How I Accidentally Started the Sixties

by Howard Bloom

  We opened our first morning with a breakfast featuring fruit, cereal, milk, and fortified sugar cubes…all your basic nutritional categories. The sugar cube’s supplement was a tad of extra nutrient for the brain: LSD. Then we took off our clothes to hike down the cliff and visit the beach, despite the fact that your most intrepid mountain goat wouldn’t have dared navigate that particular precipice without a parachute.

  But we had all the confidence in the world. I mean, the sugar cubes hadn’t discombobulated our cerebella yet, and we were in pretty good shape. Granted, none of us had ever climbed anything more complicated than an escalator, but what’s the big deal about some measly overhang the height of the Sears Tower with nothing but rocks—mostly sharp ones—at the bottom? So down we scrambled, one after the other, unprotected.

  Miracle of miracles, we were all doing pretty well, finding tree roots to dangle from and rock ledges three inches wide on which to rest our naked toes. Then, about half way down, a strange thing happened. Somebody kicked open those old doors of perception and invited us in. The Mad Hatter poured tea, the dormouse complained about being locked in the wrong pot (he would have preferred cannabis).

  But I didn’t have time for Lewis Carroll. My mind was too busy with Robert Louis Stevenson. I had been transformed into Ben Gunn, the hermit of the mountain, the miraculous old Treasure Island goat-man who could climb any vertical surface on the planet, then turn around and spit so accurately that he could hit a pirate in the eye from nearly a mile high. Which is no mean feat when you consider that pirates only have one eye, that the other is covered with a black patch, and, what’s more, if you’re an animal lover, you have to avoid spraying fugitive droplets on the parrot seated on the blaggard’s shoulder.

  Unfortunately, Mr. Gunn, despite his years of experience, had gotten himself into a bit of trouble. Just as he’d come to life, his host, the genial and ever-generous Howard Bloom, had done something dumb. He’d stepped carefully from one tiny outcrop to another until he’d found himself on a six-foot-long by two-inch-wide ledge. A perfect place to stop and rest, except for one minor flaw. There were no footholds below for a good twenty feet. It was a clean, sheer drop. And the niches that had provided the path down to this wonderful launch site had mysteriously disappeared, leaving no way to go back up and try again. Yes, I seemed to have two alternatives. Stay there until I turned ninety, hoping that Saint Francis’s birds would feed me. Or entertain myself with a three-second drop to my doom.

  Who the hell knows how I got out of this? I certainly don’t. Old Ben Gunn must have taken over, because somehow I ended up sidling to the far left end of the ledge and by a miracle beyond the powers of all the virgins of Lourdes, found another crack into which I could wedge my toe and start the descent down again.

  When I finally reached the bottom, I and my companions were too stoned to realize how astonishing it was that we were still alive. Embracing us was the strangest beach we had ever seen. It was solid black. There was no sand, just round, ebony pebbles. The entire expanse was a mere 200 feet across. The reason? The beach was shaped like a slivery crescent moon—medium deep in the center, but narrowing to tiny points toward the ends. Sealing the crescent off at the sharp end of each horn was a thin stone wall a hundred feet high, jutting like the flying buttress of a cathedral into the sea. One of these walls sliced far into the water on our right and another cut its way far into the waves on our left. The ocean, not content to be outdone by this architectural bravura, was tossing waves the height of bungalows at each buttress’ far end, smashing like Poseidon’s fists on a morning when he couldn’t find his favorite swim fins.

  Meanwhile, the chemical potion had pulled one of its specialties: reworking the fabric of time. Enough fantasies to program 500 cable channels for a month flashed through our brains in roughly three seconds. Then we’d shift our eyes in a new direction, and another month of scripts fast-forwarded through our interior picture tubes. There was only one problem. We were the starring characters in every teleplay, which meant we were switching identities at the rate of about one per nanosecond.

