11

PAMELA WAS on a run. She didn’t need to set her alarm clock; her own ideas woke her. She liked to be up and at work while it was still dark. She brewed a lethal coffee—Mocha-Java and dark French— and drank it black. She paced up and down, organizing her thoughts, and then blasted words onto paper with her small purring Olympia. John woke to her typing, to the insistent smell of her coffee, to the indigo at her windows where the night was giving up, and found that he was, and wanted to be, nowhere else but here—for once perfectly situated in that time-place-thing that’s usually called “life.” It was a kind of happiness, surely. In the ordinary language that people used every day, he could say that he’d never been happier; he called it “luck” for short, but he knew that luck didn’t have a damned thing to do with it. He lay in her bed still warm from her body, still marked with her scent, and thought about feeding her. She would eat two or three buckwheat pancakes if they were not much bigger than fifty-cent pieces, but she wouldn’t use butter or syrup on them. She would eat fresh fruit. She would eat yogurt.

“Now you’ll get to see how crazy I really am,” she’d told him. He wouldn’t have called it “crazy”—although her need for order did seem excessive to him, as compulsive as her need to fit the entire universe into a total critique, but he regarded her space as sacred and occupied it with awe. He folded her towels the way she liked them, put his clothes away in the places she’d assigned them. Then he began picking up after her, putting away her clothes. He’d never ironed anything in his life, but he learned to iron her shirts. He swept the floors, emptied the ashtrays. He did all the shopping, all the cooking. He didn’t understand exactly why or how he’d become a vegetarian—something to do with Terry, with his acid trip—but his new diet seemed to suit her. She had no great interest in meat. She too would eat vegetables and fruit, brown rice and tofu. “There’s just one basic rule, man,” she told him. “I can’t eat anything that resembles Jewish cooking.”

She said it was a relief not to have to think about food—not to have to buy it and not to have to cook it. As soon as they’d eaten, he washed the dishes and put them away. “I can see why men want wives,” she said. “Everybody ought to have one.”

They made love in the afternoons, and slept. She woke to evening driven by a mad energy. Every day she had to feed her body enough exercise to keep her from going nuts; it was more important than food. They walked for hours, talking. She wouldn’t let him read what she was writing. “Not yet,” she said, “it’s too raw.” But she told him about it. At the center was what she’d discovered while she’d been gone—her breakthrough, her higher level, that flash of insight that had made her change her ways—the theory of androgyny. She’d been busily rewriting her own life ever since; now she was busily rewriting his.

“Dig it, man,” she said, “there’s six sexes. Maybe more . . . but at least six major categories. First you divide into male and female. And then you subdivide. Into straights. And gays. And us, the androgynes. Maybe at some point in the future everything will dissolve and we won’t need distinctions at all, but what’s required at this historical moment is to clarify the distinctions. Nobody’s ever heard of us. They don’t even know we’re here. Most of us don’t even know we’re androgynes.”

Before she’d realized she was an androgyne, she’d thought of herself as a “girl.” The women in the Movement said the word was demeaning, but she’d never felt demeaned by it. The first shrink she’d ever seen had told her, “You’re afraid of growing up, Pamela. You don’t want to be a woman.” She’d thought, “Asshole. He doesn’t understand. I’m a dancer. I just want to be a few pounds lighter,” but years later, she’d admitted to herself that he’d been right—that she’d wanted to go on being a girl forever. She’d hated her periods, her breasts. For years—until she went into the hospital for the first time—she’d shaved off her pubic hair. The thought of getting pregnant still nauseated her. “Just dig it, man. Like the full horror of it. A parasite. An alien. Living inside you. Sucking off your energy.”

Her childhood, his childhood, she said—let’s consider how sick they must have looked. Abnormal. But they hadn’t been sick; it was straight society that was sick, so of course there’d been cognitive dissonance. They’d felt guilty—mad and bad. They’d been self-destructive. His “anorexic episodes” had been exactly like hers. “They were political acts,” she said, “acts of refusal. I didn’t want to be a woman, you didn’t want to be a man. And that was normal for us . . . because we were androgynes. Refusing to eat was the only power we had.”

“At those gathering points,” she said, “when you were seven, when you were fourteen . . . when you wanted to be a girl . . . you didn’t even have a way to think about it. Like we can’t even think about something new until we’ve created a whole new theoretical structure, a whole new vocabulary. We repeat everything that hasn’t been analyzed, that hasn’t become conscious. That’s why neurotics repeat the same mistakes over and over and don’t even know they’re doing it. They’ve built an elaborate set of defense mechanisms to prevent themselves from becoming conscious. But the proletariat is becoming conscious now as in no previous time in history. Don’t you see how revolutionary this is?”

Sometimes he believed her—entirely, with no reservations. Sometimes her words sank deeply into the mind-place-thing where thoughts began—flared there, burned there, said this is right. He could feel the urgency of her need to find a theory that would organize everything. If she kept on going, she would write a critique as elegant as the mind diagram that organized her apartment. It would be, to use her favorite words, “coherent” and “total.” Of course he wanted to believe in it; he could feel how seductive it was—so soaked in sexual energy it was a continual turn-on. But at other times he could feel her working too hard—like the unenlightened man in the Zen story, pulling on the grass to make it grow. He wanted to give himself to her—entirely, with no reservations—but he could feel himself holding back. Lying next to her as she slept, he was afraid that her theory might account for everything but the eerie shiver in his mind.

