Summer of '69 Page 6

  I miss those fifteen minutes with Chris each afternoon. He was funny, and real, and not caught up in typical middle-class striving for material success. A lot of well-educated, supposedly hip cats talk carpe diem, but Chris is the only person I know who really lives it.

  But now he’s over there, just another working-class “sucka” risking his life in a senseless war while most owners’ sons like me don’t have to. Damn straight I feel turmoil about that. You’d have to have a heart of stone not to be stricken by the unfairness of it.

  When I get home from work, the mail is lying on the floor below the front-door mail slot. The mailman usually comes in the early afternoon, and now it’s close to dinnertime. Those letters and magazines have been left ungathered for hours.

  Did Mom leave her room today?

  Even though Robin’s only been gone for four days, I’m disappointed that there’s no perfumed lavender envelope. According to the post office, it’ll take about two weeks for the change of address to go into effect, so it’s not like a letter from her would have gone to Bay Shore already.

  On my desk is the reading list Charles gave me. I need to start on that because I’m going to have to write an essay for my conscientious objector application.

  But I’d much rather write to Robin.

  Dear Robin,

  How’s life above the Arctic Circle? Do they have electricity where you are? Have they heard of television? Here in the US, they’ve developed something called a rocket and in a couple of weeks some brave nutjobs are going to take off in one. Guess where they think they’re going? The moon! They know what the moon is up there on the frozen tundra, don’t they? It’s that big round thing that comes out at night in the sky. If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, look for the thing Canadians howl at after dark. . . .

  By the time I finish the letter, it’s the dinner hour and I’m hungry. I leave my room and pass the den, where Alan’s in his usual spot. He’s taken off his shoes and socks, and with his eyes firmly fixed on the TV screen, he’s bent his leg around so that he can sniff his toes. I’ve learned to take his idiosyncrasies in stride, but as a kid, I was often furious with him. Incensed that he would pick his nose and eat it in public. That he would scratch himself in private places and then sniff his fingers. That he would wander into our baseball or touch football games with no sense that he was interfering.

  And that he wouldn’t listen.

  The paterfamilias gave him chores, but he’d lose interest and then I’d have to do his chores as well as mine. The paterfamilias would punish him for not doing his chores by sending him to his room, but unless someone stood guard, Alan would wait a little while and then go back to the boob tube. When the paterfamilias removed the round plastic channel dial, Alan found some pliers and used them to turn the small metal post that changed the channels. When the paterfamilias took away the pliers, Alan searched until he found them. When the paterfamilias hid the pliers where Alan couldn’t find them, my brother lay down on the kitchen floor and made us step over him.

  When we were smaller, the paterfamilias would spank us both, but Alan got the worst of it. The paterfamilias would come home from work angry and wallop him for the merest transgression. As if spanking were a way for the paterfamilias to get out his frustrations with work and life, and Alan was the easiest target. The paterfamilias used to spank us with his hand until the day he hurt his wrist and couldn’t play tennis for a few weeks. Then he started to use a yellow plastic Wiffle bat until I found it in his closet and threw it down the storm sewer. But it wasn’t long before I wished I hadn’t. Having lost the Wiffle bat, Dad turned next to a wooden racquetball paddle.

  Ultimately, the spankings were meaningless. Alan would cry, and then stop crying and go back to the TV. Eventually he gave up lying on the kitchen floor. If he couldn’t change the channel to the station he wanted, he’d watch whatever station was on.

  The kitchen is filled with the scent of warming food in the oven. Two torn Swanson fried chicken TV dinner boxes lie on the counter, while Mom sits at the kitchen table in a housedress, reading a gardening book. Gardening is her chief hobby. Spring, summer, and fall, our house is surrounded by colorful, carefully curated flower beds. (Does she surround our house with beautiful gardens to mask the ugliness inside?) She looks up at me with a wan expression. No makeup, and her hair is flat and unbrushed.

  “When were you going to tell me about Goddard?” she asks.

  She must have seen the rejection letter on my desk. I’m surprised it took so long; it’s been sitting there for nearly a week. I tell her not to worry because Charles the draft counselor is helping me apply for conscientious objector status.

