William covered the true association by kissing Rosaline gently on her flushed brow. “My apothecary? ‘He who, with charms most strange and weeds too-pow’rful, human shapes did change!’ ”
“You know your Ovid well,” Rosaline replied, then quoted back at him, “ ‘O, give us way to slide into each other’s arms! If such a bliss transcend our Fates, yet suffer us to kiss.’ Hath your apothecary given you means to slide into me again?”
Shakespeare kissed her again, then rolled off of her onto the grass. “A kiss must serve for now. ’Twould be a powerful weed indeed, so soon to change my shape to suit your pleasure. Though I be in the full flower of manhood, even a flower must fold, suck light and water, and rest ere it bloom again.”
“Very pretty,” Rosaline replied, and lay back, using William’s breeches as a pillow. “Your love talk is like to gilding what is already gold.”
“Nay,” he said, running his finger along a wet streak that ran shimmering along Rosaline’s thigh, “ ’ tis more like to painting the lily white.”
“A dainty picture to paint,” said Rosaline as she pulled down her skirts, “with so large a brush.”
William opened his mouth to reply, but nothing came. He smiled and shrugged.
“It seems at last that a woman has topped me.”
She laughed and swung herself astride him.
“By repute many a woman has topped you. Or are you so Puritan as to not allow them so high a position?”
“No Puritan I,” he said, no longer laughing, and rolled out from under her. They lay silent for a moment.
“William,” said Rosaline suddenly, “I spoke not in jest when I said you should write. Even Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, extemporized though it was, shows Anthony Munday a bull’s pizzle. You have the greater wit.”
“But the less learning. I am too unschooled.”
Rosaline leaned upon one elbow. “The stage need not be for men of learning only. Any man or woman, lettered or no, may see a play for a penny. You are lettered in the language of men and women, and what they say and do, and also in the tongue of love. The playwright’s aim is to hold a mirror up to nature, is it not?”
“Mayhap, mayhap. But the road to London, to the theatre in Blackfriars, runs not straight from Stratford. One must first pay toll at Cambridge or Oxford.”
“And where is that writ? You give yourself too little shrift of your skill and craft. Be not afeared to use what tools you are given,” she said, grabbing playfully at William’s crotch and pulling him toward her, “and use them while you may.”
William was kissing her deeply when he heard a noise in the brush behind him, followed by a voice he knew.
“Ah, what an arse is here!”
William turned suddenly around to see Sir Thomas Lucy, on his horse.
“The naked arse, no less, of young William Shakespeare. Poaching deer in my park!”
William didn’t bother to stand or reverence now. But he did pull on his breeches, and tried to riposte with the best weapon he had.
“ ‘Poaching deer,’ is it?” William replied. “That’s a new one.”
“William,” whispered Rosaline urgently, but he was already caught out, and not inclined to give Lucy the smallest shred of satisfaction.
“ ‘Hunting beaver,’ I’ve heard,” William continued. “ ‘Laying in the short grass’ is to the point.”
“William!” Rosaline whispered, louder, as she twisted suddenly to look at something behind them. But William was focused on Sir Thomas.
“ ‘Ploughing the untilled field,’ befits the setting. ‘Plucking forbidden fruit,’ now that gets it across. But ‘poaching deer’ — ”
William heard a thundering crack as something blunt and heavy hit him in the back of the head. As he fell he turned, and as blackness took him he caught a glimpse of Henry Rogers standing over him, holding the hilts of his sword like a club.
Chapter Thirteen
Accuse me thus: that I have scanted all
Wherein I should your great deserts repay,
Forgot upon your dearest love to call,
Whereto all bonds do tie me day by day;
That I have frequent been with unknown minds
And given to time your own dear-purchas’d right
That I have hoisted sail to all the winds
Which should transport me farthest from your sight.
Book both my wilfulness and errors down
And on just proof surmise accumulate;
Bring me within the level of your frown,
But shoot not at me in your wakened hate.
— Sonnet 117
The library jitney exited the freeway near the Berkeley Marina, and rolled up University Avenue toward the west end of the UC campus. Dashka finally put down her book.
