True Believers

by Kurt Andersen

  Johnson changed the subject to economics, and I would’ve changed the channel if he hadn’t been on every channel. We sucked on our giant drinks as we watched. I found a piece of eggshell in mine and spit it out. Near the end of the speech, the president returned to the subject of Vietnam.

  “I do not believe,” he said, “that I should devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal partisan causes or to any duties other than the awesome duties of this office …”

  I shook my head. “Yeah, it’s a really awesome duty to have to kill hundreds of people every hour of every—”

  “Shhh!”

  “Accordingly, I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president.”

  Alex stood up. “Wow, wow, wow,” he said. “Jesus.”

  “Thank you for listening. Good night, and God bless all of you.”

  Neither of us spoke for a long time. Finally, Alex said, “Well … that’s it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  I knew what he meant.

  He was suddenly full of energy, bouncing around the room. He turned off the TV and opened a new pack of cigarettes and turned on the radio—a Bob Dylan song was playing, the fun Dylan, “Rainy Day Women,” and Alex sang along.

  We didn’t have much of a discussion. We sat and listened to Dylan, and then the Monkees (“Daydream Believer”) and Otis Redding (“Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay”) and the Beatles (“Hello Goodbye”), drinking coffee and chain-smoking, thinking and staring.

  It took me a half hour to admit to myself that the game was over.

  We were not going through with Operation Lima Bravo Juliet.

  We were not going to assassinate a president who was now making the first serious effort since the war had begun to end it, and who would be out of office in months, possibly replaced by a president who would withdraw from Vietnam immediately.

  We were not insane.

  I thought of Tiger Tanaka, the Japanese intelligence director in You Only Live Twice, who trained as a kamikaze pilot but survived because World War II ended days before he could go on his mission.

  When the Beatles finished their song about lovers fallen out of sync—”You say yes, I say no / You say stop and I say go, go, go”—I was no longer thinking mainly about the war, or presidential politics, or all the careful plans and dangerous preparations we’d made. I was thinking that if I hadn’t stepped up to the edge of this abyss, hadn’t given myself over to the glamour of heroic gloom, I wouldn’t have cheated on Chuck. As I sat on the floor in a Times Square hotel room, like the one where Chuck and I had spent an ecstatically perfect week a half year earlier, I felt myself turning back into an ordinary girl, a college freshman in her bell-bottomed blue jeans and purple polo-neck ribbed cotton jersey sweater. I was Alice abruptly shoved back through the looking glass to the ordinary world, Dorothy returned at supersonic speed from Oz to Kansas. The net result of my strange adventure was a frivolous act of betrayal of my first love.

  We called the pay phone at the YMCA in Washington, but there was no answer. Surely they’d call us.

  “I don’t mean to sound silly,” Alex offered, “but it’s the thought that counts. We were ready to do it.”

  We had been. Hadn’t we? Until only a couple of hours before? Now it seemed no different than the nine Bond missions that had preceded it, a piece of improvised fiction, an elaborate make-believe stunt, kids playing grown-ups, the scariest game of chicken ever. At the terrifying last second before the runaway car sped over the cliff, we were jumping out.

  It was a nice night, clear and around sixty, and when we got off the subway and walked through Washington Square and the NYU campus, it was like stepping into a giant party. Kids and adults were blasting rock and roll from their rooms and apartments, opening windows, spilling outside, playing conga drums, sharing their joy and incredulity with friends and strangers, hugging, drinking, cheering, chanting “Peace now,” singing “We have overcome.”

  I couldn’t resist. I was happy, too. And relieved, so relieved that we didn’t have to go through with the murder—murders, no doubt—that we’d spent the two months between Groundhog Day and April Fool’s preparing to commit.

  “We did it, Karen,” Sarah said when I got to her dorm, where two dozen excited students were milling in the lobby, chattering up a storm, drinking beer. “The fucking system works.” PEACE was spelled out in empty bottles on the floor, and somebody had tacked up posters of Gene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy on the walls. She said, “It’s like a miracle, right?”

