After the final note of “Good Lovin’” rang out and the show was over in earnest, a mere pause until tomorrow, the foursome walked down the path, back to the parking lot, where the party was still raging. Those who hadn’t had tickets and had stayed listening to bootlegs on tape decks in the lot sat around on deck chairs by the trunks of their cars, some naked and drooling, others passed out, draped over the hoods of their cars or sprawled flat on little patches where the grass had not been completely tramped down. People streamed out of the stadium, heading to their vans and VW buses to continue the evening, lighting up barbecues and spreading out silver rings and anklets and beaded necklaces on sheets of black velvet. The two couples searched for Eliza’s car for a few minutes, or perhaps they spent several hours meandering through the cars and the Deadheads until they were in the car, speeding toward Eliza’s mom’s place in Bethpage, where they would stay until they got to come back again tomorrow afternoon.
But that first night, after they had walked over the magical line that separated this world from the one they lived in, and after Schaeffer and Eliza had gone to her childhood bedroom upstairs, Benji and Rachel headed to the pullout in Eliza Blaunstein’s basement. They were finally alone, and only now did this seem as if this had been the goal of the entire evening. Benji, releasing gently from his trip, went down on Rachel for what felt to him like several magnificent hours, and he would then realize, in between moments of stupendous joy, that what had happened was about both self-determination and community, a transcendent moment when love and music and fate and beauty all met up. He would appreciate that this was something unstoppable and good, and that, were this energy harnessed, it could do amazing things in the world. Sigmund was wrong; revolution was possible in this country. The Dead! The Dead; it made Benji think of ghosts, the friendly one, that Gloria, whose presence he’d once felt as he sat on the edge of his bed at Len’s house in Skatesville, and then the ones he had heard of but had never seen. Where did Trotsky go? Once someone had told him Mexico. But where was the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg?
Who came before his grandfather?
Benji lapped Rachel up, with vigor and abandon, Rachel, who had allowed him entry, Rachel, who had showed him everything. He knew he would do whatever he had to do to feel this way, and to help others feel this way, over and over.
There was no way he was going to miss those Jersey shows. Still, he would rather have more of his work done than he’d had last semester when, after the second show in Nassau, he and Rachel had gotten on a friend of a friend’s bus filled with MIT grads taking a break from string theory and quantum physics to tour year-round. They made gas money selling veggie pizzas and whole-wheat spaghetti in the parking lots before and after shows, and Benji and Rachel traveled with them to Providence, Philly, Maryland, and Buffalo, making red sauce with locally grown zucchini. Eight days after they’d started, Rachel had had to drag Benji away from the hot plate, off the bus, and back to Waltham, or he would most likely have continued on to Ann Arbor, then out West, never returning to school.
* * *
“Why don’t you come another weekend?” Benji had asked his mother a few days earlier. “When it won’t be so crazy here.”
She sucked in her breath. “But this is family weekend! I told you we were coming up ages ago, Ben. Ages ago.”
Benji leaned back and closed his eyes. Please don’t let this be one of those conversations, he thought. “Okay, first of all, it’s not family weekend. It’s parents’ day, but it’s also just a really busy time is all.”
“Why would they plan family day at such a busy time?”
“It’s parents’ day, Mom, Jesus!” Benji said. “It’s okay you’re bringing Vanessa, and Rachel is fine to have her stay with her in the dorm, but can we just call it parents’ weekend, not family day? It’s not camp. And who is they anyway?” Benji had a fleeting thought of sleepaway camp, all the parents lining up to meet their children, and his mother stepping up first to take his hand and hold it to her heart. Then he thought of working at that day camp out in Potomac, his hands on the shoulders of his favorite campers as their parents greeted him hello and thanked him for improving their corner kicks.
“The planners!” Sharon said. “And sure, honey, we can call it whatever you want, but we’ve all carved out time this weekend to come up, and this is what we’re doing. As a family. Besides, how will you feel if everyone else’s family is there and you’re all alone?”
