I have spent much of the last 40 years trying to figure this out - Why was there so much violence in my life?
I have 4 sons, two of whom were in grade school in the 80's and 90s, two of whom are in grade school now. Not only have none of them ever been suspended or been forced to march up to the principal's office for fighting, none of them have even had a fight that I'm aware of. My oldest son did get his face busted in HS, but that was not as a result of a fight - it was a random act of violence by a troubled kid from another town, already in "the system", who cold cocked my son with brass knuckles. No words, no warning. But not a fight, either.
When I grew up, where I grew up, fighting was just part of living. Beginning in fifth grade or so, the average kid got in perhaps 2 fights a year. Usually they happened at the playground, usually after school, but fights were known to break out at recess or gym class as well. In the early 60s there seemed to be some unspoken rules about how teachers and adults handled it, which could be summarized by "boys will be boys", whatever the hell that meant. If you got into a fight, as long as nobody got a bloody nose or a black eye, the fight was broken up, you got a stern talking to, and that was that. Sometimes the fight would resume after school, but the teachers (mostly women) were not responsible for keeping the peace 24-7. Most of the time, tho, the reason for the fight was forgotten pretty much as quickly as the fight had broken out.
The ones that resumed after school were particularly brutal. There had to be real, long standing animus to impel such events. Kids would look forward to these "street fights" all during the school day like fight fans anticipate a heavyweight championship fight. The fights themselves were nasty - kicking, biting, punching, lots of blood, and only ending in one of the combatant's humiliation. That's what these fights were all about - inflicting and absorbing humiliation.
By the mid 60s the deal had changed. Maybe it was because we were bigger, stronger and more prone to injury and injuring. But it seemed like in general schools had had it with fighting. There was no particular litigious reason for this - it's not like there had been an uptick in suits against schools or insurance claims. It was just a change in the Zeitgeist - fighting was not to be tolerated at all.
The deal became, you get in a fight, you go to the office, and you probably got suspended. I am here to tell you, this was a very bad idea. Four decades later, I STILL think this was a very bad idea.
What this policy did was make those who had nothing to lose by being suspended, the "troublemakers", more bold, and those for whom the worse part would be dealing with their parents when they got home, the "good kids", more timid. This policy basically invited the trouble makers to make more trouble with effective impunity, and force the good kids into the role of ready prey, and be punished for afterwards for it to boot.
I often said then, only a woman would come up with this policy. That's unfair, I know, but we had just gotten a new principal, and she was the one that laid down this new law.
And of course, when the inevitable happened, and you found your ass cooling your heels in the waiting area of the principal's office, waiting for one of your parents, usually your mother, to come in, if you were the prey you just seethed at the injustice of it all. Some kids got suspended even when all they did was cover their heads as they got wailed on. Didn't matter. Got in a fight? Gettin' suspended.
And the other kid? They were lucky if they could even locate that kid's parents. Generally, they didn't care - that's why the kid was a troublemaker. Duh! One time tho one of these kid's fathers did come in. He didn't wait to talk to the principal. Instead, he went right up to the kid, smacked him around, and then basically kicked him out of the office and down the hall. That was pretty bad. For once, justice.
When it happened to me, my parents had very different reactions. My mother lectured me on how it was unacceptable behavior. My father wanted to know if I had held my own. This was typical, and typical of the age. My mother was quite a by the book idealist, but the old man was from the street - and the old country. His parenting philosophy was "hit first, ask questions later". When President Kennedy was shot, late in the school day, I ran across the street home to tell my father the news. He was in the bathroom, shaving, getting ready to go to his second job, and was not in a good mood. "Pop - President Kennedy's been shot!" Without a second thought he wheeled around and smacked me across the face. "You don't joke around about something like that!" In shock, it took me a while to regain my wits and talk him into turning on the TV.
I was the tallest kid in my class from 5th to 8th grade, and one of the strongest, but I didn't want to fight if I could avoid it, irrespective of the consequences. I was too strong to be beaten, but not mean enough to beat the other kid up. What would ensue would be these ridiculous clinches, the other kid red with rage, and me having let the emotions of the moment pass. We'd dance around as he'd try to trip me to take me down, and I tried to keep him at arms length. Then a teacher would come and off to the principal's office we'd go!
What a waste of time, and what a pain in the ass.
So what I would do is try to disarm my opponent with jokes, trying to make him laugh, trying to give him an opportunity to save face by pushing off while the spectators laughed at my jokes. This strategy worked pretty well for a while.
Unfortunately, one time when I was in 8th grade, a 7th grader mistook my joking around as a sign of weakness, something to be mocked. He started to make fun of me, in front of my peers. His taunting was mean spirited. I light heartedly warned him to stop, and a few kids told him not to mess with a kid much bigger than he, but he persisted. I was being humiliated and, given my upbringing, I was vulnerable to getting enraged when humiliated. It was one thing to get into a fight during a football or basketball game due to some misinterpreted contact. I could let that go. But humiliation I was not able to let go of easily.
I changed the expression on my face and warned the kid, who was kinda straddling his bike, to stop. He kept on. I walked up to him, put my face in his, and told him he better fucking stop. He didn't.
I snapped. When it was over the schoolyard had emptied, my hands were sore and bloody, but not with my blood. That poor kid was on the ground, whimpering, bleeding. You could not tell where he began and his bike ended. He cried and cried as I huffed with afterrage.
I didn't help him up. I didn't say anything. I just stood there, over him, huffing, letting my rage unblind me. I was horrified. It was intellectually obvious that I had done the damage, but it was like I had come upon the aftermath of somebody else's handiwork.
He didn't ask for help or beg for mercy. He just wailed. I stared for a while, then turned and walked slowly home.
As I trudged I was in disbelief - did I do that? Am I responsible for that? To this day, I have never forgotten that moment, nor have I fully forgiven myself.
In 1968 that event was less than a year in the past. I had managed to avoid one on one fights since.
Then I made the mistake of walking into a pizza parlor at the same time that some drunk older kids were walking out. We bumped into each other. They didn't take it kindly.
I knew who these guys were - they were actually out of HS and in college, locally. Despite the fact that I was with three other of my frosh friends, I was the same height as these older guys, with a full beard. And let's not forget - they were "sensorily impaired".
They proceeded to push me around in the tiny vestibule of the pizza joint. I knew their reputations - they were bad guys. I pleaded my case, with the best defense I could think of - Hey, I'm a freshman!
A freshman, see? Picking a fight with a freshman when you were a junior or above was like picking a fight with a girl. There was no honor in that - in fact, it would detract from your rep if you were going around beating the shit out of little freshmen. But they didn't believe me.
My companions were obviously freshman, much shorter than I, years from shaving. They tried to help me out. "He is! He really is a freshman." This also had no effect. The drunk guys grabbed me and dragged me out in front of the blank wall on the side of the building.
I continued to plead my case. C'mon, man, what's the big deal about beatin' on a freshman? But these guys were getting ready to wail on me.
So, confronted with my new reality, I quickly calculated that I had one chance. I could get in a few shots if I acted right away, maybe knocking them off balance. Them being drunk and me being a sprinter, I figured I had a pretty good shot to run the two blocks into the woods before they could get up, amble to their car and come after me. In theory.
So I did it - Pop! Pop! I thought they were two pretty good shots. Apparently, not good enough.
I got the shit kicked out of me pretty bad. What they lost due to inebriation the wall I was up against made up for. To their credit my companions did not scatter but stayed on the sidelines at a distance until it was done. I was able to protect my face, so only my body took the brunt, and my arms. They lost interest, weaved their way to their car and sped off into the night. My friends came over, helped me up, and told me how bad I got my ass kicked. But in an empathetic kind of way, if that's possible.
I hadn't been looking for a fight, and had I entered the pizza parlor a minute earlier or a minute later, I would not remember that night.
But such was the quotidian violence that was my life at that time.
My freshman year was also my first year in an integrated school. We had had one black kid in my 8th grade graduating class. But we were a sending district for a larger high school district, and that larger district was largely black.
I had no problems with blacks. I had played football in 7th and 8th grade with them and they respected me. I had played music with them in a band program, making friends with two really nice guys, one of whom would go on to be student council president in HS when I was his VP. And I had had a great act of kindness bestowed on me by a black HS kid when I was in fourth grade and had fallen down on the asphalt basketball courts in the schoolyard and scraped my knee quite badly and bloodily. None of my white friends came to my aid. The HS basketball team had a summer camp at my school, and none of the white guys on the HS team came to my aid. But one of the black guys did, helped clean up my wound, helped me on my feet, and made sure I was okay. I had no reason to hate blacks, and lots of reasons to feel okay about them.
Nonetheless, things were tense in high school. Several times fights broke out, particularly in stairwells, probably because they were out of the eyesight of any teacher. These fights, called rumbles, would gather a crowd, the white kids chanting "Fight! Fight! Nigger and a white!", the black kids chanting "Kill that honky mutha fucka". I stayed clear of this kind of crap, but it was there, and with some frequency.
But in my life, even the teachers were a threat. Remember Mr. Apito? Well, he was buddies with my cousin on my mother's side, a guy named Sonny, who was also a teacher in the school. I guess they thought I needed some toughening up, because every once in a while, when I wasn't on my guard, Apito would grab me from behind and pull me into a doorwell. He would hold my arms behind me while Sonny would punch me in the stomach. Weird, huh? But what am I gonna do? I would tighten my abs and let him wail away. It would only last 10-15 seconds, then they'd let me go and pat me on the back, calling me a good sport.
Was this normal? Did I ask for it? Was I that much of a wise ass? Were other kids jealous of me? Did I come off as so much of a pansy that even the adults felt like they needed to toughen me up?
Maybe I had something to do with that, but even still, independent of me, there was other violence that engulfed me.
Our high school got in so many rumbles with other schools at sporting events that we got to be known as the "riot school". It seemed to start in my freshman year, and ultimately wound up with two major riots in the school itself, one requiring the State Police SWAT team, the other, in my senior year, the National Guard. But that was years away. There would be so much trouble in my freshman year that basketball games, forever the province of the winter night, were moved to the mid-afternoon daylight hours as a deterrence to violence.
My introduction to this larger environment of violence came at the first varsity football game of the season. It was a close game. I was on the freshman team so I wasn't suited up and was instead in the stands. I wasn't watching the game much, intent as I was in flirting with a gorgeous girl named Carol, who happily returned the flirting. (We soon went steady for the requisite month. I went to her house. She introduced me to her mother, "Doesn't he look dumb? But he isn't! He's smart!") Ultimately the game ended with us winning 25-19, on the road. The home team fans didn't like the outcome apparently, or perhaps it was something else, but all of a sudden a riot broke out.
In those days most of the fans at a HS football game, always played on Saturday afternoons, were students, kids. Few if any parents were there, few if any adults. (This might have been abetted by the fact that our parents were blue collar people in the kind of jobs that had shifts and afforded days off during the week, rarely on weekends.) So when a fight would break out it wouldn't take much to become a riot, since there was a lot of fuel, as it were, to add to the fire.
There is a painting by an artist, Boccioni (an interesting figure who spanned every turn of the century school from Romanticism to impressionism to pointalism to cubism) named "Riot in the Galleria". Altho it is a painting, and obviously a still impression of the event of a riot (oddly, among women!), nonetheless it is an eerily accurate portrayal of the circular, cyclone/hurricane like violence that sweeps around and around during such a phenomenon. I recommend viewing it. I have a print of it in my dining room to this day.
A riot can break out quickly, spread quickly, engulfing tens of people, then just as quickly and for no apparent reason, suddenly dissipate. That's what happened here as well. Carol jumped into my arms. (She had beautiful, large breasts, so it was an odd mix of fear and lust that overcame me at that moment...) Before we could figure out what to do, where and how to flee, the riot dissipated.
These things don't stick with you at the time. They register in the agenda of events of your life. They have no emotional truck. It was violence. Part of life. Nothing remarkable. It is only now, 40 years after the fact, that I reflect on how actually unusual it was, how outrageous, for young people to be exposed to so much violence in so many avenues of life, all of the time.
Playground. Pizza parlor. Stairwell. Classroom. Stadium. Home.
Nam.
Everywhere, violence.
And how much, I still wonder, was me?
Saturday, April 26, 2008
Bip!
Bip!
Just like that, right there on tv. Bip!
Some guy hand cuffed, right on the street in Saigon, forced to get on his knees. The other guy takes out a hand gun, puts it to the guy on his knees' head and Bip!
I'm in the living room, eating dinner on a tray table. We had a very loosely coupled family in those days - my sister off to college, my father working two jobs, my mother involved with Citizens Against Water Pollution and/or grad school classes, me fending for myself. I had been doing my own laundry and cooking for myself since I was 12, so it was not a big deal.
There I was, then, eating something and Bip!
