Another Little Piece of My Heart (10 page)

When John was killed in 1980, I sank into one of my deepest depressions. I should have been used to assassinations by then, but this felt like the worst of them, because he wasn’t a political figure in the conventional sense. Robert Christgau wrote the
Voice
’s obit. “Why is it always
Bobby Kennedy or John Lennon?” he pondered. “Why isn’t it Richard Nixon or Paul McCartney?” His answer was a very sixties one: Those who offer hope are the ones who are killed. That was a lesson I’d learned well by the time Lennon died. But I don’t want to write about my burnout right now. It won’t make sense until I explain what led to it. You see, the sixties were really two eras, and the first one ended somewhere around 1966. After that it was no longer possible to maintain the rituals of irony and distance that had fostered the idea of hip as a marker of the new elite.
Hip
became hippie, and we were all “freaks.”

Sometime that spring I traded my rock-critic drag for tie-dyed T-shirts and tatty jeans. That’s what pretty much everyone my age wore. It was part of a larger rebellion against consumerism and the false sense of self created by mass-produced goods. Only handmade products were truly authentic, even if that meant an incongruous patch of velvet sewn onto bell-bottoms, or a shirt that someone had soaked in goat urine to make the colors stick. Beads were everywhere, a symbol of membership in one or another “tribe”—that is, a loosely arranged affinity within the Nation of the Young.

Rock was the oxygenator of this exotic planet, and I was in a unique position as a rock critic. I could move easily between the mainstream media and that shapeless amalgam known as the underground press. It consisted of local, mostly radical newspapers, that reported what the dailies, with their wealthy, politically ambitious owners and their dependence on large-scale advertising, would not. These scrappy weeklies were much less literary than the publications I wrote for, but they produced a vivid account of the era, its values and its manias. Today’s “alternative” papers are the descendants of the underground press, and like many remnants of the sixties, they preserve the aura of the original without much of the radicalism. To their young writers, the sixties must seem like an Oz-like existence—and they were.

I had been present at the creation, as a nomadic college student taking refuge in the oasis of the Village, and the counterculture was an expansion of that scene, so I felt very much at home. The shyness that had burdened me dissipated, since everyone looked weird and anyone could join the welcoming herd. With my long hair and hippie haberdashery I was part of a vast youth culture in which the barriers between journalists and their subjects were porous. I could hang out with rockers
and engage them on a meaningful level, with no press agent in sight. Through these encounters I discovered the self I never knew. It’s the self I still possess.

When I think of those years I picture a sheet of ice melting from the surface down, growing wet and warm in the sun. That was the impact of this new era. I grew more trusting, and I learned that when you trust people you can relax. So I relaxed, maybe too much. But first things first. It began with a trip to California during that uncanny season called the Summer of Love.

In 1967, London was heroin and New York was speed. But San Francisco was all about psychedelics. The postman would offer to share the joint he was puffing on, his long hair flapping under the official cap. Pungent odors emanated from every doorway in the district where young people had settled by the thousands, an area near Golden Gate Park named for the intersection of two ordinary streets—Haight and Ashbury.

I never found out how the Haight, as the neighborhood was called, acquired its mystique. I figured it had something to do with the Merry Pranksters, the crew of acid explorers, led by Ken Kesey, that Tom Wolfe wrote about. The Pranksters were architects of hippie style. Swirl-covered buses like the one they traveled in were a common sight, as was their other major innovation, mass celebrations that featured LSD. In 1966, when I was reporting on the new drug culture for my ill-fated book, I’d witnessed one of these Acid Tests, as they were called. When I returned to San Francisco a year later LSD was illegal, but it was easy to come by, and certain manufacturers, such as the legendary Owsley, were treated like rock stars. The result was a stoned, sensate community, something I’d never imagined even in my wildest fantasies about what was blowing in the wind.

