---

 

A DELIBERATE INSULT TO
MEXICAN SOVEREIGNTY

No Mexican government can seriously consider the American offer to cancel our external debt in exchange for the cession of Baja California. Those who warn that this outrageous proposal is only a thinly veiled ultimatum are, of course, entirely right. But to suggest that the Republic of Mexico has no alternative but to accept the inevitable is treason, pure and simple. The Yankee aggressors may have the planes and the ships and the overwhelming military superiority, and they may indeed be able to work their will against us.

One hundred million Mexicans may be robbed of our land, as we were in 1845, but let it never be said that we were robbed of our honor. We must stand firm against all odds. We must fight to the death for every centimeter of our sacred national soil.

—Noticias de Mexico

 

---

 

XV

 

The drive up to the San Francisco Bay area was a big disappointment. Eileen wouldn’t take the Pacific Coast Highway or even 101. “It’d take twice as long that way,” she told Bobby, “and you can’t do any of the driving.” So there was no scenic seacoast road, no Big Sur, no Monterey, no Carmel.

Instead, Eileen took Interstate 5 through the San Joaquin Valley, an arrow-straight freeway through what she told him was the most productive farmland in the world.

Productive it might be, but scenic it wasn’t as they drove for about three hours up the long flat valley floor, past endless fields of crops broiling under a pitiless sun, moistened by huge sprinkler systems, harvested by spidery-looking machinery, watched over by little observation blimps. It was more of a gigantic food factory than Bobby’s romantic concept of farmland, or worse still, like some kind of military operation against nature itself.

The landscape finally began to change as they climbed out of the valley up into the low rolling hills to the north and west, where it was cooler, moister, and greener, but the improvement didn’t last for long, as the traffic thickened, and big factories sprang up beside the road—mostly defense plants, Eileen told him—and then the usual sprawl of tract houses, shopping malls, fuel stations, car lots, fast-food joints, and billboards that seemed to be characteristic of the approach to California cities.

But then they crossed another range of hills, and quite suddenly they were crawling straight north on a clogged freeway with a stupendous view that quite took Bobby’s breath away.

To the west, beyond a coastal sprawl of industrial crudland, San Francisco Bay was an immense sweep of blue water sheened golden toward its western reaches by the palpable rays of the late afternoon sun. White sails dotted the bay like a fleecing of scattered clouds, and the wakes of boats sliced the azure surface like the contrails of high-flying jets. Far to the northwest, Bobby could just make out the Golden Gate Bridge, ghostly within a bank of fog that was rolling through it and around it like an immense slow-motion breaker, pouring up the hills of San Francisco overlooking the narrow mouth of the broad bay, and wrapping the outlines of the buildings in the crystal mist of legend.

“Now that’s what I call the real California!” Bobby declared.

“You can’t mean Oakland!” Eileen said. “Ugh!”

Between the elevated freeway and the blue waters of the bay, enrobed in brown photochemical smog, was a truly repellent other vista that Bobby hadn’t deigned to notice.

Piers, dry docks, and fuel tanks spread out from the shore, connected by mazeworks of gangways, railheads, and girder bridges, and overarched by cranes, power lines, and elevated conveyers. Inland of the docks were warehouses, big sheet-steel sheds, scruffy buildings, and big open lots surrounded by high razor-wire-topped fencing. Trucks and workers and forklifts were scurrying busily everywhere.

Tied up at the piers or enfolded by dry-dock scaffolding were the objects of all this intense activity. A big aircraft carrier with huge cranes loading helicopter gunships, jump-jets, Ospreys, and hovercraft onto its flight deck. Four destroyers. A heavy cruiser. Three big troop-carrying hovercraft being loaded with gunbuggies and hovertanks and artillery pieces. Assorted tankers and freighters with numbers painted on their battleship-gray superstructures, all taking on cargo. And waiting in the parking lots, more tanks, trucks, gunbuggies, mobile rocket launchers, gunships, and assorted major military hardware.

“Here too?” Bobby moaned.

“Better believe it!” Eileen told him. “Without the Navy Yard, Oakland would be even more of a basket case than it already is. But don’t worry, no one ever goes there. Berkeley is another world.”

The freeway finally ascended into the hills, where the trees and shrubbery masked what lay to the south and west from view, and when they came down into Berkeley itself, it did indeed seem like another and far more appetizing world.

They descended out of the hills along a tree-shrouded avenue lined with private homes and low apartment complexes, past a little square with a cluster of restaurants and shops that reminded Bobby of Paris. They drove down a main street, with a big university campus on one side, and bookstores, chain restaurants, video shops, chip-rentals, supermarkets, and Laundromats on the other, then turned left onto another main drag, but of quite a different character.

“Voilà, Telegraph Avenue!” Eileen proclaimed. “The center of the universe!”

Telegraph Avenue was relatively narrow, and the traffic crawled along it at a slow walk, giving Bobby plenty of time to soak up the ambiance and marvel.

Small shops lined both sides of the street—bookstores, computer equipment shops, clothing stores, chip-boutiques, weird little craft shops selling leather goods, jewelry, bric-a-brac. There were junk shops purveying old furniture and household goods. There were tiny little restaurants, bars, sidewalk cafés, a film theater, a little playhouse, porn shops, liquor stores. Music played from cafés and clubs and portable chip-decks.

And the street was jammed with boulevardiers, almost all of them in their teens and twenties. The majority of them looked like the kids Bobby had grown used to seeing in the rest of the States; mecs in jeans, T-shirts, walking shorts, short-sleeved sport shirts, clean-shaven, with short, neatly groomed hair, girls in more tightly tailored versions of the same gear, or wearing halters, short skirts, spandex stretch pants in bright primary colors.

But a third or a quarter of the strollers on Telegraph Avenue looked like nothing Bobby had ever seen.

Mecs in asymmetrically cut jeans, one leg long, the other short, embroidered, studded, painted in crazy random rainbow patterns. They wore flowing medieval-looking blousons, big floppy leather cowboy hats, Arab kaffiyehs dyed in neon colors. Black leather jackets open over bare chests. Wide belts with gigantic carved wooden buckles. Silk sashes. Shaved heads tattooed or painted in complex designs. Brilliantly dyed hair done up in spikes and crests. Long unkempt flowing locks that went down to their asses. Oh yes, the circus was in town!