  As Alex and I were returning to Times Square that night, we saw a dozen elephants walking down the street, and behind them a gorilla and chimpanzees and tigers in cages. The Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus had just arrived on the train from Washington, D.C., and was marching toward Madison Square Garden. When we got back to the hotel, there was no message from the boys in D.C. They were probably out celebrating.

  The next morning when I woke up, Alex wasn’t in our room. I took my paperback of Cat’s Cradle and walked out to read on a bench in the middle of Broadway. It started drizzling, but I kept reading. After a while, Alex appeared.

  “Crikey, Hollaender, you’re piss-wet!”

  “Where’d you go?”

  “Oh, I, you know, woke up early and popped out, ran errands. Did Chuck and Buzzy call?”

  I shook my head.

  “They might’ve rung while you were out here,” he said. “They’ll ring.”

  We had breakfast at Howard Johnson’s. Alex was delighted that we’d aborted the mission, said he’d “realized it would probably be terrible for the Movement if we’d gone through with it, given this new situation.” He was reanimated, his old self, commenting sotto voce on our fellow diners (“Check out the enormous bum on the pigtailed chick”) and suggesting that we stay in New York for a few days anyway, all four of us, and have a real spring break.

  “We’ve got the rooms booked. And at the theater where I saw Hair? There’s a new play Darko told me about that spoofs Esperanto, by this Czech playwright, Havel. And through WMAQ, my dad could get us tickets to Johnny Carson, to be in the studio audience. Maybe I could also do my interview at Warhol’s.” He had applied to be a summer intern at the Factory, Andy Warhol’s studio. “And there’s a big Dada and surrealism show I really want to see at the Modern.”

  He was kind of manic. I was not yet prepared to have fun. “Yeah, you mentioned the art show. You said you thought we could fit it in before Lima Bravo Juliet.”

  “Come on—what happened last night threw a giant spanner into the works, but it’s not like it’s a bummer, you know? It’s a happy ending! All’s well that ends well! And at the Whitney, there’s a show by this guy who makes these absolutely plain metal boxes, like dresser drawers—like, if that’s art? I could be an artist.”

  “I think I just want to go back to Cambridge.”

  “Hollaender, you don’t need to be all … stroppy.”

  I hadn’t noticed until then that for the last couple of months, Alex had stopped trying to sound like a British person—no “pop out,” no “ring us,” no “enormous bum,” no “rooms booked,” no “stroppy.” He had been Gravely Serious Alex. Now he was Blithe Cosmopolitan Alex again. He had stepped back into character. Or stepped out of his temporary character.

  “Sorry,” I said. “What errands did you do this morning?”

  “What?” He dug into his pack for a cigarette.

  “Why did you go out?”

  “Oh, right, I had to make a phone call.”

  “From a pay phone?”

  “I didn’t want to wake you.”

  “Who?”

  “What?”

  “A phone call to who?”

  “Oh—my fine-arts section leader. He’s in Paris for spring break, so I had to ring before it got too late there. To, you know, discuss a paper I’m writing. That I plan to write.”

  “Fine Arts 13 has papers?”

  �
��No, but that’s why I needed to talk to him. It’d be, you know, for extra credit.”

  “On what? The paper.”

  “Aren’t you a nosy parker? It’s about Duchamp.”

  I didn’t know who Duchamp was. But as when Buzzy had interrogated Alex during reading period about his “family friend” in Switzerland, I was sure I’d caught him in another lie, that he was covering up some secret New York sexual assignation. Who was I to press that point? After breakfast, Alex said he was going to the Museum of Modern Art to see the Dada show and that he’d meet me at noon in Central Park across from Rumplemayer’s, a restaurant he’d loved on family visits when he was little—his treat.

  When I got back to the hotel, there was a phone message with no name, just a number with a 202 area code and the notation ASAP. I didn’t bother walking out to a pay phone. Security was no longer an issue. The plot was finished.

  The man who answered identified himself as a Penn Central Railroad assistant manager. He put Buzzy on.

