The Drifters (4 page)

‘At this point I can’t say.’

‘Legally I’m not allowed to make up your mind for you. But if you care to ask me direct questions, I’ll answer them.’

More than three minutes passed—a long time for silence between two people—before Joe said hesitantly, ‘I was sickened by the way the police beat up on my roommate. When they hit me it didn’t matter too much. That was an accident. But they were gunning for him and they really unloaded.’

Mrs. Rubin said nothing, and after another long pause Joe asked, ‘Suppose I did want to get out of the country? Then what?’

Mrs. Rubin took a freshly sharpened pencil and began doodling in orderly patterns. ‘You would have two obvious choices, Mexico or Canada. The first is most difficult. Strange language. Strange customs and no sympathy with student radicals. Mexico’s not advisable. Canada is good. Lots of people up there understand your problems and sympathize. But it’s difficult to get in. Along our western states the Canadian immigration authorities turn back obvious draft dodgers and notify the American police. To make it you’ve got to hook up with our underground railway out of New York.’

‘How would I do that?’

‘There’s a church on Washington Square in New York—that’s in Greenwich Village. You report there and they ship you north.’

Joe said nothing, so Mrs. Rubin concluded: ‘I am legally required to advise you to go to jail now, and I so recommend.’ She took down a form, carefully noted Joe’s name
and university address, and wrote: ‘I recommend that this young man submit himself now for his jail sentence.’

But when Joe rose to leave she accompanied him to the door, grasping his hand and whispering, ‘My personal opinion is that you ought to flee this insanity. Go to Samarkand or Pretoria or Marrakech. Youth’s a time for dreaming and adventure, not war. Go to jail when you’re forty, because then—who gives a damn?’

On New Year’s Day 1969 Joe started his trip into exile, and it was typical of him that he chose not the easy southern route to Boston but rather the ice-bound highways of the north, and it did not occur to him to call his ineffectual parents: his father would snarl and his mother would cry, and between them they would say not one relevant thing.

He hitchhiked up California’s central valley and at Sacramento struck east toward Reno. The high passes were covered with snow, so that at times he could look up on either side and see solid banks three or four feet above his head. He then cut across bleak and empty Nevada to Salt Lake City, where he wasted some days getting the feel of the Mormon capital, but his first moments of grandeur—the excitement he sought, the feel of America—came later when he crossed the vast and barren wastes of Wyoming. The road swept eastward in noble curves through mountains and across limitless plains. He traveled fifty or sixty miles at a clip without seeing so much as a gasoline station, and the occasional tiny town looked like a steer strayed from the herd and lost in the immensity of sky and wasteland.

At the Continental Divide, that chain of mountains separating the western lands Joe had known from the eastern he was about to see, a snowstorm overtook him, and as he rode through the night on a truck bound for Cheyenne, the headlights reflected back from a million glittering flakes.

‘This is some country,’ he mumbled approvingly to the truck driver, who was worried about the road ahead and growled, ‘They shoulda left it with the Indians.’

East of Rawlins the snowdrifts became so deep that the plows bogged down, forcing a long line of trucks and
venturesome private cars to halt at the crossroads where Route 130 cut in from the south. Drivers and passengers crowded into a small diner, where the harassed owner, caught without waitresses, was dishing out coffee and rolls.

‘This is some country,’ Joe said to a group huddling about a heater vent.

‘You headed east or west?’ one of the men asked.

‘East.’

‘You not in service?’ an older man asked, indicating Joe’s hair.

‘No.’

What happened next Joe could not reconstruct later, but somehow the men got the idea that he was heading east to report for induction into the army, and they insisted upon paying for his coffee and buying him cigarettes. ‘Best years I ever spent were in the army,’ one of the drivers said.

‘They taught me how to keep my nose clean,’ another agreed.

An older man broke in to say, ‘I spent three wonderful years in Japan.’ He laughed. ‘From Guadalcanal to Leyte Gulf, I fought the little yellow bastards; from Osaka to Tokyo, I slept with them—and I’d do both all over again.’

‘Them Japanese girls A-okay?’ a younger man asked.

‘The best.’

‘Is the country as interesting east of here?’ Joe ask.

