Heavy
gray coldness outside, he came back to consciousness, still
lying prone between the same two garages which looked like the
edge of the backyard of his folks’ house. Waking alone here,
that same isolation slowly came back to him, again -- that in
the cities and towns no one was left behind, that the milky
gray skies were still warm with the sparkling spores of the
sprouted “mushrooms,” the spores which sprinkled poison silver-dust
over the map.
In the summer, the warm garden of honeysuckle, which overgrew
the page wire
fence bordering narrow walkways between the garage walls, had
filled the air. At the base of the back door steps, a copse
of green leaves and purple blooms of lilac made a little shade
grove. In the small patch of earth between the garages his grandfather
kept his garden of eggplant, green peppers, tomato plants, with
one fig tree; which his grandfather, whose name Ignazio, meant
“fire” (Hauberc wondered if this meant the ancient tribe “fire-starter”),
would wrap and tie up to keep alive through the snowy winter.
In their neighbor’s garage next door, a policeman lived, old
Rudy had told him as a small boy, so he knew not to go too close
-- but he sometimes would stare into the window. They didn't
have a car to keep in there, so there was room for a workbench
and tools hanging on the bare wood walls, but it didn't look
too comfortable for anyone to live in there.
A rumble that shook the air above was really a sonic boom from
somewhere in the blue above the cotton landscape (through empathic
eyes). Down here on the ground there were beads of sweat in
his armpits and on his forehead, and that same metallic taste
in his mouth.
Back as a small child, he was with his mother and little sister
Juno, after spending the afternoon shopping at Howland's and
Levitt's department stores and especially at the big H.L. Green
5 & 10 Cent Store in downtown Bridgeport.
It was a sunny afternoon on spring vacation, and now they were
parked on a side-street around the corner from the entrance
of the Columbia Records factory on Barnum Avenue where his father
works, waiting for his Dad to come out at 3:30.
He
was happy today because he has finally gotten something that
he had wanted for a long time -- a beautiful set of tin soldiers
with uniforms which look like the armies of different countries
of World War I: British Grenadiers, U.S. "Doughboys",
and the Kaiser's Germans with spiked helmets. Each one pointed
a rifle or a pistol, standing, crouched, or prone on the ground.
While
waiting for his Dad to come out of work, his Mom and Juno are
up in the front seat talking about girl-stuff, so he starts
setting up his army-men, arranging them out on the backseat
facing each other from across the upholstery, rumpling his brown
jacket out across the seat to make hills and valleys and trenches
for them to hide in ambush for each other. Since it's already
warm outside, he also opens the door and moves the battle to
the cliff of the edge of the seat and sets up the Germans below
on the little flat metal ledge beneath where the backseat door
closes, and the battle is poised to begin. There they are crossing
the field, with the allies above ready to stop them from advancing.
Suddenly,
the car shakes as his Dad opens the front door and jumps into
the front seat hugging and kissing Mom and Juno. But when Dad
shuts his door the car bounces again, and all the soldiers on
the metal ledge already unsteady now start falling over. It's
too late for him to catch them as they all fall out of the car
and tumble to the ground.
"Oh,
No!" he yells, because he hadn't seen that the car was
parked over a sewer grate and the soldiers keep falling, already
slipping down through the grate, and he is helpless to catch
them. As the soldiers slowly drop and tumble down and down into
the tiny bottomless pool deep under the street, for one instant
he can first see his own face reflected from above before the
water swallows them up forever and his reflected image breaks
into small circles ...
Alone
on the beach, absolutely Nothing around was familiar, though
he knew somehow he had stood here before....He had climbed aboard
the only bus he saw, and the route had strangely gone down a
wide avenue between two, mile-long windowless tall super-structures.
No one else was riding, and now the driver directed him to get
off to make his connection, dropping him at a stop before an
expansive network of intersecting and branching ribbons.
On a wide sign post was stapled a flyer with musical notes in
the margin, reading simply: "MILIEU NO. 8, a Program of
SCARLATTI, HANDEL and CHOPIN, 4 PM Today Only, The Pier."
