✳
Bobby, who arrived at Yale late for registration that fall after the Chicago convention, has decided to live off campus. On weekends he goes to the Veterans Administration hospital for physical therapy. His left hand and left leg give him trouble. He walks with a cane, but because his hand cannot hold it securely, it is the kind with a wide metal hoop that attaches to his forearm. He does not complain, but many things have become difficult: dressing and undressing, opening doors if he is holding books or groceries, carrying his tray when he has a meal in our college dining hall. He claims not to be in pain, but it is obvious from his violent wincing when he attempts to sit or to stand that his leg is not healed. He wears a black patch over his good eye. His left eye, the one with the shattered orbit, has some weakened muscles that must be exercised if he is to avoid having a “wandering eye” for the rest of his life. Though he tries not to draw attention to himself, for the first weeks when he appears in the dining hall, conversations tend to grow hushed.
He has become quiet and withdrawn. He looks at us out of his one bruised eye, even at Allan Bernstein and Kurt Swanson and Ricky Price—who now only eats with whites once in a great while—with recurrent mild surprise, as if we have dropped in after a long stay on another planet. Or as if he has. I cannot make out whether he is surprised because we have changed a great deal—long hair, different clothes, new slang—or because by his lights we have not changed much at all. In any case he is likely to be polite with his old roommates and friends, even formal, his voice soft. He does not laugh much and he smiles, if at all, several beats after the rest of us, looking down at the place in front of him as he does, as if what he is smiling about is private. With the remains of his military burr-haircut and his two-year-old clothes, his cane and eye patch and scarred hand and blood-red uncovered eye, his shy air of ferocious self-containment, he is an unsettling sight. Allan calls him the Ghost of Christmas Future. Many people wonder if he is a hawk, or if his war experiences have made him a little crazy.
Though I try, I cannot get him to talk. I am aware I want to do this because he is my oldest friend, but also because I need someone to talk to myself. I start with simple things. Why was he so late getting home? He tells me he was delayed because he had to go to Detroit to see Reggie Robinson’s family, to tell them how Reggie lived, and how he died. His voice grows thin, as if it’s going to break. “And to tell them a lot of us in his company miss him. And won’t forget him.”
“How’d they take it, your visiting?”
He shrugs. “They don’t get white visitors in that part of town very much. You know how it is when people look at you with their nose pointed a few degrees left or right of straight on? I kept getting the feeling they were waiting for me to finish my rap and ask them for money. When I left, they looked relieved.”
“Bummer.”
“I don’t know. Later, when it sinks in I wasn’t trying to get over on them, I expect they’ll appreciate it.”
But once we get off Reggie, he clams up. I ask him how his mother and sister’s big coming-home party was, and he shrugs. I expect to hear some stories, an analysis of the military situation, some political reflections on the meaning of it all. Nothing. He is interested in what I’ve been doing and asks questions, but if as I answer he doesn’t look at me with his nose a few degrees right or left of center, his interest still feels detached and clinical more than friendly, as if he is reading a script or doing a field study for a sociology class.
I try a new tack. “How’s it feel to be back?”
“Okay. A bit weird…”
“Weird?”
“Strange. I dunno. Ask me again in a few weeks, maybe I’ll be able to describe it.”
I have talked a little about Laura Gordon to him and I am eager to have him meet her. “I want her to know you’re not just a legend.”
“Good,” he says. “Fine.”
Yet when the weekends come, he is at the VA hospital or at the library or working at the local veterans’ drop-in center. Since most of his courses are for sophomores and mine are for juniors, we barely run into each other. I make it a point to head past his Elm Street apartment several times a week, but he is home less and less often, or perhaps he has stopped answering his door. As the days go by, the more withdrawn he seems. When I am able to see him, the time is strained; I feel as if I am visiting a sick relative. And I still have no luck at getting him to talk. Finally I get frustrated enough to send him a note.
