25.

Ah, graduate school. I’d arrived there in the fall of 1967. I was in the writing program, and that attracted women, so even though I’m engaged to marry Jenny Gleason I began trying to sleep with as many women as I can. Hey, it’s right after the Summer of Love, isn’t it? I felt like it was my turn.

I also began meeting real poets. Jim Dickey, who would later be famous as the author of the novel Deliverance, came to Fayetteville as a visiting writer that fall. He liked my poems, but mostly what we did was get drunk in his hotel room and call various women he knew. Once they came on the line, he would say something like, “There should only be joy, joy, joy in the world,” and then he’d shake his head and make a kind of wattling noise.

In 1969, not long before I went in the army, I drove Allen Ginsberg and his friend Peter Orlovsky around. My 1967 Chevelle had something called a reverberator installed under the dash. It changed the sound of the radio with its single control knob. Initially, it produced a crude stereo effect, but, as you turned the knob, it created the sound of an echo chamber. Songs like The Rolling Stones’s “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” sounded like something sung deep in a cave. The song came out as “I-I-I Ca-Ca-Can’t-Can’t Ge-ge-ge-get-get-get No-No-No Sat-Sat-sat-satis-satis-satis-satisfaction.”

If you turned the unit all the way up, that line—and, in fact, the whole song—became one consonant stuttered out: “N-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n-n.”

Peter loved that unit and kept fiddling with it as I drove him and Allen around.

“This is all the poetry we need,” Peter said over and over.

Oh yes, did I mention that one of my girlfriends kind of hung around after I got married?

Did I mention that?

I didn’t mean to have a girlfriend. It just sort of happened. She was a holdover from my single days. What could I do? She wouldn’t go away.

I met her at one of the weekend parties, where girls hung around members of the writing program as if we were football stars. Sarah was sitting in a chair with her legs tucked beneath her, and she kind of raised one up, exposing her panties, and she looked at me and smiled and pretty soon we were rolling around on her bed, and I was coming like I’d never come before and this went on for weeks and then I was married and Jenny was sick and sweaty with the Hong Kong Flu and I made up my mind right then and there that one more time with Sarah would be it—absolutely, for sure it—because a marriage vow was a marriage vow. Sickness and health and all that sort of thing, and we only fucked two or three more times after that, Sarah and I—or maybe it was four or five times. It couldn’t have been, I swear to God, more than ten times.

And then she moved away, and I was a good boy again.

Yes, 1968, back and forth and round and round.

More than forty years later. I go to the Street View option at Google Maps and type in 531-A East Maple Street, Fayetteville, Arkansas. What comes up is a leaf-strewn neighborhood on a gray day. Maybe it’s fall or late winter. I spin the viewer around, but I can’t find the little building of my apartment, which, as I recall, was set back some distance from the street. Maybe it’s been torn down. What I remember, after all, happened long ago.

Using the arrows of Google Street View, I move up and down the street, but I don’t recognize anything. The scene is far different from the neighborhood I remember. I can’t find my old apartment building. Nothing looks the same as it did in 1968.

Google has a white line down the center of Maple Street, and, in the netherland of technology, I follow the line west, crossing College Avenue. The names of the streets I pass sound familiar, but nothing looks familiar.

How frustrating. Should I travel to Fayetteville, get on an actual airplane and see the real place, I wonder, to get the details right? But then, who cares about this story of mine? Do I even care?

And yet, I obsess over it. I can’t get it out of my mind. Why?

I sit in front of my computer, my head in my hands, trying to answer that question. I look like a man praying.

What I really wish I could do is travel back to January 1968. That’s when my troubles began, though I certainly didn’t know it at the time. I wish I could go back there, to those innocent days, to that little one-bedroom apartment and warn my new wife and me that the monsters are definitely coming to Maple Street.

“Look,” I’d tell Rick and Jenny, “things are going to get bad. All those promises they made to you—you know, Rickie, back in junior high when you were a bouncing, bright kid on the Algebra Squad—and, Jenny, when you were singing those folk songs and believing that you’d fix the world with love: all those promises they made to you both about how important you would be—those promises are lies. All lies. Things aren’t going to work out so well for you. The government’s not going to help you. The government might, in fact, be the enemy. The government might just be plotting to kill Little Rickie Ryan.”

