How I Accidentally Started the Sixties

by Howard Bloom

  But there was more. More that the book dared not mention. Van Leeuwenhoek’s most courageous move in the “look at things right under your nose” department was this: he looked at human sperm under the lens and discovered that it, too, was a puddle of animalcules. Then he wrote about that fact to the Royal Society in London, the brand new Vatican of science. Where do you suspect that van Leeuwenhoek got fresh sperm? Yes, he had the courage to confess an act of masturbation. To the Royal Society. That takes balls. For more reasons than one.

  Masturbation would also play a role in my future, thanks to the Boy Scouts of America. Yes, all of them. But that’s a topic for later.

  The two rules of science hit me to the quick. They roiled, churned, and glowed in me like the lava in a seventy-pound volcano. They became my religion. And they gave me something I’d never had, playmates. My new companions were men of science who could not send sentries down the driveway or pick up their bats and balls and go someplace else. Why was this gang of playmates—the great scientists of history—unlikely to reject me? Because most of its members were dead. They no longer had the energy to shoo me away.

  So I read every adult science fiction book at the local library (they weren’t supposed to let anyone under eighteen touch ’em, but the librarians took pity on me). After my first year reading two books a day, I was older and wiser and eleven, so I realized that no saucer people were likely to rescue me from life on Lake Erie. But the books were addictive. Men and women frequently engaged in something that hinted at sex. Not that I knew what sex was. But sometimes your hormones understand things that your brain has not yet figured out. What’s more, the sci-fi protagonists did this mysteriously exciting unknown act on strange planets that were nothing like the town where I’d been beaten up by my peers since the age of four. And on top of that, the books taught you about neat stuff like the Doppler Shift, this fetching little dress that Christian Doppler wore during his night life in the beerhalls of Prague. No, I’m kidding. The Doppler Shift is a blush in the color of light from distant stars. Apparently, some astral bodies embarrass easily.

  I soon moved on to real science, along with a few things like the Federalist Papers tossed in for good measure. This meant that I read books under the desk at school, never paid attention to my teachers, and had no idea of what a gerund was, or of the difference between Kansas, Katmandu, and canned asparagus. In other words, I was doing abysmally in school, but my parents had read Doctor Spock’s Baby and Child Care, the hot parenting book of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Spock, a real honest-to-goodness medical doctor, did not have pointy ears and flit through the skies on the starship Enterprise. That Spock would not be invented for another thirteen years. Spock (I’ll leave you to figure out which one) advised that you never hang your offspring from the rafters in the attic by their pinkies. And he sternly warned that you should avoid drawing and quartering your children, even with pen, ink, and sharpened coins. Even if you had a spare kid in reserve. So my mom and dad let me get away with this in-class form of truancy. I mean, how could my dad, who had flat out exited the school building altogether, complain?

  Meanwhile, my teachers liked me almost as much as my peers did. My hand-eye coordination was a sight to behold. In first grade, where you do a lot of writing, drawing and filling in workbook quizzes, I was the last one to finish every single classroom assignment. There was one exception: the day I finished second-last. The teacher was so startled that she gave me a gold star. For real.

  With my best interests at heart, the concerned pedagogue called in my mother and explained that I was mentally retarded. So my mother took me off to a specialist for psychological testing. What this sage concluded, my mother has never confessed. But, apparently, he felt the corned beef hash that God had dumped into my cranium contained the appropriate proportions of meat and potatoes, because I was not exiled to an institution for children who drool.

  My popularity among peddlers of learning grew as the years went by. My mother recently presented me with a gift-wrapped box of memorabilia in which she’d kept all of my grammar school report cards. Why she preserved them, Lord alone knows. Each document contains the exasperated rantings of some teacher who obviously could not tolerate having me in her class. After all, teachers are humans like you and me. They are starved for attention. And I was so epoxied to my books that I failed to give them even a glance.

  But these little incidents, along with the fact that my parents were constantly at each others’ throats, may help explain why I was forced to defend myself by seeking solitary confinement in my bedroom as the chief carbon dioxide generator in a micro-environment of small mammals, fish, and lizards. It may also explain why the summer camp kidnap didn’t work.

  THE SUMMER CAMP KIDNAP—

  AND HOW IT BACKFIRED

  My parents weren’t entirely pleased to have the front corner bedroom taken over by a child from another planet. Not only that, they were somewhat disconcerted that in a house kept so neat that no one was even allowed to sit on the couch but guests, this visitant from God-knows-what-slum in the solar system was turning 1,800 cubic feet of bedroom decor designed to make the bridge club die with envy into a cross between a biology lab, a miniature zoo, and a facility for the manufacture of high-grade, small-animal manure.

