Red Factor
by Earl Coleman

We had yet to make our entrance, she a small-boned, slender chick, me a grizzled rooster though still spry. I held back, demurred. "Come on, Jeanette. You can't afford extravagance like this."

"Don't tell me what I can and can't afford. I'm a liberated woman, Neal. I make a not bad salary. You sit there writing lonely all day long. You need some company until I fly back to your arms each night. I want to buy it for you. So? I'm not entitled to?"

I couldn't resist her, just about five feet, twenty-six years old but looked like twelve, an impish crinkle in her serious brown eyes. Her hair was auburn curls which she combed free and wild, disdainful of personal vanity. She had stormed into my heart, and now her grappling hooks were lodged there, bringing me a new experience of love, a fierce possession without loss of anyone's identity.

"But what, pumpkin? A parrot? Cockatoo? I've never had a bird. One has to know a little something to take care of anything, especially a living creature. I'd have to take responsibility for it."

Instead of answering she raised herself on tip-toe and we kissed in the green glow of the neon sign. It was her way of ending conflict, a signal of those times when I was OK, so was she, and we made love not war, part of that golden April, 1968 when everything seemed possible -- even to me, hard-bitten Lefty that I was, at twice her age. She'd marched against the Pentagon the year before. Imagine that in all its improbability. Diminutive Joan of Arc taking on the Army of the USA. It brought me even closer to her, this bond of being outside of the Establishment, in opposition to.

Would I have taken on the Army, thought of doing that, when I was battling Coughlinites on city streets in 1939 or fending off redneck super-patriots at Peekskill a decade later when she was in kindergarten? Was not this ambience we breathed together just one more facet of the steadfast, hard-as-diamonds left? She in her way, me in mine? And it was true the very air breathed panting, reckless motion, though every motion isn't movement as we know.

We entered the store hand in hand like kids setting out upon a secret wooded path, young lovers sneaking off to the earthy barn.

The smell was heavy, sultry, tropical rain forest, the noise predominantly parrot, phrases, high-pitched rasping calls. If there was turbulence throughout the land here nothing changed except by evolution which operated on remembered change-which-worked, evolution, measuring its time in centuries, millennia. At the rear of the store a song arrested me.

HERE'S ALL MY HEART WHERE CHAOS DWELLS BUT HOPEFUL ALWAYS SEEKS THAT PERFECT SHADOWED POOL WHERE I WAS BORN THE THRILL OF FLYING FREE WITH JUST THE SUN ABOVE THE BLUE OF SKY AND DAUNTLESS ME RED STREAKING THROUGH THE THICK GREEN TEXTURED FRONDS.

I was bowled over, enthralled, fallen in love. My heart was lost to it. We walked to where the sound was. There perched this creature five inches long, putting out a song as heartbreaking as Miles, a complex series of trills worthy of Bach, of such free form it could have been the Beatles, "Revolution 9." Oh bird, my mind went out to it, your music's rapturous. You will be my Tambourine Man, yes.

The legend on the cage told us he was a red factor male canary, six months old, born in the Everglades. I loved him instantly, a deep abiding magenta, a perky little yellow beak, black darting eyes like miniature jet beads. The way he cocked his head, pecked at his own claws in his exuberance! Jeanette was moved because my tumble into love was so immediate, so clear.

When she'd paid for him they put him in a box the size you'd put a bracelet in. We brought him, cage, seed and paraphernalia straight home.

*

The world out there did indeed whirl madly, agitated by the hot momentum of events, every moment passionate, dance, sound, making love at maximum, peak energy. In California, Ithaca, Miami North, colleges were taken over by young bearded troubadours, girls went naked to the waist, smoke-ins defied authority. The message as I read it was: If you continue with your rule of cynical venality we'll burn you down. Ours is a purifying flame. Up against the wall, mother.

In France the fiery one, Danny the Red, the brassy, red-haired trumpet of the Youth, pulled mobs of students out into the streets, threatening to bring higher education to a halt, the nation to its knees.

I was on their side, of course, although I found myself not totally in synch with that roaring, raucous, shirts-out-of-trousers world. At first I had ascribed my incipient dis-ease to the catch-all generation gap they talked about. But that wasn't how I came to see it. No. I'd fought Them in a different way, that's all. And yet, just as trench warfare had proven obsolete and Maginot Lines irrelevant, there was no principle that revolutions had to use orthodox, possibly outmoded weaponry. Why attach importance, I asked myself, to the etiquette, the comportment of the battle so long as struggle itself went on?

I was immersed for most of my day in my private world, my shelves of books, some 18th, mostly 19th and 20th centuries, and reams of blank lined writing paper. I penned my words and listened to my canary who sang to me all day. I delighted in his song, his company. I longed to bring him something of myself in return for his gift and yet I was afraid to even touch him, hold him in my hand, let him nibble at my thumb. Suppose I hurt him inadvertently?

