Beach Music

by Pat Conroy

  On this particular evening, a deputy named Willis Shealy took exception to the way I looked. Night had fallen and I knew this was a dangerous time in Southern jails, but my politeness was ingrained, even natural. The slack-jawed, hostile deputy sized me up in a way that told me I was in trouble.

  “I got a sister with big tits whose hair isn’t half as long as yours,” Shealy said.

  “The bondsman said the papers are all in order, sir,” I said, avoiding eye contact.

  “You hear what I said?” the deputy demanded.

  “Yes, sir. I did.”

  “Your friend in there’s got hair down to his ass. He got a dick or a pussy between his legs?”

  “Sir,” I said, “you’ll have to ask Capers that.”

  “Get smart with me, boy, and you’ll be spending the night with your buddy,” Shealy said.

  And just then, Jordan walked into the Columbia jail to see what was holding me up. Jordan had long ago returned to his California style and had one of the first ponytails among Carolina men.

  “What’s the problem?” Jordan asked.

  “Another one,” Shealy said, shaking his head in disgust. “If that college don’t have a chicken coop full of faggots …”

  But Jordan had no sense of restraint: “Look, loser, just let our friend out of jail and you can get back to counting your acne scars.”

  “My friend likes to joke around,” I suggested.

  Willis Shealy lifted his billy club from the metal desk in front of him and said, “He’s joking with death. I played football in high school.”

  “Oh, God. Did you hear that, Jack?” Jordan said, lifting his hands in mock terror. “I wouldn’t have dared open my mouth if I’d have known our superhero had played football. He must be one of those ass-kicking, take-no-prisoners sort of guys. My knees always get weak when I’m face-to-face with a fat-assed, pimple-faced dickhead who brags he played high school football.”

  Watching the billy club, I said, “Shut up, Jordan. Could you please release our friend, sir?”

  “I don’t like your faggot friend,” the deputy said, taking a step closer to Jordan, who responded by moving a step toward Shealy.

  “My friend hasn’t been feeling well,” I said.

  The deputy laughed and said, “Can’t cure diarrhea of the mouth.”

  “I puke every time I smell the body odor of the village redneck,” Jordan said.

  “Thanks for helping defuse the situation,” I said.

  “Hey, anytime I can lend a hand.”

  “I bet you love to suck dick, don’t you, faggot?” Shealy said.

  “Sir, if you could just hold your tongue, I think I can reason with my friend,” I said. “Neither of you’re helping me out.”

  “I happen to be an aficionado of sucking dick,” Jordan said, enjoying himself now. The muscles in Shealy’s clenched jaw tightened.

  “Aficionado? Of course, that word’s three syllables too long for you to handle, Shealy. But I’ve sucked some of the finest dicks in this country. I’m a master of the trade. My tongue is celebrated in queer bars around the country. I love fat dicks and skinny dicks. Some dicks taste like cheese, others like fresh pork, some like beef jerky, some like corn on the cob, but my favorite taste like sugarcane. Some guys’ hygiene leaves something to be desired, you know, guys like you, Shealy, guys who bathe once a month whether they need it or not. Then a sardine taste comes to mind or maybe anchovies …” Jordan was on a roll and I had rarely seen him enjoying himself more.

  “You’re one sick son of a bitch,” Shealy said. “I wouldn’t let a pervert like you in my jail.”

  “Just release our friend Mr. Middleton,” I said, “and I’ll get this pervert out of your sight.”

  “I bet you’re hung like a horse, Mr. Shealy,” Jordan said, joking, moving another step forward as Shealy retreated. “I bet I couldn’t even fit the whole thing in my mouth.”

  “If your friend moves a step closer,” Shealy said to me, “I’ll shoot both of you. Watch him now, while I get your friend inside.”

  As Shealy went back into the cell block, I said, “I got some problems with your technique.”

  “You were kissing ass,” Jordan said cheerfully. “It didn’t appear to be working.”

  “One should not scare a county deputy,” I advised. “They’re paid too little money and the only fun they have is killing someone brought in for a speeding violation.”

  “I thought you knew the South,” Jordan said. “The only reason both of us aren’t dead right now is because we’re white.”

  “You need to be more cautious,” I suggested.

  “Caution dulls me,” said Jordan matter-of-factly. “I only begin to get interested when I throw caution to the wind.”

  “Do me a favor,” I said. “Let me know when you do, so I can get out of your way.”

  Jordan said, “Don’t be colorless, Jack. Promise me you won’t be colorless.”

  “It’s what I aspire to,” I said as Capers was led out of the cell block by a still-shaken Shealy.

  “What on earth did you say to poor Deputy Shealy?” Capers said on seeing us. “He’s trembling like a leaf.”

  “Take your next demonstration outside the Richland County line, Middleton,” Shealy warned. “And buy your squirrelly friend there some mouthwash.”

  “Good line, Officer Shealy,” Jordan said. “I love it when the hoi polloi come up with a clever comeback. It gives me renewed faith in the possibilities of public education for the masses.”

  “What the hell’s he talking about?” Shealy asked me.

  “Remember, Shealy,” Jordan said, “the South’s about story, not repartee.”

