Fifty in Reverse

by Bill Flanagan

  NINE

  The rest of the morning passed in systemic lethargy. When the bell rang at two, Peter peeled off from the mob zombie-marching down the corridor and moved toward the Kent State meeting in the small auditorium at the center of campus.

  West Bethlehem Veterans Memorial High School was laid out like a hobbled swastika. The principal’s office, school staff rooms, and the two auditoriums were in the middle of the structure. Four long corridors designated wings A, B, C, and D shot out from that hub. Two of those wings bent left at their ends, creating E and F wings. Three cinderblock classrooms in a windowless pillbox outside the fire doors of F wing formed the outpost of G wing. Health classes were held out there—sex education being segregated by design or accident from the body of the school.

  Peter made it to the small auditorium and leaned against the back wall. Daphne arrived at the center of a cluster of alpha girls. She was telling them, “It’s not like they’re ever going to let us do anything that would actually address what’s really going on in this fucked-up country, right?”

  Daphne’s friend Pasa said, “Do you realize the Boston Massacre was exactly two hundred years ago? British troops opened fire on a group of protestors and killed five of them. It started the Revolutionary War.”

  Pasa wore granny glasses and high-waisted corduroy slacks. Peter couldn’t remember her real name but recalled that she’d adopted Pasa as a protest. It stood for People Against Spiro Agnew. The school jocks thought it was funny to call out “¿Qué Pasa?” when she went by. To them she said it stood for “People Against Stupid Assholes.”

  Daphne’s group took seats at single-arm desks and watched the room fill up. As freshmen they were at the bottom of the social slope. Condescending seniors, self-serious juniors, and smirking sophomores rolled in and commanded the good positions. It was unusual for representatives of all four classes to be in one gathering. Some of the ninth graders were only fourteen, while the older twelfth graders were already eighteen, the longest four-year gap in the human life span.

  Peter wondered what threats of walkouts or disruption had inspired the administration to convene this meeting. Was it a directive from the mayor’s office? Was the superintendent of schools panicked that the televised riots on college campuses in the wake of the events at Kent State would inspire an enraged archery team to volley flaming arrows at the faculty lounge? West Beth High had only recently relaxed the dress code to allow girls to wear pants to school and boys to have hair below their ears. It was no incubator of radicalism.

  A scrum of sullen seniors in defiant black armbands marched in together and reconnoitered the room. From out of the middle of their group emerged a fierce young woman with frizzy black hair and a hawk nose. Peter knew her at once: Mina Habib, strident voice of the left in the student newspaper. Mina wrote think pieces suggesting that any money spent on the space program was bread taken from the mouths of starving children. In her most famous editorial she volunteered to be bused to a black high school if any black high school wanted to take her up on it. After graduation Mina would become a civil rights attorney in Boston, a visiting professor at Wesleyan, a collaborator with Ralph Nader, Barney Frank, and Elizabeth Warren, as well as a regular guest on The Rachel Maddow Show. She would be West Beth High’s most famous graduate, unless Peter had dreamed the whole thing.

  His gaze moved to a mumbling Ricky DeVille kneeling on the small stage, screwing together a drum kit next to a Fender Twin amplifier. Apparently, there was going to be music at this rap session. A skeletal figure came out of the wings and switched on the amp. He wore a beat-up black suit jacket over a white T-shirt and pipe-cleaner jeans. His hair was greased up in a heroic pompadour that descended into knife-edge black sideburns and a waterfall of long hair curling over the collar behind.

  Peter knew it was Ricky’s older brother Rocky DeVille. Not the DeVille who asked for a reward for accidently turning himself in when he dialed the TIP Line instead of the PIT Line—that was Barry. Barry was a hood. Rocky was a mondo, a slick greaser built like an open jackknife. If Peter’s memory of life after 1970 wasn’t a fantasy, he knew a half dozen local rumors about Rocky’s eventual fate—from incarceration at the state prison to fugitive status in the Maritimes to having been found chopped up in a barrel under the Newport Bridge. Whatever cruel destiny awaited Rocky in the years to come, in 1970 he was in the small auditorium, plugging in a hollow-body Gretsch electric guitar while his younger brother, Ricky, tightened the tension rods on the drums.

