Baby Boom

by P. J. O'Rourke

  However, “We can do anything” leaves us with a lot of choices. An extravagance of choice doesn’t necessarily lead to making choices that are extravagantly good. And when we can do anything, the things start to come apart from the doing. Success gets separated from effort. Fame gets separated from merit. Dad gets separated from Mom. Existence has been more confusing for the Baby Boom than it was for the Greatest Generation. Not that we mind. It makes life interesting. We can do confusion.

  Jim Fisk was a legacy at Tappa Kegga Brew or I Phelta Thigh or some fraternity, and he considered himself obliged to go to a rush party. His dad had said, “They’re a swell bunch of guys,” in that Greatest Generation between-us-fellows way—just short of a wink and a nod—indicating there was a bottle of Old Grand-Dad somewhere in the frat house and maybe a dimly lit room where you could go with a date to “neck.” It was unlikely that, after twenty-five years, the swell bunch of guys were still hanging around. (This wouldn’t happen until later in the Baby Boom years, after Animal House was released, the drinking age was raised to twenty-one, and fraternities became cool again.)

  When Jim returned to the dorm that night he said, “It’s like they were practicing to be adults—all in sport coats and ties.”

  Perhaps this was a strange objection from a generation that would don an astonishing array of outlandish apparel. But one thing we don’t do is wear what we’re supposed to wear. With the Baby Boom, clothing’s function gets separated from clothing’s form. We’ve conducted life as a costume party.

  It’s been an important party, which we’ve needed to attend for serious reasons because we’ve turned fashions into statements. Army fatigues and old pea coats were a satire on militarism. Work shirts made an ironic comment about work. There’s no need to repeat the message 1970s duds were sending. The huge shoulder pads on women in the 1980s were a declaration that women had the power and the prerogatives usually accorded to men, usually in the NFL. Today we wear something comfortable whether we’re mall walking or receiving a Nobel Prize because who we really are is expressed by wearing something comfortable, and the king of Sweden should get comfortable with who we really are.

  Halloween, you’ll notice, has become a holiday for grown-ups. So I take Jim Fisk’s point from years ago. Dress as an adult? What a getup.

  “If you become a pledge,” Jim said, “you have to vacuum the carpet and write term papers for upperclassmen and stand on one leg while reciting the Greek alphabet and they paddle you. After that they’re supposed to be your best friends for life. I’m confused about the connection between this and fun.”

  And I was confused about the connection between actions and consequences in general. Or I was once most of the coeds had prescriptions for the pill. I was also confused about why my literature professor couldn’t see the connection between great poets like Bob Dylan and T. S. Eliot. In the room the women come and go talking of Michelangelo. Something is happening here but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mister Jones? The literary parallels seemed clear to me. Not that I had any use for clarity. That was Robert Frost, greeting card stuff, of no interest whatsoever in the happy confusion of a 1960s dorm room bull session.

  Although Frost had an effect on the 1960s. “The Road Not Taken.” I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference. Then everybody took the road less traveled by, and that made the 1960s.

  “Maybe my Anthropology class will explain the signifi­cance of initiation ceremonies and fraternities and sport coats,” Jim said.

  The other difference between the Baby Boom and the Greatest Generation is college. Not that none of them went and all of us did. By 1950, when the GI Bill had done its best work, about 14 percent of Americans had some college experience. But by the time Animal House came out in 1978, more than 30 percent of Americans had been at or near a toga party. Anyone who has dealt with an audience knows there’s a tipping point when about a third of the crowd gets a joke. E.g., in the “Where Are They Now” clips at the end of Animal House there’s a picture of “U.S. Senator Blutarsky.”

  And that reminds me of Margaret Mead coming to campus. I went to see her with Jim. She wore a skirt and sat in an armchair onstage. She had big, wide, really enormous knees that looked like Bluto when he was getting ready to impersonate a zit.

  There was a vogue for leading thinkers coming to campus. And for thinking that their thoughts led somewhere. And for Baby Boomers being smitten with them. Margaret Mead’s knees were a distraction, but her presence was nonetheless intensely important. Self-consciousness is Baby Boom’s salient trait, the crush is our signal emotion, and intense is our default mode.

