by Marge Piercy
Yet he knew that he fooled himself when he imagined being someplace with a good group of musicians really turned on again and making the music he wanted. Running away from the Indians would not bring him to musician’s heaven. The happiest time for The Coming Thing had been when there was the least gap between audience and performers. They hadn’t been that wise musically in the early days, though they had listened to all the old blues records and country music and fifties and sixties rock, and they’d thought they were able to do anything under the yellow sun. They had had great energy and the conviction of being right and a desire to play their music and get laid by groupies in piles from one coast to the other.
But already before the hired systems analysts had come trekking to Washington with their mammoth tracking system in the sky, The Coming Thing had been losing that natural rapport with their audiences. As they gained musical sophistication, they had begun to lose some of their teeny-bopper audience, who turned from them to newer, harder-sell merchandise to gobble down like candy.
Cracks had begun to appear in their solidarity. Shep had wanted the accouterments he expected with his money: what had really got him pissed was being treated as a hippy instead of as a successful young entrepreneur. He wanted to marry his debutante and receive the social deference that should be his by virtue of birth and education and accomplishment and possessions, in spite of his hair hanging down in brown curls on his shoulders and transparent shirts and brocade pants and jewelry to his navel. Frodo had wanted fun and games, a never-failing supply of sexual victims. His sadism had flourished. His games had grown more elaborate, his rites had required more props.
What had Shawn wanted.? After a certain point it had not mattered what he wanted. He knew that the world that had seemed to float on their best music required a revolution to come to pass. Insofar as their music spoke urgently of joy and spontaneity and connection, it had been unconsciously but inevitably political. Their music spoke naturally of the world where the streets did belong to the people, where the grass was to sit on and to smoke and every child had hills to run on. The music called people to dance together loosely with their whole bodies.
The necessities of making a new world call for different behavior from what will be typical of that new world: he told himself such things every day, to produce in himself patience, to hold to some simulacrum of discipline, to keep his temper in check. But sometimes he wondered if the Indians were interested in making a world where he could play his music.
The media discovered them. First liberal magazines for intellectuals wrote studies about why they were not significant. The Village Voice had for some time covered their visible actions, usually with an ironic detached reporter sounding rather weary of it all. The hippest of the commercial mags, aimed at exploiting the teen market, assigned a woman who sounded sympathetic and who was also very careful to make it clear that they were totally incorrect, of course, even if they were personally groovy. Then an interpretive piece appeared in the Sunday magazine of the New York Times on how they were merely the newest embodiment of generational discontent such as readers were accustomed to accepting as inevitable, comprising a small minority of young people (polls cited). Their ideas were influenced by anthropology but little different from the last generation of disturbed students who had been handled competently, while the peculiar form of their tribal customs could be traced back to conceptions of the Noble Savage, James Fenimore Cooper, Mark Twain and other writers tamed by the schools into docility.
Esquire put Shawn’s face on the cover in feathered headdress, and inside had a snotty article heavily laden with psychoanalytical insights. The author attacked the rock scene in general and claimed it had been only a matter of time before some manufactured sex hero took his power seriously and abused it, leading his mesmerized fans after him. The author depicted Shawn as a pampered teenager unable to adjust to adult authority, who had created a cult around himself of permanent adolescent irresponsibility.
If the Indians had read magazines, he would have been in trouble being set up as a leader. But they did not. Shawn found it all pretty funny. He had never felt so crushed by responsibility before in his life. Corey was not amused, but Joanna was. She memorized the juicy parts and recited them at what she felt were appropriate times when they were traveling. The gist of most articles was that the Indians were a violent, pseudo-fascist group of adolescent misfits, a band of bottle-throwing Peter Pans.
The brunt of the media attack on them, the “line” of explanation, however, was set by a group of ex-radicals and left-liberals comfortably housed in various universities. It was a real ulcerated hatred that seethed in the works they produced that analyzed the phenomena of the Indians. Men who had tenure in oak-shaded campuses where, amid the rhythmic yells from the football field and the songs of the glee club, institutes solved the problems of dispersing tularemia germs against enemy populations and invented models for counter-revolutionary game theory in Brazilian villages and chatted of megadeaths and genetic management, wrote about the violence of kids in the streets armed with bricks and bottles with thunderous denunciation and scathing indignation.
Some of the academic ex-radicals took the position that unrest among the youth would provoke fascism. They wrote about fascism as a dramatic change, a coup d’etat, the Pentagon marching on the White House. None of them imagined that it could come in like the morning paper, that it would be just the same families maintaining themselves in power by slightly different means. No swastikas, no eagles other than the Bald Eagle rendered extinct through DDT: only the American flag. No SS, no storm troopers, no blackshirts: only the regular police armed with tanks and gases and high explosives and training in “riot control.” They did not see that black people and kids already lived their lives in a police state.
