How I Accidentally Started the Sixties

by Howard Bloom

  Then there were meals. Looking forward to breakfast, lunch and dinner was just another way to dodge the bullets of boredom. Regular feeding times had to go. I took to eating at unpredictable hours. One small step for man, one giant step for Zenkind.

  These were the sort of spiritual athletics that monks everywhere from Nepal to 4th century Egypt had competed with each other to master. Remember Simeon Stylites, who sat on a fifty-foot-high pillar in the Syrian desert for the last thirty-seven or so years of his life way back around 450 AD? How in the world did that man get his food? How did he handle personal hygiene without toilet paper? In the category of physical abasement and self-denial, I was definitely going for the Olympics. (I can see it now—Gold Medal winner in Lunatic Asceticism for 1962: Howard Bloom.)

  The whole thing worked just the way that Rimbaud said it would. After two months of this discipline, plus a few other spiritual aerobics I invented on my own, I was capable of having full-scale hallucinations in the middle of class…without the use of drugs! Fittingly, I had most of them in my surrealism sessions, where each word on a page would conjure up its own color, globular shape, and melody in my brain, then go dancing around like something Disney had been too frightened to concoct for Fantasia. I also dozed off a lot during lectures, though I was still acing my exams, maybe because Vishnu was on my side. Gesundheit.

  Meanwhile, you may recall from our former episode that as I had lain with Jimmsy in her bedroom with my arm about to drop off in the days before this spiritual quest began, her roommate was in the sleeping chamber next door with her boyfriend.

  I held this pair in awe. Not only were they older than I was, they were infinitely better stocked with worldly wisdom. So far above me did they seem that I had never even dared approach them to say hello.

  But, one day, when I shambled into the cafeteria at about three o’clock in the afternoon to get some breakfast, Jimmsy’s roommate—Carol Maynard—and the man who aided her in her shriek-fests—Dick Hoff—were sitting at a nearby table. Shyly I averted my eyes, knowing that to them I was lower than a bottom-feeding shrimp in the Marianas Trench. To my utter surprise, they tried to make pupillary contact. What’s more, they got quite acrobatic and actually waved, summoning your lowly peon to their table.

  I clued them in on what I’d been up to and their jaws dropped, rolled around the floor and lodged in a corner. After they’d reinserted their wandering mandibles, we began to converse. Several days later, we became inseparable. Surgery would have been useless. So when my Western Culture program reached Immanuel Kant and I discovered that I couldn’t understand a single sentence of the man’s twisted syntax, the moment seemed opportune to finally live out the ambition I’d been nurturing for years and drop out of school, devoting myself full time to traveling like Jack Kerouac and searching for satori.

  I made one small mistake. I called my parents to tell them what I was doing. They were vacationing at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami, a once-in-a-lifetime splurge. But that treat came to an instant end with my phone call. They caught the next plane from Miami to Portland. Yes, they traveled a distance of 2,708 miles, a slashing diagonal across the North American continent. And they left behind one of the biggest gifts they’d ever given themselves. To save me.

  The phone call had appalled them. But when my mom and dad arrived they were even more horrified. The long ringlets of hair standing on end like shocked electric eels, the bare feet, the general mien of tunneling into a whole new universe of bohemianism. It curdled their blood like cottage cheese. So my mom did some sleuthing, found the most prestigious psychiatric institute in Portland, laid out a bundle of my dad’s cash, and sent me for three days of psychiatric testing. When all the TAT tests and ink blots were over, I was summoned to the office of the man who ran the institution. He sat behind his desk, leaned back in a strangely relaxed and open pose, and announced, “According to your tests, you are marginally psychotic and I should institutionalize you.” News that at a later point in this story, I would have welcomed. But there was a but. A big one. He leaned across his desk with intensity and went on, “I think you’re the sanest person I’ve ever met. You are on the hunt for something important. I wish you luck in what you are doing. And, frankly, I wish I was you.” William James, who saw the deep truths in insanities, would have been proud.

