Eleven

Randy's face looked normal again after Anna's fit of rage, and Dave the Poet had finished his epic, "The Stuffing of America," which came to eight hundred pages. It included not a single revision -- "My nose is my censor," he said. Meanwhile, Penelope joined an anarchist group that met every Wednesday night to make banana bread and discuss the abolishment of prisons. Their belief was that people are born innately good; it is society that makes them do bad things like rob and kill. One evening we were discussing her involvement in this group when Edgar returned from Mexico.

He was taller and darker than I'd imagined. He had three or four days' growth of beard, and his hair was also fashionably unkempt. He seemed to be one of those people who looked good no matter what he did. His patched leather aviation jacket was just the right combination of down-and-out and L. L. Bean, and he could fit in with any company he kept. At his father's club in the Loop, he was the promising lad from Princeton, the college he had in fact attended. With us, he looked like the anarchist madman who tosses bombs into First National Banks. When Randy answered the door, I thought he was going to fall down and kiss Edgar's feet, that's the kind of charisma the guy had.

With him, standing in the shadows of the stairwell, was a black guy named Carlo he'd met at the Kropotkin Institute. Carlo was from Chicago, too, but from Cabrini-Green, the public housing project, not Winnetka. He was shorter than Edgar, but elegant nevertheless. He wore a long black coat with a Persian lamb collar, a purple beret, and black canvas shoes from China. His eyes were intensely muddy, but they did not communicate inattention. He seemed to catch everything that happened, even dust falling through the sunlight.

We went into the front room. Randy made some green tea. Edgar wondered if they could stay with us for a while, until they found another apartment. We thought that was fine. They could set up sleeping bags on the living room floor. Penelope thought it was more than fine. She couldn't keep her eyes off Edgar. The dog, John Reed, came out of the back room with Dave and recognized Edgar, slinking over to him more like a jackal than a dog. Edgar gave John Reed a patronizing pat on the head, but otherwise there was no affection. It made you wonder why he had the dog in the first place, unless its pathetic condition symbolized something for him.

Edgar said his girlfriend, Marielle, and he had gotten together all right, but she had changed. They spent a couple of weeks together, and it was one fight after another. She wanted to put curtains in the window, but curtains were bourgeois. He'd ripped them down and thrown them into the street. He couldn't imagine how Marielle had become so domestic at fifteen years of age. It was her adolescent raptures that had so attracted him in the first place. If he'd wanted a mother, he said, he'd have stayed home in Winnetka.

Carlo pulled out some makings and started rolling a joint. It was the biggest one I'd ever seen, the size of a middle finger. He lit it up and within seconds, breathing the air, we were so high we couldn't see the ground. Carlo saw how well it was working on us. He smiled broadly.

"The is some fine shit," he said, "pure Colombian." Dave was impressed. The stuff he smoked was usually pure window box or Indiana roadside.

"Marielle was so bourgeois," said Edgar through the smoke. "One afternoon, while she was taking a nap, I gathered all my things, called her parents, and cleared out. Her father was so well connected, I was only three blocks away when the police blew down the street. Five minutes later, they were going back in the other direction, and she was sleeping in the back seat."

"Did you kiss her good-bye?" asked Penelope.

Carlo thought that was funny. He was slapping his knee and laughing. "Man, this bitch is something! Your head is up your ass. My man Edgar ain't gonna kiss no bitch good-bye."

I thought for a moment Penelope would leave the room, but she only shook her head, as if to clear the smoke from it.

"Did you and Carlo meet in Mexico?" I asked.

"At the institute," said Edgar. "As you know, I'm a student of Trotskyism. Kropotkin is the center for Trotsky studies in this hemisphere. Carlo and I met in a seminar on the new economics."

Dave asked what that was, and Carlo explained that it was the gradual replacement of "daylight economies" with blackmarket or "midnight" economies.

"Isn't it essentially the same money?" I asked.

"It may be the same monies physically," Edgar interjected, "but once it is ours it is shaded by us metaphysically. The political intention of the money is also darkened and corrected."

"So bad money becomes good?" I said.

"Now you got the idea," said Carlo.

"You'll be interested to know that Carlo just got out of federal prison," said Edgar.

"What for?" said Randy, excited.

"Destroyin' draft records," said Carlo. "In Joliet."

"How fascinating," said Penelope.

Carlo and Edgar explained that they were part of the Union for a Free Union, known for short as the FU. While Edgar had not been implicated in the Joliet affair, he'd been a part of its planning. Carlo, a white college student named Tim, and two white women from Loyola University, one of whom was a professor of history, drove down to Joliet in Tim's car in the middle of the night. They checked the place out in advance and brought along a crowbar. Carlo pried open the back door, which proved incredibly easy, since in a place like Joliet they didn't expect this sort of thing. In no time at all, they poured glue into the typewriters, pulled all the current records from their files, and piled what they could into the car. Since the office was on a downtown street, where of course nobody went in the evening, they were able to carry the stuff right out the front door. They filled up the trunk and most of the backseat, leaving hardly any room for themselves. Then, for good measure, they poured ketchup over what remained and nailed a pair of shoes to the floor.

"Nailed shoes to the floor?"

"Yes," said Edgar, "shoes that belonged to Trotsky himself."

"How do you know they were Trotsky's?" I asked.

"Believe me," said Carlo, "we know."

"Well, they looked like Trotsky's," said Edgar.

I didn't have the heart to tell them no one in Joliet had any idea what Trotsky's shoes looked like, nor understood that they symbolized the immobility of capitalist society.

Edgar said Carlo was a victim of society. That's why they'd asked him to come along. Carlo wasn't an original member of the group, which was mostly college students, but they felt illegitimate without some representative of the underclass. Elizabeth, who was majoring in sociology at Loyola, and Tim, who claimed "life experience" among the poor, went out on a mission to find someone who fully represented the horrors of modern society. That was how they found Carlo, drug addict, burglar, unsuccessful pimp, alcoholic, you name it. They waited outside Cook County Prison for three days and interviewed each person that came out. On the third day, at two in the afternoon, they had their man, He had just been released on an armed robbery charge because the only witness, a Pakistani, had been murdered.

"That's too bad," said Penelope.

"Yeah, fuckin' broke my heart to hear he'd died" said Carlo.

Elizabeth and Tim brought Carlo back to the FU and began his revolutionary education. They gave him revolutionary books, bought him some revolutionary clothes, cooked lots of pasta fiesole, boeuf borguignon, and other sturdy, no-nonsense foods, and let him sleep with all the women in the cadre. After two or three months of this diet, they'd taken some of the prison edge off Carlo. He no longer slept with a knife in his hand, and he didn't curse in his sleep. The main thing was, he could listen to groups like the Beatles and songs like "The Eve of Destruction" without collapsing in laughter. Carlo had become a true revolutionary, and he was going to lead them into Joliet.

Edgar had been in touch from Paris, where he was studying the structuralism of foreskins. He had a theory about the "maiming of male beauty" that had to do with Richard Nixon and LBJ, and not only did the University of Paris have the best library with regard to the penis, Paris was beautiful that spring. The best approach, he wrote in code, was to properly advertise themselves. What use was the Joliet action unless there was proper publicity? While they couldn't notify the TV stations nor send out a press release, they could leave memorable signs of what they represented. Edgar suggested the shoes, and Professor Kunkel thought ketchup would be vivid, since it represented blood without the shedding