And the girls were something else again! The same profusion of wild hairdos. Tinted plastic blouses and halters that seemed transparent. Skintight T-shirts with naked breasts painted on them. Short asymmetric skirts and high patent-leather boots in many colors that seemed to go all the way up to their crotches. Long flowing skirts painted with landscapes and spacescapes and abstract patterns. Girls who seemed entirely nude inside wrap-around capes patterned like oriental rugs. Girls in brief Japanese happi coats festooned with flashing electronic jewelry. Girls who had it and flaunted it, yes indeed!

If Telegraph Avenue reminded Bobby of anything, it was the streets of St.-Germain, up around the Sorbonne and down in the crowded maze of little streets off the Place St.-Michel, but amplified, augmented, magnified, and somehow gloriously Americanized.

He found himself falling instantly in love. With who, or with what, he didn’t know, but he felt the spirit of the street calling to him, beckoning him, giving him the eye, like the most beautiful girl he had ever seen smiling at him, crooking her finger, seductively inviting him to come and lose himself in the carnival of her eyes.

Telegraph Avenue petered out rather abruptly into another area of tree-shrouded residential streets, the private houses old and crumbly looking, the low apartment complexes gone somewhat to seed, and only then did Bobby find his voice again.

“Where to now?” he asked Eileen. “Your place?”

“My place? I live in the dorms, you can’t stay with me.”

“But I thought—”

“Come on, Bobby, I mean I just picked you up in Dirty Death a few days ago. I mean I like you, and we can date and all, but it’s not like you’re my instant boyfriend or something. I mean I see lots of guys here, I don’t want to, you know, tie myself up with a live-in regular, even if I could. . . .”

She gave him an all-too-knowing look. “Besides,” she said, “from the way your tongue was hanging out on Telegraph Avenue, you don’t either, now do you?”

Bobby had to laugh. “Ya got me,” he was forced to admit. “But . . . what am I going to do? I really don’t have that much money, and I don’t know anyone here but you.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Eileen told him. “I think I know a place you can crash real cheap, that’s where we’re going now, Little Moscow.”

“Little Moscow?”

Eileen laughed. “That’s what the Gringos call it, anyway,” she said. “The people who live there don’t call it anything. Except maybe Nat’s place, when they want to tell someone where the party is. You’re gonna love it, Bobby. And they’re gonna love you.”

 

Eileen parked the car in front of a ratty-looking old three-story wood-frame house on a somewhat disreputable-looking side street full of similar houses, with overgrown lawns, unkempt shrubbery, peeling paint, rickety porches and front stairs.

The front door was open, and she led him straight inside without knocking, into a long hallway, past the doorless entrance to a big living room full of musty-looking old furniture, where half a dozen people were sitting around in front of a videowall, past a toilet from which he heard the sound of flushing, and into a big untidy kitchen.

There was a stove, a microwave oven, two old refrigerators, a big restaurant double sink piled high with dirty dishes and grimy pots, and a big redwood picnic table with two long backless redwood benches. A blond girl in a dirty white T-shirt and cut-off jeans was stirring a huge steaming kettle with a big wooden spoon. A guy with long black hair was ripping up salad greens at the redwood table and tossing them into a large old wooden bowl.

“Hi!” Eileen said brightly. “Where’s Nat?”

“In his room marking papers,” the mec said, without looking up from his kitchen chores.

Eileen led Bobby out of the kitchen back into the hallway, then up two flights of stairs to another hall that led past a series of doors, some of them open, revealing small bedrooms with people reading, or working at computer consoles, others closed, including the one at the far end of the hall, with a crudely drawn poster tacked to it. The poster showed a hand holding five playing cards, a royal flush, and in spades.

“Knock-knock!” Eileen yelled, banging on the door.

“Who’s there?” said a man’s voice from the other side.

“Uh . . . José. . . .”

“José who?”

“José can you see by the dawn’s early light . . .”

A moment later, the door opened. The man who stood in the doorway looked to be about thirty, with thick curly black hair, a big, slightly hooked nose, wide lips, and dark brown eyes under heavy brows, eyes that seemed to flash and sparkle with some secret and highly amusing knowledge. He wore old black jeans, and a red-and-black lumberjack shirt bulging slightly over the hint of a paunch, sleeves rolled up past the elbows.

“You are . . . ?” he said in a rather rough voice. “You know what a putz I am with names, if you know me at all.”

“Eileen Sparrow, Nat,” Eileen said in some exasperation.

“This is?” Nat said, nodding toward Bobby.

“Bobby Reed. All the way from Paris.”

Nat’s eyebrows arched upward. “You want?”

“A place for Bobby to crash.”

“You can pay?”

Bobby shrugged. “I’ve got some money,” he said.

“What can you afford?”

Bobby thought about it. “Not much,” he said, rather shamefacedly. “Three hundred a night?”

“Too much. Deuce, if I say okay.”

“Great!” Bobby exclaimed in surprise.

“Not so fast. You willing to do your share of chores?”

“Sure.”

“You really a Frenchman?”

“Not exactly. I mean, I was born in Paris, but my father is an American, and I’m thinking about going to college here, and—”

“You play poker?”

“Huh?”

“I asked you if you played poker, kid. Seven- or five-card stud. Jacks or better. Straight draw. None of this wild-card bullshit.”

“Well . . . uh, no, not really, I mean I know the rules, but . . . ,” Bobby muttered in something of a daze.

“You willing to learn?”

“Well, yeah, sure, why not?”

Nat gave a positively manic cackle, rubbing his big thick hands together. “Now that’s what I like to hear!” he said. “First lesson after dinner. Spaghetti with meat sauce, or so they tell me, but what kind of meat, better you don’t ask. Gotta get back to marking this shit now. What a bunch of assholes! About all these kids know about history is that Columbus seduced the Virgin Islands, and Ronnie Reagan had an extra prick under his armpit that he used on Congress. Well, what the fuck, half right ain’t so bad!”

And he closed the door behind him.

“That’s it?” Bobby stammered.

“That’s Nat Wolfowitz!” Eileen told him, rolling her eyes toward the ceiling.

 

There were ten people at dinner that night, plus Bobby and Eileen, and over salad, served first in the American manner, spaghetti in rather watery meat sauce, and plenty of rough red California wine that presumed to call itself Burgundy, Bobby learned all about “Little Moscow.”

“Why do they call this house ‘Little Moscow’?” he asked ingenuously as the spaghetti was being served. “You people aren’t really Communists, are you?”

