True Believers

by Kurt Andersen

  It’s over, I thought. Obviously, they’d been waiting for us; obviously, we’d been followed all the way from Wilmette; obviously, the local cops had been sent to pick us up and then hand us off to the federal authorities. Maybe they’d busted Alex and he’d squealed. It’s all over now. I’m through. My astronaut’s tether cut, I was spinning out into infinite blackness of space, done, lost, gone.

  Buzzy said, “Officer, we left our IDs, um—”

  Maybe they hadn’t followed us. Maybe they didn’t know about the car.

  “We lost our wallets,” I said, “we lost all our stuff yesterday. At Centennial Beach.”

  In fact, our IDs were in Buzzy’s car a couple of blocks away. But so was the roach of the joint we’d smoked an hour earlier. I didn’t want to be busted for drugs as well.

  We told them who we were. I hadn’t known until that moment that Buzzy’s name was Bernard.

  “How’d you get to Downers Grove?” the lead cop asked. “Driving without a license?”

  “We hitchhiked,” I said.

  “Where you from?”

  “Wilmette,” I said.

  “From Las Vegas, sir, I am,” Buzzy added.

  “You in school?”

  We nodded.

  “Where at?”

  “We go to college in Boston,” I said. “We’re on summer vacation, though.”

  “I know how college works, miss. Which college?”

  At this point I was sure he knew the answer. He was toying with us, seeing if we would lie or tell the truth.

  After the obligatory pause, Buzzy said, “Harvard, sir.”

  It was their response to this answer that gave me the first itsy bit of hope that maybe I was not about to spend the rest of my life in prison. Their surprised and amused disdain, I thought, their smiles and nods and the cop who possibly muttered “Shit” or maybe just spat, seemed like reactions to fresh information, not simply confirmation of a fact they already knew. But maybe I was being wishful.

  “Are either of you in possession of illegal drugs?” the lead cop asked.

  “No, sir,” we both said.

  “We’ll see if you’re telling me the truth about that. You’re under arrest …”

  The flicker of hope winked out. The other two cops were unhooking handcuffs from their belts.

  “… for disorderly conduct. I don’t know how they do things out in Las Vegas or in Wilmette or up at Harvard, but in DuPage County, we require people to carry some kind of proof of who they claim they are.”

  Hope bloomed! And beautifully, breathtakingly exploded, like fireworks, like the Big Bang itself. Disorderly conduct? Lots of people I knew had been arrested for disorderly conduct. Sarah had been arrested for disorderly conduct in New Hampshire for handing out McCarthy leaflets too close to a polling place.

  By the time we’d made our phone calls (my uncle’s cabin had no phone, and Alex didn’t answer), it was clear that the DuPage County sheriff’s deputies thought we were a couple of random hippies, not dangerous radical assassins. I was so relieved I cheerfully answered all of the cops’ other questions—whether we’d ever been arrested before, why we’d come all the way out to Downers Grove to see fireworks, and more. And then when I was taken out of the group jail cell in the morning to sit down with an assistant district attorney, I had a gambit in mind. An unbelievably cocky gambit.

  He was friendly, a year out of Northwestern Law School, he told me. (“A few of my friends go to Northwestern,” I said.) He said he’d hitchhiked last summer to California for a big rock music festival. (I told him I saw Jimi Hendrix perform last summer, too.) He said his law school roommate’s little brother was a junior at Harvard. (“I don’t know him personally, but I recognize the name,” I lied.) I’m sure I’d flirted before, but never consciously, and never with specific ulterior motives.

  “So, Mr. Widdicombe—”

  “Didn’t I tell you to call me Will?”

  I giggled. “Well, before you go to all this trouble and fill out all those forms, I’ve got a question.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “It’s probably stupid.”

  “I doubt it. What?”

  “None of the officers, when we were being arrested, or after we got here to the station and they questioned us, nobody ever gave us our warnings—you know, from that Supreme Court case, what was it, Miranda versus Arizona? Didn’t they decide that police officers have to tell people that they have the right to remain silent and talk to a lawyer and all that stuff? They never did that.” I smiled in a friendly way.

