How I Accidentally Started the Sixties

by Howard Bloom

  This is how I became the privileged co-tenant of her mattress from eleven at night until six in the morning.

  But can a relationship built on desperation, calculation, an occasional angelic smile, Mussolini’s railroad schedule, and Yiddish interpretations of the Book of Genesis last?

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  How does all of this relate to the birth of The Sixties? Sex is more important than we think. It leads to basic life decisions, decisions about how to settle down, where, and with what career. So the most important part of The Sixties Sexual Revolution was the part that no one publicized—the Revolution’s aftermath. The aftermath in which life got serious and the veligers came home to roost. And you got to that aftermath earlier than most. Why? Because you got to the Sexual Revolution two years earlier than your peers.

  THE DAUGHTER OF THE OMEN

  Barbara had me on a schedule that involved dating another girl until 10:30 at night, coming home at 11:00, having sex (if Barbara was in the mood that night), getting up at 5:30 a.m., jogging across town to my converted closet in the West Village, and preparing to recommence the whole routine during the next twenty-four-hour rotation of the earth around its axis.

  I don’t know what softened her heart, but after three or four months of this surreptitious substitute for a relationship, Barbara finally broke down and decided she’d allow me to be seen by her offspring…not necessarily a great idea since small children usually give me a puzzled look, then conclude that I’m an appropriate target for stones, toys with sharp edges, and whatever else can be lofted at high velocity by a small but murderous hand.

  However, Barb’s subsequent suggestion that I move in with her meant that I could decamp from my elegant Bleecker Street cubicle and experience the joys of living with my inamorata in a magic kingdom where thieves visit your apartment with the regularity of unusually diligent mailmen. And we could split the $23-per-month rent. That meant $11.50 per month for each of us.

  As an elderly gentleman would explain to me a few months later while I stood in the first floor hallway of Barbara’s tenement gawking at the empty spot from which my fifth bicycle had just been stolen, this moldering patch of urban blight had once been a safe neighborhood where everyone knew everyone else. Alas, he said, those days would never return. He shuffled on up the stairs. I’d never seen him before. I never saw him again.

  Nanette, the daughter I was now privileged to haunt, was like a picture out of a fairy tale: blond, gorgeous, charming, pixie-ish, and in every way delightful. In every way, that is, until she made a minor discovery: I was going to be spending nights with her mommy. In other words, mommy would be sleeping with me, not her (not that mommy had ever slept with her, but this definitely seemed like a deprivation of a precious, if seldom exercised, right). From that moment on, the smiles and hoydenish charm vanished. Small fangs emerged from Nanette’s mouth. Her head swiveled 360 degrees. Hot green soup shot from her tonsils, redecorating a gray room that hadn’t been painted since the Depression. I was THE ENEMY!

  Getting up in the morning in a house occupied by Nanette and Barbara was an experience. No more stretching and yawning and looking out the window at the sunshine flooding the small park across the street from my old gerbil cage in a ritzy neighborhood. For one thing, the managers of Barbara’s tenement had last cleaned the windows when Boss Tweed was posing for political cartoons, and even if we’d been able to see through the scum, all we’d have spotted were the roofs of the deteriorated dwellings on the other side of the street.

  For another thing, the contemplative calm of morning was broken almost immediately by Nanette, whom Barbara was trying to dress for day-care center. By now Barbara had been living alone with her child for two years in dire poverty. She was convinced that her parents had disowned her on the grounds of premature pregnancy, so she didn’t apply to them for financial aid. She was overwhelmed with guilt that she didn’t have more time or money to spend on her daughter. As we saw a bit earlier, Nanette, a cagey toddler, had apparently spotted this chink in her mother’s armor and made the most of it. She had become a total tyrant, taking a perverse pleasure in reducing her mom to a blubbering wreck. Barbara would offer a dress. Nanette would throw it aside and shout “No!” Barbara would offer another. Nanette would loudly toss this one on the reject heap as well. Within minutes, every piece of clothing Nanette’s size in the apartment would lie discarded on the floor while the little queen would stand defiantly in her underwear, daring her mother to try something else.

