What It Takes (43 page)

He said, there are people with money in the world who can do pretty much what they want, and then there’s a lot of others. And the ones with most of the money keep the money, and do not care much about the others. The ones with the money, Carl explained, mostly live in New York, and do what they choose. The rest of us work, and get by.

Of course, the way Carl was, he said it without rancor, just stating facts in his quiet way. Still, Gary never forgot it. It was the most political statement he had ever heard in his family.

Politics wasn’t something you’d hear about in Ottawa, not the politics of social movements, certainly not at Ottawa High. It wasn’t till years after the Supreme Court decided that school case forty miles up the road, in Topeka, that Ottawa kids even heard the rumblings of protest, or civil rights, or free speech, or anything like that. In fact, when a few kids at Ottawa High finally did mount a tiny echo to the great movements abroad in the nation (they parked themselves in an upstairs hall one day, between classes, and called it a “sit-down”), Mr. Hood, the principal, marched by, clapped his hands twice and shouted, “All right! That’s it! Let’s get back to class!” ... and they were up and on their way before he got to the end of the hall.

While Gary Hartpence was there, things hadn’t even gone that far. When he looked back much later, and tried to describe Ottawa High, he said it was like the television show
Happy Days
. Fact was, they weren’t all happy. There were strata in the high school, too—cliques, more like it—and Gary wasn’t in them. Everybody knew he was smart—a hell of a reader—but that and a quarter would buy an ice cream soda at the Dutch Maid.

Jocks were the heroes, and he was not a jock. He had played football before high school, when one of the older kids organized an eighth-grade team, Gary was an end (he could catch, and, yes, he did get dirty) and he loved it. The coach, a high school player named Dick Martin, called him Harts, and Gary liked that. But after that, Gary didn’t have the speed, or size—by the middle of his high school years, he might have weighed one-fifty, maybe, with his clothes on. In fact, he stayed scrawny. And with those jug ears, and a complexion that wasn’t just right, well, he was no social lion, either.

That was the other whippy thing to be. But in that ethic, the whippiest kids had to show a streak of wildness—nothing too awful (one farm kid did sock the principal in the jaw, but that was over the line)—maybe a sack of garbage strewn on somebody’s porch, or a sack of crap at their front door, or stuff nailed up on telephone poles, like wheelbarrows, or porch furniture. Wildness was getting your father’s car and driving the tires up onto the railroad tracks, around Third Street, or Fourth, and then riding the rails, with your fists frozen around the wheel and your face a bloodless grin of fear, out to Thirteenth Street, or even Fifteenth ... before you yanked the wheel and got back onto the street. (Larry Larkin and Richard Fogel, they’d do
anything ...
rode the track fifteen
miles
, out to Williamsburg!) Wildness was bushwhacking parkers while they petted behind their steamy car windows ... and other drive-in movie stuff. But wildness was not Hartpence—not at all.

For one thing, he couldn’t go to the drive-in, or even to the Plaza Theater on Main Street. That was a Nazarene rule: no movies. Same with dancing at the youth center, which was open Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday nights (weekends, till eleven) and was a must on the high school social circuit. Sometimes, there were pyjama parties, and the girls would go out on the street, middle of the night, in their baby-doll pyjamas ... or they’d go skinny-dipping at the country club, while the boys hid in the bushes to watch. Not Gary. ... Kids would hide their cigarettes out at the quarry—then they’d get rained on and ruined, so the kids would crush up leaves and smoke the stuff from straws. Not Gary. Smoking was explicitly barred in the Godly Walk of the Nazarenes.

But it wasn’t the church that set Gary apart. It was Gary. He was shy, and just ... didn’t belong. After a while, maybe he didn’t want to belong. He’d say he couldn’t
understand why
the rest of the kids acted like they did. Things most people just took for granted ... bothered him: Why did they have to be that way? Marvin Wilson was a heck of a nice guy, good athlete, smart, good-looking ... but Marvin was Negro, so he and his family had to sit in the back row of the Plaza Theater. Why?

Friends would say: Gary, that’s just how it is. Who cares?

“Well, why is it like that? I don’t understand why.”

He couldn’t small-talk, the way most kids could, about dragging Main in Doug Shade’s car, or who was dancing (and with whom) when the youth center closed last night. ... He couldn’t see the point of that stuff, like the endless cycle of
Hi! Howareya?
in the halls at school.

