by Neil Gordon
Not because she shouldn’t be stoned—it’s good to be stoned at an interview—but because she’s fading fast and she can’t re-up: even here pulling out a joint would not go over big, talk about new models of being and interacting. As she comes down, tiredness is pouring over her in waves, actually warping her thoughts, and she finds herself wanting to tell this girl that nothing she’s saying makes any sense. New models of being and interacting? Only if that’s a phrase in a military procurement bill or a weapons catalog. Lockheed Martin’s Integrated Identification and Interdiction Systems provide soldiers in the field with new models of being and interacting with potentially hostile host populations. When it’s boots on the ground in an urban environment with enemy infiltration, Lockheed Martin IHP systems are there. She realizes that it’s a terrible sign, that she is even thinking of expressing herself to an interviewee. So she manages to bring the interview to a close, and in the couple minutes between this one and the next, she leans back and shuts her eyes.
She see her grandfather holding little Brad Flanagan’s thin arm—sees him, of course, from Brad Flanagan’s point of view, which is how she heard about the whole conversation. He says to her—and she is really dreaming now—that she was coming down here to write about politics, but it seems that the story is really about hope. The thought jars her awake, and she thinks: that makes sense. Given that these people have nothing but hope: no strategy, no vision, no reality, just hope. Then she thinks, Oh, you’re so, so unfair. They also have words. Words, words, words. And everything else was just hope. Outside, a voice accompanied by guitar is singing: I’m gonna bury that atom bomb, down by the river-side. As if Bosnia and Rwanda, Iraq and Afghanistan, Lebanon and the two intifadas—as if they all never happened; as if our draftees weren’t right now in Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan and cruising the Persian Gulf—as if there were any chance in the world of any new paradigm whatsoever bringing new hope to the horrific history of our civilization.
There is another knock at the door, and the usual pourparlers, and now a green-eyed young woman with a very pretty, very American face is sitting before her and though her urge to sleep is overwhelming, Isabel shakes herself directly into the interview.
This one explains her roots in grassroots anti-globalization movement. She is a Unitarian and a student at the Universalist Unitarian Seminary in Berkeley. Later she too will describe the influence of Catholic Workers; now she tells Isabel that she “considers her activism to be her life’s purpose.” She also has been arrested and jailed for six months by Muscogee County, and when Isabel asks her about that, she stops short. “It was hard . . . Gosh.” Then she hesitates, long enough that Isabel wakes up and begins paying attention. “It was sad, and terrifying, and exciting, and I wouldn’t trade it.”
Paying attention, she says to herself, is a good idea. Sometimes you get answers that mean something. She doesn’t feel so sleepy now, and she decides to try going right to the question she’s after—that is, the question of how she persists in doing this protest in the face of the march of history—and this is the response she gets:
“I feel a really profound sense of a belief in the goodness of humanity in general and a respect for life. And out of that grows a lot of my feelings of nonviolence and pacifism and . . . for goodness’ sake, my veganism. All of that stuff comes out of it. That’s all practice that I’ve developed out of these profound religious feelings that I’ve had my whole life.”
She goes on to tell Isabel that as a senior in college she fasted for a month in front of the gates of the School of the Americas. A one-month fast, Isabel knows, is another order of business. It is a hard thing to do. Isabel observes the girl, now, with real attention.
“Before I joined SOA Watch Movement I was sort of a good little liberal and I was doing my little liberal things. I was a Sierra Club kid; I worked on raising the corporate average fuel-economy standards for cars, I did campaigns like that, letter-writing campaigns, such as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge—it was in my freshman year of college that I started that campaign on my campus . . . so I was really into that environmental stuff. But I think that this movement—the coalition building, the really amazing analysis—pushed me to learn more about how the Left isn’t really separate . . . there’s really such a single vision and my environmental vision went with my human-rights vision, and my human-rights vision went with my anti-capitalist vision. It just all came together, and this movement really helped me to see that.”
