Russian Spring

by Norman Spinrad

  But if poker was really half luck, then why did the bills pile up so consistently in front of Nat Wolfowitz? He seemed to win about every other hand of seven-card stud, often with mediocre cards, and when he won, he won big. If someone else opened up a game of jacks or better, he dropped out immediately unless it turned out later that he had been holding three of a kind or higher. At straight draw, he either took two cards or less, or folded. At five-card stud, he seemed to follow no pattern that Bobby could discern.

  It didn’t take much more than an hour for Marla Washington to lose two hundred dollars and leave the game.

  “Lesson number one,” Wolfowitz said as Bobby took her place at the table. “The secret of winning at poker is to avoid losing.”

  “That’s number two,” Ellis Burton moaned as he dealt a hand of straight draw. “Lesson number one is don’t play with Nat.”

  Bobby had a pair of tens. Jack Genovese opened. Barry Lee raised. Wolfowitz dropped out. Bobby called. Ellis called. Jack took two cards. Wolfowitz shook his head. Barry took one card. Wolfowitz groaned. Bobby took three cards and got another ten. Ellis dropped out.

  “Dumb,” Wolfowitz said.

  “Check,” Jack said.

  “Shit,” Wolfowitz groaned.

  Barry bet five dollars.

  Bobby raised him five.

  Jack dropped out.

  “I don’t believe it,” Wolfowitz said.

  Barry saw Bobby’s five and raised him ten.

  Hesitantly, Bobby called.

  Barry Lee turned up four spades and the king of hearts. Bobby raked in the pot, feeling pretty damn proud of himself.

  A dozen hands later and down a hundred and fifty dollars, it was another matter. “Children, children,” Nat Wolfowitz said as he won yet another hand, this one at seven-card stud with threes over fives and nothing but a pair of fives showing, “wishful thinking is the opium of the poker-playing masses.”

  While Bobby thought he was beginning to understand what Nat Wolfowitz was saying in theory, when it came down to practice, the man was a poker-playing monster. He could babble on and on and on about how he was doing it, and still beat you consistently even when you thought you were using his own principles against him. How did he do it? Was it luck? Was he telepathic? Or was his line of bullshit somehow part of his game?

  However Wolfowitz was really doing it, the only thing that kept Bobby from losing the limit was that he still had twenty dollars left when Ellis and then Jack were cleaned out by Nat, leaving only three players, and, under the rules, ending the game.

  “Well, kid, you learn anything?” Wolfowitz asked him as he walked him upstairs to his room.

  Bobby shrugged. “Not to play poker against you, Nat,” he said.

  Wolfowitz laughed as he opened the door to a spare little room. There was a bed, a bureau, a desk, a chair, a lamp, all old stuff out of the junk shops of Telegraph Avenue by the look of it.

  “Righter than you think,” Wolfowitz said. “Poker, like life, only looks like a zero-sum game. A real player doesn’t play against the other guys, he plays the cards. This poor screwed-up country doesn’t understand that anymore, that’s why it’s in such shit, even though it’s got no cause to bitch about what it’s been dealt. We ever learn what we once knew, and we’ll be back on top of the game. You ever really understand what I’m telling you now, and you’ll win consistently at poker.”

  “Even against you?”

  Wolfowitz laughed. He shook his head. “You still don’t get it, kid,” he said. “No one wins by playing against a real player. You figure that one out, and you’ll be a real player too. And that’s the koan for tonight. Think about it, Bobby, and maybe you’ll find you got your hundred and eighty bucks’ worth.”

  PRESIDENT SMERLAK EXPRESSES SOVIET SOLIDARITY WITH MEXICO

  After a meeting with the Mexican Ambassador, Pedro Fuentes, President Dimitri Pavelovich Smerlak reaffirmed the support of the peoples of the Soviet Union for the territorial integrity of the Republic of Mexico.

  When asked whether any concrete steps were being taken by the Soviet Union to forestall an American invasion of Mexico, President Smerlak announced that the Soviet Union would introduce resolutions condemning any such invasion in advance in both the United Nations General Assembly and the Common European Parliament, and expressed confidence that they would pass in both bodies by overwhelming majorities.

