“Sports is a clue, an indication. Take my word. You think I can’t spot a stiff?” my father said.
But I hadn’t taken my father’s word. What were his reference points? New York City pool halls and horse rooms? The route of race tracks between Saratoga and Hialeah? The year he spent playing triple A ball for the Yankee farm club before his knees went bad? His manhood of trains and bookies and hotels, football and basketball games, boxing matches? What did that have to do with the issues?
Lyndon Baines Johnson came to Los Angeles. I went with Gerald to demonstrate against the war. LBJ was staying in Century City, a five-minute drive from the place where my father stood with his hose, inspecting his new crop of avocados.
I had witnessed a policeman beating a woman with a stick. She was trying to keep up with the flow of demonstrators circling the Century Plaza Hotel. She had a child with her. The little boy kept trying to jerk out of her grip. She was falling behind the others. The police were waiting. I watched them club her.
“The cops are beating up people,” I told my father. He was watering his balding ivy. He was watering the bougainvillaea that snaked and danced purple across the roof of the built-in brick barbecue.
“We saw a policeman club a woman,” Gerald said.
“Hippies?” My father wasn’t looking at Gerald. He was dragging his hose toward the lemon tree. “They deserve it.”
“Not just hippies,” I shouted. And why should they be beaten, for that matter? “Ordinary people. Housewives with children. There was blood.”
“You exaggerate,” my father said. He was filling a rounded wicker basket with peaches. “Besides, the cops are all lowlifes, morons and sadists. Who else would be a cop?”
I watched my father wind up the hose into a neat green coil. I looked at Gerald. Gerald looked at me. We married four months later.
Suddenly we were living in Berkeley. And all at once, Gerald was a college boy with a desk and a Tensor lamp, yelling, “Quiet. Turn off that music. I’m thinking.”
He began with physics, but it was wrong. Physics disappointed him. Physics did not make him feel complete. There were gaps big and wide as the black holes of space. There were limits strung everywhere like rows of barbwire.
Gerald decided to study mathematics and lost his scholarship. That’s when I left school and went to work at Giovanni’s Italian Restaurant. That’s where the pasta sat in big black pots steaming and it was always hot, always dark, the secret tunnel down into the oily black center of hell.
Mathematics was closer, but still, Gerald sensed something missing. He conferred with more professors. A job was found for him in something called mathematical psychology. He was, after all, brilliant. He was on the ninety-ninth percentile in everything. Gerald dragged himself to his Monday, Wednesday and Friday teaching assignment as if he were living in a seething, form-fitting nightmare. He forbade me to come.
Once I went secretly. It was a small dark room in the basement of the Life Sciences building. The room was a permanent, windowless gray. Gerald was not wearing his glasses. I doubted that he could see me, hunched in shadows along the back wall of the room, squatting down, knees on the cold gray floor. Gerald was smearing chalk on the blackboard. It made a chilling sound like a rake scratching pavement. Gerald’s mouth seemed oddly hard, as if the words he uttered were actually choking him and tearing his lips. They seemed to bubble from his lips and hang in the air all around him like gray stones. When they fell to the floor, there was a dull gray thud. I never mentioned this to him.
Gerald was settling into his thick silence. He stayed up late every night. He seemed disoriented in the morning, like a traveler, clothes crumpled, sickened by some subliminal, interminable motion.
Psychology was the answer, he assured me. I nodded my head. Gerald was talking about the human mind, where all the possibilities were stored. When Gerald talked about the mind and the possibilities, my head filled with an image of long empty gray corridors lined with identical gray metal doors. The doors were locked.
Gerald began with physiological psychology. He reread his chemistry books and talked about blood groups, electrical charges and mapping the brain. He made it sound like an expedition into unknown territories. I thought of birds with emerald and purple plumes half hidden by jade green leaves.
Then the limiting factor appeared. Gerald decided that the system was rigged in favor of the experimentalists. He no longer believed rats were going to lead the way.
“Don’t you see? The cosmos is infinite. It’s man that’s limited.”
“Of course,” I immediately agreed. I felt as if I were taking a holy communion. Gerald hadn’t spoken to me for weeks.
The experimentalists were added to our list of enemies. Gerald was developing a social conscience. It was unavoidable. There were terrible events and forces all around us: the government, the war machine, the military-industrial complex, the Dow Chemical Company, the Pentagon, Nixon, the racist police, the FDA, the undeclared war in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, fragmentation bombs, napalm, the systematic annihilation of civilians, the rotting of stockpiled wheat while millions starved, the emerging American welfare caste system, the middle-class biases of IQ tests, the pollution of rivers and seas, strip mining, the destruction of bay seals and dolphins, the imminent extinction of most mammalian species, the draft, corruption at all levels of everything, anomie, ghettos, the oppression of women, the denial of civil liberties to just about everyone, the fascist AMA, the persecution of homosexuals, the plight of Indians, the threat of nuclear reactors built on top of earthquake fault lines, carcinogenic dyes and preservatives in virtually all foodstuffs, apartheid, urban decay, Detroit’s planned obsolescence, the gun lobby, the exploited farm workers, Governor Reagan, the National Guard, the regents, the slum landlord we had, and now the experimentalists.
I tried to imagine the experimentalists. I thought they were identical men in identical white jackets. When I walked through the Life Sciences building and waited obediently for Gerald at one door or another, in one corridor or another, like a trained dog not even needing a leash, I watched the whitecoated men pass near me. I imagined their identical cocks severed and placed in bottles of formaldehyde. The identical bottles sat on a neat row in a shelf at the bottom of my mind.
The experimentalists wanted to ring one universal bell and have the whole planet rise up en masse and salivate on cue. In time they would press one single buzzer and the world’s population would march mindlessly out into the fields, harvesting the land past the point of calluses, smiles on their stripped and blank mouths, blood on their fingers.
“Don’t complain to me,” Francine said over the phone. “You want to live that stinking hippie life style, so be it. You want to be a big girl, all married, living in another city, then be a big girl. You don’t know what hardship is, kid.”
I was expected at work in ten minutes. I leaned over the toilet bowl and vomited my dinner.
On the television, Kirk said, “What do you make of it?”
“Most unusual,” Spock answered. “Our data banks show no such culture on Gamma Four.”
“But it’s there, isn’t it?” Kirk sounded as if he was thinking about what he planned to eat for dinner, after the taping.
Gerald was sitting on the couch. Buckminster Fuller’s book was opened on his lap. It was a brown Naugahyde sofa I had bought for six dollars in a thrift shop. I called Gerald to help me. He was outraged. He complained. He had been reading Marcuse. We didn’t need a sofa, anyway. We already had the three oversized pillows I’d insisted on buying. What was wrong with me? Had I no historical perspective at all? Most cultures had existed throughout time without any furniture at all. There were numerous examples of elegant, productive societies with nothing more than straw mats. I was too Western, too hopelessly middle class.