• • •

A NEW underground paper had been hitting the streets. It called itself Zygote, and the lead editorial in the first issue said, “A zygote is a cell created by union. We are the coming together of the Lost Tribes of the Age of Aquarius. We believe that whenever we focus on the negative—the dark, the demonic, the destructive—we give those forces energy. Zygote will always present creative, positive, life-affirming alternatives. We believe that even now, here in America where so much is tragically wrong, there is still room for all of us to dream, to live out our dreams, to envision and create a brave new world. Dig it, gentle children, we are what we envision, and the war is already over.”

It made John sad, but Pam said, “I can’t believe anybody’s still writing that flower-power crap.”

Zygote was beautifully produced. It had a slick four-color cover. The columns were perfectly justified. The layout was open, airy, and easy to read. The graphics looked like something from an art college. There were articles—some of them quite good—on ecology, meditation, organic gardening, alternative schools, and communal child-rearing. The section called “the Scene” was such a thorough listing of everything going down in Boston—movies, music, plays, “alternative” events—that Zygote was clearly the paper to buy if you wanted to know what was happening. “And check the ads,” John said. “How did they sell all those goddamn ads?”

“Easy. They haven’t got any politics. They’re probably funded by the CIA.”

But they were both thinking the same thing, and John said it—“Getting published is better than not getting published.”

The Weatherman National Action was coming up—the Days of Rage planned for Chicago. “We’ve got to criticize it,” Pam said. Oh, right, John thought, we’re a council. He’d almost forgotten that.

She took the two angry, disconnected paragraphs he’d written alone in his small box, laid them out next to her Olympia, and turned them into a coherent statement. When he read what she’d done, he saw how easy it had been; she’d simply built a logical bridge from his first fragment to his second and added an anarchist coda about creating the new society in the shell of the old. It was good, he thought, and a good length—fewer than eight hundred words. They took it into the Zygote office where the walls were freshly painted and all of the equipment was new. The editor called himself Adam Kabir Das. He was as pale as Pamela, as thin as John, and dressed top to toe in one hundred percent cotton. He’d obviously been growing his hair and beard for years. He had eyes like the Jesus in Sunday school paintings. “We used to work on the Weasel,” John told him.

“Groovy,” Adam said. “The Weasel was one of my inspirations . . . the old Weasel, not the death-trip bullshit they’re putting out now.”

“Right on,” Pam said. “We hate that shit too. That’s why we got purged from the staff. That’s why we’re here. And dig it, man, you don’t have any politics.”

Almost anyone else, John thought, would have accepted their piece politely and showed them to the door, but Adam sat down and read it while they waited. Then he rose gracefully to his feet, pressed the palms of his hands together, and bowed to them. “We didn’t have any politics,” he said, “because we were waiting for you.”

Zygote, Adam told them, was operating on a new and revolutionary principle, one that he hoped would help to make it the best alternative paper in Boston—they paid their contributors. Raymond Lee and Pamela Zalman each received a check for twenty-five dollars. Adam invited them to become part of the Zygote family—to write a regular column, help with the layout, become involved.

They had to talk about it. “Will we be instantly spectacularized?” John said.

Yes, probably, she said, but that was true of anything. Every gesture anyone made was instantly recuperated into the Spectacle. And maybe Zygote really was funded by the CIA, but even if it was, Adam was on his own trip. “Yeah,” John said, “he’s been to India.”

Their title had been “You Don’t Need a Weatherman,” but Adam changed it to “BRING YOUR BALLS TO CHICAGO.” What they’d written together, and published in Zygote, was not an exercise in theory; they had criticized real people. They kept hearing pings coming back on the Movement sonar; Weatherman did not see it as comradely criticism but as a declaration of war. “How the hell can you and Karen Vance still be in the Collective together?” John asked her.

“She’s not in it anymore.”

Pam’s hint of a smile told him that there was more to the story. “You purged them?” he said.

“Oh, we wouldn’t do that. We just had a sub-caucus meeting . . . you know, the women in our tendency . . . and discussed the situation. And then, when we were planning the next meeting, we didn’t bother to tell the Weatherwomen when or where it was.”

In October, the Weatherman NATIONAL ACTION finally arrived—the DAYS OF RAGE. Thousands of angry street-fighting kids were supposed to converge on Chicago to join their Vietnamese comrades in armed struggle against the might of the AMERIKKKAN EMPIRE, but only a few hundred Weatherpeople showed up. They came dressed for WARGASM—in construction boots and helmets, the women in padded bras, the men in jock straps with cups. They were armed with pipes, hammers, chains, and blackjacks. They built a bonfire in Lincoln Park and listened to speeches from Weather heavies. They ran screaming into the Loop, smashing windows, trashing and burning parked cars, flattening any hapless pedestrians who happened to get in their way. Two days before, someone had blown up the statue of a cop in Haymarket Square, so the two thousand perfectly real cops who had been called out to deal with the Weatherman menace were not in a good mood. They beat the crap out of anybody they caught, threw them in the slammer, even shot a few. The Weatherpeople had over two million bucks worth of bail laid on them—and that was a quarter of a million cash up front. Many Weatherpeople were badly injured; both Karen and Phil Vance ended up in the hospital. The Weather heavies called the action a GREAT VICTORY.

