4

THEN JOHN got himself a girlfriend . . . Well, that’s probably not what I should be calling her. Like if the word GIRLFRIEND accidentally escaped from my mouth when she was around, my continued existence as a two-balled male might have become doubtful. So let me start over. John found himself a person of the female sex to hang out with—this weird skinny speedy loudmouthed little chick from New York named Pam—and she and John dug each other because they were on the same team. She was the first real heavy-duty women’s libber I’d ever run into, and I’ve got to admit she made me nervous. More than nervous. Listening to her rap sometimes, my blood would run COLD. But Cass thought she was perfect for John. “It’s damn well about time,” she said. “I just hope he can figure out what the hell to do with her.”

“Christ,” I said, “I can’t imagine wanting to do ANYTHING with her.”

“That’s because you really are a male chauvinist pig. But she’s the kind of girl he’s always wanted. I just hope he’s not too spaced out to realize it.”

She kept worrying about John. I guess that’s what you do if you’ve got a brother, you worry about him. “He’s really hung up, man,” she said. “I don’t know what it is. He wasn’t like that when I first met him, but . . . I don’t know. He’s really fucked up over nothing. I don’t think he’s ever made it with anybody.”

I figured if you’d never made it with anybody, you’d want to start with somebody NICE—you know, kind and understanding and sweet and gentle and feminine and all that other good shit—but then what did I know about being liberated? But anyhow, I never got to the point where I could say I honest-to-God liked Pam, but I got used to her. She and Cassandra were two of the world’s most accomplished speed rappers, and when you got them together, it was like contemplating a phenomenon of nature, you know, like a typhoon. John and me would sit there amazed and just look at each other.

And meanwhile Cassandra and me were still living in our little slum dwelling out in East Cambridge, and she’d started bitching about the place the minute she’d moved in with me. “Jesus, Tom, this place is a dump. And there’s never any hot water.” Growing up with two sisters, I’m pretty well checked out on chicks, and no matter how liberated chicks get, they always want hot water. Well eventually somebody laid it on me that you could rent a whole house in Roxbury for what I was paying in East Cambridge, so we floated over there and looked at the houses, and some of them were really nice, and I rented one of them. Real bright, huh?

It never crossed my mind that there was anything wrong with living in Roxbury just because it’s full of black people. I was stationed with a lot of black dudes in the service, and I got along with them fine. I mean I liked black people, I figured they ought to like me. That’s how dumb I was. This was like a year after Martin Luther King got killed, you dig? So there was this church around the corner run by white people, and it had a big statue of Christ out front with his arms spread open like you should go up and give him a big hug, and he was all WHITE because he was carved out of marble, and one morning I noted that somebody had come along in the night and painted him BLACK. And the next little event that managed to force its way into my head was when four big black dudes fell by one night and sat around and smoked up our dope and didn’t seem to have much to say. I mean, that did seem a little odd. And then one morning I got up and went bouncing out to the truck all set to hop in and make the run for milk and eggs so we could have breakfast, and guess what? There’s no truck. That did seem a bit peculiar, right? And I found the truck down at the bottom of the hill. Somebody had pounded the shit out of it and burnt it to a crisp.

Well, I walked back up the hill contemplating that turn of events. Eventually I managed to put two and two together and laid it on Cassandra—“You know, I don’t think we’re welcome in this neighborhood.”

She says, “No shit, horse. Whatever gave you that idea?” So we smoked some more dope, and I began to wonder how I was going to do any dealing when I didn’t have transportation and it’s an hour on the subway to any place at all. Then a couple nights later somebody chucked a brick through our front window and I went out and found HONKEY BASTARDS painted on our door, and all of a sudden things seemed clear as a bell to me. “I strongly suspect,” I said to Cassandra, “that it is not the world’s greatest idea to spend another night here. We better go crash with Ethan until we get our shit together.” And she says, “Ethan!” because she hates Ethan’s guts. And I say, “OK, let us consider the options. There’s always John’s place. Of course it might be a little tight with the three of us crammed in there. Particularly in that single bed of his. But oh yeah . . . there’s always my old buddy, Bobby Lyons.” If she hates Ethan, she hates Lyons ten times worse. “All right,” she says, “Ethan’s.”

It wasn’t like we were tapped out. I still had a few bucks, and Cass had whatever was left of her part of the hash deal—and that was probably most of it because I’d been paying for everything. So we packed up our shit and Ethan picked us up, and then we’re at his place, sitting on the floor, doing a little smoke, drinking one of Terry’s disgusting herb teas, listening to Janis Joplin, and contemplating our next move.

“Go rent us some place,” Cassandra says, and pulls some money out of her jeans and gives it to me. For some reason or other that pissed me off, but I kept my mouth shut. So for a couple days I drifted around with Ethan while he was making his dope runs and pretended I was looking for apartments, but when you don’t have any wheels, wheels is pretty much all you can think about, and what do I see going by us one evening but a black 1959 Cadillac with a sign on it that says FOR SALE. “Follow that fucking car!” I yell at Ethan like we’re in the movies, and off we go. I don’t know if you remember the 1959 Cadillac, but it was the biggest pig ever to come out of Detroit—a real monstrosity, I swear to God, damn near thirty feet long. That car had chrome, that car had fins, that car had motherfucking TAIL LIGHTS, that car had it all. So we followed the owner home to Newton, and I bought the son of a bitch. It took all the cash I had with me, and I had to borrow a few bills from Ethan, and when we got back, I couldn’t figure out why Cass was pissed off. “Look, honey,” I said. “We’ve got to have transportation. That’s number one. Now we can float around and look for apartments. We can take our time and find something nice.”

