How I Accidentally Started the Sixties

by Howard Bloom

  We had no cell phones or Google Maps in those primitive days, so I have no idea of how I did it, but early in the afternoon, I rendezvoused with my gang on Berkeley’s main drag, Telegraph Avenue, just a fast automobile’s sneeze from San Francisco. Hoff, Carol, our penis-cone anthropologist from Seattle, and his girlfriend had not found a place to stay. So we marched up and down Telegraph Avenue, a thoroughfare awash with coffee houses and bookstores, looking for signs advertising vacant apartments. Lord knows how we planned to pay the rent. We were close to penniless. But, alas, we had no luck. Finally, in desperation, we pounded on apartment doors and asked the appalled inhabitants if they knew of any vacancies. Or we would have pounded on apartment doors. If the first knock had not turned out to be so darned lucky.

  Yes, the first door on which we politely used our knuckles was on the second floor above a store in a Telegraph Avenue building three blocks away from the Berkeley campus and just one block from Cody’s bookstore. The hinged slab of wood was opened by an enviably handsome nineteen-year-old. His hair was raven black, his complexion and face the fair-skinned and ruddy cheeked sort generally reserved for Dickensian heroes once they’ve overcome their poverty and become radiantly rich.

  To our surprise, he invited us in. Entering involved the kind of maneuvers used by seventeen clowns to squeeze into a Volkswagen Beetle. There were quite a few of us, and not much of him. Or not much of his habitation, that is. He was the possessor of a single room filled nearly to capacity by the slender girlfriend, draped across two floor cushions. The first one of us who figured out how to breathe explained our plight. We needed a place to live. The face of the young man lit up. “Why,” he said, “don’t you stay here?” The fact that the only way we could fit was by Scotch taping ourselves to the ceiling was not an obstacle to our eagerly saying yes. We were desperate.

  So we spread out our sleeping bags, sat on each other’s shoulders, and began to chat. It soon became obvious that our host, William, was quite a lad. He was a Berkeley student, and a top-flight one at that. What’s more, he was a cello virtuoso with the sophistication of a young Mozart. And he had enough charm to be elected president in the country of his choice.

  Shortly after we moved in with William, someone I’d met on the street came to the apartment and told me I had a call. This was a little strange, since William had no telephone. The call, it turned out, had come in at the pay phone of a gas station two blocks away. Lord knows how my mother had located me. Remember, we had no GPS in 1962. But sleuthing is one of her gifts. I suspect her powers as a peeping tom and policewoman of the cosmos may have played a role in shaping my fear of women. A fear that will reveal its significance in a bit.

  u

  Hoff attracted more females and I attracted more followers, which means that we were aching for enough space to periodically expand our rib cages and un-hunch our shoulders. A month later, we managed to find a place big enough to inhale in. It was a big, pink condemned house three blocks away from Telegraph Avenue and a short walk from the Berkeley campus. The fact that it could collapse at any minute didn’t bother us. We had faith in the quality of American workmanship.

  William abandoned his apartment and followed. And when we transferred across the bay to San Francisco, he once again came along. William’s disposition was so upbeat that he was indispensable.

  Keep William in mind. He is the lad who will teach us the lessons of San Diego, including one of the reasons that romance so often ends in a mangle.

  u

  San Francisco was famed at the time for guess what? Its role as the West Coast headquarters of the Bohemians of the Decade. This was my big chance to finally meet the spiritual saints I’d been reading about all these years—the masters of existential angst, the pioneers of poetic revolution, the frontiersmen of the new nihilism, the beatniks. A day or two after I arrived, I hitch-hiked across the Bay Bridge and headed for San Francisco’s North Beach, home of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s famed City Lights book shop, where, according to Time magazine, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and Jack Kerouac passed their afternoons howling at the lostness of their generation. I couldn’t wait to prostrate myself at my heroes’ dirt-encrusted feet.

