How I Accidentally Started the Sixties

by Howard Bloom

  I have to confess that my contribution to the drug culture had a slightly different character than most, a character determined largely by my anal-retentive nature. It all started when I was in high school, and the whole thing was Henry Luce’s fault.

  Henry Luce was the titan of American magazine publishing in the mid-twentieth century. One Oxford University Press book called him “the most influential private citizen in the America of his day.” Luce created the very first weekly news magazine—Time. Luce also put together the very first big-format, glossy, weekly magazine to cover the news with photos—Life. He crafted the first slick-paper business monthly magazine, Fortune. And he created the first weekly, slick-paper sports magazine, Sports Illustrated. In a sense, Henry Luce also created two other things: The Sixties…and me.

  As you’ll recall, I had scarfed up two books a day in my grammar school years and I had discovered that my calling in life was as a workaholic when I entered high school. From ninth grade on, I labored at homework until ten o’clock every night, including weekends. Not that it did any good—my head was as porous as a pellet of Kevlar, and the facts just wouldn’t stick, even though I tried every form of mental adhesive known to man. But in my spare time, I downed several magazines from cover to cover, including a subversive left-wing rag called The Reporter, the much more acceptable New York Times News of the Week in Review, and Time magazine. Time magazine was the one that would change me. In fact, Time would not just change me, it would alter America.

  For unknown reasons, the facts from Time actually accumulated in my otherwise information-resistant skull—so much so that my best friend (the aforementioned Jon Hyman) and I annually tied for first place in the Time magazine current events quiz, which was a great relief to the accountants back at the Time Life headquarters in Manhattan because they only allocated one prize per high school, and with two winners, neither got any awards whatsoever, thus saving at least seven dollars a year with which the corporation could pay for another glass of Mr. Luce’s Chateau Lafitte Rothschild.

  Now all of this should make parents proud and teachers beam like flashlights filled with Duracell bunnies. But the exercise in ultra-respectability backfired terribly. Like summer camp and dance school, reading Time magazine should have turned me into a normal human being, capable of carrying on casual chatter with the sort of commuters who do the daily run from Greenwich, Connecticut, to Manhattan and make the world of advertising and finance run like clockwork. But, unfortunately, my alien metabolism picked up the information and transmogrified it in ways that would unleash tidal waves of stress hormones in the circulatory systems of my high school teachers, and would make my parents wish they’d been born in a nice, incurable coma.

  You see, Henry Luce had made a discovery in the nineteen fifties that had added great quantities of extra lucre to his fortune. If you could spot a weird bohemian trend out there in America somewhere, no matter how small and marginal, you could give it a name, write it up every week, and turn it into a national movement. This would allow you to produce great piles of indignant verbiage and long strings of lurid tales condemning a generation lost in lust and rebellion, thus satisfying the hidden needs of the men in the gray flannel suits who read your publication. These flannel-shackled souls could steep themselves in your tales of free love among the despicable bohemians. Thus, they could vicariously throw off the manacles of convention for a few minutes a week. And they could justify their fascination with sex by registering outrage at the socially destructive barbarians who had the gall to wallow in sexual freedom. Then they could go to their conference rooms and spend the day yessing the boss and return home at night to be bawled out if they’d forgotten to pick up the milk.

  In the mid-1950s, Luce had discovered a scruffy group of semi-derelicts named Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. It was only four guys—along with whatever nubile young women (or nubile young men, in Ginsberg’s case) they could tempt into their unmade beds. But given a little push from the armies of Luce typewriters, this unkempt quartet could be made to look like an invading army. Luce and his underlings snatched a name coined by San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen and shotgunned it to the masses—the beatniks. And all hell broke loose.

  In Buffalo, New York, where I was growing up, there was nothing resembling a genuine beatnik anywhere in sight. Sure, we had more Poles than Warsaw. But beatniks? Not even one. But that would soon change.

