There's a Man With a Gun Over There (9 page)

Nazis? Why, Nazis are always a long way from fourth grade.

My friend, he called me, Albert Speer did. My friend.

Yes, for five minutes, it was Albert Speer and I, the best of friends, but it took me years to get there.

16.

O
h, there it goes in my dreams, floating along, the head of Henry Kissinger, tall as a five-story building, floating sixty feet overhead, filled with gas, a huge Macy's balloon, floating over the marching soldiers. In their gray camouflage uniforms in the gray air, a moving mass.

Thousands of men, marching, marching, marching.

“Go to your left, your right, your left.”

The reverberating
clump
of all those boots hitting the ground in unison.

The giant, floating head of Henry Kissinger turning slowly back and forth, his eyeglass lenses becoming opaque when the light hits them.

Millions of men beneath him, marching, marching, marching.

Clump. Clump. Clump.

“Go to your left, your right, your left,” marching, marching.

The head of Henry Kissinger nodding.

Clump. Clump. Clump.

He turns to me and smiles, Henry Kissinger does. His teeth are sharp like saw teeth. Brilliant white saw teeth.

“
Sehr schön, nicht wahr
?”

Beautiful, isn't it?

“
Der Krieg ist die Wahrheit
.”

War is the truth.

His voice is like the Arctic wind.

Why is he speaking in German? But then I remember. He is, in fact, German.

The head floats along, nodding, above the marching soldiers.

Clump. Clump. Clump.

The opaque eyes looking in the distance, looking suddenly at me. His face suddenly in front of me, his mouth open, his teeth like a spiked fence, beyond it a dragon howling, hissing fire, howling.

Clump. Clump. Clump.

Millions and millions and millions of men, marching, marching, marching.

17.

I
graduated from high school in June of 1963. That summer I worked for Bostwick's, a men's store in Janesville. This was the first of a series of summer jobs that helped pay my way through college.

I secretly believed that good clothes would somehow give me a new family. They would help me escape the haunting of my family. I'd have a sane father with a better car than an old Ford with iron surveying stakes in the trunk and rubber bands on the shift column, and a mother who didn't spend the day in her faded housecoat drinking coffee and discussing how the family fortune had been lost.

“What a man needs,” Bill Bostwick, one of the store owners, always said, “is a new Botany 500 suit and a set of matched Samsonite luggage. Those items, along with a half Windsor knot beneath the collar of a new Arrow shirt, will take you to the highest promontories of life.”

In August of 1963, when I left for little Cornell College in Iowa, I followed Bill's advice pretty closely. I had that brandnew Botany 500 suit (just like one that Dick Van Dyke wore on his TV show), some Arrow shirts, and a matched pair of Samsonite Ultralite suitcases in Colorado Brown my aunt and uncle gave me. I borrowed a device that made hard plastic label tapes with raised lettering, so my Norelco electric razor was clearly identified as belonging to “Ryan.”

“Let me get this straight,” my friend Tom Bamberger says. “You graduated from high school in 1963, and you were putting your name on your electric razor because you were worried that someone would steal it?”

“And my alarm clock—oh, and my clothes brush, too. I even put labels on these wooden hangers I had. They had these clamps to hold your pants.”

“You had wooden hangers in the fall of 1963? You had a clothes brush?”

“For my Botany 500 suit.”

“What's wrong with you? The sixties were just getting started in 1963, and you were worried about creases in your suit. Bob Dylan is writing ‘Blowing in the Wind,' and you're suiting up with The Four Freshmen.”

Look, Tom: I thought I was keeping up with the times. I thought we were pretty hip there in Mount Vernon, Iowa.

When John Kennedy was assassinated in the fall of my freshman year, I was sitting in my dorm room reading aloud from “The Fable of the Final Hour” by Dan Propper. I thought this was a pretty hip moment.

Of course “The Fable of the Final Hour” hasn't completely stood the test of time. I mean, how many times have you pulled this poem off the shelf in the last few years? How many times has anyone you know read this poem? Have you, in fact, ever
heard
of this poem? With its slightly offbeat spacing and incantatory rhythms, it seemed a piece of early 1960s hip. Now, though, the poem seems almost as earnest as the era it wanted to enlighten.