  Yes, my bedroom was a sanctuary, but it was also a barnyard bedlam inhabited by: a gaggle of guinea pigs hell-bent on overpopulating the planet; ten white mice who thought they were engaged in a procreative race to outdo the guinea pigs; an extremely tolerant cat who came to accept interspecies pluralism as a natural way of life; a slime-infested, five-gallon pickle jar in the back of the closet, a container in which I raised paramecia, amoebas, and other invisible beasts kind enough to perform nautical maneuvers under the lens of my brass-barreled 1930s professional medical microscope; and 140 guppies who amused themselves by leaping out of their tank in the middle of the night, committing suicide on the hardwood strip beyond the edge of the brown shag carpet, and, as they flipped noisily about in the darkness, terrifying me into thinking that my room was filled with ghosts. Then there were half a dozen snails eating the algae on the inside of the aquarium’s glass walls, two miniature catfish swallowing mouthfuls of sand at the aquarium’s bottom and spitting the grains out again, an assortment of angelfish, blue gouramis, neon tetras, and whatever else the tropical fish store was selling cheap that month, plus a lizard who found the whole place so unendurable that he literally hanged himself from the leash on which I’d allowed him to run around the dresser top during the day while I was away at school.

  Not everyone loved the animal population as much as I did. One year, when I was about eleven, I became curious about raising lizard eggs. I’d read in a book about reptiles and amphibians that you could get these eggs for free from your local pet store. After all, the lizards insisted on laying them. And the pet store owners didn’t know what to do with them. So you could probably cadge a few before the owners threw them out. Or threw you out. Whichever came first. The book turned out to be right. I went down to my local pet emporium and came home with an egg. I nestled it in peat moss, kept it slightly moist (or was it slightly dry…I forget). Fortunately, I was not required to sit on it. Then I waited for something to happen. But nothing did. Or so it seemed.

  Three weeks later, as I trudged up the driveway after a hard day of reading books under the school desk and being beaten up on my way home, our maid was running from the house screaming that she would never come back again. There was, she shouted over her shoulder in panic, a monster in my room. I entered my den of natural history to see what was up. There was an empty, leathery little egg shell in the peat moss. Whatever had been in it had experimented with the novelty of adhesive feet by crawling up the nearby wall, crossing the ceiling upside down, and finding itself a comfortable, eye-level spot smack dab in the middle of the wall on the opposite side of the room—the one place where the cleaning woman had never seen an animal before. And ther
e he clung, head down—a real beauty: two inches long, a lovely green, his brain cage twice as big as his body. My first (and only) lizard hatchling.

  Fortunately, the maid forgave me for terrifying her with this two-inch-long reptilian monstrosity. She even continued the hopeless task of trying to clean my room.

  u

  It was my father and mother’s most profound hope that if they simply exerted enough effort, they could make those terrible antennae on my head go away. So every year or two they came up with a new plot to turn me into a human, the kind who plays baseball and plans furtively for months to find a way to get his hands up—or down—the front of some girl’s blouse. (I would later learn, after leaving home, that you could skip the whole blouse-and-bra stage of adolescence by simply accompanying a girl to bed—where she was usually kind enough to show up without a collection of fasteners, clasps, and buttons. But that, too, is a tale for later.)

  None of the plans for my normalization ever worked. But my dad and mom were persistent. The worst of their schemes to entrap me in normalcy was summer camp—a high-security penal colony for undersized inmates. There may be no barbed wire fences or machine-gun-toting guards, but if you try to escape you’ll either be eaten by raccoons or sent back to your sneering counselor, who will make you do something humiliating like cleaning out the urinals with your teeth. In summer camp, my parents reasoned, they would force me to abide by eleven-year-old standards and practices: baseball and the blouse business, which, with any luck I’d pick up from listening to a densely packed cabin of horny pre-teens.

  I was anything but happy about this strategy. In fact, I would have preferred an all-expense-paid two months in Sing Sing. But there was no fighting it. My parents were much bigger than I was. And at my weight, I could easily be dragged anywhere.

  So I packed about two hundred sci-fi paperbacks into a suitcase, put a few changes of underwear with my name sewn in the back into a trunk big enough to be a condo, and went off determined to continue pursuing my own interests.

  My parents’ grand experiment was not a success. There was no way the camp authorities could get me to play baseball. The reason went far beyond my basic lack of interest in the game, or my technique for catching the ball, which consisted of closing my eyes and sticking my hands up in front of my face to protect my nose. When it came time to decide who would be on which team, the other kids, the same ones I’d grown up with in grammar school and who’d always done their best to keep me at least a mile and a half from their social activities, competed over me like major league owners over the next Babe Ruth. But the object of the bargaining was to make sure I didn’t land (God forbid) on the team the negotiator was speaking for.

  At first a counselor or two tried to be liberal and make sure I was wedged onto some unfortunate squad. But when it became obvious that having me in the outfield turned a viciously competitive, high-skilled sport into a Marx Brothers movie with an intolerable number of pauses for mending broken film, the authorities went along with the kids, and I was allowed to “sneak” back to the bunk and read my books in peace.

  What’s worse, I ran into a very appealing snake in the woods, made a cage for it, and planned to take it back to my bedroom menagerie. When I introduced my mother to the prospective houseguest on visiting day, she screamed.

  What’s even worse, about the only kids I could relate to in those days were four or five years older than I was. So I hung out with this fifteen year old fellow-camper who, because he was from New York City, was sophisticated, a man of the world and a budding bohemian. There were no bohemians in Buffalo, so this was a whole new experience. My new friend taught me all about a subversive form of music called jazz, whose every trill of improvisation was a clarion call, as he explained it, to freedom. It was the first seed of a Venus flytrap which some years later would nearly eat my parents alive.

