Baby Boom

by P. J. O'Rourke

  Jim Fisk said (high, squeaky, hold-your-breath voice), “We can do anything!”

  Plus, among the various ways that self-with-a-hyphen can be used to describe the Baby Boom (112 by my count in Webster’s Third International), there is self-righteous. We were looking under every rock for moral high ground to stand on. By being big ideological left-wingers we could oppose prejudice, poverty, war, and injustice and annoy our parents.

  Although not my grandmother. I came home from college disorderly, disheveled, and hirsute, with a big red fist stenciled on the back of my jean jacket. Grandma was old enough to remember when men of dignity and consequence sported the wild and woolly in a way that would have done Friedrich Engels proud. She was farm girl enough to recall men being customarily dirty. But she was concerned about my prattle on public affairs.

  “Pat,” she said, “are you becoming a Democrat?”

  “Grandma!” I said. “Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon are both fascist pigs! Of course I’m not a Democrat! I’m a communist!”

  “Well, just as long as you’re not a Democrat.”

  When Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated the black students at MSU held a memorial in the quad at the center of the campus. They wore black armbands. Black armbands were not readily available at college town haberdasheries. They tied black dress socks around their arms.

  Jumbo was the only one who felt sufficient confidence in his proletarian solidarity to mention it. “A marketing ploy for Gold Toe over-the-calf length men’s socks, at a moment like this. Truly capitalism is evil,” he said, although not within the hearing of any black students.

  As a comic interlude the sixties was not always a success. There were inner-city riots after the assassination. There were inner-city riots every summer. There were even inner-city riots where I came from, which wasn’t a big enough city to fit an inner- into it. There was, however, the black neighborhood on the south side between downtown and the rail yards. (The school system, really thinking that one through, had christened the South Side High School sports teams the Rebels, and generations of black students had a high school newspaper named The Rebel Yell.)

  On the other side of the rail yards, just outside the city limits, was Polack Town or, as it was called if you were talking to someone who was Polish (“sensitive speech” wasn’t invented yesterday), Polish Village.

  My high school girlfriend Karen was Polish. Karen, being on the same good terms with her parents as most college kids were at that time, was staying with her grandmother in Polack Town.

  She could see the fires and hear the sirens on the other side of the railroad tracks. I thought I should be there and do something, although I can’t imagine what. If the rioting spilled over from the south side maybe I could express proletarian solidarity.

  A curfew was in force. But there was a back way to Polack Town through city park service roads and down some alleys. I took the family car and drove to Karen’s grandmother’s house. Polack Town’s little front yards were filled with men holding their duck guns. Normally I would have been subject to catcalls or worse from these fellows for wearing my hair like Veronica Lake. But this evening I was white.

  I was too confused by getting a glimpse of what revolution might be like to realize I was getting a glimpse of what revolution might be like.

  You say you want a revolution is something that could have been said, if we’d known the Beatles personally, to Jumbo and me and Dirty Eddie and Uncle Mike and even Karen although she was more interested in heightening hem lines than heightening class contradictions.

  The expression of the day that nicely triangulated excitement, fear, and being stupid was “flipped out.” (Not to be confused with “freaked out,” which triangulated excitement, paranoia, and being stoned.) Karen was flipped out about the south side riots. I was flipped out about the Polack Town front yards. Karen’s grandmother had lived in the part of Poland that had had the Russians come in and the Germans come in and the Germans go out and the Russians come back in. She said, “Would you like some pierogi?”

  Over in Indochina, where actual revolutionaries were involved, things weren’t going well either. Maybe Vietnam was the Greatest Generation attempting to practice homeopathy on Cold War ills. A small dose of what makes you sick will cure you, so they had a little war instead of mutually assured destruction.

  Or maybe the Greatest Generation was trying to be imaginative with the Cold War, like Jim Fisk’s Constitutional Law professor, addressing the individual aspirations of indigenous Marxist political movements, with napalm. As mentioned, imagination was not the Greatest Generation’s strong point. They should have stuck to cars. The 1958 Edsel was so terrifyingly imaginative that my dad, who was in the business and knew the sales manager of the local Edsel dealership, said they hadn’t been able to sell a single one. The front end looked like one of those creatures that deep-sea explorers saw out the window of a bathysphere. Dropping a 1958 Edsel on Hanoi might have given Ho Chi Minh second thoughts.

  Or maybe the Greatest Generation was modeling its war against communism in Southeast Asia on its war against Dutch elm disease in the Midwest. We had a puny maple at our house, but the older homes in the neighborhood were shaded by enormous elms. They were swell climbing trees with thick limbs branching off low from the trunk, within a boy’s easy reach. Jerry Harris got his foot caught in the crotch of an elm and was stuck for hours because the only way he could get loose was by untying his shoe and leaving it there. Losing a shoe was an offense punishable by a Gulf of Tonkin Resolution on your behind. Anyway, when Dutch elm disease struck, the city council responded by cutting down all the elms in the city, and the disease was completely eradicated.

