How I Accidentally Started the Sixties

by Howard Bloom

  When a Greyhound bus finally let us off in Kingston, New York, Barbara’s hometown, I hoisted Nanette on my back again and we trudged through a neighborhood that didn’t exactly look like Barbara had described. There were no tarpaper shacks or people living in cardboard boxes with disemboweled automobiles heaped on the barren sod that passed for yards. The yards, in fact, were large and lush with manicured grass. The houses were immense wooden structures that would have done an upper-middle class Buffalonian proud.

  Finally, we rounded the corner of Lounsberry Place, which, according to Barbara’s version of her history, was supposed to be filled with chickens and heavily-muscled rats who handled collections for the neighborhood’s money-lending church mice. The street was a Hallmark greeting card paradise. Standing in a conspicuous location, with ample lawns on all four sides and a small stream flanking its southern perimeter, was a large, immaculate white house of the sort the Disney people would have gladly used for family films. This was the “crumbling shanty” in which Barbara had been born and raised.

  Yes, there was some truth in the tales Barbara had told. The second-story hallway window was, indeed, high enough for Barbara’s father to have held her brother out by the ankles for the purpose of making a disciplinary impression. After all, the place was the biggest building on the block! And there was more than enough room for the yard once to have housed a barn. In fact, a couple of horses of the kind Barbara claimed she once possessed seemed entirely appropriate to the place. Though the handmade plows Barbara implied the beasts had been forced to drag appeared decidedly unlikely.

  I began to get the impression that something was moderately askew with Barbara’s self-perception.

  We knocked. A cheerful little woman came to the front door and, despite its gargantuan size, managed to drag it open. She was Barbara’s mother. She did not seem to be clothed in rags.

  We were ushered into a large dining room. We’d arrived just in time for the evening meal. I was introduced to Barbara’s brother, a fellow in a red and black checked flannel shirt. He was slightly larger than a Mack truck and obviously manufactured entirely of muscle. He crushed my hand and gave me a friendly grin. At the head of the table was an older presence who, without ever standing, dominated the room. He had the scowling face of a Puritan elder waiting for the next heretic to come along. We had arrived late and were holding up the commencement of dinner. As he ordered us to sit, he gave the distinct impression that he was the guy who had taught Jehovah how to exude an air of authority.

  I was unaccustomed to gentile eating patterns. The emphasis here did not seem to be on shouting and screaming, but on food. The fifteen-foot-long table was covered with so many serving dishes there was barely room for them all. I tried to count the courses, but my arithmetic failed me. Then Barbara’s father ordered that we bow our heads in prayer. I was an atheist. But the tone of the command made it obvious that being a conscientious objector at this moment could be fatal. I listened while Jesus Christ was injected into the nutriments. I gathered the meal was not kosher.

  We ate. I forget whether anyone attempted to make conversation. Apparently, witty banter is not an Episcopalian (Barbara’s mother) or Quaker (her pa) specialty.

  I was on a diet. After all, remaining a ninety-nine-pound weakling takes willpower. A willpower I’d worked very hard to achieve on the kibbutz. So when the four hundred dishes went around the second time, I attempted to politely decline. Barbara’s father wouldn’t hear of it. A voice from the whirlwind ordered in no uncertain terms that I eat. Otherwise I would probably be forced to swallow a leviathan whole. Then the dishes did their third funereal parade around the table. I could feel the mashed potatoes coming out of my ears, but I didn’t dare refuse. People had been plagued with frogs, lice, and locusts for less.

  Finally, the table was cleared. And out came the pies…all three of them. Followed by the ice cream. One element of my diet had become sacred. I would not, under any circumstances, eat dessert. I hadn’t done it in the three years since I’d licked my compulsive eating problem in the Valley of Jezreel and had managed to lose twenty-eight pounds in two weeks. It had taken a will of steel to install my new eating habits, and I was damned if my metallic discipline would be crushed by some mashed pumpkin in a pastry shell.

