The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss (15 page)

Our parents’ disapproval was a red flag for Terence, who spent as much time as possible with RJ as a convenient way of irritating them. The other prong in his offensive, the one that probably broke them, began when he started pursuing the daughter of the local librarian. She was a nice girl about two years older than Terence, but because of the age difference she might as well have been the Whore of Babylon as far as our father was concerned. He became convinced that Terence was going to “knock her up.” This possibility was seen as the worst possible outcome, and it had to be thwarted. I doubt my brother and his friend ever had sex, as later events seemed to confirm; but I suspect Terence wanted our Dad to think that they were. Today, more liberal parents might address such a situation by discussing condoms or birth control with their son. In our Catholic, sexually repressed family fifty years ago, the mere idea of birth control was a heresy that could not be raised in rational conversation. In those days, if you got a girl pregnant, you married her, and that effectively ended your life.

In the spring of 1963, in the middle of this campaign, Dad suffered his first and only heart attack. I suspect today it might be viewed as a mild one, but any heart attack then was considered serious, a brush with death. Dad spent a lot of time recuperating in bed, a common mode of treatment at the time. He also gave up the unfiltered Camels he’d been smoking since the war, which did not help his mood. You’d think if your father had just suffered a heart attack, perhaps caused in good measure by the stress of dealing with you, his recalcitrant son, you might ease up a little and cut the guy some slack. Yet, as I recall, Terence raised the pressure even higher. Finally our parents relented; Terence got their permission to go. In the end, I think, my mother was worried that if he stuck around, there was a good chance he’d upset my father enough to trigger another heart attack. Once again Terence had gotten his way, as he always did, by pressing so hard they finally caved in.

That’s how, in the fall of 1963, Terry ended up attending Awalt High School in Mountain View, California, with our cousin Kathi. (The school was renamed Mountain View High in the early 1980s.) He had soon befriended a coterie of strange and interesting people, some of whom went on to play a role in both our lives. He also encountered an abundance of unconventional and even dangerous ideas. Meanwhile, Terence’s departure meant enormous change for me at home. His habit of tormenting me had already diminished by then, partly because he’d found other interests, and partly because I’d grown big enough to pose the risk I’d retaliate. Nevertheless, I was delighted to be suddenly free of all torture, and to have my own room to boot! At the same time, I was sad to see him go, because he always had enough stuff going on to keep things interesting.

A seventh grader, I’d been left to my own devices, which included astronomy, cosmology, and astrophysics. I’d eventually abandon my ambitions in those fields as I grew to realize I couldn’t cut the math, though looking back I think I could have succeeded if I’d stuck with it. What seemed then to be an insurmountable barrier was an early factor in directing my aspirations toward biology. I was also into classical music. I was a snob about pop music at the time; it took a year or so of Terence’s influence on visits back from the West Coast to make me appreciate the virtues of rock and roll and folk music. My hero was the classical guitarist Andrés Segovia. At one point, my parents let me take the bus alone to visit a friend whose family had moved to Phoenix the year before. Segovia was giving a concert at Arizona State University, and seeing him in person was a highlight of my young life. I wanted to be either the world’s next best classical guitar player or a conductor like Leonard Bernstein. As director of the New York Philharmonic, Bernstein hosted a series of television specials, called the Young People’s Concerts, that I loved. I was all over those broadcasts as much as any space shot.

Though life was better at home, my relationships at school were deteriorating. I never had a lot of friends in junior high; I suppose I was too weird for many of my peers, or too “nerdy” as we’d say now. I was a bookish fellow with eclectic interests that few of my fellow students shared. And that was fine with me. I had plenty to keep me occupied and didn’t feel the need of a large social group. I had a few close friends who either tolerated my eccentricities or were eccentric as well.

