Drew went right up to the merchant window, getting on tiptoes to deliver the goods, which Hildy helped him lift up to the counter while putting her own bag up there, too. “I’m from Smoke and Records,” Drew told the bemused teller, and explained how he wanted the $25.50—“I’d like two tens, a five, and two quarters, please”—before she’d even had a chance to open the bags.
15
avoiding cody’s
The Berkeley schools were closed for two days for some kind of “sensitivity training” for the teachers, whatever that meant, and Drew needed to go to the pediatrician for a booster shot. But it turned out to be one of those weeks when my mother didn’t get out of bed and acted like it was our fault. She was mad that we had time off school so soon after spring break—which had also been our fault. But she wanted the shot for Drew, of course, because shots involved a needle. Seriously—if we got a splinter, she’d make us hold still while she tried to take it out with a straight pin doused in rubbing alcohol, acting as if this were the only way a responsible parent would do it. We begged her to get some tweezers, but—good luck.
“I can take Drew to the doctor,” I offered, “on the bus.”
“That suits me fine,” my mother sniffed.
If she was going to be a bitch about it, and not even say thank you, I figured there was no reason we shouldn’t go to Smoke and Records afterwards. The pediatrician was only a mile down Telegraph, and Drew would deserve some consolation after getting stabbed in the arm with a needle. Besides, my father would give us money for burgers or let us go down to the fountain at Rexall for milkshakes, and then we wouldn’t have to worry about there not being dinner later.
After the doctor’s visit, Drew and I started toward the store. I was glad my mother had been in such a nasty mood that she’d forgotten to force us to bring sweaters, because it was a lovely, warm day. But as we walked north I started to feel uneasy. I thought I heard helicopters in the distance, and it looked like traffic might be closed off further up Telegraph. There could be trouble again on campus—a peace rally gone un-peaceful, or anti-ROTC protests, or maybe another showdown over People’s Park.
We crossed Dwight along the east side of Telegraph, taking in the thick smells of incense and grass. Street vendors offered beaded jewelry, leather barrettes with peace signs on them, hand-carved wooden boxes. There were multicolored candles the very same colors as tie-dyed T-shirts: what if they sold candles that were shaped like torsos instead of cylinders?
A skinny guy with a filthy yellow dog was walking toward us, muttering to no one in particular. In between the mutters, he was taking aggressive bites out of a piece of fruit whose green skin was strangely dark, and it was only as he came closer that I realized he was eating an avocado, rind and all, as if he didn’t realize “alligator pear” wasn’t actually a type of pear. I thought of nudging Drew, who was looking at leather bracelets at a table in front of Caffé Med. Instead, I just grimaced and scanned the street for Declan Wilder.
Next to the bracelet table, a young woman with an Afro was selling 1969 wall calendars for half off. The wrinkled, tanned lady next to her, with a bandana and cowboy boots and a table covered with a black velvet cloth and handmade silver earrings on top, seemed edgy and kept looking north. “The fuzz are already up there. But they must’ve called out the National Guard,” she said to the calendar lady.
“Fucking Reagan,” the calendar lady said.
At the next table, a man with a long beard and flowing brown hair with a little bald spot seemed perfectly serene—maybe because he was smoking a joint right out in public. He was selling plants. “Hey, take a look at this, kids,” he said. “It’s called sensitive mimosa.”
“Pretty,” I said.
“No, I mean touch it. Like this,” he demonstrated. “Go ahead, don’t be afraid. You won’t hurt it.”
I hesitated, but Drew ran his finger over one of the fronds, and it immediately closed up, like a cat arching its back to his stroke. For some reason, I could only think of what my mother would say. Life is not all about gimmicks of nature, young lady. That made me shrug twice in a row, and the stoner guy eyed me narrowly and said, “Hey, relax!”—which only made me shrug again. I glared at him hotly, but he didn’t seem to notice.
