You're a Big Girl Now

by Neil Gordon

  As for the Times and their expenses?

  Fuck the Times and their expenses.

  And, while I’m at it, as for you who were so enjoying watching me, beautiful woman and spoiled girl that I am, finally, get mine?

  Fuck you too.

  I was a man, you’d be applauding me.

  The plane levels into its cruise over the North Sea; the seatbelt lights go off; I pour a glass of champagne from the bottle I made the first-class steward leave for me and open up my laptop.

  I have this itty-bitty thing to write for a few hundred thousand Britons and, the strong, sexy, throb of the Afghan hash filling my veins, perfectly modulated by the bottle of champagne now sitting on my seatside table and ready to be replaced, anytime, by this stunning girl working the first-class cabin, I—as my American friends would say—am good, really good, to go.

  Once this girl in Paris whined to me, “T’es tellement m’en fichiste toi,”—“You don’t give a fuck about anything!” Then she left me alone in her little chambre de bonne on the rue des Abbesses, high above Sacré Cœur.

  She meant it as a complaint.

  I heard it as a compliment.

  I launch iTunes and hit shuffle and who do you think comes on? None other than Bowie: Major Tom.

  But what I don’t know is that all the while I’m doing what I’m doing, or what I think I’m doing, something else is going on. An amazing series of accidents is preparing themselves, one after another, and at the end of them, that quality that so frustrated that pretty little girl in her chambre de bonne high above Sacré Cœur, that m’en fichiste quality that had served me so well, is about to be taken away forever.

  And I don’t know, yet, that I will never be happy again in quite that same way I am happy, that flight from London to St. Louis to Philadelphia, floating in a tin can, high above the earth, writing a piece of journalism that is accomplished and fluent, at the height of my powers, right through in one draft, and then sitting back and, looking out into the border of space, sipping my champagne, high as a kite.

  Planet earth is blue, and there’s nothing I can do.

  2.

  So, as for Washington Square Park, New York City, to which I turn my attention the moment I have finished assassinating Crown Prince Cuntmuscle, I believe what happened was something like this. A couple-three weeks earlier in the offices of the New York Times Magazine someone brought up at an editorial meeting that a march was being planned from Zuccotti Park to Washington Square on March 6, 2011, to commemorate the Occupy Wall Street movement. It appears that the call is out to Columbia, NYU, the New School, the new SDS, Radical Students Union, the Confederation of Catholic Activists, and the like, for a huge mobilization, a march up Sixth Avenue, finishing with a rally in Washington Square.

  Right. So there’s a whole bunch of talk about that, and it gives birth eventually to the idea of publishing a “What’s Left?” article. The editor who picks it up is Stephanie Delacorte and somehow, God knows how, she makes her case. Maybe she is impassioned and sincere: Obama brought back a Left in this country, and maybe Palin’s fought it back, but it’s still there, and we need to report on it. Maybe she is cynical: Worked last year when New York did it. Maybe they have a computer that tells them that no one’s done such a piece in n months and so there’s no market saturation. Or maybe it’s pure opportunism: outside the annual protest against the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, there has not been a major left-wing mobilization in this country since Occupy Wall Street was raided by the police, and that makes it a rare peg to hang an article on—especially this year, which is an election year, in which it seems more than likely that we’ll get another four of Obama, given his extraordinary unwillingness to do anything that might piss off the one percent and the inability of the Republicans to find anyone to run who is not, in fact, a bozo.

  But since no one cares, not the slightest little bit, about a left-wing mobilization, they figure they have to generalize the article up the wazoo to make it relevant to anybody in their demographic. In other words, they can’t report simply on the protest itself, seeing no one cares but the people who are already there, making fools out of themselves—and who even knows how many there will actually be—so they have to make it the symbol for something, such as a “What’s Left?” article. What could it be about? They do their homework with assiduity—Google played the major role, one suspects, magazine editors being what they are today—and come up with the following. In March, the Occupy protest—note, they’re already calling it a protest. Then in April, the annual Spanish Civil War Veterans Memorial, once again in New York. And finally, November, the School of the Americas Protest down in Fort Benning, Georgia. That’s a cool series, What’s Left, “The New New Left,” one person covers them all, what say?

