Andersen, Kurt (41 page)

Late one night I said it seemed as if we had “reached this critical turning point in American history for better
and
for worse.”

Everyone nodded.

“At some moment,” Buzzy said, “armed chaos becomes preferable to fascist order. Political consciousness comes from action, from struggle—not just the other way around.”

Everyone nodded.

Buzzy turned to Chuck. “What’s that line of your uncle’s, the Israeli, the thing on his tombstone?”

“ ‘Making a more beautiful world can be an ugly business.’”

Everyone nodded.

The next morning I phoned Chuck to tell him I hadn’t slept but that I had a good head of steam going on my Borges paper.

“I’m in a nightmare,” he said. His voice was small and squeaky.

“What do you mean? I’m sorry I called so early.”

“I feel like like I’m trapped in a nightmare I can’t wake up from. Like life is nothing but crisis, some kind of unending surreal lie.”

“You mean the war? And everything?”

“Everything. When I woke up just now, I thought I was in a nightmare. Literally. I feel … I feel like … I don’t know.”

“What?” He didn’t answer. “You sound like you’re feeling how I feel when I’m really low and need sugar. Maybe you should go eat breakfast.”

“It’s like I’m, like, holding myself hostage. Like I’m torturing myself to make myself talk. It’s horrible.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. I didn’t ask what he meant, because I assumed he didn’t mean anything much except that he was a sleepless, speedy, freaked-out kid, like the rest of us. “I’m going to write until I finish, and then I’ll come down and we can get a late lunch?”

It was already dark when I got to Chuck’s room. Buzzy answered the door, and I was startled. He’d shaved off his beard. He looked like a
man.

“Karen?” Buzzy said quietly. “Not to be paranoid, but we should all probably stop having important conversations on the phone.”

When Chuck came out of the bathroom, I could see he’d been crying.

I hugged him. “I’m okay,” he offered. “I’m exhausted, but I’m going to be okay. I’m going to stop taking the speed.”

Buzzy rolled his eyes and his entire head.

“Do you want me to stay?” I asked Chuck.

He nodded. Buzzy popped out to give the two of us privacy, as always, and we lay in Chuck’s bed, but we didn’t do anything, and he fell asleep.

We and the upperclassmen who lived in our dorms, the proctors, were pretty much ignoring parietals by then. Chuck and I were mainly violating the letter rather than the spirit of the rules, because we were having sex as often as, say, married people do.

I watched him sleep, and I wondered if my secret four-year-long adoration had made my
idea
of Chuck Levy too wonderful for the actual Chuck Levy to sustain. Although he was still sweet, his sweetness now seemed a little soft. We were all upset and angry all the time, but he was morose. Maybe the reality of being with him could never measure up to the fantasy, the bedoozled virgin’s hopeful
fiction
of someday becoming his girlfriend. “America was more amazing from across the ocean, before I’d ever been here,” my dad once told me. I wondered if maybe the half-life of my love for Chuck wasn’t a lifetime, like uranium-232’s, but closer to californium-248, 333 days.

When Buzzy returned an hour later, Chuck mumbled that he was down for the count, so Buzzy and I went out, got a pizza to go, and headed over to Alex’s.

Alex’s math-prodigy roommate had decided to drop out when he was home for Christmas, and the hockey-player roommate stayed mostly at his girlfriend’s Boston apartment, so Alex’s empty suite became our cigarette-stocked, TV-equipped January clubhouse, the way his parents’ basement had been in Wilmette. Spending so much time in that neutral zone, instead of in my room at Radcliffe or in Chuck and Buzzy’s across the Yard, also enabled the flowering of my infatuation with Buzzy Freeman.

Even though we had all become deadly serious, I appreciated Buzzy’s humor even as I argued that jokes and entertainment amounted to self-indulgent folly. He was both the adult and the mischievous child among us. He insisted on watching the Super Bowl and the premiere of
Laugh-In,
which he said would “keep us in sync with real Americans.” He accused us of “refusing to laugh” at his new record by a comedy group called the Firesign Theatre, which Alex derided as “countercultural pastiche” and “hippie burlesque.” Back in the 1920s, I said, the fun and games of the Dadaists and Berlin cabarets had done nothing to stop the rise of fascism. “And maybe they greased the skids for the Nazis,” I said, “since the people who should’ve risen up to stop them looked at everything as a big joke.”

