Chapter 38: Safe house, Georgetown
“Where to now?” It’s become an incessantly annoying question—to ask that is.
Jared, slunk in his bucket, feet propped on the dashboard, sullen, morose, inward, quiet, sighing, almost immobile, a robot of shit and fart. Jared, wordless recipient of Witsonian welfare—who can cure him? Raise him from the living dead? Why didn’t I die? I heard the bullet. They talked to me, “The next time!” Fuck.
Steve is driving down the spine of New York’s Hudson Valley, past a Woodstock whose famed festival Jared did not drop in on but which now beams its subliminal revolutionary signal to him. This earth base station of rock ’n’ roll vibes—the first kosmic music station of the Age of Aquarius—nestled in the right ear of Manhattan, endlessly transmits its countercultural messages in the rhythms of the Moody Blues, mad-driving Jimi Hendrix, Carlos Santana, and of a thousand stoned plunkers and psychedelic spelunkers.
“. . . some pills make you larger.”
“. . . four dead in Ohio.”
“War—what is it good for? Absolutely nothing, say it again.”
“It’s a hard, it’s a hard rain . . .”
“This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius . . .”
“All we are saying is . . .”
The meaning of Woodstock is delivered to him. Did you not know all of creation is music? Did you not know that the famed astronomer Copernicus celebrated the Harmony of the Spheres? Did you not know that he so knew the Earth and its pathetic inhabitants that he held it to be between the celestial notes FA and MI—Famus et Miseria—for famine and misery? You did not know this? Then, you have not been listening!
Listening. Listening. Was the Revolution in the music? Was that where he hadn’t looked? Should he have been a rock musician instead of a raider?
Am I simply off-key? Out of harmony with the world? A speaker of holy, fiery, overturning, revolutionary words who seeks to destroy the established powers-that-be in a time that really needs laid-back, good-feeling, “Be here now!” mellow music to spur the next step of human evolution? One earth, one family.
Steve ejects the tape. He waits a few minutes, observes Jared. He needs to properly set him up for the next stage of the Ride. “Hey, c’mon guy, lighten up. I pulled you out of that hell hole. I tell you, you won’t believe what’s going down there. Let me tell you, there’s more firepower there than I saw in most actions in ’Nam. Truly, yessir, it’s like they’ve moved all their power upstream and in-country and are finally going to fight goddamn Tet all over again! They’ll do to Attica what we didn’t have the balls to do to Hanoi!” Steve’s more excited than he wants to be. His words and mood don’t faze Jared.
“Want to know where you’re going?” A tease, it should work. But no life signs blink in his patient. “Suppose I told you this is it. The end of the road. Your time’s up and you’re going to meet the Boss.” How could it not work? Then with a self-conscious correction, “Meet Mr. Hoover, that is. The Director.”
“Go on.” Barely a grunt.
“Do you think this has all been without purpose?” Steve can’t get rid of what he takes as a great one-liner, something he knows would make his fellow agents roar. “Maybe he’s going to ask you to join the Agency!”
Jared doesn’t laugh, not give Steve his comic due. He just rolls his two honking feet off the dash and cranks down his window. The rush of air waves across him like a loving flag. “Hell, man, fuck, things couldn’t get more weird, could they? Fucking-A.”
For Jared this is a conclusion, a resignation and a relegation of “reality” to the powers and authorities who move life’s scenery about. He accepts that he’s no longer—Fuck, never been!—in control of his own life. When Steve called his name, “Jeennnn ... iiiii ...nnnnnggs!” he had almost fucking-A died. He didn’t want to leave Attica, not go back on the Ride. Fucked in the ass, again!
Steve’s been looking forward to this day: “The End.” He sees the two words float in front of the windshield the instant he turns south and knows that D.C. is reserving a bed for him tonight. Yet he notices that he’s shivering although it’s a warm, early-fall D.C. day. Whatever’s messing with him, it subsides as he turns onto 270 at Frederick, Maryland and heads down towards the Capital Beltway. As he drives, he’s comforted by familiar names: Urbana, Germantown, Gaithersburg. These towns outside the Beltway are where he so often flees to be alone, where the flora and fauna do not ask him to amuse them with his gifts.
In a deeply comforting way, he’s safe here in D.C. The bureaucracy will always need him. There will always be a place for him among the computers and Xerox machines. Here he will never be totally rejected, despite an occasional glitch or a short-run failure. He knows that others say “bureaucrats” with a sneer and in disgust, but it is bureaucrats who make him feel most wanted. It’s within their mausoleums of symbols and memory that he feels proudly welcomed and secure.
Steve Witson loves Washington, D.C., adores it. He doesn’t care about what happens to Jared after today. His part is over. All he has to do is locate the safe house in Georgetown, unlock the doors, throw the cuffs and chains in the trunk, and tomorrow all the wonders of Pennsylvania Avenue will be his, once again.