  It’s a strong argument—especially in an industry in which commissioning an article entails no obligation to publish it, or pay full price for it, and so they’re all suggesting names, as editors will—Philip Gourevitch. No, Kai Bird. No, let’s ask Amy Goodman, she never writes. How about Jon Stewart? What about Amy Wilentz? What about Sean Wilentz? What about Arundhati Roy? God, too bad Hitch is dying, he could nail these guys to the wall. Or, get this, what about Christopher Buckley!—when someone—I imagine some kid just out of Yale—pipes up: what about Isabel Montgomery?

  “From the Guardian?” The idea’s so resoundingly stupid that Stephanie Delacorte actually stops talking for a moment. “Montgomery covers the Mideast, dear.”

  She has this soupy, phony English accent and now, it thoroughly shuts the kid up. So they resolve to assign George Packer, and move on. But later, Delacorte’s going over something with the Yale kid in her own office, where her ignorance can’t be seen by others, and she says:

  “Why did you suggest Isabel Montgomery?”

  The assistant knows his chance when he sees it. “Because she’s a pedigreed lefty. Her real name is Sinai. Montgomery’s just her mom. She’s Jason Sinai’s daughter and Jack Sinai’s granddaughter. Her aunt is Maggie Calaway and her uncle’s Daniel Sinai from Columbia.”

  “Is that right?” The editor looks at the kid. “How do you know this?”

  He shrugs. “My dad was in SDS.”

  The editor understands. “I see. Think Montgomery would want to do it?”

  “I can find out.”

  Or something like that. The result is that the kid calls his dad, his dad calls Uncle Danny, and Uncle Danny speaks to his wife Maggie, and Maggie—who is the single member of the family I stay in touch with, seeing she’s the one who picked me up in a hotel room when I was eleven the fuck years old and had been dumped there by my outlaw father, on the run from the FBI—calls me, and when I—who might have actually to engage in a moment of introspection if I stop working—say I’m interested, Aunt Maggie calls Uncle Danny, Uncle Danny calls the dad, the dad calls the kid, the kid tells Delacorte, and Delacorte—smoothly muscling the kid aside—borrows another assistant from another editor to call me.

  That’s how it goes, see. I’ve met enough like me—Thai Jones up in Albany, Chesa Boudin and his brothers in Chicago, the Gold girl in Temple Mountain, my half-sister Beck—to know it’s the same for everyone. We’re this weird little breed, the children of a certain group of self-styled radicals who held sway, for a few minutes in the ’60s and ’70s, over the imagination of the American Left. If I ever write a book about the Weather Underground—and if I do so, I will be joining the multitude, because there’s been an even dozen in the past ten years—that will be its title: The Imagination of the American Left, and it will catalogue the myths of which we, the children of Radicals, are such a prevalent example.

  And so because my father in a University of Michigan cafeteria in 1969 decided to listen to this prick called Billy Ayers and join a faction of SDS that would later bully and steal and cheat to take over the organization and become Weatherman; because he then engaged in various shenanigans including planting a variety of what we would call, today, IEDs—improv
ised explosive devices—in various spots around the country that had made him what he was, that is, an over-privileged, spoiled young white male; because he then spent a quarter-century living under an assumed name; because, finally, he conspired to bring not just national but international attention on himself when he at last decided to surface, a plan that included leaving me in a hotel room to be picked up by an aunt whom I had never met—because of all that a phone rang in Bahrain where I was prepping my trip to Saudi and a voice said: “Can you hold for Ms. Delacorte,” and next thing I am booked to travel to Washington Square Park, New York City, to cover what was promising to be the single largest Left-wing mobilization in the country since like 1974, for the New York Times.

  3.

  And so therefore—as Uncle Joe, whom I am soon to meet, would say—it is 6 a.m. now and I am clicking my heels down a sun-flooded corridor into Philadelphia airport and each step is taking me closer to a moment that is going to transform my little-bitty sense of myself, of who I am, of what I do, beyond anything I have ever imagined.

