The Time of My Life (20 page)

Lightning, who was reserved for the finals, didn't share Dynamite's sense of humor. His calling in life was to bloody as many small boys as possible, which he accomplished most often by commencing his performance before anybody else was ready. As soon as one of us tried to boost a rider to his back, Lightning would step on the foot of the booster, causing him to cry out and drop the rider. Or he would fall down and pin the rider under him. Or he would start bucking before the rider was firmly seated.

For a while, we tried to prevent these disasters by “earing down” Lightning while the rider climbed on deck, but his ears were stronger than our hands, and he always shook free and bit us. On the infrequent occasions when a rider actually got astride him, Lightning always made a beeline for the barbed wire fence and scraped him off.

On no occasion do I remember Dynamite or Lightning being frightened or in need of gentle understanding. But that was a long time ago, and maybe wild burros have changed since then. Kids certainly have.

July, 1980

A Chance Encounter in a Dark Park

I
WAS
SITTING
ALONE
on a bench in the small park near my house the other night. People rarely go there at night, maybe because there are no lights, so it's a nice place to spend a cool evening alone when you're in the mood to ponder sailing ships and sealing wax and such. It was that kind of evening—the temperature had dropped below ninety—and I was in that kind of mood.

I had been sitting there for some time when this guy ran past me out of nowhere. He ran maybe twenty yards across the lawn, then fell to his hands and knees and made choking and moaning sounds. I thought he had been beaten up or stabbed or was suffering a seizure of some kind. Just as I was about to get up and go to him, another figure ran past. This one was a girl. She knelt beside the guy and said, “Let me help you.”

“No,” he said.

“Aw, come on,” she said. “Let me help you.”

The guy got up and took off across the lawn again and disappeared into the darkness down by the playground. The girl watched him a minute, then turned and saw me sitting on the bench. “Is he all right?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah, he's just sick,” she said. “We've been in a bar all evening, and he had a little too much to drink. He'll be all right.”

I expected her to scat like a deer then. I would have, if I were a young woman and a stranger sitting alone on a bench in the dark, empty park spoke to me. Instead, she came over and sat down beside me. “It's hard to tell a fellow he's drinking too much,” she said. “He's not used to it.”

“How come you're out here?” I asked.

“We were on our way to a party a couple of blocks from here, and he got sick,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

“Just thinking,” I said.

“Thinking,” she said. “That's neat.”

By and by her friend returned and joined us on the bench. He didn't seem surprised to see me, either. “Hi,” he said. He was feeling okay, now, and soon the three of us were chatting like old friends on a porch swing. Somehow school became the topic, and both said they had just graduated. “From where?” I asked. The boy named a well-known Dallas private high school. “You're younger than I thought,” I said.

“Yeah, I'll be registering for the draft soon,” the boy said. “I hate to think of it.”

“I know what you mean,” I said. “I had to register once. Almost every man alive has, I guess.”

“Were you scared?”

“A little. I never had to go, though.”

“Boy, I hope I'm that lucky. What do you do?”

“I'm a writer,” I said.

“Really? That's one of the things I've been thinking of becoming,” he said. “An author. But I may go into business or the law. How do you decide?”

“Well, if you're lucky, it doesn't take long to find out what you do best,” I said. “Or what you
like
to do best.”

He was going to the University of Texas at Austin, he said, and his girl was going to the University of Arkansas. “I guess we'll meet at football games,” he said.

“It's funny,” the girl said. “We all hated high school, but now that we're splitting up, it's kind of sad. That's what this party's about. It's supposed to be a birthday party for the guy who's giving it, but it's really a last fling for the old high school gang. Who knows when we'll ever get together again.”

I thought of my own high school bunch, twenty-five years ago. We never got together again. Some of them are sending their own kids off to college. Some of them are dead. “You should go to that party,” I said.

“Are you ready to go?” the girl asked her friend.

“I'm going to sit here a while longer,” he said. “You go ahead.”

