!!!!!*****WORKING DRAFT*****!!!!!
Howard insisted on driving back to Boston. “This car is on its last legs, it’s got all these little quirks, I think I’m the only one who can keep it going.” After he’d drifted across the freeway again, almost hitting a delivery truck this time, Rachel, sitting next to him, said, “Enough! You haven’t slept more than two hours the past two nights. Time to let someone else take over. Come on, let’s trade places with Jane and Mike, you can fall asleep in the back.”
Howard, eyes drooping, reluctantly pulled over, took out the keys, and started to hand them to Mike. I looked down at the three pedals up front, and asked, “Uh, Mike, do you know how to drive a stick?” He said nothing, so I went on, “You’re always telling me how to drive, and you don’t even know how to shift gears manually?” I glared at him. “All those summers with Eddie’s VW, remember? Give me the keys.” He made a big show of dropping them into my outstretched hand, looking ready to loose a smart aleck remark. “Don’t even think about it, buddy. Watch and learn for once, OK?”
He must have thought being in the shotgun seat gave him free license to pontificate. “Remember I told you, when I was eight, I decided that scientists’ technological advances were spiraling out of control?”
“Uh-huh,” I nodded.
“…doubling at an exponential rate, and the end of 1969 was the tipping point? Well, here we are, I think. The apocalypse has arrived.”
“Isn’t that a little melodramatic? It was just people marching, almost like a giant picnic.”
“No, listen, it’s not just the march. It’s everything. Hippies, do your own thing. Landing on the moon. Johnson passing all those civil rights laws, women getting more and more respect. I read even the earth is getting its own day next year, people are starting to care about how we’re messing things up with dams and cars and nuclear plants and stuff.”
“OK, but an apocalypse?” I laughed, “Like Hair? ‘The dawning of the Age of Aquarius’? This better be good…”
He cleared his throat. “An apocalypse is an outside event which forces us to re-orient our lives in relation to its sheer existence. Sure, there can be minor apocalypses, natural disasters like a flood, a tornado, hurricanes, and earthquake, which have an effect for a limited time on the limited few to whom it occurs. President Kennedy’s death had an apocalyptic tinge, as did, in a juvenile sort of way, the advent of the Beatles, and later, Bob Dylan. World War Two was a more galvanizing, more complete apocalypse, though time-limited. And of course, there is the archetypal one in western civilization, which all of the last two millennia stems from, the Jesus story.”
“So how do you know this is the time for something thing like Jesus, or the war. I still think you’re making too big a deal out of all this.” I worried about concentrating on the road, while I absorbed this sudden epiphany he shared. I wished he’d just take a nap, even if it meant he started snoring in unison with Howard in the back. Poor Rachel.
“Well, I’ve been looking for the signs, and in this decade we’ve had many. JFK heralding our generation as the one which will face a great assault on freedom – it’s ironic that assault is coming from within the very structure he was trying to reform. Nixon resurrected, a creep like Agnew elected – all this reflects a dissatisfaction with life in general. Everyone feels it. The middle class has an undefined awareness that the course of the country is not consistent with what they were told it should be. The radicals and drop-outs express a more conscious dissatisfaction with a life they see themselves being thrust into. This march, this weekend, showed me that all of this dissatisfaction, all of the establishment repression, all of this idealism, is coalescing into a clash which will be played out in our adult lifetimes. By 1980, I bet, all the strategic timetables for corporations and government will be out the window. It is the dawn of a new age, and we saw the first recruits here in DC. For every ten of us going back to our colleges, there are a hundred in the high schools, a thousand in the nursery schools, to whom resistance will become a matter of course.”
He sounded so earnest, so idealistic, I couldn’t help getting into the spirit. “I think I get it. In 30, 40, maybe 50 years, we’ll have a complete, sudden – at least in historical terms – turn-about to some new, as yet unknown society? And we have to act, to live with this in mind, that we can’t know, much less control, what the major forces in our future will be.”
“But you can shape the course your responses will take…”
Totally caught up in it now, I jumped right in. “I’m going to be a psychologist. If what you say is true, the future will be more and more uncertain, more people will feel unmoored. They’ll need help in setting their own directions. I can help them do that.”
“How?”
“I don’t know that yet. Personal therapy, encounter groups, psychodrama, love – it’s all possible, all useful.” The freedom of the unknown seemed a guiding beacon now. “I accept it, going through the looking glass, not knowing what’s on the other side. It gives me hope my life will have some meaning.”
Back home at Oxford Street, Bev met me with a surprise as I walked up the porch steps. She pointed to the second floor bay window. “Some guys came here yesterday, said they were movie scouts. Wanted to look inside, asked if the rooms below were still for rent. The landlord wasn’t around, so I showed them in.”
“So?”
“So-ooo, they want to film a movie here.”
“A movie? A real movie, like Hollywood and everything?”
“Yeah, it’s about a couple of kids who meet at Harvard, and they need a ‘starving student’ apartment for a few scenes. Both outside and inside. Said this place was perfect.”
“That’s us, starving students…Jeanne and Marcia both here?”
“Upstairs. How did it go in DC, with Howard and Mike? Was that weird.”
“Not at all, maybe because Rachel was distracting him. And Mike was just so much more…Mike this weekend. First, he really got into the march, the idea of resistance, of change. He wanted to see and do everything, he even looked the part for once.”
“And…?”
“And, he reminded me just how much, exactly why I love and need him.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning, he’s my friend and lover, Bev, and I just have to admit it, have to accept it. Even if it all ends, I love being with him, talking with him, cuddling with him, looking at him, and I’m going to enjoy that, take advantage of it while I can.”