It’s like those green cardboard barrels labeled Emergency Supplies. Remember? The ones with the yellow letters and the round emblem with the triangle in the middle. Civil Defense supplies. Take care of people in trouble, right? Well, the ones I found in the basement of the Janesville Post Office when I had a summer job there in 1967 were empty. Empty. They were a public relations scheme.

And if I were really brave, I’d pull Jenny aside and tell her that Rickie was a two-timing asshole. That Rickie might just, in fact, be one of the monsters.

Yes, that little apartment on Maple Street, though I can’t find it anywhere on Google Earth. It’s gone now, I guess.

But I can see it in my memory: a living room, a bedroom, a kitchen. All tiny. Barely room to move in. My first wife and I there in the soft focus dream of the 1960s. I have a goatee, and Jenny wears bell-bottoms. We’re sitting down to The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. The iris eye of the CBS logo sees everything, doesn’t it?

The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite for Tuesday, January 30th, begins, the way it usually does, with an image of the newsroom in New York, a profile shot of Walter Cronkite at the circle desk tapping his papers as if he’d just arrived there, fresh from typing up what he was about to say. Teletypes clatter in the background. Walter looks at the camera. Walter is now facing us.

Jenny and I sit there with our dinner. We eat in the living room, using an old black steamer trunk as a coffee table.

“The United States Embassy in Saigon, South Vietnam, is under attack, bringing the war perilously close to the American high command. Our correspondent Robert Schakne is on the scene.”

Our little living room is shaped like a rectangle, television at one end, me at the other, putting a bite of pork chop into my mouth. On one side sits Jenny and on the other is a six-foot bookshelf made from boards and cinder-block bricks. I look over and see the books grouped by genre and alphabetized within each group. Neat. There’s Hamlet and New Poets of England and America and The Works of Edgar Allen Poe among the books I’ve read. Then there are the books for next semester: Lord Jim and In Cold Blood and Crime and Punishment. These are books for the second semester freshman composition course I will teach.

“How crimes happen,” the director of the Composition Program tells us. “The slow creep of criminality. The effects of crime on the criminal. The metaphor of crime.”

Metaphors, similes—all those techniques of writing. A life of sensitivity. A life of the mind in my little apartment.

“The United States Embassy in Saigon, South Vietnam, is under attack, bringing the war perilously close to the American high command. Our correspondent Robert Schakne is on the scene.”

Jenny’s mouth is open slightly, her arms are crossed on her chest.

I wish I could walk into this memory and talk to us back then. Warn us.

“You’re in danger,” I would say, a ghost from the future.

“Walter, this may be one of the worst days in this Viet-namese conflict,” Robert Schakne says.

It’s comfortable, sitting there, in that tiny apartment at 531-A East Maple Street in Fayetteville.

The books on the wall announcing my brilliance. A man who will soon know about crime and punishment.

I try to close my eyes and hold that moment there, but it flits away, just as it did beneath the soft plastic screen of my John Gnagy Learn-To-Draw set.

I didn’t know anything about the war in Vietnam. I didn’t, for instance, know the names of the battles I just looked up in the history book. In 1968 I’d never heard of Allelbora and Leatherneck Square and Masher and Double Eagle and White Wing and Dak To and Hill 881 South and Cedar Falls.

So much about the 1960s I didn’t know back then. I didn’t know that Huey Newton started a jail sentence in January of 1968, that the American Indian Movement was founded in July of 1968, and the Yippie! party in 1967.

I sat at my desk and smoked Winstons (“Taste good, like a cigarette should”) and memorized the difference between Italian and Shakespearean sonnets.

“Walter, this may be one of the worst days in this Vietnamese conflict.”

Here is the black steamer trunk with its brass rivets. I remember that night. I remember the piece of meat halfway to my mouth as I saw the United States military use a jeep to ram the gates of our own military compound, to retake the place from the Viet Cong. I remember being careful not to set my glass of milk down on the black surface of that trunk. I remember the way the CBS camera scanned the scene, catching images of dead Americans, of bullet holes, and of the fallen embassy seal. I remember sitting frozen there, as if something had changed. I remember looking over at my books, the neat rows of novels and books of poetry in the bookshelf I’d made out of boards and cinder-block brick.

This was different, somehow. Nineteen sixty-eight wasn’t going to be like the other years, but I went on with my pork chop, my glass of milk. I went on studying the poetry of William Butler Yeats for my seminar with Professor Ben Kimpel.