10/11/68
Dear Bobby—
I knew what was going on better when you were half a world away. If you don’t want to talk about what’s bugging you, write about it. But keep in touch, will ya? I hear that’s what friends are for.
Ben
Two nights later, while Kurt is off rehearsing for a Beckett one-act play—theater having joined theoretical physics on his list of passions—and Allan is out campaigning for Dick Gregory, Bobby drops by my room. I am about to head out myself to distribute some fliers to college representatives for them to post, fliers announcing a big antiwar rally.
“Where you headed?” he asks.
I hand him a flier. I think for a second about asking him to walk along with me and then see his cane. “It’ll wait. C’mon in.”
He limps in, lowers himself carefully into an overstuffed lounge chair, his face in the overly rigid set he gets when he doesn’t want to wince.
He settles himself, sighs, and gives the flier a little wave. “They asked me to speak at this.”
“At the rally?”
He nods.
“Really? What’d you say?” I ask.
“Said I’d think about it.”
“And?”
“I’m still thinking about it.”
“Why don’t you think out loud, then.” He frowns. “It’s me, remember?” He is silent long enough for me to hear all the sounds in the room and then out in the stairwell and the courtyard as well. “Oh, I forgot. You’re only good at talking about the results of your thinking when you’re all finished. When there’s nothing left to talk about. When you’ve worked it all out and you can report to a waiting world just what you’ve determined.”
“Like deciding to join the army.”
“Exactly like deciding to join the army. You asshole.”
He licks his lips, pauses. Finally he says, “I don’t know what I think. Half the time I’m angry at nothing…at everything. The other half I feel like shit. I keep thinking, Why me? I mean, why’d I make it and all those other guys didn’t?” He looks at me as if he honestly expects an answer. “To concentrate on a textbook, I have to pretend it’s a manual of arms. To listen to a lecture, I have to pretend I give a good goddamn.”
I reflect on this for a while. Then I say, “I don’t know what you have to feel bad about. Your leg and hand and eye are fucked up, you’re in chronic pain, you’ve seen some terrible things, you’ve had friends killed. You come back and people look at you funny, like you’re Vlad the Impaler or something. I don’t know what could possibly be bothering you.”
“They do look at me funny, don’t they?”
“Well, Bobby, there’s no way to say this except to say it—you act funny. Nobody knows what to think. Hell, I don’t know what to think. Though now I’m beginning to get the picture. You’re having trouble concentrating? There are a bunch of people around who’d be glad to help. I’ve got lecture notes from last year in half the courses you’re taking. Can’t focus on the textbook? Everybody’s got copies with yellow highlighter on the important stuff. All you gotta do is ask, fer chrissake.”
He nods a few times. I think he is going to ask me if he should see a shrink. Instead he holds up the flier. “What about the rally?”
I tell him, “You ought to say something.”
“Everybody here has gone to lectures, read books, followed the papers. I don’t know a thing about the
politics of all this anymore. I mean, when I was out there it was like someone pointed at this huge mountain of shit and said, ‘Your job is to shovel this.’ I didn’t think about how it got there, or why it was there, or who put it there. I just did my job and shoveled the shit. What am I going to say at a rally to an audience of all you activists?”
“You mean, what could you possibly say to a bunch of overprotected kids who’ve seen Vietnam on TV and, even when they aren’t wrecked on one drug or another, can barely find it on a map? Look, pal, you’ve got a moral authority about this that nobody else has. If you get up there—winner of the Silver Star, the Bronze Star, and two Purple Hearts—and say, ‘The war sucks,’ I’m telling you you’ll bring the fucking house down.” He looks at me in silence. “You used to be interested in politics. This is the way back in.”
“I don’t know.”
“Listen, my advice—which you haven’t really asked for but I’m gonna give you, anyway—is to do something with that anger you feel all the time. Stop spinning your wheels. Get mad at the sons of bitches who made you and all those guys risk your lives to shovel a shit pile. Part of you is still back in Vietnam and part of you is here. The only way you can go forward is to bring the parts together. Take the first step. Speak at the rally.’’
