How I Accidentally Started the Sixties

by Howard Bloom

  And what were these adventures revealing about the spirit of The Sixties?

  THE DEAD HORSE AND THE MAGIC SMILE

  You’ll recall that when I was in California wondering why I weighed less than one of Charles Atlas’ biceps, I compensated for this deficiency by helping kick off the Sexual Revolution of The Sixties and discovered that I couldn’t sustain a relationship with a woman for more than three days straight.

  As you know, I fled from this fact by returning to the East Coast, where I realized to my dismay that though I might be found physically appealing by California girls, back in the chilly states bordering the Atlantic, civilization still kept up some of its standards and I was considered on a par with an oversized wart. Yes, I could hold girls spellbound with tales of my adventures, and even get my hands into their panties, but because of my athletic disabilities, I couldn’t get those panties off. And due to the sluggish manner in which the Sexual Revolution crawled from one coast to the other, the girls in question, while quite willing to have certain regions digitally massaged, were not willing to remove their garments for me. What’s worse, on those infrequent occasions when women showed an interest in something that might last longer than a short case of the flu, I ran in terror.

  So one afternoon I retired to my converted closet on Bleecker Street, perched on the bed (only a small portion of my nether end could fit at any one time, since the mattress was the width of a bannister) and evaluated my life to this point. What lessons had I learned from all of my spiritual quests and travels?

  Don’t hitch rides on railroad flatcars. It takes roughly 30 seconds to bounce to the car’s edge and wave good bye to the world before the churning wheels turn you into anchovy paste.

  If you’re hitch-hiking and get stuck in the desert for more than eight hours straight, don’t stand on the asphalt. Move a few inches to your left and plant yourself on the dirt. Black tarmac absorbs the sun’s rays, reaches a temperature of 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit, fries the soles of your boots, and generates nuclear fusion in your feet.

  Something is seriously wrong with your relationships with women.

  The last point seemed the most relevant under the current circumstances. So what was I going to do about it? I retraced the stages of my sexual evolution, and discovered there was a missing link. I had been a mere innocent reading about “quick encounters in the forest” and wondering whether natives of opposite sex just shook hands and claimed to be Dr. Livingston, or managed some more complex maneuver, when all of a sudden I found myself actually sleeping with girls. I’d missed a couple of vital steps: like dating, petting, necking, begging for mercy, hoping to get to third base, acting like I’d had fifteen women when in reality I’d never seen a bra on a female outside of the ads in The New York Times Sunday Magazine, etc. My problem was that I had had fifteen women (OK, less than five) back in the dim and distant days of my 19th year, but hadn’t gone through the necessary preparation.

  So I held my breath, steeled my nerves, and took the plunge. I decided to date! If I retraced all the evolutionary steps of courtship that I’d missed, I figured, I’d be normal. My terror and brain freeze would go away. Little did I realize that terror and brain freeze are normal.

  During my first few weeks at college, I noticed something strange about human (or in my case, inhuman) nature. When you have no self-confidence, you look for every excuse to avoid the difficult. You convince yourself that each girl you see has some fatal flaw that makes her inappropriate for you. Well, maybe appropriate for a nice daydream or two. But certainly lacking the right stuff to make you force yourself, sweating, stuttering, and trembling in your socks, to actually walk up and attempt a conversation!

  My sudden pickiness disguised the reflex of the skydiving novice, who takes one look out the open door of the plane, envisions what he’ll look like if the chute doesn’t open and he’s reduced to two dimensions, then refuses to move.

  So I made another resolution. If I saw a woman I found attractive, I would stop cataloging the unsightly freckles a microscope might reveal, leap out of the hatch, land by the hapless maiden (the East Coast still had a few virgins left back in 1963—sorry, but the West Coast had run out of them), and open a chat, no matter how awkward and inane it might be.