Oh but my dear. Isabel nearly says that out loud. What she says, though, is that the entire history of American activism is a history of failed visions, and she asks her what she thinks about that? The girl nods, ready with an answer.
“Well, I think a lot of things about that. One thing that I think about it is that that’s totally true. Really, it’s hopeless. We’re never going to gain the upper hand. And since we’re not trying to gain the upper hand, the people wanting power are going to be the people who keep it, you know, instead of the people who want community or want us all to share power. Since we’re not snatching, we’re not going to win. That’s one thing that I think.”
She pauses here, looking at Isabel, who is little less than spell-bound.
“But it doesn’t help me to continue my work if I only think of the Revolution as the only win, you know. In order to keep my work going, in order to keep my motivation going, I have to focus on the smaller things that we do win. Like, the labor movement won the eight-hour day. Civil rights. If I think in pieces, I think that, you know, it’s not really a history of failure—it’s just a history of wins that’s smaller than we wish it was. So I have to focus on the small bits that we do win every day, and I also have to focus on the struggles not just in the United States but around the world. I just have to believe in that; I have to believe that it’s possible.”
Ah. In Isabel’s consciousness, one part of her registers that she has just been given her article’s peroration. Where once college students and liberals paraded their dream for a better world before news cameras, now it appears that the hope for social justice has become indistinguishable from the belief in God, and Fox is not covering it. Perhaps, given that history has never offered the slightest proof of the existence of either—social justice or God—this is fitting. But another part is listening to Sinai speaking. Revolution happened in Cuba, in Guatemala, in Iran. Never mind what happened after. That’s bullshit, saying that nothing can change—always has been, always will. Reactionary visions—even conservatism – are bulwarks of the privileged in any society against the aspirations of the disenfranchised.
Fuck. Isabel looks at this girl for a long time now. Then she tries to imagine what she, Isabel Montgomery, must look like to her. Her shoes cost €700. If she had to, maybe she would have fasted for a month to get them, but not for anything else. Seen from this vantage, the girl has been remarkably open with her, as she is being remarkably open now, looking at Isabel curiously, neutrally.
“Do you know who I am, Becky?”
“Of course I do. Of course. Don’t you see? That’s why we all agreed to speak with you.”
“I see.” Isabel finds herself rising now, gathering her things, getting ready to leave. All the while thinking to herself, Back this fucking interview up the moment you get back to the hotel. Because after you get drunk tonight—and oh my friends, and oh my foes: you, who have just been welcomed by a child who admires you because she admires Sinai, are going to get drunk tonight—tomorrow you will not remember a thing.
7.
When she walks out into the evening the sky is a blue parabola, a late November in the eastern United States, small-sky country. There is no horizon in this low-lying, ex-urban landscape. An early-rising gibbous moon, pregnant and on the wax, declining sharply to the south, is etched against the sky. Two days later was the night Molly learned that Isabel’s grandfather had died. Tonight, it would be her moon, that south-declined moon that seems to peek up into her window from the valley of Saugerti
es, although of course it’s not possible for a moon to shine upwards. The next day, for her, would be the one it rained, when her father was at Huckleberry Point. Then the moon again. On the flagstone path outside the press office Isabel squints up into the sky, then at the protest.
Like the light, the crowds have thickened and slowed, and the direction of movement is toward the soundstage and gate, people still arriving for the last appearances of the evening. For a long time she pushes against the flow until at last, when she reaches the entrance, she finds that in front of the twelve-camera PVI array, a group from Pax Christi has unfurled a long banner reading:
Our God is love, our gospel is peace. No war.
8.
The hotel the Times had booked turns out to be an upscale version of a chain with a plush carpet and a swimming pool to justify a price of three times more than even Magnolia’s hourly rate. Of course, this is no Homer’s Lounge, and by the fact that the staff are wearing these little yellow sports coats and Isabel can see a golf course out the window, she feels very confident that she won’t be seeing a lot of people coming to party after their new tattoo from Tattoo Tommy’s. Or for that matter, title-pawning—unless, as is likely, the gentleman in the green sports jacket wheeling his golf clubs through the lobby owns a few franchises.
