Читать книгу Photographs of My Father - Paul Spike - Страница 9

I. HIGH SCHOOL

I am on my way to college. It is 1965, hot August, and I arrive in America. I have graduated from high school three months ago and spent the summer bumming around Europe. Nervous, I walk through the windowless halls of U.S. Customs wearing sandals, jeans and long hair. Each person’s name is looked up against the names in a large book. Perhaps they will find “Spike” and suddenly whisk me off behind these concrete walls. I haven’t done anything wrong, so of course I’m safe. I’m looking forward to the long taxi ride into the heart of the city, through the shambles of Queens to the Triborough Bridge which lifts you up above the lizard’s tongue of Manhattan, ablaze in fumes of soot. I don’t trust these officials, my fellow Americans, in their gray shirts, polished chrome badges, stale coffee on their breaths, with their “duties” stamped right on the foggy plastic of their irises. I feel vulnerable in official territory.

There’s a long wait in line before a stall, similar to a check-out counter in a supermarket, where I will be checked into my country. A man with white hair and black-framed glasses opens my rucksack with a jerk and begins to poke around in my dirty clothes. I don’t have anything to declare except a bottle of whiskey. I am dismissed, gather up my sack and step into the free zone.

“Put your luggage on the cart and follow me,” says a man in a muddled green sportcoat. He is heavy and blunt, a plainclothes cop. His partner pushes a metal shopping cart. Is this the A & P supermarket? No, I follow them along the wall to a blank door, inside to a blank office.

“Personal inspection, kid. Empty everything in your pockets on the… Oh, yeah. Did you maybe forget to declare anything just now?”

“No.” Did I forget? My mind races.

“Okay. Empty your pockets on the desk.” I pull out keys, change, a wallet stuffed with scraps of paper, an address book, some antibiotics for a fever I had during my last ten days in Spain. The silent partner begins to make a list. This is just like prison movies. Will they hand me a striped uniform and take me away? The talking cop picks up the pills and gives them a shake. “What’s this?”

“Medicine. I got those in Spain. Antibiotics.”

“You ill, kid?”

“I had a bad fever for a couple of days. Went to a doctor. He gave me these.”

“So what kind of ‘antibiotics’ are they?”

“Chloromycetin.”

“Jesus Christ! That’s the strongest antibiotics you can get. Chloromycetin!”

“Well, my parents were there. My father actually went to the drugstore and bought them. So…”

The cop shakes his head. “Do you know what I would do if a doctor ever gave these pills to my kid? Punch him right in his mouth! Punch his mouth! Your father ought to know these are the strongest antibiotics you can get.”

“I was really sick.”

“Boy, so was this doctor.” He laughs. His partner smiles and finishes the list. I am in a zone between jet and taxi. I have landed, but on a different planet. The planet of official territory. These beings speak English out of manufactured gadgets stuck down inside their synthetic throats. They are the U.S. Customs.

“Put your hands over your head. Lean up against that wall.” The cop gives me a real television detective search. He finds nothing and I can drop my hands. He goes to my rucksack, empties it on the floor, and pokes around with his toe. Nothing there either. So he goes back and sits on the top of the desk.

“Tell me, kid, you see a lot of pot in Europe?”

Can you be arrested for having smoked pot in a foreign country? “No. I didn’t see any.”

“You smoke pot, kid?”

“No.”

“You’re as full of shit as a Christmas turkey!” He picks up the pills. “What are you doing with these antibiotics?”

“I told you.” He shakes his head, tosses them up and down in his hand. Then he starts to stare at me as if he’s running a movie in his mind of punching me in the face. He stares very hard.

“Okay. Get your stuff and get out of here.” He tosses the pills. I catch them on the rebound off my chest. Turns his back and says to his partner, “What kind of a father has this kid got?”

I’ll let my father’s own words introduce him:

In the last week of May 1963, I attended a meeting in the Harlem YMCA that lasted most of the night. This was a week following the occasion when James Baldwin, Harry Belafonte, Kenneth Clark, and a number of other Negro leaders from various professions and jobs met with Attorney General Robert Kennedy—and both the Attorney General and this group came out of the meeting filled with dismay. The Attorney General was dumbfounded to discover the depth of hostility in that group, particularly on the part of some who said that if the government of the United States would not protect them in Mississippi, then they had no intention of ever trying to protect the government of the United States in Cuba or anywhere else. The Attorney General was very upset by this. On the other hand, the group that met with him was dismayed and disheartened by what seemed to them to be a complete lack of appreciation for the intensity of feeling that existed in the Negro community at that time. This was just at the end of the Birmingham demonstrations when hundreds of people had gone to jail.

A week later, this same group of people, largely gathered around James Baldwin, met with a group of us who were leaders of various denominations and ecumenical agencies, to see what kind of communication might possibly exist with that group of people. They had been so really disheartened by their conversation with the Attorney General that they were now beginning to explore what other segments of the Establishment in this country really were feeling during this period. Through some mutual friends, we arranged the meeting.

Nearly all the people in the room that night have been in positions of leadership in various denominations and in the National Council of Churches, some for a number of years and some only recently. All of us who were there felt that we were clean as far as our lack of prejudice was concerned. We had good records on race relations; we had fought for the right resolutions in church assemblies; we were against evil in this area. But somehow it had never come to us quite the way it came on that night. We left there about 3 in the morning, after the most intense kind of conversation that you can imagine, with a feeling that we had been on the other end of Nathan’s finger—that is, that Baldwin and others had said to us for the first time, ‘You are the man!’ We felt a sense of personal guilt, of personal responsibility for the denial of full justice to Negro citizens, resulting in the deterioration of relationships between the races to the place it was in the spring of 1963.

Those of us who left that place that night decided that we had to do something. Individual ministers had gone on Freedom Rides and had been involved in all kinds of other things—but this was of a different nature. We had to begin somehow to mobilize what there was of power and strength in the Protestant community, and direct that power toward positive action.

As it happened, the General Board of the National Council of Churches was meeting the following week, so we immediately took this concern to the president of the Council, Mr. Irwin Miller, a distinguished Disciples layman from Indiana. He appointed a special committee which came up with a resolution to establish a special commission with power for direct action. This went to the Council’s General Board and was adopted on the 7th of June, thus establishing the Commission on Religion and Race. The Commission, to be appointed by the president of the Council, was charged with the responsibility of moving directly into the heart of the civil rights struggle, to take risks if necessary, to move ahead of the constituency if necessary, to involve the power and resources and personnel of the member churches in a twofold ministry: a ministry of reconciliation and a ministry of action on the side of achieving justice.

A staff was gathered, and I was asked to be the director of the Commission. We set about to try and develop an action agency tied to a body accustomed to planning and consultation rather than action.

We did not know where to begin, so we decided to start at points of most stress and tragedy in the life of the nation. Three days after the Commission was established, Medgar Evers was shot in the back. The first act of the Commission was to send a representative group of Protestant leaders to Medgar Evers’ funeral. And at that funeral came the first invitation—no, that is too mild a word—entreaty from Negro Christians in Mississippi, in the name of God, to come into that situation where there was the kind of terror symbolized by Medgar Evers’ murder.

I am lying down in the suburbs. My room is on the top floor of our split-level house. Just outside my window a maple tree is shooting green sprouts. Spring has come to Tenafly, New Jersey. With it comes a slow tug. The season makes me unhappy. I am fifteen in 1963. My father and mother, my younger brother and I have been living in this small, upper-middle-class town, a few minutes from Manhattan, for only two years. We live on the West Hill, the “wrong” hill. Across the little valley, on the back slopes of the Palisades, is the exclusive wealthy East Hill of Tenafly. The East Hill is a mixture of doctors and businessmen, stately mansions and $100,000 homes. For example, almost two hundred psychiatrists live in Tenafly. We live in an almost-new, comfortable (but modest by East Hill standards) house which my parents bought at a bargain price. (The original owner sold suddenly—soon after the first Negro family in Tenafly’s history moved in across the street in an almost identical house.

Why am I unhappy this spring? Perhaps because I am in love with a Tenafly girl who doesn’t pay much attention. Or, more likely, perhaps because I am doing poorly in the high school. Since seventh grade I have been stuck in brick and glass corridors lined with metal lockers, days divided into seven or eight periods by electric buzzers, life a series of special forms that must be completed before one can leave for the bathroom, gym class, health class, drivers’ and sex education. I have been working my way up through the grades of junior and senior high school. We moved from Teaneck, a nearby suburb, to Tenafly but nothing much changed. The teachers in both school systems are still a mixture of old and young graduates of state teachers’ colleges, taught how to teach before they learn what they are teaching. I do not mesh with suburban public schools. My family is too open and free. I am encouraged to read books at home that they won’t let me bring to school. I have been raised in a liberal tradition while the public schools are outfitted in a phony progressivism. New math, student council, sex education: it all adds up to the same rigid day, sliced into seven periods, punctuated by the same electric buzzer they use when they open the cages in prison.

Besides, kids at school turn me off. There is a crowd I could join. But I’m not a great athlete, my parents aren’t rich, my looks are average, and I refuse to adopt the blandness necessary to make the grade as a good guy among a rash of good guys. Instead, I hang around on the edge of the crowd with a couple of other self-styled teenage outsiders.

My room is my refuge from Tenafly. The walls are lined with books. I’m trying to read everything at once. From cheap novels like Battle Cry to a paperback edition of The Myth of Sisyphus which I buy after one of my friend’s sisters tells him it’s cool. It is very cool. But besides Camus, who does blast my thinking out of the corridors of junior high school, my favorites are Beat writers. I have a special shelf with my collection of their works. Kerouac, Ginsberg, Corso. On the Road and Howl, of course, but also Junkie and John Clellon Holmes’s novel Go, plus a complete set of early Evergreen Reviews (my father subscribes) and rare copies of Big Table, where portions of Naked Lunch were first printed. I even have a copy of Kerouac’s first novel, The Town and the City, which I stole out of the Teaneck library.

Lying on my bed in the suburbs, surrounded by all this literature of protest, I try and daydream up a memory of when we lived in Greenwich Village. That’s where we lived before we came out to New Jersey. My father was minister of the Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square. He actually knew Ginsberg and Corso and some of the early Beats. My father used to drink in the San Remo and the Cedar Street bars. I lie on my bed and think about one afternoon when he took me to visit a wild friend of his named John Mitchell. Mitchell was standing in a foot of brown water, digging out a basement on Macdougal Street to turn it into the Gaslight Cafe where the first cafe poetry readings and folk sessions were to be held in New York.

