Duke University - Chanticleer Yearbook (Durham, NC)

Text from Pages 1 - 168 of the 1975 volume:

t« - ' ■ ' (■ . • ■■■ - m r ' ;. ' -- .V.. .-v -- Mm - ■ ' - H is Alabaster City ' s Gleam After Dorothy nodded out in Kansas and wrote it all into our culture, the rains came again and we were consumed by them; lost, without our wizard. Instead of wizards, after the rains, we got lizards. Huge iguana-like beasts of avarice and ambition prowled the jade halls of power, consuming all the children, ail the priests. The halls of power turned a deeper green. The lizards grinned at us from their high windows and ran their forked tongues quickly in and out, testing our minds. Finding them quiet in terror, the lizards slept. They are asleep, brothers. An old story; Once there was a young man who went to Duke and later left to experience those adventures that would befall him as he travelled through life. jl ' ' - ' 5 ' it - v 1 .. . - «srf - - ' vgl$ji ' V  SI-- 7 f J1 uK •? «nvi ' fttjlftM 1 mffl m fwmwHW r.u ' .V. t!:ljt-.: ' :! ' M B P B H ' WyiWB||lH| B Wffff - ' iu My ass hurt, but othervri.se I felt good. I had consaanunated someone ' s fantasy, Brothers, I shouted lauding, you ' re not going to believe this, but I love you, Put a slug in the motherfucker ' s head, one of them said, Let ' s get out of here, said another, I wanted them to know that they had shot themselves. They left. So they didn ' t know how to circle dates on their calendar: birthdays, anniversaries, places in time where we all connect, I dragged my bleeding ass to the infirmary, My God, what happened to you? a black physician ' s assistant wanted to know, I shot myself, I told him, Ri t, And I ' m the Pope, the guy said. You just lie down on your stomach. This is going to hurt. The buckshot falling from his tweezers into a stainless steel dish beat the rhythm to Billie Holliday ' s Stormy Weather. It was raining. Every little thing I ever had was gone. Soon even the buckshot was gone. Back on the street, my fingers felt like I had lost my gloves. I wanted a horn. With my last twenty bucks I bou t a trombone from Sam ' s Pawn Shop. The sheet music to Hot Cross Buns was in the case with my horn. That ' s where I started. A month later I was working out some glider flints throu heavy turbulence in Back Door Man. Outside it was quiet; one of those days you ' re afraid to put your hands on, like wet paint. Big broken notes flopped out of the bell and rolled around the floor. Every once and a while I swept them up and put them in half full bottles of tequila, like tarragon in vinegar. At ni t I ' d drink the mixture, using cocaine for salt and guavas instead of lemons. I still ate shit. K on ' ' ' ' ' i camels off Che middle class i 10 Writing about dance is one of the hardest assignments anyone could hope for: writers may think in print, but dancers think in mo- tion. The essence of movement gets lost in the syntax, and the writer can only suggest im- ages that will force the reader ' s imagination to recreate the dance. The result is frustration; the effort, in many cases, futile. So, novelists write theory, artists write manifestoes, dan- cers write autobiographies. I ' m faced with the criticism that dance is merely narcissism made performing art. It ' s painfully true. I would like to believe otherwise, but I ' m afraid self-love is implicit in the creative process — if it ' s not applause you ' re competiting for, its gallery prizes or National Book Awards or any smaller species of pats-on-the-back. Why does anyone create but to receive love? And yet there must be more to it than that, for all artists are not love- starved egomaniacs. Though some might argue that dance re- quires self-obsession, it precludes self- indulgence. Dance is a discipline as well as an art form. More rigorous than all the demands of of diet and exercise is the psychological discipline of belief in self — the confidence that, as a choreographer, one has something important to say, and that, as a performer, one ' s means of expression is worthy of so- meone else ' s designs. Priorities are delicately arranged, but the dance must always come first. Edwin Denby realized that, A fine dancer who believes in dancing more than in himself is a wonderful thing. This discipline of emotion is perhaps hardest of all. Self-pity manifests itself in new ways: adhering to old patterns of movement, breaking the diet, cutting a class. These are only temporary setbacks in along line of what must be called temporary advances. For children, movement is spontaneous. They jump for joy, they shake with laughter. As we grow, movement becomes more calculated, backed by a conscious design. Dance as an art form contains elements of each: composition and improvisation, choreography and performance. How is movement created? Perhaps more than any other art, dance involves every aspect of the personality in creation: the con- scious mind develops the intent as far as it may go in ideas, the subconscious mind creates the movement, and the body executes it. Dance unites the parts of the person segmented by our society, from Eighteenth- century rationalism right down to Twentieth- century specialization. Though coordination has come to mean physical aptitude, its mean- ing reaches further to the synchronization of mind and body. The body improvises movement, the mind improves it. This union of body and mind is, of all the arts, peculiar to dance. That which has always been labelled mindless in the arts has been renamed in the Twentieth century — the act of creation arises from the sub- conscious mind, guided or directed by con- scious principles or intent. The choreo- grapher may conceive of a theme — big, sustained, stationary movement or small, quick steps in a pattern — then the production of the movement ultimately rests with the body ' s experiments, the invention of rhythm in motion. The expressive virtue of any dancing is its rhythm, and its rhythm is felt only in continui- ty, Denby said. To dance is to surrender your movement to a higher rhythm, a rhythm which controls. This is the maxim which pro- duces effortlessness in dancers. If the spring of a leap is on the first beat and the landing is timed for the fourth, the dancer soars through the second and third, reluctant to come down. The rhythm, however complex, is non- verbal, subconscious. It is the driving rhythm, at the heart of one ' s nervous system, that provides the direct con- nection between the subconscious mind and the physical movement. When two dancers agree on a rhythm, they dance together. With rhythm as the impetus for movement, the dancer ceases to think in ideas or words and dwells on the throbbing rhythmic current. Accusations of stupidity are levelled im- mediately: dance requires no mind, dance is anti-intellectual. As for the former (made only by non-dancers, not because dancers haven ' t the insight, but because those who do not dance fail to understand the relationship of mind to body), the best contradiction is found in the fact that the best dancers are indeed the brightest. Once a rhythm has overtaken the central nervous system, manifesting itself in movement, the brain goes to work to im- prove the movement as art. To add a pause here, a burst of energy there, to look up, to raise the leg higher before bringing it down are all functions of the mind as critic of the body as performer. The mind perfects the rhythm which the body has assi milated. The mindless dancer can only last as long as someone else is thinking for her. The smart dancer is one who brings all that she has learned of life to dancing: ultimately, she is the more interesting, the more complex to watch. With the advent of modern dance came the introduction of a wide variety of dance aesthetics. In our culture, dance has broken from the unified system of training and terminology to new approaches, many of them unsystematic. The dancer finds the theory with which both his mind and body are most at home, and then commits herself to It. Dance ' s double nature — the dancer as both creator and work of art — makes it the most in- tensely expressive and personal of all the arts. The dancer can do very little to alter the struc- ture of her body or the patterns of movement and gesture ingrained since childhood. Traditionally it has been a woman ' s art form, more subjective than objective as with most avenues of expression frequented by women. Whereas me have always dealt with the same themes on a grander scale, in both life and in art, women have been constrained by their some what limited roles and ex- periences. However, as there is no female counterpart for Dostoyevsky, there is no male match for Isadora. But the situation is chang- ing. The ideal woman is no longer ethereal and untouchable: neither is the ideal man merely her support. In the social sense, movement is indicative of one ' s attitude toward self and others. This aspect has carried over into the isolation of movement in dance. Dance is a social art, re- quiring awareness of and sensitivity to other dancers. Dance is one art form which can never become devoid of humanity. Deborah Jowitt has emphasized this: The seemingly tireless boys and girls spin- ning and leaping and taunting gravity are perhaps more vital to our spiritual defense than a standing army to our military de- fense. In all but the most morbidly sexy modern ballets, people dance optimistical- ly, openly, and with graciousness and trust toward each other. This is far from a trivial matter. HBD B l i R Nvi HI ■ ; s i To dance: to move in rhythm. There are no standard definitions which produce immediate understanding. A dancer moves in rhythm — to what? To music sometimes, to other bodies, to personal body — happenings: heartbeat, breath. Dance is reaching the awareness of growing numbers of people. And, as with any other valuable phenomenon in the public eye, its foundations are questioned, changed, remolded. There are those who argue that traditional European dance is the ultimate in achievement, while others claim that we are only now cracking the surface to discover the limits (if they exist) of the dance experience. But, for all the abstraction, dance is always a personal experience — it ' s personal for the viewer as well as for the dancer. There ' s something that often happens in situations which require some amount of concentration and it ' s particularly noticeable when the person concerned is trying hard not to concentrate: the monologue. It invariably seems to present itself in choreography. There are decisions to be made and the monologue appears: try this — it looks better with the leg higher, but feels safers with the leg lower — try these two phrases together — now smooth out the transition, and on and on. The monologue sometimes follows movement and sometimes leads and sometimes acts as a running commentary on the work in progress. It is meditative and always present. Its presence says something about the relationships between mind and body that are a necessary part of choreography. The most obvious dancer ' s pitfall is attachment to the corporeal: if a body is an instrument, as it is in dance, the easiest thing to do is to get caught up in a body trip (my extension is getting better, alignment looks pretty good). But dance has to be a mind experience too. The question of which takes over during specific points of a dance has a lot to do with how the dance looks to other people and with how it feels to the dancer. There is something very liberating about dancing without thinking — uncontrolled movement. There is a different experience involved in dance-with-thought. It is no less liberating and, at least in my own experience, just as cathartic. Dancers dance for many reasons, but one of the most important is that it feels good, it ' s a rush. We ' re told by Paul Reps and our own experience that if the things we try to do aren ' t fun, they probably aren ' t worth doing. So we think and we move and we spend hours working on a piece that never quite works out and it ' s excruciating sometimes to go through a dance class immediately after alarm clock and breakfast, but there is a pleasure in it too. It can ' t be pinned down to specific happenings. But in its totality, in the relationship between mind and body that dance requires, the da nce process encourages exploration of consciousness. And that ' s the most liberating experience of all. LKD ®il ■.vSi| r ' . ' The Chapel My first visit to the chapel came in the midst of pro- found boredom. Worn dovm slowly from the September heat and made nauseous by the whole situation of freshman week, I decided to enter the backwards blasphemy as Christ might have entered his tomb a few days before Golgotha. Check it out, pre— feel the scene. The doors were hot to the touch, yet a cool blast that came from beyond them settled the mission in the face of last minute rationalities. I entered, ig- noring the guest book, ignoring the woman at the desk, ignoring the five perfumed women imitating angels at the side. Although the altar bored me from a distance, I pro- ceeded up the aisle, confident of my ability to view the crucifixion dispassionately, and concentrated on my lack of reverence. A yo mg woman I would not meet until three months later was the only other person in the long hall. She did not greet me, yet an affinity was there. I was to learn about karma that year, and this same woman was to offer me qualudes at an orgy, for God ' s sake, that I was to unwillingly attend the night of my first experience with LSD-25. She wasn ' t praying. The cmicifixion of Jesus Christ has always struck me as perhaps the most tragic example of the himan condition. No shit cry the theologians, yet I do not understand their trans- cendent salvations derived from the act. God crucifies his most lovely manifestation. He does it everyday. Soft, beautiful babies are torn to shreds by shrapnel, blood- wetting their mothers. Young men in a city, hate filling their bellies, whip each other with radio antennas, scars forever. How many million people on this earth worship the symbol of that torture, search for its repetition with a whip of guilt, nailing themselves to a confused binary mecha- nism that killed God himself? Do not tell me that Christ was reborn. They worship his death, not his life. The pilgrim of Emmaus was a new, innocent man, not really knowing his own crucifixion. Having come within twenty feet of the altar, I halted in the middle of the aisle and stood there a few moments, staring. The power of the cross ti tened my stomach. Smiling in recognition, though still wary of its direction, I began to wonder at ray presence here. Moving to the left, I sat down and let my stomach go. I heard a preacher say, surrender yourself, all children of God, be not amused that your God is odd. I sat for an hour, not bored, not mad, not even amused then. Nothing happened, the cross endured. In the middle of my vacant reverie, the young woman on my right left suddenly with a broad smile on her face. As I got up to leave, I saw her in the back of the chapel looking toward me. She carefully ignored me as I walked out into the morning sun. I later learned her name was Xaviera. aA 1 £5- t:? ir W Mm fd - N -. i r Oq v r v to- i ' v; n: W-i ' kM - i • ' MO : V- ' •■■■ ' : d The Par-fcies In the freshman dorm, the house-master told us we should have a party. We changed the records in the juke box, got the house-master to b-uy us the strongest vodka he could get, and filled the rest of the garbage can with ice and Hawaiian Punch. We drew Carribean scenes on signs and distributed them throu out East Campus. The few women who didn ' t go home alone, seized the opportimity to fuck as many of us as they could. Our man couldn ' t get it up. ' . ' m- EV. ' m m0 : ' i ' ' ' People don ' t want to accept that about themselves, that they ' re part of the general rot, and they react to that angrily, which is a very pure reaction, and it ' s good that it happened in a sense. For even the most politicized people here at Duke, they share a common dream, and that dream has to do with finding an interesting profession, a stable job that will allow them to rise on the ladder, a marriage that ' s stable and sustains them for a long time, a sheltered kind of environment where they ' re protected against not only misfortune, but surprise. There ' s that certainty of waking up and knowing that that day ' s not going to be different from the day before — it ' s all part of that myth. And here comes this nut on stage with his Wild Turkey swinging from his hips telling them not only is that image crap, filled with rot and corruption, but it ain ' t gonna happen. No matter how much you invest and how many chips you put on the table and how many graduate schools you attend and how many teachers you suck up to and how many unintelligible theses you write, it ain ' t gonna happen. Because somewhere at the center of this society something is broken, and it ' s not gonna be repaired by dreaming a myth or believing in a myth. When someone presents that kind of truth it ' s so incomprehensible it ' s really tough to deal with. — From November, 1974, interview with Bernard Lefkowitz, journalist and visiting Duke professor. Reporter, ri por ter, n. One who reports; a member of a newspaper staff whose duty it is to give an account of the proceedings of public meetings and entertainments, collects information respecting interesting or important events, and the like. — Webster, not a Duke professor or a journalist. gonzoid specimen number 1 Page Auditorium. October 22, about nine-thirty. This will be hard. Leaving with the chaos vibes I kick a paper airplane that somehow got long-armed to the back rows and wonder how this will be done. Cannot find Dean Griffith but talk briefly to badly shaken Denise Creech in Flowers Lounge. Leave the poor girl alone. Deliberately shirk my responsibility to COVER (the whole) STORY and go with Jane to the CI where people jokingly console me about having to resurrect some front page fire from the ashes of this whiskeyed journalist ' s speech. I make notes. My head has been spinning all evening long from this darvon Pickens gave me for the eye infection and it makes the two beers go twice as far, so am roughly in Hunter ' s shape when I get around to mounting two flights of stairs, open a closed door that says Editor on it. I am not up to this. Where have you been anyway? David asks. The bad stare is justified, of course. I have been fucking around in the Cambridge Inn instead of transforming myself into the relentless amphetemined lemming that all good reporters are. He is used to this kind of flaming imcompetence on the Chronicle, only not so carefully planned and executed. Steve is staring blankly at the floor, thinking, hopefully, and some Union heavies are assembled for their official backstage report to the press. Tried to find Dean Griffith, I explain, talked to Denise there a little — uh, hi Denise — but mainly went to the CI. Didn ' t want to go into it, really, that dinner at the pits, my eye, the coffee to kill the darvon, the speech bummer and now these beers were making me ill. My eye throbbed and I wanted to go to bed. Steve finally lifts his head. Look, it ' s manageable, it ' s manageable. Dan does the speech story, David, you do the Union side of it. We ' ll run two stories. It is 10:30. Leave with my notebook for the managing editor ' s cubby hole to start typing, pause briefly to notice perhaps for the hundredth time that magic-markered gem scribbled over the drinking fountain: ' The only dope worth shooting is Nixon. At least four years old, it is — even if half-serious — a vestige of the political pretensions the Chronicle once had or pretended to have. Maybe they have never been more than nice, introverted suburban kids exchanging polo shirts and Bass Weejuns for workshirts and sandals (but with tweed in the closet), their cocktail party civility for a little rhetoric, but they could be very serious people. It was not just the political tone then, wrought through tough editorials on everything from the war, sexism and racism to scum in the garden pond, but the corresponding energies. At three in the morning in 1971 I once watched in horror as the managing editor penned a steamy half-edit essentially accusing UNC football coach Bill Dooley of murdering that player who dropped dead while running around the track. Something which could never happen now, the country, Duke students and so the Chronicle having mellowed out. Everybody but Thompson: No one has beaten him as bad as he deserves, and no one really comprehends how evil he is. The horror of it all is that he reflects the rot in all of us. I grab a fat stack of eight-and-a-half by eleven yellow copy paper out of a drawer. Up at third floor Flowers the stuff is everywhere, strewn on the floor, tacked up on walls and slipped into typewriter carriages for memos between staff people. The first time I used it was early in 1971 for an article on the new West campus tennis courts. The piece is short, not very good and (to let me know this) crammed under the Spectrum section on page two. The assistant managing editor that night was very nice about it, maybe too kind, since the short messy, poorly worded blurb would have sent most newspaper vets screaming down the stairs, doubled up in hysterics, and into the CI for sanctuary. But he printed the damn thing anyway.... Along with the yellow, the mad urgency of the NYT wire machine though not cacaphonous chugga-chugga which, being both frantic and seductive, is the perfect metaphor for newspaper work. It never stops, and the mind tends to look back into it as you think and type. Jane, from whom night editing has robbed a night ' s sleep, suggests some lines. Beer cans and an occasional joint passed among the rows of Page as Thompson... Around 11 :00 Harriet from the Tar Heel calls and asks what ' s happening officially between Thompson, his agency and the Union. Tell her to talk to David or Rick or John Miller or anyone but me. I am much more obsessed with capturing on this yellow paper what happened at something I actually saw but cannot comprehend. Anne mercifully shows up with beer and wine, John Miller stops in. Rick caiis. Spending the day with Thompson has taken its awful toll, shoving him to the brink of a minor nervous breakdown. Terrible, terrible, he moans, the Doctor started right in by ripping the headrest of the passenger seat of his Volvo, kept stopping for beers and jabbering about his need for medicine. Could I lash together a story on this? Am I even going to attempt if? he asks. Yes. Close to midnight there is another disturbance. A Chronicle hangout type comes in to put the mock moves on Jane, half-asleep over a typewriter. I politely tell this asshole to go away and shut the door; some screechy Bitch is croaking for my story so she can go home. Remember that guy from freshman year, when we were both new reporters and he was a YAFer with short hair, a big car and a rich father? A long-locked radical now, he is still tainted with that garrish piece of Detroit iron and, like many of these paper people, tends to choose his women, like the Bitch, and good buddies from Chroniclites. This practice inevitably turns up in love affairs, friendships, cliques, love triangles, frail egos and much fear and loathing on the Chronicle. Newspapers tend to breed incestuous offspring. Many new children die off quickly, the rest left to carry on comraderies and plot the editorships, ineptly pimping freshman reporters for their edit council vote in the Spring. Very arm-pitsy, so there are many good reasons not to attend edit council meetings or go on the retreats. God, drinking a lot of wine in the woods with a bunch of Chronicle people has always seemed about as exciting as playing poker with a bunch of nuns. It ' s just another place at Duke for boys and girls to meet other boys and girls, an ex-Chronicle heavy once told me. If they weren ' t so damn close socially — but professionally instead, he added, the Chronicle could be a really great college paper. Maybe so, but at this hour, who cares? My notes are hard to read, eye hurts. Where is Thompson now? Never occurred to me to hunt him down for a statement. Is that Thompson aficianado Morris getting an interview, like he said he would, feeding the Doctor Wild Turkey and stuffing a microphone in his face? It ' s late, and the repetition of images has no mercy on the deadened mind. The Thompson movie keeps attacking, reeling away those jerky movements and gritty speed-laced squawks of a whiskey man fished out of a hotel bathtub, hauled over to Page, and thrown like meat to the wired gargoyles, restless and knowing that anyone this tanked up, this crazy, is easy prey, naked lunch. Those stupid Union people, they ' re responsible for this — a very bad set-up, ambush, really. Suggested column for Friday ' s paper: Poetic justice and Hunter Thompson would both insist the person whose idea it was to cast the journalist in a podium stage lecture setting in Page Wednesday night be flogged into unconsciousness, carted out to Hillsboro in a wagon and stretched in two by sinewy field beasts, then ground into fine pinkish powder for snorting purposes... Finished at 1:00. I like the story. David ' s been in for thirty minutes and Annie N. begins to type mine, dutifully checking my messy copy for errors and suggesting changes. Cod, forgot about finishing up the edit pages but, great, Larry has cropped the Rockefeller picture for the Lewis column, Ralph, the paste-up man, will do the rest. Do not worry, these are very competent people up here tonight. Relax. 