My hyper-idealistic political book Radical Middle was published in 2004, and to nearly everyone’s surprise, including mine, it attracted some attention. Suddenly I was being asked to speak at big bookstores and other mainstream venues, and I was on the radio a lot too.
She let me sit with her and hold her hand, but it felt like the hand of a dead person.
I felt way out of my league. I’d been brought up in placid, small-town Minnesota, and still secretly wished I could be back there. On top of that, as a dedicated opponent of capitalism and its materialistic values, I was wedded to the alternative culture. Even after attending law school in my 40s — to sharpen my analytic skills after my first visionary political newsletter went kaput — I remained loyal to what I called “voluntary simplicity” and wary of becoming what I called a “groan-up.”
The year Radical Middle was published, I was living in Washington DC and putting out another visionary political newsletter. It was barely keeping me afloat but taking nearly all my time. I liked to think that that’s why I had no steady girlfriend: I was too poor, too dedicated, too impossibly idealistic. So I was touched as well as alarmed when I began receiving admiring emails from a female who described herself only as “Lauren.” I came to think of her as The Stalker and was quietly proud that I had one. (READ MORE from Mark Satin: My Super-Woke Ideas Helped Kill My Former Girlfriend)
The Stalker’s first email greeted me the night I returned to my office-apartment, alone, after being featured on Kojo Nnamdi’s popular talk radio show in DC. Her email was effusive and weird and I didn’t answer it. Later emails, also unanswered, claimed that she’d attended my talks at the fashionable Politics and Prose Bookstore on upper Connecticut Avenue and at the cavernous downtown Barnes & Noble.
I couldn’t help myself: after her seventh or eighth email I finally responded, asking for her picture, and she directed me to some on an internet site called “The Malakim,” Hebrew for “the angels.” I glowed at that, remembering how I’d felt protected by angels while couch-surfing (and double-bed-surfing) across North America to promote my New Age Politics book in the late 1970s. And her pictures were beyond lovely. She seemed about 18 (if that), with a strong alert face and long flowing hair, and a lean sensual body that reminded me of my first girlfriend’s body, 40 years before. My sexual imagination ran wild.
I tried to be responsible, kept emailing her that I was “way too old” for her, but she wouldn’t listen. When she emailed me that she’d grown up in Iowa (kissing cousin to my long-lost Minnesota), I invited her over at once. Would I pay for a cab? Of course I would, three times over; when can you get here angel?
* * *
As soon as The Stalker arrived, she called me on her mobile phone to come out and pay for her cab — apparently she wasn’t willing to risk that I’d refuse to reimburse her. It was the first time I’d heard her voice, and neither its message nor its tone appealed to me. After I came out to pay the cabbie, my heart dropped even more. She did not look like her pictures. She was at least eight years older than 18, and a bit pudgy, with hair that was shorter than mine. I escorted her to my apartment in a state of shock. We didn’t touch, and we hardly said a word.
Once inside, she sat on my couch, a rickety old thing that a friend no longer wanted, and I fetched her a glass of carrot juice. I placed it on an old Utne Reader on my coffee table, which was a couple of upside-down plastic milk-carton holders that I’d liberated from behind the neighborhood grocery.
Now she was the one that looked shell-shocked. “I thought you’d have, like, a fancier place,” she managed to say. “And this room is so narrow!”
“I am a lifelong advocate of voluntary simplicity!” I gushed. I had yet to sit down. “I wrote a whole book based on that and similar concepts in the 1970s, guess you weren’t born then.”
The Stalker stared at me blankly.
“And look around,” I enthused, waving my arms. “That’s Rothko’s ‘Green and Tangerine on Red’ taped to the wall, it extends your consciousness as far as you’ll let it. And just across the street — you can see it through my window — is the National Zoo. Who could ask for more?”
“You just look so different here than you did at the bookstores, in front of an audience,” she said. “How old are you, anyway?”
“I told you at least twice in my emails, I am ridiculously, unspeakably old. Where do you work, anyway?”
“I work in community theaters here, behind the scenes, set construction, that sort of thing, but I want to break into acting … You’re not more than about 43, are you?”
“I look younger than I am,” I said, sweating now. “I’ve always looked younger ‘cause I’ve never, ever compromised, I’ve always done exactly what I want to … Hey, get up, see where I work.” We walked into my combination bedroom and study. “I write my newsletters here, at this display table of a desk.”
“This is where you work?” she said incredulously, glancing over my banged-up office furniture and modest bed. “I mean — this is where you relate to the world? On the radio they said you’re an attorney.”
“DC Bar number 462790,” I said. “But I’m non-practicing, all I do is write my newsletters. Hey, if you listen closely you can hear the tapirs. They live right behind the zoo fence. When I relate to the world, I commune with them! They sound like humans weeping.”
The Stalker strode back to the living room and plopped down on the couch. I gingerly followed. “Your age, Mr. Satin?” she said.
“I am 67,” I said proudly.
“No you’re not,” she said.
“OK. 57.”
“Come on!”
I showed her my non-driver identification card.
“Oh my God,” she said. “What am I doing in this claustrophobic place with a guy who’s almost 60?”
“You’re exploring the universe,” I told her, seizing the opening. “I’m doing the exact same thing in my own way.”
“I have to go to the bathroom,” she said, cutting me off.
I was hoping that, in spite of everything, she’d warm up to me after she came out. But all she did was inform me that my sink and toilet needed cleaning.
“Right, will do,” I said, concealing my hurt.
“Your parents ever see this place?” she added.
“They never see me!” I said. “I’ve been basically boycotting them ever since they hated me for dodging the draft in Canada during the Vietnam War.”
“Surprise, surprise,” she said.
“Thanks for visiting,” I said, avoiding her eyes. “Can we hold hands on the coach for a while before you go?”
She let me sit with her and hold her hand, but it felt like the hand of a dead person, and after about a minute I gave her $10 for the cab ride home and escorted her to my door. Then I sank back down on the couch and pawed around for her little warm spot, but it wasn’t there. (READ MORE from Mark Satin: The Inner Lives of Socialists)
I felt too foolish to cry. But I did conk out, and when I resurfaced I felt profoundly tired — tired of living in righteous squalor, tired of refusing to reconcile with my parents, tired of preaching hyper-idealistic political fantasies, tired of not having an intimate partner to come home to. It was as if I’d been course-corrected by some angel. At the age of 57, for the first time since Minnesota, I longed to be a groan-up.
Mark Satin is the author of Up From Socialism: My 60-Year Search for a Healing New Radical Politics (Bombardier Books, 2023).