Bob Dylan sings on the phonograph in the corner of my room, his early voice like a jar of razor blades shaking in the amplifier. All I listen to this spring is Dylan. His song “Blowing in the Wind” is becoming popular through a version sung in saccharine style by a group called Peter, Paul and Mary. Dylan got started in the Gaslight Cafe. And I am stuck out in the suburbs, on my way to college, inevitably, two years more struggling upstream like a salmon toward whatever lies on top of that waterfall called college admissions. Why bother? I don’t know. Perhaps because from way back, even before junior high school, teachers were pouring their propaganda about college, especially a good college, into my head. “This is your permanent record,” they told me. “Everything you do in school—your grades, your behavior, your personality records—all these go into this permanent record which goes to the colleges.” And at home it’s the same. Even in my house, there are no exceptions. Study hard, be good, cut your buddy’s throat to get into a first choice college. Higher education has become a religion. I kneel before the altar of College.

In Dylan, in his voice and in his music, you can hear an undercurrent. “Fuck them! Fuck college! Fuck high school and junior high school, drivers’ education and sex education. Run away. Fight. Be a hobo, a bum, a Blind Boy Grunt. What do they know anyway? Didn’t they build the bomb? Didn’t they kill Medgar Evers? All the answers are up for grabs, blowing in the wind.”

In the other corner, my desk sits with my portable typewriter on top. A Christmas present from two years ago. In the desk drawers, hundreds of poems written over these last years are stuffed in envelopes. I am going to be a writer.

Just last week, I finished a short story I call “Max, An American.” It is a satire about growing up, getting a job and getting married. It is quite vulgar. And funny. When I show it to friends they are shocked. Both by the story and by the fact that I was able to write it. This afternoon I sent the story and a cover letter (mentioning, of course, that I am fifteen) to Evergreen Review. There’s a chance, slim but real, they might even accept it. What a thrill that would be. Published at fifteen.

I am thinking about my small envelope of pot. Downstairs, my mother is cooking supper. My brother is watching television. He is eleven. Four years separate us. Now I reach back behind my shelf of Beat writing and locate the envelope. I don’t have any papers so I take a Lucky Strike and slowly grind almost all the tobacco into an ashtray. My parents allow me to smoke. Not like a lot of my friends who have to sneak out to the garage every time they want a few drags of tobacco. But my parents have no idea about the pot. I suck the weed out of the envelope up through the empty cigarette until it is full again, full of finely shredded green material. One twist seals the end. I lick the whole joint and light up. The drug tastes delicious. Too bad tobacco doesn’t taste this good. In a few minutes, I’m lying back in delicate tremors. My stomach is slightly chilled, my mouth dry, my muscles relaxed. Thoughts wander in zigzags.

I wonder what next year will be like. My parents are sending me away to school, to prep school. Getting into prep school is good preparation for getting into college: all the visits, applications, interviews, transcripts, even special high school board exams and then finally the Wait. I apply to five schools. All but one reject me. I am going to my safety school, an academy in Pennsylvania named The Keaton School. What will it be like in prep school? I wonder if I should bring my pot.

I am lying in my room in the suburbs, stoned out of my mind. I long for freedom. Yet I live one of the most comfortable lives imaginable. I have a room stuffed with a hi-fi, a radio, expensive clothes, books, paintings. I am fifteen. But I don’t feel happy, don’t feel free. What’s wrong with me? My guts sometimes quake with rebellion, but I wouldn’t know where to start. Against my parents? Not likely, I love them very much, am always open with them about almost everything (pot’s an exception). They are my greatest allies. Rebel against school? Yes, but…I still feel this longing to go to a good college inside me. Yet, I’m already thinking of dropping out. I have read an article in the newspaper about how Harvard encourages students to take a year off, even two, before coming to the university. I would love a year off, dream of bumming around Europe and America for a year. Harvard! That is the heart pounding in the center of my darkest possibilities. I would love to go to Harvard. My parents would be in ecstasy. To go to Harvard would be revenge on all the lousy teachers, all the guidance counselors who have held sway over me for these past years. Harvard. It sounds like the biggest coup anybody could possibly pull at my age, in this country. It is 1963. I have two hard years of study ahead of me if I am to keep this dream alive.

Great South Beach stretches along the coast of Martha’s Vineyard for miles without a soul. In the marsh behind the beach, we are standing waist-deep in a clear stream holding screwdrivers. Steve, Ray and me. Steve is my best friend from Tenafly. He has already fled from public high school to a private school in Massachusetts called Stockbridge School. Ray teaches woodworking at Stockbridge, is a sculptor, and much older than us. He stands in the stream with a fully developed man’s body, deep tan, a full beard of chestnut whiskers streaked with silver. We are visiting Ray and Alice. They are running the Youth Hostel on the Vineyard this summer.

Ray shows us how to pry the oysters off the submerged rocks. They look just like part of the mossy stone until you feel their sharp edges under the slime. Then you dig with the tip of your screwdriver, trying to keep your hand from slipping and getting cut. We wear sneakers and bathing suits. I trip on a rock and bash my ankle against the jagged shells. When I move into shallower water I see wisps of blood trailing off, feel a little fish nuzzle his nose in the sore. The hot sun beats on our backs. But Ray makes this great fun, treats us with respect even though we are just kids.

When three buckets are full of the sloppy wet oysters, Ray says we have enough. We climb out of the water, hoist the buckets, and walk through the marsh to where we have hidden Ray’s battered and scratched old car. This is private property and we don’t want to get busted for poaching oysters.

The Hostel is only ten minutes away. A two-story wooden house in the center of a clearing, bicycle racks line the front lawn, out back is a huge stump which Ray spends hours hacking and chiseling. Alice is talking to Mercy in the kitchen.

“Surprise!” says Ray, dropping his bucket on the table.

“You got them,” beams Alice.

“Oh, Ray. This will be delicious,” says Mercy, a tall, willowy blonde who also goes to Stockbridge. Her father is a musician and she is a year older than us. Mercy has come to visit with Bill, another Stockbridge student. He is a skinny, quiet guy who acts tough a lot, talks about motorcycles when he talks, and sleeps with Mercy. There are only three private rooms in the Hostel. Ray and Alice have the biggest. Mercy and Bill share another. And Steve and I take the third. There are two enormous dormitories, boys and girls, where the hostelers sleep. These are young people on bike trips from Boston, Hartford, New Haven and New York. They come through for a couple of days with their adult leaders, sleep in the dormitories, cook their own meals. Ray and Alice just maintain the place. They don’t care much for the hostelers.

Alice is dark and small, with long hair over her shoulders, wears glasses most of the time, but without them she is beautiful. She is in her twenties and quite a bit younger than Ray. Alice gives Steve, Rick and me a kind of combination mothering-sistering-cockteasing which is nice. She loves to cook and makes huge, tasty meals.

There are tons of oysters, fried in crispy batter. When you break into them, they melt into gobs of succulent shellfish in your mouth. The beer is icy and bitter. For dessert (Alice is too much!), there is strawberry shortcake with homemade whipped cream.

We are all going into town after supper. Jack Elliot, a cowboy singer from Brooklyn and an old pal of Woody Guthrie’s, is singing at a folk music cafe. Ray and Alice have never seen him. But Steve knows him. Arlo Guthrie, Woody’s son, goes to Stockbridge and is a friend of Steve’s, of everybody here except me.

Half the Stockbridge School students play the guitar and sing, and the other half are learning how. Steve is very serious about music. He writes his own songs and plays a big Gibson guitar with real finesse. He also, just like everybody at Stockbridge it seems, holds Arlo in a little bit of awe.

On the way into town, we get Ray to stop by a liquor store. While we wait in the car, Bill—who looks old with a scruffy beard though he is really only sixteen—goes inside and purchases booze. His choice turns out to be a quart of premixed screwdrivers, vodka and orange, which goes down like sticky-sweet soda. By the time we arrive at the club, we have chugged it all. Heads spin in a “high” which is still new enough to marvel at.

Jack Elliot is about Ray’s age. Short and stocky with a weatherbeaten face, cowboy jeans and boots, a cowboy Stetson on his head. He sings with alternating humor and seriousness, lots of gusto, makes reticent little jokes between songs, songs like “Diamond Joe” and “Sowing on the Mountain.” When he finishes his first set, the little club goes haywire with enthusiasm, he grins and doffs his hat, then sneaks out to find a drink. They only serve coffee and coke in this cafe.

Sharing the bill with Jack Elliot is a jug band called The Charles River Valley Boys. In a couple of years they will become famous under the name of the Jim Kweskin Jug Band. Now we listen—stomachs full of oysters, salad, strawberries and screwdrivers—to the guitar, mandolin, and thumping washtub bass. Somebody sticks a kazoo in his mouth and soon the audience is banging on tables and singing.

On the way back to the Hostel along the midnight roads of the island, Steve has a stomachache from the screwdrivers. Ray is raving about Jack, what a great guy he seems like, so much fun, so relaxed. Alice is talking about Fritz, the tall, spaced-out-looking cat who played the washtub bass. Ray gets a little jealous at this. But then Steve starts singing, and we all join in:

Sowing on the mountain,

Reaping in the valley.

You’ve got to reap

Just what you sow.

We keep singing this chorus, with Steve and Alice alternating on the verses, like:

God gave Noah

The rainbow sign,

God gave Noah

The rainbow sign,

No more water.

The fire next time.

Before we know it, Ray is pulling up outside the dark hostel. We tiptoe past the dormitories full of snoring hostelers and upstairs to our rooms. Steve goes out in a second, but I linger in my thoughts, unable to sleep. Suddenly, a noise. Strange noise, like a cry but muffled and quick. Mercy’s cry. She and Bill are making love on the other side of the thin wall. I am a virgin. I have a crush on Mercy. The noise again, the undertone of moving bedsprings. Steve mumbles sleeptalk into his pillow. Lord, I want her. Downstairs, the bicyclists snore in rows of cots. I want some girl to sleep with all night, to love, to make that noise.

We only stay at Alice’s “restaurant” for ten days. Steve goes straight from the Vineyard to Fire Island, where his parents have a summer house. I go back to Tenafly. But after a couple of miserable days, flee again. Steve has invited me to spend August at his house.

Ocean Beach is one of fifteen or so towns strung like beads on the thin strand of the island. It is a family community where mother and kids spend the summer and Daddy commutes on the weekends. There are no cars, so people go shopping with children’s wagons. The ferry slip on Friday night is a madhouse of red wagons, harried and lonely wives, and restless five-year-olds waiting for Daddy to step off the boat in his suit and soaked shirt, having rushed early from the office to catch the 4:30 train from Pennsylvania Station.