THOUGH I PERCH SOLITARY HOPING FOR A MATE MY WORLD IS BURSTING WITH MY VIVID LIFE THE KEENNESS OF MY YEARNING NEVER LESS THAN YOURS MY RANGE OF POSSIBILITY ASTONISHING WHEN ALL I HAVE IS THIS SMALL BODY MASS YET I CAN MAKE YOUR HOUSE AND MINE RESOUND BEDAZZLE YOU WITH COLORS LIKE AN EASTERN JEWELLED FIREBIRD.

I wrote with all my heart and soul, my bird sang every note of his repertoire, but through my veins each moment ran the heady elixir of the love we shared, Jeanette and I, our new love like new May wine. Two halves of a geode as I wrote in a poem to her. She was the jig-saw puzzle pieces made me whole. I thrilled to writing, always had, and yet how impatiently I awaited close of day when breathless young Jeanette spilled out for me her glom on picaresque adventures of a world in flux. I even shared that I had lived like that, days in shards, the streets exploding, electric. I listened fondly even when I doubted strategy and tactics, although audacity was there, a requisite.

Despite uneasiness with my own passive role, as well as with the new, the current revolutionaries, when it had come to naming my canary the choice seemed obvious enough. Danny of course, for Danny the Red. My mirror and my donnish turn of speech, my old-fashioned sensibility, told me I wasn't timeless myself, but these were fascinating and who knew, maybe revolutionary times, and I was quite prepared to rock and roll with them, if only in my own stiff-jointed way.

*

How we had lived our politics, my comrades and I. In the 30's everyone was working class. When I went hatless it was because I didn't own a hat, wore out-at-knee pants because they were my only pair. We have-nots didn't own a share of Union Oil and knew we'd never own one; our politics, our empty bellies on the line, our struggle life or death. I understood the nature of that Beast.

It was difficult to come to grips with what seemed to me the middle-classness of the men and women seizing universities, who ripped their jeans themselves to make a fashion statement, grew beards to send their father's generation up the wall. Which were the politics that they inhabited? I tried to but I couldn't see them clear. Yet what was I bringing to this struggle? My clarity? Highly suspect when I'd sanctioned Uncle Joe. Lessons from my past? Or were those only past or worse, passé?

Although we knew it was self-indulgent, most nights we'd stay away from rallies, sit-ins, Jeanette and I, new to each other, listening to music, but mostly to each other's hearts, keeping Danny company, my pages written for the day, a specialty of mine laid out each of these nights for Jeanette's delectation, blanquette de veau, pecadillo, saté ayam -- somewhat like Scheherazade telling tales, the sequitur inhabiting the next day's dream. I thought I'd found my Paradise or thereabouts. When we were thus nothing roiled the which held me to a time-embracing schedule. Yet here I was separating those hours I was prepared to give to the struggle, from those I would reserve for me. Bourgeois.

"I wish I'd got to know them better, the friends I made in Watts. Remember, Neal, my month in LA and San Francisco? Well, in Watts there were these black dudes who rented space in a warehouse and put on a play they'd written themselves. It was great. They called it "Big Time Buck White." He's a preacher and in the second half of the play like he's taking questions from the audience and by the end of the play the audience and he are together, there's no separation, and they talk Black Power and why that's where it's at."

"But pumpkin, Black Power's just a slogan," I said. "It sounds more revolutionary than it is."

She squinted her pretty brown eyes, looked stricken in the candleshine as if a barb had bruised her heart. "What are you saying, Neal? You weren't there. I was."

"Jeanette," I protested, "if these guys were revolutionaries the Establishment would have knocked them off long ago." Where was her kiss that could have avoided conflict? She could have come to me. But so could I have crossed to her.

"Then what are they, Neal, what, when I was on the spot and you were probably at work here on a manuscript?" Her face seemed flushed.

"Victims, Jeanette, who've had enough of taking it on the chin. Black people want black businesses, black banks. What's wrong with that?" I took another swig of coffee. "They aren't ready to storm the Winter Palace yet but neither are a lot of folks. What they don't want is to be excluded from the American Dream, the right to exploit your fellow man."

Were those tears I saw gathered in her eyes? Why oh why had I gone on? "Whose dream is that, Neal?"

"Not mine for sure," I said.

And we were silent, me puzzled. Something had gone wrong. How could I make it better, say it right, share with her what it was I'd learned, my thousand books, my heavy, endless study groups? And then I was impelled to speak. "Don't get me wrong, pumpkin, the Establishment won't even grant them that, their modest demand in the face of our injustices to them. But their demand itself won't force Lyndon to call out his troops."

