Page 19 - WTP VOl. XI #1

persuasion. Not one of them in the three sections I taught wrote about the Kent State shootings.
A week later, the academic coordinator walked into my office to say, “Those pictures of the dead students they had in Life are all from high school. Everybody knows they didn’t look like that when the Guard fired.”
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Rich Cook was in the National Guard. A few weeks later, he and Mike Rogers were among a half dozen old fraternity brothers at a house party I attended near Youngstown. Rich Cook had lived next door to Rogers, just across the hall during my sophomore year. His car, that year, had been immersed in a flash flood near his home, and the stink refused to leave throughout an entire semester. A telephone had hung on the wall between his door and Rog- ers’. Three times that year Cook had torn loose the black receiver and carried it into my room after two a.m., each time silhouetted against the hall light, spitting, “It’s for you” as if that joke could never grow old.
Since finishing my third beer, I’d been using my near-miss with eye-witnessed history to condemn President Nixon, Ohio’s Governor Rhodes, and each and every one of the Kent State shooters. Cook, though he was avoiding the draft by being in the Guard, was soon drunk and angry and ready, he said, to shoot me if history repeated itself. He said he had a pistol in that long-ago flooded Ford
I could see through the screen door where white moths were frantic to enter, and he wondered out loud if I’d piss myself if he decided to show-and- tell me just how cowardly I could be up close with him and Rogers and Bob Bowers, who was just back from two tours with a pair of Purple Hearts, somebody who’d survived Hamburger Hill and nameless night patrols.
Cook asked if I was a Communist now or just some big-mouth asshole drinking free beer with someone like Bowers who had proved he was worth a shit. Rogers said nothing, but he looked like he remem- bered my acquiescence to his padded fists, and now Bowers was so tight-lipped I was ready to renounce my years of second-hand graduate school essays,
all of those sweet-sounding platitudes seeming as simple as pre-meal prayers while I composed apolo- gies and expected him to lay a combat-tested beat- ing upon me.
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"They parked their cars together
in the commuter lot, and every one of them sported bumper stick- ers that read America— Love It or Leave It. "
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