Steve hangs around with a slightly older crowd. We have long hair, wear white sailing jackets, jeans and bare feet. At night we smoke a little pot and sit around the main square. Sometimes we sneak into one of the bars and order a few drinks. During the afternoons we lie on the beach, mess around in town, or take out one of his cousins’ boats. They live on the bay, while Steve’s house is by the ocean.

After a week, I find a girlfriend named Liza. She is tall with olive skin and black hair, large breasts that stun me when I catch their full weight in my palms under her sweatshirt. We lie in the moist sand of the night beach and duck under the probing headlights of dune taxis. Liza is my age and lives in the city. She goes to Stuyvesant High School, is Jewish and very smart. We don’t talk much. Our routine is to meet around nine o’clock in the main square, then walk around the darker paths holding hands, exchanging bits of non-information about our day. Until the time comes to veer suddenly onto the beach. I am a little surprised that Liza seems to want this detour as much as I do. And more surprised when I meet no resistance as my hand fiddles with her bra. But grateful when her fingers touch me on my tight jeans. If I try to go below her waist, she grabs my hand and locks it like a vise to her belly. As soon as I sigh defeat, she lets me return to where I belong, polishing the rubies on her breasts.

August passes slowly. Fine with me, I’m in no hurry to discover what The Keaton School will turn out to be. One morning the phone rings and then Steve’s mother is standing in the doorway, It is very hot in the beach house. “Your father’s on the phone,” she says. I stretch naked under the thin sheet. His mother was once the top model in America. There are framed magazine covers all over the house, covers full of his mother’s face, blonde hair, elegant figure. Now she stands in a yellow jersey and white shorts looking down at my bed. She and Steve’s father are separating. She told this to Steve three days ago. “Okay,” I say. She leaves and I jump into a bathing suit and go out to answer the telephone.

“How is everything? Having a good time?” he asks.

“Sure.”

“Listen, do you remember I told you about this demonstration in Washington—the march which we’re helping to sponsor?”

“Yeah. I wanted to go.”

“Do you still want to go? How about Steve?”

“We both want to go, Dad.”

“Great. You guys can carry the banner for us then.”

“What does it say?”

“Just National Council of Churches.”

“How are we going to get down to Washington?”

“You can fly down with me the day before.”

A week later in the airport, some guy in sunglasses, with a seersucker jacket slung over one shoulder, asks the ticket clerk in front of us, “Where can a man get a can of beer around here?” The clerk sends him to the airport bar. “Did you see that guy?” my father asks.

“You mean the asshole with the beer can?” I say, in my true cynical style.

“That was Paul Newman.”

“The movie guy?”

“That’s right. He must be going to the march too.” It dawns on me for the first time that this march is going to be something big. Even movie stars are going to it.

Reporters and photographers wait at the foot of the gangplank. They go straight to my father, Paul Newman and a woman who turns out to be Marian Anderson and take them aside. Flashbulbs explode. In the morning, the picture is on the front page of the Washington papers.

We are staying in the Mayflower Hotel. It is big and impersonal and my father says it is probably the best hotel in Washington when I ask him, “What’s the best hotel in Washington?”

Steve and I are impressed. My father has a suite. This is really an adventure. We both feel very adult as we look around the rooms of our suite. Immediately, people start to arrive. The phone starts to ring. And work for my father begins. Members of the staff of the Commission on Religion and Race crowd inside. They are mostly in their thirties, ministers and lawyers. They are friendly to me and Steve, but when they look at my father it is with an almost passionate respect. He is sitting casually in an armchair, his jacket off, tie loose, feet resting on top of a coffee table. He looks very young, relaxed, optimistic.

“Did they get those sandwiches all packed?” somebody asks. The National Council is donating a hundred thousand sandwiches to the March on Washington. At the last minute, it occurred to people that the thousands of marchers were going to get hungry. Earlier this afternoon we had stood in my father’s office and looked at them loading the rented trucks out on West 120th Street with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. The Commission offices are in the Interchurch Center at 475 Riverside Drive. Nicknamed the “God box,” this building houses national offices of many of the Protestant denominations in the country.

“What a mess,” laughs my father.

“That’s what June said on the phone.” June is his secretary.

“I want to have a staff meeting tonight. Not just about tomorrow, but to talk about the whole fall program.” He is getting serious but his face loses none of its glow. “I guess we might as well eat dinner from room service. Paul, see if you can find a menu around.” Dinner is full of jokes. About four other staff, my father, Steve and I. We drink wine, then linger over coffee as the rest of the staff gradually arrive.

It is very interesting for me to watch my father and the staff work together in these meetings. They do most of the talking while he listens, occasionally filling in with a few words when his own thoughts run as fast or faster than the speaker’s, but directing the conversation too. He will suddenly cut off talk on one subject. It will be like a chapter closing in a book: neat, and logical. On to the next chapter.

Obviously, he is not just my father. He is the father, in varying degrees, of everybody in the room. He is thirty-nine years old but looks younger than most of the staff. And it is plain that for them, just as for me, there is magic in the man who sits with his chair tilted back, one finger alongside his sharp nose, listening, thinking, directing the conversation as naturally as a valley directs a river through its middle. He is our father. Something in him that gives him this incredible “fatherness” which touches so many. I don’t feel jealous. Perhaps some of the staff do, just a bit. He really is my father. His blood is my blood. It makes me glad.

The first big event involving the Commission was the March on Washington. Part of the mandate which the General Board itself passed in setting up the Commission was a call to a national meeting of Christians in Washington to symbolize the concern of the whole nation. This was before there were any crystallized plans for a march. Then we began hearing about Phillip Randolph’s plans and some other plans that Martin Luther King had, so we all put together our efforts and established the March on Washington Committee. Ten sponsoring organizations participated. The major civil rights organizations, organized labor (at least one part of it), and three religious groups—the Catholic Interracial Council, the Synagogue Council of America, and our Commission on Religion and Race of the National Council of Churches. It was our deep feeling that there had to be an affirmative, positive, committed kind of demonstration involving many parts of the population of this country on behalf of civil rights in the summer of 1963. That was our only hope to prevent an open outbreak of hostility, so deep and intense was the feeling. So we set out to reach a simple goal: to get 30,000 white people into that March. And we got slightly over 40,000 out of about 250,000 to 300,000 people who marched that day.

That was our first entree, really, into what one could call the civil rights establishment in this country, that is, the NAACP, CORE, SCLC, and civil libertarian groups working with them. It is difficult to report how suspicious and how reluctant they were, how little expectation they had from the church in this whole thing. There was an unbelievable kind of cold shoulder at the beginning, because we had made so many protestations, we were so involved in pious platitudes in race relations, and we were so guilty.

In the morning, we eat breakfast at a banquet for the National Council of Churches leaders who have come to march. Afterwards, we take an elevator back upstairs to the suite. My father has an appointment with a man who is now ambassador to a small African country. A white man from the west, he is an active layman in the Congregational Church. He was appointed by John F. Kennedy after having helped elect him in the 1960 campaign.

“I had breakfast with Him,” says the ambassador. He is short and highly groomed. His blue suit must be custom-tailored and his haircut looks about an hour old. He crosses one leg over the other gingerly.

“What are they thinking about over there in the White House this morning?” asks my father. He likes to tilt back in chairs, but his eyes are brutally alert to every nuance of gesture.

“Well, Bob, I was talking to the Big Boy about that. He’s quite concerned. Quite concerned. I would say they are, ah…praying for a peaceful day. Not much else they can do until the day is over.”

“The leadership of the March Committee is with him right now.”

“Yes, I believe so, Bob.” Later a picture will come out of a smiling, tense President surrounded by civil rights leaders. Beside Kennedy, with an expression of calm foreknowledge, is King. He must have the speech tucked in his breast pocket. He knows the day will be his.

“Do you think they are willing to work with us on getting a strong bill through Congress?” my father asks.

“He’s having problems with this Congress. You know that. In any case, today is the day. It all depends on what he sees. If there is a bloodbath in the streets of the capital during his administration…you’ve probably thought of that. If there’s violence, you’re going to have some tough times on this bill.”

“At least,” says my father, “he’s going to be paying attention to today. I don’t think there’s going to be violence.” After a few more minutes of conversation, my father walks the ambassador out to the elevators. When he comes back, he shakes his head and grins a wry grin. “Big Boy? That may be a pretty accurate description of Kennedy. I hope not.” Then adds, “Come on. We have to get downstairs and form the line. You guys have to lead us.”

Steve and I stay eight feet apart so the banner will not sag. We move at the head of the ministers. It suddenly hits me that Steve is Jewish. He can’t have thought much about it as he wrestles with the bamboo pole to keep “National Council of Churches” stretched out.

STEVE (RIGHT) AND I CARRY THE BANNER AT THE MARCH ON WASHINGTON, 1963. MY FATHER AND BISHOP JULIAN SMITH ARE IN THE LEAD.

We are insignificant particles in a chain reaction that floods the streets. Everywhere signs bob amidst black and white faces. It is impossible to keep together. Some groups, mostly white, try to sing freedom songs. But the songs do not catch at all. The crowd is mostly black and moves with stiff dignity. The difference between the whites and blacks in the march is so plain and predictable it almost makes one cry, the difference which makes the march necessary in the first place. The whites are off on an adventure. With a few exceptions, these 40,000 liberals are having a mixture of catharsis and outing. For months they have watched television news full of civil rights demonstrations in the South. They have heard the strains of “We Shall Overcome” on Huntley-Brinkley reports while eating supper in their suburban living rooms. Now they come to Washington to share in the struggle by listening to black leaders, singing black songs, getting a contact high off black nightmares. At the end of the day, they will drive back north to white Chevy Chase, white Forest Hills, white Tenafly.

I am just as guilty as any of them. I am on an adventure. I have come to be with my father, to carry a banner for him. I would follow him on a hike into the Arctic Circle in support of free ice cream if that was what he wanted.

The black crowd has not come to sing. They don’t want to perform for America this afternoon in a national civil rights minstrel show. This is not a Jerry Lewis telethon for “Freedom,” even though television cameras hang out of the treetops and down into the marchers’ faces like prehistoric reptiles, bringing it all back home.