But
already it seemed to be getting late, stars appeared in the
dimming sky over the south eastern horizon which looked like
two spinning solar-systems (though golden light of twilight
still reflected on tall buildings in the distance) ... Now he
saw that he actually stood on a two-dimensional ribbon-plane
which had coiled in below the stationary stars; and extended
over the horizon to the east. And hovering far over that was
a deep cylindrical shaft with a glowing orange interior far
inside that -- an edgeless, borderless parabola.
Suddenly
a jet plane flying out of the shaft barely missed him, skimming
the ribbon's edge at about mach-2, with a screaming sonic Doppler
wave that deafened him and knocked him to the pavement, then
plunging him again into deafened silence.
Getting to his feet, he could see two other busses moving along
here and there off in the distance, but none coming down this
ribbon---
"---How do I get out of here?" he asked a man standing
at the intersection of sunlit plastic paths --
But
impatiently waved away by the man, he trudged on, the sun low
in the black sky now beginning to glare with uncomfortable warmth
/ until he was back again at the Lordship Seawall, where the
waves normally rolled ashore… An old-fashioned style wooden
pier had been built while he had been away, and many people
were walking inside. A fellow he vaguely remembered recognized
him as he imperviously watched the scene, asking “Going to the
concert ??” He nodded and he followed along chatting, embarrassed
to himself that he couldn’t yet remember the fellow’s name ...
The
auditorium on the pier looked big enough for a recital, as he
was handed a program: a concert hall with a great curved window
behind the stage with a sweeping view of Long Island Sound,
the west and east shorelines, and southward out to sea…
Though
before them stood a beautiful grand piano, music began playing
from another one unseen, and the program persisted for some
time in this way, until a group of children in the front row
began to grow restless with the mystery:
"Let's
try this side door that goes farther out on the pier!"/
"It must lead to another hall!"/ "No! It's the
end of the pier!"
But the door was stuck and would not pry open.
All was stillness, as the first piano piece concluded, except
for the perpetual rollers that washed themselves ashore/ sweeping
along the jetty until dying at the beach gray sea reflecting
gray sky (always gray nowadays) but so s t i l l
No One was really playing the piano, but without
regard it persisted. The door still stuck tight, concealing
the
piano player's lack of identity
waves
rolling, outside
By
the first week of November of his freshman year, his life at
this uninspiring college had finally begun to improve: As soon
as he received his first acceptance letter from the State Teachers
College in New Haven, his father considered it a done deal,
with congratulations…
Hauberc
liked New Haven, as the late-era Beat coffeehouse La Gallette,
and the well-stocked bookstores there had drawn him since even
before he got his drivers license on the very day before JFK
was shot, but he would have to live at home in Stratford and
commute every morning to school. Now he had decided to take
the initiative in several of his classes, by applying his own
thinking and advanced reading in Psychology and Sociology, his
chosen major and minor subjects, and ask serious questions in
class, rather than just accept these instructors’ conventional
renderings by the book. Moreover, he had been an intellectual
leader in high school, as an outspoken anti-war advocate which
attracted others to his Humanist and individualist values, and
he was not so willing to confine his thinking to tacitly accept
the status quo and the litany of reasons being given to escalate
the war against the poor rice-farmer Marxists in Vietnam. At
13, he had been watching TV when President Eisenhower gave his
farewell address, and he wondered just what the old World War
II General meant when he said the nation needed to beware of
the “military-industrial complex”. What the heck was that ?
Now
in his freshman year, he had the feeling of being watched. --
Someone had followed him several times, he was certain, but
after several days he finally realized it was a curious-looking
pert young woman with long blonde hair and a kittenish face
that he had passed alone and remote through the corridor of
the main class building. He was sure she had even turned and
walked after him, concealed by the numbers of other students
-- And now as he walked out into the walkway with that same
feeling again, he suddenly turned around and glanced at the
window of the exit doorway he had just passed through -- and
there was just her petite face, framed by the glass of the little
window, her eyes caught for a fleeting second ---
The
following noon-time, he took his place in the hallway line going
into the cafeteria room of the Student Union hall, leaning against
the wall and looking down into a paperback book of stories by
Franz Kafka, when suddenly another young woman student with
long dark hair appeared next to him in line and smiled subtly,
suddenly chatting with a smile. “What are you studying?” she
asked curiously.
