Chapter 15
The Sound and the Fury
With thoughts that complicated the situation more than thoughts of mine might have done before yesterday, I climbed the stairs and treaded the hall to Ben’s room. I knocked on the door and waited, feeling like the father that I was.
“Just a minute,” quickly came Ben’s answer.
I didn’t smell marijuana or hear the toilet flushing.
“Oh hi, Dad,” said Ben, opening wide the door.
His friend was tucking in his shirt beside the window.
“I didn’t mean to bother you,” I said. “But I’m driving over to San Antonio this afternoon, and I wondered if you’d like to go along. I don’t have to go, but there’s something I could take care of better by being there than by telephone, and I’d like some company for the drive. Thought I’d let you know, if you’d like to go.”
“Sure, Dad,” said Ben. “I guess so. Whatever.”
“About one then? After Mom fixes lunch?”
“Yeah. Okay. See you at lunch.”
I don’t know what got into the boy. He could have fixed a sandwich anytime, as he usually did. But he sat with me and Beatrice at our kitchen table and ate cheese and tomato sandwiches and Beatrice’s wonderful potato salad as though we did that every day and all day long and cared to do nothing else. He smiled and talked.
“I was thinking about drama,” he said. “But maybe political science. I guess, in the long run, there’s not much difference. Either way, you have to perform in front of people, and either way you can get your point across. I thought about medicine, but I don’t care that much for money. And I think it would be boring.”
“Well,” said Beatrice. “Whatever you do, don’t do anything boring.”
“Mom, you’re making fun of me,” said Ben, but still he grinned.
“No, I’m not,” said Beatrice. “We all need to feel for what we do.”
Ben seemed surprised at that, and I do not know why. But, without Lev’s advice, and with Beatrice’s good wish, we headed west across flat Texas, toward the city of Saint Anthony, and the Alamo. After leaving the house, neither of us said a word until we had filled up the tank and left the city. Our Land Rover didn’t belong on the Interstate, but the trip was too far for back-roads. We braved a little tedium and talked.
“Thanks for buying this?” said Ben.
“Buying what?” I asked.
“This Rover,” said Ben. “It was my idea. Remember?”
I didn’t remember, and I had often wondered why we had bought it, since it was our only car and Beatrice wasn’t exactly a rugged outdoor type, at least not for the sake of ruggedness. I could have lied and said I did remember, but this was not a time for lies, if any ever is. And so I simply told the truth to Ben.
“No,” I said. “I don’t remember why we got it, but sometimes I’ve sort of wondered why your mom would buy such a thing. We should use it for what it’s designed for sometime. Maybe drive it down to Mexico. Do the Baja 1000 ourselves. Know what I mean? Kick a little dust?”
“Sounds right to me,” said Ben. “Whatcha got to do in San Antone?”
“Nothing important,” I said. “It’ll only take a minute. Your uncle Harry’s working a deal, and he wants a guy to see my face and shake my hand. I’ll just do it and get out, if you don’t mind waiting a few minutes. Seen the Alamo lately?”
“I don’t mind,” said Ben. “And I don’t remember ever seeing the Alamo.”
“I’ve only seen it once,” I said. “You and Quincy and your mom and I drove there once from Midland. Your mom asked me if I’d ever seen it, and I hadn’t. So she said we should, and she was right. At least I think that she is always right.
“’How else can we claim Texas as our home?’ she asked.
“So, the next weekend, we piled the two of you into that Studebaker we used to have, and we drove down. We spent the night in a motel.
“’Now that we’ve seen it, we can remember it,’ she said.
“So how’s it going with you and UCLA? Any set steps?”
“I’m accepted,” said Ben. “I was going to tell you. Listen, Dad.
“I’m sorry I freaked out in Harvard Yard. I was way out of line.”
“I’m sorry, Ben,” I said. “I think I’ve been way out of line for a long time.”
So we chitchatted pleasantly the couple-hundred miles to San Antonio. Ben drove most of the way and parked the Rover near the St. Anthony Hotel, where Harriman was having his little meeting. I did my little duty, which I had no big reason to do, and we walked to the Alamo. We took a quick tour inside and sat on a bench outside in the square. With trepidation, but not beating around the bush, I raised the subject.
