Michael, a cop killer, had dropped out of my life, but after a thirty-year absence, we meet in Seattle. I’ve never mentioned him to my wife and two daughters. My professorial butt could get thrown into prison if the FBI staked out our confab. These weren’t the free flowing days of old. But, I had to sit down with him because I expected, perhaps unrealistically, to see Bernadine after I lost her to him in 1972 while he was holed up in Montreal. She wasn’t in the Starbucks where I met Michael. Before I left home, I told myself that I’d never him ask about her; I’d only be gut-punching myself. What also stopped me from discovering her whereabouts was that I didn’t want my life again spinning out of control, as those earlier years had. I’d tried to do Internet searches, but found nothing, so I considered Bernadine’s absence like buffering when I listened to a radio station on my Gateway: I’d lost the signal, so I clicked off the power bar switch.
I’d been married twenty-four years to a woman and had two teenage daughters. We live in a Victorian home surrounded by big trees, and I associate primarily with married couples who are university teachers, doctors and journalists. I’m a tenured professor. I feel I’ve too much to lose finding out what happened to my old girlfriend. Joanie, Michael’s sister, and Peter, her husband, had been dropouts, not middleclass ones, but those who knew the folly working for groups trying to revolutionize the American political scene. We thought it more hip not to believe in anything when all our friends devoted their lives to change society. You might say I was a voyeur to the political action back then. If Bernadine showed up with Michael, kissing and caressing him, I’d still be a Peeping Tom, but I’d committed no infidelity to my wife and daughters. I’ll keep my mouth shut, never showing him any concern for her.
He’s put on weight, probably from all the rich food his sister, Joanie, bought for him. He used to be muscular and sinewy; he used small hand weights to keep in shape while he played the invisible man in Montreal. Joanie had fed him well. Michael lived much better as a fugitive than others on the Canadian welfare program, which was very generous. He’s now flabby, slovenly, limping slightly from the table as he walks over to the barista. He wants a Red Eye. I order a Grande Espresso, paying for both. Then, we sit down at an isolated table in a corner.
Michael had killed an officer during a brawl in a tavern, seizing the gun from an undercover cop, pulling the trigger five times. That was in 1972. He fled to Montreal. I heard him speak at a demonstration in Bryant Park next to the 42nd Street public library four hours before the run-in with the detective. Michael was totally charismatic as well as being intellectually gifted. Afterwards, I had a few beers with him in a tavern on the Upper West Side. The plainclothes man must’ve heard us talking politics, hating Michael for speaking out. Bernadine had to work the dayshift as a nurse at Bellevue, and missed the rally. I told her about what a fascinating guy Michael was, a real leader, one who commanded respect because he possessed authority, which we all need, as opposed to crude domination. I left the tavern to get back to my apartment on West 80 th Street where I’d lived with Bernadine for three years. She had come back from work, and we heard on a WBAI news bulletin that an all-points alert was out for Michael who was suspected of shooting a cop. WBAI insinuated the killing was political.
Joanie and Peter had a standing offer: Bernadine and I could visit them any time. Instead of taking two weeks off, I quit work at the bookstore, got the vacation pay and closed my savings account, then hitchhiked with Bernadine to Montreal, sleeping in a spare bedroom. Joanie was an assistant bank manager; Peter taught English to French-speaking Quebecois’. Both supported Michael, Joanie keeping the real reason from her husband. All she told Peter was that Michael didn’t show up for his Army physical, that he dodged the draft. In private, she told us that Michael would definitely enjoy our company, for he craved socializing with others he could completely trust.
Bernadine lost her faith in the promise of radical change after her brother, who had worn a peace sign on his helmet and refused to use his M-16 on Vietnamese, blasted himself in the mouth with a 20-gauge shotgun after coming back from a tour of duty in Vietnam. He committed suicide in their Bay Ridge home. When she and I had accumulated enough money, we traveled light, leaving the Upper West Side and NYC behind forever. When she and Michael first met, he casually broke the tension existing between the three of us. Rather than clam up about his grim situation, he made witty jokes about life as a mythic outlaw. Bernadine quickly fell in with Michael; his need for affection and a sympathetic ear overpowered her. I couldn’t compete with him. I thought she and I would live forever in our cozy apartment, but when she took up with him, I knew we were finished. I didn’t beg for her return. Passivity? A crazy form of machismo? Instead, I gave it up. I hitched alone from Montreal to Vancouver, and down to California where I got a Ph.D., now teaching political science at a state university.
Michael looks around cautiously, scanning the entire coffeehouse, something he must’ve done all those years in Montreal. He tells me he has no friends anymore in Montreal; they’ve either moved away like middle-class burghers, or shunned him because the cachet of revolution had become like a once-beautiful pansy, desiccated, decolorized, unwanted, stuck between the pages of a diary. Wasn’t Bernadine at least a friend?
Michael had been a wanted man all these years, but police agencies had drastically shifted priorities after the two towers evaporated, after the other strikes against the empire. He crossed the border three days after America was hit; the INS hadn’t tightened up yet. Michael tells me, pushing back his slightly long hair from his forehead in the half full Starbucks, that all in the World Trade Center were guilty, from the pizza guys to the maintenance crew to secretaries to the mid-level executives and on up to the CEOs.
