29.

The fabled 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention began on Monday, August 26th. My mother and I sat with pizzas watching it in the slightly overdone colors of the television set at 863 East Memorial Drive.

Here’s Anita Bryant in a blue dress singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” She has thick eyelashes on for her part of the battle. The camera pans across the placards with the names of the states held aloft. Up and down, and back and forth go Iowa, Oregon, Massachusetts, Florida, and Arizona like cards in a board game. Bang, goes the gavel. “The chair recognizes . . .” The man doesn’t so much speak as rattle the syllables out. “The chair recognizes . . .” The camera cuts to a close-up of Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, fat lipped as he whispers in the ears of men who scurry off. The men wear suits and narrow ties. The women have lacquered hairdos with stiff flips and walk in their high heels as if they don’t quite touch the ground.

It’s all a great American ritual, sponsored by recessed-filter Parliament cigarettes, Continental Insurance, and Aqua Velva aftershave lotion. “So why be alone?” the announcer asks, and the camera cuts to the minuteman emblem of Continental Insurance. And then: “There’s something,” a husky-voiced lady says, “about an Aqua Velva man.” My mother and I light up cigarettes every time a Parliament commercial comes on.

Oh yes, we do what we’re told, out here in America, don’t we?

Do you remember the CBS correspondents who covered the floor of the sixty-eight convention while Walter Cronkite sat up above in his glass-windowed booth overlooking everything? They all wore earphones with these antennas on their heads that looked like bent clothes hangers and these matching, tightly fitted gray suits, as if they were crew members in an early version of Star Trek, as if the floor of the International Amphitheatre in Chicago were some strange planet that the Enterprise had landed on, as if the convention delegates— all those jowly men from Chicago and Mississippi and New York—were aliens from some other planet.

Once in a while, correspondents Dan Rather and Marvin Kalb put their fingers to the earphones connected to the antennas, bent their heads, and listened, as if receiving instructions from some higher plane, perhaps from the booth where Walter Cronkite, that avuncular Oz in the kingdom of CBS News, sat, watching the proceedings below. Perhaps they were getting word about the frenzied confrontations between the police and the student demonstrators outside.

On Wednesday night, August 28th, Walter Cronkite hurriedly interrupts Dan Rather.

“Dan, we have to cut over to Ed Bradley, outside on Michigan Avenue.”

The screen fills with gray, blurry images.

“Walter, it’s quite a melee out here, with the Chicago police confronting protesters,” Ed says, ducking down when something flies past the camera.

The picture is out of focus, as if the cameraman is part of the struggle on the streets. We hear heavy breathing and curses, the thud of nightsticks into bodies, bursts of what sound like gunfire, but the lighting is dim, making the battle something from a hardly seen nightmare. The camera keeps moving around, looking for an image to settle on.

“Is someone shooting?” a bouffant-haired woman in an A-line skirt asks, clutching her purse to her bosom. She’s at the edge of the camera shot and nervous as a bird.

“This is Chicago. Chicago for Christ’s sake,” a voice from somewhere says.

Maybe most frightening is the undigested quality of the film. We’re used to television summarizing things after they happen—not puzzling over scenes as they occur.

And, look, there—is it possible?—stopping to pose for the camera, my God, it’s Grimes Poznik. He’s blowing “Charge!” on his trumpet, as if signaling that now the real chaos of the sixties is underway. Protesters wearing high school football helmets and carrying baseball bats pass the camera in a dark blur. Cops appear, looking back and forth, many of them wearing white helmets.

“What’s going on?” my mother asks.

Ed Bradley is coughing. The shots were tear-gas canisters being launched into the crowds of demonstrators.

“Walter, it’s chaos out here on Michigan Avenue. It looks more like Vietnam than middle America.”

“What’s going on?” my mother asks again, her cigarette halfway to her mouth.

“We’re about talked out,” Roger Mudd says to Walter and to America the last night of the convention.

Commentator Eric Sevareid nods. “Yes, Walter, we don’t know what else to say.”

“We thought about leaving,” Walter Cronkite says. “These thugs make it hard to tell America’s story . . .”

Thugs? Thugs in America?

How could that be? It must be the war protesters, right? They’re the cause of this trouble, not these soldiers in their brown shirts.

Esquire magazine hired French novelist Jean Genet, Beat memoirist William Burroughs, and all-around crazy man Terry Southern to cover the Democratic convention.

Southern picked up this observation when he noticed Genet staring at the dashboard of the Ford they were riding in: “What can be in the mind of someone who names an automobile Galaxie?”

I’m reading this quotation now, decades after Terry Southern wrote it down. I think, as I read those long-ago words, of how information can rhyme. I now know (as Terry Southern perhaps didn’t) that the overwrought egotism, which put the name Galaxie on an ordinary automobile, took place in the time when none other than Robert McNamara was an executive of the Ford Motor Company.

Mr. McNamara is, of course, one of the chief architects of the war in Vietnam.

My first car—my beloved 1961 Ford convertible with the smoky Mileage Maker Six engine and the doors that filled up with water every time it rained—was a Galaxie. I had been living in McNamara’s world for years and didn’t know it. The Galaxie, in fact, was introduced in 1959, the year Buddy Holly died.

Ah, the lovely years of my youth were just another chapter in the Book of War.

What I didn’t know, what Jean Genet doesn’t know, is that Robert McNamara is a broken man in 1968. The data he collects add up to one unmistakable total: the war in Vietnam can’t be won by the Americans.

The day after the Democratic convention ended, I went up to the bathroom where my father had sat shitting black, cancerous blood.

I took off my shirt, studied my back in the mirror, and thought about carving FUCK YOU there. I realized that I would either have to write backward in the reversed image the wall mirror gave me or use a second mirror to guide my hand. It was quite confusing.

I decided to hold a hand mirror in my left hand to check the work of my right hand in the medicine-cabinet mirror. But it was hard going. In the double mirrors, while the letters were in their proper order, everything was confused: up seemed to be down, and left appeared to be right, out was in, and in was out. I kept making mistakes and washed them off, rubbing hard with a brush to get the ink off my skin. My back turned gray from the ink and raw from all the washing.

When I finally had a fairly passable version of FUCK YOU inked on my back, I got a paring knife from the kitchen just to try a cut. I figured healed scars that read FUCK YOU might be even more dramatic than the pus-filled version. I was just drawing blood when I realized that I had no idea if the FUCK YOU I was about to carve was up or down as you actually saw it without the mirrors.

“Oh my God,” my mother said when I showed her my back. She began sobbing—big, heaving sobs. “What are you doing? What’s happening? What’s going on? Everything’s getting so strange.”