Summer of '69 Read online

  “How is she?” Mom asks.

  I’ve never spoken to her about my relationship with Robin. When I tell her that Robin’s okay, she nods doubtfully, the way people do when they know they’re not getting the whole story.

  “Does she know you’ve been rejected by Goddard?” she asks.

  “Yeah, she knows.”

  “And,” Mom says next, “what about the draft?”

  “Under control,” I assure her. That couldn’t be less true, but between Alan and Dad, she has enough grief. Besides, after the phone call with Robin, I’m not sure I give much of a damn. That letter she said she’s going to write sounds ominous. Feels like I’ve been found guilty; the only question now is what the sentence will be.

  This would be the moment when the door from the garage opens and the paterfamilias enters, wearing a white Lacoste tennis shirt and cream-colored tennis shorts. His face and arms are tanned except for the ring of pale skin around his right wrist where he always wears a sweatband.

  He contemplates the prodigal son and her tormented ladyship. His expression doesn’t change. He could be looking at cardboard cutouts. I realize it’s been a long time since I’ve seen my parents in a room together. Unless you live in a castle, it takes effort to accomplish that.

  “What happened?” the paterfamilias asks.

  Guess he noticed that I’m home a day early and Odysseus isn’t. I deliver my report regarding the demise of der Wagen.

  “You’re going to need a way to get to work.” He looks at Mom. For an instant, I wonder if he’s going to suggest that I use her station wagon. But Mom’s eyes narrow in warning.

  “He can use the MG,” she says.

  Not likely. I’ve hardly ever been allowed to drive the paterfamilias’s cherished golden chariot. Heaven forbid I should put a scratch in those lustrous eleven coats of Rolls-Royce Willow Gold.

  The color seems to drain from Musclini’s face before racing back to a deeper reddish hue. I expect him to veto the idea and instead suggest that I drive his business car, a green Mercury Cougar, while he drives the MG. But, amazingly, he agrees. “To the factory and back. That’s all. And be careful.”

  Things in the house of dashed dreams have indeed taken a strange turn.

  And speaking of strange turns: “You’re sending Alan away?” I direct the question at the paterfamilias.

  His eyes dart at Mom. “It’s your mother’s decision.”

  “He’s your son, too,” I point out.

  Musclini straightens up and puffs out his chest. He dips his forehead forward like a bull preparing to charge. “It’s what’s been decided,” he says in a raised and deepened voice — a warning shot across the bow.

  But it’s just bark. Feels like we’re back in the bathroom doorway again. “You said Mom made the decision. What about you? Do you think it’s a good idea?”

  You can feel the tension in the air. You can feel Mom and the paterfamilias forcing themselves not to look at each other. The paterfamilias maintains his confrontational posture. “I . . . agreed with her.”

  The kitchen grows hushed. The theme song from Get Smart seeps out of the den. The strain is unrelenting. The paterfamilias’s shoulders gradually stoop. It’s the way he’s looked the few times I’ve seen him lose a tennis match. He leaves the kitchen.

  Mom glances at me with a quizzical expression.

  “What?” I ask.

  She smiles weakly. “I believe you’re growing up.”

  I yawn and drag myself out of the kitchen and down the hall. Once again I’ve stood up to the paterfamilias. But where I might have imagined feeling proud, instead I feel insecure and wary, as if, by inserting myself into the muffled hostilities between my parents, I’ve thrown off the precarious balance we’ve lived with for so long. Now what? What happens next?

  Thankfully, I’m too tired to dwell on it. The long journey, the ominous conversation with Robin, the news about Alan, the confrontation with Musclini — all compound my weariness. In my room, my mattress on the floor is in the same tousled, unmade state as when I left. Suddenly I’m so wiped I can’t be bothered to undress, other than to drop into the chair and start to tug off a boot.

  That’s when my eyes travel to my desk, where a white envelope lies. The return address states:

  I don’t have to open it to know what it says.

  “You shittin’ me with this toy car, man?” Charles is bent over in the passenger seat of the MG. His knees are squeezed up to his chin, and his Afro is squashed against the fabric of the convertible roof.

