The Little Book (18 page)

He bent down and placed the ball on the rubber part of the mound. He removed his crimson cap with the white
H
and placed it with his glove beside the ball. He removed his shirt, with
Harvard
emblazoned on the front, dropped it neatly beside the cap. He pulled the cotton undershirt with the red sleeves up over his head and dropped that. He kicked off his cleats, then unbuckled his belt and removed his pants. Then he picked up the glove.

The world that mattered stared in disbelief. Wheeler stood for a moment on the mound. Michelangelo’s David in a jockstrap and a thirty-year -old baseball glove. Then he walked calmly off the diamond, out through Burden Gate, away from baseball and Harvard College forever.

17

An Unexpected Meeting

Wheeler was now very comfortable in Vienna. Dr. Freud had arranged everything. He had known a kindly older woman in the neighborhood of Berggasse 19, Frau Bauer, who had recently lost both her husband and her son and who had an extra room, a supply of clothing, and the desire for company. Questions of his mysterious appearance without identifying papers or a means of supporting himself seemed no issue. And Dr. Freud agreed to meet with him further every few days or so.

One gray and rainy Sunday shortly after moving in with the widow, Wheeler was walking toward the Café Central when he looked up to find Ernst Kleist hustling toward him, his eyes wild with excitement. “You’ve got to come see,” he said, barely stopping and pulling on Wheeler’s arm. Low dirty clouds hung over the Danube plateau, adding a kind of melancholic heavy mood. “The setting for revolution,” Kleist said as they sped along the damp curbside.

The Haze’s orations had drilled into Wheeler the explosive political situation in Vienna at the time, so he was prepared. “It’s about the Language Ordinances,” Kleist said, as they walked. “The German Austrians are furious. They don’t want the lowly Czech language forced on them, and the Slavs want their language respected. The tense politics exploded all over Austria, and now it is happening right here in capital city.”

Kleist looked terrified and exuberant. “Look at this,” he said, pulling Wheeler along with his exuberation. “The whole thing is about to erupt. Meetings have been scheduled all over the city, and now they are all rallying and marching to the Parliament and demanding the minister’s dismissal. Look, there’re thousands of them!”

They hustled together toward the Parliament building, and as they approached Wheeler could see the beginnings of a crowd forming, and he could hear the sounds of shouting. “The workers,” Kleist said. “They’re pan-Germanic.” A large group of workers, some thousands strong, had formed a few blocks away and was now marching toward Parliament. They were dressed in formal clothes, a mixture of laborers and white-collared ladies and gentlemen. They were singing their “Song of Labor.”

Then Kleist pointed down the wide boulevard. “Students from the university. They’re pro-Slav, of course. They got wind of the workers’ march and are forming a countermovement.” Off to their right, a second group approached, and the students met them marching from the opposite direction, obviously looking for a confrontation, singing a song of their own, “Watch on the Rhine.”

“Where else but Vienna,” he could hear the Haze saying, “would street rioters be singing?”

Thousands of spectators surrounded them; some joined in the riotous chorus. They all milled aimlessly around, many not knowing why they were there or what they were supposed to accomplish. Everybody was cold and wet.

Just as the two masses approached each other, a small group of students, the loudest and most belligerent, made a run at the workers. They exchanged angry words, then one of the students swung out at one of the workers and grabbed his wool cap and threw it on the ground. A burly worker stepped out of the group and cuffed the student on the ear, and one of his fellow students took a swing at the worker with a stick. Both groups stepped back, realizing for just an instant the volatility of what they were doing, and then they began yelling insults at one another. It’s just like Berkeley, Wheeler would have said, if he thought his friend would have had any idea what he was talking about. “It’s hard to hear them,” Wheeler yelled, close to Kleist’s ear.

“This has been boiling for weeks,” Kleist yelled back, pausing. “Look over there,” he said, pointing over to a line of soldiers on horseback who had cordoned off the Parliament building. “Same with the Hoffburg,” he said. “They’re sealing off the entrances. Police and soldiers blocking everything. No one can get in or out.”

