How I Accidentally Started the Sixties

by Howard Bloom

  Sexual revolutions, it seems, are not as simple as they are made out to be.

  u

  Next came the great methedrine experiment. A waltz with that stuff was also an eye-opener of the sort that Edna St. Vincent Millay had prescribed. But it would prove to be a good reminder of the reasons to avoid asking for too many dances with pharmaceutical partners.

  THE NIGHT MY BRAIN WAS ISSUED

  A SPEEDING TICKET

  When you’re seeking the yellow brick road to satori, you can’t afford to overlook any byway. And some of those side trails led through poppy fields (not that I ever touched heroin, mind you) and the farmlands where a profusion of America’s pills are grown. Ah, how well I remember methedrine and amphetamine from those golden years. For six or seven hours, you talked non-stop. Not even a tablecloth stuffed in your mouth could slow you down. Suddenly, all the mysteries of the universe became clear. Those random scraps of garbage scientists and philosophers had been tossing in the trash bin of books for millennia came together in a stately minuet and demonstrated their blissful unity. Yes, you, and you alone had the key to the universe. And you were determined to let everyone else on the planet know what it was—preferably by jabbering all ten billion of their ears off.

  With a little boost from these beneficent chemicals of speed, how generous you became with your wisdom. How rapidly the syllables exploded from your lips. You were a 33 RPM disk playing at 78 turns a minute and enjoying every second of it. Then, a funny thing happened. The energy ebbed. The well-lit universe that a minute ago was beaming warm rays of comprehension into your soul turned dark and bitter. It spewed meaninglessness and isolation. It flash-froze your emotions as if they were Birdseye peas. It liquid-nitrogened your very core. Assuming you had any core at all.

  You felt tortured, tossed out on the barren, icy landscape of a distant, empty planet. Very, very alone. About two weeks later, you snapped out of the depression and decided you were better off never taking the stuff again. Yet you were enriched by the wisdom it had left behind.

  The first time I took methedrine was the week it was introduced as a prescribable drug to the medical profession, back in 1962. A friend and I had hitchhiked from the San Francisco apartment that wobbled in the wind to San Diego so my friend could see his family. And what a family they were!

  The friend was William, the lad with the Dickensian, ruddy-cheeked handsomeness who had taken us into his apartment on Telegraph Avenue. The apartment so small that a housefly standing on all six legs would have had a hard time turning around in the place. We all knew of William’s brilliance on the cello. But he never mentioned his parents. There was a reason. His father and mother were Ozark mountain people who had picked up their hound dogs and fleas and moved to the land of endless orange groves to become Mormons and learn to beat the fear of God into their children using whips. (I kid you not. As a cursory inspection of the Bible will demonstrate, God is on particularly good terms with parents who master the lash.)

  The fond childhood memory of whippings had apparently turned my friend into a sucker for devices with anything that resembled ropes, like catgut strings stretched beyond the point of endurance, especially if such gadgets would howl the way he had when he was a kid. That’s why he had turned to the cello, in spite of his parents’ resistance. Back in the Ozarks there was a pithy folk commandment—“don’t get above your raisin.” When I first heard the expression, I thought it odd that you should never attempt to climb higher than the dried fruit in your breakfast cereal. But apparently I had misinterpreted. It actually meant that you should not inch, quiver, or sniggle above your appointed social status, a location just below the dung beetle. Should you accidentally stray, clamber, or climb, you were doomed to be turned into a cinder block by the all-forgiving Lord.

  Despite this warm family environment, William and I decided to travel on the thumb-express down to his old ancestral home in San Diego and see the folks. Our first stop in the town of William’s birth was a visit to his best friend from high school, the son of the city’s most celebrated surgeon. As we turned a corner on the way to the surgeon’s house, we spotted a newsstand with Life Magazine on prominent display. It carried the spirit of Henry Luce, the inescapable culture-shaper of the 20th century, the Wizard of America’s mid-century Oz. And what did the master of Time, space, and Life, the Great Perceptual Necromancer, have in mind this week? Splayed across the oversized picture magazine’s cover was a photo of a big, black pill, a new wonder drug, or so the folks at the Luce Empire said, a stuff called methedrine. When we got over to the house of the dissection-specialist’s offspring, the kid announced that his dad had just gotten in free samples of something we might want to try. He marched into the back of his studio-apartment-sized bedroom closet and hauled out a five-gallon pickle jar filled with pills guaranteed to boggle, tangle and twist the mind. Right on top were these little black ones—the selfsame wonder pellets that had just made the cover of Life. The generous son of Asclepius handed us four of these black wonder-capsules, and off we went into the Southern California sunshine curious about what these molecular amusement rides could do.

