How I Accidentally Started the Sixties

by Howard Bloom

  This practice brewed a strange resentment amongst my roommates. Like there was the Saturday afternoon they spent telling tales of all the gorgeous femmes who had found them irresistible and who had wrestled them into bed. Somehow none of them seemed to notice that they spent so many of their weekends telling these ever-escalating anecdotes that none of them had had a date in months. Not even the guy who was going steady.

  When the afternoon was over, I walked into my dorm room, having missed out on the male bonding. What’s worse, my neck was covered with diminutive red elevations. It seems the girls at the female dorm had decided to spend the day practicing the production of hickeys. And I was the practice hickey-ee.

  There was a strange look on the faces of my dorm-mates as they put two and two together and came up with five. It was the scowl of an incipient lynch mob.

  Gradually, the Caltech lad who could sing 4,000 folk songs fell in love at a distance with an incredibly alluring female, the kind legends are written about, Trojan Wars are launched for, and in whose praises the balladeers pour forth verse after verse. She was so utterly above the sphere of ordinary mortals that the aspiring Casanova hadn’t mustered up the nerve to introduce himself to her yet. But he had a plan. A plan he perfected in top secret meetings with two of his three roommates. Note that this secret cabal of strategists did not include me. In fact, they shut their mouths about their plot whenever I entered the room. Months later, I would find out what they were scheming about the hard way. As you will soon see.

  Here’s what the trio was planning. The annual Christmas Ball was looming in the distance, the biggest event on the Reed College calendar. The only celebration in which Reed College students tossed aside their jeans and work shirts, dressed in tuxedos, and played the F. Scott Fitzgerald routine to the hilt. My guitar-twiddling, folk-singing roommate had bought a pair of tickets to the ball and was busy planning the perfect moment to invite the face and body that had launched a thousand of his fantasies, the most-desired woman on the Reed College campus, Mademoiselle X.

  About the same day my roommate and his two dorm henchmen were purchasing tickets to the Big Dance and hatching plans for the romance of the century, I—who had not even learned how to hold hands with a girl, much less put my arm casually around her shoulder and attempt to kiss—marched off to the cafeteria for lunch. Now, the Reed College cafeteria had a strange social pattern. Males would sit with males. Females would sit with females. Much as students of opposite sexes might have yearned, burned, and prayed for each other’s attentions, they were terrified of sitting next to a person of another gender over a meal. But, as I said, I preferred women to men. And I didn’t have a clue about how to be normal. So I defied the rules and seated myself wherever the most interesting-looking young ladies were planted. That was where I felt the most at home.

  On this particular day, there was a lone co-ed at a table all by herself. She obviously liked hanging around with other women about as much as I liked being stuck with other men. So I took my tray filled with drek du jour and plopped myself next to her.

  The year was 1961. This wonder of the lunch table had dark hair and even darker eyes. We began to talk, and she turned out to be amazing. She had hitchhiked—something I’d wanted to do ever since I’d read Kerouac, but had never dared attempt. What’s more, she claimed she could easily clamber to the top of any tree in sight, and could climb brick buildings from the outside. In fact, on nights when she missed curfew and the entrance to her dorm was locked, she explained how easy it was to scramble up the facade of the building and enter through the window of her third-floor room. The lady wasn’t fibbing. Later, I would see her accomplish this feat on numerous occasions. And, oh, what a difference her ability to out-climb a kitten would make for me!

  She also had her elegant side. She designed her own formal gowns, sewed them together from scratch, and made all the other girls on campus drop dead with envy (the major cleanup problem after one of the school’s rare dances was picking up the green-tinged female corpses). She had developed a crush on her high school headmaster at the age of fifteen, and after six months of diligent effort had seduced the man, thus beginning an affair that had lasted four years, and actually still seemed to be bubbling under the surface despite the distance between them (he was stuck in Long Beach, California, where she’d grown up, and was still foolishly living with his wife and a son older than our heroine). What’s more, she had a brain that would have made the folks at Mensa salivate with envy. This astonishing and stunning-looking woman knew French literature I’d never heard of, like all the plays of Jean Anouilh. She could tell you their plots in a way that made your jaw drop. She was intimate with more poetry than anyone I’d ever met. And everything she talked about came alive with a sparkle.

