Danny’s back pages; a bit of time travel.
By Joel Deutsch
Within weeks after graduation, Daniel received a notice from the Selective Service system advising that he had been reclassified 1-A. Prime grade cannon fodder. The only way to get back his student deferment would have been to slide straight into a Master’s program in English Lit, Maybe get a teaching assistantship. Which he was fairly confident he could manage, despite a less than stellar grade point average due to willful and chronic truancy,, because he had forged friendships with some of the faculty, not all of them young, who identified with, envied, and fawned over their disaffected and often feckless countercultural students. His Shakespeare professor, who summered with his wife at San Miguel de Allende in a rented white adobe hacienda on a hill where he said he was working on a novel, had even become his most reliable pot source. All Daniel would have to do was knock on the door, and he’d be safely inside the academic cocoon again, sheltered from military conscription and within sight of tenure track career security, as well.
Inconveniently,, the thought of stepping onto that exercise wheel like a pedantic hamster to run in place, nibbling at morsels of Edam and Cheddar from the departmental feed hopper and sipping lukewarm Chablis from an inverted lab equipment water bottle, until his hair turned gray and his teeth fell out, did not appeal.
Daniel knew full well, of course, that exposure to the draft was the risk you took for rejecting such options out of hand. But saying No came reflexively to him, while he waited for something that, whatever it was, he imagined would fall upon him like an irresistible call to religious vocation.
Joining the steady trickle of draft-age Americans who were exiling themselves to Canada was out of the question, too. Sure, Vietnam was an odious and shameful military misadventure; about this, if not about Milton or Hawthorne or Faulkner, Daniel had done his homework. He’d read the New Yorker articles about the war’s genesis, watched the news, attended the teach-ins. He knew something about the sub rosa hand-off of custodianship from the French, and also about the paranoid catastrophic vision of the domino Theory, according to which, without American intervention, the world’s nations would fall to Communism, one after the other, until it leaped our buffering oceans and there were Chinese troops marching up Market Street and Soviet Red Army tanks massed in Central park. And he knew that on behalf of such a vision, a small, distant country in the throes of civil war, neither side of which had ever threatened the U.S., was being systematically devastated by bomb and bullet and burning jellied Napalm, and that American soldiers, sailors and Marines were being shipped home as corpses, more of them all the time. Daniel wasn’t willing to lend his body to the implementation of such a travesty, and possibly get it blown apart in the bargain. He couldn’t even see wearing a uniform and taking orders from someone like Buford Hibbin, the summer camp shooting instructor. The aversion to regimentation was congenital and longstanding; he’d been drummed out of the Wonderland Avenue Elementary School Cub Scout troop for refusing to give the proper salute one too many times.
But home was home, after all, and whatever kind of future lay in store for him, it wasn’t waiting in Vancouver or Toronto. so he let the whole thing slide, indulging himself in a little magical thinking, a little denial. Something would work out. It had to. What he allowed himself to worry about was closer to hand and more manageable, the problem of making a living.
The student loans and Grants, as well as the occasional checks from home, had all dried up, and it was pretty obvious that Bullfrog Karma, the psychedelic rock band he played rhythm guitar with, was going nowhere. Sure, the lead guitarist, Jeff, could play those solos that started out like Chicago blues, morphed into some kind of modal space raga, then came back home again, the lines rising and falling around quicksilver high note cascades and deftly placed feedback wails. Jambo the bass player knew how to lay down a good, funky groove, and Craig, the drummer, was solid enough, too, even if he did keep veering off into totally undanceable polyrhythms, because, he said, he was really a jazz drummer born at the wrong time and living on the wrong coast. On top of which Stormy, their chick singer, Jeff’s old lady, had it all. She could belt it out like a Broadway mama, get down low and gravelly like the Devil’s own sister, or break your heart with a pure, pitch-perfect contralto that seemed to emanate from an entirely different set of vocal chords, not to mention she had legs like a white Tina turner and a wild, gorgeous mane of blonde hair.
But for all that, the only bookings their perpetually stoned agent Frodo, neé Sheldon Klugman,, ever seemed to be able to get them were nickel and dime coffee house and bar gigs and the occasional gratis appearance at a free concert in Golden Gate Park, opening for the headliner band the people had actually come to see and dance to in their flailing, ecstatic way.