1:30. The story is ready. After changing the pasteup a bit and correcting a few typos we have a four-column two-deck headline space to fill — tastefully. This takes two hours of rumaging through tired brains. Steve, evidently, still has a great deal of energy. He is over there insisting that night editor Zipp ' s suggestion of Thompson, Crowd Run Amuck does not cut the mustard, is not journalistically or aesthetically pleasing. This starts people making up weird headlines, laughing over them. People are giddy. Around 3:00 the right head emerges: Thompson, Audience Clash in Page Chaos. Am amazed by Steve ' s meticulous quest when no one really cares any longer. 3:00. Walking around, drinking coffee, doing nothing really. I watch Steve and Zipp do national news heads and jump pages. Ralph has gone home, Zipp is about to — he has a test in six hours. My body is numb but the head still a grey circus of the Page Chaos as I stare at the too-familiar-now words and pictures people will see tomorrow, while I am still asleep. Paper goes to Mebane and I to Buchanan Avenue, exhausted. But there is no falling off so I read fifty or sixty pages of Steve ' s On the Campaign Trail (all the while the demon wire machine keeps beating through me) until the sun comes up and there is battered, reluctant sleep. Thompson, audience clash in Page chaos By Dan Hull Is there any coherence in this thing? I feel like I ' m in a hicking slaughterhouse in Chicago early in the morning. In a pathetic attempt to slide something coherent through his staccato mumble, Gonzo journalist Dr. Hunter S. Thompson was met last night at Page Auditorium with a bevy of jeers, curses, and a request by the Duke University Union to leave the stage. According to Union spokespersons, it was expected that the slightly inebriated Thompson would drive away the audience if his talk turned out particularly monotonous. Frustrated by the dialogue between the disjointed speaker and the belligerent audience, some did leave while others, many of whom were as well-oiled as Thompson, remained until the journalist was escorted off the stage. Beer and joints Beer cans and an occasional joint passed among the rows of the auditorium as Thompson, forty minutes late and looking more like a lanky tourist than a radical journalist, poked across the stage to the podium. Slouching there, Thompson began: I have no speech, nothing to say. I feel like a piece of meat, referring to his marketing by his lecture agency. Having tossed aside the index cards on which were written questions from the audience, Thompson received few serious oral questions from the audience. What I ' d really like to be in is an argimient, he said. When a baby cried Thompson miunbled, That ' s the most coherent fucking thing I ' ve heard all night. In most cases, serious questions and Thompson ' s responses to them were inaudible or incoherent. Visibly put off by the belligerent Duke audience whom he repeatedly referred to as beer hippies, Thompson was most relaxed and clear when talking about Richard Nixon. Nobody ' s beaten him as bad as he deserves, Thompson emphasized. And nobody really comprehends how evil he is. The real horror of it all is that he reflects the rot in all of us. Hell, we elected him. The bastard won by the greatest majority since George Washington. Thompson then urged the audience to go out and vote. Maintaining that the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago kicked off an era, Thompson recalled somewhat disjointedly that before going there he took along his motorcycle helmet left over from his Hell ' s Angels days. (In the sixties he rode with the Angels in order to research a book on the group). After I got there, I found out why I had brought it with me, he said. During the forty minute encounter [he was asked to leave at about 9:30), Thompson commented briefly on other subjects. The 1976 Democratic Presidential candidate: Mondale. Terry Sanford ' s possibly candidacy: I hope not. Gary Hart, the Democratic candidate for Senate in Colorado He ' ll win, but he ' s a sell-out. England: A coal mine in the Atlantic. Next to a potato farm. When asked a serious but largely inaudible question concerning the rise of consumer politics, Thompson yanked the shotgun-style microphone around the podium attempting to focus it in the direction of the questioner, a good 25 yards away. Violence is always sort of a self-satisfying thing, he added. It was at this point, reportedly, that the Union people began to seriously considered pulling Thompson from the stage. Asked by someone whether the Rockefeller family was encouraging canabalism in South America, an incredulous Thompson tossed up the remainder of his Wild Turkey onto the velvet curtain behind him, and scattered the rest of his unused index cards. Amidst jeering and confusion. Union program advisor Linda Simmons escorted Thompson off stage. Afterwards Thompson talked for an hour with about 100 students in the garden behind Page Auditorium. Post mortems on Thompson ' s abbreviated Duke debut varied. One rather inebriated disciple was overheard saying, I thought it was great, anyway. Just great. But another student remarked, I ' m totally embarrassed — for everyone. A third student commented, This was fantastic — guerrilla theater, theater of the absurd — all in one night. Good times at Duke. I crutch for those too weak to face up to drugs. Preshperson English Thirty rows ahead of me and twenty-five feet below me there was a man talking from behind a lectiirn. The color symbolism of traffic li ts figures large in the scheme of The Great Gatsby , he said. The guy beside me was drawing a picture of the lecturer in his notebook. It wasn ' t a very good likeness. At the end of the period we were assigned a paper to be called, East Egg vs. West Egg. - . ' :d Duke exerts more than it gives. Here there are some good teachers and pressure sufficient to bare the personality of all but the struggle to keep soul complete. Duke is the testing ground for the world with a short future. There is a joke that the cathedral on West Campus is Duke ' s last erection. He has penetrated all who live here and has violated many. I am saddened by my friends who function less well now than before, for my friends who in furious activity try to support their damaged person, for my friends who like myself have strengthened the intellect but, for now, have lost the will. On this campus walk old men. Some are spent and sinking, retracing the paths of wayward students. A few still teach. Human life exposed in their face, they speak through their subject, of what is right and what is other than right. They know the power of the ancients and would rather remain silent than misuse it. Duke is a loud place that has not listened to its old men. It has aged its students, ripened few. Anonymous student via the C iant c eer questionnaire □ w ' « J l ' jfl w -j -!! II :■ i l ' - ' X. . . .L yi ft ■: - i ■•- , •■ ' . ' ' S .i ■imr- ' - ' • .l tB X ' • ■ , i« ' ' { :. ' 1i ' ' ■- '  ;; , .. .: [ | The Dorms One day in the dorm when I ' d left my floor to avoid the shaving cream fi ts and the trash— harrels-full of water that were being emptied into the hall, I met, in the basement, a guy named George Barry. He was destroying the last intact piece of furniture in this room. He was screaming. She shit on me I SHE SHIT ON ME! The front legs of the chair collapsed when they hit the floor. George ' s face had the kind of pock marks that gave rise to the old joke: fliat ' d you. do, try to put out the fire on your face with an ice— pick? He had stubbly blonde hair, was built like the proverbial fire plug — thick, bowed legs, ferocious, meaty shoulders — and came from Alabajna, George came up to me, face streaming with sweat, and clamped a hand on my shoulder. She shouldna done that. He shook his head back and forth, as if hypnotized by the motion, leaned over, picked up the leg of a table, and tossed it across the room. He looked at me again. She shouldna done it, he said. •p f H«i . _ ' ' --i--,,— _ ' . Editor ' s note: The following are portions of an interview with Bernard Lefkowitz, a visiting wnter who taught a sei-ies of courses on journalism for the Public Policy Institute in the fall. The interview was conducted by a Mr. Daniel Hull and appeared in the April! 2 Ruby. Some students in one of your classes told me that you were sitting around in the CI one night and told them something to the effect that you couldn ' t really handle being a student at Duke University right now, that it would somehow stifle you. What did you mean? What I meant was that, thinking back to what I was like at eighteen or nineteen, there are all sorts of things here that I would have found very difficult to grapple with. One of them is the kind of social life that the University has. Secondly, — and I can go into each of these in a little more detail — is the political environment, and third is the closeness of the residential system, which seems to me confining. I think the big thing would ' ve been the social life, but the other stuff, too. And fourth is the kind of fairly intense competition for grades. I went to a college with high academic standards, but there was a whole lot of flexibility within those standards. They compensated for the fact that you worked on the paper or, you know, that you were half-asleep when you came into some classes. I don ' t remember ever having a course where people on a regular basis had to miss one night of sleep a week to do the readings for it. You always get sort of stuffed up at the end of the semester, but it seems here that there ' s this incredible paper chase that happens on all sorts of levels that I ' ve never experienced. Those are some of the things that I was thinking about. Could that intense competition for grades have something to do with the type of student that comes to Duke? Oh yeah, we can talk about that, about the selection process, how certain kinds of students come here, and then their values are reinforced by the University. It makes it difficult for them to escape that kind of cycle because they ' re eighteen or nineteen, not at an age where they can very easily make independent choices. You know it ' s very hard for people to say hey, this isn ' t my scene, I want to get out, I want to go someplace else. They have their parents ' approval to deal with, and other students and friends look at them as some kind of failure. And there ' s also a compulsion to chose early what you ' re going to do with the rest of your life. By getting into another scene, you ' re defering that choice in some ways, and that ' s very upsetting to some people. And the economy adds to that a little; these students are fairly privileged, so the economy doesn ' t bear as heavily as it does on other groups and classes, but it still comes down pretty hard. The emphasis is on make sure that you ' re heading in a direction that ' s going to offer a promising job or career. What do you find stifling about the social life here!? What I find stifling about the social life here — and I ' m talking about it the way I would be if I were eighteen or nineteen — is the kind of regularity of the social life. You ' re seeing the same faces, basically, every day. The events are all planned and organized either by the college or a particular dorm or sorority. It ' s a whole lot different than living in the big city: you left campus and you got onto a subway, you didn ' t know what you were going to do that night, but you had a whole city to choose from. You could catch a 1943 flick, go to the Museum of Modern Art or stand outside in thirty degree weather and listen to jazz coming up from a cellar club. You could even do that at eighteen, and you could do it without a lot of money. Well, isn ' t all that just a function of the difference between Duke in Durham and Columbia in New York City? It ' s not just location. Also, there are other colleges that by their choice of students and the way they ' re organized, try to present a more diversified, freer kind of environment. There ' s a big emphasis here on group activities, or travelling with the group, on doing what the rest of the group wants to do. Suppose you ' re not beautiful or classically good looking, you ' re not heavy into rock, your ideas are somewhat outside of the main current; Where do you find a place here? How do you find some kind of security on this campus? A lot of people think, on the other hand, that Duke is such a zoo that anyone can come here and find a place. You disagree with that. I think there are small groups that are not part of the main current here — maybe graduate students, some grad students, not the premed types — who are little off. But I think that most of the students I meet here share certain values — politically, they don ' t move very far to the left or the right, or they don ' t think very much about politics. In terms of personal relationships, most of it is grounded on sexuality. All life is grounded on sexuality, but here it ' s all in some kind of crazily impersonal way. I don ' t know if love affairs were any more meaningful when I was going to college, but here it ' s all in a tremendously physical way. I never hear a guy say, Hey, she ' s really interesting or She ' s really got a good head, smart person, she ' s done so and so. And I rarely hear anything different when a woman talks about a guy; it ' s whether they ' re cute or sexy or drink a lot of beer. Would you say that men and women view each other differently at, say, Vassar, Radcliffe, Harvard or Columbia? ...I don ' t think there ' s much difference. ...Maybe what I ' m talking about is this: I ' m afflicted with this memory bank, and I think about what three or four years ago was like, not only on college campuses, but around the country. There was a whole lot of craziness, insanity and suicidal tendencies, but there was a kind of vibrancy, a feeling of being part of something, a committment, even if it was the most superficial commitment and lasted for the shortest time. It was a sense of being part of something. When you don ' t feel that, and the only thing you ' re a part of is some amorphous group called the fraternity or the dormitory, or even your three roommates and you ' re figuring out a way to pass tests and blow off steam when the tests are over, that ' s the whole cycle. So maybe we ' re talking about a national thing. So maybe Duke is just a part of the return to the mindless fifties? I was part of the mindless fifties, and they weren ' t so fucking mindless. There was this growing, incredible sense of an explosion on the horizon and you could see it vaguely in the distance. People were reading writers who were alienated and disaffected because they were feeling alienation and disaffection, and they were looking for someone who could share that feeling. I was reminded of that a great deal when Hunter Thompson was here, being taken off the stage and everything. I talked to my class about it. People say, well, he was drunk, he was stoned, what the hell, he didn ' t deserve anything better than that. And I said, you know, one of the big issues when I was in college was a thing called the Speakers Ban, where people who had radical political views were not allowed by law to speak on university campuses for fear that they would in some way or other influence tender minds. I get very nervous when people are taken off stages, almost without exception, because I don ' t know what the next step is. If William Buckley comes on stage and I find the stuff he says unacceptable, do I got up and grab him off? Will the University begin to say a year from now that only people who have ideas within certain limits are allowed to speak? I get very nervous about that stuff because I went through that. So the fifties weren ' t really as mindless as people suggest: it was a nervous time, because people didn ' t know what was coming. We began to get a taste of it when the Freedom Riders went South, the civil rights thing began to develop and we began to understand the issues. We could feel things instinctively. The dangerous thing here is that this seems mindless in a lot of ways, because people don ' t seem to be edgy and nervous about anything. They seem to be edgy and nervous about passing tests, getting a job, etc. Did the Hunter Thompson event sum up anything for you about Duke students or Duke University? The problem is I don ' t know how many people in that audience were Duke students. He brought out a lot of people who had the stuff and felt some connection with him on a lot of levels... I couldn ' t blame the paper plane phenomenon on Duke students, and the ridiculous consequences. Even wrote a ridiculous question down because I assumed that given Duke students ' performance in the past, that everybody would be asking solemn things like Do you think Hubert Humphrey will make another try for the presidency? So I asked him if he was taking a job on The New York Times in the Business Section ' cause I thought I ' d break it up, but everybody else was asking the same questions. So its really hard to know if the Thompson things sums up Duke students. I think that what sums up Duke students more in a way is the CI at ten o ' clock at night, or walking through some or around the dorms at one in the morning. What seemed to sum up Duke more and seems to me the most fascinating issue since I ' ve been here is the Cleland House P thing.... The House P thing. I understand you think that people — students, the paper — should have made an issue of it. It goes back to when we started talking about what seems to be the values here. Here ' s a policy that was apparently tacitly sanctioned by the University. The Hanes House raids were fairly common occurances, they went both ways and there was a lot of fun and games. But there ' s a whole lot of symbolism behind those raids: the way male students react to female students, the way female students react to male students, the way the University thinks its perfectly proper for students to act. And that got out of hand, a sanctioned policy got out of hand. Some bizarre stuff happened and everybody got upset. But I don ' t think they should have been so much upset at the students in House P or the housemasters — I don ' t think they ' re to blame. I don ' t even think the students who shot off from the group and went to Cleland are to blame. I think a University policy which made this general kind of behavior permissible is to blame. And what ' s gonna happen is that it will make an atypical incident: some students are going to get some penalties and it ' ll be forgotten as an aberration rather than part of a university policy, I think discussion of the thing on this campus would have been more useful if it was conducted along those lines. It ' s still not certain whether the University will come out with some sort of covering policy on dorm raids. You wouldn ' t image at this point that anything ' ll be done about it, given what you ' ve seen at Duke so far? I don ' t know, I hope they do. But there ' s two things. One is they could do something about it. Secondly, it would be better to discuss the University ' s policy in the past because a lot of students have taken the brunt of this. These are freshmen, right? What do they know about the past? All they know is that it ' s been communicated to them that it ' s acceptable to do those raids. Nobody has said, well, don ' t rape anybody, get this high, but not higher, go into a room and yell something at a woman but don ' t take her panties off. Those gradations aren ' t spelled out; How does it strike you that Duke University students would do that anyway? They ' re at a place that lays some claim to academic excellent and all that, and it ' s supposed to be a good school, the Harvard of the South. First of all, I ' m terribly skeptical about academic excellence. Can I do an anecdote? I was talking to a faculty member, who will remain unnamed, about a week or so ago, I was telling the professor about a student who had some criticisms about some courses he was taking. And the professor said, Oh, I know that student, that student was in my class. And I said, Yeah, that student ' s in my class now, too. I thought his criticism was pretty much on the mark. The professor said Yeah, but the student has a second-rate mind, and therefore his criticism is invalid. ..Is academic excellence the ability to make good grades, to agree with teacher ' s views, to memorize material? How much freedom is there to be accepted and to even be praised, and receive good grades, when you sharply disagree with teachers, when you say they ' re full of crap on a lot of issues? How much freedom is there to do that? Maybe that ' s the measure of academic excellence. If everybody here were getting straight A ' s, that doesn ' t mean that, on the side, they couldn ' t go off and pull a House P number. You ' ve said that Duke students tend to be traditional, about playing the grade game, having certain social patterns. Is the faculty like that? Are they unimaginative? Do they lack the sort of energy you seek Dookies to lack? I think they have enormous energy when its directed toward their own success and status. I feel very awkward about that question. I ' ve met only a small number of faculty members within a limited area. . . . But I have a sense that there ' s a very traditional academic attitude here: Do the research, get tenure, teach a couple of acceptable classes, and continue that line for twenty-five years. One thing most of them do not do is take a lot of time to step outside of the academic world and trying something else. It always boggles my mind to go from Kindergarten to age forty-five one straight — with the possible exception of military service — thing in