He did speak. He was introduced, limped up to the podium, leaned on his metal cane, looked at the crowd through his one multicolored raw-meat eye, said an impassioned and eloquent and electrifying version of The War Sucks, and brought the house absolutely down. It would be nice to say that the excitement this caused—he was interviewed by several newspapers and invited to speak at a hearing of the Connecticut legislature and became a widely admired campus figure—motored him rapidly down the road to becoming his old self again. It would be nice to say that is what happened, but it wasn’t.
Right after the rally, some idiot came up to Bobby and called him a baby-killer. Bobby, bad eye, bad hand, and bad leg notwithstanding, nearly sent the kid to the hospital. By the time Allan and I and a couple of others pulled him off, Bobby was weeping in regret and screaming with rage at the same time.
Privately, the more attention Bobby got, the more unworthy he felt and the more depressed he became at each day’s end—twilight being his worst hour. I began to urge him to see a psychiatrist over at Student Health. Instead, when Kurt, who had become an enthusiast of all manner of drugs as well as of the theater, said that one mescaline trip was worth a year’s therapy, Bobby decided why the hell not.
“Because it can fuck you up,” I say. “People freak out. They go to Pluto and don’t come back.”
“Not on mesc,” says Kurt. He is what Jimi Hendrix calls Experienced. He has dropped acid half a dozen times and is the closest thing in our college to a Consumer Reports on hallucinogenic drugs. Folks who have taken LSD are accorded a certain degree of respect. They are like Vietnam vets, psychic astronauts, people who have gone to the frontiers of the known world and returned apparently intact. They have gazed into the self, leaped over bottomless gorges with no net below or safety rope attached. It is hard for me to know what proportions of courage and what of lunacy are required to decide to take the journey, but at the present I lack some of one or both. “No,” Kurt says. “Mescaline is definitely suborbital.”
“But don’t you have to have your shit together?” I ask. “If you start out feeling bad or shaky, you can still end up coming apart.”
“Maybe,” Kurt says. “But you can also get your shit together as a result. No pain, no gain.”
“I get it. If you’ve got balls, do mescaline,” I say. “Puts hair on your chest.”
“No, man,” says Kurt with widened eyes and a sudden burst of earnestness. “It’s not about testing yourself, it’s about finding yourself.” He shrugs. “Of course, there are no guarantees you’re gonna like what you find.”
I look at Bobby. He, I know, is going to make his own decision. The asshole. I drink my booze and smoke my dope and shake my head about these people who are so willing to chemically tamper with their brains.
Laura calls to say she won’t be coming this weekend. She must study for midterms. She doesn’t invite me to Poughkeepsie.
“How about if I come up?”
“I’d love to see you, Ben, but I’m going to be incredibly busy. I’ve got four exams this week.”
I don’t like the way she has used my name. Her sincerity feels excessive and her line delivery rehearsed. Of course, she would have to know I would object to not seeing her. I cajole her for a bit just to test the waters. With her clear-eyed sense of priorities, she doesn’t budge.
“Okay,” I say. “Good luck with the studying.”
“Think of it this way,” she says in a phrase she picked up from me. “Absence makes the heart grow fonder.”
“How about out of sight, out of mind?”
“Aww…”
“Aww yourself.”
“There’s one more advantage,” she says. “This way we won’t get into a rut.”
“But I like to get in a rut with you. Besides, age cannot stale nor custom wither your infinite variety.”
Doing a letter-perfect Miss Virginia, she says, “Why, I just bet you say that to all the girls.”
“So I won’t be seeing you.”
“I’m afraid not.”
Gloom settles over me.
I give it a great deal of thought and on Friday I give Kurt five dollars.
“What’s this for?” he asks.
“Some mescaline. I’m going to join you guys.”
Kurt smiles benignly. “Far out!”
I don’t know where Bobby is headed, but I don’t think he ought to go there alone. Maybe in the end I simply expect too much from Laura, but friends ought to stick with friends. Through thick and thin, to Pluto and, I hope, back.
