Lottery

She wrote the story before I was born, before my sister was born, before my brother went to kindergarten. She died before I got to junior high school; that’s where I read her story, the most famous short story in the second half of the twentieth century. In the year 1966, a full 18 years after its first appearance, the story was everywhere, confusing, shocking, and intriguing to all who read it. All the fresh set of new English teachers at Jordan Jr. High were having students read it. All the students were talking about it. We weren’t sure what to say in class, mostly because it was baffling and didn’t at all seem like a story any teacher would want students to read: A small town, families, adults and kids and an annual lottery in which one person would be stoned to death by every one else in the town, and that unlucky person turns out to be a woman, a wife, somebody’s mom. The story was far more shocking than “Incident at Owl Creek Bridge,” and anything else we had read or heard about. We talked about “The Lottery” outside the classroom. We talked about it dressing out for PE, we talked about it while eating doughnuts during nutrition break, we talked about it at 10:20 when the nutrition break bell rang, and we popped our little milk cartons with a sound that echoed between the gym and the cafeteria. We talked about it while pitching nickels and dimes against the gym wall or sometimes while flipping for quarters against out on the lower field.

     Would you do it? Stone someone to death? That’s so sick. What if you just like threw a small rock so it wasn’t you who killed her? That’s dumb. Yeah, what about where that one lady who picked up a rock so big she had to use two hands? She was like way into it. Totally. Maybe she just hated her all along. What it if was you that got the mark? Fuck that, I’d run.

     So it went, before school, at lunch, in front of Marty’s ice cream truck after school, sipping a Cactus Cooler. The story with a small provincial town, that community feeling, and murder, all rolled up into one. We were a small town. OK, we were a small city that acted like a small town. We had service clubs, Scouts, Bluebirds, Indians Guides; stern-looking teachers driving old, beautiful cars; a Friday night fight in the alley behind Bob’s; real-estate agents; car lots and car salesmen; obsessive gamblers in skinny neck ties and bloodshot eyes; calm, hard-work know-it-alls who wrote letters to the editor; barbers considering the legacy of the legendary high school football coach; and the bicycles that took us loudly to the barbershops and the baseball cards slapping the spokes of the wheels of the bicycles. There was the pristine white east side of town and the off-white west side of town, where I grew up. There were generational ways to proceed—customs, traditions, you know like when we teed the ball up to start a football game, the band played the same song for decades, the Hamm’s Beer theme song— and all of it made us feel safe and secure, like the smell of Playdough where you were a kid, and we felt connected to something, like God, the Pilgrims, Old King Cole, and local disc jockeys at work nearby, just on the other side of the overpass, and it was bound up and live and real all at once. We already knew we would look back fondly at our days hanging out at Verdugo Park or the Olive Rec Center, or Foster’s Freeze or Don’s Place or Giamela’s or the Cornell or California or Magnolia Theater, even though there would be no such thing as revisiting the time of your life and that our minds would preserve everything prejudicially but at least favorably so.

     We were not murderers, though,, and coldblooded murder—no matter the alleged purpose—is what disturbed us about the story. The stones we threw were strictly metaphorical. And neither were we inclined to participate in any process that celebrated or in any way supported that behavior. Every story needs conflict though and we felt the pull to conform, somehow, to the norms of the small town, even when the expectation was illogical and inhumane.

     There was a grease fire in a kitchen in a building at the Lockheed Airport in February, 1966. It spread fast and burned hot. The winds blew hard, fanned the flames and the fire spread and until the entire structure and the people in it were in danger. For years afterwards locals would recall the “Lockheed Fire,” as if it were something that got past our vigilance and disrupted the calm tranquility of our town.

     In the fall of 1966 the Vietnam War was escalating. It was the highest year for the number of those drafted, as the country was in the process of going from 180,000 soldiers to nearly half a million by 1968. I was still in junior high in ’68 and the very subject of the war had spilt the country. College students were protesting and newscasters mocked them. It was the around that time that I first heard the term “Silent Majority,” suggesting that the protestors were a small minority. I know for sure that my dad picked up the expression and often deployed it in almost all of our conversations. But there seemed to be no progress toward either resolving or winning the conflict. More troops did not seem to be the answer, and the debate about what to do next and why was wide open and intense.

     Official peace talks were being negotiated and I remember Miss Berry, our effervescent drama teacher pointed out to us that the talks had stalled because the shape of the table could not be decided upon. That’s right, the shape. Of the table.

