by Joe Haldeman
There was no point in getting pissed off at the firemen, and the flat tire actually wasn’t Lee’s fault, and McCarthy wasn’t such a bad man. But she really felt like biting somebody. She went into the ladies’ room instead, and sat in a stall for ten minutes, reading a Cosmo someone had left behind.
At least the ballroom wasn’t so crowded. Up in the Embassy Room, she would have had to wait for hours in the crowd crush, and probably never actually get close to Kennedy. She’d probably see him better on the TV monitors here.
Volunteers were hurriedly setting up punch bowls and tubs of soft drinks. Beverly volunteered to join the bucket brigade for ice. She went upstairs to the ice machine five times, and each time she went by a row of three stainless-steel warming tables under a sign that said THE ONCE AND FUTURE KING. Tomorrow she would see them in a newspaper photograph and faint dead away.
Lee showed up tired but determined to be friendly, and they commandeered a table with eight chairs close to one of the monitors. The table filled up fast and they chatted with the others while the TV moved from network to network. Lee didn’t mention his own heretical affiliation; on his grease-smudged shirt he wore a couple of RFK buttons as well as the VOLUNTEER GUEST badge.
The punch was slightly spiked and one of the volunteers came up with a bottle of vodka to help it along, so the wait wasn’t too onerous. The results should have been in before ten, but Los Angeles County, with 43 percent of the votes, was having computer trouble. One by one the networks predicted a Kennedy win.
They heard the cheering from upstairs first, and then the TV screens all switched to the Embassy Room. Kennedy gave a rather long, rambling victory speech, thanking everybody under the sun, including Eugene McCarthy. His last words were “Now on to Chicago and let’s win there.”
Lee wanted to get out fast and beat the crowd. That was all right with Beverly; it was past her bedtime and the vodka was making her heavy-lidded in spite of all the excitement.
The Thing was parked about ten minutes from the hotel. Beverly got to the bathroom before the line started and Lee hustled her out.
They were alone on the sidewalk, approaching the car, when a tan ambulance went screaming by. “Hope no one’s hurt,” Beverly said, without logic.
There was no Zapruder film to document the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy; only a room full of eyewitnesses. Most of them agreed on one central fact: Sirhan Sirhan fired a pistol at RFK, and RFK fell mortally wounded.
Sirhan eventually was convicted of the crime. Investigators found a notebook that he had filled with weird stream-of-consciousness ravings, repeating “RFK must die.” He sometimes acted quite sane, but was irrational often enough to make it seem convincing that the assassination had been a combination of obsessive planning and lunatic impulse.
There are two problems with that straightforward explanation. One is that Sirhan was standing in front of Kennedy, but Kennedy was struck by three bullets fired from behind him. Sirhan’s revolver held only eight bullets; either ten or thirteen were retrieved from the scene.
The fatal bullet was fired point-blank, less than one inch from Kennedy’s skull, behind the right ear. Sirhan was never closer than eighteen inches. A bullet taken from his body was compared to one taken from a bystander wounded by Sirhan while people were attempting to disarm him, and two forensic examiners agreed that the bullets came from different weapons. (A 1975 review board was not as confident as the earlier examiners, saying that the two-weapon theory was a possibility, not a certainty.)
Conspiracy buffs are quick to drag in the Mafia, since Kennedy had given a lot of grief to organized crime as attorney general. The previous month Jimmy Hoffa, serving time in a Pennsylvania federal prison, had been overheard discussing “a contract to kill Bob Kennedy.” There are tenuous links between the Mob and Sirhan (racetrack acquaintances) and the Ambassador Hotel (where racketeer Mickey Cohen had run a gambling operation in the 1940s) and Kennedy’s bodyguard Thane Eugene Cesar (vague “connections”), who was the only other armed person in the room.
Cesar carried a .38-caliber revolver, not a .22, which would seem to exonerate him. But several people reported seeing Cesar pull out a pistol and fire several times, supposedly at Sirhan, and no .38-caliber bullets were recovered from the scene. (Cesar did have a Harrington & Richardson nine-shot .22 pistol registered under his name, but he claimed to have sold it months before the assassination. Years later, a bill of sale surfaced dated September 1968, three months after the deed; police tried to track the pistol down, but it had been stolen.)
