Prologue

I’m not sure when the thought first occurred to me, but there was a first time—a thought so sudden and complete that there was no recollection of how things were before it. I could sit for hours and watch the pine tree in our front yard list to one side then straighten as if it was a miracle—the smell of dirt falling through my fingers—it wasn’t dirt anymore, it was something else.

It was too hot to sleep. I lay in my boxer shorts and listened. Even the mockingbirds sounded tired. Then it started up again, rattling the casing of the machine next door. A year ago, I moved into the second story addition that my father built. It was still unfinished and the walls were bare studs, and by the time the sun came up over the mountain the heat inside would gather like a greenhouse. Even downstairs we didn’t have air conditioning. My father said that the seasons were nature’s way of reminding us of the power of the universe; my mother insisted that we join the swim club up the street, almost before I could walk I learned how to swim.

The day Kennedy was killed I was swimming. She found me in the pool. It was my first memory of being Irish, everyone sitting around watching TV later and saying the Irish had a curse on them and how the good die young and my dad saying that that was all nonsense. Then she and some of the neighbors started crying.

Sometime later, he told me about his grandfather who came over in a boat from Ireland. He owned a pub in County Donegal, just across from the Catholic church. The pub is still standing and so is the church, but ever since the civil war, it’s been cut in half. “The border runs right through it.” With the north swearing allegiance to the queen, and the south, a free and independent republic. And then he made a joke, saying that if you sat in the pews on one side you’d receive your rewards in heaven, and if you sat on the other, you’d inherit the earth.

That’s the way he tells it, my great-grandfather’s pub and the Catholic church that’s been cut in half, making a joke on the day that Kennedy died. Indirectly, this led to my first true dilemma.

I had a habit of daydreaming at school, and no matter how many times I was reprimanded I couldn’t rid myself of it. I didn’t deliberately ignore my lessons—in some ways I had a right to stare out the window, I got it from my father, who got it from his father. But my fourth-grade teacher didn’t see it that way.

On the day the hippies marched through Berkeley burning draft cards, he was so upset, he lectured the class with his finger up at the ceiling.

“It’s un-American,” he stated, shaking it a few more times.

And this got me to thinking, looking out at the big maple planted in the courtyard outside.
Was I American?
“Un-American!” he repeated, almost shouting it this time. Then he turned to me tapping his palm until I paid attention.

So I raised my hand and asked him:

“If I was born in this country, how come we still call ourselves Irish?”

With the National Guard and Martial law and the whole country up in flames, he thought I was being a smart- ass—but I was serious, how could I be two things at once?

I was an American. But that’s not all I was, and I wasn’t going to say it was, even if he gave me detention and I had to miss a day of shooting hoops with Bobby Council on the playground.

He wasn’t right, I knew that. It wasn’t un-American to be Irish. I was in a conundrum over it all week. So the next Sunday, I ask Father Mahone, as he was shaking everyone’s hand at the front door after mass.

“You’re as Irish as Irish is,” he told me, putting his arm around my shoulder. “I baptized you myself.” Then he lowered his voice as if he were telling me a secret. “Baptism happens only once, the month after you’re born, son.”

This clarified nothing.

But you’d have better luck with big stones than to argue with Father Mahone. I knew for a fact that it didn’t happen just once, the month after you’re born. Every year the hills are baptized when the rains come and turn them green again.

The day I lost Jenny Reinhold’s garland beneath the maypole it felt like that, with the mustard blooming as far as the eye could see, and the boys going one way, and the girls going the other, weaving ribbons into a rainbow. She didn’t have a problem with being American, she knew it like she’d always known it; she was Jewish. And afterward, lying on my back staring up with the maypole poking the sky, she took it off and handed it to me and told me never to lose it.

“If you lose it, the flowers won’t bloom.”

She made me promise.

I stuck it in a cigar box and hid it in the crotch of a pear tree. In the month the grass turned, on the day they took the maypole down, I looked everywhere for that tree. But like the color green in summer, like Jenny Reinhold’s garland, I couldn’t find it anywhere.

Even now, as I lay in my boxer-shorts listening to the mockingbirds, I can still recall that vow, and one day I will find it.

But not today.

It was early. Morning was just coming up over the mountain, and already it was hot, burnishing hot. If it weren’t for the swim club, I wouldn’t have made it.

Like every day that summer, like every summer from the time I could remember, I’d immerse myself in the water, like a fish, like an amoeba, groping.

 

1

When I first met Tbone Brown, fair and square I had him pinned in a half-nelson with his face in the dirt, but he still wouldn’t cry uncle. We became friends after that, almost like brothers. He was being reborn, just like me, only with him, it wasn’t water, it was with fire.

The following year he came down with rubella fever and had to have an operation that left him with only one good ear. After that, it didn’t matter how hot it was, he wouldn’t go near the Aquatics swim club.

Indirectly, this led to his true calling.

“Look at Django, he only has two fingers,” he told me, just before he quit his paper route to devote all his time to playing guitar.

And like all the great musicians, he slept in till noon. If it wasn’t for Gracie Newsome, he wouldn’t have considered going to the club that day.

Right after doing my chores, I got a call from Johnny Martin, and he swore on a stack of bibles that she’d be there. When I called Tbone, telling him, he jumped out of bed, bolted down a bowl of Cheerios and five minutes later hopped on the Flyer—a wide-tired girl’s bike, with a double spring seat.

Pulling off the road and onto a path, he took the shortcut across the old farmlands. At one time pears grew the size of fists and plumbs and grapes in bushels, trucked down to the train stop at Hookston Station, where the Southern Pacific would pick them up and haul them off to market.

Then came the last harvest and the houses and the GI bill and the baby boom. Now the trees stood barren and ravens gathered in the branch tops, bickering. One summer, I shot one right through the eye. It just sat there without moving like a rusted weathervane, then dropped like a stone. When I found it, the BB went clean through its head and blood was coming out the other side. I wished then that I could take it back.

Tbone never wished he could take anything back. Coming to the ditch behind the dead end sign, he lit up the smoke he ripped off from his mother’s purse and pitched his lips.

“Fucking toads,” he said out loud, tossing the butt before it was half done.

Every time I saw him he was singing Suzie Q insisting there was a future in playing rock and roll just because Creedence Clearwater used to go to his high school. Now he pounded out the bass line against the chain guard, picking up speed as he hit the incline, and no one was going to tell him any different, not even Fran.

She didn’t care about the Parliaments, as long as it wasn’t her last one, but if you ever called her Lillian she could put her Irish into it. The time she caught us screaming in his good ear, she came right out of her skin. Sean said it was hormones, but I think she was just terrified that one day he would end up as deaf as a thumbtack. Every summer she took him in for a new set of earplugs, it was the only way Doc McCutchins would let him go near the water.

Right when he jumped the culvert, it was in his face—a scrap of tin above a wall of pyracantha. He paused in front of the sign, bouncing on the seat mouthing the words like he’d never seen them before “Private Drive Pool Members Only­.”

He hated that sign. What enraged him even more was the thought that he was one of them. Luciferous, unhinged, there was no turning back. It wasn’t Gracie Newsome in a bikini that gripped him like an undertow; it was something else, like a second skin or an old pair of Levies or the heat of a bonfire.

***~~***

Johnny Martin could swim both lengths of the pool, taking one breath at the turn and one breath on the way back. Tbone couldn’t swim a day to save his life, about the only thing they had in common was a crush on Gracie. But lately she’d been coming to the club with her boyfriend in his bug, so the truth was, neither of them stood a chance.

Wheeling the Flyer past a row of cars grilling in the heat, he let go of the handlebars, stretched out his arms, and let off a yahoo.

“Baby I love you, Suzie Q.”

He shoved the kickstand to ground and leered over at the VW.

Then he remembered Fran accusing him of stealing her last cigarette, then the scalding when she overheard him calling her Lillian, and all the rest—Gracie Newsome, his deaf ear, the club, and something else too. He couldn’t put his finger on it, and that bothered him more than anything.

Unless you counted the night Mary Birnbaum stuck her hand down his pants and pulled out his pecker without unzipping his jeans, he was still a virgin. Down the steps, shaded by lurching elms, his unruly mop falling over his bony shoulders, he felt like a windblown skirt.

It was the poster of Marilyn that hung over his brother’s bed, opposite the one of James Dean standing against a brick wall, and then, just as suddenly, he thought of the other two, Joplin and Hendrix. Every night before going to sleep, Sean would light a candle and say something like a prayer.

What’s the fixation with death? Tbone pondered, thinking of his brother.

To him, death was as far away as Jupiter. But Sean was different. Lately, he seemed to ruminate on it like old people—just one more thing that didn’t make sense. Tbone was growing tired of things that didn’t make sense.

Martin was preparing his serve when he saw him walk in and give his name to the girl with the black lipstick at the front desk.

“We’re over here,” he called out, without taking his eyes off the table.

“I’m going in,” he yelled back over his shoulder.

I watched him cross the lawn with a scowl on his face.

Sloughing his sandals, he unbuttoned his denims, jammed in his earplugs, and dove.

“He’s in a mood,” I said, but Martin wasn’t paying attention.

“Four, three,” he replied, as the ball ripped over the net.

There was no way to stop that.

***~~***

Tbone couldn’t put his finger on it, not that afternoon, but he wasn’t alone. In 1969, everyone was pissed off about something—United Fruit Company, Vietnam, Bobby Hutton—sometimes it was nothing at all—a traffic stop at the wrong corner and entire neighborhoods went up like kindling. Even in Pleasant Hill, under the knell of wind chimes, you could feel the tension like just before a muscle cramp.

Everyone broke the rules. Some of us didn’t get caught, others stood up and howled. Tbone broke the rules more times than he could count and so did Johnny Martin. I couldn’t put my finger on it either, none of us could, but we didn’t break the rules just to break them, we had our reasons.

The reason I let Jacques Bloxom keep his boots in my locker was my sister. Not that I blame her, but I hardly knew him. All winter long he went around school barefoot kicking a soccer ball at lunchtime—even after they split up—so when he asked to borrow it, I thought he was just trying to impress her. Why else would he ask to keep an old pair of army boots in my locker? At the time it made perfect sense to me.

Perhaps I should have known better—they weren’t his boots, they were his brother’s.

Carrie told me I should have my head examined. She made it clear: he had a history.

“People’s Park, it’s in all the papers,” she warned, wagging her finger.

But I never read the newspaper.

We were kicking back at the club, waiting for Tbone to show up, hoping he had a joint left over from the night before. So what if Bloxom spent all summer selling the Barb on Telegraph Avenue, I still would have let him keep his boots in my locker. I didn’t listen to her advice, but I should have known better, he had a history.

Every morning he drove through the tunnel with his brother, over to Max Scherr’s on Oregon Street, to pick up a stack of Berkeley Barbs. They never made more than chump change, barely enough for a half a lid or a burrito from Mamacita’s, but it was a job. Besides, it gave him a chance to be with his brother—and there weren’t that many days left. He’d already received his notice in the mail.

