I remember the moment when I decided that rock as a revolutionary force was dead. It happened in the spring of 1968, when I heard a seven-minute opus called “MacArthur Park.” I’ll mention just one of its all too many verses, something about being pressed “in love’s hot, fevered iron, like a striped pair of pants.” Actually the word striped was sung in two syllables—as in stri-ped—because, you know, this song was art. It had deep meanings, hidden references, and a refrain that was its own parody. A cake left out in the rain … the icing melting … the recipe lost forever … There was only one permissible response to imagery like that: a heartfelt “Heavy!”
Of course, icky words are not an impediment to a great pop composition. The lyrics of my youth were often insipid, but at least they were inspired by real emotions. What passed for rock poetry in 1968 lacked any relationship to recognizable experience. It was a set of floating metaphors for a culture that was growing detached from everything but its own tropes. Dylan had withdrawn from the scene, and when he returned he was writing more traditional, less flamboyant songs. A serious motorcycle crash was the ostensible reason for his retreat, but I suspect- ed that he’d caught a terminal case of disgust at the fake pieties that flooded rock in his wake. The synthesis of musical modes pioneered by the Beatles had become a rote exoticism with vaguely Eastern vibes. Every musician in Topanga Canyon was strumming a sitar. Meanwhile the Fab Four were heading for a breakup, and I could see the signs in their latest compositions, which were far easier to attribute to either Lennon or McCartney than their classics had been. There was a rumor that Paul had died in a car crash, a precursor of the famous “Paul is dead” canard of 1969, which no amount of official denial could dislodge, because the truth was not the point—it was all about the feeling of doom projected onto a beloved star. These were symptoms of a deeper disintegration. I observed them, horrified but fascinated. It was like coming across a really nasty porn film from which you can’t avert your gaze. This was more than just the triumph of plastic—it was a symptom of exhaustion.
The decadence that overran the counterculture had happened so quickly. I scrambled to describe it, fighting off the fear that doing so would threaten not just my commitment but my career. I’d been called a fascist by Mark Rudd, a leader of the radical students at Columbia University, because of my dismissal of Sgt. Pepper. I was haunted by the thought of being booed off the stage, the way I’d seen students harangue the old socialist Irving Howe, who had warned them about the consequences of doing politics by passion alone. (The election of Richard Nixon in 1968 proved him right.) But I couldn’t continue to celebrate something that no longer thrilled me. On the contrary, I felt a seething contempt for hip enlightenment. All sorts of vacant slogans were in the air. The peace sign was mandatory; any criticism brought the admonition “You’re bringing me down.” It reminded me of Communism, with its obligatory optimism, except that in the Eastern bloc countries I had visited, nearly everyone thought the professed morality was bullshit. Here, where freedom allegedly reigned, millions of kids spouted empty platitudes. This was worse than even hype, because it was self-created.
I suppose I should have focused on the fun of it—the gushy sentiments of flower power, the sheer joy of a song like “Yummy Yummy Yummy” (“I got love in my tummy”), the outsize theatricality of concerts. But I’d seen one too many L.A. bands with fire bursting from their headdresses as they rhapsodized about love. Psychedelic music was giving way to fake opulence, and a new genre called art rock appeared. These were lushly orchestrated ballads with fabulous stereo effects. They had their own delight as kitsch, I suppose, but by then I had lost my capacity for enjoying it. Too much was at stake, given the mission I’d assigned to rock. I could only rail against the simulacra of the music I adored. I knew it would earn me the ultimate accusation—bummer!—but it was as close as I dared come to issuing a warning. My column was rarely a pleasure to write, and it couldn’t have been fun to read, because there’s nothing felicitous about doubt.