  Meanwhile, the nice, gray-flannel-suited models of masculinity that Time attempted to pump into my brain each week made no impression. It was the beatniks I identified with. They were the ones who provided a voice for the incoherent mutterings of my sixteen-year-old soul. So I turned the magazine’s coverage into a do-it-yourself, make-a-bohemian-in-the-comfort-of-your-own-home course. One week Time reported that during a party, Corso, Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti had listened to records of Bartok and Stravinsky. So I ran over to Jon Hyman’s house and borrowed all of his father’s treasured Bartok and Stravinsky LPs. The next week, Corso, Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti sprouted sandals. So I scoured my hometown, whose inhabitants consisted almost entirely of burly steelworkers wearing steel-toed Sears work boots, for a pair of these peculiar footpieces. I was forced to obtain a set from a Catholic craftsman who turned out costumes for parochial school pageants centering on the Nativity. The next week I showed up in class wearing open-air footwear.

  A week later, Time had the fabulous beatnik foursome sitting around jabbering about existentialism and Zen Buddhism. So I bought a paperback or two on Zen, became a sloppy pseudo-expert, and immediately set my sights on satori, the ultimate Zen state of bliss.

  Yet another week went by, and Time reviewed Jack Kerouac’s On The Road. That’s when I told my parents that I was going to drop out and ride a motorcycle across the country in search of the Spiritual Ultimate. And that’s when my father turned purple, vomited, threatened to leave me an orphan at any moment, then fainted. My mother was trying to choose between apoplexy and hemlock. All thanks to Time magazine and its Wizard of Odd, Henry Luce.

  Since I was ten, everybody had known that I was going to be a college professor. Because of the two books a day I stuffed into my cranium, there were always crumpled pages sticking out of my ears. That, and the fact that I combed the Scientific American from cover to cover, giving it a clever poodle cut, meant that I was on a clear path to some sort of academic ivory closet.

  Now with Kerouac and Corso choreographing my hormonal tango, my future as a college professor was turning from a dream into a nightmare. It looked like I was going to be trapped in the world of abstraction, separated from reality, prevented from ever putting my feet on the ground and feeling what it was like to walk around for myself. The prospective imprisonment was intolerable. And ten years later this discontent would have consequences. Big ones.

  Then my parents made a strategic error on a multi-megaton scale. They decided to take the family for a summer vacation…to Cape Cod. Unbeknownst to them, perched on the tip of that very tame cape is a rather untame little village—Provincetown—which is exactly where my naive father and mother had booked accommodations for two entire weeks. Little did they realize that Provincetown was an artist colony. And artist colonies were filled with a genuine article I’d never been exposed to in the flesh before—living, breathing, honest-to-goodness beatniks, beatniks imported from the heartland of the species, from Beat Central, from New York’s Greenwich Village.

  When we hit the shores of the Atlantic, I was in hog heaven. I promptly befriended a middle-aged gallery owner from Jane Street (one of those narrow alleys in the depths of the West Village), who excitedly introduced me to all of her artist friends. And suddenly, there I was, a sixteen-year-old neophyte showing up in my benefactor’s gallery every afternoon to discuss existentialism, Zen Buddhism, Bartok, and Stravinsky with the best of them.

  This terrified my father, who was convinced I was becoming a homosexual
. So as soon as our two-week reservations at our beach-front cottage expired, my parents hauled us out of this Gomorrah-on-the-Beach breathing sighs of relief that could be heard all the way to Kansas.

  When high school resumed, my immensely improved bohemian regalia, complete with authentic beatnik sandals from a store in Provincetown, sent typhoons of terror through the cerebral lagoons in my teachers’ skulls. One French teacher who was particularly fond of me actually took me into a walk-in closet, closed the door, and—trembling as she asked—stuttered out the horrified question, “A-a-a-are y-y-y-you a b-b-b-beatnik?” Frankly, I don’t remember my answer. But I was flattered.

  Now none of this actually meant anything much, except that my feet were getting a lot more ventilation, and when winter came I’d occasionally lay down in the snow (with galoshes on), stare at the moon for an hour or two, and try to meditate my way into Nirvana, which, if I’d lain there any longer, I’d probably have achieved, since frostbite would have turned my brain a heavenly shade of green. But the whole experience, along with one more vital ingredient, was my preparation for bigger things to come.

