It was, finally, the no-place of where they’d come to rest at the end of that final day, the random placement of all the familiar shapes that she could see out the window, the streetlights and white lines and the grassy rises, leading nowhere, packed behind retaining walls, the feeling that no one really belonged there or could possibly miss it once they had gone, that this, at the end, was what she was left with to say goodbye to: That’s what got to her, and she cried. These were the shapes people invented so they would never forget loneliness, so that it could greet you anywhere, vast and numbing and repetitive, one anonymous landmark succeeding another, each standing alone. Her father stood over her. “You stop that. I don’t need this. Just stop it right now.”
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Shimada,
We have evaluated your child, Joan, for English language competency. This evaluation was performed by Mrs. E. Darer and Mr. J. Shemalian. For the purposes of this evaluation, the student has been tested in English both orally and in writing.
The scope of this standard test has been devised so as to determine a student’s abilities in reading, writing, and comprehension, as well as in necessary auxiliary skills. Specifically, the test requires a student to:
• Recognize, state, read, and write statements and questions.
• Listen to short conversations and answer questions orally.
• Read and comprehend silently and aloud and answer questions.
• Determine the main idea in a simple paragraph.
• Demonstrate sequential ordering of events.
• Use a dictionary and other essential reference books.
• Demonstrate a basic knowledge of punctuation.
• Write legibly upper- and lowercase letters and properly use capitalization.
Our finding is that the student is unable at this time to meet the minimum standard of competency that would enable placement in Grade 8, the level at which a child of this age ordinarily is placed. The student will be required to demonstrate increased proficiency in all areas prior to placement at this level. In the interim, the student has been placed in Grade 2, which will provide a better opportunity to learn at a more unhurried pace.
Should you have any questions concerning this matter, please do not hesitate to contact my office.
My very best wishes,
Louis F. Longcrier
Principal
Just the briefest portrayal of those Fresno Years, which began so inauspiciously. When Joan finally did get to high school at seventeen, the big deal of the thing evaded her. The Choklit Shoppe ethos reigned supreme, fifties swan song ringing out from the angular Seeburg jukes all the stiffs swayed to. Who’dja rather be, Betty or Veronica? Bro-ther! Joan rolled her eyes. The Little Jap in Black hung out with the strange ones, all the oddballs, misfits, loners, eccentrics, screwballs, nonconformists, and cranks. She smoked pot in someone’s dad’s pickup truck in a field outside Porterville. The smell of manure all around. For a minute she believed that what she was smoking actually was cow shit. She read a copy of The Subterraneans someone had lent her. Filled her head up with ideas; it seemed easier than she might have expected to wholly identify with, to imagine herself as, a Negro woman. What it filled her up with was the idea of leaving.
Throughout all this she’d kept winning prizes for her artwork. People were very reassured by this Japanese girl and her delicate touch. A dedication to the old traditional values of the Orient, all the gentle ceremony that seemed to be getting pushed out of the way in this startling new era of entrenched, highly motivated East Asian enemies. She enrolled at Fresno State——
“Well, I’ll say one thing for the Japs,” a grocer said one morning, as Joan entered his store. “I’ll say one thing for them.”
“What’s that?” asked the man he was waiting on.
“At least they ain’t Communists. They understand this system good. They make it work for them. They got it fixed so they got quotas there in all the state colleges. They steal all our inventions to send on back home and then the Japs there send them right back to us, in cheaper versions. They ain’t Communists.”
——She enrolled at Fresno State but soon knew that it was time to be moving on. For one thing, the fine arts department was desolate, an orphaned entity on a third-rate campus. But she didn’t need excuses. She just needed to get out of there. It can be said with some degree of certainty that her parents understood and supported her decision. She applied to CCAC up in Oakland, got in, and left. Exit Fresno.
