Kelly was still only twenty-two when he arrived in New Hampshire fresh from the army in February of 1968 to do what he could for the poet-politician from Minnesota. He became disillusioned with the McCarthy campaign in April of 1968, not because of the senator himself, but because of the people that he had around him. Kelly threw his support to Bobby Kennedy and later explained to his father that “my support consisted of one vote and an expert familiarity with damned near any Xerox or mimeograph machine.”
He was in Chicago, of course, for the 1968 Democrat convention and he got slugged once and gassed once and he left Chicago early with a black eye and the resigned conviction that he, alone or in concert, would never do much about steering his country off of its detour to hell.
Kelly thought of himself as a kind of social-democrat about halfway between the Americans for Democratic Action Left and the Trotskyite right. He also nursed the bitter, but perfectly indent conviction that he would always be in the minority.
Kelly had once tried to explain some, but not all of this to his father. It was nearly two years after Chicago and Kelly had a night off from his job as the midnight-to-dawn disc jockey on a Baltimore radio station. By chance he had picked a good night to talk to his father who was home alone, roaming through the large, empty house, nursing a beer. Sadie was in Los Angeles getting her teeth capped and even the ubiquitous Fred Mure was off somewhere.
Father and son had sent out for a Flying Chicken dinner and after they had eaten they settled down in the living room with a bottle of Martell between them.
“What I’ve been trying to say, chief, is that I’m a typical product of the upper middle class. We’ve never been hungry enough. There’s nothing that we ever really wanted way deep down — except somebody to love us and that’s not much of a base is it?”
Donald Cubbin wasn’t much good at talk like that. He decided that the kid probably got it from his mother who’d always had her nose in a book. Cubbin thought of falling back on the current lib-lab line, which he knew by heart, but he also knew that his son wouldn’t wear it. So instead he stalled, “You’re not a kid anymore, Kelly, and what’s more you never gave me and your mother or me and Sadie any problems.”
“You mean I’ve never been busted?”
“Well, hell, you went to college and got your degree. That’s more’n I ever did. You served your country in that VISTA outfit and went overseas and came back without getting your ass shot off. You got interested in politics and did something about it. You’re not on drugs, at least as far as I know, and you’re not a boozer like me so, what the hell, you’re indent or nearly so and I’m goddamned glad of it.” Cubbin took a sip of his brandy and added, “Also you’ve got a pretty good job and I guess that’s important. Christ, I’ve made my career out of jobs.”
“But I’ve never been interested in the union.”
“Christ, kid, that’s no disappointment to me. No, sir. Most of the time it bores me stiff; you know that — or you should know it by now. But it’s what I do and I’ve worked hard at it, well, at least I worked hard some of the time, and what the hell else could I do at sixty? It’s too late for me to go out to the Coast like I should’ve gone back in thirty-two.”
“You would have liked that, wouldn’t you?”
Cubbin gave his son a rare smile, rare because there was much genuine shyness in it. “Yeah, I’ve got just enough ham in me to have liked it, really liked it. I might even have made a pretty good living out of it, playing second leads in what they used to call B pictures. Shit, Kelly, I’d have eaten it up.”
“Maybe that’s what I’m trying to explain. You knew what you wanted; I’m not sure that I do.”
“I didn’t do anything about it,” Cubbin said.
“But you did something else. You achieved a kind of fame and prominence and all that crap.”
“Is that what you want?”
“I don’t think so, although that might be a damned lie. What I really mean is that I don’t want to pay the price that you have.”
“You mean look where it got me?”
“No, I don’t mean that either. Let me put it another way. What would happen to me if you were to die tomorrow?”
“Well, Christ, you’d get along. You’d make out all right.”
“That’s not it, chief. You’re forgetting something.”
“What?”
“I’d be a rich man with half of that insurance that you and the union carry on you.”
“You need some money?” Cubbin asked, not really wanting to talk about anything as unpleasant as his own death.
Kelly sighed. “No, I don’t need any money. I think maybe that’s what’s wrong. I’ve never needed any money because I could always touch you for some.”
“Let me tell you something, kid, there’s no virtue in poverty.”
“I’ve lived poor,” Kelly said. “Down in Alabama that time I lived just like the blacks, ate what they did, and I saw what it could do. But there was one big difference. I wasn’t black and I didn’t have to do it so that wiped out whatever lesson there might have been in it.”
Cubbin was silent for a moment. Finally, he said, “Yeah, it does something to you, being poor. I mean really poor. It gives you a twist that you never really get over. Fear, I guess. It makes you afraid.”
“How much money did you have when my granddad died?”
“You mean my old man?”
“Yes.”
Cubbin smiled again, this time the wry smile of a man who remembers something whose once dreadful importance has been partially erased by time. “When your grand mother and I got back to Pittsburgh from his funeral, we had twenty-one dollars and thirty-five cents between us. That’d be worth about a hundred dollars today, maybe two hundred, I don’t know.”
“And money was important then?”
“Dear God, yes, money was important.”
“And that’s really why you didn’t go to Hollywood?”
“Yeah, I suppose that was it — that and a lot of other things.”
“Well, I can go to Hollywood, chief.”
Cubbin brightened, but only for a moment. “I thought there for a second — but, yeah, I see what you mean. You mean you don’t really want to go to Hollywood, but if there was something like that you wanted, you could go ahead and do it.”
“That’s right.”
“Well, have you got something in mind?”
“Maybe. I think so.”
“I’ll back you in anything you want to do.”
“Sure, chief.”
“I don’t know, I guess I haven’t been a very good father,” Cubbin said, lapsing into a small bid for sympathy, the kind that had always worked very well with his late wife.
He didn’t get any sympathy from his son. “No,” Kelly said, “I suppose you haven’t.”
“What kind of lousy crack is that?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it’s just that somewhere along the line somebody like you should have said hey, look, sonny, you’re going to be a biochemist whether you like it or not so you’d better hop to it. Maybe I’d have liked somebody saying that to me. Maybe anybody would.”
“Well, you didn’t get it.”
“No.”
“And you’re sure as shit not going to get it now.”
“No.”
Cubbin decided to retreat a little. “You’ve got a pretty good job with the station.”
“I’ve got that.”
“I listen to you whenever I can. You got a hell of a voice.”
“I got that from you.”
“So what d’you think you’re going to do?”
“I know what I’m not going to do. I’m never going to make any money. I might have some after you die, but I’m never going to make any.”