The Savage Innocent 2015

He was something of an enigma, when we were younger. When we first met.

Maybe because he wasn't the typical kid next door. Maybe, too, because as soon as you met Dalton Rand you knew there was something about him worth knowing, something almost bigger than life.

I say that because there seemed to me to be an inextricable connection between the Dalton Rand I knew --and by that I mean the year I spent in school with him -- and the spirit of those times. He was alive in ways I never knew existed, preternaturally attuned to people, and people's connection to him. I often think of charged particles adrift in the cosmos, repelling, attracting, colliding, and when two extremely dissimilar particles collide there exists, if only for the brief span of it's existence -- something like a momentary lapse of reason. The laws of the universe break down, and out of the collision something peculiar emerges. A union so singular, so insular in it's inception that it's impossible not to get pulled into it's orbit. Curiosity works that way too, I guess.

It's difficult for me to think about those days, quite painful in fact. I think it's difficult to reconcile the man I think he became with the way he was then. I say this because even before he met my sister Madeleine, he seemed destined to play an outsized role in both our lives. But I have to pause here, pause to see him as he was then in my mind's eye, because with the passage of so much time I don't see those days as clearly as I once did. For me, somewhere in time he slipped into the darker realms of mythos. He belongs to the sixties, you see, and in one shattering moment he became an essential part of our mythology. He belonged to us because, in the brief spark of his youth, he came to embody everything that was righteous and strong and pure in us, and how that just wasn't enough.

So, where was I? Oh yes, bigger than life. I have to think he knew he was too, even then. He thought he knew where he was going in life, and understood some people would try to tag along for part of the ride. Anyway, I think this one fact of life, more than any other I'm going to try to pass on, defined the course of events that year. Without this one simple fact to ground you, that Rand was even then a true force of nature who pulled you into his orbit, everything else about this story will seem faintly ridiculous, even a cumbersome delusion of sorts. You'll have missed the point, I guess you might say, and that would be too bad.

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I met Rand in August, 1969, just before my freshman year of high school began, and our experiences growing up couldn't have been more different. I think kids just growing up in the late 60s were already growing allergic to Strawberry Fields, Lucy in the Sky with all those Diamonds, and all the other psychedelia that was in full bloom by the mid-sixties. We were too young to have been terminally shaped by the so-called counter-culture, and so lacked the full-blown rebelliousness of our older brothers and sisters. Like so many of us, Rand was not yet full of the rebelliousness that would soon define those precious, terrible moment of our lives. But even in the eyes of a bell-bottomed, round-eye romantic like myself, the first time I saw him I could tell there was something outrageous, possibly even titanic about the guy. I think he was, in a phrase that has passed in and out of vogue over the past two hundred years, a World Historical Figure just waiting for his moment.

When I first laid eyes on him, Dalton Rand was the square-jawed fighter pilot-to-be who all but proclaimed the Age of Aquarius was going to come crashing down all over our fevered little heads. Perhaps the central irony of this story is that we, Rand and I, had just been deposited onto the well-manicured grounds of a distinguished military academy in north-central Indiana. Vast manicured lawns rolled between ordered rows of cedars to a small lake, the grounds presided over by a huge granite cathedral, the whole place surrounded by football fields and parade grounds. The campus was a grand and glorious prison, and by the late sixties the whole place was drowning in it's contradictions.

That first day? Well, that day was as hard and real as life had ever been for the two of us, and quite possibly because the school was dedicated to creating young men ready for military service. But time has a way of creating subtle ironies in our lives, and it's those little incongruities that keep our lives interesting, I think. For instance, Rand's hair was long and blond; mine short and red. He looked carved from purest white marble, rather like Michelangelo's David; perhaps I could most charitably be described as a very pale string bean, with hideously long legs. He seemed to regard his sudden appearance at the school as an anomaly of cosmic significance, yet while I was a little confused about what life here might hold, I was sure whatever happened would be less traumatic than life at home.

