Free There's a Man With a Gun Over There by R. M. Ryan Page B

ever in two years.”
    â€œThat’s crazy.”
    â€œWhat—you think you’ll escape? We’re all going in the army. I just want to get it over with. Get on with my life.”
    The last I saw of Steve, he was slouched on a bench in the waiting room of the Greyhound Bus Terminal, cradling his guitar, strumming “It Ain’t Me, Babe.”
    Later, somebody heard that Steve was drafted and sent to Vietnam. Someone else said he was performing in a Boston coffeehouse. We also heard that he was a drifter—homeless and living on the streets in Minneapolis. He’d been seen wearing a thin nylon jacket in the middle of winter on a street corner begging, his hands shaking so badly he couldn’t hold the change people gave him.

    Grimes Poznik kept playing. He played everywhere. He’d sit on tree limbs, pop out of bushes.
    â€œAll the world’s my stage, man,” he’d tell you if you asked what he was doing. “I’m giving melodies to the air you breathe.”
    You’d be walking along, and he’d jump out from behind an acacia tree to play parts from a Mozart horn concerto. He’d be sitting in the far stall of the men’s room in the commons playing Miles Davis. The muffled tone of his horn echoed through the whole building. How strange those moments were, how they’d catch you, on your way to your bit of business, there’d be Grimes, that slice of hair down over his forehead, bending into the notes of his song, a reverie right through your day.
    â€œI bring you the night; I bring you the day,” he said.

    Who could guess that Grimes would die, homeless, of alcohol poisoning, on a street in San Francisco in the harder years that came after the 1960s.

    In spring semester of 1966, I took European history with Professor Kleinholder. I remember the day he brought this ancient record player to class. It had a detachable horn on the top and played these thick 78s.
    â€œ Ja, Ja ,” he said as he put the contraption together. “I am very interested in this American business of powdered foods, of taking water out of things. I think this is how history is— little shiny crystals, and we must put them in water, return them to the life they once had. Here is such a crystal from the past.”
    His hands shook as he put the record on the machine, cranked the handle to get it going, and set the giant needle on the record. First the sound of spinning static.
    â€œYou hear, the way it sounds like the past. Like dust from years ago blowing here into this classroom of our little college.”
    The blare, then, of a long-ago oompah band began playing a march with a chorus of men singing.
    He lifted the needle to pause the playing, and we could still hear a grinding noise as the record went round on its mechanism.
    â€œI have now an experiment. You will get to participate in the old days. The old days for you, but the new days for me. From a time when I was young. History for me, almost yesterday for me. Come stand up. Ja , come here. All of you.”
    Professor Kleinholder became animated as he showed us how to line up in front of the blackboard.
    â€œIt is a march song, ja . When it plays you will march around in a circle here, to get the feel of it. It is an experiment. We have now a laboratory of history.”
    Once we were all lined up in the space between the blackboard and the first row of seats, he cranked the handle and put the needle back on the spinning record. The static and then the oom-pah music began again, and a chorus of sturdy male voices sang.
    At first awkwardly and then more and more in time to the beat of the music, we marched in a small circle at the front of the classroom. Professor Kleinholder waved his right arm up and down and back and forth as if he were conducting this.
    â€œ Ja ,” he said. Actually he yelled over the music, which seemed to get louder. “This is the tune of an old German folk song. We