  Well, believe it or not, it worked. Within a short amount of time, I was actually dating. In fact, I was dating two or three separate girls. And, true to my plan, I was going through all the frustration I’d missed out on in adolescence. I was petting, running into resistance, having trouble getting past first base, etc. The scheme was working perfectly. But was it solving my problems? This was very hard to tell. None of my relationships were sufficiently intimate to bring on panic. So I had no clue to whether my fright-and-flight devices were successfully being wiped away.

  When I couldn’t actually get a real date (and that, fortunately, wasn’t too often), I’d go out with this good friend who had stowed away on a freighter, hitch-hiked around the world, and made it all the way through the Muslim countries to India, where she’d earned a modest living acting in early Bollywood films. This was not her only appeal. She possessed the kind of body that Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Calendar art directors search for but never find. She was also reasonably promiscuous, but reserved her physical attentions for drug addicts and outright psychotics. I was merely your run of the mill neurotic. So, though we spent a great deal of time together, I wasn’t her type. (We did, however, while away a summer sleeping together platonically in a narrow single bed with no clothes on—but that belongs to a later part of the story.)

  On the whole, things were not going all that well. My grade point average was seriously flawed. I was getting only four As per semester and one intolerable, embarrassing, zit-like B. Now, why I was embarrassed about this, Lord alone knows. Remember, I’d read two books a day under my desk in grammar school and never even noticed my grades. Only my teachers and my mom knew they were abysmal. But for some reason, my emotional core took college grades as a personal challenge. I wanted straight A’s. Yes, I know it’s crazy. But often we don’t pick our obsessions, they pick us.

  How did I solve the problem of the embarrassing B’s? During my first two semesters at NYU, I ignored my class notes, focused on the textbooks, then wrote papers and exam essays trying to offer original ideas. Yes, my own hopefully brilliant ideas. Then I remembered the lesson of writing for Sol Gordon at the Middlesex County Mental Health Clinic in New Brunswick, New Jersey. That lesson? No matter what you do, you are surfing the waves of ego. So I reversed my priorities. What did I study the hardest? My class notes. And whose ideas did I promote in my papers and in my test essays? The professor’s. From that point forward, it was all straight A’s, thirty of them in a row. So much for the notion that college is there to prepare you to think independently.

  Meanwhile, my social life was leaving certain glandular tissue very unfulfilled. And, what’s worse, I’d had this case of serious depression that had hung in there every waking minute of the day since I was thirteen. (Before the age of thirteen I hadn’t been depressed, I’d merely been miserable.)

  Then, one afternoon, I ran into a totally unexpected antidote for depression.

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  I did all my studying in the school library (large books wouldn’t fit into my rent-a-closet bedroom), and was sitting at one of those long, wooden library tables trying to comprehend a diagram of the Krebs Cycle (there are actually two of these: in one, Professor Hans Adolf Krebs, a German biochemist, walks around in circles worrying about how he’s going to pay the bills on his children’s orthodontia until his wife breaks the cycle by calling him in to dinner; in the other, a bunch of microscopic con artists lure innocent ATP molecules onto what looks like a merry-go-round, then, when the poor ATP’s have gotten very dizzy, the scoundrels pick their pockets of a phosphorus atom, thus providing you with the energy you use to walk, talk and breathe, and making us all accomplices to trillions of sle
azy criminal acts per second).

  Suddenly I looked up and way, way across the room, seated at yet another long wooden table, was the most angelic smile I had ever seen in my life. Attached to the face of a girl. Needless to say, I had been depressed while my head was still buried in my book. Lack of oxygen may have had something to do with it. What’s more, I was worried about how poor Hans Adolf Krebs’ children were going to end up with straight teeth. However, one sight of this exquisite woman’s facial expression did very strange things to my brain. It lightened my mood and made the somber freight of cares and woes lift from my weary and staggering dendrites. It was a miracle.

  You’ll recall that I’d started going to shrinks when I was in Israel. By now, I was on my third therapist or so. I’d eventually get up to seven. And none of them would be able to accomplish in years what a single glance at this woman’s face could do in seconds.