“Ben, are you gay?”
“What?” said Ben.
He looked at me, and his face turned as red as the Azalea blossoms in the square, and there was no way I was going to repeat the question. The trepidation was now beating my alien self to death. And so I bowed my Earthling head to Earth.
“Yes,” said Ben, almost immediately. “Who told you that? Is that why you asked me to come here with you? What a bunch of holy hypocritical crap!”
He had looked away and looked back again and was still as red as the blossoms.
“A friend,” I said. “You haven’t met him. He doesn’t get to Texas much, but I’ve known him a long time, and I’ve talked with him about you and all of us over the years, and I told him about Harvard Yard. He said he thinks you’re gay, and he said he thinks it’s more my fault than yours. I mean, if it’s a fault.”
“Your fault?” exclaimed Ben, looking straight at me, without an ounce of shame or doubt in sight. “Do you think everything’s about you? I’m just gay! I am! Me!”
He turned away and looked up at the sun. But at least his blood was equalizing in his body. His outside color ebbed from the crimson of the azaleas to near the hue of the adobe of the mission, and I felt I had a chance to talk again. But, just as I opened my mouth, to say what I had mustered up, he spoke again.
“Does Mom know?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Don’t you tell her!”
Now it was my turn.
“Why? Why not? Why haven’t you told her? And why haven’t you told me? Don’t you know we’re your parents and care more about you than anybody can? You keep saying everything’s no big deal, and then you freak out in Harvard Yard like everything in your life, and most of all your family, is a nightmare. Maybe being homosexual isn’t a big deal, but not trusting us to care is a huge deal. Damn!”
Now I’d done it. Ben was weeping, right there in front of the Alamo. But soon he quieted, pulled out a pocket-handkerchief and wiped his eyes. He blew his nose and began to speak again, while I shook in my shoes waiting for his to drop.
“Dad,” he said. “Oppression. I know how you feel about it. I know how you feel about it and how proud you are that Aunt Theresa and Uncle Raymond are your friends. But I’m oppressed too, or would be if anyone knew the truth about me. Mom would cry her eyes out, and that would oppress me most. I don’t want to hurt her.”
“Alright,” I said. “This time not a question. I’m going to make some statements, right in a row. You can keep your secret, but Theresa can’t hide her color and wouldn’t if she could, because she’s a good person, and so are you. Theresa, like those two black leaders who left our earth this year, has spent her life on Earth fighting for people to have the right to be good and treated accordingly, and not be oppressed by little deals. Your mother loves you, and I love you far more than any little deal, and at least as much as the big deal you’ve just mentioned. So I’m going to make a couple of suggestions.
“First that you tell your mother the first chance you get, and second that you run for governor of California the first chance you get. You’ll have to wait quite a few years for your chance for the second, but your chance for the first will be as soon as we get home tonight. Incidentally, the first is a great expectation. The second is nonessential.”
“Governor of California? I’d need your help, and I can’t be a Republican.”
“Run as a Democrat. If you and I work together, we can get it done.”
“Well,” said Ben. “We do have Uncle Harry.”
“Yes, my son. A friend is a friend.”
“But why should I be governor of California?”
“A lot of gay people there need your help,” I said.
“What about all that church stuff?”
“Give her a chance,” I answered.
We ate on the road and reached Houston late in the evening. Ben parked the Rover in the drive, and we walked together into the house. We found Beatrice in the kitchen leaning on the counter beside the sink, her arms folded as though she were trying to think of what she should do next. Ben didn’t beat around the bush, either.
“I’m gay,” he said.
“So what’s new?” she said.
She kissed him.
But I should give you more details of what I was doing during those years besides loving my family and hanging out with my friends, while Slavey and Oliver were getting themselves killed. If I gave you all the details, you’d never take the time of your life to read this book, but I think it essential to name some times and places and positions.
In 1965, while Linden was letting the Voting Rights Act slide through Congress and the advisory mission in Vietnam slide into a war, Tricky Dicky did his first widely observable trick toward sliding me into the presidency. He slid me into chairing the Republican Party in Harris, Texas. It was a small steppingstone, but key.