  Ferlinghetti’s shop was exactly where it was supposed to be. But its only inhabitants were one drab clerk, a false hope for customers, and shelves packed with eccentric books. I asked the clerk where the beatniks were. He looked as if he’d never heard of a beatnik, and gave no answer. I staggered out to the sidewalk wondering what sort of natural disaster had desolated my shrine. What sort of intergalactic specimen collectors had beamed my idols up into the skies. I stood in place on the concrete in front of the bookstore, perplexed. Finding the beatniks had become a task at the core of my very being. And now it had been yanked out like a 150-watt, brightly-shining light bulb. Not unscrewed, but yanked, leaving an appallingly empty socket. And darkness. I looked up the street to my left and down the street to my right to search for scruffily enlightened characters. None were in sight. Finally, a respectable San Franciscan pedestrian spotted me standing there dumbstruck by dither, my face pretzeled by quandary and said, “You look disturbed about something. Can I help you?” I explained to the kind Samaritan, “Yes, I’m looking for the beatniks.” He rolled his eyes up into their lids, scratched his head, thought appallingly hard, then said, “They disappeared about a year ago. Don’t know what happened to them. Have you tried Colorado?” Searching an entire state, alas, was beyond me.

  The beatniks were gone! It was clear that if Carol Maynard, Dick Hoff, and I wanted to be part of a movement, we were going to have to start our own. Which seemed to be what we were doing. Totally by accident.

  u

  Within a month, there were roughly a dozen of us, all running around totally naked on the first floor of our flamingo-pink hazardous house with visions of satori somewhere in the back of our minds. In fact, we got so used to nakedness that it was hard to remember that normal folks wore clothes. Which meant that we were tempted to go down to the local supermarket in our birthday suits. It took a lot of effort to remind ourselves that this was a bad idea.

  We were on the house’s first floor. Someone we scarcely knew was on the second floor. But when he threw a party one evening, he was kind enough to offer us an invite. For supermarkets, we needed pants, skirts, and shirts or blouses. But for a party in our own building? Surely this was informal. Surely this was come as you are. So we did. When we entered and began to introduce ourselves to the strangers in the room, they backed away. The living room in which we were attempting to be warm and sociable had been clogged with people when we first entered. But within minutes, we were the only ones in the space. Everyone else was crowded into a bedroom where we were not. And they were disturbed. Finally, they sent an emissary to tell us that our nakedness was not welcome, and could we please leave. How the inhabitants of a nudist colony manage to remind themselves that humans shock easily, I do not know.

  Despite this, our reputation was apparently spreading, because folks came from as far as Virginia to join us. Which is how Sylvia of the Red Hair, whom you will meet shortly, entered our lives.

  u

  Now, if you’ll recall, this whole epic started as a subplot on how I made a miniscule contribution to the start of something that would soon grow big, the Sixties drug culture. So if I haven’t utterly parboiled your patience, in my next four chapters I will give you the succeeding adventure, in which, if we’re lucky enough to get that far, some graduate biochemistry students at Berkeley discover how to manufacture a mysterious chemical used by the military to make cats desperately afraid of mice, then put drops of it on sugar cubes. The budding test-tube wranglers wrap the enhanced sweetener in tin foil and sell samples to their friends, thus threatening to allow small rodents to subjugate the human race.

  NO RIGHT TURN ON A GIRL

  WITH RED HAIR

  Our fame was apparently spreading like an avian flu. You know
the kind, a virus that cleverly sneaks into the guts of a migrating bird, travels a thousand miles in the avian’s innards, waits for a stopover at a farm, exits the fliers’ intestine by means we cannot mention in a family publication, and inserts itself into a hungry pig, then seizes on the nearest human, and takes its next big leaps using airlines with engines instead of beaks. One day, ambling into our illegal pink abode in Berkeley, California, came a couple of virtual foreigners. They were refugees from the genteel society of Virginian aristocracy who had gone off to the University of Virginia, where folks of their particular crust (upper) were expected to indulge in fraternity pranks for four years, do an inordinate amount of drinking, and emerge as lawyers, politicians, and pillars of the community.

