Will let Jim Ed and Lou and a bunch of G.I.’s fix the turkey the next day while he sat around in a daze. It was a good turkey, but I wasn’t very hungry. I hitched back to my room in Harry’s old place where Clu was living now. A couple of weeks later I had a stroke of luck. Nick Arnold and a carload of other people from our Organization Chapter were driving to the winter conference so I wouldn’t have to hitch. The Winter Conference was far to the north this year. It was icy cold and it would have been a rough journey hitching. All the way to the National Conference was a continuous lively left-wing discussion for Nick and his friends who had never been to a National Organization get-together before. But I was silent, slumped against the locked car door with my head against the cold window, thinking of Will and Jan, also of Hope and me. 
    The conference lasted over Christmas. Most of the Organization people professed no religion at all. The only celebration we had on Christmas Day was that a woman passed out some chocolate chip and raisin cookies she had made with a little pot in them. I called my mother for Christmas. She said she missed me a lot, but she was excited because she was getting remarried. 
    I was still sad, but there were the innumerable friends to hug and catch up on news with, there was the singing and the ever lasting debates. There were more arm loads of literature to take home with me. All the way back, the car radio news was quoting high US government officials about how the tide had turned in Vietnam and the US was looking forward to victory in 1968. But as I have said before, Organization people usually ignored TV and radio news. We assumed that it was all a lie. 
   I got back to an empty town on New Year’s Day. Clu had gone to be with her parents, and she had left her place open for me. Her father needed her by his side. He was accused of defrauding John J. Godd, the singer-songwriter who was called the Voice of the rebellious younger generation, out of $100,000 in a bogus oil deal. It was all over the newspapers. The Voice was hopping mad at Clu’s father in a very capitalistic way. The papers were saying his last name wasn’t really Godd, it was Epstein and he had never ridden freight trains as he had claimed. I couldn’t care less. As far as I was concerned, he had left our movement back in 1965 when the Vietnam war got big. Just when we could have used his songs, he started singing only about dope and his girlfriends. Some pretty good songs, but no help to us against the war. 
 It was in January, 1968 that Eugene Hobart, the former National President of the Organization and his new wife, Helen Mahler, moved to our university town. (Actually, like ninety per cent of the couples in the Organization, they weren’t legally married. They had even gone to a justice of the peace in Nevada, but they didn’t have enough money to pay him, so they just walked outside and exchanged rings). 
    Eugene and Helen had a contract from a big bourgeois publishing house to write a book about the movement. No one had expected our movement, yet we appeared suddenly like a thunderclap. The whole country was full of curiosity about us - and a little scared. Eugene was like putting our best foot forward. He was thirty years old - already ancient in the Organization. His father was a local leader in the sawmill workers’ union in the Pacific Northwest. Eugene had worked in a sawmill to get enough money to go to college. 
    Then he won a scholarship to Cornell where he got a masters’ degree in history. In the fifties and sixties a lot of the brightest working class young people were given scholarships that way - not just so the ruling class could use their skills, but so they wouldn’t be trouble makers among their fellow workers. But as Eugene once told me, "They didn’t fool us very long." Eugene and a lot of other working class intellectual youth became active in the Organization. 
     Helen was only twenty-two. Her father had been a railroad worker until he was disabled in an accident. She had a scholarship to the large university 360 miles south of us that dominated the town where Glen and Miriam and Bump had been in the Organization Chapter: she had known them well. She had helped start the ARMADILLO TIMES before she went to work in the National Office. 
     Sally Anderson had recommended our town strongly to Eugene and Helen after she came down from the National Office and started her head shop among us. So when the first advance money from the publishing house came in January, Eugene and Helen used it to rent a small house in our town a few blocks from the Green House where Clu lived now. 
 All of us in the Organization Chapter and the Committee used to go by and visit them a lot. They were both still handsome people except that their year and a half of difficult National Office conditions made them look pale and unhealthy. Eugene had a small mustache and a wave of dark brown hair rolled back from his high forehead. He was already getting a few grey streaks. Helen’s blond hair cascaded down her back like spiraling gold wires. 
    Eugene would be seated at a typewriter, surrounded by a circle of empty beer cans. Helen would be on a giant red cushion which leaked crumbling yellow foam rubber stuffing. She would read out passages from their book and Eugene would type them. All over the living room floor were books, magazines, news papers and beer cans. 
