True Believers

by Kurt Andersen

  “I have not been charged with that. In fact, nobody has said that to me yet. The first thing I heard about it was when the newspaper reporters in the hall asked me that question.”

  I was astonished. He sounded so reasonable. He looked so regular. He was wearing a crew-neck sweater.

  “Mr. Oswald, how did you hurt your eye?”

  “A policeman hit me.”

  I started to form a question about whether the police would get in trouble for hitting him, but then someone lunged into the scene, the camera jiggled, and Oswald fell.

  “He’s been shot! He’s been shot! Lee Oswald has been shot!” a man said. And then another man’s incredulous voice came out of the TV: “This is unbelievable.”

  It was as if the TV broadcast had tuned in to a dream.

  I started crying, which upset me more, since I hadn’t cried during the previous forty-eight hours. My father the psychologist came over and squatted and hugged me and said that it was probably my grief for the president finally spilling out.

  Mom and the little kids got home from St. Joseph’s, and we all kept watching. When someone on TV identified Oswald’s killer as “a nightclub owner named Jacob Leon Rubenstein,” my father sighed and muttered something in Danish and shook his head.

  I think my mother never entirely recovered from the shock of Kennedy’s murder, especially coming so soon after Pope John’s death. The instability and extremism she’d always dreaded, what she called “the cuckoo foreign stuff,” had at last infected her America. I was confused by how the death of someone she didn’t love, had never met, this remote and essentially unreal figure, could be such a personal blow to her.

  I don’t recall the days after the assassination being sad so much as weird, weird first because all regular TV programming stopped from Friday afternoon until Monday morning, and then weird again when life snapped completely back to normal on Tuesday. No one had lost their jobs, no one’s houses had burned or flooded or collapsed, no war had begun. My favorite new TV shows (Hootenanny, Patty Duke, East Side/West Side, The Fugitive) were all on the air as usual the following week, the New Trier Indians played and lost the big annual game against the Evanston Wildkits, we held our first Esperanto Club meeting, I took quizzes and wrote papers and got A’s. In other words, the assassination was this strange new kind of event that was both heavy and weightless, commanding everyone’s attention but having no immediate, discernible impact on their lives.

  Chuck was joining us late for lunch in the cafeteria. “Hey, Levy,” Alex said, “Hollaender agrees that Dylan is better than your goofball English combo.”

  “That’s not what I said. I said I can’t imagine the Beatles ever singing a song like ‘Only a Pawn in Their Game’ and that I wish Bob Dylan would go on Hootenanny.”

  “I saw them on TV the other morning, the Beatles,” Alex said, “on the CBS News. My dad thinks they look like Little Lord Fauntleroy.”

  “I don’t know what that means,” Chuck said as he set his tray down, “and I don’t much care.”

  Back in the spring Chuck had heard the Beatles’ “Please Please Me” on WLS and became an instant fan. One afternoon around Halloween he’d played his new 45 of “She Loves You” for me, just me, picking out George’s chords on his unplugged guitar. When his record player automatically started playing it again, Chuck put down the guitar and mouthed the words, smiling.

  There we were, alone in his bedroom, sitting on his bed.

  Listening to lyrics exhorting a boy to requite a poor misunderstood girl’s love. It was him I was thinking of—I loved him, and I thought he should be glad.

  I thought the moment had finally come. I hoped my face wasn’t as red-hot as it felt. I thought he was going to lean over and kiss me.

  Instead, as he stood up and turned over the record to play the B side, he asked me, “Do you think I should ask Wendy Reichman to homecoming?”

  That was the day I decided to end my five-month crush on Chuck Levy. And it’s why, I think, my fondness for the Beatles was, forever after, a bit grudging.

  “I don’t know. I hear she likes some sophomore.”

  As I struggled to keep my anger from precipitating tears, we’d listened to John and Paul sing about thinking of a girl night and day and swearing they’d get her in the end.

  Now, in the cafeteria, Chuck said. “My mom showed me this article about Oswald, about his living in New Orleans over the summer. Guess what he was reading? What he checked out from the library there? Moonraker, Goldfinger, Thunderball …”

  “Wow,” I said, “really?”

