“Try not to take this the wrong way, Lucas,” Charles now says in the smoke-filled MG, “but you have got to be the stupidest white person I’ve ever met. You know how many brothers would kill to have your life? And you’ve done everything you could to throw it away.”

It’s hard to argue. My physical examination at the army induction center in Fort Hamilton, Brooklyn, is scheduled for August 29 at seven a.m. — one month from tomorrow. I can’t stop thinking about those 242 dead men-children in Life magazine. About a photo I saw of the interior of an air force transport plane filled with row after row of flag-draped reusable aluminum caskets. What are my choices now? Canada? Prison? Fingerectomy? Maybe I could hide in the fallout shelter until the end of the war. A subterranean Anne Frank.

I was so distracted by my looming army physical that I couldn’t focus at work today. My inserter jammed so many times that the foreman, Mr. DiPasquale, asked if I was okay. At lunch I raced over to the library to read up on David Harris, the husband of Joan Baez, who chose prison rather than fight in Vietnam. Turns out that Rudy didn’t have the facts quite right. Harris is currently in the San Francisco County Jail. He’s supposed to be sent to a minimum-security prison camp in Texas, where inmates live in barracks (so it’s like the army, only you’re not required to kill anyone), but that’s not guaranteed. Draft resisters can be sent to either medium- or minimum-security prisons depending on where the federal prison system has vacancies. So I could get sent to a place where I might have a hard-core criminal for a roommate. Given the possibility of two or three years in a cell sixteen hours a day with someone like Red-Eyed Clyde of Pagan’s fame, I’d seriously have to consider life with one less finger.

But tonight there’s new hope for avoiding the draft. Last week Charles wasn’t around because he was out in San Francisco, where he spent an afternoon talking to other draft counselors at the Berkeley chapter of the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (aka “the Mobe”). Recently the army doctors out there have started giving anyone who asked 1-Y draft status, which means the military won’t call you into service unless America itself is attacked.

“All we gotta do is set you up with a phony address in the Bay Area, make it seem like you’re actually living there. You cool with that?” Charles said back in the church office.