But the backup heavyweight was a hawk; there was no getting through to him. American involvement in the war in Vietnam had ended. Nixon had become the first president to resign from office. The fall of Saigon had already happened, but the small heavyweight with the long arms insisted that the Vietnam War had been a “just war”; it was a “war against communist aggression,” he kept saying. We could have won it, he declared; “we should have obliterated the communists,” he said. He kept glancing at Elliot Barlow, and then looking away from her—as if he purposely meant not to see her. My mother had her arms around the snowshoer, but she kept smiling at me and the heavyweight without a name. I was afraid she’d overheard the Zimmermann or Zimmer words; I didn’t want my mom to join our conversation thinking we were reminiscing about her beloved Zim. “And your mom still has the big girlfriend, I see,” the small heavyweight said, glancing quickly at Molly, then quickly away. “I’m a New Yorker, I’ve seen some shows at the Gallows—Two Twats, or whatever those lickers call themselves,” the tall, lean guy went on. “I’ve seen what your dyke cousin calls ‘The News in English,’ I know her leftist politics,” the asshole said. At the time, I was taken aback by his right-wing rhetoric and his homophobic, sexist slurs, but Ronald Reagan was coming. The Christian Right was coming. Was the certitude of the undersize heavyweight a harbinger of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority? They were coming, too.

At a loss for words, I inquired of the heavyweight without a name if he’d perhaps known Zim at Yale. “Did you go to Yale?” I suddenly asked the guy, which made no sense at all—even to me. I just had to say something.

“I was in the Marine Corps,” he answered me coldly. He made it sound as if his being a marine precluded a college education, or made the matter of where he’d gone to university superfluous. “Yalies!” he suddenly said, with scorn—the way he’d said lightweights.