Summer of '69

by Todd Strasser

  “Have you decided what you’re going to do?” I ask. I can’t bring myself to say “about Antonia,” but he knows what I’m talking about.

  He shakes his head.

  “Well, whatever you decide . . .” I begin. “I want you to know that it’ll be okay with me.”

  His forehead creases. He pulls his lips in. His eyes become glittery.

  He goes inside.

  8/18/69

  Dear Lucas,

  Thank you for your letter. Thank you for being so understanding and not being angry. I’ve always known that you’re an amazing person. Once again you’ve proved it.

  In a way, you’ve made things harder for me. It would have been easier if you had gotten mad about Samuel. Instead you reminded me of all the good times we had last year. And of course you were right. We did have lots more good than bad.

  I’m so confused. I was unsure before, and I’m even more unsure now. Maybe you’re right about me using Samuel as a way to let you know how serious I am about getting you to change. I don’t know. I hate the idea of using anyone, so it could be true and I just don’t want to admit it.

  Things feel so uncertain. I’m sure part of it has to do with going to Middlebury next month. And maybe it’s also the way things are in our country right now. Everything feels so up in the air. It’s not only the way people are so violently divided about this terrible war. You must have heard about that cult killing in California? And all the children who are starving to death in Biafra? And that woman dying in Senator Kennedy’s car? Doesn’t it feel like we’re becoming unhinged?

  I wish I knew what to say about us. I wish I understood what I’m feeling. I hate being this way. I hate to keep you in suspense. You don’t deserve that. I do love you, Lucas. But as I said before, I can’t go back to the way things were last spring. And I’m scared that if we get together again, that’s what will happen. I didn’t intend to become that person last time. So what’s to make me think it won’t happen again?

  xoxoxo Robin

  My heart swells. Robin’s letter is written on the lavender stationery she last used over Easter vacation, when her missives arrived every day, saturated with Shalimar and professions of love. I bring this one close to my nose. No perfume, but that’s okay. Tears seep through my squeezed-closed eyes as I laugh, and sob, and laugh.

  Dear Chris,

  Did Mr. DiPasquale say anything about you taking off early on Mondays and Wednesdays for school this summer? My father said he’d talk to him about it. I guess it has to be night school, right? After what you’ve been through, it would be totally weird to go back to high school with a bunch of kids.

  Man, I still can’t believe that working in the factory may have been what saved your butt. Not that you learned anything about how the postal system actually works, but that’s the army, right? And speaking of which, can you believe that story about all those officers trying to cover up that massacre near My Lai? I sure hope you never saw anything like that over there.

  I know what you mean when you say life before the army feels like ancient history. Or maybe what’s ancient are the dopes we were back then. Almost every night after dinner, most of the guys I know go to bars or stay at their places and get ripped. I’m starting to think that it was a good thing that we got most of that lunacy out of our systems when we did. Not that we don’t enjoy a beer and a toke now and then. I mean, let’s be real.

  Anyway, since you asked what I’ve been up to here in the Green Mountains . . . the ski season is starting to wind down. It’s mostly spring skiing now. Since we work at the shop until 10:30 every morning and have to be back by 2:30 or 3, we ski midday, sometimes in shorts and even T-shirts. With the sun’s rays reflecting off the snow, you can actually get a pretty serious sunburn if you’re not careful.

  Most of the guys in the shop don’t give a crap about the business and just put in their time so they can ski every day, but I’ve been learning stuff. I don’t dig the sales part. It’s typical capitalist bullshit. Dave, the owner, wants us to sell whatever gear gives him the biggest profit margin. But the technical side of the business is pretty interesting. There’s a ton of stuff you need to know about how the different brands of skis, bindings, and boots work together. Binding placement. Adjustments and blah blah. Dave took me aside the other day and said if I was serious about it, he’d send me to some tech clinics next fall.

  That’s a possibility, but the other thing is, from his days in ad sales at Time magazine, my father knows some people at Ziff Davis, the company that owns Ski magazine. They have some trade journals about the ski business, and he’s going to find out if maybe they’d give me a job. I’ve been doing a lot of writing. Short stories and things like that. Might try sending a few to literary magazines. In the meantime, how amazing would it be if I could get a job writing about skiing?

  Guess I’ll have to see where things are with Robin next year. Most of her friends at Middlebury think it’s pretty groovy that she’s got a ski bum boyfriend. But a couple of weeks ago she asked me if I planned to work in a ski shop for the rest of my life. So of course I said yes just to give her grief. But between you and me, I doubt it. Working in a shop and having to deal with deranged customers is a drag. I can’t imagine making a career of it. And like I said, writing about skiing would be a dream.

