By the time I got to the coast you’d been there since three p.m. If to plot your truth I do not need exactly time here tonight in your late apartment, so I did not that Tuesday night of Sister Deirdre’s Rotary Congress when though tardy catching up with you on the coast I naturally foresaw what had happened, I mean your telegraphed challenges to students, to faculty, to one or two sheriffs, to the governor, though nothing for the college administration. You were photographed in The Examiner with your mouth tortuously open as in one of your accents, Irish, Italian, southern.
Wednesday in a squared spiral you climbed the flights of tiled stair-halls in that official edifice the occupation of whose top few floors students had signaled weeks before by accidentally jamming both elevators. You lost interest and paused at the sixth floor for a sight of the twilit sea and a slight press conference. Yes, you said, your blast in Chicago yesterday had been intended; and yes, Religious Leaders for once had better be poured all on the same griddle if only to see if their differences disappeared. But feeling the pull from above you were off up the stairs again, summiting at last among an occupation squad who had read some of your books, knew your later positions on the Mickey Mouse watch, followed your campaigns for archery, undersea farming, marriage, trains, highway de-organization, and the House of Representatives, rocked onto your one musical composition “The Song of Kuwait” which had unexpectedly taken off and not as satire but as a reversible area of open yearn — and having had a suppertime wrap-up on their synchronized transistors they at once asked what might come of your Chicago blast. Answer? If my step-son Ted had watched me, Dom, the way I observed you, he’d have been just as able to foresee that I’d be awake at that dawn hour when he was looking out our kitchen window, as I to foresee your response to those student demonstrators nine or ten levels above the Pacific coast.
You were baring your teeth to speak, when a harmless fub-lubber blurted out a mere matter of fact: “You, you — led-a-march-on-Santa-Barbara.” He might as well have said you’d been divorced or had a daughter Lila and a son Richard who didn’t like his sister’s husband or in New York you’d kept a trampoline on your upstairs neighbor’s penthouse terrace. The fub, who twice told newsmen it was tough making a revolution, making a revolution made a man thirsty — admired that 1966 cause of yours.
On what ensued student testimony seems consistent if not wholly factual. You said (winded from your climb), “You kids think you’re tough. Where I come from there’s tough guys and tough guys.” You told them when you went to Harvard the last thing you’d have thought worth your sweat was administrative reform. You told them if they had to use a logical counter like “relevant” better be clear what wasn’t relevant to what, and — look, one term of the relation was themselves and the other term was (you name it) a book assigned or a policy promulgated or what one of their own number right here in the clerical wreckage of this room high above the Pacific had just last week cryptically designated “ancient atmospheres.” Yeah, where are you Darla Fasinelli? ah that’s you, sweetiepants, nicer than the U.P. shot, yeah well then let’s say ancient atmospheres are not relevant to you heads, but how many atmospheres? and just which ones? you can’t cry “irrelevant” if you don’t know both terms of the relation. But (as, Dom, you briskly unsealed one of their dark jugs of Paisano) tough? Why who up there knew about tough?, and how come no niggers? and what’s your paramillinery yearning power?
Dom, you might at this point high above the campus and its Pacific cliff have brought up the street fight in New York, Christmas of ’67. You’d been on a platform a few stones’ throw south of San Gennaro — Hester it was. You held a succulent sheep’s head half out of its brown paper bag and beside you was a starched ribboned child whose papa pushed her up the steps to you while you were praising your friends the Iacco boys home from Air Cavalry duty, the younger missing a hand. You were trying to end your celebration speech and get a drink, and at last suddenly said that the talk against the war made us forget that in any war men could be brave as well as weak, and had true chances to be tested unlike almost any other chances in a man’s life. I trailed your group north, and so did that last remark, and so did two giant sisters who own Empire Hardware off Canaclass="underline" three girls with knapsacks stopped chanting “Hardware No! Software Sí!” to accuse you of glorifying the war, and you grinned and called back to them, “It’s a stupid pointless war, that’s my position” whereupon the giant Duono sisters caught you with your back to the church fence and shouted, “I got a brother over there!” and thrust at you cute metal flags prettily painted fifty stars and all — and with your back to the wire-mesh and through it behind you the lifesize Christmas crêche, you—
your pen seemed for a moment to run dry just as I was forgetting your retort and as your tale here in one long square corner of your living room was rushing into it a host of facts like me, innocently standing by on its banks hoping none will ask me what’s my line—
child, sheepshead, hand, sisters, hardware, church, crêche: you required all your old craft to defend yourself without (a) attacking the giant sisters, or (b) understandably bolting. How well I myself know that riddle, the contour determinable yet in the mind of its exact describer open. Just how many equidistances locate my only parabola not even I the parabolist know. Your back against the fence, you retorted to the Duono sisters but to the knapsack girls too and with troubled pompous eyes to the crowd: “Look, you can’t insure yourself against life, you can’t insure yourself against interference, not even against being a hero.”
High above the Pacific you might have cited San Gennaro for toughness, but these students wouldn’t have understood. Or you might have described the toughness needed at the end of the Santa Barbara Anti-Abstraction March the year before. Granted entry at last to the sunny Think-Tank, you changed your mind and left the initial mission interrupted and spoke to all and sundry dispersed and gathered there outside the cloister. (Your ink runs fast, and I am nothing and the only way you can understand these sentences maybe is if I read them aloud to you but there isn’t time and you’re not here yet.) A prime speech indeed, it led to your risky trick, a gappy calculus to test young auditors by tossing them a dear dogma to gnaw. Darla, the others, even (if he was there) the blurting thirsty chub, could not have seen through that one either, though maybe they thought it more nearly relevant than the (sic) threadbare conservatism of your Hester Street climax—“the wonderful world of war” you were disquoted underground the next week in Manhattan Hash.
What you did say about true toughness there above the blue Pacific before what the papers called your “surprise defenestration” was as easy to foresee as, now in retrospect, your exit from Chicago that noon. I hear our west elevator again moaning near, perhaps bringing force, cop or super or curious, incurious or furious tenant, or a field of smells, Dom. The ideas in your response to the occupation crew high above the Pacific in rising dusk seem not now vivid, but wrong too in their too prompt association with your (come now, surprise?) de-fe-nes — I confess I confess (yes suddenly we’ve gotten somewhere tonight) that in the virtually narrative length of that ancient word that means “throwing out of a window”—defenestration—and, more, in the clear slots between its Roman units, I see not your (for me) abstracted and fraternal point but in spite of myself and in no clear order Bob’s white-knuckled fist, Al’s drenched sneaker, and my venerable but still efficient junior Corona stolen from our downstairs doorway in Brooklyn Heights in April of 1946.