The rebel, p.33
The Rebel, page 33
“What?”
Jimmy laughed grimly. “They were in Whisper. So much for politics, hey?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Pier wanted me to be like Bobby. I told her she’d have to kill Lady Bird Johnson, or you, if she ever wanted a shot at being First Lady. I didn’t expect her to kill herself.”
“If you ever want to go into politics, Jimmy, what happened…it wouldn’t hurt you.”
“That’s the last thing I’m ever going to do, Ethel. So tell Bobby he doesn’t have to worry.”
“Bobby mentioned you in his victory speech.”
“That’s nice,” Jimmy said dismissively.
“He told everyone that he believes you have so much to give and that he thinks you’ll be doing much more than making movies.”
Jimmy laughed at that. “I won’t be doing shit, Ethel, and the last thing I want to be is like Bobby. No offense.”
“None taken.”
Jimmy stared straight ahead, holding himself as still as a statue.
“Jimmy?”
“Yeah?”
“It’s going to be all right. If you believed in God, it would be so much easier, everything would be so much clearer, and—”
“Don’t even bother me with that Bible-pounder shit, Ethel. That’s what you came all the way over here to tell me? That God is going to make everything all right?”
“If—”
“Don’t.”
Ethel nodded, and Jimmy leaned toward her, put his arm around her, brushed his hand intentionally against her right breast.
“No, Jimmy, that’s not what I came here for. Bobby would probably try that sort of thing, but I expect something different from you.”
“I’m sorry,” Jimmy said. “It was an accident. No, it wasn’t an accident. I’m sorry, Ethel. I just wanted to be close, that’s all.”
“We can be close,” she said, her voice surprisingly husky. “That’s why I’m here. You just can’t do that, that’s all.”
“Would you have wanted me to if circumstances were different?”
Ethel laughed nervously. “Jimmy, you can’t ask me such a question.”
“Would you?”
“Maybe, Jimmy, but circumstances aren’t different. I’ve got a husband who I love. I took vows, which I don’t take lightly.”
“And I’ve got a friend.”
Ethel smiled and allowed Jimmy to nuzzle her. “Yes, you do.”
“How could I have missed it?” Jimmy asked. “She was seeing him right under my nose. I’m a fucking fool.”
“No, Jimmy, you’re anything but a fool.”
“Then how could I not know?”
“She was an actress,” Ethel said, “and a very good one. Of course she could fool you, just as she fooled herself.”
“What do you mean?” Ethel stared at her hands, and Jimmy could feel her tremble. “She told you about it, didn’t she?”
Ethel nodded. “She talked to me when he threatened to blackmail her. She said she couldn’t trust anyone else. I told her to tell you, I begged her, but she was sure that she would lose you if she did. Like she told you in her letter. That was all true.”
“Something could have been done,” Jimmy said, “but…she loved him. She didn’t want to stop seeing him.” Jimmy looked like he was in physical pain. He pulled away from Ethel.
“She was just in too deep,” Ethel said. “He was a nasty piece of work. She did want to stop seeing him, Jimmy. She just didn’t know how to get out of it. I tried to help her.”
“How?”
“There just wasn’t enough time,” Ethel said.
“What do you mean?”
“Lem Billings was putting something together.”
“Like what?” Jimmy asked, surprised, angry, and humiliated.
“Something to scare the man away from Pier. Pier didn’t know…nobody knew, but everything happened so fast, Pier taking her own life, I don’t know, Jimmy, I’m so sorry for you.”
“Bobby knows, doesn’t he?” Jimmy asked. “You told him.”
“I’m sorry, Jimmy. We just wanted to help.” She shrugged, helpless. “But we were too late.”
“You should have told me. Everyone knew but me. Son of a bitch!” Jimmy stood up and paced around the room. “I wanted to break every one of these fucking dolls, did you know that? But I couldn’t. Just like I wanted to break that asshole artist’s face. Did you read her last request—that I shouldn’t hurt him? What bullshit. I should break his face. I’m going to break his face.” Jimmy moved toward the door.
