Subversive

Reading.  It was liberating and subversive.  The world I read about was not the one I inhabited.  It seemed that something was being kept from me or I from it.  Something was going on somewhere that I wasn't supposed to know about.  I got the news, of course, every night from Walter Cronkite, and so I knew about current events.  There was a war in Vietnam and people were dying.  There were protests against the war in other places, but I never heard anyone say anything against it.  Negroes were marching, too, and now there was forced integration.  The neighborhoods surrounding me were full of people raised in the deep south, people from Texas and Mississippi and Alabama and Georgia, working class people who did manual labor and spoke in accents so deep and rich that at sometimes I thought they were kidding.  Our school had been integrated that year, but not by students.  We had gotten three black teachers, and I had one for math.  She was a skinny, nervous woman who hardly smiled.  For many, it was an outrage, but there was no real trouble about it beyond the inevitable epithets spoken in hallways and the dramatically disapproving postures of burr headed boys slumping in their seats who answered "What?" to every question they were asked.  For many, Alabama's Governor was a hero.  He was running a campaign for President on the Independent Party ticket and it seemed that most people where I lived supported him.  

I think it was Wallace that scared me most.  His hatred was ugly and large.  He promoted violence against "niggers, hippies, and jews," and vowed to run over any protesters who stood in front of his car.  Among the people I dwelt was an anger you could smell, a danger you could taste.  Wallace's validation of violence was welcomed by people for whom it was second nature, for whom fighting was a right of passage and a source of knowledge.  It was how men were valued and ranked.  That was our hierarchy.  

But in the pages of Life magazine, I saw something else.  Bobby Kennedy promised a return to Camelot, they said.  And you could believe in it, too, if you looked at those photographs.  I couldn't understand how someone would choose the face of Wallace over the face of Kennedy, those gestures caught mid-movement on the opposite sides of grace.  

It was Playboy magazine, however, that truly captured my imagination.  Each month, I read every word in the publication, cover to cover.  Of course, I was enamored of the pictures, too.  Those impossible women who beamed out from the pages were nowhere to be seen in my town where you needed only a single good feature to be considered attractive, nice hands or pretty skin or hair that was naturally wavy.  But the words lit me up.  I had never heard such ideas uttered before, and surely I understood little of what I read.  Still, in my unknowing conscience, I thought there was a greatness to what was discussed, to the way it was said.  I knew there was a philosophy and a politics involved but it was presented as something tangible, something you could eat and drink and drive.  The allure was overwhelming for a teenage boy.  It was tangible, I thought, and I would have it.