I bonded best with other skeptics, and they weren’t easy to find, since most of my peers were convinced that I needed to mellow out and trip more frequently. My favorite holdout against this kind of thinking was Bill Graham, the rock impresario who managed the Fillmore Ballroom, booking the great bands I’d seen in San Francisco. I met him in 1968 as he was about to open the Fillmore East in a former Yiddish theater on Second Avenue. Graham was not a child of security like most of his customers. Born in Berlin, he’d escaped from the Nazis in a children’s refugee program and grown up in the Bronx with American foster parents. The intent expression on his face, the grimness around the eyes even when he was amused, was the only way in which his past life intruded. He was one of the few people I could trust with my apprehensions about the zaniness pretending to be a higher sanity, since he shared those qualms. Pondering the latest bizarro excess of the counterculture, we would shrug to each other like old Jews expressing fatalism toward the future. I could read the meaning of this gesture because at heart all Jews of my generation are survivors. My parents never mentioned the death camps, but I was aware of them as a boy in my nightmares. Graham had been shaped by the real thing. He didn’t do drugs, as far as I knew. I figured that he didn’t dare.
I spent many nights at the Fillmore East in the line of duty, sitting so close to the stage that my body vibrated from the sound and the fillings in my teeth hurt. After several hours of this barrage I would fall into a daze under the influence of blobby projections on the screen. I have trouble remembering the details of those shows, since I saw so many. But I do recall the night I noticed a musician in the B-band warming up the crowd. He was a Groovy look-alike, another long-haired, lanky kid with a sinus-driven thrum in his voice. I’d thought of Groovy often since our acid trip on Lake Tahoe, and I wondered whether he’d become a drug dealer, a patient in a psych ward, or a rocker. Any of those alternatives seemed possible. By then I associated him with an experience that was both outside my life and deep within it. On LSD I’d felt as if my defenses were a celluloid scrim. He could see through it to the murky core. I didn’t trust anyone with the power to do that, not in the midst of a confusion that made me feel as fragile and hollow as the Japanese paper lamp shade in my living room. I was pretty good at hiding my anguish, even from those who knew me well. Only my mustache, uneven because of the hairs I bit out of it as a nervous tic, gave me away. But I couldn’t hide myself on acid.
The Groovy look-alike stepped to the mike, his face pale in the blue lights. His band was pure California mellow. The soft thump of the bass and the low patter of drums matched his supple voice. The beat was barely there, and the melodies seemed as indefinite as a breeze. But most of all I remember his wispy tenor. It blurred the lines between guy and girly. I closed my notebook and let the music take me.
I wasn’t sure whether it was the singer or the association with Groovy, but I felt a vibration in my pelvic region, as if fingers were running down my spine. It wasn’t a unique experience—my body was often suffused with arousal when I listened to rock. But this was so much like an overtly sexual feeling that I clenched my legs together and touched my crotch to reassure myself that I wasn’t getting hard. I looked around. Everyone was sitting alert with their eyes closed, transfixed.
The set went on for maybe twenty minutes. Then it ended abruptly. There was no applause, just a kind of sigh moving through the audience. The B-band left the stage, a new set of equipment appeared, and the clang of guitars in the semidarkness reminded me of the real reason I was here tonight. It wasn’t the kid from California. I had come to see some hard-driving British group, the Moody Yardbirds or whatever. I figured that they had brought this laid-back kid along, plucking him from a honeysuckle bush in L.A. as a gentle prelude to the bum’s rush of their act. I settled down for what I anticipated would be a very long set, but then I heard a commotion in the aisle. It was that kid, surrounded by a knot of fans. Now I really wasn’t sure if he was Groovy; acid had created an indefinite image in my mind, and the kid almost fit it. He smiled at me—was that a sign of recognition or a California courtesy nod? I thought of approaching him, if only to find out whether he really was my old acid buddy. But what did it matter? Seeing him had brought me back to that afternoon at Tahoe, when Groovy’s long face looked like a Disney doggy and his uncombed hair bristled like a mane.
