by Joe Haldeman
He didn’t know that the Be-In problems were just a pale foreshadowing of the storm that was building. The new governor of California, Ronald Reagan, was not exactly a friend of the Movement. His campaign had been pro-Vietnam, pro-police, and anti-student. One of the first things he had done upon taking office was to fire the president of the University of California, who was coddling the student radicals. Police stepped up drug and obscenity busts.
But the Haight would have been going to hell without any help from the government. Lee had left before the widely publicized Summer of Love began. Nearly a hundred thousand people from all over the country converged on Haight-Ashbury, most of them high-school dropouts and other rootless youngsters. Marijuana and LSD became relatively scarce; speed and heroin became problems. Drug-related hospital admissions quintupled. Stoned teenagers wearing what their hometown newspapers said hippies wore wandered around the district grokking it in its fullness and asking “Spare change?” of the hordes of tourists who came down to look at them.
By the end of summer, the tourists and media went away, and most of the stoned children went away, but the hard elements stayed.
The police began to sweep the streets for runaways and undesirables. Any male who couldn’t produce a draft card was in trouble. Most of the actual hippies drifted out into the country.
Lee hardly recognized the place. The glittering bohemia had become a dangerous slum. They drove around for an hour, Lee quietly describing things as they used to be, and then headed back to Berkeley for the night. Lee might have spent a few days in the Haight out of curiosity and nostalgia, but Beverly was in no shape for it.
Some Berkeley friends let them crash for grass and groceries, and Lee found a two-week housepainting job. Beverly sought out the local Kennedy-for-President campaign office and spent a few hours a day stuffing envelopes and being a gofer. It helped her state of mind to be doing something useful, and she was excited at the prospect of actually meeting Robert Kennedy. He was scheduled to come to California in a few weeks.
Homecoming (2)
Spider was sprawled across his bed upstairs after dinner, immersed in Delany’s The Einstein Intersection, when he heard his father’s car pull up in the driveway.
He wasn’t sure what to do. Go downstairs and greet him? Hi, Dad. How were things in Gettysburg? How was that girl?
The front door opened and his father called out, “Carrie, I’m home,” as if he was just getting home from work. Spider heard his mother’s running footsteps and then muffled sobs, and decided to wait until he was summoned. He lay back on the bed and pretended to be asleep.
After a few minutes his mother came to the door. “John? John, wake up.” He sat up and made a show of rubbing his eyes. “Your father’s downstairs.” She didn’t look very good, slumped against the doorjamb, tired red eyes and crooked smile.
He followed her down to the living room, where his father was centered on the couch in front of a tall glass of bourbon, already half gone. That was how and where he sat when he wanted an audience. Spider and his mother would sit and listen on easy chairs facing the couch. For a second he felt like a kid again, having to explain a report card or that broken window.
But he kept his cool. This is my father but there’s not much he can do to me now. This is my father but it’s also a man who just deserted his wife for two weeks of drinking and adultery.
“You’re still at home,” he said. “That’s good. We’ve hardly had any chance to talk.”
Spider nodded and sat down and took the beer his mother brought. His father’s speech was slow and slurred. He had dark circles under his eyes and his skin was pasty. “Was it a good trip?” Spider asked.
“Oh yeah, yeah. Good trip.” He gulped at the bourbon. “We have to talk about what you did in Vietnam.”
Why? Spider almost said. “Handled bodies for a while, humped the boonies for a while, got hurt, came home. I pretty much wrote you everything that happened.”
“But not everything. You didn’t write everything.”
“I held back a little. Didn’t want to upset Mom and Bev.”
“Bet you did. Hold back.” He looked up at his wife. “Carrie, this is man talk.”
“Phooie on that. Man talk! He’s my son, too.”
He looked at her for a long moment. “You’ve had a lot to drink.”
“And you, you’ve been on the wagon for the past couple weeks.”
He swiveled back to Spider, like a man aiming a weapon. “Okay. You tell me and your Mom just what you couldn’t put in those letters.”
He looked straight into his father’s face. “Couple of guys got their dicks blown off.”
At first he didn’t move a muscle, but his face turned red, dark red. “You just wade right in, don’t you.”
“You asked.”
He picked up his drink slowly, thoughtfully, and hurled it straight at his son’s face. Spider ducked; the glass bounced off the carpet and hit the wall without breaking.
His mother stood up unsteadily. “What on earth—”
“Your son’s a fucking queer!” He roared, stabbing his finger toward Spider as he rose in sodden wrath. “You don’t even know what ‘blow’ means, do you?”
Spider was wiping bourbon sting from his eyes. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“Your own doctor said so! He said he was trying to cure you.”
“Oh, that. Folsom’s not a doctor. And he admitted he was—”
“By God you don’t have to be a doctor to tell a queer!”
Spider turned to his mother. She was staring at both of them with dumb astonishment. “It’s not true, Mother.”
“Has he been on a date since he got home? Has he even looked at a girl?”
She shook her head slowly. “No.”
“I have. I tried to find Beverly.”
“She ran away,” his mother said, voice shaking. “Her father says she ran away to California with a hippy, a ho—, a homo hippy.”