  She was bewitching. She gave the impression that other listeners, sitting at her feet in an effort to catch her every glistening word, had accidentally been turned into toads.

  What started as a casual conversation turned into one of those sessions where your pupils seem glued together with those of the person you’re talking to and every one of your nerves comes to the surface, wriggling in some sort of orgiastic dance as you reveal things you’ve never dared confess, discover excitements you share in common, and are caught in a mutual trance. I told her I wrote poetry in voluminous quantities (my high school English teacher had hated my poetry—once I got out of my Housman phase and into Samuel Beckett, it had become too modern for him; my high school math teacher, on the other hand, seemed to like it…but he was from Egypt, so what did he know). She wanted to see my literary output. When we finished lunch, we went over to my dorm and I picked up a handful of the stuff. Then we planted ourselves on a huge lawn under a tree and the wild conversation continued. She loved the poetry. I was hypnotized by her vivacity. When the night’s curfew fell, we were still together, blurting out revelations. We had missed all of our afternoon classes. Then we parted to our separate dorms. But not until after I saw her scale the brick wall to enter her third-floor room.

  Early the next morning, I was sure I would never see her again. I was worth less than the seared, browned remains of one of Walt Whitman’s blades of grass after a terminal drought, and she was an entire spring meadow in bloom. Surely she had realized the mistake of talking to me the minute our conversation had ended the previous evening, had fled to the bathroom, and had induced vomiting to eject whatever foul taste of me was still in her system. It was 8:30 a.m., and I was packing my book bag for my first class when she showed up at the entrance, twenty feet down the stairs from my open third-floor dorm room door and said she had accidentally left something in my room. When she invaded the quarters that I and my roommates shared, she and I started talking again and couldn’t stop. We missed our classes again. All of them. There was a rainstorm. We sat on the campus lawn madly talking through it, imagining that we were raging against the forces of nature like King Lear. She climbed the highest tree on campus just to show me she hadn’t been kidding about her Spider-Man claims. By the time we should have been forced to leave each other, it was dark, and curfew had arrived again. Curfews didn’t matter to her. She snuck me into her dorm room. I spent the night.

  Now mind you, I had never, as I’ve mentioned, gone through the normal motions of petting, though several girls, at one time or another, had tried to involve me in the sport. But I wasn’t in the mood for a learning experience with the only women who seemed insane enough to lust over my twiggy form—the young ladies of the Weight Watchers set. So Jimmsy Law, the miracle sylph, and I didn’t do anything suspicious. We merely slept in the same bed, fully clothed, with her curled up against me, her head on my arm, my arm going to sleep, the rest of me staying awake, unwilling to move my numb limb from beneath her exquisite temple even though I knew this meant they would have to amputate it in the morning (my arm, that is, not her head).

  The next morning, she showed me a trick. There was a trap door in the ceiling of the hal
l outside her room. The men’s and women’s dorms were in one long Victorian building divided into seven separate units, some set aside for males, others for females. There were no connecting doors, and the male and female sections were hermetically sealed off from each other…or at least they were supposed to be. But the trapdoor led to a cramped attic in the tiny triangle—the claustrophobic A-frame—beneath the peaked roof. The attic was not meant for mere mortals. It was filled with piping, insulation and narrow boards spanning the beams for the convenience of maintenance men and of any Flying Wallendas who might drop into Portland, Oregon. I hoisted myself up to the attic, crawled across the boards, found the equivalent trap door in my own dorm, and dropped down into the corridor outside my room. My roommates wondered where I’d spent the night. I didn’t tell them.