The kid called the next day. He was following up on the eye contact we’d made, and he invited me to visit him at the Albert, the hip hotel for musicians in New York. This was proof that he was just another peace-signer with a hard-on for success. I was sure that his first words when I arrived would be a West Coast version of, Rich, baby, for you there’s some hash in the butterfly.
I realized right away that he wasn’t Groovy. The thrum in his singing, which had reminded me of my friend, was missing on the phone, and so was the laid-back attitude. This kid sounded as hungry as me. But he was definitely my type: string-bean body and an edge of delicacy that he couldn’t quite suppress. “Let’s do a doobie,” he said in an L.A. accent that spoke of surf and serenity. As we chatted I pictured myself stoned on his grass, gazing at his superstar grin while he sprawled across the bed, leaning on a skinny elbow, his wares showing through his jeans.
I’ll call the kid Denny. (It seems apt to name him after a fast-food chain that probably supplied a major part of his diet.) He’d grown up in a tract-house exurb of San Francisco, amusing himself with war games in the chaparral. Then came puberty, and he met its tests in the usual budding rocker way: he withdrew to his guitar. That was when he began to create his own songs—typical shit about flowers and gentle people. His mother listened like a fan, and she told him that he had an enchanting voice. His father said nothing. He’d hoped for a son more attuned to the manly arts of football and fishing, but Denny dreaded the sight of a salmon squirming on the hook, and as for sports, when he was remanded to a neighbor’s care for lessons in the pigskin arts he stood dreamily with the ball at his side, immune to all coaxing. The neighbor gave up, and his father retreated, subtly but permanently.
This is the scenario that disposes a boy to become an artist, and, listening to Denny’s bio, I decided that he had the makings of the real thing. Maybe it was just the genius that I ascribed to anyone who turned me on. There was nothing terribly original about his songs—they were Beatle-bangle chazerei to my jaded mind—and his professional life wasn’t special: migration to L.A., small gigs in smaller clubs, a nibble from an independent label with ambitions to be gobbled up by the Warner combine. I asked if he had an album in the works. “Eventually,” he sighed, which I took to mean, I need your help.
I was sure I could wring a story out of Denny—every child of the vast basin between the Pacific and the desert had a sensitive soul to reveal. More to the point, I got the gist of his message: I could have him if I was willing to write about him. I felt the indisputable evidence of a stiffie, but I was sure he couldn’t possibly find me attractive. It never occurred to me that we might have enough in common to inspire a buzz between us. It could only be my power to promote his career. I had been in such situations before, and I saw the exchange of sex for publicity as a kind of payola, so I always backed away. I might have made an exception for Denny—he was such a classic of the nerdy/arty type. But I could tell from the way my fingers trembled as I gripped the phone that this wouldn’t be the forgettable sex I was willing to have with guys. He would ride off into the neon sunset, while I would think of him forever, just as I still think of Groovy. I couldn’t afford another phantom lover; so, no, I wouldn’t have a “gay-off” with this dude.
I told him that I couldn’t make time for him—too many deadlines to meet. I expected him to sound disappointed and maybe a little hurt. Instead, he said something that hit me like a bullet. He said I was afraid to let myself love.
I was used to people making inappropriate remarks. The sixties were an age of faux candor, nuggets of wisdom meant to be therapeutic but actually just manipulative. And here was this kid implying that I didn’t want to write about him because I dreaded the way he made me feel. Troubadours from the land of eternal sunshine weren’t supposed to be wise. It pissed me off, but I was stunned by his insight.
“That’s why you’re such a good critic,” he said. “The music is an echo.”
“Of what?” I asked, trying to sound casual.
“Of what you need.”
I didn’t have to respond. He seemed to sense my thoughts. “Stop worrying about getting laid,” he said. “Start thinking about giving love.”