“Can’t we can have a little fun
and
resist?” Buzzy replied.

By the middle of January, the jar of Benzedrine was a third empty. I discovered a side benefit—when a hit of speed didn’t have any effect on me, it meant my blood sugar was high and I needed to inject insulin. “I’m telling you, man,” Buzzy said, “it’s an all-round revolutionary wonder drug, gives you fucking superpowers. We
are
the Justice League of America!” He rechristened each of us—Chuck was Aquaman, Alex was Batman, I was Wonder Woman, and Buzzy made himself the Flash.

“Karen is
Catwoman,
” Chuck said without smiling, as if making an important factual correction.

“Somebody’s grumpy and needs his go pills,” Buzzy said.

“Sorry. I don’t want to become an addict,” Chuck said.

“Oh, you’re fine with smoking two packs of butts a day,” Buzzy said, “but a tablet that makes you smarter and better and doesn’t kill you is a terrible thing?”

“Hollaender injects insulin twice a day to make her brain operate better,” Alex pointed out.

I never liked two or three against one, even when I was in the majority. “That’s not the same,” I said. “I’m not addicted, it’s a rational choice I make every day to stay alive.”

“And taking bennies,” Alex said, “is a rational choice we’re making every day to
feel
alive.”

Buzzy left the room without a word and returned a half hour later from the library with a photocopy of a medical journal article. “ ‘Subjectively,’” he read, “ ‘Benzedrine produces increased confidence, initiative and ease in making decisions,’” etcetera, etcetera, ‘thinking processes appear to be speeded up
without
impairing attention, concentration, or judgment.’”

“Yeah,
‘subjectively,’
” Chuck said.

“What else
is
there but subjectively?” Alex asked.

“‘And,’” Buzzy continued quoting, “ ‘intelligence scores are improved.’ Is that objective enough for you, man? ‘Among mildly obsessional personalities there were some who responded extraordinarily well, especially hesitant individuals who show a tendency to obsessional doubt and difficulty in making up their minds.’” He paused and theatrically popped his eyes at Chuck. “See? It cures Hamlet syndrome! And here you go, from
doctors:
‘Addiction
will be
rare.’
”

Alex turned on the news. Our acute sense of crisis was not just a function of being young and alarmed and cooped up in a room for a month in the middle of a gray winter with an endless supply of Benzedrine. The day before, the North Koreans had captured a U.S. Navy spy ship, the
Pueblo
—and if they didn’t return the ship and its crew immediately, the Democratic chairman of the House Armed Services Committee was saying on TV, President Johnson should fire a nuclear missile at them, see to it that “one of their cities would disappear from the face of earth.”

“Stupid squid spooks,” Buzzy said, referring to the captured navy men, and moved to sit right in front of the television so he could turn the dial back and forth among NBC, CBS, and ABC.

“This guy I met who works for the government,” Alex said, “told me that LBJ has three TVs in the Oval Office so he can watch the three news shows all at once. Also? A button on his desk he presses just to have a servant bring him a Fresca.”

“That’s gross,” I said.

“Yeah,” Alex said, “but cool, too. I’d like to have three TVs, all lined up.”

Buzzy turned to Alex. “What guy you met who works for the government?”

“In Europe over Christmas, in Zurich, an American official. An embassy official.”

“An embassy official? Bern is the capital of Switzerland. That’s where they have embassies. Not Zurich.”

“I don’t know, a consulate official, State Department or something. I didn’t ask for his ID.”

I’d started to suspect Alex had a secret romantic life, and I was unhappy that Buzzy had caught him in some kind of fib about his unspoken homosexuality.

The second story on the news was the nightly war report, about a huge new battle at Khe Sanh in South Vietnam, where the North Vietnamese Army was laying siege to a U.S. Marine base.

“This is big,” Buzzy said. “This is hellacious.” We watched footage of jungle exploding beneath American planes “like three hundred meters from the fucking perimeter … Fox Fours
and
Thuds
and
Big Ugly Fuckers”—the nicknames he used for F-4 Phantoms and F-105 Thunderchiefs and B-52s.