Eventually, the band collapsed. “Disbanded. Disbanded. Dis-BAND-ed,” Frodo had intoned repeatedly in mournful wonderment one night at the apartment Daniel shared with his girlfriend Kristin, passing the blown glass hash pipe to Daniel across the kitchen table over a half gallon jug of Red Mountain Burgundy and the three mismatched coffee mugs they were drinking it from. “That’s what it means, man. That’s why they call it that. Wow. Shit. I never realized that.”
Jeff talked his way into a job in concert promotion, married Stormy, bought a house in Mill Valley. Jambo went north to Mendocino to join an organic restaurant commune. Craig left town,, someone said New York but someone else said Boston. Frodo disappeared and eventually wrote Daniel a few months later from Cleveland, where he was working in his father’s luggage store. Frodo was dead, he explained. Just as well, thought Daniel, considering that there must be enough Frodos around those days, from the East village to Haight Street, to populate a small Frodo City somewhere like the Santa Cruz mountains. He had applied to podiatry school, and he was at one with the decision. Because how could anyone make the Dharma Journey with bad feet? “So I guess I’ll be a Bodhisattva of the bunion,” he quipped. The letter was signed Love and peace, Shelly.
And Daniel, rudderless, drifted. Until they fired him for reading behind the cash register, Richard Brautigan, ZAP Comix, Ian Fleming, Hermann Hesse, whatever came to hand, he clerked at Cody’s Books on Telegraph. He sold the Berkeley Barb on street corners. He took a civil Service exam and got hired by the Post Office to deliver mail on a route in a bad part of Oakland, quitting after one broad daylight gunpoint robbery and a tetanus shot more painful than the bite of the deliberately-unleashed Doberman that had torn a gash in the forearm he had raised to defend himself.
If not for Kristin, Daniel didn’t know what he would have done. she was a senior, an anthropology major. Her father, a Seattle psychiatrist, sent her a generous monthly stipend, which she willingly donated to the cause of their domestic solvency, the only drawback being the necessity to not let the good doctor find out that Daniel was living with his daughter, a deception that had its harrowing and amusing moments.
Then Daniel heard that Yellow Cab was hiring over in the City, and soon he was wrestling taxis up and down the brake-burning, transmission-stripping grades of Nob Hill and Pacific Heights, white-knuckled, no steely-eyed Steve McQueen behind the wheel of a growling Shelby Mustang in Bullitt, he.
“You should be in a profession like mine, guy, not wasting your brains driving a cab,” declared a New York advertising executive around Daniel’s age from the back seat as Daniel ferried him between meetings in the Financial District. He’d spotted Daniel for a fellow Jewboy, a smart but sadly misdirected one.
“Take me, for instance. Here’s my agenda for today: I go have a primo seafood lunch with this client down near Fisherman’s Wharf, right? Then, I meet with these other ones in their offices up in this high-rise with a view of the fucking golden Gate Bridge, for God’s sake. Then it’s back to the Miyako Hotel for a rub-down and some top-flight head from this Japanese masseuse, then it’s the sauna and the shower, and then I’ve got a dinner date at this romantic Italian place in North Beach with one of the models we used on the last photo layout shoot I did here in good old Frisco. I know people. I get people. That’s what I do. And I can tell you this, my friend, a smart guy like you doesn’t belong driving a taxi like some dumb schmuck who couldn’t do anything else with his life. You ever think about it? You ever think about advertising?”
No, Daniel hadn’t, actually, nor was he likely to. He went on driving a cab for a long time after that, years, his middle expanding from the diet of dashboard doughnuts and drive-through McDonald’s, his vague hopes for some kind of a life steadily slackening, until he read Dylan saying in a Rolling Stone interview that everyone was going to have to have their cards on the table by 1980. he wasn’t sure what Dylan meant by that; you couldn’t even assume the Trickster-bard to mean anything at all by such pronouncements, necessarily. But if you were so disposed, as Daniel was, desperate for prophecy despite knowing better, you could interpret them the way you’d parse a reading in the I Ching. The fox crossing the water, trying to keep his tail dry.
At about which time, used paperbacks of Gideon’s Trumpet, To Kill a Mockingbirdand histories of American and English common law began finding their way into the canvas Danish school bag on his front seat among the novels and self-help books he took along to read while waiting in hotel lines and the airport cab garage. Because law school was one of the things you could do when you admitted to yourself that you couldn’t do whatever it was you had mistakenly, in your youthful grandiosity, dreamed yourself capable of doing. At least it wasn’t advertising. And, after all, how many times had someone remarked to Daniel, usually someone of his own defiantly inarticulate generation, not at all meaning to flatter, something like “Wow, man, you sound like a lawyer.” So why not take it as a sign?