WHOA! It was hard not to recoil. I didn't know it then, but at that very moment my whole perception of Vietnam changed.
Even with Iraq and Afghanistan going on right now, it's hard to explain to people who were not around back then how surreal Nam was. The hot war had been going on since 61 or so, and full force by 65. This was nearly 3 years later. Every night the news opened with Nam, segued into the Civil Rights movement and then, with the time remaining, focused on other stories that emerged from time to time - drugs, sex, rock 'n' roll...
Nam was the constant. It's cliched now, but there were body counts. The VC always lost like 2000 men, we'd lose like 250. In 67 it was clear we were gonna win, just a matter of a year or two. We always had, so there was no reason to expect otherwise.
But Nam was not like a real war, like THE war, y'know, the big one that everybody's father fought in. This was the GoGo Sixties, the time of great prosperity, of technological wonder, or leisure time, of the certainty of going to college if you had half a brain, of nice houses, bigger houses. The last vestiges of "Depression-itis", of that odd frugality and modesty born of the 1930s, were falling away. Middle aged women, like my mother and most of my brunette aunts, suddenly became blonds. Cellars became rec rooms, people got in ground pools instead of bomb shelters, every house had an attached two car garage.
Life Magazine had done a big spread about the Class of '65, how they were the best and the brightest in history and would remake the world. Hollywood put out movie after movie about Americans going abroad, basically to marvel at how backwards the rest of the world was and how it was our burden, our duty, to spread plastics, the frug and indoor plumbing.
In this time, Nam was half soap-opera, half sporting event. The country had become obsessed with keeping score, and body counts were just the ticket. The first Super Bowl had been played the year before; we had gotten our first color TV in time for it, with its massive round green picture tube. It was in a "console" - a six foot cabinet with big speakers, an AM/FM radio tuner and a turntable for both 45s and LPs. It was the centerpiece of not just ours but everyone's living room.
Nam was far away, and not just in distance. The current revisionism, also popular at the time with people like my Normandy vet old man, that the government didn't do a good job of propagandizing the war is just total crap. Nam was everywhere. Every night, every headline, every radio newscast. Nam was everywhere - everywhere but here.
In February of 1968 there were only two ways you could find yourself in a rice paddy - either you were too dumb to get a deferment, or you were dumb enough to enlist. I'm not talking academically dumb - that didn't matter. College campuses were places where Nam was opposed. Whether out of principle or recognizing an opportunity when they saw one, colleges bent over backwards to admit people to college. In those days California set the cultural trends of the nation and thus the world. Their public education system was the envy of every other state, if you can believe it, and they had instituted not just two large university systems but a vast community college and junior college system as well. If you got into college you got a student deferment, no questions asked. In California you were accepted as a matter of right, irrespective of your high school performance or abilities. No problem - in many junior colleges, remediative courses were the most well enrolled.
But I'm not talking academically dumb - you could get in. No, you just had to be dumb, like in head in the sand dumb, or like we said in our dialect, stunata. If you couldn't get into a 4 year college, fine - you could get into a 2 year, and for cheap - most community colleges cost less than $200 per semester. Two years and the war is probably over. But if you didn't wanna mark time in a classroom you had at least two other things to try.
First, you could get married. Back in those days, married guys didn't have to get assigned to combat. You could either get deferred, or at worst get drafted and go to Germany. Or Korea. Or Okinawa or the Phillipines. Even Guantanamo.
Another thing you could try - the 4F route, altho this was usually the province of the upper middle class. In the upper middle class town where my cousins lived, everyone had a friend who had a father or uncle who was a doctor who could find something to diagnose you with that would disqualify you - scoliosis, some respiratory thing or the ever popular flat feet. Many scions of doctors in the 60s became doctors themselves courtesy of a 4F qualification which allowed them to stay out of the heat and go to med school.
(Of course, few doctors would help low middle class kids like us get 4Fs. The attitude was that we were going nowhere fast anyhow, might as well join the Army and "become a man". Yeah, the Army was the perfect place for THOSE people. And many of those doctors had come from THAT side of the tracks, joined the military in WWII, become men, and gone to med school on the GI Bill. Didn't hurt them - in fact, it had given them a golden opportunity. So by not providing us an excuse to get out of service, they were actually doing us a favor. Funny, though, how it didn't seem proper to give their own sons that same golden opportunity...)
You also could get lucky - you might be the sole male survivor in a household. This was a big one in WWII, when so many families lost all their sons early on in the war. A more agrarian society back then, it was seen as destructive to family farms and small businesses to have all male heirs get taken out in shooting wars.
There were tons of ways in early 68 to get out of being drafted, but what made all the wheels turn in this industry of deferment was that at that time there was no pressure for the vast number of troops we would soon need to be drafted, and that was because there were so many enlistees.
In the mid 50s, movies like Rebel Without a Cause and the Wild One, West Side Story and even Marty, portrayed a lost generation of youths who found no meaning in the standard American model - high school, work, family, suburbs. Malcontented generations always sprung up after wars - consider the expats of Hemingway's movable feast - even the Civil War, where Go West Young Man meant getting out of having to conform to the expectations of a more rigid social, economic and familial set up. The Post WWII era was no different, and the nihilism portrayed in the 50s was real.
Nam provided a way for obstreperous, disaffected youth in the early to mid 60s to find adventure or at least escape the boredom and certainty of what was a fixed, predictable game for them. Enlist and you might see the world, maybe not, but you sure as hell would get out of your hometown, your old circle of boring predictable aimless friends, your semi-commitments to your girl friend and most of all, your family.
In my home town only about 25-30% wound up going to college anyway, so what were you gonna do? Get a job, get drunk, get laid, get in trouble. We lived in a resort area where most of the jobs were service jobs - not manly pursuits. The few factory jobs around required you to know somebody, as did the trades - electrician, carpenter, dry wall, plumber. Fathers, who had grown up in the aimless and hopeless unemployment of the Depression, had told their sons that the Army was the best thing that ever happened to them, despite the fighting. So many guys figured, what the hell...
In early 68, in a back water place like ours, there were no drugs really. The only ones who smoked dope (as we called it) were the ones that came back from college, where it was plentiful and readily accessible. If you wanted to get marijuana you had to know somebody on "the Ave", the main drag of the nearby black district a couple of towns over. Only the elite schools offered LSD and other psychodelics and there weren't any guys from our town who went to those places, so there weren't many who could come back to spread their gospel.
Booze and beers were the drugs of choice, or, rather, the only drugs around. The cops didn't mess with you as long as you weren't a complete asshole about it. Guys would get drunk, get in fights, get in trouble, but it was tolerated. A guy could work as a mechanic at a gas station, get paid, and on weekends get in trouble. Nobody sweated it.
But it was boring as hell...
No, if you weren't the type to go to college, and most of us weren't, the Army looked like a great way to get the hell out of there.
Nam was wallpaper. Nam was background. There was the GI bill, with its educational benefits, but more importantly its housing and training benefits. By 68 there had been a good 10 years of guys who had joined up, gone to Germany or one of those Asian outposts, had a piece of cake tour of duty, and comeback with honor, maybe some skills, and some cachet that employers loved. And you had gotten the hell out of here without having to sit yet again in stupid classrooms "becoming astronauts" - that is, taking up space.
What happened tho, was that occasionally Nam would reach out and tap you on the shoulder and remind you that it was there, still lurking in the shadows. Somebody would have a cousin, boyfriend, uncle - always from another town - get killed. When it happened it was surreal, like being struck by lightning. Unlike the stories we'd heard about every family losing someone in WWII, virtually no one had lost anyone in Nam. On those rare cases when it did happen, the grieving family was looked on as particularly unfortunate, and maybe even cursed. Not honored, but rather treated like lepers - unfortunate, but to be shunned, since their tragedy was so out of tune with the rest of what was going on, which was prosperity, upward mobility and by all means fun.
But by the beginning of 1968, despite perhaps a hundred of enlistees out of our little town, nobody had been killed. Enlisting was not seen as a risk of death really. You sign up, you do basic, they ship you somewhere, you do your tour, and you come back. Just like as if you had gone to college, but a lot more fun and mayhem.
Nam was solidly in the background of my life. Then, Bip!
It happened quickly. It was shown in a montage of the clean up after the so called Tet Offensive. The VC had launched a whole series of surprise attacks that shook everyone up, but by mid February it was clear things were back under control. At least that's what was said.
But there was something different now. The body counts continued, like the scores of an undefeated team, but there was a new dimension. It's hard to put one's finger on it, but the best I can do, even 40 years on, is to say that there was now a moral dimension.
God knows who that poor wretch was that was eliminated, "execution style" as they say, or what he had done. He might have killed babies for all we knew, drank their blood and used their bodies for sandbags. We had been continually told how savage and backwards the VC were, so nothing could be put past them.
Even still, we were the Americans, the good guys, the ones who treated prisoners well and helped rebuild our enemies after they were vanquished, even if they were as brutal and cruel as the Japanese and Germans. We were not like them godless Commies who were capable of tremendous unfeeling cruelty.
But even tho it was another Vietnamese who rubbed out the prisoner with so much dispatch and disregard right in front of us from Coast to Coast, nonetheless he was our guy, our representative, our ally, and to watch that happen sent several new and disturbing messages.
Were they guys we were fighting with, fighting for, just as bad as the bad guys? Were we putting up with this unacceptable, unAmerican behavior?
Or had things taken a bad turn? Were things really so bad that such desperate measures were justified merely to keep things under control?
Whatever it was, whatever the voice over and body counts said about our "victory", the emotional impact gave a very different message indeed.
Nam was not a soap opera. Nam was not a sporting event. Nam was spinning out of control, and about to enmesh us in its web in a way that threatened to take us way, way out of our prosperity drenched sunlight and into the fog of terror, tension and cruelty.
I was 15. I had 3 years of HS left. Three years is a long time and the war would certainly be over by then. I was going to go to college. I would not have to enlist, and I would not get drafted. Nam was far away, and like the Berlin Wall and the Cuban Missile Crisis, it was just part of the furniture of the Cold War, which, by 1968, was a negligible part of the prosperity of the times. I had nothing to worry about.
Still, that image stuck. Bip! I don't think it took more than 3 or 4 seconds. Gone. Just like that. Right on the street in Saigon.
There was something wrong with this war. Something wrong, something turning us into someone we didn't want to be, someone we were not back here, back home, back in the USA. Maybe those college kids knew something we didn't, those kids going door to door for McCarthy in New Hampshire.
I didn't know.
All I knew was this guy threw this other guy down on his knees and then Bip!
And things would never be the same...
Just like that, right there on tv. Bip!
Some guy hand cuffed, right on the street in Saigon, forced to get on his knees. The other guy takes out a hand gun, puts it to the guy on his knees' head and Bip!
I'm in the living room, eating dinner on a tray table. We had a very loosely coupled family in those days - my sister off to college, my father working two jobs, my mother involved with Citizens Against Water Pollution and/or grad school classes, me fending for myself. I had been doing my own laundry and cooking for myself since I was 12, so it was not a big deal.
There I was, then, eating something and Bip!
WHOA! It was hard not to recoil. I didn't know it then, but at that very moment my whole perception of Vietnam changed.
Even with Iraq and Afghanistan going on right now, it's hard to explain to people who were not around back then how surreal Nam was. The hot war had been going on since 61 or so, and full force by 65. This was nearly 3 years later. Every night the news opened with Nam, segued into the Civil Rights movement and then, with the time remaining, focused on other stories that emerged from time to time - drugs, sex, rock 'n' roll...
Nam was the constant. It's cliched now, but there were body counts. The VC always lost like 2000 men, we'd lose like 250. In 67 it was clear we were gonna win, just a matter of a year or two. We always had, so there was no reason to expect otherwise.
But Nam was not like a real war, like THE war, y'know, the big one that everybody's father fought in. This was the GoGo Sixties, the time of great prosperity, of technological wonder, or leisure time, of the certainty of going to college if you had half a brain, of nice houses, bigger houses. The last vestiges of "Depression-itis", of that odd frugality and modesty born of the 1930s, were falling away. Middle aged women, like my mother and most of my brunette aunts, suddenly became blonds. Cellars became rec rooms, people got in ground pools instead of bomb shelters, every house had an attached two car garage.
Life Magazine had done a big spread about the Class of '65, how they were the best and the brightest in history and would remake the world. Hollywood put out movie after movie about Americans going abroad, basically to marvel at how backwards the rest of the world was and how it was our burden, our duty, to spread plastics, the frug and indoor plumbing.
In this time, Nam was half soap-opera, half sporting event. The country had become obsessed with keeping score, and body counts were just the ticket. The first Super Bowl had been played the year before; we had gotten our first color TV in time for it, with its massive round green picture tube. It was in a "console" - a six foot cabinet with big speakers, an AM/FM radio tuner and a turntable for both 45s and LPs. It was the centerpiece of not just ours but everyone's living room.
