the draft 1

 I was hoping for some comment on The Great Wall this overcast Monday morning.  Sundays I almost always have the blues, kind of drag myself through the day. telling myself this is just a thing, no big deal, it will be gone Monday morning when I will be right back with the crew ready to get things done, and I usually like to start out the day responding on the blog, but this morning there is nothing.  Well, very well then I shall continue.

So that story, The Great Wall, many of the incidents were ripped from my faded newspapers.  There was a Dawn Weaver and early on she came to work with her eyes frozen shut, and was the heroine of the morning.  She was always a steady hand guiding her huge heavy tray of bowls and dishes steaming with hot Chinese food through the crowded shifting passageways of the dining room and coming for a clean landing on the tray stand next to the table of eager eaters.

It was some years later that I was shocked to learn that she was helping herself to booze out of that upstairs bar.  I think I have already explained how that face in the bowl of Special Great Wall Won Ton Soup happened.  There was a Vincent who did paint a big mural of vaguely tropical things on one of the walls of the House of Chin.  

There was a time when George was arrested for drunken driving and me and a hostess and a dishwasher were delegated to bail him out, but we had to wait for him to get fully booked, so we sat around in our regular bar across the street from the cop shop with a wad of money and the keys to his Buick Riviera, and at the time in was in the back of my mind that we could, you know, just go.  Out of town where University Avenue ran into I 57, you hit a fork in the road where you could go to Chicago or Memphis.  Of course I always took the fork to Chicago, but it was always in the back of my mind that someday, on a whim, I would turn south and go to that mysterious city of Memphis.

Never happened of course, and I never kissed the devil in her stained red dress in a crumby bar while a blues song played on the jukebox.

Paths never taken.

But here is a path that I did take, from not graduating in June of 1967 and losing my student deferment to getting my CO in the late summer of 1969.  It is pretty much all true though some details may have been polished a bit.

I would have graduated the summer of 1967.  It was theoretically possible if I'd passed all my courses, but of course I didn't. My parents didn't find out I wasn't graduating until the last moment.  I'd known it for some time, but how did you do tell that to your parents who were planning on coming down for graduation?  Marlene and I used to joke about it.  How maybe we could rent some caps and gowns and get some friends to cooperate in a phony ceremony.  It was pretty funny, but even as I was laughing I would worry about how I would slip this dagger into my parents' hearts.

 Well I did it somehow eventually.  They did come down though, out of momentum, to try to get some kind of explanation or something.  I had been seeing this guy I called my shrink, actually a counselor in the Student Services building.  I'd written my parents about him and my mom insisted on seeing him.  These things happen was the only explanation he could give them.  On the way out of his office my mom bumped into somebody, or maybe they into her.  She gave them a raft of shit, why don't you watch where you're going.  She went on and on.  She was really pissed.

 But then that was over, and I was free.  I went out to the quad to hang with my friends.  It was a hot day and I had taken off my boots to walk around barefoot.  When I went back to pick them up I noticed that they were all scruffy, beat up and torn.  Well I wouldn't need them anymore.  I left them on the quad.  I was free. 

 Champaign Urbana in the summer is a wonderful place.  No hordes of students, the living is easy.  I slept on couches, wandered down to the union in the late morning and hung out there until it was time for the bars to open.  Everything was green and weedy under my bare feet.  There was no time, not really.  This would never end.

 I moved in with Marlene.  This was nice.  But a couple days into that I was brushing my teeth and she caught me using her toothpaste.  

 Well what was the big deal?  I didn't have any of my own so I was using hers.

 You don't have anything do you?

 Well no.  I'm free.

 Freeloading more like it.  Did I expect that I was going to just freeload off her indefinitely?

 That is what I had expected, but I knew better than to say that.

 Why didn't I get a job?

 A job?  I supposed I could try, but who was going to hire me with all my hair and my beard?

 Why don't you cut it off then?  

 Cut off my hair?  How could this be, the love of my life was asking me to cut off my hair?

 But that's what I did eventually.  Got a job at the Wigwam waiting tables and eventually moved into tending bar, working those eleven hour days six days a week.

 Marlene meanwhile had taken up with some mope.  A lump of a guy really, sat around reading philosophy or mysticism or something.  Was always depressed, didn't have much to say.  I don't know what she saw in him.  Maybe she thought he was deep.  I didn't see him as any real competition, just a stupid little fling of hers.  I could get her back at any time, whenever I decided to make my move.  Then she moved to Berkeley and took the mope with her.