  “Chuck’s gone loco. After the thing last night on TV, he’s more gung ho than ever, the war’s not over, I’m a hypocrite and a pussy if I’m going to back out now. We have this knockdown, dragout, huge fight, and he walks off, just splits. He shows up back at the Y around three this morning, wakes me up, and—I assume you guys agree, right, we’re done, the whole … the thing is moot, right, because—”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Good. Because I fibbed and told him I’d talked to both of you last night and that the three of us completely agree. And he just … freaks out. He starts yelling and punching me, and then some YMCA guy shows up, and Chuck insists on getting his own room. And then this morning he’s gone. Disappeared.” Buzzy’s voice became a muffled whisper: “He left a note: ‘The worse the better’ and ‘Tell Jessica that Hugo still loves her.’ I get the first”—it was a Bolshevik saying from before the Russian Revolution—”but who are Jessica and Hugo?”

  “Nobody. Fictional characters. I’ll tell you later.”

  “He took everything.”

  “Your car?”

  “Everything. You know? Everything.” He paused to make sure I understood his meaning.

  I felt as if I were floating, literally, physically, sickeningly, like on a roller coaster plummeting downhill.

  “All I had is the twenty bucks in my billfold, which is barely enough to get me back to Cambridge. Which is why this very nice gentleman is letting me use the phone in his office. The fucking pay phones here—oh, sorry, sir—the phones at the station don’t accept incoming long-distance, and the Boston train leaves in, crap, six minutes.”

  “Jesus,” I asked, “where is he? What’s—what’s he going to do?”

  “Can’t really talk now.”

  “I’m coming down there. Alex and I will catch the next train.”

  “That’s stupid, Karen. That makes no sense. In fact, you know, it’s probably … you know …”

  “Dangerous?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Did you try looking for him?”

  “Look where? He could be anywhere. Doing … whatever. D.C. is bigger than Boston, and I don’t know my way around.”

  Oh, Christ. “Buzzy, did you tell him? About us?”

  “I’m afraid so. Yeah. This morning. Although he was kind of grokking it on his own, too. I’ll explain. Gotta go.”

  Oh, God, oh fuck, oh fuck, oh shit.

  I smoked a cigarette.

  Jesus Christ.

  I’d never felt more fond of Buzzy, and I realized, as I rushed out of the hotel and headed for the museum to find Alex, one of the reasons why: during our phone conversation, he had not once used any of his ridiculous military slang, no “Lima Bravo Juliet,” no “AWOL,” no “ABORT,” no “zero-700 hours.” He wasn’t playing a role. He was being a normal person.

  I was panicky, and being in New York amped up the panic. After two years of self-indoctrination and three months in our Harvard Yard militant hothouse, the four of us had made a mad leap of faith hand in hand—but at the last second, one of us couldn’t manage the midair twist and leap back.

  Alex and Buzzy and I had let rationality reassert itself, but Chuck—earnest Chuck, realistic Chuck, irresolute Chuck, cuckolded Chuck, three-against-one Chuck, Chuck now all alone—was going for broke.

  I thought of the times I’d called him a wishy-washy liberal, the times I didn’t rise up in defense when Buzzy and Alex called him Hamlet. He was going to prove he was the stalwart one, tougher than a Vietnam vet, the true hero among us all. Hamlet? Hamlet finally acts by embarking on a righteous killing spree.

  In twenty-four hours, I had gone from feverish tunnel-vision commitment to miraculous release from the delirium at the eleventh hour to … chaos, life out of control, my fortunes tied to a betrayed and berserk runaway boy.

  He was alone in Washington, D.C., wandering with a pistol, fifty rounds of ammunition, ten pounds of explosive putty, a couple of hundred dollars, a hundred Benzedrine tablets, and a 1956 Plymouth station wagon. And the giant radio-controlled model airplane he’d built by hand with his dad when he was eleven years old.

  I was terrified of what he might do and terrified of what might happen to me. He was on his own, but we would be liable. For two months I had swatted away the obvious, bothersome possibility that my life was about to be ruined because of the choice I’d made, but on the afternoon of April 1, I couldn’t stop thinking that my life was about to be ruined despite the sensible new choice I’d made the night before. My ruination, if it came, would be the result of another irrevocable choice—the emotional decision I’d made after making the rational decision to kill Lyndon Johnson and before the rational decision that assassinating him no longer made sense. I was paying the price for deciding I might as well fuck Buzzy Freeman.

