Unsuspecting grads
make final statement
I was stumped.
While I had known Anzio to
spearhead drives for neo-populist
causes ranging from Quadraped
Liberation to Post-Mortem Civil
Rights, I never would have sus
pected that an arcane pagan ritual
like graduation would be the
student gathering to capture his
anarchic imagination. God knows/
sure didn’t look forward to it — sal
low students in ebony shrouds
thinking “what for?” while a minor
dignitary chanted the Rites of
Bureaucratic Passage — and I was
only doing it for the folks, whose
sweat-stained checks had kept me
in books and granola for the past
four years.
But Anzio—the same Anzio who
regarded everything but earth
quakes as overly ritualistic — was,
unbelievably, more excited about
the looming graduation exercises
than he had been about the Hunger
Shuffle. He had even managed to
become head of the organizing
committee, and spent hours in the
study of his day-gio decorated bus
poring over seating arrangements
and typing up reams of notes. He
had taken responsibility for picking
up, preparing and delivering all of
the caps and gowns and, through
phone calls and visits, made abso
lutely sure that each student knew
where he or she was to sit In all it
was an impressive effort, and more
than one bystander was moved to
comment smugly that Crazy Anzio
had apparently Figured Things Out
at last, and with the organizational
skills he was showing, he should be
a Marketable Commodity in the
Job Market of the Real World.
Personally, I didn’t know what to
make of my friend’s sudden refor
mation, but by the time the dreaded
day arrived I was too caught up in
my own crisis to give it further
thoughts. Standing with the other
students in the hallway, outside of
the ballroom smoking and swearing
and explaining that it was “for the
folks,’’ I happened to catch a
glimpse of the latter through a crack
in the partition. My worst fears were
confirmed.
There, in the spectator section,
flanked by bank after bank of
softball-sized multi-megawatt re
flector blubs, behind a Blastaar.
Polychromatic, 16mm, full-racking,
auto-zoom movie camera, holding
an omnidirectional “pin-drop” mic
rophone attached to a mammoth,
reel-to-reel, fully-compensating
tape recorder, under a maroon
director’s beret and behind a confi
dent smile, sat my father. My
mother was beside him, murmering
softly as he set the audio level.
As we lined up, looking for all the
world like a great, black caterpillar, I
whispered a tiny prayer, asking that
this particular moviemaking effort
by my father be more subdued than
his previous efforts. Foremost in my
memories were the horrible Hal
of wary veterans of the Monster’s
attacks slipping Tootsie Rolls to us
through the mail slots in their
doors.)
While I shuddered at the recollec
tions the dirge began on the organ
and the great caterpillar snaked in
side and lumbered up the aisle,
splitting inself into 30-leg hunks as
we veered off into our rows. I
glanced at Dad, surrounded by a
frame of tiny white suns, and then
sat and stared straight ahead, my
eyes singed, resolved to ignore him
in spite of the hot ivory light that
bathed the left side of my face.
When my vision returned I took
quick stock of my surroundings and
discovered three interesting, if
somewhat puzzling facts: 1) On the
back of the person seated in front of
me was a text of the speech that was
to be given by the graduation
speaker, intercut with weird paren
thetical commands (i.e. “Flip hat, 5
sec.”). 2) Anzio and some of his
friends from the Bourgeois Busters
Brigade were busily skipping
through the rows pinning more of
the sheets on people’s backs, and
3) my mortarboard was pure white
on the underside, like everyone
else’s. I was at a loss to explain any
of this, though I suspected the two
tone mortarboards were Anzio’s
idea of a stylish change from the
old-fashioned outfits. It seemed a
token reform, however, certainly
less than I had expected from such
an accomplished radical.
Finally the dirge died out and the
ballroom grew quiet as the speaker,
a Mr. Hal Armstrong, the ancient
retired head of the State Fish and
Game Department, assumed the
podium. He deared his throat for a
substantial portion of the afternoon
and then began croaking in
monotones.
