The Laws of our Fathers kc-4 Read online

  I initially viewed Michael as a hapless turkey, with his slipstick hanging from a plastic holster on his belt. But he eventually sifted his way into our life. I found him uncommonly generous. Michael filled in with Nile when he could, and also helped me keep up a preposterous fiction I'd created for my mother that Sonny and I were living in different apartments. The idea of me cohabiting with a woman was much too much for my mother. In her Old World view, marriage would have been morally required, an impossible thought both because Sonny was not Jewish and because it would represent one more rending of the strong fabric that bound me to her. Instead, I'd had a second phone installed in our apartment which I alone answered when my parents called. With Michael's permission, I gave my mother his address and thumbed through his mail each day for her letters.

  Nonetheless, what drew Sonny and me to Michael most strongly was probably our stomachs. He could cook, a skill we each decidedly lacked. With the wok, Michael was a master. He could tell the temperature of hot oil within a few degrees, by dropping a scallion on the surface and watching it wither. Since it was often my job to give Nile dinner, and Nile always craved Michael's company, the four of us often ate together. I shopped. Michael was the chef. Sonny did the dishes. We pooled our student food stamps for costs and also fished scraps out of the Eddgars' refrigerator. On the weekends, we were frequently joined by Hobie and Lucy. She was a terrific cook herself and would add exotic touches – cilantro and peppers she'd found in the mercados along Mission Street, or watercress which she'd discovered growing wild beside the golf course in Golden Gate Park.

  Michael also began to join us for something we called 'Doobie Hour.' In college, Hobie and I had always ended the day together, passing a joint with dormmates, and we'd more or less kept the custom alive in Damon. In our living room, amid the tattered, used furnishings, we'd all watch an 11:30 p.m. rebroadcast of Walter Cronkite that followed the local news. We smoked or drank wine, making smug remarks in reply to Nixon or Agnew or Melvin Laird when they appeared on the TV screen. Michael would pass on the j, but always seemed to enjoy Hobie's and my late-hour riffs.

  Usually during those first months in California, when the news was over, I became the entertainment, reciting weird little sci-fi fantasies that ventilated my grim obsessions and which I liked to pretend could be turned into movies. There was one about a fakir who somehow lost his ability to walk across hot coals; another about a heartless mercenary from Vietnam who became the ruler of a South Seas nation and met a chilling end when the natives saw through his magic. One night Michael told us how the universe was expanding but might someday reach its limit, contracting like a rubber band. According to Einsteinian theory, this would cause time to run in reverse. I spent a number of nights thereafter spinning out tales about this inverted universe in which effect preceded cause, where people at birth sprang out of their graves like tulips and grew ever younger, where you knew the lessons of life before you'd had the experience, and where you perished while your parents were at the height of passion. Michael was especially amused by my freewheeling improvisations on the principles of physics.

  He spent most of his time at the Miller Damon Applied Research Center – the ARC – which was located in the elephant-toed hills south of the campus. Within its walls, elite scientists conducted experiments in high-energy physics, including many projects sponsored by the Defense Department in hopes of aiding in the war. According to various reports, these included efforts to miniaturize nuclear devices, to perfect laser-guidance systems for mortar shells and bombs and – the innovation that was bruited about most often on campus – the battlefield use of microwaves.

  This would allow the army to stop trying to rout the NLF from their networks of tunnels, dangerous, often lethal duty, loathed by our servicemen. Instead, grunts could just point a portable device and cook the gooks alive. These ghoulish rumors were never denied, and as a result the facility was the target of repeated demonstrations. Marchers stormed up the road and were regularly rebuffed by phalanxes of university security police in helmets and shields.

  'Hey, man,' said Hobie one night during Doobie Hour, 'this stuff about roasting slopes in the tunnels – is that for real?'

  'That's classified,' Michael said immediately, a response which deadened the room. He finally tipped a shoulder. 'I'm doing a little work in there. Just a little. In one of the labs. Everything is need-to-know. But there's a lot of unusual microwave research. You hear stuff.'