She gets her key, goes up to her room and finds that it’s non-smoking. She goes back down and spends a long time at the desk waiting for a party of unrepentant Reaganites in checkered trousers. Then she is told that there is no other room available due to a golf tournament. She tries to imagine coming here because you want to rather than because you have to. Where would you have to be coming from? She goes back up to her room, opens the window onto the golf course, sits at the little phony wood desk, and lights a cigarette. There’s a half-bottle of Glenmorangie in her bag, lifted, if she remembers correctly, which is unlikely, from the first-class cabin of her flight from San Jose. She hits this, then closes it and puts it down on the desk next to a Gideon Bible. She finishes the cigarette, throws it into the golf course, shuts the window, lies on the bed.
Isabel doesn’t dream, but she doesn’t really sleep either. Or if she does, it is a loud, restless activity, punctuated by noises of the hotel, watchful and aware. Perhaps she does dream, a little, toward the end, when she sees her father’s face, clean shaven and tanned, under bright sun behind the green of the Catskills in leaf. When she wakes it is instantly, eyes wide open, the picture so real that she is surprised not to have an afterimage of the Catskills sunlight. Instead there is the light from the window to the golf course, a low sky of dusking grey cloud. Without even sitting up she reaches to the bedside table, finds and lights a cigarette—a hash-loaded one—then remembers that she’s not meant to smoke here. She gets up and opens the window, ashing the cigarette onto the golf course. On the way, she lifts the half-bottle of scotch off the desk and hits it while she finishes the cigarette. When she puts it back on the desk, her eye falls on the Gideon Bible, and without much thinking about what she’s doing, she tosses it out the open window after her ash. That feels good, so she tosses out also the pen, writing pad, and hotel information booklet. She observes, with satisfaction, that they’ve all fallen on the green of the seventh hole. She closes the window, then goes take a shower, with the cigarette.
When she finishes, she is feeling better. She dresses in jeans—Massimo Dutti, cut for a low waist and good legs—and a sleeveless silk vest, Agnès B, black and buttoned down the middle, its straps as well as its buttons showing a black leotard beneath. She has washed and blow-dried her hair and put on red lipstick and mascara, slowly, all the while smoking the loaded cigarette and hitting the Glenmorangie. When she’s done she puts a single credit card in her back pocket and, carrying her cigarettes, walks out into the evening.
The hotel restaurant, the Columbia Inn, is across the parking lot, on the road. This seems intended, Isabel feels, to conceal the connection with the hotel chain and imply some rootedness to the town. But that pretension is belied by the poured-concrete architecture, identical to the hotel, and the fact that the whole thing sits in a development, far from the center of town, where no building is older than ten years. No doubt there is an antebellum heart of Columbia, but out here is newer money, transplants from Atlanta, white-flight, and the drinks menu will more likely have margaritas than mint juleps. It is 7:30. The sun has not yet set.
Inside, there is a long horseshoe bar, lit by low-hanging green-tinted lamps and tended by two very young, very pretty brunette girls, each in a short green skirt and stockings. One is slightly long of torso, which she’s trying to conceal with a loose white blouse, and of face, which she’s had the good sense not to mess with. The other, who is nearly flawless, wears a sleeveless white top, skin tight, very pretty indeed. This one is cutting lemons, the other loading wine glasses in an overhead rack. Both watch Isabel enter without expression.
Under their examination she stops for a moment, considering. Despite its pretensions, the Columbia Inn has failed to attract the golfing set, which is very revealing about it, and is empty but for a few folk at the bar, of which some seem to be protesters. Beyond sits a series of dining booths, artfully lighted and appointed, entirely empty. On one hand trial by barmaid, the two watching her in blank accusation like a Degas composition. On the other hand the solitude of the mood-lighted dining room. Here the tables are under white cloth. On the walls, framed in polished oak, signed photos of golfers and displays of memorabilia. The style is high Applebees.