  I pass him a joint. “Think of it as a white man’s pimpmobile.”

  “A white midget, maybe. So what happened to that groovy van?”

  I deliver Odysseus’s obituary.

  “Bummer.” Charles’s knees are pressed so close to his face that he’s having trouble getting the joint to his lips. The British clearly don’t consider anyone over six feet two inches when they design sports cars. In the dimness, small drops of sweat glisten on Charles’s forehead. Yesterday and today have been scorchers, and it’s supposed to get worse before it gets better. I wonder if that’s why the paterfamilias didn’t insist that I drive his Mercury this week. He must have heard a weather forecast and decided he’d rather be in his business car with its AC. “Your old man really drive around in this thing?”

  “Mostly to and from tennis on the weekends.”

  Charles wipes his forehead with his sleeve. “What’d you say his business was?”

  “Different stuff.” I find myself reluctant to tell him that my father owns two relatively small companies as well as some real estate. Nor do I want to mention that the paterfamilias has achieved the ultimate goal of capitalistic suburban life: not having to commute to the city. He’s reached that venerated state of “making his own hours,” which basically means taking time to play as much tennis (and chase as much tail?) as he wants. Coincidentally, one of the main tenets of the cultural revolution is also breaking out of the nine-to-five “rat race.” The paterfamilias once told me he thought of himself as an “iconoclast.” (According to the dictionary, “a person who attacks cherished beliefs or institutions.”) I guess that’s true in some ways, but it’s definitely not in others. He’s still pursuing the almighty dollar, still paying his workers less than they deserve, and no doubt charging higher rents than he needs to.

  Charles exhales a cloud of smoke. Back in the church basement a little while ago, I showed him the order to report for the armed forces physical examination that had come in the mail, and told him why I was giving up on the personal-moral-code CO. He admitted that the argument’s success rate has been negligible so far but added that, according to the Chinese philosopher Lao-tzu, “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” I said I could dig that, but Lao-tzu probably wasn’t facing one-in-five odds of getting his ass shot off.

  “Try not to take this the wrong way, Lucas,” Charles now says in the smoke-filled MG, “but you have got to be the stupidest white person I’ve ever met. You know how many brothers would kill to have your life? And you’ve done everything you could to throw it away.”

  It’s hard to argue. My physical examination at the army induction center in Fort Hamilton, Brooklyn, is scheduled for August 29 at seven a.m. — one month from tomorrow. I can’t stop thinking about those 242 dead men-children in Life magazine. About a photo I saw of the interior of an air force transport plane filled with row after row of flag-draped reusable aluminum caskets. What are my choices now? Canada? Prison? Fingerectomy? Maybe I could hide in the fallout shelter until the end of the war. A subterranean Anne Frank.

  I was so distracted by my looming army physical that I couldn’t focus at work today. My inserter jammed so many times that the foreman, Mr. DiPasquale, asked if I was okay. At lunch I raced over to the library to read up on David Harris, the husband of Joan Baez, who chose prison rather than fight in Vietnam. Turns out that Rudy didn’t have the facts quite right. Harris is currently in the San Francisco County
Jail. He’s supposed to be sent to a minimum-security prison camp in Texas, where inmates live in barracks (so it’s like the army, only you’re not required to kill anyone), but that’s not guaranteed. Draft resisters can be sent to either medium- or minimum-security prisons depending on where the federal prison system has vacancies. So I could get sent to a place where I might have a hard-core criminal for a roommate. Given the possibility of two or three years in a cell sixteen hours a day with someone like Red-Eyed Clyde of Pagan’s fame, I’d seriously have to consider life with one less finger.

  But tonight there’s new hope for avoiding the draft. Last week Charles wasn’t around because he was out in San Francisco, where he spent an afternoon talking to other draft counselors at the Berkeley chapter of the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (aka “the Mobe”). Recently the army doctors out there have started giving anyone who asked 1-Y draft status, which means the military won’t call you into service unless America itself is attacked.

  “All we gotta do is set you up with a phony address in the Bay Area, make it seem like you’re actually living there. You cool with that?” Charles said back in the church office.