I wasn’t very hip to the San Francisco scene when I arrived. All I knew was what I’d seen on TV. There was lots of coverage, little of it knowledgeable. The reporters were outsiders, and their attitude was fascination mixed with dread, a combination I hated. (I still remembered the “Guide For Worried Parents” that the publisher inserted into my drug book.) But nothing since the Beatles had produced such a media frenzy, and I was sure I could do a better job than these pros at describing it. Only problem was, I didn’t smoke grass. Though I’d tried it in
college, I was convinced that if I got high again I would turn into Norman Bates. But there was no way I could understand the hippies without sharing their signature experience. So I bought a nickel bag in New York—approximately enough for two joints. Being stoned was less unsettling than I feared. I stuffed myself with Sara Lee cheesecake and got lost in a song, but there were no major changes. My intellect was intact, and I could still take notes, though they might climb the side of the page. Once I realized that I could function on grass, I felt ready to head west.

I arrived with the mental baggage of a New Yorker, sheathed in cynicism and highly suspicious of anything that claimed to be mystical. In that respect I wasn’t so different from the lefties who created the alternative culture of San Francisco. Their attitude toward the ragtag army of young longhairs in their midst was both welcoming and skeptical. On the one hand, these kids shared the values of the left, including collectivism, environmentalism, and an obsession with consensus. But they had no politics in the usual sense. They were hardly intellectual, and most of them mistrusted reason. This was profoundly unsettling to the old guard, as it was to me. I didn’t know whether to mock the hippies or protect them, especially since many were high schoolers, the lowest of the low. They had no money and no homes. They moved among de facto crash pads, occupied the sidewalks, or camped in the temperate groves of Golden Gate Park. That was where I’d been told to go if I wanted to meet the real thing. So I checked out of my motel, determined to live like a denizen of the scene—in the open air.

It was late spring. A warm mist wafted over the cypress trees; music mingled with the caw of seagulls; salt and incense were in the air. Food simply appeared, and I wandered from group to group chowing down. When I was tired I plopped on the side of someone’s sleeping bag. I had come expecting to be drenched in sex, but it was harder to come by than I expected. Free love didn’t mean you could just walk up to a chick and whip out your love wand. You had to connect on a level that seemed mysterious to me. I hadn’t yet come to appreciate the beauty in a woman with downy legs. It took getting used to, as did trusting in that vague sensation of compatibility known as “the vibe.” The consolation was that my body type mattered less than the color my karma produced in someone’s mood ring. Within a day or two I managed to
hook up, though I’d never had sex in a park and I couldn’t help worrying about the cops. I wasn’t sure my partner was on the pill, and it didn’t reassure me to see her douche afterward with water from a canteen.

At first I was appalled by all this. The hippies seemed so blockheaded, so forced in their mellowness, blowing bubbles or handing me the gift of a small rubber dinosaur. I could tell from their disregard for money that they were securely middle class, while I came from a background where dropping out meant only one thing: poverty. What I saw looked dangerous and, even worse, indulgent. But the naïveté was irresistible. It brought out the Holden Caulfield in me. I wanted to be their catcher in the rye.

I quickly learned to honor the astrological metaphysics that functioned as a greeting. “What sign are you?” I was asked many times, and when I replied, the response was, invariably, “I knew it.” After a while I stopped thinking of this as silly; it was just another code, like the peace-sign salute. I was beginning to fall under the spell of the scene, with its remarkable capacity to calm my anxieties. Everything that mattered in my life—the clawing for fame, the fending off of sycophants, the constant risk of being put on or put down—all of it dropped away. Every now and then I’d catch myself, take a step back, and think,
what the fuck am I doing in this place?
Me, the Herring Maiven, a wunderkind of the written word, nodding to the sound of a (not very well-played) drum, seriously contemplating losing my dignity with a woman in a dress that had recently been a bedspread. But out here I was just an ordinary dude, which was precisely what I wanted. I yearned to let go of the struggle, to strip off my Manhattan identity like winter clothing until, naked (or maybe in just my underwear), I would live as a desiring animal in the wide open of the California dream.

