What is love? ’tis not hereafter;
Present mirth hath present laughter;
What’s to come is still unsure:
In delay there lies no plenty;
Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty,
Youth’s a stuff will not endure.
—William Shakespeare,
Twelfth Night
ERA OF GOOD FEELINGS
If the sixties were the wild times we insist they were, we should have better stories. I blame it on drugs. When you drink beer a lot of things happen in the world. When you take drugs a lot of things happen in your head. Although sometimes the world and your head get mixed together. Once when I’d taken LSD I became convinced that Big Green’s stairwell was the inside of an evil giant eel. If I went upstairs I’d be chewed by giant eel teeth. If I went downstairs I’d be eel shit. You spend a lot of your wild times just sitting there when you take drugs.
Dirty Eddie took drugs all the time. Not that he was inert. Sometimes he was busily to and fro in the world in a stoned way. He found a discarded floor-model console radio and somehow wrestled it back to Big Green and upstairs to his room. Plugged in, the radio received no broadcasts, but it’s large, round dial lit up and its vacuum tubes produced a low hum.
The hum was, said Eddie, “Om, the cosmic sound of God.” Eddie was a Hindu at the moment. He painted his room in saffron and red horizontal stripes. “Saffron,” he said to anyone who would listen, “is the Vedic symbol of asceticism, and red is the Vedic symbol of sensuality.” These wouldn’t seem to go together, and they didn’t because the two cans of paint that Eddie found on the discount table at the hardware store were icky yellow and dark pink.
Eddie painted the stripes freehand, beginning with the floorboards and going around the room over the woodwork, doors, light fixtures, window frames, window glass, curtains, and shades as high as he could reach, which left an additional stripe of flowered wallpaper visible beneath the crown moldings. The ultraviolet black light effects, the Day-Glo posters, and the lava lamps that people claim to remember from the 1960s would have been, comparatively, in restrained good taste.
Eddie also found, or purloined, a dozen metal folding chairs and arranged these facing the radio in what he called the “Om Theater.” He sat in the front row, cross-legged on one of the chairs, hands templed at his sternum, humming along with the Philco. Nobody joined him. Dirty Eddie took to spending so much time in the Om Theater that the rest of us at Big Green forgot he was there.
Uncle Mike’s room was next to Dirty Eddie’s. Uncle Mike—so called for his avuncular way when urging others to use intoxicants and firearms—took drugs too. But he drank beer more often, especially when something was wrong with the world such as the Kaluza-Klein theory of five-dimensional cubes, President Johnson’s proposed Gun Control Act, Vatican II, or a girl.
One day something was very wrong with the world. Uncle Mike returned from a long evening at the Final Exam, locked himself in his room, and expressed his Weltschmerz (or Welt-Schlitz, as it were) by firing a pistol into a wall about fifty times.
My girlfriend and I were downstairs and didn’t pay much attention. It was a small-caliber pistol, and Uncle Mike had expressed himself before. We heard Uncle Mike unlock his door and walk, rather heavily, down the hallway toward the bathroom. Then there was a pause followed by screaming.
We ran upstairs. Dirty Eddie was lying on the pink and yellow floor in a tangle of chair legs.
“I killed him! I killed him! I killed him!” screamed Uncle Mike.
“I’m dead! I’m dead! I’m dead!” screamed Dirty Eddie.
“I shot through the wall and the bullets hit him!” screamed Uncle Mike.
“He shot through the wall and the bullets hit me!” screamed Dirty Eddie.
My girlfriend turned on the ceiling light. Eddie hadn’t been able to get to it with his paintbrush. There didn’t seem to be any blood on Dirty Eddie, although, what with the paint splatters all over his clothes, it was hard to tell.
I looked at the wall in Eddie’s room. There were no bullet holes. I looked at the wall in Mike’s room. There were plenty of bullet holes.
A weeping Uncle Mike was kneeling over a prostrate Dirty Eddie.
“I killed him!”
“I’m dead!”
“I killed him!”
“I’m dead!”
“Uncle Mike,” I said, “the wall in Eddie’s room doesn’t have any bullet holes in it.”
“Of course it doesn’t,” my girlfriend said. “Uncle Mike’s closet is in between.”
When Uncle Mike went to Mass on Sunday he could wiggle his fingers through the punctures in his suit coat pockets.
Of course this girlfriend at Big Green, Diane, was not the same girlfriend as the girlfriend in high school, Karen. We understand ourselves as an existential generation, creatures of here and now. Karen had an existential problem. She wasn’t here now. Not that I didn’t still love Karen, in the sixties sense of love, meaning fuck.
