Several days into the camping season of the following summer I got a rude awakening. Another camper felt about Dickie as I did. This was Freddie Weymarsh of Knoxville, who supplanted me in one day’s time. The camp went on a field trip. Dickie and I were assigned to different buses. When I got off mine, there he and Freddie were, thenceforth inseparable.
I swore never to get over it. And went where the brokenhearted go. To books. At Indianola the must-reads were To Kill a Mockingbird, Lord of the Flies and The Catcher in the Rye, a trinity standardized throughout the land. A few of the older boys were dipping into Franny and Zooey and Nine Stories. I even took a crack at Seymour: An Introduction but soon lost heart, skipping ahead to the magical last words: “Just go to bed, now. Quickly. Quickly and slowly.”
That summer I finally did have tears to shed into my pillow. With boundless self-pity I’d go to bed quickly but to sleep slowly, indulging a good cry after lights-out; and did my utmost to suffer as much as I could; and, as usual, had murder in my heart, envisioning for Freddie a shallow culvert. I was indeed of the same clay as Loeb and Leopold. While you slept, Weymarsh, had you any idea how inclined I was to put a rag in your mouth?
A new friend came to my aid, bright-hearted, inquisitive Scott Simon, for many years now a much-loved personality on National Public Radio. But I hung upon his commentaries before any of you. He’d share with me pages of a novel he was at work on about a national political convention—which, as it happened, was what we were hearing on the radio each evening from San Francisco’s Cow Palace. I’d go over to his cabin and sit on his bed till my welcome wore out, and listen to what we believed to be a real contest between Governor William Scranton of Pennsylvania and Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona.
In reality it was only the leading Republican moderate, Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York, who’d stood a chance against the Goldwater right. But Rocky had been outflanked. “Extremism in the defense of liberty” had triumphed. Scott the novelist took careful note of every rhetorical twist and turn. “It is essential that this convention repudiate here and now,” shouted Rockefeller, who on the Tuesday evening of the convention had taken the podium to cheers and murmurs and a catcall or two, “any doctrinaire,”—here the boos began—“militant minority, whether Communist, Ku Klux Klan or Bircher”—cheers and boos—“which would subvert this party to purposes alien to the very basic tenets which gave this party birth.” A deepening restiveness in the Cow Palace. “Precisely one year ago today, on July 14, 1963, I warned that the Republican Party is in real danger of subversion by a radical, well-financed and highly disciplined minority. . . .” Boos galore. “The methods of these extremist elements I have experienced at first hand—” Here a chorus of “We want Barry! We want Barry!” drowned out the governor.
Meanwhile, in New York, our national life took a dark turn on Thursday of that week: A fifteen-year-old black boy was shot in Harlem by a white policeman, precipitating six nights of large-scale looting and arson that spread also to the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. Similar inner-city riots were shortly to follow in Rochester, Philadelphia, Chicago, Jersey City, Paterson and Elizabeth, along with one in St. Augustine, Florida. (Televised coverage of these events marked an epoch. “The other America” was now on view every evening in middle-class homes. A summer later, in 1965, Watts was on fire. In 1966 it would be the Hough neighborhood of Cleveland. In 1967, Newark, Detroit, Milwaukee. During Holy Week of 1968, in the aftermath of Dr. King’s murder, there were riots in more than a hundred American cities, our greatest national disorder since the Civil War. These urban devastations, along with a rapidly expanding presence in Southeast Asia and the growing antiwar movement it spawned, were what people would shortly mean by “The Sixties,” when the air rang with utopian battle cries and stank of ghettos burning.)
• • •
Three weeks later that summer, at a little past ten-thirty on the night of August 4, about an hour after taps, I woke to the murmurs of several counselors on the veranda. They were tuning into a radio broadcast. I slipped from my covers and, hoping no floorboard would creak, padded to the screen door. The mournful voice of Lyndon Johnson was explaining that in the Gulf of Tonkin (wherever that was) an American destroyer, the USS Maddox, had been attacked with torpedoes two days earlier and two other destroyers had been attacked that day. And that we had sunk the offending gunboats and were retaliating further. “The determination of all Americans to carry out our full commitment to the people and to the government of South Vietnam will be redoubled by this outrage. Yet our response, for the present, will be limited and fitting. We Americans know, although others appear to forget, the risk of spreading conflict.”