Nam was far away, and not just in distance. The current revisionism, also popular at the time with people like my Normandy vet old man, that the government didn't do a good job of propagandizing the war is just total crap. Nam was everywhere. Every night, every headline, every radio newscast. Nam was everywhere - everywhere but here.
In February of 1968 there were only two ways you could find yourself in a rice paddy - either you were too dumb to get a deferment, or you were dumb enough to enlist. I'm not talking academically dumb - that didn't matter. College campuses were places where Nam was opposed. Whether out of principle or recognizing an opportunity when they saw one, colleges bent over backwards to admit people to college. In those days California set the cultural trends of the nation and thus the world. Their public education system was the envy of every other state, if you can believe it, and they had instituted not just two large university systems but a vast community college and junior college system as well. If you got into college you got a student deferment, no questions asked. In California you were accepted as a matter of right, irrespective of your high school performance or abilities. No problem - in many junior colleges, remediative courses were the most well enrolled.
But I'm not talking academically dumb - you could get in. No, you just had to be dumb, like in head in the sand dumb, or like we said in our dialect, stunata. If you couldn't get into a 4 year college, fine - you could get into a 2 year, and for cheap - most community colleges cost less than $200 per semester. Two years and the war is probably over. But if you didn't wanna mark time in a classroom you had at least two other things to try.
First, you could get married. Back in those days, married guys didn't have to get assigned to combat. You could either get deferred, or at worst get drafted and go to Germany. Or Korea. Or Okinawa or the Phillipines. Even Guantanamo.
Another thing you could try - the 4F route, altho this was usually the province of the upper middle class. In the upper middle class town where my cousins lived, everyone had a friend who had a father or uncle who was a doctor who could find something to diagnose you with that would disqualify you - scoliosis, some respiratory thing or the ever popular flat feet. Many scions of doctors in the 60s became doctors themselves courtesy of a 4F qualification which allowed them to stay out of the heat and go to med school.
(Of course, few doctors would help low middle class kids like us get 4Fs. The attitude was that we were going nowhere fast anyhow, might as well join the Army and "become a man". Yeah, the Army was the perfect place for THOSE people. And many of those doctors had come from THAT side of the tracks, joined the military in WWII, become men, and gone to med school on the GI Bill. Didn't hurt them - in fact, it had given them a golden opportunity. So by not providing us an excuse to get out of service, they were actually doing us a favor. Funny, though, how it didn't seem proper to give their own sons that same golden opportunity...)
You also could get lucky - you might be the sole male survivor in a household. This was a big one in WWII, when so many families lost all their sons early on in the war. A more agrarian society back then, it was seen as destructive to family farms and small businesses to have all male heirs get taken out in shooting wars.
There were tons of ways in early 68 to get out of being drafted, but what made all the wheels turn in this industry of deferment was that at that time there was no pressure for the vast number of troops we would soon need to be drafted, and that was because there were so many enlistees.
In the mid 50s, movies like Rebel Without a Cause and the Wild One, West Side Story and even Marty, portrayed a lost generation of youths who found no meaning in the standard American model - high school, work, family, suburbs. Malcontented generations always sprung up after wars - consider the expats of Hemingway's movable feast - even the Civil War, where Go West Young Man meant getting out of having to conform to the expectations of a more rigid social, economic and familial set up. The Post WWII era was no different, and the nihilism portrayed in the 50s was real.
Nam provided a way for obstreperous, disaffected youth in the early to mid 60s to find adventure or at least escape the boredom and certainty of what was a fixed, predictable game for them. Enlist and you might see the world, maybe not, but you sure as hell would get out of your hometown, your old circle of boring predictable aimless friends, your semi-commitments to your girl friend and most of all, your family.
In my home town only about 25-30% wound up going to college anyway, so what were you gonna do? Get a job, get drunk, get laid, get in trouble. We lived in a resort area where most of the jobs were service jobs - not manly pursuits. The few factory jobs around required you to know somebody, as did the trades - electrician, carpenter, dry wall, plumber. Fathers, who had grown up in the aimless and hopeless unemployment of the Depression, had told their sons that the Army was the best thing that ever happened to them, despite the fighting. So many guys figured, what the hell...
In early 68, in a back water place like ours, there were no drugs really. The only ones who smoked dope (as we called it) were the ones that came back from college, where it was plentiful and readily accessible. If you wanted to get marijuana you had to know somebody on "the Ave", the main drag of the nearby black district a couple of towns over. Only the elite schools offered LSD and other psychodelics and there weren't any guys from our town who went to those places, so there weren't many who could come back to spread their gospel.
Booze and beers were the drugs of choice, or, rather, the only drugs around. The cops didn't mess with you as long as you weren't a complete asshole about it. Guys would get drunk, get in fights, get in trouble, but it was tolerated. A guy could work as a mechanic at a gas station, get paid, and on weekends get in trouble. Nobody sweated it.
But it was boring as hell...
No, if you weren't the type to go to college, and most of us weren't, the Army looked like a great way to get the hell out of there.
Nam was wallpaper. Nam was background. There was the GI bill, with its educational benefits, but more importantly its housing and training benefits. By 68 there had been a good 10 years of guys who had joined up, gone to Germany or one of those Asian outposts, had a piece of cake tour of duty, and comeback with honor, maybe some skills, and some cachet that employers loved. And you had gotten the hell out of here without having to sit yet again in stupid classrooms "becoming astronauts" - that is, taking up space.
What happened tho, was that occasionally Nam would reach out and tap you on the shoulder and remind you that it was there, still lurking in the shadows. Somebody would have a cousin, boyfriend, uncle - always from another town - get killed. When it happened it was surreal, like being struck by lightning. Unlike the stories we'd heard about every family losing someone in WWII, virtually no one had lost anyone in Nam. On those rare cases when it did happen, the grieving family was looked on as particularly unfortunate, and maybe even cursed. Not honored, but rather treated like lepers - unfortunate, but to be shunned, since their tragedy was so out of tune with the rest of what was going on, which was prosperity, upward mobility and by all means fun.
But by the beginning of 1968, despite perhaps a hundred of enlistees out of our little town, nobody had been killed. Enlisting was not seen as a risk of death really. You sign up, you do basic, they ship you somewhere, you do your tour, and you come back. Just like as if you had gone to college, but a lot more fun and mayhem.
Nam was solidly in the background of my life. Then, Bip!
It happened quickly. It was shown in a montage of the clean up after the so called Tet Offensive. The VC had launched a whole series of surprise attacks that shook everyone up, but by mid February it was clear things were back under control. At least that's what was said.
But there was something different now. The body counts continued, like the scores of an undefeated team, but there was a new dimension. It's hard to put one's finger on it, but the best I can do, even 40 years on, is to say that there was now a moral dimension.
God knows who that poor wretch was that was eliminated, "execution style" as they say, or what he had done. He might have killed babies for all we knew, drank their blood and used their bodies for sandbags. We had been continually told how savage and backwards the VC were, so nothing could be put past them.
Even still, we were the Americans, the good guys, the ones who treated prisoners well and helped rebuild our enemies after they were vanquished, even if they were as brutal and cruel as the Japanese and Germans. We were not like them godless Commies who were capable of tremendous unfeeling cruelty.
But even tho it was another Vietnamese who rubbed out the prisoner with so much dispatch and disregard right in front of us from Coast to Coast, nonetheless he was our guy, our representative, our ally, and to watch that happen sent several new and disturbing messages.
Were they guys we were fighting with, fighting for, just as bad as the bad guys? Were we putting up with this unacceptable, unAmerican behavior?
Or had things taken a bad turn? Were things really so bad that such desperate measures were justified merely to keep things under control?
Whatever it was, whatever the voice over and body counts said about our "victory", the emotional impact gave a very different message indeed.
Nam was not a soap opera. Nam was not a sporting event. Nam was spinning out of control, and about to enmesh us in its web in a way that threatened to take us way, way out of our prosperity drenched sunlight and into the fog of terror, tension and cruelty.
I was 15. I had 3 years of HS left. Three years is a long time and the war would certainly be over by then. I was going to go to college. I would not have to enlist, and I would not get drafted. Nam was far away, and like the Berlin Wall and the Cuban Missile Crisis, it was just part of the furniture of the Cold War, which, by 1968, was a negligible part of the prosperity of the times. I had nothing to worry about.
Still, that image stuck. Bip! I don't think it took more than 3 or 4 seconds. Gone. Just like that. Right on the street in Saigon.
There was something wrong with this war. Something wrong, something turning us into someone we didn't want to be, someone we were not back here, back home, back in the USA. Maybe those college kids knew something we didn't, those kids going door to door for McCarthy in New Hampshire.
I didn't know.
All I knew was this guy threw this other guy down on his knees and then Bip!
And things would never be the same...
Saturday, April 5, 2008
Flask
I love basketball.
It was my best game. I played football and ran track, but I hated football practice and didn't want to be a lineman. I played center as a legacy of Intermediate School football, when I was huge and smart, but by freshman year I wasn't as relatively tall and there were many guys I went up against who outweighed me by 50 lbs or more. Hike the ball, make sure the QB gets it right, then get your brains bashed in. I felt I should be an end, a receiver, but it took a long time to talk the coaches into it.
Basketball was another story. In basketball practice you don't do inane, boring, unrelated drills like you do as a lineman in football. In basketball practice, you play basketball.
As I previously mentioned, in 8th Grade I was quite the basketball star. But I failed to grow over the next year, so instead of playing center or even power forward I was moved down to the 3. This was okay, but it required a lot more dribbling than I was used to, and less rebounding and layups, both of which I excelled at.
To make matters worse, I wasn't starting. I had gone to grammar school in another town, a sending district. All the other kids had come up thru the normal Intermediate School and the Frosh coach knew them and was comfortable with them. Thus his starting five were kids he knew. I felt I was much better than they, but I had to wait for my opportunity.
Meanwhile I spent a lot of time on the bench. There were a lot of marginal players on the bench and that stuck in my craw as well, to be lumped in with such a bunch. One of those kids was a short kid, barely 5 feet tall. He lacked skills, but not confidence. "See these feet? They're the feet of a six footer!" he would pronounce confidently, as if it was just a matter of time before he would be a starter. He also had a motor mouth. Yap, yap, yap, six footer, six footer, six footer... Cut me a break!
I finally got my chance one game. One of the starters got into foul trouble early. The coach looked down the bench and there wasn't much there. He called my number. Well, I went in and kicked mofobo. I got rebounds, steals, scored 17 points, all in about a quarter and a half. The crowd went nuts (it was a home game), helped by members of the harem. It was by far the best single performance by anyone in the young season. I was sure I was starting.
I did indeed start the next game and did equivalently well, on the road. And I started the next one too. I was getting into my new role as a swing man, and altho my shot wasn't that great, my moves were and I had a habit of getting my own rebound and putting it in. Altho there were a few guys taller than I on the team, I was by far the best jumper, so I jumped center, even tho I played the 3.
Then one day early in January the coach called me into his office. "Listen, I'm not gonna start you tomorrow..." Why not?? I've been playing well. I'm one of your main scorers and rebounders. I jump center, for chrissakes!
The coach kinda shifted in his chair. "I know that. Doncha think I know that?" Okay, so what's the problem?
"The higher ups wanna give some other guys some more playing time." The "higher ups" was the varsity coach. "Some other guys" were the taller, less talented ones. I can't blame him, he had to look at the future. They had 4 or five inches on me. He didn't want to depend on a 3 who was 5'11" and quite likely had stopped growing. I couldn't do anything about it, the frosh coach couldn't do anything, either. I accepted it.
We tanked as the taller guys struggled. None of them ever made varsity as it turned out. But hey, they had to look to the future, they made their bet, and it didn't turn out. We struggled the rest of the season and finished a game or two over .500.
Towards the end of the season I wasn't playing much. I'd pack my uniform, go on the bus, sit the bench, take a shower, get back on the bus.
One time we had a Saturday afternoon game. It was a home game and gonna be over at around 6. The CYO dance started at 7:30. The plan was to go right from the game, meet up with Bruiser and Fatty, do some drinking and go to the dance.
Since I wasn't playing much, my gym bag became the most convenient place to keep my books. They stayed in there, rather than in my locker, even on weekends. I wore my cons all the time so all I needed was my uniform to play; I didn't even keep a jock in there.
Given that I was going drinking right after the game, and given that I made my own wine, I filled a flask that my father had lying around and put it in my gym bag. It was a glass bottle, one that had had whiskey in it that my father hadn't touched in what seemed to be years. There was maybe an ounce at the bottom. I figured he wouldn't miss it. I poured out the whiskey (which I detested) and filled it up with my wine.
