by Mark Merlis
If I work hard and paint lots of vegetables I can be hung in a pay-to-exhibit art show and sit here on my very own camp stool. Sit in the autumn sun and ruminate about how I never did anything I meant to.
May 6, 197O
The undergraduates are on strike. Take that, Richard Nixon! The School for Liberal Studies, the very home base of the effete corps of impudent snobs, is closed for business! We will defy the fascists by making our timid professors cancel all the classes that our parents, optimistic and bewildered dentists and accountants, paid for!
I am being too hard on them. The world seems crazy these last few days: the war spreading into Cambodia, students gunned down by the National Guard (that is, working-class kids shooting middle-class kids, a grim parody of the proletarian uprising). I can see why the students felt they had to do something. But they could have done something actual: shut down a Selective Service office, freed the youngest kids at Rikers Island, something. Of course then they would have been arrested, maybe done time, maybe lost their student deferments from the draft. So much safer just to racket around the halls of SLS, confident that no one will call the cops.
All they’ve accomplished so far is to scare the daylights out of some of the older faculty--German and Austrian refugees with sharp and unhappy memories of civil disorder. The kids have camped out in some offices and managed to ignite-probably inadvertently--the contents of Ignaz Gruenthal’s file cabinet. Luckily it turns out that Ignaz does his real work at home and the papers in his cabinet were mostly the last five years of the Times crossword. All neatly solved and retained--why? My own office they’ve left alone, probably because it’s too far from the vending machines.
This afternoon a student appeared at my office doorway and said, “You’re Jonathan Ascher?” I would have snidely directed his attention to the plaque next to the door, except that my own attention was captured by the way his body filled his T-shirt. (“Nixon Pull Out Like Your Father Should Have.”) Muscles are not a common sight at SLS. I wonder how this boy escaped my notice; maybe I should start teaching undergraduates again.
He said there’s a meeting tomorrow morning in the Lubitz Auditorium and wondered if I wanted to speak. I asked who else they’d invited. He chuckled--sensing, I guess, the vanity behind this question. “Just you,” he said. I shouldn’t be so flattered. But maybe a few of the students have read JD, or at least the dust jacket. Or maybe they’ve just heard I used to be on television.
“I’ll think about it,” I said. “If I show up, I show up.”
“Cool.”
I think maybe I will. And I think maybe they will regret having asked me.
I remember this—and remember being surprised that Jonathan even had to think about it. He had taken to the spotlight; he would happily have delivered a lecture to a platter of smoked fish. But there was something that didn’t click between Jonathan and the kids of those years. Perhaps because, his TV stardom notwithstanding, he was last year’s brand by then, not quite what they wanted. As they were not quite what he wanted.
When the flower children first appeared, popping up like sudden blooms on MacDougal Street or in Washington Square, Jonathan was entranced. Especially by the boys, of course: he said they looked to him like figures from a Caravaggio, those mirthful youths who hovered between hooligan and angel. They just looked lost to me, those unwashed seraphs, and even more lost the drug-addled baby girls who hung around with them and whom they treated with un-flowery contempt.
It was a year or two before hippies stopped being colorful street accessories and descended on the SLS in the form of long-haired freshmen from Massapequa and South Orange. In their dorm rooms they had Che Guevara posters and costly stereo systems and hookahs. These kids, too, Jonathan welcomed at first. What a happy contrast to the previous generation of SLS students, who wore corduroy jackets and horn-rimmed glasses, and who tried to smoke pipes while they prattled nasally about C. Wright Mills!
Jonathan’s enchantment wore off soon enough. First he discovered that his little Mannerist princes didn’t read anything except pornographic comic books and maybe that old charlatan Hermann Hesse. Then—I am guessing—he discovered that they wouldn’t put out. Last he found out that they had no politics. Slogans, things they wanted to tear down, but nowhere they wanted to get to.
So Jonathan was encouraged, that spring of 1970, that the shutdown was about the Cambodian incursion and the shootings at Kent State, instead of something like No! More! Foreign! Language! Requirement! I assumed that was why he agreed to speak at the meeting, and I tagged along just to see what the children were up to.