Here the President’s voice grew emphatic: “We still seek no wider war.”
There were quiet exchanges among the senior counselors, young men with only college deferments standing between them and conscription. “It is a solemn responsibility,” the President wound up, “to have to order even limited military action by forces whose overall strength is as vast and as awesome as that of the United States of America, but it is my considered conviction, shared throughout your government, that firmness in the right is indispensable today for peace; that firmness will always be measured. Its mission is peace.”
“Is there going to be a war?” I asked through the screen.
“Get back to bed!” one of the counselors ordered. I returned to my cot and drifted off, thinking of the godlike creatures on the veranda jumping out of helicopters and leaping from foxholes.
Earlier that day the bodies of three missing Congress of Racial Equality fieldworkers—Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James E. Chaney—were discovered in an earthen dam near Philadelphia, Mississippi. A day after that, in retaliation for the Gulf of Tonkin, American bombers carried out strike sorties against North Vietnamese torpedo bases and oil-storage depots at Hon Gai, Vinh and other coastal targets. What we now know, of course, is that the second Gulf of Tonkin attack never happened, that the Maddox and another vessel, the USS Turner Joy, had seen radar shadows, not torpedoes, on their instruments, and that the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, Johnson’s nearly unanimous warrant from Congress for all the years of war to come, was based on a fiction. The bombing campaigns, the hundreds of thousands of ground troops, the free-fire zones and matter-of-fact atrocities, the widening of the war throughout Southeast Asia, the 58,307 American dead and hundreds of thousands maimed in body and mind, the uncountable Vietnamese dead—all of these the college boys on the veranda would in due course protest from the safety of their privileged lives. But as it was the first American war we sent chiefly our poor to fight and die in, I doubt that any of them ever went to Vietnam.
• • •
My constant companion from age nine had been a Nikkorex F 35mm. I became the best photographer at Indianola and won the photography competition two years running. My forte was pictures without people in them: close-up studies of lichens on stones; a broken fence entwined with poison ivy; canoes upside down in their racks. I still have some of these, printed with sepia toner to make everything look venerable. Already in childhood the perils of nostalgia were gaining on me.
But my masterpiece did have a figure in it. Under strictest supervision, I was allowed to go out on the rifle range and photograph Neil Meltzer lying prone with a .22 rifle pointed straight at me. This shot won the 1963 photography contest and appeared on the cover of the camp yearbook.
How am I remembered by those who were there? As a photographer, yes. Also as a purveyor of beside-the-point information, a tiptoe walker, a disaster at team sports and a furtive student of bodies in the communal showers. That I was asked back for three successive years after my rocky first summer is a tribute to the broad-mindedness of the management. I’d sometimes do bad things with no premeditation or even grasp of what I was doing. In my fourth and final summer I peed one morning out front of Cabin Sixteen rather than going to the lavatory
, a terrible infraction. My cabin mates—none of whom cared for me, not even Dickie anymore—decided to administer the silent treatment. The silent treatment, from Dickie! Here was true desolation. Next evening Chief came to Cabin Sixteen’s table in the refectory and told them to knock it off. His kindly words are with me still: “If all of us did what this boy did, the camp would smell like an open sewer. But it’s time to forgive him. And to remember our own mistakes.” Nobody had ever heard of Asperger’s back then, of course. There were just us odd wads, spazzes, dipshits, homos, dickheads and so on. But Chief Woldenberg knew enough about boys to spot the peculiar one in need of a little looking after, a little latitude.