  Finally, Barbara would pick a rag at random and insist Nanette put it on. Out came the second in the bag of pint-sized tricks. The beautiful blond child would fling herself on the floor and scream at the top of her lungs. If Barbara uttered another syllable of entreaty, Nanette would elevate the decibel level and pound her fists and feet on the floorboards. The daily climax came as Barbara shriveled to a bewildered blob and cowered in a corner of the room, certain this was all her fault. How Nanette ever got to day care in anything but panties is beyond me.

  But this did help explain why when I’d arrive home at 11:00 p.m., Barbara often was in no mood for sex. In fact, it helped explain why she would not allow me to get anywhere closer than fifteen feet away from her. She never wanted to have another one of these!

  What is a house guest who is gradually turning into a surrogate parent to do? I hauled every book on child-rearing I could find out of the NYU library. I read them all, down to the last semicolon and period of the index. Then I tried out the books’ recommended methods. I calmly reasoned with Nanette. That didn’t work. I talked to her like a buddy. No soap. I had her draw pictures of Barbara and me and release her aggression by slicing and pummeling the portraits to bits. This was fun, but it didn’t solve the problem of getting the child clothed.

  As things proceeded, I made a horrible realization. Nanette perceived this as a form of warfare. I was using every rule of decorum in the book. Nanette was following Sun Tzu’s manual of dirty tricks. And she was beating Barbara and me to bits.

  So I did the unthinkable. I turned to B. F. Skinner’s pigeon experiments, the ones about positive and negative reinforcement. For Skinner, positive reinforcement was food. Negative reinforcement was an electric shock. But frying Nanette with an electrical jolt was out of the question. Instead, when it came time to clothe Nanette in the morning, I used sweet reason and offered her a food pellet. If that didn’t work (and it never did), I gave her a directive even a bird in a cage could understand. “If you don’t have your dress on by the time I count ten, you’ll get a spanking.” The first two times I said it, Nanette didn’t believe me. She stood there defiantly and stuck out her tongue. After the second spanking, she no longer doubted my word. By the count of eight, the child was fully dressed.

  This was not an easy approach for a nice Jewish believer in nonviolence to implement. I loathed the idea of hitting a child. My father had probably only whacked me about four times in his entire life. So I went to my shrink—psychotherapist number five—to seek absolution.

  Now this was one of your more unusual practitioners of applied psychology. She was a German who, if she’d only been a male, would probably have ended up in the Prussian cavalry. She was taller than I was, and when she opened the door to allow me into her office, she glowered down at the top of my head with supreme disdain. Then she walked to her high-backed office chair and swiveled it 180 degrees so she could stare out the window at the garden behind her brownstone-based office. In other words, she turned her back to me. And I spent the entire session opening my heart to the rear of her severely disciplined hairstyle.

  This had astonishing therapeutic effects. I began to come down with stomachaches so severe that I could barely walk. My family doctor couldn’t figure out the cause (but he was in his eighties, so he could barely figure out how to operate a roll of toilet paper). In desperation, I began a diary, keeping track of what I was eating, what I was doing, and when the stomach pains occurred
. After two weeks, a pattern emerged. The attacks always punched me in the gut at 2:30 on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. Guess what came at 3:30 on those very days? You got it—my visit to the Prussian shrink.

  And it was this Teutonic tower of comfort I went to confess my sin—physically disciplining Nanette. Yes, I had transgressed. I had spanked a child. And not just once…twice. I desperately needed someone to tell me that this was okay, that I had solved a difficult problem in a reasonable way, and that I had not turned overnight into the Snidely Whiplash in this play. But I had come to the wrong person. My compassionate therapist immediately offered comfort. She swiveled around in her chair, stared at me with smoldering eyes (thus allowing me to see her face during a session for the first time in a year), and called me a Nazi. Then she threw me out of her office.

