It proves not to be a great time to land in Chicago. There is a phone strike, a taxi strike, a bus strike, plus a heat wave. Delegates from all over the country and journalists from all over the world are still arriving. Chicagoans themselves are returning on this late-August day from their summer vacations. There are lines to pick up luggage, lines to the few working phones, lines to the restaurants, bathrooms, airline ticket-sales desks, and lines to limousine and private car and bus pickups. It is hot inside as well as out, and people are irritable. When I left, the airline forced me to check my backpack through as luggage, and now it appears to be lost. It did not come off the plane with all the other luggage.
As I stand in a ticket line to report the missing piece, I hear two girls behind me arguing. One of them is saying in a determined voice that they ought to head straight into Chicago, the other that she wants to get home, take a long bath, wash her clothes, and sleep in a real bed. “And eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, made with Sunbeam.” Her Southern accent and slow-paced voice make it come out: “An eat uh paynut buttuh an jellay samwich.”
“We can do that,” her friend says. “We’ll just do it in Chicago.”
“But we don’t know anybody in Chicago. Let’s go home.”
They argue for a while, the passivist pleading with the activist just to head back with her to Charlottesville.
The activist begins to dig in her heels. “It’s only for a couple of days. Look, we’ve had this great two weeks playing around. But things are happening here we ought to be a part of.”
A faint note of protest now begins to enter the passivist’s response. “We didn’t just play. We went to museums. We went to look at that awful camp outside of Munich. But what difference does it make if we go or don’t go to this convention? What’s going to happen is going to happen whether we’re there or not. And it’s not going to be safe.”
The activist sighs. “To me it’s a question of bearing moral witness. When I’m old and gray and my kid asks me what I did in the old days to try and stop what’s happening, I’m not going to say I sunburned m-my butt on a nude beach on Mykonos.”
I stare straight ahead, not wishing to affect their conversation by letting them know someone is listening. I’ll be staying with my cousin, Eliot Leavitt, the one I consulted about Bobby’s thyroid cancer, who is now teaching at Northwestern Medical School. As I stand here in line listening to the argument, curiosity is killing me. I have to know who the activist is. So I turn around, excuse myself, and say I am heading into Chicago myself and can find a place in Evanston for them to stay. I don’t know whether this is true, but Eliot is nice, and a request to crash on someone’s floor is usually not much of an imposition.
Even before I see her face, I am half in love with this woman. She has a warm voice, soft on its hesitant surface, but with real backbone underneath. Her deeply tanned face and arms, her sun-streaked hair and athletic leanness make her awfully easy to look at, something I attempt to do casually, but which requires a restraint that immediately proves to be beyond me. The activist’s friend appears used to being the one more often stared at of the two, with her light blond hair and voluptuous figure. She obviously doesn’t like me. Why should she? I am stepping in uninvited on the wrong side of the dispute she is having. But I suspect that when my pupils do not dilate and my glance fails to linger on her for the required interval, I commit an equally serious offense.
They seem like an odd pair to be traveling together. One is wearing candied lipstick and ample eye makeup, dragging a suitcase on rollers, and smells like a florist’s shop. The activist, who might have put on some lip gloss that morning to protect herself against the sun, smells faintly of shampoo and fresh vanilla. Her alert eyes, green shading to brown, regard me neutrally.
I introduce myself. The activist, Laura Gordon, returns the favor. Debbie, her friend, in a gesture I remember unpleasantly from freshman mixers, quickly glances past my shoulder at something more interesting. It is Laura who, embarrassed by the pause, tells me her friend’s name, at which point Debbie impatiently shifts her weight from one foot to the other and rolls her eyes.
✳
Now, all these years later, I am suddenly struck by the fidelity of my recall. I can see the smallest details of the airport, Laura’s long hair parted in the middle, the texture of the beige nubbly cloth on the arriving plane’s narrow seats. Yet how different I am now from what I used to be. If the world can be divided into activists and passivists, it is not hard to see I have come to have far more in common with Debbie than I would ever have imagined possible.
