The sixties—which, as everybody knows, began in 1963 and ended in 1974—happened, like a sitcom, in the middle of my living room.
I was president of the sixth grade of one of the first desegregated elementary schools in California, and when the BBC came to interview me, I spoke so passionately that they had to stop the film because the cameraman was crying.
By the end of eighth grade it was a profound social embarrassment if you hadn’t “gotten married,” which meant lost your virginity.
The third-floor roof of our high school overlooked the pool in the middle of the courtyard. People who were tripping would jump off the top of the roof into the pool on Saturday nights. Occasionally the pool would have been drained. If someone dove into the empty pool, it was called a “header.”
Yvonne, who wore miniskirts and leather jackets and was by far the school’s best girl swimmer, drowned when she tried to swim all the way out to Alcatraz immediately after a huge lunch of hash brownies.
A married couple who worked for the McGovern campaign, Janice and Michael, came down from Seattle and stayed in our house from the California primary until the general election. I had such a bad crush on Janice that on the night of Nixon’s landslide, I disconnected the car radio so she’d still be in a good enough mood to come with me as I took old people around to the polls until closing.
I wrote so many satires about capital punishment for the high school newspaper that students who didn’t read carefully started calling me the Beheader.
I heard a rumor that Smith Corona also made munitions and immediately switched to Olivetti.
As the editor of the Observer, the newspaper of the California Democratic Council, my father was at times caught in the middle between opponents and defenders of the Vietnam War. He finally ran a cartoon that showed LBJ surfing off the coast of Cambodia, which made the point about American imperialism. The caption my father wrote was “Up Surf.” He was fired within the month, not because of the content of the cartoon but because he didn’t know the idiom.
The majority of my nieces and nephews on both sides of my family have—or at least at one point had—first names that are either colors, animals, or trees, or a combination of colors, animals, or trees.
Freshman year of high school we all had to take world geography, and the first day of class we all had to come up onstage and tell “Glen” what kind of animal we were, then portray this animal for a few seconds. The entire semester there was no mention of anything even remotely related to world geography.
The ecology club held a massive demonstration and littered the courtyard with so many placards that for once I abandoned my capital punishment theme and wrote a satire about the event; the ecology club retaliated by toilet-papering my house.
My half-brother, Joseph, had a phrase, “Tain’t no big thang.” No one knew where he got it, whether or when it was meant sincerely or ironically, but he said it in response to almost every possible development.
When he and his roommate were arrested for possession of those hundreds of capsules of DMT, Joseph told the cops he was going to use them to decorate a Christmas tree. “In June?” one cop asked. “Tain’t no big thang,” Joseph said.
For sociology class I interviewed sixteen different cliques in our high school and found that precisely three-quarters of the groups made “insider/outcast” distinctions not on the basis of money, appearance, academics, after-school job, or sports. Precisely three-quarters of the groups made “insider/outcast” distinctions on the basis of what kind of drugs you used.
Newsweek reported that our high school had the highest drug use per capita of any high school in the United States, and people threw parties for a month straight to protect our number one ranking.
My half-sister, Emily, had a life-threatening case of colitis and traveled all over India, looking for a holistic cure; she finally settled on Transcendental Meditation, which seemed to do the trick. If you asked her if she wanted to do almost anything, she’d say, “Gotta have time to smell the roses,” which was, of course, just another version of “Tain’t no big thang.”
My sister and her best friend had a bitter fight, from which the relationship never fully recovered, over who was the cutest Monkee, Davy or Micky.
I broke up with my girlfriend when one day she decided she couldn’t stand it any longer and went ahead and shaved her legs.
A friend of my father’s in LA lived less than a block from where the Symbionese Liberation Army was being busted on live TV; we were visiting, so we kept one eye on the television, the other eye out the window. “It’s so real I feel like I can almost smell the smoke,” someone said. “You can smell the smoke,” my father said. The SLA was burning to death and smoke was pouring through an open window.
In the fall of 1974 I left the Bay Area to go to college in Providence, Rhode Island, which I imagined as, quite literally, Providence—a heavenly city populated by seraphic souls. I imagined Rhode Island as an actual island, the exotic edge of the eastern coast. And I saw Brown as enclosed, paradisal space in which strong boys played rugby on fields of snow, then read Ruskin by gaslight in marble libraries too old to close, and girls with thick dark hair, good bodies, and great minds talked about Goethe (which I pronounced “Go-eth”) at breakfast. The first month of my first semester, black students occupied the administration building and demanded increases in black student enrollment and financial aid. These seemed to me laudable goals, so I went over to become part of the picket line outside the administration building and marched in a circle, chanting, for a few minutes, but the whole event seemed like a really weak imitation of all the demonstrations I’d been going to since I was six years old, and I wanted to get away from groups and the West Coast and my former milieu for a while. A few people from my dorm were tossing around a Frisbee on the back side of the green, and I left the picket line to go join them. That, for me, was the end of the sixties.