Backward-Facing Man Read online

  “It’s okay,” the woman said, smoothing the blanket. Her ankles jutted out from underneath her dress so that he could see the inside of her calf, pale and smooth. There was a stack of books between them. “Have a seat.”

  “Really, I oughta just keep going….”

  “Hey, you’re here,” the man on the blanket said. He had a thick Boston accent. “What are you studying?”

  “Uh, pre-med,” Chuck said. It was a strange thing to say. He had no interest in medicine, or in any of his freshman courses for that matter. “How about you?”

  “Lorraine is studying God,” the young man said. “Her mission is to find a man who rides a motorcycle, reads scripture, and doesn’t worship his mother. She wants to become enlightened through fucking. Satori. Religious ecstacy. Spiritual orgasm.”

  Lorraine made a motion like objecting.

  “Maybe this here’s your guy,” the man said. “What’s your name, sailor?”

  “Chuck.”

  “Maybe Chuck’s your God-fearing man, Lorraine, your saint in denim vestments. That is, if he’s a believer. Are you a believer, Charles?” he said in a southern preacher’s voice. Chuck looked at the books. Sylvia Plath. Richard Brautigan. Herbert Marcuse. He felt as if he’d walked into a scripted drama.

  “Maybe Chuck’s relationship to God is none of your business.”

  “Religion is a crutch. And Chuck here’s probably no different from the rest of humanity.” The guy on the blanket took a swig of beer and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “Afraid of freedom, afraid of death, ready to devote himself to anyone with a beard in priestly robes who promises salvation!”

  “And you,” Lorraine shot back, “Mr. Independent—”

  “Atheism is the only true expression of inner freedom. When it’s chaos inside, we seek order; we pledge allegiance to the flags of corporations, the military, the university.” His lip curled into a sneer.

  “So, what’re you studying?” Chuck asked. A squirrel scurried across the lawn. Chuck had a feeling something akin to fear, as if these people were bored with civility and would have enjoyed any distraction.

  “Frederick let his scholarship lapse,” Lorraine answered. “He’s gonna help spread atheism to the rice paddies of Vietnam….”

  “Chemistry, until recently,” Frederick said. Chuck felt a point of contact—vials of pills and powder from the pharmacy he’d worked in, the periodic table, symbols and abbreviations, combining atoms into globs—structure and predictability that had always appealed to him about science.

  “He was here at MIT,” Lorraine said, “but he quit.” Her voice was flat, uninflected. She arched her eyebrows.

  “I got tired of repeating experiments people have been doing for a hundred years, and I refuse to help people in the military-industrial complex, the trustees and the corporate sponsors, get richer. The world is fucked-up enough….”

  “You could be effective working from the inside,” Lorraine said in what sounded like a long-running feud.

  “Only if I was looking for spoils,” he said. “When the revolution’s over, you’re not going to find me making napalm for Dow Chemical or developing germ strains for Pfizer.”

  “What about the draft?” Chuck asked. If you were of age in 1968 and you dropped out of college, either you had connections or you went to Vietnam.

  Frederick pointed to himself with his thumbs. “You’re looking at the future commander in chief of the People’s Army. In the meantime, I’m gonna stay fucked-up.” He tilted his beer toward her like he was making a toast. With this gesture, Frederick released them from the requirement for serious discourse.

  Chuck withdrew a stone pipe from his knapsack. Lorraine stood up and began stretching again, facing the river. Back then, getting stoned in public was a way of bonding with someone, an act of daring, an expression of solidarity and of civil disobedience. In certain circles in Cambridge, taking the right drugs in the right quantities was like having school spirit. Frederick and Chuck took turns inhaling and holding their breath. Lorraine watched a sailboat motor toward open water. The wind picked up a little, and it was starting to get cold. For Chuck, the world narrowed to a small piece of land slightly larger than the blanket. Clouds moved across the sky like a time-lapse photograph, and a cold breeze came in off the river. After a little while, Lorraine started loading books into her pouch. Sensing their imminent departure, Chuck asked where they lived, hoping for two different answers.

  “In the country,” Frederick said, rolling off the blanket.

  “Near BC,” Lorraine answered, motioning across the river.

