“Hi, Bobby,” Eileen’s voice said brightly on the other end of the old-fashioned audio-only American phone. “Have a good time?”
“Uh . . .”
“I had a wonderful time, I met this guy with millions of muscles who fucked my brains out!”
“Why are you telling me this, Eileen?” Bobby stammered.
“Why to thank you for inviting me, of course!”
Bobby didn’t know what to say to that.
But Eileen Sparrow, as usual, was not at a loss for words. “Well, that’s not exactly the whole truth, Bobby,” she said when he didn’t reply. “I mean, you were so silly last night, I mean you acted like I was your mother or something! I just wanted to set you straight, I mean, I really wasn’t pissed at you at all, truly, truly, I wasn’t. Okay?”
“Okay,” Bobby said, quite touched.
“I mean, you don’t owe me anything, and I don’t owe you anything, so please, please, just have a good time and don’t be so uptight about it. We’re young, we’re horny, it’s only like natural, and this is—”
“I know, I know, this is Berkeley!” Bobby said, and they both laughed.
“Well, I gotta go now, Bobby,” Eileen said. “Mr. America has another hard-on, would you believe it?”
“Have fun,” Bobby said, and, somewhat to his surprise, he realized that he meant it.
“Oh don’t worry, I will! ’Bye!”
And that was the moment of revelation, as Bobby stood there in the kitchen, with Karl and Cindy pouring themselves coffee from the communal urn and Shandra Corday upstairs in his bed, and Eileen Sparrow off somewhere in bed with someone else, but enough of a real friend to have called him to set his mind at ease.
This was where he belonged. This was a time and a place and a feeling that he never wanted to leave. He would go to college at UC Berkeley. He would major in history, and maybe he could go to grad school here too, and get a job teaching at the university like Nat Wolfowitz, and with luck, he could stay here in Berkeley forever.
Finding the courage to call Paris was something else again. Mom would go through the roof. The deal was that he was supposed to come back to Paris and go to the Sorbonne in the fall, and Dad had had to get into some pretty bad stuff with her to get him even this trip. Things had not been so terrific between them when he had left, which was maybe one of the reasons he hadn’t called home at all yet. And now . . .
Bobby put it off, and put it off, and put it off, but finally, late at night after another losing poker game, when he knew he would catch his parents at the breakfast table, and fatigue had fogged his brain sufficiently, he found himself walking into the empty kitchen and dialing Paris before he had complete awareness of exactly what he was doing.
Maybe they’ve left already, he told himself as the phone rang once, twice, thrice.
“Hello?” said his father’s voice on the other end.
No such luck.
“Hi, Dad, this is Bobby.”
“Bobby! Where the hell are you? We’ve been worried sick! Sonya, it’s Bobby, pick up in the bedroom!”
“I’m in Berkeley, Dad, I’m sorry, but—”
“Robert!”
“Hi, Mom—”
“Where on earth are you?”
“He’s in Berkeley, Sonya.”
“Why haven’t you called?” Mom demanded. “Not even a postcard!”
“And what’s wrong with the picture? Our screens are blank.”
“This is America, Mom, ordinary homes aren’t wired for v-phones, remember?”
“But the decent hotels certainly must have—”
“I’m not staying in a hotel, I’ve got a room in this great house, with wonderful people, it’s real cheap, and I can stay here as long as I want, so it’s hardly gonna cost you anything for me to go to UC Berkeley, except for tuition. . . .”
There, it was out, and done.
“Oh no you’re not, Robert!” Mom snapped.
“Oh yes I am! My mind’s made up, and you’re not gonna change it. I’m going to Berkeley!”
“Not on our money, you’re not, Robert,” Mom said. “Not one ECU, not one ruble, not one dollar!”
“Sonya!” Dad exclaimed.
“He’ll forget about this nonsense as soon as he runs out of money.”
“Sonya, he’s got a right to live his own life, we can’t blackmail—”
“This is all your fault, Jerry Reed! I knew we should never have let him go to that madhouse in the first place! No money, Robert, you’re coming home, and you’re going to the Sorbonne!”
