“It’s fucking fascistic, is what it is,” Number 12 said, and he and Number 8 were off and running down the stairs, slower than Benji could tell they’d intended, handicapped by their cleats and shin guards.
At the bottom of the stairs, Number 8 turned around. “We’re going back to our rooms to make signs—grab what you have, come out to the protest!”
“They can’t take away our right to participate!” Number 12 chimed in without turning. “The Olympics is about the world!”
And then they were off. “The whole world!” they screamed, fists raised high in the air.
CHAPTER 10
The Protest
March 22, 1980
Benji thought of the soccer players’ plight as he watched them disappear into their dorms. So much really was at stake; the Olympics was about the world. And it was also personal; watching the games with his mother created an unrecognizable but radiating joy that circulated in his stomach. Now he remembered the girls spinning on the ice, weightless and bewitching, his mother close, cheering wildly when Dorothy Hamill performed her Hamill Camel perfectly. It had made Ben want to create a signature move on the soccer field, a reverse scissors perhaps, the ball rolling sideways across his body, that he thought he’d call a Rolled Gold, which he’d never got around to making unique enough to call his own. Then it hit him the way seeing his grandfather in that textbook at the beginning of the semester, the way seeing Rachel holding her little sign in front of Sherman, had. There are many ways to win: there is nothing more mine than this fight.
And Benji decided to take political action.
He walked over to Chapels Field. There, with most of the soccer players, the baseball and softball teams, basketball players, even the club teams, the rugby players and the touch footballers, girls who were once gymnasts, anyone who had ever loved a sport and who knew it could be elevated to art, anyone who knew what it was like to step onto a field, or a court or a balance beam, anyone who understood what it meant to use his or her body to be victorious, Benji made signs well into the evening. Everyone was banded together, working in the gloaming beneath that scattering of sunlight in the upper atmosphere illuminating the field just before dusk, and it felt then just as it had in high school on those nights they’d been able to continue practice before the lights clicked on and the lightning bugs and mosquitoes came out.
As Benji sat out at the makeshift tables filling in his hammer-and-sickles on red poster board with black ink, he thought of all the work he wasn’t doing, which in light of the Jersey shows made him want to put down his marker and go to the library to get some actual reading done.
Then it came to him. “Let’s have a rally, like a real rally, not just a bunch of us hanging around with signs!” he’d yelled into the crowd of athletes. And if it worked? An extra bonus that this could also satisfy his American Protest! class project.
Bent over their own signs, the kids next to him had flinched, startled by his outburst.
“We can have speakers and we can get athletes from all over Boston to come,” he’d said, a little softer. He’d looked out onto the field and was met with a dozen athletes sticking their fists in the air. “Yeah!” they screamed. “Ra-lee!”
Several kids started throwing around a football, and as a game of touch developed on the field, Benji and Number 8 and Number 12, Larry Fuchs and Andy Shapiro, as well as Peter Cox and Roland Berger, juniors from Benji’s American Protest! class, went back to his dorm to plan the event.
They decided to call their fledgling organization STAB—Students to Abort the Boycott—well, it almost worked and Larry thought that STAB could also mean “stabbed in the back,” which was what this country was doing to its athletes by not letting them compete. Benji put Moscow out of his head, the Moscow he heard on the other end of the long string that led to his father, who he now imagined had sat on the edge of a tautly made bed in some Stalin-era hotel, drinking Stolichnaya. Vodka, he’d told Benji as he rose from the just made bed to leave Benji’s brand-new dorm room, it’s worse than a woman; vodka is not your friend. It was such an unlikely thing for his father to say. It sounded as if he were channeling some Russki spy who’d grown old and now lived on a hill in Calais overlooking the sea and was telling his life story to a foreigner. Surely there are far worse double-crossers than vodka. Like the government, for instance! Like the U.S. government!