“So,” Willie asked. “What are you researching here?”
She shrugged, and shifted. “The War of the Roses. I’m working on my dissertation proposal.”
Willie took a second to do the math on this. “Shouldn’t it be approved already? I thought you’d already passed your exams.”
“I did. And it was approved. But I . . . ran into a bump or two. I’m reworking it.”
Willie jumped on this. “Aha, so you — ”
“I,” Dashka interrupted, clearly annoyed, “can still put the kibosh on your thesis — sexual favors or no.”
Willie wisely changed the subject. “I’m staying up here for the weekend,” he said as he put on his jacket and gathered up his backpack and the duffel. “So I won’t see you on the way back.”
Dashka looked at him without answering for a moment, seeming to consider. Then she put her book away in her black leather bag. “I’ll be here for the next couple of days, too.” She took out a pen and a small spiral notebook and scribbled. “My best friend from high school.” She tore out the note and handed it to him. “Give me a call if you want. Or drop by.”
Willie looked at it. It was an address in El Cerrito.
The van pulled into the circular drive at the top of University Avenue, and stopped under the giant oak that dominates Springer Gateway at the campus’s western entrance. The driver opened the passenger door. The mustachioed man stepped out, followed by the mousy girl. Willie let Dashka go ahead of him.
As Willie passed the driver, he said, “I completely agree about Reagan. Thanks for the ride.”
The driver grunted in response.
Willie emerged from the bus, and Dashka had turned back toward him and was puckering up to give him a peck on the cheek, when Willie saw Robin.
“Hey! Hi!” Willie said, and stepped forward, awkwardly ignoring Dashka and moving past her to hug a woman, his age, with wavy brown hair, a slightly crooked nose, not tall, but cute, with bright brown eyes.
She gave a short, comprehending look to Dashka. Then she gave a tight smile to Willie.
“Hi, honey. How was the trip?”
Part Two
POLITICS AND RELIGION
Chapter Fourteen
Madman, thou errest: I say, there is no darkness but ignorance, in which thou art more puzzled than the Egyptians in their fog.
— Clown, Twelfth Night, IV.ii.42
As he walked onto the campus where his father had worked Willie’s whole life, the drug raid in Santa Cruz seemed like the distant past. Today was Thursday, and he wouldn’t be able to complete his delivery to the Renaissance Faire until Saturday. He was grateful for the chance of a couple of days in Berkeley, his hometown, to collect his thoughts, to be himself.
“Thanks for meeting me,” Willie said to Robin as they walked under the redwoods and the giant eucalyptus grove along Strawberry Creek. Willie liked this part of the walk; the trees formed a pleasant, transitional buffer zone from Santa Cruz to Berkeley. “I thought I was surprising you.”
“You told me on Monday you were coming. I thought I’d surprise you.”
“I don’t remember telling you.”
“You were probably stoned.”
&nb
sp; They came out of the trees and under the shadow of the gigantic Life Sciences Building, PHYSIOLOGY and BACTERIOLOGY looming over them in towering neoclassical letters above a wide lawn. Willie felt a tug of pride as he passed the familiar Department of Dramatic Art, nestled in a small wood-shingle shack in a shady spot. Across a circular driveway, the marquee of Durham Studio Theater advertised DOGG’S HAMLET / CAHOOT’S MACBETH. They crossed the creek over a stone bridge, and a short flight of steps brought them up to the wide cement expanse of Lower Sproul Plaza, largely empty but for a few students, late to their nine o’clock classes, watched from on high by the statue of a Golden Bear. Robin stopped at a prominent bulletin board in front of the Bear’s Lair, the campus pub. The plywood was covered with notices of rooms to rent, bands playing clubs, political manifestos, plays opening.
Robin took a stack of flyers and a staple gun from her book bag. “Hold this,” she said, handing Willie the flyers as she took one, and with a confident ka-thwunk of the staple gun, pinned it to the board.
RALLY FRIDAY!!!!
TIMOTHY LEARY
Speaks out against Carlton Turner, Ronald Reagan, and the
Fascist Tactics of the DEA
12:00 Noon
Upper Sproul Plaza
BRING SIGNS! BE HEARD!!!
