This All-at-Onceness

by Wittes Schlack, Julie

  I left Fountain Hill Mills for a series of jobs in electronics factories soon after. They were as clean as the garment mills were filthy. I earned a low but stable hourly wage, and there was something aesthetically pleasing in assembling the multi-colored transistors and resistors, loading them into printed circuit boards, and soldering them into place. Though I didn’t understand the physics of electronics, I loved the poetry of its language, the transmission and capacity of current, the easy flux of solder from glowing liquid to solid. I worked mostly with men. While they could be just as cruel to each other as the women in the garment mills, their jabs were funnier. Many of them had been in the military, and went to New York regularly, even if just to see Yankees games. Their worlds were bigger.

  Mark and I had gotten married, had a baby, and established a small but reliable social circle. Occasionally we’d have barbeques with the couple next door, a hairdresser named Cindy and her dumb but sweet husband, Harmon, who worked at the Sunoco station. Domingo, a chain-smoking Dominican, down the block, always sitting on his stoop or working on his car, ambled over whenever we stepped outside, to talk about the Iranian hostage crisis or the Panama Canal Treaty or Mohammed Ali’s loss to Leon Spinks.

  Mark had befriended Ken, a guy at the Caloric stove factory where he worked, and through him, we loosely folded into a group of people our age that had grown up in the Lehigh Valley. On summer days we’d cheer at Ken’s softball games or go swimming in the local quarries where the water was clear and the sunfish were so plentiful and fearless that they’d nibble on our toes. We had lazy, long evenings at the drive-in, where we learned to bring lawn chairs and coolers and have moonlit picnics.

  But most nights we watched television, prepared our lunches to take to work the next day, cut grocery coupons, worried over the bills, and cared for our daughter. “What is to be done?” I’d murmur to her every night (echoing Lenin’s famous 1902 tract), then answer with a singsong litany: “First we change your diaper. Then put on your jammies. Then we feed you dinner. Yummm...milk again.” What is to be done? I’d ask myself the next morning as I reeled through my checklist: diaper bag, lunch, purse, keys.

  I felt less and less like a poser as our days took on the same silhouetted routines as everyone around us. We’d made a life not so different from those of the people we’d come to rescue, one of yawning tedium and small pleasures, but also marked by a nagging despair at our own inertia. We’d been to college and knew how to fit in among highly achieving people. We read books and the New York Times, had been to Europe, didn’t say “ain’t,” and had good teeth. A road back to an easier, more stimulating life beckoned to us.

  But taking it, resuming the lives we’d been born into, felt shameful, even though we no longer believed what we’d probably never believed—that the American proletariat would rise up and make a better world.

  John, the Pottstown auto worker who embraced his role as boss of our New Left cadre with all the passion and avarice of Gordon Gecko at a junk bond auction, always suspected that the siren song of our own privilege called to us. Smart but bitter, frustrated by the mindlessness of his day job, he loved to quote Stalin, and his droopy mustache even resembled Uncle Joe’s. He’d abandoned the Russian Orthodoxy of his Serbian parents for the Marxism of a guy he used to drink with, and as one of the few proletarians in an organization of middle-class kids who aspired to be downwardly mobile, had risen rapidly through the ranks. He was a sneering, self-important martinet, but as dislikable as he was, John was actually right in his conviction that when I moved to Allentown, I was a spoiled middle-class girl, fundamentally just hoping that somehow we could all just be nicer to each other. Allentown was supposed to cure me of that and expand my horizons, immerse me in the real world.

  The biweekly meeting of our cadre was now down to eight or so people, six of whom were tired of our own voices. I commented about our latest directive. “On the one hand...”

  “On the one hand!” John interrupted. “So you’re going to tell me there’s another hand?”

  “Um, yes.”

  He laughed at me. “You’re still the same petit bourgeois you were when you came here. You’ve got two books on the shelf.”

  “Two books on the shelf?”

  “Yeah, you want to consider all the possibilities.” He squealed “all” in a falsetto. “You don’t want to commit to the correct path, even though Mao says that when it comes to the science of revolution, you only need one book on the shelf.”

