The Mammoth Book of Alternate Histories [Anthology]

by Edited By Ian Watson

  “He sure did. By spring 1968, a lot of campus radio stations all over California were off the air and the campus newspapers were a joke. No funding, see. And by then, everyone was too sick of the smell of tear gas to fight real hard. That was Reagan’s whole thing—sit-ins and take-overs weren’t covered by the right of free assembly, they were criminal acts. Unless you had to be in a building for a class, you were trespassing. I got about a mile of trespassing convictions on my rap sheet and so do a lot of other people. And Mr. and Mrs. America, they were real impressed the way Reagan came down on the troublemakers.

  “Sure were a lot of troublemakers. Too many to keep track of. That’s what happened to me, you know. Got lost in the court system. The next thing I knew, it was 1970, and nobody remembered my name, except the guards. And they could remember my number a lot easier. Still can.

  “The thing is, I never burned my draft card. That was a frame-up. I wouldn’t have burned it. I was ready to go to Canada, but I intended to keep my draft card. As a reminder, you know. And not even my parents believed me. By then, I’d been into so much radical shit, they figured everything the pigs said about me was true.

  “But the fact is, everything I owned was in that building when it burned. So of course my draft card burned up with it! But I never set that fire. My court-appointed lawyer—this is me laughing bitterly—said if I told my ‘crazy story’ about seeing off-duty cops with gasoline cans running from the scene just before the explosion, the judge would tack an extra five years on my sentence for perjury. I should have believed him, because it was the only time anyone told me the truth.”

  Interview conducted at Attica,

  published in

  Orphans of the Great Society,

  Fuck The System Press, 197?

  (circulated illegally in photocopy)

  Some say, even today, that Reagan wouldn’t have taken such an extremist path if Wallace hadn’t been such a strong contender. Nixon’s mistake was in dismissing Wallace’s strong showing, choosing to narrow his focus to the competition within his own party for the nomination. This made him look dinky, as if he didn’t care as much about being president as he did about being the Republican candidate for president. That would show those damned reporters that they couldn’t kick around Dick Nixon, uh-huh. Even if he lost, they’d have to take him seriously; if he actually won, they’d have to take him even more seriously. Which made him look not only dinky, but like a whiner—the kind of weak sister who, for example, might stand up in front of a television camera and rant about cocker spaniel puppies and good Republican cloth coats, instead of telling the American people that rioting, looting, and draft-card burning would no longer be tolerated. Even Ike’s coattails weren’t enough to repair Nixon’s image, and Ike himself was comatose or nearly so in Walter Reed after a series of heart attacks.

  The Republican National Convention was notable for three things: Rockefeller’s last-minute declaration of candidacy, which further diluted Nixon’s support, the luxuriousness of the accommodations and facilities, and its complete removal from the rioting that had broken out in Miami proper, where an allegedly minor racial incident escalated into a full-scale battle. The convention center was in Miami Beach, far from the madding Miami crowd, a self-contained playground for the rich. You couldn’t smell the tear gas from Miami Beach, and the wind direction was such that you couldn’t hear the sirens that screamed all night long…

  “Carole Feeney” [this subject is still a fugitive]:

  “I told everybody it was the goddam fatcat Republicans that we ought to go after, not the Democrats. But Johnson the Madman was running and everyone really thought that he was going to get the nomination. I said they were crazy, Kennedy had it in the bag. But Johnson really had them all running scared. I tried talking to some of the people in the Mobe. Half of them didn’t want to go to either convention and the other half were trying to buy guns to take to Chicago! Off the pigs, they kept saying. Off the pigs. Jesus, I thought, the only pig that was going to get offed was Pigasus—the real pig that the Yippies were going to announce as the candidate from the Youth International Party. That was cute. I mean, really, it was. I said, let’s go ahead and do that somewhere in California, film it and send the film to a TV station and let them run it on the news. Uh-uh, nothing doing. Lincoln Park or bust. Yeah, right—Lincoln Park and bust. Busted heads, busted bodies, busted and thrown in jail.