Watching and listening, I felt panic. Twenty thousand Americans had died in the war so far. The deaths had doubled between 1966 and 1967, but now the number was doubling every
month.

The next story was about a Strategic Air Command B-52 that had crashed and burned on an ice bank off Greenland. Its four hydrogen bombs had gone missing.

“Holy shit,” Chuck said, lighting a new cigarette off the one he was smoking.

At a press conference, the president assured a reporter that the missing bombs were nothing to worry about.

The wave of horror was unlike any I’d ever felt, panic on behalf of the whole world but with the additional voltage of personal threat. “The idea that
that
monster,” I said, “has a button he can push to destroy the world right next to the button he can push to get a fucking Fresca is—I mean, that is
insane.
Beyond his being a murdering redneck fascist prick, that is just
terrifying.
” I pointed at the TV. “The fate of mankind is in
his
hands,
his
insane senile brain. That is just
wrong.
”

“There’s not really one nuclear button like that,” my boyfriend said. “And people don’t get senile at fifty-nine.”

“Oh, Jesus Christ, Chuck, you’re not my fucking professor grading my paper!” I had never blown up at him. In front of other people, we’d never even bickered.

“It’s not like I’m defending—”

“I’m tired of you correcting me, always trying to calm me down, ‘Things really aren’t
that
bad, honey.’ Were you
watching
? Things
are
that bad. How could they be worse?”

No one made a peep. I wasn’t going to let my anger turn to tears, and I wasn’t through. “At the Dow thing that morning,
you
were the one who said this is a do-or-die moment like Germany in the thirties.
You’re
the one who says your relatives were liquidated because they refused to believe the Nazis were evil until it was too late. So either that’s all bullshit, and we should all go dress up nice and knock on doors and give out McCarthy buttons—or else it’s real.”

I lit a cigarette, and Alex bummed one of mine.

“Want a Coke?” Buzzy asked me after a little while. That was code for
Do you think your blood sugar’s low?
If it had been, I almost certainly would have snapped at Buzzy and denied it—and when I went to the bathroom, the test strip came out a perfect blue. My panic and anger were real.

On TV, Huntley or Brinkley was saying that Dr. Spock and William Sloane Coffin, the Yale chaplain, “have been indicted by a grand jury in Boston on federal conspiracy charges for advising young men to dodge the draft. If convicted, the activists face prison terms of five years.”

Buzzy was nodding. “Not to be paranoid, folks, but that grand jury is right across the river. The shit is officially hitting the fan.”

Chuck stood up. “I’ve got a sociology exam at nine tomorrow,” he announced, and left. I stayed.

At lunch the next day Chuck told me that he’d ended his speed hiatus; he’d taken three bennies that morning and filled two blue books with exam answers “about the pseudo-objectivity of sociologists who are puppets of the reactionary power elite.” He also said he was sorry about giving in so often to his niggling, paralyzing, wishy-washy liberalism, and that he had also started writing me a long letter “explaining everything.” I accepted his apology and told him he didn’t need to write a letter. He had snapped out of his funk, and my anger was once again homed in on people I’d never met. Benzedrine
was
an all-around wonder drug.

The feeling of Armageddon in progress, however, did not abate. In Khe Sanh, the swarms of American planes continued their devastation around the clock, day after day, dropping thousands of tons of bombs on a few square miles of Vietnam, the most concentrated continuous bombardment in human history. Respectable people in the newspapers and on TV were saying that Vietnam might be about to trigger World War III.

We decided to mark the end of exam period by tripping—Alex for the second time, me for the third, Chuck for the fourth, Buzzy for “I don’t know, the fifteenth, maybe.” The drug we took the afternoon of Groundhog Day 1968 wasn’t mescaline or acid but something called DOM that Buzzy had gotten in the mail from his Benzedrine supplier in California, “Dimethoxy-something, totally new, just invented. Chemically related to speed, so you know—never mix, never worry!”

As soon as we each swallowed a pill, Buzzy grinned and wouldn’t stop.

“What?” I asked.

He handed me the envelope that the pills had come in, pointing to the postmark. “Walnut Grove, California,” he said. “About twenty-five clicks east of Oakland. Big corporate research lab.” He was still grinning.

We waited for the punch line.

“The following psychedelic experience is brought to you by the Dow Chemical Company.”