Steve and I sit down in front of the Lincoln Memorial. There are two moments this afternoon. The blacks in the crowd burst out in waves of thunder when Mahalia Jackson sings “Buked and Scorned” with tears pouring down her face. She turns the city of Washington into a hot Baptist church on a dusty Sunday street in Niggertown, Mississippi. It is almost enough. But Martin Luther King will take the day and make it his, his gift to the crowd. His Dream reaches down inside each listener’s ear, a silver lance of language piercing not only the head but into the guts, touching that invisible envelope, whatever it looks like, soul. Men weep around me. Women grab their hair and shake. Steve looks lost and we move from one foot to another, our voices shouted away.

“…let Freedom ring.” He closes each mirage with this command, which is also a warning, which is also a prayer. “…let Freedom ring.”

I have never seen Martin Luther King before. I have not been prepared. He picks me up and shakes me as if a black Andalusian bull had got his horns into my guts and was tossing me above his head. Then drops me on my feet. I am not bleeding. But I have been gored, I am open in front. The March passes away slowly, like the approaching autumn of 1963, the hundreds of thousands drifting back through the trees to buses and cars.

I remember the March as one of the great events of my life. When we stepped off the curb onto Constitution Avenue and startedtoward the Lincoln Memorial, I glanced around me and saw under the banner of the National Council of Churches 200 of the leaders of Protestantism—Ralph Sockman right behind me—and every name off the cover of the Christian Century for the last two decades. As we got into the middle of that crowd and started down Constitution Avenue, I felt for the first time in my ministry that the church was where it belonged, in the middle of the street. There was an eschatological feeling about the whole day. It was very unreal, because everyone knew this was an affirmation of determination. By this event we were inescapably committed to move beyond acquiescence in present conditions.

ON THE STEPS OF THE LINCOLN MEMORIAL.

I get out of bed on a Sunday morning not long after the March. It is past noon. Downstairs I can hear my father’s voice. He must be talking on the telephone. His voice sounds angry. I know Sunday mornings in this house in Tenafly and something is going on out of the ordinary today.

“Yes. I already talked to somebody at the Justice Department,” he says into the phone. I walk past him to get some orange juice out of the refrigerator. He is still in his pajamas and robe, sitting on the edge of the formica table. “Sure, a telegram is okay. And we have to get a large delegation down there for the funeral. But I want federal protection there. Yes, I have the number of somebody closer to Bobby.”

I walk into the living room. I have rarely seen my father so upset. The fat package of The New York Times sits untouched on the seat of our red armchair. The television is running, with the sound turned down—one of those interview shows with some government official and three reporters. My father hangs up in the kitchen.

“What’s happening, Dad?”

“They bombed a church in Birmingham, Alabama, this morning. Killed four little girls in the Sunday school.”

“What?”

“It’s unbelievable, isn’t it? I called the Justice Department this morning and told them if we can protect three-quarters of the world from communism, we ought to be able to protect a Sunday school from being bombed in Alabama.”

“Have they caught anyone?”

“No. And they won’t. There is a riot going on down there now. God only knows how many are going to die today. The President has got to step in. They have to put more FBI from the North down there. The FBI in the South are racists like anybody else.”

“Four little girls? That’s incredible.”

“Isn’t it sickening?” He sits down. “I don’t know if I should go down or send someone else and organize. King will be going there. Right now we have to build a national coalition of all the local churches. When something like this happens, we have to be right there to put pressure on the government. Otherwise nothing is going to change.”

On the television, there is suddenly a special news bulletin. “Turn it up,” my father says. Then a series of still photographs of the bombed-out church, the frantic congregation being fired on by the Birmingham police, the bodies being hauled on stretchers past wailing women, police chasing a black man up the street with his shirt ripped and their clubs raised high over their heads. The newscaster says another Negro has died, killed by a shotgun blast from the police. My stomach is knotted. I am disgusted and furious. I look at my father and remember the night of the March. There was a celebration thrown in the Mayflower suite for many of the leaders. I was introduced to Floyd McKissick, who spoke for CORE at the March. “This is Bob Spike’s son.”

“You Bob Spike’s son?” he asked, leaning toward me, obviously a little high and full of the afterglow from that afternoon.

“Yes.”

“I hope you know you got a great daddy. Your daddy is a great man. If it weren’t for him, hardly none of these white folks would have marched today.”

My father is looking at a photograph of a Birmingham cop slugging a young black in the neck with his truncheon. He lets the air out of his mouth in a hiss. “Would you look at that son of a bitch!”

“I’d like to kill that cop,” I say. My father says nothing. I have never seen him so disturbed.

“I’m going to call the Justice Department again,” he says and gets up.

“What are you going to say?”

“I don’t know.” The sound of his finger dialing. Then he says, “I’m going to tell them the Protestant churches in this country are finished ignoring the lynchings and bombings in the South. If they don’t do something about them, the Protestant churches are going to find somebody who will in the next election.

My father was a gentle man who filled people with strength. His early biography might be something out of Horatio Alger.

He was born in 1923 and grew up on a farm in upstate New York in that stretch of harsh terrain and gravel-bottomed lakes which runs from Rochester to Buffalo. From the beginning, he was an exceptional child, especially in school. His high school record was flawless, after having skipped two grades in elementary school. In his senior year, he set a record on the New York Regents’ Exams and won a scholarship to Denison University in Ohio. Besides being a top student, he was regarded as one of the most remarkable and promising young men ever to have passed through his local Baptist church.

His mother, Lucy Spike, was a former schoolteacher and a loyal Baptist. She began taking her son Bob to church from infancy. Lucy did not allow or approve of smoking, drinking or cards. She was a little round woman in spectacles who could be sweeter than honey to a grandchild. I remember the summers that I spent in her Rochester house as the best of my childhood.

As soon as I arrived, she would take down a huge jar of pennies which she had been saving all year and we would roll them up, then take them to the bank and exchange them for spending cash. The best part came after we got off the bus in downtown Rochester. I was free to go through the toy departments of all the local stores and spend every last penny on whatever toys caught my eye. It was almost better than Christmas. But a grandchild’s memories are not a child’s. I know my father lived his childhood under her strong influence and then spent years breaking away from it. And, from what I have heard, my grandfather spent much of his life pushing his wife away.

Warren Spike was gassed in the trenches of France during World War I. He returned alive, but with his face a red map of exposed veins and capillaries. The German gas gave him an incurable skin condition and blood disease which, while it wasn’t fatal, left him looking flushed and furious for the rest of his life. Sad, for the rest of his life would too often justify his angry face.

My grandfather moved from disappointment to disappointment, failure to failure. He began as a farmer and ended as a salesman for furniture with built-in massage vibrators. He kept his failures stored inside. They dissolved into a bitter acid which rarely leaked out, for he was not a talkative man. On those summers when I visited Rochester, when he touched me, I felt the uneasiness and confusion in his fingers. He would tenderly show me his beautiful garden and suddenly, in the middle of a row of flowers, walk away and into the house without a word. He loved to hunt and fish and care for his dogs. He treated each dog he owned like a son.

One afternoon in her kitchen, my grandmother turned from her baking and began to tell me about how my grandfather had beaten my father when he was a boy. I was six on this afternoon. I remember she told me in vivid detail of how Grandpa had stripped off my father’s pants and whipped him with a special leather strap until the blood poured down his naked legs. She told me she screamed and pleaded with him to stop. “Your father was a good boy. But if he was just a little naughty, Grandpa would whip him.”

My father told his best friend, who later told me, that when he was about two years old, he suddenly felt his father stop loving him. He could remember the feeling clearly. Utterly, completely, the love was taken away. What failure or disappointment in Warren Spike’s life made him withdraw his love from his oldest son, I do not know. But my father grew up without a father’s love, knowing that nothing he could do would win it back.

Lucy Spike had enough love and enough visions to shelter him, to keep him alive, to drive him to straight A’s and Denison. Her real vision was of her son Bob in the pulpit. He majored in philosophy in college, joined a fraternity, acted in college plays, and kept active in the Baptist Church. When he graduated—Phi Beta Kappa, the whole bundle of college honors—he decided to return to upstate New York and the Colgate-Rochester Divinity School. He was ordained in 1945 and shortly afterwards he married my mother.

They had met at Denison. She was from Arlington, Virginia, the daughter of a government scientist and a schoolteacher mother. My mother was not what my grandmother probably saw in her visions of a wife for Bob. She was outspoken, vivacious, very bright and independent, with a zany sense of humor. She smoked, drank and played bridge. She wanted children, but she wanted her own life, to be more than a minister’s wife serving coffee to the church women’s society and ironing his clerical collars. Marrying my mother was probably my father’s first step toward total independence. It was a rejection of his mother not only in classical Freudian terms, but in terms of the basic facts of the situation. In college, my father’s thought had already moved far beyond the Baptist theology of his childhood. By the time he was ordained and out of seminary, he had developed his own kind of pragmatic Christian existentialism, very much directed at the sociological mission of the Christian church, based heavily on his understanding of Niebuhr, Tillich, Barth and Kierkegaard. Many years later at the March he would feel, “for the first time in my ministry… the church was where it belonged, in the middle of the street.”

His ministry is best seen in four chronological parts. He was minister of the Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village from the late forties until 1955. He left this pulpit to become a church executive for the Congregationalist Church, now the United Church of Christ. There he served for eight years before going to direct the Commission on Religion and Race in the summer of 1963.

The final section of his career began in 1966 when he went to the University of Chicago as a professor and administrator.

Written above, the four parts of his ministry lie upon the page like four spoons on a bare table. But each was full of substance, each was electric.

His beginning, at the Judson Church, was crucial. Here he changed himself, as he changed Judson, from a conservative Baptist into a modern pioneer in the wilderness of postwar American society. I think it was at Judson that he felt for the first time the injustice deeply engrained in our society and felt his own nature respond to it with an urgent need for change. He became a rebel, on his way to becoming a revolutionary. He was one of the most radical ministers in the American church. He was blessed with not only radical ideas and imagination, but a sense of how to change things.

Judson had once been the most fashionable church in New York, back in the days when Henry James was writing about Washington Square. But by the late 1940s, the huge Stanford White-designed brick building was a relic without congregation or program, a dead property in the midst of an Italian ghetto sprawling with life. At the time of his arrival, one of the biggest problems in the Village, as in every part of New York City, was the teenage gangs that were making war on one another and anyone who happened to wander into the middle of their turf. This was one of the two chief annoyances for the neighborhood Italians, who liked to run their lives in quiet, secretive order. The other was the presence of some of the most unhappy but brilliant men and women in the country. These were the artists and writers, the would-be artists, and the self-proclaimed bohemians who lived in the cheap tenements and drank in the local bars. When my father arrived at Judson, he looked around the community to see where his congregation would come from and where his ministry must go. For the most part, it was a question of the ministry going outside the church. His congregation, he felt, consisted of the gangs and the bohemians, along with a small but active group of young people recently out of college who were drifting around on the fringes of the Village. These people weren’t sure if they believed in God, but they came to believe in the Judson Church.

