Andersen, Kurt (53 page)

Until the last year, I’d never read any of the memoirs published by the old ‘60s radicals. They were people who’d genuinely believed they were making a revolution, who had set off bombs in government buildings for years and really did go underground for a decade. Now I’ve read every one, and I find them unsatisfactory.

They are too fondly sentimental about their crazed young selves, coy and opaque about exactly what they did and disingenuous about their motives. They don’t quite regard their crimes as real crimes, and definitely not their madness as madness. For them, “Mistakes were made” has no ironic stink. They mainly blame the Man for their mistakes and still think of themselves as noble veterans of a great and ongoing crusade for justice. They give sincerity a bad name. I’m not saying every ‘60s radical was obliged to undergo a political apostasy, or that their careers in education and prison reform and all the rest have been unworthy. The balance in their memoirs between candid explanation and self-justifying rationalization, however, is tipped way, way too far toward the latter. They remind me very much of members of the Bush administration talking about the wars they waged and bungled.

32

As I awoke the morning after we found out Chuck had been killed, and every morning for days, I had a quick flicker of hope that it had all been a dream, like at the end of
Alice Through the Looking Glass.
I experienced that same hopeful instant the morning the three of us took a taxi to the airport to fly to Chicago for Chuck’s funeral, and the morning we went to sit shiva and I told Mrs. Levy that Chuck was not a drug dealer or a drug addict and I didn’t know whom he’d gotten involved with in Washington on spring break.

After those half-awake instants of magical thinking stopped, I woke up every day wondering only if that would be the day the men in suits knocked on my door in North House or stopped me in the Yard as I walked to class and informed me, as they snapped on the handcuffs, that I had the right to remain silent.

But a week after and then two weeks and three weeks after Chuck died, nobody questioned us. Alex and Buzzy and I avoided discussing what we had done and what had happened, both as a matter of operational security—who knew, Buzzy said, how or when they might be eavesdropping?—and for me, to avoid jinxing this uncanny limbo condition. The flipped coin had landed on its edge, and I didn’t dare move or breathe. Life during the months leading up to April had been one kind of implausible dream state, and life afterward was another kind.

I would cry, then feel like crying until I cried again.

The world at large, meanwhile, was boiling over, which made my frozen cowering anxiety feel all the weirder. What I considered to be Chuck’s last words—
This is the revolution
—seemed like a prophecy coming true. It was as if the signal had gone off, and millions of angry, energized young would-be agents of history were running wild. While I skulked off carefully and silently in the opposite direction.

The newspaper front page might as well have been spinning toward me each morning, like in an old movie.

At the end of April 1968, as SDS embarked on its nationwide antiwar campaign, Ten Days to Shake the Empire, Columbia students occupied buildings and took a dean hostage. After a thousand cops busted them, Columbia was shut down for the rest of the semester, and two hundred thousand New York college and high school kids stopped going to classes in protest, chanting “No class today, no ruling class tomorrow.” The student marches in Paris in early May became riots and repeated themselves, more spectacularly and with more people, in Paris and other cities around France, day after day, until the whole country went out on strike. The revolt spread to West Germany and Italy, even to Prague and Zagreb.

The afternoon I arrived home in Wilmette for the summer, my mother said, “It looks like President Johnson
heard
you.”

What?
I was speechless.

“He wants to lower the voting age to eighteen—he’s sending Congress the constitutional amendment this week.” I watched her face drop as her very hopefulness made her sad for a few seconds—she was thinking of Sabrina, who would have been old enough to vote in 1970. But my mother refused to give in to the blues. “He also said he wanted to end the draft. Thank God, for your little brother.”

“They’re not drafting twelve-year-olds yet, Mom.”

“And for Alex. And all the boys.” I saw her fighting sadness again as she thought of Chuck.

After dinner, Alex called and asked if I’d seen on the news that Andy Warhol was going to pull through. We’d read in the paper that morning at Logan Airport that an actress from one of his movies had shot him. I’d noticed but didn’t mention that she had used a .32-caliber automatic, the same as the pistol we’d taken to New York. Alex wondered how long he should wait to phone the Warhol people and ask whether his internship was still on.