“History has demonstrated that we were correct,” Pam said, her wry tone undercutting the jargon. “Doesn’t that make you feel good?”

“No,” John said.

In November, the mainstream anti-war movement, under the umbrella of the Moratorium, brought three-quarters of a million people to Washington. It was the largest single protest demonstration in the history of the United States. At the Washington Monument, Pete Seeger led that crowd of mostly straight people in the singing of “Give Peace a Chance.”

“Pathetic,” Pam said.

Yes, he supposed it was pathetic, but back along the track, strands were winding together. John was playing that Stella of Ethan’s every day, and if it wasn’t for Pete Seeger, that grand old man, he might not be doing that. John saying no to the draft, going to Canada, coming back to try to change something—if it wasn’t for Pete Seeger and folk songs, Kerouac and Gary Snyder and Buddhism, Carl Oglesby’s speech about “making love more possible,” he might not have done any of that. Those strands made a pattern, a tapestry. It was his tapestry, his subjectivity, and wasn’t that where Pam said everything had to start? That huge crowd of ordinary people at the Washington Monument, Pete Seeger leading them in song—he felt a significance, a resonance. “How long has it been,” he said, “since all we wanted to do was end the war?”

A splinter group had broken off from the main demonstration— Weathermen, some of the reports said—and attacked the Justice Department with a battering ram. The pigs blocked all the side streets and laid down so much tear gas that Attorney General Mitchell got a good dose of it in his office. That splinter demonstration of several hundred people got far more press coverage than the peaceful three-quarters of a million at the Washington Monument. “Of course it did,” Pam said.

• • •

WINTER WAS setting in and things were starting to come apart on us. Like there was no one big bummer crashing down like where you could say, oh, sweet Jesus, I got to deal with that motherfucker. No, it was like my mom says—JUST ONE THING AFTER ANOTHER. It started with bread . . . Well, with Garvin and Lorraine, bread had always been a problem. Garvin never did find work. Lorraine used to have a waitressing gig there for a while, but then one night the owner threw the make on her—not just assing around but in a fairly sleazeball way—and she kneed him in the balls, and that was the end of that. And it never crossed Cassandra’s mind that she should contribute to the household finances. So guess what? Here’s old Tommy Parker supporting four people instead of two, and I was doing pretty good in the import and retail business, but I wasn’t doing that good. I was starting to fray around the edges.

OK, the next thing I know Garvin decides he’s going to score a little doogie. “I’ve got to get some bread happening,” he says. Well, yes. “This is motherfucking ridiculous,” he says. “I know we been depending on you, man, and it hurts me. Yeah, it really does, swear to God. Shit, man, I always paid my own way my whole fucking life, you know what I mean? Don’t worry, man, I’m not going to USE, you dig? I’m just going to MOVE IT AROUND TOWN. So if you could maybe do me a little bread up front . . .”

I could have written that movie, but what the hell. So I slipped him some coin and he scored, and he paid me back, every damn cent—at least that first time he did—and then we entered a short sweet period of DEAD CALM. Because in the evenings there wasn’t much to disturb the sounds of silence except the occasional THUD as Garvin or Lorraine’s head bounced off the table top.

But it didn’t stay calm for long because Garvin and Lorraine knew every junkie in the Greater Boston Area—especially all the REHABILITATED ones—and within a week the word went out that our place was WHERE IT WAS HAPPENING. And then it’s people looking to score falling by, and people looking to deal falling by, and people with some smack they want to give away for some crazy reason, and pill freaks and weirdoes and rip-off artists, and teeny-boppers who think junkies are neat, and just every imaginable lame dude falling by. Some of those mind-fucked junkies were around so much they practically moved in with us, and I swear to God they had names like Joe the Mooch and Betty Delirious, and you’d never know when you got up in the morning who was going to be crashed on the floor, some mornings wall-to-wall bodies in the living room and even in the halls, for Christ’s sake, and some of those dudes made Houdini look like a rank amateur the way things VANISHED whenever they came around—like you couldn’t lay a thing down and expect it to be there thirty seconds later. I never caught one of them with his hand in my pants, but it came pretty close to that. And then one night Garvin came back late and found that somebody had locked him out and everybody inside was too wasted to manage to crawl the six feet to the door and let him in, so he just kicked the door in and broke the lock bigger than hell, and after that, our front door was always open and anybody could come strolling in any damn time they pleased. Well, I suppose I could have fixed it, but I was thinking, fuck the front door and fuck all you assholes. Somebody wants in here, any window will do—like they had a nice selection to choose from, all of them at ground level—so I fell by the lock store and said, “Give me the biggest meanest one you got,” and guess where I screwed that motherfucker? ON OUR BEDROOM DOOR.

The camper got stripped to the bone in nothing flat, so I had to keep it locked and parked way the hell and gone so the skagheads wouldn’t know where it was, and you know what? Right at the heart of this whole sick scene was our bathroom. Yeah, our bathroom was starting to look like the neighborhood community center, and one night Cassandra says, “Jesus, this place is a motherfucking SHOOTING GALLERY,” so that’s what we started calling it.

