The Brothers K (55 page)

He was completely overwhelmed, mentally and visually. Was it Pound who said that excessive Natasha could lead to imbecility? “Huh,” Everett told her. “Hmm. Okay. Thanks.”

She cocked her head, leaned toward him, looked deep into his eyes—and the sun flared red in her auburn hair! her irises were a filigree of coppery greens and blues! the flares and filigree surpassed the face that surpassed the body that surpassed the bottom that surpassed the five thousand bottoms he’d just peace-marched past! Then she said, “Are you stoned, Everett?”

“Me?” He blushed. “Oh, no.”

She laughed. “What’s with the face? And the giant ‘oh, no’? You think I care? A big ol’ hippie like you? I should think you’d be ashamed to be seen straight.”

“Huh.” He managed a shrug. “Well, I’m not. I mean, I’m not stoned, I mean. I just, uh, have to speak in a bit.”

“Ah!” She laughed. “Well, good luck!”

“Huh. I mean, thanks.”
Where was his brain!

She laughed again. “So even the Big Bad Rad gets a little stage fright, huh?”

“Huh?”

“I already said that.”

“Huh.”

“Hey, listen. Just … never mind. I’ll talk to you later. Go give ’em hell. Sorry I broke your concentration. And be funny, okay?”

“Huh. Hey. Thanks. Okay, thanks.”

Shit O. Deer.

“T
here’s an old Yiddish saying that I used to find funny. It went, ‘If the rich could hire others to die for them, the poor could make a good living.’”

The crowd roared—ten thousand people throwing back their heads and howling because of something Everett had said. That was power! That was euphoria! And he’d stolen the line from the dad in
Fiddler on the Roof
.

“That’s right,” he continued without cracking a smile—because he saw Natasha hadn’t cracked a smile. “It’s a funny saying to a healthy mind. It’s a joke. And I grew up in a home where it was considered tasteless, if not a deadly sin, to have to explain a joke. But I feel a need to explain this one.”

Some stoned-out dork back in the crowd let out a hysterical shriek of laughter. “The reason the saying was considered funny is that dead men can’t spend money. Everybody knew that, back in the old days.”

But now the entire crowd was yukking it up again! Ten thousand people chuckling at a joke that wasn’t there! Except Natasha. Who was putting on sunglasses. And
now
look at her face. Impenetrable blankness. Look at those damned mirror shades. World’s sexiest grasshopper. Look at that body! Shit O. Deer. “But the incredible thing about this joke …”
Go slower. Maybe they’ll catch on
. “… the incredible thing about it, and the reason I’ve committed the sin of explaining it, is that the Americans in power just don’t get it anymore. In the name of our country, a lot of Yanks have been asking their own sons to leave our country, to go to Vietnam, and to die a death they neither understand nor choose. In other words, to become the new Yiddish poor.”

A few no-hope yo-yos chuckled, but most of the crowd seemed somewhat moved now. Whew. Apparently no one wondered why he was giving a Vietnam rap at an antisubmarine rally. The truth was, he’d been so sure of his Wrongway Peachfuzz material that he’d decided to wing it. But
when he’d faced the crowd, when he’d received the glowing intro, when the palpable wind of the cheering blew through him, creating the power surge that always set his magic tongue in motion, he made the fatal blunder of smiling at Natasha … and all he had left after she smiled back were cotton mouth and the opening line from some antiwar talk he’d given God-knows-where. Maybe clear back in high school. And it wasn’t even funny!

“Should any male student in this crowd choose to exercise his freedom by leaving school tomorrow, should he become ill, or troubled, or distracted by, say, falling in love …”
(oh good! very subtle, Everett!)
“… should he even be flunked by some grumpy ol’ European Intellectual History professor …”
(she’s flipping me the bird!)
“… he, uh, he …” (Shit O. Deer) “… excuse me, he will lose his deferment and become eligible for a draft created not by any democratic process, but by the decree of Americans so powerful, so imperial, that they can force the disenfranchised, the nonintellectual and the unlucky to kill and be killed in what is, for them, just a profitable military and political experiment.”

Okay. Pretty decent recovery. He gave them the three-second pause, let the groundswell of anger build, collected his shredded wits, and even managed to generate some power as he asked, “How can they get away with this? In the land of the so-called free, how can our leaders get away with this Czar-like betrayal of their very own sons?”

