How I Accidentally Started the Sixties Read online

  I’d camped out in the basement of a Seattle anthropologist with a remarkably hospitable nature—so hospitable, in fact, that the basement’s opposite end was occupied by a charming drag queen who could have given Josephine Baker lessons in haute couture. Somehow, this master of the plumed gown and feathered boa had no influence on our host. But apparently, I did. In fact, I accidentally became our host’s spiritual master. My hunt for satori—for Zen Buddhist enlightenment—was so intense that it gave the impression that I knew something. In reality, I knew nothing. All I had were questions. But when you are certain that your questions point to truths that are gut-deep, you apparently develop a misleading charisma.

  Our anthropologist host was just about to finish his PhD thesis. The topic? Ornamental penis cones in the South Pacific. He showed us pictures. His South Pacific subjects were nudists. They wore not a stitch of clothing. But stitches exist in fabric. And fabric was not what these macho warriors preferred as apparel. Instead they had wooden cylinders the size of the sausages Italians feed you with onions and peppers, sausages with deep hollows drilled in their centers. And they slipped their penises into these things, then paraded about, proudly thrusting their pelvic appurtenances into the viewfinder of any passing anthropologist’s camera and wearing these penis cones all day long.

  Why bother? Because the penis cones were a language. A pecking order language. A language of hierarchy, of who is on top and who is not. Penis cones, like $4,000 suits, displayed status. Thus, a lesson was inserted into my brain about the central role of status in the lives of men, a lesson that would eventually shape my theories and my books. But that’s in the very distant future. Let’s get back to 1962.

  Despite the fact that he had almost finished his thesis, the anthropological type decided to abandon his mortgage, forget about his teaching job, leave his shot at a PhD, stop paying for his girlfriend’s orthodontia, grab that girlfriend, and follow me and two of my friends to California.

  Our arrangements for departure were all set. We would head for the nearest freight yard and catch a box-car headed south. Unfortunately, I got a cold, and my followers left me to catch up with them when I could get better. Not a nice thing to do to your spiritual leader.

  But they weren’t heartless about it. They found me a room in one of those environmentally-conscious University of Seattle off-campus hovels where no student has washed the dishes for six months and every platter and fork is turning mossy in the ecosystem of the sink. I had a mattress of my own on a nice, organic, hardwood floor. The boards were biodegradable. You could tell—they were rotting. And my acolytes had provided for my recovery with a leaking pitcher of orange juice, a pile of sandwiches, and the company of a remarkably sympathetic horde of cockroaches.

  Four days later, thanks to the healing powers of this nature-rich habitat, I finally got my health back. I went to the local supermarket, gently laid a quart of milk and a loaf of bread in my shopping cart, then stuffed my athletic supporter with provisions—cream cheese, smoked oysters, and a variety of other delicacies. I paid for the milk and the bread, accepted the more expensive items as a donation, and headed back for the moss-covered kitchen, where I cleared a space between the fungi, spread out my twenty-four slices of bread, made twelve sandwiches, packed them in the plastic bag provided as a bonus by Wonder Bread, made a gallon of Kool-Aid in a Clorox jug, rolled the food into my sleeping bag, headed for the open road, and stuck out my thumb. Jack Kerouac, one of my idols at the time, would have been proud.

  My apostles, the ones who had left me on the floor of a Seattle cockroach dance hall, had ridden the rails. I had decided to travel by road. Unfortunately, hitchhiking is an unreliable form of transportation. There are no regularly scheduled pickups. You depend on the milk of human kindness. And the cows that produce this stuff are apparently an endangered species. So, as usual when I propped myself in the gravel by a stretch of tarmac, I was stuck. In eight hours, I’d zoomed a full seventy-five miles. Now I still had 529.6 left to go before reaching my destination—the San Francisco Bay.

  For four hours, I had been sampling gourmet exhaust fumes on a two-lane blacktop that ran through a collection of five buildings called Eugene, Oregon. Every twenty minutes or so, an approaching car lifted my hopes, then dropped them without a parachute as it disappeared over the horizon. I attempted to summon each vehicle’s return with wistful looks. But much as Walt Disney had assured me that “when you wish upon a star your dreams come true,” Walt—and innumerable drivers—seemed to be letting me down. Maybe my problem was that it was still daylight. Which meant there wasn’t a star in sight.