I glanced across Telegraph: Moe’s Books, the Éclair Bakery, and then Cody’s Books on the corner. Cody’s! Smart people seem to view the place as a holy sanctuary, and now that I think about it, with its two-story-high atrium, Cody’s is kind of chapel-like. But I don’t feel God in there, or calm, or whatever it is that people feel in chapels. Those books, covering every wall from floor to ceiling and displayed on every available horizontal surface—they’ve always felt to me like an approaching tidal wave, ready to rip through a little town that’s supposedly built on high ground. I’m the town, bracing for the flood, hoping I’ll survive somehow simply because I do the best I can on the high ground known as school. People like Hildy and Declan and Brett—they’re surfers. They don’t feel reproached by the tide or mocked or accused of ignorance. No, they find the tide exhilarating.
I guess Cody’s is sort of the opposite of “isolating the spots.” In Cody’s, there’s no way I can list, let alone make an exercise of, the things that trip me up; there are just too many of them. “Isolating the spots” means you know you’ll improve, that your future will be better. It’s a kind of belief.
Drew and I crossed Haste and kept going. I thought I saw Declan coming out of Mario’s La Fiesta, but it was someone else. Why did I even want to run into him? Unless the topic was music, conversations with him only made me feel stupid. Declan Wilder was the kind of person who knew all about Proust, and could quote stanza after stanza of Irish poetry, and couldn’t imagine why you would want to miss out on such cool things. Which was worse than if he came right out and called you an idiot.
The helicopters were louder now. I wanted to hurry to the store, but Drew was sniffing different kinds of incense at one of the tables, and I was trying not to rush him. Actually, maybe it was more that I was trying to know my brother. What made him tick? I knew he was popular at school, but he never seemed to want to bring friends home (neither had Hildy or I), so I had little sense of what he was like with his peers. What was Drew thinking all the time? I could never quite imagine, aside from things like multiplication tables and playing cards and marbles and army men and comic books and Tintin. Drew was good at making himself small, at saying very little. At disappearing. It was as if he were trying to slip through the cracks so no one would bother him.
A woman vendor was chatting with the guy at the next table. “Just more bullshit, brought to you by the purveyors of the bullshit rhetoric of—”
“—the bullshit military-industrial complex,” the guy finished for her. He was selling models of bones that were made of plastic but that looked real: thigh bones and arm bones and jawbones.
“Right on, brother,” the lady agreed.
Drew picked up a half-size replica of a human skull. “Neato!” he exclaimed. “This is so cool. Isn’t it, Marth?” He looked so happy as he dug into his pocket that I smiled and tousled his curls. Drew always seemed to have money. Recently, a classmate of Hildy’s at Berkeley High had commented about the “nice little business” Drew had. What business? Hildy wanted to know. It turned out the classmate had a younger cousin who was in Drew’s class. Drew was letting other kids copy off his math papers for a quarter, and the cousin was one of his customers. Hildy thought Drew might be playing cards for money, too.
By the time Drew and I passed Larry Blake’s, we could see some army-type trucks parked on the north side of Bancroft, along the edge of the campus. Traffic was closed off between Durant and Bancroft. I was feeling some urgency about getting to the store, and without talking about it, Drew and I both picked up the pace. We were practically race-walking when I saw Clifton Cray walking up the west side of Telegraph, carrying a skateboard and looking uncertain. “Clifton!” I shouted, but there was too much helicopter noise.<
br />
“Martha, let’s go,” Drew urged.
“We are going. Clifton!” I kept shouting, grabbing Drew’s hand and trotting across the eerily traffic-free last block of Telegraph. Finally, Clifton turned around and waved back, looking relieved and happy. “This’s my brother, Drew,” I told him, panting. “You gotta come with us!”
Bancroft, too, was completely closed to traffic. In a row that stretched way down the block below Telegraph, there were a bunch of policemen in helmets, one next to the other, all facing the campus. Other cops had batons and gas masks and guns across their bodies all at the same diagonal angle, and it looked like the ones in the line did, too. As if in opposition to the row of police, people were lined up on the Student Union balcony, facing them, or maybe just watching, I couldn’t tell. There was also a huge crowd milling around across the street. I craned my neck and could see there were tons of people further into the campus, too, all the way to Sather Gate and past it. Black flatbed trucks, each one with a white five-pointed star on it, were lined up behind the row of police. Then police started crossing into Holy Hubert’s area.
