The Clarinet Polka (34 page)

“Yeah, except they're ignorant and degenerate,” she said. “Oh, he just drives me right up the wall!”

*   *   *

Janice did a lot of complaining about her parents. When you're sixteen, it kind of goes with the territory, and that spring they were really getting to her. Like her dad wanted Janice to stay a little girl forever, but her mom kept remembering when
she'd
been sixteen back in Poland before the war, so she wanted Janice to look like what she called “sophisticated,” which meant these weird grown-up clothes Janice wouldn't wear on a bet. And her mom liked to see Janice with makeup on, but if her dad caught her with anything more than just a little lipstick, he'd make her go wash her face.

Then there's the pigtails. Now what do I know about pigtails? I figure a pigtail's a pigtail, right? Well, that just goes to show you how ignorant I am. Janice hadn't had her hair cut since she'd been like four or five, and her mom was the one who'd put her in pigtails in the first place because it's cute on a little girl—you know, the braids hanging down her back—and Janice still did her hair that way when she was in school because the nuns liked it. But when she was out of school, she did what all her girlfriends did—the braids in the front, Indian style, so her hair covered her ears. And the little-girl pigtails her mom thought were pathetic on a sixteen-year-old, but the Indian braids drove her absolutely berserk because they made Janice look like a hippie. Which is exactly why Janice and her pals did it, right? Meanwhile Czesław didn't really give a damn whether they were braided in the front or in the back. He just thought braids on young girls were very becoming, and if Janice ever got her hair cut, it'd be a major tragedy.

But her mom wanted Janice's hair cut so bad she was freaking right out about it. Janice just kept going no, no, no, and in the last year it'd reached fever pitch. Her mom kept saying, “One of these nights when you're asleep, I'm going to sneak in with a pair of scissors and cut those damned braids off.”

Janice didn't really believe her mom would ever do that, but she started locking her bedroom door when she went to bed. “I swear, Jimmy,” Janice said, “if they don't let me alone, I'm going to become one of those teenage runaways.”

*   *   *

Well, the tension kept building up in the Dłuwiecki household, and Janice and her dad finally had themselves just a dandy brawl—over Vietnam, if you can believe that. You see, the war just kept ticking along in the background, and you couldn't really ignore it for very long because every once in a while it'd jump up on your television screen and bite you again. That spring the good old U.S. of A. invaded Cambodia.

An incursion is what they called it. That scumbag Nixon came on the tube and did his song and dance about how he'd rather be a one-term president than have America turn into a second-rate power, and America shouldn't be acting like a helpless giant, and we've got to go hit the Commies hard to defend freedom in the world, and, you know, basically ranted on. It was kind of scary.

I remember talking to some of the young guys in the PAC—guys who'd just got their draft cards—and they were saying, “What the hell's he talking about? I thought he was winding the sucker down. What's this—the war that goes on forever?”

You remember that silent majority Nixon thought he had behind him? Well, I don't know how behind him it was at that point. If the silent majority meant people like Old Bullet Head, I'll tell you what he said about our little incursion into Cambodia. “Hell, Jimmy, Nixon's got no plan to end the war and he never had one. We're going to be bogged down in Southeast Asia for the next twenty years.”

I think most Americans were fed up with the war by then and just wanted us to find some way to get out of it that wasn't too messy. But there was one issue where Nixon really did have the silent majority behind him—and that's when it came to the protesters. After Nixon's speech, the college campuses went up like a bunch of firecrackers, and that student protest stuff was starting to really grate on people's nerves. I was feeling kind of that way myself. Lately we'd been seeing kids seizing buildings on their campuses, and trashing offices, and generally acting like assholes, and people thought—

Well, again let me give you Old Bullet Head on the topic. From his point of view, you send your kids to school so they can get a good education and have a better life than you did, and it costs a bundle, and it's a big sacrifice. To him those campus radicals were just a bunch of ungrateful spoiled brats. “The girls should be sent home and have their asses paddled,” he said, “and the boys should get drafted so fast their heads would swim.”