“Psychology
and Sociology -- but I’m thinking of changing my minor to Literature...”
“Really
? -- Pych and Sosh -- that’s an unusual combination -- Um...
you should meet my roommate Margo, we’re sophomores -- that’s
her same major and minor too --”
Two
days later at noon-time, he was there again waiting in line
for lunch, and there now appeared this same brunette, this time
with another friend, the same petite face he was certain he
had glanced in the window frame...
But later that afternoon he again passed through the corridor
near the Administration Office on the way to his next class,
when this time a young man in a suit accosted him, “Have you
had your hair cut recently? Our dress code doesn’t approve of
your boots or black jeans...”
Hauberc
looks up, amazed at the man, who introduced himself, “I’m John
Gunnar, Assistant Dean of Students... What’s your name, young
man?” The pronoun phrase seemed strange coming from this fellow,
who looked only in his own mid-twenties, sandy-haired clean-cut.
“No
one ever criticized me in high-school for my taste in clothes..”
Hauberc replied.
“You’re
in college now, young man, and you’d better dress for success!
I want to
see you next week in some conventional attire and a haircut.
Come to see me Thursday at 2 PM, Office 222.”
By
Friday he was so preoccupied with thoughts about his late-night
dates with Margo, who turned out to be the same girl with the
kitten face, that his one encounter with this “juvenile authority”
seemed really remote. Having to live at home and drive the second
family car to college every day, his father didn’t seem to be
aware that he would get home from Margo’s off-campus apartment
around 4 AM several nights a week, so that the car would be
home when his parents got up at 6 AM.
His
Pysch class was an auditorium full of zombie kids, and a panel
of team-teachers on the stage. -- Not one student in the audience
asked an interesting question to challenge the conventional
principles being presented: such as that humans thoughts were
the result of environmental stimuli. Hauberc wondered whether
this would somehow include the eccentric
and bizarre ideas of the artists that he knew in high-school?
After a month of this, Hauberc he made an appointment to chat
with the most knowledgeable-looking professor of the “team”
-- typically set at the prof's “office” on the stage:
“I'm
majoring in Psych. Will we read anything of Freud’s this semester?”
“We’re not so devoted to Freud in the first-year study, we want
to give a wider background in clinical principles…”
“Well,
what about Georg Groddeck’s clinical theories -- he was a correspondent
of Freud who did mostly clinical work, and came up with a theory
in “The Book of the It”, about the independent actions of the
Subconscious in the individual ?”
-- “The term Freud used was “Id”,” he cut in. “Where did you
find that?”
“Even
Freud gave Groddeck credit for inventing it, das Es,” Hauberc
rejoined, “in The Ego and the Id; the problems with uncontrollable
forces.”
Feeling
now out on a limb, Hauberc tried to balance this statement,
explaining with a smile, “When I was 12, I loved “Adventures
in Paradise” on TV and reading Two Years Before the Mast and
Moby Dick and I wanted to go to Tahiti --
I was looking for books about the South Seas and I accidentally
found a book called Totem and Taboo -- and was pretty surprised
by the way he talked about ambivalent emotions and sex, and
omnipotent thoughts...”
Dull
thud, “Oh?” Then, “The aim of modern psychology is the establishment
of rational behavior in society.”
“When
I read The Ego and the Id, it reminded me of Moby Dick submerged
under the waves, tormenting Ahab, the father figure.”