I can picture the Lubitz Auditorium clearly enough, after being dragged to so many lectures there—or dutifully dragging myself, during one of my cultural enrichment spells, to endless recitals of twelve-tone music. It was an ovoid room walled with even slats of costly third-world hardwoods, interrupted here and there by strange rhomboid projections that were meant to improve the acoustics. They did not: the voices of the speakers at the front of the room that morning were lost in the general hubbub. Half the kids weren’t even facing the podium, the room had a dozen or more little huddles, cells, clots of students arguing passionately about—what? Whether they ought to be focusing on the war or on the Black Panther trials in New Haven. Whether everybody should just go back home to New Jersey or stay here and have seminars on Frantz Fanon. Whether—
All so young: less a political meeting than the junior prom if the chaperones left. I think the only grown-ups were Jonathan and I, hovering at the edge of the room. Jonathan was looking around for whoever it was that invited him; his lips tightened the way they did when he was about to insist that we leave a party I was enjoying.
At last a tall boy with the neck of a wrestler arrived at the podium and, amazingly, the room grew silent, everyone turned to him. This must have been the boy Jonathan wrote about: he had shoulder-length hair and a sparse beard, wore the same raggedy jeans and faded shirt as all the other kids, but the uniform seemed different on him. If the other students were mock-proletarians, he was like a banker who wears an out-at-the-elbows jacket at his country place.
“Hey guys,” he began, languidly. “We’re going to try to get our act together now.” I think maybe that was the first time I ever heard that phrase; I was a little confused by it, the apparent confession that what was going on was a performance.
I picture him so clearly, that boy. I remember thinking: he should be hanging out at the Deke house in New Haven, not calling to order a room full of anarchic Jewish kids. Of course, they were on strike at Yale, too, that week. Even at Smith—going to their rallies and then coming back for afternoon tea with the housemother.
I remember thinking: I wish Mickey were like this boy.
No, nothing so definite. Even near the end, when Mickey had turned into the pallid, shaky creature whom the army gathered up and carted away like a refuse collector picking up an empty bottle: even near the end I never wanted him to be anyone but Mickey. And that day in 1970 I didn’t see the end. Mickey was a senior in high school, no longer the toddler I once adored but still quite Mickey-like.
More and more, over the next couple of years, I would look at some other woman’s boy and feel a twinge of something. Nothing definite, I couldn’t even form a thought because a reflexive wave of guilt would make me turn away at once, focus on anything else. Before the little dark cloud in my head could shape itself into some articulate treason: he’s better than Mickey, he’s happier than Mickey, handsomer, smarter. Or into some fatuity: my, his mother must be proud!
If I recall that blond boy so clearly, perhaps it is because he was the first to raise that little cloud in me, the tiny nip of remorse I dared not examine. Or maybe I thought for the first time that day, only a couple of years prematurely: he is alive and Mickey is not. Because I already felt, I think, even that early—Mickey was broken somehow, Jonathan and I had already broken him. The way Mickey would sometimes break one of his gifts before we even got to the Chr
istmas breakfast table. And I would be stern, even on Christmas: you broke it, you’re not getting another.
The blond boy said, “We have … uh … Professor Ascher to say a couple words.” Jonathan didn’t move; of course he was expecting some recitation of his achievements, some expression of gratitude for his appearing without compensation. After a moment, the boy nodded impatiently; that was all the introduction Jonathan was going to get.
Jonathan strolled to the podium. It had become, those last few years, his natural habitat. Standing before an auditorium packed with students, scolding, at a set fee of $2,000 per scold. Plus airfare. He smiled: the patient smile he used to bestow on me when he was getting ready to tell me how the world worked.
“How many of you guys were at Woodstock?” he said. A scattering of raised hands; by now, thirty years later, everyone who was in that room must half remember having been at Woodstock. “Woodstock was really Bethel, I guess you all know that. And the electricity in Bethel, New York, comes from this company—I looked it up—the Central Hudson Gas & Electric Company.” He looked around, seeing I guess many puzzled faces. Probably not an unfamiliar sight for Jonathan.
