1970 - 47,768

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In retrospect I probably shouldn't have told the cop to go fuck himself. Events just sort of got out of hand.

We'd been reading about Berzerkley for years. Violence had intensified to the point where the cops were shooting birdshot into the crowd along with their routine doses of tear gas. Week after week the student paper would carry the blows, pictures of wounded students and bystanders. It was ugly.

The particular flare-up might be over the use of an assembly point, or police brutality, or administrative disciplines, or any other number of things but the underlying reason for the disturbance, said or unsaid, was the war. Take the protest over the Chicago 7 verdict: The 7 were on trial for inciting a riot at the Democratic convention. A riot that was protesting U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia and the Democrats' inability to nominate a candidate who would forcibly oppose the policy. It was a crazy trial alright but that wasn't enough to cause the furor it did. It was the war. If the Chicago 7 had been Young Republicans who had been arrested protesting free love by parading down Chicago's main streets wearing nothing except panties on their heads, none of us would have given a damn about the outcome of any trial.

Other campuses had gone off but no one expected any trouble from the direction of Santa Barbara. UCSB was a party school. It sat on the beach and so did its students. But youth carries blasting caps in their pants and age strikes at its own peril. We had all participated in the student moratorium at the end of '69 but that was easy. Most of the profs were in on it so nothing that was going to effect a grade was going to be missed. Some of the faculty were the most articulate opponents of the war.

One vocal opponent was a young anthropology professor. Despite, or perhaps because of, his popularity with the students, he had been fired. The prof claimed that his lectures on U.S. imperialism toward Latin America threatened the status quo and the administration, being part of the status quo, was likewise intimidated, so they forced his dismissal. It wasn't hard to see a parallel between Latin America and Southeast Asia. Both areas contained third world people of color, indigenous populations being slaughtered by a military culture supported by the U.S. government and a wealthy ruling elite likewise supported by U.S. business interests. Later, the School of the Americas would be directly implicated with the death squads educating their populations to the uses of torture.

During a rally for the prof held by the bell tower I narrowly missed being arrested. I should have known better than to put my body close to a potential clubbing. When I saw someone push towards the line of cops I should have taken off in the other direction but for some reason I was in the mood for a little excitement and incitement. Someone was yelling, "Sit down and cover! Sit down and cover your head!" I didn't take the command and remained ready to run but unbeknownst to me the kids behind me sat down. The cops lunge forward and pick off a couple of students who they arrest. Most of the rest of the agitators at the rally disperse in a frenzy but since I was several rows of students away from the nearest cop, I let everyone run by me. I've always been quick on my feet so I was confident if I had a jump on a cop pounding after me in hard shoes and lugging his cop gear, I could outrun him. Never wear sandals to a riot. So what happens? I finally did turn and begin to run and I fall over the students who had taken the order to sit down literally and who had sat down behind me. This not only scared the shit out of me because I thought I'd lost the couple of steps I was counting on, but the physical contact also frightened the two I tripped over. We all scrambled to our feet, elbowing and kneeing each other in the process, and took off running like three dogs dragging tin cans tied to their tails.

I headed for the administration building but it was not as an act of protest. During a previous campus disturbance I'd been through the halls of the administration after students had taken over the building. For sheer boredom few excursions could match it. The doors to the individual offices were locked so students were sprawled across the first floor or milling around the open spaces on the first floor or sitting in the stairwells. Someone yelled, "Let's burn the records." Someone else yelled, "Only if we start at the end of the alphabet. I want mine to go first." Someone moved to cut the electricity. "What about the bathrooms? I'm not going to pee in the dark, not without a nitelite." So the dialogue went. I wandered back out of the building as did most of the occupants when they got hungry.

On this day I was planning on occupying the administration alright but only for an hour or two and I wasn't going to raise any protest except the normal ones between employee and employer. I had a job that paid me a little extra money. The job wasn't full- time but it was very convenient. It was on campus in the administration building running the duplicating machines. The copy room was squeezed into the building as an afterthought and the placement was on the upper floor between administrators' offices.

And I needed the money.

The rent had been raised on our cramped apartment in Isla Vista again and we were pissed off but also captive. Isla Vista, like the name implies is an area quarantined from the rest of Santa Barbara. It is a square mile student ghetto. The upstanding members of the community never come in contact with the population of I.V. unless they are taking their out-of-town guests on a tour of the I.V. zoo, "Oh, look there's one eating and if we wait here long enough maybe his little friend will join him." I.V. was self- contained. It had everything anyone needed for cultural and personal enlightenment; movie theater, music store, and cheap food. Independence was a necessity because the rest of Santa Barbara was in a different zip and more importantly, a different tax bracket. Dorm rooms were at a premium and a place in Santa Barbara proper was invariably too far away to make an 8:00 morning class without getting up at an indecent hour and too expensive for dear old dad even if a place that would rent to students could be found. The Isla Vista landlords were civic-minded men. As good members of the community they wanted to keep property values inflated. Since they had no real desire to make capital improvements, they did the next best thing, they raised our rent. It was not uncommon for rent to go up two times a year, once at the end of each 6-month lease. It might have been less costly for us if our landlords did not pursue their civic duties with such zeal.

Remnants of a memo canceling Jerry Rubin's speaking engagement were in the copy room. "They couldn't be any more inept," I said aloud. It was just enough lightweight control to create what it desired to avert. Jerry Rubin was one of the aforementioned Chicago 7. The administration feared a rally that drew hordes of students and then snowballed into a demonstration that spilled into the streets around the campus. Since Rubin had been convicted of inciting a riot, it didn't make a lot of sense to invite John Brown onto the plantation. The right wing conservative students, calling themselves moderates, allied with the regents and called Rubin a clown and a self-promoter. Santa Barbara is a long way from Chicago they said. Those arguments, whether sound or not, like almost everything else they said, fell on deaf ears. Rubin was a rallying point if he was allowed to speak but he was a bigger rallying point if he was not allowed to speak. Even those of us who went to assemblies to watch the girls were peeved after it was canceled. Irritated because we missed an opportunity to socialize and doubly irritated because we wondered what he could say that might be so threatening. The chemicals weren't yet dry on the Administration's announcement before SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) was circulating flyers decrying the repression and the blatant suppression of Rubin's free speech rights. I think they were irked because they considered getting Rubin to stop in Santa Barbara somewhat of an underground coup, a recognition that UCSB radicalism had come of age. And then the administration had taken away their hall pass by not allowing him to speak.

"Hey, Clemente," I recognized one of my acquaintances walking down the hall outside my workroom. He was a history grad student who came from Mexico and was studying to be a teacher. "What are you doing wandering around the admission's building? Trying to change your grades?"

"I was visiting the financial aid office."

I handed him one of the memos. "What do you think of this?"

He read the paper with his sad timeless eyes and shrugged. Since he always had sad timeless eyes and frequently shrugged that wasn't much to go on and I pressed him further, "I would have liked to have heard Rubin speak. How much more oppressive can the administration get?"

There was a wry grin behind his words, "This is nada. In my country, 200 students were killed facing the military police in 1968."

I knew of the event but that was Mexico.

Clemente had more to say, "They're just turning off the loudspeakers. They're not using surgery to slice open his throat and take out his voicebox. His wife will speak."

Since he knew Rubin's wife was going to replace him as a speaker, he was obviously current with the event. I had no further insights but I wanted to comment so by way of a question I continued, "You don't think those in power in the U.S. are as ruthless as those in power in Mexico?"