That morning, in “Sosh” class, the topic got around to the “nuclear
family” structure, and mentioned how young people were moving
away from their families to start their own lives working for
big companies being paid enough to support themselves. Sitting
in the back of the room, Hauberc had raised his hand and asked,
“ ‘The Organization Man’ by William Whyte, talks about that,
but what about young people who move away from home in order
to find their own individuality…?” The instructor, a typical-looking
woman in her mid-thirties, simply paused for twenty seconds,
then went on to the next question from a conventional-looking
female student in the front of the class. By this point in the
semester, early November, the class favorites were already chosen…
Now Hauberc felt that he had gotten himself in “solid” with
his teachers, ironically. It was past 1 PM, and he sat alone
at a dining table in the Student Union wondering if he had already
missed his friends for lunch, another face, the young Dean of
Students was suddenly looming over him as he tried to chew his
food. By now he had begun to hear crazy stories from other students,
even those with only short hair needing a trim over their ears,
that they too had been stopped in the corridor. “You missed
your appointment with me yesterday, Mr. Hauberc.. Please show
me your Student ID card.” Hauberc took out his card from his
wallet and handed it to Gunnar.
“OK,
thank you,” Gunnar said, putting the card in his shirt pocket.
“Be in my office next Tuesday, November 9th at 2 o’clock with
your hair cut according to school regulations, and you’ll get
you ID back, or else you’re automatically suspended.”
Hauberc
in the hasty encounter neglected to mention that he had a Math
class at 2:15, Tuesday. But on Tuesday, before class as he lingered
outside his math room, a messenger walked up to those standing
by the door. “Who’s John Hauberc?” But no one else answered,
and neither did he..
Inside the class, fifteen minutes later, the messenger this
time entered the room and spoke to his instructor. “Mr. Hauberc,
you’re wanted in the Dean Gunnar’s office right away..”
When
he walked into the office, Dean Gunnar spoke succinctly, “You’re
already under suspension as of 2 PM. I want you to leave campus
until you make another appointment to see me personally under
the conditions we discussed. That’s all, Mr. Hauberc!”
Hauberc
walked out of the office, both terrified and almost laughing.
He went back to his car and sat in the parking lot and studied
and pondered until 4 PM, then drove to his part-time job at
Dow Corning in the Trumbull industrial park, arriving at the
manufacturing plant at 5:15 where he worked four times a week
as a night watchman. On the car radio news was
the report of a priest immolating himself in front of the United
Nations this morning, to protest the war in Vietnam. Since JFK
died in Dallas, LBJ was building up the war and sending as many
boys as he could draft. Hauberc was safe as long as he stayed
in college...
At
Dow Corning, his father was the Production Planner, and had
gotten him the job over the summer vacation, and now greeted
Hauberc with his usual mix of off-hand pleasantry and mild scowl.
Hauberc
was suddenly perplexed though, wondering how he could tell his
father what happened today at school. “No,” he thought to himself,
“I’d better wait and figure this out first..”
Almost
5:30, Hauberc walked down the corridor, to the door to say goodbye
to his father and the other dozen or so office and plant employees
done for the day.
“See
you home…” Dad says non-chalantly as he exits the door, and
Hauberc follows, thinking “Well, I didn’t tell him..” By the
time he reaches the plant door and peeps out the little window,
his father is already getting into his car, parked right outside
the door, and is starting the motor, gesturing a quick wave
with no smile.
At
this instant, the florescent lights in the hall began to flicker
and dim for several moments, then all popped out at once, and
the building goes dark, and the parking lot lights go off too,
in the dimming November twilight. Hauberc opened the door and
shouted to the guys still in the parking lot “Hey, the lights
just went out!”
His
Dad and several others began to filter back inside to check
the fuse boxes, the main circuit-breaker, the outside lines.
Eerily, the early dusk seemed to plunge the whole neighbor-hood
into darkness. One of the guys walks back from his car into
the building saying, “CBS Radio just said the whole Northeast
just went out !!”
The
telephone still worked, but with a strange winding sound.. Turning
the dials of the secretary’s transistor battery radio, they
could tune in only one weak signal, the local station in Bridgeport.
“We are still on the air with our own auxiliary power…At 5:27,
a few moments ago,” the tinny voice says on the little transistor
radio, “telephone reports are now coming in from all over New
York State, New Jersey, New England, and Ontario, that the entire
region lost electric power. Telephones seem to be working, on
a separate circuit.”
A
few minutes later, the second report adds, “The Niagara Falls
Generation Plant has overloaded all its substations, and all
the linked grids in the Northeast have shut down.”
It
was November 9, 1965.
---->
An odd place
to
find himself waiting on his first day in Boston.
