The Laws of our Fathers

FALL, 1969

Seth

Jolted by the million marchers who'd gathered on the Mall on November 15 to protest the war, Congress enacted the draft lottery system the next week. Now, instead of years of continuing jeopardy, eligible men would confront only a single night when their fate would be decided. Some would go; some would be free. I recognized the lottery for what it was, an ignoble effort to divide and demobilize the young. But privately I was near jubilation. All but certain to be drafted days before, I now had a chance to escape.

The lottery was conducted on December 2, at 5 p.m. our time. We watched in our apartment. Hobie and Lucy were there. So was Michael. Sonny sat next to me, holding my hand. The local news yielded to Walter Cronkite and a live feed from Washington. It looked like my imagination of a court-martial – a bunch of old men up on a platform. A congressman pulled the first little capsule from the rotating drum. A date, September 14, was read aloud by an elderly colonel and posted on a board behind him. The point of the lottery was to place every day of the year in a random order, which would, in turn, become the sequence in which young men would be called. If you were born on September 14, you'd be drafted first. On the other hand, if Hobie's birthday or mine was pulled above a certain number – 200, we figured, given the many deferments in University Park – we'd be free.

Members of President Nixon's Selective Service Youth Advisory Board grabbed the remaining little bullets from the drum. They were draft-age men with haircuts which revealed their ears, work-within-the-system types whom I despised. One of them drew my birthday, March 12. It was the fifteenth number selected. I would get a draft notice by April at the latest.

'Luck of the Irish,' I said, but the joke was bad and my tone was worse. Somehow I'd gotten to my feet. From behind, Sonny wrapped both arms around my chest, just to hold on. 'I am fucked,' I told her. There was no counter.

The local newscast resumed, with the numbers from DC scrolled along the bottom of the screen. I watched stupefied, trying to envision my future and hating everything in America. In Hartford, two students were on trial for criminal libel for publishing an obscene cartoon of Nixon in the college paper. Mark Rudd and the Weathermen had been indicted in Chicago for the Days of Rage. And the saga of Juanita Rice, currently riveting California, was continuing. The girl was the object of occasional sightings across the state, while her captors issued various communiques demanding five evenings of national TV time. Since it had occurred, the Rice kidnapping had been of irrational concern to my mother. Having heard about my radical acquaintances in the building, she convinced herself they might kidnap me, too. It was, I suppose, some kind of coping mechanism, a danger she could reasonably dismiss – unlike Vietnam.

In the meantime, Hobie sat silently before the TV, watching the numbers roll. Hobie was as intent on avoiding Nam as I was, but he had a different approach. He swore he would show up for his induction physical in a dress. He was going to claim to have had homosexual relations with every prominent black Communist from Patrice Lumumba to Gus Hall. He also sometimes attached his leg to a concrete cinder block and pulley, hoping to aggravate a high-school football injury. Now, once the numbers passed 275, we knew he would not have to go through any of those antics. Inconsolably jealous, I nonetheless roused myself to kiss him on the forehead.

'Luck of the Irish,' Hobie said. He did not hit until after 300. The last one to go was Michael at 342 – and him with a 1-Y. Even though he had grown up mowing and baling, Michael had been exempted from the draft for hay fever and asthma. It did not seem fair, but very little at that moment did.

My mother and father had viewed the lottery with almost pitiably high hopes. They did not find the courage to call until the following afternoon. It was 6:01 p.m. Central Time, the very minute long-distance rates went down. No matter how extreme the circumstances, my father would never violate his personal dogma about money.

When my parents phoned on Sundays, my father and I barely spoke. He made a few correct inquiries regarding my health or the California weather, then passed the phone to my mother, who painfully elaborated a list of questions I knew she had been assembling all week. With a rush of constricted feeling, 1 would visualize the two of them, my mother holding a ball of Kleenex, her fingers touching her mouth, my father close enough to overhear, but with his head in a paper to show he did not have much interest. But this was a moment of confrontation with his renegade son, a challenge from which my father never retreated.

'I believe this decision is unwarranted,' he said at last, when I told him I had no choice now about Canada. 'There are alternatives.'

'Such as?'

‘I have the name of a doctor. He is conversant apparently with all the regulations.'

'Oh great. I'm going to bribe some MD to find something wrong with me. Is that the idea?'

'The idea is this man feels as you do and will assist you.'

'Oh sure. What other ideas have you got?' I imagined that my mother had rushed him straight to the phone as soon as he came in from work, still in his heavy wool suit. Beside him stood his briefcase, which, as a child, I had improbably associated with a cowboy's saddle bags.

'I have talked with Harold Blossman. He tells me his son has joined the Naval Reserve. There is some period of training, then you are free to go on your way. Write movies, whatever.'

'And what happens if you get called up?'

'Called up?'

'You know, they activate your unit. Then when you run away they call it treason.' 'Apparently that is rare.' 'And if it happens?'

'Then you confront the matter at that time, Seth. Dear God, you cannot make plans for the rest of your life concerning a matter of this sort.'

This talk of compromise, difficult to counter, tended to terrify me. In my passionate disapproval of the war, I had found one thing – perhaps the only thing – which I knew to be right and which was thoroughly mine. To believe so strongly and not to act on it, to capitulate to my parents' needs, was to condemn myself to a murk in which I'd never find my own outline.

