© 2005 by John Varley; all rights reserved

Arlington West

1st Lt Kenneth Ballard, 26, died in firefight

Arlington West

 

They are cool and supple to the touch, very smooth. It is quite a sensation to have one crawling all over you.

Santa Barbara, CA

When the 2000th US soldier died in Iraq, there were vigils all over the country. Lee heard there was going to be one in San Luis Obispo at 6:30, and we decided to go. It was in the little plaza in front of the Mission San Luis Obispo de Tolosa.

When we got there we saw some people gathered, holding candles. It was a small enough crowd that I could actually count heads. I came up with 125. There were two remote trucks from local TV stations with their dishes cranked up in the air and two people with shoulder-mounted minicams looking for a ten-second shot for the 11 o’clock news.

What you do at a thing like this, they give you a candle that’s been shoved through a hole in the bottom of a Dixie cup, to catch the wax. I’m not much of a candle holder, but Lee took one ... and then of course she had to have both hands free to take pictures, so I ended up standing there holding a candle in a Dixie cup. Most of the cups had been bought at the Wal-Mart or something, and had Halloween ghosts and witches on them, which made me feel even sillier.

After a while a young woman urged everyone to get in a circle and she gave an impromptu little speech. Practically the first words out of her mouth were “We don’t have any kind of plan ...” Right, just like the Democratic Party. What plan they did have involved a period of silence, and then people could say what they wanted to say, if anybody wanted to say anything. For quite a while, no one did.

There was this one guy with so much hair on his head and face I couldn’t see his mouth. He wore a black coat and black hat, like it had been jammed down on a white dandelion. He looked vaguely dirty and vaguely crazy. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d whipped his coat open to reveal he wasn’t wearing any clothes, just the legs of pants strapped to his knees. I sort of wished he’d flashed us. It would have been more interesting than what was going on. Then he shouted.

“One is too many!

“Two is too many!

“Three is too many!”

Oh my god. He’s going to go all the way to 2002, which was the death toll on the only sign in evidence.

But he didn’t. He started into a rambling speech that I couldn’t understand. I still couldn’t see his mouth moving. Finally he wound down, and another silence descended. I couldn’t tell if it was the same moment of silence to honor the dead or just your garden variety I’m-too-shy-to-say-anything silence. I had time to look over the little group. There were a few young people, but most of them were my age or older. Hell, some of these people were probably at the Pentagon in the ‘60s, stuffing flowers into the muzzles of guns.

A woman began to sing “This Little Light of Mine,” and everyone was relieved to join in. But nobody knew the second verse, so that sort of petered out. Somebody else sang something else, and only a few people knew the lyrics to that one. I can’t remember what it was. I knew it was only a matter of time, and sure enough, here it came ... “We Shall Overcome.” Once again, nobody knew more than one verse. Where are Malvina Reynolds and Joan Baez when you need them?

The first woman came back to the center of the circle again. Was she trying to get some excitement going? Everybody was just standing there. She introduced a man whose son died in Iraq, and he gave us a speech that sounded like he’d given it a hundred times before. Not that it wasn’t sincere, but after you do the same rap that many times some of the life goes out of it. He’d been in Crawford with Cindy Sheehan, been on the bus, gone to the White House and the Pentagon to get refused entry. And so forth. I felt for him. Everybody did, I’m sure.

But, man ...

I was never a protester, never a sign carrier, never a candle holder or a rock thrower or a chanter. But one day I walked down Lombard Street in San Francisco with 200,000 other flower children and freaks and activists to the Presidio and watched them shout at the soldiers behind the locked gate. Once I went to a rally on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley and saw the police forming up, and got out of there with the smell of tear gas and a burning Bank of America in my nostrils. People were angry.

What the hell is wrong with me, anyway? San Luis is a small town, I never expected thousands of people shouting. Shouting wouldn’t have been appropriate, anyway, since we were gathered to memorialize 2000 dead Americans and an unknown number of thousands of dead Iraqis. But it was so damn depressing! Everybody looked so damn tired. Back in 1968 we thought we were changing the world. Were we? Well, a little. I don’t believe we stopped the war, but along with the bitter and angry veterans who came back from that evil quagmire, we did change the way people looked at war. Or so we thought. Was everybody so tired and discouraged, like me, because here we were almost 40 years later, seeing the same fucking thing happening again?

