Something Red

by Jennifer Gilmore

  Benji woke up early, a little after eight, and he slipped out of the room without waking Rachel. As he walked back to his dorm, the morning gray and cold, Skatesville was on his mind, and he thought of one of those few weekends in winter when he and Vanessa were kids and Len and Annie were there with the twins, and the family had slept in the one guest room together, to stay warm. Ben and his sister slept on cots until they crawled into the big bed in the cold mornings, under an old, smelly quilt. Benji remembered that feeling of pure invincibility in the warm, dry love of their four bodies, a single unit. Now the campus felt depressing, cold, and terribly small. It seemed discharged of people, as if students had been poured out of the jar of it, and the buildings looked as if they were made of cardboard, so new did they seem to him. Benji wondered about his friends from high school at their old Ivy League campuses, vines covered in thick, waxy leaves climbing up redbrick and white-columned buildings opening onto porches, and inside dark-paneled rooms, old oil paintings of men and spaniels hanging along the walls.

  When he got to his room, Benji found a note from Arnold pinned to his pillow: Your parents are running late! He had signed it with a smiley face and pinned it to his pillow! Benji gritted his teeth at the thought of Arnie bending down and grasping at the fabric to attach the note with its impossibly small gold safety pin. How had he opened and closed it with his plump, nail-bitten fingers? Many times he had asked Arnie to leave notes for him on his desk, but he was always met by his roommate’s defensive claims that Benji never found said messages on his disgustingly messy desk, and that he always blamed Arnie when he didn’t receive them. Either way, Benji was relieved to know his parents would be late.

  It was only 8:30 a.m. but he had so much to do before the rally, he didn’t know where to begin. He pulled off his sweatshirt, grabbed a T-shirt from the mess on his bed—Rachel’s Grateful Dead Winterland T-shirt, so soft, a faded blue, almost the color of fog, with a skull wrapped in a crown of roses over the left breast—and over that, he pulled on a sweater. He didn’t bother changing his underwear. Benji went to fill a bowl from the bag stashed in his desk drawer, then decided against it, realizing that the day might demand quite a bit of him. There was too much unknown, and how much better to have the first smoke of the day be later, he thought, when it was over, before another oppressive family dinner.

  The Action Station, a makeshift booth intended to be the headquarters of the event, was already being set up. Benji nodded at several girls from the Action Coalition who were stacking up papers and pulling tops off Magic Markers, checking their potency. “Hey,” he said, pointing to a sign-up sheet. “What’s that?”

  “A sign-up-to-vote sheet,” one girl said.

  He looked at her quizzically. “This isn’t about voting!” He began to panic that they all had the wrong event. This is STAB, he’d wanted to scream. STAB! But he had remained calm.

  “We do this at every rally, Benji,” the girl said instructively.

  He smiled at his name. Then he looked to the one bending over to open her knit bag. Alice was her name; she had helped him secure a permit for the rally at the eleventh hour last night, while Larry was arranging for buses from the neighboring colleges. Benji had heard a rumor that someone had stumbled upon her in the wee hours of the morning several months ago, behind Rosenthal, doing it doggie style with an activist from Northampton who was here for a rally to fight homelessness. Benji watched her stand up with her pile of folded pamphlets pressed to her chest, and he thought of the way the morning light must have reflected off her blue-white body, the flash of her ass, her hands and feet planted into the earth taking root, like young trees.

  “Because voting is, like, the whole point. To everything. It’s the basis for what we do, no matter what we’re fighting for.” This one was a freckled brunette with long, curly hair and green eyes. He noted that she too seemed to have an extra layer of fat, even around her eyes, which almost disappeared when she smiled. “Can’t vote; can’t get anything voted on.”

  “Got it.” He shrugged. “Sounds like a good plan.”

  “Andy’s over there.” She pointed to the pay phone. “I’m Gwen.”

  “I know,” Benji lied. “Gwen.”

  He walked over to Andy, talking animatedly into the scratched-up pay phone.

  “Everything okay?” Benji gestured.

