True Believers by Kurt Andersen

Author:Kurt Andersen
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9781588366863
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2012-02-21T22:00:00+00:00

Every morning for the next month, I woke up happy. However, there was nobody with whom I could revel and squeal. I had girlfriends, but since I’d never revealed to anyone the extent of my crush, I couldn’t reveal the full extent of my delight. After all, it was just another night out with Chuck Levy, on the surface nothing very special. My mother understood it was a big deal, however, and I was secretly grateful for her irritating excitement on my behalf.

Neither Chuck nor I had uttered the D-word, but our first date was the date-iest of my life, before or since. When he picked me up around two in the afternoon, he presented me with a corsage—a parody of a corsage, really, five white daisies, the antiwar flower, bundled together with a pink ribbon and a peace button to pin it to my dress, which I did for my mother to take a Polaroid and then promptly removed.

We could’ve driven into Chicago in an hour, but instead, we drove to his flying club’s hangar.

Chuck had always been mechanically fluent—he’d used a power saw to build a tree house in sixth grade, he’d made the silencer for his jazz-club Luger, he’d helped his uncle build a duck-hunting blind, he replaced tubes in his guitar amplifier—but as I sat next to him in his rented Piper Cherokee, I was in awe of his competence. He wasn’t playing a character on a mission when he said, “Magnetos, check,” or that he was flying at “sixty knots.” He was actually piloting an airplane. As he talked on the radio (“Affirmative, taxi four, Piper seven three niner”) and stepped on the rudder pedals and steered and throttled and checked all those dials, he was completely adult, a man.

We flew to Miegs Field, the tiny downtown airport on an island in Lake Michigan, aiming for the planetarium dome as we landed. It was a five-minute walk to Shedd Aquarium, our first stop because, Chuck said, I’d wanted to go there four years ago on the evening of our last, best, scariest Bond mission. As we strolled between the sharks and the otters, Chuck took my hand in his, and I jumped as if I’d gotten an electric shock, which made him smile.

Holding hands with Chuck Levy. Chuck Levy acting like my boyfriend. Chuck Levy was my boyfriend.

We went to a movie, the Bond parody Casino Royale, with Peter Sellers and Woody Allen; we went to a comedy show at Second City on North Wells Street; and I had my first dinner ever at a Mexican restaurant, where they didn’t card us when we ordered Pabst Blue Ribbons. As we wandered the miles back toward Miegs Field though Old Town, pretending not to stare at the hippies, he put his arm around my waist. I made us stop twice to buy Cokes and go to the bathroom.

Near the end of our walk, Chuck stopped, took a box of stick matches from the pocket of his

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