Bernie's Big Secret  

6

 

So if I knew he could draw threats from government officials and he could uncover threatening government secrets, why couldn’t I believe he was target of the FBI? One reason was a faultline of political paranoia I could trace all the way back to the first night I met him, on the night shift at Rincon Annex, the post office hub of the Pacific mail routes. Hippies worked at the post office for the same reason black people did: it was the federal government and it couldn’t discriminate against long hair any more than dark skin.

It was when conversation drifted to Nixon, for whom we shared a loathing, that I got a first glimpse of the depths of Bernie’s political paranoia. We were on adjacent stools sorting mail. We leaned toward each other, shouting in the rhythmic clatter of the huge automated sorting machines all around us.

“Oh, c’mon . . .” I said incredulous of an assertion that Nixon was about to incarcerate the anti-war movement.

“No, it-th twue (it’s true),” he insisted, his eyelids half shut. It was his third day without sleep. “They declayoo an emuhgency (...declare an emergency) and then they wound (round)-up the whole anti-wah (war) movement . . .”

“Congress would never let him,” I countered, placing a letter in a slot in front of me.

His eyes closed and his head slumped forward. Instead of sleeping, he spent his days working full time as an underground journalist, usually sleeping only a few hours every other day. After a couple seconds, he sprang awake.

“Pubwic opinion wiyoh fohth (Public opinion will force) them to.”

He lowered his head toward me, furtively looked from side to side and then up. Rincon Annex had floor space the size of a football field and suspended over it from the high ceiling were enclosed catwalks. They had strategically placed slots covered with dark glass through which the workers below were watched.

He said in a lowered voice, “He aweady hath plan-th dwawn up (…already has plans drawn up).”

“How do you know that?” I asked at normal volume and inserted another letter.

Rather than lift his eyelids, he titled his head back to look at me from under them.

“They can yuth the pwithon camp-th (...use the prison camps) they put the Japaneeth-Amehwicanth in in Wuhld Wah (...Japanese-Americans in in World War)Two.”

“Naw. The public might go along with it, but not the Congress. There are still some decent people in Congress.”

While I was speaking, Bernie stared at a letter in his hand, figured out what it was doing there, and put it in a slot.

“Didn’t you evew notith (ever notice),” he asked, then lowered his voice, “how Nikthon thuwoundth himthelf with Guhmanth (...Nixon surrounds himself with Germans)?”

“What?”

He took a pen from a shirt pocket and wrote on the back of a letter “GERMANS.”

“Guhman thuhname-th (German surnames): Haldeman, Eulekman (Erlichman). That-th a methage to the wuhld (That’s a message to the world). Nothing at that levoo ith cointhidenth (...level is coincidence).”

I thought about that for a moment, and then, when I turned to rebuke him, I saw that he had fallen dead asleep holding a letter in front of a slot.

It was inevitable that Bernie and I would meet. Each on his own homed-in on the easiest job in the building. Payments on oil company credit cards had their very own sorting machines and the sorted envelopes had to be collected. Two people worked all night at something one could do in half a night. We had each maneuvered through the bureaucracy to get ourselves permanently assigned this job.

I occasionally had articles published in the underground press, usually book reviews, and we discovered that we knew some of the same people. I was at the fringes of circles he was at the center of. He had a column in the most popular Bay Area underground newspaper, and in the early sixties, he published the largest radical newsletter on college campuses on the West Coast. He had written or collaborated on several books with radical themes. He knew Jerry Rubin and Abby Hoffman and was himself something of a minor celebrity. Only a few days before I met him, I had read his interview with a well-known, mainstream journalist who had just returned from Hanoi.

But what really cemented our friendship that first night was his sharing of a secret. All of my free time on the job, half a shift, was spent reading in a lavatory stall. Suspended from the coat hook on the inside of the door of a stall was a white cardboard dispenser of paper toilet-seat covers, “ass-gaskets.” I discovered that on the blank backside of many of the dispensers, which were about the size of typing paper, there was a periodical full of dirt on Rincon Annex handwritten by an anonymous representative of the people. As a loyal reader and occasional contributor to “The Ass-Gasket Gazette,” I was thrilled to meet the founder and publisher when Bernie confided, upon my guarantee of not telling anyone, that it was none other than he.