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EXT. LAKE VILLA - MARCH 23RD, 1968
The first time Tom Hayden meets Abbie Hoffman is at the Mobe conference in Lake Villa. It's a small, carefully organized affair—invite only—focused on coalition-building.
He's looking for the local Mobe people to sort out an issue with an overbooked cabin, and he finds them, unfortunately, smoking a joint with Abbie and Jerry Rubin at the sign-in table set up outside the main hall. Abbie's using the table as a footrest, beaded vest open across his chest. Tom recognizes him from photos in the newspaper—the hair, the wide grin.
Him and Jerry—Tom can't help but resent them, a little, for the way they bring into focus the drabness of it all. The Yippies are escapees from the banal day-to-day of serious activism, the meeting notes and subcommittees. Amidst the Manila folders and linoleum, Abbie is glowing; Abbie is alive.
"This is a conference, not a Jefferson Airplane concert," Tom says.
Jerry squints up at him through his sunglasses. "That's not our fault, is it? I bet you didn't even invite them. I can give you Grace's number."
Tom rubs his temples to stave off an oncoming headache. "I really, honestly don't have time for this."
"You're Tom Hayden, aren't you?" Jerry says. "I thought you'd be taller." He turns to Abbie, says, "I thought he'd be taller."
Abbie shrugs, holds out the joint in Tom's direction.
Tom doesn't take it. He throws up his hands and lets Rennie deal with the situation.
EXT. CHICAGO - AUGUST 17TH, 1968
Abbie's putting up flyers outside the community center when Tom arrives for the meeting. He looks the part—long hair, headband, close-fitting tie dye t-shirt. A motley collection of Yippie hangers-on have spilled into the street, making Hyde Park feel more like the middle of Haight-Ashbury.
"Hayden," Abbie says, by way of hello, and barely spares him a glance.
Tom aims a tight smile in his general direction, and nearly makes it past without further incident, until Abbie takes another look at him.
"Hey," Abbie calls, "wait up. No one's gonna listen to you if you go in there looking like that. C'mere."
Tom sighs. "What do you want?"
"Hold these for a sec, will ya?" he says. Tom takes what's shoved at him out of reflex and finds himself with a stack of posters and an unlatched stapler, inches from the person he'd been least looking forward to seeing tonight.
"This isn't your usual crowd, Tom," Abbie says, undoing the top button of Tom's shirt, and subsequently several more, with the general demeanor of a mom wiping dirt off her child's face before a family photo. "These are my people. Dropouts, not students. If you want them to listen to you, you gotta—well, you gotta have a sense of humor, but we all know that's a lost cause. Failing that, the least you could do is make a bit of an effort to fit in."
Despite himself, Tom's gaze slips down to Abbie's hands at his shirt, the newly-bared skin of his chest, up to Abbie's face—Abbie's looking down, of course, so they don't make eye contact—then off to the inoffensive middle distance.
"Style over substance," he says. "Got it. I'll make sure to dumb everything down for the three people in there who aren't too stoned for it to possibly make a difference."
Abbie unwinds a string of beads from around his neck and drapes it over Tom's, then steps back to look him up and down. He shrugs. "Let the record show I tried my best. Can I have my stapler back?"
"Always a pleasure, Abbie," Tom says.
Abbie raises his eyebrows. "I'm sorry, you're right. That was terribly rude," he says. "Next time I try to undress you in public I'll buy you a drink first." He winks ostentatiously.
Tom does up just one shirt button again before he goes inside. Never let it be said that he doesn't know how to compromise.
INT. CONSPIRACY OFFICE MEETING ROOM - JANUARY 22ND, 1970
Tom, as per usual, is working on witness prep.
There isn't a great place to work in the apartment he and Rennie are subletting, just a cramped kitchen table that's shared with two other residents, so he's made a habit of staying at the conspiracy office late into the night—he crashes here so often he should probably stop paying rent at the other place.