“Never!” Bobby shouted. “I’m staying here.”
“We’ll see how long you last supporting yourself and paying your own tuition. . . .”
“I’ll . . . I’ll get a job!” Bobby stammered.
“I’m sure there are endless jobs in California for eighteen-year-olds with no experience that pay enough to send you through a capitalist university,” Mom said sarcastically.
“I’ll . . . I’ll join the Army! They pay for four years of college in return for four years’ service.”
“Bob!”
“Go ahead, Robert,” Mom said knowingly. “That’s one silly bluff I’m quite ready to call.”
Bobby forced himself to think coldly. Play the cards, he told himself. You don’t have much showing, but they can’t be sure what you’ve got in the hole.
“Have it your way, Mom,” Bobby said in as cool a tone as he could muster. “I can always deal drugs, they bring back marijuana in body bags from the South American war zones, did you know that? I know the guys who are doing it. No one goes broke dealing dope in Berkeley. . . .”
“Bob!” Dad shouted in a horrified voice. “For God’s sake, don’t do anything stupid! I’ll get you the money one way or another, I promise!”
“Jerry!”
“Goddamnit, Sonya, you want your own son dealing dope? You want to see him rotting in some miserable jail for twenty years?”
“I won’t have it, I won’t have you blackmailing us like this, Robert!”
“Now the Politburo is calling the Supreme Soviet a bunch of Commies?” Bobby snapped back.
There was the sound of a receiver hanging up.
“Promise me you won’t do anything foolish, Bob,” Dad’s voice pleaded. “Give me your number, and I’ll call you back when I’ve convinced your mother to listen to reason. But please don’t do anything stupid, let me handle it, okay?”
“Okay, Dad,” Bobby said. “But I’m serious. I’ll do whatever I have to to stay here. Do you believe me?”
“I believe you, Bob,” Dad said woodenly. “Just wait for my call before you do anything.”
And after Bobby gave him the number, he hung up, leaving Bobby alone in the empty kitchen in the dead of night, wondering what he would really do if his bluff was called.
Two days later, Mom and Dad called together. It was really strange. “The three of us have got to work this out as a family instead of fighting with each other,” Dad said in a weird pleading tone of voice.
“Your father and I have worked out a compromise,” Mom said, sounding strangely distant. “You come home to Paris for college, and you can spend your summers in America.”
“No,” Bobby said.
“Please, Bob,” Dad pleaded. “You’re making things very difficult.”
“I’ll spend my summers in Paris if you pay for me to go to Berkeley,” Bobby countered.
“I told you this was futile, Jerry!” Mom snapped angrily.
“Bob, please, your mother and I—”
“I thought you were on my side, Dad! All that stuff you were always telling me about America ever since I was a little kid—”
“Bob—”
“—it was all a lie, wasn’t it? You never believed a word of it!”
“You know that’s not true! If it wasn’t for me, you wouldn’t be in America in the first place!”
“That’s the first intelligent thing you’ve said in a week, Jerry Reed!”
>
“Sonya!”
“Don’t Sonya me!”
“Please, Bob, can’t you see that your mother and I—”
“Classes start here in ten days, and if I don’t have the tuition money by Monday, I’m going to have to borrow the first installment from my dealer friends and start pushing drugs to pay it back or they’ll stuff me in a body bag!”
And he hung up on them and let them think about it.
Finally, late Sunday night, Bobby got the long-awaited call from his father. Dad sounded weary, and distant, and strangely defeated.
“All right, Bob,” he said tiredly. “I’ll be wiring you the money tomorrow.”
“Hey, that’s great, Dad, that’s just great!” Bobby exclaimed. “How did you manage to convince Mom?”
There was a long silence and then an audible sigh on the other end of the line. “That’s . . . that’s between your mother and me,” Dad finally said. “You know . . . she really does love you, in her way. . . .”
“She sure has a funny way of showing it.”
