How I Accidentally Started the Sixties

by Howard Bloom

  Meanwhile, the idea of plowing through eight academic semesters and getting a degree didn’t entirely soothe my troubled spirit. I needed to add more meat to my goal. Yes, I was about to return to school. But what in the world for? What did I want to become? Soaring over the landscape like an eagle would have to be a major component. Soaring over the landscape of the sciences. But talons, test tubes, and lab rats were not enough.

  The answer lay with this kid who lived a half mile away from me on a Buffalonian avenue with huge houses, wonderfully full lawns, and an arch of elm trees that was astonishing. He could afford it. His parents were doctors.

  Late every afternoon I’d bicycle over to the lake in the middle of the 220-acre Frederick Law Olmsted marvel called Delaware Park, wander through the scrub to a huge construction pile, climb on top of it and watch the sunset. Henry Rubin, the guy from the street with the gothic arch of elms, had heard of my ritual, I don’t know how. So he contacted me and said he wanted to come along. While we were standing on the pinnacle of this hill, with vast spreads of greenery and a huge horizon stretched out before us and the sun turning everything in sight a Maxfield Parrish gold, Henry explained a twist that providence had recently thrown in his path.

  He’d gone to Oberlin to major in pre-med and to follow his parents’ example suturing intestines. They were both doctors and they insisted that to make a good living, he must be a doctor, too. But ever since he’d been small, Henry had played the violin. One day, Isaac Stern, one of the most legendary violinists of the 20th century, came to Oberlin and heard Henry scratching some Mozart out of his poor, tortured strings. Stern took the kid aside and quizzed him about his future plans. Then the maestro made a pronouncement. Henry, he said, would have to drop medicine. His musical talent was simply too great to waste. If Henry would agree to fiddle full time, Stern would make him a deal—he’d let Henry have a semi-permanent loan of his spare Stradivarius. Stern’s deal convinced Henry’s parents to let their son leave the lucrative world of the scalpel.

  So Henry switched from pre-med to Oberlin’s conservatory of music. And he made a discovery. When you concentrate intensely on one thing that you love, at first it seems as if you’ve imprisoned yourself in a very tiny corner of the universe. But a strange thing happens. The nano-discipline into which you’ve squeezed yourself becomes a lens. Details of the world that seemed half dead come alive with whole new meanings. The finite becomes a telescope to the infinite—or something like that. Something very Edna St. Vincent Millay.

  Remember William Blake’s seeing the universe in a grain of sand? Apparently the poor man had just come from the beach and had gotten something in his eye.

  But by the time Henry finished his story, I’d decided to pick one skill at random—writing (the choices weren’t too great—if you’ve seen me play pool, it’s not a pretty sight). Then I remembered that Einstein had tried to put me on the path to literature and I’d somehow fallen off. Obviously the universe was trying to tell me something. And despite the fact that I never listen, the message was getting through. To be a scientific thinker, you have to be a writer. Or, as Einstein put it, to be a genius it is not enough to come up with a theory that only seven men in the world can understand. To be a genius you have to be able to express that theory so clearly that anyone with a high school education and a reasonable degree of intelligence can understand it.

  Thanks to Henry Rubin, I went back to college invigorated by the hope that an army of English literature professors would stand over me with a whip and make me learn to write like de Maupassant, Faulkner, Tolstoy, and Woody Allen. That would not quite happen. But quite a bit else would.

  u

  In September, my parents drove me to the Big Apple, where I got a case of permanent neck strain from looking up at tall buildings. My dad and mom helped me find a place to live. There was this lovely brownstone on Bleeker Street near Eighth Avenue in the heart of the West Village, the former capital of the East Coast beatniks. It was the home of a family who had two rooms for rent on their top floor. One was a luxurious bedchamber with a wood-burning fireplace and windows looking out on the triangular micro-park across the street. This room went for $15 a week. Then there was the room next door. It used to be a walk-in closet, but it had been converted into a cute little sleeping cell, so cute that even a person my size (5’8” and 140 pounds), had to walk sideways to fit between the dresser and the six-inch wide bed. Even then, it was impossible to pull off a trip from one end of the room to the other without snagging your navel on the dresser’s knobs.

