Summer of '69 Read online

  We hung up. Zach’s surprise when I asked if Barry’d been doing heroin at the farm sounded genuine. Besides, I’d seen my cousin when he was doing heavy drugs, and he didn’t act or look anything like the Barry I’d hung with at the festival. In a way it makes his story even sadder. He’d climbed out of the darkness. Finally gotten out of the house. Started creating art. And then . . . one small but horribly lethal mistake.

  The casket is lowered into the open grave, part of a family plot I didn’t know about. How can one person know so little about his own family? Is it because such things aren’t spoken about until there’s a reason? But there was a reason. In the ground a few inches from my shoes is a small footstone:

  The funeral ends. Friends help Aunt Jane and Uncle Phillip to a car. Soon the only ones left are my family and some funeral workers in overalls waiting nearby. I catch the paterfamilias’s eye and look down at Brett’s footstone. The paterfamilias winces. He doesn’t want to deal with this right now. He’s been dealing with it for nearly sixteen years.

  He puts an arm around my brother’s shoulders and leads him toward the car. Yesterday, I volunteered to drive up to the camp and get Alan, but the paterfamilias said he wanted to do it.

  The hot, dry wind whisks more dust off the pile of dirt. My stomach growls angrily. I feel sluggish, light-headed, and mildly nauseated from hunger. It’s a hell of a lot harder to starve myself than I had imagined. (Forget the finger; maybe I should just chop off the whole fucking arm. That’ll help me lose weight.)

  Mom steps beside me, looks down at the footstone.

  “Why don’t we ever talk about him?” I ask.

  “What’s there to say, Lucas?” She lifts her chin and has the impassive look of someone who for a long time has been trying to get past tears.

  “Barry told me that you took him out in the cold. But that doesn’t mean it had anything to do with him getting sick, right?”

  Mom slides her arm through mine as if she needs to keep me close. “But it might have.”

  Her words hang in the hot summer air.

  “We’ll never know,” she adds.

  It was almost sixteen years ago. She’s still going to that shrink in the city. What a thing to have to live with.

  I wipe my face with a bandanna, feeling the windblown grit that’s collected on my forehead. Stomach growls again. It’s been three days of sheer agony. I don’t know how I’m going to get through another week of this.

  I’m ready to go home. There’s too much sadness here. Barry, Brett. But Mom holds my arm tight. “If it hadn’t been for you and Alan, I don’t know how I would have survived.” It feels like she’s relieved to be able to tell me. As if she’s been waiting a long time.

  “Mom, can I ask you a question?”

  “I wish you would.”

  “Do you . . . think this has something to do with the way Dad’s been all this time?”

  She squeezes my arm and looks down at the footstone again. “I think he tried to accept what happened. I think he really tried not to blame me. But he wasn’t able to do it. I tried so many times to get him to talk. If not to me, then to a therapist. He went a few times, and then . . .” She shakes her head and trails off.

  “And then you had Alan.”

  Shovels scrape and clatter as the cemetery men start to scoop the remaining dirt back into Barry’s grave. Mom sniffs, wipes a tear away. I can’t recall ever seeing her cry before. Her grip on my arm stays tight, but her voice quavers. “We’ll never know who Brett was, or what he might have become. It’s so easy to project on him all the hopes and dreams you have for a child. To imagine he would have been everything you could have wished for. I think that’s what your father’s done. He’s never been able to let go of what might have been. Brett, not Alan. He can’t help himself.”

  And Antonia has two young sons who need a father. Somewhere in Dad’s head, does he think it’s a do-over?

  The cemetery men shovel with short, efficient strokes. Each scoop of dirt that lands with a soft thump on Barry’s casket is another reminder of how real, how horribly irreversible, what’s happened is. Mom wipes away another tear. I slide my arm out of hers and put it around her shoulders. “I love you, Mom.”

  “Thank you, Lucas. And, of course, I love you.”

  We walk back to the car, where the paterfamilias and Alan are waiting. I get in the back with Alan. No one speaks during the drive to Barry’s house. No one spoke during the drive to the cemetery, either.

