Backward-Facing Man (21 page)

There was a fumbling sound, the microphone changing hands, and then a different voice, also a man's. “Bill Harris,” Lorraine said. “Cinque's second in command.” Harris spoke in the manner of a white man trying to sound black, a prissy, educated guy trying to be streetwise. “If white people in fascist America don't think they are enslaved, they only prove their own foolishness…the thing the pigs have feared the most is happening…a People's Army of irate niggers of all races, including whites—not talkers anymore, but fighters. The enemy recognizes that the People are on the brink of revolution…. Death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the People!”

Lorraine turned off the tape. “You have to understand. These were the days of law and order. Richard Nixon was president. The sixties had flamed out. It was the beginning of everyone being afraid. Before the SLA could even state their demands for Patty's release, Governor
Reagan announced there'd be no deals. Patty's father donated two million dollars in food to California supermarkets, while Ronald Reagan told reporters he hoped the poor people eating it would get botulism and learn their lesson about handouts.”

I asked what was happening to Patty all that time.

Lorraine was calm and relaxed as she spoke. “Patty stayed in the closet, except to bathe or relieve herself. After a while, she lost muscle mass in her legs. She couldn't walk. She stopped menstruating. When she balked at sharing the group's toothbrush, she was teased for her bourgeois tendencies. When she tried to be sympathetic, she was called a rich bitch who would never understand. They broke her down.”

I would learn later that the formal name for this is the Stockholm syndrome, after a bank robbery in Sweden, where a female hostage was so thankful that her life had been spared that she fell in love with one of the robbers, had sex with him on the floor of the vault, even pleaded with police to spare him when he surrendered. Any person held prisoner or hostage, traumatized long enough, will go from defiant to dependent to sympathetic.

Lorraine put the blank tape back in and pressed
RECORD
. “Of course, what the SLA became most famous for was convincing your friend Patty to renounce her parents and her privileged upbringing and become Tania, the gun-toting urban guerrilla who participated in a string of SLA robberies until the spring of 1975, when six of the nine SLA members, including Cinque, were incinerated in a small house in Los Angeles.” Lorraine produced another thick folder and handed me a photograph of cops surrounding a small house in Los Angeles that was billowing smoke. The caption read: “9,000 bullets, 125 tear-gas canisters, 320 police cars, 400 siege officers, 2 helicopters, and an array of media, and SLA is history. Media heiress Patty Hearst feared dead.”

I shook my head, trying to imagine my little friend from Camp Tidewater at the center of such a strange drama. “It was the first live cremation—right up there in television history with Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald. Patty watched her comrades go up in flames on TV from a motel in Disneyland. By the time the inferno was over, she and the Harrises were in a car heading back up to San Francisco, listening to their own eulogies on the radio.”

“You think letting Patty escape was part of the government's plan?”

“In the world of double agents and brainwashing, once a handler turns his back on an operative, they're finished. Keeping somebody you've tried to kill around is generally a bad thing.” I was surprised how knowledgeable Lorraine seemed about all this. “To stay sane,” she said, utterly convincingly, “operatives imprint to their handlers. After Cinque broke her down, Patty thought of him as a father figure. When the FBI killed him, Patty probably felt like she'd been orphaned. Despite the fact that she'd be unpredictable, the government would have needed her to denounce the SLA, which, after she was captured, is exactly what she did.”

“The three of them—Bill and Emily Harris and Patty—scrambled, avoiding the Feds, evading police, and dodging roadblocks for another year. They traveled across the country and back—staying briefly in Manhattan, upstate New York, and near the Pocono Mountains in a house in Honesdale, Pennsylvania, which is where I hooked up with them.” Lorraine paused to look at her watch. “I'm exhausted. I need to get some rest. We can get together once more…before I leave. Can you give me a lift home?”

Although the government conspiracy theories and the details of Patty's brainwashing fascinated me, I was much more interested in hearing about Lorraine's and Patty's meeting in the mid-seventies. I had the feeling that something really important had happened, not just for the two of them, but for me as well. “I'll leave the bag with you,” she said, standing.

