Saturday, May 17, 2008
She has a donated castle and an army of volunteers wearing T-shirts saying "I Drank the Kool-Aid." So what is Rebecca supposed to do now?
Mar 10, 2004 | The next day, Rebecca and Giacomo watched everything in their sad and small storefront office disappear in a matter of minutes, thrown into the back of two station wagons and a minivan, and then witnessed, awed, those objects reappear inside a huge building resembling in every way a castle, though one located in the middle of downtown Chicago. It had once been a very popular under-21 nightclub called Pandora's, with five stories and dozens of rooms and balconies and nooks where depressed teenagers would find temporary solace in each other's henna-tattooed arms. The building was now abandoned, having lost its license when two teenagers gave birth to babies in adjoining stalls the same night a group of boys were caught sacrificing a goat to Peter Murphy.
Rebecca wondered if it had the wrong sort of aura about it. She peeked in, Giacomo right behind her.
"You like it, right?" Scylla said.
"It was hard to get," Chary added. "The owner has a new Lettuce Entertain You restaurant coming in pretty soon, but he figured a tweener tenant could exorcise some of the -- what did he call them, Scyl?"
"Freak demons."
"Yeah, exorcise the freak demons from the place."
It was dark and filthy and in it still hovered the stench of years-old clove cigarettes and black nail polish. Covering the floor like tile were promotional copies of CDs by a Dead Can Dance reunion concert, and everywhere the palette was black, dark grey, black, violet and black, with dashes of crimson.
"Perfect, right?" said Scylla.
"It'll be clean by tomorrow," Chary said, pushing Rebecca out the door. "Go home and sleep."
But Rebecca couldn't sleep. How could anyone sleep in her situation? She sat awake in her bed, and then reclined on her deck, and then on the floor of her kitchen, eating carrots and drinking aquavit, wondering if this was the right thing, if she wanted this sort of following. Didn't movements like this invariably come to no good? The followers, bent on purity and with perhaps an unrealistic faith in their leader, would inevitably be disappointed, for no one could match their expectations with deeds. The only way, really, to prevent their disappointment and their subsequent disillusionment with the entire American democratic process was to-- She gasped, alone on her kitchen floor, at the notion. But she couldn't do that, could she?
- - - - - - - - - - - -
The castle was indeed clean the next day. The volunteers, now numbering over 500, had freed all the windows, which had been covered with stained-glass decals, and had painted all of the walls white and gold. The new space was infinitely larger that the storefront, was airier, had about it an aura of a Beaux-Arts cathedral, glorious in a way, though it had no heat or air conditioning. Thus it was easily over 100 degrees inside, and became hotter with every movement of the hundreds of college-age people inside, doing god knows what, all wearing yellow -- or chartreuse, really -- shirts. It took Rebecca a few seconds to see what was printed, in pink, on the fronts. Could it be? It was true, all the shirts said: "I DRANK THE KOOL-AID." Rebecca smiled and then felt sick. She really never liked that expression, used here and there in politics to identify the true believers, and Rebecca was doubly saddened by the implication that the creation of the T-shirts required, so soon, the breaking of the overarching vow, to avoid spending a nickel on this campaign.
"Who paid for the T-shirts?" she asked, hoping fervently that someone had the right answer.
"No one," Chary said. "Everyone was told to bring in yellow shirts, and we ironed on the images. Easy."
Now that she looked closely, Rebecca confirmed that the shirts were of various shades of chartreuse, and represented any number of stages of wear and tear. From a distance the volunteers appeared as a cohesive, almost machine-like corps, though up close there was a scruffiness that looked either endearing or totally handmade and loony. But these T-shirts were her campaign, sweaty and full of holes, threadbare and with slogans applied, lovingly, by hands pressing heat.
Episode 16: Edward Longshanks fought fires, but was Edward Longshanks a firefighter? He was not.
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