10,000 MILES FROM HOME
Protest songs, baseball scores, weed and Vietnam — the birth of a suburban radical
To say I was radicalised in the Sixties would be putting it mildly. I was the stoner’s stoner, the hippie’s hippie, the protestor’s protestor. Hell no, I wasn’t going to go. No way. The war in Vietnam was a war of independence, first from the French, then the Japanese, then the French again, then us, and just try to argue against that and see what would happen. I’d talk you to death, that’s what I’d do, and maybe I’d even get violent, the examples of King and Gandhi notwithstanding. I wanted power and I was powerless. But I was on the right side, the side of the oppressed, and the music and culture of my milieu in suburban New York supported, even applauded me. I saw Richard Nixon — and Lyndon Johnson before him — not as leaders of the Free World but as agents of death. I was mad (“mad like Sonny Liston… mad like Cassius Clay,” as The Animals had put it in 1964, inserting the names of our contemporary powerhouses into the John Lee Hooker tune “I’m Mad Again” about betrayal in love), but by the time it was my turn to go down to the US Army induction centre for my draft physical, it was easy to be mad. We were all mad by then.
But who got mad first? That same Cassius Clay, self-transformed into Muhammad Ali, who sacrificed himself and showed us the way, giving us a figure of defiance to rally behind. He was sentenced to prison. He had his title stripped. And yet he never bowed his head, using his wit, charisma and influence to speak directly to the moral vacuity of the war. “Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam,” he demanded, “while so-called negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights?”
The Daily News, the organ of information in our working-class household, ran this headline on the back page in 1967, when Ali was convicted of evading the draft: “Clay gets 5 years; Phils one-hit Mets, 4–0; Yanks lose”. At the time, it was all a wash to me. I’d absorbed the news of Cassius Clay twice defeating Sonny Liston, the toughest man alive, and seen photos of their fights in the Daily News a few years earlier, but I was probably more interested in the sad fact of the Mets and Yankees losing than in Ali’s conviction. I wasn’t mad, not yet, because the finger wasn’t pointing at me. I was an adolescent, buried deep in my own obsessions, which were purely existential — and purely selfish. Women were a big factor in my life then, women in miniskirts, their hair parted in the middle and trailing down their shoulders. Drugs, too, in all their power and dominion. Still, the fact remained that I was in possession of a draft card, as we all were, and the payment on that debt was about to come due.
The US Army building on Whitehall Street in New York, during the summer before it was bombed for the second time, was a grim eight-storey stone building reeking of the body odour of all the thousands upon thousands of draftees stripped to their boxers and giving up their bodily fluids in support of America. My II-S student status was downgraded to I-A when I’d graduated college just weeks earlier, and before I could catch my breath I was ordered to present myself for evaluation so the army could gauge my fitness to serve. I presented myself. By this juncture, I was mad, fully mad, but playing my cards close to the vest. I could have gone to Canada or Sweden, but that would have been like climbing Mt Everest without oxygen considering that I had no money and the farthest afield I’d ever travelled was Vermont.
What do I remember about the day I spent in that building? The stink of us. The whiteness, the blackness, the brownness of our flesh. The decaying-peach colour of the urine in the cups lined up on every shelf, every desk, every available surface throughout that gloomy Dickensian edifice. And the climax of the day, when we were all herded into an enormous room to hear a man in uniform pronounce our fate. I was seated with
the hundreds to the right of the lectern; to the left was a much smaller group. He addressed us as men, though most of us were boys, turning first to the smaller group to console them for having been found unfit for military service (wild cheers), then to the larger group, my group, to congratulate us on our good fortune.
Did I think about Ali on the train ride back up the river to my parents’ house in Peekskill? I don’t know. Probably not. Did I fret over the fate of the Vietnamese in their patriotic struggle for independence? No. I thought only of myself, of my options, of my fear and hatred and determination to do anything it took to elude my fate. Ali was courageous, he was a lion, he saw the larger picture and he believed deeply in what was right, not only for himself and black America but also for the Vietnamese and all of us who wanted to live our own lives in our own way. But I wasn’t.
Still, I was ready in that moment to breathe in his air of defiance. I would have bombed Whitehall Street myself, would have cut my wrists, swum to Cuba, anything, but it never came to that. At the last moment, through the intercession of a boyhood friend’s father, I got a job considered vital to national security — teaching English in an under-represented community — and was thus able to fulfil my immediate destiny as the stoner’s stoner etc, and finally, once the draft ended and the yoke was lifted, begin my career as a writer. I didn’t go 10,000 miles from home. I didn’t have to bleed, didn’t have to sacrifice, but I was mad. I’m still mad. And yesterday, when I saw a YouTube clip of Ali rope-a-doping George Foreman before fluidly uncoiling to knock him down with eight quick punches, I stood up and cheered. That cheer was for Ali and his manipulation of power, for grace and courage, and it was for the person I was then and who I am now. Nobody rests in peace; they just die. But the power of the deed, of the word on the page, the art — that lives on.