Kate and Julia never came back to the trailer. Julia got her things in the morning and left for an "apartment-sitting" ( her words ) gig on the Upper West Side. Anyway, she had keys. I learned from Maria in the afternoon they all gathered in a yacht owned by one of Werner's friends. "You missed it, Ron. We had lots of fun," Maria said.
She spoke as if they'd ordered four pizzas with all the toppings and listened to a Beatles FM radio marathon, but her blasé attitude belied the truth: all kinds of sexual permutations went on. Had I missed my deepest fantasy, a voyeur peeping at a grainy reel of incest?
Once Dorr asked me whether I wanted to watch, but I said nyet. Admission of perversity could emancipate me, much like a schizophrenic breakdown, joining them would've cracked me free of all inhibitions, but who was I, Janis Joplin.
I used to have a paperback of Marital epigrams. My favorite: "The wretched may well despise and laugh at death; but he is braver far who can live wretched." Maria fired me up about an upcoming demonstration in New Haven. Bobby Seale and Erica Huggins were in jail on bogus charges. She made a passionate speech about their innocence, addressing details in alternative newspapers. I left her the with Dorr.
In the trailer, the "braver far" man, braver than all revolutionary figures in history, sat alone. I earned my narcissism, a nicer word than lonely.
I finally read the book, One-Dimensional Man. Herbert Marcuse's chapter on repressive desublimination was impressive. The gathering liberations of private behavior in the face of a governing political and economical class so confident of its power that no matter what civilians did to free themselves from traditional bondages, the ruling class would only increase their domination.
Kate, Maria, and Julia took birth control pills or used diaphragms, former sexual restraints became instant gratification. Werner bought clothes for Maria from the exclusive Bergdorf Goodman, yet we still listened to Radio Havana. Repressive hierarchy grew more entrenched as individuals thought themselves freer than before. Elite rulers tolerated defiance as long as we consumed their products, gaining more control over the population, all insatiable consumers.
The new opiate of the masses was no longer religion but pursuing individual joy and mutual assured satisfaction, vis-à-vis material well being. Dorr bought the best NYC marijuana and sometimes hashish from an university connection but had that easy freedom done anything to undermine the influence the Pentagon?
While Dorr made contacts with the Weather Underground, and Kate and Maria connected with the women's liberation struggle, I acted as a sentinel, an observer. I never felt of service to the Movement and that futility drove my isolation deeper. All that evinced Revolution magnified my unworthiness. Revolution expanded everywhere, yet I felt like imploding. Watchfulness would be my contribution to the Movement.
Two weeks later, Julia phoned Maria, inviting us to her "apartment-sitting" job. The apartment was nearly empty except for an extra-large bed. The hardwood floors gleamed, and Kate took off her shoes, skidding over the luster. Maria walked from room to room, and commented how the large windows shone light everywhere.
"So much political content," I said ironically. They looked stupefied at that remark.
Dorr lit another one for Maria, and two for Kate and Julia. I puffed a bit and grew paranoid. As the THC weakened, I felt better.
"We need positivity,' Dorr said, "not suicide." He looked at my glum face.
"Living hopeless is the only way, but still considering all revolutionary options," I said. He sucked the J deeply and said:
"What Marx called 'use value' was satisfying people's wants but 'exchange value' was the specter of speculation, how ownership exploited disposable workers and all the time engendering money and riches, an illusion of permanence dominated. The gap between 'use value' and 'exchange value' would spark the demise of capitalism. That pretty much boils it down."
"Are you telling me my life's an illusion?" On the record player Leonard Cohen sang, "The Old Revolution," the corpses were getting lugged away. He sang for a new kind of Revolution.
I dwelled upon "old": no 1970 activist revolutionaries need apply. I appropriated despair, the tone of Cohen's songs.
"You're not paranoid right now, are you?"
"It's not in demise yet."
"'I can't pretend I still feel very much like singing.' We're next in line," said Dorr loud and clear, "We're the inheritors."
"I thought it was about the end of an love affair," Julia said.
"What?" asked Dorr.
"The song. Or maybe if you have a lover, he won't betray you even though it's been hell," Julia said.