  “Yeah, and From Russia with Love.” He didn’t need to remind us that was JFK’s favorite.

  “Wow,” Alex said.

  We sat in silence for a good fifteen seconds, picking at lasagna, sucking milk from two-cent half-pint cartons.

  Chuck was the first to speak. “Dr. Kimble’s dream was cool, wasn’t it, the way they did it so the first time you think it’s real?” Now he was talking about The Fugitive, which we watched every week. In the previous night’s episode, Kimble, the innocent doctor convicted of murder, has a recurring nightmare in which he’s cornered and shot by the police detective chasing him across the country.

  “My father,” I offered, “says that in real life, psychologically, that kind of recurring dream can mean you feel guilty about something real and want to be punished.”

  Alex said, “What, you think Dr. Kimble did kill his wife?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe he did and just thinks he didn’t. Maybe that’s how they’ll end the series.”

  Alex shook his head. “No way. That’d be cool, but on TV? The good guy has to be a good guy.”

  Finally, Chuck spoke again. “I have a dream like that, where I’ve murdered somebody and I can’t stand that I’m going to have to spend the rest of my life worrying about getting caught. It always seems really real.”

  15

  Back in 1963 people thought they were seeing the future when Gordon Cooper spent a day in outer space circling the earth. But when I look back now at the long weekend after John Kennedy’s assassination, I realize that was the big time-warped glimpse into the twenty-first century. In 1963 it was unprecedented and bizarre to have nothing but news and discussions of news events airing on all three TV channels around the clock for days on end, and to have that clip of Oswald shooting Ruby played again and again. I sit with a plastic pint of sugar-free green-tea gelato and Clarence Darrow purring on my lap, flipping between MSNBC and CNN and FOX, driven from one to the other and back by ads for pharmaceuticals and gold. On every channel, people are talking about the latest breakdown of talks between Israel and the Palestinians. In the last forty-five minutes, I’ve listened to a dozen different anchors and experts and commentators and have learned absolutely nothing I didn’t know from reading the story in the newspaper this morning. For a few months last year, when I stopped watching cable news altogether, I think I felt slightly mellower and happier, like when I gave up cigarettes and Diet Coke, or when mosquito season ends. And as with cigarettes, I’ve come to believe cable news is slowly killing us, giving us intellectual emphysema, cancer of the mind. After all, people smoked for the better part of a century before they really knew it could be fatal.

  On FOX News they’re talking about the heavy security planned for the G-20 summit in Miami next month. An unworried man in Opa-Locka wearing dark glasses and a Nirvana T-shirt says that if they’d moved the summit elsewhere because of the Boca dirty bomb, it would mean the terrorists had won.

  At the ad for Vizontin, the new serotonin re-uptake inhibitor that’s supposed to enable and enhance religious feelings, I switch to CNN International. Their grinning, shouty correspondent who reminds me of Austin Powers is presenting a piece about “controversial political artists.” Such as a Canadian who styles himself to look exactly like Adolf Hitler and appears unannounced in public places apologizing in German for the Holocaust. And—oh my God—Alex Macallister. Alex has paid $225,000 for a lock of
Che Guevara’s hair, which he intends to incorporate into a mixed-media self-portrait. I am stunned. Maybe he really has erased his problematic memories of 1968.

  The phone ring startles me, which makes the cat jump and run. I see on the TV screen that it’s Waverly calling. I feel instantly better, hitched back to reality. She is my anti-anxiety elixir.

  “Hello, darling!”

  “Hey, Grams, guess what? Your foundation guy’s assistant says the grant for Virtual Home’s going to get approved at their next board meeting! Thirty thousand dollars! I almost can’t believe it. Thank you so much.”

  “It wasn’t my doing, it’s your brilliant project—I just pointed you in the right direction.” And also reminded my friend the executive director, in passing, that Waverly is half-nonwhite. “Your mom and dad must be proud.”

  “Yes and no. Dad thinks it’ll help me get into college, make ‘a more attractively balanced extracurricular portfolio,’ which is his way of saying theater’s a waste of time, but he hates that it means I’ll be spending even more time with ‘the derelicts.’ He is such a tool.”

  Yes, he is. “He loves you.”