Waiting,
waiting in the sitting room of Dayan’s dorm, waiting for her
to show up well into the night. It was now 11:30 PM and no sign
of her. Five years ago, he had first seen her the first day
of 10th grade homeroom in their high school, standing for the
Pledge of Allegiance,
but she would never accept his invitations to go anywhere together
without others along, like Opal.
She
had now invited him to come and visit her at school in Boston
before his departure over-seas, and was to have had a place
for him to stay with a friend nearby named John, off-campus.
Now it was the beginning of February, Margo had broken off their
romance, and he hadn’t been able to get his father to agree
to let him transfer to another college. He applied to the New
School of Social Research in New York, but Dad said “I'm not
sending you to that commie school !” So he had decided to let
re-registration for the Spring semester pass by, and to leave
home for as long as he could with the money he made from being
a night-watchman.
For the rest of the Fall semester, he had managed to stay out
of Assistant Dean Gunnar’s sight, after the situation had mushroomed
out of control, thanks to Margo’s friends on the staff of The
Yale Daily News having published an interview with him, misquoting
him as mocking the president of the State Teachers College as
being bald … He had finally got an appointment with Head Dean
Middlebrook, Gunnar’s boss, and apologized for the whole episode,
saying that he just wanted to get an education, be a serious
student, and not cause trouble…. The thoughtful dean had looked
at his high-school record and had written him a pass to go back
to classes on the agreement of a hair trim.
But still the same pattern of social programming persisted in
his main courses, and he was pulling B’s when he could tell
his reading background was further advanced than the students
getting A’s who parroted the instructors' ideas…. Instead of
registering for the next semester, he got his passport and booked
passage to split on a Yugoslavian passenger-freighter out of
New York.
OK, being here, stranded in Boston, was a dry-run of traveling
alone, and he tried not to connect this situation with other
disappointments, and not to be discouraged by Dayan’s neglect
of his stated feelings, unrequited, yet kind, yet twisted. Already
the same pattern beginning to repeat: he had waited here fruitlessly
five hours for Dayan to meet him, sitting in the Administration
Lobby of the Boston Conservatory, then in the entry waiting
room of her dorm, where a nice older proctor told him sympathetically
she didn't know when Dayan would be back.
Now past midnight, they asked him to leave. He ventured out
into the February night, and called the YMCA from a phone-booth,
no rooms available. A hotel room would spend all the money he
had. Tripping over patches of snow and ice on the city streets,
suitcase in hand, he found his way to South Station, and sat
there in the railway waiting room. He would try to read all
night, but around 2:30 the guard told him the station was closing.
From there he walked the dark and cold streets to find the Y,
where he would just sit in the lobby if they would let him.
But they sold him a room.
Climbing under clean white sheets, exhausted, he passed into
a future story: A sunny day in Boston, at first it was tomorrow,
he knew Dayan was coming to meet him at her cafeteria.
Built on a crescent-shaped block, the street called The Fenway
overlooked the swampy-edged meadow, with the famous baseball
field on the other side. Now it was next year in his sleep,
the Spring after he has already come back from Europe wanting
to find her again, still. These buildings seem unchanged since
his first visit, but yet this school corridor did not even feel
familiar since last evening.
Unknown people
walking by him, just as a stranger
coming late into the semester, he would be a student here too
…. .
Then Dayan, the pretty and demure piano student, like a stranger,
from his home town, a stranger from his high school home-room,
finally comes into view across the corridor, floating up to
him, as simple as though having seen him every day,
to say "..hello." (in perfect bathos).
He had envisioned that she would come walking
in through the glass door (an ectoplasmic entrance), to embrace
and kiss him hello/
-- But walking with her he begins to feel happier, becoming
re-accustomed to her reticent, slightly awkward manner, yet
he is still apprehensive about starting new classes...
The busy lobby now beginning to clear, the walls come in view
as wood paneling.
Across the room walking toward the modern escalator, riding
up to the annex of classrooms, he wonders aloud that his classroom
must be
like the deck of a sailing ship since the musical instrument
he will major in will
be the
Capstan (with strings and bow).