“Mr. President, faculty, parents
and you wonderfully parified stu
dents, the event of your graduation
reminds me of a fish I encountered
once at the Bonneville ladder. This
fish, unlike you, never had the op
portunity to attend college ...”
While Mr. Armstrong related the
hopeless situation of the unedu
cated fish I leaned back, bored, and
looked enviously at the smiling face
of my friend Frank, who was seated
on my right. Frank had ingested 15
micrograms of powdered Vicks 44,
6 saguaro buttons and half a liter of
Wild Turkey an hour before the
ceremony began, and whispered to
me, gigging, that we certainly were
lucky to have a fish for a graduation
speaker.
I wasn’t so sure. The speech
droned on, while the uninterested
students followed the texts in front
of them. We read along as Arm
strong continued, “... and just as
the deer have learned the wisdom
of knuckling under to the supre
macy of the hunters, so too will you
discover that life is a series of com
promises, and that each of us must
... helmeted policeman
swirled into the melee...
loweens of my youth, when kindly
neighbors opened their doors to my
sister and me only to collapse in
optic-overload comas as Dad sea
red their eyes with the ghastly tight
(Later, Dad spliced all of the Hal
loween reels into a two-hour epic
that Sis and I called “Attack of the
Lightening Monster,” which begins
with scenes of naive citizens being
mercilessly zapped by the intense
candlepower, and ends with shots
crawl before (flip hat, 5 sec.)..
Now Mr. Armstrong did not say
“flip hat,” but there it was on the
text in front of me, so feeling a little
foolish but wanting to do the right
thing, I casually reached up and
turned my mortarboard over, hold
ing it on top of my head, and
counted to five as Mr. Armstrong
continued “... before the corpo
rate powers that have made this
country great.”
Graphic by Jon Combs
Suddenly a muffled gasp broke
out in the spectator section, and I
turned to notice my father panning
his camera -across the graduates.
Someone with more courage than
myself, I figured, had probably re
gistered his or her disappointment
with this foolish ceremony by lifting
his or her gown to reveal a birthday
suit to the shocked audience. I
turned my mortarboard back over
and returned to my text
“... along with the new conser
vatism winging its way across the
land like a gaggle of mallards, we
see spawned an age of (flip hat, 5
sec-”
Again, I self-condously flipped
my mortarboard, and again the
gasp swept through the auditorium;
with an ugly, growling undercurrent
this time, as if the audience was be
ginning to understand the affront—
whatever it was—and did not like it
at all. Armstrong, however, was
reading his speech with the aid of a
plate-sized magnifying c^ass and ,
blind beyond the edge of the
podium, continued speaking un
perturbed:
“ ... power, taming the wild
atom, creating clean (flip hat, 10
sec.)...”
The angry buzz, continuous now,
rose in pitch.
“ ... like the grizzly, defending
his den, out B-52’s. (flip hat, 10
sec.)...”
And so it went, the crowd grow
ing uglier, until finally parents and
grandparents, aunts and uncles and
the very administrative heads and
captains of local industry onstage
could stand the mysterious outrage
no longer, they descended on us,
their surrounded, bewildered prey,
like the seine-net that the oblivious
Armstrong was calmly describing in
another of his naturalistic analogies.
Mothers stretched on tiptoes to
snag the ears of six-foot sons and
tugged with a ferocity that must
have inspired some painful nostal
gia, and fathers smacked the grace
ful folds of daughters gowns with
equal zeal. I glanced around nerv
ously and was reassured by the
sight of my seated father, grinning
hugely as he panned the chaotic
scene, with Mom swiveling the
mammoth lights to capture the ac
tion.
Finally helmeted policemen
swirled into the melee, cordoning
the square battlefield into sections
and ushering the combatants into
the hallway a section at a time. The
family scenes that greeted me as I
was escorted with my group into the
hallway were strikingly similar A
pink-eared and confused son or
daughter being lectured in stereo by
irate parents, who sprinkled words
like “circus” and “stunt” into their
castigations.
