Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [5]
Yesterday Andy Warhol was shot in his New York office, today Robert Kennedy in an LA. hotel lounge just as he was finishing his victory speech after winning the California primary. And just two months ago, almost to the day, Martin Luther King, a far better man than either of the other two, was murdered in Memphis by a hired assassin who still eludes the FBI. Who next? What next? Andy and I were sitting in the den about half past midnight browsing a state college catalog when her mother shouted from the bedroom, “Andy! Come quickly! Bobby Kennedy's been shot!” We ran down the hall to sit dazedly watching the strange milling mélange on the screen, nervous confused newscasters their voices breaking as they interviewed witnesses most of whom had differing stories, cameras blurring in and out of focus again and again, pandemonium, a harried cop shouting for everyone to clear the room but breaking off in mid-sentence as he saw a CBS man two feet away holding his microphone out to a witness, muddy charcoal semidarkness on the screen as they doused the lights in the lounge in an unsuccessful attempt to clear it, hearing an account later of the tense moments right after the shooting when photographers and reporters and bystanders crowded in so close over Kennedy and the two other wounded individuals that the senator (prone on the floor with blood all over his face, hands, and hips) finally had to cry out for some air, his mob was suffocating him… saw the would-be assassin dragged out surrounded by a tough contingent of a couple dozen cops pushing through the crowd, their captive barely glimpsed between trunks of cops as he hung half-limp yet his muscles tightened trying to roll himself almost into a fetal ball with arms defensively over the crown of his head… another supposed assassin got away… Andy was sobbing. Her mother clucked about “This country, I don’t know…” and said to Paul: “Paul, let's move to Australia.” Andy declared fiercely through her tears: “I’ll bet it was one of those McCarthyites!” She is, predictably, a fanatical Kennedy supporter. I’m for McCarthy. Earlier in the evening, she had been crying, “nearly distraught” as she herself put it at the prospect, which seemed quite likely then according to network projections, of Kennedy's defeat. I watched the TV coverage of the immediate aftermath of his shooting with my jaw hanging, stupefied and shocked in the same way I’d been those interminable leagues of moments that I sat in the Angels’ living room watching the progress of their gang rape.The data on the TV began to repeat itself: no new developments. I said good night to Andy and drove to Valley Liquor to pick up some Ezerase typing paper for the philosophy paper I’d planned to write on this all-night speed session. As I paid for it I casually said to the clerk, “Dja hear the news about Bobby Kennedy?” and he said, passing time of day with customer, “Yeah… they’re gonna hafta stop doing those things.”
Andy called me to report through tears that Senator Kennedy was still on the operating table, seven hours since the shooting, she says they got him through the shoulder, neck, and one big corner clipped off the skull behind an ear, three bullets through the smiling young presidential hopeful, and she has sat all night in front of the TV speeding and crying, while I’ve sat puffing panting with the sustained sex joy of plumbing this my Mainline, jugular vein of memories, convictions of the head and reachings-out of heart all years for some crystalline totality, and this is it, I can’t cry this morning, even though America is disintegrating with a rapidity that's even shocking some of the dissidents, with an immutable beam-cracking ruination exceeding the wildest projections of those wooly insurgents America internalized from Tom Paine Franklin and the rest, as I feel the total tornado of the cosmos whirling ‘round me “like a Jacuzzi Whirlpool Bath,” as all the Gross-mont Junior College speakers used to say muckraking at tournaments until poor wop