So one night I decide to drive somewhere, and I trot over the six blocks to where I’d parked the camper, and I detect the fact that somebody has managed to unlock my fine vehicle and there’s a pair of legs with old beat-to-shit cowboy boots attached to them sticking out from under the dash. I give the boots a kick and out crawls this sorry son of a bitch that called itself Joe the Mooch. He’d been crashed on our floor for a while—the same dude I’d seen like an hour before with a spike in his arm in our bathroom—and I say, “What the fuck you doing, asshole?” but it’s kind of obvious what he’s doing.

“Hey, I’m sorry, man,” he says, “I didn’t know this was YOUR truck. I wouldn’t have gone anywhere near it if I’d known it was YOUR truck.”

Well, that was an interesting theory, and I did stand there a minute and consider it. And I gave myself a little lecture. Like, OK, Tommy boy, do not go off half-cocked. Even though your patience has been sorely tried, that will accomplish nothing. What is required here is what they call A CALM RATION AL DECISION . OK? And my CALM RATIONAL DECISION was that I should get the word out to the skaghead community that Tom Parker was not somebody to fuck with. So I gave the bastard my best Roy Rogers smile, and I offered him my hand, and I said, “Well, shit, man, no harm done, right?”

He’s kind of startled, but what choice has he got, right? He’s got to shake on it, and that means he’s got to take a step toward me. So he does that, and I take his right hand in my right hand, and I deposit my left fist in his gut. Did I tell you I’m a southpaw? And he goes OOOF and kind of folds up, and I slap his head one way, and then I slap it the other. I’d been so pissed off for days it just did my heart good, you know what I mean?

I get him in an arm bar and choke him for awhile, and then I turn him loose and boot his ass right on down to the ground. He lays there on his face kind of sobbing and moaning, and I just stand behind him and wait. He tries to scrabble up and run, and I boot him down again. He tries to run a few more times, and every time, I boot him down again. I just want to make sure, you know, that the old knees and elbows are getting a good workout on that fine Somerville pavement. Well, I finally let him go, and he makes his break but good, and I’m left with that wonderful feeling of GRIM SATISFACTION, because I’d done exactly what I’d wanted—like no serious damage, but I was pretty sure I’d scared the flaming bejesus out of that junkie asshole, and that was the point. And, yeah, it was sad that things had got down to that, a fairly sorry day when things had got down to that, like so much for love and peace and brotherhood and flower power, right? But that stuff only takes you so far, and then you got to revert to basics.

• • •

STRANGELY, THE way everything seemed to be happening now, without his having to do much about it, John’s life changed again— or that track usually called “life” continued to carry him. He had a job again, something to do, something that might mean something. He was even getting paid for it. Although money never seemed to be a problem. “Who’s supporting us?” he asked Pamela.

“Mainly my father. Don’t worry, he can afford us.”

John never stopped being astonished that he was living with a woman. She was still saying they were “a council,” but he thought— although he didn’t say it to her—that they might be turning into “a couple.” He was getting used to her, to her strange ways, but she could still surprise him every day.

She owned dozens of records but not one that anybody would describe as “cool.” She was the first person he’d ever known who actually liked classical music. He tried, but he couldn’t groove on her taste; everything ran together in his mind. Was that fat wash of melancholy strings Mahler or Bruckner? Or maybe even Brahms? He did become fond of the records she chose for the afternoons when they were making love—Shostakovich’s pieces for the piano, Beethoven’s stately Eroica. He played the guitar for her, picked through every tune his fingers remembered. She said she liked hearing him play—except in the morning when she was working. He never sang. He still didn’t trust his voice, and now he knew why. To sing, you have to use words.

She’d brought pictures back from New York to show him—a studio glossy of herself en pointe, the weight of her entire body balanced on the curve of a single immaculate foot, on the tiny tip of one gleaming pointe shoe. “Oh, my God, you were beautiful,” he said.

“Oh, yeah,” deadpan. “Sure I was. A real doll.”

“What did it feel like?”

“It’s hard to . . . I’d give you the experience if I could, but . . . It satisfied something in me in a way that nothing else ever has, but I was always worried. Like anxious. Like nerve-twitchy teenage awful chalk-on-the-blackboard anxious . . . Like that’s the highest level of stylization you can achieve with the female body, and I sensed it, and I wanted it, but there’s no way I could have verbalized it. I never thought I was good enough . . . perfect enough. I honestly believed that perfection could be achieved. And that’s the ballet death-trip, right there, man, WHAM.”

She showed him an album of family snapshots, starting when she was a child and ending when she was a teenager. She kept getting older but her clothes stayed the same—hair ribbons, blazers and kilts, short skirts and Mary Janes. “I drove my mother nuts. I was in the vanguard of fashion, but we didn’t know that. She kept trying to put me in heels, but I refused. Like who needed that shit? If I wanted to do high femme, I had pointe.”

The last picture was a publicity shot of herself in her only solo role—Clara. She was sixteen but looked twelve—in a child’s flounced white dress, a ribbon in her hair (the one she’d pinned up by her bed), clutching a gigantic nutcracker to her flat chest, a look of dewy expectancy on her face. “Talk about being perfectly cast,” she said, “oh, my. You can keep that if you want. I’ve got a dozen of these damned things. Yeah, when you get back to Toronto, put it next to the picture of yourself as Alice. They go together.”

Sleeping in the same bed with her never stopped feeling magical. “Something you should know about me,” she said. “I’m not cuddly.” She needed a foot of space between them; every night, from her side of that foot of space, she kept on talking until sleep sandbagged her. He loved lying in the dark next to her, listening as her mind scattered. That’s when she would say things that trailed free—loose and airy things that were not yet fully nailed into her total critique.