  This furnished coffin rented for $10 a week. My parents did a little arithmetic, and lo and behold, the closet was mine, all mine.

  Then my generous father and mother (don’t worry, if you knew the fortune they were spending on my psychotherapy, you’d be glad they were saving their pennies) waved goodbye and headed back to Buffalo.

  Now back to French. I passed NYU’s test with flying colors, and was allowed to take the most advanced Gallic courses they could throw at me. Meanwhile, I figured that the folks in the English literature department would get out their cat-o-nine-tails and put me through all the basic torments of wordsmanship—forcing me to bang together tales of flatulence in the style of Chaucer, plays about murdering your step-parents in the manner of Shakespeare, war stories complete with nurses who couldn’t keep their hands (and assorted other body parts) off you in the mode of Hemingway, and nonsense in the vein of Edward Lear (here the task would be to come up with a couple even more genitally incompatible than an owl and a pussycat).

  But I was horrified to discover that NYU’s literary dons had no intention of lashing me into shape as the next Dostoyevsky. In fact, they weren’t even prepared to make me an honorary Karamazov. Their idea of a good education consisted of learning to count the adjectives in a deservedly forgotten fifteenthth-century story and write a paper so dry that even cockroaches wouldn’t eat it. The major issue in English Literature at the time was the significance of verbal modifiers for western civilization.

  So to learn anything about writing, I had to turn to my French lessons. There, in addition to absorbing great gobs of Racine, Corneille, Anonyme, and just about everyone else who had ever purchased a pen somewhere in the vicinity of Paris, I was given the flogging I’d come to expect. Only they called it “Exercises Du Style.” They picked one august author every week, stripped the covering off of his primary tricks in front of your eyes, then forced you to write in his style. When you finished imitating Montesquieu or Pascal, it was time to spit out sentences that aped Flaubert and Stendhal. You even had to learn to walk like Jerry Lewis (they were convinced he, too, was French).

  Actually, my creative mind worked better in the dusky atmosphere of French literature, since I was filled with college-age delights—alienation, despair, and the desire to dramatize even the most minuscule hint of gloom. So I wrote reams of fiction in the language of Jacques Cousteau. Yes, I dove into a veritable sea of Gallic saliva (a necessity for sailing r’s around your uvula), not to mention Gallic angst (so how come the Germans have a better word for it?).

  On the side, I minored in psychology, just so I could keep paddling around in the old scientific swimming hole with such amiable creatures as hippocampi, limbic systems, adrenocorticotropic hormones, and stimulus-response models.

  If you are wise, and I suspect you are, you will be virtually certain that I am now rambling far, far from the subject at hand. But guess again. For my fling with French would eventually lead to love, a misshapen semblance of lust, and one of the world’s most bizarre mutations of romance. Not to mention more adventures in the nascent quirks and shudders of The Sixties.

  NIGHTS IN A TRANSVESTITE

  DRESSING ROOM

  My progress in the absorption of new eccentricities was remarkable. Let’s rephrase that. My accidental dive into the sort of extremes that Edna St. Vincent Millay had demanded was far from at an end. Very far.

&nbs
p; One night I was walking through the club and restaurant district of Bleeker Street in the West Village, where hovels for entertainment clot the side of the road, and a voice from the other side of the street called my name. I sauntered across to the opposite sidewalk and discovered this ebullient little fellow who had recognized me from an NYU history class and wanted to make friends. Why was he standing outside in the cold? Because he was the barker for the Crazy Horse. And what was the Crazy Horse? The city’s leading transvestite nightclub. A club where grown men dressed up as grown women and performed onstage. My new friend told me that if I ever needed a place to hang out, I could use the club’s dressing room. Yes, he said I could drop in any time.

  So I spent my Saturday post-midnight hours writing letters home from the dressing room of this tiny emporium where female impersonators were busy changing sex. I sat half-swallowed by the gums of an ancient couch—yellow pad in hand—chatting with imitation Diana Rosses, Bessy Smiths, and Marilyn Monroes while they sidled out of their female attire, shucked their phony hips and breasts, and zipped themselves into their all-leather, one-piece, skin-tight, supposedly-male jumpsuits to swish back over to Christopher Street, the capital of the gay community.

