Sweet Sunday

by John Lawton

  ‘Not so good?’

  ‘Well . . . actually he’s dead.’

  And so was the line. He hung up on me. I kept trying for two days and got the busy signal, and then on the third I got the discontinued. But by then I’d got the message. Barclay never was going to talk to me and dearly wished he had not talked to Mel. Chicago it was. LaGuardia to O’Hare, one blistering day in July. Once more into the Restofamerica. If I’d had to draw up a list of places I’d been to that I never wanted to see again, I think that toddlin’ town would be number two or three on that list. It was less than a year since I’d been there.

  §

  Summer 1968. I had Mel on the phone. ‘Don’t duck out on me, man. This is important.’

  It wasn’t and I told him so. Going to the Democratic Convention in Chicago was a waste of time. It wasn’t a convention, it was a coronation. Hubert Humphrey was LBJ’s chosen one. And that was that. The Hump was his vengeance on us all. We’d thrown him out and to pay us back he’d sicced a total loser onto us.

  ‘Mel, I didn’t spend a freezing winter in New Hampshire just to watch the Hump get elected. We’ve lost. Bobby Kennedy’s dead, McCarthy hasn’t got the delegates. If you want to see it stay home and watch it on the tube.’

  ‘See it, see it. Raines, you are so goddam passive. See it—I want to touch it, feel it—I want to fuck it!’

  He set Rubin onto me. I got the Yipster standard line from him.

  ‘Look at it this way. It’s going to be fun. Who wants a revolution that isn’t fun?’

  ‘Jerry, that is complete nonsense.’

  ‘And . . . there are the inherent possibilities.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘Chicago is Daley’s town. Mr Mayor is a predictable man. We have only to push him so far and he will turn his pigs loose upon us.’

  ‘You’re nuts. You really want that? There’ll be a bloodbath!’

  ‘It’s exactly what I want. I want every TV camera in Chicago to record what happens. The pigs will go crazy—Mom and Pop back home on the couches of Amerika will see it. Maybe then they’ll say—if this is what Amerika is doing to our kids in Chicago what are we doing to kids elsewhere, what is happening in Vietnam? If we can do this—at home—to our own . . . what can we not do overseas to gooks and slopes?’

  ‘You’d push the cops to that just to get a reaction?’

  ‘Damn right I would.’

  ‘You could end up reaping the wind.’

  ‘I know that.’

  ‘Maybe Amerika doesn’t react. Maybe Amerika just changes channels?’

  ‘It’ll be on all of them—CBS, NBC, ABC. They won’t dare miss it.’

  ‘Jerry, this really isn’t me.’

  ‘Johnnie, do it for me. We’re running a pig for president.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I mean. A real pig. Four legs. Goes oink. Shits everywhere. You could mind the pig while we start the revolution.’

  God help me, I gave in to the bastard. His ‘do it for me’ had been a sly paraphrase of ‘you owe me’. Mel and I had campaigned for McCarthy in the New Hampshire primary when the Yippies were writing him off as just another suit and his left-wing and hippie supporters as people who’d ‘stripped clean for Gene’. Rubin told me McCarthy was the real enemy—Nixon was an upfront villain, you knew where you were with Tricky, McCarthy’s liberalism could not but be a mask for the bad things we did not yet know about him. We did not agree. We went to New Hampshire. Us and several thousand others. And Rubin gave us shit for weeks after—Mel had even signed his damn Yippie Manifesto back in ’67—‘Amerika is a Death Machine’; repetitive stuff, not a spark of poetry to it—could there be a bigger turncoat? I hadn’t. I never believed the Yippies amounted to more than half a dozen people, but then that was part of the joke, the big put-on. A mass movement that existed only in its own press releases. I gave in because I didn’t want Rubin calling me chicken for the next six months. I went to Chicago as the most reluctant Yippie in that crazy little Yippie world.

  When I said I’d taken one look at Chicago and ran, I was speaking metaphorically of how I’d felt. I arrived well after the vanguard of Mel, Rubin and Hoffman to find they had gotten themselves rooms and had not bothered to save a room for me. A hotel was out of the question. Chicago was full.

  ‘You’ll be with the pig, man. They won’t let a pig into the house.’