There were several youth programs connected to other churches in the Village, but they all barred any gang members or troublemakers from entering. The people who most needed a place to get off the street were the last ones to find a place. In the basement of Judson was a large gymnasium, several locker rooms, and about seven meeting rooms. These were turned into the Judson Center and thrown open to any kids in the neighborhood who wanted to come. In a few weeks, the toughest kids in the Village, all of them Italian and Roman Catholic, were members of the Center. They called him Spike. They gradually came to trust him with everything.

We—my mother, brother and I—lived behind the church on Thompson Street. I remember many mornings when my father would dress in his clerical collar, usually worn only on Sunday mornings. I would ask him why he was getting dressed up.

“I have to go to court. Vinnie is going on trial today.” It could be Vinnie, Tony, Al, or Rocco. It got so his clerical collar stopped meaning Sunday morning to me but instead meant he was on his way to court. Eventually he was such a familiar face in the youth courts, they asked him if he would be interested in serving as Protestant Chaplain of Youth House. This is the prison for New York boys awaiting trial or sentencing. For the next several years, he got up early every Sunday morning and went to hold a service and talk individually with kids in Youth House.

Most of the boys he dealt with were black, because the gangs of Harlem and Brooklyn were made up of black Baptists and other Protestant boys who gave themselves names like The Deacons or The Chaplains or The Bishops. My father had already spent one summer living and working in Harlem during seminary. He formed friendships with some of the toughest leaders of these gangs. Though he was white, they often asked him to go into court with them. Later on in the fifties, when gangs suddenly became a kind of national craze for a few years thanks to movies like The Wild Ones and Blackboard Jungle, Life Magazine ran a series of memoirs by a warlord of one of the Harlem gangs named Churchy. My father happened to look over my shoulder as I was devouring this piece with great interest.

“I knew him,” he said.

“You did? Do you want to read this?”

“I don’t think so. I think I know too much about it already.”

The other day, I heard my father’s voice for the first time in six years. It was only a tape, but suddenly I felt my own strength shift inside me at the sound. He lived in his words and spent most of his life talking to people. That was chiefly how he ministered to them. After he left Judson and went to the office of the Congregationalist Church, he began to travel all over the country, preach in hundreds of churches, talk to thousands of ministers, laymen, people on airplanes, everyone. His congregation became a group of men and women stretched across America who only had him in common. After he died, hundreds of letters came to our house saying, “Bob Spike was my minister. He changed my life.” Writing this is almost embarrassing. It sounds like schmaltz. My father detested sentimental eulogizing. Knee deep in confusion in America, it seems almost impossible to write about a man like my father. He does not seem like a modern hero but someone out of a book written in the early part of the century. On the other hand, when the total story of his life is recalled, he is as typical of the sixties as any man was. Impossible as it sounds, my father could heal people just by talking to them. He was a man who believed in his own “soul,” who helped other people believe in theirs: government people in Washington, students in Harlem, people who worked in the White House and people who worked in the White Tower hamburger stand. There were hundreds of members in his congregation.

In his calm voice, he would lay out reasonable views of the world in such crystal-clear visions that you couldn’t help feeling hopeful. Even though some of his visions were highly critical, almost despairing, of the future of this country, and the church’s place, he never talked as a minister or church leader or even father. It was as Bob Spike, a man who combined all three roles but made them his own. He would lend you his faith in things as things were. He didn’t paint heavenly pictures in the air but pinned down reality in each moment, “in the middle of the street.”

He liked to laugh at himself and to sit over a drink and trade stories. Dirty jokes were okay and so was profanity. I never saw my father shocked by language, and by only one movie—The Ten Commandments. What did shock him was cruelty and injustice, hypocrisy and betrayal.

As I grew up, I often asked him questions about religion and the Bible, which I loved to read. But he never forced any religion on either me or my brother. We both were baptized and confirmed. But he trained me himself at home for the latter and I was confirmed at Judson Church in the Village, though we were living, by then, in Tenafly. We rarely went to church in the suburbs. There weren’t any that he really felt comfortable in near our house. Most Sundays, anyway, he was off preaching somewhere around the country. I began to wonder if I was an atheist when I was about eleven. I asked my father why he believed in God.

“When things get hectic or very troubled, I have this thing I feel. I suppose I call this God. It is just a feeling, very mysterious but I get it, which I can rest inside, feel safe inside. I rest in this feeling of ‘God.’”

In his book The Freedom Revolution and the Churches, he wrote:

The whole human race is encamped once again by the Red Sea. Will it be engulfed by the terrible forces that the clever shamans have let loose—destructive hydrogen bombs, or mechanically clever devices to enslave the whole race to idleness? The human spirit is aching with anxiety about the future. And, in addition, some parts of the human family are still kept in slavery because of their color. I believe that the God of our Fathers will deliver us.

So do I. At least, I believe the God of my father will.

My father delivers me to Keaton in late September. When he drives away in his little cream-colored Morris Minor, I stand on the curb and wave good-bye like a good scout. In fact, I am curious about what will happen next. In hours, I find that I have jumped right into a combination New England prep school (with all the pretensions but none of the qualities) and West Point military academy (with both the pretensions and the qualities). As a new boy, I have to spend two ridiculous weeks under New Boy Rules, which are a kind of martial law administered by the senior class. I must doff my blue and gold beanie at all the seniors, always wear one blue and one gold sock, a blue and gold bowtie, and recite cheers and fight songs for any upper classmen who request it. I have come to accomplish one thing: get the grades to get into Harvard. But I quickly see that Keaton is in business not just to educate but to mold character. I like mine the way it is, and so do my parents, but that is hardly relevant. The next year becomes a struggle to shut up and study.

Built around a grassy quad, the brick buildings of Keaton are square and plain, not ugly but not attractive. Most monstrous of them all is Smyth Hall, an enormous building in which about half the four hundred students are housed, along with the vast dining hall and the “butt lounge,” which is the only area where boys sixteen and over, with parents’ permission, are allowed to smoke. The rest of the campus is built on a thin crust of dry land floating over the marshes of eastern Pennsylvania. There is a mudhole called Tom’s Lake and a nine-hole golf course used by the golf team, faculty, and God only knows who else. It is off-limits to most of the students. The focal point of the campus, at the south end of the quad, is the Baptist chapel with its white steeple and new, redbrick walls.

True, I love to read the Bible. But not for the religion in it. I read it like a novel, especially the Gospels, and look at Christ as a rebel-hero to identify with, to weep over at his Crucifixion, but not to worship. Any kind of worship leaves me feeling self-conscious and uncomfortable. I know my father may be leading the prayer, all heads are bowed, yet I stare around the room looking at people for my own interests. Whose lips are moving? Who else doesn’t close his eyes? Now at Keaton we go into the chapel five times a week for worship. Four days during the school week we have chapel, in which local ministers, from fundamentalists to liberals, come and deliver short homilies to the boys. There is Convocation one Sunday a month. Other Sundays we go to local churches in Coaltown. Worship abounds. Yet nobody, not the teachers or the students, seems to take it seriously. In fact, Keaton is no more Christian than the most public of public schools.

Keaton is run by bells, not God. A bell wakes me up. A bell orders me to sleep. The first step is learning to cheat the bells.

When the wake-up sounds shortly before seven, I burrow my head under the pillow and continue sleeping. Not until the warning bell for breakfast do I jump up, dive into my clothes, and run across a hundred yards of quad, trying to tie my tie as I sprint. Up the stairs, getting the knot to my throat just in time to melt through the door with the last bit of crowd and into the dining hall. Nothing can adequately describe the sinking feeling, the depression, which hits you in the face as you enter this vast warehouse for eating first thing in the morning. Like a prison or an army camp, the tables are lined up across the wide interior for hundreds of boys to stand and wait through Grace so that they can explode into a thunder of scraping chairs. Then wait for the master—as every teacher must be called—to pass out the tubs of soggy cereal and greasy eggs.

I try to think of nothing. Not the day that is just beginning. Not the day passed. Not the night nor the weekend nor the next vacation. One tries to survive by blanking out all thoughts which do not go with the bells.

In public high school in the suburbs, I felt a hidden fascism underneath all the glittering new equipment, the student council elections, and the bullshit about democracy and school spirit. At prep school, I have to admit, I finally have found overt conditions that beg, absolutely beg to be rebelled against. Yet the joke is on me, for I have come to Keaton of my own free will. In fact, I have asked my parents to send me away and they are paying several thousand dollars for the right to experience a totalitarian education where nothing is subtle or hidden, everything as overt as the greenish brack that floats atop Tom’s Lake.

The school is run on an ingenious foundation called the Credit and Demerit System. Every possible instance of misbehavior that could occur, from missing the first two minutes of breakfast to being caught drunk and in your skivvies on the roof of the chapel, has already been assigned a value in credits and demerits. Each boy is given one hundred credits. If he is late to a class, he can lose five. If he is caught smoking in his room, he can lose a considerable bit more. Losing credits is called a sting.

“I’m going to sting you ten for that.”

Or, “Consider yourself stung.” Keaton is a hive of stinging Wasps. The masters rely on a group of student turnkeys known as monitors to do most of the stinging. Each morning a sting sheet is posted outside the Dean’s office with yesterday’s stings listed on it. In the basement, one’s credit rating is posted every week. If it dips below seventy, you are put on campus. This means the loss of all privileges, including the right to take a stroll around the dingy streets of Coaltown with its several gas stations, one diner, one stationery store and two groceries.

In any case, with all this stinging going on, it would be absolutely unlivable if it were not for that great institution known as The Bribe. The monitors (not all but a good many of them) will accept money in return for turning the other way should you want to buy your way out of a week of breakfasts, a month of work programs. The masters must know about all this, but free enterprise prevails.

I, through some luck and some fast talking, end up as a junior in one of the smaller dorms reserved for seniors. I have a small, single room with a window that looks out on Tom’s Lake. There is also a fireplace which it is completely forbidden to use, but up which I blow the smoke from my illegal cigarettes in the winter.

I must teach myself how to study. I have never really studied since my first year in junior high school. At Keaton, there is five times the amount of homework as in the suburbs. And it becomes quickly clear that most of this study means old-fashioned memorization. The more I memorize, the better grades I receive. That is how life goes, like a jack-hammer, a continual series of stings and grades, facts and bells, a routine as mechanical as possible.