  I bet Brett would have been a brilliant student. A terrific tennis player, too.

  People gather at my aunt and uncle’s house. Sitting in one of the rusty chairs on the small back patio, I smoke the umpteenth cigarette of the day. My throat is raw and my chest feels full of sludge, but smoking helps dull the gnawing craving for food.

  In the yellow ashtray on the filmy-glass table, the remains of unfiltered cigarette butts still float in their brownish broth. The breeze blows long thin needles out of the trees and onto the ground. The backyard is small, no more than a few dozen feet on each side. When Barry and I were younger and did on occasion play together, it was either basketball in the driveway or football or baseball on the street.

  The patio door opens, and Tinsley comes out. The scent of patchouli whisks past when she sits. I offer her a Marlboro, but she taps a cigarette from a blue pack of Gauloises. I cup my hands to protect the flame while she lights her cigarette, then catch a whiff of strong, pungent smoke.

  “I’m so sorry, Lucas. It’s . . . so hard to believe.”

  Even at the age of eighteen, I’m beginning to see how we meander along a winding path filled with blind corners and switchbacks, at times thinking we’re dealing with some pretty heavy shit (broken hearts / draft / college / future?). Then the phone rings or there’s a knock on the door. And it’s instant implosion. The path vanishes into a vacuum that nothing can fill. Part of you is snatched away. Suddenly, nothing you thought of as heavy shit before even comes close.

  Tinsley exhales. Like Barry’s life, smoke races away on the breeze. It doesn’t seem possible that someone you’ve grown up with, someone you’ve known for so long, someone you spent so much time comparing yourself to, can suddenly not be there.

  The wind rattles the tree branches. More long brown pine needles sprinkle down. Tinsley says, “I’m going to Paris.”

  “With Bernard?” I ask.

  “Bien sûr. But also to study. Have you heard of Henri Cartier-Bresson? They say he’s the father of photojournalism.”

  “Sounds very cool, but what about your mom?”

  “I think it’s a blessing in disguise for her. I’ll be out of the house and she can tell her friends that I’m studying abroad. It’s so”— she strikes a pose and bats her eyes — “so terribly chic.”

  Inhale, exhale. My throat feels like sandpaper. My stomach growls and cries. Tinsley’s long yellow hair lifts on the breeze and settles.

  “You’re not angry, are you?” she asks.

  That Barry is dead? That my family is falling apart? That it’s been three weeks since I last heard from Robin? That Chris and thousands of men-children like him might, could, will die? That to avoid the same fate, I will have to endure the minute-by-minute torture of starvation for seven more days?

  But I know that what she means is, am I mad at her for going off with Bernard at Woodstock. “No. You came back with the rice and that can of SpaghettiOs. And you stayed for Saturday night when you didn’t have to.”

  “It wouldn’t have been right otherwise.”

  “You mean it wasn’t the I Ching that told you to come back?”

  Tinsley smiles archly. It’s been almost a month since the night we lay under the stars on that smoky mattress in a field near Kemptville, Ontario, and she said looking at the stars made the universe seem closer. Things do seem closer now. Unfortunately, those things include death, war, bereavement.

  “How’s your girlfriend?” she asks.

  “Not good.”

 
“Not because of me, I hope?”

  “No. Because of me.”

  Tinsley takes another drag off her cigarette and plunks the butt into the brown broth. It hisses. She rises from the chair and gives me a peck on the cheek. “I hope you fix it, if that’s what you want.”

  “Thanks. Good luck in France.”

  “Merci beaucoup.”

  Canned laughter seeps out of the den. At Barry’s house, Alan got bored and wanted to watch TV, but the living room was full of mourners, so Mom asked me to bring him home. She said she and the paterfamilias would get a ride back later.

  On the way home, I asked Alan how camp was. He said he was the best rower.

  “In a rowboat?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  “So you liked it?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Would you go back next summer?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Even without TV?”

  He said he’d think about it.

  Standing at the living-room window at home, I gaze out at the street. The late-afternoon light floods in, illuminating the slowly floating bits of fiber and dust in the motionless air. Every now and then, a particle catches the light and refracts it in a tiny burst of rainbow spectrum, then vanishes forever.

