— She enrolled at Fresno State but soon knew that it was time to be moving on. For one thing, the fine arts department was desolate, an orphaned entity on a third-rate campus. But she didn’t need excuses. She just needed to get out of there. It can be said with some degree of certainty that her parents understood and supported her decision. She applied to CCAC up in Oakland, got in, and left. Exit Fresno.
It was possible, even in the late 1960s, for a person in the Bay Area, in Berkeley, to sustain an apolitical outlook. This was in itself a sort of political posture — albeit a crouch — particularly for someone like Joan, a person for whom politics had never had any point, who had always seen clearly that the divisiveness of political discourse ultimately and inevitably split people into those who were free and those who were “relocated.” That at least was a kind of brutal commitment. True, the camps had preempted discourse, but there in the depraved fact of them lay the resolution of whatever dialectic may have ensued, then or now. In the paper she read of the army’s “strategic hamlets” in South Vietnam, accompanied by a photograph of the peasants, baffled and defiant, behind the barbed wire that was to preserve them from the wrong ideas. There was a Nazi propaganda film she’d seen at the Art Institute; it announced, “Hitler has built a city for the Jews!” She remembered Manzanar, the mountains cut clean against the horizon, the white of the peaks against the white of the sky, from which they could be distinguished only by the glare at their summits. For a few years she went about her business, ignoring the political poseurs and the hippies alike, especially the hippies, who all seemed about two weeks removed from their crew cuts and prom tuxes.
It was three credits that brought Joan into alignment with her political kismet in 1969. She was lacking three humanities credits that she needed to get her diploma and move on to whatever the next thing was going to be for her, and she enrolled in a night philosophy course at Merritt, a JuCo in Oakland. There she met a man, Ralph, who very gradually introduced her to politics. That her newfound engagement was at the beginning inextricably linked to the powerful, explosive orgasms — her very first — that Ralph provided her seemed both just and honorable. By the time the course ended the affair was about over, but the aspirant beatnik from the Central Valley via Hiroshima via Manzanar had already developed a certain taste, for which the peculiar circumstances of her life had prepared her, for the exhausting encounters, the minuteman keenness, the leery reexamination of the old pieties, required of the political radical.
Joan met Willie Clay at one of the People’s Park demonstrations in May 1969. By now, a week or two after the first riot, the National Guard, the police, and the demonstrators appeared to have worked out the blocking of the scene. It was the first time that Joan had actually been to the park site, and she hung back on Telegraph, keeping an extra half block between her and the center of things down Haste Street. Something about the whole setting that day, under the unseasonable lowering sky, gave her the creeps. It was the sort of weather that piss offed the bees, made the dogs bark and run across their yard at you. She was really just trying this People’s Park business on for size anyway. It was all anybody was talking about, there were all those National Guard guys all over the place freaking everybody out (though Joan herself was familiar with the sight of uniformed, armed men), so why not? Now she was kind of sorry that she’d come, and it occurred to her all at once, as she was caught up in the crowd, the small, churning eddy of people below the steady current flowing through the Sather Gate and down Telegraph, that the affirming solidarity others found in the midst of a swarming, loud assembly was nothing that she needed, at all.
She was a stealthy, secret person, with a delicate touch.
What she had to offer was more than the pinprick presence of her body smack dabbed in the middle of a jam. It was something more, an individual voice that inspired, an individual vision that revealed.
OK, so this bared some lingering fucked-up values, some egotype issues she still had to deal with. But right now she had to like get out of there. She’d reached the corner and could see that the demo had begun to disintegrate, that a sequence of discrete clashes had built into a rush toward the park itself, vacant in its ruin behind a defensive line of helmeted guardsmen who stood in impassive anticipation of the encounter. The hollowed voice, its pulsing monotone, coming through the police bullhorn, seemed to counterpoint the surging crowd and its own steady noise, like an ostinato playing against the surf:
“CLEARraaaaaTHEaaaaaaAREAaaaaaaDISPERSEaaaaaaNOW aaaaaaCLEARaaaaaaTHEaaaaaaAREAaaaaaaDISPERSEaaaaaa NOWaaaaaa.”
Others at the edges now saw the swelling, and the confrontation waiting for it where it would break, and turned to run, pushing into the milling group that was on Telegraph and forcing it into two sections, angry where they had divided and coming together again, like reverse mitosis. Behind her Joan heard the sound of glass breaking and turned her head to see a heavy bearded man rolling through the jagged center of a broken plate glass storefront, just rolling slowly and as easy as you please. As she was pushed back, she felt with her heel for the curb, fearful that she would fall beneath all those feet, and she stumbled up onto the sidewalk just as the first heavy drops of rain began to fall. More people were coming onto Telegraph from Haste now, the bullhorn had quit, and she heard the sounds of combat, those intent on fighting sandwiched between police and national guardsmen, and the rest in flight. She saw a wispy trailing plume climb away from the police line, describe an arc, then vanish into the crowd nearby, where a pale haze gathered and expanded in the humid air, repelling people.
“Gas!” someone shouted. “The fucking pigs are gassing us!”
A man made for the canister. “I wouldn’t grab that,” another man said. With lucid calm Joan studied his T-shirt, which depicted a friendly-looking young man evolving in several stages into a ferocious pig clad in army fatigues and bearing a rifle, over the legend DON’T LET THIS HAPPEN TO YOU. “It’s fucking hot,” he added.
The first man removed his hat and, using that, gingerly picked up the canister. Again the plume rose, tracing its path back in the direction it had come, as he returned the canister to the police. Joan caught some of the fumes and instinctively brought her hands to her face, astonished by the speed with which the reaction arrived, bringing convulsive retching and elastic strings of saliva that swung from her mouth. She tried to keep her eyes open, but they fluttered spasmodically. Tears and snot rolled down her face. She lurched for the building behind her, figuring to grope and fight her way out of there. Her outstretched fingers jammed against something both hard and soft, and something seized her by the wrist and swung her back into the crowd.
“Watch where you’re going, you dumb bitch,” a voice said, aggrieved.
She tried again, but now her disorientation was complete. Light appeared between her eyelids, which thankfully had stopped flapping, but now they just sagged, sleepily half shut, so that she really couldn’t see. She placed her hands in front of her face, palms out, and pushed forward. She decided not to panic. She felt panic approaching because she was caught in the crowd and she was feeling sick to her stomach and her eyes and her nose and her lips were burning and she was having tremendous trouble catching her breath and she couldn’t see a damn thing. Panic was hanging back, but just waiting to sprint in and unhinge her completely. So she deliberately considered her case. OK, Joan, she said to herself, you’re going to just walk until you run into something solid. Then you’re going to hang on to it. This rule outs people, who move and fall. This rule outs cars, that someone can move or that can turn over. This rule outs the sidewalk, for there’s nothing to hang on to, plus you might get walked all over. Her manner with herself kept her calm enough that she was able to keep going through the crowd, which, fortunately for her, had not yet discovered its direction. She was almost amused, and she kept it up. Well, Joan. You have really gotten into a good mess here. What in the earth were you thinking about? Joan, you are just not a crowd person. Then her palms were up against something flat and smooth. It was not a wall, and it was not a door, nor was it a truck or a bus, and panic finally turned up when she realized that she had worked herself face up to a big plate glass window like the one she had just seen the fat man fall through. The crowd heaved slightly behind her, pushing her a little, and involuntarily she let escape a cry. The moderating, mildly reproving voice inside had abandoned her, and she was left with a growing conviction that she would be pushed through the glass and cut to pieces. Then she felt a hand on her.