Waxing philosophical is not one of my favorite pastimes. Ever since I was let down by Eric Hoffer, I’ve realized virtually any clown with a sesquipedalian command of the English language can write a book of “philosophy” and get a following of dregs to chant his or her brilliance to the academic skies. Look at the Skinnerians. Saddening, really, how easy it is to dupe a large contingent of lames and wearies, get them to accept a “philosophy of life” in toto. The no-neck nits who followed Senator Joseph McCarthy into the witch-burning arena; the millions and millions of Americans who refuse to accept the responsibility for their own existences and follow Nixon even when they know he’s a thief, a liar and a self-server; all the poor bastards who are into Jesus Freakism because they can’t face the world as it really is and haven’t the stamina to change it for the better; Existentialists, Solipsists, Berkleyites, Sybarites, believers in Atlantis, flying saucers, reincarnation, Catholics who clap their hands in adolescent delight at the Reaffirmation of the Doctrine of Papal Infallibility, crazed reactionaries who cling with insupportable paranoia to the Threat of the Communist Menace; and all the phonies who went from dope to Zen to the Maharishi to Baba Ram Dass to macrobiotic dining to astrology and don’t know where their next savior is coming from. All of them, the poor fuckers, washed here and there like flotsam on the inexorable tide of Life. Believing. Having nothing to succor and recommend them but their beliefs. Proselytizing and chanting and stumbling ever forward toward lightless deaths in which they will certainly find none of it carries the spark.
One guy even wrote me a letter telling me I had The Word and he wanted to be my Follower. Sooner would I have the clap for a thousand years than stalk about spouting The Word. On him I wish a plague of toads in his bathroom.
However, I did have an idle thought the other day, which I guess comes under the heading of “philosophy.”
I’ll probably have to wash my mind out with Lava for even venturing that this idle concept is philosophical, but it seemed to me a particularly gentle and humanistic thought, so I’ll share it with you. It’s not often I have these damned things, and while it probably isn’t profound in the Nietzschean sense, it may permit you to love a few more of the walking-wounded around you than you’d thought possible; and if it serves no other end…well, the time is well spent.
What it was, was this:
Those we call “phonies” may not, in fact, be phonies at all. They may merely be poor suckers who don’t know who they are. They may not be trying to “put on airs” but may simply be lost souls who haven’t established their own personal ambiences. The universe lets us know it ain’t easy; these days especially. Everywhere you look, someone is telling you how to dress, what to wear, whom to associate with, what to listen to, how you should think and react and feel…and that’s an ugly pressure many people can’t handle. Whether you call it Future Shock, or Cultural Ambivalence, or Alienation, what it means is that most of the people you meet in a day—and probably the both of us, if we’d but cop to it—are spinning. They don’t know what to believe, or how to act to be “cool,” or what is currently in or out. If that weren’t the truth, how do you account for the hypes of “acts” like Johnny Winter or Nazareth or Alice Cooper, none of whom can hold a moment of fascination for an intelligent human being with taste, while Bach and Scarlatti go on and on and on?
I will cop to having been a phony so long, it’s become my real skin. Now. That out of the way, I can point out that there are people who are so confused as to their true nature that they seem phony because they’re never the same two days running. Take a joker like Buddy Greco. Good singer. Nice voice. The poor slob is so confused about who he is, has always been so confused about it that instead of getting his own sound, he emulates other, more successful singers.
When folk singing was in, he sounded like a solo Kingston Trio. When Sinatra was hot, he sounded like a surrogate. When Bobby Darin was popular, Greco dropped all the “g’s” off his words (grammatically, it’s called apocope) and ran that number. Now he’s into country-rock. He isn’t a phony, despite the Sicilian cufflinks and the white-on-white shirts. He’s merely confused. He hasn’t got enough personal strength to find out his true name and go with it; for good or ill.
The same for several dozen friends of mine, nice people all, who move from apartment to apartment and change their phone numbers so often they have a permanent deposit on file with Pacific Telephone. When it was drug culture time, they came around and espoused the joys of honking kitchen cleanser; when flower power was preeminent they were seen on The Strip with garlands of hollyhocks, festooned with beads; when it was Dissent Time, they always saluted with a balled fist from their freshly-coral-waxed cars; now that greed and taking care of number one are the in-trips, they have become the most venal and despicable slugs in the garden. They’re turning Republican.