“You see? You see?”
“If he’s a homo,” Spider said, “why is he interested in Beverly?”
“Why don’t you tell me,” his father said. “I don’t know a fucking thing about that kind of … thing.”
He looked at his father and wondered why he didn’t feel more anger. He didn’t feel fear or hate or much of anything. Just tiredness, and frustration. Probably the Valium. “Dad, why don’t we talk in the morning? You’re tired and you’ve had too much to drink.”
“You can’t tell me how much to drink.”
“I guess not.” Spider stood up and headed for the door. “I’ll see you both later.”
He was wrong.
Life is but a dream
Spider stopped at the light where East-West Highway crosses Wisconsin, a long light, and a man walked by and looked into the car at him. His face was melted, scar tissue from a terrible burn.
And suddenly Spider was not in the car. He was back in the cold white room with the smells, and today, his next-to-last day, there was a new smell, like roasted pork.
It was already out of the body bag, lying on its side on the porcelain table. The image of a human being crudely sculpted out of carbon char.
“Saved this one for you, John,” the black man said, but his voice was serious and strained. “You never got a napalm before. Crispy critter.”
“One of ours?”
“Uh huh. Air strike, Fang said, guy was in a LP cut off from the rest of the unit. You wanta check his dog tags?”
Spider moved toward the corpse as if through thick glue. Its mouth was open impossibly wide. Even the tongue was burned, blistered. The face was not a face. There were cheekbones and holes that had been eyes and two slits marking where the nose had been and one melted ear. The black stumps that had been arms were drawn together across its chest and its knees were pulled up. All the clothes were burned off and it had the charred fossil of an erection.
The dogtag was warped by the heat, and oxidized. Spider bent it back
into shape and scraped the crud off it with his thumbnail, and wiped the thumbnail on his trousers. When he tried to talk no sound came out.
He coughed twice. “Ramble, John NMI. RA-three-seven-six-six-four-five-nine-eight.”
“Stupid prick joined up.”
“Yeah. Baptist. Type A.”
“See if there’s a unit designation on the body bag.”
Spider bent over to look at the body bag and his knees buckled and he fainted dead away. Almost a year later, the incident triggered a chorus of automobile horns.
The great white hope
Robert F. Kennedy had run John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign, and as a reward for that success was appointed to the office of attorney general at the age of thirty-five. After his brother was killed, RFK sought the vice presidential nomination in 1964. Lyndon Johnson said no, so RFK ran for a Senate seat in New York and won. He bided his time. In 1967 and early 1968, Johnson’s popularity slid and then, after Tet, nosedived. In mid-March, six weeks after Tet, “Bobby” threw his hat in the ring.
Like a lot of Americans of her generation, Beverly was hypnotized by Bobby’s youthful energy and Brahmin charm, and saw in them the possibility of reclaiming JFK’s Camelot. Never mind that much of the world had seen JFK as a saber-rattling bully, threatening nuclear war over Cuba and sending American troops to support a corrupt regime in Vietnam; never mind that RFK had cut his political teeth on Joe McCarthy’s vicious Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Both men had personal magnetism and liberal credentials that overshadowed not-so-liberal actions.
It was another McCarthy, Eugene, who had Lee’s vote. “Clean Gene” was going to fire Secretary of State Dean Rusk, the Selective Service’s General Hershey, and J. Edgar Hoover. (Like both Kennedys, McCarthy’s record was not in harmony with his rhetoric: he had voted for the Tonkin Gulf Resolution that put us into Vietnam, and voted in favor of every Vietnam war appropriation bill.)
McCarthy, much more than Kennedy, pushed Johnson into the decision not to run in 1968. The President was humiliated by the Wisconsin primary, which went to McCarthy, 57 to 36 percent. Right after that, LBJ gave the famous 31 March television speech that ended, “I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President.”
Bobby moved in for the kill. He was less worried about McCarthy, whom he assessed as a fringe protest candidate, than he was about Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who was shedding his liberal principles fast, in order to secure the party’s centrist nomination. Bobby was generous in his public praise for LBJ’s wisdom and magnanimity; his great achievements for racial harmony and economic opportunity—forgetting the beware-the-warmonger rhetoric of previous months—but Johnson was unmoved. He hadn’t liked Bobby in 1964, and he certainly had nothing to gain by appearing to like him now. LBJ would endorse his Vice President as the lesser of two evils, and the Democratic Party machine would fall in behind him.
Kennedy campaigned hard through April, and in early May won his first primary victory, Indiana, with almost twice as many votes as McCarthy. He won handily again in mid-May, in Nebraska, but at the end of the month was edged out in liberal Oregon, McCarthy taking 45 percent to his 39.
California would be the make-or-break test, with its large liberal population and crucial 174 convention delegates. Both men moved toward Los Angeles for the showdown.
Moving in, moving out
Spider parked the car more or less legally and went uphill to the Language Building, where he’d seen a bulletin board full of notices of apartments and rooms to rent. There was a furnished attic room for $65 that was only a few blocks from the doughnut place. He called from a pay phone and a woman with a dry whispery voice said it was still available.
