How I Accidentally Started the Sixties

by Howard Bloom

  OK, I’ll admit, when you put them into a room together, each kid gives a little speech to mark out his territory. Or hers. And that done, these healthy, hearty specimens of Americana lapse into a befuddled silence. So if you happen to be a blabbermouth and your motor lips can machine gun the faintest semblance of an idea of what to do next, suddenly you are it. The others realize that if they vote you the chairman of their committee, they can all go back to heavy petting and you will take care of the rest. Which means that I may have been the most unpopular kid on the entire thirty-four-acre campus of the Park School of Buffalo, but I when it came to getting something concrete done, I was suddenly elected to high office. Not one of the popularity offices, mind you. Those were strictly off limits. But one of the practical offices.

  Now Park School began every day at 8:00 a.m. with a gathering of the entire student body. Yes, all the freshmen, sophomores, juniors, seniors, and the entire staff. Three of these assemblies were programmed by the faculty. And two were put together by students. A very particular group of students. The students on the Program Committee. Which means that the Program Committee was not a glamor job, a job where you showed off the fashionable, Brylcreemed wave at the front of your crew cut, strutted your well-cut chinos, flashed your pearly teeth, then did nothing. It was one of those ghastly jobs where you actually had to get something accomplished. So in my junior year, an unusually young age for the task, I was elected chairman of the Program Committee.

  And the Chairman of the Program Committee had one more responsibility other than just programming. He was also the MC of all five morning assemblies. Which meant that for the first two months on the job I was knotted in fear, staggered by stage fright, paralyzed by the idea of going before 350 students who hated me, opening my mouth, and actually shoving terrified syllables past my teeth with my tongue. Then I got used to it. In fact, going in front of an audience and shoveling syllables became like breathing.

  Emceeing must have terrified everyone else at Park School, too. How do I know? In my senior year, my fellow students voted me head of the Program Committee for a second year in a row. Surely it was not because they liked me. In fact, there was a brand new clue to their distaste for my existence. I starred in many of the school’s plays. The ones that didn’t require singing—a skill that I handled with the fine-tuning of a fingernail screeching across a chalk board. One night when we’d finished performing Sophocles’ Antigone, we had a cast party. It was at a bar on Main Street. I was clueless about bar behavior. I still am. Minutes into the celebration of a play in which I’d just performed the male lead—Creon, the ruler of Thebes—it became obvious that the rest of the cast would be far more comfortable if I wasn’t there. By unspoken popular demand, I edged my way out of the bar and went home. I was not welcome at the cast party of a play in which I’d been the star.

  Nonetheless, a week or two later, the juniors came to me with a request. They were going to have a dance. Could I please find some way of advertising it to the assembled multitudes in the morning assembly. Little did they see the irony. Kids all over Buffalo made it abundantly clear that if there was something resembling a terpsichorean gathering anywhere in the city, I was kindly invited to park my feet as far away as possible—say, Cleveland. What’s more, I had learned from a year in dance class—a humiliation we’ll get to in a minute­­—that I was so clumsy at the basic ballroom steps of the late nineteen-fifties—the box step, the fox trot, and the waltz—that if you put 300 girls on any dance floor anywhere in the world, I could step on all 3,000 dainty, nail-polished, female toes with just a few swift, tripping movements of my dress shoes. Do I have the math on the number of podiatric digits right?

  And the juniors wanted me to advertise their dance? I mean, really! But I said yes.

  So I picked a piece of music, put it on a record player at the back of the stage, then went center stage with absolutely nothing planned. And let loose. Moved. Wriggled. Jiggled. Writhed. Whumped. Bumped. Jumped. Stumped. Whipped my shoulders up and down, Let my arms fly. Wriggled and squoonched my facial muscles. Interpreted the music in a way that apparently no one had ever seen before. I looked like a Loony Toon drawn under the influence of something that would not appear on the scene for another two years—LSD. Yes, I looked like a cartoon drawn by Chuck Jones (of Wiley Coyote, Pepe Le Pew, Daffy Duck, and Tom and Jerry fame) himself. On a night when his brain was chemically whipped, beaten, mashed, boiled, and fried.

  This maniacal spasm of movement had consequences. It did something strange to the audience. Three hundred fifty people who hated me—700 spite-filled eyeballs worth—had a look I’d never seen before. The ocular orbs of the girl who hated me the most were zeroed in with disbelief. Six hundred and ninety-eight other irises were glued with an intensity I’d never seen. Talk about eye contact! Pupils dilated—they grew wide. Yes, 700 of them. Faces went limp. Three hundred and fifty physiognomies flaccidified. Everything that those spell-bound students had, were, and felt was concentrated in their gaze. And that gaze was lasered onto the least likely object in the room—me.

  The power of those 700 emotionally-focused fovea sent a strange force coursing through me. It was as if the energy of the individuals in the auditorium had merged into one big collective thundercloud, as if that cloud had aimed its bolts straight through the core of me, as if those ribbons of lightning had slammed up my backbone from my tail to my throat on their way to a transformer just above my head, a transformer in which the voltage was converted into something bigger, stranger, and more powerful, then was channeled back down through me as if I were a coaxial copper cable, zapped out to those 350 transfixed faces, then sizzled from them back to me again for further amplification.