  The bathroom scale reads 162. I need to get down to 135. After three days of famine, my clothes feel loose and I’m pulling my belt to the last notch. Even with the countless cigarettes and glasses of water, I don’t know how much longer I can bear this agony.

  I didn’t have the energy to go anywhere last night, so I asked Milton and Arno to come over. We sat on the back patio and I laid it out for them: if I can’t keep starving myself, or if it gets close to the physical and I haven’t lost enough weight, I’m going to need their help. I’m not going to prison or Canada.

  Milton said he’d had a feeling I might call upon him; Rudy had told him about what we’d discussed.

  “I’ll do whatever you need me to,” he said.

  Arno squirmed and scratched his chin nervously. “Man, you can’t just help people cut off parts of their bodies, can you? It’s got to be illegal.”

  “Arno, you were planning on selling two thousand hits of acid at the festival.”

  “That’s different.”

  “How?” I ask.

  “I don’t know. It just is.”

  “Chicken?” Milton taunted.

  “Shove it, idiot-stick.”

  “Great story to tell your new friends at Bucknell,” I suggested.

  Arno lifted his eyebrows. He appeared to mull it over, then leaned forward. “What’re you going to do with it?”

  “My finger?”

  “Yeah.” Suddenly his eyes were bright.

  “You cannot be serious,” Milton muttered.

  “What would you do?” I asked Arno. “Dry it out and wear it on a cord around your neck?”

  “No, flea-brain. I’d put it in a jar with alcohol. Keep it on my desk. I mean, tell me that wouldn’t be the coolest thing ever.”

  Was he serious? I didn’t know what to say. I looked at them both, and it was the craziest thing, but inside me so much emotion suddenly welled up that I had to blink back tears. Milton with his gun and Molotov cocktail, his head practically shaved for court. Arno with his GTO and two thousand hits of acid, his Good & Plenty aftershave still stinking up the place. Maybe we didn’t get to have our last hurrah at Woodstock, but what a summer it had been regardless. Only in a week or so, Arno was going to Bucknell, and Milton was going back to MIT, and I was going . . . Well, I was going to miss them so damn bad that I was almost tempted to cut off a finger right then and there and give them each a piece of it to remember me by.

  In the den, Alan’s back in his old spot in front of the boob tube. Any moment now, Mom and the paterfamilias will return. The paterfamilias will probably have to hang around the house. It would be unseemly to go off and play tennis on the day his nephew is put in the ground. Maybe he’ll go up to his gym in the attic and work out. The amount of stress around here will once again rise to palpable levels. But at least now I’ve gotten a glimpse of why.

  Still, the hunger, the misery of losing Barry, the anxiety of my looming induction physical — it’s almost too much to bear. In the past when I’ve felt like this, there’s always been a way out. But that’s changed since the music festival. I keep thinking about those hippies. The real hippies, living in school buses, eating gruel, and being high all the time. What gets me is the sense that that’s the way they always live. Not just for a few days at a festival. I feel about as far from those feral beings as I am from the generals who are sending young men to die in Vietnam.

  The laugh track from the den ebbs and flows. I ache — for Cousin Barry; for my aunt and uncle; for Brett, the brother I’ve never known; for Robin; for a cheeseburger. Getting intimate with Mr. Water Pipe would be the perfect escape. Maybe take a few reds to get numb. I can barely remember the last time I went this long without getting wrecked. But every time the impulse strikes, so do the words When are you gonna grow up and stop feeling sorry for yourself?

  Fuckin’ Arno.

  The mailman is coming up the walk, his bulky gray canvas satchel slung over his shoulder. Last night — even though I promised myself I wouldn’t write to Robin again until she answered my last letter — I broke down and wrote to her about Barry and how devastated his death has left me. About how tenuous and precious life really is. I wrote about Karl, and how (without going into the gory details) one way or the other I’ll be staying out of the army. About how, less than two months ago, I was almost annoyed that after graduating high school, life suddenly felt so serious, but now I realize that life feels serious because it is serious.