There was a moment of dead silence along the big picnic table. A big black girl named Marla Washington gave him a rather hostile look. “What are you, some kind of gringo jingo?” she snapped. “You think we’ve got something catching?”

“Hey,” Bobby shot back on instant impulse, “some of my best friends are Communists.”

“Very funny,” said Jack Genovese, who had made the salad.

“No, really . . . ,” Bobby said. He paused. Well, what the hell, if he was really going to live here, these people were going to find out all about him sooner or later anyway. “My mother’s a Party member, and my sister is gonna end up with a Party card too, I guess. . . .”

“You serious, kid?” Nat Wolfowitz said. “I thought the last American Communist went out with the dodo.”

“My mother’s a Russian.”

“A Russian?”

“I thought you were some kind of Frenchman,” Wolfowitz said.

“Well, I was born in Paris, but my mother is a Soviet national, and my dad still has American citizenship, even though they lifted his passport, and . . .” Bobby threw up his hands. “It’s kind of complicated,” he said.

“Do tell,” said Nat Wolfowitz. Eileen eyed him a bit peculiarly, suddenly reminding Bobby that he hadn’t exactly told her all of this stuff. The rest of them studied him quite intently, though without apparent hostility, as if he were some kind of exotic creature suddenly dropped down from a flying saucer into their midst. Which, from their point of view, he realized, he was.

So, over spaghetti and a couple of glasses of bad red wine, Bobby told his life story, such as it was, and as he did, a strange thing began to happen.

He was one of the youngest people at the table, and he hadn’t been in the house for much more than three hours, but here he was, holding the attention of all these college students; even Nat Wolfowitz, who was some kind of assistant professor or something, listened raptly, with a kind of respect, even. What was more, by the time he had finished, they were smiling at him, dishing him out more spaghetti, refilling his glass, making him feel more welcome, somehow, than he had ever felt anywhere before any time in his life.

“And so now here I am,” he finally said. “Now will you guys tell me why they call this place ‘Little Moscow’?”

“Because we’re all Reds!” exclaimed Cindy Feinstein the spaghetti maker, and everyone but Eileen broke up into raucous laughter.

“Then you are Communists?”

More laughter.

“Explain it to him, Nat,” said Karl Horvath, a pudgy kid in a Donald Duck T-shirt. Wolfowitz poured himself another drink, leaned forward on his elbows, and rattled it off in rapid fire.

“Berkeley, like Gaul, as in Charles de, is divided into two parts. Party of the first being the Gringos, who you may have noticed, clean-cut all-American boys and girls, techheads for the most part, noses to the grindstone, eye on the main chance, namely a good job in biotech or better yet the defense industry, jingo assholes who study hard, give boring parties, blot themselves on beer . . .”

“Boo! Hiss!”

“Balls to the wall!”

“Party of the second part being weirdos like us, who have no ambition to cog into the Big Green Machine, major in economically pointless shit like history and literature, are less than entranced with Festung Amerika, Pigs in Space, and our snatches and grabs in Latin America, and are not entirely convinced that the Peens are a treacherous gang of frog-eating faggots—”

“Real party animals!”

“Complete garbageheads!”

“Know how to wail!”

“Which, from the Gringo point of view, makes us all a bunch of un-American Peen-loving Commie degenerates who oughta be tarred and feathered and ridden out of the country on a rail, especially since we don’t let them come to our parties. . . .”

“Hence, Reds!”

“Hence, Little Moscow, hotbed thereof!”

“Je comprends,” Bobby muttered.

“Oooh, French!” Cindy moaned in good-natured mock admiration. “Très chic!”

Bobby laughed. A warm glow of contentment suffused his body, and not just from the wine and the heavy meal. For the first time in his life, he felt that he had found a group of people roughly his own age who truly accepted him for what he was, for all that he was, the first really like-minded people he had ever met, Americans in a kind of exile themselves, just like him, people whom he sensed could become a real circle of true friends.

How unexpected, and how sweet it was, that he had found them here, in the United States.

 

After dinner was over, Bobby learned the rules of the house. There were fourteen people currently in residence, meaning that he was responsible for the communal dinner one night in fourteen. One day in fourteen, he had to clean the living room and the halls. One day in fourteen, he had to do the bathrooms. And one day in fourteen, he had to do the dinner dishes, and since he was the new boy in the house, he might as well get started now. After he was through, he could join the poker game.

It seemed like a fair and not very onerous arrangement, and so Bobby took Eileen’s phone number, promised to call, kissed her good-bye, and got down to doing the dishes that people had stacked in the sink, another house rule.

Bobby had never faced such a stack of dishes and pots in his life, indeed since he had grown up with a dishwasher in the kitchen, he had scarcely faced any dishes at all, but he set to work with a will, it really wasn’t so bad, and after less than an hour, he had everything stacked in the drying rack—don’t bother to dry anything was, fortunately, another house rule—and he was ready to join the poker game.

Wolfowitz, Marla, Jack, Barry Lee, a thin gangly Oriental with his hair done up in a red Mohawk, and Ellis Burton, duded out in asymmetrical painted jeans and a leather vest, were already playing around a big round table in the living room, and since another of the rules was that Nat would not play poker with less than three or more than five hands, Bobby was told that he would have to kibitz until someone dropped out or was cleaned out.

“Don’t worry, kid,” Wolfowitz told him, “with these marks, that won’t take long.”

Bobby knew the basic rules of poker, but he had played very little; nevertheless, it didn’t take him long to see what Nat Wolfowitz meant.

It was a low-stakes game with a ten-dollar-bet limit, and one of the other rules was that you had to leave when you lost two hundred bucks. “I only play with these rubes for practice,” Wolfowitz declared with an evil leer as he shuffled the cards. “From each according to their ability, which around here ain’t Jack shit, to me according to my greed, which approaches infinity as a limit, but I don’t take serious money from my friends, I save that for the Fat Men.”

The game was dealer’s choice, but only straight draw, five- or seven-card stud, and jacks or better were allowed, and Wolfowitz always opted for seven-card when he had the deck.

“Poker, like life, is at least as much luck as skill,” he informed Bobby, “but seven-card stud gives skill more room to operate. It’s what separates the men from the boys and the boys from their bucks.”

But if poker was really half luck, then why did the bills pile up so consistently in front of Nat Wolfowitz? He seemed to win about every other hand of seven-card stud, often with mediocre cards, and when he won, he won big. If someone else opened up a game of jacks or better, he dropped out immediately unless it turned out later that he had been holding three of a kind or higher. At straight draw, he either took two cards or less, or folded. At five-card stud, he seemed to follow no pattern that Bobby could discern.