  As dusk turned the countryside gray and the first pinpricks of light appeared in the black and blue sky, my fate went through a sudden alteration. An old, hearse-black Hudson rattled in my direction, flapping the random pieces of tin from which it was made in an effort to warn any farm animals grazing on the asphalt of its approach.

  My spirits, as usual, went up like a weather balloon. The car grew near, slowed down, and veered right, toward the gravel shoulder. Then the inhabitants apparently looked me over carefully, noted that I was barefoot and had a haircut of a kind unknown to Western Civilization for roughly 300 years (the Beatles hadn’t arrived to make long hair acceptable yet, and even when they would, their mop-tops would not emerge from their scalps like foot-long worms curled in terminal pain). The auto’s inhabitants saw that I was carrying a thoroughly disreputable sleeping bag packed with food and my one extra piece of clothing, an ultra-baggy, bargain-basement white sweater. A sweater of a brightness designed to distinguish me clearly from the empty air above the roadside gravel as I plaintively stuck out my thumb in the blackness of the night. The folks in the car were unable to spot my major virtue—I showered every morning. The inspection was apparently unsatisfactory. They picked up momentum, spat gravel, and left me in their dust.

  The sun had sunk, the clouds on the horizon were red, and so were the whites of my eyes. Eugene, Oregon, was disappearing into the gloom along with my hopes, the sort of experience that makes a rejected hitchhiker feel as if his emotions have been plunged into liquid nitrogen. Then a miracle occurred. The funereal Hudson appeared on a side road about 250 feet behind me. Disney’s star had worked! Maybe because I looked like Jiminy Cricket. The car’s inhabitants had debated about me, changed their minds, taken a left, looped around a patch of farmland, and returned.

  The dusty rear door of the ebony car opened, spilling two dozen empty beer cans into the road. A pale, white hand emerged from the dark interior and gestured. I snatched my sleeping bag and ran, hoping to catch up with this sweet chariot before it could swing across the Jordan without me. It was the beginning of one of the strangest nights of my life.

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  To enter the car, I had to find space for myself on a back seat whose legroom was occupied by four cases of beer. Inside, the figures were spectrally silent. A gaunt, tall man clutched the steering wheel, staring straight ahead. In the dusk, his eye sockets looked like huge black holes. The passenger seat held a smaller person with slick, dark hair who never turned his head. And ensconced on my left was the most genial of my hosts, a round-faced fellow who silently bid me make myself comfortable before he, too, riveted his eyes to the view from the front window and imitated an extra from Night of the Living Dead.

  I asked where they were going, knowing that at best if I was in luck I’d be carried fifty or sixty miles before I was let out to unfurl my white sweater once again. A voice welled up somewhere in the car—I couldn’t quite tell from whom—with the most welcome—though ghostly—syllables I’d heard in days: “San Francisco.” These saviors were destined to take me my full 529.6 miles!

  One of the joys of hitchhiking is conversation. It’s a delight to yank life stories from the unsuspecting benefactors who haul you around. My luck in this sport had always been superb. I had pulled inner secrets out of a carnival barker, a narcotics agent, a Bible College graduate
who was fleeing from a conspiracy between flying saucer people and the CIA, and even from an insurance salesman who explained with extraordinary warmth why his kids and wife were more important to him than his career.

  “What do you guys do for a living?” I asked. This question was the guaranteed key with which to roll open the top of the conversational sardine can.

  But not tonight. My three hosts stared straight ahead. The eye sockets of the driver grew more cadaverous. The last light disappeared from the sky beyond the windshield. No one said a word. I tried a few more questions. Silence. Except for those rare occasions on which a hollowed-out voice would ask the slightly pudgy figure in the gloaming on my left for another can of beer.

