How I Accidentally Started the Sixties

by Howard Bloom

  Breaking in wild stallions became his specialty. He could stay on a bucking bronco’s back longer than a stripe sticks to a zebra. Then, one day, he was being tossed up and down on the vertebrae of some ornery untamed brute (no, it wasn’t his boss’ wife, it was a horse) and was about to give it the surprise of its life, the final dramatic coup that would turn it once and for all from a fiery individualist into a meek mount fit for women, small children and elderly quadriplegics. That’s right, he was about to go through the old ritual of breaking a bottle of cold water over the beast’s head, a technique that totally confuses even the most blood-hungry horse and leaves it staggering around begging for someone to tell it where to go next and whether the prospective passenger would like a receipt at the end of the ride. Then it occurred to my friend Ed that he had left New York because his father was breaking his spirit. Now he was about to break the spirit of this magnificent wild thing. He couldn’t do it.

  He jumped off the bucking beast and explained his philosophical position to the befuddled creature, who had just been getting enthusiastic about tossing Ed like a shot put, then stomping him into sewage. As Jonathan Swift will tell you, horses understand these things a lot better than we do, so the stallion was sympathetic. They shook hooves, went off for a drink, and traded the stories of their lives.

  We won’t go into the horse’s sad tale here, since we’re trying to stick to the story of Ed. But let’s just say it isn’t easy being a colt during the Depression.

  The upshot was that Ed gave his saddle and a jar of Adolf’s Meat Tenderizer to a blind and homeless man who hadn’t eaten for months, then moseyed off into the sunset and became a union organizer back in the days when management used negotiators who ironed out the fine points of a contract with Tommy guns and lead pipes. Ed was arrested for organizing union protests, led a jail breakout, tore the door off of his cell, was welded (yes, welded) back into the cage with thirty other freedom-hungry criminals, led a hunger strike, and learned all the words to “We Shall Overcome,” a brand new song at the time.

  By the time I met him, he owned a pickup truck and not much else, having spent about six months of the year prospecting for gold in the mountains of Northern California, which gave him just enough money to make it through the rest of the year, then loafed, passed his evenings at the bar, and occasionally took a long-distance vacation traveling as an illegal passenger on freight trains. The last time I heard from Ed, he was spending a month at a cushy New York State resort called Attica Prison after being caught fixing up first-class accommodations for himself and a friend in a boxcar. The state was hoping the free room and board would convince him to change travel agents.

  Remember the Sixties was not just a time of revolution for the sexual organs—for their right to stand up and speak for themselves. And it was not just a time for new potions to discombobulate the brain. It was a revolution in the horizons of the human soul. The kind of revolution that Edna St. Vincent Millay preaches in Renascence. The kind of revolution that T. S. Eliot urges you to begin today. The kind that William Blake and William James admired. It was an era of mind expansion. And Ed did his best to expand mine.

  Ed sensed in me a kindred soul (though certainly not a kindred body; with my hand-eye coordination I couldn’t even hang a lasso on a coat rack, much less use one to trip a calf). So he decided to educate me in what freedom of spirit was all about.

  First he drove me to a place called Watts Towers, a five-story-tall contraption made out of scrap metal, concrete, and the bottoms of thousands of old pop bottles that an Italian immigrant had spent his whole life building in an impecunious residential district of Los Angeles just to show how high even the souls of the poor could soar. Ed was particu­larly proud of the fact that when the city decided to supposedly conduct a stress test and sent its wrecking crews out to the unauthor­ized monument, the contraption was so structural­ly impregnable that the biggest bulldozers the town fathers could muster didn’t even dent the towers’ finish—or so I was told.

  Then Ed drove me further south to San Juan Capistrano to visit an Indian friend of his. The friend was a Native American anthropologist who had gone off one summer to do some research on the Southwestern mesa where his ancestors used to roam. First he’d discovered that to feed himself, he was going to need to shoot some rabbits. But whenev­er he fired a gun, every rabbit on the mesa heard the bang and high-tailed it for the nearest burrow (if they’d been Mexican rabbits, they’d probably have headed for the nearest burro, but that joke is so far beneath contempt I won’t even mention it). So he made himself a bow and arrow, which solved the noise problem, much to the chagrin of the rabbit population.