  But I have no clue. Prince Cuntmuscle is done and ready to file the moment I find a wifi connection and my Mitsu 3000GT, twenty-two hundred a week as opposed to the Aveo for four, is waiting at Avis and the last little electric buzz of the Afghan hash is in my blood like a tiny warm orgasm. And God bless airports, don’t we just come out of the off-ramp into the terminal and witness a Chili’s open, first thing you see, and aren’t they just claiming to serve breakfast burritos but just look at that well-stocked bar which is open for business and finding takers and where my laptop, perched on the bar, is in reach of an ambient wireless connection?

  True, it is seeming like the finest place in the world to me just now as I order and down a straight shot of Irish whiskey—oh, how I love gentrification, because they have a single-barrel Red Breast here—and log into my VPN and file Cuntmuscle, four thousand words, fact-checking notes and photos, and aren’t you just the most consummate little girl reporter? Just like Tintin.

  Except Tintin wouldn’t be going again on a shot of Irish at 6 a.m., would he now? Tintin wouldn’t be hitting that and then an ice-cold Heineken and then sitting back in his bar seat feeling heat spread through his stomach, his breasts; Tintin wouldn’t be thinking on a wave of drunkenness that everything has come together, just right, once again, would he?

  On the other hand, just like Tintin, I am the consummate professional, aren’t I just? No sooner is cuntmuscle.doc off into the ether than, on my laptop on the bar next to me, is the research Little Lincoln—how I call him, anyway, my long-faced research assistant in London—has so ably gathered for me in a single folder on the screen: New York Times articles on the Occupy Movement; clips of TV coverage, appropriate chapters from a little bibliography of historical sources about American activism since Vietnam, Jim Miller’s Democracy is in the Streets, Gitlin’s SDS, and all the autobiographies, published or unpublished: Billy Ayers, Cathy Wilkerson, Mark Rudd, Howie Machtinger. A cake walk. A fucking sleigh ride. I am almost done with the research already, sitting here at the bar. I mean after all. We were weaned on these images, on this story, a certain kind of us; we sucked it out of the tits of our weepy-eyed wet-nurse, this, Woodstock, March on the Pentagon, Democratic Convention, the mother’s milk of the pathos of the American Left. There you go. That’s the book right there: The Tits of the American Left.

  Bet you thought I was going to say, pathos, didn’t you? The Pathos of the American Left. Now there’s the title, isn’t it just? You can just see it in that clunky cover type on the New York Review of Books, can’t you? The Pathos of the American Left, reviewed by Theodore Draper.

  Only I’m not writing it.

  Know why?

  Because I don’t give a fuck.

  This is just an assignment for me. I only took it to avoid doing something more meaningful. That I’m familiar with my father and his bullshit doesn’t mean I care about it, or him. In fact, I doubt that I’ve spent more than six months with my father, and that only because I had to, since, at thirteen, I insisted on going to live with my mother. The way I see it? I hit this Irish one last time, I shoot up to New York, I check into the W Union Square and then stroll down to look at the protest, I kill some time, grab some authenticating detail—tie-dyed shirts and Birkenstocks, one assumes—and then stick around to grab a quote from some speech. Then I see who I can find to spend the night with in my suite at the W, which will have a minibar, and in the morning I get the fuck back to the airport. The only possible delay is if there’s some real violence, and I should be so lucky. Write the thing up on the flight to London, then talk Momma into going somewhere nice, somewhere sunny with many clothes stores, not a hard sell to Momma in any season but particularly after the rough work of shopping the fall collections which will have left her weary.

  For a couple minutes I click through the photos the assistant sent me of my interviewees. The organizer of the march is this guy, Patrick Douglas, a lefty lawyer, nice-looking guy of thirty or so with an open face. But so was Crown Prince Cuntmuscle nice-looking—and he owned two billion dollars’ worth of hotels from Mecca to Miami. Still he was about to be drawn and quartered in the Guardian. These little folk with their little gathering in Union Square? These half-baked heirs to a failed tradition of American radicalism; this new generation of shitheads who, once again, was organizing penny-ante demonstrations while the machinery of government, the military, trillions of dollars of the Federal Reserve, the combined powers of the mightiest nation in human history, was held by their enemies? I was taking them downtown.

  The fact is, I don’t only think in Momma’s voice, but in Sinai’s sometimes too.

  Especially when I’m being an asshole.