Her tears were falling now. Why? "You do that sometimes, Neal. Get cynical. It's not your most endearing quality."

Would it have been patronizing to have gone to her and held her? I should have done it anyway, changed the record, gone to the john. I couldn't fly against my nature as it were. How could I, rooted in the now as well as in the then of things, attempting to peer through the thicket, through the mist? "I try to clarify, pumpkin. I don't think that's cynical. There's nothing rattling the timbers of this system as I see it, nothing causing the Establishment to work up a sweat. Not now there's not."

"You sound so smug when you're like this," tears flowing, her brow furrowed. "The Black Panthers, Neal? The marches, Watts, the snarling dogs?"

"Whoa, pumpkin. Watts happened. The dogs happened. Malcolm was killed because he might have organized some fundamental change. That hasn't happened yet."

She said she didn't want to stay the night and left.

*

Although we patched things, made nice, we never again achieved the Elysium we had reached when we were going strong in that first blush of love when we thought our ideas all meshed as one.

And Danny lost his hue, becoming yellower. I wondered if they'd painted him as if he were a stolen car.

EVEN A CAPELLA I MUST CRY . . . MY NOTE'S STILL CLEAR IF GROWING HALT......I THOUGHT YOU OFFERED SANCTUARY HERE . . . .BRAVURA'S ALWAYS SERVED ME WHEN I'M MOST UNSURE . . . WHO DRAINS MY MUSIC DRAINS AWAY MY LIFE . . . I AM A POINTILLIST, MY PALETTE'S TURNED TO MUD, THE USE OF IT IS SLIPPING FROM ME FAST.

I took him back to the shop, cage and all.

"Are you feeding him his betacarotene?" the owner asked, looking at poor Danny and shaking his head.

"His what? You never told me about betacarotene."

"We didn't? Sorry about that. We have jars of it. Broccoli is good as well. Cauliflower. Just chop it fine. I see the bottoms of his feet are raw. It's from the gravel-paper perch coverings you're using. Take them off."

"You sold them to me!"

"Well. Some people like them for their birds. I'd get rid of them."

"Is there more to know? I feel I never got the grounding I should have had. Would he like a mate?"

"He'd love a mate, but then you'd lose his song. He sings only to attract a mate."

"What!? I didn't know that. God. I'm his jailer! What's to do? I bring nothing to him, only hold him back. What about a mirror at the least, to take away his loneliness?"

"The same effect."

"Poor bird. I've such a much to know. Care for a canary. Even that."

"It's only expertise," he said.

*

At Tanglewood we met some of Jeanette's friends. I wept through the Mahler and the Berg riled me. But the concert ended with the A minor Concerto of Saint-Saëns and I found myself in tears again, profoundly moved. Her friends drove off in beetles and we followed them although the dusk was gathering and I do poorly in terra incognita. We wound up at a house without a hitch, in concert as it were. I kissed Jeanette tenderly before we got out of the car, to share the emotion of the music, offer something of my heart. But she was eager to go in.

Inside -- a jumble, three bearded men I couldn't tell apart. For just a flash I drew a parallel to white men thrust among Indians, Chinese, blacks. Hard to differentiate when they looked all alike and alien. The three young women were in miniskirts. A soup was being made. A loaf of cornbread sliced.

We talked politics and music over supper, free-ranging, spirited. I listened mostly but contributed when it seemed right.

When precisely did I feel Jeanette was in her element but I was not? Was it their age, their uniformity that acted as their glue, more powerful than politics? Isn't it true for twelve-year-olds as well, where everyone who counts is twelve and sixteen is too old and six too young and parents ancient at the age of thirty-one and relegated to complete irrelevance? And eight-year-olds where everyone who counts is eight? And fifty-two-year-olds? How we put each other down! In the event I felt out of place. What was I doing here with her? She belonged, not I.

We gathered at a fireplace and in the midst of things a floorboard was removed and a box appeared. A hush came over everyone. Rich, I think his name was, opened up the lid. "Do you smoke?" he asked me. I'd no experience with them but thought of frats, induction of pledgees.

"Gave it up some years ago," I said. Now why was I perverse and disingenuous? Was I petulant, dismissed, or so I thought, and widening the gap?

"Like I've got something here that ain't a Marlboro." Giggles all around.

"No thanks."

"C'mon," they chorused.

"No, really, thanks all the same."

Jeanette, petite against the fire-screen, looked over at me, a look I read as her embarrassment for me. I was embarrassing her! "Go ahead, Neal. Give it a try," she said.

Jehovah's Witnesses, racists, drinkers, believers in our System are all the same. If you're not with them you're against them. They have to sign you up, get you to participate. They're validated when they win you to their side.

