How I Accidentally Started the Sixties

by Howard Bloom

  One day when the cat displeased him, he threw it out the third-story window. Said cat managed to land on its feet, but carried on bravely from that point with a distinct and ineradicable limp. Yes, even the family feline kept a stiff upper lip. And during one of Wentworth’s frequent disciplinary sessions with his mob of children, who, like my one daughter, seemed to have come from the mail order catalog sent out by the devil’s subterranean retail operation, good old Cyril had broken one of his youngsters’ arms.

  Then there was Heather, the mom. Suburban life utterly bored her. I mean, she’d come from some Novocained state like Nebraska and had not headed east just to learn how to daintily cover her mouth when she yawned. She wanted life, lust, and adventure. It was The Sixties. She wanted to be a Hippie!

  There were numerous candidates in our neighborhood who could have helped her in her quest. For example, there was the mother of another of Nanette’s close friends. This child’s mama—Orange—had originally been married to the man to whom Allen Ginsberg dedicated his seminal poem “Howl.” Orange sat around making necklaces from individual beads so fascinating in their intricacy that you could get utterly lost just wallowing in the aesthetic tricks contained in a single one. She complemented her bead stringing by ingesting a variety of illicit substances—LSD, methedrine, and God-knows-what-all else. And she augmented her income by importing marijuana. Thirty or forty one-kilo bricks of the stuff often covered her bed from one end to the other, waiting to be broken up, sifted for unsuitable plant parts, and divided into thousands of portions which she could put into tiny polyethylene bags and sell for $20 per. What’s more, Orange was charming, reasonably attractive, and—I much later discovered—certifiably insane.

  Then there was the gentleman who lived downstairs from this queen of psychedelia. He had been a member of the Chad Mitchell trio until he fell into a vat of lysergic acid and saw whole new aspects of the universe—like the spiritual innards of Alpha Centauri. He had then dropped out of his fabulously successful singing career and been replaced by some hopeless nerd named John Denver (whom I would work with twenty years later). Then the newly illuminated former singer had begun to study religion. Today, the Chad Mitchell renegade is a successful Unitarian minister. A psychedelic steward of human souls.

  With competition like this, how Barbara and I became Heather Wentworth’s hippies of choice is utterly beyond me. I mean, we didn’t take drugs, and I was a God-damned workaholic! Maybe Heather heard my stories and realized something that had not quite dawned on me: that I had accidentally helped the Hippie Movement get its start.

  Nonetheless, Heather and her corporate husband seized on us as their passport to the netherworld of bohemian bliss. They had us over for dinner all the time, thus contributing most of the calories that kept our monthly diet above the starvation level. Meanwhile, Nanette (my daughter) and Paulette (the toughest of their daughters) formed a crime syndicate for six-year-olds and stole $20 or $30 in cash at a crack from the Wentworths, from Barbara, from me, and from any other neighborhood parents naive enough to allow the duo into their homes and to leave a couple of dollars on the bedroom dresser for emergencies. Then the partners in larceny would skip school for the day and go off to Coney Island to spend their loot (which is some feat for a first-grader, when you think about it, since even I couldn’t figure out how to get from our apartment to Coney Island).

  Eventually Barbara’s and my company was not enough to satisfy Heather Wentworth’s cravings for hippiedom. Nor was possessing a husband who slept with other women while highly competitive bulldogs watched. So, at the age of thirty-five, Heather found herself a twenty-three-year-old jazz musician and decided to run off to Europe with the lad. A good, solid, hippie thing to do. What’s more, the saxophone master was only four years past his sexual peak, and the odds seemed pretty good that he’d be able to keep up with the demands of Heather’s locomotive-like libido.

  But Heather was not the kind of mother who simply abandons her children, then forgets them. No, she sought out good homes, then abandoned them. In short, she deposited her brood with her friends.

  Since we were high on the friends list, we were chosen to operate in loco parentis for the oldest female, Beryl. Beryl was roughly fifteen, and had come out about the way you’d expect from a thoroughly dysfunctional family. She was the next best thing to a limp parsnip, and had totally withdrawn from humanity. In the entire year she lived with us, I don’t think she had a conversation with us once. She went to school, came home, and spent the rest of the day and early evening indulging her worship of Bob Marley.

