Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

“Oh, God, no. Not Betty Azizi again.”

“Yes. That little Arab girl. Always at the house. Always picking things up. ‘Oh, this is so beautiful.’ Picking things up and turning them over in her hands. Searching for the price tag perhaps? Had nothing and wanted everything. Eyes lit up every time she came through the door.”

“If I remember correctly, her father was a lawyer who worked for the Iranian consulate. Big house in the San Carlos hills.”

“When they’re that close, they want it even more. Especially an Arab.”

“Um,” says Guy. “Iranians aren’t Arabs.” The couple ignores him.

“Even Eric Stump,” says Lydia. “You practically adopted him.”

“No, I did not. I tried to make him feel at home. It’s my nature to be friendly. How was I to know he would turn out to be such a cold mackerel?”

“Exactly.” And Lydia raises that.45-caliber hand again and points directly at Guy’s head. Nice well-bred lady like her, pointing.

“Look,” says Guy, “I helped your daughter when she was in need. I’m still helping her.”

“You call that helping her? If you’d wanted to help, you might have told her it was time to come home and face the music rather than arrange a summer retreat,” says Lydia.

Guy experiences the strange lighted calm he used to feel just before a meet against an opponent he feared. He continues. “She thought the cops were going to off her. Not too farfetched at that point.”

“As ye sow,” says Lydia.

“That summer retreat cost me about eight grand, incidentally. I’ve spent a lot of money.”

“Here it comes.”

“I don’t expect to see that dough again. But I could use a little help. I’ve got lawyer bills. I’ve got doctor bills. I’ve got phone bills like you wouldn’t believe. I’ve got bills from auto mechanics. Bartenders.” He essays a faint smile. He was going to say drug dealers. Joke falls flat anyway.

“Tsk, tsk. You may have heard that we made our own modest contribution to our daughter’s Wanderjahr.”

“Your daughter. Not my daughter. Listen. Hank here told me, and I quote, if there’s ever anything I can do for you, be sure and let me know. I need a hand. Not a payoff. A job as a sportswriter for the Examiner maybe. A columnist working for a paycheck every week.”

Lydia bursts out laughing, an awful, high-pitched laugh. Hank cringes.

Well, time for the chimichangas! Lydia has the taco salad, which she “picks at” in time-honored fashion. A pitcher of dark beer sits untouched before the couple. Guy orders another margarita, though he skips the Cuervo on the side. Lydia really fucked him, bringing up his motivations straightaway like that. Now he has to wade back in, deeper and deeper, reclaiming his position. What was it Hemingway said? Fly-fishing in the swamp is a tragic adventure? Lydia has his number, all right. Guy knows that Hank does too; the guy just doesn’t give a damn. Not going to nickel-and-dime his kid’s life at this point. Guy figures the best thing to do is to talk. He has nothing to lose giving up information. Or he does, but the thought of quantifying that loss makes his skull throb within the generous, taco-shaped space behind his forehead. So he goes ahead and says that Alice is thinking about leaving the group. That while it may not be practical for her to come aboveground, she’d like to be in touch with her family. That her urban guerrilla days are probably more or less over, that she and some of the others, the more normal others, have been talking in terms of a “small-scale revolution,” and no, he doesn’t really know what that means either, but he’s heard snatches about local activism, community gardens, the Equal Rights Amendment, and food co-ops; about boycotts of table grapes, lettuce, tree fruit, and other agricultural products; about marijuana decriminalization, mandatory recycling, antinuclear protests, nonpartisan elections, handicapped parking spots, and other such issues. Lydia’s expression is carved onto her face, and her ramrod posture does not slacken, but he can see Hank relax; who wouldn’t want to hear that these are the keynote issues of the armed opposition? It’s like being told that the editorial page staff of the Village Voice is massed outside the walls of the keep.

And, as Guy speaks, he considers how things have changed. War over, Nixon out, and all the wind basically went out of the sails of the Movement. Stands to reason that a zany little twerp like Drew Shepard would be the last man on deck.

Not to mention that every young grease monkey, factory worker, and warehouseman now was as hirsute as, now was taking the same drugs as, now was listening to the same sort of music as every hippie, radical, and hanger-on from Bloomfield Hills, Brentwood, and Great Neck. Even the cops had mustaches and long hair. The sixties had finally arrived in the prefab dells and factory barrens and methedrine parishes of hamburger America; the People had been won over after all. Suddenly the Left felt the fear, seized up with those old class prejudices; it was all well and good to feel bad for the snaggle-toothed trailer kid, the guy who mixed the paint at the hardware store, the jokester squeegeeing your windshield at the Union 76, but it was something else to share your blanket and weed with them at the festival, to have them sticking their big uncircumcised pricks into your women, to suffer their ineducability, their ignorance, their dinner conversation. These were the People ? No, no, no, no, no: the People were black and brown and red and yellow, a beautiful smeary rainbow with a pot of moral indignation at its end. The People were beautiful. They wore cardboard shoes and ate cakes made of newspapers when they hungered. They migrated from one oppressive job to another. They were raised in shacks or in cinder-block slums. They were subdued by heroin and malt liquor. They were incarcerated unjustly in Amerikkkan concentration camps, where they painstakingly taught themselves to read, to write, to study. They weren’t these louts from Kalamazoo and Pomona and Queens, with their muscle cars and their Bachman-Turner Overdrive eight-tracks. What had failed to transcend race and age had managed, to an extent, to transcend class, and the Left was uninterested. The Left had gone to the disco.

I See Phantoms of Hatred and of the Heart’s Fullness and of the Coming Emptiness.

And here, thinks Guy, comes the end point of the Movement. For all the talk — about the minority this, about the false that, about the bourgeois this, about the Marx’s that, for all the endless talk — the only thing that had been successfully accomplished was the carving out of another bourgeois role. And to play that part, you needed money. He acknowledges. Sadly. He’s laying it on thick for Mr. and Mrs. Mom and Dad here at the Mexican restaurant, making a play for his grubstake. Does Tania really want to be dealt out of the game? He thinks maybe she does. Running gets you down. Tires out your eyes, your neck, your jaw. Uses up cash. Depletes your body of B vitamins. Shrinks your dick. Had she really wanted to cause the downfall of the U.S. government? Hadn’t that already happened without her? Happened in committee rooms while they were playing popgun in the woods? Now it’s business as usual, with the blandest of all possible alternatives in charge. If she wants out, it’s either boredom, fear, or a complete understanding of the magnitude of the task they face, if they’re really serious about the whole thing. But who really is “serious”? Everyone admires the Vietcong, loves those courageous little bastards to death, but who the fuck is prepared to spend a thousand years fighting, waging war against an army that brings Coke machines and cases of cigarettes and whiskey into the field with it? Around you everywhere you look are things you wouldn’t dream of doing without, not for a month, not for a day, notwithstanding the premeditated squalor demanded by Cinque Mtume, the Fifth Prophet. It’s the psychos, the Tekos and Yolandas, who set the example of austere self-denial. Guy grimaces, sticks a fork into the friable surface of his chimichanga. Suddenly all he can smell is fat, fat and old cooking oil.