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Overview
It starts with a blue hash pipe in a shabby field and a hot, tight dance at the Mayflower Hotel, and rapidly accelerates against the kaleidoscopic backdrop of the Sixties.
Describing a time weirdly similar to today, Expecting to Fly recalls a conservative government embroiled in an increasingly unpopular war, racial tensions, and a generation of disillusioned young people looking for something meaningful to believe in -- teenagers who, like Dudman, hurled themselves into a sea of drugs and sex they weren't really ready for.
With the same passion and brutal honesty that she brought to her first book, Augusta, Gone -- the story of her daughter's troubled adolescence -- Dudman re-creates her own wild ride through the turbulent Sixties, vividly recounting scenes you probably experienced yourself.
From the prim tradition of a posh girls' school and debutante parties of Washington, D.C., to the snows of New Hampshire and the campaign for Eugene McCarthy, from living out of a knapsack in Spain to getting stoned on acid in Yellow Springs, Ohio, Expecting to Fly takes us on a blistering trip to a time when the only thing you couldn't be was shocked.
Now, years later, Dudman reflects on that time and what it means: "Which was it -- triumph, exploration, some important journey, or just a big stupid mistake, a total waste of time?"
You decide.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781439104484 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Simon & Schuster |
| Publication date: | 06/15/2010 |
| Sold by: | SIMON & SCHUSTER |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Expecting to Fly
A Sixties ReckoningBy Martha Tod Dudman
Simon & Schuster
Copyright © 2004 Martha Tod DudmanAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0-7432-4773-6
Chapter One
Eugene McCarthy & The Red Leather WalletBack when I was at Alice Deal Junior High School, I got a huge crush on a boy with perfect features. One day he came up to me in the hall.
"I heard you were in a protest march," he told me.
Bunches of us from Cleveland Park would go down in station wagons, trudge up and down in front of the White House in the cold dark night. On Saturdays Bishop Moore led us to Lafayette Park where we stood hand in hand with people we didn't know under the cloudy, moody Washington autumn skies.
"Are you against the war in Vietnam?" he asked me.
"Yeah."
We got permission to leave homeroom and go out and argue in the stairwell. Our teachers let us because it was current events. His father was in the government. A general or something.
I got my ammunition from my father.
"There's this boy at school who says we have to fight to keep the Communists from taking over the world."
My father looked up from his evening paper. He was always reading the newspaper - the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Post-Dispatch. At night he'd bring home the Evening Star and the Washington Daily News. The inky stacks piled up beside his Danish modern chair. His fingers dark with reading.
"Well, it's a bum war, Martha," my father told me.
My father was a foreign correspondent for The St. Louis Post Dispatch. He'd been over there tons of times - to Vietnam, to Laos, Cambodia. He said the war in Vietnam was a mistake from the start.
"How come?" I asked him. I was against it because it was a war. But he had real reasons.
"Martha," he told me, "people think there's a Communist conspiracy like an evil octopus trying to take over the world. They think the Russians and the Chinese are working together. That there's a Sino-Soviet conspiracy. They're all wet. Ho Chi Minh has used their help, but he's fighting for freedom and independence.
"And there's another thing - because of what happened in World War II, people think you've got to stop an aggressor in his tracks. But we're not dealing with Hitler here.
"We can't win this war. The North Vietnamese and the Vietcong are fighting for independence and for the unity of their country that's been colonized and split in half by outsiders. They've got a powerful incentive. But most of our soldiers don't want to be there - they're just hoping to get home alive. Our morale is low, but the other side is fighting for survival."
I wasn't sure exactly what he meant by all that Sino-Soviet stuff, but I knew he was right. He'd been there. Everything I knew was about emotion and cute little Vietnamese babies getting shot and children aflame with napalm running down the street, but there was also a logic behind the peace movement - a series of ponderous arguments and explanations that grown-ups used to bolster truth.
I went back the next day and repeated my father's arguments to the boy in the stairwell.
He'd been talking to his father, too. And he had a new set of arguments of his own.
That night I told my father what the boy had said.
"He says I must be a Communist if I'm against the war. He says we have to support our troops."
My father thought for a minute, looking at me seriously.
"Ask him," he said, "if he thinks you should always support any war your country undertakes. Tell him that if he says yes, then there's no reason for further conversation. Because if he thinks we ought to unquestioningly follow our country into war, then there's nothing more to discuss."
I thought about that. It made good sense. But I didn't want to ask the boy that question. Because if he said yes - and he might have - then our morning arguments during homeroom would be over, and I liked the arguing, I liked the feeling of passionate indignation. And I liked his handsome, alien face.