It actually looked better than he had expected. It was smaller than his room at home, but it was clean and had an interesting mix of Salvation Army furniture. The man who showed him the room was not your ideal landlord, though; old and deaf and querulous. He asked if Spider were one of those “hipsters.” When Spider said no, he’d just gotten out of the army, the man was monumentally unimpressed. He’d been Field Artillery in double-you-double-you-One, now that was a war. Spider agreed with him.
No pets, no girls, no parties. Mrs. Remington will fix you one egg and toast in the morning; if you want more than that you have to get it somewhere else. Laundromat two blocks away, but Mrs. Remington will do your sheets every Saturday for an extra two dollars a month. No food stored in your room but you can have the bottom shelf of the refrigerator.
Spider looked at the money he had left over after the deposit and realized he would have to budget it. He hadn’t asked the guy at the doughnut shop how long it would be until he got paid. Figure a couple of weeks, anyhow. There was a place in Riverside where he could get Budweiser in returnables for $1.99 a case. Otherwise, he could live on peanut-butter-and-pickle sandwiches and canned beans. It wouldn’t be any worse than his mother’s home cooking.
He went out and stocked up and filled the bottom of the refrigerator with beer and pickles and cans of tuna fish that had been on sale. He decided to wait a day before going back home, at least a day. Give his dad some time to cool off. Or leave.
The Remingtons had an old balloon-tire bicycle in the garage that he could use. He pumped up the tires and oiled it and set out squeakily to explore the neighborhood. Mostly quiet and residential. He came to a park and watched some girls play softball for a while. They were fun to look at but probably too young for him, and anyhow none expressed any interest. They were absorbed in the game, awkwardly intense, but the worst of them could probably outhit and outpitch Spider. He could probably outrun them, but none of them chased him.
A few blocks away, he found a large ramshackle used-book store. They had unbelievable deals on old science fiction magazines and paperbacks, two for a quarter. He reevaluated his budget and dropped four dollars. That was about as much literature as the bicycle’s front basket could manage.
He went back to his new home and sat on the porch drinking beer and reading Mercenary, a Mack Reynolds novel about a future where wars were fought by corporations and televised as entertainment. That didn’t seem so far-fetched. Parts of the book made him nervous, so he took an extra Valium. He fell asleep in the last chapter and dozed until dark, his butt growing numb and cold on the porch swing.
He woke up famished and polished off a can of tuna with two slices of bread and a dill pickle. He read in bed for a while and then turned off the light and worried about tomorrow until he fell asleep.
His father’s car was gone when he pulled into the driveway in the morning. He peeked in the garage and saw his mother’s car was gone, too. He let himself into the quiet house.
He got a beer out of the refrigerator and walked around the rooms, remembering. They had moved here when he was six; nothing earlier was actually real to him.
For some reason it was easier to remember things, walking through alone. He didn’t have to reconcile his memory of his mother, or his father, with what they were now. The memories were mostly good.
He found three liquor boxes in the garage and filled them up with books. He opened the biology book and got an insistent erection from the Playboy pictures, but decided not to do anything about it until he got to his new place, a sort of christening.
He swaddled the microscope in clothes and packed it with the slide collection, but decided against hauling the telescope over. It would take up an awful lot of room, and he wouldn’t be able to use it anyhow, until he got better. The memory of that night still spooked him. He took all the astronomy books, though, and the star charts.
He looked at the chart of the Southern skies and had to sit down on the bed. That terrible night with the guy moaning kill me, kill me, just shoot me in the head. His legs and dick blown off, or was it just his dick. Bang cock. And then his father thinking he was talking about blowing a guy. Sucking someone’s dick, ugh. Thanks a lot, Captain My Captain. Thanks for everything.
> He filled a suitcase with school clothes and threw in a bathing suit and his gym shorts and jockstrap from high school. The catalog said he had to take swimming and two other gym courses to graduate. Maybe swimming was coed; that would be all right.
At that moment he realized it wasn’t Beverly he missed, not Beverly specifically. He just desperately needed a girl, any girl, to talk to, to look at. God, to hold her softness and smell her hair. He remembered that like a blow.
He wasn’t crying but his eyes were leaking, and his nose filled up. He went down to the kitchen to get a paper towel. His mother’s bourbon bottle was there and he poured half a tumbler full. He added a couple of ice cubes but it wasn’t even cool when he choked it all down, medicine drinking. Just like dear old Dad. He shouted at the empty kitchen and loaded up his car and drove slowly, grimly, back to College Park.
A good man is easy to lose
Lee’s Thing From Detroit had a flat tire on the way to the Ambassador Hotel, so they showed up for the Kennedy party an hour late. Beverly was in a rotten and contentious mood anyhow, since McCarthy had won Oregon the week before, and Lee was doing a bad job of hiding his pleasure at that. He dropped her at the hotel and went off in search of a free parking place. He’d find a place to wash up from changing the tire and meet her upstairs.
The Embassy Room, where Kennedy would make his victory or concession speech, was packed solid; a brace of firemen blocking the door sent her downstairs to the overflow area, the Ambassador Ballroom.