I didn’t realize it then, but this line of thinking would soon spread across the whole grid of my generation. It was the great temptation of the sixties, the ghost of Rousseau that haunted every Freudian my age. What lay beneath the layers of repression? Suddenly it seemed possible to know, not through a lengthy course of psychoanalysis but simply by being here now. The Oedipus complex—fuck that! In the words of the Incest Liberation Front (a West Coast group of the sixties), “Sex before eight, or else it’s too late.” If neurosis was the price we paid for civilization, maybe the only way to be healthy was to be uncivilized.

I veered between embracing what I saw and bristling with contempt for it. Finally I decided that I was on vacation, and that nothing I did here would matter once I got back to New York. That was how I gave myself permission to wade, if not plunge, into the hot tub of desire that was all around me. Everything seemed inchoate, unstructured, accepting. Any combination worked: hetero, homo, bi, the categories lost their grip. Gender was (ideally) fungible, race was (officially) irrelevant, class was … what’s that? Never mind that these distinctions were still lurking under the long hair and jeans. I was sick of living in a world where the social order was all too obvious. That’s why the hippies were so appealing to people like me. They represented liberation from reality.

Out here in the land of the unrooted I left all my connections behind, among them the woman who would soon become my wife. I had to be mobile; that was my excuse for traveling without her, but actually I needed a break from everything in my life. Though I wanted to marry Judith, the idea of being truly intimate with a woman frightened me at the age of twenty-three. It helped that monogamy wasn’t part of the deal—like many sixties couples, we were free to explore. But cleaving, as my parents had, for better and for worse, seemed so … Levitical. Before it could happen I had to understand who I was. San Francisco was perfect for the purpose, and so was the music that came from there. It felt as wild as British blues were restrained. There was none of the ornate eroticism of the Rolling Stones. The musicians were sexy in an ordinary way, and their sets seemed shapeless, though not aimless, to me. This was rock gone elastic.

The best bands played for free in Golden Gate Park. It felt a little like the folk-music gatherings I’d joined in Washington Square, except that there was no turf to fight for here, no standard of purity to defend. The competition among college students from Queens over who could sing like a native Appalachian was as irrelevant as a medieval debate about the nature of angels. The only offense was ambition. This, I was told more often than I liked, was an ego trip. A game. A curse that could only be explained when I admitted that I was from New York. Then I would receive a look of pity, a hug, and perhaps an exhortation to trip. I became so anxious about being plied with LSD that I refused to drink out of any bottle that wasn’t sealed.

Lots of people told me that the only way to appreciate hippie culture was to drop acid, but I was convinced that it could be explained by the
right theory. I had several, ranging from the fashionable postlinear ideas of Marshall McLuhan to a homegrown historicism in which the hippies were an incarnation of the revolutionaries of 1848. In a way they were, just as they echoed the mystical beliefs of the American Transcendentalists, but they were also a manifestation of something timeless and universal. By suppressing the vaunted “reality principle,” LSD created patterns of thought and visual styles that pulsed like the glowing abstractions in stained-glass windows or Tibetan mandalas. It struck me that there was a reason why these disparate mystical traditions produced the same patterns as your average tie-dye. They all evoked the deep structure of consciousness, the interplay of neurons. That was what acid had in common with Buddhist and Hindu meditation; it unlocked perceptions blocked by the organizing power of reason. But unlike those other practices, it did so instantly. The passion for shortcuts, which had always been present in America—Tocqueville noticed it in 1832—was the real enabler of LSD.

It wasn’t until I actually took acid that I encountered the part of me I was searching for, the self I’d denied. It had little to do with my sexuality. Desire, which felt so central to my being, now seemed like only the surface. On LSD, I accessed my subconscious, and it contained not only monsters and immense depths of love but the evidence that I had something in common with all living things. That was a big relief, because I’d always felt trapped in my uniqueness. Certain artworks—the Black Paintings of Goya, the late portraits by Rembrandt, the Paleolithic drawings on the walls of a grotto in France—have had a similar effect on me; the sense of connection, across time, with a consciousness beyond my personality. Which is not the same thing as feeling the presence of God. Acid didn’t change my atheism, but it was the source of whatever spiritual feelings persist in me. Like the kids I’d been skeptical about, I found the hippie within.