How I Accidentally Started the Sixties

by Howard Bloom

  To soften her sorrows, I wrote some of Barbara’s papers (remember, she was attempting to get a graduate degree in education), and ultimately helped engineer an escape from pedagogy by inserting her into the New York Library system. Nonetheless, Barbara’s resentment was building. Then the dam broke. One evening in the spring of 1967, she sat me down in a cheap Algerian restaurant a five-minute walk away from our apartment in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, and told me point-blank that she wanted me to go out and have an affair. Why? She wanted to have an affair and she didn’t want to feel guilty.

  At the time, I happened to be editing the NYU literary magazine. More about how this happened in a minute. It was a sordid task that I had been dragged into much against my will. But it did have its perks: I was surrounded by intriguing young women. And one of them, in particular, was more intriguing than the rest. She wasn’t the best-dressed person in the world. In fact, her very dishevelment put her on my wavelength. I can’t manage to shevel properly either. What’s more, she had a mischievous smile, a wonderful verve, a quick mind, a mouth-watering shape, and she seemed to find me fascinating. We’d taken to three-hour phone conversations every night, utterly wrapped up in each other. I was reasonably certain this couldn’t interfere with my marriage. After all, for three years I’d proven remarkably adept at being faithful to Barbara. But now Barbara was telling me to ditch fidelity.

  So I called up the girl with whom I’d had the Platonic exchanges of telephonic passion—Betty Sue Cross—and asked if I could meet her at her place. The next night, the Platonism gave way to aphrodisia. It turned out that under Betty Sue’s walking laundry hamper of carelessly tossed-on skirt and blouse was a tiny waist, a slender torso, small, firm breasts, and hips like a perfect pear. A body that stunned me. But there was a problem. In the throes of passion, instead of climaxing, she broke out crying. Somehow our love making hit the spot where the loss of her mother when she was still a child had lacerated her heart. It didn’t matter. I thought she was wonderful.

  A few days later, when I was waiting alone in Betty Sue’s apartment for her arrival, Betty Sue’s roommate, Page, marched in and told me she’d been deeply hurt. I was sleeping with her roomie and wasn’t sleeping with her. How could I be so cruel! Apparently, the Sexual Revolution had finally reached the East Coast.

  A few nights later, I met Page at a sparely furnished but neatly kept Manhattan apartment she’d borrowed, in a huge thicket of 1940s middle-income brick buildings called Stuyvesant Town. We spent the night together, and it was an amazement. By 10:00 p.m. we had our clothes off, and by 10:02 my hands made one of the most astonishing discoveries of their lives—not to mention mine. My fingers and palms saw her body with a clarity and amazement that mere eyes can only wish for. She was a wonderland of curves, smoothness, and bits of fuzz in unexpected places, textures, and shapes that your hands can see in ways far more wondrous than your sight. Though the sight of her was beyond belief, too. For example, her breasts were small and high, and between them was a down you could not see, but that delighted your touch. My hands were so entranced that I was still on a voyage of discovery, gently touching and stroking her at 6:00 a.m., when the sun rose.

  Suddenly I had not just the one woman I had intended to be faithful to for life, but three. Two more than I’d bargained for. And there was a twist. Remember how my Aunt Rose had introduced me to music by immersing me in Peter and the Wolf? Then, when I was roughly eleven, the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra had announced that it was going to perform Peter and the Wolf live. My mom knew I loved the piece and took me to see it. The conductor whose name appeared on the concert program was Willis Page. He was Page’s dad.

  Thus started the summer of the Great Polygamy Experiment. I was now sleeping with three women. You couldn’t tell it at the time, but in the grand sweep of history—the sweep for which Mother History uses her push broom—this made sense. The coming months of 1967 were about to get a name, one very relevant to Barbara’s demand that I cast a wider sexual net: The Summer of Love. And the Summer of Love would become a Sixties landmark. A landmark that, like so much of The Sixties, echoed the Sexual Revolution I’d been a part of in 1962.

