Here Comes Trouble (32 page)

Forced to have to say during a press conference, “I’m not a crook” (the mantra of crooks everywhere), Nixon was looking for a way to bypass the press—“the enemy,” “the Jews”—and reach out directly to the people, his “silent majority,” whom he knew loved him.

That opportunity came when he appointed Republican congressman James Harvey to the federal bench in January of ’74. This created the need for a special election to fill his seat, and Nixon decided that the solidly Republican “thumb” area of Michigan was the perfect place to go for the pick-me-up that he needed.

It was also where I decided I would finally meet the man and ask him to leave. It was April 10, 1974, and my friend Jeff, my sister Veronica, and I got in the car and drove over to Bad Axe, Michigan, the small town where Nixon would make what would turn out to be the last campaign appearance of his presidency.

Bad Axe was the county seat of Huron County, Michigan. It had a courthouse and a movie theater and was surrounded by miles and miles of farmland. (It was on one of these farms south of Bad Axe where Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols stayed with Nichols’s brother before the Oklahoma City bombing.)

The area was part of a peninsula surrounded on three sides by Lake Huron, and it was full of some of the most conservative people in the state of Michigan. How conservative? The nearest liberal probably lived across the lake in Canada.

Bad Axe had never had a presidential visit. So the whole town showed up in full red, white, and blue regalia to greet the nation’s First Felon. A parade for Nixon was planned, and we were prepared to join the welcoming party.

Fortunately, when we arrived in Bad Axe, we were not the only ones who thought Nixon had to go. There were at least three hundred other protesters among the few thousand happy Bad Axers who were anxiously awaiting Nixon’s arrival.

I found a good spot right on the curb of the town’s main street. I brought a sign that said in big, bold letters: N
IXON
’
S A
C
ROOK
. Jeff and Veronica had signs that said I
MPEACHMENT
N
OW
and W
AR
C
RIMINAL
. Basic, straightforward stuff. No ambiguity or subtlety. Short enough for him to read as he passed us by.

The locals standing around us tried to block our signs. But with three hundred fellow travelers there with us, it was impossible to make us go away. People shouted at us: “Outsiders go home!” and “Hippies burn in Hell!” Simple. No ambiguity. But no violence.

After about an hour, the parade/motorcade began to make its way down Huron Avenue. There were fire trucks and police cars and a marching band and cheerleaders and Boy Scouts and Future Farmers of America. On the tops of convertibles sat the mayor and the Republican candidate for Congress, James “No One Has Ever Heard of Me” Sparling, waving to the cheering crowd. If this was what Nixon was hoping for—an emotional outpouring of support—he was about to get it in Bad Axe.

Finally, his presidential limo came into view. He was standing up and sticking out of its sun roof, bobbing and waving like a forlorn jack-in-the-box. He flashed his famous Nixon smile, thrusting out his hands with the “V for Victory” sign he made with his index and middle fingers. We weren’t more than ten feet from him, and I held up my sign at eye level so he could clearly see it.

And he did. The car was not going more than five miles per hour. As it crept past me I looked directly into his eyes—and he into mine. It seemed in that instant everything went into slow motion. He looked at me, standing there in my bibbed overalls and long hair. I looked at him. The pancake makeup on him was so overdone, so thick and caked, that his face was like a slab of petrified orange, and his attempts to smile were somehow being impeded by the plaster that had been put on his mug. He looked ill. Seriously ill. I did not expect to see this. For reasons that I will have to explain later at St. Peter’s Gate, I felt an instant sadness for him. He was like a corpse who had been wheeled out to whip up the people and get them to vote for a man he didn’t even know. Though the small-town crowd was spirited and happy to see him, he really wasn’t happy to see them. You know when you go to a play or a movie and you can
see
the acting,
see
the actor performing his lines, going through the motions, and at that moment the performance has lost you and it is over and it can’t be recovered? That was Nixon in Bad Axe. The man who had been a congressman, senator, vice president, and now president, the man who had met with world leaders and at one time considered dropping The Bomb on North Vietnam, the man who clawed and climbed his way to the top more than once—now here he was in a place he’d never seen, reduced to sitting on the pop-top of a Pontiac in a staged parade of hopeful photo ops, a nice piece for the evening news, but there was no fooling anyone: This was not Nixon in China. This was Nixon in Bad Axe. Crushing, and irrevocably humiliating. It was all that he had left.

As his eyes glanced down at my N
IXON
’
S A
C
ROOK
sign he did his best to look away and pretend to be happy, but there was just the next sign after me and the one after that and the 297 after that. When I saw his sad reaction to my sign, I instinctively lowered it, ashamed that I was now kicking a man when he was down—a pretty ruthless, despicable man, but nonetheless, a man shamed and alone. A man on his way back to Orange County or to prison. He may have been surrounded by thousands there in Bad Axe, but the only axe that mattered now was the one that was just weeks away from being lowered on his head. The Republican governor of Michigan, William Milliken, declined to join him in the parade. Milhous was a pariah, he knew it, and, really, what was the point at this juncture?

I’ll tell you what it was. He said he would end the war—
he told us he would end the war!
—and instead he sent another twenty thousand American boys to their deaths. He rained so many bombs down on the civilians of Vietnam and Laos and Cambodia that to this day no one can give an exact body count. (Is it 2 million? 3 million? 4 million? At this level, you’re talking Holocaust numbers, and if you paid your taxes, then you supported this and you are culpable and you know it and you just want to puke.) He had committed war crimes so heinous that we still live with the legacy of his actions to this day. We lost our moral compass with him and we’ve never gotten it back. We no longer know when we’re the good guys and when we’re the terrorists. History has already written our demise, and History will say it began with Vietnam and Nixon. Before Vietnam there was so much hope. Since Nixon we have known only the Permanent War.