  “What an asshole,” Shealy answered.

  “You’re a genius, sir,” Jordan said. “You returned fire with both story and repartee.”

  Capers pulled his long hair back with both hands and asked, “What’s Jordan been drinking?”

  “He’s high on life,” I said. “Let’s make like horse shit and hit the trail.”

  “That’s a Boy Scout joke,” said Capers. “If only my scoutmaster could see me now.”

  “Trying to destroy America,” Jordan said. “And everything that made us great.”

  “Trying to save America,” Capers said, his face growing serious.

  “You’ve become something of a grump since you set out to save the planet and all its singing birds, Capers,” Jordan said.

  “Let’s continue this discussion at Yesterday’s,” I suggested. “Mike has bailed out Jane Fonda. She’ll want to yell at us too.”

  We all went off to Yesterday’s, where Mike and Shyla were already nursing a drink at a table. Capers and Shyla kissed passionately as was their habit in those heady days of arrests and speeches shouted out of bullhorns. They held hands in public, were affectionate in ways that made me extremely uncomfortable and caused Jordan to avert his eyes. It was not enough that they were living together; their unvoiced message seemed to be that the fury of their beliefs had deepened the intensity of their sexual life. As we sat waiting for our beers in Yesterday’s, their hands moved along each other’s bodies as though the curves of their own pliant flesh were the only braille they could trust.

  “Unglue yourselves,” Mike said, “so we can order.”

  “You’re just jealous,” Capers said, staring deeply into Shyla’s eyes. “I feel like I’ve lost my arms and legs when we’re apart. It’s like we’ve been one ever since the revolution took off.”

  “What revolution?” I asked.

  “When’re you gonna wake up, Jack?” Shyla said sharply. “How many bodies’re going to have to pile up in Vietnam before it claims a share of your attention?”

  “Seventy-two thousand three hundred and sixty-eight,” I said, studying the menu.

  “How can you make jokes when young American boys are dying in an immoral war?” Capers asked, grabbing my wrist.

  Jordan was reading from his own menu and said, “I want a cheeseburger smothered w
ith onions. And there’s that fabulous hot dog also waiting to be eaten. Something in me also craves a salad. But then, I think of those boys dying in an immoral war, and I realize I don’t want food at all. I want to carry a placard and march in an antiwar demonstration, and be morally superior to every human being I pass.”

  “I thought I was going to get a T-bone steak,” I added. “But I can’t think about red meat without thinking of Hué and body bags loaded up with young men who will never hear the words of the Gettysburg Address again. The T-bone seems immoral to me. Then I think about getting the red beans and rice, but the rice reminds me of the poor Viet Cong who are being killed while fighting a moral war against perfect shitheads like me. The rice is out. I want to order something that has no political message at all. So I think I’ll get a raw carrot and a glass of water.”

  Mike warned, “Capers and Shyla don’t think you boys are very funny.”

  “Too bad,” I said.

  “Tough titty,” Jordan added.

  “What’s funny about Vietnam?” Shyla asked.

  “It’s made our whole country crazy,” I said. “It’s turned wonderful people like the two of you into fanatics. Look at you, Capers. From KA to Abbie Hoffman in a calendar year. And you, Shyla. You were more fun to be around than anyone I’ve ever met, but now I’d rather read back copies of the Congressional Record than be near your sorry ass. I don’t understand why you can’t be a liberal without turning into smug, pious assholes.”

  “We’re trying to stop the war, Jack,” Capers said. “I’m sorry our piety ruins your fun.”

  “Do you stand for anything?” Shyla asked.

  “ ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’ ” I said.

  “Cheap patriotism,” Capers sneered. “What I love about the American flag is one doesn’t have to stand up for it. One can burn it, stomp on it, or throw it in the trash, and our Constitution grants us that precious right.”

  “There’s a fascist in you, Jack, waiting to be born,” Shyla said.

  “If it’s ever born, it’ll be because I hung around you and Capers too long,” I said. “Every time I’m with you, I want to drop an H-bomb on Hanoi.”

  “So you’re for the war,” Shyla shouted. “Admit it.”

  “We’re in college,” Jordan said. “No one’s for this war. It’s a stupid war, fought for stupid reasons, by stupid people.”

  “Then you’re on our side,” Shyla said.

  “Yeh, we’re on your side,” Jordan said. “We’re just a lot quieter about it.”

  “I can’t be quiet about napalm and children on fire running down country roads,” Capers said.

  “Neither can I,” said Shyla. “Nor can I sit with anyone who can.”

  As she and Capers rose to leave, I stood and said, “I’d like to make a toast to napalm. May it only strike innocent children, orphans clutching teddy bears, paraplegics, amputees waiting for prosthetic devices, beloved cartoon characters, nuns with rosaries and bad breath, cheerleaders from the Atlantic Coast Conference …”

  I was still compiling my list when Capers and Shyla made their way out into the darkness.

  “Humor’s not their long suit these days,” Mike said, snapping photographs of all of us as they retreated.

  “It’s all false,” I said. “They’ve fallen in love with rhetoric and bullshit. They can talk for hours about free speech and then get pissed off when anyone says something they disagree with.”

