“Yeah, okay, give me one,” I said and sat down across from him, believing about half his story.
Gradually, Zack brought me up to date on his life. “Changes, man, big changes.” After his tour as a Peace Corps volunteer in Ghana, he’d taken our generation’s version of the Grand Tour. Though he didn’t say it, I knew he’d been financed by his trust fund as he drifted through most of the Third World, with extended stops in Tangier, Calcutta, Nepal, and Thailand for drugs and enlightenment, shorter visits to Saigon, Mexico City, and Havana for politics, and had ended back in the States, convinced that a worldwide revolution was inevitable and imminent. For Zack, the introductory music for the Revolution had already been struck up, and the theme song was “Street Fighting Man.”
“The past is prelude, man, and the prelude has passed. We’re in it now!”
Around two in the morning, Carol came home, and I introduced Zack as my cousin. From his extreme height, he splashed kindly attention onto her, and she responded with surprised pleasure and quick affection, and when he asked if he could crash at our apartment until he found a job and a place of his own, she readily agreed, without so much as a sideways glance in my direction.
“Where’s he gonna stay, Carol?” I asked.
“Your workroom,” she said. “It’s only temporary. Right, Zack?”
And to his credit, it was. A few days later, he rented a room in a downtown flophouse and took a part-time job driving a local cab.
It was hard not to like Zack, and especially hard for me not to take some of his voltage and use it to charge my own depleted batteries. Until he showed up, I had been moving slower and slower with every passing week. For the first time in my life, I depended more on habit and routine than on political commitment to get me though my days and nights, and no matter how much comfort I took in Carol’s and Bettina’s familial presence, I was lonely and sad and aimless most of the time. For years, since adolescence, I’d lived with the sense that soon, very soon, something life changing, maybe world changing was going to happen, that a political Second Coming was locked into the calendar, into my personal calendar. That belief had made my life seem exciting to me and purposeful. But in the past year, especially in the last few months, as the Vietnam War chewed up Southeast Asia and ate away at the American economy, and the body count kept rising, and Lyndon Johnson’s America got replaced by Nixon’s and Kissinger’s, and as I found myself growing older, in my thirties now, gray hairs showing up in the tub drain, it had started to seem that all I had to help me explain the content of my present life was the form of my past life.
There is a crucial transition from radical activist to revolutionary, and when you’ve made that crossing, you no longer question why you have no profession, no husband, no children, why you have no contact with your parents, and why you have no true friends — only comrades and people who think they’re your true friend but don’t know your real name. Until Zack showed up, even though I was paying the price of being a revolutionary, I hadn’t really made that crossing yet, and consequently my life had come to feel shriveled and gray, boring and pointless. I had the effects, but no cause.
Zack changed that. Almost immediately, as if we were a couple of pimple-faced kids starting a fan club for a rock star, he and I formed an independent Weather cell together — which was how it was generally done in those days, as there was no central authority or headquarters that kept track of us or passed out membership cards and a handbook. We were expected to work independently and generate and carry out actions against the War Machine ourselves. Within weeks, in the dingy, damp basement of the three-storey wooden tenement building on Phillips Street, while in the apartment upstairs, Carol and I and her daughter, Bettina, still pretended that we were a family, Zack and I were in the basement, two or three nights a week and on weekends, trying to make pipe bombs and Molotov cocktails. Cousin Zack, as the little family half-jokingly called him, and I hinted to Carol that what we were making was cool and secret, which she assumed was a present for Bettina’s upcoming birthday, a dollhouse, maybe.
The rest of the time I sleepwalked through what passed in those days, the early and mid-1970s, for a normal, if quasi-bohemian, life. Except for the fact, of course, that my parents and no one from my childhood or adolescence or even from most of my adult life so far knew what my name was now or where I was living and working or the name of the young woman I lived with and what we did together on those few occasions when we were alone and in bed. And even the young woman herself did not know the truth, and probably never would, for as soon as Zack and I built and successfully set off our bombs, I intended to disappear from her life. I had in fact already cleaned up my room, packed my clothes and books and a few records, and destroyed everything that might connect me to Carol and incriminate her in any way. She had to be able to say, “I didn’t know anything about it,” and be telling the truth. In thirty seconds, all signs of my ever having lived in that apartment could be erased, and would be.