I should have detected the fact that the recent events had weirded Cassandra right out, but I didn’t. She launched into me non-stop. “No, Tommy, I do not want to float around looking at apartments. No, Tommy, I do not want to take my fucking time. No, Tommy, I do not want to piss around with this bullshit any longer. Listen, I know safety is a relative term. From the moment we fight our way out of the womb, we are contemplating our own death. That’s what they call a GIVEN, an inescapable fact of THE HUMAN CONDITION, and when viewed from that perspective, nothing is safe. We are all, at any moment, a heartbeat away from the end. We could be hit be a car. We could fall down in the shower and crack our skulls. Some bizarre medical condition we don’t even know about could snuff us at any moment. A motherfucking meteorite could fall through the roof, for Christ’s sake. You, having been in the war effort, must surely understand what I’m talking about—and what I am talking about is the horrible terror of being alive at all—so, yes, when viewed from that perspective, safety is relative. But you must admit, in terms of ordinary life as we live it, some places are safer than others. Boston is, in most respects, a somewhat safer place than Saigon. Harvard Square might be considered safer than East Cambridge. If you are white, places occupied largely by white people are probably safer than places occupied largely by black people. I could go on, but I think you get my point. Now it may be a monumental failure on my part to be concerned about such trivial matters. It may indicate that I am repressed and uptight and unable to go with the flow, but if that is the case, then I frankly do not give a flying fuck. Safety is an important matter to me. So could you please go rent us an apartment? Not on the first floor. Some place in a reasonably nice neighborhood in a reasonably nice building where everybody is motherfucking WHITE? And could you do it within the next twenty-four hours? It’s not like we’re broke, asshole,” and she pulls out a whole bunch of money and throws it on the floor.

Looking back on it, you always know what should have gone down, right? You take, for instance, when the French called up Dwight David Eisenhower, and they said, “Hey, Ike, sorry to bother you, but there’s this fascinating piece of the world called Indochina. Perhaps you might recall that God-forsaken place. Your predecessor, Give-’em-Hell-Harry, took some interest in it. Well, it seems like we’re having us a little problem over there, and maybe you could help us out.”

Now, looking back on it, we know perfectly well what he should have said. He should have said, “That’s what you get for having colonies, you dumb fucks. Go home and eat snails.” But that’s not what he said.

Looking back on it, I should have said, “Sure, babe, anything you want.” But that’s not what I said. I said, “Keep your goddamn money.”

Cassandra says, “Fuck you, man, I’m going to New York,” and she stuffs her things in her little suitcase and calls a cab and she’s gone. Like that fast, ZAP. Ethan and Terry are laughing at me, and I’m going, “Shit, what happened?” and I’m thinking, Christ, Tommy, you really are a moron.

The minute she was gone, it finally flashed on me—hey, this is heavy. Like it wasn’t just another show I was drifting through. Like as far out as chicks ever got, Cass was always out there a notch farther, and it just seemed stupid for things to end like that. So I knew she had a sister in New York, and I got her number from John and I called it a few times, and eventually I got Cassandra. “Hey, old buddy,” I said, “I’m sorry about the way things went down. I’m not too swift sometimes. Is there any possibility you might ever consider coming back to this fair city of beans?”

“Oh, shit, Tommy,” she says. “I’m sorry too. I’d just fucking run it out, that’s all . . . and sometimes you’re just so fucking HOPELESS. Get us a nice place, OK? Little sister’s already driving me nuts. I’ll be back up there eventually.”

I would have just loved to get us a nice place, and I kept INTENDING to get us a nice place, but the problem was that when I’d said “Keep your goddamn money,” that’s exactly what she’d done—scooped up those bills off the floor and shoved them in her jeans and split—and I was down to zip, and they have this strange ritual there in Boston, which is that the Lord of the Land wants his first month and his last month up front, so I kept making an effort, but I never did manage to put it all together, and it wasn’t too bad crashed at Ethan’s waiting for Cass to come back. Terry’s a hell of a good cook, and of course there was always plenty of weed.

• • •

SO ANYHOW, with Cassandra gone, that broke up our little threesome and left John and me alone together to confront reality, and it flashed on us one night that we’d really depended on Cass to keep us from going nuts. Like when she was around, one thing you could always depend on was that she’d never stop talking, so as weirded out as we ever got, we could always count on her voice—you know, like a constant radio transmission we could home in on and get ourselves back from whatever bizarre place we’d been. So without her, we had no reality reference, and we slipped over the edge a few times—like the two days we spent crashed at Lyons’ place because the show was just too fucking good in there, you know what I mean? And every time we tried to figure how to stand up, and walk out the door, and drive away, somebody would roll us another joint.

All John could talk about that spring was Pam Zalman. PAMELA, he called her. And a lot of times she couldn’t come out and play with him—you know, what with her being heavy into her women’s lib shit—and he’d get stoned with me and say, “Do you think she likes me?” like a boy with his first crush, kind of pathetic. Yeah, he was motherfucking LOVESICK.

So one day Ethan and me are laying around at his place drinking our morning coffee at noon when the phone rings and it’s John telling us that we’ve got to get our asses over to Harvard because there’s some ACTION going down there. Ethan says he don’t give a shit, so I zip by the office and pick up John. I really dug the scene at Harvard, like they say, THE IVORY TOWER. I used to wander around the residence halls at night, knocking on doors and going, “Hey, it’s me, Weird Tom the Weed Man,” and believe me, mucho dope did I sell. So anyhow, we’ve got a perfect spring day, the sun like honey, swear to God, and John says, “Yeah, a great day for a building occupation,” because the dudes from SDS have seized University Hall and they’re flying their red-and-black flag out the second floor window.

Harvard Yard’s one big party, hundreds of kids just hanging out, rapping, getting off on each other, eating ice cream cones, and generally looking good. People just drift in and out of University Hall whenever they feel like it, so we wander around in there for a while. John’s taking pictures and asking questions like a real grownup reporter, and we find this enormous room where there’s a meeting going on and check that out, but that’s not where it’s at, so we’ve got to keep on going until we locate this little side room, like an office, where there’s a few heavies having themselves a real serious rap. I mean REAL SERIOUS. I recognize Phil Vance and some of the other SDS dudes from the Weasel, and then I detect the fact that Pam Zalman’s there. I go, oh, NOW I see why we had to get our asses over here so fast.