  When I returned to my bedroom animal refuge in Bisonburg, my antennae were longer than ever. What’s more, I began squandering the family fortune on vast quantities of music by Mingus, Miles Davis, and Lord-knows what other drug addicts, in addition to my growing diet of Bartok, Stravinsky, Beethoven, and Vivaldi. Why, oh why, thought my mother in her silent prayers, won’t he listen to Elvis?

  u

  Meanwhile, I had acquired an ambition truly worthy of someone judged mentally retarded by his first-grade teacher. I wanted to be Albert Einstein. I first discovered that he and I were similar when I was ten years old and spent an hour roaming the empty house from basement to attic in a frantic search for the scissors. Then I found that someone had cagily hidden them in my left hand. A bit of deductive reasoning led to the conclusion that the culprit was…me. Thus, I realized that I had all the equipment necessary to be an absent-minded professor. Which is to say, I was prematurely senile.

  Einstein, of course, had been plagued by the same problem. He’d shuffle off to the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University wearing bedroom slippers and pajamas, and his poor wife (his second one; wife number-one had become tired of this nonsense and gone off to find a husband with a brain) was forced to sprint up the street carrying shoes, socks, pants, a shirt, a winter coat, and whatever other relevant items she could find in the closet. “Albert, Albert,” she’d shout, trying to get her perpetually preoccupied hubby’s attention, “You forget something.” Poor Albie had forgotten to get dressed. Which is why half the time he delivered his lectures in a fitted sheet.

  In high school, I would discover yet another curious Einsteinian characteristic. I could master the concepts of advanced mathematics with only a few hours of bashing my head up against the nearest wall, but couldn’t do arithmetic—at least not in a manner that allowed the results to resemble reality. So I’d get ninety-nine on all my homework assignments. Why no one hundreds? I’d absorbed the principles of each problem in my own very peculiar way, head bashing. But in carrying out the addition and subtraction, I’d invariably added one and one and gotten three, so all of my answers were bizarrely off base. Einstein, it seems, had the same difficulty. He’d stand at a blackboard for an hour scrawling complex equations that only three men in the known universe could understand. Then, when he was finished, some visiting six-year-old in the back row would raise her hand and point out that the professor had added two to three and gotten six.

  But my ultimate attachment to Einstein did not come when I discovered that he and I both dressed like unmade beds (when we remembered to dress, that is). It came when I was in eighth grade and some young wench in my class who’d made a point of ignoring me all year (just as all the other females had) brought a whole new phenomenon into my life—eye contact. Her pupils did something no girls’ had ever done before. First they swiveled in my direction. That was a shock. Then they locked onto my irises. That was electrifying. It set my entire nervous system into overdrive. What impelled her to do something so violently against the laws of nature? What motivated her to walk up and actually open a conversation? “I told my mother,” she said, “that you understand Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.”

  Now, look, I had absorbed huge globs of advanced science at this point, but the Theory of Relativity wasn’t one of them. However, I wasn’t about to admit it. After all, I couldn’t catch a ball. I couldn’t quote a sports score. The one thing I could claim was having some sort of a brain. What sort, not even the animals in my room knew. So I wasn’t ready to give up the one title my classmates had glued to me like a “kick me” sign—the “sickly scientist.” Which means that the minute school was over, I jumped on my bike and pedaled two miles to my local library, a small, white, single-story building dwarfed by six-story high elm trees. I suspect the library building was small because books had not yet caught on in Buffalo.

  The librarians knew me better than my mother did. They were the ones who had let me loose in the forbidden zone, the adult books, the sci fi books with petting and heavy breathing, when I was ten. “Give me everything you’ve got on
the Theory of Relativity,” I said. One of the pair went back into god knows what shelves, returned, and slid two books by Einstein across the desk. One was not just fat, it was obese. The other was slender. It may have been on a diet. I grabbed both of them, put them in the clamp on the back of my bike, and pedaled frantically for home. I was on a deadline. I had to understand the Theory of Relativity by 9:00 a.m. the next day or be deemed an idiot. I took the books up to my bedroom and closed the door so I could concentrate.

  The animals were vaguely curious, but none of them volunteered to help. And help was what I needed. The overweight book contained approximately sixteen words of English per page and 425 mathematical formulae. Yes, 425 equations per page. Equations that might as well have been cellulite. Math formulae have always been beyond me. But the overweight tome was the book I tackled first. Why? I’d learned that if you slog through something you don’t understand a bit, by the time you get to the end, you’ve understood something. Even if only at the level of your gut.

  So I attacked the bulging book at 4:00 p.m. By 8:00 p.m., I’d only gotten through fifty pages. And I hadn’t understood a thing. Now remember, I was on a deadline. I had two hours left before my mom would order lights out and sleep. Two tiny hours in which to understand the most elusive theory of the twentieth century. So I gave up and turned to the slender, blue, cloth-covered book.

  The overweight book had been written by Einstein and two collaborators. The skinny one was written by Dr. Einstein all by himself. What struck me most about it was its introduction.