The Drifters (2 page)

‘Maud?’

‘Yep. She saw the doctor and it’s official. Morning after the wedding I go back to my draft board and pick up that good old 3-A classification … and I’m home free.’

Other students came in to congratulate him, and he said expansively, ‘Maud and I studied the rhythm system till we had it pinpointed. During the period when she could be knocked up we screwed three, four times a day. You remember how I fell down in the Oregon game? Hell, I was so weary I couldn’t stand up. I screwed her twice that morning. Coach gave me all hell, but I think that was the morning I rammed it home. Anyway, she’s pregnant and I’m out of the draft.’

One of the men asked, ‘You think your 3-A classification will hold?’

‘It’s the sure one. All you guys ought to get married. Lots of girls over there would be glad to shack up with you. Screw ’em to death. Get ’em pregnant. Tell the government to go to hell.’

‘Is it worth it?’ someone asked.

‘Who gives a good goddamn? When this nonsense passes, get a divorce and go about your business.’

‘Would you get a divorce?’ Joe asked.

The football player looked at Joe, started to hand him a wisecrack, reconsidered, and said, ‘If the girl you got pregnant happened to be someone you loved, you’d be ahead of the game.’

‘Yours wasn’t?’ Joe asked quietly.

‘Mine wasn’t,’ the big man said.

The third experience made a moral confrontation unavoidable. On the floor above was a pitiful jerk named Max who studied every weekend, with never a chance of understanding calculus or Adam Smith. He was a fat boy from Los Angeles with a bad complexion and he wanted to be a doctor, as his mother said, but his professors quickly saw that this was out of the question, so he had shifted to business, but this was also impossible.

‘You’ve got to stay in college!’ his parents bellowed. ‘You want to disgrace us? You want to fail and go into the army?’

His mother had arranged for him to transfer to education. ‘So you can get a job teaching in Los Angeles, like Harry Phillips, and you’re safe.’ He had switched to education but lacked even the intelligence to pass those courses, and now it appeared that he was to be dismissed from the university, lose his draft deferment, and return to 1-A.

At this crisis Max waddled through the dormitory, looking for someone who would be willing to slip into the examination room and write a critical test for him. ‘The questions are easy,’ he explained, ‘but I just can’t organize my thoughts.’ When he found no one on the second floor willing to take the risk, he came back to Joe and said, ‘Even if you haven’t taken the course, Joe, you could answer the questions. I know you could.’ It was a pitiful performance, and after the exams were corrected, Max got the bad news. He was out. His deferment was ended. He must go into the army.

His distracted parents came to collect him, and in the privacy of his room, gave him hell, so that he left the dormitory red-eyed and trembling. He broke away from his parents to say goodbye to Joe. ‘You were a good friend,’ he said. Then, shuddering, he walked toward the car.

The fellows talked about Max a good deal and agreed that if there was ever a man who ought not go to war, it was Max. A pre-med student said, ‘How’d you like to have him as your buddy on patrol through a rice paddy?’ Another said, ‘It’s criminal to pick soldiers because they were dumb in college.’ But Joe’s philosophical roommate offered a correction: ‘The crime began when our nation permitted college to serve as an exemption from a service which for others was obligatory.’

When the crowd broke up, Joe and his roommate continued the discussion till well past midnight, and for the
first time Joe heard a literate man propound the theory that the whole system was immoral. His roommate argued, ‘As you said the other day, for Karl to ruin the lives of his students so that he can escape the draft is an obvious immorality, but it’s caused by a greater. The immorality of the United States waging an undeclared war which has never been authorized by Congress.’

‘What do you mean?’ Joe asked.

‘Take that loud-mouthed football player who was boasting he’d knocked up a girl he didn’t love in order to escape the draft. That’s obviously immoral, but it couldn’t have happened unless our democracy had first been degraded. Officials who are elected to represent us allow themselves to be by-passed, then applaud when our President acts illegally.’

‘What are you going to do about it?’

‘I don’t know. But I do know that a man cannot cooperate indefinitely with an immoral situation without becoming contaminated. And I do not intend to contaminate myself.’

He spoke quietly, but with such deep conviction that Joe had to determine for himself how far he would permit the self-contamination of avoiding the draft by hiding in college.