It didn’t take much more than an hour for Marla Washington to lose two hundred dollars and leave the game.

“Lesson number one,” Wolfowitz said as Bobby took her place at the table. “The secret of winning at poker is to avoid losing.”

“That’s number two,” Ellis Burton moaned as he dealt a hand of straight draw. “Lesson number one is don’t play with Nat.”

Bobby had a pair of tens. Jack Genovese opened. Barry Lee raised. Wolfowitz dropped out. Bobby called. Ellis called. Jack took two cards. Wolfowitz shook his head. Barry took one card. Wolfowitz groaned. Bobby took three cards and got another ten. Ellis dropped out.

“Dumb,” Wolfowitz said.

“Check,” Jack said.

“Shit,” Wolfowitz groaned.

Barry bet five dollars.

Bobby raised him five.

Jack dropped out.

“I don’t believe it,” Wolfowitz said.

Barry saw Bobby’s five and raised him ten.

Hesitantly, Bobby called.

Barry Lee turned up four spades and the king of hearts. Bobby raked in the pot, feeling pretty damn proud of himself.

A dozen hands later and down a hundred and fifty dollars, it was another matter. “Children, children,” Nat Wolfowitz said as he won yet another hand, this one at seven-card stud with threes over fives and nothing but a pair of fives showing, “wishful thinking is the opium of the poker-playing masses.”

While Bobby thought he was beginning to understand what Nat Wolfowitz was saying in theory, when it came down to practice, the man was a poker-playing monster. He could babble on and on and on about how he was doing it, and still beat you consistently even when you thought you were using his own principles against him. How did he do it? Was it luck? Was he telepathic? Or was his line of bullshit somehow part of his game?

However Wolfowitz was really doing it, the only thing that kept Bobby from losing the limit was that he still had twenty dollars left when Ellis and then Jack were cleaned out by Nat, leaving only three players, and, under the rules, ending the game.

“Well, kid, you learn anything?” Wolfowitz asked him as he walked him upstairs to his room.

Bobby shrugged. “Not to play poker against you, Nat,” he said.

Wolfowitz laughed as he opened the door to a spare little room. There was a bed, a bureau, a desk, a chair, a lamp, all old stuff out of the junk shops of Telegraph Avenue by the look of it.

“Righter than you think,” Wolfowitz said. “Poker, like life, only looks like a zero-sum game. A real player doesn’t play against the other guys, he plays the cards. This poor screwed-up country doesn’t understand that anymore, that’s why it’s in such shit, even though it’s got no cause to bitch about what it’s been dealt. We ever learn what we once knew, and we’ll be back on top of the game. You ever really understand what I’m telling you now, and you’ll win consistently at poker.”

“Even against you?”

Wolfowitz laughed. He shook his head. “You still don’t get it, kid,” he said. “No one wins by playing against a real player. You figure that one out, and you’ll be a real player too. And that’s the koan for tonight. Think about it, Bobby, and maybe you’ll find you got your hundred and eighty bucks’ worth.”

 

PRESIDENT SMERLAK EXPRESSES SOVIET
SOLIDARITY WITH MEXICO

After a meeting with the Mexican Ambassador, Pedro Fuentes, President Dimitri Pavelovich Smerlak reaffirmed the support of the peoples of the Soviet Union for the territorial integrity of the Republic of Mexico.

When asked whether any concrete steps were being taken by the Soviet Union to forestall an American invasion of Mexico, President Smerlak announced that the Soviet Union would introduce resolutions condemning any such invasion in advance in both the United Nations General Assembly and the Common European Parliament, and expressed confidence that they would pass in both bodies by overwhelming majorities.

“That, a tortilla, and a cup of refritos would just about make a burrito,” Ambassador Fuentes observed enigmatically.

—Novosti

 

The next week was a golden time for Bobby.

He spent long sunny afternoons cruising Telegraph Avenue and buying himself a proper outfit—asymmetrically cut blue jeans with red-and-white painted stripes, perfect Franco-American ambiguity, a black velvet blouson embroided with a flaming California sun setting behind a silhouetted palm tree, and a pair of used tooled-leather cowboy boots.

He cooked a big pot of choucroute garnie for the communal dinner, which was well received—even though the charcuterie was hot dogs, knockwurst, chorizo, and something called Canadian bacon, which was all he could find in the supermarket, and the limp sauerkraut came out of cans—probably because he loudly proclaimed its French authenticity and managed to come up with Dijon mustard and a couple of jugs of cheap Alsatian wine.

He toured the bars and clubs and cafés of Telegraph Avenue with Ellis and Jack and a mec from New York named Claude, met lots of people, heard strange retro music called “Acid Rock” and bizarre Peruvian jazz played by a flute band, and was introduced everywhere not as just the new kid in town, but the Parisian sophisticate from France.

He cleaned the living room and the halls, which was merely tedious, and the bathrooms, which was pretty gross, but he didn’t mind at all; somehow these domestic chores, which he had never been forced to do at home, cemented the feeling of belonging that he had never found anywhere else before.

And he joined in the nightly poker games a few more times, though he swiftly came to realize that he could hardly afford to play every night. Once he even came out ahead, thanks to a lucky run of cards, and thought that maybe he had picked up something from Nat Wolfowitz, until the next game, when, all too cocksure, he stayed in just about every hand, bluffed wildly, and was cleaned out in less than an hour.

Finally, after endless passed messages and missed connections, he got ahold of Eileen and persuaded her to take him on a tour of the Berkeley campus. It seemed almost as big as UCLA, the architecture and the sprawling layout weren’t that much different in style, and the place was thronged with the same sort of Gringos he had seen on the Trojan campus, but the Reds of Telegraph Avenue were everywhere in evidence too, lounging in groups on the lawns, listening to soapbox speakers around the Telegraph Avenue entrance railing against the coming invasion of Mexico, arguing with the Gringos, and that somehow made all the difference in the world. UC Berkeley was alive in a way that UCLA was dead, and it didn’t take Bobby more than that one afternoon to realize that this was surely the place for him.

He took Eileen to dinner in a little inexpensive African restaurant on Telegraph, and then back to his room at Little Moscow for a couple of hours of love-making, after which she insisted on going back to her dorm.

