave up, the hippies, gave up and moved along to some other precinct or, better, some other city. Then Chicago wouldn’t have to deal with what was roundly agreed to be the worst generation ever. Easily the worst, even though it was his generation too. He wasn’t much older than the kids he busted. But the uniform made him feel older, the uniform and crew cut and wife and child and preference for quiet things like bars without too much music where the only thing you heard was the murmur of conversation and the occasional sharp thwack of billiard balls. And church. Going to church and seeing the other beat cops there: It was a brotherhood. They were Catholic guys, neighborhood guys. You slapped them on the back when you saw them. They were good guys, they drank but not too much, they were kind to their wives, fixed up their houses, built things, played poker, paid their mortgages. Their wives knew each other, their kids played together. They’d been living on the block since forever. Their fathers had lived here, grandfathers too. They were Irish, Poles, Germans, Czechs, Swedes, but now thoroughly Chicagoans. They had city pensions that made them a good catch for the neighborhood ladies looking to settle down. They loved each other, loved the city, loved America, and not in an abstract way like kids asked to pledge allegiance but way down to their core—because they were happy, they were doing it, living, being successful, working hard, raising kids, sending kids to goddamn school. They had watched their own fathers raise them and, like most boys, they worried about measuring up. But here they were, doing it, and they thanked God and America and the city of Chicago for it. They hadn’t asked for much, but what they’d asked for, they’d gotten.