Eventually the roar died down to
angry stares and the family groups
detached themselves from the
crowd. Going away, the scenes
were once again similar: two
flushed, red, wrinkled necks, and,
between them a foot higher, a curly
head that shook back and forth
wonderingly.
I did not have the slightest idea of
what had happened.
Dad explained it to me later, and
it was all over the newspapers the
next day, but it seemed so...
bizarre that I knew it would take
Dad’s film to explain it fully. The
wait seemed interminable, but the
film was developed by the following
evening, and so, before an audi
ence that included dozens of my
fellow graduates, including the
now-famous Anzio, Dad flipped the
switch and the sliver screen on our
living room wall glowed to life.
Even Dad’s theatrical zooms and
pans could not make the start of the
ceremony any more interesting
than it had been originally. There
was old Armstrong, his boring croak
revived through the speaker be
neath the screen, and in front of him
a black sea of mortarboards rippled
softly, as if stirred by his gasping
inhalations. He was just warming to
bis topic, the desirability erf bourg
eois supremacy, when suddenly
hundreds of hands popped up like
periscopes from the ebony ex
panse, grasped the sides of their
mortarboards and turned them
over to reveal their white under
sides.
Dad had explained it fully, and
the Associated Press had even has
tily thrown a diagram into its ac
count, but neither had prepared me
for watching that black, anonymous
plane transform itself into a perfect,
white-line caricature of Nelson
Rockfeller, smiling toothily and
framed by a dozen fat dollar signs.
The cheers in our living room
drowned the shock gasp that who
oshed from the speaker as we con
gratulated ourselves on the radical
statement that he had made, albeit
ignorantly.
The rest of the film was just as
delightful. Following the wonderful
caricature came the slogan, in
Gothic lettering, ‘ ‘The Rock Owns a
Piece of You.” This was succeeded
at two-minute intervals by a variety
of leftist catchphrases, including
“Swat the Fascist Insect”, “Free
Patty, She’s Suffered Enough”,
and “Get the Rich Out of Their
Cadillacs.” There was also some
nostalgia: “Hell no, We Won’t
Go”, “What, My Lai?”, some en
vironmental pleas: “Save the
Whales”, “Split Wood, not Atoms”,
some general obscenity in beautiful
script, and a final eloquent two-part
statement that began “When Free
dom is Outlawed..and ended
“Only Outlaws Will Be Free!” The
tumult began after this, and the final
scene was a zoom of Anzio, smiling
and riding the crest of the battle like
Todd Hackett happily greeting the
day of the locust.
in the end, everyone was happy.
Dad sold the film to CBS for twice
what Zapruder got for his, and be
came a local celebrity. Due to the
random luck of my seating position
I was also brushed with fame, as I
stutteringly told Barbara Walters in
a live interview how it had felt to be
the dot on the “i” in “Remember
Attica.”
But it was Anzio who reaped the
greatest notoriety, as he was
swamped with interview and speak
ing requests from all over the na
tion. And after some of the damor
had died down, he ironically, ended
up fulfilling the earlier expectations
that his organizational skills would
get him a Good Job. Proudly show
ing me his first paycheck, a $2,000
draft from a Mexican bank, Anzio
explained that he was now ‘ ‘Oppos
ition Destablizer” for an idle
California politician who was gear
ing up for a comeback try in 1980.
Causes...
(Continued from Page 2)
more, what with traviling and every
thing.”
“1 haven’t got any fertilizer,” I
muttered.
“Oh, that’s okay, they sell special
sacrificial packets at a garden shop
on 13th. Each packer has enough
fertilizer to conduct a Chlorophyll
Catechism, and they only cost...”
“One dollar,” I muttered, flip
ping a bill into the hubcap.
“Yeah, how did you guess?” she
said, snatching up the money and
heading for the door.
“Just a shot in the dark,” I mum
bled at her retreating form. I leaned
back, sighed, and watched an out
of-focus housewife sing a lilting
serenade to her dishwashing liquid.
Next time, 1 resolved. I’m coming in
through the post office.