the classroom! The conversations are stylized, the relationships are stylized. The great victims of that is faculty wives, who have stepped outside in a lot of cases, and have to play that game that ' s been fashioned by their husbands, but they don ' t feel a part of that game, aside from it being part of their marriage. Larry Coodwyn, a teacher here, once said that there ' s a whole lot of deadness on the faculty, and I think there is deadness in the sense that there ' s a lack of surprise, a lack of imagination and initiative, at least among some of the people. For a long time there ' s been a feeling on this campus that there ' s a tremendous schism between professors and students. You seem to hang out a great deal with students. Why? They ' re more interesting than the faculty members. As you know, I really have an enormously warm feeling towards the students here. They ' re delightful, charming people; they ' re fun to be around. A number of them are very responsive. And it ' s fun to give them my little pitch and talk about the kinds of political discussions they ' re not likely to get into with another teacher, or to talk about journalism in a very straightforward way, to talk about the University. Sometimes we talk about their personal lives. I find that interesting. And they don ' t have as many barriers to those discussions as faculty members do. I remember a faculty party I once went to where everybody sat in a semi-circle, the wine came out at nine-thirty, the cheese came out at ten o ' clock, the coffee came out at ten-thirty and we left at eleven. The only thing we didn ' t do was parade out in a straight line; I mean, it was so bad that people had to raise their hands to be heard in the group! It was like a fucking classroom! So I find students much more fun to be with than faculty. What about athletes here? You know, this is the first time I ' ve met the caricature of the athlete who ' s always been described in newspapers and magazines as this huge guy on a football treadmill and maybe on his way to a professional career. He thinks as the rest of the team does, does the kind of things traditionally associated with athletes. When I went to college, athletes intellectually, socially and politically were as diverse and Interesting a group as the rest of the student population. There are athletes here. I ' m sure, who are really interesting — I ' ve met one or two. But I ' ve also seen some incredibly barbaric stuff, and sat in on conversations in the dining halls with athletes that really sound like a 1940 image of what an athlete is like. I don ' t know how much attention is given in recruiting an athlete, to what kind of a person he is, or what his attitudes are. And I don ' t know if any attention is given to the selection of other students on those terms. Do you think it ' s imcompatible with the spirit of a university like Duke to have a fairly heavy athletics recruitment scholarship program? Depends on what your attitude about Duke is. In my sense, it ' s perfect ) compatible. I think Duke wants to be a university with everything. It wants to be a pretty university, it wants to be a relatively placid university. At the same time it wants at least a surface of vigor, and clash of ideas. It wants excellence academically; at the same time it does not want any big departmental fights over politics, or any teachers who move off the center too much.... It ' s a kind of perfect balance, and the football team fits in the middle of that. It ' s good to have a football team, that wins a certain number of games, but not too many, because you don ' t want to be called a football factory. I don ' t know what would happen if Duke was listed in the top five. Maybe Harvard would get upset and Duke couldn ' t be called the Harvard of the South. - • . ' • Qt  «.r ' iiX - ' ' ■,2 ' ' GA Look, motherfucker, don ' t tread on me. counted the scars on his face. I took off my shirt and went to Gilbert- Addoms, Running my hand through the luxurious hair on my chest, I reassured myself that some yoting dahlin from Alabama or some such fucking place would want to be held in my arms and be told of her tender charms. I ate a lifesaver. At the door to the women ' s dorm I was met by a cyclone fence topped with four feet of barbed wire. Bovine women smelling like lemon- ade were grazing in the grassless lobby. They drove me nuts, I wanted to arrange them all arotmd me and like a kada I wanted to put every appendage of my form into every orifice of theirs. We would wriggle so hard that Chubby Checker would fall out of everyone ' s memory and break. Behind the barricade sat an overwei t woman the color of moth balls. She smiled. Who ' s calling please? I could have fucked her ri t there. I didn ' t. Shrieking in terror I ran out the door, threw myself onto the ground. I rubbed my face in the grass. V. . Ail 4 ' - -•■«: MMmniiiN|piit|P(ppiliHt j« i • ' v. ' « ' w4 iM j iit: •■ - mi ' - • ' ' 5«P ' :is h. ' « ♦si? ' :€ . ' ' 4m: r« :.-• «! V v.;% ii fc-Vt • £ The Tunnels When I found out about the tunnels, I knew. It wasn ' t difficult to improvise a living space in them. It was funny how easily I adapted. It ' s all down there, you know. I put a poster of Schopenhauer on the wall, ate a quart of raw clams I had hou t that afternoon, and masturbated, thinking of that chick I ' d seen in the chapel. I had touched the bottom of my meta- physical despair, I told myself. -.mmmmt m % ' Ai Kf: ' S-.: iffr ' -M.: y ' SSS- camels of the ruling class MAKING THE NUT AT DUKE Prologue lournalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits — a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the side-walk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage. — Hunter S. Thompson My Editor grinned as he handed me two .44 magnum shells. With my pocket knife I pried the brass casings away from the lead slugs. I pulled the bullet out with my teeth and spit it into the corner. I separated the powder into two even piles. Travis descended upon one of them with a rolled ten dollar bill; inhaling sharply, he snorted the smokeless black powder up into his sinuses. A direct hit. The stuff scored on his brain, the power of the first rush sending him out of the Yearbook office screaming: Layout, copy! Roll the presses! Next? I asked. Most of the others in the crowded room were reluctant to involve themselves in that sort of high-powered chemistry, so O.Z. the photography editor, and I, shared the remaining hit. Spring semester, and the editorial staff of the Duke Yearbook had aril become borderline gunpowder junkies. They would come up to me on the quad with that crazed look in the eyes, looking to turn out my sinuses. Which was fine with me, except that my Editor, a six-foot Irishman with a red pony tail, constantly exhorted me to turn in a draft of my story. Something on the Duke Experience, that ' s all I ask, he was always telling me. But I had better things to experience: my job, my Shakespeare paper, and a young woman who lived near the VA Hospital. Finally I decided to devote ten days to the story. Alas, they turned out to be an important ten days, some of the most exciting and revealing times of my Duke Experience. I was amused. On the eve of my ten day adventure I attended a meeting in Cross Chemistry Auditorium. The administration had been coming on feisty with budget cuts for two weeks, some of which would mangle the forestry program, the environmental studies program, and the Primate Center. In light of the type of people associated with these departments and the planned construction of a new 91 million dollar hospital, many of the faculty and students were sceptical. Many of the hundred or more in Cross that night were actually outraged. Chan Smith, curly hair and work shirt, mc ' d the show, and he did it with style and class. He was experienced in these matters, having been at Duke for almost seven years. A veteran of the 1969 takeover of Allen Building and terrorization of then president Doug Knight ' s home (at which time the demands of the dissident students included one that the Duke administration stop the killing in Viet Nam), Chan had strong feelings about the Forestry Issue. He had been president of ASDU when that body had passed a resolution declaring null and void all regulations of the University. Everyone knows — if they read Time or Newsweek — that the students of the Seventies are more cynical and less politically active. And Duke is no exception. So I was surprised to see so many angry faces that night, sitting there throwing around words like Mobilization! Strike! Community Organizing! The adrenalin buzz of the crowd was written all over their rhetoric. The buzz was not sustained, however. Within a week the original furor caused by Sanford ' s arrogance and Fred Cleaveland ' s foot-eating had been subverted by an insidious disease called The Politics of Nostalgia. An organized movement was born, The Movement for Shared Authority or MSA. Its goals were hazier, its leadership shadowy, and its energy was sustained for about one week. That week ended with a day-long lesson in the Politics of Nostalgia: a teach-in on the subject of shared authority. At this point I must confess my own participation in the Movement. In fact, I put in some very long and cold hours painting cliches on the bridge between campuses. They were all good, principled people, and I don ' t regret my own part in the proceedings. I can ' t however, neglect my responsibilities to the story and let them off the hook completely. I can take a joke. The Politics of Nostalgia are best explained through example. There was the revival, on Wednesday, of the clenched fist stencil painted in blue this time on the sidewalks and walls on West. At Friday ' s teach-in the students who gathered in front of the Union were warmed up by Bob Dylan ( The times, they are a changin ) on the PA, followed by live locals singing other songs that had warmed other crowds — at Chicago in ' 68, Washington in ' 67, and Berkeley before that. At Duke in ' 75 they sounded like dropped change. There wasn ' t a cop in sight. Even Chan Smith couldn ' t resist the urge to refer us back to those glory days of the Allen takeover, if only to assure us that this movement is better organized and more mature and knowledgeable than his previous venture. But he was later to admit that organization and information were just that, and wouldn ' t quite make the nut on their own. There was an element of uncertainty infused throughout all of the radical rhetoric. Even the organizers of the demonstration sensed the impotence of it; anxiety bordered the voices that spoke in the planning sessions. The fiery rhetoric of the Sixties could be copied, but the self-assuredness was missing. We had read Mailer and Wolfe, and none of us were quite convinced that we weren ' t being silly. In fact, the odds looked good that at the end of this particular tunnel lay only the smouldering disillusionment of our predecessors, our friends, brothers, and sisters, who had passed this way in their own time. Mindful as I was of all the inherent contradictions of my own participation in this entropic movement, I set myself about the task of researching into the deeper nature of the Politics of Nostalgia. Behind my investigation was the feeling that if there was to be a new uprising of the kind of intrepid spirit that had inspired Duke in the late Sixties, it could not come until this particular breed of sentimentality had been recognized and expurgated. Real rebellion leaves little time for such sappy hearkening back to the good ole days. We had to get into the present, at least. Chan Smith shared this feeling. Disgusted with the bureaucratic tone that one of those movement meetings had assumed, we departed to watch a video tape of Friday ' s big teach-in. On that afternoon the MSA — in spite of endless folk-singers and boring speakers — had banded together several hundred student-types in an audio assault on Allen Building — more specifically, on the ears of Terry Sanford. After fifteen minutes of sign-waving and slogan chanting we finally brought him down to the front steps. There he refused to answer any of the demands, using the fact that he was standing on a bush as an excuse for meaningless mumbling. It was all very exciting. But now, five days later on video tape, the real mood of the crowd was revealed. The looks on the faces were: bored, basically. People were getting up on the speaker ' s platform and delivering the most inflamatory speeches we had ever heard, accusing the administration of every crime known to God and man. And the crowd was bored, basically. We watched as my roommate, wearing my father ' s W.W. II overcoat, appeared on the screen. An unscheduled speaker, as they say. We want change! he shouted, raising his fist in the air. What do we want? We want change! The dull-witted crowd finally got the idea and took up the chant, shouting in unison We want change! It lasted two minutes. Parker went off to work. What a bunch of beat-offs. I assessed the situation in my usual rational and well-phrased style. That ' s it exactly, Chan replied. Those people don ' t know anything about getting off. This campus needs a shot of Reich ' s orgastic politics. Orgone boxes in Perkins Library. Hmmm. . . I speculated on that one as we walked to the CI. The problem ' s not that simple, I told him. They can get off, alright, but they only know one way. Masturbation. This University promotes a prolonged adolescence. They don ' t learn to act creatively. Or even usefully, for Christ ' s sake. This movement, this whole protest thing, said Chain, will never get anywhere if we can ' t figure some way to turn these people on, to get them off on what we ' re doing. When I came here in 1968 everyone was getting off, on arts, dope, or shit like the Chronicle or the Archive. The result of all that energy was the Black students ' takeover of Allen Building. I had a few hummers in the CI and pondered the incredible differences between Chan ' s Duke Experience and my own. Time was running out: on my story deadline, on my patience with boring classes and meetings, and, I began to fear, on our whole twisted country. On the average Dukies are probably less apathetic and more aware than most of the geeks in America. The thought was depressing. That night, crawling in bed with my beloved, I mentioned my conversation with Chan. She told me that she had been craving an affair with him since they had first met two years ago. Score one for the orgasmic forestry student liber-radical leader. Of course we had other means of getting off. These usually assumed the form of drugs, from plain Mexican pot to exotic Oriental pot to mid-eastern hashish. During that weird period of the Yearbook production gunpowder had become the drug du maison, since the stuff was readily accessible and would keep your head together for several hours at a time. Occassionally the chemistry would change from gunpowder to such crazy organic substances as mescaline, a drug which combines well with orgasmic politics. What times we do live in, my friend: when I and my cohort can snort some funny reddish powder (stuff the color of Carolina dirt) and go downstairs to the CI for some iced tea. There our reverie was disturbed: ABC cameras on the scene, on the quad, covering the story. They were interviewing our cracker president in front of his library, all very polite and proper there in front of the artfully decadent neo-gothic rock pile that makes up West Campus. A fine backdrop for our presidential hopeful. Birds, perhaps, in the trees. Alas, the bucolic scene was soon disturbed, if not destroyed, by the sound of: Yippes, Terry, it ' s those kids, fucking kids coming out of the CI armed with picket signs. I can just imagine the question that must have been on that newsman ' s lips when they first came out: Mr. Sanford, we understand that Duke is taking a leadership role in its attempt to hold off the economic difficulties and maintain a high level of academic. . . What the Fuck? A little disdainful, they are, working out of ' lanta and all, you understand, and not quite sure what to make of it. The kids are coming in a steady stream now, about fifty or so sign-carrying, chanting student-types. Nice looking women too. Hot damn! They look like this is all a lot of fun for them, and why, Mr. Sanford is taking it a bit more seriously. His scowl could have stopped a barbecue cold. But they had no idea of when to stop. No decorum at all. Soon a crowd had gathered (it was a sunny day) stopping traffic on the chapel circle, which caused one gentleman to lean on his horn, adding to the confusion. By this time Terry had had it; the cameramen filmed some of the smiling boys and girls with their signs, marching there in front of Allen Building. And our Candidate? Having regained his poise, he answered some SERIOUS QUESTIONS about his budget and withstood his share of heckling, hiding behind his moderate rhetoric and down home drawl. I figured that, as a journalist, it was my duty to get down to the facts. I approached Sanford with a slightly wild look in my eye, still high as a Georgia pine on the mescaline. I glanced down to scribble in my notebook, something about his future as a car salesman. For at that moment Terry was standing beside his 1974 Buick Limited, a dark blue Detroit Monster. He had opened the door not, apparently, to get in, but to show off the powder-blue interior. Luxury befitting a plantation owner, or a Presidential Candidate, perhaps. But for an inflation-fighting university president constantly pledging his support for environmental studies? Mr. Sanford? I waved my pen in front of him. He looked over, and I could see he recognized me as a representative of the media. When any politician as hardened as old Terry sees a reporter, he realizes one very important factor: votes. Returning his gaze stonily, I put the question to him: How many miles to a gallon does this car get? Total shock. Another angry scowl, lost poise. A groan escaped from M, MM. 1 Jr his throat like a lizard crawling out from under a rock. No, Mr. Sanford, I ' m not being facetious. I had him where I wanted him: on the Issue. The other questionners were laughing. Some of the sober ones were aghast. I think it ' s a serious environmental question, sir. About twelve, he muttered, looking for another question about fund raising and pro-rated rates of inflation and representative democracy. I don ' t believe that, I retorted. Hell, he ' s probably lucky to get from station to station with that gas hog. I walked away in disgust. Soon afternoon Bob had to drag me back to the CI. I had gotten into a laughing fit at the thought of Terry getting his hand slammed in the car door and campaigning, his arm in a sling, on the Cripple Ticket with George Wallace. That was the high water mark of orgasmic politics at Duke that spring. Coincidentally, my ten days were up, and I abandoned my beleagured ride on The Duke Experience. But I fear that damage to my psyche had already been done. I was left hoping for the salvation of the Forestry School and depressed at the prospects of the University and our generation. My involvement in the orgasm went on at an intensified level, however. Perhaps it was my preoccupation with such a high-energy form of release which eventually led to my freakish behavior. One March afternoon Walton, Bob and I were cruising around looking for cocaine, on our way to the CI Happy Hour. Spring is Mother Nature ' s orgasm, Walton said, rather abruptly. When Mother Nature comes, the world will get green. In that case, I continued, 1 think it should be our mission to tickle her clit, maybe help things along a little. Ah, but where is Mother Nature ' s clitoris? asked Bob. The implications were clear: the three of us had happened upon the makings of a life-long quest, one that might lead us to new heights of adventure and new nadirs of decadence. What could be more of a challenge, or more of a reward, if the object should yield herself up to our efforts? Keep your eyes and ears open, men, I said. This is the stuff real stories are made of. Even then I was losing touch. I pursued Mother Nature ' s clitoris to the beach. There was purgation and catharsis, but the trigger of springtime and renewal was not there. Another restless week passed. After running amok through the stacks of Perkins library one afternoon, I had nothing more to show for my work than an Eighteenth Century scholarly treatise on orgasm in Shakespeare. It proved a waste of time. One cloudy night I was busted in the Gardens and spent a long hour in the Campus Cops ' office trying to explain why I had been peering under the bushes at three A.M. bellowing obscenities about Mary Duke Biddle. My ass was saved by two pieces of paper in my wallet: one was my student ID, the other a card that says ' I have Epilepsy. ' Ain ' t no clit in here, I was muttering when they picked me up. Of course there were those moments when I forgot the mythic quest and just plain got fucked up. One afternoon during Spring Break, in the midst of a gunpowder snorting session, my enfeebled brain finally mutinied against the evil that is Duke. It was a horrible scene, something out of Kafka. There were five atavistic and violent fetishists playing on the floor of the office with a set of plastic soldiers. The last thing my Editor said was, Let ' s rip off some of their artillery. Then the battle was on. I was hurled backward off my chair and found myself in the middle of a twisted, drug-induced psychotic episode. I escaped downstairs to the CI to await the staff ' s return to sanity. Here they were, all professing liberals and peace freaks, involved in war games. Imaginary atrocities. Fantastical violence. They must be getting off on it, I thought. Now, how depraved had these people become? I saw the power of the orgasm in a new, malevolent light. I was aware of the violent forces that could be unleashed. I walked out into the rainy night — it had been raining for a week or more — and headed straight for my mescaline dealer. I figured it best to plot the next step from a slightly higher plane. On the afternoon of the next day, wasted from lack of sleep and the red powder, I piled clothes and books into the rested hulk of my 1969 Checker cab. Armed with a credit card and a thirty-minute tape of Rosswell Rudd ' s trombone, I pulled out onto southbound 1-85. Cruising for twenty hours, I finally found warm weather just south of the Florida border. A joint in one hand, a Schlitz in the other, I pulled into a Holiday Inn. A little euphoric, I walked nonchalantly into the Red Fox Lounge and ordered vodka and orange juice. Then, fixing the bartender with a stare, I whispered: Do you know where Mother Nature ' s clitoris is? The intensity with which I asked the question — or maybe it was my ' Save the Forestry School T-shirt ' — startled the geek at first. Figuring it best to humor me, he asked: No, where is it? I gulped down my drink without taking my fix off his eyes. The key to spring, I told the man, is on the road. Five minutes after checking in I dived into the pool, and haven ' t come out since. T-aii ' .vi;. • . .