The next step was more visible. That party and people put me into the United States House of Representatives, as a congressman for Houston. That’s what I was doing while Slavey and Oliver were getting themselves killed, and Linden suggested that I step from the House to the Senate. I ran, and I had a lot of support, with Cleve Powell as state editor of the Austin Statesman writing a huge feature about me. But my heart wasn’t quite in it, and we found other ways. And the House was enough for my résumé.
Also, Cleve’s feature, although it was lengthy, was off-center. It was full of praise but for little things, pork-barrel types of things, and it embarrassed me. Lev told me he ran into Cleve later at the White Oaks Saloon, which is why I refer to him as Cleve while his name is Marvin Cleveland Powell. But Lev liked to call him Cleavon Howley.
Anyhow, Howley had become quite a drunk and had borrowed money from his father to buy the Lincoln County News, and he remembered little of his feature about me, but much of his having met Linden. He’d met him by covering the dedication of Linden’s presidential library, and he remembered one circumstance above all else.
He told Lev that, while he sat beside Linden on a sofa in a room full of people, Linden hardly spoke to him. But he said that Linden, sitting there beside him and talking to other people, reached up and rubbed his neck, not Linden’s own neck, but Howley’s. He said it felt pretty good, considering all the stress he was under, there without a drink.
I don’t know what to make of that, and so I make nothing of it. But I do make something of something else that was happening in this nation at that time. From the beatniks of the fifties, improvisational jazz had risen in popularity, along with the rise of civil rights. It was more free than Dixieland jazz and more white while yet mostly black.
Playboy magazine, for its mostly white audience, initiated an annual jazz poll to discover what jazz artists its readers preferred. The female vocalist who won the poll each year from the fifties into the middle of the sixties was Ella Fitzgerald, who was black and sang scat but sounded quite white. Nina Simone didn’t stand a chance.
In the mid-sixties, two female vocalists rose to huge fame. One was African American, the other Israeli American. The African American, whose name was Nancy Wilson, sang a blue note with flat clear sustenance to break a heart. The Israeli American, whose name was Barbra Streisand, sang with the virtuosity of birds.
Somehow, among young and educated music-lovers, a debate arose. The question was of who was better, Nancy Wilson or Barbra Streisand. Ben and Quincy took up the question between themselves but never decided on an answer, each agreeing with the points of argument the other put forth. They couldn’t decide, but they felt they should.
“Why can’t each be best in her own way?” I asked in our kitchen in Houston, around the Christmas of 1965. “Nancy Wilson sings jazz, and Barbra Streisand sings show-tunes. They both do both excellently, but mainly they stick to their niches and don’t tread on each other, as the world seems to choose to think they must.”
“That’s a copout,” said Quincy. “You have to take a side.”
“No,” said Ben. “Dad’s right on this one. It’s like that Slavey character who says he doesn’t have a name but lets people call him Slavey because it shows how most black people here got their names. That guy’s going around saying black is beautiful makes me sick. We’re all beautiful in our own ways. Aren’t we?”
“Sounds right to me,” I said. “But Slavey didn’t start that stuff about black being beautiful, at least not in those terms.”
“But he preaches killing white people by any means necessary,” said Quincy.
“'By any means necessary' doesn’t necessarily mean killing,” I answered.
“Yeah,” said Ben. “Dad’s right on this one. The rottenest attitude humans have is that no one can win without beating someone else."
I thought I was right, or I wouldn’t have said it, and I was proud of Ben for recognizing that the debate was essentially bigotry, although I didn’t know at the time his vested interest. Nancy Wilson soon bumped Ella Fitzgerald from the top of the jazz poll, but Barbra Streisand quickly succeeded her after Playboy implemented Ben’s reconciling argument. Playboy changed the name from “jazz poll” to “jazz and pop poll”.
Soon, Nancy Wilson faded from view, but I still love to hear them both, and I feel a huge loss. It was hardly a battlefield, maybe insignificant either in the general history of Earth or the particular history of that decade, but I feel a loss by having no notion of how it should have cleared. Should we have boosted Nancy Wilson with affirmative action, or Barbra Streisand by the same reasoning, because of the Holocaust?