If they had ten or fifteen dollars after paying for gas, they bought them outright, if not, they would offer up the Nikon as collateral. Jacques would tie his hair back, fill both sides of his saddlebag and head over to Shattuck by the YMCA. If the corner was taken, he’d make his way down the sidewalk, past Woolworths, and onto the campus. He could get busted on university property, and just after spring break, on account of the park, the pigs were everywhere, but everyone wanted a copy of the Barb, and he knew he could sell out in less than an hour.

Afterward, they met up at Marcella’s pad to smoke out. Then they all took a walk through the alley and hung out with the freaks making music on washboards and empty five-gallon buckets. Jacques was welcome everywhere with his hair, lopping over his forehead like corn shucks, and Jean knew just about everyone on the street that day.

“A monsoon’s coming,” a guy in dreadlocks sang out, pounding on a High Voltage box with two ends of a broomstick. He stopped in mid-rhythm and looked up. “Tomorrow, man, it is coming down.”

Someone else handed him a joint as big as a cigar and told him it was from Cuba.

“Che’s gold,” he said.

“Viva la Gente,” Jacques replied, taking a toke.

“Viva la Gente,” they all conferred.

Then they got so stoned they forgot all about Vietnam, or the week before, when the notice came, ordering his brother to show up at the Oakland Induction Center in thirty days.

The next morning they left early and beat the traffic, and everyone met up on the corner of Dwight and Telegraph in a vacant lot full of garbage and old tires.

Jacques had never worked so hard in all his life, sweat from his armpits and blisters, the smell of dirt, like ligaments reaching up from the earth. At the end of the day he was tired, but it felt good, unloading the sod truck, looking over at his brother smiling, like there would be a tomorrow; like he could live his whole life sleeping under the trees, watching Marcella, half naked, rolling a hula hoop around and around, and the white stars he painted on everyone’s forehead like the chosen ones, and he was good at painting teardrops too, and he painted one on Marcella’s breast, and when she pointed the other one at him saying it wasn’t fair leaving this one undone, they fell down and did it right there on the ground like a Greek mystery.

It was taking root now, with flowers and new shrubs, and it looked like a park, and it was the people’s, and he was one of them, and it felt good, like family, like he’d finally done something.

But all that changed with the gas. Everything changed when the gas came down.

That was the day his brother got drafted. And just after he disappeared behind the big glass doors at the Oakland Induction Center, Jacques sat on the sidewalk wondering if he would ever see him again, when it fell from the sky. He couldn’t fight it. That was like fighting ghosts.

They were going to spend the day, just the two of them, maybe stop in at Moe’s, say goodbye to some friends, buy takeout and eat it at the park. Then everything began to spin, like a balloon with a hole in it. The fence and the police in gas masks and people on the street screaming, “take back the park, take back the park.” And someone else said the Blue Meanies were using buckshot, and someone got blown away, and they were beating everyone with clubs, and all they could do was run as fast as th-+y could to keep from getting trampled.

Then his brother was gone through the big glass doors, and a darkness descended and he forgot where he was, sitting on the sidewalk. If it weren’t for Marcella dragging him back that night, he would have been busted. There was a curfew and the cops roved in gangs like they were hunting Cong in the jungle.

The next day, he was back on the sidewalk again, staring at his shoes, when they swept him up like a riptide, screaming, “take it back, take it back.” He couldn’t see a thing except for arms and shoulders, and he looked up over the heads and into the sky and wondered if he would ever see him again when he heard it: the whack and whir.

It was flying so close to the ground he thought it would crash, diving just over the top of the Campanile with a trail of smoke gushing from its side. But it didn’t crash. Then someone shouted, “it’s gas, it’s gas,” and his lungs felt like they were on fire, and suddenly he threw up on the guy next to him, all over his peacoat and football helmet with the button ears, just in case he ended up in the front line.

They were being pushed back now, ground into the pavement, and all he could see were boots and an empty beer bottle wedged in the storm drain and a crumpled-up bag from McDonald’s with greasy ketchup stains, or maybe it was blood.

He couldn’t find Marcella; he could barely stand up. Somehow he made it down to Ashby and held out his thumb. It never took more than a few minutes to get a ride on Ashby, not in those days, but during the riots it was different, hardly anyone stopped. When he finally got to Pleasant Hill, he walked the last three miles with his eyes swollen, as much from the gas as missing his brother. Then he slept for two days.

The first thing he did when he woke up was write the letter. It poured out of him as if in a dream, and when he finished, he sat reading it over and over—the games they used to play, shooting the carbine he cut out from a barn wood plank with a coping saw, killing Nazis with the best throaty gun noises in the neighborhood. And later, throwing rocks and running from the pigs, remember? They couldn’t do anything about it in their riot gear and plastic face shields. That was just a game too.

But it wasn’t a game anymore.

He put it in an envelope, found out the 101st was stationed somewhere in Tennessee and even paid the postage, but right in front of the mailbox, he stopped. He didn’t know why; he just couldn’t do it.

It was the shock he felt every morning as if snowmelt were thrown in his face, longing for the bygone days, and when he saw it on the rag rack at Moes—the last edition of the Berkeley Barb with the headlines that read: Max the Oinker, in bold print, and just beneath it, the shocking disclosure­: Final Edition—he had to send that too, it was the end of an era, Max was closing the doors.

He’s playing the martyr Jacques thought. Max the Pig, it was more self-pity than a coup de tat—all of his writers had quit to start up a new paper called The Tribe, and Max decided there would be no more Berkeley Barb. Bloxom couldn’t be sure how much of it was true, but he was sure his brother would want to read all about it. He put it all in a manila envelope and set it on the table by his bed and turned off the light.

Everything is coming to an end…even the Barb.

“Everything except the war,” he said aloud, looking out the window at the tree fort they slept in every summer. One of the rails had broken off, but it was still solid after all these years, and I know it hurt. He could feel it beating, but it hurt.

***~~***

Boredom was like having your face peeled off and stuck in a jar. But it created bonds like hoof glue.

Born in a bog is how my dad once put it.

He was a nuclear engineer and split atoms for the government, and he would sit at the kitchen table for hours hovering over a yellow legal pad, doing equations. When I was younger, I used to imagine him going off to work in a pinstriped hat with a hatchet, until he told me he wasn’t that kind of engineer.

My mother was a nurse. One day the neighbor’s kid got a prune pit stuck in his throat, and she reached around his back with both hands and tugged on his stomach so hard that it popped right out of his mouth.

Johnny Martin was there. Ever since then, he wanted to be a doctor. For a while, he used to go around at the swim club with a ping pong ball practicing the Heimlich maneuver on everyone.

“I don’t want to end up selling insurance like my dad,” he would say. Usually whenever he talked about his dad he called him a toad, even though I know he loved his parents.

I loved my parents too, but they were still toads. All of them were toads, even Fran.

And none of us were going to end up like them, ever.

***~~***

We hadn’t finished the game, when he came down the steps right after Tbone, looking like he could kill something.

“Your name, sir?” the girl with the black lips at the front desk asked.

He grunted, ignoring the question. He wasn’t there for a cool dip, he was on a mission.

Mikie Rawlins was a breaststroker, college, maybe even the Olympics, there were big plans for his son. But the night before, he got so drunk I thought he was going to drive into a telephone pole. And when he found him lying on the front lawn, heaving his guts out, ranting about Mary Birnbaum in the back seat, and Tbone hooting when she flashed us with no panties on, he was supposed to be in training.

The way I saw it, he was lucky to be alive. After the concert, Tbone drove the car home, even though he didn’t have his license yet. He should have been thankful. But he didn’t see it that way.

They’re hooligans, looking out over the pool for Tbone. “Hey, Hey I’m a Monkey,” the lyrics grated across the roof of his mouth like gravel.

First it was the hair, then the music, and now this, filching whiskey from his own car!

He stared over at Tbone thrashing the water.

You call that swimming? he fumed.

The problem was, the Brown brothers lived right next door, and that meant Fran.

***~~***

I didn’t have any of his dad’s whiskey, and neither did Johnny Martin. I’m not making excuses, I was in the car, but it wasn’t our fault that Mikie got drunk and disoriented, right after the muff in his face, and ended up sitting on the kitchen chair like a lump of Jell-O, with his dad screaming like an over-boiled hotdog. We had ulterior motives, I admit it, but narking someone out is crossing the line. Mikie knew it, everybody knows it, he should have kept his mouth shut.

He couldn’t just order him out of the pool, and demand an explanation—not Tbone—he needed proof. Surveying the beach towels, the flip-flops, the crass-colored umbrellas strewn across the dandelions, he found his mark­—a pair of huaraches. He hated those slabs of cowhide, glued onto tires, worn night and day, ever since that exchange program to Michoacan.

He spread his towel and lay down, and I could see him fliping through the pages of Life magazine.

“He put down right beside Tbone,” I said, returning the volley.

Tbone’s Swiss Army rucksack, from his periphery, was just poking out from under his towel and he looped the strap around his toe and shuffled it beneath his magazine.

“19 to 20, game point,” Martin said, then put a forward spin on it, keeping it low to the net.

“What’s he doing now?” I asked, returning it.

“Lying there like a codfish,” he said, barely taking his eyes from the table.

I glanced over, but he wasn’t just lying there.

Piece by piece, probing with the spine—an adult comic book, an earplug case, a hairbrush, and a pair of worn weightlifter gloves with the fingers ripped off.

“Shit…he’s busted,” I said, slamming the ball out of play.

We headed for the pool.

Martin came to the surface with a smooth angular stroke, shoving Tbone toward the shallow end.

“You swim like a dead rat,” he said.

“What?” Tbone asked.

“YOU SWIM LIKE A DEAD RAT!” He shouted this time.

“Bullshit, a dead rat swims like this.” Tbone spread flat, face down, with bubbles coming from the corners of his mouth. I pushed off the bottom and slapped him on the head, nodding toward his towel. At the edge of the pool, he stood up and pulled out his earplugs.

“Hey, are you looking through my backpack?” He asked, point blank.

***~~***

He would have crucified him if he found it, but Tbone was so pissed off, he didn’t give a shit. Besides, he had it hid in the bottom of his earplug case. As it was, they squared off shouting at one another.

When Rawlins threatened to call the cops, Tbone told him to go right ahead. Then the lifeguard came over, and he told him to fuck off. That’s when Gracie left. He could see her ass, just like I could, still dripping from the pool and tightly wrapped in banana bottoms. When her boyfriend reached over and offered her a towel, his eyes blazed. Then Rawlins hung up the pay phone out front, and the girl in the black lips at the desk looked over at us. When he came walking back, Tbone stuck out his lips and they started in again.

A few minutes later, they showed up at the front gate, and he slipped his earplugs back in. One stayed behind with his thumbs in his belt, eyeing the gathering crowd. The other started in with the usual opener.

“What seems to be the trouble?”

“Huh?” Tbone looked up, wide-eyed.

“He’s got a bad ear,” I explained, trying to be helpful.

The cop shot me a shut up or I’ll kick your ass look.

“Let me take these out,” he said loudly, leaving the case open, long enough for them to get a look inside.

