I attended a march against the Gulf War, and when I confessed to my father that I was constitutionally incapable of participating vivaciously in any sort of group activity, he responded by sending me a series of one-sentence postcards: “It’s better to light one candle than to curse the darkness.” “If you can move one grain of sand from one spot to another, the world will never be the same.” “Popular culture, of which you and your generation are so enamored, is substitute family, substitute community, substitute love.” “Never again.” “It’s better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.” “Change the world—it needs it.” I grew up with these aphorisms, these elegant dicta that were meant to explain everything.
On Friday nights, when my sister and I were in junior high school, my parents would take us to Kepler’s, the bookstore of choice for Bay Area radicals; while I was supposed to be tracking down Soul on Ice or Steal This Book, I was actually scouring The Whole Earth Catalog and the Evergreen Review for pictures of naked ladies.
The summer before my first year of college, I worked as a teacher’s aide in a remedial summer school in San Francisco. All the students were black, and all the teachers except me were black. Sometimes at the end of the day, the teachers screened blaxploitation films. We watched Mandingo, a weird Southern gothic inversion of the genre. James Mason, the white massa, acted evil; Richard Ward, his slave, plotted freedom; everybody shouted, “Right on!” Caught up in the action, I, too, shouted, “Right on!” Everyone turned around and stared icily. A line had been crossed, a taboo broken. Though I’d been completely serious, I said, “Just kidding,” so we could all get back to watching the movie.
Since I was president of the eighth grade, I was directed, despite my stutter, to address, via the intercom in the principal’s office, the entire junior high school on the subject of the eighth grade’s appalling behavior at the recent assembly. I found the assignment so flattering, the power so intoxicating, that I didn’t stutter at all. Not once. I don’t think I even paused for breath.
I know nothing about planes, but a couple of DC-10s had gone down in recent weeks, so I asked the American Airlines ticket agent, “What kind of plane will we be flying?” “Were you in ’Nam?” she said. Confusion (what does asking what kind of plane we’re flying have to do with Vietnam?—only now do I see the connection; she thought I might be carrying explosives) and pride (I’d been mistaken for a soldier) warred in my brain before I said, “Um…no.”
The summer between high school and college I taped a photograph of each Watergate witness (above his most self-incriminating quotation) on the same wall that I’d once covered with pictures of the 1965 Dodgers. Heroes, villains—it hardly mattered; the subject was where I wanted him: at the vanishing point.
The former governor of California hired me to write a biography of him that would have as its subtitle “Champion of Social Justice.” I quit, or he fired me, when it became increasingly apparent that no one was interested in the champion of social justice except in conjunction with his acerbic son. One day, I was walking with the champion of social justice the few blocks from a restaurant back to his law office in Beverly Hills, when he turned to me and said, “Guess how much it cost me to join the Bel-Air Country Club?” I told him I had no idea. “Fifty thousand dollars,” he said.
“I don’t buy Coors,” I heard someone explain to his roommate in the market. “They’re fascists.” “They’re what?” the roommate said. “They support fascist causes,” the man said. “Like what?” the roommate said. “Someone told me what they were,” the man said, “but I forget.”
Now the only people I like are ambivalent about everything to the point of paralysis.