Charles

Degelman

Part One

Spring, 1969

CHAPTER 1

Bloody Thursday

“Don’t come over here.”

I’d never heard Super Joel whisper before. During the loudest of demos, you could hear the man bellow from a block down the street.

“It’s the Meanies … fuckers are massing down at the south end of Telegraph,” he hissed. “They’re packin’ shotguns.”

The Meanies. Meaning the Blue Meanies. That’s what we called the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department. Why? Because the Blue Meanies looked just like the cartoon juggernauts who pursued the Beatles in their Yellow Submarine.

The authorities had trained the Blue Meanies to fight the war at home. Real-life, no-cartoon Meanies wore powder-blue coveralls with service pistolas, teargas grenades and other pieces of military-issue crap slung off belts beneath their beer bellies. Blue Meanie coveralls hid badges, making it difficult to link any one Meanie to any particular act of violence.

Battles against the Blue Meanies were always lopsided: us in our blue jeans, teargas bandanas, and motorcycle helmets, them with their flak jackets, carbon-fiber jock straps, gas grenades, pistolas, and shotguns.

On Bloody Thursday, my theater company was scheduled to  perform our brand-new, super-hip, Black Panther puppet show for the embattled masses who occupied People’s Park seven days per week, 24 hours per day.

So, we had called Super Joel at the action center to let him know we were locked and loaded.

“Blue Meanies with guns?” I asked Super Joel. “Nothing new there. They just lob teargas grenades. I mean… nobody’s been shot. Right?”

“No. Not yet.”

“Well, there ya go!”

“I don’t know, man,” Super Joel whispered. “This feels different.”

“What do you mean ‘different.’ ”

“Like, different. It’s like a bad moon rising over here.” Super Joel sounded like a hippie, but he wasn’t. Far from it. Super Joel was a smart, funny, well-read, Left-wing political agitator and a full-blown anarchist. Nobody had ever succeeded in telling Joel what to do … about anything. “I don’t like it,” he continued. “The scene today … it’s not like … manageable, you know what I’m sayin’?”

“How come you’re whispering?”

“I’m whispering?”

“You’re whispering. You got the Man in the office with you?”

“Okay, wise guy,” he growled. “Bring your fuckin’ show over here. You’ll see how fuckin’ funny it is.”

Click.

Dial tone.

*

People’s Park had begun as a hangout. Hatched in a vacant lot owned by the University of California, a laid-back trip-hippie culture gained energy. Soon an amorphous cohort of Berkeley street people were planting vegetable gardens, trees, and roll-out sod. They liberated benches, chairs, old couches and hammocks and arranged them in convivial powwow circles. Flags and tie-dyed banners, political slogans and silk-screened portraits of Che Guevara hung in festoons from poles rigged with cabaret lights. Rebel electricians had bootlegged a connection off the city power grid. Any time the city shut down the power, the electricians rewired it.

A motley crowd hung out in the park, lovers and hustlers, street musicians, suburban kids looking for action. Groups of hippies gathered to smoke and deal dope, there was an incessant rumble of congas, a free store swapped out clothes for furniture, tents for books and paintings. University grad students and professors conducted teach-ins on everything from the history of Indochina to techniques of civil disobedience and organic gardening.

Knowledge, baby, is power.

People’s Park began to annoy the University, the most powerful property owner in the East Bay. The Chancellor and his lackeys implemented their disapproval of the grungy goings-on. When the Chancellors of the University of California got pissed off, the city of Berkeley and the State of California got pissed off. The Chamber of Commerce and the Oakland Tribune got pissed off.

Governor Ronnie Reagan – caught somewhere between Hollywood and Sacramento – got word of the freakishness that had mutated just outside the hallowed grounds and halcyon halls of the University. Orders rumbled down the chain. “Get rid of those people. Now.” Yessirs resounded from top to bottom of the academic food chain.

*

On the day that would become Bloody Thursday, Blue Meanies were lounging around the streets with shotguns while my theater company – the People’s Theater Collective -- humped across the Bay Bridge in an old flatbed truck. I huddled below the chill of the foggy morning, keeping watch over a clutter of guerrilla theater gear – a puppet stage, a bass drum, a battered tuba, and a battery of flags and banners – that rattled as the truck bumped over the expansion joints of the great gray bridge. Minutes later, we burst out of the San Francisco fog into the sunshine and tear gas of Berkeley. We made it up University Avenue almost to Shattuck before a handful of shotgun-wielding Meanies closed in around the truck.

“Good morning, officers.” Benny was driving. He was a tough, stubby little thespian from working-class Baltimore who had abandoned a “diamond in the rough” scholarship at Harvard to join the revolution.

“Where you going with this load of shit?” The head Meanie jerked his head toward the back of the truck.

