Mr. Keeble talked about West Side Story and Romeo and Juliet too. The underlying issues were relevant to the poverty problems in America today, and the resulting conflict was relevant to the Katanga rebellion. “If the United Nations charter had been in force in Verona the UN would have intervened with the Capulets and Montagues the way Dag Hammarskjöld intervened in the Congo,” Mr. Keeble said. Dag Hammarskjöld died.
At the end of West Side Story Maria doesn’t die. At least I think she doesn’t. By that time Ana Klein was in tears and I was in mystification. I put my arm around Ana and said, “There, there,” because that’s what men said to women who are crying, as opposed to what boys said to girls who are crying, which is, “Knock it off.”
When the movie was over my mother was waiting in the car right outside instead of three blocks away. I pulled my arm free and looked at Ana and said, “Knock it off.”
Years would pass before I realized Ana Klein was cute. And she liked me. For a knowing generation, we got off to a slow start.
Myself when young did eagerly frequent
Doctor and Saint, and heard great Argument
About it and about: but evermore
Came out by the same Door wherein I went.
—Edward FitzGerald,
The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
8
AGENTS OF INFLUENCE
Adolescence is a time of discovery. The Baby Boom discovered beer.
At about the same time we discovered beer we discovered that, now we were older, our parents went out at night. We never wondered where they went. Possibly the Greatest Generation had a social life. To us it seemed unlikely. We were the center of the universe and if our parents weren’t orbiting close by then they were out in the void of space where events that didn’t immediately concern us took place.
Meanwhile we also discovered that Jim Fisk, with the serious expression on his face, looked almost old enough to buy beer. Not that the clerk at Lefty’s Package Goods paid much attention to a customer’s appearance as long as he appeared to be tall enough to reach the counter with $1.10 for a six-pack of Blatz. We’d go over to somebody’s house that night. His parents were out.
Beer was the miracle multivitamin of Baby Boom male adolescence. The necessary requirements for our generational growth were provided in large doses. Beer gave us the confidence to deal with our salient trait of self-consciousness. Beer quelled our reserve about divulging the secrets of our signal emotion the crush. Beer made us brave, cheerful, and sick all over the kitchen floor. The effects of beer were extraordinary. What else could have made a teenage boy mop the kitchen?
Then Mom and Dad come home and the place still reeks of beer and vomit. Mom goes upstairs, not being understanding for once, which is a relief, and making loud sighing noises. And Dad sits you down for the first man-to-man talk since the sex one. It’s a rite of passage.
“I guess this is what they call a rite of passage,” Dad says.
Without beer—and assuming the reader was as bad at being a loudmouthed obnoxious high school sports star as I was—what would there be for a Greatest Generation dad to take a certain sneaking pride in?
Beer has been good to the Baby Boom. Our greatest achievement has been in the field of communications. We were just then developing our first form of new media—the instant, high-speed dissemination of our ideas and opinions for which the Baby Boom is famous. And mooning people never would have occurred to us if it hadn’t been for beer.
One of our ideas and opinions is that inhibitions are unhealthy. Inhibitions are almost as unhealthy as guilt. Beer is health food. We wished we could get the girls to partake more. We wished we could come up with a special beer for girls. It’s a problem. What is beer for Baby Boom girls?
Sometimes, of course, it was beer. Although the girls got more silly than uninhibited. They made it to the bathroom before they threw up. And they never made it with us. We’re supposed to be a generation with a short attention span, but we worked on the beer-for-girls problem for twenty years. Mateus Rose? Wine coolers? Pot? LSD? As it turns out, cocaine was beer for Baby Boom girls. Cocaine is not health food. Alas.
Another Baby Boom idea is that we know everything. And now we do, thanks to the Internet. But we already had the secret to learning what’s what. You can click on an icon or you can pull on a pop top. Information is one beer away.
