1970 SUMMER
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Did you ever fall out of a boat, land in the water, and then come up underneath it? Well, that was me.
Graduation came at the end of May. Some kids didn't bother attending but most students felt that after they'd laid out the cash for four years of school it was appropriate to ask your parents if they wanted to see you go through the ceremony. My mother and father drove up to the campus. My father seemed genuinely proud of me. I was on my best behavior throughout the afternoon and through dinner and so were they. Neither of them pressed for my plans and I thought that very gracious of them. It was the most cordial we had been since I'd left four years prior. At the end of the evening I hugged both of them and waved as they drove south towards home. I never considered myself to be a reservoir of courage or resolve when it came to doing the "right thing" but what little I could summon when it was needed in the future was directly a result of that last meeting with them. Of all the memories of my mother and father, I think most often of that one.
I had six weeks left on our lease and I had told my parents that I was staying for a little while to explore some local job offers. In truth, I was in the water swimming and I was waiting for the dam to burst and the river to rise. Graduation had opened my wallet, found my draft card, and ripped it to shreds. I had lost my student deferment.
At an end-of-the-year bash that extended across several apartments I met up with a girl who I had known during the school year only enough to wave a greeting at as we passed from class to class. At the party I spent some time with her and she thought I was funny and giggled easily at my silliness. I took her home and fell into the sack with her. I immediately felt guilty about it. The bitter taste of recrimination remained when I learned she was planning on going to summer school. That meant I'd be with her for a more protracted time than I had planned. It was clear she was looking for a deeper relationship than I was willing to offer and I had no wish to lead her on but I was too craven to put all my intentions on the table. So we made love to each other and in truth, I was very fond of her. She was a nice girl and I enjoyed her company. The last thing I wanted to do was cause harm to someone who had shown me nothing but generosity. I was hoping that after she spent some time with me I'd wear thin on her and she'd discard me.
Summer school affords the students plenty of free time so I spent a lot of the day at her place. I got to know her roommate rather well. My little girlfriend worked at a department store in town so sometimes I hung around waiting for her to come back from work talking to her roommate. It wasn't long before a sweet friendship began to take place. I'm a fantasizing rogue in my own mind, a Don Juan or a Casanova, but in the world where everyone else is an inhabitant, I'm a pathetic lap dog. I don't have the stomach for treachery in love. I think it stems from my deep insecurity. I'm so thankful and surprised that any girl could find me attractive that I can't stand the thought of losing stature in her eyes. I stayed loyal to my girlfriend.
It's a funny thing about roommates. No matter that the roomie is male or female, they can develop a dislike for the new lover. It's as if the new person is an interloper in an already established relationship. Which, come to think of it, is true to a great degree. Often it seems, coincidentally, the roomie doesn't have a paramour. And then sometimes the roomie is as attached to the boyfriend or girlfriend, in a platonic way of course, as their roommate.
My girlfriend wasn't issue oriented and it was hard to discuss current events with her. We talked a great deal about other subjects just not politics. Her roommate was different. She was political but not crazy political. And we often talked about the draft. I told her, "Why would they want me after college?, I have a bad attitude."
She looked at me as if I had been dropped on my head and she was checking for brain damage. "Your arrogance is great but theirs is greater. They will break you, then remake you in the way they want you to be."
Sometimes at night walking back to my apartment I would take a very long route through the surrounding streets pondering my impending fate not coming up with any real solutions, just feeling sorry for myself, wondering what action I was going to take, wondering if I could find the courage for action. I went through my options repeatedly.
By 1970 all the tricks had been played. You would have to go some to trump any of the deferment requirements. All the ruses were well known to the Army. Take the personality disorder. To come with a new approach to being insane you either had to be really crazy or brilliantly learned in human psychosis. And I wasn't either. I could handle street crazies and drug addled brains but institutional insanity paralyzed me. I was too much in its grip. I understood the way absurdity was piled upon absurdity in perfect logical succession so when I was confronted by their special brand of dementia I couldn't help pausing to consider the logic behind the arguments. The crazy person, acting or not, is judged by his immediate reaction to the moment, he does not consider. Then there's the physical requirements. Surfers have a much greater chance of failing the intelligence tests than the physical tests. If you took drugs to raise or lower a vital function, you'd end up staying in some hotel under supervision and coming back to take another physical when the drugs had worn off. Forget about acting homosexual unless as you stood in line at the induction center in your underwear you could manage to pop a boner that pointed at the guy in front of you. After years in locker rooms, I knew that to be very unlikely, not that I had ever tried mind you.
One night the subject of blurring one's sexual identity in some kind of transgender ruse came up as the three of us chatted. One of the girls went upstairs and brought down a large bra. We then whipped together a sticky concoction of bread dough, corn syrup, and maraschino cherries and pasted it on me to look like breasts. When we were done I looked like an 80-year-old mutant from mars. The damn stuff stuck so firmly to my chest that it ripped out my hair and tried to suck off my nipples as we pried it loose. I was red and skinned when we finally got it removed. I swore I'd never try that again even when they both tried to entice me into wearing oversized panties that admittedly, for a split second, held with it a curious, if deviant, eroticism for me as I thought about parading around in the panties before the two of them.