-.. Below is an excerpt from a larger work entitled Confessions of Demagogue , written by Bob Gamble, Vice-President of ASDU, ' 74- ' 75. The following week was incredibly hectic for Gamble. Besides the forestry school activities, he had an economics mid-term on Tuesday, a legislature meeting Tuesday night at which the student government ' s $160,000 budget was to be considered, a student government election on Thursday, and a mathematics hourly on Friday. When Friday morning came then. Gamble was very tired, but nevertheless able to get back on his feet. He spent the middle hours of the morning cramming for his math hourly. At about 10:45, he put down his books in the physics building and began walking to the main quadrangle of the campus. He and student government president, Jeff Talmadge, had an 11:00 appointment with University President Terry Sanford. They were to discuss the fate of the forestry school. The students organizing the rally had done a very efficient job. Their media blitz had been thorough and well-timed. All of the students on the campus were aware of the forestry issue and many of them had strong opinions. Only once or twice before had Gamble seen an issue generate such enthusiasm. Yet something still bothered Gamble about the fledgling movement. It was the amazing extent to which the movement mimicked the student movements of the late sixties. For the most part, this mimicry was probably accidental. But on some points, for example, the issuance of armbands emblazoned with MSA and a small pine tree, and the stencil-paintings of clenched fists on sidewalks and buildings, the mimicry was ominously self-conscious. The important question here was whether or not the movement would also replicate the mistakes of the earlier student movements. Gamble was a bit worried. But only time would tell, and maybe it wouldn ' t make any difference to him by then, anyway. On his walk to the administration building. Gamble noticed that the stage for the rally was being completed, the public address system was being tested, and the crowd was beginning to gather. Gamble met Talmadge in the second-floor lobby of the administration building. Jeff Talmadge was the president of the student government. His Texan upbringing was reflected more in his appearance than in his personality. For, though he often garbed his incredibly slim figure in jeans and cowboy shirts, complete with a brown felt Texan hat and pointed-toe boots, he was not the stereotypic bigmouthed, macho, swaggering Texan phony. To the contrary, he was usually quite soft-spoken. Indeed, on first acquaintance, one would find him far too quiet to occupy any position of leadership. The key to his success in leadership was his ability to be extremely assertive and resourceful in that quiet, unemotional manner. Further, his long sad face, which his detractors may have likened to that of a bassett hound, belied a quick, sharp-edged wit. Hello, gentlemen. How are you? drawled Sanford, shaking Talmadge ' s hand. Come right in and have a seat, I ' ll be right with you, Sanford said, shaking Gamble ' s hand. This ritual had been repeated a dozen times in the past year. Sanford ' s office is very large — it was once suggested that a couple of bunk beds could easily be moved into it to help ease dormitory overcrowding. Lush red carpet covered the floor from mahogany-paneled wall to wall. The huge redwood desk sat in front of the six-paneled window which overlooked the main quad. On the wall opposite the desk was a clock which chimed at the hour and half-hour. By the time Sanford returned to the office, and Talmadge and Gamble had finished teasing the politician about the Tips on How to Save Energy pamphlet which was on his desk, the rally was beginning to generate quite a bit of noise. Talmadge opened the discussion, speaking slowly as he lit his pipe: We really have just one question for you, uh. President Sanford. What the hell is going on? Gamble would later compliment Talmadge for the superb mau-mau of an opener. Sanford hesitated, looking straight ahead rather than at his questioners, then answering slowly, What we see here is the failure of a decision-making process which was defined several years ago following the problems we had over the phasing out of graduate nursing. Of course, this method had never been tried before, but we should have realized there were some flaws in it. What flaws are you talkmg about? asked Gamble. Sanford, gesturing with both hands and speaking more quickly, answered, Well, we should have known that when Dean Ralston (of the forestry school) got that letter, he wouldn ' t just sit back calmly and wait for the Academic Council to respond. A cornered animal will always fight back. There should have been better communication between the forestry school and the provost ' s staff. What could have been done differently? Talmadge asked. Well, I ' m not sure. We ' ve got to re-examine this whole process now, reflected Sanford. Talmadge interjected, Yesterday at the Academic Council meeting you said that the students on the Business and Finance Committee knew in advance of this decision. That ' s not true, you know? I thought they had met recently and discussed that, Sanford answered. They don ' t meet until next Monday, Gamble added sharply. But haven ' t you all been meeting with Mr. Huestis and Dr. Blackburn and Dr. Cleaveland in their budget sessions? asked Sanford. Gamble, almost angry, replied, We ' ve met with Mr. Huestis a few times, but you should remember perfectly well that Dr. Blackburn, at a luncheon you attended, refused to let us sit in on the budget sessions. I don ' t remember ... Why did he say that? Sanford wondered. Gamble continued, He was afraid we ' d blow salary figures to the press if we saw them. There ought to b e some way we can work around that. Sanford musingly suggested. The conversation continued in this vein for about an hour. No conclusions or basic agreements were arrived at. Meanwhile, the rally outside was gathering momentum. The speeches and music were clearly audible in Sanford ' s office. Shortly before noon, a lull occurred in the conversation. Bermanzohn was delivering a harangue outside. Gamble, aware of Sanford ' s hostility to the socialist, teasingly interjected, I think that ' s your old buddy Bermanzohn speaking now. Sanford cocked his head to listen for a second, and then spoke, That is him, isn ' t it? Let ' s get one thing straight about Bermanzohn. He ' s with those UNC people now. Memorial Hospital at UNC and Watts Hospital have been trying as hard as they can to stop us from building our new hospital. But Bermanzohn graduated from Duke. Are you suggesting there ' s a conspiracy? asked Talmadge. Sanford answered quickly, He ' s working at Memorial now. I don ' t know if there ' s a conspiracy or not, but if there is, Bermanzohn ' s too stupid to be a part of it. That argument he has about the new hospital being inflationary just doesn ' t make sense. Gamble was amazed at how visibly agitated Sanford had become. He had known that Bermanzoh ' s activities were a touchy subject, but seldom had he seen the politican get so excited. Who ' s that speaking now? Sanford asked. I believe that ' s Fuller, Gamble spoke. Fuller was a local union organizer. He was delivering his speech in a fast, loud, emotional gospel style. Listen to that, Sanford sneered. It ' s almost incoherent. As the thunderous applause and cheering began at the end of Fuller ' s speech, Sanford continued, That ' s a sad comment on tfie intelligence level of the population, and I don ' t mean just at Duke. People will cheer stuff like that anywhere. A stran ge feeling was gradually overcoming Gamble. He lost track of the conversation, and wandered off into his own confused thoughts. I can ' t believe there are really six hundred people out there. Why am I up here with him rather than down there with them? Whose side am I on? They ' re almost as full of hot air as Sanford. I have as little in common with the crowd as with Sanford. I never thought I ' d witness a demonstration from this viewpoint. There ' s got to be more to this than meets the eye. Or maybe there ' s a great deal less. Sanford and Talmadge also became quiet, apparently lost in their thoughts. After what seemed like a very long period of silence, Talmadge reopened the discussion with another excellent mau-mau: Well, President Sanford.... what are you going to do? Sanford spoke slowly, staring straight ahead, I don ' t know ... what do they want? Gamble was disappointed. This man was running for President of the United States and couldn ' t even solve a simple public relations problem. Restraining himself for a moment. Gamble replied, Look, you ' re going to have to explain to these people how this process was supposed to have worked. And then you ' ll have to explain the mistakes you made this time and what you ' ll do differently next time. Talmadge concurred laconically, Yeah, people are really upset. Sanford made no reply. After a moment of silence, he swiveled around in his chair and stood up. He stood at the window, raised the blinds, and stared out at the rally. After a few seconds, Talmadge stood and walked over to the window. Gamble joined them. Sanford spoke slowly, Well, I ' ve been kicked in the ass a lot over the years ... A smile came to his face and he continued, ... but I ' ve got a big ass. Talmadge and Gamble laughed out loud, but Terry just kept staring out at the crowd. il %s ■ ' :S His Alibi Well, good evening to yourself again, you motherfucker. My hand is so sweaty it can hardly hold this chewed up pencil. Nothing. I don ' t see why I even sit down here again. I ' m nothing, no, but I ' ll take that back. I ' m a nervous liar, a deceptive liar, and a lousy one at that. I can ' t even look anybody in the eye without stuttering and these past few days when I start talking with any- body I can ' t think of anything to say at all, at all, at all, but sometimes I can stutter out some inanities about my classes and their classes and the weather and sometimes express myself on how I hate the fucking CI but all that is just so nervous that they get nervous and of course the whole conversation Just slinks lower and lower until there are quickly made goodbyes. I ' m a liar, liar, liar and am not able, not capable, of telling one single troith. I mean I want to show myself, show myself as a really good person deep inside, but then even that would be lying. Shit, fuck!, and a thoiisand profanities. Kick the chair and punch the wall. Taking shits and eating are the only things I can look forward to anymore. Animal masturbations, impotent research leading nowhere, dull fetid blue jeans that are beginning to stink because I don ' t understand cleanliness. Somewhere I ' m ri t, I ' ve got to be somewhere, you know. (The timnels are just hot as hell toni t, steam on the walls, me smelling like an Eskimo massacre, sticky, way too sticky to do anything but sit here and think to myself. Think, think, think, where does it lead you son, you great artist, you young dog, you rotten piece of fish?) I couldn ' t believe it today. I met a really nice girl in class, she sat beside me in the lecture and even started talking to me first. We talked a bit about the book we were supposed to read and I bullshitted her as if I ' d read the book closely but disagreed with the author on this and this and I don ' t know if she knew or not that I hadn ' t even bothered to finish it. But she told me to come see her sometime at the end and I did later in the afternoon. She wasn ' t in but I sat in one of those putrid fucking parlors for gentleman callers and wrote her a pretty nice little poem and asked her to meet me later for dinner in front of her quad or to leave a message if she couldn ' t. I went and waited for a long time but she didn ' t show and when I asked at the desk there was no message. Can you imagine? I mean I wrote her a poem, a nice interesting poem that I thou t she ' d really like, I mean she looked like a girl that read poems all the time and there I went throwing one at her and she didn ' t even respond. She ' ll never talk to me again either. Do I care, though? Do I give a damn at all? No way, no way, sister. This tunnel is all that is real, I mean this is the place vdiere no games are allowed. I won ' t play that game of give and no take. To have come back from that foreign war..., the country was hot and its endless sands served only to absorb the futile designs and spiritless attempts of the men who ran bellowing to their deaths. It was existence that screamed and only a few of lis were left to hear the passing echoes. It was somehow too loud and uninteresting. And she probably just threw it away and goddam it she ' s ri t, it all sucks. The poem was not even a poem, just a bloody scab that doesn ' t quite protect the wound. I ONCE DREAMED I WAS IN A CLASS WHERE SCOOP JACKSON WAS LECTURING. HOW ' S THAT FOR A POLITICAL DREAM? The following is an interview with former ASDU President, Jeff Talmadge. The Chanticleer conducted four such interviews with Talmadge, the vast majority of which no one will ever see due to the technical impossibility of anyone to transcribe five voices all speaking loudly at the same time. The excerpt below is definitely one of the more subdued moments and is of interest only to those with a fascination with university politics. Although it was more interesting, Talmadge did not allow us to record much of his straight talk about the political elite as persons. We guess you ' ll see the boy again. Chanticleer: Can you think of anything this year that ASDU did that you thought was especially interesting? What do you think is the effect of all these studies that were conducted? Talmadge: The two main committees or two main study groups were the Governance Commission, which I headed up, and the Tenure Study Commission. Those sorts of things are important more from the historical point of view than any other, because of its importance for the people five years from now. They will need to know what we thought and how we viewed certain parts of the University — if for no other reason than the refutation of the argument that ' s used by the more traditional educators that students don ' t have very long memories, that it ' s only four years long. If students learned anything in the Sixties it was that such an assumption is not necessarily true. We can expand our memories and provide a type of continuity in the way that we approach issues and one way to do that is preserving what our predecessors thought. The Tenure Study Commission was in a sense an exercise to put a group of students on record with their view of the tenure policy at Duke. That had never been done before. It ' s hard to tell if anything concrete will come of it. But if anything ever does there will be an indebtedness to this report as a tool for expanding student memory. Chanticleer: And the Governance Report. Talmadge: I like to talk about the Governance Report. It was the first time that students sat down and talked about what they wanted to do in terms of governance and write it down in a formal manner and present it formally to various faculty bodies. I believe this to be a much more conscientious approach to it. Implementation will depend a good deal on the faculty and administration. Chanticleer: What were the implications of the Report? Under this proposition, just how much more would students affect the actual governance of the University? Talmadge: Well, it provides for substantial increases in the role of students. But it ' s also my opinion that it would not substantially decrease the role of the faculty. I think it would provide for a better decision-making process than the present one, because more often than not you would have the faculty and the students working toge ther. And I think that ' s what students want. I think everyone got a little scared in the Sixties and there may have been some reason to . . . but ... If we learned anything from the Forestry School issue, it was that the way to approach an issue isn ' t in little bits and pieces but in a united fashion. The administration also sees that students are around here for just four years. They have to keep students happy for four years. They have to keep faculty happy for twenty years at a time. And so, they can live over a five year spasm in the way that students behave and then they ' ll be back to where everybody ' s happy again — that ' s what we ' ve seen here. What it takes you back to, then, is the need to have a continuous view of things on the part of students that doesn ' t erase itself every four years. Chanticleer: Speaking of spasmodic students, how effective do you think the Movement for Shared Authority was? Talmadge: Well, another lesson to be learned from some of those things that went on five or ten years ago with students is that ' movements ' are, by necessity, short term actions with immediate goals. Because of the energy factor, you can ' t sustain them over a long period of time. Chanticleer: The first MSA rally was, I think, completely useless unless it tried to force a showdown — it had to push for an immediately realization of its goal. Talmadge: I was a little disappointed that President Sanford didn ' t answer the demands more directly. He did answer some of them but I think he could have done it more directly. It became clear from the beginning from the way Sanford was responding to the demonstration that he was going to answer MSA through ASDU. He said that from the beginning. That was a few days before I left office; I was still President during the demonstration. But in the week or two after that you immediately had a new ASDU President. I thjnk a bigger attempt should have been made to channel the energy through ASDU. A lot of people think that would have compromised the position, and would have ... a lot of people don ' t like ASDU anyway. But when Sanford made it clear that that was the way he would respond .... Chanticleer: How could the sort of energy that was displayed at the demonstration be channeled through ASDU? Talmadge: Well, I think it ' s important to have a group like MSA there to bring the pressure to bear because it ' s sometimes the sort of thing that ASDU can ' t do for political reasons. There are things that you can say if you ' re on the outside that you can ' t say if you ' re on the inside. And the pressure is brought to bear in two ways really. It ' s brought to bear on Sanford to respond, but it should have also been directed to ASDU to get the response. The pressure should have been as much on the student leaders as on anyone else. I ' m in sort of an unusual position because I watched some of the demonstration from President Sanford ' s window. Chanticleer: What about Sanford? Talmadge: Sanford asked me what I thought should be done. I felt personally obligated to present the point of view which I thought most of the students held about the Forestry School. But I thought the real issue there was process. It wasn ' t . . . the issue of whether or not the Forestry School should stay was very important, but the more important issue was how the decision to phase out the School was arrived at. If you don ' t change that process, then what happens? Well, you may save the Forestry School but you may lose the Black Studies department or some other smaller department. Chanticleer: Getting back to the broader issues, how do you view the student movements of the Sixties as compared to MSA? Talmadge: I ' m a little cynical about the Sixties demonstration. A lot of those came out of the fact that students were being drafted, that college students were getting killed. It tended to be a little more personally important ... so, first off, most of the motivation was selfish. Chanticleer: Are you a radical, Jeff? Talmadge: I ' ve got a lot of friends still doing the radical thing, but I don ' t relate to them as well as I used to. I don ' t know whether that ' s just because I ' m tired of politics or not. I ' m not really tired of politics, but it ' s really hard work. You do get tired, just as if you were working on a job all day. Chanticleer: You mean, is it hard relating to the administrators? Did they ever put any pressure on you as a person to agree with their politics? Talmadge: The way that exists is probably the way it exists with anyone else and that is if there is someone who doesn ' t get along with your or doesn ' t like you and tells his or her friends or associates, then that person ' s associates might not look upon you as highly as they did before. Then the way you are hurt is just in terms of your effectiveness. It ' s nothing direct. I don ' t think this happened very much. The whole year I was able to remain on pretty friendly terms with everyone in Allen building and not be in an adversary position too often. You ' re often a radical when you go in, you ' re usually not when you come out. Chanticleer: Did that happen to you? Talmadge: Sort of. All my radical friends felt that anybody who did that was selling out. Chanticleer: You don ' t regard that as selling out? Talmadge: The problem is that the people who in a position to change things, like the administrators, aren ' t radical. They tend to reject radical ideas. You see, the administrators, when all is said and done, are the ones who decide things and they hold most of the power. That ' s just not true here, but probably just about anywhere in any structured, bureaucratic government. But since they make the decisions, if they don ' t want to include you in anything they do, they don ' t have to. They can make all the decisions they want without asking anybody. You have to try to avoid being shut out. It ' s a fine line. Now, what this does is force you to act in one of two ways. You have to present radical positions in a way that they don ' t look radical, or you have to present things that aren ' t radical to begin with. Chanticleer: Could you give me a specific example? Talmadge: Let ' s talk about a radical idea in a university: Students should have some control over the way in which their lives are run. That ' s radical at Duke. At some universities it ' s not, but at Duke students are at the bottom in terms of being in any position to have any control over the way their lives are governed. I had to present the student control issue in the Governance Report, and the Executive Committee of the Undergraduate Faculty Council presented a bylaw to the Trustees. Simply stated, it recommends that they recognize that the student body exists. If you read the Duke University bylaws you wouldn ' t even know that there was a student body. It isn ' t mentioned in there. And philosophically I think that says a good bit about Duke University. The bylaw — which I wrote — doesn ' t call for anything substantially different. It merely recognizes that there are students in this university. Chanticleer: Do you believe in the democratic ideal today in this country? Is it operating? Talmadge: That ' s a good question. Chanticleer: It seems that out of this whole era — the student movements and even before Watergate — came a disbelief that democracy was really democracy, or that it was any longer at work in Washington. Talmadge: I don ' t know if I ' d agree with that or not. I think the question is whether or not democracy works, or is it working here. I think it does, but that it ' s slow. See, I think it worked when Nixon was forced to resign, but it took a long time, a long time for the representatives to react. If people had been really concerned about corruption in government — I ' m sure that such concern really existed — then maybe they didn ' t know that it was going on. Chanticleer: Yes, but there are always those people who take the cynical outlook, who have knowledge of the corruption but accept it as a necessary correlative to the system. Talmadge: That ' s true. But, going back to the democracy question . . . Americans supported the war in Viet Nam for a long time and it ' s not quite accurate to say that it went on against the will of the people. Mayor Rizzo, just re-elected mayor of Philadelphia, is essentially a law-and-order candidate. And he was charged with corruption, yet maintained his innocence even after he flunked a lie detector test. But he was still re-elected to a second term. Chanticleer: That ' s incredible. It seems that in the structure of government today, even more important than the ends of the process should be the means — that is, the way people influence things and the attitudes with which children are brought into political community. That seems to be essential to democracy, and at this stage of our evolution you would think that we would be emphasizing the purity of the process rather than merely its output. This goal-orientation is absurd. Putting something way ahead of you and concentrating on that rather than the here and now and the manner in which you are acting in the world. Talmadge: That might be true . . . most religions. . . I guess Christianity and other religions as well . . . you have a goal but the goal is accomplished in terms of the means. Chanticleer: How do you, personally, reconcile your Christian beliefs and politics? How can you get involved in a political system that deals in power and which composes its beliefs on agressive assertion? Talmadge: That ' s like asking if I still beat my wife. I think its difficult to reconcile them, but I think it ' s necessary because I think those kind of beliefs are needed in government. Not just religious people, necessarily, but people who are concerned about the effects that their decisions have on other people and then to put others at least equal with themselves, and maybe before themselves in making a decision. I think to reconcile it, you just have to be aware of what ' s happening to you and realize that you ' re in a situation in which you ' re very vulnerable. - hi .