  I had reverted to my prehistoric condition again, and was walking the beach on all fours, testing the ground with my front paw while my remaining limbs formed a sturdy tripod holding me hunchedly horizontal and waiting for the test results from the probing forward paw to come in. This proved very handy when climbing through the narrow twenty-foot long by three-foot wide cave-slits in the towering outcrops of rock that separated the crescent-shaped beaches from each other, since any piece of shale you put your foot on could carry you like a toboggan into the sea. That faithful antenna of the fourth limb up ahead kept you from accompanying some slate super-sled into the waves. And these waves were not the kind you’d want to mess with. They’d have whisked you to a farewell vacation in the mixing bowl at Club Cuisinart.

  Then we discovered limpets. And, oh, how the limpets wished we hadn’t. Limpets are dainty half-clams that cling to the rocks. Pry one off, and you can watch the naked creature at work inside, an orange and gray bit of flesh puckering up its lips in the hope of sucking solid surface, gluing itself to a stone, and feeding on algae. I’m afraid we were not very humane about these innocent beasts. We pried them out of their shells, still lip-synching to instrumental tracks only they could hear, and ate them. Meanwhile, the entire evolution of the universe flashed through our minds in an animation drawn by Disney, directed by Spielberg, garnished with special effects by the team that would someday make Star Wars, and animated by Pixar. Except Star Wars and Pixar did not yet exist. And Spielberg was only sixteen years old.

  Perched on the base of one of the stone buttresses that stretched far out into the sea, with waves thundering around as they ground rocks into sand and reached their spray-tipped fingers up to grab us if they could, I had my big insight for the day. I was with Alice, a rosy-cheeked, ravishing brunette who had been lured into our group by Dick Hoff’s charms. I was still very, very shy about sex, and felt that there was something essentially evil about being male, something deeply malevolent about wanting women in a physical way. Images of masculine figures flashed through my mind, villains with curling mustaches whose unspeakable sin had been their lust for the body of an innocent heroine. Simon Legrees who demanded to have sex with your teenage daughter or they would collect on your unpaid mortgage and throw your family out on the snow-drift-covered streets. The Perils of Pauline with me as the bad guys. All twenty of them. Including every villain who had ever tied a heroine to a railroad track. The self-hatred was on a par with being coated in salt, wrapped in razor wire, then dropped off the back of a speeding truck.

  Then I remembered a little Pakistani businessman who had picked up Hoff, Carol, and me one day when we’d been hitchhiking in San Francisco. We were still living in the big, pink, condemned house in Berkeley, but wanted to move to the City on the Bay, so we were apartment hunting. With no money to pay the rent. We’d been knocking on doors in San Francisco’s black ghetto all day, asking the inhabitants if they knew of any vacancies. And we’d made a discovery. There were two different subcultures of blacks in the city forced to live cheek by jowl with each other against their will by ghettoization. First, there were the folks of the street culture. The Porgy and Bess culture. People who sat on stoops from 11:00 a.m. onward with bottles of alcohol in brown paper bags and shouted their conversations to each other from one side of the road to the other with enormous energy. On the rare occasion when a pink Cadillac convertible would cruise the street, it would drive at five miles an hour so the folks on the stoops could shout exchanges with the people in the car.

  But hidden in their apartments were the folks of a radically different subculture, an incipient middle class. These people shielded their children from the street culture. They didn’t allow their kids out of the house after they came home from school. The fathers had jobs. And the mothers wanted their kids to get a good education. How did we discover this? From the fathers who ans
wered our knocks dressed in the green uniforms of garage workers or the blues of janitors. So it had been a rich day of subcultural discovery. But not of finding apartments, alas.

  Now we needed to get back to Berkeley for the night. It was dusk, the loneliest time of day, and we were trying to catch a ride across the Bay Bridge. A Pakistani stopped his car for us, heard our plight while he was driving, and invited us to spend the night in his home in the city. We accepted his generous offer. Staying in town would allow us to get back to apartment hunting first thing in the morning.

  Our host fed us a very nice dinner, which he cooked himself, since his wife seemed to be out of town. Then he began to drink. When he got sufficiently potted, he asked Carol to sleep with him. He was little and round and the sort of person who, when he’s clothed, wears a suit and tie, and Carol did not find him the least bit appealing. Plus, believe it or not, she did not sleep with men on the first date. In fact, she didn’t date at all. She had reserved her body for Hoff, with a little bit of me thrown in when things looked desperate.

