“They’re beautiful,” I say to the guy. “They look just the way I hoped they would!”
All of a sudden it seems to be coming together. I thank the guy, paying him with what’s left of my monthly disability check, money I should be using for rent. I drive back home with the AVM buttons, banner, flags, and membership cards in the trunk of my Oldsmobile, feeling happier than I have in a long time. My book can wait. Now I have to organize the others and turn my dream into reality.
The next morning I drive south down the 405 freeway to the Long Beach VA, where twenty minutes later I pull into the Spinal Cord Injury parking lot, transfer into my wheelchair, and head into the hospital. I really don’t know where to start first, and I feel an almost overwhelming desire to tell everyone about the new organization. But who can I trust? Who should I approach first? These are big plans and it feels like a lot is at stake. I finally decide to go to the cafeteria, get some lunch, and take a little time to think about what to do next.
As I enter the cafeteria I spot my friend Bobby Mays sitting alone at one of the tables, staring blankly out the window.
“Hey, brother, how ya doin’?” I shout as I wheel my chair next to his.
* * *
Bobby and I first met the year before, just as I was leaving D ward one afternoon and he was walking out too. As we passed each other I remember he suddenly stopped, looked straight at me, and started shouting, “Ron Kovic? Are you Ron Kovic? I can’t believe it’s you!” Months before, his wife Sharon had given him a copy of the July 19, 1973 Rolling Stone article about me, “Ask a Marine,” by the draft resister David Harris, with a large centerfold photo of me sitting in my wheelchair, taken by the photographer Annie Lebowitz. He told me he had read the article countless times and had been carrying around that issue of Rolling Stone in his backpack for months. “I knew it was you!” he shouted, hugging me with that tremendous enthusiasm of his, almost lifting me out of my wheelchair. How could I not love Bobby from the start? He made me feel great. He was one of the sweetest, most generous men I had ever met and even gave me the shirt off his back on several occasions when I was down and out and running low on clothes.
He had curly red hair, sparkling, intense, almost crazy blue eyes, and the handsome good looks of a movie star. “I always knew I was going to meet you someday!” he yelled. Like long-lost brothers we bonded that afternoon, and I knew we would always be friends.
Without missing a beat, Bobby talked nonstop for nearly an hour, telling me how he had become addicted to heroin while serving with the air force in Saigon, and was later arrested, tried, and sentenced to nine months of hard labor at Vietnam’s infamous Long Binh Jail stockade, describing the terrible abuse he had suffered in solitary confinement.
He eventually became involved in a riot at LBJ in August of 1968. Bobby was initially accused of being one of the ringleaders of the rebellion, though the charges were eventually dropped. After finally being released from the LBJ stockade in April 1969, he was forced to serve the rest of his tour of duty before being allowed to return home.
In October of 1969 he headed back to Indiana a broken man, distrusting all authority and hooked on heroin. After wandering around for several months, depressed, homeless, and jobless, he joined the local chapter of the Vietnam Veterans against the War (VVAW), where he met the beautiful nineteen-year-old Sharon McAlester, who got him off drugs and eventually agreed to marry him.
They hitchhiked out to the West Coast in early ’73 with, from what Sharon later told me, nothing more than twenty-nine dollars and the packs on their backs. Bobby was now clean and sober and got a job as a nurse’s aide for one of the paralyzed veterans at the Long Beach VA and began taking caregiver classes at the hospital, determined to leave the drugs behind and straighten out his life.
He and I soon became the best of friends, with Bobby on several occasions inviting me down to his place in Long Beach for one of Sharon’s delicious home-cooked meals. He would later join me in organizing the Patients’/Workers’ Rights Committee and attended every meeting we had.
Bobby really missed me when I was away, telling me he got depressed after the Patients’/Workers’ Rights Committee fell apart and that he’s anxious to know what we plan to do next. He’d heard rumors I was back in town and wants to know about everything I’ve been doing. “What’s up, brother? What’s happening? Anything new?” he asks.
His eyes light up as I begin telling him all about the AVM. Then I share my idea of setting up a meeting with Senator Alan Cranston to discuss the conditions on the SCI ward. Later in the afternoon I show him the buttons and banners in the trunk of my car, explaining how we will get all the guys we know in the hospital to join us, and will take over the senator’s office and begin a sit-in, not leaving until our demands are met.
“Will he actually meet with us?” Bobby asks.
“I don’t know. That’s what we’re going to find out. Come on, Bobby, follow me!” I say as I wheel over to a pay phone, in that crazy and spontaneous way of mine back then, and put in a couple of quarters. “I’m calling the senator’s office over at the Federal Building in Westwood right now!”
Bobby stands next to me with a curious look on his face.
“Hello, is this Senator Cranston’s office? Who am I speaking with, please? . . . Hi, this is Ron Kovic and I’m a paralyzed Vietnam veteran calling from the Long Beach veterans hospital. I’m calling today because we’ve got some serious problems down here on the Spinal Cord Injury ward and we’d like to set up a meeting with Senator Cranston as soon as possible.”
The guy, who by the sound of his voice I can tell is very young, thanks me for my service, telling me that the senator will be out of town for the next few weeks. However, the senator’s aide offers to meet with us the following week on Tuesday, February 12, at two o’clock, promising that he’ll take notes and share all our concerns with the senator. “Will that work for you?” he asks in a chirpy voice.
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