Sociologists and social psychologists got grants to study the Indians. They interviewed captured Indians in prisons and stockades and juvenile concentration camps. Some of the kids cooperated, hoping to shorten their time. Some refused to speak. Some lied in beautiful arabesques of absolute invention. A few of these inventions such as the war dance passed into the scientific literature, into common myth, and late in that winter Shawn found himself visiting a tribe in Cleveland that had adopted it.
The most important attack on them was contained in a book by a professor at Yale who had been active himself in radical politics in his graduate-student days. When repression had come down on the movement of that time, he had found his colleagues extremists and veered toward new colleagues. He was still regarded as a radical by most academics, but since he did not organize or agitate or take part in any actions but only wrote acceptable scholarly texts on the French Revolution, he remained inside the pale.
His thesis was that poor child-rearing practices, a lack of strict toilet training, the absence of the father from most homes, and the decline of discipline in the early grades of the schools had led to a total breakdown of socialization practices. He called the street children the new barbarians, equating their revolt with the End of Morality. He compared them to the Huns, to the hordes of Attila sweeping into the power vacuum of the declining Roman Empire. “The issue is freedom within discipline, within the orderly constraints of society. If we quail before the attacks of these barbarian hordes, we will have lost at once three hundred years of lawful decision-making and two thousand years of common morality” He claimed that the new illiteracy had produced a great degradation in the capacity to think and even to feel, and that the children who fled the system were benumbed and brutalized savages—truly feral and subhuman.
In the meantime, a Commission on Social Disruption and Violence reported to the President their recommendations. Channeling came too late. All six-year-olds must be tested to detect criminal tendencies; to determine their future potential for criminal behavior; to locate those children with delinquent character structures and prevent the development of full-fledged adolescent deviants. A full battery of predictive tests must be administered to all
six-year-olds, the psychiatrists and psychologists advised, and the young hardcore disruptive boys sent to special camps for treatment. All adolescents should be required to produce a certificate of mental health before being allowed to enter society, fill jobs or assume responsibility.
Tabloids headlined “TEEN GANGS HOLD PAINTED SEX ORGIES” On television, detective and police heroes tracked down young villains who belonged to tribes and seduced innocents with dangerous drugs. At the same time, teen magazines pushed the buck look and the squaw look, with fringed shirts and beads and expensive deerskin moccasins and boots, with beaded headbands and feather hats that looked like run-over chickens dipped in paint pots, wampum belts, clay peace pipes, Deerslayer tunics for that huntress look, fur rugs for that Tribal Pow Wow, genuine (more or less) buffalo greatcoats for Shaggy Male Splendor, saddlebag purses and washable body paints that came in powder horns and little clay pots.
Rancid waves of commerce touched them from time to time. They would find kids who thought they were Indians tricked out in costumes from the local Bizarre Bazaar of their town’s fattest department store, and would have a rocky time persuading them to strip down and start over in the oldest clothes they owned.
Corey: “Indians don’t dress up like department-store dummies. Indians dress to be invisible. The red Indian wore deerskin because it ran past his door. Wear what you can make and replace. Make yourself a sack. You aren’t selling yourself. Put on a bag and wear it with pride. Who you are you can’t buy in a store. You have to make it together.”
Shawn sang:
We are in the belly of the whale
and the whale is going down.
Hold your peace,
sit still and drown.
If you want out
you got to use a knife.
We’re in the big white whale.
Prisoner, how much, how much
do you want your life?
Going down, dying
going down.
Everybody’s like to drown.
Blubber and steel,
smog and rubber.
You got to chop right out to freedom,
see your road and choose it,
take a knife and use it.
Cut your road to freedom if you can.
You got to kill Leviathan,
hey, prisoner, look up
before you can be
a man.
“That’s a male chauvinist song,” Joanna told him.
“Well, woman doesn’t rhyme with much, does it now?”
“Who said people will only listen to jingles?”
“Shawn. He said, one good song is worth two dozen warriors throwing bottles at the National Guard.”
“But he didn’t dare say it in council.”
“No, Joanna-love, because he didn’t want two dozen warriors throwing bottles at him.”
“Why not, if he wants so much to be a man? … Shawn, don’t you ever feel trapped?”
“Often enough. But it’s orneriness and laziness, you know. We weren’t brought up to do much of anything real”
“Am I doing anything real now?”
“What kind of stupid thing is that to ask? Yes, we’re really fighting. We’re really alive and soon we’ll be really dead.”
“It’s just that trying to make change is so much of it pretending. Making images of what might be. Pretending we’ve already done things we’ve only begun to do, or don’t even know how to begin on.”
“But they lie more than we do. Propaganda was their invention to begin with: the way the people with power construct the world to prove they ought to have the power, or that there’s really no such thing as power, or that what really matters is burning witches or lynching blacks or hunting commies.”
“But there’s so much we pretend not to notice in each other. We pretend each other is better than he is. We pretend to think we’re further along the road than we know. I want to be more me. I want to use more of me … I’m not wrong! He leans too hard and he gobbles me without seeing it. Then I bitch and go for his belly. Because everything stays in there between us.”
