by Lewis Shiner
“And I say, ‘Really, Vicente? You would really kill me if I don’t read this shit?’
“And Vicente says, he says, ‘You are standing at the crossroads. You read Che, and you open your brain to what he has to say, and you will be on the road to being a real man, and maybe you and me will be brothers in the struggle. But if you close your mind and don’t read it, you will be just another spic on the corner, a waste of the good food my mother gives you, a waste of the air you breathe, and no, I won’t give a fuck if you live or die, and nobody else will either.’
“I start reading it that night and I’m thinking, if it’s either read this shit or die, I have a very tough decision to make. You understand, up to this point, I never read a whole book in my life. I did the least amount of homework I could get away with. I printed my words like a third grader. But I got my moms to help me with the Spanish and I wrote down some questions. What happened at Playa Girón? What the fuck is ‘dialectical unity’?
“Then something happened. I figured out that the reason Georgie and Vicente wanted me to read this is that the ‘new man’ that Che is talking about, that could be me. Whoa! That completely fucked with my head. Suddenly all this shit that was abstract and boring, now it’s personal. It’s not some faceless masses that are getting fucked by capitalism, it’s me. And my moms, and all the guys in the Dragons and the Viceroys, and even those assholes in the pinche Red Wings. Everybody in New York City that’s ever been called nigger or spic or wop. It was like being asleep for fourteen years and you suddenly wake up, and man, you are ready to go.
“There was plenty to do. Free breakfast programs. Clothing giveaways. Testing for lead paint poisoning and tb. Garbage cleanup. And reading. Marx, Mao, Lenin. And not just political shit. Pablo Neruda. Julia de Burgos. Dylan Thomas.
“Me and Vicente got initiated at the same time. I was proud of that, and him too. The first action we did together was Lincoln Hospital, July 1970, a year from my first dinner at Vicente’s house.”
“Lincoln Hospital?”
“Lincoln was such a shithole, man, it had been condemned for twenty years and they were still using it. People died in the halls waiting for somebody to see them, and they died of septicemia if somebody did see them. We occupied it with guns, to show we were serious. Because we were not a gang, right, we were an army. Like the Panthers or the Weathermen. And we won, because they are building our new hospital now. Like we won all our actions, because we had the community behind us, because we listened to what they wanted.”
The film was going to run out. “Hold that thought,” Alex said, and changed cartridges. He repositioned the camera to one side, had Felix adjust the boom mike, got his focus and started again.
“Whenever you’re ready,” he said to Miguel, “turn and look at the camera and pick up where you left off. You were talking about being part of the community.”
Miguel was quiet for a few seconds, then you could see his mood change, turn somber. “It was great for another year, then it all went to shit, like it did for the Panthers and the Weathermen and every other revolutionary organization in the United States.”
The first drops of rain started to fall. Alex peeled off his jacket and held it above the camera so the rain wouldn’t streak the lens. “Somehow we ended up committed to Puerto Rican independence, and all the community work stopped and the Central Committee went to the island, and that was a total failure, and when they came back we were all factionalized. That was when they changed the name, and Gloria was now top dog, and she exiled Yoruba, man, she exiled Fi, and most of the old guard walked out, including Vicente. When Vicente quit, man, that broke my fucking heart.”
“Why did everything change?”
“You know what cointelpro is, right?” Alex shook his head. “It’s the fucking feebs, man, the fbi, infiltrating revolutionary organizations, pushing the leadership to do stupid things, inciting them to violence, driving them to extremes. They got to the Panthers, to the sds, the Weathermen, everybody, and they got to us.
“That’s part of the story. And part of it is the kind of people who get involved in a movement like this in the first place. You got idealists with their heads in outer space, and you got narcissists that always got to be looked at. And you got people like me, ordinary people of good will, that need somebody to lead us.
“I keep on because… I don’t know. I’m not so sure anymore. Hoping for a miracle? There’s no miracles in El Barrio or Loisaida. Just a lot of poor people who had some hope for a while and now they don’t anymore.”