  Cool with it? I was blinking back tears of relief and gratitude. Fake an address? Hey, I’m a pro. It’s no different than pretending to live in Bay Shore, only, according to Charles, I won’t have to sign any change-of-address forms. He warned me not to tell anyone about the scheme because if all the other “rich white kids” find out about it, they’ll all start trying to shift their physicals to San Francisco, and that’ll be the end of it. As soon as the Berkeley chapter of the Mobe creates the fake address, I’ll fly out there for my physical, get my 1-Y, and be a free man.

  “Were you out there on vacation?” I ask.

  Charles gives me a disdainful look. “Could you please try to be a little less bourgeois, white boy? I know it’s hard, but don’t make me regret telling you about San Francisco.”

  “Sorry.” You can take the white boy of out of suburbs, but . . .

  “It was an exploratory expedition. Spent most of my time in Oakland, with the Panthers.”

  I stare through the smoke at him. The charges against the Panther 21 in New York may be trumped-up bullshit, but the last I heard, the organization was still a self-proclaimed violent revolutionary group. Members have been convicted of murder, as well as of engaging in gun battles with the police.

  “Easy does it, my man.” Charles puts his hand on my arm when he sees the surprise on my face. “Yeah, they can be violent, but only when violence is used against them. The reason they organized in the first place is because the Oakland pigs are the most racist and brutal police force in the country. How else were they supposed to protect themselves? Maybe you haven’t noticed, but we live in a racist society, dig? The Panthers make an important point. Why should brothers be fighting for the freedom of the South Vietnamese when what we should really be fighting for is our freedom here?”

  He lets go of my arm. “Last week opened my eyes. Things have changed. The Panthers are into social programs now. Feed the children. Kids who’ve had breakfast do better in school. Makes sense, right? It’s hard to focus on learning when you’re hungry and not sure where your next meal’ll come from.”

  Even in my barely functional family, I’ve never, ever had to worry about not having enough to eat. Never even considered the possibility of police brutality. There are no black kids at my high school, no black families in my all-white community or at the country club. It seems incredible that for so much of my life I didn’t even think about how anyone else (except for farmers) lived. Rich white boy, indeed.

  Arno’s one-joint-rebreathe-the-smoke experiment may not have worked in the fallout shelter, but here in the cramped and enclosed confines of the MG, the result appears to be more fruitful. Charles and Lucas the Honky Cracker finish the joint and space out in the fumy humid haze. Hard to imagine two people more similar and dissimilar. “Know what, Charles?” Lucas says.

  “What’s that, my man?”

  “You may be a dissociated Jehovah’s Witness —”

  “Disassociated,” Charles corrects him. “If I was dissociated, we’d be having this rap at Creedmoor.”

  “Uh, yeah, right. Anyway, like I was saying, I think you’ve still got religion, man.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Charles chuckles. “What makes you say that?”

  “Because tonight, in that office, you saved my ass. And you didn’t have to, man. Maybe you didn’t even want to. Maybe I don’t deserve it. But you did it because you knew it was the right thing to do.”

  Charles looks off into the dark and then back. “Remember, it’s not a done deal yet. But we’ll see what we can do. And if that’s your way of saying thank you, white boy, then you’re welcome.”

  “That is definitely my way of saying thank you. I mean it, man, from the bottom of my bourgeois white heart.”

  Charles laughs. He says he’ll be in touch with the fake-address details soon, and unfolds himself from the MG. Lucas watches him stroll off into the dark. There goes someone who is sacrificing for the greater good. Someone who spends his days ministering to nutcases over at Creedmoor and his nights voluntarily advising rich white boys on how to avoid the draft.

  What are you doing for the greater good? the bourgeois white boy asks himself.

  No answer is forthcoming. Lucas starts the MG and steers out of the church lot. Stops at a traffic light. Feels himself smile. The albatross is taking flight. Lucas Lindbergh imagines the MG sprouting wings. In his mind, the traffic light turns green and he accelerates through the gears, hits takeoff velocity, the Spirit of Long Island lifts —

  “Sweet ride, babe.” A voice comes from his left.