  For now I’m planning on hanging around here until Robin’s semester ends. Then we’ll spend June and July in Boston. Robin’s roommate’s family owns a restaurant where we can work part-time. The rest of the time, we’ll be working for the Student Mobilization Committee to End the War. Then in August Robin wants us to go to Europe for two weeks. I thought we could hitchhike around and camp out, but she insists that we get Europasses, travel by train, and stay in hostels. Did I hear you mutter “henpecked”? Who, me?

  So that’s it for now, my friend. We’ll be home for a week before we go to Boston, and I’ll give you a shout. And as I said before, it’s fantastic to have you back in one piece on this side of the planet. I’m glad you want to get your high-school diploma. You’ve got too much on the ball to spend the rest of your life operating a junk-mail inserter.

  Peace, brother,

  Lucas

  As great as it is to have Chris home, there are still hundreds of thousands of kids like him over there killing and dying. Last November, a couple of months before Chris finished his tour, Robin and I marched in Washington, D.C., in a giant protest against the war. And just days after that, the world saw the photos of all the Vietnamese women and children who were massacred by U.S. soldiers near My Lai a couple years ago. Who knows how many other atrocities like that haven’t yet been revealed? We have to stop this war. Now.

  “Nervous?” Robin asks as we pass an orchard of trees covered with white blossoms. We’re driving home from Vermont in her VW Beetle (she learned to drive a stick last fall when she got this Bug). A few hours ago, she took her last final of the spring semester.

  “Yeah.” I haven’t been home since October. Will it feel strange reentering the house of dashed dreams? Seeing the folks again? Will it be just as tense as when I left? But I am looking forward to seeing Alan, Arno, and Milton. Arno and I exchanged a few letters over the winter. Sounds like he managed to make friends at Bucknell without needing to sell acid or display someone’s finger in a jar on his desk. And I spoke pretty regularly on the phone with Milton; he and some pals at MIT built something called a blue box that allows them to make long-distance phone calls for free.

  Around Robin’s neck is the sterling-silver love pendant from Tiffany’s that I’d planned to give her last summer at Lake Juliette. When I reach over and tuck a few errant strands of her hair behind her ear, she turns and briefly smiles. She says Samuel’s out of the picture, and given how solid things between us have been for the past eight months, there’s no reason to doubt her. And I told her about Tinsley. It seemed like the right thing to do. I didn’t want to live with the idea of being like my father and keeping something like that a secret. I guess th
ere are two ways to look at the examples our parents set. You can learn from them what to do, or you can learn what not to do.

  Anyway, Robin was cool about Tinsley. In a weird way I think it was good that Robin had her fling with Samuel. Somehow it feels like it’s made what we have stronger.

  “Has your dad said anything more about Antonia?” she asks.

  “I know he’s been playing a lot of tennis tournaments in New Jersey, but he’s still living at home most of the time. Alan’s got three more years of school. Maybe he’s decided to stick around till then.” As long as Dad continues to do right by Mom and Alan, who am I to say what else he should do?

  And even though I’ve moved away, I know I’ve got to stay involved in my brother’s life, too. Alan and I talk on the phone now and then, mostly about what amusement rides he’s gone on and the shows he’s watched. The funny thing is, the kid who never wanted to talk in person turns into a chatterbox on the phone. Go figure.

  Robin’s hands are in the precise ten-and-two position on the steering wheel. It’s strange to think that less than a year ago, my hands were on Odysseus’s steering wheel while I tripped my brains out on Orange Sunshine and drove us from Cambridge to Long Island. It feels bizarre to think that tripping freak was me. Hard to imagine these days that I’d ever impulsively drop acid, then get in a car and drive down a busy highway for hours. Or be so reckless that I’d risk being drafted instead of putting in the work to apply to college. Sometimes it feels like those are the memories of someone else. It makes me wonder why it is that even when we’re not sure of ourselves or what we’re doing, we can still insist on being so firm in our beliefs. Is it because it’s too frightening to admit that we may never know anything for certain?

  “You think it’s possible that no matter who we think we are at any given time in our lives, ultimately we never stop changing?” I ask.

  Robin shoots me a quizzical glance. “Where did that come from?”

  “Just wondering.”

  She looks back at the highway. “I guess. Maybe it’s a good thing. It could be kind of boring to be the same person your whole life.”

  In twenty years, we can ask Arno. If there’s one person who’ll never change . . .

