Beach Music (94 page)

“You’re inciting to riot, young man,” the colonel said after the noise died down.

“The students or the National Guard?” Jordan asked.

An exchange took place again at the podium and a slick, well-dressed young man from the governor’s office took the colonel’s place and got right down to business. “Any student found in the Russell House in five minutes will be suspended from the university for the rest of this semester. You will not be allowed to take exams or graduate with your class.”

Shouts and curses again filled the air, yet there was movement in the crowd toward the doors and when all the shifting and maneuvering was over, five hundred students still remained rooted in their spots. I looked around and was surprised to see that I did not recognize most of them, nor did I spot a single member of the SDS.

The young man onstage presented a flawless style of no-nonsense leadership. His youth lent him an air of quiet fascist authority. His angelic face with his high coloring and good cheekbones made him look like a candidate for water commissioner or for leading a probe into ethical violations by union officials. More and more students began sneaking out, their heads down, running as soon as they reached the doors.

When five minutes had passed, the young man, who identified himself as Christopher Fisher, announced that the one hundred or so students still remaining, their eyes fierce in their loathing of him and the safety net he stood for in his buttoned-down propriety, were expelled from the university.

“Why am I here?” I said. “I should be back in the dorm studying for my Victorian Novel exam.”

“Because you’re a man of character,” Jordan said, sitting easily beside me. “You’ve also never liked to cut and run just because an asshole told you to.”

“We’re not graduating,” I said, letting the full weight of my impulsive decision wash over me. “No diplomas, no walk across the stage, no handshakes and hugs from the parents. I’m not even sure I’m against the Vietnam War and I’m not going to graduate because my friends are all fanatics and my roommate just had a nervous breakdown right before my eyes.”

“They sent Capers to the hospital, unconscious,” Jordan said. “They arrested Shyla for giving a speech.”

“Oh yeh,” I said. “I knew there was a high moral principle involved that I don’t even believe in. I knew I was ruining my whole life for a perfectly stupid reason.”

“Go on back to the room then,” Jordan suggested.

“Then you’ll think you’re philosophically superior to me,” I said.

“I already think that,” replied Jordan, smiling.

“Shyla’d never talk to me again,” I mused aloud.

Jordan nodded. “That’s a given.”

“Mike would take a photo of me sneaking out, cringing like a whipped dog.”

“It’d be in all the papers,” Jordan agreed.

“But I could move to Alaska where they’ve never heard of South Carolina,” I said. “I could start a new life. Rumors of my cowardice would be dismissed. Or I could go to Vietnam. Volunteer. Become a Green Beret. Cut the throats of village chieftains soft on the Viet Cong. Win medals. Get laid in Bangkok on R&R. Parachute into the North and wreak havoc on supply lines. Make a necklace out of human ears. Step on a land mine. Lose both legs and watch a small pig run away with my balls in its mouth. Save up enough money to get an electric wheelchair. Set off metal detectors ’cause there’s so much shrapnel in what’s left of my dick. Nope. I’m staying.”

“Good decision,” Jordan said.

“But you were planning to join the Marines after graduation,” I said.

“It was going to be a gift to my father,” Jordan said, smiling. “I wanted to give him a single chance in our life together to be proud of me.”

“I think you ought to see a career counselor to give you a few more options,” I said as the circle of policemen and Guards tightened.

Jordan said, “This’ll hurt my chance for Commandant.”

“Our parents’re going to kill us,” I said. “Oh, my God, my mother’s going to hit the roof. She thinks she’s earned my diploma.”

“We can go to summer school.”

Then Christopher Fisher’s voice echoed through the theater again. “All those students who do not leave the Student Union in the next five minutes will be arrested. A state of emergency has been called. You now have exactly four minutes and forty seconds to return to your rooms.”

Jordan stood up and said, “Yoo-hoo. Fellas, you’re not getting the big picture. Let’s go over this one more time. This
is
our room. This is the
Student
Union.
Student
. You see a pattern here?”

One of the students who had not said a word stood up at the far end of the dwindling circle. Though I did not recognize him, he looked far more warlike and menacing than the rest of us with his shaggy, unkempt hair, greasy headband, and torn jeans. His camouflage jacket lent authority to his rage and he began to scream orders to his fellow students.

“If the pigs want this building, let’s burn the fucker down and let them keep the ashes. This peace shit isn’t working with these assholes. They want to kick some ass, let’s kick back. If they want to shoot a bunch of unarmed kids, let’s go down while taking a few of them with us. I’m tired of talking, man. I want to kill me a pig.”