  Next he found that whenever there was a downpour, it soaked him to the skin, and his clothes took hours to dry, threatening him with pneumonia. But there was a solution! If he stripped down to a loin cloth, he ceased to be waterlogged in seconds. So he diapered himself in chamois.

  Finally, since there were no barbers in sight, his hair grew and got in his eyes when he was rabbit-hunting. So he ripped up some cloth and made himself a headband. By the end of the summer, he’d gone whole hog and returned to the ways of his ancestors. Then came September, and he had to put his clothes back on and return to fighting for tenure. But he’d learned a lesson from it all. Listen to your great, great grandparents. Sometimes ancestors are not as dumb as they look. But don’t always depend on your great grand-elders for advice on how to dress if you want to impress your department head.

  Together, Ed and his anthropologist friend gave me one more gift. Ed described what it had been like to go on a hunger strike during his post-labor-protest jail experience. After day three without food, something remarkable happened. Ed felt invincible. He was soaring with a mightiness of mood he’d never before experienced.

  The anthropologist had dipped into the same sort of thing. His ancestors, he explained, had gone on spirit quests to find their true identity. And their adult name. They had left the tribe late in their teens, plunged into the wilderness, and had starved themselves until they were visited by a vision, a vision that gave them their sense of self and their title: Running Bear, Dancing Elk, Humble Horse, Flying Buffalo, Pitiful Prairie Dog, etc. When the anthropologist had discarded his rifle and clothes and had gone back to the ways of his ancestors, he, too, had begun a spirit quest. To achieve it, he’d fasted. And like Ed, his clarity of mind and his sense of power had soared. So I, too, wanted to fast. It was the Edna St. Vincent Millay and J. Alfred Prufrock thing to do.

  For the next two or three days, I ate nothing. Then something strange happened. Ed was hungry. He took me to a restaurant. I read the menu. And I looked at the dishes that diners up and down the rows of tables were tucking into. They looked delicious. Now here’s the weird part: I was able to taste each item with a sharpness that actually eating the food would never have delivered. Others in the restaurant were limited by two things. They were forced to choose just a small number of items from the menu. And after the first two or three bites, the pleasure of a dish’s flavor leached away, abducted by what psychologists call “habituation.” Meaning even the most remarkable dish becomes ordinary by the fourth fork-load. But I didn’t have those obstacles. I could taste everything that I saw on the restaurant’s twenty tables. I could taste items represented only by words and pictures on the menu. Which means that my eating choices were vast. And I didn’t grow tired of the flavors. They stayed sharp and delicious.

  The lesson? The spirit can be more vivid than the flesh. You don’t always need to physically possess something to enjoy it. Sometimes simply knowing it exists is enough. Like the Hubble Space Telescope. You’ve never seen it. You can’t tuck it away in your closet. You can’t feel its metal with your palms. Yet you carry what it sees around in your head day after day. It has given you a cosmos. And you carry that cosmos around in the creases and wrinkles of your brain.

  The realm of the human spirit is vast. So is the potenti
al universe of your mind.

  THE FINE ART OF NUDE CLIFF HANGING,

  or FROM MUPPET TO MOUNTAIN MAN

  IN ONE EASY LESSON

  I’d eaten everything in the restaurant without any artificial stimulation. Aside, that is, from organic, one hundred percent natural starvation. But far more powerful tools for the exploration of the soul were about to enter the scene—those bizarre things Aldous Huxley had pontificated about on the BBC: psychedelics.

  When a month had passed, Sylvia of the red hair became bored with me. Never again had I attacked her and pulled her apart. Never again had I given her intense hours of emotionally charged attention. Attention is the oxygen of the human soul. And I was not the oxygen-giver she’d hoped for.

  What’s more, I had learned all that I could from San Pedro, like how to be very polite to policemen when they pick you up for looking like a suspicious character and when they threaten to show you exactly how limber your limb bones can be. For example, one evening at dusk, I was getting the daily exercise recommended by the President’s Citizens-Advisory Committee on Fitness of American Youth and attempting to enlarge my muscles by running the two miles from our apartment to the bar. And I was cheating. The whole run was downhill.

