Amateur Insanity

Vietnam

 

The Hell’s Angels were, then, a redneck gang on wheels, a California cousin to the Klan, though more bandits than terrorists. (There were no black Hell’s Angels.) The Angels were the darkest part of the dark side of the Haight and their acid dealer, just after he left, reminded me of the first time I had heard of them: when they beat up anti-Vietnam War demonstrators.

In the following days, Tim looked for Shob to cancel the deal but he couldn’t find him. Gradually Tim started worrying that Shob’s scarcity was due to an intense campaign to raise the money, and the more trouble invested, the angrier Shob would be when the deal was cancelled. Tim asked everyone he could think of whether they had seen Shob or knew where he was but still couldn’t find him. So he became desperate, a pest, asking the same people over and over.

By Wednesday, when a freak saw Tim coming toward him on Haight Street, he preemptively said, “No, Tim, I haven’t seen Shob.”

Those days of Tim’s search, I lolled around the apartment brooding over my parents and the draft. While we were in LA, a letter arrived from my parents and another from the draft board. I had to have a pre-induction physical. I was an expert on the draft and knew this was too early for a physical. The draft board shouldn’t even have my grades yet, but even if they did, I was supposed to have a semester of failure before losing my deferment. In Summerville everyone knew I had become a hippy, no doubt confirming suspicions. Drafting me may have become a patriotic obligation.

My parents’ letter made them seem innocents from the perspective of Haight-Ashbury which had surfaced in the media since the last time I visited at Christmas nine months before. In Haight-Ashbury, for the first time in my life, I felt part of something bigger than myself. The future’s welcoming committee. A group who, though vastly outnumbered, were inevitable.
Meanwhile, media exposure had made hippies living smut. Juvenile delinquency with a twist of degeneracy. A consumer item of bigotry. “For the very first time! All together in one compact portable unit! A combination sex deviate, dope fiend, communist, & welfare loafer!” We were voluntary niggers.

At my parents’, the Haight would have been another trip wire for shouting matches, for another eruption of the ongoing argument that began with atheism at fifteen, continued through my long hair, and now with Vietnam and the draft, culminated in exile, from home and soon probably country. I couldn’t blame my parents for the exile from home because I wouldn’t have returned there during that time anyway. I feared as much as them whatever the shouting matches were crescendoing towards.

“The Vietnamese fought the French, the Japanese, and now us, ‘the good guys,’” I wrote in the latest of the letters the argument was now confined to. “The U.S. broke the Geneva Accords of 1956 by not allowing elections that would have put the communists in power like the people want… The North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong are nationalists before they’re communists anyway… I’m including a clipping of an article by Walter Lippman that makes the argument that, since the U.S. hung Nazis for obeying immoral orders, they can’t expect us to obey orders we consider immoral…”

Letter after letter I watched meticulous arguments die bug-deaths splat! against incomprehension and/or indifference. The letter accompanying the draft notice was written by my mother and I skimmed it on the livingroom couch, cringing in anticipation of the first shot. A classmate I didn’t like much was killed in Vietnam… Something about “our boys” over there… Hi from my cousin, the son of her twin sister and like a brother to me, whose letters from Vietnam coincided with mine from the Haight. (He would later tell me, not them, about grooving on acid to the light shows of nighttime artillery duels.)

My mother’s letter avoided the argument completely, and at the end I found out why. “I know you’re busy but it does seem like an awfully long time since you visited.” My father hadn’t told her that he had asked me to “not come home for a while.”

I dropped my hands holding the letter finally admitting to myself that I couldn’t possibly go into the army. I saw now with stabbing clarity, there was no way to avoid the public humiliation of my parents… and after all their pride in my scholarship to a prestigious private college (from which I transferred at the earliest opportunity to San Francisco State, where the action was). That scholarship was a compensation payment for a son who was a freak and now would also be a draft dodger.

I loved them, which didn’t keep me from feeling like a space-alien foundling. Still I loved them, and theirlove for me was granite, and I ached at the thought of hurting them. I thought conscientious objector status might be a solution. But they were horrified, having the WWII army-surplus attitude that C.O. status was a ruse for draft dodging. Which, in my case, it was. Far from feeling the requisite pacifism, I carried a heartworm of rage against rednecks.

“Please realize things have changed since World War II” I wrote. “I am more intelligent, better educated, and more sensitive than the majority of Americans whose opinions you defend. Please remember I am sincere and I am doing all I can not to hurt you.”

While putting my mother’s letter back in the envelope I wondered: so, what next? My instinct was to go on the lam, like others I knew, maybe to Canada or Sweden or Mexico. Just a few weeks before, a young F.B.I. agent appeared at the door of a shaggy bearded friend of mine and showed him a picture of himself short-haired and shaven and asked the whereabouts of the guy in the picture. The young agent must have known it was him, but went away, instead of busting him, apparently tipping him off. My friend immediately disappeared. Eventually I would have to also.