ALSO BY DAVID GOODWILLIE
Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time: A Memoir
AMERICAN
SUBVERSIVE
A NOVEL
DAVID GOODWILLIE
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Copyright © 2010 by David Goodwillie
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Manufactured in the United States of America
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2009042233
ISBN 978-1-4391-5705-3
ISBN 978-1-4391-6992-6 (ebook)
For my brother, Douglas
Let me say, at the risk of seeming ridiculous,
that a true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love.
—Che Guevara
Americans learn only from catastrophe
and not from experience.
—Theodore Roosevelt
I AM IN HIDING, SOMEPLACE COLD. SOMEPLACE THEY WON’T FIND ME, OR haven’t yet. Weeks have passed, weeks spent watching weather through windows, flash storms, incessant rains. And now the first snow. It fell in the night, six inches or more, and with dawn came the groaning plows down in the valley—the digging out before the long settling in. The hillsides are barren, the foliage all fallen away, leaving only the trees themselves, shivering and vulnerable. I can see most of the driveway through the bare branches, a half mile of unpaved switchbacks winding through the fields, before the final run-out to the county road. To civilization, if that’s what you’d call it. That’s what I called it for a long time, or would have if I’d ever thought like that. About America, I mean.
The house isn’t so bad. It’s a retrofitted barn with two low-ceilinged bedrooms upstairs, and down here, a central space for eating, working, living. Plenty of furniture, too, a jumble of cast-off antiques and yard-sale specials, amassed slowly over the years—spared, salvaged, saved. A running theme, perhaps. There is no romance in going underground, in becoming anonymous, stateless, tended to by strangers who come and go in shadows. I have no TV, no phone, no computer or Internet. They’re serious about communication, or the necessary lack of it, because you never know who could be listening in. The best I can do is a small radio and days-old newspapers, which my handlers bring on their twice-weekly visits. Tuesdays and Fridays at dusk. They flash their high beams at the bottom of the driveway and again closer to the house. Otherwise I split. That’s the plan.
I don’t know the history of the place, but I imagine it’s been used like this for a while—as a hideout, a safe house, a place to regroup and then move on. Everything here is transitory, cheap, easily left behind. Even the few decorations—the model ship above the fireplace, the sun-faded posters advertising Pan Am 747s and British Rail routes to Scotland—speak to travel, to escape. But there’s nowhere to go, not right now, and so I sit here at this timeworn desk, keyed up on coffee and cigarettes, searching for a voice, a way into the story. I want to remember what my life was like before. Sounds stupid, I realize. I lived it, so how hard can it be to put into words? Well, I’ve tried:
My name is Aidan Cole. For three years I wrote and edited a popular New York–based blog called Roorback.com. Defined literally, a roorback is a “defamatory falsehood published for political effect,” but I wanted the grand old word to stand for all the defamations and falsehoods published and proffered in our irreverent media age. Indeed, my blog was a wryly cynical and slightly subversive examination of the fourth estate’s daily lies and blunderings, a kind of meta-media—
Oh, you know all that already, and you know much of what’s to follow as well. The public facts are all too familiar. But the truth . . . the truth has remained elusive.
Even now, it’s hard to accept—to really comprehend—what has happened. Maybe putting it down on paper will help. Somewhere out there—and I wish I knew where—Paige Roderick is doing the same, using words to explain her actions. Our actions. That’s the promise we made on our last night together: to write our stories as best we understood them. Perhaps these accounts will aid our defense if we get caught, or enlighten others if we get killed. That was Paige’s original intent, after all—to hijack people’s scant attentions and warn them of the world to come. Maybe, months or years from now, hidden behind foolproof identities or living safely on foreign soil, we’ll combine the two tales, then post it all online or publish it as a memoir, a kind of warning shot across the American bow. And why not? We’re a decade into the century of the self, the age of endless explanation, where every life demands a public forum, every face a shot at fame. More likely, though, these pages will never find an audience. Our tenuous situations will change, or certain memories will prove too much to revisit day after day. And maybe that’s for the best. Still, we must try, while we have time and truth on our side. We’re far from innocent. But we’re hardly guilty as charged.
AIDAN
TO THINK THIS ALL STARTED AT MY GIRLFRIEND’S PARTY, LESS THAN THREE months ago. I say girlfriend, but Cressida preferred lover. Girlfriend meant something different in her native London, she always told me, but I think she just liked the mystery, the vague open-endedness of her favored term. That and it read better. Cressida Kent, in case you’re not from New York (and believe me, there’s no reason you should be), was a metro reporter and monthly “relationships columnist” for the New York Times, the latest—and most accomplished—in a long line of shameless girls-about-town who documented the romantic possibilities of the city after dark. She lived with two other women in their early thirties (a reality-TV producer and a senior editor at Glamour), in a converted warehouse on Gansevoort Street, smack in the middle of the Meatpacking District. They were of a type, the three roommates—assiduous, attractive, and unmarried—and judging by the crowd that night, they seemed to know every young media professional still lucky enough to be employed after two long years of recessionary layoffs.