  Andy nodded, twirling the phone cord the way Vanessa used to do back when his sister was a regular girl who did regular-girl things, such as talk all night with her girlfriends and refuse to let him even speak to his friends to so much as confirm a spot to hang out. Fleetingly, he missed Heather and Jessica and Bee, all matching in their scuffed-up brown cowboy boots and satiny blouses, their hair so feathered and wispy, lips oozing root-beer-smelling lip gloss. One night he had come home late and was sitting out on the screened-in back porch when Bee came downstairs in her nightie. She had stood in the doorway, the kitchen light shining from behind her, illuminating her curved body and her nipples, dark against the diaphanous fabric of her light pink nightgown. They had made out in the hammock for hours, tiptoeing back into the house just before dawn.

  Andy got off the phone and announced to Benji that in addition to Robert Parish, he’d just now secured Kathy McMillan, the long jumper who had won the silver medal in Montreal in ’76. “Yeah, she was visiting her sister in Roxbury this weekend, just randomly. Her sister is friends with my brother, and word got out, so I just called and she’s up for it. It’ll be cool because she can talk about being in the Olympics and what it feels like to not go this year.”

  “No shit,” Benji said. “It’s just so unfair! Hey, anything happen with the flame?”

  Roland had thought it would be bangin’ to get the real Olympic flame electronically transmitted, the way it had been in Montreal, but orchestrating it proved far beyond what these five guys were capable of managing technically.

  “Yeah, here, check it out.” Roland walked Benji outside and over to the fake wooden podium, which two guys from the radio station were helping to wire. A huge Olympic flame, the fire constructed out of tissue and stiff tulle or chiffon, hung from the window of the radio station.

  “Wow,” Benji said.

  “Lana did it. Art major.” Roland held out his palms as if to ask, What can I say?

  Benji laughed. “It looks good!” he said, even though it was hideous.

  He looked around to see if perhaps Rachel had awoken to massive amounts of guilt at abandoning her devoted boyfriend and had decided to come. Though she was not among them, many kids had begun streaming in to the rally, carrying steaming cups of coffee and pink and white boxes of doughnuts. With any bit of luck, today would run smoothly; all that Benji could do was hope the speakers showed, that there was a good crowd, and everywhere from the Brandeis Justice to World News Tonight would report on it. Perhaps, he thought to himself, this event could actually effect change. How amazing would that be?

  Around eleven thirty, buses started chugging up the hill. He watched them pull into the circular drive out front, which brought to mind the children’s book about the train his mother had read to him; she’d curled around him with her smell of spicy perfume and ChapStick, and he remembered the train’s smiling face carrying all the toys to all the needy children: I think I can I think I can. To his surprise and delight, the buses were as filled with students as that grinning blue train had been with toys. Kids spilled out of them, some in full sports regalia, and others in their school colors or sweatshirts with school names blazoned across their chests. Benji looked up at the thick gray sky and imagined a whole other universe behind it, begging him to stomp through, a thought he’d once had while tripping on a cold day beneath an overcast sky. The thought of an entire people, their faces and fists pressed against the sky waiting to be let in, had never left him.

  He had a brief flash of his parents making their way up 95 in the Volvo, Vanessa sulking in the backseat, his parents up front bickering over when to get on the Jersey Turnpike. I think I can
I think I can. The train reached the top of the hill. Bring it on! Benji thought. Anything.

  Still Benji watched for Rachel as Tuesday Twilight, the more popular of the campus cover bands as it featured Matty Schlangel, a cherubic political science major who resembled Jerry Garcia, played. They covered a few Dead tunes as Benji greeted the buses. He also helped adjust the mikes, and assisted in stapling two-by-fours to the backs of thick poster board: End the Cold War Now! and You Can’t Keep Us Out of Red Square!—even the random ones from the Communist Club that caused some minor disagreements about varied purposes and agendas: What Would Karl Say? and Capitalism Is Evil! As he worked, Benji constantly checked each entrance to the quad in hopes that the next gust of chilly March air would bring Rachel loping up the path and out of the gray day with her just-fell-out-of-bed tangle of black hair, that fringed jacket, her tan suede boots that wrapped around the shapely gams he’d been twisted up in just last night. Matty Schlangel dedicated their next song to the youth of today and began: Comes a time when you’re driftin’. Rachel held in her a radiating heat that went from her stomach outward, and he craved the inside and outside of her. Comes a time when you settle down . . . His mouth watered for the taste of her, he couldn’t help himself, and he blushed as he put down his sign to turn to see if maybe she had arrived. Because he did not know what he would do if she didn’t show.