  Jumbo was imaginative in his organization of an antiwar protest at MSU. When the campus bell tower’s bells rang at noon on May first, student antiwar protesters flushed all the school’s toilets at the same time. There were strong objections from students who were not protesting and were in the gymnasium showers. Jumbo was expelled and got drafted.

  He was philosophical about it. “If I don’t go, one of the proletariat will have to go in my place and I’m one of the proletariat so I’m going in place of myself.”

  “Jumbo,” said Diane, “the only job you’ve ever had was at Varsity Pizza Pie, and you were fired for eating too much of the pizza.”

  “In communist society, accumulated labor is but a means to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence of the laborer,” said Jumbo, quoting The Communist Manifesto. “And,” he added, “I’ll be in the belly of the beast.”

  “I see the belly part,” said Diane.

  “I’ll work from within to end the war,” said Jumbo. “My strategy is fraternization with the masses.”

  This was the same strategy Jumbo had advocated for inner-city riots in Jim Fisk’s Constitutional Law class.

  “When the Eighty-second Airborne was sent into Detroit,” Jumbo had said, “they should have brought some of that amazing pot from Vietnam with them. Everything would have been cool.”

  Everything didn’t seem to be cool in Vietnam, amazing pot or no. In Detroit 43 people were killed and 412 buildings were burned. Maybe amazing pot would have made the gunfire less accurate and also limited the arson, if trying to keep a joint lit is anything to go by. Jumbo was getting an A in Constitutional Law before he was expelled.

  “Judging by Jack Hubert’s stories about the clap,” Jumbo said, “fraternization with the masses has already progressed to a high degree.”

  “Wear a rubber,” said Diane.

  Jumbo did well in basic training. “Graduated with high Marx”—his joke, not mine, on a postcard from Fort Dix. When he was given a form allowing him to state a preference for specialized training he discovered that the Army Blimp Corps still existed and checked that box. The army assigned him to forward air control instead.

 
Jumbo sat in the back of a little tandem-seat propeller plane, a modified Cessna 170, never mind his bulk. The plane, barely faster than the Edsel that should have been dropped on Ho Chi Minh, flew low over the jungle looking for things to be bombed or shelled. Jumbo’s plane was shot down and he was killed.

  Glendower: I can call spirits from the vasty deep.

  Hotspur: Why, so can I, or so can any man; But will they come when you do call for them?

  —William Shakespeare,

  Henry IV, Part 1

  15

  DAWN’S EARLY LIGHT

  You can’t make a joke out of everything. But you can keep trying. Those of us, at least those of us who dodged the draft and who were still adrift along the Baby Boom’s infinite tangents of choice, were doing a pretty good job of it with our own lives.

  I came east to graduate school in Baltimore at Ivy Wannabe University where I was enrolled in its not very renowned Writers Workshop. This met twice a week and most of the class period was devoted, disappointingly, to the other workshop students reading aloud from their incomprehensible prose and poetry instead of me reading aloud from mine. In my spare time, which is to say all but eight waking hours per month, I was writing long rants about bourgeois pigs for an underground newspaper called Puddles. (“Fascist pigs” was the way I put it, although the Greatest Generation had done so well at wiping out fascist pigs that there weren’t enough left to go around.)

  I probably was, personally, getting too far out on the Baby Boom’s antiestablishmentarian freaky vector. I mean, not weird heavy twisted freaky far out like some poor benighted Baby Boomers such as Linda Kasabian, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, and Squeaky Fromme. (Talk about having an ultimately disappointing relationship with the Silent ­Generation—Charles Manson was born in 1934.)

  Joe Brody, on the other hand, gave up on avoiding the draft and enlisted in the Marine Corps where he was well received. I guess the marines are used to fellows like Joe Brody. My mother could always make him behave. He became a platoon commander up near the DMZ and wrote letters about the carnage. “The Officers Club was fragged. Fortunately I was around back smoking a joint. There was blood all over the place.”

  “There was blood all over the place!” Karen shouted over the telephone, long distance, collect. After four years studying fashion at the two-year college downtown she had transferred to Kent State and was running around and squealing fashionably with the rest of the demonstrators when the National Guard shot at them. Karen was getting a knack for being on-site when things were going to hell. She was unscathed. Kent State was closed. Karen came east to “join the movement.”

  All the colleges in Ohio were closed. Jim Fisk was working on his MA in political science at Selective State (thesis topic: “Indomitable Trends in American Politics: The ­Vision of Senator Eugene McCarthy”). He visited me too. We had a private moment, around the corner from the shabby row house where Puddles had its office, drinking beer at the Ebony Lounge where the Puddles staff was tolerated because we drank a lot of beer.

  “Who goes to Kent State?” said Jim.

  “Um . . . ,” I said (this was before the world knew that Michael Keaton, Drew Carey, and most of Devo were Kent State alumni), “kids whose families aren’t that well-off, kids who kind of scraped through high school, kids who are avoiding the draft.”

  “Who joins the National Guard?”

  “Kids whose families aren’t that well-off, kids who kind of scraped through . . .”

  “We just shot ourselves,” said Jim.

  There was an enormous, angry demonstration at Ivy Wannabe. We considered Kent State an earth-shattering event. College students were being damaged. The Earth Day demonstration two weeks before had attracted maybe a hundred people.

