The White Album Read Online Free PDF Page B

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    “Make them submit any questions in writing,” someone else suggested . “The Black Student Union does that very successfully, then they just don’t answer anything they don’t want to answer . ”
    “That’s it, don’t fall into their trap . ”
    “Something we should stress at this press conference is who owns the media . ”
    “You don’t think it’s common knowledge that the papers represent corporate interests?” a realist among them interjected doubtfully .
    “I don’t think it’s understood!’
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    T Two hours and several dozen hand votes later, the group had selected four members to tell the press who owned the media, had decided to appear en masse at an opposition press conference, and had debated various slogans for the next day’s demonstration . “Let’s see, first we have ‘Hearst Tells It Like It Ain’t,’ then ‘Stop Press Distortion’—that’s the one there was some political controversy about . ... ”
    And, before they broke up, they had listened to a student who had driven up for the day from the College of San Mateo, a junior college down the peninsula from San Francisco . “I came up here today with some Third World students to tell you that w e’re with you, and we hope you’ll be with us when we try to pull off a strike next week, because we’re really into it, we carry our motorcycle helmets all the time, can’t think, can’t go to class . ”
    He had paused . He was a nice-looking boy, and fired with his task . I considered the tender melancholy of life in San Mateo, which is one of the richest counties per capita in the United States of America, and I considered whether or not the Wichita Lineman and the petals on the wet black bough represented the aimlessness of the bourgeoisie, and I considered the illusion of aim to be gained by holding a press conference, the only problem with press conferences being that the press asked questions . “I’m here to tell you that at College of San Mateo we’re living like revolutionaries” the boy said then .
     
    10
    We put “Lay Lady Lay” on the record player, and “Suzanne . ” We went down to Melrose Avenue to see the Flying Burritos . There was a jasmine vine grown over the verandah of the big house on Franklin Avenue, and in the evenings the smell of jasmine came in through all the open doors and windows . I made bouillabaisse for people who did not eat meat . I imagined that my own life was simple and sweet, and sometimes it was, but there were odd things going around town . There were rumors . There were stories . Everything was unmentionable but nothing was unimaginable . This mystical flirtation with the idea of “sin”—this sense that it was possible to go “too far,” and that many people were doing it—was very much with us in Los Angeles in 1968 and 1969 .
    A demented and seductive vortical tension was building in tne community . The jitters were setting in . I recall a time when the dogs barked every night and the moon was always full . On August 9,1969,1 was sitting in the shallow end of my sister-in-law’s swimming pool in Beverly Hills when she received a telephone call from a friend who had just heard about the murders at Sharon Tate Polanski’s house on Cielo Drive . The phone rang many times during the next hour . These early reports were garbled and contradictory . One caller would say hoods, the next would say chains . There were twenty dead, no, twelve, ten, eighteen . Black masses were imagined, and bad trips blamed . I remember all of the day’s misinformation very clearly, and I also remember this, and wish I did not: I remember that no one was surprised .
     
    11
    When I first met Linda Kasabian in the summer of 1970 she was wearing her hair parted neatly in the middle, no makeup, Elizabeth Arden “Blue Grass” perfume, and the unpressed blue uniform issued to inmates at the Sybil Brand Institute for Women in Los Angeles . She was at Sybil Brand in protective custody,