1.
We request that the on-campus medical facility be available twenty-four hours a day.
2.
That the infirmary undergo a thorough examination by competent medical personnel and security representatives who can quickly assess its status.
3.
That the recommendations of the person(s) conducting the inventory be accepted ASAP and that a schedule be adopted for bringing our facility supplies up to current community population requirements.
4.
That Dr. Davies, current on-campus physician, be dismissed.
5.
That a schedule be organized among all the available medical supplementary personnel to cover the campus responsibilities until a permanent replacement can be found.
6.
That a fully equipped ambulance be purchased and placed under the jurisdiction of campus security, with a competent driver always on duty with an appropriate license.
7.
That a new on-campus physician be aggressively sought and hired, whose primary responsibility will be the entire Lincoln community and who therefore will also be aware of coed treatment and sensitive to our new diversity.
“Hell, you ain’t gonna get all a this,” somebody said quietly and passed the sheet on. “Numbers five, six, and seven.”
“We need them,” I said.
Brian and Carl agreed.
“So what do you want from us,” said another vet.
“I want you guys on the doors to the classroom buildings after breakfast,” I said. “I want you to tell folks there are no classes in the morning and that there’s going to be a campus meeting in the chapel at ten o’clock. It’s for everybody: teachers, day student commuters, administration folks, everybody.”
I finished with, “I can’t get started without support from down here.”
“And what about after the meeting?”
“There will be no classes until these requests are met.”
“You may get the first.”
“Is it agreed that we need these things?” I asked.
“Well, yeah, but you know what they gon’ say about money.”
“Fees are up, enrollment is doubled. We’re supposed to be state-related,” I cut in.
“All right, Spiderman,” came a baritone from the back of the room, “we’ll work with you in the morning.”
It was one in the morning when I left Vet Ville and headed slowly back to the main campus. I had to consider whether the issues I had numbered were as succinct and well-stated as they needed to be. It was all kinds of ironic that after a five-hour emotional roller-coaster ride, everything boiled down to my ability as a writer.
As I walked back, I heard the vets chorus of comments ringing in my ears: “You can probably get them first four, maybe, but you can forget them last two or three.”
Well, we’d see. Because none of them were expendable. I knew that good negotiators always included points they could afford to concede. But I wasn’t putting together a package to negotiate. The whole thing was shaky. There were only thirty students or so out of more than six hundred who knew anything was going on. And only thirty who recognized me as in charge. This was a hell of a thing, no doubt.
I tried to put together a list of things to do in order of priority. I started to realize what I hadn’t done since I arrived back on campus. I hadn’t eaten. I hadn’t had anything to drink. I hadn’t cracked a book—but that was okay because classes were cancelled at least for tomorrow. Hell, I just plain old hadn’t shaved, showered, smiled, or sat down to really consider what I was going to do tomorrow. And now, at 1 a.m., it was already tomorrow.
Arriving at the regular dorms, I took the stairs up to Eddie’s room two at a time. There was a whisper of marijuana squeezing its way down the hall, mixing with the dampness of two thousand rainy nights that had soaked into the floor and the walls of the old dorm like that forgotten first coat of paint, now inseparable from the wood. I heard something by Miles on the box, something slow and thoughtful and lonely. Something Miles could do without trying, maybe because he was that way.
I knocked, entered, flipped out a cigarette, and passed Eddie my list on my way to a chair in the corner. The room was full, like on the nights when the NBA was playing or a Monday night football game was on. Eddie’s room, with a larger than usual common room, had become the meeting place. Eddie passed the paper on and nodded at me.
“We need to organize how this chapel thing is going to go,” I finally said.
Everybody shifted in their seats. I could see tired and serious and thoughtful and sad on brothers’ faces. I could feel it in the room.
“We need to get in touch with Ron’s folks, too. See what we can do. Anybody talk to them yet?”
Carl said yes. That was good. I’d rather have fought the vets than do that.
There are so many divisions and subdivisions on a college campus that it is probably a social miracle when the whole community is pulling in the same direction, everybody wanting the same thing. The next morning, when I walked to the podium at the chapel, it was way over its capacity of two hundred. It was standing room only, with people jammed all along the back and in the aisles.
I was as brief and devoid of drama as possible. This was not an occasion to try to whip up waves of emotion. The truth was dramatic enough. The third brother to die in two years at Lincoln was being buried in a couple of days. These deaths served to highlight the fact that the facilities at the isolated old school had not kept pace with its growth.
I reviewed the incidents that had magnified the shortcomings of Lincoln’s health services. I described the three young men, two classmates and a fellow musician. I took care not to attach blame for the tragedies. But then I listed the specific mistakes made in diagnoses and treatment, and said this pattern was no longer acceptable. I then suggested that a complete boycott of classes would minimize the potential for injury or illness while allowing the administration to concentrate on our requests. I announced that this boycott would remain in effect until further notice. In conclusion, I read the seven requests, told the assembly that they could collect a copy on their way out, and assured them that everyone would be kept abreast of progress made in these areas. Then I expressed a confidence—that I did not feel—that these adjustments would be made quickly and that we would all be back on our regular schedules soon. Then I asked them all to leave the chapel slowly—repeating the need to avoid anyone getting hurt.