"People in power are all the same. Power breeds ruthlessness. The political base in Mexico is very small. It is an elite. The elite were not firing on their sons and daughters. Their children were safe away at foreign schools. It is different here." He left me to finish up my work.

The first of the ensuing I.V. riots caught me sleeping. I was napping late in the evening over a textbook when the bank windows got smashed. The sirens from the cop cars brought me, along with many of the other apartment dwellers, outside to see what the commotion was about. The chatter in the crowd placed the blame on the pigs. Supposedly, the cops had beat someone senseless and he had been rescued by some passerbys. Though no one I spoke with had actually seen it, I found everything but the rescue to be entirely credible. The I.V. officers had a history of hassling residents. Right outside my apartment the previous year I'd seen a guy thrown up against the trunk of a patrol car and then shoved into the backseat with no care taken about the delicate metal door frame coming in contact with the guy's head. The antagonist depended on your point of view but once violence was initiated, it escalated. The initial incident brought out the curious and the provocateurs, the cops had to respond to the crowd which brought a larger crowd and greater belligerence from the cops. Out came the rocks, then out came the riot gear. Orders were given to disperse and this produced a failure to follow orders which brought out the tear gas. Tear gas fueled the worst instincts of the mob. By midnight the whole course had been run and I'd been chased up and down the pavement with the rest of the troublemakers. I headed home, like a lot of the rabble, because I was tired. Revolution is exhausting work.

It's nice to live within walking distance of a riot. Not only when you're sleepy but also if you want a bite to eat or to relieve yourself. Convenience brought out the best in my commitment to the cause.

"The pigs have got my apartment blocked off." We had been dormies together. "They won't let any of us in. You mind if we crash at your place?" I invited them in. I could have said no. I got the feeling he hadn't sought me out in particular, I happen to wander by. He had acquired a girlfriend since he had been my roommate. She was uncomfortably quiet. He did all the talking, she did all the whispering. And only to him. Dialogue crept out of her like thin strands of smoke floating only into his ear. He spoke to me, I answered, and as long as I wasn't looking at her, more words might drift into his ear. The whole thing left me very disquieted. I felt like I was a convicted rapist or something. Unless she was fanatically Catholic, thinking wasn't the same as doing, so I felt wrongly imprisoned. Maybe she was a nice girl with some lovely attributes but after a little of this kind of conversation I didn't care. I said goodnight and went up to my room.

The next day I had a morning class and I rolled out of bed still somewhat buzzed from the excitement of the night before. My two guests were gone. I grabbed an apple and banana and left for the campus. That afternoon Kunstler, a movement lawyer who was prominent during the Chicago 7 trial, had spoken on campus but I had missed him. The copier had jammed up and I had taken it apart trying to clear it and then couldn't get it back together. I'd managed to squander 3 hours and still hadn't gotten the damn thing to work. Fortunately, one of the janitors heard me swearing and poked his head in the door. Ten to fifteen minutes later, he closed up the panel and it was fixed. I thanked him profusely as he left me alone in the room. He didn't say it but it was there in his eyes, "stupid college boy". I nursed the machine through the remaining pile of important debris.

Voices were coming through the walls. Caught between the Chancellor's office and the Dean of Student's office, my work location afforded me an opportunity to eavesdrop if I turned off all the machines and found a suitably thin place along the wall through which the sound traveled. The thought had never occurred to me before that afternoon. Reams of paper greeted me each time I stepped through the door and I had to work swiftly to finish all of the tasks of collating, stapling, hole-punching, mimeo-graphing, copying, and digging for tests and confidential school news in the bits of paper scattered around the small office. That afternoon the clamor was difficult to ignore, try as I might. Over the clatter of the stapler I heard the voices.

"We've got kids shaking the light standards on the quad." The voice was clearly upset. The tone was bouncing octaves, syllables squealing up out of the excitement. "That's a potentially dangerous situation. If the wires become exposed, we're gonna have electrocutions, fires, who the hell knows what."

"Someone's going to get hurt."

"What is it that they want?"

"They want us to end the war."

"Maybe if we talk to them."

"Maybe if we send them to bed without dinner. Or maybe if we let them borrow the car tonight, they'll be good boys and girls and go home." There was an edge to his voice that was not apparent in the others. "Gentlemen, these people are acting like common criminals. They should be treated like criminals."

"They're students, Sheriff, not criminals."

"They're spoiled brats. Has even a one of 'em ever worked a day in his life?" The voice was of a different timbre with the same message. Evidently, there were at least two tongues in the room with martial intent.

"They're Communist dupes. Twenty-five percent have a direct link to Moscow." It was an authoritative exhortation meant to dominate all other arguments.

"When the children of privilege decline that privilege, society is at risk." Spoken like a professor and it kind of warmed my heart.

"So let them run amuck?" I wasn't in the room but I knew that the Sheriff was hearing more argument than he was willing to holster. Cops in those days were working class stiffs. They didn't need college. They were big and mean and that was enough. In one of the phone booths on campus among the rest of the graffiti there was this dark penciled line just below eye level and inscribed on it was: "If you can pee above this line the SBPD wants you." That pretty much summed up the qualifications for being a cop. "Are we suppose to close our eyes and hope it all stops?" the officer of the law continued.

"The Chief's point is well-taken. It sets a dangerous precedent to let them impact the operation of the institution. They are showing contempt for academia and academic freedom. We may sympathize with the students. We may support their positions. But we all know the only viewpoint they're willing to consider is their own. They show a disregard for the rigors of intellectual life. Our credibility is at risk, the institution's credibility is at risk. We should not be intimidated. I suggest we deal with them firmly." It was an accent I recognized but could not associate with a face.

"What then are you suggesting?"

"Police presence."

"Step up patrols by our Uni cops?"

"Your Uni cops are nothing but tin soldiers. Let us handle it. We'll bring in our city officers and the Sheriff's deputies. We'll stop trouble before it starts, overwhelm them with force. I'll put a call into Ventura and get some backup."

There was a pause broken by the professor, "I don't know, it seems like we're escalating the problem here."

Another person was quick to counter, "If that's the case and it proves ineffective, we can always pull back."

"The Governor is not giving me much choice." Up till then I hadn't heard from the Chancellor. "I'm caught in a squeeze tighter than a groom just married to a 500 pound virgin. If I don't quell this disturbance the governor will come down hard on me, make no mistake about it. He's made it very clear by his action in San Francisco. I'm hearing the same message from alumni and major contributors. They don't want our campus to look like Columbia or the ones up north. I wish this whole matter would go away. We have an academic agenda to maintain and I hate to see us wasting our time and resources getting mixed up where we can't win, where we only come out smelling like a dog chasing a polecat."

"Let's not forget 30% of those in IV are outside agitators, non-students." Next, he'd find that 50% of us had pimples.

"They're ungrateful. We give them this education. We give them these beautiful surroundings and they try to burn it. But they're not all criminals. No. And those that are the good students are who we have a responsibility to educate. We have to make it safe for those students who want to get an education. We have to find a way to reach them and let them know we are on their side and we will not let them be held hostage by the vocal minority. We have to be clever about this."

An unintelligible voice rumbled in the background.

"They are better off dealing with us than the governor." That inflection again. It was like someone who had practiced long and hard to remove a thick tongue. It was a voice I should have been able to attach to a face but the image lay in a coma in my mind and would only awake on its own time.

"We need to bear in mind that perhaps half of those protesting may be high on drugs. It's our duty to keep the streets safe," said the authoritative voice.