  Envelopes and magazines slide through the front-door mail slot. Bending to pick them up, I wish for a letter from Robin, but at this point any mail for me would go to the address in Bay Shore. A white envelope pokes out from under a House & Garden magazine. The return address says:

  It’s addressed to Mr. Richard Baker. That’s strange. Why would the Bay Shore draft board write to my father? I hold the envelope up to the sunlight, which outlines a card inside. It’s the same exact size and shape as a draft card. It doesn’t make sense. I tear the envelope open and find a pale-yellow draft card with my name and selective service number. It is dated August 18, 1969, and signed by the executive secretary, Norman C. Brown.

  It states that I, Lucas Baker, have been classified 1-Y.

  It doesn’t make sense. How is this possible? I study the card closely, flip it over, flip it back, searching for anything that might reveal it to be a fake. But it’s real.

  It’s fucking real.

  The slices of Wonder Bread tear when I spread Dad’s glutinous natural peanut butter on them. I ravenously stuff hunks of the white-and-brown conglomeration into my mouth and wash it down with milk, barely pausing to chew.

  I’m 1-Y!

  How is this possible?

  I go into the garage, my cheeks bulging with Wonder Bread and peanut butter. When I came home with Alan before, the MG wasn’t in its usual spot. Something about that felt odd, but there were too many other things to focus on. Now I see that not only is the sports car gone, so are the snow tires and the detachable plastic side windows that go on it in cold weather. And so is the brass knock-off hammer for loosening the wire wheel hubs.

  Through the open garage door, I see a car stop at the foot of the driveway. Mom and the paterfamilias get out. Mom nods at me and goes up the walk to the front door. The paterfamilias comes up the driveway, then stops. We both stare at the dark oil-stained patch of concrete where the MG used to sit.

  Memory fragments filter through my mind: Norman C. Brown . . . the heavyset man in the blue blazer . . . “Quite the collector of fine British motoring.” The metal badge on the grille of the red Jaguar that said Bay Shore Sports Car Club. “She’s a beauty, just as you promised.”

  I hold up the yellow draft card for the paterfamilias to see. “You a
re not to say anything to anyone,” he sternly commands. “Not your friends, not a draft counselor. No one. Understand?”

  Don’t say anything to your mother about Hazel.

  Don’t tell anyone at the bank where the coins really come from.

  I’d appreciate it if you didn’t mention Sharon.

  It’s another one of his scams. Only this one’s entirely for my benefit. The change-of-address form, the library card, the DMV form — it was all so that I would fall under the jurisdiction of the Bay Shore draft board, so that Mr. Brown could arrange to have me classified as 1-Y: only required to serve during a national emergency. Dad traded his precious MG for my sorry ass.

  It’s amazing! It’s un-fucking-believable!

  It feels like a harbinger for how it will be from now on. How I’ll never look at Dad the old way again. I’ve blamed him for so much. But what if sometimes there is no one to blame, because no one is at fault? Sometimes things happen that will never truly be resolved or settled, and the best you can do is just get on with it and make your own peace.

  He starts toward the door that leads to the house. There’s a war on the other side of the planet that I have no say in. There’s one much closer that I do.

  “Dad?”

  He stops, probably as unaccustomed to hearing that word come through my lips as I am to saying it.

  “Thank you. I mean it. Really.”

  He quietly appraises me. It’s a familiar gesture. For an instant I’m reminded of being twelve and a goddamn goofball because I’ve just blown a crucial point in a father-and-son doubles match.

  But then he says, “You can quit starving yourself. You won’t need to worry about that physical now.”

  I blink. He’s done despicable things, but he also taught me to ski. Taught me to play tennis. Provided for his family. Built a fallout shelter when he thought it was crucial. Gave me a job. Probably taught me the meaning of work. Saved my butt just when it looked like my ass was grass.

  There’s another picture in a photo album somewhere of him and me dressed in matching dungarees and gray sweatshirts. I must be five years old. We’re sitting on the front step, and his hand is on my shoulder. He’s smiling, but I have a bigger smile.