“We androgynes get turned on by ambiguity,” she said. “We have a wider range of sexual response than other people. You could make it with straight girls. You could make it with boy androgynes. Just don’t ever try to make it with straight men. Wow, is that ever a bummer.”

“You actually liked little girls,” she said. “That’s so groovy, man. You identified with little girls. You should be proud of it. Most little boys don’t like little girls, and look how they grow up.”

Some of her probes were so right-on they stopped his breath. “I understand about Zoë now,” she said. “It isn’t just that she was your little sister. You were her sister.”

“You didn’t fall for those girls in high school because they were young,” she said. “You fell for them because they were androgynous. Like they hadn’t been defined yet. Linda was just learning how to be a girl, and that fascinated you because you wanted to do it too. And Cassandra’s an androgyne just like us.”

Even as a child, she’d adored the pretty boys in her ballet classes. As a teenager, she’d had terrible crushes on some of them. “Like it wasn’t conscious, but I kept falling for femmy boys. I didn’t know what it was, but they drew me like a magnet. It was sad. They always turned out to be gay.”

“Back along the track,” she said, giving his own formulation back to him, “you were a pretty boy in my ballet class, and I let you wear my pointe shoes. When you were fourteen, I dressed you up just like me . . . so we looked like twins, girlfriends . . . Does that turn you on?” reaching a cool hand across that foot of space to see if it did—and of course it did.

Ah, sex—more potent, more all-encompassing, more compelling than any drug he could imagine. He’d always thought that if you had as much sex as you wanted, you might eventually get enough of it, but no—the more you had, the more you wanted. She told him about her first girlfriend, Melanie. They’d been in ballet school together, had lived together at Melanie’s house, slept in the same bed. “I couldn’t wait for bedtime. I thought about it all day. So did she. I could look at her across a room, and . . . like I could get her wet just by looking at her.”

“Being with a girl still feels more natural to me,” she told him, “and it probably always will. Like there’s different balances to androgyny, you dig? And I’m naturally balanced toward the lesbian side. Just like you’re naturally balanced toward the straight side. But we’re a good match . . . for right now.” He didn’t like “for right now.”

Sleep always came to her before it did to him. Sometimes it would take her out in the middle of a sentence. He’d lie next to her and listen to her breathing. He was different from her in this—sleep slithered over him gently, from unexpected directions, untangling him, and then, as he’d been doing ever since his acid trip, he’d go back along the track to that point before it had all divided. It was never anything that could be explained—not by any maneuver he might make and not by Pamela’s total critique either. Then, as he entered into his nightly journey through interlinking mind-feeling-things, he found that behind each image was yet another image—as far back as he’d yet been able to travel—but he wanted to keep on going until he arrived at the back of everything where there was nothing left but an emptiness that would make everything simple.

• • •

IN THE cool blue mornings, John felt a sharpness returning, an edge he’d lost, the ability to use things, and he knew that he was finally recovering from his acid trip. He found himself thinking—daydreaming— about being a grad student again. He could write a paper on the myth of Achilles, do a real Northrop Frye number on it. Something obvious that nobody seemed to have pointed out yet—not only had Achilles been the original draft dodger, but when he’d been hiding out with the girls, he’d looked so much like a girl, acted so much like a girl, that it had taken the cleverest man in all of Greece to ferret him out. John thought it would have been a better myth—better for the good of humanity—if Achilles had stayed right where he was, playing dolls and dressup, instead of going on to become Auden’s “man-slaying Achilles who would not live long.”

John hadn’t written a word since he’d moved in with Pamela; now he sat down at his own typewriter and blasted out a one-paragraph summary of her theory of androgyny:

• • •

Reich: if the dominant ideas in any age are always ruling-class ideas, then the dominant sexuality in any age is always ruling-class sexuality. The State needs to produce the kind of people who will reproduce the State. Straight male sexuality is dominant and oppressive, and that’s exactly what is required to continue the world as it is--to maintain the oppression of workers, women, children, gays, blacks, Vietnamese, everybody--including, in the end, even the straight males themselves because their personalities are warped and stunted by the process. The entire project of spectacularized capitalism, of imperialism, rests on the bedrock of straight male sexuality. If you want to get to the root of everything, that’s where you have to start. Androgyny, then, doesn’t define merely a separate sexual category. Androgyny is revolutionary sexuality.

“Well, that’s like the bare bones,” she said.

“Yeah, I know it’s not total, but is it coherent?”

She had to think about it. “Yes.”

“OK. Don’t you think other people need to hear it . . . at this particular time in history?” He knew that argument would get to her.

John expanded his paragraph into a hippie-style rap. Pam corrected it four times before she allowed him to take it to Zygote. Adam wanted to run it under the title of “Beyond Women’s Liberation.”

“Oh no, you won’t,” Pam said.

They settled on “Androgyny in the New Age,” and Adam printed it over a ten-percent screen of the compassionate image of Kuan-yin—“She who listens to the cries of the world.” He explained to them that in India she had been a male deity, Avalokiteshvara, but when she’d come to China, she’d changed her sex.