"Let's make sure we appeal to the good citizens of the town. Take the high ground, be one step ahead." It was the one counseling cleverness again.

The Chancellor spoke again, "The Santa Barbara PD and the County Sheriff will maintain a strong presence. Classes will be canceled. Let's try to see if we can make it till the weekend."

The sound of the swinging door indicated that the meeting had adjourned and they were filing out of the office. I restricted my movements for fear of detection. I knew I had permission to be in the building but I felt as though I had wandered through an opened door and not seen the sign that read: "Top secret clearance only, violators immediately executed". It wasn't that I feared detection, but I didn't want to be shot before I had time to spend my paycheck for the night's work. I'd rather be executed when I was broke.

I heard the Chancellor call out, evidently to an assistant, "Ring up that Press Courier reporter who's been calling me. We're going to have to get out there with our version of events before he fills in the blanks with his own unflattering interpretation."

The assistant reported back, "He already has a line on a feature about last night's trouble and why the cops are occupying the campus."

"Let me talk to him.

"This is the Chancellor and I've got a story of hooliganism; of restraint by Santa Barbara's finest in the face of provocation; of firmness to our commitment to education and most importantly that the police are maintaining normal patrols and responding as the situation warrants. There is no change in policy whatsoever. I can't tell you what to print but I'll know how badly you want to keep the channels between us open by what I read in the next edition."

I put my completed work in their appropriate piles, threw away the discards, picked up my jacket and left.

I walked out into the fading light, my ears still ringing from the din of the copy room and my head boiling over with the conversations I had heard.

He was called James James the Arcane. It was not meant to be derogatory, it was out of respect for his scholarship. I'd gotten to know him at the end of my second year during a celebration commemorating the just completed year. I was quite blitzed or I probably wouldn't have struck up a conversation with him. I held him in too much regard. I had noticed him earlier in the first quarter. He was eating at the table I was sitting at when he was approached by a grad student. The student questioned him about a point of erudition. The student was perplexed over something he was reading which was in contradiction to what he thought he knew to be true.

James quietly put down his fork and asked the student, "Who wrote the book?"

That was the lesson that education seldom asks us to explore, "Consider the source." For good reason, the source is always the one who has access to the PR machine either through official announcements, through victory, or through money.

I came out of the Administration building and James was on the walk. I exchanged greetings and then asked him, "What if you knew that the cops were going to be called in to pound some heads?"

As always James's voice carried a faint mixture of arrogance and tolerance. "I do know that. I think we all know that. Isn't that the general idea behind a demonstration? Make enough noise until it's suppressed."

"I mean I have proof that the administration is conspiring with the cops."

James said nothing. His silence was not supportive.

"You don't favor our presence in Vietnam do you? Shouldn't we pull out."

"History abhors a vacuum. Something will fill it. And that something will likely not be what we expect or want. History is full of triumphant campaigns followed by unintended consequences; Father Serra over-crowding heaven with saved souls, Robespierre embracing the guillotine, Marc Antony rescuing Cleopatra."

James James bid me farewell beneath the syncopated din of helicopter blades. As I angled towards their source I saw the eerie glow of a broad beam light. I knew enough to stay outside its catch until I could ascertain the situation. The shadows held as much terror as the light and when one moved I started.

"The streets are filled with treachery. Beware the narc in the oxfords." If he wasn't so deadpan earnest, it would have been quite a humorous warning. We all knew the tales of the undercover cops. They could be anywhere, anyone, your best friend or the guy next door. Except for the madly paranoid, no one really believed in those stories. Later, much later, after what little organization for change was broken or discredited, we would find out that only the paranoid among us had grasped reality firmly. And the narcs weren't limited to taking names when the teacher was away, they were the agent provocateurs, the worst inciters, they were the arsonists in the fire department. The cops infiltrated the student and black leftist groups supposedly to protect the rest of mainstream society. In fact, they were protecting their own little rat trap jobs. No one dare let go of the exterminators when the rats were still scurrying about. And the cops were piling trash to make sure the rats would stay around.

I watched for undercover cops in black oxfords over white socks and driving unmarked cars with government plates. I saw only kids in standard issue sneakers and soft-soled desert boots mostly just milling around. A small squad of Santa Barbara's finest had been surrounded and beaten back. This left the mob with an uncertain feeling of euphoria. Uncertain because though they felt their power, they expected reprisals. Every so often someone would scream that the cops were coming down Embarcadero Del Norte or up Embarcadero Del Mar or down Del Mar and up Del Norte, it didn't matter, the effect was the same. The crowd would scoot like one great millipede bound at the knees in the opposite direction of the supposed police invasion.

A patrol car had been flipped over and torched. It was a ghostly site. I peered into the passenger compartment half- expecting to see the skeletons of the former occupants still wearing their cop hats.

Someone with knowledge of hydration or at least how to use a pipe wrench had opened up a fire hydrant. Wanton destruction, yes, but rushing water with that much volume is a mesmerizing sight to behold. It's a lot like a flag coming down from a flagpole at speed. At an earlier demonstration someone had unhooked the tethering line from the flagpole and the American flag had streaked down to the ground. It was another act of vandalism except with political significance. For me, it was just plain neat to watch. I wanted to hoist it up again just so I could cut it down and watch it drop another time.

"You fascist fucks," he let out a harsh distorted bark. "They're out there waiting to beat heads." He looked straight into my eyes and his wild fury horrified me. "You fucking pigs," his voice called out again into the empty street.

I made a note not to be around him if trouble broke because his belligerence would surely attract a comparable response from the cops. I surmised the black letters on the faded fatigue jacket he was wearing spelled out his name and that coat identified him as a veteran. His ferocity was not new. I'd seen it before on the veterans who demonstrated and mind you, not all of them did. During a campus call to boycott classes I saw a vet shatter a glass pane with a shot from his fist. I lightly stepped around him.

Another voice came out of the shadows, "You know what they're up to, don't you. Uh?"

My blank stare indicated I had no idea what the hell he was talking about.

"They've got bounties on students. The more head banging they do the more the Sheriff pays them." He continued without prodding from me. He was moving again and I found myself striding along. "One of my friends said that he knows a guy whose roommate didn't come back last night. And he's not the only one. They've got a storehouse off of State where stacks of bodies are laid out." He turned and started back up the way he had come. "You know that mace hanging off the Sheriff's belt? It's not just for show. I heard he put a guy's eye out and supposedly disfigured a girl so badly she'll never be the same."

I left that section of street and went to find someone with a more positive outlook on life. I had mistakenly thought, as did many of the revelers, that the festivities were over for the night. Nevertheless, we milled around later than usual since classes had been canceled for the next day.

Let me explain IV's thriving business community. At the time it had the Bank of America, a movie theater, a small copy center, a couple of fast food joints, and real estate offices. That was it. Not exactly Manhattan. So if you were looking around for a symbol of corporate capitalism what would stand out? And we in the IV community firmly believed B of A was making vast sums of money off us. Don't ask me how this was being accomplished when all most of us did was use the bank to cash a check from home, we just knew we were being manipulated. Furthermore, someone was funding the war. Since the impetus of capital investment is profit, we knew that meant someone was making money off it. We couldn't directly target the war but we could set fire to the money. That was the night that B. of A. first went up in flames.

