Withdrawing Fables From The Memory Bank
Part Two: All The Rage
Our story opens on a Monday in November of 1964, with a view from up on top of one of the many construction cranes where the Lincoln Center for Performing Arts was rising. A twenty slipped to the worker on the crane got us this interesting overhead shot.
We see Basil, a fifteen-year-old high school freshman emerging from the subway station and walking towards Power Memorial Academy, the all-boys school he is attending. Basil’s family, mother and older brother Marko, moved from the Lower East Side of Manhattan to Brooklyn during the summer—and this is his daily weekday commute. This morning, as he heads into the building, his thoughts are filled with concern for his brother.
Last year, when Marko was seventeen, just graduated from high school, he was hoping to get job with the post office. He did all the necessary preparations and a couple weeks after his eighteenth birthday he became a US Citizen.
The nightmare he had not considered came a month later in the form of a notice in the mail that he had to register for the Selective Service.
The United States has been in Vietnam since the 1940s, but their geopolitical empire strategies were expanding, and a fresh supply of young men was needed.