We immediately disrupt their discussion because they have some guys stationed at the door who attempt to dissuade us from entering, and I suggest that they get themselves seriously bent and offer to help them do it, so Pam and Phil Vance start piping up with, “Hey, wait a minute. They’re OK. They’re from the Weasel,” and that causes the heavies to launch into a thing about how there was a vote, remember? And it had been decided that there wasn’t supposed to be any press in there at all except from Harvard, so Pam says, “Yeah, yeah, right,” and leaves the meeting and comes outside into the sunshine with us. She’s giving us the straight scoop, and John’s hanging on every word. “Motherfucking PL,” she says. “They did it again.”

Like I said, I never could figure out all the teams they had playing in Boston that season, and everybody disagreed with everybody, but the folks I ran with, one thing they all agreed on was that Progressive Labor sucked shit. John and Pam told me all about it. PL was a heavy top-down organization, they said, and whatever the cats at the top thought, that’s what all the members thought, and if the cats at the top changed their minds, then all the members changed their minds, and when PL came into a meeting, they all voted the same way, so going up against them was like ramming your head into a concrete wall. And PL was big on THE WORKERS. Like they dressed real straight—the guys cut their hair and the girls wore skirts—and if they lived together, they had to get married, and nobody was allowed to do drugs, and that was all so they wouldn’t piss off THE WORKERS. OK? Now most of the workers I knew—anyhow, the ones who were our age—were growing lots of hair, fucking every chance they got, and smoking all the weed they could get their hands on, but the dudes from PL never noticed because they were all STUDENTS.

“THREE FUCKING TIMES,” Pam keeps saying. You see, they’d had a big meeting to see if they should seize a building, and they’d voted on it three times, and every damn time the meeting had voted it down. But PL had gone ahead and seized University Hall anyway, and all the people who were against PL had to come along with them or get left out in the cold—which is what Pam was doing there with the other heavies. “Eventually we’ve got to deal with those motherfuckers,” she says.

But, in the meantime, there they were occupying a building—PL and the people who hated them all crammed in together—and they were trying to work out something they agreed on, and so far, that wasn’t much. The whole thing struck me as ridiculous. “Forgive me for being a dumb shit,” I said, “but what is it they want?”

It seemed like a simple question, but they looked at me like I’d just asked them what was the quadratic double factor of minus to the forty-seven. I had another run at it. “The people who seized the hall . . . what is it they want? When you seize a building, aren’t you supposed to want something?”

So John explains to me all about the six demands. They had to do with abolishing ROTC and stopping Harvard from expanding into poor people’s neighborhoods and like that. “But the issue isn’t the issue,” he says. “I mean, they’re serious demands, but the whole point is to force Harvard into bringing the pigs onto campus and pissing off the moderate students. You know, to radicalize them and to broaden the base of support.”

“What? They want a bust?”

“Oh, yeah. You’ve got to have a bust.”

“So you’re telling me that the bust’s what counts and it don’t matter what the demands are?”

“Well, yes and no. You’ve got to be demanding the right things.”

“I know it sounds cynical,” Pam says, “but we’ve got to reveal power for what it is. They try to hide it, but behind power there’s always pigs.”

The sun’s shining, and the kids are milling around with their ice cream cones and bottles of pop, and it looks like one great big be-in, like you can feel this puppy-dog spirit in the air—oh, wow, SPRING!—and I’m thinking, shit, I don’t get this. “Hey,” I say, “what is it YOU want? Yeah, the two of you.”

They look at each other for a minute, and then John says, “OK , in the short run, you want to raise the level of chaos. Like more and more campus disruptions, more building seizures, more draft card burnings, more anything at all . . . to make it harder to conduct the war. Like eventually to make it so hard to conduct the war, that they’ll just have to get the hell out of Vietnam. But in the long run . . .”

Pam picks it up for him. “In the long run, you hope that there’s going to be a concrete situation where the students outrun the so-called leadership. Where they won’t disband when the action’s over. Where the action keeps on going and they create parallel structures. Where the revolutionary moment spills out of its container.” And on and on she goes, and I haven’t got a clue what she’s talking about.

Over on the steps of the library some Harvard asshole’s mouthing off through a bullhorn. We can’t make out much of what he’s saying, just things like, “ . . . depart therefrom . . . subject to prosecution . . . criminal trespass . . .” I’m thinking, fuck, that poor son of a bitch isn’t going to know what hit him.

“If you were Harvard, what would you do?” I ask them.

John just looks at me, but I can see Pam thinking about it. “You know,” she says, “that’s an interesting question. The administration doesn’t want another Columbia. They’re scared shitless of that. But if they had any sense, they’d never call in the pigs. They could issue some statements that sounded like they were dealing with the demands, and they could like call for a big meeting of the moderates on campus . . . and pretend they were actually listening to them. And they could create some kind of committee to study the problem, a committee with STUDENTS on it. And as time went by, the people in University Hall would start fighting with each other, and they’d look more and more like assholes, and the broad campus support for the occupation would just dwindle away.”

Yeah, she was smart, all right. “Maybe they’ll do that,” I said.

“No they won’t,” she said.

• • •

A GIRL on the phone: “Ray? Ray?” He’d been asleep—gone and down a mile—now thinking: shit, why does this keep happening to me? His clock told him it was half past three in the middle of the goddamned night. Yeah, his name was Ray. Of course it was. “Yeah?” he said, keeping his voice neutral.

“It’s me.” She didn’t say her own name, but by now he would have known her voice anywhere. “The bust’s coming down,” she said.

“What? Now?”

