The Laws of our Fathers (28 page)

    When I reached their apartment on Grand Street in Damon, I found Lucy cowering behind the door, shooing away their dog, a large cream-colored husky named Mighty White. Hobie's late-term cramming had left the apartment looking as if a twister had hit. Throughout college, Hobie had indulged Gurney, his father, in a pharmacist's predictable dream that his son would go to medical school. Those of us who knew Hobie well realized his only interest was in getting his hands on his own prescription pad. In the end, he chose law school both to pacify his parents and because he'd heard the only required work was a single exam in each course. He didn't want to waste his time on papers and midterms just to get drafted. But now that the lottery had freed him, he had to learn something about law fast. The first exams were a few days away. His casebooks and notes were thrown all over the living room, and the place reeked of cigarettes, a habit he took up at the end of each semester, asking all his friends to save, from their flights home over the holidays, the little four-packs that the airlines handed out with meals. I'd seen this routine many times at Easton: Hobie begging every guy in the dorm for notes on the classes he'd cut, the texts he'd never bought. Ultimately, he always made the Dean's List, with grades higher than mine.

At the moment, Hobie sat across the room on the sofa, a secondhand piece with rolled arms and a campy countrified floral pattern. He was sobbing. His cheeks shone and his arms hung loose between his knees. At the same time, he remained fixed on the TV, which, pursuant to the needs of his lifestyle, was positioned only a few steps from him. An old movie was running. Hepburn and Tracy.

    Lucy explained that Hobie was enduring the results of playing chemistry lab with his own head: he had dropped some acid and taken a noseful of Cleveland's snow as a garnish.

    'He's been crazy,' she said. 'Throwing stuff? Screaming?'

    'Have we got like a theme?'

    'You'll hear.' She rolled her eyes in a rare show of exasperation.

    Near the sofa, a picture of Hobie's family was smashed in its frame. An ashtray had been emptied. I sat down next to him carefully. He was wearing a T-shirt of his own design, which he had produced and marketed at Easton - an anatomically perfect heart and lungs brightly serigraphed above a black legend which read 'Be My Transplant.'

    'So, Mr Gordon, any sign of the evil emperor Ming?' In his eyes, you could see my question lost like quicksilver in some crack in his brain. Somehow it was always a gas for me when Hobie was fucked up and I was straight, making me, for a brief interval, the master in our tangled relationship. 'So like what's flipping across the screen, dude, got you so unhappy?'

    'Hey, man, you know.' Blasted by the drugs, he was softer, deprived of his usual hard-shell hipness. His round face was puffed up by tears.

    'Are you in-body?' I asked. Hobie had experienced reliable sensations two or three times during acid trips of being someone else: a fourteenth-century woman in Avignon who worked on the weaving of one of the Papal tapestries, and a Nepalese peasant named Prithvi Pradyumna, whose life each day, treading behind his oxen, was consumed with unrelenting bitter anguish that his brother, rather than he, had been permitted to become a monk. His eyes flickered up now.

    'It's all bad,' he told me.

    'You mean the dope. What are we saying?'

    'Dope? Huh? It's dope. It's everything. It's being skulled and crazy. It's
all
the dope.'

    I agreed: he did too much. I told him that. Immediately, he began to rage at me.

    'No! You know why I been stoned for five years, man? You know?' He thundered to his feet abruptly and loomed over me. 'I've been killing the pain, boy! I've been ignoring the facts! Did you know that?' 'No.'

    'Did you
know
that?' he screamed with his substantial arms outstretched. Lucy peeked in from the kitchen. Now that I had arrived, she had given way. She was crying, her face a mess of melted liner. 'Man, there is something I ain't never wanted to tell myself. And you know what it is? Do you
know
what it is?'

    'No.'

    'He doesn't
know
what it is,' Hobie bellowed to the ceiling. Up there, he had glued one of his casebooks with a note reading 'Law is a natural high' dangling from a corner. He faced me so suddenly that I flinched. 'I'm a
black
man,' he declared and briefly descended into a terrible grief-strained spasm of tears. 'Do you know what it means to be a black man? Do you know?'

    Growing up in my father's home, I'd felt a special sense for the brute pain of oppression. I began to remind Hobie of my efforts, the meetings, the marches I'd made with his parents. It only infuriated him.