• • •

SO ONE night me and Cass come back fairly late, like maybe four in the morning, and the minute we stroll though the front door, I detect the fact that things had achieved TOTAL QUIET. Like there’s nowhere near the usual number of fuckheads, and the ones we’ve got are passed out like corpses, and Cass says, “Shit, what is this? Sleeping Beauty’s palace?” And the only one who’s even remotely near consciousness is good old Garvin. He’s sitting . . . Well, sitting ain’t quite right. PROPPED is more like it. He’s PROPPED up at the kitchen table. And it takes him, oh, maybe a century and a half to get his eyes open, and they look like little red coals at the back of an old fire. He goes, “MMMMM . . . laid some groovy shit on us,” and he nods off. So we go trotting upstairs to our room, and I get out my key to open the big mother lock, and I immediately notice that I don’t need the key.

The door is splintered and cracked, looks like somebody went at it with a battering ram, and we’ve been CLEANED OUT. That little stereo we’d bought when we’d been crashed at John’s is gone, naturally, and all the records, and Cassandra’s books, and, when you get right down to it, pretty much EVERYTHING is gone except for the bed Cassandra had made me buy when we’d moved in there. But they’d tried to get the mattress out the door, for fuck’s sake, like they’d got it jammed in the doorway and had to give up on it. I shoved it back in the room and we stood there for a while contemplating this fine little twist of fate, and Cassandra starts laughing. “Well, old Thoreau says to simplify. We just been motherfucking SIMPLIFIED.”

So I go back downstairs, and I prop Garvin up into a somewhat more upright position, and I lean down so I can whisper in his ear, and I say, “OK, buddy, so tell me. WHO laid this groovy shit on you?”

“Ummm,” he goes. “It was Joe the Mooch.” Oh, I loved that. I simply ADORED it.

You think things can’t get worse? Want to bet? Eventually I noted the fact that there were a couple dudes in a grey car who seemed to spend a lot of time parked directly across the street, so I laid it on Lorraine—“Hey, have you caught those guys in the Chevy?”

“Yeah. They’re narks.”

“Oh, yeah? Well that’s NICE.”

And then . . . Well, this is going to sound like I made it up, but I swear it’s the truth. This strange dude started hanging around the house, and he was a tall skinny guy in BRAND-NEW cowboy boots, and BRAND-NEW blue jeans, and VERY SHORT hair, and WRAP-AROUND SUNGLASSES. He’d fall by and give everybody free drugs, prescription drugs straight from the bottle. He had a camera, one of these tiny jobs that fit in the palm of your hand, and he didn’t even try to hide it. He took pictures of everybody in the house. By that time I was beginning to figure that maybe it was ME that was nuts, so I went around asking people—you know, just doing my own reality check—“Hey, could it be possible that dude just might possibly be a nark?”

The skagheads said, “That’s his thing, man. He gets off on bringing everybody down by pretending he’s a nark.”

I say, “Now wait a minute. How do you know he’s not a nark?”

They say, “Well, Christ, man, he’s laying all this groovy shit on us.” And so even I believed it for a while. Well, sort of believed it. I thought, shit, he looks so OBVIOUSLY like a nark, there’s no way in hell he could really be a nark. But then I decided to check with Lorraine, because if anybody would know, she would, and she says, “Oh, him? He’s a nark, man. Works for Lieutenant Vincenti.”

“Well, for Christ’s sake. WHAT THE FUCK ARE WE DOING HERE?”

She just shrugs. “They’re not going to bust the house, man. They’re pulling too much information out of here. Besides, they’d just send me back to the hospital again.” Well, that’s OK for you, Lorraine old buddy, but what about me and Cassandra who don’t happen to be lucky enough to be junkies? And you know what was the craziest thing of all? We kept right on living there just like it was perfectly normal.

• • •

JOHN LOVED to see Pamela dressed for the winter—how much she looked like a boy—and sometimes when they’d come home in the evenings from the Zygote office, she’d deliberately pretend to be a boy. As soon as they stepped into her apartment and the door clicked shut behind them, she’d slam him into the wall and thrust her tongue into his mouth. If she was heavy into the fantasy, she’d push on his shoulders, an unmistakable command—down. Kneeling at her feet, he’d unzip her boots and pull them off, undo her belt, unbutton her jeans, unzip her fly, work her jeans down her hard thighs—slowly, teasing her—and peel off her underwear. She’d sink into the firmly rooted karate stance that said boy, and he’d press his mouth into the tender patch of dark curly hair between her legs, pretending he was taking an erect penis into his mouth—although he couldn’t maintain that fantasy for very long. He loved the taste of her that was not boyish at all.

“I keep thinking about you down there with a mouthful of hair,” she said. “It really bothers me. Like vile, man.”

They both knew it was only an excuse. She let him begin with scissors. “Just like Zoë’s eyelashes,” she said, “be careful.”

She finished the job herself—with a razor in the bathtub. Looking down at herself, she said, “Yeah, that’s how I ought to look, the real me.” Smooth, clean, not yet defined. Just as he’d known it would, it turned him on, but it made him uneasy too. Standing next to her, he looked too male—and she’d gone somewhere else, dispersed through a mind-feeling-place of her own and left him behind. “But maybe just a few pounds lighter,” she was saying.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake.”

“Hey, whoa, I’m just putting you on. Well, mostly putting you on. But if I went down to . . . like maybe a hundred and five . . . I wouldn’t have any breasts at all. But no, I’m not even going to think about that, am I, man? OK, your turn.”