  “You know what else he wanted me to do? Take some genetic test to find out how likely I am to become a junkie.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah, it’s crazy. They can tell from some certain gene if you’re likely to become an addict or not. I told him no way, but then Saturday morning when I was asleep, he snuck into the bathroom and took my toothbrush and strands of my hair to send to the testing lab. He stole my fucking DNA.”

  “Wow.”

  “Hunter says if the test shows I have a high resistance to addiction, I should start doing coke and then tell Dad it’s all his fault.”

  “No.”

  “I hate coke.”

  “What?”

  “In fact, Hunter and I realized that drugs, drugs you get addicted to, are like some parody of the modern consumer system, right? Shit that brainwashes you into thinking you Must—Buy—More—to—Be—Happy, but then it only makes you temporarily not-unhappy and sets you up to want to buy more. Zombieland, Incorporated.”

  “Very smart. Are you and Hunter, um … going steady?”

  She laughs. “You’re cute, Grams. Yeah, I guess. But he graduates in June, he got in to Wesleyan early. So who knows.”

  “I’d love to meet him.”

  “Great! Actually, that’s why I called. I looked it up online, and your spring break is the same as our spring break, March fifteenth to March twenty-third … “

  I am such a lucky grandmother. “Right, that’s when I’m coming to New York.”

  “No, well, what I was thinking is that you could still come here … and then—and then go with us down to Miami. If you wanted. We’re going down for Occupy the G-20?” She pauses. “I told you, you remember, right?”

  Of course I remember. “Uh-huh.” She wanted me to convince her parents to let her go. “What do your mom and dad think of this plan?”

  “Dad’s worried about me getting busted, but he also thinks it could be a great subject for a college application essay. So Mom’s saying I can go if I don’t sleep outside and a trustworthy adult comes along. Hunter’s brother doesn’t count, even though he’s twenty-three. So …”

  “And she considers me sufficiently trustworthy?”

  “I haven’t—I didn’t want to bring up the possibility until I talked to you. We’d be there for four days. I figured you could stay in a nice hotel, I found one for you online not too far from the hostel where we’d be. And the fare’s only ninety-three dollars each way.”

  “You and Hunter and I would fly down together from New York?”

  She doesn’t answer right away. “We can’t fly, Grams. You know? To this? It’d be too wrong. And planes are so CO2-intensive, like five times the bus.”

  “The bus?”

  “I know, I know, but it only takes twenty-two hours, and you’re asleep for like half that.”

  “I’m flattered you want me to come, I really am, but I haven’t been on a Greyhound in, God, forever.”

  “It’s not Greyhound, but it would be fun, right? Like the old days, a road trip, Kerouac, Kesey, the Jolly Pranksters, all that.”

  “Merry Pranksters,” I tell her. “Maybe after it’s over, after you’re done, I could fly home to L.A. directly from Miami? Which would cut down on my share of C02 emissions, not coming back to New York first.”

  “Absolutely, yeah, I think, if Mom agrees to let me and Hunter take the bus home by ourselves, which I think she would. Wow: you’ll actually do it?”

  Oh, Lord. I guess so. Carpe diem. “Sure.”

  “Awesome.”

  “And your friend Hunter is okay with this plan?”

  “Completely. He won’t believe it, he’s a huge fan, you’re like this big celebrity to him. He did a whole thing in history class based on your article about how the American political system is unconstitutional.”

  “I appreciate that Hunter’s a fan, but that’s not what I wrote, honey.” She was referring to a minor point I made a few years ago that caused a stink, thanks to FOX News. “One could argue,” I wrote in The Atlantic, “that we the people are engaged in a systemic de facto abrogation of Article VI—’no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office’—given that only one of our 535 members of Congress can or will admit to being an atheist.” Even if I hadn’t withdrawn my name from consideration for the Court last year, and I’d been nominated, that sentence alone might have queered my chances for confirmation.

  “Whatever,” Waverly said, “he’ll be super-excited. He’s also inspired by your diabetes, that you’re so completely fine after fifty years of having it.”

  Forty-six years and nine months. “That’s nice.”

  “You are completely healthy—right?”

  “I’m good.”

  “That’s what I thought. No … like, mental issues or anything, right?”