“What’s in the bag?” the cop asked, then pulled out the gloves, smelled the gum, turned over the hairbrush, and flipped through the comic book with raised eyebrows.

He shot a Cheshire grin back at me. He didn’t give a shit. The cop motioned toward the case, still in his hand.

“Can’t swim without them,” he shrugged, pointing to his ear before handing it over.

The cop snapped it open, looked down at the plugs, then snapped it shut. “We’ll have to call your parents,” he said.

That’s when Lillian cut in, right out of nowhere.

“That won’t be necessary,” she said, with one hand on her hip.

Rawlins took a step back, rocking on his heels. Tbone looked down at the ground.

“It appears Mr. Rawlins has violated the privacy of your son, Mrs. Brown,” the cop said.

The square-jawed one with the pinball eyes stepped up and returned the backpack. He knew the Browns; he was the one who busted Sean with an ounce less than a year ago.

“If you would like to file a complaint, ma’am…”

“Is anything missing?” she asked.

“No ma’am, I do not believe…”

She turned and looked him full in the face, “I am asking my son,” she said, then handed it back to Tbone.

“No,” he replied, sheepishly.

“What were you looking for, John?” she asked Mr. Rawlins.

“Like I told the police, I believe your son gave my boy some marijuana.”

“And what makes you think that?”

“Last night, he said he gave him a puff.”

“Is that true Michael?”

“I didn’t give him anything,” he replied.

“We will talk about this later,” she said, firmly.

Tbone knew what that meant. “Yes mom,” he said, looking back at his feet.

“As for this,” she continued, as much to the cops as to Mr. Rawlins, “we are neighbors, and the Bill of Rights applies to a teenager the same as everyone else. How would it be, if on my way in here, I opened your car door and rifled through the mail on your front seat?”

“Lillian, that’s just it, they were rifling through my…”

She cut him short, looking over the top of her half moons, “That’s not what I heard, Jack.”

She didn’t have to take it any further. She cast a warm smile, nodded her head to the cops and walked away. And that was that. No one messed with Fran, not even the fuzz. She was just about the coolest mom on the planet, even if she was a toad.

***~~***

Everyone has an angel, but even the benevolent ones demand something in return. And when they cease to be amused they can be merciless. I felt sorry for his brother, but when the draft board finally withdrew his deferment, his time was up.

Jacques had a right to be pissed off, I would have been if it was me. My sister hung up on him anyway. I couldn’t blame her either, it was noxious: the gas, Vietnam, the pigs, especially that pig Max, paying his writers minimum wage. After that, he didn’t want anything to do with the Barb or even Berkeley, but it was the only way he could get his Nikon back. What was she supposed to do about it? It was his camera. She just hung up.

It had been a month since he’d seen Marcella, and after rolling a joint on the couch and blowing facefuls of weed at one other for an hour, he managed to talk her into going over to Scherr’s house and picking it up for him.

“I’m OK with that,” she said, her eyes peering through the shanks like it was the jungle. “I don’t think he’s a pig. When he started it, he was processing rolls in his kitchen sink. He can do what he wants, it’s a free country.” She sashayed around the corner in a tea gown and leotard, turning back with a parade wave as she crossed Grove Park.

Later, they met up at Moe’s Bookstore, browsing the stacks and giggling through the comic strips. When she held up a copy of the Austin Rag and turned to The Fabulous Freak Brothers, starting in on a stand up routine right in the aisle, Jacques framed her perfectly with his Nikon and snapped one off.

***~~***

Nixon must have thought he was doing the right thing in Vietnam, he just didn’t know what he was up against.

Jean Bloxom didn’t know what he was up against, either. He came out of basic training like a left threaded screw. When he got to Nam his whole world turned upside down, and Jacques didn’t hear a word from him all summer. Where was he supposed to send it, general delivery, the Army?

The rag rack at Moe’s Bookstore had publications from every underground newspaper in print, even articles from the College Press Service. Jacques read all he could about the flap over The Tribe, but what he was really looking for was news of the 101^st Airborne. That’s where he found the article by the Quakers, in one of the GI rags, called The Ally.

The American Friend’s of Service put out a call for all men in uniform to lay down their guns and start singing the psalms. He bought that issue and read it a dozen times and never went back to Berkeley for the rest of the summer.

Then one day it occurred to him, he had a story to tell, as good as anyone’s. Digging through his mother’s closet, he pulled out the old Olympia and spent all day pecking at the keys. When he finished, he sent it in. He didn’t expect The Ally to print it, or the twenty five dollar check they sent a month later. But there it was, sitting on the rag rack at Moe’s, right alongside Kaleidoscope and The Seed—his first published work. And after two months of laying low, he felt his wings again. The first thing he did was call my sister and brag about it.

***~~***

The day after Tbone almost got busted, Fran offered to take us out to lunch at The Bottomless Bowl. I think she was trying to make up for us getting harassed by the cops, and as we passed through the Caldecott Tunnel, she kept saying stuff like, “It’s right in our own backyard.”

Driving down Ashby, the National Guard trucks parked along the road; it was a state of siege. Those were her exact words, as we passed the big white spires on top of the Claremont Hotel.

“A state of siege,” she repeated.

A half mile down from the campus, we crossed Telegraph, looking for a place to park. Barricades stood on the boulevard. Several soldiers in fatigues lounged in the shade, smoking and shooting the shit. They looked bored. One was leaning against a big green truck with a white star on the door, and stared back with the strap off his helmet dangling in his face. We flashed him the peace sign from the rear window. He smiled, flashing it back; he didn’t look like a pig.

“It’s fucking criminal,” Fran said, more to herself than to us. I’d never heard her use the F word before; she didn’t sound pissed off, just sad.

The day after the riots, street people came from all over the Bay and tried to take it back, living in tents on the sidewalk.

The only Governor in US history to gas his own people from a helicopter, she explained, as we walked by a guy standing on a milk crate.

We The People, he recited. It sounded grand.

A girl sat cross-legged strumming on a dulcimer, someone else plucked on a jews-harp, the month before, James Rector got a hole blown in his stomach. He died the next day in Herrick Hospital, now there were flowers everywhere.

At the Bottomless Bowl, the soup came in pails and no one ever finished. Tbone was doing his best, trying to get to it, just to see if there was one. He finally gave up, leaned back, and let off a distended belch. After a short pause, everyone started laughing, even Fran. Everyone except Sean. Preoccupied in a frown, he barely lifted his spoon. He was younger than Tbone by a year, but he was the first one of us to start smoking weed, and by now his hair was halfway down his back. I could always tell when he had something on his mind. He would reach around and tug on his ponytail and say nothing. He was conspiring, no doubt about it.

I wiped my chin on a coarsely stitched napkin cut from a flour sack and looked up into Fran’s eyes beaming over the top of her half moons. “Shall we go and meet the people?” she proposed.

Telegraph Avenue was a parade, awash with barefoot freaks, lovers holding hands, boots in bell bottoms, bandanas and leather, silver and beads. A guy in a top hat walked down the middle of the street juggling bananas; a girl wearing a fur coat with nothing underneath, flashed everyone the peace sign down the sidewalk sitting in a red wagon. In the distance the low moan of conch shell sounded, and over the tops of heads, bunches of flowers flew into the air.

We made our way across the street and came to a fence where a couple of college girls stood, beckoning us from the other side. Behind the wire at People’s Park, they looked like prisoners of war, except for the big white daisies cradled in their arms. They handed us each one through the chinks. Patchouli, umbilical and suffuse aroused a memory, old and familiar, like the blessed virgin with the sound of bells on her lips.

“Hey nonnonny, there’s a daisy for you.” Through the dangle of her shirt, heaving up a chorus of the earth, she became the other Mary. Molten pollen flushed through my veins.

Suddenly, she looked up, time slowed almost to a stop, and my whole body went numb. She was looking right at him, and when I turned, he hovered above me with an M-16 across his chest, scouring the horizon like a dead tree. She pushed a flower toward him nearly touching his cheek, but he didn’t move.

Fran said it was the power of love when I told her, and I wondered if that was the reason why she brought us, so that one day, when the time came, we could make up our own minds. I stuck a flower behind each ear, and we loped across the avenue toward Moe’s.

***~~***

From the day of the riots, Jean Bloxom’s luck had run out. And his angels were merciless, not only was he drafted but he was sidled up with 101^st Airborne—the one division that was always in the shit. After that, it was like some weird ghost sat on his shoulder, forcing him to stand witness to an atrocity he could not prevent.

Except for boot camp, he never jumped out of a plane. He never volunteered for a mission. He rarely even fired his rifle, and then it was into the bush without taking aim. He wasn’t a coward, he just wanted to survive. Above all, he wanted to hold onto something that was real.

In the months that followed, the only way he could manage that was to keep his head down and smoke as much hooch as he could get his hands on. Whenever he had a chance, he’d hop on a bicycle and peddle down the highway. Over one stretch of road, houses with thatched roofs, women in straw hats knee-high in the rice paddies, waving as he passed. It was the strangest thing he’d ever seen, paradise in the middle of purgatory.

One morning, he woke up from a dream reciting the Lord’s Prayer. He hadn’t done that since Sunday school and figured it must be divine intervention. It didn’t last long. He still said it a hundred times a day, but it was fading, and when the feeling was gone, there was nothing left to hold onto. One minute, the endless roar of the 155mm howitzers making him puke, and the next a silence that lasted for weeks, so complete, all he could hear was the insects crawling through the jungle.

***~~***

The Ally was a GI rag. No one read it except soldiers and priests. But it circulated to over two thousand readers, and one of them wrote back offering his support. Jacques couldn’t figure out how a guy with a printing press in Denver could help with anything, but it was still a rush, knowing someone that far away had read it.

But the boon didn’t last long, and for a while, he didn’t do much of anything except lay around in a funk he never thought possible, until one day he stood up and smashed his fist through the drywall and shouted, “Fuck this shit.”

It was that afternoon that he finally sent the letter. He addressed it: Pfc Jean Bloxom, 101^st Airborne, 506^th Infantry Division, PO Box: Hell.

***~~***

Agent Burk didn’t have much interest in the GI rags, but it wasn’t an accident that a copy of The Ally crossed his desk. Every morning over coffee, sometimes right up until lunchtime, he would sit in his cubicle at the San Francisco Regional office and read the underground press. It was his job. He gleaned more information from the Berkeley Barb than he did from the San Francisco Chronicle; it gave him a sense of style that made him an asset to the FBI. Other agents had managed to hoodwink the pinkos and print in the Daily Worker or the black liberation rags like Right On, but no agent yet had gotten so much as a sentence into the Barb. Burk intended to be the first.

He went to Dartmouth. It wasn’t his ambition to work intelligence, he was always a physical kind of guy, even played rugby for while until he blew out his knee. But the year he graduated, 1956, a new operation called COINTELPRO was just getting started, and that’s where they wanted him. After his basic training, including a short course with the CIA at The Farm, he was one of the select few assigned to the San Francisco office. Just after that, the directive came from Hoover himself. Almost every day he wrote anonymous missives with just enough truth to seem credible, and just enough lie to sow dissent. If they were good enough, they’d end up in print.