“Americans all have blood on their hands, just as the Islamic brothers,” he says, his voice low, but within the body of the message I hear vehement and absolute judgment. Had Bernadine heard him rant about what happened that day? Did she fully realize how threatening he truly was? Before her, he had lived alone in a small attic room not far from McGill University, reading history and Zola. When I left Montreal, he and Bernadine moved into a small studio apartment. I guess she used her savings to get them started. I didn’t disagree with him about Americans not being all that guilt-free as the commentators and government puppets want us to believe. But what if I had been in the WTC speaking to a group of international business people on conditions in India, for instance? Would I, too, a professor who still teaches Franz Fanon, also have blood on my hands if I had to be there in the South Tower that day for some hypothetical reason?
“All benefit from privileges America doles out its citizens,” he says. Trite, I think
“Privilege is at the heart of American literature,” I fire back. I order another Grande for myself and a second Red Eye for Michael. I ask him why is he here now, isn’t it still dangerous even after all these years? When his face morphs into Bernadine’s, I shake, knowing that things aren’t ever what they appear to be.
“If you want to make war all the time, this country’s the center of the universe,” he says, “Canada’s a tomb, hell, I can feel the finger-pop, snap-snap energy, all the power-surge that’s missing from Canada.”
“Maybe it’s the caffeine,” I suggest. Too flippant. He glares at me. Did he choose Starbucks as a rendezvous because he wants to resume a typical American life, not one of pleasure, but more attune with escapist consumption? Does he really want more of adrenaline-fear-smelling-rush of the States? His hands sweat, his ashen-colored face looking like he’s spent way too much time indoors. He wriggles his butt uncomfortably in the chair. Is he nervous about being discovered by the FBI or is his apparent anxiety more personal? Does he want to tell me why Bernadine isn’t with him?
“This still is a country where street smarts take backseat to self-absorption,” sweeping his arm around the chatty coffeehouse. Corny. Get to the point, Michael, you’re killing me.
I remember in Montreal after we each took a Quaalude, the popular drug of choice then in the Latin Quarter. We were in a park near the St. Lawrence River. Michael looked gaunt and haggard, and I told him he reminded me of Paul Muni when he slunk into shadows at the end of I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang. I worried about him always having to be running, but he calmly said, “I’m not going anywhere.” Bernadine hadn’t indulged in anything other than beer and wine, occasionally low THC weed, nothing else, until that day. But, then, Bernadine flopped onto his lap; the ‘lude let her touch Michael for the first time in a manner I’d never expected. I’d never seen her so loose and comfortable with another guy. Why didn’t she nod out on my lap
Now, the Montreal-convincing smile has twisted into a crooked snarl, and there’s a pallid, jagged scar on his cheek, perhaps getting into some scrape in a nightclub such as one on St-Denis where we three had beers. It was a crowded, noisy place with tables jammed together, with raucous, animated French-speaking, drugged-out talk. Ambient music of Van Morrison, Pink Floyd, Etta James and Albert King blasted out. Starbucks it wasn’t; I have trouble putting Michael into a familiar context I didn’t ask him about the silvery scar. Bernadine spent all the time in the loud club listening to him explain how Montreal was a city of zombies. She had taken the ‘lude earlier, I looking at her as if she had performed public sex with him in the park. Mixing a second ‘lude with beers made her loopier than ever. He rambled on about famous and notorious exiles in history. Much later, I used what I knew about him as part of a monograph for a political science journal. It drew great attention: it read so knowledgeably about political refugees
Back then, at the river’s edge, Michael said, “I always wanted to strike their jugular veins,” he said, “I guess you could say I’m actually an artist.”
“You’re impermanent, elusive and volatile---that makes you poetic,” I said, feeling Big Q transform me into a fawning jerk. He had gone from being an articulate spokesperson of radical change, one galvanizing others, to an efficient ‘lude-popper. From persons such as he, coalitions could be made. The only union he’d secured in which I’m aware was made with Bernadine. I’d hated him right then, in spite of his past potential, the ‘lude subduing my overt anger. Bernadine had by then moved in with him rather than sleep in the bedroom with me in Joanie’s house.
Now, he whispers to me that he was the driver for a bank job in a wealthy suburb outside of Vancouver, British Columbia. “I want you to know my bona vides,” he says.
“That’ll hold you for a while down here,” I say. Did Bernadine get caught, he leaving her to take the rap? Why did he conceal her from me? I feel like snitching him out to the police, something I didn’t believe in the abstract. However, I’m an agnostic when it gets down to specific cases.
“All those wasted years in Montreal,” he says. I hear regret and rue in his voice.
“So it’s like getting off welfare and making it on your own, not scrounging,” I say.
He tosses me a hard look, and then smirks. “It’s not that difficult to do bank stunts,” he says, pulling a money clip out, counting fifties as if they were new-born babies.
“Is it harder than stealing real people out from under them?” I ask. Bernadine burbles up inside me; I never knew my unconscious was so near the surface. Fear shoots through my solar plexus, and I’m shocked that I’d just asked the taboo question.
