“They say that in the reign of Tarquin the Proud, last king of Rome, the Cumaean sybil
offered the king nine scrolls of prophecy, which allegedly contained the future of Rome all written out,
for a certain outrageous price. Tarquin refused, incapable of imaging that any old scrolls could be
worth so much. The prophetess then burned three of the scrolls and offered the remaining six to
Tarquin for the same price. The king admonished her not to mock him, but the old woman burned
three more scrolls and offered him the last three at the same price once again. Afraid of offending
fate, Tarquin paid the hag her original asking price for the remaining three scrolls, which were kept in
the temple of Jupiter, to be reverently consulted by future generations.”
“They don't seem to have been very much help to Rome, Professor Ballard.”
“If it'd been me, Wayne, I'd have burned them all up the first time he turned my offer down.”
*****
Classes were over. Wayne was stuck in San Jose, Texas. He had no money to travel, not
even back home to Chicago. His first year of grad school had been successful academically , his
personal life a mess. South Central Texas State University had a alleged reputation as the best
resort in Texas . To Wayne it hardly mattered. The college town was friendly enough on the surface,
but fat, chain-smoking, sarcastic Chicago Yankee geeks didn't get over too well. The Indian and
Chinese guys did better than he did. He was only just over thirty, but he felt old and tired, unable and
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unwilling to party hardy. And who the hell could you trust these days? He figured that in the era of the
Patriot Act you had to be careful talking serious politics, especially with his kinds of opinions. Many of
his grad-student peers smoked pot, which only made him more paranoid and indignant at their
frivolity. How could anybody know anything about history and still be loose, fun-loving, carefree?
"In those days I was a Red," the email had said. Of course, good gray prof had meant leftwing; it was after his heyday that the American media had used Red as the color of the Reagan
"revolution". So what was the old man now? A good Blue democrat? A Libertarian? Any one of a
number of varieties of religious nuts? The end of his note indicated that he was a little bit bitter and
world-weary. Perhaps he and Wayne had something in common after all.
As the token leftist in
the department, the job offer from the retired math prof with a collection of 60's and 70's memorabilia
naturally was passed on to him, especially since summer teaching hadn't come through.
Without a class for the summer, or other work like this archiving job, he would have to live off
contract programming and software technical support. But ever since he had published his little
paper on the Ukrainian anarchist Nestor Makhno, writing and maintaining code had become a joyless
chore. He missed the times when, as a game programmer, he would pass nights living on cigs and
coffee, creatively joining modules together that made the console dance and sing while killing legions
of zombies, illegal/extra-terrestrial aliens, White Russians, whatever, as long as they could die a
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gory death and simulate the thrill of dangerous combat. But now game programming was work, just
another job. The research he had done on Makhno to make his Red-White game more historically
realistic had stimulated his brain like nothing else since Visual Basic.
Wayne tired of shouting “Professor Ballard” over the boom of gloomy choral music coming
from the rickety door of the shack behind the trailer, where the GPS said Ballard lived, afraid to
knock lest the door shatter. He had just turned away and given up on the meeting, deep down fearful
that the old man might have had a stroke-or God knows what else- and that Wayne would have to
deal with it were he to cross the threshold. Suddenly the door commenced to labor open. A tall
stooped man in an open burgundy bathrobe ventured out, his bald shank ending in a silly slippered
foot groping for the ground.
“May I help you?” He was trying to close his robe.
“Professor Ballard?”
“Who? Who?” To Wayne, he resembled an owl, puzzled and fierce.
“CAN YOU PLEASE TURN THE MUSIC DOWN?”
“Why are you shouting...? C'mon in.”
Ballard went inside to turn off his gloomy music, driven by a record player spinning a slightly
warped 33 1/3 vinyl LP. Wayne now saw that the back of the robe had a slogan like a boxer's, in dirty
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white letters:
TIO
ROGELIO
The
Mathematical
Marauder
The professor's life was organized by piles. Some of the piles were on bookshelves, but they
were just stacks turned on their sides. The piles not on shelves seemed to form concentric circles
around a long foldout table that served as a desk in the center of the room, facing the door to the
north. Piles of books, papers, file folders, broken appliances, bags of trash, notepads and more
notepads, boxes of never unpacked material from his teaching days, magazines, beer bottles, other
bottles, newspapers, cartons with sadness in them.
As Wayne went his way through the labyrinthine piles , he first beheld behind the desk, to the
south, a closed door framed with a hodge-podge of radical left-wing political posters, hardly any
newer than 1984. Wayne recognized a poster from 1978 on the tenth anniversary of the student
massacre at Tlatelolco in Mexico City. He also recognized a portrait of Che Guevara and some antinuclear power and antiwar rallies for most of the wars from Vietnam to Afghanistan. But the books on
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that wall were not political books, rather math and science books and notes. The east wall had
pictures of Roger, along with friends and family above piles of mostly literature books that framed a
doorway to a rather nasty bathroom with a large print of Hieronymus Bosch's “Garden of Delight”
over the toilet.