  'Evil,' Hobie muttered. 'What about you, dude?' Hobie asked. 'Is your shit classified?'

  'That's classified,' answered Michael, in what passed from him as outrageous humor.

  As guardian of the counterculture, Hobie was always suspicious of straights and he was sure now he was on to Michael. 'You think Eddgar knows he's got a fascist scientist around his boy?' Hobie asked as soon as Michael left. 'Did you hear him? "That's classified." What could he be doing that's classified? You think he's studying the peace process? I'll bet Eddgar isn't hip to it.' Hobie hooted. He ridiculed political involvements and Eddgar therefore presented an especially tempting target. Hobie's father, Gurney Turtle, was on the executive board of the Kindle County NAACP, and throughout high school and the early years of college, I was arm-in-arm with him and Hobie's mother, Loretta, at marches and demonstrations for open housing, for passage of the Civil Rights Act, during those sweet, inspired days when we believed the right laws would bring down every barrier. Hobie made fun of us all. His concern was the inner realm. He read The Tibetan Book of the Dead and Nightwood and the novels of

  Hermann Hesse. He listened to Charles Mingus records, and took incredible quantities and varieties of dope. Hobie's credo was that thought was culture and culture was the vice that contained us all. Anything conventional, any activity people had tried before, whether it was sit-ins or even revolution, was hopeless, a dreary repetition of the limitations of the past. 'Michael's a good head,' I answered.

  Lucy, who disliked no one, spoke up for him too. He was an Aquarius, she said. It was a compliment, though I didn't know why. She'd found a job at a kiosk on Fisherman's Wharf, drawing astrological charts, an activity she viewed with Delphic seriousness and which Hobie, to her face, treated as laughable.

  'He's just quiet,' said Sonny.

  'Quiet?' asked Hobie. 'Sometimes when I'm with him, man, I feel like I'm in a Bergman movie.'

  Much as I wanted to defend Michael, there was no denying the cryptic element. He was a ham operator and had three or four radios, big clunky boxes, in his apartment. This activity was what had first led him to speculate about wave motion and energy, the unseen realm of the furthest spectrum of light. When he was ten, Michael's mother had died. He never spoke about that, but I often imagined him as a boy in his small Idaho town, lonely, half-orphaned, sitting up at night, spinning the dials and listening to the jits and jots of Morse code, the static-scratched voices in other languages. Typically, he was only a listener; he sent no messages of his own. He said he had tried it once or twice, but he was never quick enough with the snappy lingo of the airwaves. On occasion when I was searching for Nile, I'd knock on Michael' s door and, getting no response, let myself in, only to find Michael sitting there with his headset, mystically absorbed by these unseen lives and the flickers of sound they emitted from almost as far off as heaven.

  On our side of the Bay, Friday, November 14, 1969 was warm and clear. The National Student Mobilization Committee had scheduled local demonstrations across the country, hoping to spark interest in the massive marches set to take place the next day in San Francisco and Washington, DC. My own interest in stopping the war was growing increasingly personal and desperate. Throughout the fall, I'd endured a series of dismal phone calls from home in which my mother in her heavy accent read the latest bad news from my draft board. First my application for conscientious-objector status was denied; then I was ordered to report for a pre-induction physical. In response, I talked about leaving the country, and my mother, two thousand miles away, wept. Grab
bing the phone, my father would order me to cease discussing such insane plans. The two of us always ended up screaming.