“Well, sir,” Benny said, “we were invited to do a performance on Sproul Plaza. I believe you’ll find we have a permit on file with the office of ... ”

This was bullshit. The UC administration would have self-administered an enema before they granted a permit allowing the People’s Theater Collective to come on campus and rouse the rabble.

The Meanie wasn’t about to check with anybody.

“The campus is off limits.”

“But we ... ”

“That means everybody!” the Meanie roared. “Now turn this shit heap turned around and get the hell out of here!”

A phalanx of Meanies closed in around the truck.

“Let’s do what the Man says,” I whispered into the cab. Funny. I was whispering, too, just like Super Joel.

“Yessir.” Benny saluted the head Meanie, ground the truck into reverse, hung a Y-turn into somebody’s driveway, and headed us back the way we came.

I shivered as we drove past the prickly cluster of shotguns, barrels crazy-aimed everywhere – at the bright, blue sky, the Berkeley tarmac, and between my shoulder blades. I leaned over the cab as Benny headed South on Sacramento Avenue. “Nice work, Benny. You sounded so ... sweet.”

“Thanks, man. Well, those guys are my brothers, aren’t they? Just because they kick the shit out of us ... ”

I had just straightened up and had begun to relax when Benny abruptly turned right onto a side street, then turned right again. The tuba tumbled out of its perch and slammed up against the side rail of the truck, picking up another dent in its soft coils. We were heading back toward the campus.

“What the fuck are you doing?” I shouted over the wind while I righted the collapsed puppet stage and the bass drum.

“We came to do a show. Fuck them.”

“Fuck them,” I repeated to myself. So we were driving behind enemy lines. No big deal, right?

“I’m just gonna head up and around and come in on the North side of the campus. There won’t be so much action up ... ”

“Blam! Blam-blam!”

Benny stopped talking and slammed on the brakes. Normally, the sound of gun-like detonations wasn’t surprising; the cops launched teargas canisters out of special guns but these detonations didn’t carry the dull “thud” of teargas. Something was – as Super Joel had said – different.

A retreating army of students, hippies, and bystanders stampeded toward us, their faces full of fear. There was none of the hysterical laughter, shrieks, and epithets that usually accompanied a rout by the pigs. These kids weren’t laughing, they weren’t shouting, and they weren’t looking back.

Further up the street, towards Telegraph Avenue and the Park, Blue Meanies had broken ranks. Every so often, one of them would stop long enough to raise his gun and fire. I saw a studenty-looking girl scream and spin, swatting at her back and arms as if she were being bitten by angry bees. Her knees buckled and she fell to the ground like a rag doll.

The crowd hit us like a wave.

“Get out! Get out!” a hippie shouted through the bandanna that was twisted across his face. “They got live ammo!” He sounded like a surprised child.

The fleeing demonstrators streamed around us. Others scuttled down the sidewalk behind the parked cars, keeping low, running crablike down the long blocks of quaint, neatly-kept cottages that sheltered the academics of Berkeley, California. Benny and I and the rest of the thesbians abandoned ship and ran with the others.

“Shit,” Benny hollered. “I left the keys in the truck.”

I ran back, yanked open the truck door, and grabbed the keys. I had just slammed the door shut when I heard, rather than felt, the rattle of pellets against the door. A slashing pain roared up my spinal column as if I had been doused in boiling water. I tried to turn and run but nothing happened. My butt, back, and legs went numb and I felt myself slipping down, down, past the running board, onto the pavement, into the broken-cigarette, popsicle-stick, candy-wrapper detritus of the street. I tried to move, tried to rise, but I felt all white and woozy and like I needed to go to sleep.

* * *

Chapter Two

Breakfast of Champions

When the People’s Theater Collective wasn’t doing free commedia dell’arte shows in the parks, I lived with Tilly Bonaventure and her two kids in a flowery low-rent bungalow perched on a brown hillside above the sprawling, East Bay city of Richmond, California. Below the bungalow a petroleum refinery chuffed like a mechanical dragon. Oily mist hung in the air, smelling sickly-sweet from the effluvia of long-dead fossils. Flares from the refinery’s burn-off towers and cracking plants, trapped and reflected by the summer-long ceiling of bay fog, made the whole world pulsate with a wild, orange light.

The refinery created a bizarre industrial counterpoint to the ramshackle comfort of the bungalow with its rose garden and sunny kitchen, with Tilly’s kids’ toys strewn around. We got a grim satisfaction, Tilly and I, from sitting above the stinking jumble of towers, tanks, and pipelines while the refinery pounded its blind, violent mantra. It was like living on top of an apocalypse.