He protested gallantly, but the truth of it was that he really didn’t mind, for somehow, outside of bed, her company seemed to have paled beside that of his newfound circle of friends; by this time, he was feeling like a Little Moscow insider, and Eileen Sparrow, who lived in the dorms, who was hardly known by his housemates, who was a native of LA, a city despised by the Berkeley Reds as the citadel of the Big Green Machine and all it implied, and who, despite her political heart being more or less in the right place, talked like one, clearly was not.

Tomorrow was Saturday, and that was party night in Little Moscow, and while Bobby, as a member of the commune, took pride in being able to invite her and would hardly have been crude enough not to do so, his pleasure was tempered by a certain feeling of detachment, a desire to be there on his own, and he didn’t offer to pick her up and escort her, nor was he disappointed when she didn’t ask.

 

By nine o’clock, the house was pretty much filled up with people, and the party was well stocked with the bottles of wine and vodka and tequila that they had brought along, for one of the other rules of the house was that party guests were expected to contribute the refreshments, else how could the commune afford to throw these things every week?

Or, as Wolfowitz put it, “There may not be any such thing as a free lunch left in Festung Amerika, but we have figured out a way to keep ourselves well supplied with free booze.”

Music played on the living room chip-deck—all sorts of stuff, since guests brought their favorite chips too—wine and liquor flowed, and there were even people smoking hand-rolled cigarettes that some guy in a black leather jacket claimed was real marijuana, smuggled past the interdiction inside body bags from the Venezuelan war zone.

Bobby wandered around the party waiting for Eileen to show up, but half hoping that she wouldn’t, what with all the truly incredible girls hanging around, dressed to kill in brief electronic happi coats, see-through plastic blouses, shorts that were all but nonexistent, even with bare boobs artfully peeping out from shirts open to the waist.

They were more than willing to chat with the likes of him too if there was someone like Marla or Claude or Karl around to introduce him as the exotic import from Paris, and for the most part it wasn’t dumb talk, either. What they wanted to hear about was life in Paris, what he thought about the Soviet entry into Common Europe, what he had learned in his romantic odyssey hitchhiking across the country, whether Common Europe was really going to break off diplomatic relations with the United States if Mexico was invaded, and, of course, the differences, if any, between European women and Americans like themselves.

Bobby found himself at the drifting center of really interesting conversation; girls, and mecs too, for that matter, moving in and out of his sphere of influence as he moved around the house, trailing an actual entourage for the first time in his life, and enjoying it hugely.

And more than mere ego-stroking pleasure, though there was certainly plenty of that, he found the sense of belonging he had found among his housemates in Little Moscow extending outward toward the Reds of Berkeley in general.

They too were Americans in a sort of exile, dreaming vaguely of a future American Renaissance connected somehow to Berkeley’s long radical past, an America that would give up its Latin American adventures, kick down the walls of Festung Amerika, join with Common Europe, and again become the light of freedom that had once illumined the world.

The object of attention of all these fantastic and intelligent girls, spinning tall tales of a Europe he had in reality been only too glad to leave, Bobby Reed found that he had come home to a place he had never been before. Except in his most impossible dreams.

When he strolled into the living room feeling like the cock of the walk, he had half a dozen people trailing after him, first and foremost a truly stunning girl named Shandra, who had huge lustrous dark eyes, fine aquiline features, smooth coffee-colored skin, long black hair worn in wild unkempt ringlets, who wore a kind of rainbow-tinted translucent plastic body-cloak that made it clear she had nothing on under it, and who had been listening to him longer than any of the others, staring at him quite openly without saying much.

And when he found a seat in the crowded room at one end of a musty old couch, a handful of people seated themselves on the floor before him, including Shandra, who folded her long brown legs under her Indian-style, propped her elbows on her knees and her head in her hands, and sat there looking up at him raptly as he spun his war story about the riot at the American Embassy.

“. . . I was there getting my passport when it started, they started heaving shit and blood over the wall, and—”

“They really threw shit?” exclaimed a mec in a cowboy hat.

“Shit and blood all mixed together, I got splattered myself, let me tell you, it was—”

“I thought that was a bunch of gringo jingo propaganda!”

“Hey, I was there, the Embassy was covered with blood and shit, the mob was charging the wall, they had to use the disrupters—”

“To defend the flag and all that jingo shit!”

“To defend the people trapped in the compound,” Bobby insisted.

“Woulda been better if they had sacked the Embassy, woulda taught the jingos a lesson they’d never forget.”

“You wouldn’t be saying that if you were there,” Bobby said. “Those people were out for blood, you should’ve seen the hate in their eyes. . . .” He shuddered, remembering.

Shandra, who had been sitting there silently the whole time just eyeing him, finally spoke up in a soft lilting voice that sent shivers down Bobby’s spine. “Did you hate them?” she said. “I mean, while it was going on?”

Bobby looked deep into her big brown eyes, pondering—pondering what she really wanted to hear him say as much as the truth of his feelings at the time, and finding, somewhat to his surprise, that they were one and the same, or so at least it seemed.

“No,” he said. “I was afraid, and I was angry too, maybe, but how could I really hate those people? I mean, they were right, weren’t they, America had just given Europe a good hosing, and they had good cause to hate the United States.”

“That is very wise,” Shandra purred up at him, and although she really didn’t move, she seemed to be leaning closer.

“Then why you defending the fucking Marines?”

Bobby shrugged, his gaze locked with Shandra’s, searching for the words that would draw her closer, and all at once something that Nat Wolfowitz had said suddenly seemed to make sense. “The Marines were dealt a shitty hand of cards,” he said. “They played them the best way they could. The Embassy didn’t get sacked, and no one really got hurt, either. Made you proud to be an American.”

“Proud to be an American!” the guy in the cowboy hat sneered.

“Aren’t you proud to be an American?” Bobby shot back, still staring straight at Shandra.

“Are you?”

“Proud of what we just did to Common Europe? Proud of what we’re about to do to Mexico?” Bobby sighed. “Yeah, what America’s been doing since before I was born isn’t anything to be proud of,” he said. “But we’re Americans too, aren’t we? We start hating America, don’t we end up hating ourselves? Don’t we leave our country to the jingos?”

There was a long moment of silence. Shandra slowly unwound herself from her squat, rose, sat down on the couch beside him. “You don’t mind?”

“Not at all,” Bobby said, beaming at her, feeling the warmth of her thigh pressed against his.

“You’ve actually hitchhiked across the country?” she said. “That was very brave, people just don’t do that anymore.”

