How I Accidentally Started the Sixties

by Howard Bloom

  This is where my Francophonic obsession once again came in handy. In a school with over 3,000 undergraduates, I happened to be NYU’s best French student. I know, it’s hard to believe, especially for me. But it’s true. So I went to my exercise du style dominatrix, who, when she wasn’t wearing her leather bra and spike-tipped boots, was one of America’s top Camus scholars. I asked if she could do anything to help me. She offered me a chair, cuffed me playfully with her iron-studded gauntlet, phoned a friend at Williams College who ran the school’s student exchange operation, and ordered him to accept me into his program. He whimpered with erotic pleasure, imagining the spanking he might receive if only they were together. Within half an hour, without an application, I was scheduled to head for Paris.

  Then came the end of my freshman year and the beginning of the summer. I wanted a summer job in editing and writing. I was still following Einstein’s commandment—to be an original scientific thinker, you have to be a writer. First, I made a list of every job I’d ever had, intent on writing a resume. The process was depressing. Most of the jobs I’d been given involved painting. And I can’t paint. While others coat a few hundred feet of wooden siding with a new layer of colored sticky stuff, I manage to paint one. One foot. So I finally went to Barbara in despair, showed her my very long compendium, and wailed, “Look at this list of failures.” Barbara stopped me with a simple statement: “Those are not your failures. That’s your experience.” See? I told you she had a brain.

  Next, I went through The New York Times want-ads, took down the information on a hundred employment agencies that dealt with “editorial” jobs, then methodically began to call the agencies, one by one. And one by one they told me they had nothing for me. But, remember, the difference between an idea and a reality is persistence. Persistence and money. But money is a subject for another book. When I got to agency number ninety-eight, very close to the last agency on the list, I got a very different response: “We think we have something for you. Could you come in and see us?” Yes I could, and yes I did. Who was the employer they had in mind? The Boy Scouts of America.

  This was a bit peculiar. Lieutenant General Robert Stephenson Smyth Baden-Powell’s organization for turning horny young boys into horny old men, and some of those horny old men into sexually predatory leaders of scouting troops, had thrown me out when I was eleven. The troop leader told me it was for incompetence at Morse Code. But he could just as easily have tossed me out for incompetence at knot tying. Yes, the people who wanted my writing skills worked for the very entity that had spit me out like a long-haired caterpillar in a Caesar salad.

  So when my freshman year of school let out, I began a daily commute to the Boy Scouts of America’s headquarters in New Brunswick, New Jersey, the very town in which I’d taught nubile young women the nomenclature of electrical wiring just a year and a half earlier.

  In those days, there were no word processors and no spell checkers. Just extremely expensive and totally clueless electric typewriters, typewriters so rude that they never lifted a lever to tell you when you’d spelled a word so badly that even the ceiling over your head could see that it was wrong. So the Boy Scouts gave me the chore of proofreading. God knows whether I was the least bit effective at this task. I have a strong suspicion that delinquent periods and commas snuck into what I was doing, then, when I failed to catch them, then got together and made fun of me behind my back. Like the bear and the stag who snickered at Barbara’s dad.

  After two days of this, the chief of the editorial department yanked me out of the proofreading pool. He had a crucial assignment. The Bible of the Boy Scouts is its Handbook. And that Handbook had a problem. Its chapter on masturbation had been written in the 1930s. Its reasons for not touching yourself down there, much less not touching yourself to the point of arousal? You’d go blind. And a three-foot-long black hair would emerge from your palm, be impossible to pluck, and would label you as a sexual weakling whenever you tried to gesticulate. I kid you not. For some reason, the head of The Boy Scout editorial department did not think that these reasons would cut the mustard with kids in 1965. Could I rewrite the chapter, he asked? But what he really wanted me to do was a bit sneakier. He wanted new reasons not to do it. So I came up with one—you’ll feel guilty. My boss—the head of editorial—was delighted. And there’s just a chance that my, ahem, handiwork is still a chapter in the Boy Scout Handbook today.

  Then the kindly editorial head wound up for a big pitch and tossed a more challenging assignment my way. Rewriting the Boy Scout Merit Badge pamphlet on stalking and tracking. He didn’t bother to ask if I knew anything about this woodsy art. I didn’t. Other kids in my Boy Scout troop had trouble finding their way out of a forest. I had trouble finding my way into one.

