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PARTISAN REVIEW
extent the paranoia was legitimate-the reaction of a culture that
suddenly found itself illegal-and to what extent it was a way of
herding together.
Neither of us had much sympathy for the usual scatter-ass
attempts to burn down a wood shingle NROTC building by attacking
it in bright afternoon, two hundred marching strong. If you are
going to do something, do it, don't pretend to, and Ling herself
lived by her capacity for single-hearted action, that rotten pistol in
her roaring hand filled with the cyanide pellets. "Man, there ain't no
way that cat's going to survive when I get through with him," she
must have flashed before Foster's assassination. But I suspect any
political murder fundamentally appealed to her. I remember how
pleased she was when, "ALIOTO GOT OFFED," a billboard mis–
reading of mine, became "Alligator got offed, read the crowbarn
dance committee's sign." The" impossible dream" of an early letter
'did not mean becoming a doctor-rather the assassination of a parole
officer. At our first lunch she told me that if she had no police
record-a few hours' in Santa Rita notwithstanding-that one day
in the guise of a servant she'd be able to introduce herself in an
officer's home and there do him in. She lived with a whole
commedia
dell'arte
of criminal cohorts who knew how to do things, make a train
run on time or pick a car lock. She didn't realize that such people
pay by being turned into ants and made to run around in smaller
and smaller circles until some oaf steps on them, or pours out a tub
of hot water. If you work and think this way you become an agent for
stupidity and death.
The last blast of mescaline was our coup de grace. Ling had only
to read my scrawlings to realize she had become the evil wish, the
black wind in my skin. Just as one can discover himself abroad, so
Ling had come to see that her life in the ghetto was more than a
sordid failure. One of the achievements of the sixties was to destroy
the myth of inherent racial-sexual boundaries. A person is who he
wants to be-provided he is willing to take on that state of mind in
its social entirety. Ling was. She had gotten married and tried to live
to its full vicious extent a ghetto life, and now living with me she felt
cut off from her people, their broken bottles and vivid shoutings.
By then I could see that her sojourn with me stood more in the
nature of a vacation. She needed to recuperate, and I had let her do