Many of us watched the fire in the bank with a mixture of the awe that fire always engenders and pride, the kind of pride one has for a younger sibling or nephew who goes out into the world and does well. There was even a degree of ceremony that preceded the actual sacrifice. Some guy was chanting while he danced and drummed around in the lobby of the bank. You could see him through the broken windows banging on his tom-tom and madly spinning his body in circles. I assumed he was zonked out of his mind but that was never a safe assumption. The freakiest actions were often by those who were stone-cold sober and acting out heroic roles in their own maniacal visions. Arson is not as easy as it sounds. I think 3 or 4 fires were started with increasing amounts of fuel and conviction before one finally took hold. And when it did, it was like a big scary genie let out of the bottle and in no mood for a master. The fire department arrived too late to save the bank and the cops arrived too late to make any arrests.

"So much for non-violence," it was a frat guy. Frat guys were often on the edges of demonstrations showing up just after we massed. No one gave them much notice. Frat guys were traditionally more conservative than their fellow students. At least on the west coast in the large universities, fraternities had failed to establish themselves as campus players. They had become all but irrelevant as soon as political rallies had taken the place of social dances. Besides, most of us wanted to get away from what they were offering, regimentation and order. I had known frat boys and they were usually decent enough guys, it's just that they were busy getting their parent's education. They were learning which wine to serve with filet of sole while the rest of us were getting bombed out of our gourds with smoke and stuffing ourselves with potato chips and beef jerky. They were carefully searching out the girl they would marry while we were indiscriminately trying to marry any girl who would have us for one night. I had also come across a number of ROTC students. One of the people I liked to hang out with was an ROTC student. He was witty and a laugh came easy to him. He was fun to be around, a good guy. He wasn't at all like the 2nd Louies in the movies who are college boys stumbling all over themselves to prove that college didn't make them less of a man. No, he was the type of guy who'd get himself killed making sure others didn't. Each time we parted I said a silent prayer, despite my prayers being worthless, that he'd never have to go. We never talked politics. I had too much respect for him. I envied his honor. He would serve because he had signed up to serve. That was the deal he had made, what he had agreed to do. That's how he was getting through school, not on his daddy's money but on his word.

"So much for non-violence." I heard it again. Few of us considered the destruction of private property to be an act of violence. A window got broke and it was as if we violated some code of ethical riot behavior. You may shout slogans but don't use swear words. You may march down the street but cross only at the light. You may engage in civil disobedience but only if you then go to jail. Well screw your rules and the jackass they rode in on. Americans want antiseptic dissension. They don't want anything that confronts them with the oozing sore that is the foreign policy committed in their name. They can read "collateral damage" because it is disconnected from the images of women and children bloodied beyond recognition. Americans have no ground zero perspective. Their perspective is only from the bomb bay doors. Small wonder parts of the world think we are arrogant lunatics. There were some anti-war pacifists in the ranks of activists but that didn't mean we were all pacifists. And none of us were concerned with our own hypocrisy because we weren't manufacturing the B-51's or discovering ways to bring modern mechanical slaughter to a primitive people. We were only breaking windows. And burning a bank.

"Tell me, my friend, what are you going to do after the revolution." It was Cy and I waited for more that was sure to come. "I figure you might be among the first sent to the Gulags. There are no Soviet board riders. Mao said a lot of shit but nowhere in his little red book does he utter, 'Surf's up!'" He put his hand on my shoulder. "If I were you, I'd start making amends. Beer. I'm thinking if you brought the beer to the demonstrations you'd be a very popular guy. Five or six keggers. Hell, the cops may even adopt you."

It was hard not to be charmed by Cy but I was managing quite well not to be. "And after the revolution where will a fine scholar like yourself be found?"

Cy was saved from answering by the girl down the hall and her friend, a cute little dark-haired girl. "How about women? After the revolution what will our place be?"

Most guys at that time would have stooped to the demeaning. Women's liberation had not taken hold although many seminal works had been published. Demeaning comments were still the norm. But Cy was a charmer and a wit.

"After the revolution, women won't be counted." Indeed, during the revolution women were seldom counted. There was a hierarchy at anti-war rallies both in procession and in speaker sequence. First came the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, then the black contingent, then the brown contingent, there seldom was an Asian contingent although you'd think there should have been, and then any other minorities, and then came the women, mother's against the war, mothers for peace, sisters against the war, sisters for peace, etc. Their placement was by design. By the end of a rally many people had left or at least had less energy to devote to listening than at the front of the rally. "Women won't be counted," Cy repeated, "that's why I'll be joining the revolution against the revolution, the counting revolution, so that women will be counted."

"I think that's counter-revolution."

"Would you counting-revolutionaries like some coffee?" She pulled out a large thermos from her bag. "Find us a place to sit."

The four of us walked a half of a block and found an old couch meditating on a weedy lawn in front of an apartment building. Discarded furniture and abandoned cars were plentiful in IV before the riots but they were beginning to be less plentiful as the demonstrations continued. People were hauling junk cars and anything else that wasn't tied down that might ignite into the street by day so they could be burned by night. Cy borrowed two beach towels that were hanging from a porch railing and laid them on the couch and we scrunched together to fit on it The top of the thermos was unscrewed and a cup of coffee poured.

"Wow, you two work wonders with coffee beans."

"The Kahlua helps," the girls giggled.

We sat in the glow of the burning bank as it highlighted the night sky above the surrounding apartments and we could hear the turmoil of the violence between the sirens, the rocks gently clattering on the parked vehicles and splattering on the pavement, the shouting and swearing and name-calling drifting the couple of blocks to our ears. Our eyes watered and we could smell the traces of gas and scorched flotsam and feel the change in temperature as the night air brought it against our faces. The quietude of the moment was broken by the swift movement of a kid running down the street. And then a motorcycle cop. There was an instant when the cop froze in front of us illuminated by the soft yellow of the street lamps. He looked at us looking at him and then took off after his quarry.

"Maybe we should have offered him some coffee."

"You can't offer coffee to your enemy."

"If you can't offer coffee to your enemy, who can you offer coffee to?"

We had all seen the exhaustion lining his face and the weariness in his stare. You should never be able to see the face of your foe.

We broke up soon after that. "Thanks for a lovely evening," the girls said and we bowed and replied that the pleasure was ours.

Some have memories of cops in flight. Of bravery in the face of beatings. Of being arrested. Of being gassed. I remember once watching a guy hold off a line of cops with a fire hose until they turned off the water and beat the living hell out of him. There are memories of speeches made in earnest. Of historic marches. But for me, the sweet time in the early morning hours we shared with the two girls was my fondest anti-war remembrance.

There was a small gathering in the streets on Friday but the weather had turned nasty and banks don't burn in the rain so the night was quiet. The weekend was saved for other things like movies and beer, or going home with the laundry and studying. We put our rage on simmer, left it smoldering on the back burner until the heat was turned up again.

Off we went to class like Mary's little lamb. Few of us had wandered far from the books. You don't get into UCSB by being a complete jerk-off. Either you had grades or test scores or both. And you stayed in school by riding whatever it was that got you there. A little acknowledged byproduct of the war was that there were really only three grades; A, B, or C. A miscreant could still flunk out but you had to work at it. Despite what they may have thought about your relative merits as a scholar or the relative merits of the war, few profs wanted to send you out into the draft before your time.
SECOND POINT GO TO THIRD POINT

Just when academic life threatened to raise its wrinkled learned head and reach out with its bony fingers and touch us with its knowledge, an anti-war strategy meeting was called with the intent of presenting demands to the administration. The gathering was sponsored by something called The Coalition to End the War, a purposely innocuous sounding designation so those who took umbrage at the usual cast of campus political characters would not be discouraged from attending.