Over the din of the helicopters, I heard a voice: “I’m requesting you all to leave the plaza!” I squinted up at the balcony of the Student Union building, where a police officer, or maybe a National Guardsman, was using a bullhorn. All I caught was that something was “going to be dropped in the next five minutes.”
Clifton looked up at me as there was a roar from the crowd. “What’re chemical reagents?” He’d heard better than I had.
Whatever the hell chemical reagents were, they didn’t sound healthy for children and other living things.
16
helicopters
I shoved Drew inside first, then Clifton.
“Martha! Drew!” Hildy greeted us with a furrowed brow, coming out from behind the counter, where Bob Metcalf was poking at his own eyes with his thumb and middle finger. He’d just recently started wearing contact lenses, and it looked like he was trying to get them out.
“What are all those trucks for?” I asked, not even taking the time to introduce Clifton.
“They called out the National Guard,” Hildy said breathlessly. “The helicopters are so they can shoot off tear gas. Dad says all hell’s gonna break loose! The point is—you shouldn’t’ve come!”
“Shitballs,” Drew said.
“Well, how were we supposed to know,” I said lamely. Of course I should have known. It seemed so obvious in retrospect: I should never have brought Drew, and now Clifton, into a dangerous situation. Everyone said trust your instincts. No one ever explained what to do if your instincts were stupid.
My father ran up from the record area, practically jumping out of his skin. “What are you doing here?” he demanded, as Clifton shrunk back with his skateboard. Half an hour ago, I had actually thought my father might be happy to see me; I never came to the store unless it was scheduled.
“We just—Drew needed a shot at the doctor, and Mom wasn’t— and then Clifton—”
We heard the bullhorn-amplified voice again. Vacate the area! Please cooperate!
“We wanted to surprise you, Dad!” Drew said. “See what I got?” He showed my father the skull.
“Jesus Christ—get the hell out of the way! All of you!” At first I thought he was telling Hildy, Drew, Clifton and me to go up to the tree house, but my father reached in his pocket for the keys to the apartment just as we heard two loud pops that sounded like guns. Shrug. We were going to be shot. We could hear people screaming across the street, police shouting with bullhorns.
Clifton read my panic. “Don’t worry, Martha,” he said, putting a hand on my shoulder. “We’ll be okay.”
Three more pops, and some hissing.
“NOW!” my father yelled at Hildy, throwing her the keys.
But it was too late, because suddenly, a huge, thick white cloud of tear gas was whooshing our way.
“Get behind the counter! Down! Down!” my father shouted at us. All of us kids squished behind the cash register alongside Bob, who had managed to get out one contact lens but not the other. Clifton was somehow able to lodge his skateboard under the counter. I didn’t see so much as hear a stampede of shouting people, louder as it thundered toward the store. I wanted to know what was going on, but now it hurt too much to open my eyes.
Hildy had grabbed Drew’s hand, and without even thinking, I grabbed Clifton’s. He gave back a comforting squeeze. An unexpected warmth spread through my body. Sexual warmth. Jesus Christ— Clifton was thirteen, and a goody-goody! Just one more example of trust your instincts not applying to people like me.
Meanwhile, stabbing pain attacked my tightly shut eyes, and tears coursed down my cheeks. A bunch of people—twelve? twenty? thirty?—were now in the shop. I opened my eyes to a squint and immediately slammed them shut again. My father had locked down the Telegraph door against the stampede and the cloud of noxious fumes, and was now securing the Bancroft door. It didn’t make sense; why would he want to trap the tear gas inside our store? But as another wave of people rolled toward us, I realized he felt that the crowd was more of a danger than the chemicals.
In between coughs into the crook of his arm, my father was barking orders. He’d taken some ratty old towel from behind the cash register to stuff under one of the doors. Then he grabbed a stack of small brown paper bags and started crumpling them up one at a time and tossing them at the people in the store. I was confused until I realized he was having everyone shove the bags under the doors in the space where more gas was getting in.