  ‘Have you got the pig?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Fine, I’ll sleep on your floor.’

  ‘No, man, we think it would be better if you found a place in the park where we could stash the pig.’

  I should have walked out there and then. In fact I spent a night in Lincoln Park dodging club-happy Daley cops and eventually fell asleep around dawn with my back to a tree while the generation gap raged about me. I woke exhausted and grubby to find two bits of jailbait sitting at my feet, solemnly passing a joint between them, T-shirted, bra-less, sporting Yippie buttons, and no more than fifteen years old to look at. One of them passed the joint to me. I said no. I couldn’t start the day stoned. I could not get through the day without thinking Rubin had initiated a latter-day Children’s Crusade.

  ‘Do you girls know anything about pigs?’

  ‘Man, this is Chicago. Pig city.’

  I spent much of that day bewitched, bothered and bewildered, wondering just why I’d come. They were predicting half a million—the big Yip-In (or was it the big Yip-Out?) anarchy on the sidewalk, fucking in the streets, LSD in the water supply. I’d seen just a few hundred so far—I think the cops outnumbered us about two to one.

  Rubin and Abbie Hoffman fell out over the pig almost at once. Rubin said, ‘Raines grew up on a farm. He knows about pigs.’ It had been fifteen years or more since I’d last had anything to do with pigs, but what the heck. Hoffman drove out to Belvedere, Illinois and came back with this cute little pinky-white sow. Rubin said she was not hefty enough—he wanted a piggier pig, a grunting, rooting hog, not this cool character who looked more likely to say ‘howdy doody’ than take a piece out of you. Hoffman handed me the pig leash, said, ‘a pig is a pig is a pig’ and vanished.

  Rubin drove back into Illinois, found another hog farm, persuaded the singer Phil Ochs to part with the money and returned with a two-hundred pound boar, white with a black rump patch. He didn’t act mean, but he sure looked the part. I was now a two pig pigman. For the ‘nomination’, I left the little sow with the jailbait sisters and we took ‘Pigasus’—yes, ‘Pigasus’—to the Picasso statue in the downtown Civic Center. We sang the national anthem, ‘Pigasus’ got pignapped by the cops—which I felt relieved me of any responsibility for him—and heads got cracked. I heard a rumor that the cops told the guys they busted along with the pig, ‘Got you now, boys—the pig squealed.’ Who says they don’t have a sense of humor?

  I got back to Lincoln Park—managed to outrun the cop who tagged me—and found the sisters of mercy high as the rafters and no sign of the sow.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘The pig lit out, man.’

  ‘You mean you let her escape.’

  ‘No man, we liberated her. Free the pigs!’

  Suddenly I was the official Yippie pigman with not a pig to my name. I thought of going home there and then. The younger, smaller of the sisters came on to me, her breasts pressed against my belly, head on my chest, a hand between my legs.

  ‘Loosen up, man. Let’s make out. Fuck for peace. I could blow your balls and sis could blow your mind.’

  Not while I was still sane we couldn’t.

  The cops were hard to insult. You called ’em pig and they wore it like a medal—they adopted ‘Pigasus’ as a mascot. Hard to insult, but there was one bunch found a way. We’d reached another of those endless Mexican stand-offs outside the Hilton Hotel. Cops holding us back,
delegates and newsmen and hangers-on trying to get inside.

  It seemed to me they came out of nowhere, sidestepped and suckerpunched the cops and ran for the building lickety-split—a dozen hairy guys with buckets. Buckets of what? I didn’t need to ask. They threw them everywhere—at the cops, the TV crew, the delegates—a dapper man wearing a Brooks Brothers suit and a Gene McCarthy button, one hand plastered to the crud on his suit, his lips voicing ‘what the . . . ?’—and they threw ’em at us. Shit. Not manure, not animal shit, but human shit, a stinking mess of human shit and piss so rancid they must have been crapping in those buckets for a week. The cops broke rank and started beating the hell out of those guys. I watched ’em go down fighting. I had to admire their guts. They were giving Rubin exactly what he wanted. I watched a TV cameraman wipe the shit off his lens and point the camera at the carnage. Let Mom and Pop Couch get an eyeful of this. Everything Jerry had asked for and more.