  I resigned myself to looking out the side window at the blackness of the countryside. Then, after half an hour, one of my dark angels of transportation asked a brief question. “You don’t mind a little heater action, do you?” It was getting chilly. So I answered that I didn’t mind at all. But no one reached for the dashboard switch that would have pumped out some warmth. Then slowly it dawned on me—a faint recollection of Sergeant Joe Friday on the 1950s TV show Dragnet. A “heater” was a gun.

  I sat in a cold sweat with mental pictures of my limp body tied to a telephone pole in the desert, slightly marred by a bullet hole in the head. After all, who else was there to shoot? The answer emerged ten minutes later when we pulled into a lonely country gas station—one of those gray, unpainted, deteriorating, wooden, all-purpose retail shacks that’ll sell you everything from a spark plug and a Snickers Bar to an extension cord. The pudgy gentleman next to me and the fellow from the passenger seat disembarked and headed for the modest hut’s screen door. The tall skeleton at the wheel kept the engine running and his nerves glued to the open road.

  Through the plate glass window, I could see an elderly man behind a counter. I waited for a bang, spurting blood, and the spectacle of the gray-haired fellow falling over backwards with a startled look on his face, knocking a couple of cans of pork and beans off the shelf. Then I expected to see the duo in whose car I was scrunched run from the hovel with greenbacks spilling from their fingers.

  Nothing of the sort occurred. When the gunmen headed back to the car, the old man was still upright. His would-be terminators were less so. In fact, their postures had been infected by a definite slump. The two slipped back into their places in the Hudson and angrily slammed the doors. We took off.

  Turned out my companions had been attempting a quick-change routine. Such was their expertise that they’d gone in prepared to offer a twenty and get change for a hundred. They’d ended up with change for a ten. Oregonian country store operators are apparently a shifty lot.

  The failure was humiliating. So humiliating, in fact, that the trio felt compelled to rescue their dignity. Thus they finally confessed their line of business. The driver and his partner in the front seat were specialists in armed robbery. They were particularly proud of their ability to break into fur vaults in the wee small hours and make off with skins that numerous small animals had donated to provide warmth for status-starved females of the human upper crust. Minks and ermines, for example. At the moment, the pair were out on bail pending trial for one of their more spectacular heists.

  The guy in the back seat was the one who had botched the short change deal and made the whole gang look like suckers in front of a total stranger. Despite his moronic fuck-up, they allowed him to announce his claim to fame. He was a con-man. Judging from his recent performance, it was a miracle he made a living.

  It would take more bragging than this to recover the pride the group had lost, and they knew it. So the driver removed the coffin-lid from his larynx and confessed the details of his hobby—murdering his fellow men. Well, in reality, his victims weren’t really men. They were Native Americans, a species he was sure fell on the evolutionary ladder somewhere below toilet algae. But that didn’t keep the sport from having its moments of excitement. Like there was the elderly red man our driver had beaten up and shoved over a cliff at a garbage dump. There was the guy he’d chained to a bed in a basement without food or water. And there were a variety of others on whom he’d demonstrated his marksmanship. So, he’d missed a few of his shots. But, he assured me, when he really concentrated he could actually hit a target.

  Turns out they’d picked me up because they were heroin addicts and the supply of drugs in their home town, Vancouver, had dried up. They were hoping to score some dope in San Francisco and the sight of my outfit—long hair, no shoes, etc.—had convinced them I’d be able to provide leads on where to find injectable materials. Unfortunately, the only drug dealers I was aware of sold aspirin.

  Before their poppy-starved metabolisms could freeze a Thanksgiving bird and turn them into cold turkeys, they were attempting to stave off agony with substitute chemicals. Hence their oversized supply of beer.

  Eventually the tale of noble deeds—robbery, homicide and such—petered out. They put a final frosting on their image of machismo by trading lengthy epics of all the women who had given them oral sex, comparing fine points of lingual techniques too technical for me to follow as they attempted to ascertain which woman had the most acrobatic mouth in Western Canada. But finally, they ran out of peculiarly-shaped throats and other feminine orifices to compare, and were left with nothing to say. After all, it takes a long time to drive 529.6 miles.