  It was obvious even from a distance of forty feet that this gorgeous creature was my mirror opposite—the all-American girl, a slender 5’6 1/2”, 115 pounds, with auburn hair and the kind of natural facial coloring the average Cosmo cover model employs an army of makeup artists to simulate. She could have posed for Breck Shampoo ads, led cheerleading squads, and dated the Arrow Shirt man. But it was the smile that really did the trick. No one on this earth possessed anything quite like it.

  So I established a new routine. When I got out of class and retired to the library for a few hours of bashing my brains with books, I cased the joint carefully to see where this woman with the healing visage was parked, then found myself a table located a discreet fifty or sixty feet away in a spot from which I had a clear view. Her smile never went away. And whenever my gloom descended, I’d simply look up from my verse of Chaucer, sneak a quick glance, feel infinitely better, and get back to mispronouncing the English language the way they did 600 years ago.

  Now as you’ll recall, I had made a resolution to start a conversation with any female I found even vaguely interesting and secure a date. But my dating card was quite full, and for some reason it took me weeks to realize that I’d been so enraptured by this lovely being’s face that I had utterly forgotten to live up to my self-imposed dictum. When it finally hit me that I’d been derelict in my duties, I hoisted myself out of my wooden seat, ambled over, stood behind the otherworldly girl, tapped her on the shoulder, explained that I’d noticed her smile for the last few weeks, and asked what she might be reading that brought on such celestial delight. I expected something riddled with comedy, like maybe Lucius Apuleius’ The Golden Ass.

  “Oh,” she said, and showed me the book in her hand. It was Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs Du Mal, one of the more pathologically troubled collections of poetry produced in the last few centuries (if you didn’t count the stuff I was writing).

  And exactly what wisp of whimsy had brought a sublime expression to the lips of milady today? A little ditty about a bunch of flies throwing a feast in the entrails of a horse lying dead by the side of a road. Very cheerful…if you’re an insect. Somewhat more distressing if you lack an exoskeleton and call yourself a mammal.

  This should have clued me in that there was something a bit askew about the otherworldly grin that had lifted me from the bowels of the earth. But instead, I was preoccupied with prying the conversation open.

  As I mentioned in what you mistakenly thought was one of my delirious rambles, I’d become a hot shot in the language of frogs’ legs and goose livers, using the vintage products of France’s finest lunatics, the surrealists, to drive myself slightly crazy on the West Coast. I’d even gone so far as to insult every Gaul walking upright on dry land by writing all my fiction in the language of his ancestors.

  And the creature with whom I had just opened a conversation was a French major who had actually been accepted for graduate school the upcoming year at the Sorbonne, the most prestigious institute of higher learning in all of continental Europe. So, having rapidly established a point of common interest, I moved my books next to hers; and in subsequent days, we studied together on a regular basis, swapping gossip about Moliere, Racine, and other folks with a congenital hatred for Englishmen.

  Sitting next to this person, who happened to be Barbara, turned out to be a deprivation, since it made it much harder to stare at her face when I needed a mood boost. But what the heck, I was enjoying the company, and was willing to endure the hardship. However, I never asked her out. Seems there were only seven nights in the week, and despite my gnomish appearance, I had all of them filled.

  One day I did invite Barbara to a greasy spoon next door to the library for a cup of coffee, something my contacts with the police had taught me that men in uniform do as an excuse to get together—much more of an excuse in my case than most, since I not only wouldn’t touch coffee with a ten-foot pole, I wouldn’t even drink it if the Pole invited me to her boudoir for a demonstration of advanced sipping techniques. But the trip to the coffee shop was about as close to a date as we got.

  Then one afternoon something very strange occurred. Barbara turned to me all of a sudden, forcing me to lose my place in Madame Bovary, and blurted out some words apropos of nothing. “We can’t date,” she said. “I’m much too old for you. I’m twenty-five, and I have a five-year old daughter.” Well, I was twenty-one, and what she said made a modicum of sense (though it turned out that she was exaggerating; she was actually twenty-four, and her daughter hadn’t quite turned five). So I agreed that we’d just be friends. Little did she know that there was no room for her on my social calendar.