He remembered his mother then, stepping away from his father and greeting him by the flagpole; she looked tan and young and pretty, not the way he saw her when, after hearing of her accident, he’d come back from Rachel’s parents’ house to see her arms and chest bandaged, her head propped up and lolling from side to side from the morphine. I am risking vulnerability today, she’d said when she saw him. Today I hold out my hand of trust, she’d said, extending the arm that was not bandaged. Benji took her hand without hesitation and sat down.
“None of my friends’ parents are coming, Mom.” Benji quickly discounted Arnie from this category. “Because it’s No Big Deal. But you know what? Forget it, just come up. Okay?”
“Great, sweetie. We’ll be there, don’t worry. And we’re all thrilled to meet Rachel. We’ll see you in a few days!”
When Benji had hung up, he was surprised to find himself relieved. Why relief was the dominating sensation, he couldn’t really say, but when he thought about it, he could pinpoint its arrival around the moment his mother referred to the event as “family” day. Meaning she did not have the impression it was mother/son day. Because Benji could not have endured one single minute of mother/son day, which he imagined as one extra-long afternoon of his mother splayed out on his beanbag chair listening to The Stranger. He remembered her fingering the record cover featuring Billy Joel gazing at that faggy white mask, and she’d said to Benji, We all wear masks, you know. Benjamin—she’d looked up at him with watery eyes—can you see mine?
No, he couldn’t, he thought now. And he did not want to. He remembered his mother wandering into his room nonchalantly after he got home from practice and lying on her back on the floor, her hair fanned out behind her head while he played Elton John and Jim Croce. In this way someone else played his mother his own emotional sound track. In the seventh grade he’d made out at a dance with Holly Martin, an art-club girl with long hair and freckles and blue paint beneath her fingernails, to Joe Cocker’s “You Are So Beautiful,” and though he hadn’t told this to his mother, he had played the song for Holly.
His mother had cried. You’re everything I hoped for; you’re everything I need . . . Joe Cocker’s psychotic singing fused with his mother’s tears. “Do you think anyone will ever say this about me?” she’d asked him, her hands splayed over her face. “Benjamin, honey, life can be so disappointing.” Instantly his associations shifted from Holly’s soft, wet mouth, her darting animal tongue, and her lithe body that shook just a little in his arms from first-time fear, to his mother.
Since her accident, Benji had received several late-night calls that he had not told anyone about, not even Rachel. His mother sounded as if she were speaking from a phone booth beneath a torrent of rain. He would picture her pulling her coat around her and pushing the glass door shut, trying to stay dry. She always seemed thousands of miles away, like his father had the time he’d spoken to him when he was in Moscow. Benji had been told that his father had called from Russia the day Vanessa was born, but he held only the most vague memory of that day, a foggy image of his grandfather Herbert sitting with him at the kitchen table watching as Benji wound the yellow telephone cord tight around his index finger as he talked into the huge receiver. In these late-night conversations his mother would tell him how she could no longer talk to his father, or that sometimes she wanted to stay in her dreams. She worried that her own father was dying. His skin, she would say, is so thin, so thin, Ben. We’re all getting very old.
Benji could not fathom why his mother insisted on handing over so
much, as if he were a vault where she could store all her emotions. He hung up with her and then crept across campus, around the pond, no moon visible tonight, the still water a sheet of black, past the art museum, to Ridgewood. As always, late-night partiers were hanging out drinking from a massive jug of red wine and playing guitar in the courtyard, and he nodded at them as he went up to Rachel’s suite, into her room, and, finally, completing the journey’s objective, into her warm bed.
She yawned into him, her body hot with sleep. “Hey, you,” she said, poking his side. “What’s up?”