I hid in the past, reveling its immortality. Change frightened me. I only clung to these people because I knew Dorr. "You'll rather hang around people you don't like simply because you already know them. No surprises": Louis-Ferdinand Celine.
The next day, Kate flew out of JFK Airport to Mexico City, joining a male friend of Dorr's. She quit her airline job, striking out in new directions. I tossed the blankets aside and Kate's expression changed from a normal alert state to genuine surprise. After months I had never exposed her to my briefs getting up in the morning. The timing for this loosening couldn't have been worse. Now I wanted to sock it to her. I quickly dressed, stood near her, wanting to reach out and touch her, but knew there wasn't enough time. Her flight left in two hours. She stared at me and lunged forward, embraced me, then swiftly let go. She said it would be up to Werner whether I stayed in the trailer in her absence. Julia had flown to Rome where the left was a veritable powerhouse compared with the U.S.
Maria drove Dorr and me in her Volkswagen to New Haven. She parked many blocks from the Green, and we linked up with others. The town's windows boarded up, 10,000 protesters stood on New Haven's Green as speaker after speaker denounced the racist American system. Dave Dellinger connected the racist, repressive system here with the war in Vietnam. Many times before the coupling had been made, but Dellinger's eloquence moved the crowd.
My favorite speaker was Jean Genet, a French author whose books inspired me to pick up the cudgel and smash to bits my bourgeois upbringing: they pushed me into a feisty stance against all things bourgeois, a push-button-strike-their-jugulars word, bourgeois. Genet's speech, translated into English, was powerful.
I clicked with Dorr in college in the early '60s when I told him about Genet's life which stood in antipathy to respectability and hypocrisy of middle-class life. Thanks to his encouragement, I kept a steady drumbeat against my family and its grotesque values.
We left as speakers debunked the melting pot, telling the world American apple pie was spiked with racist poison. From New Haven, Maria and Dorr headed for Mexico City in her Volkswagen, hooking up with Kate.
For two days, I took the IRT to Manhattan early, coming back when the Bronx tool shop closed. I wanted to avoid Werner. The third day I took the IRT and ate breakfast at a cheap Greek restaurant on seedy, dirty 8th Avenue. I later walked around and people soon jammed Times Square, my traipsing pointless.
I went to the Fifth Avenue Public Library, settled in a cozy chair in the cavernous reading room. I had to have a book and chose Don Quixote, reading a chapter until I rested my head on the novel and dozed off. Awakened, I realized I had only $40 in traveler's checks.
Outside, I looked up at the running electric news flashing around the Times Tower and read four Kent State students were shot dead. They protested the escalation of the war into Cambodia. I walked aimlessly on Broadway and 7th Avenue, with no sense of direction.
I walked into Howard Johnson's and blurted to the waitress behind the counter:
"Four students have been shot and killed in Ohio." The young woman had a plate in one hand, setting it before a customer. I thought she'd ignore me, caught up in the work routine. But she said:
"They're too many things happening, I just can't keep up."
I forgot about food, and wandered a bit, then took the train from Grand Central Station to the Bronx.
The next day, Werner caught me before I again departed the marina. He held a $50 bill at eye level and politely requested I leave. We shook hands. I took the bill, packed my things, and paid a week's rent for a room in the 34th Street YMCA.
I almost phoned my parents, asking for more money. I had to look for a job. From the seventh floor, I gazed down at the people below, most of them on the streets returning from work, going to work, or wanting to buy something. I wanted to buy things too. Fear of living on the street ignited me, and the very first place I asked was a paperback bookstore on Broadway near the Times Tower.
The manager took me to the back room and said:
"You can go far working here." He saw that I'd graduated from college.
After four months, the assistant manager said to me:
"You're too smart to believe in revolution. It'll never happen."
I never thought myself smart. As for the Revolution, it hung on a spider's web in an attic.
George Sparling says, "I live on the North Coast of California. I like the death of rain, each drop blood from the Void. I'm currently reading Don Carpenter's Hard Rain Falling. Suffering and pain bleeds on every page. My real life is the space between words on a page, a blank. Though an atheist by default, I have a print on my wall by John Martin, a 19th Century painter of "The Great Day of the Divine Wrath," fiery red flame, its dark, catastrophic clouds cracking earth apart, relief at last that our stinking entrails have sunk into oblivion."
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