    "Read that again?" Eugene would say. 
    "The liberation of the body from the stifling repression of a hierachial society - a totally new physical freedom which will come with..." Helen would read out. Then they would argue about corrections. And so it would go all day. 
    But they were always very kind to me and all their visitors - ready to stop everything for another round of the eternal left-wing dialogue and beer or a joint or hot tea. Will and Jim Ed visited them to see about their help selling the Wallenberg brothers’ pot among the students. Pretty soon a car load of G.I.’s from Fort Clay would drop by their house and visit. 
    One night, early in February I went by Eugene and Helen’s. I had just come in from hitching down to the campus south of us. The living room lights were on as I walked up to the door. I knocked. No answer. As always the door was open, so I walked in. 
    "Eugene? Helen?" I called out. 
    "Eugene and Helen have gone to a Socialist Scholars Conference," a familiar voice said from the spare bedroom, "they said I could stay here till they got back." 
    I ran to the spare bedroom. There was Pete Yoder wearing nothing but a pair of old army fatigue pants sitting on a mattress on the floor. 
 I started to walk into the room. "No, get back, please," Pete said suddenly. 
    "All right, I’m sorry," I said and started walking back into the living room. 
    "OK, you can come on back in!" Pete called out. 
    I turned around and headed back towards the spare bedroom. 
    "Come on in, sit down," Pete said. I stepped into the room and sat down on the floor. 
    "Hey, what’s the matter?" I asked. 
    "You see," Pete said. "My dad was a minister. He sent me to a fundamentalist private school. I lived in a dorm. I couldn’t leave the campus. Anytime, night or day they could walk in an inspect my room without knocking. So as soon as I was eighteen, I joined the army and that was three more years of the same thing. I just got out of the army last week and now I really like being able to control my own space. Thank you for going along with it," 
    "Well, I guess you’re welcome," I said. 
    "Every day I just take off and walk for miles," Pete said. "And there’s no one to stop me, for the first time in my life. It’s a great feeling." 
    Just then we heard a fist banging at the door and "Hey, Pete! I need you! Clu said you were here!" 
    It was Will’s voice. 
    We ran to the door, Pete opened and Will came in with a plastic jar of red koolaid in his hand. He flung his arms around both of us and said, "Come outside and look what I got." 
    We walked out on the porch and saw a battered 1958 Ford parked at the curb. 
     "I just bought it with the pot money," Will said, "and I need you to help me drive tonight, Pete." 
    "Huh?" Pete said turning to stare at Will. 
    "Yeah," Will said. "Jan phoned this afternoon and told me she got away from her mother. She told me just where she’ll be waiting for us. So put on your shirt and your shoes, Pete, and let’s drive to Florida." 
    Pete blinked a few times and walked back into the spare bedroom. He came out in a minute wearing his shoes and a T-shirt and an old brown leather jacket. All at once I felt sad, hurting deep in the pit of my stomach. 
    "You know Will, you’re lucky," I said. "You’re getting back with Jan. I’ll never get back with Hope. Maybe being in the Movement means I’m not meant to have any sort of personal life - no relationship, no woman to love, ever." 
    "Don’t give me that bullshit!" he said. "Man, you helped make my whole life, so don’t put yourself down! You’re a revolutionary, you can do anything you want. Here, take this!" 
    He handed me the plastic jug of koolaid. I drank down a couple of big swallows. 
    "It’s strawberry!" I said. "I never was much for strawberry." 
    "It’s got twenty hits of Owsley acid in it," he said. 
    "I kind of thought it did," I said and took another swallow. 
    "Hey!" Will hollered, "leave some for me and Pete and Jan!" 
    I handed the jug back to him. He leaned his head back and took a big swig and went ‘Hah!’ Then he stuck the jug out to Pete and said, "Here! It’ll keep you going on the way." 
    Pete took the jug and drank a big gulp. We all three put our arms around each other’s shoulders for a minute, then Will and Pete ran out to the car and drove off into the night to Florida. 
