Hearts In Atlantis

There was no letter, no note, no writing of any kind. When Bobby tilted the envelope, what showered down on the surface of his desk were rose petals of the deepest, darkest red he had ever seen.

Heart’s blood, he thought, exalted without knowing why. All at once, and for the first time in years, he remembered how you could take your mind away, how you could just put it on parole. And even as he thought of it he felt his thoughts lifting. The rose petals gleamed on the scarred surface of his desk like rubies, like secret light spilled from the world’s secret heart.

Not just one world, Bobby thought. Not just one. There are other worlds than this, millions of worlds, all turning on the spindle of the Tower.

And then he thought: He got away from them again. He’s free again.

The petals left no room for doubt. They were all the yes anyone could ever need; all the you-may, all the you- can, all the it’s-true.

Now they go, now they slow, Bobby thought, knowing he had heard those words before, not remembering where or knowing why they had recurred to him now. Not caring, either.

Ted was free. Not in this world and time, this time he had run in another direction . . . but in some world.

Bobby scooped up the petals, each one like a tiny silk coin. He cupped them like palmfuls of blood, then raised them to his face. He could have drowned in their sweet reek. Ted was in them, Ted clear as day with his funny stooped way of walking, his baby-fine white hair, and the yellow nicotine spots tattooed on the first two fingers of his right hand. Ted with his carryhandle shopping bags.

As on the day when he had punished Harry Doolin for hurting Carol, he heard Ted’s voice. T hen it had been mostly imagination. This time Bobby thought it was real, something which had been embedded in the rose petals and left for him.

Steady on, Bobby. Enough is enough, so just steady on. Control yourself.

He sat at his desk for a long time with the rose petals pressed to his face. At last, careful not to lose a single one, he put them back into the little envelope and folded down the torn top.

He’s free. He’s . . . somewhere. And he remembered.

“He remembered me,” Bobby said. “He remembered me.”

He got up, went into the kitchen, and put on the tea kettle. Then he went into his mother's room.  She was on her bed, lying there in her slip with her feet up, and he could see she had started to look old.  She turned her face away from him when he sat down next to her, a boy now almost as big as a man, but she let him take her hand.  He held it and stroked it and waitied for the kettle to whistle.  After awhile she turned to look at him. 'Oh Bobby', she said 'We've made such a mess of things, you and me.  What are we going to do?'

'The best we can', he said, still stroker her hand.  He raised it to his lips and kissed the palm where her lifeline and heatline tangled briefly before wandering away from each other again. 'The best we can.'

1966: Man, we just couldn't stop laughing.

1

When I came to the University of Maine in 1966, there was still a Goldwater sticker, tattered and faded but perfectly readable (AuH₂O-4-USA), on the old station wagon I inherited from my brother. When I left the University in 1970, I had no car. What I did have was a beard, hair down to my shoulders, and a backpack with a sticker on it reading RICHARD NIXON IS A WAR CRIMINAL. The button on the collar of my denim jacket read I AIN’T NO FORTUNATE SON. College is always a time of change, I guess, the last major convulsion of childhood, but I doubt there were ever changes of such magnitude as those faced by the students who came to their campuses in the late sixties.

Most of us don’t say much about those years now, not because we don’t remember them but because the language which we spoke back then has been lost. When I try to talk about the sixties—when I even try to think about them—I am overcome by horror and hilarity. I see bell-bottom pants and Earth Shoes. I smell pot and patchouli, incense and peppermints. And I hear Donovan Leitch singing his sweet and stupid song about the continent of Atlantis, lyrics that still seem pro-found to me in the watches of the night, when I can’t sleep. The older I get, the harder it is to let go of that song’s stupidity and hold onto its sweetness. I have to remind myself that we were smaller then, small enough to live our brightly hued lives under the mushrooms, all the time believing them to be trees, shelter from the sheltering sky. I know that doesn’t make any real sense, but it’s the best I can do: hail Atlantis.

2

I finished my senior year living off-campus in LSD Acres, the rotting cabins down by the Stillwater River, but when I came to U of M in 1966 I lived in Chamberlain Hall, which was part of a three-dorm complex: Chamberlain (men), King (men), and Franklin (women). There was also a dining hall, Holyoke Commons, which stood a little apart from the dorms—not far, perhaps only an eighth of a mile, but it seemed far on winter nights when the wind was strong and the tem-perature dipped below zero. Far enough so that Holyoke was known as the Palace on the Plains.

I learned a lot in college, the very least of it in the classrooms. I learned how to kiss a girl and put on a rubber at the same time (a necessary but often overlooked skill), how to chug a sixteen-ounce can of beer without throwing up, how to make extra cash in my spare time (writing term papers for kids with more money than I, which was most of them), how not to be a Republican even though I had sprung from a long line of them, how to go into the streets with a sign held up over my head, chanting One two three four we won’t fight your fucking war and Hey hey LBJ how many kids did you kill today. I learned that you should try to get downwind of teargas and breathe slowly through a handkerchief or a bandanna if you couldn’t do that. I learned that when the nightsticks come out, you want to fall on your side, draw your knees up to your chest, and cover the back of your head with your hands. In Chicago, in 1968, I learned that cops can beat the shit out of you no matter how well you cover up.

But before I learned any of those things, I learned about the plea-sures and dangers of Hearts. There were sixteen rooms holding thirty-two boys on the third floor of Chamberlain Hall in the fall of 1966; by January of 1967, nineteen of those boys had either moved or flunked out, victims of Hearts. It swept through us that fall like a virulent strain of influenza. Only three of the young men on Three were com-pletely immune, I think. One was my roommate, Nathan Hoppen-stand. One was David “Dearie” Dearborn, the floor-proctor. The third was Stokely Jones III, soon to be known to the citizenry of Chamberlain Hall as Rip-Rip. Sometimes I think it’s Rip-Rip I want to tell you about; sometimes I think it’s Skip Kirk (later known as Captain Kirk, of course), who was my best friend during those years; sometimes I think it’s Carol. Often I believe it’s the sixties themselves I want to talk about, impossible as that has always seemed to me. But before I talk about any of those things, I better tell you about Hearts.

Skip once said that Whist is Bridge for dopes and Hearts is Bridge for real dopes. You’ll get no argument from me, although that kind of misses the point. Hearts is fun, that’s the point, and when you play it for money—a nickel a point was the going rate on Chamberlain Three—it quickly becomes compulsive. The ideal number of players is four. All the cards are dealt out and then played in tricks. Each hand amounts to twenty-six total points: thirteen hearts at a point each, and the queen of spades (which we called The Bitch), worth