Obviously I could not and would not even try to handle the responsibility for the entire campus. The more positions I delegated to other people, the more folks would participate. Let me note that there was no formal student government, and if there had been I’m sure folks would have been more focused on what would have been seen as my coup d’état than on my list of requests. As it was, I had to admit that I had no mandate, and that there had only been the vets standing at the doors of the classroom buildings and my standing on the chapel stage to suggest I was in charge.
Finally, however, it was the reaction of the powers that be that cemented my precarious perch as the voice, if not the head, of the student body. A schedule was posted that afternoon listing the nurses who would be in the infirmary from midnight until the regular 8 a.m. opening. On Tuesday morning Dr. Warren Smith, the school psychiatrist, arrived and let it be known that he would be conducting a review of the infirmary inventory and making recommendations for upgrading the supplies. One, two, and three.
I resisted the opportunity to ring the chapel bell and announce that we were almost halfway home. I went to dinner instead and then back to Eddie’s room. After all, the vets had conceded the first three points would be met. The rest would be more difficult.
I went to talk to Dr. Smith as he moved around the supply room in the infirmary, opening first one cabinet and then another
, noting what he found. He was a large, friendly bear of a man with a bald spot and graying hair. I hadn’t seen him in more than a year, since he had approved my request to take the year off. I wanted to ask him what he thought of what was going on; I wanted to ask him for suggestions on how best to approach the top people, the university president and the dean. He would also know where the money was and who had it. In the end, this was always going to be about money.
But Dr. Smith kept talking, controlling the conversation as though we were being monitored. I sincerely doubt that we were. It could have been that he was offended by the criticism of the medical facilities. Perhaps he had been reminded by administration officials that his letter from the previous October had made it possible for me to return. Or it could have been that he knew the conflict was only beginning and that Ron Colburn would not be the last casualty.
In fact, there was another one that night.
There are casualties in every conflict. It gave me no pleasure to include the request that the campus physician be dismissed. The timing of the request, in the wake of Ron’s death, implied a connection—that the doctor had been at fault. Actually, he hadn’t been involved in any of the three fatalities I had discussed in the chapel. The doctor was an old-school Lincoln man, a graduate with a practice in nearby Oxford who lived on campus with his family and was available day and night. But I really had no choice. The doctor was having a battle with the bottle; he won some rounds and lost some. A couple of his losses took place at the wrong time and influenced his examination of patients. One of those patients led a group of students into the doctor’s front yard on Wednesday evening. He was carrying a papier-mâché dummy with a rope around its neck. The student threw the rope over a limb of a huge tree in front of the doc’s house and set the dummy on fire.
The school doctor came out of his house to confront the crowd, screaming at them about his innocence, swearing that he had nothing to do with the deaths.
That’s when I arrived, walking slowly into a position between the excited group and the tearful doctor, standing alone in a T-shirt and dark slacks. I could see the doctor’s tears of rage and sadness behind his glasses. So could everybody else. We had to look into the eyes of the man being burned in effigy, and see the wide eyes of his children staring out of the front window behind him, watching their father’s impotent humiliation, perhaps fearful that their lives were in danger.
A cold flash scampered across the back of my neck. The whole scene had me spinning. I didn’t begin to relax until the students started backing away, scattering toward the dorms. I knew now that the doc would resign. I got no joy from request number four.
As the week wore on, I saw Dr. Smith and others coming and going with supplies, taking packages of meds, crutches, bandages, oxygen tanks, halogen lamps, updated medical dictionaries and books on the latest treatments, and even a few pocketbooks for patients needing to stay overnight. There were also new curtains, carpeting, and a new eye chart. And the infirmary was staffed every night.
It was generally agreed that the highlight of the week, the most dramatic moment, came after the student body decided to continue the boycott. The last three points were not done. There was no schedule of doctors beyond a day or two in advance, there was no ambulance, and there was no line forming to take the newly open position of campus physician.
On Thursday afternoon, I was wondering what I could do to pacify certain factions grumbling and mumbling about returning everyone to class. The rumor was that if we reached the weekend without further progress, there would be no real reason to continue the boycott. People were warning: “We got all we could after the doctor quit. Extending this boycott thing is all about Spiderman. He need to quit.”
It might have worked. Negative talk can produce a negative mindset. Which is why my heart did a little jerk as I stepped out of the lunch room. Parked at the bottom of the northside incline as though just waiting for my nod of approval was a blood-red ambulance with a fresh coat of wax. The shine was strong enough to be seen by the blind, and the dishwater gray sky was momentarily shocked into retreat by the energy of the red radiating from that vehicle.