"No. I'll be just fine."

Laurie, I think it was: "Hey man. Don't be a drag. We're like sharing with you, man. Like check it out before you turn it off."

The time to bite my tongue was there and bite my tongue I did. Smoking dope and bombing ROTC buildings was not all of them, any more than pedantry and Party Line were all of me, as the guillotine was not the sum of all the sans-culottes. No one could be pigeon-holed so readily, tempting as it was. These were my comrades, perfect or not. Their victories were mine. And their defeats. On the other hand, my stands were always principled. I couldn't be a weathervane to be expedient, not even if there was to be a gale.

"I'll pass, if you don't mind," I said.

Jeanette rose quickly from her crouch, her cheeks aflame. "We're cutting out of here," she said.

*

One morning Danny seemed fine, even his red returning just a little bit, but the next morning disaster. His feathers were ruffled, bedraggled. His left eye looked wrong, as though he couldn't keep it open. His pretty yellow beak had a large black blemish on it. He kept opening his mouth to let his pink tongue slip through as though trying for, gasping for fresh air.

I took him to the vet. She looked down his throat, shone her light in his eyes. She held him in her large, capable hand. And now I could see him real close up and knew how dear to me he was, the promise that he brought.

"I don't like the way he looks at all," she said.

"Nor I."

"I see infection, mites, scale on his little claws. His nasal passages are stopped. We'll have to operate." She had her finger on his tiny eye, his beak.

"Operate!? But he's so small, so young." I must have sounded terminally dumb. What I wanted was to shield and nurture him, protect him, have him sing to me forever in his wild, untrammelled way.

"We'd better do it while we have him here." She buzzed for an aide and in moments they'd anesthetized him. What I remember most is the tiny drill biting into his beak, giving him an artificial hole through which to breathe. Now limited, his life itself flowed through this aperture.

She gave me drops to add to his drinking water and a substance to spray him with to rid him of the mites which had done a number on his feathers. Poor Danny looked helpless in her hand as must we all when we are on some bed of pain, our natures raising havoc with us, threatening our lives.

Jeanette no longer raced from work each afternoon to be with me. I had repelled her, let her song go out of my life, insensitive to givens that she lived by. I had ruined what was beautiful, certain she would leave me soon. I missed her already although we had a date that very night. I did the things that I knew how to do. I whipped us up a mushroom omelette, took out the Mozart Requiem.

*

The war in Vietnam intensified. Cops killed and beat up young protesters. The French peasants and the Communist Parisian workers found themselves in an alliance which crushed Danny the Red and his would-be cohort. Perhaps it was then, in that summer of '68, that what passes for a polity said "Halt. Enough." I think they added "A Lenin would be great right now and even a Marat acceptable, but we can't use these Playboys of the Western World." But who knows, that may not be what they said at all, and I'm just reading into it the things I know. In the event it was some time that same year the pendulum began its inexorable move to the right.

I tried to nurse poor Danny back to health. It was now Indian summer, the sky painfully blue, the sun beneficent. I put aside the revisions of the first chapter of my new novel and prepared to treat my bird. Poor thing, half blind and breathing through a punctured beak. I couldn't tell yet if the treatment was having an effect. Not as brave as the vet or as skilled, I was still afraid to take him in my hands, my own clumsy hands, where I might crush him by mistake despite my best intentions, by brute force, or by just not knowing all there was to know. What I did was take the cage off its hook, set it on the dining room table, unhinge the top and slide out the bottom of the cage so it wouldn't get all wet from the spray. Although I knew the routine, this day Danny managed to escape in a blur of mostly yellow and some orange-red.

Oh Lord. I closed the doors and looked on top of things, my bookcases, filing cabinets, out-basket, Indian headdress. Had I been too slow? Had he flown out of the room or was he underfoot somewhere where I might step on him and crush him unwittingly? I sat to ponder this and as I did, with just one piping note, he flew from somewhere back of me straight at the window pane and crashed against it with a sound as heavy as a hammer blow. And dropped upon my rug.

I rushed to his side but he was on his back and motionless. I fetched some water, flung drops of it at his face but he did not resuscitate. I picked him up, no longer afraid to do so, put him to my ear with some idea that I might hear his heart. Where was the tug of gravity? He weighed a few ounces only, bones and feathers and a beak and eyes.

But no -- that was not his quiddity, the all of him, nor why my heart broke as I stroked his head, wishing I had had the courage to do so when he'd lived, loved him properly. I'd loved him, yes, but I could have got to know him in his fantastic gallimaufry, caught his problems sooner, made some impact on his life, starting with the song he sang, his flair. We could have built from there.