'I'm against this. You don't understand. I'm against this war machine. I want to resist. I don't want to just skate through so that some Puerto Rican kid from the North End can go die for me. I don't want to pretend I'll serve and let them torture me in basic training and then run away if they're going to ship me out to Nam. It's another form of involuntary servitude, to go fight the war that the defense contractors want. There is one alternative.'

'This is not an alternative.'

'Dad, this is the kind of thing that has to be fought. I would think you'd understand that.' I knew this was a vain argument. My father and I agreed that there were lessons in history, but not about who was who. He scoffed at the parallels I drew between our national government and Germany in the thirties. It was the students at Columbia whom my father compared to the beer-hall putsch; the Panthers, in his eyes, were the brownshirts with berets.

'Your mother would feel that her life had come to nothing,' he finally said. 'You should have some feeling for her. I do not need to remind you.' As I had gotten older, my conflicts with my father were all supposedly conducted for her sake. What he wanted, did not want, was never purportedly in his own behalf. He was her spokesman, her defender. I begged him not to start with that.

'And Hobie?' my father asked. 'What will he do? Will he run away with you?' My father and Hobie always had a peculiar kinship, on some weird wavelength of their own. My father had the usual Viennese snob's appreciation for high intellect, and he listened to Hobie's smart remarks with a dry, approving smile he never found for me. When I told him that Hobie had pulled a high number, he sounded relieved. 'So you will take this step alone,' he pointed out. 'And when is that?' 'I don't know. Not for a while.' 'I see. We can hope then for your better senses, can we not?' I did not answer. Sonny had come in by then and she stood tensely listening to the conclusion of my conversation. I looked to her as I cradled the phone.

' "Zere are alternatifs," ' I said, mocking my father's accent. I had made fun of both my parents this way all my life, even to their faces, never quite focusing on why this teasing was acceptable to them. Yet it was always vital to my parents that I be genuinely American, fully at home here – and secure. They spoke English whenever I was around, and had even given me a name which to my enduring puzzlement neither of them could correctly pronounce. I was 'Set' in my mother's Czech accent, 'Sess' to my father. This passionate desire of theirs that I fit in was my sole avenue of escape in a home where my father's humorless correctness and my mother's anxieties left me little other refuge. My claim that something was 'American' – cap guns, when I was six; watching too much TV; my irregular sense of humor – almost invariably caused them to yield. Which, in large part, was why so much seemed to be at stake in my decision to leave the United States.

'Did he have any new ideas?' Sonny asked.

'Zip,' I responded. In truth, there were other courses that fit my moral regimen. I could go underground. False IDs – especially a social security number – were needed, but it was really life on the run, with the constant anxiety of apprehension, that seemed impossible to me. There was also the more noble alternative of accepting prosecution. Brad Kolaric, a fellow I knew at Easton, had done it and was now in the federal penitentiary at Terre Haute. But the prison butt-fuck stories kept me up at night, and I didn't feel my government should be imprisoning me for its errors. Exile seemed my only alternative.

'Maybe I can trade myself for Juanita Rice. Maybe the Gypsies would kidnap me. Carry me away with them. My mother always told me how they snatch children.'

Sonny had heard the same from her Aunt Hen.

'You think they have an age limit?' I asked.

'They might.'

'Shit. I thought I had the solution. They could take me to Canada.' I looked at Sonny. 'It's such a down,' I told her. 'There's no answer, baby.' 'Kidnapping,' I said.

Sonny gave me a melancholy smile. 'I don't think so.'

'Hey, look, I know what bothers me. It's not Canada really. It's deserting them. That's the way they see it. If they knew I was safe in a real nice country but being held against my will -' I shot out a hand: smooth sailing. More than the government, what I needed to escape was my parents' unspoken condemnation -that I would dare forget what was never to be forgotten.

No doubt, that night I dreamt about the numbers. Frail figures, they turned up in my dreams throughout my childhood, usually appearing to my horror somewhere on my body: under a trouser cufF, in the center of my forehead when I caught sight of myself in a mirror. Unlike my father, who wore long sleeves on all occasions, even in the mug of summer, who, so far as I can recall, never swam in public – unlike him, my mother made no exceptional efforts to hide the blue-green characters tattooed on her forearm, a few inches above her wrist. The marks, so distinct, were always remarkable to me – ineradicable and vaguely disfiguring, but dear and special because they were so identifiably hers. I can recall more than one occasion when I was very young when I wet a finger from my mouth and with no objection from her tried to wipe the numerals away. When I asked what they were, she said simply – always – 'Those? Those are numbers.' And when I wrote numbers – scribbles, really – on myself in pen, she walked me to the sink at once.

As I learned to read, I remember noticing that the figures were peculiarly formed – hand-drawn in a style that struck me as foreign. There were tails of some sort on the fives and a dash across the middle of the seven. And around this age I began, at last, in some awful unspeaking way, to associate the numbers with that large, indescribable horror, that dark fog that lay somewhere in the past which was always the subject of silent allusion in my parents' home.

My father never allowed any talk about the camps. If something appeared on TV, he watched it with unwavering silent attention. But he made no mention on his own and would discourage my mother with stark looks. And yet the few images I saw – of the naked skeletal bodies, the cyanotic corpses stacked and so profoundly without life – endured as specters. They lived with me inalterably, part of the high tension of my household, which had an atmosphere at all times like a tautened instrument string waiting to be plucked.