My problem is, however, glaringly obvious to the masters. While I am a good student and do not get in disciplinary trouble, it is clear that I have the wrong attitude. So long as my grades and credit rating are kept up, they will tolerate me at Keaton. But should I slip, should I lose a little control in either area, they will waste no time in sending me home, expelled, tuition nonrefundable. Keaton expels a huge quantity of boys each term.

But in its harsh way, the school is fair. At public school, I often found my grades much lower than I had expected because of some mysterious thing called class participation upon which a teacher could base anything and grade you off for it. Here, if a teacher doesn’t like you, your grades will not suffer. You get what you deserve. He will take out his displeasure in other ways, on the sting sheet or by making your life generally miserable.

All this talk of grades! But that is Keaton’s most important product. Parents pay money so their boys will get good grades and eventually barter them for an admission to a good college. Life is simple. Life is preparing to live. Perhaps once in college, life will cease being a preparation and begin being a life.

We’re sitting in Zeke’s room. It is mid-morning and we’re cutting chapel, having bribed our way out. We sit and smoke. “I would really like the rest of the day off. I’m tired from staying up all night writing that report,” I say.

“I know,” he nods. Zeke is my best friend at Keaton. He is built like a bear and lumbers across the lawn. With his brown hair messy and his spectacles sitting on a pug nose, he makes quite a sight in the bib overalls and wool shirt he wears when it is free time and he can climb out of the regulation jacket and tie.

Zeke is sitting on his bed leaning against the wall, and picking a guitar. He sings cowboy songs like Jack Elliot but doesn’t really want to be a folksinger like my friend Steve. Zeke wants to be a painter. Zeke is not his real name, either. He gave it to himself as a kind of present when he arrived at Keaton.

“Your father’s going to speak next weekend, isn’t he?” he says.

“Yeah.”

“You’re lucky, Spike.”

“Why?”

“Your father. My father is messed up.” Lucky? I don’t say anything. I know it’s true. Keaton is driving into winter. Already the snow has fallen over the brick dormitories like wads of boiled notebook paper. Zeke is going to get thrown out of Keaton.

He is very smart. There are even rumors floating around about how his I.Q. is the highest in the school. But each day he performs an act. Zeke plays the role of a country hick somehow enrolled in a sophisticated Eastern prep school. He is unable to understand more than the most perfunctory instructions. He refuses to study. On the weekends, parents and visitors look aghast at this young farmer who wanders around the campus in his overalls. The rest of the preppies either ignore or else try to bait or abuse him. He is too spaced out to pay any attention. At night, just before lights out, he takes off his farmer’s outfit and gets back into his tweed sportcoat and khaki slacks. Then knots his rep tie, turns off the light, and falls on his bed. That is how he sleeps, using the prep school uniform for his pajamas. So that in the morning when he comes into the huge dining hall rubbing his eyes, on the verge of being late, it is obvious that he has just gotten out of bed. His jacket and tie are incredibly rumpled and creased. He is like a six foot two inch Charlie Chaplin stumbling into breakfast.

“Did you do the assignment for Turner?”

“Bullshit,” he says.

“You want to copy mine?”

“Okay.” I give it to him. He takes out his notebook, filled with sketches and cartoons, and finds a clean page. Turner is an ex-Marine who teaches us history, though in different sections, and who absolutely hates Zeke.

“You know,” he says to me, “you ought to tell your old man about Wechsler’s speech.”

“I already did. On the phone.” Wechsler is the master in charge of Zeke’s floor. He claims to be a graduate of Yale and Annapolis, a world traveler, a bon vivant from Vermont who now teaches at Keaton. The March on Washington and the Birmingham bombings have not won America over to civil rights just like that. The fall of 1963 sees the invention of the white backlash. Throughout the country, not only in the South, resentment against black demonstrators is growing like a malignant disease. Some of it is the raw sewage of hatred. Other kinds are more careful and respectable. Wechsler requested from the administration a special assembly one afternoon (during a time period reserved for such rare occasions) in which he wanted to present some other aspects of the civil rights problem. Nobody quite knew what to expect and Wechsler had blown himself up to be quite a scholar so we all were required to attend. Whereupon, Mr. Wechsler pulls out a speech that is the result of his own private research and clippings, proving he claims, the genetic inferiority of Negroes. Unreal. It leaves most of the four hundred Keaton students bored. Who listens to assembly speakers anyway? A few of the younger faculty are appalled. And the five or six Negro students sit with dazed expressions. As if they have been beaten with pillows. One can only imagine what worm of hatred feeds on Wechsler’s speech in their minds.

“Wechsler blew it with that speech,” I say.

“A complete prick.”

“Total racist. Those statistics were as phony as a three-dollar bill.”

“Introduce your father to him,” says Zeke.

“I hope I get the chance.” I pick up the guitar and take a few token strums on it.

“What do you think would happen if I introduced your father and my father?” I ask Zeke.

He looks up. “Jeez, are you kidding? They’d both get so uptight they’d pop their skulls.”

“I guess so.” His father is a highly successful businessman with a huge company.

“My father told me he wants to be a millionaire in five years. That’s what he said. Can you imagine that?”

“Being a millionaire wouldn’t be so bad,” I say. I am thinking that in five minutes I will have to get up and run to class. “Christ, I feel like cutting the rest of the day.”

“Maybe we should try the Infirmary,” he says.

“I’ve never been in there yet.”

“Good. A point in your favor. I was there in the beginning.”

“What’s it like?”

“Boring. But you can sleep all you want. And the food is a little better. We could tell them…or you could tell them you have the runs. That would get you in for a day. Especially if you work up a little fever.”

“What about you? I don’t feel like going to the Infirmary by myself.”

“I’ll tell them I have pains in my back.”

“Not bad.” I smile.

“Out of sight. They’ll never go for it but it’s definitely worth a try.” He stands up and reaches for his sadly abused gray tweed hanging off the doorknob.

“If they do, a little vacation wouldn’t hurt. I could dig about twenty-four hours of total sleep.”

“Okay. I’ll try first.”

I wish him luck. In a few minutes, I see him through the window trudging out of Smyth Hall in the direction of the Infirmary. A couple of times he rubs his back. Already putting on a show, in case the nurse may be staring out the window with nothing to do this morning. Suddenly Zeke falls down on the concrete path and begins to writhe. Both hands clutch at the small of his back as if there was a small animal biting him. For a minute of pure craziness, Zeke rolls around on the ground alone, acting, but not acting. I can see that the act has taken possession of him and he is lost in a seizure of mad energy. I’m sure the nurse is missing this. Good thing, she would probably send him straight to a psychiatrist. Only I am watching his performance, his fit of Keaton Spirit. They are always talking about the Keaton Spirit. Now here is a boy who really has it.

Far away beyond the row of chestnut trees, big columns of the main classroom building obscure the little Infirmary. Zeke is up and on his feet again, moving toward this target. He mounts the three steps and disappears. I look at my watch. If he is inside for twenty-five minutes, then I will get up and leave his room and go launch my own act. This is tricky, for chapel is almost over. If I wait twenty-five minutes, I will definitely have to go to the Infirmary or else be accused of cutting my English class without an excuse. The Infirmary will write down exactly what time I arrived. So there will be about fifteen minutes of unaccounted time. I will say I was in the bathroom. Nine minutes have now gone by.

The bearlike figure in the rumpled clothes appears on top of the steps of the Infirmary. He walks down, then breaks into a trot back to the dormitory just as the bell rings from the top of the chapel. No luck this morning.

There are two classes after lunch. Zeke has his American history with Turner and I have geometry. Math is my weakest subject and I doze while formulas are run. The bell rings, I yawn and hoist my books.

A strange buzz in the hallways. I leave the building and head toward the library across the quad. History is in a classroom on the second floor. Zeke and I usually pass each other going in opposite directions. On the lawn someone says, “Kennedy was shot.”

“What?”

Several people turn and look at the boy. He keeps walking. Another instance of Keaton Spirit, I think. Every day there is a new rumor, a new secret expression or a new way of giving the finger to the masters behind their backs. “That’s what I heard too in Higgins’ class,” says another.

“The President was shot?” There are about sixty boys crisscrossing on the lawn. At the south end, to my left, the chapel pokes its white needle into the afternoon sky. Looks like an advertisement for prep school, I think. The sky is full of mashed potato clouds and royal blue gravy. The sun blinks in and out of the cumulus. Here comes Zeke making an end run around a line of football players. They laugh at him when he passes. His ragged notebook drips out of one hand and the other is buried in his pocket. He looks sad.

“How was the drill sergeant?” I ask.

“Off the wall. As usual.” We stop for a second.

“You going to gym?”

“No. She gave me a gym excuse at the Infirmary.”

“So at least you got that.”

“We better hurry. The bell is about to ring.” I nod and run. I am thinking about this rumor as I hurry into the classroom. The big blond conference table is full. But Turner is not in his seat. I sit down and get my notebook arranged. There is a good possibility of a surprise quiz today, I think. Everyone is chattering.

“O’Brien came into our room and asked Mr. Hurst if he had heard about it.”

“…Dallas.”

“What a piece of bullshit.”

“Got to be a rumor, Santini. No way.”

Turner steps in the door. “All right, everybody shut up! Are you all talking about this rumor? Does anybody have any facts besides this scuttlebutt?”

Roy Sanders raises his hand and Turner nods. “Sir, Mr. O’Brien came into our class and said it was true.”

“What was true?”

“The President was shot, sir.” This is a Keaton fact. If another master has openly stated something, it cannot be quickly dismissed without an investigation.

“I frankly don’t believe it,” says Turner. “Mr. Wechsler and I were just told the same by a couple of students. If this is a rumor, a perverted mind thought it up. I don’t know about you guys.”

“Sir? Why don’t you send somebody upstairs to turn on the television?” It is Rick Hiller, a star on the lacrosse team which Turner coaches.

“What’s the matter, Rick? You missing your favorite cartoons?”

“I just thought if the President was shot…it would be on the tube. That’s all, sir.” Turner stares at him and mulls this idea over.

“Maybe so. Okay, Rick. Let’s everybody go up and turn on the television in the lecture hall. Bring your notebooks. If this rumor isn’t true, you can all take your quiz upstairs.” He twists the word quiz like a dull knife. Half the class, the half which didn’t do last night’s assignment, moans. “Quiz?”

Upstairs, he switches on the lights in the back of the room. Rick turns on the television.

“Nice idea Rick. You prick!”

“Way to go, Ricky boy.” They blame him for the quiz.