Laura has gone to the clinic by the time I arrive. Jimmy, who is almost done with his own trimester at Eliot’s school, has gone with his friend Alex to the capital to film a press conference Congressman Wheatley has called. There he announces the release—thanks to his enormous influence and courageous intervention with what he leads you to believe must have been snarling, well-armed agriculture officials—of some farm subsidy payments. Annie is helping her mother this morning at the community clinic. Bobby is on the phone. He nods at me when I come in.
I hold up a racquet. “Tennis?”
He mutters a few okays into the receiver and a goodbye and then hangs it up. “Fine,” he says to me. “Let’s do it.”
I look him up and down. “First lesson. Generally we do not play the game of tennis in gray slacks and black dress shoes.”
He looks down at himself. “Right.” Because I have been thinking about our college days, I look at him, too, considering for a second how he has changed physically. Though he looks youthful, you also would not misjudge his age. His light-brown hair has grayed at the sides and his face has the lines and creases of someone who has worked outside a great deal, or thought a great deal, or both. It is a strong-looking, intelligent face, one that even a few years ago you thought looked handsome first and interesting second. Now it’s the reverse.
“It’s also always handy to have a racquet,” I point out.
“I’ve got one,” he protests. He extends a hand toward the bottom of the stairs, where, I find, leans a twenty-five-year-old wood racquet that is screwed tightly into a wooden press. I pick it up. The screws and wing nuts are seized with rust.
“Jack Kramer,” I read. I press the strings. They are plastic, loose, spongy, and frayed. “Has it ever been restrung?”
“You have to restring ’em?” he asks, surprised.
I push him toward the stairs. “Go change your clothes. This is going to be hard enough. I brought you an extra racquet.”
Because he was, and is, a gifted athlete, he thinks he can pick up the game in an hour or so. As we walk out onto the junior high school courts, I warn him that tennis is largely a game of skill.
“What are you saying?”
“It takes practice. Like shooting pool or playing Ping-Pong or learning to drive. It takes practice to do it well.”
“How much practice?”
“Weeks and months.” I watch him stretch his legs, favoring his still-bad left one. In his cutoff jeans, all these years later, his scars remain pretty dramatic, thick cords, red here and white there. “Not minutes and hours.”
“No one ever played exotic games like tennis in Oshiola.” He grunts as he stretches. “We had your basketball, football, and your baseball. Tennis was somewhere down with quoits and curling and golf.”
“Does your willingness to play mean you’ve been talking to Jeannie?”
“A little, yes.”
“Good.”
He is very competitive. It becomes clear that besides wanting to give the charity audience their money’s worth and not wanting to embarrass himself, he would also like to win. I remind him about some of the rudiments of the game, and soon he is eager to start playing. Then, as we start to rally and I would like him simply to keep the ball in play, he begins blasting away, driving the ball toward the corners. He has a g
ood natural forehand, though his backhand is a stroke he tends either to hit long or dump into the net. Because of his left leg, he also has trouble moving to his backhand side.
He requests playing some games. I serve, first telling him, and then showing him when he doesn’t listen to me, that he stands too far to his backhand. I ace him to his forehand side and then pass him there. He gets the message.
I show him how to hit an underspin backhand, explaining that it may not win a lot of points, but it keeps the ball low and gives the opponent a chance to miss. He works on it for a few minutes. His athletic talents help him pick it up so quickly I begin to wonder if my warnings about tennis being a game of skill are wrong.
His serve is terrible. The only way he can get the ball in play is by clunking it softly over the net with a stroke that belongs more to badminton than tennis. I feed him balls. He serves fifty or sixty times. We play a set in which I beat him six to zero. He appears to be studying my game. By the end of the set, I feel as if I am watching myself on videotape. Even between points, he walks with his head down and his racquet gripped at the throat, just as I do. This gives me an idea.