Outside, it was very cold. The sun had set and the moon was a tiny sliver along the horizon. Most of the lights in nearby houses were off. A little over an hour later, when I got home, I ate some leftovers and cleared a space on what had been my mother's dining room table. I took a stack of sixties memorabilia and SLA clippings from Lorraine's tote bag and began reading. It was an astonishing archive of this particular era within an era. There were articles about race riots, break-ins at Selective Service offices, pictures of nuns in soup kitchens and priests in field hospitals, eyewitness accounts of bombs that went off in basements and behind statues. There were pamphlets and position papers by all kinds of revolutionary groups, photographs of long-haired men
and women blurred by time or an unsteady camera, group shots and individuals, hippies and flower children collapsing with laughter, standing with signs against the war, flashing the peace sign and smiling. In several of them, I recognized Lorraine: young, beautiful, full of life. One showed her sitting with a man against a tree, their eyes closed, sunlight from directly above settling around their hair like a halo. In another, the same young man with long, tangled reddish brown hair, a turned-up nose, and freckles was looking earnestly into the lens. Underneath, it said: “Frederick Keane: Wanted, Armed and Dangerous.”

In a box marked “SLA,” I found an eight-by-eleven print. Eight young people held automatic weapons in front of a seven-headed snake. Someone had drawn an arrow pointing to Patty, who was wearing a kerchief, crouching, and smiling timidly, just as she had in the Camp Tidewater play a few summers earlier. She was dressed in brown fatigues, her shirt open midway down her chest, her small hands supporting a machine gun, staring blankly ahead. A newspaper account speculated that an army of revolutionaries had descended upon the Bay Area as in a science-fiction movie.

Before falling asleep, I found individual pages torn from a child's coloring book. On the back of each page, in crayon, was what looked like the Hearst family history, written in cursive handwriting as though it was a fairy tale.

After finals, Chuck Puckman found a cheap room on the Boston side, about a mile down the road from Lorraine, between Boston College and Boston University. By walking up and down Harvard Avenue, nodding at the freaks and holding a cigarette ambiguously, he attracted new customers for weed, hashish, and hash oil, which he began buying in larger quantities from the road manager of the band in Connecticut. For the summer, Lorraine got a job selling life insurance door to door. Everyone teased her about it, but she had a way with regular people, especially when it came to talking about what matters. She was successful from the start, earning sometimes as much as $1,000 in commissions, to be paid out over the life of the policies.

Consistent with the belief that after the revolution, professional sports would replace war, satisfying man's craving for aggression, Frederick applied for a job with the Red Sox organization. By mid-May, he'd joined the ground crew at Fenway Park, tamping, sweeping, digging, piling, and preparing the field for play. When the Red Sox were at home, he worked from early in the morning until midday, and then sat in the bleachers for free. When the Sox went on the road, Frederick did, too, traveling to Providence, New York, and New Haven to meet other radicals planning demonstrations against the war.

While Frederick was away, Chuck helped Lorraine with laundry or paperwork on the life insurance policies she'd written; other days, they'd go to teach-ins or rallies to distribute flyers. Lorraine made no effort to hide their relationship from Frederick. Several times, Frederick came home from a trip shortly after Lorraine and Chuck had been intimate and started one of his rants, oblivious to the messy bed and their flushed cheeks. “Revolution and baseball,” he would say. “The perfect combination.” And it was. The nexus of his two loves.

One sweltering afternoon in July, Chuck let himself into the house in Brighton before Lorraine got home from work. Her bedroom was stuffy, the sheets on her bed damp with humidity. He opened a window. On a small desk were newly printed broadsides against the war and the guts of a black box Frederick was building that enabled a user to make free long-distance calls. Chuck laid a couple pinches of weed on one side of a double album and let the seeds roll into the center. He put a pillow against the wall, propped himself up on the bed, and lit a joint. Despite evidence of Frederick all around him, he felt lucky to be in Lorraine's world. Shortly thereafter, she came home. “What are you
doing
?” she asked, irritated.

“Waiting for you,” Chuck said.

Lorraine tossed her bag on the floor and her keys on the bed and walked into the kitchen. “You just show up in someone's house whenever you feel like it?”

“I thought maybe you'd want some company after work,” he said, sitting up. “You know, with Frederick always running around…”

Lorraine walked back in with a glass of water and sat down. “Listen, Charles,” she said. “Frederick's working for something he believes in. He doesn't have a cushy job with his daddy waiting for him.” Chuck watched her open a bottle of aspirin and shake a couple into her hand. “When it comes right down to it…” She held her tongue.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“What is it?”

“You'll never know what it's like, Charles,” Lorraine said matter-of-factly, “to be out there on your own.”

Chuck collected his stash from her desk and stood, his head bobbing up and down, his eyes filling up like they had when he was a kid and his brother would set him up to take his mother's wrath. Lorraine slipped out of her shoes and her shirt without even looking at him.

