The Laws of our Fathers (12 page)

    By April of 1970,
1
had received my draft notice and was being forced to choose between conscription - and the likelihood of a tour of duty in the jungles of Vietnam - or exile in Canada.

    Each course seemed unbearable. My opposition to the war was unyielding. On the other hand, I was an only child, weighed down by my parents' many claims on me. Even 1,900 miles away from them and my home in Kindle County, I felt them close - a hot breath from behind - a phenomenon that left me alternately infuriated or resigned. They were camp survivors who had met in Auschwitz after their families - her husband, his wife and child - had perished. My father was almost seventy now, still robust, still full of his subtle commanding powers, but bound for decline. Even more troubling was my mother, a fretful person who seemed to sustain herself by clutching me close. When I was a child, a sensation of my mother's pain was always turning near my heart, and I had grown up feeling an unwavering duty not to add further to her suffering. My departure with my girlfriend for California the prior fall had prostrated her with grief. Actual exile, as my father never tired of reminding me, would revive for her - for both of them - unbearable horrors.

    Faced with the pressure of sorting this out, I allowed the other relations in my life to collapse. I fell out badly with my best friend since childhood, Hobie Turtle, who was a first-year law student in the Bay Area. But my greatest agony, as is usually the case, came from love. The spring before, in 1969,
I
had fallen helplessly for a young woman - strong, dark, and beautiful - named Sonia Klonsky, whom I had met on an overnight bus trip from Kindle County to D C, heading for one of the first of the Student Mobilization Committee's marches on Washington. At the time, we were both college seniors on the verge of graduation, she from the U. in the city and I from stuffy, renowned Easton College. With her striking dark looks, set amid a stormy abundance of jet hair, her long-waisted, full-busted proportions, and, most important, her air of frank seriousness about herself, Sonny was dazzling to me.

    I had never been in love. In fact, I had never been a notable success with women. My bleak outlook and sardonic manner made me somewhat fashionable, I guess, but under the strain of sustained female attention, I tended to come off as simply weird.

    My relationships all petered out after a few weeks. So my passion for Sonny was a great shock - the heat of it, the puppyish desire to be near, the amazing news that human loneliness, which I took as an elemental condition, could vanish like the reagents in a test tube. My mind and heart spun crazily on the magic of details: We were both left-handed. We both knew the words to every cut on
Happy Jack.
When we were alone, she called me 'Baby.' The news that I held a spot in the life of someone so fiercely intelligent, so beautiful, so surely destined to make her mark upon the world, clapped home three times a day with the breathtaking impact of divine revelation.

    This devotion, the stuff of legends, would have been perfect, had it been better received. Sonny enjoyed my company, my idiosyncratic humor, my headlong commitment to what she thought was right, my unruly, experimental side. But she forbade all talk of love. In September 1969 she prepared to leave for the Bay Area, where she had been accepted at Miller Damon Senior University in an accelerated, interdisciplinary Ph.D. program known as Modern Critical Thought and Philosophy. I moped around until she finally suggested I come with her to California, a step I'd already secretly contemplated, given Hobie's destination for the same locale.

    'Because you need a ride?' I was always trying to trap her.

    'Seth.'

    'No, seriously, man. What'll we be, roommates?'

    'We'll be "living together." Dangerous words then for a man and a woman, full of a subversive appeal I could never reject. So we had driven west in my yellow VW Bug, in a two-car caravan with Hobie and his young girlfriend, Lucy McMartin. Big and good-looking, smooth-talking and funny, Hobie was a hit with many women, and Lucy had dropped out of her sophomore year at Easton to follow him. Lucy was cute in a Betty Boop way, a little freckle-faced white girl, narrowly made, always clothed in stylish items culled from second-hand stores - leather vests and a short-billed cap like the ones the Beatles wore in
Help!
Hobie found Lucy pliant, sweet-natured, and bright, if chronically naive, but she was generally overwhelmed by Hobie and his lunatic manner. Behind her back, we called her 'Groovy,' since that was her automatic reply to any inquiry from 'How do you do?' to discussion of the Tet Offensive.

