DH: I’ve secured a copy of Fred Hiltz’s subscriber lists. I’m looking through them for leads on possible infiltrators.

JEH: And you paid him out of the cold funds I supplied you with to rescue Junior.

DH: Yes, Sir. Ten thousand cold and a pound of cocaine.

JEH: His poor sinuses. I shudder to think.

DH: Yes, Sir.

JEH: And you’re still looking for an informant? Preferably a woman?

DH: Yes, Sir.

JEH: And informant number 4361 is pondering referrals?

DH: She is, Sir.

JEH: Aaah, Dwight. Your wistful inflection on the word she speaks puerile volumes.

DH: Some things can’t be disguised, Sir.

JEH: The Klansman’s son and the Quaker pacifist. God himself must marvel at your pillow talk.

DH: It’s lively, Sir.

JEH: Am I ever discussed?

DH: Contentiously, Sir.

JEH: Does it perturb you that she might record your dubious liaison for posterity? Her curriculum vitae lists her as a daily journal keeper. She may well have jotted notes on her suppression-minded lover.

DH: I’ve black-bagged her, Sir. Her notes to date have been laudatory.

JEH: And rightly so, I’m sure.

DH: Thank you, Sir.

JEH: I’m slipping, Dwight. I know it, and I know that you know it. I am a boxer who has been in the ring for a very long time, but I remain dangerous because of and not in spite of it.

DH: I understand that fully, Sir.

JEH: Good day, Dwight.

DH: Good day, Sir.

DOCUMENT INSERT: 8/25/68. Extract from the privately held journal of Karen Sifakis.

Los Angeles,

August 25, 1968

I should be in Chicago. What’s-His-Name is passing through en route to Philadelphia and will be calling me with reports. It’s going to be bad; everyone knows it; everyone knows that Nixon v. Humphrey is no choice at all and that the war will continue regardless of the outcome in November. This entry and any other entries I may write during the convention will be ascribed here in my second journal, the one I hide at school and that Dwight must never see. It’s the names I might record. Mr. Hoover (and Dwight by extension) is file-happy and thinks that everyone in the movement knows everyone else and has thus colluded across a wide spectrum of political activity. Of course, that’s not true. Love affairs-usually brief and passionate and doomed by factional issues-may occur that pervasively, but not prosecutable political conspiracy. Paranoia defines the Right (although Dwight tends to eschew it and occasionally critiques it with sardonic humor) and the Left as well. Everyone knows everyone else and suspects everyone else and needs everyone else as well. Political agendas and personal agendas shift along those lines, which certainly defines the inimical worldviews, collusive agendas and deep comradeship of Dwight and me.

God, Dwight Chalfont Holly and “comrade” in a single sentence!

Chicago is going to be bad. Danny T. and Sid F. have called with advance news. They are Marxist Nixonites in their determination to fuck up Hubert Humphrey and elect the man who will instill greater repression and provide a clearer shot at revolution at some ambiguously perceived later point. Of course, lives will be shattered and lost in the process and only utilitarians like me (and dare I say it, D.H.) understand that purely destructive folly. Dwight can talk me into almost anything if he can convince me that it will divert destruction and death in the moment. Chicago feels like a widely willed moment of sincere outrage and horrible hatred that is politically and spiritually mandated beyond all utilitarian considerations, which is what scares me.

The convention-hall fence is topped with barbed wire and 5,000 riot troops have been flown in, with 5,000 more on call. W.H.N. (who secretly and ghoulishly loves weaponry) said that Maury W. saw boxes of rocket launchers being unloaded at O’Hare. There’s a taxi-cab strike in progress; a large bus drivers’ local stands ready to strike; the IBEW began striking on May 8 and thus telephone service within the city and environs is a complete mess. W.H.N. predicts a radical or radical-aligned (largely fool mischief-makers of the counterculture and fatuous Left) presence of 100,000 people. It is going to be bad because it’s overdue to be bad and the statement needs to be made at a horrible and horribly attention-getting cost, which makes the whole thing all the more complexly deplorable to me.

So I will pray for peace and feel Eleanora grow within me and make love with Dwight, who knows many of the things I do but cannot confront them because the moment of moral explication would drive him insane.

As always, I will marvel in the aftermath of my prayers and ponder how much or how little quantifiable good our odd comrade-ship of conflicting ideology gives to the world. Mutual benefit. It sounds viciously capitalistic, but it is wholly egalitarian within that compromised context.

Dwight needs an informant to work the BTA and MMLF. He’s got me half-convinced that both groups are viciously self-serving, ideologically unsound and destructive. Should I introduce him to Joan?

DOCUMENT INSERT: 8/25/68. Los Angeles Times headline and subhead:

DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION SET TO CONVENE

PROTEST TROUBLE LOOMS IN WINDY CITY

DOCUMENT INSERT: 8/25/68. San Francisco Examiner headline and subhead:

TENSION SIMMERS AS PROTEST YOUTH MOBILIZES

DOCUMENT INSERT: 8/25/68. Telex communiquй. From: Supervisory Unit, St. Louis Office, Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and. Firearms. To: Field Unit #112, all personnel. Topic: Grapevine Tavern surveillance.

Gentlemen,

Grapevine investigation to terminate 9/1/68. Discontinue all surveillance on that date. The U.S. attorney has deemed insufficient grounds to prosecute.

Thomas T. Wiltsie, Agent-in-Charge

(Los Angeles, 8/25/68)

Lists:

Hate-mail subscribers, hate-meeting attendees, hate-cartoon devotees.

Cross-referenced to:

Rap-sheet lists, DMV lists, subversive-group lists.

Cross-referenced to:

The hate lit itself. Sample copies. All hate-the-white-man shit. Negro mailees cross-referenced back to all the fucking lists.

Dwight worked in the drop-front. He built paper piles from Dr. Fred’s stash and carbons from LAPD and the California DMV. Hate, hate, hate. Big paper piles-the Himalayas of Hate.

He’d been at it since his Vegas jaunt. He started with municipal PD intelligence files. He looked for male Negro cops with infiltration experience. He got no names. He went back to the subscriber lists then. He secured paper and culled paper and built shelves to rein paper in. It was a Negro name hunt. Find a male Negro hate bunny. Recruit him, coerce him, or entrap him-and teach him how to re-hate.

The glut of names was engulfing. The hate lit and hate pix supplied yuks. White men had small dicks, black men had big dicks, the dick-size diaspora defined black history. Jew doctors spread sickle-cell anemia. Audrey Hepburn had Jim Brown’s black baby. Lawrence Welk was really black. Count Basic was really white. John Glenn was the world’s first nigger astronaut.

Dwight name-hunted. A to Z and back again. Pebble-in-an-avalanche dreck. U, V, W, X, Y, Z and back to A.