  Laura Whitehorn, when I met her once at the national LGBT convention, over coffee, she says: “He may be your father, but Sinai’s an asshole. Always was, always will be.”

  Me too.

  Then I lean back from my laptop and kill the Heineken and put on my earphones and hit shuffle, which bless its heart goes to U2, and I close my eyes and feel just how good it is going to feel to be in New York, that city of blinding lights, how wonderful it has been, the amazing life that brought me—my neon heart, my Day-Glo eyes—to this city lit by fireflies where they’re advertising in the skies.

  And I am, still, unaware of the most amazing event of all, the one that is about to change everything.

  Because what I don’t know, as I float on my morning buzz, is that none of these accidents have been quite so amazing as the fact that unbeknownst to me, while I am watching over this most beautiful of airports in this most beautiful of worlds, feeling the inexorable satiety of addiction; unbeknownst to me, while cuntmuscle.doc—wonder what the editorial assistant who downloads that will think of the title?—uploaded in my email program, I made a serious mistake.

  Not miniskirt-sized.

  Big, super-duper, major mistake.

  In fact, two.

  The first was that I leave my email program open after cuntmuscle.doc has sent and, thus, let my mail come in with that fucking little chime showing there’s new mail and its horrid seduction and now, when I open my eyes, U2 loud in my ears, before I can think, I look at my email and see there is a letter from Sinai.

  The second is that I read it.

  Once for six months I had Sinai’s email removed by my spam program.

  Never would I open a letter from him right when it came in.

  But because of this amazing series of accidents, I read it, then I read it again.

  And then, all of a sudden, I am no longer drunk. I am no longer drunk and I am no longer high and what is more suddenly, from all around me—the Chili’s logo, the McDonald’s sign, the Hudson News, the flat-screen TVs showing CNN—all the color has drained out of the world.

  Sinai is dying.

  I suppose it’s some sort of vascular thing. A blood-pressure drop, something like that. Or it’s the booze. But for a moment, all around me—all around me—the worl
d is turned to black and white, like the screen of an old TV in a movie, only still high def, like reality, and for a moment, everything stops.

  Sinai is dying, but I’m not going to tell you about it. In a way, it wouldn’t even be accurate to. Because I’m not thinking about my father’s impending death, all that’s in my mind is Laura Whitehorn: “He may be your father, but Sinai’s an asshole. Always was, always will be.”

  And before I know it I have downed a third Red Breast and a second Heineken and suddenly not just drunk again but very drunk, very drunk indeed, I am able to slam shut my computer, pay my bill, and walk in my miniskirt right out of the terminal, the neon glowing in the periphery of my eyes, my feet strong and steady and a huge confidence in my heart.

  I get my Mitsu, set the GPS, lower the top, and gun toward the airport exit, feeling the engine. Avis, turns out, has the non-turbo SL, which unlike the twin VR4 is only truly good if it’s rented and you can abuse it. Before I pull out of the airport, I take a laced Marlboro from my pack—one of the six I had meticulously loaded with a little sliver of Cuntmuscle’s Afghan hash—“tribute from the brave Mujahedeen, my love”—before I ate the remaining gram on the airplane, what seems to me, now, a million years ago. And by the time I’m speeding up the 95 through a landscape of budding trees, under a blue east-coast sky of high clouds, I have so successfully forgotten Sinai’s letter that I even find myself singing to the random song that’s shuffled up into my ears although, when I realize what it is I am singing, I stop myself and turn on the radio. It is, see, the first couple lines of that Dylan song:

  Our conversation was short and sweet

  It nearly swept me off-a my feet

  4.

  Tell me that it hurts less when your father is dying if you hate him. Tell me that it’s not our fault we come from these goddamn people whom we never can leave alone. I was thirteen the last time I spent a full week under the roof of my father. I am twenty-seven today and if the time in between has been anything to me, it’s not because I went to Cambridge at sixteen and graduated at nineteen; SOAS at nineteen and graduated at twenty-three with a Ph.D. Not because by twenty-five I had a byline in the Economist, not because I hold visiting appointments at LSE and The Monterey School of International Studies, but because in all that time, all that time, I have stayed the fuck away from my father.