Sons (47 page)

Dearest Wat,

Do you remember a boy named Bernie Lang from Harvard? We met him at a party here in Boston one weekend, a very tall kid with a sort of gloomy expression? At J.L.’s apartment? Anyway, somebody told me he was dropping acid, and I didn’t believe it, but I understand he had a very bad trip just last week, convinced he was a race horse and challenging all the traffic in Kenmore Square. I know it sounds comical, Wat, but it was really quite serious. He was taken to Boston Psychopathic for observation, and the rumor is that he’s gone completely out of his mind. Whether it’s temporary or not is still anyone’s guess, but it’s enough to scare hell out of you, isn’t it? When Carol heard about it, she flushed all our pot down the toilet, which I thought was going a little too far since I’d paid for half of it, and since pot simply
ain’t
LSD.

Rusty is screaming her head off, I’ll bet she’s caught something!

(No, she hasn’t.)

She’s grown very big in the past few weeks and is beginning to lose all of her maidenly charm. In fact, there’s a lecherous old tom who’s already begun serenading her from the backyard, probably setting the poor dear up for an early conquest, you cats is all alike, man. Carol wants to get rid of her. She says it’s because the landlady has been prowling around suspiciously outside our door, certain we’re harboring boys. But I think it’s because Rusty still seems to prefer Carol’s bed to the litter pan we’ve put under the sink. I must admit the place is beginning to smell. We take the cat out every now and then for exercise, hiding her under our raincoats to sneak her past Mrs. Cooley, but we look like three-breasted creatures when we slink down the stairs that way, and besides it’s getting too warm to be wearing raincoats, and it hasn’t rained once since the beginning of the month. But the last time Carol suggested that we dispossess the cat, I said, “Okay, let’s tie a brick around her neck and dump her in the Charles,” which shocked her out of her pants. I guess I like that old dumb cat.

Look at her.

She knows I’m writing about her.

I’m still not too thrilled about going up to the Cape next month, especially since my mother informs me that there’s no sewing machine in the house they’ve taken. I recently had to shorten all of my skirts (again!) and I began to get the sewing itch, and was planning on making myself some clothes this summer. There are so many great styles coming in, Wat, and I’ll bet I could whip up some of those Marimekko things in a matter of hours. Of course, it’s the material that makes those look so great, but maybe I can find some cool material when I’m in New York. Without a machine, though, it’d be murder. And who wants to hear glove anaesthesia discussed by a multitude of shrinks as the sun sinks into the Atlantic and their wives envy my boobs and tell me I was but a mere child the last time, etc. etc. etc.? Not me. I want to come to Hawaii and be with you.

Incidentally, I have a nomination for the Tyler-Castelli Fire and Brimstone Award for June, and I’d like your opinion on it. I think it should go to Billy Graham who told 19,000 listeners in London, “I fear that sex has become our goddess — and has that one-eyed thing in our living room become our God?”
Is
sex your goddess, Wat? I thought
I
was. And what about that one-eyed thing in the living room, huh? I keep talking to Carol about it, but she insists it must be one of
my
friends, as all of hers have 20/20 vision. Let me know about the R and R, and also about Billy Graham, as I want to contact him immediately if he’s a Recipient. Actually, though, I think he’s an Evangelist.

Dana

P. S. Your description of the base camp perimeter was very illuminating.
You’re under arrest!

Dearest Wat,

I miss you so much I can’t think straight. How many months do we have to go? I know you have the days marked off out there, but I keep forgetting whether we have to count a year from when you went into the service or a year from when you got to Vietnam. Please tell me. Please date your next letter very carefully, and state in it exactly how many months and days it will be until you can come home. Then I’ll mark it on my calendar, too, and at least that part of the uncertainty will be gone.

Too many things have been happening here at home. And a thing that seems terribly important when it occurs is almost immediately overshadowed by something even more important. I don’t think I told you that James Meredith was shot eleven days ago down in Mississippi. He was on U. S. Highway 51, a few miles outside of Hernando, when a white man wielding a 16-gauge shotgun stepped out of the bushes on the side of the road and began yelling his name, “James Meredith, James Meredith, I only want James Meredith,” and then tiring four loads of birdshot into the highway. I guess he was avenging Ole Miss for being forced to admit Meredith as its first Negro student back in the Dark Ages of 1962, or maybe he wanted to prove to Meredith that it was
not
safe for a Negro to walk from Memphis to Jackson in an attempt to inspire voter-registration. Luckily, he didn’t kill him. But that wasn’t the end of it, Wat, which is what I meant about more important events overtaking those that seem terribly meaningful at the time.

