How I Accidentally Started the Sixties

by Howard Bloom

  The railroad dicks (sorry, not the name I would have chosen for these gentlemen, even if they were upright) issued a warning. If they caught me on their train again it would be jail.

  I’d had it with the rails. What’s more, after standing up for 39,600 seconds and having my features chiseled away, I was too exhausted to hitch-hike another 2,000 miles.

  To make matters worse, when I stopped at the bathroom of the only gas-station in Starkey and spent an hour attempting to wash the coal dust off my face, I made a discovery. The carbonaceous material in which I was sheathed was no longer a superficial coating removable by soap. It was now a permanent part of my epidermis. Under the influence of diligent scrubbing I went from Ethiopian black to creole gray. But I still retained a skin color that was distinctly African-American. What I didn’t realize was that I was about to go through more than the accidental adoption of a minority skin color. I was about to undergo a switch from the animal kingdom to the kingdom of plants. I was about to become a vegetable. But let us not sprint ahead of ourselves. Or sprout ahead of ourselves, as the case may be.

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  Let’s do a quick reprise. My color-correcting coal car had carried me to the railroad mecca called Starkey, Nevada. Less than 130 miles away was a settlement of far less significance to railroad cognoscenti. It was called Salt Lake City. And it had a special grace: airline terminals. So I hitch-hiked into the town of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, found my way to the airport, and wired my parents for enough money to purchase an airline ticket home. To them, any way of luring me back was fine. The cash arrived via Western Union in an hour.

  I straggled back from the Western Union office to the airport and homed in on the American Airlines counter to buy myself accommodations east, only to discover that the next plane for Buffalo wouldn’t depart for another eight hours. Eight hours in an airport with nothing to do but count the holes in the acoustical ceiling tile. Surely, I reasoned, there must be some way to keep my neural tissue from dying of stimulus deprivation. And, indeed, there was. The card and souvenir shop had a rack of paperbacks. Not that I could afford to buy one, mind you. I was carrying a grand total of $1.35 and a non-negotiable airline ticket. But I could browse.

  So I picked up To Kill A Mockingbird and carted it over to my nearby molded plastic seat, figuring that eight hours of browsing should allow me to finish the book.

  Unfortunately, my perusal of the merchandise was misinterpreted. I’d gotten less than fifteen pages into the plot, when a rather tall, moderately paunchy, middle-aged policeman loomed over me. His glance was menacing. “Put back the book,” he ordered, “and follow me.” He hustled me to his office and began a harsh interrogation. Harsh, that is, until I explained that I was a poor college student on my way back to Buffalo to visit my parents after having not seen my mother for a year. The officer’s stern look liquified like margarine in a frying pan. The cross-examination turned into a chat. When it was over, the man in blue invited me to have a cup of coffee. Hopefully without hurting his feelings, I turned him down.

  So he escorted me back to my seat and said that if I needed anything, I should just ask him. I went back to counting the holes in the acoustical tiles. A few minutes later, the policeman reappeared looking extremely apologetic. At his side was a man in a business suit. “This,” said the policeman, “is the Vice President of American Airlines for Salt Lake City. He says that because of your appearance, you can’t fly on his plane.” Apparently, the man didn’t approve of my luggage—the sleeping bag accessorized with the aforementioned Clorox jug. Nor did he care for my skin tone (my face had brightened to charcoal gray; but my ears, despite over thirty minutes of scrubbing, were still pitch black). And he felt quite strongly that American Airlines passengers should wear shoes—an article of clothing I had voluntarily ceased to possess some eight months earlier.

  I didn’t know what to do. Walking to Buffalo seemed impractical. Even if the soles of my feet were sufficiently hardened to step painlessly on the gravel at the shoulders of the roads. What’s more, my ticket was already paid for. The distress must have somehow leaked from my facial muscles. So the policeman turned to the pin-striped executive and pleaded my case. I was a poor college student, he explained, on my way back to Buffalo, New York, to see my mother after a year of separation. The executive’s glare softened. “Well,” he said, “I guess you can fly American.” Then he invited me out for a cup of coffee. I did my best to turn him down without seeming rude.