But for a while that year, a certain group of boys took it upon themselves to single me out for bullying. Most I considered “meatheads.” The exception was Richard, one of my closest friends, so his involvement was all the more hurtful and confusing. Like the others, he was a year ahead of me. He sometimes tried to defend me or persuade the others to leave me alone; but just as often he joined in the taunting, which developed into a daily occurrence and quickly became intolerable. Richard may have been insecure about his status—although why was a mystery to me, as he was admired as an athlete and was attractive to girls. In any case, I think he felt compelled to participate in the bullying as a way to demonstrate solidarity with his peers, and for that I don’t blame him. Seventh grade seems to be a critical time in childhood when acceptance by the group becomes particularly important, and if acceptance requires one to display loyalty to the “gang” by ostracizing another, so be it.

This went on for weeks. It was my custom to walk the few blocks home for lunch, returning to school half an hour before the noon break ended. And there they’d be, waiting. I hardly remember what if anything the harassment was about beyond snide remarks about my sexuality, allusions that I was “queer” even though I clearly wasn’t, snatching my glasses, hitting, poking, pulling on my clothes, silly things like that. Without really knowing what I was doing, except that the harassment had to be stopped, I did bring it all to an abrupt end one day. A kid named Sheldon often led the proceedings. My tormentors usually greeted me when I returned, forming a kind of gauntlet I’d have to run up the front steps into the building. While they seldom pursued me beyond that point, this time Sheldon blocked my path, standing on the top steps in front of the double doors with their large plate-glass windows. Though I was cornered, by then I’d had enough. I gave Sheldon a push, a rather gentle push, actually, but he lost his balance and staggered back; I saw the cracks appear in the glass around a Sheldon-shaped impression as the heavy glass shattered and he fell through. There was a moment of stunned silence. Imagine the tableau: Sheldon on his back amid a pile of shattered glass, me standing over him shaking with rage, the others paralyzed at the foot of the stairs, appalled at what had happened. The freeze-frame lasted only a second; time started to flow again as I turned toward them and screamed, “Just leave me alone, all I want is to be left alone!” Or something lame like that.

Before we knew it we were all sitting in the office of the school principal. Mr. Etherton was a cool guy, actually, well liked and rather easygoing. Though he had known about the bullying for some time, he’d made no effort to intervene. This was his chance. Things were quickly sorted out, blame was laid (on all of us, including me) and justice dispensed: All parties had to avoid each other, and all had to chip in to repair the window. The first condition worked; the harassment ended. As for the second, I was never asked to help pay for the window, nor were my tormentors, as far as I know.

Ironically, some of these older guys became my best friends in high school. By then the hippie meme had arrived, and suddenly I was cool, having gotten my hands on some cannabis and turned them on. Strong friendships were forged on our mutual interest in novel and prohibited intoxicants. While a few of those bonds have persisted to this day, over the years some of us drifted apart, and some have passed away. As for my nemesis, Sheldon, he wasn’t part of that group, but we left each other alone. He wanted to be a lawyer, if I recall. I don’t know if he achieved his ambitions, but I think he would have made a great prosecutor.

I can’t conclude my remembrance of seventh grade without mentioning Madeline. She was a special friend of a quite different order than the other girls I longed for and lusted over at that age. Though she was perhaps more beautiful than they were, and certainly smarter, our relationship remained platonic, except for one abortive effort during my first summer back from the University of Colorado in Boulder. We both realized then that an amorous relationship was not to be our fate, though at times I’ve regretted that. In many ways we were soul mates. What we shared was a love of books and ideas, and that gave us plenty to talk about, even as it separated us from most of our peers. We were “extra-environmental,” a term coined by the media theorist Marshall McLuhan to describe someone who is
in
a culture but not
of
it, like an anthropologist living with some exotic tribe. Both introverts, we came to see ourselves as kindred spirits trapped in a milieu of meatheads, jocks, and “mean girls.” We weren’t part of the cool cliques, and didn’t care; we took pride in our extra-environmental status and cultivated a bemused detachment from the games that shaped the social dynamics among our peers. Sexual attraction didn’t come into it, and I really don’t know why.

