1.
May, 1970
You say you want a Revolution?
Tobin and Nate hid in the shrubbery along the back of their college dormitory, watching a patrol car slowly crawl along the far edge of the parking lot. From the shotgun side of the custom Ford Fairlane with a cherry top, a hand-held spot lamp searched with an intense light along the Potter’s Lake, and the surrounding park between the football stadium and the main campus. The silence was broken by quiet nervous laughter from the open cop car window, followed by the broadcast of garbled scratching static from the radio. The laughter turned into nervous cursing. The red and yellow bubble gum light spun and flashed, the siren wailed, and gravel spit like jet exhaust as the patrol car fishtailed out onto the street.
Nate and Tobin sprinted across the parking lot, through the branches of an old willow tree and abruptly they were on the steep slope that overlooked the football stadium. They huddled under the willow tree breathing steadily and easily.
The moonless spring night was cool and slightly windy. Except for the fading siren, it was quiet. Tobin and Nate sat listening and watching. The horseshoe shaped football stadium glowed, and was pulsing an alien-like light that illuminated the Campanile hillside.
"Once we get by the stadium we'll be ok," said Tobin. Nate scanned the trees next to the Campanile looking for any movement.
The recent news that Nixon and Kissinger had invaded Cambodia ignited campus demonstrations across the country, including in Lawrence Kansas. The University of Kansas, more famous for basketball and track and field, was getting a radical reputation. An article in Rolling Stone had recently referred to the school as “The Berkeley of the Midwest”. Nate and Tobin had gone out to march once, and Nate had thrown rocks at the ROTC building, but mostly the two freshmen had stayed in their dorm room, with a wet towel on the floor against the door, getting high and listened to the latest albums - Ten Years After, Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, Jethro Tull, Quicksilver Messenger, Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead - but then, two days ago, the shootings at Kent State had supercharged the radicalization of America’s colleges and universities. Tobin and Nate saw the newly announced citywide curfew as a challenge and decided to go out into the night.
Lawrence Kansas, once home to John Brown’s anti-slavery movement, and later the victim of a bloody massacre by Missouri Confederate raiders, was now, again under siege. Rumors were spreading that redneck vigilantes from down near Wichita were in town.
"Let's just sit here and watch for a while. See what's moving around." said Nate.
Two nights ago, Nate, having just left a Psych 101 night lab (guinea pigs in a box) in Frazier Hall, was walking by the University's Student Union when he heard a muffled explosion and looked up to see flames blow out the windows of the top floor of the Union. He then saw a wide eyed woman with a fiery red afro come out of a side door of the Union. She smiled at Nate, then walked quickly across Oread Avenue, and then down 13th street.
The next day the University alumni association offered a ten thousand dollar reward for information leading to an arrest of the molotov cocktail arsonist.
"Let's get stoned", said Tobin, pulling a small brass pipe and a chunk of tinfoil the size of an acorn from the breast pocket of his green field jacket. Nate watched him break off a pinch of hashish and thought it unwise to light a match in their present situation, but he very much wanted to get high. He looked over at the charred husk that was the top half of the Student Union building.
"Stand close so they can't see the match." Nate held up his windbreaker as a shield. "We ought to try and smoke all this now... wish I'd brought a joint." Tobin shook his head. They sucked the hash quickly. Tobin knocked the ashes to the wind where they flew like a meteor shower, burning out in mid-air as if swallowed into a small leak in space.
Another car passed above them in the parking lot. Nate and Tobin looked at one another, nodded, and took off running down the hill and across the well lit lawn. They stopped next to the bushes near the entrance to Mississippi Street, saw no traffic, and sprinted across the road and up the rock cul-de-sac at the end of 13th Ave.
The cul-de-sac, twenty feet above Mississippi, overlooked the whole south end of the stadium. Rocks the size of grapefruit were lying loose next to the old three-foot high rock wall, a WPA project built during the depression, along with the red brick pavement. The houses and apartments nearby were dark and the shades were drawn.