Police were walking and riding horseback among the crowd, trying to encourage order, asking people to disperse and go home, but they seemed to be generally ignored. “They’ll keep order. Nothing bad will happen,” Kleist yelled above the noise.

Just then, segments of both crowds seethed toward the other, and what had been two clear sides melded together in a melee of flying fists and shrieks of vituperation. The scattered mounted police tried to pull together and form a phalanx, using their horses to intimidate and control the seething mass, but there were too many protesters, and the police were too spread out. One policeman on foot yelled at a group that was flailing at one another, and then he raised his stick to try to strike one, and he was set upon by a group of students, who disarmed him and shoved him to the ground, where he had to jump up quickly before being trampled. He yelled to his fellow officers for help, and suddenly, at what must have been high noon, a loud command sounded through the rain. The soldiers stationed in front of the Parliament building formed a disciplined line, drew their sabers, and began galloping straight forward.

The parts of the crowd that saw the soldiers charging lurched backward into those who were still oblivious and milling about, some still singing. Those too far in the middle of the pack could only sense the escalation in violence and began moving off to the side. “Let’s get out of here,” Wheeler said, but he could see that there was no dissuading Kleist, who was itching to be in the middle of things.

Wheeler and Kleist had worked themselves over to the side of the crowd closest to the Parliament building and the soldiers. “If anything happens,” Wheeler said, “this is the side we want to be on.” He had been in the middle of enough unruly crowds to know that you didn’t want to place yourself in the path of the potential stampede. Now, in full view of the whole spectacle, they stood transfixed, able to see the line of mounted soldiers charging forward, their swords drawn and flashing. “Surely they are not going to use those,” Wheeler yelled at Kleist.

“They’ll just control things,” Kleist said with a look of calm confidence. But then the first sword came down, and a spurt of blood came from the neck of one of the multitude before he dropped to the ground. The young man looked at Wheeler with a kind of desperation in his eyes. Then another sword came crashing down, then another. “It has gone beyond control, ” Kleist yelled in alarm. “Chaos has come.”

The soldiers, their brightly colored uniforms flashing, their swords drawn and held high in the air, charged their horses straight into the crowd, with no regard for safety or compromise, intent on mayhem and no-quarter rout. Wheeler thought suddenly of the Kent State debacle in 1969, when National Guard troops opened fire on students, and how the whole unfortunate event had gone against everyone’s intentions. “American youth didn’t want to fire on American youth,” one observer said. “Some National Guard kid just panicked.” Not so with the hussars of the emperor’s Fifteenth Cavalry Regiment, it appeared. They rode into the unarmed crowd the way they would into an enemy infantry, with every intention to use their swords.

An immense panic ensued. The soldiers began hacking right and left. Blood was flowing everywhere. “This is awful,” shouted Kleist. And the scene in front of them was pure bedlam. Men fell in the mud cursing, women screamed, young boys were bleeding, as many injured by the stampeding crowd as by the mercilessness of the swords and horses. Later, there would be reports that the panic lasted all afternoon and spread through the city.

Seeing the swords flashing in the gloomy light, Kleist was finally making his exit. “This is no place to be,” he yelled and stepped away from Wheeler, disappearing into the crowd of students.

But Wheeler held his ground, pushing forward even, for a better view. Seeing that the line of soldiers was not going to pass the point where he was standing, he felt that advancing or retreating would attract more attention than just standing in one place. He stood transfixed and watched the soldiers wade into the crowd. People were trying their best to avoid the sweeping arcs of the swords, stepping on one another. The soldiers were riding forward, taking full swings with their swords, seemingly without regard to age or gender or whether or not the victims were trying to stay or flee. Many were dropping, and wounded citizens lay everywhere. Since there was no way for the people on the street to protect themselves or fight back, the soldiers were unscathed. Now fallen bodies were in the path of fleeing feet and horses. People were screaming and tripping, and blood began to spot the ground.

Later, in accounting for his hasty retreat, Kleist remarked how calm Wheeler was. “You must be very brave,” he said. “Or very foolish.”

