Revenge of the Lawn, the Abortion, So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away (30 page)

She's in the other room now cooking up a big Pakistani dinner and Foster is watching her with a can of beer in his hand. He's got a job at Bethlehem Steel
over in San Francisco at night working on an aircraft carrier that's in dry dock being fixed. Today is Foster's day off.

Vida is off doing something or other and will be home soon. She doesn't work tonight either. I've spent the afternoon at a table across from Sproul Hall where they took all those hundreds of Free Speech kids off to jail in 1964. I've been gathering contributions for The American Forever, Etc.

I like to set my table up around lunch time near the fountain, so I can see the students when they come pouring through Sather Gate like the petals of a thousand-colored flower. I love the joy of their intellectual perfume and the political rallies they hold at noon on the steps of Sproul Hall.

It's nice near the fountain with green trees all around and bricks and people that need me. There are even a lot of dogs that hang around the plaza. They are of all shapes and colors. I think it's important that you find things like this at the University of California.

Vida was right when she said that I would be a hero in Berkeley.

This book is for
Portia Crockett
and Marian Renken.

I didn't know that afternoon that the ground was waiting to become another grave in just a few short days. Too bad I couldn't grab the bullet out of the air and put it back into the .22 rifle barrel and have it spiral itself back down the barrel and into the chamber and refasten itself to the shell and be as if it had never been fired or even loaded into the gun.

I wish the bullet was back in its box with the other 49 brother and sister bullets and the box was safely on the shelf in the gunshop, and I had just walked by the shop on that rainy February afternoon and never gone inside.

I wish I had been hungry for a hamburger instead of bullets. There was a restaurant right next to the gunshop. They had very good hamburgers, but I wasn't hungry.

For the rest of my life I'll think about that hamburger. I'll be sitting there at the counter, holding it in my hands with tears streaming down my cheeks. The waitress will be looking away because she doesn't like to see kids crying when they are eating hamburgers, and also she doesn't want to embarrass me.

I am the only customer in the restaurant.

She doesn't need this.

She has her own problems.

Her boyfriend left her last week for a redhead from Chicago. This is the second time in a year this has happened to her. She can't believe it. It has to be more than a coincidence. How many redheads are there in Chicago?

She takes a rag and cleans up an imaginary stain far down the counter, wiping up something spilled that isn't there. I'll continue on with this story:

 

So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away
Dust ... American ... Dust

 

It was the second year after World War II ended, when they rattled down a rutted, mud-hardened road toward the pond in an old pickup truck that had their fishing furniture piled on the back. It was always around 7 o'clock in the summer evenings of 1947 when they pulled up beside the pond and began taking their furniture off the truck.

First, they took the couch off. It was a big heavy couch but it was no problem for them because they were both big heavy people. She was just about as big as he was. They put the couch down on the grass right
beside the pond, so they could sit there and fish off the couch.

They always took the couch off first and then they got the rest of the furniture. It took them no time at all to set up their things. They were very efficient at it and obviously had been doing this for years before I saw them and began waiting for them to arrive at the pond and became, in my own small way, a part of their life.

Sometimes I would arrive early and wait for them.

As I sit here on August ist, 1979, my ear is pressed up against the past as if to the wall of a house that no longer exists.

I can hear the sound of redwing blackbirds and the wind blowing hard against the cattails. They rustle in the wind like ghost swords in battle and there is the steady lapping of the pond at the shore's edge, which I belong to with my imagination.

The blackbirds sound like melancholy exclamation marks typed on the summer late afternoon, which has a feeling of bored exhaustion because a hot wind is blowing from the south. That kind of wind is always tiring and gets on my nerves.

A plank has been crudely engineered with the help of a small log at the end and some stake-like pilings to form at best the world's saddest fishing dock.

It's really pathetic, and all of my own design and construction, so there's really no one else to blame, and I'm standing on the end of it, about twelve feet away from the shore. The plank cuts a narrow corridor through the cattails to get to the open water of the pond. The plank sags in the middle, so it's covered with three inches of water, and it's not solid enough to jump over.

My clown-like dock would collapse if I tried that, so I have to wade through the water to get to the dry end of the plank to fish.

Fortunately, twelve-year-old boys don't care if they get their tennis shoes wet. It means practically nothing to them. They couldn't care less, so I'm standing there with wet feet, fishing into the southern wind, listening to the blackbirds and the dry sword-like rustling of the cattails and the steady lapping of the water against where the pond ends and the shore of the world begins.

I'm fishing directly across the pond from where they will come in a few hours and set up their furniture.

I'm waiting for them by watching my bobber bobbing up and down like a strange floating metronome and slowly drowning a worm because the fish are not interested in the slightest with its plight.

The fish just aren't biting, but I don't care.

I'm just waiting and this is as good a way to wait
as any other way to wait because waiting's all the same anywait.

The sun is shining on the water in front of me, so I have to keep looking away. Whenever I look at the sun, it is reflected back to me like a shiny bedspread whose design is hundreds of wind-driven roller coasters.

There is no freshness to the sun.

The sun turned boring in the middle of the afternoon, as it does so often for children, and was almost out of style like old clothes that were poorly and uninterestingly designed from the very beginning. Maybe He should have thought twice about it.

The sun was burning me slightly but I didn't care. My face felt a little flushed. I wasn't wearing a hat. I seldom wore hats when I was a child. Hats were to come later on.

I had almost albino white hair.

Kids called me "Whitey."

I had been standing there so long that my tennis shoes were almost dry. They were at their half-life, which is the best time for tennis shoes. They felt as if they were truly a part of me like an extension of my soles. They were alive at the bottoms of my feet.