Disinformation was his mantra. Lately, he’d been writing to the parents of several students seen protesting the recruitment booths at Richmond High, and they had to have a familial tang and use hip lingo like Off the pig if he wanted to stir up trouble.

For the most part, that’s what he did for a living, stir up trouble. He was good at it, one of the best in COINTELLPRO, San Francisco regional, and he knew it.

***~~***

I once had my mouth washed out with soap. I hadn’t been in my parent’s bathroom since. Now I’m looking in the mirror. There aren’t as many as on Johnny Martin’s chin, but there are more than the last time I looked. My father’s double-edged razor is in a whiskey jar, beside a bar of old spice and a barber’s brush, and I’m going to do it.

Twisting the handle, peering inside, it’s paper thin and says safety razor on both sides. When I fill the sink, it’s the water, slapping against my ears that does it. Suddenly, I remember, standing on the blocks, three weeks before, my back is arched touching my toes, my body taught like a coiled spring.

I’m the last man on the blocks, and I’m waiting.

I can hear my mother above the crowd, “You can do it, Tulle, you can do it.” Someone else screams my name, and from the corner of my eye, in the lane next to me, I see him jump. It’s an awkward dive, and he hits the water, hard.

We lost to Miramonte once before, and we are losing now. Percy is their fastest swimmer, but he was first off the blocks, today. They’ve stacked their relay, I’m counting on it. I don’t look up. My heart is beating louder than my mother’s screams coming from the stands.

“You can do it, you can do it,” I hear her, and I know I can.

Miller is flagging, two strokes left. When his hand reaches the wall, I’m gone like an unchained greyhound.

Cutting into the water, angling down, with just enough glide and a swift dolphin kick, one stoke then another, pulling at it like I’m falling.

One, two, one, two, stroke, stroke, even, regular, ripping through, like a machine. Then I fold my legs, slapping them back, tucking my knees, pushing off. Just below the surface, a short kick, then a stroke, then another, down, up, down, up, no breath, no thought, another, then another, then I slam into the wall.

When I raise my head, the sidelines erupt. I’ve done it.

Martin reaches down and yanks me out of the water, and I brush against the blocks, scrapping my thigh. I’m still dripping, and my mother’s in tears, and she gives me a hug and then she screams, but not like the ones coming from the stands.

“Tulle, you’re bleeding!” she cries. A thick runnel of red slides down my leg, diluted and turning orange as it hits the pool. She wraps it, twisting the ends, telling me to hold on until we get in the car. I look down at the blood soaking through the towel.

On the way back with ten stitches, wondering why—a moment of glory and then this. It was then that I made up my mind.

“I’m not going to swim anymore,” I tell her, surprising myself.

Staring at the road ahead in silence, she finally asks, “Are you sure?”

I was sure.

“OK, I hear you, but you should think it over…you could get a scholarship.”

I wasn’t going to think it over, I’d made up my mind, and in one stroke leaving the track of the razor behind I’d done it. Now I was thinking about other things.

The face in the mirror looked too much like a baby’s. “I should do something about that,” I said aloud, running my hand over my cheeks, more surprised than anything. For years everything seemed to stay just the same, and now everything was changing so fast. How could I wake up and be so completely different than I was the day before? How was it possible that I was looking in the mirror only yesterday and it wasn’t the same person I’m looking at now? How long would this continue, I wondered, how many different mes would pop up out of nowhere as if they’d always been me?

***~~***

Sean never made excuses for the fact that he was different. More than any of us, he was living on the edge. But it wasn’t just hormones, he was diagnosed with congenital diabetes when he was eleven.

After a brief training session with the nurse, he learned how to inject insulin, and from then on, he had a sense of himself.

Maybe that explained it.

None of us expected to live past thirty. But for us, it came with the apocalypse and the air raid sirens. For him, the specter had a face. My theory was he was compensating for the possibility that his life might come up short, and he had to pack it in as tight as he could.

Or maybe he was just a forward thinker.

One way or another after hearing about the concert on KPFK, he was determined to get to Yasgur’s farm. Hendricks, The Who, Big Brother & The Holding Company—Woodstock was the event of the century.

His angel was high maintenance, and there was never a moment when she wasn’t plotting his course to nowhere fast, but he always knew where he was headed.

The day at People’s Park, right after we got our daisies and went into Moe’s, he slipped off to the Berkeley Public Library and posted his number on the bulletin boards.

A few days later he got a call from a guy going to Colorado. That was halfway, and Sean figured with the forty-five bucks he’d saved, he could hitchhike the remaining 1,400 miles.

A week after that, he packed a bag full of peanut butter sandwiches, met the guy at a coffee shop down the street from the UC Theater and hit the road. He didn’t say a word to his parents. He didn’t even tell Tbone.

When he got to Colorado, the guy dropped him off in a small town called Larkspur, and he spent the first night in a barn at one end of a barren field with only a thin leather jacket, a sweater, and a pile of hay to stop the frost. It made shooting insulin real difficult.

The next morning, he walked the two miles into town, got a few looks from the cowpokes at the counter, bought a coffee to get some phone change, and called home so his toads wouldn’t think he’d been kidnapped. If he were my kid, I’d have given him options, but not Fran. She told him to find the Western Union, pick up the money she wired, and get his ass on a bus headed west, that night.

“Have you taken your insulin?” she screamed into the phone. When he ignored her, she threatened to smash the Gibson into pieces. If he conceded, he’d be giving up on a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and he had no intention of doing that. Fran upped the ante and told him she would dump his record collection in the Goodwill bin. And she was serious. He told her he’d think about it, then hung up.

From what he told me, he spent most of the day thinking about it, sitting on the side of the road with his thumb out, turning half blue from the chill factor, making his teeth chatter. He set up his Argus rangefinder on a fence post, pushed the self-timer and stood in the middle of the highway, snapping off a postcard so we would have something to remember him by. It was important, he said, to document such moments. “Like Dylan Thomas, raging against the dying light.”

Several rednecks slowed down to make derogatory remarks, shouting “Fucking queer, as if I was worse than garbage.”

When the two greaseballs from the café pulled over and sat in their truck staring at him with the windows rolled up, he felt the wrath. One nodded, and the other pointed and cracked a grin. Then they drove off.

“And that was it,” he said. His angels relinquished.

A few hours later he was on the Greyhound back to Utah.

There was one benefit, he noted. He took the long way home and passed through the Rockies with a layover in Aspen. At the station, he got wind of a jazz festival playing at a club around the corner. Through the front door, he watched a keyboard and a stand-up bass play a duet—he’d never seen anyone fly like that.

“That’s my story, and I’m sticking with it.” He was still making us laugh, a few days later, telling it, even though he was on restriction for half a year.

***~~***

Accounts differ from person to person; my sister’s was different than Bloxom’s, even the newspapers got it wrong. The FBI files, what little I received, years after, only fueled speculation. Much of what follows is from my own memory, as fallible as it is. And Dr. Green? Dr. Green had an ax to grind. The strange thing is, all of them tell the truth. It makes it all the more difficult to know where accountability lies.

Bloxom had issues, to be sure, some were beyond his control. Blaming him just didn’t seem right.

But Agent Burk was sworn to uphold the law, and that’s different. To him people weren’t human beings, they were either right or wrong. And I know that isn’t right. Maybe all FBI agents are that way, I can’t see how else he could have done what he did.

Tbone summed it up one day: “When you spend your whole life following the rules, that’s what comes out of the oven.”

***~~***

If he didn’t want to end up in Des Moines, parking in a lot next to a cornfield, he followed the rules to the letter, and every scrap that crossed his desk had his initials on it. But he had ambition. He’d only been a G-man for six years when they made him a Field Supervisor, and that was unheard of.

Not long after that, the Memorandum circulated—agents were ordered to scrutinize the anarchist press and look for opportunities, to confuse and disrupt New Left activities with misinformation.

One of his favorite rags was Orpheus, run by that paranoid freak, Tom Forcade. He hated Forcade. Publishing out of a school bus, until he moved to New York and formed a syndicate, spreading his psychotic bile like a plague.

After reading it, he set the copy of the East Village Other in a pile marked for Airtel, and narrowed his eyes into slits.

It wasn’t a hard rule, the SAC frowned on irregularity—even coming into work early was discouraged, but Burk managed to sneak in once or twice a week. This enabled him to finish off before lunch and have the whole afternoon to devote to his cases. Every scrap that crossed his desk, he did it all, but he lived for his cases.

The morning wore on interminably, and by the time he got to the GI rags he was losing interest. Bloxom’s article only caught his attention because of the Quakers—The American Friend’s of Service were high on his list.

Was this a new paper? he thought, dismally, scrutinizing all twelve pages of the Ally. But when he came to it, he felt something. It had heart, he admitted, coming from a kid brother.

Bloxom had talent, as misguided as it was, and Burk had an eye for talent. He put it on top of the pile labeled personal. It didn’t warrant an Airtel, but it wasn’t worthless. Later he would file it away in the big tin box he kept under his desk.

It was well after noon when he took a break, eating a sandwich and barely pausing for a cigarette before he opened the folder on Dr. Green.

Sitting in the Safeway parking lot for over a month? He shook his head, leafing through the skimpy file. Nothing. Patients with long hair and beads, traipsing in and out like windblown leaves—every doctor in Berkeley had that clientele.

But Dr. Green was on the street that day, he knew that—swabbing eyes, hosing off the gas with water spritzers, passing out aspirin—there were witnesses. One of them was a reliable source. And Burk trusted his sources. He had him on the corner, standing up late in the afternoon, addressing the crowd around him, calling Reagan a fascist. Then he offered his services free of charge to anyone with the courage to fight back.

Was he just a doctor, venting his Socratic spleen, or was there something more? Burk looked through the file again. The militant manner in which he gave his “sermon,” according to the report, and what was worse was, they were digging it.

There was nothing illegal about it, but Burk put in a request to open a file anyway. There were others that day, some were inciting violence with chants like off the pig. But he was a doctor.

For Burk, the pressure was on, his reputation was on the line. He was nowhere, and he knew it, but that’s when he was at his best, when the pressure was on.

Scanning over his notes, the background check was clean, he’d graduated from the University of San Francisco with an outstanding record. The DMV had nothing, a few unpaid parking tickets. He had a call out to a friend, on the board of directors at Herrick Hospital. It was almost 5 O’clock, when the phone rang.

“This is Burk,” he growled, thinking it was Duke checking out for the day.

But it wasn’t Duke.

His friend at Herrick knew Dr. Green. At least he knew the stories, with his secretary in the parking lot at Spengers, down by the wharf.

“…flaunting it,” as he put it.

Dr. Green was a married man with house payments. Finally, Burk had something that he could work with. As soon as he got back to the office, he sent off the Airtel.

The next day, the director himself sent one back. “…an upstanding pillar of society, the medical profession, will not be perverted by liberal militants.”

It wasn’t exactly consent—but that’s how things worked at the bureau. Coming from the director, it bolstered his confidence, and within a week Duke had a photograph.

There was a bounce in his step that was missing the day before. After a quick run over to the Chinese market to get a coffee, he settled down, tapping on his Smith-Corona.

