Page 20 - WTP VOl. XI #1

Exploitation (continued from preceding page)
I could say the overhead kitchen light beamed a Saint Paul moment of self-knowledge and conver- sion, but what it did was flicker once when the refrigerator hummed into life just before Bowers said, “Fuck the Guard” so matter-of-factly I heard the period drop into place, ambushing one argu- ment, at least, in Youngstown where August was fishtailing into September.
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arm in the chest. I fumbled, but the ball tumbled out of bounds. I sank to one knee and tried to get my breath, waiting for the penalty to be assessed. “Good hit,” somebody said. Nothing was called.
I understood I was getting my teacher evaluation. Like Mike Rogers, Rich Cook, and the motorcycle accident victim, those students thought they knew me for a coward. Four weeks later, Calvin was killed in Vietnam.
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Vietnam was still more than a year away for Calvin Clifford and his roommate when, not long before graduation, my roommate and I joined them for
a weekend at a deserted farmhouse owned by a relative of Calvin’s roommate. We weren’t there for late-college binge drinking; our girlfriends came along. No one had lived in the house for a couple
of years. We walked around whtat was left of the farm’s fields, played touch football, slow-drank beer or wine, and ate hot dogs we jammed onto pointed sticks to cook over a fire. After dark, we moved into separate rooms for the night, devising beds from abandoned furniture and sleeping bags. It felt daring and sexy, but before long we under- stood there were rats or mice or both in large numbers, and they had sensed every crumb we hadn’t picked up.
Some of us chose to sit up for the night; some of us chose to sleep outside. No one lay back down inside the house of scurrying paws. In an annual succes- sion, three of the couples were soon married—Cal- vin that summer, me the next, and then my room- mate the next. Despite the rats and approaching final exams, the weekend felt bucolic. Consequently, those two days never demanded to be on the page until now.
Throughout a half century of opportunity, my choices, when writing about Calvin and the other fraternity brothers I lived with for three years, have all been grounded in their proximity to violence.
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The note Calvin’s widow sent seemed to have a tone of repressed violence. I’ve taken her fifteen years
of silence as confirmation. If I could convince her
to listen to me at all, it would be to say how Calvin had, in some significant ways, saved my life from careening off in another direction that would, with- out question, have been worse. Thought she might, with good reason, answer by reminding me how his unselfishness had gone unrewarded while a prick
When school began in September, the Penn State Beaver Campus faculty fielded a team in the intra- mural seven-on-seven touch football league. One of us had played major college football at West Virgin- ia; the rest of us boasted some high school memo- ries or gym class heroics, good enough, it turned out, to go 5-1, tied for first and paired against a team of guys who all wore the same high school varsity jacket to our late October playoff game. Five of them were enrolled in one of my sections of introductory composition, two of them carrying Ds, another an F, but it wasn’t their grades that made them see me as the enemy, it was my status as the Kent State radi- cal because I’d spoken briefly at a campus rally and submitted a “Kent State was Murder” opinion piece to the campus newspaper.
They parked their cars together in the commuter lot, and every one of them sported bumper stickers that read America—Love It or Leave It. As if there were a dress code, all of them wore their hair short, and none of them had sideburns like I did. Three
of them had made a point to tell me they had older brothers in Vietnam.
I wasn’t thinking about any of that until I went out for a pass, the WVU alum tossing a perfect spiral my way. Just as I extended for the ball, the world suddenly spun out of control. I lay on my back for a few seconds to get reoriented. “What happened?” I asked when I got back to the huddle.
“You were clotheslined,“ the former Division I player said, laughing as if he’d enjoyed the incompletion.
Clotheslining in touch football seemed like an obvi- ous penalty, but the student referee standing nearby was expressionless, his whistle quiet. I didn’t even know which of the players on the other team had thrown his forearm under my chin and spun me head over heels.
A few plays after that, my legs back under me, I caught a short, sideline pass and turned up field, taking one step before I took a shoulder and fore-
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