walls were posters that declaimed what I then considered embarrassing slogans about imperialism and the working class, or heroic images of Cuban and Chinese revolutionaries. Emma had arrived at Irvine from Cornell the year before when UCI — one of three new campuses in the Cal system — had opened. On the rear window of her microbus, mimicking the Greek letter car window decals that identified the fraternity or sorority of a vehicle’s owner, Emma had affixed a sigma, delta, and sigma. Irvine didn’t even have any frats yet, though I’d seen such Greek letters displayed during my undergrad years at the University of British Columbia.
“You’re in SDS?” Jay asked.
“What’s SDS?” Pump inquired, offering me another hit from the doobie.
“Students for a Democratic Society,” I said before sucking in the sweet smoke.
“Commie scum,” Edward contributed helpfully. We all laughed.
Pump was focused on relighting the joint Edward had returned to him. “Are you one of those campus protesters, man?”
I tried to concentrate how best to present myself to a stoner fresh out of the army. “Even before I heard of SDS … I thought the war was wrong.” I explained that after the Vietnamese kicked out the French, Eisenhower promised free elections. “Ho Chi Minh would have won hands down, so the U.S. made damn sure that vote was never —”
Jay stood. “I’m going to change the record.”
I realized H.P. Lovecraft had finished.
“You can see why Wayman is a clear and present danger to the republic,” Edward said to Pump.
“No, no …” I demurred. Even to myself, I had sounded incoherent about why I belonged to SDS. Being ripped out my gourd wasn’t helping. From inside the house, familiar opening chords announced Jefferson Airplane’s “Come Up the Years.”
“The civil-rights movement got me thinking, too.” I launched into a rap I’d delivered before to students who browsed our weekly SDS literature table on campus and initiated a conversation. How could America, I would ask them, with all its inspiring statements about freedom and dignity in its founding documents, still have water fountains marked FOR COLORED ONLY a hundred years after the Civil War supposedly ended slavery? Or civil-rights activists being shot for helping black people register to vote? “How can such contradictions —”
“Good choice, man,” Pump called, startling me. I understood a second later his comment was aimed at Jay’s musical preference. Pump must have caught my surprised expression, because he gestured toward me. “Sorry.”
“When I got to Irvine,” I continued, still attempting to sort out what I should tell him, “the SDS chapter showed me how things like the war and racism and the university tie together. How school teaches us to shut up, obey, put up with boredom, serve the corporations and the status quo. Whatever’s going on, it’s not about a real education.”
Jay had re-entered the porch during my little rant and accepted the joint passed to him by Edward. “‘Something is happening,’” Jay quoted Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man.” He took a drag and continued between his teeth: “‘But you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?’”
“That’s about it,” I confirmed. I was feeling a little sheepish about rapping on and on. “How did you guys wind up in the army? Were you drafted?”
“Did you and Pump finish the taco chips?” Edward asked his brother.
“In the cupboard, below the toaster,” Jay said. “Last time I looked.”
Edward hoisted himself from the deck chair and disappeared into the house. From the living room the Airplane were admonishing us, in a tone of exaltation, to heed the brevity of existence:
Some will come,
And some will go.
We shall surely pass
When the wind that
Left us here
Returns for us at last.
We are but a moment’s sunlight
Fading in the grass.
C’mon, people, now,
Smile on your brother,
Let me see you get together,
Love one another
Right now.
“Fool that I was, man,” Pump said. “I enlisted. I’d finished high school, didn’t know what to do. I was 1-A, anyway. They promised you had more choice if you went in voluntarily.”
“Dummy,” Jay said.
“You did the same,” Pump complained.
“You enlisted out of high school?” I asked Jay.
“I wasn’t a brain like Eddie. I’d just broken up with a girlfriend. Seemed like a good idea at the time.”
“We were lucky, man,” Pump said. “Plenty of suckers like us wound up grunts in Nam. So much for learning a trade.”
“The army was an education,” Jay said.
“Yeah, you learn what not to do with your life.”
“We’re catching up on what we missed, though, since we got out,” Jay added.
“Not that we didn’t get blasted inside, too,” Pump chortled.
Edward emerged through the doorway carrying a large bowl of corn chips in one hand and a smaller bowl of salsa in the other. With his foot he hooked a small stool out of a corner of the porch and lowered the bowls onto it. “Whatever Wayman’s been telling you, don’t forget he’s not even a citizen.” Edward reclaimed his deck chair. “His road to ruin should be a lesson for you boys.”
“Ruin?” Jay asked.
“We’ll need more beer to wash these down,” Pump observed.
Edward reached for some chips. “Go get them then.”
I picked out some chips myself and ran them through the salsa.
“You mean ruin, as in how he became a protester?” Pump coughed, and smoke streamed out his nose.
“A radical,” Edward said.
“I didn’t start out radical,” I objected, chowing down on the chips.
I considered mentioning how maybe journalism was the starting point for me coming to hold the beliefs I did. First as a reporter for the UBC student newspaper, and later on the Sun, I had been shocked when I interviewed authorities concerning injustices or other societal failures. This response was reinforced when I listened to Sun reporters tell their insider’s experiences with politicians and bureaucrats. Whether the issue was substandard student housing — converted old army barracks still in use, with rotting floors and leaky plumbing — or repressive university policies, or provincial
