There's a Man With a Gun Over There (15 page)

Ah, yes, 1968. Nineteen sixty-eight is the year of Khe Sanh and the Tet Offensive and the First Battle of Saigon.

Does anyone remember those battles anymore?

“A cold, gray fog lifts on the bodies of American soldiers killed at the perimeter of Khe Sanh, Walter,” John Laurence of CBS says on
The Nightly News
.

Those were the monsters, I suppose, but they were a long way from Maple Street, weren't they? They couldn't come here, could they?

I don't know that my graduate school draft deferment is coming to an end while I amble along Maple Street toward the university, though I'm sad. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot the night before, and that troubles me a little. Like many other people my age I've sat around singing “We Shall Overcome.” I'm in favor of integration, but, truth be told, I haven't done much about civil rights except be sentimental, so I am having an appropriately sentimental moment as I walk along Maple Street toward the university. Vietnam and the struggle for civil rights are a long way off.

Yes, I am walking west from my little apartment, carrying my yellow, college-ruled notebook and a copy of
The Form and Theory of Poetry
by Paul Fussell.

I think I'm going to be a poet, but the world has other plans.

Ah yes, 1968: that Tilt-A-Whirl of a year is stopping to pick me up.

Oh I almost forgot: the Big Mac was introduced nationwide in 1968. America was at war, and it was getting fatter, too.

25.

A
h, graduate school. I'd arrived there in the fall of 1967. I was in the writing program, and that attracted women, so even though I'm engaged to marry Jenny Gleason I began trying to sleep with as many women as I can. Hey, it's right after the Summer of Love, isn't it? I felt like it was my turn.

I also began meeting real poets. Jim Dickey, who would later be famous as the author of the novel
Deliverance,
came to Fayetteville as a visiting writer that fall. He liked my poems, but mostly what we did was get drunk in his hotel room and call various women he knew. Once they came on the line, he would say something like, “There should only be joy, joy, joy in the world,” and then he'd shake his head and make a kind of wattling noise.

In 1969, not long before I went in the army, I drove Allen Ginsberg and his friend Peter Orlovsky around. My 1967 Chevelle had something called a reverberator installed under the dash. It changed the sound of the radio with its single control knob. Initially, it produced a crude stereo effect, but, as you turned the knob, it created the sound of an echo chamber. Songs like The Rolling Stones's “(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction” sounded like something sung deep in a cave. The song came out as “I-I-I Ca-Ca-Can't-Can't Ge-ge-ge-get-get-get No-No-No Sat-Sat-sat-satis-satis-satis-satisfaction.”

If you turned the unit all the way up, that line—and, in fact, the whole song—became one consonant stuttered out: “N-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n.”

Peter loved that unit and kept fiddling with it as I drove him and Allen around.

“This is all the poetry we need,” Peter said over and over.

Oh yes, did I mention that one of my girlfriends kind of hung around after I got married?

Did I mention that?

I didn't mean to have a girlfriend. It just sort of happened. She was a holdover from my single days. What could I do? She wouldn't go away.

I met her at one of the weekend parties, where girls hung around members of the writing program as if we were football stars. Sarah was sitting in a chair with her legs tucked beneath her, and she kind of raised one up, exposing her panties, and she looked at me and smiled and pretty soon we were rolling around on her bed, and I was coming like I'd never come before and this went on for weeks and then I was married and Jenny was sick and sweaty with the Hong Kong Flu and I made up my mind right then and there that one more time with Sarah would be it—absolutely, for sure
it
—because a marriage vow was a marriage vow. Sickness and health and all that sort of thing, and we only fucked two or three more times after that, Sarah and I—or maybe it was four or five times. It couldn't have been, I swear to God, more than ten times.

And then she moved away, and I was a good boy again.

Yes, 1968, back and forth and round and round.