*

On winter nights I descended to the leaky garage built into the hillside below the bungalow to build a redwood camper shell for the back of my truck. Beneath the dim light of a single overhead bulb, I cut, chiseled, screwed and glued white pine struts together. I ripped the resawn redwood ply to size and screwed it to the struts, all the time surrounded by fragrant pine shavings and rust-red sawdust. For reasons unknown to me then, I was recollecting the skills my father had given me.

When I was nine, I had built a soap box racer with my old man in the basement of our Massachusetts home. This was no jalopy. This was a bona fide racing machine, constructed according to the specs and blueprints of the National Soap Box Derby, held annually in Akron, Ohio, Tire Capital of the World or so it was called in 1954, when the ore belt was still high on the momentum of World War Two, knocking out cars as quick as they could haul coal, steel, and rubber to Detroit.

Night after night, the racer took shape under the warm cone of light that separated the workbench from the dank recesses of the coal bin and the furnace room. I learned how to guide a bucking, kicking saber saw along a pattern scribed onto a sheet of three-quarter-inch plywood. I learned how to mix water with the fine powder of composite resin glue and spread the stuff evenly over the pine frame members before I screwed down the masonite skin with a big, well-oiled Yankee screwdriver. I learned how to push a brace and bit against my chest while I drilled clearance holes for the carriage bolts that would clamp the axle, sandwiched between two two-by-fours, to the floorboards.

Before we shut out the light each night, my old man and I would stand back and admire our progress. The scent of plywood and pine pitch, vaporized by the friction of drillbits, sawblades, and sandpaper, merged with the fishy odor of the glue pot and the molasses sweetness of my old man’s Pall Malls. Slowly I began to realize that, as I built the camper, the reactivation of my carpentry skills was reuniting me with my old man’s spirit.

*

Now I lay face down on the Indian print bedspread that covered the living room couch, naked ass in the air, while Tilly tweezed birdshot pellets out of my butt cheeks. Getting shot in the ass has certain strategic connotations. One, it suggests that you have pissed somebody off. Two, that you are running away from that somebody. And three, that he, she, or they have gotten the upper hand in the situation. All of those things were true in Berkeley California on Bloody Thursday, May 8, 1969.

We were guerrilla warriors, modeling ourselves after the Viet Cong and Ho Chi Minh and General Giap, the political and military genius who directed the powerful resistance in what they called simply “The American War.” But here, in the war at home, we lacked the slowly accumulated discipline, experience, guerrilla tactics, and political profundity of the Vietcong. We had little to counter with but our own anarchic energy. people were beginning to understand that, but not me.

I wasn’t seeing out of my eyes.

“How long before they get tired of this game?” Tilly swabbed alcohol on the little black scabs that had formed on my back, butt, and legs.

“What game?” I winced.

Birdshot penetrates the flesh to varying levels. The emergency room doctor had gotten to most of the pellets but he warned me that others might surface.

Tilly got up. Her long, blue-jeaned legs stretched up and away, out of my vision. She reached for a saucer and a pair of tweezers that was sitting on the PG&E cable spool that served as a table in the living room.

“Youch!” I hollered, as tweezers probed my flesh.

“You ready to take to the hills, cowpoke?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You came home after they let you out of the hospital.” She dug again.

“Youch!” I squirmed in pain. “Yeah? So?”

“So … You think they’d have sent you home if this was for real?”

“It’s for real. They don’t know what we’re gonna do next.”

“So … They have you on file, your prints, a mug shot.”

“That’s nothing new.”

“So … You’re on the list for Santa Rita.”

“No shit,” I said proudly.

Santa Rita was an old prison camp the county was renovating to use as a holding facility for overzealous Bay Area activists. The Berkeley Barb, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Oakland Tribune had hollered bloody murder, comparing Santa Rita to an American Auschwitz. The potential was there.

“So finally,” Tilly continued. “When do they decide to round up the people on that list? You, me ... The kids. What do we do with the kids if we get busted? Ever think of that, Chairman Mao?” One more sharp, stinging jolt and I heard the “tink” of a pellet landing in the saucer.

I looked over. It was smeared with blood.

“Speak of the devil,” Tilly said.

The kids came tromping in from school. Jossy, short for Jocelyn, headed straight for the refrigerator. I got up and stumbled into the bathroom holding my pants away from my stinging rear end. Jake came in to piss with me.

“Red cross,” he said, his tiny, clear stream intersecting mine.

“Get out of your school clothes before you go outside,” I told him. Jake could bust through a pair of jeans quicker than a pipefitter. He took off, exploding with after-school energy.

In the kitchen I heard the klink of a knife in a peanut butter jar. Tilly was talking to Jossy about school. In contrast to her tone with me, Tilly’s voice sounded light, happy, relieved to be with her daughter, grateful for the peace they shared between them.

I stumbled back to the couch, holding my pants up around my buttocks.

Tilly stood in the doorway to the kitchen licking peanut butter off her fingers. “You’re fucking with the United States of America,” she sighed.