Then she yawned. Devastation! One lousy yawn and he found himself thinking, “How do
I
get away with
this?”
He tried to fight back. He tried to summon his arrogance: I
made ’em cry with this speech once! I can still make it work!
He summoned his Sabbath School roots:
No Delilah for this Samson, thank you!
But when she yawned yet again, he nearly yawned himself as he said to the crowd, “I’ll tell you how. They use the old Yiddish punchline. They
pay
us for it. Except listen. The Yiddish joke said that if the rich could hire others to die for them, the poor could make a
good
living. But for going to Vietnam, our American Czars pay us something like thirty-seven cents an hour! They can’t even get the damned joke right!”

The crowd whistled and laughed and revived him enough so that, by keeping his eyes as far from Natasha as he could without turning his back on his audience, he thought he
might
be able to finish. Taking a deep breath, he tried to look solemn instead of spaced, and said, “The old Yiddish joke has become the life story of one and a half million American boys so far. And the death story of forty-seven thousand of them.” There were murmurs. There was anger. There was even a moan. Fantastic. He
gave them the full four-second pause. Then: “To my mind, a joke that kills forty-seven thousand of us is a joke no longer. For dirt wages, the rich and powerful
are
hiring the poor to die for them.
We
are the poor. So I ask you. At the very least, isn’t it time we told our Czars to find a new fucking joke to tell us?”

The crowd went wild. All right! It hadn’t gone badly after all.

But where was his brain-melting nemesis? Ah. Of course. Standing by a phone pole reading a bunch of rain-shredded year-old rock-concert posters.

“I
’d heard it,” she said, once he’d fought his way through the thank-you!s and far-out!s and way-to-go-man!s to stand like a mute little lapdog at her side. “Twice before, actually.”

“Huh. I mean, sorry.”

“No no. Don’t apologize. I understand. You media-hype types have got to repeat yourselves now and then.”

The poetry of her jeans! The Dow Jones Industrial Average of her sunglasses! The well-meant, emasculating, malevolent benevolence of her words! By the time he’d exhausted himself listening to and looking at her, he was honestly speaking every word he could think of when he said, yet again: “Huh.”

“I’m whipped, Everett. What say we bag this Boston Tea Party and go for some real tea? Or if it’s Lipton, some coffee?”

The sunsets in her eyes! the sun-flares in her hair! he, Everett? him with them? “Coffee?” he said.

“Coffee.”

“I mean, sure.”

“You need a rest, Everett.”

“Huh.”

“Huh.”

T
hey’d spent the rest of the day together. And Everett had discovered that her original name had been Laurel Lee, that she was from Knoxville, Tennessee, that her parents had divorced when she was thirteen, that she’d read
War and Peace
during the custody battle, that she’d changed her name to Natasha after her mother moved them to Phoenix, Arizona, and that Laurel Lee of Tennessee was every bit as appealing but no easier to impress than Natasha of Czarist Russia. For his part, Everett continued to say “huh” and “whew” a lot. He also managed to murmur that the march and speech had fried him. But he wasn’t fried. He was far worse
off than that. He was imploded. The stand-up-firebrand-playboy-superstar, the man who’d wanted Woman, had been reduced to a pile of mute brown dust by the intensity of his need for this one inimitable woman—and he sensed that the sooner he showed his need, the sooner she would reject him.

Hoping he’d sensed wrong, he finally couldn’t resist venturing, while walking her home, to place a single finger in a belt loop on the side of the eudaemoniacal jeans.
Instant havoc!
She spun away in a cloud of speech and beauty that stirred the dust he’d become till the very air of the city turned brown. “I like you, Everett,” she said as he peered through the sediment. “And I find you ridiculous. I might even like having sex with you, and finding that ridiculous. But I’m a dinosaur, Everett. Because I believe in romance. Understand? And if we started a romance off with a Peachfuzz march, a used speech, a coffee and a fuck, where on earth could it go from there?”

When Everett spared her the “huh” and said nothing, she gave him back his own rhetorical “I’ll tell you where” and added: “Back to your imaginary revolution. And on to your next … girlfriend or groupie or whatever you call your rotation of female admirers. Which just ain’t my style. So I’ll see you around. Okay?”