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  At first, the affair with Betty Sue was a lark. Not Lark Clark, the girl I’d put together with Tom Reichmann for a deep dive into subway-tunnel romance. It was a slide, a glide, a delight. I figured, as everyone did that summer, that sex was a casual entertainment. You’d enjoy it immensely, and no one would get hurt. And that, in the beginning, was the way it seemed. Page, the roommate, would come out to Brooklyn and stay with Barbara while I spent the night with Betty Sue on Tenth Street, near First Avenue, in Manhattan. Page and Mrs. Bloom would indulge in a royal rollick, killing a half gallon of Almaden Chablis, gobbling a giant cake straight from the bakery box, and digging out the filling between the layers with their fingers.

  Betty Sue and I would dive into the perplexities of passion. Everyone was good friends. One Sunday in June, Barbara, Betty Sue, and I even subwayed to Manhattan and walked hand in hand in hand north through Central Park to the Guggenheim Museum, like poster children for the Summer of Love. Sure, there were occasional difficulties, like the time the sister of my best friend from high school showed up to visit and was shocked into speechlessness. She trudged up our Brooklyn hallway just as I was running back and forth between opposite ends of the apartment trying to calm down two weeping women. And she happened to ring the doorbell while I was frantic and didn’t have a stitch of clothing on. Being greeted by a breathless nudist who asks that you just take a walk around the block and give him a chance to get the rapidly separating pieces of his cosmos strapped back together can throw a twist into your system. I never saw her again.

  Then something dark heaved beneath the surface of this sexual Disneyland. The power of attachment. I began to need Betty Sue like a drug. I fell in love with her. I wanted to be a permanent part of her life. The candy-coated fantasy of the polygamous playground was being melted by some primal pull toward involuntary monogamy. That pull was overwhelming, an obsession, an undertow of emotion that sucked in all of consciousness.

  Betty Sue seemed to be going through very much the same thing. And, what’s worse, the summer was about to end, and someone was planning to return to the city whose existence Betty Sue had neglected to mention to me…her live-in boyfriend. Betty Sue and I had embarked on what even she’d thought would be a temporary entertainment. And we’d found that the frills and flounces were merely a disguise with which the primal pull of permanent coupling entices us into its trap.

  There was something more. I was often impotent with Betty Sue. That’s not something I was used to. But you become hideously ashamed of yourself when the organ you need to consummate an act of love refuses to inflate. Why this inability to stiffen, something even the dumbest garden hose can accomplish without a hint of performance anxiety? I suspect it was the image of my New Jersey aunts, the towers of power who screamed at their husbands non-stop. In the back of my mind, in some dusty closet, towering over dust bunnies the size of dinosaurs, those aunts had made being in love with a woman a cause of terror. Ahhh, the joys of intimacy panic. Something I had apparently not conquered, despite shackling myself to Barbara.

  It was all downhill from there. Betty Sue tried to end it and go back to her boyfriend. After all, he was down to earth, sensible, and was about to get an engineering degree. No, he didn’t understand her emotions. Not a bit. But he was solid. And tall. I was not. I understood her emotional core powerfully. But that’s because within me was an emotional whirlwind, the kind that even seagulls find challenging. And worse, I was married. But getting rid of me was hard. We’d see each other to say goodbye and end up rumpling her sheets and our emotions again, even though consciously that wasn’t what we’d planned.

  Many months later, in the deep freeze of December, when the first issue of the literary magazine that had flung us together in the first place finally came out,
I threw a party at my apartment for the staff. I lay in a gargantuan supply of cheap muscatel—an alcoholic beverage highly recommended long ago by the kindly Californian fruit picker we met in a box car in 1962. The price of this connoisseur grape extract was perfect for an impecunious college student. It was on par with chicken hearts and silver-slimed mackerel. Apparently I swigged down nearly a case of the stuff. Then I told Betty Sue’s boyfriend about our affair. In fact, I offered to trade Betty Sue to him for another glass of fermented grape juice. Then I blacked out, and can’t remember the incident to this day. Since I don’t drink, this’ll give you some idea of how desperate things had gotten.