  These gentlemen were walking paradoxes. They were more feminine in their male clothing than they’d been when they were dressed as women. In dresses they had a vigorous mastery, a total command. In their male outfits, they were walking apologies. Their limp wrists and body swish were submission gestures incarnate.

  My message to my parents generally ran something like this:

  Hi,

  Nothing is happening in New York. Absolutely nothing. This place is so normal you could die.

  Your son,

  Howard

  Admitting that I was writing from a diminutive Disneyland of sexual extremes and doing it on their dime didn’t seem advisable at the time. But surely Jack Kerouac would have approved. And there were more Kerouacian adventures to come.

  Stewart, the barker, soon introduced me to his friends. One was a guy named Tom Reichman. And Tom’s story would turn to tragedy.

  Reichman was a tall, red-headed film-maker who’d already won awards for a documentary on bass-playing jazz giant Charles Mingus despite the fact that Tom was only twenty years old. Plus, he was a source of unmitigated delight, and knew how to woo a woman. When I introduced him to one of my female NYU acquaintances, Lark Clark, an ultra-Bohemian whose buddies included folks like then-embryonic playwright/actor Sam Shepherd and the members of the quintessentially Sixties rock band The Fugs, Reichman asked her out on a date.

  The russet-headed cinematographer arrived at Lark’s apartment on Eighth Street, in the core of the Village, in the middle of winter with a picnic basket and a blanket. Lark was a little perplexed. Then Tom took her by the hand, led her to a subway station, walked her to the end of the platform where metal stairs descended to the mysteries of the tunnel beyond, guided her down those stairs into the tunnel’s darkness, and forward a quarter of a mile along the forbidden territory on the margins of the tracks. Then he swept her through the entrance of a comfortable and commodious cavern carved into the stone wall. Tom spread his blanket, removed candles from his picnic basket, lit them, opened a bottle of champagne, and laid out a gourmet feast. Lark and Tom became an item. I took total credit for making the match.

  That provided one lesson in romance. But another was coming up. And it would prove crucial.

  u

  You could barely squeeze a prefabricated sandwich into the room I inhabited over on Bleeker Street, much less find enough room to make one, eat one, and brush away the crumbs. So I rented the kitchen of a fellow Buffalonian and NYU student named Andy Kulberg, whose West Village apartment at Bleeker Street and Sixth Avenue was less than a ten minute walk away from my walk-in closet. Kulberg was not your average kitchen-lord. When it came to music, he knew more than Richard Wagner, Richard Strauss, and Richard Nixon combined. And like them (well, two of them), he could write the stuff. He played God-knows-how-many musical instruments, had a collection of nearly every Beethoven recording ever made, and was on his way to a degree as a composer. Yes, his stuff was actually being performed in public. By a genuine string quartet.

  But every three weeks or so, Andy would enter the kitchen in the first phases of a romantic seizure. While I chopped carrots, celery, and onions, he would rave that he had just met the girl of his dreams, the universal male fantasy come true. All he wanted was to woo and win her, and he’d be happy for the rest of his life. You could look into his rapturous face and see that, inwardly, he was projecting every mushy fantasy he’d ever had onto this female person he scarcely knew, as if she were a blank movie screen. His exhilaration was positively giddy.

  His next two weeks were spent in a state of ecstasy as he plowed through the uncertain phases of pursuit and conquest, finally discovering that she liked him, too. Then a sudden transformation would set in. Once Andy and the ideal maid were going out like clockwork, the big screen on which he’d been flashing his own Gone with the Wind was taken down, and there, standing onstage in place of Scarlett O’Hara, was an uncomfortably normal human female. Andy’s erstwhile eruptions of enthusiasm were replaced by complaints about where she put the toothpaste cap and how she hung her panties in the bathroom to dry. He never discussed his sentiments about warts, moles, or hairs in unexpected places, but you can guess. The hidden motivation was obvious: the man was searching frantically for excuses to escape.

  Usually, it was all over in a month. Then a strange thing would happen. Andy would meet another girl.