It was a large assemblage for this kind of an event; the meeting garnered about four or five hundred squeezed into a large hall in the student union. It was not a formal concert theater but the hall was often the venue for events that might attract sizable crowds such as lesser known rock performers or more widely known speakers. The chair of the meeting sat on the stage holding a microphone and two mikes were set up opposite each other in the aisles along the sides of the room. I arrived before the meeting had begun and people waiting to speak were already queued up behind the mike stands. It was not going to be a meeting where listening was prized. If the chair had prepared opening remarks, he had wasted his time. Someone yelled, "ROTC off Campus". Cheers followed. And the mikes hadn't even been turned on. The chair calmly asked for order. It didn't arrive before the next shout from the floor. "Who appointed you in charge?"

From across the room someone yelled, "Don't follow leaders."

A voice behind me tagged on, "Watch your parking meters."

Those that weren't clapping were whistling and those that weren't clapping or whistling were howling and those who were less vocal were at least nodding in agreement. Even the chair appreciated the reference and had a bemused look on his face.

The mikes were powered up and the speakers began to fill balloons with their words and the balloons drifted over the hall before they popped and spread the words over the seated crowd. They were earnest and righteous. I left after about 45 minutes. The next day the petition was published in the "Goucho", the school newspaper. It was a formidable list of grievances. First came the demand to drop all charges against those arrested in the previous disturbance. Then, the dissolution of the Reserve Officer Training Corp followed by an end to all military-related research. These were reasonable appeals and starting points for serious negotiation with the administration. But after that, it got plain crazy. It was like watching a mentally ill person disintegrate before your eyes, slowly obliterating all rational behavior by a series of incomprehensible grunts. UCSB regents were suppose to end the war in Vietnam, stop all U.S. imperialism, end racism, end police brutality, end defilement of the earth, and obscene capital profits. Might as well throw in ending sunburn, drunk drivers, and the color fuschia.

There was a plan of action: Present the petition. Be denied. Agitate. It was a good plan and a plan that was followed on campuses across the country. But it lacked the element of surprise and our adversaries made their move before us.

Nixon went into Cambodia. Expanded the war to limit it. Vietnamized the war by sending American troops deeper into the jungle. His supporters claimed he wasn't being duplicitous. And they were correct. To be two-faced you had to have a face. When Nixon removed his mask another mask showed underneath. He had stalked American politics for two decades, an unreal figment, a boogie man, a pasty vision of our dark side, a perpetual loser whose primary skill was perseverance and in a country where there is no last chance, that skill can take you to the presidency. He was declared brilliant in political circles but outside politics he was dense as mud. He was elected to end the war. He wasn't required to win it, just end it. It wasn't his war anymore than it was ours. But he was making it his by throwing bombs and throwing troops and throwing rhetoric. It was like he was told to go in and get his brother who had wandered into a neighborhood where the locals were threatening the kid. Nixon could have said, "Mom wants you" and grabbed the kid by the scruff of the neck and taken him home. But his was the worst possible reaction to the situation. He put himself in the middle of the fray, went on the offensive and claimed family honor was at stake. And as the blood began to splatter the ground, he had to prove that his family honor was worth the mess and the way he proved it was by making a bigger mess.

So Nixon went into Cambodia and we went into the streets. First there were rallies. And not the old-fashioned kind that geared the school up for the big game. Athletics had become irrelevant at best and persona non grata on campus at worst. Athletic macho is akin to military macho, hence, the disfavor. Don't get me wrong, I took in every contest of every sport I could find. I watched b-ball and volleyball and swimming and baseball and track and even games I couldn't fathom like lacrosse and soccer. I wasn't the only person in the stands either. We loved our Gouchos, we just didn't cheer them on when they were off the court.

I'd heard most of the speakers at the rally before. The thin kid with the 'fro was one of my favorites, not so much because of what he said but because of how he looked. He had dark kinky hair grown out in a big ball. He was a very pale, very skinny white guy so topped with that round ball he bore a striking resemblance to a large Tootsie Roll Pop. He stood out more than most since not a lot of genuine afros were in the crowd. The black students stayed away from the demonstrations. It wasn't that they didn't have a stake in the war. They were dying with the best of them. Up north, in San Fran, the BSU (Black Students Union) had shut the school down for weeks trying to force the administration to open admission up to more minorities. They were obviously capable of taking a powerful stand. Maybe they saw the white betrayal that would come after the war ended. We pledged we would prove them wrong. We'd be there when the billy clubs beat heads; when the police dogs were unleashed; when the fire hoses were opened up. And we might have been but instead, whites were asked to stay out of grad school and then later, when things got tight, set aside places for the underprivileged. I mean there's a limit.

Speaking after the Tootsie Roll guy was my old friend, Autumn. She had been filled further with the fervor. She was all covered up in an army fatigue jacket. It was a curious style. While the returning vets often wore theirs because it was functional and eliminated the need to buy a coat, in some circles army wear had become radical chic. Some of the girls wore parts of fatigues because they thought it looked cute to wear men's fashion. Some wore it to mock the uniform the way General Hershey Bar did. The General was an ubiquitous character at many large Southern California anti-war protests. He bedecked himself in an officer's uniform covered with funny looking medals and toy airplanes so preposterous that he called attention to the silly ribbons worn on authentic uniforms. Others saw themselves in conflict with the status quo so they wore it as an outward sign of that conflict. Autumn fit into this last category. She topped the uniform by wearing a red bandanna. She looked like something out of La Raza. Maybe she'd discovered that she had some kind of Latin heritage. The jacket really wasn't all that flattering on her but she did look militant. I bet she didn't shave either. I started to gag at the thought. Some things take more getting use to than others. Autumn punctuated the end of her talk as many others did with "power to the people."

"I'm calling for a general strike. I say shut 'em down. This is my last chance to revive my flagging academic career by bring everyone else down to my ignominious standard. Power to the people." It was the unmistakable twisted voice of Cy. "As Mao said, 'Many are the women in the field with furrows soft and shapely and in need of plowing.' All power to the people." He'd been banned from speaking at the rallies by most of the campus leaders but their own sense of democracy allowed a long list of irrelevant speakers and somehow Cy always managed to sneak up to the microphone for a minute or two. "As Mao says: We are like shafts of wheat firm and rigid in the wind and bursting with seed."

What began as a noon time rally ended by being a call to action, a march. We tramped down the long thoroughfare leading out of the campus and headed towards Raytheon. Raytheon is a large defense contractor specializing in electronics. Santa Barbara's facility is one of many throughout the United States. Few of us knew what they were doing behind the gates or what we were going to do in front of the gates. Activity was so slow on the other side it looked as though someone had beat us to the punch, closed the place before we could make our demands to close the place. Maybe behind the doors they were making camouflage rubbers to go over their missiles but from the outside it looked like a very uninteresting industrial office.

We shouted the usual slogans such as "shut 'em down" and "pull out Dick like your father should have".

"Close 101 down," someone loudly suggested.

Taking it to the streets had suddenly become too pedestrian. We were double-clutching it into overdrive. We were going to play tag on the freeway.

"Barricade the on-ramp."

We headed for the 101 freeway. Patrol cars had passed us on our march but now they were circling closer. Civilian autos detoured around us as we occupied the slope that led up to the freeway lanes. I could see some bony blue jeaned covered kid dodging cars in the slow lane. The Highway Patrol fortunately was quick to put a stop to that.

