JD (28 page)

Jonathan strolled to the podium. It had become, those last few years, his natural habitat. Standing before an auditorium packed with students, scolding, at a set fee of $2,000 per scold. Plus airfare. He smiled: the patient smile he used to bestow on me when he was getting ready to tell me how the world worked.

“How many of you guys were at Woodstock?” he said. A scattering of raised hands; by now, thirty years later, everyone who was in that room must half remember having been at Woodstock. “Woodstock was really Bethel, I guess you all know that. And the electricity in Bethel, New York, comes from this company—I looked it up—the Central Hudson Gas & Electric Company.” He looked around, seeing I guess many puzzled faces. Probably not an unfamiliar sight for Jonathan.

He sighed, the way he did when he had to spell out the obvious. “The amplifiers at Woodstock were powered by the Central Hudson Gas & Electric Company. And I have had a chance, during these days of leisure that your little manifestation has afforded me, I've had a chance to learn a few things about the Central Hudson Gas & Electric Company. They make electricity using something called steam turbines, however those work. These turbines get hot, and the way they cool them off is with water from the Hudson. The beautiful Hudson, the majestic Hudson that greeted those Dutch sailors' eyes and that was commensurate with their capacity for wonder.”

Some of the kids were just staring at him now, with their mouths open. Also perhaps not an unfamiliar vista for Jonathan. “This company draws a couple hundred million gallons of cold water out of the Hudson, boiling thousands and thousands of fish every day in a monstrous coal-fired bouillabaisse, a piscine holocaust. And then it pours the filthy boiling water back into the Hudson to kill some more. And every time that wild-haired lady, Janis something, with the—what's it called? how apt: the
Holding Company
—every time she bellowed into the microphone, fishes died, and every time that guy with the round Zulu-y hair made his guitar scream, fishes died and the Hudson died some more, dying every day.”

Oh, of course. How could I not have seen where this was going? I must have heard some version of this lecture a thousand times. If he came along to the grocery store he would stop me from buying a can of coffee because cash crops were destroying the—what did we call them then?—the underdeveloped nations, a phrase that conjured up a picture of ninety-eight-pound weaklings in grass shacks. Jonathan would look for the union label on underwear and forget to check for his size. Finally it was agreed that I would be the one who would go out into the world and secure the essentials of life and bear the sin of complicity, complicity, complicity with the machine. Leaving Jonathan free to sit in the apartment, drinking coffee in his underwear and reading the sports pages of the
Times
.

So he had come just to deliver this spiel to a new audience. Having heard it, I tuned out and looked around at the kids—very well, looked at the blond ringleader, who was stroking his faint aspirational beard and staring down at the floor. I'm not sure how long Jonathan rambled on about steam turbines, but suddenly he was shouting. The blond boy and I turned back to him, startled.

“When you break a rule, you just break that rule. If a demonstrator stops traffic he has only stopped traffic, he might as well be a fucking jaywalker. If you close down this school, you've just wasted your own tuition.” He cackled: “Fact, I got news for you. I got my paycheck yesterday, all you've done the last week is give me a paid holiday.”

There was a little indistinct mumbling from the crowd.

“If you play your cards right, you can drag this show out straight through to June, and then you'll all go home, no examinations,
everybody passes. A terrific start on your unexamined lives. And when you're home this summer, by the pool or working in your father's haberdashery, other kids who are no worse than you are, decent kids whose daddies couldn't send them to the nice college you're trying to tear down, those kids will still be dropping bombs on hapless little yellow people who don't even know why the planes keep coming.

“Your little shindig won't have done a damn thing to stop those planes. And really: when the fire rains down from the sky, the people on the ground won't know that you're not in the cockpit. Maybe you are.”

A little more backtalk now, but still nothing clear or articulate. The noise the extras in a crowd scene used to make: rhubarb, rhubarb.

You could still hear Jonathan. He wasn't shouting anymore, but he still had the mike. He wasn't shouting but doing what those who knew him understood to be even louder than a shout: scratching his head as he spoke.