  In those antediluvian days, the word “jogging” had not yet been invented. Nor had the upper middle class rituals that go with it—$2,000 designer shorts cleverly camouflaged to look casual, fitness apps, fanny packs, armbands for your iPod, and a discreet supply of artificial smiles to wear when it feels like your spleen is about to burst. Which means that a nineteen-year-old youth running on a residential sidewalk in the gloaming meant just one thing—robbery. Even if that youth had bare feet and hair that looked like an explosion in a coiled telephone cord factory.

  A police car rounded the corner just uphill. It came halfway down the street, drew even with me on my left, and cruised at my precise speed. What a coincidence. Then the officer on the passenger side rolled down his window, ordered me to stop, and both men in blue emerged from their vehicle. They were considerably larger than I was. You could have squeezed two of me into one of them. The opening move from these keepers of the peace was a generous offer to augment my aerobic lope by helping with a bit of stretching—a necessity if I was to retain maximum flexibility. Their suppleness-enhancer of choice? Spread-eagling me against their car and frisking me. How could I possibly refuse their kindness? Before they could make me assume the position, I countered their verbal suggestion by telling them my tale. I was a poor college student who had dropped out of school on a spiritual quest. Yeah, really? Then they grilled me on the most criminal suspicion that my words aroused. How long had it been since I’d seen my mother? When I confessed that it had been almost a year, they were seized by nurturing instincts. They tried with all their might to persuade me to go back home and see my family before my mother’s heart could crack like a glass egg and leave shattered shell fragments all over the interior of her torso. And they were right about one thing: maternal wisdom matters.

  As your mother will tell you, manners mean everything, because by the end of fifteen minutes trying to save me, the officers of the law asked if they could buy me a cup of coffee. I didn’t drink coffee, but I appreciated the offer.

  u

  The time had come to leave San Pedro and head back to the Bay Area. Trailing me as I left the town in which Sylvia of the Red Hair was seeking new men to terrify, was an eighteen-year-old who had become hypnotized by my tales of seeking the spiritual holy grail and had insisted on leaving his summer job at the post-office, his future as a college student, his horrified middle-class parents, and, so far as I could see, his sanity. Why? I’d met him at the bar where I’d run into Ed. The eighteen-year-old had a strange problem. His life, as he explained it, was filled with wild adventures. He’d worked on a merchant marine ship, crawled through African jungles, lunched with polar bears in the Arctic, discussed existentialism with seals, wallowed in Wittgenstein with walruses, sipped rare wines with sea otters, and a whole lot more. There was only one problem. None of his tales were true. They were symptoms, outcroppings of his extreme dissatisfaction with an embarrassingly ordinary life. In reality, as you remember, he had a job at the post office. Apparently, he had never heard the message of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”—if you have something heroic to do, something that defines you, start it now. Today. And unfortunately for him, he got that message, but not directly from Mr. Prufrock. He got it from me.

  So he kicked himself in the gristly tissue cushioning the posterior of his pelvis and set out for real adventure by leaving his parents and attaching himself to, well, poor choice, but, ummm, to me. His real-life adventures would begin much more rapidly than he imagined.

  u

  The two of us set out for the open road early in the evening, and sure enough were blessed with instant luck. A brand new blue Chevrolet, the all-American kind that in those days—before a luxury automobile was downsized to fit on a charm bracelet and manufactured in Germany or Japan—could do 120 miles per hour, pulled over and offered us a ride all the way to SF. Well, actually, it wasn’t the car that made the offer. It was the kid inside, a nineteen- or twenty-year-old in a genuine cheap suit, rumpled as if it had just been yanked out of a laundry bag and wanted to get back in and hide. He had an open shirt collar and no tie and said it was his dad’s car, and that he’d been attending a business convention in San Diego. Now as you may recall, in those days, I was the only person from Buffalo, New York, over the age of 16 who had never gotten a driver’s license. But I loved to stomp my left foot on an accelerator. Miracle of miracles, the driver said he was tired, and asked if one of us would mind taking the wheel…he wanted to take a nap. I couldn’t wait to sidle into the pilot’s seat, which I did with the swiftness of a chameleon’s tongue.

