by Marge Piercy
“Joanna! Hey, over here” Corey sprang to his feet. She was plodding down the hill with a basket of gooseberries, sweaty and red-faced with her carroty hair tangled over her shoulders.
“I have to take these into the kitchen before they get bruised. Let go, I’m dying of thirst.” She tried to push Corey away as he hugged her. “I’m dying for a cold bath.”
“Come on, we’ll take a shower together.” He pulled the basket from her and started downhill. The conversation was over. Billy remained squatting in the grass. Then he got slowly up. Maybe he had wanted Corey to talk him out of going. He knew only that he felt cheated.
The bread had no effect that night. He could not get high, could not rise off the ground where he sat into the distant cold ring of liquid stars above them. The drums pestered him like mosquitoes. He was invisible sitting against a tree in the vague flicker of firelight. Invisible to all of them drunk with their bodies and their sensuality.
He did not mind the mystics, the solitaries, the seekers who spun on the wheel at the beating heart of the music. They were only after what he was after when he took bread. They could not see him or anyone else. They were solitary and pure in their burning, and their flesh was an instrument. Like dervishes. They shared nothing he could not reach. The vision hardened them. He approved, though that was not his way.
It was the others who danced on his head, those who used the ritual to move each other, to finagle what they wanted, to strut and preen and rub lasciviously in the firelight. The painted bodies wavered like flames. They were so sure. They could tease and mock and wriggle their breasts and buttocks and poke their dicks in the air without shame. Without shame or clumsiness they summoned everyone to look at them.
Rage grew in him. It was a lewd nightmare danced on his head. They ignored him sitting alone, or if they looked, they smiled or waved or felt sorry. Dared to pity him as he saw them in his clarity.
Even Ginny forgot to glance at him when she was in the center. There she was mocking him with her wriggling body. And Corey could say obscenely that she loved him. There was Corey leaping about, shaking himself like a puppy dog with Shawn, imitating the combat Shawn had never yet been tried in—tried and found wanting. He ground his teeth. Joanna was dancing with one of his warriors, Big Ned, almost dancing circles around him. Dancing to be watched, showing off. He shut his eyes.
Middle-class brats having fun and confusing their games with changes in the real world. The government had for the moment chosen repression, but the liberal mode would come in again, and all that fun and games would be co-opted. Sex was the hottest commodity. You’d have the whole population fucking like rabbits at every bus stop, and so what? The Roman emperors had been fond of orgies. They’d all rather fuck than think, fuck than fight. Easy! In the morning he would talk to his men one by one and see how many were fed up and willing to return to the city. How many would follow him. How many were ready at last for some action.
As soon as he was back in the city, he knew he was right. Running away was nowhere. To stay in there close to the enemy.
Now every day he had his face rubbed in what he was fighting, who he was fighting, why he was fighting.
He found the atmosphere slack in the communes, but the opportunity for change wide open. Let Corey stay in the country. He would run a tight ship for a change. Time for the warriors to shape up: drill and weapons practice, discipline, political education. Anyone who could not keep up the pace should be jolted out. He had made enough excuses about what the warriors were not ready for. Maybe the farms would have a use, of stripping off the soft queasy layers and leaving only the unyielding core for him to work on.
He looked through the potential cadre with a harder eye than he had ever used. He had to choose well. He studied the warriors who had followed him from the farm, the few who had already come back to the city before him, the new recruits. Carefully he chose his lieutenant, Matty, solid, strong, politically hard. He was sick to death of the mushiness. All the soft democratic mumblings of the council did was to concentrate power in Corey’s hands. Corey pretended to a false equality. He pretended there was no leadership, that he was not a leader; with the other half of him, he pretended that he was the tribe.
Billy could remember when in fact there had been no leadership: when they had taken the school, the first time. But patterns developed. Now there was merely unconscious leadership, irresponsible leadership, leadership with the left hand and out of the side of the mouth, leadership through charm and manipulation.
