Mr. Keeble could get into a heated debate, mostly with himself, about Quemoy, Matsu, the Bay of Pigs, and Laos. He wanted us to ask questions. And we had some. The Ohio, America, and the World textbook didn’t have much in the way of maps.
The first lady sounded like she was talking baby talk. Marilyn Monroe talked baby talk too. What was it with important adults talking baby talk and urging us to talk like adults about important things such as the Cold War, counterinsurgency, and the Green Berets? But if I raised my hand to ask whether it was, maybe, kind of embarrassing to make our toughest, most lethal military unit wear Force de Frappe things on their heads, Mr. Keeble smirked.
Then he caught himself. Teachers were supposed to “engage” us. Education in the 1960s couldn’t seem to leave it at educating. Engagement with students was the first step education took as it meandered off toward “relevance.” Education was changing.
It worked. The Baby Boom has engaged in all sorts of things. And we consider ourselves so relevant to the world that we think we can stop rising sea levels by separating the glass from the plastic in our trash.
But it’s difficult, in retrospect, to say what penetrated the mind of a high school freshman. I don’t recall having much mind, and what I did have wandered.
Mr. Keeble went on at length about the New Frontier. It lacked Comanches, gunfighters, and cattle stampedes but had the Peace Corps. I couldn’t picture myself dramatically wounded and bleeding to death while bravely urging Sargent Shriver to leave me behind and repair the village well.
What did impress itself on the nascent 1960s adolescent brain was all the talk that things were changing. Things like soldiers and Girl Scouts wearing the same berets? We could do better than that. The seed of the Baby Boom’s you-ain’t-seen-nothing-yet was planted.
And the growth of boredom was nurtured. It had sprouted in first grade and now began to bear fruit and has done so ever since. Ask Baby Boomers to explain the most dramatic episodes in our ever transforming opinions, attitudes, careers, marriages, and ways of life and we’ll tell you—when we’re feeling honest—“I got bored.”
Algebra was very boring. “There are some things you don’t want to know” is not a Baby Boom phrase. We’re a knowing generation. Nonetheless, if such things did exist, I suspected that what equals was one of them.
Mr. Wiley the Algebra teacher was old. Engagement with students probably sounded to him like some kind of violation of the Mann Act. Education did not meander for Mr. Wiley. We’d have to look at the Mad magazine we had tucked inside the Algebra Now textbook if we wanted relevance.
There was a future irony awaiting us in the Algebra class boredom. The Baby Boom’s billionaires are the kids with dandruff, smudged eyeglasses, unmatched socks, and misbuttoned shirts who joined Math Club freshman year and now commute by helicopter from Greenwich and Palo Alto where they live with their Generation Y smoking hot third wives. Software algorithms and formulae for finance market mathematical models (damn you, Mr. Keeble, for never mentioning them) explain why ironic vies with easily bored as the typical Baby Boom frame of mind.
I was bored by my old friends. I had nothing in common with them now. Billy Stumf was on the West Side High JV football team, although he was still second string, so he could say hello to me in the halls. Bobby Stumf was in eighth grade. Steve Penske was becoming “hoody”—slicking his hair, turning up his jacket collar, and smoking cigarettes closer to the school entrance than was allowed. Johnny MacKay had moved and went to North Side High. He rooted for the North Side Polar Bears instead of the West Side Cowboys.
We’re a mobile generation. Or, as Johnny MacKay put it, “Why didn’t Dad move us to California?” The Baby Boom would expand American geographical and social mobility. Americans used to head outward and upward. We’d beat that. We’d head downward and backward too. Downward all the way to the hollers of Appalachia, as the folk music mania was about to prove, and backward to the tenement slums about which our grandparents had kept us ignorant. (So ignorant that in my hipster twenties when I moved to Greenwich Village and saw my first rat, I left a bowl of water out for it because I thought the kid next door had lost his pet.) Our identities themselves are mobile, like our biker gangs of fellow retired business executives. Frequent change of friends is necessary. Though eventually we go on Facebook and get back in touch. “Hey, what you been doing since Miss Burbage sent you to the principal?”
