Summer of '69 Page 10

  Milton looks at his watch. “It’s after one.”

  Realization strikes us both: Where’s Arno?

  In the darkness outside the rink, police with megaphones are urging everyone to leave the park. Searching for our friend, Milton and I wade through the tide of spent, trudging post-concert bodies until Milton grabs my arm and points.

  Thirty feet away, in the faint illumination of a lamppost, Arno is gesticulating to a police officer. For an instant, I’m gripped with fear that he’s been busted with the acid. But he’s not handcuffed. The red-and-white cap pokes out of his back pocket. The police officer’s arms are crossed, and there’s a scowl on his face.

  The cop turns away. Arno’s face is contorted in iodine and baby oil sunburned outrage. He sees us approaching and complains, “Stupid cops won’t do anything.”

  “About?” Milton asks.

  “Clyde ripped me off.”

  It takes a moment to piece together.

  “You . . . told that pig?” Milton asks in astonishment.

  “Damn straight. Think I’m gonna let some scumbag get away with my five hundred bucks?”

  Another officer appears on the walk. “Move along now, boys. Out of the park.”

  I’ve come down from the Windowpane enough to be geographically aware. Most of the crowd is leaving through the Grand Army Plaza exit at 60th Street. But Arno turns uptown, meaning we came in through an entrance farther up Fifth Ave. In that direction, the park path is shadowy and nearly deserted, the night air practically muted. All that remains of the concert is the ringing in my ears.

  “So, I’m curious,” Milton says. “What did the pig say when you told him you’d given Clyde five hundred bucks for LSD?”

  “Jerk laughed at me,” Arno growls bitterly. “I don’t get it. Isn’t it robbery? Theft under false pretenses or something?”

  The hand that comes out of the dark feels disembodied when it clamps over my mouth. But another hand grabs my wrist and wrenches it behind my back with more than enough force to be convincing.

  “Hey!” I let out a muffled yelp. A bolt of hot red pain shoots through my shoulder.

  “Ow! Ow! Stop!” Milton howls near me. We’ve been jumped. I can’t see the guy who’s got me from behind, but the one who’s grabbed Milton is big, with long stringy hair hanging over the collar of a torn denim jacket with a Pagan’s patch.

  “Hey! Quit it!” Another Pagan has Arno. All three of us are forced quickly down the walkway by our attackers. Amid the scrapes and slaps of rapid steps, my knees have gone rubbery. Are we being mugged? Are we about to die? The hand over my mouth is clammy and stinks of nicotine. My shoulder throbs painfully. I’ve never been mugged before. I’ve never been killed before. Blood pounds in my temples. I am scared shitless. If John Bonham himself were bashing my heart with his drum kick, he couldn’t make it beat any faster.

  We’re herded into a small dank tunnel that’s so dark I can only tell how close the walls are by the echoes. It’s like being in the fallout shelter again, only here the air is rank with urine and Pagan’s BO. My pulse continues to race — from fear and the haste at which we’ve been marched down the walkway.

  “Hey! Wait! No! Let me go!” Milton’s flipping out.

  “Shaddup!” a voice snaps, and I hear the hard chunk! of hand against skull.

  “You a pig?” That’s Clyde’s voice, high, nearly hysterical. As my eyes gradually adjust to the blackout of the tunnel, I recognize his Lincolnesque silhouette. He’s nose to nose with Arno, who’s being restrained from behind by a heavy guy with greased-back hair. Under Arno’s chin is the faintest glint of metal.

  A knife?

  Oh, God, no!

  “Mffh?” Arno’s answer to Clyde’s question is muffled by the hand over his mouth.

  “Undercover heat?” grunts the guy who’s holding him.

  The knife under Arno’s chin becomes a sword. Clyde is a Pagan black knight in denim armor.

  I’m trembling with fright for Arno. For Milton. For me. Please, we’re just three suburban kids.

  “Nffh!” Arno frantically tries to shake his head. There’s the faint but irrefutable dribble of liquid splishing on the ground around his feet.

  “What’d you tell that pig?” Clyde screams.

  “Pfft!”

  The stinky hand leaves my mouth, goes into my back pocket, and yanks out my wallet.

  “Please, let me go! I need to get out of here!” Milton’s begging desperately.

