Sounding the Waters

by James Glickman

  Alex punches him in the arm, turns his hat brim-side to the back, and says, “Let’s eat.” Annie helps herself to some more fruit salad and the two boys heap plates with a prodigious assortment of foods. I begin to watch with a kind of surprise as they empty the plates, fill them completely, empty them again, and then wipe out what remains of the fruit salad, the ice cream, and the frozen yogurt. Bobby and I used to do the same thing in the old days, but I had forgotten.

  I get home, get in bed, read for a while, turn out the lights, and find I cannot sleep. Perhaps it was seeing Clive Sanford or Jimmy and Alex, but whatever the reason, I keep thinking about “the old days.” I consider turning the light on and reading or watching TV, but I wonder if thinking about the past might offer me a clue about how to alter my present. My fingers laced behind my head, staring at the darkened ceiling, I am back in college. It is a time when, unburdened as I am by grief or very much knowledge, experience seems to pass straight and undiluted into my nervous system.

  ✳

  It is 1966. Bobby and I are going east. I have it in my head I want to study history, and a book I look at says Yale has the best history department. So when to my surprise the school lets me in, I don’t need time to think it over. Bobby, however, is recruited by colleges far and wide. He has decided back in the golden penumbra of the Kennedy era that he wants to go into politics. So I assume he will go to Harvard. But when it comes right down to making his final choice, he decides he wanted a touch of familiarity in the new world. So I have some company on my flight into Tweed Airport in New Haven.

  He and I are going to be roommates on the Old Campus, along with two other fellows, identified on a postcard as R. James Price of Washington, DC, and Kurt Swanson of Palo Alto, California. I stare at the postcard and picture R. James Price to be the son of diplomats, educated at the American School in Paris or perhaps Andover, a trim young man wearing a striped tie under his sleek blue blazer. Kurt Swanson I expect is student body president, a tall, tan, blond-haired blue-eyed mesomorph for whom everything good is “bitchin’!’’ and who likes to hang ten in between eating his protein powder as part of his training for the Olympic swim team. The reality is that Ricky Price is a shy black kid who has graduated from a tough city high school and has been raised by his widower father, a city sanitation worker. Kurt Swanson, president of the student body, is tall, tan, blond, etc., and, though he likes surfing, has a passion for theoretical physics.

  I have also imagined I will adjust all right to college life but wonder if Bobby might need some looking after. After all, though I am hardly a world traveler, my trips with my family to New York and Los Angeles have made me Ferdinand Magellan compared with Bobby, who for his longest journey has once gone to a state fair forty-two miles from Oshiola. Instead, though, from the moment we climb the worn marble steps to drop our luggage off at our room and begin a quick tour of the campus, I am the one who feels uneasy, by unpredictable turns, either like one of the world’s deserving rare elect or an utter fraud.

  Bobby goes off to football practice, makes friends, takes things in stride.

  Classes make me miserable and exhilarated, or exhilarated and miserable. Unlike most of my sophisticated classmates, I have been raised on a range of ideas that is neither wide nor deep. Actually, I don’t really have ideas. I have a view of things, imbibed like mother’s milk from earliest consciousness: people, I think, are basically good. Sometimes civilization or mean parents distort their basic noble nature and make them bad.

  A few weeks of some philosophy, history, psychology, and political science make me feel like one of those test pilots I saw in grade-school science films, a man strapped on a rocket sled, the flesh of his face mashed against his skull, stretched into a single grotesque grimace by all the G-forces piling up during the acceleration. My ride is an intellectual rocket sled tour of twentieth-century thought, leaving my cheerful corn-fed Rousseauian, Jeffersonian, and Leave It to Beaverian views on the Nature of Man blowing behind the engines like scraps of gum wrapper. Fueled up with Plato and Aristotle and Socrates, I go on a white-knuckled tour through HegelHeideggerNietzcheFreud

  MarxBFSkinner EinsteinHeisenbergSartre, with a few brief glimpses at JungKantCamusWittengstein. And while I argue late into the night about determinism and free will and the absence of any absolute truth, Bobby studies, goes to football practice, and writes letters to his mother and sister.