It was the fourth experience that crystallized his attitude, a thing of itself so trivial that to an ordinary man in ordinary times it would not even be remembered. Joe had gone to a bar in the rougher part of town to hear a musical group, and on the way back to the dormitory he happened to pass a crowd of Negroes lounging at a street corner, and one of them in military uniform had said, ‘Hiya, Whitey. See you in Vietnam,’ and another said, ‘Not him. He’s college.’ Joe laughed, cocked his right thumb and forefinger like a pistol and shot at the soldier, clicking his tongue as he did. The soldier fell back two paces, clutched his heart, and said, ‘Damn, he shoot straight.’

That was all. Joe passed on, but the meaningless incident kept reverberating in his mind, day after day—the horrible fact that in this war black men who could not afford to attend university were drafted and white men who had the money were not. It was indecent, immoral, infuriating, and everything said by the leaders of society, men like General Hershey and J. Edgar Hoover, simply exacerbated the basic wrong. Negroes were drafted, white men weren’t; the
poor were hauled off to war, the rich weren’t; the stupid were shot at, the bright boys weren’t. And it was all done from an immoral premise in prosecution of a war immorally founded.

Perplexed by these confusions, Joe entered the final month of the year, unaware that his roommate, thanks to his training in philosophy, had arrived at certain important conclusions that Joe would not reach for some weeks to come. Shortly before Christmas a group of students opposed to the war announced a peace rally. It was scheduled for two in the afternoon at the main quadrangle, and by one the campus was crowded with spectators from the town. Special campus police were on hand, with instructions to prevent physical violence. They were supported by regular police, also determined to forestall trouble. When these saw a parade approaching with signs like
Love America or Leave It
,
U.S.A. All the Way
, and
Back Our Brave Men in Vietnam
, they quietly diverted the marchers from the campus.

Through a bull horn, one of the policemen told these counter-demonstrators, ‘The peaceniks have a constitutional right to their say. You can’t take those signs on campus.’ The signs were confiscated but the marchers were allowed to disperse through the crowd in the quadrangle.

When Joe’s roommate looked down from their dormitory and saw the strangers and the two groups of police, he said, ‘Things may get tough. I want you to know that what I’m going to do this afternoon isn’t done hastily. I’ve been thinking about it ever since that day we saw Karl teaching in his school.’

He and Joe walked down to the quadrangle, where they parted, because Joe always backed away from public demonstrations. As a freshman he had refused to attend football rallies and he felt the same about campus protests. ‘You do your thing,’ he told his roommate. ‘I’ll watch from over here.’

The demonstration proceeded peacefully. Joe, perched on the base of a statue commemorating the founder of the university, listened to the loudspeakers as a wispy little professor of chemistry, Dr. Laurence Rubin, tried to explain that the war was damaging America’s posture at home and abroad, but hecklers from the parade kept shouting, ‘You wanna surrender?’ Rubin had anticipated such a charge, but when he tried to explain the difference
between surrender and planned withdrawal from a non-productive situation, the hecklers would not allow him to give it, shouting, ‘Ending the war is Nixon’s job. Shut up and let him do it.’ So Professor Rubin was driven from the microphone with his basic thesis unstated.

A student with a voice capable of filling the quadrangle grabbed the microphone and shouted, ‘If action is the only thing Washington can understand, we’ll give them action.’ Joe noticed that as soon as this echoed through the loudspeakers, both the campus police and the regulars moved closer to the platform. The speaker saw them coming but nevertheless gave a signal, whereupon a group of some thirty or forty coeds began singing ‘Blowin’ in the Wind,’ a stately chant of resistance which some of the men in the audience took up. It was a wintry song, well adapted to this quadrangle with its milling and undefined groups.

When the song was at its height a group of seven young men climbed onto the platform, and in view of everyone, lit cigarette lighters and with studied resolve burned their draft cards. To his surprise, Joe saw that his quiet roommate was among them, was indeed their leader in this act of defiance that solemnly separated them from a society they could no longer respect and whose laws they would no longer obey.

The sight of smoke curling into the air inflamed the marchers from the town, and even those spectators who had brought with them no intention of violence found themselves outraged. Suddenly, from many quarters, people started rushing at the platform, trying to pull down the seven card-burners, and this brought the two groups of police into action, their clubs swinging. To Joe’s astonishment, the police did not use their clubs against the rioters; instead they reached up, grabbed the protesting students, and beat them as they dragged them to the ground. Joe’s roommate broke loose and started to run away, but another group of students, infuriated by the card-burning, blocked his way and began punching him in the face. He lurched backward into a girl, who screamed. Other girls, not yet involved but afraid that they might be knocked down, began screaming, and a general melee developed.