For the most part, I can’t bring myself to hate them. Forgive them, Father, they know not who they am.
They are searching for a skin to wear. For a hat that fits them comfortably. For a scene that won’t reject them in six months when it ain’t chic no more. In the truest sense of the word, they are seekers.
Formerly, a great number of those tagged “phonies” were gay. That was their lot. They were forced to play at roles that didn’t suit them. Things are a little better now. They can declare and find life-niches that joy them. I wish them Godspeed and good luck. The same for many women I know. Shoehorned into socially acceptable sets, they railed and wept and felt strictured. Now, for them, things can be different, too. But for the mass of men and women who don’t know what they want, have no idea what they’re capable of doing, conceive of no enrichment beyond that which is programmed by their society, there is no way of coming out of the closet. They must search and search, stay awhile in this scene, stay awhile in that scene, and if they get very lucky, they find a face behind which they can hide with security.
So I have to separate the “phonies” into two major groups. Those who know who they are and find something loathsome in the self-image, and so consciously adopt another mien. I know a writer who, if left to his own devices, with no one peeking through his curtains at night, would live a life of television, bowling, McDonald’s hamburgers and Mad magazine. He’s a sentimental person who secretly digs the effusions on Hallmark cards and cries at movies about dogs, God and paraplegics. But he knows the world he wants to move in would label him a square, so he watches only educational programming on the Living Arts of Japan, has learned to play backgammon (which bores the ass off him) in Beverly Hills, studies the wine list at Scandia and orders the correct vintage straight out of a supplement in Esquire, and actually reads Esquire, something I haven’t been able to do in years, though I have five years remaining of a twenty-year subscription. He has confided that he is dismally unhappy with his lot in life, that he doesn’t know where he’s going or what he eventually wants to be, and when I suggested that he is playing a mug’s game by trying to emulate lifestyles not his own, he shrugs off the answer as too simply structured, and continues looking for The Holy Grail. It’s a no-price life.
The other group, and larger by far, is comprised of those who aren’t phony at all, who are simply trying to find a way to get through all the days and nights of their lives without suffering too much. They believe what is told them, they wear those gawdawful platform shoes that make them look like clubfoots, they read Jacqueline Susann or Kurt Vonnegut with equal aplomb because they’re #1 on the Times list, they laugh at Rodney Dangerfield or George Carlin and make no distinctions for originality or imagination, and the dreams they dream belong to others who have had them first and deserve them. They are the Wandering Jews of our Times.
Someone said to me, the other day, about a woman we both knew, “She’s such a phony.” And I started to agree, and just as suddenly stopped, because the thought—the “philosophical” thought, if you will—I’ve explicated here hit me. She isn’t a phony. She’s just spent all her formative years trying to be the kind of woman one guy after another with whom she’s been involved wanted her to be. It’s made her sly, cynical, unhappy, undependable, giddy, a thing of bits and pieces. She isn’t phony, she just doesn’t know who she is.
And when I thought that, it was as though someone had drained all the dislike out of me for that person.
Try it. Maybe it’ll work for you.
Obituaries are terrible things, and I hate them more than I can say. But yesterday, Sunday the 8th, Gene L. Coon died. He was a writer. He was the Producer of Star Trek for a while, and we served together on the Board of Directors of the Writers Guild, and he was as good a man as I’ve ever met. He was enormously kind to me personally, and he was a rarity in this cesspool of an industry: he was an honest, caring human being with taste and discretion and imagination and vast pools of love. He spent much of his life unhappy, and only got happy during the last few years. That his joy should have been cut off so suddenly, so without warning, merely causes those of us who knew and admired him to rail at a Thug God whose list of motherfuckers and thieves ought to be so filled he wouldn’t have time to gather away from those of us who treasure them, one of the few good guys walking around. For those who knew him, who even met him once and drew pleasure from his existence in a frequently loveless world, this is a lousy week. As Dorothy Parker once said of someone else, we will not soon see his like again.