  I wish I’d stood up then, said “You’re right—I want a shelf full of books,” and stormed out. But though John’s dogmatism helped push us out the door, as much as we longed to return to a big city, one where we had old friends and new possibilities, we were scared. We’d been off the expected path for several years, during which our college friends were becoming doctors and lawyers and social workers. Unattached and childless, they were going to clubs and had taken up jogging.

  Mark and I were still drawn by their gravitational field, but ours was a cold, dark orbit. We felt more remote with each passing day.

  What was to be done?

  Winters (1978-Present)

  We felt as though we had come across something that people did not understand or did not recognize but that’s the season that we were going into, not for three months but for an extended period of time. A lot of the folks who represented summer and spring and fall had been killed and assassinated. The only season left was winter. ...

  - Gil Scott-Heron, discussing the origin of his 1974 album, “Winter in America”

  We were driving west on I-84, on our way back from Boston to Allentown, and on the radio, Bob Seger was singing Against the Wind, wishing he knew as little now as he did when he was young. Mark and I joined heartily joined in the chorus when we saw two helicopters overhead. I ejected the tape from the cassette player and turned on the radio.

  “After 444 days in captivity, the fifty-two American hostages have just touched down on American soil,” the newscaster intoned. “After being greeted by President Carter—excuse me, Former President Carter—at the U.S. Air Force hospital in Wiesbaden, Germany, where they received medical check-ups and debriefings, they embarked on their final leg home.”

  We pulled onto the shoulder just before the first exit to Newburgh. On this gray, bone-chillingly damp January day in 1981, many more copters approached, swarming like black flies. The choppers’ staccato penetrated the car microseconds before we then also heard it on the radio at a slightly higher pitch. Though I could see the helicopters through the windshield, somehow the broadcaster’s trebly chronicle filling the car felt more real.

  “And now—yes, they are deboarding at the Stewart Air National Guard base in Newburgh, New York, and boarding buses to West Point,” the newscaster continued. It was strange to be so near to such a highly anticipated event, to hear what was happening only a mile away but to see only the watchers in their choppers. “There, throngs of grateful Americans are already lining the streets to greet them.”

  The day before, sitting in my parents’ living room, we’d glumly watched Ronald Reagan’s inaugural address, which unfolded as the hostages were being led to the MedEvac planes that would take them from Tehran to Athens to Algiers, and finally to the U.S. Air Force base in Germany. As the final affront to Jimmy Carter’s decimated dignity, the Iranian regime ensured that the hostage release would not happen while he was president. And perhaps they already recognized that they’d have a friend, albeit a covert one, in the new president.

  “We must act today in order to preserve tomorrow,” Reagan had said, his rouged cheeks glowing. “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.”

  “It is now,” Mark muttered.

  When Richard Nixon had defeated George McGovern in a landslide victory eight years earlier, I’d at least had enough spirit to get blazingly drunk with my brother and a few fri
ends, and throw a boot out the car window on our way home. But on the night that Reagan beat Carter by a margin almost as large, I couldn’t even bear to watch the returns. I left Mark slack-jawed on the couch, climbed upstairs with our two-year-old daughter in my arms, and went to bed. Katie slept with us that night; I sought comfort in her soft splayed form in footsy pajamas and her deep surrender to sleep. I was seeking sanctuary as much as giving it.

  The 1960s ended in 1975. By the time Saigon fell in April and U.S. Marines frantically air-lifted the remaining Americans out of Vietnam, the anti-war movement and all it carried in its wake was spent.

  As usual, it was the artists who’d absorbed the zeitgeist, naming what so many of us felt. “Winter in America,” poet Gil Scott-Heron called it on his 1975 album. Songwriter Jackson Browne knew it too. “Running on Empty,” he sang in 1977.

  And like him, there were Mark and I—running behind. As we traipsed from house to house, job to job, and from one anemic protest to the next, we were increasingly mute. Political splits, defections, and just plain fatigue caused lifeboat-based friendships to drift apart. One by one, we were being submerged.

