He showed me around Berkeley, and got me to visit the latest coffee houses. Brought me to assemblies where he was a star of the New Left. His speeches were passionate, and always well attended. The first time I saw him talk I remember thinking, I share an apartment with the guy, with a sort of unhealthy pride that would have alarmed me if I hadn’t been so fragile. He’d been incredible, magnificent, really. We were at Sproul Hall. Some fifteen hundred, maybe two thousand students were listening to him. Tension was in the air, and the cops seemed nervous. Powerful in his eloquence, he had the crowd under his spell from the very first second, “We no longer want anything to do with this war! Four years, my friends, it’s been four years! Four years we’ve been fighting against it by any means! Four years and no one listens in Washington! What else do they need? Riots? Violence? Bodies in the streets? Have we become outcasts in our own land? Have we? Outcasts?” The crowd roared its agreement. “Oh, they would love to get rid of each and every one of us.…” His eyes, filled with fire, scanned the assembled multitude. “To kill their own citizens, like they send others to be murdered over there for their own interests!” Thunderous applause broke out, eliciting in him a devilish smile. He gestured towards the crowd, you could barely see his handicap then, hands joined together, index finger pointed towards us, as if holding a gun. And the crowd began to chant, “Shoot us! Shoot us!” And he pretended to shoot us down, one by one, his eyes like embers now. “That’s what they dream of in Washington, to eliminate us! All of us! One by one! To have their path free and clear and pursue their imperialist mission. But we are Reason, my friends! The conscience of this nation. And to do nothing in these troubled times is a form of violence in and of itself.”
And the crowd, in a frenzy, chanted all over again, “Shoot us! Shoot us! Please shoot us!”
Life in Berkeley was exhilarating. Intriguing youth, arrogant, not exactly like New York. Here, young people were kings in their own country — demonstrations, sit-ins; they filled the streets by the thousands — angry, determined, and they could paralyze the life of an entire community without warning. They were certain they were giving birth to a new society, pacifist, egalitarian, as if the previous generations had never thought of doing the same or simply didn’t have the same intellectual and material capabilities. The Vietnam War gave them this platform, an opportunity to be heard, to show their superiority. Their feeling of superiority could be seen everywhere — in the speeches, in the eyes of Ken Lafayette, in the relationship the activists had with authority figures and police. A supercharged mood that I tried to describe to my mother in our phone calls, but that she simply couldn’t understand, “You’re being careful, Romain? It sounds dangerous.” My mother suffered, knowing I was so far away. “California? What about your diploma in New York?” She cried, making veiled accusations of having abandoned her. Her health was declining; like her own mother, her heart was failing, her legs had begun to swell again. Pockets full of change, I called her every week from a phone booth on Telegraph Avenue, describing what I was seeing around me — sometimes a demonstration was taking place, and she could hear the police sirens and the deafening growl of helicopters overhead. “Romain, it sounds like war.” I reassured her as best I could, and each time, the same question, “Where is Berkeley exactly?”
“On the other side of the continent, Ma. I told you.”
And I told myself: far enough for me to start feeling lighter again. I realized that my headaches and anxiety attacks were growing further apart. I was still fragile, certainly, and prone to terrible fits of sadness, but I was doing better, trying to live one day at a time, trying not to think too much about the past or the future.
Ken’s mood changed; the honeymoon hadn’t lasted long. At first, I didn’t understand. “Ken, is there a problem?” He’d make a face.
“Problems? There are problems everywhere! That’s all there is!”
I was stunned. “Did I do something to annoy you?” This fear I had of indisposing him was insane.
Again he made a face, “Please, don’t be like the others. All those people at the committee who are scared of me. It’s pathetic.”
I was concerned. He had charmed me with his ability to talk brilliantly about any subject, his status as the star of the antiwar movement in Berkeley, his face in the newspapers — and now that he had nothing left to tell me about himself, it seemed I didn’t deserve his attention. Was that it?
He was constantly picking fights. Once it was a shower, too long for his taste. “Hey, petty bourgeois,” he shouted, slamming his fist on the bathroom door. “This is no palace here!” Oh, and the groceries. He had offered me a place to stay, so I bought food to thank him, an exchange of services he seemed to appreciate until he began inspecting every bag I brought back from Lucky Supermarket. “What’s that?” Once, it was a roll of Saran Wrap. I thought he was going to punch me.
“What do you mean, that? You’re holding it, you know what it is.”
“That shit’s produced by Dow Chemical! Napalm, you fool, does that mean anything to you?”
Furious, disgusted, he pulled out toothpaste, jam, toilet paper. “All of this trash is made by companies on the blacklist of criminal imperialist conglomerates that have a financial interest in the war. None of it can enter this apartment, you hear? Since you’re not intelligent enough to understand that, from now on you go through inspection before putting anything away.”
I don’t know why I didn’t just say, Go fuck yourself! Buy your own shit! The shame and self-loathing I felt! Why did he turn me into a goddamn child?
