Free Boarded Windows by Dylan Hicks Page B

back.
    “A fake name’s okay, but nothing clever, no anagrams,” Barry said.
    “So not too fakey?” Martha said with what my mother Marleen called her “Saharan sarcasm.”
    “Probably there won’t be any reporters left,” Barry said. He was wearing a Donegal tweed overcoat, its frayed collar partly covered by the hooklike ends of his blond hair. He had agreed to pay a disproportionate share of the co-op’s expenses for seven more months; then new arrangements would have to be made. He had a straight job as a copywriter and rumored inherited wealth, including some obviously hypocritical investments.
    “We’re not going to give them our names,” Marleen said.
    “Sociology’s a rinky-dink field, anyway,” the driver said.
    “This isn’t just about Dixon,” Barry said.
    “I just don’t think it’s a serious field,” the driver said.
    “Well, you’re the expert,” Marleen said, and Martha stanched a laugh.
    “Regardless,” Barry said, “it’s in our interest to have anti-Establishment thinkers in sociology departments, if only to act as foils to those who dreamed up Muzak.”
    The co-op housed six to eight people, depending on whom you asked, and was supposed to and sometimes did run on Marxist principles, to which its residents, in the normal way of things, were divergently committed. Martha was an ideological jumble, here radical, there conservative. Her short residency at the co-op might be called situational communism (not situationist, though there was some of that too, probably coincidental). Marleen had already been invited to join the co-op, but, somewhat cautious by nature, chose to stay in her dormitory. She too had a temporizing interest in Marxism, though she didn’t pretend to more than a passing familiarity with its texts. Two women lived in the co-op, or so Marleen had heard from Barry, but before the drive to Chicago, she’d met neither one. The other woman, Martha explained to Marleen in the backseat, had moved out a few months earlier. “She’s coming back,” Barry said. “She’s just taking care of some family shit.” Martha turned to Marleen and shook her head with ironic affirmation. John snored, the driver turned on the radio.
    For all I know the tension between Barry and Martha was romantic in origin, but if so, Marleen never learned about these origins, and it’s just as possible that they simply disliked each other, or liked goading each other. “Unlike certain people in this bucket,” Martha slipped in when she and Marleen’s conversation returned to politics, “I actually come from the prolefuckingtariat.” Profane tmesis, Marleen led me to believe, was one of Martha’s trendy tics: fanfuckingtastic, bullfuckingshit, on and on like that. Barry moved his long legs from one apparently uncomfortable position to another. Martha’s grandfather, his granddaughter added, joined the Socialist Party during its North Dakota heyday in the teens and never lost faith. “So all this stuff is old hat for me,” she said, tapping the driver’s porkpie. “What kind of work did your grandfather do?” Barry asked. “He was just a poor farmer,” Martha said, “trying to set up farmer-owned grain elevators and whatnot.” “Then he was a peasant, not a proletarian,” Barry said. Martha held her middle finger behind Barry’s head for several seconds. As she saw it, she said after collecting herself to some degree, there was no real revolutionary potential in the U.S., not for the foreseeable future, not in the way Marx imagined it, and certainly not from the proletariat. But widespread, ever-growing spiritual-erotic hunger, hunger for the stuff American capitalism trivialized, coarsened, and suppressed, that kind of hunger could lead to a bigger cultural transformation than anyone had imagined. She was showing off with her speech, but also her voice was shaking. The future’s great works of art, she said, wouldn’t look like art at all, would be mistaken for