  Marshall McLuhan came to campus. The 1960s was an era of large thoughts. And yet, amazingly, each of those thoughts could fit on a T-shirt. The medium is the message. Buckminster Fuller came to campus too. (His nickname among architects was “Fuckminster Bullshit.”) A couple of years later Timothy Leary was there. I was deeply impressed by his line of reasoning that was so convoluted even he couldn’t follow it. Yes, I was stoned. But I walked away in awe that someone that old—he was in his forties—could still talk crazy talk. It gave me hope for the future. My hope for the future has not been disappointed, in this one respect.

  Jim Fisk and I began hanging around at one of those old, large, and run-down houses rented to a constantly shuffled pack of students by landlords who have made a deal with the devil, the fire insurance company, and the county health department. Such houses in college towns were given names, perhaps because so much of college education has to do with naming things: ontogeny, phylogeny, Tappa Kegga Brew. This house was called Big Green after the color it had once been painted. Here in the prescribed disorder was the accustomed misbehavior and the requisite mayhem with the obligatory colorful characters.

  Mostly it involved beer. But drugs were beginning to make an appearance or, rather, a smell. Now and then some of the tenants of the house would disappear mysteriously into the basement. A strong odor came up the stairs. The first time I visited I ran to the cellar door and yelled, “I think something’s on fire down there!”

  High, squeaky, hold-your-breath voices from below: “Everything’s fine.”

  Jumbo was the first communist I’d ever met. From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. Jumbo needed beer.

  Uncle Mike was a Physics grad student who spent a lot of time in the basement and a lot of the rest of the time in his room using Plexiglas, string, and felt-tipped markers to make models of four-dimensional cubes. Uncle Mike also liked handguns. And no matter what had gone on on Saturday night, he got up on Sunday morning, put on a suit, and went to Mass.

  Dirty Eddie was the first hippie I’d ever met and the first person I’d ever heard say, “Oh, wow.”

  “It might rain.”

  “Oh, wow.”

  Dirty Eddie was letting all his fingernails grow, to see if he could.

  Jack Hubert had been drafted and sent to Vietnam. He told us about the horrors of war. “The Vietnamese clap is the worst clap in the world. There are claw marks on the walls over all the urinals in Saigon from guys who got the Vietnamese clap.”

  Jack used his GI student benefits to buy a Norton Commando 750, which was supposed to be the fastest motorcycle made. The Norton was so aggressive-looking that it seemed like it could hurt you standing still. And with beer and faulty kickstand placement, it did just that to Jack.

  There were parties at Big Green on Friday night and Saturday night and on Sunday night and Tuesday night and Thursday night, because smart people signed up for classes that met only on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and on Monday night and Wednesday night, because smart people signed up for classes that met after noon.

  Sometimes the local bar band would bring its guitars and amplifiers, set up in the middle of the dining room, and perform “Tom Dooley” by the Kingston Trio, “Don�
��t Let the Sun Catch You Crying” by Gerry and the Pacemakers, and “Paperback Writer” by the Beatles because these can be played with two chords.

  Sometimes someone would suggest a “Mazola party” where everybody got naked in a heap on the floor and poured cooking oil all over themselves. But that much Mazola would cost a lot, and the floor was covered with cigarette butts and pop tops.

  The next day everyone who was living in the house, or who was still there after the party, swept the floor. Under the front rooms of Big Green was a crawl space—twenty-five feet by twelve feet and four feet deep. A trap door opened into it. All the beer cans went down there. By June it was full. I calculate that during the 1965–66 school year we had 1,200 cubic feet of fun.

  Our generation is identified with drugs, and even now the Baby Boom accords great significance (serotonin reuptake inhibitors) to drugs. But we never gave up on beer. We know what’s good for us. Even when we were in our most hallucinogenic phase, we drank beer. Expanding your mind is like putting an addition on your house. You have to dig the stupid foundation first. And yet none of us has ever claimed that we’ve acquired happiness or peace of mind or wisdom or self-knowledge through beer. Nobody reads Aldous Huxley’s The Six-Pack of Perception.

