Backward-Facing Man (35 page)

There are detailed descriptions of every car, every pier, every office building, and every military statue blown up in the late sixties and early seventies, yet there's very little about the Volcano bombings and almost nothing about Frederick Fergus Keane. You get no hits on the search engines, no archived news stories or files from the Freedom of Information Act, no pictures from his high school yearbook. In the written and recorded history of the SLA, including seven audiotapes the group made and delivered to San Francisco radio stations, there's no mention of an eighth tape or its transcription—the one Lorraine claimed to have received in the mail just after she returned from Honesdale. It's as if Fergus Keane didn't exist and the Volcano bombings never happened
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For a long time, I tried imagining his life. Did he blend into the heartland or drift back to New England? Did he settle down or continue as a provocateur? There are so few data points—born in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1943, attended MIT in 1966 and perhaps early 1967, disappeared the morning of November 12, 1968. I spent several months at the main branch of the Philadelphia Public Library researching the sixties. I visited thrift stores, collecting record albums, vintage clothing, and knickknacks from that era. In the dining room of my mother's cottage, I posted a ten-foot section of blank newsprint, to
which I attached photographs and posters, bumper stickers, and copies of newspaper headlines in the approximate order in which they had occurred. I went to New York City. In Columbia's archives, I found articles, interviews, and books about the SLA. I listened to the recorded voices of Don DeFreeze, aka Cinque M'Tume, of Bill and Emily Harris, Alan and Judy from Honesdale, Patty and the others—long, tedious declarations of class war, demanding the redistribution of wealth and the dissolution of white society—comically overwrought by today's standards. With the help of Patty's agent, I got copies of her numerous television appearances, which I watched several times to try to determine my friend's state of mind when she was released
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This much I do know: Frederick's manifesto differs markedly from anything attributed to the SLA. It is not, like so much of the sixties rhetoric, naïve or dated. There's no passing the microphone around. No amplified outrage. No evidence of groupthink. It's one man's voice, and the speaker is cynical, self-aware, with faint traces of what could be described as a working-class New England accent. And although it refers specifically to the SLA, it takes a much broader view of society than any of the other missives from that time. A professor from Berkeley I talked to says it is as cogent and authentic an attempt to square up Marxism and modern times as he's heard, its title alone worthy of a spirited debate about free speech and the impact of media ownership in the hands of giant corporate conglomerates. And yet if there is such a thing as Frederick's manifesto, there is no evidence of it either in the public record or in government files I was able to get released under the Freedom of Information Act. There is nothing but the typed letter Lorraine received from Salt Lake City, Utah, postmarked August 1975, and a beat-up cassette tape I found in the box she gave me
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For a while, I was obsessed. I hired a lab to do electron dispersion spectroscopy, which confirmed it to be standard issue paper, prepared on a Smith Corona portable electric, exactly the kind manufactured from the mid-sixties to the late seventies. I examined the rhetoric, studied the syntax, broke down the sentences, hoping to find a writing sample from Frederick's high school days. I even engaged a company that specialized in forensic audio enhancement, hoping to identify background sounds and to pinpoint the accent of the speaker on the tape
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But the more time I spent thinking about it, the less interested I became in the actual transmission and the more intrigued I was by the
content. The concept of
capitocracy,
Frederick's term for the fusion of our economic system with our form of government, and his manifesto, seem powerfully prescient. “Who owns the means of bewilderment,” my professor friend says, “owns our country.”

As to whether or not the government released a small but virulent dose of radicalism to inoculate the country from an all-out revolution seems like conspiracy theory that may never be proved or disproved. Still, it's hard to ignore what Frederick asserted—that the fall of the Symbionese Liberation Army coincided with the disintegration of the black militancy and youth movements of the sixties
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In August 1975, a year after Honesdale, Patty Hearst was arrested with Wendy Yoshimura, the Asian girl Lorraine called Joan. The trial was a circus and Patty's defense abysmal. Despite being kidnapped and tortured, Patty was convicted of bank robbery and sentenced to seven years in federal prison. This is what happens, the local Hearst paper editorialized, when children rise up against their parents, when blacks take up arms against whites, and when liberalism prevails over conservative values
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Old news stories drop like meat through a barbecue grill. Chuck Puckman's sentencing drew no reporters, no sketch artists, and nobody taking pictures of the blonde by his side. Though she didn't know for sure at the time, Stardust Nadia suspected, and therefore testified, that she was indeed Chuck Puckman's daughter, who, until that weekend, had never met her father. Owing to the tragic and recent loss of Stardust's mother, Wilkie Crackford argued Chuck's sentence should be de minimis
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The last time I saw Lorraine was a week before her trip. She still had some things she needed to buy, so we met near an outfitter in Suburban Square. Over corn soup and quesadillas, she told me she was eager to test herself against the elements, and I believed her. There was nothing morbid or ominous about it—no hint that she might not return—other than that what we were working on would be the basis of her memoir. If anything, there was a kind of settledness or resolve that she may not have possessed the first few times we met
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I remember a particular moment with Lorraine. It was a Sunday afternoon—my favorite time of the week—when everybody is momentarily aligned in the absence of ambition. Lorraine had been talking for almost an hour: about Frederick's frame of mind after the Fenway hack, the disastrous turnout at the Democratic National Convention, how their VW kept breaking down on the way back from Chicago, and how the guy driving it kept hitting on her while Frederick fooled around under the hood. She remembered getting back to Cambridge, Frederick hell-bent on making his mark on the movement. He'd decided on a target in upstate New York. When Frederick insisted on using Chuck to gather the chemicals, Lorraine objected. She said she had a really bad feeling.