■ T BlX, prjr- H 1 1 f — t 5rv  (i V Daytime TV What can you do with a drunken sailor, what can you do with a drunken sailor, what can you do with a drunken sailor, early in the morning? You can wake him up with a kiss. Feed him pickled eggs and cabbage, and send him on the way. Scratching his underarm, he chewed gum ftiriously. You ' re really sad, she said. Yeah, he shot back, undisturbed. He pulled out his joint and handed it to her, Sorry, she said, I don ' t have a match. Chanticleer: From the administration ' s standpoint, and I guess your standpoint, what do you think went wrong in regard to handling the Forestry school decision? Sanford: In my own personal judgement, it was purely and simply a matter of communication gone awry. As we looked to the future, we had to consider some programs that might not have as high a priority as other programs. It was obvious that we couldn ' t keep all the programs and keep up the quality generally at Duke University. And for whatever tentative reasons, the decision was made to consider the future of the Master of Forestry Program. There was never any decision that I know of to ever consider doing away with the Master of Environmental Management. In fact, I had been responsible for creating that program; in fact, it ' s only two or three years old. Somehow the whole thing got distorted. It ' s now back on track. The plan that we adopted with faculty concurrence years ago, was that when any program was to be discontinued, first the faculty and the provost group would sit down with the faculty concerned and talk about it and their alternatives. That grew out of the rather precipitous decision to do away with the Ph.D. in Nursing in 1970. The thought was that we ' d talk about (the forestry school) and then arrive at a sensible conclusion. It might very well have been that the suggestion was that the program change somewhat in scope or the discussion may have led to more financing. ...whatever. But in any event, we never reached that stage until after all the hurrah. But now we are doing just that. That discussion is now in progress and will be carried over into the fall. It ' s not a decision that has to be made on the spur of the moment. I can ' t say why it got off the track. I don ' t think it would serve any purpose if I had an opinion. Chanticleer: When you say communication went awry , between whom do you mean? Sanford: Well, I would assume that the Dean of the Forestry School was acting in good faith. He apparently thought that the whole school was being abolished. The Provost thought that he was asking for a discussion on the continuation of the Master of Forestry Program. Now these two opinions are rather different. It was in that link of communication that the slip-up occurred. Chanticleer: Do you think it was misreported in the Chronicle? Sanford: Oh, I don ' t know. I don ' t read the Chronicle that closely. I don ' t think they reported incorrectly what they were told, and of course they did get that story from just one side. To that extent, they reported the perception of one person and did not record the other point of view. In any case, there isn ' t any way that this administration would have made the decision to get rid of the forestry school without that consultation. There wasn ' t any way that it was going to be abolished. There wasn ' t any decision made to that effect. There wasn ' t even any decision to abolish the Master of Forestry Program. Obviously, something happened to that communication since those decisions could not have been made without me and I never made them and never even considered the merits of making them. Chanticleer: Why did it take so long for an explanation of all this? Sanford: My guess is that the Chronicle is not representative of the student body. Rather, it is made up of those who want to worktin the Chronicle. They don ' t necessarily see it as their duty to report both sides of the question. They didn ' t much care what the Allen Building had to say. They are inclined to believe what they already believe. Chanticleer: Were you surprised by the amount of student reaction? Sanford: No, not particularly. In fact, I might have acted the same way myself if I thought that Allen Building had abolished the Forestry School and that of Environmental Management. Chanticleer: There ' s such a huge problem of communication here. There are still people who don ' t know what you ' ve just told us. Sanford: Well, that ' s correct, (pause) The administration doesn ' t always take the blame for everything that happens. It ' s all still in the discussion stage. This administration should not and could not have recognized that letter to the Dean in advance of the Dean and the faculty discussing it. It wouldn ' t have been proper for the Provost to have called in the Chronicle and to have said, Hey, listen, we ' re thinking about doing away with the Master of Forestry Program. Chanticleer: Why not? Sanford: I think it would have been unfair to the faculty to have done it that way and that was not our procedure. Our procedure was that first the faculty discusses it, then if the faculty is not satisfied with the decision, then the entire academic counsel can discuss it. The whole faculty becomes part of the decision. I think to announce in advance something like that not only would have been improper, but not along the lines of our policy. Chanticleer: It seems by judging something improper that you ' re putting an obstruction in the way of more fully integrating the people with their government. It seems that the bureaucracy is getting removed from the people and becoming some independent force.... Sanford: Well, the bureaucracy, if you can call it that at Duke, is closer to the students and the faculty and communicates with them more open and directly, and makes available to them all of the discussions from the board of trustees meetings on, than any university I know of, anywhere in the country. I ' ll stand on that statement. But give me some examples of what you ' re criticizing. Chanticleer: Besides this process issue? Well, a couple of years ago, there was a Chaplain Search Committee whose suggestion, two or three people who were on that committee told me, was virtually ignored. Sanford: That is precisely wrong! It was precisely followed. They looked at about 120 people and on my instructions recommended three people. This was the set of reasons, to recommend, not to appoint a Chaplain. It ' s true that there was some favoritism for one of the men but the information I received about the man at Princeton as sufficient enough for me to put him at the bottom of the list. They were not responsible for appointing a Chaplain. And this is the type of thing that gets thoroughly distorted through one student. Now, several students didn ' t tell you that; one student told you that. That one student felt that he had a right to name the Chaplain. Barney Jones, who is Chairman of the department, would be glad to spell it out for you. They gave us the three names and that ' s what the Search Committee was for. I ' m supposed to pick the person. I ' ve always worked in three ' s when appointing a Chaplain. I did what I was supposed to do. If they think that a certain committee is supposed to pick the Chaplain, then they ought to change the rules. I don ' t happen to think that ' s so. But, anyhow, you know, I acted in complete good faith. So now bring up any other one. I seldom make the mistake of not consulting myself. Chanticleer: About changing the rules, do you think that this is the direction that we ought to be moving in? Should the students have a part in the actual decision-making here at Duke? Sanford: I ' m going to keep making these decisions as long as I ' m President. However, I believe that the buck stops here, and I ' m willing to take my share of the responsibility. And I ' m willing to share that responsibility considerably. I didn ' t have to have a search committee. I could have said to the Bishop, Just give me a man. But I didn ' t even specify that he had to be a Methodist. There was even pressure on me that they be tenured. Chaticleer: All right, can you say something about the Public Policy decision? That raised a disturbance and there seemed to be little student, faculty consultation about it being made into a department. Sanford: I don ' t really know anything about it. Chanticleer: You don ' t know anything about it? r ' nford: It never reached the level of this office. Chanticleer: Well, who made that decision? Sanford: Well, ultimately the faculty made it. You ' d have to tilk to Dr. Cleaveland about it. I honestly don ' t know anything about it. Chanticleer: Did Dr. Cleaveland initiate that decision to have it made into a department? Sanford: You ' d have to ask him. My understanding is that it was made on the basis of considerable study. I consider a department a step lower than an institute. An institute may cut across departmental lines. I think one of the things wrong with a University is its departmental hierarchy. I ' d like to see us have a much more free-flowing structure. So, as far as I was concerned, that was a down-grading of the original concept I had of what the Public Policy Institute should be. I wanted to extend that concept to international studies. The institute was an overlay that went beyond a department so that when they made it a department it was in effect admitting defeat. Chanticleer: Speaking of international studies, why does Duke seem to ignore Asian Studies? Sanford: Well, we don ' t have any program, to speak of. I couldn ' t agree with you more. There were several things when I came here that needed beefing up . We beefed up a good many of them, including the Arts, I might say. Right now, we ' ve done well in spite of the tightness that comes with inflation. We ' ve done awfully well to have held our own. I would love to move more into the field of Asian and International Studies. I couldn ' t agree with you more. I feel that we ' ve neglected something that is becoming increasingly important. Chanticleer: The other decision I was going to refer to was the appointment of Clark Cahow. Sanford: That ' s made at the Provost ' s level and I wasn ' t involved in that except to indicate that everyone knew that Clark Cahow was the best.... Chanticleer: He wasn ' t recommended.... Sanford: He wasn ' t recommended because he wouldn ' t let them consider him. He wasn ' t an applicant. Chanticleer: You seem pretty isolated up here. Sanford: I ' m not isolated. I believe in delegating duty and letting it fall where it ' s -supposed to fall. The selection of the Provost isn ' t something that should be decided by the President of the university. You ' re not going to have a good administration if you only have one person to make all the decisions. Also, who would direct, say, the department of Political Science? It should be up to the Department. But I keep a wary eye on these matters. There were two people for the Admissions job that I would have been highly wary of. Chanticleer: Let ' s get back to this subject of friction between the students and administration. There seems to be a lot of hate out there, justified or not, as exemplified at that Saturday morning meeting between Cleaveland and the forestry school and at the big rally that followed later that week. How does that make you feel? Sanford: I think that was an exhibition of people reacting without full information, with no desire to get the full information. I regret that they see things like that. I can absorb that, you know, because the next day it will be something different. I could have gone out there and rabble-roused them the other way but I don ' t believe in that. You know they were wrong in that case. They were mad. Chanticleer: You say that these people lacked information because they didn ' t want it. Dr. Cleaveland did not inform those people at his three hour meeting, in fact, he seemed rather uninformed himself. That whole week was nothing more than people trying to find out. Sanford: Well, you know, I ought to agree with you there. It seemed to me at the time, I ought to let it run in the proper channels. In the long run, you get a better administration if you let people be in charge of what they ' re supposed to be doing. Occasionally, they make mistakes. You learn from mistakes. I don ' t worry about animosity. I think the feeling of goodwill on this campus is so remarkably different from the Spring of 1970 that no one could look at the campus without feeling a glowing appreciation for the past five years. Chanticleer: What about Duke Forest? Sanford: I ' ve never in private life, public life, or university life observed a more outrageous distortion. There has never been even the slightest mention that the Duke Forest would ever be sold, in part of in whole, or mortgaged, or any other of the other silly things mentioned. I think the Duke trustees would sooner turn the Chapel into a massage parlor than get rid of the forest. There ' s not one piece of evidence to give anybody the grounds to make that assertion. Now, the very idea that Mr. Duke started the forestry school to protect the forest doesn ' t hold up, in as much as the forest was acquired in the twenties and Duke University was chartered in 1924 and the forestry school was started in 1938. Whether it ' s a good or bad program has nothing to do with the forest, it has nothing to do with the maintenance of the forest or the fact that we ' re going to keep the forest. It was just a total distortion and it was designed, I presume, to add fuel to a fire that should never have been built in the first place. Chanticleer: Well, that ' s great to hear. To close it for a yearbook, what, do you think, is the most important thing that happened at Duke this year as far as what you tried to do? Sanford: The most important thing that happened this year happened the last day of school when we passed out the diplomas. That ' s what it ' s all about. Anybody who loses sight of that loses sight of what Duke is supposed to be doing. • Oblivion Althou oblivion, of course, is all around us, it was only after a year in the txinnels that I began to feel how omnipresent it is. We forget oblivion because to forget allows us to concentrate on the details of our high wire act. Maybe it is necessary to ignore the greatest essence, I don ' t know. Certainly it is absurd to watch (not to men- tion participate in) the details of acts performed by those unaware of their surr ounding doom. Absurd and angering. So many times, I just wanted to grab one of them, shake, beat, scare or even love some sense, some perspective into their heads. Nothing, And so the perspective drags on, unanswered, until the stunning inertia that comes from constantly confronting one ' s own disability sets in. The words don ' t fit. It creeps up on you, but the effects are overwhelming. It poisons you, like a bite from a venomous insect received while asleep or drugged. No panic; just despair. Black, rotten, shit-assed nothingness. I fell through the air; throu the net and into the sawdust floor of this circus. On another level, you could just say that my body lost its ability to locomote. On yet another level, you could say I became catatonic. VJhatever. I lay (l am not sure of all this) on the mattress, staring off at the steam pipes receding into the dis- tance, not moving an eyeball. I shat and pissed all over myself, until the clothes rotted from my body. After a while I lost the ability to recognize sensory input. I stopped seeing pipes, no longer heard the toilet flushings, couldn ' t smell the moulds; felt nothing. I felt incredibly peaceful. I wanted nothing. Out of boredom, I would imagine there to be a nickel on my forearm. An Indian head nickel. I could feel 1937. The Indian, if you were standing, was upside down. It was what I chose to call upside down relative to my forearm, anyway. This meant that the buffalo was facing out and ri t-side up. I freed the buffalo from the coin ' s tail and let him traverse my body. It seemed only natural then to transform my body into a great prairie, and to create company, in the form of ten thousand good-looking bison cows, to go along with my buffalo adam. This buffalo, I intended, was going to have a good time. I was going to be a good creator; not make a fucking mess of things like someone I know. Adam the buffalo was to get laid with ball-busting frequency, and he was going to like it. I considered possessing this stud, but then realized it was a waste of time. I could do more. I created races who would never be dispossessed from their lands and heritage; men who would culminate their civilizations in joy and harmony. I imagined natural orders of things, both living and mineral. This was a world without insects, violence, suffering, raistmderstanding, ignorance or sadness. It was perfection. I was bored again. V ell and good, let me be bored. Then a thou t occurred. Would this world disin- tegrate in the absence of my interest? How much reality had I given it? Since I could only focus my attention on one thing at a time, in this world as well as the one in which my body lay, I was always ignoring things and yet they kept right on existing, or could be called back to fantastic existence. The dilemma reminded me of a bizarre feeling I had had when we played the Math 51 Star Trek Program Game on the Duke computer. You would be given a set of constants by the program, such as speed, distance, and attitude concerning your imitation Enterprise and an imitation Klingon battle cruiser. The object was to destroy the Klingon cruiser, and the least you could do was try and keep the Enterprise in one piece. What if that were real somewhere? V iat if our pri- mary reality was of the same order in some other program? The thought was awesome. Back in nothingness, I eventvially surprised myself. While motionless, I had spent a long time exploring the workings of my vital organs. It interested me. Slowing my breath to less than twice a minute, I finally found my heartbeat growing so soft and slow that a few times I was sure I had died. I lingered in this state for what must have been days. I thought nothing. Suddenly I was overcome by an impulse to look behind me. In so doing I saw my own body on the mattress, several yards to my rear. Between the glare of two naked li t bulbs my body lay curled, a faint smile on a glass face. I felt joyful yet incredibly cautious, like a child having transgressed some forbidden boundary. I soon walked on down the tunnels, thou ever careful to keep my body in sight. There was my body, and the tunnels. Everything appeared quite ordinary, thou more grey and pale than my normal visual perception. It was like being outdoors on a moonlit night, except for a feeling of containment in a high-vaulted vacant room which echoed my every thou t. My brain whirred like an over-loaded computer, rapidly scanning and indexing every idea it had ever birthed. They were all rejected, and this made me glad. I decided to forget my body puppet and begin anew with this astral experience. Suddenly I was back on the mattress, my nose between my knees. I took off down a tunnel, breaking light bulbs v;ith my fists. camels of the liberation NXP1331536 IN CUSTODY NEW YORK: A U.S. marshal holds on to handcuffed Patricia Elizabeth Swinton following her arrival at Kennedy Airport March 12th. Miss Swinton, 33, sou t by the FBI for five years as an alleged member of a radical leftist ring that bombed a series of corporation and government buildings in New York City, was arrested March 12th in Brattleboro, Vermont, as she stacked jars of peanut butter in a health food store. CREDIT: (UPl) 3 13 75 vb da al ' Jj! -0 5c iF I r; ' ' i ' m w I ppi M Just sitting here watching shredded bodies pulling themselves down a road south from Danang, bombs and fear are everywhere and I ' m watching this on TV mind you and the US Congress today fell head over guilty heels to show itself a big tender humanitarian by get- ting those orphans out of Saigon and do you realize Mr. Senator that you have made those children so happy by giving them a chance to come to America? and my conscience im- plodes and I watch this on TV mind you in this full honky room and everybody wants to feel bad but no one really can and then feels bad because they can ' t and, America, I appreciate what you do for me but you have been a heartless and deceptive lover to all them mothers and fathers who let you come close and I just have to big doubt all these lights, energies, God or wholly myself who created these horrors for perhaps nothing more than dramatic amusements that turned into com- edies when consciousness thought it had to be born and history became the game it re- mains, with me, who doesn ' t even want to see Time having to devote the day a whole day to writing about a book that was wrong and wasn ' t it right that love is somewhere but where am I now as these dying Vietnamese mothers are screaming empty screams that slam me to the wall. Yesterday that jet crashed just disintegrating all those orphans.... April 5, 1975 i- .-. .■■■ ■ ' ■■ k. ' . l ' . , .,):■.■ •V, ' ,- ■■Vi ' v ' i ' - .■ i -; . U I am a sole survivor of the West twenty-fifth street Gang, who see only there in The rat-corners of Sanfran the exalting Bug-eaten truth of railroad travels On live tracks, they mark bur Course through dusty bowls of Wood America, shacks of Dr. Pepper Where old bums who don ' t know la Difference hang around waiting for Armageddon to rescue the lost souls of millions. Third street Sanfran where we wander Lost in front of our flop talking to Aimless dopedealers trying to score ya Know mon? and I have endless love for them But where am us in this seething madness of Yellow cab menace watch the steel ball As it eats your only house where you never Lived anyway, a true folly. Railroad eatery, pocatello idyho, crowded at Three A.M. with other lost souls and truck angels All glancing sideways at us images of mad road Wildness and hey shit ya know we ' re just as Lost as you my friend how ' s about a ride in yer Semi out there in that sweet Idaho night just Ripe for an all-night ride up over them mother Sawtooths north into the great divide between The Swift and the Sucked. We always find ourselves on great mad desperation dashes Into the unknown and unseen darkness of new Road on forward ahead let ' s keep on doing it and See what happens when none of us really believed Existence of roadhogs was allowed at night, and To creep into Green River up over those sad mean But stoned shale cliffs like the most shit upon Wyoming dog flea and hide in the brush watching Pacific freights getting put together boom into The night echoing off the desolation walls of Ourselves lost again. 