Much of what I knew came from what I'd read – almost unconsciously – or what my mother eventually told me. I learned the few details I was allowed in my teens and largely in answer to my own ceaseless question to her: What was wrong with him, this man, my father? The stories I was told, in the barest strokes, were so alien to the secure envelope of University Park – its streets canopied by elderly elms, its confident persistent values and enduring social ethos of calm, intellectual debate – that I was truly years in absorbing them, some kind of titration of my own experience that took place in infinitesimal measure like medication being dripped by IV, tear by tear, into the blood. And even so they remain to me the very quintessence of horror: how my mother's husband had disappeared from her for good, as they were sorted by gender in one of Birkenau's lines. How my father's six-year-old boy was shot dead right before him at Buchenwald. The inhuman work. Meals of boiled grass. The unfathomable nature of what it means to have survived this utter blackness.

I rigidly avoided any conscious thought of my parents as the victims of any of those barbarities, and never took account of the mark their experience had made on me. Sonny had shipped literally hundreds of books from home. I had taken only four or five: The Diary of Anne Frank; The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Talcott Parsons; Alan Bullock's biography of Hitler. A few lonely volumes, they stood together on the lee end of one shelf amid the board-and-cinder-block bookcases erected along every free wall of our flat in Damon. Even seeing them side by side, I had absolutely no sense of what connected them. They were simply great books to me, consumed in college in hours of isolated reprieve from life's furies. I did not see any relationship between my parents' past and my political passions. I didn't recognize the futile deal I'd silently negotiated with myself: that if the world could be reformed, made right, if I knew there could never be another Holocaust, I would be free of the burdens they had placed upon me. It was all invisible to me. Instead, during those years, I had an unexplained phobia which filled me with so much racing panic that I was always forced to leave the room whenever I saw scenes in cowboy movies of cattle being branded.

In the aftermath of the melee at the ARC, demonstrators -consistently reported to be wearing the red arm sash of One Hundred Flowers members – had rampaged on campus. Windows in most of the buildings on the main quadrangle were smashed and glass vials of sheep's blood were splashed on the buff bricks. A smoke bomb was hurled through a basement window into Ryerson, the main undergraduate library. It was closed for four days and hundreds of thousands of volumes were removed to protect them from the lingering stench. Another bomb had been dropped down the chimney of the headquarters of the Damon Security Corps. According to reports, the bomber had slipped in his haste and cascaded off the tile roof, thudding to the ground, feet first, right outside the police station windows. The cops claimed he had been gathered up by other arm-banded rads, who carried him away, his foot, or ankle, or lower leg severely injured. Emergency rooms throughout the Bay Area had been combed, but the bomber was not identified.

On campus and on the Boul the talk for days afterwards focused on how it all went wrong. The campus police announced that Eddgar was under investigation for inciting to riot and claimed that his boisterous, singing quotation from The Little Red Book was the cue for the rocks to fly. But I spoke to dozens of people who had been at the head of the crowd and were certain the cops had struck first, clubbing a woman whose dog had innocently approached the police line. Pressed, most of these witnesses admitted they had merely seen her bloodied face. No one seemed to recall the batons falling on her. Some said she wore a One Hundred Flowers sash, and others were clear she hadn't. The woman could not be found. Eddgar calmly denied any role in the provocation.

'How foolish do you think I am, Seth?' he asked when I finally attempted to talk to him about it the following week. 'Do you really believe the faculty apparatchiks? The administration's theories -why, they're actually amusing. I'm not fooling. They paint me as the arch manipulator, the grand schemer with control over scores of lumpen rebels. And yet they want to claim I would stand in public and issue signals to a mob? Does that sound like a well-conceived attempt to subvert anyone but myself?'

I knew that this speech was rehearsed, that it had been given a dozen times already. Only last week, I had heard Eddgar quote Sun-tzu to June. 'War is deception,' he had said. Eddgar never explained – nor did I dare ask – how the smoke bomber, with his broken leg, arrived under our stairwell. But I wanted to believe him when he denied orchestrating violence.

Sonny was far more skeptical. We quarreled about Eddgar all the time.

'At least he's not like the head cases out on Campus Boul saying, "How can I make the world better for me?" ' I explained to her one night. 'He doesn't say, "Let's change everything, but make sure there's still plenty of LSD and lots of cool James Bond movies and someone to do my cleaning." What I think is that he's said to himself, "If I was poor, if I was dispossessed, if I was, you know, like Fanon says, one of the wretched of the earth, how would I react? If I had these smarts, what would I do? Would I put up with this crap for an instant?" And he's being honest when he says the answer is no. He'd want to smash everything that kept him from being equal and free.'

'And you agree with him?'

' "Agree?" No. Not completely. But I mean, I'm more with him than against him. "Whoever sides with the revolutionary people is a revolutionary." Right?' I smiled puckishly and Sonny made a face. 'Christ,' I said, 'why do I have to explain this to you. You're the one who was raised as a Commie.'

‘I wasn't "raised as a Commie." It's not like being a Baptist, baby. My mother belonged to the Party. Not me. And that doesn't make her the same kind of Stalinist zealot Eddgar is. He'd think she's a Trotskyist.'

