1968. Part 21

"And I feel fine." He felt stupid, actually, standing in front of the refrigerator with a beer in one hand, a salami in the other, and a jar of pickles under one arm. He set down two of them and opened the third.

"I'll try commuting for a while." He returned to the refrigerator for mayonnaise. "Do we have any peanut b.u.t.ter?"

"I'll get it." She bustled off to the pantry. "It's not that far."

"Eighteen miles." He got the cutting board from beneath the sink. "That's a gallon of gas, two gallons both ways." He cut three thick slabs of salami and sliced two pickles into strips.

"So what's that, eighty cents a day?"

"Twenty-four dollars a month. That's half what a room would cost."

"Well. you could use my Esso card for gas. Your father wouldn't mind."

Spider refrained from pointing out that his father had been gone for two weeks, and probablywould mind. He put mayo on one slice of bread and crunchy peanut b.u.t.ter on the other and stacked the salami and pickles together into a thick pregnant-woman's sandwich. His mother handed him a plate. "You don't like mustard anymore?""Not with pickles. You eating?"

"No, I had an egg." There was no evidence that she'd had anything but bourbon and ginger ale. Spider put the stuff back in the refrigerator and carried his sandwich and beer to the dining room table.

"Dad call last night?"

"Yes. He's in Gettysburg." Spider had overheard a teary drunken conversation between his mother and Aunt Phyllis two nights before. All the collect calls were coming from the same number in Baltimore. His father was supposedly out "checking prospects" for his insurance company in western Maryland and southern Pennsylvania. She'd checked with the company, though, and he was on an indefinite leave of absence. He was withthat girl, his mother had said. Aunt Phyllis had said that she was hardly agirl anymore.

What Spider wanted to say to his mother was that it was obvious his father was not coming home as long as Spider was there, for some mysterious reason, and they were probably running out of money, and pretty soon his father wouldn't have a job to come back to. The best thing in the world for all of them would be for Spider to pack up and move out to College Park. But he wasn't sure he wanted to. This house was secure, especially the room upstairs. And in some screwy way he liked the family the way it was, having his mother to himself. Maybe it was an Oedipus complex.

Spider went to bed early and set the alarm for 2:00 A.M., partly to get used to it, and partly so he could use his telescope after moonset. He'd wrestled the heavy instrument downstairs and set it up in the back yard while there was still light, covering it with a plastic tarp to keep the dew off. He'd gone down for a few minutes after sundown to look at the crescent moon and Jupiter, which wouldn't be visible later.

He dressed in the dark to preserve his night vision, and felt his way downstairs in the darkness. He had a red-light astronomical flashlight, the lens dimmed with thick coats of fingernail polish, but he'd left it down on the back porch, with the star map and eyepiece box.

The sky was black and brilliant with summer stars, just a faint horizon glow in the direction of Was.h.i.+ngton. The Milky Way rolled from Cygnus overhead down to Sagittarius in the south and Ca.s.siopeia in the north. Spider stood and looked up at the sky for a minute, drinking in the familiarity and the alien aloofness of it.

He slid the tarp off and enjoyed the faint smell of the machine, the pungent Bakelite telescope tube and the grease-and-cutting-oil whisper of the heavy mounting. He'd built the telescope in junior high, half a year's worth of weekends and a red ribbon in the Science Fair. It was a six-inch Newtonian reflector.

The workshop leader had persuaded him to build a mounting st.u.r.dy enough for a bigger machine, since most people go straight back to the workshop and start grinding an eight-inch mirror, and then a ten- or twelve-inch, and so on up. Spider had never contracted "aperture fever," though. p.u.b.erty struck, instead, and his weekends were spoken for.

