Nightmare Scenario

I made a first attempt at writing movie scripts in 1967. The Vietnam War and homefront resistance to it were both raging, Black people and some young whites seemed to be literally under fire; and I was an outspoken liberal fresh out of grad school--protesting publically some, arguing heatedly with my conservative parents, threatening to head for Canada if drafted, etc. (I was married and had a son, so that was unlikely.)

I tried to marshall some of those emotional issues in my first written-on-spec screenplay, titled The Wounded Man. In it, the protagonist, another war opponent who was earlier drafted, has already served a tour in Vietnam as a non-combatant medic. Now he is in pre-Med training at a university and very withdrawn and silent in general (reflecting his own traumatic experiences). At a campus rally for the Democratic candidate running for President, the lead guy meets and is attracted to a firebrand young woman, active supporter of a radical group (thinly disguised Black Panthers). The two of them argue politics, gradually become emotionally/sexually involved, and he is soon reluctantly embroiled in her (the group's) tribulations at the hands of authorities. This is all Act One lead-up to the major events of the story.

On the night of his election as President of the United States, the politically liberal winner is assassinated right on the steps of his New England home during his victory speech. The entire nation reacts first in horror and then violence, riots quickly spreading everywhere, even to Seattle. The unpopular lameduck President orders martial law measures. Various escalations occur, finally driving the woman and the hero and others into the group's headquarters, barricaded and about to be attacked full-scale by the police and whoever else is out there.

My "wounded man" has continually argued for Ghandi-styled peaceful resistance, and now from inside he tries to convince the armed Panthers to back away from this sure-to-be-disastrous confrontation. Working as go-between, he persuades the police to allow a peaceable surrender and then convinces the group's skeptical leader to give up. But when the Black man steps out into the lights, someone outside shouts that he has a gun! A fusillade of bullets strikes him down, and the woman rushes out to help him and is shot too.

Now what will the hero do? Continue espousing non-violence? Wait to be arrested or killed? Pick up the discarded gun and go to war? He chooses the last, runs out into the lights, and the screen goes to white. End of film.

Simplified in this telling, it doesn't sound like much, and probably wasn't. But the events of the last couple of weeks in the U.S. political race gradually brought this melodramatic story back into my mind. The parallels are just too bizarre to ignore... Unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; a despised President; references to assassination; Bobby Kennedy memorials in magazines; a too-violent nation that won't give up its guns; Obama the winning candidate but white voters, ostensible Democrats, refusing to back him, and Republicans even less likely to elect such a man.

I mentioned some of this to my son-in-law, who immediately wanted me to resurrect and update the screenplay. But I think not. I still remember the strange post-release saga of The Manchurian Candidate, and I've decided simply to mention my script in this blog.

As a disenfranchised citizen in the past, in despair of necessary change ever coming, at different times I voted for George McGovern, Eugene McCarthy, even Eldridge Cleaver. Now we have an inspiring and remarkable candidate promising Hope and Change once more. I'll warily vote for him.

"Barack the vote!" is the bumper-sticker slogan I suggested to his campaign months ago, which was (wisely) rejected or ignored. Now I say: Obama will have a tough time, both during the campaign and, if he's victorious, afterward.

I hope he succeeds... hell, I just pray he lives.

Grad School Days (2)

((I turned 65 yesterday, which is the main reason I've been thinking so much about the old days of school and otherwise. So please forgive the ego stuff--I'll be better soon, honest!))

The first thing a newly graduated male, 18 or older, had to think about in 1964 was military service. Vietnam was starting to heat up, bodies were being called up... There really was a draft back then, and within a couple of years, as some may remember, it became a huge issue--vocal resistance, draftcard burnings, young men fleeing to Canada or using their parents' clout to get exempted somehow (hmmm, sounds like a President or two I've heard about).

I didn't have much to worry about, actually. I had gotten married as a Senior, and my then-wife was pregnant, so I had that solid bit of protection. And if I moved straight on into grad school, that too would serve as a shield of sorts. I had already signed up to continue on at the UW and had proved myself sufficiently as a serious Senior that I received another scholarship and a part-time Teaching Assistant job. (I worked at Safeway stores too. Yeah, those were the days: a 32-hours-a-week job as grocery clerk, a teaching schedule to fulfill, graduate English classes to wrestle into submission, creative writing that drove me to pen and paper, and a fledgling marriage and pregnant wife to worry about.)

What I really hadn't settled for sure, and this drifted in and out of our lives for a few years, was what career I wanted. Working on a Master's Degree, I was in line to become a college professor and publishing poet, but I quickly learned that academia was--sadly? luckily?--not for me. I disliked the over-zealous, competitive grad students, I found many professors arrogant and mean-spirited and boring, I still got A's but foolishly resented the drudgery of lengthy footnoted papers and such. But, really, it was down to me. Back at Northwestern, I had joined and then quickly dropped out of ROTC; and the same stubborn resistance to order-taking I'd felt then seemed to influence my attitude toward academia. I could do the work and often beat out other grads for honors, but I didn't want the results, or the pressure, or... I don't know.

So I was casting about for what to do next. Safeway store clerk didn't seem the answer. A side note for a moment. One of the customers where I worked as stocker and cashier was an ex-wife of country singer Tex Ritter; she would come in from time to time with their preteen daughter. She looked at me one evening and said, deadpan, "There is no safe way," then walked out. (I've split the store name in her sentence, because I believe that's how she meant the layered pun, with which I belatedly agreed.)