“Why don’t you get Captain Kangaroo, your favorite show, you stupid cunt!”

“Fuck off, you guys,” says Rick. The television begins to hum. Still no light on the mud-colored screen.

“Turner really eats the bird,” a guy on my right whispers.

“Everybody shut up!” shouts Turner from the back. The hum of the electronic gear in the console jells into a voice. A frantic voice in Dallas. It nails the confusion of the boys. Everybody shuts up. Turner catches the tone and walks to the front to stand beside the television with his arms limp. I can see a tiny edge of sweat below the line of his crewcut bristles. The screen fills with an unrecognizable picture. Much later I know this is Dealey Plaza, empty. The room is cold and quiet. Only the flickering box has any heat. Wechsler appears at the door and leads his class silently into the room. Several boys sit with looks of relief on their faces. Thank God, they think. The President was shot. No quiz today.

I talk to my mother on the phone. “Where’s Dad?”

“He’s in Washington. He called this afternoon.”

“They might let us all go home.”

“When?” she asks.

“They probably won’t. What’s wrong with this country? It’s going crazy.”

“I know it,” says my mother.

On Saturday night at Keaton, there is no place to go except the butt lounge, the little snackbar or the lousy movie.

In keeping with its religious tradition, anyone caught drinking is liable for expulsion on the spot. If you go out for lunch with your parents on a day leave and have a sip of your father’s martini and a master smells alcohol on your breath when you return, it’s all over. I think they like to expel people. It keeps the budget balanced.

Zeke and I discover the pleasures of a bottle of thick cough medicine gulped on an empty stomach. Half-drunk, half-drugged, you tend to fall down a lot and mostly want to lie on your bed and listen to music. Then Zeke and I read about people who are getting high on morning glory seeds. I remember my grandfather showing me his morning glories in the Rochester garden. We go to the local hardware store and find they have stocked just the kind that makes you high: Heavenly Blue. I decide I don’t want to trip. I am afraid to lose control. I have fitted my mind into harness and the fit is tight, the harness weak. I still want to go to a good college and to get out in June, not in the middle of a term. I am a robot in tweed and necktie.

Zeke grinds up packets of morning glory seeds and washes down the foul-tasting powder with orange juice. In an hour, he is hallucinating. He lies on his bed and watches the gyrating flame of a small candle which he has put inside one of his wire sculptures. This throws eerie shadows on the walls of the room. I have drunk some cough medicine.

Later that night, I am awakened at four o’clock when a flashlight zaps me in my sleeping face. It combs the room.

“Is Zeke here?”

“No.”

“He’s out of his room. We’re looking for him.” The master closes the door and I listen to him walk down the steps and outside my dorm.

I am worried. Tom’s Lake sits outside in the darkness. Last year a boy, the most sensitive boy in the school, who wrote poetry and was into drugs, was found floating face down in Tom’s Lake. His blood was choked with barbiturates. I don’t want them to find Zeke floating in four inches of water. A few more months and we can be out of this place. We can be friends in a world without bells. I love Zeke. I have never had a friend I felt so close to before, whom I could talk to so easily, who understood me, both my strengths and my weaknesses.

Most everyone at school despises him. More seem to like me. Very strange, for Zeke is quiet and gentle and never says a hostile word to anybody. But I am continually blasting, bitching and moaning, possessed of a nasty cynical streak. I cut people down to their face, behind their backs, from left and right. I never let up the flow of insults hurled at Keaton. If I must be here—and I know I must for I have put myself here—I will fight it tooth and nail, while trying to ride it out for a year and the grades.

One afternoon after one of my caustic tirades against the school, Zeke looks up and says, “I want to teach you how to be nice.” He stares at me through his glasses, not angry but with seriousness. I know exactly what he means and for a moment, I feel tears building.

Four hundred boys stuck together in this school and everyone is afraid of being queer. There is a lot of talk about it. Who do you think on the faculty is queer? Who among the students? And each boy wondering, “Am I queer?” I know I love Zeke. And I worry. Yet I have no desire to touch him sexually. No fantasies about his cock or anything of the sort. Yet I know that there are nights I would just like to lie in bed beside him, not even hugging. Just to sleep next to my friend all night would be enough. This is the first year I have ever lived away from home and I am very lonely. No good thinking of that. Must make my mind a blank and get those grades…

The next morning, I find Zeke before breakfast. “Where were you?”

“Walking around. I was having a great time on the seeds. Couldn’t stay in this room. Went out to walk. Wechsler came into my room about five minutes after I got back. They went to your room, huh?”

“What’s going to happen?” I ask.

“What do you think?”

“Mr. Wechsler, I’d like to introduce you to my father.” They shake hands. Almost at once, Wechsler himself brings up the speech he has given. He knows my father works in the civil rights movement. The lounge is filled with mothers and fathers down for Parents’ Day. A table is covered with cookies and punch, big red bowls of the same stuff we drink with meals and call bug juice. Now they have slices of fruit floating in it. The walls and ceiling are festooned with blue and gold decorations. Wechsler is here with his girlfriend. A tall girl with long hair and long legs, she looks like a Vassar or Wellesley caricature. Each weekend he has her down. Nobody among the students is yet sure if they sleep together all night in his dorm apartment. Many investigations have been launched to garner this information, but so far he has evaded them all.

“Dr. Spike, take for example this law about segregated bathrooms in the South. People are making such a big protest about this. They want to make this illegal with the Civil Rights Bill.”

“Yes?” says my father. A faint smile flickers just beneath the surface of my father’s face.

“You’re a learned man, Dr. Spike. You have to respect the statistics. And the statistics show the necessity for segregated bathrooms.” Wechsler is smoking a cigarette in a very pompous way. His girlfriend is watching him carefully, with big eyes. My mother looks as if she wants to punch him. And I am waiting for my father’s move. I hope he gets Wechsler, I really do.

“Which statistics are those?” he asks.

“Statistics about venereal disease in this country. The rate among Negroes is at least three times as high as among white people.” Wechsler can hardly resist a big grin. He probably has the clippings with this statistic upstairs in a manila envelope labeled “Negroes.” He senses he is on the verge of triumph. At last! The chance to put one of these civil rights liberals straight.

“You’re also a learned man, Mr. Wechsler,” says my father. “I guess you’ve been around quite a bit too.” Wechsler nods. Is my father conceding, surrendering?

“Yes,” says Wechsler.

“Don’t you know where you get venereal disease?”

“What do you mean?”

“Not on toilet seats, Mr. Wechsler.” This hits the mark to bring a red blush over Wechsler’s face. He doesn’t know what to say. His girl is watching him. My father smiles. I am thinking, “You racist, you got what you deserve.” The conversation dies right there and the master and his girl melt away to the far side of the room.

“Thanks, Dad.”

They expel Zeke. The final straw comes at dinner one evening. A master named Mr. Fendler has the job of saying grace before meals. Fendler is an obnoxious little man. He hangs around the wrestlers and most everyone agrees he is a queer. Fendler likes to write very elaborate, original graces. They begin with openings like “Lord, Almighty God, watch over this room full of young lions as they prepare to break bread…” He imposes this on a room full of starving people for five or six minutes at a clip. Finally one night he has a grace which is based on his feeling that things have been getting out of hand lately around the school. Several seniors have just been caught drinking, some others have been caught stealing exams. Fendler’s grace begins: “Lord, most Almighty God in Heaven and on earth, you have given these boys a sack of gold. Now they turn around and treat it like a bag full of bent pennies…” His masterpiece goes on for eight minutes. At its conclusion, everyone groans and sits down in a din to eat supper. Except Zeke. He remains on his feet and gives Fendler one minute of standing ovation for his grace.

The next afternoon the Dean comes to his table in the middle of a tunafish salad lunch. Zeke follows him out. His father is waiting outside in the empty hall.

“Dad?”

“Let’s just get your stuff,” says his father. For an instant, Zeke thinks his father has come to rescue him. But the Dean’s bloated expression tells him the truth.

We ride a bus through the early evening traffic on the thruway to a small city. The school is on top of a little hill in a residential area. I ask someone, “What are they like at Plum Hill?”

“You mean Prostitute Hill?”

“Cherry Hill,” corrects somebody else. “Mostly pigs. One girl last year looked pretty hot. Carson was supposed to have planked her in the bathroom.” Maybe you can get venereal disease on a toilet seat?

“I had a boss chick last year,” says a guy in front. Seems to be a group of dance regulars. Maybe fifteen guys. They fancy themselves studs. The rest have less experience. This is my first prep school dance.

It is being held in the library. Everything has been done to disguise the books and make this place pulse with Christmas cheer. Red and green everywhere. The girls cling together, party dresses and high heels for all. Tons of makeup. “Check the one by the globe, in the corner,” says a guy I know named Jim. I locate the girl. She is cute, a gumdrop face, soft brown hair cupping a dazed, expressionless stare. She is a dormitory fantasy, a Keaton antidote.

“She’s pretty.”

“You can have her friend,” he says. The friend is weasel-faced with a figure like a stalk of celery.

“You’re pretty generous, Jim.”

“Don’t mention it. Why do they always travel like that? Beauty and the beast.”

“Symbiotic relationship,” I say. I have been reading about symbiotic relationships in some book recently. A girl suddenly comes out of the librarian’s office holding a handful of white cards. The girls stir with excitement as if she was holding the results of a million dollar lottery. These are the dance cards. On the front of each some girl has carefully drawn a little bunch of candy canes lying on top of a holly leaf. Inside each card, five names are listed. These are supposed to be the first five girls you dance with. “Why do they have these things?” I ask Jim.

“To make sure all the ugly girls get a crack at some handsome boys.”

“So my first dance is with this name here…Diane Nuccaroni?”

“That’s right.” I go over to the girl who has just handed out our cards.

“Who is Diane Nuccaroni?” She looks around the room.

“Don’t see her right now.”

“Is she pretty?”

“You’ll like her.” I get a funny look from her. In a couple of minutes, the records start, mostly rock and roll oldies. The segregated groups of Keaton boys and Plum Hill girls slowly join on the floor, holding their cards up in front of them, searching for partners. Jim and I lean against the wall. “Let them find us,” he says.

Immediately, the little gumdrop girl is floating on the arms of a handsome halfback named Wells. The two stars have located each other already. Might as well forget about her for the rest of the night. “Paul Spike?” A finger jabs my arm. Standing behind me is a girl around my height, with a beehive hairdo, a hard but not unattractive face. She looks a little older than most of the others.

“I’m Diane.”

“Nuccaroni?”