Jared’s off the Ride, but where? Why? He read the road signs, knows it’s D.C., but he doesn’t know this town. He was down here for one major Moratorium march, but that wasn’t a tourist trip. Is Hoover coming? Really? Why? Okay, why not? Maybe I should join the Agency, become a good Catholic boy again, kill somebody and be saved!
Jared’s been at the safe house a week. Steve stayed idling as Jared stepped out of the van and stood, as he now stands, before the mansion. “Remarkable!” he whispers, once again. For it is one of those replicas of the Forgotten South that are so often resurrected by foreign architects as they construct an Embassy which reflects what they feel is American. “Ah, will Tara ever fade, Miss Charlotte?”
Often on one of his many walks around the grounds, Jared stands here, half expecting some darkie to greet him and lead him within. Today there is a change, he notices it, senses that something is welling up inside, that something is coming down over him from out the sky—You lost, they won, you fucked up, where the fuck are you?…like what happens to a recently paroled con, once back Outside all the negative energy from Inside comes home to roost. Jared doesn’t resist, can’t, just lets it form his reality. So weary. So tired. So broken. Fuck!
No one escapes prison unbroken. No matter the state of their health, the prowess of their lips, the charge of their bravado. Fucking-A! Prison works; it crushes.
In truth, parole is just a new imprisonment. Jared muses, Parole never ends, man. One is always imprisoned by either one’s own imagination or one’s fears.
Jared surrenders. Not in word. Not a salute. No Farewell Address to his troops. Nothing so dramatic. Just an unnoticed sigh, released from deep within as he tosses away the chains that bound him to himself.
Within that surrender, he slithers into a puddle, soft and round, only an inch deep, all himself, onto the wondrously manicured lawn. He has come home, to a house he has made a home in his mind. He’s come to rest; exhausting on the spot.
Jared’s brain begins to deprogram. All the brain’s information cells discharge as if shorted out. All that he has sought during the twenty odd years of his intellectual pursuits, these he chucks. A cellular transformation sets in. He is that tabula rasa so yearned for by the dreamers of Liberty, those Englishmen of Yore whose metaphysical fancies became the Frontier Land of our early revolutionists. A land with rollercoaster rides labeled Democracy and thrills barked as “Liberty! Come one, come all!”
Jared is now that “blank pad,” “clean slate,” unmarred table of yet to be thought Grand Thoughts. Tabula rasa: erased wax tablet. Thoughtless. This is where Jared is living. What he has become.
He is deeply placated, suffused, filled. Once inside the mansion, he has no desire for News from any media source, from anywhere or place Outs
ide. He ambles about the several spectacular private libraries of the estate but dusts off nary a book or journal. He does not push himself to test the stone boundary that girdles the estate beyond the trees and bushes. He’s content to be in this world.
If it is a garden, then so be it! If it is an island, so be it! He honestly does not care. Wherever he is, whatever he’s in, it’s a special place, a spot that takes him in and nurtures him. As on the first, so every night, he’s nestled by and around a late night fire that warms him, deeply and throughout. The darkened air comforts him. And the smoothness of morning light lays him quiet and concept-less.
If he had been in his characteristic analytical mood, if the frenzy of Attica and the Ride were still coursing through his mind’s blood, if he were who he has been, then he would have been critical of the empowering empty-headedness of the place. It is what, at another stage, he would have judged an effect of a sacred, holy power, a presence which can absorb one’s mind so that it seems not to be one’s own anymore. Contented, he does not so think because he is what this place intends him to be; thoughtless.
Almost two months pass by before Jared’s idling brain begins to shift into first gear—that of curiosity. He’s been in and out of every room but—still doing time— he passed up on the several large libraries that justly amaze the average visitor. Then, out of nowhere, Jared shifts into low. He just gets up from his chair and starts touring, working his way around the main seating room’s vast holdings. He snoops, grabs a book, flips some pages, checks an index, in another the table of contents, and, without intent but certainly welcoming the surprise he locates a booze closet, lifts a bottle or two, selects something he’s never drunk: Woodford Reserve, fine Kentucky bourbon—why not? He floats back into his bedroom.
Up into second and into a smooth overdrive throughout the evening, Jared sips and reads. The book he grabbed, somewhat mindlessly—Karma, J?—is blowing his mind. Its title: The Viet Cong Front in the United States. On the back of the title page is the explanation, “. . . originally appeared as The Second Front of the Vietnam War: Communist Subversion in the Peace Movement.” It further notes that on April 21, 1971, the Honorable John G. Schmitz in collaboration with the Honorable Fletcher Thompson and the Honorable Roger H. Zion with the assistance of the minority staff of the House Internal Security Committee presented this material for publication in the Congressional Record. Jared has never seen this book or any reference to it. This report—if true!—puts a fresh face onto everything. Maybe we were wrong. Maybe I‘m wrong?
Kill the dove! Page 38