They had arrived in a car, it turned out. She walked out to the street and got in it and drove away. “I haven't met many authors,” the boy said. “Do they make much money?”

“The chances are better in business and law,” I said.

“I'm not sure I could write anyway,” he said. “I can't imagine writing a book. Hey, would you like to come to our party? You might get a kick out of it— meeting the new high school generation, you know.”

We walked around the corner to a big house at the end of the block, and around the house to the back yard. Several kids were splashing in a huge swimming pool there, and rock music was booming over a stereo. My new friend introduced me to a group around the beer keg. “Do you know how to get beer out of a keg?” one of the girls asked.

“Yes, I've done it a time or two,” I said.

The kids hadn't seen each other since graduation, which seemed a long time ago to them, and they greeted each other with a kind of seriousness. As they talked of college and vague career plans and the draft, they seemed to realize—though maybe only half-consciously—that their lives already were moving apart, that there would never be another night like this.

I began to feel sad, too, for these polite young strangers of the new high school generation, who weren't very different from all the old high school generations. After my first beer I went home, glad I didn't have to do it all over again.

August, 1980

Who's Buried in Lee Oswald's Grave?

U
NTIL
ROBERT
OSWALD
got his temporary restraining order the other day, medical examiners and funeral directors were gearing up to answer the question that has intrigued us all for so long: Who the heck is buried in Lee Harvey Oswald's grave?

When a casket was buried there, everybody assumed Lee Harvey Oswald was in it. But we assumed a lot of things in 1963. We assumed that Oswald shot John Kennedy and that Jack Ruby shot Oswald and that Kennedy was buried in Arlington National Cemetery and that Oswald was buried in Rose Hill Cemetery in Fort Worth.

We assumed these things because the FBI said so, the Secret Service said so, the Dallas Police Department said so, the doctors who performed the autopsies said so, the Warren Commission said so. We even saw Jack Ruby shoot Lee Harvey Oswald on TV. We believed that's what we were seeing, anyway, because the networks said that's what it was. And a jury in Dallas decided that Ruby shot Oswald and sentenced him to the electric chair, but his conviction was reversed and he reportedly died of cancer while awaiting a new trial. We assumed the man shot by Oswald was really Kennedy and that the man who was said to be Oswald was really Oswald and that the man who shot him was really Ruby and that all these men were really buried. We assumed the man said to be J. D. Tippit, who was said to be a Dallas policeman, also was shot by the man said to be Oswald, and that he also was buried.

How naive we were.

We've learned since then that some people in government tell lies. Therefore, isn't it reasonable to assume that all people in government tell lies? And if they tell lies sometimes, isn't it reasonable to assume they lie all the time? Therefore, isn't it reasonable to assume that everything we were told about Kennedy and Oswald and Ruby and Tippit was a lie?

We've read enough spy novels to know things as big as presidential assassinations aren't done by warehouse laborers. They're done by the Big Boys. And who are the Big Boys? They're the Russians. They're the Cubans. They're the Mafia. They're the Teamsters. They're the wealthy Dallas right-wing fanatics. They're the CIA and the FBI. Hell, maybe they're Lyndon Johnson.

All these possibilities and other possibilities and various combinations of the possibilities have sold a lot of books and magazines since 1963. The U.S. House of Representatives was persuaded to appoint a special committee to investigate all the possibilities, but the committee did only half the job. It reported the assassination may well have been a conspiracy, but it didn't tell us who the conspirators might have been. Or maybe it was lying.

But for a while there, we were about to get down to the nitty-gritty. We were going to dig up Oswald. Or whoever, if anyone, is in his grave.

The exhumation was the idea of Michael Eddowes, a British lawyer and writer who is said to have devoted sixteen years to his investigation of the alleged Kennedy assassination. He has noticed some discrepancies in the Oswald statistics. While Oswald's Marine Corps record states his height as five-foot-eleven, the autopsy report lists it as five-foot-nine. The report also doesn't mention a scar that Oswald is said to have had behind his ear from a childhood mastoid operation.

