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Rebellion in a Curious Way | Poem

REBELLION IN A CURIOUS WAY by Jodey Bateman
 

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 CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
      We both ran out the back door. It seemed like we were in the back yard for years, but really it was less than ten minutes till the fire engine came. The fire fighters put the fire out quickly, but all the living room furniture was burned. The ceiling plaster was scorched black over the center of the room and in places the wood was exposed. The fire fighters found the remains of a whiskey bottle full of gasoline on the floor. 
      About nine o’clock that morning Oren Olson, the owner of the building came by to look at the damage. He was a short slender, dark haired fellow about thirty with a hard tense smile on his face. 
      "Well, Clu, I told you!" he quacked. "If  you keep messing with all this bullshit, you’ll get in trouble. Now I want you out of here by this weekend!" 
      For some reason, more than any other person I’ve ever seen, Oren’s tongue was visible as he talked. Clu stood there with her hands hanging at her sides and slowly they clenched into fists as Oren talked. 
      "Oren, I  have a lawyer," Clu said quietly. "I’ll leave when I can. I have a lease until December." 
      "But this building is to be condemned!" Oren said. "It’s unfit for human habitation!" 
      "My room and Dale’s room are still OK,’ Clu replied. She and Oren stared at each other with glares like ground glass. Then Oren announced, "I’ll see you later about this!" He wheeled around and strode out. 
      Clu leaned against my shoulder. At first she was crying but all at once she started shaking with laughter. She looked up at me with a smile. "If I learned anything from my capitalist dad and his oil company deals," she said. "It was how to keep a good poker face and bluff. I can’t believe it! I stared Oren Olson down. I don’t think I’ll even bother Ben Markovitz about this. Just let Oren think I’m consulting a lawyer and he’ll let me stay till I can find a good place." 
      "Harry Holtzenheimer’s moving out of his place at the end of next month," I said. "I bet he’ll turn it over to you if you can hold off Oren till then." 
      "I bet I can!" Clu said, grinning. We shook hands on it. 
      We spent the next few hours cleaning the living room the best we could, putting the remains of the rug and curtains in the trash can. We got one of the Committee people who had a pickup and we loaded the furniture on it and hauled it to the dump. We mopped the floor over and over and scrubbed all the grit off the walls. 
      When the place was as clean as we could make it, Clu ran to her bedroom. She brought back a picture of Lenin and hammered a nail into the living room wall and hung the picture there. Then she went back to the bedroom and got a tan pottery jar with a branch of reddish pink artificial flowers sticking out of it at a graceful angle. She set this on the floor near the Lenin picture. 
      I was all dirty and sweaty from the work fixing up the living room. Clu put one hand on my shoulder and pointed with her other hand at the branch of artificial flowers springing from the jar. "Those are supposed to be plum blossoms, Dale," she said. "In Japan plum blossoms are a symbol of determination because they’ll bloom even when it’s snowing." 
      Then Clu went to the police station and made a report about the fire bombing. But what sticks in my mind the most about that day is what didn’t happen after she got back. We waited for hours. None of the local newspapers or radio and TV stations sent anyone to Clu’s place about the firebombing. Finally Clu called them. The papers ran small stories on their back pages, but the radio and TV never ran anything, never sent anyone by to interview us. I wrote stories for the GUARDIAN and the RED BALLOON about the whole summer’s harassment ending with the high school kids breaking Shin’s wrist and the firebombing. So these two publications told our side. 
      Also, Clu called up Don in New York and gave him an account of Will’s speech and the firebombing for the WEEKLY VANGUARD. 
      "Don was pretty surprised to hear from me," she told me after her call. "He was a little upset that I didn’t even phone him after the whole business with the drunk state legislators at Will’s speech. Now that I think about it, I don’t have a good reason why I didn’t call him back then." 
 I was a little surprised that Clu was trusting me enough to tell me her dealings with Don. But it was like that for a while after the firebombing, a lot of walls came down between us. We were no longer "Dale the Organization" versus "Clu the Vanguard" - at least not during those days before this call. When she wanted legal advice she called Ben Markovitz. When she wanted to know what was going on with the G.I.’s at Fort Clay she called Will - also for the human warmth she had lost when Don left her for Marge. But what she usually didn’t need to hear from was Don as part of the national leadership of the Vanguard. 