“They don’t?” Bobby said innocently.

Shandra laughed. She snuggled closer to him. “You really are a European, aren’t you?” she said.

Bobby threw up his hands, shrugged, and in the process managed to drape his arm on the couch back around her shoulders without quite touching her. “I’ve spent my whole life trying to figure that one out,” he said. “In Paris, I felt like an American, but in New York and Washington and Miami, an American was the last thing I wanted to be. . . .”

Shandra leaned even closer. He could smell the jasmine perfume of her, feel her heat. “And now that you’re here in Berkeley?” she said, placing a gentle hand on the top of his thigh.

“Now that I’m here, I like it just fine,” Bobby whispered, letting his arm slide down the couch back. Shandra fitted herself into the crook of his arm; without knowing quite when it had happened, Bobby realized that his entourage had melted away, leaving him alone with this gorgeous and apparently willing creature.

“You have a room here, do you not . . . ?” Shandra suggested.

“Hi, Bobby!” a female voice piped brightly. Bobby looked up and saw Eileen Sparrow standing over them. Oh shit!

“Uh, hi, Eileen . . . ,” Bobby muttered guiltily.

“Don’t let me disturb you,” Eileen said dryly.

Jesus! “Uh, we were just . . .”

“So I see,” Eileen said. “Cute, isn’t he?” she said to Shandra, without a hint of malice. “And he gives pretty good head too, I taught him how.”

Bobby felt that he must be turning scarlet.

Eileen laughed. “Where’s your European sophistication?” she said, and laughed again.

Shandra laughed too.

“You . . . uh . . . don’t mind?” Bobby stammered.

Eileen made a great show of gazing around the room and licking her lips theatrically. “With all these men here?” she exclaimed. “Come on, Bobby, this is Berkeley!” And she sashayed off, blew him a kiss over her shoulder, and was gone.

 

Though it took him four more days to nerve himself up to make the dreaded phone call home, the Sunday afternoon after the party was when Bobby Reed realized that he had long since decided that he was going to go to college here in Berkeley no matter what his mother said.

Shandra Corday had been wonderful in bed indeed, at least from his limited critical perspective, but that was not what caused Bobby’s great revelation. Indeed, Shandra had made it quite clear to him afterward that this was just a nice little adventure for her, as, if he was honest, it had been for him; she was seeing three other men and was not at this point in her evolution looking for the love of her life.

“This is, after all, Berkeley,” she told him in the morning, and they both had a friendly little laugh over that.

No, what did it, strangely enough, was the phone call from Eileen Sparrow that came while he was still in bed with Shandra. Marla Washington opened his door and, without raising an eyebrow or missing a beat, told him he had a phone call. Bobby pulled on his pants and took it in the kitchen.

“Hi, Bobby,” Eileen’s voice said brightly on the other end of the old-fashioned audio-only American phone. “Have a good time?”

“Uh . . .”

“I had a wonderful time, I met this guy with millions of muscles who fucked my brains out!”

“Why are you telling me this, Eileen?” Bobby stammered.

“Why to thank you for inviting me, of course!”

Bobby didn’t know what to say to that.

But Eileen Sparrow, as usual, was not at a loss for words. “Well, that’s not exactly the whole truth, Bobby,” she said when he didn’t reply. “I mean, you were so silly last night, I mean you acted like I was your mother or something! I just wanted to set you straight, I mean, I really wasn’t pissed at you at all, truly, truly, I wasn’t. Okay?”

“Okay,” Bobby said, quite touched.

“I mean, you don’t owe me anything, and I don’t owe you anything, so please, please, just have a good time and don’t be so uptight about it. We’re young, we’re horny, it’s only like natural, and this is—”

“I know, I know, this is Berkeley!” Bobby said, and they both laughed.

“Well, I gotta go now, Bobby,” Eileen said. “Mr. America has another hard-on, would you believe it?”

“Have fun,” Bobby said, and, somewhat to his surprise, he realized that he meant it.

“Oh don’t worry, I will! ’Bye!”

And that was the moment of revelation, as Bobby stood there in the kitchen, with Karl and Cindy pouring themselves coffee from the communal urn and Shandra Corday upstairs in his bed, and Eileen Sparrow off somewhere in bed with someone else, but enough of a real friend to have called him to set his mind at ease.

This was where he belonged. This was a time and a place and a feeling that he never wanted to leave. He would go to college at UC Berkeley. He would major in history, and maybe he could go to grad school here too, and get a job teaching at the university like Nat Wolfowitz, and with luck, he could stay here in Berkeley forever.

Finding the courage to call Paris was something else again. Mom would go through the roof. The deal was that he was supposed to come back to Paris and go to the Sorbonne in the fall, and Dad had had to get into some pretty bad stuff with her to get him even this trip. Things had not been so terrific between them when he had left, which was maybe one of the reasons he hadn’t called home at all yet. And now . . .

Bobby put it off, and put it off, and put it off, but finally, late at night after another losing poker game, when he knew he would catch his parents at the breakfast table, and fatigue had fogged his brain sufficiently, he found himself walking into the empty kitchen and dialing Paris before he had complete awareness of exactly what he was doing.

Maybe they’ve left already, he told himself as the phone rang once, twice, thrice.

“Hello?” said his father’s voice on the other end.

No such luck.

“Hi, Dad, this is Bobby.”

“Bobby! Where the hell are you? We’ve been worried sick! Sonya, it’s Bobby, pick up in the bedroom!”

“I’m in Berkeley, Dad, I’m sorry, but—”

“Robert!”

“Hi, Mom—”

“Where on earth are you?”

“He’s in Berkeley, Sonya.”

“Why haven’t you called?” Mom demanded. “Not even a postcard!”

“And what’s wrong with the picture? Our screens are blank.”

“This is America, Mom, ordinary homes aren’t wired for v-phones, remember?”

“But the decent hotels certainly must have—”

“I’m not staying in a hotel, I’ve got a room in this great house, with wonderful people, it’s real cheap, and I can stay here as long as I want, so it’s hardly gonna cost you anything for me to go to UC Berkeley, except for tuition. . . .”

There, it was out, and done.

“Oh no you’re not, Robert!” Mom snapped.

“Oh yes I am! My mind’s made up, and you’re not gonna change it. I’m going to Berkeley!”

“Not on our money, you’re not, Robert,” Mom said. “Not one ECU, not one ruble, not one dollar!”