  Meanwhile, I had an out of body experience. No kidding. I was on the ceiling watching this whole thing from above. And what I saw was a reverberatory circuit. A circular flow amping up a high-watt current. And transmogrifying it. Utterly. A feedback loop of human spirit. A feedback loop of naked soul. When the music was over and my fit of dancing ceased, the crowd did something it had never done before in my three years at the Park School and that it never did again. Not for football players, homecoming queens, or exchange students just back from Italy. All 350 Park Schoolers surged down to the foot of the stage, picked me up off the proscenium, put me on their shoulders, carried me out of the auditorium door, and transported me up the sidewalk to the building where our classes were held.

  Ecstasy is a funny word. It means standing outside of yourself. And the dance-trance was ecstatic. It was one of those Varieties of the Religious Experience that William James had attempted to capture. An experience of the sort that he couldn’t explain. In fact, accidentally fire-balling on the stage at Park School would prove to be a massive clue to the gods inside.

  I had heard the mermaids singing each to each for five brief moments. And they had sung to me.

  u

  How will our hero find satori, discover the meaning of life, and get the girl? How will he do it by following the instructions of the three murderers, the dictates of the three poets, a clue or two from William James, and by adding in a lesson learned from clams and seagulls? In other words, how will he do it by accidentally helping to start The Sixties? For the answer, dear reader, please plow on.

  SEX TRIES TO ENTER THE PICTURE

  BUT CAN’T SEEM TO DRILL THROUGH THE FRAME

  Well, you’ve read this far, and I know it wasn’t easy for you. Frankly, the only reward I can think of is the saga of how I shocked my teachers, horrified my parents, sought spiritual enlightenment, found sex instead, and helped start two revolutions, the Sexual Revolution and the Drug Revolution. Two of the movements that would define The Sixties.

  We will begin with a prologue—the pathetic narrative of my early love life.

  You’re aware of the fact that at about the age of ten I withdrew totally from my parents’ perpetual combat and built a world of my own in my bedroom. The place
was so self-contained that you probably could have removed it from the rest of the house and launched it into orbit, and I wouldn’t have known the difference.

  I slathered the walls with arcane posters showing the lift-off velocities of every rocket ever built by German rocket scientists pretending to be Americans from Alabama, and I wouldn’t allow a soul in except the reptile-repelled maid.

  OK, I admit that there was one other guest permitted in this sealed-off sanctum: the girl next door. She was willing to accept the fact that I did strange things like anneal wire to make electrical coils (that never worked), soldered together my own transistor radio (that never worked), made cold cream from scratch by following the list of ingredients in a book of industrial formulae (my mother refused to use it), and built the computer I mentioned many pages ago, the one that carried out symbolic logic operations (this one did work, but all the other computers laughed because mine, as you recall, used a form of math called Boolean Algebra, and no electronic processing device in its right mind could take a name like “Boolean” seriously). The girl next door was also willing to tolerate my blither about cosmology, topology, quantum physics, microbiology, and other such unearthly nonsense. Needless to say, none of these achievements are considered admirable in eighth grade—at least not by your baseball-obsessed peers and the girls who swoon over them.

  However, the girl next door was unavailable for anything but wrestling matches and chess games because she was an older woman (by six months) and besides, she was two grades ahead of me in school (she’d been leapfrogged over her age group a couple of times) and had her eye out for much more mature men—like fifteen year olds. This was agonizing because when I hit sixteen, I fell in love with her. So much in love that when she took a month-long summer trip to the musical festivals of Europe, I made her give me the list of every hotel she’d be staying at, then wrote her a six-page, typewritten letter every day. No dice. She was still hooked on mature, sophisticated men—seventeen year olds.

  Then there were our games of chess. Chess was the pastime of the truly brainy. Since braininess was my only claim to fame, I insisted on learning how to play. That proved a huge mistake. Even after months of practice with the girl I loved but could not have, a lady bug could have beaten me with her wings tied behind her back. In fact, when I finally met three really bright kids, all three could lick me in five moves. They could even whip my butt while I played with the chess board and pieces on my bedroom floor in clear sight, and my opponents laid on the bed looking up at the ceiling, playing the game in their heads. So I clearly was about as bright as a door knob. How in the world would I be an Einstein?

  The answer: genius is not just a matter of the talent you’re given. It’s a matter of the persistence with which you apply what you’ve got. And of your willingness to see in ways that others don’t dare conceive. But that answer would take eons to make itself apparent.

  Meanwhile back at school, where the process of playing kickball with me as the ball had frequently made me the center of attention among my male comrades, I was incredibly popular with the girls. To show you just how popular, let’s take a brief flashback into another parental attempt to make me normal: dance class. Yes, if I could only dance, my parents reasoned when I was thirteen, I would be human. And I’d learn the social graces: Grace Kelly and Grace Burns. So in eighth grade they packed me off to dance class at the ritziest temple in town. Yes, every Friday night for a year I’d stand alone on the boys’ side of the room, rejected by every girl in viewing distance, while my peers found partners and danced. Every once in a while the instructresses would take pity on my miserable state and dance with me. The number of mashed toes that emerged from this process must have been staggering.

