Free Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion

was free to look around. I leafed through some of the Uterature out of Peking (Vice-Premier Chen Yi Answers Questions Put by Correspondents) , Hanoi (President Ho Chi Minh Answers President L . B . Johnson) , and Tirana, Albania (The Hue and Cry About a Change in Tito ’ s Policy and the Undeniable Truth) , and I tried to hum, from a North Vietnamese song book, “When the Party Needs Us Our Hearts Are Filled with Hatred.” The literature was in the front of the store, along with a cash register and the kitchen table; in back, behind a plywood partition, were a few cots and the press and mimeograph machine on which the Central Committee prints its “political organ,” People ’ s Voice , and its “theoretical organ,” Red Flag . “There’s a cadre assigned to this facility in order to guarantee the security,” Michael Laski said when I mentioned the cots. “They have a small arsenal in back, a couple of shotguns and a number of other items.”
    So much security may seem curious when one considers what the members of the cadre actually do, which is, aside from selling the People ’ s Voice and trying to set up People’s Armed Defense Groups, largely a matter of perfecting their own ideology, searching out “errors” and “mistakes” in one another’s attitudes. “What we do may seem a waste of time to some people,” Michael Laski said suddenly. “Not having any ideology yourself, you might wonder what the Party offers. It offers nothing. It offers thirty or forty years of putting the Party above everything. It offers beatings. Jail. On the high levels, assassination.”
    But of course that was offering a great deal. The world Michael Laski had constructed for himself was one of labyrinthine intricacy and immaculate clarity, a world made meaningful not only by high purpose but by external and internal threats, intrigues and apparatus, an immutably ordered world in which things mattered. Let me tell you about another day at the Workers’ International Bookstore. The Marxist-Leninists had been out selling the People ’ s Voice , and now Michael Laski and three other members of the cadre were going over the proceeds, a ceremony as formal as a gathering of the Morgan partners.
    “Mr. — Comrade —Simmons—what was the total income?” Michael Laski asked.
    “Nine dollars and ninety-one cents.”
    “Over what period of time?”
    “Four hours.”
    “What was the total number of papers sold?”
    “Seventy-five.”
    “And the average per hour?”
    “Nineteen.”
    “The average contribution?”
    “Thirteen and a half cents.”
    “The largest contribution?”
    “Sixty cents.”
    “The smallest?”
    “Four cents.”
    “It was not a very good day, Comrade Simmons. Can you explain?”
    “It’s always bad the day before welfare and unemployment checks arrive.”
    “Very good, Comrade Simmons.”
    You see what the world of Michael Laski is: a minor but perilous triumph of being over nothingness.

    1967
     
     

 

     
     

    7000 Romaine, Los Angeles 38
     
     
    seven thousand romaine Street is in that part of Los Angeles familiar to admirers of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett: the underside of Hollywood, south of Sunset Boulevard, a middle-class slum of “model studios” and warehouses and two-family bungalows. Because Paramount and Columbia and Desilu and the Samuel Goldwyn studios are nearby, many of the people who live around here have some tenuous connection with the motion-picture industry. They once processed fan photographs, say, or knew Jean Harlow’s manicurist. 7000 Romaine looks itself like a faded movie exterior, a pastel building with chipped art moderne detailing, the windows now either boarded or paned with chicken-wire glass and, at the entrance, among the dusty oleander, a rubber mat that reads welcome .
    Actually no one is welcome, for 7000 Romaine belongs to Howard Hughes, and the door is locked. That the Hughes “communications center” should lie here in the dull