The shooting drew Negro leaders to the South from all over the country, naturally, some of them seeking publicity, I guess, but all of them determined to finish Meredith’s march for him. But they ran into difficulty again just yesterday in the town of Greenwood, where the police wouldn’t let them pitch their tents on school property and where Stokely Carmichael of SNCC was arrested with several other Negroes. He’s now been let out on bail, Wat, but when they freed him, he yelled to the assembled crowd, “We want black power! Every courthouse in Mississippi ought to be burned down to get rid of the dirt.” As you know, Carmichael’s sentiments tend to be Black Nationalist, so the important thing wasn’t his racist vehemence, which was expected, but the way the Negroes in the crowd isolated only two words of his outburst and began chanting them like a slogan, “Black power, black power, black power.”

I can remember a girl who had to quit B.U. because her father was being transferred out to California someplace, telling me she was never quite certain about what she should call herself, the derogatory expression nigger having derived from Nigra, which was a mispronunciation of Negro — so was it okay to call herself a Negro? Wasn’t that only a refined way of saying nigger? She had never heard a Negro woman referring to herself as a Negress, for example, because that was
certainly
derogatory. (Didn’t the Nazis use the word Jewess in much the same way?) And whereas she thought it might be okay to call herself a colored person, she felt her uncle was putting on airs when he referred to himself as a person of color. So where did this leave her? Well, I think Mr. Carmichael has started something down there in Mississippi, for better or worse. I think Negroes will
know
what to call themselves from now on, even though black may be only another misnomer. (Have
you
ever met a black Negro?) It scares me, Wat, all of it. Martin Luther King keeps urging peaceful protest, but I sense that even
his
patience is wearing thin, and I wonder how long he can sustain his grander vision and his larger dream? Bobby Kennedy gets up on top of a car outside racist Johannesburg and tells the gathered people, “Hate and bigotry will end in South Africa one day,” and he’s
really
saying to the world that it will end in America, too. I say
aluvai
to both of them. I’d like to invite them to dinner one night. I think they would like Rusty the cat.

Hey!

Lenny and Roxanne have finally decided to get married after only two short years of sleeping together! The decision was all very sudden (though I’m sure she’s not pregnant) and the wedding is set for June 25th, which is a week from tomorrow. I’ve been asked to be one of the witnesses. They’re getting married by a justice of the peace, so it won’t be a big production, but there’ll be a reception afterwards at the 79th Street apartment, and I’m very excited about the whole thing. In her letter to me, by the way, Roxanne reported a fine piece of graffiti she spotted in the ladies’ room of Schrafft’s 88th Street, and which I now pass on to you:

MAYOR LINDSAY IS A LESBIAN

Write to me soon. I love you.

Dana

P. S. Do you ever discuss any of these things with Lloyd Parsons? I gather from your letters that he’s your closest friend in the hootch, but I was wondering if your relationship is that free. I imagine the Army’s integration is real enough — I can’t, for example, visualize any racial conflict on a patrol into enemy territory — but sometimes I wonder.

Darling,

I have to run out to look at an apartment that suddenly materialized on St. Mary’s Street — kitchen, living room, and two bedrooms, all for $125.00! (Its last occupant was a maiden lady who drove it only on Sundays.) Carol is yelling for me to hurry up, and we’re going over to C’est Si Bon afterwards for some onion soup and those great pâté sandwiches, and won’t be back till late tonight so I won’t have a chance to write to you. I’ll just stick a stamp on this and mail it when I go down, A WRIGHT, SHADDUP ALREADY!

I love you,

Dana

Dearest Wat,

I think we may get the apartment, but it’s not a certainty yet. Two other girls had been to look at it before us, and they left a deposit on it. But they’re not sure they’re going to take it because one of the girls had rheumatic fever last fall, and it affected her heart, and she’s not sure her parents will dig her climbing all those steps every day. I hope they’re as much concerned about the poor kid’s health as I am, because Wat this is the most terrific apartment ever, with this little entrance alcove lined with bookshelves, and a tiny kitchen off to the left and a fairly decent-sized living room and, of course, the
two
bedrooms. They’re both very small, but can you imagine the luxury of not having to listen to Carol arguing on the phone with her mother, or not having to yell at her to put out the light? Can you imagine how nice it’ll be to reach for a ribbon on the dresser top and not stick my hand into a cold cream jar Carol has left open? Darling, keep your fingers crossed for me. If we don’t get this apartment, I’m going to enter a life of prostitution.

Meanwhile, other troubles loom.

What do you do with a cat when you go home for the summer? Carol’s parents own a Great Dane who would swallow poor Rusty in a second.
My
parents would appreciate a cat as much as a case of German measles, and we can’t find anyone here to take the poor beast, even though she’s turning out to be an excellent mouser. (At least she doesn’t run away from them any more.) It occurs to me suddenly that perhaps you could use a mobile mouse trap for under your hootch out there. The rat population being what it is in Vietnam, Rusty could perform a much-needed service while perhaps simultaneously becoming the company mascot, on lesser inspirations have entire wars been won. Vot you say, big boy? Shall we wrap her as a gift? Sorry we don’t have any of the ball-bearing kind, but who knows what sexy Rusty may lure to the camp? She certainly seems to be doing all right with our back alley tenor? Yes? No? I send? I don’t?