Sonny always stuck up fiercely for her mother. During her term as president of her pipefitters' local, during World War II, Zora had appeared on the cover of Life – Wendy the Welder – with her acetylene torch glimmering like the Lamp of Liberty on the lowered visor of her mask. She was famous then. But because she was a Communist, and female, she was hounded from leadership and, eventually, from the union once the men came back. At the height of the McCarthy years, Zora had packed canned goods and blankets in two suitcases, expecting the army any day to take Sonny and her to the camps.

Sonny was cheerfully tolerant of her mother's eccentricities. Zora tended to call out of the blue and would keep Sonny on the phone forever. She would sit locked in the bedroom, even when we had guests in the apartment or people waiting elsewhere. By habit, Sonny never disagreed with her. She was silent. Zora talked.

'So what did she say?'

'Not much.'

'In an hour and a half?'

Sonny shook her head. It went beyond her power to explain. 'You know her.'

I didn't really. I had met Zora on only a few occasions. She was a tiny woman, not more than five feet, if that, always smoking Chesterfields. She had one walleye and heavy glasses and barely filled out her shirtwaist dress. I recall being impressed by the strings of muscles in her forearms. A tough bird, you'd say. The few times Sonny brought me by, Zora had not directed a single word to me, including hello. Instead, she soon launched into an account for Sonny's benefit of some recent outrage she had suffered – unemployment, landlord troubles, a union steward who had become a management whore. Small and quick, racing back and forth, Zora reminded me of a hamster in a cage. She screamed, spat words, raged her hands through the air, as she rambled at enormous speed and volume.

Sonny tirelessly consoled Zora. She sent her money whenever she could afford to and also maintained communications with

Zora's enormous Polish family – the Milkowskis – with whom Zora, generally, was not on speaking terms. I took Zora with her wild look, erratic manner, and self-centered habits as clearly out of her mind. But this, I quickly learned, was not a view I was free to share.

Late one night the meeting of one of Eddgar's collectives ended upstairs, while Sonny and I were in the rack, stoned and amorous. In order to confound the Damon police surveillance, the rads would head out from Eddgar's in all directions, and three or four of them came clomping down the back stairs in their work boots, passing right next to our open window. We ceased grinding, waiting for the loud voices to drift off into the thin night. One of the last remarks I heard was someone trying to be brassy, boasting about the oinkers he was going to off on the day the rev came. Drifting on the dope, I found myself pondering the question that life in Eddgar's midst was gradually forcing on me.

'Do you think there's going to be a revolution?' I asked. ‘I mean, really?'

Beneath me, Sonny groaned. 'Of course not.'

'Oh.'

'Seth, I mean – baby, I grew up with this. It's a crazy discussion. If there was no revolution in the United States in the 1930s, when 15 percent of the workforce was unemployed, how could it ever happen now?'

I repeated, somewhat experimentally, what I'd heard Eddgar say about raising the consciousness of the working class. 'These guys on the assembly lines who think they love George Wallace? They're like avoiding the despair of their own lives.'

'Seth, these are the people my mother has been organizing all her life. I've listened to Zora explain to them that they don't recognize their despair, and they've run her out of town.'

'That's Zora.'

Beneath me, Sonny slid her hips back so that I was suddenly on my own. 'What does that mean?'

I knew I was on tender ground, but somehow I felt provoked, probably by her callousness toward my own screwy hopes.

'It means, you know, no offense, but your mother can come across as a little weird.'

'Meaning?'

' "Meaning?" Jesus, don't be dense, goddamn it. I mean, maybe all these working joes are like rejecting Zora, not what she's saying.'

The light went on then, a painful brightness. Sonny, whose warmth seldom left her, was cold as stone. 'Not my mother,' she said. I shielded my eyes. 'Okay.' 'Never.' 'I get it.'

She flipped the light off and turned her back on me. 'Sonny.'

She shirked my hand.

Eventually I slept, but about an hour along I woke. Some sense, perhaps just waiting for my bearings, told me not to move too quickly. Gradually I became aware of Sonny beside me, breathing heavily, jolting with small tremors. After a number of minutes, I realized that her hands were beneath her waist, finishing off what I'd begun. I lay there in the dark, absolutely still, not knowing what to do, whether it would be too humiliating if I intervened -or if, as I suspected, that was not even desired. Instead, I listened, as her breath slowly rose, reaching its summit and briefly ceasing as she thrilled to her own touch, and then resuming softly as she disappeared into sleep.

Hobie's newfound alliance with Cleveland Marsh, which had uncharacteristically brought both of them to the ARC demonstration, had begun one night in the fall when Hobie was at our apartment for dinner. Heading up the stairs to a meeting at the Eddgars', Cleveland had caught sight of Hobie in our doorway, where he was lurking as usual in hopes of passing a word with his illustrious classmate. In his black turtleneck and shades, Cleveland drifted past, then thought better of something and, a few steps above, extended a finger Hobie's way. A.45-caliber cartridge, sleekly jacketed in copper, swung like an amulet around his neck.

'Hey, Blood,' he said. 'We got a kind of study thing we might be doin’ in Contracts. You know? Maybe you be up for that?'

