by Lewis Shiner
A crazed anger boiled up inside him, and he kept it down only by imagining himself in a wheelchair, brain-damaged and paralyzed from a nightstick beating. He stayed away from the front lines, part of him amazed and terrified by what he saw, part of him so consumed by rage that he wanted the riot to spread until the entire city, the entire unjust country, was torched to the ground.
The cops finally managed to get a few token prisoners into the van, and they retreated down Guadalupe, sirens blaring, as the mob ran after them, grabbing at door handles, yelling, throwing bottles and rocks.
Alex found a patch of grass to sit on. He was still unable to completely get his breath, and when he coughed it tore at his ravaged throat. A long-haired guy with a full beard knelt beside him at some point, touched him on the shoulder, and asked if he was okay. Alex nodded. Eventually he made his way to his car and drove to the Castle.
Landon was already there, and helped him wash his eyes with saline solution. Landon was jazzed, convinced the Revolution was underway. Alex took a lukewarm shower—his teargassed skin couldn’t bear the touch of hot water—and it was only then that he connected what he’d just been through to the Paris riots of the year before. It gave him a surge of excitement and a new, romantic image of himself: Jean-Paul Montoya, Situationist philosopher and revolutionary.
A rally the next day drew two thousand people, Alex among them, to demand the release of the prisoners and the prohibition of city police on campus. The protest was in vain. By the end of the week, the Student Association and the students themselves had sold them out, voting to ban non-students from not only the Chuckwagon but from the entire Union building.
Alex was bitter and Landon unfazed. Revolution was a process, Landon said, and loaned him Lenin’s What Is to Be Done.
Throughout the winter and spring the protests came faster and faster. Alex was at most of them, prepared for teargas with long sleeves and a plastic sandwich bag that held a bandana soaked in lemon juice. The rallies protested the war, the travesties at the Chicago Seven conspiracy trial, the felony indictments of 22 Chuckwagon protesters. In April, the radical Ying-Yang Conspiracy candidate was elected president of the Student Association. Then, on May 1, 1970, in complete contempt of the growing opposition to the war, despite a year of gradual troop withdrawals and so-called “Vietnamization,” Nixon ordered US soldiers into Cambodia.
Landon was ecstatic, saying, “This is going to do it. The whole country is coming down.” Over the weekend he went out to pay phones and used bogus credit card numbers to coordinate with activists on other campuses, and on Monday, May 4, the demonstrations began.
Alex didn’t hear the news from Kent State until that night, the four unarmed students shot dead by the Ohio National Guard. “It’s a declaration of war,” Landon said with a grim smile. “And if that’s what they want…”
Nixon’s reaction was blunt. “When dissent turns to violence,” he said, “it invites tragedy,” blaming the protesters and promising more bloodshed to come. Alex, in fury and disbelief, understood that Nixon had just personally threatened to kill him.
With eight thousand others he was on the Main Mall the next day at noon, ready for anything. The rally organizers began by asking the crowd to endorse a set of demands that Landon had helped draft over the weekend. The first demand was that the university stop feeding the war machine with their rotc program and “defense” research. Other demands included punishment for the killers at Kent State, justice for Bobby Seale and the Black Panthers, and an end to repression in Austin, all of which the audience approved by acclamation.
The rally turned into a march and Alex let himself be swept up in it, shouting until his voice was gone. Any semblance of a plan was abandoned and the mob, still numbering in the thousands, paraded down the middle of Guadalupe Street, headed for the State Capitol. They evaded police attempts to stop them until they got to the capitol grounds, where a full complement of police in riot gear tried to turn them back. More teargas was fired, some of it inside the Capitol building. Marchers pulled off their shirts and wet them in the sprinklers on the lawn, tying them over their mouths and noses and attacking the cops with their fists. Even with his lemon-soaked bandana, Alex was blinded by the gas and was wildly flailing his arms when friendly hands took hold of him and guided him back toward campus.
That night Alex lay in bed and shook.
The more violently the police tried to crush them, the harder the students fought back, and the more police came out to suppress them. It was Vietnam come home, escalation leading to more violence, more violence leading to more escalation. In a moment of clarity he saw how his own helplessness and fear was expressing itself as anger and defiance, feeding the cycle, and how the same thing was true for the other side, adults terrified that their children had become monsters, seduced by communism and drugs into tearing down everything America represented.
He’d been reading about the Paris Commune of 1871, where for over two months the city became an independent socialist workers’ state, only to be violently overrun by the regular French Army during “La Semaine sanglante,” the bloody week of May 21. How strong would the US students have to be to stand up to the local cops and the Army and the National Guard? How many more would die?
Imagining defeat was easy, imagining winning, for whatever meaning you gave the word, was vastly more difficult. Worker-owned businesses, communal farming, mandatory work assignments, like in Cuba? Corrupt party officials and long lines for everything, like in the Soviet Union? Where was the model for what they were trying to build?
He couldn’t see the way forward, couldn’t bear to retreat. He curled up and hugged his knees and waited for dawn.