Once the Baby Boom had decided war was wrong and prejudice, poverty, and injustice should be eliminated and had gone to college, we began to understand ourselves as a noble generation. We had a right—droit du seigneur—to have sex and—noblesse oblige—an obligation to. Rights must be exercised in order to be preserved. We got a lot of exercise.
Diane was everything I desired. She laughed at my stories about how Al Bartz had commandeered the West Side High PA system. When Leo Luhan came for a visit from Big State she didn’t make fun of him for falling down the trap door into the crawl space because he was wearing sunglasses indoors. She had—evidence indicated—fantasized about having sex with someone less tall and handsome than the boys on The Old School Cheer patio. In every imaginable position. She knew a dozen. If the sculptures she produced in Art class were anything to go by, she may have harbored a secret fondness for customizing plastic model cars.
Diane is my rod and my staff. We’ve been through the shadowed valleys, green pastures, and still waters. And the grandchildren are adorable. On another planet. In some different dimension. Out along one of those infinite tangents of choice that spun away in every direction from the perfect circle of the Baby Boom self.
I blame it on drugs. I don’t blame drugs for what I did to Diane. I blame drugs for the other planet, the different dimension, and all the tangents the Baby Boom went off on. (And our spacey inclinations may explain why the Baby Boom wasn’t as impressed with the 1969 moon landing as we should have been. “Moon?” we thought. “Everyone’s gone to the moon.”)
We weren’t the first generation to fly around the room under the influence of pixie dust, act like fools with girls who called themselves “Tinker Bell” and “Tiger Lily,” battle an imagined villain such as Hook—be he captain of pirate ship, industry, police force, or army—and string Wendy along for years while she yearned for a home and children of her own. But we were the generation that did it best.
Either we blame it on drugs or we blame it on ourselves. And let’s not be silly.
For the middle-class, middle-America, middlingly hip Baby Boom, drugs arrived at the end of 1966. On Christmas break Jim Fisk, Tim Minsky, Ana Klein, Leo Luhan, and Al Bartz were in the finished basement at my house. We had a wooden matchbox completely full of pot. Joe Brody, as resident mischief maker, rightly should have been the one who “scored.” Or Tim Minsky, home from with-it Yale. But it was premed Al Bartz.
“Organic Chem grad student,” he said knowingly. Joe, however, figured out how to use the rolling papers.
Ana said, “All of existence is a dance.”
“. . . a pardon, a parole,” said Joe.
“. . . a lesson in organic chemistry,” said Al.
“. . . a proof of Fermat’s theorem,” said Tim. (And a Baby Boom mathematician would prove it, though not Tim Minsky.)
“. . . a vindication of the rights of man,” said Jim.
“Oh, wow,” said Leo.
I said, “John Milton smoked pot,” and got out my Norton Anthology of English Literature to prove it.
And Joy shall overtake us as a flood;
When everything that is sincerely good
And perfectly divine,
With Truth, and Peace, and Love, shall ever shine . . .
Then, all this earthy grossness quit,
Attired with stars we shall for ever sit,
Triumphing over Death, and Chance, and thee, O Time!
We’d lost track of time. My mother came back from her bridge game, ran to the cellar door, and yelled, “I think something’s on fire down there!”
Did drugs give the Baby Boom its taste for big ideas? More than enough big ideas were going around already in the sixties. Of the many big ideas I had on drugs, I can remember one. I had a sudden insight that there was a whole world outside me and a whole world inside me, and the outer world was no larger or more important than the inner world, but the inner world hadn’t been explored, and society was telling me I could sail off the edge of it. So I took the Nina, the Pinta, the Santa Maria and some more LSD.
“I contain multitudes.” Walt Whitman probably did take drugs, judging by the way his poetry scans. The word epiphany and the word fantasy have the same root in the Greek phainein, “to show.” Psychedelic drugs put on quite a show.
Over the years I’ve asked old friends what effect drug taking had on the Baby Boom. When he got his first job selling boats, Billy Stumf said, “It’s a great sales tool. I mean, for understanding the way customers think. I mean, you really don’t know how stupid people are if you haven’t taken drugs.”
Back when we were still taking a lot of drugs, besides Lipitor, Jumbo said, “Drugs are the opiate of the masses.” And added, “I’m a mass movement kind of guy.”