  So I had received, of all the strange things, an official permission to drop out. My parents went back to vacationing, this time by driving down the Pacific Coast to California. With my mom looking out the window of the passenger seat wondering if each hitch hiker by the side of the road was her son.

  Wherever I was about to go, Carol Maynard and Dick Hoff wanted to come along, which meant that Carol would have to drop out, too. The three of us decided to hitchhike to Seattle, where Carol had some friends who would put us up. This is how I, who, despite my heavily self-conscious coital bliss with Jimmsy, had never had a full-scale date, never smooched, necked, petted or performed any of the steps preparatory to a proper physical education, took my next step as one of the accidental pioneers of The Sixties’ Sexual Revolution.

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  Actually, Dick Hoff was the real revolutionary. Hoff was about 6’1” in an era when that was so tall it could have induced altitude sickness. He had a body that Adonis would have drooled over. And he possessed a strange face that was covered with acne scars, but was illuminated by a smile unlike anything you’ve ever seen.

  There was something unearthly about Dick. He’d been raised an only child by a single mother. What influence that had on the way he turned out, Lord alone knows. But he was the only person I’d ever met who had genuinely never in his life felt guilt, depression, humiliation, or any other psychological pain. Everything and everyone he saw delighted him. Any activity he’d never tried or place he’d never been or emotion he’d never had intrigued him. He wanted to experience them all. Edna St. Vincent Millay would have loved him.

  Hoff took such overwhelming pleasure from the mere act of waking up in the morning that the emotion illuminated him like a beacon. The result? Despite the fact that his skin had more craters than your average moon, females of all species could not take their eyes off him. One glimpse sent their hormones racing. When we walked down the street together, strange women passing on the sidewalk locked their eyes on him, swiveled their gaze through me as if I were invisible, forgot what they were doing, and altered their routes to follow him. The most gorgeous and intelligent ladies of any town he happened to pass through developed hot flashes, their thighs trembled, and they fantasized uncontrollably about getting him into their beds. And into even more intimate locations.

  All of this despite the fact that Dick complemented his pitted countenance by dressing in a rather abnormal manner. He wore net shirts that showed off his insanely perfect upper musculature. His jeans had worn out at the crotch about a century earlier and he never donned underwear, so his pelvic appendages had a tendency to tumble into broad daylight. He never wore shoes.

  But he capered down the street like some tall, woodsy male sprite straight out of Ovid. The mere act of taking a walk got him so blissed-out that he’d jump high in the air, wrap his hand around the upper reaches of a lamp post, and swing down in circles. No matter how odd he appeared, you couldn’t gaze at him for more than ten seconds without realizing that he took the same joy in life that a baby radiates when it sees a new ceiling fan. And the impact was way, way beyond charismatic.

  At any rate, the three of us, Hoff, Carol (Jimmsy’s former roommate), and I all headed for the highway and hitchhiked from Portland, Oregon, to Seattle, where we put up in the basement of this guy who was teaching anthropology at the local university and finishing up his PhD on the previously mentioned penis cones of the South Pacific. Peculiar extremes of sexuality seemed to be the house’s motif. Sharing the lower bowels of the basement with us was the aforementioned drag queen who could have put Marie Antoinette to shame. I mean, when it came to ball
gowns and tiaras, this man knew how to dress!

  Carol and Dick kept up their regular bouts of copulation, raising enough noise to seriously undermine the nice, white house’s foundations and to make me realize that whatever I’d learned about sex in my apprenticeship with Jimmsy was not even beginner-level.

  So I stuck to my own areas of expertise: seeking spiritual enlightenment, and telling anyone who seemed the least bit interested the story of how and why I was doing it. Hoff had his effect on people, I had mine. Women wanted his body. And folks of both sexes seemed to want my brain. Or at least my hunt for the spiritual ultimate.