  He grimaced and rolled his eyes and shook his head and left the little office for ten minutes. When he returned, he told me the disorderly conduct charges were being dropped.

  When Buzzy called me “Bonnie”—as in Bonnie and Clyde, as if we were Movement fugitives gone underground—I wanted him to go. I had no interest in taking the outlaw mise-en-scène to the next chapter. The next morning, after he left for Vegas, I drove alone to a Catholic church where none of the priests would know me. Thus on the first Saturday in July 1968, I wound up sitting in a confessional at Saint Mary Catholic Church in Evanston.

  I confessed to what I considered my two mortal sins—plotting a murder that I decided not to carry out, and anonymously giving the name of one of my fellow plotters in order to stop him from committing murder, thereby inadvertently causing his death and the deaths of two other men.

  I’d decided beforehand that if the priest insisted I turn myself in to the police before giving me penance and absolution, I would refuse the deal. He didn’t. I told him I didn’t believe in hell, which might have helped make my case that I was confessing because I was heartily sorry for what I’d done and not just to escape (in the Catholic sense) eternal damnation. He told me he believed I was showing “perfect sorrow” for my sins, which is the Catholic term for a sincere confession. When I promised “to avoid the near occasion of sin” in the future, I meant it, as far as these kinds of sins were concerned. And in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, a man with a kind, high-pitched voice whose face I never saw absolved me of my sins.

  I felt a little better. And although I didn’t and still don’t believe in God in any sense reconcilable with his church’s, on that afternoon I scrupulously committed to performing every bit of the elaborate penance he prescribed.

  The following week my boss from the SDS community organizing office in Uptown called to ask if I wanted to work on the new project he’d set up over in Gary. I declined and spent the rest of the summer typing and filing and greeting clients at my uncle’s law firm, still wondering each morning if government men might show up that day to take me away.

  Alex’s Warhol internship had been canceled, but we saw each other only a couple of times that summer in Wilmette. Taking his lead, we never once discussed Operation Lima Bravo Juliet, and we rarely talked about Chuck.

  “Chuck would’ve loved that,” he said the night we went to see The Thomas Crown Affair.

  “Uh-huh.”

  I forced myself not to cry. The movie is set in Boston and stars Steve McQueen as a sportsman who wears a leather jacket and flies gliders and robs banks for fun. He has an affair with Vicki, Faye Dunaway’s character who tries to turn him in—but at the end, as the police dragnet falls, he escapes, coolly, with a smile.

  “Although I liked her better in Bonnie and Clyde,” Alex said. “She’s better as a crook than a cop.”

  I was not Bonnie Parker or Vicki Anderson, and I was not Tatiana Romanova or Gala Brand or Honey Rider or Viv Michel or Vesper Lynd. I was not a fictional character. My life was not fiction, or a simulation, or a game.

  In August, an SDS girl I knew from Radcliffe phoned and asked if she and two friends could “crash” at my house in Wilmette. I said no, sorry. With the Democratic National Convention as a pretext, thousands of kids were coming to occupy Chicago, to protest the war, the government, capitalism, the American way of life.

  On the second day of the
convention, I was surprised when Alex told me he was driving into Chicago to attend the protests with Patti, his ex. “I need to shoot everything and everybody,” by which he meant he wanted to make films of the protests. “It’s important. Like the guy said on TV today, ‘the whole world is watching.’”

  He could see I was shocked that he was going to put himself in the middle of such a spectacle.

  “Hollaender, we can’t just hunker down for eternity. Life goes on.”

  I didn’t reply, but I disagreed. I tried not to overdramatize our situation, and I found that my fear of getting busted was very slowly diminishing—its half-life would be years, I knew, not months—but I still felt like a fugitive. Waiting for the secret to be discovered and my life to be wrecked, I decided, would be like living with a chronic disease—like my diabetes, which I knew I would have forever, until, probably, someday, it destroyed me.