  From that point on, Jimmsy and I were inseparable. Every night, I crept across the boards in the attic to Jimmsy’s dorm and went through the platonic ritual of tormenting my left arm in her bed. The only hint of sex came from the adjoining chamber where her roommate slept. The roommate had a boyfriend—a philosophy major who had already graduated from school but continued to hang around—and he apparently snuck into the dorm every night, too. But what the roommate and her philosophical companion did with their mattress sounded frightening. All I heard were several hours of shrieks, moans and screams. Obviously Jimmsy’s roommate was being tortured to the point of death…and was enduring this agony over and over again. Surely we should save her…or at least give her a painkiller. When I expressed my concern to Jimmsy, she reassured me that they were not reenacting the Inquisition. However when it came to exactly what they were doing, I was still very confused.

  Then Jimmsy sprang a major proposal on me. Christmas vacation was coming up. She had arranged to rent a house off campus instead of going home to see her parents. She asked me to come live with her for the treasured two-week holiday break. This was a little sticky. Because of the expense of trips from Oregon to Buffalo, I hadn’t seen my parents for Thanksgiving. They were looking forward to my return at Christmas. In fact, they were consumed by the desire to spend a few weeks with their long-lost son. If they missed the chance, maternal suicide seemed a likely outcome. But when the tides of opportunity knock, even those who hate having water flood their apartment are fools not to open the door. I accepted Jimmsy’s offer.

  When I got back to my dorm that afternoon, I finally confessed to my roommates where I had been passing my nights and told them where I planned to spend my Christmas vacation. That look of the lynch mob crossed their faces again. But this time, it had a new twist. That’s when I found out the identity of the gorgeous and unattainable girl my older, far more-sophisticated, master-of-the-folk-song roommate was planning to ask out for the Christmas dance—the girl who had snared his heart and for whom he had laid four months of careful plans to make his own. It was Jimmsy. And I, the klutz who knew nothing about sex, couldn’t discuss football, never had a single carnal adventure to brag about, and even had the audacity to evade the libidinous bragging sessions by hanging out with GIRLS, had through some ghastly accident of fate, some practical joke perpetrated by a particularly nasty gaggle of gods, landed this heavenly vision first! What’s worse, I’d done it by accident!!!

  The lesson: sometimes action is more important than planning.

  u

  I wrote to my parents to tell them I wouldn’t be coming home. They were shocked, flustered, flummoxed, and furious. It was only 1961. The high point of the Sexual Revolution—the Summer of Love—was six years in the future. And the phrase “living with a girl” was not yet in circulation. So when my folks figured out that I was going to cohabit with a person of the opposite gender, their gall bladders threatened to throw stones, their hearts murmured ominously of shutting down the valves, and even their bunions put in a special request for aid to Dr. Scholls.

  Nonetheless, when classes ground to a halt, Jimmsy and I moved to a modest shack with a kerosene heater, kerosene lighting, and other luxuries that would have made the Jukes and Kallikaks—the Appalachian mountain folks who wore tattered clothes, married their sisters, and shredded each other with gunshot in perpetual backwoods feuds—feel thoroughly at home.

  It didn’t take her long to seduce me, though that first time was a little bumpy. I was in an arm chair. Jimmsy sat, as she had often done, on the floor between my legs, the back of her head on my crotch. As she wove one of her entrancing tales, she took my hand and slid it down her blouse. She wasn’t wearing a bra. It was clear from the audaciously skyward tilt of the object in my hand that she didn’t need one. The experience so stunned my fingers that the blood drained from every organ above my navel. So I have no idea of how we preceded from my armchair to the bed. In fact, there’s very little I can recall except this: while we lay there wriggling and such, all my male classmates from high school came swimming to the forefront of my consciousness, dried themselves off, sat in an amphitheater behind my forehead, and watched. I was so self-conscious that I could perform tolerably, but only up to a point. This meant that I had an erection that lasted three hours. But with the eyes of all those Park Schoolers looking over my shoulder, I couldn’t ejaculate. This led Jimmsy to the erroneous conclusion that I was the most virile lover she had ever encountered. I didn’t have the heart to tell her the truth.

  A few nights later, a girlfriend of Jimmsy’s came to the door crying, sobbed that she was having terrible troubles, and asked if Jimmsy could please go walking with her for ten minutes to comfort her. Jimmsy, who would have helped a trapped mosquito if it asked politely enough, promptly put on her winter coat and stepped out to implement an emotional rescue. I had a horsemeat roast (it was all we could afford) in the oven, and it was due to reach the peak of succulence in a quarter of an hour. I reminded Jimmsy to come back before it could overcook.

