How I Accidentally Started the Sixties

by Howard Bloom

  “Yyyyyesssss,” I stuttered, “I’ve just been made the editor of the literary magazine…” And my face, still as distorted as a Denver omelet scrambled with a spiked football shoe, must have said the rest. “Why don’t you come downstairs with me for a cup of coffee,” my anonymous benefactor said, “and we’ll talk about it.” Despite all the coffee invitations in odd places like the streets of San Pedro and Salt Lake City’s airport, and despite my one-time-only amateur attempt at coffee with Barbara, I’d never actually taken a potential host up on this sort of invitation. But I was as limp as chloroformed cat. So I meekly followed to the stairs at the end of the hall, down the flights from the third floor to the first, out the door to Waverly Place, and twenty feet east to a coffee shop. He ordered coffee. I ordered water.

  Then this nameless instant caregiver asked me one of the most important questions I’d ever been tossed in my life. “If you could do anything with this magazine that you wanted,” he said, “anything at all, what would it be?” It was the hideous visual nightmare of literary magazines that bothered me. Graphics so bad that if you asked for my advice on how to commit suicide, I’d tell you to take two college literary magazines and call me in the morning. So I said, “I’d turn it into a picture book.”

  And that it is what I did. I went to Barbara number two, the visual artist with the red hair who hung out with the Warhol crowd, and asked where I could find artists. She pointed me to one. And I rapidly acquired others. Many of those others were not NYU students. But it didn’t matter. I wanted a magazine so delicious that even one glimpse of its cover would suck you in. A magazine so glorious that every two-page spread would wrap itself around you and entrance you like the light shows at a concert hall that impresario Bill Graham had opened just a few blocks away from NYU on Second Avenue in the East Village, the Fillmore East. In the Fillmore’s light shows, images of shifting color blobs metamorphosed on the ceiling, the walls, and the floor below your shoes. But I wanted the images in the magazine to be far crisper and more compelling than anything that the Fillmore’s Josh White Light Show had ever produced.

  One of the most brilliant of my artist recruits was a scrawny person even shorter than I am, which is not easy—some dachshunds are taller than I am—slender, with a Snidely Whiplash mustache, and a charisma that outbulked the Hulk. His name was Peter Bramley. It was an era of underground comics, and Peter was a cartoon master, able to fill a single astonishing 11x14 inch page with an overall composition that grabbed you by your eye sockets, screwed in two light bulbs, then turned on the switch. Why? Hidden in the big picture were hundreds of little pictures, like Hieronymus Bosch on cannabis.

  Peter had a pretty wife and a baby, but they will change my life in just a few minutes. So hang tight.

  The first issue of the radically re-conceived literary magazine—The Washington Square Review—was a smash. Among other things, it was twelve inches by twelve inches, oversized and square, printed on a quality of paper more delicious to the touch than the skin of a new lover—Page, for example—and bursting with color. The NYU Art School, which had never paid attention to the Liberal Arts School and its stupid literary magazine before, bought forty copies for its archives. Robert Hazel, the poet in residence who had strapped me into editorial slavery, was ecstatic. I had no idea of where the money that I was spending on paper with extraordinary heft and texture, and on a fine-art printing firm capable of making masterpieces came from, but I rapidly found out. It was something called the Student Activities Committee. Who even knew that that there was such a thing? But the committee commanded that I appear at one of its meetings. I showed up to take my punishment like a man…and they doubled my budget.

  So, in December and January, a few days after I offered to sell Betty Sue Cross to the engineering student she was living with for a glass of muscatel, I began to plan Washington Square Review issue number two. And Peter Bramley of the weasel mustache was one of my prime co-conspirators. With the new budget, I was planning even more extraordinary paper than issue number one. And not just the full four-color printing of the first issue, but five color printing. In addition to the standard blue, red, yellow and black, we were going to have silver. But there was going to be a theme. And as that theme emerged, half of my staff quit. Why?

