Memoirs of an Insane Age
Allison, Wick
Wick Allison Memoirs of an Insane Age The year is measured in semesters. On the first day of the springs semester, my last semester, I arrived on campus at a comfortable hour and strolled over to...
...The revelation brought joyful tears to his eyes...
...If the river of emotion arose from a single source, if the madness had a central purpose or reason, it soon became disconnected, it broke away and became an event in itself...
...A horse has four legs...
...We were desperate men, and the madness was in control...
...Through the uppermost corner of my right eye I saw T.C...
...As he liked to point out, patronizing affection was a sure signal of social contempt...
...I made my way to the composing table with a carefully rehearsed indifference to his existence, sat down at my usual chair, and began poring studiously over the latest issue of the Texan...
...tried to rush the front door to retrieve his accountant's desk I would instinctively grab the letter-opener and growl menacingly until he slinked away...
...His pointed teeth, and his posture when bent over the accountant's desk...
...When matters got really out of hand, I would practice syllogisms and other exercises in logic, sometimes aloud before gathered friends, like a banned priest reciting whispered secrets of salvation...
...With short heaving breaths he told us that he had been running from place to place on campus asking different people how closing down the University of Texas would end the war in Vietnam...
...A gesture of mourning, they said...
...A pretty face framed with blond hair...
...Nobody missed them...
...I often thought his laughter was a bit forced, but we welcomed it nevertheless...
...The radical student caucus saw it was being upstaged...
...The madness spread beyond all control, and touched everything...
...The much-proclaimed "end of ideology" was forgotten...
...After deliberating several proposals, they came up with a real winner, a sure-fire hit: an all-night student vigil on the university's main mall...
...Thoughts of the courtroom scene swirled in my mind...
...T.C...
...It did...
...Mourning...
...Inside, shaking my head at the pious inaccuracy of the quotation, I rounded a corner to the left, avoided a collision with a Daily Texan reporter interviewing himself, and entered the familiar cluttered precincts of the magazine office...
...We survived that last semester at an American university, but only by the slimmest of margins...
...I began peeking around the edges of the paper for a possible weapon...
...turn and give me his most piercing glower...
...Later I was to serve with a commission charged with explaining the pandemonium of that year to the President...
...On the modem American campus, who sees a professor anyway...
...His eyes had a strange gleam as he sketchily related the known facts...
...It just doesn't work...
...This time it was the faculty who voted to close the university...
...he was certainly nowhere near an American university...
...You're trying to destroy me...
...He didn't pretend to be sane...
...I couldn't find him and was saved...
...The minute I walked in my heart sank...
...II It was the year of Cambodia and Kent State...
...Should have shot the whole bunch of 'em...
...And, for blessed reason's sake, who in Washington could be expected to explain it...
...Seated at his stool bent over his old accountant's desk was my Nemesis, my Waterloo...
...Lassie is a horse you fool...
...My own girlfriend...
...A minor argument now and then, yes...
...Atkinson, tiredly skeptical and our best wit, would push a beer in my direction and launch into one of his remarkable imitations of the latest campus heroes, reducing their sizeable buffoonery to manageable limits...
...Swirling thoughts of the courtroom scene bellowed in my mind...
...Lassie is a horse...
...Reading Mao had not capsized T.C.'s fragile mind...
...I sighed audibly...
...More importantly, they brought three rock bands, and over a hundred cases of beer, frisbees, and pot...
...to oppose the raging tide was to throw yourself at the mercy of the hurricane...
...His face was heavily lined, older, and his voice was broken with half-sobs...
...I understood the portent of the scene...
...I knew perfectly well what caused it...
...There are times when the only answer is to ignore the question...
...A year of burnings and marches, bombings and rallies...
...His hair was long, and his clothes were both ragged and stylish, the ultimate in radical apparel...
...Or, more appropriately, every apartment...
...On the first day of the springs semester, my last semester, I arrived on campus at a comfortable hour and strolled over to the Journalism Building, the one with "veritas vincit omnia" carved in block letters on the concrete staircase leading to the front doors...
...III Two months after my confrontation with T.C, the radical student caucus voted to close down the university in protest against the Vietnam war...
...I could only nod sympathetically...
...He would only add to the confusion by strumming his guitar and reciting Ginsberg...
...In the hallway I ran into a buddy who said he had gone to class for the first time in three months...
...Veritas vincit omnia" is bad syntax, but since the occupants of this building were known for their flagrant disregard for syntax and grammar in English, I don't suppose anyone ever bothered about it in Latin...
...YOU'RE TRYING TO DESTROY ME...
...His sharp teeth glistened, and I could see down his throat where the tonsils were swelling...
...And, God help me, I was all alone...
...Like the Black Plague over Europe, it struck at every house...
...It was the madness...
...My hands were quivering, my nerves taut...
...Such a scheme was bound to draw a crowd...
...By the slimmest of margins...
...Bartlett rushed in with the news, disrupting an intense game of spades...
...I recently read an article by an eminent conservative scholar reflecting on that incredible period...
...I returned to my newspaper, but the printed words were blurred into black streaks...
...The suggestion was received with enthusiasm...