We both arrived on the same chartered bus from O'Hare; that old stainless steel bullet dropped us off on a sweltering Saturday morning in mid-August, 1969; Rand's black-stenciled olive drab foot-locker matched mine in all details save a few scratches and dents, while his jeans and white polo shirt were somewhat at odds with this universe. There were 43 of us on that bus, and I think, looking back on it all, we must have all looked rather alike -- except for Rand. If you are the cynical type, you might have said our group looked rather patrician. Gray flannel slacks, white button down Oxfords, red and blue regimental ties...you know the score, I'm sure. We probably looked like clueless stacks of Wonder-Bread.

As it happened, Rand and myself were assigned to room 21, a second floor corner room that looked down on a little stone and hedge-lined quad. Statues and cannon defined the view out our windows, images of history and sacrifice. My first impression of the view was that it was pretty nice -- for a prison. Even one of the cannon was aimed squarely at our windows, and the placement seemed to reinforce the sense of involuntary confinement I felt. I fondly remembered looking at the school's glossy catalogue the winter before, at the ordered rows of scowling cadets and a fierce looking fullback charging behind pulling guards, and wanting passionately, furiously, to belong to this place. As is so often the case, you've got to be careful what you wish for. Clio is a deadly muse, is she not?

I turned from my prison window and opened my footlocker, looked down at the proscribed number of white boxer shorts labeled just so, at the white sheets my grandmother had laundered and folded not a day before, and I felt the first stabs of anomie. Then I looked at Rand. He was lying on his bed face up, staring intently at the ceiling. He didn't look lost there, far from it. No, it looked as if he was pondering the very limits of the universe, the nature of existence.

And I noticed them then. The shoes on his feet.

Wingtips.

Heavy, black wingtips on his feet, just like my father's. And probably, I thought, just like his father's. A polo shirt, jeans, and big, fat wingtips?

His jaw was clenched, his left fist balled tightly in a knot, the thumbnail digging into the skin on the side of his finger. Believe it or not that was the first time I noticed how clear-eyed he was, how full of manifest purpose he seemed. I remember placing folded white t-shirts and rolled-up black socks into a drawer while regarding him as one might a smoldering volcano across a narrow strait. Krakatoa comes to mind.

We had been told to get our belongings unpacked and squared-away, yet Rand remained as fixed in place as a new specimen on a lepidopterists' examining-table. Pinned flat, so to speak. Anyway, I wasn't exactly surprised when, half an hour later a short, blunt instrument by the name of Lt E. G. Crist pounded on our door and came blustering into our lives. He looked at Rand's unpacked footlocker and stared at my roommate with a sort of wild-eyed disbelief stammering across his face.

"What the FUCK are YOU doing, Cheesedick!" Crist, E. G. yelled as he took in the sight of our pinned butterfly.

The inert mass that was Dalton Rand barely stirred, the clear grey eyes barely came back to us for a moment, and he looked benignly at Crist, E. G. for a moment before looking back at the ceiling.

"I was thinking about your mother," Rand said, and Crist, E. G. began to tremble and fume.

"What did you say?" Crist, E. G. screamed.

"I was thinking about your mother, and the last time I fucked her up the ass," he said clearly, and Crist, E. G. seemed like a kettle too long on the boil. He frothed and fumed and leaned over, got in Rand's face and started to yell when the volcano blew. Yes, that volcano. Krakatoa.

Rand was off the bed and airborne in an instant and took Crist, E. G. by the neck and the balls and pinned to the far wall, his own face now just inches from the shocked kids, the butterfly now a cobra, malevolent fury coiled in the air around his hissing smile. And then Rand was smiling, and he pulled back from the strike, let the poor kid slide down to the floor.

Eddie Crist had just met Dalton Rand -- and his world had been turned upside down. Hell, who knows, maybe it never would never be the same.

But then again, so had mine, and I guess you could say mine never would be, too.

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We had, the forty or so who'd arrived on the bus that afternoon, reported to campus two weeks early for football. The school was not, therefore, really in session, not yet operating at full military power. Only a few staff were around, and only a few of the teachers who would define the perimeters of our existence over the next year were anywhere to be seen. We hadn't been issued uniforms yet, didn't form up in front of the dorms every morning, yet all things being equal, life wasn't quite what it had been the day before, either. Still, there was a residual informality lingering over the campus, a casual give or take that would soon, and inevitably, give way to the barked orders and clipped cadences of military school. But within this casual informality, word of Crist's encounter with Rand had spread like a particularly vile sexually transmitted disease.