The weekend passed and we reconvened in the chapel on Monday. This time I called for a vote, and the students voted to continue the boycott.
On Tuesday—day seven without classes, day nine since what was feeling more and more like a daring game of chicken began, day eleven since Ron Colburn had died—I was sitting in the front seat of an administrator’s car, riding around the perimeter of the campus under a light rain. It was day one of the administration focusing fully on me as their problem.
“What is it you want, Spider?” he asked.
This brother, light skinned with glasses and a moustache, was one of the younger administrators, one who tried to relate. I’d gotten to know him when I stayed on campus part of one summer to work as a counselor for a summer program. He was probably eight years older than I was, married, a ball player, and a Lincoln man.
“Just what it says on the paper, man,” I said, lighting a cigarette.
“No, Spider,” he said, slowing the car. “What is it that you want out of all this?”
“You think I got . . .”
“Well, you know,” he cut in, “me and some others know you. We knew you when you were down here in the summer with the kids and there wasn’t none . . .”
“I was a friend of Ron’s,” I said. “As I am a friend of yours. There’s six or seven hundred . . .”
He nodded his head sadly, looking ahead through the grayness.
“You should have let it go last night,” he said.
Last night had been dramatic, and I had gotten the impression from a lot of people that there should never have been a vote; that I should have simply walked into the chapel, thanked the students for their cooperation in applying the pressure that got us six out of seven of our objectives. Victory, essentially. Six out of seven was two more than the vets had foreseen, and nobody thought we’d get it all. Therefore I should have come in last night and said, “We won, so go to class tomorrow.”
I hadn’t done that. And maybe it was somewhat chickenshit not to do that. Forget about the fact that on Monday night we were no better off than on Friday morning. There had been a feeling of suspended animation on campus from the time after the tomato-ketchup, fresh-blood, fire-engine red ambulance had been parked so conspicuously in front of the student union building. That was a real surrender.
“I couldn’t do . . . ”
“Yeah, you could have, Spider,” he said. His use of my nickname somehow reduced me from student leader to comic-book caricature. “And you should have.”
“I was supposed to just announce that, right? Some son of a bitch would have accused me of being a dictator.”
I felt like I was talking to myself.
“You started it by yourself and kept it going. You gave it the shape and strength nobody else on this campus could have. Anybody popular enough wouldn’t have had the guts, the nerve.”
He paused and dropped his voice to tell me a secret.
“They spent last week with you kickin’ their asses,” he said, laughing. “They were kickin’ their own asses for letting you back in here. But other folks kept saying that it wasn’t bad, because it wasn’t wrong, what you were saying. There was a mix of admiration and self-recrimination. We were students here, too. And we knew.”
Then he finished: “They’re over being scared. They’re gonna get you out of here.”
The question of who “they” were was never put to him. I got out of the car and trotted to shelter. He drove off.
I was still sitting in the basement of the student union building as night closed in around the campus, filling all the spaces between the few naked trees and colorless, spartan dormitories. The classrooms and buildings where all the knowledge was stored and stacked were hidden behind fog. I was virtually inside a private one of those myself, focused in and fogged up when a young coed, a freshman I recogniz
ed, walked up to me. I don’t remember enough of what she said even to paraphrase it, but as quickly as I could I was up the stairs and walk-running south between the administration building and the security house. I crossed the street and went quickly to another house there, usually dark but now well lit.
Inside there was a smile for me from a handsome middle-aged lady. She introduced herself as “Dr. Mondry” as I reached to shake hands. She was interested in the job opening we had, she said, but she would only take it with my approval.
Dr. Mondry saved my life.
INTERLUDE
May 1970
The laws of chance got bitch-slapped for sure one night when the artist had his back squarely against a wall. He’d been knocked out, and as he slowly, swimmingly came to, there were the anxious faces of the six-foot-seven Robert Berry and G.I. Joe Sheffi staring down at him with wide eyes.
It started to come back to him.
They’d been about four miles north of Lincoln University on Route 1, a couple of miles from Avondale, Pennsylvania. One of the old Isaac Hayes—bald, dig?—tires on his ancient, rusty Rambler, the left rear tire, had committed suicide. (Evidently it shot itself. They’d heard a loud boom.)
Unfortunately it developed into one of those domino-type incidents. With the death of the admirable left rear, now a candidate for becoming a million rubber bands, the Rambler convertible was converted. From a ’65 white Rambler into a white Rambler with a black vinyl top and innumerable rust spots going into a skid at sixty miles per hour. Without benefit of brakes he dared not even tap. And with a panoramic view of more or less rural America sliding sideways across his windshield as the two-lane blacktop changed to four lanes and they slid like a three-legged whale across the double yellow lines and the soft gravel shoulder on the opposite side of the road, through a sizable piece of the parking lot of a local insurance firm, and soon after into a sixty mile-per-hour collision with the corner of the insurance company’s local office.
The Last Holiday Page 12
