Andersen, Kurt (26 page)

I applauded when they finished. “That is
great,
you guys.”

“It’s a pastiche,” Alex said. I didn’t know what that meant.

“It’ll be better with props and costumes,” Chuck said.

“And that last song isn’t completely finished yet.”

“The hell it isn’t.”

“Well,” I said, “it’s going to be great. People will freak out. I can’t wait.”

In their ten-minute play, James Bond is dispatched to Cuba and South America by MI6 and the CIA to track down and terminate Che Guevara. It had an original rock-and-roll score, with each appearance by Bond cued by two bars of a silly toy-piano rendition of the familiar
Dr. No
riff, which had now featured in four movies. (On principle, we had vowed not to see
Thunderball,
the latest one.)

“A lot of Che’s lines,” Alex explained, “maybe half of them, are things he’s actually said.”

“Or written,” Chuck added. “Mostly written.”

“I figured.”

“ ‘Many will call me an adventurer,’” Alex said, “ ‘but I am one of a different sort, who risks his skin to prove his platitudes.’ And ‘The revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe—you have to
make
it fall.’ Like, those are real.”

“And the chorus in the last song, ‘I Don’t Care,’” Chuck added, “that’s a Che quote, too,” and he proceeded to sing the line once more: “ ‘I don’t care, I’m not the one, as long as somebody picks up my gun.’ We got them from some books about him at the library at Northwestern.”

Ah, the Charles Deering Library, where Chuck Levy and I spent our first and final date, on that summer afternoon so long ago, when we were only fourteen …

“Any suggestions?” Alex asked me. “You can be our dramaturge.”

Speaking of Northwestern and dashing foreign leftists in their thirties, like Che, I had sex with my professor last night in his car! He’s thirty-one, and he’s German!

“ I wonder if a few of the lines won’t maybe sound too … stiff. They’re kind of a mouthful, some of them. Like ‘Our enemy is the monopolistic government of the United States of America’? I don’t know.”

“Exactly,”
Chuck said. “They’ll sound like jokes. People will laugh in the wrong places.”

Alex looked up and closed his eyes and shook his head. “That’s what Mr. Hendricks says
conventional
people who don’t know what they’re talking about say about
Brecht.
It’s all in the
performance.
And it is still a work in progress.”

I heard the Macallisters’ automatic garage door opening above us and a car pulling out. “I thought your mom and dad were in Europe?”

“It’s Flip. He and his buddies are celebrating before he heads back to Madison.” Alex’s older brother wasn’t doing well at the University of Wisconsin, so that summer he’d had to take the national Selective Service exam in order to keep his student deferment and escape the draft.

“He passed?” I asked, and Alex nodded.

“That is so unfair,” Chuck said, “that getting sent to kill people in Vietnam is a punishment for being stupid or poor. The screwed over get more screwed over.”

Chuck was picking out a song on his guitar, and nobody said anything for a while. He and Alex were months away from turning eighteen, when they would have to register for the draft, too.

Alex reached into the pocket of his chinos. “Flip gave me a present last night.” He grinned and held up and jiggled a crumpled Baggie with two hand-rolled cigarettes inside.

One afternoon that summer I thought I’d spotted two of the guys from the JOIN office sneaking a joint in an alley, but I had never tried pot. None of us had.

We smoked a joint. I felt nothing, and Alex and Chuck admitted they didn’t, either. We lit the second one, and Chuck took the first hit.

“When my dad went down to the Amazon to study those Indians for Searle,” I said, “the drug company? In seventh grade? He asked the old medicine man, ‘Why do you
chant
after you chew your special bark? What’s the purpose of your chanting?’ And the Indian guy stares at him a long time and finally says, ‘Because the bark requires half an hour to take effect, and waiting gets
so boring.
’”

Chuck violently exhaled a cloud of smoke as he began laughing, then kept laughing, then Alex and I joined in. At last we stopped, got our breath, and wiped our eyes.

“We are real hepcats,” Alex said, “smoking reefers.”

Chuck started laughing again, then Alex, and then, after abandoning a sudden urge to exercise control, me. I’d learned about grass when I was twelve, from Allen Ginsberg’s poem
Howl,
but Chuck and Alex didn’t know about it until they read
Live and Let Die.
In the novel, at a restaurant in Harlem, Bond smells “marihuana,” and Felix Leiter tells Bond that “the real hepcats smoke reefers.”