  By that afternoon, my friend had still not worked up the nerve to see his parents, so we dropped in on another buddy of his, Andrea Seroff, a gorgeously elegant concert pianist in her late thirties who saw that we were at loose ends and invited us to stay for dinner and bunk down overnight on her living room floor. About two hours before mealtime, we took the little black pills. Thirty minutes later, we wandered into the kitchen, where the pianist was carefully piecing together an epicurean feast in our honor, and began to rattle out sentence fragments like bullets from a machine gun. Within minutes, we decided to pull our hostess’ life apart, put the pieces back together, and figure out her problems, providing handy solutions for each one. After all, who could solve life’s dilemmas better than we could? We had reached the age of ultimate wisdom—nineteen.

  Andrea’s mother had died in childbirth. Her father, savaged by the loss, had felt that his brand-new infant was the murderer. Andrea became a hateful appendage to his existence, an encumbrance he raised while fiercely rejecting her attachment. When Andrea’s musical brilliance had flowered, other men had entered her life. She’d been married three times since. After half a dozen years, each romantic pairing had detonated like a time bomb.

  Why? Her latest union had been with a man she still adored: a brilliant, sensitive, and extraordinarily good-looking Brazilian who’d begun as her manager, had become her lover, and had taken her to the altar. After six concert seasons, he still accompanied her on her world tours, standing worshipfully in the wings during each performance and overseeing her career. But in the seventh year a restlessness had seized her—a growing panic about her husband’s love. Her answer: to attempt its destruction. With only the most peripheral awareness of what she was doing, she invented a swarm of ways to convert her mate’s adoration into agony. Her initial incitements were subtle, like striking the wrong keys at a climactic moment of a vital public exhibition. Her later provocations were more dramatic—attacks, tantrums, frigidity, and pinpoint manipulations of his weaknesses. Her husband had shown nothing but concern and an effort to calm her growing frenzy for over a year. Then his patience had shattered. The marriage was over. She breathed a sigh of relief.

  Love was only acceptable if it ended in rejection. Her father had inadvertently taught her that. He had rejected her. And she knew in her bones that another rejection was coming. She could feel it. The suspense, waiting for its detonation, was more than she could endure. So she took charge and made it happen. All by herself. Or so our sizzling analytic senses decreed.

  For an encore, we untangled the evolution of the universe and figured out how each strand tied into the magisterial fabric of human history. As we were braiding together several mysteries about Egyptian and European civilization that had puzzled the pros for centuries, our hostess remembered that she still needed to buy dessert
, and asked if we’d drive her car down to the local store and pick up a cake. That turned out to be a mistake. A big one. Remember, we were on a drug.

  We piled into her precious, expensive vehicle and piloted it to the grocery, our tongues picking up velocity as we rolled along. By the time we parked in front of the fly-specked corner food shop, we were splicing broken filaments of world history at such a phenomenal rate of speed that we totally forgot where we were and what we were there for. We never even got out of the car. We madly rushed to come up with the definitive answers to all of those messy conundrums that Isaac Newton and Arnold Toynbee had carelessly left unsolved. We were unbeatable, invincible, unstoppable, and certainly unshuttupable.

  The next thing we knew, it was dawn and we were still sitting in front of the grocery. But our tongues, after twelve solid hours of flapping like hummingbird wings, had transmuted to lead in our mouths. The universe, which earlier in the evening had been beaming proudly at us as it spewed out its secrets, had now turned its back and was spraying diarrhetically from its infinite sphincter. I looked over at William. In the pre-sunlight, his eyes seemed to have sunken so far toward the back of his head that they had totally disappeared, leaving nothing but black, cavernous craters. The answers to the problems of life flickered away as the streetlights went out.