I stayed up late that night with my parents and Peter, watching the election returns from California. For my mother, an unhappy outcome was impossible. She loved Senator McCarthy, but Bobby Kennedy was every bit as liberal, and a Catholic, and quoted Aeschylus and Shakespeare, and had won two out of the last three primaries, so when he came on TV around two in the morning to give his victory speech, she said to my little brother, “Peter, I think you’re watching the next president of the United States.”

A few minutes later, Kennedy was shot dead.

When Peter quietly asked, “Why do they only kill the good guys?,” I was surprised when I realized it wasn’t a rhetorical question.

I think my family was surprised by how hard and long I cried.

Buzzy had gotten a form letter from the D.C. police telling him his car had been found abandoned. And empty. Overcoming his paranoia that it might be some kind of trap, he went down to Washington, paid the parking tickets, and drove west, arriving without warning in Wilmette on the last day of June, on his way home to Las Vegas.

As soon as he arrived, I knew my attraction to him had fizzled, that my lust had depended on our affair being illicit. My parents and brother had gone to Wisconsin for the Fourth of July long weekend, so on his final night in Wilmette, Buzzy and I drove out way into the sticks to watch a fireworks show. We smoked a joint in his car beforehand.

After the last explosions, as we stood up and turned to leave the Downers Grove park, three DuPage County sheriff’s deputies were standing directly behind us. Two of them had their hands on their holstered pistols. The other one asked to see our identification.

It’s
over, I thought. Obviously, they’d been waiting for us; obviously, we’d been followed all the way from Wilmette; obviously, the local cops had been sent to pick us up and then hand us off to the federal authorities. Maybe they’d busted Alex and he’d squealed.
It’s all over now. I’m through.
My astronaut’s tether cut, I was spinning out into infinite blackness of space, done, lost, gone.

Buzzy said, “Officer, we left our IDs, um—”

Maybe they hadn’t followed us. Maybe they didn’t know about the car.

“We lost our wallets,” I said, “we lost all our stuff yesterday. At Centennial Beach.”

In fact, our IDs were in Buzzy’s car a couple of blocks away. But so was the roach of the joint we’d smoked an hour earlier. I didn’t want to be busted for drugs as well.

We told them who we were. I hadn’t known until that moment that Buzzy’s name was Bernard.

“How’d you get to Downers Grove?” the lead cop asked. “Driving without a license?”

“We hitchhiked,” I said.

“Where you from?”

“Wilmette,” I said.

“From Las Vegas, sir, I am,” Buzzy added.

“You in school?”

We nodded.

“Where at?”

“We go to college in Boston,” I said. “We’re on summer vacation, though.”

“I know how college works, miss. Which college?”

At this point I was sure he knew the answer. He was toying with us, seeing if we would lie or tell the truth.

After the obligatory pause, Buzzy said, “Harvard, sir.”

It was their response to this answer that gave me the first itsy bit of hope that maybe I was not about to spend the rest of my life in prison. Their surprised and amused disdain, I thought, their smiles and nods and the cop who possibly muttered
“Shit”
or maybe just spat, seemed like reactions to fresh information, not simply confirmation of a fact they already knew. But maybe I was being wishful.

“Are either of you in possession of illegal drugs?” the lead cop asked.

“No, sir,” we both said.

“We’ll see if you’re telling me the truth about that. You’re under arrest …”

The flicker of hope winked out. The other two cops were unhooking handcuffs from their belts.

“… for disorderly conduct. I don’t know how they do things out in Las Vegas or in Wilmette or up at Harvard, but in DuPage County, we require people to carry some kind of proof of who they claim they are.”

Hope bloomed! And beautifully, breathtakingly exploded, like fireworks, like the Big Bang itself.
Disorderly conduct?
Lots of people I knew had been arrested for disorderly conduct. Sarah had been arrested for disorderly conduct in New Hampshire for handing out McCarthy leaflets too close to a polling place.