It was possible, even in the late 1960s, for a person in the Bay Area, in Berkeley, to sustain an apolitical outlook. This was in itself a sort of political posture—albeit a crouch—particularly for someone like Joan, a person for whom politics had never had any point, who had always seen clearly that the divisiveness of political discourse ultimately and inevitably split people into those who were free and those who were “relocated.” That at least was a kind of brutal commitment. True, the camps had preempted discourse, but there in the depraved fact of them lay the resolution of whatever dialectic may have ensued, then or now. In the paper she read of the army’s “strategic hamlets” in South Vietnam, accompanied by a photograph of the peasants, baffled and defiant, behind the barbed wire that was to preserve them from the wrong ideas. There was a Nazi propaganda film she’d seen at the Art Institute; it announced, “Hitler has built a city for the Jews!” She remembered Manzanar, the mountains cut clean against the horizon, the white of the peaks against the white of the sky, from which they could be distinguished only by the glare at their summits. For a few years she went about her business, ignoring the political poseurs and the hippies alike, especially the hippies, who all seemed about two weeks removed from their crew cuts and prom tuxes.
It was three credits that brought Joan into alignment with her political kismet in 1969. She was lacking three humanities credits that she needed to get her diploma and move on to whatever the next thing was going to be for her, and she enrolled in a night philosophy course at Merritt, a JuCo in Oakland. There she met a man, Ralph, who very gradually introduced her to politics. That her newfound engagement was at the beginning inextricably linked to the powerful, explosive orgasms—her very first—that Ralph provided her seemed both just and honorable. By the time the course ended the affair was about over, but the aspirant beatnik from the Central Valley via Hiroshima via Manzanar had already developed a certain taste, for which the peculiar circumstances of her life had prepared her, for the exhausting encounters, the minuteman keenness, the leery reexamination of the old pieties, required of the political radical.
Joan met Willie Clay at one of the People’s Park demonstrations in May 1969. By now, a week or two after the first riot, the National Guard, the police, and the demonstrators appeared to have worked out the blocking of the scene. It was the first time that Joan had actually been to the park site, and she hung back on Telegraph, keeping an extra half block between her and the center of things down Haste Street. Something about the whole setting that day, under the unseasonable lowering sky, gave her the creeps. It was the sort of weather that piss offed the bees, made the dogs bark and run across their yard at you. She was really just trying this People’s Park business on for size anyway. It was all anybody was talking about, there were all those National Guard guys all over the place freaking everybody out (though Joan herself was familiar with the sight of uniformed, armed men), so why not? Now she was kind of sorry that she’d come, and it occurred to her all at once, as she was caught up in the crowd, the small, churning eddy of people below the steady current flowing through the Sather Gate and down Telegraph, that the affirming solidarity others found in the midst of a swarming, loud assembly was nothing that she needed, at all.
She was a stealthy, secret person, with a delicate touch.
What she had to offer was more than the pinprick presence of her body smack dabbed in the middle of a jam. It was something more, an individual voice that inspired, an individual vision that revealed.
OK
, so this bared some lingering fucked-up values, some egotype issues she still had to deal with. But right now she had to like get out of there. She’d reached the corner and could see that the demo had begun to disintegrate, that a sequence of discrete clashes had built into a rush toward the park itself, vacant in its ruin behind a defensive line of helmeted guardsmen who stood in impassive anticipation of the encounter. The hollowed voice, its pulsing monotone, coming through the police bullhorn, seemed to counterpoint the surging crowd and its own steady noise, like an ostinato playing against the surf:
“CLEARraaaaaTHEaaaaaaAREAaaaaaaDISPERSEaaaaaaNOW aaaaaaCLEARaaaaaaTHEaaaaaaAREAaaaaaaDISPERSEaaaaaa NOWaaaaaa.”
Others at the edges now saw the swelling, and the confrontation waiting for it where it would break, and turned to run, pushing into the milling group that was on Telegraph and forcing it into two sections, angry where they had divided and coming together again, like reverse mitosis. Behind her Joan heard the sound of glass breaking and turned her head to see a heavy bearded man rolling through the jagged center of a broken plate glass storefront, just rolling slowly and as easy as you please. As she was pushed back, she felt with her heel for the curb, fearful that she would fall beneath all those feet, and she stumbled up onto the sidewalk just as the first heavy drops of rain began to fall. More people were coming onto Telegraph from Haste now, the bullhorn had quit, and she heard the sounds of combat, those intent on fighting sandwiched between police and national guardsmen, and the rest in flight. She saw a wispy trailing plume climb away from the police line, describe an arc, then vanish into the crowd nearby, where a pale haze gathered and expanded in the humid air, repelling people.