  Benji watched all the athletes and hippies and socialists, the communists, the lesbians, the gays, the environmentalists, the feminists, the militants, and, he noticed now, several Russian Jews, famous on campus for the asylum Brandeis granted them, fill the outside of Usdan, all singing and clapping their hands. And another one for us and our buddies who should be in Moscow! Matty Schlangel declared. He’s got the whole world—Come on now!—in his hands! Matty let his guitar hang at his hip, and turning to the two other members of Tuesday Twilight, he clapped his hands together above his head.

  Several star activists were in attendance, the strongest voices—despite their claim that every voice, each human’s story told, was evidence of another’s silenced—at every campus rally, their mouths practically eating the mike as they galvanized every crowd into action. Today, however, there was also a new contingent: the athletes. Not just Brandeis athletes, which would most certainly have limited the number, but players from neighboring schools, each wearing a team uniform or their school colors, a team jacket and sweatshirt. Scanning the crowd now, Benji saw three football players from Harvard, several from the MIT soccer team, a few Boston University hockey players, some of the Wellesley lacrosse players in their little plaid skirts, and rowers from all over the area, including Tufts. He’s got the whole world in his hands. Matty Schlangel lifted up his brawny fist, and the crowd sent up a scream of applause.

  Here Benji’s past life and the present converged, and he remembered how he’d once felt his body move in parts; he had controlled which muscles grew, which ones diminished, the coordination of his limbs and muscles directly corresponding with what he visualized. Now he inadvertently flexed his calves and bunched up his fists. It was so crowded people were standing on the brick walls surrounding the center, holding signs and lacrosse sticks and footballs. He smiled to himself; it was just like before a game, just like the moment before he was about to rush onto the field and play.

  Organizers and friends swatted Benji on the shoulder, nodding to the music as they shuffled into the outside circle of the student center, streaming in from all entrances, and he nodded back at them, smiling, also noting several newscasters walking around the student center. They held microphones beneath students’ noses and happily asked the reasons for the rally and if anyone, anyone at all, felt the protest might become violent.

  This, he thought, in this magnificent crowd of committed people, was a worthy cause. Tuesday Twilight sang their final song in harmony: The river is deep and the river is wide, hallelujah. He remembered his family, all of them singing along with the crowd, led by Peter, Paul and Mary. Milk and honey on the other side, hallelujah. Benji felt the past stitched inside him like a secret pocket. The future would be sutured where? he wondered.

  You cannot take away a dream, Robert Parish had said after Matty led the crowd in the final round of “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore” and bowed off with the rest of the band. That was pretty much all Parish said—that mute-Indian rumor had evidently gotten started for a reason—but he did have a point, and his sheer tallness, as well as his blackness on such a glaringly white campus, gave him the presence they needed to begin the day. It centered the rally. Andy had also spoken and introduced Professor Schwartz, who then gave a speech about tradition.

  “The sixties is always with us,” he’d said. “Look around you. Herbert Marcuse was here, may he finally rest in peace. Abby Hoffman was graduated at Brandeis, wherever he may now be. So was Angela Davis, a Phi Beta. Were these students, now legends, embraced by the system? Were they embraced by this university? They were not! But never will their legacies die.”

  Before Kathy McMillan got up to speak, anyone could say whatever he or she pleased at a free mike. This was always the wildest part of any rally—individuals with their own agendas, ranting and raving. Some hippie went up, half naked and drooling, and begged to drink bong water, God’s juice, he said. The crowd watched him in silence. Then a slight, brown-haired woman with a head full of split ends, upright golden threads reflected in the noonday sun, spoke about Free Schools.