Now my gym bag was rugged. I lugged it to school every day, it went to all my classes, it went on the bus to away games, everything. It still looked new, tho, because nothing ever happened to it.
But don't it always seem to go like this? The ONE day I have a flask of wine in my bag, THE ONE DAY, and one of my teammates, who had no way of knowing I had anything but books and my uniform in there, who had to know that it was heavy, decided to kick my bag! Kick it! While I was carrying it! Kick it! What, was this guy nuts? He coulda broken his foot, it was so heavy! He kicked it!
Needless to say, he kicked it right where the flask was, and it broke. And he hurt his foot! He's complaining, dancing around, and meanwhile purple liquid is dripping from the bottom. Now I've got a big problem. I run into the boys room, dripping wine with every step. I grab as many paper towels as I can, mopping up the floor in the bathroom, tracing my steps, mopping up the mess in the hall, saying "Shit! Shit! Shit!" all the while. Aside from smelling like a winery, the hall floor still has drips and drabs. I realize holy crap, I have to clean up the bag... THE BAG! Not only are all my books in there, my UNIFORM is in there. And it's a home game so the jersey is WHITE. Oh Christ! Not any more...
I quickly duck back into the boys room, mopping with my foot as I go. I get into the boys room and survey the damage. I pull out my uniform. Shoot! The jersey is not bad, but the spot is noticeable. I quickly rinse it out. Rinse, scrub with hand soap, wring, scrub again. The jersey is wet and I gotta use it in a half hour. How the hell am I gonna dry it.
Luckily there was one of those hand air dryer things. Usually they don't work in schools, but our school was brand new so this one worked. I put it under there for what seemed to be 20 rounds. It was finally dry. If you looked really hard you could see where the stains were, but in those funky gym lights no one would notice. Especially sitting on the bench, no one would notice, altho it did take on the smell of that nasty hand soap.
Relieved, I took a deep breath. Then I remembered, oh no, my freaking books! I slipped on my uniform over my clothes and frantically began to empty the bag. There was broken glass, but since it had been full, the flask was broken into big pieces. I carefully removed them, and then began taking out my books, one by one.
Now, a gym bag in those days was sort of pyramidic. Thus you placed your books in them in pyramidic fashion, largest ones on the bottom, working backwards until the smallest ones were at the top. My 3 ring binder notebook was mounted on its spine, but it was plastic, and the big rings kept the paper from getting stained. It was easy to clean up. As for my book pyramid, all the liquid had drained to the bottom, so only the bottom book was affected, the largest - my Western Civilization textbook. By a stroke of luck, altho it had a cloth bound heavy cardboard cover, it was purple. Aside from the smell and the slight warping, you couldn't notice. I daubed it dry, and mopped up the book bag, then refilled it.
The next day, as I began my homework, when I cracked open my Western Civ book I realized I had not been so lucky. Wine had seeped around the edges and up the spine, bleeding into the white pages like a Rorschach. Page after page had a noticeable purple tint, a psychedelic stain. Oh shit...
Fast forward to June. Last day of school. Gotta hand in your books. When my name gets called to turn in my book, I bring it up and present it. The teacher, Mr. Apito (more about him, later), goes to perfunctorily leave thru the pages but is surprised by the purple moire's on just about every page.
"What the hell happened here?"
I decided to tell the truth. Why, I still don't know... "It's wine stains. I had a flask of wine in my gym bag and some kid kicked it, it broke and the wine got all over my book."
Apito looked at me, half stunned, half angry. I began to question the wisdom of my move. I was sure I was going to the office, gonna get suspended on the last day, maybe carrying over into sophomore year. And my mother would find out! I was toast...
"Don't hand me that crap! You didn't spill wine on this book!" I didn't know what to say to that! Was this guy delusional? Shoot, if you sniffed it really close you could freaking SMELL the wine! I was silent. I had no idea what to say or do.
He bailed me out. "This is grape juice! You spilled grape juice on it, didn't ya!"
I stared at him. I just stared at him. I musta blinked, I stared so long.
"You spilled grape juice on this perfectly good book. I really oughta make you pay for it, for the whole book, to replace it." He shook his head in annoyance. He muttered something out of frustration, probably profanely. I just stood there.
"Yeah, grape juice" I said. "You got me."
"Aaah, go siddown. Just go!" He shooed me off dismissively, like I had just ruined his whole school year. I turned around and went back to my seat, feeling like someone who'd just survived 5 rounds of Russian Roulette.
I could swear I heard him mutter as I walked away, "Goddamn grape juice..."
It was my best game. I played football and ran track, but I hated football practice and didn't want to be a lineman. I played center as a legacy of Intermediate School football, when I was huge and smart, but by freshman year I wasn't as relatively tall and there were many guys I went up against who outweighed me by 50 lbs or more. Hike the ball, make sure the QB gets it right, then get your brains bashed in. I felt I should be an end, a receiver, but it took a long time to talk the coaches into it.
Basketball was another story. In basketball practice you don't do inane, boring, unrelated drills like you do as a lineman in football. In basketball practice, you play basketball.
As I previously mentioned, in 8th Grade I was quite the basketball star. But I failed to grow over the next year, so instead of playing center or even power forward I was moved down to the 3. This was okay, but it required a lot more dribbling than I was used to, and less rebounding and layups, both of which I excelled at.
To make matters worse, I wasn't starting. I had gone to grammar school in another town, a sending district. All the other kids had come up thru the normal Intermediate School and the Frosh coach knew them and was comfortable with them. Thus his starting five were kids he knew. I felt I was much better than they, but I had to wait for my opportunity.
Meanwhile I spent a lot of time on the bench. There were a lot of marginal players on the bench and that stuck in my craw as well, to be lumped in with such a bunch. One of those kids was a short kid, barely 5 feet tall. He lacked skills, but not confidence. "See these feet? They're the feet of a six footer!" he would pronounce confidently, as if it was just a matter of time before he would be a starter. He also had a motor mouth. Yap, yap, yap, six footer, six footer, six footer... Cut me a break!
I finally got my chance one game. One of the starters got into foul trouble early. The coach looked down the bench and there wasn't much there. He called my number. Well, I went in and kicked mofobo. I got rebounds, steals, scored 17 points, all in about a quarter and a half. The crowd went nuts (it was a home game), helped by members of the harem. It was by far the best single performance by anyone in the young season. I was sure I was starting.
I did indeed start the next game and did equivalently well, on the road. And I started the next one too. I was getting into my new role as a swing man, and altho my shot wasn't that great, my moves were and I had a habit of getting my own rebound and putting it in. Altho there were a few guys taller than I on the team, I was by far the best jumper, so I jumped center, even tho I played the 3.
Then one day early in January the coach called me into his office. "Listen, I'm not gonna start you tomorrow..." Why not?? I've been playing well. I'm one of your main scorers and rebounders. I jump center, for chrissakes!
The coach kinda shifted in his chair. "I know that. Doncha think I know that?" Okay, so what's the problem?
"The higher ups wanna give some other guys some more playing time." The "higher ups" was the varsity coach. "Some other guys" were the taller, less talented ones. I can't blame him, he had to look at the future. They had 4 or five inches on me. He didn't want to depend on a 3 who was 5'11" and quite likely had stopped growing. I couldn't do anything about it, the frosh coach couldn't do anything, either. I accepted it.
We tanked as the taller guys struggled. None of them ever made varsity as it turned out. But hey, they had to look to the future, they made their bet, and it didn't turn out. We struggled the rest of the season and finished a game or two over .500.
Towards the end of the season I wasn't playing much. I'd pack my uniform, go on the bus, sit the bench, take a shower, get back on the bus.
One time we had a Saturday afternoon game. It was a home game and gonna be over at around 6. The CYO dance started at 7:30. The plan was to go right from the game, meet up with Bruiser and Fatty, do some drinking and go to the dance.
Since I wasn't playing much, my gym bag became the most convenient place to keep my books. They stayed in there, rather than in my locker, even on weekends. I wore my cons all the time so all I needed was my uniform to play; I didn't even keep a jock in there.
Given that I was going drinking right after the game, and given that I made my own wine, I filled a flask that my father had lying around and put it in my gym bag. It was a glass bottle, one that had had whiskey in it that my father hadn't touched in what seemed to be years. There was maybe an ounce at the bottom. I figured he wouldn't miss it. I poured out the whiskey (which I detested) and filled it up with my wine.
Now my gym bag was rugged. I lugged it to school every day, it went to all my classes, it went on the bus to away games, everything. It still looked new, tho, because nothing ever happened to it.
But don't it always seem to go like this? The ONE day I have a flask of wine in my bag, THE ONE DAY, and one of my teammates, who had no way of knowing I had anything but books and my uniform in there, who had to know that it was heavy, decided to kick my bag! Kick it! While I was carrying it! Kick it! What, was this guy nuts? He coulda broken his foot, it was so heavy! He kicked it!
Needless to say, he kicked it right where the flask was, and it broke. And he hurt his foot! He's complaining, dancing around, and meanwhile purple liquid is dripping from the bottom. Now I've got a big problem. I run into the boys room, dripping wine with every step. I grab as many paper towels as I can, mopping up the floor in the bathroom, tracing my steps, mopping up the mess in the hall, saying "Shit! Shit! Shit!" all the while. Aside from smelling like a winery, the hall floor still has drips and drabs. I realize holy crap, I have to clean up the bag... THE BAG! Not only are all my books in there, my UNIFORM is in there. And it's a home game so the jersey is WHITE. Oh Christ! Not any more...
I quickly duck back into the boys room, mopping with my foot as I go. I get into the boys room and survey the damage. I pull out my uniform. Shoot! The jersey is not bad, but the spot is noticeable. I quickly rinse it out. Rinse, scrub with hand soap, wring, scrub again. The jersey is wet and I gotta use it in a half hour. How the hell am I gonna dry it.
Luckily there was one of those hand air dryer things. Usually they don't work in schools, but our school was brand new so this one worked. I put it under there for what seemed to be 20 rounds. It was finally dry. If you looked really hard you could see where the stains were, but in those funky gym lights no one would notice. Especially sitting on the bench, no one would notice, altho it did take on the smell of that nasty hand soap.
Relieved, I took a deep breath. Then I remembered, oh no, my freaking books! I slipped on my uniform over my clothes and frantically began to empty the bag. There was broken glass, but since it had been full, the flask was broken into big pieces. I carefully removed them, and then began taking out my books, one by one.
Now, a gym bag in those days was sort of pyramidic. Thus you placed your books in them in pyramidic fashion, largest ones on the bottom, working backwards until the smallest ones were at the top. My 3 ring binder notebook was mounted on its spine, but it was plastic, and the big rings kept the paper from getting stained. It was easy to clean up. As for my book pyramid, all the liquid had drained to the bottom, so only the bottom book was affected, the largest - my Western Civilization textbook. By a stroke of luck, altho it had a cloth bound heavy cardboard cover, it was purple. Aside from the smell and the slight warping, you couldn't notice. I daubed it dry, and mopped up the book bag, then refilled it.
The next day, as I began my homework, when I cracked open my Western Civ book I realized I had not been so lucky. Wine had seeped around the edges and up the spine, bleeding into the white pages like a Rorschach. Page after page had a noticeable purple tint, a psychedelic stain. Oh shit...
Fast forward to June. Last day of school. Gotta hand in your books. When my name gets called to turn in my book, I bring it up and present it. The teacher, Mr. Apito (more about him, later), goes to perfunctorily leave thru the pages but is surprised by the purple moire's on just about every page.
"What the hell happened here?"
I decided to tell the truth. Why, I still don't know... "It's wine stains. I had a flask of wine in my gym bag and some kid kicked it, it broke and the wine got all over my book."
Apito looked at me, half stunned, half angry. I began to question the wisdom of my move. I was sure I was going to the office, gonna get suspended on the last day, maybe carrying over into sophomore year. And my mother would find out! I was toast...
"Don't hand me that crap! You didn't spill wine on this book!" I didn't know what to say to that! Was this guy delusional? Shoot, if you sniffed it really close you could freaking SMELL the wine! I was silent. I had no idea what to say or do.
He bailed me out. "This is grape juice! You spilled grape juice on it, didn't ya!"
I stared at him. I just stared at him. I musta blinked, I stared so long.
"You spilled grape juice on this perfectly good book. I really oughta make you pay for it, for the whole book, to replace it." He shook his head in annoyance. He muttered something out of frustration, probably profanely. I just stood there.
"Yeah, grape juice" I said. "You got me."
"Aaah, go siddown. Just go!" He shooed me off dismissively, like I had just ruined his whole school year. I turned around and went back to my seat, feeling like someone who'd just survived 5 rounds of Russian Roulette.
I could swear I heard him mutter as I walked away, "Goddamn grape juice..."
