LITMIR.BIZ

      Tom Morton

      Summer 1963

      In those days I believed that America could be made safe for democracy, from the grassroots up, with just a little help from me and my friends. And so I served as a summer soldier to fight for civil rights. We were neophytes who thought that we could redeem our nation by holding hands and singing freedom songs. But when you toe the asphalt, stick out your thumb, and become a hitchhiker of history, currents beyond your control sweep you to destinations not of your devising. By the time I left the Movement, the world had not changed much, but at least I had not sat on the sidelines with the lip-service liberals; rather I had become my own contemporary and acted on my ideals. I had gone in search of America, and myself. What I found was Mississippi.

      During the summer of 1963 I worked at a tennis camp in the Adirondacks for Jewish kids from Long Island. “We’re from Great Neck,” they used to chant, “couldn’t be prouder. If you don’t believe us, we’ll buy you out!” Each cabin counselor was a college tennis player, and we spent long afternoons shouting “Racquet back; eye on the ball!” to our awkward pupils. They practiced hard, whether to satisfy their own dreams of athletic prowess or to please their parents, but only a few displayed the skills to excel.

      The boy I remember best was a manic perfectionist who sometimes flipped out when he failed. Mostly he was quiet and kept to himself, speaking in soft monosyllables and rarely smiling. Asked to make his bed or to police the grounds for inspection, he did it impeccably: a dime bounced on his taut sheets and all the gum wrappers were gone. He used to sit on the front steps of the cabin strumming the same folk tune by the hour, until some web-footed demon in his fingers slipped up. I found his guitar, back broken, left for dead in the weeds. Once, during a softball game, when a pitch caught the inside corner of the plate and I called him out on strikes, he whirled, white-eyed, and swung for my skull.

      Palm Sunday (our name for parents’ weekend) came in mid-July that year. The moms and dads pontooned up to the dock in their own seaplanes or parked swank machines on the outfield grass. The rule was no tipping. (Ten spots changed hands on the sly, a small offering to redeem a boy’s second serve or forgive his faults.) That evening at the intracamp basketball game, the parents protected themselves from the splinters in the bleachers by sitting on foxes and mink, on Scottish tweed, ready to praise the least sign of grace in their ungainly offspring. As referee, my job was to spot infractions. “Two shots,” I shouted, “in the act,” raising two fingers and pointing out the culprit, my camper. When I turned toward the foul line, he suddenly pounced on my back and clamped my throat with a merciless grip, which I unpried, smiling, while the parents smiled back: boys will be boys. At the bench he wept and pleaded, “I didn’t do it! I didn’t do it!” He left the next day. I said good-bye to the family: his mother, face salvaged by plastic surgery, her bouffant living a peroxide life of its own; the father, pudgy and puzzled; and the son, grinning. I watched them walk down to the dock; their plane skimmed the lake, gathering speed, and ascended into heaven.

      I couldn’t help identifying with that boy who wanted to be perfect. I didn’t have his fits of violence, but I fell into moody brooding and self-pity when life didn’t meet my expectations. I wanted to be a top tennis player, but I had only made the Hiram team as a sophomore, and the moves I brought to the game were better suited to basketball: I had quick hands, covered a lot of court, and my best stroke was a kind of walk-on-air leaping lunge that resembled a fallaway jump shot more than an overhead smash. At Camp Idylwold I soon realized that I was out of my league. Most of the other counselors beat me decisively, and the camp pro, Joe Fishback, demolished me. No matter how hard I hit the ball, he returned it with ease, and the wonder of it was, I never saw him run. He seemed to be waiting at the exact spot long before even my most sharply angled shots arrived. At the end of the match I slammed my racquet to the ground, and to make my humiliation complete, it bounced back up and smacked me in the face.

      Nothing had gone the way I wanted that summer. My tennis game improved, but not as much as I had wished. When my girlfriend, Michelle, arrived unexpectedly, and the whole camp stood on the hillside cheering as I shouldered my sleeping bag and walked toward her car, I learned that she had come not because she wanted my body but because she had decided to go to Africa with the Peace Corps and was bound for Dartmouth to study Swahili. I’d been jilted before, but never by a continent.

      Two weeks later I received letters from both my parents, bearing different addresses. “Your mother and I have decided to separate,” my dad wrote, and he added with characteristic elusiveness, “I can’t tell you how much I loved that house. Don’t think for a minute I didn’t hate to leave, but it got to a point where I couldn’t stand it any more.” I knew that was all he’d ever say, and for a moment I saw the stone fireplace and oak bookcases he had constructed with his own hands, and I wondered if he loved those better than he loved me. After years of listening to Mom’s monologues and Dad’s silences, I was not surprised. I thought of the photos of them when they were my age. He was a six-foot-two, well-muscled track star, and she a bright and patrician lawyer’s daughter: an all-American couple walking arm-in-arm across the Oberlin campus with the world before them.

      I had planned to drive straight back to Ohio as soon as camp closed, but I felt bitter and betrayed, as if they had staged all this just to hurt my feelings. I have no home, I thought, I’m on my own. I called my friend Lenny Swift in Washington. I admired his unflappable cool, his smart remarks at the passing scene; he could always make me laugh. Lenny had a heart, but he never wore it on his sleeve, and I found comfort in his caustic wit. He urged me to come to D.C. and join him for the March on Washington. That sounded like fun to me, especially after Lenny told me that Bob Dylan and Joan Baez would be singing. On the way, I decided to stop off in New York to scout out a suitable garret in Greenwich Village. Like most people my age I was auditioning identities: I saw myself at the time as something of a dandy, an aristocratic Q flaunting his foppish tail at the monotonous world of Os. Rather than go to graduate school as my favorite history professor had urged, I resolved to become a famous writer. I had read enough Jack Kerouac to assume that the place to find Real Life was with the hoboes huddled around flaming trash cans and the dark-skinned folk who worked

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