And then when you're remembering all the players from those days, you can't forget your Weathermen from SDS—yeah, banana city. They'd been out rioting and busting windows in Chicago, and a few of them had been holed up in New York somewhere making bombs, and they'd slipped up and blown themselves to shit. But God knows, maybe there were some others hiding out somewhere who were a little bit less clumsy, you know what I mean? So that was something else you had to worry about.

Yeah, it was a real cheery time all round. Nixon makes his speech, and we're seeing all these protests on television, and over at Kent State in Ohio, the kids burn down the ROTC building, and the governor of the state sends in the National Guard, and most people—including me—are saying, “Yeah, well, that's exactly what he should do.”

It was kind of amazing when you think about it. Why Kent State of all places? It's not that far from Raysburg. It's right smack out in the center of middle America. You'd think it would be the quietest, most conservative little school you could possibly imagine. But the Ohio National Guard occupied the campus, and the students had some kind of protest, and the guard fired into those students and killed four of them.

I was having a beer with Mondrowski in the PAC, and I made this automatic knee-jerk statement, just something that was real easy to say in those days. I said something to the tune of how it's about time some of those damn protesters got a chance to see what war is really like.

Georgie went ballistic on me, like in half a second. “What the hell you talking about?” he's yelling at me. “You think it's a good idea to start shooting protesters?”

I'd forgot for a minute there he was South Raysburg's one-man antiwar movement, that he was, you know, in that vets' organization and read their newsletters like the Bible—he kept giving those dumb things to me and I'd throw them away—and any idiot should have known he was bound to have some fairly strong feelings on the topic. For a few seconds there, I thought he was going to pound me one. Of course that didn't shut me up.

“What the hell we doing over there anyway?” he's yelling at me. “We're supposed to be fighting for democracy, right? That's a joke. What we're fighting for is the right for some goddamn gook to make money off the black market. We're fighting for the right of twelve-year-old girls to sell their asses to a bunch of horny GIs. We've ruined that country, is what we've done. Everybody hates our guts over there. Even the people who are supposed to be our friends hate our guts. But it's supposed to be for democracy, right? So you shoot anybody who's against it, right? Is that democracy?”

I'm going, “Wait a minute, wait a minute. That's not what I meant.”

“We still got a Constitution?” he's yelling at me. “The goddamn Constitution still mean anything?”

Georgie is leaning over, staring me right in the face. He's slamming his fist down on the bar. “The right of peaceful assembly—remember that? It's one of the reasons we fought the goddamn American Revolution.”

“Those kids weren't exactly peaceful,” I'm yelling back. “They burned down the ROTC building. That's goddamn peaceful assembly?”

Old Joe Nigbor's sitting at that same table playing cards with the same guys he always plays with every night in the PAC. He pushes himself up and walks over to us and says, “Tell you what, boys. You want to fight the Vietnam War, why don't you try fighting it in Vietnam?”

Georgie didn't bother to tell old Joe that he'd already done that. We took us a little walk. Down to the riverbank. Georgie smoked a joint and mellowed out, and I had a second thought or two and allowed as how he had a point.

“But you can understand those guys in the guard,” I said. “Here you are, and you're just a kid from some dumb little town in Ohio. And the reason you joined the guard in the first place is so you wouldn't have to go to Vietnam and get your ass shot off, and that tends to make you kind of super-patriotic. And so they send you onto this campus to impose some peace, and you're scared shitless. And here are all these long-haired hippie weirdos, and they've all got 2-S deferments, and there's no way in hell your family could afford to send you to college in the first place. And those long-haired hippie weirdos are taunting you and calling you names and maybe throwing rocks or something, and you just lose it.”

“Sure, I can understand that guy,” Georgie says. “That's why you don't send the National Guard onto a college campus.”

“But they were burning down the ROTC building!”

“What? They haven't got cops in Ohio? And even if you bring in the guard, there's just no way in hell you use full firepower on unarmed people.”