"This has been declared an unlawful assembly. You have two minutes to disperse. I saw a cop line forming under the overpass. I wondered how they came up with that number, two. Why were we given 2 minutes and not 3 or 1? I didn't need the full clock to skip on out of the danger zone.

"Pigs today, bacon tomorrow," was someone's defiant reply.

Autumn was leading a chant, "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, NLF is gonna win."

Arrests were made. Kids were hauled away. And I escaped back to the campus.

I returned to my afternoon job. I could boycott school but I wasn't going on strike against eating and making money allowed me the luxury of food. The sound was again coming through the walls.

"I'm getting pecked on the ass like I was the lowliest chicken in the coop. The Governor wants my job. The alumni are threatening to withdraw funds. The city council wants law and order. The buzzards are circling and I'm barely breathing."

Humility rounds its shoulders and blends in with the surroundings. It wears a smile. Arrogance is loud and calls attention to itself by its disregard for those in its presence. The deans and professors and law officers weren't even bothering to close the door anymore.

The accent spoke, "You're in a tight spot, Mr. President, but you're doing what must be done. They don't know what it's like to be president of a university. I don't suppose they've come up with any viable alternatives only criticisms." What a master suck-up, I thought.

"How much do the alumni know? Give them an NCAA championship and they're good for a year. Give them a Nobel Peace Prize candidate and they hardly notice." I was beginning to recognize their voices. This was the advocate of tricky strategies. This time he was driving a wedge between the President and the alumni. "You'll get more mileage out of appeasing the locals. In sheer numbers, they're much stronger."

"It does no good to repress rebellion," said the voice with the peremptory resonance. "Repression will bond the moderate students to the radicals. It's like a pressure cooker. A little steam gets let out but as long as the lid doesn't blow we can keep it under control. We can keep the lid on until summer."

"Shit, boy! The lids been blown into the next room. We're closing the gate after the bitch dog is pregnant. We're imposing curfew starting tonight."

"Come down tough on the student leaders." With no less authority the resonating voice had changed his point of view. "Arrest them and quarantine them before they infect the student body as a whole. We still have punitive means at our disposal. Many of them are grad students, T.A.'s or readers, they're on financial aid of some kind. We'll put them out of work. Failing that, put them on academic probation. If they get arrested, threaten expulsion." Perhaps his agility could have been seen as the mark of a lithe mind but it wasn't doing a tumbling routine. It was floating in space, no up, no down, it's only frame of reference the way the Chancellor's speech blew.

"We made four times the arrests we made last February."

"Chief, don't you get it, the more arrests the worse it looks. The more arrests, the more rioting we're acknowledging is taking place."

The chief didn't get it.

"Can't you occupy the center of the streets over there."

"You mean Isla Vista and it's over in that direction." They were evidently studying their geography.

"Yes, I'm twisted around. Occupy the center where you can't be seen by the rest of Santa Barbara. Then fan out from there."

"Have you ever been in the center of Isla Vista?"

There was silence.

"Let me ask you again. Have any of you ever been in the center of Isla Vista?"

"I've been through it, yes."

"Then you should know. We can seal them in by closing the exits out of the area but staying in the center of town makes us targets and allows the occupants to cluster and disperse as they please."

"What do you believe we should do?"

The conversation had taken an on-ramp. No turn signal was given, no map consulted, no consensus as to the direction, but they were about to proceed at speed down a thoroughfare, a route that was laid down by the cops.

"Shot." There was stunned silence. I wasn't sure I'd heard correctly until he repeated it. "Birdshot."

A voice started again, "You're going to fire on kids?"

"Pellets, only pellets."

"I don't care what you call it. It comes out of a gun."

"We can't very well gather buckshot in our hands and then throw it at them." It was a brief moment of levity that allowed the Chief's suggestions to settle into the room and become more comfortable.

"We don't have much choice if we are to maintain our credibility. Anyway, if things get out of hand, we can always pull back."

"Chief, it would be wrong to put the kids in jeopardy from birdshot ..."

The Chief had caught wind of the weakness in the President's position and he began to exploit it. Maybe he wasn't the subtlest or the cleverest or the smartest in the room but he ended up being the most effective because he had argued from a position of strength. Oh, it wasn't the strength of logic or the strength of righteousness. It was the strength of force. In a world where power is the accepted response to any situation, a person who fails to use the power at his disposal risks being judged as faint of heart. The Chief countered, "I don't care what's right or wrong - let your damn professors in their debating societies chew over rightness and wrongness. I don't have time to indulge myself in debate. All I know is, if you lack the will to do what it takes to end this anarchy on your campus, then a president will be found who can do what is needed. Mr. President, the dominos are going to fall. And you're the last domino."

I heard the hackles rise and I could almost catch him eyeing the faculty members and administrators in the room and then turning to the chief, "If I go, we all go, the trustees will make a clean sweep of it. Nothing wipes the blood from a dogs jaws but more blood. We'll call in the Guard but I don't want to be reading anything in the papers about UCSB administrators being too soft or hearing anything about UCSB administrators not nipping this in the bud because I'll make damn sure every electorate in the district knows you couldn't handle some pantywaist kids yourself and had to call in the National Guard. I'm imposing a curfew beginning immediately and I'm calling the governor for the Guard."

He wasn't president for nothing.

That ended the gathering on a suitably amiable note. I heard them stream down the corridor. The Chancellor remained with one of his advisors.

"You know the cops are SOB's."

"Yeh, but they're our SOB's."

"Young man!" I started but was composed enough not to blink, or so I hoped. "You, young man! I had an important work scheduled for copying." It was the accent whining and scolding at the same time. I listened to his complaint. "Where are my papers? I must have my papers. I've got class in ten minutes."

Apparently he saw no need to ingratiate himself with me. I was only a worker. So I answered in the universal retort of all workers, "Huh?" I rummaged around and found what he was looking for.
THIRD POINT

I got off work and went looking for a vending machine. As a rule I didn't like spending money but sometimes you need something sweet to set your mind right. Actually, the craving had been triggered by blue ink on goldenrod paper. I was combing the snack areas for a Butterfinger. So much for the sophistication of my mind. I was two steps past the opened door of a lecture hall when I recognized the unmistakable accent. I couldn't resist backing up to confirm my suspicion. I heard him entreat his students to "take to the streets for justice." He had talent. He could direct his message to any audience. He was a master ass-kissing guy. There's something to be said for that, but I'll let others mouth it.

The next day's newspapers were filled with pictures of the second bank burning. That night everyone had headed for the Bank of America site. Any parent knows you don't clean up your kid's mess right away. You let him stew in it and contemplate his bad behavior. The executives in charge had foolishly built Bank of America back up by moving in a temporary trailer.

The newspaper columns also carried the official line from the administration which insisted that nothing had changed, that no further instructions were given to the police who were handling any disturbance solely with local patrols and that students were unrestricted in their movements. I skimmed the stories on my way to the sports pages where the weather forecast always ran. The forecast predicted some waves.

It figured to be the last winter swell before spring pacified the ocean. Classes had been canceled once again and IV was under lock and key. I drove south. Rincon had caught too much wind so I continued down the coast and stopped at Pidas. When Pidas breaks it creates a steep, thin, wave that barrels away from the point. Strictly a locals break. If you're not known, you can get some heavy vibes laid on you. People have to recognize you by sight or style.