He was surprised, but not that surprised. Of course he would let her do it—was even prepared to like it—but the scissors snipping away so near his balls and penis terrified him. “Wow,” she said, giggling, “I’ve never seen you so limp. Cool out, man. I’m not Valarie Solanis. Trust me . . . How about the rest of you? Would you like that?”

Having his public hair shaved off was not a turn-on, but having the rest of him shaved obviously was. Now his erection felt like a length of steel pipe. “Bizarre,” she said. “Men’s bodies . . . so strange.”

He stood up in the bathtub so she could shave the backs of his legs. He turned to face her so she could shave the front of his legs—and his stomach and chest. She even shaved his underarms. It took forever. She had to keep changing blades. He kept phasing in and out of the turn-on; sometimes he was hard and sometimes he wasn’t. It didn’t matter. Wherever she’d gone, he was catching up to her, and he allowed the words in his head to come and go and leave nothing behind but slender vapor trails. Later, he would remember saying, “Now there won’t even be hair between us.”

“Oy, you’re such a Romantic.” Someone had told him that before. It was probably true.

She rinsed him in the shower, dried him, massaged his hairless body with apricot lotion. It made him tingle all over. “Sexy, sexy, sexy,” she said, “but wow, is it ever a bitch when it grows back. You’ll see.”

He wanted to look at himself in the mirror, but she wouldn’t let him. “Not yet. Wait till I’m finished.”

They blew some weed. It made her even more single-minded and intent. She rummaged around in the back of her closet, found a plastic bag filled with old makeup. She brushed his hair smooth, parted it in the middle, and tied it into two ponytails with black ribbons—cleaned his face with cream, wiped it off with Kleenex, patted it with astringent, and smoothed an ivory foundation over it. “Oh,” she said, murmuring, “you’re going to look . . . just so . . . absolutely . . . far out.”

She kept saying, “Trust me.” She told him to stare at a fixed point on the far wall. She drew lines around his eyes with a kohl pencil, shadowed his lids with smoky blue powder. He’d often seen her like this before—meticulous, determined, rapt, obsessive—but now he felt the full purity of the mind-focus-thing that took her and distanced her. If they were playing dolls and dressup, he was the doll, and he wanted to be the doll. She was doing to him what she said men did to women all the time—turning him into an object—but he wanted to be objectified. Maybe later he would be able to untangle these fabulously complex knots of mind-stuff—the lines and threads of these interwoven tapestries—but, for now, all he knew was that he wanted to be an object of her desire.

She curled his eyelashes, coated them with mascara—let them dry and coated them again. “Oh, darling,” she whispered, “I’m going to make you look just like me.”

She walked quickly to her dresser, opened a drawer, searched for something—came back with a pair of her panties and handed them to him. He took them reluctantly. They were a shiny pale pink, made of some heavy-duty stretch fabric. They looked far too small. He stepped into them, tried to pull them up, but his hard-on made it impossible. It felt entirely independent of him. “Think about something that’s not a turn-on,” she said.

But the whole world was a turn-on. “What do you think I am?” he said. “A goddamned yogi?”

She stared into his eyes for a long moment. “What was Bakunin’s central objection to Marx’s idea of the people’s state?” she said.

A ragged fracturing. “Bakunin?” It took him a moment even to translate her bizarre question into an intelligible sentence. “Bakunin! What the fuck . . . ?”

“Yeah, Bakunin. You know. His objection to . . .”

“For Christ’s sake, Pam, why are you . . . ?”

“Seriously, man. Tell me. Come on. The dictatorship of the proletariat . . .?”

John looked away. Her small white world they were occupying was vibrating like an anthill. Spinning off, wobbling, he heard himself say, “If the proletariat becomes the ruling class, who’s it ruling? Is that what you mean?”

“Yeah. That’s it exactly. Go on. Tell me.”

“OK. The proletariat then becomes a class itself, and that implies . . . Jesus, Pam. Why are you doing this? Jesus, it’s motherfucking freaky . . . like . . .”

Smiling slightly, she glanced down. He followed her eyes. He had gone limp.

Not daring to think, he worked the panties up quickly, over his hips, folded himself into them and drew them up tight. As soon as he felt that damnable stretch fabric trap him and hold him down, the full heat of the turn-on came back like the door swinging open on a blast furnace. Something scary about that. He was shaking all over. Tuned in to him, she said, “Oh, baby, are you all right?”

The last thing he wanted was for her to turn into a mom. “I’m OK. I’m fine.”

She took his hand and led him to the mirror. “I’m OK,” he said again to convince her—and to convince himself.

He looked and saw that they had become two slender white entities with ribbons in their hair, their smooth hairless bodies gleaming with apricot lotion, every muscle clearly edged with light. Two sets of huge eyes stared back at them—eyes like images painted onto ritual masks. He was no longer a boy. He looked something like a girl but not really like a girl. It was hard to say what he looked like. And his ambiguous presence next to Pam undermined her image so that she didn’t look like a girl either. The shaved triangle between her legs looked as strangely chaste as if it had been carved from marble. They were as sexless as angels. “Oh, aren’t we pretty?” she said.