Personally, I was somewhat unsettled by my passing contacts with Cleveland. Not because he was manifestly angry. Leaving aside Hobie, every young black person I knew seemed perpetually pissed off, an attitude which required little explanation in 1969, a year after Martin Luther King had been gunned down, and one in every eight Americans had voted for George Wallace for President. But I'd grown up around black folks; I'd marched, I'd held hands; I'd dated black girls. I knew the churches and the preaching; the dance steps; the hierarchies of the black middle class. I knew what was different and what wasn't. Cleveland was the first black person I'd encountered who unrepentantly refused to look beyond the color of my skin. He viewed me with the sinister, unfeeling look you'd save for a snake.

Nonetheless, Hobie was thrilled by Cleveland's comradeship. Cleveland had grown up in Marin City, the housing project at the foot of the Golden Gate, and had become an all-West Coast Conference running back for Damon. In the spring of 1968, he had made the national news shows repeatedly, first when he announced that he had joined the Panthers, and then when he was admitted to Damon Law School amid protests from faculty and alumni, who objected either to his political views or to his qualifications. Hobie regarded anyone who'd been on television as if they descended from a higher realm. In this, I suppose, he took after his father, Gurney, who had a treasured row of celebrity photos above his soda fountain, featuring baseball stars, jazz musicians, and boxers. Besides, Hobie's relationship with Cleveland soon took on a predictable dimension. Shortly after the ARC demonstration, Hobie arrived for Doobie Hour with a small bundle which he opened as soon as Michael was gone for the night.

'Called co-caine,' he told Sonny and me, as he spilled a small white rock out of a test tube onto a pocket mirror. Sonny was always too earnest to really enjoy drugs of any kind. She described the near-ruination of Sigmund Freud's medical career when he'd unwittingly addicted patients to this miracle substance, and left the room in disgust. But with Hobie my watchword was to try anything once. Overall, I wasn't impressed.

'It's groovy,' said Lucy. 'Except the straw. Everybody's nose? That's gross.'

'Where do you come into this stuff?' I asked Hobie.

'Panthers are into some awesome shit,' he said, as he was sniffling and wheeling his head about to absorb the rush. 'This here, man, this is a far-out form of political fund-raising. They've got a dude, man, he's stamping out acid in tabs with the big B on them? Wrapped in the little bubbles of cellophane? Aspirin all the way, when you look at it. Outta-sight operation.'

'Hobie even went to Cleveland's house,' said Lucy. 'He's got like kids. It was all weird and everything. Did you tell Seth? There are all these guns? And -'

With his huge hand, Hobie had taken hold of her knee. His eyes flashed at me somewhat tentatively.

'That whole scene, they're freaky paranoid, you know. "Safe houses." All that shit. Fucking I Spy, or something. You know the rap: I'm righteous and I'm a brother, but anybody else, nothin bout nothin. I had to swear by the Zulu gods.' He smiled at himself. It took me a second to understand he was saying he wasn't going to talk about it. Hobie and I generally had no secrets, particularly when it came to his exploits. But Cleveland remained a touchy subject.

Late one afternoon, shortly after the turn of the year, Hobie rang the bell and stood downstairs in his green army-surplus poncho. The rains had come then, occasional chill downpours, but more often drizzle and heavy fog, nasty stuff that felt like a cold hand gripping my bones. The blue flame in the space heater in our hall was never off.

'Okay you drive?' Hobie yelled up. We were going to play basketball on campus. As we were walking among the puddles toward my car, I glimpsed Hobie's old Dodge Dart, springshot and rustworn, off in a corner of the gravel lot. The car had the old push-button automatic and half a psychedelic paint job, both front fenders whorled in color. I asked what was wrong with it.

'Nothing. I just got some stuff in there.'

Hobie had an uncharacteristic poor-mouth expression and I pushed past his hand to inspect. The car was full of oozing burlap sacks, piled on the front and back seats. Hobie, who'd followed, pointed to the sky and told me it was raining.

'Hobie, don't be a douche bag. What is this, the Magical Mystery Tour? What the hell do you have back here, man?'

'Sandbags.'

'Sandbags?'

'Suckers are heavy, too. Wudn't even sure Nellybelle was gonna make it up the hill on Shattuck.' Nellybelle was his car, named after Roy Rogers's sidekick's jeep.

'You get the lowdown from Noah? Are we havin another flood?'

'It's just a favor, man. That's all. I was rappin with Cleveland a little after Contracts yesterday, and he asked when I was comin this way to hang with you. So he's like, well do I mind any stoppin at an auto-supply place – tells me where a couple are – pick up a can of battery acid and twenty sandbags. Gives me the money and all. Weird, right? Saidjust leave the car unlocked. Somebody'd get it.'

'Eddgar?' Cleveland didn't know anyone else in the building. 'Man, I didn't ask. It's just a favor. Dude does for me. I do for him.'

'Hobie, you better watch your ass.'

He hooted at that, particularly coming from me, Eddgar's admiring employee. 'Come on. Battery acid and sandbags? Gimme a break, Jack. Why should I be gettin uptight about that?'

'Well, what are they doing with it?'

Hobie shrugged. 'Only thing I could figure is like winter travel. You know, Gurney's always topping off his battery and throwing a few sandbags in the trunk around this time of year. But it's gonna be a hell of a climate change for California, if that's what he's getting ready for.'

'Maybe he got an advance forecast from the Weathermen.'