  This was going to be the sex and death issue. A delicately colored dragonfly on the cover was superimposed on the cross-shaped ground plan of a cathedral. The pastel colors of the insect were set in a deep frame of black and silver. The two-page spread behind the cover was a photo of a massive cemetery in black and silver. The names of the staff members were printed on the pathway to a crypt. We had high gloss, thick paper, as irresistable to the touch as a lover’s earlobes to your lips. And we featured a terrific short story on, what else is there to write stories about? Sex. A story in white knockout type on black, a tale richly illustrated with Peter Bramley’s pictures.

  But the second issue got no response from the Student Activities Committee. In fact, no response from a single soul at NYU. And none from Robert Hazel. Then one day I ran into Hazel turning a corner at Waverly and University Place across the street from Washington Square Park. He was not happy to see me. I asked what he thought of the new issue. “Did you have to put in that poem by your friend Jason Schneider that starts with masturbation?” he said, and walked away from me as quickly as he could. He was disturbed by the very subject that the Boy Scouts had ordered me to write about. The very topic that Anton van Leeuwenhoek had shared with the Royal Society in 1688. I was a pariah in the halls of ivy. Or in the NYU buildings that pigeons used as public toilets. I mean, this was Manhattan, not Harvard Square.

  But that wasn’t the end of issue number two. Not by a long shot. It was sold in bookstores up and down Eighth Street, the main drag of Greenwich Village. The art director of Look magazine, Life Magazine’s competitor as the leading big-format picture magazine in the country, called and asked if I could trek up to midtown Manhattan to meet with him. The art director of Evergreen Review, the leading Bohemian magazine in North America, called and made the same request. Then came a call from the very organization that kept coughing me up the way a cocker spaniel regurgitates a cigar it has mistaken for a sausage, the Boy Scouts of America. The art director of the Boy Scouts’ official, big-format, glossy, gorgeous monthly magazine, Boy’s Life, wanted a meeting, too. Idiotic how it had never occurred to me that New York had more than just NYU. It was the art-directorial capital of the Western hemisphere.

  Oh, and long into the future, Jason Schneider, who had written the masturbation poem that blasted Robert Hazel’s bile, would become the editor of Modern Photography and Popular Photography. Plus the literary offerings in The Washington Square Review issue number one would win two National Academy of Poets’ prizes. Or so I was told. By the poet who was awarded the prizes.

  A month later, school ended. I graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa thanks to the lesson of the egos, a lesson derived in part from my misadventure with Ten Steps to Organize a Boy Scout Troop. The idea of dressing up for graduation was no more appealing than wearing a suit to go to High Holiday services had been when I was thirteen. So I skipped my graduation ceremony. Instead, I accepted an invitation from Orange, the highly-bohemian mother of one of Nanette’s best friends, to go see a Country Joe and the Fish concert with her and a circle of friends. Country Joe and the Fish was the quintessential Sixties band. It was San Franciscan, psychedelic, sang songs of protest, and was famous for this cheerful chorus:

  And it’s one, two, three, what’re we fighting for?

  Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn

  Next stop is Vietnam

  And it’s five, six, seven, open up the pearly gates

  Well there ain’t no time to wonder why

  Whoopee! We’re all gonna die

  That was the night I realized that I had lost my Sisyphean rock. For four years, I had awakened every day with a mission—get A�
��s and graduate. Now that goal was gone. All I had when I woke up in the morning was the prospect of grad school at Columbia in September. And that was not a goal that could provide a structure for the day.

  At the Country Joe and the Fish concert in a seatless, standing-area-only auditorium somewhere in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of northern Manhattan, on the fringe of the Columbia University campus, Orange passed out little black pills to all of those in her party. I took what I was given. Always be gracious to your hostess. It was some sort of speed. And you remember what happens with speed. Twelve hours of heaven, ninety six hours of hell. During that hell, in the dawn of the next day, I sat with a huge bottle of Valium in front of me seriously contemplating suicide. I don’t even remember where I was. But when your sense of purpose goes, your emotional agonies arise like post-industrial dragons lifting their heads from the poisonous slime around an oil refinery. Orange saw what was on my mind, grabbed the valium bottle, and insisted that I spend the night at her place. When she took me to her bed, we got naked between the sheets, and she let me slip between her welcoming thighs. It was one of the most comfortable and obligation-free acts of intercourse in which I’ve ever engaged. I owe her thanks.