  “So I wasn’t going to go. Then I found out what Davis was doing. I couldn’t believe it—Davis Trainor had been in on everything practically from the beginning. He was real good-looking and real popular, he had this real goofy sense of humor and he always seemed to come up with good ideas for guerrilla action. He actually did all the set-up work on the pirate radio station we ran out of Oakland and he worked out our escape routes. Not one of us got caught in the KCUF caper. We called it our Fuck-You caper, of course.

  “Then I’m doing the laundry and I find it—his COINTELPRO I.D.—stuffed into that little bitty pocket in his jeans. You know, it’s like a little secret pocket right above the regular pocket on the right. The one thing I always hated about the movement was that it was as sexist as the Establishment. If you were a woman, you always got stuck doing all the cooking and the cleaning up and the laundry and stuff. Unless you were a movement queen like Dohrn. Then you didn’t have to do anything except make speeches and get laid if you wanted. Oh, they threw us a sop by letting us set up our own feminist actions and stuff, but we all knew it was a sop. We kept telling each other that after we changed things, it would be different and for now, we’d watch and listen and learn. Besides, everyone knew that the Establishment wouldn’t take women as seriously as they would men. I wonder now how much any of us believed that—that it would really be different, that we could change things at all.

  “Anyway, I went straight to the Mobe with my discovery, but it was too late—Davis discovered his pants were missing and he’d already split. I really didn’t want to go to Chicago after that, but the alternative seemed to be either stay home and wait to get busted, or go to Chicago and get busted in action. I was still enough of an idealist that they talked me into Chicago. If I was going to get busted, I might as well be accomplishing something, and anyway, after the revolution, I’d be a National Heroine, and not a political prisoner.

  “So, the revolution’s come and gone and here I am. Still working for the movement—the feminist movement, that is. What little I can do, referring women with unwanted pregnancies to safe abortionists. Yes, there are some. Not all of us were poli-sci majors—some of us were pre-med, some of us went to nursing school. It costs a goddam fortune, but I’m not getting rich on it. It’s for the risk, you know. You get the death penalty in this state for performing an illegal abortion. I could get life as an accessory, and there was a woman in Missouri who did get death for doing what I’m doing.

  “Nobody in my family knows, of course. Especially not my husband. If he knew, he’d probably kill me himself. Odd as it sounds, I don’t hate him… not when I think what good cover he is, and what the alternative would be if I didn’t have such good cover…”

  Part of a transcript labeled “Carole Feeney”

  obtained in a 1989 raid on a motel

  said to be part of a network of underground “safe houses” for tax protestors,

  leftist terrorists,

  and other subversives;

  no other illegal literature recovered

  The source of the DYLAN IS COMING! rumor never was pinpointed. Some say it sprang into being all on its own and stayed alive because so many people wanted it to be true. And for all anyone knows, perhaps it actually was true, for a little while anyway; perhaps Dylan simply changed his mind. The more cynical suggested that the rumor had been planted by infiltrators like the notorious Davis Trainor, whose face became so well known thanks to the Mobe’s mock WANTED poster that he had to have extensive plastic surgery, a total of a dozen operations in all. The poster was done well enough that it passed as
legitimate and was often allowed to hang undisturbed in post offices, libraries, and other public places, side by side with the FBI’s posters of dissidents and activists. One poster was found in a Minneapolis library as late as 1975; the head librarian was taken into custody, questioned, and released. But it is no coincidence that the library was audited for objectionable material soon after that and has been subject to surprise spot-checks for the last fifteen years, in spite of the fact that it has always showed 100 percent compliance with government standards for reading matter. The price of a tyrant’s victory is eternal vigilance.

  This was once considered to be the price of liberty. Nothing buys what it used to.

  Steve D’Alessandro:

  “By Sunday, when Dylan didn’t show, people were starting to get angry. I kept saying, well, hey, Allen Ginsberg showed. Allen Ginsberg! Man, he was like… God to me. He was doing his best, going around rapping with people, trying to get everybody calmed down and focused, you know. A whole bunch of us got in a circle around him and we were chanting Om, Om. I was getting a really good vibe and then some asshole throws a bottle at him and yells, Oh, shut up, you fag!