Then there was Pete. He was arrested in a bar in Oakland, completely drunk.
“What the hell was he doing in a fucking bar?”
Ken learned about it from a guy who was with Pete that night. After half a dozen beers, Pete got into a fight with another customer (over a woman, maybe?), the bar’s owner called the cops, who quickly figured out they had an AWOL soldier.
Pete was sent to the Presidio in San Francisco, a military prison with a sinister reputation.
I said, horrified, “We’ve got to get him out of there.”
Ken snickered. “Yeah? And how are we going to do that? We’re not in a Walt Disney movie!” He kicked the couch in the living room and disappeared into the kitchen. A few minutes later, he reappeared, his hair a mess, as if he’d been holding his head in his hands.
“Well, let’s see the good side of this mess. Better in prison than running to Canada.”
“You can’t be serious.…”
“Of course I am! It might be difficult to drill into your bourgeois head, thinking about saving your own skin, that’s your first goddamn thought!” He shook his head with disgust. “What a pathetic reflex. To save your own life. Just like your friend Charlie Moses.”
I could barely choke out the words, “What the fuck, man!”
“Oh, and now you’re crying over the fate of your little friend!” On the coffee table, the newspaper with the day’s tally of the dead in Vietnam. He picked it up and threw it in my face. “For each guy who flees to Canada, another will have to replace him. Do you think about the man who will get his brains shot out of his skull instead of your coward of a friend?”
Coward! “You have no idea what you’re talking about!”
“Of course I know what I’m talking about! People who shit their pants in fear, I see them every goddamn day. Not everyone is a hero, unfortunately. You should know, what with your friend Moïse.”
And you, you should know, protected by your limp. Are you a hero? But I stayed silent. Once again.
Weeks later, desperate knocks on the apartment door. It was past midnight, and I was in bed with a book. I heard Ken swear in his room, and then his feet dragging to the door. “Pete? What are you doing here?”
Pete? Out of prison?
I ran to the living room and found a horrifyingly skinny Pete, his skin waxy. He staggered
to the couch, and fell on it. I ran to the kitchen and grabbed him a beer, which he drank thirstily, his eyes closed. We watched him. “Pete? What happened?” Ken asked impatiently, “They let you leave the Presidio?” Pete shook his head weakly. No. “So?”
“Escaped.”
“Escaped? Shit!”
His hands and face were covered in scabs. His clothes smelled like urine. Mould. Barely audible, Pete told how, in his section, they discovered that one of the guys had hepatitis B. “We threw ourselves on him like vampires. Cutting him with our nails, with stones, whatever we could find to make him bleed. Then we cut ourselves and we mixed our blood with the guy’s, like brothers making a pact. We waited and soon enough we were trembling all over and shitting ourselves. They waited a few days before sending us to the hospital, just to make sure we weren’t acting. Then they realized we weren’t. There were five of us transferred to the hospital, and I managed to escape with another guy.”
“If they catch you,” Ken said, “you’ll be in for fifteen years. We’ve got to get you to Canada.”
Stupefied, I stared at Ken, who averted his eyes. He had spoken with disgust, shaking his head, as I’d seen him do so many times. Pete, a desperate case that you gave up on? A problem to be gotten rid of in Canada? I shivered.
Why didn’t I leave, right then and there? Why?
3
Pete needed a driver to cross the border. I offered without hesitation.
It was one of those cold and foggy January mornings. A humidity that put a chill in your bones. The sun giving half-light, barely warm at all, as if covered in plastic film. The air hung heavy, and we breathed even more heavily.
That morning, Ken hardly helped us at all, saying something about some emergency or other at the committee. I grabbed him by the sleeve as he was leaving the apartment. We could hear poor, sick Pete savouring a last warm shower before the great departure, at least as much as he could savour anything in his current state. I was angry.
“He’s your friend, Ken!”
“That’s how it is. Nothing more to say.”
He left, not bothering to shut the door behind him. Flabbergasted, I watched him go down the stairs, limping, one hand on the railing. A few minutes later, Pete appeared in the living room, bare feet and a towel around his hips, revealing a thin figure, his back and arms covered in infected scabs.
“My God, Pete. We’ll need to find you a doctor soon. We’ve got to take care of you.”
He shrugged and his eyes glanced towards the open door.
“Where’s Ken?”
It was just too cruel. “He left. An emergency. He couldn’t wait. He’s sorry, really. He said he was sorry. He wants us to call him as soon as we’re in Vancouver. He’ll never give up on you. He promised.”
A tired smile on his face, “I knew it. He’s the best. You can always count on him.”
I spared him the truth, and returned a smile. All the while cursing Ken Lafayette.
We drove north, towards Canada. A pit in my stomach and Pete in the back, on the Westfalia’s cot, under heavy blankets, a shadow of his former self. It had been only three months since that rainy evening in October 1968, on Route 160, south of Sacramento. His long scraggly figure, waxy skin, and that old Giants baseball cap Ken gave him to hide his shaved head that marked him as a GI. So weak and feverish I had to help him climb down the three stories of the Le Roy Avenue building. His burning skin gave off a strong smell of infected flesh. He was wearing my clothes, and looked like a kid in them.
