“You got gassed?” a voice asked.
She nodded.
“Can you breathe? Take deep, slow breaths. Don’t take panic breaths. You’re OK. You got bronchitis? Asthma? Tuberculosis? Lung cancer? No? You’re probably OK. You might react, bronchospasms or something, but you haven’t so far, so again, you’re probably OK. Hold on and come with me.”
She reached out, and her hand partly encircled a forearm — not a particularly hairy one, she noticed right off. They walked this way for a bit, forearm to forearm, and soon had turned off Telegraph and onto a quieter side street.
“Good thing it’s raining,” the voice said. It was a man’s voice. “Tilt your head up. Did you rub your eyes?”
“A little,” said Joan.
“That makes it worse. Here, now let the rain wash some out. I have a canteen here too. I always carry one to these demos. You never know when the pigs are going to start firing that stuff. You’re not wearing contact lenses, are you?”
No, Joan shook her head.
“Good. Boy, they’re murder. People wear them, though. Ego. Got to look your best. I guess you never know when you’re going to meet that special someone. But listen, now I’m going to pour some water out of the canteen directly into your eyes. Just blink it out. How’s your breathing?”
“Good. Better.”
“Blink. Blink. Here, hold out your hands. You rubbed your eyes, you got it on your hands. How’s your eyes?”
“Good.”
“Can you see?”
What she could see was Willie Clay, nice-looking guy, trim, good face, a little short. Younger than she was, it looked like. What she said was, “A little better.”
“What you really need to do is take a shower. You live nearby?”
Joan shook her head no. He blushed. Definitely younger.
“Do you think you might want,” he suggested, his eyes widening as if he were astonishing himself, “to come back to my place?”
If Joan didn’t want to deal with the crowds, she’d met up with Willie Clay at just about the right time, because to his way of thinking the demos were now entropically inclined. It was as if a buzzer had gone off and suddenly the idea was done. First off, people had started to show up looking for the hippies: the dancing naked girls with henna tattoos, the burnout freaks with flowers in their hair. This was bad. This made Willie feel useless, impotent, helpless, feeble, and shabby. But then the dancing naked girls had started showing up too, and this Willie could not abide. Also to his way of thinking, even the most serious-minded group of demonstrators tended to find itself at loggerheads over the single central issue of intent. To wit: in the case of, say, an antiwar demonstration, most of the people who showed up, well, they just wanted the war to stop. OK, Willie would say to them, so we stop the war. Then what? Then we go back to drinking jug wine and eating table grapes? because so what about the farm workers? Then we go back to living in communities where the basic job of the pigs is to keep the blacks confined in their ghettos? Then we go back to our credo that every American has the God-given right to walk around his house in a T-shirt in the middle of winter and drive his Cadillac two and a half blocks to the grocery store? Then we go back to smoking dope with towels stuffed under the doors because they’ll bust your ass and lock it up for years? Then we just go back to Nixon? Richard M. Nixon? Excuse me, but you mean we just go back to waiting patiently while Nixon serves out, presides for, eight years? Huh? And so they would look at you like, What the fuck is up your ass, man? We just want the damn war to stop. Or they’d go, It’s the first domino, with the self-satisfied affect that only complete mastery of evocative but basically empty jargon brings. Domino! Willie repeated, fairly heaving with disgust. This is the image McNamara and Co. (he pronounced it, and Joan envisioned, “coe”) came up with to sell the war here at home. To his way of thinking, these people, the purist war enders, would eventually form a new class: financially comfortable, tasteful, smugly proud of its impeccable progressive credentials, entrepreneurial, and totally, emetically bourgeois. Raising false consciousness to unheardof levels of falsity. Just stand by until around 1984, and you’d see. To his way of thinking, when the government finally got around to ending the war — which wasn’t likely to happen real soon if the opposition principally spent its time marching around on college campuses, which had about as much to do with the daily life of the average American as bathing rituals along the Ubangi — these poseurs would probably take the credit for it. Shameless! Here was Willie’s opinion: To his way of thinking, you wanted to end the war by bringing the society that waged it, that developed and continually refined its rationale, to an end. You wanted total revolution. Of course, if you had that, you couldn’t open a food co-op somewhere or buy yourself a nice piece of land in Bolinas. You’d have to commit; you’d have to fight and struggle. His right fist hitting his left palm for emphasis.
Willie could work himself into a real lather. He was the sort of intense, wiry little guy that Joan had been noticing at the fringes of things for years, since she’d returned to America and kept her eyes and ears open behind the humiliating primary school readers she was obliged to master before joining children her own age in school. In high school she’d hung out with several of this type, but the light had already started failing in them; mostly what they were fighting and struggling against was following their fathers into the produce business. Joan figured that this was Willie’s way of beating a similar rap. And as she was drawn further into Willie’s circle, her foremost impression of these young radicals was that despite themselves, they felt that they were getting away with something, beating the rap, that the makeup of the thing was 50 percent revolution and 50 percent defying expectations.
So it was just big talk. Not that Joan didn’t love to hear Willie talk. To have him sitting there, all five feet seven of him, taking up revolution’s case in his polished and unconscious American idiom, was like listening to a Little Leaguer talk dirty to you. Innocent, exciting, and erotically charged. Willie was unconscious of it, and there was nothing he could have done about it had he tried; he couldn’t halt his big American self-confidence even in his stylized oppression, couldn’t stop it any more than he could stop himself from rooting for the Cubs or preferring the micronite filter of Kent cigarettes. Willie was politically very aware, but he was also a bright, interesting, sexy fantasist, and Joan fell in love with him.
Then he asked her to rent the bomb factory.