WE SPENT MORE THAN AN hour together, the combined membership of the Scum Front and I. I became acquainted with Lillian Ray and her daughter, Rachel: the Bear and “Kate King.” I heard how it all started. I heard how the name came from the woman who tried to kill Andy Warhol on behalf of the Society to Cut Up Men, SCUM, and how they thought the name was funny. I heard how they had met last night to talk everything through. I heard how they had decided to give it all up. The problem was working out how. They made me coffee.
Not evil people. Innocents of a kind. People who could attend a meeting and hear a speaker ask, “What are you doing about the environment?” and take it seriously, personally. “At first I just made sure to use ozone-friendly hair spray,” Kathryn Morgason told me. “We all did.”
“And unleaded gas,” Lillian Ray said. “But it was all so small. So trivial. What was the point when General Motors and General Electric and the generals at the Pentagon weren't making the same effort?”
“For me it was soap,” Charlotte Vivien said.
“That's right,” Lillian Ray said. “You buy vegetable oil soap to save the whales but the supermarket is still stacked with the other kind. It makes you feel so powerless.”
“And then,” Charlotte Vivien said, “you begin to ask yourself where the real power in society is.”
“It isn't people working alone,” Kathryn Morgason said.
“You have to find each other,” Lillian Ray said. “You have to think it through. You have to be able to work out plans. You'll never have power yourself, but if you work it out right you might be able to make the people with the power do something.”
The turning point was when Rachel Ray came home from high school one day with a copy of Poor Man's James Bond. Classmates had been selling them via a computer notice board.
Bond is a bomb-making book, like The Anarchist's Cook-book in the sixties. Except that Bond even gives instructions for putting together a nuclear bomb.
The police had broken up the high school enterprise. But not before “Kate King” got her copy.
Then, when her mother next talked about her friends, Rachel Ray said, “I've got something you'll be interested in, Mother.”
Mother had looked at the Bond. #dpBombs?”
“I thought you said you guys wanted to do something.”
So Rachel joined the “group” and they had ended up doing something.
Kathryn Morgason brought media know-how. She'd been a copywriter before she married her television magnate.
Lillian Ray had the contacts that led to an illicit dynamite supplier. She was an assistant professor of sociology.
And Charlotte Vivien had the money. And the driving energy. She wanted to spend both on something more significant than giving great parties and sponsoring poets in residence.
And between them they had scared the shit out of a city.
“But we never once considered that someone might pick up one of our bombs and use it,” Lillian Ray said.
There was a chorus of agreement.
“Nobody did use it,” I said.
“What?”
“Wait here.”
Bobbie Lee stood by and watched me take the plastic bag from my trunk. She called to me as I headed back to the room, “I can tell from the way you're walking that it's going all right. What's in the bag? Lunch?”
“Yup,” I said. But I winked.
Getting their bomb back didn't make them feel better. That was good.
They didn't deserve to feel better. The atmosphere they created had nerved up the imitators who put a man in the hospital.
But I had made the decision that I had to make. I would not give the police their names.
“So,” I said, “what do you people plan to do to make amends?”