Dear Patients of Dr. Green,

I am keeping this letter short and to the point: that mother fucker ripped me off. He told me I would get a deferment for sure, all I needed was the paperwork. But he strung me out, man. I never got the deferment, but I got the bill. Three hundred dollars for a pile of useless paper. So next time I had my appointment, I took my camera. See for yourself, that’s his secretary, fucking sexist pig. The revolution will not be aided by this mother fucker. Down with the Pig. Long live the revolution.

Sincerely,

Dr. Green’s favorite patient.

Down with the Pig, might be overdoing it, he paused in a frown, looking over his work. Then he threw it in the trash can.

Even with a photograph, even with a letter, he was nowhere.

Addresses, god damn it, he almost lost it and shouted.

Without them, he was wasting his time. He couldn’t just go up and flash his badge, not in Berkeley. Not with his secretary, Melissa. She was a firecracker, arrested on the steps of Sproul Hall, joined a committee to free Angela Davis, she would never give up an address, no way, he frowned, stuffing her file back together.

There was always old school, a black bagger. Duke would love that. But that was too much of a risk. Not that summer, he scoffed, not after James, hole-in-the-gut, Rector, he would be drubbed and pillared if something went wrong. He had to be more creative.

Desks in broken rows extended across the linoleum all the way to the windows looking down on Market Street. He pushed a filing cart out of the way, stood upright, and surveyed his options.

The most respected agents were the ones who could get what they wanted without sucking up. What Duke wanted most was to be out in the field. Instead, he had his heels up with his arms folded and the brim of his hat creasing his nose. When Burk kicked his chair and it didn’t move, he leaned in and told him,

“Get a sound man by this afternoon.”

***~~***

One time, when I was in grade school, my father picked up the television, hauled it out on to the patio, and dashed it on the flagstones. He called it the boob tube. That’s what they were arguing about.

After that, he read to us almost every night, sitting in the big orange chair in the living room. Kipling, Treasure Island, Uncle Remus.

I don’t know what they were arguing about this time, but I could hear it coming up through the stairwell.

Later that night, Carrie came in and sat on my bed. The IRA was all over the news lately, and the petrol bombs exploding in the streets of Belfast reminded us of the TV imploding in the backyard, and from then on, every time they had an argument we called it “the Troubles.”

I spent the last part of the summer at my grandmother’s in Yuba City on account of the Troubles. Carrie went to my other Grandma’s in Alameda

“They better sort it out before school starts,” she said, as she got on the Greyhound bus. “This is bullshit.” She didn’t even give me a hug like she usually did. Then she was gone.

Before I left, I met Johnny Martin at the dead end sign at the bottom of my street.

“When I get back, I’m done with it,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“I’m done with it,” I repeated, unable to put it any other way.

“I know what you mean,” he said.

Feeding my grandma’s chickens, the sweltering heat, bored brainless, and watching I Love Lucy reruns, if it weren’t for Darrell Johnson, my summer would have been a hole.

His dad owned five acres just across the road, and they had stables and a roping corral. Darrel could hog tie a calf in twelve seconds flat, holding his hands up with the butt end of the rope still in his mouth and the buzzer going off.

I got to ride Dago, almost every day, after cleaning the stalls. The first quarter horse I was ever on, throwing a lariat over the fence post. His dad had an issue with liability, so I was never allowed in the ring with a real cow.

***~~***

The day I got back, Tbone came over on the Flyer and told me straight out that I had missed a milestone in history. Then he held up the album.

“Check it out,” he boasted, putting down the needle. “Soul Sacrifice.”

Santana was an entirely different sound and burned.

After we listened to both sides, he said, “And that ain’t the half of it.” Then he suggested we go to the mall.

As far as I was concerned the mall was over-rated, supposedly a great hangout where you could pick-up chicks, but I never once saw anyone do it. Every once in a while a gander of pretty girls walked by, but they just ignored us.

“Come on, I want to show you something,” he said.

We wound through the aisles at Macy’s, coming to the record bins. He pulled one out and held it up like he found a ten dollar bill in the clothes dryer.

“Hear this yet?” he asked.

On the cover was a picture of a burning blimp.

He knew I hadn’t, so I didn’t say anything. Then he looked down the aisle, turned his back to me, and stuffed it up his shirt.

“Can you see it?” he whispered, over his shoulder.

“What are you doing?” I hissed.

“Can you see it?” he asked again.

“No.”

“Stay right behind me.”

We made our way to the men’s clothing, pretending to be interested in a pair of jeans.

“Anyone following us?” he shot back under his breath.

I pulled up to the rack, pushing around a hanger, looking out over the store. A guy across the aisle was posing in front of a mirror, straightening out the collar of a new blazer.

“Just some guy trying on a coat.”

We ended up in the shoe department staring at the Converse high tops.

“Twelve bucks,” I announced, “they’re ten everywhere else.”

“He still behind us?”

I looked over his shoulder.

Wheeling our bikes through Gregory Gardens, I expressed my concern. “I don’t know, T…I mean stealing.”

“They have so much money, every time you go into that store they’re ripping you off.”

The high tops were a rip-off, but that wasn’t the same thing as outright stealing.

“It cost eight dollars, you have eight dollars?” he asked.

“No.”

“You want to hear it don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Forget about it, soon as I play this, it won’t matter where it came from.”

“Still…”

“If it’s going to make you feel guilty every time you hear it, don’t listen.”

“I didn’t say that.”

I wasn’t sure how I felt about stealing from a store. I guess it depended on what store. I knew he would never do it to a person, even Tbone’s muse frowned on that. But for now, she seemed to delight in the Zeppelin album, almost as much as his ingenuity.

Sean was lying on his bed staring up at the ceiling, and as soon as we came in, he started laughing. Tbone worked his fingernail around the cellophane, letting it drop to the floor in one piece.

“Hey Sean, Dazed and Confused,” he said, holding it up.

He laughed even harder, grabbing his knees and rolling around on the mattress. It was an awesome album, but there wasn’t anything particularly funny about it. Then he fell off the bed and began waving his hand in front of his face. Tbone raised his eyebrows at me, then looked back at his brother.

“Wow…” he said, looking at his fingers, one after the other, “…trails.”

***~~***

Everything changed that year, almost overnight. Even the way we said goodbye. All four of us went to different schools, and when the club closed at the end of the summer, we’d part ways with a “see ya later,” and wouldn’t see one another all year. But after we turned-on that year, “see ya later” got shortened. Just before he rode off on the Flyer, Tbone looked back over his shoulder and stuck out his lips.

“Later,” he said.

And that could mean anything—later that night, after dinner, “I’ll meet you at Hangman’s, I just scored a lid.”

In some ways, I began to take things more seriously. More than ever, it seemed, we had to get it right. “Get your shit together,” Martin would say. We started hanging at the Browns’ house even on school nights, mostly because his parents didn’t care if we played records or smoked pot once in a while.

“Better in the house than on the street,” I heard Fran say one time.

Sometimes it got out of hand, and she pounded on the ceiling when we raged. Usually it had something to do with the Man, or the corporation, turning into a fascist state; once in a while, it was Vietnam.

But we argued about music more than anything. The downbeat, a lyric, how far out a song could get and still make it back. Each one of us had our favorite bands, and often we didn’t agree.

“What do you think he’s talking about?” Sean asked, holding up a yellow and pink album, creased at the corners. “You can listen to him, fine, but you can’t hear him until you’ve had the experience.”

I argued that he would be just as big an influence, with or without it.

Unmoved, he stared at the ceiling, a Kool hanging off his lips, reeling off a salvo of facts: Rainbow Bridge, injecting speedballs into his temples, how he got inspired jumping out of a plane in boot camp, listening to the air thrum against his eardrums.

But I held my ground, these were ancillary points.

Shooting hoops in the front yard, I remembered the day he died, right over the transistor radio, sliding across the stage, peeling off left-handed riffs with his upside down guitar slung behind his back. Right up to heaven.

It was his music, pure and simple, that made Hendrix immortal.

“It’s because he’s dead,” Sean came back, motioning to his shrine, made out of a wine crate, with a playbill from the Berkeley Community Theater stapled to the back slats.

After practicing in the garage for most of the summer, we had a set, all three chord numbers, like Gloria and Wild Thing. I hammered away, looking cool, but barely keeping the beat. Johnny Martin played the piano ever since his mom made him take lessons for Sunday mass. Sean started playing the string bass in grammar school. That Christmas, Fran bought the 175—an old jazz fatty with two Humbuckings, and Tbone never left the house without it.

Spinning vinyl on bands like Traffic and Jeff Beck, we would lounge on the sofa, plucking chords and moan about girls.

“Come along and listen to my story all about a girl that you should know….”

“Oh, Giiiiirl.”

Vietnam? Vietnam was as far away as Neptune.

***~~***

On account of the vomiting fits, PFC Bloxom was taken off the job of stacking howitzer shells, ironically, he later reflected, this saved his life. He was gangly and a scrapper, ideal for crawling through the elephant grass blanketing the lowlands, like a phantom, unseen, unheard, and the only weapon he had to use on recon patrol were his eyes. Marking the NVA supply lines that crisscrossed the A Shau Valley was the one thing he was good at, so good he almost forgot he had a brother.

Firebase Ripcord wasn’t the first mountaintop the Army had tried to hold along the Laotian border. But it would be the last.

In a pre-dawn raid, just before Mother’s Day, Charlie Company overran a handful of sappers, taking over the hill from the Viet Cong without a shot being fired. Within a week the 506th were air dropped by helicopter. They worked all night in shifts, leveling the ground, digging the footings, stacking sandbags like giant horseshoes in a ring along the perimeter.

Even before they were ready, the big guns came in. Six tons, hanging from slings under the massive rotors, filling the air with dust like tornados. It was the roaring in his ears until it felt like his skull would crack, that brought on the nausea again.

In the early morning, the fog hung above the treetops, and he could see across the valley into Laos. If he looked hard enough, he could follow it, stretching north, until it disappeared under a canopy of jungle. He wondered if he could see that far. All the way to China.

For years the Viet Cong funneled troops and supplies deep into the south along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. And now they had the mountaintop. Everyone in the 506th knew what that meant. They would hold it, whatever the cost.

The day the letter arrived he was sitting on the edge of his cot in his boxer shorts, staring down at his thighs with a pair of pliers in his hands. Sometimes you could spot them dangling off the flat-leafed ferns like bent fingers. Sometimes not. You could burn them with a cigarette, if you got to them quick enough, otherwise you had to pull them off with pliers. This one would leave a scar.

On recon patrol, just the day before, he could feel it crawling up his leg. But there wasn’t a thing he could do about it, if he moved, even an inch, he was a dead man.

It was a routine extraction, and a half hour after calling it in they came upon the LZ. No one saw it. It was just a mound of dirt covered in thatch, impossible to spot until you were right on top of it.

They had been there the day before and the LZ was guaranteed secure. But a lot can change in the jungle overnight. Bloxom should have remembered that. He wasn’t paying attention; he was thinking about a hot meal and falling on his cot when the shots rang out.

