“I’ll remember that.”
“Losing sucks,” he said. “Losers lose.”
He removed his cowboy hat and brushed the brim with the back of his hand. His voice had a squeaky, hollowed-out sound, like an old 78 recording.
“So anyway,” he said, “let’s brainstorm a minute. Let’s say, for instance, we drop this peaceful-protest crud. Winning-wise, it don’t create the right impression. You got to wake people up—get their attention, basically—which means you blow a few socks off. Rig up some ordnance. Let the wreckage speak for itself.”
“Not interested,” I said.
“You don’t talk bombs. You show bombs. Scorch City. I guarantee, nobody laughs. Don’t hear jack.”
Then he listed some recent developments.
He talked about C-4 explosives and white phosphorus and the killing radius of a Claymore mine. A technical whiz, I thought, but what impressed me most was his little-man ferocity, and that gremlin voice, and the way he managed to present his own freakiness in a fairly convincing context. Sitting there, half listening, I was reminded of those old B movies with midgets dressed up as cowboys—the hero and the outlaws and the Shetland ponies—all midgets, but they play it straight, so after a while you begin to think that’s how the world is, it’s pint-sized, it comes at you in small doses. With Ollie Winkler, however, there was the added dimension of danger.
I finally stood up.
“One personal question,” I said casually, smiling at him. “When you were a kid, I mean, did you ever fool around with chemistry sets? Like testing nails for their iron content?”
He gave me a stare.
“Maybe so,” he said. “What if?”
“Just a question.”
“Yeah, but so what?”
“Fine,” I said, “don’t get defensive.”
“I’m not defensive. What if, though?”
I nodded soberly and picked up my tray.
“Those nails,” I said. “I’ve always wondered. Iron or no iron?”
Ollie slapped a fork against the palm of his hand. There was a pause, then he chuckled and rolled his shoulders.
“Super wit,” he said. “Chemistry sets, I like that, very shitty-witty. And here’s another funny one: What’d the chef say to the terrorist? There’s this chef, see, and there’s this jerkoff terrorist—real namby-pamby, can’t get no results—so the chef says, he says: Listen up, asshole. You don’t make a revolution without breaking a few legs.”
A week later he joined me on the line. He was carrying a home-made model bomb. “Audiovisual device,” he said, “like in show-and-tell.”
It wasn’t friendship, just an alliance. Two of us now—me with my poster, Ollie with his bomb—and together we established a makeshift front against the war. It was entirely my show. No broken legs, I told him, and although there were complaints now and then, he generally played along.
“You’re the boss,” he’d say softly, “but the time’ll come. You can mark it on your calendar.”
I didn’t let it influence me.
Slow and steady, I thought.
It was a routine. All through December, then time off for Christmas vacation, then the brittle cold of January. Long hours on the line, stiff fingers and tenacity. There was schoolwork, too, and exams and humdrum classes, but there was also a subtle new sense of command. I slept well. Fluid sleep, smooth and buoyant, a plush new laxity in my bowels. I was healthy. I was almost happy.
The only drawback, really, was Ollie Winkler.
“Letter bomb?” he’d say. “All I need’s a zip code. Send it COD.”
“No.”
“Yeah, but Jesus, we’re not getting anywhere.”
“Negative.”
“No, you mean?”
“I do. I mean no.”
By temperament, obviously, I was not inclined toward violence, and therefore even his mock-up bomb made me a bit queasy. A demo model, Ollie called it, but it had the heft and authority of the genuine article. A steel frame with nasty appendages at each end, bright copper wiring, a soft ticking at its core.
“The bombs are real,” Ollie said, and tapped the hollow casing. “Say the word, I’ll arrange some surprises.”
I just shook my head.
In a way, though, he was right. The bomb had credibility. People made wide turns as they entered the cafeteria. The power of firepower: it delivered a punchy little message.
“What I could do,” Ollie said, “I could—”
“No.”
He grinned. “Oh, well,” he said, “live and learn.”
Mostly it was drudge work. We doubled our picket time—Mondays and Fridays. No theatrics, just moral presence. We were there. All around us, of course, the apathy was like cement, hard and dense, and to be honest there were times when I came close to chucking it. Goofy, I’d think. And futile. I was no martyr. I hated the public eye, I felt vulnerable and absurd. Fuck it, I’d tell myself, but then I’d remember. Headlines. A new year, January 1967, and eighteen GIs died under heavy mortar fire outside Saigon.
Goofy, perhaps, but the goofiness had an edge to it.
So what does one do?
Hold the line and hope. My dreams were honorable. There was the golden dome on the state capitol; there was the world-as-it-should-be.
When I look back on that period, it’s clear that my motives were not strictly political. At best, I think, it was a kind of precognitive politics. Granted, the war was part of it, I had ideals and convictions, but for me the imperative went deeper. Sirens and pigeons. A midnight light show. It occurred to me, even at the time, that our political lives could not be separated from the matrix of life in general. Joseph Stalin: the son of a poor cobbler in Tiflis. George Washington: a young neurotic who could not bring himself to tell a modest lie. Why does one man vote Republican, another Socialist, another not at all? Pure intellect? A cool adjudication between means and ends? Or more likely, does it have to do with a thick tangle of factors—Ollie Winkler’s garbled chromosomes, my own childhood, a blend of memory and circumstance and dream?
I wasn’t a fortune-teller.
Vision, nothing more. Dim previews of coming attractions. The rest was trial and error.
In the first week of February, we set up a formal organization on campus. The Committee, we called it. We took out an ad in the Pevee Weekly, calling for volunteers, and three days later, on a Saturday afternoon, we convened our first meeting in a small conference room in the basement of Old Main.
I presided, Ollie sat to my immediate left. At two o’clock, when I called the meeting to order, it was clear that we had a severe manpower problem. The only other body in the room belonged to a large, tent-shaped coed who brooded in total silence at the far end of the table.
“This is Tina,” Ollie said, “I’ll vouch for her.”
The girl gazed fixedly at her own stomach; she seemed fascinated by it, a little overwhelmed.
Tina Roebuck: two hundred pounds of stolid mediocrity. A home-ec major. A chronic overeater. She was not obese, exactly, just well spread out. Generous hips and sturdy thighs and big utilitarian breasts. Like a Russian hammer-thrower, I decided—the poor girl obviously could not tell day from night without a sundial.
I smiled and shuffled some papers.
“Floor’s open,” I said, and shrugged. “I think we can dispense with parliamentary procedure.”
Then I settled back.
Ollie Winkler did most of the talking. For ten minutes the discussion revolved around petty organizational matters. Ollie slipped his boots off, resting a foot on the edge of the table. “What we got here,” he was saying, “is a troika situation, like in the USS of R, three horses pulling the same big sled. Which means we best divvy up the power, keep the reins straight so to speak, that way we don’t get tangled up or nothing… Like with—”