Back from overseas, he was hard at work there for months already,
a factory in the west end of Bridgeport, a job given him as
a material handler in the manufacturing production of military
ordnance. Cast back into this purgatory, thanks to his Uncle
Simone, who would keep him from being shipped off to combat
in Vietnam, as long as Hauberc did a few things for him. --
A depressing, grinding factory workplace, but he still felt
more sympathy for the others in this industrial dungeon, than
his own misery at being given this secret security assignment,
as they called it-- so secret they wouldn’t even tell him until
he had actually arrived. Rather than face a bad discharge now,
he could eventually redeem his situation.
Lines of long assembly-line work tables on one side of an open
warehouse size room, windows overlooking the stone railroad
viaduct where the trains chugged by every hour. Women of all
ages were seated women on stools, piecing together tiny electrical
parts to be bolted together inside cigarette-pack size olive-drab
triggering cases; and, on the other side of the room, from asbestos-sided
oven conveyors there emerged a steady stream of plate-sized
devices still hot, , their component parts were ball-bearing
pellets of steel sealed in layers of hot grey Devcon plastic,
each encased in an olive-drab curved panel: Anti-Personnel Land
Mines!
As each unit comes out of the oven conveyor, it is picked up
off the warm steel grating and its plastic casing pulled apart
– revealing its layer of ball bearings pressed down with knob-handled
bolts and cooked into its Devcon mold. Each unit is handed off
to another man who deftly uses a triangular sided metal blade
tool to scrape away all the excess hardened glue while still
warm and soft thus producing one more diabolical device ready
to be packed for the field with a pouch of explosive powder.
Hauberc knew where these pieces were going once they were packed
into cases of twenty-four sections each and shipped off, first
to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, then to Vietnam.
He reminisced his trip to Boston, more than a year later now,
as he waited for Dayan’s face to perhaps appear around a corner.
The following days with her when they had jaunted through historical
houses in Cambridge, philosophizing Pythagoras, singing and
harmonizing Beatles' songs, Eight Days A Week and If I Fell
In Love With You, their voices weaving together in perfect counterpoint,
their eyes breathing all their memories, and their future memories
of this moment ---
The first morning he finally caught up with her, after wandering
around Boston, she had led him immediately to her first class
of the day in a large auditorium, where they couldn’t even find
two seats together. He had watched her from across the rows,
soon realizing that the conceited, affected young man sitting
with his clique-ish friends several rows ahead of her, was the
same "virtuoso piano student" she had spent the previous
evening with, and who would now barely acknowledge her presence...
But another year later, when she came home from school the second
week of May, she telephoned at 7 PM and asked him to come and
pick her up at the train station. It was a Wednesday, the night
before his 20th birthday. When she got into his car, she asked
him to stop on the way for a cup of tea and a sandwich. “I haven’t
called home yet,” she softly said as they sat together. “I told
my Mom and Dad I was coming home tomorrow.” “What are you going
to do?” he asked. “Can I stay at your house tonight?”
At 9:30 PM, he went in and asked his parents if Dayan could
stay overnight. His Mom looked puzzled but sympathetic, Dayan
would have his room, and he the living-room sofa, but as he
briefly said good-night to her, she pulled a cotton nightgown
from her suitcase. Instead, still dressed, before bed-time,
they sat together on the living-room floor in front of the stereo
listening to two of his new Rock albums that she wanted to hear.
Playing a song on Fresh Cream, “Dreaming About My Life,” she
told him over the volume, employed atonal harmony, and Pink
Floyd’s “Interstellar Overdrive,” carried out the constant line
of a Baroque continuo. At 6:30 AM, his parents were up, and
Mom came downstairs and said he should wake up his friend. Upstairs,
he entered his own room and sat on the chair next to the head
of his own bed, watching Dayan softly sleep for a long time
before touching her face to wake her. Her amber eyes opened
smiling.
On the first Sunday of June, two and a half weeks later, he
picked up Opal and Dayan at 1 PM at their houses, and drove
down to the beach at Lordship, at the south end of Stratford,
facing Long Island Sound. Uncle Simone still kept calling him,
pestering him to get Opal to tell him the code to reset the
Communications circuit which she worked on at the phone company.