  The pair that showed up on our doorstep—a young man and his girlfriend—had failed to find the meaning of life in a beer bottle. So they’d dropped out of school, tucked their spare jeans into the trunk of a classic, red MG open-topped sports car, headed the vehicle in a westerly direction, and ended up in the general vicinity of the Pacific. How they’d heard of the band of humans to which I belonged and how they’d dug up the address of our big, pink, condemned house in Berkeley, God alone knows. But one morning, there they were, determined to visit, or perhaps even to fall in with our wayward deeds. Little did I realize that through one of them, I’d trip across the generation of Bohemians who had come before the beatniks, a generation so antique that Henry Luce had not even dignified them with a name.

  The distaff member of this couple was particularly impressive. She was slim but shapely—with flaming red hair that fell to her waist. She was clothed in jeans, a motorcycle-style denim jacket, masculine boots, and swore with a hammer-hard authority that would have shocked a truck driver. Frankly, she scared me to death.

  The two of us managed to successfully stay at opposite corners of every room in which we found ourselves for a week or two, until one night, six or seven of us—including her and her boyfriend—decided to crash a movie. We had no money, hadn’t seen a film in years, and one of my favorites, an Alec Guinness thing with great gobs of music by Prokofiev—The Horse’s Mouth, had come to town. So we all trooped off to the parking lot outside the local theater to wait for intermission, when the exit doors would open and we could sneak in the back way. Unfortunately, the neighbors saw us, called the cops, and we had to split. This left us with no way to amuse ourselves.

  But being resourceful, we pinch-hit. We went off to a laundromat and decided to shock the patrons by taking Sylvia (the girl with the long red hair), who pretended she was a corpse, and stuffing her into the dryer. Just as we had gotten Sylvia’s limp upper half into the machine and were about to slip her lower extremities in, a very tall man in a business suit tapped one of us on the shoulder and asked us sternly whether we needed any bleach. He was, he explained, the manager.

  We all ran very fast. The main body of the mob sprinted out the front door. I dashed out the back with one other person following close behind. I didn’t pay much attention to who it was until we got to our big, rosé, condemned domicile, sat down in the living room to catch our breath, discovered we were utterly alone, and looked each other in the eye. My fellow escapee had been…Sylvia. The woman who terrified me. And there was no one around we could use to avoid each other.

  Well, it was a long night. God knows where the rest of the crew had disappeared, but they didn’t show up. I was still panicked by this stainless-steel lady. But when it became obvious I wasn’t going to be able to dodge conversing with her, I defended myself by doing something utterly despicable. I analyzed her personality. Piece by piece I took her apart, displaying the disassembled components before her eyes and explaining how they worked together to make a finished, ultra-tough human being who used a fist-like pose to hide a carefully-concealed vulnerability, a need to curl up like a kitten in the protective hand of someone she felt was stronger than herself. It was nasty, fiendish, and I apologize, but I was young.

  At any rate, we were still there talking (or was I lecturing?) when the sun latched its first dim, green fingers of light around the sill of the horizon and threatened to haul its full body through the window of the sky. As the light acquired the pea-soup quality of very early day, a strange transformation hit Sylvia. Her dagger-throwing eyes went soft. The hit-man hardness in her face relaxed. Her I-can-whip-your-ass muscular posture melted. Then came the ultimate shock. She swore she was in love with me. My God, what had I gotten myself into!

  u

  Sylvia decided that she and I should go off together. Which we did. At that point in my life, I wasn’t particularly adept at saying no. We hitch-hiked the 403.8 miles or so down to San Pedro, the port south of LA. Which gives you a precise measure of the distance that at least one man will go to have sex. Our passionate love affair, which had been entirely one-sided and based on some illusion of me that Sylvia had concocted in that peculiar night of escape from the laundromat, lasted about five hours. I was not a commanding giant who would take five hours to focus on her emotional interior and analyze it on a daily basis, then take her to bed when she unclenched. That had been a one-time-only self-defense maneuver. Who cared? She was far more interesting as a roommate and a friend than she’d been as a nemesis.

