Chapter 14
When Z found Rai that evening at the Place, he came bearing two gifts, something extraordinary for him. Had she been that much of a bitch? Rai wondered. Was he trying to make her feel better? She didn’t know exactly what to make of that hypothesis.
The first gift seemed particularly out of character, given Z’s hatred of all things Russian (except Lenin and Trotsky, of course). He handed her a package with a certain amount of fanfare; he had even taken the time to wrap it. She made quick work of the paper bags and little ribbon, and found a hardback copy of the new translation of Anna Karenina. She almost broke down in the middle of the lunchroom.
“Thank you, Z. That’s just so cool.” Without the veneer of Weltschmertz, she looked like a little girl again. Several of the staff members gathered by the kitchen looked at her as if they didn’t know who she was. “You’re a good friend. I know I don’t tell you that enough.”
“No biggie. Just thought you might like it,” he replied gruffly.
“Like it? I always wanted to read it. Always. So what else did you bring me?”
He unrolled the now recognizable form of a subway advertisement. It had been an ad for the New School University. Now it appeared to be an ad for Aristotle.
“Almost everything has been discovered already.”
-Aristotle
As they rode the train up and down the West side, then off toward Park Slope, dozens of people laughed and pointed to the fake ad. Just about everyone knew Aristotle as the wisest man in history, yet they saw him saying something so horribly wrong. Students laughed at the sign, black grandmothers explained it to their grandkids, Upper West Side Jews guffawed as they got off in the Village.
Rai had loved the idea when Z had first shown it to her, but now, unexpectedly, she was not pleased. “Fuckers,” she whispered to Z after a group of Gen X computer types slid off the train, talking about discovery and science.
“Huh?” Z was surprised. He thought they’d provoked exactly the kind of controversy Rai wanted.
“They’re just such fucking losers, but they wanna pretend they’re better’n they are. So instead of actually trying to be smarter or stronger or whatever, they just wanna see great people humiliated. It makes them feel like they don’t suck so much. Pure fucking resentment.”
“Except–”
“Except nothing. They get to feel smart for knowing who Aristotle was. They feel good about themselves, so they laugh.”
“Maybe–”
“All we’re doing is fucking helping Muggles feel good about themselves.”
“But they are reading…”
“But are they learning anything? No. Zippo. Just becoming more comfortable. More quiet. More boring.”
“Sometimes its just good to see a name. Maybe tonight one of them will pick up a copy of the Nicomachean Ethics. It’s possible, huh?”
“Just what we need. More fucking Aristotelians.”
“God, Rai. You hate it when nobody notices a quote, but when I find one that gets everybody talking, you get pissed. Ya wanna give it a chance here?”
“‘A mere consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.’” By the time she finished her quote, she had almost reminded herself not to be so serious, but she was still unhappy. Her plan to teach the Muggles to think was not going where she wanted. She and Z seemed as far from enlightenment, fame, revolution, and meaning as they had been a week before.
* * * * *
“The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”
-Karl Marx
Perhaps it was Rai’s dark mood that inspired her to chose that particular quote, or perhaps it was Z’s clever idea to use it over an ad for the Dance Theater of Harlem. “Black people doing ballet? Like they’re from Kiev or some shit. Now that’s a fucking nightmare,” he had pontificated. Unfortunately, no one even had the chance to be confused, because after they had slid it into place, a pack of 16 year old gangsters rampaged through the car, breaking everything they could find.
“Dead traditions, broken…” Rai looked for a word and couldn’t find it. It was becoming increasingly difficult to make a silver lining out of their failures.
Z said simply, “Fuckers.”
“So whadda we do to make people pay attention? How they gonna learn what we have to say?”
“Hit ‘em over the head with a hammer. That’s all that’s left.”
“C’mon, there’s–” Rai didn’t even know what she wanted to say.
“Maybe thinking is just one of those traditions of dead generations. Why think when you got Puff Daddy. Or is it P. Diddy? Fuck ‘em all.” The expression on his face held more than his usual anger. It hinted at despair.
