Look, man, he went on to say, I don’t know how politically active you are, or what your political affiliations, if any, may happen to be, but I was wondering about how much of that sort of thing you might have run into by now. Because, man, one of the first things that struck me about this town when I arrived and first started making the rounds was all the political recruitment I was forever running into. Somebody was forever trying to get me to join some political group or other, all of them calling themselves either liberal, left-wing, or downright radical if not outright revolutionary.
Man, you’d see some very fly fay chippie and catch her eye or the sparkle that she’s aiming at you and you move in on her or she might move in on you and take her to your place or perhaps more often to hers, and the next morning you’d find out what the game is. She was the one that had you in her sights as soon as you hit the scene. Not because of all that ever ready automatically syncopated action she says you inherited from your stud horse male ancestors she was thanking you all night for laying on her. Man, all of that hair-trigger ecstatic response is subject to be the standard prelude to a bunch of political pamphlets that she’s going to lay on you. And if she doesn’t quiz you about them on the next tête-à-tête she’s definitely going to check you out on the third. Then if you become a recruit she might keep you in her stable for a while before passing you on to somebody closer to the inner circle.
SOP, man, he said, chuckling again. Standard operating procedure. Standing revolutionary recruitment procedure for the ostracized minorities! Man, you’ve got to watch that stuff, or you’ll be well on you way to becoming a statistic on somebody’s revolutionary agenda. Man, that stuff used to be downright evangelical. But of course I don’t have to tell you that most down-home cats drop those pamphlets in the first trash can they came to en route to the subway. Man, you know as well as I do that what them down-home boots were out for was not some abstract political program but some unsegregated easily accessible living and breathing hot-to-trot body action for free, or at least for not more than a drink or two.
He said, Man, a few jive artists might have tried to fake and cross talk their way through some of that stuff if reading it was what you had to do to get to the sack in the first place. But my guess is that not many were likely to work their way through that kind of stuff to get back to the sack for a second go-round. Because all they were out for was a one-night pickup in the first place. Man, as far as they were concerned, it was not a matter of how many times with the same chicks but how many chicks.
But on the other hand, though, as you also know, there were and are also some splibs who figure that they have to read that stuff to prove that their formal education qualifies them to move in such exclusive, articulate and up-to-date company as they assume their present company represents—just in case there’s any question of basic intellectual eligibility. Hey, don’t play me cheap, Miss Lady Blueblood playgirl. Some of us may be from across the tracks, but here’s one who can dig this dialectic jive, too! Now, man, that’s a sitting duck.
Which brings me around to why I’ve been meaning to get around to this topic in the first place: so here comes old Taft Woodrow Edison with his high grade-point average flashing like stop-look-and-listen at an express crossing. Not to mention three years of college earned through meritorious scholarship! So what does he on whom little in the weekly, monthly, and quarterly journals and critical reviews in the periodicals room of the campus library was lost—man, what does he do with those evangelical pamphlets? He reads them! Man, he reads them to satisfy his endemic Oklahoma suspicion that they are not worth reading. They are not worth the cornbread paper they are printed on. And then does he dump them in the nearest garbage drop? Absolutely not! Because he’s made so many marginal notes that he wants to argue about that he calls up his recruiter for another date! And man, that call led me into some stuff that is a part of what I’m still trying to come to terms with on my own as a writer.
Then he said, Of course when I think back on it now I see it as something that turned out to be a sort of catalytic agent. Or let’s put it this way: I would not be going about this thing of being a writer in the way I’m going about it as of now if that encounter hadn’t turned out to be one of those encounters.
That was why it was on the same afternoon that I told him about my time on the road with the band that I also told him what I told him about what happened when my roommate and I read André Malraux’s Man’s Fate during my sophomore year. I said, Man, the first thing I ever really heard about what that kind of recruitment was like was what my roommate told me about what he had already found out about the movement (meaning the underground movement) in Chicago by the time he finished junior high school. Before that the only kind of political recruitment I can remember hearing about