Unfortunately, this means he sees a lot of Abbie. Unlike Tom, he doesn't seem to have any legitimate reason for spending a lot of time at the office aside from furthering his grand project of being a general nuisance. There are any number of dive bars and open mic nights at which he could almost certainly find a much more receptive audience for testing out new standup material, but instead he hangs around smoking up their legal counsel, making asinine comments, and being a pain in Tom's ass.
Tom follows the same routine almost every day court's in session—after they get the dishes cleared away from dinner, he sets up with a binder full of relevant interview clippings and pores over a copy of the latest notes Bill and Leonard have put together, shirt sleeves rolled up so they don't get stained with pen or newspaper ink.
It's never easy to get things done in the miasma of smoke and patchouli and permanent marker that is the conspiracy office, but his brain is particularly foggy today. It's Bernardine's day off, which leaves him in charge of the phone, and it takes longer and longer to regain his concentration every time he gets interrupted. Even the well-meaning interruptions are grating, and he doesn't even bother answering when Jerry Rubin pokes his head into the room to earnestly tell him he should take a break.
Abbie, of course, makes everything worse. As everyone else filters out of the office to go their separate ways, he remains. He's settled in on the bench at the far end of the room, legs folded under him, writing in a notebook and humming tunelessly to himself.
"Do you mind?" Tom says eventually, pointed.
Abbie looks up. "You're in luck," he says. "I was just thinking about leaving."
He does actually close his notebook and stand up, but he pauses before collecting the rest of his things, looking thoughtfully over the mess of papers Tom's spread across the table.
All Tom really has to show for four hours of work is a single page of mostly scratched out notes and discarded ideas. They're nearing the end of their list of witnesses, and it's hard to feel like they're not just putting off the inevitable, but the chance that there's some brilliant line of questioning they've all overlooked that will prove their good intentions so conclusively that even the feds can't keep up the charade—well, it's slim, but it's not zero. It keeps him up at night.
This is his way of handling the stress and despair—the rest of them, they have their own ways of coping, some nastier than others.
"They don't teach people how to use pencils in the SDS?" Abbie says. "Thought you guys were an intellectual crowd. They have this really handy thing on the other end called an eraser."
"Weren't you leaving?"
"Explain to me again why we bothered hiring a team of first-string civil rights lawyers if you're just going to scribble all over their work?"
Tom would like nothing more than to tune him out, but the ink on the typewritten pages in front of him doesn't even look like words anymore, just shapes on the page. God, he's tired. "You know what, Abbie? Being around you makes it really hard to write about the value of nonviolence. I think Dave might have had the right idea—only punch people in the face when they really have it coming."
"Well just hit me, then, if it'd make you feel better," Abbie says. "I mean, don't rough me up too hard, but I can't imagine you'll do more damage than the Chicago Police on a good day."
"Seriously?"
"C'mon," Abbie says. "If I'm that much of a distraction you're not in the right headspace to work on those briefings anyway. If a busted lip is the price to pay to present a unified front to dear old Jules in the morning, then so be it. Wouldn't be the first time I've been a martyr for the movement."
"You really think that's the best way to settle differences within the Left? Petty brawling?"
Abbie considers the question. "Well, second best, anyway." He gives Tom a significant look.
Tom puts down his pen. "Is this your typical 'love conquers all, let's all have orgies in the town square' schtick, or are you suggesting you and I have sex?"
"Well, only if you're interested."
I'm not, Tom means to say. He says, "I'll take it under advisement."
"That's a fuckin' cop out, man. Fuck me or fight me, Hayden. What's it gonna be?"
"Fine," Tom says. He stands up abruptly, so abruptly that the folding chair he'd been sitting on teeters and threatens to fall backwards before settling back into place. "Fine, we'll try this your way."
He's got Abbie shoved against the wall, back against a spread of creased rally posters, without really having a sense of which option he's chosen. Abbie's laughing, delighted. "Didn't think you knew how to have fun," he says, and Tom kisses him.