“Gas!” someone shouted. “The fucking pigs are gassing us!”
A man made for the canister. “I wouldn’t grab that,” another man said. With lucid calm Joan studied his T-shirt, which depicted a friendly-looking young man evolving in several stages into a ferocious pig clad in army fatigues and bearing a rifle, over the legend DON’T LET THIS HAPPEN TO YOU. “It’s fucking hot,” he added.
The first man removed his hat and, using that, gingerly picked up the canister. Again the plume rose, tracing its path back in the direction it had come, as he returned the canister to the police. Joan caught some of the fumes and instinctively brought her hands to her face, astonished by the speed with which the reaction arrived, bringing convulsive retching and elastic strings of saliva that swung from her mouth. She tried to keep her eyes open, but they fluttered spasmodically. Tears and snot rolled down her face. She lurched for the building behind her, figuring to grope and fight her way out of there. Her outstretched fingers jammed against something both hard and soft, and something seized her by the wrist and swung her back into the crowd.
“Watch where you’re going, you dumb bitch,” a voice said, aggrieved.
She tried again, but now her disorientation was complete. Light appeared between her eyelids, which thankfully had stopped flapping, but now they just sagged, sleepily half shut, so that she really couldn’t see. She placed her hands in front of her face, palms out, and pushed forward. She decided not to panic. She felt panic approaching because she was caught in the crowd and she was feeling sick to her stomach and her eyes and her nose and her lips were burning and she was having tremendous trouble catching her breath and she couldn’t see a damn thing. Panic was hanging back, but just waiting to sprint in and unhinge her completely. So she deliberately considered her case. OK, Joan, she said to herself, you’re going to just walk until you run into something solid. Then you’re going to hang on to it. This rule outs people, who move and fall. This rule outs cars, that someone can move or that can turn over. This rule outs the sidewalk, for there’s nothing to hang on to, plus you might get walked all over. Her manner with herself kept her calm enough that she was able to keep going through the crowd, which, fortunately for her, had not yet discovered its direction. She was almost amused, and she kept it up. Well, Joan. You have really gotten into a good mess here. What in the earth were you thinking about? Joan, you are just not a crowd person. Then her palms were up against something flat and smooth. It was not a wall, and it was not a door, nor was it a truck or a bus, and panic finally turned up when she realized that she had worked herself face up to a big plate glass window like the one she had just seen the fat man fall through. The crowd heaved slightly behind her, pushing her a little, and involuntarily she let escape a cry. The moderating, mildly reproving voice inside had abandoned her, and she was left with a growing conviction that she would be pushed through the glass and cut to pieces. Then she felt a hand on her.
“You got gassed?” a voice asked.
She nodded.
“Can you breathe? Take deep, slow breaths. Don’t take panic breaths. You’re OK. You got bronchitis? Asthma? Tuberculosis? Lung cancer? No? You’re probably OK. You might react, bronchospasms or something, but you haven’t so far, so again, you’re probably OK. Hold on and come with me.”
She reached out, and her hand partly encircled a forearm—not a particularly hairy one, she noticed right off. They walked this way for a bit, forearm to forearm, and soon had turned off Telegraph and onto a quieter side street.
“Good thing it’s raining,” the voice said. It was a man’s voice. “Tilt your head up. Did you rub your eyes?”
“A little,” said Joan.
“That makes it worse. Here, now let the rain wash some out. I have a canteen here too. I always carry one to these demos. You never know when the pigs are going to start firing that stuff. You’re not wearing contact lenses, are you?”
No, Joan shook her head.