We larked around for a moment with the notion. What a gas if the Weathermen really knew something about the weather. Or, better yet, could change it. Talk about making trouble.

When we came back later, I was careful, at Hobie's instruction, not to pull in next to his car. Instead, I watched him cross the lot. It was still raining. Inside, he turned my way and rolled down the window so I could see him as he mouthed a single word: 'Gone.'

One Wednesday afternoon in January, I walked into Michael Frain's apartment, calling for Nile, and found Michael in bed with June Eddgar. It was around 4 p.m. Down on campus at another Student Mobilization Committee meeting, I'd been pierced by a sudden fear June had forgotten I was off today, and that Nile, as a result, would have no one looking after him. Shouting the little boy's name, I'd rushed through all the places in the building he was likely to be. From the bedroom, I was sure I'd heard Michael answer, 'In here.'

When I pushed open the door, June was sitting up in the bed, with the sheet drawn across her chest and her other hand pinching the bridge of her nose. Lying beside her, Michael was turned away from me. I could see nothing but his skinny shoulders and the pale bald spot among his longish dreadlock curls. But even at that I recognized him. It was, after all, his apartment.

I said exactly one word, 'Whoops,' and turned completely around. 1 ransacked myself for some idea of what to do next and finally, foolishly, called Nile's name again.

'We said, "He's not here," ' June answered behind me. She was in the doorway now, unclothed. She confronted me flatfooted, utterly confident of herself, as I took in what she unflinchingly revealed – limbs of trim strength, the dark female triangle, a tummy barely sloping and withered by childbirth, her daring uncompromising nature. Released from her ponytail, her bronze hair fell to her shoulders. 'Nile's with Eddgar,' she added, clearly aware of the boldness of speaking her husband's name in these circumstances. That said, June closed the door.

June had always seemed elusive to me. Campus legends painted her as a revolutionary drone, fully governed by Eddgar and the requirements of doctrine. There were astounding rumors – that at Eddgar's demand she'd slept with the entire Panther leadership council in Oakland; that she'd taken wild risks smuggling in weapons for the Marin County jail breakout. But to me that picture never seemed quite right. She rarely passed a mirror without a prudent look at the fine figure she saw there, straightening her collar, patting a stray ringlet back into place, still a bit the Southern cotillion queen. June's training at Easton was in theater, although, in the spirit of the cultural revolution, she now worked on the line in a salmon-canning plant in the East Bay. Yet at moments she continued to exude a star's enigmatic domineering air. She was forever laying a hand on my elbow and somehow getting me to do favors – run to the store, throw wash into the dryer – although we both knew these errands weren't part of my job. Even Eddgar, at moments, seemed wary of her. Now and then I saw them in the kitchen, hip to hip, debating in low voices beneath an old console radio playing to foil any wiretap. Eddgar watched her tensely lest something be missed at his expense, his lean jaw set, his focus unblinking.

The dimensions of the Eddgars' relationship, always unclear to me, now seemed unfathomable. But no one else, it turned out, was as shaken by my discovery as I was. Sonny, when I told her later that afternoon, actually laughed.

'You mean this isn't like the shock of the century?' I demanded of her. 'You don't find it perverted? Don't look at me that way. It's weird, man. She's a mother, for crying out loud. She's fifteen years older than him. I mean -' I couldn't find the words.

'God, are you uptight.' I was always unnerved that Sonny's sophistication about sexual matters was so much greater than mine. Most girls I'd grown up with fretted obsessively about their virginity, but Zora was a freethinker and in late adolescence Sonny seemed to have found welcome solace in the attentions of men.

'Uptight?' I asked. ‘I mean, what about Eddgar?'

'What about him? Maybe he doesn't care. Maybe he likes it.'

'Eddgar?' There were many disciples of free love in Damon, but it was hard to imagine Eddgar as one of them. 'Think about this. I bet she's the one who convinced Eddgar they can trust Michael. You know. Even though he's hooked into Applied Research and that whole thing? I'll bet she did.'

'So?'

'So, it's like her revolutionary movement is all in the hips.'

I debated for a few days about whether to mention what I'd seen to Hobie and Lucy. He was a menace with secrets, especially when he could use them against someone, like Eddgar, whom he wanted to cut down to size. But the gossip was too sensational to keep to myself and I finally shared it at Doobie Hour. It turned out both of them already knew.

Lucy nodded stoically. 'It's sad for him, really,' she answered. 'For Michael?' Over time, Lucy had succeeded far more than the rest of us in drawing Michael out. No one ever disliked Lucy; she was too passionately sincere. Men, especially, seemed to pour their hearts out to her, stirred by the way her tiny brimming brown eyes, her entire being, seemed given over to whatever they had to say. For Michael, so ill at ease, this avid, unquestioning interest must have been especially welcome. Lucy and he usually cooked together, on the weekends. The rest of us did the scutwork while they toiled happily in the kitchen, murmuring to each other like children. Lucy let cheerful talk pour from herself with the natural forward motion of a fresh running spring. It hadn't occurred to me, until now, that there'd been anything confessional about their discussions.

'He wants her to leave Eddgar,' Lucy explained. 'Leave?' I'd envisioned this relationship as no more than a dalliance.

