bridge, and then it got louder and seemed to be machinery pounding away on sheet metal. It grew so loud that you couldn’t hear anything else and the camera moved in slowly on the frozen angry face of the boy, and then abruptly a teenager was pounding a speedbag in a gym.
Again the audience burst into applause, with one table hitting it harder than the rest. Jack Liffey noticed that the guy on the speedbag was bellied back from the table, grinning, and it started coming clear that it was mainly the cast and crew of the videos who made up the audience. When the next video was announced, the baton of fervent applause passed to another table.
He lost interest in the videos but not in the crowd. He looked around at the vaguely self-important, not unhappy kids and wondered, if things had turned out a bit differently, if he’d ever have ended up in a place like this, taken some arts course at UCLA, fallen in with the high-button crowd, and sat up late talking fiercely about the enigma of visibility. It probably wasn’t as bad as it sounded. He might have ended up lashing together some sense of vocation that felt like it justified his life. He didn’t usually indulge what-ifs, but he found he wanted to like these kids for some reason.
He saw a skinny boy at a table with his shoe off and his foot obviously far up under the skirt of a girl who was giving dreamy looks at the wall. He remembered what an idiot he’d been in college, wasting all that opportunity on one drunken party after another, chasing the wrong women, and taking the easiest classes. Back when life was still provisional and still could go this way as well as that. He felt a profound sense of loss for just a moment, and then he chased the whole thing away.
The heavyset man announced the main course, an hour-long documentary on the SHARPs, which he explained in a bellowy voice stood for Skin Heads Against Racial Prejudice, and the table with the short hair and fatigues whistled and clapped. Jack Liffey remembered the Nazi leaflet in the girl’s coat pocket, and he settled back to watch the virtuous lads applauding themselves. He guessed there were two sorts at the table, the young men in camouflage who were the SHARPS in person, and the artier-looking kids who were probably the filmmakers.
The show was mainly grainy heads talking about their lives as the camera moved restlessly around them, and after ten minutes he found his mind drifting away. He wondered what they would make of the old guy behind them in the SAC jacket, and he realized all of a sudden that he was just about the only person in the place who’d seen Ozzie and Harriet when it wasn’t yet high camp and Vietnam was still a real place to Americans, with real pain. On the wall only a few inches from his cheek was a poster of Leonard Nimoy as Spock making his four-finger V gesture. It seemed an odd emblem for the sophisticates at the Eighth Art, but he supposed it suited the TV generation. He leaned away to read the talk balloon someone had written on it: Jim, TV is information severed from all lived experience. And another hand had added in tiny letters: The true problem lies in the scale of what must be destroyed before anything can be renewed.
One of the SHARPs waved a hand high in the air all of a sudden, as if asking permission to go to the bathroom. The sleeve was rolled up enough to show ring after ring of barbed wire tattooed around the biceps. The video seemed to be winding down into a chaos of testosterone—swaggering black and white gangsters who barged arm in arm through startled shoppers, a strange dissonance between angry bellows and words of brotherhood. The SHARP table whistled and pounded their fists over the credits and others applauded politely.
When the lights went up, Jack Liffey made his way to their table.
“Congratulations,” he said.
The eyes of one of the SHARPs lifted to him, trying to look hard and mocking. He had a sinister little goatee.
“For what?”
“The
Again the audience burst into applause, with one table hitting it harder than the rest. Jack Liffey noticed that the guy on the speedbag was bellied back from the table, grinning, and it started coming clear that it was mainly the cast and crew of the videos who made up the audience. When the next video was announced, the baton of fervent applause passed to another table.
He lost interest in the videos but not in the crowd. He looked around at the vaguely self-important, not unhappy kids and wondered, if things had turned out a bit differently, if he’d ever have ended up in a place like this, taken some arts course at UCLA, fallen in with the high-button crowd, and sat up late talking fiercely about the enigma of visibility. It probably wasn’t as bad as it sounded. He might have ended up lashing together some sense of vocation that felt like it justified his life. He didn’t usually indulge what-ifs, but he found he wanted to like these kids for some reason.
He saw a skinny boy at a table with his shoe off and his foot obviously far up under the skirt of a girl who was giving dreamy looks at the wall. He remembered what an idiot he’d been in college, wasting all that opportunity on one drunken party after another, chasing the wrong women, and taking the easiest classes. Back when life was still provisional and still could go this way as well as that. He felt a profound sense of loss for just a moment, and then he chased the whole thing away.
The heavyset man announced the main course, an hour-long documentary on the SHARPs, which he explained in a bellowy voice stood for Skin Heads Against Racial Prejudice, and the table with the short hair and fatigues whistled and clapped. Jack Liffey remembered the Nazi leaflet in the girl’s coat pocket, and he settled back to watch the virtuous lads applauding themselves. He guessed there were two sorts at the table, the young men in camouflage who were the SHARPS in person, and the artier-looking kids who were probably the filmmakers.
The show was mainly grainy heads talking about their lives as the camera moved restlessly around them, and after ten minutes he found his mind drifting away. He wondered what they would make of the old guy behind them in the SAC jacket, and he realized all of a sudden that he was just about the only person in the place who’d seen Ozzie and Harriet when it wasn’t yet high camp and Vietnam was still a real place to Americans, with real pain. On the wall only a few inches from his cheek was a poster of Leonard Nimoy as Spock making his four-finger V gesture. It seemed an odd emblem for the sophisticates at the Eighth Art, but he supposed it suited the TV generation. He leaned away to read the talk balloon someone had written on it: Jim, TV is information severed from all lived experience. And another hand had added in tiny letters: The true problem lies in the scale of what must be destroyed before anything can be renewed.
One of the SHARPs waved a hand high in the air all of a sudden, as if asking permission to go to the bathroom. The sleeve was rolled up enough to show ring after ring of barbed wire tattooed around the biceps. The video seemed to be winding down into a chaos of testosterone—swaggering black and white gangsters who barged arm in arm through startled shoppers, a strange dissonance between angry bellows and words of brotherhood. The SHARP table whistled and pounded their fists over the credits and others applauded politely.
When the lights went up, Jack Liffey made his way to their table.
“Congratulations,” he said.
The eyes of one of the SHARPs lifted to him, trying to look hard and mocking. He had a sinister little goatee.
“For what?”
“The
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