Could anyone be indifferent to this? Always, I added the two numbers together. My God, I would think. Dear God. Look how many people died today! (What if one of them was you?)
• • •
YOU ARE ON A PLANE, an ordinary plane. You could be en route to Denver from Chicago or going home for Christmas if you just close your eyes and believe only your ears. But you are really between Japan and Vietnam. The plane has a stewardess dressed in a bathing suit like Miss America. This is designed as a consolation for you. If you are very, very frightened, she may agree to wear rabbit ears and a tail when she brings you your drink. But you must not touch her. She is a white woman and looks familiar to you — her height, her build quite ordinary. This will change. When you remember her later she will seem exotic. It will seem odd to you that a woman should be so big. You will remember that she came and tightened your seat belt as if she were your mother. What was she keeping you safe for? Whose body is it anyway? You look at your legs, at your hands, and wonder what your body will be like when it is returned to you. You wonder who will want it then.
The immediate threat is the plane’s descent. You make a sudden decision not to descend with it. You spread your arms to hold yourself aloft. You hover near the top of the plane. But it is hopeless. If they have to shoot you down, they will. Friendly fire. You return to your seat. The plane carries your body down into Vietnam.
You think of me. How I will hate you if you don’t live through this. How you must protect me. And during your whole tour, every time you meet someone returning home, you will give him a message for me. You will write your message on the casts of the wounded. You will print it on the foreheads of those who return walking, on the teeth of those who return bagged. I am here, I am here, I am here. So many messages. How are you to know that none will get through?
• • •
MY AFFINITY GROUP was very kind about you. I would tell them frequently how the war would be over by Christmas, how you were responsible for the growing dissatisfaction among servicemen. Vets against the war, I said to them, was probably one of your ideas. They never mentioned how you never wrote. Neither did I. You were my wound. I had my broken ankle and I had you. It was so much more than they had. It made them protective of me.
They didn’t want me at any more demonstrations. “When you could run,” Lauren pointed out, “look what happened to you.” But I was there with them when the police cordoned off Sproul Plaza, trapping us inside, and gassed us from the air. You don’t want to believe this. Governor Ronald Reagan and all the major networks assured you that we had been asked to disperse but had refused. Only Poncho Taylor told the truth. We had not been allowed to leave. Anyone who tried to leave was clubbed. A helicopter flew over the area and dropped tear gas on us. The gas went into the hospital and into the neighboring residential areas. When the police asked the city to buy them a second helicopter so that they could enlarge operations, many people not of the radical persuasion objected. A committee was formed to prevent this purchase, a committee headed by an old Bay Area activist. She happened to be Poncho Taylor’s grandmother. Lauren took it as a sign from God.
Lauren’s passion for Poncho had continued to grow, and we had continued to feed it. It’s difficult to explain why Poncho had become so important to us. Partly it was just that Lauren loved him and we loved Lauren. Whatever Lauren wanted she should have. But partly it was the futility of our political work. We continued to do it but without energy, without hope. Poncho began to seem attainable when peace was not. Poncho began to represent the rest of our lives, outside the words.
Lauren told everyone how she felt. Our friends all knew and soon their friends knew and then the friends of their friends. It was like a message Lauren was sending to Poncho. And if it didn’t reach him, Lauren could combine useful political effort with another conduit. She called Poncho’s grandmother and volunteered us all for the Stop the Helicopter campaign.
We went to an evening organizational meeting. (We did more organizing than anything else.) Though now I remember that Julie did not come with us, but stayed at home to rendezvous in the empty apartment with her teaching assistant.
The meeting was crowded, but eventually we verified Poncho’s absence. After interminable discussion we were told to organize phone trees, circulate petitions, see that the city council meeting, scheduled for the end of the month, was packed with vocal opponents. Lauren couldn’t even get close to Poncho’s grandmother.
When we returned home, Julie was drunk. Her lover had failed to show, but Mike, a friend of mine, had come by with a bottle of wine. Julie had never known Mike very well or liked him very much, but he had stayed the whole evening and they had gotten along wonderfully. Julie had a large collection of Barbra Streisand records we refused to let her play. Mike had not only put them on but actually cried over them. “He’s a lot more sensitive than I thought,” Julie told me.
Mike denied it all. He was so drunk he wove from side to side even sitting down. He tried to kiss me and landed on my shoulder. “How did the meeting go?” he asked, and snorted when we told him. “Phone trees.” He lifted his head to grin at me, red-faced, unshaven, wine-soaked breath. “The old radicals are even less ballsy than the young ones.”
I picked up one of his hands. “Do you think it’s possible,” I asked him, “for a revolution to be entirely personal? Suppose we all concentrated on our own lives, filled them with revolutionary moments, revolutionary relationships. When we had enough of them, it would be a revolution.”
“No.” Mike removed his hand from mine. “It wouldn’t. That’s cowardice talking. That’s you being liberal. That’s you saying, ‘Let’s make a revolution, but let’s be nice about it.’ People are dying. There’s a real war going on. We can’t be incremental.”
“Exactly,” said Gretchen. “Exactly. Time is as much the issue as anything else.”
“Then we should all be carrying guns,” said Julie. “We should be planning political assassinations.”
“We should be robbing banks,” said Mike. “Or printing phony bills.” Mike had been known to pass a bad check or two, though he never needed the money. He was an auto mechanic by day, a dope dealer by night. He was the richest person we knew. “Lauren,” he called, and Lauren appeared in the doorway to the kitchen. “I came here tonight because I have a surprise for you.” He was grinning.
“If it’s dope, I’m not interested,” said Lauren. “Nor am I solvent.”
“What would you say,” Mike asked, “if I told you that right now, right at this very moment, I have Poncho Taylor’s car sitting in my garage waiting for repairs?” Lauren said we would go right over.
Poncho had a white convertible. Lauren loved it. She sat in the driver’s seat, because Poncho had sat there. She sat on the passenger side, because that was where she would be sitting herself. I discovered an old valentine in the glove compartment. Lauren was torn between the despair of thinking he already had a girlfriend and the thrill of finally discovering something personal. She opened it.
“Love and a hundred smooches, Deborah.” Lauren read it aloud disapprovingly. “This Deborah sounds like a real sap.”
“Poncho seems more and more to be the perfect match for you,” I added. The valentine had one feature of incontrovertible value. It had Poncho’s address on it. Lauren began to copy it, then looked at us.
“What the hell,” she said and put the whole thing in her purse.