That pretty well did it. Nothing left on the sidewalk beside her but a mute, half-blind, Everett-shaped pile of dry rot awaiting a dustpan. Which is why he didn’t even see the lips coming as they reached right in through the brownness and bequeathed him a kiss which, for all its fleetingness and all his experience, he swears was his very first.

Okay, you guys. Pair up in threes.

—Yogi Berra

I
n December 1969, after a brief visit home from Harvard, Peter hitchhiked up to Seattle to catch a plane back to Boston, and also to spend an afternoon and night with Everett, whom he hadn’t seen in nearly two years. They met, at Everett’s suggestion, in a U-district sandwich and beer joint—a small, smoky place decorated with neon-lit posters of Vincent van Gogh’s most lysergic-looking paintings, hence its teeth-grindingly groovy name, Van GoGo’s. Definitely a foreign country for the non-drinking, nonsmoking, vegetarian Peter. But, contrary to Everett’s
expectation, Pete didn’t grow faint or nauseous upon entering. Like a regular guy in a beer ad (except for the ponytail and East Indian clothes), he smiled with delight as he clapped Everett on the shoulder, said how great it was to see him, and seemed to mean it. And though he couldn’t quite bring himself to order a Bud, he did spring for a pitcher of imported draft for them both.

But the old roommates had barely sucked the foam from their beers when a woman took the stool on Everett’s opposite side, ordered an Olympia (never a good sign), took a sip, then seemed to say to the beer, “You look just like Cat Stevens!”

Hearing her speak, both my brothers looked at her. Peter’s impression was that she was some soused suburban housewife drinking her way home from a party, where she’d worn her teenaged daughter’s tackiest clothes for a joke. But Everett’s reaction was quite different. Though he clearly saw the colorless, predatory eyes, the lime-green hip-hugger bellbottoms, the broad white plastic belt, and the literal bells (the kind Santa’s helpers sew on Christmas stockings) round the flared cuffs, none of this prevented him from remarking to his own beer, “You look like somebody who wouldn’t like Cat Stevens.”

Thinking this was mere friendliness, thinking that Everett was becoming less superficial about the appearance of others, Peter tried to think good thoughts as well as he watched the woman turn to Everett, note that his ponytail was thick and clean, that the ear on her side sported a small gold ring, and that the brown beard swirled down into the black chest hair in the open shirt. But he couldn’t help cringing as she moaned, again into her Oly, “I just
adore
Cat Stevens!”

“What say we move to a table?” Pete whispered to Everett.

“What for?” Everett asked.

“Exactly like him!” the woman repeated.

“To chat about matters of life, death and baseball,” Peter said. “And to give this nice lady and her beer some privacy so they can chat too.”

“What if she doesn’t want privacy?” Everett said.

“‘On the Road to Find Out,’” she said. “That’s my absolute favorite!”

“Let’s just go,” Peter whispered.

But Everett ignored him, and began to study the woman more closely.

Wondering what he could possibly be thinking now (deep people are often mystified by hopelessly shallow situations), Peter tried to study her too. But it wasn’t easy for him. Though his vegetarianism and Buddhism didn’t prevent him from noticing that her breasts were rather extensive, what really struck him was her abdomen. It was a pale, distended, sadlooking
thing, completely exposed by her hideous pants and short, frilled blouse. Pete’s feeling was that, no matter whether babies, groceries, or beers from previous pit stops had brought it to its present pass, it was an abdomen that had seen years of hard use and now deserved a dignified life of privacy. But no sooner had he thought this than Everett looked the woman in the face and, with a tough little shrug, told her, “I prefer Mick Jagger.”

And her eyes began running up and down him like a pair of mice exploring a two-pound block of cheese.

Pete finally began to catch on: the R-rated brotherly chat for which he’d detoured through Seattle was in danger of being preempted by Everett’s conflicting role in an eventually to be X-rated performance with the Sad Abdomen Lady! He could hardly believe it. He felt ashamed to even think it. But Everett was clearly onstage now: he’d come entirely to his surface; everything he did or didn’t do was intended to convey messages to the woman. His manner was no longer aloof: it was a performance that said,
Isn’t my manner aloof?
His hair, beard and earring were no longer whimsical hippie paraphernalia: they were calculated image-implements designed to say:
I like the Stones. I’m dangerous. What do you think of me?
What was worse, it was all working. “Mick Jagger
scares
me!” the woman half gasped. “But I just
love
Cat Stevens.”