by Joe Haldeman
The Yippies got a disproportionate amount of media coverage, especially television, since political conventions are basically boring and repetitive. The reportage had to be santized, though, with a “Look at what these crazy kids are up to now!” slant, because most of what the Yippies did and said was not suitable for the six o’clock news or family magazines. For instance, they circulated a leaflet demanding that the city of Chicago set up free medical clinics, to prevent a plague of VD—otherwise “We will fuck the police and their horses! NOTHING will be SAFE from STREET FREAK GERM WARFARE if the city does not allow us to disarm ourselves!”
The L.A. contingent had heard about a Yippie gathering in Lincoln Park the Sunday they arrived, August 25th. It was a good place to relax after the long drive. A couple of thousand young people, rock music, dope, street theater. There was a nervous edge to the festivities, but the expected trouble with Mayor Daley’s police didn’t materialize. After sundown, the more affluent went out into the suburbs to find motel rooms. Lee and Beverly found a quiet side street and slept in the Thing.
They were not sure where to head after the convention. Beverly sort of wanted to go back to Maryland and resume college, and maybe get in touch with her mother, but she liked California, too. Lee was bummed out over what the Haight had become and never had liked L.A. much. If by some miracle McCarthy won the nomination, he wanted to go back to the Washington area, to be where the action was. They wound up deciding not to make a decision just yet.
They wandered around the park the next day. Beverly found a couple she’d known at the university, who had brought along a hibachi grill. They pigged out on cheap hot dogs and then followed the crowd, several thousand, to the Chicago Coliseum for music and speeches. Dick Gregory and Phil Ochs entertained the troops, and the air was thick with antiestablishment solidarity.
Things started to unravel Tuesday night. The city ordered everyone out of the park. In response, the various groups organized a sit-in vigil, people wearing black armbands and singing hymns.
Plainclothes police surrounded the park. The uniformed cops took off their badges and nameplates. Around twelve-thirty, they struck, first raining tear gas and Mace on the crowd, and then wading in with nightsticks. To Beverly and Lee it looked like a hopeless situation; they managed to slip out unharmed except for eye and nose irritation from the gas. On their way back to the Thing they stopped and watched a convoy of National Guard trucks roar toward the park.
They talked about leaving, but both of them were more angry than scared. The morning news said that Mayor Daley had given the Mobilization a permit to assemble at Grant Park. They decided to stay at least for that, since that was one reason they’d come: to assemble and march ten thousand strong to the Democratic Convention Amphitheatre. Confront the delegates with the fact that most of the people they represented wanted the United States out of the war.
The permit was to assemble, though; not to march. By dusk, nearly fifteen thousand people had poured into the park. The police tried to cordon them off. They broke through the police line and surged downtown.
Lee and Beverly went with the crowd. For the first half-hour it was fairly peaceful, if not exactly orderly. But as they approached the Conrad Hilton Hotel, where the delegates were staying, the police attacked with a sudden ferocity that made Tuesday’s harassment look like a mild dress rehearsal.
Norman Mailer, watching from a hotel balcony, later said: “Lines of twenty and thirty policemen striking out in an arc … attacked [the crowd] like a chain saw cutting into wood.” Lee and Beverly saw clouds of tear gas and Mace coming toward them. They tied bandannas soaked with Coke over mouth and nose. People were running in every direction, screaming, as anonymous police worked through the crowd swinging their clubs at random.
Lee was holding Beverly’s hand, both of them trying to stay upright in the stampede, when she received one of those impersonal blows. Neither of them saw it coming. She was struck from behind, whacked on the crown, and fell forward onto her hands and knees, blood streaming. Lee went to help her and someone kicked him in the ribs. As he fell down, a big cop grabbed one foot and held his legs apart, laughing, while his partner beat him three times hard in the groin with a nightstick. He stayed conscious just long enough to crawl over to Beverly and curl protectively around her.
The rescue squad people who cleaned up after the police gave Beverly twelve stitches. There wasn’t much they could do for Lee other than cold compresses and reassurance. His scrotum was bruised and bleeding and swollen to twice normal size; he was in so much pain he could only grunt in monosyllables. They would later find out that he had two fractured ribs as well.
The police had destroyed every camera they saw, but they didn’t get all of them. The riot was on prime-time news Wednesday night, before the tear gas had even dissipated. Walter Cronkite, whom a poll had named “the Most Trusted Man in America,” told viewers, “I want to pack my bags and get out of this city.”
That’s exactly what Lee and Beverly did, she steering the big car out to the interstate while he lay curled up in the back, washing painkillers down with beer. As soon as they were out of the city, she exited onto a random country road, pulled over onto the shoulder and had some pills and beer herself. They spent the next ten hours in drugged sleep and then woke up and pointed the Thing From Detroit toward the rising sun.
Healing
Spider watched the Chicago police riots on television with some interest, but the big thing in his life was that he was going to be released from the hospital. The skin grafts had been successfully completed weeks before, but his arms and hands were weak from the long period of immobility. He spent most of his day either doing physical therapy or recovering from it.
They found out he played the guitar and got him one from the Red Cross. It was especially good exercise for his left hand, which didn’t get as much casual use as his right.