The odd resonances with RFK’s brother’s assassination can be taken two ways, of course. It could be that both men were murdered by a conspiracy involving organized crime. It could be that if you probe deeply enough into any murder that’s not a domestic affair, you’ll find oddities galore, including connections with criminals, some of them more or less organized.
Maybe our desire to see these assassinations as the work of large mysterious forces beyond our control is a way of denying the simple truth: in America, any nut case with the price of a gun obviously has a fair prospect of killing any public figure he dislikes.
That said, there are other strands of coincidence and malice to be added to the web that connects Martin Luther King, Robert F. Kennedy, and J. Edgar Hoover. It was Kennedy who authorized Hoover’s snooping on King, that led to the taped evidence of adultery being sent to his wife. But Kennedy was of course on King’s side politically, and it was Kennedy who chartered the plane that transported King’s family and his body from Memphis to Atlanta. In a eulogy for King, Kennedy had the weirdly prophetic line “No one can be certain who next will suffer from some senseless act of bloodshed.”
As noted earlier, James Earl Ray was apprehended in a theater-of-the-absurd confrontation with the customs people at London’s Heathrow—presenting two passports with different names; trying to smuggle a concealed weapon aboard a plane—but Hoover asked the British authorities to keep it quiet. He delayed the news of Ray’s apprehension for a day so that King’s widow would be told of it during her attendance at Kennedy’s funeral.
One day on the job
Spider bicycled through the morning darkness to the doughnut shop, peering intently at the pool of light thrown from a flashlight clipped to the handlebars. It had rained earlier and now the air was pleasantly heavy and cool. Crickets chirped back at his squeaking wheels. When he got to Route 1 he switched to the sidewalk, enduring the cracks and puddles rather than trust the night vision of truck drivers high on Benzedrine and coffee, trying to make New York before rush hour. Why didn’t they use the Beltway? Speed traps, he supposed.
He got to the shop a few minutes before three. (On the other coast, Robert Kennedy was taking a short-cut through the hotel kitchen.) The bright fluorescents inside flooded the small parking lot with a ghostly glare. There weren’t any customers. The guy behind the cash register was squinting at a thick textbook and taking notes on a spiral pad. While Spider locked up the bike, a rattletrap van pulled into the lot and parked next to him. It dieseled, the engine coughing and sputtering after the driver turned it off. Spider could hear him pump the accelerator, grumbling in some foreign language. The engine stopped with a minor explosion and his boss got out.
“Early, that’s good.” He shook Spider’s hand and ushered him into the shop. “Hey, Kerry, studyin’ on company time.”
Kerry looked up heavy-lidded. “So you want a doughnut?”
“Huh uh, You gotta stop bein’ a student and be a teacher.” The boss introduced them.
Kerry had been expecting him. “Yeah, that’s mainly why I’m going into grad school, stay out of Vietnam. Hope it’ll be over in a couple of years.”
“God knows. They stop fuckin’ around in Paris and get down to business.” Spider saw the boss wince. “Sorry. Watch my language.”
“Jus’ when customers around. You got the Fryolater up?”
“I’d give it a few more minutes,” Kerry said. “Thermometer’s be
en running low, I mean high. It’ll say the oil’s hot enough but they won’t brown up.”
“Well, show Spider the batter stuff. I gotta inventory and go down to the warehouse, shoulda done it yesterday.”
“We just have enough four-ex for one more batch, maybe two.”
“That’s what I figured; apples, too. Check everything out, I’ll be back by five.”
Kerry took Spider back to the Mixing Station. It was not too challenging for a person who was able to read; there was a fifteen-step recipe taped to the mixer head. It took about ten minutes for Spider to go through the process for vanilla. He carried the heavy steel mixing bowl to a sideboard and started over with an empty one for “fudge.” Kerry was a good mentor, supplying information when Spider needed it, but mainly letting him go through the steps on his own.