“As you know, the anarchists—well, no, you don't know the anarchists, you don't know much—there were these guys called anarchists, they had beards and names you can't spell and they threw bombs like bowling balls with fuses. You picture these guys now, from some cartoon? The anarchists fought all the time over whether they should pursue Propaganda of the Word or Propaganda of the Deed. The Deed being those lit bowling balls, or a potshot at the tsar or the empress of Austria or the president.

“Of course, the Deed never changed anything, mostly just made things worse. Oh, but that
was
changing something. It was the Word, the Word that never changed anything. All the broadsides, all the speeches, all the books. Books, books, books! All of them together not equal to one pellet of lead in the guts of William McKinley at the Buffalo Exposition.

“You will keep babbling until the finals can't be delayed any longer and we just send you home. Then you'll come back in the fall. You will finish out your student deferments, escape slaughter by some byway or other, and ten years from now you will be on Madison Avenue devising slogans for toilet paper, or the brightest of you will be at the RAND Corporation plotting the moves and countermoves of Armageddon.
This will all be a little episode. You'll chuckle at it when you're fat and old, the way people my age chuckle at flagpole sitting and the Lindy Hop.”

The booing began in one corner of the room—pie slice, rather, in that oval. Literal
boos
. Self-parodying, like the boos the audience at a dinner-theater melodrama is encouraged to hurl at the villain. That's how it started, kids having fun and going boo. But as it spread through the room, punctuated with
asshole
and
motherfucker
, the boo became very serious indeed. While some kids were still just happily hooting, others' faces were contorted with genuine rage. Jonathan was the enemy. Not just, like other adults, somewhere along the spectrum between beatified youth and pig cop. But all the way at the end, past the cops even, the embodiment of everything the kids were fighting against.

Which was—what, finally?

We're fond of saying that it was all a game, or a passing tantrum. This baby-boom generation—as if my sisters and I had had little explosions in our tummies!—this generation that settled down so quickly to buying mutual funds and driving sport-utility vehicles, they mustn't have meant any of it. But that isn't so: I suppose they've never stopped wishing for a world of justice and love, if those two are not incompatible. They just realized, at varying speeds, that they weren't going to make that world, that they were too enmeshed.

Not that the forces ranged against them were too powerful, or even that they were too much like their enemy, but there was too much they were unable to give up. Hooked, as they were supposed to be, as the whole system had engineered them to be, on the material, the denims and record albums and VW Beetles that could be supplied only by the machine they were trying to break. They learned that idylls and the simple life and communing with nature were for the rich; the poor lived much more complicated lives, in unheated rooms that opened onto hallways strewn with used syringes.

So it was as if Jonathan were a fortune-teller, reading in their collective palm the future of self-betrayal and exhausted surrender that lay before them. It's a wonder they didn't kill him.

May 9, 197O

After I left the meeting the other day--as I predicted,
making them regret having invited me--they apparently decided that the thing to do was march on Wall Street. So yesterday morning a bunch of SLS kids went down, along with students from other colleges and even some high school kids (not including Mickey, who has no politics I can discern). They wound up on the steps at Federal Hall, chanting the usual stuff about ending the war and freeing political prisoners.

Then a bunch of union construction workers, wearing hard hats and carrying American flags, descended on the kids and started beating them up. The police just stood by or, in some accounts, cheered. The SLS kids fled back to the campus. A couple were bleeding. The muscular boy who had asked me to the meeting had the start of a black eye but bragged about taking out a couple of the bastards.

I didn't foresee this when I gave my cheery talk the other day. After all these years of Leninist crap about the intellectual cadres leading the workers, the workers have predictably gotten fed up: to hell with all these panty-waists. But here's what nobody saw, surely not me. The pantywaists have gotten tired of the workers, too. Marxism is dead, finally, the class struggle over, all the old truisms gone. So maybe, after all, there is a chance of casting all that aside and finding our way to the city I wrote about in
JD
? To the primitive, ecstatic village that is our only chance of saving our planet and our lives.