    
'Don't
tell me about that! You think cause you went marching up and down the street askin people not to be so mean, I have to send you a fucking thank-you note? What'd that ever do, man? That was nothing more than a walk in the fresh air.' Hobie kicked the coffee table, a miserable piece of cheap wood with a scarred veneer, so that it jumped against my knees.

    'I know the world's fucked up, man. But it's changing. It's
changed,
for Chrissake. Twenty years from now, man, there isn't going to be a slum left in this country. Poor Negroes -'

    'Blacks!
Blacks,
man.'

    It was Hobie's dad, Gurney, in his avuncular way, who'd taught me one day in his drugstore when I was seven to say 'Negro' rather than 'colored.'

    'Right, blacks. Blacks, poor blacks are like immigrants who got off the boat in 1964. They're newly arrived. You think they won't jump into the melting pot, too? They'll stop speaking dialect, they'll-'

    ' "Di'-alect"? Man, that's our language. That's our culture. Shit! You know, I just can't talk to you about this.' Both Lucy and the dog cringed by the wall as Hobie strode from the room. In time, I found him on the back porch, a rickety wooden construction off the kitchen, where the floor was reinforced to hold a washer. He was ripping wet laundry out of the machine. He picked up three or four items, slinging them without aiming across the bright kitchen. A shirt stuck to the refrigerator. A sock hung on the clock. A pair of jeans hit the yellow wall with a moist thwack and after a time crawled down to the floor, leaving a glistening trail. He reared up in fury when he saw me again.

    'America is a nation conceived in original sin and that sin is slavery!'

    'Oh, stop it,' I said. 'Stop trying to bend my mind with how bad the Negro people have had it. I get it, okay? And they aren't the only ones who have suffered.'

    'You tell me who's had it worse?'

    'Who? Oh, fuck you, Jack. Man, I wouldn't even be standing here -'

    'Oh, that. That! Except the whole fucking white world got its little act together, man, and kicked Adolf Hitler's ass. Now, let's lookee here, over in the US of A, man: We got lynchings and rapings and burnings. We got KKKs and White Citizens Councils and Orval Faubus. We got Bull Conner lettin his hound dogs loose on black teenagers who just want to sit at a
lunch
counter, have a sandwich, man. And did all them European leaders say, "We got us another threat to civilization"? Don't tell me, man. I've already heard it a thousand times: that's different.'

    'It is different. Even slavery isn't annihilation.'

    From her corner, Lucy said it was all terrible and asked why it mattered which was worse. Neither of us was paying any attention.

    'Our slavery never ended,' Hobie said. 'We will never be anything here but slaves or the children of slaves. Never! There is no forgetting.' Standing over the machine, he was virtually hyperventilating.

    'You and I never remembered.'

    'Bullshit!' he screamed.

 'Hobie, you're tripping.'

    Somehow this was the worst thing I had said yet. He took fierce hold of my shirt. As I was trying to break away, I ended up getting butted hard by his forehead. My lip bled freely. Lucy brought me a cloth and ice and I sat at the kitchen table, attending to myself. Hobie did not seem to notice. He came back in my direction, still screaming.

    'This Is Not a Fucking Trip! This Is My Fucking Life!'

    Afterwards, replaying the conversation for Sonny, what shocked me, as much as Hobie's anger, was the instinctive speed with which I had seized my parents' experience as my own. I'd been indignant that Hobie, of all people, would forget the solemn moral claims of my heritage.

    Our relationship was never fully repaired. I knew Hobie better than to expect an apology, but he made no amends of any kind. His appearances at Doobie Hour became infrequent and Lucy often arrived without him. We simply let time pass. The night of my birthday, March 12, we tried it again. The four of us went out to a little Vietnamese restaurant Hobie had found in San Francisco. It was a hole in the wall on Van Ness, specializing in spring rolls and savory soups. Catholics, the owners had dolled up the little place for Mardi Gras with boughs of gilt leaves.

    'Three great cuisines, man,' Hobie pronounced. 'Chinese. Indian. French. And only one place they've met. We're bombing the finest fucking cooks in the world.'