“Yeah now. Soon anyway. There’s a million pigs over at the Cambridge Fire Station. How fast can you get here?”

He sat up in bed—fear like heat lightning—and finally got it. She’d called him Ray because his phone might be tapped, and Jesus fucking Christ, she wanted him at Harvard. “Shit,” he said, “the MTA’s closed.”

“Take a cab.” It never would have occurred to him in a million years. “You got any money?” she was saying. “Don’t worry about money. I’ve got money. Just get here.”

He’d never been any closer to a violent confrontation than watching Chicago on the tube. He threw back his sleeping bag and stood shivering in the dark—afraid that he’d be immobilized—but then, reaching back years, found his old readiness to pull on his boots and be gone. Down what road? Shit, any road would do, and with that, he was launched into a motion that felt inevitable—called a cab, got dressed, loaded his camera with Tri-X, hung it in its case under his coat, and walked out.

He still loved the kick just like in the old days—to be up and out when everybody else was asleep, to be up so early his breath steamed and the sky was blistered with mad stars. The cab pulled up, and he stepped into it, told the driver Harvard Square. Pam was waiting for him exactly where she’d said she’d be, in the spot where she’d met him that first time, in front of Nini’s, but Nini’s was closed—of course it was, at that cold empty hour. Stepping eagerly toward him, she looked as slender as a boy. Her twin ponytails were gone; she’d bound her hair back and tucked it inside her Levi jacket. “You sure it’s a bust?” he said.

“Oh, yeah. Jesus, man, you should see the pigs.”

“Shit, that was fast. It didn’t even last a day.”

“Yeah, well, Nathan Pusey has his head up his ass.” She pressed her hand into the small of his back, pushed him the way she wanted him to go; later he would realize it was the first time she’d ever touched him. “We’ve got to go over the wall,” she said. “The gates are locked, and there’s pigs at every one of them.”

Climbing over the wall into Harvard Yard was simply not possible; he was not agile, not physically brave, but there was no question about it—he was going to get over that fucking wall. She was already on the top reaching down for him. She caught his wrist, and he caught hers—a grip like a trapeze artist’s—and hung suspended a moment on nothing but the sinews of her thin arm. Scrabbling, smearing the toes of his shoes against the stones, flailing like a goof, WILLING himself to make it—he was mysteriously up and over. If he’d had a chance to think about it, he couldn’t have done it. He landed on all fours, still crouching, heard a man’s voice hard with authority: “Hey. What are you doing?”

He sprang up to run, but Pam said “Walk,” took his arm, led him into the crowd.

The Yard was full of kids—boys mostly, but some girls too, probably Cliffies. Nothing left of the party mood of the day before; hushed anxious voices, some of them whispering. And dawn was sneaking in—a swell of gunmetal grey on the edge, on the trees still stripped for winter, on the ancient stately buildings of the university, on old John Harvard himself, his statue staring out at his quiet world. “Fuck,” John said, “what a horrible time for this. They shoot people at dawn, don’t they?”

He was talking too much, but he couldn’t help it. “It’s classic, right? Dawn’s always the time when the KGB shows up.”

“Yeah,” she said, “the motherfuckers thought they’d pull it off with everybody asleep, right? But we set off the fire alarms in the freshman dorms. There’s going to be witnesses. There’s going to be lots of witnesses.”

A shaft of ugly white light was emerging from behind the church. Headlights. A car. “Jesus, what the fuck’s that?” somebody said. John and Pam drifted with the crowd. Some of the Harvard boys still had their pajamas and bathrobes on. Another car and then another car—of course they had to be plain dark cars, John thought; that’s what the script called for—and they were driving right into the middle of the Yard, onto the soft spring dirt, onto the tender spring grass. Behind them, some other huge thing lurched in, a dinosaur— wobbling, teetering, righting itself—a motherfucking bus crammed with pigs, their impassive faces framed in the windows. John could feel a wind of sorrow move across the kids—below speech, below voice—a collective silent moan. A girl murmured, “I don’t believe this shit.”

There were more buses. Pigs in full riot gear poured out of them. Behind the buses was a column of marching men. “You’ve got to get this,” Pam whispered.

Oh, right, John thought, the camera. He unzipped his jacket, swung his Nikon around in front of him. Took off the lens cap, dropped it into his pocket, opened up wide, set the shutter at one-fiftieth. He’d tell the lab to push it to the moon; it was the best he could do. The way his hands were shaking, he was probably not going to get a damned thing but blur anyway.

John looked up and saw that a Harvard boy was staring at him with tears in his eyes. “How could they do this to us?” he asked as though John might know the answer.

“Bummer,” John said. Stupid. The only thing he could think of.

“Watch yourself,” Pam told him. “They see the camera, they’ll beat the crap out of you.”

John walked toward University Hall, shooting automatically. There was already a police line going up, and the cops who’d marched into the Yard were headed straight for the building. That’s not good drama, John thought. There should be a standoff, a confrontation, the chance to make some speeches—but with no ceremony at all, the cops were getting right to work. Students had packed the steps; the cops clubbed them, grabbed them, flung them down the steps where other cops grabbed them, hauled them off, and shoved them into buses.

With a taste in his mouth like lighter fluid, John broke into a run. Carried along by a wave of kids, he allowed himself to be swept though the police line. He could hear the distinct smack of clubs on bodies. A lot of the kids were screaming now. Even as far away as he was, he could see the blood. A cluster of politicos began to chant “ROTC must go,” and, from somewhere else, a counter-chant rose up, “Pusey must go,” but from the steps, individual voices shrieking—“Pigs. You motherfucking pigs.” “Long-haired commies.” Just ahead of him, cops were running after students, clubbing them. John sank into a crouch and shot twice, then turned and ran. He’d lost track of Pam.

Winded, he stopped on the far side of the police line, turned back to see what was going on now. The steps had been cleared. Jesus, he thought, that was fast—a matter of minutes. And Pam was magically next to him, her hand on his shoulder. “You OK?”

