The illuminatus! trilogy by Robert Shea, Robert Anton Wilson Page A

like the eye of the rattlesnake
. She wants to see me cry. She stands there and waits, watching me through the bars.
“Don’t you have any feelings at all? Are you some kind of animal?”
I say nothing. I keep my face immobile. No white shall ever see the tears of a Menominee.
At the Biograph Theatre, Molly Moon turns away in disgust as souvenir hunters dip their handkerchiefs in the blood
. I turn away from the matron and look up, out the barred window, to the stars, and the spaces between them seem bigger than ever. Bigger and emptier. Inside me there is a space like that now, big and empty, and it will never be filled again. When the tree is torn out by its roots, the earth must feel that way. The earth must scream silently, as I screamed silently.)
But she understood the sacramental meaning of the handkerchiefs dipped in blood; as Simon understands it
.
    Simon, in fact, had what can only be called a funky education. I mean, man, when your parents are both anarchists the Chicago public school system is going to do your head absolutely no good at all. Feature me in a 1956 classroom with Eisenhower’s Moby Dick face on one wall and Nixon’s Captain Ahab glare on the other, and in between, standing in front of the inevitable American rag, Miss Doris Day or her older sister telling the class to take home a leaflet explaining to their parents why it’s important for them to vote.
    “My parents don’t vote,” I say.
    “Well, this leaflet will explain to them why they should,” she tells me with the real authentic Doris Day sunshine and Kansas cornball smile. It’s early in the term and she hasn’t heard about me from the last-semester teacher.
    “I really don’t think so,” I say politely. “They don’t think it makes any difference whether Eisenhower or Stevenson is in the White House. They say the orders will still come from Wall Street.”
    It’s like a thundercloud. All the sunshine goes away. They never prepared her for this in the school where they turn out all these Doris Day replicas. The wisdom of the Fathers is being questioned. She opens her mouth and closes it and opens and closes it and finally takes such a deep breath that every boy in the room (we’re all on the cusp of puberty) gets a hard-on from watching her breasts heave up and slide down again. I mean, they’re all praying (except me, I’m an atheist, of course) that they won’t get called on to stand up; if it wouldn’t attract attention, they’d be clubbing their dicks down with their geography books. “That’s the wonderful thing about this country,” she finally gets out, “even people with opinions like that can say what they want without going to jail.”
    “You must be nuts,” I say. “My dad’s been in and out of jail so many times they should put in a special revolving door just for him. My mom, too.
You
oughta go out with subversive leaflets in this town and see what happens.”
    Then, of course, after school, a gang of patriots, with the odds around seven-to-one, beat the shit out of me and make me kiss their red-white-and-blue totem. It’s no better at home. Mom’s an anarcho-pacifist, Tolstoy and all that, and she wants me to say I didn’t fight back. Dad’s a Wobbly and wants to be sure that I hurt some of them at least as bad as they hurt me. After they yell at me for a half hour, they yell at each other for two. Bakunin said this and Kropotkin said that and Gandhi said the other and Martin Luther King is the savior of America and Martin Luther King is a bloody fool who’s selling his people an opium Utopia and all that jive. Go down to Wobbly Hall or Solidarity Bookstore and you’ll still hear the same debate, doubled, redoubled, in spades, and vulnerable.
    So naturally I start hanging out on Wall Street and smoking dope and pretty soon I’m the youngest livingmember of what they called the Beat Generation. Which does not improve my relations with school authorities, but at least it’s a relief from all