“Good. Boy, they’re murder. People wear them, though. Ego. Got to look your best. I guess you never know when you’re going to meet that special someone. But listen, now I’m going to pour some water out of the canteen directly into your eyes. Just blink it out. How’s your breathing?”
“Good. Better.”
“Blink. Blink. Here, hold out your hands. You rubbed your eyes, you got it on your hands. How’s your eyes?”
“Good.”
“Can you see?”
What she could see was Willie Clay, nice-looking guy, trim, good face, a little short. Younger than she was, it looked like. What she said was, “A little better.”
“What you really need to do is take a shower. You live nearby?”
Joan shook her head no. He blushed. Definitely younger.
“Do you think you might want,” he suggested, his eyes widening as if he were astonishing himself, “to come back to my place?”
If Joan didn’t want to deal with the crowds, she’d met up with Willie Clay at just about the right time, because to his way of thinking the demos were now entropically inclined. It was as if a buzzer had gone off and suddenly the idea was done. First off, people had started to show up looking for the hippies: the dancing naked girls with henna tattoos, the burnout freaks with flowers in their hair. This was bad. This made Willie feel useless, impotent, helpless, feeble, and shabby. But then the dancing naked girls had started showing up too, and this Willie could not abide. Also to his way of thinking, even the most serious-minded group of demonstrators tended to find itself at loggerheads over the single central issue of intent. To wit: in the case of, say, an antiwar demonstration, most of the people who showed up, well, they just wanted the war to stop. OK, Willie would say to them, so we stop the war. Then what? Then we go back to drinking jug wine and eating table grapes? because so what about the farm workers? Then we go back to living in communities where the basic job of the pigs is to keep the blacks confined in their ghettos? Then we go back to our credo that every American has the God-given right to walk around his house in a T-shirt in the middle of winter and drive his Cadillac two and a half blocks to the grocery store? Then we go back to smoking dope with towels stuffed under the doors because they’ll bust your ass and lock it up for years? Then we just go back to Nixon? Richard M. Nixon? Excuse me, but you mean we just go back to waiting patiently while
Nixon serves out, presides for, eight years? Huh? And so they would look at you like, What the fuck is up your ass, man? We just want the damn war to stop. Or they’d go, It’s the first domino, with the self-satisfied affect that only complete mastery of evocative but basically empty jargon brings. Domino! Willie repeated, fairly heaving with disgust. This is the image McNamara and Co. (he pronounced it, and Joan envisioned, “coe”) came up with to sell the war here at home. To his way of thinking, these people, the purist war enders, would eventually form a new class: financially comfortable, tasteful, smugly proud of its impeccable progressive credentials, entrepreneurial, and totally, emetically bourgeois. Raising false consciousness to unheardof levels of falsity. Just stand by until around 1984, and you’d see. To his way of thinking, when the government finally got around to ending the war—which wasn’t likely to happen real soon if the opposition principally spent its time marching around on college campuses, which had about as much to do with the daily life of the average American as bathing rituals along the Ubangi—these poseurs would probably take the credit for it. Shameless! Here was Willie’s opinion: To his way of thinking, you wanted to end the war by bringing the society that waged it, that developed and continually refined its rationale, to an end. You wanted total revolution. Of course, if you had that, you couldn’t open a food co-op somewhere or buy yourself a nice piece of land in Bolinas. You’d have to commit; you’d have to fight and struggle. His right fist hitting his left palm for emphasis.
Willie could work himself into a real lather. He was the sort of intense, wiry little guy that Joan had been noticing at the fringes of things for years, since she’d returned to America and kept her eyes and ears open behind the humiliating primary school readers she was obliged to master before joining children her own age in school. In high school she’d hung out with several of this type, but the light had already started failing in them; mostly what they were fighting and struggling against was following their fathers into the produce business. Joan figured that this was Willie’s way of beating a similar rap. And as she was drawn further into Willie’s circle, her foremost impression of these young radicals was that despite themselves, they felt that they were getting away with something, beating the rap, that the makeup of the thing was 50 percent revolution and 50 percent defying expectations.
Trance Page 26