The night had cleared and the stars sparkled. They heard the first gunshot of the night.
"Next time a pig comes by, let's nail him." Tobin picked up a rock and twisted his Celtic mug into a smile. Nate picked up an odd shaped rock with a blunt end. He tested various ways to grip it. Its flat face, he thought, would make quaint paperweight.
"This is a revolution," said Tobin. He brought a piece of rubber tubing out of his back pocket. "We are the vanguard mother fuckers!”
Nate nodded, but he was pretty sure they weren’t the “vanguard”, whatever that was.
“We gotta find a soda bottle and an old rag or something,” continued Tobin. “We'll siphon some gas out of one of those cars..."
Nate looked across the stadium parking lot at a marching formation of National Guardsmen. Working guys, his age, probably knocked up their high school squeeze and were avoiding the draft the 'honorable way'.
Nate watched the company of soldiers march across the parking lot. The soldiers became an old penny collection he had started but hadn't finished, getting up out their ordered neat blue cardboard folder, marching back under seat cushions, behind furniture, into the pockets of long unworn jackets, into piggy banks shattered long ago, pancaked into copper razors next to abandoned railroad tracks, wedging into the top of loafers. This numismatical nightmare, this twisted parody of Gresham's Law, it wasn't “bad” money chasing “good”. It was the entropic failing of all ordered things to disorder, of those poor suckers playing soldier, chasing him playing freedom fighter, at the same time seeking to escape from the order they walked in, the orders that made them do it...
Woooah ... this is good shit, thought Nate. Tobin retrieved his pipe and lit it again.
"If we had rifles we could waste ten of them before they could get to cover." He took a hit and passed Nate the pipe. "We’re just some banana republic, bringing the Army in. Pttrr, pttrr, look at those dumb fuckers. Damn! If we hadn’t run when we did, they'd have had us...I bet they were probably all under the stadium getting high." Nate giggled at the thought. The soldiers marched slowly now, no longer in step, breaking formation, up the Campanile. An obelisk belltower memorial dedicated to Kansans killed in war, the Campanile minified the National Guardsmen.
There was another gunshot. The soldiers stopped, brought their rifles to ‘at ready’, then cautiously continued. Tobin knocked more dead ashes out of his pipe. A humming engine, a car was coming down from the campus, slowly.
"Here comes a pig." said Tobin. The bubble gum machine on the patrol car roof was clearly silhouetted. Nate's stomach gurgled. The static of the squad radio got louder and louder ...
"I think it's the same one we saw a bit ago," said Tobin. Nate got ready to throw. Nate remained squatting behind the ancient rock wall. Tobin stood up and heaved his rock straight down, while Nate lofted his flat-ended rock with an over the shoulder hook shot. Tobin's rock hit the hood a second or so before Nate's misshapen missile smashed through the front windshield. The police car squealed to a stop. Tobin and Nate turned and ran up to the top of 13th street.
"Halt!" A fat man in a blue blazer came out of the alley and was right behind them with his gun drawn. They ran across Illinois and cut through a frat house lawn. Another squad car pulled into the driveway of the fraternity and out jumped two more cops and another fat middle aged fuck in a blue-blazer, guns drawn.
"Freeze!" Nate vaulted over a short rock fence. A black cop came out of nowhere and tackled Tobin. Nate was sprinting all out now, barrelling down 12th street ... he was lost ... into an alley ... headlights appeared at the other end ... down a muddy slope. Nate ran between two houses briefly shielded from the alley. Sirens from different directions were converging on him. He jumped into a dugout space in front of a cellar window and squatted down.
Suddenly, he was half blinded by a sudden light from inside the cellar apartment. On the other side of the window - a woman - dark curly brown hair fell to her eyebrows and shoulders. A red strike fist was stenciled on her yellow tee shirt. She looked at him over her rimless granny glasses. Nate waved his hand down.
She turned off the lights and opened the window.
A car door slammed. Nate held his index finger to his lips.
"...I think he went down..." There was a loud splat and someone laughed ... someone else snapped, "Quiet! .. Get up!" The walking continued toward the cellar.