Still, he bore with me only up to a point. When my all-in-focus shot looking up a totem pole won me Indianola’s photography competition for the second year in a row, he would not let it appear on the yearbook cover. “We’ve given him a prize for looking down the barrel of a gun,” Chief said to Captain Dave, in charge of photography. “Now it’s for looking up a totem pole. Frankly, I don’t see any of that boy’s photographs as prizeworthy.”
How do I know Chief’s words? I was eavesdropping under the window of his office. Truth was, the totem pole was magnificent, a great image I’m proud of to this day. But I was the embarrassing boy who’d peed on the green instead of in the can, and no more photos of mine were going to grace the yearbook cover.
| CHAPTER EIGHT |
NO JEWS, NO COMMIES, NO FAGS NEITHER
At the start of seventh grade in the autumn of 1964, perhaps in keeping with our changed circumstances, I passed from public into private school. Farewell, gentle high-minded Westcliff Elementary. Hello, brutal, snobbish Fort Worth Country Day.
Sensing the difficulties they’d plunged me into, my parents came up with their usual solution. A party. Mom and I addressed invitations to the whole seventh grade, none of whom I knew well: “Come to a Patio Shindig!” (Shindig! was a pop music show on TV that everybody was watching.) This was to be a boy-girl event, unimaginable only six months earlier. A shadow line had been crossed.
I prepared for the big evening by writing out and memorizing several things to say to my guests, whether they were interested to hear them or not. And a very satisfactory shindig it turned out to be, with the girls in their sweater sets and Dad turning hot dogs and hamburgers on the barbecue and a local disc jockey playing the top forty while my classmates and I wiggled. And everybody seeming to like me.
That was the week the Rolling Stones appeared for the first time on Ed Sullivan, singing “Time Is on My Side.” A lot of other songs we danced to that evening have stood the test of time: “Twist and Shout” and “She Loves You,” of course, by the greatest group of them all. And the Beach Boys’ “I Get Around.” But also the Supremes doing “Baby Love” and, for slow dancing, Chad and Jeremy’s “A Summer Song,” Dionne Warwick’s “Walk On By,” the Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost that Lovin’ Feelin’” and—my favorite—Gerry and the Pacemakers’ “Don’t Let the Sun Catch You Crying.”
True, we heard over and over on the radio the horrible novelty “My Boy Lollipop,” a folk abomination called “We’ll Sing in the Sunshine” and a demented bike-wreck ballad, “Leader of the Pack.” But never to be forgotten from those music-rich months was “Then He Kissed Me” by the Crystals and Martha and the Vandellas’ “Dancing in the Street.” We were in a supernova of new music. The Negroes had taken charge of our emotions. Hearing the Drifters sing “Under the Boardwalk” or the Four Tops do “Baby I Need Your Loving” made the fifties-style white tunes of our elder siblings sound plain dumb.
Most of these songs advised a girl to put out. The penny may have dropped for two or three “couples” who ventured down the hill to exchange kisses and had to be called back by Mom, good-natured, unprudish, inclined to make a joke of such things, especially as we were, she believed, too young to know what came after a peck.
“It’s ice cream up here!” she called into the autumn twilight. “All hands on deck!”
• • •
A few days after the party a boy named Fenton Bosley, who’d enjoyed himself on our patio, saw me sitting alone in the lunchroom—for the party hadn’t made me as popular as it was intended to—and put down his tray next to mine. “Something I’ve been wanting to ask,” he said. “Are you grateful?”
“Grateful for what?”
“For what we did for you.”
“Did for me?” I asked. (Coming to my party?)
A quick pantomime as his face leapt into a snarl. “‘Did for me?’ The Second World War, queerbait. Don’t you know we fought it for you people? Because you don’t know how to fight.”
Thus was I introduced to Jew-hatred. At dinner I told the folks what Fenton Bosley had said. Mom replied: “Bosley. The name registered with me when we were addressing invitations, but I didn’t tell you. He’s someone you knew when you were three and four. In nursery school. At the synagogue. But you knew him as Sammy.” I remembered no Sammy or much else from when I was three and four. “After his father, Abe Epstein, went to New York and threw himself out the window of the Barbizon-Plaza, his widow, Lurleene, married Cliff Bosley and they changed the children’s names, last and first. Sammy was the little boy and Ruthie was the little girl. He became Fenton, if you can believe it. She became Christine or something.”