I think neither, because I love music, and so I let it rest. What breaks my heart, the loss I feel from that little exercise of democracy, is that the people of this land of the free generally subordinated even music to bigotry, to pick a side. For what?
Whatever, I was busy balancing other things, oil economics and political power. Hitler was dead, and Oliver and Slavey were dead, and Mikhail was laying low but climbing quickly. Tricky Dicky was rearing his head again for the presidency, and he would win this time, we knew. On that there wasn’t much to do. We’d done it.
My main problem now was on the oil side, and my congressional position had little to do with that. Yasser was buried so deep beneath the other Arab factions that we had no notion what might happen next, and we weren’t in a position to do anything about whatever it might be, if we did know. I paid a visit to Yasser in Damascus, wishing for the possibility of falling out of the plane and into enlightenment, as Saul of Tarsus said he did from his horse on his way to that old city, thereby learning not to persecute. Now, everyone in the area was up in arms, and reason wasn’t in it, as far as I could see.
Keep in mind that this was a score of years after the institution of the Israeli state, after the second war to end all wars on Earth. But Fatah was still fighting Irgun, although Irgun had given up its name, through joining the United Nations under the name of Israel. Menachem Begin had founded Irgun to terrorize Canaanites not Jewish, and Yasser had founded Fatah to fight Irgun. Now Irgun was Israel, and Fatah was buried in dust.
Fits Jr. threw that decade’s monkey-wrench into the works there. He could not have won the presidency of the United States without endorsing the United States civil rights movement, and he could not have won without endorsing Israel as a state. But, for him, both endorsements were insubstantial. He’d act differently, or indifferently, later.
Linden acted indifferently, while doing little things to seem otherwise. He signed things, to have the United States of America do things, like provide arms to Israel. The Soviet Union responded in kind for the Arab nations around Canaan, and the world now had two arms-races. One was between the United States and the Soviet Union for themselves, and the other was between the United States and the Soviet Union for the fight over Canaan. Dust was rising clouding every issue.
“What are you going to do?” I asked, as Yasser and I drank more of that brain-buzzing tea at a café beneath the Damascus citadel.
“I have no notion what to do,” said Yasser. “It’s anarchy and confusion, everybody running everywhere and paying no attention to where they’re going or where they’ve been. The Israelis are saying your CIA is backing them, and I have to wonder what that means and whether it’s true. Do you know they’ve made Menachem Begin a minister without portfolio? What does that mean?”
“The CIA claim is bogus,” I said. “Linden may have given the agency some marching orders, but the order of the agency’s march depends on bureaucracy far deeper than Linden’s vision or his span of concentration. You know what making Begin a minister without portfolio means, just as you know my vision is deeper than Linden’s. Begin will be Prime Minister of Israel some day, partly through this current march. I mean, the march to bury you still more.”
“Yes,” said Yasser. “I do know, and I know that what we have on our hands is anarchy, confusion. Begin has some focus, and the legitimization of Irgun into Israel was but a temporary setback in his relative power. But, for the rest, I’ve seen some of those old silent movies of your country. This is global Keystone Cops.”
“Well, my friend, I know,” I said. “I just wish to say you’re not forgotten, not by people who care about everyone. Thanks for your patience so far. Please keep it.”
“If you were my lord,” said Yasser, “I’d ask you that question of the Israelis’ that drives me crazy. I’d ask you how long, but I’m not Israeli. I’ll wait.”
“Thank the Lord for that,” I said to him.
Yasser kept up his little attacks in hope that the Palestinians not totally be forgotten in the chaos, but he kept the attacks small enough to avoid any general sanction for large-scale military attack from Israel. But the attack came anyway.
In one fit, Egypt closed the Straits of Titan to Israeli traffic. Israel’s responsive fit was to attack every Arab in sight, with the military might the United States had slid to them under Linden’s indifference. The Soviets, in this little arms race, had exercised more restraint. So, in six days, Israel tripled its land. And Yasser lay deeper in dust.
Meanwhile, back in the U.S.A., Tricky Dicky was running for president. He was a shoe-in, after all the screwing up that Linden had done. Linden had kept his word and refused reelection, but the messes he’d permitted had also diminished the stature of his party, in the minds of any loving persons viewing the burning babies in Vietnam. No decent person wished to risk continuing that. But Dicky thought he still must be tricky.
