The Nuclear Age (12 page)

The only drawback, really, was Ollie Winkler.

“Letter bomb?” he’d say. “All I need’s a zip code. Send it COD.”

“No.”

“Yeah, but Jesus, we’re not
getting
anywhere.”

“Negative.”

“No, you mean?”

“I do. I mean no.”

By temperament, obviously, I was not inclined toward violence, and therefore even his mock-up bomb made me a bit queasy. A demo model, Ollie called it, but it had the heft and authority of the genuine article. A steel frame with nasty appendages at each end, bright copper wiring, a soft ticking at its core.

“The bombs are real,” Ollie said, and tapped the hollow casing. “Say the word, I’ll arrange some surprises.”

I just shook my head.

In a way, though, he was right. The bomb had credibility. People made wide turns as they entered the cafeteria. The power of firepower: it delivered a punchy little message.

“What I could do,” Ollie said, “I could—”

“No.”

He grinned. “Oh, well,” he said, “live and learn.”

Mostly it was drudge work. We doubled our picket time—Mondays and Fridays. No theatrics, just moral presence. We were
there
. All around us, of course, the apathy was like cement, hard
and dense, and to be honest there were times when I came close to chucking it. Goofy, I’d think. And futile. I was no martyr. I hated the public eye, I felt vulnerable and absurd. Fuck it, I’d tell myself, but then I’d remember. Headlines. A new year, January 1967, and eighteen GIs died under heavy mortar fire outside Saigon.

Goofy, perhaps, but the goofiness had an edge to it.

So what does one do?

Hold the line and hope. My dreams were honorable. There was the golden dome on the state capitol; there was the world-as-it-should-be.

When I look back on that period, it’s clear that my motives were not strictly political. At best, I think, it was a kind of precognitive politics. Granted, the war was part of it, I had ideals and convictions, but for me the imperative went deeper. Sirens and pigeons. A midnight light show. It occurred to me, even at the time, that our political lives could not be separated from the matrix of life in general. Joseph Stalin: the son of a poor cobbler in Tiflis. George Washington: a young neurotic who could not bring himself to tell a modest lie. Why does one man vote Republican, another Socialist, another not at all? Pure intellect? A cool adjudication between means and ends? Or more likely, does it have to do with a thick tangle of factors—Ollie Winkler’s garbled chromosomes, my own childhood, a blend of memory and circumstance and dream?

I wasn’t a fortune-teller.

Vision, nothing more. Dim previews of coming attractions. The rest was trial and error.

In the first week of February, we set up a formal organization on campus. The Committee, we called it. We took out an ad in the
Pevee Weekly
, calling for volunteers, and three days later, on a Saturday afternoon, we convened our first meeting in a small conference room in the basement of Old Main.

I presided, Ollie sat to my immediate left. At two o’clock, when I called the meeting to order, it was clear that we had a severe manpower problem. The only other body in the room belonged to a large, tent-shaped coed who brooded in total silence at the far end of the table.

“This is Tina,” Ollie said, “I’ll vouch for her.”

The girl gazed fixedly at her own stomach; she seemed fascinated by it, a little overwhelmed.

Tina Roebuck: two hundred pounds of stolid mediocrity. A home-ec major. A chronic overeater. She was not obese, exactly, just well spread out. Generous hips and sturdy thighs and big utilitarian breasts. Like a Russian hammer-thrower, I decided—the poor girl obviously could not tell day from night without a sundial.

I smiled and shuffled some papers.

“Floor’s open,” I said, and shrugged. “I think we can dispense with parliamentary procedure.”

Then I settled back.

Ollie Winkler did most of the talking. For ten minutes the discussion revolved around petty organizational matters. Ollie slipped his boots off, resting a foot on the edge of the table. “What we got here,” he was saying, “is a troika situation, like in the USS of R, three horses pulling the same big sled. Which means we best divvy up the power, keep the reins straight so to speak, that way we don’t get tangled up or nothing … Like with—”

I stood up and opened a window. The room had a stale, dirty-sock smell.