Brillo
In June of 1962, when I was 9 going on 10, I was running across the school lawn to the yard behind to shoot some baskets. It happened to be Graduation Day at the school, a grammar school, and some guys were hanging out outside on one of the stoops of the doors. They were singing acapella, "As we stroll along to-oo-ge-e- ther..."...
I stopped in my tracks. I was transfixed. I think they were in high school, probably only freshmen, there to egg on some buddy of theirs graduating that night. I stood there, enraptured. When they were done I clapped. They threw things at me (like I think empty beer cans) and hurled insults at me, driving me off. I ran off to go shoot hoops. I didn't realize it then, but I had fallen seriously in love. With acapella.
Fast forward five years. The world had changed, particularly music. Doo-wop was long dead. White groups were all trying to be like the Beatles. But black music, "soul" music, still had singing, and harmony. I had abandoned the "white" radio stations (WABC, WMCA, WINS) back in 6th grade for the "black" ones - WNJR, WWRL and WLIB, primarily so I could still hear that vocal harmony.
Once again it was Graduation Night, this time my own, from 8th Grade, from the same school. One of the girls in my class had a party, so I went. It was pretty much a 45s make out party, a lot of dancing, that kind of thing.
All of a sudden, this girls shouts "Can I have your attention?" We stopped what we were doing and took the needle off the records. "My brother's group would like to perform a song for yiz."
We were down in the quasi finished basement and over by the cellar wall was a narrow staircase that emptied out onto a small landing. Down came these 4 white guys, "pressed out" as we used to say, in their banlon shirts and smoking jackets, pimpin'.
"I know you wanna leave me," one of them called out, holding his hand as if he were clutching a mike, "but I refuse to let you go-o-o". The other three were dippin' and divin' as he sang. Soon they were joining in, in unison, aping the Temptations.
I use the word "sang" loosely. The histrionics were great, but not only was the singing in unison, it was off key. They finished to rousing applause and went back upstairs.
I knew her brother. He had gone to Catholic school but hung out at the school yard at the other side of town, and I had played stickball and basketball with him. He was a nice guy and altho I feared him physically (his nickname was Bruiser, and he was quite muscular) he was very friendly to me and quite approachable.
More important - what they had done struck a chord with me. My old love of vocal harmony was rekindled. I ran upstairs after them.
Nowadays it seems things are different, but back then your grade in school was pretty close to your caste. You did not travel above or below except in rare circumstances. The fact that I was a newly graduated 8th grader and they were in HS magnified this. Me going upstairs to talk to these guys was an extreme broach of social etiquette, risking unnamed social consequences. To say nothing of humiliation and embarassment.
Nonetheless, my love for acapella won out. I would take the risk.
I went all the way up to the second floor of the house and knocked on Bruiser's door. One of the other guys opened the door and scowled, but Bruiser smiled and welcomed me in. "Hey, guys, that was great, but you should sing the background like this - " and I pointed out some harmony parts. The other guys didn't like the advice, but Bruiser was supportive. "Yeah, hey yeah, that's good." He patted me on the back and escorted me out the door.
You mighta thought that was the end of it, but a week later Bruiser called me up. "Hey, were starting up a new singing group and we'd like you to audition." This was a guy gonna be a junior in the fall, and I was a mere freshman. "Sure, you kiddin'? But what about those other guys?" He didn't want to bash them, since they were his friends, but it was clear he understood that when it came to real singing, these guys we'ren't gonna cut it. "We wanna move in a new direction". I jumped at the chance. "I can really help you out a lot. I know harmony, and music and..." He wanted to make sure I understood that it was just a try out, that I might not make it, that nothing was guaranteed. I understood.
The "audition" actually turned out to be he and I auditioning other guys, to see who could actually sing, actually hear. We wound up taking nobody.
Bruiser was confident that one of his original four, a kid nicknamed Fatty, would work out, as long as we could pry him from his social calendar. Fatty was a year younger than Bruiser and a year older than I was, but his easy going character and gregarious manner made him quite popular, even with older kids. Bruiser and he had played football together and they were two of a kind in the way in which they could get everyone to like them. It took a week, but Bruiser finally coaxed Fatty to "try out".
Fatty had the best ear by far of any of the guys we tried out, and by the end of the session the three of us were doing basic three part harmony, pretty well. Our voices had complimentary timbres and it sounded pretty good. I knew we had found our man. Bruiser was optimistic as well, but Fatty hesitated. It seemed like a big commitment. But Bruiser talked him into it. We needed a name - the Fabulons (my suggestion) were born.
We practiced all summer long, particularly under a bridge by the beach we all went to - that is, that the older kids like Bruiser and Fatty went to. We developed quite a tight harmony. Our singing gave us extra cachet with the girls, which was a plus for Bruiser and Fatty, but not for me, since I was clearly below caste. We got to sing at a couple of sweet 16's and things like that, using various personnel. But I sang lead in those cases, and the background clearly suffered.
When the fall started, fall of my freshman year in 1967, we had a really good and tight background, but no lead. You might have thought it would be easy to find a lead singer, given how reliably good we were and how much glamour was associated with it, but we spent almost all of the fall trying to find one. We found guys with personality that couldn't sing a note, and guys who could sing but had the personality of a polenta.
Fun as it was to learn new backgrounds and groove on how good we were, it was getting to be a drag not being able to sing out due to the lack of a lead. This led us to take several risks. We even tried out a guy who was several years older than we were, who turned out to be an ex-con and way too full of himself for us.
Finally, around Christmas, Bruiser suggested a kid that he had gone to Catholic school with, a guy with a dead on beautifully strong voice, with an equally legendary, flighty temper. He was half Jay Black, half Huntz Hall. And he was all Jake LaMotta.
An FBI (full blooded Italian), he had a big curly head of hair, a "whi-fro". Bruiser called him Brillo-head. This was shortened to just Brillo.
We sounded really great with Brillo, between our background and his lead, altho he never complimented us. Practicing with him was dicey - he didn't always go to school, and when he did he was in the shop program, while the other guys were college prep. His father wanted him to know the value of a dollar, so he worked nearly every day after school at his uncle's glass business, which limited the days we could sing together. And when he had an off day he was more interested in being with his girlfriend than spending time with us, understandably.
The hard work was in the background, and since he never sang background he would have to wait, fidgeting, while we worked things out. All he had to do was show up and show off, while we had to make sure we blended and followed properly. Basically, it was a drag for him to come to practice, and a drag to sing without him.
Finally, his father decided if his son was gonna sing with us we had to get something going. This guy was not a doctor or banker; he was a cab driver, and where we lived most decent, middle class people drove. The only people who needed a cab were the indigent, the welfare mothers who went shopping once a month with their food stamps, the guys who couldn't get a license, primarily since they had just gotten out of jail, the mentally dubious. His work wasn't exactly glamourous, and not exactly stable. We didn't know the details, but in the circles he frequented there were people who needed various favors from time to time, and we speculated that this cab driver supplemented his income in that way.
That's unfair, since we had no proof, but he did set us up at his favorite bar to sing a coupla numbers. It was a cold night in early February, 1968. We were pumped to finally be performing. That was lost as soon as we walked in the joint.
First of all, it was very, very dark, except for a small light above the pool table, and smoky. The place was populated by all men, and this wasn't a gay bar, not by a long shot! Fatty in particular was spooked by the place, fearing the "rough crowd" of the place. Bruiser wasn't too pleased either. Brillo was keyed up, in that Huntz Hall cum Jake LaMotta way. Me, I was just worried about everybody doing their parts right, oblivious to the surroundings. At first...
So Brillo's father herds us into the place, proud as can be, speaking words of encouragement to us and batting away his son's over-the-top argumentative comments. We slouched into the main barroom and stood against the wall. We were all underaged but no one noticed. The bartender asked us if we wanted a drink. Brillo was all set to order a scotch and soda when his father intervened and said "Get 'em all ginger ales!" He then stepped up on a little riser that was in the corner of the room. "Hey, yous guys, lemme have your attention, hanh?"
The patrons pretty much continued what they were doing, altho a few looked up, not impressed. "C'mon, hanh? I ain't gonna bite cha..." He persisted until he got the attention of the reluctant crowd, such as it was.
"These kids here, my son and his cohorts, they wanna sing for yiz, so give 'em a hand here!" He started clapping and a few in the crowd gave unenthusiastic applause as well. We mounted the riser nervously - Brillo out of aggression, Bruiser and Fatty out of worry, me out of concern for our performance.
We started singing "Till Then", the old Mills Brothers song, updated to the doo-wop style of the Classics. Brillo sounded beautiful. It was our custom in the backgroud to face each other in a small semicircle and that helped calm the other two guys, which helped them hit their parts well, which helped me relax. The Fabulons were on their way!
During the first release, for whatever reason, some old guy near the pool table began to heckle us. "That ain't the way the song goes!" Brillo was annoyed by this but kept on singing. The heckler didn't relent. "Hey, keep quiet when they're singin'!" Brillo's father yelled. The guy at the pool table waved his hand in disgust.
Maybe we shoulda been smart and end the song after the third verse, but the arrangement called for two releases, and there was no way we were gonna be able to stop easily. Besides, we sounded, to my critical ears, really good. But altho the heckler had seemed to retreat after his wave, he reemerged once we went back into the release. He actually started to boo us.
Brillo's father began to object to this. "Aaah, siddown an' shaddap!" "I ain't gonna shaddap. This is bullshit!" "Don't tell me that! You don't know music, ya deaf bastard!"
Then all of a sudden, just as he was supposed to sing "But pray that our loss, is nothing but time" Brillo lost it. Unlike his father, he didn't resort to words. Instead, he charged the guy, who had to be 40 years older than he was. Brillo's old man tried to restrain him but by then Brillo is barking right in the face of the guy, his curly hair bobbing up and down as he spit out his words.
Next thing you know, somebody picked up a chair and broke it. Things started flying, including fists. The bartender calmly ducked under the bar to wait out the melee. "Holy shit!" yelled Fatty and tried to push by me to get out of there. I was just stunned. I had not anticipated the chaos and just stood there, mouth agape. "We better get going" Bruiser said as he ushered me out the back door.
We didn't wait around for Brillo or his dad, our ride, but instead walked the 3 mile home in the cold winter night. Needless to say, that was the last time we sang with Brillo.
And we were back to not having a lead...
I stopped in my tracks. I was transfixed. I think they were in high school, probably only freshmen, there to egg on some buddy of theirs graduating that night. I stood there, enraptured. When they were done I clapped. They threw things at me (like I think empty beer cans) and hurled insults at me, driving me off. I ran off to go shoot hoops. I didn't realize it then, but I had fallen seriously in love. With acapella.
Fast forward five years. The world had changed, particularly music. Doo-wop was long dead. White groups were all trying to be like the Beatles. But black music, "soul" music, still had singing, and harmony. I had abandoned the "white" radio stations (WABC, WMCA, WINS) back in 6th grade for the "black" ones - WNJR, WWRL and WLIB, primarily so I could still hear that vocal harmony.
Once again it was Graduation Night, this time my own, from 8th Grade, from the same school. One of the girls in my class had a party, so I went. It was pretty much a 45s make out party, a lot of dancing, that kind of thing.
All of a sudden, this girls shouts "Can I have your attention?" We stopped what we were doing and took the needle off the records. "My brother's group would like to perform a song for yiz."
We were down in the quasi finished basement and over by the cellar wall was a narrow staircase that emptied out onto a small landing. Down came these 4 white guys, "pressed out" as we used to say, in their banlon shirts and smoking jackets, pimpin'.
"I know you wanna leave me," one of them called out, holding his hand as if he were clutching a mike, "but I refuse to let you go-o-o". The other three were dippin' and divin' as he sang. Soon they were joining in, in unison, aping the Temptations.
I use the word "sang" loosely. The histrionics were great, but not only was the singing in unison, it was off key. They finished to rousing applause and went back upstairs.
I knew her brother. He had gone to Catholic school but hung out at the school yard at the other side of town, and I had played stickball and basketball with him. He was a nice guy and altho I feared him physically (his nickname was Bruiser, and he was quite muscular) he was very friendly to me and quite approachable.
More important - what they had done struck a chord with me. My old love of vocal harmony was rekindled. I ran upstairs after them.
Nowadays it seems things are different, but back then your grade in school was pretty close to your caste. You did not travel above or below except in rare circumstances. The fact that I was a newly graduated 8th grader and they were in HS magnified this. Me going upstairs to talk to these guys was an extreme broach of social etiquette, risking unnamed social consequences. To say nothing of humiliation and embarassment.
Nonetheless, my love for acapella won out. I would take the risk.