“Yeah, well . . . love isn’t always easy, Bob,” Dad said sadly. “Love isn’t always right either. Sometimes, well, people who love each other hurt each other, like . . . like . . . Well, someday, if you’re not so lucky, maybe you’ll understand. . . .”
“Are you all right, Dad?”
There was a long pause. “Just terrific,” Dad said hollowly. “Haven’t a care in the world. . . . You take care, Bob.”
“Uh, yeah, you too, Dad,” Bobby said uneasily, and that was the way the conversation ended, with his jubilation soured, at least for the moment, by feelings of vague guilt for he knew not what.
Bobby’s somber mood didn’t last much past breakfast. He went over to UC Berkeley to fill out his matriculation papers, spent the afternoon wandering around the campus, went back to the house, called Eileen and Shandra to tell them the good news, and before dinner, the money arrived from Paris. He won forty dollars at poker that night, cashed the draft from his father the next morning, paid up his tuition in the afternoon, had dinner with Eileen, made love, spent the next night with Shandra Corday, and by that time, the strange way Dad had acted on the phone was quite forgotten.
Until two days later, when Marla Washington handed him a letter that had arrived in the mail. “All the way from Russia!”
It was from Franja. His Russian was still good enough for him to read the Cyrillic on the stationery. It was a Gagarin University envelope. The letter lay heavily in his hand like a very cold and very dead fish. Franja had never written him a letter before, and somehow he had the feeling that this was not going to be a pleasure. And when he took it up to his room to read it in private, it was even worse than he had imagined.
Dear Bobby:
I do hope you are enjoying yourself in Gringoland, little brother. I suppose you’re not very interested in what your vile little blackmail scheme has done to your own parents, but I’m going to tell you anyway.
Father went out and wired you your tuition money without even telling Mother, did you know that? I only wish you had been there when he finally told her at dinner, it would have been only what you deserve. They screamed and yelled at each other for over an hour. It was horrible.
They called each other all kinds of names, and when Mother finally ended up calling Father a fascist gringo unilateralist, Father actually accused her of having an affair with Ilya Pashikov. And the so-called conversation ended with Mother shouting “Just maybe I will!”
Mother ended up sleeping on the couch, and when I left they were barely speaking to each other.
When you told Father to sign my admission papers to Gagarin, I made the mistake of thinking you might have some human decency, after all. Stupid me! You’re no different from the rest of them, Bobby Le Gringo. You’ve wrecked our parents’ marriage for your own selfish purposes just as Washington is intent on wrecking international peace and prosperity in the service of American greed and envy.
But then, you’re actually proud to call yourself an American, now aren’t you?
Three cheers for the
Red, White, and Blue,
Franja Yurievna
Bobby stormed out of the house in a tearful rage and jogged all the way to Telegraph Avenue. He knew just what he was looking for. Half the stationery stores on Telegraph Avenue were selling the hateful thing, and it was just the perfect reply for sister Franja.
He bought one of the postcards, addressed it to her with no message on it, and mailed it before he had time to think about it, wondering maliciously what the Soviet postmen would make of it.
On the postcard was a hideous bear wearing a big sombrero with a hammer and sickle on it in case anyone didn’t get the message. It was bent over at the knees with a piteous expression on its face and its ass in the air.
Uncle Sam was buggering it with a laser-beam phallus.
Franja never answered back.
Eight days before classes started at UC Berkeley, there was a coup in Mexico City. Two days after that, the blatantly CIA-backed puppet regime ceded Baja California to the United States in return for cancellation of the Mexican debt. The next day, elements of the Mexican Army seized the capital and executed the traitors.
The day after that, an American aircraft carrier task force sailed into Vera Cruz harbor, Navy planes strafed the city, and Marines went ashore. Another carrier task force landed amphibious forces at Rosarita Beach, and two armored divisions crossed the border and occupied Tijuana. Yet a third carrier task force blockaded the Pacific coast of mainland Mexico.
The Gringos celebrated with enormous beer-busts all that weekend. There was no party at Little Moscow that Saturday. Everyone sat in the living room watching TV coverage from the war zones.
