Revolution (3 page)

*   *   *

George had an odd system of rules. He didn't believe in paying bills. Phone bills, library fines, gas bills. It was a principle for him: never pay bills. Corporations were evil, rich, foolish to trust him. Around that time credit card companies first began handing out cards to students. He thought this was funny. He called it free money. He signed up for several credit cards, spent up to the limit, and threw the bills away. At first I didn't know how this was going to work out for him, but it wasn't as bad as you'd think. Bills piled up and floated away, and more appeared to replace them. Yet he never refused someone money if asked, even if he himself really needed it (which was always), so he was usually broke. It was what made me fall in love with him: his disregard for rules other than his own. He simply didn't care about money, possessions, sleep, food. I found this daring and visionary. I wanted to be like that too.

He had a coterie of friends since childhood who were protective, fearful for him. “Oh, give it here,” they'd say, dropping a twenty on the counter, “I'll pay for his.” Never resentful, they acted as if George had done them some quiet deed long ago and now they were in his debt, or—on his more annoying days—as if he were the kid brother whose father on his deathbed had charged them with his care. Maybe to them he seemed hopeless or muddled. You could not have a regular conversation with the guy. He had no reaction to chitchat about sports, school, snow. He never swore, never took drugs. At a party he was the one in the corner bending the lamp into strange shapes. He wasn't outgoing and he wasn't a leader. He was a prankster, but all his pranks were private jokes. I was the only one who laughed. To me, George was spectacular, misunderstood, brilliant. He was a senior and he studied continuously, four hours a night, and he never missed a class. At a school like ours, this was deranged. He went in for physics, philosophy, and math. Amid the psych majors, the communications minors, boys sunk in bean bags watching ball, no one understood what he was talking about. He was just smarter than everyone else.

“Genius,” was how I put it then. “He's a
genius
.” I felt that I'd come from a long line of genius men. The women in my family fell in love with geniuses, was how I understood it.

“I believe he might be the real thing,” I told my friends from home on the phone. “A true
genius
.”

*   *   *

He and I both had checked jackets for some reason. The jackets more or less matched, and we rarely took them off. We walked around campus, jabbering to each other in those jackets. Whatever few scraps of friends I'd begun to make in the dorms I immediately forgot. Until I met George I'd found my new college life that had been set up for me boring, excruciatingly so, and the people who were supposed to be my new college friends by far the most boring element in it: smiley, well-built women—skiers, runners, blondes. They were eager to describe their organizational achievements—their schedules, their sports activities, their boyfriends, their matching heart mugs and flower shower buckets. So if I wasn't with George, I wasn't with anyone. He and I would meet up at four o'clock each day and, before our long nights of homework, go scrounging for food. I had a meal ticket, but I didn't want to be away from him for the time it took to eat.

*   *   *

At first we slept in the physics building, a tower that rose high over the campus. He held a key to the top floor. A lounge of couches stood under a line of tall windows. He was living there, had given up his room in an apartment—or he was about to, I don't recall the exact timing. I only recall his inconvenient, complex housing plan, which involved him moving his belongings every few days. But he was putting one over on the school, he told me. They'd left themselves open. He could have it all for free. Late at night we walked through the physics tower, perfecting the housing plan, how he'd eat, the rooftop barbeques.

For a while it was just he and I kidding around, laughing at our own jokes, but soon it became a powerful passion. It was us against them, and “they” were anybody, everybody—whoever they were, they were out there, and we were against them, jokingly.

*   *   *

He had a huge number of brothers, most of whom lived on the nearby flatland of flags and rectangles of lawn. He brought me to meet them one by one. The oldest of them had been a hippie and the rest thought that was cool. They were sorry they had missed out. They still listened to the music and wore the floppy hats and talked about how the oldest had had all the luck. The first few brothers were religious and smart about it, studying philosophy and theology. George was the last of this group. The very final brother, the youngest, the “baby,” hated all the other brothers. He wanted to be a cop and put the other brothers in jail.

The two oldest brothers knew how to fix cars, how to read a mountain map, and they taught the other brothers their skills. They wore beards and gave advice. They played father to the younger brothers among them. The father himself didn't behave like a father. I don't know why. It was a deep wound in the family, the father. He never spoke and he wore a sarcastic expression on his face, a combination of irritation and mock surprise. The brothers and the mother conferred in low tones about how he might react to things they wanted to do. When he was in the house, everyone felt his presence, although he was never in the same room.

*   *   *

I have photos of George and me hitchhiking through New Mexico over Christmas, the two of us standing on the road. I have photos of the people who picked us up. There's the prison guard, the truck driver, the lady with the dog. There's the town Truth or Consequences, where we couldn't find a ride. We look ludicrously happy, thin and young and grinning. I'm carrying a camera that looks like a gun.

*   *   *

By spring we stopped going to the physics tower. He moved into my room in the dorm, brought his books and a duffel of clothes. We got in big trouble for that. The resident assistants called us into the office. The dorm administrators called us into another office. They said I was on dorm warning. They said we were both kicked out. George said not to worry. He said we would live on the quad in a tent (students were doing that—as a show of solidarity with South Africa). He said not to worry, we would get blankets and camp out in the fields (Fidel Castro, Central Park, 1960, until Malcolm X came and carried him to Harlem). It was a problem, a big problem, and just when I was beginning to wonder (and maybe worry) how this was all going to play out (blankets in the fields? now how would that work?), suddenly it wasn't a problem anymore because George said we would drop out of school and join the revolution.

I said okay.