How you doin’?

Fine.

Hiya, Gary!

Eight times a day, they’d say the same thing! “Why do we
do
these things? ...”

At one point, he worked out his own answer:

How are ya, Gary?

“Well,” he’d say, “I feel much more like I do now than I did when I got up this morning.”

His humor was a bit quiet for the crowd.

Tell the truth, he probably would have loved it if his talk had been just the right talk, or Carl’s car had been just the right car, instead of the solid, family Chrysler sedan (with wheels so wide, you couldn’t even
try
to ride the rails). He always half admired (more than half!) the ease some guys had: his friend, Kent Granger, a good athlete, had a way with girls that was so natural. Another friend, Dick Martin, was so ornery as a kid, his mother used to chain him to the clothesline ... but Dick’s dad was president of Ottawa U, and so, by right, he just belonged.

It wasn’t that Gary didn’t want to get into the swim. And it wasn’t his fault that by the time he got to the edge of the pond, he had the wit, the discernment, to see it was
empty
. ... It just happened that he wasn’t a jock, or easily social, so he had to find another way to get what he needed, to see himself whole.

He was not going to make the football team, no ... but he made the tennis team. He was not going to play varsity basketball ... so he became the team manager. For a while, he went to games as announcer for Ottawa’s first and only radio station, KOFO (
twelve-twenty on your dial
...). He was the only boy to apply for editor in chief of the student paper. So, Florence Robinson, the faculty adviser, asked the other teachers, and ... Gary was the chief. And then, too, he ran for class office: not yet for president; that was still the province of jocks, heroes ... but everybody knew Hartpence was smart, and serious, so they voted him vice president. (It wasn’t till his senior year he tried for president, and almost sailed in unopposed, until his friend Willie Hoobing filed on a whim, and Willie, who always small-talked
everyone
, took that prize away.)

Meanwhile, Gary did his reading, kept out of trouble. There was a mini-scandal in chem class one year when someone stole the final exam, and Lester Hoffman, the teacher, hit the roof and made everybody take the test again ... but Gary didn’t need that kind of shortcut. (In fact, Bill Meucke offered him a peek at the test, but Gary was scared, and said, “Get that thing out of here!”) Grades were never a problem for Hartpence. Like most of the smart kids, he knew he was going to college. Even had the school picked out: Bethany, a Nazarene college near Oklahoma City. Of course, that wasn’t a big school, with teams that people talked about, like KU, or K-State, or even Ottawa U ... so it wasn’t something he could small-talk about.

But even with that, he found another way. He found out he could
not
talk. It worked like a charm! In fact, it was charm ... you could almost see it happening in him, about the time everybody got their licenses, sophomore year, ’51–’52. ... Gary and a friend, or a couple of friends, would be riding around, dragging Main, like everybody else, in the evening. Maybe they’d check in at the Dutch Maid, or Scott’s (seven burgers for a dollar) on Fifth Street, near the library ... and then, they’d go to the youth center ... where Gary found he didn’t have to dance, and he didn’t have to play Ping-Pong, and he didn’t even have to small-talk. He found out he could sit in the back, alone, near the fireplace, lost in his thoughts, a bit melancholy, silent... and, sure enough, some girl would come over to say, “Oh, Gary, don’t worry ...

“Gary, things’re gonna be all right. Are you sad?”

And Gary’d say, no, he was all right, just thinking ...

“Really?”

And sometimes, they’d get to talking about what Gary was thinking, maybe what he’d been reading ... he was so smart! And he made them feel smart. He always wanted to know about them, what they thought ... (Really? That’s what they thought? He never
knew
that ...) And he spoke so softly, almost purring, and they could see how he brightened, the fun in him, his eyes ... if they were a year or two younger, it was even easier, and almost more fun, and it made them feel important.

Sometimes, they’d get back in the car, Gary and the girl, or him and a friend and a couple of girls, and they’d drive out to the south edge of town, to the airport, just a strip of concrete in the fields—no lights, no planes at night ... and they’d pull out onto the runway, and stop the car, and open the doors. And with the radio glowing, the Mills Brothers piercing the dark, they’d dance on the runway, under the stars. ... Gary liked to dance slow, and close, almost motionless. ... That concrete was rough on the shoes, but what the hell—Gary hardly moved his feet.