  The second indispensable additive to the explosive mixture that I was about to become arrived from yet another source which should have been pounding great spikes of respectability into my head. I am speaking of the British Broadcasting Company, the BBC. You see, Buffalo may be bereft of most high cultural advantages. But it was on the outskirts of a potent cultural diffusion zone. Buffalo was on the border with Canada. And in Canada, they have this radio network called the Canadian Broadcasting Company, the CBC. The CBC didn’t have much of a budget, but it did have high cultural pretensions. And where is the ultimate home of culture? London. So the CBC bought huge patches of programming from the BBC. And I listened to the resulting imports of British sophistication like crazy.

  Theoretically, while Time was fitting me for a gray flannel suit, the BBC should have been training me for dark pinstripes and a bowler. But when your brain is warped, the respectable stuff never makes a dent. Instead, I was impressed primarily with a bit of utter lunacy called The Goon Show—a sort of radio father of Monty Python’s Flying Circus—featuring Peter Sellers and a bunch of limeys named things like Spike Milligan, yes, Spike, carrying on as if they’d spent too much time swimming in a pool of mescaline.

  Which leads us to the second great contribution that the CBC made to my life: a series of lectures by the highly-regarded author and master of intellect Aldous Huxley. When I was twelve, Huxley published a new book called The Doors of Perception. His erudite radio exegeses on the book’s revelations, delivered in the clipped accents of the English aristocracy, were about his discovery of a wondrous new chemical that would have made Alice in Wonderland’s hookah-smoking caterpillar envious, a chemical that had surfaced in the Navy’s Project Chatter, a diabolical series of experiments to see if you could concoct a potion that would drag—and drug—secrets out of prisoners of war without the use of torture. The chemical failed to be the secret weapon with which to get enemy prisoners blabbering, but it proved to have another use. For centuries, unfortunate Zen students had not experienced enlightenment until their generous Zen masters had humiliated them for fifteen years, then tossed them off a porch and broken at least one of their arms. But this miracle alkaloid opened the human mind to all the wonders that those crazy Zen recluses had been forced to dig up the hard way. I am referring to mescaline. The stuff in peyote buttons.

  Up to this point I had never had a glass of beer, never been closer than five feet to a tumbler of liquor, never smoked a cigarette, and never even used a four-letter word. I just dressed in peculiar foot gear and had a mind chock full of bizarre jigsaw puzzle chunks.

  The jigsaw pieces came together when I finally left home on the three-day-and-night train trip to Portland, Oregon, and Reed College. In addition to its stratospheric median SATs, and a set of courses tougher than the ones they casually toss around at Harvard, Reed was home to an environment known as one of the most “progressive” in the country, complete with an art class whose teacher was the most popular on campus because, instead of teaching anything about art, he devoted his entire lecture time to Eastern mysticism. He danced perilously close to the volcano’s edge—to Zen Buddhism and satori.

  It was at Reed, as you’ll recall, that Jimmsy Law introduced me to the secret of sex.

  What’s more, Jimmsy introduced me to this stuff that you could buy in flat boxes about the size of a medium pizza box at a mere ten dollars per carton from some mail-order Indians in New Mexico. It was called peyote, and it wasn’t even illegal yet. Unfortunately, the Reed kids had some misimpressions about how to take the stuff. They noticed that it tasted as appealing as a slatternly vegetable’s menstrual fluid. So they baked it, shredded it, and put it in gelatin capsules. Very clever. Also very dumb. It meant that you could have gotten a more effective buzz by taking two aspirin and calling your doctor in the morning.

  But this 1962 chemical misstep was about to kick start something new—the drug culture, a pillar of The Sixties.