And then he went down, flat on his back, and couldn’t feel a thing, not at first, and he thought he was dead. And then came the pain, and the only thing he could do then was play dead.

The cloudless sky over his head was so blue it turned turquoise and gave him plenty of room to pray. And that’s what he did, play dead and pray.

Four hours later, the sun finally set, and he crawled, inch by inch, until he reached the tree line. He was lucky that day, lucky to be alive, lucky that the bandolier that he was wearing had stopped the bullet, lucky the VC were short on ammo and not wasted it on a dead man. Lucky Bloxom.

He was tired, laying out in the hooch with the rest of his ragged platoon, dug into the side of the barren knoll, that topped the ridge like a canker sore. He was dog tired, when the letter arrived. It left a scar too.

He preferred being close to the entrance, even though it was only a flap of canvas, because he could roll off his cot in an instant if a mortar scored a direct hit.

And even though he could never get rid of the dust, clinging to everything—the seams in his dungarees, the seams in his eyelids, making his chest hurt every time he took a breath—he had a view and could see the sun come up.

The medic said he might have cracked a rib and wrapped him in an ace bandage and told him go lie down. But he wouldn’t give him any morphine. There was a firefight coming, and without saying a word, he let him know: they might be needing it.

And why the fuck were they calling his name? It was his only solace, ten minutes on a dusty cot; he hadn’t received one since he’d been there.

It fell from the sky anyway, with a “Happy 4th of July,” from Patterson, as he shuffled off to the corner where the sandbags were taller than his head.

Bloxom stared at the envelope on his lap and slowly ripped it open without reading the return address. He knew who it was from, no one else would send him a letter. He wasn’t sure how he felt about news from home. He wasn’t sure where that was anymore. He sure wasn’t expecting a copy of the Barb.

Or the avalanche of memories.

It wasn’t the headlines, but Rocinante galloping across the page, and it all came back—the good old days, standing on the corner, a lifetime ago.

Why didn’t he write something? he thought—anything at all to take his mind off this shit.

As he leafed through it, The Ally fell on the floor, and he almost choked when he saw his name, highlighted with a pink marker.

‘The gun noises, counting to ten, they sure were good at it,’ he mused, as he read the article out loud. Then he past it around, bragging, and one of his grunt buddies read a little further and commented.

“Hey, I’ve heard of these guys, they’re Quakers,” he said, referring to the article by The Friend’s of Service, about the two old Quaker ladies who donated carnations at People’s Park. This brought on a round of Jesus jokes, and everyone was splitting a gut except Patterson.

“Fuck that,” he said, “you think Jesus is going to save you in this shit? Only way to do it is frag the fuckers.” And he meant it.

“Currahee,” a couple of the others conferred.

“Currahee,” Bloxom mumbled.

***~~***

Martin told me not to make the decision lightly, it was unlike anything I could imagine. There were dangers. But it only made me more curious.

“What’s it like?” I asked him again. He laughed this time, a dry whiffling that hung in his throat.

“It’s impossible to describe,” he stated flatly.

Sean didn’t have an opinion one way or the other. “When you’re ready, you’ll know,” was all he said.

He was right about one thing, it is impossible to describe. But not about the warning—I never saw things so right in all my life.

White Lightning was a mellow trip with a wallop.

We only scored it once, and only then because Tbone had connections. He knew Dave Ward. Dave Ward knew a guy who knew Owsley. Owsley was a chemistry student at UC Berkeley and made the best acid on the planet. Jimmy Hendrix wrote a song about it. Now Owsley was in jail, but before he was busted, he lived in Orinda, and gave his recipe to his protégé. He was the guy who knew Dave Ward. He made White Lightning right up the street and no one knew it. That’s how it works with connections.

“It’s so tiny, how could it do that?” I asked. I waited a half hour and couldn’t feel a thing. “Should I take another?”

Martin looked at me like I was an idiot.

“Give it a little longer,” he advised.

Another twenty minutes passed.

“What am I waiting for?” I asked again.

Before he answered, I put another one in my mouth.

“For the miracle to unwind,” he said, laughing, as It dissolved under my tongue.

And unwind it did, like a ball of twine falling off a cliff.

“How many of them are there?” I ask him, looking down on the lawn from my window.

“Infinity,” is all he says.

They’re all wearing tiny green hats like Robin Hoods with little legs in white booties so bright they could be made of snow, kicking into the center, separating, then coming together, rotating, then doing it again, like gears in a clock.

“A snow clock,” I say. Then they all wave at once and place their hands on the shoulder next to them and kick their feet into the center again.

“Why are they kicking their legs like that?” I ask.

“It’s what the grass looks like when you can see it grow,” he says.

“Where is it growing to?” I ask.

He doesn’t answer. I move away from the window.

“Why are you walking backwards?” he asks.

“I want to watch myself grow backward so I can end up at the beginning. Try it.”

So he does, and we both walk backward. I take one step at a time, carefully, all the way down the stairs, until I reach the bottom. When I get there everything stops, like the earth is coming to a halt, or a tree groaning in the forest, only bigger, like I swallowed the ocean in one gulp, only bigger, like the entire atmosphere filling my lungs, only bigger and I think I’m going to pop, but I don’t pop. I take a step, closer, just one. Then I take another, backward, and my skin dissolves like I was born that way. No skin, no bones, no nothing and everything passes right through me because I’m invisible.

And then I’m flying over the hedge in the front yard, faster and higher, into a ball, I somersault, but land on my feet perfectly, flat, with outstretched arms that start flapping.

“I feel like god,” I say, then hold my arms still. “Now I feel like a dog.” Then I start flapping again. “I feel like god again,” I say, and then I stop. “Now I’m a dog,” I wait for the right moment. “Now I’m god again,” I say again. Then I’m flapping, then I’m a dog, then I’m god again, then I’m flapping.

“Goddog, Goddog, Goddog,” the Ravens caw from the driveway.

“What happens if I keep doing it?” I ask.

“Don’t stop, find out,” he says.

So I did, and everything starts rising up, but I’m still on the ground because the whole earth is falling with me.

We called it the month of miracles.

Fairies, urchins, banshees, and nymphs, gathered in the unnoticed chinks of time, under dirt clods, in vacant robin’s nests, dressed in dried oak leaves, dancing on the moss at the creek’s edge, plucking their tunes on dew swept spider webs. Aroused by the slightest inflection, you may ask one, which way to the mountain? And if you put your ear to the earth and listen with all your heart, you will hear, always.

All ways will work, but some take a lot longer, and that is one thing we never did, waste time. C7 became Cm7, then C7flatted 9 with a raised fifth. My grades diminished, my freshman year, but my angels soared.

“What in fuckin’ hell are you doing?”

“Throwing rocks at your window, get out of bed, it’s a full moon.”

“What for?”

“We have a mission.”

“Yeah, what’s that?

“We have to take that hill.”

“What hill?”

“Pleasant Hill.”

***~~***

It had been building for weeks, and then one morning, looking out over the valley, he heard it. The jungle was silent, but he heard it.

Bravo Company found a line of camo wire, just a few days before, strung between two trees, and they tapped in with a pair of alligator clips. It wasn’t just a couple of regiments in the misty green below, it was an entire division. The 101 were deep in the shit this time, but all they could do was wait. That was the hardest part.

Then it came: a fire that rained from the sky that didn’t stop for twenty-three days.

A perimeter had been cleared in a ring fifty yards below the sandbags, making a dead zone around the mountain, all the way to the summit. If they wanted it, they would have to die for it.

But they fought the Chinese, and knew how to dig. Just beyond the bush line, they set up their mortars, under mounds of dirt, broken tree trunks, trenches that zigzagged down the slope. Round after round, like raining stones, lobbed from the center of the earth.

On some days he could hear the jets screaming from the valley floor, and all he could do was hug his cot. Then came the flash, a blast of heat, and the smell of gasoline and burnt rubber. Then silence, and he could doze off for a few hours.

Sometime later it started up again. The thump, the whistle, the wham, and the wiz.

The first rays of morning slashed across his face in a stripe of sunlight that cut into the hooch, reaching all the way to the back wall.

“It’s not the wham,” Patterson said, sitting up on his cot. “It’s the wiz.”

“Curahee,” mumbled Bloxom.

Right after breakfast, they scrounged as many sandbags as they could, stacked them in front, and hunkered down. The 101st could hold out as long as they had food.

But the Viet Cong were desperate men, passionate men, men not afraid to die. Above all, they were patient.

It was a fuel supply drop at the start of the week that brought about the end of Firebase Ripcord.

A 155mm howitzer can send a payload up to fourteen miles but at 400 meters it was useless, so the only cover fire came from RPGs and machine guns. On approach, the pilot radioed in, and they put down a barrage, with chunks of dirt flying, shattering stumps and singeing the earth. All they needed was enough time to hover, drop a pallet of kerosene, and hightail it out of there.

“It was a total fluke,” the Captain said later. “A hole in one.”

When the mortar plopped right into the cab, the Chinook blew like a giant conflagrant moth, twirling its wings above the tarmac. Then the entire hilltop went up in flames.

It was the strangest moment of his life. Not because of the guy running around in circles with his hair on fire and his face melting in lumps that made his cheeks sag; it wasn’t the 155mm rounds, popping off like kettle corn in the towering flames, it was the smell of CS gas. It reminded him of Berkeley.

A week later, half his buddies were dead, and along with the wounded, they were the first to be flown out. Then came everyone else in the 506^th. Waiting for his turn was the hardest part, wondering if he’d get one. After that, the hill went back to the jungle.

But not Bloxom, he went to Saigon for a little R&R. He’d earned it. That’s when he scored the black Afghani; a whole pound, from a fourteen-year-old kid, hawking it on the street corner like the Barb.

***~~***

‘Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Americans—mostly under 30—are determined to destroy our society.’

McElroy finished writing the quote on the board. A couple of hands went up.

I agreed with it, for the most part, but I didn’t say anything. I knew he was deliberately being provocative.

More than half of the class thought Nixon was right about Cambodia, and I was so bored hearing Sue Henderson advance the domino theory again, that I couldn’t wait for the bell.

And then McElroy finished with a comment that hit me right between the eyes.

“In times of war, the law falls silent,” he quoted Cicero, asking if anyone knew what happened to him after that.

That evening, at dinner, my dad told me they were his last words before he bared his throat to his assassins.

“It was the only thing that could shut him up,” he chuckled. He knew all about Cicero, more than enough to help me write my essay.

***~~***

Burk studied law at Dartmouth, and as far as he was concerned, Cicero was a prophet. With armed revolution in the streets, the war had come home, and that was the price of war. The domestic counter-intelligence program may have been unconstitutional, but if something wasn’t done there would be no constitution.

At one meeting, the SAC took it even further,

“There will be no country!” he raised his voice, losing his composure and nearly shouting.

He never made speeches, especially at weekly briefings, but he was fed up and wanted solutions.

“What good is a constitution without a country?” he asked, in earnest, and that ended the meeting. They had a job to do. They were the FBI. It wasn’t a question of the law, Agent Burk was saving America.