The woman with the granny glasses, staying very cool, took his hand and guided Nate as he crawled inside and stepped down to the basement floor from a rickety bookshelf. The police were continuing toward them. Without closing the window, the woman pulled Nate by the wrists to her bed. She flipped back the covers and with a matador's move pulled them over both of them. Just as they settled, a flashlight shone in, slowly working around the room toward the bed.
“Hey…turn that off!” The woman shouted up at the window. They heard a muffled shout. The flashlight turned away from the window.
"Hey! You! Down on the street. Halt!" The flashlight swept away and there was running.
They lay quiet on the mattress, as the shouting faded. "Thanks," Nate said.
The woman looked different two inches away.
"Wow!" She took off her glasses and put them on the table
behind her bed. "You must have been bad."
Nate nodded his head. His mind was racing. He didn't want to blow this one. He was 18 years old, and yet, still, up to that moment had failed to have achieved ‘penetration’. He had been close - the previous summer he had laid under an August moon with his neighbor and high school classmate, a plain, thin, blonde with very small breasts. Only her desperate and repeated appeals to his conscience not to bring matters to the thrusting point had frustrated his efforts. More scenes than he cared to recount rose and tumbled in his memory. The Kansas farm girl in the hayloft at a barn party the previous fall, again during the Christmas holidays with a high school classmate. Each time it had been yes and then no. The hellish word virgin screeched in his eardrums like fingernails on a blackboard.
He had an erection.
"What's your name?" she asked.
"Nate." He was a little more nervous now than he had been a couple of minutes before.
"Nate!" She laughed and kissed him on the mouth. "Take off your shoes," she told him.
He sat up and began to untie his Pumas. She pulled off her tee shirt. Her breasts pulled up, then snapped back.
Nate had almost finished untying his first shoe when he grabbed her and pulled her down to the bed. "What's yours?"
"Paula."
Nate began kissing Paula. She effortlessly slipped from under him.
"What's the matter?" Nate asked nervously.
"Nothing". Her affection blinked. Then she stuck her tongue out and touched the tip of his nose. "I just wanted to light a candle, that's all." She looked at the fat drip-covered purple candle sitting next to her glasses on the night table but made no move to light it. "What happened tonight?" Paula threw her jeans out from under the covers.
Nate leaned back against the wall next to the bed. What had happened? They got Tobin. Poor Jake, with his pipe and rubber hose. And they might ... he didn't want trouble for...for...?
“What’s your name again?”
"Paula."
"Of course." he said a bit shrilly. She smiled.
"I might be in trouble."
Paula sat up and looked at him very closely. She squinted slightly.
"I mean those guys were cops and they might be back. I threw a rock through a pig's windshield." He tried not to sound like he was bragging and failed.
"All right!" Paula got up, wearing nothing but knee-length socks. She was smiling. "Let's smoke some dope to celebrate another victorious street action!" She reached to her bookshelf and retrieved a paperback copy of Gogol's Dead Souls. It was hollowed out neatly. She brought out a half smoked joint from a baggie of seeds and stems.
"I can't believe tonight," said Paula. She lit the joint and gave it a very self-satisfied toke.
"Oh."
"You'd never guess who left here not a minute ago."
Nate couldn't guess.
"Abbie Hoffman."
"Wow." Abbie Hoffman - Nate along with an overflow crowd of students and radicals had listened to him rant a couple of nights ago at Allen Field House. Abbie blew his nose on an American flag handkerchief and was now wanted for “Flag Desecretion" . "He's still in town huh?"
Paula nodded with continued self-satisfaction. Nate didn't know what to say. As Paula leaned toward him, her perked up breasts pushing into his face and her thin arms wrapped around Nate's neck. Nate rolled on top of her. "I want you to lick my pussy." she demanded gently.
Nate put his knee down between her legs.
"Unt uh. Come on."
Nate put his foot down between her ankles.
"No! Come on. Touch me first..."