  In case you’re not up on Caribbean arcana, Bob Marley is the patron saint of Jamaica. In Rastafarianism, the home-grown Jamaican religion, God is Haile Selassie, former Emperor of Ethiopia. One day God (that’s Haile) will descend to Jamaica, apparently piloting a large passenger ship, something along the lines of the Queen Mary. He will load up his faithful followers and take them from their imprisonment in Babylon (that’s Jamaica) to the New Jerusalem (Ethiopia), which will flourish as a paradise on earth and rise high above all the other kingdoms (not to mention dictatorships and democracies) on the planet.

  Marley, a singer and composer of reggae, the Rastafarian musical form, not only became capable during his lifetime of drawing crowds of 120,000 to soccer stadiums everywhere from Ireland and Italy to Zimbabwe, but Rastafarians felt that Marley was to Haile Selassie (who, you will recall, is God) what St. Paul was to Jesus. I know. Sixteen years later, I would become Bob Marley’s publicist.

  Meanwhile, Beryl Wentworth, the lumpily lassitudinous teenager, returned from her classes every day, shut herself in her room, and spent the rest of the afternoon and evening drawing pictures of her hero’s face.

  Beryl’s arrival was the beginning of a Wentworth tradition. No matter what Heather (the wandering mother) was up to, she could always fall back on us as surrogate parents for her kids. A year after she departed from the States, she returned. She’d discovered that while her twenty-three-year-old lover’s pelvic appurtenances were, indeed, able to function much as she had hoped, he had certain other drawbacks. Most notably, he was a heroin addict. As they schlepped from Venice to Vienna to the Place Vendome, she tried to cure him of his habit. But she didn’t have much luck. Hence, she reentered the US without the self-puncturing musical whiz, collected the kids she had deposited hither and yon, unloaded them on a commune in Massachusetts, then went off to Woodstock, a haven of hippiedom, to gallivant some more.

  This led to one of Nanette’s more daring escapades. By now the year was 1970. My daughter was eleven, and had become the Moriarty of Mischief. She told us she’d be staying overnight at a friend’s house, then trooped off in what seemed to be the right direction. At 2:00 a.m. I got a furious phone call from someone I’d never heard of asking if I knew where my daughter was. Of course, I knew. She was staying with a friend. The man on the other end of the phone snorted in a mixture of anger and contempt, clearly meaning to question my competence as a parent. Then he explained that Nanette had run away to the commune in Massachusetts to be with her friends, the Wentworth gang (and in their case, they qualified for this term as thoroughly as any social group ever put together by Jesse James or the Dalton boys). How did he know? He was the commune’s head. I was rather disturbed, to say the least. But under the irritation was an absolute awe at Nanette’s navigational skills.

  The commune leader sent Nanette back. And the rest of the Wentworths arrived soon thereafter. Their mother had decided to reassemble them as a family unit (minus father Cyril), rent the apartment immediately beneath us, and rely on our friendship and support while she dedicated herself to one old hobby and one new one—sex (the one she’d been perfecting for quite some time), and the large-scale consumption of alcohol (a skill which came with some difficulty, but to whose mastery she applied herself with a heroic determination).

  So her kids were in and out of our shabby apartment all the time, knowing t
hat we were about the only stable—not to mention sober—people in their lives.

  There were other episodes—like the year that Paulette, the Wentworth hellion who at the tender age of five had been capable of turning her peers into chopped meat through the dexterous application of her teeth and fists—came to live with us. Now sixteen years old, she struck up an affair with the boy across the street, an exceedingly good-natured lad with a constant smile on his face and a girth similar to Shamu the Whale’s. He came from a nice, Dominican family. And when I say came, I mean came to stay. He ended up sleeping with Paulette every night and emerging from her bedroom every morning with his usual marvelous grin. How the two of them (Paulette was also rather large-boned) managed to fit into a single bed designed for an underfed monk is beyond me.

  It wasn’t until Paulette later married the blimp-like lad and had his child that we all discovered he’d gone into the family business—smuggling cocaine. Eventually, after enjoying a good deal of her husband’s merchandise, Paulette divorced him. She is a successful sales executive in the garment industry today, her child is an adult, she and Nanette have remained good friends, but we never hear from her anymore.