  It's probably useless trying to explain the passions of one era to another. I can say now, as a sign of mature detachment and openness to reason, that my views about Vietnam might even have been wrong. But I do not mean it. They were formed then with the hardness of diamonds and not even the surface can really be scratched. I carried few images of Vietnam with me. 1 did not see its overgrown humid beauty, its mountain verdure, or the casual depravity of drugged-out troops fragging lieutenants or having debased encounters with former peasant girls, now sexual zombies in the meaty trading places of the cities. For me it was the vaguer, close-up view of the nightly news: sweating grunts streaked by camouflage paint, tensely stalking among the oversized leaves of the tropical Asian forests; huts in flames and black-garbed peasant mothers running with their bald-headed babies as strafing raised dust along the earth. The wrong of Vietnam was not on the ground but in the air – in principle, far more than in particulars. I envisioned a black heart, a jungle enshrouded in permanent night, where conscience and reason did not even make the skittering light of tracers in the air. I did not deceive myself: the rage of that era was not simply about whose prediction of the future of Southeast Asia was accurate, or the issue of an indigenous people's right to control their nation, or even the debate about whether Ho Chi Minh was more noble than the U S-sponsored thugs. In my own mind, in my own bones, the war protest represented an entire generation in combat against the rigid views of our parents, especially about the roles of men -about the need for males to be warriors, patriots, conformists, unblinking followers of aging generals and other elders. The furious issue was what would happen to all of us, parents and children, if the laws of our fathers were forgotten.

  On November 14, about five thousand people surged up the dry road from campus, boiling dust on our way to the Applied Research Center. We larked in the warm air, flaunting banners and chanting slogans. 'One. Two. Three. Four. We don't want this fucking war.' 'Withdraw, Nixon, like your father should have.' 'Drop acid, not bombs.' Although she was burdened by her classes, Sonny was with me. Women's liberation notwithstanding, the war had a special gender inequality, since only men were being drafted. The watchword of the day was 'Girls say yes to boys who say no.' I always felt the moment I'd won Sonny the prior spring was when I'd confided that I was serious about going to Canada, a step she'd pledged to support.

  A lawsuit had forced the university to permit us onto the grounds of the ARC, and its iron gates, tipped in spears of gold, were thrown open. A cast of thousands, we marched on the winding asphalt road past the precise lawns and hedges, up to a wide concrete plaza that fronted the Research Center. The building, ordinarily unseen except from a distance, loomed there like Oz. It was a futurist design with large fluted pillars of sand-colored stucco and vast windows protected from the sun by a cantilevered overhang. Between the building and the crowd, the Damon Security Corps positioned themselves in three even rows. In the middle ground, a single square fountain issued a segmented spray that piddled on brainlessly, wavering in an occasional light wind. The cops wore white reflective patrol belts angled across their chests, the better to recognize each other in a melee, and riot helmets whose Plexiglas visors were raised like the lids on welders' masks.

  Long batons were holstered at their sides, and a large plastic shield rested at the feet of each officer, like an obedient dog.

  The turnout was far larger than any of us on the Mobilization Committee had foreseen. The weather, a welcome relief from a recent chilly spell, made it a good day to cut classes. I rarely admitted to myself the extent to which demonstrating had become sport for people my age. A generation that had lived secondhand through the television set seemed to find a special thrill in the live spectacle. But the political climate was also provocative. In the aftermath of the Moratorium Day in October, in which campuses and many businesses around the country had shut down, Richard Nixon had delivered a defiant speech announcing that a 'silent majority' of Americans supported his refusal to withdraw from Vietnam. The ugliness of the war Nixon wanted to maintain had been underscored by reports this week of a young lieutenant, William Laws Calley, detained at Fort Benning on suspicion of having slaughtered five hundred Vietnamese villagers.

  As music played, the crowd assembled on the ARC's vast lawn. Sonny and I lay toward the rear on a large beach towel. Behind us, people threw Frisbees for their dogs, while the usual contingent from the National Organization for Marijuana Legalization lofted smoke upwind where the telltale aroma breathed down on the security forces, who were powerless to abandon their posts.

  Near 3:30, the speeches began. The Moratorium demonstrations were intended to show the breadth of opposition to the war, and representatives of all the participating organizations briefly spoke: church groups, faculty committees, union representatives, businessmen against the war, women's liberationists, browns and blacks, students of all stripes, from rads to McCloskey Republicans. In this pantheon, One Hundred Flowers had been included, notwithstanding objections that their agenda was not peace. As a makeshift stage, the speakers had mounted a sign for the ARC, a large concrete block perhaps six feet high, and near the end of the afternoon Loyell Eddgar appeared there. The various entities that comprised One Hundred Flowers had identified themselves with red arm sashes decorated with Chinese characters. As Eddgar was announced, a number of them forced themselves through the crowd toward the front. About sixty members of the Progressive Labor Party went by close to where Sonny and I were sitting. They were all in their khakis, and rushed forward, heads bowed, hands on the shoulders of the person ahead, the tails of their arm sashes turned at the same precise angle. They chanted: Mao is red Red's Supreme Mao will smash the war machine.