  Finally, I decided to buy lunch. After all, I had my pride…and my $1.35. So I went to the coffee shop, sat down at the counter, and ordered Lord-knows-what kind of cut-rate sandwich—probably imitation American cheese on artificial bread crusts. The boy waiter—a full year younger than I—was extraordinarily curious about my appearance: my long hair, my baggy white sweater, and my bare feet. “Are you,” he asked hesitantly, “Jewish?” I confessed that I was.

  His face fell in astonishment. After he picked it up, rubbed it clean on his apron, and woggled it back in place, he explained that he was a Mormon and had never seen a Jew before. Obviously, I was exactly what he’d been led to expect. I looked like a Sunday-School-book illustration of Isaiah after a six-month desert conference with God. Even the soot fit the image. After all, didn’t the Almighty speak in tongues of flame?

  The counter-lad dropped his restaurateurial duties and spent the entire time I was ingesting my sandwich in dialog. He asked me a bunch of awed questions, then attempted to explain Mormonism to me. I didn’t get it. Joseph Smith, it seems, had lived on a farm in Manchester, New York. One day an angel with a name that sounded suspiciously like an Italian pasta, Moroni, pointed him to a hill on which he found a batch of golden plates. In a three-ring binder, no less. I am not kidding. Though the plates were in a strange tongue, Smith was able to read them through the lenses of two stones, the Urim and Thummim. Just like the book that mysteriously appeared in my lap when I was ten and taught me the first two rules of science. Did this mean that Smith and I were both prophets? That seemed unlikely. Finally, when I paid the bill, gave the generous serving lad a tip, and turned to leave he said, “Wait. I want to give you this,” and handed me a bible-sized Book of Mormon. I was grateful.

  The rest of the trip home was a quiet affair. The airlines had just begun to replace their prop planes with jets. And I was lucky enough to be seated in one of these new air-munching, flame-powered machines. My only previous plane trip had happened when I was five and my parents had flown with me to New York for a family wedding. In those days you could look out the window, watch the propeller blades go from slow motion to a blur, then glue your eyes to the people, cars, and trees below as you flew at a height only slightly above the telephone poles. But in a jet flying at 35,000 feet, nothing interesting at ground level was visible. A whole new experience, but not one rich in stimulation. The stewardess was also apparently suffering from stimulus deprivation. She decided that I was the most entertaining feature of her flight, and spent all her spare time plonked down next to me engaged in conversation. Shades of the days when I got hickeys but no sex.

  Thus, I returned to the East Coast, where I would wilt like last week’s lettuce, elude a posse on the Swarthmore College Campus, and end up being shipped overseas. And where I would learn that returning to see your mother is not all it’s cracked up to be. In fact, sometimes it’s downright dangerous. But more about that in a minute.

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  First, in the noble tradition of Hollywood’s better movies, I think we’d better let you know what happened to our cast of characters after I left the Pacific Rim.

  Carol Maynard, the woman of the tactile body and the highly trained internal parts, reveled in her discovery of drugs. Wallowed may be a better verb. Whereas folks like yours truly used each chemical once or twice, sucked vast pools of knowledge out of the experience, then abandoned it, Carol decided that the best way to straighten your head out (you’ll recall hers was on the pleas
antly round side) was to take illicit pharmaceuticals morning, noon and night. When I ran into someone several years later who had bumped into Carol, she had, much to my @@#!%%* sorrow, become a vegetable—probably a once-round and shiny eggplant, now grown soft and misshapen—and was pioneering the path that would be followed in the 1980s and 1990s by the brave hordes of America’s homeless…either sleeping with desperately horny men to gain the use of the roof over their heads, or finding a nice soft spot on the sidewalk. She was a victim of The Sixties Drug Culture before that Culture even got its name.

  Dick Hoff, who had never experienced an emotional pain in his life, was thoroughly intrigued by depression and self-doubt, since they were things he’d never tasted. Remember, he wanted to try everything on the menu of life at least once. While I was still in San Francisco, we had run into a former industrialist from Czechoslovakia who had fled the Communists, gone to Chicago, become a crafter of humble hand-made toys (each toy bowed obsequiously and mumbled words of self-deprecation when its betters walked into the room), and married a farm girl young enough to be his daughter just to give his fingers something to do after a busy day in the workshop. One evening, he had been lying on his bed in his dingy little room next to the overhead railway tracks when the ceiling had been suffused with light, and he had been invaded by the Universal Spirit and attained Enlightenment. The fact that the splat of light may have been a spark from the railroad wheels was irrelevant.