    Entering the town of Damon, California, was much like crossing a national border. Beyond the campus environs dwelled men who looked as if they had gotten their haircuts in pencil sharpeners and women in girdles, but here along Damon's main drag, Campus Boulevard, the culture of the young flourished in a tumbling bazaar atmosphere. The town's transient elements - students and street freaks, hippies, home runaways, and communards - now far outnumbered the indigenous residents, the faculty families, and various grumpy Latinos who had watched as Campus Boul sprawled, surrounding the bookstores and student hangouts and mercados with head shops, candle stores, and the new 'boutiques' vending tie-dyed dresses and garments of macrame. The traffic, thick at all hours with touring gawkers, staggered by, while street performers - mimes and bongo drummers and gentle pipers - did their things, and the Damonites, in leisure suits and floral granny gowns, strolled the avenue among the soiled barefoot hippies, each one inevitably accompanied by a mongrel dog leashed on a piece of string. On the building sides, the trisected peace sign was spray-painted, while harsher words praised the NFL in Vietnam, and Huey Newton, then in jail for supposedly killing a police officer. Appearing often amidst the graffiti in Day-Glo shades was a round-lettered injunction which simply urged, 'Be Free.' Arriving with Sonny, I found all of this, the commotion, the array, the slogans inspiring; I could feel the life of my generation - historical, dynamic, epochal - like a rush flowing through my arms. This was the bold new world, its shape as yet uncertain, but sure to be better than the one our parents had given us.

    On the first weekend in town, Hobie led us to Dionysus '69, the theater-of-assault piece, in which cast members mingled naked with the audience. The next night it was Fillmore West, a teeming environment of maximum amplification, sweat, and drug deals, where amoeba-like colored visuals swarmed on enormous projector screens, and various rock maniacs cruised about with a hipper-than-thou air. Hobie, particularly, loved the Bay Area scene: so many wiggy new things to dig, so many new drugs to take. First citizen of the counterculture, he wore shirts mottled with balls of color the size of grapefruits, bell-bottoms bigger than his shoes, and tinted aviator shades. He'd also grown a large globe Afro, somewhat reluctantly, since he'd been at constant odds with the Black Power types at Easton, who called him a Tom for rooming with a white guy.

    Hobie and I had grown up together in University Park, the only neighborhood in the Tri-Cities anybody might have called cosmopolitan and probably one of the few in America which, during the years of our childhood, could pass as integrated. Blacks had arrived in U. Park during the Civil War, brought by the Underground Railroad, and were quickly isolated through the device of four public parks laid out around the small area where they resided. But beginning in the 1930s it gradually became acceptable for Negroes of sufficient stature - doctors, dentists, lawyers, certain entrepreneurs - to settle on the white sides of the park. This depressed land values somewhat, and my father, always in relentless pursuit of a bargain, could not resist. Thus, I moved in down the street from Hobie Turtle. As youngsters, we had little contact; Hobie went to Catholic elementary school and, always large, was known as something of a bully. It was only in junior high that we suddenly found each other. He was someone else who openly admitted having weird thoughts about science, girls, his parents.

    In high school, we went through phases together. For a while, we were beatniks, appearing each day in berets and shades and black turtlenecks and calling each other 'Daddy-o.' We spent weekend nights in the paneled basement of Hobie's home, eating pizza, listening to Mort Sahl and Tom Lehrer records, and debating the philosophical issues of male adolescence, such as whether vaginas, like snowfiakes, were each unique. In college, we'd become mildly notorious on the Easton campus as performers. During rush week, we did our own minstrel show, a Negro and a Jew, pining together in Jolson-faces before a picture of the honey-haired homecoming queen - Muffy or Buffy or Betty -crooning Bing's old tune: 'I'm dreaming of a' -

    Hobie: 'White'

    Seth: 'Christian.'

    We thought we were hysterical. Both Lucy and Sonny had met the inevitable measure, proving tolerant of our strange riffs. The apartment Sonny and I found in Damon was only a block from them.