15-501 Durham with little bits of dirty crusted Snow clinging to the overpass in a heavy winter Fog, we pause a second to stare at it as another Desolate wall of ourselves melts under the fog and Sleet-laced wind, salty, we feel trust shattered Between us as rigors of Florida road and Duke Ignorance smeared the final roadhike into a slippery Silence. The TV in some commons room showed Astronauts. M ' Ai J imiiS The Smile on his Pace In the steam plant one night, I get to witness what you mi t call a work-related injury. I walked to the plant in order to get my constitution amended by a healthy dose of steam; this being a habit I had developed. Instead I see this: A worker is oiling one of those valves. It ' s a tricky scene, because he ' s supposed to oil the short arm of this assembly. The machine is clanking away at overtime, and the guy ' s trying to juke his oilcan in time with the valve. This fellow ' s sort of goofy and he ' s having a hell of a time. What makes matters worse is that every time the long arm slides by a little puff of live steam squirts out right in his face. Each time this happens, the guy lets loose with an ah, shit. It would be funny, if you disregarded the terrific frustration this guy must have felt. The supervisor, meanwhile, stands up on a catwalk and watches. Every time the worker says ah, shit, he lets out a little chuckle and makes a mark on his clip board. This isn ' t lost on the worker; he hates that supervisor, I can see it cover his eyes as clear as you can see an oil slick. Then the long arm swings by and something goes wrong. It happens fast: the oilcan gets knocked out of the worker ' s hand and onto the floor where it pops open. The supervisor cracks up and starts to write all over his clipboard. This infuriates the worker, who turns to give the guy the bird, but slips in the oil and gets his middle finger whacked off by the small arm. The steam puffs out and the worker screams. The supervisor laughs so hard, he falls off the catwalk and lands with his ass on top of a return valve, which has got to puncture him halfway to his gizzard, but in so doing trips the valve. Steam blows everywhere and sirens go off. I split down the tunnel towards Bell Building, dodging bits of blown out boilers. Something my size flies over my head and smacks to a stop where the tunnel takes a hard right. It ' s the worker. He ' s all messed up, but he ' s got a smile on his face that could sink a ship. I just lay low. COOL HAND DUKE The base for outrage against Duke can be summed up in one sentence — The only thing that matters in this University is BUCKS. Chan Smith said this is one of his public condemnations of efforts to phase out the forestry school. Bucks — that ' s what ' s embodied in the priorities, the educational programs, the type of students, relations with the people who work here, relations with the city of Durham. Buck Duke made those bucks building a tobacco monopoly and much of his character has been preserved in the supposed gesture of beneficence that has become Duke University. Duke, as much as American Tobacco is a corporation, preoccupied with its expansion, its market appeal, its prestige. Duke produces a variety of commodities but it is especially noted for education and medical care. It is these commodities I ' d like to talk about. Let ' s take the second one first. What is medical care at Duke like? Basically it is the biggest industry in Durham, employing over 9000 people. Duke hospital provides primary care to a large part of the Durham population and tertiary care (roughly meaning last resort) to folks from all over the Carolinas. Duke establishes the health industry norms for the city and has provided Durham with five times the ratio of neurosurgeons to population as the national average, six times the ratio of orthopedic surgeons, while Durham has one-seventh the ratio of general practitioners to population. Medical care at Duke is big and getting bigger. Notice that I say medical care and not health care, because the kind of medicine practiced at Duke has little to do with health, the prevention of disease, or the treatment of the common health problems of the population. In brief, Duke bills itself as a teaching and research hospital (and it bills its patients heavily to serve as teaching material ). It ' s reputation is built on advanced research and esoteric problems; it ' s staff and students pursue high-paying specialties. This continues while there are not nearly enough physicians or facilities to meet the common health needs of much of the US population. These are the kind of medical priorities which Duke is perpetuating in three ways: structurally, politically, and in the minds of those who study here. The structural aspects are the most obvious. On October 1 ground will be broken for construction of a new $96 million hospital — Duke North. Despite the fact that the University faced last spring a $3.4 million deficit, the trustees have approved plans to build a structure for which the annual debt retirement will be almost twice that deficit. Briefly, the new structure will house 600 new beds, a more than generous replacement of care. But as is true in so much of our society, more is not necessarily better. We would not argue that there are not some beds at Duke that need replacing. We would not argue that medical research is irrelevant and should be discontinued at Duke. We will argue that this new hospital is a costly mistake. Structures alone don ' t determine function, but they can easily cement the direction and practices of an institution. As planned, this hospital is cementing Duke ' s past priorities so that they will be Duke ' s future. An exorbitant amount of money is going for this building, rather than for staffing, new programs or qualitative improvement of health care — much less for the 200 obsolete beds in the present hospital. The total number of beds will be raised by 150, though there is obviously no need for more beds for Durham residents with a new county hospital opening this spring and no convincing evidence that patient demand will suddenly increase since Duke ' s occupancy rate has never been and is not projected to be over 85%. The clincher is that in this new hospital the cost of staying one day has been estimated at $394, a 250% increase over the current cost of a day at Duke ($151 ). Surely, one would think that a new larger hospital would improve the quality of patient development of practice in preventive health care, outreach, primary care — areas which are rapidly becoming the true rarities of medical practice as sub-specialization flourishes. And what do we get for all this money? We do not get any expanded clinic space, despite the fact that outpatient care was cited as the one outstanding need for the Durham area in the Regional Health Planning Commission ' s study Health Care for the 70 ' s . For $8.4 million we get a subway system with the astounding capability of moving 6000 people per hour. Of course, one might question why 75% of the hospital workforce would want to be moved every hour. We do get more beds — all in single rooms. Duke says that it needs all single rooms because as it is now, they can ' t accept as many patients as they want because you can ' t mix sexes and some conditions in the same room. However they do not project any rise in the occupancy rate when they have all single rooms. Those beds will have to be filled for Duke to remain solvent. Hospital management studies prove that if beds are available, doctors will prescribe more frequent and longer stays in the hospital — certainly the most expensive form of medical attention. But expense seems to be the last concern. The original projection was for a cost of $91 million. Cost projections have already risen by $5 million, and a greater percentage of the burden has shifted to the patient. The original plans called for an annual debt retirement of $5.6 million. (One can presume that the new figures are higher). Meeting those payments will exert profound pressure to raise prices constantly and if one wants to generalize about inflation trends and construction cost overruns, well, someone ' s going to pay through their teeth. As Alexander McMahon, chairman of the Board of Trustees said in May, If people are going to expect to get better medical care, they ' ll just have to pay for it. And pay we will, with no control over the kind of care we ' re getting or not getting. Now some will argue that no one pays for hospitalization these days — insurance covers it all. But what is insurance but premiums paid monthly from working people ' s salaries? When the cost of health care goes up, premiums go up. In Durham in the next few years, they should soar. By 1980 there will be 1500 beds in Durham county. 93% of them will be in private rooms. Almost all group insurance policies administered at workplaces, including Duke, only cover care in semi-private rooms. Either people will stop going to the hospital or rates will go up. Not only does Duke get the bread, the insurance companies get some healthy benefits too. The insurance dimension brings out some of the political aspects of the construction of Duke North. As part of its national reputation, Duke sports some big names in national health circles. One of them is the man who ' s let them eat cake attitude I just cited — Alexander McMahon, Chairman of the Duke Board of Trustees, president of the American Hospital Association (AHA), former president of Blue Cross Blue Shield. He ' s a man known for ability to draw profits out of seemingly constrained financial situations. In 1970, while he served as a member of Nixon ' s cost of living council which imposed across the board 5% price increase freezes, Blue Cross Blue Shield managed to gain a 32% rate increase. They should merit a substantial increase from the Duke project as well. McMahon, along with William G. Aniyan, Duke ' s Vice-President for health affairs, who chairs the national Association of Academic Health Centers, and many department heads in the medical center have a great deal of influence in national health circles. This is especially important in terms of lobbying efforts to introduce national health insurance which will underwrite all hospital construction costs, legislation of which the AHA is sponsoring. Then expense won ' t matter — except that taxes will rise to keep up with the ever spiraling costs of health care. It ' s like a free ride for major medical centers to expand and expand and expand. It ' s happening across the country, and as they build, costs will rise higher and higher. And there is no way we who pay for it through our taxes have any say. There are some who will claim that the health care system is disorganized. Actually it is very well organized for those who can make profits out of it — insurance companies, drug companies, major health care providers, doctors. The book-keeping is organized, if the services aren ' t. There are a lot of political implications in the way those services are delivered, too. Hospitals don ' t operate without people — lots of them — people who examine patients, who give them medicine, administer therapeutic programs, perform tests, prepare food, clean up after everyone else. The most striking characteristic of working at Duke is that almost everyone is overworked, and it is very difficult to provide those services well when you simply don ' t have the time. The second major characteristic of working at Duke is that most people are treated as if the work they do is unimportant, or at least very secondary to the doctor. The people who provide the services seldom have any part in deciding how the services are to be performed — and doctors and administrators don ' t know everything. Thirdly there is pay — can you imagine trying to raise a family on $2.72 an hour? (And that ' s not the lowest pay scale). There are attempts being made to organize the services — literally. Ten years ago workers at Duke were getting paid 85 i an hour. That was when union organizing began. In the ensuing time, Duke has probably spent more money fighting unionization than it has been forced to give up to union members — in court costs, lawyers fees, and extending benefits gained by the unions to other employees in an effort to discourage them from joining the union. You might say that Duke has a two-pronged approach: 1) making it seem that they really care about the workers, and 2) intimidating and pressuring workers in terms of their job security. The unions have withstood the pressure, have grown, and are now winning tangible benefits for their members, benefits which Duke then has to extend to non-union workers in order to prove that they care, and to keep them from adding to the strength of the unions. This summer Duke was proud to announce that employees would get their birthdays off as a holiday, and that evening and night shift workers would get an extra premium for their work. Their circular made a point of saying that these benefits apply only to non-bargaining unit employees, the reason being, of course, that union members already had bargained for them and won them. Big Daddy Duke, so generous publicly, also believes that sparing the rod spoils the worker, and last fall published new work rules Including a dress code, and by arbitrarily using strict enforcement, tried to make people fearful for their jobs. There was a reason — it ' s good public relations to give people a raise in hard times, so Duke tried to reduce its payroll by 5% in order to give an 8.5% cost-of-living increase to those who were left. That meant firing people, for signing in less than five minutes before they actually came in, for reading a newspaper during working hours. People were sent home with warnings for not wearing name tags, or for having runs in their stockings. It ' s hard to organize people to fight when they fear for their jobs, and especially when some of the most outspoken proponents of the union are tailed around the hospital by people from the labor realtions office. The workers have a pretty clear analogy. They call Duke the plantation . Most of the problems with patient care at Duke come down to this — the people who provide the care are not able to determine how that care is delivered, and they are prevented from taking steps to change that. That active unveiling of the hospital plans in the summer of 1974 coincided with Congressional amendment of labor laws to permit the unionization of voluntary hospitals, like Duke. So that in terms of the Duke North construction, the interests of those who run Duke the administrators and trustees, has always been in clear opposition to the interests of those who make Duke run — the workers. There is simply not enough money to really improve working conditions at Duke and to build Duke North, and the construction behind Hanes House shows which won out. What does this all mean? Why is Duke North being built? Duke functions around a drive for prestige and money, prestige because it brings money. Therefore, it boils down to money. The people who run this place, the trustees, have spent their lives making money, or adding to the money left to them. They think making money, lots of it, is an inherently good thing. They think that Duke should do it, and that Duke students should do it. We concentrated on the medical center in this article because it gets, makes, and spends more money than any orther portion of the University, and its influence pervades the experience of everyone at Duke. Physically it dominates all of west Durham, with buildings stretching out over half a mile past Davison. Look at the students who come here. Sixty to eighty per cent of the recent freshman classes have come with pre-med intentions, choosing Duke largely in hopes that it will improve their chances of getting in the medical school. I needn ' t belabor the stereotypic myth of the pre-med. But what kind of doctors does Duke train, anyway? Doctors who are taught to conform to Duke ' s medical priorities and ignorance of primary care and preventive care; doctors who are taught that they always know what ' s best — or if they don ' t, only another doctor does; doctors who think that only medicine is important and the political and economic realities behind the health care system are irrelevant. And then the medical center dominates in terms of developmental priorities, because it generates the most prestige and the most money. Chancellor Jack Blackburn said last spring, by way of defending the hospital construction to the faculty that Duke was a second-rate university attached to a first-rate medical center. He seemed to think Duke should keep it that way. And with the amount of resources now being funeled to the medical center, it looks like it will. The contradictions became clear when attempts were made to phase out the forestry school to help cover last spring ' s deficit. Foresters, of all the professionals trained at Duke, do not make much money, and do not generate prestigious research. They just work at keeping the environment stable enough to withstand the onslaughts other professionals plan on it. Ecologists are expendable, as are most other educational endeavors which aren ' t either prestige rendering (e.g. public policy research) or classically entrenched (though some of the latter are on occasion threatened). Duke North is being built because it will add to the medical center ' s prestige, and not incidentally to the prestige of the people associated with it. The patients who come there, the workers who operate it will pay for it, with no improvement in the quality of care received or provided or in the conditions under which services are rendered. The medical care which the Duke corporation is marketing, even in its jazzed up new form, is not the commodity it should be, but we have no choice but to buy it, because it ' s all there is. What does this say about that second commodity, education? First, that the university ' s emphasis on the medical center effectively precludes the development of a larger emphasis in other areas. Secondly, the financial and political dominance of the medical center on campus shows that the ideology which rules the medical center dominates the university. That ideology is one of prestige and profit — an endowment of Buck Duke just as surely as those bucks were. Throughout the university there is more attention to the window-dressing than to the substantive quality of work, just as in the hospital the money is going for a new building rather than for improvement of services. The work is largely that which generates prestige rather than that which is needed; i.e., teachers publishing rather than teaching, just as the hospital concentrates on research and puts little energy into primary care. And just as medical students are trained to conform to Duke ' s priorities, to only value professional opinion, to ignore the political and economic implications of their work, so are the rest of us trained. Our minds and our futures are largely the product the Duke corporation is processing. Of course, we chose to come here. But was there any other choice? We want to do productive work, our backgrounds have insisted that to do that one goes to college, and one tries to go to the most prestigious college possible, so as to be better able to land a position of influence. We don ' t question that Duke ' s going to provide us with what we want. We don ' t question what Duke provides us with. We don ' t question what we want. But then we ' re taught not to question things as basic as all that — taught it at home, in school all our lives, through the media — not to question who has authority, and who has money, and how they get it, and whether someone should be listened to if they ' re a woman or black, and why things can ' t be done right instead of the way they ' re done by someone up there. Because basically this system is set up so that those folks who have the authority, and the money, and are listened to, and do things are the same people who have all the answers for us — educationally, medically, politically, socially ... ad infinitum. The Duke trustees and administrators aren ' t the only ogres. People just like them are guiding every other institution in our society, with much the same ideology and practices. And they cooperate, of course, in the way that insurance company heads. doctors, and college administrators cooperated in planning Duke North. And that ' s how power consolidates. And that ' s how Cool Hand Duke holds all the cards. However, there ' s no reason why they have to keep those cards. The amorphous entity which is Duke is made up of thousands of people. Everytime it has been used in this article, the word Duke has meant those who run Duke, because at this point, they have determined what it stands for, and what it is doing and will be doing. They are also those who have benefitted from Duke being what they have made it. But what about the thousands of us who work and study here? Those cards are really ours, but our only power is in our numbers. It ' s not all that hard to create an individual solution to whatever problems you have with Duke, given time and modest expectations. But individual solutions will not challenge the priorities, direction or quality of education or any other of Duke ' s commodities. It is only by struggling to build a union that those who work at Duke have begun to gain some control over their work. There are clear reasons for outrage against Duke. There are two ways to deal with it: either stay in the tunnels, or fight it. -NAM v •V ' bfcV CV - v f.: ' «j ii ' i ' ' .