From Trespassers, Chapter 12

The hum of the SDS meeting reached me long before I got to the room. I pushed past smokers and gossipers with their backs against the yellowing marble and balustrades of old, once-elegant, double staircased Hamilton Hall. It was a big crowd tonight, all the fixed wooden desks of the lecture hall filled, and more people crouching and wandering in the aisles, leaning on the blackboards, using the teacher's desk for a back rest as well as a speaker's lectern. After a couple of minutes, someone vacated space on a table in the back, and I scrambled up to stand on it, carefully wedging my bag between my ankles.

J.C. Cohen was squatting in a window holding a pink Spalding rubber ball that he tossed from one hand to the other. Shelley was lounging just below him, and Louie was next to her. Shelley looked magnificent, her hair in reddish bright disorder, held back with a bandanna, jeans tight and low on the hip. I waved and Shelley waved back. J.C. grinned his little white crescent grin and played with his rubber ball while other people shouted how they had talked enough, let's do something for Chrissake.

A representative of an organization called the Citizenship Council asked whether or not SDS was going to join in a protest at the site of the gym the University was building in the park, and someone else shouted, “What about Dow Chemical? I thought we were going to talk about Dow coming to recruit.” The Chairman was chairing the meeting, and he asked people to wait to be recognized, and got himself booed. “What is this, Boy Scouts?” someone shouted. “Hey Rudd, are you working on your Parliamentary Procedure Badge?”

They talked about the anti-gym demonstration for a while, and someone volunteered to be liaison and work with the Citizenship Council.

The Chairman next recognized a man with a thinnish beard, old enough to be a professor, wearing a very professorial sports jacket and gesturing with an unlit pipe. The man began outlining at length the coming collapse of the International Monetary System. I had never seen him before, and I didn't follow much of what he said, but it was clear he wanted everyone to understand something absolutely essential and terribly imminent, and I leaned forward, trying to take it in. His voice carried well in spite of an increasing volume of whispers and murmurs.

A boy just below me said, “Man, if I wanted a lecture, I'd go to class!”

The Chairman and a couple of people from the steering committee were conferring, not listening, and suddenly J.C.'s voice joined the murmurs and occasional shouts. “Fuckin International Monetary System ain't collapsing, you are!” He tossed the ball for emphasis.

A few people laughed, more raucously and longer than the joke warranted. The Chairman said to the speaker, “OK, thirty seconds,” and someone from the front row hopped up and shouted, “There was no vote for a time limit on speakers! Are you calling for a motion to limit speakers?”

“Fuckin A,” said J.C. “What is this shit? Fuckin A, vote if anybody wants to hear him, nobody wants to hear him.”

“Regardless,” said the Chairman. “One minute to finish it up.”

I was more or less enjoying the lecture. I wanted to remember some of this, try it out on Aaron. J.C. ought to be glad that the international monetary system was in crisis, I thought. The man with the beard said the System had to crash, if not tomorrow, then next week, or next year or next decade, because the Powers had to work against each other in the long run because all they wanted was profit. That made sense to me; it was like television thieves after a bank heist; someone always double-crossed someone else because their allegiance was to the money, not the people. The man drifted off into theory again, probably Marx, although I couldn't be sure, and my mind began to wander. I looked over at the door and saw someone sturdily built and dark and thought it was Aaron come to join me after all, but it wasn't. I started counting girls around the room, wondering why they so rarely made speeches. I'd like to make a speech, I thought. But I knew nothing about theory, hadn't read a word of Marx yet. I wished the speaker would give some references so I would know what to read.

“What kind of minute was that?” called J.C.

“Yeah,” shouted Louie. “That was more than a minute!”

“Thirty seconds left,” said Rudd, pulling back the cuff of his flannel shirt to show he was checking his watch. It was a chance for the speaker to conclude gracefully, but he went on as if he had a text to read and no awareness at all of the discontented murmurs.

J.C. stood up now, filled the window with his spread legs. “Hey this is too much. I mean, this is too much to take, man,” and he threw the ball. It wasn't a hard throw, really just a long slow lob, but it bounced precisely off the middle of the speaker's forehead.