By the time we’d made our phone calls (my uncle’s cabin had no phone, and Alex didn’t answer), it was clear that the DuPage County sheriff’s deputies thought we were a couple of random hippies, not dangerous radical assassins. I was so relieved I cheerfully answered all of the cops’ other questions—whether we’d ever been arrested before, why we’d come all the way out to Downers Grove to see fireworks, and more. And then when I was taken out of the group jail cell in the morning to sit down with an assistant district attorney, I had a gambit in mind. An unbelievably cocky gambit.

He was friendly, a year out of Northwestern Law School, he told me. (“A few of my friends go to Northwestern,” I said.) He said he’d hitchhiked last summer to California for a big rock music festival. (I told him I saw Jimi Hendrix perform last summer, too.) He said his law school roommate’s little brother was a junior at Harvard. (“I don’t know him personally, but I recognize the name,” I lied.) I’m sure I’d flirted before, but never consciously, and never with specific ulterior motives.

“So, Mr. Widdicombe—”

“Didn’t I tell you to call me Will?”

I giggled. “Well, before you go to all this trouble and fill out all those forms, I’ve got a question.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“It’s probably stupid.”

“I doubt it. What?”

“None of the officers, when we were being arrested, or after we got here to the station and they questioned us, nobody ever gave us our warnings—you know, from that Supreme Court case, what was it,
Miranda
versus
Arizona
? Didn’t they decide that police officers have to tell people that they have the right to remain silent and talk to a lawyer and all that stuff? They never did that.” I smiled in a friendly way.

He grimaced and rolled his eyes and shook his head and left the little office for ten minutes. When he returned, he told me the disorderly conduct charges were being dropped.

When Buzzy called me “Bonnie”—as in Bonnie and Clyde, as if we were Movement fugitives gone underground—I wanted him to go. I had no interest in taking the outlaw mise-en-scène to the next chapter. The next morning, after he left for Vegas, I drove alone to a Catholic church where none of the priests would know me. Thus on the first Saturday in July 1968, I wound up sitting in a confessional at Saint Mary Catholic Church in Evanston.

I confessed to what I considered my two mortal sins—plotting a murder that I decided not to carry out, and anonymously giving the name of one of my fellow plotters in order to stop him from committing murder, thereby inadvertently causing his death and the deaths of two other men.

I’d decided beforehand that if the priest insisted I turn myself in to the police before giving me penance and absolution, I would refuse the deal. He didn’t. I told him I didn’t believe in hell, which might have helped make my case that I was confessing because I was heartily sorry for what I’d done and not just to escape (in the Catholic sense) eternal damnation. He told me he believed I was showing “perfect sorrow” for my sins, which is the Catholic term for a sincere confession. When I promised “to avoid the near occasion of sin” in the future, I meant it, as far as these kinds of sins were concerned. And in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, a man with a kind, high-pitched voice whose face I never saw absolved me of my sins.

I felt a little better. And although I didn’t and still don’t believe in God in any sense reconcilable with his church’s, on that afternoon I scrupulously committed to performing every bit of the elaborate penance he prescribed.

The following week my boss from the SDS community organizing office in Uptown called to ask if I wanted to work on the new project he’d set up over in Gary. I declined and spent the rest of the summer typing and filing and greeting clients at my uncle’s law firm, still wondering each morning if government men might show up that day to take me away.

Alex’s Warhol internship had been canceled, but we saw each other only a couple of times that summer in Wilmette. Taking his lead, we never once discussed Operation Lima Bravo Juliet, and we rarely talked about Chuck.

“Chuck would’ve loved that,” he said the night we went to see
The
Thomas Crown Affair.

“Uh-huh.”

I forced myself not to cry. The movie is set in Boston and stars Steve McQueen as a sportsman who wears a leather jacket and flies gliders and robs banks for fun. He has an affair with Vicki, Faye Dunaway’s character who tries to turn him in—but at the end, as the police dragnet falls, he escapes, coolly, with a smile.

“Although I liked her better in
Bonnie and Clyde,
” Alex said. “She’s better as a crook than a cop.”

I was not Bonnie Parker or Vicki Anderson, and I was not Tatiana Romanova or Gala Brand or Honey Rider or Viv Michel or Vesper Lynd. I was not a fictional character. My life was not fiction, or a simulation, or a game.