  The time had come for a test of wills. Armstrong Aurelius Steele, Barbara’s dad, began to cut pie number one, placing slices on fine china plates, crowning them with balls of ice cream big enough to be used as the bellies of overweight snowmen, and passing them around the table. I explained meekly that I didn’t eat dessert. Armstrong responded by cutting a slice twice the normal size, putting on enough Sealtest ice cream to cap Mount Everest, and shoving it in my direction. I politely demurred.

  For the first time since we’d entered his palace, Armstrong Aurelius Steele rose to his feet. His head scraped the ceiling. His shoulders barely fit into the room. There wasn’t a scrap of fat on him. He came over to my side of the table. A fist the size of an Easter ham descended in front of my face. It bore the sidewalk-sized slab of pie. “Eat,” he said, in that hospitable sort of voice with which the giant used to rumble his fee-fi-fo-fums. The floor shook. So did the other inhabitants of the table. I refused. The plate moved to within an inch of my nose. Once again Vesuvius erupted with a single syllable: “Eat!!!!”

  I’d lost the battle. I took the pie. Then I ingested the second helping proffered by the ham-like fist. For the first time in the evening, Armstrong Aurelius Steele looked content. When dinner ended, I was rolled out of the room like a beer barrel and propped up in a living room chair for an evening of what passes in Protestant homes for conversation. That is to say, utter silence.

  But I had apparently passed some arcane gentile test. The Steeles liked me. The fact is, after the first husband Barbara hauled in, they’d have liked Jack the Ripper.

  Eventually Barbara’s brother, the only Steele offspring who had managed to dodge college, went home to his trailer in the woods. Ten o’clock arrived, and Armstrong and Elizabeth Steele said their monosyllabic goodnights, then retreated upstairs to their separate bedrooms. They had also chastely assigned Barbara and me to separate bedrooms, somehow overlooking the fact that the two rooms they gave us were connected by an adjoining door. Maybe they were hoping that we were more than just friends.

  Once her parents had trudged up the stairs to chastely slide themselves between the sheets and enter snoozeland with at least one solid wall separating them, Barbara and I were alone. Alone in the living room that had witnessed the family gatherings of her childhood. And whose every wall had probably winced at the sight.

  The hint of sexual possibility provided by the adjoining bedrooms upstairs, the bedrooms with an easily-openable door between them, wasn’t good enough for Barbara. She, unbeknownst to me, had come up here to her parental home to exorcise a demon. For months, the guilt left over from her out-of-wedlock-pregnancy had mixed with images of her mother frowning every time she had allowed me, a man she hadn’t married, into her bed for the night…not to mention into her body. To untangle the knot of guilt, she had her own test of will in mind.

  During the last six or seven weeks she’d had a headache every night, and sex had been out of the question. But now that her parents were upstairs and we were left alone in the living room, she grabbed me like an animal and wrestled me to the floor. Within minutes she had unzipped several vital items of apparel, and we had sinned on the family carpet. She grinned with far greater glee than even her father was able to exude over the Victory of the Pie. Then she dragged me upstairs to my assigned bedroom to do it all over again, this time within earshot of her mother’s room. And that earshot made a difference. The mattress on which we pumped away was like Walter Mitty—it had a secret life. It imagined it was a musical instrument. And every spring shrieked as if it had been strung with pickups by Les Paul and had been blown up to Little Richard proportions by Marshall amps. So every move we made w
as blasted by the box springs through the entire house. Including the rooms Barbara wanted to reach the most—the separate bedrooms of her mom and dad.

  Finally, after another hour of calisthenics in the missionary position, Barbara snuck through the door and into the adjoining room she had been ordered to occupy. I was exhausted and overstuffed. So, if you’ll excuse the expression, was Barbara.

  It was the second time that Barbara had made love with gusto. At least with me. The first had been the night when she’d draped herself across her mattress on 7th Street to hook me like a fish. Apparently, to Barbara sex was something you saved for use as a tool on critical occasions.