  Then came the end of the year, a chance to celebrate all the box steps, fox trots, and waltzes we had learned. So the dance instructors planned an elaborate formal ball at the snootiest Jewish club in town. There was only one small problem. Arithmetic.

  When we arrived in formal attire, there were one hundred and eighty-one of us pubescents eager to ape the ways of adults. One hundred and eighty- one, you’ll notice, is not an even number. In fact, like me, it’s odd. Very odd. Which led to a problem. There were ninety girls in the room. But there were ninety-one boys. Some luckless boy was doomed to be the odd one out.

  To pair off couples for the preparatory dinner, the name of each of the boys was written on a scrap of paper, crumpled like a spit ball, and thrown into a bag. The girls drew spit balls of paper at random. Ahhh, egalitarian democracy. Ahhh, the spirit of fairness. How they shine! What the pedagogues of dance failed to account for was the force of the market. Supply and demand. Disgust and desire. And the intensity of female competition. The thirteen-year-old girls tossed the principle that all pubescent boys are equal in the eyes of their creator into the coat closet, and began a half hour of horse trading, haggling, and swapping the random swatches of paper like crazy. When all the bargaining, cajoling and begging was over, one male name was tossed back into the bag. Guess whose it was? I’ll give you a clue. It was me! Yes, a democratic, free market process had proven unequivocally that I was the least wanted male in the room. And just possibly the least-wanted male in the city.

  As you can imagine, this led to a rather full social calendar. I was denied invitations for every party, sporting event and informal gathering ever conceived in the Buffalo of the 1950s. And my dating schedule—well, I could write an entire comma about that.

  In high school, things didn’t get much better. There was an occasional girl—undoubtedly some social misfit with a slight indentation in that part of the brain responsible for maintaining sanity—who got a crush on me. But I didn’t pay attention to any of them because I was madly infatuated with Marge Walls, who was two inches taller than I was and thought of me as one of her best friends and a person she put on an intellectual a pedestal…then left there to go out with college basketball players.

  About the only relief in this dreary landscape of sexual abstinence was the field trip my class took to the Cambridge School in Massachusetts. My best friend, Jon Hyman, and I conceived a skit mocking the Kennedy-Nixon debates. I forget which of us played which part. But when the skit was over, I found myself mobbed by Cambridge School groupies, all of them extremely fetching maidens, each one hoping to spend the rest of the evening with me doing whatever teenage boys and girls of that age did with each other. Actually, I had no idea of what that might be. The only sex book that Jon and I could get access to was an anthropology text we smuggled from his father’s library, and its most explicit phrase, repeated quite frequently, was “quick encounter in the forest.” What one did during that brief and leafy interlude, God alone knew.

  So I didn’t pick one of the girls in the flock and settle my attentions on her. I conversed with the entire crowd. The result? Eventually that crowd melted away. Leaving no girls whatsoever. Surely there was a lesson here. Like you have to know when to stop multi-tasking and focus? But whatever it was, it eluded me.

  Alas, I couldn’t have taken the gaggle of feminine admirers back from Cambridge to Buffalo, even if they had chosen to stick around. And there was no chance of transferring to Massachusetts. So that single evening was pretty much the beginning and end of my life as a high school sex symbol. Four years of school, four hours of glory.

  The result, as you can imagine, is that I was totally unprepared for college. I went off to Reed, in Portland, Oregon, which at the time had the highest proportion of Rhodes scholars in the country and the highest median SAT’s, higher than Harvard, Yale, and MIT. Reed was the school that would in the distant future produce one of the most famous dropouts on the planet, Steve Jobs. Hot stuff, huh? For some reason, the institution’s proportion of virgins was not noted in its catalogue.

  When it came time for dormitory accommodations, I was thrown into a two-room suite with three other guys…all men of the world. One was a junior who wore an ascot, smoked a pipe,
was going steady with a girl, yes, a real, actual girl, and gave broad hints that he and she were “doing it” on a fairly regular basis. Another was a sophomore who’d transferred from Caltech. He was no Robert Redford, but he exuded savoir faire and sexual experience. What’s more, he could play the guitar like nobody’s business and work wonders with every folk song ever catalogued by a Lomax Brother. As girl-bait in those bohemian days, this was better than owning a dozen Porsches. My third roommate was a freshman like myself, but he was from New York, so he was no fool and had done things most eighteen year olds from backward burgs like Buffalo can’t even figure out how to dream about.

  This bunch and the guys across the hall showed off their macho credentials by hanging around the dorm on Saturday afternoons sipping fine wines out of pseudo-crystal glasses, spitting out sports statistics, and topping each other with tales of sexual conquests. I hated sports and had no sexual conquests. What’s more, I found women far more attractive than hairy specimens of my own sex. Even if these men were marinated in a fine wine.

  So while my comrades paraded the stories of their triumphs, I went off each weekend to the girls’ dorm and horsed around with blonds from North Dakota who had grown up on turkey farms but who had the brains of future Nobel Prize winners and the bodies of Playboy Bunnies.