  Then our host, yawning from the back seat, asked if we’d mind pulling the car into a filling station and putting some gas in the tank. He’d pay for the fuel, he said, but someone had stolen his wallet at the convention and his cash was all gone. My post-office runaway friend and I pooled our spare change, pulled into a station, and purchased two dollars’ worth of nourishment for the machine.

  When the attendant asked us to turn off the engine, we discovered that we couldn’t. There were no keys. We asked our genial friend, who was laying so low in the back that you’d have thought he was auditioning to be a carpet, where the keys were. “Oh,” he whispered, “they were in my wallet when it was nabbed.”

  The gas jockey kindly agreed to dole out a few drinks to our thirsty gas-guzzler despite the fact that its eight pistons were still spitting internal bursts of flame. And despite the fact that we could only afford two dollars’ worth of fuel.

  Then we set off on our travels again, glorying in the realization that it was 2:30 a.m. Why? Because this meant that the six-lane highway was almost totally empty, and I could methodically test the technical limits of the engines they shoved into Chevys in 1962. Frankly, it wasn’t a bad little V8. It cruised comfortably at 115 mph. I didn’t take it much above that speed. After all, I was driving illegally, and I didn’t want to push my luck.

  Our only bad fortune came when we were barreling down the tarmac and some vehicle bore down upon us from behind flashing ominous red lights. “Oh, my God,” I thought, “the cops.” So I hit the brakes like a sledgehammer, decelerating at a rate that nearly tossed our heads through the windshield. This was not, it turned out, a wise move. The thing behind us had no ability to slow down at a commensurate speed. As our rapid descent in velocity brought the vehicle on our tail to within about thirty feet of our back bumper, I finally made out in the rear view mirror exactly what it was—a Mack truck bigger than Darth Vader’s death star hurtling toward us at 120 miles an hour. It had red-lighted us as a signal to move to the right and let it pass. Thank God Chevys in those days could accelerate. I smashed the gas pedal half-way through the floorboards and we gathered momentum fast
enough to avoid becoming just another squashed bug on the Mack’s already insect-littered grill.

  We hit the San Francisco area just as the sun was coming up and all the early-morning commuters were emerging to park their cars on the highway. By the light of the dawn, we could see that the grass on the hills on either side of the road, grass that had been a promising green when I’d headed south from Berkeley to San Pedro with Sylvia, had lapsed into its default color—brownish gold. In California, it seems, grass is green for a maximum of two weeks a year. Then it goes through the sort of thing that Keats was lamenting when he wrote:

  Oh what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,

  Alone and palely loitering?

  The sedge has withered from the lake,

  And no birds sing.

  Sure enough there were no birds in sight. Or lakes. That may be why the blades of grass I’d first seen when exiting the car of the murderers on my descent from Seattle had been so balloonish, so insistent on imitating tiny water tanks. Is the yellowish tan of the hillsides on the West Coast the real reason they call California the golden state?

  But we made it through the frozen molasses of morning traffic, finally dropped ourselves off at my tribe’s new location, and thanked the guy in the back seat profusely for the ride. New location? Yes, my clan had by now abandoned its big, pink lair and found new quarters in the heart of San Francisco’s black ghetto. The super-slum neighborhood of choice was called the Fillmore District, but Bill Graham wouldn’t discover it for another three or four years. So at the moment, my companions were the only people in the neighborhood whose faces had the reflective qualities that make your cheeks and chin clearly visible at night. The rent for the new abode was dirt cheap because the spacious seven-room apartment was on the third floor of a building whose first two stories had been burned to a fine ash, leaving only six columns of questionable strength holding up the higher floors and a stairway that wobbled in the wind, but, with care and mountain climbing equipment could convey the intrepid to the two surviving stories, the two remaining apartments in the sky. I had not yet seen this new nest.