  In March of 1979, when Katie was five months old, Three Mile Island, a nuclear power plant about eighty miles west of our house in Allentown, threatened to blow up. News reports were conflicting and vague: There had been a partial meltdown or there hadn’t; there was cause for “concern” but not “alarm”; radioactive steam may or may not have been released into the air; radiation levels were or weren’t elevated; the increased radiation levels weren’t a danger to public health, but 140,000 pregnant women and children were being evacuated from a twenty-mile radius of the plant; cows were toppling over in the fields around Harrisburg or lactating with their usual sluggish contentment, confined to their barns or free to graze. The situation was, according to Governor Scranton, “under control” or “more complex than MetEd first led us to believe.”

  Should we leave town, which would have cost us our lousy, poorly paying, but scarce jobs? Should we stay, choose to believe what reassurances were being issued, and just hope everything would be okay? I watched Katie nap, knees tucked and arms outstretched like a tiny frog. Was her paleness just the normal March pallor? And was she suddenly napping longer? By the third day of the crisis, when a hydrogen bubble had developed within the reactor’s dome, we were done vacillating. We stocked up on infant formula and drove our baby to Mark’s sister’s house in Long Island. She spent one very long week there—great fun for my young, newly married and unemployed sister-in-law, but wrenching for us. When we brought Katie back home, it wasn’t with relief so much as fatalism. Recession, contamination, apathy followed by jingoism —we were fucked.

  Almost exactly a year after Three Mile Island, in March of 1980, I began my automotive day doing the only thing that would enable my car—a massive burgundy Olds Delta 88—to start. I opened the hood, unscrewed the wing nut on the air cleaner, lifted it out, then inserted the hard plastic head of Katie’s toy elephant, trunk first, into the throat of the carburetor to prop open the butterfly valve. Once the engine was running, I reassembled the air cleaner, closed the hood, tucked the elephant into my glove compartment, and headed off to work. At the end of the day, I repeated the process as my amused co-workers at Colbourn Instruments stood in the parking lot looking on. (“That chick sure knows how to give head,” Dwight would sometimes say, earning a rare reproof from the other guys, who didn’t approve of sexually crude comments pertaining to women they knew.) After pulling out onto West Tilghman, I’d gun the engine, hoping to catch a green light at the top of the hill so that my wheezing old car wouldn’t stall out.

  We’d bought this enormous vehicle (for “a song,” the Pottstown used car dealer assured us) after my oil-gushing Subaru, which had boycotted the reverse gear for months, finally refused to shift into first gear as well. It held over twenty gallons, and at almost a dollar per gallon, a fill-up was unaffordable.

  Thanks to gas rationing, at least once or twice a week I got to end the workday by waiting in a crawling, exhaust-spewing parade to top off my tank. April 21, 1979, was an odd date of the month, and since my license plate number ended with a three, I was eligible to buy gas. Me, and the fifty or so cars in front of me snaking around Liberty onto Ninth Street. Since the gas line wasn’t moving, like most of the other drivers, I got out of the car to stretch my legs and have a better view of the inaction.

  Two guys leaned on the bumper of the black Ford Pinto in front of me.

  “This is just like ‘73,” the redhead in the dark blue, oil-stained jumpsuit said. A Mack Truck logo was emblazoned over his left chest pocket. “Fucking OPEC is at it again.”

  “No, they’re not,” retorted his buddy, an older guy with a leathery face and a missing tooth. “They’re on our side this time.”

  “Bullshit,” redhead answered, emphasizing the second syllable, as if to distinguish this bull product from others. “Haven’t you seen them fucking towelheads on the news?”

  He was referring to the fist-pumping Iranian crowds demanding the extradition of Reza Pahlavi from the United States. A month earlier, the U.S.-installed Shah of Iran had been overthrown and fled the country, eventually landing in New York to be treated for the cancer that would kill him a few months later.