  The lack of entertainment and the deprived status of their endogenous morphine receptors were beginning to drive them crazy. Finally, in a last-ditch effort to entertain themselves, the homicidal threesome started to ask questions about what I did to sustain myself. I told them how I had dropped out of school to seek satori—the ultimate state of Zen Buddhist enlightenment. This did not exactly thrill them. I offered them some of my cream-cheese and smoked oyster sandwiches. When they heard that the oysters had been transported from the A&P in my jock strap, they mysteriously lost their appetites. What’s worse, this revelation of my life of crime (to wit, nourishing myself and my friends at the expense of large supermarkets), threw them into a frenzy of moral disturbance. They feared for the fate of my soul. When we got to the fact that I hadn’t seen my mother in over nine months, they became hysterical.

  It was obvious that they had an emergency on their hands—a human about to self-destruct. Like a team of paramedics, they mobilized to affect my rescue.

  First they outlined the error of my ways. I was living without real goals, they said. No human being could do that. Second, you needed a nice, steady relationship to give your life some meaning—like the ones they had with the girlfriends they cheated on back home. If they didn’t save me fast, they could see I was going to tumble straight into hell, and they were desperate to catch me before I fell. What’s more, I HAD to go home to see my mother!

  So the visions of being tied to a telephone pole disappeared from my head, and between midnight and dawn I received caring, fatherly lectures on how to lead a moral life from folks who poked lead into other people’s brains for amusement. Damon Runyon was right. There’s honor, and even generosity, among thieves.

  An hour after sunrise, the moral lectures stopped. Something almost too exciting to contemplate was coming up. We were about to cross the Golden Gate Bridge. This was the first chance in their lives for my traveling companions to see the Disneyland that every con man and murderer dreams about, the ultimate tourist attraction for felons: Alcatraz. As they caught a glimpse of the fabled island in the mist across the water, all three of them squealed like five year olds.

  The strange thing is this. Over the next few years, I’d get a lot of advice from truck drivers, migrant fruit pickers, psychiatrists, psychologists, corporate presidents, and even rock-and-roll stars. But in the end, I’d make a simple discovery: When it came to the meaning of life, the murderers had been right. You need a woman.

  ALL HAIL TO THE KING

  OF SPRINGFIELD AVENUE

  How’d I en
d up hitchhiking on a roadside in a forlorn corner of Oregon?

  Rumor in my grammar school had it that I was hatched from an egg, and not even an earthling egg at that. Those in the know implied that a batch of inept Martians had misread a road map as they rushed to an obstetrical facility to help their embryo crack its way out of the shell and had landed on the wrong planet. Without competent medical guidance, they’d barely hauled me out of my calcium casing. Then they’d become so confused repacking the flying saucer that they’d forgotten to toss their new offspring into a bassinet. Thus was I abandoned in the alien landscape of Western New York State.

  My parents deny this story. But it’s hard to take their word for it. I know for a fact that the two of them have never had sex.

  On the off chance that my dad and mom are not pulling a fast one, however, I’ve been prodding relatives to reveal all they remember of the family past, and have constructed a rough outline of my roots. This, in slightly garbled form, is the result.

  My putative great grandfather lived in the section of Russia that Jews were restricted to (White Russia, a territory that was either Russian, Polish or Ukrainian, depending on which century you happened to be consulting your map). The old man, who was quite young at the time, managed to pull off the impossible. Jews were not allowed to have government jobs. But he got one. He was a courier in the service of the czar. To wit, a messenger boy. This was unheard of, totally verboten, and not bad for a guy who thought that Orthodox meant you wore a yarmulke, not that you made a big deal about Easter and Greek.

  What’s more, it meant he could do something with his kid, my grandfather that was forbidden to Jews. He could send him to a Russian government school. Again, the family seems to have gotten a little off track. You’d think, “Aha, Jewish kid, probably pretty smart, bet he’s going to be a big-time scholar and invent psychotherapy and everyone will call him Dr. Freud.” No such luck. The kid with the big break went off to the hot shot Russian school and was trained as—a brain surgeon? A physicist? The inventor of the nuclear samovar? No, are you ready for this? A boot maker. Ah, well, we can’t all have Erasmus Darwin as a grandfather.