    Lucy wore sparkles in her hair for the occasion and had brought sequined pinwheels for each of us. Sonny gave me a copy of
Abbey Road.
We all drank Chinese beer. Hobie said it was the best high he'd had since he'd given up cocaine. I - and especially Sonny - was pleased by that news.

    'No lie, man,' Hobie said. 'I'm totally checked out of this white-is-right bag.'

    Against the counsel of an inner voice, I asked what he meant.

    'The American thing, man. White men have been destroying people of color around the globe since the sixteenth century, taking their countries, killing them, or making them slaves. The war in Vietnam and the war on the US plains, man - same damn thing. You think it's just coincidental that those grunts in Nam call NLF territory "Indian Country"? Think it's an accident we dropped the A-bomb on the yellow folks in Japan and not the whites in Germany? And now, man, if one planet ain't enough, now you-all gonna colonize the fucking moon.' These imperialist designs, Hobie said, were betrayed everywhere, not merely in the gross manifestations, as in Vietnam, but in the seemingly innocuous items of daily life. Hobie was now convinced that refined sugar was the product of a ruthless oligopoly, the subjugators of Cuba and Hawaii, who had purified their product in order to addict children, while appealing to the basic racist subtext of American life by turning a brown commodity white. The same was true of cocaine. 'White,' said Hobie. 'Purity, propriety, cleanliness, and stature. This country's got white-is-right on the brain. Look at all those dudes going to work every day in white shirts, washing their hands in Ivory soap. Think about it, man,' he demanded.
'Think
about it.'

    I studied him for quite some time, then told him he was mouthing Black Panther bullshit. He became incredibly provoked.

    'They are powerful black men!' he shouted. 'Can't you dig? The Panthers are exactly what America has not wanted to see for four hundred years, man. They are African males, with their great big guns, not runnin, not hidin, sayin, Stick 'em up, motherfucker, I want what's mine.'

    'You're fucked,' I said. 'You're out of your gourd.'

    'Man,' Hobie told me, 'you can't even see me anymore. If I'm not just some cute Negro with a bunch of amusing things to say, you can't cope. Let's go,' he told Lucy and stalked out.

    I sat there an instant, unhappy with myself. I briefly looked to Sonny and Lucy for consolation, but I finally followed him out. On the crowded street of low dun-colored buildings, Hobie stood on the walk, observing the streaming traffic mounting the hills of Van Ness. One of the aboriginal fern bars was down on the corner.

    'If I've been talking down to what you believe, then I'm really sorry,' I told him. 'I've got my own thing right at the moment. But I get it. You know. I'm with you. I've always been with you.'

    'You won't be there forever, man. Nobody white's gonna be there forever.'

    'How's that?'

    'This country's for you, man. It's
for
you.'

    'It is, huh? That's why I have to run away from it?'

    'Oh, you know. Time passes.'

    I couldn't believe it. I swore at him.

    'Okay,' he said. 'I'm just saying how it is. I know you're against things right now. Cause right now they're gonna draft your ass.'

    'Right and you're a disinterested philosopher. You care about the oppression of people of color because you're a Negro - or black, or whatever word it is this week.'

    'But here it is, man.' He pounded on his palm. 'Twenty years from now, you'll be rich and fat and white - and I'll still be a Negro, or whatever it is that week.'

    'And I'll be a fucking Canadian.'

    I understood all right. It was clear now. We had been through college, we had been through everything. We had been children, we had played intense boy-games, football on cold afternoons, wrestling where he always was pinning me, sitting on my throat or bloodying my nose. We'd done junior high school who-loves-who, showed each other our pubic hair when it started to grow in. In high school we'd made friends with Weird John Savio, who took us driving on the frontage road behind the highway in his mother's three-speed Fairlane, which he ran at no miles per hour until the engine smoked. In college, we stayed up all night at least twice a week, drawing anyone we liked into our discussions about

    Occam's razor and various proofs for the existence of God, pondering the implications if it turned out that it was actually life on Earth that was really Hell. We secretly knew we were the instigators of Easton's legendary freshman-sophomore water fight. We'd done heavy doses of cannabis and Benzedrine hoping to bend our minds about what Einstein had meant when he postulated that matter equaled time. We had been through everything. But we were not going to get through this.