For some reason, not knowing then what would come of our country, I lifted my sign back up. I wanted none of it and none of him.

We walked down to where he was going to give his speech, but the police made sure we got nowhere near him. He got on the loudspeaker and bragged about his subsidies to the local farmers. He asked the crowd if their doctor “should work for his patients or for the government?” And then he addressed the young people who were there.

“I have brought you a lasting peace,” he told them. “Yours will be the first generation in this century who will not know war. And to you young boys here, you will be the first group of eighteen-year-olds not drafted in over twenty-five years!”

The crowd cheered. Nixon, the peace president. We booed as loud as we could. It was more like a howl. Nixon would not make another campaign appearance before resigning from the presidency a few months later. We were there for his last one.

If only we could have said the same about that being America’s last war.

Crisis Intervention

H
E WALKED STRAIGHT
in through the front doors, wielding a shotgun.

I had been told by the teachers at my crisis intervention training that this day would eventually come. They called it the “audience suicide.”

“This is it, motherfuckers!”
he yelled out after entering the Hotline Center where I worked.
“This is good-bye and fuck every last one of you!”

“Hold on,” I said quietly as I emerged from the room that contained the crisis phone lines. “Hold on. Talk to me.”

There are a number of situations in life that the average citizen tries to avoid: (1) Oncoming Semi Truck in Your Lane; (2) Floating in the Niagara River 200 Feet from the Falls; (3) Crazy Distraught Man with Double-Barreled Shotgun Yelling in Your Hallway.

Unfortunately for me, I was the only one there, pulling the graveyard shift. Shit, did I just call it that?

“C’mon,” I continued, trying to hide the shakiness in my voice. “It’s gonna be OK. We’re here for you.”

With the word
you,
his scattershot eye movements came to a halt and locked on me. And then he started to sob, but without tears.

“C’mon, brother, it’s OK. Let it out.”

And with that the sobbing stopped.

“Are you who I talked to on the phone?” he asked.

“I don’t think so,” I replied. “You might have been talking to Craig. His shift just ended and he’s not here. But I’ll talk to you. Let’s say we put down the gun first, OK?”

And with that he put his finger on the trigger.

My lungs slammed shut and my heart felt like it went with them. I had a half second to make up my mind about what to do. Do I run? Do I rush him? Do I beg him to let me live? Do I try to stay calm and appear strong so as to steady him? Do I say my last prayer?

“Wait!” I said forcefully, without shouting. “
That
is
not
an option.”

He stopped and looked at me like a dog that didn’t want to obey his master’s order, but for some reason his brain knew only that he must.

“What do you mean it’s not an option?”
he screamed back at me.

“Because,” I said firmly with the sternest look I could muster through my own holy-shit terror and fear. “Because. I. Said. So.”

A thought from my training clicked in my head: They call it an audience suicide because the suicide needs an audience. He kills me, there’s no audience. I knew he wasn’t going to kill me. He was going to kill himself. And let me live with the image of that for the rest of my life. I was the stand-in for the abusive parent, the cheating wife, the disloyal friend, the bastard of a boss, the voice in his head. I was to be punished the way “they” had punished him his whole life—or, maybe, just this past week.

With his finger on the trigger, he placed the shotgun barrel under his chin and prepared to pull.

“I am
not
impressed,” I blurted out. “
Do you hear me?
And right now, you are pissing me off because you have no idea how much I
care
about you, and right now I’m all you got, and goddammit, if you took a second to put that gun down and talk to me you’d know you’ve got a friend here—
me
—right here, and
fuck it,
I’m worth at least a couple goddamn minutes of your time!”

I had no idea what I just said. What I did know was that it sounded all wrong. Nothing like what was in the “empathy training” the county workers gave us when I came up with the idea to open this place. I was nineteen then, and I didn’t see any adult organization doing much good when it came to truly helping young people. A teenager would run away and get caught, and instead of anyone listening to them to find out
why
they ran away—like, maybe they had a
reason
to run away—they were just sent back home, often for another beating or molestation. The experience I had with a friend who needed an abortion but couldn’t get one because it was illegal in Michigan, plus a classmate who had overdosed and another kid from my old Boy Scout troop who had hung himself was enough for me to start this hotline center. My rules: It would be run by young people for young people. You need a place to crash, you got it. You need a pregnancy test, we do it for you. You high on drugs? Drop by and let it wear off while sitting with us. We will never call the cops, and your parents will never know.

The ethos of this was shocking to many of the adults in the area, although some, like the VFW and the Rotarians, wrote us checks because they saw the good work we were doing, even if it was a bit unorthodox. But the results were that the runaways didn’t keep running, young girls weren’t forced to have babies they couldn’t care for at sixteen, we handed out free birth control, and our phone lines were open from 3:00 p.m. to midnight (’til 2:00 a.m. on weekends), seven days a week.

It was now 1975 and I was twenty-one. This was my first confrontational encounter with a loaded gun. My only goal was to keep both shells in the barrels of that gun. The very next sound I heard was not a shotgun blast.

“Don’t yell at me!”
he shouted back.

Whew. He had chosen to engage me instead of the trigger.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to yell,” I said, my own voice now quivering. “It’s just that I’ve had a rough day and it just can’t fucking end like this with you killing yourself.”