  In between I make the unwelcome discovery that going to an all-male school actually means there are no girls. To meet them, you must find some way to travel a hundred miles to a girls’ school. If you are a freshman and do not look like Kurt Swanson, you are rapidly—as the saying goes—shot down. And if you are me, someone who is on the ungainly side, this Darwinian social life is not heaven-sent.

  Bobby finds a nice Mount Holyoke girl to date.

  I also make the unsettling discovery that the American history I learned in high school is as much fable as fact. And if the history I have studied, written by the victors, has too often been the lie we agreed to, what about now? For instance, what about what is still happening to Negroes? And what about this little war that is going on in Southeast Asia?

  A lot of what we learn is new to Bobby, too, and it makes him angry, but he is less surprised about it all than I am. He has always been less permeable to myth and romance than people like our classmates and me, who have had easier lives. And what the government and the banks did to his father—both of whom he trusted and was not in the least prepared for their changing the rules on him—is a lesson Bobby has not forgotten. As he sees it, the anguish and the anxiety their treatment gave his father hastened his death. So Bobby wants to go into government service to help people, yes, certainly, but he also wants just as much to protect them from getting the wrong kind of help.

  After the football season, he and I join the Political Union. We go, not knowing really what we’ll see but hoping to find a way to contribute to the public good in some manner, and perhaps learn something about the real life of public officials in the process. Bobby and I expect issues to be discussed. Instead we find something that is a weird mixture of beauty pageant and dog fight. Each gathering is half-filled with a bunch of handsome upperclassmen who want—and expect—to be John Kennedy, most of them wealthy glad-handing preppies grooming their résumé, draft-deferred and openly enthusiastic about others paying any price or bearing any burden in Vietnam. I suppose Bobby reacts so strongly to them because, even romance-resistant as he is, part of him still shares their longings and fantasies, and he’s angered to find so much preening mixed in with so little altruism. He quits on the spot.

  He has done very well on the football team and does even better on the basketball team. The athletic department finds him a decent-paying part-time job answering a phone in an alumni office, an office where the phone rings once every hour or so and where he is encouraged to keep up with his homework between calls. So he even ends up doing well in his courses.

  When I get ever-so-slightly better grades than he, Bobby is still competitive enough to get annoyed. After I explain this has happened only because I am undistracted by a single extracurricular activity, moral cause, or date, he is mollified.

  Summer arrives, a vast green and sunlit expanse. At home there are girls nearby, not a hundred miles away, and a couple of them seem pleased to go out with me. True, there are some inconveniences, like a summer job working on the slag pile in a foundry, but basically it is blissful. I figure Bobby, though, will be champing at the bit to get back to school. So it is with open-mouthed astonishment that I listen as he informs me at the beginning of June that he is leaving school and is letting the army draft him.

  I think he is kidding. It takes him several minutes to convince me of his seriousness. After it finally begins to sink in, I ask my first question. “But why?”

  As he sometimes can, Bobby looks suddenly older than his years. His face, though calm, seems to draw taut an
d its bones to become pronounced. “I’m just not getting much out of things.”

  “But everything was going fine for you. You took to college like a duck to water.”

  He shrugs. “It just looked that way. I mean it was all right. I got along. My grades were okay and everything. But nothing was really getting through. The fact is, you were getting a lot more out of the place than I ever was.”

  “But I…I hate it.”

  “Right. That’s exactly because it’s getting through to you.”

  “So you’re joining the army so you can hate it, too?”

  “I’m not joining, I’ll be drafted. That means two years, not four. But whether I love it or hate it, who knows? I just don’t expect to drift through it…”

  “This is great, Bobby. No, really, honest, it’s just great. If you get killed, you can say, ‘Hey, something’s really gotten through to me now!’”

  “Look, what’s so fair about my sitting safe and sound in New Haven while”—he names three of our high school classmates who had not gone to college and were drafted right after graduation—“get their asses shot off?”

  “I get it. You should go get your ass shot off, and then things’ll be hunky-dory.”

  “Not all draftees get sent to Vietnam.”