‘I mean, her thing with Eddgar is a nothing. Nothing,' she repeated, with an emphasis that suggested sex. 'Not since Nile,' she added. The intimacy of this detail threw me for a loop. I suspected at once that June – or Michael – was simply inventing excuses.

'What sense does that make?' I asked. 'Why's she stick with the guy?'

Lucy hitched her slender shoulders. 'She told Michael he's like the greatest actor she ever met.'

'Actor?' I'd heard similar remarks about Eddgar regularly -that he was a chameleon, a phony. But I hardly expected that from June.

'It was a compliment, I think,' Lucy said. 'You know, like a great actor makes Shakespeare even greater? Or maybe, he's at his best onstage?'

'That dude doesn't even know who he is if he's not onstage,' said Hobie, who'd been listening with his joint from his usual outpost on the rug.

I was unsettled by all of this. Neither Michael nor June ever spoke a word to me about their affair, but I felt the silence we all maintained made us – me, in particular – conspirators against Eddgar, even, possibly, Nile. The whole arrangement suggested things about love, the world of women and men, that I didn't understand, or perhaps even wish to know. After that, I was always uneasy whenever Michael and June were together, pretending to be indifferent to one another.

'From what I hear, Graeme's parties are really wild,' Sonny told me as we approached the little Victorian coach house in the city where Graeme was living. It was late January, near the end of the semester. I could see that Sonny had weighed saying anything at all. I was carrying a half-gallon jug of wine in a paper bag and she was wearing a black shawl and a floor-length skirt made from an old American flag. Her hair, freshly washed, lifted in the city winds. I thought what I always thought, that she was gorgeous. 'We'll just see, okay? But I may not want to stay long.'

'He's your buddy.' I'd thought it was sporting of me to come in the fust place, but Graeme had promised it would not be the usual departmental party, with people talking about Foucault as if he were an intimate. Sonny found Graeme endlessly intriguing. He was ironic and complex, and egalitarian in manner, and she admired his innovative if grandiose structuralist theories. Graeme claimed that the Western societies were in the midst of altering the episteme – the ultimate generative structure from which all thought in the culture devolved, a kind of girdle on the brain that loosened and changed shape only at critical historical moments, one of which was now.

'Sonny!' Graeme cried, as we came through the door. He was lit already. Both arms were aloft, a clipped roach in one hand glowing amid a twirl of fragrant smoke. He came crashing down upon her in a stifling embrace and, without a glance at me, swept her into the living room and the midst of the dense, gabbling party crowd. I realized gradually that Graeme had been honest in a way. This party was nothing like ones we ordinarily went to. An expectant, high-voltage energy charged the air and the crowd was far more funky-looking than the Damon contingent – leggy sinuous women with miniskirts and ironed hair, men in beads. Plangent sitar ragas groaned from speakers hidden amid the deep human undergrowth in the room.

That night people seldom spoke of politics – the war or Loyell Eddgar – which were the staples of university conversation. Here there was only one topic and frequent references to bacchic adventures that had occurred before. The guests tirelessly discussed open relationships, always concluding that anyone who refused to take part was not simply unhip but somehow dangerous. A girl whom I encountered while I was putting down our coats uttered the Weatherman dogma that one purpose of the revolution was to destroy monogamy.

This young woman, named Dagmar, remained by me most of the evening. She was a student of Graeme's, a junior in one of his undergraduate courses. Dagmar was blond, with a cheeky face and imposing breasts, barely concealed by a stretch top she wore braless. It did not occur to me until later that Graeme might have inspired her role as my escort, or distraction.

Whenever I tried to find a sight line to Sonny, she seemed unapproachable. There were always a dozen people around Graeme. His long form and whitish pageboy remained bent over Sonny, his arm loitering about her shoulder. At one point, I broke free to offer to fetch Sonny a drink. There were mescal and tequila available, and a tremendous amount of dope. In the first instant she glanced over, Sonny seemed somewhat startled to see me, then reached for my hand in a way that seemed so paltry and apologetic that I fled back to Dagmar immediately.

Near midnight, virtually at the stroke of the hour, a group of men and women stalked through the living room entirely unclothed, the dark pubic regions and swinging parts shocking and incongruous as the clink and chatter of the party went on. A moment later, someone switched off most of the lights.

'Are you ready?' Dagmar asked.

'For what?'

'For what's happening. Come on, Seth. Be mellow. Don't hassle it.' She touched the heavy buckle on my jeans, and I jolted back protectively. Dagmar took this response antagonistically. She eyed me fiercely and tended to herself. Her little miniskirt slid to the floor, then she unsnapped the body stocking and peeled that off too. She was revealed at instants by the oscillating shadows of a lava lamp. Drunk and stoned, besotted by the evening, I found it hard to deal with the cruel edge of this invitation. Dagmar's breasts were very large but tiny-nippled, blued by a heavy network of veins. We confronted each other without speaking, then she moved off with an insolent toss of her soiled blond hair. I heard the determined thud as she pounded up the stairs.

