Eminent Hipsters (9781101638095) (7 page)

In his teens, my cousin Richard Cohn was an amateur magician. All of us kids would freak out when he'd perform at our birthday parties, pulling rabbits out of hats and coins out of our ears. (Later, he became a playwright and illustrator and changed his name to Dalt Wonk.) Since he seemed to prosper during his four years at Bard College, I applied as well. I must have been accepted on the basis of the great personal charm I displayed during my interview, because my high school grades sucked.

S
ituated on the lush east bank of the Hudson River just north of Rhinebeck, New York, Bard College was built on the former estate of its founder, John Bard, who'd wanted to establish a finishing school for Episcopalian ministers. By the 1960s, Bard had drifted, somewhat, from its theological origins. Now an infamous “progressive” school, it attracted a strange mix of applicants ranging from desperate suburban misfits with impressive verbal skills but appalling high school records (like myself) to pink-cheeked, short-sleeved-shirt-wearing “churchys” who were looking forward to contemplative nature walks and French horn sonatas in Bard Hall. There were private-school girls from Long Island and Connecticut in tennis whites, “red diaper” babies from Manhattan and a small contingent of droll, perpetually baked hipsters from the D.C. area. In 1965, Bard's
student body numbered about six hundred students, total. There were no fraternities.

On a dark, drizzly morning, the first day of school, my father and I loaded up the trunk of his Olds Dynamic 88 in preparation for the drive to upstate New York. When he turned on the ignition, the Top 40 station was featuring “Like a Rolling Stone.” That morning, we'd had a nasty argument when he'd refused to let me drive up alone in my own car. Feelings were still raw. Dylan's six-minute-plus majestic rant seemed, somehow, to validate my adolescent rage.

As the song played on (forever, it seemed), I looked over at my father sitting behind the wheel and couldn't help hearing the music through his ears. I was certain that what he was hearing wasn't a latter-day Beat masterpiece; it wasn't music or poetry at all, just self-indulgent noise. I couldn't help giggling to myself when I thought of a then recent
Mad
magazine parody that announced the release of a new album:
Bob Dilly Sings—Almost
. I was leaving one world, but hadn't quite arrived in the next.

Three tense hours later, we arrived on campus. Though the college had converted two elegant riverside manor houses into dormitory space, my own dorm was part of Stone Row, a group of ivy-covered buildings at the campus center in serious need of renovation. My father couldn't believe that Bard's exorbitant tuition (constituting the greater portion of his life savings) had bought me this dump of a room with leaky windows and peeling blue paint. Trying to make the best of it, he suggested to my roommate, a clarinetist named Chester Brezniak, that he toss a coin for the lower bunk. I won. I'm pretty sure my father cheated.

Two other students occupied tiny inner rooms. Lonnie was a senior, a painter with an outstanding record collection, an endless supply of marijuana and nightly visits from an assortment of willowy girlfriends. In the other room was Alan, a soft-spoken, Peter Pan–ish, coffee-colored dancer who was always wearing leg warmers. The thing was, as I'd never knowingly met a homosexual and had some doubt as to whether they actually existed, the only category I could think to put him in was, maybe, “hyperaesthetic messenger of the gods.”

The first weekend after registration, flyers announced that there was to be a “tequila mixer” in Sottery Hall for the incoming class. Shortly before it was to begin, I happened to be in the court behind Stone Row when I saw a van skid into the main parking lot and disgorge a group of scuzzy hippies—actually, I don't think the word “hippy” was as yet being used to describe what they were—carrying guitars and equipment cases. This turned out to be the Group Image, an early tribal-type band that had been booked to provide the entertainment along with a fine band led by two Bardians, the Boylan brothers, called the Gingermen.