  Outdoors, it was the murky, greenish cream of pre-daylight. But in our heads, we had entered the dark night of the soul.

  We suddenly realized that we were late for dinner. The grocery store was closed, so there was no way to buy a cake. At 7:00 a.m., we revved up the ignition and headed back to the concert pianist’s house.

  She was in her bathrobe when we rang the bell. But that wasn’t the worst of it. She was also in hysterics. We had disappeared. So had her car. She hadn’t heard a thing from us. We could have been dead. And in those dim and distant days of the early sixties, there were no cell phones with which she could contact us. So she had been going crazy with worry all night. And dinner had been ruined. We had violated her trust. We had trashed her friendship. She never wanted to see us again.

  We spent the next three days in our sleeping bags camped out in the eucalyptus groves outside the fences that wall off the more secluded regions of the San Diego Zoo. As peacocks modeled their latest fashions a hundred feet away, we were sunken in a state of meaninglessness so profound that Jean Paul Sartre would have been proud to call it his own.

  Then we finally went to see my traveling companion’s Ozark/Mormon parents, who fed us a wonderful meal, the highlight of which was Williams’ sister, a sixteen-year-old knockout—temptingly breasted, small waisted, and firmly hipped, with high color in her cheeks and dark hair that spilled to her shoulder blades. At first, she seemed like a joyful, rambunctious tomboy. But after dinner, when the three of us went for a walk, she begged us to take her with us back to San Francisco. Her normally vigorous voice was strained with desperation.

  We wanted to know what was wrong. The pleasant parents who had accepted my oddness and fed us to the gills turned out to have a darker side. The motto about not attempting to top your raisin was a clue. Their world was frozen in the cast-iron regulations of a furious God who punished every deviation from his intended course. The least misstep could trigger His wrath. So Williams’ parents lived in perpetual fear.

  Their daughter’s sloppiness imperiled the divine order and threatened to bury them in brimstone. Her latest sin: she had been washing the dishes the previous night. A teacup had slipped from her soapy hands and shattered on the floor. Knowing the Almighty’s sense of propriety, her parents had panicked. To prevent divine retribution, they had thrown their daughter on a bed, strapped her wrists and ankles to its posts, and flogged her with a leather belt until she’d bled.

  The next day, we noticed a peppy pugnaciousness in the girl. She playfully did everything in her power to lure William into a fist fight. Apparently, she could only trust in love if it was accompanied by violence. Violence like the furies that her parents had unleashed when they feared she might upset their God. Very similar to the conundrum of our concert pianist who could only accept love bundled with the rejection of her father. So the deeds of the fathers do, indeed, implant themselves in the sexual and love patterns of their daughters. And their sons. Food for thought. But thought was not the most urgent thing on our agenda. Something else was.

  We wanted to help William’s sister escape. But kidnap laws have secular penalties as severe as those of the Mormon Elohim. We came up with an alternative. We would visit the Mormon Bishop of San Diego and ask for his intervention. Later that afternoon, we were seated in the Sears-suited gentleman’s study. His holiness did not criticize my bare feet and primitive appearance. In fact, he asked for a sample of my handwriting, analyzed it, and declared that I was one of the most spiritual people he’d ever met. Apparently, flattery was one of the skills that had put him in charge of San Diego’s Mormon community.

  We explained the nightmare on Elm Street. The bishop made sympathetic sounds and promised to remedy the situation.

  Still worried, two days later we headed for the road back to San Francisco, with my friend carrying his cello (and its case) over his shoulder. This meant we could only accept rides from very large cars. In those days, as I mentioned earlier, the Japanese hadn’t yet introduced automobiles the size of running shoes, and every internal combustion vehicle was the size of the Kennedy yacht. Plus, even though I was barefoot and looked utterly disreputable, the cello helped us attract drivers who aspired to be patrons of the arts.

