University of Wisconsin Milwaukee UWM Digital Commons Theses and Dissertations 12-1-2016 The omediC ans: A Novel Roswitha T. Both University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Follow this and additional works at: https://dc.uwm.edu/etd Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Both, Roswitha T., "The omeC dians: A Novel" (2016). Theses and Dissertations. 1353. https://dc.uwm.edu/etd/1353 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by UWM Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of UWM Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THE COMEDIANS: A NOVEL by Roswitha T. Both Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English at The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee December 2016 ABSTRACT THE COMEDIANS: A NOVEL by Roswitha T. Both The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee , 2016 Under the Supervision of Professor George Clark In the spring of 1970, university campuses across the United States were roiled by the news that the Vietnam War had been escalated, through a bombing campaign, into the jungles of Laos and Cambodia. The protests at UW-Madison campus were among the largest. Frustration that, despite years of protests, the War not only continued but had expanded beyond Vietnam’s borders, led to the bombing of a physics research building on the UW campus later that summer. THE COMEDIANS begins a few weeks after that bombing. The novel’s primary setting is a student housing co-op near Langdon Street, formerly known as Fraternity Row. The male residents of this co-op decide to harbor one of the bombers of the physics research building, who has failed to disappear into the underground as the other two have. For the duration of the novel, from the beginning of the semester to Halloween, the male residents of the novel are concerned with a scheme to conceal the identity of their new lodger from the female residents, who have begun to hold feminist consciousness-raising sessions that disturb the relationships of several of the couples living in the house. The night of the Halloween party, the co-op is invaded by a local biker gang, rampaging right-wing reactionaries, and the FBI. When the dust clears, the fugitive is gone, and two of the house members, both in relationships with other people, are on their way to falling in love. ii THE COMEDIANS: A NOVEL Prologue The city of Madison lies on an isthmus, a wide strip of land between two blue Midwestern lakes. State Street, on the lower end of the isthmus, is the center of downtown Madison, linking the Wisconsin State Capitol with the University of Wisconsin campus. Back in the 1950s, Life magazine dubbed Madison the Athens of the Midwest. But don’t be deceived. That big white dome, those faux-Romanesque columns, recall a civilization in ruins when we first re-discovered it, our architectural homages a backhanded compliment to the remains of misunderstood glory. Opposite the dome on the other end of State Street, on a shady hill studded with more remnants, sits Lincoln's statue on its throne of carved rock. On the right lies the lake they call Mendota, a Ho-Chunk word meaning “big blue lake white man fill with algae.” Glories of western civ, dead ahead. Bascom Hill looks deceptively serene on a warm September Friday afternoon. Most of the students have retired to the Rathskellar to drink beer and argue amongst their factions. Only a few linger on the grass, reading or tossing blue or yellow or white disks at each other, sometimes managing to catch them. At the foot of Bascom Hill, a hirsute and ornery tribe throngs State Street. Among them move small people with clean, short hair, frightened-looking people, especially when they are accosted by leaflets, which they take, hurriedly stuffing them in their pockets. The others, the leaflettiers, veterans identifiable by their army-surplus clothing, appear restless, accosting each other with questions, warily looking around. Along the edges of the Library Mall; outside the University Bookstore (one of many bunker-like structures recently constructed on this part of campus); lining the entrance to Paul’s Books (used); covering the lamp pole in front of Rennebohm’s Drugs, its windows invisible 1 THE COMEDIANS: A NOVEL behind sheets of plywood; outside Burrito Brothers (named after the band and selling what you’d expect); at the Brathaus; at Spudnuts (doughnuts made in some arcane manner from potatoes); at the Chocolate Factory; and the place that sells all the Badger sporting things, the hockey sticks and Bucky sweatshirts; thick at the Yellow Jersey Bike Co-op where the same rusty no-speed