  Her eyebrows dip. “Didn’t Milton’s brother, Rudy, try to be a conscientious objector?”

  I know what she’s thinking: If super-smart piano prodigy Rudy tried the CO route and got turned down, what chance does nonprodigy Goddard College reject Lucas have?

  “If conscientious objector doesn’t work, Charles says we have time to explore other options.”

  “Such as?”

  Prison, Canada . . . Nothing I want to lay on her until we see where the CO thing goes. “Mom, I’ll figure it out. I promise.”

  When she squeezes her eyes closed, then lowers her face into her hands, I’m caught off guard. “What is it, Mom?”

  A long moment passes. She lifts her head and has the look of someone who might have had tears in her eyes if they had any tears left. She shakes her head as if snapping herself out of something. “Nothing. It was just a thought.”

  “About?”

  She focuses, looks directly at me. “That I can’t lose you, too.”

  For an instant I assume she’s referring to Dad. Then it hits me. Shit. Shit! From deep in the cave of forgetfulness comes a glimpse of what she must have been thinking. When I was around two and a half, a little brother named Brett was born. I wish I could remember him, but I can’t. He died of pneumonia after six weeks. What I do remember, or think I remember, is the long period of gray stillness that followed at home. Alan was born a year and a half later.

  And now Mom’s facing the possibility of losing another son. The merest hint of which must be unbearable to her.

  Way to go, numbnuts.

  The tinny canned laughter coming from the TV in the den feels like it’s aimed at me. I step closer. “Mom, I’m not going to Vietnam. I promise.”

  The oven pings. The TV dinners are done. Even though Mom is probably average weight or less, she wearily heaves herself up like someone who weighs a lot more. She puts a TV dinner on Alan’s yellow Superman tray with a glass of milk, then gestures for me to take it to him.

  In the den, Alan’s no longer sniffing his toes. As usual, he’s sitting too close to the TV screen, but this evening I don’t have the will to tell him to move back. I put the tray on the floor beside him. He removes the false-teeth bite plate and picks up a drumstick.

  Back in the kitchen, the other TV dinner rests on the kitchen table. Mom stands by the sliding glass doors, gazing out. Orange light bathes the backyard, illuminating the weeping willows, throwing shadows over the lawn and beds of orange lilies, white gardenias, and red and yellow marigolds that line the patio.

  She grew up during the Depression, excelled academically, and was fortunate to get a college scholarship when there were few to go around. Graduated summa cum laude, got a job as an editorial assistant at Time magazine, hoping to someday be a journalist and writer. There she met the paterfamilias, who sold advertising space for the magazine. They married, had me, and moved to the suburbs. Mom gave up her career to be a mother and live the postwar American dream.

  And now? She has a husband who cheats on her, one son she’s buried, another who’s not right in the head, and a third who, if the United States government has its way, could soon end up being just one more American casualty traded for the lives of ten Vietcong.

  I seat myself at the kitchen table, feel the moist heat rise to my face from the warm TV
dinner nestled in its compartmentalized tinfoil tray.

  “How does the application for conscientious objector work?” Mom asks.

  Between bites of chicken, mashed potatoes, and mixed vegetables, I explain that I have to write an essay justifying my antiwar beliefs. If the draft board accepts it, I’ll then have to go in person for an interview.

  “An essay?” Mom repeats with a grimace. The word is a charged one around here, and not only because I insisted on submitting my epic poem–college essay to Goddard without allowing anyone to read it. Mom and I had a deal regarding the other four colleges she wanted me to apply to: she’d fill in the applications; all I’d have to do was write the essays. But as the deadlines approached, the essays remained unwritten until she finally had no choice but to write them herself.

  (If only I’d taken those applications more seriously. If only I had a college to go to now. Even a school hundreds of miles from Middlebury would have meant I could see Robin two or three times a month.)

  Mom returns to the table and sits. “I wish you’d continued with Dr. Hill.”

  She’s changed the subject to another highly charged topic. By junior year of high school, I was most definitely in high school.

  Stoned at school.