That was pretty much where the conversation ended. I shook it off as hippie drivel—a more genital version of the injunction to “Be here now!”—and I never wrote about Denny or saw him again. But I’ve thought a lot about the spell he cast. Groovy had the same ability to propel me into a state of childlike wonder. I realize now that this allure was a quality my favorite rock stars also possessed. Something about their bodies bathed in light, slamming into their axes or wrapped around the mike, captivated me. It could happen in the clamor of a hard-edged blues or the ebb and flow of a ballad. When it came from a woman, I felt a deep identification, as if I were inhabiting her. With a man, it was a different sort of intimacy—I was jamming with him, locking guitars. I didn’t think of these sensations as queer. All I knew was that they were thrilling.
So the kid was right about why I was an effective critic. It wasn’t just my way with words. It was my passion about the music and what it meant to me. I might pretend that virtuosity was what counted in rock—that was the manly thing to admire—but actually it was about longing and craving, the need to possess and to adore; desire in all its permutations, unbounded and uncanny. I tried to evoke that mythic dimension in my pieces. I’d described Mick Jagger as a pop incarnation of Shango, the African thunder god, and Jim Morrison as the Lizard King. But I never really captured the emotions that rock conjured up in me. The terror of knowing myself stopped me from writing about, or even perceiving, what I really felt. It was accessible only with my eyes closed or in the darkness of an arena, when everything repugnant about me vanished in the sound, and I was lost in ecstasy. Music was the only way I could connect with my latent feelings, the only time I felt whole, and this had been true ever since I was a teenager, locked in loneliness. Like Jenny, the sad girl Lou Reed sings about, I was saved by rock ’n’ roll.
Despite all the amputation
You could dance to the rock ’n’ roll station …
Baby, baby, ooohhh.
The encounter with Denny made sex with my wife even more intense. The feelings I had for her were genuine, but they also affirmed my membership in the holy order of heterosexuality. I still had doubts, and I eased them with the occasional chick. (I actually had a wrestling match with another rock critic over a woman—he got me in an illegal hold, and I was on crutches for several weeks.) But my greatest escape from myself was what it always had been: writing. Ironically, the best way to flee into reality was to cover the new unreality, and it wasn’t hard to find. As the order lost credibility, so did its spiritual consistency. A Mexican peyote shaman seemed far wiser than the Cardinal blessing the troops in Vietnam. Krishna Consciousness was a lot more devout than a catered bar mitzvah. The problem was that anything could be a mantra, just as anything could be a jingle. How to tell the polyester from the polytheism?
I saw a role for the critic in me. But despite my best efforts, I couldn’t dislodge the slogan of the moment: “Be here now!” Its inventor, Richard Alpert, had morphed psychedelically into Baba Ram Das. I couldn’t resist referring to him as “baba au rhum.” Still, I had my moments of weakness when it came to free-floating religiosity. I remember remarking to Judith, in an intoxicated state, that Jesus was in all of us. (She kicked me.) Before my military physical I consulted an ancient and very trendy Chinese work of prophecy called the I-Ching. There were hundreds of passages in the text, and throwing coins would lead to one of them. By pure chance, I got a passage called “The Army.” It was a Far-out! moment, tantamount to realizing that, though I didn’t believe in astrology, I was a classic Gemini. I never lost myself in the cosmic vibes, but I could understand why people with mystical leanings were drawn to Alpert’s partner in revelation, Timothy Leary. In certain enlightened circles, he was referred to as an incarnation of the divine. To me, he was all too human—and that’s the kindest thing I can say about him.
No one knows how many young people took LSD in the sixties. Several million is my best guess (and what’s a memoir if not a guess?). I suspect that most of them look back on tripping as an adventure they don’t regret, though they wouldn’t recommend it to their grandkids. For some, it was a very important experience; I have a friend who was inspired to become an artist while tripping. The comix, the posters, the curvaceous mode of music and decor, all attest to the profound influence of acid on the counterculture. But the drug was a crapshoot. It could access parts of the brain where inspirations reside, or it could induce a harrowing panic attack—the infamous “bummer.” You might be a very fucked-up person and have a wonderful time, or be very together and end up in a state of dread. Most people came to their senses after the drug wore off, give or take a few recurring “flashes,” but some acid-heads never came down. Others believed they were endowed with the power to control others, and still others decided to follow them. Cults arose around this mutual illusion—can you say Manson? On LSD, it is easy to see God or be God.