The doughnut gun was fun to learn, but Kerry guaranteed it would get old fast. You filled the cylinder up with batter and then fired it into the Fryolater’s tub of hot fat, firing close to the surface so the hot oil didn’t splash on you. One cylinder produced about twelve doughnuts. You refilled and emptied it fast and fried two dozen at a time. (Too many and the temperature of the oil would go down and make the doughnuts greasy. But you didn’t want to make too few, or you’d be standing by the Fryolater all morning.) The doughnuts floated. After they’d fried for a little less than two minutes, brown on one side, you turned them over with a long fork and let them go until that side was brown, maybe another minute. Then you threaded them onto a cooling rod and racked them, and started over.
The hot oil made Spider nervous. He had been badly burned as a kid, trying to help his mother fry chicken. The back of his right hand was slick with scar tissue from the accident. The napalm memory was there, too.
Kerry studied while Spider did five racks. Then he initiated him into the mysteries of powdered sugar, which was pretty obvious; honey-dipped, which used no honey and weren’t dipped; and the panoply of combinations possible with sprinkles, coconut shreds, and chopped nuts, combined with glazes of chocolate, cherry, hard sauce, and butterscotch. Spider ate three of his creations and thought they were great. Kerry went back to his books and ate half a ham sandwich.
Spider started the process over. They wanted to do all of the regular batter before they fried the fudge ones. His boss came back and approved of his new expertise, and manned the Fryolater while Spider and Kerry unloaded the van and stacked the boxes in the storage room.
This is how things happen. Spider was dragging, so he poured a cup of coffee to perk him up. He went to relieve his boss at the Fryolater. The boss finished turning the current batch and told Spider to give them a little extra time.
He studied the doughnuts turning lazily in the sizzling oil. He didn’t notice his boss go outside through the storage room and get into the van, parked right by the open window. When he tried to start the old thing, it backfired, one loud bark like a hand grenade. Spider’s whole body jerked in a spasm of hypervigilance, and the coffee cup sailed into the Fryolater. He just had time to throw up his hands to shield his face.
Spider staggered back from the explosion of boiling oil, knocking over a rack of doughnuts but staying upright himself, sagging back in agony against the wall. The left side of his face was badly burned: forehead, eyelid, cheek, and ear. But he didn’t notice. He was staring at his hands, watching angry blisters form on the palms and fingers and on his forearms halfway down to the elbows.
His boss did one good thing, calling the rescue squad, and one bad thing, smearing the burns with Crisco. Then he went outside to lean on the van and stare at the charcoal sky.
Spider wept, but not from pain. “Why me?” he asked Kerry, who was cradling his head and dabbing at his face with a paper towel wetted with ice water. “I go through all this fuckin’ shit and now this. Why me?”
The paramedics gave him morphine and, after they found the bottle in his pocket, a shot of Valium, He still cried out in agony when they got him back to the ER and cleaned the Crisco off and dressed his burns. They gave him more morphine and he fell asleep.
From his wallet they got his home phone number and called it. There was no answer. He wasn’t carrying any record of the place where he was currently living, of course; he hadn’t even given the address to his boss yet.
They found the purple ID that identified him as a disabled veteran, and called the Baltimore VA hospital to arrange for a bed in the burn unit. The clerk there noted that John Darcy Speidel had an appointment that morning in Psych. Could the wound have been self-inflicted? The medic said he didn’t know, but it seemed unlikely. There were a lot of more direct ways to hurt yourself.
He slept through most of the ambulance ride to Baltimore. When he woke up, the nurse who was riding with him gave him a pill. When he realized he couldn’t even hold a glass by himself, he began to cry again, and asked her the same question that Kerry couldn’t answer. Sobbing herself, partly for him and partly from the shocking news about Kennedy, she held him for a minute, carefully, and in her softness and sadness he quieted down.
SUMMER
Spider’s sex life (3)
For weeks the pain was always there, but it never came to the surface, smothered under layers of medication. Spider felt like he never slept and never quite woke up, either. He lay on a bed, naked except for a tee shirt and socks, with his palms taped permanently to his thighs. He was growing a new layer of skin on his hands, they told him; try to keep them still.