  Stoned at home.

  Stoned wherever the buffalo roam.

  I’d get high at lunchtime or drop acid and trip through my afternoon classes. Sensing that something was amiss, Mom insisted that I start seeing Dr. Hill, a psychiatrist. At his office, the good doctor would ask how I felt about Alan. How I felt about my parents. About myself. (Didn’t he understand that the whole purpose of taking drugs was not to feel?) I usually went into his office stoned.

  “Mom, what’s the point?”

  “Didn’t you feel it was helping?” she asks.

  “Helping you, maybe.”

  She stiffens. “Why do you say that?”

  “Seriously, Mom? Wasn’t the point of sending me to a shrink to make you feel better? Like you were doing something instead of nothing?”

  Mom’s face scrunches and she takes a deep breath. I feel a rebuttal coming and wipe my lips with the napkin. “I’m not blaming you. You had your hands full with Alan. And it’s not like you’ve gotten a lot of help from you-know-who.”

  “We’re not talking about him,” Mom says. “We’re talking about you and Dr. Hill.”

  “You don’t think it’s all mixed together? Come on; we both know Dad has no interest in this family. We’re nothing but a burden to him.”

  After a moment’s stillness, Mom leans forward and speaks in a measured tone. “That is not true.”

  How can she defend him? Does she know about the blonde I saw in the MG a little more than a week ago? I’m certain she knows about some of the other women. Why would she defend him? I find it nearly incomprehensible. Should I tell her about his latest dalliance? Something holds me back. Is it that I can’t imagine how telling her about this one would make a difference if the others didn’t? Is it because this summer things between my parents already feel more strained than ever and I’m hesitant to make it worse?

  Or is something else stopping me?

  Work’s over. In the parking lot, a pair of feet jut out from around the side of Odysseus. Whoa. I know I had a toke on the way to work this morning, but I think I would have noticed if I’d run over someone.

  I round the microbus. It’s Tinsley, sitting on the pavement in the shade cast by Odysseus. The bottoms of her bare feet are nearly black. Her legs spread wide under a long purple tie-dyed skirt gathered to her knees.

  Uncertainty ripples through me. What’s she doing here? Where’s Barry? “Hi.” I try to sound nonchalant while recollecting the awkward sensation of her naked breast squashed against my palm behind the junior high last week.

  Tinsley doesn’t respond. She’s concentrating on three bronze coins that she’s just tossed onto the asphalt. The coins have square holes at their centers. With her fountain pen, she draws two dashes in a notebook and scribbles the number five.

  “Whatcha doing?” I ask.

  “Throwing the I Ching. An ancient form of divination.”

  “Uh, come again?”

  “A way to figure things out and gain insight.” She pats the asphalt beside her.

  I sit with my back against Odysseus’s door and light a cigarette. What’s Tinsley trying to gain insight about here in the parking lot? Whether or not she should do something insane and sexual again? Hopefully not here where my fellow workers can observe. I could play it cool and simply wait and see, but it annoys me that she has the ability to make me uneasy. “So, uh, what’s up?”

  Once again the coins clink on the pavement. “Barry told me where you work.”

  Right. And it’s not like the factory parking lot is overflowing with psychedelically painted VW microbuses. But she still hasn’t explained what she’s doing here.

  My fellow workers stare as they pass on the way to their cars, no doubt thinking that only a couple of weirdo hippies like us would choose to sit in a parking lot amid smatterings of broken bottles, cigarette butts, and spots of ground-in chewing gum. Do they still think I’m a spy for my father? I wonder. This is my third year at the junk-mail factory. I show up on time, do my job and anything else that’s asked of me, and never leave early. If they knew anything about the counterculture, they’d understand that I’m probably the last person who’d turn on them.

  Tinsley scribbles in the notebook. Snap! Snap! Snap! In the parking lot of the warehouse next door a couple of kids set off firecrackers left over from the Fourth of July. Four nights ago, I took Alan up to Bayville to Adventure Park, a rinky-dink amusement center with half a dozen kiddie rides. From there we went to the crescent-shaped beach where every fifty yards bonfires burned and people were shooting off rockets and firecrackers. Alan likes to watch fireworks almost as much as he likes going on rides, but the loud bangs scare him if we get too close, so we sat on a low white concrete wall some distance away. When a cherry bomb went off nearby, he took my hand in his.

