Baby Boom
Page 15
“. . . 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 conside
red 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.
To flaming youth let virtue be as wax.
—William Shakespeare,
Hamlet
13
THE BABY BOOM’S
GARDEN OF EDEN—THANKS
FOR THE SNAKE
Were the sixties primarily a political phenomenon? Were the sixties primarily a cultural phenomenon? Were the sixties primarily a social phenomenon? Don’t ask us.
In the sixties the Baby Boom was the tailgate party, not the team on the field. There was a lot of “talkin’ ’bout my generation” (Pete Townshend, born 1945), but it wasn’t my generation that was causing “What’s Going On” (Marvin Gaye, born 1939) during the “Youthquake” (a coinage from Punch, edited by people born when mastodons roamed the earth). A birth year checklist tells the story.
Bob Dylan, 1941
John Lennon, 1940
Mick Jagger, 1943
Timothy Leary, 1920
Ken Kesey, 1935
R. Crumb, 1943
Peter Max, 1937
Bernardine Dohrn, 1942
Bill Ayers, 1944
Che Guevara, 1928
Malcolm X, 1925
Muhammad Ali, 1942
Abbie Hoffman, 1936
Jane Fonda, 1937
Gloria Steinem, 1934
Jimi Hendrix, 1942
Jerry Garcia, 1942
Chairman Mao, 1893
I guess to fully understand what it was like to be young in the 1960s you had to not be. The Silent Generation, as usual, was producing the loudest noise. The most influential sixties scene makers who were actually members of the Baby Boom were Donovan (1946) and Twiggy (1949).
We aren’t the generation of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, expanded consciousness, the New Left, Black Power, or Women’s Liberation. We’re the generation of the fanboy (Jann Wenner, 1946), Grand Funk Railroad (all born in the early 1950s), and Ben & Jerry (both born in 1951).
As their ice cream attests (go for the Butter Pecan, skip the Phish Food), the Baby Boom enjoys its luxuries. And what is more luxurious than knowing something wasn’t our fault? Especially something like the sixties.
It was a comic interlude—in a century that needed one. Not that we didn’t take being ridiculous seriously. That was part of the fun. You can goof off at work, but you can’t goof off at goofing off. Fun engages your attention.
“The personal is the political” was a fun idea. Not that we goof-offs used the phrase at the time, any more than we called ourselves “hippies” (Dirty Eddie excepted) or claimed that “What’s Going On” was a “Youthquake.” The personal/ political slogan came a little later, from the feminists, once they’d realized they should be pissed off about the sexual revolution (and everything else). But we got the idea. Politics was all about me.
We the Me of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Me, establish Just Me, insure domestic Tranquility (Diane had moved in with Me), provide for defense of Me (Uncle Mike had guns), promote going on Welfare (if it came to that for Me), and secure the Blessing of Liberty to Me and Abortion Rights for my Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for Me!
Jim Fisk’s Constitutional Law class had happily degenerated into an hour-long, three-times-a-week shouting match about the war in Vietnam. It is difficult, at this late date, to explain who was shouting at whom and about what.
The professor opposed the war in Vietnam and the students opposed the war in Vietnam except for one holdout coed whose fiancé was a marine lieutenant in Vietnam, and she was too cute to shout at. But, in politics as in life, once things get personal a lot of shouting ensues.
The professor, who’d once had something to do with Adlai Stevenson’s presidential campaign, possibly involving yard signs, believed in fighting communism by diplomatic engagement, addressing the individual aspirations of indigenous Marxist political movements, playing upon the contradictions and rivalries within the Sino-Soviet bloc. “You don’t understand,” he would shout. “Yugoslavia is the future!”
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The students believed the Vietcong hated LBJ almost as much as we did. Jack Hubert said the pot in Vietnam was amazing. And the Vietcong had that cool name, like with a fistful of Lyndon Johnson instead of Fay Wray and Huey helicopters instead of biplanes, hanging in there on top of a monument to greedy materialism. They were obviously the good guys, or would be the good guys, if they’d stop trying to kill the cute coed’s fiancé and he’d stop trying to kill them, war being wrong.
“War is wrong!” a pacifist student would shout at an activist student.
“Imperialism is wrong!” the activist student would shout back.
“Neocolonialism is wrong!” a leftist student would shout at both of them. “Amerika [the lefist students such as Jumbo were able to get the k in there verbally] is waging war on Vietnam [pronounced “Vietnahm” if you were against the war and “Viet Nam” if you were for it] to exploit Vietnamese natural resources!”
Which, nowadays, would have brought the shouting to a halt while somebody Googled to see if Vietnam has any. But Larry Page and Sergey Brin hadn’t invented Google yet. They’re a couple of those Generation X slackers who had to come up with Google because they lacked the Baby Boom gumption for a real shouting match, if you ask me. And you’ll note that Google never settles a Baby Boom shouting match anyway; it just causes a brief, smug pause.
“Natural resources like rice!” someone else would shout. “The company that owns Uncle Ben’s rice is part of the military-industrial complex like Dow Chemical that produces Saran Wrap and napalm!”
“Uncle Ben is a racist stereotype!”
“War is wrong because Saran Wrap exploits black people!”
“My fiancé is in Viet Nam!”
Jim said, “I had to raise my voice to a shout in Constitutional Law class to point out that the war is unconstitutional —Article I, section 8.”
When the bell rang everyone left to smoke pot, often at the professor’s house. Except for the cute coed. She went back to her sorority. Although they were starting to smoke pot there too.