Miguel looked away. Alex kept the camera running until Miguel, still staring off into the trees, made a throat-cutting gesture with the flat of his hand. “Se acabó. That’s it.”
Alex had a vision of how he could shape it, take out the questions so it was just Miguel talking. He shot another half-roll to use as cutaways—birds flying over the Meer, Miguel looking thoughtfully into the distance, a close-up of his interlaced fingers holding his knees, raindrops clinging to a blade of grass.
*
When the work print came back, Alex put the picture roll and the sprocketed soundtrack tape on rewinds on an editing table. He cut off Felix’s feeble speech and saved it on separate mag and picture rolls. He cut out his own questions and a few of Miguel’s sentences here and there and spliced in the B-roll footage to cover the cuts, editing the mag tape to keep the picture and sound in synch as he went. He watched it a couple of times on the little Moviscop viewer on the table and gave himself chills.
He kept thinking about Miguel with his beret and rifle marching into Lincoln Hospital, surrounded by his compañeros, all of them carrying guns “to show they were serious.” Alex wondered if he’d ever been that serious. What if it had come to that at ut? Would he have been able to harness his rage to a gun? Harness his principles to one?
Callie was supposed to come to his apartment at seven pm and didn’t arrive until 8:45. She smelled of linseed oil, not unpleasantly, and her unwashed hair was pinned up in a wad on top of her head. Under her bomber jacket she wore paint-streaked jeans and a flannel shirt and a testy attitude. “Sorry,” she said. “I was working.”
Alex hadn’t seen her for two days and wasn’t sure whether he was more eager to show her the piece of film or get her into bed. What he ended up doing was making the grilled cheese sandwiches she asked for while she talked about Spiro Agnew, who’d been busted for taking over a hundred thousand dollars in bribes when he was governor of Maryland. Like with Capone, it was failure to pay taxes on his illegal income that did him in.
“The fucker pleads nolo contendere,” Callie said venomously, “pays a lousy ten grand, and gets three years unsupervised probation. Oh, and he has to give up being vice president of the United States.”
Alex was glad to see the mean-spirited bastard go down, though he wouldn’t be truly satisfied until Nixon himself was doing hard time on a chain gang. “Well,” he said, “at least he put the vice back in the vice presidency.”
Callie stared at him as if he was a babbling lunatic. “This is serious.”
“Sorry,” Alex said.
“What’s got into you tonight?”
Alex wondered if the question had been pointed in the right direction. “I really want you to see this footage.”
By the time he got her up to the ninth floor of the East Building, home of The Institute of Film and Television, it was after ten. The editing room was a big open space carved into separate work areas—editing tables with hand cranks, Moviolas, and one new Steenbeck flatbed editor, a veritable Maserati next to the Moviola’s Model T. His Fundamentals of Filmmaking teacher, Mr. Scorsese, was on the Steenbeck, hunched over, his long, dark hair hanging everywhere, whizzing film and a couple of mag tapes back and forth with nervous energy.
Which left the Moviolas, four-foot-high, green-gray, cast-iron praying mantises with viewers for heads and backward and forward pedals for front feet. Alex pulled up a stool and threaded in the film and the mag track. “Grab a
stool and look over my shoulder,” Alex said.
“I want to run it,” Callie said.
“No way. This thing is a bitch with sixteen millimeter, and it’ll chew up a work print in the blink of an eye.”
He read annoyance in her silence, in her hesitation at the edge of his vision. “Look,” he said, “if you don’t want to see this, we can do it another night.”
“I didn’t say that.” She moved behind him, standing, not touching him.
“Can you see okay?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
He let out the clutch and Miguel looked at them and said, “See, I used to jitterbug.”
Callie watched in silence. Alex got carried away with the performance all over again and was close to tears at the end. He got himself under control and rewound both the film and the tape. “Well?” he said at last. “What’d you think?”
He shifted around on the stool. Callie looked preoccupied. “The kid’s a natural,” she said. “People will eat that up, that whole quitting the gang and finding his social conscience bit.”
“But not you.”