  Chuck followed them through the quadrangle, past the stone buildings. Frederick talked nonstop about the movement and Abbie Hoffman, a kid from Worcester who’d graduated from Brandeis a few years earlier. Hoffman founded his own political party, the Yippies, which had become famous for its subversive goofiness, organizing freaks to levitate the Pentagon, sticking flowers in National Guardsmen’s bayonets, and hosting large gatherings of pot-smoking hippies called be-ins that attracted widespread media attention. For this and for being from Frederick’s hometown, Hoffman had earned the former chemistry student’s deep and abiding respect.

  Chuck looked from Frederick to Lorraine and then back at Frederick again, and he wondered what kind of relationship they had—casual and temporary, loving, or contentious. They were standing in front of a row of retail stores while Frederick described a stunt Hoffman had just pulled off. In Manhattan, a dozen freaks signed up for a tour of the New York Stock Exchange and tossed dollar bills over the balcony, causing the ticker to stop and all the brokers on the floor to scramble and cheer. With the major networks’ news teams filming, and everyone dancing with joy, Hoffman declared the end of money. As Frederick spoke, his eyes narrowed behind his glasses and he tilted his head back as if he, too, aspired to a stunt this brilliant. “A bunch of acidhead Communist freaks made national news for under a hundred dollars!” Frederick said. “Is that fucking brilliant?”

  Traffic whizzed by. Neither Lorraine nor Chuck said anything for a minute, and then Lorraine spoke. “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”

  Frederick stumbled backward, acting stunned. “Do you have any idea how many kids in Iowa who never considered burning their draft cards will join the movement because of this?” The sky was cloudy now and the wind made a sound like the ocean. The light changed and Frederick stepped down off the curb. Behind him a guy dragged a heavy satchel into the Laundromat.

  Lorraine stood still, her arms across her chest. “You think regular people are going to turn themselves into revolutionaries?” she asked calmly. Chuck had heard about people burning their draft cards, but he’d never much thought about it. He wasn’t only receiving new information about politics and civil disobedience, he was observing up close how a cutting-edge radical couple behaved.

  “Absolutely,” Frederick said. “Once they get our message, it’s just a matter of time.” He spoke as if he, too, was a Yippie. The light changed again from green to yellow. “Confuse the symbol with the thing,” Frederick said, “and you change people’s minds. The map may not be the territory, but it gets you close.”

  “The stunt completely obscures the message,” Lorraine said, taking Frederick by the arm. “Yippies are confusing civil disobedience with theater of the absurd. It’s too far-fetched. Normal people don’t see something like this on the news and just forget about their mortgages.” She pointed to a Chinese restaurant across the street and said, “I’m hungry.” The wind blew a piece of trash up against Frederick’s leg.

  “What do you think?” Frederick asked Chuck.

  He felt as if he’d been caught daydreaming in class. The truth was he had no opinion. He was along for the ride, hoping to get close to this girl whose arm was hooked around Frederick’s. He considered the question. Whether the stunt would have an effect on people was so fundamentally different from a mathematical proof, he had no idea how to approach it. He tried calculating how many peop
le might be watching when the prank was shown. That was the denominator. Of those, how many would it actually mean something to? There was no numerator, no way to know, which made him slightly nauseous, the same way he felt walking around Cambridge, which was full of radicals and freaks, intellectuals and professors, jocks and stoners.

  “What exactly is the message?” Chuck said, hoping to buy time.

  Frederick looked at him as if he was kidding.

  “Well, I guess if you want to show people that money is the root of all evil,” Chuck stammered, restating what he thought was Frederick’s argument. “Maybe they’d have better luck with kids.” There was silence. Lorraine and Frederick were both staring at him now. In the background, traffic passed indifferently. “Maybe they oughta set up at 4H fairs or sponsor Little League teams. You know, teach kids how to resolve conflict peaceably….”

  Lorraine moved her arm in front of Frederick, who began to laugh, long and low, making a sound like horns honking. “Maybe you oughta be a babysitter, man,” he said loudly, waving his hands above his head and sticking his face forward. “In between wiping kids’ asses you could draw pictures of Vietnamese children playing with cluster bombs and napalm.” The whole scene—Chuck’s answer and Frederick’s response—struck Lorraine as funny, and she, too, started laughing. This was unfortunate. It was the first time Chuck had really taken a position on something political, even though he’d done so primarily to align himself with a girl, and this little exchange forged a permanent place in his memory. “That’s got to be the lamest thing I’ve ever heard,” Frederick said in a falsetto, taking Lorraine’s hand and crossing the street.