I won’t even discuss how shitty I think it was of your C.O. to refuse the R and R. You’ve been there for four months already, and it’ll be six months by August (when I could have gotten away very easily) and I think the old bastard
might
have broken his heart and said yes.

I miss you. I want you. I love you.

Dana

Wat darling,

Please forgive this odd-looking stationery. Carol and I are in the midst of packing all our things, and I can’t find my usual dainty, lady-like, jonquil-colored, quality writing paper. You guessed it (God, are you intelligent!) we got the apartment! Papa of the rheumatic fever victim called his child prepaid from Tampa, Florida, to say he would
not
have her climbing five flights to an apartment even if it was the Taj Mahal, which it couldn’t possibly be in a place like Boston, and the answer was No, definitely No, N-O, double O, O. So the landlady refunded the deposit, which was really very nice of her since she didn’t have to, and then called us to report what had happened and to say the place was ours if we still wanted it.
Still wanted it?!?!
Carol and I ran from here to St. Mary’s (eight blocks) in a matter of six seconds, showered a month’s advance rent on the poor bewildered old lady and made wild promises such as we’d be in bed by eight o’clock each night after we had eaten all our Pablum. Anyway, it’s ours, and we’re moving in tomorrow, and then locking the place up for July and August. Mommy and Daddy are already on the Cape, and I’ll be going there directly from here, so that’s that.

Roxanne’s wedding was absolutely beautiful, just a simple ceremony, but I wept all the way through it anyway, and practically couldn’t sign my name straight when it came time to witness the certificate. The reception afterwards in her parents’ apartment was somewhat crowded, to say the least. Try to picture four or live hundred relatives and friends packed into a place that’s identical to my parents’, Wat, only two floors lower down. It was possible to get intimate with someone just by being introduced! (Now don’t start worrying about that, I’m only kidding.) The food was marvelous, and there was plenty to drink, and I met a lot of kids Roxanne and I used to go to Dalton with, and we got very weepy all over again, and it was a thoroughly enjoyable female experience. The only sad part of it was that you weren’t there to enjoy it with me. But that, Wat, is the only sad part about my entire life.

Come home soon.

You hear me?

I have now marked the exact end of your tour on next year’s little calendar at the back of my appointment book: March 30, 1967. I expect to meet you wherever your plane lands, and we’ll throw champagne glasses in the lire and pretend there never was a stupid war. March 30th is exactly 276 days from now, you think I’m not counting?

Hey, guess what? We got rid of Rusty. I suppose I shouldn’t put it quite so crassly, but I must admit the cat was beginning to be a severe pain, and both Carol and I were getting quite anxious about what to do with her come the end of the week. She chewed up my best nylons (the cat, not Carol) on Friday, and I had to rush out to buy another pair before going down for the wedding, as if things weren’t hectic enough with the apartment hanging in the balance and with Carol moaning about having flunked Descriptive Astronomy. (She really
was
surprised, can you believe it? By the way, I passed Renaissance Lit with a B, so I expect you to send me some kind of award from out there in the jungle, like maybe an orchid picked from a tree, or a smooth pebble from a stream, or perhaps even a piece of bamboo drilled with evenly spaced holes, upon which I can play ancient tunes like “And I Love Her.” I will leave it to your imagination.) Anyway, we had a girl from Simmons up for dinner Sunday night when I got back from New York, oh, listen, this was
some
production. Candlelight and wine, you know, and Rusty cute as anything with a blue ribbon around her neck, cocking her head to one side, the whole adorable quizzical cat routine, Carol and I dressed to kill and stumbling all over ourselves in our efforts to please. When we were mixing the salad in the kitchen, Carol suggested that we turn the Simmons girl on, but I thought this might be a bit much for someone from Muncie, Indiana. In fact, she even declined the scotch we offered, and I thought our entire NBC Special might be preempted, as they say in TV Land, but Rusty rescued the day by climbing gently into her lap after dinner, and purring against her bosom, and I’m happy to report it was love at first sight. Carol is even now delivering Rusty to the girl’s room on Park Drive, over near the Fine Arts Museum, so thank God for that! If I ever write to say I’m about to take in another pet, please send me a hand grenade by return airmail.

Wat darling, let me go pack the rest of my junk or we’ll
never
get out of here. I’m so afraid the new apartment will vanish into thin air before we move into it. I love you, love you, love you. Write soon.

Dana