Not to mention that every young grease monkey, factory worker, and warehouseman now was as hirsute as, now was taking the same drugs as, now was listening to the same sort of music as every hippie, radical, and hanger-on from Bloomfield Hills, Brentwood, and Great Neck. Even the cops had mustaches and long hair. The sixties had finally arrived in the prefab dells and factory barrens and methedrine parishes of hamburger America; the People had been won over after all. Suddenly the Left felt the fear, seized up with those old class prejudices; it was all well and good to feel bad for the snaggle-toothed trailer kid, the guy who mixed the paint at the hardware store, the jokester squeegeeing your windshield at the Union 76, but it was something else to share your blanket and weed with them at the festival, to have them sticking their big uncircumcised pricks into your women, to suffer their ineducability, their ignorance, their dinner conversation. These were the People? No, no, no, no, no: the People were black and brown and red and yellow, a beautiful smeary rainbow with a pot of moral indignation at its end. The People were beautiful. They wore cardboard shoes and ate cakes made of newspapers when they hungered. They migrated from one oppressive job to another. They were raised in shacks or in cinder-block slums. They were subdued by heroin and malt liquor. They were incarcerated unjustly in Amerikkkan concentration camps, where they painstakingly taught themselves to read, to write, to study. They weren’t these louts from Kalamazoo and Pomona and Queens, with their muscle cars and their Bachman-Turner Overdrive eight-tracks. What had failed to transcend race and age had managed, to an extent, to transcend class, and the Left was uninterested. The Left had gone to the disco.
I See Phantoms of Hatred and of the Heart’s Fullness and of the Coming Emptiness.
And here, thinks Guy, comes the end point of the Movement. For all the talk — about the minority this, about the false that, about the bourgeois this, about the Marx’s that, for all the endless talk — the only thing that had been successfully accomplished was the carving out of another bourgeois role. And to play that part, you needed money. He acknowledges. Sadly. He’s laying it on thick for Mr. and Mrs. Mom and Dad here at the Mexican restaurant, making a play for his grubstake. Does Tania really want to be dealt out of the game? He thinks maybe she does. Running gets you down. Tires out your eyes, your neck, your jaw. Uses up cash. Depletes your body of B vitamins. Shrinks your dick. Had she really wanted to cause the downfall of the U.S. government? Hadn’t that already happened without her? Happened in committee rooms while they were playing popgun in the woods? Now it’s business as usual, with the blandest of all possible alternatives in charge. If she wants out, it’s either boredom, fear, or a complete understanding of the magnitude of the task they face, if they’re really serious about the whole thing. But who really is “serious”? Everyone admires the Vietcong, loves those courageous little bastards to death, but who the fuck is prepared to spend a thousand years fighting, waging war against an army that brings Coke machines and cases of cigarettes and whiskey into the field with it? Around you everywhere you look are things you wouldn’t dream of doing without, not for a month, not for a day, notwithstanding the premeditated squalor demanded by Cinque Mtume, the Fifth Prophet. It’s the psychos, the Tekos and Yolandas, who set the example of austere self-denial. Guy grimaces, sticks a fork into the friable surface of his chimichanga. Suddenly all he can smell is fat, fat and old cooking oil.
“I’d need,” he says, “to be able to go to her and say that you were willing to make a significant good-faith gesture.”
“More significant than picking up the tab for every deadbeat in the state with a brood of kids to feed?”
“Shhh,” says Hank.
“I’m not talking about money.”
“I keep hearing you say that, but I’ll believe it when you walk away with nothing for your troubles.”
“Please don’t change the subject,” says Hank.
“I mean more like go to her with a political good-faith gesture.”
“More political than giving up control of our front page?”
“Shhh,” says Hank.
“Like you quitting the UC Board of Regents,” Guy says calmly to Lydia.
“What?”
“It couldn’t hurt,” says Hank.
“I won’t. I won’t be bullied. We’ve been over this.”
“OK,” says Guy. “It’s your decision. Let me just say that your being on the board is an irritant. I mean, it doesn’t help. I won’t even go into your actions as a member.”
Someone once fired a rifle bullet into the limousine Lydia was riding in. Tore through the rear fender just behind her and flattened out like a ball of clay dropped from a height. Designed to separate her body into a variety of unexpected segments. The woman had remained undaunted.
“Go right ahead.”
“No, I’m literally not arguing. It’s your call. Let me just say that it’s important to your daughter that if she comes out, she does it without compromising her political viability. She needs to be able to maneuver in the Left. It’s important to her and to everyone.” Especially Guy. Because without Tania’s viability, what would become of his own? He doesn’t want any dumdums heading his way.
“Oh, so that she can continue with her asinine politics I have to abandon my own?”
“That’s a good way of putting it.”
Guy feels pretty good. Nice recovery. It’s no skin off his nose whether Tania visits her parents at Thanksgiving or not. Sits under the gleaming tree, tearing open presents. Whatever the sacred daydream is. They talk for a while longer. He senses that some sort of accommodation is going to be made. Sweet, sweet relief. In a grand gesture, he takes a paper napkin and writes a number on it. He doesn’t know it’s going to say twenty thousand dollars until he begins writing. Does some rapacious Ouija spirit guide his hand to form the figure? He pushes the napkin over to Hank.
“Look, I’m not asking for anything. But this is just so you know. That is all out of pocket.”
Guy goes to the men’s room, where he lays the most gigantic log he believes he’s ever produced. It does not have a healthy look to it, or a healthy feel coming out, either. He struggles, briefly and distressingly unsuccessfully, to remember what he ate for dinner the night before. When Guy was growing up, there was a kid, Carl Harrigan, who would call you into the bathroom to look at his turds. Gigantic shits were his specialty, his contribution to neighborhood lore. It was both fascinating and deeply embarrassing. Kids would rush in — everybody was always at everybody else’s house — to group around the toilet, gazing down at the monstrosity, coiled around the inside of the bowl or half concealed in the hole, like a sullen and dangerous animal in its burrow. Carl would linger over it, babbling praise, reluctant to flush his impressive creation. The things you think of.
After Mock and the Galtons leave, Nietfeldt remains at his table at Senor Pico, working away at a seafood burrito. File it under Seemed like a Good Idea at the Time. After each bite he pauses to consider the thing, until it becomes a gelid mass on his plate, inedible. He pays the check and heads back downtown.
He can’t quite figure it. As near as he can make out, Hank and Lydia are very close to establishing contact with their daughter through Mock, but there doesn’t appear to be any happy accord. Hank’s looking out for his daughter, but for reasons that aren’t clear, Lydia is ready to put the kid through the wringer. Who knows why? It occurs to him that it might be a good idea to talk to the Galtons, separately, to remind them of the penalties they face if they attempt to shield their daughter from justice. Hank will brush them off, but Lydia is likely to be considerably more forthcoming. She’s not interested in shielding Alice from shit, doesn’t care whether the kid’s in custody the next time she sees her.