Rai knew that another nightmare weighed on top of Z. Or perhaps it was many nightmares. From time to time, she told herself that if she had the excuse of his past, she’d let herself go really insane:
That morning when he woke in suburbia with neither memories nor clothing, Z had run madly through the strip malls of north Houston. Though he could never describe how, by nightfall he found himself downtown. Only cops and homeless old men prowled the surreally deserted streets, but Z knew that he could not trust the police; he did not know how he knew, but he knew. Terrified of everyone but desperate for any protection, he mustered the courage to approach four black men smoking cigarettes on a corner. “Can you help me?” he asked, hearing for the first time his own Jamaican accent.
“Who are you?” asked the youngest of the four, staring with distrust at the expensive clothes Z had found on the floor that morning. Z couldn’t respond. “I said, who the fuck are you?”
“I don’t know.” And he began to cry.
The next several days offered no more clarity. He began to call himself “Z” when the old men informed him that the enigmatic “X” had already been taken, and they taught him where to get a free meal and how to shoplift a candy bar. Soon, though, he found another desire even stronger than hunger. Since he was young and handsome — in spite of the scars — he could always find a woman at a soup kitchen who would assuage the demands of his body. No one needed to teach him about sex. Somehow, he already knew.
From time to time, Z tried to explain what those first days had been like, but his memory and vocabulary failed him. He could remember only disgust: at his own body, at the food he picked from dumpsters or off styrofoam plates in church basements, at the women who satisfied his desires. In the midst of that horror, he had told Rai, he needed something beautiful.
Redemption, if one could call it that, came in the form of words. In one of those church basements — now in New Orleans, where he had hitched to escape Houston and the heavy blankness it impressed on his memory — he found two books: a King James Bible and a copy of “Romeo and Juliet.” As for every other fifteen year old boy in the history of the West, the Bible opened automatically to the Song of Songs, and he found that the words printed there touched not only him, but also the women to whom he recited them. These stolen words and his roguish charm won him a bed and roof on many wet nights.
Others may have doubted Z’s story, but Rai could not. Life on the street had taught her that sex was a more horrifying continent than she had ever imagined when her fantasies roamed an immaculate bedroom in Vanillaville. She might have predicted the respectable middle class men who offered a home to both boys and girls in exchange for sex, but respectable middle class women that would invite a scarred black body into their beds? Unfortunately for her childhood dreams of human innocence, Rai saw it every day — not just with Z, but with dozens of handsome boys at The Place. When she asked Z about the phenomenon, he was evasive. For some it was fantasies about black sexuality, he admitted, for others a game of power or a motherly urge or a desire for sex without commitment, but he avoided the details. “Just leave it at this,” he told Rai with something between a grimace and a naughty smile, “men have no monopoly on perversion.”
The combination of sleeping with white women and living on the street gave Z an intimate knowledge of questions of power and injustice. At least that’s what he told anyone who asked him how he came across Marx. Of course, he had heard the name, but for the first years available to his memory, Z had just thought of Marxism as old tyrants in badly cut suits.
Then one day in San Francisco, a good two years before he met Rai, Z saw a beautiful blond girl selling newspapers in the Haight. As he had hitched his way across the continent, libraries and bookshops and the occasional lover had introduced him to many new books, especially romantic poetry. He had been memorizing Neruda’s Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, so he gathered his courage, walked up to the girl, looked her straight in the eye, and recited.
Leaning into the afternoon I cast my sad nets
into your oceanic eyes.
There in the highest blaze, my solitude lengthens and flames,
its arms turning like a drowning man’s.
I send out red signals across your absent eyes
that wave like the sea or the beach by the lighthouse.
You keep only darkness, my distant female;
from your regard sometimes the coast of my dread emerges.
Leaning into the afternoons I fling my sad nets
to that sea that is lashed by your oceanic eyes.
The birds of night peck at the first stars
that flash like my soul when I love you.
The night gallops on its shadowy mare
sledding blue tassels over the land.
Beds where eternal thirst flows
and weariness follows, and the infinite ache.
Her eyes did not become dreamy in the way they were supposed to. She held the newspapers tightly against her breast (Z read THE DAILY WORKER in red ink) and asked, “Who wrote that?”
“Pablo Neruda.” Z said proudly.