February 1968. The war was still on and Eugene McCarthy was running for president. My parents knew him. He lived in our neighborhood, and he was against the War. He was the first politician since Kennedy that didn't seem like a Republican. Even Johnson sort of seemed like a Republican. And all those other tired, sour old men in the Senate. McCarthy wasn't young like Bobby Kennedy and handsome and rich, but he was handsome in a drifty, gray, Minnesotan way, wise and poetic. And we had to do something to stop the war.
All the rest of them went along with it - the senators and everything - they agreed with it or they didn't really agree, sort of knew it was bad, but they didn't want to look like they were soft on Communism or not patriotic. Everybody was just letting it happen, except my dad, who wrote the truth about it even though the government tapped our phones, and Eugene McCarthy who was running for president and who might actually make things better in the world.
My parents were for him. My dad had a tiny Eugene McCarthy button, which he wore on the underneath side of his lapel because he was a reporter and he couldn't be openly partisan. When my sister and I started volunteering at campaign headquarters, our parents thought it was wonderful that we were getting involved politically. I felt proud and important. And besides, a lot of cute guys worked there.
On Saturdays Annie and I helped out at the McCarthy for President office at Alban Towers, the tall brown brick apartment building on Wisconsin Avenue. We collated papers and stuffed envelopes with the other volunteers. The radio was on WEAM; and most of them were in college.
There were some kids there, too. Paul Wright, the handsome one I'd danced with at the Mayflower Hotel, was working there, and a guy named Steve with curly hair who'd dropped out of high school in Massachusetts to work for McCarthy. My sister Annie and our friend Kathleen.
In February a bunch of us took a bus to New Hampshire to help with the primary there. We slept on a church floor and went door-to-door for McCarthy through the Manchester snow, and over spring vacation I went out to Wisconsin. Paul Wright was there, and other volunteers all working out of old hotel rooms, walking down the snowy streets of Milwaukee in the wintertime - We'd like to talk to you about Senator McCarthy, he's running for president. Wouldn't it be cool if he won?
I was part of something big, something new that brought people together. It wasn't just like war protesting which was fun, but sort of disorganized and angry and at the end of it - what had you done? The people behind the barricades still mad at us - Go live in Russia! This was different. This was a grown-up endeavor. Everybody there was funny and cool. Smart college guys with beards or with no beards. With their sleeves rolled back who went to Yale and Harvard. With corduroy pants and self-assurance. Who drank coffee, smoked cigarettes. Looked like men but acted sometimes like boys and thought I was terrific.
How old are you, anyway? they'd ask me. They thought it was cute that I was only sixteen.
We went out all day canvassing the icy roads of Milwaukee; walking from house to house slumped under in the snow.
The people were friendlier here than in New Hampshire.
"Oh, you must be cold, come in!" the lady in the doorway said to us.
And, "all the way from Washington?" and shook her head. "Well, you must really believe in what you're doing."
We did! We did! Vindicated by the lady on the green sofa. We did! We believed in it. We were against the war and we were doing something. We were going to get rid of Johnson. Hey! Hey! LBJ! How many kids did you kill today? We were against the corrupt political System. We were for civil rights. We were for freedom. We were for Eugene McCarthy who was so quiet and unusual, not a typical politician but a poet, and he'd stop the war.
I felt proud and determined. "This is really important. Your vote can make a difference in the world," I said, looking her right in the eye.
The man I was with looked startled, glanced around at me. They never let young ones like me go out alone. We had to go with someone older. Someone who was at least in college.
"That was a good thing you did in there," he told me later as we went out into the puddles and frozen fields of Milwaukee.
We turned and she waved to us from the doorway.
"You maybe even got us a vote."
"You think she'll vote for McCarthy?"
He shrugged. "You never know. But she wouldn't have before. Now we've got a shot at it."
He stopped. There was a broad field before us. Patchy with snow and the flat winter grass underneath sticking through in beigey patches here and there. It was late March.
"You ever fly a kite?" he asked me.
"Huh?"
"A kite. This would be a perfect place to fly a kite. I used to fly kites with my father when I was a kid."
And I understood that he was telling me something else, was accepting me into his own uncertain ranks. Adult. When you looked back at stuff like that. Stuff you used to do.
But I didn't know. Wasn't I still a kid? What happened? Was it over already?
I hadn't eaten hardly anything in about five days. I was going to be really thin. I hurried out to canvass with people they assigned to me; typed letters for the staff at the Sheraton Shroeder. Ran back to the Milwaukee Hotel to man the desk with Steve and Paul.
Paul had gotten his hair cut.
"Clean for Gene," he said.
"God," said Steve. "God, man, you look like somebody else."
He did look different, but he was still handsome.