June 5, 197O

I went into Mickey's room this afternoon to get
The Magic Mountain
, which I have to teach next year because I decided to volunteer for a section of the freshman humanities survey and learned too late that the reading list was made up by a committee stacked with relics of the Weimar era. So I have to read the goddamn
Zauberberg
one last time; life turns out to be just one homework assignment after another. Maybe I could read the Cliffs Notes, as most of my students will. Then at least we'd be talking about the same text.

On Mickey's desk was his high school yearbook. I thumbed through it for a minute or two, noting in particular the varsity wrestling team and, of course, the swimmers in their tiny shmattes. They look at once bold and abashed: conscious that it's odd for a bunch of boys to be photographed in this way, displayed near-naked and with their legs shaved, like a lineup of Miss Rheingold contestants. But also of course proud of their lithe bodies, ready to plunge into life.

I arrived at the individual pictures of the seniors: Allen, Andropoulos, Antonelli, Aronowitz, Ascher. Ascher's long blond hair was tamed by some kind of gunk that day-parted in the middle, the way I combed mine in 1928. He has a bland, pleasant expression, like the one worn by the guest of honor at an open-casket funeral. There is a smudge on his forehead where the photographer must have effaced a pimple. Below the picture a single activity: Science Club 9. All the other kids have lines and lines of achievement or at least participation: Student Government 1O, 11; Intramural Hopscotch 12; Latin Prize 11. Mickey just stopped, in ninth grade. The year I touched him.

Only a couple of friends have signed the book. “Have some high times this summer,” one writes. Referring, I take it, to his principal extracurricular activity. I don't care so much about the drugs. I guess half his class has tried them, and he did manage to keep his grades up--they were good enough to get into Warwick, anyway, which is all his mother and assorted dead Axelrods wanted from him. It doesn't even matter whether he played games or joined clubs. But it seems to me that Mickey has simply declined the whole life of his generation.

He has no politics, no hobbies, no enthusiasms--not even the soul music anymore. He isn't rebelling against me or Martha or the military-industrial complex or anything. All the other kids are on fire just now--about the war, race, injustice. This youthful ferment, feckless and ill-directed as I may think it is, is
what's going on
. Nothing
is going on with Mickey. His fire has burned out, if he ever had one.

I feel that I am the one who extinguished it, feel it every time I look at him. I know I fucked him up, but he won't let me close enough to find out just how. Or how to make it right.

I don't know just how Jonathan did it, either. But it is certainly true that Mickey's fire was put out, somehow. Here, maybe, is what struck me for the first time at the Lubitz Auditorium. I can't recall ever hearing him in those last years say, as any boy will say: someday I'll be or someday I'll do or someday I'll have or someday I'll go.

Did he have some premonition, did he know inside that any predicate he might supply for those sentences would be a lie? Maybe he spoke to himself, much too early, the other sentence that I hear always now, a chant that has receded to mere background noise but that never ceases: someday I'll die. No, I can't believe he felt that, at least not until he was
in country
. But Jonathan is right about the main thing: some time in his teens, when he should have been white-hot with lust for the world, he forgot how to speak in the future tense.

If I saw this at the time, perhaps I just thought his future was all settled—Warwick, law, a normal life—that's why he didn't need to speak of it. But nothing was settled at all.

June 8, 197O

Martha wants to take Mickey to Truro again. She said at dinner this might be the last summer he and his cousin Alan will have to capsize the Sunfish together before they go off to their respective colleges, then on to their respective lives. Mickey just listened. I don't guess he'd mind one more idle summer at Bernie's place, but he must also be wondering where he's going to get his drugs in a little hamlet populated entirely by shrinks and watercolorists.

I thought of pointing out that it's also the last summer Mickey and I will have together. But of course we aren't together, we haven't been together since I fucked everything up. He never walks down the street with me, never
asks me a question that doesn't conclude with the mention of a sum of money, has apparently never wondered how I felt about his going off to Warwick or any of his other bourgeois life choices. And of course he has never, not once in four years, sat next to me on a sofa.