The west wall had the only window, so that the only sunlight came from the setting sun.
Other than bursts sneaking inside from the outside door that opened north, there was no other direct
natural light. The record player fit on a card table beneath the window. The west wall had floor to
ceiling bookshelves, with history, politics, left-wing politics, lots of theology, church history, and thencontemporary issue books, devotional writings, mostly Christian but from a wide variety of faith
traditions. And beside them were Nietzsche, Marx and Engels, Bertrand Russell's “Letters”,
Einstein's “Ideas and Opinions”, Hitler's “Mein Kampf”, all mixed together.
Roger stood by the record player, a finger on his lips, seemingly absorbed with trying to
remember... something. Wayne broke the uneasy silence, asking
“You seem to have an interesting system for organizing your books, Professor Ballard. Are Einstein
and Hitler grouped together for any particular reason?”
Roger seemed to reflect on this question and suddenly concluded
“You're the graduate student!” Grey eyes focused and peered out from a shock of gray hair (original
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color uncertain). The old man seemed to have a revelation, an insight into the meaning of the
appearance of this fat young man in his “portable building”.
“Professor Ballard, I'm Wayne Grodsky. You emailed me your address to meet me here, today,
almost an hour ago.” Wayne held out his hand, which the professor ignored.
“Wayne. All the crazy guys in News of the Weird were named Wayne.”
In response to this non sequitur Wayne sought for a place to sit amidst the piles. The only
available seating were four standard metal foldout chairs, piled against the south wall behind the
desk. Wayne was certain the seats were too small for his bottom, but he went to fetch one anyway, if
only to lean on. And as he turned north he saw that framing the door was Roger's altar, with candles
of San Judas Tadeo [St. Jude. Patron of Lost Causes], Divine Mercy, Sagrado Corazon [Sacred
Heart], St. Michael the Archangel, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., la Virgen de Guadalupe, Justo Juez
[Just Judge] with the crucified Christ surrounded by the instruments of the Passion, the Holy Spirit,
some two dozen in all, counting the velas with pictures of friends and family who had died. There
was a picture of Pope John Paul II on his trip to San Antonio and a smaller one of Benedict XVI, a
picture of Mother Theresa's corpse from the feet-first perspective beside a print of la Anima Bendita
portraying a young woman chained in a cell surrounded by flames of purgatory, yet reaching up in
hope. There was a curious picture of Prof. Ballard and some other men dressed in costumes, holding
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swords and wearing plumed hats.
But central to the shrine, above the outside door was a gilded heart-shaped frame holding a
portrait of a shyly smiling woman. She holds a toddler, a girl with pierced ears, who is staring into
the camera with wide black eyes. Thus Roger Ballard, sitting at his desk, would see that heartframed portrait every time he raised his head; of course, he could also hide behind the computer
monitor should he choose not to behold the monstrance.
“By size, I guess.” Roger uttered this tidbit of knowledge as though it had been a carefully
considered response.
Wayne stopped scanning. “I beg your pardon?”
“I said, the books are probably arranged by size. Einstein and Hitler are together because the
volumes fit nicely.”
Because of the piles, Wayne could not see what the books were on the bottom shelves;
perhaps course materials, failed projects. How many trees had been felled to make the books and
papers piled into this hovel? On the top of the desk were about a square foot of clear space, an oldstyle computer monitor and keyboard, a surprisingly clean ash tray, and heaps of piles, of course,
some topped by paper plates that once had supported lonely meals.
“Uh sir I need to know if you're gonna pay me for today...at least give me gas money...if this
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doesn't work out?”
“Are we working something out? ”
“You have some papers, Professor Ballard? Some books? I'm here to survey your collection, to see
what we need to do to archive it.”
“That's it!”
“Pardon me?”
“Why you're here. Why we're here. Why we're here...” Roger turned to the bookcase.
“We might as well start here,” and Roger took a book down from the shelf next to him, and
proceeded to lecture. “This book The Decline of American Capitalism was written by Lewis Corey.
His real name was Louis Fraina, and he was a founder of the CP in 1919...”
Wayne was glancing over the titles, some of which he recognized immediately: Malcolm X,
Eldridge Cleaver, Jerry Rubin, and what looked like a red-covered copy of Prairie Fire by the
Weather Underground- might be interesting if it's original. But who were Harry Haywood, Nelson
Peery, the Proletarian Unity League?
“...wanted scholarly proof that capitalism couldn't last-”
“Professor Ballard, I see an ash tray on your desk; does that mean I may smoke in here? Please say
yes.”
