Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

Willie could work himself into a real lather. He was the sort of intense, wiry little guy that Joan had been noticing at the fringes of things for years, since she’d returned to America and kept her eyes and ears open behind the humiliating primary school readers she was obliged to master before joining children her own age in school. In high school she’d hung out with several of this type, but the light had already started failing in them; mostly what they were fighting and struggling against was following their fathers into the produce business. Joan figured that this was Willie’s way of beating a similar rap. And as she was drawn further into Willie’s circle, her foremost impression of these young radicals was that despite themselves, they felt that they were getting away with something, beating the rap, that the makeup of the thing was 50 percent revolution and 50 percent defying expectations.

So it was just big talk. Not that Joan didn’t love to hear Willie talk. To have him sitting there, all five feet seven of him, taking up revolution’s case in his polished and unconscious American idiom, was like listening to a Little Leaguer talk dirty to you. Innocent, exciting, and erotically charged. Willie was unconscious of it, and there was nothing he could have done about it had he tried; he couldn’t halt his big American self-confidence even in his stylized oppression, couldn’t stop it any more than he could stop himself from rooting for the Cubs or preferring the micronite filter of Kent cigarettes. Willie was politically very aware, but he was also a bright, interesting, sexy fantasist, and Joan fell in love with him.

Then he asked her to rent the bomb factory.

It was a vacant, detached garage in Berkeley that was renting for twenty-eight dollars a month. Joan called the number Willie had copied from the hand-lettered sign taped to the roll-down door and, identifying herself as “Anne Wong,” agreed to meet the landlord to inspect the place. She showed up at the designated time, did whatever she thought would indicate her sincere interest in a sheltered, secure parking space for her car — pulled down the door a couple of times, tried the switch that turned on the overhead light — and then rented it on the spot, sealing the deal with a month’s security and the first month’s rent in advance. The way Willie had said “bomb factory,” eyes alight and with a goofy smile, aided Joan in her belief that he didn’t actually mean it, that he had been interested in renting the garage for some other purpose, though what that purpose might be Joan couldn’t guess. Willie’s friends didn’t exactly seem poised to begin blowing things up, no matter what they might say around the kitchen table. But then Willie began to produce certain items, some of them from hiding places within the apartment — where, it became clear to her, Joan had been living in a state of willed benightedness — produced them and started to move them, in stages, to the garage, from placid objects, like notes and communiques attributed to “The Revolutionary Army” to such terrifying materials as ammonium nitrate, ammunition, blasting caps, fuses, gunpowder, guns, and pipe bombs.

From the first, through self-interest alone, Joan found secrecy an easy burden. Then, gradually, trust eliminated the weight entirely. Born a suspect, she was happy to become a coconspirator with whoever would bank on her. Sometimes the Revolutionary Army was Willie alone. Sometimes members of Venceremos joined in. Occasionally the odd Weatherman or two. Always Joan’s participation was unquestioned; her race, prized.

Willie’s original objective was armed propaganda. After-hours bomb blasts would be visited upon banks, brokerage houses, and other temples of capital in deserted financial district streets and suburban office parks. Small blows, systematically delivered, would damage the system while sparing the comparatively innocent, was the idea. This rule did not apply on the day in 1971 when Joan drove with Willie to O’Connor’s, a cop bar across the street from the Hall of Justice in San Francisco. It was about 4:30 when they pulled up, just around the time when cops, bailiffs, marshals, and deputies began filling the saloon. Willie sat in the passenger seat with a Styrofoam cooler on his lap. In it was a six-pack of Olympia beer, only five of whose cans contained the brew. The sixth held gunpowder, nails, and carpet tacks. For this Willie had devised a fuse by scraping the substance from Fourth of July sparklers and crushing it, mixing the resulting powder with water, and then dipping string into the mixture. Once fuses of varying lengths had dried Joan had tested several, timing each as it sparkled and popped itself into a length of gray ash. She had done it in the alley outside the garage, squatting on the cracked slab of concrete angling into the space, whose door she had discreetly lowered. Two boys zipping up the alley on banana bikes had come to a stop so that they could watch. Eventually, after a period of reverential silence, one had been moved to ask, “What’re those for?”

Joan had given him a tight smile. “Chinese New Year,” she said.

Ten seconds was what she had figured. Enough time for Willie to light it, toss it in, get back to the car, and get away. She had cut several fuses to the proper length and placed them in a plastic bag that previously had held sticks of incense. Now, as Willie took the bomb from the cooler, she reached for the bag of fuses. In her nervousness she dropped one as she withdrew it from the bag.

“Come on, c’mon,” said Willie.

The musky incense smell filled the car. Hare Krishna, thought Joan, Krishna Hare. She didn’t know why. She put her hand to her mouth to stifle a laugh.

“This is the exact frame of mind I had hoped you would avoid like the plague,” said Willie. “You either think this is funny or you’re panicking and in either case you’re scaring the shit out of me.”

Joan snorted. She couldn’t stop; she definitely had the giggles. Willie took the bag of fuses from her, pulled one out, and fitted it to the beer can grenade.

“Now. I’m going to go. I’m going to do it. Be ready to get out of here.” He threw open the door and was out of the car. Joan bit the insides of her cheeks and prepared to drive off. Then Willie was back. The beer can still in his hand.

“A light?” he asked, gesturing with his free hand at the bomb.

Joan scanned the car. She reached out and pushed in the dashboard cigarette lighter.

“That’s it? That’s the light we brought?”

Joan started giggling again.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake.” He waited, jiggling his leg, the beer can held gingerly by his fingertips, until the lighter popped out, and then grabbed it.

“Better hurry up,” said Joan. “It colds down real fast.”

He dashed to the entrance, sheltering the glowing end of the lighter, the bomb cradled against his chest. Joan ticked off: Light fuse, open door, toss in grenade, dash back to car.

“Go, go, go go go!” he said, though Joan had the car moving before he had closed his door. “That ought to get them. That ought to take care of them.”

“Did you mail the communiqué?” asked Joan.

“I figured I’d wait until the action was over.”

“It won’t get picked up until tomorrow, you know. Unless we take it right to the post office.”

“It’ll keep,” he said. “What do you say we go to Flint’s? We can eat in the car and listen to the news.”

But there wasn’t any news. Whether the grenade had been stomped out by a vigilant off-duty cop or had simply been a dud, the thing didn’t go off, and there was only a small item in the local section of the Chronicle the next morning. No radio or TV coverage at all. Disappointed, Willie began to plot out more ambitious actions. His visits to the garage became lengthier and more frequent.