  I had never heard Eddgar speak before and my impression at first was that I was experiencing some trick of perspective, seeing from a distance someone I'd known only at close range. Here was this lean figure dressed simply in a button-down shirt and chinos that might have been left over from his college years. His thick, dark hair was lustrous with sweat, and the tendons and muscles in his neck and jaw stood out as he spoke. But gradually I realized he was in fact someone else. Standing on the concrete block, projecting his voice through a bullhorn which amplified both his breathing and the click of the machine going on and off, Eddgar was transformed by revolutionary passion. In the spirit of the Cultural Revolution, he called for the destruction of all elites.

  'We must make this university a place that improves the world rather than destroys it. We do not need to study how to cook our enemies. We must study how to feed the poor, and help them feed themselves. We must stop educating the children of the ruling class, to the exclusion of the black, the brown, the red and yellow people who come into our classrooms more often to clean the desks than to sit behind them as students.'

  Led by One Hundred Flowers members who were still pushing to the front, the crowd began greeting Eddgar's well-timed pauses with choruses of 'Right on!'

  'We must take the power to make the decisions about our lives from people who care only about theirs," Eddgar cried. 'We must, as Mao taught, "Make trouble, fail; make trouble again, fail again… till their doom." '

  Suddenly, somewhere near the front, a woman cried out – a shocking, terrified sound. Something was happening. We all knew it. 'This isn't good,' Sonny said and pulled me to my feet. Around us, everyone was rising.

  Eddgar, who had been silent for a moment, screamed another quotation into the bullhorn: ' "It is good we are attacked by the enemy, since it proves we have drawn a clear line of demarcation between the enemy and ourselves." '

  I saw the first rock in the air then, traveling a long arc toward the enormous panes of the front windows of the building. The closed environment, the riot-clothed coppers, the university's sullen, entrenched battlefield atmosphere agitated me enough that an abandoned, heart-sprung piece of me probably soared in flight with
that stone. But the thinking part was already in agony. The window seemed to drop out at once. A waterfall of glass crashed down on the cops, who reacted immediately. They claimed afterwards there'd been some further attack, but I know I saw batons swinging then. There was intense confusion, high-pitched screaming, fierce buffeting as people fled.

  From the rear, where Sonny and I were, the deterioration near the stage had a remote quality for a moment. We could see the crowd peeling back in rows twenty or thirty deep as the line of cops fell upon them. Then suddenly, the ripples of panicked movement were nearby, then around us – molten faces and piercing voices and hair flying about. The earth jumped with the pounding of the mob. Some people held their ground momentarily to throw rocks and cans, but Sonny and I ran. As I reached the road back to the gates, a young woman stumbled to the asphalt right next to me and I helped her up. There was an open gash across her forehead, amid a throbbing welt. Blood ran on her face and was already crusted in her hair. She wiped at it tentatively and cried aloud when she saw her hand, then she ran along, clearly afraid of being struck again. You could feel from the surging, wild movement of the crowd that the cops were still coming, still swinging.

  For a moment, as we all rushed toward the gates, the panic seemed to have receded. I had lost Sonny somewhere and I stood on the tarred drive, yelling her name, answered with the cries of a dozen people like me attempting to find someone from whom they'd been separated. Then, without warning, another hysterical chorus rose up. With the second volley, I recognized the screaming sound of the canisters in the air. The little smoky trails, innocuous-appearing at a distance, dissolved as they rose from the ground, but the students knew enough to take flight with a new, maddened intensity. At the bottom of the hill, I could see people climbing the iron fence, and the spikes rocking at other points as the crowd massed against it. Overhead, the birds who had tasted the tear gas shrieked, flying crazy circles, mad with pain.