“Loving is difficult, so I’ve been told. All this racketing around the country doesn’t make it any easier.”
“It has to loosen, somehow. I have to open it up. But a scared bitch in me keeps saying that I can’t bear to lose him, so don’t rock the boat. I take those fears out on him too. This is the only good thing I’ve ever had. I never loved anybody before—I hardly even fooled myself. Oh, of course, back when I was little, I loved my parents, I loved them a lot. But that’s so far gone, so buried by now. But I thought I was naturally cold, and I thought everything people said about relationships was a lot of nonsense to hide that they were scared to be alone. Maybe it’s a taste, maybe it’s a habit. Maybe now I’m scared to be alone too” She twisted her fingers in her kinky hair and her light-brown eyes looked no place while she frowned like a child. “Do you love anybody?”
“Yes. Corey and you”
“Both of us separately or both of us together?”
“Separately. Together, you’re a closed corporation.”
“But you love him better?”
“Don’t whine. Don’t pull at things.”
“Pulling at things is something every good revolutionary has to do—no?”
“Not everything the same way, hopefully. Pulling at a blade of grass is different from pulling on a doorknob”
“I’ll find out”
“Nobody finds out anything by making tests to do it”
He watched her go away hands clasped behind her back whistling and shuffling her feet. Prickly Joanna. What was love anyhow? A doing. A habit. A set of aches. A context. The name of a box for putting people in. Tomorrow night, back to the farm and maybe plump Ginny in the night. Unless there was somebody new who would…
No. Ginny. Too long between. She never talked to him about how she felt about him. She kept a certain amount of space around her. Not coldly, but because she was building a sense of herself. She was making herself slowly and firmly. It was as if she came out to meet him, pleased to see him, but quietly shut the door behind. She was reluctant to talk about Billy with him, because they did not get along. But she would talk obliquely. She would say she thought she could love anyone if only she looked at him closely enough. The determining factor was a real desire to be loved—not to imagine oneself loved in some idealized way, but to be loved in the flesh day to day, with the lover alive and a separate person and continuing to exist even when you found it inconvenient.
She was not quite as plump as she had been the first time they had gone upstairs together and she had taken him sweetly into her fullness. There were still bouncy soft piles of her, but the piles were firmer.
Tomorrow night on the farm he would find her in the dance, and she would paint herself gravely and come to him, and they would go to her cabin or his, and she would be clean and bountiful and smell like tea and soap. He would stretch out with her and play and be at ease. Very simply they were friends. Very simply it was good together. And the tribe rolled around them and included them, and, of its need, let them come together or draw apart into their tasks. They did not need a structure to meet inside. He did not have to borrow or buy or steal a house to be with her. The best part of what he had had with Denise he could touch with Ginny.
All except for Stevie. There were three babies at the farm now, and he liked that and he wanted them quickly to reach the stage when he could talk to them and play with them beyond tossing and tickling and making noises. He would take on baby-tending tasks without the self-righteous, assisting-women’s-liberation attitude of the other few men who were willing. He dug kids. But he wanted them to stop crawling and mewling and dripping and sit up and be ready to take things in. Then he might just revolt against all his traveling and singing and turning people on. He thought he might be nursery-school teacher for a couple of years. That would suit him just fine.
He wanted to take the elements of mus
ic apart and put it back together right with the very young children. That was where he would find his alternate society. He thought that one of his greatest strengths was that he remembered so exactly what it had felt like to be a child.
It was early spring and time for plowing and planting when they got back. They had been gone since the middle of February. The farm smelled wet and pale green and earthy, with a streak of manure. Mud puddles and tracked hallways. The air felt volatile. Everyone looked solid. People always looked healthier to him on the farm than anyplace else. The reason was simple enough: they got out a lot, they worked hard, they were not anxious or afraid. Most people look good when they feel like that. He ate with the second shift for supper in the dining room smelling of lamb stew and fresh-baked biscuits. People mingled with them, greeting and asking after friends in other tribes and telling anecdotes of the past month.
Council was mainly reports and felt endless. Shawn was sick of meetings. He felt that he had passed the month in a mumbly twilight meeting. Joanna seemed to spend especially long on her report. She took it seriously. He stifled yawns and twitched and waited the time out. There was Ginny, round as a rabbit, giving him a little warm smile across the circle. To husk her out of her coarse clothes like an ear of sweet yellow corn and nibble her down. On to the dance, come on. Finally.
He never enjoyed dancing as much in other places. This was home ground. He took just a little bread to hone his traveling fatigue. It always turned him up a couple of notches, like a guitar put back in tune. Then he moved out into the ease of it, striding in the rhythm of the turning circle. The circle began with a casual shuffle, people just getting ready to loosen up, letting the rhythms soak through them. For maybe forty minutes he followed the circle, watching the dances develop in the center, before he shucked and moved in.