James Boylan. “If you never had sex at Wesleyan, it wasn’t for lack of opportunity,” she said.
“I know,” I told her. “I had plenty of opportunity. I just didn’t have any motive.”
I thought I was all done with the business of not having sex for the evening, when from across the hallway, a dorm-room door swung open, and there, all sleepy, was my friend Lucy, a bighearted, Camel-smoking, slow-talking architecture student. She had glasses almost exactly like mine. “Jaaames,” she said, and raised one eyebrow.
* * *
Meanwhile, back in Pennsylvania.
My mother belongs to a group of ladies who play bridge. They come over to our house every six weeks or so, to play cards and to eat cucumber sandwiches and to drink gin and tonics in the middle of the day. The doorbell rings. The back door creaks open. “Hildegarde?” calls Mrs. Towson, one of the neighbors.
Hildegarde has told her friends not to walk in unless she herself has opened the door, but most of the women in her circle ignore this request, figuring, well, what’s the worst that could happen?
In answer to this query, ladies and gentlemen: It’s Matt the Mutt! Here he comes, fresh from fucking the daylights out of Sausage, who’s still lying discombobulated but highly satisfied on my bed up on the third floor. Matt’s come down all the flights of stairs in just a few seconds. He hits Mrs. Towson like an avalanche off the Matterhorn, and just like that Mrs. Towson is on her ass and the tray full of guacamole and chips is rotating through the air. As Hildegarde enters the room, Mrs. Towson, a lovely, round woman wearing a dress covered with large purple flowers, finds herself covered with guacamole and surrounded by pieces of broken dishes. There are corn chips on the floor, in her clothes, in her hair. Matt is lapping up the loose chips as if there’s no tomorrow. Now he’s lapping the guac out of Mrs. Towson’s hair.
“No,” says Hildegarde. “No!”
“Why, I—,” says Mrs. Towson.
Hildegarde is pulling back on Matt’s choke chain-collar and now he is coughing and hacking as if he’s being strangulated. He snaps out of Hildegarde’s hands and runs around the room. He gets as far as our freezer, in which an entire side of beef is stored in separate pieces individually wrapped in butcher paper, each one marked RIB EYE or GROUND BEEF or ROUND STEAK, and then he raises his leg and pees on the freezer. There’s another knock on the door, and in comes Mrs. Larou, who lives just down Devon Boulevard. She has a plate full of deviled eggs. Matt looks over at her.
“No,” says my mother. “Matthew! No!”
But Matt the Mutt will not be counseled. He sees Mrs. Larou, and her platter full of deviled eggs, and he knows what must be done.
* * *
Shortly before my sister boarded the plane for Minnesota, my parents had gathered us around the living room fireplace once more. It was not clear, during this period, if Dad’s melanoma was in remission or what, and I feared, given their somber expressions, that they were going to tell us that Dad’s cancer had indeed metastasized. Instead my father explained, in his quiet, twinkling, academic manner, that a socialist magazine in Minnesota had declared that he was one of the top ten people to kidnap in America. It was an honor, I guess, but not the kind you wanted.
Why anybody would want to kidnap my father is beyond me. Even if you believed that the world would be better off without capitalist stooges, surely there were better people to ransom than Dad. As far as capitalist stooges went, he was more Shemp than Curly. I’m not saying he wasn’t a stooge, but please. He was a long way from Moe.
My guess is that the person who wrote the article hadn’t really done much research. The writer had come up with this story in the same way that I, some years later, would come up with an explanation to a police officer for why I was driving a car wearing the bottom half of a gorilla suit. Dick Boylan was an innovator, to be sure, in the field of financial instruments, and no one would mistake him for Noam Chomsky. But all things considered, if what you wanted was to bring about a more just society, there were all sorts of other people you’d want to murder first.
My father thought the whole thing was funny—not the threat