“It’s apparently easier to keep fighting a war than it is to decide of the shape of a table,” she remarked one afternoon.

A square table meant that someone was going to be at the front of it. A round table meant that no one was in charge. It was something along those lines. I think that at the end they had a round table separating two square tables, because the North Vietnamese representative would not sit at the same table as the South Vietnamese representative. Or maybe it was vice-verse. In any case, who was to be recognized and how they were to be recognized was more important than negotiating an end to the war, or even a cease fire. We weren’t even in high school but we saw the absurdity in it and we saw that Miss Berry, an adult, and an adult entrusted to explain the world to us, also saw the absurdity in it.

      I began thinking about desks in the classrooms and how they were always six rows across, six desks deep, very straight, facing the front of the room, and how most teachers had their desks in front, a lot of times near the flag. I was sure it was the same everywhere in all the classrooms, in all the schools. Of course it was that way. Where else would we sit? I couldn’t think of any other configuration but I began to imagine that there must be one, and maybe more than one. But the war continued, regardless.

     It wasn’t like a regular war. And it wasn’t at all like the pretend war my pal Doug and I played in the early 60’s, marching around in his backyard with backpacks and canteens, shooting invisible Nazis, and winning World War II except when his mom called us for lunch—peanut butter and jelly, which we called C-rations—after which we resumed our mission. This was different. We were moving from everything’s fine or will be soon enough to what the hell is going on? It was a stupendous coincidence to be heading into adolescence exactly at that time, when everything got thrown into question and every known thing was no longer certain. It was not at all like one of those dreams involving falling out of a tree and hearing the air whistling in your ears, going faster and faster.

     By the time I started high school stories were coming back from older brothers. Booby traps with bamboo spikes, kids with grenades, kids getting their flesh burned off, murderous prostitutes, abused POW’s, fire fights on pitch black nights, swamps, lethal snakes, tigers, slackers, deserters, drug users, ear collectors. I think it was my brother who told me the story of a guy who died in a train wreck on his way to basic training. In that story, Fate, destiny, self-determination, self-preservation, the indifference of the world, everything, all of it, all got tossed in the blender. In October of my sophomore year, there was a national walk out of your class to protest the war day. Mr. Korngold put all 30 of us in check by threatening us with an “F for the day.” He seemed disgusted with something after he took role. I couldn’t tell though whether it was the day and method of protest or that we all chose not to defy him.

     The draft for conscription was still strong, but there were others who were signing up, putting words like freedom, democracy, duty, God and country, all to some kind of personal litmus test. The words were abstractions, ideas, and beliefs to be tested against the simple and pure impulse to stay alive and not kill other people. I was at home, safe, dreaming of cars and girls, or walking to 7-11 or to Verdugo Park to play basketball, or playing Dylan records with words like

Paupers change possessions Each one wishing for what the other has got, And the princess and the prince Discuss what’s real and what is not.

     More direct and on point, though, was “Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die,” which I first heard when I was 15. I did not want to “Be the first one on your block to have you son come home in a box.” I didn’t want anyone to come home in a box.

     I turned 18 in 1972, and that was very real and surreal at the same time, similar to the day I got my driver’s license and Dad asked if they took my finger prints. When I said yes, he cryptically remarked, “Now you went to jail.” The advent now of registering, throwing my name in the pot, gave me that feeling Dad had described.

     The war was still on but except for those who were there, it was not the hot-button issue it once was. Its favorability factor had declined. More and more, people were asking what we were doing there anyway, and stock answers were not as effective as they once were. More and more people were wearing POW bracelets. The focus was shifting from the ideological outcome to the person by person realities.

     I was 18 years old, and now I was in the morality play, even though the war seemed to be in its waning days. There was registering or not registering. It had been said that a large number of those who did not register were not troubled any further. I wasn’t sure I believed it. I considered my options, which had been commonly talked about: join a service branch that might be better than being in the Army; refuse to register and wait to see what happened; relocate to Mexico or Canada; chop a toe off, whereby you wouldn’t be able to march; artificially raise your blood pressure to likewise flunk the physical; present yourself as a homosexual who were, at the time, not allowed in the military; and register and wait to see what happens. I was inclined to do the last—there was a kind of fatalism to it that appealed to me, and I knew that if I got called up I would very likely comply because none of the other options seemed like something I would do. At the same time I was certain that I would not do well with basic training, being cussed and yelled at by a drill sergeant. Neither would I cotton to being asked to be a loyal part of a team at the exclusion of my individuality. And I did not relish the idea of discharging a weapon that was aimed at another human being, but I knew that I would have to in as much as that other human was aiming at me. I was especially worried that in the heat of battle I would be too scared to fight and would endanger my fellow soldiers. I was sure that fate would make a huge mistake if I became a soldier; I was betting that fate had some common sense.