  Meanwhile Paulette’s mother, Heather, showed that though she may have been as pickled as a gherkin, she still retained her sexual prowess. The government was conducting its decennial census, and had hired whatever flotsam and jetsam it could find to canvas neighborhoods inquiring about how many inhabitants were squirreled away in each abode. A young man arrived at Heather’s door sporting a beard, an official clipboard, a smile, and a sense of humor. Heather flung open the door to reveal herself in her full glory—blurred only mildly by a black, see-through negligee. The census taker, who turned out to be a struggling commercial designer, put down his clipboard and didn’t leave for six years.

  Heather stuck around downstairs until her children were all grown and the former urchins didn’t need to drop in on us—or move in, as the case may be—all the time. Then she went out into the world to seek more escapades…and more men. When she hit roughly fifty, she found a male in a personals column who advertised that he had money, a large home, and owned a boat. She married him and retired to the comfort of alcoholism. Eventually, it would kill her.

  Beryl, the Marley fanatic, wedded a Rastafarian who turned out to be an enthusiastic participant in four popular Jamaican sports: sex, smoking cannabis, playing soccer, and killing rival Rastas. After fathering a son—who today is uncommonly handsome and delightful, but probably a psychiatric time bomb—Beryl’s husband was killed in one of those raucous little gang battles believers in Haile Selassie have such fun with. Today, I believe Beryl is living on welfare. She never talked to us while she was holed up here, and she’s maintained the practice ever since, so it’s kind of hard to track her movements. However, one thing is certain: she’s a second-generation casualty of the spiritual quest with which I’d helped kick off The Sixties, a quest that apparently soured as it aged.

  THE SUMMER OF

  THE GREAT POLYGAMY EXPERIMENT

  Barbara’s discontent came to a head in 1967. Her discontent with what? With me, of course. You’ll recall that in September of 1965, when she’d married me, Barbara was none too happy about finally being knotted to the man she’d attempted to corner for the previous ten months. Guess what? Things went downhill from there. Within the first weeks after I moved in with her on the Lower East Side, the smile that lit my spirit had disappeared. She was glum, grumpy and resentful. If she acted civil more than once in six months, it was a major break in the clouds.

  To motivate myself, I’d visualize Barbara’s smile day after day for periods as long as twelve months at a time, twelve months when there was no Barbara smile in sight. In fact, when I came home and walked into the kitchen, Barbara would often pull back to the farthest diagonal corner of the room, shrinking from me as if I was spitting, leaking, and sneezing the Ebola virus. “Don’t get near me,” she’d say in a line you’ve read before, “your breath smells like dead pollywogs.”

  By that time, I’d shucked my Prussian psychotherapist and had found a male shrink named Murray Stern. He was the opposite of the brain untangler who had turned her back on me. He was tall and warm. And he let me see his face. I’d walk into Murray’s office, sit across from him, and explain that I was in a state of unaccountable and almost indescribable emotional pain. “It feels like I’m in the middle of a whirlwind,” I’d say, “the wind is whipping around shards of glass and tin. And every one of those shards is cutting me.” Then Murray would ask one of the wisest questions ever tossed at an emotional sufferer. “What happened last night?” What happened the night before the agony began? I’d think. Recalling emotionally scarring moments is not easy. At least not for me. “Ummm, Barbara told me to stay on the other side of the room. She said my breath smelled like rotting pollywogs. Then, when we went to bed, she turned her back on me.” Voila. The unaccountable whirlwind of blades was no longer unaccountable. The slashing vortex went straight back to a moment of rejection.

  Nonetheless, from the time she’d seized on me in the NYU library, I’d been faithful, loyal and true. That continued during our marriage. I was not a perfect husband…I’m sure there was lots of room for legitimate complaint. My dishwashing was appalling. The food I made contained bargain basement ingredients even cats wouldn’t touch—the aforementioned chicken hearts and a brand of cut-priced canned mackerel with an unpleasant silver slime on its surface, the last remains of its flashy, pimped-up skin. After all, I had to feed us protein on a bread-and-water budget. But I was faithful to a T. And it wasn’t for lack of temptation.