I went all the way up to the second floor of the house and knocked on Bruiser's door. One of the other guys opened the door and scowled, but Bruiser smiled and welcomed me in. "Hey, guys, that was great, but you should sing the background like this - " and I pointed out some harmony parts. The other guys didn't like the advice, but Bruiser was supportive. "Yeah, hey yeah, that's good." He patted me on the back and escorted me out the door.
You mighta thought that was the end of it, but a week later Bruiser called me up. "Hey, were starting up a new singing group and we'd like you to audition." This was a guy gonna be a junior in the fall, and I was a mere freshman. "Sure, you kiddin'? But what about those other guys?" He didn't want to bash them, since they were his friends, but it was clear he understood that when it came to real singing, these guys we'ren't gonna cut it. "We wanna move in a new direction". I jumped at the chance. "I can really help you out a lot. I know harmony, and music and..." He wanted to make sure I understood that it was just a try out, that I might not make it, that nothing was guaranteed. I understood.
The "audition" actually turned out to be he and I auditioning other guys, to see who could actually sing, actually hear. We wound up taking nobody.
Bruiser was confident that one of his original four, a kid nicknamed Fatty, would work out, as long as we could pry him from his social calendar. Fatty was a year younger than Bruiser and a year older than I was, but his easy going character and gregarious manner made him quite popular, even with older kids. Bruiser and he had played football together and they were two of a kind in the way in which they could get everyone to like them. It took a week, but Bruiser finally coaxed Fatty to "try out".
Fatty had the best ear by far of any of the guys we tried out, and by the end of the session the three of us were doing basic three part harmony, pretty well. Our voices had complimentary timbres and it sounded pretty good. I knew we had found our man. Bruiser was optimistic as well, but Fatty hesitated. It seemed like a big commitment. But Bruiser talked him into it. We needed a name - the Fabulons (my suggestion) were born.
We practiced all summer long, particularly under a bridge by the beach we all went to - that is, that the older kids like Bruiser and Fatty went to. We developed quite a tight harmony. Our singing gave us extra cachet with the girls, which was a plus for Bruiser and Fatty, but not for me, since I was clearly below caste. We got to sing at a couple of sweet 16's and things like that, using various personnel. But I sang lead in those cases, and the background clearly suffered.
When the fall started, fall of my freshman year in 1967, we had a really good and tight background, but no lead. You might have thought it would be easy to find a lead singer, given how reliably good we were and how much glamour was associated with it, but we spent almost all of the fall trying to find one. We found guys with personality that couldn't sing a note, and guys who could sing but had the personality of a polenta.
Fun as it was to learn new backgrounds and groove on how good we were, it was getting to be a drag not being able to sing out due to the lack of a lead. This led us to take several risks. We even tried out a guy who was several years older than we were, who turned out to be an ex-con and way too full of himself for us.
Finally, around Christmas, Bruiser suggested a kid that he had gone to Catholic school with, a guy with a dead on beautifully strong voice, with an equally legendary, flighty temper. He was half Jay Black, half Huntz Hall. And he was all Jake LaMotta.
An FBI (full blooded Italian), he had a big curly head of hair, a "whi-fro". Bruiser called him Brillo-head. This was shortened to just Brillo.
We sounded really great with Brillo, between our background and his lead, altho he never complimented us. Practicing with him was dicey - he didn't always go to school, and when he did he was in the shop program, while the other guys were college prep. His father wanted him to know the value of a dollar, so he worked nearly every day after school at his uncle's glass business, which limited the days we could sing together. And when he had an off day he was more interested in being with his girlfriend than spending time with us, understandably.
The hard work was in the background, and since he never sang background he would have to wait, fidgeting, while we worked things out. All he had to do was show up and show off, while we had to make sure we blended and followed properly. Basically, it was a drag for him to come to practice, and a drag to sing without him.
Finally, his father decided if his son was gonna sing with us we had to get something going. This guy was not a doctor or banker; he was a cab driver, and where we lived most decent, middle class people drove. The only people who needed a cab were the indigent, the welfare mothers who went shopping once a month with their food stamps, the guys who couldn't get a license, primarily since they had just gotten out of jail, the mentally dubious. His work wasn't exactly glamourous, and not exactly stable. We didn't know the details, but in the circles he frequented there were people who needed various favors from time to time, and we speculated that this cab driver supplemented his income in that way.
That's unfair, since we had no proof, but he did set us up at his favorite bar to sing a coupla numbers. It was a cold night in early February, 1968. We were pumped to finally be performing. That was lost as soon as we walked in the joint.
First of all, it was very, very dark, except for a small light above the pool table, and smoky. The place was populated by all men, and this wasn't a gay bar, not by a long shot! Fatty in particular was spooked by the place, fearing the "rough crowd" of the place. Bruiser wasn't too pleased either. Brillo was keyed up, in that Huntz Hall cum Jake LaMotta way. Me, I was just worried about everybody doing their parts right, oblivious to the surroundings. At first...
So Brillo's father herds us into the place, proud as can be, speaking words of encouragement to us and batting away his son's over-the-top argumentative comments. We slouched into the main barroom and stood against the wall. We were all underaged but no one noticed. The bartender asked us if we wanted a drink. Brillo was all set to order a scotch and soda when his father intervened and said "Get 'em all ginger ales!" He then stepped up on a little riser that was in the corner of the room. "Hey, yous guys, lemme have your attention, hanh?"
The patrons pretty much continued what they were doing, altho a few looked up, not impressed. "C'mon, hanh? I ain't gonna bite cha..." He persisted until he got the attention of the reluctant crowd, such as it was.
"These kids here, my son and his cohorts, they wanna sing for yiz, so give 'em a hand here!" He started clapping and a few in the crowd gave unenthusiastic applause as well. We mounted the riser nervously - Brillo out of aggression, Bruiser and Fatty out of worry, me out of concern for our performance.
We started singing "Till Then", the old Mills Brothers song, updated to the doo-wop style of the Classics. Brillo sounded beautiful. It was our custom in the backgroud to face each other in a small semicircle and that helped calm the other two guys, which helped them hit their parts well, which helped me relax. The Fabulons were on their way!
During the first release, for whatever reason, some old guy near the pool table began to heckle us. "That ain't the way the song goes!" Brillo was annoyed by this but kept on singing. The heckler didn't relent. "Hey, keep quiet when they're singin'!" Brillo's father yelled. The guy at the pool table waved his hand in disgust.
Maybe we shoulda been smart and end the song after the third verse, but the arrangement called for two releases, and there was no way we were gonna be able to stop easily. Besides, we sounded, to my critical ears, really good. But altho the heckler had seemed to retreat after his wave, he reemerged once we went back into the release. He actually started to boo us.
Brillo's father began to object to this. "Aaah, siddown an' shaddap!" "I ain't gonna shaddap. This is bullshit!" "Don't tell me that! You don't know music, ya deaf bastard!"
Then all of a sudden, just as he was supposed to sing "But pray that our loss, is nothing but time" Brillo lost it. Unlike his father, he didn't resort to words. Instead, he charged the guy, who had to be 40 years older than he was. Brillo's old man tried to restrain him but by then Brillo is barking right in the face of the guy, his curly hair bobbing up and down as he spit out his words.
Next thing you know, somebody picked up a chair and broke it. Things started flying, including fists. The bartender calmly ducked under the bar to wait out the melee. "Holy shit!" yelled Fatty and tried to push by me to get out of there. I was just stunned. I had not anticipated the chaos and just stood there, mouth agape. "We better get going" Bruiser said as he ushered me out the back door.
We didn't wait around for Brillo or his dad, our ride, but instead walked the 3 mile home in the cold winter night. Needless to say, that was the last time we sang with Brillo.
And we were back to not having a lead...
Hair
"When the moon is in the seventh house..."
Yeah, Hair opened in 1968, created quite a stir - nude bodies at the close of the first act! Can you imagine...?
But more about that later. Meanwhile I had my own hair story going...
By the end of January my brief fling with the beautiful and sincerely sweet Barbara had come to an end. (She had apparently been "two timing" me. Some other girls, eager for a chance with me, had put me on to this by dedicating a song to me at a dance - "Woman, Woman" by Gary Puckett and the Union Gap. "Have you got cheating on your mind, on your mind?")
Ok, so it ended with a little bit of drama, and now it was key to demonstrate to my public that it was not gonna faze me one bit. I went looking for a suitable substitute.
There was this girl, Bonnie. She was in my grade, but not in any of my classes. She was always smiling, in a dopey but endearing kinda way, altho she always seemed to be blushing. She didn't hang out at the dances, but she was beautiful in a pert kind of way, and she had cachet, since she had been the long time girlfriend of a guy named Tony who was a couple of grades older. Tony was already driving. He was cool, but in a long hair kinda way. It was rumored that they did acid together and, you know, were having sex...
Word had gotten out that Bonnie and Tony had broken up. I decided to make my move. At a dance (she was on the outs, so she began going) I asked her to dance. Other guys backed off. I dance with her the entire night. She seemed like she was having fun. I began calling her.
It was then that I realized why she was not in any of my classes. Let's just say, she was hard to engage in a conversation about virtually everything. Music, sports, current events, other couples and popular people - nothing. I even tried broaching the topics of LSD and sex, as if I myself had experienced them. There were many long, embarrassing pauses. I could hear her blushing over the phone.
Thus it went or about 3 weeks or so. I think we kissed once. She would go to dances with me, but she always had to go over to talk to her friends, and a couple of times I caught them pointing at me an laughing. She had that dopey, blushing face on, so I told myself they were not mocking me.
This relationship was giving me nothing, but I had a reputation to defend. One Saturday as we (meaning I) were talking on the phone, she actually asked me to go to a local park that night. It was February so the lake there was frozen, and a bunch of kids were getting together to skate. I didn't own a pair of skates and didn't know how to even if I did. I equivocated, but later on that day I got wind that Tony was gonna be there. My rep was on the line. I had to be there.
The deal was, I was not looking for a fight, but I knew I would have to confront him. There was a code of conduct. The worst case scenario was that Bonnie would just try to break us up, chide both of us. The best case scenario was that she would be impressed with me for being wiling to fight for her. In the first scenario, it would be over but I could withdraw with honor, as it were. In the second scenario, she would be warmer to me.
So I went. Bonnie was standoffish. I didn't see Tony, but he was rumored still to be coming. Bonnie could skate well and enticed me to try it, altho where I was gonna get skates, I had no idea. And the last thing I wanted to do was make a fool of myself. If I were comfortable in our relationship I'da probly done it, have some laughs. But I wasn't, and I was there to defend my rep. Being an ass was out of the question.
After a couple of hours of watching her skate around, and hovering with her friends and giggling, and not paying much attention to me, and with Tony nowhere in sight. I decided to go. She seemed non-plussed.
Monday I went up to her in the hall. Again, we didn't share any classes so the hall was the only opportunity I had to speak to her. Again, she was standoffish. I asked her what was up. She was with a friend, so it was difficult, but she had on that dopey, blushing smile and kept looking at her friend as I spoke, like, get a load of this guy!
I pushed the issue - so, I guess you don't wanna go out anymore... What is it, Tony? I guess this hit on something, because she blurted out - "Why don't you wash your hair every once in a while?"
She smiled and blushed and giggled with her friend, and then turned and walked off.
I was devastated. Forget being let down so cavalierly - she was pretty with a nice figure and all, but dumb as dirt and boring as hell. I had been going thru the motions, as had she. Tony or no Tony, this thing was terminal, and soon.
But she had cut me to the quick. She had put me in my place, and maybe just needed to say something mean to get herself off the hook, knowing that for me to call her again would be the equivalent of crawling. But I was embarrassed beyond all reckoning.
It was true - I didn't wash my hair often. I never used shampoo. This was still the Brylcream age, when slick greasy hair was cool, so having greasy hair was not such a big deal. But she had made me feel dirty. And fact of the matter was, my hair WAS dirty.
I began to think, is that why her friends were giggling and pointing at me? Was that dopey, blushing smile really embarrassment for me? Here was this girl, hanging out with an older guy who was driving, dropping acid and having sex. And here was I, little twerp with the greasy hair, playing little boy smootchy games. I felt like I was an inch tall.
Luckily, the other girls "my own age" didn't notice, or didn't care, or didn't let on that they cared. Life after Bonnie was like life before - popularity, coolness, the harem.
But I made sure I started washing my hair!
Yeah, Hair opened in 1968, created quite a stir - nude bodies at the close of the first act! Can you imagine...?
But more about that later. Meanwhile I had my own hair story going...
By the end of January my brief fling with the beautiful and sincerely sweet Barbara had come to an end. (She had apparently been "two timing" me. Some other girls, eager for a chance with me, had put me on to this by dedicating a song to me at a dance - "Woman, Woman" by Gary Puckett and the Union Gap. "Have you got cheating on your mind, on your mind?")
Ok, so it ended with a little bit of drama, and now it was key to demonstrate to my public that it was not gonna faze me one bit. I went looking for a suitable substitute.