  “A lot do.” He shrugs again. He has this fixed look about the eyes that tells me his mind is made up. I sigh. “Why didn’t you talk about this before? Why spring out with it like this?”

  “I hadn’t really decided until recently.”

  “A lot of people talk things over before they decide, Bobby.”

  He laughs. “The army’s not such a bad place.”

  “Yeah, sure. Have you talked to your mother about this?”

  “She’s all for it. You know her. She’s all for anything I decide to do.”

  “What does Jeannie think?”

  “She’s not a big fan of my going. But I promised her I would be careful. And she respects my judgment.”

  “Well, fuck, Bobby… What the hell, maybe I should drop out, too.”

  “You?”

  “You don’t think I want to go back there alone, do you?”

  But when fall comes, I do go back there alone.

  Ricky Price has requested and gotten a single room, one which proves to be across the hall from Kurt and me. The first time I see him leaning over the sink in the bathroom we share on the floor, I don’t recognize him. In place of his usually carefully sculpted flattop is a round nimbus of curls, a luxurious Afro which frames his head like a corona around the sun. In place of his old careful and stiff manner is a sense of ease—“Hello” having been replaced by “Hey, man.” Even his way of standing, which used to have the formality of a private at parade rest, now involves shifting weight comfortably from one foot to the other, and his once tight-assed walk has given way to something between a roll and a bounce. We talk about our summers for a while—he spent his working construction—and I feel confused about his new manner. I can’t always understand him, something I know he recognizes even as it occurs, yet he gives me the sense that somehow this is my problem. He mentions something about Bobby, and when I tell him about his being drafted, Ricky stands dead still for a moment, then says, very slowly, “No shit.”

  “No shit.”

  He shakes his head. “Two of the guys I worked with just got back from Nam. They say there is some real heavy shit goin’ down there. Real heavy. Fuck you up. Bobby better keep his ass way clear of that place.”

  I hear voices in the hall: two black friends of Ricky’s have come by. They give one another elaborate handshakes whose movements are too fast for me to make out, say things I can’t follow (“What it is, man! What it is!”), laugh loudly in a way that sounds more angry and ironic than merry, and when they head off and I call goodbye to Ricky, he gives me an almost imperceptible nod, points a finger at me pistol-like, and says, “Later.” As I watch him walk away, it occurs to me his rocket-sled trip has been one hell of a lot faster than mine, and it has gone a hell of a lot farther. I wonder where he’s going next and at what speed.

  Over the summer I have been seeing on television terrible riots in the ghettos of cities like Detroit and Newark and reading in papers and magazines about pollution in the air and water, about pesticides and nuclear waste in the food chain, about the population bomb that is ticking ever-louder, the heroin epidemic in the cities, about this Asian war that keeps going and going, despite assurances from the President and the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the generals on the ground that light has been seen at the end of the tunnel and victory is just around the corner. (All they needed was another 50,000 men. And when that didn’t work, all they needed was another 150,000 men, and they’d be home by Christmas. And when they were wrong about that, too, then it was another 250,000 men.) By this time, though, with the nearly half a million servicemen on the ground, perhaps soon to include Bobby Parrish, they are absolutely, positively sure. Ask somebody, however, why we were in Vietnam, and why my friends and I ought to consider dying there, and the answers came back either confused or icily abstract or full of bluster.

  Kurt has grown a beard and discovered the pacific pleasures of marijuana. Tunes from Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band cascade from windows. Bob Dylan sings nasally from down the hall. Along with the Beatles, Kurt thinks that what our vexed world needs most now is love, sweet love. It is what he likes to call his Unified Field Theory, the answer to entropy, to early death by heart attack, to existential angst, to war. One needs to be in harmony with Nature and, through Nature, with Man. With application and dedication, we can effect a change in our own consciousness, and then our friends’, and then the world’s. We have to be cool. Utopia, he says, is just around the corner.