  That weekend, something else strange occurred. Barbara hadn’t wanted to be around for the party. She was as discontented with me as ever. So she had fled upstate to visit her parents. When Betty Sue called Kingston to tell her that I’d ingested four gallons of muscatel and was still unconscious twenty hours later, Barbara had a sudden revelation. Up to that point, she’d figured she was saddled with me. She’d married me to have a father for her child—actually, more like a baby-sitter. The further into the relationship we’d gotten, the more she’d felt burdened, trapped, strapped to a marriage she really didn’t want. Now, when Betty Sue phoned Barbara, something snapped. Barbara realized that I was about to slip from her grasp. The relationship that had seemed like imprisonment suddenly struck her as something she didn’t want to lose. She came back to New York…fast. And she returned with a whole new attitude.

  Among other things, she didn’t want me to have an affair anymore. That’s when we both started to enjoy the relationship. And the result has probably been the greatest pleasure in my life.

  SATORI AT LAST

  Eventually, I graduated from college and got a Phi Beta Kappa key. But I still haven’t found a single lock it fits.

  Barbara became tired of supporting student husbands and subtly discouraged me from accepting the four graduate fellowships I’d won in physiological psychology—a field that would later get sneaky and change its name to neuropsychology. She was tired of having student husbands. The implication was simple. If I went to grad school, she would leave. But since she never said it in so many words, she could deny that she’d ever issued an ultimatum. Sort of like drinking a bottle of Jim Beam when she was a teenager, then heading into the back seat of her fifty-dollar car with her boyfriend for the evening. Why the liquor? So the next morning she could blame anything that she had deeply wished would happen on the alcohol. It’s called “deniability.”

  There was another problem. One of the things that fascinated me was mass human emotion. Ecstatic emotion. The gods inside of you and me and their role as power sources in the forces of history. Adolf Hitler had exhilarated the people of Germany by staging torch light parades. Six hour, night-time marches of 25,000 SA and SS men, nine abreast, carrying torches and goose-stepping down the Unter den Linden boulevard through Berlin’s massive triumphal arch, the Brandenburg Gate, to the Presidential Palace and the Reich Chancellery. And those parades had accomplished something extraordinary. They had exhilarated and exalted their audience, the people crowding the sidewalk so thickly that if you pulled up your feet, the press of bodies surrounding you would still hold you upright. Torch light parades gave their viewers something spookily close to an out of body experience. The sort of experience I’d had when dancing on a stage at the Park School of Buffalo.

  We all need to feel that we are a part of something bigger than our selves. And the folks on the sidewalks of Berlin got a sense of rising to a level of the sublime by merging into not just one, but three things higher than their individual identities. Hitler called it “ein volk, ein reich, ein führer”—one people, one state, one leader.

  Volk was not just a trivial word. It was a peoplehood, a supposedly distinct master race, allegedly gifted by three thousand years of evolution with its own collective soul. A collective unconscious superior to the deep self of any other group on earth. And if you were in the audience of a torch light parade, you rose out of your self and became one with that overarching collective soul. You became one with the empyreal. You became a molecule in the tidal wave of an over-race destined to take over the world.

  Hitler had tapped the gods inside. He had roused one of the varieties of the religious experience. And the mass passions that this little man with the mustache had stoked were the forces of history. Alas, Hitler had used these forces for evil.

  Now the job was to find those gods and figure out how to use them for good.

  My task since I’d held onto the doors of a blue Frazier when I was thirteen while my parents tore at my socks and tried to wrestle me to Temple Beth El had been to find the gods inside. And through those gods, to find the mass passions that made Hitler’s torch light parades the thrill of a lifetime. My task had been to track down the mass passions that shift and tweezle history. And to see how they fit into the evolution of the cosmos.

  Was I going to find those mass passions by going to Columbia University for courses in psychology and to Columbia’s med school for courses in physiology? Not on your life. I’d be condemned to a career giving college students pencil and paper tests in exchange for a psychology credit. In classrooms of students filling out tests, I’d be far, far away from passion. And even farther from the sort of mass passion that froths, foams, and forms history’s sucking currents. Not to mention even farther from the gods inside. In other words, grad school loomed as an Auschwitz for the mind. And I had a shot at something I knew nothing about. Something so soaked in mass passion that it was ridiculous. I had a shot at another adventure. Going into the terra incognita called popular culture.