  Carol was terrified. Dick, who was the epitome of kindness, protected her, but did it while trying not to hurt the Pakistani’s feelings. But the little Paki was oozing the pain of sexual frustration from every pore. When he had a few more drinks, he started to shed his clothes. First the tie, then the shirt, then the pants, and finally the underwear. His paunch was astonishingly round. His body hair was like the decoration on the Taj Mahal. It curled in elegant spirals around his navel and his nipples.

  He began to walk in circles, holding his penis, bleating pathetically, “Why won’t she sleep with me? Why won’t she sleep with me?” Horniness is much too flippant a word for sexual deprivation. It does nothing to capture the state’s agonies. I identified with this man. His was the plight of 95 percent of the males on the planet, but it had been removed from beneath the floorboards where it is normally hidden and allowed to parade its misery for a moment in plain sight.

  Dick protected Carol all night. I wished I could make this man feel better, but I simply couldn’t short of sexual contact, something I, like Carol, preferred to avoid. Our Pakistani host continued to amble in his circular path. Then he finally gave up, whimpering, and went off to his bedroom to practice the skill of passing out. And perhaps another skill as well. One he shared with Anton van Leeuwenhoek.

  The next morning we left, with an image of something terribly basic tattooed on my frontal lobes. Naked, painful, unfulfillable sexual need. Unwanted, unwelcome, overwhelming sexual desire. The very thing that had driven my room mates at Reed to gather like a pack of wolves in the dorm room across the hall and howl, “I’m so horny I could die.”

  Hunched on the outcrop of rock with Alice, while the sea tried to snatch us into oblivion, I became the little Pakistani. I was pathetic and frustrated and I wanted sex. Not that Alice was unwilling. But I’d never dared ask. Then I realized that the nightmare of being cast in the body of an Asian inmate from a sexual purgatory was telling me something. I had sexual needs just like everybody else. But I had been frightened to admit them to myself, much less do anything about them. My image of male sexuality as villainous, something that would get you kicked out of the solar system and frozen in the nothingness beyond the planets, might just be wrong. When I was attracted to a woman, I needed to face up to the fact and attempt to win her over, preferably charming her sufficiently so that I could enjoy a conversation unencumbered by the obstacle of her clothes.

  Sometimes I learn lessons with the speed of a decorticated snail, but this time I got the message. I asked Alice to sleep with me. Surprisingly, Alice was pleased with the notion. She said yes. Much as my mind was still in the torture chambers beneath the House of Horrors dressed up as a naked Pakistani, I had enough wits about me to make a date with her for the day after next, when she’d be back in Berkeley, the rest of us would be in San Francisco, and our brains would be tucked back into our skulls.

  u

  The sun soon flashed a warning that the night show was about to go on. Old Sol dipped toward the water to take a bath, turning the sky a bright crimson. And glazing the undulating, mirror-like surfaces of the waves the red of the horizon, the white of the clouds, and the blue of the darkening sky above. On the waves’ sharp crenellations were, guess what? Glistening pinpricks. Stars of light. The ocean was showing its patriotism in a sunset salute to the U-S-of-A.

  So back up the cliff we went, finding toe-holds, grabbing on to roots, and hoping that the bit of bush we’d wrapped a fist around was well enough anchored in the crumbling cliff-face to hold our weight, since none of us particularly wanted to attempt manned flight without the aerodynamic aid of underwear. The sun dove beneath the surface to snorkel until morning. The last light ebbed, leaving us to the disapproving eyes of cold, indifferent stars. And we were only half way up the cliff.

  With my naked body pressed against a wall of stone and soil, I felt that I was climbing mother nature’s breast, and that she loved and would protect me (boy, were her nipples hard). Then I reached for the next root, and with a shower of dirt it jerked out of the cliff’s surface. I quickly let it go, and didn’t hear it hit the beach for three or four seconds. Suddenly I realized that Mother Nature, for all her maternal instincts, was apparently busy just then with another of her children, and I was on my own. With visions of the sucking lips of limpets wall-papering my now darkened eyes, I somehow made it to the top. So did we all. Lord knows how.

