Photographs of My Father. Paul Spike
senses what I am doing and pushes me away. But it is only so she can unzip the back of her dress, pop the brassiere and then pull her arms out of the sleeves. So cooperative, I pray that her headmistress will not suddenly come in the door on a casual inspection of the language lab. I gently remove her bra and lower my face between the two headphones on her chest. Her nipples have a terrific pronunciation. What is that they are whispering to me? I think I hear a special message…
“That stays!” “Come on…”
“I mean it!” I remove my fingers from the girdle. Immediately, the grind of her pelvis begins again. I shrug and kiss her breast but something occurs to me. Maybe there is a misunderstanding. I want to make everything clear. So I say, “I want to stick my cock in you.”
“You must be kidding!”
Downstairs, a convention of honeymooners has replaced the previous shy group of students. Everyone is dancing in deep embrace, eyes closed, hands rubbing intricate messages around the fringes of each other’s zones. Jim comes over holding a girl’s hand, a cute girl, but he lets go and takes me aside for a second.
“Where did you go? Outside?”
“Upstairs. The language laboratory.”
“You bastard. Did you screw? She really looks hot.”
“I’ve got a hot set of blue balls.”
“You mean you didn’t screw?”
“Lend me a blowtorch so I can take off her girdle.”
He punches me in the shoulder. “Tough luck, buddy. You can’t win ’em all.”
“Go fuck yourself,” I tell him.
“I would if I could, believe me.”
At the bus, the scene is definitely out of a 1940s war movie. Sweethearts kiss their soldier boyfriends good-bye on the dock, off to the war in the Pacific. Only now it’s outside the Trailways bus hired for the evening to take us off to prep school. Practically in tears, they tug and tear at each other on the dark sidewalk. “I’ll write you.”
“Call me tomorrow.”
“So long. Be sure to write.” All the Keaton guys want letters. It is a big thing to take a letter out of your mailbox in the crowd before lunch and sniff it. Pass it around. “Man, smell the perfume on this one!” Mailbox Romeos. They even caught a guy who was perfuming and mailing letters to himself.
“This is crazy. Look at these jerks,” says Jim, as we wade through the crowd of young lovers making their final adieus. Jim and I go to the back of the bus and he takes the window seat. The master in charge of the bus goes to the door and shouts, “Everybody has thirty seconds to finish saying good-bye and then we’re leaving without you.” There is a last frenzied farewell outside.
“These idiots act like they’re leaving their wives or something,” says Jim. He is in a bad temper and this scene is bugging him for some reason. The driver starts the engine. This is the last signal and now the final lovers leap aboard. The girls line up outside the bus and wave good-bye from the curb.
“Good-bye, my love,” shouts Jim sarcastically. “Farewell sweet dreamer! Good-bye, good-bye.” He is arching his ass off the seat. I had not seen him unzip. But now he has the end of his cock in his fingers and stretches it out like a pink sausage, plainly visible to the girls outside the bus.
A few see him exposing himself! Confusion, and then a kind of terror. The driver pops the clutch and we move off the curb. Twenty-five girls get a quick flash of Jim stretching his prick in their faces. It is insane. Nobody on the bus has seen him except me. Everybody stares at us curious to know why we laugh so hard as the bus rumbles us back to the dorms. Why I am laughing so hard is a mystery to me too. Keaton is a daily excursion through madness. It lies down the dark road waiting for us, completely isolated yet continually devoured by the darker madness of the whole country. Keaton takes the sixteenth year of my life.
While I sit in the seclusion of Keaton, far away from worldly struggles, except the one to keep my behavior mechanical and my head running like a computer till June, my father takes the air shuttle back and forth to Washington several times a week. The Commission is building a lobbying effort in Congress, based on the enormous resources of people and money in the Protestant Church. The effort has only one goal: passage of the bill. My father writes about this in some detail:
While all this was going on in the area of community action, we had other staff members helping to form what developed into a national bipartisan consensus in behalf of the strongest civil rights legislation that has ever passed the Congress of the United States. Early in this effort we decided that a major responsibility of the Commission was a regional one—not in the South but in the Midwest—because the key votes for the passage really resided in those states in the Midwest where the intensity of the racial crisis was less severely felt. There was a kind of irony that the fate of the legislation was held in the hands of the white, Anglo-Saxon, largely Protestant constituency of the Midwest. We set out to try and inform that part of the country about the issue, beginning with a big meeting in Lincoln, Nebraska, in September 1963, to which we brought people from councils of churches throughout the area. Then we sent out traveling teams of people, both Negro and white, some of whom had participated in the struggle in the South, to carry on a continuous program of informing people and attempting to build a consensus favoring passage of a strong bill.
So central did this issue become in the life of the churches that in December, 1963, when the General Assembly of the National Council of Churches met, it took formal action in respect to a small parliamentary matter that was delaying passage of the Civil Rights Bill through Congress at the time. It was unheard of for a church body to get that involved in details of political process, and it is something I would be steadfastly opposed to on most issues. But in this case, the issue seemed so morally unambiguous, so essential, that the Assembly took action.
Toward the end of April we held a large interreligious assembly of Catholics, Protestants and Jews at Georgetown University gymnasium. Thousands of people came from all over; many could not get into the building. Dr. Blake gave what I consider the greatest address I have ever heard him make. I shall never forget at the end of that address seeing a nun, the first person to her feet, seeming to jump straight up into the air with approval and applause.
DEMONSTRATING FOR PASSAGE OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS BILL WITH JAMES FARMER OF CORE AND JOHN LEWIS OF SNCC, WASHINGTON, 1964.
The next morning, we began holding daily services of worship on Capitol Hill with the announced intention that we would not pronounce benediction for these services until the bill had been passed. At 9 a.m. every morning, six days a week, we brought into the Lutheran Church of the Reformation, just behind the Capitol, preachers from every communion all over the country for daily worship. People came from everywhere. Sometimes we’d have seven or eight people; sometimes we’d have twenty-five; sometimes we would have a hundred. We never really knew what to expect. Following the service, there would be a period of briefing in the basement of the church about the state of the legislation. Then people went to the Hill to talk to their Senators. This went on for over two months until the bill was finally passed.
We have some satisfaction in having it said in Washington that the bill was passed because of what the churches did. This was said by both our friends and enemies. Hubert Humphrey said so many times, both to me in private and also publicly. And Senator Russell said “The bill would never have passed if those damn ministers hadn’t got an idea that this was a moral issue!”
The breakthrough comes when Senator Dirksen