Forget the Soviets. Benji willed himself not to think of Tatti’s story, his grandmother, young, cheeks flushed red with cold, ice-skating to scratched records in Gorky Park, hot potatoes in her mittens, an image now as frozen in his mind as Moscow must become in winter. Why expunge the memory? Benji thought, as he realized only in this moment that what he was actually protesting here was the American government and the way it exploited people, the way it used the erroneous—grain, for instance—for political gain. People were not weapons, he thought, but as he thought it, he wondered, were weapons involved, would he not be protesting them as well? There was little now, Benji thought, that was not protest-worthy; how does it end? How did the sixties end? Did people run out of protests; did they forget the violent way so many people had been killed?
Well, he hadn’t gotten that far in his class, but he had already read Rules for Radicals and A Time to Speak, a Time to Act, so he knew that things changed. Groups factionalized. Agendas split. People went berserk; they seized revolution. Now Benji remembered being one of many in that huge stadium, his body rocking back and forth, eyes closed, his face tilted back as “Box of Rain” enveloped him, each note, each lyric, so many stars tumbling over him. Nothing was wrong in this, Benji had thought at the show, he and Rachel sewn together, her curves sutured to his bones, unless pure joy had also become something to rise up against and beat down.
Through simple, divine word of mouth, the college teams all over the Boston area began to hear news of STAB and the rally. Athletes, Benji told himself, were as networked, if not as sweet-smelling, as the Washington politicians he grew up around. He remembered the smell of D.C. insiders—the scent of perfume and liquor and tropical flowers—that lingered on his mother’s clothes when she came in from some catering affair. Ratner at Columbia, whom Benji called with news of the protest, knew a dozen players at Harvard and Tufts, and it went from there. Benji, who had once been in this athletic network, felt a pang of jealousy at the speed at which his news was traveling.
Andy, who was from Worcester, had interned one summer with an assistant coach of the Celtics, and he tried to get Larry Bird to come speak. Instead he’d ended up with Robert Parish, who, Andy had on inside information, would most likely be sent to Boston from Oakland next season. This was far less impressive, and Roland was concerned about Parish’s growing reputation for silence.
“I mean, are you sure the guy will actually talk?” he had asked. They were using the blackboard in the lounge to brainstorm over who might speak and had come up with a list of the Celtics past and present, peppered with one or two New England Patriots. Roland went to the board and began to erase them all. “Because he doesn’t say a whole hell of a lot.”
“Actually,” Andy said, folding his arms and pushing his chair back on two legs. “That’s a lie. I’ve heard he’s a terrific public speaker.” His chair slammed back onto the floor.
Roland threw the eraser down hard, and a cloud of dust puffed out around it. “So what’s with the mute-Indian rep then?”
“Shhh.” Benji placed his hands palms down on the table and looked around the room, making sure no one outside their group had heard the slur. “Come on, man, none of that shit here, okay? And anyway, he’s called the Chief.”
“Why is that?” Larry had asked.
“One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, baby!” Peter said. “The Indian who did Jack Nicholson in.”
“Oh, yeah,” Larry said. “Yeah.”
“Talk about the sixties, man,” Peter said.
But such a prominent player lending support was exactly what they needed to give some credence to the
ir cause and to assist Benji with reaching out to the media. He called contacts from the Boston Globe to the People’s World, to local NPR, to the nightly news, all from a phone list provided by the Campus Action Committee. Benji left long, heartfelt messages on STAB’s plight for producers and editors well after eleven o’clock that evening. Several even picked up, including a producer at CBS’s Evening News, who told him, “Pray for a slow news day, kid. If all we got tomorrow is who shot JR tonight, and more of this hostage crisis, we’ll be there.”
Well after midnight, Benji climbed eagerly into Rachel’s bed, anxious to tell her about his day. His amazing, came-out-of-nowhere-important, life-changing, life-affirming fucking day.
“I’m not sure I believe in this, Benji,” she told him, curling into herself as she put her underwear back on.
“Are you kidding me?” Benji flipped onto his back, his dick softening.
