How I Accidentally Started the Sixties Read online

  Also by Howard Bloom

  The Lucifer Principle

  Global Brain

  The Genius of the Beast

  The God Problem

  The Mohammed Code

  This is a Genuine Vireo Book

  published in association with Dragonfly Books & Media

  Vireo | Rare Bird

  453 South Spring Street, Suite 302

  Los Angeles, CA 90013

  rarebirdbooks.com

  Copyright © 2017 by Howard Bloom

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever, including but not limited to print, audio, and electronic. For more information, address: A Vireo Book | Rare Bird Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 453 South Spring Street, Suite 302,

  Los Angeles, CA 90013.

  Set in Dante

  epub isbn: 9781947856042

  Cover Photograph by Jason Schneider, 1965

  Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication data available upon request.

  This stuff really happened. Several names have been changed to protect me from my attorney. However, any lack of resemblance to actual people, living or dead, is solely due to the incompetence of the author.

  Contents

  PROLOGUE—LIFTING TIMOTHY LEARY

  HOW I GOT INTO THIS MESS TO BEGIN WITH

  FROM THE MOUTHS OF MURDERERS

  ALL HAIL TO THE KING OF SPRINGFIELD AVENUE

  AND UNTO THEM A CHILD WAS BORN

  THE SUMMER CAMP KIDNAP—AND HOW IT BACKFIRED

  THE CASE OF THE FAMILY SNATCHING

  SEIZED BY POETRY

  SEX TRIES TO ENTER THE PICTURE BUT CAN’T SEEM TO DRILL THROUGH THE FRAME

  THE CHEMICAL CONEY ISLAND OF THE MIND

  AEROBICS FOR THE GONADS

  NO RIGHT TURN ON A GIRL WITH RED HAIR

  THE COWBOY AND THE INDIAN

  THE FINE ART OF NUDE CLIFF HANGING, or FROM MUPPET TO MOUNTAIN MAN IN ONE EASY LESSON

  THE NIGHT MY BRAIN WAS ISSUED A SPEEDING TICKET

  YOUR POLICE FORCE—KEEPING THE WORLD SAFE FOR INSANITY

  WAS SISYPHUS A SISSY?

  A LITTLE B. F. SKINNERING

  THE JOYS OF LIVING IN A CLOSET

  NIGHTS IN A TRANSVESTITE DRESSING ROOM

  THE DEAD HORSE AND THE MAGIC SMILE

  BEWARE THE BACKSEATS OF AUTOS WITHOUT BRAKES

  THE DAUGHTER OF THE OMEN

  THE BEAR THAT HUNTED BARBARA’S DAD

  FLEEING FROM THE FLAMES OF HELL

  HOW TO SLEEP WITH YOUR GIRLFRIEND UNDER HER MOTHER’S NOSE

  MOTHER OF FIVE RUNS OFF TO EUROPE WITH TWENTY-THREE-YEAR-OLD JAZZ MUSICIAN, LEAVES CHILDREN WITH…ME?

  THE SUMMER OF THE GREAT POLYGAMY EXPERIMENT

  SATORI AT LAST

  EPILOGUE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PROLOGUE—LIFTING TIMOTHY LEARY

  Before we begin, let me tell you a story, the tale of how Timothy Leary’s praise of How I Accidentally Started The Sixties came to be.

  It was 1995. I had come down with an illness seven years earlier, in 1988, that had left me in solitary confinement in a bedroom in Park Slope, Brooklyn, too weak to talk for five years and too weak have another person in the room with me. My wife had tried to keep me company by laying on our king-sized mattress next to me reading. But the sound of a newspaper page-turning tore through me like a cannonball. And eventually, thanks to the illness, she would leave me.

  For three years, the doctors didn’t have a clue to what I had. Turned out to be Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, also known as myalgic encephalomyelitis. And it’s far more wicked than you might think.

  Staying alive was rough. I needed entertainment with zero stress that would somehow keep my brain busy. And I needed social contact. I needed friends.