I didn't like it when my tennis shoes completely wore out and we didn't have any money to buy another pair. I always felt as if I had done something bad and was being punished for it.

I must be a better kid!

This was how God was punishing me: by making me wear fucked-up old tennis shoes, so that I was embarrassed to look at my own feet.

I was too young and naive then to link up the meaning of those ridiculingly defunct tennis shoes that I was forced to wear with the reality that we were on Welfare and Welfare was not designed to provide a child with any pride in its existence.

When I got a new pair of tennis shoes, my outlook on life immediately changed. I was a new person and proud to walk on the earth again and thanked God in my prayers for helping me get a new pair of tennis shoes.

But in the meantime it was the summer of 1947, and I got bored waiting for them to come with their furniture and decided to go visit an old man who was a night watchman at a small sawmill nearby.

He lived in a little shack by the sawmill and drank beer. He drank a lot of beer while he watched the sawmill, so that no one took anything. The sawmill was very, very quiet after the workers went home. He watched it with a bottle of beer in his hand. I think you could have stolen the entire sawmill and he wouldn't have noticed it.

I would often visit him and he would give me his empty beer bottles and I would return them to the store and get a penny apiece deposit for them.

Collecting his beer bottles was a good idea.

It beat looking into the sun.

I waded back across the plank and my feet were wet again. It took only a few seconds to make it as if they had never been dry, that they had always been wet, but I didn't care.

I had to make the decision whether to take my bamboo fishing pole with me because there was a place along the way where I sometimes jigged for frogs or hide it in the bushes. I stood there and took about ten seconds longer to make that decision than I should have.

I hid my pole in some bushes.

The idea of frogs was as boring as the sun.

I would pick it up when I came back to join the man and the woman in their open fishing house across the pond. I was now ahead of them in time, so I would give them a couple of hours to catch up.

There were other things that I could do besides not catch fish until they came and the night watchman's beer bottles was one of them.

While I walked a quarter of a mile to the sawmill, my mind was occupied with fantasies of empty beer bottles. Maybe he had two cases of them or perhaps even three. I hadn't visited him in a week or so and maybe he had been drinking more beer than usual. I hoped that was the case. Then I had the sobering thought that maybe another kid had already visited
him and gotten all the beer bottles that should rightfully have been mine.

I didn't like the idea of that kid.

I vowed to make it a regular part of my life to visit that old man at least every four days and get all of his beer bottles for myself.

The loss of that revenue was no laughing matter, especially if part of your life you had to wear shitty tennis shoes.

During those years just after World War II, I could be quite a formidable collector of beer bottles if I put my mind to it. They were worth a penny apiece for the small ones and two cents apiece for quarts.

When I was in a very serious beer-bottle mood, I would take an old baby buggy with me. It was made out of wicker and had a huge hood. I could put a lot of beer bottles in that buggy.

Sometimes I would spend a whole day pushing it around, collecting abandoned beer bottles. Within a mile of where we lived, there were many opportunities for a young beer-bottle capitalist if he pushed his baby buggy hard and long enough.

There was a highway to be explored. People liked to drink beer in their cars and throw the bottles out the windows where they would land in my baby buggy a week later.

The highway stretched between cities and went
all the way across the state, but I used only a mile of it as part of my beer-bottle empire.

That mile was on the edge of town where I lived with my mother and two sisters in a cabin at an auto court, but we didn't have an automobile. We never had one. We were autoless guests of the Welfare Department. It was strange all those people coming and going to and from different places when we were going nowhere.

My mother and my sisters won't be mentioned again because they are not really a part of this story. That of course is a lie. They will be mentioned later on. I don't know why I just told this lie. It was really a silly and useless thing for me to do, but sometimes people do silly and useless things. They can't help themselves. They are often at the mercy of unknown vectors.

I have corrected it, though, and now we can continue on without, I hope, too much loss of credibility, and please remember that I could have changed this story to cover my lie and
actually
have left them out and substituted an aunt and two cousins in their place.

So please accept my apology and be prepared for them to reappear on
[>]
.

The highway went right past the auto court and I followed it out of town with my baby buggy. I got the baby buggy from an old woman who said she'd give me something if I went to the store for her. I said
OK, and she gave me a list of things she wanted and the money to pay for them.

"Can I trust you?" she said, pausing a very old hand on the clasp of an equally old black leather purse.

"Yes," I said, already holding the list in my hand. We had already gone that far with the deal, so she was holding onto the last flickering doubts of an already negotiated deal. All I needed was the money. We were both very aware of this. She sighed and opened the purse at the same time, saying, "I wish my husband wasn't dead."

"What did he die of?" I said, not really caring but knowing that I had to say something. You can't leave a remark like that alone without an attending comment, or so I thought at the time.

"A heart attack. He died in bed. He was an older man."

She handed me two dollars.

"When?" I chirped like a little death sparrow.

The money was old and crumpled like the woman. She must have had it for a very long time. Maybe she slept on it while dreaming of her dead husband. Old people are supposed to do that: sleep on their money, snoring on top of thousands of George Washingtons and Abraham Lincolns.

"March 3, 1916."

I did some primitive arithmetic in my mind which
has not been too good at arithmetic, anyway, and then said, "He's been dead for a long time."

"Too long," she said. "I can hardly remember what it was like."

I didn't know the full meaning of what she was saying.

I do now.

When I came back with the sack of groceries, she gave me the baby buggy. It was in a garage full of other old things right beside the weather-worn house that she lived in. The paint had fallen off the house years before, so the house just stood there in the neighborhood, hardly noticed any more.