*   *   *

George had been to Mexico and Guatemala—just once, the year before he and I met. At school he'd met a Guatemalan student whom I never knew and who had talked George into coming with him home. I believe he needed an extra driver. As far as I could gather, George had spent the entire three weeks drunk. I am amazed that he had been such a typical gringo on that trip, drunk, waving his pesos at a bartender. But I suppose if you put anyone in a certain context, they could look typical, even if they aren't. Maybe he's sitting somewhere looking typical right now. Maybe for years now he's been looking that way, and no one around him knows who he really is.

Once, in our first months together, George and I somehow came up with a car and we drove to the border of Utah. At the border sign we pulled over and pushed the car across with our hands so we could say, “Whew, we pushed the car to Utah last night.”

I don't know, maybe that's a typical thing to do. Maybe that's the point: he was just a typical guy in a typical place, and he made choices, and each choice changed him, and each change began to close off other possibilities, seal shut other rooms, exclude other people he might become, one by one, until he could no longer be anything but what he was.

*   *   *

I'm not sure what it was about that first trip to Guatemala that made him want to go back, but he did. That man, that typical drunk gringo in Guatemala, had emerged from the bar, sobering in the light, brushing off his shirt, waving away his comrades, and had taken a new walk—not the one he took with me, that was just more of the same, minus the drinking—but the one after ours, a walk he would never return from, not really, not because he didn't want to and not because he wasn't allowed to, but because he couldn't. A typical man is capable of that.

SPANISH

It turns out that no one in my family is a genius, male or female. I understood that later, another broken myth tossed in an old box with Santa. But all of us are fairly smart, can do our times tables, can follow installation instructions, and most of us can speak Spanish. Unlike George, I'd spent a good deal of time in Mexico growing up, starting from the age of four. My grandparents had a house in Mexico, and my first words in Spanish were “
Leche chocolate, por favor
” and “
¿Dónde están los gatitos
?” so obviously I knew what was important.

Houses in Mexico were cheap at that time and my grandfather bought one for my grandmother. Each fall he packed her off to Mexico, and she drove from Chicago to Cuernavaca and then waited for the rest of us to show up on airplanes when we could get away. This was before the Free Trade Agreement, and Grandmother told me solemn stories about how the officials would stop her car and take away her place mats. Other people came to the house too, Mexicans and Americans. Grandfather invited them, or someone did. We all hung around the garden and swam in the pool. I have photos from that time of the men and women lying around on towels in the grass. It was the seventies and they looked pretty groovy in their haircuts and clothes. I don't know who those people were. I used to say they were artists. I used to tell people that painters and writers would come stay with us in Mexico, but I don't think that's right. I think they were business associates of my grandfather. They liked to play board games with me and do thousand-piece puzzles, or at least they pretended to. They left behind books that I read and didn't understand.
Call It Sleep. Fear of Flying. Lolita.

*   *   *

Behind my grandparents' house there were no other houses yet. I walked through the fields back there with the woman who did the laundry. Across the street from us lived an old blind man alone in a large house. My father would send my brother and me over to visit him. My father felt nervous and sad if we didn't go every few days. I believe this was because my father is afraid of death. To get us to visit, my father told us the old man would give us cookies and ice cream. That was a lie. The man never gave us cookies or ice cream and I think my father understood that.

The old man talked about the War for hours. My brother and I were trapped. All I could do was dream of getting away. I never understood whose side he was on. He had one picture of himself with Goebbels, one of himself with Himmler, and one with Churchill. He talked about Nazi Germany for hours and hours. He spoke six languages, but with us he mostly spoke English and Spanish. The old man was blind, but he knew where the pictures were on his walls and would bring us over to them and make us stand there. He could also play the ukulele. He was the most boring man I've ever known. My brother thought he was fascinating. We visited him all the time until one year we came back and he was dead.

JOB

George and I arrived at the orphanage just in time for the all-night prayer vigil, which was our luck.

“All-night prayer vigil, what is that?” I said. We'd made it to El Salvador, had gotten off the paro bus and arrived at the orphanage only a few minutes before. I was tired and dead ready to eat. We stood in the entry in our backpacks.

“A vigil. You know, prayer?” said Hermana Mana.

A detachment of orphans raveled themselves around my legs.

“What for?”

“
Por la guerra.
For the war. Have you heard we have a war going on in El Salvador?”

I looked at George. He was bent over, studying a regiment of orphans who had settled at his feet. Frankly I didn't think that praying all night was going to help, not to mention how smart is it to keep eight-year-olds up past ten? Stay up all night? What a horrendous idea. God had ears to hear just as well in the morning.

Hermana Mana folded her arms. “Or do you not believe in the power of prayer?” She was not a nun. We were just supposed to call her Hermana Mana.

George was walking as if in galoshes, a band of orphans wrapped on. “Okay, okay,” he said. “Let's all pray for the war.”

*   *   *

Our first revolution job was in El Salvador, where there was a civil war, not a revolution. (I was only half clear on the difference: it appeared that it was just an insurrection or at most a civil war until it was won, at which point it became a revolution.) During the civil war in El Salvador villages were being taken apart—bombed or scorched—and the villagers were being rounded up and killed by military forces because it was assumed that the villagers wanted to rise up against the military and overthrow the government. But sometimes a mother and a father would be killed and a child would be left over, hidden, who would come out later and walk to another village, maybe with a little brother or a sister or a friend by the hand. So an orphanage had been set up just outside the war zone. The kids rode on local buses from the orphanage over the hills each day to a village school and then they rode back, and everybody agreed not to bomb or shoot them, even though these kids were nascent insurgents, sympathizers by birth, so some said, and in fact the military did bomb them, just the once—killed the kitchen, before we arrived—after all, the place was filled with a bunch of budding FMLN guerrilla fighters, so what did they expect?

The problem is then the war moved over a little, so the orphanage was right in the middle of it and then the paro began, so the buses stopped running and the kids couldn't go to school or leave the premises at all.