  As I bicycled back from her high-priced neighborhood to our moldering urban boneyard, I was suicidal. I thought of steering myself in front of a high-speed truck. But all the vehicles were mired in Broadway traffic, so the best I’d be able to accomplish was a broken wrist. Since this seemed unlikely to kill me off quickly, I continued peddling miserably downtown.

  Barbara, however, was grateful for my minor exhibitions of violence. Peace had descended on her household for the first time in years. She didn’t consider spankings a big deal. Making mischief on a major scale had been her hobby when she was Nanette’s age, and her father had pulverized her rear at least once a day. In fact, with her brother, her dad had gone farther. He’d picked the kid up by the ankles and dangled him outside the second-floor hall window. So what I was doing seemed mild by comparison. Nanette, on the other hand, already hated me for taking away her sole possession: her mother. Now she began a mental list of my monstrous qualities. Item number one: child abuse.

  But there was some question of who was abusing whom. For example, one night Tom Reichman of the red hair, the Mingus movie, and the subway-tunnel romance volunteered to babysit for Nanette while Barbara and I went out for dinner at a genuine restaurant, one with metal knives and forks. Nanette had her friend Maria with her. Both Nanette and Maria were precocious, articulate kids. It would turn out that they were just a tad too precocious. Barbara and I had a steak dinner on University Place and Eleventh Street, a twenty-minute walk away from Barbara’s slum apartment but a light year up in neatness. The table cloths were on the table, not on the floor. When we finished our ribeyes, our baked potatoes with sour cream and chives, and our apple pies a la mode, Barbara, unbeknownst to me, tucked a few forks and steak knives into her purse. We walked back home from the restaurant only to discover Barbara’s apartment destroyed and Tom Reichman reduced to a nearly catatonic wreck.

  What had happened, we wanted to know. Well, Nanette was not supposed to touch the potted plants, so she and Maria had dumped the contents of every pot on the floor, crushing the splooted greenery under pot-shaped lumps of soil, lumps with their hind ends in the air. Nanette was not supposed to scatter stuff on the floor. So she and Maria had taken every issue of the Village Voice—a paper that was obscenely fat in those distant days of overweight print—defoliated it page by page as if they were removing the petals from a daisy, and scattered each page randomly on the floor, pretty much as you’d do if you were preparing to paint your ceiling. But there was more. Nanette was only allowed to eat one dill pickle a day. So the five-gallon pickle jar in the refrigerator had been looted, and not a pickle was left, just enough gherkin juice to fill an aquarium. Nanette was not supposed to touch the ice cream. So that, too, had been plundered. The empty box was on the floor with the plants, the potting soil, and the newspaper.

  But this was nothing compared to what Nanette and Maria had done to Tom himself. They had reduced him to a quivering porridge. His face no longer looked lively and alert. It seemed to have melted into a pudge of featureless baby fat. Why? Because Nanette and Maria—both, you will recall, a mere five years old and still in their age of innocence—had told Tom a very Jack-and Jill-like story. A story with at least ninety verses of extraordinarily graphic misadventures. But the two starring characters in the tale were not named Jack and Jill. They were called Dicky and Pussy. Which hinted that at the tender age of five, Nanette know more about sex than you, me, Barbara, and Tom combined. The bottom line? Nanette and Maria had broken down the boundaries of Tom’s self, the boundaries with which he maintained his sense of control, and had turned him into a helpless infant.

  Sigmund Freud said that we become sexual at the age of five. Silly idea, right? But maybe Siggy was on to something. Six months later, gorgeous, blonde, lively Nanette would be discovered playing with an equally gorgeous blond male child up the street. The two of them were naked in a closet, carefully hidden from parental supervision.

  A year after the pickle-and-newspaper trauma, Tom put a gun in his mouth and blew his brains out. I was furious at him for removing himself from my life. Yes, the suicide of someone you love can trigger very selfish reactions. But I always suspected that Tom’s night with Nanette, Maria, and Dicky and Pussy had touched one of the hidden pains that would lead to his death.