  “That, a tortilla, and a cup of refritos would just about make a burrito,” Ambassador Fuentes observed enigmatically.

  —Novosti

  The next week was a golden time for Bobby.

  He spent long sunny afternoons cruising Telegraph Avenue and buying himself a proper outfit—asymmetrically cut blue jeans with red-and-white painted stripes, perfect Franco-American ambiguity, a black velvet blouson embroided with a flaming California sun setting behind a silhouetted palm tree, and a pair of used tooled-leather cowboy boots.

  He cooked a big pot of choucroute garnie for the communal dinner, which was well received—even though the charcuterie was hot dogs, knockwurst, chorizo, and something called Canadian bacon, which was all he could find in the supermarket, and the limp sauerkraut came out of cans—probably because he loudly proclaimed its French authenticity and managed to come up with Dijon mustard and a couple of jugs of cheap Alsatian wine.

  He toured the bars and clubs and cafés of Telegraph Avenue with Ellis and Jack and a mec from New York named Claude, met lots of people, heard strange retro music called “Acid Rock” and bizarre Peruvian jazz played by a flute band, and was introduced everywhere not as just the new kid in town, but the Parisian sophisticate from France.

  He cleaned the living room and the halls, which was merely tedious, and the bathrooms, which was pretty gross, but he didn’t mind at all; somehow these domestic chores, which he had never been forced to do at home, cemented the feeling of belonging that he had never found anywhere else before.

  And he joined in the nightly poker games a few more times, though he swiftly came to realize that he could hardly afford to play every night. Once he even came out ahead, thanks to a lucky run of cards, and thought that maybe he had picked up something from Nat Wolfowitz, until the next game, when, all too cocksure, he stayed in just about every hand, bluffed wildly, and was cleaned out in less than an hour.

  Finally, after endless passed messages and missed connections, he got ahold of Eileen and persuaded her to take him on a tour of the Berkeley campus. It seemed almost as big as UCLA, the architecture and the sprawling layout weren’t that much different in style, and the place was thronged with the same sort of Gringos he had seen on the Trojan campus, but the Reds of Telegraph Avenue were everywhere in evidence too, lounging in groups on the lawns, listening to soapbox speakers around the Telegraph Avenue entrance railing against the coming invasion of Mexico, arguing with the Gringos, and that somehow made all the difference in the world. UC Berkeley was alive in a way that UCLA was dead, and it didn’t take Bobby more than that one afternoon to realize that this was surely the place for him.

  He took Eileen to dinner in a little inexpensive African restaurant on Telegraph, and then back to his room at Little Moscow for a couple of hours of love-making, after which she insisted on going back to her dorm.

  He protested gallantly, but the truth of it was that he really didn’t mind, for somehow, outside of bed, her company seemed to have paled beside that of his newfound circle of friends; by this time, he was feeling like a Little Moscow insider, and Eileen Sparrow, who lived in the dorms, who was hardly known by his housemates, who was a native of LA, a city despised by the Berkeley Reds as the citadel of the Big Green Machine and all it implied, and who, despite her political heart being more or less in the right place, talked like one, clearly was not.

  Tomorrow was Saturday, and that was party night in Little Moscow, and while Bobby, as a member of the commune, took pride in being able to invite her and would hardly have been crude enough not to do so, his pleasure was tempered by a cer
tain feeling of detachment, a desire to be there on his own, and he didn’t offer to pick her up and escort her, nor was he disappointed when she didn’t ask.

  By nine o’clock, the house was pretty much filled up with people, and the party was well stocked with the bottles of wine and vodka and tequila that they had brought along, for one of the other rules of the house was that party guests were expected to contribute the refreshments, else how could the commune afford to throw these things every week?

  Or, as Wolfowitz put it, “There may not be any such thing as a free lunch left in Festung Amerika, but we have figured out a way to keep ourselves well supplied with free booze.”