More than forty years later. I go to the Street View option at Google Maps and type in 531-A East Maple Street, Fayetteville, Arkansas. What comes up is a leaf-strewn neighborhood on a gray day. Maybe it's fall or late winter. I spin the viewer around, but I can't find the little building of my apartment, which, as I recall, was set back some distance from the street. Maybe it's been torn down. What I remember, after all, happened long ago.

Using the arrows of Google Street View, I move up and down the street, but I don't recognize anything. The scene is far different from the neighborhood I remember. I can't find my old apartment building. Nothing looks the same as it did in 1968.

Google has a white line down the center of Maple Street, and, in the netherland of technology, I follow the line west, crossing College Avenue. The names of the streets I pass sound familiar, but nothing looks familiar.

How frustrating. Should I travel to Fayetteville, get on an actual airplane and see the real place, I wonder, to get the details right? But then, who cares about this story of mine? Do I even care?

And yet, I obsess over it. I can't get it out of my mind. Why?

I sit in front of my computer, my head in my hands, trying to answer that question. I look like a man praying.

What I really wish I could do is travel back to January 1968. That's when my troubles began, though I certainly didn't know it at the time. I wish I could go back there, to those innocent days, to that little one-bedroom apartment and warn my new wife and me that the monsters are definitely coming to Maple Street.

“Look,” I'd tell Rick and Jenny, “things are going to get bad. All those promises they made to you—you know, Rickie, back in junior high when you were a bouncing, bright kid on the Algebra Squad—and, Jenny, when you were singing those folk songs and believing that you'd fix the world with love: all those promises they made to you both about how important you would be—those promises are lies. All lies. Things aren't going to work out so well for you. The government's not going to help you. The government might, in fact, be the enemy. The government might just be plotting to kill Little Rickie Ryan.”

It's like those green cardboard barrels labeled Emergency Supplies. Remember? The ones with the yellow letters and the round emblem with the triangle in the middle. Civil Defense supplies. Take care of people in trouble, right? Well, the ones I found in the basement of the Janesville Post Office when I had a summer job there in 1967 were empty. Empty. They were a public relations scheme.

And if I were really brave, I'd pull Jenny aside and tell her that Rickie was a two-timing asshole. That Rickie might just, in fact, be one of the monsters.

Yes, that little apartment on Maple Street, though I can't find it anywhere on Google Earth. It's gone now, I guess.

But I can see it in my memory: a living room, a bedroom, a kitchen. All tiny. Barely room to move in. My first wife and I there in the soft focus dream of the 1960s. I have a goatee, and Jenny wears bell-bottoms. We're sitting down to
The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite
. The iris eye of the CBS logo sees everything, doesn't it?

The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite
for Tuesday, January 30th, begins, the way it usually does, with an image of the newsroom in New York, a profile shot of Walter Cronkite at the circle desk tapping his papers as if he'd just arrived there, fresh from typing up what he was about to say. Teletypes clatter in the background. Walter looks at the camera. Walter is now facing us.

Jenny and I sit there with our dinner. We eat in the living room, using an old black steamer trunk as a coffee table.

“The United States Embassy in Saigon, South Vietnam, is under attack, bringing the war perilously close to the American high command. Our correspondent Robert Schakne is on the scene.”

Our little living room is shaped like a rectangle, television at one end, me at the other, putting a bite of pork chop into my mouth. On one side sits Jenny and on the other is a six-foot bookshelf made from boards and cinder-block bricks. I look over and see the books grouped by genre and alphabetized within each group. Neat. There's
Hamlet
and
New Poets of England and America
and
The Works of Edgar Allen Poe
among the books I've read. Then there are the books for next semester
: Lord Jim
and
In Cold Blood
and
Crime and Punishment
. These are books for the second semester freshman composition course I will teach.

“How crimes happen,” the director of the Composition Program tells us. “The slow creep of criminality. The effects of crime on the criminal. The metaphor of crime.”

Metaphors, similes—all those techniques of writing. A life of sensitivity. A life of the mind in my little apartment.