How I Accidentally Started the Sixties

by Howard Bloom

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  Despite occasional heroic efforts to support me in my oddnesses, my parents made one final attempt to inject me into the mainstream of society. One final crash-program to make me normal. And, boy, was it sneaky. My parents decided that my problem was entirely nasal. I’ve mentioned in passing that I had this schnoz of rather unusual proportions. Were it not for extraordinarily powerful neck muscles, I’d have been forced to carry the thing around in a wheelbarrow. What’s worse, as an air passage, it was a failure. This would have left my lungs seriously undersupplied…if it hadn’t been for my big mouth.

  One night my despairing father and mother had a brainstorm. “Of course he’s a social reject,” they said, clapping their hands to their foreheads. First off, boys didn’t like me because I was incompetent at sports. Why? The Nose. How could I possibly see around it to catch a ball? And as for my lack of popularity with girls, the difficulty once again was obviously nasal. If only these sylphs and nymphs could see past my breathing apparatus, they’d be entranced by the sweet charm of my marginally crazed face. So my parents sent me off to a medical specialist, supposedly to correct my peculiar breathing (not to mention my daily nose bleeds, a result of the frequent occasions on which my classmates mistook my snorkel for a punching bag).

  “Aha,” said the proboscis expert, “the child has septal spurs.” This sounded like good news to me. Despite its many drawbacks, at least my nose might someday allow me to get maximum speed out of a quarter horse. No, said the doctor, these hideous distortions of my nasal passages would have to go. Then my parents cautiously revealed their hidden motive. Since I was going to have my nose sliced open like a hot dog roll, my mother cooed sweetly, wouldn’t it be nice if we could get it trimmed down in size? At first, I huffily refused. I had my integrity to think of. What’s worse, I was already a ninety-nine-pound weakling. Without the twenty-pound nose, I couldn’t even qualify for that! But my protests were of no use. When I woke up after the operation, most of what I’d formerly thought of as my body was gone. Oh, sure, the arms and legs were still there. But where was my nose?

  For weeks I walked around with my head in bandages, looking like The Invisible Man after his magic formula wore off. Finally, the day of the great unveiling came. The doctor unwrapped my head. I looked in the mirror and saw, to my horror, an unfamiliar elephant. “Nothing to worry about,” said the surgeon, pointing to my trunk. “The swelling will go down in about two weeks. But,” and his voice turned icy, “you will have to be extremely careful. Your nose is still plastic.” Apparently, this didn’t mean my schnoz had been molded in a Chinese toy factory, but that it was as easily reshapeable as a lump of spackle. “Under no condition,” the doctor said, “are you to engage in contact sports.” This was one order he could count on me to follow. Folks with athletic skills felt that the less contact with me the better.

  So for ten days, I conscientiously avoided the baseball and football teams that wouldn’t allow me within five blocks of their playing fields and waited for the inflated organ to shrivel to its new size. Smaller than a salami. Then, one day, I made a mistake. I washed my face. The problem was not the water.

  The half-bathroom that served as an extra convenience on our first floor was big enough to sit down in—but barely. After doing the usual unspeakables, I stood up, went to the sink, carefully soaped and watered my frontal features, then turned around with my eyes shut to reach for a towel. Not a good idea! The bathroom door, which opened inward and was almost the size of the room itself, was ajar. And, alas, not a mason jar. As I pivoted clockwise, my nose smashed into the hinged slab of lumber. The door consulted the laws of physics, concluded that two objects could not occupy the same place at the same time, and decided that my nose would have to move. Move it did…all the way to the far left-hand side of my face, where it shook hands with my earlobe. As I stepped back, the nose bounced wildly across my windscreen, seeking its original position. It missed, and snapped to the right, reaching the far side of my cheek. After a few more rubbery bounces from one cheekbone to the other, it finally settled in the middle…more or less. But it was no longer the carefully sculpted key to social acceptability that my doctor had labored for hours to create. The pieces had reassembled themselves in a jagged crescent arching sideways from my eyebrows to my upper lip. The incident was a sign from the Almighty I didn’t believe in. There was no way in Hell he wanted me to be normal.

