How I Accidentally Started the Sixties

by Howard Bloom

  Which leaves us with a simple moral, a lesson in geometry. Not all circular firing squads are circular.

  u

  Meanwhile Barbara, for some reason, overlooked another simple lesson in life. If you’re a girl, you’re supposed to follow the role model of your MOTHER. Over the years it would become apparent that I had unwittingly met a clone of Barbara’s father, carefully disguised by certain minor sexual alterations and a considerable diminution in height and overall heft. As time went on, Barbara was seized by strange attractions toward horses, barns, hammers, and nails. Fortunately, she never went in for guns.

  On this initial visit, there was only one small tip-off to the fact that her father’s soul was caged within this delicate female form. Barbara hauled me out onto Lounsberry Place, planted herself in the middle of the street, and ordered me to catch a football. She tossed the pigskin, and I went into my normal receiver’s stance—both eyes closed, hands protectively shielding my face. After retrieving the ball from the gutter, I lobbed it back in her direction. Despite my lack of coordination, the missile was moving pretty fast. There was, however, a snag: it wasn’t headed anywhere near Barbara. No problem. She took off like a banshee, leaped into the air, snatched the errant torpedo, hugged it to her midriff, and wrapped her entire body around it—arms, legs, chin, everything. That ball didn’t have a chance in hell of escape. From this I learned that Barbara and I had diametrically opposite approaches to the physical world.

  Yes, there were giants in those times. Most of them in Barbara’s family. Thank God she’s the runt of the litter.

  u

  So Barbara had not grown up in poverty. The family chickens (yes, they at least had existed) were never forced to lend the family money. The local church mice had been unable to collect from the Steele clan, which had enough in the bank to buy the church and all its rodents several times over. And Barbara’s girlhood impoverishment was all in her head. Lord knows how it got there, since she is a very brainy soul. But maybe she shared something in common with her daughter, who, as you’ll recall, invented the half-a-sandwich lunch. The mystery of Barbara’s delusion goes unsolved to this very day.

  FLEEING FROM THE FLAMES OF HELL

  When we last left off, Barbara had attempted to expel the flaming tapeworms of guilt from her conscience by dragging me up to Kingston, New York, and ravishing me on her parents’ living room floor. But she’d failed. Not in ravishing me. She’d done that quite effectively. But in banishing the fire-snorting Platyhelminthes from her brain. This spelled trouble.

  To understand why, you have to get to know a little bit more about my family. Let’s start with my grandparents. You’ve already met the ones on my father’s side—the great grandfather who was a courier for the tsar, and his son who worked his boot-making skills up into a pocket-sized real estate empire in Asbury Park, New Jersey.

  My grandmother on my mother’s side was a gorgeous redhead. Or so the lore of the family has it. She grew up in Riga, Latvia, a suave Baltic Sea port, a seaport suffering from a cultural split bigger than the Martian canyon that cracks open a fifth of the Red Planet’s surface. Riga was established in roughly the second century AD by the Latvians. A thousand years later, in 1200 AD, an ambitious German bishop attacked with twenty-three German war ships and 500 German warrior-monk crusaders and took the town over. In 1282, the Germans went further—they made Riga a member of their Baltic Sea trade web, the Hanseatic League. Which meant that Riga had two cultures, a “high” German culture and a “low” Latvian culture. The very name of the Latvians—“Latvis”—implies a hayseed lower class, a people of the margins—“forest clearers.” Fringe people. Uncouth folks with wood chips in their beards. Needless to say, the Germanic master race looked down upon these log-splinter-covered Latvians. Who knows what the Latvians thought of the snobby Germans.

  This culture clash would later drag at least two marriages in my family down to the pits of hell. Not the mainstream pits in which normal sinners writhe in socially acceptable ways. The side chambers in which Lucifer snickers at the fact that he doesn’t have to lift a pitchfork because couples handle the invention of new agonies totally on their own. And they do it with an inventiveness that would impress even Vlad the Impaler. This creative approach to agony would make me one of the most peculiar mate-seekers on a planet where peculiarity, torment, and love seem to go hand in hand.