I smoked the same cigarettes as Paul now. Lucky Strikes. Filterless. Steve smoked them, too. I put my pack down in the hotel coffee shop on the shiny Formica counter that looked spangled in the coffee shop light with the cake holders and the napkin holders and the plastic-covered Midwestern menus with the metal tips. I felt expansive sitting there, adult, with my pack of cigarettes, no sleep, my gritty eyes.
"Just coffee," I told the lady. "Black."
"You don't want anything to eat?"
No. I didn't want anything. I wanted to be so thin I disappeared. I wanted to be the opposite of myself. I wanted to be thin and racked with a racking cough. I wanted to be huddled in my coat against the northern wintry blasts, a lonely grown-up. I had a whole picture of who I was, here in Milwaukee.
We stayed up late that night in the tall lobby of the Milwaukee Hotel with the dark paneling and the plump dark red velvet chairs. It was exotic, being in a downtown hotel at night, halfway across the country from home, with the abandoned snowy streets and neon bars outside.
We sprawled out in the chairs, Paul, Steve, and I, talking about everything, even girls. Paul told about this girl he'd been in love with. She was older and she'd hurt him.
"I guess I'm not really over her yet," he said.
That was so sad! Maybe that's why he had that faraway look when I met him at the dance.
"I know what you mean," I told him. I tried to think of somebody I'd been in love with. Maybe I could use Jon. But he didn't really count. Everybody else already had some sad, past history. I better hurry.
Outside the quiet snow fell down. The lobby was deserted. We might have been anywhere, in any time. The downtown, old-fashioned city. The USO headquarters next door. The coffee shop with its Formica counters, silent now. The Midwest winter drifting into spring.
"Let's go back to the hotel," Paul said at last.
We walked back through the snowy, cold night streets, talking and laughing, leaping the murky puddles. We were all tired and bumping into each other as we walked, clutching each other to keep from falling down. And then, suddenly, we were at the Sheraton Shroeder, tall and bright in the city night.
Paul glanced at Steve.
"I've got to meet someone," Steve said, and he disappeared.
We were up in the room where Paul was staying with a bunch of guys. Nobody else was there.
"You want to watch TV?" Paul asked me.
"OK," I said.
I didn't know what was supposed to happen next. It felt as if it were up to me.
He turned on the TV.
There were beds all over the room, but nobody else was there.
He would kiss me or not kiss me.
I could wait, but then it might never happen. I might have to be the one.
But what did I do? How did I start it - that slow swim?
There were no parents here. There was no one to call down from upstairs. No one to hear us. There was only the dark huge hotel room full of unmade beds and the big television showing some old black-and-white movie and the abandoned room service trays and the boy beside me sitting on the bed and it was late.
I could feel the hum of his body near mine. Could feel how his hair would feel; the tender edges. How it would feel for his hands to touch me.
Everything rushed around us and was done.
Everything seemed inevitable and certain.
And all I really wanted was to be there with him now, with everything about to happen.
He had the front of my dress pulled down and his mouth on my breast when the door opened and we could see the tall dark shapes of the boys in the doorway.
Paul pulled my dress up; yanked the blanket over us both.
I started giggling and he put his hand over my mouth.
"You okay?" somebody shouted.
"Sure," Paul told him in a tired voice that said it all. Boy language. I had her clothes partly off. You interrupted us. I could have, maybe would have, but then you barged in.
But to me in the dark he was elegant. Courteous.
"Are you okay?" he whispered.
I tightened my arm around him the way I imagined a woman would tighten her arm around a man.
And we fell asleep like that with all our clothes on and Paul's arm around me and my face against his chest, which felt like a man's chest. That was really what I wanted anyway, that and the brief sight of my own breast in the dim room. That and his head bent over me tenderly. That and the expectation and the TV flickering away with the sound off and the quiet distant thump of the night snow falling from the roof of the hotel.
The next night Paul lay on top of me with all our clothes on and ground himself against me again and again. There was a name for this. I didn't know it. Ground himself against me until it kind of hurt, but it also felt good in a dark, fierce way.
I couldn't believe it. Here I was - Martha Dudman - grinding away with Paul Wright, the most handsome boy I had ever seen in my life with his perfect features, his rich, important father, his big Catholic family. His big happy important family and he had chosen me! I was the one he was grinding away at in the dark hotel room. I was the one he did the Temptation Walk with in the lobby of the Milwaukee Hotel. I was the one whose hand he took almost as if by accident and squeezed when Steve said something funny. I was the one he looked around at, smiled at. It was like a dream.
It was like a dream of a dream.
Continues...
Excerpted from Expecting to Fly by Martha Tod Dudman Copyright © 2004 by Martha Tod Dudman. Excerpted by permission.
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