“Well, you know. It’s a bit predigested, isn’t it? All kind of neat. Like an After School Special.”
“A what?”
“You know, those tv movies for kids. Troubled teen triumphs over adversity thanks to hip and caring adult.”
Alex took off the split reels and put both rolls back in their cans. Mr. Scorsese looked up from the Steenbeck and said, “Alex, how you doing? You got something?”
“I don’t know yet,” Alex said.
“Yeah, sometimes that’s the best kind.”
Alex and Callie rode down the elevator in silence together. He’d tiptoed around her moods before, or managed to distract her, but tonight he felt like one of those gis he’d read about in Vietnam, who’d stepped on a landmine and heard the click, knowing it would explode as soon as he took his weight off. “Maybe I should walk you home,” he said.
“Why, because I didn’t go apeshit over your movie?”
“You don’t seem that into being with me tonight.”
“I wish you wouldn’t tell me what I’m feeling.”
Alex stopped. “Look, I don’t want to fight.”
“Fine, then don’t start one.”
Alex had always thought of himself as a reasonably mellow individual. Callie had the ability to turn him into a mass of seething chemicals inside a hot, thin skin. He shoved his hands in his pockets, the film reels pinned under one arm, and strode off toward his apartment, not looking to see if Callie was following.
She caught up to him at the front door of his building. “You know,” she said, “if you’re going to be an artist, you have to learn to accept that people are going to have their own opinions about your work.”
As badly as he’d missed her the last two days, that was how much he now wished she would go away. The highs and lows of the day had left him exhausted. Back in the apartment, he said, “I’m going to bed.”
Callie was rummaging around in his fridge. “Suit yourself. I’m going to stay up and read for a while.”
The hissing of the radiator covered most of the noise of her shifting around on the creaky couch and flicking the pages of her book. Eventually he went all the way under. At three am he woke to Callie crawling into bed next to him. He kept his back to her and felt her flannel shirt against his skin as she draped an arm over his chest. Lust dueled briefly with resentment and lost, and Alex went back to sleep.
*
He woke late the next morning, alone, to pounding at the door. “Phone, Alex,” the landlady said.
He put on some random clothes and went downstairs. His mother was on the phone with bad news from Guanajuato. His grandmother had been sick and it had turned to pneumonia. His grandfather had been keeping vigil by her bedside and had a fatal stroke. His grandmother was not expected to last the week.
They were both in their early 70s and old before their time, having only had any luxury in their lives for the last dozen years. Alex had always found his grandfather remote, stern, and formal, and his grandmother had devoted her life to pleasing her husband. He had trouble feeling more than a superficial sadness, and most of that was for his own vague and happy memories of their houses in Monterrey and Guanajuato.
His parents would fly down the next day. “I know it would be hard for you to get away,” his mother said, “but if you want to come…”
“I want to,” Alex said. “Between school and work…”
“I understand,” his mother said.
As he climbed the stairs he was torn between relief and guilt, relief that his mother had made it so easy for him, guilt because it wasn’t school or work keeping him in New York. It was Callie.
*
Hurrying home from class on Monday afternoon, with an hour to grab a bite before work, Alex saw Maelo leaning against the front of their building, smoking.
«¿Qué pasó, Maelo? Where’s your beret?»
“Gloria kicked us out,” Maelo said in English. He was smiling. “All three of us.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No, man, straight up.”
“Oh, shit, man, was it because of the movie?”
“That was her excuse. Really, she’s been about to do it for the last year. To her we’re reactionary. Anybody is who’s to the right of Mao. It’s a sinking ship, and Gloria’s going to take it to the bottom of the sea, all by herself.”
Alex was suddenly furious. At Gloria, at the lack of justice in the world, at the trouble his own half-assed ambitions had caused. “That sucks.”
“Hey, it sucks for you too. You won’t be able to make your movie now. Gloria said if you came around again she would break your camera. I’m leaving out some words between ‘your’ and ‘camera.’”