But I thank my lucky stars for Madeline. Our friendship made school life almost tolerable. She belonged to the little band of rebels that coalesced around me in high school, whose main preoccupation was the exploration of altered states of consciousness accessed through various pharmacological portals. The two of us remained close throughout high school and beyond, until we lost touch in the seventies. I know she moved away; I may have heard that she’d married a teacher, or perhaps had become a teacher herself. I haven’t seen her in many years, but she lives on, fondly, in memory.

The biggest trauma that school year occurred far from school. Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963, exploded onto the global stage, throwing the country into a paroxysm of shock and horror. Though Terence was in California, both he and I were similarly affected, as a letter to me revealed. How could this vibrant, handsome president who symbolized hope and progress for so many, including us, be gunned down by a madman with a cheap, mail-order rifle? It was too much. Such a thing could not happen in a sane and rational world, only in a world under the sway of dark and sinister forces. Or at least that’s how we felt. America’s age of innocence was over, and in many ways, so was ours.

Along with the rest of the country, we did little in the following days except stare at the television as the grim spectacle unfolded: Oswald, the alleged assassin, shot as he was led from his cell in Dallas; Kennedy’s body lying in state in the Capitol rotunda as the silent crowds shuffled past; the funeral cortege, the riderless horse, the burial at Arlington National Cemetery; all the futile pomp and effort to bind the wound where a country’s heart had been ripped out. It’s been said that the idealism of a generation died with Kennedy, but the America that shaped our idealism may have died as well. As I look back, it appears increasingly certain that none of what was lost then will ever be recovered—not our hope, our optimism, or our direction. Though the country’s fortunes have since gone through many apparent ups and downs, in retrospect that half-century looks more like a steady devolution, an unraveling, as we spiral inevitably toward some unknown outcome. A country cannot foresee its fate in world history, of course, but it’s gotten harder for me to envision ours with a happy ending.

Many people have remarked that they sense time is somehow accelerating, or that more and more events are being crammed into less and less time. That was certainly how it felt as the dark days of late 1963 gave way to a new year. The rhythm of current events seemed to be picking up, and so did the pace of personal events. The latter may have been an illusion, or just a matter of being older with more to do, but nonetheless, over the next few years our own lives felt as if they were moving ever faster.

In January 1964, President Lyndon Johnson used his first State of the Union address to announce his “War on Poverty.” In February, the Beatles arrived for their inaugural U.S. tour and dominated pop radio with a string of hits. Spring brought the first Rolling Stones album, the first student protests against the Vietnam War, and the first draft-card burnings. In July, Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, outlawing segregation, and Barry Goldwater, the Republican presidential nominee, famously stated, “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.” In August, Congress passed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which allowed the president to wage war in Southeast Asia without having that war actually declared. By year’s end, American troops in South Vietnam numbered 23,300. Johnson beat Goldwater in the November elections, Martin Luther King, Jr. won the Nobel Peace Prize, and comedian Lenny Bruce was sentenced to four months in the workhouse for using offensive language at a New York club.

A wider debate over what could and could not be said in public had erupted that fall at the University of California, Berkeley. Known as the Free Speech Movement, or FSM, it began in September when UC officials decided to enforce a long-ignored rule against leafleting and recruiting for various off-campus political concerns on university property. Civil rights and the war were two such concerns, but the ban curtailed conservative activities as well. A series of rallies ensued, including a massive sit-in that led to the arrest of hundreds. Terence, then a high school senior, closely followed those events in Berkeley, which later had a profound if indirect affect on him—and on me as well.

In what might be termed “drug news” of the day, in 1964 Congress recognized bourbon whiskey (our father’s drug of choice, though he never acknowledged it was a drug) as “a distinctive product of the United States.” The Catholic church condemned the female contraceptive pill. The novelist Ken Kesey embarked on the decade’s strangest book tour, aboard a painted bus with his fellow Merry Pranksters, a trip later recounted by Tom Wolfe in
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
. Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, and Richard Alpert published
The Psychedelic Experience
, a tripper’s guide loosely based on the
Tibetan Book of the Dead
. Bob Dylan turned the Beatles on to cannabis.