  My young, russet-haired grandmother was from the Jewish culture that had caught the fever of German aspirations. She hungered for the aristocratic distinction of advanced degrees. And she dreamed of playing the lady of the manor in a living room from whose grand-piano strings the arpeggios of Mozart and Schubert would frequently roll, battling underweight pizzicatos for attention. Preferably, these highly refined musical notes would stream from the fingers of her precocious progeny, children whose talents prestigious impresarios would beg her to make available for performances in public. Which means that her clan was proud of the fact that in the final decades of the 1800s, the family had produced ballerinas, dentists, and other high class, semi-intellectual types. Unfortunately, this would snarfle the red head’s love life…and mine.

  The young and pretty madchen, my grandmother, fell in love with the perfect, high-prestige, Germanic-Jewish catch: a doctor. She seemed about to snare him. In fact, she considered herself engaged. Then the medical graduate horrified her by finding some other woman more appealing and promptly running off to the rabbi with her. Heartbroken, my grandmother immigrated to America at the turn of the century, did needle work in a New York sweatshop, met a tailor newly arrived from the boondocks of Latvia, and married him. The pair moved to Western New York, where her freshly-caught husband eventually managed to open his own shop and provide a modest living for his two daughters and one son.

  The little tailor was one of the nicest, best-humored people on the planet. What’s more, he was madly in love with his wife. But this availed him nothing. He wasn’t a doctor. Worse, he wasn’t from Riga’s Germanic culture. In fact, he wasn’t even from Riga. He was from a nearby town, Golding, of less than 5,000 inhabitants. A town of primitives on a par with the Piltdown Man—an alleged half-human, half-orangutan who turned out to be a fraud. In other words, her tailor was from the culture of the locals, the hicks, the rubes, the rednecks, and the barbarians: the Latvian-ish Jews. My grandmother would never forgive him.

  In fact, she would make every day of his life a walking misery. She would belittle and scold him, pecking at him like a chicken with high aspirations punishing Barbara’s pet, the runt of the litter. When he was fifty, my grandfather couldn’t take it anymore and moved out. Then he came down with liver cancer, and his youngest daughter was delegated to plead with him to come home and die with his children…who loved him.

  What were this poor man’s sins in the eyes of his wife? To repeat. He was from a culture of bumpkins. And he wasn’t a doctor. This pattern of marriage would poison my mother. It would poison me. And it would erect barriers taller than the Burj Dubai for Barbara.

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  You recall that my mother was a bright young girl with the kind of vocabulary Samuel Johnson dreamt about. She had only one goal in life: a college education. But the family was poor. So they used all the savings they had to send her brother off to college and incarcerated her in secretarial school, despite the fact that some institution of higher learning had actually awarded her a partial scholarship. Eventually, as you may remember, she became the private secretary to the head of the New York State Liquor Authority, a strange position for a girl who didn’t drink, and by the age of thirty was still unmarried, don’t ask me why.

  Then this thirty-two-year-old bachelor came to Buffalo from Asbury Park, New Jersey, and started a children’s clothing store in the middle of the Depression. In those days, parents preferred that their children wear hand-me-downs from deceased relatives who had shriveled to only twice the child’s size, so the business produced just enough
money to feed a very small family of fruit flies. As you recall, my dad ate a lot of beans and tried to concoct a stew from the cans, but found the results inedible. However, despite his poverty, he had one advantage. He was exactly like my mother’s much-adored dad—loyal, patient, pleasant, and the bearer of a good sense of humor…but not a doctor.

  So my mother married him. Then she realized that he was missing something critical—an MD. Following in her mother’s footsteps, she opened a campaign of verbal harassment. She unleashed a barrage of brilliantly articulate insults. A daily campaign. And though Irving Bloom, my dad, worked fourteen hours a day, seven days a week to build the biggest liquor store in Western New York State, thus showering my mom with comfortable quantities of cash, the warfare never ceased. After all, my mom had a family obligation: to keep her mother’s marital legacy alive.