  Then one night, I’d made arrangements to see an off-Broadway production of The Trojan Women (in those days, I had no taste) with the girl with the Sports Illustrated body and absolutely no interest in my physique. Early in the afternoon, Ms. Swimsuit called and said she couldn’t make it. So when I arrived for my daily rendezvous with my Francophilic study mate, Barbara, I made her a proposition she could easily refuse. “Look,” I said, “I’ve got these tickets to a play that all the critics are raving about, and the girl who I was supposed to go with cancelled out on me. Now I know we can’t go on dates and have to be just friends, and I’m perfectly willing to go along with that. But how would you like to come with me so this expensive extra ticket doesn’t go to waste?” Sounds like a come-on, doesn’t it? It wasn’t. When I told her I’d abide by her boundaries, I meant every syllable of it. Or so I thought.

  Well, we watched this bloody play and both managed to stay awake, don’t ask me how, then I offered to walk her back to her apartment. After all, she lived in a pretty rough neighborhood, one where you had to bob and weave through a hailstorm of .38 caliber slugs if you wanted to make it safely from one street corner to the next. I wasn’t very athletic, but at least I could shield her with my body if the local boys cruised by with their zip guns blazing. Then I could get a good job in a processing plant as an industrial sieve.

  Barbara’s place was a hefty twenty-minute trek from the theater. It was on Seventh Street between Avenues B and C on the Lower East Side, sometimes called the East Village, in a territory where civilization dared not stretch its tender fingertips for fear of being bitten and where even the police felt besieged. I kept the chatter as innocent as possible, though I must confess, I strayed from my promise a little bit. I did hold her hand. And she didn’t pull it away and slap me with it.

  But the real bombshell came when we were within a block or so of our destination. As we passed a small park where muggers held raucous nightly conventions, she said, “You know we can’t sleep together until next Tuesday [this was a Thursday night]. I won’t have my diaphragm until then.” Clearly the girl had plans that hadn’t crossed my mind. But why?

  In a very confused state, I said goodbye to her outside her door. I didn’t even attempt a kiss. I was in shock. It took the whole walk home (two miles—forty minutes) to sort the thing out. I had been a perfect gentleman (aside from the hand holding). I had kept our conversation o
n strictly neutral territory. But she had consistently taken my innocent words and turned them to the subject of sex. It had happened over and over again. Then she had gone a step further and announced that not only were we going to talk about sex, but we were going to HAVE it. And she had specified exactly when! Next Tuesday! To add to the mounting pile of peculiarities, I hadn’t even made a pass. I finally came to a conclusion. Through no fault of my own, we weren’t just friends anymore.

  Frankly, I should have breathed a sigh of relief. It meant I wasn’t going to have to go through all the petting and necking and other stuff that I figured had been missing from my youth, but that, in reality, was wearing me down to a frustrated frazzle. The difficulties my awkward fingers went through trying to cope with fasteners and zippers was on a par with those of an armless earthworm attempting to play Isaac Stern’s spare Stradivarius. This was much more the California approach to which I’d grown accustomed. Besides, like males from Tenerife to Timbuktu, I was a slave to my hormones.

  So I showed up, as ordered, on Tuesday night to have sex. The apartment, a six-story walkup in a Lower East Side tenement planted in the wilds of a solidly black and Puerto Rican neighborhood, was unlike anything I had ever seen. No item of clothing in the place had ever been introduced to a hanger, much less to a closet. The entire wardrobe was in a heap on the floor. There was no such thing as a bookcase. Not that there weren’t books, mind you, there were lots of them. It’s just that they were all in piles on the floor. And the dishes—an ample, though thoroughly mismatched, collection—were haphazardly jumbled in the sink. At least they were not on the floor. But frankly, it was hard to tell whether they were clean or dirty. Maybe there were some of both. My guess is that only the cockroaches knew for sure. After all, they formed a sort of wall-to-wall shag carpet in the place, thus providing its decorative motif.