Over his protests, I call for a study break. I take him to the local video store and rent a tape by Stan Smith on tennis fundamentals. I make him watch it—which he does with one of those pure, trancelike states children have while watching a favorite program. When it is over, he blinks and says, “Okay. Let’s go.”
His game is immediately 70 percent better, his serve 100 percent better. He wins a game in the second set and presses me hard in several others. In a few days, I would have to work to get the rust out of my own game to maintain an advantage. If he played consistently for a couple of weeks, I would have no advantage at all.
I suggest he find a way to play again before the charity exhibition next week, but he is booked solid until then.
“I won’t look like a fool?” he asks.
“You’ll be fine. The idiot savant of the tennis court. Buy a pair of white shorts, though.”
He looks down at his cutoffs. “Oh. Right.”
I ask him why he has agreed to play. He explains that Jeannie was afraid she would not get enough celebrities to agree to appear without the assurance that other celebrities were already going to be there. As a personal favor but mostly as a sign he was willing to begin to talk to her again, Bobby signed on. Others then fell right in place. While Representative Wheatley pleaded a scheduling conflict, the head of Wheatley’s party in the state, Gerry Dolan, quickly agreed to come in his place. And Jeannie was able to round up the university football coach and a number of radio and television personalities to balance things off.
“Gerry Dolan?” I say. “Of course he’d agree to come. He was a nationally ranked junior player when we were in college. Whatever you do, tell Jeannie not to pair you against him.”
“She won’t. She knows I barely know how to play the game.”
I get him to rent two more video tennis lessons and take him home.
We do not once talk about Jeannie or Erickson Bruce or the senatorial campaign. It is almost like a holiday. It is almost like the old days. Except, I remember, the old days were no holiday.
✳
Laura Gordon. Chicago, 1968.
After a night on Cousin Eliot’s floor, she and I hitchhike into the city to Lincoln Park. There, the usual festive atmosphere that precedes demonstrations is in lazy swing. People are playing Frisbee, smoking dope and drinking wine, radios and tapes are playing, a few dogs are gamboling about, and people are picnicking and snoozing, all in a kind of funky version of La Grande Jatte. Except for some of the hand-lettered placards that lay around and a smoky, rank smell I attribute to the ghosts of the nearby unused stockyards, it is indistinguishable from the hours before an outdoor folk concert.
We sit down and pull off our backpacks. Someone offers us a jug of wine. Laura takes a swallow and passes it to me, and as I lean my head back to take a pull, I glance up at the person who has so generously offered it.
“Allan?”
“’Bout time you said hello.”
It is my roommate, Allan Bernstein. He has a huge discolored lump on his forehead, his eyes behind his badly bent wire-rimmed glasses are red, and his face has an odd slick shine. I scramble to my feet and we hug each other. “Unbelievable!” I say, holding him at arm’s length. “Great to see you, man! You all right? You look like shit.”
He shrugs. “Two nights of tear gas and police beatings aren’t exactly a trip to the beach.” His voice is flat, his face expressionless. He sounds like somebody who has just walked away from a bad car crash and the experience hasn’t registered yet.
Laura leans forward. “What?”
I introduce her and repeat her question.
Allan looks at each of us in turn. “Where you guys been?”
“Laura just got in from London yesterday. I’ve been working an extra shift and have seen nothing.”
“You haven’t read a paper or seen TV?”
We shake our heads.
His laugh sounds like paper being crumpled.
“It’s a fucking nightmare. Daley, we’re talking, Hizzoner Da Mare, won’t give any of the groups here permits to march. He won’t give them permits to stay overnight anywhere. He closes this and every other city park at eleven p.m. On Sunday night he sent in the cops. They gassed and beat up everyone in sight—reporters, clergy, cameramen, photographers, Yippies, demonstrators, famous writers, Tom Hayden, everybody. Last night they did the same thing. Tonight they’ll sure as shit do it again.”
“Where does everyone go?” Laura asks.