 

After winning the California primary, Robert Kennedy was shot at point-blank range in the kitchen pantry of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles in June 1968, leaving liberals in a gloom. Two radical groups—Students for a Democratic Society and the Mobe, the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam—pushed for nonviolent demonstrations at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. They filed petitions for permits that would allow freaks and demonstrators to sleep in the park, picket the convention hotels, and march in the rallies.

The Weather Underground, the Panthers, and the Yippies, all groups with whom Frederick claimed high-level connections, wanted their efforts to be coordinated, confrontational, and flagrant. They envisioned a half million people occupying downtown Chicago, disrupting the proceedings, and drawing worldwide media coverage. In preparation, they planned marches through the commercial districts, all-night gatherings in Lincoln Park, and missions to spike the water supply with LSD, launch a flotilla of naked people in Lake Michigan, even send young radical girls dressed as prostitutes to seduce delegates. It was to be the culmination of years of civil disobedience and protest—the chance for young people to influence politics on the presidential level. Frederick said the antiwar movement was at a critical juncture and it was time for decisive action.

But by early August, Mayor Daley denied the permits and told young people to stay away. He also told the Chicago police that if kids got unruly, they had his permission to shoot to kill. Naturally, this caused much consternation among radical leaders. Factions splintered off and formed new groups; intellectuals and leftists who'd supported civil disobedience started talking revolution.

“You can't just destroy things,” Lorraine argued one night. “You need a vision for what comes next.”

“Fuck vision. Fuck values,” Frederick said. “It doesn't matter what you believe, what you stand for. Either you do something to stop the war or you don't. It's time for action. The Vietcong attacked Hue, Saigon, Khe Sanh. American casualties are heavy. We've got to do something, now.” The three of them were in the Phoenix Room, two tables from where Chuck and Lorraine had first gotten drunk together months earlier. Once Frederick got started, it was impossible to get a word in edgewise. “The SDS manifesto and the Port Huron statement are too tame.” Frederick took a copy of Mao's Little Red Book out of his knapsack and pounded it for emphasis. “The revolution is at hand!” Chuck pictured him in fatigues and a beret, standing on the table waving a machete. Sometimes, his enthusiasm was exciting and contagious, but just as often, it was too intense, toxic. Frederick had started using speed—black beauties and crystal meth, cooked up in makeshift labs outside of town—which had the effect of making him sound desperate, windmilling around topics, his voice scratchy and thin. “The Vietcong are fighting for their fucking lives. We should be, too.”

“They're being attacked,” Lorraine said. “They have no alternative.”

“Yeah, it's kill or be killed,” Chuck said, siding with Frederick.

“Killing is wrong,” Lorraine said.

“Right and wrong is subjective,” Frederick said. “Even a sniper acts consistent with his values.”

“So assassination's okay?”

“Like floods and plague,” he said, shrugging. “Part of the plan.”

“What plan?” Chuck asked.

“What plan?” Frederick repeated, sending bursts of cigarette smoke toward the ceiling. A television in the background blared. “In all your time together, Lorraine hasn't explained the plan to you?” Chuck looked at Lorraine, who looked down at her hands. “How is it you talk about everybody's destiny except his?” Frederick said, sneering at Chuck.

“Frederick…” Lorraine said, pressing his arm.

“How we live in service to it or we run away,” Frederick continued, his eyes glowing behind his glasses. It seemed to Chuck that Frederick was referring to something specific. Frederick lit a cigarette with the stub of an old one. “Of course, we all know my destiny,” Frederick said. “Leading the revolution!” He raised his beer.

“And Lorraine here, she wants to be around for the great spiritual awakening, right, Lorraine?” She was shaking her head. “So what about you, my friend?” Frederick said. Chuck kept looking at Lorraine, who was looking at the television. Frederick's face was within inches of Chuck's. “Seems to me you came to college to avoid the draft. And you deal dope because you have the capital.”

“Frederick…” Lorraine said.

He lifted his beer as though he was going to sip from it again. “There's nothing wrong with that,” he said. “Somebody's got to keep us high. What I want to know is what you're hanging around us for?”

“Frederick!” Lorraine had both hands on the table. Frederick shrugged his shoulders.

“Be cool, Lorrie,” Frederick said, staring hard at Chuck. “Are you in search of your destiny?” Frederick twirled the base of the beer in circles, his fingernails blackened, the areas under his eyes gray and wrinkled from lack of sleep. “You looking to get your hip card punched?”

