We Are Still Married (33 page)

Losers drag their feet and stand flat on their heels like ordinary people. They stand and perspire and wait for misery and pain to finish with them. In the stadium, the sun shining down on her, Graf makes you feel what the age of nineteen is like on its best days, the pleasure, the heat, the spring in your legs, the murder in your eyes. My son's songs on a tape he had played for me the night before had that sort of snap and sting to them. A powerful age. To be a world-beater is exactly what a healthy nineteen-year-old would want, I guess. Be a winner. Beat the pants off older players, cream Chris Evert, pulverize Martina, and play killer guitar. In between the singles and doubles match, I had my hot dogs, two excellent wieners, with sauerkraut and mustard, chased with a cold beer. I ate them in the sun, wearing a bright-red shirt and white jeans and a pair of shades, thinking: Only athletes and musicians get so good so young and travel easily across borders, playing and winning as they go. We ordinary cats just have to clunk along with our old forgetful typewriters. Our language hems us in, our hangup with language defeats us, and after a few weeks on foreign turf our feet start to drag. Ddkjfksdjfkjqoueourweiuriuw. Farewell to summer. Time to come home, clean house, write some letters, and elect a decent president.

T
HIS TRIP GOT PLANNED back before I knew how wrapped up in the presidential election I'd get, and it was painful, like dropping out of school, to pull out and leave the
Times
and its daily spread of campaign news. People are dead wrong: this election is the most riveting in twenty years. I took a plane to Copenhagen and read my last
Times
and slept the rest of the way; the flight felt like a short hop. Arrived at 8:00 A.M. under a dim impression that I was in Chicago. But then caught a snatch of the Olympics on TV in the airport. No commercials. You could actually watch the games.

Hung around the apartment, washed clothes, and took the overnight train to Rome. (A fast smooth ride, by the way, on a classy train that glided into the station exactly two minutes early. And those were
democracies
it ran through on time.) Along the way, being
Timesless
began to sink in. Somewhere, fresh polls were emerging, movement was being detected, new negatives were developing, stories were being spun, and the spinners were spinning each other, and I was out of the loop, un-
Timesed.
Switzerland swept by, the Alps above, the tidy villages below, and awakened in me a long-lost fondness for East Los Angeles. In the Basel rail station,
USA Today
was on sale, but I passed. Why eat popcorn when it's pork roast that you want? A newshead requires daily bulk of the sort the
Times
provides: whole paragraphs of direct quotes, your champ wielding his bright sword, the other bum flopping around in the sawdust.

In Rome, at the hotel near the Spanish Steps, more Olympics. The Italians won a gold medal in rowing, and the announcer doing the stroke-by-stroke was crazed with joy. Then divers, then fencers. No commercials. No announcers on camera, flaying us with expertise, no visual odes to the Stars and Stripes, just athletes winging around and Italian bubbling along underneath.

In the hotel lobby, saw a
Wall Street Journal
on a marble buffet and snatched it up. Not much about the election (except a shithead editorial), but a disquieting list of the world's largest banks, showing that nine of the top ten are Japanese. Of the hundred largest public companies, fifty-three for them, thirty-four for us. This score lent some sharper poignancy to a walk that afternoon around the shell of the Colosseum and the ruins of the Forum. When foreign tourists arrive in Washington someday to walk the Mall and see the shattered buildings of old Federal America—the ruins of the Capitol, with its West Front fallen in heaps, and its domeless Rotunda, where dead presidents once lay in state—will our descendants be able to make a decent living by selling them pop and candy and driving the tour buses? American candy and pop, cigarettes and movies are all over Europe, but not many American cars, and no
Times.

To Athens. Some Dukakis bumper stickers outside the airport. Taxis on strike, so rode with a guy with a Dukakis sticker. Two thousand drachmas, about fifteen bucks. With the Acropolis visible out the hotel window, lay down and checked out the Olympics. Earl Bell, the pole vaulter, looked a lot like George Bush. Women's fencing, tennis. No beer on the screen, no pop, no cigarettes. Just sports. The unfairness struck me. Why should Americans have to sit for hours of brain-dead commercials, thereby subsidizing the games for Greeks, who get off scot-free? A
Times
editorial there, maybe a campaign issue? Without advertising, the games become a whole religious drama, with athletes waiting, pacing, tensing, getting psyched up, then the moment of repose before they burst off the mark. Why clutter this sacred ritual with Budweiser horses? On the other hand, I was thirsty. No room service, so hiked down to the Marriott's Polynesian restaurant. A long photo mural of Bora Bora. Greek waiters in Hawaiian shirts serving mai tais and platters of pupu.