  Meanwhile, Orange called Barbara about my contemplation of self-annihilation. Barbara called my uncle Fred, my mother’s brother who had been the focus of my grandparent’s minimal money for college and had become a medical doctor. And Uncle Fred recommended a consummation that once upon a time I had devoutly wished—incarceration in a mental institution.

  Actually, my time in the prison for those with discombobulated brains—the nut house—was a learning experience. But that’s a subject for another book.

  After two weeks, the authorities let me out of the institution early. For good behavior. And that’s when my life was changed.

  u

  I went to visit Peter Bramley, my brilliant artist, at his apartment on Second Avenue and Tenth Street. I climbed the two flights of stairs, entered, and found a room devoid of furniture. Seated on the wall-to-wall carpet were three figures—Peter, his wife Florrie, and their three-year-old, Gareth. All of them were crying. I wanted to know what was wrong. Peter and Florrie explained that they were broke. Their furniture had been dispossessed. Their electricity and phone were about to be cut off. And they were being evicted.

  Now, look, Peter’s work was a friggin’ astonishment. And I hadn’t yet found a summer job. I’d been too busy analyzing the behavior of a bunch of folks who were as crazy as I was from deep within the locked building that housed them—and that housed me—the loony bin. So I asked Peter to give me the portfolio of his art. I figured I’d show Peter’s artwork to a dozen people. They would see his brilliance. They’d give him work. He would be able to pay his rent and get his furniture back. And I could return to looking for a summer job. The whole rescue, I estimated, would take two weeks.

  But Peter had a dream—founding an art studio with two other artists. So we put together a portfolio that included all three of them. Peter dubbed us Cloud Studio. And I began to schlepp the studio’s portfolio to magazines, book publishers, record companies, advertising agencies, and anyone else I could find in the yellow pages who might need art work. Including the art directors who had called me after the second issue, the sex and death issue, of the Washington Square Review. By the end of the summer, I had gotten New York magazine interested in doing a feature on our studio. But I hadn’t sold a thing. And Barbara was making it clear that if I went back to school in September, I could kiss her good bye. Although I’d be forbidden to actually get close enough to give her a kiss.

  So in September I called Columbia and asked for a year off. But instead of putting a year into Cloud Studio, I put in three. And that’s how I escaped the Auschwitz of the mind of grad school and entered a field I knew nothing about—popular culture. The culture of the kids who used to beat me up. But hidden deep inside that culture was the myth making machinery of modern society. And that machinery might, just might, if I was lucky, lead to the gods inside. Not to mention to their product—the forces of history.

  u

  The first year, we Cloud Studioniks earned $75 a week per person. Pathetic, right? But it allowed Bramley to pay his bills. Two years into the process, we were creating book covers for companies like Harper & Row and Bantam Books, we were providing illustrations for the Institutional Investor Magazine, and, most important, we were doing all the artwork for ABC’s seven FM radio stations, radio stations that were using our art in seven major cities to help establish a whole new kind of radio—progressive radio, album rock. What’s more, I’d invented a new animation technique for NBC-TV, and ABC had asked me to found an ad agency to handle their account. I declined. I didn’t want to learn how to buy time on radio and TV. Not my cup of borscht. And, to show you how low some publications will sink, I’d been featured on the cover of Art Direction Magazine—in a cartoon drawn by Peter Bramley

  But the really-big deal came when Matty Simmons, the man who had helped invent the credit card for American Express, started to treat me as if I were his son. Something that Maurice Girodias, the legendary pornographer who had been the first to publish Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Lolita, and Henry Miller, had also begun to do. Matty Simmons had taken the plunge into publishing. And he’d had an idea. Once a year, a bunch of kids at Harvard turned out a magazine that hit newsstands all over the USA and sold out instantly. Matty wanted that crew to do a magazine once a month. The Harvard kids went for it. The magazine they’d done in Boston was called the Harvard Lampoon. Matty’s monthly variation was called the National Lampoon. And Matty chose us—Cloud Studio—to art direct the magazine. This meant we got a monthly check. A big one.