  Moe Mosspaw entered the room in a hurry. He was carrying a folder of papers and was dressed in his usual uniform of short-sleeve dress shirt, fat necktie, horn-rimmed glasses, and double-knit pants. He called the room to order.

  “You guys in the back? Find a seat. There’s plenty of places up here. Okay, we in? Everyone in? I’m not going to take attendance.”

  Daphne was studying Rocky DeVille with a scrutiny that made Peter jealous. He was immediately angry with himself. The DeVilles finished arranging their instruments and crouched on the side of the stage like two suspects trying to not be picked out of a lineup.

  The guidance counselor spoke: “Okay, you all know what happened yesterday in Ohio. Four protestors shot by National Guardsmen during a demonstration against the American incursion into Cambodia.”

  “It’s not an incursion,” one of the black armbands shouted. “It’s an illegal invasion of a neutral country in violation of international law!”

  A hockey player raised his voice: “The Viet Cong are already in there! They cross the border, strike at our troops, and then run back into Cambodia, and we’re not supposed to follow them? We can’t win the war if we’re not allowed to retaliate against attacks!”

  “We have no legal reason to be there in the first place,” Mina Habib said. “We’ve already dragged one country into a brutal war, and now instead of pulling out as they promised, Nixon and Kissinger are moving the conflict into another.”

  The hockey player shot back, “Nixon didn’t start this war. The Democrats did, the liberals did! Nixon’s trying to get us out of there with honor…”

  The word honor brought hoots and jeers from the black armband crowd. Peter saw that the hockey player represented a silent majority of student council members, athletes, and class officers. They hadn’t come to this meeting to man the ramparts. The treasurer of the junior class, a girl with a green vest and a white turtleneck, said, “The communists attacked the south. Would you let them just take over?”

  Mr. Mosspaw tried to restore order. “Okay, gang,” he said. “Good points on both sides! Now here’s the thing. We won’t settle the Vietnam War at this meeting. That’s up to the diplomats at the Paris peace talks. Let’s talk about how we feel about the deaths at Kent State. Who here wants to start?”

  “Cancel final exams!” one sophomore said. His buddies giggled.

  Mina Habib knew why she had come. She said, “I want our school—students and administration—to petition the governor to lower all flags to half-mast and institute a day of mourning for the slain students, and also to demand that the state legislature condemn the actions of the Ohio National Guard and ask for a full investigation of the shooting by an impartial team of prosecutors with power of subpoena at the federal level.”

  “Good idea,” the hockey player said. “Federal prosecutors often take orders from high school assemblies.”

  Half the room laughed at this while the radicals looked like they were ready to bust out the machetes. Mr. Mosspaw said, “Let’s hear from some other voices. Delores, you have something to read?”

  Peter hadn’t noticed earnest Delores of the pinioned smiley faces at the back of the room. Of course she was there—she was everywhere. She marched forward with determination, mounted the steps to the stage past the DeVille boys, and planted herself behind a microphone on a stand. She read from a poem she had composed for the occasion called “The Flower or the Sword.”

  I see the line of stony faces

  The bay
onets fixed and trained

  The ideals of a generation

  Falling like spring rain

  Who are these child soldiers

  No older than the ones they face

  They can’t afford to go to college

  Which of us would take their place?

  The reaction was an unspoken “Huh?” Moe Mosspaw clapped enthusiastically, and some of the gathering were polite enough to join in. Delores accepted her applause stoically and returned to the back of the room.

  Mr. Mosspaw said, “Now Rick DeVille has prepared a musical statement about how he and, I’m sure, many of the rest of you feel about the turmoil our nation is going through.”

  Sharp, thin Rocky sat at the drums while Ricky strapped on the Gretsch and turned the volume knobs. Rocky counted off, and the two of them launched into a startlingly loud and off-key rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” in the napalm style Jimi Hendrix had popularized at Woodstock the summer before—newly available on triple LP. As few had ever heard Ricky DeVille speak, let alone stand in front of a class, the room was astonished to see him bending the guitar strings to summon bazooka blasts of distortion at a volume that sent them across not only the small auditorium but also West Beth Vets rafters from the gymnasium to the distant G wing.

