Last week I went out to eat with my nephews and their parents at a Mexican restaurant on Okochobee Boulevard in West Palm Beach. The conversation gravitated to sports; baseball for Trey, golf for Reese, and basketball for their father and me. Their mother was happy to be left in peace. After dinner we stepped into a warm Florida night. There was no one in the parking lot.
Looking at the colorful mural on the wall, I said, “Mexico 1968.”
“What about it?” AK’s slender and ever-beautiful wife responded with interest. We were more friends than before. I was good to her kids and nothing earns trust from a mother faster than treating their spawn well. My clan was far away in Thailand.
“Summer Olympics was held in Mexico City.”
“More like the Autumn Olympics. For some reason they were in October.”
“Summer or fall didn’t matter after Bob Beamon set a world record in the high jump at the altitude of 6000 feet. Rightfully never an asterisk for that jump.” My individual best had been in my senior year. 1970. 19’6″.
“He broke the previous record by a foot and a half.” AK joined in the telling. He was my age. 1968 was our youth.
“The world was on fire. Only the week before hundreds of students had been shot by the Mexican army and the streets of America were on fire after the assassination of Martin Luther King.”
“Could we talk about something else?” AK and I went back over thirty years to 1973. He was no born-again conservative, but the right-wing Storm Front had their headquarter meetings not far from here, White people in Florida tend to be whiter than most whites elsewhere in the USA and my talk was incendiary to white people, but the parking lot was empty.
“Let him talk.” AK’s blonde wife taught music at a private school. The curriculum was restrained by religion. She appreciated my loose tongue. ”
“Other places were in revolt too. Viet-Nam, Paris, Prague.”
I sang the first stanza of the Rolling Stones’ STREET FIGHTING MAN.
“Everywhere I hear the sound of marching, charging feet, boy, cause summer’s here and the time is right for fighting in the street, boy.”
AK rolled his eyes. He was more into R&B than rock, having played in the Authentics, a Boston funk band, to pay for his tuition at Berkeley School of Music. On our cross-country trip in 1974 AK had taught me how to play the kazoo.
“No one at the Olympics protested the death of hundreds of Mexican students. The army was in the streets. The olympic committee banned any protests by the athletes. The best runner in the world was Tommie Smith, 220 and 440 champion. A black man.”
“From California.” AK was a sports nut too. Knicks versus my Celtics. We had played countless one-on-ones on the playgrounds of Boston and New York. He dominated the first twenty years. I outlasted his knees during the 90s, although now neither of us were in good shape.
“Tommie Smith set a world record in the 220.
“Time 19.83 seconds.” AK was showing off sports knowledge to his sons.
My best time in the 440 was 54.8 seconds. About thirty yrds behind Tommie Smit’s best.
“At the medal ceremony Tommie Smith and John Carlos, the bronze winner, lifted their fists during THE STAR-SPANGLED banner to protest the mistreatment of blacks in America.”
My best friend in school is black.” Reese was named after the Dodgers’ Pee Wee Reese.
“And what he say in class the other day.” AK was a Brooklyn boy at heart.
“That his father had been killed in Iraq. His father was a soldier.” Reese was eleven. Old enough to understand that death meant death. His younger brother believed in Santa Claus. I wished that I did too.
“Probably a good man as was the silver-medal winner from Australia.”
“Peter Norman wore an American “civil rights” badge as support to them on the podium.” AK remembered the incident better than me. “The Olympic Committee banned Smith and Carlos from the Village and Norman was dropped from the 1972 team.”
“The good are always good at the moment of their best.”
I explained the myth of the rights of man. My nephews were fast studies and loyal nephews. We were two miles from The Breakers Hotel. I told them a story that I had heard three years ago.
“The beachfront hotel had been a world-class destination for over a century. The railroad tycoon Henry Flagler completed construction on his resort for the rich in 1896. That night Flagler held a BBQ for the laborers on the golf course. While they feasted on ribs and chicken, Flagler ordered his goons to burn out the workers’ bungalows, thus insuring that no poor people will ever live on the barrier island.”
‘Is that a true story?” My oldest nephew asked his father. We had been friends for almost forty years. The West Palm Beach school teacher shrugged with suspicion.
“True as far as I know.” My source had lived in Palm Beach since her childhood, but was no historian. “But that wasn’t right either. That’s why we protest against the evil in man.”
“Your uncle tells a good story.”
“It’s the truth.”
“Interesting if true. That’s you.”
My nephews and I posed before the Mexican mural with raised fists. Their mother took the photo. We said good night. It had been great to see AK and his family. The last time had been in the summer of 2008. Things were better now.
Later that night I went online to find out the truth about the Breakers.
It wasn’t there.
Then again the truth is yet to be told.
Bring on the revolution.
The youth is with us and we are coming for your children.