  THE CASE OF THE FAMILY SNATCHING

  My best friend from grammar school was literally an egg-head—not only was he a complete intellectual doofus like yours truly, but his head bulged like a Martian’s to make room for a couple of extra brains. Suddenly, in ninth grade he went off to a formerly all-white high school and they integrated the place. My pal with the double dome turned to gambling and ran high-stakes poker games on the ping pong table in his basement. Obviously, the ghetto influence at work.

  My parents sent me off to another local high school, one that had been integrated for eons. It was a gargantuan place designed by the folks who brought you the wistful architecture of Leavenworth Penitentiary, with 750 freshmen in the incoming class. In homeroom, I sat next to this tall black kid, and he was one of the nicest people I’d ever met. I liked him a lot. The feeling seemed to be mutual. Not something I was accustomed to from my peers. We probably would have become good friends, even though we hadn’t a stitch of interests in common. But I felt as if I were stuck in a penitentiary (could it have had anything to do with the architecture?). Then, after seven days of torment, my parents revealed that they’d gotten me into a small, ultra-progressive private school. Since I looked as if someone had hung me upside down on a dungeon wall for the last week without food or water, if I really wanted to, and if I promised to study, they said they’d let me go. Hmmm, studying. That was something I’d studiously avoided…by reading.

  But you wouldn’t believe how relieved I was. Parole! After only a week!! So I made the promise—yes, I would try to pay attention in class and do my homework. In other words, I would try to end my real education—those two books a day under the school desk.

  The private school—the Park School of Buffalo—turned out to be a godsend. For the first time in my life, the teachers actually tried to make me fit in, even if the other kids still thought I should go back to the planet I’d come from. Yet they voted me head of all kinds of committees, I guess on the theory that an extraterrestrial perspective might add something to the student government. And eight years later, one of those committees would play a role in a sexual scandal in a galaxy far, far away…Vermont. But, again, we’ll get to that later. The bottom line: I ceased to be a social bag of dirt for the first time in my life. At least partially.

  Despite the fact that I was so uncoordinated that I couldn’t even roast a marshmallow, much less kick a soccer ball, Park School insisted on awarding me bogus certificates for athletic achievement. Coach Herb Mohls must have had tears in his eyes every time he was forced to sign one of these things. I wonder who was holding the gun to his head.

  And besides, I took the promise to study seriously. The idea of having to go back to Penitentiary High was terrifying. So I became…a shoolaholic!

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  Since I had a hard time identifying with my father and mother—who had scads of good qualities, but were involved in a poisonous relationship whose acidic contents kept splashing onto me—and since my father and mother didn’t share my interests or represent my aspirations (neither of them, for example, showed signs of premature senility)—I groped around for families I could adopt. That is to say, I mercilessly hunted down ersatz parents. I only bagged two pairs.

  The first were the Pressman’s. The father of the two Pressman kids, Dr. David Pressman, had been a student of Linus Pauling back in the days when Pauling was working on the stuff that won him a Nobel Prize. Then, for Lord knows what reason, Dr. Pressman moved to Buffalo and became head of the biochemistry department at the Roswell Park Memo
rial Cancer Research Institute, which at the time was the biggest organization of its kind in the world. He probably came to our cesspool on Lake Erie because Roswell Park gave him the money and staff to do pioneering work on immunology, outside-the-box work that would become the basis of much of today’s medical science.

  Dr. Pressman’s son, Jeff, as I mentioned a few minutes ago, was an extraordinarily gifted kid who became my best friend in something like sixth grade. Not that he was happy about it. There was always this phantom notion in the back of his head that if he could only ditch a geek like me and improve his football, he could be normal. But, frankly, Jeff didn’t stand a chance. With his aforementioned bulging skull, the odds that by learning to tackle he’d somehow come out looking like Gregory Peck were on the slim side. I was the best he could do in the way of semi-human companionship, so we spent a lot of time together. And, like a leech, I latched on to his parents.

