Baby Boom

by P. J. O'Rourke

  Not that we got paid ourselves. When we were broke we would go downtown and stand on the sidewalk and sell the papers ourselves for 25 cents. It was surprising how many people would give Hairy Bob, who had large goggling eyes and was quite untidy, a quarter just because he was standing there yelling “Puddles!” Often they didn’t even take the paper. And then we would go to the Ebony Lounge.

  For a publication that included a lot of long bourgeois pig rants, Puddles was good-natured. We printed the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers comic strip by Gilbert Shelton on the front page. (And, Gilbert, if you’re still looking for the syndication fees, I live in, um, Auckland.) We ran personal ads that provided amusement. “Happening older dude seeking out-of-sight chick for blind date.” The doctor was funny in his “HIPpocratic Oath” column.

  Q. When I get really stoned I think there’s something large and horrible in the attic.

  A. Buy a hook and eye latch, attach it to the attic door, and make sure it’s fastened before you take drugs.

  After the police raided the Puddles office seeking small amounts of marijuana, Puddles ran a photograph of the office in a state of extreme mess, captioned, “Puddles office after police drug search.” Under which was the same photograph captioned, “Puddles office before police drug search.”

  When waterbeds came on the market in 1971 we conducted extensive testing. We conducted very extensive testing. It’s a wonder the second floor of the Puddles row house withstood our published findings. I doubt the contents of Combat were presented with as light a touch.

  Steverino Leary was something of a misfit at Puddles. This was a time when many Baby Boomers were eagerly pursuing the label of misfit, but some of us fitted into being misfits better than others. Steverino had creases in his bell-bottoms. And he was ahead of the 1970s curve with lime green and canary yellow shirts, some of which had ruffles. “My wife likes to iron,” he said. An alarming statement even before Gloria Steinem had published the first issue of Ms. We never saw his wife.

  Steverino spent nearly all his time at the Puddles office, mostly with the wanderers in and hangers around, mostly with the cute girl ones. He said pot gave him a headache; he liked beer better. (Secretly, so did I. Pot made me sensitively perceptive and, what with Karen and Windflower in the same house and the sixties in general, I was beginning to wonder if sensitively perceptive was a good thing.) He said he was a bitterly disillusioned Vietnam vet. Well, not Vietnam exactly. He’d been in the navy and stationed in the Philippines, but we could dig what he was saying. We’re a generation that sets great store by bitter disillusionment. Given our illusions, this has stood us in good stead. And Steverino wasn’t quite as broke as the rest of us—“military disability”—and he had a camera and knew how to develop film.

  Also Steverino had helped Hairy Bob and Skinny Bob and me harbor a fugitive on the run, Larry I’m-Not-Telling-You-My-Real-Name, as he called himself. He was not on the run from the law. Real Name Larry, as we called him, was on the run from the Weathermen or the Weather Underground or whatever they were calling themselves at the moment. The moment being a couple days after March 6, 1970, when members of the New York Weathermen cell had blown themselves up while trying to make a bomb in the basement of a rich-girl cell member’s parents’ house on West Eleventh Street in Greenwich Village. It was what bomb squads refer to as a “self-criticizing exercise.”

  “Those motherfucking crazy motherfuckers are fucking crazy,” said Real Name Larry. “They used to have ‘ideological struggle,’ which meant you sit around in a circle and everybody screams at each other, but now they’ve formed ‘cells’ and gone ‘underground,’ which means in some rich-girl cell member’s parents’ house when the parents are in Bermuda, and they lock themselves in the house and spend twenty hours a day ‘struggling’ about ‘armed struggle’ and ‘white skin privilege.’”

  I had never heard so many internal quotation marks in a single sentence and wouldn’t again until irony flourished and air quotes bloomed.

  “And,” said Real Name Larry, “monogamy and fascio-hetro-sexualism have been abolished. Everybody’s supposed to fuck everybody. Yuck.”

  I also had never heard those last two sentiments expressed in conjunction. They would prove prescient later in the newly fledged decade.