  I ran most of the way to the museum. I waited almost an hour, until twelve-thirty, but Alex never came out, so I headed up Sixth Avenue toward Central Park to our appointed meeting place.

  He said the line at the Dada show had been too long, so he “went for a stroll, window-shopping, people-watching.”

  I practically shouted the news—that Chuck was determined to go through with it, had taken the pistol and speed and money and car and bomb and set out on his own, and Buzzy had no idea where he was. Alex said I sounded hysterical and suggested I was hypoglycemic or going through Benzedrine withdrawal. I was hysterical.

  “Okay, yes,” Alex said, “this thing has gone completely pear-shaped. But he’ll spend a day or two sulking alone and figure out what makes sense and get a grip. Flying the Dauntless by himself and then getting away? I don’t think so. I mean, Karen, come on, Chuck isn’t a nutter.”

  “He’s got the explosive. He’s got the gun. It sounds like he may not be thinking about getting away. Remember, at the beginning, he was the one who said, ‘We could do it close up.’”

  “Yeah, but we were brainstorming. He didn’t want to go kamikaze. Remember? We quoted Churchill, and he agreed.”

  The Churchill quote had come up when we were hatching the plan—Buzzy had said “ ‘Although always prepared for martyrdom,’” and Alex finished the sentence with him: “‘ I prefer that it should be postponed.’”

  “That was two months ago,” I said. “A lot’s happened since then. Once we made the putty and bought the pistols—”

  “They bought the pistols.”

  “—I think Chuck sort of started, you know, tripping on violence.”

  “Ours is now gone, by the way, the pistol,” Alex said, “along with the bullets. Down a sewer.”

  “He used to play with the Luger sometimes, he’d look at himself in the mirror holding it. And one night a month ago, he asked if I’d ever believed in an afterlife, and when I said yeah, until I was eleven I thought I was going to heaven, he told me he’d never believed any of it—that Jews don’t. I said, ‘Another reason to like Jewish people. They’re rational.’ He said his dad says that’s why Jews are so neurotic, because they know this
, life, is it. ‘No do-overs.’ But Chuck said now he realized the flip side of that—he said, ‘I don’t have to worry about dying because I don’t have to worry about going to hell.’”

  “He’ll ring. We can talk him off the ledge. Take a deep breath. Sit down.”

  I took a breath, and then another, and we sat on a bench. “Buzzy told him we slept together. Buzzy and I. We did. We are. We have been.”

  “What? Oh my God, Hollaender! I knew it. I mean, I didn’t actually know it, but I’m not surprised.” With the slightest smile, he leaned back and looked me over and shook his head, not so much in disapproval, I thought, but interestedly, maybe enviously. “Very déjà vu, Hollaender.”

  I had no idea what he meant.

  “ ‘Oh, my goodness,’” he cooed in a high-pitched voice meant to be mine, “ ‘what can you possibly be talking about?’ Last spring, when you and Chuck started your shagging and kept it secret from me. Now I get why he’s so freaked out. He feels betrayed. By you two.”

  I wanted to curse Alex, slap him. But he was right. So I resorted to the tactic we, especially he, used when we were little—I know you are, but what am I? “Keeping secrets from your best friends, huh? Secret sex, huh? Like you and your secret rendezvous, your ‘friend’ in Yugoslavia and your ‘friend’ in Switzerland and calling your teacher and ‘window-shopping’ this morning. Give me a break.”

  “No—you don’t have any idea what you’re talking about. No idea.”

  I already regretted my bitch gambit. Alex’s private life was none of my business. And arguing about sex and lies was a stupid digression. We had to figure out some way to stop Chuck from killing people and destroying himself and wrecking our lives.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Maybe I should drink a pop.”

  He bought me a Coke from a hot-dog cart, and after a few minutes I felt better, my anger gone, my panic and regret still intense but proportionate, no longer spiraling down into some hypoglycemic pit. I cried, and Alex got me a napkin so I could blow my nose.

  We talked about going to the authorities, turning Chuck in, but apart from the ethics of squealing, the chances of that ending badly seemed high. Besides, then we would be implicated.