Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

Speak right up. “Train” her. Like she is a spaniel or hound, begging for dinner table scraps.

Just looking at that gun gave her the courage, the nerve, to tell that McCarthy bitch off and walk out, past all the dumb faces of those drones working there. She forgot to get her time card signed, but that’s OK. The gun makes her feel better about that too. Money becomes so abstract, the nitpicky refuge of the chickenhearted, at the uplifting sight of a gun, its pure power to convert whatever you need or desire into something you actually have.

NIETFELDT HAS A ONE — BEDROOM apartment on Lupine, a little spur off Geary. The building is built into the side of a hill, so that his third-floor apartment is reached by entering the building’s lobby and walking down a flight. The whole building is low ceilings, long corridors, right angles, dark corners, and the thin institutional smell of ammonia. Utterly claustrophobic.

Gradually he’s turned into one of those men with great bundles of dirty laundry piled in the corners, leftover pizza in the refrigerator, old newspapers on top of the stove. For someone else the rooms would be a rebuke, the embodiment of his seclusion, the measure of his digression from the norm, but for him this is the norm. So his wives had discovered. Anything else would be cosmetic, a disguise. Still, he avoids the apartment as much as he can. Checks in long enough to get the mail, put it on the table.

Tonight he takes the time to open a beer and have another look at Joan Shimada’s file. Here’s a new wrinkle. Susan Rorvik’s logged eight trips to Soledad over the last three years for the purpose of visiting William Clay, Joan Shimada’s former lover and comrade-in-arms. He finds that in the Shimada file, right in front of his face all this time. If that were the only connection between Susan and Joan, Nietfeldt wouldn’t be all that impressed; a steady stream of pilgrims from the East Bay have gone to call on Willie Clay. What has impressed him is the discovery that working side by side at the Plate of Brasse with “Susan Anger” is a certain Meg Speice. Speice is a Jersey girl who was a dead end in the Shimada investigation three years ago. She admitted then that she and Joan were friends but that Joan had long since gone on her way and she hadn’t seen or heard from her. No reason to think Speice was lying in 1972. But now she pops up here in San Francisco right around when the summer hidey-hole had to have been abandoned, working side by side with a known SLA sympathizer with links to Guy Mock. His chain is looking longer and stronger.

He has the vague feeling that he’ll regret it, but what he needs is to have an agent in Southern California head out to Palmdale to pay the Rorviks a visit. He could go himself, but Gary Haff was extrasensitive about getting his toes stepped on. Brilliant work he’d done on the case last May. Just brilliant.

Summer Chronicle

The women’s collective meets, possibly for the last time as such. The members have decided to set aside their work for the time being to pursue more absolutely the goal of revolution, in keeping with Teko’s intense desire to begin blowing things up.

On the agenda is the matter of prostitution. They are attempting to decide if sexual entrepreneurialism is liberating, oppressive, or simply retrograde. Tania, “troop scribe,” as Joan has dubbed her, jots down the minutes.

Susan suggests that a woman who is in business for herself, who controls the means of production, is more correct, politically, than one who’s been turned out by a pimp. Cf. her own experience as an actress v. her experience waiting tables; oh there are some quite long reminiscences.

Joan speculates that in the socialist or barter economy that might exist in an emerging postrevolutionary state, such “entrepreneurs” might then be politically obliged to stop seeking payment for their services and thus be placed in a position of slavery all over again, trading sexual favors for subsistence. She seems to enjoy lobbing such near paradoxes into their midst.

Yolanda says that all sex workers will receive training in the manual art of their choice, be it auto repair, locksmithing, air conditioning and refrigeration, or computer programming.

At some point they agree that all men are pimps. In theory. Meeting adjourned.

Tania sits on the floor in her panties, topless. She leans against the couch, her legs extended under the scarred coffee table. Her paint-spattered clothes are piled on the floor. She feels grimy, bone tired: two units today, at a complex up in Diamond Heights, a mixed neighborhood as they say, with black families trudging home from the Safeway, laden with grocery bags, beneath clean modern houses built into the bluffs overlooking the city. She’d felt safe enough venturing out, but the landlord, a friendly old guy with a limp, someone’s good grampa, had brought them lunch and then stuck around to argue good-naturedly with Roger, Giants versus Dodgers stuff, so she’d withdrawn from sight, actually putting in a day’s work, finishing off the first unit in the hot bare sun streaming through the western windows and then doing the hated bathroom of the second. In a daze of ennui and fatigue, she sits holding an unlit cigarette in one hand and a paperback book in the other, staring blankly at one smudge among many on the wall.

The book is The Collective Family: A Handbook for Russian Parents. Teko found it while prowling around Moe’s — a stupid move, his going there; Tania doesn’t even want to know if he pocketed it — and he presented it to her casually one day, almost like a joke, after Tania had mentioned offhandedly that she wanted children eventually.

“This here’s like the Soviet Dr. Spock,” he said.

As she might have known, whereas someone normal might expect a thank-you note, what Teko requires is a full report on A. S. Makarenko’s tome, and she has barely cracked its spine.

Makarenko says, “Such parents never command discipline. Their children are simply afraid of them and try to live out of range of their authority and power.”

Fuck Teko. She gets up and walks into the dark kitchen to drink cold milk out of the container, standing in the light of the fridge.

She returns to the living room and flips on the Philco, stands watching, right hip jutting out and her weight resting on her left leg, as the old set warms and the image spreads gradually across the surface of the picture tube. And here’s the Miss Universe pageant. The girls strut their stuff down the runway in the ballroom of the National Gymnasium in San Salvador, each of these hardworking beauty queens appearing in what Tania gathers is traditional native garb. Misses Sri Lanka, Sweden, Switzerland, Thailand, Trinidad and Tobago, Turkey, Uruguay. Bob Barker’s narration of the procession skillfully combines both veiled lecherousness and false reverence for the honored customs each elaborate outfit represents. “Miss USA,” he announces casually But wait. The pretty brunette sauntering across the screen appears to be wearing combat fatigues, a beret, and an automatic rifle. She arrives at the edge of the stage, like all the milkmaids, priestesses, and native dancers going before her, and, flashing a gorgeous smile to acknowledge the sustained applause that has greeted her appearance, lifts the weapon to her hip, and trains it on the members of the audience, swinging slowly to the right and then to the left, as she might if she were to clear the room, firing full auto.

Tania watches the pageant until the end. Miss USA ends up coming in third, behind the first runner-up, Miss Haiti, and the winner, Miss Finland. She is named Miss Photogenic, having tied with Martha Echeverry of Colombia for the honor.

They’re sitting in traffic one day, Teko and Jeff up front, Tania and Susan in back, the car like an oven, when Jeff and Teko begin to argue, then fight. They slap and shove each other across the sticky front seat, breathing hard, pausing for a moment so that Teko can throw the car into park. They struggle, aiming shots carefully across the short distance separating them, covering up, panting in the swelter, in the blare of horns.