  Ricky was ascending to the rocket’s red glare when the door flew open and science teacher Houlihan steamed into the room, his face crimson, his belly cannonballing before him, and his fists ready to fly at the source of this sacrilege. Ricky had his head down and his eyes closed—he didn’t see the torpedo approaching. Houlihan flew up onto the stage and yanked the plug out of the amplifier.

  The volume went dead. Ricky opened his eyes, confused. Brother Rocky kept drumming for seven bars before he realized he was doing a solo. Seeing Rocky, a delinquent he thought he had disposed of years earlier, shattered whatever was left of Houlihan’s equilibrium.

  “This meeting is over!” Houlihan shouted. “You children get back to your classes! And take off those armbands! Anyone wearing a black armband in school will be suspended!”

  Peter wondered if there was going to be another student massacre right there in the small auditorium. Mina Habib was shouting, “Fascism! Fascism!” and the hockey player had deputized both his goalies and the president of the student council to charge the radicals. Daphne was licking her lips in anticipation of a fistfight.

  Peter took it in. He looked at the two DeVille brothers stranded on the stage with their guitar and drums and studied the melee breaking out all around him, and he stared at Daphne’s profile and made a decision to surrender to his delusion. He wove between the shouting factions and climbed up on the stage and said to Ricky, “Can I borrow your guitar for a minute?”

  Ricky looked like it was no weirder to him than anything else going on that day. He handed Peter the Gretsch with great care. Peter turned to Rocky and said, “Moderate march, like this,” and tapped a rhythm. He hauled over the microphone into which Delores had declaimed her poem. Mr. Houlihan was waving a ruler around in the air like a saber and shouting about sending for the state police, and Mina was yelling back at him, “The whole world is watching,” which was demonstrably untrue. No one in the room was paying any attention to Peter. Mr. Mosspaw restrained Mina from jumping onto Houlihan’s back while the jocks and radicals ducked and weaved and dared each other to take the first swing.

  Peter said into the microphone, “I’d like to express something about how we feel.”

  One person noticed him. Daphne. He looked at her and drew in a breath. The frets felt awkward under his fingers. It didn’t matter. He could play “Ohio.” He could sing it too, in an imitation of Neil Young’s high and shaky voice.

  “Tin soldiers and Nixon coming, we’re finally on our own…”

  Bad boy Rocky DeVille fell in behind him. The room turned his way.

  By the time he got to the end, repeating, “Four dead in Ohio,” every eye in the auditorium was on him. The hockey players were dumbfounded, the student council members were nodding their heads in time, Mr. Mosspaw was looking on in wonder, and Mina and the black armband boys were chanting right along, their fists in the air.

  Daphne was more impressed than if Peter had pierced his nipples with paper clips and stuck a pencil in his eye.

  Vice Principal Lockwood, former Peace Corps volunteer and almost-nun, had arrived to stop a riot and found herself instead standing in the doorway with tears on her cheeks.

  The last chorus of “Ohio” faded. Peter let the echo of the final chord ring. Teachers and students who had crowded into the room to see what all the noise was clapped and whistled. Ricky and Rocky DeVille slapped him on the shoulder and told him he was great.

  “Peter,” Mr. Mosspaw asked, “you wrote that?”

  “Yes sir,” the boy said.

  The guidance counselor said, “I had no idea you were so talented.”

  Peter smiled and took in the applause. He said, “Wait till you hear my song ‘Stairway to Heaven.’ ”

  TEN

  On Saturday morning Peter stretched out on his bed, considering that he had performed “Ohio” in public before Neil Young had written it. The bad news was, when the Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young version came out in a few weeks, he would be exposed as a plagiarist. The good news was, when the CSNY version came out, it would be proof that he knew the future.