  “None that I haven’t always had. How come? Am I sounding senile?”

  “No, of course not, Mom and Dad were just talking about, I don’t know, scans and new brain studies and whatnot. Mom stuff.”

  As soon as I hang up, I go online to make a reservation for my ton-of-CO2-emitting flights to and from the East Coast. And I see that I’ve received an email from Alex. We’ve had no communication since we spoke a month ago.

  The salutation is “my dearest pal karen.” He says that “if I know 1 thing it’s that everybody’s got his/her own truth,” and that he’s “felt so SHITTY evr since r misunderstanding,” that at the time he was “crazy-frazzled from being in my work/war-zone/rug-merchant head. hope 2 c u f2f IRL soonest. hey! at biotech conference at rockefeller u in nyc i met yr beautiful brainiac greta! SO jealous u have such offspring.”

  16

  If you lived in a prosperous American suburb and attended public high school in the 1960s, you know what my life was like. If your era came later, imagine it with a bit less jadedness and drugs and sex, and no hip-hop or computers: those are my teenage years.

  I understand now why filmmakers resort to montage to suggest the passage of time.

  My family eating Sunday dinner in front of the TV so we can watch the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, with Sabrina using her new Instamatic to take a color picture of the black-and-white screen.

  Me examining myself in a full-length mirror as I talk to my friend Mary Ann on the new TouchTone phone about how I look in my first miniskirt.

  Me on assignment for the New Trier News, interviewing the actor Raymond Burr, who plays Perry Mason on TV, just before he addresses the annual dinner of the North Shore Bar Association.

  Alex and me in the stands at the state championship swim meet, both of us staring at Chuck’s lean, smooth, Speedo’d six-foot-three body as he shakes his arms and flexes his legs in preparation for swimming the 400 freestyle.

  The three of us in Alex’s basement on a Saturday night with a half gallon of orange juice and a fif
th of vodka, Alex belting out “The Name Game” (“Chuck, Chuck bo Buck, banana fanna fo fuck”), me dancing as his go-go-girl sidekick and Chuck applauding.

  The sock hop where Chuck debuts his band, me dancing with a short boy wearing a dickey as I watch Wendy Reichman do an impeccable Jerk all by herself as she gazes adoringly at Chuck.

  Me in French class carefully writing and underlining L’existentialisme, me that night in a Rambler at the Bel-Air drive-in theater (double feature: That Darn Cat! and Die! Die! My Darling!), with a boy a year older from Loyola Academy, making out for the first time and going to second base for the first time the same night.

  Alex and Chuck and me, all three of us in time-lapse close-up, our hair growing longer from freshman to senior year, the boys’ extending over their ears and collars, mine inching past my collarbone to my shoulders and then cascading down my arms and back.

  Me at home alone on a Friday night, listening to Simon & Garfunkel and looking up from The Nation to imagine Chuck (I was not a rock, I was not an island, I felt pain, I was crying) at the Beatles concert at Comiskey Park with Wendy Reichman … Peter and Sabrina going up to bed at the end of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. while I watch That Was the Week That Was with Dad … me in the backseat of our station wagon reading Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut as we drive to northern Minnesota for a family canoe trip during which I will break my arm.

  And so on. Each one of those scenes is absolutely factual, but the portrait as a whole seems half true at best, so much more brisk and fun than the real thing. In a more accurate montage, there would be weirder, less Hollywood-cute moments—me dripping hot wax from a candle onto my little finger to encase it, me using a needle and thread to stitch patterns into the tough skin on the sole of my foot. And all of the five-second glimpses would be effervescent punctuation between long scenes of me reading assigned books and writing key facts on three-by-five cards.

  Notwithstanding the arrival of The Sixties like a very noisy circus parade rolling into town from another dimension, I remained a conscientious student, as did Chuck and Alex. During high school, we never discussed and weren’t even quite aware of the straddle we were attempting, studying hard and participating in extracurriculars even while we reimagined ourselves as existential renegades driven by contempt for conventional ambition and hypocrisy. But after several years doing that straddle, one foot on the solid old dock and the other in the new speedboat as it gunned its engines and started pulling away, it eventually became untenable.