  However, it was Nanette who was compiling a dossier on Howard the Monster, not the other way around. Over the years, Nanette—a brilliantly imaginative child—would build the list of my sins to mythic proportions, adding many fanciful embellishments and reciting the final product to anyone who would listen. The tale of my villainy would become a permanent part of her arsenal for eliciting sympathy from adults, a skill she developed to a high degree. For example, a year later, I’d make her lunch every day and send her off to first grade. I’d give her two fat sandwiches and a piece of fruit. Then one evening I had a call from her teacher, who sounded extremely disturbed. So I went in to the school the next day to see what was the matter.

  Why, the teacher asked, did I perpetually ship my child to school with only half a sandwich? My jaw fell so far down my neck that you would have thought I was wearing a necklace of teeth. One half a sandwich, I asked? Then I explained what I actually packed in Nanette’s bulging lunch bag. Two gourmet peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Or, when the mood for health-food hit, two cream cheese and jelly sandwiches. Plus some fruit. The teacher deduced that her waif-like pupil had been throwing most of her lunch away, then pretending that she was being starved and telling everyone in sight about her evil stepfather and his techniques for destroying her life. The result: all the students her age with parents wealthy enough to provide high-class luncheon cuisine had pitied her and taken her home to be fed a proper meal. Nanette had used the myth of Howard-the-Monster to trade up from peanut butter and jelly to Lobster Newburg. And more. Much more.

  One family that fed Nanette her mid-day dietary upgrades took her to Mexico. Another took her to Europe. And the film-producing dad of one of her upscale mid-day meal partners took her for a helicopter tour of Manhattan. The tale of Howard the Monster and the half a sandwich worked a magic that even the Wicked Witch of the West couldn’t equal. Not even with an NIH grant and the diligent research and development work of every one her flying monkeys.

  “I have a class of very disturbed kids,” said the teacher. “Most of them,” she said, “come from middle class, single-parent homes.” White, middle-class, single-parent homes were brand new at the time, and single moms did not have a playbook of social convention to work from. The result was what were called latch-key kids. Kids who wore their house keys around their neck so they could let themselves into an empty, lonely family domicile after 3:00 p.m. when school threw them out and left them to their own devices. “But of all my kids,” said the teacher, “yours is the most disturbed.” That’s when Nanette’s teacher suggested that I get Nanette into the hands of a good therapist. Knowing how valuable these professionals can be (look how useful mine had been), I immediately complied.

  The psychological expert worked wonders. The proof? Eventually Nanette would use the tale of the spankings and numerous variations on the half-a-sandwich routin
e to make herself the star of a small circle of co-dependency and child-abuse self-help groups. But she swears she’s trying to get over it and is beginning to look at my good points. I hope they don’t make her ill. They certainly don’t comfort me.

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  Part one of Barbara’s plot had worked. She’d ended her sexual fixation on fire hydrants and had found herself a baby-sitter. For part two, you’ll have to wait until our next exciting episode, in which you will meet Barbara’s father and discover the truth behind the story that Barbara was raised in a hovel.

  THE BEAR THAT HUNTED BARBARA’S DAD

  A strange restlessness began to grip my bedmate. She hadn’t talked to her family in years. Remember, she was sure they’d disowned her. But, apparently, someone had planted salmon genes in her chromosomes, because she wanted to swim up the Hudson and take me to see her parents. I was game for anything. After all, I hadn’t been despised by families of impecunious Protestants for years. And given my bohemian look, there was little chance of any reaction from Barbara’s clan other than nausea.

  Nanette was too small to walk very far without demanding to be carried. She looked as dainty as Alice in Wonderland, but since she was five and tall for her age, she weighed as much as a Honda Civic. So we made it to the Port Authority Bus Terminal with me lugging Nanette like a Volga barge hauler trying to carry the boat up the footpath instead of letting it merely fight the current at his side. (You’ll recall these poor Russian boatmen had to bend over so far to tug their craft that most of them scraped off their foreheads on the pathway. This explains the high intelligence of today’s average Russian citizen.)