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My mother called me at college. “They’re throwing Paul out of high school. Can you come home?” I came back from New Hampshire, a sophisticated college senior (or so I thought) and English literature major, and made an appointment with the school principal. I brought my mother along. My goal was Paul’s reinstatement with a pledge that he would cause no further trouble. This brought weak smiles from the administrators in the room. They countered with a proposition: Paul could finish school but not at Toms River. They offered a GED program in North Dakota where he would also work with Indians to satisfy his desire to work with the oppressed. (Yes, they wanted him on a reservation!) The adventure completely appealed to Paul, and a compromise was worked out. The program would begin in the summer, several months away. They also wanted him away, out of town, in the interim. So he came back with me to college and slept in my room. He found college life amenable and especially enjoyed the parties.

After a month, the high school decided against the Indian program—because of the expense, I think—and he was readmitted to finish his senior year. By then, with encouragement from the school administration, he had come under the surveillance of the township police. He had gotten under their skins too. They waited patiently for him to make the wrong move. Weeks before he was going to graduate, he was approached by an older guy at Seaside Heights—the nearby boardwalk resort town where Paul and his friends often hung out. The guy was a Vietnam vet and a local hippie who had a reputation, literally, for having gone to pot. He wanted to buy some grass. Could Paul help him out? Paul said yes and made a contact for him, and the grass was delivered by an intermediary. A couple of months later, in a sweep through Ocean County, dozens of arrests were made and a warrant was issued for Paul’s arrest. The hippie had been a narcotics agent. This was a new order of seriousness. Paul turned himself in to the police.

The cops, of course, were gleeful. He was booked at the Dover Township police station and taken through the various stations of the cross—mug shot, fingerprinting, holding cell. While there and waiting, he saw the mother of one of his friends who worked in the courthouse. Paul said hello. She wanted to know what he was doing at the police station. He told her.

“Oh my,” she said.

Paul and her son were close friends. She was one of those nononsense and capable women who as secretaries run courthouses, school district offices and probably the offices of congressmen. (I had known many from my mother’s beauty shop, where they had their hair done religiously every Thursday. Shampoo and set.) She said she would see what could be done. Two days passed. She got back to him: the police would be willing to file the charges with no prosecution but without dismissal if he left Toms River for at least a year and enrolled in college. This was a deal even a DA would have had trouble arranging.

So off he went to Monmouth College, majoring in sociology and discovering Marcuse, Marx and the Grateful Dead. He lived with a group of guys in a big house in Long Branch, just around the corner from the Stone Pony bar in Asbury Park, where a singer and guitar player named Springsteen was getting started. It was there that he met the dark-eyed beauty from Philadelphia, and the two of them organized demonstrations against the war at Fort Monmouth down the road from the college. My mother sent me the clippings from the Asbury Park Press. One of her sons was in the newspaper, which was not nothing.

CHAPTER 6

THE FRAME

I had been stubborn about salvaging the timbers because I knew that no part of this cabin would give me more pleasure than assembling its frame. In an odd way, the urge to raise those timbers was rooted in my need to put my life back together, or at least the pieces of it that had felt broken. I don’t know how I had connected these two impulses, to build and to reorder my life, or how