Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

Guy finishes up and puts his glass and spoon in the sink. It’s time to head out. He goes into the spare bedroom and gathers up some things he thinks he might need: a portable cassette tape recorder, a yellow legal pad, a copy of The Athletic Revolution , some pens. He puts these things in his shoulder bag and then pauses. The tape recorder would probably scare them off. He removes it. Now, a gift. As in other times of uncertainty, he refers to the movies. In which one bears evocative gifts when visiting prisoners or fugitives or soldiers far from home, chocolate bars and cigarettes. Always, the guy called Brooklyn (played by William Bendix) asks, “How the Bums doin’?” The emissary is maybe played by Robert Montgomery: “Two games behind the Cardinals last I heard, Flatbush.” Then Bendix gets shot by the Japs.

He gets shot. Guy thinks of the footage. He watched it in a dingy bar up near Columbia, that little house burning for the cameras. Very weird, staring at the palms hard-edged against the flames and red smoke, the lives of those people roaring into that distant sky, while with one hand he searched around in a jar for a pickled egg in this place that felt as old as thankless endeavor itself. Strictly drunks, no students. It was the sort of place where his brother, Ernest, would have taken up residence.

A guy sitting next to him at the bar, said he was a vet, pointed at the screen. “Search-and-destroy. That is a fucking search-and-destroy op, just like Vietnam. Fucking textbook.” OK, so this was not just any old bunch of kids standing up for their rights. They armed themselves and wrote inflammatory communiques and shot progressive public school administrators and kidnapped people and robbed banks and shot innocent bystanders. He understood the pull of the suggestion that they’d “asked for it.” And he further understood that police logic found its source at a strange and alien fountainhead. But the point was that something seemed wrong about this. The point was that pinning down the SLA in a house and setting it on fire seemed pretty extreme.

Susan had said: “She particularly, Guy, is very scared and plus very sad because of, you know, Willie, and they are all freaked out, but they’re doing pretty well under the circumstances, though I think she’s kind of paranoid because she’s thinking she’ll be singled out. Like, shot on sight. And I wouldn’t say that she thinks that’s the worst thing that could happen to her right now either. But I think what they really need is to get the hell out of California for a while.”

Jesus, now how is he going to break this to Randi?

But what a fucking gas !

Cigarettes and chocolate bars he figures they can manage all by themselves. So far their ordeal hasn’t required this kind of denial of the flesh. He is amused to think of revolutionaries, down from the hills, pausing at roadside restaurants to order their food from tasseled menus the size and shape of Monopoly boards. He’s been to those places on I-5 and 101 and 99. You could try to apply your survival skills to the wilderness, to gather mushrooms and roots, but in the approximate center of the Golden State, cleared and furrowed and planted with the world’s bounty, the big difficulty was to find a decent place with free refills. He moves back into the kitchen carrying the shoulder bag. The back door is open, and he sees Randi half inside the storage shed in the yard. Sitting on the counter is yesterday’s loaf of zucchini bread, about a third of it gone. He shoves it into a brown paper bag and carries it to the car.

Guy has a fantastic idea in mind that’s arrived so fully formed that he can’t help thinking that he subconsciously conceived it sitting in Morningside Heights on that barstool beside the drunken vet and then filed it away for it to reappear at the proper time, which presented itself when his old pal Susan Rorvik called to tell him that she’d been contacted by Yolanda of the SLA. That had been a shocker; after Susan had organized the rally at Ho Chi Minh Park, Guy just assumed she’d be under surveillance by the Pigs. He can’t believe the SLA has taken the risk of contacting her. Still, maybe that’s a measure of their desperation. The SLA was unloved within the Movement, that’s for sure. At best they were considered a joke; at worst they were suspected of being a front for the CIA. Now that they’ve been martyred — and gotten plenty of press in the process — opinion seems to be shifting. Here’s where Guy figures he can help out. What he wants to do is to write a book-length treatment of the SLA experience: their ideas, their goals, their viewpoint, basically their side of the whole fucking story. Sure, there’ll have to be a certain emphasis on Tania, but every show has its star, and he figures if he presents it to the fugitives as a saga about their carrying on in the face of adversity, while pitching it to publishers as the Insider Story of the Missing Heiress, things will work out fine. They have to. Guy’s feeling a certain in-betweenness regarding his life these days that he’s getting a little tired of, and after years of having taken for granted his ability to wander into situations where he’s grossly out of place, wander in and deliver congressional testimony or wangle a faculty appointment or an editorship or swing a book deal, he’s still shaken by his sudden dismissal from Oberlin.

In a weird way, Guy’s ideas about sports had been greeted with even more hostility than the SLA’s manifestos. He’d challenged some very entrenched notions about masculinity, about strength, about triumph, and he’d done it precisely at a time when thousands of young men were thinking twice about wearing uniforms and taking orders. From Guy’s suggestion that it was unnecessary to listen to people like Bear Bryant or Bobby Knight, that there was something illegitimate about their absolute authority, it could logically be inferred that it was equally unnecessary to listen to Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. Of course the draft was finished. And the war was over too. But these were moves that had been made under a dread aura of concession, rather than in the spirit of progress.

Guy had no idea of what a lightning rod he’d become. While he could describe with admirable eloquence the sort of wrongdoing that went on every Saturday afternoon in the name of sport, he had been against the war because it was stupid and murderous, not because he had any per se objection to the way in which soldiers were trained. But the paranoid brain sees things in terms of metaphor: Guy thought that athletes were more important than gate receipts and Howard Cosell; ergo he was putting across a clandestine vilification of our South Asia policy. The man was unfixably askew from bedrock American principles. He was an “enemy of sport,” Agnew said. He could just as easily have said “our enemy.”

Ah, who cares about Spiro Agnew? Nobody cares about Spiro Agnew.

The thing is that when Guy had first heard about the Oberlin job, he’d been enchanted, thought of the place in terms of woodwinds, of simply dressed cellists with lank hair and calloused fingers, of listening to music in an amphitheater on a star-stung night. The stridor, the white roar of the arena, was far from his mind. He was tricked. The search committee flew him out. He opened his mouth, and the usual sounds came out. He didn’t try to fool anybody; he told them he would hire women and blacks. He told them that he would attempt to make the ecumenical style of the place fit his principles, not the other way around. In his mind he saw himself sitting under the stars on a soft midwestern evening, listening to music.

Anyway, he was hired. Oberlin had built a nice new sports complex. And he and Randi stayed up late the night before school began, hanging a curtain across the men’s locker room, since the architects had forgotten to put in a separate one for women: oops. He hired Linda Huey to coach women’s track and promised her a budget equal to that of the men’s team (faint stirrings of disquiet among the trustees). He hired Tommie Smith to coach men’s track. He saw a gold medalist who had a sympathetic way with young athletes; they saw the black fist hanging in the Mexico City sky, hanging forever in commemoration of a shame this sort of victory simply couldn’t address, the fist that still sent ripples of unease trembling across the dark fields of the Republic. After the billeting of this seditionist, the hiring of “fellow Negroes” (as one paper put it) Cass Jackson and Patrick Penn went almost unnoticed. Almost.