After two days of recruiting and rallies and votes, with classes cancelled and 25,000 people mobilized, with rumors flying of National Guard intervention and police armed with shotguns, the Friday demonstration was an anticlimax. At the last possible moment, as protesters were already on the street, law students convinced the city to let them march. Official approval robbed the day of its fury. Marchers stayed on the sidewalk and police stood by in silence. Red flags were waved, coffins were carried, signs held high. napalm: better killing through chemistry. no more boys in boxes. They chanted, “One, two, three, four, we don’t want your fucking war!” and “Hey, hey, USA, how many kids did you kill today?” The 13-block-long column of students and faculty and sympathetic locals wound harmlessly through downtown and back to campus, where a party ensued. Wine and dope and guitars passed from hand to hand. Couples retreated to empty classrooms to make love, not war.
Alex climbed a tree on the South Mall and watched the dancing and listened to the excited voices and asked himself what, exactly, they’d gained. The university had not agreed to any of their demands. The successful march had defused the mounting tension. The self-congratulation marked, he thought, the end of something that had barely gotten off the ground.
The next Tuesday, following Landon’s instructions, he went to a barber shop and got his hair cut short, put on a white shirt and tie, and roamed downtown with a clipboard and a pocket full of pens, trying to get signatures on a petition to end the war. The air was muggy, the sun relentless. At one point a police car followed him for thirty minutes, trying to rattle him. It worked. He had started the day with a warm smile, asking, “Would you care to sign a petition for peace?” After hundreds of refusals he was simply asking, “Peace?” and still getting “no” for an answer. In the early afternoon, a convertible pulled up with four college-age boys in it. The one in the front passenger seat asked to sign. When Alex handed over the clipboard, with the paltry 27 signatures that represented his entire day’s work, they drove away with it, laughing and giving him the finger.
That night he got very drunk and the next day he went back to class.
In Paris, at the end of May of 1968, with millions of workers on strike and thousands of students celebrating in the streets, de Gaulle dissolved the National Assembly and called for new elections in
June. It sounded like victory and the strikers returned to work. De Gaulle’s party won a landslide victory and the revolution was over.
Landon was graduating and headed for the Salinas Valley in California to help Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers in their struggle against the Teamsters. As a farewell present, he gave Alex a copy of Marx’s Capital. On the flyleaf he wrote, “The true revolutionary is never discouraged and never satisfied. He is always vigilant for the moment of opportunity.” As he drove away in his battered Ford Falcon, he saluted Alex with a clenched fist held high out the car window.
The week after finals, his father drove down alone and Alex put him up in Cole’s newly empty room. They went to the Hoffbrau for dinner, and Alex didn’t have to wait long for the question he’d been dreading.
“Tell me,” his father said, “what happened to your grades.”
He’d managed an A in French, the rest Bs and Cs. Every semester before, all the way back through high school, he’d made As with only the occasional B. His father’s voice held more concern than accusation, and Alex was more embarrassed than militant. “It won’t happen again,” he said.
“Was it a girl?” his father asked. “Or…”
Alex supposed that drugs were at the top of his father’s list of suspects. “Politics,” Alex said. “I was demonstrating against the war.”
His father nodded. They both had Carta Blanca longnecks, and Alex watched the sweat on his father’s bottle break and run down the label. “Like the kids at Kent State.”
“And because of them.”
“The war is wrong,” his father said. “We’ve got no business in Vietnam. And I don’t want you to end up over there.”
“But…?”
His father looked over Alex’s shoulder, the way he did when he was about to say something he wasn’t proud of. “But your job right now is to get a diploma. I’m naturally going to worry about anything that endangers that.”
“I thought my job was to learn. I’ve learned more in the last nine months than in the rest of my life put together.”
“Did you learn anything you can use in the real world?”
For his father, the only real world was business. Alex longed to say that business meant nothing to him. All of his confrontations with police in riot gear had not taught him how to say those words to his father, whom he loved.
That summer he was back at the 7-Up plant, this time helping with the books and making bank runs, including cashing checks for the men without bank accounts, some of whom were undocumented workers from Latin America. When he could, he talked to them, in Spanish where appropriate, about their working conditions and made some suggestions about what a union might do to help.
July 3 was a Friday, a paid holiday for the clerical staff. Late Thursday afternoon, the plant manager, a graying ex-football player that everyone called Bud, walked up to Alex’s desk and said, “My office. Now.”
Alex followed him, hating his automatic fear response. Bud sat behind his cluttered desk and said, “Close the door.”
As soon as the door shut, Bud said, “I owe your father a lot, which is why you’re not out on your ass right now. Texas is a right-to-work state, which, if you don’t know, means nobody has to put up with the extortion, corruption, bullying, and general bullshit that goes on up north because of gangster unions. There’s not going to be a union in my shop, and that’s not just because I want it that way, it’s because the employees don’t want to be pushed around by a lot of fat-ass parasites.”