“Bobby got mad at me, too,” Ethel said.
“For what?”
“For telling him about Pier, for asking him to help you.”
“You should have told me,” Jimmy said, pacing around the room again.
“Pier made me promise. I knew I couldn’t win, that whatever I did would be wrong. But I care about you, Jimmy, and so does Bobby.”
“Bobby only cares about Bobby.”
“He made me promise not to tell you anything. He said it would only make it worse. He was right. He said you wouldn’t want him to know. He said that you think he killed Marilyn. He said you probably think he had something to do with Pier’s death, too, and that I was never to tell you that he was trying to help.”
“Why?”
“Because he said you wouldn’t believe it. It would just make it worse. Do you believe me, Jimmy?”
After a beat, Jimmy said, “Yeah…about Pier, I do.”
“And Marilyn?”
“This isn’t a conversation we should be having.”
“Now you sound like a lawyer,” Ethel said.
Jimmy sat down beside her. “I can’t talk to you about Bobby. You’re his wife.”
“Yes, you can. I’ve broken all my confidences to be honest with you. You can tell me what you think, your feelings.”
“How do I know you won’t break my confidence, go back and tell Bobby everything?”
“I guess you don’t,” Ethel said in a voice so low it was barely audible.
“I don’t know what I think. I saw Bobby’s men in Marilyn’s house the night she was killed…died. What do you want me to say? That because Bobby’s my friend, I think he’s innocent?”
Ethel was shaking. Not with anger. Perhaps fear. “He’s not a murderer, Jimmy. And neither are you.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s not your fault.”
“You’re right about that. It’s Pier and that fuckhole of a boyfriend of hers.” He hugged Ethel and cried. “No, it’s not Pier. It’s…everything.”
He fumbled with her white satin blouse.
“Jimmy, please don’t.” Her voice seemed to catch in her throat. She pulled gently away from him and whispered, “Bobby’s not a murderer.”
“I’m sorry, Ethel,” Jimmy said, staring hard at her. He needed and desired her. He wanted to kiss her and be safe. He wanted to be inside her. But he had broken a trust. He was as self-serving and unethical as that asshole Domenicos Theotocopoulos, and she was plain as vanilla ice cream…yet she was beautiful, radiant in bulging pregnancy—her breasts full; her stomach round with life, her face tight; eyes wide, almost goggly, nose slightly too large and flared; mousy brown hair flat against her neck and forehead. No makeup. She smelled of milk and mint and soft perfume. With a shock Jimmy realized it was Joy, Marilyn’s perfume.
“Do you want to feel the baby?” Ethel asked.
Jimmy let her guide his hand to her stomach.
“There, feel it?”
Jimmy giggled and nodded. He left his hand on her stomach. “Pier didn’t even want me to take care of Perry.”
“You could fight it. Would you want to?”
“He’s not my son, not physically, anyway. Pier never knew that I knew.”
“Does that matter?”
“I wouldn’t stand a chance in court.”
“I’m sure you’ll be able to see him whenever you want,” Ethel said.
“Pier’s mother won’t let me near him. She’s got good lawyers, too.”
“I’m sorry, Jimmy.”
“How do I get past all this?” Ethel shook her head. “You ever been to the Santa Monica pier?” Jimmy asked. Ethel shook her head again. “I used to go there a lot. Something about seeing the ocean makes everything else seem…small. You eat cotton candy?”
Ethel laughed, and Jimmy imagined he was walking into the sea, into the cold froth of the breakers, into the deep lithium darkness.
TWENTY-TWO
Methods and Martyrs
LOS ANGELES: FEBRUARY 1965
Jimmy met her at Berkeley, after he gave a speech in front of the Sproul Hall steps. She wore her hair in an Afro, a huge kinked halo that framed her face as a perfect oval. Her eyelashes were thick, her black eye makeup even thicker. She had a perfectly straight nose, and faint laugh lines shadowed the corners of her full, sensual mouth. Her skin was powder dark, her neck long and regal. She wore a very long bead necklace and an emerald-green sheath dress, and she carried a honey-colored acoustic guitar with a white, beaded strap.
