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Where's Jake Smith?

It is June 1971 during bombings in Southeast Asia, and Lennie Diamond leaves a pipe bomb at a Boston revolutionary landmark.

He escapes to the crowded Sunday morning bus, pays his quarter and hesitates to sit down near the driver, but manages to help an old woman with her groceries whom he recognizes from childhood as his grandmother’s cleaning lady.

Lennie rushes off the 66 and hears singing from a black Pentecostal storefront church, rushes in and sits in the back. They are tarrying for the Holy Ghost and just about everyone is speaking in a foreign tongue.

Not knowing if he should remove his Red Sox baseball cap, Lennie falls into a deep reverie.

At first he remembers Pinky and Mousey who raped him at eleven when he skipped temple, finding himself with a bloody face in the snow, then wanting to take the cane to every teacher who hurt him or humiliated him.

He remembered his piano and clarinet lessons, wanting to be a young Benny Goodman.

The Pastor, in a green ruffled shirt and sleeked down ‘fro was starting to preach. When his eyes meet Lennie’s, Lennie runs out the door and onto a subway train near Dover Street.

Lennie remembered the last week of hearing incessant political revolutionary talk at his dorm from Stalinists, ex-Trotsky followers, Maoists and the meaninglessness of it all. And here was Vietnam being bombed; and suddenly he recalled that guy putting LSD in his drink.

Again Lennie starts to hallucinate but recalls when he was seven and in Franklin Park near the rose garden, and that elderly Austrian lady with the clawlike fingers around her white umbrella telling him menacingly to get off the park bench.

“You ruined Europe, always grasping, never satisfied but taking, never respecting or having property or even a place of your own, violating others. We gave you your rights and look what you did with it, becoming Communists and capitalists at the same time, bringing the Antichrist wherever you go, and the Negroes will always follow in your steps. Get off this bench; don’t get your dirty sneakers near me.”

Lennie hears the conductor of the train announce, “Last stop, kid,” and Lennie stops in his tracks.

Maybe the bomb did not go off, did not kill anyone; he hadn’t stuck around to find out.

Why was his cause Vietnam anyway? What was his connection to this humanity? In a fearful way suddenly it did not make sense.

Lennie walked into a restaurant called the Dugout to wash his face and use the restroom. He pushes against Walter the waiter he recognized from the campus cafeteria.

“Lennie, what are you doing here? Organizing or boycotting the grapes we use for our fruit salad?”

Lennie runs out the door, shaking and sweating, feeling always like a loner. He goes home, showers, taking out his clarinet and plays until he puts on the radio and hears a brief report on his revolutionary anarchist act. He laughs hysterically in the bathroom mirror at his own permanent adolescence.

He calls up Sonny, his ex-roommate.

“I never liked Walter. He’s a redneck intellectual.”

“Do you realize, Lennie, what time it is?”

“For a revolutionary, Sonny, there is no time.”

“Not much time for you, Lennie. A tourist recognized you after your bomb throwing and snapped a picture. You were on Channel 4 on the late news. You looked good.”

“You’re kidding. Even in my mustached disguise?”

“More Groucho than Karl.”

“But I don’t have a record.”

“You do now.”

“Can’t I come over?”

“I’ve got Kathy over. Sorry.” Sonny hangs up the phone but Lennie calls him back.

“Fair weather patriot.”

Then Lennie calls up Marilyn, his former girlfriend.

“Lennie, we broke up last Thursday. I saw you on the television.”

“How did I look?”

“Yourself.”

“You recognized me…”

“Big deal. Call the ACLU.”

“Is that the thanks you give me for taking that exam for you?”

“I’ve done more for you.”

“Don’t start that abortion talk.”

“It was all for your benefit. You told me you didn’t believe in marriage – all bougie.”

Lennie hangs up the phone. He takes a cab to the bus station. A young hustler signals to him. Mike is lean and hunched over.

“I need to get away.”