“Like with electricity,” Ollie said. “Power lines, I mean. One person can’t hog the amps and volts. Power, that’s where it’s at, we got to spread it around equal. The troika idea. Equal horsepower.” He paused to let this concept take shape, then massaged his toes and went on to talk about the virtues of shared leadership, how we had to be a democracy.

I slapped the table.

“Democracy’s fine,” I said. “Put your goddamn
boots
on.”

Ollie blinked.

“A case in point,” he said.

There was laughter at the end of the table. Tina Roebuck reached into her purse and pulled out a giant-sized Mars bar and placed it on the table directly in front of her.

She folded her hands and stared at it.

“Democracy,” Ollie sighed, “a lost art.”

“Next item,” I said.

Ollie hesitated. “Well, hey. Can’t we at least assign jobs, sort of? Like sergeant at arms. Where’s the fun if you don’t get special jobs?”

“Sergeant at arms,” I said. “You’re elected.”

“We didn’t
vote
.”

“One-zip, a landslide.”

“But we got to—”

“Unanimous. Congratulations.”

He grinned and tipped back his cowboy hat. “Sergeant at arms, it’s right up my alley. Jeez, maybe I should get myself an armband or something—I saw that on TV once, they always wear these nifty black armbands. Like a symbol, you know?”

“Fine,” I murmured.

“Armband. Write it down, man.”

“What?”

“On
paper
. Armband, put it in writing.”

I jotted a quick note to myself.

There was a disconcerting absence of dignity in the room. Shallow, I thought. Sad and stupid. Across the table, Tina Roebuck was still examining her Mars bar, hands folded. It was a test of willpower, apparently, a curious exercise in temptation and denial. At one point she reached out and nudged the candy with a thumb and then shuddered and quickly folded her hands again.

The world, I realized, was a frail and desperate place.

“Tina,” I said gently, “eat it.”

She frowned and looked up.

“Eat?” she whispered.

“Don’t be bashful.”

“But I’m not … I mean, I’m not hungry.”

“Go ahead, though,” I said. “Treat yourself.”

She glanced at the Mars bar. “No, I just like to look at it. Window-shop, sort of.” She swallowed. Her voice was soft, almost sexy, a surprising Deep South lilt to the vowels. “Anyway, I’m not hungry.”

“Well, good.”

“I’m
not
.”

“But if you get the urge—”

“Fuck off!” she yelled. The softness was gone. She shifted weight and stared at me. “All this bullshit! The
war
, that’s why I’m here. People getting
killed
.”

Ollie smiled.

“Give it to him,” he said. “Open up, kid—both barrels.”

“Killed dead!” said Tina.

“More.”

“Dead,” she repeated. She poked the candy bar. “Talk-talk, no
action
. When do we start raising hell?”

Again, Ollie smiled at her, fondly.

“There’s the question,” he said. “When?”

Strange people, I thought. The incongruities were beguiling. I couldn’t help but take notice of Tina’s white ballet slippers, Ollie’s cowboy shirt with its fancy embroidery and brass studs. Here was the new order. A midget in the White House, a Mars bar on every plate. Almost funny, except there was some emotion in the room.

“Shock waves,” Ollie was saying. “We cut out this pussyfoot stuff. Apply some heat, that’s my vote.”

I shook my head.

“We’ve been over this,” I said. “No bombs.”

“I’m not
talking
bombs. Noisemakers. Don’t hurt nobody, just decibels. Sit there, thumb up your ass, but sooner or later it’s smash time. The chef and the terrorist, remember?”

“I do.”

“And you know the moral? The moral’s this. Heat. You bring it to bear. And if you can’t stand the heat … Understand me?”

Tina Roebuck chuckled.

“The frying pan,” she said softly.

“That’s it exactly,” said Ollie. He smiled at me, but it was a grim smile. “Fuckin’ sizzle. That’s what the chef says. He says you better learn to tolerate extremes.”

I’d had enough.

I stacked my papers, stood up, and moved to the door.

“Carry on,” I said. I nodded at Tina. “Let me know how it turns out with that candy bar.”