  For problem number one, stuff to keep my brain busy, I discovered humor. Humor and two of its masters: Dave Barry and P. G. Wodehouse (the creator of Jeeves the Butler). Their books were hilarious. And hilarity has a peculiar property—it can lift you out of your miseries and put you, no matter how briefly, into an alternative universe, a virtual reality. It can lift you out of a body that is failing and awaken your capacity for joy.

  Problem number two was social connection. Without connection, we die. Our immune system goes into a nosedive and our thinking capacity whiffles into the dead zone. I was in solitary confinement and could not utter a single syllable. What’s worse, one of my scientific colleagues, evolutionary biologist Valerius Geist, says all communication boils down to two things—attraction cues and repulsion cues. When you’re sick, you give off repulsion cues. People flee from you. Even those who formerly seemed to be your best friends.

  How can you get people to interact with you? You need to give off attraction cues. And what’s one of the greatest attraction cues of all? Humor.

  So I wrote a series of letters to my friends, letters telling tales that I’d told for years out loud when my tongue and larynx had still been functional. Tales that my tiny audiences had found mind-boggling. Why? They were tales of my adventures accidentally helping start The Sixties. Tales of hitchhiking on the West Coast, riding the rails, seeking the Zen Buddhist form of enlightenment, satori, experimenting with peculiar new drugs, and discovering sexuality. Tales of inadvertently cofounding a human tidal wave the press would later call “the hippie movement.”

  The internet was still so new in 1990 that only techie friends like Peter Gabriel were on it. So I wrote my letters horizontal in the bed using a keyboard across my lap, a keyboard connected to the two computers an arm’s length to my left. Then I had my assistant/caretaker send the epistles out on paper via snail mail. And to the best of my ability I wrote these episodes in the style I’d learned from Dave Barry and P. G. Wodehouse. But I wrote in a Wodehouse and Barry style transformed and transmogrified by a very strange mind, mine.

  It worked. I found two friends who would stick with me. Then over the course of five years this process produced the first draft of a book: How I Accidentally Started The Sixties.

  Keep in mind, I began to write How I Accidentally Started The Sixties in 1990. I put it together in book form in 1995. And I wanted to get it published, whether I was imprisoned in bed or not. So I aimed to get some quotes on the book from people famous for their centrality in The Sixties.

  The first folks I thought of were the Jefferson Airplane. Why them? Well, their song proclaiming that One pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small, and the ones that mother gives you don’t do anything at all was a Sixties anthem. I’d listened to it in 1967—the Summer of Love—in a Manhattan apartment in the East Village laying in the bed of a girl I was madly in love with. I had removed her two small stereo speakers from their normal position on a shelf and relocated them around my head just an inch or two from my ears. That was during the Summer of the Great Polygamy Experiment, whose undulations you can read in How I Accidentally Started The Sixties.

  But there was one more reason to zero in on Grace Slick and her merry band. I had a friend, rock manager Eric Gardner, who had started his music career as a roadie for the Jefferson Airplane.

  So I snail mailed a letter to Eric asking if he could get How I Accidentally Started The Sixties to the Jefferson Airplane. He snail mailed me back saying that he had someone far better in mind, another client of his, Timothy Leary. So my assistant printed out a massive pile of paper, a copy of the How I Accidentally Started The Sixties manuscript, and shipped it to Eric.

  Eric allege
dly got the manuscript to Leary. And a month later I received this in the mail:

  “This is a monumental, epic, glorious literary achievement. Every page, every paragraph, every sentence sparkles with captivating metaphors, delightful verbal concoctions, alchemical insights, philosophic whimsy, absurd illogicals, scientific comedy routines, relentless, non-stop waves of hilarity. The comparisons to James Joyce are inevitable and undeniable. Finnegans Wake wanders through the rock ‘n roll sixties. Wow! Whew! Wild! Wonderful!”

  —Timothy Leary

  Frankly, I didn’t believe that Leary had actually written this. I thought Eric had done it, as a favor.

  Then, in roughly 2000, Douglas Rushkoff, the author of books like Media Virus, Coercion, and Cyberia, came to my bedroom to see me. By then, I could talk again, and I could have others in my room. Doug brought with him a San Francisco visual artist, a male with long blond hair, a haircut that smacked of Haight-Ashbury. In our conversation, something became obvious. Doug and his artist friend had known Leary. More than that. They had spent Leary’s last six months of life watching over him in his bedroom and keeping him cheered and occupied.