Could this mean that the Marine Corps or the medical examiner measured Oswald wrong? Does it mean the scar was overlooked by the medical examiner?

That's a very uninteresting possibility. Eddowes thinks it more plausible that the body in Oswald's grave (assuming there is one) is that of a Soviet intelligence agent who switched identities with the real Oswald in Russia and came to this country and killed Kennedy. Meanwhile, the real Oswald (assuming there was one) “disappeared” in Russia. Maybe he's buried in the grave of some Russian spy.

Okay. Suppose Robert Oswald loses his case when it comes up for a hearing and the restraining order is removed and the body (assuming there is one) is exhumed, and Oswald's dental records match its teeth, and the evidence of the mastoid operation is there, and the body is as long as Oswald was supposed to be. Will we have to admit that the man in Oswald's grave is Oswald?

Not necessarily. Wouldn't it make more sense to conclude that the FBI or the CIA or the Marines swiped the real Oswald's medical records and substituted those of whoever the guy in the grave is? And why would they do that? Because they were in on the conspiracy, of course.

On the other hand, if it turns out that the guy in the grave doesn't match the records, why assume that he's some lowly Russian spy? Maybe it's Leon Trotsky. Nobody has seen him lately. Or Amelia Earhart. Or Judge Crater. Or Jimmy Hoffa.

And if Oswald isn't buried in Oswald's grave, where the heck is he? Why should we believe he simply “disappeared” in Russia? It's more likely he's impersonating a KGB agent for the FBI, isn't it? Or playing baseball in Cuba? Or running a string of hookers for the Mafia in New Orleans? Hey, maybe he's buried in Jack Ruby's grave.

That's the neat thing about conspiracies. Give them a little push and they'll go on forever.

August, 1980

No Shortage of Causes

I
S THERE
NOT
a cause?” inquired I Samuel 17:29 from the banner above the stage at Reunion Arena.

The question was the theme of a two-day National Affairs Briefing that attracted twelve thousand preachers, laymen, politicians, and generals from most of the states. The meeting wasn't a briefing in the traditional sense, however. It was a fundamentalist revival meeting, a pep rally for
laissez faire
capitalism and Teddy Roosevelt foreign policy, a political convention that William Jennings Bryan would have loved, a religio-political TV extravaganza with an all-star cast.

Its theme was a rhetorical question. Of course there was a cause. Many causes, in fact, and everyone who paid five dollars for a seat in the arena already knew what the causes were: abortion, busing, homosexuality, divorce, big government, labor unions, welfare, weak-kneed-lily-livered liberalism, environmental-ism, feminism, taxes, disarmament, pornography, evolution, atheism, communism, all advocated by “secular humanists” and “humanist liberals” who didn't attend the National Affairs Briefing but have ”subverted our beloved country,” have seized control of America and are working like beavers to destroy it.

On the other hand, the cause of the people in the arena was to prevent the “secular humanists” and the “humanist liberals” from doing that.

“Welcome to one of the most important convocations convened in this century,” said Dr. W. A. Cris-well, pastor of Dallas' First Baptist Church, who was introduced by equally hyperbolic video evangelist James Robison as “a representative of our Lord and our God and our great country.”

But Dr. Criswell was by no means the only divine representative present. Singer Jerry McGrath assured the audience that all the men and women who would speak during the meeting were “God's best.” Robison, who was one of the organizers and sponsors of the meeting, described his co-sponsor, Ed McAteer, as “a man God trusts,” and McAteer, in turn, called the preachers “the great voices of God.”

The question asked over and over again by speaker after speaker was: “What has this nation come to?” The answers were not happy. We have come to a pretty pass. We are coming to ruin from within and without. We have come to hell in a hand-basket.

But, the speakers said, there's still a way to halt America's slide down the skids. “The place to begin in making America great again,” said Michigan Congressman Guy Vander Jagt, who keynoted the Republican National Convention as well as this one, “is to bring this nation back to God.”