“I liked what you said,” the woman said to Jimmy. Jimmy nodded. There was something cruel and hard about her features. She was stunning. “You want a toke?” She handed him what was left of a marijuana cigarette.
Absentmindedly, Jimmy took it. He inhaled deeply and held it in his lungs. There were thousands of people behind him, mostly students. Heads nodded at him as he gazed around, young people making eye contact, congratulating him, making the connection, and that was enough; they didn’t need to press him for attention and autographs; they were too cool for that. Here he was famous yet somehow anonymous. Here he was safe and calm in this dreamless, crowded, noisy place. Here everything was solid, tangible, hard, like the Nubian student princess beside him, who was probably one of the free-speech-movement leaders.
“How come you’re here?” she asked.
Jimmy gave her back the joint and shrugged. “Somebody asked me to come and say something. Probably someone from the student union.”
“It’s not organized like that, and that’s not what I asked you.”
Jimmy snorted. I don’t need this shit.
“But I did like your ‘students are just citizens caught in the machine’ speech. You’re the only old person who seems to give a shit.” That said sarcastically, not innocently. Jimmy laughed. “I mean who’s over thirty.”
“There’re hundreds of people here who are over thirty,” Jimmy said.
She shrugged. “Yeah, I suppose. I probably should stop smoking these silly cigarettes.”
“How old are you?”
“Over twenty-one. Old enough to know.”
“You a student here?”
She shook her head and smiled grimly. “Just someone who cares about freedom of speech.”
“You a folksinger?”
“No, but I sing a little.”
“I think you’re older than you look.”
“You do, do you?”
“Yeah,” Jimmy said, and then the crowd began shouting at a thin, wiry, dark-haired student leader. Framed between Corinthian pillars, Mario Savio stood on the steps of the administration building. Shaking with energy and conviction, he thanked Jimmy for his support and then gave his speech. The amplifier made his voice so loud that it echoed around the square.
“…and you know, James Dean is absolutely right, we’re all caught up in the gears of the government machine. But there’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, and you’ve got to make it stop.”
The crowd went wild and kept shouting, “Make it stop Make it stop Make it stop!”
“Claudia, you want to come up here and help us out with a song?” Savio said in a resonant voice as big as the crowd; and the woman Jimmy had been talking to stepped in front of the microphone and began to sing “Blowin’ in the Wind.” After the first chorus, the student leader interrupted her and shouted, “Are you ready to march into the administration building right now and sit down on the gears?”
The crowd surged forward. “Fuck, yes!”
Claudia continued to sing, her contralto voice a combination of gravel and molasses; and then, when all the students who were going to participate in the sit-down had disappeared into Sproul Hall, she looked at Jimmy and spoke into the microphone, “You going inside, Jimmy?”
The plaza was almost empty, and Jimmy felt deflated, enervated, as if he was a vampire who had taken the blood energy from the crowd, and now there was nothing left, no crowd, no pounding deafening screams, no mass bobbing, heaving, swaying to capture and fill his field of vision; and once again he felt the crushing weight of memory. Pier was dead. Marilyn was dead. “I’m a ghost,” he said to himself.
“What?” Claudia asked, her voice large in the plaza that had nearly emptied; there were still students about, students standing around talking and smoking and passing out political leaflets.
Jimmy laughed and said, “I’m a ghost.” People watched him, listening.
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Claudia asked. Jimmy shrugged. “So are you going in or what?”
“No,” Jimmy said. “My work is done.” And he turned and started walking through the plaza.
“Hey, you want to have coffee?” Claudia asked, still using the microphone.
“No,” Jimmy answered, but dark, sleek, cool, self-possessed, over-twenty-one Claudia couldn’t hear him.