At the time it all seemed hopeless, but in the end that meeting represented a pivot of sorts, a classic confrontation between the either-ors. The choice was there. I could’ve backed out with honor. Shrug and walk away—I could’ve dismissed the complications. Was it a correct war? Was it a civil war? Was Ho Chi Minh a nationalist or a Communist, or both, and to what degree, and what about the Geneva Accords, and what about SEATO, and what is worth killing for, if anything, and what is worth dying for, and who decides? I could’ve done without these riddles. I could’ve pursued my studies and graduated with distinction and spent the next decade lying low. Hedged my bets. Closed my eyes. Nothing to it, a slight change of course. Let the gravediggers do their work, I could’ve managed quite nicely. A snug mountain retreat. Or a cave, or a hole. No armies, no social milieu, no drafts to dodge, no underground strife. True, you can’t rewind history, but if I’d recognized the pivot for what it was, things might’ve followed a different track. I could’ve avoided some funerals. A choice, and I chose, but I could’ve avoided the rest of my life.

Amazing, how the circuits connect. One minute you’re all alone and then suddenly it just happens. The wires touch. A Friday evening, February 1967, and Sarah glared at me.

“You,” she said.

It was an affair called Winter Carnival. Like a prom, basically: an all-night party to ward off the midterm blahs. First a dance, then a buffet, then a movie, then finally a dawn breakfast. I’m not sure what made me go—premonition sounds phony—but around eight o’clock I put on a clean shirt and hiked over to the gymnasium.

For a while I just stood at the doorway letting my eyes adjust. Pitiful, I thought. Penny loafers and spiffy sweaters. No one knew. The theme for that year’s Carnival was “Custer’s Last Stand,” and the gym had been decorated to resemble a large and very gory battlefield, a mock-up of the Little Bighorn, with cardboard cutouts of dead horses and burning wagons and arrows and tomahawks and wild-eyed Indians and mutilated soldiers. At the center of the dance floor was a big papier-mâché dummy of Custer himself—very
lifelike, except he was obviously dead. The body had been propped up against a wagon wheel. It was shot full of arrows and the hair was gone and the whole corpse was wet with ketchup-blood. The idea, no doubt, was to make everyone feel a swell of state pride, or a sense of history, but for me it was the creeps. Especially the scalps. Greasy and convincing—scalps everywhere—dangling from the basketball hoops, floating in the punch bowl.

Custer’s Last Stand, it was insane and juvenile. It was Montana, 1967.

At the front door a kid dressed up as Crazy Horse used a scissors to perform a symbolic scalping. Ned Rafferty, a big-shit line-backer—I recognized him through his war paint. Dumb as bread, of course, but very presentable in the muscle department.

Rafferty dipped some of my hair into a bowl of ketchup.

“Careful now,” he said. He gave me a long look. “Like your poster says. A violent world, white man.”

I nodded and edged away.

Jocks, I thought. Linebackers and bacteria. Try, but you couldn’t escape them.

Up at the far end of the gym, a band was playing
Stranger on the Shore
. The place was dark and noisy. Like a cattle show—everybody sweating and swaying and grinding up against each other. Right then I nearly called it a night. No dignity, I thought, but I moved over to the punch bowl and stood around drinking scalp for the next half hour. No knowledge, no vision. Wall-to-wall morons. At one point I spotted Ollie and Tina out on the dance floor. They were snuggled up close, like lovers, and in a way I envied them. Just the closeness. They weren’t my kind, though, and when Ollie waved at me I turned away and watched the band.

I could feel my stomach cramping up. Maybe it was the punch, maybe loneliness, but I was on the verge of walking out when the circuits connected.

Partly luck, partly circumstance.

It began as a silly party game called Pevee Pair-Off. The idea was for the women to line up in a single long row at one end of the gym, all the men at the other, and then when the signal was given,
the two rows were supposed to march toward each other like opposing skirmish lines in old-fashioned warfare. A lottery of sorts. Whoever you bumped into became your partner for the evening. Again, for me, it was one of those mysterious either-ors—I could’ve headed for the door—but for some reason I took the risk.