Here's where one's snap, or even considered, decisions can affect a lifetime... I'd have a Master's in Lit by summer 1966, trained to do only one sort of thing, teach Lit or write. So I applied for various teaching jobs, and was offered positions at regional community colleges, even at Pacific Lutheran University (where I would be a sort of guest poet teaching creative writing), but turned them all down--in the case of PLU because I didn't want any religious stuff hanging over my head. (Would I have found things that onerous, really? I was desperate for excuses.)

I applied to New York University's famous film school (one of very few existing back in those distant days) and was offered a slot but no scholarship money. Then-wife and I had already agreed that she would be an at-home Mom, so I would have had to work full-time in NYC as well as go to school. (I was too unsure of costs and my stamina and resolve--basically chicken. Another opportunity wasted.)

I applied to a university in the Sussex area of England where I would supposedly continue on towards a Doctorate in English Lit, imagining that the slightly exotic locale might inspire me onwards--was welcomed too, but passed on the opportunity again, still convinced that the money problems couldn't be overcome. (No Thomas Hardy or Jane Austen environments on our horizon.)

Clearly, I just wasn't brave enough to tackle the challenges each opportunity offered.

Finally, lazily, desultorily, I settled for becoming a writer-editor for the University Relations Office at the UW, initially preparing press releases and alumni news for the campus Alumnus Magazine. And I did all right at the small stuff, and soon was writing full-length magazine pieces, and then I moved on to Seattle Magazine, where... but I've already covered that experience in an earlier posting. (See chapter titled A Whale of a Tale, from May 27 last year.)

The point is this: I finally, for better or worse, was off on a full-time writing career--which would carry me into film work, and then advertising and production, in and out of poetry and plays, and eventually around the world and back again, to become a semi-retired bookseller.

But I coulda been a contender. I had my chance at academia, and campus literary lion, and New York magazine stardom, and successful Hollywood screenwriter on strike, and who-knows-what-all might have been... but passed on them all.

Rightly or wrongly, here I sit, blogging. School days do part-shape one's life.

The Colonel

My father died a few years back, but he lived long enough to celebrate over 60 years married to the same woman. If Marge and Ed Sr. were still around, today would be their 66th anniversary. First, D-Day the 6th of June, then A-Day the 7th--made it easy to remember the date every year!

Since next weekend is Father's Day as well, I decided to consider Dad in this slice o' blog.

Born in 1917, he was third in the string of four boys of a well-to-do family residing in Joliet, Illinois. But the Stock Market Crash and Depression wiped out the family money, so my father and his brothers (one of them nicknamed "Cheese," mostly because Leimbacher sounds something like Limburger!) went to college and/or work early; no playboy life for those guys.

In fact, I think my father quit college slightly early to work as a shoes/clothing salesman. He joined the Army Air Corps in '40 when war started looking more likely, and then completed his degree after WWII courtesy of the GI Bill. (If these factoids are wrong, no doubt one of my sisters will set me straight.) He was a flight instructor throughout the war years, and even served as a "poster boy" of sorts for the work of the Air Corps (see photo).

Anyway, he started a water-softening business in the later Forties in upstate New York, then got called back to service when the Korean War began. His hapless partner drove the business into the ground (so to speak), so Dad decided to make the Air Force his career thereafter. But he was no driven Cold Warrior. Serious, hard-working, yes, pilot enough to keep his flight pay, yet more an administrator and manager, Dad still rose steadily and became a Lieutenant Colonel.

We dependent brats took to calling him "The Colonel," but really that was because Mom and he taught us three to think and be in-dependent; and by the time of high school and college, social issues like Civil Rights and Vietnam and the Feminist Movement all created a widening rift between elders and upstarts that made the "parii" (another nickname) wonder if they had created three young Frankenstein's monsters.

But we all survived those angry years, and Mom and Dad were able to call on us as their years advanced and health declined--my sisters especially rallied 'round. I carried some residual resentment from the stuff said back and forth in the Sixties and Seventies, but I guess things were okay by the time they died.

Some years ago, I tried to address the differences in a poem meant also to be a tribute to Dad...

Your Shirt

I wear it sometimes.
Recruited by seams
and sharp creases,
military press,
rapt in epaulettes
and flap pockets,
I briefly become
another: someone
larger, uniform;
I’m armored warm.
Midnight-blue wool
might not be cool,
but the USAF cut
doesn’t chafe… much.

Touched, I salute
the brass we accrued
as service brats:
h.q. where your hat
and hash-marks hung;
no one place for long.
Which meant I grew up
all over the map...
intellectually.
You expected me
to act sans orders.

In off-base quarters
the soldiers’ old saw
("No Asian land-war")
brazenly became
"Reclaim Vietnam
for US." I balked.
Then father-son talk
burned down a decade
of sniping and Red-
baiting... Long ago,

that war. I’m blue
at 55 now,
while you’ve turned slow,
receding, 80.
Peace, separately
made, suffices—
the past, I guess, as
shucked off as your gear
I sometimes wear:
the survival boots
that counsel how to;
the warm-up jacket,
requisitioned, that
helps me play ball.

I’m your son… still
cadging cast-offs,
unwarranted gifts,
the blessings of your
heart’s blue yonder.
Shrunken over all,
you might not fill
the shirt these days.
I try to, always.