From The Cornell Daily Sun (February, 2006)
In the last exciting installment of C Town Blues: Harold Rothman ’72, having been suspended/banished from Plymouth University for a period of no less than one year, spent the spring of 1970 in the bowels of the New York City Library inspecting microfilm of old/defunct journals by day, and hanging out at the Museum of Modern Night by night. He also was nearly blow up when he walks past a Weatherman bomb factory in Greenwich Village.
“He’s a real Nowhere Man…
Sitting in his nowhere land
Making all his nowhere plans
For somebody…”
-“Nowhere Man”
The Beatles
And so Harold Rothman ’72 spent his first months of enforced leave from Plymouth University. If he had felt like the Nowhere Man before, all those endless days and nights cooped up in his garret-like room at 405 College Avenue, nearly killing himself because he thought he was already dead the morning of his spiked birthday trip, out of the university’s sight and mind, now he felt even more so as he reported to his microfilm inspection every day at 9, on the dot, before proceeding to inspect that day’s volumes of Candy and Confectionery Journal and Police Gazette, disconsolately having lunch with himself on a bench in Bryant Park.
Did he miss Plymouth? “No way,” he muttered to himself one afternoon as he was reviewing the film of a 1954 volume or Rubber Dealer for mistakes. How could one miss an institution that, while taking its good time to deliberate his fate – not to mention allowing him to fall between the cracks to begin w I t h – h a d allowed him to take classes for a full month before declaring him persona non grata and spitting him out. How could one miss an institution like that? “No way – I don’t miss Plymouth” Rothman hissed aloud, as he sat there thinking, his head concealed by the microfilm viewer, in between volumes, in a strange, hazy, sprocketed ontological-cum-literary zone of his own between the pit of Rothman’s fears and the summit of his knowledge, as Rod Serling might have said. Or something like that.
“Fuck Plymouth,” he said, before inspecting a page of twenty two year old rubber-related news (“NEW IDEAS ON FIGHTING RUBBER PLANTATION FIRES..”). On another day, at another time, Rothman would have seen the humor of a magazine entitled Rubber Dealer But today, it was just work, breaking rock.
No, he didn’t Plymouth, the institution, but, he had to admit, he missed the place. He missed Camp Plymouth. He missed the gorges. He missed the unbelievable way the sun set over East Hill. He missed the squirrels on the Arts Quad – even some of the professors. Not many, but some, some.
Rothman stopped reeling. “I have to go back,” he decided. “Have to.”
There was only one problem, of course. Rothman had been banished, effectively kicked off campus, told to stay away. As in away. If he wanted to come back at all. As Steve Freak, in his amphetamine throes, had kept saying at Rothman’s suspension party, over and over, in his endearingly demented way “Personanongratapersonanongratapersonanongratapersonanongrata…”
Yeah, he had to admit, he missed Steve Freak, too. He even missed his crummy C TOWN room. He missed watching the sunrise from the top bench of Schoelkopf Stadium, tripping or not.
So he decided to go back. Just for a weekend. Slink into town and out. Just do it, as Jerry Rubin would advise: Yippie!
“Yeah, I’m going back,” he said to himself. And so the next weekend Harold Rothman took the bus back to Plymouth.
Talk about timing, man! That upcoming weekend, it so happened, was “Amerika Is Hard To Escape Weekend,” after the poem of the same name by Father Peter Rattigan, the celebrated Plymouth campus advisor-cum-poet-cum-antiwar activist who had failed to surrender to The Authorities after his conviction for pouring blood on draft records and was now at large. Rattigan’s legion of campus devotees had planned a whole weekend of festivities in his honor, culminating in a mass concert-cum-demonstration-cum-be-in at Binton Hall featuring Phil Ochs and the Bread and Puppet Theatre, amongst others. And, it was rumored, at some point, an appearance by Plymouth’s Most Wanted Priest himself.
“Yeah, it’s going to be far out,” his former roommate David Hollow promised Rothman between tokes over the phone. “Come on up, man. You can crash here. We’ll keep it mum.”
So Rothman took the bus back up to Plymouth and had the obligatory smoke-filled reunion with his C Town buddies and he regaled them with tales of his Dostoeivskian existence on the microfilm chain gang. And he looked at his old room, where he had had that death trip back on his birthday. Still looked pretty crummy. But, yes, it was good to be back.
And so Saturday night, of course, the whole gang – Guido, Steve, Dlovid, Jeff and the rest of Rocks ‘N Bottles, the name of the informal 405 house band – rumbled over to Binton Hall to hear Phil Ochs and Dave Dellinger and to see the Bread and Puppet Theater, with their tripped-out, life-sized costumes, parading around.
And then, suddenly, in the midst of the Bread and Puppet performance, the lights went on and there was the fugitive priest on the stage, flanked by the puppet people, flashing the peace sign, daring the special agents in the crowd of 15,000 to arrest him. And Rothman couldn’t help but smile at his timing. After all, he was a fugitive of sorts, too.
Then the lights went out again, and you could see the a dozen or so small fires flickering, as student resistors, swept up in the moment, decided to provoke the G men by burning their draft cards.
When the lights went back on, Rattigan had vanished. The next morning, at dawn, Rothman did, too.