“Yeah. I’m OK. This is fucking insane.”

It was daylight. Sure, he’d watched this shit go down on the tube, but he’d never been right there in the flesh to hear what he was hearing now. Chanting, screaming, pleading, and the most chilling sound of all—kids weeping. Sometimes individual words: Pigs. Motherfucking pigs. Fascist pigs . . . Please, please don’t . . . Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you. A nasty electronic bullhorn voice, absolutely unintelligible: Braow da blat blat, blat blat blat. Something like a pile driver, a regular rhythmic smashing. A new chant started up—picked up more and more voices, built in intensity, until it became a sustained pulse: Seig heil, seig heil, seig heil.

Not more than ten yards in front of him, a Cliffie was losing it. Waving her hands in the air, she stumbled toward the police line, wailing, “Pigs, pigs, pigs, pigs, pigs, pigs.” John couldn’t understand why none of the other students stopped her. A cop broke from the line, ran at her, swung. She twisted away, dodging. The club caught her at the point where her neck met her shoulder. She fell to her knees, screaming and crying. John ran forward, framed her in his lens. As the cop swung straight down, John hit the shutter. The club struck her on the top of her head. Blood spurted out. She screamed.

“Commie cunt,” the cop said and kicked her in the side.

John would never understand why he did what he did then—he raised his camera, aimed it directly at the man’s face, and took his picture. Instantly Pamela was clawing at his arm. They turned and ran.

She darted like a needle through a surging tapestry of students, dragging him along half a step behind her. Her grip on his hand was brutal. How the hell could she run so fast? He was running flat out, at a speed he knew he couldn’t hold for more than a few seconds. He didn’t dare look back. He heard screaming behind him. Pam suddenly shoved him to the left, smashed her hip into his to make the point, and they veered off sharply, headed for a building—what building? He only hoped Pam knew. He flicked a glance back, saw the cop—a huge motherfucking man—still lumbering behind them, smashing students out of his way. “Shit, shit, shit,” John heard himself chanting, and they were inside, running down a corridor, their bootheels echoing back from the walls. Harvard boys in open doorways stared at them as they sprinted past.

Pam propelled them through a doorway, slammed the door shut behind them, locked it. She bent double, panting. A boy in pajamas stood where he’d frozen, just out of bed, his thin veined feet gripping the floor. His face was white. His lips were trembling. They heard screaming from the hallway. The three of them stared at the locked door. John knew perfectly well the cop could come through it with one massive kick—but had the cop seen which room they’d picked? John stood, poised, trying to soften the sound of his breathing. He counted to a hundred, and then he did it again.

Pamela slowly straightened up. She gave John an odd little smile. “Private property,” she said.

“What?”

“All primitive peoples have fetishes. The door to this room’s private property.”

There was a new sound out in the yard—THWUNK. “Tear gas,” Pam said. In a moment they could smell the acrid bite of it. She squeezed the Harvard boy’s shoulder. “Sorry,” she said.

• • •

UNIVERSITY HALL had been cleared. The students who’d been inside had been arrested and hauled off to jail. The pigs were leaving, some climbing back aboard their blue buses, some marching off campus, grinning and twirling their clubs. Hundreds of students milled around in the Yard or sat on the steps of the church. Some were still yelling at the cops; others were crying. SDS leaflets, scattered everywhere, were ground into the mud. Keeping well back from the last of the cops, John and Pam were drifting toward Widener. “Were the pigs this bad at Columbia?” he said.

“Oh, yeah. Some of them are just doing their jobs . . . yeah, like Eichmann. But there’s others . . . You’ve read Reich . . . A lot of them are repressed and uptight and horny as hell, and they motherfucking hate us, man. Why else would they go after women the way they do? You can’t fuck her, but you can bust her head.”

John was coming down from the adrenaline rush, sinking into the kind of exhaustion that even sleep wouldn’t fix, and it wouldn’t take much to keep right on sinking into honest-to-God despair— except that Pam was still holding his hand. It felt like a natural thing, a simple thing, a good thing, to walk with her, holding hands. Unlike herself, she’d fallen silent. Somebody from SDS was yelling through a bullhorn, inviting people to move onto Widener’s steps. Ah, yes, another meeting.

“You can’t afford to get arrested, can you?” she said suddenly.

“Oh, hell no. Not even for a traffic ticket.”

“Jesus, man, you’re goddamned fearless.”

“Who me? No, I’m not. I’m the original chickenshit.” It was important—he didn’t know why—that she didn’t have any illusions about his bravery. “I’m serious,” he said. “Violent confrontations scare the shit out of me.”

She squeezed his hand. “Yeah, they scare me too. I get sucked up into the rush of it, and . . .” In a moment she finished the sentence, half swallowing the words. “I don’t trust myself.”

He didn’t know what to say to that. “You saved my ass,” he said.

She looked at him without smiling—an inscrutable, level-eyed look. She let go of his hand, drew her hair out of her jacket, unbound it, shook her head. She had wonderful hair, glorious hair—a rich golden brown, not light enough to be called blond but just on the edge of it. He loved everything about her. He was even prepared to love everything that was wrong with her.

She took his hand again. Somebody on the steps on Widener was addressing the crowd. “Who’s that?” John said.

“He’s PL.” She led him away from Widener. “Sometimes I get really sick of this shit,” she said. “Sometimes I just want to get out of SDS, work in the Collective, work with people who are . . . like in theoretical agreement . . . like you. Just let SDS go fuck itself. Did you notice how few women there are in the so-called leadership here?”

“There aren’t any, are there?”

The kids around the library began chanting, “Strike, strike, strike.”

“Yeah,” she said, “the strike. Everything’s going according to plan.”

She was leading him away from that angry electronic voice. The cars and buses had left huge ugly ruts in the soft grass of the yard; she pointed at them. “Great, huh?”

