True Believers

by Kurt Andersen

  On Tuesday I went to the memorial service for Dr. King at the church in Harvard Yard. Again my crying was partly selfish, because it started when Chuck’s freshman seminar teacher rose to deliver one of the eulogies. With his beard and long hair, twenty-nine-year-old Professor Peretz looked like Chuck would look in ten years—that’s the thought that made me choke up, and then his words made me start weeping. “It is now five minutes before midnight,” he said. “Not earlier. Five minutes before midnight.”

  On Sunday, April 14, I phoned my parents. My mother had spent every weekend all winter ringing doorbells in Wisconsin for Gene McCarthy, so she was ecstatic that he’d won the primary by a landslide, and even happier when I neglected to pooh-pooh his victory.

  “I’m so pleased you called us on Easter, Karen.”

  “Good.” It’s Sunday, Mother. I call every Sunday. “I’m glad.”

  “Are you feeling all right, honey? You sound out of sorts. How’s Chuck?”

  “The same.” We talked for another few minutes, and almost as soon as I hung up, the phone rang.

  I was going to kill the president, and I cheated on my boyfriend with one of our best friends, and Chuck has gone into hiding with the arsenal we assembled, so yes, Mother, I guess I am feeling a little out of sorts. “What is it?”

  “He called.” It was Alex. “I just got off with him. He’s still in Washington. So that’s good.”

  I didn’t stop to ask why that was good. I wondered if Chuck had tried calling me and gotten a busy signal. “How does he sound?”

  “Not quite as mad as a box of frogs.”

  “Did you get his address? Or a phone number?”

  “He refused. ‘Operational security,’ he said.”

  “Oh, Jesus.”

  “When I asked if he’d heard Johnson’s speech to Congress”—the president had convened a joint session to propose “constructive action instead of destructive action in this hour of national need”—”Chuck just laughed. He’s staying in some rooming house in the ghetto down there, and he was thrilled to be in the middle of the riots last week. He was thrilled that some guy he met where he’s staying, some random Negro, told him that Stokely Carmichael was talking to a crowd in the street right near where they were. Chuck went out and heard him say, Stokely Carmichael, ‘It’s time to end this nonviolence bullshit.’ He talked about sneaking out after curfew with the Luger, like he was playing some kind of game. And he kept saying, ‘Alex, this is the revolution … This is the revolution.’ He asked if I’d heard about Rudi Dutschke.” A few days earlier in West Berlin, our number one favorite New Left leader had been shot in the face by a young neo-Nazi. “He said, ‘It’s sad, but man, the worse the better.’ He’s almost out of money, though, so that’s good, too. And he said to tell you not to worry the Cubs have lost two of their first four games. Which seemed sort of … sane-ish.”

  “Does he have the plane and the putty?”

  “He didn’t say. I didn’t ask. I assume so.”

  “Did he mention me and Buzzy?”

  “He said, ‘I guess I had it coming.’”

  “What does that mean?”

  “He said, ‘We’re all human.’ He said, ‘Along the way, we’ve all been sneaky and disloyal in our own ways.’”

  “What does that mean?” I thought of my one-minute conversation two weeks earlier with Special Agent Hardison. I’d never told Alex or Buzzy or anyone else about the call.

  “Who bloody knows? But I think there’s a real chance it may work out okay. Johnson’s going to Hawaii tonight, so that’s another fairly brilliant piece of luck. I think I’ve made a good start, you know, to bring Chuck in from the cold.”

  “What, he’s calling it quits and coming back to Cambridge?”

  “It’s delicate, Hollaender. It may not be that simple. He and I are going to talk again tomorrow night.”

  Maybe because I’d heard a lot of Scripture at the service for Dr. King, or maybe because it was Easter, I spent the rest of the night thinking about Genesis 22, one of the stories in the Bible that I’d always found horrible and unfathomable. That’s the one where God, (apparently) in order to test Abraham’s unquestioning faith, commands him to murder and burn his young son Isaac in “a holocaust,” but then (apparently) sends an angel at the last instant to stop the sacrifice. Was I Abraham or God? Was Chuck Isaac or Abraham? Was the angel Alex or me? In any case, the story in the Bible ended happily.