‘Interesting?’ the older man snorted. ‘There’s not an inch of Japan that isn’t interesting. You ever hear of Nikko? Son, when you’re in Vietnam and get some leave, haul your ass up to Tokyo and catch the train to Nikko. You’ll see something.’

‘I meant this country. Is it good east of here?’

‘This is a beautiful country, from the Golden Gate to Brooklyn Bridge,’ one of the drivers said reverently, ‘and don’t you ever forget it.’

This note of patriotism induced a different mood, and one of the drivers said, ‘They’re sure gonna cut hell out of that hair when you join the army, son. You’ll be better for it.’

The drivers agreed that Joe would profit from the discipline of army life, and as he listened to them extolling its benefits he thought how cowardly he was to allow them to think that he was about to follow in their steps when in fact he was using their hospitality to escape. He swallowed
his ignominy and thought: If I told them I was dodging the draft they’d probably stomp me to death.

Ashamed of such duplicity, he left the diner and walked into the storm, where headlights from cars pulling off the road cast strange beams into the snowy night. At times his universe seemed minute, no larger than the circle formed by the flakes, but at other times, when the lights had vanished, it broadened out to an infinite prairie, silent and of enormous dimension. As he stood in the storm, caught within the circle of light, yet thrust outward to the horizon, he gained a sense of the world, that never-known miracle of which he would henceforth be a sentient part.

At the same time he achieved his first appreciation of America, vast and inchoate in the darkness which engulfed it. ‘This is a land worth fighting for,’ he muttered, feeling no contradiction in being a man running away from the draft yet inspired to fight for a land which he sensed was good. So far as he could judge, the most notable patriot he had met in the last four years had been Mrs. Rubin, a Jewish housewife perched in the basement of a Presbyterian church, trying to bring some kind of order out of the chaos her country had fallen into.

As soon as he hit New York he headed for Washington Square, where the church he sought looked exactly like the one he had left in California and where the Quaker woman counseling him could have been Mrs. Rubin’s sister. She assured him that jobs were available, but that he’d have to be careful in seeking them: ‘You’ve got to avoid places where the owner might want to see your draft card. And watch out for the older men in the construction unions. They’re very patriotic and they’ll insist that you be patriotic too … in their way. But here’s an address that might work. They’re tearing down an old building and they’ll be happy to have anyone with a strong back.’

He reported to a site near Gramercy Park, where there was a huge hole in the ground next to a large private house that was being demolished. The foreman explained: ‘The hitch is that some nuts want to save the ceilings. Seems they were carved a hundred years ago. Your job is to get them down without pulverizing them.’ Before Joe could say anything, the foreman thrust a crowbar in his hands,
shouting, ‘Remember, if we wanted them goddamn ceilings torn apart we’d use the wrecking ball. We want ’em in one piece.’ A little later an assistant came into the room where Joe was working from a scaffold and whispered, ‘If anyone asks about your union card, you’re a private artist saving the ceiling for a museum.’

‘What museum?’

‘New York Museum of Architecture and Design,’ the man said promptly. ‘There ain’t none with that name and it’ll keep the union guy busy till next week figurin’ it out.’

The work was dusty and back-breaking, but when Joe climbed down for a rest, the assistant said, ‘Imagine you’re Michelangelo. He worked up there twenty years, I saw it in the movies. “You’ll work there if I say so!” ’ He continued bellowing in a theatrical voice, ‘ “I’m the Pope. Get the hell back to work.” ’

At night Joe slept in a flophouse recommended to him by the woman at the church, and he was so tired that he dropped off to sleep immediately. His neighborhood was a lively one, and during the day he saw young people, including many attractive girls, gathering in the streets, but he could not bring himself to join them. His immediate responsibility was to earn enough money to make the break for Canada.

On his last visit to the church his counselor gave him an address in New Haven, and told him, ‘Report after six in the evening. This office is run by Yale men and they attend classes during the day.’

He left New York with the impression that it was probably a hundred times larger than he had guessed, a hundred times more interesting. At some future time, when circumstances were more congenial, he would like to test himself against this city, against its indifference and beautiful girls. ‘I wonder if I could handle New York?’ he asked himself as he headed north.

