Sporting Goods was staged to alert the authorities to begin the termination op.
Lionel Congreaves had put that message on his answering machine to demonstrate a sense of humor. A sense of humor was sometimes the only thing you had left. Also, he thought it broke the tension. Because the fact of the matter was there were a lot of people calling up just to see if he’d been offed yet — most of them pro — Lionel Congreaves, incidentally — and he thought the message was considerate in a humorous sort of way, while also being a bit of a thumb in the eye of those who were less than well-wishers.
There were some other totally baseless reports too, plenty of them. But after having put them side by side in their endless permutations and studied them for a while, Lionel Congreaves had decided that this particular arrangement formed a nice, coherent chronology of innuendo. And he generally liked to take a break right about here to review some of the contradictory aspects of the above-mentioned insinuations, after which all the rest could be presented as the humorous miscellany of ridiculousness that it so plainly was. The fact of the matter was that he had done his best to help Don DeFreeze, as he had with all the worthless losers in the AACE, not to mention their exceedingly immature white friends on the outside, such as Willie Wolfe. What Lionel Congreaves had tried to do was develop a selection of courses in art, black history, literature, math, and political science (though basically his whole thrust was necessarily remediation). And in the spirit of free inquiry Lionel Congreaves was happy to admit Marx and Lenin into the curriculum; they were dandy as far as they went, which was pretty damn far in prison with its compulsory work rules and poor conditions and the natural solidarities that tended to form among the various constituencies thereat. But to urge a bunch of convicts to think of themselves as “soldiers” was just asking for trouble. The fact of the matter was that as soon as Chairman Mao entered the room where the AACE participants met, channeled by skinny uppermiddle-class white kids like Willie Wolfe, Lionel Congreaves had scooted out double quick.
Now, Lionel Congreaves could certainly understand why, for example, a loser who had never managed to get a single thing right in his life might become transfixed by a vision of himself as a righteous
Speaking of which. Just some more happenstance that Lionel Congreaves had collected for his own edification and for that of those who were willing to look with their eyes, there was a novel by Sam Greenlee, The Spook Who Sat by the Door. The book deals with a spook, that was to say a black person, who works as a double agent, that was to say a spook, for the CIA. But he evades his control officer to recruit a multiracial, coed guerrilla army — which he characterizes using the neologism symbiology—the idea being to incite a race war. In the end, the brother and his group are cornered in a small tract house in South Central L.A., surrounded by overwhelming police fire power. Published when? 1968. Funny, huh? Coincidence was always funny. Wouldn’t be coincidence if it wasn’t funny.
You wanted to hear funny, now here was something so funny it might curl your hair. Book called Black Abductor. By a man named Harrison James, who nobody ever heard of. Published by Regency Press, which never before or again published another book so far as anyone knows. A PO Box address. Deals with the heiress of a famous California conservative family. She is kidnapped from the off-campus apartment she shares with her boyfriend by a multiracial band of revolutionaries. After indoctrination and many freewheeling sexual experiences with her captors, she is converted to their revolutionary cause and opts to join them. And oh, the name of the heiress is Alice. Year published: 1972.
But anyway. Lionel Congreaves was getting a little ahead of himself. Now, how — if the Shepards were the ones coordinating the assault on the SLA from inside — did the rumormongers get Don DeFreeze and company all the way from the house on West Eighty-fourth Street over to the house on East Fifty-fourth where they got cremated? The Shepards and the rest of the SLA were incommunicado after the machine-gunning at Mel’s, so how did the Shepards “coordinate” DeFreeze all the way to a specific house in a totally different part of town? ESP? It’s humorous; it’s laughable in the extreme.
And DeFreeze. Supposedly he was the agent provocateur nonpareil, yet his single distinguishing qualification was that he had been a police informer? So a man who obviously couldn’t keep secrets was expected to keep the lid on something like this? Assuming, for the sake of argument, the truth of the allegations regarding Lionel Congreaves’s intelligence affiliations, his immanent pigginess, would he have selected or acceded to the selection of an individual whose instability was so luminously apparent?
Lionel Congreaves found the accusations concerning that poor kidnapped girl to be revolting. Personally, and only on the basis of what he’d read in the papers plus his own schoolmarmish knowledge of the inner lives of his AACE charges, he believed the girl had been snatched for real. Mary Alice Siem he remembered very well; she was what in an earlier time might have been called an “adventuress.” She certainly was not the missing girl whose smiling face he’d been looking at in the papers for months. And it hardly seemed likely, at least to Lionel Congreaves, that the girl would dream up her own kidnapping to get out from under an unhappy engagement. He meant, first you wanted to try less drastic measures. A series of long and candid talks, therapy, a weekend in Sonoma, even a trial separation. He knew the drill.
Lionel Congreaves was always very happy to be asked what he thought instead of being forced to react to a bunch of Mickey Mouse charges with him at their center.
Now, and who hired Lake Headley to conduct this so-called investigation? Lionel Congreaves would surely like to know the basis for Headley’s assertions that he, Lionel Congreaves, had himself worked with the LAPD’s Criminal Conspiracy Section, particularly since this alleged partnership allegedly occurred during the period for which he was already being shellacked for allegedly building alleged CIA torture chambers in Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. He meant, Which was it? He wasn’t prepared to offer up any confessions in either event, but it didn’t quite strike him as cricket to be forced into a position where he had to play one baseless allegation off against another.
The fact of the matter was that anyone’s life had a series of unknowable holes in it that, if you were resourceful and persistent and could get The New York Times to show up at your press conferences, you could pack with allegations and lies. See, the truly funny thing was, people were so eager to believe this stuff that they couldn’t see the real consequences that stemmed from asserting the pseudoconfluence of all these pseudoevents. He meant, Where was the documentation? Everybody left a trail, the Pentagon Papers were a famous trail, and now the president of the United States of America couldn’t erase the trail he’d made, and so how was Lionel Congreaves supposed to?
And here were the real consequences. The real consequences were, Lionel Congreaves was an educated and well-spoken black man who didn’t spout the I-am-a-victim pieties of Movement theology, and the next thing you know he was putting masking tape on his windows so that the broken glass didn’t fall onto the rug when the rocks started sailing. A man who looked old enough to know better just walked up to him while he was standing there outside a store and told him to “eat shit.” White guy, middle-aged, with a shopping bag in his hand from Macy’s. Eat shit.