He rocked the mounting around a few inches so it was in line with Polaris, and then used bright red Antares to adjust the viewfinder, a modified riflescope. He inserted the high-power eyepiece to lock in the focus, switched back to the low-power one to look at the globular cl.u.s.ters in the south, and then slowly cruised up the Milky Way. He paused for the blue-and-gold double star Alberio and the four jewels of Epsilon Lyrae. He found the tiny O of the Ring Nebula, and started to switch eyepieces, to get a close-up look. He saw a light out of the corner of his eye and looked up.

It was a brilliant meteor, rolling slowly down to the west, coruscating white and yellow and red, leavingbehind a pale gray glowing trail. For some reason it was terrifying rather than beautiful. Spider dropped the eyepiece. He heard it click against the tripod leg and thump in the gra.s.s some distance away.

Spider set down the eyepiece box and picked up the flashlight, hands shaking. The batteries were dead.

He crawled out into the darkness on his hands and knees, patting the damp gra.s.s in careful arcs. His heart was hammering. He thought he heard a noise and looked up, and saw he wasn't alone.

There were vague figures everywhere, motionless in the dim starlight. And right by the telescope, not six feet away, the familiar slumped posture of the man with no face.

Spider did know there was no one there, no one real, but his legs would not be convinced. He ran straight for the porch steps, slipped on the damp wood and almost fell, rushed through the door to the kitchen and locked it. Then he turned on both kitchen lights and got a beer out of the refrigerator and drained it in three fast gulps. He pulled out two more and trudged up toward his room, leaving a path of light behind him.

Decisions Roe vs. Wadewas still five years in the future, but it wasn't hard for a woman in California to get an abortion. The three-room clinic friends had recommended to them was clean and modern; the gynecologist and nurse they talked to were casual, rea.s.suring. It would cost $575, cash on the barrelhead-feel free to shop around, but you get what you pay for. Beverly said they had to talk about it, and took the release form down the block to a coffeehouse.

Beverly took one sip of cappuccino and let it turn cold as she read the form over and over.

"You don't have to do it," Lee said. "I'll stick by you."

"You said that already."

"Well, it's true."

"I know you think it's true."

"What do you mean by that? Don't you think I'm a. You think I'd back out on-"

"Shut up," she said quietly, not looking up from the paper. "Would you please shut up and get us a couple of beers?"

The waitress brought two drafts and centered them on souvenir blotters that said steal me but leave the gla.s.s. Beverly put the paper down and reached for the beer, but then stood up suddenly. "Have to go barf. Save my place?" She put a hand to her mouth, looked around quickly, and darted toward the sign that pointed to the restrooms.

She came back pale. Her hand trembled as she picked up the beer.

"I'm sorry about the morning sickness," Lee said.

"That wasn't morning sickness." She took a slow sip and made a face. "That was thinking about that old man sticking a vacuum cleaner up my c.u.n.t and sucking the life out of it. Wouldn't that make you puke, if you had a c.u.n.t?"Lee made a helpless gesture.

"But you do have a c.u.n.t. You're stuck with me."

"Not stuck with. I do love you, Beverly."

"Uh huh." She unfolded a paper napkin and pressed it to both eyes. "I feel so s.h.i.+tty. I don't know what to think, I don't know what to do." She balled up the napkin and looked at the ground. "Whatever I do is going to be wrong for both of us. And the baby, too, or whatever you call whatever it is now."

"We could raise a baby. There's that commune up in Oregon-"

"Oh, stop. You've already f.u.c.ked half the women in that commune. You'd f.u.c.k the other half while I was changing diapers."

"I wouldn't. I'd promise."

"I guess you would. Promise." She took a big drink and set the heavy mug down silently. "How much money do we have?"

"About six hundred, plus whatever's in your purse."

"Twenty and two ones." She looked straight at him. "We better do it now."

"He said a month wouldn't make any difference."

"Not to him. I think we better do it now."

"You don't have to rush into it."

"You're right." Her face tightened with the effort of keeping tears back. "Let's finish these beers first."

PTSD.

