ADMITTEDLY, the time didn't seem quite right for violent revolution, but, what the hell, it might at least turn out to be another Woodstock, and, well, what else could a poor boy do....

Sometime after sundown on Friday, we stopped at this place just off Delaware's John F. Kennedy Memorial Highway. As far as roadside rest areas go, it wasn't any Howard Johnson's. Lacking the proper blandness, the place was creatively ugly. Most of it consisted of nothing but a central lobby, plastic glassy skylights, and a semi-cubistic chandelier. All in all, little more than a retarded version of Miami Beach. Except that off to one side of the lobby, roped off with velvet covered ropes, was a plaster bust of JFK painted to look bronze.

We had only stopped to take a piss. But then, so had a couple of hundred other people who all looked like they were also going down to D.C. (Perhaps all they were saying was give piss a chance? Sorry.) In any case, here we all find ourselves, we being mostly guys, shuffling about anxiously in this neo-Miami lobby, because a bunch of girls have taken over the men's room, complaining something about the lady's john having proved to be inadequate. Now, nothing is less conducive to upholding what shreds of male chauvinism are presently left us-not to mention one's own sense of propriety-than the need to take a good piss. So, unable to shuffle about any longer, a bunch of us joined the girls. Naturally they were all wearing women's lib buttons. And for a moment it did really seem that in that port- Howard Johnson's somewhere off the Delaware Pike the revolution was, quite decidedly, all systems go.

I arrived in Washington too late Friday night to get gassed at Dupont Circle. That was a pretty hard fate to accept-rather like being the last kid in your class to enter puberty.

About one in the morning, a bunch of us drove out to Arlington National Cemetery. A half dozen MP's with jeeps and rifles and all manner of meanness barred us from entering. They told us that the beginning of the March Against Death had been moved down to the Memorial Bridge, then told us to move on.

"I wonder who they're afraid might get into that place?" I asked as we drove off. A voice from the back seat mumbled, "Necrophiliacs."

With the temperature sinking down through the thirties, you'd have had to have been the most masochistic of liberals to have marched against death Friday night. Nonetheless, the liberals were out in force.

The Moratorium people had pitched a series of tents along the edge of the Potomac. There was also a Red Cross vehicle, a refreshment wagon, and a couple of portable johns. To march against death, you had to line up in the dark, the Potomac peacefully smacking somewhere near your feet, then slowly pass through each of the tents, picking up buttons and candles and placards in the process. The lines of people were almost silent, more interested in conserving warmth than maintaining conversation. From up close, they looked like the docile victims of a concentration camp, but when viewed from a distance, the whole scene looked more like some late night revival meeting. In its way, I guess, it was both.

Near the foot of the bridge where the march proper began, a bell tolled every few seconds. A couple of kids, wrapped in blankets and sleeping bags and asking everyone they saw if they had a joint, took turns ringing the bell. We helped them for a few minutes. The bell's clang seemed to affirm the primitive purity of the whole effort. For an army was encamped by the bank of the Potomac, an army silent and cold and dark, waiting for the dawn to plunge its incongruous, unarmed infantry into some kind of crazy civil war battle. I stood and watched the scene, hoping like hell that this was the way things might have felt in King Henry's camp the night before the battle of Agincourt. For a moment one almost wanted to be a liberal again.

Joel and David and I spent the night on the floor of an apartment of a friend of a friend. Joel and David had just come from Dupont Circle. The place was hardly worth fighting over, they complained, little more than a glorified traffic circle. And as for tactics, the leaders of the march had just kept dragging the crowd back into the middle of the circle, and then they would all be gassed out, and then they would just drag them back again. Hell, that was no way to street-fight.

This street-fighting business had begun because of the way we were all dressed. We all wore denims and Joel even had a helmet as well as a pack. He looked the part. A real street-fighter. Until he opened his pack and pulled out an electric blanket.

Before we went to sleep, we tried to figure out what was the most anarchic act possible in Washington. We decided that it would be to blow out the eternal flame on Kennedy's grave.

We slept over. It was almost ten-thirty when the march down Pennsylvania Avenue began, and it was closer to noon when we woke up. But that was alright we decided because streetfighters had to conserve their energies for late afternoon confrontations with the pigs.

A more immediate problem was food; we grubbed about in the refrigerator of a friend of a friend. A good streetfighter had to live off the land, we figured. We were really getting into the fantasy of the thing.

Joel and David invited me to join their affinity group, and, cognizant of the honor, I accepted, only to lose them in the crowd as soon as we reached the Washington Monument.