  Real Name Larry had become interested in ideological struggle when he was a student at the University of ­Michigan at Flint. If you’ve ever been to Flint, you’ll realize that almost anything that doesn’t have to do with Flint can seem interesting there. We’d hidden him in the attic (hook and eye latch on the inside of the door). It took him three weeks to get up the nerve to go home and live with his mother.

  Several months after Real Name Larry left we had an ideological struggle of our own. The Puddles office was invaded by a group of local radicals who called themselves the Balto-Cong. It’s the one name of any consequence that I haven’t changed in this book. How could it be improved?

  The Balto-Cong believed in armed struggle and white skin privilege—that is to say they didn’t believe in white skin privilege—and apparently we did or, in the matter of armed struggle, didn’t. They came through the front door one evening waving sticks and fists and saying they were “liberating” the Puddles capitalist rip-off newspaper in the name of “The People.”

  Steverino was off somewhere, maybe with one of the cute girl wanderers in. Hairy Bob and Skinny Bob and Karen and Windflower and I were there. We tried to explain that the Puddles capitalist rip-off newspaper consisted, at that point, of a $3,000 debt owed to Hairy Bob’s parents, $4,500 in unpaid printing bills, a house where the rent was three months overdue, and a couple of typewriters. Frankly, The People were welcome to it.

  Instead we were held at stick- and fistpoint and subjected to consciousness raising. Consciousness raising is different from ideological struggle in that during ideological struggle you sit around in a circle and everybody screams at each other while during consciousness raising you sit in the middle of a circle and everybody screams at you. It resembles a certain kind of family gathering when you were a kid, if you were a certain kind of kid.

  There were fifteen or eighteen Balto-Cong. Hairy Bob’s eyes goggled and he did quite a bit of screaming back, as did Karen. The consciousness raising showed every sign of going on all night and might have done so if two of The People, who lived down the block, hadn’t wandered in and scared the Balto-Cong away.

  These were Philip and Levon, two good-sized young men sporting the currently fashionable leather-coat Huey P. Newton look. They were honor students at the local high school and often came to the Puddles office in hope that we would publish their poetry. And, after that evening, I’m glad to say we did.

  “What the heck’s going on here?” said Philip, the larger of the two. And the whole Balto-Cong contingent headed for the door.

  Windflower, however, went with them. Her consciousness had been raised.

  I have been told that, the next day, I went around the office banging my fist on things and yelling, “Spiro Agnew was right!”

  The Balto-Cong could come back. We decided that somebody should be standing guard every night at the Puddles office. We didn’t know anybody who got up before noon so we didn’t worry about somebody standing guard all day. We stood guard faithfully for a week until we began to forget to. At the end of that week Steverino and I were standing guard although not very well because Steverino had brought a six-pack and we forgot to lock the front door.

  For the purpose of standing guard, Steverino had his service automatic, which he’d tucked in the waistband of his creased bell-bottom pants between the ruffles of his canary yellow shirt. I had a .22 pistol, a gift from Uncle Mike. My pistol was in the drawer of the Puddles office front desk where Karen, when she felt like it, sat and asked people who wandered in or were hanging around if they had any articles or artwork that they wanted to not g
et paid for.

  We had just come back from looking in the refrigerator to double-check that the six-pack was gone. Steverino was leaning against a wall and I was standing behind the desk and the front door banged open.

  The Balto-Cong had come back. There were fifteen or eighteen of them again, quite a crowd in our modest entryway. Steverino reached for his automatic, but in his alarm, and with some hindrance from ruffles, he shoved the gun down his trousers. I rushed to the desk, opened the desk drawer, stuck my hand inside, and grabbed the pistol. However, in my rush to the desk I had rushed right up against it, and once I had my hand around the pistol I couldn’t get my hand out of the desk drawer because I couldn’t open the desk drawer because my thigh was in the way.

  Steverino thrust his hand into the front of his pants in search of the automatic. My gun and hand were stuck in the drawer. Steverino fumbled in his pants. I banged the gun around in the desk. The Balto-Cong were confronted by somebody wildly groping himself and somebody else whose arm was apparently being eaten by a desk drawer. It gave them pause.