Joe Brody was in my homeroom. The half hour before lunch was occupied by Homeroom, the purpose of which was unclear. Attendance was taken. This meant you could have skipped the first half of the school day—as Joe Brody found out, while the rest of us lacked the courage to act on his findings. Important announcements were made over the school PA system by someone using broadcast equipment borrowed from Steve Penske’s ham radio set. Our generation has certain shortcomings. I blame the school PA system. Probably the important announcement was “All students reporting to Room 110 at three p.m. will be given a dose of common sense.”
Ana Klein was also in my homeroom. She saved a place for me in the high school cafeteria. Not that there was a crowd trying to sit with the freshmen, although there might have been if Ana hadn’t worn her hair in a Martha Graham bun and walked like a duck the way girls who take too many dance classes do.
Ana’s cousin Tim Minsky sat with us. He didn’t have dandruff or wear glasses or need help buttoning his shirt. He hated being smart in math. He knew what equals.
“So tell me,” I said.
“There are some things you don’t want to know.”
Leo Luhan thought he was cool. He sat with us because we, and only we, thought so too. Joe Brody sat with us because the other kids who were in as much trouble as Joe had skipped the rest of the school day.
Jim Fisk was too thoughtful to sit anywhere else. He was practicing to get on the debate team. We listened to “Resolved: The United States Should Not Sell Wheat to the Soviet Union Because a Soviet Union Wheat Surplus Will Be Used to Build Nuclear Warheads.” In return Jim listened to physics equations that proved high school doesn’t exist, why the Kingston Trio would change American music forever, tales from detention, how Martha Graham’s contribution to modern dance had transformed West Side Story, and concerns about Green Beret headgear.
And Al Bartz was too thoughtless to sit anywhere else. He was funny. He could fart at will.
Of course I had nothing in common with my new friends either. That was different. Jerry Harris farted a lot. But not at will.
What I could do at will, and even more so when I willed otherwise, was get erections. Perhaps something needs to be said about the human penis after all. I would get an erection hurrying from class to class between bells so that I’d have to carry my books like a girl. Carrying my books like a girl provoked enough thought of girls to give me another erection in class. Then I would be called on to stand up and give an answer about the independence of emerging African nations and why it was like the New Frontier.
If it weren’t for the protective spread of open three-ring binders propped on desktops there would be no adult male Baby Boomers. We all would have died of embarrassment.
I’d get an erection at the family dinner table and have to carefully dawdle over my lima beans for reasons other than Kukla, Fran and Ollie. I’d get an erection at Uncle Walter’s cottage when my older cousin Shirley wore a two-piece bathing suit that revealed her navel. I’d have to stand around in water up to my waist for no reason while Uncle Timmy accused me of peeing in the lake. I always had an erection in the morning. Someone should have taken my mother aside and solemnly informed her, “If you ask a boy to get out of bed, and he says he doesn’t want to, don’t insist. Not even if he’s late for school. He may have personal, private reasons for not wanting to.”
Our turgid toy fox terrier Pee Wee had died—just when I was beginning to sympathize with his plight.
But Pee Wee wanted to hump everything. The indicator of my desire, like a compass needle (apt simile for a hundred-pound, five-foot-two-inch boy who spent half an hour every night examining legs, underarms, and groin in hope of a dark hair), swung around to the magnetic north of sophomore Marsha Matthiessen, in the frozen terrain of the hopeless crush.
If self-consciousness is the salient trait of the Baby Boom, the crush is the signal emotion. Our generation is not given to tragic passion—too tragic. Nor are we much for stolid affection that matures and strengthens with age. (March 1, 2012, item from the New York Times: “Over the past 20 years, the divorce rate among baby boomers has surged by more than 50 per cent.”) The perfect love is the crush—Romeo and Juliet without the plot resolution. What’s the harm in it?
We’re an expansive generation. We would discover that we could have a dozen crushes at once, while even three or four simultaneous affairs led to complications. Nor did our crushes need to be limited to persons. We could fall for groups of people—social classes, ethnicities, races. In a few years we’d show up wearing bell-bottoms, work shirts, Stetsons, braids, clunky turquoise jewelry, and sandals. Smitten by various exotic types, we’d imitate the dress of sailors, ditchdiggers, cowboys, Indians, Mexican peasants, and Jesus all in one outfit.