  Smack! “Shaddup!”

  “He’s claustrophobic,” I try to explain.

  “What?”

  “What’d you tell that pig?” Clyde yells at Arno again.

  “Th-that y-you took my m-money. I — I thought you w-weren’t coming back,” Arno stammers, his voice high and terrified.

  “You tell him my name? You say anything about the Pagans?”

  “N-n-no. I swear!”

  A cigarette lighter bursts on. The flame illuminates a hairy hand holding Milton’s Life magazine, which immediately gets flung away.

  “Please,” Milton whimpers. “You don’t understand.”

  The flame illuminates draft cards, licenses, school IDs pulled from our wallets. “High-school kids?” Someone sounds surprised. A draft card is flicked away into the dark.

  “This license ain’t even real.”

  “F-for getting into bars,” Milton tries to explain.

  For a moment, all I hear is our heavy, scared-to-death panting. Are the Pagans trying to decide what to do next? Will a jogger discover the bodies of three young men in this tunnel tomorrow morning?

  The hand holding my arm behind my back relaxes. The pain in my shoulder subsides. The distant sound of city traffic seeps faintly into the tunnel.

  “Told you they was too young for undercover,” one of the Pagans says.

  The situation seems defused. Relief wants to creep in, but I’m not sure it’s warranted.

  “You stupid fuck!” Clyde punches Arno hard in the solar plexus.

  “Oof!” You can hear the wind rush out of Arno’s lungs. He doubles over, crumples to his knees. Our wallets slap to the ground. A hundred imaginary bats burst from of the tunnel’s ceiling and flap away.

  Clyde turns to me. I grimace and brace, expecting a blow. Instead, he thrusts something small and tubular into my palm. “Don’t lose it, pansy.”

  Arno’s on his hands and knees, his rasping gasps echoing off the curved tunnel walls. Milton and I are breathing hard. My queasy stomach feels like a water balloon that’s been dropped from four floors up. The Windowpane has become an annoyance, making it difficult to find consistent purchase in reality. The lingering hallucinations — flapping bats overhead, tarantulas on the walls — are a distraction. Milton groans, bends over, and puts his hands on his knees. An instant later, he bolts out of the tunnel.

  The splash of vomit follows.

  Arno slowly gets to his feet and wipes his hands over and over on his jeans. The insides of his pants legs are stained dark. He’s trembling.

  Using the flame from my Zippo for light, I collect our wallets, cards, and IDs. On the cover of Milton’s Life magazine is a slightly blurred black-and-white photo portrait of a boyish-looking soldier. The small headline reads:

  THE FACES OF THE AMERICAN DEAD IN VIETNAM

  In the flickering light and sputtering residue of the Windowpane, the face seems to have a rueful expression, as if it is saying, Go back to the suburbs, children. You’re out of your league here.

  Back on the walkway, Arno scrubs his hands in a drinking fountain. He’s still quivering when we reach the car. We pretend not to notice the scent of urine from his jeans.

  The drive home is hushed. Not even the usual distraction of radio or tape deck. In the back seat, I hold up the Life so the headlights from the cars behind us illuminate it. Some of the pages are torn, others curled and smudged as if the magazine’s been passed from person to person for weeks. The little square pictures are not of dads but of the dead. Twelve p
ages of small black-and-white photos of the 242 young men who died in Vietnam during one week last month. More than thirty dead each day. I squint at the faces, dreading the thought of finding Chris’s among them. But the light is too jumpy and fleeting, the pictures too small, the lingering hallucinations from the Windowpane too distracting.

  Letting the magazine fall to my lap, I think about turning eighteen two months ago, then graduating from high school three weeks ago. Thanks to the Semi-Miraculous Transformation, I may have a body that places me in the category of mature young man, but I swear, ever since I graduated, there have been moments when I’ve felt less prepared for life than ever. Tonight was definitely one of them. Arno, Milton, and I were mere boys. Messing with a motorcycle gang? I tremble again thinking about it. Tonight was the first time in my life I truly felt the terrifying, bladder-emptying possibility of death. Those brief moments in that tunnel were both paralyzing and exhausting. Imagine being at war. Imagine having to endure that terror for months on end.