  Replacing Bobby in our new triple room is Allan Bernstein, a fast-talking kid from the Bronx, who is convinced it is not Utopia at all but Armageddon that is just around the corner. Workers are fed up, blacks are fed up, women are fed up, students are fed up, and a Great Change lies ahead. After a week in our room, he admits that while he supposes he likes Kurt “personally,” a word he speaks with derision, he finds “this open-minded, do-your-own-thing, peace-and-love bag pretty fucking stupid. I mean,” he concludes, “you can be so open-minded your brains fall out.” We don’t have to be cool; we have to be hot. And he has a political analysis for everything touched by human hands.

  I have no idea what is around the corner, nor whether this is the best of times or the worst of times. Songs tell us we are on the Eve of Destruction, and a Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall, and There’s a Man with a Gun Over There Who Says I Got to Beware. I keep thinking, Bobby won’t believe the changes when he comes back. Meanwhile, though, body counts are listed in the paper like box scores, and every week the numbers of Americans dead and wounded keep rising. My questions about American policy are not interesting moral or geopolitical puzzles anymore. Behind every numeral looms a life, a life just like Bobby’s, ended forever. And yet somehow all around in the world outside Chapel and Church Streets, life goes on much as before, full of ordinary joys and sorrows.

  Bobby writes once in a while after he finishes basic training at Fort Hood. He doesn’t like it much. In fact he likes the army so little—just a lot of bullshit, he writes—that he volunteers to go to Vietnam so he can get an early release. I tell him he is a stupid flaming fuck, and the day I get the news from him, I feel like killing him, a state of mind a few hundred thousand North Vietnamese will soon be sharing. He thinks the war isn’t such a bad thing. Fighting for freedom is a good thing, isn’t it? He also thinks he doesn’t have much chance of “getting to be in the show” since all the officers are saying Charlie—Mr. Zip, Dink, or Gook—is whipped now, and The Whole Thing is winding down.

  He arrives in Saigon at the end of 1967, a long, long way from the black earth and green pastures of Oshiola. And I can tell from his letter that he has had his own tour
on the rocket sled. His words, usually plain and serious in tone, begin to develop an edge of flippancy.

  Company C, 3rd Brig

  25th Infantry Division

  APO Frisco, 96490

  12/4/67

  Well, Ben, I’m here. Tan Son Nhut Airport is a hell of a lot bigger than New Haven’s, and the weather’s a sight warmer. One of your letters caught up with me in Oakland—it’s great to hear all the news (keep thum cards ’n letters comin’!) and to find out what’s happening on that side of the world. So. I gotta question. If Ricky’s into Black being Beautiful and Kurt’s, like, oh wow, groovin’ on a new hippie thing, and this guy Allan thinks Trotsky Lives, then what about you, pal? What’s your scene? Joining a kibbutz? Tuning in, turning on, etc.? As for me, despite your accusations, I promise you it’s no John Wayne trip. Nor is it, Dr. Freud, as you speculate, “a death wish and a neurotic need to reenact the trauma of being brushed by mortality.” I will admit this. Just living, or at least college living—if that isn’t too much of a contradiction—is not enough for me. I need to feel involved in something bigger than the next French exam. And though neither basic nor AIT exactly charged my batteries, a glimpse at another world and another culture is pretty strong stuff, combat or no combat. Hell, I’ve even gotten to use a little of my French.

  And this is a different place, let me tell you. You step off the nice air-conditioned plane, wave goodbye to the pretty American stewardesses, turn and, wham, the warmth even in December plus some weird, wet, ripe-rotten-smoky vegetable smell thwacks you right in the face. They say they have to burn the shit here—if you don’t, instead of it turning into earth, the earth around turns to shit—and maybe that’s part of it. We’re going to be sent up near Chu Lai for the time being, a town on the coast at the edge of the Highlands. (Grunt’s the name, pacification’s our game.) There’s no real “front.” There’re bases and friendlies and triple canopy jungles and NVA who pop up like bad dreams when you least expect it. Or so I hear. What nobody told us, though, while they were training us to be killers (some of the guys didn’t need much help), was that the place is extraordinarily beautiful. From the air, anyway. Gotta split. Lot of officers back in the World say we’ll be home by Christmas. Which makes it a dead-certain lead-pipe cinch we won’t be. Let me know if Mother Yale is still suckling you at her razor-tipped breasts.