“There were some centers around here for people to crash, but last night the cops broke in the centers and beat folks. I’m lying on the floor and these cops with their badges removed so you can’t report them burst in and start nightsticking people right where they lay. I tried to get up and take a photo, and this fat pig of a cop kicks me right in the head. Picks up and smashes my camera. Then he pounds me in the kidneys as I’m trying to crawl away. I slept in the subway last night. Pissed blood all morning.” He looks around uneasily. “There are plainclothes cops everywhere around here. Informants. Provocateurs. Somebody tries to sell you anything, get you to throw anything, suggests some violent shit, stay clear. They’re trying to fuck with people’s heads before they beat on them. It may look groovy around here now, but watch out.”
I try to take this all in. A Frisbee sails by. A dog barks. “Are you all right now? Maybe you should go to the emergency room.”
“I’m all right,” he insists. “Just wish I had a camera.”
“If there’re no permits,” I ask, “then where are the demonstrations? Somebody said the Coliseum, somebody else said the convention itself.”
“Forget the convention. You can’t get within a half-mile of the Amphitheater. Of course, tonight they’re going to debate the Vietnam plank of the party platform inside, so who knows what’ll come down. There may be a delegate walkout. You hear all kind of rumors.”
“So what’re you going to do?”
“Me? Same as everyone else. Hang out. See what happens.”
“Here?” Laura asks.
“Here.” He takes out a bandanna and wipes his face. “Vaseline keeps the Mace from burning your skin. If you’re here at nightfall, I suggest you get some for yourselves.”
I have spent the better part of the day trying to persuade Laura to meet me later outside the park, but she is having none of it. She seems determined to prove something to someone, or to herself. I finally suggest we both stay clear of the place. She looks at me, eyebrows lifted in surprise, and says with a note of challenge in her voice that she would hate to have to go there by herself. Her eyes glitter with nervousness and excitement.
“But how would your parents feel?” I ask, half-joking.
She grins. “They’d absolutely h
ate it.”
So here we both are. As we wait in the humid night I try and pick out the Yippies. I want to keep away from them. If the SDS’ers are like Allan—intellectual, disciplined, and angry—the Yippies, usually especially long-haired, flamboyant, and wasted-looking, are the nihilistic pranksters and crazy fuck-ups who would put LSD in your lemonade for laughs. They are a perfect crew to use for provocation. Next to me, Allan borrows someone’s cigarette, holds it up, and announces to those nearby that the wind is still coming in from the lake. It takes me a few seconds to realize he is offering information about which direction to go to keep upwind of the tear gas. He passes us a canteen to wet the bandannas we’ll tie over our nose and mouth when the time comes, and he reminds us to be sure to walk away from the cops. “They’re like dogs. Running excites ’em. They love to take out a moving target.” He seems calm, almost weary, but his Bronx accent is thickening by the minute. He passes me a jar, but I decide to skip the Vaseline. I intend not to get close enough to a cop to get Maced. Laura puts some on, a thin skim, and as I watch her smooth it onto herself, I am instantly aroused.
All of a sudden a voice comes out of the darkness from the street, electronically amplified. “This is the police. Lincoln Park is closed. You have five minutes to clear the area. The park is closed. I repeat, you have five minutes to clear the area.”
People, including me, who have until now been standing quietly around, begin to talk to complete strangers, introducing ourselves, saying our names, as if we will need every last friend we can make. As we perhaps will. If you fall, get a face full of gas, or get beaten, making it anywhere on your own will not be easy. I had one small whiff of tear gas near the Dupont Plaza in Washington, and it was not an experience I am looking forward to repeating. I tell Laura to be sure to breathe through her mouth in short breaths and not to rub or touch her eyes—it makes it worse. Allan, who is buttoning his shirt and jacket all the way up to his neck, nods. Laura, looking frightened but determined, helps me tie on my bandanna. Everyone is speaking softly now, many whispering, as if they don’t want to wake the neighbors. Allan shakes hands with each of us, mentioning Stony’s, a coffee shop a few blocks away on Division Street where we will meet later if we get separated.
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