I careered through the first floor. Sonny and Graeme were gone. Forlornly, I considered the staircase up to the bedrooms. Utterly bewildered about what I might do next, I headed up. In Graeme's bedroom, I was relieved to see no sign of Sonny. But most of the group which had capered naked around the living room were there, six or seven men and women, applying body paint freely to one another with their hands. One fellow had sprouted an impressive hard-on, which a young lady was obligingly swirling in a kind of Day-Glo green from a squeeze bottle. Two other groups were engaged in various states of intercourse. On the waterbed, three people, two men and a woman, were entwined, a nest of butts and legs, in what I took to be a post-coital trance, while below, on the semi-privacy of the shag rug, another couple was grinding away. The guy, who was on top, had a belly so huge it looked almost as if there were a foreign object between him and the woman beneath him. When she turned my way, I recognized Dagmar. She gave me a vaporous smile and lifted one hand, still pudgy with baby fat, even as she jolted with the fat man' s emphatic thrusts. I thought she was waving and timidly waved back; I realized then she had been beckoning me inside.

'On the bus or off the bus, m'boy.' Graeme had caught me by the elbow. He was in an improbable getup, dressed only in briefs and dark elastic socks attached to calf garters. A few errant hairs grew amid the spots on his sternum. He tried to edge me from the door, but I was too spaced-out to move. The room stank with cat pee, and I noticed only now shadowy forms within the waterbed mattress which I recognized as goldfish. Graeme was gone momentarily. When he returned, Sonny spoke behind me.

'Come here, baby.' She stood down the narrow hall, which was yellowed by a Chinese paper shade that covered the single bulb. If anything, she appeared prim and collected in her flag skirt.

'One of those girls asked me to sleep with her.' I was well enough out of it that this struck me as some kind of explanation of my conduct.

' "Women." Which one?'

I turned back to the bedroom to point, but the door was closed now and Graeme was gone.

'Did you?'

'Hell no.' I was slow. 'What about you and Graeme?' I asked. She seemed to shake her head.

We found Sonny's shawl bundled in another room downstairs, and left in silence. I stood still suddenly on the walk outside, my face to the stars and the dank city night. It was like the touch of a cold towel, a sobering relief after the spoiled, smoky air of the cottage.

'God,' I said, 'what a dildo I am. This guy invited us to this party fourteen times, and I never flashed on what he was up to.' 'Referring to what?'

'Referring to the fact that in your case he's got his own ideas about conquering the mind-body dichotomy.' She said nothing.

'You sure you didn't sleep with him?'

'No. I said no.'

'But you thought about it?'

'You're hassling me, Seth.' She plunged down the walk and I slowly followed, the noise and music of the party dwindling. 'Am I supposed to be against it?' she asked. 'Am I supposed to think it would be immoral or bad? I didn't feel like it. He's old. He's strange. It's not my bag. Okay?'

'Yeah, but I mean, I'm trying to figure out where we stand here.'

'Here's where we stand, baby. I live with you. I sleep in the same bed with you. You want a chastity belt, too? You want to have the key?' Like most conversations that started out about the way we felt, this one was quickly wandering toward the safer grounds of politics, where the doctrines were previously determined and where Sonny could nimbly foreclose any genuine discussion.

'But I mean, look,' I said lamely, ‘I love you.' ' Why do you always say that?' 'How about because I do?' 'What does it mean?'

'Mean? It means I think you're keen. It means the biggest trip in the galaxy is hanging out with you. It means what it always means.'

'It scares me. You're twenty-two years old. You don't know what you're saying.'

'Okay, so you're gonna head-fuck me, right? You tell me what I feel.'

Silence. I was not satisfied, naturally, to have won the round.

'So here's the deal, right? I love you and you don't love me.'

'Oh, Seth. Not again. This is a drag.' Her arms went limp, allowing her shawl to lie half on the sidewalk as we stood beneath a streetlamp. Our voices were strangely resonant in the sudden isolation of the street, where small single-story houses stair-stepped the hill.

'It's the truth. I mean really, man. What is this, you and me? Entertainment?'

'It's life, Seth. It's living. I mean, I enjoy you. I care about you. It's better being with you. Usually.' She walked on then. She stopped in a moment when she found more words. 'Seth, you drive me crazy to say I love you, because you can't say it to yourself.'

'Oh yeah, great.' I said. 'Great. I'm like incredibly glad you told me. Now I can save all the bread I was gonna spend on that trip to Esalen.'

'Seth, you don't see this. Sometimes, it feels like you want so much of me that you'd like to be me.' She nodded sharply, certain that she'd scored. I caught her by the arm as she turned to surge ahead.

'So what,' I said suddenly. 'So what? Let's say that's true. At least I know what I admire. You're the most together, the sanest -'

'That!' she screamed, 'that's the problem. You don't know the first thing about me. I'm an imaginary person to you.'

'Jesus,' I said. 'What are you talking about? I've like fucking studied you. I've listened to your batty old mother. I've met her friends. Your aunt. I've read your high-school yearbooks. I try to wheedle any story I can about your childhood. And you think I'm missing the point? Here's the problem, lady. You're afraid I'll know you. You don't want anybody to discover the shit you don't want to know yourself.'

'What a load,' she said. She twisted in agonized disbelief. We were done then. She was the first one to the car and I half expected her to leave me. Instead, we puttered across the Bay Bridge in silence, the only noise the little engine of the Bug, which, at high r.p.m.'s, uttered a sound as if change were twirling through its carburetor. I turned on the radio finally – KSAN – where, naturally enough, they were playing a clever, larking piano arrangement of 'What Is This Thing Called Love?'