Howie

Howie is 24fps’s paperwork handler, a wary pragmatist whose practical work repeatedly places him behind the camera when the collective’s political world turns dangerous. He helps monitor Frenesi Gates, lights an improvised attempt to film Weed Atman, and records the aftermath of Atman’s killing. His story also exposes the limits of the group’s solidarity: after the collective is shattered, Howie is among its Berkeley survivors, but he is later reported arrested on a cocaine charge involving a drug he has never used.

Identity and Place in 24fps

Howie occupies the administrative and skeptical end of 24fps. In a group divided among dreamers, realists, and members trying to hold the center, he handles the paperwork and stands closer to the practical camp associated with DL and Sledge Poteet than to the sometimes absent idealism of Mirage. His role is not that of a leader; at meetings, other members take on the tasks of calming disputes and keeping the collective together. But his work makes him a recurring witness to the group’s decisions and their consequences.

His pragmatism includes a distrust of the romantic image of California. When Ditzah Pisk and Zipi Pisk contrast the supposed warmth of New York with the West Coast, Howie recalls visiting his sister in New York and finding that looking someone in the eye could earn an abrupt rebuff. The exchange is comic, but it also establishes his distance from the Pisk sisters’ nostalgia: he is willing to puncture their generalizations with an ordinary, personal counterexample.

The sisters’ suspicion of surfers becomes a more direct irritation when the group is in Trasero. Howie admits that he needs a diversion from their surfophobia. At DL’s suggestion, he acquires an old surfboard as a theatrical prop and begins visiting Rex Snuvvle’s house at least once a day, ostensibly to keep watch on Frenesi Gates. The disguise makes his surveillance look casual, but it also puts him in the room where the collective’s suspicions about Weed Atman become personal and irreversible.

Watching Frenesi Gates and Weed Atman

Howie’s watch over Frenesi Gates yields no immediate confrontation. She notices, or at least does not visibly react to, his visits. One evening, after dozing in a bedroom during a rerun of The Invaders, he wakes to voices from the living room and finds Frenesi Gates and Rex Snuvvle sitting close together, their faces flushed and their eyes wet. Their laughter has woken him; the intimacy between them is already apparent before anyone explains it.

Frenesi Gates tells Howie that Weed Atman is an FBI informant, assigned to lead the group astray, and says that Atman himself disclosed this. Howie does not simply accept the accusation as sufficient proof. He suggests that, if Atman really admitted to working for the FBI, the matter should be brought before a meeting of the collective. Rex Snuvvle rejects that procedural response with urgency, insisting that the group is being broken up and that Atman has always been spying for the authorities. Frenesi Gates is furious at Howie’s suggestion. In this exchange, his instinct to refer an accusation to the group’s shared process collides with the others’ conviction that there is no time left for deliberation.

The argument leaves Howie visibly shaken. The account describes his mouth going dry as he realizes that Rex Snuvvle and Frenesi Gates are not joking. When he turns on the television and stands in front of it, the gesture reads as a retreat from the confrontation into the distraction of the screen. Rex Snuvvle calls him clever, but the praise does not mean that Howie has become a willing participant in the plan taking shape around him.

The Camera and Atman’s Death

Frenesi Gates soon asks Howie to help set up lights so she can film Weed Atman. She wants to put a microphone in front of him and record his account; Howie asks what she has in mind, then warns that taking a person’s image on film is like taking his soul. Rex Snuvvle counters that Atman’s soul has already been taken. The exchange gives Howie’s camera work a moral dimension: he is not only handling equipment but voicing a fear about what filming does to the person being filmed.

At Rex Snuvvle’s house, the collective makes repeated attempts to record Atman. Frenesi Gates urges him to describe what happened, and Howie switches the lights on as she begins filming. Atman seems about to speak, then changes his mind, so Howie turns the lights off. This pattern repeats. His work is practical and responsive, but the stop-start recording also registers the strain of trying to turn a contested, frightening event into a coherent on-camera account.

When Jinx arrives with Penny and Moe, the room’s balance changes. Later, Rex Snuvvle returns with Weed Atman, and Jinx hurriedly takes the children outside. Rex Snuvvle is trembling, carrying a shoulder bag with a heavy object inside, while Atman stands between him and the others. The lights are on and two cameras are recording: Ditzah Pisk operates an old Auricon, while Howie has the Scoopic. Rex Snuvvle demands that Frenesi Gates tell Atman they know everything. The cameras capture the recognition dawning on Atman’s face, an expression the group will later watch in a makeshift screening at Ditzah Pisk’s house.

In the ensuing confusion, Howie changes film reels. The delay costs him the fatal instant: he goes outside with a light, but loses the moment while trying to open the lens. Sledge Poteet is close to the action, and the gunshot is captured on Krishna’s sound recording. When Howie reaches the scene, Atman is lying face down in blood. Rex Snuvvle poses for the camera and pretends to blow smoke from his P38. The film records Rex Snuvvle in close-up, but Howie’s missed image and the surviving audio make the recording an incomplete witness: the camera preserves the scene around the killing without capturing the decisive act itself.

Filming the Campus Assault

Howie’s camera work continues during the final night of the Rock and Roll Republic. While DL and Zipi Pisk are filming at the campus, Howie is at Rex Snuvvle’s house, helping prepare lights and recharge Frenesi Gates’s camera. When footage of the night is later viewed, it shows helicopters descending, young people dancing to the same radio station, and soldiers in camouflage advancing with their faces blackened. The crew had used its most sensitive available stock, 7242, and opened the lenses fully, sacrificing some of the depth of field Ditzah Pisk wanted.

The lights make the filmmakers visible to the soldiers, who turn their attention toward the lamps. Yet the camera does not retreat; it continues to meet what comes toward it. Howie had anticipated that the lights could draw fire, and Prairie’s later reaction makes the danger plain. His role here differs from the awkward work at Rex Snuvvle’s house: in the campus footage, lighting and recording are part of a deliberate effort to document the assault, even as they expose the crew to it.

Arrest and Narrative Significance

After the dispersal, DL returns to Berkeley with Howie and Sledge Poteet. They realize that they are more or less all that remains of 24fps. DL is in shock, struggling to keep track of who is present and experiencing a persistent ringing in her ears and intermittent blurred vision. Howie’s survival is therefore situated within the wreckage of the collective, not presented as a return to ordinary life.

Later, Mirage reports that Howie has been arrested for cocaine possession, although he has never used cocaine. She attributes the episode to malign influences on his astrological Fifth House, but the concrete news is the discrepancy between the charge and his history. She contacts former members of 24fps after learning of his arrest and discovers that two or three others have also abruptly become unreachable. Howie’s arrest thus joins the story’s pattern of political vulnerability: the man who watched events through a camera and tried to send an accusation back through the collective’s procedures becomes, in turn, someone whose whereabouts are uncertain.

Howie’s recurring position is that of a working witness. He handles forms, keeps watch, manages lights, and changes reels; none of these tasks gives him control over what the camera can ultimately preserve. At Atman’s death, a missed reel change leaves the most consequential instant outside the image. During the campus assault, the camera holds its ground against the soldiers’ attempt to extinguish the lights. Between those scenes, Howie’s warning about the camera taking a person’s soul remains unsettled: film can preserve evidence, but it cannot guarantee either a complete account or safety for the people behind it.