Nathan Hill - The Nix

“Tomorrow’s edition,” he said, smiling, turning the paper to the light.

“What’s in it?”

“Letters to the editor. I had a stockpile.”

“Are they good?”

“They’ll blow your mind,” he said, loading more paper onto the bed of the machine. “Sorry. Act normal. I’m not even here.”

And so everyone turned back and the meeting began again, but Faye kept watching Sebastian. How he fiddled with knobs and cranks, how he lowered the head of the machine to smash ink onto the paper, how he pressed his lips together in concentration, how the collar on his white shirt had been stained a deep, dark green, and she was thinking about how he looked like some beautifully sloppy mad scientist and how she felt connected to him in the way outsiders feel a certain kinship with each other when she heard someone in the group say something about orgasms. Faye turned to see who was speaking — tall woman, blond hair like a waterfall down to her back, a string of beads around her neck, a bright red shirt with a deep neckline. She was leaning forward and asking about orgasms. Can you have them only in one position? Faye could not believe she’d said such a thing with a boy in the room. Behind them, his machine punched at paper, throbbing like a heartbeat. Someone suggested that you could have orgasms in two and perhaps as many as three positions. Someone else said the orgasm was a fiction. It was invented by doctors to make us feel ashamed. Ashamed of what? That we don’t have them like boys do. People nodded at this. They moved on.

It was suggested you could orgasm on weed, and sometimes acid, but almost never on heroin. Someone said sex on the natch was best anyway. One woman’s boyfriend couldn’t have sex unless he was drunk. Another woman’s boyfriend had recently asked her to douche. There was a boyfriend who, after sex, spent an hour cleaning the bedroom with a mop and germicide. There was another boyfriend who named his dick Mr. Rumpy-Pumpy. Another only wanted blow jobs until marriage.

“Free love!” someone said, and everyone laughed.

Because despite what the newspapers said, it was not the time of free love. It was the time of free-love writing, when free love was widely condemned, rarely practiced, and terrifically marketed. Photos of topless women dancing in public in Berkeley were greatly criticized and distributed. News of the oral-sex scandal at Yale reached every bedroom in the country. Everyone had heard of the Barnard girl who was living with a boy she wasn’t even married to. The imagination was seized by the pelvic regions of university girls — stories of once-chaste daughters turned to deviants in only one semester. Magazine articles condemned masturbation, the FBI warned against clitoral orgasm, and Congress investigated the dangers of fellatio. Never before had the authorities been so remarkably explicit. Mothers were taught the warning signs of sex addiction, kids were counseled against criminal and soul-destroying pleasure. Police flew helicopters over beaches to catch bare-breasted women. Life magazine said slutty girls had penis envy and were turning real men into pansies. The New York Times said excessive fornication caused girls to go psychotic. Good middle-class kids were becoming queers, dopers, dropouts, beatniks. It was true. Heard it on Cronkite. Politicians vowed to get tough. They blamed the pill, permissive liberal parents, the climbing divorce rate, raunchy movies, go-go clubs, atheism. People shook their heads, appalled at youth run amuck, and then set out looking for more tawdry stories, found them, and read every word.

The barometer for the health of the country seemed to be what middle-aged men thought about the behavior of college girls.

But for the girls, it was not the time of free love. It was the time of awkward love, embarrassed and nervous and ignorant love. This is what nobody reported, how free-love girls gathered in these dark rooms and worried. They’d read all the stories, and believed them, and thus thought they were doing something wrong. “I want to be hip, but I don’t want my boyfriend fucking all these other women,” said many, many girls who found that free love was still tangled up in all the old arguments — jealousy, envy, power. It was a sexual bait and switch, the free-love trip not quite measuring up to its hype.

“If I don’t want to have sex with someone, does that mean I’m a prude?” said one of the women at the meeting.

“If I don’t want to strip at a protest, am I a prude?” said another.

“Men think you’re a hip chick if you take your shirt off at rallies.”

“All those nude girls in Berkeley holding flowers.”

“They sell lots of papers.”

“Posing with psychedelic paint on their tits.”

“What kind of freedom is that?”

“They’re just doing it to be popular.”

“They’re not free.”

“They’re doing it for men.”

“Why else would they do it?”

“There’s no other reason to do it.”

“Maybe they like it,” said a new voice, a small voice, and everyone looked to see where it had come from: the girl with the funny round glasses who had been unnaturally quiet up to this point. Faye’s face flushed red and she looked at the floor.

Alice turned around and stared at her. “What do they like about it?” she asked.

Faye shrugged. She’d shocked herself by saying anything, much less that. She wanted to take it back immediately, reach out and stuff it into her stupid mouth. Maybe they like it, oh lord, oh god, the girls looked at her and waited. She had the feeling of being a wounded bird in a room full of cats.

Alice cocked her head and said, “Do you like it?”

“Sometimes. I don’t know. No.”

She had forgotten herself. She had been caught up in the moment — all this talk of sex, all the girls so excited, and she imagined herself at home standing in front of her big picture window imagining some dark stranger walking by and seeing her, when this thing erupted, it just came out. Maybe they like it.

“You like putting on a show for men?” Alice asked. “Parading your tits so they’ll like you?”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“What’s your name?” someone asked.

“Faye,” she said, and the girls waited. They watched her. She wanted more than anything to run out of the room, but that would draw so much more attention. She sat in a tight ball, trying to think of something to say, and that’s when Sebastian stepped out from the shadows and saved her.

“I’m sorry to interrupt,” he said, “but I have an announcement.”

And as he talked the group mercifully forgot about Faye. She sat there boiling and listening to Sebastian — he was talking about the upcoming protest, how the city hadn’t given them a permit to occupy the park but they were going to do it anyway. “Make sure to tell your friends,” he said. “Bring everybody. We’re gonna have a hundred thousand people or more. We’re gonna change the world. We’re gonna end the war. Nobody will go to work. Nobody will go to school. We’re gonna shut the city down. Music and dancing at every red light. The pigs can’t stop us.”

And at the mention of the pigs, the pigs themselves laughed.

For they were listening.

They were packed into a small office several miles south called the “war room” in the basement of the International Amphitheater, where the detectives listened through static to Sebastian’s exhortations, the girls’ inane chatter. They wrote on legal pads and remarked on the stupidity of college kids, how they were so trusting. The office of the Chicago Free Voice had been bugged for how long now? How many months? The kids didn’t have a clue.