  Mike said, “That’s not why you’re angry, Jack.”

  “Mike’s right,” Jordan said.

  “Then why am I angry?” I asked. “It’s good to have two friends who are all-wise and all-knowing and who can explain the ways of the world to their slow-witted friend.”

  “You’re in love with Shyla,” Mike said. “No sin in that. But she only gets excited by the boys who run away from tear gas.”

  “I’m against the war,” I said. “But I like America. So kill me.”

  “She’s in a very radical stage,” Mike explained.

  “They’re not serious about stopping this war,” Jordan said, taking a long pull from his bottle.

  “I think they are,” Mike disagreed.

  “No, they aren’t. I don’t agree with my old man very much,” Jordan said, “but he said you could know how serious you were about something by how willing you were to risk everything for it. He told me last month that he wouldn’t take Capers seriously until Capers gave him some sign that this wasn’t just playacting.”

  “What would Capers have to do?” I asked.

  Jordan laughed. “He said if Capers believed what he says he does, he’d blow up every barracks at Fort Jackson. My father doesn’t mistake anyone for the real thing unless they’re willing to lay down their lives for their beliefs. When Capers and Shyla kill their first MP, he’ll start listening to them.”

  The war didn’t come home to us until months later, the day Jordan was in my room reading Thomas Merton’s Seven Storey Mountain and I was writing a letter to my mother. Mike appeared in the doorway.

  “Hear the news?” he asked, carrying three cameras around his neck. “National Guardsmen killed some college students at an antiwar demonstration. Listen.”

  Jordan turned his head and said, “People’re screaming.”

  I looked out the window and saw students emptying trash out the windows of the Education Building. Others were running down the streets, screaming and crying.

  “Shyla and Capers have called for a rally,” Mike exclaimed. “All this because Nixon bombed Cambodia. Wow, never underestimate the power of cause and effect.”

  From the second-story window, Mike began snapping the bizarre, sometimes violent reaction of students to the news of what we would soon learn were the Kent State killings.

  It was one measure of President Nixon’s innocence that he would have little idea how incendiary his incursion into Cambodia would prove to be among us, even the nation’s most compliant students. A fearful discharge of energy was set off in the hearts of those of us who had long ago grown accustomed to our roles as wards of the state. We poured out of dormitories and fraternity and sorority houses and left our books untended in library carrels. We wandered singly and in pairs until we gathered in a group that was moving toward the Horseshoe, past the open plaza outside of the Russell House. Disoriented and without any sense of purpose, we registered incomprehension, grief, and betrayal over the senseless murder of four of our own. If the deaths had occurred at the already-radicalized Harvard or Columbia, there would have been some context, some force of mitigating circumstances. But the gunning down of thirteen students in the idyllic heartland town of Kent, Ohio, at Kent State, a college far more deferential in its acquiescence to authority than even the University of South Carolina, was inconceivable. It was clear to us that the government had declared open season on anyone opposing the war. On that single day, in the milling, insurgent coming together of the students of America, all the dangers of solidarity were set loose. Even the most docile and passive of students felt the hot breath of mutiny in the air as we walked toward the Horseshoe. Grievance would soon turn to rage and meekness turn mean, then majestic. What was happening in this blind migration of students toward the open space between the library and the Russell House was taking place on campuses all over America. Intellect and reason had gone underground, civility hibernated, and insurrection took the lead. Yet none of us knew where we were going.

  Later, I thought that this moving without reason had been an unforgettable sensation that made me understand the comfort of herds, the safety that great numbers lend to religious pilgrimages. I had never been a part of something so much larger than myself. My hands trembled with fury and my mouth was dry; I felt irrational and murderous, yet curiously not angry as I walked with the students, many crying, around me.

  By the time we reached the open space in front of the library, Capers and Shyla had already been arrested for unlawful assembly. News of their arrest spread angrily through the crowd along with t
he surprising fact that the president of the university himself had secured their releases. Like an overhang of mist from the Saluda River, the mob dissipated, almost shyly, breaking up as though a spell had been lifted by an unseen hand.

  That night, Jordan, Mike, and I were at Yesterday’s when Shyla and Capers walked in. They were welcomed by a thunderous ovation as they moved toward the bar with their fists raised and people reaching out to touch them. Capers wore a butterfly Band-Aid over his left eye where one of the arresting officers had banged his head against a wall. Shyla went to the front entrance of the restaurant and worked the crowd into a lather of self-righteousness, while Capers and Radical Bob worked the back door and the bar. Shouts echoed through the streets and a police car went up in flames near the stadium. The sound of sirens hovered over the city. It was not anarchy or even near it, but something had disturbed the sediments of dispassion in the loose boundaries of this college. You could feel the thrill of lethargy set afire. On this night, the pure fact of living seemed like a new branch of theology. There was wildness and disquiet along the tree-lined streets of a sleeping city. Over the televisions and the radios came the news that none of the slain students had been a radical and one had even belonged to a ROTC unit. The men in uniforms had turned their guns on college students. My generation cohered in outrage and parents everywhere were afraid.