Hearts In Atlantis

In Honolulu hula-hula girls greeted President Johnson.

At the U.N., Secretary General U Thant was pleading with Amer-ican representative Arthur Goldberg to stop, at least temporarily, the bombing of North Vietnam. Arthur Goldberg got in touch with the Great White Father in Hawaii to relay Thant’s request. The Great White Father, perhaps still wearing his lei, said no way, we’d stop when the Viet Cong stopped, but in the meantime they were going to cry 96 tears. At least 96. (Johnson did a brief, clumsy shimmy with the hula-hula girls; I remember watching that on The Huntley-Brinkley Report and thinking he danced like every other white guy I knew . . . which was, incidentally, all the guys I knew.)

In Greenwich Village a peace march was broken up by the police. The marchers had no permit, the police said. In San Francisco war protesters carrying plastic skulls on sticks and wearing whiteface like a troupe of mimes were dispersed by teargas. In Denver police tore down thousands of posters advertising an antiwar rally at Chau-tauqua Park in Boulder. The police had discovered a statute forbid-ding the posting of such bills. The statute did not, the Denver Chief said, forbid posted bills which advertised movies, old clothes drives, VFW dances, or rewards for information leading to the recovery of lost pets. Those posters, the chief explained, were not political.

On our own little patch, there was a sit-in at East Annex, where Coleman Chemicals was holding job interviews. Coleman, like Dow, made napalm. Coleman also made Agent Orange, botulin com-pound, and anthrax, it turned out, although no one knew that until the company went bankrupt in 1980. In the Maine Campus there was a small picture of the protesters being led away. A larger photo showed one protester being pulled out of the East Annex doorway by a campus cop while another cop stood by, holding the protester’s crutches—said protester was Stoke Jones, of course, wearing his duf-fle coat with the sparrow-track on the back. The cops were treating him kindly enough, I’m sure—at that point war protesters were still more novelty than nuisance—but the combination of the big cop and the staggering boy made the picture creepy, somehow. I thought of it many times between 1968 and 1971, years when, in the words of Bob Dylan, “the game got rough.” The largest photo in that issue, the only one above the fold, showed ROTC guys in uniform march-ing on the sunny football field while large crowds watched. MANEU-

VERS DRAW RECORD CROWD, read the headline.

Closer to home still, one Peter Riley got a D on his Geology quiz and a D-plus on a Sociology quiz two days later. On Friday I got back a one-page “essay of opinion” I had scribbled just before Intro English (Writing) on Monday morning. The subject was Ties (Should/ShouldNot)Be Required for Men in Restaurants. I had chosen Should Not. This little expository exercise had been marked with a big red C, the first C I’d gotten in English since arriving at U of M with my straight A’s in high-school English and my 740 score on the SAT Verbals. That red hook shocked me in a way the quiz D’s hadn’t, and angered me as well. Across the top Mr. Babcock had written, “Your usual clarity is present, but in this case serves only to show what a meatless meal this is. Your humor, although facile, falls far short of wit. The C is actually something of a gift. Sloppy work.”

I thought of approaching him after class, then rejected the idea. Mr. Babcock, who wore bowties and big hornrimmed glasses, had made it clear in just four weeks that he considered grade-grubbers the lowest form of academic life. Also, it was noon. If I grabbed a quick bite at the Palace on the Plains, I could be back on Chamber- lain Three by one. All the tables in the lounge (and all four corners of the room) would be filled by three o’clock that afternoon, but at one I’d still be able to find a seat. I was almost twenty dollars to the good by then, and planned to spend a profitable late-October weekend lining my pockets. I was also planning on the Saturday-night dance in Lengyll Gym. Carol had agreed to go with me. The Cumberlands, a popular campus group, were playing. At some point (more likely at several points) they would do their version of “96 Tears.”

The voice of conscience, already speaking in the tones of Nate Hoppenstand, suggested I’d do well to spend at least part of the weekend hitting the books. I had two chapters of geology to read, two chapters of sociology, forty pages of history (the Middle Ages at a gulp), plus a set of questions to answer concerning trade routes.

I’ll get to it, don’t worry, I’ll get to it, I told that voice. Sunday’s my day to study. You can count on it, you can take it to the bank. And for awhile on Sunday I actually did read about in-groups, outgroups, and group sanctions. Between hands of cards I read about them. Then things got interesting and my soash book ended up on the floor under the couch. Going to bed on Sunday night—late Sun-day night—it occurred to me that not only had my winnings shrunk instead of grown (Ronnie now seemed actually to be seeking me out), but I hadn’t really gotten very far with my studying. Also, I hadn’t made a certain phone-call.

If you really want to put your hand there, Carol said, and she had been smiling that funny little smile when she said it, that smile which was mostly dimples and a look in the eyes. If you really want to put your hand there.

About halfway through the Saturday-night dance, she and I had gone out for a smoke. It was a mild night, and along Lengyll’s brick north side maybe twenty couples were hugging and kissing by the light of the moon rising over Chadbourne Hall. Carol and I joined them. Before long I had my hand inside her sweater. I rubbed my thumb over the smooth cotton of her bra-cup, feeling the stiff little rise of her nipple. My temperature was also rising. I could feel hers rising, as well. She looked into my face with her arms still locked around my neck and said, “If you really want to put your hand there, I think you owe somebody a phone-call, don’t you?”

There’s time, I told myself as I drifted toward sleep. There’s plenty of time for studying, plenty of time for phone-calls. Plenty of time.

14

Skip Kirk blew an Anthropology quiz—ended up guessing at half of the answers and getting a fifty-eight. He got a C-minus on an Advanced Calc quiz, and only did that well because his last math course in high school had covered some of the same concepts. We were in the same Sociology course and he got a D-minus on the quiz, scoring a bare seventy.

We weren’t the only ones with problems. Ronnie was a winner at Hearts, better than fifty bucks up in ten days of play, if you believed him (no one completely did, although we knew he was winning), but a loser in his classes. He flunked a French quiz, blew off the little En-glish paper in the class we shared (“Who gives a fuck about ties, I eat at McDonald’s” he said), and scraped through a quiz in some other history division by scanning an admirer’s notes just before class.

Kirby McClendon had quit shaving and began gnawing his fin-gernails between deals. He also began cutting significant numbers of classes. Jack Frady convinced his advisor to let him drop Statistics I even though add-drop was officially over. “I cried a little,” he told me matter-of-factly one night in the lounge as we Bitch-hunted our way toward the wee hours. “It’s something I learned to do in Dramatics Club.” Lennie Doria tapped on my door a couple of nights later while I was cramming (Nate had been in the rack for an hour or more, sleeping the sleep of the just and the caught-up) and asked me if I had any interest in writing a paper about Crispus Atticus. He had heard I could do such things. He’d pay a fair price, Lennie said; he was currently ten bucks up in the game. I said I was sorry but I couldn’t help him. I was behind a couple of papers myself. Lennie nodded and slipped out.

Ashley Rice broke out in horrible oozing acne all over his face, Mark St. Pierre had a sleepwalking interlude after losing almost twenty bucks in one catastrophic night, and Brad Witherspoon got into a fight with a guy on the first floor. The guy made some innocu-ous little crack—later on Brad himself admitted it had been innocu-ous—but Brad, who’d just been hit with The Bitch three times in four hands and only wanted a Coke out of the first-floor machine to soothe his butt-parched throat, wasn’t in an innocuous mood. He turned, dropped his unopened soda into the