She smelled of pot and sandalwood and mint-chip ice cream, and Benji lifted her T-shirt—the yellow Maryland Is for Crabs shirt he’d gotten in Ocean City years ago, faded from beach sun and walking on the boardwalk, watching for girls at the funnel stands and the Tilt-A-Whirl—to run his palm over her fleshy belly. All the weed-smoking girls he now knew had an extra layer that spilled out over their diaphanous, long skirts, their tie-dyed tank tops, and along the peripheries of their round happy faces. Benji grew to love this, in Rachel in particular, and he could see her abundance even on her toes, the silver toe ring, tight around the second toe. Tonight he’d wanted to curl up in her flesh without explanation. This was why, he thought now, he enjoyed tripping. When he was in transit from one world to the other, all that was so inarticulate was not negative at all, but wholly transforming.
The little, everyday stuff was also transfigured when tripping. Just the previous week he and Rachel and Schaeffer had eaten mushrooms and taken the train into Boston. They’d ended up on the Common, where a million dogs dotted the park. There were huge Newfoundlands and Great Danes—like the one that had lived across the street from Benji and had almost bit off that girl’s face—and there were bichons and vizslas and springer spaniels and cairn terriers and poodles and also mutts of all sizes, colors, and combinations.
Benji approached the owner of a Saint Bernard. “Excuse me. What a lovely species! Is there some kind of a dog show here this evening?”
The man had looked at him strangely, and Benji wondered if he could tell he was tripping. “Umm, no. It’s six o’clock and folks are home from work and we’re all just out walking our dogs.”
“Really! You are all very lucky individuals, these are spectacular creatures!” Benji had said as Rachel and Schaeffer giggled a few yards away.
Not all trips, however, were good trips, and tonight there was no trip at all. Benji wanted to disappear in this bed and not be asked why, as Rachel was wont to ask. Why are you feeling freaked-out tonight? Why does this word—family—upset you so much? Are you feeling bad about your mother’s accident? All were fair game and it would be exhausting. But she had merely turned toward him sleepily. I can’t explain it, he’d wanted to tell Rachel without telling her, and so his finger trailed down her soft stomach and into her wild bush of hair, and then, as if this would name his feeling, made its way urgently inside.
Benji put his family’s imminent visit out of his mind and turned to his American Protest! work. It was really the first class of its kind, Professor Schwartz, one of the youngest professors at the university, told the students often. After all, curriculums change more slowly than the living events of the world, he’d said, quoting from the “Port Huron Statement,” Benji realized only later as he went over the document line by line with a pink highlighter. The rumor was that Professor Schwartz’s girlfriend had left him to become a Manson follower and had somehow—maybe tangentially?—been involved in Helter Skelter, though no one had the balls to ask him about it. How could one be tangentially involved with Manson anyway? It seemed as if you were in or out when it came to Manson. Reports, perhaps faulty as well, had also circulated that the professor had fucked Sharon Tate before dating said girlfriend. It was a series of strange and unusual coincidences. Or was it? the students all asked one another. Perhaps, they said, it was all connected in some grand and divine plan. Whatever the case, it gave the professor a certain amount of cred to teach such a subversive class; he could be student and university, establishment and anti-establishment, everything at once.
The yearlong course—because two semesters, Schwartz had written in the course description, was as long as he needed to teach it—had already ambled through the history of social movements of the thirties to the resistance of the forties, and on to the era of conformity that was the fifties, a time Benji still could not completely wrap his head around, but for the past few weeks the class had become about the sixties and the sixties alone. The sixties; The Sixties! What hadn’t happened in the sixties, the mother of all eras, when it came to radicalism. Berkeley! Civil rights! Student revolts! Psychedelia! This was what the students had all been waiting for; it was why they’d taken the class in the first place, and each and every day Benji sat in a lecture, he wished he’d been born a decade and a half previously. He’d had no idea how much social protest there had been, and how much of it had happened here at Brandeis University. Black, feminist, anti-war, gay, environmental, social-class, student, all these forms of activism were incredibly edifying. “The Port Huron Statement” was old, but still it rang so very true: The decline of utopia and hope is in fact one of the defining features of social life today. The reasons are various: the dreams of the older left were perverted by Stalinism and never re-created.