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“Go ahead; I understand. But you have to take your ashes and butts out with you. I used to smoke
tobacco. It was probably 1975 or so that I found this book in a used book store. I knew of course its
predictions had not come to pass, but I was interested in how reasonable his case was at the time-”
“Excuse me, Professor, but I'm not prepared to do an oral history.” Wayne took a deep drag and
exhaled. “My understanding was that you had stuff to archive.”
“That's right. But I need to tell you what they are- or were.”
“I can google the book titles and search various data bases-”
“But I need to tell you what it meant! What it meant to look through these books, actually reading
some of them, hoping that they might have answers, to explain how to better the world, make the
revolution, build the Kingdom of God- with sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll -good vibes, flower power,
the Age of Aquarius. Ha! What did we know?”
Indeed. Wayne left his cig in the ash tray and went to fetch another folding chair, the two of
them supporting his weight like crutches.
“Don't you want to know what this stuff is that you're archiving, and what it meant?”
“If you want, my phone here has a voice recorder, and I have some smartware which can transcribe
it into text. I usually have someone else edit it, to minimize my bias.”
“Ten dollars an hour, plus another ten for gas and expenses.”
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Wayne sucked up on his cig. “Say what?”
“That's what I will pay you. Starting next Monday, get here at one o'clock and I'll let you go at five. I'll
put up with you for five days.”
“Twenty hours in all. I can smoke. No gloomy music.”
“Fifty dollars a day .You can smoke. I will play any music I please. It was Mozart's Requiem.”
The men shook on it Texas-style, Wayne's plump paw clasping Roger's big-knuckled mitt.
Wayne couldn't get a clear answer about how much stuff Roger actually had, besides his vague
gestures at some piles or shelves. Supposing that one fifth of the material was relevant to catalog,
Wayne estimated there were 100-150 books and 30-50 documents to consider. Doable, if he could
keep Ballard on track and not rambling incessantly. Anyway, Wayne wouldn't have to listen to his
yammering; the voice recorder would get it all.
After Wayne packed out his cigarette butt and ashes, squeezed through the door, and
hurried to his car, the gloomy music started again.
So come Monday, Wayne would get paid, so he needn't be so tight with the few dollars he
had until then. It was early enough to drive to the Thursday night ISO Meeting in Austin, and
afterwards treat himself to a real meal and some drinks... flee for awhile from the vacuous vicious
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students and invincibly ignorant rednecks that filled the local bars in San Jose...
Roger ate Ben and Jerry Cherry Garcia ice cream for dinner. To get it, he had been forced to
abandon his domain and go to the refrigerator in the main house, then bring back the bowl of ice
cream piled with graham crackers. Although she had been dead for several years, in his mind the
main house was her house, his wife Angelita's, not his. More and more he liked to stay in his shed,
except to sleep. After his meal and his visit to the bathroom, he sat at his desk and faced west
towards the setting sun. He lit the candle for St. Michael the Archangel, with its label showing
Michael beating down bat-winged Satan with a wavy-bladed sword. He read the form for Evening
Prayer from Magnificat magazine, and the assigned readings from the Lectionary. He said his
prayers, the special ones for Juana and Angelita, turning to their picture over the door. He also
prayed:
“Lord, watch over this new guy Wayne. Please don't let it turn out that he's a serial killer of old men.”
He concluded with an Our Father, a Hail Mary , and a Glory Be.
Roger tried working at his desk for a while. He read some email, hoping for messages from
his children, Michael and Melinda, but finding none; no surprise there. He checked out some web
sites. Nothing new under the sun. Nothing remarkable nor unforeseen had happened to his money.
Most of the personal news was about his friends dying, getting sick, or going crazy. The national and
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world news reminded him of how total and profound were the failures of leadership of his generation.
He wanted to write but had nothing to say, no theorems to prove that the math world needed.
So it was time to shut down this computer and go into the Room of Solitary Vice, the little
room behind his desk, on the south wall. His inner sanctum had nothing more than a desk, a chair, a
cot, and a waste basket. He carried the candle and put it on the desk. From a desk drawer he took
out a Volcano vaporizer and some unremarkable pot. The drawer below had a pint of whiskeygetting precariously low- and a dirty glass. Roger downed a substantial shot before going to the
bathroom to fetch a water chaser. Thus fortified, he followed the ritual prescribed for charging and
preparing the futuristic-looking vaporizer, then inhaled a hefty cloud. The bliss came on in seconds.