In the 37th minute of the final hour a Bop version of the Star-Spangled Banner was proclaimed official arrangement of the United States Marines

As I read to my bored roommates from “The Fable of the Final Hour” that chilly November afternoon, I began to feel pretty hip myself, with the syncopated flow of those anapests running along:

In the 51st minute of the final hour Texas was declared Incapable and assigned a guardian

This was the exact sentence I was reading the afternoon of November 22nd, 1963, when Freddie Sarnack came running into the room.

“The president,” he said, out of breath, trying to get enough wind for a full sentence. “The president . . . the president has been shot.”

This is probably the one and only moment in my life when I was somehow completely in tune with the subterranean, homesick blues of my time.

“I think you're kidding yourself, Rick,” Tom Bamberger tells me. “That isn't a real sixties story. Real sixties stories involve pot or sex or war protests—not reading bad poetry. Did you ever have to wash the smell of tear gas out of your clothes?”

“I was close. There were war protests in Madison. I grew up only forty miles away in Janesville. I visited a lot.”

“You visited the sixties,” Bamberger tells me. “That's funny.”

Oh—and there was the time I was almost a civil rights protester.

18.

I
n 1965, I can see Dr. Larry Stone, professor of religion, stapling posters to the trees on campus. They announced a trip in March to join a big civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.

Be Part of the History of Your Time
.
Join hands with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
END
Racial injustice in the South.
We SHALL Overcome

I had my first real girlfriend then, and sex got mixed up in my politics.

Jenny was a folksinger and always talked about how strict her father was and how he would be apoplectic if he discovered his daughter participating in left-wing causes, so she had to be careful, Jenny told me. She wouldn't, therefore, be going to Selma, no—but when I mentioned that I was kind of, sort of thinking about going, her body became electric, and she sang “We Shall Overcome” softly in my ear and let me caress her inner thighs.

At this point, Mr. Cock became involved. While caressing a young lady's thighs covered by the denim of blue jeans wasn't, perhaps, exactly an admission to her inner sanctum, Mr. Cock reasoned that I was on my way.

At this point, Mr. Cock made the decision for me—he was sending himself to Jenny Gleason's vagina via a voter registration program for Negroes in Selma, Alabama.

The information meeting drew a healthy crowd—maybe fifty or sixty students, including one of the conservatives, who sat in the back row holding up a poster that said
SPONGE— Society for the Prevention of Negroes Getting Everything.

“This is,” Dr. Stone said, his voice turned into echoes and screeches by the bad PA system, “one of the profound moments of our time. Years from now, your grandchildren will ask you where you were when Dr. King and his followers joined hands and marched to Montgomery, Alabama. When the histories of the twentieth century are written, these days will have a prominent place. Your grandchildren will ask you where you were that fateful day.”

I picked up a schedule and a form I was to have my parents sign. Since I wasn't yet twenty-one, I needed their permission to go. Now this was a problem. My parents—while basically good, kind people—were also white people of their times.

“Those Negroes,” my father once told me.

“Yes?”

“Those Negroes have to help themselves out, you know. We can't do it for them.”

“This country has brutalized the Negroes,” I said, quoting Dr. Stone.

“Well, you'll see. We can't do it for them.”

What did that mean, I wondered. When I got angry with him, I yelled it out, “What does that mean? We have to help; it's our duty!”

“You can't sit this game out,” Dr. Stone said. “If you don't help the Negro gain the basic rights of citizenship, then the blood of the Negro is on your hands. You are as guilty as some Klansman in a white sheet setting fire to a Negro church. Think about it.”

“The government is up to no good,” my dad said, picking up a flake of tobacco from his tongue. “No good at all.”

“Oh, baby” is what Jenny Gleason said when I told her I was going with Dr. Stone on the trip to Montgomery. Suddenly, in the middle of Iowa, I, who hadn't been out of the Midwest in my life, slurred “Montgomery” as though I were a southerner.

Jenny leaned back on the couch and spread her legs, as if inviting me in, and I began stroking her crotch, which seemed to soften like melting ice cream. I was underneath the bra in no time. Her nipples were as erect as my cock.

“Oh, baby,” she said.

“Ryan. Rick Ryan,” I said to Dr. Stone the next morning, and he checked me off his list, which had thirty or forty names.

Three other people eventually showed up—Wade Leonard, Jeannie Farago, and Mary Rombauer.

We met in front of Lennox Hall, the men's dormitory.

“Wait a minute,” Dr. Stone said. “I can't believe we don't have more students than you four. My meeting had ten times that many people, didn't it?”