Only two guys looked wrong to me.
They were white, pushing thirty, and had on hippie-ish attire that tried a little too hard, tie-dye headbands, leather fringed vests, peace-symbol t-shirts, patched jeans. What really gave it away was how similar their get-ups were. I say get-ups because two possibilities struck me: they were in the same rock band or were undercover cops.
They whispered now and then, smiling and chuckling as they shared private jokes. For guys with peace symbols, they didn’t seem terribly interested in Mr. Spock pushing an anti-war presidential candidate.
Right now the actor was talking about how he sensed a real build-up of enthusiasm for McGovern, not just from new, under-twenty-one voters, but from labor, farmers and senior citizens.
“Of course I’m at a disadvantage,” the actor said with a grin. “I’ve spent most of my previous life on Vulcan, so I don’t know too much about the people in this country.”
I was also keeping my eye on that tall, pockmarked, skin-and-bones staffer — his name, I’d learned, was André — who didn’t seem to do much of anything at the office yet was always around, pretending to keep busy. He was toward the front of standing room to my left, on the edge of the crowd, fairly close to the door. All in black — black sports jacket, pointy-collar black shirt, wide black big-buckle belt, black leather pants, pointed black boots — as if he’d hoped to disappear in a dark room. But the speaker had double-crossed him, keeping the lights on...
Nimoy was wrapping up with strong words about that Watergate mess on the news. “It’s more than political trickery or even espionage,” he was saying. “It’s sabotage linked to the Oval Office.”
That maybe showed how desperate this campaign was getting, making a production out of a chickenshit burglary.
Then Nimoy gave his co-star a big build-up — Reverend Lloyd, that is, not William Shatner — likening him to Ralph Bunch and Martin Luther King. And between the Trekkies and the Coalition staffers, Lloyd got damn near as warm a welcome as Mr. Spock, if minus the whistles and hoots and hollers.
Six feet or better, in a black suit and black-and-red tie, movie-star handsome — if that movie star was Richard Roundtree, anyway — Reverend Raymond Wesley Lloyd strode in with his two tall black, black-suited bodyguards following. They peeled off to position themselves at the entry’s either side like eunuchs guarding a harem, and the Reverend strode to the stage, oozing strength, confidence, charisma. He joined Nimoy, who was leading the applause. The two men exchanged handshakes and respectful nods, and Nimoy disappeared down into the audience, where a front-row folding chair awaited.
The applause continued, as the commanding figure stood before the McGOVERN banner exuding the confidence of General Patton in front of a big fat fucking American flag. He smiled, showing some startlingly white teeth, and gave a little head bow to sections of the crowd. I guess he’d been on the news enough to deserve this kind of recognition and response. But it still sort of surprised me.
He had a bass voice with rumbling resonance and spoke with the sharp articulation of a ghetto kid who’d trained himself to sound damn near Shakespearean. He acknowledged Nimoy, making a remark about Vulcans being “a minority group underrepresented in government,” and began to speak with a rolling kind of poetry that made it hard to pay attention to the actual content.
Standing at the microphone (but not holding onto it as the actor had), head back, eyes unblinking, he said, “Senator McGovern is a warrior, a war hero of yesterday who brings courage today to the battle against poverty and hunger, to the fight against political dishonesty and warmongering, to the never-ending struggle between right and wrong. His is a voice for reform, to inspire the Democratic party to bring about greater participation from blacks and browns and women and young people!”
André slipped out the door, between the two bodyguards, who paid him no heed. Maybe he was going out for a smoke — it wasn’t allowed in many areas of the student union, including this one — or maybe he’d just heard all of this before. Hell, he might just be making a quick trip to the john.
But I didn’t think so.
“We must band together, become a coalition of many colors...”
Now the pair of fake hippies exited together, out the door on the opposite side of the room.
“Why this effort to end the war at this time, during an election year? Why not four years ago? Before Cambodia? Before Laos? Before so much blood and treasure had been tossed heedlessly to the winds of time?”
I went out the way André had, though I did earn glances from the harem eunuchs. You have to watch these white boys, you know, even when they’re on your team. I went up the stairs two at a time, crossed the lobby.
At the front double doors, I glanced out and, as Ruth had predicted, Nixon supporters were lined up on either side of the sidewalk — maybe a dozen, with their placards shouldered: NIXON’S THE ONE; RIGHT ON, MR. PRESIDENT; RE-ELECT THE PRESIDENT; and (my favorite) YOU CAN’T LICK OUR DICK. They were in their thirties and forties primarily, though several in their twenties wore Army jackets.
No way I was going down that receiving line, looking this much like a real college student. More to the point, I didn’t think André had either, or the fake hippies, who might be cops after all, tagging after him to make a drug bust.
If Reverend Lloyd really was funding his efforts by distributing dope via his speaking tours, André seemed the perfect candidate for carrying the ball for him. He had that emaciated druggie look, which I didn’t detect on any of the other staffers.
Oh, many of the Reverend’s young troops were into weed, no doubt — yesterday afternoon, Harold Jackson had given them a loud reminder at headquarters that no “mowing the grass” would be tolerated on this overnight, and that included “behind closed doors — your hotel rooms are on university property!”
He’d even taken me aside, the new kid, to emphasize the same point. “Mr. Blake, you get caught blastin’ a joint, we all go down. Remember that, son.”
I hadn’t smoked weed since Vietnam and not much of it at that. A sniper has to have an edge. Mellow is not a good state of mind when you’re killing people.
So I’d assured Big Chief Second-in-Command of my chronic lack of interest... only now I seemed to be about to learn whether the Coalition’s ’48 Greyhound had been transporting more than just politically active young people.
Looking past the lined-up Nixon lovers, however, taking in the parking lot, I didn’t see the bus anywhere. Earlier, the vehicle had let us out at the curb, but apparently had not managed to get itself parked in the big lot, which wasn’t nearly full.
At the lobby’s hotel desk, a kid in a blazer with a GO HUSKIES button told me buses sometimes parked around on the west end of the building. His pointing finger led to me more double doors, where I looked out and indeed saw the blue-and-silver bus, parked midway in a lot, well away from a few cars parked near the curb. André stood at the door of the big vehicle, which he appeared to be unlocking. No sign of the Mod Squad.
He went up inside.
Maybe two minutes later, André came down out of the bus and locked the door behind him. The way he walked said something was tucked under his black sports jacket, beneath his left arm. Damn, he seemed to be making a beeline right toward me.