The Radicals

by Ryan McIlvain

  “Anyway, I assume you’ve heard about old Larry?” Sam said to me.

  “Larry?”

  “Old Lar—the disgraced Soline CEO, just got off scot-free in the trial, to no one’s great surprise? We’re on a first-name basis now.”

  “Of course, yes, sorry.”

  Larry Bosch, man of the hour again. At the start of a forced but rich, a very rich retirement, he was readying his forty- or fifty-odd million in cashed-out, apparently untouchable stock to take with him to the gated obscurity of Westchester County, or maybe over to the Hamptons or the Vineyard, down to Florida. No one quite knew his final hiding place—reports differed—but the general shape of it we’d seen enough to lift our shoulders, most of us, with something less than shock. The captain of industry sails off into the sunset in his looted ship, leaving behind crowded raftfuls of lawyers on huge retainers to continue muddying the waters. The plausible denials must be kept plausible for the appeals process, a few of the lower-downs appeased in their country-club prisons—le capitalisme americain. I’d seen and read plenty about it in the news—you couldn’t not—yet the heart that hung under the head registering all those nouns and verbs was already gamy, contracting, already packed tight with its own troubles. Life was then pizza dough and stinging flour and gray scalding dishwater, as I’ve said, and now it was also a fiancée whose first foretaste of professional failure had pushed her so deep into herself that for all my attempts at comfort I must have looked like a sea lion awkwardly battering an oyster. (The show was rumored to be losing backers, and initial rehearsals had gone disastrously. Raymond had moved things to a smaller venue, pushed back the theoretical opening, etc.) Nor could I get Jen to dissociate herself at all from a production that she herself had called a hijacking—she was merely taking orders now, “shaping” again, doing damage control. The depression she’d sunk to also belied, frankly, what she’d once told me by way of comfort, roles reversed. All jobs suck a little, on Broadway or in the academy or on a grill line—most of the time you’re doing someone else’s bidding, biding your time, and the important thing is to keep your perspective. But now? Some blogger for New York magazine writes a glorified gossip piece (“June vs. Hurricane—And the Hurricane Appears to Be Winning”), and Jen prints it out and pins it to a corkboard hung above the desk in our bedroom, double-underlining the worst parts.

  Failure! Failure everywhere! More than enough failure to go around! In between long pulls on his fruit-punch Gatorade, the gulps like live squirming worms moving down Sam’s throat—out of this vivid grotesquerie Sam produced even greater ones from a seemingly endless store of facts and figures about the Soline result. Eight cents on the dollar, he said. That’s what the thousands of Soline victims could expect from the compromised settlement more than two years after the fact, two years after most of them had lost their savings or their retirements or their homes or all three: The prosecutors would get their generous cuts, the victims would get the leftovers.

  “I know. It’s depressing,” I said.

  “It’s accepted,” Sam said. “It’s basically unchallenged—Lazarus under the table waiting patiently for the scraps to drop, only now there’s no afterlife to make it up to him in. Do you know what eight cents on the dollar actually means for these people? One source I saw estimated that each family will get less than three thousand dollars apiece, whenever they do finally get it. That’s eight fucking cents on the fucking dollar.”

  “Jesus,” I said.

  “It’s a joke. It’s disgraceful.”

  “Well, what is to be done? That old, depressing question.”

  Sam stood up. “Are you coming back to the House today?”

  I still had a little caked dirt clinging stubbornly to the backs of my thighs when we arrived at the Phoenix House. The other times I’d visited, Alex had been out, but now here she came down the front wooden stairs like a fifties housewife in her blue-checkered dress, supple and smiling. She looked a lot better than Sam did, anyway. Her color had returned, and a healthy bit of flesh. I was tempted to greet her as the Italians do—You’ve gained weight!

  Or not really. And the Italians don’t actually prize plump edges anymore, do they? It’s the imaginary idea of Italy, the ancient idealized idea of a thing that clings to the mind.

  “Comrade!”

  This was Alex’s greeting to me, a happy one. I gave it back in kind, with a pair of impromptu European air-kisses—and all was forgiven.