     I had Don Mclean’s hit album, “American Pie,” at the time and I got goose bumps every time I played the song “The Grave”—a song about a soldier in a fire fight who realizes he is not cut out for fighting and thinks, “They can’t let me die, they can’t let me die here…I’ll cover myself in the mud and the earth. I’ll cover myself, I know I’m not brave.” The song got in my head. I didn’t want to kill anyone, or even try to, and I didn’t want to die, and I didn’t want to increase the chances of someone else getting killed by my own cowardice. I didn’t like the feeling the song gave me, but I wouldn’t stop playing it.

     I know that there are thousands upon thousands of my generational peers who either were drafted or volunteered and went there and faced all those situations and more, maybe overcoming their own fear or disdain, maybe not fully understanding or maybe fully understanding or believing or not believing in the cause or purpose for being there, and yet did what they were asked to do and came home and re-acclimated their lives and their purpose and lived their life. Some returned home believing in the purpose even more than when they went; some went as believers and returned as skeptics. Some could not re-acclimate when they came back to the world. Some did not come back. For these and for every other combination there is, I am here saying I respect those choices and responses, and I don’t think anyone can or should say “They should have done this instead of that.” We were all in the moment, trying to grapple with something that was bigger than anything we had experienced or were able to imagine.

     All that I was and knew and all that I wasn’t and didn’t know shaped my decision, and I’m still good with it. The famous story, “The Lottery,” by Shirley Jackson, was the beginning of it, and there is no particular end to what we learn and what we do with what we learn, so there really won’t be an end to any of it.

     I went to a post office in North Hollywood as I recall, it was either on Magnolia or Burbank Boulevard, and filled out a form. I drove there in the ’65 Impala, which I often called my car but in fact was Mom’s. Chances are I was wearing blue jeans, low-cut black Converse All-Stars, a white t-shirt and maybe a $5 version of aviator sunglasses. Chances are I thought about what I would wear, how I would walk into the place, how I would modulate my voice when I spoke to the clerk and what I might say when I was done. Chances are also good that I said something to myself when I got back in the car, then turned up the volume on the radio and drove home as fast as I could. A few months later, the Burbank Daily Review posted the draft selections by month and date. The number of young men drafted in 1972 was 49,000, down from 1966 when it was 382,000. I knew draft selections were down but I never knew by how much. As long as I was a possibility, I was obliged to feel nervous. My draft number, done according to my March 2 birthday was 322, very high. My brother assured me I was ok. He was right; the highest number selected that year was 95.

     I had that card in my wallet for 10 years. It went through several wallets. I even lost my wallet at the beach once but it was returned to me through the mail by an anonymous good Samaritan, with everything intact and much sand in it. Sometimes I would put the card in with the money; other times in the secret compartment sections. Every two or three years I would take it out and read all of it, front and back, then put it back. At some point it got a stain on it, I think it was car oil, but I don’t know for sure or how car oil came to be on it.

     So many things had change in my life in those 10 years, it would seem impossible to describe. I was married, had a job, a new car, a house, a haircut, a briefcase, and once when I felt nostalgic for my teen years I bought a pair of All-Stars, but they had no arch support and compared to whatever I was wearing at the time they seemed inferior in every way, something like cheap beach walkers covered in canvas. I wore them a couple of times and put them in the back of the closet.

     Eventually I realized I was past draftable age, and I put the card in a jar and got a shovel and dug a hole in the space between the grass and the fence. I used the front and the back of the shovel, the way my dad had showed me. I dug past the hard pan. I cut through roots and removed them. I buried the jar with the draft card in it in the backyard. I think the card was in a sandwich bag and then in the jar and then buried deep in the back yard. I didn’t want water or moisture to ruin the card. I put the shovel back in the garage, went in the house, washed my hands, went into the living room and sat down. I inhaled the Dial soap on my clean hands. But the draft card was still with me, as was the lottery and wars and rumors of wars, and the idea of all of it was still in the world.