with the conviction that there is something dangerous in the basement that I must get rid of, though I can’t think what it is.
When I offered my services in the movement, I had been hanging around meetings and saying smart things for about a year. I knew how to go out to Jersey and buy dynamite at farm equipment stores. I dared to have a number eight blasting cap in my pocket, a piece of bravado that would not tempt me now, and when one of them said, “How would you cause a lot of damage to Ma Bell?” I said, “Twenty-five sticks of dynamite in the center of the building, between a couple of elevator shafts. You’d probably get the electrical system, too.” I pulled out the blasting cap and rolled it casually around my palm. He smiled. It was like a kiss. His name was Maury Nassiter, and he had a girl friend, a wispy Quaker. She thought he was exotic, but I had his number: he’d been raised about six blocks from my grandparents’ old building, and his cousin knew my aunt Tova. He was the handsomest man I have ever seen. Maury had either lost his manners, or never had any, because he wasn’t very nice to that pretty girl, whose name was Eileen Hobhouse, but he clung to her. He never made a pass at me, but I was special. I joked around. I tempted death. He treated me very respectfully, for a leftist.
I used to watch him with Eileen, instructing her. She would turn the crank on the ditto machine and he would say things like, “The important thing in a relationship is the struggle aspect,” or “When the bosses have succeeded in forcing the worker to consume his own goods, then there’s a crash, and that’s the excuse for moving the means of production elsewhere. Do you see that?” Eileen would crank andnod. We ate communally. Maury would sit down to his bowl of rice and beans and hot sauce, and admire it for a moment, then say to Eileen, “Doesn’t this make you feel connected to the whole Third World?” To me, he would say, “Can I get it all in my backpack?” and I would say, “Mark should take half and go by the PATH train.” I heard that he bargained for a reduced charge, maybe in exchange for naming me, among others, but I was gone by that time, and Maury didn’t know who I’d become or where I was. Neither did anyone else.
Last night Michael and I sat out in my garden. I think he was perplexed at how I kept questioning him about his mother. She drives a tractor, she has five daughters, she reads
The New York Review of Books
. He shifted around in his chair and said, “Stop looking at me like she’s some kind of phenomenon! She’s a woman who lives on a farm!” The images were wrong, which is why I kept asking for more. Nothing about her soothed me. Finally I said, “What does she cook? What’s the
worst
thing she cooks?”
“Jesus,” he said. Then he leaned back in his chair and looked out into space. After a few minutes, he said, in a deep, and I think unconscious, voice, “The wheeling stars.” I smiled. I was crawling around between the rows in the garden, hands and knees, and slapping the dirt, just to feel the resistant give of the soil. The solidity of the earth was something I hadn’t experienced before I came here. Now I don’t know if I would rather see it from a distance—its curve and spread—or feel it, or smell it. There are people who eat it, I’ve heard. So I crawl around the garden, then I stand up and inhale and look, then I crawl around again. “I’m sorry,” Michael said. “What are you doing?”
“Pulling weeds,” I said. That was sufficient. To a farm kid, pulling weeds is always an acceptable, and even ennobling, activity.
He didn’t leave until one. Listening to Michael talk about his mother made mine seem very present, so present that to have picked up the receiver and dialed the numbers, to have overlooked the passage of fifteen years, seemed easy. But in New York it was already after two, and I didn’t have the first notion about where she was,
When I offered my services in the movement, I had been hanging around meetings and saying smart things for about a year. I knew how to go out to Jersey and buy dynamite at farm equipment stores. I dared to have a number eight blasting cap in my pocket, a piece of bravado that would not tempt me now, and when one of them said, “How would you cause a lot of damage to Ma Bell?” I said, “Twenty-five sticks of dynamite in the center of the building, between a couple of elevator shafts. You’d probably get the electrical system, too.” I pulled out the blasting cap and rolled it casually around my palm. He smiled. It was like a kiss. His name was Maury Nassiter, and he had a girl friend, a wispy Quaker. She thought he was exotic, but I had his number: he’d been raised about six blocks from my grandparents’ old building, and his cousin knew my aunt Tova. He was the handsomest man I have ever seen. Maury had either lost his manners, or never had any, because he wasn’t very nice to that pretty girl, whose name was Eileen Hobhouse, but he clung to her. He never made a pass at me, but I was special. I joked around. I tempted death. He treated me very respectfully, for a leftist.
I used to watch him with Eileen, instructing her. She would turn the crank on the ditto machine and he would say things like, “The important thing in a relationship is the struggle aspect,” or “When the bosses have succeeded in forcing the worker to consume his own goods, then there’s a crash, and that’s the excuse for moving the means of production elsewhere. Do you see that?” Eileen would crank andnod. We ate communally. Maury would sit down to his bowl of rice and beans and hot sauce, and admire it for a moment, then say to Eileen, “Doesn’t this make you feel connected to the whole Third World?” To me, he would say, “Can I get it all in my backpack?” and I would say, “Mark should take half and go by the PATH train.” I heard that he bargained for a reduced charge, maybe in exchange for naming me, among others, but I was gone by that time, and Maury didn’t know who I’d become or where I was. Neither did anyone else.
Last night Michael and I sat out in my garden. I think he was perplexed at how I kept questioning him about his mother. She drives a tractor, she has five daughters, she reads
The New York Review of Books
. He shifted around in his chair and said, “Stop looking at me like she’s some kind of phenomenon! She’s a woman who lives on a farm!” The images were wrong, which is why I kept asking for more. Nothing about her soothed me. Finally I said, “What does she cook? What’s the
worst
thing she cooks?”
“Jesus,” he said. Then he leaned back in his chair and looked out into space. After a few minutes, he said, in a deep, and I think unconscious, voice, “The wheeling stars.” I smiled. I was crawling around between the rows in the garden, hands and knees, and slapping the dirt, just to feel the resistant give of the soil. The solidity of the earth was something I hadn’t experienced before I came here. Now I don’t know if I would rather see it from a distance—its curve and spread—or feel it, or smell it. There are people who eat it, I’ve heard. So I crawl around the garden, then I stand up and inhale and look, then I crawl around again. “I’m sorry,” Michael said. “What are you doing?”
“Pulling weeds,” I said. That was sufficient. To a farm kid, pulling weeds is always an acceptable, and even ennobling, activity.
He didn’t leave until one. Listening to Michael talk about his mother made mine seem very present, so present that to have picked up the receiver and dialed the numbers, to have overlooked the passage of fifteen years, seemed easy. But in New York it was already after two, and I didn’t have the first notion about where she was,
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