“God, I feel like I just swam a mile,” Chuck said, out of breath.

Now that the Macallisters owned two color TVs, their old one was in the basement. Alex turned it on.

“Wow,” I said.

“Yeah,” Chuck agreed.

It was so … 
colorful.
We were staring at a new game show we’d never seen.

There was a category, and you had to name something in it that began with the letter of the last thing named. “Venezuela,” said David McCallum, who played Illya Kuryakin on
The Man from U.N.C.L.E.

“Algeria,” his teammate replied.

“Better say Afghanistan, Illya!” Chuck warned. “Only ‘A’ country that doesn’t also end in ‘A’! Only escape from the perpetual loop!”

“That’s really interesting,” I said to Chuck, thinking of perpetual loops.

“Austria,” said the actor on TV.

“How old do you think he is?” Alex asked.

“Thirty-one,” I answered immediately.

Chuck turned to look at me. “You
know
that Illya Kuryakin is exactly thirty-one?”

“No,” I said, “no, but, you know, he—he’s probably—I mean, you know, he looks thirty-one. To me. He looks like someone I know who’s thirty-one.”

“Who?” Alex asked.

“Who?” My face felt sunburned.

“The guy at your community-organizing office, your boss?”

“No. No.”

“That guy who taught us the chant?” The previous Saturday we’d gone into Chicago for an antiwar demonstration, where we’d learned to shout “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” as we marched along Hyde Park Boulevard.

“Uh-uh.”

“Don’t be such a girl, Macallister,” Chuck said.

“You are really at sixes and sevens, Hollaender,” Alex said. “You’ve got a
crush
on David McCallum!”

“No, I do not. He looks the same age as my literature professor at Northwestern. Who’s thirty-one.” The sunburned feeling swept my body.

Chuck got up and turned the channel, first to an
Andy of Mayberry
rerun—

“Not black and white,” Alex commanded, and I said, “Goober looks kind of like the star of the new Godard movie.”

—and then to a game show in color on channel 7.

“You saw
Alphaville
?” Alex asked.

“Uh-huh, at the Wilmette last night.”

Chuck was apparently paying no attention to Alex and me. Was he ignoring our dangerous conversational tangent on purpose? “This is incredible,” he said. “I’ve never seen this. This is really crazy.”

Cameras were following a feverish-looking man as he huffed and puffed up and down the aisles of an empty supermarket, grabbing and throwing packages and jars into his grocery cart. He squatted to sweep off every can of sardines on a shelf. A clock on the screen ticked down. He had forty-eight, forty-seven, forty-six seconds left.

“It’s like—it’s like he’s pretending to be a looter,” I said.

“Look,
look,
” Alex said, pointing at the TV screen, “one of the TV cameras is
in
the
picture.
I love when that happens.”

Supermarket Sweep
was a new show, and none of us had known about it until that morning.

Chuck shook his head. “Incredible. I mean, for a second it was hard to believe that was
real.
”

“It’s
great,
” Alex said. “It’s hilarious. It’s like the best satire of America ever.”

I shivered. “This country is grotesque.” It was a sincere insight, given emotional oomph by my annoyance at Chuck’s obliviousness to the new me. I lit a cigarette.

“You went to see
Alphaville,
” Alex asked, his nosiness pleasing me for the first time ever, “with who? Your dad?”

“No. With my professor from the class at Northwestern.”

Now Chuck was paying attention. And right after
Supermarket Sweep, The Dating Game
came on, with its swingin’ Bozo theme music.

“That’s cool,” Chuck said. “It was like a class field trip?”

“Uh-uh.” It would be too coy to let it hang there. “It was like a date.” I forced myself to keep looking at the TV and not at Chuck.

Alex was electrified. “
Hollaender.
What happened? Are you, like,
seeing
the guy?”

I smiled a little and took a drag on my cigarette and shrugged. “He’s going home to West Germany.” And: “He thinks I look like Julie Newmar.”

Chuck put aside his guitar, stood, and brushed against my knee as he headed for the stairs. “Okay if I go make some cinnamon toast?”

Was he surprised, confused? I thought so. I hoped so.

“Make pieces for Catwoman and me, too.”