  The next day, Barbara’s mom pretended she’d never heard a thing, which seems highly unlikely given the decibel level of our a cappella mattress. And I learned the truth about the Steele family’s poverty.

  u

  Young Armstrong Aurelius Steele’s parents died when he was an infant, and he was raised in Philadelphia by Quaker aunts who, without realizing it, were actually Calvinists in disguise. One was the first female to graduate from Swarthmore College. Later, she became head of a school where hellfire and damnation were the primary staples of the cafeteria diet. In her spinsterish bedroom, she carefully copied amusing quotes into a tiny leather-bound notebook. I know. I read it. Her favorite subject? How suffering strengthens the soul, fire tempers steel, and banging your head up against obstacles until you bleed gives you character. So Armstrong grew up a fiercely rectitudinous young man, tall, built like a football player, and apparently extremely good looking. He drove a bread truck in New York City back when a one-horsepower engine consisted of exactly one horse. But he didn’t see much future for himself in the loaf-delivery business, so he moved to Central Valley, New York, and got a job selling utilities shares back in the heady 1920s, the era of Samuel Insull, who built a giant trust of electrical companies and electrical railroads, floated his trust’s stock in mega-quantities, stirred Americans into a speculative frenzy, was credited with founding General Electric and creating America’s electric infrastructure, then was accused of defrauding the public and starting the Great Depression, and driven out of the country.

  Arm (as Armstrong was called by his friends) met a fetching upstate maid and took her off to a restaurant where a great deal of tea was served from a lovely antique china pot. It was Prohibition, and the tea was stronger than most. Those who imbibed more than one cup tended, like the liquid, to become potted.

  Arm was a dapper fellow who, despite his Calvinist Quakerism, had purchased an ancient Rolls Royce. He let the subject of his affection drive it while he sat at her elbow and used the opportunity to chastely paw her elbows and shoulders. She had very little mechanical aptitude and piloted the vehicle into a creek. Armstrong, being slightly larger than your average Caterpillar demolition excavator, hauled the thing out with his pinkie.

  Young Steele could not resist Liz’s automotive skills, and hastily married her. She had spent her younger years sailing boats on the local lakes with her best friend, the daughter of a geology professor at Syracuse University, so she was fairly sharp. She’d also read the Koran, the Bhagavad Gita and the collected works of Emerson. But this didn’t keep her from having children.

  Meanwhile, some hapless Jewish immigrant had gotten off the boat at Ellis Island and been given the misimpression that there was a fortune to be made in the Catskills. He had bought himself a knapsack, a bunch of trinkets, and some household cutlery, and had set off on foot to peddle his wares to the farm wives isolated from civilization in the mountains. In those days, there were no Jewish comedians to liven up the Catskills’ hills and valleys, so someone with Yiddish pronunciation trying to sell you a pot was about the only entertainment for the year.

  The peddler eventually saved his money, married one of the non-Jewish farm girls (they were the only girls he’d seen for ten years now, if you don’t count the occasional flirtatious cow), dragged her off to the bright lights of the big city—Kingston—and proceeded to make himself the local Croesus by going into more sedentary businesses.

  Along came young Armstrong Aurelius Steele and attempted to sell the former peddler a utility share or two. The kid looked honest, earnest, hard-working, and had an awesomely flinty Old Testament morality. So the former peddler took the young man under his wing, and eventually helped him start an oil business.

  Now in Texas, the oil business means that you sit around all day on the back porch shooting jack rabbits while the pumps chug up and down, pumping money into your bank account. In Kingston, New York, it isn’t that easy. Up there, you work twenty hours a day during the winter, delivering oil to folks about to freeze like oversized Popsicles, or you get calls at three in the morning from citizens whose burners have just broken down and you haul yourself over to their basements to spend the rest of the pre-dawn hours talking recalcitrant machinery into behaving itself, occasionally punctuating your message with a firm twist of the wrench.