He sighed, the way he did when he had to spell out the obvious. “The amplifiers at Woodstock were powered by the Central Hudson Gas & Electric Company. And I have had a chance, during these days of leisure that your little manifestation has afforded me, I’ve had a chance to learn a few things about the Central Hudson Gas & Electric Company. They make electricity using something called steam turbines, however those work. These turbines get hot, and the way they cool them off is with water from the Hudson. The beautiful Hudson, the majestic Hudson that greeted those Dutch sailors’ eyes and that was commensurate with their capacity for wonder.”
Some of the kids were just staring at him now, with their mouths open. Also perhaps not an unfamiliar vista for Jonathan. “This company draws a couple hundred million gallons of cold water out of the Hudson, boiling thousands and thousands of fish every day in a monstrous coal-fired bouillabaisse, a piscine holocaust. And then it pours the filthy boiling water back into the Hudson to kill some more. And every time that wild-haired lady, Janis something, with the—what’s it called? how apt: the Holding Company—every time she bellowed into the microphone, fishes died, and every time that guy with the round Zulu-y hair made his guitar scream, fishes died and the Hudson died some more, dying every day.”
Oh, of course. How could I not have seen where this was going? I must have heard some version of this lecture a thousand times. If he came along to the grocery store he would stop me from buying a can of coffee because cash crops were destroying the—what did we call them then?—the underdeveloped nations, a phrase that conjured up a picture of ninety-eight-pound weaklings in grass shacks. Jonathan would look for the union label on underwear and forget to check for his size. Finally it was agreed that I would be the one who would go out into the world and secure the essentials of life and bear the sin of complicity, complicity, complicity with the machine. Leaving Jonathan free to sit in the apartment, drinking coffee in his underwear and reading the sports pages of the Times.
So he had come just to deliver this spiel to a new audience. Having heard it, I tuned out and looked around at the kids—very well, looked at the blond ringleader, who was stroking his faint aspirational beard and staring down at the floor. I’m not sure how long Jonathan rambled on about steam turbines, but suddenly he was shouting. The blond boy and I turned back to him, startled.
“When you break a rule, you just break that rule. If a demonstrator stops traffic he has only stopped traffic, he might as well be a fucking jaywalker. If you close down this school, you’ve just wasted your own tuition.” He cackled: “Fact, I got news for you. I got my paycheck yesterday, all you’ve done the last week is give me a paid holiday.”
There was a little indistinct mumbling from the crowd.
“If you play your cards right, you can drag this show out straight through to June, and then you’ll all go home, no examinations, everybody passes. A terrific start on your unexamined lives. And when you’re home this summer, by the pool or working in your father’s haberdashery, other kids who are no worse than you are, decent kids whose daddies couldn’t send them to the nice college you’re trying to tear down, those kids will still be dropping bombs on hapless little yellow people who don’t even know why the planes keep coming.
“Your little shindig won’t have done a damn thing to stop those planes. And really: when the fire rains down from the sky, the people on the ground won’t know that you’re not in the cockpit. Maybe you are.”
A little more backtalk now, but still nothing clear or articulate. The noise the extras in a crowd scene used to make: rhubarb, rhubarb.
You could still hear Jonathan. He wasn’t shouting anymore, but he still had the mike. He wasn’t shouting but doing what those who knew him understood to be even louder than a shout: scratching his head as he spoke.
“As you know, the anarchists—well, no, you don’t know the anarchists, you don’t know much—there were these guys called anarchists, they had beards and names you can’t spell and they threw bombs like bowling balls with fuses. You picture these guys now, from some cartoon? The anarchists fought all the time over whether they should pursue Propaganda of the Word or Propaganda of the Deed. The Deed being those lit bowling balls, or a potshot at the tsar or the empress of Austria or the president.