  The last thing I heard as the battle cry went up was the cop chant of ‘Kill kill kill!’—exactly what the Crazies would chant one year later in the Greenwich Village School, the last time I saw Mel.

  I turned around. Walked away. And then ran. Found the nearest CTA station and caught the L-train. I was caked in shit. A bum on the train—the kind of guy you just know reeked of cheesy rot—held his nose and got out at the next stop. I’d had enough. I rode all the way to O’Hare, cleaned myself up and got on a plane back to New York.

  ‘Why does it bother you so much?’ Mel called me when he got out of jail again. ‘We just made the mothers do on camera what they’ve been doing to us for years.’

  ‘No, Mel. It was worse than that.’

  ‘Worse? They damn near killed you in Mississippi in ’61!’

  ‘It’s not what the cops are doing. It’s what we’re doing. I don’t know where we’re going anymore. In fact I think some of us may be as crazy as they are.’

  ‘What? You mean the shit? It was a stunt, that’s all. Some corny piece of street theater. We been doing street theater for years. Ask me what our decade’s been about and I’ll tell you—street theater, send up what you can’t pull down.’

  ‘I don’t know where it’s leading. We were going to take back ­Amerika—now I don’t even think I recognize Amerika and I don’t see where we are in it. Mel, is this what we fought for?’

  ‘Maybe not, but it’s a means to an end. “By any means necessary”, remember?’

  ‘Six or seven years ago you would have said that was the logic of a fascist.’

  ‘Fuck you, Turner. Fuckyoufuckyoufuckyoufuckyoufuckyou!’

  He went on saying it till I hung up on him.

  Hoffman called me.

  ‘Y’OK, man?’

  ‘Sure, I’ll be fine,’ I lied.

  ‘I hear pain in your voice.’

  ‘Pain? No. I got away without a scratch.’

  ‘I meant like spiritual pain, man.’

  ‘I don’t do spiritual, Abbie.’

  You ever wonder when the sixties—I mean the concept not the ­calendar—ended? Like a party game? Like ‘Where were you in ’63?’ ‘JFK blown away?’ ‘How did we get from surfin’ safari with the Beach Boys to buckets of shit?’ Did it end right there, on the streets of Chicago in August 1968? Probably. But everyone will have a different day. Personally, the sixties ended when I put down the phone on Mel the week after. The day I told him the revolution had died. I’d tasted shit. Everything since has had the taste of ash.

  About three days after I hung up on Mel, a newspaper clipping arrived in the post. Chicago Daily News, showing Mr and Mrs Pigasus reunited ‘in pokey’ and smiling their pig smiles across the top of a sty door. The signature at the torn edge read simply ‘MK’. I took it as cloture. Like I said, I never wanted to hear the word Chicago again.

  §

  1969. I’d a rough idea of what Mel had dropped on me. I had the feeling that it was no big deal. But that competed with the sure knowledge that whatever it was it had got him killed. The whatever was the stuff of rumor—rumor but you knew it happened. Had to happen. Fragging. Platoons, whole platoons or lone lunatics had been known to turn on their officers. A fragmentation grenade lobbed into a tent in the night and some greenhorn second lieutenant gets taken out. I’d even heard of one guy who’d surrounded his billet with Claymores and blown the hell out of half his own platoon. Paranoia strikes deep in the heartland, just like the man said. Strikes a damn sight deeper when you’re in the other guy’s heartland.

  I picked up a rental car at O’Hare airport. I may not have been the smartest gumshoe in the world, and I may not have had years of experience under my belt, but I had the feeling—must have been my day for ‘feelings’—that I was being followed. Now if I read that in a book I’d think ‘bullshit’ just like you’re thinking now, but I seemed to keep seeing the same car in the rear-view as I picked my way from the highway to the suburbs of the North Side. Never right behind me, one or two cars away. If I’d been more certain than that I’d’ve tried to lose it, but by the time I got to West Rogers Park I seemed to have lost it without trying. Maybe my ‘feelings’ were my paranoia. Back in Chicago. Richard J. Daley’s heartland. Bound to put me on edge. Besides, I’d never been a great believer in detective’s instinct. What did a ‘feeling’ matter? The job was all about shoe-leather. I’d been at it long enough to know that.