That night, watched the news, which looked a lot like anybody else's news. Not a sound bite could I understand, not one—there was only calm, scholarly, incomprehensible Greek along with the pictures. A handsome black-haired man in a dark-blue suit read the stories off a script on his desk, glancing up on every other phrase, in front of a large screen that showed:

London. Prime Minister Papandreou in a blue suit, standing next to a fat man with a cleft chin.

A Greek Orthodox bishop arriving on a ferryboat to inspect two rows of troops.

A speaker at the UN.

Melina Mercouri.

A parade of taxis in downtown Athens, people waving signs.

Gorbachev, posing in a row of blue suits that included a frail Andrei Gromyko, then inking a treaty.

A woman weeping behind a barred gate.

A map of Albania.

Scenes of Florida, a Florida license plate, men climbing out of a limo.

Weather report, in centigrade. Lows of 13-20. Highs, 28-31.

A Greek flag as the Greek national anthem was playing.

Sign-off at 11:30, the last image an outline of Greece, white against blue, the country resembling a sea horse with islands scattered near its tail, including Patmos, where I am now, on a shaded terrace of a house with thick stone walls plastered white, in a village of dazzling whitewashed stone houses bunched around a monastery on a mountain. The hills are brown, the sea is clear blue, and I hear chickens nearby, complaining. A train of four donkeys clops down our stone street, five feet wide in places, and a man calls his wares, fish and vegetables, on this street and, a moment later, on the next. The news here is all ancient: the friendliness of foreign people, the mysteries of the East. We eat fresh goat yogurt and thyme honey for breakfast, on a second terrace, walled, under an orange tree. The house is from the seventeenth century, like all the others. A quarter-mile down the road is the cave where John dreamed about the end of the world and wrote the Book of Revelation and told about the Lake of Everlasting Fire that so absorbed my entire youth. A few miles farther is a sandy beach where young German and Swedish and French women lie naked in the sun, which would have absorbed me even more then than it does now, which is,
considerably
. We ride to the beach, and then back up the mountain, on green Honda scooters. My mother never let me own one or ride on one, feeling that any motorized two-wheeled vehicle was a ticket to flaming death. The beauty of such a strict upbringing is to give a person a low threshold of excitement. When we cruise down the mountain and take the outside curve at 15 m.p.h. and look over the edge, I hear her voice say, “Be careful, Gary! Not so fast!”

When we putt-putt up from the naked beach past John's cave to the mountaintop, I hear his voice say, “Woe! Woe! Woe!” We will make this trip everyday for two more weeks and then go home.

I
T'S NOT OFTEN that people care to celebrate the anniversary of a panic, so I gladly drove down to West Windsor Township, New Jersey, on Halloween weekend for a festival celebrating a night in 1938 when many citizens there and across America got scared by a radio play and ran around and did things they felt sheepish about later. West Windsor, just east of Princeton, includes the village of Grover's Mill, which a scriptwriter happened to pick off a map and use as the site of the Martian invasion in the play
The War of the Worlds,
performed by Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre of the Air and broadcast on the CBS network at 8:00 P.M., Eastern time, October 30, 1938. About twelve million persons tuned in, many of them too late to hear Welles's introduction but in time to hear about “a huge, flaming object, believed to be a meteorite,” crashing near Grover's Mill. It turned out to be a metal cylinder ninety feet in diameter, according to Carl Phillips, the reporter in the play, and the folks at home could hear the crowd of curious onlookers at the crash site, an ominous humming sound, and a loud
clank
as the cylinder opened, and then Carl's gasp. A thing with luminous eyes and gray tentacles wriggled out of the black hole, glistening, pulsating, dripping saliva, and a moment later Carl's microphone thunked to the ground. Dead air. Then an announcer came on with a news bulletin: “At least forty people, including six state troopers, lie dead in a field east of the village of Grover's Mill, their bodies burned and distorted beyond all possible recognition.”