In high school, understand, I'd never had much of a social life. I was one of a few Jews in a spanking-new facility in rural New Jersey. Moreover, I was an introverted jazz snob who was afraid to ride in other kids' cars for fear that “Johnny Get Angry” by Joanie Sommers might come on the radio (though I did have a secret throb for Mary Weiss of the Shangri-Las). I tried taking up the baritone horn, but when the music teacher, Chauncey Chatten, forced me to march during halftime at football games, I gave the damn thing back. So, for most of my high
school years, while the rest of my class was attending sports events or knocking over gas stations (I really had no idea what they did), I was home in my room flipping through the
Saturday Review
(I had a subscription), reading the thick Dover paperbacks I'd stolen from a basement bookshop in Princeton or sitting at the piano copping licks off Red Garland records. I didn't drink or smoke. Aside from Soupy Sales's rogue kiddie show, I had stopped watching TV when I was about thirteen. In short, I was a first-tier nerd, and pitifully lonely.

Lacking physical confidence, I was shy with girls. I'd skipped the proms and graduation and all that stuff. The idea of actually going on a date was both conceptually repugnant and beyond the limits of my courage. In my senior year, I'd somehow managed to gain the friendship of a gorgeous, sad and hilarious girl by tossing off snappy remarks. I could make her laugh, but it never went much further than that.

So I was a bit anxious when I walked into the Sottery Hall tequila mixer. The lights had been dimmed. Along one wall, several tables had been set up and stocked with hundreds of shot glasses rimmed with salt and filled with tequila. There were enormous wooden bowls of lemons and a fruit knife. After watching a few other students demonstrate their technique, I picked up a shot glass, bit into a lemon slice and threw the poison back.

A couple of hours and many shots later, I was sitting against a wall, unable to move, watching an extended jam by the Group Image. For whatever they may have lacked in the way of musical accomplishment, they compensated with real enthusiasm and some nice visuals, including a strobe lighting system—the
first I'd ever seen—and a skinny girl singer named Sheila, who was wearing the shortest microskirt ever manufactured. She'd stopped singing early on and was now in a Dionysian trance, twitching like a maenad. That night, if I hadn't been paralyzed by the tequila, I would've tossed the whole college deal, crawled over to the band bus and begged them to take me with them, to whatever dissolute planet they were bound.

Of course, the next morning I postponed the call to adventure, vowed never again to drink the hard stuff and reverted back to young scholar. Though I'd dabbled in jazz piano and composing since I was a kid, I didn't think I had enough formal training to major in music, so I chose English, with a minor in heartbreak (more on that later). Bard was known for having a strong faculty and those years were no exception. I studied poetry with Anthony Hecht, philosophy with Heinrich Blücher and musical composition with Jacob Druckman. My favorite prof, though, was Baruch Hochman, a little Jewish firecracker and D. H. Lawrence freak with a brush mustache. He used to say things like “If all you do is identify with the protagonist, you're not fully engaged with the text—it's like making love to a woman and feeling nothing but your own body.”

One overcast weekend in the spring of 1967, several of us participated in what turned out to be an underwhelming event called the “Human Be-In” in Central Park. Long-haired “freaks”—newly coined slang at the time—and their scrawny face-painted girlfriends ran around aimlessly while the Grateful Dead struggled in vain to get something going on a small jerry-built stage. The following morning, Hochman began class by looking around the room and saying, “I certainly
hope none of you attended that vulgar display in the park.” Silence prevailed.

I should comment on Bard's strangely apolitical character. After all, this was the sixties. I could say that the sort of student Bard attracted in those days, no matter from what background, tended to share that portion of the decade's ethos that was concerned with exploring inner space rather than the drive to interact with the world and effect change, or that we were in training to be cultural revolutionaries and not firebrands keen to man the barricades. I could say that the campus was isolated in a rural district that made access to daily newspapers and television difficult. But, folks, I don't want to be no jive turkey: most of us were just incredibly self-involved, happy as hell to be away from our “noids” (that's parents, from “paranoids”) and primed to leave the repressive fifties behind and make the leap into the groovy, unbounded, sexualized Day-Glo future. The only demonstration I remember was a march on the president's house (totally justified) to protest the horrible quality of the food.

Besides, I had grave problems of my own. From the very first weeks at Bard, I'd fall in love with a new beauty at least once a semester, each one more unhinged than the last. Perhaps I felt more comfortable with girls who made me feel like my own degree of lunacy was less severe. But, if truth be told, I'd always been drawn to those damaged, incandescent originals who seemed to have, out of necessity, created themselves from scratch, whose core beauty reveals itself in the way they describe themselves and their world. In any case, there was certainly never any thought or calculation on my part. I'd spot
someone in a class, or see a girl on the platform at Rhinecliff station, and that would be that.