It was the last Wednesday in August. Almost four days had passed since the explosion, but its effects were still evident in every corner of the room. New York, despite the faded memory of 9/11, had never really been a city of bombs. So many countries were represented by its consulates and realized in its boroughs that I’d always believed there was a kind of unstated agreement to fight the terror wars elsewhere, in distant gulfs and deserts. But those assumptions had just changed overn
ight, and quickly, the nine years since 2001 seemed nothing more than time to catch our breath.
Cressida’s large, exposed-brick loft was full of wrinkled shirts and wearied brows, tired but exhilarated men and women still seeking answers to the most basic journalistic questions—the who, how, and why of the act itself. The story of the year was up for grabs, and every able reporter in the city was chasing it. Hence the scattered cliques, pockets of people in corners, horse-trading gossip, running rumors on margin. Still, the party wasn’t all business, because terrorism, in the end, is personal (just as politics is local). It starts with the one, with private fears and anxieties and an inevitable looking inward, until we each lift our heads and find one other. It was the first night people had ventured back out, and the feeling that we ’ d once again dodged some kind of bullet—or bomb—hovered over the proceedings like so much cigarette smoke. The collective relief was palpable.
Our hosts hadn’t held back: two male models poured liquor from behind a fully stocked bar; moonlighting actresses slithered through the crowd carrying trays of dumplings and miniature spring rolls; in a corner near the kitchen a voluptuous woman in a flowing ensemble read tarot cards to a captivated audience; and toward the back of the space, beyond the dining-room-cum-dance-floor, stood a dead-eyed DJ in a black-and-white-striped bodysuit, spinning seventies glam rock sprinkled with new wave. The party was loud and crowded, and that was the point: to get people out of their offices and away from their iPhones, their BlackBerrys, their laptops. If only for a night. It was almost 1 a.m. and I’d spent the last half hour inching through the high-ceilinged room, hugging friends and sparring with acquaintances. For these were the very people I chronicled. I was trying to find Cressida and had come within sight of her more than once, but every time we made eye contact, she shook her head and turned away. You see, I hadn’t actually been invited. We’d been fighting since her last column appeared, the week before, but still, I hoped my surprise appearance, coupled with the larger events of the moment, might bring her to the bargaining table. If not the bedroom.
Then I saw Touché. He was talking to the DJ as he flipped through her milk crate of LPs. She stood behind the turntables expressionless, pretending not to listen, but her headphones were down around her neck, leaving her ears vulnerable to that purring South American accent. She was all black bangs and colored tattoos—not Touché’s normal quarry, but my friend was nothing if not adaptable—and she was trying so hard to remain aloof. Indeed, her tortured disdain for her surroundings was a thing to behold, all these young professionals in their boutique clothes and jangling accessories, blurring after a while into the same self-important person—Exhibit A being this suave Latin guy flipping through her records, far too well dressed and classically handsome for her taste, but still, there was something about him. I watched her glance his way, once and then again. And then I knew she had no chance. Julian Touché was tall and dark, with smooth hair and flawless skin, but his eyes were what did it. They were charcoal colored, but when they fell on someone (and they always fell, moving down from some higher place), they became at that moment the brightest in any room. He could look a woman dead on and she’d forget what she was saying. It was a talent we, his friends, had noticed early on, and Christ, how it worked: send Touché to break the ice and everyone was in for a memorable night. And yet, something about his rakishness was completely sincere. He never tried too hard; with his looks, background, and bank account he didn’t have to. He was the kind of person you just wanted to be around because there was always a chance something extraordinary would happen. I watched him pick out a record, then lean in close to give it to her. He whispered something in her ear, and that’s all it took: she fell out of character. She bit her lip, grabbed his forearm, and giggled. Suddenly she was just another jaded hipster who knew too much about music.
She was examining the album in her hands when Touché looked up and saw me. A grin spread across his face, a grin that reached back past our recent months of silence to the luminous years that had come before. He gave the DJ what looked like a kiss on the neck, then turned and came striding toward me. When he put his arms out to greet me, I got that same old feeling—that I was in the glowing center of it all.
“Too long,” he said. We hugged, then he stepped back to take my measure.
“You’re the one who disappeared.”
“Ah, Aidan, I’m not so hard to find.”
A new song came on, some nineties Brit-pop number, Pulp or James or Blur—I always got them confused—and Touché turned and gave the DJ a small wave.
“You picked this?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Who sings it?”