If Spider had presented his symptoms a few years later, he probably would not have been misdiagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. In 1968, people mumbled about sh.e.l.l-shock and neurasthenia, but there was no actual medical term for the malady that eventually affected about a third of the men and women who were exposed to combat in Vietnam.

There was nothing new about Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Odysseus shows symptoms of it in Homer's banquet scene. The disease is accurately described inHenry IV, Part 1, when Lady Percy complains to her soldier husband Hotspur: Tell me, sweet lord, what is't that takes from thee Thy stomach, pleasure and thy golden sleep?

Why dost thou bend thine eyes upon the earth And start so often when thou sit'st alone?Why hast thou lost the fresh blood in thy cheeks; And given my treasures and my rights of thee To thick-eyed musing and cursed melancholy?

In thy faint slumbers I by thee have watch'd And heard thee murmur tales of iron wars.

Hotspur can't answer. Lady Percy presses him, and he blows up: ... Love! I love thee not, I care not for thee, Kate: this is no world To play with mammets and to tilt with lips: We must have b.l.o.o.d.y noses and crack'd crowns.

Psychologists note that veterans like Hotspur, who were able to respond to the terrors of combat directly, by killing the enemy, later also respond with violence when confronted with the more mysterious anguish of PTSD. Those like Spider, who witnessed the terrors but never fought back, tend to retreat into more pa.s.sive states of anxiety, panic, and depression.

Captain My Captain's DSM-I, the diagnostic manual that cla.s.sified h.o.m.os.e.xuality as the prime s.e.xual perversion, didn't have any description of psychological problems caused by combat stress, although individual physicians had been reporting them at least since the Civil War. Years after that war broke Walt Whitman's heart, tending the wounds of "O my soldiers, my veterans," he described PTSD's characteristic recurrent dreams: In midnight sleep of many a face of anguish, Of the look at first of the mortally wounded, (of that indescribable look), Of the dead on their backs with arms extended wide, I dream, I dream, I dream.

Long have they pa.s.s'd, faces and trenches and fields, Where through the carnage I moved with a callous composure, or away from the fallen, Onward I sped at the time-but now of their forms at night, I dream, I dream, I dream.

The 1987 DSM-III(R) does list PTSD, and its description of the cause and symptoms fits Spider well: A. The person has experienced an event that is outside the range of usual human experience and thatwould be markedly distressing to almost anyone, e.g. serious threat to one's life. or seeing another person who has recently been, or is being. killed as the result of an accident or physical violence.

B. The traumatic event is persistently reexperienced in at least one of the following ways: (1) recurrent and intrusive recollections of the event (2) recurrent distressing dreams of the event (3) sudden acting or feeling as if the traumatic event were recurring C. numbing of general responsiveness D. Persistent symptoms of increased arousal.

(1) difficulty falling or staying asleep (2) irritability or outbursts of anger (3) difficulty concentrating (4) hypervigilance (5) exaggerated startle response Spider always had been a little antsy, as his mother put it, but now he was a constant nervous wreck. He jumped at the slightest noise. If a car backfired he would dive for the ground. He'd done it twice indoors, frightening her-once in the grocery store, when someone dropped a large can, and once at home, when she drew the living room curtains shut. He had picked himself up sheepishly and explained that it sounded like an artillery round coming in.

She didn't know how to act. He got agitated when he realized that she was tiptoeing around him. But if she tried to "act natural," it was even worse. He drank beer all the time, but of course she couldn't say anything about that. He'd found an old BB pistol that Terry had given him for his twelfth birthday. She remembered how relieved she'd been when he lost interest in it. Now he spent an hour or more every day down in the garage, listening to the radio and shooting Necco Wafers that he propped up on a Scrabble rack. (She'd hated the smell of the little candies ever since his uncle had shown him how the BB made them explode.) He kept talking about leaving, getting a room near College Park, and she half wished he would. But that would be like deserting him. And she didn't want to be left alone, herself.