There was an instant of complete silence except for the ball making a quick series of descending dribbles, and then every one started to laugh and applaud. The man blinked and took off his glasses as if he expected further blows and didn't want the glasses broken, but he kept talking. You couldn't hear anything now, though: only laughter, Louie's guffaw loudest of all. He slapped hands with J.C. The Chairman pounded on the desk for order.

People shouted: “Sit down!”

“J.C. shouldn't of used a rubber ball! Get a hardball for that creep!”

“Forget the baseball, man, get out a bat!”

Well now that's not right, I thought. J.C. was making short tosses of his head, as if he thought this window sill was a stage and he was Mick Jagger. This is not what I got into a fight with Aaron for: this was supposed to be important. I didn't even know what I wanted to say, but my hand shot up on a surge of exasperation.

Probably grateful for a fresh face, The Chairman called on me. Heads turned, a little space cleared and a measure of silence prevailed.

“The thing is,” I shouted, shrilly, and louder than I needed, and then I shouted it again in a lower tone, “The thing is, how are we supposed to decide anything if no one listens to anyone else?” My hands, of their own accord it seemed, chopped through the air, opening wide. “I mean, come on, J.C., are you ten years old?”

And someone called out, “No, he's only nine and a half.”

I took the laughter as a good omen. “I mean,” I said, “There are people here, including me, who would actually like to listen and maybe even learn something.”

“Right on,” said an enthusiastic voice. “Hey yeah, that's right, right on!”

And other voices: scattered agreement, a couple of smiles.

What did I say? I wondered. What are they agreeing with? I sound so incredibly naive. But J.C. had stopped prancing and crossed his arms. I said, “What I mean is, how can you have participatory democracy if people can’t participate?” Stretched back in my mind after something Aaron had said: “And physical intimidation puts us on the level of fascists. We're going to end up in a million splinter groups the way things are going. There's a war, people! Children are getting killed!” I wished I had a theory to tell them now that they were listening. I wished I could tell them what they should do because they were all listening to me now.

J.C. made a sour but not humorless face across the room. “Hey, babe, I apologize. Je-sus I threw a ball at the man. Hey man, you can throw it back at me.” He spread eagled himself against the window glass for a target, and everyone laughed.

The Chairman said, “Okay, right, back to her. Are you finished?”

People were smiling up at me, waiting for more. I liked standing above them. “Look,” I said, “I mean, I thought we wanted a crisis in capitalism. Wouldn't that stop the war? Don't we all at least want to stop the war?”

They clapped: not everyone, and it wasn't precisely applause, but a sort of acclaim of my position: let's get to work, let's decide something. “Right,” said the Chairman. “Let's see if anyone else wants to respond to the proposals so far, and then we'll get on to Dow, and we'll see if we can get everything covered tonight.”

I felt wonderful. I was in my own little glow of success, but also listening clearly: Dow Chemical Corporation, the makers of napalm, were sending someone to do recruiting on campus, and the discussion immediately veered to whether or not we would break the university's rule against indoor demonstrations. This was another of Aaron's predictions: of course there would be a demonstration, he had said, and of course they will break the indoor demonstration rule. Fine, I thought. So what if breaking the rule seems so important to them. It is important to put yourself on the line; let them throw you out of school if they want to. Stop the manufacturer of napalm which burned the clothes and the skin off babies.

But then someone mentioned the day of the demonstration, and I was stricken to realize that it was a work day. Not only a work day, but Birthday party day and Mary Frances had already told me she couldn’t be there. Someone announced that another Dow recruiter was coming to campus to try and snare a few engineers and business students a few days later. There was some discussion about whether or not they should even bother to organize a demonstration as this recruiter (said the School of Engineering informant) had only a couple of appointments.

I raised my hand. “Corporations that make weapons and poison have to be met every time they come to campus! Even if it's only one appointment and one anti-war student, we have to be there to meet them.”

“Right on,” they said, and the Chairman said okay, he would appoint a committee to set up the smaller demonstration. I had had a momentary terror of being passed over, but The Chairman 's eyes stayed on me, and I was not just on a committee, I was head of one. I felt high: I had an action of my own!