We’d get crushes on moods. Groovy. We’d get crushes on slogans. Make love not war. (Fortunately we got over that one before we had to apply it to Osama bin Laden.) We’d get crushes on abstract ideas. The Whole Earth. And we still do. The balanced budget. We’d have passions for diseases. Everybody had mono, then it was chronic fatigue syndrome, now it’s Asperger’s. And all our children are allergic to peanuts.
Philosophies, politics, and religions have been the objects of our unrequited love. From Jean-Paul Sartre we’d find out what’s up with Being and Nothingness. (Nothing, as far as I could tell from the book.) The “liberal consensus” meant “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.” (He was fibbing.) And it turns out the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi smiles like that at everybody. We would feel unrequited love for love itself. All you need is unrequited love. And our crushes would last as long as we cared to let them. Love never dies when what you love doesn’t know you’re alive.
However, in 1961 I was a beginner with crushes. Marsha Matthiessen was a slight girl, almost elfin. A full-sized homecoming queen would have been aiming too high even for the permanently elevated angle of my imagination. Besides, Marsha Matthiessen had wonderful qualities all her own.
She lived ten blocks from me, and at night I’d walk in drizzle or slush or biting cold to observe those qualities. That is, to observe the lighted windows of the house in which those qualities were displayed.
Inside, at the Matthiessen dinner table, Marsha was giving her opinion about selling wheat to the Soviet Union and what should equal. She was laughing at how Al Bartz had commandeered the school PA system and announced that Federal Communications Commission chairman Newton N. Minow’s speech to the school assembly about “The Vast Wasteland” had been canceled due to a scheduling conflict with Wagon Train. But she didn’t laugh at Leo Luhan for bumping into a drinking fountain because he was wearing sunglasses indoors, being cool. She liked modern dance but not enough to walk like a duck. If she had a chance she’d let Joe Brody drive her dad’s Corvette. That was her dad’s Corvette, the one parked near her house sometimes. I was sure of it.
In the blue television glow behind the living room curtains, Mr. and Mrs. Matthiessen were watching reruns of Jackie Kennedy’s White House tour. They’d say I was too young for Marsha, and too wild at heart. Marsha was bored by old furniture. The light on upstairs, that was her in her bedroom, flipping through a fashion magazine with an eye to getting the U.S. Special Forces into uniforms of the latest style. And she was fantasizing about having sex with someone less hairy than a sophomore or a junior or a senior boy. In every imaginable position. I knew of three. Sometimes there was a light on in the basement, where the workshop would be. Marsha harbored a secret fondness for customizing plastic model cars.
I never said anything about my crush. Al Bartz would have made some wisecrack, called her “Bluie, the M&M that’s not in the pack.” I did mention her name to Billy Stumf (I mean, you can’t not ever speak of the eternal love of your life). Billy was a sophomore and maybe knew . . . “Yeah,” Billy said, “melts in your mouth, not in your hand!”
I had nothing in common with my old friends now, but we did that nothing together most weekends. Billy was out for the season with a ruptured spleen. Bobby Stumf was still in eighth grade, but he was bigger than any of the rest of us. Johnny MacKay didn’t like North Side High. Steve Penske was having trouble being hoody. He was expected to pick on littler kids, and there weren’t many kids who were littler, except me, and he’d already suffered the effects of my roundhouse right. Unfiltered cigarettes made him sneeze. He liked menthols, which were for girls. And it turns out ham radio is not hoody. Jerry Harris was still in eighth grade too, but Mr. Harris didn’t notice if we got into the Chartreuse or even the Baileys Irish Cream. We could do anything we wanted in the Harris basement as long as we didn’t smoke near the guppies.
When Joe Brody came over we planned to make trouble like we used to. But we seemed to have lost the knack. Sometimes we’d go to where roadwork was being done on Central Avenue and rearrange the traffic cones so that drivers found themselves in a lane too narrow to pass through.