We ambled slowly to breakfast early that first Sunday morning, met the coaches then walked with them to the locker room an hour later and were issued our gear. We were the new kids, Rand and I and the forty others we'd traveled with on the bus were told, and we were the unknowns, the untested. We were, we were told, being relegated to tackling dummy status the first few days of practice, and somehow I felt a little tainted simply being Rand's roommate. Guilt by association, I suppose, because it was soon apparent our coaches didn't know what to make of Rand. They looked at him, felt the pyroclastic fury in his eyes, and I think they must have assumed I fit into that same classification. Anyway, I got the impression they were a little unsure of themselves around Rand. Not quite afraid, but they sure as Hell weren't going to turn their backs on him, either.

After this first orientation was over, we had the rest of the day off, so Rand and I and a few of the other freshmen took off and explored the farther reaches of the campus -- and beyond. When we got back to the dorm, we all showered and Rand finally got around to unpacking, then we made it to dinner, and found Crist and a few of his upperclassmen buddies watching our every move.

Crist, E. G. was a short, stocky kid who grew up on a dairy farm north of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and it looked like one day he might even be muscular, yet for some reason he considered himself linebacker material. He wore the number 66, like his hero Ray Nitschke of the Green Bay Packers. Everything about the kid screamed 'insecurity', from the way he looked at himself in the mirror when he popped zits to the way he strutted around the practice field. I think all our coaches thought he was a prick; I know all of us freshmen thought he was.

Anyway, that first Monday practice, late in the afternoon, Rand was lined up opposite Crist in the tackling pit. They faced one another as rookie versus veteran, buck private against first lieutenant, Crist all snarling and chest beating, his beady-eyes red with full-blown fury, and when the coach's whistle pierced the air Rand lowered his head and drove his helmet right through Crist's gut. I remember looking down at the writhing numbers boiling on the sand and thinking the kid sure didn't look like Ray Nitschke anymore.

It turned out there wasn't a thing Rand couldn't do better than anyone else on the team, and in due course he started throwing the ball with one of the coaches. Let me just say this: Rand could throw a football. Point of fact, he could drive nails with a football at twenty yards, and rifle the thing through a swinging tire hanging from a tree thirty yards away, time after time. He had, you see, grown up playing ball with kids on military bases in Germany. Much older kids. All this put our coaches in a bit of a fix.

The presumed quarterback that year, Tucker Harriman, had been so-ordained last year. Not by talent alone, mind you, but by dent of his father's having helmed the team through an almost mythical 8-0 season in 1936. And the truth be told, Tucker wasn't a bad quarterback, in fact, he was considered better than any other kid in our league. But the simple fact of the matter was this: Tucker was not even close to being half as good as Rand. Tucker was, however, a senior; Rand was, like myself, a freshman. After watching Rand run some plays, everyone, and I mean everyone knew Rand was a far better QB, but facts are facts: the deck was stacked against Rand. Still, Harriman knew he was the Big Man and strutted around the field like the stud he thought he was.

At the end of our second week of practice, we scrimmaged against the local high school's varsity squad. The game was a cross-town rivalry always enjoyed by the townies because they got to kick our asses all over the field. The local kids were, you see, almost all farmer's kids. Big, mid-Western farmer's kids. They usually wiped our much smaller school's team right off the field within the first few minutes of the game. The word going around town was that their entire offensive line had harnessed up and plowed fields all summer long just to get ready for this season-opener, and the guys on our defensive line were a little weirded-out by this kind of talk. Anyway. we took to the field late that afternoon; August was about to give up the ghost and harvest time was coming, and there were a few big storms brewing off to the southwest.