“Of course, the Deed never changed anything, mostly just made things worse. Oh, but that was changing something. It was the Word, the Word that never changed anything. All the broadsides, all the speeches, all the books. Books, books, books! All of them together not equal to one pellet of lead in the guts of William McKinley at the Buffalo Exposition.
“You will keep babbling until the finals can’t be delayed any longer and we just send you home. Then you’ll come back in the fall. You will finish out your student deferments, escape slaughter by some byway or other, and ten years from now you will be on Madison Avenue devising slogans for toilet paper, or the brightest of you will be at the RAND Corporation plotting the moves and countermoves of Armageddon. This will all be a little episode. You’ll chuckle at it when you’re fat and old, the way people my age chuckle at flagpole sitting and the Lindy Hop.”
The booing began in one corner of the room—pie slice, rather, in that oval. Literal boos. Self-parodying, like the boos the audience at a dinner-theater melodrama is encouraged to hurl at the villain. That’s how it started, kids having fun and going boo. But as it spread through the room, punctuated with asshole and motherfucker, the boo became very serious indeed. While some kids were still just happily hooting, others’ faces were contorted with genuine rage. Jonathan was the enemy. Not just, like other adults, somewhere along the spectrum between beatified youth and pig cop. But all the way at the end, past the cops even, the embodiment of everything the kids were fighting against.
Which was—what, finally?
We’re fond of saying that it was all a game, or a passing tantrum. This baby-boom generation—as if my sisters and I had had little explosions in our tummies!—this generation that settled down so quickly to buying mutual funds and driving sport-utility vehicles, they mustn’t have meant any of it. But that isn’t so: I suppose they’ve never stopped wishing for a world of justice and love, if those two are not incompatible. They just realized, at varying speeds, that they weren’t going to make that world, that they were too enmeshed.
Not that the forces ranged against them were too powerful, or even that they were too much like their enemy, but there was too much they were unable to give up. Hooked, as they were supposed to be, as the whole system had engineered them to be, on the material, the denims and record albums and VW Beetles that could be supplied only by the machine they were trying to break. They learned that idylls and the simple life and communing with nature were for the rich; the poor lived much more complicated lives, in unheated rooms that opened onto hallways strewn with used s
yringes.
So it was as if Jonathan were a fortune-teller, reading in their collective palm the future of self-betrayal and exhausted surrender that lay before them. It’s a wonder they didn’t kill him.
May 9, 197O
After I left the meeting the other day--as I predicted, making them regret having invited me--they apparently decided that the thing to do was march on Wall Street. So yesterday morning a bunch of SLS kids went down, along with students from other colleges and even some high school kids (not including Mickey, who has no politics I can discern). They wound up on the steps at Federal Hall, chanting the usual stuff about ending the war and freeing political prisoners.
Then a bunch of union construction workers, wearing hard hats and carrying American flags, descended on the kids and started beating them up. The police just stood by or, in some accounts, cheered. The SLS kids fled back to the campus. A couple were bleeding. The muscular boy who had asked me to the meeting had the start of a black eye but bragged about taking out a couple of the bastards.
I didn’t foresee this when I gave my cheery talk the other day. After all these years of Leninist crap about the intellectual cadres leading the workers, the workers have predictably gotten fed up: to hell with all these panty-waists. But here’s what nobody saw, surely not me. The pantywaists have gotten tired of the workers, too. Marxism is dead, finally, the class struggle over, all the old truisms gone. So maybe, after all, there is a chance of casting all that aside and finding our way to the city I wrote about in JD? To the primitive, ecstatic village that is our only chance of saving our planet and our lives.
June 5, 197O
I went into Mickey’s room this afternoon to get The Magic Mountain, which I have to teach next year because I decided to volunteer for a section of the freshman humanities survey and learned too late that the reading list was made up by a committee stacked with relics of the Weimar era. So I have to read the goddamn Zauberberg one last time; life turns out to be just one homework assignment after another. Maybe I could read the Cliffs Notes, as most of my students will. Then at least we’d be talking about the same text.