He poured another, more modest shot, practically emptying the bottle. On the desk sat a laptop,
which connected to the Internet by a router from his desktop computer. Roger powered it up and
opened his browser. He checked a few of his bookmarked sites to see if there was anything new:
amazing, the number of instances of Latina women giving oral sex and swallowing, and all the subtle
variations on this theme; had anyone done a serious study? He had given up surfing and had about
twenty sites that he visited occasionally to see what was new. Yet there were but four damas to
whom he had any loyalty or devotion. He religiously read their blogs and kept up with them and let
their sweet sex talk charm him. The mistress of them all was vintage porn star Vanessa del Rio, with
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whom he had had a purely VCR and cyberspace relationship for a quarter century; she was the only
one to whom he had ever sent money, the only one to whom he had ever written, the only fan club
(of any sort) of whose he had ever joined.
Again, nothing new under the sun. The sites came and went. In their blogs the ladies would
sometimes say they left to have babies, or become monogamous, or simply to retire from “the
industry,” having made the money they needed for student loans, boyfriends' lawyer, or child's
hospitalization, and “moved on”. One or two had progressed to more conventional acting careers.
Some left abruptly, like thieves in the night. A very few quit in anger and left messages of betrayal
and regret. One accepted Jesus Christ as her Savior and Lord. When the ladies left, he missed
them; he no longer enjoyed surfing for new faces, new hotties, new women in his life. He was
comforted by the re-enactment of the same encounters, variants of oral sex, favorite stories he
never tired of hearing- or rather, of seeing acted out.
Roger felt some sympathic stirring down there beneath his robe, between his crossed legs,
fuzzy thigh crossed over long bald shank. He shut the laptop and turned the sarape down on the cot.
The blanket was scratchy, rough on the skin. He lay down and reached for the Kleenex underneath.
The candle barely illuminated a ceiling poster of Vanessa del Rio, which had been up there before
his and Angelita's daughter died; Vanessa was there when he went through the pain and felt
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dominated by death, decay, and destruction. In the daylight one could see how Vanessa had been
blackened by soot from generations of candles.
Angelita and Juana are there, dressed in white robes, the garments of righteousness. Juana is
now a teenage girl, They look on smiling while Vanessa is giving him head, praising and approving
the couple. “All we want, dearest Roger, all God wants, is for you to be happy and feel good. So it's
OK to do whatever with Vanessa. It's OK to get high and eat ice cream and drink whiskey... we love
you...Jesus loves you..so do Mary and Joseph...They want you to get off...Roger?”
Roger awoke from his post-orgasm nap more clear-headed. He left the Room of Solitary
Vice, went to the bathroom, washed his hands, and made other ritual ablutions. He said an Act of
Contrition and prayed,
“Oh Lord, thank you for the gift of Vanessa del Rio and for all the pleasure and comfort she
has given me these many years, and for her continued good health and success as an entrepreneur
as she approaches sixty. In Jesus' name, Amen.”
For awhile he shuffled around some piles, to help his relevant memorabilia bubble up to the
surface. He got sidetracked, but there was no one here to talk with about the material. Why did he
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need to talk? Why was he paying this guy Wayne?
Roger did not like to sleep in his shed. He took his bowl back to her house, rinsed it out, and
put it away as she would have wished. He tried watching the History Channel, but it either bored him
or angered him. After dozing off in front of the television he awoke with a start. He went into her
bedroom for the night, the room where they had slept, the bed on which he had slumbered in stupor
while smoke killed Juana La Loca, the child in the heart-framed picture in the shed. He opened the
closet door on her side; after all this time, it still smelled like Angelita. So did some of the drawers
with her underwear, socks, and bras, a reserve of the scent of his reina amada preciosa, his beloved
precious queen. He picked up a handful of her stuff and breathed in. Was there any smell left that
was actually from her body or just the familiar residues of powders and deodorants and soap?
Roger took the medicines prescribed before bedtime and considered saying the Rosary
before retiring, but he didn't want to fuss with the beads. Besides, he wasn't sure where he'd placed
them. He could see Angelita's rosary hanging over the cross, as always, but he would never, never
disturb it. Instead he prayed, first in Spanish, then in English:
“Angelita querida, al lado de Nuestro Señor en los cielos, y Juana amada, puesto en Su
pecho, rogad por mí, pecador. Dearest Angelita, at the side of Our Lord in heaven. and beloved
Juana, placed on His bosom, pray for me, a sinner.”
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After all that, W. Roger Ballard drifted off to sleep with his mouth open while saying a final
Our Father.
*****
By 1:00 PM, Monday the Texas sun was making considerable progress on its avowed
purpose: making Wayne miserable. Now the old coot was making him wait outside; he feared he
would have to get a hat for his balding head. Some old rock band was playing, the sound vaguely
familiar to Wayne but before his time. Gloomy rock, instead of Mozart. But soon the rickety door
opened, less dramatically than before, and Roger beckoned him inside. He was still wearing the
boxer's robe, making Wayne wonder if old Ballard had left this hovel since he was here last week.