Al Bartz informed us that the Blatz brewery was started by a distant relative of his but that the Japanese immigrants in Milwaukee couldn’t pronounce Bartz because, phonetically, the letter L is almost the same as the letter R except that L is an alveolar lateral while R is an alveolar glide.
Al had done a paper on phonetics for extra credit in AP English titled, “Why the Japanese Say, ‘Rots of Ruck.’”
The Baby Boom’s greatest achievement of all has been in the field of bullshit. We excel not merely at communicating but at marketing, public relations, political campaigning, high finance, law, the oracular sciences, everything to do with the World Wide Web, and all professions that employ important-sounding jargon.
Yet another Baby Boom idea is that life is like high school. We are the first generation to make this claim. It’s hard to imagine the GIs of D-day standing around on Omaha Beach saying, “Life is like high school.” Life was not like high school in ancient times. Although a prom date with Henry VIII could turn out to have a Carrie ending. Nowhere in the philosophy of Plato does the phrase “Life is like Plato’s Symposium” appear. But if you consider the role that bullshit plays in the modern world, life is like high school.
I mean bullshit as no insult. The Greatest Generation created the atomic bomb. The Baby Boom created the story that Saddam Hussein had one. (Please do not answer the question “Which was worse, Hiroshima or the George W. Bush administration?” if you’ve voted for Dick Gregory, John Anderson, Lyndon LaRouche, Ross Perot, or Ron Paul. Especially don’t answer it if you’ve voted for all five.)
Our generation is identified with drugs. Use of drugs has declined. Because we took them all. But it was beer that revealed our true qualities. And memo to Generation X with your microbreweries and your hops and malt snobs: beer is quantitative. Speaking of which, our parents drank more than we do. Why wasn’t alcohol the path to success for them? Probably it had something to do with their guilt and inhibitions. I’ll have to ask Al Bartz. He became a psychiatrist.
Using our talent as communicators, we communicated the Baby Boom idea that we are each perfectly unique by acting in complete unison with a clique (which we pronounced “click”) of six or eight other kids who we thought were just like us. That way the one-of-a-kind nature of our self was multiplied by six or eight—enough to make an impact on life, which is like high school.
In the high school of the early Baby Boom everyone dressed the same. This was how we communicated our idea that we were nonconformists. Identical clothing demonstrated the individualism of the Baby Boom. Tim Minsky, being good at math, explained it after two beers. The theory of quantum mechanics predicts that infinite random behavior results in universal laws of physics.
The universal law at our high school was boys wore penny loafers with white wool socks, chinos, and long-sleeved madras shirts. Individualism was expressed when the madras bled on Dad’s white dress shirts.
Girls wore penny loafers, too, with white cotton ankle socks, pleated tartan skirts, and Peter Pan collar blouses embellished with circle pins. Boys told each other that a circle pin meant a girl was a virgin. Whether it was meant to mean that or not, it did.
This style was known as “collegiate.” Any college would do, even the two-year college downtown. Kids who were going to work instead of college didn’t need to communicate nonconformity and could wear anything they liked. Except blue jeans.
The school authorities forbade work clothes in school. However, the school aut
horities said we had to work hard in school. Otherwise, when we left school, we’d have to do hard work. Probably wearing blue jeans. “Question Authority,” as the aging dork in a Prius who held me up in traffic this morning said on his bumper sticker.
Questions of legal, moral, and institutional authority began to be fiercely debated in public schools. The fierce debate of the 1962–63 school year was whether white Levi’s were blue jeans.
Today the question of whether students should be given condoms is fiercely debated in public schools. Speaking as someone who carried around the same Trojan until it wore a white ring in the leather of my wallet, it’s amazing how much bullshit our generation has piled on legal, moral, and institutional authority. The fierce debate of the 1963–64 school year would be whether students should be given haircuts.