  Fifteen minutes went by, and Jimmsy didn’t return. Another half hour, and still no Jimmsy. Two hours passed, and my beautiful sexual savior seemed to have been swallowed up by the Northwest Pacific fog. Finally, afraid for her safety, I jumped on my bicycle and pedaled off into the dark to see if I could find her. By midnight, no luck. I pedaled back, dispirited, to our hovel. The roast was ruined! Then Jimmsy finally returned.

  She’d been kidnapped. The supplicant with the urgent problem had lured Jimmsy to the street corner, then she and a bunch of male cohorts had stuffed the momentary love of my life into a car and had taken her, protesting that the roast was due out of the oven any minute, across town. They’d dragged her up the stairs to a dingy apartment whose living room was dominated by a Fu Manchu–like presence—my frustrated, folk-singing roommate. For the next three hours, this picture of sophistication begged Jimmsy to leave me and to come live with him. He told her what a fool, an ass, and idiot I was. He revealed the fact that I didn’t know how to sip wine and recite football scores. I was a misfit. He was everything a girl could ever dream of. Whereupon he whipped out his guitar and began to show her his stuff.

  The trick didn’t work. To get out of the place, Jimmsy threw him a sop. She agreed to accompany him to the Christmas Ball. She knew I didn’t want to wear a tuxedo, and this would give her a chance to show off the latest gown she’d designed and built. Then she persuaded the kidnappers to put her in their car and drive her back…to me.

  Jimmsy and I had two extremely interesting weeks off campus. I finally learned what some of the shrieking and moaning from the dorm room next-door had been about. But my devotion swelled beyond the limits of female endurance. I was ripped apart emotionally by even a separation of half an hour. My neediness was unendurable. Two months after the vacation, Jimmsy dropped out of school and went back to Long Beach and her old headmaster. He left his wife, his kid, and his job. The last I heard, the two of them were married, and he had a new position as a professor at the University of Oregon. In Eugene, the town where I would soon meet the murderers. I hate the idea of a man busting up his family like that. But I know
why he couldn’t resist.

  Thanks to Jimmsy, I’d been ushered into a movement that, as yet, had no name: the Sexual Revolution. And that Revolution was about to become one of the key currents of an era that was also nameless: The Sixties. But that’s not the only current of the Sixties into which I’d stumble before it got its name.

  When I returned to school from vacation, I discovered I was being reassigned to a new dorm. My three roommates had gotten together, visited the dean, and petitioned him to send me as far away from them as possible—preferably to the septic tank of a monastery in Tibet. Their grounds for this request? We were, they said, “incompatible.” Thus was I tumbled onto the path recommended by a Frenchman who had fried his brain when he was seventeen years old and served it up to us with a light burnt butter sauce in his poetry. The Frenchman—Arthur Rimbaud—called his recipe for Cervelles au Beurre noire, “the deliberate derangement of the senses.” I would soon outdo him in deliberate derangement by baking my brain in a light cactus marinade.

  THE CHEMICAL CONEY ISLAND

  OF THE MIND

  My God, we’re three thousand pages into this book, and I’m still working up to how I met the woman the murderers insisted that I should. (Believe me, the entire tale above eventually turns out to be relevant.) I promise, I’ll make it up to you. Trust me.

  But first we have some elementary chemistry to take care of—to wit, my role in co-founding the Sixties drug culture.

  My adventure with Jimmsy was one sign of a sexual revolution bubbling beneath the surface in 1961 and 1962. A revolution of private parts set free to interpenetrate. A revolution that, six years later, would lead to the aforementioned Summer of Love. I mean, in my father’s day, if you slept with a woman, she wasn’t a woman anymore. She was a tramp or a prostitute. Jimmsy was something new. A woman who experimented with sex audaciously, but who stayed on her pedestal. And the birth control pill was about to take the pedestal approach that Jimmsy pioneered mainstream. But more about that later.