  “I went crazy. Sure, I was in the closet then because the movement wasn’t as enlightened as some of us wished it were. The FBI was doing this thing where it was going around trying to discredit a lot of people by accusing them of being queer, and everybody caught homophobia like it was measles. I ain’t no fairy, no, sir, not me, I fucked a hundred chicks this week and my dick’s draggin’ on the ground so don’t you call me no fag! It still stings, even when I compare it to how things are now. But then, I don’t expect any kind of enlightened feeling in a society where I have to take fucking hormone treatments so I won’t get a hard-on when I see another guy.

  “Anyway, I found the scumbag that did it and I punched him out. I gave him a limp wrist. I gave him two of them. And I know I had a lot of support— I mean, a lot of straights admired Ginsberg, too, even if he was gay, just on the basis of Howl, but later, a bunch of Abbie’s friends blamed me for creating the disturbance that gave the police the excuse they needed to wade in and start busting heads.

  “Sometimes I’m afraid maybe they were right. But Annie Phillips told me it was just a coincidence. About me, I mean. She said they came in because they saw a black guy kissing a white girl. I guess nobody’ll ever really know for sure, because the black guy died of his injuries and the white girl never came forward.

  “I prefer to think that’s what made Annie and her crowd go ahead with the bomb at the convention center. I don’t like to think that Annie really wanted to blow anybody up. It was kind of weird how I knew Annie. Well, not weird, really. I probably owed Annie my life, or damn near, and so did a certain man of African-American descent. We were lucky it was her that walked in on us that day. She was enlightened, or at least tolerant, and we could trust her not to say anything. I didn’t think she liked white people too much, but I’d heard she’d been with Martin Luther King a couple of years before on those marches and I couldn’t blame her. Anyway, she couldn’t give me away without giving away the brother, but to this day, I believe it really didn’t matter to her—homosexuality, that is. Maybe because the Establishment hated us worse than they hated blacks.

  “Anyway, I wasn’t intending to be in the crowd that crashed the gate at the convention center on Wednesday. Nomination day. We’d been fighting in the streets since Monday and Daley’s stormtroopers were beating the shit out of us. Late Tuesday night, the National Guard arrived. That’s when we knew it was war.

  “On Wednesday, we got hemmed in in Grant Park. People were pouring in by then, and nobody had expected that. It was like everyone was standing up to be counted because Dylan hadn’t, or something. Anyway, there were maybe ten-twelve thousand of us at the band shell in the park, singing, listening to speeches, and then two kids went up a flagpole and lowered the flag to half-mast. The cops went crazy—they came in swinging wild and they didn’t care who they hit or where they hit them. I was scared out of my mind. I saw those cops close up and they looked as mad as Johnson was supposed to be. On the spot, I became a believer like I’d never been before—Madman in the White House and Madman Daley and his Madman cops. It was all true, I thought while I curled up on the ground with my hands over my head and prayed some kill-crazy pig wouldn’t decide to pound my ass to jelly.

  “Somebody pulled me up and yelled that we were supposed to all go to in front of the Hilton. I ran like hell all the way to the railroad tracks along with everybody else and that was where the Guard caught us with the tear gas. Man, I thought I was going to die of tear-gas suffocation if I didn’t get trampled by the people I was with. Everyone was running around like crazy. I don’t know how we ever got out of there but somebody found a way onto Michigan Avenue and somehow we all followed. And the Guard followed after us. Somebody said later they weren’t supposed to, but they did. And they weren’t carrying popguns.

  “Well, we ran smack into Ralph Abernathy and his Poor People’s Campaign mule train and that was more confusion. Then the Guard waded in and a lot of Poor People went to the hospital that night (it was after seven by then). I’ll never forget that, or the sight of all those TV cameras and the bright lights shining in our eyes. We were all staggering around when a fresh bus-load of riot cops arrived, and that’s another sight I’ll never forget—two dozen beefy bruisers in riot gear shooting out of that bus like they were being shot from cannons and landing on all of us with both feet and their billyclubs. I lost my front teeth and I was so freaked I didn’t even feel it until the next day.