  Along came a child, and my mother trained him well. I became an expert in the arts of conversational sabotage and ambush—all directed at my dad, of course. My mother reserved the more subtle stratagems for herself—forms of mental flagellation so heinous that even medieval torture masters would have judged them inhumane.

  Every day my dad came home from his store at 6:00 p.m. to have dinner with us, then went back to the store to work until eleven. Every evening he slid into his habitual position on one of the two red, padded banquettes of the breakfast nook, a tiny room like a restaurant booth with built-in benches set up on either side of a built-in table. Every day, he radiated smiles, eager to tell the stories of the people he had met during the day—his customers, people he loved. Like Erskine Caldwell, who wrote the novel Tobacco Road. And like the auto dealer who took a big chance, stepped outside the box, ignored cars from General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler, and went with the strange autos turned out by an industrialist who had helped America win World War II—Henry Kaiser, the aluminum king, the father of American shipbuilding, and the maker of the Liberty Ships. My dad loved to tell how Kaiser had turned out the huge ships that helped America win the war at a rate of three per day. Which meant that my dad’s customer was selling cars with strange names like the Henry J (for Henry J. Kaiser) and the Kaiser. And we were eventually driving in them.

  Every day my dad would begin one of his stories of the day’s adventures. But before he could get out more than three sentences, my mom would cut him down with a withering fire of put downs. Brilliant, gifted, but undeserved insults. And she trained me and my younger brother to join in the fusillade. My dad was a man of natural good-heartedness and joy. But every day, my mom turned that joy into an agony. With, alas, my help. And my brother’s.

  Astonishingly, my mother recognized the destructive savagery of her mother’s guerrilla attacks. How do I know? She spent decades trying to track down what was left of her family in Europe, taking trips to New York City to pour through the archives of The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. Of the hundreds who had lived in the 1930s, only two were left. One was a woman who had married one of the Russian soldiers liberating Riga from the Nazis, had moved from Riga to the Russian portion of the USSR, and had become a tractor driver. The other was a dentist in South Africa. In one of my mother’s letters to the South African dentist, she told the tale of her mother’s marriage, complete with the tortures her mother had inflicted on her tailor spouse and why. She pinpointed the sources of her mother’s venom with precision: the fact that her husband did not have the lofty stature of an advanced degree and a medical practice, and did not come from Riga’s German-cultured Jewish aristocracy. What’s perplexing was my mom’s failure to see that even as she typed her analysis of her mother’s mistakes, she was faithfully repeating them.

  I, however, was much too wise to get my notions of marriage solely from bits of carnage blown across the family dinner table. I sought other, counterbalancing examples. And I found them…in my father’s New Jersey sisters. There was no New York State Thruway in those dim and distant days. So in the depths of winter, we’d climb into our brand new Henry J and wend our way to a patch of ice-covered switchbacks of asphalt through mountains that I can’t find on Google Maps, but that my dad aimed at with the accuracy of a sea turtle swimming a thousand miles to the patch of beach that gave it birth. The roads that snaked through these steep slopes never failed to entertain. The cliffs to our right were peppered with cars that had gone off the road and had been stopped by the trees in a vertical position, standing on their noses with their trunks in the air. Our destination: Asbury Park. There, in the former playground-on-the-sea for the super rich, I would see what true marital bliss could be.

  My Aunt Beck and Uncle Al lived in an enormous, seven-bedroom, white-painted, ornate home that my grandfather had bought, a house that gave Beck and Al enough space to spend their days without seeing each other. But distance could do nothing to diminish the boom of their long-range artillery. Though they were located a dozen rooms away from each other, you could have heard their shouting above the crowd noises at Ebbets Field, sixty miles to the North.

  My Aunt Golda and Uncle Nat had an equally blissful ménage. Close-quarter vituperation was their specialty. Their shrieks in their tiny breakfast room were so shrill that you could have used the sonic vibrations to dislodge kidney stones.