He landed in New Haven at mid-afternoon, and as the woman in New York had predicted, the underground office was closed, so he drifted about the ugly city. It was a cold day, and the more coffee he drank in order to share the warmth of the restaurants, the more his bladder suffered from the icy wind, and he was most uncomfortable, but when the counseling office opened he was more than repaid.

The counselor was a professor of poetry with an Oxford background, so Joe concluded that he must have been a
Rhodes Scholar. To protect himself legally, the professor, a young man with enthusiastic ideas, advised Joe to surrender and go to jail, but when Joe refused, the professor leaned back in his chair and said, ‘When I was about your age I went to Europe with hosannas in my ears. You’ll be going as a criminal.
Plus ça change, plus ce n’est pas la même chose.
’

‘I haven’t decided yet,’ Joe said.

‘Good God! Aren’t you the lad I was supposed to meet from Alabama?’

‘California.’

‘My dear fellow, forgive me. We get these urgent messages and we don’t really spend the time we should. There’s a deserter being smuggled through here this evening on his way to Canada, and I assumed that you were he.’ He struck himself on the forehead and said, ‘Good God! One look at your hair should have satisfied me you hadn’t been in the army. I’m going to turn you over to one of our chaps who specializes in draft delinquency. I really don’t know the facts.’ He called for a student named Jellinek, but got no response, so he looked outside the door to see if the deserter from Alabama had arrived, then sank back into his chair, adjusting his legs beneath him as if he had no bones.

Speaking rapidly and with mounting enthusiasm, he said, ‘Since both of our people are late we may as well exchange confidences. If I were you I’d head straight for Europe. Even if I had only ten dollars I’d go. How? Work on a cattle boat. Ensnare a rich widow. God knows how I’d do it, but I’d do it. I’d see the Van Eyck altarpiece at Ghent, the Brueghels at Vienna, the Velázquezes in the Prado. I’d want to see Weimar and Chartres and San Gimignano and Split in Yugoslavia. Do it, young man, no matter the cost. Don’t waste these years in hiding in Canada. There’s nothing you can learn there that you can’t learn hiding in Montana. Go to Europe, educate yourself, and when this madness is over, come back and go to jail. Because if you go into your cell with ideas and visions, the years of imprisonment won’t be wasted and you may come out a man of substance.’

‘How would I get to Europe … with no money, that is?’

‘Good God, money is the cheapest thing on this earth, but with you boys, it seems to be the overriding concern.’ He leaped from his chair and stormed about the room,
scratching his head. Suddenly he stopped and pointed a long finger. ‘I know just the place for you. Get to Europe any way you can and drift down the coast of Spain to a place called Torremolinos. All sorts of bars, dance halls. A smart chap can always make a living there.’

‘My Spanish isn’t too good.’

‘In Torremolinos they speak everything else but. How’s your Swedish?’ He laughed and ran to the door again to check on his missing Alabaman. Finding no one, he returned to his desk and said, ‘In Boston you’ll find a splendid group of people. They’ll give you surprising assistance. There’s a girl up there … her name is … Jellinek will know when he gets here.’

This exhausted what he could tell Joe, so the two wasted the better part of an hour discussing the university situation in California. The professor had a high opinion of the California schools and said he might like to teach there one of these days. ‘It’s where the action is,’ he said, and Joe thought that no matter where he said he came from, someone always said, ‘That’s where the action is.’ It was a phrase without meaning.

‘Torremolinos is different,’ the professor said nostalgically. ‘For young people it’s the capital of the world. You’ll find more ideas there in a week than you will at Yale in a year. The right kind of ideas, that is. The irrelevant ones.’

When another half hour passed, with the Alabama deserter still missing, the professor suggested, ‘We both seem to be stood up. How about having dinner with me?’ He took Joe to an Italian restaurant, where six students were waiting, two with their girl friends. ‘I’ve brought along the walking delegate from California,’ he said, and it was understood that Joe was a fugitive of one sort or another. No one asked details, because there was a good chance that before the year ended, each of them might be in similar circumstances.

There was much talk of the Vietnam war, much irritation expressed at the tardy rate at which desegregation of education was progressing. There were no Negroes in the group, but no collection of blacks could have defended the Negro cause more ably than these whites. ‘The time is coming,’ the professor said, ‘when Yale has got to face up to the Negro problem. And do you know when that time will be? When we are surrounded on seven sides by a solid black urban population.’