“No, I’m not kidding.” Rachel sat up. “It’s important only to protest what one really believes in. Otherwise one’s voice is a muted voice; one will be taken less seriously. We can’t just jump onto every cause. I mean, I’m supposed to go to every protest on campus?”
“I met you at a pork rally, Rachel.” He brushed his growing hair out of his face and began vigorously twisting a curl. “You’re a fucking vegetarian.”
“Make fun if you want. The pork and shellfish debate was about the university’s larger issues, which I believe I explained to you.” Rachel thumped her head against the wall, crossing her arms over her naked belly, conscious, Benji noted, of the skin that folded into her stomach like a stack of thick, fluffy pancakes when she sat up.
“Lighten up, Rache,” he said, simultaneously wondering if Larry, who was responsible for contacting teams all over the Boston area, had cast a net as wide as they needed to get a decent crowd. And if Peter had organized the buses correctly, one for every school, with the corresponding pickup time. “And anyway, I believe in it,” Benji said, propped on his side. “And I’m one of the organizers. Isn’t that enough?”
“I believe in a cause because my boyfriend does? Well, that’s impressive.”
Benji had made signs supporting abortion rights—Take your laws off my body! He’d painted that for Rachel. He had marched to protest nuclear testing after Three Mile Island, and he had run a half marathon to free South Africa, a marathon at which, he noted now, Rachel had merely greeted him at the finish line. That day he had also signed a contract to never use Shell Oil, a company that Rachel had told him paid hundreds of millions to circumvent oil sanctions in South Africa while they had half a billion dollars invested there. And he had done it all willingly, happily even. Learning from Rachel was part of what drew him to her; her ideas and the way she articulated them separated her from any other girl he had known. To watch her get all fired up in public, then be the one that she chose to be alone with later, the two of them smoking hash off spoons and listening to Dead bootlegs as they made love, was one of his newfound and necessary pleasures. Benji accepted what Rachel believed not because he was without his own ideas, but because she believed them and he loved and trusted her.
“We always go to your things. What about mine?” Benji lifted Rachel’s duvet and scanned the bottom of the bed for the underwear he’d kicked off not twenty minutes before when he’d entered Rachel from behind, cupping her breasts with his hands as his chest pressed into her thick, warm back. He had felt so excited and stressed and filled with anxiety over all he needed to do for tomorrow, being inside her had been a tremendous relief.
“Okay, well, why do you believe in it then?” Rachel’s mouth was raised at one side in a smirk. Her fingertips rubbed her elbows.
“Because I do, is why. It doesn’t matter; that I do should be enough. And I’ve done a lot to plan this.”
“And you should go to it.”
“I am going to it. And so should you.” He found his underwear in the tangle of bedsheets and struggled each of his legs through the white cotton. “You don’t think it’s worthy? Even if it’s important to me, you won’t come?”
“As I said, Benji, I’m not sure we should be there—in Moscow, I mean. It’s very complicated, all these issues. You’re acting with your heart, not your head. I mean, isn’t this more about being on a soccer team or screwing a cheerleader?”
“What?” He pulled up the briefs, the waistband snapping.
“Sorry,” she said. “I mean, it is about the soccer, though. You missing soccer.”
“That is so condescending! We all, I should hope, act with our hearts. I understand the issues, you know. I’m fucking Russian for one. When they come and clear all the Russians out, when there’s a Russian holocaust, I’ll be gone.”
“What the hell are you talking about? Come on, Benji, you’re as Russian as anyone else here. And there’s no holocaust.”
“I am too Russian,” he said, though he had never considered himself so until this very moment. Isn’t that when identity is determined? He’d read it somewhere: the second there is opposition, you become what is being opposed. Just look at the Holocaust, he thought.
“Fine.” Rachel rolled her eyes.