Roger turned off the record player without lifting the pickup arm, then cursed himself because
he had forgotten “you weren't supposed to do that to vinyl records”- at least in his day, before hiphop DJ's used them purely for sound effects. Wayne arranged two folding chairs so he could sit, lit
a cigarette, and turned on his phone voice recorder...
“I did a little organizing and I think I know where I want to start-”
“Hold it, Professor... Wayne Grodsky, archiving material of Professor Roger Ballard-”
“W. Roger Ballard. It makes me different from Father.”
“-him talking. June 11, 201*”
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Wayne indicated that he go ahead. Roger opened a yellowed newspaper with the headline
KING SHOT IN MEMPHIS;
CONDITION CRITICAL
“New York Daily News from April 4, 1968,” Wayne told the recorder.
“OK, surely that's available on microfilm and by now it may be digitalized. Why don't you just
show me where it is and I'll go through it. If I have any questions, I'll ask you-”
“So you're saying that all history will know about this headline is what's on microfiche? Don't
you want to know how it affected people?”
Affected you, you mean. But Wayne held his tongue while he considered that perhaps letting
the old man ramble was to his benefit. After all, if Ballard would let him have direct access to
examine the material and read off the titles, he could be done in 5-8 hours, rather less than in the 20
hours he was counting on, for the money. Also, he might get a publication out of this or even make it
into his Master's thesis.
“Yes, go ahead Professor Ballard. Roger Ballard, professor emeritus of ...mathematics? At
South Central Texas State University-”
“I'm Associate Professor, and W. Roger Ballard. Don't you listen? The W. is to distinguish me from
Father, Roger Ballard....”
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And here follows an edited transcript of W. Roger Ballard's first tale
...who also did not want a junior or a II. It was my mysterious mother who named me, they
say. Maybe she wanted to say I was his and not hers, foretelling her leaving us after my birth, for
reasons never explained. And Bessie was delighted that her Roger had a son to carry on the name,
praise God!
You know, I was born and grew up here in San Jose, but much of my adult life I lived up
North, where many people, especially white liberals or wannabe radicals, would assume I was a
racist redneck because of my Texas accent, which only diminished when I lived in Mexico City and
spoke only Spanish. But, in fact, my father made his reputation opposing the KKK and was elected
County Judge at Law as a Republican yet! This was in the late 1920's, when Texas was part of the
Solid Democratic South- but he had a reputation for honesty and for upholding the law. He also
supported legal rights for Negroes, also supported segregation, both because it was the law and
because he believed both races were better off and safer. He was called “nigger lover” a lot, and the
taunt was passed on to me. I got in fights about it. The year, sometime in the 1950's, when he ran for
Governor on the Republican ticket was the worst.
I guess we were lovers of Negroes, at least certain ones. I was often amazed at how little
actual contact my rad/lib Chicago friends had actually had with black people, and the bizarre
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mythologies they clung to. In our case, Father had been raised if not nursed by Bessie, who had
been born a slave on the Jameson cotton plantation. Father was her darling, and he loved her back,
helping her kin to get a fair trial and sometimes succeeding.
By the time I was born on All Saint's Day, 1940 Anno Domini, Bessie must have been about
eighty. After Mother left us, Father called on Bessie to help with me. And she tried. But, apparently,
when I went through my Terrible Twos, I was too much for her to handle. I guess that's when he
replaced her with Maria...
But later on- I must have been four or five- Bessie came back to visit us. By this time I had
forgotten her- children are so fickle! Father and Maria got me, saying Bessie was here to see me.
They bring me to this very black very old woman with white hair. She held out her hefty arms,
spread her lap, and said with a big toothy grin, "C'mon, lil Roger, give Bessie some sugar!" I thought
that she must be God, the God I'd heard about in stories- in fact, I suppose Bessie formed my
earliest visualization of the Ineffable. She was compelling, but repelling, inviting but frightening,
familiar yet exotic and different, an aura of great power with gentleness. I remember that I could not
see her eyes, because she wore wire-rim glasses and the reflection concealed them, because "Thou
shalt not look upon the face of the LORD thy GOD and live"?
I don't remember if I got up on her lap and gave her a hug and kiss. Run screaming from the
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porch? start bawling? scowl and whine? go back sullenly after admonishment? Certainly I've
behaved towards God in all those ways...
The point? Well, you might say we go back a long way, my family and black folks. Father
sent me to San Jose Baptist Academy as a day student, and I had some “colored” classmates then,
children of mixed marriages from outside the US, mainly Latin America and the Caribbean. So don't
assume because I'm from Texas that I'm especially racist and bigoted! Father and I had a love of
history in common, but I was attracted to math and science, and I had little interest in law or politics
in those years.