Since their escape from that insane cop, she’d been . . . well, “subdued,” he might have called it, but now he could sense that something else was happening. He could feel the energy of it in her hand.

“Ah, the fucking pigs,” she said. “I know they’re just tools of power, but I hate those bastards. God, and I hate the men who send them out . . . Yeah, the men. The goddamned men. The men. Fuck.”

He felt chilled. But she was still holding his hand. She stopped walking, turned to look at him. “Those bastards should never believe . . . not for a minute . . . Yeah, they should never believe even for a minute that they’ve got a monopoly on violence.”

• • •

• • •

JOHN SAT at the typewriter waiting while Pam paced up and down. They were in her apartment, taking turns with the typing. “You know what the fuck I want to say?” she asked him. “The incoherence of their critique guarantees that their every action will be a critique of their incoherence.”

“Right on. It’s true.”

“I know it’s true. That doesn’t mean we should say it.”

John hadn’t slept more than two hours at a stretch since the Harvard bust. They’d been working on a special edition of the Weasel. Tonight they’d lay it out; tomorrow it would hit the streets. It was, John thought, going to be a damned fine issue. John’s pictures of the cop beating the Cliffie would be splashed across the front page with a caption that read simply: OINK! Phil Vance had written the story of the bust from inside University Hall. John and Pam had written the story from the outside—not as two separate points of view but as a unified piece with a double by-line. He’d been surprised at how easy it had been for him to work with her—up until now. Ethan had dumped the lead editorial on them. “I don’t know fuck about Harvard, and I don’t give a fuck,” he’d told them. “You guys write it.” They’d been trying for hours.

“Things have got too polarized,” Pam said. “PL just never lets up and . . . Shit, you can’t make a move that’s not . . .”

He waited for her to finish her sentence, but it appeared that she wasn’t going to. “Right on,” he said, “that’s what polarization’s all about.” By now he’d read all the SI stuff she’d lent him and could quote it back to her: “But like Vaneigem says, isn’t there always a third force?”

“Yeah,” she said, “but we’re right in the middle of an action . . .”

“Isn’t that exactly the right time? And if it isn’t the right time, then what are we doing fucking around with theory?”

“Yeah, but . . . Well, you can see where they’re coming from. It’s like the old action-faction thing. It’s the action that counts. Let’s do something even if it’s wrong. And there’s something to be said for that. And we certainly don’t want to fuck up the action with anything we say . . . or contribute to fucking it up. I know nothing we write’s going to have that much . . . And it’s so easy to get recuperated . . . Oy, I don’t know. If we could just . . .”

They were interrupted by the soft chime of Pam’s doorbell. She hesitated a moment, frowning, then said, “Shit,” shot out the door and down the stairs.

John heard another girl’s voice, knew it, stood up. Footsteps, BANG—her knapsack dumped into a corner—yes, it was Cassandra. “Hey, Dupre, what the fuck’s happening?”

“I couldn’t tell you.” They hugged, and he felt the same old rush he always felt when he first saw her. “Hey, would you mind taking your boots off?” Pam was saying.

“Oh, aren’t you the princess?” Cass said, but she pulled her boots off and threw them at her knapsack.

“How was New York?” John said.

“Just groovy as all hell.”

“Nice to see you, Cass.” Pam’s voice was oddly stiff. “Do want anything to eat? Oh, God, I sound like my mother.”

“What have you got?”

“Just the weird crap I usually eat. Cheese and crackers? A peanut butter sandwich?” then, laughing at herself, “a grapefruit?”

“Thanks for the offer, but I’ll catch Tommy later, and most likely we’ll run down a steak. Tell you what, though. You wouldn’t happen to have a pinch of smoke? Hey, I dig your space. It’s a stone groove.”

“Thanks.” Pam sent John a look he couldn’t read—impatience, annoyance?—retrieved her dope and licorice papers from behind her books, began rolling a joint. “How’d you get my address?” she asked—slightly too casually.

“Oh, easy. I just called my boss in Arlington, Virginia. You know, at the CIA . . . Jesus, I fell by the newspaper office and got it from Phil Vance. Welcome back to the land of the paranoid. Where’s Tommy?”

“Still crashed at Ethan’s,” John said.

“Shit, that’s what I was afraid of. God, he’s hopeless.”

Pam passed the joint to Cassandra who lit and dragged, passed it on to John. “We probably needed a break,” Pam said to him.

“You guys into something heavy?” Cassandra said. “I can split.”

“No, no, no,” Pam said, “it’s OK ,” and to John, “Maybe we could offer comradely criticism . . . ?”

“What? Like Rosa lecturing Lenin?”

“Yeah. Sure. Exactly like that.”

“You guys are so full of shit,” Cassandra said. “It’s kind of endearing.”

“OK,” John said, “that’s how we’ll do it. Now we can write that fucker in ten minutes.”

“But that’s later, right?” Cassandra said. “Now we need a little smoke, right?”

“You the one,” John told her.

“Ludicrous,” Pam said, shrugging. She dragged on the joint, passed it back to Cassandra, sent John another of her coded looks. This one he could read clearly enough: “Fuck it, what can you do?”

“How’s Zoë?” John said.

“Far fucking out of sight, that’s how Zoë is. She got into Vogue, so she’s higher than a kite.”

“No, shit?”

“I kid you not, Dupre. She just happened to have an extra copy lying around . . . like maybe four million of them. I’ve got one in my knapsack for you.”

“Groovy,” John said uneasily. “How is she? I mean really. She OK?”

