I Was a Revolutionary (14 page)

You don't know that he's considering all of this in the long silence that has come between the two of you before he relents, writes the prescription, and retreats to an empty adjacent room to wash his hands before seeing his next patient. Right now you are struck by the certain fear that he knows you're sleeping with a married white man.

Neither of you knows the complexities of the other.

You have poor kin in Mississippi who were sterilized without their consent or knowledge, who have wondered aloud why God won't bless them with a child as He has you, and many years from now, when the duplicity is revealed and thousands of folks begin the long process of seeking legal recourse, you will recall the silence in this office, on this day in January, when there was new snow on the ground and President Eisenhower, Ike from Abilene, Kansas, was to give his farewell address.

We. We live on the Farm. We snort and smoke and drink and fuck. We inject things meant for barnyard animals. Cow speed!
Tranquilizers! We make a living selling shitty ragweed to dealers in Florida who use it to cut the good stuff that comes up from South America. K-pot, ditch weed! Which grows wild in the fields outside of Lawrence, brought here in the hooves of Texas steer in the days of the old cattle drives. We're on the Silk Road for drugs, the meeting place of every east-west/north-south drug runner. Baghdad on the Kaw. Highway 40 SDS. We are the Kaw Valley Hemp Pickers! We are from towns most have never heard of—Coats, Seneca, Sublette, Holcomb—and we've dropped out of school and landed in communes and stash houses in and around Lawrence, which is burning, burning, burning. This is the summer the cops have killed Rodney Burnside, and three nights later they shot that white kid outside the Gaslight. Now there are fires every night, bombs, arson, snipers in windows shooting cop cars. People are arming themselves: the Panthers in east Lawrence, the Lawrence Liberation Front in Oread, the Klan and the Minutemen at the police station, scared citizens in their homes, clutching shotguns. Everyone is on edge, and we want only to roll the fattest jay and exhale a mushroom cloud on the city, but right now there is little interest in drugs. Right now the market has spoken and people want guns, and so we will deliver weapons we have no clue how to use.

The cache arrives in the trunk of a green '62 Skylark, driven by bleary-eyed Weathermen who've been driving for twenty hours straight, headed for a meeting in California. Two dykes. They've been put in touch with us by a guy who knows a guy who once scribbled the address of the Farm on a piece of paper and then swallowed that piece of paper. We direct them to pull around back so their car stays out of sight from the road. We watch them unload the package and switch license plates. We are to run the guns to the Panthers, who will hand us an enve
lope of money. They want us to go now, but Lawrence is under curfew. It's too hot, we tell them. We'll go in the morning. “Don't double-cross us, or we'll blow this place to fuck,” they say, and we nod.

“Wouldn't dream of it,” we say. “We're on your side.” They look us up and down and tell us that we are not on their side. They are not a chatty pair. When they speak, it's mostly to tell us about the big meeting in California they can't tell us anything about. They do not partake of the spliff we pass. They ask us if we've read Lenin and we say we are the walrus. They are not amused. We are lost causes, at best human shields for a future bank expropriation. They will allow themselves a bowl of hippie gruel, three hours of sleep, and nothing more before they resume driving. They tell us when we wake they will be gone and we will forget their faces and the make of their car. “If I hear from the Panthers that you didn't deliver the package,” says the one who looks uncannily like John Brown, “I'll personally come back and blow this place sky high. You won't even know it's coming.”

If it must be so, we tell them, we'd prefer not to know it's coming.

The other one is also thin but with blond hair that looks to have been dyed even blonder. She is, in fact, blonde on blonde. Is that what Dylan meant? We'll debate this later when the dykes have gone to bed, tripping outside under the lonesome stars. She looks at me and asks, “Why aren't you a Panther?”

I rise from my chair quickly, muster a straight-faced anger.

“That's some racist shit,” I say in a voice not my own.

Blondie is caught off guard, scoots her chair back. She is about to apologize when John Brown's gaunt, woodeny face says, “We're antiracist.”

“Show me,” I say.

“Show you?” says Brown.

“Show me how antiracist you are,” I say. “Kiss my black feet.”