Jordan shouted for everyone to keep their seats and he walked slowly over to the out-of-control student. He put his arm around the young man’s shoulder, then grasped his neck with his hand. “Funny the way cops dress these days,” Jordan said to the remaining demonstrators. “Anybody know this guy? I don’t know a lot of you by name, but I’ve seen you around. I’ve been watching Mr. Radical here. He looks kind of overdressed, doesn’t he? I mean he’d look
natural at Berkeley, but he’s gone Hollywood on us down here in Dixie. Now he wants us to charge the guys with the guns. Makes a lot of sense, huh!”

“Stool pigeon,” some of the students started yelling.

“Get lost, pal,” Jordan suggested. “These’re nice kids. Don’t get them shot.”

“I hate this fucking war, man,” the man shouted, appealing to the crowd. “Talk’s bullshit. Action’s what’ll get their attention.”

I moved in behind him and pulled a wallet out of his back pocket. His police badge was standard issue. I lifted it up high so the other students could see that Jordan had guessed right. The students, chastened already by their expulsion, hissed until the lead character actor of the afternoon drama skulked away into the ranks of his brethren.

“Everybody sure they want to be here?” Jordan said. “There’s no shame in getting out of here now.”

“They’ve no right to do this,” a graduate student named Elayne Scott said. “How can they kick me out of my own school for sitting down in the Student Union?”

“I’m
for
the Vietnam War,” a pretty girl named Laurel Lee said and I laughed when I recognized one of Ledare’s Tri Delts. “But my mama and daddy taught me right from wrong and this is all wrong.”

Then the order was given and the arrests were made.

W
hen we left jail the next morning, we had become emblematic of our times, part of that troubling despoiled era when Americans quit listening to one another.

Two hundred students and five television cameras met us as we came out into the dazzling sunlight of a state where summer had come early. Shyla and Capers hugged us in triumph, for the benefit of the cameras, then they hustled us off to a quiet enclave on Blossom Street where the SDS was planning its next move. The radicals who had only tolerated Jordan and me before now treated us as if we had proven ourselves in some fearful test of spite and venom. We were being cast as brothers in a circle we did not even like. But the night in jail had scared us and being lionized and fussed over felt good, providing the balms that calmed our jangled spirits. The marijuana was free and so was the Jack Daniel’s.

I was high and happy when Shyla motioned to us to follow her. She led us to a backyard picnic table where Radical Bob had gathered a council of war for a meeting outside to ensure our conversations were not recorded. He was arguing that Jordan and I could not be trusted to attend this war council just because of a single arrest and a starring role in a demonstration that had spun out of everyone’s control. He was afraid the movement had become the venue and training ground of amateurs who were freelancing without a revolutionary philosophy to ground them. Already that day, a hundred
disheveled students had stormed the administration building in a spontaneous riot that had neither purpose nor leadership.

“Action without philosophy is anarchy,” Radical Bob said.

“What?” I said. “Every time you open your mouth, Bob, it sounds like you learned your English at a Berlitz session.”

“Who asked you?” Radical Bob shot back. “Just because you and Jordan went out and played heroes yesterday, it certainly didn’t help make this war one day shorter.”

“I noticed that none of you got arrested with us,” Jordan said, looking around at the twenty-two veterans of SDS who sat in the yard around the picnic table. Many were passing joints back and forth, some so small it was as if they were trading pubic hairs pinched between thumbs and forefingers. On this day, except for Bob, the group was deferring to Jordan and me. By becoming front-page news, we had suddenly become valuable members of this very small South Carolina club.

“They risked everything, Bob,” Shyla said. “And they lost everything. They got arrested along with all those other students. It’s no surprise when people like you and me get arrested. It happens every day. But this was an uprising of anonymous students—no organization at all. Pure heroism, a battle cry of the common man. In one unplanned action, these students did more than the SDS has done in a year. Admittedly, they didn’t know what they were doing. But it was brilliant.”

“They shouldn’t be a part of the action tonight,” Bob said.

“I don’t agree,” Shyla said.

“You want to come with us?” Bob turned to me angrily. “Then come on, motherfucker.”

“Is it nonviolent?” Jordan asked.

“Of course. We’re trying to end a war, not start one.”

Jordan looked over at me and said, “I’m too drunk to say no. Besides, I don’t have any exams tomorrow.”