...But the question hung in the silent air for a long time until Bartlett, always practical, suggested that we skip the amenities and go get drunk...
...The strike was having its effect...
...It could have been Jamie Wyeth's latest gallery exhibit for all that it mattered...
...This was the biggest year for ideology since 1917...
...A boom year for sloganeers and poster printers...
...He was actually paid by the university to run errands for the magazine's manager...
...took a healthy swig from the Coke bottle and stalked out of the room...
...I knew the hour of madness was at hand...
...Higher education in America, which in the best of times proceeds at a snail's pace, came to a grinding halt...
...was only one of them, though more honest than the rest...
...People were going to class...
...No jury in the world would...
...Then with a jolt I recognized a face...
...We few sane ones did what we could to shore up each other's flagging courage...
...I was chuckling over the discovery when Atkinson entered the office...
...Should shoot some around here...
...We gathered in small groups for safety's sake, and we drank very much very often, and we thought only of survival...
...The faculty, its collective pride wounded, voted to strike...
...Inspired, I went looking for T.C...
...Bartlett, eminently practical and stal-wartly provincial, would drop by the magazine office to laugh uproariously over the day's editorials in the Texan, the curious ramblings of our colleagues down the hall...
...Whenever T.C...
...T.C...
...I was prepared for the assault...
...grabbed a Coke bottle...
...Lassie has four legs...
...Instead he was glaring at me and about to speak...
...The word was meaningless...
...But opposition...
...When we put Richard to bed that night we noted with satisfaction that he snored loudly and slept in blissful peace...
...Then he paused greedily and hoarded our attention...
...Who could explain it...
...Several times I would be working at the composing table while Atkinson leaned back in his chair studying a half-torn page stuck in his typewriter...
...Perhaps the root of the madness was Vietnam...
...had never heard of Mao...
...They brought blankets and sleeping bags...
...When things got out of hand, perhaps a sarcastic diatribe in the Texan or the magazine...
...The others did...
...During that year the eminent conservative scholar must have been in Afghanistan...
...The next afternoon Richard, one of those quietly reflective types, appeared at the magazine's office...
...We were slipping...
...I wandered through the mall, stepping over embracing bodies, avoiding bacchanalian dancers, and watching my generation's unique new form of mourning...
...His red beard, blazing eyes, flushed though barely visible cheeks...
...The next morning, after an argument at breakfast and a glass of orange juice in my face, I made my way to the Journalism Building...
...Voting to close the university had become such a matter of routine by now that the administration and student body took it for granted and ignored it...
...With a beer in her hand...
...The madness occurred and it still lingers...
...V The greatest blow came with the Kent State killings...
...I beamed at Mm...
...T.C...
...The commission was composed of honorable, if slightly biased, men who ended up reflecting the pandemonium instead of explaining it...
...His short height...
...Five thousand boys and girls acting their age...
...That was no year for reasoned resistance...
...I saw myself on the stand and heard the solemn pronouncement: "Not guilty by reason of temporary insanity...
...Atkinson was an inexplicable paradox to our brethren down the hall...
...He was often mistaken for one of Them, which gave him a sort of devilish pleasure...
...Suddenly the chair would tilt forward...
...In fact, the others were the most pretentious pretenders I have ever encountered...
...His eyes were glazed, and we patted his shoulder in dismay...
...Maybe the eminent conservative scholar will see that instead of being censured for not having eradicated it, we should be congratulated for having survived it - to tell the tale.ed for having survived it - to tell the tale...
...Students, even notoriously lazy students, were experiencing a sudden explosion of scholarly passion...
...I asked innocently, with my harried professor's interrupted look...
...I took her by the hand, lifted her to her feet, and fed her straight home...
...fits - the present tense indicating that he still does, if he's still alive, a question which has never bothered me - he fits my ideal image of the successful comic book cartoonist...
...It's been going around lately, you know...
...He demanded to know why no students stood up to defend civilized order during the great onslaught of 1970...
...The university witnessed the largest single fraternity party in its history...
...IV When the President ordered the Cambodian excursion we knew what to expect and we tried to steel ourselves, but the tide was still overwhelming...
...VI That is how we survived, all of us...
...I began to look frantically for a weapon...
...At 3 a.m...
...Bartlett had risen by the sweat of his brow from that favorite of all sociologists' muddles, the lower classes - and he wasn't too pleased by the sudden affection expressed by these long-haired, solidly bourgeois students for the poor, the blacks, the Indians, the dispossessed...
...It was my last stand for male chauvinism...
...He would pause and look beseechingly in my direction...
...On the chosen night 5,000 (that's five thousand) bodies covered the mall...
...Madness was in the air that spring, and I was one of the few who had not tasted it, although I couldn't avoid the odor of its presence...
...No, we few who remained sane did so only through our cowardice...
...T.C could have been putting the finishing touches on next month's Daffy Duck series...
...The screech nearly jolted me from my chair...
...We editors called him The Creep, which is more a biological classification than a name...
...my last semester at the university, and I was surrounded by madmen...
...What...
...I had suggested in a meeting earlier in the week that the funds spent on our errand-runner might be better used to pay our starving student writers...
Vol. 6 • January 1973 • No. 4