Alex was about to politely dispute that characterization when Bud said, “I don’t want to hear a word out of you. There will be no more union talk in this building, is that clear? You can nod your head and come back on Monday, or you can shake your head or open your mouth and clean out your desk. Your call.”
Alex was so infuriated that his eyes wouldn’t focus. He clenched his teeth and swallowed and forced his head to move stiffly up and down.
“You jackass college kids read a few books and think you’re qualified to tell people how to run their business, people who’ve spent their entire lives doing real work and sweating decisions with real consequences. And you know what? After a few years down here in the trenches, most of you come to realize we weren’t so goddamn stupid after all.”
He paused to see if Alex wanted to defy him. Alex doubted he could relax his jaw to talk if he had to.
“Go home,” Bud said. “Come in on Monday ready to work and I won’t say anything to your father about this. He’s a good man and deserves better than this from you.”
Alex stood in silence and Bud said, “That’s all. Get out of here. Leave the door open when you go.”
In the fall, Frank Erwin fired a number of ut administrators, apparently in retaliation for the chaos on campus in May. Students protested, and an anti-war march was called for Halloween that drew a few thousand supporters.
Alex stayed home, reading in Vaneigem’s Traité de savoir-vivre how Power turned everything into commodities, which were dead things, and that life as a commodity was no more than mere survival, «to the point that the forces of death threaten to overwhelm human survival itself. Unless, of course, the passion for destruction is replaced by the passion for life.»
For Vaneigem the antidote was art, poetry, and sex. Poetry, he said, came from «the impulse to change the world to meet the demands of radical subjectivity,» which he defined as «an indomitable will to create a passionate life.» Poetry, he said, «is the act that engenders new realities, the consummation of radical theory, the revolutionary act par excellence.»
Alex was not sure that Vaneigem was not copping out, though the students in Paris in ’68, inspired by Vaneigem, had turned their revolution into art, maintaining a sense of humor that Alex had lost from the get-go.
Marx was harder. Though his edition of Capital Volume 1 was ostensibly in English, Alex could rarely manage more than a page or two without falling asleep. Fortunately he found plenty of secondary sources for his quotes for Marx.
He titled his thesis The Descent of Philosophy, the Philosophy of Dissent, playing on the kind of turnarounds that peppered Vaneigem’s book. His advisor, Dr. Sobel from the French department, had been one of the striking professors that spring. She was thirty, with a Parisian father and a mother from Barcelona. She had golden skin and short hair dyed bright orange. She dressed in men’s clothes, either big sweaters or oversize jackets and neckties. She was fluent in French, Spanish, and English, and had a street knowledge of Arabic and Russian. She had a lilt to her voice that was not quite an accent. From their first meeting, Alex was powerfully attracted, and equally intimidated by her age and worldliness. He also had no idea whether she was even into men.
The deeper Alex got into the thesis, the more Sobel’s enthusiasm grew. At a meeting in late October, she urged him to go on to graduate school in history, spend a semester in France doing interviews, and turn it into a book. She had a way of looking at him with a fixed intensity that made him want to believe her interest was more than intellectual.
“Maybe we should talk about it over dinner,” he said, and only after the words were out and she’d stared at him with a knowing smile did he consider the damage you could do to your academic career if you pissed off your thesis advisor.
She let him sweat for a while, then said, “You know the gm Steakhouse, downtown?”
It was a blue-collar joint on Congress Avenue. “Yes.”
“You have a way to get there? A car or something?”
“Yes.”
“I like to eat early. Meet me there at 6:30.”
“Okay.”
She picked up her pen and looked at an open folder on her desk. “See you then.”
She was 15 minutes late. Once he saw her, Alex was disinclined to complain. She wore high heels, tight jeans, a tight black turtleneck with no bra, and a tight navy-blue blazer. He stood up as she got to the table, which made her laugh. She told him to call her Vivienne as long as they were not on campus.
They both ordered the $2.07 sirloin with fries and salad. As they ate, they gave each other the short versions of their life stories. Hers included several years in Algeria and a couple of stepfathers. When Alex mentioned his bands, she said, “Ah. This gave you a lot of women, I think. This is where you get your confidence.”
“I don’t feel very confident at the moment,” Alex said.
“Nor should you. As it happens, I don’t fuck my students, and I like older men anyway.” She popped the last bite of meat in her mouth and looked up at him through her lashes. “Do I shock you?”
“No,” Alex lied. He forced himself to eat a blood-soaked French fry. “I guess I’m wondering what we’re doing here. And… why you’re dressed like that.”
“First, this is the way I dress when I’m not at work. And what we’re doing here is that I am toying with you.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Of course you don’t. You are a man, or nearly one. You have a great sense of entitlement. You are not to be toyed with. Especially by a woman that you desire. Your desire is a categorical imperative right out of Kant.”
Vivienne was greatly amused. Alex wondered if he would jeopardize his degree by walking out.
“Let me ask you a question,” Vivienne said. “Do you have any women friends? By that I mean, women that you spend time with but haven’t had sex with and are not trying to have sex with?”