By nature, I'm a screw-up. No matter how serious the situation, I can reach into my pocket and find levity jingling with my change. There's a famous picture of Black Thursday, the day the stock market crashed in '29, that depicts a throng of people on the steps outside the exchange. If you look in the left corner you can see two guys sharing a large laugh. While many were stepping through opened fifth floor windows, to some, nothing, even a depression is cause for too much alarm. I identify with them. I see myself standing on a cliff among the lemmings saying, "C'mon, show me some originality! I want to see a half-gainer with a twist." I thought it quite possible that I could purposely fail to adjust to army life by maintaining that attitude. I didn't know how to shine shoes and saw no reason to learn. I couldn't make a bed unless I was in it. In any kind of group I could be so disruptive that I would be asked to leave. The problem is that at the same time, it is quite easy for me to fade into anonymity. I can do exactly as I'm told and do it well enough so no one notices. Screwing up when everyone else is breaking their knuckles to set some kind of record in spit-shine diligence takes tremendous amounts of courage, conviction, and single-mindedness. The peer pressure of being responsible for your whole platoon going through extra paces because of your goof-ups leaves you vulnerable. And I'm not that brave. I would follow the slippery slope. I'd go in and then hope for a job any place other than Vietnam. Then I'd be sent to Vietnam and hope for a non-combat job. I'd still be hoping as I squeezed the rounds into the village huts. It would be easy for me. I don't have the kind of courage that stops in the middle of something and reevaluates. Besides, at that point, after graduation and teach-in upon teach-in about the injustices perpetrated by U.S. policy, going into the military would have been impossible to rationalize. I make no distinction between those who pick out the targets and those who drop the bombs, those who pull the trigger and those who make the bullets, those who patch the wounded so they can fight again and those who fight again. They're all part of the machine, a machine with interchangeable parts.
I possessed one major theatrical trick. I could drag my left leg behind me, pull my right arm over my chest and hunch my back in a mimic of the Hunchback of Notre Dame. So, it isn't that great of a talent, it's all I got. I thought it might keep me from being drafted, consequently, for two days I hunched around the apartment and between classes. Late on the second day I came down a long hall of classrooms and at the end of the hall was a small girl with glasses sitting in a wheelchair whose legs didn't even reach to the feet supports. Her right hand was on the chair control and her eyes were huge staring at me behind those thick glasses. I immediately straightened and swiftly walked around a corner. All I could see was her poor body trapped in that chair. I hoped she didn't think I was making fun of her but what else could she think as I skulked down the corridor. Perhaps I should have been pissed at myself for resorting to such feeble-brained ideas but instead I cursed at the draft for making me less of who I thought I was.
A movement was underway to clog the legal system either by court challenges or by prison terms. If everyone who wanted the draft to end was prepared to place themselves in a situation where they had to be dealt with by the authorities, then, so the argument goes, the authorities would soon run out of resources. Yeh, since when? First off, I don't have a Christ or a Ghandi complex and as previously noted, I ain't that filled with courage or saintliness. When they come to get me I'm not going peaceably. If one of my partners raises his sword and cuts off the ear of a cop, I'm gonna give him an increase in his salary. Second off, embracing jail as a viable alternative was never a real consideration for me. I find it hard to believe that if I put on a long face and sit in the corner of my cell I will so shame the jailer that he will leave the keys and uniform on the table and depart. My experience tells me that jailers are jailers because they like the sound of the bars clanking shut and none of us will ever run out of people who we believe need to be locked up. Take for instance my dentist. Somehow, I can't recall how, I learned that he was among the Japanese-Americans interred during World War II. In retrospect, most Americans consider the imprisonment of Japanese-American citizens a dreadful wrong. Interestingly enough, the dentist's son ended up going to prison for resisting the Vietnam draft. I don't think their faith in the basic goodness of the system has been repaid.
Don't get me wrong. I recognize the heroic qualities in those who resisted by acting crazy or scheming against the draft or defying military authority or going to jail as a protest against the war. A part of me wishes I could muster that kind of courage and commitment but nothing in my past points towards heroism. I have no reason to believe that all my cowardly yesterdays would lead to a brave tomorrow.
My roommates had packed up and gone home. Like I'd told my parents, the lease wasn't up until the end of July. In August, students would begin to snatch up the housing in IV. But in June and July the place was deserted. I was driving around with my van half-filled with my stuff from the apartment.
Perfect Park was droning the chant of "Hare, Hare Krishna, Krishna, Krishna .." something or other. It was the Hare Krishna freaks. I never liked to get too close to them and it wasn't just the smell of burnt-shit incense. They spooked me. People mistakenly look for space aliens in UFO's. I got a news flash for those searching the skies. They're already here and they're dressed in saffron robes. Under those robes are the sexless, mindless automatons from outer space. They chant that code to each other like we send out Morse. And for a brief moment I thought of joining them to hide out. I needed a place to lay low. I could go underground amidst the Haries. They shave my head, wrap me up like an orange dreamsicle and drop me off at some airport with pamphlets and flowers to hawk and who'd know it was me? Unfortunately, I'd probably not know it was me either.
I walked past Perfect Park and the Haries and towards my apartment. I spotted him before I reached the drive. Sometimes we recognize a person because of time or place. Sometimes we recognize people without the reference of place. That was how I saw Rallio. He was on the stoop outside my apartment with a large green duffel. I was so happy to see him I didn't consider the incongruity of him sitting at my doorstep.