ONE THING THAT BOTHERED ME: that black kid getting away. As much as it
provoked reverential pleasure each time I beheld the orderliness by which
ewe ess guv was capable of processing its own
sons for slaughter, when one got away who by all accounts was in need
of snuffing out--like that spastic,
conscientious brother from South Berkeley--my heart of cooled magma
dropped. No hundreds of thousands of exceptional specimens, offered up
on the draft altar to the gnashing
jaws of war, could lift it in its igneous heaviness . . . all because of
the infinitesimal exceptionalness of one who got away.
He might have gone the way of the geese at winter's end; gone off to
gookville, like a good ram, for his feedbag
of shrapnel; or even gotten political (ewe!) and
burned his ticket--getting, for his fifteen seconds of street theater,
an express transfer to Port Penitentiary, where draft-dodge martyrs
embark on a restful, three-year tour. Whatever route he would have
taken, he would have been out of the way! As it turned out, in spite of
my considerable connections in the upper echelons of random drawings and
luckless lotteries, his number
didn't come up.