Uncle Mike, who’s been on the wagon since 1982, said, “It was just part of the fun. We were issued a lifetime supply of fun in the sixties. Although I went through mine pretty quick.”
Tim Minsky said, “Drugs taught a generation of Americans the metric system.” And who indeed knew what a kilo or a gram was before pot and coke began arriving in those quantities?
Jim Fisk said, “Drugs helped me with parenting by showing me how to lie to my children. I used to tell little lies. ‘Oh, that old picture of Daddy with his hair all over the place? I was in a band. We played at folk Masses.’ Then the kids got old enough to start asking about drugs. I realized I had to go big or go bust. ‘I never took drugs. We thought drugs were really bad when I was at college. Drugs make people do embarrassing things and then the rush committee won’t let you pledge Tappa Kegga Brew even though you’re a legacy through Grandpa.’”
Jim is a writer. “Jim,” I said, “you’re a writer. You’ve written about taking drugs.”
“Fortunately,” he said, “the only people you can count on to never read anything you’ve written are your children.” I’m counting on it myself.
Joe Brody said, “Drugs are a one-man birthday party. You don’t get any presents you don’t bring.”
Al Bartz said drugs were a lesson in organic chemistry. “The brain is an organic chemistry factory. Baby Boomers with psychiatric problems know something’s wrong with their brain chemistry. When I prescribe drugs for depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, or whatever, all my patients born before 1946 ask when they can get off drugs. All my patients born after 1946 ask when they can get more.”
Leo Luhan said, “Oh, wow.”
And Ana Klein said she couldn’t make up her mind about the effect of drug taking on the Baby Boom. She wasn’t sure whether it was a good thing or a bad thing, although drugs had put several boyfriends and two husbands out of the picture, and she wasn’t sure whether that was a good thing or a bad thing either.
The sexual revolution was a bad thing. Imagine if what happened with sex and women in the sixties happened with golf and men in their sixties.
The Club is a wonderful place, with great facilities and a fabulous course. You’d always had a standing invitation to play there. But Club membership was restricted. No matter how often you’d been to Club events, and no matter how willingly you’d helped out with buffet suppers, table decorations, and cleaning up after the party, you couldn’t join on your own.
Suddenly, you’re a member. But it turns out you’re expected to mow the fairways and tend the greens yourself and do all the Club’s cooking and cleaning too. You not only get to play, you have to play. You’re required to be in every foursome. (Well, let’s not exaggerate—every twosome.) And abortion isn’t legal yet, so no mulligans. (No cheap jokes about Hole-in-One tournaments either.)
We never thought of our 1960s sexual excursions as causing us to lose our bearings in our 1960s political movements or make detours in our 1960s spiritual journeys. We must have had quite a map. (And not for nothing was the word trip overused in the sixties.)
Beginning our mystical jaunt, we carried very little luggage. The only religious idea that any of us seemed to remember from going through the motions and maintaining the forms at Sunday school was a phrase of the Apostle John’s from a part of the New Testament that even Johnny MacKay hadn’t had to read. The First Epistle General of John, chapter 4, verse 8: “God is love.” Oddly, the Jewish kids seemed to remember it too, which says something about the well-intentioned homogeneity of 1950s American culture, although I don’t know what it says, because not long after we learned God is love we learned love in the sixties sense.
These things I command you, that ye fuck one another. Thou shalt fuck thy neighbor as thyself. Better is a dinner of herbs where a fuck is, than a stalled ox back home with your parents. Greater love hath no woman than this, that a woman lay down with everybody. So faith, hope, and love abide, but the greatest of these is a blow job. For God so fucked the world . . .
We are a unitary generation, determined that the physical, the metaphysical, and the intellectual be brought together, not to say get all mixed up. We recognize no separation of minds, spirits, and bodies. Especially bodies. Or we didn’t until Baby Boom feminists read the riot act to Baby Boom chauvinists during the divorce. After that only one body occupied the physical house and the bank account became metaphysical because the intellectual lawyer had to be paid.
But forty-some years ago the Baby Boom could be observed in its unadulterated (a pun on adultery is lurking in there) state—trying to get to all the places no one had ever been before and hoping to get enlightened, stoned, and laid in all those places at the same time. “Dear Mom and Dad, I’m trying to find myself. I think I might be in San Francisco. Please send airfare.”