  West Rogers Park was not Brighton Beach. A ’burb—that was undeniable, the lots were as regular as tablecloths, green grass stripes for gingham check—but the houses were bigger and no two looked alike. Each one custom built it seemed by a different builder, the lots probably filled in at different times, sometimes years apart, as the twentieth century crept slowly up the side of Lake Michigan from Chicago. It was a place apart from the city, a place, I would guess, of homeowners and families. Each house with a garage, each garage with a basketball hoop over the door, and a kid’s bicycle abandoned in the drive. I had an Andy Hardy moment, one of those visions of childhood that probably never existed this side of a Hollywood backlot—a boy on a bike, zipping along the street aiming folded newspapers at every porch, missing as often as not. ‘G’mornin’, Mrs Jones. G’mornin’, Mrs Riley.’ I didn’t have a childhood that remotely resembled Andy Hardy’s but I could never resist wondering who did if I ever thought I’d stumbled into the right set.

  Maybe it wasn’t Marty Fawcett either. The Fawcett house stood alone at the very end of a north–south street, on three times the land, with a two-car garage. No basket ball hoop, no bike. Every other house spoke stability and respectability to me, this one said ‘hell no, we got money’.

  It was deathly quiet. Not a whisper of a radio, not a hum nor rattle of a domestic appliance. Even the doorbell seemed to ring sotto voce at the other end of the house, and then I could hear footsteps, tapping softly towards me.

  A short, black woman in a black dress and a white apron opened the door.

  ‘C’n I he’p you?’

  The elisions—the missing ‘l’ in help—spoke Mississippi to me. Another Southern Black who’d made the long ride north up Highway 55 to Chicago. Been a while since I’d heard that accent.

  ‘I was wondering if Mr Fawcett was at home.’

  ‘Mr Fawcett’s at his office, sir.’

  A woman’s voice called out from within the house. ‘Alice? Alice? Who is it?’

  Alice turned to answer the woman who stood shadowed in a big arch at the end of the lobby. ‘Ge’man wants to see Mr Fawcett.’

  I called across her.

  ‘I was just hoping for word with your—’

  The woman came towards me. I’d been about to say ‘husband’, but this woman was a slender, good-looking fifty-year-old. I managed to say ‘your son’ without sounding as though I’d changed direction mid-sentence. All the same the word seemed to galvanise her.

  ‘My son? Come i
nside, please. Alice, close the door.’

  Mrs Fawcett led off through the arch with me and Alice trailing. A big room, with chunky cream-colored furniture, an electric punkah fan twirling slowly in the center of the ceiling. She stopped by a huge, white marble fireplace, its mantelpiece packed with photographs, its cold hearth stuffed with dried flowers, and turned to face us.

  ‘I think summer’s finally arrived, don’t you? Perhaps some iced tea?’

  I said yes. Alice disappeared to the back of the house without waiting to be asked. Mrs Fawcett held out her hand to me.

  ‘Carrie Fawcett,’ she said. ‘You knew my son, Mr . . . ?’

  ‘Raines, ma’am. Turner Raines. And no, I don’t know your son.’

  She turned her back on me again. Picked up a table lighter from the mantelpiece, struck the flint a couple of times and when she turned back she was Bette Davis in I forget what movie, a king size cigarette between her fingers, a long trail of smoke curling from her nostrils.

  She sat down. I followed suit. I began to get the feeling that I was here on false pretences. The sooner I spat it out the better.

  ‘Mrs Fawcett, I’m a Private Investigator, working out of New York City. I have ID if you care to see it.’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Why would I doubt it? How do you think Marty could help you, Mr Raines?’

  ‘I . . . I’m investigating a murder, ma’am. I think it’s possible the man who was murdered might have met or talked to your son.’

  ‘Murdered? Who’s been murdered?’

  ‘A journalist. Name of Mel Kissing.’

  ‘No,’ she said without the need to think about it. ‘Marty never mentioned anyone of that name to me.’

  ‘All the same. I would like to ask him myself.’

  ‘Of course, you’re only doing your job. But . . . Mr Raines, my son died six weeks ago.’

  I felt stupid. It had been implicit in her question—‘You knew my son?’—and I’d not noticed till now. My reaction must have been written on my face as plain as a punctuated sentence.