Nate was a bit awkwardly situated. He reached down and began rubbing his finger around her pubic bone. She closed her eyes.
"Lick me."
Nate didn't want to put his mouth where he assumed that Abbie Hoffman had just had his dick. Paula closed her eyes and was rocking back and forth. Nate slid his head down her body. He stopped at her belly button and lingered.
Paula reached down and gently pushed his head into her crouch. He put his nose into her cunt. Paula began convulsing. She pulled at the hair on his head. Nate wrapped his teeth with his lips and bit into her pussy. She pulled his hair harder. Nate poked his tongue out of his mouth tentatively.
"Yes, yes!" Paula was stroking his head. He pushed his tongue into her and started flicking it around and then, he smelled something like bleach, something pungent and bland at the same time.
He stopped and sat up. So did Paula. He grabbed her and pulled her down again and she opened her legs. But his cock was no longer hard. "I need a drink of water." Nate went into the bathroom, pinched a bit of toothpaste into his mouth and then swished water through it. He wasn't disappointed so much as he was puzzled. "Do you have any beer?", he asked through the bathroom wall. She came in and kissed him, handed him a Budweiser and took him back to her mattress on the basement floor.
They talked for a while. She told him she was a graduate student in psychology, but that none of that mattered now. He told her about his 101 psych lab and the guinea pig and she laughed. They got dressed and went out in front of her apartment house and sat on the steps that overlooked Ohio Street. People were out milling around in the street below, and the cops were parked at each end of the block watching. Nate told her about Tobin getting busted, and she said she knew a lawyer who would be down at the jail advocating for anyone arrested for protesting. They smoked another joint, and got silly. They went back in at about two in the morning.
They got into bed, and she was ready for him, smiling, her eyes opened, then he was in, and it was over almost before it started.
As he rolled off, Nate's mind was clearer, and more alert than he had ever known. He stared at Che Guevara who stared down at him from the poster on the refrigerator. He hadn’t a thought in his head as he fell off into a deep sleep.
*********
When he woke, she was gone. The morning sun lit up the dingy basement apartment. She left a note on her desk, saying for him to come down to Strong Hall.
He walked and up the hill toward the campus, and soon joined a crowd marching toward the cheering which was coming from a growing crowd in front of Strong Hall. Shouting from the steps some one who looked like a professor was listing a litany of American crimes, long, dreadful, undeniable. The Three-Fifths Compromise, the Sand Creek Massacre, Wounded Knee, My Lai, the murders of Mark Clark and Fred Hampton: reminders of the fact that the United States was a violent repressive country, a fact now punctuated by the murders at Kent State.
But the crowd was getting restless and wasn't in the mood for any classroom horseshit. Nate pushed his way to the front through the fragmenting mass.
"The word revolution in its present context, dates back to Galileo and Copernicus, when the idea that the earth revolved around the sun..."
“Sit down asshole!” There was some cheering and Nate saw TV cameras coming from the other direction. The professor finished up with some Latin quotation and was hustled off the stage to a loud cheer. The crowd gathered around Strong hall was feeding on itself, it's restlessness only made it stronger. Nate was feeling a sense of power, and confidence, of inevitability. Everything in his life had led up to this moment. He saw her, the only woman among a group of long haired men all in their mid twenties. One of them had on a top hat. He searched their faces, but he didn’t see Abbie Hoffman.
But Nate no longer cared to just watch and analyze, he wanted to be part of it, to be an inevitable part of history. Regardless of how events had gone, if Kennedy had lived, if Nixon had beat Brown, or even if the Phillies had won in 1964, it wouldn't have mattered: This thing would have happened, everyone here would have come together today. To be young,challenging power is the stuff of Asgard and Olympus: The crowd, my crowd thought Nate, pushing through toward Paula, history is surely on our side this time.
The speaker passed the bullhorn to Paula.
"Here, listen to this." She held up a copy of the Lawrence Journal World, and began to read in an even tone. All the conversation, and chimerical self-charging among the two or three thousand students, hippies, professors, journalists and FBI informants stopped. Her voice had a magic quality when amplified, smooth and silky from all the hand-rolled smoking she did.