    Now I’ll wind my story up quickly. Will and Pete brought Jan back. That summer of ’68, the three of them got together with Dave Cooper, the Vietnam vet who had been Rocky Mountain Regional traveler for the Organization, who I had last seen in Washington DC. They got a grant from a left-wing foundation, along with Will’s pot money to set up a coffee house in Tralee, a small army town just outside of Fort Holden. It was about 300 miles south of Fort Clay, where Will had been stationed in the army. 
    They used the coffee house to give out anti-war literature to G.I.’s and organize anti-war demonstrations. I used to go down there and sing for them a lot, and help out as best I could. 
    By that time, the summer of ’68, I had given up being a Regional Traveler for the Organization. Another Vanguard had tried to take over the Organization. This bunch was even more humorless than Clu’s Vanguard. In response, the national leadership of the Organization had tried to organize itself just as tight as any of the Vanguards to be able to repel the take over attempt. I couldn’t take the rigidity and elitism the national office showed now. Partly it was because they were burning out from long hours of work and abominable food. As they felt themselves disintegrate from poor health, the rigidity helped hold them together. 
    Finally the internal feuding and the sheer amount of burn out (probably helped along by under cover government agents) caused the Organization to fall apart in 1969. The break up of the leadership was at its height - 100,000 members. Most of the membership didn’t join any of the sects, but most of them did continue in some sort of activism, at least until the war ended. 
    That was how it was with me, helping Will and the others out at the anti-war coffeehouse, which, of course, was called Black Hill. When the war was over, Will and Jan went to live up on the island where he was born. They found themselves in the middle of a big fight to protect the island from being taken over by developers and made into summer homes for rich people. Long before they were thirty, Will and Jan were leading their island tribe against the developers. Will and Jan write me about it now and then. It’s still going on. It’s an endless struggle. 
    When the war ended Pete and his new girlfriend Kay left the Black Hill coffee house to go live in the Rocky Mountains with some bizarre street people anarchist groups like the MotherFuckers and the Asshole family - the kind of people that Don of the Vanguard called, "those crazy freaky kids". 
    Long before the war was over, Clu blew off the Vanguard. She started taking more and more acid. Finally she moved out to Los Angeles and became a cab driver. She did show up in New York when Don died of sheer overwork for the Vanguard (and not taking care of his health, like most movement people). Clu was there at his funeral along with many of those who had loved him. She used to send me letter and postcards from time to time. One card was wildly enthusiastic. It said she’d found the new light in Radical Lesbians. A few months later I got a letter from her that said: 
    "I couldn’t stay with that bunch anymore. They’re as stuffy and self-righteous as the Vanguard. Also you have to have this big permanent relationship with a lover to fit in, and I just don’t have one. I miss that old house where I worked with the Committee and had you upstairs to talk to." 
    Finally Clu was arrested for sales of acid. She did a year in prison and I haven’t heard from her since. After Clu left, her Committee continued going strong until the war ended. 
    I was doing stuff with it when I wasn’t down at the coffee house with Will and Jan. But we were all surprised after the war was over to find that the new Committee leader had been working undercover for the FBI. 
    Even though the war ended after the anti-war movement had passed its peak, I think the way it ended was a tremendous victory for all of us who opposed it - especially for G.I.’s who resisted the war, like Will. The loss of the war - and our example of resistance took away the ability of the US ruling class to send large numbers of American troops to crush Third World Revolutions. Even in the Eighties, when the conservative times came that Don had predicted to me, we were still vigorous and still organizing. Will and Jan went down to Nicaragua with a shipment of food and medicine from their island people for the revolution. Because we were still strong and ready here, the Sandinistas could not be completely destroyed, or driven underground like the US government wanted. They still stand we still stand. 
    In my personal world, Hope went off to Oregon to college and I never heard from her again. Naldo was pretty down after she was gone. He started shooting lots of speed until he was a wreck. Terry and Sally gave up the head store business they had with him. They went out on the West Coast to do activist work until the war ended. 
    I have never yet settled down with a woman and had kids - I would really love that, but so far the big satisfaction of my life has not been personal - it has been what we accomplished in our Movement. This is true for many activists of my generation. 
    And as for the US ruling class that we went up against? They are weaker than ever. For the last fifteen years or so, I have watched them build ever more magnificent skyscrapers on foundation of sand, waiting for the next big wave to come. Meanwhile, "It takes a bus load of faith to get by."