To my amazement they actually do so. They lower their weary white bodies to the floor, their heads hovering over my sandals like I'm Jesus Himself, and we can't hold it in any longer. We crack up, our eyes fill with tears. We shoot ropes of snot from our noses. We fall out of chairs. We haven't laughed like this in at least half an hour.

“Fucking cunts,” says Blondie.

“Fucking dicks,” adds Brown. As they leave the kitchen, she stops and says, “Deliver the guns tomorrow, or sky high, I'll do it. I'll send this place to the fucking moon.”

In the morning—perhaps we've woken, or maybe the sun has only come up—they're gone. We snoop through the cache: two rifles, a bunch of handguns, a few grenades. In case the cops pull the truck over, we decide it's best if not everyone goes. Can't risk the whole Farm getting busted. Rutabaga twirls in circles—a light-blue flash of clacking beads and chains—chanting his gibberish, and then stops on a dime and says he's in. His mantra this morning is: “I'll go.” Scare Baby says we need someone else. He looks at Mr. B, and Mr. B looks at Wishy, who is pregnant and splayed out on the couch.

“Maybe you should go, Bug,” says Mr. B.

Scare Baby agrees: “The Panthers'll deal easier with you.”

“Just don't tell them to kiss your feet,” says Wishy, trying to joke, but no one laughs. She is wearing only a dish towel that she's fashioned into a loincloth. Her long blond hair falls past her nipples. I tell her to shut up and put on something besides a diaper. I'm edgy and short-tempered because I haven't yet taken anything this morning.

“Hey,” says Mr. B, resting a hand on my chest. “She has a pretty face. Her diaper is lovely.”

So then it's me and Rutabaga in the red truck, driving into town. The package is in the flat bed, tied up in a blanket and covered by a heavy tarp weighted down by rocks. I watch my speed, check the rearview, and Rutabaga speaks words I do not understand. We don't know much about him. He showed up at the Farm a few months ago, saying he'd just come from India. He'd studied with the maharishi and now his name was Rudra Veda. He asked if he could be our guru. Sure, Rutabaga, we said. We could use a guru.

We turn onto Mass Street, driving slowly past South Park, where there's some sort of demonstration going on. A hundred years ago, this was the street Quantrill's guerrillas rode up and down, looting stores and killing townsfolk in the name of the Confederacy. The shit you remember from school, even when you've dropped out.

I pull the truck over in front of Strawberry Fields. Rutabaga doesn't ask why, just gets out like it's a planned stop. It's already hot and I think that maybe after we make the drop we can swing by the pool to cool off. A church bell tolls, its sound hanging long and lonesome in the summer air. We go inside and I buy some papers and a one-hitter to give to Wishy when we return, a peace offering. Rutabaga stares at a case of crystals for a while, mumbling to himself, before picking up a necklace that has a many-armed figure hanging from the end. He holds the idol close to his face, and then he puts the necklace around his neck and leaves the store. “We'll take that too,” I say to the girl at the counter.

Outside, the bells still ring. They unsettle me and I wish I'd gotten high before leaving. I'm itchy, aching, already feeling hollow in my bones. I roll a cigarette and a police car creeps by. Rutabaga waves and I tell him to knock it off. “The fuck is going on with these bells?” I say. “It's not even Sunday, is it?”

“It's okay,” Rutabaga says. “I hear them too.”

I tell him let's get this over with.

When we get to Afro House, there are several guys in full Panther dress standing watch on the porch. It's all black denim and berets over there. One approaches the truck and I tell him we have the package. He looks at Rutabaga, then at me, takes the toothpick from his mouth, and tells us to pull around the side of the house. Before we've even gotten out of the car, two others have thrown back the tarps and taken the package through a back door. We follow them, but there's a big cat standing guard at the door. “We haven't been paid yet,” I say. He says I can come in but Rutabaga can't. “He's cool,” I say. “He's not white anymore. He's Indian.” He pauses a moment to remove his beret and wipe away sweat before leading us inside and down a flight of stairs to the basement. It's a cellar they've fashioned into a war room. There is a map of Lawrence with certain areas highlighted and marked beneath the black stencil:
Fight Pig Amerika
. Pictures of Che, Ho, and Malcolm—the gang's all here—on the wall, and maybe two dozen Most Wanted posters bearing the face of the cop who shot Rodney.
Wanted for Murder
, they say.
Ten Pigs for Our Brother
. Another shows Rodney's face above the words:
He Was Ready—Are You?
Seven or eight Panthers follow us in and take seats on the ratty couches to our left and right. Before us stands Honeyboy. The package lies on the floor before him and he squats to inspect it, then looks at us a long moment.