  According to the news, President Johnson was staying away from Chicago, watching the convention—and the mobs and screaming and beatings—at home on TV. I did the same thing. My mom and dad were surprised.

  I felt silly going to the college bursar’s office on my first day back in Cambridge to change the spelling of my last name from Hollænder to Hollander, but I needed to codify my rebirth.

  I felt nauseated and dizzy a lot that fall. The University Health Service doctors could find no medical reason. They encouraged me to quit cigarettes. They asked if I wanted to see a psychiatrist. I didn’t. How could I honestly talk to some shrink about my secret torment? As my father had said when we’d discussed the Catholic sniper in Texas two summers before, psychiatrists don’t observe any priestly Seal of Confession.

  To freshmen, I’d been that poor girl whose sister died in that plane crash, and to sophomores, I was that poor girl whose boyfriend died doing that drug deal in Washington.

  As hard as I tried to resist overindulging in metaphors and taking my life cues from fiction, the universe didn’t cooperate.

  In my class on the nineteenth-century European novel, the first book we read was Madame Bovary, and I considered it a personal rebuke. I had been Emma Bovary—a spoiled, dreamy, overimaginative, adulterous young thrill seeker who refashioned her life in imitation of the romantic stories and heroines she adored. Once again, I was overidentifying with a fictional character, this time a character whose tragic flaw was overidentifying with tragic fictional characters. I was glad when she killed herself, because I despised her, and because it meant I wasn’t as crazy as she was.

  I was desperate for normalcy, but when my new girlfriends smiled and joked and bummed cigarettes and talked about boys and classes and the Beatles’ White Album, I felt like an impostor.

  Over the summer, Alex had said we needed to “avoid going all Edgar Allan Poe.” I’d figured he meant “The Tell-Tale Heart,” but I’d never read the story until one afternoon in October, standing alone in the dim, musty, silent stacks of Widener Library, hearing my breath and feeling my heart beat. The narrator is a murderer. “You should have seen how wisely I proceeded—with what caution—with what foresight, with what dissimulation!” He’s hidden his victim beneath the floorboards, and when police come to question him, he hallucinates the sound of the beating heart of the dead man, imagining that the police must hear it, too. “The sound increased—and what could I do? … steadily increased … steadily increased … arose over all and continually increased. It grew louder—louder—louder! And still the men chatted pleasantly, and smiled … louder! louder! louder! LOUDER!”

  I put the book back on the shelf and raced out. I am not a character in fiction, I told myself. This is not a story by Poe or Sartre or Flaubert or Ian Fleming or anybody else. This is real life.

  I remembered the retroactive precognition epiphany I’d shared with Chuck and Alex on that druggy dawn when we first talked about assassinating Johnson: It’s what we were training for all along with the James Bond missions. But now I realized that our Bond games had been a different kind of training, not for killing villains but for keeping secrets and leading a double life.

  I threw up as soon as I got outside, on the library steps.

  I mostly succeeded for the rest of college in leading a life that looked normal—in fact, abnormal in those years only for being completely apolitical.

  I wasn’t interested in taking the new courses—”Imperialism and the University,” “Radicalism in America”—that Buzzy and other undergraduates helped teach. A thousand kids signed up for these “cooperative explorations.” and until the college put its foot down, grades were to be assigned randomly.

  I wasn’t among the hundred students who staged a sit-in at the faculty meeting about ending course credit for ROTC, or the hundred who barged into the design school’s course on preventing urban violence, forcing the cancellation of the class.

  Nor did I join up with the hundred SDS kids who took over the main university administration building for most of a day and a night in the spring. I ran into Alex the next afternoon as I was going to the library, and he couldn’t wait to tell me that he’d filmed the bust from outside University Hall at four that morning, including a cop billy-clubbing a kid in a wheelchair.

  “It was amazing,” he said, “it was almost like a scene from If …”

  If … was Alex’s new favorite movie, and not just because everyone told him he looked like its twenty-four-year-old English star, Malcolm McDowell. It was about a teenager leading an armed uprising at his English boarding school in which the insurrectionists fire on other students and parents and faculty. I didn’t want to see it.