The most dangerous trips involved a lasting confusion of fantasy and reality. I never had that problem, perhaps because my suspicions cut so deep that I always knew when I was having a hallucination. I wasn’t tempted to leap from a ten-story building, convinced I could fly, and I never became psychotic, though I knew people who did. I had friends who struggled for years to climb out of the rabbit hole they’d fallen into. One of them joined a rehab program that required him to perform elaborate rituals of neatness. He had to iron his socks and hankies every day. To me, that was worse than ego death.
The casualties of acid were easy to spot. They had a floating look, and if you let them they would share all sorts of exotic beliefs. Pharaonic spirits were inhabiting the body of my buddy Joel, who, by 1968, had left his communal farm in the Catskills and renamed himself Mithra (though he preferred the more casual Ra). Planets were converging in apocalyptic signs for him, amid astrological calculations that went beyond any Zoroastrian scheme. And Joel was far from unique. Even freaks who functioned well might harbor ideas that failed the test of reason. The truth was in the vibe, the higher reality made sensate. LSD was an agent of this thinking, but not the cause. The psychic chaos that the drug sometimes produced was consistent with the climate of the time. Acid is a template on which many things can be inscribed. For all that it might put you in touch with your inner drives or enable you to access the oversoul, it could also inspire an undue confidence in your feelings. LSD rarely fostered doubt, but, then, very little in the sixties did. It’s often said that the boomer generation was narcissistic, but the real problem was negligence—of one another and finally of reality. That was the decade’s greatest contradiction: its capacity for radical change was also a tendency toward madness. Acid fostered both.
The original advocates of LSD understood its power, and they urged careful attention to what was called “set and setting.” I heeded their advice to trip in parks or forests, and always with a “guide,” a kind of designated driver who could talk me down from a panic attack or give me Valium if all else failed. I was much too self-conscious to drop acid at a concert or a tribal gathering; the prospect of blowing my mind among thousands of similarly disoriented kids didn’t appeal to me. And as for psychedelic sex, I can only say that orgasm is not the point. I would get lost in the fleshiness and forget the need to come.
I was reckless about all sorts of things in the sixties, but not LSD. The same cannot be said for Leary. To him, acid was an elixir that should be widely and casually dispensed. Dosage was whatever it took; undesirable effects were the remnant of ego games that could best be dealt with by taking more acid. Working to better the here and now through politics was futile. It would merely lead to more of the same. The only activism worth embracing was to change the world by altering consciousness. This was a just-add-water cake-mix vision of America, where the spirit would triumph over Moloch, courtesy of chemicals. The counterculture had its own version of the Rapture; John Lennon would call it “instant karma,” a flash of revelation that could happen through either meditation or the shortcut of a drug. Though the mystique of acid has long since faded, something like that concept has survived, thanks to the rise of an industrialized pharma culture with labs churning out mood-altering meds for an ever more diagnosed nation. This is Leary’s real legacy.
Class consciousness was not his strong suit. He was ignorant (willfully, I thought) of the impact that racism and poverty might have on someone’s drug experience. The distance between Leary and Martin Luther King was unbridgeable, and since I was closer to the idea of passive resistance than I was to pacifism, I approached his psychedelic revolution with my antennae of doubt bristling. At least the Beats had embraced the idea of voluntary poverty; Leary preferred pleasure to self-denial. He was quite willing to hole up in an estate about an hour north of New York City, in a part of Dutchess County where the horses were better fed than the help. There, under the auspices of a nonprofit called the League for Spiritual Discovery—LSD, get it?—he hosted various illuminati (Allen Ginsberg hung out there) along with renegade academics and any guru who could shake his ashram. I didn’t merit an invitation to Leary’s lair, but I was useful enough for him to grant me an interview in town. Like many of my subjects, he couldn’t resist publicity.