***~~***

Tying into the phone lines is about as easy as hanging up your laundry—you clamp onto one end and rout the signal somewhere else. If it was sent to the regional office in Hayward, all Jack Kimble had to do was wait for the green light to start blinking, patch in and start the tape recorder.

On his watch, it would never blink more than twice, and that took phantom hands. Jack Kimble was the best sound man in the San Francisco office, so good they let him set up shop across the bay in a warehouse and gave him a nick name: Nimble Kimble.

After the contractors put in a raised floor, framing it in with twelve-foot beams that jutted to the ceiling, he had an office. Every morning he sat just below a row of dangling chords cracking his knuckles and sliding across the hardwood planks on a well-oiled rolling chair like a bobsled. From there he could monitor just about any conversation in the East Bay.

After the request for phone surveillance was approved, Duke called over to the AT&T on Santa Clara and made the arrangements. The Systems Manager agreed to the meeting, and a few days later, they followed him through a steel-walled vault. He stopped in front of a utility closet and pulled on his keys, opening the door onto a row of punch-down blocks along the back wall. Then he left the room.

Holding up the blueprint, Kimble located the number and after a few tests, tied in, splicing Dr. Green’s office into one of the empty lines on the FBI’s account.

And it didn’t take long to get his first address, Melissa, his secretary, practically spelled it out.

“Mrs. Gentry?” she asked.

“Yes?”

“This is Dr. Green’s office calling. Do you still live at 348 Oak Street?”

“Yes…”

At first, Dr. Green didn’t have a clue, they just stopped coming. He’d been through dry spells before, but never like this. Berkeley was a dead zone lately, after People’s Park, but even so, with the influenza epidemic, he always had patients in the winter.

He finally made the decision, that afternoon, and had a long chat with Melissa, just before he left the office. Although technically not a break-up, she agreed. She couldn’t work for minimum wage anyway, even with the perks—the valium, the free dinners, the wild sex in the parking lot—so she just shrugged her shoulders and said “Its time to move on.”

No threats, no dramas, Melissa was mellow and free, and that’s what made her beautiful. The pang hit him once, as he was getting off the BART train at the 19th St. station. He would miss her, but he knew it was the right thing to do.

Standing on the sidewalk, just in front of the green canvas awning, looking up at the gabled windows, he had no idea just how much the right thing to do was going to cost him.

His wife didn’t leave a note, just a photograph, in the backseat, with her blouse off and a smile like the dickens. Later that evening, he called his friend, Dr. Frankle, and nearly broke down crying.

“Listen,” his former partner told him. “There is something odd going on here, James. The other day, a letter came to my office, written by one of your patients. This can’t be a coincidence.”

***~~***

His head flared up from his chin into a flat top, like a votary urn, with one eye slanting off to the left and the other looking straight back at him.

“Primo, number one, black, like pussy, you smell, you smell,” he said.

All PFC Bloxom had to do was take a whiff and he knew what it was, even without the kid repeating it over and over. And when he asked him how much he could get, he replied “Much as you want, bro,” with a lopsided grin.

He followed him down an alley and then into another. He’d heard of the tunnels before, below Saigon, Patterson told him it was a place where ghosts lived. But he’d never been in them. And he didn’t believe in ghosts.

The walls leaned in on themselves growing narrower, darker, into a maze carved below the ground. He could barely see him up ahead, bobbing like a spring doll. Maybe it was a ruse, or worse, maybe the little fuckers were waiting just around the corner with sticks and tire irons. But he didn’t care.

Moth-eaten, drooping from the windows, rusted tin slanting off roofs, monsoons and countless charcoal fires, the smell of a dead dog—he didn’t care anymore.

The boy suddenly stopped and took a short bow, waving him inside. Under the lintel, he stooped into a single ray of light coming from a chimney hole in the ceiling.

An old woman sat cross-legged in the middle of the room; her hands joined as if in prayer. A column of smoke rose from a makeshift altar in front of her, turning the shaft white as it billowed upwards. The reflection off a brass urn lit from several candles made her face glow.

The smell of old wood caught in his throat, and she looked up, like water running over rock, passing through him, through the walls, through the plywood, peeling, the slatted bamboo and stucco wattle, through the bricks, beyond the trees, the hills, beyond the sky, and the night, beyond the curvature of the earth, to the land of eternal sunrises, where there are no shadows.

There were ashes in the urn in front of her; maybe it was her husband, maybe her son. He heard the word Buddha, followed by a low moan, then Buddha again.

The boy walked over to a large wicker basket, threw off a pile of shirts, and pulled out a wooden crate, once used for champagne. Bloxom looked down at a row of slabs, like giant chocolate bars, tightly wrapped in wax paper.

“Primo, you want one elbow, two elbow, how many?”

There were ten pounds in there. Maybe more. How could a fourteen-year-old kid get that much hash? Bloxom wondered. He could kick his flat head in and no one would know.

Then it came again, Buddha, hanging in the well of her throat, a long drawn out moan.

“How much for one pound?”

The boy stood for a moment, sizing him up.

“One thousand, US.”

Bloxom raised his eyebrows, tossing the slab lightly in the air. “How much is this?”

“One quarter, four make one.”

Bloxom could do the math, but he didn’t have a thousand dollars.

“I only have five hundred,” which was a lie, and the kid knew it. They settled on six.

***~~***

It was a lucky score, almost a fluke, even in Nam a pound of Afghani was rare, and he celebrated that afternoon, breaking off a chunk the size of his thumb, and washing it down with a couple of quarts of Bia Hoi. Canned Heat throbbed over a crappy cassette, distorting the bass lines, droning into a fugue. It made him more homesick than ever.

Hanging out the window of the hotel, watching the motorbikes passing on the street below, he could hear the silk fluttering on the railing across the way, and the sun fell on his face, and he closed his eyes, and for the first time in months he remembered, one day, then another, with clarity. He actually had a life before this fucking madness. And he had a brother too. And that’s when he sat down and wrote him back.

Dear Jacques,

They really socked-it-to-me this time…

***~~***

Except for the dead lawn in the front yard, the Browns’ house looked pretty much like any other two-story, four-bedroom house on the block. But inside it was turmoil.

Fran had to wait a few years before getting her studio. In those days she set up shop in the living room—bags of clay, boxes of tools, two drafting tables, and a potter’s wheel. One side of the room was a shelf where she kept her pots, before going to the kiln. On the other, sketches, diagrams, photos cut out from National Geographic push-pinned to the wall. It was a hovel, with dust so thick you had to walk underneath the staircase to get to the kitchen.

After the opening of her one-woman show, I overheard her talking with some friends at the reception. She said that it was the only thing that kept her sane. Thank god for that, they all agreed. Some were curious and called it her muse, others were cautious, but Fran insisted that it started out as therapy. Only recently was she beginning to take it seriously and call it art.

That morning, she offered us each five bucks to help out for a few hours. Sean was making the hors-d’oeuvres, hovering over a bowl of liver patè in a baker’s cap, Martin was in his Sunday best, while Tbone and I set up card tables in the back, throwing bed sheets over her work in progress in the living room.

The library wasn’t much of place to have the reception, so after the opening, everyone was invited over and by five o’clock the house was packed.

“Most women have had this connection severed long ago,” she said, casually, to a group gathered in the kitchen.

Severed, I said to myself, passing by the breakfast nook, looking for Tbone. Martin glanced over and rolled his eyes, offering crackers from the tray to the guests in the rec room.

Is she talking about John the Baptist? He whispered, and I pictured Salome dancing around the room with a Scimitar.

“What I’m trying to do is reinvent myself through one of the ancient crafts…hoping to uncover something,” she continued, leaving the sentence hang.

As I reached the door, her words slammed into my back.

“The inner feminine?” the guy in the tweed blazer chided, getting a chuckle.

“She’s trying to unlock the secret of the Pharaohs,” Mr. Brown ribbed.

“Not the Pharaohs, Jim, the goddess of Sinai,” she replied, matter-of-factly.

After a brief pause, one woman commented, “I noticed the motifs on your vases, they’re beautiful.”

“Thank, you,” Fran smiled, touched by the compliment.

What motifs? I liked the nine vases she had on display at the library, but they all looked pretty much the same to me.

“It’s cheaper than a shrink,” Jim teased, taking it a little further than he intended.

“I just like the feel of wet clay on my fingers,” Fran mocked, striking a pose and raising her hand, as if to lick it.

As I passed through the open door and onto the lawn, the room broke into odd laughter, more from unease than joie de vivre.

Later, as we were cleaning up, Tbone found a nearly full glass, and looked toward the house.

“Wants not, wastes not,” he said, then swilled it.

She was a gracious host, thanking her guests with hugs, but as soon as they left, she turned feral. He was in the kitchen loading the dishwasher.

“I’m not disagreeing with you, Fran, just let it go,” he said, hanging his head over the sink.

“But you’re not supporting me either.”

“What do you call this?” he turned, holding out his hands.

“Males have a feminine nature too,” she stated, unwilling to let it go.

He shook his head and turned back to the sink.

“Just stack them on the counter, Tulle, thank you,” she smiled. “They know it instinctively,” she continued, looking down at me for confirmation.

“That’s right, Mrs. Brown,” I said cheerfully, putting the stack on the counter.

The inner feminine. I tried to get my arms around it. But the only feminine I could come up with was a girlfriend. Is that what she meant?

***~~***

It came in the mail at the end of the year, and when my mother opened it she beamed with pride. My whole family was invited to the annual sports banquet.

“You have to go, Tulle? It’s a White Letter,” she pleaded. But I wouldn’t do it.

She hated the war as much as anyone, but a sport’s banquet had nothing to do with Vietnam. I shouted back that I would never wear the sweater, it condoned the atrocity. She said that I would regret it, but much to my surprise, she managed a smile, and didn’t say anything more, except “You should think about it.”

And I did. Long and hard, most of the summer. I still went to the club and did a workout once in a while, but I didn’t join the team. Martin didn’t either, and we spent most of it playing music, him on the piano downstairs, and me on the Framis, working on a duet.

Every once in a while, lying on my bed, staring at the rafters, I’d think about it, and then one night I sat at my desk until dawn scratching out lines with a pencil and rewriting them until I had a poem.

 

They honor youth with sweaters
then send them off to war
a badge in place of honor
an honor never worn
To those they gave the last salute
pinned upon her breast
An honor served to Mothers
postmortem as they rest
The final token offered
their coffins draped in flags
a medal for their sons
zippered up in bags.

When she read it, she said it made her cry.

“But I still don’t see what a sweater has to do with the medal of honor,” she said.

And maybe she was right. It wasn’t like I was standing on the street corner burning effigies. But I wasn’t going along with the program either. I wasn’t about to tell her that I was thinking about quitting football, forever. That would have made her cry again for sure. But I was done with it.

***~~***

Not long after the route at Firebase Ripcord, Jean Bloxom was done with it too. And then came the news of the My Lai Massacre, and that pushed him over the edge.

What was left of his unit was re-assigned to a rancid hamlet near Luong Quan. After the Engineer Corps laid down a dam just down river, it turned into a swamp and nothing ever dried. That’s when he finally said fuck it for the last time.