  When my roommates went to the mass meeting at the stadium after the University Hall takeover and bust, and voted with the majority of the thousands of students to strike, I stayed in our room studying. When I went to dinner that night, I stopped to read one of the silkscreened posters that had been plastered all over campus encouraging students to strike and giving thirteen reasons to do so, printed entirely in capital letters. I thought two of the reasons—STRIKE BECAUSE THERE’S NO POETRY IN YOUR LECTURES and STRIKE BECAUSE CLASSES ARE A BORE—were factually untrue. And although two others—SEIZE CONTROL OF YOUR LIFE and BECOME MORE HUMAN—were precisely what I was now trying to do, I didn’t think skipping classes was the best means to that end. The next day was the first anniversary of Chuck’s death.

  Coats and ties were no longer required in dining halls, more lectures were disrupted, people screamed at college officials, bomb scares were called in, classes stopped meeting, final exams were canceled once again.

  In the fall, I did not go with the super-radical new SDS faction calling itself Weathermen to vandalize, twice, the Center for International Affairs. One afternoon in the spring, on my way to a lecture on luck and morality by a visiting British philosopher, I happened to run into a huge mob of kids, hundreds, marching from the Yard to the ROTC building. They were chanting, “Burn it down, burn it down.” As I kept walking in the opposite direction, I passed some stragglers, hippies, who had their own chant: “Dare to struggle, dare to win, Charlie Manson, live like him!” They were smirking as they said it, but still.

  I continued to feel like Wile E. Coyote in a Road Runner cartoon, suspended in midair just past the edge of the cliff, waiting to fall. My heart beat faster every time I picked up the phone and heard an unfamiliar voice, or found a letter from an unfamiliar address in my mailbox. When I got a call from the dean’s office in the spring asking me to come in for a chat “as soon as possible,” I warned Buzzy and Alex. But the dean just wanted to gauge my feelings about moving into one of the coeducationalizing Harvard dorms the next fall. “You seem able to stand on your own two feet around boys,” she said.

  During junior year, I’d begun to accept the idea that maybe, somehow, we really had gotten away with it. But at the end of a nervous week in March, I was reading yet another newspaper story about the three SDSers who’d accidentally killed themselves making bombs in a New York town house. The Times said that one of them had bragged of
sloughing off “bourgeois hang-ups like privacy and monogamy” and recently told a college buddy that “for security reasons,” they were dividing into cells of four people. “I know now I’m not afraid to die,” he’d said to his friend two weeks before he blew himself up. The article had a photo. I recognized him. He was one of those resistance and struggle Columbia boys I’d met with Sarah in New York in the summer of 1967, and I remembered him writing down my name and Radcliffe dorm. In the spring of 1970, I found myself hoping that his little address book from three years before had been destroyed in the town house explosion.

  In May, the night I arrived home in Wilmette, as my family sat down to dinner, Dad very ceremoniously told me that he wanted to apologize.

  He had been fifteen minutes late picking me up at O’Hare that afternoon.

  “Oh, come on, don’t worry about it. I’m twenty-one! And I didn’t think you’d forgotten about me.”

  “No, I’m apologizing for what I said when we were sitting at this table three years ago, the night before you left for college. Talking about the war, you said the Johnson administration was ‘fascist,’ and I got very angry with you.”

  I remembered, and so did my fourteen-year-old brother. “It was ‘fucking fascists.’”

  “Peter,” my mother said.

  Dad sighed and shook his head. “So many more people have died since then, tens of thousands of American kids. For no good reason.”

  My eyes were filling with tears.

  “And My Lai,” Dad said. The world had just learned of the massacre by an army company of several hundred unarmed South Vietnamese civilians, mostly women and children, and its cover-up by the U.S. government. “And now these kids in Ohio.” Three weeks earlier, Ohio National Guardsmen had shot thirteen students at Kent State University during an antiwar protest, killing four of them. “I’ve realized you weren’t so wrong after all, Karen. And I’m sorry.”