“Those were revolutionary times,” he says, his eyes for the first time not linked with mine. “Right now, I need someone close I can talk to.” I teach political theory, not converse with an old partisan about how simple it is to heist banks. And why doesn’t he tell me where Bernadine is? Why isn’t she seated right here at this table. “You’re in bad shape if I’m your only confidant,” I say. I’m not your typical political burnout because I knew there were no objective conditions for revolution. It existed only in middle-class druggies’ minds and others so desperate they couldn’t think straight. What was revolutionary when Bernadine got infatuated with this murderer?
“You wouldn’t believe what money can buy these days,” he says, in an undertow of anticipation, even exhilaration. It’s as if he’s pleased and surprised about the more-bang-for-the-buck added attraction in his life.
“Drugs? Land? Travel? Diamonds? Stocks? People?” I say, fumbling for what he was up to. When I ask, “People?” am I thinking of Yahoo’s “People Search?” I hope not. She didn’t turn up on death records. Nothing. Disappeared. I did this in the privacy of my university office.
“Shoulder-held missile launchers aren’t all that impossible to get your hands on,” he says. I eyeball him, trying to determine how serious he is, whether he’s actually going through with that bloody mission. I read Jane’s International Defense Review in the university library. I try not to get outflanked by techno-intellectuals on campus. I imagine that Michael finally finds where his nouveau riche gains may be put to profitable use: a Wellington WI-50S Fire and Forget Anti-Missile Launcher! He certainly has the physical strength to hoist it onto his shoulders
“Since we’re all guilty because of our complicity in being citizens of the real rogue nation, you’re justified in blowing civilian airline passengers to smithereens, is that it?” I say. “And you’re not guilty of anything?” I keep control of my voice, speaking with a napkin partially covering my mouth.
“I want all those years back when I could’ve kept going to Columbia U,” Michael says, “That screwed-up deal with the cop denied me all that.” I watch his face flush and his lips tighten, all fingers rapping the tabletop. I recognize that he knows he shouldn’t have mentioned the missile launcher business. He looks paranoid now, an expression I’ve never seen before overrun his face. Do I bolt this table or hang in here for rope to hang me with, the noose getting tighter with each revelatory plot of criminal violence?
“I better leave before I get implicated in your grandiose plans,” I say. “You’re a kiss kiss-of-death man.” I start to rise, but he pulls my arm, insisting that I stay.
“You’re the only friend I can count on,” he tells me. We sit in silence except for the gathering thrum of more customers in Starbucks. He tells me how glad it is that I no longer have to do menial work like shelving books anymore, that university teaching suits me. If I want to know where Bernadine is, now I should ask. But I don’t. I’ve annulled her life, our times together, all the experiences we shared in New York, and her abandonment. I’ve never spoken her name out loud for three decades. But, it shouldn’t, in principle, be that upsetting if I asked him point-blank: Where is Bernadine? I know all about theory; I’ve taught it for almost twenty years. But, the theoretical life makes one weak and craven. I’ve no cojones, I guess.
“I won’t ever forget this day,” I say, shaking his sweaty palm, about to leave for the airport. “But I bet I feel cheated as much as you do.” We stand at the edge of our table, like two persons after a party in a foyer of a home, finding no final words of parting.
“Bernadine died in Montreal,” he blurts out. “Crack killed her. She went into cardiac arrest, then had a brain seizure. She weighed eighty-seven pounds. I saw her buried.”
She wanted her scorched ashes dissolved in the toxic Hudson River. “Is she interred in Montreal?” I carefully ask him. He clenches his teeth, as if angry that I even asked. “I’ll only say somewhere in Canada.” He says. “If I tell you, the pigs will be able to trace me.” I believe he’s correct about that, but for christssake, “pigs”? What kind of an animal is he?
“When did she die?” I ask. I’ve so far never asked that question to anyone
“A month ago,” he says. “I feel dirty for not contacting her parents about her death.”
“Sure. I’ll phone them,” I say. “Don’t worry, I won’t tell them about you.” I hope they still live in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. I knew the complications he’d face if he notified them. He’s about to embrace me, but I step back. No more brother/comrade love. Then, he tries to give me the power/solidarity handshake, proving our bond. To me, it’s as if he’s making an obscene gesture. Why doesn’t he give me the raised middle finger? I drop my hands to my sides because I don’t want to feel the hand that most likely last touched Bernadine. My sudden sentimentality surprises me; it’s like I’d been proven a liar.
“She never talked about you with me,” he says, pissed that I’m no revolutionary. “Not once.” His hand reaches into his pocket, the one with all the stolen cash. Yes, he realizes I know he’s at the periphery of a new quest, and therefore onto something. In a peculiar way, I envy him, for he’ll never bear the prick of despair. More bank robberies, taking out airplanes, making contacts with others of his same mindset: a man of action has no time for remorse. I wait for Michael to leave first, which he does, walking past the window of Starbucks, rain hitting his face, hair slicked down over his forehead. He’s gone
I’ll tell my family I’d a quick meeting with an old Canadian professor who taught me political philosophy. My private Montreal I’ll bury.
Internet