There was this girl, Bonnie. She was in my grade, but not in any of my classes. She was always smiling, in a dopey but endearing kinda way, altho she always seemed to be blushing. She didn't hang out at the dances, but she was beautiful in a pert kind of way, and she had cachet, since she had been the long time girlfriend of a guy named Tony who was a couple of grades older. Tony was already driving. He was cool, but in a long hair kinda way. It was rumored that they did acid together and, you know, were having sex...
Word had gotten out that Bonnie and Tony had broken up. I decided to make my move. At a dance (she was on the outs, so she began going) I asked her to dance. Other guys backed off. I dance with her the entire night. She seemed like she was having fun. I began calling her.
It was then that I realized why she was not in any of my classes. Let's just say, she was hard to engage in a conversation about virtually everything. Music, sports, current events, other couples and popular people - nothing. I even tried broaching the topics of LSD and sex, as if I myself had experienced them. There were many long, embarrassing pauses. I could hear her blushing over the phone.
Thus it went or about 3 weeks or so. I think we kissed once. She would go to dances with me, but she always had to go over to talk to her friends, and a couple of times I caught them pointing at me an laughing. She had that dopey, blushing face on, so I told myself they were not mocking me.
This relationship was giving me nothing, but I had a reputation to defend. One Saturday as we (meaning I) were talking on the phone, she actually asked me to go to a local park that night. It was February so the lake there was frozen, and a bunch of kids were getting together to skate. I didn't own a pair of skates and didn't know how to even if I did. I equivocated, but later on that day I got wind that Tony was gonna be there. My rep was on the line. I had to be there.
The deal was, I was not looking for a fight, but I knew I would have to confront him. There was a code of conduct. The worst case scenario was that Bonnie would just try to break us up, chide both of us. The best case scenario was that she would be impressed with me for being wiling to fight for her. In the first scenario, it would be over but I could withdraw with honor, as it were. In the second scenario, she would be warmer to me.
So I went. Bonnie was standoffish. I didn't see Tony, but he was rumored still to be coming. Bonnie could skate well and enticed me to try it, altho where I was gonna get skates, I had no idea. And the last thing I wanted to do was make a fool of myself. If I were comfortable in our relationship I'da probly done it, have some laughs. But I wasn't, and I was there to defend my rep. Being an ass was out of the question.
After a couple of hours of watching her skate around, and hovering with her friends and giggling, and not paying much attention to me, and with Tony nowhere in sight. I decided to go. She seemed non-plussed.
Monday I went up to her in the hall. Again, we didn't share any classes so the hall was the only opportunity I had to speak to her. Again, she was standoffish. I asked her what was up. She was with a friend, so it was difficult, but she had on that dopey, blushing smile and kept looking at her friend as I spoke, like, get a load of this guy!
I pushed the issue - so, I guess you don't wanna go out anymore... What is it, Tony? I guess this hit on something, because she blurted out - "Why don't you wash your hair every once in a while?"
She smiled and blushed and giggled with her friend, and then turned and walked off.
I was devastated. Forget being let down so cavalierly - she was pretty with a nice figure and all, but dumb as dirt and boring as hell. I had been going thru the motions, as had she. Tony or no Tony, this thing was terminal, and soon.
But she had cut me to the quick. She had put me in my place, and maybe just needed to say something mean to get herself off the hook, knowing that for me to call her again would be the equivalent of crawling. But I was embarrassed beyond all reckoning.
It was true - I didn't wash my hair often. I never used shampoo. This was still the Brylcream age, when slick greasy hair was cool, so having greasy hair was not such a big deal. But she had made me feel dirty. And fact of the matter was, my hair WAS dirty.
I began to think, is that why her friends were giggling and pointing at me? Was that dopey, blushing smile really embarrassment for me? Here was this girl, hanging out with an older guy who was driving, dropping acid and having sex. And here was I, little twerp with the greasy hair, playing little boy smootchy games. I felt like I was an inch tall.
Luckily, the other girls "my own age" didn't notice, or didn't care, or didn't let on that they cared. Life after Bonnie was like life before - popularity, coolness, the harem.
But I made sure I started washing my hair!
Me
See, it was all about me, really...
I had always been the tallest kid in my class. And the smartest. The best singer. The best looking. The most popular. The most charismatic.
I remember the first day of Kindergarten, 1958. (Ok, for me it was Round Two of Kindergarten. My mother had tried to start me in 57, when I was almost 5. We lived across the street (albeit a very busy street called "The Highway") from the school. My mother walked me across the street and into the classroom. About an hour in, I was playing with some trucks and then this lady says Ok, come on over here into this circle. I mean, I'm having fun here, lady! In the rush of kids putting things down and finding a place in the circle I got up and left the room. I went out the back door of the school and down the driveway and across the busy street, opened my front door and went about playing. My mother nearly had a heart attack. What are you doing here?!?! Playing. Why aren't you in school??? That lady told me I couldn't play anymore. I figured, clear thinking 4 year old that I was, why the hell should I be here playing with somebody else's toys when I could be playing at home with my own toys without this lady telling me what to do? Needless to say, my mother and the teacher decided I "wasn't quite ready" for Kindergarten that year...) There was this kid. He came to school on the first day clutching a really cool looking Mexican coin, 10 pesos. It had Mayan symbols on it. He was showing it around. I coveted it.
Well, without me asking for it, he comes up to me and gives it to me. He says I can keep it. You sure? Yeah, keep it. I was amazed - why would this kid give up his prized possession to me, without me even asking or it? I also got the message that there was something special about me... (I still have it to this day...)
I was an American, and Italian and a Catholic. Upon meeting my grandfather's new wife (my Grandmother had died in 55) in 57, she told me, I introduced myself by saying "I'm a 'Talian boy - best kind there is!" Italians had the best food, we had Columbus, we had Sinatra, Connie Francis, Perry Como, Mario Lanza, Frankie Avalon, Annette Funicello, Joe Bellino, Joe DiMaggio, Joe Pepitone, the Roman Empire and the Pope. For some reason, other kids in school treated me with a kind of fearful respect, like I was dangerous or something. (You didn't talk about organized crime in those days, if you were Italian, particularly in a family that was proud of its progress in this country in the legal and honorable spheres, so I had no clue about the Mafia.)
Later I found out about the Roman Empire, how it lasted 2000 years, how it not just conquered the world, it civilized it. How everybody conquered was better off for it. And all this Latin stuff - in Church, on buildings, even on coins ("E pluribus unum") came from the Romans who, of course, were Italian boys, just like me - best kind there is!
I liked reading encylopedias and almanacs, and they said Catholicism was the largest religion on Earth. We had a cool Pope, John XXIII. The nuns told us ours was the only religion that came directly from Jesus himself, via Peter and all the subsequent popes - an unbroken skein. We had the best looking and biggest churches around. We were the best.
And being American - we hadn't lost a war, and those we did fight (like "THE War", WWII, the big one) we had to, and we did for good causes - proclaim liberty (Revolution), preserve liberty (1812), free the slaves (Civil War), stop them bad Germans from doing bad things TWICE, stop Communism in its tracks. And then, we would rebuild our enemies countries, be it Reconstruction or the Marshall Plan.
We were the first and oldest democracy, and we had the best of everything - all the sports records were ours, all the Nobel prizes, all the wealth. My family's history was like virtually everyone else's I knew - grandparents came out of poverty from somewhere else - Italy, Poland, Ireland, Russia - and now look at us: We have running water in nice houses with cars and TV! All because America is a great place, not like the "old country". God shed his grace on us!
And it was all me! Italian, Catholic, American. Tallest, smartest, best looking, best athlete, most popular...
By the time I was in 8th Grade, I was tall (5'11"), star of the basketball team (24 pts, 20 rebs a game), star of the track team (220, long jump, high jump, shot put), number one in my class academically, and so popular that I hung out with HIGH SCHOOL KIDS. (Of course, as I mentioned before, this was largely due to my ability to reliably get served...)
There was music, too. In sixth grade, at a local fire department wet-down, I got up out of the crowd and went up to the band and had them play the Rascals' "Good Lovin'", and I sang it - brought the place down! By 7th grade I had a group which played at all the school functions - talent shows, assemblies, dances, graduations - and we always made the crowd go wild! Add that to the list - Rock star!
Ever since 6th grade I called perhaps 10 girls a night, flirting, sweet talking. I always played the field, such as it was. Girls would giggle and talk amongst themselves about me, I knew it. They played up to me. I dug it.
By freshman year, in the fall of 1967, I was way too cool for school, as it were. I was very popular at dances. I had lots of girls hanging with and on me. I had developed what amounted to a cult following. My sister called them my "harem".
I would go steady from time to time but only for effect - you know, only the best looking ones du jour. Helped my reputation. Breaking up was not hard to do, because there were always dozens of others waiting in line to comfort (so to speak) you.
I had other guys, in awe of me, coming up to me telling me this girl was interested in me, that girl wanted to "sleep" (whatever THAT meant) with me. I would handle the news so cooly, so confidently. The guys dug it - I was their hero. Popular with the older guys, popular with the ladies.
I even had girls who were years older than I chasing after me. That year, in 1968, I took up with a girl from another school, who was really hot and hot for me. Things were going great until by accident it was discovered that her father was my geometry teacher... Another time, a girl from the senior HS came over to the Junior HS where I was a frosh and found me waiting to see the Vice Principal (for disciplinary reasons, of course). She was shocked to find out I actually was a student there, a freshman! You could see her blush with embarrassment...
In sum, the deal was, I was the center of the universe. I was the baddest of the bad. And I knew it. Life was good.
I was a despicable, conceited little twerp.
I had always been the tallest kid in my class. And the smartest. The best singer. The best looking. The most popular. The most charismatic.
I remember the first day of Kindergarten, 1958. (Ok, for me it was Round Two of Kindergarten. My mother had tried to start me in 57, when I was almost 5. We lived across the street (albeit a very busy street called "The Highway") from the school. My mother walked me across the street and into the classroom. About an hour in, I was playing with some trucks and then this lady says Ok, come on over here into this circle. I mean, I'm having fun here, lady! In the rush of kids putting things down and finding a place in the circle I got up and left the room. I went out the back door of the school and down the driveway and across the busy street, opened my front door and went about playing. My mother nearly had a heart attack. What are you doing here?!?! Playing. Why aren't you in school??? That lady told me I couldn't play anymore. I figured, clear thinking 4 year old that I was, why the hell should I be here playing with somebody else's toys when I could be playing at home with my own toys without this lady telling me what to do? Needless to say, my mother and the teacher decided I "wasn't quite ready" for Kindergarten that year...) There was this kid. He came to school on the first day clutching a really cool looking Mexican coin, 10 pesos. It had Mayan symbols on it. He was showing it around. I coveted it.
Well, without me asking for it, he comes up to me and gives it to me. He says I can keep it. You sure? Yeah, keep it. I was amazed - why would this kid give up his prized possession to me, without me even asking or it? I also got the message that there was something special about me... (I still have it to this day...)
I was an American, and Italian and a Catholic. Upon meeting my grandfather's new wife (my Grandmother had died in 55) in 57, she told me, I introduced myself by saying "I'm a 'Talian boy - best kind there is!" Italians had the best food, we had Columbus, we had Sinatra, Connie Francis, Perry Como, Mario Lanza, Frankie Avalon, Annette Funicello, Joe Bellino, Joe DiMaggio, Joe Pepitone, the Roman Empire and the Pope. For some reason, other kids in school treated me with a kind of fearful respect, like I was dangerous or something. (You didn't talk about organized crime in those days, if you were Italian, particularly in a family that was proud of its progress in this country in the legal and honorable spheres, so I had no clue about the Mafia.)
Later I found out about the Roman Empire, how it lasted 2000 years, how it not just conquered the world, it civilized it. How everybody conquered was better off for it. And all this Latin stuff - in Church, on buildings, even on coins ("E pluribus unum") came from the Romans who, of course, were Italian boys, just like me - best kind there is!
I liked reading encylopedias and almanacs, and they said Catholicism was the largest religion on Earth. We had a cool Pope, John XXIII. The nuns told us ours was the only religion that came directly from Jesus himself, via Peter and all the subsequent popes - an unbroken skein. We had the best looking and biggest churches around. We were the best.
And being American - we hadn't lost a war, and those we did fight (like "THE War", WWII, the big one) we had to, and we did for good causes - proclaim liberty (Revolution), preserve liberty (1812), free the slaves (Civil War), stop them bad Germans from doing bad things TWICE, stop Communism in its tracks. And then, we would rebuild our enemies countries, be it Reconstruction or the Marshall Plan.