Joe had an idea for a prank on Johnny’s high school. The Polar Bears’ homecoming game was next week. They’d be playing the Cowboys. We’d get a ton of weed killer and write BEARS BITE on the football field grass, which would get brown and dead just in time for the game. We didn’t have enough money for a ton of weed killer, but Mr. Biedermeyer was a fanatic about his lawn and he’d have lots in his garage. We’d catch Joe’s stepdad at just the right moment, a six-pack into being good-natured, and tell him a story about donating weed killer to a poor family on the north side of town who couldn’t afford to take care of their yard. He’d put the seven of us in his car, with the weed killer in the trunk, and drop us off behind the Polar Bears’ stadium. We’d wait until late at night and scale the chain-link fence. (Note how, later, the aging Baby Boom—having never forgotten our youthful dreams and aspirations—would equip everyplace with surveillance cameras as soon as they were invented.) And we’d work by match light and Zippo flame until past midnight spreading weed killer in big block letters. But Mr. Biedermeyer’s garage was locked.
I told Ana Klein all about Marsha Matthiessen. Girls understand these things. Ana asked me if I wanted to see West Side Story. Her parents balked at going for the fourth time. Taking Ana to see West Side Story was not, per se, a date. It was a mutual attendance at a cultural event.
As with television, tail fins, the suburbs, fads, and JFK, movies are supposed to have had a profound influence on the Baby Boom. And maybe they did. At the end of a good 1960s movie the characters died. Especially if they were the characters that the Baby Boom audience liked. Not just in West Side Story but in The Alamo, Spartacus, To Kill a Mockingbird, Bonnie and Clyde, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. At the end of Dr. Strangelove everybody dies. This taught the Baby Boom a lesson. In marketing. If our generation had been running the movie industry when Dr. Strangelove was in production, Stanley Kubrick would have been fired and replaced with Todd Phillips and Slim Pickens would have ridden his H-bomb into a Mai Tai being drunk by Zach Galifianakis where it would have fizzled and Dr. Strangelove would be a franchise with Part VIII coming soon in 3-D to a multiplex near you.
As I was saying, taking Ana to see West Side Story was not a date. Ana and I never dated. But we experienced the painful logistics of early teenage dating. My mother drove.
If my mother and Ana and I all sat in the front seat we’d look ridiculous. If I sat in the back, Ana would be exposed to inquiries from my understanding mother. My mother had taken dance classes when s
he was a girl. She and Ana might have a conversation. And if I sat in the front and Ana sat in the back, my mother would drag me into the conversation, doubling the embarrassment.
Baby Boom parents were picking up on ideas from Mr. Keeble and other adults. Mom would try to engage us. The whole adult world was failing to keep its distance. The generation gap was a hope long before it was a catchphrase.
Ana and I both sat in the back. I insisted that we be dropped off three blocks from the movie theater.
I didn’t get West Side Story. The west side was the good part of town. (Although parts of the north side were nice too.) Prevailing winds blew factory smoke to the smelly east side. The teenagers, who seemed to be going on thirty, were supposed to be hoods. But they were singing songs and dancing like Ana Klein. And the Jets wore gym shoes. Steve Penske would never wear gym shoes. Hoody kids wore black, pointy shoes from Thom McAn.
We were reading Romeo and Juliet in freshman English. Mrs. Orpington the English teacher said West Side Story was Romeo and Juliet retold. But the Montagues and Capulets were both Italians like the Jets were, although none of the Jet families seemed to own Italian restaurants, and the Sharks were from Puerto Rico and talked like Speedy Gonzales.
Tony and Maria on a fire escape was sort of the same as the balcony scene in Act II, but they were on a fire escape, so it was sort of the same as a Mad magazine parody of the balcony scene in Act II. And what kind of name was “Jets” for a teenage gang? Over in Cleveland there was a teenage gang called the Vice Joys. That was more like it.
If Romeo and Juliet hadn’t kept going on and on about whether it’s larks or whether it’s nightingales they would have had time to do it again in Act III before Lady Capulet started hollering. Then they die.
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