Well, Corey had for the moment abandoned the city to him. Corey was bored with New York. He would not remain fascinated by the farm forever, but in the meantime the city was Billy’s, and here he was going to develop the kind of model the rest of the tribes could emulate. Responsible leadership, practicing criticism and self-criticism, would relate to the mass of the tribes and the kids they were trying to organize in a conscious, political way. A cadre responsible to itself with discipline and a clear sense of priorities. Why fight the farm? He would simply make it irrelevant. He would not deny he was being elitist: he would be clearly and responsibly a leader and create an apparatus that would produce others, thus making himself finally and truly unnecessary.
He loved and hated the city. It was the city of empire. Yes, he was locked in combat with it the way the old radicals of Israel, the prophets, had gone railing to Babylon. Whore, cesspool, golden sepulcher. Corey felt nothing of that. He was never anyplace. He was always wandering around the map of his brain. The chemistry of real places could not get through to him. He would sit on the subway humming and babbling to himself as if he were jogging along a country lane in the back of an open truck. Shawn: what was his natural landscape? The cinematic floodlit pools of youthcult: an eternal wave coming in on an antiseptic beach, high midnight on the Strip, strobe-spastic boutiques. The carbonized freeways of the brain. Los Angeles: city that was nothing but a slot machine dispensing plastic toys. Nothing was visible there but a whole people dying of consumption. Here you could see the pillars of the empire.
Pillars of the empire. It had been stinking hot for a week. He had been killing himself every day. Wednesday at noon he smelled a wind stirring the fetid air of the Lower East Side. There was a vein of lead in the mugginess. Green and gray shimmered in the sky. He told his new right hand, Matty, “I’m going off to inspect the ass of the ruling class” He had to scowl to get off alone. As soon as he came out of the subway at Thirty-fourth, his stride lengthened, his pace quickened. How clean it was! A light fog of poisonous smoke hung in the air here, too, but of course no one in the glass houses was smelling it.
Buildings where corporations live. Prettier, as the time and money defined pretty, than anything else built. They could even afford to “waste” a little of the golden footage in plantings, cement plazas, arcades, once in a billionaire’s while a fountain or a reflecting pool. Nothing went on for miles that was humanly useful. Somewhere out in the empire people were mining tin and pumping oil and growing soybeans and making rubber. Here was the accounting and administering, the finaglings of how to turn labor into profit, the edifice of words and lies and images created, the selling of what no one needed into what everyone must want, the high-level bribery, the stock-option plans and the media bamboozles.
The Garden of Mammon, full of glass headstones glaring in the sun. The earth is my shit heap, I shall not want, say the ruling class. They were gutting the earth as fast as ever they could, their vast factories pissing into it, scooping out the elements and the minerals and leaving only a poisoned desert for the billions who would inherit the plundered craters from which everything profitable had been extracted and consumed. After them, around them, the big famine, the final hunger.
Corey would be wondering what to do with these strange aquariums built for paper. But Billy understood that that was not his problem. He would not live on to being human. He was a weapon, forged in a society that had discovered that great profit could accrue to some people (those who
counted, those who counted each other) by sending the young of the powerless off to be killed killing far larger numbers of peasants here and there who wanted to control their own lands and their own lives. Because every time a bomb exploded, every anti-personnel weapon that sent its hundreds of particles tearing through the soft tissues of soft bodies, every helicopter that was shot down with its crew, every plane hit with a missile: brrrring, brrrring, on the great cash register in the homeland bank. It was all profit. It would have to be replaced. It was the perfect form of fantastically expensive and forced consumption, paid for by taxes.
He walked and walked. Now he was among their dwellings. The wind was rising down the long avenues. Lava-like clouds were piling up beyond the East River. How comfortable they made themselves! How jolly and cozy it must be in there, knowing rats were chewing babies just three miles north on 110th Street and that two miles south on Fourteenth Street girls were selling themselves for supper and a fix for their pimp.
Did that consciousness titillate them? Or was part of owning the world never to think of all that? Did they laugh at the fools they robbed, who were fool enough to admire them and vote them into office so they could arrange things more conveniently for their enterprises?