  “It is a dying movement, but so necessary when we have schools, not unlike this very one”—she pointed a finger to the sky—“that turn out merely manageable workers, obedient consumers, and malleable voters. That churn out willing murderers!” she said, raising her tiny arm above her head. “Stop the domination now!”

  Benji heard one of Rachel’s sayings, Everyone’s voice deserves to be heard, and nodded at the memory and in the spirit of his egalitarianism.

  Several athletes also spoke—Larry talked about his brother, who would have been here today to represent the ripped-off, but he was too distraught to travel. He had trained for the Olympics since they were children.

  “Who knows what the next four years will bring? What,” Larry asked the crowd, “does this teach our brothers?”

  “Lies!” the crowd answered in unison.

  Standing as part of the crowd, Benji could see so plainly his history and his future, and how everyone, all of them, he thought, had a past they were running from or running toward; why couldn’t Rachel see and appreciate this? Kathy McMillan went up to talk about her Olympic experience. Going to Montreal—such a foreign country!—was, she said, the most amazing experience of her life, hands down. Being in the Olympic Village was like being in the League of Nations. She’d never known, she said as she bowed her head, that the world was so large.

  The crowd was steady, people filing in and out, bringing in burritos and sandwiches at lunch, drinking from bottles of beer and cans of Coke and orange soda, their signs leaning on their shoulders as they took huge bites of their burgers and slices. After one o’clock, someone—it turned out to be Schaeffer—began handing out tabs of acid imprinted with the Pink Panther, though when it reached him, Benji declined, laughing to himself about the prospect of tripping when his mother arrived.

  It was already past three o’clock and the permit stated the area needed to be completely cleared out by four. Rachel had not shown; now Benji remembered seeing her that first time, standing in front of Sherman with only those several protesters, holding her wilting little sign: Get your rules out of our kitchens! She wore all white and she was so brown; he had wanted her from the moment he saw her.

  He looked up to the podium where the crowd waited for the next speaker. Benji watched Professor Schwartz milling about, hands in his pockets, indicating he was merely an observer here, and not a terribly impressed one at that. His gait seemed to be saying, In my day things would have been done differently. Benji thought of his father holding him up into the intense sunshine, Peter, Paul and Mary singin
g on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. It’s the song of love between my brothers and my sisters . . . Benji shook his head for a moment to counter his daze, and only when he was able to again focus on the here and now did he realize that someone was calling his name, that he was next, that now, he thought, as Schaeffer pushed him toward the microphone, now it was his turn.

  CHAPTER 11

  I Spy

  They were on the road up to Waltham by seven; Vanessa tried to be patient. She even brought some of her music to play for her parents. Dennis had slipped in the Bad Brains cassette just as soon as they’d turned onto Connecticut Avenue. By the time they’d hit the ramp for 95, he’d ejected it.

  “I just can’t,” he said. “I’m sorry, honey, but it’s too early and life’s too short.”

  “Why do we have a cassette player in the car if we don’t put it to good use?” Vanessa said. “I had thought I could explain it to you.” It was a rare moment where, briefly unhindered by embarrassment, she felt she could say, This is Bad Brains, they created punk in this city, and they believe in a powerful mental attitude. At least H.R. does. He’s the singer, she’d have told them if they’d asked. When he plays you kind of believe him; you feel like you can do whatever you want to do—is that weird? And yet. And yet, she would not tell them, the whole punk ethic seemed sometimes to Vanessa like the cheer of a frat boy: just do it yourself, who cares if you can’t sing—sing!—play the drums if that’s what you’re into, start a fucking band. Because, Vanessa thought, growing more and more skeptical, how does one really make that leap of faith?

  She’d felt guilty about the toilet-papering; she wanted to give something back, a bit of herself, even though saying punk, just the word, made Vanessa feel like a poseur. Here she was with her parents in their Volvo driving up to Brandeis. How punk rock was that? She half expected to hear a driver scream, Poseur! from the car in the next lane, just like when someone showed up at Madam’s Organ in a new coat or sneakers because they’d read about the place in City Paper. Lame-ass fat fucking suburban poseur! She looked out of her window at the wood-paneled station wagons and Bugs passing by, but no one seemed to notice her.