  He was listening to the plastic clock radio on his nightstand. He heard the Moments, Melanie, Tyrone Davis, and the Jackson 5. It pleased him that in 1970 rock and roll still meant black and white music together. It would be another few years before FM radio consultants would resegregate the genre and “rock and roll” would come to mean white boys with guitars only—as if Little Richard and Fats Domino had never happened. As if Ray Charles and Chuck Berry had not invented the form.

  His mother called from downstairs that Dr. Terry was coming up the driveway on his motorcycle. The radio said, “Here’s a big WPRO exclusive! It’s the new track from the Beatles! Those reports of a breakup were premature. Here’s the latest from John, Paul, George, and Ringo—‘So Intoxifying.’ The Beatles on PRO!”

  Peter stared at the radio. It was playing a Beatles record he had never heard. A darting McCartney bassline bounced off Ringo’s rolling drums, and John Lennon’s unmistakable voice rang out with a lyric about feeling like he had his fix every time we kiss.

  Peter said, “This is impossible.”

  He let the song finish and listened to the disc jockey talk about sticking around because in the next half hour he would play the flip side. “The Beatles are back, and we’ve got ’em on the station that reaches the beaches—WPRO!”

  He wandered downstairs into the library where Dr. Terry was waiting.

  “Here’s the songwriter,” the therapist announced when he saw Peter. “The hero of the protest rally! It’s a thin line between madness and creativity, Pete.”

  Peter was distant. He said, “Doctor, something very strange just happened. I heard a new song by the Beatles on the radio.”

  “Not an unusual occurrence, Pete.”

  The boy rubbed his forehead. “No, it’s impossible. The Beatles broke up in April of 1970. Everybody knows that. Paul sued the other three to dissolve the partnership. They never got back together.”

  The doctor became serious. He said, “That’s how it was in your experience? In the delusion?”

  Peter nodded.

  The doctor said, “So how do you reconcile this new song?”

  Peter said, “The disc jockey was playing a hoax. It’s Badfinger. It’s Klaatu.”

  “Pete, I got something to show you. You see today’s paper?” Dr. Terry opened his leather satchel and pulled out the Boston Globe. He pointed to page one. Peter looked at the headline. He said, “That can’t be.”

  Dr. Terry read the headline out loud: “Rockefeller Dies in Plane Crash.”

  Peter said, “It’s wrong. Nelson Rockefeller becomes vice president after Nixon…”

  Terr
y said, “After Nixon resigns, right. That’s what you said. Turn on the news.” The doctor read from the paper: “New York governor Nelson Rockefeller died in a plane crash in Pennsylvania last night. Also killed were the pilot of Rockefeller’s Learjet and one of the governor’s aides.”

  The doctor passed the newspaper to the boy.

  “Pete, the world you think you remember…”

  Peter’s face went from puzzled to distraught. The doctor said, “The Beatles are not breaking up, Pete. Nelson Rockefeller is not going to be vice president. I very much doubt Richard Nixon is going to resign. And you could not have stopped the Kent State massacre, because as hard as this is to accept, you did not know it was going to happen.”

  He waited for Peter to respond. He didn’t expect him to say, “I have to make a phone call.”

  Dr. Terry followed Peter into the front hall. He was asking the operator for directory information for Long Beach, New York. He asked for the phone number of a Mr. Gus Crowley on Sawchuk Road.

  Dr. Terry watched as Peter protested. He hung up and tried again. He argued. He put down the phone and stood facing away from the psychiatrist.

  “They said there’s no Gus Crowley in Long Beach, and no Sawchuk Road.”

  “Who is Gus Crowley?” the doctor asked.

  “My father-in-law. My wife, Janice, grew up on Sawchuk Road in Long Beach, Long Island. Her dad built the house right after the war. In 1970 he would have been an undercover narcotics detective. By the time I met him he was chief of police. Imagine that, huh?”

  “Peter…”

  The boy was shaking. “How could that not be true?” He began to sob, and Terry Canyon reached out to him. “Doctor, how could none of my life be true?”

  “Remember what we talked about, Peter? You can love your wife and children as a memory the way you loved your parents before you got them back.”