  Lucas slowly turns his head. It’s a guy in a Stingray in the lane beside him. Stingray Man is grinning, but when he sees that Lucas isn’t a babe, his jaw drops. His face hardens. The light turns green, and it’s the Stingray that hits takeoff velocity, leaving rubber.

  One small gaffe for Stingray Man, one annoying reminder for Lucas that we are what we drive.

  Brought back to earth by the stink of the Stingray’s burned rubber, I put the MG into gear and ease through the intersection. Even though it’s practically sweltering out and the MG doesn’t have air-conditioning, I drive with the top up, not wanting to be seen. That’s why the guy in the Stingray thought I was a chick. It’s night and all he saw was a classic car and long hair.

  But this minor incident pushes me over an invisible line. Each time I settle into the MG’s red leather seat, I find myself surrounded by a hornet’s nest of memories. The hours of drudgery spent washing, simonizing, and waxing, not to mention scrubbing road tar and dirt off the wire wheels with brushes soaked in a noxious cleaner called Gunk. And seeing the blond woman in the passenger seat when Robin and I drove to Maine. I hated driving into the factory parking lot this morning, where my coworkers stared. Rich white boy, indeed! I hate feeling beholden to the paterfamilias for lending me this symbol of financial excess and infidelity.

  I’m going to have to do something.

  “What do you think you can afford?” Lou Wilkinson dabs his flushed red face with a stained, yellowed handkerchief. The showroom at Wilkinson Motorsports is dimly lit, filled with uncomfortably warm, stagnant air and dusty European motorcycles like BMWs, Triumphs, Nortons, and Ducatis.

  What guy hasn’t dreamed of having a motorcycle? Ever since Dylan wore that Triumph T-shirt on the cover of Highway 61 Revisited, it’s been on my mind. Could anything be cooler? Besides, with everyone going off to college in a month, it’s not like I need a vehicle I can give my friends rides in.

  I tell Lou what I can spend. It’s not nearly enough for a Triumph, but he does have a used BSA B40, a British cycle with a 343 cc engine, that will fit my budget. He proudly tells me that BSA stands for Birmingham Small Arms, a company that makes everything from motorcycles and bicycles to machine guns and armored cars and has been in business for more than a hund
red years. (I feel momentary discomfort about purchasing a cycle made by a company that profits from the business of war, but I’m not aware of the U.K. being involved in Vietnam.)

  I’ve never ridden a cycle before, so we take the BSA out to the parking lot, where Lou shows me how to kick-start and shift gears. Thanks to Odysseus and the MG, I’m familiar with the coordination of clutch and gearshift. Lou encourages me to take a spin around the parking lot. I like the throaty rumble of the BSA’s exhaust.

  Doing laps in the parking lot, I imagine hightailing it up to Canada. Ever since that phone call with Robin, I’ve dwelled in a state of nonstop anxiety awaiting the letter she’s promised. There are moments now when I regret not continuing north by any means possible the day after Odysseus perished. Even if I’d arrived at Camp Juliette a day or two late, even if I couldn’t actually spend time with Robin, it would have been a huge gesture of my feelings for her. Lucas Hoffman at the end of The Graduate, hammering my fists against the church window and shouting, “Robin! Robin!”

  What if the dreaded letter contains the worst news imaginable? (Dear John — I mean, Lucas — I’m sorry to do this in a letter, but . . .) Then there’ll be one more option besides Canada, prison, or chopping off a finger — I could throw some clothes in my knapsack, jump on this cycle, and light out for the great unknown, a fugitive from “justice” (as if there’s justice in killing innocent civilians), the powerful claws of the draft system left grasping at my dust.

  Alan’s gone to camp. The house of dashed dreams is eerily still without the sound of the TV. The shag carpet in the den is matted and slightly threadbare in the place where he usually sits. Another thin white air-mail envelope from Chris (Thank God! He’s still alive!) is on my desk, my address crossed out and the Bay Shore one written in. But before I read the letter, I chew two Tums to settle an anxious stomach, then open the window and spend a few quality moments with Mr. Water Pipe. I really have been cutting back on my consumption of grass, but given the anxiety of having another letter from Chris to read, plus everything else that feels like it’s going off the rails in my life, a modest self-medicating buzz should be permissible.