There was a beautiful well-shaded lawn in front of the hospital, and when the weather was nice he would sit on a park bench there and play, practicing songs out of the hospital’s Joan Baez and Bob Dylan songbooks.
(Once he’d worn a straw hat outside to keep the sun off his head, then took it off when clouds came up. A passerby threw a quarter into it as he sat there playing. Amused, he moved it to the grass at his feet, and after a couple of hours had collected $1.87—a new career!)
The world didn’t look too bad. He’d given up smoking, rather than ask people to sit and hold a cigarette for him, and he felt a lot better for losing the chronic cough and sinus problems. He was still taking Valium, but only two thirds of his prescription (he palmed the morning pills and sold them to a more strung-out patient). He was in some pain most of the time, but it was a healing pain, tolerable.
He was apprehensive about going home. The VA had notified his parents as to what had happened to him and where he was, but there had been no response. He’d called home daily since his hands had been free, but never got an answer.
FALL
Homecoming (3)
The VA released Spider on 14 September and put him on a dawn bus to Washington. All he had were the clothes he’d been wearing when he reported for work at the doughnut shop, a hospital ditty bag, and a couple of beat-up books from the Red Cross box. He was fairly flush, though, with $216.76, and another VA check due in two weeks.
At the Washington terminal he called home and listened to it ring twenty times. The ticket lady gave him directions and he caught a city bus to the District Line (that would have been the number 9 streetcar when he was a kid; they were all gone now). He was tempted to walk the five miles home, to put off facing whatever was there, but he took a cab.
The ride was reassuring. Bethesda was unchanged. It felt like he’d been hospitalized a long time, but it had only been a couple of months. Maybe there was something wrong with the phone, or he had the number wrong.
He paid off the cab and got out to stare at a FOR SALE sign. The grass had been cut but half of it was brown patches, and th
e flowers that used to border the house were all dead.
There was no car in the driveway. He peered into the garage and it was empty—not only was his mother’s car gone, but so was all the years of crap that should have been piled on the shelves all around. He peered into the living room and there was no furniture, just fresh paint and new carpeting. He tried his key in the front door and it just got stuck.
“What the hell do you think you’re doin’?” Spider turned around. One of the neighbors—Mr. Menzel Manville?—was standing there with a baseball bat.
“It’s me, Spider.” The man took a step toward him and Spider cringed back. “John. John Darcy.”
“Good God, boy.” He peered at him “You look like hell.”
“I was in an accident at work. Been in the hospital.”
“Didn’t know you was back from Vit-nam.” He gestured with the baseball bat: the lawn, the house. “What happened with your folks?”
“I was gonna ask you. What is this?”
“I don’t have the faintest. You know your dad was gone for a while. Then he come back two days, Mrs. Marvell says, or at least his car’s back. Then he goes away again and about a month later your mom goes away, too. Then a coupla weeks ago this movin’ crew comes in and cleans the place out and they paint it inside and mow the lawn—I mean it was a foot high—and put up the FOR SALE sign.”
Spider shook his head. “Jesus.”
“You got any relatives could tell you something?”
“One aunt. Tried to get her from the hospital. She’s got an unlisted number, though, and the phone company wouldn’t give it to me.”
“I was you, I’d call this real estate company on the sign. You can use our phone.”
Spider wrote the number down on the back page of War With the Rull and went inside the Marvells’ home. It was oppressively neat, doilies on top of plastic on the arms of furniture.
The real estate lady said the owner of record was the Bank of Bethesda, and gave him a number. The woman at the bank said they couldn’t give him any information unless he showed up in person, with identification.
“Maybe you better shave and dress up before you go to some bank,” Mr. Marvell suggested.
“Yeah, maybe.” Spider wasn’t going to shave. He didn’t want to know what his face looked like. “My stuff’s all over in Riverside. Mind if I call a cab?”
The cab took about ten minutes, while Spider and Mr. Marvell engaged in excruciating conversation on the front porch. He directed the cab to the doughnut shop, since he didn’t remember the Remingtons’ address.
The shop had a new paint job, an awful shade of pink, and a new neon sigh. Inside, it had a new owner. He was Indian or Pakistani, friendly and earnest but without much English. Spider was able to make out his explanation that the previous owner had retired to California and “Would like old job back, please? Boys we need two.” No, thanks. He’d had a lifetime’s worth of doughnut shop experience in one night.
The Remingtons’ bicycle was still locked up where he’d left it, but both bike and lock were rusted solid. He walked the few blocks to their house. His car wasn’t parked outside.
Mr. Remington talked to him without opening the door for a minute, unconvinced that he was who he said he was. Finally, Spider held his driver’s license up to the peephole.
He opened the door a foot. “We thought you’d took the bike and gone. Kids do things like that.”
“Like I say, I had an accident at work. I didn’t have any way to get in touch with you.”
“Well, that ain’t my fault. What about the damn bike?”
“It’s still down at the doughnut shop. I would’ve brought it up, but the lock’s rusted shut.”
“Hmm. Figured you were gone for good.”
“That’s okay. Can I just get my stuff? My car?”