  Now, remember, I didn’t believe that Leary had written the quote that Eric Gardner had sent. But I had a printer in the bedroom. So I printed out two copies of the alleged Leary quote and handed one to Doug and one to his friend. They sat in chairs at the foot of my bed, read the quote, and lapsed into a frightening, tomb-like silence. I knew exactly what was going through their minds. They could see that the quote wasn’t from Tim, and they were trying to figure out how to tell me without hurting my feelings.

  Finally, Doug spoke. But in a very strange tone, a sepulchral tone. “This is Tim,” he said. And you knew why he was sepulchral. The quote had brought Timothy Leary alive for a moment to Doug and his friend. In a Brooklyn bedroom. It had brought Tim alive with all the pains of his illness. And with the terrible loss when he died.

  As you recall, I had written this book in a style designed to lift even those of us undergoing disaster out of our woes. I’d written it to take readers to the alternative reality of humor. What Doug and his friend explained to me is that Timothy Leary had read How I Accidentally Started The Sixties when he was terminally ill with prostate cancer. He’d read the book six months before he died.

  I’d tried to write in a style that could lift people dehumanized by illness out of their body and up to another plane. And that’s what How I Accidentally Started The Sixties had apparently done for Leary. When he was in bed dying. One extremely sick person had reached out to lift another. And it had worked! That’s apparently why Leary had written such a powerful quote. How I Accidentally Started The Sixties had worked the magic it aspired to.

  But why had Leary compared How I Accidentally Started The Sixties to a work by James Joyce? After Rushkoff’s visit, I went online and found Leary’s obituary in The New York Times. Joyce, said the obituary, was Leary’s favorite author on planet earth.

  Let’s hope that Timothy Leary was right about How I Accidentally Started The Sixties. If he was, you may be in for the ride of your life.

  HOW I GOT INTO THIS MESS

  TO BEGIN WITH

  It was a rainy August day in 1969 on Max Yasgur’s farm just outside of Woodstock, New York. Good for the crops. You could tell. There were over 400,000 of them. Kids. Lots with long hair (including some of the girls). Some naked from the waist up (including some of the boys). Others cross-pollinating in nature’s ultimate fertility cream—mud. Yeah, there was mud by the acre. This wasn’t an event for industrial pollutants like Astroturf.

  No, the chemical additives were mostly in the kids. Cannabis, peyote, LSD, amphetamine, and a lot of elephant tranquilizer.

  Then there was the greenery. Half the kids who’d swallowed pills were green. So was most of the cash. That was being handled by a friend of mine, Michael Lang, who was having it carted by the hay load to his bank back in New York. He’d decided to throw this little harvest. Musicians, hallucinations, and declarations of political rights for plants in bloom (“flower power”). I’m Bloom. But I wasn’t there. Didn’t need to be. I’d sown the seeds seven years earlier. Long hair. Lysergic acid. Entering the vaginal canal of any willing girl in sight. But I hadn’t done it on purpose. Honest. The whole thing was an accident.

  u

  If you are like most of us, you think The Sixties began in 1964 when Ken Kesey, the author of a wildly successful novel—One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest—came up with a strange idea for publicity. And an even stranger idea for inspiration. Instead of begging the nine muses to blow on the smoldering coals of his imagination, he saturated the six layers of his cerebral cortex with lysergic acid—LSD. Then, to draw attention to the novel that limped and crawled from this process, Sometimes a Great Notion, this enterprising scribbler packed fourteen friends from the fringe of lunacy into a wildly graffitied ancient bus at his ranch in La Honda, California. All fourteen were dedicated to an overarching mission: scrambling their brains like Scrabble tiles. Kesey called his improvised tribe the Merry Pranksters, and set off toward the 1964 World’s Fair in New York City, thus carrying a first hint of the drug culture and of its goal, mind expansion, from the sunset golden beaches of the West to the sunrise silver beaches of the East.