Magazine issues Spider decided to investigate reality as a kind of research project. At the hospital they'd only had a limited range of magazines, likeReader's Digest andNational Geographic, and even those had articles missing if they were potentially disturbing. He stopped at a newsstand and bought a couple of dozen magazines, fromNational Review andHarper's to various journals of observational gynecology.

One article really got to him, a supposedly factual thing called "What Every Vietnam Veteran Knows." It was a catalog of horrors-GIs mutilating Viet Cong bodies, making necklaces of ears and even genitalia,fragging officers, ma.s.sacring civilians, running amok on heroin and speed. There was a kernel of truth in all of that. Everybody did know about the necklaces of ears, though to his knowledge n.o.body had ever seen one; unpopular officers died and there were whispers; civilians got in the way of bullets and bombs; men took dope and some got addicted. But things like that must have happened in every war; it was basically an unsavory and dangerous, dehumanizing activity. This writer acted as if Vietnam vets were something out of a grade-B horror movie, soulless zombies out to destroy anything that got in their path.

Killer was the only guy he'd known who was crazy, and even he wasn'tthat crazy.

Spider started to write a letter to the magazine, but after half a page he saw that it madehim look like a raving maniac. And he reminded himself that he hadn't exactly been in the hospital with the flu; he wasn't the world's most reliable authority on sane soldiers. And then his father came home.

Hashbury Beverly suffered no physical complications from her abortion. She was upset, especially after the doctor insisted that she look at the fetus, but after only a couple of days of lying crying in a dark room, crammed with cotton and full of Valium and pain pills, she was ready to sample the wonders of Lee's spiritual home, the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco.

Haight-Ashbury wasn't the only concentration of hippies in the area. The Pine Streeters could lay claim to more solidarity. Virginia City, Nevada, was probably more drugged-out. But the Haight drew media attention and became symbolic of the youth revolution characterized by particular kinds of rock and folk music, dope smoking, interest in oriental religion, weird clothes, and s.e.xual liberation.

The term "hippy" was originally a derisive name applied by the few surviving beatniks to these young and uncool upstarts-"hipsters" who didn't quite make the grade. Since the mid-sixties, beatniks and hippies alike had been moving out of their traditional North Beach digs, which had become fas.h.i.+onable and expensive. Haight-Ashbury attracted them with its big cheap Victorian houses and funky atmosphere.

When Lee had left the Haight, early in 1967, there were already signs of trouble in paradise. He was part of the January Be-In, more than ten thousand "Love Generation" youths wandering around Golden Gate Park absorbing Krishna consciousness, stoned on marijuana and Owsley Stanley's new White Lightning LSD and each other. The Diggers pa.s.sed out free turkey sandwiches (from dozens of turkeys donated by dealer Owsley) and the h.e.l.l's Angels kept the peace. Free music from bands like the Jefferson Airplane, Loading Zone, and the Grateful Dead. Two mounted policemen moved through the crowd, ignoring violations of drug laws.

But there were problems, for the ten thousand and for Lee. At one end of the crowd, fights broke out between the hippies and a group of local blacks and Chicanos. When the horde left the stadium, the waiting police arrested nearly fifty for obstructing traffic. Lee saw it happening and slipped away through side streets, wandering around while his high dissipated. When he came back a few hours later, though, the cops had towed his car away. He'd left it in gear, and so they'd kindly wrecked the transmission in the process of towing it. Fixing the transmission would have cost more than he'd paid for the junker. He bought the Thing From Detroit from a friend and headed east, just to be away for a while.

He didn't know that the Be-In problems were just a pale foreshadowing of the storm that was building.

The new governor of California, Ronald Reagan, was not exactly a friend of the Movement. His campaign had been pro-Vietnam, pro-police, and anti-student. One of the first things he had done upon taking office was to fire the president of the University of California, who was coddling the student radicals. Police stepped up drug and obscenity busts.But the Haight would have been going to h.e.l.l without any help from the government. Lee had left before the widely publicized Summer of Love began. Nearly a hundred thousand people from all over the country converged on Haight-Ashbury, most of them high-school dropouts and other rootless youngsters. Marijuana and LSD became relatively scarce; speed and heroin became problems.