“The fuck you doing here, peckerwood faggot?” he says.

“It's okay,” I say. “He's with me.”

“I wasn't talking about him.” He stands and moves close to me, leans in an inch away from my face. “Look at you in your sandals and beads.” He slowly circles around me. “You worse than Uncle Tom. Ain't never seen anything as backwards as a hippie nigga.”

“I'm not the one wearing sunglasses in a dark basement.”

He pushes me. “Motherfucker, I will end you.”

“Stop!” a voice from behind calls. Though I haven't seen her in over a year, of course I recognize it.

“He my brother.”

Petal enters the cellar and won't make eye contact with me. She's looking at Honeyboy, who seems to think she's joking, but then it clicks and he stares at me hard. “Shit, I remember you.” He waves over his shoulder to a fat man with a cigar box by his foot. “Pay these goofy-looking motherfuckers.”

“Let there be commerce between us,” smiles Rutabaga, the tips of his fingers touching, forming a tent on his chest.

“Show these hippie capitalists the door.”

Petal follows us outside. She looks just as absurd as the others. I ask if she's got a minute. She glances back at her comrades in the doorway and nods at them. “A minute,” she says. I tell Rutabaga to scoot over so the three of us can fit in the cab of the truck and Petal tells him that's not going to work and points to the truck bed. He complies without comment, hopping in and scooting to the side. We are silent as I drive, and I watch Rutabaga studying the god on his necklace out back. The last time I saw Petal was right before I dropped out of LHS and moved to the Farm. It was the last time I saw Mother as well. The three of us had gone to see Daddy in Topeka. Petal and Mother argued the entire time about the war, about politics, about school, and by the time we got to the sanitarium they were no longer speaking to each other. They brought Daddy out to the foyer and we took seats around him on a couch. Mom visited him every week, Petal and I less frequently, but this was how it always was. The three of us sitting around him, wondering if he'll ever say anything again. He just sat there, rubbing his hand over his leg as Mom gave him the week's news. She told him how after two years the city had finally built the swimming pool just in time for the summer heat.
“Petal and Brian are going to the opening, aren't you all?” she said. I looked at Petal and she was slumping in her chair, shaking her head. It was hard trying to talk to someone who never answered. I said, yeah, we sure were.

I park the car on Eighth and tell Rutabaga to wait there. Petal and I walk quietly a minute and there's just the sound of the bells ringing. I tell her I'm gonna go crazy if they don't stop.

“They ringing it forty-four thousand times for the war dead.”

“Good thing I live in the country now.”

“Of course they only counting they own dead. Ain't enough bells in town to ring for all the Vietnamese.”

When we get to Mass Street, I tell her I'm sorry about Rodney.

“After his funeral,” she says, “we marched from the church to the cemetery, right up Mass. Had his casket on a hearse pulled by a couple ponies. Crackers on the sidewalks and in store windows just staring. You could feel how scared they was. That's when I knew we were gonna win.”

We have stopped in front of Stoughton's. She asks if I remember this place. One time when I was little, before he fully cracked, Daddy brought me here to meet his old boss. I don't remember Stoughton's face, but I can hear his voice. “This is your youngest?” he'd said. “Yes, sir,” Daddy answered. “This Brian, my leastest.” My
leastest
. Where had he gotten that? The kind of expression Mother probably tried to coach out of him. It's one of the few things I remember him ever saying. He and Stoughton spoke a minute more—about what I don't remember—and then we left and continued down Mass Street.

The store is empty now.
CLOSED INDEFINITELY
, a sign says. Petal cranes her neck to see the roof, where the brick is scorched, the upper-floor windows blown out.

“That night, after we put Rodney in the ground, I threw the Molotov right through that window. I hoped he was in there.”