  His father never showed any great affection for me, though he did take me along on family outings. And he apparently respected my scientific obsessions, because when I was sixteen he got me into a summer internship program at his cancer research institute without my having to apply. He even bucked the fact that I was technically too young to meet the requirements. What’s more, he assigned a short, barrel-shaped young biochemist to be my mentor and to make sure I didn’t smash too much lab equipment. And that mentor would change my life.

  His name was Phil Fish. He had grown up in Boston. When he was first asked to move to Buffalo, he’d been shocked. Buffalo, in his mind, was a city in the Wild, Wild West. A town in which dime store Indians still sold cigars on the street corners. Nonetheless, Roswell Park had lured Phil into what he’d imagined was the land of prairie grass, tumbleweeds, and bulls with anger management problems. But Phil would teach me a lesson. And he would help me discover a small part of my mission in life. How?

  Phil took me to his small and windowless office. In it was a built-in desk that went lengthwise from one wall of the room to the other. On that desk were six stacks of books, each roughly seven books high. And every one of these tomes was in German. Explained Phil, “I’m synthesizing a single molecule. To do it, I have to read all of the books on this desk. The three piles of books on the right are books I’ve finished. The three piles on the left are books I’m going to have to read before I can synthesize the molecule we’re looking for. The whole process will take me five years.” Something hit me.

  Phil Fish was a scientist whose specialization was so narrow that his work made any big picture synthesis impossible. Phil’s dilemma reminded me of something I’d been reading a few months earlier, when my high school headmaster had arranged for me to take a course in philosophy at the University of Buffalo. The entire course had been dedicated to two philosophers—Aristotle and Nietzsche. Nietzsche had transfixed me. Most men, he’d said, huddle in the valley, protected by the walls of the mountains on either side. But they seldom see the sun. In the morning, their village is in the shadow of the mountains in the east. In the afternoon, their town is in the shadow of the mountains in the west. They only see the sun at noon. Sounds like my predicament when I’d been locked by a child gate into a dark corridor at the age of two and a half. But, says Nietzsche, occasionally a rare individual, an Übermensch, an over-man, a superman, leaves the protection of the village, climbs to the tallest mountain’s peak, stands on the pinnacle, and dances in the sun.

  In fact, Phil’s labors hinted that there are two kinds of scientists. One is a gopher. He is so specialized that he digs a hole and can only see the dirt ahead of him and on either side. He can’t see the landscape. I never wanted to be that kind of scientist. Scientist number two is like an eagle. He soars over the landscape and tries to see how all the specializations fit into a big picture. I loathed the idea of becoming a gopher. I wanted to be the eagle. Or like an Übermensch equipped with wings.

  I’d soon discover that most scientists are stuck with the role of gophers. And that there is no role for the eagles. There is not even a formal name for what the eagle does. But the goal of flying over the landscape and discovering how all the puzzle pieces produced by specialists fit into a big picture would become a central thread of my life.

  A mission is not something chiseled into you by a supernatural force. It’s an aspiration woven into your passions by key emotional experience in your first twenty years of life. A mission is an aspiration that you choose to pursue. Phil Fish had helped me find a part of mine.

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  Phil Fish, ironically, was hungry for the big picture. And, of all the absurdities on earth, I tried to give it to him. There were a bunch of older kids in Roswell Park’s student program, kids who would soon troop off to august institutions like MIT. One was the kid I’d co-conceived a computer with at the age of twelve. He, Phil Fish, a close friend of my fellow computer conceiver who was also in the Roswell Park program, and I convened in the Institute’s cafeteria for lunch every day and brainstormed. Wildly. Multi-disciplinarily. The process was so exhilarating that when work ended at five, we went to one of the kid’s big house in a nearby town, Clarence, to sling ideas around like pizza dough until the wee hours.