“Listen,” I say, “this is stupid—us arguing like this. There's nothing we disagree about. No, they shouldn't have shot those kids. No way in hell they should have shot those kids. But there are still guys dying every day in Nam—”

“You think I don't know that? Jesus, Jimmy.”

“Okay, okay, okay. But all those guys that are still over there. Don't they deserve something?”

“Yeah, they do. They deserve to come home in one piece.”

*   *   *

He was right, of course, but it was real hard back in those days to think anything through in any kind of calm way. It's like everybody had an opinion and didn't want to get confused with facts.

So I'm sitting in the Dłuwieckis' living room having myself a thimbleful of embalming fluid with good old Czesław, and, boy, does he have some opinions. He's fairly pissed off because they've closed down Ohio State, where his oldest boy's in grad school, and he thinks all the protesting students from coast to coast are part of one big conspiracy. So shooting four of those radical punks at Kent State was a good start, he says, but they stopped too soon. They should have shot forty more of them.

“You know, Jimmy, they get their marching orders straight from Havana. Don't laugh, the Cubans have been financing most of these radical groups. And that Weatherman outfit—the ones with the bombs—they're infiltrating high schools now. Can you believe that? Self-avowed Communists, and that's their next target.
High schools!
We've got to stop it right now before it goes any farther. The governor of Ohio was right—they're worse than the brownshirts.”

Now ordinarily when her dad and me had our little chats, Janice would just sit there on the end of the couch not saying a word. That day she says, “Why are they like the brownshirts?”

Her dad goes, “Pardon? What did you say?”

“Why do you think they're like the brownshirts? Why aren't they like the gallant students of Prague you used to talk about?”

So all of a sudden you've got your world-famous generation gap opening up between Czesław and his daughter right there at our feet, and it's about the size of the Grand Canyon. Janice has got a take on Kent State that's just as clear as her dad's.

After Nixon widened the war by invading a neutral country—which he didn't have any legal right to do, she says—the students at Kent State naturally were upset, and they were demonstrating for peace, and then their own government murdered four of them in cold blood. It's the first time I ever heard Janice express a political opinion, and it kind of surprised me. She didn't have any doubts about what she thought.

“She thinks those dead punks are martyrs,” he says, pointing at his daughter like she's Exhibit A. “She's got that girl's picture taped up on her wall.” It was that famous picture, you know, of that girl kneeling by one of the dead students, and she's waving her arms in the air and she's got an expression on her face that's like, oh, God, no!

“It's my room,” Janice says, “and I can put anything I want to on my wall. And they
are
martyrs. And we've got to stop the killing.”

“See what high ideals she has,” he says to me. “She means well, but American children are so naive.”

“Stop talking about me in the third person,” she says to him. “I'm right here, and I'm not a child.”

Now I'm checked out on sixteen-year-old girls. Linda turned sixteen when I was still working at the Sylvania plant, and she and Old Bullet Head used to get into it, and she'd get so mad at him, she'd burst into tears and go running out of the kitchen and up into her bedroom and slam the door like a pistol shot. He'd be left sitting there looking at Mom going, “Hell. What did I say this time?”

So I'm expecting Janice to do pretty much the same thing. Her face turns bright red, and her eyes are filling up, and she's shaking all over, and she's so mad that when she tries to say anything, she's got to half choke herself so she's not yelling at him. But damn it, she's not going to let herself cry. And she's not going to run away. She's going to sit right there and argue with her old man, by God. It's the first time I realized how much alike they are—both of them stubborn as bulldogs.

So he's going on about how he got to know the Nazis and Commies—you know, up close and personal—and if she'd seen what he'd seen, she wouldn't be saying any of those ridiculous things. And when he was in university in Warsaw, the Endeks were trying to destroy it just like these campus radicals today—that's the Polish right-wingers he's talking about—and they'd beat up students on the street and come right into the classrooms to beat people up, sometimes even the professors, and he and his pals fought them off with fists and clubs and stones. And when he says that, he looks like if you gave him half a chance, he'd jump up and start fighting them all over again right now—so you don't have to tell him about campus radicals. He knows all there is to know about campus radicals.