It starts out like an argument—little surprise that they can't agree on which way to turn their heads or when to come up for air—but Abbie takes to it with all the casual abandon of someone accustomed to group sex in public parks. Tom is none too gentle with him—why should he be? He's got fistfuls of Abbie's hair in his hands. When he lets his teeth scrape too hard over Abbie's lip, Abbie bites him back.
It starts out like an argument, but it doesn't take long for Tom to lose himself in the heat of Abbie's mouth, the drag of his stubble against Tom's jaw, all the places they're pressed up against each other through their clothes. He thinks this might be the best they've ever managed to communicate with each other. Abbie might be on to something with his hippie bullshit, or maybe it's a contact high, or the sleep deprivation, or the knowledge they might be weeks away from going to jail for a long, long time.
He's probably crazy, but maybe all they need to end the war is get Richard Nixon to make out with Abbie Hoffman in a soft sweater, half a joint away from sober.
He snaps out of it when a poster comes loose from the wall behind Abbie and flutters to the floor like the world's worst paper airplane. He steps back, blinks. "Jesus, you taste like pot," he says. "Fuck."
Abbie grins. "If you like that, you're gonna go absolutely wild for it when my mouth tastes like pot and semen."
"That's the grossest way someone's offered to suck my dick in recent memory."
"Are you saying you aren't interested?"
"Of course not. I've never gotten head from a Brandeis grad before. Can't wait to see what I'm missing out on."
INT. CONSPIRACY OFFICE LIVING ROOM - JANUARY 22ND, 1970
Sucking dick is, in a way, a kind of theatre, so it's unsurprising that Abbie isn't half bad at it. It's all about knowing your audience, and Abbie knows him far too well—all his worst instincts and flawed motivations, his fucking speech patterns, and, apparently, exactly how to drive him out of his fucking mind. Tom hasn't completely lost it yet, but it's a near thing. He's sweating though his shirt; over the hum of the radiator and the sounds of Abbie's mouth on him, he can hear his own ragged breathing.
Abbie's tied his hair back; like Abbie himself, it doesn't react well to attempts to tame it. He looks like an overgrown topiary, curls escaping in every direction, but it strangely doesn't detract at all from the visual of him on his knees in front of the couch, dimly lit by the light filtering in from the makeshift conference room across the hall. The shadows on his face shift and change as his head bobs on Tom's dick; true to form, he's the most interesting thing to look at in the room, and he didn't even have to dress up for the occasion.
Also true to form, Abbie loves to talk in situations where shutting the fuck up would really be most expedient to the objective at hand. At least he's tactful enough to make conversation that doesn't involve exactly how hard Tom was before Abbie even got his slacks unzipped. Tom's going to need to process that at some unspecified future date, and he isn't looking forward to it.
Instead, Abbie says stuff like, "If a journalist happened to walk by right now, do you think we'd get a segment on the evening news?" He jerks his head to indicate the window as his hand keeps up a steady rhythm on Tom's dick. "Bizzah new developments surrounding the Chicago conspiracy trial." He'd have a passable Walter Cronkite impression if Walter Cronkite had been born and raised in suburban Greater Boston.
"That's your kink, not mine," Tom says, nearly chokes as Abbie drags his lips over the wet head of his dick without breaking eye contact. It's always put him off-balance, how fast Abbie can switch between joking and deadly serious, but Abbie breaks character almost immediately, eyes crinkling up as he huffs out a laugh against sensitive skin that has the side effect of making Tom feel like he's just gotten a mild shock from an electrical outlet.
"Nah, that doesn't really do it for me anymore. Probably wouldn't make CBS, anyway. Maybe some photos in the National Enquirer. Nothing my mother would find out about."
After that, Abbie shuts up for a while, mercifully.
It's good—God, it's good. Tom's been too busy, too exhausted to even think about masturbation most days, let alone sex, and his body knows it's been deprived, overreacts to every sensation. He has his manners, doesn't let his hips rock up to meet Abbie's mouth, but he can't stop thinking about it—about seeing Abbie gag, hearing him beg, making him come so hard he forgets every clever thing he's ever thought of saying.
