Lottery

The night they chose the lottery numbers for the draft, we all gathered in the student center in front of a big T.V. It was a nervous time. We all wanted high numbers, of course. The year before, they had taken men with numbers up into the one hundred and twenties. The energy in the room was weird, something that mediated between horror and ecstasy. Some of us were going to be happy. Others. . . .

But when the lottery began, everyone was silent. We waited as they drew the first number, then we waited to see if anyone one in the room had been chosen. Nobody said anything, and there was a general twitter all around. The second number was drawn, December 24, and Jon went nuts. There was no way around it. He was going to be drafted.

I had known Jon since elementary school. He was a tall kid and an athlete, and he and I used to arm wrestle for the class at recess on Fridays for our sixth grade class (this turned into a round robin eventually, with other boys participating, but all that ended when Virginia got involved and slapped all the boys' wrist to the table without effort). He and I had played football and baseball together in junior high, and he went on to play for the high school basketball team. But like most of us, he'd become enamored of lefty politics, or at least hippie life-styles, and he was determined that he would not go into the military.

After that night, he set about destroying his health. He did massive amounts of drugs and didn't eat, and the day he was to go for his physical, he rubbed Vicks Vapor Rub on his chest and drove a motorcycle sixty miles north with his shirt undone. He was so emaciated that he failed the physical.

That night, though, the lottery went on. Another of my friends got a low number, but he told us he was filing for Conscientious Objector status because of his religious beliefs. He succeeded in that and had to become a night janitor at an elementary school for his public service duty.

At the end of the night, I knew little more than when it started. My number was 136, high enough not to be taken if the war did not escalate, but not a sure thing. I wouldn't have to make up my mind what to do that night. I had some time.

But the draft had left many politicized for the first time in their lives. And, as Ken Kesey had famously declared, you were either on the bus or off the bus.

I was definitely on.

Even on our small campus among intellectuals of the lesser kind, ideology dominated. We now counted the faculty as left or right. We avoided as much as we could the Nixonians preferring professors who had more liberal leanings. We took one professor of humanities, for instance, because he studied The Who's "Tommy: A Rock Opera" in his class. He was a little guy who looked like he might have wrestled in college. He was an unlikely candidate as a liberal, for he dressed neatly and had perfect hair. But like many of our professors, you couldn't tell about him. He seemed more liberal, perhaps, because he was teaching painting and music. He loved Kandinsky who I couldn't stand, but his enthusiasm for his groundbreaking compositions marked him a revolutionary.

He had a strange quirk of rocking his head back and forth quickly to crack his neck, a twitch that I aped, I guess, for one night at dinner, my father asked me what was wrong with my neck.

One day after class, a fellow I'd talked to in groups stayed to ask the professor some questions. I hung around not wanting to miss anything that might be useful on a test. The fellow was older and had a military haircut. He was lean and muscular and looked as if he would be a Marine the rest of his life. He reminded me of a younger version of Catfish, the fellow who had grabbed me by the hair after my accident at the construction site. I should have been more cautious.

He asked the professor a few questions which he answered, but The Marine kept asking more and more questions, and I could see that the professor was a bit flummoxed by it, so I decided to try to help and offered up something of my own. But The Marine was already in a mood. Perhaps he didn't like the prof. I don't know. What I do know is that he turned to me with a look of hate and loathing and said in a threatening voice, "I wasn't talking to you." My face went red immediately out of embarrassment. What was there to say? He was right. I had butted in uninvited. But the viscousness of his response was awful and inappropriate. I said something weak like, "Fine, I wont' try to help you any longer," to which he barked some terrible agreement. The professor stood there nervously gathering up his things and said, "Come by my office if you want to talk about this any further," and then he was gone. Fortunately, The Marine followed him out the door, and I was left in the classroom with an embarrassed impotence wadded in my throat.

I studiously avoided The Marine after that. And I kept a weather eye upon the draft.