"The dusk-to-dawn curfew in force since the student Union fire has been lifted, a spokesman for the department of Public Safety announced today..." Here she laughed to herself, which got a chuckle from the crowd "...asked if yesterday’s stoning of the patrol car was related to the Student Union burning, the Public Safety spokesman said, "In the context of events of the last few weeks, I think it is obvious that there is a connection. We have a suspect in custody and are pursuing leads pointing to the identity of others involved. It's definitely a conspiracy." Paula stopped to take a toke off a joint being passed on the steps.
"He's right." Paula said. He paused, a pause that in a normal conversation would have seemed contrived and melodramatic, but to this crowd hit a perfect note. Her laid back confidence projected as sexy common sense, her reading voice was not shrill or forced and the acoustics by some weird luck were perfect. She had them.
"There is a connection." The roar built up ... "It is a conspiracy." And exploded in thunderous approval. She stood looking at the crowd calmly, allowing the cheering to slowly subside.
Paula looked right at Nate. He wondered if she had been watching him all along. "Everything is connected," she said. "The napalming, the murder that is going on everyday in Vietnam is connected to that police car." More hooting continued. Someone passed Nate a joint. “We are all in this struggle, Black, Brown, all of us stand with our Asian brothers struggling against American Imperialism!" There was more cheering - “Wait!” she yelled. “We have a special guest here!”
Paula climbed down from the steps, and the crowd parted, and she ran toward Nate. She grabbed him by the hand and led him up the steps of Strong Hall. Handed Nate the megaphone. He was scared, because he didn't want to go to jail, but he took the bullhorn and turned toward the crowd.
"They haven't proved a thing!” Slowly the crowd went from snide chuckling to a growing roar. “The have not proved a thing, because..." He held as the cheering grew louder. ..."because when everyone is a suspect then no one is suspected." The line fell a bit dead. Someone yelled, "I'm Spartacus", but that line didn't seem to catch on either.
Standing near the back of the crowd was the red-haired woman, the one he saw leaving the Student Union when it began to burn. They made eye contact, and she smiled.
Then a squad of cops and some corpulent "Public Safety" officials in blue blazers began to move up Jayhawk Blvd. slowly coming toward the crowd. They stopped at a distance and watched. The crowd began to chant, "Pigs out! Pigs out!"
When he looked back the Red haired woman was gone.
*********
Nate stayed at Paula's for the rest of the semester meeting all the hip politicos, staying stoned all the time and they fucked their brains out as often as they could. This was the reason he came to college. A week later the student body decided by voice vote to end school early, as a protest against the Incursion into Cambodia and the shootings at Kent State. Nate went back to New Jersey for the summer, and had a fling with a girl still in high school.
**********
Esther Spears, Tobin's step mother, darling of the Right Wing, and the author of 'Dare to be Free', 'Thirty Years of Deceit', and 'First Strike - Two Can Play that Game Ivan!', had talked on the phone with Jake while he was in jail, just after she posted his bail, but before he was processed. She cried the whole time, but Jake barely heard her over the cursing and abuses being thrown at his jailers by his fellow inmates, as well as the off key singing (Alice’s Restaurant). She begged him to come home for the summer. He needed to be closer to his family, she said. It was really the only time he had heard his step Mom cry. She sobbed that she had hopes for him. She knew that he hadn't done anything wrong, that he was just running with the wrong crowd, that it was really OK because he had to learn things the hard way. It had been the same with her and she didn't blame him one bit.
Jake did not contradict her. He didn’t like being in jail, and he listened to her, and thought about what she said. And anyway, he knew he only had to seem like he was at a cross road in his thinking, like some character out of Atlas Shrugged. She had been proud of him when he read that book when he was 14.
The day after school was cancelled, he was released and all charges were dropped. The next day he intercepted the $500 that was meant for his bail, and he bought a Honda 350 and rode it to San Francisco where he spent the summer. By the end of August he decided to go back to school.
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