Cabin_ Two Brothers, a Dream, and Five Acres in Maine - Lou Ureneck [52]
My mother had by then been near an emotional collapse from worry about money and the conflict with Johnny, and his departure brought her a combination of sadness and relief, setting in motion a long melancholic emptiness that went on for years. It broke her. She experienced his departure as a kind of death after a long illness. But Paul’s reaction was angry and violent; he was devastated. He was a junior in high school by then, and he and Johnny had continued to be close, despite the boozing. It was right around this time that Paul got his first motorcycle. It was a 90-cubic-centimeter dirt bike, which is a lot of power for a boy tearing through the woods on sandy paths and between trees. Johnny loved motorcycles—he had owned an Indian as a young man—and he put his big frame on Paul’s tiny dirt bike to try it out. Motorcycles were one more way that they related to each other. Johnny’s departure—no good-bye, nothing—clobbered Paul. I remember coming home from college and discovering him intent on finding Johnny. He said he would track him down in whatever beer joint he had disappeared into and (he said) beat the shit out of him. It was love turned overnight to rage. How could Johnny have done this to him?
Paul’s life pivoted in another way too. As a child, he had been mischievous and unruly. As a teenager, he became politicized, which made his rebellion dangerous. In his sophomore year of high school, a friend handed him a flyer in the school hallway that had been produced by the Students for a Democratic Society. The flyer attacked the Vietnam War. There was a meeting, and Paul attended it with his friend. He found it interesting. In 1969, a half million American troops were in Vietnam, and nearly a thousand were being killed a month. A quarter of a million people marched on Washington to protest the war.
Paul was taking an economics class at the time. He asked the teacher challenging questions about capitalism. This was not part of the day’s lesson, the teacher said. Paul persisted. The teacher fumed. “This is an economics class, right?” Paul said out loud. He was sent to the principal’s office.
He let his hair grow long. In the summer, he went to rock concerts, mainly in Philadelphia, to see the Rolling Stones, Ten Years After, Procol Harum, Alice Cooper, James Taylor and Bob Dylan. He smoked marijuana and, to the complete consternation of the local police, began dating the daughter of the town’s deputy police chief.
I was aware only vaguely of the life he was living. I came home in the summer from college and worked long hot days at a construction job that typically left me so exhausted that I showered and went right to sleep when I got home. Sometimes I didn’t even have the energy to shower and I fell asleep in my work clothes.
Then, in the fall of Paul’s senior year of high school, there came an event that landed him in serious trouble. A bomb threat was called into the high school while he was in class. Students were evacuated to the gym while the police searched the school. The hundreds of students in the gym were restless and noisy, as they are when they are in a big group and loosely supervised, and the teachers there, too, were talking among themselves and kibitzing. An assistant principal went to a microphone and scolded the students for being noisy. He demanded silence. Paul stood up in the crowded room and said something like, “Why don’t you say something to the teachers? They’re talking too.” The students cheered. A back-and-forth ensued between Paul and the assistant principal. Paul walked out. Incredibly, several hundred students