  Music played on the living room chip-deck—all sorts of stuff, since guests brought their favorite chips too—wine and liquor flowed, and there were even people smoking hand-rolled cigarettes that some guy in a black leather jacket claimed was real marijuana, smuggled past the interdiction inside body bags from the Venezuelan war zone.

  Bobby wandered around the party waiting for Eileen to show up, but half hoping that she wouldn’t, what with all the truly incredible girls hanging around, dressed to kill in brief electronic happi coats, see-through plastic blouses, shorts that were all but nonexistent, even with bare boobs artfully peeping out from shirts open to the waist.

  They were more than willing to chat with the likes of him too if there was someone like Marla or Claude or Karl around to introduce him as the exotic import from Paris, and for the most part it wasn’t dumb talk, either. What they wanted to hear about was life in Paris, what he thought about the Soviet entry into Common Europe, what he had learned in his romantic odyssey hitchhiking across the country, whether Common Europe was really going to break off diplomatic relations with the United States if Mexico was invaded, and, of course, the differences, if any, between European women and Americans like themselves.

  Bobby found himself at the drifting center of really interesting conversation; girls, and mecs too, for that matter, moving in and out of his sphere of influence as he moved around the house, trailing an actual entourage for the first time in his life, and enjoying it hugely.

  And more than mere ego-stroking pleasure, though there was certainly plenty of that, he found the sense of belonging he had found among his housemates in Little Moscow extending outward toward the Reds of Berkeley in general.

  They too were Americans in a sort of exile, dreaming vaguely of a future American Renaissance connected somehow to Berkeley’s long radical past, an America that would give up its Latin American adventures, kick down the walls of Festung Amerika, join with Common Europe, and again become the light of freedom that had once illumined the world.

  The object of attention of all these fantastic and intelligent girls, spinning tall tales of a Europe he had in reality been only too glad to leave, Bobby Reed found that he had come home to a place he had never been before. Except in his most impossible dreams.

  When he strolled into the living room feeling like the cock of the walk, he had half a dozen people trailing after him, first and foremost a truly stunning girl named Shandra, who had huge lustrous dark eyes, fine aquiline features, smooth coffee-colored skin, long black hair worn in wild unkempt ringlets, who wore a kind of rainbow-tinted translucent plastic body-cloak that made it clear she had nothing on under it, and who had been listening to him longer than any of the others, staring at him quite openly without saying much.

  And when he found a seat in the crowded room at one end of a musty old couch, a handful of people seated themselves on the floor before him, including Shandra, who folded her long brown legs under her Indian-style, propped her elbows on her knees and her head in her hands, and sat there looking up at him raptly as he spun his war story about the riot at the American Embassy.

  “. . . I was there getting my passport when it started, they started heaving shit and blood over the wall, and—”

  “They really threw shit?” exclaimed a mec in a cowboy hat.

  “Shit and blood all mixed together, I got splattered myself, let me tell you, it was—”

  “I thought that was a bunch of gringo jingo propaganda!”

  “Hey, I was there, the Embassy was covered with blood and shit, the mob was charging the wall, they had to use the disrupters—”

  “To defend the flag and all that jingo shit!”

  “To defend the people trapped in the compound,” Bobby insisted.

  “Woulda been better if they had sacked the Embassy, woulda taught the jingos a lesson they’d never forget.”

  “You wouldn’t be saying that if you were there,” Bobby said. “Those people were out for blood, you should’ve seen the hate in their eyes. . . .” He shuddered, remembering.

  Shandra, who had been sitting there silently the whole time just eyeing him, finally spoke up in a soft lilting voice that sent shivers down Bobby’s spine. “Did you hate them?” she said. “I mean, while it was going on?”

  Bobby looked deep into her big brown eyes, pondering—pondering what she really wanted to hear him say as much as the truth of his feelings at the time, and finding, somewhat to his surprise, that they were one and the same, or so at least it seemed.

  “No,” he said. “I was afraid, and I was angry too, maybe, but how could I really hate those people? I mean, they were right, weren’t they, America had just given Europe a good hosing, and they had good cause to hate the United States.”