  Back before I’d started living with Barbara, temptations had been few and far between. Yes, there was my period of sexual good fortune on the West Coast. But New York was different. When you’re alone and feeling it sharply, you give off a perfume of desperation. Women avoid you like the plague. Then I’d started living with Barbara. That lifted the odor of isolation in a radical manner. Suddenly, half the females in the city seemed to want me.

  Well, maybe only four.

  The week I moved my things over to Barbara’s, I was squeezing through the door of a poetry writing class along with an exiting mob of fellow wannabe Gerard Manley Hopkins’s when this red-headed girl who wrote things that I considered absolutely grotesque (multiple-choice poetry with postage-stamp-sized pictures inserted in the text) slipped next to me and slid a small piece of paper into my hand. I unfolded it after she disappeared around a corner and discovered it was a strange little poem about someone with lizard lips. Lizard lips? What did that have to do with me? Sorry, but I’m a little dense. Suddenly it hit me. It was a love poem. What’s worse, it was directed at yours truly, the man whose misshapen smile every bug-eyed chameleon on the planet recognizes as akin to his very own.

  Suddenly, the girl’s poetry seemed far less contemptible. I deigned to talk to the creature, who turned out to be a graphic artist and the aforementioned member of the Warhol crowd. A few days later, she asked me to move in with her. I turned her down, gently, I hope. I was being faithful to Barbara.

  Then there was the woman in one of my literature courses. She was intelligent, attractive, a bit older than I was—but then, who wasn’t? Barbara was, too—had a five-year-old daughter like Barbara, and had been married to some member of the Van Doren family who’d gotten cancer at the age of twenty-seven and had left her an uncommonly young widow. She made it clear that I would be an admirable replacement. I said no, I hope without hurting her feelings. I was still being faithful to Barbara.

  In my 17th century poetry class was the most interesting temptation of all, a gorgeous, extraordinarily brilliant girl who did not seem hobbled by the slightest bit of ignorance or naiveté. She was dressed in black leather—complete with leather skirt, leather boots, leather blouse, and leather jacket. She’d been a stripper for a while, had indulged in a few lesbian relationships, had married a filmmaker, and had go
ne back to school. While her husband was off in Afghanistan making movies, she’d decided that the man she really wanted was, you guessed it, the Woody Allen/Kermit the Frog look-alike. Me. And she was passionate about it. My handwriting was enough, she said, to drive her to orgasm. Now, I admit I was tempted. I enjoyed this woman’s effervescent intellect to the nth degree. And her body was mind-boggling. But, in the end, I couldn’t do it. Still being faithful to Barbara.

  The fact is, I stuck to the one I was with, and that was that.

  Well, along came 1967, the end of my junior year. Barbara had put in two years as a teacher while I studied my ass off at NYU. Not that teaching wasn’t fun for Barbara, mind you. The school board had sent her to a junior high in Bedford Stuyvesant where the kids stabbed their principals for sport. It was rated the most dangerous educational institution west of Beirut. And Barbara’s students were so inspired by the notion of learning French that they spent the entire class on their feet playing basketball with wads of paper torn from their textbooks. To score extra points, they attempted to throw each other out the windows.

  To lighten her burden, the school administrators had suggested that Barbara double as an art teacher. Aside from one required undergraduate course in art history, this was a subject she knew nothing about. So every night Barbara would come home, literally cry for an hour or two, then try to learn enough about drawing stick figures to prepare lesson plans for the next day.

  Meanwhile, I took care of the shopping, the cooking, the carpentry, and Nanette.

  I also tried to be helpful with Barbara’s vocational dilemma. I sought more advice from the head of NYU’s graduate school of education. The one who had pointed me to Brooklyn. Unfortunately, this backfired. The dean recommended a book written by a New York Times reporter who had gone underground as a teacher in the most dangerous school in the city, a junior high on a par with a war zone in Syria. After the principal was shot by a student, the intrepid reporter fled in fear for his life. Alas, it turned out that the whole saga had occurred in Barbara’s school. Not a good book to show Barbara if I wanted to cheer her up.