  Peter and another of the artists didn’t like the fact that I’d get a share of this bonanza. So they voted me out of the studio. An act of cruelty and greed that would pay off big time for me.

  What saved me? Attention Deficit Disorder. Which means you actually DO pay attention, but to more things than most adults approve of. On the side, I’d been buying wildly unconventional, custom-made outfits from a designer located a mere five blocks away from Cloud Studio on the Lower East Side’s velvet strand of hippie businesses, Second Avenue. In fact, I’d been co-designing some of these clothes myself. And I’d been hankering to write for magazines. Why? The Albert Einstein imperative—to be a scientific thinker, you have to be a writer. One day I’d walked into a brand new underground fashion magazine financed by one of the founders of Rolling Stone. The new magazine was called Rags. I figured an eager new magazine might need artwork. But instead of leafing with popping eyes through Cloud Studio’s portfolio, they gawked at my outfit: purple bellbottoms with a purple tunic and a huge, handmade leather belt holding up a handmade leather pouch for bills, change, a handkerchief, and a few pets. Do you have more of these clothes, they asked. Yes, I have a whole closet full of them, I replied. Do you think you could write about them, asked the editor, a quick-thinking blond with serious acne scars but a wonderful personality. You bet, I said, leaping at the big chance to do an Einstein.

  So I went home, wrote an article about business suits as the ultimate self-imprisonment devices and about the sort of liberating outfits my designer and I were putting together. I modeled four of these eye-busting outfits for Rags’ photographer. And guess what? They asked if I could write more.

  So I got up every morning at six, went directly to the typewriter, slugged a cup of coffee, and typed. Then I went into Cloud Studio and hauled its portfolio uptown, thus threatening to snap my vertebrae. Carrying an artists’ portfolio is a bit like carting an anesthetized baby hippo with a handle in its back. At seven pm, I’d get home, make dinner for Barbara, Nanette, and myself. Then I would sit at a solid-metal, 1940s Remington -non-electric typewriter and smash away at the keys until 11:00 p.m. Something you must understand about the sturdy pre-electric Remington. To move just one key, you have to hit it with the fo
rce of four Arnold Schwarzeneggers pounding the nose of a single villain. Then, on weekends, I’d write from dawn to dusk.

  When I was up to roughly a hundred articles for Rags and had been named a contributing editor, another contributing editor walked in, this one a slender, woodsy blond who liked to spend her time in leafy locations like upstate New York dressed in a manner the deer would have found acceptable—medium sloppy. Said my fellow contributing editor, she, too, was starting an underground magazine, Natural Lifestyles. Would I agree to be a contributing editor? So my deadlines increased, but my spare time did not. This was a problem. Then Cloud Studio was kind enough to vote me out, thus giving me the time I needed to out-type Tom Wolfe.

  One afternoon I was covering a national parapsychology convention for Natural Lifestyles, whose editor loved to toss me into the lunatic fringe and see what my science-obsessed mind would make of it. I was scribbling notes like a Babylonian scribe taking dictation from the king when a twenty-year-old male wearing a suit jacket walked up to me and asked if I’d like to edit a magazine. Hmmmm, edit a magazine. That sounded like something that would allow me to write by day and end my 6:00 a.m. and 10:00 p.m. battles with my cast-iron Remington. Having written on stalking, tracking, and organizing troops for the Boy Scouts, I didn’t ask what the magazine was about. I figured I could write about anything. See what a real Boy Scout training will do for you?

  In those days there was no Google in which to look things up. So I went to a meeting with the magazine’s publisher not having a clue. The magazine was called Circus. But it didn’t cover the sexual improprieties of clowns and the scandals among elephants. It was about something I’d just begun to pay attention to during my frequent visits to ABC’s seven FM station headquarters on Sixth Avenue. Yes, at ABC the promotion manager for the stations had taught me that you could tell Carol King from James Taylor by the sexual cues in their names. A hint: James was the male. Ahhhhh.