The next week we saw Nguyen Ngoc Loan, the chief of the South Vietnamese National Police, shoot a man through the head. Just like that. Poof. A little smoke. The man winces, as though he might have a toothache on his right side. Then he topples over. The moment of the shot is also in newspapers, and so the image reverberates from television to newspapers back to television again.

But the war was a long way away, wasn’t it, even though every noon a little cluster of demonstrators stood at the intersection of North Garland and West Maple.

I stood on the other side of the street, watching them, as I sipped from a Coke I just bought at the student union.

“Those fools think the president wants their opinion?” someone in the crowd behind me said.

For Bill Ayers—who was a leader of the Weather Underground, a group that performed all kinds of violent pranks in the late 1960s, including setting off a bomb in a restroom of the Pentagon—“Nineteen sixty-eight began with staccato bursts and gunfire from all sides, the rat-tat-tat of everyday events tattooing the air. I was twenty-three. It was the year of wonder and miracle.”

Me, I turned twenty-three that year, too, but there wasn’t the rat-tat-tat of much of anything for me, except on television. I was still grieving for the loss of my father, living inside the gauze of that grief, getting fatter from all the heavy meals Jenny prepared.

“Rickie, what are you going to do about the army?” my mother asked in one of her weekly phone calls.

For reasons I can’t really explain, I wasn’t worried. My fellow students didn’t seem too concerned. When I talked to John Freeman and Larry Johnson, they generally said something like, “The army isn’t going to want us.”

Here’s John Laurence on The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite: “Walter, death is everywhere in the ancient city of Hue—in the mass graves of South Vietnamese soldiers, in the open holes where the bodies of North Vietnamese sprawl, in the women who sit and grieve beside the bodies.”

I stayed up late, until one or two in the morning, learning the metrics of poetry, how to scan lines for iambs and trochees and the lovely hoofbeats of those anapests. “I spring to the stirrup, and Joris and he. Dirck galloped, I galloped. We galloped all three.”

Tea and cigarettes, a little daytime television, lots of literature—all punctuated by the rat-tat-tat of the war narrated by Walter Cronkite every evening at five thirty.

“Walter, death is everywhere in the ancient city of Hue.”

As the days drifted along, the story I missed was this one, from February 17: “Most draft deferments for graduate study and critical jobs were ended by the National Security Council. All graduating seniors at colleges, all first-year graduate students and all men who will receive master’s degrees in June will be eligible for the draft.”

This was probably Walt Rostow’s idea; he was the president’s National Security Adviser then.

A few years ago, before he died, I called him in Texas. I wanted to know why he drafted me.

I called the institute where he worked in Austin. He answered his own phone.

“This is Rick Ryan, Mr. Rostow. I want to know why you wanted to draft me in 1968. Why was I so important to you?”

I could hear a scratchy sound. He had put his hand over the mouthpiece of the phone. I could hear a murmured question, probably to his secretary. I guessed he was wondering how my call got through.

But then he couldn’t resist, I guess.

“Is this a joke? How can you expect me to remember a single draftee? We had a war to fight.”

“Did you really call him?” Carol asks me.

“Look. Those days are over,” Walt Rostow says. “You need to get over it. I certainly don’t spend much time worrying about that period.”

Then the click of the phone hanging up, and the moan of the dial tone.

In April of 1968, my mother calls.

“Oh, Rickie,” my mother says, crying. “Your number’s up.”

“What?”

“You have to go.”

“To Vietnam?” When I say the three syllables of that country’s name, I feel as though a steel hand is squeezing my heart.

“Mom, tell me what happened.”

“It’s all over for me.”

“Mom, come on. Tell me what happened.”

“You got this letter from the government, so I opened it. I shouldn’t have, but I did.”

“What does it say?”

“Here. ‘Selective Service System Order to Report for Armed Forces Examination.’ ”

“Shit. When do I go?”

“June 19th. In Milwaukee. It’s a Wednesday.”

Time was slowing down for me. Slowing and slowing, like an episode from Days of Our Lives. “Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives.” The film running at half or even quarter speed. I could hear my heart beating, as if it were now in my head, filling it with sound. I suddenly remembered the sound of those bullets going off in the basement.

You begin a triangulation from a known point.

“Send me the notice, OK?” I said.

“OK. Rickie?”

“Yes.”

“You won’t get killed, will you? You’re all I have.”

What is the known point?