Sigh.

The “leader” came back again. What can we do? Nothing, really, she said. One more exciting, inspiring message. Oh, call up your congresspeople and tell them not to vote for the $50 billion war appropriation coming up. You know, those congresspeople who won’t see you when you want to protest the war, the ones who are in office because they outspent their opponents 10 to one, and who have a 97% chance of being re-elected unless they murdered Chandra Levy.

The TV trucks had sucked their dishes back down and left. We had lasted thirty minutes, which seemed about long enough to Do the Right Thing for that night. Take that, George Bush! So we went away, had a great chicken-fried steak at Margie’s Diner, and went home to await the latest news on Scootergate. And today Scooter got indicted, though I’m starting to fear that that human slug, Karl Rove, may manage to crawl away. But if we do need to find him, we can follow the slime trail with a shaker of salt ...

So the next Sunday we went back to Santa Barbara again, to Arlington West. The damn thing is bigger than ever. Now they’re got a whole new section. Lee must have a thousand pictures of it by now. It has never been easy to visit there, and it gets harder every time. But you can’t turn away.

It was the day before Halloween, and two days before Día de los Muertos, but downtown Santa Barbara was celebrating both holidays with merchants up and down State Street giving out candy to kids in costumes between noon and 4 PM. We thought that was a good idea. Who needs kids running around in the dark in dark costumes begging for food door to door? I remember I used to enjoy it, but it was a simpler age then. I remember people used to bake treats and wrap them in paper. Who would eat stuff like that from strangers these days? Nobody, that’s who.

It turned an already lively downtown into something of a zoo, but a delightful one. Kids everywhere you looked, most in store-bought costumes but some with real imagination, getting stoked on a major sugar high. We strolled along, digging it. We had lunch in a sidewalk place called Zia, what they were calling New Mexican food. It was very similar to regular Mex, but had its own style. They had terrific hot salsa. There’s scads of good restaurants on State Street, and not all of them are expensive. It was about 75 degrees and sunny. Ah, Southern Cahleefornia!

At the Paseo there were a few guys from a place called Reptile Rescue, I think. Anyway, they had about a dozen snakes, from little ones hardly thicker than a noodle up to a couple six-foot pythons and boas. There were snakes I’d never seen before, fabulous colors. The kids were lining up to handle them. Very few had any problems with the idea. And no wonder. If you have a snake phobia, that’s too bad, but they are not slimy. They are cool and supple to the touch, very smooth. It is quite a sensation to have one crawling all over you.

We made it on up to the Art Museum for the free Sunday admission. They were having a big shindig in a pretty small space in front of the museum. There were all sorts of dancers, both Mexican and ... I think the word is Mestizo. Traditional dances of all kinds. The men were mostly in black with lots of silver, with super-wide hats, and the women were simply an explosion of colors. That’s something I love about Mexicans. They aren’t shy about bright colors. None of your “tasteful” beige for those ladies. We saw some great dancing and heard some great music.

Inside the museum they had set up Day of the Dead “altars,” much of them made of sweets in the form of skulls and skeletons. I think I like Day of the Dead more than I like Halloween. Both are sort of ghoulish, but there are no phony “monsters” in the Mexican celebration. They celebrate the dead, they go into graveyards and have fiestas.

The Greta Garbo exhibition was long gone, and in its place there was a variety of new stuff from the rotating collection, of varying quality from some excellent Rembrandt etchings to some real crap from Rothko and some other modern splatter art. I know it’s been said before, but one set of a dozen watercolor scraps of paper look like something that somebody might have used to clean his brushes. No kidding, this was stuff that, if your kindergartner came home with it, you’d be ashamed to put it up on your fridge. You could fill your mouth with paint and spew, and come up with results indistinguishable from this shit. I mentioned to Lee something that I’ve felt for a long time when looking at about 95% of art made since about 1900. A hundred years from now, people will be laughing at this stuff. I’m dead serious. They will look at this crap and say, “What could they possibly have been thinking?”

But it is an excellent little museum, with a many great items. We spent a little time sitting in front of the three Monets, the prizes of the whole place, on permanent display.
 

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