“Or anywhere to go,” I said. “They emptied our dorm room and chained it shut. We’ve got the rest of our lives to do what we want.”

“Count us in,” Jordan said.

At two the next morning, Capers Middleton, dressed in
paramilitary regalia, broke a small window of a lavatory on the first floor of a Main Street building housing the Selective Service Office of South Carolina. He slipped through the darkness and came to the small door leading off an alleyway where a group of college students who would soon become known as the Columbia Twelve had gathered.

Forcing the door open, Capers put his fingers to his lips and led the rest of us into the interior of the building through the back staircase. The action had been planned for weeks and everyone performed their duties perfectly in the first minutes of the break-in. Keys stolen from the busy janitors opened the right locks. The boys carried heavy buckets of cow’s blood and the girls brought all the incendiary material needed to burn the draft file of every boy in South Carolina.

Shyla went to the first file cabinet and with not a single wasted moment pulled out the files and splayed them flat on the floor. Jordan and I followed her, covering each one with cow’s blood. Capers led the group that was piling draft files into the center of a vast, colorless room. The pile grew higher and higher as Capers urged everyone to work faster. He checked his watch, nodded, and Radical Bob doused the files with gasoline. When Capers was exhorting everyone to superhuman effort I noticed an edge to his voice and stopped what I was doing. My nostrils were overwhelmed by gasoline, and I was exhausted from a lack of sleep. I looked over and saw Shyla’s face, which looked like a nun’s in ecstasy. In fact we all looked like a religious band about to ignite a heretic in some bizarre and surreally modern auto-da-fé. Alarms went off in me for no reason and I studied the faces of these friends and complete strangers, trying to fight off a sense of panic. Backing away from the long rows of files, I grabbed Jordan by the shoulders as I saw Radical Bob light a match and the others flick cigarette lighters and move toward the mountain of draft files.

“Let’s burn the whole goddamn building down,” Radical Bob said.

“No,” Shyla said. “Just the files.”

“Bob’s right,” Capers said. “If we’re serious about the revolution, let’s do the building. Let’s do the whole town. Let’s bring the
war home. Show them what the Vietnamese people are going through.”

“Shut up,” Shyla said. “We’re nonviolent. Nonviolent.”

“Speak for yourself,” Radical Bob said and the room erupted in flame and light and a hundred sirens went off outside as cops and firemen burst into the room. An army of cops swarmed over us, knocking us to the floor with billy clubs and fists. Two enormous men sat on me and handcuffed me, laughing when I howled in pain as they tightened the cuffs hard enough to cut the flow of blood into my wrists.

“Fucking pigs,” Capers was screaming. “Fucking pigs. Who ratted?”

“I told you to keep your goddamn friends out of it,” Radical Bob said. “Everything about this was amateur hour.”

“We did nothing wrong,” Shyla said. “We tried to strike a blow for peace. We didn’t totally succeed, but they know we’ve been here.”

“Oh shit,” I heard Jordan moan. “What’s wrong?” I asked.

“We didn’t think this one through,” said Jordan. “This is a federal crime. We’ve stepped into some deep shit.”

T
he day of our arraignment, we were taken in paddy wagons to the federal courthouse and had to run the gauntlet of news reporters and cameramen to enter the courthouse door. Mike was there and he knew exactly what to look for. His Nikon was set correctly when General Elliott, resplendent in his creased, perfectly fitting Marine uniform, broke out of the crowd and walked swiftly down the stairs to meet his son. A detective was leading Jordan up the stairs, pulling the handcuffs that bound him. When the general backhanded Jordan to his knees, Mike got the photo. The general, in his iconic fury, looked every inch the figure of indignant, long-suffering authority striking down the long-haired flouter of rules and law on the steps of a hall of justice. The photograph was a flawless cameo of almost biblical power of a father reestablishing authority in his own home. Stricken and on his knees, Jordan’s agonized expression reflected the
shame and humiliation of a childhood that had gone on too long. In the nation’s mind, General Elliott represented America to adults, but to us he stood for everything that was tyrannical and immovable and dissembling in the American spirit turned leprous by Vietnam. Jordan on his knees carried all the power of deep symbol: his face registered the traces of betrayal that his generation felt. Mike’s photo was the last ticket on a point of no return. Like a beaten Christ-figure, Jordan rose to face his father, walking up the step that separated them, staring into his father’s eyes.