  It’s not until after we’ve dropped Milton off at his house that I remember the tiny glass vial Clyde gave me. It’s about an inch long and the diameter of a pencil. I reach up and flick on the GTO’s inside light. The vial is about a third filled with white powder.

  Arno sees it and beams like a little kid.

  3:47 a.m. The Windowpane’s mostly worn off, but not enough to allow for sleep. When I got home from the concert about an hour and a half ago, Chris’s latest letter was on my desk.

  6/28/69

  Dear Loogie,

  You heard about getting into Goddard? I hope you did, man. Believe me, you DO NOT want to get sent over here, Loogs.

  The whole scene over here is a total bust. No one does shit anymore. All we do is get high and listen to music and try not to die. It’s a good thing they got a lot of drugs. Not just the army issued pep pills and codeine but we sure dig that shit. They got killer weed over here like you wouldn’t believe. The stuff’s called Thai stick and it’s mind blowing. You can’t take more than two or three tokes without falling flat on your face. It’s got to be ten times more potent than the weed you and me used to smoke behind the shed. Man if we’d been smoking Thai stick back there I promise you wouldn’t know which end of your inserter was up.

  That’s not all. Everywhere you go there’s smack. Pure horse. Dangerous pure. Most guys smoke it in cigarettes because it don’t stink like Thai stick so you can smoke it right under the NCO’s nose and he won’t know. But that ain’t the only reason guys smoke it. The stuff’s so pure that smoking is the only way you can take it without having to worry about ODing.

  That is UNLESS YOU WANT TO OD. Believe me, not a day goes by that I don’t think about it. ’Cause I KNOW I can’t take another six months of this. We know what people back home think of this war. It’s a WASTE OF LIVES. All we do is spend each day waiting to see if this will be the day they get you. Sometimes I get so tired and scared I’m ready to do anything so I won’t have to be tired and scared no more.

  The thing guys do when they can’t take it no more is shoot themself in the foot or butt. The second or third toe on the left foot is what I hear. You can blow that sucker right off. The butt is a tougher shot. You got to fire pretty deep to make it real but if you ain’t careful you can lose a whole Chunk O’ Butt. Then someday you’ll be at the beach and people will be asking where’s the other half of his ass. Pretty half assed, right?

  Guess it ain’t that bad if I can make jokes, right, Loogs? It’s just that sometimes it IS that bad. Being all the way over here knowing no one back home gives a shit. When I first got here a lot of the guys were pissed about the protests back home. For a while I guess we believed we were stopping communism and couldn’t understand why so many people back in the States were against that.

  But not no more. To the gooks this war ain’t about communism. If all you been doing for a thousand years is grow rice, what does it matter if your country is democratic or communist? They’re fighting to protect their country from imperialist invaders. And guess what? THAT’S US.

  So that’s where it’s at. The gooks hate us here and folks hate us back home. If that ain’t the worst feeling in the world, then I don’t know what is. That’s when you start thinking why bother with a toe or a butt cheek? Why not suck the muzzle and get it over with?

  Sorry to lay that on you, man. Don’t worry. I am OK most of the time. I’m glad I got you to write to because I sure can’t write about it to no one else. Be good, Loogs. MAKE SURE YOU DON’T GET DRAFTED AND SENT TO THIS HELL HOLE. And write back soon. OK?

  Peace, brother,

  Chris

  Oh, man. I can’t tell him Goddard rejected me. He’s already got more than enough crap to deal with.

  Chris nicknamed me Loogie one afternoon when we were out behind the shed. He’d taken a big hit off a joint and started coughing his guts out. “Gotta hock this loogie, man,” he wheezed, then cleared his throat and spit out a huge wad of gray-and-yellow phlegm.

  I burst out laughing.

  “What’s so funny?” he asked.

  “What you said. What was it? Hawk a loogie?”

  “Hock, not hawk.” He looked surprised. “You never heard that before?”

  “Don’t give me that. You just made it up.”

  “The hell I did.” Chris laughed. “Man’s been hocking loogies ever since . . . since . . . there was loogies to hock.”

  “Bull.”

  “Bull, my ass. What rock you been hiding under? From now on I’m calling you Loogie.” Even though he’d just hacked his brains out, he took another deep hit off the J.

  And started coughing every bit as hard as before.