My first wife Sarah and I were fairly liberal when we were living in Troy, New York while I was
going to RPI [Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute]. When we baptized Michael (I wasn't a militant atheist
yet) we chose a black friend (our only one in town) as the godfather. I listened to Pete Seegar,
cheered for the Freedom Riders, deeply appreciated jazz, blues, and R&B, liked Moms Mabley and
Redd Foxx. Sarah came from a working-class family in Troy, Italian and Irish, and had little feeling
about black folks one way or another. But we liked the message of Dr. King, especially the “I Have a
Dream” speech. It brought tears to my eyes, then and now. I wanted my children to grow up without
racial tension and fear, which, alas, was to be worse for them than it ever was for me. It had pained
me as a boy when, after a certain age, I could no longer hang out with the black kids, relatives and
“Tales of our Days”, Excerpt from the beginning, 05/14/10
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acquaintances of Bessie that I had known since childhood. When we saw each other in San Jose,
we'd barely nod. Remember, in those days there were separate drinking fountains for White and
Colored. The colored children would dare one another to drink from the White fountain when the
coast was clear, but the white kids never drank from the Colored fountain because you might get
polio or syphilis or turn black or get kinky hair.
OK, I just want you to know where I'm coming from. Back to the Daily News headline. So I
was in Manhattan the day King was shot in Memphis, April 4, 1968 .
Over spring break I had driven with Linda, Martha, and Kathy, all Sophie's good friends from
Wash U [Washington University, St. Louis], to visit her in New York, where Sophie had gone to seek
her fortune and, as it turned out, hook up again with her boyfriend. Two nights prior I had told her I
thought I was in love with her, that I had separated from my wife, and... like the others who drove on
this pilgrimage to Sophie, I missed her so bad I had to tag along with her devoted comrades. I tried
to kiss her, which made her nervous. She asked me to stop, and of course I did. My coming on to her
made her uneasy and disturbed our friendship. She thought I was a safe older man at age 26, I
suppose. And just my luck that the day before we arrived, she and boyfriend had decided to be
monogamous. And thus my crush was crushed.
How could she not have guessed? She, in late January 1968, the Year Everything
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Happened, beckoned me, standing by a vending machine in the basement of Cupples at Wash U:
“Why won't you try one of the apples?” She bit into the one she'd just bought. “They're delicious.”
Dressed in a peasant blouse and a short skirt, wild wavy hair, red lips and ruddy cheeks, a smile that
broke a heart of stone, this incarnation of Eve was buxom and healthy, free and informal,
unstarched and unironed but not hippie-loose. I suppose she didn't know how much she had opened
up new avenues, alternative paths for me- how could she know? I, who dressed very seriously, white
shirt and dark slacks, 1950's style hair, glasses. After all, I was a married math grad student with a
son and a daughter.
“Why, yes, I believe I will,” and I broke routine and bought an apple. It was cold, crisp, juicyeverything she said it was. We talked about how good the apple was for about a minute. My day
transformed from being passively ominous and fretful to hope-filled, augmenting my life with minor
joys, the apple and pleasant talk, as good as a cigarette when you want but don't need one.
Pleasant talk from a woman was a joy, because my wife Sarah and I had been tense for a
long time. Sophie and I ran into each other in Holme's lounge, and she invited me over a few to her
apartment where we'd eat, smoke pot, drink a little, but mostly talk, relations and politics. She gave
me a copy of Erich Fromm's The Art of Loving. No, we weren't lovers; I literally couldn't conceive of
infidelity at that point. But I certainly saw in Sophie that women can be pleasant, and I liked it. We
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hugged in a chaste way.
OK, I know you want to hear about King, but my story is part of it, too. Later, you separate it
out, edit, do what the fuck you want to. But I'm gonna talk about things and people that shouldn't be
forgotten.
In two months Sophie and I were fast friends. Sarah had formed her own circle, and I had
learned the hard lesson that in a marriage, husband and wife both need friendships, even at the risk
of sexual attraction . Sarah needed more from me , but I chose not to see it. Anyway, I was frantically
trying to finish my dissertation. The night I got it ready for the typist was the night Sarah stood me up
and slept with another man. My friend Sophie was one of the few I had to talk to about all this. She
left to New York, spring break came, and so I went with her girlfriends. By that time, I was
separated... and I figured out I was in love with Sophie, with no idea what to do about it, but needing
terribly to be with her. I came too little too late. But she sure was worth the chase to NY. Absolutely.