Anyway, were white Levi’s blue jeans? The school authorities maintained they were Levi’s. The students maintained they were white. Parents and teachers got involved. Jim Fisk’s debate team adviser changed the debate topic from selling wheat to Russia to “Resolved: White Levi’s Are Not Appropriate Apparel for School.”
We’re a generation that doesn’t back down on matters of principle. Starting in 1963 boys at our high school wore penny loafers with white wool socks, white Levi’s, and long-sleeved madras shirts.
White Levi’s weren’t the only pressing issue of the day. Mr. Collingwood the Biology teacher interrupted class during the Cuban missile crisis. He told us that this was a very grave crisis. There was a genuine threat of nuclear war. We should have a class discussion.
My Biology lab partner, Susan, was no Marsha Matthiessen but she was cute enough that I’d dissected her frog for her.
I told Susan, “We could be dead next week. You and I should, you know, do it.”
Susan gave me a look like she’d given the frog when it came out of the jar of formaldehyde.
“No, seriously,” I said. “We don’t want to die virgins.”
Susan gave me a different look, more like the one when I’d pulled her frog over to my side of the table and, shielding her view with my madras-clad elbow, recited the names of frog innards so she could label the diagram in her lab notebook.
She said she needed time to think. She’d give me her answer on Monday. Then the Cuban missile crisis was over, darn it.
Pressing issues were becoming popular. Class was interrupted more often. We discussed mutually assured destruction and civil rights. Even parents wanted to have discussions.
Ana Klein’s father was a doctor. Her mother volunteered at the city’s Planned Parenthood clinic. There was no TV in their living room. They owned hard-back books. They had a poster of Matisse’s La Danse on the rec room wall and they used cloth napkins on weeknights.
Dr. Klein turned to me at dinner and asked, “What do you think about civil rights?”
Was I supposed to argue? Saying, “Civil rights are great!” didn’t sound right either. I had very little experience of anybody talking about anything at the dinner table. I said, “Civil rights are the pressing issue of the day.”
Dr. Klein nodded with grave approval. But civil rights were, paradoxically, almost as damaging to the Baby Boom’s understanding of the nature of evil as superhero comic books and Hannah Arendt. I hope nobody who was completely right about something that was completely wrong will take offense, but Baby Boomers would end up thinking that each pressing issue of the day—no matter which side of the issue the Baby Boomer is on at the moment—is a matter of, as it were, black and white.
Of course Ana and the rest of us did talk about civil rights and other pressing issues when we were by ourselves. Dr. and Mrs. Klein went out a lot. They had a wine cellar. That is, they had a cellar with a cupboard that had wine in it. We tried Manischewitz. That makes a real mess on the kitchen floor.
Ana and Leo Luhan were determined to become Freedom Riders. Ana was indignant that West Side High School wasn’t integrated. Leo thought the way white people in Mississippi talked, dressed, and acted wasn’t cool. They had a plan to be Freedom Riders on the city bus that ran back and forth along Coolidge Avenue between the West Side High school district and the city’s black neighborhood. And Joe Brody had a paper bag full of bus token slugs.
But before they could get organized Coach Gurnsey, who coached the West Side Cowboys football team, started worrying that West Side wasn’t getting any of the Negro kids who were good at playing football. A former Cowboy football star who sold real estate found a house in the West Side school district for the family of the black neighborhood’s best running back. The house was on a street with a lot of new immigrants who didn’t speak English well enough to say prejudiced things.
People like Coach Gurnsey and the former football star real estate salesman don’t seem to come up in any Ken Burns saga of the American civil rights movement. And I suppose Coach’s motives for integrating West Side High wouldn’t have made for an elevating classroom discussion about civil rights. But the running back was always called on to explain how it felt to be discriminated against.
Tim Minsky, Jim Fisk, and I signed up for “Model UN.” We did it to get excused from gym. At “Model UN” the pressing issue was “Should Communist China Be Admitted?” The answer was no. It would lead to an imbalance for Chinese communists. Later the answer would be yes. It would lead to a balance for Russian communists. Phillip Woo, the only Chinese kid in the city school system that we knew of, did not sign up. His parents owned a Chinese restaurant. Maybe they would have liked 800,000,000 more customers.