  “You okay?” I asked, not so much because he was coughing (he’d told me about his mild asthma), but because he was taking such deep hits. It was the kind of thing you did when you wanted to get seriously wasted, and we still had to go back inside and work.

  Chris pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket. On the letterhead was the round Selective Service System emblem with the bald eagle clasping arrows in one claw and the branch of a holly bush in the other.

  “There are ways to get out of this, man,” I said. “I mean, all you have to do is go back to high school.”

  “That ain’t the problem.” Chris hadn’t stopped wheezing. “They may not want me.”

  Maybe it was the grass, but I didn’t follow. “It doesn’t matter whether they want you or not. They have to take you. All you have to do is tell ’em you want to finish high school. That’ll get you a Two-S status, at least until —”

  Chris waved his hand at me to stop. He caught his breath. “You don’t get it, man. The army may not want me.”

  That stopped me. Cold.

  “It’s the asthma. If I flunk the physical, my family’ll think I’m a total jerk-off. My dad and uncles served in World War Two. I got cousins over in Nam. In my family, you serve your country. You do your patriotic duty.”

  It was a startling example of how far apart his and my worlds were. In mine, you were a loser if you let yourself get drafted. In his, you were a loser if you didn’t.

  “You really want to fight in that stupid war?”

  He snorted derisively. “Ain’t you heard that all you longhairs are traitors? This is America. ‘Love it or leave it.’”

  “Yeah, but how do you feel about it?” I asked.

  “Don’t matter.” Chris cleared his chest and spit once more. Then he turned and went back into the factory.

  It’s four a.m. and I’m wiped. I could probably sleep now, but I’m looking at the faces of the dead boys in Life magazine again. The majority are between eighteen and twenty-one years old. Decked out in their fanciest Class A uniforms, wearing broad service caps that look too big for their heads. But not all are in uniform. Several dozen photos are lifted from high-school yearbooks. Most of these round-cheeked, clean-shaven youths look younger than me.

  In Central Park tonight, my friends and I were way out of our depth. Same
as the boys in these pages. A handful were seventeen when they died. Boys who, before they left for Vietnam, couldn’t possibly have grasped the mortal danger that lay ahead. Boys who died before they ever had a chance to really be alive.

  All I have to do is look in the mirror to see who could be next.

  Dear Chris,

  Listen, man, feel free to lay whatever you want on me. That’s what I’m here for. But I want to correct one thing. They won’t hate you when you get back home, especially if you join the protests. To me, some of the bravest cats around are the vets against the war. To go through that horror and come back against it says a lot. You’ll be a hero. We need you, man.

  Stay away from the horse, okay? I don’t have to tell you that heroin is killer shit. Once you start smoking it, you’re just one small step from shooting up. And you and I both know that if there’s lots of it around, sooner or later that’s what a few guys are going to try. Hey, can you believe it? Ever think you’d hear Loogie lecture you about drugs? . . .

  “If you don’t believe in a Supreme Being, what is the basis for your personal moral code?” In the church basement, Charles is running through the questions I can expect the draft board to ask.

  “To me, if you believe in God, you’re not obligated to have a moral code,” I answer. “The responsibility’s off your shoulders because you expect him to enforce morality for all. But if you believe there is no God, then you, the individual, are obligated to be moral, because no one else is going to do the job for you. And if no one’s moral, humanity and civilization collapse. So the individual must carry the responsibility to be moral on his shoulders. That’s why I can’t kill another human being. It is my responsibility to live a moral life, and to adhere to it because I can’t expect anyone else to do it for me.”

  “What if it’s a question of kill or be killed?” Charles asks. His boots are up on the corner of the desk again.

  “Thomas Aquinas postulated that for a war to be just, the following four conditions have to be met: The war has to have just cause. It has to be declared by a proper authority. It has to possess the right intention. And it has to have a reasonable chance of success. Vietnam fails every condition. It’s a political conflict, which is not considered a just cause. It’s never been officially declared a war by any authority. The reason it’s officially labeled a conflict is because the United States is not in danger and therefore has no legitimate grounds for being there. The same goes for intention. Who are we to decide what form of government the Vietnamese people should have? That’s their decision, not ours. And as far as having a reasonable chance of success? Even the president of the United States has basically admitted we’re not going to win. Last year the best he could do was promise there would be an honorable end to the conflict, whatever that means.