He doesn't realize exactly how close he is until Abbie pulls away again, but it hits him all at once, the sudden loss of inertia, feels it in his balls and the pit of his stomach.
"You're awfully quiet for a guy getting a blow job," Abbie says, casual, like he didn't just yank Tom bodily away from orgasm. "Talk dirty to me, Hayden. It's a new decade—what are your hopes for American democracy in the 1970s?"
"Fuck," Tom says, and this time he does buck up into Abbie's grasp, helpless to stop himself. "Fuck off."
"I'm serious, that shit really does it for me. Come on, not a single opinion about how to organize around the upcoming midterms?"
"Abbie," Tom says, and it comes out hoarse and strained, "For once, can you— please—"
"Well, since you asked so nicely," Abbie says. "Go rough on me this time. And come in my mouth, if you want."
God help him, Tom does. He just—lets go, loses himself in the rush of taking exactly what he fucking wants to. The first time he fucks up into Abbie's mouth, Abbie makes an approving noise, a sort of "mhmm" or "uh-huh" muffled by Tom's dick. The second time, Abbie gags.
It's like a fucking religious experience. He was angry at Abbie, earlier, is pretty sure he still is, but he can't sort out frustration from desire in his brain anymore. Maybe the line between the two was never that strong in the first place. This—this is exactly what he needed. He's sure conjuring up this memory will get him zen-like through the next hundred pissing contests, will get him through fucking prison, if it has to.
Abbie doesn't let up, even as Tom gags him with his dick for a second and a third time. He's playing it up, probably, but it's still spectacularly, desperately hot.
Orgasm doesn't sneak up on Tom this time—he chases it with his whole body, with reckless abandon. He still doesn't manage much of a warning, though, can't get the words out without embarrassing himself. "Abbie, I—" he starts, and it's breathy, drawn out. He tries again. "I'm—ah, ah shit—"
He's cognizant, as he's coming, that Abbie's letting him do it, feels him choke and swallow. He pulls off after Tom's mostly finished shuddering through the aftershocks, raises his eyebrows at Tom like he's just won a dare.
"Fuck," Tom says. "Holy shit." He tucks himself back into his briefs, does up his zipper, buckles his belt. "Were you actually into that, or do you just like playing mind games?"
"Baby," Abbie says, throaty, and Tom winces, "there's only one way to find out." He looks like the cat that got the canary, the smear of come shining on his bottom lip as incriminating as a yellow feather hanging out of Sylvester's mouth.
Tom tugs him up by the front of his sweater and kisses him.
"Told ya," Abbie says, grins. "Can't go wrong with pot and—" Tom palms him through his jeans, and he cuts off on a groan, shuts his eyes.
"Oh," Tom says. "Not just mind games, then."
"You—you always care so much about being in control," Abbie breathes. It always raises Tom's hackles, the fucking psychoanalysis, but it hits different when he's got a hand curled around Abbie's hard dick through a layer of denim, when Abbie is grinding up against it like he needs to to live. "You have no idea how fucking hot it was to watch you lose it."
It's easy to jerk Abbie off, once Tom gets him out of his jeans, and somehow more intimate even than having his dick in Abbie's mouth. Unlike Tom, Abbie's unselfconscious during sex, has none of Tom's hang-ups. Tom becomes obsessed with the noises he's getting out of him, the way he falls apart against him.
It's been a while since anyone's moaned his name and sounded like they fucking meant it.
When Abbie comes, Tom feels like he's cracked some sort of secret to the universe.
FADE TO BLACK
Peace never lasts, of course. Over the last weeks of the trial, they still get into explosive fights. Tom still says things he regrets, things that make Rennie blink and frown, that make Jerry say things like, "You could try to be nicer to us, you know. We're all on the same side here."
Tom kept the beads, though, the ones Abbie gave him back in '68. He brings them to the trial sometimes, fiddles with them in the pocket of his blazer like a good luck charm, or a rosary.
He never tells Abbie.