  Are we being deliberately dishonest with ourselves? There’s that Baby Boom thesis that postulates we can do anything. And on the subject of this thesis beer teaches important lessons. The next day.

  Late one night we ran out of beer. Jack Hubert said he knew a place in the townie part of town where they sold moonshine. He returned with four mason jars. We drank them. I vomited. And I woke up blind. All I could see was blank white nothingness. I squinted. I blinked. Everything was white. There was a cold ring of pain around the top of my skull. “I drank moonshine and I’m blind!” I had passed out with my head upside down in the toilet.

  What is love? ’tis not hereafter;

  Present mirth hath present laughter;

  What’s to come is still unsure:

  In delay there lies no plenty;

  Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty,

  Youth’s a stuff will not endure.

  —William Shakespeare,

  Twelfth Night

  12

  ERA OF GOOD FEELINGS

  If the sixties were the wild times we insist they were, we should have better stories. I blame it on drugs. When you drink beer a lot of things happen in the world. When you take drugs a lot of things happen in your head. Although sometimes the world and your head get mixed together. Once when I’d taken LSD I became convinced that Big Green’s stairwell was the inside of an evil giant eel. If I went upstairs I’d be chewed by giant eel teeth. If I went downstairs I’d be eel shit. You spend a lot of your wild times just sitting there when you take drugs.

  Dirty Eddie took drugs all the time. Not that he was inert. Sometimes he was busily to and fro in the world in a stoned way. He found a discarded floor-model console radio and somehow wrestled it back to Big Green and upstairs to his room. Plugged in, the radio received no broadcasts, but it’s large, round dial lit up and its vacuum tubes produced a low hum.

  The hum was, said Eddie, “Om, the cosmic sound of God.” Eddie was a Hindu at the moment. He painted his room in saffron and red horizontal stripes. “Saffron,” he said to anyone who would listen, “is the Vedic symbol of asceticism, and red is the Vedic symbol of sensuality.” These wouldn’t seem to go together, and they didn’t because the two cans of paint that Eddie found on the discount table at the hardware store were icky yellow and dark pink.

  Eddie painted the stripes freehand, beginning with the floorboards and going around the room over the woodwork, doors, light fixtures, window frames, window glass, curtains, and shades as high as he could reach, which left an additional stripe of flowered wallpaper visible beneath the crown moldings. The ultraviolet black light effects, the Day-Glo posters, and the lava lamps that people claim to remember from the 1960s would have been, comparatively, in restrained good taste.

  Eddie also found, or purloined, a dozen metal folding chairs and arranged these facing the radio in what he called the “Om Theater.” He sat in the front row, cross-legged on one of the chairs, hands templed at his sternum, humming along with the Philco. Nobody joined him. Dirty Eddie took to spending so much time in the Om Theater that the rest of us at Big Green forgot he was there.

  Uncle Mike’s room was next to Dirty Eddie’s. Uncle Mike—so called for his avuncular way when urging others to use intoxicants and firearms—took drugs too. But he drank beer more often, especially when something was wrong with the world such as the Kaluza-Klein theory of five-dimensional cubes, President Johnson’s proposed Gun Control Act, Vatican II, or a girl.

  One day something was very wrong with the world. Uncle Mike returned from a long evening at the Final Exam, locked himself in his room, and expressed his Weltschmerz (or Welt-Schlitz, as it were) by firing a pistol into a wall about fifty times.

  My girlfriend and I were downstairs and didn’t pay much attention. It was a small-caliber pistol, and Uncle Mike had expressed himself before. We heard Uncle Mike unlock his door and walk, rather heavily, down the hallway toward the bathroom. Then there was a pause followed by screaming.

  We ran upstairs. Dirty Eddie was lying on the pink and yellow floor in a tangle of chair legs.

  “I killed him! I killed him! I killed him!” screamed Uncle Mike.