“Sonya!” Dad exclaimed.

“He’ll forget about this nonsense as soon as he runs out of money.”

“Sonya, he’s got a right to live his own life, we can’t blackmail—”

“This is all your fault, Jerry Reed! I knew we should never have let him go to that madhouse in the first place! No money, Robert, you’re coming home, and you’re going to the Sorbonne!”

“Never!” Bobby shouted. “I’m staying here.”

“We’ll see how long you last supporting yourself and paying your own tuition. . . .”

“I’ll . . . I’ll get a job!” Bobby stammered.

“I’m sure there are endless jobs in California for eighteen-year-olds with no experience that pay enough to send you through a capitalist university,” Mom said sarcastically.

“I’ll . . . I’ll join the Army! They pay for four years of college in return for four years’ service.”

“Bob!”

“Go ahead, Robert,” Mom said knowingly. “That’s one silly bluff I’m quite ready to call.”

Bobby forced himself to think coldly. Play the cards, he told himself. You don’t have much showing, but they can’t be sure what you’ve got in the hole.

“Have it your way, Mom,” Bobby said in as cool a tone as he could muster. “I can always deal drugs, they bring back marijuana in body bags from the South American war zones, did you know that? I know the guys who are doing it. No one goes broke dealing dope in Berkeley. . . .”

“Bob!” Dad shouted in a horrified voice. “For God’s sake, don’t do anything stupid! I’ll get you the money one way or another, I promise!”

“Jerry!”

“Goddamnit, Sonya, you want your own son dealing dope? You want to see him rotting in some miserable jail for twenty years?”

“I won’t have it, I won’t have you blackmailing us like this, Robert!”

“Now the Politburo is calling the Supreme Soviet a bunch of Commies?” Bobby snapped back.

There was the sound of a receiver hanging up.

“Promise me you won’t do anything foolish, Bob,” Dad’s voice pleaded. “Give me your number, and I’ll call you back when I’ve convinced your mother to listen to reason. But please don’t do anything stupid, let me handle it, okay?”

“Okay, Dad,” Bobby said. “But I’m serious. I’ll do whatever I have to to stay here. Do you believe me?”

“I believe you, Bob,” Dad said woodenly. “Just wait for my call before you do anything.”

And after Bobby gave him the number, he hung up, leaving Bobby alone in the empty kitchen in the dead of night, wondering what he would really do if his bluff was called.

 

Two days later, Mom and Dad called together. It was really strange. “The three of us have got to work this out as a family instead of fighting with each other,” Dad said in a weird pleading tone of voice.

“Your father and I have worked out a compromise,” Mom said, sounding strangely distant. “You come home to Paris for college, and you can spend your summers in America.”

“No,” Bobby said.

“Please, Bob,” Dad pleaded. “You’re making things very difficult.”

“I’ll spend my summers in Paris if you pay for me to go to Berkeley,” Bobby countered.

“I told you this was futile, Jerry!” Mom snapped angrily.

“Bob, please, your mother and I—”

“I thought you were on my side, Dad! All that stuff you were always telling me about America ever since I was a little kid—”

“Bob—”

“—it was all a lie, wasn’t it? You never believed a word of it!”

“You know that’s not true! If it wasn’t for me, you wouldn’t be in America in the first place!”

“That’s the first intelligent thing you’ve said in a week, Jerry Reed!”

“Sonya!”

“Don’t Sonya me!”

“Please, Bob, can’t you see that your mother and I—”

“Classes start here in ten days, and if I don’t have the tuition money by Monday, I’m going to have to borrow the first installment from my dealer friends and start pushing drugs to pay it back or they’ll stuff me in a body bag!”

And he hung up on them and let them think about it.

Finally, late Sunday night, Bobby got the long-awaited call from his father. Dad sounded weary, and distant, and strangely defeated.

“All right, Bob,” he said tiredly. “I’ll be wiring you the money tomorrow.”

“Hey, that’s great, Dad, that’s just great!” Bobby exclaimed. “How did you manage to convince Mom?”

There was a long silence and then an audible sigh on the other end of the line. “That’s . . . that’s between your mother and me,” Dad finally said. “You know . . . she really does love you, in her way. . . .”

“She sure has a funny way of showing it.”

“Yeah, well . . . love isn’t always easy, Bob,” Dad said sadly. “Love isn’t always right either. Sometimes, well, people who love each other hurt each other, like . . . like . . . Well, someday, if you’re not so lucky, maybe you’ll understand. . . .”

“Are you all right, Dad?”

There was a long pause. “Just terrific,” Dad said hollowly. “Haven’t a care in the world. . . . You take care, Bob.”

“Uh, yeah, you too, Dad,” Bobby said uneasily, and that was the way the conversation ended, with his jubilation soured, at least for the moment, by feelings of vague guilt for he knew not what.

 

Bobby’s somber mood didn’t last much past breakfast. He went over to UC Berkeley to fill out his matriculation papers, spent the afternoon wandering around the campus, went back to the house, called Eileen and Shandra to tell them the good news, and before dinner, the money arrived from Paris. He won forty dollars at poker that night, cashed the draft from his father the next morning, paid up his tuition in the afternoon, had dinner with Eileen, made love, spent the next night with Shandra Corday, and by that time, the strange way Dad had acted on the phone was quite forgotten.

Until two days later, when Marla Washington handed him a letter that had arrived in the mail. “All the way from Russia!”

It was from Franja. His Russian was still good enough for him to read the Cyrillic on the stationery. It was a Gagarin University envelope. The letter lay heavily in his hand like a very cold and very dead fish. Franja had never written him a letter before, and somehow he had the feeling that this was not going to be a pleasure. And when he took it up to his room to read it in private, it was even worse than he had imagined.

 

Dear Bobby:

I do hope you are enjoying yourself in Gringoland, little brother. I suppose you’re not very interested in what your vile little blackmail scheme has done to your own parents, but I’m going to tell you anyway.

Father went out and wired you your tuition money without even telling Mother, did you know that? I only wish you had been there when he finally told her at dinner, it would have been only what you deserve. They screamed and yelled at each other for over an hour. It was horrible.

They called each other all kinds of names, and when Mother finally ended up calling Father a fascist gringo unilateralist, Father actually accused her of having an affair with Ilya Pashikov. And the so-called conversation ended with Mother shouting “Just maybe I will!”

Mother ended up sleeping on the couch, and when I left they were barely speaking to each other.