Poor Fenton, you perished a few years later in one of those flaming teenage car wrecks so common among the privileged of our town. A year or two more and Lurleene had shot Cliff to death after an evening at the country club where people witnessed him slap her around. (At that country club, Dad used to say, even the drapes were anti-Semitic.) No charges filed. I wonder what happened to the little girl. Probably nothing good.
Like every other classmate at Country Day, Fenton had been vociferous for Goldwater. Indeed, North Texas was at the center of the far-right strategy for defeating Rockefeller for the nomination. The whole ruling class of Fort Worth had gone over from the till recently omnipotent Democrats to this new breed of far-right Republicanism. They quoted from The Conscience of a Conservative, their savior’s testament. (At the time nobody knew it had been ghostwritten for Goldwater by L. Brent Bozell Jr., William F. Buckley Jr.’s brother-in-law.) Many attended so-called resignation rallies at which they swore off sin, i.e., the Democratic Party, and were baptized into the gospel according to Barry. A decade after Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court decision was deemed the devil’s work: “I am firmly convinced,” said Goldwater, “not only that integrated schools are not required, but that the Constitution does not permit any interference whatsoever by the federal government in the field of education.” His Fort Worth followers damned civil rights as a “Second Reconstruction.” Over drinks my classmates’ parents discussed another of their favorite new books, John A. Stormer’s None Dare Call It Treason, in which the federal government was unmasked as a bunch of Reds. And they more than muttered that the South was going to have to rearm.
As for the Civil Rights Act, signed into law by President Johnson in July, it prompted the inevitable outcry “States’ rights, not civil rights!” along with boilerplate claims that the movement for racial equality was being run from Moscow. Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, his newly announced legislative program for the fight against poverty and racial discrimination, was seen as the Democrats’ blueprint for a mongrelized Commie anthill. At Dallas Memorial Auditorium on June 16, when the Texas Republican State Convention gave Goldwater the fifty-six additional delegates he needed to clinch the nomination, he announced himself to the crowd as the only candidate for President “who is proud and happy to recognize the South as part of the United States.” The wild demonstration that followed featured a banner, snake-danced through the hall, that read, “The worm has turned.” It had indeed. The five states of the Deep South that Goldwater would carry in November became the core of a Southern Strategy that gave Republicans their long-term edge in national pol
itics. Foreseeing with great clarity the consequences of this southern shift, this turn of the worm, Johnson said privately: “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”
About a month before the election a strange news story gripped me and the nation. Johnson’s closest aide, Walter Jenkins, was arrested for some kind of misbehavior in a men’s room at the Washington, D.C., YMCA. “Must have had a nervous breakdown,” I heard Dad tell Mom. “What the hell else could it be?” Goldwater supporters printed up bumper stickers saying ALL THE WAY WITH LBJ—BUT DON’T GO NEAR THE YMCA! I understood there was something ineffably nasty in all of this. And after that I would shudder when Dad warned Mom, as from time to time he did, that he was headed for a nervous breakdown. I believed he’d have to go to the Y to have it. And gathered that things went badly there.
• • •
On the morning of Election Day 1964, I covered my school blazer with Johnson–Humphrey buttons. When I came to breakfast Dad stared. “You’re brave, son,” was all he allowed. In chapel at Country Day the laughter around me was general. At lunch I ate alone, wondering if I should take off a few of the buttons. Breezing past on his way to the in-crowd’s table, Fenton said: “For your information, Goldwater’s got this thing wrapped up.” That afternoon somebody, some fellow seventh-grader, I assume, stuck a note through the slot of my locker: NO JEWS, NO COMMIES, NO FAGS NEITHER.
The Hue and Cry at Our House Page 8