He felt silly asking those questions. They thought they were the real people. The people they ate were just fodder. It was like asking a diner to weep for the fish on his plate. No, it did not do to be concerned with them. He watched the limousines glide by, the exotic cars, the exotic dogs. He carried over his shoulder a sack of grenades, still invisible, and tossed them right and left to bloom like Johnny Appleseed planting his trees.
He must remember that it did not matter if the lady walking that fuzzy orange beast was softhearted and spent boring hours at meetings she thought worthy and worried about the starving natives of some other place. She was dressed in the skins of natives. He must not concern himself with the inside of her head.
Let him live long enough to kill a few of his enemies: the enemies of most of humankind. Let him live long enough to forge a weapon that would kill more. Born twisted, born warped, born in the center of the empire, he could only pride himself that they had not succeeded in using him. They had come close. But he had escaped them and turned. For the society, the system was mad: it caused the people in it to go slowly mad. They could not care for each other. They could only hate and fear and compete and fantasize; they could only rub against each other and try to use each other and suck on their own anxieties.
He would never live to be human. Nobody like him or these people could imagine what it might be like to be human, in a society people ran for the common good instead of the plunder of the few. Dimly, like a blind man imagining the sun, he could call up fancies of a person who was strong, unafraid, social, generous, gentle, ready. The brother. He could almost imagine. Tenderness swept his body. Someday there would be people. But that coming would not be gentle. It would sprout from straggle and death. Someday there would be human people.
The skies opened up and the rain fell down, straight down hard upon his body. His shirt was plastered to his sides. Water ran in streams down the sidewalk over his shoes. People scuttled under canopies and sent out doormen to whistle at cabs. He was alone in the embrace of the water. He raised his arms into the torrent. How good it felt! Good to be alive for a moment, even as a weapon! Let it all come down.
Corey Holds on to the Ball
Kids had broken tribal rules before. The error was discussed in council until they all agreed on a verdict. The person might be required to fast in solitude for a few days to clear his head and body of what had been eating him. He might be barred from the dance for a couple of weeks. He might even be expelled from the group. But Chuck was the first warrior to commit something that everyone saw as serious. He was caught selling bread at high prices and keeping the money.
Chuck had only stayed on the farm a few weeks before returning to the commune on Spring Street, so the council to judge him would meet there—his commune plus representatives from others. Corey would have been glad to avoid this council in the name of tribal democracy, but he knew the situation was important. Almost he had persuaded himself that he had to go to L.A. immediately instead. He knew it was from squeamishness that he wanted to stay out. He had to be there to make sure everyone understood the implications of what Chuck had done, that the political message of the situation was clear. A contingent from the farm drove in. He rode in the back of the closed truck with his head in Joanna’s lap and said nothing.
He had wanted Shawn to come.
Shawn had leaned on the new bench in the dining hall, still holding a plane in his hand. “No, man. Sometimes you’re blind. Willfully blind. I can’t sit in on the trial of one of Billy’s warriors. I’m not a warrior, I never bothered to become one, and I never will. All we need is for them to start talking about the elite country types trying to control their councils.”
Everybody always had such good reasons for not wanting to stick their fingers in the fire. Never that it would hurt, of course. “You think I shouldn’t go?”
“You have to. You’re a warrior. I’m not.”
“Don’t feel that way. You’re respected.”
“Not by Billy’s boys. That’s fine with me. I’m not big on judging people, anyhow. It’s not my scene.”
Do you think it s mine? he wanted to ask, but swallowed it. Don’t push too hard on people. He had wanted Shawn with him. It wasn’t the same as needing Joanna there, but it was strong. Shawn made a balance in him. Shawn held him to the light side of himself, just as Joanna held him steady and sane. She kept him from sliding into his withdrawn inner blackness; she kept him from cracking, from splintering. Shawn gave him an opening to others. With Shawn he could play in a good way. With Shawn he could talk bluntly about what happened. He did not have to put on a performance, to convince and act out and demonstrate.