has been chained outside for months; stopping only at the feet of that white-domed building topped by the gold statue of some muse-type woman; in fact, all along this stretch of straight but not narrow road, with its easy Friday-afternoon traffic and its sidewalks crowded with students and University-town hangers-on, covering every telephone pole and lamppost and papering the entryways to many of the businesses, are eight-and-a-half by eleven sheets covered with words and art, hand-drawn, screen-printed, or run off on mimeograph machines. The Magic Lantern Film Society is screening Vittorio De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief . Another flyer, hand-lettered in primary colors, announces: AMRC IS THE REAL CRIMINAL! This one is taped up next to one that says FBI MOST WANTED above a high-school yearbook photo of a thin-faced, wanly smiling boy in black-framed glasses. His name is Barry Stein. The FBI wants him for blowing up a University building, resulting in death to a physics professor and serious injury to his graduate assistant. The law has been busy. This poster is accompanied by several featuring the other two members of the Labor Day Gang, Kevin Armstrong and Larry Buell. These two are clearly grown men, covered in facial hair but under twenty-five. Given that all three members of the Labor Day Gang are still at large, the law has not been very successful. On a sunny Friday afternoon, the Capitol Building appears unprotected, benign. But were one of the veterans to approach it unexpectedly, by a side entrance, men in tall boots 2 THE COMEDIANS: A NOVEL carrying rifles would suddenly appear, directing them to move along now, be someplace else, you long-haired commie piece of shit. If you really want to enjoy our State Capitol, it’s important to see it by night, when it may be a long way a long way up those terraced stairs leading to doors made of brass. But that’s all right. We are not going to be hoofing it up those stairs. We will be conveyed. 3 THE COMEDIANS: A NOVEL Chapter 1. “The Bag of Man” Around this time, a few steps from the Capitol building when everything is happening at the other end of State Street, Jake Winslow, student and worker, cores a jalapeno in the kitchen of Pancho’s foods of Mexico. Focusing the worker portion of his brain (only a third, “lover” comprising a good share) on the guacamole of which this jalapeno forms a component, Jake slices, cores and chops the pepper into tiny, speck-like pieces. He soon notices a fiery tingle in his fingertips and wonders if these fingertips will still be tingling when he gets home tonight and runs them down the (problematically) voluptuous body of his newly wed wife, Jeanie. Would she too begin to tingle? Would his hands leave a trail of fire down the length of a Junoesque thigh? Even more so than usual, let’s say? And what if he were to go into the men’s room right now and give his cock a couple of pulls? Would he then be able to transfer this same tingling, burning sensation to tender and moist feminine parts? Of course his wife is working tonight, at that new job of hers at the pancake house out on Park Street. But there are ways around that situation. He could, for instance, smuggle a jalapeno into the pocket of his jeans. Just then a hand appears in the long window that separates the chefs (as they call themselves) from the red cavern of the dining room. Jake feels a kinship with this hand, which is disproportionate to the medium-sized girl it is attached to, because he too has hands that don’t match the rest of him. Jake has a slim, muscular frame, thighs that would do a smack-crazed rocker proud, and he ought to have those tapering fingers that look good holding a guitar pick and sending waves of feedback over an adoring crowd. Instead he’s got thick-fingered, calloused, working man’s hands, now ferociously chopping lemons in half like a Frenchman 4 THE COMEDIANS: A NOVEL decapitating aristocrats. He glances up to see if the owner of that substantial female hand, Renate Weile, has noticed his skill with a blade. She appears unimpressed, or impressed in the wrong way. The large yet feminine hand now covers the bottom-half of her face, and her moss-green eyes are wide with either mirth or horror as she twirls around and rushes off into the gloom of the restaurant. “Fuck was that about?” Jake mutters, not really expecting a response. “I dunno, but if I were you, I’d start singing the praises of Betty Friedan,” says Christian Hobbs, the other day chef, snatching Renate’s ticket off the order wheel and slamming two platters onto the slatted wooden counter next to Jake’s guac-in-progress.