“Oh, yeah. Don’t know how much coin she’s knocking down, but enough to stay in the game. She’s . . . Jesus, it’s hard to be a Girl Scout in the modeling biz, but little sister’s doing her best. In bed by midnight all covered with cream from head to toe. Sleeps with gloves on half the time, can you believe that? She’s just so . . . She says, ‘Oh, Cass, I was at this reception the other night, and you know what they were doing?’ Miss Wide Eyes, right? ‘They were doing Co-caine! ’ I’m going, ‘No shit, Zo. You’ve got to be putting me on. Cocaine? I can’t believe anybody would do that.’ God, she lives in a parallel universe . . . So what are you guys into? Heard there was some heavy shit going down at Harvard.”

Grass seemed to have an identical effect on both girls—shot pure energy straight to their speech centers. Pam was doing the whole Harvard thing from beginning to end—the meetings, the factional disputes, the bust. “You guys are fucking nuts,” Cassandra was saying. “The minute there’s motherfucking pigs, I’m gone.”

Getting stoned was probably not a good idea—not if they wanted to get their editorial written by seven—and John felt all the time around him melting down like butter in the sun. Both girls got next to him, and it was all just too fucking much, and if he didn’t stop thinking of them as girls and start thinking of them as women, it was going to pop out of his mouth sometime when his guard was down, and then he’d be in deep shit. How could they talk so fast while he was reduced to his usual bemused catatonia?

Cassandra had moved on to bitching about Tom: “Where the hell’s his head at? Oh, I know . . . up his ass. Knew the son of bitch would never move out of there. So here we go again. Yeah, we’re going to be looking so good, me and Terry, just us chicks together, man, barefoot in the kitchen, yeah, baking our bread and reading our Tarot cards and rocking and rolling and having a good time.”

“You want to stay here?” Pam said.

Cassandra’s eyes circled the small apartment, paused on the one and only bed. “You don’t want me in your bed, Pamela. I’m a lousy fuck these days.”

John would have thought that Pam was unshockable, but he saw that one get to her. She managed to laugh. “I love you, Cass. You’ll say anything.”

“Oh, yeah. Other people have noted that about me. Hey, you want to see little sister?” She opened her knapsack. “Lots of goodies for the Zoë Markapolous fan club,” she said to John. “She’s intrigued that you’re in Boston, man. Very intrigued. She sent all this shit to you specially.”

John said Stop! with his eyes, but if she got the message, she wasn’t paying any attention to it. “Here’s a whole bunch of tear sheets she had copied just for you, and here’s Vogue, and here’s her latest head shot.” Cassandra drew a black-and-white eight-by-ten glossy out of its manila envelope. “Some hot-shit photographer did this for her . . . a true master of the art, Zoë says . . . This anybody you know?”

At first glance it was nobody he knew—but yes, of course it was Zoë, thoroughly disguised. Hair parted in the middle, curling around her face, framing it, setting it off—a thick tumble of curls. Very dramatic lighting, a three-quarter shot. Exposed behind the fall of hair, one ear, stunningly lit, balancing the brilliance of her face. Eyeliner carried all the way to the tear ducts just as her sister had worn it years before, and—although it was hard to tell—probably false lashes. Printed on paper so hard the greys were knocked right out of it—the contrast between white white face and black black turtleneck pushing it damned near into the realm of a charcoal drawing. It wasn’t the girl he knew and liked, the little kid he’d watched growing up. It wasn’t anybody real. Zoë had no expression whatsoever and didn’t need one. “Oh, wow,” Pam said, “she’s a doll.” John was shocked—but he supposed that women were still allowed to say things like that.

“Yeah, literally,” Cassandra said.

“Let me see it,” Pam said. John passed her the photograph. “Far out,” she said. “It’s almost Kabuki. I keep having arguments with the women in the Collective about this shit. They say, ‘Yuck, that’s not beauty,’ but I keep telling them you can’t deny the power of the image. Like never underestimate your enemy . . .”

“Zoë would love hearing that,” Cassandra said.

“No, no, I don’t mean your sister’s the enemy . . .”

“Oh, I know what you mean, Pamela. I’m just jerking you around.”

“It’s weird,” John said. “It’s nearly an abstraction.”

“Yeah,” Pam said, “some cultures use masks exactly like that. It’s like the nexus where a whole complex web of cultural values converge. You don’t have to do anything with it. You just have to display it.”

“Hey,” Cassandra said to John, “she’s not just cute, she’s been to college too.”

“Oh, fuck off, Cass,” Pam said, laughing. “But I’ve thought about this a lot. Like I’ve been there. I used to be a dancer. I’ve got pictures of me en pointe that are exactly like this.”

“A dancer? No shit? Like a for-real dancer . . . up on the stage, the whole bit?”

“Oh, yeah,” with her wry smile, “the whole bit.”

“Far out,” John said. “You never told me that.”

“You never asked me.”

“How the hell would I even know to ask you?”

“Come on, that isn’t what I meant. I didn’t think you were interested in . . . like where I’m coming from.”

“Of course I am.”

“I’ll tell you anything you want to know about me,” she said. “I’m not a secretive person.”

Meaning that he was? Paranoia—ping, ping, ping. And grinning Cassandra, who’d watched that small fiery personal exchange go down, said, “Shit, babe, he ain’t going to tell you nothing. He’s playing secret agent these days. Don’t even know his own name half the time,” and they were swallowed up immediately by the pothead’s collective bummer, immobilized by it—the weird silence—each left wrestling with whatever personal demons were emanating from the Void. Could they have planned this? John was wondering. Worked it out ahead of time? Hey, let’s really fuck with his head . . .

But he could always count on Cassandra. “Yeah, and here she is in Vogue”—her voice like a lifeline. “The freaky thing is, this is what she really looks like.”

Cassandra flipped through the pages, found the section with Zoë in it, lay the magazine open on John’s lap. Pam knelt by the side of his basket chair—laughed. “What?” he said.

“The caption,” Pam said. It was splashed in bold type across the top of the page—THE ACTION FOR SPRING! “God, they’re shameless.”