  The household hell I’d seen in my extended family was one I never wanted to be battered and deep-fat fried in. By my teen years, I had made a simple vow. Never, ever in my life would I get married.

  This would have consequences just an inch or two down the line.

  u

  Fast forward to Barbara and me taking the bus from Kingston back to the Lower East Side. The weekend’s exhibitions of prurient behavior had done nothing to tranquilize the hyperactive tapeworms of Barbara’s guilty conscience. In fact, her self-punishment festered and grew.

  The neighbors in our tenement were all Roman Catholic Puerto Ricans. Barbara was sure that her illicit sexual relationship was all they talked about. When she walked down the block, she ignored the drug dealers and stick-up artists. All she could see were the faces of Virgin Mary worshippers frowning on her extra-marital immorality. How the Virgin Mary would have disapproved is hard to understand. She’d had an extra-marital affair with an undersized animal—an oversexed dove. But the Catholic Church nonetheless does everything in its power to chill the libido. And that chill was making Barbara shiver.

  Finally, Barbara couldn’t take it anymore. After four months of living together, she handed me an ultimatum. Either I married her, or in two months I’d have to move out. Marriage, I explained, was out of the question. I warned her about the booby-traps of connubial bliss—in other words, I gave her the story of my mother and my aunts. No dice. It was marriage or exile!

  Two months later, I went apartment hunting. This led to a fourth story walk-up on Eleventh Street between First Avenue and Avenue A, a few blocks from Barbara’s, with a splendid view of a playground and the outrageously high rent of $45 a month. There was a petite girl at NYU with red-tinged hair—the sort who wore makeup and knew how to use it to look like a model—who had set her sights on me and figured that this would be her big chance to move in for the kill. She’d spotted me slitting fetal pigs in biology class and had probably concluded I’d become a brain surgeon. A very rich brain surgeon. Little did she suspect my manual incompetence. This vision of loveliness seemed to want to share my new apartment, not to mention my bed. I somehow managed to sidestep her snares. Then there was the girl from the Andy Warhol crowd who had asked me to move in with her two days after I’d moved in with Barbara. She was kind enough to help with my housewarming by letting me stay overnight in her bed, a convenient one block away from Barbara…and three blocks south of my new apartment. For even further convenience her name was also Barbara. So I had help in making the move. And in remembering names.

  But when the first weekend after my banishment came, I invited Barbara number one to take a load off by letting me baby-sit for Nanette. Barbara, who was being reminded of just h
ow rough handling The Daughter of the Damned by yourself can be, was more than willing to toss me her bundle of Satanic fury. So I made Nanette meals and let her horse around on the playground while I kept my eye on her through my kitchen window.

  The experience was an epiphany. Suddenly Barbara remembered why she’d tolerated me—because I had taken the burden of her kid off her shoulders. I kept my separate tenement apartment in the slums of East Eleventh Street. But within a week Barbara and I were living together again. The subject of marriage faded from our conversations. My function as baby-sitter was blessing enough. Ironically, the child who wanted to tear us apart had brought us back together again.

  HOW TO SLEEP WITH YOUR GIRLFRIEND UNDER HER MOTHER’S NOSE

  My renewed relationship with Barbara was marred by a little glitch: her imminent departure to the Sorbonne. For the first five or six months of the relationship, the intrusion of the Eiffel Tower into our bliss seemed too distant to worry about. Then it finally occurred to me that the 3,000-mile separation might make it more difficult for me to see Barbara’s smile, thus somewhat dampening the therapeutic effects of our togetherness. Even worse, it would make sex impossible.

  I pondered this dilemma for a while, but being a slow thinker, it took six months before I hit on a solution: accompanying my semi–loved one to France! There was only one small, six-legged invertebrate in the unguent. It was April by the time I arrived at my momentous revelation, and the application deadlines for all the French exchange programs in America had whizzed past roughly four months earlier. By now, the professors in charge were all looking up the phone numbers of Gallic girlfriends and making lists of what brands of brie they wanted to buy once they hit the Seine.