  Rather than spending the night in the lean-to, we took our sleeping bags across the highway and up the mountainside into the piney forest of fir. Then we laid our cocoons of slumber over the pine needles and huddled together. By now, I felt like the puppy dog in the group, a faithful follower of someone, probably Dick Hoff, anxious to be cuddled, willing to be warm and friendly to anyone. Though many of these people had followed me into the group, I never felt like a leader. But puppy dogs apparently have their appeal. When we arranged our sleeping bags so that we’d all be touching as many of each other as possible, everybody wanted to have his or her bag touching mine. I was very surprised. But it felt nice.

  We hallucinated the fluorescent sea anemones we’d seen that afternoon in tidal pools, and they pulsated us to sleep.

  u

  Two days later, I was sober again, and sitting on a front lawn in Berkeley with Alice. Once again, I felt out step-by-step her interest in me. It was there. It was real. And a pleasant portion of it was carnal. I had learned the lesson of the LSD and would carry it with me for years. It was a lesson of the kind that would help the sexual revolution hit its peak five years later in the summer of 1967, the Summer of Love. And I would be part of that summer, the Summer of Love, too. But we are still in 1962, before the Sexual Revolution had a name.

  In point of fact, the vast majority of the fantasies that had elbowed their way through my brain two days earlier in Big Sur were nightmares. Most of them had carried barbs of pain and poison. I never took LSD again. But I never forgot what it had shown me. And, like peyote, it had done what Edna St. Vincent Millay had demanded. It had been an excursion through alien emotions. Emotions that are hidden deep within, guess who? You and me.

  u

  There was one more emotion to explore, an emotion on the dark side of the soon-to-be-named Sexual Revolution—intimacy panic. It would arrive as I followed through on the Big Sur conversation with Alice.

  u

  You may have noticed that Hoff’s copulatory dance card was always full. Mine was comparatively empty. But that’s compared to Hoff, mind you. Because once every three or four months—or was it once every three or four years—some highly attractive woman, for reasons utterly inexplicable to anyone, would decide that I’d go perfectly with her sheets. In other words, I was a sexual revolutionary who was having very little sex. Alice would be an exception to that rule.

  After we determined that Alice was interested in me, she snuck me into the second-floor bedroom
she was renting in the three-story house of a woman who would have had us snatched by the vice squad if she’d found out that I’d even managed to pass her portals, not to mention Alice’s. I’d go hitch-hiking during the day, accumulating adventures. Then at night, I’d go to Alice’s, climb the tree outside her bedroom window, do the last few yards to the second floor by trellis, and crawl in through her bedroom window. Romeo would have been envious.

  In hushed tones, so the landlady wouldn’t hear, I’d enrapture Alice with the piping hot episodes of my day’s escapades. Having adventures is often painful. But telling about them is sheer joy. Then we’d crawl into bed and she’d show me a good time.

  But about day number three or four, some form of utter mania overtook me. I felt trapped, as if Alice, the woman I’d been enjoying with such total glee, was about to amputate a vital part of my highly expendable-looking body—probably my head. Anxiety hung me by my thumbs. My mind went blank. I became incapable of a word of conversation. And in my panic, all I wanted was escape. This was sick, sick, sick. But I couldn’t seem to help it.

  This is when I made a horrible discovery. I was terrified of commitment. And this would not be the only time. I’d enjoy the first night or three like crazy. Often, those initial evenings of dalliance and lust would be terribly romantic. Then would come the nightmare.

  Several years later, I’d discover that it was a Standard Male Syndrome. But that tale is yet to come.

  u

  Alice made things easy. Just as I was plunging into a paralyzed panic, she left a note on her pillow saying that she’d gone to Mexico with some tall black man she’d met that afternoon. “Love—Alice.” So I was saved, and left to ache for the lost dear one I’d been trying to figure out how to flee.