  29

  Forty-six springs ago, after we ended the plot, I decided my tragic flaw was an overactive imagination, my love of stories, that I would never again assume the guise of some fictional character—no more young King Arthur or Alice, no more Howl beatnik, no more Bond girl, no more New Left mother-country guerrilla. As things turned out, I’ve had to play a different fictional character for forty-six years, a version of Karen Hollander who did not conspire to assassinate the president.

  I admire my eighteen-going-on-nineteen-year-old self for having the acuity and will to see clearly what I’d been doing my whole life—imagining myself as a fictional character—and then decide to quit doing it. It wasn’t until many years later that I came to understand it wasn’t only Alex and Chuck and I who had quasi-fictionalized ourselves; that we’d been afflicted by a pandemic perceptual glitch.

  In the 1960s, metaphors started to seem more real to more people than ever before. Sure, we all lived in the ordinary world, writing checks, shampooing our hair, stopping at red lights. And we continued to understand that novels and movies and comic books and dreams were unreal. But with the ‘60s, I think, came a new hybrid consciousness, an in-between realm where the metaphorical and the fantastical mingled with the literal and the everyday.

  I don’t think it was caused by the sudden wholesale use of marijuana and LSD, although those drugs certainly intensified the sensation of not-quite-real-but-not-quite-fictional life. The three times I took psychedelics, I never thought the strangers I encountered were literally lizards or mutant angels or extraterrestrials, and when I was stoned, I didn’t literally think the TV had turned into one of Big Brother’s telescreens from 1984. But some of those strangers seemed very, very lizardy, and the government seemed powerful and malevolent in a way it never had previously.

  To millions of other people as well, starting in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, notions that for years had been safely metaphorical—such as the miraculous stories in the Bible—turned literal. Because so many people of so many different types experienced the same glitch at the same time, it seemed like a new feature of consciousness rather than a bug.

  This glitch spread beyond hippies and radicals and Jesus freaks, and it was never entirely repaired. Twenty-first-century people fictionalize themselves like mad.

  When I was little, the women who dyed their hair were outré; now we all do. Cosmetic surgery is all about self-fictionalizing. Young people these days routinely talk about themselves secondhand, as if they’re describing characters in a novel or a movie; instead of Waverly’s friend Sophie complaining, for instance, I hated what that boy did, she said, “I was like, ‘Hello, just shoot me, please.’”

  People have online avatars and pseudonyms, and turn themselves into fictional online farmers or killers who form guilds and cults to embark on missions and quests to raise immortal cherry trees or destroy vampires and elves, and spend billions of real dollars buying entirely fictional digital merchandise. I just discovered that in the 3-D virtual world Second Life, there’s an “FBI Careers Island” where “Bureau job-seekers and their influencers” interact with “in-world mentors.” In the real world, adults compete to become fictional “mayors” of actual restaurants and shops, and roam city streets in superhero costumes to fight crime, and insist that counterfactual fictions (the U.S. government arranged the 9/11 attacks, the president is a foreigner) are true, and dress up in eighteenth-century drag to call moderate politicians fascists, socialists, traitors, Antichrists. Real life has become a massive multiplayer role-playing game. Thi
s week I watched a ten-minute video of a big battle in the Pakistani civil war, filmed from a high-rise in Islamabad. The video had been “tilt-shifted” with a computer effect to make everything look miniature—the tanks firing and buildings exploding and soldiers and jihadists dying all looked like little toys.

  The most serious argument I ever had with my granddaughter concerned the “truth about 9/11” nonsense, which she discovered on the tenth anniversary, in 2011, when she was fourteen. Having finally convinced Waverly that such a conspiracy and cover-up were impossible, I worry that, as she reads my story—a conspiracy, a cover-up that lasted for decades—she will be nudged away from the reality-based community.