“Don’t we all. Maybe I’m more streetwise than you. I’ve been in trouble since I was born. What about you? I saw your picture on the TV screen.”

“No way.”

“I’ve got a memory for faces. In my business I have to. I know you need me.”

“For what?”

“Whatever. I’ve got disguises in my luggage; beards, masks, glasses.”

“I’ll take whatever you can give me.”

“Thought so. Now I can make you over, in my own fantasy for once. I got a great imagination.”

Lennie starts to laugh.

“Which bus are we going to take boss, Hollywood or New York?”

“Haven’t decided.”

“I have to take a leak.”

“We can change your image in the men’s room. I know every stall.”

“I can’t stall. I’ve gotta go.”

In the locker room at the Greyhound bus station Lennie changes his face and he and Mike get on the bus. Lennie feels sick to his stomach and Mike gives him antacid.

On the bus is a guy named Buckey.

“Where you two headed?” he asks.

“Nowhere,” mumbles Lennie.

“I got a dude ranch in New Mexico with studs and horses. Name’s Buckey.”

“Hey, Buckey.” Mike and Buckey shake hands.

“I’m happy to meet you. You’re all-American, aren’t you?”

“Sure.”

“That’s what we like back home. None of those foreign socialists taking everything away from us. I built the ranch from scratch. We’re going to the next stop where I have a limo waiting. You believe in something?”

“Whatever.”

“Sounds good to me. I come up to Boston to find some good specimens, but they all seem to be in the discos in New York. Kind of ethnic there, not my ethnic, if you catch my speech.”

“Sure, Buckey; anything you say.”

“You seem high strung… I like my kind of guys low key. Ever ride a stud, man?”

“Many times – palominos,” says Mike.

At the bus station Buckey has his limo all right, driven by an Italian stallion, as Buckey calls him – Geno, who seems as cool as all get up, Mike says.

Only once when parked at a gas station is there a hint that Lennie is a wanted man.

Mike whispers to Lennie and Geno.

“Can we leave Buckey off somewhere?”

“He’s my bread and butter, man,” Geno says.

Geno buys it and when Buckey is at a rest stop Mike leaves him in the lav and finds two thousand dollars in the glove compartment of the limo.

Lennie, Geno and Mike become bouncers in the disco world of New York for a while, meeting some of the former Ashcan school painters at a reception they crash.

Lennie takes up with a painter, Fabula, who insists she knew him in a former life in Babylon.

They fly to Venice, California where Lennie gets away from Mike who is always hustling and high and Geno who listens to him as long as he gets what he needs.

Fabula is in a blue silken gown. “Lennie, what is it you really want?”

“I want the identity you had with me in ancient Babylon – I want a brand new face.”

“But I like your face.”

“Don’t you know a plastic surgeon out here in L.A. who can make me better?”

“Of course, darling. Leave it to me.”

Lennie feels saved as he walks out of the office of Dr. Spiegel.

“No one will recognize you. Not even Fabula. She has paid me top dollar.”

“Thank you, Dr. Spiegel. I feel better.”

“She is waiting for you.”

Fabula screams in the waiting room.

“This is not my Lennie. This is my ancient enemy at the King’s Court in Babylon. Dr. Spiegel, make him another appointment for Thursday.”

Lennie is already outside in his rental car and heads for a hotel lobby in San Francisco.

Lennie always liked the feel of hotels, the lobbies which were always places to escape to. He gets a job as a head waiter in one of the hotels. He meets an interesting clientele, plays the part of a gigolo and even acts Republican to the wife of a State Senator who gets her husband to let him write his political ads.

Here Lennie, now Jake Smith, after having sex with the Senator’s wife at the Hotel St. Francis, and talking up Reagan and arguing with a doubting Thomas veteran, now a bellboy, that Vietnam had been winnable – in the morning Lennie walks by a Vietnamese storefront church and starts to weep in the aisle. But no one pays attention.

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