  Remember, it was the early summer of 1962, two years before anyone would recognize that we had left the 1950s and entered a strange new period of history, The Sixties. Sylvia and I started body-surfing in the Pacific waves five blocks away from the room in which we slept by day, and hanging out by night at a seedy little bar straight out of a pre-beatnik fantasy, which is where I met a living embodiment of 1940s bohemianism, a man about to teach me new lessons in meaning and the unseen range of human possibilities. New lessons in the hidden infinities hinted at by Edna St. Vincent Millay, T. S. Eliot, William Blake, and William James. His name was Ed. And he was a blessing.

  THE COWBOY AND THE INDIAN

  No search for the spiritual ultimate is complete without a visit to a Native American wise man. I had mine six years before Carlos Castaneda’s books about a flying Mexican peyote eater would make the practice fashionable: in the early summer of 1962. Though in California, it is difficult to tell summer and winter apart.

  My opportunity to absorb the wisdom of those who show their love for nature by sleeping in fur blankets yanked from unwilling buffaloes came when Sylvia and I marched off to the aforementioned pre-beatnik bar, a bar even Tom Wolfe and Ken Kesey never imagined in their wildest dreams. And a strange place for a kid who didn’t drink, but I fit in for other reasons which will make themselves apparent shortly. It was, as you already know, the hangout of a lost generation of bohemians. I qualified highly here, since I hadn’t worn shoes in eight months, even in the snow, my hair was down to my shoulders, and I got lost easily. What’s more, since every hair on my cranium was curly, it fluffed itself into what would later be known as a Jew-Fro, so my coiffure stood at attention about a foot above my head.

  To make matters worse, the Beatles hadn’t shown up in the United States with shockingly long hair, so anything more extensive than a crew-cut was considered un-American. In fact, a male with long hair was something people had never seen…except on portraits of Jesus Christ. And he had straight hair. I did not. So my coiffeur resembled the wig worn by Harpo Marx. The result? Kind-hearted folks would literally stop their cars in the middle of the road and stare. Then they’d jump out and generously offer to beat the shit out of me, gang rape me, tie my heels together, attach me to a fender, and drag me to the nearest barber shop…twenty-seven miles away. Fortunately, I was always able to talk my way out of being turned into a well-tenderized and neatly-groomed sack of meat.

  But back to the bar. Just to give you the flavor of the place, every night at 2:00 a.m. when her professional duties were over, the town Madame, a woman of fading but stately beauty, would glide up in her eighty-foot-long Cadillac to find the companionship of folks she could count on as friends. One of these wa
s a man who rapidly adopted me as a semi-son.

  The guy who took me under his wing was a big, genial man in his forties, Ed. He’d grown up in New York, and if I’m not mixing things up terribly, said he’d been sired by an extremely authoritarian rabbi, which is a bit strange since he looked about as Jewish as Clark Gable. At any rate, no matter what his father’s religious persuasion, Ed couldn’t take being bossed around all the time, and at the age of fourteen he ran away from home, followed Horace Greeley’s advice, and headed west. How he traveled, Lord alone knows, but soon he found himself in the vast lands of sagebrush and tumbleweed, where men are men, sheep are nervous, and fried bulls testicles are a munchie on a par with popcorn (which, I should think, would give the bulls even more anxiety attacks that the ewes).

  So, Ed bravely strode into whatever ranch seemed to be hogging up the roadside and asked for a job. They probably gave him one sweeping up the cattle droppings in the barn. But Ed wasn’t the kind of guy to let a humble beginning get him down. Before long, he was the best darned cowboy you’d ever seen. He could rope a calf, ride a bull, chew two packets of Marlboros, and tell the difference between a horse and a hearse. Just to show he was REALLY a cowpoke, though, he couldn’t handle the difference in spelling between the two.

  Ed became so good at what he did that from time to time he’d go off to Mexico for a season and sign up with the gauchos, the cowboys south of the border. These virtuosos can lasso a bull with dental floss and get the damned hulk of beef to brand itself, then to convince the next bull in the pasture to step into the caballero corral and show how macho he is by tattooing himself as well. This is why gauchos can take siestas: they trick the cattle in to doing most of the work. At any rate, Ed was able to out-gaucho the gauchos at their own game (gin rummy), and won a reputation everywhere from Juarez to Argentina.