Usually, I'd just stare at the object of desire from afar and die a thousand deaths. But not always. One numbing winter, I was so in love with a skipping blond pixie that I stopped eating and sleeping and developed walking pneumonia. I remember standing in the snow one night, tapping on her dorm window and pleading until she finally took me, coughing and weeping, into her bed. Another time, in the dining commons, I saw a tall, exotic creature in a ruffled miniskirt drop a slice of baloney on her slim, naked thigh, stare at it with an amused expression for a ten count, then peel it off and eat it. Years later, I looked her up and ended up following her to Paris.

Before the days of coed dorms, the enemies of romance were heartless men in heavy plaid jackets known as “proctors,” official voyeurs whose job it was to roam the campus at night listening at windows for sounds of depravity. If they found a girl in a guy's dorm the slut was called out and marched back to her proper lodgings. Every so often I'd be awakened at four a.m. by the loud fulminations of a young swell defending the honor and identity of his giggling accomplice, refusing to give her up.

I actually made some friends at Bard, some of whom I'm still in touch with almost a half century later. They came from two distinct groups. One bunch was from my own class, the Stone Row crew, and included the aforementioned vipers from the D.C. area, a brilliant and funny black philosophy major from Harlem and a couple of wry dudes from a prep school in Pennsylvania. The other bunch was from the class of '68. These guys seemed more mature and tended to be more academically inclined. In
fact, most had arrived at Bard with some already developed skills. Delmore could speak Chinese. Bexley, a composer, taught me proper musical notation, and Jonas won top prize for his senior thesis on Borges. Actually, it always seemed to me that the class of '68 was the last bunch of kids not seriously despoiled in their youth by television (with its insidious brainworm commercials) and drugs. Chances were they'd spent their first years of life without a TV and had to use their imagination to entertain themselves. Perhaps they'd even played with some non-corporate-developed toys and read a few books. Sans malls, they hung out at candy stores and had milk delivered by the milkman and the doctor came to their bedrooms when they were ill. Since then, TV and the malls and the drugs have annually compounded the Big Stupid we live with now.

That said, all these guys were now smoking enormous quantities of weed, which had just begun to be co-opted by the middle class. I smoked a fair amount myself until a series of anxiety attacks scared me off in the winter of 1967. For a while I thought the attacks had been triggered by the DMT my friends and I smoked during the big blizzard of that year. Dimethyltryptamine was the hallucinogen that Timothy Leary called the “businessman's trip” because of its intensity and brief duration. The intrepid Bard sophomore would load a pipe with a couple of parsley leaves that had been soaked with the stuff, take a toke and, just as it hit, run out into the stormy night. You'd go from zero to a peak acid-strength high in a nanosecond. The snow that was billowing across the campus was revealed as an army of tiny angels, and you wondered why you hadn't noticed that the college buildings huffed and puffed as if they were in a
Betty Boop cartoon from the thirties. Fifteen minutes later, everything looked normal except for a warm, lingering glow. Back to the dorm for another hit . . .

Mystic note: In the summer of 1965, a month before that first drive up to Bard, I'd already had my introduction to Oblivion. My friend Pete had gone off to Brandeis the year before and brought back a small cache of sugar cubes laced with five hundred micrograms of lysergic acid diethylamide, still perfectly legal at the time, and a book called
The Psychedelic Experience
by a trio of Harvard professors, including the notorious Dr. Leary before he went totally bat-shit loony. Inspired by a reference by Aldous Huxley in
The Doors of Perception
, the book was based on the Bardo Thodol (aka the Tibetan Book of the Dead), a Buddhist manual for the rebirth of the soul just as it leaves the body. Leary and his colleagues conceived their version as a road map for the serious tripper looking to achieve perfect ego death. (We're talking East Coast style here. Way out west, Ken Kesey was already using acid to clear the palate at beer parties.)