It wasn’t entirely certain that Canada would welcome Pete. Ken knew it and hadn’t cared. After all, a key portion of the immigration process was the medical exam.
I got a first laugh out of him in downtown Seattle when I gave him a handful of Canadian bills, about a hundred dollars that I had exchanged at the bank.
“That? Money? You just got swindled, buddy!” He put the bills on the cot, laughing like a kid as he examined their colours. “It’s like Monopoly money!” Then, intrigued, “Who’s the chick with the uppity air?”
“You’re kidding! You don’t know who that is?”
He shook his head weakly, “Should I know?”
“That’s Queen Elizabeth II.”
He coughed, sniffed. “What’s she doing there? She’s the Queen of England, right?”
“Ours as well.”
“Hey, we fought a war in 1775 to get rid of her!”
“Well not us.”
He looked at me, confused, as if I was telling him that we were off to Siberia. The ignorance of Americans always astonished me. As if Canada was a building, or the name of a horse, of no interest at all. A banal, ordinary thing they paid no attention to. Oh, sure, they’d been told once it was another country, but that hadn’t stuck.
We were a few miles from the border. We drove through breathtaking landscapes. Pete saw none of it. He slept, interrupted by episodes of delirium, and that goddamn fever that didn’t seem to be letting up. “Pete, we’re getting closer. You need to sit up front.” I helped him sit up, got him out of the Westfalia. He drank a bit of water, pissed on the side of the road; he seemed lost. Night had fallen, it was past eleven. We were betting the border guards wouldn’t be as curious so late, hoping that Pete’s state wouldn’t seem suspicious. I washed his face, got him into clean clothes and threw out the ones he’d been wearing since we left. He moaned, but let himself be moved this way and that. He said, a small smile on his pale lips, “Don’t worry, it’ll be fine.”
Yet the battle was far from over.
Our anxious faces at the Douglas border crossing. That great white shining arch, illuminated at its base, the Peace Arch on which both flags flew, carried by the wind, dancing, synchronized. The inscription at the arch’s base read, MAY THESE GATES NEVER BE CLOSED. Pete took it as a promise.
A first stop, then a second. I lowered the window. A thin guy, some forty years old, “What brings you to Canada?” I could feel my heart beating in my chest. I said, my voice choked with nervousness,
“We’re coming to spend a few days with friends in Vancouver.”
He stared at me impassively. “American?”
“No, Canadian.” And without him asking for it, I offered my birth certificate, immediately regretting my hurry, which might look like an admission of guilt. He seemed surprised, looked at the document.
“And you?”
As we’d hoped, the darkness worked to Pete’s advantage. “No, American.”
“Anything to declare?”
“No,” Pete said, his voice surprisingly strong.
“Alcohol? Cigarettes?”
“No,” Pete said a second time.
“How many days in Vancouver?”
“Three days,” I said. “We’ll be back on Sunday.”
“Have a nice visit.”
And that was it. We drove the next few yards in incredulous silence. When we got far enough and the light from the Peace Arch couldn’t be seen anymore, Pete began to cry.
Georgia Street, East Vancouver. Abandoned buildings for rent, small sad, worn-down houses, and heavy low clouds, the colour of lead.
The war resisters committee was easy to find — a ground floor office in a beat-up brick building that had, at one point, been of a definable colour, posters mounted in dirty windows shouting their slogans, exclamation marks punctuating them like explosions: STOP IT! U.S. OUT OF S.E. ASIA NOW! ENDLESS WAR IS ENDLESS DEATH!
Pete was becoming weaker by the hour. He could barely cross the street to the office. I had to help him up the couple of steps until a guy inside the office saw us and ran outside to help. What a welcome! A handful of friendly volunteers, far more relaxed than those who swarmed around Ken Lafayette. We were invited to sit, served coffee and cookies. While we were introducing ourselves and getting to know one another, a doctor, whom one of the girls had called, arrived at the offic
e. He was a young guy with long hair. He took Pete aside, examined him before prescribing a long list of medicines. “Enough to treat a whole Marine battalion,” Pete said.
The committee’s volunteers gave us the address of a cheap hotel to the west on Georgia Street. While Pete — knocked out by the doctor’s pills — was sleeping like a baby in our room, I visited an apartment not too far away with one of the committee members. Three clean rooms, well heated. We went out to buy some furniture that we transported in the Westfalia, and filled the refrigerator. I paid a year’s rent to the owner, a dry, haughty woman who looked at me with suspicion until I pulled out my stack of bills. “Oh! If only all young people were like you!” I said nothing, simply shaking her hand with the lease in my pocket.
Pete thought the apartment was perfect. “This is home? I’ve never had anything like it. How can I thank you, Roman?”
“By getting back on your feet as soon as you can, and accepting this envelope without saying a word.”
Métis Beach Page 24