The play bounced along in this news-documentary style: to Washington for an emergency message from the Secretary of the Interior; back to the studio for news bulletins as the invaders advanced toward New York City in giant walking tripods and zapped Army bombers out of the sky with deadly heat rays; then hysterical warnings (“Poisonous black smoke pouring in from Jersey marshes. Reaches South Street. Gas masks useless. . . . Automobiles, use Routes 7, 23, 24
”
). Here and there, listeners panicked—perhaps a million, according to a 1947 study by the Princeton psychologist Hadley Cantril, which quoted some of them:

Newark: “We listened, getting more and more excited. We all felt the world was coming to an end. Then we heard ‘Get gas masks!' That was the part that got me. I thought I was going crazy.”

New England: “I kept shivering and shaking. I pulled out suitcases and put them back, started to pack, but didn't know what to take.”

Illinois: “We ran to the doctor's to see if he could help us get away. Everybody was out in the street, and somebody told my husband it was just a play.”

New York: “One of the first things I did was to try to phone my girl, in Poughkeepsie, but the lines were all busy, so that just confirmed my impression that the thing was true.... We had heard that . . . gas was spreading over New Jersey and fire, so I figured there wasn't anything to do—we figured our friends and families were all dead. I made the forty-five miles in thirty-five minutes and didn't even realize it. I drove right through Newburgh and never even knew I went through it.”

The epicenter of the panic, which was a township of truck farms fifty years ago, is a suburb of New York now, near the Princeton Junction stop on the Metroliner route. Its potato fields are filling up with three-hundred-thousand-dollar two-story frame or brick houses (advertised on billboards as “estate” or “manor” homes) in tract developments with names that use the suffixes
-dale, -shire, -ford, -brook,
and
-crest
a lot. Next to the millpond, where Carl Phillips was killed by the invaders' heat rays, is a small park with a few picnic tables, swings, a shelter, a bike stand, and a monument to the broadcast, dedicated this year.

The panic commemorative included an art show, a dance, a Martian Landing parade, a Martian Fling social, a panel discussion (“Could It Happen Again?”), and a Martian Panic run, with three hundred runners, many in horrific alien faces, chasing each other, costumes flapping, for ten kilometers around West Windsor. Waiting for the winner, I met the festival chairman, Douglas Forrester, who looks a lot like the young Orson Welles, and who was happy that the whole thing had been a huge success. “This place has always been in the shadow of Princeton,” he said. “We need something to give us an identity, a community spirit.” He added that, with seven different zip codes, the township was a crazy quilt of little farming burgs, like Grover's Mill, Penns Neck, Dutch Neck, and Princeton Junction, once separate and now stitched together by housing developments, and some of the new residents weren't even sure exactly where they lived. He said the festival had got a lot of people involved in the community for the first time.

It struck me that the festival was a rare occasion of media justice—a town once exploited by radio now getting a chance to exploit its exploitation, and put on a party and get a million dollars' worth of publicity in the bargain (from five TV networks, AP, UPI, the BBC, major European news services, radio stations from almost every state in the Union, and more newspapers than you could shake a stick at)—and it also struck me that the creature who crawled out of the metal cylinder and killed Carl Phillips was present at the festivities, holding a video camera and recording sound bites.

I had always considered the story of the
War of the Worlds
panic a case of gullible rural people, many of them fundamentalists with a taste for the apocalyptic, who heard an incredible tall tale and swallowed it. But as I see it now, at the end of the 1988 presidential campaign, the panic seems reasonable, the people who ran from their homes in fear no fools. The broadcast of 1938 crossed a line between entertainment and news, which has since become blurred, and people panicked because they were accustomed to believing the news. Tuning in the radio to hear a voice say that a black fog of poisonous gas was pouring into New York and killing people like rats, the listener jumped. Except for a disclaimer here and there,
The War of the Worlds
sounded like news, and listeners heard it as news. It simply reported news that was untrue.