Fiction | May 02, 2025

Enemy of the Good 

Drew Calvert

My favorite communist ever was this Airbnb host named Reg, a short, furry, retired professor of sociology. By communist I mean party member—Reg was a dues-paying officer for the Takoma Park, Maryland branch of the CPUSA, and I believe he still is, though I haven’t checked the website for a breakdown of the org chart. Reginald Beam: a terrific name. I savored his online profile. He’d written a book called Weathermen: Igniting the Contradictions back in 1984, and he’d taught Marx at U of M for twenty-nine years. I would estimate he was 5’5’’. Full beard. The whole deal. 

I met him in 2016, the year I returned from the Peace Corps. Having scheduled a murder of interviews with consultancies and think tanks in the DC metro area, where I hoped to launch an exciting career, I needed a cheap place to stay, and Reg’s house in Takoma Park was a short walk from the metro station that linked his burb to the capital. I stayed for a week and loved it. I am very fond of eccentrics. I’d hardly dropped my duffel bag in the cramped, booklined guest room, where a welcome snack of granola bars and sweet apples awaited me, before Reg and his wife, Janis, who was pushing 5’9’’, began peppering me with tales of their youth. Janis had been a Goldwater Republican long ago, I learned. Reg had been an Eagle Scout. There was no money for college, so he’d joined the Merchant Marines, but his friend Spud invited him to an LSD party on the eve of graduation and he found himself expelled before noon the following day. It was all for the best, apparently. He spent the early Seventies in a state of ill repute before returning to school and feathering his nest in academia. This was a nice coincidence, for my father, too, had experimented with acid during his college years, as he’d told me over fillets on my eighteenth birthday. Crucially, he was never caught. He earned his degree in marketing, then worked as an oil trader for a lucrative twenty-five years, which meant that I attended schools in Lagos, Doha, and Bartlesville. I wrote about my childhood and expansive worldview in a somber personal essay that I sent to Middlebury College, where the drug of choice was Adderall, and upon my own graduation I flew eastward to Cambodia, where I spent two years instructing at a primary school in Siem Reap and touring Southeast Asia, where the drugs of choice were ecstasy, mushrooms, opium, and benzos. When my father suggested an internship with an oil company—he had friends—I demurred. Oil was not for me. I wanted wealth and power, of course, but I wanted the liberal version, where you lounge in Adirondack chairs at the edge of Martha’s Vineyard with a craft ale and boat shoes and a grin as if from flatulence as your poetry-quoting, service-minded, gluten-free children help unsnarl each other’s fishing lines. I wanted to brunch with Fellows at the Council on Foreign Relations.