Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

“Do you mind if I borrow my daughter?”

“G’right ahead.”

Susan is steered in the direction of the deck.

“He’s certainly feeling good,” whispers her mom. “Why were you two lurking under the eaves like that?”

“Just talking, Mom.”

On the deck Roger listens politely to a man railing about the flight paths that bring airliners directly over Palo Alto. He’s building up the record, making sound recordings from his lawn. Circulating petitions. He’s ready to fight them on this.

Her mother parks her in front of her Aunt Nancy.

“Susan. Your mother tells me you’re working at the Drake.”

“I’m in the restaurant.”

“That is so nice. Are you developing an interest. In restaurants, food service, whatever?”

“Not particularly.”

“And how is your young man? Are you planning on taking the plunge? Or are you going to keep letting him get the milk for free?”

Susan had grown up in Palmdale. Defense industry town. She’d always been drawn to performing, was aware that what she most sought was the love and approval of her audience, that what she most enjoyed was to manipulate them into admiring not merely her skill but her virtue as well. A kind of flashy extrinsic goodness — a quality, in short, of likability — was draped over these performances, inherently immature, a quality Susan herself found just cloying enough to miss being charm, though it was the sort of quality that was treasured in Palmdale. It also was the sort of quality that could carry you pretty far away from Palmdale, and it carried her across the desert and over the mountains and up the coast to UCSB, a school that filled her parents with vaguely defined misgivings. Who knew what you might undergo in such a place? As far as Susan was concerned, the point was to undergo something. So she sat in a trash can in a storefront theater in Goleta, doing Endgame in front of eighteen people, even as the drama department was staging its sold-out Witness for the Prosecution. Before audiences of farm workers, she performed guerrilla theater with a group modeled after El Teatro Campesino. Marched and sang. Raised her fist. Grew her hair.

She graduated and with Jeff Wolfritz, the man getting it for free, moved to a commune near Monterey, which she found a fundamentally disagreeable experience and thus not worth the fury of their parents’ combined disapproval. A letter from her mother during this period:

August 12, 1970

Dear Susan,

I hope this finds you well. I am doing fine myself and your father feels much better, the doctor believes that it is just a muscle strain and has prescribed some cortisone that helps a good deal. Quite a scare, though. Thank you for getting back to us on that, I know telephoning is a little hard from where you are.

I have enclosed a clipping from the Sunday paper, which tells about a religious sect near here. I am sorry to admit that when I read it the first thing I thought of was you! You know your father and I both trust your judgement and we understand this is a time of many changes in a young person’s life. But I think you will agree that the best decisions are made from all available information. I am trying my best not to see things as if you are “turning your back” on your family and the things that we value. I know that you are a level headed young woman and you have never really disappointed me as long as I have known you. Don’t forget, though, that sometimes things done for the sake of novelty affect your life long after the novelty wears off! Jeff is a smart young man with a real future and you know what I think of your abilities and your father and I think that the best way for the two of you to work things out is if you just get back on track and start moving forward. “Dropping out” is NOT the answer.

All our love to you, honey, and tell Jeff your father and I send our best regards.

Love,

Mom

Such documents were enough to drive Susan up the wall, but a steady stream of these low-key implicative jeremiads, reinforced by periodic telephone calls (as her mother very well knew, phoning wasn’t difficult at all), helped to hasten her and Jeff’s departure from Monterey and move to L.A., where, looking for stage work while dealing with an unfamiliar city that she had, despite herself, romanticized, she encountered the sensation of superfluousness that gradually overcame people who were uninvolved in the Industry, while suffering the same rejection as any other aspirant actress. Beckett was no help. “We lose our hair, our teeth! Our bloom, our ideals.”

Then Guy Mock stepped in to relieve the boredom. Just about the only thing you could always count on him for. Jeff had decided that it might be more fun to write about sports than to pursue the graduate economics work his degree had prepared him for, and he’d begun corresponding with Guy, a “radical sportswriter” dedicated to looking at sports within the larger context of social and political conflict, or something. Anyway, he pissed a lot of people off, and that was good enough for Jeff. When the three finally met in L.A., it was love at first sight, at least as far as Jeff was concerned. Guy was an intense, wiry, nervous man with the constant predatory gaze of an owl and a receding hairline, and he sat across the table at the downtown cafeteria where they met, his eyes boring holes into Jeff and Susan from below the shiny crown of his head, speaking nonstop about athletes and athletics and investing it all with a kind of metaphorical lyricism and a political urgency, turning his drill-like eyes first on Jeff and then on Susan with a slight and somewhat birdlike motion of his head, while saying something like “Sixteen out of nineteen black athletes at Cal felt that racism was rampant in the athletic department, and all nineteen were totally pissed off about their experiences.” It lit up something strange inside her. She wanted to believe that the world was a bigger, more beautiful, more overwhelmingly exciting place than it had seemed in either Palmdale or Isla Vista or Monterey. She’d sat in garbage cans in front of strangers who’d paid to see her do it, but that had, perhaps unsurprisingly, made her feel small, ugly, and enervated. She’d performed “actos” before migrant workers, reenacting their daily struggle and exploitation, but they’d been unmoved. But Guy Mock, simply by sitting there talking about the tyranny of track and field coaches at the university level, made her realize the quotidian stage on which her boredom played itself out, the fact that the atlas of her days had been mapped out for her by people and institutions interested mainly in consolidating power.

When they were done eating, Guy took out a Pentax to photograph the shimmering Jell-O desserts; trembling, translucent parfaits buried under pompadours of Reddi-wip, ignoring the mild objections of the manager, who was not used to seeing his food paid such close and permanent attention, who perhaps thought Guy was an inspector. Of some sort.

On August 21, 1971, George Jackson, celebrated convict author of Soledad Brother, was killed in a supposed “escape attempt” at San Quentin, a death that helped ice the mood in Berkeley and among the Left in general. It was into this climate of frigid and bitter suspicion, paranoia, and anger that Susan and Jeff relocated from L.A. in early September, spending some chaotic time in Guy and Randi Mock’s Oakland apartment, a period that Susan recalled with cancerous distaste. Guy and Jeff would sit around drinking beer and talking, occasionally in the company of another of Guy’s proselytes, stacking empty cans of Coors and Olympia until they stretched toward the ceiling, and when it became patently obvious that Susan had no intention of feeding them, the proselyte would leave or the pair or three of them would rise and shuffle irritably out the door, leaving her with their mess. She was so mad at Jeff that by the time they found their own apartment she was ready to throw him out of it.