  By some strange accident, I was morphing into a pre–New Age Elmer Gantry. You remember Elmer, a fictional evangelist from a Sinclair Lewis novel, an ex-college-athlete whose preaching was so electrifying that his frenzied fans multiplied, made him famous, and gave him sexual access to nearly every woman in town. I wasn’t going anywhere near Gantry’s sexual magnetism, but I was apparently neck and neck with him in oratory. When I talked about stripping the artificial layers from a carefully hidden nugget of bliss buried at the bottom of the soul, people found it hypnotic. Don’t ask me why. As you’ve seen, I didn’t know a thing. I didn’t have a single answer. But I had questions. And I was a fireball of conviction about my quest, about my carefully thought out path to the alleviation of my ignorance.

  Like there was the time many months later when I was hitchhiking through LA. The folks I was with took me to MacArthur Park, where there were dozens of madmen standing on soapboxes, orating their tonsils out about Marxism or the Second Coming of Christ or whatever else had twisted their cerebral ropes into a slip knot. Some intelligent-looking fellow walked up to me in the crowd of listeners and said that I looked like a character out of Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot. Not the highest compliment in the world, I suspect. But my first grade teacher would have concurred. The amiable stranger quizzed me about what I was up to and started to drag the story of my spiritual mouse hunt out of me.

  Without quite realizing it, I slipped into messianic mode. And by the time I was finished, all the Socialist Utopians and Second Coming advocates had been abandoned. The entire population of the park was clustered around the least likely humanoid in the place—me—trying to clasp, grasp, and wrestle with my every word. It was embarrassing. I didn’t even have a soap box!

  But I suspect that the spell-bound audience really hung on every syllable because they wanted to know how a Russian with the brains of a boiled cabbage could speak English.

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  By the way, Dick Hoff harbored another habit I forgot to mention: wandering around indoors without clothes. He’d get up in the morning and shamble past me stark naked. Since I considered male genitalia the ugliest thing hung on a creature since turkey wattles, I found this utterly shocking. What’s more, Hoff left the bathroom door open when he went, and continued grinning and carrying on his conversation as if nothing unusual was happening at his nether end. This made my hair stand in horror and look around for some new body toward which to migrate. But within a couple of weeks, Hoff had me wandering around like an accomplished nudist. And I, like Hoff, gradually came to regard bathroom doors as mere impediments to a good chat.

  All of this would make a contribution to two revolutions that were still in the distant future: the sexual and the drug upheavals that would soon distinguish The Sixties from all other decades, marking off the period the way that black and white splotches brand a Guernsey cow. Our contribution was a prelude, a preamble, the first faint stirring of what would emerge two years later under the aegis of Timothy Leary, Ken Kesey, and The Beatles. How? As I said, wherever we went, women flung themselves at Hoff’s feet, or at body parts slightly higher if they could manage it. And Dick couldn’t resist new experiences, like exploring the anatomies of girls he’d never had the pleasure of before. What’s more, Dick had no suspicion that his travel-and-bed companion, Carol, was vulnerable and depended on him. His feel for her griefs was blinded by the fact that he’d literally never been vulnerable, never been hurt, and never been dependent. So he would frequently disappear for a few hours with some delicious lass who had newly thrown herself across his path. And Carol would agonize.

  One night we were visiting a party thrown by a clump of University of Seattle students in our temporary neighborhood and Dick quietly went poof. Carol and I finally got tired of waiting, decided to go home to our Seattle basement, and hunted for Hoff. But we couldn’t find him. Eventually we knocked on the door of an apartment across the hall belonging to a girl who had been at the soiree earlier in the evening and had mysteriously disappeared at about the same time that Hoff had become invisible. Hoff answered the door in the buff, smiled delightedly, and explained that this girl had the silkiest skin he’d ever felt and would we mind going home without him.

  Carol and I trudged out into the darkness. I knew that Dick meant no harm. This was simply part of his impulse to taste everything in life at least once, even if his lollipop of the moment nestled between moistened labia. Carol had a harder time accepting it. So I tried to calm her down and make her feel better. Finally, we passed a storefront housing a closed-up artist’s studio. Turned out that Carol had lived with the artist once, he had gone out of town, and she knew how to get in despite the fact that the place was locked. So we sidled somehow through the back door.