  We enter a long blind curve in the shadow of a hill that blocks the afternoon sun. Robin’s shoulders are hunched while she concentrates on steering. We’ll spend a week on Long Island and then head to Boston, but the trip to Europe in August is on hold. There’s too much that needs to be done here. Instead of trying to end the war, Nixon’s expanded it into Cambodia. Two weeks ago, National Guard troops at Kent State University in Ohio actually shot and killed four college students who were protesting. The Student Mobilization Committee is calling for a referendum next November asking Massachusetts voters to support an immediate end of the war. They’ll need a minimum of forty-eight thousand registered voters to sign petitions to get the referendum on the ballot, but the SMC leaders want to get at least a hundred thousand signatures, and hopefully more, to make a point. So that’s what we’ll be doing this summer.

  We come out of the curve, back into the sunlight and onto a long straightaway that leads toward some distant low green mountains. Off to the right is a sun-washed red barn, and beyond it broad fields with long, straight rows of brown dirt topped with thin green sprouts. It’s the beginning of another summer. How many times last summer did I escape disaster by the skin of my teeth, whether it was from Vietnam, border guards, gangs of hoods, OD’ing on pills, or nearly losing Robin?

  (Arno’s right. I really have been a lucky fuck. Not only because of the Semi-Miraculous Transformation, but for reasons even the I Ching probably can’t explain.)

  Barry’s death is still a throbbing ache, but other events from last summer seem like distant memories — some of them funny, some frightening, some sad, and some astonishing. It’s crazy how much has changed. Can today truly be the first day of the rest of your life? Yeah, I think I’m probably living proof that it can. Maybe that’s what life is — a whole series of first days.

  Just as long as we never forget how incredibly lucky we are to be alive.

  A few people have asked why I waited so long to tell this story. A big part of the reason was that I didn’t want this book to be published while my mother and father, and aunt and uncle, were able to read it. They’d all been through enough in their lives and didn’t need to be reminded.

  While many of the episodes in the book are based on personal experience, there are some that came to me secondhand. The scene in the tunnel with the Pagan’s motorcycle gang after the Led Zeppelin concert (and what a concert it was!), the Molotov cocktail incident, and the run-in with the hoods on the beach are three such “borrowed” incidents.

  The same is true of the characters. Some are conglomerations of people I knew at the time. For instance, the young woman who introduced me to the Planting Fields, and with whom I went to Woodstock on my motorcycle, was not the one I hitched home with after leaving my partly burned microbus in Canada. Likewise, the friend who bought the half a gram of pure acid was not the one who complained to the police when he thought he’d been ripped off by a fake dealer. From surfing I’ve learned that close to a storm, waves tend to be many and disorganized, but as they travel away from the storm center, they meld — thanks to the physical law of conservation of energy — into one another and become organized sets of fewer waves. A similar process happened as I wrote this book. Where two characters could be blended into one, they naturally did so, thus conserving the amount of energy it required to keep the character in the reader’s consciousness.

  In addition, even those characters who maintained their singular identities have had some details of their lives changed to better fit the story and narrative. After Woodstock, my cousin died from a heroin overdose in Vancouver, not Monticello. The businesses my father was involved with were not the ones described in the book, although I did indeed work in a bulk-mail facility. Also, I graduated from high school in 1968, not 1969, and while the danger of being drafted loomed ever-present in my life, my own circumstances never became quite as dire as those of my alter ego, Lucas.

  And as far as the Semi-Miraculous Transformation? As anyone who knows me can attest, it may have happened to Lucas, but it sure didn’t happen to me.

  The author, early August 1969

  Photo by Anita Green

  My deepest gratitude and thanks to:

  My editor, Kaylan Adair, without whose long, detailed, and insightful editorial letters and comments, this book simply would not exist. Also to Betsy Uhrig and Hannah Mahoney, for their diligent and detailed copyediting; Jackie Shepherd for her wonderful cover; and Nathan Pyritz for his help, and patience, with the interior design. And to all of Candlewick Press for being a place where such books are nurtured and supported.

  My agent, Stephen Barbara, for his unwavering support and attention, and for bringing me to Candlewick in the first place.

  My elementary- and high-school buddies Jed, Joel, David, Ken, George, Jon, and Tom, for answering my queries about the past, sharing their memories, and correcting mine. Also to Anita and Rick (wherever you are), for sharing so much of that summer.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or, if real, are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2019 by Todd Strasser

  Cover illustration based on artwork copyright © 2019 by Shutterstock

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in an information retrieval system in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, taping, and recording, without prior written permission from the publisher.

  First electronic edition 2019

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 2018961332

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