Alex noted that he didn’t like being threatened. Not by cops in Austin, not by Maoist revolutionaries, not by Callie. “What about Miguel? He must be really disappointed.”
“No, man, not at all. His heart wasn’t in it anymore either.”
Alex seemed to be the only one who cared. He’d become invested second-hand, his own unfinished business with the Revolution come back to haunt him. “What are you guys going to do?”
Maelo shrugged. “What everybody else does, I guess. Look out for number one.”
*
Apparently Alex had not yet had enough bad news. Three days later, at ten pm, eating a chicken pie and obsessing over Callie, he got called to the phone again.
“Alex?” said a vaguely familiar voice. “Alex, is it you?”
“Frederica?”
“Yes, honey, it’s me. Your mama gave me your number, but I can’t stay on the line, I’m at a pay phone with some change.” Her voice sounded weak.
Frederica had “retired” in 1970. His father had made some kind of financial arrangement with her and Alex hadn’t asked about the details.
“Are you okay?” Alex asked.
“I’m not doing so good. I got the rheumatoid arthritis in both my hands and I can’t work. The little money your daddy gives me every month is not enough. I’m 65 now, but nobody ever paid Social Security to my account, so they tell me there’s no benefits to take out.” She sighed. “I don’t want to unload all my troubles on you, honey, this isn’t any of it your fault. I just need help, is all, and I know you’ve still got love for me in your heart.”
Guilt and helplessness swallowed Alex whole. He’d lavished his empathy on French students with cobblestones, while knowing that Frederica was spending two hours on the bus every day to work for two dollars an hour, barely more than minimum wage. Now, when she needed him, he had nothing to give her.
He tried to explain his financial situation, and in the middle of it the phone started beeping and she was gone. He didn’t have a number to call her back and his parents were in Mexico.
Duane Reed pharmacies, Callie, film school, the Lower East Side, what the hell did he think he was doing? Who was he trying to kid? He didn�
��t belong here any more than he did behind a bass guitar at a frat house.
*
Early in the afternoon on the Sunday before Christmas, Madelyn stood among the flags in Rockefeller Center and let thick, wet flakes of snow fall on her as she watched the skaters glide across the rink below. The idea was to raise her spirits by glutting herself on the New York Christmas experience. She’d already spent an hour attempting to admire the overdressed windows on 5th Avenue and she was headed uptown to see Central Park covered in white. The beauty and the melancholy were seamlessly intertwined.
“Young SoHo Originals” had opened on Friday, December 6. The other two artists, Kindred’s picks, sold enough to keep the show from being a complete disaster; Callie Janus had so far failed to sell a single painting. The reviews hadn’t helped. Hilton Kramer, the Times’ new, extremely conservative art critic, had insinuated that she’d gotten into the show purely on the basis of her gender. In the Voice, John Perreault wrote, “In an era where art is attempting to redefine itself in terms of space rather than story, Janus’s rather awkward paintings are all about ‘words, words, words,’ as Hamlet said. She is swimming upstream, but she has failed to spawn.”
Kindred had laughed off Callie’s failure, saying, “You can’t predict a painter’s success any more than you can predict a hit record. There are too many variables. You have to follow your heart and hope for the best.” Madelyn, however, saw it as her own failure, the fault of clouded judgement and inexperience and her predilection for academia.
Callie herself had put up a brave front, dismissing Kramer as a “fascist asshole” and accusing Perreault of being jealous, though of what she didn’t say. Now she was in Dallas, where Alex, to Madelyn’s astonishment, had flown her. Alex had assured her that it was not what it sounded like. “It’s just a place for her to spend Christmas. She doesn’t really get along with her own family.”
Madelyn had refrained from asking who, exactly, she did get along with; the answer seemed to be Alex. Sometimes.
Despite her best efforts at Christmas cheer, Madelyn wanted nothing more than to be in Dallas herself. Kindred had offered to let her go, with poor enough grace that Madelyn had known better than to take him up on it. Her parents had originally planned to fly up, and then Julia had totaled her car; she was not seriously injured, but they’d needed the money to help her get a new one.