Instead of slopping on the griseofulvin and cleaning up the fungus between his toes, he let them rot. And when that didn’t get attention, he took a pair of dikes and cut one off. That did.

They gave him a ten-day medical leave for that, and back in Saigon, he bribed the nurse of the ward with an ounce of opium-ribbed Afghani. The Air Force was even easier. It only took a few grams to the shipping clerk, and he found himself on a military transport to Edwards Air Force Base, with more than a half pound stashed in his unused boot, and no intention of ever going back.

***~~***

Jacques Bloxom would come out of nowhere like a dragonfly swooping through mustard flower, stuff his boots in my locker, and then disappear for a month. Then he’d show up in journalism. Being published in magazines, his articles always got on the cover of the Rampage. I never read the Rampage, and other than his boots, my sister was our only connection.

During registration, the first week of school, I was late, and the only English class open was McElroy’s. Maybe it would teach me a lesson, the counselor said, to be on time.

As I was leaving, I saw Mastrangelo. I’d known him since kindergarten. We played football since the fourth grade. Just like me, he was late.

“Honors?” I asked.

“Only class left.”

The year before, when we were assigned lockers, I was sitting on my haunches trying out my combination, and he tilted his head sideways and asked if I was going to be on my knees every morning before school.

“Pretty much,” I told him.

From then on, we shared a locker, and we only used the bottom one to keep our cleats in.

During the first week of McElroy’s, I lost my copy of The Red Badge of Courage, so I borrowed his. I’ll be damned if I couldn’t find it, still. Right before the bell rang, I looked down at my bottom locker thinking it might be in there, when fate hit me like a wet towel.

Jacques Bloxom was barefoot, with a pair of army boots doddering around his neck, walking right for me.

“Mind if I keep these in there once a while?” he asked, motioning to his boots.

I’m not sure why I said OK, pointing to a crack in the stucco where we wrote down the combination. He was one of my sister’s heartbreaks, maybe I felt sorry for him. Besides, everyone knew we had a bottom locker for shoes. I didn’t ask him why he didn’t use his own, maybe I should have, I knew he was holding.

“Thanks, I’ll get you back,” he said, and gave me a brother shake. Then he loped off, with his clodhoppers swaging around his neck. I watched him, like a deer running into the bush, and thought no more about it.

***~~***

Later in the day, I heard his brother went AWOL. I saw him in the upper parking lot after school, with a wrap of gauze around one foot, leaning on crutches. He wasn’t in a uniform.

Pretty much everyone knew Jean Bloxom had gone over the wall. Even McElroy. When he brought up the topic of the conscientious objector, he wasn’t talking about Private Fleming, he was referring to PFC Bloxom.

My sister had known for weeks, and when I told her about his army boots, she called me a fucking dolt for letting him keep them in my locker. She was a radical with morals, and in her own way, she was just watching out for me. I don’t know why, I had plenty of people watching over me: the vice principal, the football coach, my angels—they were working over time. I had no way of knowing that the FBI would soon stake a claim.

***~~***

It was mountainous, the piles beside his desk, he needed a shovel to get to his typewriter.

When the memorandum from the DoD circulated, he didn’t give it much thought. The DoD had a special arrangement with the NCIC to help track down deserters, And as much as Burk agreed, the NCIC was the wave of the future, he didn’t agree that it was best put to use solving the army’s problems.

Fifteen agencies utilized the network from all over law enforcement. The NCIC made gathered information from every source imaginable. The DMV, the IRS, medical records—single, married, bank accounts, death certificates, lawsuits, friends with money, the mentally challenged, the house you lived in, the car you drove, the channels you watched, the books you read. Multiply that by everyone and there was no end.

“There aren’t enough boxes,” Burk added, candidly, just before the weekly briefing got started.

The super computers at NCIC were the wave of the future, with the power to transform, he had no argument on that point. But lately, it seemed to him that there was too much emphasis on the future. He didn’t join the FBI to sit at a desk analyzing data.

“Six feet high, Jim,” he quipped, referring to the wall of cardboard. Then he put his argument on the table: Information was invaluable, no doubt about it, it was the wave of the future. But it didn’t make arrests. Most criminals didn’t have houses, or jobs, or even cars, he pointed out.

“That’s why they steal them,” he argued. He wasn’t condescending, everyone sitting at the table shared his views, but he had the balls to state them, right in front of SAC.

It wasn’t long after that meeting that his promotion went through. He continued working Cointel, but his job description changed. He finally made detective, Special Agent in the Criminal Investigations Division, and his mornings inputting data were over. The only Intel he gathered now was for his cases.

***~~***

Johnny Martin wore button-down Van Heusens, sometimes a sports coat and once in a while, a tie. All through high school he had a steady job; he even managed to hold down a B average for a while. This got him a reputation for being responsible.

When the Aquatics Swim Club opened early that year, he made it over on the weekends, getting in a few laps at the ten-minute break. That Saturday, as he was drying off under the sycamore, he heard him from halfway across the lawn.

Dr. Newsome always liked Johnny Martin, and when he walked up and spread open his towel, he had an idea. Maybe it was the Van Huesens, or maybe he felt sorry for him falling so hard for his daughter, but it hit him like a brace of trumpets.

“John, what do you think the chances are of Oakland winning the pennant?” he asked.

“Baltimore, no doubt in my mind,” Martin replied.

“Against Vida Blue? Did you hear that game the other day?”

“No.”

“Nobody can pitch like Vida Blue.”

Martin didn’t contest it.

It was then and there that he asked him.

“My boy, how are you going to make a difference?”

Martin didn’t hesitate, and fired back without missing a beat. “What do you mean Dr. Newsome, like a career?”

“Well, yes.”

“I feel a little embarrassed telling you.”

“Nonsense.”

“I want to be a doctor.”

“I knew it. Why would you be embarrassed?”

“Just seems like a long shot,” he shrugged.

“Listen, John, there is a situation that has come to my attention.”

Then he told him that the custodian at the medical complex was retiring, and that he was sure that he could convince the Board of Directors, that in this case, a sixteen-year-old was responsible enough.

“What do you say, John, are you interested?”

With his neatly trimmed mustache and his short sleeve dress shirts, he was more than interested. So he got the job.

***~~***

“Thirty-one days,” Carrie said cryptically, wagging her finger, as she passed me in the hall.

“What?” I asked after her. But she was already around the corner. Thirty-one days after he went AWOL is what she meant, after that his status changed to DFR, and he became a deserter.

Rarely did he let an emotion show, but Burk was annoyed when he read it, mandating that law enforcement all over the country cooperate with the Department of Defense. It was the DoD’s headache, not his, and it was the same complaint they had been making all year. Now the Airtel was coming from the director himself. Burk knew it was political, probably had something to do with access to the NCIC. Like it or not, he had to give it his attention.

That’s when he saw it, the next Airtel, and he paused like a wolf downwind. Just under the heading: American Friends of Service, At It Again, was a photocopy of The Ally.

Church bells rang every time serendipity crossed his path.

It took him an hour, but he came up with it, filed in the tin box under his desk—his older brother, who taught him everything he knew, “except how to fight ghosts.”

It was the same Bloxom, he was sure of it. He loaded up the Corona and started in on an Airtel, glancing back at the memorandum.

101st Airborne, Medical leave from chronic fungal rot, last known address: Oakland, California. Next of kin: mother. Address: 2349 Vernon Ave, Pleasant Hill.

Pleasant Hill, he thought. They have a high school in Pleasant Hill.

After thumbing through the Contra Costa phone book, he called over and asked to speak to the principal. Almost immediately, Mr. Hansen came on the line.

“Yes, we have a student with that name,” he disclosed, mildly surprised. He knew Jacques was headed upriver sooner or later, but he had never received a call from the FBI before.

***~~***

Jean Bloxom could expect an indictment anytime after being classified DFR. Then there would be a warrant out for his arrest. They had relatives in Canada, if he could find a way there. But he couldn’t risk the Greyhound.

He’d heard stories, even before he went to Nam, about the Underground Railroad, helping draft dodgers get from the Bay Area up to the border. But what he needed was a connection.

He also needed a doctor to take a look at his foot. A red streak had started up his leg, a fever in the morning, it was a sure sign that it was infected. He had to find some penicillin from someone who wouldn’t ask questions. He remembered Dr. Green.

They found the address without a problem, but when Jacques went to the front door, cupping his hands on the window, all the furniture was gone, and only a few cardboard boxes were strewn across the floor. He pulled on the chain fastened with a padlock, glancing at an index card taped to one side.

If you need to contact Dr. Green: then a P.O. box.

There was an envelope sticking through the mail slot with a return address from Dr. Frankle, at Herrick Hospital.

The nurse at the admissions window was cute, and Jacques sucked in his cheeks to accent his dimples. A few minutes later, Dr. Frankle answered the page.

In the waiting room, Jean told him that he was a former patient and that it was important, motioning to his foot. The doctor scribbled a number on his prescription pad and handed it to him, first making him swear that he was neither a journalist or a member of law enforcement.

Dr. Green had signed so many deferment forms, he couldn’t remember names, and he almost hung up. But something in Jean’s voice made him pause, and he agreed to meet up at a coffee shop on University. An hour later Bloxom had a prescription for amoxicillin, and the phone number of a guy who worked at the Berkeley Free Church.

“The American Friends can’t help you, but these guys can. Be careful, the place is under surveillance.”

Just before they parted, Bloxom turned and asked, “Do you smoke?” breaking off a chunk and handing it to him.

***~~***

He had a job.

Two blocks down Westover, a left at the dead end, a cut through Strandwood, straight up Helen, ten minutes tops and he was there.

He could work at his own pace, get paid for a full shift, and have a couple hours of unaccounted time to himself. Not many sixteen-year-olds were given an opportunity like that, and he was determined to make the most of it.

From the day he started as custodian for the Gregory Gardens Medical Center, he felt like he’d turned a corner. It wasn’t a week later that it hit him. He could walk the ten blocks in as many minutes, but with school and homework and now a real job, he had leverage.

“Do you really need the car?” his father demurred, cleaning a piece of gristle from between his teeth.

“If I don’t have too much homework, I can walk,” he shrugged, smashing the few peas left on his plate with his fork.

“Won’t you be tired, dear?” his mother asked.

“Marylyn, he is not a child.”

“It’s alright, mom. It’s just…afterwards.”

“Is it really going to be eleven o’clock every night?” she asked.

“Pretty much.”

“Jack, we can’t have him walking the streets at night, there’s a curfew.”

His mother never drove anywhere except to mass, and his sister wouldn’t be caught dead in a four-door station wagon with a stuck window and a cracked vinyl dashboard. A few minutes later his father caved in, and pro domo, he owned a car.

This sudden boon put a little hair on my chest as well, for other than LSD, the most radical leap into the realm that I ever took was when Johnny Martin wheeled the Belair through the crossroads, making way with an open throttle, and singing out at the top of his lungs.

“Onward ye knights, in the grail we trust, until it be found, it’s Camelot or bust.”