Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

Feeling slightly unsteady, trying to take a true look at these things. It was like touring a place you were about to leave permanently.

But all he was doing was running errands. Nothing suspicious about that, correct? If someone was to leap out of a doorway and confront him, confront him with the subject of his culpability, holding a microphone or a protest sign or a hand grenade (they seemed equally likely possibilities), his list was as innocent as Christ. Now see here: he wanted to buy some stamps, and a package of Aquafilters, and a pound of spiced ham, and a magazine for Helene. Lydia laughed sharply. She thought it was ridiculous. She wondered what would bring this playacting to an end. Going downtown in a brown station wagon like a fool. And then, if he really wanted to, he could come home and stack cans in the pantry.

But that was what he wanted. Affix a clean piece of scrap paper to the fridge with a magnet and begin the list all over again. If you just kept buying groceries the household would continue forever.

Groceries. There hadn’t been enough money to satisfy the SLA’s ransom demand that he personally feed the state’s poor. Not that they’d believed him. He had a hard enough time explaining to the immediate family, let alone to the fanatics holding his daughter, the elaborately interwoven relationships among the old man’s heirs, the Galton Corporation, the Galton Foundation, and the Galton Family Trust. In effect, Hank was the paid employee of his father’s money, not its possessor. The bottom line was that he was worth about two million bucks, about a half million of it available in cash, which he’d duly forked over to the food relief effort, a program dubbed People in Need. For the remainder of what would be required, he’d had to appeal to the corporation, which, acting through the trustees, had given him a total of four million dollars to work with. He and the other five family members on the board had recused themselves from the vote. Though he was glad not to have been there, tired of hearing the value of his daughter’s life weighed. They came out with the four million figure and he said fine. Sounds good. What the hell did he know? Not only did he have no idea how much it would cost, he had no idea what “it” was; in one tape Alice said that the SLA would accept a “good-faith gesture,” that “whatever you come up with is basically OK.” What he’d god damned come up with was one-quarter of his net worth. But later in the tape Cinque, to whose voice Hank had begun to react with nauseous loathing, had endeavored to clarify the matter by defining a “good-faith gesture” as a “sincere effort.” Thank you so very much. Sincere effort further stipulated to mean seventy dollars’ worth of “top-quality fresh meats, dairy products and produce,” handed over to anyone who turned up to ask for it, regardless of need.

Oh, that was a good tape, the February 19 tape, a fine tape. They could seal that one in a capsule and blast it into space with a Snoopy doll and copies of Jonathan Livingston Seagull and Sergeant Pepper’s Lonelyhearts Club Band . (How had he learned of these things?) Wherever it turned up, whatever bat-eared, green-blooded creature hauled it out of the icy void to discover something about the human race in the twentieth century, that tape would impart with complete accuracy an allusive record of all the ingratitude, the venality, the envy, the hypocritical greed, the ineducable recalcitrance, the superficiality, and above all the cavalier disregard for fact that, as far as he was concerned, distinguished the new generation from the preceding one. What ate him up was that he listened to the — you should pardon the expression — substance of what Cinque said and found himself trying hard to give a damn. Many of the things he’d always been secure from had been brought to his attention, and he wanted to sympathize. But that this repellent shit, Cinque, had appointed himself Official Spokesman just turned him off so completely that he had trouble doing so.

On the February 19 tape, Cinque berated him, provided a comically inaccurate list of “his” assets, demanded an additional four million bucks, demanded that the food program be handed over to the prickly Western Addition Project Area Committee, and then built to one of the trademark crescendos Hank had become accustomed to:

You do, indeed, know me. You have always known me. I’m that nigger you have hunted and feared night and day. I’m that nigger you have killed hundreds of my people in a vain hope of finding. I’m that nigger that is no longer just hunted, robbed and murdered. I’m the nigger that hunts you now!

Yes, you know me. You know me, I’m the wetback. You know me, I’m the gook, the broad, the servant, the spik.

Yes, indeed, you know us all and we know you — the oppressor, murderer and robber. And you have hunted and robbed and exploited us all. Now we are the hunters that will give you no rest. And we will not compromise the freedom of our children.

DEATH TO THE FASCIST INSECT THAT PREYS UPON THE LIFE OF THE PEOPLE!

That first distribution. A bucket of blood, as his father might have said. Angry crowds overran the distribution sites; men climbed aboard the trucks to stand in their beds, on their roofs, heaving frozen chickens into the throng. Imagine checking into the hospital with that as your chief complaint. Frozen broiler to the head. Roving gangs robbed recipients of their grocery bags. A Black Muslim bakery overseeing the distribution in Oakland billed the program for $154,000, claiming that it had provided that much of its own food to replace stolen and looted stock. “Volunteers” showed up at the warehouses, offered to drive laden trucks to the distribution centers, and then vanished, trucks, food, and all. Leaving Hank wondering: What do you do with two tons of canned Virginia hams? Security guards hired to protect the warehouses started looting from them as well. Reporters on the evening news took a gleeful interest in unpacking the groceries from random sacks provided by disgruntled recipients (no shortage of these deadbeats), displaying for their viewers weirdly juxtaposed food items: a can of tomato juice, a box of pancake mix, a head of lettuce. A jar of peanut butter, a sack of flour, a box of rice. Crackers, celery, and powdered milk.

“Hard to imagine serving a dinner made from these items to your family.”

He’d spoken long distance to his brother Walt.

“You know what they say, Hank,” Walt said in his light lazy drawl.

“Hmm?”

“Build a man a fire, and he’s warm for one night.” Walt paused, and Hank anticipated a punch line, picturing Walt’s smile.

“Yeah?”

“Set a man on fire, and he’s warm for the rest of his life.”

Lydia had liked that one. It put her in mind of Reagan’s comment, delivered at a Washington luncheon. “It’s just too bad,” the governor had said, “we can’t have an epidemic of botulism.”

He wanted the Aquafilters, to be sure, but it was a joy and a satisfaction to enter the Smoke Shop (Lydia’s bark of a laugh), Isidore at the ancient register in his ridiculous toupee. Long, narrow store, much of the floor space occupied by unsold newspapers, tied and bundled for return. Buzzy fluorescents. Behind the counter hundreds of brands of cigarettes were ranked along the wall, and in display cases there were pipe tobacco blends, cigars, cigar cases, cigar cutters, humidors, tobacco pouches, lighters, cigarette cases, pipes of briar and meerschaum, cigarette holders of ebony, of bone, of tortoiseshell, crystal and alabaster ashtrays, and a small hand-lettered sign:

OWING TO THE POTENTIAL FOR

MISUSE WE NO LONGER CARRY

ROLLING MACHINES OR CIGARETTE

PAPERS. THE MANAGEMENT REGRETS

ANY INCONVENIENCE.