  Chuck had to shake his head to think clearly. For a moment, he considered throwing himself into traffic. The embarrassment of saying something stupid combined with the wind whipping around the buildings made his face redden. He stood on the curb watching as Frederick and Lorraine crossed the street. Before entering the restaurant, Lorraine turned and looked back with what Chuck imagined later might have been a sympathetic nod.

  A week later, Chuck found himself in the back of a dormitory lounge with a couple dozen students watching TV. It was just after dinner and the volume on the little black-and-white was jacked way up, blasting the canned music that precedes a news bulletin. “The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated today on the balcony of his motel room in Memphis,” Walter Cronkite said, in a voice reserved for tragedy, “just months before he was to lead a huge march on Washington.” The camera cut to a crowd of blacks outside the motel, looking angry and dazed. Dr. King had been seen by many as a symbol of hope, Cronkite lamented.

  In the lounge, the talk turned quickly to conspiracy. A frizzy-haired student from Brooklyn said that J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI were behind it. Within hours, riots broke out in cities all over the country. Instead of peaceful marches and a boycott that Dr. King had planned, angry blacks picked up rocks and sticks and began fighting with their hands.

  Over the next several weeks, Chuck watched the news on TV every night. The networks showed blacks being rounded up, fire hosed, shot at, billy clubbed, and attacked by dogs. To describe the mayhem one night, a reporter let slip the word revolution. “The revolution is coming, man,” Frederick had promised a few weeks ago on the lawn. “In a system like ours, ordinary people are fed up. If you can’t see that, you’re blind.”

  April in Boston is a dicey proposition and soon the weather turned nasty again. People swaddled themselves in their winter gear and went about their routines—eating in restaurants, attending classes, going to work, getting high—yet nobody could put Dr. King’s death far out of mind. The reaction in black and liberal communities around the country went from bereft to outraged, and soon, blacks in U.S. cities took to the streets, marching and chanting and, in some parts of Boston, hurling bricks through storefronts. Students organized teach-ins, which often erupted in violence. Chuck pictured Frederick being interrogated under bright lights, burning his draft card, having his eyelids pinned open or his fingernails pried off, while Lorraine huddled next to Chuck, her face buried in his chest. Since their encounter at MIT, nothing in Chuck’s life had changed, yet everything around him seemed different. He was restless, uncertain, excited.

  Most mornings, Chuck slept late. By the time he showered and dressed, his classes had already started; for breakfast he wandered to a nearby shelter populated by homeless people, paranoid schizophrenics, runaways, and religious nuts. He spent his afternoons, stoned, in Boston and Cambridge, wandering into foreign film screenings, bookstores, hospital waiting rooms, pawnshops, public gatherings, marches, and be-ins, especially in parks, listening to music, Hare Krishnas chanting, and soapbox orators bemoaning the war. He lived in distraction and denial, deploying powerful drugs in their service.

  Earlier in the year, Chuck met a guy in a club on Mass Avenue who dreamed of playing percussion with the rock band the Inter Galactic Messengers. Augie Pearson was a roadie, part of a two-man sound crew that worked for the band’s manager, who sold dope to pay for the band’s thunderous sound system. Through the fall and winter, depending on road conditions and the most recent Mexican harvest, Chuck drove a borrowed van down the Mass Pike to the band’s rented house in Connecticut, his knapsack full of cash, returning with a shopping bag full of buds and shake, which he broke up and sold out of his dorm.

  By spring, unable to get Lorraine out of his mind, Chuck showed up for a chemistry lab and waited outside to talk to the teaching assistant. “How would somebody go about getting a scholarship to MIT?” he asked, after the other students had filed out. The graduate student squinted, trying to place the impish young man.

  “You could start by getting a passing grade,” he said.

  Chuck followed the instructor into the hall. “Did you know a scholarship student who dropped out last year? Reddish brown hair, glasses, a big talker, weird ideas about politics, a radical?”