  “The protests are in Iran,” his friend patiently explained. “Iran’s the country that’s exporting less oil to us. All them other Arab countries are in OPEC, and they’re picking up the slack.” He laughed, shaking his head. “Don’t you get it, man. There is no gas shortage, just high prices and panic-buying.”

  The guy in the jump suit bowed in mock deference. “Well, excuse me, Professor. It’s hard to keep track of who hates us this week.”

  “They’re mad about us sheltering the Shah.” The older man laughed. “Try saying that three times fast. Sheltering the Shah, Sheltering the Shah…” He seemed to be trying to coax his buddy into good humor.

  “Enough, man. I get it. And I’m not laughing. Jesus Christ.” He smacked his car’s dusty black trunk. “We’re using up all the gas we’re buying just waiting to buy the next round.”

  “What kind of mileage does this thing get when it’s not exploding?” his friend asked, now trying to change the subject. “Eight, ten miles to the gallon?”

  “What does it matter, asshole? If that pansy Carter hadn’t invited that shit-eating Shah here in the first place, we wouldn’t be having these problems.”

  “I don’t think I’m the asshole, sunshine.” He was done cajoling. “It’s not Carter, it’s not the Shah that’s our problem. It’s Exxon and Mobil and all the big oil companies making up this phony shortage.”

  “You’re calling me sunshine?”

  I’d heard accounts of fights breaking out when a car tried to cut in line or fill a gas can in addition to a tank. One gas station attendant got kicked to the ground for imposing a five-dollar maximum on every driver. It was a necessary but dangerous time to make the case for American Imperialism being the enemy, and not the crowds of chanting, bearded Iranian men we were seeing on the news every night. So although I had leaflets in my car, I wasn’t about to hand them out in this fuming queue.

  From about 1978 until the early 1980s, I was chronically scared. During the 1960s and early 1970s, the political demonstrations I had been in were peaceful and huge. We were the majority, and though our chants may have been angry (“Hey, hey, LBJ, How many kids did you kill today?”), we eschewed violence. Even at Richard Nixon’s counter-Inaugural, the protestors outnumbered the people there to cheer Tricky Dick’s second term.

  But by the late 1970s, the clock had been turned back twenty years, and small, mean, angry mobs were once again in vogue. In 1975, before we’d left Boston for Allentown, a teenager in a small white crowd protesting the desegregation of the schools, was immortalized in a newspaper photograph. Grimacing, legs planted wide apart, he grasped a long pointy flag pole and tried
to impale a black man with the Stars and Stripes.

  One Saturday night in November, 1979, Mark and I sat on our blue plaid couch in Allentown, facing the living room wall that the previous owner had painted in purple stripes and bordered with pink roofing shingles. We’d seen the tail-end of Jeopardy (“What is Lake Baikal?” we shouted to each other in unison, then tallied up the money we would have won had we been contestants), and were awaiting a rerun of Laverne and Shirley.

  But before it did, the familiar logo of the network’s News Brief filled the screen.

  “Five people believed to be members of the Communist Workers Party were shot and killed today in a protest in Greensboro, North Carolina,” the newscaster announced. Mark and I froze. Though we didn’t belong to that group, it was possible, even likely, that we knew people who did. “Their ‘Death to the Klan’ rally and march were disrupted by several vehicles filled with men believed to be members of the Ku Klux Klan and American Nazi Party,” he explained as video from the incident played.

  The protest had been small—a cadre of mostly white people in blue hard hats chanting “Death to the Klan,” curiously observed by the residents of the housing project they were parading by. A procession of cars drove up alongside the marchers—a big, pale-green one with a confederate flag decal on its front bumper and looming dorsal fins over the back wheels, a blue car, a red van, a long white pick-up truck. The marchers seemed to be hitting one of the cars with their signs. Two of them pulled over, and passengers pulled rifles out of the trunk of one of them. They scrambled down the street, shooting at the marchers in front of them. They did this for about thirty seconds—running, aiming, shooting, before going back to the car and returning the weapons to its trunk. The camera panned a little, showing one body on the grass beside a flat, ugly building with a cross over its door. On the ground behind a parked car, someone else twitched his foot.