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The waiting line at the financial aid office snaked down the corridor and into the main lobby of Sproul Hall and moved at the celerity of a banana slug on Thorazine. Most students sat on the cold floor against a marbled wall, shifting one body place every five minutes. At that rate, it would be close to an hour before I'd get to the service window.
While waiting to pick up my scholarship check and work-study grant, I did what every conscientious college student does. I did my homework. I pulled out my copy of Virginia Woolf and tried to read while surreptitiously watching the cute women walking by.
After forty minutes, I was optimistic. I had moved close enough to the front of the line to hear the applicants and financial-aid clerk's conversations.
No matter what the applicant's problem was, the answer was still the same. "Fill out this form," the clerk said. "Sign the three places marked with an X and go to Window C with your driver's license and student ID."
"But this stipend check was sent to me in error," said the student. "It's made payable to someone else. I want to return it and get the check that was supposed to be mine."
"No problem," said the clerk. "That happens all the time. Your check was probably sent to this person's address. I hope that she'll catch the error and turn in the check. In the meantime, you'll need to fill out this form, sign an affidavit swearing you didn't get your check, and go to windows C to look up your records, then window D to return the erroneously issued check and window E, with proof from window C and D, to get your check reissued. Once you submit all that, you have to wait two weeks until we send you a letter that your check is ready to pick up at window B. Understand?" The student took the paperwork and left. Everyone in line moved up one-body space.
I heard shouting and chanting coming from outside the building. "HEY, HEY, HO, HO. UC HAS GOT TO GO. OUT OF SOUTH AFRICA NOW."
The chanting became louder before I noticed that the antiapartheid protesters had rushed into the building and filled the entire first-floor hallway. Then, as if on cue, they sat and blocked the entrances and the main hallway. Many protesters were students, but most looked like street vagabonds with their unwashed scraggly hair, filthy T-shirts, torn blue jeans with kneeholes and dirty bare feet.
"THERE CAN BE NO BUSINESS AS USUAL UNTIL UC DIVESTS ITSELF FROM CORPORATIONS THAT DO BUSINESS IN SOUTH AFRICA." A speaker, dressed in the black and red colors of the Revolutionary Student Brigade, shouted through a bullhorn. "WORKERS AND STUDENTS UNITE. JOIN US IN OUR SIT-IN OF SPROUL HALL."
I looked at the other students in line with me. I didn't know any of them, but we had spent the last forty minutes together. I had more of a relationship with them than the protesters, who had mobbed Sproul Hall.
What were the people before me going to do? Were they going to abandon their position and leave? If I left now and the financial-aid office stayed open for business, I would have wasted the morning for nothing and have to wait again later. If any students in front of me left and I stayed, I’d be closer to the front.
The financial aid office remained open. Even with the protesters seated in the main hallway, making it difficult to go anywhere, the university was still in business.
"The only people these protesters are hurting is me," said the guy before me. "They should be protesting outside Standard Oil or the Bank of America, not the financial aid office."
Three episodes to go before the end of chapter ten and the preview ends.
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This episode is based on a true story.
Although seventy-five percent of this memoir is factual, liberties were taken with the other twenty-five percent for plot purposes. That is where scenes were recreated from memory when they were not clearly defined in the journals written by the author from 1976 to 1980.
Individual characters are composites of several people and do not represent any one person, and the names have been changed to protect innocent people that may be guilty of indiscretions in their youth.
All characters, names and events as well as all places, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this memoir should be considered products of the author’s imagination and are used fictitiously.