He couldn't just come out and ask her...?! And now Opal brought
along Dayan, to complicate the whole mission. Opal and Dayan
wanted to go to an art opening in Milford this afternoon, that
friends had told Hauberc about, but Opal had something good
to smoke in the car first, so he drove down toward Long Beach
past Lordship. Sitting three across in the front seat, they
passed it back and forth, until they were all blitzed.
Listening
to a New York Rock AM station on the radio, he was hoping they
would play some Stones, to match the mood he was now in, but
now they were playing the entire new Beatles album on the radio,
"Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band," just
released on Friday, and the last song had started just as he
had pulled into the long parking lot and parked facing the unusually
big waves smashing the sandy shoreline. The sunlight glinted
through the waves and flying spray, creating a prismatic rainbow
of colors…. Lennon singing: "I read the news today, oh
boy……" The song went on and on about 4000 holes in Blackburn
Lancashire and the Albert Hall, and Paul riding a double-decker
London bus. The music finally rose to a crescendo at the coda,
then dropped to sudden silence. He thought it was over, but
then it pounded an enormous syncopated punctuation at the very
end, which came over like an Exclamation Point of History ...
The
enormous organ sound slowly diminished, slowly trailing off
a long decline to silence ……
Next to him, Dayan said quiety, almost to herself, "Augmented,
sustained, then diminished... it's beautiful." Stunned
all together by this crescendo, they got out of the car and
walked down the beach. Dayan walked further down the shoreline,
lost in mysterious thoughts. Hauberc climbed on the big rocks
of the stone jetty and walked out towards the end of it, staring
out to sea, as the large waves splashed over the rocks, sending
up a rainbow of colors in the high spray.
These could be the Last Waves, one after the other.
The feeling was the foreboding of Time, endless Ending.
Opal came up behind him during this reverie, asking, "Did
you get that Punctuation Point? That’s John Lennon’s message
-- it’s the End of History ….!"
Later, at the artists' reception in Milford near the Wilbur
Cross Parkway, the opening was for artist Bruce Berthiaume and
photographer Phil Epstein. Hauberc, Dayan, and Opal chatted
with artists friends and drank allot of red wine. The art show
was in the Common Room at a Howard Johnson’s motel, and when
the party wound down, two more of his friends, one gay, one
“bi” had taken a motel room for the day, across the lawn. After
three more bottles of wine, they were all giggling and somehow
all lounging back crowded on the two beds pushed close.
With five all together, one fellow in the middle rolled back
and forth, Opal on the other side.
With Hauberc on one edge, now Dayan was really next to him,
both their heads on one pillow, and he reached out to put his
arms around her and held her close to him for the first time
since he ever saw her, kissing her face, her soft cheeks, her
eyes.
Someone on the other bed started to kiss Opal and she called
out "It’s a play orgy," quickly sitting up; then everyone
got up to go home, it was late.
He awoke before the alarm went off the next morning, a Monday,
with the second sensation still under his eyelids from last
night, of Dayan softly tracing her finger tips around his face,
sitting in the middle next to him as he drove down the River
Road taking them home. Now the clock-radio clicked on, 6:00
AM, an early June Monday with the early sunlight coming in the
window when he opened his eyes.
But the clock-radio, WCBS-News 880, now spoke "It’s June
5th. War in the Middle East today: The UPI and Reuters report
that Israel Defense Minister Moshe Dayan is battling neighbors
on all sides. Israeli jets are attacking Cairo, and Israeli
armored divisions are moving into the Sinai Peninsula, against
Egyptian tank battalions. Jordan has opened artillery shelling
on West Jerusalem."
After a few minutes listening to understand this, he heard the
phone ring in the other room, and his father walked in and handed
him the receiver on its long wire, "It’s your Great-uncle."
-- It was General Simone’s voice, "I thought you were supposed
to call me last week, or last night after your talked to your
Russian friend ??!! All Hell is breaking loose, we’re already
bumped up to Red Alert with the Ruskies. Our jets are scrambling
! I think you fucked up your job!!"