  What’s worse, when I had applied for merit badges before my expulsion from the Boy Scouts, I’d filled out the paperwork for each award, then had slipped it under the bathroom door and left it on my parents’ night table in the hope of getting something that the Scouts absolutely required, a parental signature. My dad and mom had always been too busy to sign. Then, when my brother had hit Cub Scout age, my mom had become his Den Mother. Go figure. So I was as well qualified to write Merit Badge manuals as a rusty lawn mower.

  But the Boy Scouts had a very good research library. And I figured that if you love the kids you’re writing for and want them to be able to stalk and track so successfully that they can get close enough to a bunny rabbit to rub noses with it before it sees them, you can write about anything. One day, on the way from the New Brunswick bus terminal to the office, I spotted a wild bunny in the middle of an empty lot, dropped down on all fours, and tested what I’d learned from my library research. There was no grass and there were no trees. No natural cover. This was the equivalent of crawling across a parking lot without the benefit of black paint on your back to make you look like asphalt or a white line. But the rabbit was extremely indulgent. It pretended it didn’t see me and let me get within three feet. Lord knows what impelled it to be so charitable. Maybe it needed a good story to tell the bunnies in the burrow back home.

  My boss was happy with the stalking and tracking pamphlet, so he gave me one on camouflage. Again, he didn’t ask whether I knew anything about the subject. Does turning white as a sheet in bed and blending in with the cotton count? When that was over, he gave me the ultimate assignment: Ten Steps to Organize a Boy Scout Troop—THE book used at the most critical phase of Boy Scout expansion, the book you relied on if you wanted to establish a new Boy Scout troop from scratch. He tossed an existing manuscript for Ten Steps to Organize a Boy Scout Troop at me. It was worse than rough. It was incomprehensible. So incomprehensible that no cut and paste would work, no matter how thorough. So I went back to basics. I researched every topic covered in each chapter from scratch. I watched a ream of pre-packaged audiovisual presentations. And I read books and other scraps of verbiage. Thank God for the library. Then I wrote new chapters from the ground up.

  When the process was finished, I took the new booklet to my boss. He read it, mumbled what may have been good things about it, then revealed something he had not previously told me. The big task was not to rewrite the book. The really-big job was to get what I’d written through the booby-trapped corridors of bureaucracy. Corridors blocked by the razor wire of ego. It seems that the original ball of incomprehensibility had been written by a very big cheese down the hall, the Vice President of Munster and the Chief Executive of Camembert. I had worked for weeks to turn an abused and battered slurry of screaming syllables into a stainless-steel tool. But the real labor of Hercules was getting past the man who was proud of the slurry. And my new mentor, the head of editorial, was going to give that job to me. All me. We’ll tell you how that turned out in a few minutes. But first, let’s get back to Barbara.

  u

  In fact, let’s slide all the way back to early June, when I was still trying to corner fugitive misspellings during my two
-day proofreading task at the Boy Scouts of America Headquarters. The chore that, unbeknownst to me, was my tryout for the big masturbation assignment. That’s when Barbara had to prepare for her upcoming Sorbonnerie by trooping off to Middlebury College for a summer-long crash program in Gallicisms—you know, the sort-of-concentration-camp-style session in which you’re thrown into the pastry oven if you utter a non-French syllable at any time during the summer. At first, I took our two-month separation fairly well. I lost most of my marbles, blithered a lot, and contemplated going to the local Purina factory and volunteering as a cat-food ingredient.

  So to soothe my loneliness, I did two things. I had my platonic friend with the Sports Illustrated swimsuit physique move in with me. You’ll recall that this remarkable lady was the one whose inability to show up for “The Trojan Women” had triggered my first non-date with Barbara. If I give you this lovely woman’s name, you will throw spittoons at me. Why? The woman with the perfect tan everywhere (she enjoyed nude sunbathing) was named, don’t hit me, Barbara. Apparently, the name Barbara was the only one that new parents could think of in the early 1940s. World War II had bludgeoned these young couples into a stupor. And they didn’t want to saddle their baby girls with the only other name on their mind—Adolf. For simplicity, let’s call the Barbara of the Coppertone tan Barbara number three.