The next evening before dinner Kurt puts on a bright red-and-yellow Hawaiian shirt—his trip costume. It’s good for visuals, he says, plus it makes it easier to keep him in sight if any of us needs to talk to him. He tells Allan and Bobby and me to stay cool. “Nothing to be uptight about,” he says. “We’ll be up for about six or seven hours. Anybody freaks out, the rest of us will gather and help talk him through it. Those are the rules. Some people get a little nauseated, most don’t. No booze, no dope. Never mix, never worry. And don’t pig out at dinner. Questions?”
“When’s this stuff take effect?” Allan asks.
“Half hour to an hour.” He takes out two large white pills, carefully breaks them, then hands them out. “Half a tab each.” We swallow them with a little water. “Happy trails,” he says, and we all head for dinner.
Two hours later, we’re all back in the room laughing nervously, eyes wide. Everyone is hallucinating. Kurt decides either we’ve taken a dose of acid or some bizarrely strong mescaline—quality control not being a strong suit in this area. Whatever it is, he says it has also been laced with some speed. I keep seeing bulges where the corners of the room meet, and the door frame keeps melting and regaining its shape. Kurt and his shirt literally glow, lit from within; I have to squint against the brightness when I look his way. This all seems extraordinarily interesting at the time, as does my sudden conviction that determininism is correct and we’re all completely products of our environment. No one, I see, is singular or individual, but is merely the result of complex chains of circumstance and experience refracted through consciousness. Depressed by this, I am seized by a sudden longing to see Laura. I decide to hitchhike to Poughkeepsie. Kurt and Bobby and Allan stop me before I reach the stairs.
This, I decide, is not the right drug for me tonight.
Kurt and Allan are doing a lot of Oh-Wowing as they turn on and off the colored swag lamp we have hanging in the living room. Bobby is sitting on the window seat and staring out into the courtyard.
“You all right?” I ask.
He stares out the
window in silence.
“What’s up?” I ask him.
He shakes his head. “Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“I’m thinking about nothing. The zero that comes before one or makes one into ten. The absence of something that was once there. Nothingness. The void. Absolute vacuum.”
I am not sure this is the right drug for him tonight, either.
A few minutes later—minutes have lost shape, density, and meaning as a measure of anything, but by the clock only a few minutes have passed—Bobby begins, quietly, to weep. I ask him what’s wrong. He waves me off. Over at the swag lamp, Allan becomes convinced he has found an FBI bug, placed there to monitor his political activities. He begins yelling at the lamp that J. Edgar Hoover should go eat shit and die. Kurt is talking to him in a soothing voice, but he also keeps staring down at his own shirt. Allan, looking grim, heads to the phone and starts to take it apart, convinced it’s tapped. Suddenly Kurt rips off his own shirt, two buttons clattering to the floor on either side of him.
“There’s something fucking on here,” he says, shaking the shirt, dropping it to the floor and then stomping on it wildly. His eyes get wide. “No! It’s on my back!” He runs over to me, yelling, “Get it off! Get it off me! It’s crawling all over my back!”
I don’t see anything, but I swat repeatedly at his back with both hands. This makes him feel better. He goes to the bathroom to look at his back in the mirror. Soon I hear him swatting himself. Bobby continues to weep and Allan to disassemble the phone. Everything keeps melting and shifting before my eyes. I feel hot. The room suddenly has no air. I go to open a window, burp up the taste of dinner, and also of breakfast and lunch and dinners from many years past. I veer toward the bathroom, head past Kurt, and nearly make it to the toilet. I vomit all over his sneakers.
“That was some weird shit,” Kurt says the next morning. “It’s not usually like that at all.” Allan is not awake yet. He was up most of the night examining the room and waiting for the speed to wear off. Bobby fell asleep early on the couch and woke up early. He rubs his face and looks at Kurt.
Sounding the Waters Page 14