Chuck drained his beer, stood up, walked out of the bar, and lit a cigarette. The moon was midway up the sky, clearing the apartment buildings across the street, casting a bluish pall over Commonwealth Avenue. A trolley car rumbled toward him from up the hill, its steel hull shaking like a nocturnal beast. Above, a streetlight flickered, but failed to ignite. Chuck leaned against the stucco, trying to decide whether to leave when he heard her. “Chuck,” she said, touching his shoulder and back, sending shivers through his entire body.

“C'mon, buddy,” Frederick said, softer now. “Let's go hear some music.”

 

With Frederick and Lorraine on either side of him, Chuck headed down the hill, past a clothing store with a mannequin wearing bell-bottom jeans and paisley shirts. On Harvard Avenue, beneath a rotating sign in a second-floor real estate office, they wandered into a smoky bar that advertised twenty-five-cent beers and R&B covers.

Frederick was magnificent that night. He introduced himself to a gaggle of girls from a nearby secretarial school and struck up a conversation with a table of electric company techs still wearing their tool belts. He ordered a round of shots for the band—Jose Cuervo—and persuaded Chuck to open a stick of gooey black primo hashish he'd been saving. As the two of them huddled together in a stall in the men's room, smoking, Frederick insisted they share some crusty yellow powder from a little vial. When they returned to the bar, their hearts pounding, the keyboard player was articulating the opening figure in The Doors' “Light My Fire.” By then, the club was filled with BU students chasing shots of Jack Daniel's with cheap drafts. Before long, everyone was on the dance floor, a tangle of arms moving up and down, hair plastered with sweat, eyes glazed over.

Fueled by meth and booze, Chuck pressed against Lorraine, while Frederick worked the crowd—disappearing for a while with one of the secretaries or a couple of locals resentful that out-of-town students with money were wandering back into Boston, changing the vibe from loose and summery to uptight fall. The band worked its way through “Whiter Shade of Pale” and, drunk and fucked-up on meth and hash, Chuck forgot all about being challenged in the Phoenix Room. He imagined himself, too, a warrior in the great revolutionary struggle and felt sublime pleasure being near Lorraine and Frederick. At that moment, he felt he had a right to his naïveté and plenty of time to develop political views and a sense of his own purpose in life. On some level, he forgave Frederick for the line of questioning and understood how his innocence could be an irritant to someone as world weary and wise as Frederick. Sweaty, dancing, and feeling surges of energy flooding through his veins, it didn't matter that Chuck wasn't Lorraine's main man. He was grateful to have a place—any place—in their near-perfect lives. As the set ended, the lead singer announced last call.

The three of them made their way, singing and laughing, up Comm Avenue toward Lorraine's. Frederick suggested they smoke some more hash, but Chuck couldn't find the pipe. When they got to the house in Brighton, Lorraine put her hands out to each of them, leading them up the steps, stumbling in, past the bare furnishings in the living room, until they collapsed in a heap on Lorraine's bed, a tangle of legs and limbs, clothing and hair.

Chuck's senses softened and then blazed. Every sound, every movement, every smell, was magnified. He felt a limb move under his leg and tried to orient himself on the bed, to visualize his own body in relation to the others. He smelled booze and hair—thick, moist, and smoky. The room swirled. Sometime later, Chuck became conscious of the quiet, the rhythm of his own breathing, and the two of them—Frederick and Lorraine—nearby. He tried focusing on the clock ticking above his head. He played a little game, anticipating sounds, using them to try to sober himself up by calibrating his mind to his surroundings and the passage of time, but the ticking seemed to surge and then fade away, speeding up and then slowing down. Someone belched and Chuck smelled beer, which nauseated him. He felt his own consciousness drift to the very top back portion of his head. There was a thicket of rustling, and all their weight shifted. Whoever was nearest the wall rolled toward him so that their mouth was close to his ear and their body was pressed up against his. A hand moved against his thigh. He felt hot breath on his neck, sour, relaxed. The hand on his leg moved higher, up across his stomach and then underneath his shirt, touching the tuft below his navel. He inhaled and held still. It flattened and then pressed itself, a rough palm against his skin. He reminded himself to breathe.

Minutes passed this way, and Chuck alternated between trying to figure out who was where and what exactly was happening. The body that was pressed against his side held still, the breath on his neck became steady, the flattened palm on his abdomen was motionless. Then it moved. He timed his own breaths to every third or fourth tick of the clock. After what seemed like a long time, he felt his belt unbuckling, a wave of excitement, and then fear. There was an exquisite pause in which he felt the bed dropping out from underneath him as the hand slid down, down, down.