Free Another Bullshit Night in Suck City by Nick Flynn Page A

the first time offers me one.

the take
    (1974) Early February. Brandishing weapons, the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) kidnap Patricia Campbell Hearst as she’s watching television with her boyfriend, Steven Weed. The SLA force Hearst into the parking garage and into the trunk of a waiting car. The SLA does not take Weed. I am barely fourteen at this point, “weed” is what I call marijuana. I keep my weed hidden in a book I found in my grandmother’s attic and hollowed out, The Stories of Saki , which was good but not good enough to save the book from my razor. I have a paper route, and I read the story as I trudge through snow at dawn, mesmerized by the kidnapped heiress, by the idea of an invisible army, by the man named “Weed” useless to stop them.
    The ransom note for Hearst comes in the form of a tape recording sent to San Francisco radio station KPFA. In it the SLA demands that Hearst’s father, the newspaper baron, give every “Californian in need” seventy dollars’ worth of “quality” food. One feast, one last supper, and then she will be freed. After brief deliberations Hearst’s father complies. Packages containing two turkey hind-quarters, two cans of tomato juice, two cans of meat, and a box of saltine crackers are handed out to hundreds of people at several food distribution points. Two million dollars’ worth of quality food.
    My father, along with the rest of the country, reads about the kidnapped heiress. In some ways he’s also an heir, but to a fortune he will never see. His father died four years earlier and left him one dollar, in this way guaranteeing that the will cannot be disputed. Last May the “Plumbers” broke into the Watergate Hotel for the first time, word that Nixon may have ordered the break-in is seeping out. I stand under streetlights in the middle of my route, reading about Patty, unable to stop reading about her. Everyone now calls her simply “Patty.”
    After the food is distributed Patty is not returned. All that remains is Weed, who tells the tale over and over, pulling aside the curtain of his hair to show where he took the blow. Without Patty he is briefly a star. Weeks pass, our attention flags, then the image of Patty transformed appears—rifle in her lap, the Symbionese Liberation Army insignia behind her, snakes coming out of her beret—heiress as Medusa, gone over to the other side. Now she is “Tania.” A tape recording of her voice says, “This is my choice,” and the shrink talking head and the police specialist talking head and the crisis expert talking head all say it is likely she’s been brainwashed, likely she’s doing this in order to survive, that she’s reached a state of transference, which is complex and unpredictable and likely to influence her future actions. But to me it seems obvious—to risk so much for one meal, who wouldn’t be charmed?
    During these months many newspapers are sold, subscriptions rise, home delivery desired. I read about her every day between houses, I grow up as I read about her. Weed still occasionally looks pleadingly out from below a headline, though by now no one believes she will return to him. Within weeks Tania is photographed by security cameras holding a gun while the Hibernia Bank is robbed. The roiling interest ignites into a frenzy. The SLA is funding a worldwide revolution. I drop a folded paper onto a porch.
     
    A year before his fall from the ladder my father sent his novel, or some version of it, to Viking Press and received a hand-signed rejection letter in response. He will xerox this letter for years to come and mail it out again—to friends, to Ted Kennedy, eventually to me—apparently to prove that he is, or was, “known.” Kurt Vonnegut told me to try Viking. I wanted to stay with Little, Brown, but Vonnegut insisted . My father puts the rejection letter aside, picks up a newspaper, reads the headlines. He sees her face, the beret, the gun. The grainy surveillance photo, the