But that was later. Much later. Meantime, Daniel’s desertion from the Post Office had not discouraged the U.S. government’s interest in employing him, one way or another, and the order to appear for his pre-induction Army physical exam arrived one fateful day with the morning mail.
“So what you’re saying, Mr. Silver, if I understand these answers you gave on the personality profile, is that you can’t keep your hands off other men. Is that true?” Behind his desk, the Army psychiatrist was sifting through the questionnaires and tests Daniel had spent the morning filling out before lining up with the other potential recruits in his Jockey shorts along a hallway of the Oakland Army Induction Center outside the medical exam room.
Now he was dressed again, in ordinary-enough hippie-era street clothes– frayed Levis bellbottoms, buckle-sided Frye boots, blue chambray work shirt– except for the eyeliner, mascara and pink lip gloss that Kristin, who like all the young women Daniel knew, shunned cosmetics herself, had picked out for him at a University Avenue drug store and applied as skillfully as she could, after gathering his auburn Sampson mane into a ponytail and securing it with one of the handmade leather barrettes they had picked up at a crafts fair, then trimming his bushy mustache to reveal more of his upper lip. His lower lip already pouted nicely enough over the beard, she assured him, and kissed him full on the mouth, hard and long, just to see what it would feel like, whereupon she had to apply the lip gloss all over again.
“It isn’t like that, sir,” Daniel replied with an air of delicacy he hadn’t known he had in him. “that’s the furthest thing from my mind. I mean, I’m not some kind of animal who goes around just grabbing people. God knows I’m not cruising for a beating from some man in a uniform. If that was my thing, I’d be hanging out at the rough trade bars on Folsom Street, over in The city. It’s not that I can’t control my hands. It’s my feelings I’m afraid I just won’t be able to keep to myself. I’m like an open book. Everybody who knows me says so. and I don’t want to make anyone uncomfortable. It just wouldn’t be right.”
The best Daniel had dared to hope for was a psychological deferment requiring periodic reexamination to determine if he had gotten his mind right. but no, according to the forms a middle aged officer handed Daniel after a long wait on a bench with five or six other rejects, he was classified 4-F. Unequivocally and irreversibly disqualified from military service, forever.
“I don’t believe there’s any known cure for homosexual tendencies,” said the man, glancing from Daniel’s hirsute and prettified face to the paperwork and back again, with a look of distaste. So I guess all there is to say at this point in time is that I wish you the best of luck in civilian society.”
“thank you, sir,” replied Daniel humbly, shaking the reluctantly proffered hand, his heart racing with nervousness and jubilation. “I guess I’ll just have to get along the best I can.”
“If you don’t mind me saying so, son,” said the officer, “in the middle of that beard and mustache, with the lipstick and all, your mouth looks like a goddam pussy. That can’t do you much good out there.”
“yes, sir,” said Daniel. “Thanks a lot. I’ll remember that.”
When he emerged from the Induction Center, Kristin was waiting for him in the parking lot, leaning against their maroon and white wreck of a ’56 Chevy Bel Air, peering at a novel she’d been reading through the gold-rimmed granny glasses that made her look like a prim schoolteacher in a Western movie. When , beaming, Daniel held up his documents and pointed out the merciful classification, Kristin dropped the book and lifted him clear off the ground with a joyful whoop.
To celebrate, they drove over the Richmond Bridge into Marin County, the radio up loud, Kristen dabbing the lip gloss from Daniel’s mouth with Kleenex as he coaxed their oil-burning jalopy onward. At a little French restaurant in Sausalito right on the Bay, with a view of passenger ferries and sailboats and Alcatraz Island, they spent everything but the rent and gas money on dinner and a bottle of Bordeaux the indulgent sommelier had assured them was their least expensive and still palatable choice.
Two months later,, Kristin would leave for graduate school in Tucson, and Daniel would never see her again. But for now, they were the King and Queen of May, and someday, when enough people like them wanted the war to be over, it would be over. Simple as that, and the escargot in their bath of garlic butter didn’t taste bad at all.
To be continued…