For the long Labor Day weekend, I went with my family up to my aunt and uncle’s lake cabin in Wisconsin. On Sunday just before twilight, when the surface of the lake looked perfectly still, Uncle Tom rowed his motorboat a little ways out, emptied two big cans of gasoline onto the surface, and lit the gas on fire. At which point the kids, my brother and sister and I and our two cousins, all dove off the end of the dock and headed out to the blaze, swimming beneath the aquatic bonfire. The idea was to go as deep as possible and then look up at the fire from underwater. And then surface somewhere beyond the ring of fire.

I went deep and got maybe a ten-second-long glimpse of the spectacle. It was fantastic, otherworldly, a hundred shifting, flickering rods of bright yellow fire-light extending down through the murky water all around me, the silence and beauty and fear making it feel like some kind of religious rite. If I hadn’t in the previous two weeks made love with a thirty-one-year-old German and gotten high for the first time, swimming beneath fire on Oconomowoc Lake at dusk would have been the single most awesome moment of my seventeen years on earth.

The next night, back in Wilmette, my summer boss phoned to tell me that the Chicago cops, pissed about JOIN’s involvement in the protest over the shooting of the neighborhood boy, had raided the office, roughed people up, and busted some of my former coworkers “on a completely bogus dope charge.” The reason I hadn’t seen anything about it in the newspaper was “because the Establishment media prefers it that way.”

I was lucky to have missed the raid, but instead, I felt entirely unlucky, removed prematurely from the action, snatched by North Shore privilege out of revolutionary harm’s way.

19

Who knew bus travel had gotten so spiffy? I’m going to start evangelizing on behalf of buses, and not just to amuse people at Santa Monica dinner parties. No arriving two hours before departure, no extra charges for bags, no frantic removal of shoes and belts and bracelets and laptops, no child-size tubes and bottles and jars jammed into Baggies, no delays or cancellations. Fourteen hours into our trip, I haven’t had that moment when I attempt to reconcile myself to imminent death, the way I do on half the flights I take. I’ve got as much space as I would in an airline business-class seat, with TV and free Wi-Fi. The air is fresher. I slept, Ambien-free, from Silver Spring, Maryland, to a rest stop near Lynchburg, South Carolina. (Question: why are all the towns with “lynch” in their names in the South?) The pecan-studded French toast at this Stuckey’s is far superior to any breakfast I’ve eaten on a commercial airliner. And there’s no such thing as bus lag.

“Ms. Hollander, I have a question.”

“I told you to cut that out, Hunter.”

“Okay, but I really don’t think I can bring myself to call you Karen.”

“There, you just did. Anyhow,
Mr.
Phelan, what’s your question?”

“Do you use a pump?”

“
Hunter!
” says their friend Sophie, whose parents allowed her to come along because of me. “Are you
high
?”

“I mean an electronic insulin pump,” he tells her. “She’s a Type 1, too.”

“Oh, right,” says Sophie. “Sorry.”

I wonder what embarrassing pump device she imagined he was asking me about. “I don’t use a pump,” I told him. “I never have. Don’t like the idea of a thing poking into my body all the time. Do you have one?”

“No. But you didn’t go to the bathroom, and I didn’t see you inject on the bus, either.”

“I did it sitting here, ten minutes ago, in my thigh. Through my pants.”

“Really?” he asked, astounded. “Right here? In public?”

“I’ve had a long time to learn to do it discreetly. I’m sneaky.” I pause, waiting for the waitress to finish refilling our water glasses. “I shoot up anywhere.”

“You use a pen, huh, dial in the dose?”

“Nope, just a regular syringe.”

“But,” he says, his voice a half-octave higher, “but what if people, you know,
see
you, see the needle and freak out?”

“First of all, they don’t. Second of all, fuck ‘em.”

“Rad,” Sophie says.

Although it wasn’t my main intention to impress the seventeen-year-olds, Waverly is smiling proudly. “What do I always say?” she tells Hunter, then turns to me. “I always say he shouldn’t be embarrassed about it. That
you’re
not, at all.”

“In fact,” I tell them, “since I ate a lot more of this delicious sugar-coated fried bread than I’d planned, I need to shoot some more.” I reach into my bag, take out my little black kit, and, far more brazenly than is my custom, suck precisely four units of insulin into a fresh syringe and then plunge it through my blouse into my belly. “Voilà.”