Fits Jr.’s hubris lived more in his pants, and the drugs he took for his back kept him permanently in desperation, and none of that came from his being a Catholic. Dicky’s hubris lived more in his desire to be loved for being a better person than he thought he was, and some of that came from his being a Quaker, although he was no Mary Dyer. Had he her courage of conviction, we wouldn’t have put him into the presidency. But, had he, he wouldn’t have killed Robert Fits.
Oliver was right. When Dicky and Fits Jr. were both alive, they were both contenders for being the most dangerous man in the world. And Fits Jr.’s brother Robert was a contender for being the most decent man in the world at that level of political popularity. And, if Dicky was right, and Robert Fits had won, I’d have suffered gladly.
Fits Sr., also known as Sugar Fits, had been one of the most ridiculously dangerous men in the world. A son of Irish immigrants, he made his fortune during prohibition, untouched through all the corruption one sees in gangster movies about that era. After prohibition ended, he found a legitimate way to be corrupt, by selling the hooch-delivery-trucks he hadn’t legally owned and by collecting dues from the drivers for the legal companies that bought them. The companies went along because they bought the trucks at bargain prices, and the drivers went along because they needed a job. And all of them, in that new beginning, had been in Sugar’s illegal business.
From there, the step to organizing other companies into the system was a matter of salesmanship and breaking legs. The salesmanship was a pretense at acting in the interest of the drivers, and the breaking of legs came when the salesmanship didn’t do the job. So Sugar Fits built a legal business on the capital infrastructure and human resources of his old allegedly prohibited one. Corrupt policemen, corrupt politicians, and corrupt employees, all kept him corpulently corrupt, on his corn-liquor-fed sugar.
And, altogether, they kept him legally corrupt, and earned him so much respect that he was Ambassador to England before his grand finale of having his son elected President of the United States and his family called America’s monarchy.
He was Boston-born-and-bred. Boston, the cradle of liberally taking advantage of other people’s weaknesses, the home of the Puritans' robbing the natives and hanging Mary Dyer for her courage of conviction, the home of a plurality of the pedophilic priests of the Roman Catholic Church, was a perfect place for such as Sugar Fits.
We often think of Italians as gangsters and Irish as police, but prohibition tangled the two together. So South Boston with its predominantly Irish population and Boston’s North End with its predominantly Italian population met at Scolley Square, which was near City Hall and the State House and Fanueil Hall and is now at the center of what Boston calls its Government Center. Evolution is a fascinating thing.
So Boston was a perfect place for Sugar Fits to raise a family, to establish a family tradition. Rudy Fits, his youngest son, gets drunk and drives off a bridge with a woman he’s picked up at a party, and leaves her to drown while he runs for cover, dry clothes and political protection. I guess picking priorities is quite complex sometimes.
Another member of the Fits family beats a woman to death with a golf-club. Another kills himself skiing drunk into a tree, and the collection of American monarchists George Washington tried to evade burns candles on television for the poor Fits family, cursed by tragedy wherever it turns. Oh woe is who and why, I have to ask.
Fast forward to the scion of the family, the young prince, Little Fits. He founds a magazine named George, and no one asks whether the name is for George Washington or for the crazy king George Washington defeated. He marries a cocaine addict, and the American monarchists call her addiction recreational, and nothing to do with him.
For, after all, they both die before anyone finds out, because the young prince flies himself and his young cocaine princess into the oblivion into which his father nearly sank all humans. Hubris, I hope anyone would say, to fly or preside beyond one’s ability, at risk and cost of others’ lives. Achilles was not a god and died a soldier.
Now one son of Fits remains alive, the one who drove the girl into the creek. The people of the cradle of liberalism, who touted Frederick Douglas but let his people down to die, elected Rudy to the United States Senate and has kept him there for forty years. I have to wonder how an unrepentant drunken glutton became an elder statesman.
But thank God the rest of the nation hasn’t made him president. Not all people of the United States are like the electorate of Massachusetts, and not all cities of the United States are like Boston. And, also, not all citizens of Boston and Massachusetts and New England vote for hope of gaining from corruption.
Thank God this nation’s grown from sea to sea, and back again.