  Waverly told me last week that she’d done some research into SDS and its positions during the years I was a member, when I was in high school. “It doesn’t sound ‘radical’ at all,” she said. She has a point. The 1967 SDS national convention passed a resolution in favor of reproductive rights and suggesting that husbands and wives share housework equally. And one of my projects the summer I worked for JOIN in Chicago involved buying hamburger meat in supermarkets in working-class and well-to-do neighborhoods, frying it, measuring the fat that cooked off, and presenting to the city council our findings that poor people paid more for fattier meat.

  Imagine if a random New Left kid could be fetched from 1968 to the twenty-first century. Wouldn’t she look around and think the revolution had succeeded? The draft ended, the Vietcong won. Communist China isn’t just in the UN but on its way to becoming the most powerful nation on earth. Socialists run Venezuela and Nicaragua as well as Cuba. Since Vietnam, the biggest U.S. wars have been tiny by comparison. Apartheid ended in South Africa, and a billion fewer Asians are poor. All sensible people take ecology seriously. Feminism triumphed—most new doctors and lawyers are women, and so is a majority of the American workforce. Abortion is mainly legal and marijuana practically so. On television, people curse and have sex, and there’s a twenty-four-hour leftist news channel. Respectable grown-ups wear blue jeans and sneakers and listen to rock music and get high. A black man who did drugs and admired Malcolm X was elected president. And Henry Kissinger and other old conservatives formed an organization promoting total nuclear disarmament.

  Our young time traveler would find that the utopian New Left notion of “post-scarcity,” the idea that humankind can produce more than enough stuff to satisfy everyone on earth, has been achieved in one realm: information and entertainment. To our 1968 kid, that aspect of the present day—cheap instant access from anywhere on earth to billions of books and journals and magazines and maps and pictures and charts and pamphlets and catalogs, as well as every movie and show and song—would seem like some stoner’s sci-fi fantasy come true.

  But I wonder what she would make of the fact that the Rolling Stones and Paul McCartney and Cream are playing gigs as seventy-year-olds. I’m not sure she’d be pleased to find that the chant she shouted at Vietnam demonstrations—”Hey, hey, LBJ”—has been continually repeated ever since by crowds outside police stations and embassies and corporate headquarters and the White House: “Thatcher, Reagan, CIA,” “Hey, Clinton,” “Hey, Bush,” “Hey, Obama, what do you say, how many kids did you kill today?” I think it might seem annoying and freaky, like an album that kept skipping for fifty years and nobody lifted the needle to move it past the scratch.

  After a while visiting our era, in fact, she might become dispirited by all the familiar political tropes, what Waverly calls the “cover versions of the sixties.” The rest of the world is still complaining about the wealth and power and obliviousness of America, as they began doing in the ‘60s. American leaders still warn that negotiating with foreign dictators is like the British appeasing Hitler, the way the secretary of state warned in 1966 against making peace overtures in Vietnam. Hip white kids are still romanticizing ghetto violence, unsmiling costumed Panthers then and unsmiling costumed rappers now. Armageddon and apocalypse were right around the corner in the late ‘60s, and they’re right around the corner now. Now as then, true believers loathe the moderates in their midst. She would definitely understand why, since her era, we’ve coined the phrase “been there, done that.”

  30

  During the day after Alex talked to Chuck on the phone, I convinced myself that this adventure would finally, yes, have a happy ending. Chuck was just freaked out. He wasn’t crazy. Alex was right. Someday we’d all laugh about it. That’s what adults always said about the fucked-up things that happened to them when they were young.

  When I called Alex that Monday afternoon, he hadn’t yet heard from Chuck, but he told me not to worry. But then when I called after dinner, he sounded weird, reticent. The chipper hopefulness was all gone.

  “Chuck called, didn’t he? He’s going to try to go through with it, isn’t he?”

  “No.”

  “What did he say?”

  “I didn’t talk to him.”

  “When are you supposed to talk to him?”