Their offensive linemen cast a mighty shadow, no doubt about it, and at the end of the first quarter the score was 23 to zip. Our coaches looked despondent, our defensive line looked ready for a trip to the local ER. So, the game now safely out of reach, our coach decided to preserve what little was left of Harriman's dignity and sent Rand in to face the lions in the den. Coach also sent in a list of plays he wanted Rand to call. I was sent in too, at wide receiver. The first play on Rand's crib sheet was a running play, a fullback plunge between center and left guard; true to form Rand called passing play, a wide right fly pattern and sent me long.

Let's just cut to the chase here and be done with it; Rand's first pass from scrimmage was completed to me for a touchdown and Coach benched Rand. Harriman went back in and threw another interception on our next possession, then he stomped off the field blaming the offensive line for failing to protect him. Still, our Coach blistered Rand in front of the bench, told him he wasn't a team player; Rand made a germane if impertinent comment about how well the team was doing and everyone thought poor Coach was going to blow one of the veins in his forehead. Harriman continued playing; Rand and I warmed the bench.

Mid-way through the fourth quarter, the score now a comfortable 55-7, Coach decided to send in Rand and I -- and all the rest of the freshmen into the game. Mind you, the locals were still playing their varsity squad so when we, the scrawny horde, took to the field we could feel a palpable blood-lust radiating from the sidelines and stands across the field. It was really quite heartening in a way, a weird sort of Norman Rockwell moment. Their coach was salivating, while our coach dutifully sent in another fullback plunge.

Yeah, right. That was going to accomplish a lot.

Rand characteristically broke the huddle and sent me and another receiver wide right again; coach was red-faced and howling like a stuck pig. The guys on the defensive line could smell red meat; they knew Rand was going to fire long again. I was about ten yards from coach and could see the veins on his forehead bulging while I listened to the count. On the snap I went long then cut hard across field; Rand was running a quarterback draw, and had already cut up-field on the far side of the field. He was hauling the mail, and had cleared all but the deep safety by the time I made it across to his side of the field. I just managed to block their safety, a tall rangy-legged kid about a foot taller and fifty pounds heavier than myself, and Rand zipped into the end-zone untouched.

I'll never forget the look on Coach's face while we trotted back to the sideline: the lips on his weathered face were tightly pursed and his brown eyes hidden within a distant squinting gaze, while his arms were crossed over his chest and his feet were planted about a yard apart. He looked like he'd just eaten his first raw oyster, and while completely prepared to hate the experience -- he had instead rather enjoyed everything about it. So, it wasn't surprise I saw on his face when we walked past; he instead kept his eyes dead ahead, and to me it looked like he was reevaluating the very meaning of existence. The whole game was like that, too; that last touchdown just brought a touch of clarity to the proceedings. I mention this evening in passing, however, and only to reinforce the idea once again that Rand had that kind of impact on everyone around him.

Tucker Harriman started the first game of the regular season, by the way.

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The next day all the remaining cadets arrived, the upperclassmen as well as all the faculty. We were sent to the Quartermaster's building for uniforms and on to the nurse's office for flu shots and hernia checks (turn your head, cough), then across campus to the barber shop for a shiny new set of white-walls. Rand was called to the Commandant's office later that afternoon and, I suppose, someone read him the riot act. Gross insubordination would not be tolerated, they said, at least as he relayed the incident to me later, and that had been the sole topic of conversation. I could see reflections of their red capes waving in front of his eyes as he spoke, and the way he must've dug his hooves in. That said, we could all see the contours of a colossal battle shaping up after that day. Rand was in his habitual horizontal mode as he spoke, and had resumed staring at the ceiling. Having read The Catcher in The Rye not long before, I hope you can understand the queasy feeling I had in my gut while I listened to Rand talk. He was becoming more than a little disconcerting to me. I say this because I think I was then, and maybe was right up to the day our world collapsed, the only person on earth who saw through his game, and saw it for what it truly was.

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And I suppose First Lieutenant Edwin G. Crist must have been informed of Rand's little chat in the Commandant's office, because not an hour later he came thundering down the hall, banging on doors, yelling there would be a room inspection before dinner "and everyone better be ready -- or else." Rand of course took off his clothes and threw them on the floor, grabbed a towel and walked off to the showers.