This announcement brought to you by the committee to
F$¢K REAGAN!
“Who’s Carlton Turner?” Willie asked.
Robin looked at him as if he were from another planet. “Reagan’s drug czar since nineteen eighty-two?”
Willie hadn’t followed politics, or much of anything, very closely during his years in Santa Cruz. “Right, right. And what’s he doing now?”
Robin gave Willie a withering look. “Burr-other. It’s true what they say about Santa Cruz, you really do have your head in the clouds. Have you heard of a little thing called the Anti-Drug Abuse Act?”
“Enlighten me.”
As she moved around Lower Sproul Plaza, handing out and pasting up flyers, Robin told Willie about the Act: new legislation just signed by President Reagan that required mandatory prison sentences for first-time drug users. The only out: finking on other drug users. “I can see it now,” she said. “Kids who get busted for crack turning in their parents because they have some hash in the underwear drawer.”
“Oh, come on, that’s not gonna happen,” Willie said defensively, but he again had a vision of Todd at a metal desk under a single bare lightbulb.
“And the worst part is, there’s a scale for the sentencing. Marijuana gets less jail time than crack. You know what that means?”
“More brothers in prison than suburban whites,” said Willie, but his mind was busy trying to guess where on the sentencing scale giant psilocybin mushrooms fell.
“Yes. It’s totally racist. Oh, and there was a vast budget increase for the Drug Enforcement Agency. They’re using copters, planes, who knows, probably spy satellites, too, all over California.” She looked at Willie seriously. “You and your friends should be careful.”
Willie unconsciously shifted the weight of the duffel bag on his shoulder.
Robin continued, “So . . . we’re going to try to take down Carlton Turner.”
“With Timothy Leary? Is he the most credible opposition you could find?”
“He’s more credible than Carlton Turner. In Berkeley at least. You know what Turner said last week? That marijuana — did you hear this? — marijuana causes both homosexuality and compromised immune systems . . . and therefore, the AIDS crisis.”
“No way.”
“That’s right,” Robin said, “according to Reagan’s top drug man, pot causes AIDS. Again . . . you should be careful.”
Willie was beginning to feel distinctly uncomfortable. “I have been experiencing unusual cravings for butt-love recently.”
“Leary’s nuts, but Carlton Turner is evil and nuts.”
“Maybe he’s not evil,” said Willie. “Maybe he’s just a repressed, gay, self-loathing, alcoholic Republican.”
Robin smiled cynically. “They always are.”
She had finished papering Lower Sproul, and they trotted up the steps to Upper Sproul Plaza. For Willie, any vestigial feeling of the quiet, misty forests of Santa Cruz faded. The plaza was a giant petri dish of political life. Faculty, staff, and students of every age and description bustled to and from classes.
A short, dark woman in fatigues hawked copies of The Daily Worker. “The Soviet Union will outlast America! Read why here!”
A long-haired, spiral-eyed Jesus freak with a megaphone read from Revelation:
“Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long will it be before you judge and avenge our blood on the inhabitants of the earth?”
He continued his rant as Robin and Willie passed, but his brimstone eyes bored in on Willie and screamed, “Sinner!”
Along the length of Sproul Plaza, leading toward Sather Gate, there were tables arrayed end to end in the shade of two lines of pollarded trees. There were tables for undergrad collegiate pursuits: the French Club, the Geography Club, the Chess Club, and the Latin Club. There were tables for ethnic associations, staffed by lonely, long-faced students offering support for other lonely, long-faced students from Japan, the Philippines, Taiwan, Africa, Palestine — the latter being the longest faces of all. There were also tables for Jews for Jesus, Buddhists for Jesus, and Christians for Buddha. The Democratic Party, the Communist Party, and the Green Party were there. PETA, YMCA, NOW, and the ACLU were all represented. There were tables for support groups for the transsexual, the transgendered, and the transcendent. There were tables hawking hawkishness, and tables hawking dovishness. Right to Life, Right to Death, Death to Gay Rights, they were all here. And there were actually people checking out the tables, too, picking up flyers, signing petitions, and talking earnestly to the earnest kids sitting behind them.