“Cleaned out the room when we got a new tenant. Down to the Goodwill. Police took your car away.”
“You gave away all of my things?”
“We ain’t no storage company. You go down to the Goodwill, it’s likely mostly there.”
“But the car, my car … it wasn’t illegally parked.”
“Couldn’t have it clutterin’ up the curb. New tenant, he had a car, too. You go down to the Riverside police station and they’ll have it there.” His brow furrowed. “One thing we still got is that guitar. Mrs. Remington kept it for her grandson, but he didn’t want it. Said it was a piece of junk.”
Spider knew that. “Could I have it back, anyhow?”
“I don’t know. You want the room?”
“I thought you had a tenant.”
“Didn’t work out. Foulmouth kid.”
“Look, that guitar’s mine. Could I please have it back?”
“Don’t you raise your voice at me, young man.” He walked away. After a couple of minutes he came back, but with a hacksaw rather than a guitar. “Now you bring back that bicycle. Then we’ll see about the guitar.” Spider took the saw and the man shut the door.
He went about a block and threw the saw behind a hedge. Then he headed for the police station.
Spider would never find out what had happened to his parents. His father had one last drunken confrontation with his mother and then left, picked up his Baltimore girlfriend, and went out west to “make a new start.” That lasted less than a year. She testified against him and he wound up in a Phoenix prison, doing time for assault and battery and assault with a deadly weapon, a tire iron.
His mother grew increasingly depressed and ineffectual. Her sister stopped having anything to do with her, and on impulse she drove up to New Hampshire, where she had a half sister from her father’s first marriage. The older woman, recently widowed, took her in, but they weren’t good for each other, both alcoholic and depressed. She stopped making sense and her half sister had her committed, and then sort of forgot about her, and then died.
Spider didn’t know the half sister existed; he didn’t even know his grandfather had been married twice, a dark family secret.
The police didn’t give Spider any trouble about his car. They even offered him a lift out to the private lot in College Park where it was impounded, pending auction. He had to pay the lot $58 for towing and storage, but they did help him jump-start the car.
He gassed up with the engine still running and took it out to the Beltway for a half hour of highspeed aimlessness, just charging the battery and moving. Then he drove back to Riverside and parked it on a hill overlooking the Goodwill store.
The lady there was apologetic that she couldn’t just give him his things back, under the circumstances. She did let him have anything he was sure was his for half price. He found the suitcase with his name on it and a few changes of clothes, including a set of fatigues left over from Basic Training, and almost all of his books except for the science fiction. The microscope was long gone; she remembered it selling the same day it came in.
The whole thing came to $28, but she only took twenty. She said she would pray for him and things would get better if he would only try to look on the good side. He thanked her and lugged the suitcase and box of books up to the car. When he opened the trunk a very skinny rat jumped out.
The car started okay. He drove downtown to Ninth Street and got lunch from a hotdog stand, then wandered from pawn shop to pawn shop for a couple of hours, looking at guitars and trying them out. He finally settled on an old Fhole Silvertone, mainly because the guy behind the counter was a fellow Vietnam vet. They saw each other’s brass bracelets and traded a few tales, and he offered to knock twenty bucks off the $60 price tag.
Spider drove back toward Maryland and stopped at a bar that looked halfway clean, and took the suitcase in. He ordered a beer and went into the john to change clothes. School clothes with a sport coat; that should be good enough for talking with a bank clerk. He combed his hair and briefly considered shaving. No. With the beard he just looked sort of like a student, hair not long enough for a hippy. The beard would be less conspicuous than th
e scars.
He drank the beer standing up and bought a roll of breath mints from the bartender. Three o’clock; better move along.
He sucked on the mints as he drove slowly down Wisconsin Avenue. He didn’t really want to talk to the woman at the bank. What could she tell him that was good news? Sorry, it was all a mistake, your mom and dad are vacationing in Florida, it was somebody else’s house we were supposed to gut and paint and put on the market. I’ll just open the vault here and let you take all you want, okay? Feel better?
Florida. That’s where Killer was from. They were going to meet in Tampa and go down to the Everglades and hunt alligators. You could make a lot of money and it would be a damn sight easier than humpin’ the boonies.
He parked on the street a block from the bank and checked the name he had written in The War With the Rull. Mrs. Daintith. A woman with an extra tit, right in the middle of her name. His hands were shaking.
The bank was all marble and dark wood and brass. High heels clicking and echoing, the smell of expensive cigars.
He found Mrs. Daintith’s cubicle: Mortgages. She was a fairly young woman, attractive, trying to look neither. No makeup except lipstick, small square eyeglasses, ash-blond hair pulled back in a bun, dark blue dress with high neck and long sleeves. Spider tapped on the wood and she looked up over the rims of her glasses. “May I help you?”
“I’m John Speidel. I called you this morning about my house, my parents—”
“Yes. Please sit down.” Spider perched on the hard wooden chair and she flipped through the manila folders on her desktop. “Here, Speidel. You have identification?”
Spider fumbled with his wallet and handed over his driver’s license. She studied it and looked at him and then looked at the picture again.
“I was sixteen then; I look a lot—”