  From the outside the Phoenix House looked unremarkable, a faded yellow semidetached at the end of a street full of faded semidetacheds, just another homely tooth in the long gappy smile of the block. Only on the inside did the House distinguish itself as the sort of punk pad–cum–commune it aspired to be: Trotsky beside Lenin beside Baraka on the sagging weathered built-ins, a few novels and flimsy chapbooks to ward off the suggestion of narrowness, a mess of washed-out Persian rugs on the hardwood floors, tacked-up festoons of Christmas lights on the walls, and beneath them several unframed photos and handmade signs: Polaroids of the Group members, the obligatory red fist, a Sharpied encouragement to FUCK THE POLICE! There was also an apparently working record player overhanging the salvaged end table that stood next to a quadrant of dirtied, deeply used couches…It was the signature decor, the feng shui of another, older time, only now it belonged to our time, too, by sheer insistence. Past and present together. Not dead, not even past.

  I thought of Florence again—helplessly. At any moment it seemed the present world could drop away and sunstruck tangerine-colored Firenze could float up to take its place: the patched stucco walls, narrow cobblestone streets, the chilled frescoed chapels, the green-and-white canvas restaurant awnings that rippled from across the piazzas like sails. Only a week in country, but it was more than enough time for Alex and me to put on a little Italianate flesh of our own: We ate meals of pasta and pizza and risotto, minestrone, mozzarella di bufala, or sometimes straight gelato, affogatos galore, espressos at all hours and in all weathers, great quantities of cheap wine, stinging grappas tossed back in one go, Hemingway-style—all that wonderful peasant food. Il cibo poveri!

  We loved the taste of the language too, though we understood so little of it, spoke even less. We went to our guidebook for relevant words and phrases that we practiced like vaudevillians in the privacy of our little pensione room. Il cibo poveri!—the local lilt leaping up and jumping down each word, each syllable a seesaw, with the pinched swirling hand flourish too, of course, that we inevitably let slip into our real interactions with real Italians. You asked directions of a kind-looking man in uncomfortable-looking shoes, the classic nose—must be a native—but at the end of your question about un ottimo caffé your hand floated up and circled as you looked helplessly on, too late, like a Tourette’s sufferer.

  “I can’t believe you did that,” Alex said the first time it happened.

  “You think he noticed?”

  “Of course he noticed!” She threw her head back, laughing, the beautiful white horseshoe of her upper teeth exposed. We laughed together. I don’t believe we ever did find that ottimo caffé—we made do with another guidebook-recommended gelateria instead, more ice cream for dinner.

  But I return, a little reluctantly, to the Phoenix House.

  I’d sunk down into a low gray couch opposite Sam and Alex, Sam stretching out his pale thin legs, stork-like, his tennis shorts riding high on his thighs. I noticed the downy white hair there, and Alex’s hand coming casually to rest. I thought of the undersides of my own legs. Should I put a towel down? Or was there a bathroom I could freshen up in?

  Alex craned her head behind her past the kitchen, half open above a yellow laminate island, the matching counters with the stands of opaque vodka bottles, cereal boxes, a coffeemaker, more photos on the fridge.

  “Give it a minute?” Alex said. “Or maybe more than a minute? I think there’s a bit of a happening in there.”


  She didn’t elaborate further, only lifted down the record player’s arm onto Sam Cooke’s haunting, beautiful song “A Change Is Gonna Come.” The famous keening voice rose up out of timpani and big-band strings—

  “Nice call on the music,” I said. “Your namesake, Sam.”

  Sam was looking at Alex. “He could use the bathroom upstairs, couldn’t he?”

  “Downstairs is community space, upstairs is for House members,” Alex said, as if speaking only to Sam.

  “I know that.”

  “Okay, then.”

  “He’s an honorary House member, isn’t he? He’s basically here on a trial basis.”

  “Is that true?” Alex said, turning to me.

  “I just don’t want to dirty up your couches.”

  “They’ve seen worse.”

