LITMIR.BIZ

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later, I could casually broach the topic. Even then the inquiry would have to be phrased delicately. On the turntable, H.P. Lovecraft were uttering a melodious complaint about a girlfriend’s betrayal. Behind the words, two electric guitars spoke back and forth. Except when the loss being articulated by the lyrics became too painful, an organ and some mellifluous scat wove to and fro under the song’s sad tale. A background chorus, “Shawn — shawna-wanna-way-o,” was repeated soothingly. Yet resentment was decidedly being voiced in the forefront:

      How could you

      Be so cool

      To sit and let me

      Play the fool

      And pick up all the tabs

      For all your fu-un?

      I bought your

      Brand-new clothes

      And heaven only knows

      That all the time

      I thought that I was

      Number one.

      Well, I saw Fred yesterday.

      He says he saw you in L.A.

      Well, I hope the weather’s groovy

      Way out west.

      If that’s how much you love me, baby,

      More or less.

      I tripped out on the song, cautioning myself to be ready to learn — if not tonight, then sometime in the next few days — that Janey had indeed found somebody else over the summer. Not someone else, I corrected myself: she and I didn’t really have anything going.

      From a distance I heard Edward’s voice stating that he had run into one of my SDS colleagues, or should he say, comrades, the day before yesterday downtown on Forest. He had been told that the SDS convention had been wild. The bubble that had been slowly expanding within my mind unexpectedly popped, and I perceived I was both deliciously and thoroughly stoned and at the same time possessed an augmented capacity to be articulate, to communicate a penetrating and convincing utterance on any topic.

      “Who did you talk to?” I succeeded in asking.

      “Emma.”

      Emma was a main energy source for UC Irvine’s SDS chapter. A Ph.D. student in anthropology, tall and gangly and about my age, she was already immersed in the organization when I started attending the occasional meeting my first September at Irvine. During the initial couple of months, I regarded her as far too involved in protest politics. On my first visit to her ground-level apartment a few blocks toward Boat Canyon from my house, I was amazed by her rooms filled with stacks of pamphlets and radical newspapers, and bookshelves bearing volumes by Marx, Lenin, Mao, Fanon, Marcuse, and similar left-wing heavies. The only decoration on her walls were posters that declaimed what I then considered embarrassing slogans about imperialism and the working class, or heroic images of Cuban and Chinese revolutionaries. Emma had arrived at Irvine from Cornell the year before when UCI — one of three new campuses in the Cal system — had opened. On the rear window of her microbus, mimicking the Greek letter car window decals that identified the fraternity or sorority of a vehicle’s owner, Emma had affixed a sigma, delta, and sigma. Irvine didn’t even have any frats yet, though I’d seen such Greek letters displayed during my undergrad years at the University of British Columbia.

      “You’re in SDS?” Jay asked.

      “What’s SDS?” Pump inquired, offering me another hit from the doobie.

      “Students for a Democratic Society,” I said before sucking in the sweet smoke.

      “Commie scum,” Edward contributed helpfully. We all laughed.

      Pump was focused on relighting the joint Edward had returned to him. “Are you one of those campus protesters, man?”

      I tried to concentrate how best to present myself to a stoner fresh out of the army. “Even before I heard of SDS … I thought the war was wrong.” I explained that after the Vietnamese kicked out the French, Eisenhower promised free elections. “Ho Chi Minh would have won hands down, so the U.S. made damn sure that vote was never —”

      Jay stood. “I’m going to change the record.”

      I realized H.P. Lovecraft had finished.

      “You can see why Wayman is a clear and present danger to the republic,” Edward said to Pump.

      “No, no …” I demurred. Even to myself, I had sounded incoherent about why I belonged to SDS. Being ripped out my gourd wasn’t helping. From inside the house, familiar opening chords announced Jefferson Airplane’s “Come Up the Years.”

      “The civil-rights movement got me thinking, too.” I launched into a rap I’d delivered before to students who browsed our weekly SDS literature table on campus and initiated a conversation. How could America, I would ask them, with all its inspiring statements about freedom and dignity in its founding documents, still have water fountains marked FOR COLORED ONLY a hundred years after the Civil War supposedly ended slavery? Or civil-rights activists being shot for helping black people register to vote? “How can such contradictions —”

      “Good choice, man,” Pump called, startling me. I understood a second later his comment was aimed at Jay’s musical preference. Pump must have caught my surprised expression, because he gestured toward me. “Sorry.”

      “When I got to Irvine,” I continued, still attempting to sort out what I should tell him, “the SDS chapter showed me how things like the war and racism and the university tie together. How school teaches us to shut up, obey, put up with boredom, serve the corporations and the status quo. Whatever’s going on, it’s not about a real education.”

      Jay had re-entered the porch during my little rant and accepted the joint passed to him by Edward. “‘Something is happening,’” Jay quoted Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man.” He took a drag and continued between his teeth: “‘But you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?’”

      “That’s about it,” I confirmed. I was feeling a little sheepish about rapping on and on. “How did you guys wind up in the army? Were you drafted?”

      “Did you and Pump finish the taco chips?” Edward asked his brother.

      “In the cupboard, below the toaster,” Jay said. “Last time I looked.”

      Edward hoisted himself from the deck chair and disappeared into the house. From the living room the Airplane were admonishing us, in a tone of exaltation, to heed the brevity of existence:

      Some will come,

      And some will go.

      We shall surely pass

      When the wind that

      Left us here

      Returns for us at last.

      We are but a moment’s sunlight

      Fading in the grass.

      C’mon, people, now,

      Smile on your brother,

      Let me see you get together,

      Love one another

      Right now.

      “Fool that I was, man,” Pump said. “I enlisted. I’d finished high school, didn’t know what to do. I was 1-A, anyway. They promised you had more choice if you went in voluntarily.”

      “Dummy,” Jay said.

      “You did the same,” Pump complained.

      “You enlisted out of high school?” I asked Jay.

      “I wasn’t a brain like Eddie. I’d just broken up with a girlfriend. Seemed like a good idea at the time.”

      “We were lucky, man,” Pump said. “Plenty of suckers like us wound up grunts in Nam. So much for learning a trade.”

      “The army was an education,”

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