So, on the 4th, I wanted to go to the Cloisters Museum in northern Manhattan. Sophie didn't
want to go, and clearly the ladies needed some time together. So I smoked a little hash and took the
train way uptown by myself. About a year earlier, some friends had taken me to the Cloisters, but this
time it was just me alone with cold stone walls uprooted by J. P .Morgan, disturbing and compelling
paintings, mostly on religious themes, and the appropriate spooky music softly piped in. Somehow, I
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began to get some glimmer of the belief system of my European ancestors, the dying Christ, the
weeping Mother, the Risen Christ... I certainly thought by this time of life I was over such
superstitious nonsense as religion; I was certain the was no God. But that day, the suffering Christ
moved me; I was transported back to the Middle Ages; I yearned to kneel at the Altar before the
Rood, a knight holding up his sword like a crucifer raises the cross. These thoughts troubled me; I
could not imagine I was influenced by such superstitious nonsense. The notion of the crucified
Christ, “the perfect oblation and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world”, the horror and sadness,
the numbing cruelty, all haunted me. Still, there was no hint, no trace of a God that Bessie had
symbolized.
I left and got on a train going downtown to where we were staying on 93rd St. As we passed
through Harlem, my car filled with black people, I looked down and a woman had a NY Daily News
with the headline:
KING SHOT IN MEMPHIS;
CONDITION CRITICAL
I was stunned and suppose my face showed my feelings. The woman said.
“He's dead. I heard it on the radio before I got on the train. He's dead.”
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For once I had the good sense to say nothing- what could I say? That I was sorry? for what? white
racism? craziness? hatred? the fact of evil? I felt totally helpless and sad, a terrible sense of loss of
moral leadership. I got off without incident at my stop and went to the apartment. Fortunately, all the
girls were safe and accounted for. That night, as we saw the northern sky aglow with Harlem on fire,
we held hands and prayed for peace. We bonded while watching anger combust in a smoke haze up
on the roof of the building.
The next day, we all thought it best to return to St. Louis- except for Linda, who decided to
stay with Sophie and seek her fortune in the Big Apple. So I said goodbye to my unrequited love,
Sophie, and wished Linda well. Martha, Kathy, and I drove back in Martha's VW bug.
Martha was a very straight, clean-cut, kind-hearted Irish Catholic girl who had a heart of gold and
spoke perfect Mandarin. In NYC Chinatown, she amazed the folks with her fluency and correct
pronunciation and tone. Her credit card got us out of many tough spots. Kathy was a theater major
who happened to have a leg in a cast, from a skiing accident before our trip. We felt we already knew
one another, so we talked freely and honestly. I felt very protective of them, but they also cared for
me.
On the car radio, we listened to relays of Dr. King's speeches, especially the very last one,
where he's been to the mountain top and seen the Promised Land. And he said, Don't remember me
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for my Nobel Prize, and my credentials- just say, 'He tried to help somebody.' And that's what I hope
they'd say about me.
We passed Pittsburgh, the ghetto on fire. In Indiana, we pulled up for gas. A frantic man
yelled, “Get out of here! The whole place is gonna go up any minute!”
I wasn't sure exactly of the extent of the “place” he meant, but we fled and finally found an open gas
station. Exhausted as we were, we didn't dare to stop to rest; besides, we were anxious to get back.
We drove through East St. Louis in the wee hours of the morning. Fires still smoldered, but
we drove over the bridge, across the Mississippi. Right at the Missouri side, white men with
shotguns flagged down our car. A man stuck a flashlight in the car to ascertain we were all white.
Had we not been, they would have blown us away unless we went back, I suppose.
Martha dropped Kathy off, and Kathy asked me to get out with her. We hugged Martha
goodbye, and then Kathy and I walked holding hands, in pace with her limp. That night, we made
love. She was the first woman besides Sarah in seven years- a woman with a broken leg- whose
husband was serving his country in Vietnam, as they say.
A few days later the “progressive element” in St. Louis organized a big march in solidarity
with the black community and in honor of Dr. King. We marched from downtown all the way though
the black ghetto, where people watched us from open windows with expressionless faces. They
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rarely joined in our chants of “Power to the People!” etc., but they didn't razz us either.
Sarah and I went together, and we took the kids, Michael and Melinda, the three of them
living in the old apartment; another man moved in soon after. Melinda was in a stroller, and I carried
Michael on my shoulders for much of the way. As it turned out, this was our last family activity. Years
later, Sarah would rant about how dangerous it had been and we could have gotten killed. Maybe
she had a point, but after what I had been though, seen and heard, how could I have done
otherwise?
*****
“Wayne, buddy, I'm sorry, but the smoke is getting me. Damn, you smoke a lot. Go ahead and
stand in the door, so we can keep talking.”
Wayne turned off the voice recorder. “I think this is a good place to stop and take a break.”
He put his butt in the ash tray, used the bathroom in the shed, the door of which only shut
half way. It took him longer to piss than it even took old Roger. He settled himself by the open door
with lit cig. Roger sat by his desk, facing the monstrance of wife and child over Wayne's balding
head.