  Then, during the summer, you loaf and figure out what to do with your profits. In the first years, the profits were somewhat marginal. So Armstrong Aurelius Steele spent the money on needle and thread and sewed pregnancy girdles for his young wife, who popped out one kid after another until the total reached four. Then, as the profits grew more substantial, he discovered that he liked torturing boards with nails and other sharp objects. So he built a big, white house for his growing family on the outskirts of town where the occasional chicken and goat could still be seen demonstrating the life of leisure. Yes, he built his own house. With his own hands. Hands the size of a pig’s hind end. Then he slapped together a barn in the back and got a couple of horses, making sure that none of them had bread trucks grafted to their hindquarters.

  Gradually, the oil operation grew until it was pulling in bundles of bucks. At that point, Armstrong’s Jewish mentor came along with another scheme that would make them all a crate full of cash, if only they were willing to put off luxuries like meat, butter, milk and air for the next fifteen years or so. The Steele’s Jewish financial protector wangled them an opportunity to purchase the International Diamond Building on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan. Eventually a builder decided to put up a high-rise office tower on the spot, and paid them several barge loads of greenbacks for the thing.

  Armstrong got restless, spent ten years looking for the patch of property of his dreams, finally found sixty acres on Mount Mombaccus overlooking an unending vista of Catskill peaks, cleared enough trees to create a meadow that allowed you to see the view, and built a summer house made of stones the size of small refrigerators…once again, with his bare hands. He called it a camp, but the man couldn’t fool anyone. This was a full-scale second home, complete with a massive stone fireplace, every rock of which he’d pried out of the fields himself. The man was never happier than when he was riding a bulldozer—or lifting it out of the muck when it had bogged down after a rain storm. The hard part was telling the difference between Armstrong and his earth-moving equipment.

  Not that papa Steele didn’t have his flaws. There was the day that Barbara’s dad, shotgun in hand, was tracking a bear through the Catskills when he noticed that the number of footprints on the trail had doubled. Not only were there now the paw marks of two bears, but there were also the indentations of two pair of human boots—both, curiously enough, of identical size. This is when it dawned on Arm that he was going around in circles because the bear thought it might be fun to reverse the nature of things and start trailing him. Like the Steele’s horses, the bear had a sense of humor. Why these upstate New York animals did not go into standup comedy, I will never know.

  Armstrong Aurelius Steele apparently made it out of the woods uneaten. Sometimes bears are willing to forgo a snack if they can pull off a practical joke.

  Barbara’s dad’s friends were also Great White Hunters. Like there was the day they all went to his stone “cabin” on Mount Mombaccus to prepare for a weekend dedicated to
the manly sport of putting holes in unsuspecting deer.

  The universally accepted preparatory ritual for one of these slaughters, as Hemingway would tell you if he hadn’t put a hole in himself some time ago, is to swig down a couple of bottles of Jack Daniels early in the morning. Apparently this acts as either anti-freeze or lighter fluid, I’m not quite sure which. But with enough of the stuff on your breath, you can put a lit match in front of your face, exhale, and do a pretty good imitation of an industrial blowtorch.

  Once the men had thoroughly stoked their bloodstreams with ethanol, they set off to stalk the mighty deer. Now, the deer on Mount Mombaccus are either total idiots, or have a much better sense of humor than even the bears. The men set off in two parallel lines about twenty feet apart. They’d only gone a few hundred yards up the mountain when suddenly a magnificent buck came charging out of the woods and ran like blazes straight between the two files of noble hunters. Every man, his reflexes operating like lightning, hoisted his gun to his shoulder and spat lead by the pound. The problem was, the single file of guys on the left just happened to be shooting directly at the folks in the line on the right, and vice versa.

  Fortunately, no one was hit. The deer got away without a scratch, though I suspect it had to put a hoof over its mouth when it went back into the brush and told the story to the rest of the herd. After all, you don’t want those pesky drunkards with guns to discover your whereabouts just because you’re laughing too loud.

  When the men realized just who they’d really been shooting at, they checked themselves thoroughly to make sure their heads were still on their necks and there were no six-inch holes in anyone’s chest. Then they figured that they’d done the preparatory ritual all wrong and went back to get out another case of Jack Daniels. Fortunately, most of them passed out before they could venture into the woods and threaten each other with lethal weapons again.