Drug-related hospital admissions quintupled. Stoned teenagers wearing what their hometown newspapers said hippies wore wandered around the district grokking it in its fullness and asking "Spare change?" of the hordes of tourists who came down to look at them.

By the end of summer, the tourists and media went away, and most of the stoned children went away, but the hard elements stayed. The police began to sweep the streets for runaways and undesirables. Any male who couldn't produce a draft card was in trouble. Most of the actual hippies drifted out into the country.

Lee hardly recognized the place. The glittering bohemia had become a dangerous slum. They drove around for an hour, Lee quietly describing things as they used to be, and then headed back to Berkeley for the night. Lee might have spent a few days in the Haight out of curiosity and nostalgia, but Beverly was in no shape for it.

Some Berkeley friends let them crash for gra.s.s and groceries, and Lee found a two-week housepainting job. Beverly sought out the local Kennedy-for-President campaign office and spent a few hours a day stuffing envelopes and being a gofer. It helped her state of mind to be doing something useful, and she was excited at the prospect of actually meeting Robert Kennedy. He was scheduled to come to California in a few weeks.

Homecoming (2) Spider was sprawled across his bed upstairs after dinner, immersed in Delany'sThe Einstein Intersection, when he heard his father's car pull up in the driveway.

He wasn't sure what to do. Go downstairs and greet him? Hi, Dad. How were things in Gettysburg?

How wasthat girl?

The front door opened and his father called out, "Carrie, I'm home," as if he was just getting home from work. Spider heard his mother's running footsteps and then m.u.f.fled sobs, and decided to wait until he was summoned. He lay back on the bed and pretended to be asleep.

After a few minutes his mother came to the door. "John? John, wake up." He sat up and made a show of rubbing his eyes. "Your father's downstairs." She didn't look very good, slumped against the doorjamb, tired red eyes and crooked smile.

He followed her down to the living room, where his father was centered on the couch in front of a tall gla.s.s of bourbon, already half gone. That was how and where he sat when he wanted an audience.

Spider and his mother would sit and listen on easy chairs facing the couch. For a second he felt like a kid again, having to explain a report card or that broken window.

But he kept his cool. This is my father but there's not much he can do to me now. This is my father but it's also a man who just deserted his wife for two weeks of drinking and adultery.

"You're still at home," he said. "That's good. We've hardly had any chance to talk."

Spider nodded and sat down and took the beer his mother brought. His father's speech was slow andslurred. He had dark circles under his eyes and his skin was pasty. "Was it a good trip?" Spider asked.

"Oh yeah, yeah. Good trip." He gulped at the bourbon. "We have to talk about what you did in Vietnam."

Why?Spider almost said. "Handled bodies for a while, humped the boonies for a while, got hurt, came home. I pretty much wrote you everything that happened."

"But not everything. You didn't write everything."

"I held back a little. Didn't want to upset Mom and Bev."

"Bet you did. Hold back." He looked up at his wife. "Carrie, this is man talk."

"Phooie on that.Man talk! He's my son, too."

He looked at her for a long moment. "You've had a lot to drink."

"And you, you've been on the wagon for the past couple weeks."

He swiveled back to Spider, like a man aiming a weapon. "Okay. You tell me and yourMom just what you couldn't put in those letters."

He looked straight into his father's face. "Couple of guys got their d.i.c.ks blown off."

At first he didn't move a muscle, but his face turned red, dark red. "You just wade right in, don't you."

"You asked."

He picked up his drink slowly, thoughtfully, and hurled it straight at his son's face. Spider ducked; the gla.s.s bounced off the carpet and hit the wall without breaking.

His mother stood up unsteadily. "What on earth-"