  Alex didn’t say anything.

  “Alex?”

  “There was no specific time.”

  “Maybe we should both hang out in your room, so when he does call, I’ll be there. I mean, if he wants to talk to me. If it seems like that would help.”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  As I left my Folklore and Mythology class the next morning, where the professor talked about the mythic Norse super-warriors known as berserkers, I stood in the big arched front doorway of Sever Hall slipping on the knit gloves Sabrina had given me two Christmases before. I looked up and saw Buzzy and Alex standing at the foot of the steps, a few feet away. They were both looking at me. Buzzy was holding a Washington Post with both hands.

  The article was tiny, a couple of inches at the bottom of a page deep in the paper. The only newsworthiness was flagged in the headline, 3 WHITES FATALLY SHOT IN SOUTHEAST D.C.—Caucasians had killed other Caucasians in a black neighborhood.

  Three men were shot and killed yesterday after a brief gun battle on the third floor of a rooming house in the Anacostia section of Southeast Washington. All of the men were white. According to DC police, the first shots were fired by one of those killed, Charles A. Levy, 19, of Wilmette, Ill., who had been renting a room there for two weeks. The identities of the two other victims, one of whom died later of his wounds at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, could not be immediately confirmed. Both were said to be Virginia residents. The surviving gunman is in federal custody.

  A DC police detective said that the shootings “appeared to be the result of a drug deal gone bad,” adding that a large empty amphetamine canister was found at the scene.

  Mildred Thigpen, a resident of the rooming house, located on Good Hope Road near 17th Street, said she heard shots, “but we hear guns all the time anyhow.” Miss Thigpen also said that following the shooting, “there were about ten plainclothes all up in here everywhere right away. I never seen nothing like that. Because of the rioting, I guess. And because they were white men who done the shooting.”

  DC police say that no other suspects are being sought.

  My face was wet. Buzzy had his arm around me. We were still standing in front of Sever. Kids walked past us, going to the library, going to class, laughing, looking at the budding trees. I felt sick. I thought I might pass out.

  “That’s it?” I asked.

  That was it.

  “Who were the other men?”

  Alex shrugged and shook his head. “Feds,” Buzzy said. “Had to be.”

  We all went to Buzzy and Chuck’s dorm room. I sobbed until my eyes were almost swollen shut. I had been in love with Chuck Levy for a third of my life. I’d never felt such agony.

  But it was hard to separate my grief and guilt from my fear. Whoever killed him had known who Chuck was. He had been shot twenty-four hours earlier, plenty of time for the authorities to search every scrap in his room and to know who his friends were. I was surprised we hadn’t already been busted, and I figured that soon we
’d be questioned and arrested by the Secret Service or the FBI, charged with conspiracy to murder the president, possession of explosives, God knows what else.

  I could tell Buzzy was scared, too. “ ‘No other suspects are being sought’ is obviously bullshit. Not to be paranoid, okay,” he said, before sputtering and speculating at high speed about whether the new Supreme Court ruling on confessions meant that if we immediately blabbed as they were arresting us, before they warned us we didn’t have to talk, maybe our convictions would be overturned … and then about a theory he’d studied last semester, “the prisoner’s dilemma,” where three criminals are arrested and interrogated separately, and how each of them has the choice of ratting out the others, which, if they all do, achieves almost nothing; or keeping quiet, which works out okay if none of them snitch; or, if two keep quiet but the other one rats out those two …

  “Actually,” Alex said, “I think this is it. I think we might be okay. I mean, yes, absolutely, if they question us, none of us knows anything about, you know, the plan. In fact, I think this should be the last time the three of us talk about it even to each other. But it’s not like Chuck kept a diary or anything. Right? ‘No notes,’ that’s what you kept saying, Buzzy, ‘no notes, nothing written down, optimize OP-SEC.’ Right?”

  “I’ve already combed this room three times in the last two weeks,” Buzzy said. “But who knows what he might’ve been writing at the end down there by himself.”