I paddled out against a strong surge and in going over a set I stroked right at a guy trying to take off on a formidable peak. He let me know I'd spoiled his wave. And he let his buddies know I'd spoiled his wave. And his buddies let their buddies know until pretty soon I felt like a bleeding mackerel in a school of sharks. I let the current push me to the southernmost crest where I felt I was out of their scrutiny.

I muttered to myself about the injustice. According to my way of thinking a guy going out always has the right of way mainly because he's a sitting duck. The guy coming in riding his board has the momentum of the wave which gives him an amount of movement.

This particular break has a wave that has a way of working me over when I'm least expecting it. The ride is so fast and fun that I seem to push it until the wave closes out on me with a violent crush of its palm and I end up bouncing off the bottom or otherwise going through the wash cycle. By the end of the afternoon as the sun settled in for the night I felt ragged and spent.

I dressed, stopped for a burrito, cruised on back to the campus, and found a place to park. It was quite late, well past curfew. For some reason that didn't register with me so I nearly jumped out of my shirt when the car's P.A. sounded and the light shone on me as I was carrying my board back to the apartment.

"ID!"

With the board in my hand, I fumbled for my wallet.

"Drop the board."

I continued to grapple for my license while holding my surfboard under my arm.

The cop's partner was behind me and he gave the end of the board a violent push so that it dislodged from my arm.

"Shit," I groused as the sidewalk struck at the fiberglass.

"Watch your language. Where you been?"

"Skiing. Can't you tell?"

"We don't like smart young punks. Why don't you just shut your yap and do as you're told?"

"Why don't you just go and fuck yourself?" Now that was stupid. And I quickly learned just how stupid as I was thrown to the sidewalk next to my board.

I was incredibly fortunate because a crowd had gathered on a balcony above us and were taunting the cops and watching my arrest. If the officers were prone to brutality, and a number of them were, then they were tempered by the spectators.

I don't know what the final charges were. It was a litany of unrecognizable transgressions by the time their report was filed. None were that distant from plausibility if a judge was looking for criminality, nor was the arrest much different from those of the other students who had been apprehended.

The first hour I spent locked up was very long. I was weak and sick with fear and panic. Then I got company. It was another guy arrested for curfew. Then another appeared and more. I have never been so thankful to see people I didn't know. A couple of those arrested appeared to be hard core agitators but others were like me and we bunched together and quizzed each other for suggestions about what we should do. Someone passed the word that we weren't to make bail. We were to clog the courts. Everyone agreed. It was alright by me. I had no one to call to post bond. The next day we were mustered into the courtroom and paraded before the judge with various levels of defiance evident in our gait. This should have been a hearing to set bail. Make bail or make jail. The judge read our charges and dismissed the lot of them. It was weird. I had met students who were still in the system. They had been arrested months earlier and were out on bail awaiting trial, but here I was in and out in less than 24 hours. I hadn't done anything but I also knew that didn't matter. The judge evidently found curfew prosecutions to be a misapplication of the state's power. If anyone had wanted to know, I would have wholeheartedly agreed with the judge. Later, I found out the judge had dismissed the charges at his own peril. He was forced to recuse himself from any case that involved an IV demonstrator or curfew violator or the DA was going recharge those he had dismissed. So I got lucky plain and simple. And learned that the law was neither plain, nor simple.

My job with the school had been terminated. I wasn't fired or dismissed for cause. The job was just fazed out. It wasn't coincidental. The UCSB administrators read the police blotter. Expulsion would have followed a conviction and termination would have followed expulsion. All that parading around with formality wasn't needed. You may be innocent until proven guilty but that doesn't mean you can't be castigated while the verdict is in doubt.

Others would also be looking for employment before the next fall quarter. Sometime after the end of the school year the Chancellor announced his resignation to pursue other endeavors. Most of his advisors, so cocksure of themselves when they came into their positions, slipped away into other jobs. Of course, some always remain for continuity. Taking the President's place was the tricky one and at his side was the ass-kissing guy.

But first, before any of them exited, they had to strut and puff across the stage and say their lines so that the action could be escalated. It was the third act. In the third act the National Guard is called in to quell the disturbance. Martial law. Rifles on every street corner. In the third act of a tragedy someone must die.

There were bad vibes on the street.

The crazies were out. Many of them street people. "He's probably a narc," one of them said pointing at me. Where his eyes should have been were two peering holes and I was looking straight into the terror of his medulla oblongata. I was transfixed by him, the way you are frozen in place by a mad snarling dog.

"That right, man, you a narc, man?" Another one came in close, threatening. In a population of scroungy, ill-dressed urchins, these stood out. A veneer of squalor marked them. They weren't college kids, not even one rung lower; they weren't even on the ladder. They were claimants to IV because of generational affinity and once they had staked out a claim they would fervently protect it because they were not apt to get another stake.

I could out-crazy the craziest. "Yeh, you got me, I'm a narc. Now hand over all of your dope. Just the good stuff, I don't want none of that paraquat shit. C'mon dig deep, I want all of your private stashes." I wasn't sure if such sophisticated humor wasn't going to be lost on them.

The leader looked at me for a while and then said, "Let's go, he ain't no narc." They went off to terrorize some well-dressed co-ed unlucky enough to be coming home from work.

It was bad vibes on the street. And bad vibes in the country. Governor Reagan,(yeh, that same Reagan) had said about the college demonstrations, "If it's a blood bath they want, then let it begin here." Nixon was using the same political method that got him elected. He was dividing his enemy into groups then playing each group against the other trying to eliminate an organized majority. The war was still swallowing the country's youth so he couldn't end the draft but he could institute a lottery system in the hopes that those unlikely to be called would lose interest in protesting the war. Agnew, Nixon's VP, later to be indicted and convicted for taking kickbacks, was crisscrossing the country pretending that alliteration was wit. Negative nabobs of doom he called us and asserted that thousands of peacniks were duped by a small cadre of Communist controlled conspirators. The Nixon administration had no understanding of what was happening in their own country so how could they have an understanding of what was happening in Vietnam? Their steadfast adherence to the course of their foreign policy meant they had no intention of ending the war. They had started the Paris Peace talks and were still arguing on the dimensions of the table. It wasn't an idle argument. Tables are either round or rectangular. A round table gives equal weight to all. A rectangular table sets two sides in opposition. In a country divided by North and South and including Northern regulars and Viet Cong and U.S. troops and Southern regulars the weight given to each party and the number of sides mattered, but it didn't play well with those hoping for peace. We all sensed the peace process's impotence and the frustration in the street grew.

Nixon and Kissinger mined Haiphong Harbor and the campuses went out on strike. They stepped up the punishing bombardment in the North to scare the North Vietnamese back to the peace table and the campuses exploded. It was pure anger now. Them against us. Four kids shot at Kent State. The National Guard had trained their guns on students. At Jackson State the authorities had fired indiscriminately into a dorm even though the troops weren't in danger but the Mississippi kids weren't white so the reverberations weren't as great. Those that had retained their belief in the system were ridiculed. We demonstrated now to strike back, to retaliate against the authorities.

"Hey James." I bent down and took a seat on a patch of grass next to James James. "Did I miss anything?"

"Not yet."

I had been at UCSB two years before I realized that Perfect Park was not Prefect Park misspelled. The park was a small open space about the lot size of a small office building. The action had begun as a sit-down in the park. As most of IV began to show up the mass spilled out into the surrounding streets. By the time the cops got done with their rampage, even those in IV not prone to demonstrating were in the streets throwing rocks and heaving bottles, cursing and spitting at the cops, and being hauled away to jail. Over 1,000 arrested, most with charges subsequently dropped.

