Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

On March 30, 1972, two policemen on patrol were hailed by a Berkeley housewife who told them that she was smelling gas “out back.” After advising dispatch to notify PG&E, the cops went into the alley that ran behind the street, where they made a cursory examination of the area, just sticking around until the utility guys arrived. The alley was lined with freestanding garages on one side, with the backs of bungalows and apartment houses on the other. Coming from one of the garages was a keen, chemical odor that aroused the curiosity of the cops, not the odor of gas, but it was a faintly familiar smell, and it was a slow morning, and they had a valid pretext, so what the hell. The cops picked the garage door lock easily and rolled it up, extending daylight into the small space. There they discovered the appurtenances and raw materials that constituted what the newspapers, with typical color, soon described as a “massive” bomb factory. Although, coming almost exactly two years after members of the Weather Underground had blown up a Greenwich Village town house by accidentally touching off thirty sticks of dynamite, such hyperbole was perhaps understandable.

Joan typically woke to a clock radio, a device that enchanted her and drove Willie nuts. She woke up to the news, to even-toned voices telling of faraway things! It was a lovely idea, to lie there in her bed, next to Willie, allowing her consciousness to absorb the world events of the last twenty-four hours. On the morning of Good Friday 1972, the top news was local: Three men had been arrested and charged with operating a “massive bomb factory,” right there in Berkeley. This had Joan sitting bolt upright. The men apparently had been on their way to bomb the UC Naval Architecture Building when the police had taken them into custody.

Joan had only just typed out the communique: “Any stage in the production of the Empire’s death machines is a legitimate target of revolutionary war, including the training school for the technicians of Death.”

Also discovered in the suspects’ possession were notes plotting the kidnap of Robert S. McNamara and a detailed plan for the bombing of the UC Berkeley space sciences laboratory. Two of the suspects were identified as Paul Rubenstein, twenty-two, and Michael Bortin, twenty-three, both of Berkeley. A third man remained unidentified. That was Willie! Holy shits! No wonder the pigs weren’t knocking down her door! He’d given her a chance to get out of there. But to go where?

Of all Willie’s friends, the one who in his raffish self-confidence had most appealed was Guy Mock, whose every word seemed to insinuate a supreme ability to compartmentalize, a detachment from the moment at hand, that just as one project was beginning to cool off another was simmering and about to bubble; that no matter where he was or what he was doing there was always a different place where he would soon need to go or to be. If connections were the most important thing, whether in business, bureaucracy, or revolution, Guy stressed his connections everywhere , dropping names into conversations like depth charges. If anyone could help her out in a quick jiffy it would be Guy. And Guy loved to acquire people; she’d felt it herself from time to time when he’d cozy up to her, weird big eyes glowing, with this sort of Hey Sexy Exotic Little Jap Bomber Girl Pound for Pound You are a Pearl of Great Price, covetous but not in a strictly sexual way. She knew he would kill to have her owe him a favor.

She took a pair of clean panties and her toothbrush and put them into her purse. She left the apartment then, heading for Guy and Randi Mock’s place on Fifty-eighth Street. As she had guessed, Guy was delighted to help. Two days later she was flying out of LAX, seated in first class, with Guy beside her and an enormous stuffed bunny on her lap.

The questions of who is to run into town to perform errands, and in what guise, remain unanswered, forgotten, and gradually it becomes plain to Tania that what Teko and Yolanda put forward to Joan as issues concerning the well-being of the entire group, matters of crucial importance, are actually excuses to manipulate her, to boss her around. Joan remains stubbornly resistant to this sort of handling. She bluntly declares that the SLA’s concerns and her concerns are two different things. She will not take part in the drills — in the biceps curls, shoulder shrugs, paratroop push-ups, sit-ups, knee bends, leg lifts, and jumping jacks that Teko, Yolanda, and Tania practice every day, though she enjoys the regular morning and afternoon runs. She will not participate in the study sessions, which bore her, or the political discussions, which she refers to derisively as “fantasyland.” She declines to be comradely with either Teko or Yolanda. She reads the Sunday newspaper, works the crossword. She carries a lipstick and occasionally applies it. What’s especially infuriating, from Teko and Yolanda’s perspective, is that Joan’s insubordination is accomplished with that unruffled equanimity that comes as naturally to her as breathing. She is not rude or unpleasant about it, simply dismissive in a very forthright way, in the manner of a gracious child rejecting what is offered. What remains is the assurance of a young woman whom it is impossible to intimidate or coerce.

Later, at trial, this same resistance to intimidation will bag her five contempt of court citations.

Tania is duly impressed. Nor is this impression lost on either Teko or Yolanda. So the summer’s design works out to something like: Take a crack at Joan every day, see what the yield is (Teko persuades Joan to pour him a glass of orange juice when she pours one for herself = major victory); take turns trying to destroy her growing influence on Tania.

Early one morning Teko gathers rocks, about thirty-five pounds of them, and loads them into an old canvas knapsack. Hoisting it, he guides Tania’s arms through the straps.

“Now run,” he says, pointing at Yolanda, who waits before a group of birch trees by one of the property’s three ponds, a hundred yards distant. She waves back at the two of them, less a friendly gesture than as if she were trying to hail a cab in the rain. “Run!”

Tania begins to trot. The pack weighs more than a third of what she does, the stones dig into her spine and rib cage like a dozen elbows. Teko jogs beside her. “Run all out, or I’ll be right behind you, kicking your ass.” To illustrate, he drops back and dispenses a kick to her left buttock. Tania gasps.

“Come on, Tania!” Yolanda hollers, waving with both arms now. Mist hangs low, in gnarled puffs, over the pond.

“You want another one?”

“No!” pants Tania. “Please!”

He kicks her anyway.

“Get down there! Move! Christ!”

“Come on, Tania!”

She plods along toward Yolanda, the pack chafing her shoulders, the rocks jabbing her, the sound of Teko’s breathing behind her. Finally, she reaches Yolanda. She halts and bends at the waist, getting the weight of the knapsack off her shoulders while she catches her breath.

“Well, what are you stopping for?”

“You heard her, keep going!”

Tania looks blankly ahead of her. They stand at the edge of the pond, which drops away from the shore to a total depth of around eight feet.

“Get in there!”

Tania begins to slip out of the pack.

“With the pack, come on!”

“With this pack?” says Tania. “I’ll drown. It’s too heavy.”

“What if,” poses Yolanda, “you were being pursued by the enemy and you were carrying essential supplies? Would you just stop at the edge of the water? Or would you go on, like a true guerrilla?”

“You’d get in there,” says Teko.

“No, but I’d leave the pack behind,” says Tania. “No way I’d get in there with it.” To her this is still a situation to which she can apply reason. In spite of everything that has happened to her, she believes this.