  Barbara III and I slept with no clothes in a single bed the width of a plank of wood. But, hey, what are friends for? We both abided by the rules. No sex!

  Meanwhile, two and a half months earlier, Tom Reichman, the red-headed film-maker whose idea of a date was a trek to a cave in the subway, had bought Nanette a tiny, fluffy, yellow baby chick for Easter. Yes, yellow! And like everything sold on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in those days, this chick was a counterfeit. It had been sold to Tom as an infant chicken. But two months later it was summer and the chick had grown up, shown its true colors (white with an orange beak), and developed webbed feet that would make any self-respecting hen feel ridiculous. It was not a chicken, it was a duck. A big one. What’s worse, the duck had developed the prudish instincts of a chaperone. Or a puppy. So it got into bed with Barbara III and me and slept between our heads.

  Somewhat lacking in sexual fulfillment, I decided to visit Barbara I in Middlebury. A big mistake.

  u

  On the long bus-ride from New York to Vermont, I managed to earn money working madly on Ten Steps to Organize a Boy Scout Troop. Yes, using a yellow pad, a pen, scissors, and Scotch Tape, I labored diligently to instruct would-be makers of men on how to put troops of innocent youngsters into ill-fitting green costumes and persuade them to hike into caves filled with hungry bears. The Scouts believed in the honor system, so they let me do my writing even in moving vehicles, then they took my word for the number of hours I’d put in. The consequent earnings would come in handy at a slightly later point in our story.

  Late on a Friday afternoon, I showed up on the Middlebury campus with my Boy Scout scribblings and my sleeping bag. Being at least as capable of speaking French as your average Algerian dish of couscous, I gladly dove into the linguistic discipline of the place and put my English behind me. I mean, I fit into the all-French-all-the-time snobbishness perfectly. I was obnoxious about my ability to toss accent agues like Frisbees. If you overlook the fact that I can’t actually toss Frisbees. Then, when Friday night fell, I intended to do something about my sexual deprivation. In perfect French. So, like Abelard guiding Eloise, I took Barbara by the hand, tucked my sleeping bag under my arm, and headed off for the woods. I had lascivious intentions written all over my face, apparently in jumbo magic marker! But in perfect French. As we passed the dormitories, I saw numerous female ankles disappearing into the windows of male bedrooms. But what business was that of mine?

  I promptly found a nice, soft anthill between the pine trees, laid out the sleeping bag, and we made love. Yes, in French. Then, the next morning, we woke up and cursed our ant bites in the language of Rabelais.

  A few days later, I was back in New Brunswick. My moment of truth had arrived. My boss, the head of editorial, sent me down the hall to the corner office with windows on two walls. Why? So I could present my total rewrite of Ten Steps to Organize a Boy Scout Troop to, gulp, the man who had written the original. I was up against a problem. Eighteen months earlier, when I’d presented radical rewrites to Sol Gordon, the head of the Middlesex County Mental Health Clinic, nearly every word was his. But with Ten Steps to Organize a Boy Scout Troop, not a word of the original remained. With the exception of “a,” “the,” and “scout.” So I had a problem.

  I was ushered into the office of the big muckety-muck, the chief honcho whose love child I’d left on a mountain to die. I took my place across from him on the peon’s side of the desk. And I told him something that was only partially true—that I’d taken his magnificent ideas and clarified them. In what way was this for real? First of all, I had used the very meat and marrow of the man’s masterpiece—the same twenty-four letters of the alphabet. Every one of them. Honest. Secondly, I had leaned on his original for a vital element of punctuation: starting each sentence with a capital letter and ending it with a period. Thirdly, this earnest executive had written a book that aimed to tell generous-spirited, beer-swilling Americans how to organize Boy Scout troops from scratch. Without spilling their barley-malt. I had been true to the author’s intention. I’d written exactly what he’d aimed for—ten steps to organize a Boy Scout Troop. I mean, I’d even followed his game plan. I’d laid out a number of steps precisely equal to the total of your toes. I just hadn’t used the man’s incomprehensible prose. But I had kept his title. Surely that counts for something. Right? Wrong.