  On the radio on the way home, we heard the DJ talking about Brian Jones, who’d been discovered dead in his swimming pool the day before.

  “That sucks,” I muttered to myself.

  “Who’s that?” Alan asked.

  “Brian Jones? Ever heard of the Rolling Stones?”

  He shook his head.

  I don’t know what threw me more: that Alan had no idea who Mick Jagger and crew were, or that someone as talented and famous as Brian Jones would so carelessly throw it all away when so many guys in Nam were spending each day desperately trying to stay alive.

  “Think I’m strange?” Tinsley asks, bringing me back from my musings.

  “Because you’re sitting in a parking lot using an ancient way of figuring things out?”

  “That and other things.”

  Is she referring to the incident at the junior high? Are we finally going to address the elephant in the parking lot? But before I can say Yeah, that thing with your breast seemed a bit unusual, something stops me. Instead I go with “Jim Morrison said people are strange —”

  “When you’re a stranger.” Tinsley finishes the line.

  Our eyes meet, and there’s that connection again. Brautigan and Morrison — the high priests of our tribe. Either could have written the line She does what she pleases with whomever pleases her.

  Tinsley tosses the coins again. I think about Robin. It’s been eleven days since she left, the longest we’ve ever been apart. I’ve written to her every day. Sometimes twice. I’ve always enjoyed jotting down little snippets of poetry and whatnot, but this summer, for the first time, writing has become a salve on the stinging gash of separation. Only so far there’s been no reply from my ladylove. (The change of address hasn’t gone into effect yet, because yesterday the new issue of Rolling Stone arrived with Jim Morrison — speak of the devil — on the cover.) Is it the fault of the Royal Molasses Canada Post that no missive from Robin has yet arrived? Is C
amp Juliette so deep in the sticks that the mail has to be flown in and out? I’ve read that in situations like that, the mail can only go out once a week.

  I ache for a letter from her, reassurance that things are okay. The memory of the morning she departed replays constantly in my head, and not in a good way. The startled look on her face when I unexpectedly showed up. Her eyes filling with tears as she rolled up the window. I was so overcome with sadness at that moment that I wasn’t processing much. But something about that morning has begun to prey on my thoughts. She didn’t look pleased when I showed up. Didn’t wave as she left. Didn’t even look back.

  Tinsley gathers the coins and puts them in a small drawstring sack. She plucks the cigarette from my fingers and takes a drag. “Ever been to the Planting Fields?”

  “Never heard of them.”

  “You’ll dig it.” She gets to her feet and reaches down to help me up.

  I hesitate before giving her my hand. “Does Barry know you’re here?”

  “I do as I please.” She wiggles her fingers at me. “Now, come along, young man.”

  So hip,

  So cool,

  So what?

  We ride in Tinsley’s green Triumph Spitfire. There are some among my cohort who would balk at the materialism inherent in this current craze for British two-seater convertible sports cars. But to me the stylistic design and aerodynamic lines of Triumphs and Jaguars, Austin-Healeys and MGs, and of course the car James Bond made famous, the Aston Martin DB5 (though I’ve never seen one in real life), transcend materialism. They are works of art. And while Tinsley may go barefoot and dress like a hippie chick, it’s pretty obvious that she’s what Barry would call a postcard hippie, who’s not willing to completely abandon the good life. To have a car like this, one suspects she has a PhD, as in Pop has Dough.

  The Spitfire’s top is down, the wind in our faces, and the new group Crosby, Stills & Nash on the tape deck. Their harmonies are mind-blowing. And guess what? They’re scheduled to play next month at the music festival. Cousin Barry says that if he goes up to Zach’s farm near Ottawa, they’ll drive down and we’ll meet there. My cousin’s musical tastes lean toward blues and hard rock, so he’s keen to see the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, the Who, Johnny Winter, and Hendrix (and so am I).