  During the course of these summer brainstorming sessions, I was sumo wrestling with a mystery in the physics of 1959, the CPT problem, the Charge-Parity-Time problem, which goes like this. If matter and anti-matter are created in equal amounts at precisely the same time, why is there so much normal matter in this universe and so little anti-matter? Thirteen point seven billion years ago, at the instant of the Big Bang, did anti-matter consider the raw stuff of our universe beneath contempt and march off with its nose in the air, settling in some gated community where it could keep the low-life particles of normal matter from knocking on car windows and asking for spare change? Tackling this brain boggler for two months straight, I spewed forth an entire cosmological theory complete with an explanation for the beginning, middle, and end of the universe. And this theory implied one minor prediction—that at a certain point, the migrating herds of matter in this cosmos—flocks of matter like galaxies—would gain a distaste for each other’s company and, like your mate after a fight or vast herds of bison spotting Buffalo Bill loading his Remington .44 revolver, would begin an ever-accelerating sprint for the exit. Today that accelerating sprint is called dark energy. And it’s one of the biggest puzzles in theoretical physics. But the Bloom Toroidal Model of the Universe, alias The Big Bagel, the result of these summer-of-1959 thrashings, explains it. And predicted it thirty-nine years before its discovery.

  However, I was sure that Big Bagel theory was comic-book science and would never hold up in a court of mathematics. So at the end of the summer, I put it away and didn’t talk about it for thirty years. But fifty-one years later, in roughly 2010, Big Bagel theory would be declared “rigorous” and thoroughly mathematical by one overly-generous cosmologist, the University of Pittsburgh’s Martin Bojowald. A man whose charity outshines that of Mother Theresa. More to the point, my dogfights with the puzzles of physics managed to keep our tiny Roswell Park verbiage-production group spellbound—or at least awake. Entertaining intellectuals in those days was easy. Remember, we didn’t have Netflix.

  It also allowed Phil Fish to immerse himself in something that his single-minded pursuit of a single molecule denied him—the big picture. The connect-the-dots that soars over the scientific landscape like an eagle. It got Phil out of his gopher hole.

  And the urge to be an eagle would soon play a role in shaping The Sixties.

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  After the Roswell Park adventure, I lost touch with Jeff Pressman and his dad. Jeff eventually moved on to Princeton, wrote a brilliant book in his first year of grad school proving that for every $100 being spent on federal programs for the poor, only a dollar made it to anyone impecunious, then killed himself. Probably because he was a liberal who’d been forced to a conservative conclusion. Not to be topped, his father, who seemed to have ev
erything to live for (among other things, his wife was ebullient and gorgeous) killed himself, too. So adopted family number one disappeared. And I must admit that I was anything but happy about it. But Jeff’s dad had left me with a gift—a destiny.

  When I moved to Park School in ninth grade, I met a tall, bespectacled lad named Jon Hyman. He was even more on my wavelength than Jeff Pressman had been. For one thing, he was capable of tripping over a chalk mark on the sidewalk. For another, we were both into geopolitics. And we were fascinated by science. When the Scientific American recommended taking apart a pocket watch and putting it back together as an exercise in philosophical thinking, we made a mess on the Hyman’s dinner table as we tried to get the microscopic parts of $4.98 timepieces to balance while we managed to delicately lower the top plates into which each wobbling pinion had to fit. Both of us failed in this act of finger-flagellation.

  To top it all off, in class we made nuisances of ourselves by frenziedly passing notes. But these were not the comments on the latest classroom mammary developments that ordinary males shuttle back and forth. Ours were more phallic—specifically, they were designs for rocket reentry vehicles that could avoid being burned up while penetrating the delicate folds of the upper atmosphere.

  About the only thing I think we failed to share was my obsession with poetry. As you’ll see in a minute, I devoured anthologies of modern verse from cover to cover and gave public readings of T. S. Eliot and Edna St. Vincent Millay at a seedy jazz bar downtown…usually after the audience had wisely left for the night. And the poems I recited would change my life.