Otherwise, my life passed for ordinary. If I got caught trying to set off a bomb in the Federal Building in Boston, which was our primary target, or the Shawmut Bank or the eighteenth Precinct Boston Police Station, two of our secondary targets, or if one night, God forbid, down in the basement Zack or I, a little stoned on grass maybe, touched the wrong wires together and blew ourselves and the building to bits — like Diana, Ted, and Terry, when they blew up the townhouse on West Eleventh Street back in ’70—and if as a result of the accident we killed Carol and Bettina and who knows how many others in their sleep, then the neighbors and my co-workers at the hospital and the guys who ran the deli on the corner of Phillips and Bay Streets and the mailman and the guy who read the electric meter and the Greek who collected our rent once a month (in cash, always in cash), they’d all say, I dunno, she seemed like a nice enough girl, quiet, though, kept pretty much to herself, always paid the rent on time, didn’t smile much, didn’t socialize with anybody, except her friend, the other girl, the one with the kid. Never came to any of the office parties, didn’t hang out in the bars, not even the bar where her friend worked. Really kind of an ordinary girl, I guess. The kind of person you don’t actually notice. You could call her a loner. More a loner than a loser. Like whatzizname, Lee Harvey Oswald.
Basically, it was a childish fantasy, wanting to survive your own death so you could overhear the postmortem, read your own obituary, attend your own funeral, and I indulged it often. But at the same time I was aware of something rumbling beneath it, a hidden desire to get caught, to fail in a spectacular, even suicidal way, and it made me very nervous. It was the feeling I sometimes got driving over a high bridge: one quick tug of the steering wheel to the right, and it’s over the edge and straight down. I had to force myself consciously to resist that impulse, or else pretend that I wasn’t on a bridge — no, I was driving across the Plains, somewhere west of Iowa, nothing but flat, solid, grassy ground beneath me stretching from horizon to horizon.
WHEN HE WASN’T WORKING with me in the basement or driving his cab, Zack had taken to traveling to New York City for days at a time. “I’m making some very cool contact down there with our black comrades-in-arms,” he told me. “These brothers, man, they’re the forward force of the revolution, the elite corps. A lot of them have been in the joint, some of the brothers are vets back from ’Nam, man. And they’re pissed. They make Weather look like candy stripers, man.”
I asked him if they were Black Panthers, but he said, “No way, these guys are in deep cover, man. And the kind of action they’re into is almost beyond politics. These brothers are much heavier than the Panthers.” Again, I believed about half of what he told me. But the half I believed lifted my spirits. For years, ever since the Civil Rights movement got taken over by blacks, and the white college kids like me and the white lawyers and clergymen were sent home from the South, leaving us with only the splinters that were left of the antiwar movement — SDS, Weatherman, the Yippies, Diggers, and so on, all of whom were white and middle class — I’d felt somehow cheated out of my true mission, as if in my chosen line of work I’d been deprived of an essential tool, and that tool was black people. Practically from childhood, and especially in high school and college — thanks to my father’s old-time New England hierarchy of values, I’m sure, and his heavy emphasis on noblesse oblige — my heroes had been the nineteenth-century white abolitionists, most of whom were educated, upper-class women from New England. Like me. And my father had nothing for those women but unqualified praise and admiration. “Among all our distinguished ancestors, Hannah, those female abolitionists are the ones I hold in highest regard. The others, the men, all they ever did was make money. Until I came along,” he’d add, laughing, as if he, a world-famous pediatrician who wrote best-selling books on child care, had somehow managed to avoid making money.