Preface
This is not a memoir. These are journals, begun in 1970, at the age of seventeen, written as it happened, filled with youthful indiscretions. They have occupied a couple of shelves in my library for the past forty years. I think I initially kept a journal because I didn’t like the feeling of time slipping through my fingers, and this was a way of arresting it. Writing was a way of self-mythologizing, so I could get a grasp on who I, and my friends, might be. I read a lot and wanted to emulate what I was reading. I was under the spell of Kerouac. The early journals were filled with a lot of stream–of-consciousness writing (which I have edited out—terrible mumbo-jumbo), exacerbated by the drugs I was taking. I’m fortunate I jotted down a lot of dialogue and bits of detail, because these would have left my memory. Anyhow, it’s all as I saw it.
The books themselves are black-bound, unlined, sized eight and a half by eleven inches, purchased at art supply stores. I named each one (there are twenty) and did a proper DIY title page. They acted as scrapbooks as well, which was a family tradition. Even my grandparents were avid scrapbook keepers. My Rapidograph script is wedged in between pasted clippings of my current favorite rock stars, movie stars, nudes, candy wrappers, tickets, and general flotsam my magpie nature retrieved from the dustbin. I wasn’t yet a collagist, but had an eye for paper ephemera. I started pasting with Elmer’s glue, then switched to rubber cement, which smelled nice, but discolored the clippings and lost its adhesive qualities after a few years. I eventually settled on spray fixatives, which are highly toxic yet were perfect for my needs. There were black-and-white photos of me and my friends sprinkled throughout.
These journals start when I was a junior in a public high school. I’d been expelled from the private boys’ school (Blake) I’d attended for five years for selling LSD (under duress) to a tubby student who used to play keyboards in the Atlantic Queen, a garage band that we both once were in. He freaked out and ratted on me. As it turned out, it was a good thing I got thrown out, as I was flunking French, Latin, history, science, and geometry (we were doing E = mc2—in tenth grade, for chrissakes!). I excelled only at English and art. Hated the compulsory sports.
My dad had been valedictorian of that same school, skipping a couple of grades before entering Harvard at sixteen. I wasn’t exactly following in his footsteps. He was a dapper corporate lawyer (think James Mason) and had been on mood stabilizers since the year I was born, to combat depression. He always wished he’d stayed in the Navy. He had a good war, skippering a sub chaser in the Solomon Islands, rescuing Australian coastwatchers from Japanese-occupied islands, doing clean-up after Guadalcanal…plus, he was on a destroyer moored next to the Missouri during the Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay.
Now there were his evening martinis, wine with dinner, sometimes a Scotch-and-soda after dinner. Pills to wake up, pills to go to sleep. He said the secret to happiness was distraction. He belonged to an old men’s club in downtown Minneapolis, covered in ivy, where he played squash. I liked to read Sherlock Holmes in their big burgundy-leather armchairs. We belonged to a beautiful country club just outside the city, where he played tennis with his lawyer buddies. I liked the giant kidney-shaped swimming pool overlooking Lake Calhoun, listening to my transistor radio, eating Fudgsicles.
My mother was a great beauty in her youth. Still was. A bit like Maureen O’Sullivan (Tarzan’s Jane). She was always stylishly dressed and loved parties. She worked as an interior decorator. My parents used her income to travel to Europe several times a year. They would pore over travel magazines and timetables, plotting trips. When I began to go wrong, my mother seemed to take it personally and would unleash her anger. She could never hold her liquor, whereas my dad could. Dad usually took the long view that my generation was being profoundly affected by the ongoing turmoil in the USA. He took the high road.
My sister was five and a half years older. She was a great achiever, voted “Peppiest” by her high school. She left to go to Mount Holyoke. Marched with Martin Luther King. My parents had been strict with her, but they gave up when it got around to me. I didn’t have a virginity to protect.
Jim and Bunny Hannah
The end of the sixties hit me dead-on. I started smoking cigarettes at fourteen, pot at fifteen; then came the rest—LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, hashish, opium, Dexedrine, crystal meth, booze. I lost my virginity while still in boys’ school, to an apple-cheeked suburban cheerleader with whom I had nothing in common other than raging hormones. The ritual took place in the back of a small speedboat docked in a marina on Lake Minnetonka, smelling of canvas, vinyl, and gasoline. She had me pull out periodically when she thought I was getting too excited, terrified of getting pregnant. She wouldn’t let me use a rubber, said they were “dirty.”
What I was interested in was rock ’n’ roll music, pop art, girlie magazines and dirty books (I learned the facts of life from two paperbacks, Strumpets’ Jungle and Pay-for-Play Girl), drugs, my weirdo friends, movies, and books, mostly coming-of-age stuff like Salinger and the Beats, also the pulp reissues of Doc Savage and Fu Manchu. I was a drummer in various bands and an artist. I did impatient, jittery drawings that combined all my interests. I was always the “class artist,” for which I was given special attention. I had a fresh face which I inherited from my mom. I assumed I was headed for great things. And indeed, I had a lot of lucky breaks over the years. I was eager to move to New York and join in the fray.
The title Twentieth-Century Boy (taken from the T. Rex song of that name) seemed fitting. I am truly a product of the second half of the twentieth century. For all its faults, the seventies in NYC were a great time to come of age. There was no money, so that wasn’t a concern. Living in Manhattan was cheap, and one could lead an interesting existence on four hundred dollars a month. There was no Internet, so one did one’s research in a more hands-on way. I suspect the results meant more to us, because they were hard won. The seventies had a rearview undercurrent of interest in the thirties, forties, and fifties, which jibed with my sensibility. Our quest for authenticity and experience led us in colorful directions. We had faith in the journey, even if we were unsure of the destination.
I had never read these journals before transcribing them. In preparing them for publication, I removed a lot of extraneous detritus. I didn’t do a lot of navel gazing, as many diarists do, so I didn’t have that to contend with. I noticed, at the time, that mostly it was girls who kept journals, and they generally wrote only when they were upset. I was determined not to do this. I tended to write from jubilation. I wrote these at night, in bed (if I was in any kind of shape to write), or in the morning, over coffee. I didn’t write every day, and as life accelerated I would miss notating chunks of experience. Indeed, 1979 hardly gets a look in at all. I don’t know why. I’ve changed some of the names to protect the innocent, and also the not-so-innocent. The grammar and spelling have also been corrected, as my slipshod grasp of English composition leaves something to be desired.
It struck me, as I waded through these journals, that this was a very long time ago—totally different from today’s climate. Strange to view this rake’s progress through a contemporary lens. The sexual landscape was different then—wide open. It seemed a new frontier. It was a weird feeling to reconnect with my youthful self, whom I was often amused by and often ashamed of, but such is the nature of youth. I felt a sympathy for my parents and my sister Holly that I selfishly didn’t have at the time. I felt sympathy for me as well, in the throes of nascent alcoholism that I didn’t then understand. I saw the arc of addiction going from bad to worse. I saw myself trying to keep up with it all, from becoming the artist I wanted to be to becoming the man I wanted to be. I was scrabbling for a foothold in the contemporary culture on my own terms. Miraculously, most of what I’d yearned for on page one had come true on the last page, when I was twenty-eight. I think only then did I begin to grow up. Of course a lot of it was fun, and funny, but a lot of it was harrowing too. It could have ended up very differently had I not had a guardian angel watching over me. What would I change? A futile question. It is what it is. No regrets.
New York City, February 2017