  I was thinking quick: “If I can’t get the gun out of the drawer because I can’t get the drawer open because my thigh is in the way, I’ll slip the safety off, cock the hammer, and shoot through the desk.” Just as I’d formed this plan the Balto-Cong crowd parted and there was Windflower.

  Windflower seemed oblivious to Steverino and me but, then again, Windflower generally did seem oblivious. She announced, “I left my steam iron and my ironing board here.”

  As I said, the sixties produced various enigmas. What was Windflower, who wore nothing, and I mean nothing at all, but tie-dyed muumuus, doing with a steam iron and an ironing board? If Windflower was ironing her hair she was doing it about as well as I would my button-down dress shirts when I finally got a coat and tie and was a bachelor. And what did this have to do with Steverino’s wife who liked to iron? There were no coincidences in the sixties. “Far out,” I probably said. The Balto-Cong seemed to regard the situation as far out themselves. They hesitated by the front door.

  Windflower marched upstairs. She marched back downstairs with an ironing board under her right arm and a Sunbeam steam iron in her left hand. Steverino gave up the search for the automatic. I uncocked the .22.

  It’s the only time I’ve ever pointed a gun at anyone. It looks better in the movies.

  The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon . . . and, at length, the middle-aged man concludes to build a woodshed with them.

  —Henry David Thoreau

  16

  REAL LIFE

  Adulthood, however, pursues the most evasive grown-up. I got a job. I consulted the want ads. There wasn’t anything under “incomprehensible poets” and no one was looking to hire bourgeois pig ranters. I got a job as a messenger. This was before the era of bicycle messengers, with their distinctive glamour. I took the bus. Occasionally I received a smile from a pretty receptionist until she realized what my occupation was.

  I made $75 a week. Payday came every two weeks. I’d moved out of the Puddles office a couple of months before. I was looking forward to the $150 and so was my landlord. When I got my paycheck I found that I netted $82.27 after federal income tax, state income tax, city income tax, Social Security, union dues, and pension fund contribution.

  I was a communist. I had protested for communism. I had demonstrated for communism. I had rioted for communism. Then I got a capitalist job and found out we had communism already.

  I had long ago smashed up my motorcycle. While I was sprawled in the street, two cops in a patrol car stopped, called an ambulance, and hunched over me, trying to see how unconscious I’d been knocked. One cop asked, “Do you know your name? What year is it? Who’s the president of the United States?”

  I said, “Johnson, Nixon, one of those sons of bitches.”

  “Oh, he’s okay,” said the other cop.

  Steverino Leary turned out to be a cop. Three protesters went on trial for smashing the windows in city hall and beaning a traffic policeman during a demonstration in favor of peace in Vietnam. Skinny Bob was covering—he was fond of using newspaper reporter words—the trial for Puddles. As evidence, the prosecutor presented the jury with several glossy photographs of the three protesters smashing the windows in city hall and beaning a traffic policeman.

  Steverino had taken the photographs. Skinny Bob knew this because he and Hairy Bob and I had looked at the photographs Steverino took at the demonstration and had decided that several of them, involving smashing windows and beaning a traffic policeman, did not show peace protesters in their best light. We tore up the photos and flushed them down the toilet at the Puddles office, a prolonged process. The toilet always clogged.

  Only one person could have developed a second set of those photographs. Meanwhile, this one person and Hairy Bob were on a road trip to a pop festival in Atlanta that was almost as successful (Richie Havens played) as Woodstock. Midway to Atlanta Steverino confessed to his best friend that he was a plainclothes Baltimore police officer, working undercover at the Puddles office.

  Maybe my reaction would have been, “You call those ruffles plainclothes?”

  Or maybe, “In that case, when you finally fished the automatic out of the cuff of your bell-bottoms, why didn’t you shoot some goddamn Balto-Cong?”

  Or maybe not. I was still young.

  Hairy Bob’s reaction was bitter disillusionment. He made Steverino stop the car. Hairy Bob got out and hitchhiked home.

  Skinny Bob got back to the Puddles office about an hour after Hairy Bob did. Skinny Bob was in tumult about his scoop. Hairy Bob was in tears about his friend.