  “I’m dead! I’m dead! I’m dead!” screamed Dirty Eddie.

  “I shot through the wall and the bullets hit him!” screamed Uncle Mike.

  “He shot through the wall and the bullets hit me!” screamed Dirty Eddie.

  My girlfriend turned on the ceiling light. Eddie hadn’t been able to get to it with his paintbrush. There didn’t seem to be any blood on Dirty Eddie, although, what with the paint splatters all over his clothes, it was hard to tell.

  I looked at the wall in Eddie’s room. There were no bullet holes. I looked at the wall in Mike’s room. There were plenty of bullet holes.

  A weeping Uncle Mike was kneeling over a prostrate Dirty Eddie.

  “I killed him!”

  “I’m dead!”

  “I killed him!”

  “I’m dead!”

  “Uncle Mike,” I said, “the wall in Eddie’s room doesn’t have any bullet holes in it.”

  “Of course it doesn’t,” my girlfriend said. “Uncle Mike’s closet is in between.”

  When Uncle Mike went to Mass on Sunday he could wiggle his fingers through the punctures in his suit coat pockets.

  Of course this girlfriend at Big Green, Diane, was not the same girlfriend as the girlfriend in high school, Karen. We understand ourselves as an existential generation, creatures of here and now. Karen had an existential problem. She wasn’t here now. Not that I didn’t still love Karen, in the sixties sense of love, meaning fuck.

  Once the Baby Boom had decided war was wrong and prejudice, poverty, and injustice should be eliminated and had gone to college, we began to understand ourselves as a noble generation. We had a right—droit du seigneur—to have sex and—noblesse oblige—an obligation to. Rights must be exercised in order to be preserved. We got a lot of exercise.

  Diane was everything I desired. She laughed at my stories about how Al Bartz had commandeered the West Side High PA system. When Leo Luhan came for a visit from Big State she didn’t make fun of him for falling down the trap door into the crawl space because he was wearing sunglasses indoors. She had—evidence indicated—fantasized about having sex with someone less tall and handsome than the boys on The Old School Cheer patio. In every imaginable position. She knew a dozen. If the sculptures she produced in Art class were anything to go by, she may have harbored a secret fondness for customizing plastic model cars.

  Diane is my rod and my staff. We’ve been
through the shadowed valleys, green pastures, and still waters. And the grandchildren are adorable. On another planet. In some different dimension. Out along one of those infinite tangents of choice that spun away in every direction from the perfect circle of the Baby Boom self.

  I blame it on drugs. I don’t blame drugs for what I did to Diane. I blame drugs for the other planet, the different dimension, and all the tangents the Baby Boom went off on. (And our spacey inclinations may explain why the Baby Boom wasn’t as impressed with the 1969 moon landing as we should have been. “Moon?” we thought. “Everyone’s gone to the moon.”)

  We weren’t the first generation to fly around the room under the influence of pixie dust, act like fools with girls who called themselves “Tinker Bell” and “Tiger Lily,” battle an imagined villain such as Hook—be he captain of pirate ship, industry, police force, or army—and string Wendy along for years while she yearned for a home and children of her own. But we were the generation that did it best.

  Either we blame it on drugs or we blame it on ourselves. And let’s not be silly.

  For the middle-class, middle-America, middlingly hip Baby Boom, drugs arrived at the end of 1966. On Christmas break Jim Fisk, Tim Minsky, Ana Klein, Leo Luhan, and Al Bartz were in the finished basement at my house. We had a wooden matchbox completely full of pot. Joe Brody, as resident mischief maker, rightly should have been the one who “scored.” Or Tim Minsky, home from with-it Yale. But it was premed Al Bartz.

  “Organic Chem grad student,” he said knowingly. Joe, however, figured out how to use the rolling papers.

  Ana said, “All of existence is a dance.”

  “. . . a pardon, a parole,” said Joe.

  “. . . a lesson in organic chemistry,” said Al.

  “. . . a proof of Fermat’s theorem,” said Tim. (And a Baby Boom mathematician would prove it, though not Tim Minsky.)