“Hey…”
SHE SAID SHE HAD A CRASH PAD IN WATTS, BEHIND THE PROJECTS on Imperial Highway. Jimmy considered the slums in L.A. to be rather nice, candy-ass, working-class black neighborhoods; they certainly weren’t anything like the South Bronx or Bed-Stuy in New York. Now those were slums. War zones that smelled of fear. You knew you were a target there, but Watts didn’t feel that way.
Jesus Christ almighty, this could be any neighborhood in Indianapolis, Indiana. But Jimmy wasn’t taking any chances. “You got a garage?”
“You think nobody here ever saw a Jag?” Claudia said, teasing him.
“I’d just like it to be in one piece when I leave.”
“I thought you said this ain’t no ghetto, just pretty little ramshackle houses all in a row. Nigger heaven, eh, Jimmy?”
“Yeah, yeah,” Jimmy said.
“Turn right at the next corner. My house is the brown one right after the grocery store, and, yes, I have a garage.”
“So it’s a house.”
“Yeah…what’d you expect?”
“You said a crash pad.”
“Well, that’s what it is.”
“You own it?”
He stopped in front of the grafittied two-car garage, and without answering, she got out of the car and opened the roller door. “Yeah, I own it,” she said, leading him through a narrow hallway to the living room, which was as messy as Dean’s house used to be. The room was dark, the windows covered with dirty eggshell-colored pull shades. She picked up a pile of newspapers and magazines to make room on the couch for Jimmy. “You want a joint?”
Jimmy shrugged.
She fumbled around for a half-smoked joint in a large, porcelain ashtray, which was overflowing, and said, “I’m never here.”
“Where are you, then?”
“Working, mostly down South. I’ll be moving to Selma. That’s in Alabama.”
“When you going?” Jimmy asked, ignoring her condescension and making small talk, accepting the little fuzzy high that the marijuana would give him and wondering what the fuck he was doing here. She had wanted to talk to him over coffee, and there were a hundred coffee shops and restaurants around Berkeley, but here they were, in her crash-pad house, in the candy-ass slums, and for a terrifying instant he couldn’t remember the sequence of events, how he got here—yes, yes, the car, but why not the coffee shop? Why did he accept her invitation? Did she invite him?
“I’m leaving in a few days,” Claudia said. She sat beside him but kept her distance. He glanced at her breasts, which made interesting wrinkles in her tight-fitting dress. She wasn’t wearing a bra.
“You know, maybe it’s the dope, but I don’t know why I’m here. I thought you wanted to have coffee. I thought I said no.”
“Yeah, you did.”
“Then how am I here?”
She laughed. “You gave a pretty good speech at the university for someone who was stoned out of his head.”
“I wasn’t stoned then,” Jimmy said.
“Then what was all that ‘I’m a ghost’ business, and all that jive about being a vampire?” Jimmy shrugged. “Maybe I shouldn’t have brought you back here, but you seemed completely fucked up.”
“I drove us here.”
“Yeah,” Claudia said. “So what’s your point? That I’m stupid?”
Jimmy grinned at her. If he hadn’t been stoned at the rally, he certainly was now. “This is good shit. I’m practically hallucinating.”
“Panama Red. Expensive.”
“I can see squiggly lines going through your furniture.”
“Terrific.”
“Was that what you gave me earlier? This Panama Red?”
“No,” she said, making fun of him. “That was Acapulco Gold.”
So it was the pot, he told himself, but he’d only taken one toke at the campus—no, he had finished the entire joint while she was singing, and then he walked away and—
“You were a mess, man. What was that shit about being a vampire?”
“I was talking out of my head,” Jimmy said. He noticed that her mouth turned down at the corners. He felt a sudden urge to suck on her bottom lip. She wore dark lipstick, and stoned-out Jimmy thought of plums.
“Yeah…but it was about something. You said you could only get close to your wife when you were in a crowd. You remember that?”
“No,” Jimmy said, suddenly focused and sensing danger, “I don’t remember nothin’. Are you the goddamn FBI or what?” She could be the FBI. “What about you? What were you doing at the rally?”
“Singing, remember?”
He snorted. “Yeah, I remember.”
“Oh, it was that bad, eh?”