  In 1965, when the acid-saturated busload of Pranking passengers returned to the Kesey ranch, they invented The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test, a trial-by-liquid in which they made you drink a cup of punch richly riddled with LSD, forced you to listen to the music of a band that would later call itself the Grateful Dead, and challenged you to keep your sanity from shattering in a “freak out” like a teacup dropped from a Boeing 727.

  Yes, if you have all your marbles still in their original package complete with instructions, you are probably under the impression that The Sixties began in 1964, which was also the year in which Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, and Ralph Metzner—after experimenting with the hallucination-inducing formulation called psilocybin at Harvard—wrote their book The Psychedelic Experience, and gave their age a name—the psychedelic era. What’s more, if your pre-frontal lobe has not petitioned your brainstem for removal to someone else’s skull, you almost certainly know that The Sixties climbed toward its peak in 1967 when the Jefferson Airplane sang that one pill makes you larger, the other makes you small, and the ones that mother gives you don’t do anything at all. In addition, if you know that your ears are up and your ankles are down, you realize that The Sixties soared even higher four months later when Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix burst out of nowhere at the Monterey Pop Festival.

  Surely those were The Sixties, weren’t they? Yes, like a rampaging rhododendron bursting with blossoms, those were the overground explosions that grabbed attention. But could it be that the real story is not in the blossoms but in the roots? Not above the ground but beneath it?

  Two years before the Merry Pranksters and Timothy Leary, five years before Grace Slick’s “White Rabbit,” and half a decade before the Monterey Pop Festival, the members of a tiny tribe with no name at all were marinating their brains in strange substances, twist-tying their axons and their dendrites, using bizarre molecules to confuse innocent neuroreceptors, and polluting hapless potassium-sodium-ion channels with peculiar chemicals. That nameless tribe was also pioneering the copulatory freedoms that would rocket to fame in 1967’s Summer of Love and The Sixties Sexual Revolution.

  In other words, when that tiny, anonymous gaggle was surfing the waves of emotional mystery, The Sixties that you and I know and love had not yet begun. But to understand where the Age of Aquarius and the Era of the Hippy came from, what box it sprang from like a goggle-eyed toy, you have to look back to 1962, when most calendrically-challenged Americans still thought it was the Fifties. You have to peer into a tide pool of hidden escapades, secret adventures in the chemical maddening of the brain, slapstick sloshings in the inner terra incognita that would become the roots of more del
iberate insanities yet to arrive on the scene.

  And if you are lucky, you may catch a glimpse of the embryonic pulse and twist of delirium that would later splotch the world with tie-dyed T-shirts, bell bottom trousers, and psychedelic concert posters. If you are even luckier, you may be able to see the motives behind the madness: a bloodhound sniff-fest, a determined hunt, a pursuit of higher truths. And a quest for truths that are far, far lower.

  Why? Because sometimes the lower truths are the most important truths of all.

  FROM THE MOUTHS OF MURDERERS

  It feels a little funny to drag these stories from the depths of memory now that us baby boomers are all supposed to be picking out the patterns for our tombstones, counting our wrinkles, and trying to replicate the secret of Ronald Reagan’s perpetually dark hair.

  But speaking as a voice from the crypt, let me see if I can impart some mangled semblance of wisdom to this seriously brain-damaged world. To follow this tale of moral profundity, you’ll have to travel with me back to the dim and distant days of a long-forgotten era, before Roomba robots, apps that identify bird calls, gaming consoles you can communicate with by twerking, garden hoses that miraculously avoid tying their own creative variations of Boy Scout knots, and drones with which you can watch your wife doing things with some other guy that she’s always refused to do with you. Yes, we are fumbling through the swirling mists of the past to those years of astonishing antiquity when even Donald Trump, David Letterman, and Jay Leno were still in their teens and when Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift, and Miley Cyrus had not yet been born, THE EARLY SIXTIES!!!

  More specifically, it was 1962. I had just left college without finishing my freshman year, a high crime. Escape from an institution of higher learning before your sentence expired was so unheard of for a middle-class Jewish kid that there wasn’t even a name for the crime—just a mushroom cloud of incoherent curses that erupted when your parents discovered your abominable act. The word “dropout” wouldn’t go mainstream in the American vocabulary for years to come.