  Carol didn’t want to walk all the way back to our place—another mile or two away—and decided we should bed down at her old lover’s place for the night. But there was just one bed, and an awfully narrow one at that. We both climbed in. I had no particular hopes that this arrangement would turn into anything physical. As far as I could tell, Carol found me about as appealing as a blister.

  Well, there we were in this bed whose sheets hadn’t been changed since the Vikings discovered Greenland, and I was squeezing my body into sixteen square inches of space and trying to sleep, when Carol turned around and aimed her soft, round face at me. Her translucent green eyes were exaggerated in size and appeal by a street lamp’s light filtering from the sidewalk through the dusty plate glass display window. The question she cooed was totally unexpected: “Do you find me sexually attractive?”

  What had we here? I admitted very timidly that I did. I mean, the girl had this kind of kittenish appeal that no one with a body temperature over zero could possibly ignore. What’s more, I explained that she was very tactile, which means that any male would have a hard time keeping his hands off her.

  Carol had popped one of those questions that Emily Post will tell you demands polite reciprocity. So I asked her if she found me appealing, knowing full well that in all probability the only way she could tolerate having me around was by taking a steady dose of Dramamine. Her answer: yes, she did. I had, she said, a certain cat-like appeal. This was such an insult to the feline population that I could hear a meow of protest ricocheting around the globe. But she was apparently serious. So serious, in fact, that it was only a matter of minutes before we had each other’s clothes off. (It would have been a matter of seconds, but as I’ve implied before, I have the hand-eye coordination of a petrified tree.)

  That’s when I discovered that every art has its virtuosi. Jimmsy Law had been a pleasure, a delight, and a figure who deserves the immortality of Helen of Troy. But Carol Maynard could do things with her internal musculature that no anatomist had ever imagined. The girl was more than just an artist. It’s a shame that she performed all of her gymnastics within the narrow confines of her abdominal walls.

  It took me decades to realize Carol’s motivation. She had been discarded by the man she was in love with—Hoff. Yes, only temporarily, but when you’re in love, seconds are eternities and minutes are agonies. She needed to prove that she was still attractive. And I was her litmus paper. I was her proof.

  There was a crucial lesson in Carol’s embrace: sex comes with more than mere physical pleasure. It is packed with emotions. Emotions that sometimes go to th
e very heart of who and what we are.

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  The Buffalo boy who’d never had a date had just gained his second lesson in The Joys of Sex. But there would be more to come.

  After a month in the gender-challenging basement in Seattle, Dick decided we should go to Berkeley, thus theoretically leaving the fog of the Pacific Northwest and heading for the California sunshine. We packed and prepared to catch a freight train south. That’s when I came down with a cold, got left behind, was forced to hitch-hike to the San Francisco Bay on my own, and was scooped up in Eugene, Oregon, by the three fatherly murderers you may remember from our opening chapter. The kindly men in the black Hudson who delivered sermons on the need for meaning despite the fact that they occasionally amused themselves by punctuating skulls with periods and commas of lead.

  It was roughly 7:00 a.m. in some numberless morning in May of 1962 when my generous threesome of homicide specialists from Vancouver let me out on the shoulder of a San Francisco highway. The sun was glorious, and the plants by the roadside were unlike anything I’d ever seen. In the lands to which I’d recently traveled—Buffalo, Portland, and Seattle—a blade of grass was a skinny affair. Broad to catch the sun. But flat and playing-card thin to save on cellulose. A proof of nature’s pinch-penny ways. What passed for grass on the shoulders of San Francisco’s freeways showed no interest in thrift. At least not in saving on lignin. These grasses were built for a different sort of saving. Which meant that California blades of highway grass were not the ribbons of green that Walt Whitman would have recognized. They were fat, rubbery stubs, like long ink erasers. Their sole challenge was apparently not just to snag the photons flooding from the solar orb. Their second job was to hog up as much water as possible on the rare occasions when it rained, and to hold that water in fat, stubby storage tanks so that it would be available during the long and inevitable seasons of drought—the dry seasons. It was a shame to walk on plants that were working so hard to overcome a tricky challenge. But I had no choice.