Shawn had not followed out of belief. Sometimes he was afraid he did not know why Shawn had followed. But with Joanna and with Shawn he could open his doubts, and that kept him able to move and change and roll with the punches. That was the major thing: not to get hung on being right, not to let himself go rigid.
They left the truck several blocks away and walked to the meeting. It was a hot September night, and the air felt like mud, an element twice as heavy as the air of the farm.
“How dirty it is” Joanna said softly as they walked.
To look at the garbage of casual living all over the streets, bottles and cans and newspapers and broken chairs and banana peels and pizza boxes, had to make you feel that being human was a mean low thing. City people were like pets trapped in a cage with their own shit. Shawn had talked about the use of shit to make you feel defiled, to break you down to self-loathing in brig.
“Hey, the air’s like spaghetti!” Corey shouted. Everyone felt dispirited. He had to rouse them. He pantomimed fighting his way through a forest of wet spaghetti. Clown, he went lunging over the sidewalk offering himself to their stares and laughter. At the top of his raucous voice he sang:
“I am an Indian, wild and mean,
The reddest thing you ever seen!
How! How! How! How! Now!”
All six of them joined hands and went dancing up the street with Ned, the husky AWOL with the fatback in his voice, at the head of the line whipping it around, and little Ben on the end almost flying. When they came to the commune, they shushed at once. But Corey thought they brought a little wave of energy—positive good energy—with them. The room was packed already.
At first when somebody had done something that bothered people, they held gentle family sessions, everyone talking about why they were upset and the person responding and usually trying hard to understand. But somehow, slowly, a court emerged. Maybe their society had got them so used to thinking in terms of blame and punishment and using power to put down, that they had carried some of that over. He liked the old way of gentle sessions better. But they encountered little gentleness in t
he streets.
First the witnesses against Chuck spoke. Rumors had come to the commune that the Indians would sell bread to anyone now, but that their price had gone up. The rumors were so persistent that Matty, who was head of security in August, set out to run them down. Being head of security meant you handled intelligence for a month. Corey had been strong on that. “Function corrupts” he had said till he got the idea across. “We don’t turn anybody into a gun or into a shovel or into a stove or into a desk or into an account book.”
Matty had found that the peddler was Chuck, but he had watched him for two weeks longer. He wanted to understand what Chuck was doing. He then discovered that Chuck had opened a bank account in his own name and that he was buying a car, a three-year-old Ford convertible he kept in a garage in the Village.
Chuck rose to defend himself. Corey had known him since high school, and he felt sick. Chuck had been in the first assault on Franklin High. He had been beaten in the first bust. He was a solid-looking boy with a brown moustache, a deep voice, and an ingratiating smile. “Look here, I been with the Indians since the beginning, and I’ve pulled my share and then some. Everybody here who knows me knows that. I risked my skin as much as anybody, and I’m not boasting, just telling the truth. But a man has needs. I’ve always had a car. I like to drive. I like to move around. I can’t ask permission every time I want to wipe my ass, I’m not a kid. I had a job caddying in high school and I always had money in my pocket that I earned.
“Look, I see some girl and I want to take her out. I’m not going to try to convert her first. You got to have some money to spend on a girl. I want to take her to the movies or for pizza. Girls like you to have a car. It’s nothing serious. Maybe I just want to pick her up and drive around and lay her. It doesn’t do you any harm. The girls in the commune are fine. But when I’m on the street and I see a chick I want, I got to go after her. I don’t want to organize her. Maybe I don’t even want to see her again. I’m risking my ass peddling bread. The Mafia don’t like us none, and if they get one of us, they cut him up or bust his guts open. They killed Sandy and we think they killed Eileen. They don’t like us selling so cheap. I never held back a penny of the regular price. I turned that over fair and square. But what I could get above that was my own hustle, and I can’t see what skin it is off anybody else’s back. I just want to feel like a man sometimes and have a good time. That’s only human. Why pretend to be some kind of crazy monks?”