I met him in the East Village, outside the theater where he was holding forth weekly at a “psychedelic celebration” called The Death of the Mind. It had something to do with everyone’s favorite incarnation of the Buddha, the young seeker Steppenwolf. It featured a light show by Leary’s associates, the same pair who had advertised themselves in the Voice as being available for psychedelic fashion shows, industrial shows, and bar mitzvahs. Everything fit together: enlightenment, entertainment, subsidiary rights.
As we walked up the street Leary greeted admirers among the passersby, his hands folded together, guru style. We popped into the Second Avenue Deli. It struck me an odd haunt for a man whose followers would probably regard everything on the menu as the product of a savage slaughter. But I could tell from his expertise in ordering pastrami that he knew his way around a mile-high sandwich dripping grease. This was another earthly delight for a man of big appetites, as was sex. From the way he cased out the room, I had the feeling that he would just as soon fuck a woman with one of the pickles in the briny bowl on the table as eat it. Lust was an acceptable lifestyle in the sixties, but the idea was to be casual about it. Leary had the lubricious air of a man who had come only lately to the sexual feast. He’d arrived at every pop spiritualist’s dream, a milieu where prophecy is a greater aphrodisiac than even power.
He had that floaty look. There was dried pigeon shit on his sweater. But he also radiated the sleek serenity of a yogi and the well-tanned face of a movie star. He’d come a long way since his days as a professor at Harvard, which had severed its connection with him, ostensibly because of his very public experiments with LSD. Listening to his rap, I concluded that the real reason was intellectual mediocrity. His spiel was a blend of ideas bobbing around in the cultural soup. I could hear chunks of Jim Morrison and Susan Sontag, along with New Age rhetoric via the New Left, in the quotable lines he flung at me. As in: “The police-state mentality always tries to repress sensual experience; it never works.” Or: “The average man has got to come to his senses.” There was no personal dimension to our conversation; he was as slick and mediagenic as any celebrity intellectual. Indeed, he was following the trail blazed by Marshall McLuhan, whom he admired, up to a point. “He knows about psychedelic art,” Leary said, “but he’s all external; he hasn’t seen the inside yet. It’ll be fascinating to see what happens when he finally takes LSD.” This was the way he divided up the world. There were those who sensed the truth and those who truly grasped it on acid. He might as well have been a Christian missionary bringing the light to pagans.
As for the media’s response to his preaching—the usual combo of fascination and feigned horror—he seemed to regard it as something of a miracle. “When you think of the history of new movements,” he said, “no country has ever been as tolerant as America of a force that’s going to wipe it out. In any other time or place we’d be in danger of our lives.” He’d already done a stint in jail as a “narcotics offender,” but prison was something many activists endured with far less attention than he got. He wasn’t political enough to be in real danger. I wanted to hurl that accusation at him, but, as usual, I saved my wrath for the article.
I think I reacted the way I did to Leary because his narcissism cor-responded to a part of me that I despised. But unlike me, he had no capacity for self-doubt, and without that it’s possible to believe in anything. There was a sweeping certitude to his ideas, and beneath it an even more offensive philistinism. He blithely explained that the theater had been taken over by careerist intellectuals. “Plays by Tennessee Williams, for instance, are the memoirs of a neurotic, not art. Art must involve the senses. All original drama is psychedelic. The theater, remember, was originally a religious experience. It all stems back to religious motives—someone with a vision turns other people on.” This was the same old shaman routine, much less attractively packaged than Morrison’s, but, then, Leary didn’t have an original thought in his head. His ability to think systematically had been undermined, not by drugs (there were plenty of smart acid-heads), but by fame. He was caught up in the vortex of the time, the conviction that his own impulses were more important than reasoning. I was quite familiar with these illusions, but I was only an expert on pop culture. He was an expert on the death of the mind.