“Model UN” was held downtown in the drafty auditorium of the two-year college. There were about a hundred high school student delegates, the kind who want to get excused from gym. I can’t remember anything else, and wouldn’t if I could. Nothing produces more useless tedium than “Model UN” except the UN.
The Greatest Generation was pretending it was good Cold War strategy to send a bunch of kids someplace to argue about things they didn’t understand. In a couple of years the Greatest Generation would quit pretending. In a couple of years the Greatest Generation would really believe it was good Cold War strategy to send a bunch of kids someplace—someplace worse than a drafty auditorium— to do something worse than argue, about things they still didn’t understand.
The Baby Boom’s greatest achievement has been in the field of bullshit, but we didn’t invent it.
No, no; for my virginity,
When I lose that, says Rose, I’ll die:
Behind the elms, last night, cried Dick,
Rose, were you not extremely sick?
—Matthew Prior,
“A True Maid”
9
THE PRELUDE
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven, as William Wordsworth said when he got his driver’s license.
The Baby Boom’s first social movement was cruising. This is not to be confused with “Crusin’”—adolescence on wheels as it is poorly remembered in popular culture and badly reenacted in Plymouth Belvederes by old bald guys. I never saw a carhop wearing roller skates. The idea was as stupid then as it is now.
Nor did we cruise in the singles bar or Chistopher Street sense, loitering with sexual intent. We were full of sexual intentions. And we could loiter. But we had a broader agenda.
We drove around and around. Our parents didn’t understand cruising. They thought we were driving around to find a place to drink and make out. Not that we weren’t. But the Greatest Generation, with its dull powers of fancy, never suspected that our goal was to have no goal at all. Life is a journey, not a destination, as Ralph Waldo Emerson said when he got his driver’s license.
We had the perfect pointless joy of freedom. It wasn’t just our parents who didn’t understand; neither do we anymore. We as grown-ups tell ourselves as kids (and tell our own kids), ??
?Freedom is a serious responsibility” or, “Freedom means making important choices” or, if we’ve had a couple of drinks and are listening to an oldies station, “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” We as kids tell ourselves as grown-ups, “No, it’s not” and “No, it doesn’t.” And our kids tell us that Janis Joplin needed Auto-Tune. I leave it to others to decide whether, over the years, the Baby Boom has gained sophistication concerning the ontological question of free will.
We drove around and around. There were a few little red sports cars, hot rods, custom jobs, and bitching sets of wheels. Very few. Turning sixteen caused our parents to break out in a rash of vehicular insipidity. (Any good Baby Boom boy my age can testify that the oomph went out of American family car design in 1963.) Dad bought Mom a snappy convertible back about the time of the Nixon-Kennedy debates. When we got our driver’s license, he traded it in on a station wagon.
Only rich kids with indulgent parents and poor kids with after-school jobs had their own cars. And thus began the political trend of Angry Middle-class Resentment. The middle class is furious, or at least as furious as middle-class proprieties allow. You’ve seen it in the firebrand—well, Weber grill charcoal lighter—demagoguery and the crass rabble-rousing (though we’re not rabble, so call it Babbitt-rousing) of recent elections and on Morning Joe.
Once the Baby Boom had gone through all its rudimentary phases of ideological development, from revolutionary pimples to Reaganite hip replacement, the true politics of our generation would be revealed. In America the reasonably well-off and moderately comfortable are the angry masses. It has to do with borrowing Mom’s car.
Jim Fisk tried seriously to make the best of things. He showed everybody how one pull on a lever caused the whole front seat of his mother’s Nash Rambler to fold down into a bed.
Ana Klein said, “You’re going to pull the lever and some girl’s going to flip over backward and break her neck.”