  My attempt to give the guy in the power seat credit for the finished product didn’t work. He had noticed a small flaw in my handiwork: there wasn’t a single sentence of his in the new book. The bottom line? I had spilled raw sewage all over his ego. Two days later my boss called me in and told me that it was with great regret that he had to inform me that I no longer had a job concocting instructions on how to terminally mismanage Boy Scout affairs. But both he and I knew that he’d taught me many a valuable lesson. Including this: don’t mess with people’s egos. Feed their sense of self-worth. Do it honestly. Find what others offer of value then let them know that you see it. Remember that every master or mistress of human affairs is a surfer on a tsunami. A tidal wave of hungry readers, voters, or viewers in search of affirmation. A rider on a foaming crest of ego.

  A rider who occasionally has to tell truths others do not want to hear.

  The timing of my job loss was fortunate. A day later I got an emergency call. Barbara was hysterical. It sounded like she was calling from the bottom of a fishbowl. Tears were running down her cheeks and flooding the receiver. Why? The dean of Middlebury had ordered an assembly and delivered a lecture on sexual indiscretion. During his fiery oration, everyone in the room had stared at one person and one person only: Barbara. Or at least that’s the way Barbara saw it. In her view, there was a scarlet “I” (“indiscreet”) on her forehead in not-so-invisible ink.

  Discretion, it turned out, meant sneaking into men’s dorm rooms after dark and pretending no one noticed. Barbara had broken the code. She had brazenly marched off to the woods with a boy and a sleeping bag, and Sam the Cook (not to be mistaken for Sam Cook, the famous American soul singer) had seen her. Sure, she’d done it after dark. But it violated the rules of romance laid down by the Académie Française. Sneaking through windows is civilized. Entering the woods is not. The old nature versus man-made artifact conundrum.

  There was a certain irony here. Once upon a time, my French teacher, Madame Hennin, the woman who brought the Myth of Sisyphus into my life, had convinced a dean from Middlebury College to visit my high school to address the student body. I was her star student. I had skipped from French One to French Four, then had been moved to French Five in two weeks. That’s what having two gorge
ous, brainy, and vivacious French teachers in a row will do for you. Especially when your hormones are brand new and you haven’t ever tried them out. Madame Hennin was looking forward to introducing the dean to me. But, alas, no one informed me that he was coming. And it gets worse.

  As you probably recall, I had been elected the Chairman of the Park School’s Program Committee for two years in a row. We had school assemblies every morning from 8:00 to 9:00 a.m. Being Chairman of the Program Committee meant programming two of those school assemblies per week, and emceeing all five.

  The school was terrific. It left me entirely to my own devices (and those of my committee members, all comely maidens). That worked most of the time. Most. But not on this occasion. Why? No one had given me any training in how to treat a surprise guest.

  The august dean showed up unexpectedly on the school’s stage at 8:00 a.m. and gave a talk. For half an hour, he said his bit. When he was finished, if I’d known anything about manners, I’d have come up, thanked him for his glowing coals of wisdom, shown him to a chair, and taken the day’s announcements from the student body (“I lost an algebra book in the woods while I was sneaking a cigarette yesterday, so if anyone sees a book half-buried in the mud next to a three-foot pile of tobacco ash, could they please return it to me,” etc.).

  Unfortunately, I knew nothing about human etiquette. You’ll recall that I had come from a home in which my parents made a habit of attempting to detonate each other with smart bombs. I had early in life turned my bedroom into a bunker, surrounding myself with a small army of guinea pigs, white rats, lizards, and guppies. None of my late-night conversations with these companions had covered diplomatic protocol. In fact, any social nicety not in the standard behavioral repertoire of a guinea pig was beyond me.

  When the dean who my teacher had so nicely persuaded to leave Vermont finished his finely polished words, I didn’t have any idea of what a guinea pig would do with him, except perhaps sniff his shoes and urinate in appreciation. So instead of praising the dean for his eloquence and gracefully shuffling him away from the podium, I stood in front of him, slouched in my unkempt winter coat, displayed my three-day growth of pubescent stubble, and asked for announcements, leaving the poor man to wonder why he was staring at the back of a student who had seized his platform and was now treating him as if he didn’t exist.