Only one table was entirely forlorn, a single, melancholy, well-dressed, clean-shaven young man sitting behind it: this was the Berkeley outpost of the Log Cabin Republicans. The Gay Old Party was not a big demographic in Berkeley.
And there were the crazy people. William the Polka-Dot Man lay in front of Sather Gate at the campus’s nineteenth-century entrance, wearing a white jumpsuit covered with large red dots and controlling the silent machinery that prevented the Apocalypse. The Piano Man (not, thankfully, Billy Joel) played standards on a piano that appeared on Sproul each morning from who knows where? The Bubble Lady blew soap bubbles from a small green container and sold copies of her quite good books of poetry. The Hate Man said clearly and viciously to Robin and Willie as they passed, “I hate you,” as he did to everyone, all day, every day. Then there was the man who wandered around the plaza muttering nonstop in some sort of high-level mathematical language, but who — either by choice or by curious lack of the self-promotional abilities possessed of the other Berkeley madmen- and madwomen-savants — had no snappy moniker: he was just Serge. Willie listened for a couple of seconds as he passed: “The imaginary number square root of negative one times Planck’s constant divided by two pi . . .” Rumor had it that he was a former physics professor who took too much acid.
And then there were the performers. A solo guitarist played classical versions of Beatles songs. There was Stoney Burke, crazy or crazy like a fox, ranting a political comedy diatribe to a small audience. A juggler juggled a chain saw, a bowling ball, and an egg while his partner lay beneath him protecting his crotch to much laughter.
Robin was sticking a flyer to the side of the Piano Man’s piano (by his silent, nodded permission) when Willie heard someone saying, “But soft, what wind through yonder lighter breaks?” Willie turned to the sound, and saw that on the steps of Sproul Hall, the very steps from which Mario Savio ignited the free speech movement in 1964, there were two young men, one freakishly tall, wearing tights, puffy shirts, and high-top sneakers, performing Romeo and Juliet to a craning crowd of two or three dozen students. He nudged Robin. “I’m gonna go check these g
uys out.”
Robin nodded, uninterested. “Okay.”
As he approached, Willie saw that the two men were actually three. One, wearing a bad wig and a dress, sat atop the shoulders of the third, whose head was cloistered under “her” skirt. “O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo? . . . Romeo?” The handsome, bearded Romeo was busy hitting on a hot girl in the front row. “Up here, Romeo,” said Juliet, then screaming with sudden hysteria, “on the balcony, you fucking moron!”
The crowd laughed.
“Dude,” responded Romeo (after handing the cute girl his card), “you can’t say ‘fuck.’ This is a facility of higher learning.”
“No, it isn’t, this is Berkeley.” Another laugh. “I can say whatever I want to,” Juliet continued. “The free speech movement started right here on these steps. Joan Baez sang here!”
“Joan Baez sucks!” said Romeo.
“Fuck you, Romeo,” said Juliet.
The crowd, which had already doubled since Willie arrived, laughed uproariously. They were eating it up.
“Would you please say your next line!?” said Romeo.
Juliet crossed her arms petulantly. “I’m exercising my freedom of speech by not saying it.”
“Just say it,” Romeo pleaded.
A line from the scene suddenly popped into Willie’s head. He couldn’t resist, and called out, “O gentle Romeo, if thou dost love, pronounce it faithfully!”
The performers stopped, and turned to stare Willie down. The guy playing Romeo said, “Oh great, now we got a Shakespeare wannabe in the crowd.” Laughter. Romeo continued to cut Willie, the heckler, down to size. “That’s totally not the next line. You just skipped the whole balcony scene, genius.”
From under Juliet’s dress came the heavily muffled sound of the poor third actor. It sounded something like “That’s fine with me!”
The crowd roared.
Juliet wiggled on his shoulders. “Quit it!” she said to the man under her dress. “Your beard scratches when you talk!”
The crowd roared again.
“Okay, Shakespeare,” said Romeo to Willie, “give me the cue one more time.”
My Name Is Will Page 10