H
ERE THEY COME, OFF
the plane, the diddybop Bostons, jangling down the ramp to get ahead of their man. There’s nothing like them—not out here, anyway. First thing is their color: they’re gray. In Iowa, the only people that color are sick. But the Bostons are always soot-color in the winter—like streets after snow, after the salt trucks come through and it dries during the day ... asphalt gray. They don’t notice: they feel fine, full of nervy energy and quick talk. And busy, always—maybe that’s what makes them gray, those women with the skin stretched around their eyes, like they’ve been in traffic for the last ten years, their jaws narrow under tight haircuts. The guys seem to have more flesh, and flush to their cheeks, but when you get close, it’s only broken veins ... their capillaries all had little strokes, practicing up for the Big One. The other thing is the way they move, so busy: the first ones are hunched over fast mincy steps, like they’re getting out of cabs in the rain; they’ve got to get off the ramp, to get the shot, and their cameras, lights, boom mikes all stick out, giving them a six-legged look, like something skittering under the stove when the light switches on in the kitchen. Then the lights
are
on, and the others come out, bouncing down the ramp, with the jingle of all the crap they carry (even the guys have little bags), with their heads bobbing time, and their gray eye sockets shifting back and forth, looking the place over, while their heads are nodding, like they’d buy it—if it weren’t such a dump. A couple of the guys have a hand in a pocket, like they’re holding shivs, and there’s one chewing gum, and they’re off the ramp, still bouncing and jingling, while they trade bursts of rat-a-tat talk down the concourse, and quick snorts of laughter, and two of them stop at a picture on the wall, the sort of color-chocked promotional photograph that airport authorities select by committee, and one of them is digging in a bag for a notebook. It’s
a farm scene
... with
animals ...
which is just what the diddybops came out to
see
... and now a third one comes up behind, and says, as if the first two were wondering, “That’s a cow.” And they all have a giggle about coming out here—“hog-hopping,” as the
Globe
would call it the next day.

Make no mistake, though: these people were in deadly earnest. For one thing, besides the Governor and his wife, and Sasso, and a couple of staff to tend to them, there were about twenty-five reporters, and each would have to get a story, to justify the trip. All the affiliate TV stations had three or four people each, not to mention Channel Fifty-six, and public TV, and Ken Bode with his crew from NBC, and the big papers had at least two, or two and a columnist, and the smaller papers—
The Quincy Patriot Ledger, The Worcester Telegram
—had their State House guys out there, with plane tickets and hotel rooms ... and those guys weren’t even political writers, who were used to spending a fortune to learn ... well, not much. No, these guys had to have a story, and the story was: Is he running, or not? So every few minutes, they’d poke their mikes in, like thermometers, to see if the fever was rising.

The official line on the trip was that Governor Dukakis, a prominent member of the National Governors Association, was
invited
to Iowa by the Governor, Terry Branstad, for a
hearing
on rural America ... just part of the Governor’s continuing process of self-education. But that polite fiction begged the question: as if Neil Armstrong stepped off the lunar landing module, and tried to explain, “Hey, no big deal, I’m just here to collect some rocks.” No, the point for the Bostons was the trip itself, and they were in full Presidential cry. The Bostons always expect to have a piece of this President business: it’s a regional industry with them—like ham is in Virginia. There was no Kennedy going this time, so ... The Duke was the ticket. The Boston TVs had already commissioned exclusive polls to see where he stood in Iowa. The
Globe
had a guy on the streets of Des Moines two days early, showing a picture of Michael, like a runaway child, to see if anybody knew him.

They didn’t. But the process already was feeding on itself. The moment the diddybops hit that ramp, Gate 3B, Des Moines Airport, it did not matter that no one in Iowa wanted Michael Dukakis to be President. The local TVs and
The Des Moines Register
showed up to cover the arrival ... as news! ...
He has come!
Hey, more than a year to the caucuses, and this guy already needs a Greyhound to carry his press corps—
we better get out there
! At one point, one of the Bostons asked one of the Des Moineses why the hell he was there: “If so many of you guys weren’t here,” said Michael Day, of KCCI, Des Moines, “we wouldn’t
be
covering this today.” Meanwhile, Day complained that Dukakis wasn’t
saying
anything. Which, of course, filtered back to Michael. Why didn’t he say something?