Freed from the standards of scholarship, he dispensed pronouncements with no attempt to prove them. For example, he proffered LSD as a cure for homosexuality. I tried to imagine Allen Ginsberg dosed straight, or Tennessee Williams newly enlightened and rewriting Stanley Kowalski as a rock star with fire spurting from his headdress. I’m going on about this because it was so emblematic of the unraveling, the dance of expectation and ecstasy, the indifference to the consequences of our schemes. And there were consequences, believe me.
On acid the magic of infancy returns in HD. Colors prismatize, sounds resonate with overtones, the shapes and patterns that allow us to function become suggestive. Something like driving is impossible, at least on planet Earth. (I understood that very well, having survived a road trip with Dennis Wilson tripping at the wheel.) Having children, however, is something LSD does not impede, and lots of stoners did. Childhood had a special status in hippie culture. It was the state of innocent wonder to which everyone longed to return. I never knew anyone who fed their babies LSD, despite many rumors to that effect. It was commonly believed that the benefits of the drug came naturally to kids. They were vectors of love, and a great deal of affection was showered on them. These were not the cleanest girls and boys, but they were less unruly than you might think, considering that they ran around freely and were clearly the center of attention. I know a number of people—some quite famous now—who grew up in such households. They’ve got their resentments (what kid doesn’t), but they’re very close to their parents.
However, raising children requires skills that tripping is likely to suspend, such as keeping an eye on the little ones. That was a lesson Leary and his largely childless cohort didn’t think to teach, and this lapse led to some devastating incidents. One of them involved a three-year-old boy named Godo. He’d been described in Life magazine as “the most beautiful child in creation, with pure blond hair to his shoulders, pudgy little cheeks and blue eyes that are steady and make you want to weep.” In the photo that ran with this piece, Godo is posing with his father, Vito, an artist and dancer who was a star of the L.A. freak scene. Bohemians there have always attracted the wrong kind of attention—think beatnik movies set in Venice—and in 1966, Vito was a regular on the kind of TV show where the host berates his dissident guests. He was also a darling of skin mags with pretensions to interests higher than flesh. “A name that represents nonconformity, artistic freedom, originality,” one journal of ass and the arts gushed about him. “One of the most diversified sculptors the world has ever known.” (I don’t think any museum agreed.)
Godo was raised to expect the spotlight, and his exploits only added to his legend. It was said that if the police showed up at his parents’ place, a bead-curtained loft that looked a lot like the set of a beatnik movie, this magic child would answer the door. “Fuck off, cop,” he’d snarl, and the officers would leave. I believed those stories because I knew how indifferent most cops and city bureaucrats were to the lives of hippies. As a result, no one inspected Vito’s loft for safety hazards. At some point a trap door on the roof gave way, and Godo fell through.
A few months afterward, I was in L.A. to cover a hippie riot, something I regarded as inevitable, though I didn’t think it would happen on the Sunset Strip. I associated that boulevard with delta-wing diners and relentless glare. But its disposable identity made the Strip a perfect gathering place for kids—not the Laurel Canyon crowd, but flotsam from the endless suburbs, who looked like neon butterflies. They staked their claim to turf around a club called Pandora’s Box. By the time the police moved in to clear them, there were maybe a thousand longhairs hanging out on the pavement. The confrontation that followed wasn’t violent by the standards of, say, the Watts riot, but it was bloodier than anything these strays had seen. Night after night of protest followed. A song by Buffalo Springfield summed up the mood of darkening paranoia.
It starts when you’re always afraid
Step out of line, the man come and take you away.