“How’s your butt, Gus?” Jossy stood in the doorway beside Tilly. At seven she already had her mother’s reedy limbs and frame.

“It hurts. But pretty soon I’ll be jumping around like Howdy Doody.”

“Howdy Doody’s a puppet,” Jossy said, and headed for the bedroom balancing a treat of bread and peanut butter on each open palm.

“The harder you push,” Tilly said, “the harder they push back. You go back to Berkeley loaded for bear, they’ll call in the National Guard. Or the Air Force.” She followed the kids into the bedroom.

I watched her settle onto the lower tier of the bunk bed, watching her little boy tie his sneakers.

“Last year, after Tet,” I hollered from the couch, “Westmoreland begs for half a million more teenagers to kill. What did Johnson say?”

“Who cares? He was the President. He was bound to say something stupid.”

“Johnson said, ‘If I give you half a million more young Americans men, Herr General, I cannot guarantee our national security here at home.’ National security! Who the fuck was he talking about?” I didn’t wait for an answer. “He was talking about us, that’s who. We’re the threat to national security. Us, the Panthers, the whole fucking civil rights movement, every long-haired, dope-smoking, rock-throwing weirdo in every city in America ... ”

Tilly stopped me in mid-rant. “You can’t think of anything but getting back at these bozos: the General Waste-More-Lands, big fat President Johnson with his beagles and his McGeorge Bundies and his Robert McNamaras and all those other half-dead, white guys. They’re not your father. Leave them alone. Before they kill you. Before they kill all of us. They stink and it’s beginning to smell in here, too. Pull your own damn pellets out of your own damned ass.” Tilly pushed away from the doorjamb with her shoulder and disappeared into the bright sunshine of the back yard to join her kids.

Birdshot notwithstanding, I pulled up my pants and followed her into the yard. There, squinting into the sunshine, surrounded by growing things, the two kids watching wide-eyed while I hollered, I vociferously refused to recognize that my shredded ass was evidence that we weren’t going to overthrow the government of the United States via street rebellion.

I denied that half of the anger I felt toward the system had its origins in my own heart, that – until I healed myself – I probably wasn’t going to heal the world and all its suffering.

Somehow, Tilly’s disgusted silence and the kids’ calm scrutiny underscored my feeling that – beneath my rage at The Machine – I was fucked up … very fucked up. My personal past had been deeply scarred long before the war turned our lives upside down. But it was impossible for me to separate the outrage I felt at the violence of napalm from the sorrow, loss, and anger that swirled in my own soul. I continued my bluster, full of hot air and Alameda County birdshot.

*

The next morning, Tilly served me a bowl full of galvanized roofing nails for breakfast, complete with milk, sugar, blueberries, a very pretty picture. “Here ya go, tough guy,” she said. “Breakfast of champions.”

The kids thought it was funny.

Tilly wasn’t laughing.

The episode inspired the recollection that Dave West, my neighbor, had recently told me about a job to be had, working as a handyman for an old lady who lived high in the Colorado Rockies.

I when I had finished miming the ingestion of the roofing nails, accompanied by appreciative lip smacking and belly rubbing, I rose from the table and walked up the hill to Dave West’s. The job was still open. I jumped at the chance.

“I need to spend time alone,” I explained to Tilly when I returned home. “Work with my hands. Get close to nature.”

Tilly listened from the kitchen door, arms folded beneath her breasts. “What about the theater company?”

“They’ll get along without me,” I said. “Where one tree falls, a thousand will take its place.”

“Great. Quotations from Chairman Mao.”

“Ho Chi Minh.”

“ ‘Where one tree falls,’ ” she repeated. “Shit, man, you haven’t fallen anywhere. You’re just running away. From yourself.”

“I don’t need your fucking amateur advice,” I hissed. “I’m gonna get my head together, that’s all. Now leave me the fuck alone.”

“With pleasure.” She kicked herself away from the doorjamb.

I gathered up my clothes, a few books, my guitar, and my carpentry tools and – still smarting from the exit wounds of the last bead of birdshot – packed them into my truck with its new, redwood camper.

“You better take Wooly and Zoom with you,” Jake said. “Then you won’t be all alone.”

“Yeah, Gus, you better,” Jossy agreed.

“Just as well,” Tilly added. “I’m off with the kids to Grandma’s and you weren’t planning to come anyway, were you?”

I nodded, my eyes full of tears. I hadn’t remembered Tilly’s plans for the summer, hadn’t considered the kids, the dogs, any of it. All was lost in the hurricane of my revolutionary fervor. I was grateful for the kids’ gracious suggestion. Wooly and Zoom would provide a link to Tilly, the kids, our lives, for however long we would be apart.

*   *   *

A Bowl Full

of Nails

A Novel