  “That is very wise,” Shandra purred up at him, and although she really didn’t move, she seemed to be leaning closer.

  “Then why you defending the fucking Marines?”

  Bobby shrugged, his gaze locked with Shandra’s, searching for the words that would draw her closer, and all at once something that Nat Wolfowitz had said suddenly seemed to make sense. “The Marines were dealt a shitty hand of cards,” he said. “They played them the best way they could. The Embassy didn’t get sacked, and no one really got hurt, either. Made you proud to be an American.”

  “Proud to be an American!” the guy in the cowboy hat sneered.

  “Aren’t you proud to be an American?” Bobby shot back, still staring straight at Shandra.

  “Are you?”

  “Proud of what we just did to Common Europe? Proud of what we’re about to do to Mexico?” Bobby sighed. “Yeah, what America’s been doing since before I was born isn’t anything to be proud of,” he said. “But we’re Americans too, aren’t we? We start hating America, don’t we end up hating ourselves? Don’t we leave our country to the jingos?”

  There was a long moment of silence. Shandra slowly unwound herself from her squat, rose, sat down on the couch beside him. “You don’t mind?”

  “Not at all,” Bobby said, beaming at her, feeling the warmth of her thigh pressed against his.

  “You’ve actually hitchhiked across the country?” she said. “That was very brave, people just don’t do that anymore.”

  “They don’t?” Bobby said innocently.

  Shandra laughed. She snuggled closer to him. “You really are a European, aren’t you?” she said.

  Bobby threw up his hands, shrugged, and in the process managed to drape his arm on the couch back around her shoulders without quite touching her. “I’ve spent my whole life trying to figure that one out,” he said. “In Paris, I felt like an American, but in New York and Washington and Miami, an American was the last thing I wanted to be. . . .”

  Shandra leaned even closer. He could smell the jasmine perfume of her, feel her heat. “And now that you’re here in Berkeley?” she said, placing a gentle hand on the top of his thigh.

  “Now that I’m here, I like it just fine,” Bobby whispered, letting his arm slide down the couch back. Shandra fitted herself into the crook of his arm; without knowing quite when it had happened, Bobby realized that his entourage had melted away, leaving him alone with this gorgeous and apparently willing creature.

  “You have a room here, do you not . . . ?” Shandra suggested.

  “Hi, Bobby!” a female voi
ce piped brightly. Bobby looked up and saw Eileen Sparrow standing over them. Oh shit!

  “Uh, hi, Eileen . . . ,” Bobby muttered guiltily.

  “Don’t let me disturb you,” Eileen said dryly.

  Jesus! “Uh, we were just . . .”

  “So I see,” Eileen said. “Cute, isn’t he?” she said to Shandra, without a hint of malice. “And he gives pretty good head too, I taught him how.”

  Bobby felt that he must be turning scarlet.

  Eileen laughed. “Where’s your European sophistication?” she said, and laughed again.

  Shandra laughed too.

  “You . . . uh . . . don’t mind?” Bobby stammered.

  Eileen made a great show of gazing around the room and licking her lips theatrically. “With all these men here?” she exclaimed. “Come on, Bobby, this is Berkeley!” And she sashayed off, blew him a kiss over her shoulder, and was gone.

  Though it took him four more days to nerve himself up to make the dreaded phone call home, the Sunday afternoon after the party was when Bobby Reed realized that he had long since decided that he was going to go to college here in Berkeley no matter what his mother said.

  Shandra Corday had been wonderful in bed indeed, at least from his limited critical perspective, but that was not what caused Bobby’s great revelation. Indeed, Shandra had made it quite clear to him afterward that this was just a nice little adventure for her, as, if he was honest, it had been for him; she was seeing three other men and was not at this point in her evolution looking for the love of her life.

  “This is, after all, Berkeley,” she told him in the morning, and they both had a friendly little laugh over that.

  No, what did it, strangely enough, was the phone call from Eileen Sparrow that came while he was still in bed with Shandra. Marla Washington opened his door and, without raising an eyebrow or missing a beat, told him he had a phone call. Bobby pulled on his pants and took it in the kitchen.