The Marines were wiping up the last resistance in Vera Cruz. The amphibious forces landed at Rosarita Beach had already linked up with elements of the ground forces that had taken Tijuana. The President went on the air and announced that the United States had no territorial ambitions in mainland Mexico. The President of the Soviet Union denounced American imperialism but promised nothing. The Common European Parliament passed a meaningless resolution of condemnation. The Mexican chief of staff had apparently ordered his army to disperse into battalion-sized units and begin guerrilla warfare.
It was all over but the shouting, which was still going on all over town.
“And in Berkeley, California, this . . . ,” the announcer said.
“Hey, that’s Telegraph Avenue!” Bobby exclaimed.
And so it was, the camera apparently mounted on a truck moving down the center of Telegraph, about two hours ago, by the look of the lighting, dollying slowly past sidewalks jammed with drunken jingo louts, waving beer cans, mugging at the camera, holding giant burning sombreros on the ends of poles, sticking up American flag posters on the windows of closed shops and restaurants, singing “God Bless America” in beered-out unison.
“Doesn’t it make you proud to be an American?” Claude muttered bitterly.
“A peaceful victory demonstration . . .”
“By every drunken asshole in town!” Karl shouted at the screen.
“. . . was disrupted by a small group of agitators . . .”
“Oh shit,” Nat Wolfowitz moaned, as the camera suddenly zoomed down Telegraph Avenue into a tight shot on a small group of demonstrators, no more than two dozen of them, and Reds by the look of their clothing. They were carrying a black wooden coffin, and they were marching behind a big American flag hung upside down from a clothesline strung between two poles.
“. . . believed to be members of an extremist Marxist group known as the American Red Army . . .”
“Bullshit!” Marla Washington shouted. “There’s no such thing!”
“Tell me about it. . . .” Wolfowitz grunted.
The demonstrators marched slowly up the street beneath a hail of beer cans and paper cups. Some jerk in a white T-shirt and running shorts ran up to the front rank and spat in a girl’s fa
ce. Then it all started to happen at once. Mobs of Gringos rushed the demonstration from both sides and the front. Fistfights broke out. Someone grabbed one of the poles holding the flag. Someone grabbed the other pole.
The camera reverse-zoomed, then the tape jump-cut to another angle. The jingos had the flag. A huge mob of them paraded down the sidewalk behind it, pumping their fists in the air and screaming.
“. . . forcing patriotic Americans to rescue Old Glory from desecration.”
“Those poor stupid brave bastards . . . ,” Nat Wolfowitz said.
“And in New York, Lance Dickson pitched a no-hitter for the New York Yankees against the Boston Red Sox, pulling them to within a game and a half of first place—”
“I think we can do without the fucking ball scores,” Jack Genovese said, and turned off the videowall.
There was a long moment of silence. People just sat there staring at each other, saying nothing.
“Well, Bobby,” Marla Washington said grimly, “you still want to go to college in good old Berkeley?”
“Yeah, maybe you oughta go back to Paris while you can.”
“You’re not stuck here in Gringo Jingo Land. . . .”
“Not yet, anyway. . . .”
“What about it, Bobby, you sure you wouldn’t rather go home and be a Frenchman?”
“And take us with you?”
Bobby realized much to his surprise, and no little discomfort, that all eyes were now on him. Even Nat Wolfowitz was staring at him with the strangest expression on his face.
“What about it, kid?” Wolfowitz said. “You gonna fold this hand and go home to someplace sane like a smart player? Or stay here in the game like a sucker?”
Bobby realized that he had to say something. What are you now, Bobby Reed? they all seemed to be asking him. You’re the only one here who gets to choose. You still want to be an American?
Bobby thought about what he had just seen. He thought about those agonizing phone calls with his parents, the last call from Dad in particular. He thought about Franja’s letter, and the postcard he had sent in reply. He thought about his golden days with his new friends here in Berkeley. And in his mind’s eye, he saw another mob, and the American Embassy smeared with blood and shit.
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