-J ' ' ■- W: J ' r- r P ti ■w- ;fc-. - ' m iK . ' % r Dear Xaviera, Your cryptic note does not amaze me. You seem to think that logic would mean something to me. You say that you think I know. Well, yes, X., per- haps. But what I know is not what you think. I do not have to posit relevence. I do not have to decide to live. I do not have to explain myself to anyone. Artificer you say? Creator of this tunnel maze? Hal Listen, Xaviera, there is no creator. Neither myself or any big mind. The universe is infinite to all perception. The very quantity of it denies all statements of moral validity, creation or even absurdity. There is no judge. There is no one that cares. You and I are but tiny specks in the middle of nowhere. Not one damn thing we do matters. I ' m in this tunnel only because I want to be. Go on, try to deny my whims. Cheer up, Bozo, you haven ' t failed. Sure I ' ll take that gun. Suicide may be a rush. Come on down and talk, if you dare. Here tomorrow. m s 1 P mH I Baby Rat • s Lament It was incredibly terse. The fucking rats were climbing all over me. Suddenly, accompanied by a flash of light and a loud retort, I let fly with both barrels of my twelve-guage double-barrel shotgun. One of them struck the beast somewhere between the neck and right shoulder. It was blown to smitherines. Yuck! Puck! said mother rat, slinking back into the family burrow. What ' s gone wrong, asked dad rat, the head of that particular burrow. I mean, like, what is the story woman, coming home all shot up, bleeding from those holes between your joints and mouth and heiny? Gome, clean, momma rat. Listen, dad, she said, attending to her wo mds with her tongue. Don you gib me dat Jive shit. One dem honkies don drilled ray young ass wid a shotgun. I am all alone, said baby rat, staring wistfully out the picture window. She sat up all night and watched the garbage fires biom. The following are excerpts from a series of letters received by our offices from Joe Harris, a ' 74 Duke graduate now conducting agricultural development (i.e. draining swamps) with the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone. I met Joe at the end of last summer and only knew him for a month before he left for Africa. He had spent the summer pickin ' peas in Maryland and had turned down a full scholarship to attend graduate school in sociology at UNC, opting instead to go to Africa. Having come to Duke as a young Baptist boy on football scholarship, Joe saw the full spectrum while here and when 1 met him was living in the Coca-Cola mansion with a bunch of freaks. I have a desire to get quite syrupy here and tell you what a fine, beautiful man he is if only to put into perspective his Africa ravings. Though ifs quite true, I won ' t. We just included his letters for all of you who said you ' d want to go into the Peace Corps and never did. January 20 Dear Kerry, I know it ' s bad form to start a letter with an apology, but if I ever needed to do so, this is it. First of all, for not writing you before, well — what can I say? Inexcusable. If it matters at all, about the only people I ' ve written besides Melissa are my brother and parents. Not much of a defense, but you haven ' t written me either! — if you ' ll allow a regression to my 3-year old mentality. Genuine heart-felt apologies. As for the photo business — I didn ' t know what I was getting into. I have tried — really put out an effort — but the obstacles are so great that I wouldn ' t feel guilty at all about not sending more photos if it hadn ' t been you that gave me the film for the Chanticleer. First of all, the 14-16 hour a day, 6 days a week training program that started on the first day I entered Africa left me little time for serious photography. The physical adjustment to food, water, climate, tropical diseases, etc. kept me zonked out for quite a big chunk of time. I ' m just now (after 3 months) beginning to make the physical adjustments so that I ' m not sick 4 days a week and run-down dog-tired the other 3. And the cultural problems connected with photography here are too much to handle. I ' m mostly into photographing people, and the older people here resent the white man sticking his camera into their lives; while the younger people, especially kids, go wild at the sight of a camera and immediately strike weird ' funny-face ' , ' king-fu ' , big ' shit-eating grin ' poses, artificial as hell. Fifty kids jump in front of the camera as soon as you pull it out, making it impossible to get a decent shot of anyone. Also, if you point a camera at the wrong thing (secret society house, sacred bush, holy place, almost any tribal ritual, etc.) they ' ll take your film out of the camera (it they don ' t smash the camera first). And for one last excuse, I plead emotional incapacitation. That ' s not true, but the ' culture shock ' was a hell of a lot harder to take than I had imagined. Thinking of it in terms of a two-year commitment didn ' t ease things at all. For the first two and a half months 1 was on such an emotional roller-coaster that it was totally unbelievable. So high on Africa and what I ' m doing one day that I just float, like a 15-year-old kid in love for the first time (if you can stomach that illustration); and the next day so incredibly bummed out by the lonliness and disappointment of trying to live in such a socially primitive and prejudiced culture that all I want to do is cry and crawl back to America. One reason for leaving America was so I could perhaps learn to appreciate the positive aspects of it better; perhaps my ass! The corruption at every level of life and organization here, the rigid class barriers, the degree of female slavery and the grossness of the male chauvinism and machismo that ' s so prevalent here, the prejudice, and the inter-tribal stereotyping and hatred, you just wouldn ' t believe that anyone could be so naive as to think that he was fleeing to an unspoiled beautiful people world (certainly not me!). January 21 Got too drunk to finish the letter yesterday. Maybe you can appreciate the change in perspective from drunk to hung-over. Sitting in a run-down, sleezy, cheap-cheap hotel in Freetown (Memories of George Orwell ' s Down And Out In Paris And London) scene of a hell of a fight yesterday, started between 2 whores and spread between 20 or more people for an hour before things quieted down. Not a nasty head splitting, bloody, bone-breaking rumble like in America — it was strictly a West-African fight. Mostly noise and plenty of that. Hair pulling and clothes tearing and a god-awful lot of screaming, funny as hell. Be great entertainment if they ' d cut the volume down a notch. I am now an official Peace Corps Volunteer; after three months in limbo as a trainee I was sworn in 6:17 p.m. Thursday, January 16, 1975, with a group administered pledge to uphold and defend the United States of America ' s Constitution to the utmost of my ability. (I will admit that I fudged a bit on the oath, left out some of the declarations of loyalty and altered some of the phrases into obscene retorts; not that I have anything against the U.S. Constitution. ..it ' s a fine piece of literature and highly idealistic — too bad it didn ' t work out practically like the theoretical blue-prints — but I was drunk at the time and it seemed like a good idea to say fuck ' America ' while being sworn in as a government agent). This country is enough to turn a young idealist middle-class white American child of the 1%0 ' s into a flaming bigot and U.S. patriot imperialist isolationist. I try to be sensitive to the culture and to the real heavy problem of an African country torn by the very sudden transition from traditional tribal life-styles, culture, values, etc. to Western civilization which brings out so many strange things with it, but I find myself getting drunk a lot. Quite often, should I say? I wrote to Tricia saying that when you ' re collapsed, clumped against that prickly palm-frond wall of a foul smelling latrine in tropical summer rainy season heat and humidity with sweat oozing outta every grimy stinking slimy pore of your body after a week ' s worth of dysentary with no end in sight and all your vital body fluids and hopes and dreams are dribbling out of the bloody raw hole at the bottom of your guts and big ugly fat green shit-glutted flies are crawling all over your bare ass because no matter how many times you get up and let a hundred buzz out there ' s still a thousand there when you sit down again as you know you must and you can ' t remember the last time that your stomach felt decent, it ' s hard to answer Will Barrett ' s eternal query What ' s wrong with Mr. and Mrs. Will Barrett, Suburbia, U.S.A.? (Walker Percy ' s The Last Gentleman, WILL BARRETT, what a name! I love it, the crucified modern man, Mr. Will Barrett). The characteristics of a human being are certainly that he must progress alone towards his own unique destiny, his own death. To this extent each man must be related to the world by his own connections with it and no one elses. It is. ..at the threshhold of authentic self-discovery that the human being experiences anxiety. It is not anything particular which afflicts him. It is simply his unsupported, isolated position in the world. He begins to doubt the reality of the world, because he realizes that he is the source of its reality. Even his own place in the world is doubtful, and he cannot take anything for granted anymore. I have never been much for reading philosophy per se, it ' s always impressed me as a boring and pretentious waste of time to spend hours reading circular, repetitive, verbose arguments that are usually 95% syntax and 5% unoriginal thoughts and unanswered questions. ( can ask myself questions that I can ' t answer.) It is, of course, true that for each individual, the world exists solely in relation to himself. If a tree falls in an empty forest. ..does it make a sound? ha ha ha ha! If 1,752,836 people starve to death in Pakistan, does anyone in America lose weight? And how many starving Indians will one atom bomb feed? And who gives a fuck? Well, I did rush to join the front lines of the fight to feed the 3rd world, sacrificing worldly comfort to feed mankind. Still, I don ' t feel that COSMIC UNITY, that INNER PEACE, that ULTIMATE HARMONY! Tough shit. I really do not wish to live by any law of decay. )ust tell me, how long has the world got to be like this? Why should there be no hope for suffering? It so happens that I believe that something can be done, and this is why I have rushed out into the world as you have noted. ...everything about you, Henderson-Sungo, cries out, ' Salvation, Salvation! What shall I do? At once! What will become of me? ' And so on. That is bad. If I had the mental constitution to live inside the nutshell and think myself the king of the infinite space, that would be just fine. But that ' s not how I am. I am a becomer...rve just got to stop BECOMING. Jesus Christ, when am I going to BE? Saul Bellow ' s, Henderson The Rain King (what else are you gonna read during your first African exile?) isn ' t a great book, and it ' s existential salve of love being is certainly trite enough, but it does pose one good point. What good does it do to beat your head against the wall? You know that there is no answer to the existential dilemma, so why torture yourself? The world does not exist except through you (each individual human); you are the world. And what else should you do except enjoy your self your existence the world. Hopefully, fulfilling your unique identity will have positive rather than negative value. (What is good? evil? pos-neg? ta da ta da) But what does it matter? You ' ve got to live your life. Right now, for me, living my life has brought me to Africa to try to help some very needy people in a grass-roots, earthy type of way. Maybe it ' s idealistic and naive to think that perhaps I can do some good, and especially so to actually try and do it, but it doesn ' t ease that cosmic itch. You can ' t find an answer and do it either; you ' ve just got to develop your head and get into your life, whatever is going on. Maybe when I serve my time in Africa I ' ll be able to enjoy life by going to law school and living comfortably with a mountain house and a sailboat and good wine and a woman that touches my soul. Or selling used cars. Or living on a subsistance farm commune. Whatever, it doesn ' t matter. I hope that didn ' t bore you too much. If this seems rather silly, just remember that I ' m living in a culture that doesn ' t discuss anything heavier than today ' s rice crop. I ' ll try to send more photos, but don ' t expect much from me. I ' ve got so much to keep me busy now. Planning out a water control for just one swamp, surveying the land, marking contours, designing the system, supervising the work, beaurocratic hassles getting supplies, food and laborers and writing monthly reports and applying for grants from the U.S. Embassy, Catholic Relief Service, World Food Programme, problems with the natives,... it ' s a hell of a lot of work and time for just one swamp, and the native agricultural extension agents in my chiefdom have registered 336 2-acre swamps for development this year, and there are also two large swamps (40-plus acres and 100-plus acres) that need to be done. Of course I ' ll never do half that work. Tuesday night (maybe) Kerry, my man, brother lover kindred spirit soul heart and cosmic conscience of mine — greetings and heart-felt salutations. Hope you ' re still in Durham, hanging around waiting for this letter. My job and life here has entailed more bureaucratic hassles than I would have dreamed of, and the extra added mind-fuck of being a genuine boss man ala British Colonial Mentality (every African son of a mother kisses white-ass and not a day passes when I don ' t hear 4 or 5 variations of we the black man are lowly ungrateful thieves and liars, o holy white man; we don ' t believe ourselves, only the white man; black skin, black heart, etc., etc.) Makes me a mosf (ha!) wish I were in Angola dodging insults instead of sleeping in shit here. What makes it worse is that I enjoy having a houseboy to fetch water for me and plow the garden and wash dishes, and I even enjoy having preferential treatment in getting a good seat on public transport (well, god damn it, so would you after riding with 42 other people in the enclosed back of a Datsun pick-up truck in 90° weather when you ' re the only one who ' s had a bath in the past week.) One field assistant (the natives that I work most closely with, who all claim that I am their best friend in the whole world) broke into my house and stole everything of value that he could carry out but was kept out of trouble because he was related to the assistant minister of Ag.S.L. even though he had been caught stealing once before. One field assistant was caught stealing a $4.00 rope when he brought me 4 ropes and been given 5 ropes to give to me. One field assistant was caught stealing, then selling 50 bags of (U.S.A. donated) nutritionally enriched bulgar that was supposed to be fed to those undernourished farmers and kids as an incentive to work in our water control-agricultural improvement program. One field assistant sold some tools (Peace Corps via Catholic Relief Service grant I personally received) I had given to him to distribute to farmers he was supervising. These are only four out of the nine who ' ve been caught, lord knows what else they ' ve gotten away with. Fuck, you can ' t feel sorry for yourself for so long, there ' s another month old shit coming down on my head, so shall we turn the whole thing into a massive soap-opera tragedy or shall we forbear and live in the sweeter moments of life? It ' s now Tuesday night. ..sittin ' at a bar in Waterloo drinking beer and eating beef sticks (beef and onion shis-ke-bob with native spicy sauce). Might as well tell you about the greeting with the Paramount Chief today. Had a palm frond made especially for the seclusion S.L. soldiers and police guarding the compound with their rifles and demanding clearance before admitting anyone. A pile of shoes and sandles outside the entrance, barefoot only. Enter the compound, 3 walls and then the open gathering space. Five people under mats for shade, the Chief, the 2nd big man in chiefdom. Chief ' s 1st wife. Chief ' s father, and biggest section chief in Koya Chiefdom. Diagonal to that was a low bench with 10 big chiefs. Then rows of benches facing the chief with all the other village and section chiefs and tribal authorities. Came in with my village chief, Sheku, greeting, bows, pleasantries, introductions, etc., then they led me to the 6th seat in the front, next to the Paramount Chief ' s 1st wife. What a big man I was. What bluff and bullshit. I did get off on the tribal rituals cross-cultural experience type stuff; in fact, it seemed more natural than a western board of directors meeting in a skyscraper in a concrete and smog village, but it was nonetheless bluff and bullshit as everywhere as always people just can ' t exist without those social games and ego games. Pottos (white people) are big people here because they ' re white Westerners (esp. American) but it ' s a hollow type of respect, mostly just a barrier to any personal interaction. Listen, Kerry, if there ' s one ounce of love for me in your crazy hippy-spaced soul, you will forthwith procure a copy of Famous Men and devote yourself to it for however long it takes. ...a portrait of Depression tenant farmers that might help you to appreciate all your advantages while you still have them, before you run away with the Peace Corps and live as a western totem in the midst of squalor ignorance indifference or trot off to another unrealistic American adventure as an apprentice mystic with your nose stuck up some stagnated egotistical messiah ' s ass. Oust a friendly and compassionate note of warning from a fellow youthful idealistic crusader who is sacrificing American luxury and intellectual stimulation and social bowel movements in a frustrating and largely unappreciated effort to save the Third World from starvation.) By the way, the photos here of two men holding a pole between them (on their shoulders) are of a native magic ceremony. The stick is a thief stick . Some native in Mapaki stole some clothes from a P.C., so the village chief sent for a medicine man to catch the thief. The medicine man tied a cloth containing magic objects, juju, into a ball and tied it on the thief stick with twine. Two men carry the pole of their shoulders, and the medicine man sprinkles a liquid potion on their heads, shoulders, hands, knees with a special stick. The two men carrying the stick go into a trance, their eyes alternately screwed shut and open blank, shaking and trembling uncontrollably all over their body, esp. at the upper chest and shoulders where the stick is resting. The men are unable to release their two-fisted grip; it takes four or five men to pry them off. (At Mapaki, the first man they tried on the front of the stick was perfect; they had to try four different men at the back before one got into a satisfactory trance.) Then with the thief stick guiding and controlling them, they begin lurching and stumblin ' about, running at top speed {barefoot over stony pebble-covered ground), stopping suddenly, wheeling, spinning, always with jerky wild motions. First, they made a trial run to prove to everyone that the medicine works. The chief hides a coin somewhere in the village, and the stick finds it, after 30 minutes or so. The villagers are laughing and joking during the search, but whenever the stick comes near them they run away and avoid it. When the thief stick finds the coin, everyone becomes silent. The stick has proven itself. Now to catch the thief. The thief stick runs all over the village, dashing at groups of people, all of whom shy away from the stick and try to avoid it. The stick (and men holding it, of course) runs into people violently at random, scattering groups and occasionally knocking an unwary person down. It finally comes to bear on one young man, who is obviously frightened and quite nervous when the stick singles him out. It turns out that this man knows someone who knows who the thief is. Back into the search. A second man is pointed out. He is not the thief, but he knows who the thief is. Back into the search. The crowd of villagers watching is quiet and tense, somewhat nervous. The stick jerks and lurches and spins as before, as always, and then dashes into a man sitting in a hammock, striking him repeatedly and knocking him out of the hammock. It is the thief. He protests, insisting that he is innocent. I ask a village elder what happens when a man who is pointed out by the stick claims to be innocent. He said that it often happens, but after you beat the thief he always confesses. At any rate, the man the thief stick pointed out in Mapaki was the actual thief, because they found the clothes in his room when they searched it. Theft is very common in Sierra Leonne. Even in the very small bush villages people lock their doors and windows. When a thief is caught in a village, he is beaten half to death (literally) before he is turned over to the legal authorities. Starting a garden here. ..American-type vegees. Hope they do all right in the African soil and climate. Tomatoes, cucumbers, yellow squash, zucchini, lima beans, field peas, watermelon, cantaloupe, mustard greens, radishes It ' s been good going through the various fruit seasons here. Oranges and bananas when I arrived, then pineapple, avocado, and mango; coconut all the time; plums, peanuts, lemons and limes. Got a pet monkey now, don ' t know what kind, but I ' ve seen them in the zoos. This one ' s fairly tame, young, affectionate, and real cute. A bit of a hassle sometimes, always getting tangled around tree-posts, and getting his bod emeshed in the jaws of passing dogs. Thursday afternoon Ahh, swamp work; fresh air and sunshine in gargantuan doses, a thoroughly respectable job, a solid niche in the world and a clear conscience; what more could a man ask for besides decent food, and a humane climate, freedom from constant sieges of tropical diseases and parasites and decent companionship? Ah yes, those bitter-sweet blues. Well, one last thing, about those cosmic doubts and all. No, of course I don ' t think that money and mellow thighs will ease any doubts or answer any questions. It just seems like one can resign himself to the great DOUBT just as easily with a glass of good Scotch in his hand and a few good friends in more desirable conditions. Have no fear, I am not opting for law school and Cadillacs (not yet). Guide yourself as you go. Love, joe One night I had gone to the Student Prince with three Kappa Alpha that were rushing me. The guys were getting the beer. I lay my jacket on a chair, studying the messages carved in the table. I learned that Rufus loved BuleaJi. Gladys loved to suck cock. And Sarah ' s number was 286-2825. The meanest-looking man in the world sat on my jacket. One of the guys said, Watch out for him. He ' s a psychopath, and he ' s all-ACC. When I had a few beers in me, and knew I didn ' t want to be a Kappa Alpha, the goon was still on my jacket. I saw his hairy arm flatten against my father ' s fli t jacket. Excuse me, could I please have my jacket. Arching my eyebrows, I tried to look as meek as I could. With enormous irritation, he turned his jaw my way. The very jut in it violated my personal space. I didn ' t want to be a Kappa Alpha, and I wanted my jacket. I looked to the other guys for approval, scratched my ear, put ray hand on my jacket, and tugged. The lights went out. Staggering into the parking lot, I went looking for the other guys. When I found them they said, I told you h e was poison. At the basketball game I saw the star guard from State shaking his fist at our man. Blood gushing from his mouth, he stared agog at the star. The star turned, put his hand on his hip and winked at the crowd. We had booed the refs ever since the day we met. The Library A passage exists out of these timnels into the ■underground stacks of Perkins Library. I simply pried loose a metal grill and came out. When my eyes had ad- justed to the li t, I discovered myself surrounded by endless rows of books, each one a stitch, each row a seajn holding together the fabric of that world which I have left behind. The books screamed at me with the voice of a million authors — Read mel I ' m important! I have answers! Read me! The din raised by this awful litany sent me running down the aisles, looking for a way out. I popped through a swinging door and into a bathroom. It was quiet in there, except for the hum of the flourescent generator and a dripping faucet. Quiet, and sterile, like a doctor ' s office: the floor and walls were made of the same ceramic tile. All of the fixtures were of stainless steel, all spotless. I couldn ' t avoid the mirror. I saw the face looking back at me, looking more boyish than I could have imagined. I looked almost beatific, in spite of my dirt— and sweat-streaked face and