      Don asked Clu to call him back the next day. When she called he said he would be down for Will’s Field Board Hearing with Marge and Randy Mezarosh. Clu stiffened up and got a little more Vanguard when she heard this. The weekend after Will’s Field Board Hearing was to be a huge national anti-war demonstration in Washington, D. C. Don and the other two Vanguarders were hoping to go to D. C. for the march with Clu and some of the rest of us. "And we will have a press conference this time," Don added. 
      Next day Clu sent me over to Harry Holtzenheimer’s to see about her renting the place when he moved out. He let me in and went on taking oatmeal and coffee from his kitchen to his girlfriend Mariah, who was sitting in the living room. He was walking with a cheerful bounce to his step. Mariah, who had often seemed depressed to me, looked happier than usual. Even Harry’s monkey hopped around in a special good mood. 
      "Say, you know Clu’s house was damaged pretty bad," I said. "Her landlord wants her to move out. Harry, when you move out of here next month, could you turn your place over to Clu?" 
       "Great idea!" Harry said at once. "I’ll be glad to do it! You know what? The Wallenberg brothers said they’ll be up from Mexico Saturday with my last pot shipment and the acid for the farewell party will be sometime next week. The big acid party will happen two weeks from Saturday." 
      All of a sudden I flashed that Harry’s farewell acid party would be two days before Will’s Field Board Hearing. 
      "Yeah, it’s gonna be so far out," Mariah said. "Dale, you’ve just gotta be there with your guitar to sing." 
      "We need you," Harry added. "Naldo’s gonna be there with his guitar. He’s the instrumentalist, but you’re the one that knows all those songs." 
      I was silent a little while. "Uh-sure I’ll be glad to sing," I finally said. Naldo was still living with Hope. I had been through about every experience possible on LSD, including some rather difficult ones like being questioned by cops. I had never lost it. But having Naldo and Hope there would take this acid trip from being simply a lark and make it into one that would involve a certain amount of work on my head. 
      I walked back to Clu’s. The sky was a shining pale blue. There were touches of gold in the foliage of the trees with big leaves, like maple and sycamore. After the heat of late summer there was just enough coolness so that I should have been skipping down the sidewalk. But the thought of Hope slowed me down. She still meant more than I had realized. 
      When I got back, Clu had borrowed the Committee member’s pickup we had used to haul the burnt furniture to the dump. This time I went to the Salvation Army store with her and she bought a second hand couch and armchair - they looked like tenth hand. When I helped her load them on the truck, I could feel that the frame of the couch must be cracked in several places. Clu also bought some big cushions for people to sit on the floor and a frayed old purple rug. You can say one thing for Clu - she could use whatever materials she had with style. When we went back to her place and unloaded the furniture, she arranged some cushions against the wall and some on the floor with the care given to boulders in a Japanese rock garden. 
      Once the rug covered the burnt spot, the room actually had some charm with the artificial flowering branch and Lenin’s picture giving his ironic, narrow-eyed smile from the wall. 
      "Now we’re ready for Don and Marge and Randy," Clu said. "It’s a pity my records were ruined in the fire so I can’t play Schubert for them." 
      Besides the Schubert shortage, the only real problem we had now was the big hole in the front window pane where the Molotov cocktail had smashed through. The nights were getting colder and a chilly draft came in through the hole and filled the house. I bought a couple of second hand blankets at the church thrift store. So the cold didn’t bother me at night. What got to me was a lonely place inside I still felt with Hope gone. 
      The next week I hit the jackpot. For the first time in months I got $20 for my staff pay instead of the usual $10, or nothing. I wanted to get out of town and stop hanging around, mooning about a romance that couldn’t be. And after all I was campus traveler. The Organization was paying me for something. So I ought to get out and do some traveling and write a report to the National Office. 
      I wouldn’t even have to hitch. Sally, the former National Secretary had Friday off from waitressing at the Touchdown Cafe because that week’s football game was out of town. Terry took the weekend off from the gas station where he worked. I could put in $10 on  gas for Sally’s car. She and Terry were both anxious to see what the rest of the region was like, so we took off Friday afternoon - first to Pronghorn and then to the big Organization Chapter in the college town 360 miles south of us. We had a back seat full of GUARDIANS and other literature. I had an extra shirt, one of my second hand blankets, and a notebook. 