We were the first and oldest democracy, and we had the best of everything - all the sports records were ours, all the Nobel prizes, all the wealth. My family's history was like virtually everyone else's I knew - grandparents came out of poverty from somewhere else - Italy, Poland, Ireland, Russia - and now look at us: We have running water in nice houses with cars and TV! All because America is a great place, not like the "old country". God shed his grace on us!
And it was all me! Italian, Catholic, American. Tallest, smartest, best looking, best athlete, most popular...
By the time I was in 8th Grade, I was tall (5'11"), star of the basketball team (24 pts, 20 rebs a game), star of the track team (220, long jump, high jump, shot put), number one in my class academically, and so popular that I hung out with HIGH SCHOOL KIDS. (Of course, as I mentioned before, this was largely due to my ability to reliably get served...)
There was music, too. In sixth grade, at a local fire department wet-down, I got up out of the crowd and went up to the band and had them play the Rascals' "Good Lovin'", and I sang it - brought the place down! By 7th grade I had a group which played at all the school functions - talent shows, assemblies, dances, graduations - and we always made the crowd go wild! Add that to the list - Rock star!
Ever since 6th grade I called perhaps 10 girls a night, flirting, sweet talking. I always played the field, such as it was. Girls would giggle and talk amongst themselves about me, I knew it. They played up to me. I dug it.
By freshman year, in the fall of 1967, I was way too cool for school, as it were. I was very popular at dances. I had lots of girls hanging with and on me. I had developed what amounted to a cult following. My sister called them my "harem".
I would go steady from time to time but only for effect - you know, only the best looking ones du jour. Helped my reputation. Breaking up was not hard to do, because there were always dozens of others waiting in line to comfort (so to speak) you.
I had other guys, in awe of me, coming up to me telling me this girl was interested in me, that girl wanted to "sleep" (whatever THAT meant) with me. I would handle the news so cooly, so confidently. The guys dug it - I was their hero. Popular with the older guys, popular with the ladies.
I even had girls who were years older than I chasing after me. That year, in 1968, I took up with a girl from another school, who was really hot and hot for me. Things were going great until by accident it was discovered that her father was my geometry teacher... Another time, a girl from the senior HS came over to the Junior HS where I was a frosh and found me waiting to see the Vice Principal (for disciplinary reasons, of course). She was shocked to find out I actually was a student there, a freshman! You could see her blush with embarrassment...
In sum, the deal was, I was the center of the universe. I was the baddest of the bad. And I knew it. Life was good.
I was a despicable, conceited little twerp.
Had
Here's another backgrounder related to the Graduate one. Again, this is not about 1968 per se, but then again, it is...
From Sara Robinson (an American-expat in Canada, essentially a Canadian) in "Born-Again Americans and That Old-Time (Civil) Religion" on http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/born-again-americans-and-old-time-civil-religion
[Bellah [sociologist Robert Bellah, probably in his book The Broken Covenant] writes: “Once in each of the last three centuries America has faced a time of trial, a time of testing so severe that...the existence of our nation has been called in question...the spiritual glue that had bound the nation together in previous years had simply collapsed."
For the current cycle, the glue started coming loose during the 1960s -- and the resulting collapse was the defining event of the decade. The Boomers, who had been raised deep in the cradle of postwar patriotism and inculcated early with the themes of American greatness and exceptionalism, were brought up short by some brutal realities almost as soon as they reached adulthood. Between the lies that fed the Vietnam War and the intractable injustice evident in the civil rights battles being fought at home, they confronted the sickening realization that the institutions they'd been taught to trust were deeply corrupt, and that the civil religion was being used to justify actions that ran completely contrary to the high ideals they'd been told their country stood for.
They'd been had -- by their parents, by their teachers, and by every single institution in society. Their response: "Don't trust anyone over 30." Don't trust any institutions run by them -- schools, churches, governments, professions, any of it. And especially: Don't trust the civil religion, which is nothing more than a pack of establishment lies.]
From Sara Robinson (an American-expat in Canada, essentially a Canadian) in "Born-Again Americans and That Old-Time (Civil) Religion" on http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/born-again-americans-and-old-time-civil-religion
[Bellah [sociologist Robert Bellah, probably in his book The Broken Covenant] writes: “Once in each of the last three centuries America has faced a time of trial, a time of testing so severe that...the existence of our nation has been called in question...the spiritual glue that had bound the nation together in previous years had simply collapsed."
For the current cycle, the glue started coming loose during the 1960s -- and the resulting collapse was the defining event of the decade. The Boomers, who had been raised deep in the cradle of postwar patriotism and inculcated early with the themes of American greatness and exceptionalism, were brought up short by some brutal realities almost as soon as they reached adulthood. Between the lies that fed the Vietnam War and the intractable injustice evident in the civil rights battles being fought at home, they confronted the sickening realization that the institutions they'd been taught to trust were deeply corrupt, and that the civil religion was being used to justify actions that ran completely contrary to the high ideals they'd been told their country stood for.
They'd been had -- by their parents, by their teachers, and by every single institution in society. Their response: "Don't trust anyone over 30." Don't trust any institutions run by them -- schools, churches, governments, professions, any of it. And especially: Don't trust the civil religion, which is nothing more than a pack of establishment lies.]
Graduate
Technically, this is not about 1968, per se. The movie "The Graduate" came out in 67, altho it did win the Academy Award for Best Director for that year, in ceremonies held in April 68. Nonetheless, my cousin read this excerpt of an email I wrote to a young person about the movie and encouraged me to post it here, which, in deference to him, I will.
Anyway, it does serve a a backgrounder...
Here it is:
"The Graduate is one of the most iconic films of the 60s. Altho it came out in 67 (the last "nice" year) it was actually filmed in 66 and written in 65, just as the "agonizing reappraisals" were beginning. This is before the Summer of Love, before Hippies, before Tune in, Turn On, Drop Out, before Nam really got going and before Newark/Detroit. JUST before.
Benjamin's parents' generation represent The American Dream - nice house, pool, money, comfort - and its dark side: ennui, desperation, hopelessness. It is no accident that Benjamin contemplates this in the pool, underwater, floating, directionless. That's where it all leads to. Drowning...
(In those days, having a pool was a big, big status symbol. Only the well off had them. Around that time, gratia largely to Zappa, it became a symbol, particularly on the West Coast, of all that was wrong with suburban surfeit and despair.)
(In fact, if you have never heard it, you might want to listen to "Brown Shoes Don't Make It" by Zappa on the "Absolutely Free" album, which not so ironically came out right at the same time. That whole album is a scathing satire/critique of the whole desperation and meaninglessness of the material American Dream...)
Elaine and Benjamin's lives are all laid out for them - best schools (Berkeley, Ivy), comfort, connections, privilege - but all around them all they see is desperation - embodied (literally!) by Mrs Robinson, the dark underbelly of it all.
Bullshit ("I have one word for you - PLASTICS" (Now, hows THAT for getting hit over the head with symbolism??) (Which reminds me, listen to "Plastic People" on that same Zappa album) (Zappa, BTW, was from LA, just like where the Graduate takes place...)) reigns everywhere. And duplicity - Mrs Robinson with Benjamin, Elaine with Benjamin, Benjamin with Mr Robinson, etc.
Elaine and Benjamin represent a literal and symbolic running away, escape from all that. Again, we have symbolism - the older generation is trapped in the church with its own cross. E & B don't ride off in his Alpha Romeo - another symbol of decadent, meaningless wealth - but instead take the bus.
The final scene, as you astutely mention, is ALL ABOUT "Now what?" and this too is symbolic, as they sit in the back of the bus (sound familiar) with the great unwashed masses, contemplating fleetingly their triumph and having no clue what to replace their rejected, all-set-up lives with.
If that ain't the 60s I don't know what is!
I don't think many people resonate with the symbolic power of the movie any more because if you didn't live with what came before the 60s you have no clue how stifling and desperate and depressing it was for many if not most people.
You got all the personal stuff, but not very much of the symbolic stuff, that I can tell, anyway. And not surprisingly. You, right now, in your life, have much more in common with Benjamin that Elaine. It's hard to communicate this to young women, but if that were 1957, Elaine's life was done. Fully determined. Fully figured out. She marries that guy right out of college (as did I and most of my cousins, BTW...), They will settle down in a house in an affluent suburb. She'll have kids, join the Junior League, have cocktails with the "ladies who lunch" (cf Sondheim's "Company", another period piece of the time - check it out - actually, I have a tape of a recent production where all the cast play musical instruments, very cool. I told my daughter I'd digitize it and send it to her. If so, I'll send it to you as well...), have cocktails at the end of the day with an aloof and distracted hubby by the pool and leading a life of quiet desperation...
And Benjamin? Join the firm. Make the bucks. Pork the secretary. Have cocktails by the pool at the end of the day with a bored and depressed (and probably medicated) wife and leading a life of quiet desperation...
All laid out. Cut and dried. No surprises.
Say what you will about the 60s but having lived thru the 50s and 60s and subsequently the 70s (ugh!) and 80s (double ugh!!), I will take the 60s any day, riots and Nam and the whole magilla, because there was at least the hope that things could be different.
I would take sitting in the back of the bus with no clue as to what to do next over a predetermined sentence of a life. Any day."
Anyway, it does serve a a backgrounder...
Here it is:
"The Graduate is one of the most iconic films of the 60s. Altho it came out in 67 (the last "nice" year) it was actually filmed in 66 and written in 65, just as the "agonizing reappraisals" were beginning. This is before the Summer of Love, before Hippies, before Tune in, Turn On, Drop Out, before Nam really got going and before Newark/Detroit. JUST before.
Benjamin's parents' generation represent The American Dream - nice house, pool, money, comfort - and its dark side: ennui, desperation, hopelessness. It is no accident that Benjamin contemplates this in the pool, underwater, floating, directionless. That's where it all leads to. Drowning...
(In those days, having a pool was a big, big status symbol. Only the well off had them. Around that time, gratia largely to Zappa, it became a symbol, particularly on the West Coast, of all that was wrong with suburban surfeit and despair.)
(In fact, if you have never heard it, you might want to listen to "Brown Shoes Don't Make It" by Zappa on the "Absolutely Free" album, which not so ironically came out right at the same time. That whole album is a scathing satire/critique of the whole desperation and meaninglessness of the material American Dream...)
Elaine and Benjamin's lives are all laid out for them - best schools (Berkeley, Ivy), comfort, connections, privilege - but all around them all they see is desperation - embodied (literally!) by Mrs Robinson, the dark underbelly of it all.
Bullshit ("I have one word for you - PLASTICS" (Now, hows THAT for getting hit over the head with symbolism??) (Which reminds me, listen to "Plastic People" on that same Zappa album) (Zappa, BTW, was from LA, just like where the Graduate takes place...)) reigns everywhere. And duplicity - Mrs Robinson with Benjamin, Elaine with Benjamin, Benjamin with Mr Robinson, etc.
Elaine and Benjamin represent a literal and symbolic running away, escape from all that. Again, we have symbolism - the older generation is trapped in the church with its own cross. E & B don't ride off in his Alpha Romeo - another symbol of decadent, meaningless wealth - but instead take the bus.
The final scene, as you astutely mention, is ALL ABOUT "Now what?" and this too is symbolic, as they sit in the back of the bus (sound familiar) with the great unwashed masses, contemplating fleetingly their triumph and having no clue what to replace their rejected, all-set-up lives with.
If that ain't the 60s I don't know what is!
I don't think many people resonate with the symbolic power of the movie any more because if you didn't live with what came before the 60s you have no clue how stifling and desperate and depressing it was for many if not most people.
You got all the personal stuff, but not very much of the symbolic stuff, that I can tell, anyway. And not surprisingly. You, right now, in your life, have much more in common with Benjamin that Elaine. It's hard to communicate this to young women, but if that were 1957, Elaine's life was done. Fully determined. Fully figured out. She marries that guy right out of college (as did I and most of my cousins, BTW...), They will settle down in a house in an affluent suburb. She'll have kids, join the Junior League, have cocktails with the "ladies who lunch" (cf Sondheim's "Company", another period piece of the time - check it out - actually, I have a tape of a recent production where all the cast play musical instruments, very cool. I told my daughter I'd digitize it and send it to her. If so, I'll send it to you as well...), have cocktails at the end of the day with an aloof and distracted hubby by the pool and leading a life of quiet desperation...
And Benjamin? Join the firm. Make the bucks. Pork the secretary. Have cocktails by the pool at the end of the day with a bored and depressed (and probably medicated) wife and leading a life of quiet desperation...
All laid out. Cut and dried. No surprises.
Say what you will about the 60s but having lived thru the 50s and 60s and subsequently the 70s (ugh!) and 80s (double ugh!!), I will take the 60s any day, riots and Nam and the whole magilla, because there was at least the hope that things could be different.
I would take sitting in the back of the bus with no clue as to what to do next over a predetermined sentence of a life. Any day."
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