tangled hair. There were the tracks of strain and struggle in the face, and a certain loneliness; but the weariness, the blood- shot eyes and tight mouth that formerly were mine seemed gone. At first I couldn ' t believe it. How could my underground existence, with its constant self-confrontations and torturous intensity, have re-made me into a boy? I washed my face and smoothed the gnarled hair with my hand. Looking again, the face smiled at me. The teeth were yellow— brown, but still, none of them were rot- ten, or abnormally ugly. The door opened, I was startled. I saw the intruder first in the mirror: a tall, thin, blonde man with a young face. His was a contorted young face, mis- shapen by the world vftiich had driven me underground. Instead of going into the stall, the man stopped directly behind me. I con- tinued looking in the mirror. Let ' s get to it, he said. His voice was hi -pitched in spite of an attempt to sound gruff. His speaking startled me even more. I cleared my throat, searching for some way to answer. In the mirror a bead of sweat collected in the blonde fuzz on his upper lip. Listen, do you want it or not? he asked, trying to demand, instead the pleading in his voice betraying him. What the hell are you talking to me for? I croaked, still looking at him in the mirror. He faltered; I thought for a moment he was going to turn and walk out; but he hung there indecisive, then stepped towards me. His knees touched the backs of my thi s. They twitched nervously. Watching his eyes, I knew he had no intention of attacking me. We both stood motionless as the silence became unbearable. My own knees felt weak, my stomach was churning. I had not been this close to ajiother human being for ... a long -time. I took my focus from his face and looked at my ovm. My lips formed a ti t purple line across the middle of my face, and my eyes looked back at me full of pleading, as if they were about to cry milky tears of loneliness. I-Iy image started to get hazy and I shifted back to the other pair of eyes in the glass. He saw the unbounded magnitude of my loneliness, felt the fury of my frustrated love. Then he glanced down and saw my tangled, dirty hair, knotted ciirls full of spider webs and dusty grease. He looked at my tattered clothes, the shirt sleeves shredded by sharp fences and gates, the blue jeans worn through but impatched. Suddenly, realizing how I looked, how unappealing to any, even the loneliest, of human beings, I felt ashamed, embarrassed, pl uiged even deeper into my well of separation. When his eyes returned to the mirror they met mine with incredulity and then fear. I felt his knees wobble with it. ii;ifho — wha — he grunted involuntarily and ran out the door. Without thinking I turned and ran after him. He was fast, his long legs carried him down between the rows of books. He ran in and out of the stacks, but I kept pace with him. I saw his head tiirn to guage his lead and, running into a chair, he lost his balajice and fell. I hurled myself on top of him; sitting on his stomach, I pinned his arms to the floor. SqTaeezing his eyes tightly shut he ttirned his head to the side, as if trying to burrow through the concrete floor. Vjhat do you want? he pleaded, and began sobbing pitifully. I was breathless from the chase, my heart was pounding wildly in my chest. But my brain was clear, and it was working on a riddle which it couldn ' t understand. Why, after going to such great lengths for so long to avoid these cretins, was I running one down like he was the last on earth? He had acted like he knew me, his look had affected me in a strange way. I needed to discover why. Look at me, I said, kneeling down in front of him. I tried to take all emotion out of my voice; I didn ' t want to scare him, or hurt him. Listen, blondie, look at me. He opened his eyes, but turned his head to the chair. I took his face in both hands and turned it toward me. I don ' t want to hurt you, so just answer me a question, okay? No, no, leave me alone. Sweet Jesus, sweet Jesus, I ' m sorry. He was reduced to a pathetic quivering terror. But I had to get my answer. Talk to me, not Jesus, you dumb shit. I shook him by the shirt front until he looked at me. That ' s better. Now shut up and listen: why did you come into that bathroom tonight? How did you know I ' d be there? He shut his eyes again; I snapped his neck and they came open. You know, he said. You know. Listen, you asshole, I don ' t know why, I don ' t know you, I ' ve never been in that John before in my life. So, you just tell me. He looked at me through his tears, then, in an effort to compose himself, he wiped his nose on his shirtsleeve. I don ' t believe you. Listen, motherfucker, I ' m losing my patience. I was. Listen, he said, mimicking me with his frightened voice, you ' re just a god- dammed pervert, a no good, fucking, cock-sucking pervert. If you don ' t leave me alone I ' ll have your ass sucking cocks in a jail some place. His attempt at bravado was too much. I broke up laughing, which only increased his fright. I watched the terror rise in his throat, and he tried to bolt. Catching him by the shirt-tail, I slapped his face twice and sat him down again. Okay, let ' s go back to that John. I grabbed his ankles and dragged him along the smooth concrete floor to the door. He got up, and I pushed him inside. Once I was inside he turned his back to me and, still in that whimpering voice, said; Okay, this is what you want, go ahead and do it. And he turned around with his cock in his hand. All of the anger went out of me. Put it back in your pants, I said, turning to go out the door. What? He seemed to sink into the floor. Hey come back here. He was grabbing ray arm. I was unresisting; the episode had sent me back to that place in my mind where nothing matters, I just wanted to get back to where the walls are dark and encrusted with dirt, where dark tunnels run in all directions. Bu t first he wanted to show me something. Scrawled on the wall with a felt-tip pen was this: Free Blow Job — This Stall — l l9 75 — 12:30 a.m. Don ' t you recognize your own handwriting, you pervert, he said bitterly. I didn ' t write it, I whispered. He dropped my arm; I just walked back across the stacks and crawled through the passageway, back into my world. r«  ' .m jf j -Mm mi Hi- sr « ■sti-m si r . i. m Si m -tr- ■ V A solitary man should think twice before he gets a gun, but when Xaviera dropped a test like that in my lap, I could no longer avoid the logic of death. lust for kicks I rounded up some mirrors from Storeroom 347 and placed them in a circle around nie. Obliterating those mirrors with a .44 magnum was quite thrilling, but the next to the last mirror was almost the last to hold this dirty face. Rebounding off a brass pipe behind it, the bullet grazed the curve of flesh where neck and shoulder meet. For a while I stared blankly into the last mirror. Then, using the blood from my shoulder and chest, I traced the outline of my face on the glass. The surprise impact of the bullet interrupted the plodding in- evitability of my fascination with death. I laughed. signature nine am I I v i These systems of mind — I ' d have to open them or they ' d bust on their own. Not wanting to have my brains dislodged any more, I took the old form out to find vhat ' s what and who ' s who. My mother ! had sent a copy of the garbage directory, I and I tried to find my name. Instead, I found an old letter tucked between I Rothschild and Russel. It was mostly ! sex talk between an old lover and myself. I remembered our bliss above hot rocks. That woman made mine steam. I had flashes, like a television coming on with its elec- tron grin. Sex. I hadn ' t been laid in three years. Sure, I had read books; but eating Peking Duck isn ' t exactly a ' conversation with the Chairman. My out— of-the-body experiences had done a lot, interviewed a part of me I used to think couldn ' t make sense. I liked that inter- view, but it was unsatisfactory in the end, like the best of movies, still, only itself, as fresh as yesterday ' s fish. I had ei t lives left at least, I figured, and I wasn ' t going to miss the Y this next time. Muff diving! A hot meal of whisker ■biscuits would melt my butter faster than rany of these slack metaphysical retorts received from Xaviera, you could bet your lolly pop. I wanted to get into Mrs. Robinson. Hell, I ' d take Betty Ford. Shit, I ' d dig up Betsy Ross if I had to. Anybody. I was like an artist in search of a critic. I was fed up with eating shit. the grounds crew in four dimensional life il lakes three to tango. Hazel Barnett was a worker on Duke ' s grounds crew. He died on May 12, 1975 at the age of 67. the only death that has mattered- matters more than dealing with-makes sane. the connection: to make a contribution is to set roots in your soul — the vital pit of growth, and henceforth comes the challenge to offer a valid excuse to give a damn, i won ' t make a storm, rather define one. This world needs a storm, many. Reflect for a mo- ment on a storm. Notice how folks release their inhibitions — the street downtown for a split second becomes a neighborhood — people waving from shop fronts as if they were on their own porch — they ' re made to re- alize what it is that ' s around them. Be it trees bent, or trash scattered about or a scurrying of an old woman to cover. Birds drop from the sky as missiles on inexplicable joy rides, dogs bathing in mud, while raptured amphibious belches play in the wind. It ' s a storm that clears the air, flushes streams, tumbles em- bankments, finds us as in a tremble. For a mo- ment. But to relax and wonder after a storm — what has happened — what ' s new — how does it mean to do us. As a social comment — and really not so much social, rather human; are we then, to go without comparative storms — in a microscosmic gesture of need — a need un- defined, but bold nevertheless? So, duke, what are you, you that are here? Are we at- tached to each the other — is there a thing of growth here — we are calling on storms, you stoned arches and highbrow fame! funeral, durham. 1975 I looked for a face I couldn ' t find, closing my eyes to tears, realized we were in a church, a church of holy men, and crying men. Hazel, old buddie, do you see this your fellowship? Do you know our sorrow? And you are in joy? If you notice my small frame, my broken pain, know how short it will be. There was one man, he always be so lazy, and wantin no work for food. We, perhaps, was bums, but we knew each other as friends, and there ' s a law in it. Those of us got together under a rock. It was tough times, and the railroad bulls were hot. So we found this rock to git under — to keep from the rain and wind, ya know. Each day we ' d go out, and do little jobs, askin fer food, or a little money. Some of us was just askin, some was findin work. Then each night we ' d go back to the rock and share what we gots during the day. But this one guy, he won ' t work, see, and he ' d eat. But we say ' d to him, you ' s got to work. He says, ' But i cain ' t eat nothin ' cept cone bread. ' So we ' s got together and decided to only br- ing back cone bread — seein that ' s only his ex- cuse. And it warn ' t long fore he got the wind and see ' s we mean him to work or go. And he went to work. That ' s, you know, the way a law works. And we was people. I wouldn ' t have to be here, but I wanted to see you again, Hazel. You gave me so much, and I am part of your family. Hazel ' s best friend was lost to me in the crowd. I never saw a place so full of folk. And every face had the knowing in it. Everything — in a blur — my first tears in months and months. The preacher man, young, alive, clean and cool, stood tall above us in his pulpit platform — his dark body, clothed in the blackest robe, was set off by electric lit cross and beyond, the sacred windows of prophets and searchers. The crowd ' s heartbeat began to tick, it was a dam to burst, a storm of holy clamoring — I knew — but this preacher, this reverant being was so cool, so calm, that I doubted the show. D ' you know, Scott, dat I ain ' t so good. ..wit church, or goin. But my wife, she go when she can, and I know the Bible. Yessir, and I knows Cod is a blessin me. God know all bout you, and what you does, and he follows you, makes you be OK, and won ' t let noffin wrong harms you. But once at last. He comes to call you to him. It ' s a good day. I can almost smell gin, as must be the clear message. A heart attack? Well — I guess he used it plenty — the heart. What that he had to work every day — hard and aching, strong and tiring man. Hazel rested, and besides a few, the only silent one. Oh, the jungle heat, the Amazon beat — rock and roll, true shot to the angry ' ■ ' - yi- t: L ' IZ -M. ' % m B j j f; M god, the holding god — the demanding god. Let my people go. And what I thought was a cool preacher, well, he got hot — he burned my very face, he scorched my soul, and with all his song and scream. Left, and right, Oh, Jesus, we know it ' s hard, and a long road, it ' s rough. Lord and sometimes we think we aren ' t gonna make it — Yess, Jesus, oh praise you — and yet we hold our heads up, Jesus, and we know that the Holy Spirit is with us, oh lord, oh lord, mighty and — Yess, yes, yes — Jesus, yes, oh yes! — — the holy one, we know our brothers break bread to you, and in your Saving Grace we al- low to be Your servents. My head was down — I found my strength withered as if the desert sun were resting on my forehead. How do these people leave such a sce ne? And is Hazel rolling, too? You ' re a good friend, Scott, cause you know that it ain ' t much difference to being old or young. Some old people hates to see the young ones havin fun — but dey always been dat way. When they was young — dey was hard already. I ain ' t gonna quit bein young, Scott. I just can ' t. Scott, I ' s 66 years old. That ' s 66 years! And I seen a whole lot, and been a long way, but I ' m always back, and see ' s a good time for a party, and then we git together. Like now, and dance, and have music — I, see — I gots my harp here with me, always gots it here in my pocket. Man, you dance and dance where you are, then. I must believe that. And you dance inside of me. Then it was over, a prayer or something quiet, brought us to speechless wonder. And ushers issued forth, their slow motioned sweep towards this and that row — with the turn to say farewell. Hazel. I couldn ' t help crying. It came like a force all its own, hardly of me at all. Wonder if I could look at Hazel and keep living — I went. And I made it — I didn ' t look long, there was a body. I recognized, but no life, and so — well, I went on. The return to our places, a glance encom- passed Hazel ' s wife. Bent as the oldest living one, the hardest beat of all, torn from sanity, peace, and my bestest friend. Like a shot of cognac — I burned, reeled and bolted — all as in a vague motion — towards my seat. My senses, oblivious save for her words, He was the bestest friend I ' ver haid. I saw her go up to her man, she flew as in a mad chance, a sporadic hope, that her mate, now so deeply gone from her — would in his turn, lift up — jump to the floor to meet her — to grasp her — to melt as one in love — and take her on wing into the heaven so demanding, the fixed, the absorbing passions complet. I clenched in fright at how real and front-on this ordeal was — how lost we are to define it. Hazel would be the only one now to un- derstand. His person was full, as a pregnant explosion — always leaking the truth of such solid acquaintance with this opening flow of life. Death would not halt his pace, merely beckon him on. Fellow clowns, associated jokers — halt thy chuckle. Make one moment, one fucking pause — to mingle your very soul — the quick of your being, to awaken with the heavens and praise the man. I see all around an earth in sorrow deep as the furrows of Eden ' s struggle — yet it grew so we have witnessed and we know that there are lambs and lions as one with the single birth, the exhalted source. Asa member, I ask of you — all of you — to shed a tear as grace allows for the fine and pure emotion love — to speak then, with a black angel much like rainbow ' s sparkle — and the multitude of colours fastened as a solitary mark — that is black — and it then is Black — and an angel is born to behold a new day a new song. ♦ • ' I Making Friends You don ' t always jet used to the strange noises you hear under£,Tound. A threat can talce any form; I learned about that fast enou£;h. Xaviera had ' bou:; t me a .44 magnum; simple technology ' s power implement. This was a Smith and Wesson model 29, the only handgfun of this caliber v ith both a sin£;le and a double action. This fucker had a six inch barrel and could launch a factory loaded bullet that wei£;hs close to an ounce at over fifteen hundred feet per second, developing enough stopping power to knock Big Daddy Lipscomb on his ass, or whatever was left of it. I cared for this monster v ell; kept it by my side for ei t months before smashing the action and leaving it in the furnace. I thought when I had it, the gun v;ould provide ample protection. On a Sunday afternoon, while I was under HH building, I heard this guy screaming his lungs out. Oh my God, Jesus. Please somebody help me. Help, went the screams. It sounded like a male student , I heard it again. The screams sounded sincere. This put me in a tight spot. I don ' t like to leave the tunnels for any reason or anyone. A year before, when I had cut through to an artery in my left hand by mistake, I cared for myself rather than come above ground for medi- cal assistance, getting a nice infection for my trouble. Another time I sv;eated throu a six day fever, hardly able to take food, I had ample opportunities to gain superficial profit by coming up, and I never responded. Figuring a life might depend on it, this time I came up, crawling throu{ the trunk storage space and coming out of the maid ' s closet into the first floor hall. I covered the first floor of the dorm looking for the screamer, who had by now stopped screaming. With my pass key, I opened all the rooms and found the entire floor deserted. I took the center stairs to the second floor, but propped the fire door open with a beer can so that I could hear anyone moving around downstairs. The second floor was deserted, but then I heard the fire door close and footsteps. Down the stairway I went, shouting this time, Is anyone here? Is anybody hurt? Nothing. Then more footsteps, and finally the sound of a stereo. I heard the music seeping under the door from room 112. Room 112 was empty less than two minutes ago. Standing by the door, I yelled, Is anybody hurt in there? Nothing again. VJhatever was going on, was either a sham or very serious. Or maybe this guy had a wairped sense of humor. It started not to matter which it was. Having been raised from the dis involvement of the tunnels, having been motivated by concern for a fellow human, I began to take the incident grimly. I opened the door with my pass key. In the single room, on a mattress thrown on the floor, lay this naked guy, listening to the stereo. His hair and beard were blonde and his dick flopped across his right thigh. He looked infinitely bored. He raised his eyebrows, as if to ask me, what ' s the matter with you, buster? Were you screaming? I demanded. He breathed three times before answering. Not anytime recently. I was not attracted to this guy. Wot a bit. Did you hear someone screaming? I wanted to know. He didn ' t answer. Were you screaming? I asked again, raising my voice, before anytime recently? He turned, still looking bored, to face the wall. Leave me alone, man, he whispered, I could have shot that motherfucker. Ufe m4 r ' ' ) ' HH n U : wliM i ' sj •j ' .vi ' i ' a •.• ' ,■ ' .■■.■ ■Vl i ' , ' ■■■ ' rfl i ;«,l v; . x Inr The Pipes I ' d been talking to myself about this closed system I was in all along. Miserable as I was, I ' d thought I was learning important truths avail- able only within it. IVhat I didn ' t know was that that ass;araption was itself the system ' s last trump card. I and the world around me were collapsing even more readily than usual, tmder my abstracted and self-referential scrutiny. For me to try to think at all was like pissing in the wind. Solipsism, salvation through sex, masturbation — I ' d tried them all. But only one thing stuck with me. In the tunnels one day I ' d found a trap pipe and played it like a French horn. A funnel stuck into the end improved the tone, and I had something I could trust, that was my own. Some- thing real. IJ[y mouth bled like a tomato mashed on a cheese grater, but that too was okay. The only thing was, I didn ' t know what the quality of my pleasure had been till weeks later, when I awoke from a dream, swabbing compulsively at my mouth with my shirt tail, surprised there was no blood. I went back and looked for the pipe but couldn ' t find it; so I put the incident out of mind. My last morning in the tunnels I woke up with Thelonious Monk ' s tune Ba-lue Bolivar Ba- lues going throu me strong as a jackhammer, twisting my pelvis to its will. I could play a trombone part to it that would be stronger than a horn. I needed a fucking trombone. That was what I needed. A trombone. Ba-lue- Bolivar Ba-lues. With some guts in it. By the time I left I didn ' t give a shit about that Schopenhauer poster. I mean, what was a country— squire pessimist next to a tromlione? As I came out the door, I saw a form hanging in the sky, scarring the face of the moon. It was a dead dog, mouth sopping with blood, tail dangling from a single strand of muscle. I tripped and, catching my wei t sharply on my elbow, realized it wasn ' t there. On my way to the bus station, I promised myself I would never call these the good old days. I House. it was I I had ray short-haired wig on as I passed Brown Some bare-chested freaks asked me what time told them and kept walking. felt buckshot hit my ass. When I rolled over all I could see was smoke coming out the barrel of a shotgun. I couldn ' t see any faces. The Chanticleer wo j d like to thank the following contributors and inspired tyros without whose labor this book would not have been possible: Delia Adkins, Sony Asti, Gary Beck, Andrew Berlin, Rob Brezsney, Holly Brubach, Roger Calistro, Dr. Phil Calkins, Elizabeth Chapman, )im Cobb, Chris Cooper, Dr. Roger Corless, E.E. Cummings, Dave Darling, Russell Dione, Ross Dunseath, Ned Earle, Scott Elsbree, Steve Emerson, Jim Farley, Aden Field, Julie Garnett, Lama Govinda, Gretchen, Dean Bill Griffith, Richard Hackel, joe Harris, Ed Harrison, Dan Hull, Mick Jagger, Robin-Eve Jasper, Laura Knott, Dr. Wesley Kort, Mark Kutler, Nick Kyriazi, Bernard Lefkowitz, Rick Levine, Cindy Lewis, Joe Linus, Vic Lucas, Colt Luse, Matt Mackowski, Marci, Dan McVane, Martha Maiden, Elizabeth Matheson, Robert McKenzie, Peg Melville, John Menapace, Steve Miller, Bill Morris, Diane Neumaier, Bob Nesbit, Dee O ' Neal, Nick Pearson, Maggie Radzwilier, Tim Ramsey, Day Ricketts, Scott Ricketts, Peaches Rigsbee, Richard Robinson, Tom Rodman, Phil Schaefer, Lee Shoemaker, Mark Smylie, Gary Snyder, Pete Synowiez, Bob Watson, Bruce Weinstein, Kerry Wilson, Terry Wong, Bill Worrell, and Wendy Zeilman. Special thanks to Ras Daniel Heartman, Dan Moses, Ronald Prewitt, Fritz Haffner, and the people at Western Publishing Company. Andy . . . when I see you repeat a race riot ... I don ' t see it as a political statement but rather as an expression of indifference to your subject. Warhol: It is indifference ... It just caught my eye. Andy Warhol, 1964  mm ■ 1 ■■;:- ' ' ' l 1 -: -■ ' ' ' 1 - tl, . ,,v,V . •■.• •■■ ' A . V f , ' WV , ' D02604708R