  After I disappeared Eastward, Hoff hung around this guru hoping to experience the Dark Night of the Soul. Finally, Dick’s dreams came true. He learned how to become depressed just like everyone else. Boy, was he sorry. The last I heard, he was wandering the beaches of Hawaii with porpoises offshore sniggering at his forlorn appearance. He was trying to figure out how to get back his old sense of joy.

  As for me, I’d accomplished five things.

  I’d lived the sort of adventures hinted at by Jack Kerouac.

  I’d experienced just enough sex to titillate a horny adolescent or a married man in middle-aged crisis. Thus satisfying the demands of Henry Luce.

  I’d lived up to T. S. Eliot’s commandment—if you have something heroic to do, begin it now.

  I’d followed Edna St. Vincent Millay’s imperative—experience every form of human suffering and of extreme emotion if you want to see the infinite in the tiniest of things. Adventure!

  And I’d discovered that I couldn’t sustain a relationship.

  So by the time another year or two of bizarre episodes had passed, all I wanted to do was settle down.

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  Now, if you eat all your broccoli, in just another three chapters Howard Bloom will finally meet the girl of his dreams. But first, my departure from the kingdom of animals to the realm whose citizens stay in one place and kidnap photons with a felonious chemical called chlorophyll. The kingdom of plants.

  WAS SISYPHUS A SISSY?

  In September, 1962, I arrived in the city of my birth only to discover that my father and mother, who had nearly lost their minds over my year of absence, had a new reason to nearly lose their sanity: my presence. Yes, they were somewhat unhinged by the fact that I ran around the house naked and that I marched into other people’s expensively carpeted homes clothed but barefoot (don’t worry, I still took a shower every morning). Then I was hit by that peculiar infantilization that disables even the mighty when they return to their nursemaids after conquering a continent or two. In short, I became nearly catatonic. Like Carol Maynard, I turned into a vegetable…an overcooked turnip.

  You may know the state. You wake up in the morning with no goal in sight, only a murky fog where your sense of purpose should be. You remind yourself that you are back home, where your folks would prefer a modicum of clothing. But picking up your underwear seems an impossible chore. Much less putting it on. You have to muster more willpower than it took Odysseus to put out the eye of the Cyclops, to avoid the charms of Circe, to survive the Sirens, and to outwit Scylla and Charybdis. But in this case, what you are straining to achieve is to sit up, stretch your arm to the floor, and winch your thumb and forefinger around the elastic band of your Fruit of the Looms. Fortunately in my case, salvation was in the wings. Salvation…and one bright speck of wisdom.

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  Seeing my vegetative condition, my former French teacher, Madame P. F. Hennin (whose name I haven’t changed because, unlike most of the guilty—or simply hapless—parties in this book, she’s innocent), took me into her home for a few weeks and let me sleep there. Despite the fact that there is no room for turnips in French cuisine. Instead of schooling me in the art of sautéing and making sauces, Madame Hennin taught me her version of the secret of life (which we will reveal to you upon request; just send a self-addressed, stamped envelope crammed with all the money you can get your hands on). OK, you wormed it out of me. The pedagogue was vivacious, slender, and brilliant. I explained what I’d been after. We circle, I said, some source of ultimate satisfaction like a planet going around the sun. But orbiting at arm’s length never gets us any closer to what we want. The solution: dive straight for it—that ultimate and ever-satisfying whatever-it-is.

  Madame Hennin sat me down and told me Albert Camus’ version of the myth of Sisyphus. You probably remember the basic story. Sisyphus is condemned to roll a rock the size of a three-car garage up a mountain. Just as he almost reaches the top, the perverse boulder slips from his fingers and bounces back to the bottom. Sisyphus is forced to clamber back down to the valley and start the task all over again the next day. Every day of the week!