I heard coughing, crying, gasping, whimpering. Bodies were jammed up right next to the glass display case that my father always worried was fragile. There were so many people squished into the narrow space that I was sure the magazine stacks on the floor were being scuffed and creased, the vertical metal racks bent. I huddled next to Clifton, my hand still in his. Outside, someone was vomiting, and that made me gag, too.
“Are you kids all right?” Bob kept asking, in between coughs. “I can’t see a damned thing!”
Finally, with the gas outside mostly dissipated, my father re-opened the doors and shoved the filthy towel aside with his foot. “Who needs the bathroom?” he shouted, grabbing a handful of dimes out of the cash register so that anyone who wanted soda could use the Coke machine.
“Bob does!” Hildy shouted, guiding Bob in to wash his hands, get the other lens out, and flush his eyes out with the pathetic little stream of water. Hildy pulled Drew in there next, and I told her to take her turn too. My throat hurt as much as my eyes did, and as soon as Drew was done, Clifton insisted I go. I washed my eyes and slurped as much water as I could as it piddled onto the rusted drain at the bottom of the sink. Clifton went in next.
My eyes were still tearing and my stomach was churning. I was grateful for the Coke, and so were the bystanders. My father shouted at people to go ahead and use the bathroom. When everyone started to clear out, my father went in himself.
Crumpled paper bags and the towel were still strewn on the floor and outside on the sidewalk, and Clifton, Drew and I assured Bob we’d pick everything up while he ran over to his apartment for his glasses and Hildy went next door to get us all burgers. While we were gathering the bags, Clifton told me he was worried about his friend Ben. The two had planned to meet on Telegraph, have milkshakes at Rexall, do some skateboarding on campus, and then maybe pick up a copy of the latest Popular Mechanics so he and Ben could work on some projects with Mr. Cray in the Crays’ garage. But Ben hadn’t shown up.
“Dad, Clifton needs to use the phone,” I told my father. “I mean, this is Clifton, by the way. My old violin teacher, Mrs. Cray? This is her son.”
My father looked at Clifton, smiled slightly and reached out to shake his hand. Then he looked at me, then back at Clifton. Shrug.
When Clifton reached Ben, he found out that Ben’s grandmother had made him stay home because she’d gotten wind of the trouble brewing on campus. Then Clifton phoned Mrs.
Cray, who said to skateboard up to her office in the music building. Drew and I both told Clifton to stay for a few more minutes so he could eat.
The truth was, I didn’t want Clifton to leave at all. Or, if he did, I wanted him to take me with him. I wanted to hang around in his garage, work with him and his dad as they tinkered with their car, or did some carpentry project, or repaired something that was broken. Or maybe I’d just watch them, with Mrs. Cray’s violin lessons as the soundtrack.
After Clifton was gone, my father put Petrushka on, and people started trickling in again, looking for gum, Camels, the Berkeley Barb, Beethoven’s Archduke trio. My father encouraged us to call my mother, but Hildy, Drew and I all begged him not to make us.
Drew trotted behind the counter to retrieve the skull replica he’d left there. “Look, you guys,” he said, waving it at my father and Hildy. “Isn’t it neat?”
“It’s really neat, Drew,” Hildy said.
“Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him well,” my father intoned.
“You mean, I knew him, Horatio,” I corrected.
“It’s I knew him well,” Hildy put in.
“No it’s not, Hildy. My English teacher—”
“My English teacher,” my father mimicked.
“You guys are both wrong,” I said flatly. Sometimes I let Hildy keep the bullshit going, because I felt guilty that my mother was so much meaner to Hildy than she was to me. But then sometimes I was just sick of it. I hated how it turned out that the Haydn string quartet my father was always whistling didn’t actually have those two extra beats—he added them in, for no reason. I hated the way he misquoted things, the way he mispronounced words, the way he botched people’s names. And I hated how Hildy automatically assumed this was because everyone else in the world was getting it all wrong.
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