He couldn’t feed himself or wipe himself. He didn’t talk to anyone. He was in a corner bed, and the man in the bed next to him didn’t say anything; he just moaned and whimpered, his face a blistered molten ruin. Spider wondered what his own face looked like. They’d asked him whether he would rather let his beard grow out than have someone shave him, and he nodded. He could feel it on the pillow, scratchy at first, then more like hair.
Every few days a male orderly would unbutton the soft buttons along the side of his tee shirt and give him a sponge bath. It mortified him, because he always had an erection, but there was no way he could think it away! The orderly always worked around it without comment. Once, after a couple of weeks, an older female nurse gave him his bath, behind a screen, and with a whispered lame joke (“Don’t point that thing at me; it might go off”) helped him with three or four merciful strokes, and cleaned up afterward.
A world of hurt
The summer that followed Kennedy’s assassination was a season of anger all over the world, citizens’ protests answered with clubs and guns and cynical politics.
In Czechoslovakia, the promise of a “Prague Spring” of liberalization was crushed under the treads of Soviet tanks. The coalition of students and workers in France was beaten down by truncheons and tear gas. Students and police exchanged blows in Mexico, Japan, Yugoslavia, England, Spain, Germany, California.
In Miami, the Republicans selected their ticket, Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew, who would eventually become the only executive pair ever forced from office for criminal dishonesty. While the Republicans were celebrating with their noisemakers and confetti and balloons, Miami police were trying to contain a race riot downtown that had escalated from shouts to sniper fire.
Nixon was less worried about the Democrats than the American Independence Party’s George Wallace. His straightforward campaign—keep the niggers in their place, put the students in jail, untie the hands of the police, go in and win that goddamned war—was not going to siphon many votes from Hubert Humphrey, but it could dangerously split Nixon’s far-right bloc.
(By November, Wallace’s campaign—following the usual pattern of third-party politics in America—would weaken to where he only cost Nixon 14 percent of the popular vote, dropping “Tricky Dick” down to a 43-43-percent tie with “The Hump.” But Nixon would win handily in the Electoral College, with thirty-two states and the District of Columbia.)
Nixon may have taken a few votes from Humphrey with his claim that he had a “secret plan” to end the war in Vietn
am soon after he took office. The plan would still be secret when he left office in disgrace, six years later.
A week after the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia, the Democrats invaded Chicago. It was hostile territory for liberals.
After Kennedy’s death, Beverly had joined Lee in working for McCarthy. Their labors in the Los Angeles office were similar to what they had done for King in Washington—slipsheeting mimeos, stuffing envelopes, talking to strangers on the phone—but the spirit was completely different. In Washington the fuel had been rage. In Los Angeles it was righteousness, which burns with a paler flame. It didn’t help that a lot of workers felt there was no realistic chance of their winning the nomination, let alone the election, but you did have to do something.
At the end of August, a lot of the workers convoyed off to Chicago to show their support for Gene. Lee’s Thing was one of the few plain American cars in the group, which had a preponderance of Volkswagen bugs and buses, many with amateur paint jobs in floral motifs.
The trip was a lot of fun, eight carloads stopping together for lunch and camping out, Lee playing and singing protest songs, half of the people high on politics and half on other painkillers. Some version of the experience was duplicated thousands of times as the counterculture converged on Chicago. Chicago would be ready for them.
Beverly and Lee, planning to demonstrate with the National Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam, were on the sedate end of the counterculture’s political spectrum, closer to the mainstream than the Students for a Democratic Society and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (many of whose members were neither students nor pacifists). At the far ultraviolet end were splinter groups like the White Panthers and the West Side Motherfuckers, into violent anarchy.
The best-organized far-left group was the Youth International Party, the Yippies, led by Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. Rubin and Phil Ochs had scoured the Illinois countryside for the ugliest pig they could find; they named it Pigasus and offered it as the Yippie candidate.