      All the way to Pronghorn, Sally and Terry were talking enthusiastically about the Prairie Fire, the head shop they planned to open with Naldo’s help, November 7th in the living room of their small apartment. Just hearing Naldo’s name made my stomach flutter and brought back memories of Hope. but I had to admire the fliers with fancy lettering that Naldo had designed to announce "A Single Spark Can Set a Prairie Fire." Naldo really outdid himself on the calligraphy. He probably didn’t know the words were a quote from Mao. Some of the fliers were red and green, others blue and orange. We had a stack of them in the back seat with the other literature to give out in Pronghorn. 
      As we drove into Pronghorn, Terry and Sally stared around with amazement at what was for them an exotic new world. There were the elderly Indian women with multi-colored blankets wrapped around their shoulders, elderly Indian men with their hair in long braids, threaded with colored yarn and tied at the ends with ribbons. 
      Most of all there were the young G.I.’s trying to look like hippies, many of them in bell bottoms, many with beads around their necks. I noticed that their mustaches and their sideburns were a lot bushier than they had been when I was in Pronghorn in June. As opposition to the war among G.I.’s increased, the hair sprouted. 
      We went into the Barrage. Jim Ed was tending bar. He waved at us and gave us his brilliant grin. The place was packed with G.I.’s and there was an energy in the air. 
      I introduced Jim Ed to Terry and Sally and said, "Hey, what’s going on with all the G.I.’s? I notice there’s more hair and there’s less polish on the shoes." 
      "I’ll show you," Jim Ed said. "Hey, Merle, come meet my friend!" He called to a tall young Indian soldier in a sleeveless shirt, who was playing pool. 
      When the Indian G.I. came to the bar, I noticed his hair was in a Mohawk - we shook hands and I was staring a little at what he had of his hair. 
      "Don’t they hassle you about your haircut in the army?" I asked. 
      "I got my hair like my granddaddy had his and they ain’t gonna fuck with me," he said, pointing to a tattoo on his shoulder, "See that? That’s why!" The tattoo said ‘DEROS 8-27-67’. "DEROS means the date I left Nam," the Indian G.I. said. "I done been there! They ain’t gonna give me no more bullshit!" 
      "More and more guys are coming back from Nam like that," Jim Ed said. "They don’t give a fuck. They won’t take no more shit off the army." 
      "Damn straight!" The young Indian said, and went back to his pool game. Just then Will and his girlfriend Jan walked in the Barrage with Pete Yoder and a couple of other G.I.’s I didn’t know. People all over the bar called out greetings to Will. He was wearing a cowboy hat and his hair had grown longer so that it was sticking out from under the hat - more reddish and less sun-faded than I remembered. His army field jacket was open showing he still was wearing his baggy BLACK HILL FOREVER T-shirt. He came up and hugged me and I introduced him to Terry and Sally. 
      "We’ve got a bunch of anti-war literature out in the car," Sally told Will. "Dale here has said that Frog, the owner of this bar doesn’t want the literature in his bar, but we’ll leave it at Jim Ed’s place for you when the bar closes down." 
      "Great!" Will said. "I’ll be there to pick it up. You know, I’ve got fifty G.I.’s at Fort Clay now that I give what literature I have regularly and a lot of them have other people that they give it to." 
      "And we’ve got some literature of our own," Terry said. "We are starting a head shop called the Prairie Fire in our living room November 7. We’ve got a bunch of fliers out in the car with the date and our address. We’ll leave the fliers with the anti-war literature if you want." 
      "I sure do," Will said. "A lot of G.I.’s would like to know some place to go away from Pronghorn. There are narcs and MP’s all over the place and they’ve really been watching the G.I.’s ever since all that stuff happened at the motel this summer." 
      Then Will turned to me and said, "Say, Dale, would you come outside with me a minute?" 
      "Sure," I said, and we went out the Barrage door and up the steps onto the neon lit sidewalk under the darkening sky.
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