When you told Father to sign my admission papers to Gagarin, I made the mistake of thinking you might have some human decency, after all. Stupid me! You’re no different from the rest of them, Bobby Le Gringo. You’ve wrecked our parents’ marriage for your own selfish purposes just as Washington is intent on wrecking international peace and prosperity in the service of American greed and envy.

But then, you’re actually proud to call yourself an American, now aren’t you?

 

Bobby stormed out of the house in a tearful rage and jogged all the way to Telegraph Avenue. He knew just what he was looking for. Half the stationery stores on Telegraph Avenue were selling the hateful thing, and it was just the perfect reply for sister Franja.

He bought one of the postcards, addressed it to her with no message on it, and mailed it before he had time to think about it, wondering maliciously what the Soviet postmen would make of it.

On the postcard was a hideous bear wearing a big sombrero with a hammer and sickle on it in case anyone didn’t get the message. It was bent over at the knees with a piteous expression on its face and its ass in the air.

Uncle Sam was buggering it with a laser-beam phallus.

Franja never answered back.

 

Eight days before classes started at UC Berkeley, there was a coup in Mexico City. Two days after that, the blatantly CIA-backed puppet regime ceded Baja California to the United States in return for cancellation of the Mexican debt. The next day, elements of the Mexican Army seized the capital and executed the traitors.

The day after that, an American aircraft carrier task force sailed into Vera Cruz harbor, Navy planes strafed the city, and Marines went ashore. Another carrier task force landed amphibious forces at Rosarita Beach, and two armored divisions crossed the border and occupied Tijuana. Yet a third carrier task force blockaded the Pacific coast of mainland Mexico.

The Gringos celebrated with enormous beer-busts all that weekend. There was no party at Little Moscow that Saturday. Everyone sat in the living room watching TV coverage from the war zones.

The Marines were wiping up the last resistance in Vera Cruz. The amphibious forces landed at Rosarita Beach had already linked up with elements of the ground forces that had taken Tijuana. The President went on the air and announced that the United States had no territorial ambitions in mainland Mexico. The President of the Soviet Union denounced American imperialism but promised nothing. The Common European Parliament passed a meaningless resolution of condemnation. The Mexican chief of staff had apparently ordered his army to disperse into battalion-sized units and begin guerrilla warfare.

It was all over but the shouting, which was still going on all over town.

“And in Berkeley, California, this . . . ,” the announcer said.

“Hey, that’s Telegraph Avenue!” Bobby exclaimed.

And so it was, the camera apparently mounted on a truck moving down the center of Telegraph, about two hours ago, by the look of the lighting, dollying slowly past sidewalks jammed with drunken jingo louts, waving beer cans, mugging at the camera, holding giant burning sombreros on the ends of poles, sticking up American flag posters on the windows of closed shops and restaurants, singing “God Bless America” in beered-out unison.

“Doesn’t it make you proud to be an American?” Claude muttered bitterly.

“A peaceful victory demonstration . . .”

“By every drunken asshole in town!” Karl shouted at the screen.

“. . . was disrupted by a small group of agitators . . .”

“Oh shit,” Nat Wolfowitz moaned, as the camera suddenly zoomed down Telegraph Avenue into a tight shot on a small group of demonstrators, no more than two dozen of them, and Reds by the look of their clothing. They were carrying a black wooden coffin, and they were marching behind a big American flag hung upside down from a clothesline strung between two poles.

“. . . believed to be members of an extremist Marxist group known as the American Red Army . . .”

“Bullshit!” Marla Washington shouted. “There’s no such thing!”

“Tell me about it. . . .” Wolfowitz grunted.

The demonstrators marched slowly up the street beneath a hail of beer cans and paper cups. Some jerk in a white T-shirt and running shorts ran up to the front rank and spat in a girl’s face. Then it all started to happen at once. Mobs of Gringos rushed the demonstration from both sides and the front. Fistfights broke out. Someone grabbed one of the poles holding the flag. Someone grabbed the other pole.

The camera reverse-zoomed, then the tape jump-cut to another angle. The jingos had the flag. A huge mob of them paraded down the sidewalk behind it, pumping their fists in the air and screaming.

“. . . forcing patriotic Americans to rescue Old Glory from desecration.”

“Those poor stupid brave bastards . . . ,” Nat Wolfowitz said.

“And in New York, Lance Dickson pitched a no-hitter for the New York Yankees against the Boston Red Sox, pulling them to within a game and a half of first place—”

“I think we can do without the fucking ball scores,” Jack Genovese said, and turned off the videowall.

There was a long moment of silence. People just sat there staring at each other, saying nothing.

“Well, Bobby,” Marla Washington said grimly, “you still want to go to college in good old Berkeley?”

“Yeah, maybe you oughta go back to Paris while you can.”

“You’re not stuck here in Gringo Jingo Land. . . .”

“Not yet, anyway. . . .”

“What about it, Bobby, you sure you wouldn’t rather go home and be a Frenchman?”

“And take us with you?”

Bobby realized much to his surprise, and no little discomfort, that all eyes were now on him. Even Nat Wolfowitz was staring at him with the strangest expression on his face.

“What about it, kid?” Wolfowitz said. “You gonna fold this hand and go home to someplace sane like a smart player? Or stay here in the game like a sucker?”

Bobby realized that he had to say something. What are you now, Bobby Reed? they all seemed to be asking him. You’re the only one here who gets to choose. You still want to be an American?

Bobby thought about what he had just seen. He thought about those agonizing phone calls with his parents, the last call from Dad in particular. He thought about Franja’s letter, and the postcard he had sent in reply. He thought about his golden days with his new friends here in Berkeley. And in his mind’s eye, he saw another mob, and the American Embassy smeared with blood and shit.

“So call me a sucker, Nat, ’cause I’m staying,” he said. “I only wish I had been out there with them, marching behind that flag.”

“Out there getting the crap beat out of you on television?” Marla said.

“Somebody had to do it,” Bobby told her. “The goddamn jingos may have smeared blood and shit all over our flag, but when those people hung it upside down and marched up Telegraph behind it, they washed it clean, they made it something to be proud of again. They showed the world that there are still some real Americans.”

“Now is the time for futile gestures?” Wolfowitz said sarcastically. But his eyes told quite another story.

“Hey, Nat,” Bobby said, staring straight into them, “so it’s a lousy hand we’ve been dealt. But these are the cards, and this is the only game in town, so we gotta play ’em.”