Now the police took over, slam-banging their way through the crowd to arrest the card-burners. Joe’s roommate, his head befuddled by the punches he had taken, stumbled toward the police as if he were attacking them
and was greeted by a rain of sickening blows which knocked him to the pavement. Joe, when he saw him fall, automatically leaped from the safety of his pedestal and ran to help, but the police considered him one more longhaired troublemaker and waded into him.

One club racked him up, another smashed into his gut, and a third cracked across his skull and brought him down in a heap. He said later that he heard this last blow before he felt its piercing message; it was the last thing he did hear, for he collapsed in a lump of meaningless bone and unassociated flesh. He vaguely remembered thinking that his knees had disappeared and his legs had become water. Then he fainted.

While his roommate sat in jail awaiting trial, Joe stayed alone in the dormitory grappling with a slowly developing conviction. Customarily such painful assessment comes to a man in his late forties, when he girds himself for a final push, or in his fifties, when he assesses the dark failure in which he is embroiled without chance of escape, but for Joe’s generation the time of reappraisal came early, and he faced his alone.

He liked girls and dated several, but so far had found none with whom he would be easy in discussing his present crisis. He was also familiar with certain boys in the dorm, but knew none well enough to burden them with his confusion. There were no professors with whom he would have cared to talk; those who showed understanding were too busy with their own work, and those who were available were clods with whom any meaningful dialogue would be impossible. So he stayed to himself.

The university was on the quarter system, which required a battery of exams prior to Christmas. Joe mustered enough concentration to try Professor Rubin’s chemistry exam, but he did so poorly that when history and English III came around, he didn’t bother to report to the examination hall. He stayed in his room and tried to face up to the various dilemmas in which he found himself. He did not shave, nor did he report to the dining hall. Late at night he would wander through the dark streets and pick up a hamburger and some coffee, but for the most part he kept to himself, rubbing the knobby bruise on his head and thinking.

A girl from La Jolla dropped off a letter inviting him to drive her home in her car. When he read the message he could visualize her, an attractive kid with neatly combed hair pulled back into a ponytail. It would be fun spending the Christmas vacation with her, but not this year. He went down to the phone. ‘That you, Elinor? It was a sweet letter you sent. I’d like to, but I’m all chopped up.’ She said, ‘I know,’ and drove home alone.

For the first week Joe stayed in his silent room within the silent dormitory. Since the dining room was closed, he ate pick-up meals, and had his dinner at a hamburger joint. As the year drew to a close he tried to cast up his situation, and concluded that for him the university was washed up. He could not in honesty remain in what had become for many a draft haven. He rejected refuge in these classrooms when men like Max had to leave for war, or when the Negroes down the back alleys were being conscripted. He refused to compromise any longer with an immoral position.

On the other hand, he could not publicly burn his draft card the way his roommate had done, for he shied away from exhibitionism. To stand in a conspicuous group while girl students were chanting ‘The answer is blowing in the wind’ would be ridiculous. That was out.

He remembered the rationalization of a chap from San Francisco who had allowed himself to be drafted last spring: ‘The only honorable thing to do is join the army and bore from within. When they get me they’re gonna get a guy determined to undermine the whole military complex.’ On his first weekend in camp he had begun distributing pamphlets urging his fellow soldiers to revolt against their officers, and he followed his own advice. One morning at roll call he started laughing, real loud, and when the sergeant stormed down the line and asked what he thought was so funny, he said, ‘The whole silly system, and you most of all.’ The sergeant kept his temper and asked what he meant by this, and he said, ‘You, you stupid son-of-a-bitch. You tell us to suck in our guts and you couldn’t suck in your gut if …’ The sergeant had poleaxed him, and in the infirmary he was notified of the court-martial which eventually sent him to jail. The fellows in the dormitory had agreed that he had behaved honorably, but for Joe such action would be inappropriate; he did not like to disrupt things, and even were he so inclined, when the fat sergeant
arrived to bawl him out, he would feel sorry for him and not want to cause trouble.