  So I wasn’t the only one who panicked when the whale-like jaws of a genuine relationship closed down around me. Based on a sample of two, it looked like the terror was universal. Since names mean everything, as the tale of the organelle indicates, let’s give it one: “intimacy panic.”

  From this, I began to suspect that romance is a temporary seizure of the hormones designed to suck us into attachment, procreation, and the torments of a baby’s midnight wails. The glandular fever rapidly retreats, leaving the average male in a cold sweat. Some primordial instinct warns him that if he continues on his enchanted path, he will end up with infants who refuse to allow a hard-working adult to sleep. And he will discover that his wife has lost all interest in sex—except, perhaps, with someone else.

  Kulberg’s ultimate fate would have less to do with women than with the curved beauty he kept in a corner of the kitchen—his six-foot-high bass violin. One of his chamber music compositions was about to be performed by the NYU String Quartet, which was rehearsing the thing for its big unveiling. Then Andy walked down MacDougal Street from NYU to his apartment one afternoon and dropped in—for reasons unknown—to a small club called the Gaslight. The Gaslight was dark and dingy and a tight squeeze for any more than 110 people, but it had hosted early poetry readings by beatnik legends Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, then had achieved a place in Sixties music history. It was the club in which Bob Dylan had recorded a live album just two years earlier.

  Turns out that a blues quartet—the Danny Kalb Quartet, to be specific—had shown up that afternoon at the Gaslight to rehearse for a performance that night and had discovered that it was afflicted with a small problem. It was down to a trio. The bassist had disappeared. Someone asked the shadowy figures hanging out in the club’s gloom if anyone possessed a bass. Andy happened to have a large bass languishing next to his refrigerator. What’s more, he could play it.

  So, as I stood at the cutting board performing brain surgery on a cabbage one late afternoon, Andy rushed in, grabbed the instrument, gave a quick explanation of why he wouldn’t be home for dinner (by now, I’d taken to cooking for him and his roommate as well as for myself), and dashed off, his pocket protector still full of pens, the sleeves of his white shirt unbuttoned and flapping in the breeze.

  Not long after, Andy Kulberg, the classical composer, dropped out of sch
ool. The next time I saw him, he was swaggering down the NYU corridors in tight gray suede pants, an equally tight gray suede top, and gray suede high-heeled boots. It was merely a visit. He’d become a rock and roll star. The quartet had become famous (for about ten minutes) as The Blues Project. Andy’s composition “Flute Thing” was all over the airwaves. The band had been touring the country, and Kulberg had just gotten off the plane and come back to show off on his old stomping grounds. How in the world had he managed to function without a pocket protector and half a dozen pens?

  Nine years later, I was taking a long bus trip to upstate New York with the huge silver earphones and Martian antennae of a brand new 1973 Sony headphone radio clamped around my temples (sorry, no unauthorized worship allowed) when this amazing piece of music came on—a long, ostensible rock and roll instrumental with all kinds of allusions to Beethoven, Prokofiev, Aaron Copeland, and God-knows-who-all-else. Though I hadn’t seen Kulberg in years, I wished he could hear it. It was his kind of music. I eventually found out there was a reason. Andy wrote it.

  Andy had found his place as a musician who fused rock and classical music. And Andy had also found a mate. Actually more than one. He eventually married. Twice. The world’s population of veligers would have applauded. Even the seagulls would have been proud. I guess Kulberg got over the terror-phase of his relationships’ “intimacy panic.” As I would, too. Very, very soon. But it wouldn’t be easy.

  u

  Why all these run ins with musicians and creative types? Why the violinist Henry Rubin, the filmmaker Tom Reichmann, and the composer Andy Kulberg? Not to mention the “girls” at the Crazy Horse? Was fate trying to tell me something? Something about how the mass passions pulled together by music and film would someday fit into my science? Something about how sex and the relationship with a woman fit into this puzzle, too? Something about the forces of history? Something about the gods inside? And something about a possible place for me in this world? A place that would have pleased T. S. Eliot, Edna St. Vincent Millay, William Blake, William James, Jack Kerouac, and your average veliger? Maybe even your above average veliger?