But Wheeler knew it was neither. It was more of a sense of being above it somehow. Having been dislocated in time, he felt invulnerable, as if knowing that he had not been transported to this foreign time and place to be a casualty of such a scene of incoherence and riot. He stood his ground as an unassailable and detached observer.

As the scene diminished and the crowd dispersed in panic, Wheeler became aware of one other observer, a man in his late twenties, it seemed, whose eyes had a steely calm about them, as if he, like Wheeler, knew he was simply an observer at the scene. Distracted by the dwindling pageant, by the sweaty horses and the bloody bodies on the ground, he did not notice Wheeler’s eyes fixed on him.

Almost instantly recognizing the young man—how could he not?— Wheeler approached and gave him a thorough, close-up examination. The man looked at him now, surprised by his attention. “Can I help you?” he said, a challenge, not really a cordiality.

Wheeler gave him one more long appraisal, looking him up and down. “You are from Boston, aren’t you?”

At first, the man looked totally stunned but quickly seemed to understand. “Why, yes, I am.”

“From Harvard.”

The young man’s look shifted quickly to one of puzzlement, aware that he might be being mistaken for someone else. “How would you know that?”

“You look very familiar,” Wheeler said.

The young man knew too much to do anything but accept it. He spoke slowly, forming the words cautiously, almost afraid of their results, then regained his confidence. “You’re from Boston?” he said.

“Enough to know who you are,” Wheeler said, helping him out.

“I’m sorry. You have mistaken me for someone else.” Understandably, the young man was incredulous, feeling quite sure there was no way he could be recognized.

Wheeler held firm. “No, I’m quite sure.”

The man stuck out his hand. “Let me introduce myself,” he said vigorously. “The name’s Herbert Hoover.”

Wheeler took the hand and shook it, looking the man square in the eye. “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Hoover,” Wheeler said, pausing for only an instant’s calculation without offering his own name. Instead, “That isn’t your true name, is it?” was what he said.

“How could you possibly know that?” said the man with a look of total bewilderment.

“I know who you are,” Wheeler said definitively. “You are Dilly Burden. ”

PART TWO

T
he Nature of Our Condition

18

Famous for Being Famous

Exactly how Shadow Self became national icons and Wheeler became one of America’s Most Recognizable is documented in two major
Rolling Stone
articles, the most memorable being the first, shortly after the Woodstock festival in the fall of 1969.

When Wheeler dropped out of Harvard College, he had enrolled almost immediately in the Berklee School of Music in Boston, studying guitar formally. During that time, Shadow Self moved away from the Brattle Street scene, where they had become very popular, and began playing at a roadhouse on Cape Cod, striking out on their own, you might say. They were still singing the Buddy Holly songs, but they had also begun writing songs of their own and perfecting their three- and four-part harmonies. Word of their musicianship spread, and famous musicians from all categories began stopping in to listen. Wheeler by that time was lead guitarist and had developed quite a name among the folk groups and hot new rock bands.

Among those who came to see them from time to time was a young Yale Law School graduate from New York named Joel Rosenman. Rosenman, a singer and guitar player himself, had with a wealthy partner hatched a dream of creating an annual rock music festival in artistic Woodstock, New York, something to rival the Newport jazz and folk festivals. No one really took them seriously, but Wheeler and his band had said yes, they would be there, if the festival ever got going. This was in 1967. Rosenman came to see them a year later and said he had lost the rights to the Woodstock site because things had gotten too big, but he had contracted with a farmer named Max Yasgur in nearby Bethel, Sullivan County, New York, to use his open field. Their grandiose scheme was becoming even more grandiose. They were in the process of contracting about every famous band and personality they could think of and still wanted Shadow Self to be in that number.

The rest of the story is well documented in many sources, but Shadow Self performed before some four hundred thousand people, their album sold over a million copies, and they were suddenly a name. Wheeler was sporting his Wild Bill Hickok look by then, “so he wouldn’t look like Harvard, ” Joan Quigley said. His image began appearing in newspapers and magazines as, more than any of the other musicians, Wheeler Burden became a symbol of the times.