  “What’s it to you?” the TA replied.

  “The other night, I ran into a guy who was bragging about getting a free ride,” Chuck said.

  “So?”

  “He said he quit because he outgrew the people in the department….”

  The graduate student laughed. “He outgrew us, huh?” They made their way down the marble stairs.

  “He made it sound like he was some kind of a genius—”

  “The guy was an asshole,” the graduate student said. “Some kind of Communist. He refused to do the labs. After he was expelled, we found a bunch of lab equipment had disappeared.”

  “He was expelled?” Chuck said, smiling.

  The graduate student pushed open the door and stepped into the cold. Chuck pulled his parka up and followed him down the steps. “This place doesn’t graduate lunatics.”

  By May, the world—once as comprehensible as a quadratic equation—seemed dangerous and strange. Unable to sleep, Chuck spent many nights watching the Krishnas and the Fantasy Jugglers near the all-night newsstand in Harvard Square. As the sun rose, he read about arrests and curfews in Detroit and Los Angeles and the aftermath of the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, picturing boys he’d known—kids from the old neighborhood—in hospitals or body bags.

  One morning, he caught the first bus of the day to Kenmore Square, where he changed to the T and rode it to the end of the line. Directly across from where the trolley stopped was a huge stone archway with BOSTON COLLEGE carved in it. Chuck followed students up a long driveway and a steep set of stairs, which led to the main campus, passing old buildings arranged in quadrangles, imperial structures linked by paved pathways, where he stood outside lecture halls that held courses with names like “The Symbolic Presence of Redemptive Mysteries of Christ” and “Religious Currents in the Third Century.”

  Not that morning, but on his third visit to BC, he found Lorraine, her blonde hair pulled back in a bandanna. She was standing in the back of a line of students who looked to be out of a Clearasil commercial. She was wearing a suede Davy Crockett jacket, her arm hooked a
round a tall brunette’s, her hand moving now and then to adjust a piece of hair that kept falling in her face. Chuck followed her to Commonwealth Avenue and the trolley terminus, where the taller woman boarded. Chuck watched as Lorraine kissed the woman full on the mouth and then hiked up the hill and down a small street in Brighton to a small ramshackle duplex. Unable to think of what to do next, he took the Green Line home.

  Two days later, he had a plan. He returned at sunset and took the steps to the front porch, which was cluttered with a sofa and a couple of old bicycles. A calico cat sat motionless on the windowsill. Inside, Jefferson Airplane was playing. Chuck took a deep breath and knocked. “Petition,” he said through the screen door. When it opened a crack, Chuck smelled food cooking—a soup or stew—stale tobacco, moisture from a recent shower. A young man with long stringy hair wearing a Jimi Hendrix T-shirt looked him up and down. “I’m collecting signatures to keep ROTC off campus.”

  The young man held up his index finger and then shut the door in Chuck’s face so he could remove the chain. “Right on, brother,” the man said, taking the pen. He wore a pair of tight-fitting jeans and large tinted aviator glasses. Chuck looked inside. In the living room was a beat-up couch and a large coffee table covered with magazines, newspapers, record albums, and a bong. A sleeping bag and some blankets were balled up against a wall. Both the television and the stereo were on and Chuck could hear people talking in other rooms. He asked the guy with the glasses if anyone else in the house might be willing to sign. “Jerry, Lorrie, Mark!” he called over his shoulder.

  A man in his mid-twenties with a buzz cut walked out of the kitchen carrying a spatula and turned the record over. “What’s up?” he said, looking bored. Lorraine had four roommates that spring—all guys.

  “The ROTC is an instrument of American foreign policy,” said the one who’d answered the door.

  She stepped into the living room with a towel wrapped around her torso, her shoulders bare, her hair dripping onto the floor, took the clipboard without looking up, and read the first few paragraphs Chuck had typed calling for the withdrawal of the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps from campuses in the Boston area. With all three of them staring at her shoulders, she thumbed through the attached pages, which were blank. “Haven’t gotten very far, have you?” Lorraine said to Chuck matter-of-factly. Then she motioned for the pen. “Colleges shouldn’t teach people to kill,” Lorraine said simply. She signed her name, passed the clipboard back to him, and turned around.