The three pages that featured Zoë were variations on a theme, Vogue’s idea of THE ACTION—a brown jumper with white buttons worn with a white blouse, white knee socks, and white dead-flat patent leather shoes decorated with string bows; a cream jumper with big brass buttons worn with a brown sweater, diamond-patterned knee socks, and brown and white oxfords; a black and white houndstooth jumper worn with a black turtleneck, black knee socks, and black and white spectator Mary Janes. Her head shot might have transformed Zoë into a mask, but in Vogue she was a living human being, wearing a brilliant I’m-having-the-time-of-my-life smile, at ease in the childish clothes.

Even though he knew it was dangerous territory, John couldn’t restrain his old fascination with this stuff. “You can see why they picked her from Seventeen,” he said. “It’s a Seventeen look. But why are they showing it in Vogue?”

“That’s easy,” Pam said, “they want to turn us all back into good little girls.”

“God, they keep on doing it no matter what’s coming down,” Cassandra said. “Does anybody anywhere ever wear this shit?”

“Maybe somebody somewhere,” John said.

“Me,” Pam said. “Fuck”—to their laughter—“I don’t mean now, but that’s exactly how I used to dress. Do you think I’m kidding? I’m not kidding. My father was in the shmatta trade. I was a very well-dressed little girl, you better believe it. Ten years ago . . . fuck, even five years ago . . . I would have looked at this shit and reacted like a trained rat. Like, wow, what cute shoes. I wonder where I can buy them?”

“Yeah,” Cass said, “we’ve all been through that one. I used to run right out and buy the Vogue patterns so I’d be ahead of everybody else in town.” And then, to John’s amazement—and delight—Cassandra, the jaded and cynical former Playboy bunny, and Pamela, the full-time revolutionary anarchist, went sailing off into recollections of their fashionable girlhoods: how they’d checked out the clothes, shopped for the clothes, worn the clothes—what it had meant to wear the clothes. “Yeah,” Pam was saying, “none of us got out alive. But the thing is, we’re all wearing uniforms, we’re still wearing uniforms.”

“All except for you, Miss Hair Ribbons,” Cassandra said.

“Yeah, it’s just a little thing, but . . . I try to find some way to express all the contradictory parts of myself. The revolution’s got to mean diversity, not uniformity.” She’d lifted the Vogue from John’s lap, studied it. “You see how they do it. The illusion of life enforces a life of illusion . . .”

“Holy fuck,” Cassandra said to John, laughing, “did you get that one?”

“Well, dig it,” Pam said, not amused at all, “it’s not a difficult concept. Just look. You can see a real person there. That’s why she’s good for them. She gives the illusion of life.”

“Oh, I got it, Pamela,” Cassandra said. “I’m just putting you on.”

Pam looked up from the magazine directly into Cassandra’s eyes. Cassandra returned the look with an intensity that transformed her into the luminescent fourteen-year-old she’d been so many years ago—or maybe, John thought, it was just his own treasonous head kicking him back along the time-track—but he watched the girls’ eyes hold each other for so long it was freaking him right out. Goddamn, it was like a staring contest. Then—and he felt it as a physical shock—Cassandra lost the game and looked away. “Whew,” she said, “this is some heavy grass.”

Pam looked back down at Vogue. More time melted and dribbled through the cracks. Nobody was talking, so he’d better do it. “Yeah,” he said, “heavy.”

“Heavy?” Pam said to him. “Yeah, you bet. Like Debord says, the Spectacle isn’t the images. The Spectacle is social relations mediated by images,” and to Cassandra, “She looks like she’s a really nice person.”

“Well, that’s true,” Cassandra said. “Nobody’s any nicer.”

“How old is she?” Pam said.

“Nineteen.”

“Oh, just a baby.”

“You bet. But she thinks she’s so fucking mature, way more mature than me. I’m just a stoned-out hippie asshole, right?”

“Nineteen,” Pam said, the meditative sound of her voice telling John that now she really was somewhere else. “God, it’s weird,” she said. “What were you doing at nineteen?” she asked Cassandra.

“Shit, I was at Bennington, bummed out of my skull.”

“You should have seen her.” John was scrambling hard to find a safe space. “White lips and white nails. Heavy into Camus.”

“Camus,” Pam said. “Yeah. I read him in French. Jesus, I can’t believe I did that . . . How about you, man?”

“Me?” he said. “Oh, we’re doing nineteen, are we? I was in my first year at WVU. It wasn’t a bad year.”

Good memories from that year—making out with Cass on a beach towel at Waverly Park the summer she was fifteen. Did she remember? He looked into her eyes, saw a flash of something coming back, couldn’t read it, couldn’t possibly untangle all the knots—and, shit, that could bum him right out if he let it. It was dangerous to have memories—here in this thickly contracted city where grown men with clubs beat girls on the head until the blood ran down.

Pam began to roll yet another joint. “Nineteen was a pretty good year for me,” she said, “although it didn’t feel like it at the time. It was the turn-around year, the make-or-break year . . . like the year when I could’ve really fucked it, but I didn’t. I was . . . Oy, I was such a mess. I’d been in and out of the hospital like a yo-yo, but . . . I got out of there for the last time, and my parents had finally split up, thank God, so I was living with my father in Manhattan. I started taking courses at NYU, but I still had some leftover high-school shit to finish up . . . like I hadn’t officially graduated from high school. And it was totally . . . like a schlep the whole way . . . where you wake up in the morning and think, hey, I can’t do it. But you get up and you do it anyway. And I got through it.”

She checked out John and Cassandra as though she’d forgotten them. She shrugged. She didn’t pass the joint but lit it and dragged.

“What were you in the hospital for?” Cassandra said.

“Oh . . . like Laing says, I was mad and bad . . . You mean the label they put on me? Anorexia nervosa.”

John had heard the term—probably back at WVU when he’d been doing Rat Psych—but he wasn’t sure he remembered exactly what it meant. “What’s that?”

She smiled. “That’s when you stop eating till you die.”