JD by Mark Merlis

Author:Mark Merlis [Merlis Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press

September 14, 1966

I was heading for the SLS library to read up on Ham and Noah, but as I turned the corner at 9th Street a cop stopped me. “Mister, this is off limits right now.”

“How come?”

“There was a call about a sniper. Probably crap, but just in case …”

This was about that crazy guy in Texas a few weeks ago. The guy who went up in the tower at the university in Austin and shot a bunch of people.

We all looked at that story and it just seemed so very Texan, of a piece with Oswald and the Impeach Earl Warren people and H. L. Hunt. But I guess we’re all in Texas now. Probably the call was crap. Still, I don’t doubt that there are, in Manhattan as much as anywhere else, guys with automatic rifles and an ember of nihilism in their bellies waiting to be fanned into massacre.

I remember: the Texas shooter was named Whitman--I am large, I contain multitudes, then I gun ‘em down--and he was a marine. Like Dennis O’Grady. Whatever they do to those gyrenes, somehow they come out mass murderers or poets, if there’s a difference. But of course Dennis O’Grady served in peacetime; he wasn’t off slaughtering uppity Asians. I expect the current generation of marines will come back a little less inclined to write free verse.

Anyway, I headed up to Bryant Park, figuring I could do my research at the main library and also, long as the kid’s in school, do a little extra credit research in the men’s lounge of one of the theaters on 42nd Street. When I emerged from the movie palace, I was blinking--not at the light, so much, rather at the way the crowd went about its diverse purposes, when I had just been in a room where everyone had the same purpose, a place as communal and full of ritual as a shul. I found myself looking up, like a gawking tourist, at all the towers on Sixth Avenue. Seeing how many windows were open, figuring possible lines of fire. A surpassingly dense and complex spiderweb, death aimed at me from so many matrices.

We’ve lived--half my adult life I have lived, his whole goddamn life Mickey has lived--with the knowledge that the thermonuclear war could start any minute, and then the cockroaches would take over. I made so much of this in JD, all the stuff about kids growing up in a world whose absurdity is highlighted by the constant threat of annihilation. But I was wrong.

We have had knowledge but not belief. Was it Freud who said that no one really believes in the possibility of his own extinction? For a few years we dutifully read the books and watched the movies: On the Beach, Dr. Strangelove, Fail-Safe; we all shivered during the Cuban thing; we gave our money to the SANE committee while sniggering a little at the goo-goo Bertrand Russell naïveté of it all. But we didn’t believe it. Even during the Cuban thing, we didn’t really look up into the skies for the incoming missile.

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