Of course this is a sweeping generalization about the Baby Boom. More than enough sweeping generalizations are going around already in this book. A unitary generation we may have been. A unified generation we weren’t. Many Baby Boomers were almost normal. Sometimes, in moments of doubt, one wonders if there’s really such a thing as a Baby Boom generation at all. For example, everything I have to say about the sixties Baby Boom is what, in deductive logic, is called “fallacy of the undistributed middle term.” To put it into a syllogism:
Major proposition: In 1967 everyone between the age of 21 and the age of 3 was a member of the Baby Boom.
Minor proposition: I was nuts.
Conclusion: What a generation!
Or, using inductive logic, I’m thinking about the six of us who grew up at the same end of the block: Billy and Bobby Stumf, Johnny MacKay, Steve Penske, Jerry Harris, and me. We were a pretty good statistical sample, being randomly acquainted in a random city in that random state Ohio. We were a socioeconomic cross section. We weren’t really. But in those days everybody who wasn’t considered normal was considered abnormal. Being black and poor and other things meant you were a “statistical outlier.” And, in fact, we were an economic cross section of a kind. Suburbia had not begun its meritocratic sorting of educated elites from people who lift things. David Brooks wasn’t born yet.
Susie Inwood’s dad was a postman. Mr. Biedermeyer was assistant superintendant of schools. Mr. Stumf sold (strangely or aptly, considering how he’d risked his life in World War II and Korea) life insurance. My dad sold cars. Mr. MacKay owned a printing company. Mr. Penske was a telephone lineman. Mr. Harris managed the produce department at a grocery store.
The six of us were all boys, which leaves out half of the Baby Boom. But that was the sixties for you. See sexual revolution above.
Steve Penske died young. He accidentally drowned while fishing. Dying young was a very sixties thing to do. But while fishing? Johnny MacKay stayed born-again and not because of cancer, jail, or a 12-step program (or those wet baptismal gowns) but because he believed what he’d been taught, which is never a sufficient excuse with our generation. Jerry Harris didn’t go to West Side High. He went to Central Tech. He never attended college. And he learned a trade. Thus there is no part for him to play in the sixties Baby Boom narrative—François Villon escaping the gallows to be an apprentice plumber. Bobby Stumf volunteered for Vietnam, returned to our hometown, and became a policeman. That leaves me and Billy Stumf, who was selling boats the last I heard. And I’ve lost touch with Billy.
But who wants logic? Being logical would have wrecked the sixties. The sixties were so creative. Being logical wrecks every form of creativity. Hamlet lets it slide. Lady Macbeth says, “Oh, listen to you, big Thane of Cawdor. Enough already with the social climbing.” Iago talks trash about Desdemona, TLC makes a reality TV show about it, everybody gets paid a fortune, and Othello becomes a spokesperson for a national campaign against family violence.
Anyway, sweeping generalizations about 1960s sexual excursions, political movements, and spiritual journeys are all right. It’s not as if we got very far on most of our trips.
We were thrown out of Big Green because the owner was, quite rightly, tearing the place down. Also, we hadn’t paid the rent. Jumbo found us a farmhouse for $125 a month. “The guerrilla must move among the peasants as a fish swims in the sea,” Jumbo said, quoting Chairman Mao. Not that Jumbo went outdoors much. And the peasants were Republican.
Uncle Mike got ahold of some dynamite. In those days you could buy dynamite and fuses and blasting caps at the feed and grain store, for blowing up stumps. We didn’t have a stump, but Uncle Mike thought that just the blowing up part would be a trip.
We were stoned. We’d been sitting on the front porch all afternoon smoking hashish until the world had slowed to a crawl. Uncle Mike seemed to take forever inserting the blasting cap into the stick of dynamite and the fuse into the blasting cap. Finally he had the cap crimped and his Zippo ready, and he began to walk out into the hayfield the farmhouse had instead of a yard. He walked and he walked. And he walked and walked and walked. At last, far, far away, he put the dynamite down in the grass. There was a slow stoop and a long pause and a brilliant little spark visible in the extreme distance as he lit the fuse. Then Mike began to run back to the house. He ran and ran. He kept running. He seemed to be taking forever to run. And just as he put his foot on the porch step the dynamite exploded.
There was an immense shower of plants and dirt. Uncle Mike was driven into Jumbo and both went through the screen in the screen door. Diane was sitting on the porch swing and was propelled back over the railing and almost dumped in the forsythia. The hash pipe was pushed out of Dirty Eddie’s teeth and into his face leaving a blister on the end of his nose. Several windows were broken. Some shingles were blown off the porch roof. Uncle Mike had planted the dynamite five feet from the house.