“Yes. How are ya?” she asks, cute as a Christmas cookie.

“Okay. You want to dance?” We move onto the floor and fortunately it is a slow record. I don’t feel like twisting or frugging because, frankly, I don’t do it very well. Her breasts poke through my jacket like hard cones. She must be wearing an aluminum bra. Her cheek rests on mine without hesitation and I catch a thunderbolt of tutti-frutti perfume. On my back, her hand begins to rub implications. She wants me closer. At once, she responds with a grind on my upper leg. This is amazing, the first dance. I get a hard-on immediately. My brain doesn’t hesitate but hands me a fantasy sandwich: “I am going to get laid tonight.” What a thought! This girl has already taken her hand out of mine and is dancing with both arms around my neck. The grinding moves over from my thigh onto my zipper. I move my hand down and press the top of her ass. Underneath, I feel something smooth and slick in contrast to the wool of her skirt. A girdle! Diane seems to be wearing a set of armor. Who cares? The grind goes on.

“What are the chances of sneaking out of here?” I ask after two more dances.

“See that woman over by the door? She’s our headmistress. She’s guarding the door. Anybody caught outside will be expelled.” One good thing about Keaton, they have never expelled any of their boys for sneaking out of a dance at a girls’ school. Only at Keaton. The double standard. “Do you like Keaton?” Diane asks.

“Can we talk about something else?” I am considering the possibilities of making this fantasy sandwich come true. “What’s upstairs?”

“The language lab.” I flash a room full of cubicles and headphones. Hardly a room in the Holiday Inn but I would lie down in a pool of slush to make love to this girl. I am a virgin. Weeks of midnight masturbation alone in my dormitory. Six weeks of seclusion at Keaton since my last visa to Tenafly. The grinding armor of Diane Nuccaroni has set me on fire.

“Let’s sneak upstairs. They won’t throw you out for that.”

“Do you think…I guess we could.”

“Sure. Where are the stairs?”

“Follow me.”

I am searching for a match to light her cigarette. The lights are off in the language lab. When I get it, the dim shadows grow blindingly familiar. About ten stalls with headphones hanging from hooks and dials built on the countertops. I wish this was the Infirmary or a teacher’s lounge. Something with a bed or couch to lie down on. Her hand slips into mine. Language labs are supposed to improve your pronunciation. I used to fall asleep with my head on the edge of the table, sitting in the chair. The time has come to kiss her.

Just in time to catch a face full of exhaled smoke.

Her hands embrace me very hard, the grind is going again. This is fantastic, I think. Who cares if you are leaning up against the partition in a dark language laboratory with a girl you find moderately attractive who doesn’t know how to kiss. Maybe you will get laid! I try for second base, shoot under her arm to cup one tightly wrapped breast. So many nights in the dormitories jacking off to fantasies of this. Now real! Stay there, Experience! I want to memorize you like the date of Teddy Roosevelt’s inauguration or the formula for determining the circumference of a circle. I’m going to be needing you soon, Experience. Tomorrow night in Coaltown.

Grind and rub. Knees poke knees. I feel the volume controls of the language stall crunching against my thigh. I try to pull her down on the floor. “My dress…” she whispers. Then drops her cigarette on the floor and searches with her shoe to stomp it out. I had not realized it was still burning. She sticks her tongue in my ear and gives me an agonizing rake job of delicious noise. Time for skin.

She senses what I am doing and pushes me away. But it is only so she can unzip the back of her dress, pop the brassiere and then pull her arms out of the sleeves. So cooperative, I pray that her headmistress will not suddenly come in the door on a casual inspection of the language lab. I gently remove her bra and lower my face between the two headphones on her chest. Her nipples have a terrific pronunciation. What is that they are whispering to me? I think I hear a special message…

“That stays!” “Come on…”

“I mean it!” I remove my fingers from the girdle. Immediately, the grind of her pelvis begins again. I shrug and kiss her breast but something occurs to me. Maybe there is a misunderstanding. I want to make everything clear. So I say, “I want to stick my cock in you.”

“You must be kidding!”

Downstairs, a convention of honeymooners has replaced the previous shy group of students. Everyone is dancing in deep embrace, eyes closed, hands rubbing intricate messages around the fringes of each other’s zones. Jim comes over holding a girl’s hand, a cute girl, but he lets go and takes me aside for a second.

“Where did you go? Outside?”

“Upstairs. The language laboratory.”

“You bastard. Did you screw? She really looks hot.”

“I’ve got a hot set of blue balls.”

“You mean you didn’t screw?”

“Lend me a blowtorch so I can take off her girdle.”

He punches me in the shoulder. “Tough luck, buddy. You can’t win ’em all.”

“Go fuck yourself,” I tell him.

“I would if I could, believe me.”

At the bus, the scene is definitely out of a 1940s war movie. Sweethearts kiss their soldier boyfriends good-bye on the dock, off to the war in the Pacific. Only now it’s outside the Trailways bus hired for the evening to take us off to prep school. Practically in tears, they tug and tear at each other on the dark sidewalk. “I’ll write you.”

“Call me tomorrow.”

“So long. Be sure to write.” All the Keaton guys want letters. It is a big thing to take a letter out of your mailbox in the crowd before lunch and sniff it. Pass it around. “Man, smell the perfume on this one!” Mailbox Romeos. They even caught a guy who was perfuming and mailing letters to himself.

“This is crazy. Look at these jerks,” says Jim, as we wade through the crowd of young lovers making their final adieus. Jim and I go to the back of the bus and he takes the window seat. The master in charge of the bus goes to the door and shouts, “Everybody has thirty seconds to finish saying good-bye and then we’re leaving without you.” There is a last frenzied farewell outside.

“These idiots act like they’re leaving their wives or something,” says Jim. He is in a bad temper and this scene is bugging him for some reason. The driver starts the engine. This is the last signal and now the final lovers leap aboard. The girls line up outside the bus and wave good-bye from the curb.

“Good-bye, my love,” shouts Jim sarcastically. “Farewell sweet dreamer! Good-bye, good-bye.” He is arching his ass off the seat. I had not seen him unzip. But now he has the end of his cock in his fingers and stretches it out like a pink sausage, plainly visible to the girls outside the bus.

A few see him exposing himself! Confusion, and then a kind of terror. The driver pops the clutch and we move off the curb. Twenty-five girls get a quick flash of Jim stretching his prick in their faces. It is insane. Nobody on the bus has seen him except me. Everybody stares at us curious to know why we laugh so hard as the bus rumbles us back to the dorms. Why I am laughing so hard is a mystery to me too. Keaton is a daily excursion through madness. It lies down the dark road waiting for us, completely isolated yet continually devoured by the darker madness of the whole country. Keaton takes the sixteenth year of my life.

While I sit in the seclusion of Keaton, far away from worldly struggles, except the one to keep my behavior mechanical and my head running like a computer till June, my father takes the air shuttle back and forth to Washington several times a week. The Commission is building a lobbying effort in Congress, based on the enormous resources of people and money in the Protestant Church. The effort has only one goal: passage of the bill. My father writes about this in some detail:

While all this was going on in the area of community action, we had other staff members helping to form what developed into a national bipartisan consensus in behalf of the strongest civil rights legislation that has ever passed the Congress of the United States. Early in this effort we decided that a major responsibility of the Commission was a regional one—not in the South but in the Midwest—because the key votes for the passage really resided in those states in the Midwest where the intensity of the racial crisis was less severely felt. There was a kind of irony that the fate of the legislation was held in the hands of the white, Anglo-Saxon, largely Protestant constituency of the Midwest. We set out to try and inform that part of the country about the issue, beginning with a big meeting in Lincoln, Nebraska, in September 1963, to which we brought people from councils of churches throughout the area. Then we sent out traveling teams of people, both Negro and white, some of whom had participated in the struggle in the South, to carry on a continuous program of informing people and attempting to build a consensus favoring passage of a strong bill.

So central did this issue become in the life of the churches that in December, 1963, when the General Assembly of the National Council of Churches met, it took formal action in respect to a small parliamentary matter that was delaying passage of the Civil Rights Bill through Congress at the time. It was unheard of for a church body to get that involved in details of political process, and it is something I would be steadfastly opposed to on most issues. But in this case, the issue seemed so morally unambiguous, so essential, that the Assembly took action.

Toward the end of April we held a large interreligious assembly of Catholics, Protestants and Jews at Georgetown University gymnasium. Thousands of people came from all over; many could not get into the building. Dr. Blake gave what I consider the greatest address I have ever heard him make. I shall never forget at the end of that address seeing a nun, the first person to her feet, seeming to jump straight up into the air with approval and applause.

DEMONSTRATING FOR PASSAGE OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS BILL WITH JAMES FARMER OF CORE AND JOHN LEWIS OF SNCC, WASHINGTON, 1964.

The next morning, we began holding daily services of worship on Capitol Hill with the announced intention that we would not pronounce benediction for these services until the bill had been passed. At 9 a.m. every morning, six days a week, we brought into the Lutheran Church of the Reformation, just behind the Capitol, preachers from every communion all over the country for daily worship. People came from everywhere. Sometimes we’d have seven or eight people; sometimes we’d have twenty-five; sometimes we would have a hundred. We never really knew what to expect. Following the service, there would be a period of briefing in the basement of the church about the state of the legislation. Then people went to the Hill to talk to their Senators. This went on for over two months until the bill was finally passed.

We have some satisfaction in having it said in Washington that the bill was passed because of what the churches did. This was said by both our friends and enemies. Hubert Humphrey said so many times, both to me in private and also publicly. And Senator Russell said “The bill would never have passed if those damn ministers hadn’t got an idea that this was a moral issue!”

The breakthrough comes when Senator Dirksen of Illinois, the leader of the Republicans in the Senate, is convinced by his local minister that civil rights is, indeed, a moral issue. Once Dirksen decides it is not just another political problem to be dealt with in private fashion, the other Republican senators, with some exceptions, move to support the Civil Rights Bill.

I sit in the Tenafly kitchen. It is eleven o’clock at night. My father has just come back from Washington and is upstairs talking to my mother. I am home from Keaton for a glorious few days of freedom. I hear him close the door to their room. He stops in the hall and listens to my brother snoring lightly in his dark room. Then he comes down the few stairs and into the bright kitchen. He has taken off his jacket and tie, wears his dark suit pants and a Brooks Brothers shirt, striped, with no pocket, which is half unbuttoned. His eyes are bloodshot and the skin on his face is etched with what I think are new wrinkles. “You look tired, Dad.”

“I had an exhausting two days.”