  At first glance, Madame Hennin explained, it looks as if Sisyphus’ life is a hideous torture. It is meaningless. After all, meaning comes from achieving an end—getting that damned boulder to sit on the peak. Right? But that’s, she said, a misunderstanding. Real meaning comes not from the achievement of a purpose, but from the process of pursuing it. The satisfaction of Sisyphus comes from rolling the stone toward a goal, no matter how arbitrary that goal may be, not from positioning the stone at the mountain’s top, brushing the dust off of his hands, turning his back on his handiwork and wondering what to do next.

  Sisyphus isn’t condemned, he’s blessed. Every day he wakes up with a clear target, a task to perform, an aim, a structure for his day. Without a goal of that kind, your days are a foggy fudge. A painful blur in which you wonder why in the world you should bother to take your next breath. Madame Hennin was very persuasive. Her beauty helped. So did the fact that she held me captive for a week. Just about the right amount of time for a good brainwashing, complete with soak, suds, dry, starch, and ironing.

  The result? I abandoned the quest for some primal center of permanent bliss, and sought satisfaction in something that the Vancouver murderers had agreed that all of us humans need: a goal. Any goal would do. Now all I had to do was find one.

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  While I was goal-hunting, I rode horses bareback (saddles have a nasty habit of pumpkin-chunking me into the nearest thorn bush) on the Canadian beach of Lake Erie, a few hundred yards from Madame Hennin’s home, with her buxom sixteen-year-old daughter, trying to initiate the girl into the mysteries of sex. Not a nice way to repay my hostess. But the rules of the budding sexual revolution were strict. To demonstrate your liberation from anti-sexual taboos, you were required to make sexual advances toward every female in sight, even if she was a cocker spaniel. Technically, I should have been an equal-opportunity lecher and hit on the horse. Yes, Lord, I sinned against the rules of the Revolution. I overlooked the beast and focused on the girl. But things would soon get worse.

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  My father was in a panic over how to shape me into something vaguely human. Shades of the summer camp kidnap, the nose job, and the dance class. So he decided to ship me off to Israel, where I would presumably become a mensch…or maybe even a Messiah. Little did my dad pause to think that in the land of very little milk and hardly any honey, a bunch
of Jewish kooks very much like his son had also worn tattered clothes, gone barefoot in the desert, and barged in on middle class dwellings orating their heads off. Yes, in the homeland of Ezekiel and Isaiah, there was no telling what kind of demented blatherer I might someday become.

  Why did I say yes? Aside from the disappearance of the will with which to pick up the tree-ripened Fruit of the Loom that was designed to cover my private parts? First, a trip to the Holy Land was something Sisyphus would have approved of, a goal. But something more was at stake. The going theories of the day said that if you changed the social structure within which humans lived, you’d change human nature itself. Under the surface was another message: capitalism kills. Capitalism breeds greed, selfishness, competition, and exploitation. Not to mention haughtiness, contempt, and bullying. Eliminate capitalism, replace it with socialism, and, in theory, humans would turn generous and kind. Not to mention egalitarian. Which meant the end of snottiness, snootiness, and snobbery. Not to mention sarcasm, cheap shots, and bullying. But was that true? Would sharing everything in common make all of us loving and compassionate? Would it make us empty our pockets according to our abilities and only sparingly bag the free stuff, each according to his need? Israel had one of the few genuinely egalitarian, let’s-share-everything societies on earth, the Kibbutz. The ideal collectivist, socialist community. Had kibbutzim wrought miracles?

  Finding out would take one more tiny tangle with outlaw behavior. Specifically, it would take a trip to Philadelphia. Yes, I would study up for my trip across the seas by hitch-hiking to Swarthmore College and researching the Middle East in the institution’s library for a month. Without paying tuition, room, or board. And just how would I arrange this involuntary scholarship, this inadvertent largesse from Swarthmore? A friend in the student body—the next-door neighbor I’d been madly in love with at sixteen—had invited me down to visit the campus, but, alas, she’d never asked permission from the authorities. So I lived as a fugitive in the men’s dorm and illegally snuck into the line at the cafeteria for my three meals a day. For a month.