"Did you hear Clemente was confronted by the cops last evening on his way home from the campus?" James James told me.

"No kidding. Is he alright?"

"They pushed him around some but they thought he was a migrant and let him go."

"That's funny."

"In a peculiar way it is humorous. But it was not a great night for him. We got gassed. We were standing in the dorm and he was telling me his story when there was a commotion at the front door. A squad of cops rushed the hall and nabbed one of the residents. The next thing I know Clemente is choking and tears are running down his face and I'm doing likewise. We got a full whiff from the canister."

"You recovered I take it."

"The gas ran its course."

"So you're here in protest?"

"If I'm going to be gassed, I want to know the reason."

Cy had just delivered one of his quotations when the cops made their first charge into the crowd. As he raised his fist to shout power to the people the club cracked across his face. I was many yards away and voices were beginning to rise in protest but still I heard the sound of his breaking jaw.

"James!" I was yelling at him although he was no more than six or seven feet away. I had instinctively gotten up and moved away from the police line. When I turned and looked back at James he was still seated. "James! Get up. Let's go."

Someone was calling out to protect and cover in the posture learned in non-violent workshops. "Make the cops drag all of us away." I was too busy getting the hell out of there with James to point out to the nonviolent martyr types that the pigs weren't just cuffing. They were beating the shit out of anyone within reach. They waded into the seated students swinging their clubs targeting those who were most offensive to them; males with long hair, screaming females, males looking effeminate, anyone resisting. I passed my old roomie's girlfriend. She wasn't whispering anymore. She was standing with fists clenched at her side screaming one loud obscenity.

I got a good look at the police faces under the helmet. They weren't too much older than us but they were light years from us in viewpoint. These guys were the lineman, the draught animals, the work horses in from the farm. If they were told to eat shit for the good of the force, they'd get out the catsup. The cop charge had the desired effect of scattering those students in and around the park but it didn't disperse the mass of students in the streets. Instead we formed in little groups bent on revenge. The cops had been employing a tactic of riding in on the back of trash trucks using the huge metal frame as a shield for protection. Someone had managed to throw a flaming trash can in the back of one of the parked trash trucks and black noxious smoke was billowing a hundred feet in the air.

Conversation on the street spooked me down to my shorts. It had taken a turn towards the paranoid but it was all believable.

"They've got sharpshooters miles away ready to pick us off," someone told me. I took my hands out of my pocket. I didn't want any of the phantom snipers thinking I was holding a phantom weapon.

"They grabbed my roommate right out of the room, I'm not shitting you. Broke down the door and hauled him away while he was studying."

"They've got concentration camps in the desert where they're detaining those considered subversive."

A phalanx of cops lined up across the park. Kids were running towards the line and throwing rocks, bottles, sometimes molotov cocktails. A tear gas canister landed near me and I watched a guy pick it up with his shirt and sail it back at them. Everyone was in on the frenzy. "This is serious shit," someone pronounced. I felt like I was letting down the team. When all the cars are blaring at the car stalled in front of you, it's very difficult not to lean on your horn and since your ears are already aching from the noise what's one more honk. I picked up a rock. I rolled it around in my palm. It was not quite as big as a baseball but larger than a golf ball. I always had a good arm. The officers in the front row had their riot helmets on and their masks down protecting their faces. Many of the cops behind them were much more lax in their protection. I saw what looked like a sergeant leaning over the hood of a car studying a map. I let the rock fly. The sergeant grabbed at his face. He was immediately surrounded by his comrades so I couldn't tell the extent of his injuries. I didn't know for certain that it was my rock but it certainly could have been. My stomach sank. I wanted to take it back. To bring the rock back to my palm, back to the ground. I wouldn't have minded busting a windshield or denting a hood but I wasn't intent on maiming someone who had caused me no harm. It was a serious thing I did. I didn't want any part of the cops. I wanted them to stop beating us. I didn't want them in IV. I wanted them to go home where they belonged. But that's all I wanted. What the hell was I thinking? You pick up a rock, what do you expect? A thoroughly grave thing to do. I lowered my head and slipped to the back of the mob.

The rocks and bottles and mayhem lasted past dusk. At night things got real bad. Who knows how it began. Maybe someone did fire at the cops as their official reports alleged but I'm not convinced. More likely the cops heard something or thought they heard something that sounded like shots and returned fire. The police believed they were taking rounds because they could see the bullets ricocheting off the buildings. This brought more outgoing volleys. Pretty soon they were lighting up the night sky aimed at the rooftop snipers. The more salvos they let loose, the heavier the incoming barrage seemed to be. Finally, after they stopped wreaking terror the incoming stopped. People were on the edge in both place and manner. Reinforcements on both sides were taking their place along the barricades. The bank was still a rallying point. It was rubble now but it continued to be a target for arson and destruction. A mob gathered around the bank remains. A couple of the more conservative students stood between the crowd and the ruins wanting to protect the bank from further destruction. The cops arrived by the truckload and began to disembark. Something popped and one of the students guarding the bank was on the ground. He died at the scene. It was later determined that a police gun misfired as the officer jumped from the truck.

The next day I drove out of IV into Santa Barbara and journeyed up main street. I picked up a bagel at a bakery and found a wall to lean against and watch the traffic. Outside the cinema the ushers were just opening for the day. Two young kids, they looked to be about high school age, brought out a cardboard cutout of Dirty Harry. He had a tight-lipped-no-nonsense looking face meant to strike fear into the heart of criminals, a serious man with a grim reaper smile. They stood it up and then stepped back and it fell forward on its mug. They set it up again and it did another nose plant. Neither of the two seemed too upset about the whole affair. They giggled each time it crashed to the ground. I suppose you could have called them silly kids. She was the active one and the talkative one but when he chose to speak she often broke down in laughing convulsions. They were having a silly old good time. Again, the cutout fell. Finally, they both stood over it with their hands on their hips looking down at it for a good minute. Together they picked up Harry and propped him up out of the way against the wall in the corner of the foyer. They then went inside. I watched them through the glass doors going about their chores. She moved behind the snack bar to prepare whatever it is she was suppose to prepare. He had a vacuum out and was sweeping the carpet. Every so often he'd stop the machine and call out to her. Sometimes she reacted by laughing, sometimes it appeared instruction passed between the two, once she wagged her finger at him in a mock scold.

Soon a line began to form at the box office and I saw her slip inside the door to sell the tickets. He stood at the door to tear the tickets upon entry. They never seemed to completely take on a solemn role. I felt compelled to be near them, to hear the depth of their voices, to see the light-heartedness in their faces. I walked across the street and got close to their substance. She was even slighter in person and he was thin and a little pale. As I ambled up to ask her a question about the time of the next showing, I saw him eye me in a protective stare and turn his head slightly to listen. Her voice had a smooth Southern California lilt. I felt better after hearing her. Harry sat mute in the corner, scowling. I got a good look at him. He was as deadly serious as a man could be and quite ridiculous.

Maybe it was because graduation neared, but I told myself I would not be a serious man again. No sober righteousness would make me an idiot. I would be an idiot of my own accords. I cast one look back at the two young employees. They were both in their work postures gliding through their tasks. I wound down the sidewalk. A car ran up to the light and squawked its horn and I jumped along with the other pedestrians and the driver laughed. I would not pretend again that I could not add nor detract from the noise.

To solidify my new resolve I set out for the beach. I knew decisions lay offshore but that was OK. I'd meet them when the swell rose up before me.

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