  Alex looked into Sam’s long face again. She turned back to me slowly. “Here’s what you do. Go take a shower upstairs. Make sure the little window’s open or you’ll die of mold ingestion. Dinner’s in an hour, maybe two. Everyone’ll be here. Okay?”

  Sam Cooke was singing out from the depths of his gloomier bridge—

  Then I gooooooo-ooooo to my brother

  And I say, “Brother, help me pleeeeeaaase…”

  The nearer Sam, meanwhile, looked satisfied, nodding, not quite meeting my eye.

  I climbed the stairs with my duffel bag and came down several minutes later to find the music changed, and everything else in the House too. Several people buzzed in the kitchen, talking loudly and knowingly about things I could just miss the meaning of, or just miss the larger meanings behind the smaller ones, I suppose I mean. Jamaal in a bright pink T-shirt that said THIS IS WHAT A FEMINIST LOOKS LIKE said, “Anyhow, how touching, right? How hopeful! Democracy! Bipartisanship! Reaching across the aisle! Eli!” He side-armed me into a hug when he saw me standing there, holding up his other hand ashine from a bowl of tossed salad on the counter. I eventually gathered that Jamaal’s sarcasm—I’d heard it dripping from the first—referred to a private-jet-setting consortium of American billionaires, mostly New York–based but with a few outliers in Chicago, Houston, Silicon Valley. Democrats and Republicans, Yankees and Southerners, men (and they were all men) who spanned radically different industries and “cultures,” but they’d all come together to promote competitiveness, free trade, unfettered innovation—or really ballbusting tactics to compete with the ballbusters abroad, exploitation, and death to all regulators. Touching and democratic indeed. I kept hearing the name “O’Bannon” bandied about, particularly in Jamaal’s mouth, and with a kind of odd pride, as if O’Bannon were a horse Jamaal had put money on.

  “The man is a flat-out evil genius,” Jamaal said. “You know he’s being investigated, right?” Sam and Alex at either end of a wooden cutting board nodded; Tiffany rifling around in the condiments shelf of the open refrigerator sent up a blasé “Figures.” “Yup,” echoed Greg—Greg from the old norming sessions, bow-tie Greg, at the stove, sautéing onions. Jamaal must have noticed the look of confusion on my face because he lifted a pontificating finger as if to explain his point, then he shook the hand out. “In short, he’s funneled money to every Tom, Dick, and Harry in his fucked-up nepotistic Irish family, but since they’re all on the payroll, and since they all have some inscrutable Orwellian title like IT Product Design Overage Underage Manager, as wide a brief as they need to cover their asses, basically—oh, and they’ve all got their own shell companies! That’s the thing! They’ve shell-companied the fuck out of this steaming pile of till-stealing until the investigators can hardly move. The latest is they tried to subpoena one of O’Bannon’s son’s hard drives but O’Bannon claimed the computer wasn’t theirs to give away—it belongs to the shell company, a separate legal entity, no provable paper trail connecting the two. It’s a fucking free-for-all.”

  “Bravo,” said Tiffany wearily.

  “But he’s still in New York?”

  This was Sam from the opposite counter, still slicing off coins of what looked like cucumber.

  “I’m pretty sure,” said Jamaal.

  “You’re pretty sure, pretty boy?”

  “Well, what about your boy? What’s the latest on him?”

  “Oh he’s here. He’s still around. His greed keeps him close.”

  Somewhat absently, a little hard to hear (I’d been drafted to set the table in the other room), Sam took up the conversational line and described Larry Bosch in the late nineties, early two thousands, several years after he’d filed for and recovered from bankruptcy. Now at the cutting edge of a union-busting movement, he’d secretly hired a PR firm to slime the union bosses at the Jersey-based petrochemical company where he worked in the front office. Portraying the bosses as two-bit Castros but just as greedy—how they lined their pockets with members’ dues, drove Lexuses, sold their charges downriver for discreet bonuses, etc., etc.