Under the influence of the weed, repelled by the barmaids, Isabel begins to make her way to a table, but as she shifts into the mood light the ersatz memorabilia make her feel slightly ill. She stops and sees the study of her grandfather’s house. Then she sees that the bar has ashtrays—God bless the Confederacy—the tables not. So she turns back and takes a bar stool and as she attends to the barmaids—who seem to feel that a period of studious indifference is required before they serve her—she realizes that only one of them is out of Degas. The other—the long-torsoed one—is attractive, in this case intensely, rather than pretty—and out of Toulouse Lautrec. When she approaches, Isabel asks for un absinthe, s’il vous plaît, ma jolie petite laide, but softly enough so that when the barmaid doesn’t hear and asks her again for her order, she can get bourbon and beer.
It is warm enough that she had decided not to—or more precisely, she was stoned enough to forget to—put on a jacket, and so Isabel is bare shouldered, which is a good look for her. She is, she thinks, perhaps not up to the two barmaids, but then, she points out to herself, she can have sex without your partner risking a statutory rape charge, can’t she now? Which is not true of the barmaids.
And, furthermore—most importantly, in fact—she has before her now a straight shot of bourbon, cozying up to a beer glass, cute as a button. The first hit sinks straight to her belly and begins radiating heat. Carefully, she chooses a clean cigarette from the pack, lights it, sighs in the smoke, then out. Then she hits the bourbon again.
And here’s the way Izzy sees it: she is alone in a foreign country. She can sit right here for the next three, maybe four hours, with a drink, a cigarette, and the ten-yard stare she got from her mother, who before she became an ex-drug addict was a drug addict, and before she was a drug addict was a starlet with quite a little Hollywood career, and in all three capacities had voluminous call to silence many people with a ten-yard stare. At some point she can add whatever they serve here that has high-fat meat: she is five foot three inches, and she now weighs one hundred and fifteen, despite eating like a horse. Then she can have a few more bourbons. And sometime, sometime late tonight when the restaurant is full and smoky and filled with Garth Brooks or Burt Bacharach or whoever the fuck they play in an ex-urban Georgia restaurant—although right now they are playing for some reason Lennon—she can pay her bill with the Times’s credit card, rise carefully and steadily from her seat, navigate her way out of the bar and across the hotel parking lot, go up to her room, and
if she’s not so blind drunk by then that she’ll pass clean out without thinking again about Sinai, well then she’ll have just enough scotch left for a couple of alprazolam or lorazepam or diazepam or whatever comes first to hand from her copious travel pharmacopeia and then, friend, she will have quite a few hours, won’t she just, perhaps longer—perhaps forever!—before she has to think about anything at all.
It is a good life. Isabel is on bourbon two now, and she’s thinking, there is of course copious pain available, but it is a good, harsh, peripatetic life, a world always clean and private. Yeah, hanging behind you somewhere is that crowd of people you belong to, that history-laden, heavy bunch of folk with everything they believe. And yeah, in front of you there is something terribly wrong, something you can’t bear to think about, but you are already so drunk you can keep yourself from putting your finger on it, so drunk that you can absorb the pain it generates, the pain you won’t think about, into the muscle of your stomach and there let it radiate like rain into a paper cup that slither as they slip away across the universe.
Jai guru deva om, Jesus. It is pulsing through her now, sleeplessness and the fine Los Angeles medical marijuana and ritalin, and coke, and methamphetamine, and ketamine, and alprazolam diazepam Lorazepam whatever the fuck she has been ingesting all these months and above all this deep brown distillation, this silken mother’s milk from Kentucky. For an hour, anyway: a good, blissful hour that contains two cigarettes and two more bourbons and a space of images of broken light which dance before her like a million eyes in which everything—Prince Cuntmuscle and Sinai and the girl who said she was m’en fichiste on the rue des Abbesses and Molly’s dream that comes to her all the time—fail, utterly fail, in her deep, narcotic, alcohol trance, to change her world.
Nothing’s going to.
Until, gradually, she becomes aware that someone is talking to her.