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  How did this strange exit strategy show up? Or was it a strange entry strategy? An entry into the dark underbelly where new mass moods and new myths are brewed? Just possibly the land of the gods? The land of the gods inside? Let’s flash back a minute to the literary magazine that helped launch the summer of the Great Polygamy Experiment. How in the world did I get involved with a literary magazine?

  I’d taken poetry seriously ever since A. E. Housman had grabbed me by my rhyming couplets. In fact, poetry seemed a perfect way to wince with agony without making noises out loud. Poems were an iambic pentameter ouch. A necessity for someone with non-stop clinical depression. NYU had a specialist to aid students terminally addicted to verse—its poet in residence, Robert Hazel. Apparently named after one of my grandmother’s favorite and most aromatic health aids, witch hazel. Though he never had a discernable aroma.

  I didn’t know it, but Hazel had mentored semi-famous writers like Wendell Berry, Bobbie Ann Mason, Ed McClanahan, and Rita Mae Brown. All people I’d never read and never heard of. Seven years later, Hazel would go on to be the poetry editor for the magazine The Nation. And I took one semester of poetry writing after another from this poor man, who was thus forced to read the contorted stuff I was pouring forth. It’s hard to believe, but the poor man was not driven into madness by my tortured doggerel. Or maybe he was. One day, when poetry class was over and I was about to exit the classroom, Hazel ordered me to stay. In fact, he commanded that I wait until everyone left, then close the door, grab a chair, and put it in the you-are-about-to-be-balled-out position across from his desk.

  When we were alone, Hazel locked his eyes on my face and said, “Look, you. Last year I asked you to be on the staff of the literary magazine. You never showed up. This year, I’m telling you—you are the editor of the literary magazine. You don’t have a single way out. You don’t even have a faculty advisor. The minute you go out the door, you ARE the literary magazine. Now go.”

  This was a problem. I hated college literary magazines. Stage a rip-roaring party, invite sixty Irish soccer hooligans, offer them thirty bottles of one hundred proof Drunken Leprechaun Mash, wait until 2:00 a.m., when the Celtic uproar would deafen the deck flagman on an aircraft carrier, put a literary magazine in the room, and the partiers
would freeze like statues, turning their let’s-burn-a-police-car fun into silence. Silence complete with a premature hangover.

  Why? Just look at the cover. It’s a shade of blue designed to put even sloths to sleep. If a bird’s egg were colored this ghastly hue, the mother bird would give up and sit on some other female’s nest. Or on some other female. What’s worse, the appalling typeface threatens to scratch out your eyeballs and inject Nembutal into your exposed optic nerves. The font and its positioning are so awkward that they should immediately excuse themselves, gather up the magazine behind them, and hide in the nearest bathroom, offering themselves up as toilet paper.

  So when I exited Hazel’s classroom, I was in a state of shock. In fact, I was stopped dead in my tracks in the corridor outside of Hazel’s door. I was stunned. From the inside, my face felt like a frog run over by one of those mining trucks in Arizona with tires five feet taller than you are.

  But a funny thing happens when you possess an uncontrollable blabber-mouth and a delight in sailing half-baked insights at the professor like meringue pies, then catching as he throws a raspberry pie back. In other words, when you’re one of those obnoxious students who, in an amphitheater with 150 other pupils madly taking notes, ends up in a dialog with the PhD on the stage. Kids know you who you don’t know. Stewart, the barker at the Crazy Horse, the transvestite nightclub, had been one of those fellow students. Now, two years later, in a moment of need, another amphitheater Samaritan came down the hall, saw me standing stock still, and stopped. “You look troubled about something,” he said, “can I help you?” The very same words a kindly passerby had said in front of San Francisco’s City Lights Bookstore when I couldn’t find the beatniks. There is a secret kindness in the hearts of even the worst of us.