  “He was basically calling them class traitors,” Sam said, “and the thing is these fucking guys sort of were—huge salaries, lavish vacations and conferences that the workers they represented couldn’t possibly afford. They basically handed their own prosecution to the executive class on a silver platter. You wonder what the Madison Avenue guys got paid for.”

  The conversation had spilled over into the communal meal of French bread and salad and some kind of baked vegetable medley—a ratatouille?—that tasted powerfully of the Pam some two-bit chef had slathered the cooking dish with. I didn’t much mind. A general bonhomie more than made up for it. We caught up, reminisced, gossiped. (I shouldn’t suggest that all the House talk, or even the bulk of it, revolved around questions of social justice or strategy or one-percenter excess.) At the end of the meal I’d relaxed enough to try out a quip about Maoist self-criticism sessions—when would ours begin? I was ready. All this felt too pleasant and freeform to be trusted. When would we draw blood?

  “I bet you’d like that, wouldn’t you,” Alex said. “A little Stalinist circle jerk?”

  “I was kidding, I was kidding!”

  “So was I,” she said. “You can relax, Eli. You’re welcome here.”

  I got back to the apartment in Greenpoint very late that night, begging a ride from Sam. Jen was awake upstairs. She asked where I’d been and I told her everything. Or almost everything. I didn’t mention the job I’d unofficially quit (or the doctoral program I’d quit months earlier). I didn’t mention the wallet and the phone I’d tried to steal from my boss, the jerry-rigged atonement I’d tried to make at Sam’s insistence, all the shouting that followed. I talked about Sam instead, the visit to the Phoenix House, the reunion with the old cohort, some of whom I hadn’t seen in almost two years, and how much the same they seemed and yet different, some of them scarily different. In the blue-black dark of Jen’s bedroom—this was still how I thought of it—I lit up the air with my talk, calm and clinical but also a little wondrous, too, like an anthropologist’s talk. Each member of the House contributed not to an individual quota but a general goal, and not just toward rent and food (these were cheap when you considered how many people were crammed into a two-bedroom two-bathroom house) but also toward an action fund. I couldn’t get anyone to pin down exactly what action they were building toward; they didn’t know themselves, they said—things were fluid, evolving. Sam was still stealing and selling phones with the help of Jamaal and Tiffany, who also had side jobs. ASU Jason worked graveyard shifts at a 7-Eleven, Alex did a little bartending, Adam and Greg had rich and trusting parents. All the House members cadged what they could from friends and family, honed hard-luck stories, lied shamelessly. And all for a cause no one knew anything about—what it was, what its goals were, who would lead it. I never even found out who was in the downstairs bathroom or what they were doing in there for seven hours, closer to eight. I’d been granted a little access but no real access. I’d gotten information but no answers.

 
“I know the feeling,” Jen said, not bothering to hide whatever it was that seeped up into her voice.

  I thought to keep going, pretend to the normalcy I’d pretended to more and more lately—normalcy at three a.m., on a work night, in another shared anecdote, since we shared everything with each other, didn’t we? I started to tell Jen about the Bank of America ad Sam had pulled up on YouTube to show me. This was much later in the evening, much deeper in our cups. Picture Maria’s round face resolving out of the PBR fog and smiling gamely over small white script that read “actual Bank of America customer”—a well-lit room in soft focus behind her, a soundtrack of feel-good acoustic music underneath. She described how she couldn’t have gotten back on her feet without the help and understanding of her Bank of America mortgage broker and the debt-forgiveness plan they’d drawn up together. Cut to a brief slow-motion of Maria and her children playing in a green backyard, gamboling around like cartoon sheep.

  “That’s not their backyard, is it?” I asked Sam.

  “Of course not. You think they let them keep the house?”

  “I just didn’t think a bank could do that sort of thing,” Maria was saying as the music went tonic, the screen fading to white as the words stood out in simple black script: “Caring. It’s what we do.” The bank’s logo faded last, of course, outlasting everything, tattooing itself on the eye.

  “If not the house, what are they talking about?” I asked. “You think she’s talking about that deficiency-agreement stuff?”

  “Who knows what the small print actually covers,” Sam said.