“Well?” he said sheepishly. He now chose to ignore what he’d brought up, this inevitable dialogue overheard in every crevasse and corner of this institution. Will there be another one? Could there be? Will it be here? Who will be taken? “And, just for the record, I grew up in Washington. I was going to protest marches on the Mall while you were shopping in the strip malls of New Jersey, you know.” His rally, he was beginning to see, was effectively a mobilization to support the Soviets. Was Rachel correct to tell him he had not thought the issues through, that he had in fact been swayed by the heart; by aching memories of cheering crowds and locker rooms and, yes, cheerleaders? Because this rally protested the Americans, and in plucking this one aspect from the complex web of history that went back and back, as Sigmund had told him, to the original Revolution—1917!—the one that had worked, the only one, Benji had landed quite staunchly on the side of the Russians. So did this make him a communist? Sigmund would say no. His father would say, please, please, no. Wouldn’t he? “And I also feel for the athletes; there’s nothing wrong with knowing both sides. I have absolutely no idea what this has to do with balling cheerleaders.”
“Well, didn’t you?”
Benji couldn’t stop himself; he thought of Nikol Stathakis in her short polyester gold skirt with navy pleating tucked in crisp, secretive folds obscenely slicing the skirt and revealing the blue fabric within when she moved. She wore the little team Skivvies beneath, and when she walked, the big W stamped on the ass revealed itself in parts. The image alone seemed to prove Rachel right. She was always game, Nikol. Once he’d finger-fucked her beneath the bleachers, smack in the middle of a football game. She’d sauntered over at a third down, retrieved him from the top seats, and led him there herself.
“I have, yes,” Benji said, remembering the view of asses and legs and shoes they stood beneath as he felt his way to her.
“I really hate that about you.” Rachel’s left hand—every digit but her wedding finger, including her thumb, wrapped by a silver ring—tapped the opposite arm.
Benji looked at her, squinting. “Really. And why’s that?”
“That you were once that kind of a guy. Who went out with cheerleaders.”
He stared at Rachel. She had always seemed so secure, above the usual forms of female pettiness. “Yeah, well, I did. That was me. I was him.”
“I know that.” She brought her chin toward her chest and took a deep breath through her nose.
“What does it matter?” Part of him wanted to offer comfort, alleviating those insecurities he’d never known her to have. He recognized in Rachel what he had begun to see in his sister, that all her hates were merely fears turned around. The other part of him, however, wanted to say something horrid, demeaning, unmentionable. But for better or worse, his anger stayed closed, a bee trapped inside a soda-pop can dropped on som
e sunny field, unable to find the opening out. “This is about people, athletes, who are having their dreams stolen right out from under them. Even cheerleaders deserve to have dreams.”
Rachel was silent, working both arms with her fingers and rocking herself.
“And who were you anyway?” Benji asked. “What made you so special?”
He didn’t wait for an answer, but turned away from her, slamming onto his side. Smoke curled around the window in fading, delicate wisps, and he could hear people out in the quad. Someone strummed an out-of-tune guitar as several girls sang “Puff, the Magic Dragon,” and the soapy smell of opium permeated the air the way honeysuckle does. He thought now, though he hadn’t remembered it until he’d mentioned it, of driving downtown and parking in his father’s office garage and walking out onto the Mall, mobbed with people. His mother had been tense. He could tell she was afraid, but his father made his way surely through the crowd, the three of them linking hands, Dennis holding Vanessa, and weaving toward the Reflecting Pool. All around young people screamed with rage. He still remembered one girl’s face, a deep shade of angry red, her nose had snot streaming out of it, her eyes were tearing, and her mouth was open in a scream, and yet she was covered in yellow flowers, long strands wrapped around her neck and ankles and wrists, at the crown of her head. Both her arms reached into the sky, and Benji followed them up, to see her fingers flashing the familiar V of a peace sign. All around her, kids were screaming, Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today? and his mother’s hands gripped tight on his shoulders. Peter, Paul and Mary had been singing, he remembered. Painted wings and giant rings make way for other toys, the girls continued below the window, and Benji’s heart rose in his throat.
He feigned sleep, a trick he used to will himself calm.
“Who said I was special?” he thought he heard Rachel say just before he fell asleep.
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