“Really?” She allowed the papers to fall away a bit. “He’s one of us.”
“Huh?” Z responded, confused.
“A communist. A Marxist. That’s why the Chilean fascists killed him,” she clarified.
It would take quite some time for Z to learn that Neruda’s death had not been quite so dramatic; at the time, the story of Neruda’s martyrdom just contributed to Sabine’s already substantial appeal. By the time Z finally got her into bed (two days, an endurance record for him), he had learned much of The Communist Manifesto by heart.
It was Z’s first real relationship. Sabine took him to political meetings, introduced him to party and labor leaders, got him to sell newspapers, and made him read for hours on end. A good Leninist would have called her thought ‘heterodox,’ depending as it did on Trotsky and Che, but what she lacked in knowledge, she made up for in passion.
A psychoanalyst might have said that politics filled the wound in Z’s soul where his past should have been, or that it served as a revenge fantasy for the cold looks he received that first morning in wealthy Houston suburbs. Z simply declared that Marx made sense, or more accurately, that Marx allowed him to make sense of his own life. He had experienced injustice, and now he had a tool to understand it.
Z and Sabine spent four months together before Z got cabin fever and decided he had to leave, but he left with his head full of revolutionary words and his bag full of books by the Frankfurt School. More difficult, he had the heart of a true convert, and he desperately wanted the masses of America to see the light as he had. With some of the income he had made from selling newspapers, he took a bus into Oregon, rented a cheap room, and printed out a hundred copies of the first several pages of The Communist Manifesto. Without much trouble, he found the lumber mill outside of town and walked there with a heavy ream of paper and a sturdy wooden box.
At shift change, he set the box upside down in the parking lot, stood on top of it, and began to preach. “Workers of the world, you have nothing to lose but your chains!” he began, and then worked his way into a fury about the alienation of labor. The lumbermen leaving their shift just ignored him, walking to their cars with their faces averted, then driving quickly out of the lot. It was the workers coming onto their shifts who were the problem. As Z was preaching the difference between use value and exchange value, a burly logger stepped up to him.
“You should probably go,” he said.
“See!” Z cried. “Management sends its stooges to undermine the voice of the working man! But will we retreat? No! Will we surrender? No! Because–”
“Son, I’m the steward of the union here.” The lumberjack replied menacingly. “Those men–” he pointed to a group of several even bigger loggers standing by the gate, their arms held akimbo “–those men have asked me to tell you that if you don’t leave voluntarily, you’re going to leave involuntarily.”
Z continued, “And shall we collapse in fear before the Kulaks and the lumpenproletariat? No! Because we see the future before us, and–”
The six men lifted both Z and his soapbox from the ground and carried him toward the road. He began to struggle against them, but they simply held his arms until he slipped out of their grasp and swung wildly with his fists. He felt one punch strike home, then only blackness.
A nighttime rain woke him. He was in a ditch by the road on the far side of town, with all of his pamphlets scattered on top of his body. He stumbled back to the motel, terribly bruised. The next day, still limping, humiliated by the experience, he stuck out his thumb to go east.
As hard as Rai tried to press him for the details of the next two years, Z remained silent, with a look as close to shame as Rai ever saw on his face. His consciousness raising plan had gone badly, and from time to time he alluded to bruises outside a Kentucky distillery or a broken rib in front of a Detroit car plant. Once, he had returned to San Francisco, remembering the blissful months with Sabine, but, with an angry tear in her eye, she told him she’d become a lesbian.
The needle that Rai had found in his arm 18 months before in Washington told her a lot about the intervening year. Even so, Rai had never looked at her friend with pity. She respected his strength, admired his mind, and was infinitely grateful for his protection.
In one of those uncommon moments of emotional insight that allowed Rai to tell herself that she was not always a bitch, she remembered that Z had brought her a gift that morning. She wasn’t nice to him very often, she admitted. Maybe that’s what he needed. Maybe she could be a little kinder to him, even compliment him from time to time.
Inviting Z to the MoMA that evening had hardly been a financial sacrifice — it was “pay what you wish,” after all — but Friday night had always been her time to be alone. She felt like it was a kind offer. Certainly kind enough that he could have been nicer in turning her down.