Suddenly, the hippies were being lumped together with rampaging blacks in a city gripped by anxiety. It wasn’t just the fear that another race riot was imminent and that this time a dusky mob would surge out of the ghettos and torch West Hollywood. There were huge antiwar demos, one of which, along the Avenue of the Stars, had been broken up by club-swinging police, leaving hundreds injured. Maintaining order on the streets was an obsession. Long-haired loiterers were busted on a charge that had been used for vagrants strolling in pricey districts. It was called “suspicion.” (The courts would later deem it unconstitutional.) L.A. cops, in those days, were the closest America got to the spirit of a Leni Riefenstahl movie: leather-clad storm troopers on motorcycles, impassive behind wraparound shades. “Whip-dick” was their favorite word for hippies, and bashing these kids was a sport for them. No one in charge intervened.
During a lull in the protests I contacted Vito. He was eager to be interviewed, which struck me as odd, since I thought he’d want to be left alone with his grief. I showed up at his loft feeling like an intruder, but he didn’t look like he was in mourning. We Jews sit on crates for seven days after someone in the family dies, and we say the kaddish for eleven months. Vito was ebullient. He seemed more like a press agent than a bereaved parent, and he had a lot of Godo memorabilia to show me. Nothing was off-limits, not even his most painful recollection of the child. He told me about the last time he’d seen Godo, lying on a metal hospital table, strapped down and spread-eagled, a towel covering the hole in his head, his fists clenched. “Help me!” Godo cried. An hour later, he was dead.
Why was the child strapped down to a table; why wasn’t a tracheotomy performed; why was the trap door on the roof left to rust? These were plausible questions, but they came with delusions of persecution, as if some diabolic force had failed to treat Godo or fix the door. Vito saw himself as the victim of a fascist conspiracy to demonize the freaks by framing him. This rap went beyond the anguish of a parent dealing with guilt. I decided that he was one of those people—I’d run into many—whose identity hinges on playing to the media. He was already producing the next sensation, another magic child. That’s why he was so glad to see me; he wanted the world to know the auspicious news. His eyes shining, he pointed to his wife’s belly. “My baby is already dancing in her stomach,” he said with a delight that spoke of radical detachment from the tragedy in his midst. I was used to the rote optimism that passed for hippie style, but this went far beyond the usual buoyancy. It struck me as a perfect example of the attitude I saw all around me, a desperate clinging to joy in the face of looming chaos.
I worried about turning into Joan Didion, whose literary career consisted of compiling grotesque examples of the unraveling of reason, so that sensible readers could be horrified and amused by it all. I hated her perspective because it came from far above and outside the counterculture. She had the symptoms right, but not the causes. She saw the widening gyre, but not its axis. In order to understand why people behaved as they did you had to experience it on the ground, and that was where I drew my conclusions from.
Many kids around me thought we were entering a revolutionary situation. I agreed, up to a point. But it seemed to me that this was different from the insurrections of the past and the uprisings in what was then called the Third World. Our revolution was sparked by promo and hype as much as ideology. This combination had a huge influence on how people processed the circumstances around them. It heightened feelings of personal power and diminished the ability to make judgments that were urgent and necessary. It occurred to me that advertising had something in common with acid: they both distorted the relationship between impulse and reality, novelty and change. For hippies whose rebellion wasn’t grounded in concrete politics, this confusion was profound. Moving among them felt like being in the middle of a commercial for a future that would never exist outside of merchandising. Everything is beautiful in its own way. Banal ballads are actually wise. Life is transient and transferable. Of all the gauzy rock songs that were called progressive, the one that best captured the tenor of the late sixties didn’t appear until 1977. I can still recall its melancholy refrain: “All we are is dust in the wind.”
I didn’t believe that. We weren’t dust in the wind; we only had dust in our eyes. And yet … and yet. I couldn’t forget the kids I’d met in the Haight, the softness in their faces, unencumbered by the ambition that seethed within me; how deeply they moved me and how much I wanted to protect them. What would happen to these kids once the dust hit the fan?