“So, Professor, I gather Dr. King influenced you. I suppose with your family background you
were an activist. Did you take part in a sit-in to integrate lunch counters in the South, here in Texas?”
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“No, but some of us talked seriously about it.”
“You were a Freedom Rider, then, going down to Mississippi to organize poor black people to vote.”
“No, I was absorbed with being a husband and father, and my studies. Sarah and I screwed a lot.”
“Not a veteran of the March on Selma either, I suppose.”
“What year was that?” Wayne told him it was 1965.
“That was when we got pregnant with Melinda. I was suffering through measure theory in grad
school.”
“So your attachment was only sentimental-”
“I marched later. Free Huey Newton!” Roger raised his left fist.
“At that time, what was your class analysis of racism? Or had you read any of these books on
Marxism by that time?”
“In 1965, only a very few. But by 1968 and the time King was shot I got radicalized. A good friend-”
“Let's save the tale for another time, Professor. I would like to inspect and record some more of
these documents.”
So they got back to work, and Roger had periods as long as an hour where he could sort
through his stuff without getting too terribly sidetracked. At the end of the work day, Roger gave
Wayne his first $50 pay, getting a receipt in return. As Wayne went to his car, Roger shut the door
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and put on another record, Bach's unaccompanied cello suites.
*****
With his princely pay, Wayne treated himself to a dinner at Taco Bell's, followed by several
pints at Señor Sapo's, a popular bar named for a toad that lives nowhere but in the mud of the San
Jose river. Wayne sat at the bar, balancing on the stool. The Dos Xes draft beer seemed warm to
him.
He saw a grad student acquaintance, a black guy he'd had a class with first semester, sitting
with a date. Wayne lacked enough beer courage to join him at his table, and he couldn't be sure if
the dude's name was Leroy or Clarence or something else. Wayne knew that he had the “correct
line” on the race question, a proper class analysis of the struggle. Yet failed Roger, reactionary
Roger, was more comfortable with them- meaning blacks like Leroy or Clarence or whoever- than
was Wayne, despite his superior analysis, deplete of sentimentality about revered old mammies.
Wayne finished his beer and ordered another, a less expensive Lone Star.
To him it was clear that he'd earn every stinking dollar that the old bastard would pay him.
His 'documents' are wads of paper, some of which turn out to be faded leaflets, manifestos, letters,
receipts, all manner of detritus. Wayne felt his chore would be to listen, to try to keep Ballard on
track, and then try to come up with a label, a catalog description that might be of use to somebody, in
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the rare instance that somebody cares. Typically, he would have to reduce 400 words of bullshit to
an eight word description. He conceded that Ballard does have some interesting books, but what
good these days is an original paper copy of Weatherman's Prairie Fire when there are online copies
out there? Wayne mused maybe old Roger should bundle his junk up and auction it off on Ebay;
surely some sentimental boomer would buy some stuff that invoked his wayward radical youth, the
time in his life when he stood up for something- for awhile, until things got 'heavy'.
To Wayne, the lessons of history that are to be learned from the old New Left are obvious :
spoiled, selfish thrill-seekers cannot make a revolution. Perhaps there are facts to be dug out which
would illuminate the sequence of events, reveal the reasons for certain (mostly bad) choices being
made, but Wayne doubt if they're to be found in Ballard's garbage.
After his sixth draft, Wayne had enough beer courage to amble over to the black dude's
table.
Wayne introduced himself to the couple, Arthur and Janice, he stood.
“Hey, I was wondering, if San Jose has a ghetto- you know, a traditionally black section of
town.” Wayne could not have blurted this out when sober.
“Yeah, I think so, but I've never been there. I'm from Houston, and I live in the student ghetto.
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Ha ha.”
Janice joined in. “I've never been there either, but I know there's a Martin Luther King DriveI've passed it driving into town.”
Wayne made academic small talk, about how the semester went and the next semester's
courses, which profs were assholes- that sort of thing. He barely listened to their chatter. He had
been standing the whole time, so he dismissed himself and left Señor Sapo's without leaving a tip at
the bar. The street was moribund; it was Monday. Time to head back to the student Cedarwood
Circle Apartments, where he lived alone since Carla left him a week after they arrived.
With Ballard's tale about King still on his mind, Wayne looked for Martin Luther King Drive
with his GPS. He was fairly certain he had passed such a street in town somewhere, sometime. It
was close by; he cruised slowly down the quiet street. No bros hanging out. No hookers. No boys
shooting hoops, this late on a summer night. He turned around and went back on Center Street, past
church after church- African Methodist Episcopal, a sure sign of the black ghetto. There was an
African-American history museum, the Hoosegow, formerly the jail for Negroes. Finally, he headed
back to where he slept, not succeeding in finding whatever it was he sought.
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