Were the older left and his grandfather truly this dismissible? The class had learned about his grandfather’s generation last semester—the many ways they had built on the Debsian tradition of socialism, how they had brought it into a universal, national debate, and how they were once a great force in American democracy. But they got lost, Schwartz said. They didn’t take action, man! They were apologists for Stalin. Benji thought of his grandfather stepping out of a train with Tatti, several disco compilations tucked under his arm. Perhaps this was the look of a man who had lost his way.
Thanksgiving was the first time Benji had talked to his grandfather about all he’d learned. He’d stepped into the house on Thornapple Street and it had seemed tiny to him, a dollhouse with minuscule rooms and miniature pieces of furniture; even the plates and silverware seemed to have shrunk since he’d gone.
The dining room table was formally set—light green linen tablecloth, Sharon’s mother’s silver, her wedding china, ringed in gold—for six, and just as everyone was poised to pull out his or her chair, Benji stopped suddenly. “Wait!” he said, clearing his throat. “Before eating of this most beautiful bounty, we need to take a moment to remember the Native Americans. Thanksgiving was, after all, a day of mourning for the original Americans, and so today we should all remember the injustices our people inflicted on them.”
“Not my people,” Vanessa said, pulling out her chair. “My people were being killed somewhere else.”
“You get what I mean,” Benji said. “Jesus.”
A few moments into the meal, after Dennis had served the carved bird, and Sharon had spooned gratin, too hot to pass, on the plates beside the meat, Benji turned to his grandfather.
“I have a question,” he said, before stuffing himself with turkey and cranberry sauce. “Did socialism fail because all you guys at City College hung on to your beliefs in Stalin for too long?” Benji had thought about becoming a vegetarian, like Rachel, who had such good reasons for abstaining from meat, and who told him about them nearly every time he ordered a burger. But he just couldn’t do it. He loved his meat, he thought now, chewing his mother’s most excellent turkey. A man needs his meat, he laughed to himself, knowing he would never say this to his feminist girlfriend unless he was in the mood to be pummeled.
Sigmund’s nostrils flared. “That is entirely incorrect. Who told you such a thing?” he asked, sitting up in his chair and quietly putting down his fork.
Dennis cleared his throat and shot Sharon a look across the table. Benji thought of the previous Thanksgiving when he had still lived at home and his mom’s parents had flown in from Los Angeles. Helen said she’d had enough of the uncivilized trip to the East Coa
st, just to gnaw on a turkey leg and listen to Sigmund drone on as he did. This year, they had gone to some club in Palm Springs, and during the cheese and crackers before the meal, there had been much conversation about why they hadn’t come and, more important, why they would ever join a club that only began to let in Jews two years ago. Benji imagined them now, eating turkey and stuffing alone at the club with a view of the golf course. He’d have felt bad if he hadn’t known they were having a far better time there than they would here, Helen screaming over to Tatiana, as if she were not foreign, but deaf, and Herb talking about bonds for Israel and baseball and his Olympic-coin collection, reaching right over Dennis for salt and gravy. Benji knew few people with less to talk about than his grandfathers.
Now Benji shrugged sheepishly at Sigmund’s question. “I can’t remember who told me. My protest-class professor, maybe?” He felt protective of Schwartz for some reason. “But I’m not sure; we haven’t gotten to that time period yet. I’m reading a little ahead.” He put out his plate for his mother to serve him more of the gratin, then took a massive forkful of cheese and potato and shoved it into his mouth.
“You like it!” she said, smiling too brightly.
“How often are we here as a family? Ben’s home.” Dennis clapped his hands together in a false manner of exclamation. “Ben, why don’t you tell us a little about your life at school?”
“Everyone can call me Benji now.” He looked around the table. “And this is my life at school, Dad. This is totally my life now.”
Dennis took a deep breath and Vanessa giggled.
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