“Betrayal is a form of completion,” she told me, describing the night of the raid on the Higher Purpose Commune. “Death within life is a central theme of the Tarot. When you draw certain cards, you have the opportunity—the obligation actually—to re-create yourself. As long as you do, you keep on living. When you stop and wind up just skating along, you lose your personal power and you might as well be dead.”

 

Stardust never went back to the reception desk at Drinker & Sledge. After Chuck was sentenced, she sold the house on Medley Street, collected Lorraine's pension, and moved to a furnished apartment in the art museum area. Within a few weeks, she got back in touch with Rahim and Ovella, and, that spring, the three of them refurbished the little apartment above the factory. In May, while sifting through receipts, mail, and old phone messages, she came across my name and remembered the inscription I'd written on the inside cover of
What Mattered Most.
We met on a weekday morning in the back of the Reading Terminal Market. In her khaki skirt, vintage suede jacket, and a baseball cap, she looked like a distracted, impatient, slightly edgier version of her mother. At that time, I really didn't know what, if anything, I was going to do with what Lorraine had told me.

As soon as we sat down she told me. “My mother passed away over Christmas.” She put my book on the table and folded her hands. “I want to know everything.” Though she was matter-of-fact about it,
I could see how much she hurt. I told her about our meeting at Borders and Lorraine's interest in Patty Hearst, about whom Stardust knew very little. I outlined the story of the Volcano Bomber and tossed about some conspiracy theories and then excused myself to pick up my niece after school.

Until then, I'd been sitting around the cottage in Merion wondering what to do next. Until then, I'd considered Lorraine a quirky, colorful character, but my interest in her had been casual. I'd felt more disappointed than anything—discouraged that I'd wasted six months of my life on a project that would go nowhere. But late that night, looking through the boxes, I pictured Stardust, walking around the house by herself, and I felt sad thinking that Lorraine's life was like so many other peoples' from the sixties—dramatic, idealistic, passionate, and romantic even, but ultimately incomplete—no big revelations, no payoff, no catharsis, no intimation of meaning or symmetry that one hopes to have at the end.

 

Over the next few months, I invited Stardust out to visit as often as she wanted. She listened to her mother's voice on the tapes. She pored over photographs and mementos that Lorraine left me and tried to match them with events she researched about the sixties, about radicalism, about protests against the war in Vietnam, about the race riots, and about Boston in the late 1960s. She became fascinated by Patty Hearst and the SLA, studying psychological materials available on the Stockholm syndrome. Together, we visited a professor at Penn who specialized in kidnappings and hostage psychology, and Stardust argued, quite eloquently I thought, that everyone, to some extent, was brainwashed by their culture. Gradually, she opened up, and, about a month after we met, she told me Chuck's version of the events in 1968 and what became of his life after fleeing Boston, which is when it occurred to me that the repercussions of the Volcano bombings—in-deed, the real legacy of the radical movement—weren't really being felt until now. In a general way, the same things that happened to Chuck Puckman, Lorraine Nadia, and Frederick Keane happened to thousands of other young people who came of age during those
years. My interest became an obsession, so when Stardust invited me to meet Rahim and Ovella and to see what they were doing at the factory, I accepted.

I would like to believe that parents are an irreducible fraction and that, underneath their rage, all children hold a reservoir of forgiveness. Few of us are fortunate enough to hear a parent explain what ignited them and made them feel alive. Most of us are left to puzzle out the meaning of our parents' and our own lives from their lifestyles, the things they say, or, in rare cases, the things they accomplish. Stardust Nadia looked long and hard at the photograph she took from Chuck's room and made several decisions.

She let Rahim continue to run Softpawn, which produced a steady revenue stream and employed several of the neighbors and former employees. Together with Ovella, who'd long felt that what the neighborhood really needed was a day care center, she converted the little office of Puckman Security into a playroom, installing a rubberized floor and a big-screen television with a VCR—a place where young women could leave their small children while they worked. Stardust believed that workers who'd formerly operated punch presses and assembled security guards needed new job skills in order to be employable in the future, and, with Rahim's help, she refashioned the area of the factory where Gutierrez succumbed to trichloroethylene fumes to a job-retraining lab. While Chuck served his sentence, the old Puckman factory became busy again—with Rahim entering data to Softpawn; infants and toddlers watching videos and napping; and a half dozen men in their forties and fifties learning to repair copiers and computers, read blueprints, and program computer numeric-controlled equipment.

I remember vividly the moment I decided to tell this story. It was early fall, a delightful time in Philadelphia. We were sitting in a used bookstore in the Italian Market, a few blocks from where the Puckman boys grew up. Stardust had put on some weight and had let her natural hair color grow in. The lines in her face had softened, and there was a receptiveness there that I construed as good humor. She was wearing jeans and a beige cashmere sweater. She looked well rested.