18 West Eleventh Street, March 5th, 1970
for Rachel Hadas and Jeffrey Harrison
Late winter, 52 degrees, partly cloudy, NYC,
my prep school roommate, Dave Petty, and I
are guests of his parents’ friends, Audrey and Joe
Wilkerson, who is vice president of Young and
Rubicam, at their Greenwich Village brownstone
on 18 West 11th St.. We are juniors in high school
on our way back from winter-break to the Kent
School in Kent Connecticut with no idea yet
of who we are really or we want to be but in the shoot
of America’s Götterdämmerung that spring—Kent
State, Detroit, Asbury Park, Augusta, Cambodia.
Dave would be dead by suicide three decades hence
and I a high school English teacher and wannabe
dharma bum. But we are children still this day
in the long, dark shadow of Vietnam where thousands
of our peers are losing their lives 8,200 miles away
while we study and play and dream in bedighted rooms,
although there are some for whom that distance
is moot. They are Cathy Wilkerson, Terry Robbins, Diane
Oughten, Ted Gold, and Cathy Boudin just waiting
for us across the street to leave before they enter
the house with sixty sticks of dynamite and a detonator
whose wires Robbins will later mistake and cross
later that day, blowing up Oughten, Gold, and himself
to the point the medical examiner will need smidgens
of DNA to make positive ID’s—only a thumbnail
in Robbin’s case. Wilkerson is upstairs when the bomb
goes off, ironing the linen sheets of her father’s bed
in which she has slept the night before, while Boudin
is in the shower. Both survive and run almost naked
from the house. Dave and I awake on the morning
before in the guest room on the second floor that is
furnished with English antiques, which is strangely
the first thing I think of in my disbelief when I see
the headline at the top of the New York Times
the following morning of Match 15th and then
that hole in the street emitting a cloud of smoke
that looks like a ghost. “What the fuck!” I say
to myself and then again to Dave who only gazes
at the photo with the same disbelief, so reads it
again thinking to himself that the act of just reading it
in all its elegant Georgia font and obsidian ink
will somehow erase this news. So now that I’ve spent
half a century thinking about this catastrophe,
I’m still confused about just what drove these students
who called themselves The Weather Underground
to plot like this with a plan to plant five dozen sticks
of dynamite at a dance for non-commissioned officers
at Fort Dix in New Jersey the following day.
Just what had usurped their categorical imperative
to lie down instead like lambs in the street with signs
that simply read: “End this war right now or rot
in Hell!” Because they already had and it was not
enough to have any effect on the President or Congress
or muck-a-mucks in the the Industrial Military Complex.
So, they were perplexed and desperate and intransigent
like Antigone in their zeal. Because their blood
had boiled and turned their minds to a dream
that couldn’t come true but in which they believed.
Because their murderous will was Shakespearean,
although they had labored in the fields
of elementary schools and churches and fields
of Guatemala. Because it seems in retrospect now
that their fate had been sealed on some American stone
centuries ago that they would construct their own crosses
for themselves without knowing it, although it hadn’t.