  We hit Palo Alto, where William wanted to make a stopover, at about four in the afternoon, when the orange California sunshine makes everything look mouth-watering. Apollo’s paint-crew had splashed their gilt with particular liberality on the house we were about to invade—a big, white, Spanish-style, three-story edifice surrounded by gardens with more exotic blooms than the entire Dutch wholesale floral exchange.

  Turns out an old buddy of William’s lived there. She was the sixteen-year-old daughter of a high-ranking physicist from Stanford University. Her papa was no ordinary atom smasher. He had a major international rep, and political connections to match. As a consequence, he spent most of his time in Geneva negotiating nuclear treaties. Big ones. History changers. That is not an exaggeration.

  His wife answered the door, and barely escaped a coronary thrombosis. We could have been poster children for disreputability. But she feigned charm with remarkable skill, and invited us in. Frankly, she should have been accustomed to the odd by now. It was long, long before anyone but alcoholics scraped from the bottom of society’s shoes would live together out of wedlock, but her daughter had begun cohabiting with her boyfriend at the age of fifteen. That incipient embryo of the Sexual Revolution again. What’s worse, the teenager saved money on rent in some distant location by sinning nightly in the bedroom where she’d spent her infant years—the one in her parents’ home.

  We were allowed to stay overnight and we were treated as if we were normal human beings (which we definitely were not). But we could hear a powerful wind rushing through the foliage as we departed the next morning. It was the mother breathing a sigh of relief.

  Relief, however, was not to be our fate. It wasn’t until we’d returned to San Francisco that we realized we’d been conned. A surreptitious telephone conversation with William’s sister made it obvious that nothing had changed. The Mormon official’s “handwriting analysis” had been a trick to win our trust…and to lull us into submission.

  We made a few more long-distance calls to the Bishop, and never accomplished a thing. As deliverers, we had failed. But I, at least, had learned a lesson. Sylvia of the red hair fell in love only when a man ruthlessly mastered her. Williams’ sister could accept affection only if it was accompanied by fisticuffs. And the concert pianist had been comfortable in a relationship only if she were rejected. Sigmund Freud was right. In some of us, the patterns of childhood dig the canals
through which love flows. And those conduits are sometimes self-defeating.

  But would any of this newfound knowledge help me thread my way through the labyrinth of my own intimacy panic? We shall have to see.

  u

  Our adventures in the chemical maddening of the brain would become the roots of more deliberate insanities yet to arrive on the scene. Public insanities. Mass mood swings. Shifts in the undercurrents of history. Why? Our chemical journeys were the embryonic pulse and twist of deliriums that would later splotch the world with psychedelic frenzy. Remember, we were marinating our brains in strange substances two years before Ken Kesey would make headlines with his invention of the Electric Kool Aid Acid Test, two years before the Merry Pranksters would alert the world to the drug culture, and two years before the popularization of the phrase that would capture the drug culture’s goal: . In my case, where did the call for mind expansion come from? Not from Kesey and his Merry Pranksters. As yet, the Pranksters did not exist. But from Edna St. Vincent Millay, William Blake, T. S. Eliot, and William James. Three poets and a scientist; four inadvertent prophets. Prophets of the gods inside.

  u

  The two days of depression that kick in after you take methedrine are hell. But in exchange for that hell, you learn lessons. For me, it was time to toss the hell away, keep the lessons, and tangle with…the law. As in “I fought the law and the law won.” But the fate indicated by the lyrics of this song would not be mine. Far from it. (Maybe that’s because the song would not be written for another three years.)

  YOUR POLICE FORCE—KEEPING THE WORLD SAFE FOR INSANITY

  You’ll recall that a few chapters ago we covered the story of Ed, the ex-vaquero who refused to break a bottle of water over the head of a stallion that was turning his rump into chopped meat, and the American Indian anthropologist who had discovered his roots, then hadn’t known where to put them in his already overcrowded cottage. Ed’s luck with the police wasn’t so good. As you know, he decided to take a cross-country vacation via freight train and got as far as New York State before the boys in blue got him and decided to show him the accommodations in Attica Prison.