  AEROBICS FOR THE GONADS

  When we last said good-bye to our hero (that’s me), he had gone off to college after a high school career so sexually ascetic that it would have shamed a monk, then had landed—with no preparation—in bed with the one girl on the Reed College campus whom every man over the age of thirteen in the state of Oregon was hoping to sandwich between his sheets. After two weeks living with me, her brain—an astonishing specimen of brilliance—was so mangled that she fled, thus leaving me once again alone in the world.

  And from that alone-ness would emerge two things: the currents of an embryonic drug culture, and another equally embryonic movement. A movement that would someday be named by, guess who? Henry Luce.

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  There I was, in isolation at Reed College in the dark gray, perpetual mist of Portland, Oregon, in January of 1961. And isolation in a gray mist, it would turn out, was the perfect place for the mutant intellectual seeds planted by Luce, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Gregory Corso to germinate. The Jimmsy incident resurrected the old itch for finding the ultimate in mystic enlightenment. What’s worse, in a dramatic demonstration of the fact that college courses can be dangerous to your health, I was a hot shot at Gallic literature and was taking a semester’s worth of French Surrealist poetry and prose. I don’t know if you’ve ever read this stuff—but Mallarmé, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and that guy who wrote Ubu Roi were utterly mad, which fit my state of mind perfectly. Rimbaud, as we saw earlier, recommended a “systematic derangement of the senses,” which went beautifully with all the Zen trash I’d absorbed. And with William James’s awe of insanity in The Varieties of the Religious Experience.

  I overlooked the fact that this sort of wisdom had killed off Rimbaud’s creativity when he was a mere twenty-one, and I began to follow my Zen/beatnik/surrealist hodgepodge of gurus into the thorny undergrowth of the human mind.

  Eastern mysticism instructed you to detach yourself from the things of this world so you could dive past all the outer layers of the onion and get directly to the small green sprout of spontaneous awareness that comes straight from the center of consciousness. Or from the universe or the Godhead or whatever. Since I’d been tossed out of my dorm room anyway, I decided to shuck my connection to material things. They were mere defense mechanisms, artificial vanities, designer jeans for the ego, trapping you in the superficial, shielding you from the reality pulsing at the center of is-ness.

  So I did a little analysis of the “artificial patterns,” the defense mechanisms, with which I’d propped up my ego over the years, and decided to discard them one by one so I could follow the yellow brick road to Enlightenment. First of all, I’d toss away any identification with a single room. After all, what is a habitation, anyway? It’s a place where you smear your vanity all over the walls, erecting a shell of devices that hide you from your spontaneous self. Every poster or painting that
you put up, every book that you squeeze onto a shelf, and every record album in your LP rack is secretly designed to impress the next pretty girl who walks in, stupefying her with the superiority of your taste and your intellect. Your room is as superficial as the exoskeleton of a dead cicada and as ego-driven as the scent markings of a horny dog. It’s a barricade against the unpredictable energy of the universal mind. You’ve gotta get rid of it!

  So instead of settling into the new dorm room that the college authorities had generously assigned to me, I made myself a bedroll and did my dives into the land of Morpheus on the concrete floor of the library basement, on the linoleum floor of a dormitory social room, and wherever else I could sneak floor space without anyone noticing.

  Why didn’t anybody trip over me and complain to the authorities about this obstruction in the path, you may well ask. Fact is, I’d noticed that I leaned on another artificial crutch—going to sleep at the same time every night. When you’re stuck with the interminably dull 1,200 pages a week of Ficino, Averroes, Hobbes, Locke, Falafel, and the other obscure and confoundedly convoluted writers whose books Reed fired at you like cannon balls, you can barely keep your eyes open, and the idea of a slow death by blowtorch begins to sound like relaxation. So what do you think of as the ultimate escape? Bedtime!

  Under the new spiritual regimen, escapes were verboten. Bedtime had to be eliminated! So I slept at a different arbitrary hour in every twenty-four-hour solar cycle, napping for no more than 180 minutes at a time. And I did all my snoozing long after others had passed the precipice of the REM state. That’s why no one ever caught me napping on their linoleum tiles. I was catching cat naps at three am. What a victory. I had removed one cosmetic layer from the face of reality!