  “I was freaked, but I was also furious. We were all furious. It was like, Johnson would send us to Vietnam to be killed or he’d let us be killed by Daley’s madman cops on the Chicago streets, it didn’t matter to him. I think a lot of us expected the convention to adjourn in protest at our treatment. At least that Bobby Kennedy would speak out in protest against the brutality. The name Kennedy meant human rights, after all. Nobody knew that Kennedy had been removed from the convention center under heavy guard because they were all convinced that someone would make another attempt on his life. I heard that later, before they clamped down on all the information. He was about to get the fucking nomination and he was on his way back to his hotel. They said Madman Johnson was more like Mad-Dog Johnson over that, but who the fuck knows?

  “George McGovern was at the podium when we busted in. I hadn’t really been intending to be in that group that busted in, but I got carried along and when I saw we were going to crash the amphitheater, I thought, what the fuck.

  “I almost got crushed against the doors before they gave, and I barely missed falling on my face and getting run over by six thousand screaming demonstrators. And the first person I saw was Annie Phillips.

  “I thought I was in a Fellini film. She was dressed in this godawful maid’s uniform with a handkerchief around her head mashing down her Afro, but I knew it was her. We looked right into each other’s eyes as I went by, still more carried along with the crowd than running on my own and she put both hands over her mouth in horror. That was the last time I saw her until she was on TV.

  “I managed to get out of the way and stay to the back of the amphitheater itself. I just wanted to catch my breath and try to think how I was going to get out from all this shit without getting my head split open by a crazy Guardsman or a cop. I was still there when the bomb went off down front.

  “The sound was so loud I thought my ears were bleeding. Automatically, I dropped to the floor and covered my head. There was a little debris, not much, where I was. When I finally dared to look, what I saw didn’t make any sense. I still can’t tell you exactly what I saw. I blocked it out. But sometimes, I think I dream it. I dream that I saw Johnson’s head sitting on a Texas flagpole. I’m pretty sure that’s just my imagination, because in the dream, he’s got this vaguely surprised-annoyed expression on his saggy old face, like he’s saying, Whut the fuck is goin’ on here?

  “Anyway, t
he next thing I knew, I was out on the street again, and somebody was crying about they were bombing us now, along with the Vietnamese. Which was about the time the Guard opened fire, thinking we were bombing them, I guess.

  “I was lucky. I took a bullet in my thigh and it put me out of the action. Just a flesh wound, really. It bled pretty impressively for a while and then quit. By then, I was so out of my head that I can’t even tell you where I staggered off to. The people who found me in their front yard the next morning took care of me and got me to a hospital. It was a five-hour wait in the emergency room. That was where I was when I heard about Kennedy.”

  Part of the data recovered

  from a disk

  taken in a raid on an illegal

  software laboratory,

  March, 1981

  Jack Kennedy had died in the middle of a Dallas street, his head blown off in front of thousands of spectators and his horrified wife. Bobby Kennedy had narrowly missed meeting his end during a moment of triumph in a Los Angeles hotel. Ultimately, that seemed to have been only a brief reprieve before fate caught up with him…

  Jasmine Chang:

  “Everyone heard the explosion but nobody knew whether it was something the demonstrators had done, or if the National Guard had rolled in a tank or if the world had come to an end. I ran down to the lobby with just about everyone else on the staff and a good many of the hotel guests, trying to see what was happening outside without having to go out in it. Nobody wanted to go outside. That night, the manager on duty had told us that anyone who wanted could stay over if we didn’t mind roughing it in the meeting rooms. I made myself a sleeping bag out of spare linens under a heavy table in one of the smaller rooms. The night before, the cops had cracked one of the dining room windows with a demonstrator’s head. I wasn’t about to risk my neck going out in that frenzy.