“I have no idea. But she has to like it. They’re her records, no?” He laughed, then looked at the empty drink in my hand. “That won’t do. I’ll be right back.” Before I could answer, he disappeared into the crowd in front of the bar.
He was always disappearing. Sometimes it was minutes, often it was months. As it happened, I hadn’t seen him since before Memorial Day, when he flew down to Venezuela to spend a few weeks with his family. He did it every year, except this time he didn’t come back. Or maybe he did and never told me, which was entirely possible: Julian Touché’s life was defined by ambiguity. Part of it was the money, of course; money can make anyone mysterious. But Touché seemed to thrive on vagueness. We could pick right back up where we left off, as if the last three months had never happened, and as long as I didn’t ask questions, as long as he was ultimately calling the shots, everything would be fine.
We met in the fall of 2002, a few weeks into our first semester at NYU’s graduate school of journalism. It was the night the clocks changed, and I was at a bar on the Bowery with a girl I sat next to in Politics and the Press. When the conversation dried up, she used the extra hour as an excuse to head home to get some work done. This was some years ago, when the Bowery at 2 a.m.—or 3—was still a shadowy obstacle course for a woman dressed like she meant it, and so I said I’d walk her back to campus. On Mercer Street, we fell in with a group of fellow journalism students heading to a party. When my date heard the host’s name, she suddenly got her second wind.
Their destination was a stately Washington Square apartment building with a uniformed doorman and a spacious lobby that had us talking under our breath out of respect for the marble. The doorman didn’t ask whom we were visiting. He just looked at the girls with a smile, then followed us into the elevator, pulled the crosshatched gate closed, and up we went. All the way to the top. There was no exterior hallway; the doors opened right into the apartment. It was a small detail at the time, but one I still remember these many years later. How real wealth is so often measured by absence. The apartment was a maze of frayed and well-worn rooms filled with cracked-leather armchairs and antique armoires, a collage of old-world styles and colors, the accumulation of generations—generations of Touchés, as it turned out. I walked down a corridor lined with sconces and into a living room the size of a small Broadway stage. Other halls wandered off toward distant bedrooms, but everything happened in that central room. I perched on an armrest and watched pretty people come and go, the party continually refreshing itself like a stylish European airport bar as small waves of new arrivals appeared (after last call at the bars) to replace the not-so-early departures.
I met the man himself in the kitchen. He’d just finished pouring shots for a semifamous actor and his friends, and when he saw me, he simply walked up and introduced himself. He didn’t ask who I was or how I’d gotten there; for that matter, no one did. Just finding the place meant I belonged. He looked familiar, and for good reason. We weren’t in any classes together, but we knew some of the same people, had noticed the same girls. We talked awhile, and when he was finally called into other conversations, I wandered back to the living room, with its period furniture and peeling wallpaper. A painter’s easel near the windows held a half-finished watercolor (Mrs. Touché’s sometimes hobby, I later learned). In a ne
arby corner rested a stand-up globe, its faded sepia surface hinting at the hard-won boundaries of earlier empires. But Touché the younger had made his mark as well, and the room now teetered between generations: nude Nan Goldin photographs beside nude Picasso prints; a flat-screen TV wedged between century-old French windows; and behind the globe a complex stereo system, its lights and buttons blinking down upon the dusty earth like alien crafts in formation.
When I finally left, around 5 a.m., I did so with the impression that Julian Touché and I had, well, hit it off—a rare thing for two straight men in New York—though I couldn’t for the life of me remember what we’d discussed. In the weeks that followed I tried to piece together my new friend’s background. Everyone at school claimed to know something about him. His father, Santo, was a successful businessman-turned-politician from one of Venezuela’s oldest families. Mary, his exquisite mother, was an American heiress, a descendant of Du Ponts. From here, we moved toward conjecture. It was said that Santo Touché played a large role in the palace coup that had just that year brought down the socialist regime of Hugo Chávez. But in the power vacuum that followed, Chávez was sucked back into office, and Santo and dozens of other aristocratic revolutionaries were forced to flee with their families to the relative safety of distant provinces. Some, citing Julian’s extended absences, believed my new friend had played a significant part in these proceedings. Others thought him nothing more than a generous playboy living high off his two noble bloodlines—the New York apartment, a summer house on Fishers Island, a chalet in Courchevel—while his father moved among hidden estates in the foothills of the Orinoco River.
This was my introduction to the legend. And there was so much more. I heard—and would soon become part of—stories that became almost mythical in the retelling, but I’ll spare you the specifics. It is enough to say that Julian Touché enjoyed excesses of every kind, traveled in circles I’d only glimpsed, and all the while stage-managed the many facets of his life so carefully that after many years of camaraderie, even close friends never quite knew where they stood within his wide and graceful orbit.
American Subversive Page 1