  Hairy Bob blubbered, “Steverino is a cop!”

  “Steverino is a cop!” Skinny Bob exclaimed.

  It turned out okay. We’re a generation that doesn’t appreciate consequences. And we appreciated consequences even less after the Vietnam War, which had 47,415 of them in combat, not counting 153,303 wounded. At the end of the 1970s there was a catchphrase, “Don’t sweat the small stuff . . . And it’s all small stuff,” always spoken more in hope than expectation. (Richard Carlson, the Baby Boomer psychotherapist who turned the catchphrase into a best seller in 1997, died while on book tour, the consequence of a pulmonary embolism.)

  Steverino really did consider Hairy Bob to be his best friend. When it came time for him to testify at the protesters’ trial he claimed he couldn’t identify them because “my view was blocked by the camera.” The protesters got off. The beaned traffic policeman recovered.

  A year later Hairy Bob ran into Steverino at the Ebony Lounge. Hairy Bob refused Steverino’s offer to buy him a beer. Twice. I wasn’t there so I don’t know exactly how the conversation went. Steverino bought Hairy Bob a beer on the third try.

  Hairy Bob said that Steverino wasn’t a bitterly disillusioned Vietnam vet. He joined the police force to avoid being drafted. They assigned him to go undercover because he owned bell-bottom pants. He was supposed to infiltrate Puddles and spy on dangerous radicals, but we weren’t ones, and he liked us, and we became his friends, and it was a great way to meet cute hippie girls. His wife did like to iron. And he had refused to testify against the peace protesters.

  “Steverino is back in uniform,” Hairy Bob said, “riding in a patrol car.”

  Which, now that year-round mugging by heroin addicts was replacing summer riots, the city could use some more of, as far as I was concerned.

  “What about spying on the goddamned Balto-Cong?” I asked.

  “Steverino said the only dangerous radical thing they ever did was take over the Puddles office.”

  The political, cultural, and social phenomena of the sixties became a thin film spreading to everywhere in the 1970s, a shiny, multicolored iridescence that was beautiful to behold in a certain light. Like the slick from
the Torrey Canyon oil spill. Call us a superficial and slippery generation if you will, but Pliny the Elder, Plutarch, the Venerable Bede, and Benjamin Franklin all make positive mention of “pouring oil on troubled waters.” Nonetheless some cleaning up was required.

  Hairy Bob, heedless of my grandmother, became a Democrat. Others of us became otherwise. Some got the memo late. Real Name Larry’s motherfucking crazy motherfucker Weathermen went on bombing things—U.S. Capitol men’s room, Pentagon women’s room, various other rooms in government offices, police precincts, and corporate headquarters. Not many innocent lives were lost. Intentionally, it is claimed. Inexpertly, it is suspected.

  I happened to be in, or at, one of the worst of the 1970s bombings, on December 29, 1975, at LaGuardia Airport. I don’t think the Weathermen did it. I don’t think anyone has ever figured out who did it, but it was somebody who thought he was such a big ideological left-winger, I’ll bet. Karen had returned to Ohio. I was flying to Cleveland to see her. For once she wasn’t right there when things were going to hell, if you don’t count what happened to Cleveland in the 1970s.

  A bomb equivalent in size to twenty-five sticks of Uncle Mike’s hayfield dynamite went off on the arrivals level. Pieces of bodies were strewn across LaGuardia’s lower roadway. It is the opinion of the Baby Boom that no other generation has ever felt the horror of strewn pieces of bodies as acutely as the Baby Boom. I got letters from Joe Brody, when he was still in Vietnam, about leading his platoon into Vietnamese villages that had been bombed. He expressed the same opinion about the callous nature (“asshole shithead fuckwads” was the way he put it) of his senior officers.

  I was upstairs on the departures level when the bomb went off. I was in the concourse bar and had just ordered a drink from the bartender, a guy about my age wearing a gunfighter mustache. There was an immense shock and crash. We didn’t know if was a bomb or if an airplane had crashed into the terminal, but some terrible event had taken place. We Baby Boomers are sensitive to these things. “Make that a double?” said the bartender.