It was true. They were pretty. She kissed him, her tongue in his mouth. With her fingertips, she drew delicate lines of fire on his thighs and stomach, over his curled, compressed cock. She turned slightly so that she could see herself kissing him, touching him. “Sweetheart,” she whispered, “my pretty girl,” and that was exactly what he wanted her to say.

He was connecting back to countless high school make-out sessions, to Linda in the gazebo, mounting him like a horse, and to Carol, of course, who’d teased him to a fearful nausea. Pamela was not teasing him, was doing something else entirely, but he was so turned on, had been turned on for so long, it was twisting back on him, gutting him, making him sick. “Pam,” he said, “you’re killing me.”

She led him behind the Japanese screen, but once he was there, he changed his mind. No, he wasn’t ready to stop yet. If he’d become a girl—or something like a girl—he wanted to go on being one. Attached to him by a million tiny filaments, Pamela took him into her arms and kissed him slowly, in excessive detail, but the burning ache between his legs kept reminding him that he wasn’t a girl. It was that old despair—that he couldn’t hold either position, the boy’s or the girl’s. That was the mistake he’d seen so clearly on acid—that the two sides of himself still made up a demonic construction, that he was at heart unstable, irresolvable. But no, maybe there was a way out, a possible resolution. If Pam was right about him, he was an androgyne, and an androgyne is something like an angel. She had made him into something like an angel, and she had called him her angel. But angels don’t have sex. Angels are pure, and that purity gave him a resting place, a stability. He had a man’s body, not an angel’s, so it would be painful, but if that’s what she wanted, that’s what he would give her.

That must not have been what she wanted. She was sliding the stretchy panties down. He was almost disappointed. But why had he been working so hard in his head? Once again, he’d missed the point—it was hers to choose and always had been.

As soon as it was freed, his cock leapt up—a sensation far more compelling than mere relief. Not able to think about anything now but physical immediacy, he sank onto the edge of the bed. She followed, swung herself onto his lap, spread her legs and straddled him. Unlike herself, she seemed to have arrived there with no plan; wide-eyed, astonished, she stared into his eyes. He grasped the cheeks of her ass. As tall and substantial as she seemed to him sometimes, it was an illusion; she really was a small girl, not heavy at all. He lifted her up. He could support all of her weight if he had to. And then it was as though his polarity had reversed in an instant—he wanted to be a boy just as badly as, only a few seconds before, he had wanted to be a girl. For the first time since they’d become lovers, he had the sensation—what he thought must be an entirely male sensation—of impaling her. She whispered: “Oh”—a released breath—“God.”

After a moment, his sense of being male—and different from her—melted away and they were again what they had been so often, twins joined at the hip. But in that position, he couldn’t do anything. What needed to be done was something she would have to do. As she always did.

He kissed her. She opened her mouth so his tongue could enter her. He knew that she liked being kissed, could feel it in her shiver, but she didn’t respond. Her tensely drawn power seemed to have left her entirely—all of her fierce boyishness—and she seemed unable to do anything but look into the eyes she’d made up to look exactly like her own. He had always thought that aggressiveness defined her sexually; without it, she’d become someone he didn’t know. Maybe she didn’t know him either. She kept staring at him with a focused, dazzled expression he could call “wonderment.” And then he understood what must have happened, or at least something of it—her body had caught up with her unawares and blown her mind as empty as the Buddha’s. Even though she was free to move, she couldn’t move. She couldn’t do anything. She was so turned on she was utterly helpless.

For a moment he was baffled, but then he allowed himself to understand her perfectly. He grasped her again, took all of her weight, and rolled backward onto the bed, carrying her with him. On his back, he arched under her, held her by her sharp pelvic bones and pushed her up high enough to give himself room to move. “Ah,” she said, gasping. She began to move with him.

Her bed was low enough for him to press his feet into the hardwood floor; he needed to push his legs and feet down so he could push his pelvis up—but their bodies, linked at even a deeper level than their minds, had already got the idea. She didn’t kiss him as she usually did but stared blindly into an emptiness a few inches above his head, her mouth hanging open, and he felt how alive they were—not images, not angels—but vulnerable animals caught up in a motion that was undeniable. Ah, yes, he thought—it was an animal thing, and this is what you did with the jangle. The sound of her voice ignited a pulse in his throat, and he cried out right along with her.

She melted, flowed out over him, her energy lines cut, her ballerina’s legs splayed flat. She didn’t, as she usually did, withdraw at once. She didn’t, as she usually did, start talking. He could feel her heart racing. Then, strangely, after they’d finished, she broke into a sweat, her skin beneath his hands going suddenly moist. The whole world stank of apricots.

She kept her hips glued to his. He was still inside her. He saw that she could see him again. “I don’t believe this,” she said. “I just don’t fucking believe it. Did you come?” she said.

“Jesus, Pam, what do you think? Couldn’t you feel it?”

“Of course I could feel it. My God, man, we just had a simultaneous orgasm. And I thought it was a load of crap, a male chauvinist myth. But it’s real. Jesus, man, do you know what that means? Reich wasn’t just right about the mass psychology of fascism. He was right about sex.”

He laughed. “What?” she said, wrinkling her nose. “Is that funny? What’s funny?”

“The way your mind kicks in,” he said, but he was laughing at himself too.

“Yeah, it’s weird. I always told you I was weird, and it’s . . . Wow, it’s fucking amazing, man. You know, that’s the first time in my life I ever understood why straight people bother to do it.”