    So we arrived, and in less than a year I had been handed over to doom. I look back at that young man with his hand-tooled-leather headband, his Sergeant Pepper mustache, the froth of mid-shoulder blondish hair, which my father in his correct Viennese accent never tired of comparing to Jesus's, and feel weak with shame. In spite of my degree from a fancy, famous Midwestern university, I was largely aimless. For a year or two in college I'd had thoughts that Hobie and I would become a comedy act, but I was simply not funny enough; these days I was talking about writing underground movies and had broken all records for repeat watchings of
Jules et Jim
and the films of Jean-Luc Godard. For the most part, I saw the draft as having rudely barricaded my way, but at moments, especially when I was stoned, I would recognize how large and undifferentiated my universe seemed, how lost I was inside myself. I was liable to fall under the influence of any strong suggestion, acting at moments with no more forethought than a person trying on hats. I knew only a few things for certain: That I was in love. That I wanted the world to be better than it was. Yet my passions seemed powerful enough to light the planet. And now that the earth is somewhat dimmer, I look back with a solitary heart, limp not merely with regret, but also with longing.

    

    

    Sonny had her fellowship and I supported myself with hand-to-mouth measures typical of the era, food stamps, and a variety of odd jobs. I sold
The Good Times
out on Campus Boul and was eventually recruited to distribute a rival publication called
After Dark,
basically a skin mag, whose cover each week featured a blurry color separation of an unclothed full-busted beauty whose smoky look smoldered above the fold in the vending machines where I placed the papers. My principal occupation, however, turned out to be baby-sitting for a six-year-old named Nile Eddgar. His parents lived in the same apartment building as Sonny and I, a brown-shingled Victorian with a round bulb extension at one end that rose three floors to a roof pointed like a wimple. The inner construction was shabby - the usual marked walls and devastated carpeting of a typical student slum - but our apartment had an ample kitchen and many nifty Victorian touches, including a raised pattern in the plaster.

    I'd found my job with Nile purely by accident. The day we moved in, I knocked on the door to the single upstairs flat, looking for a hammer, and was greeted by Nile's father, Loyell Eddgar, whose movie-star looks undoubtedly contributed to his charisma. He was a slighter, shorter version of Bruce Jenner, an Olympic athlete of the day, with the same long, lank hair smoothly groomed, and a similar Barbie doll handsomeness. I was struck by his eyes, a remarkable limpid blue, which gave him the pale haunted gaze of a mystic. Eddgar, however, had none of a jock's relaxed way - he was rigid as someone taking an electrical shock. As I explained what I needed, he stood his ground in the threshold and clearly would have slammed the door on me had it not been for a mild Southern voice behind him. A pleasant-looking woman in jeans and a chambray shirt approached, her stiff, bronze hair ponytailed, her measured smile reflecting self-control and excellent breeding.

    'Will you sit?' June Eddgar asked, as soon as we'd made our introductions. As it turned out, this was a job offer, rather than an effort to improve on Eddgar's congeniality. June explained that both she and her husband, a theology professor at Damon, worked full-time. Their former baby-sitter, our neighbor downstairs, Michael Frain, had quit unexpectedly only the day before in order to supervise a lab in the Applied Research Center. She was, frankly, desperate, and hoped I could step in with Nile, after school and on some evenings.

    The notion of me as a baby-sitter seemed slightly preposterous. I had no younger siblings and naturally thought of it as girls' work. On the other hand, I was without any means of support at that point, which meant, even halfway across the country, I felt myself vulnerable to my father and his perpetual craziness about money. He was an economist, one of the first of the money-supply experts, whose lifework - his very consciousness - was given over to money, which, as a result, was the frequent terrain of our many conflicts.

    Only after I accepted June's offer did I find out what I had gotten myself into. 'Oh, lad. You're a flippin employee of the chairman of One Hundred Flowers,' I was informed that night by Sonny's departmental adviser, Graeme Florry. We were at the first of what I quickly came to regard as dreadful events, the departmental party, where the grad students chattered brightly and sized each other up. Graeme, a tall ruddy Englishman with a blond pageboy, wore a skinny Jacob's beard fringing his jaw and narrow yellow-tinted granny glasses suggestive of some psychedelic orientation. I had no idea what he meant by One Hundred Flowers or why he seemed so agitated.