  Karen, in her capacity as outraged eyewitness, addressed the crowd inexpertly and at length through a bullhorn. I was proud of her, but with a feeling I couldn’t describe at the time. Now, having spent the requisite years listening to my children at recitals, recitations, thespian performances, and speeches to school assemblies, I know what I was thinking. This isn’t making any goddamned sense and when the fuck will it be over.

  I dodged the draft with the help of a former captain in the Army Medical Corps who’d become a hippie, wrote a health advice column for Puddles called “HIPpocratic Oath,” and ran a free clinic that mostly treated crab lice. He composed a long letter for me to take to my draft physical. It outlined my deep-seated psychiatric problems:

  makes careless mistakes in schoolwork

  does not seem to listen

  is often easily distracted

  fidgets with hands or feet or squirms in seat

  runs about or climbs excessively

  has difficulty playing or engaging in leisure activities quietly

  And it contained four pages about my history of drug abuse, three and a half of them devoted to listing the drugs I’d abused. “You don’t need to act like a lunatic,” the hippie doctor advised.

  I carried the document in a fat manila envelope. My fellow recipients of a “Greetings” and I were transported by bus to the draft induction center at some ungodly hour like 9 a.m. There we were assembled in a large room standing in rows in our socks and underwear. All the guys wearing Gold Toe over-the-calf length men’s dress socks and boxer shorts were holding fat manila envelopes. All the guys wearing the kind of socks that are bought by the bagful at Kmart and Y-front Hanes underpants that come up over your belly button were not.

  I suppose I should have noticed that the bourgeois pigs were hogging the fat manila envelopes. But getting drafted was an earth-shattering event. And the problem with belonging to a generation that always speaks personally is that everything comes down to a first-person story. I admire junior Baby Boomer Jay McInerney’s attempt, in his book Bright Lights, Big City, to use the second-person voice. But enough about you, Jay.

  The army doctor in charge of the draft physical sent me to the army psychiatrist in charge of people with fat manila envelopes. The psychiatrist, as he was reading the letter I’d given him while I was being easily distracted and fidgeting in my seat, began to back his chair away from mine. When he’d finished the letter he said, “Ah-hem. Do you still take drugs?”

  I did not seem to listen. Finally I said, “I’m really not into drugs anymore at all, man. I mean, like, I smoke grass. But that’s herbal. Like a all-natural thing. But I’m really not into drugs. I mean if I’m tired or something I might do some speed. You know, to keep me going and everything. And if I sort of start freaking out on the speed I’ll do some downers or get a bottle of Robitussin. Smack’s not my thing, man. You get all strung out on smack. I drop acid. Like when things get heavy. Acid trips give you this groovy perspective. I mean, like mescaline and peyote. Peyote is a real trip. But I’m really not into drugs anymore at all. Although I do drink a lot.”

  By this time the psychiatrist was standing up behind his chair, with the chair between him and me. He was getting red in the face.

  “Do you have a home?!”

  “I, like, crash at places.”

  “What do you do for a living?!”

  “I’m totally into it. Like, you know, living.”

  “Do you know why you’re here?!”

  “Oh, wow, that’s heavy, man.”

  “You’re fucked up!” the psychiatrist said. (Are psychiatrists allowed to say things like that? Or only army psychiatrists? I’ll have to ask Al Bartz. Anyway, this interchange at the draft physical casts some doubt on the idea that the Baby Boom is the Therapeutic Generation.)

  “You don’t belong in the army!” the psychiatrist said. “You need help!”

  I couldn’t help that Karen moved in with me although I was already living with another girlfriend, who actually did call herself something like Sunshine, in thi
s case Windflower. And she was missing some of her petals. Before any carnal images, bygone fantasies, or false memories from long ago are aroused in the minds of my fellow male Baby Boomers, let me say that the leaders of the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, and suchlike are ensconced in households with multiple mates and that there is nothing SEAL Team Six can do to them that is worse than what’s going on at home.

  We all lived in the Puddles row house. Puddles, like many such publications around the country, called itself an “under­ground newspaper” because that’s what Combat, the clandestine publication of the French Resistance during World War II, was called. Combat was edited by Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. Puddles was edited by Hairy Bob and me. Combat was in constant danger of being raided by the Gestapo seeking vicious reprisals. Puddles was in occasional danger of being raided by the police seeking small amounts of marijuana.

  Puddles was named Puddles because nobody could figure out what to name it. At the time Hairy Bob started the newspaper he had a girlfriend with a four-year-old son. The son had a puppy named Puddles. The name of the dog was considered hilarious by the boy, who went around the house repeating it over and over.

  The Puddles staff consisted of Hairy Bob, me, Windflower, Karen, Skinny Bob who was a student at Ivy Wannabe’s journalism school and would become a real newspaper reporter someday and already owned a trench coat, and the staff photographer, Hairy Bob’s best friend, Steverino Leary. Plus there were a number of wanderers in and hangers around supplying unpaid articles and artwork and unpaid labor getting the layout together for the latest issue, whenever we got it together to have a latest issue.