Wisdom of the Aged by Craig Hattersley - HTML preview

The SDS experience at Syracuse wasn’t far different from that at many other colleges nationwide, as subsequent discussions with other baby boomers showed. While opposition to the war spread to the general population (a 1967 Gallup poll revealed that an increasing majority of Americans considered our military involvement in Vietnam to be a mistake), burgeoning demonstrations by and large remained relatively peaceful. A linkage to a more visceral civil-rights movement became clear when Martin Luther King Jr. said in 1967, “If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read ‘Vietnam.’”

The good portion of the hullabaloo and media attention drawn to the antiwar movement came courtesy of the Yippies, the Youth International Party (founded by, among others, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and Paul Krassner). Their appeal lay mainly in their irreverent sense of humor, seen in elaborate and satiric antics such as their appearance at the visitors’ gallery of the New York Stock Exchange, where they chucked fistfuls of real and fake dollars to the traders on the floor below, causing on the one hand boos and hisses and on the other a mad scramble for the loot. (The gallery was subsequently closed until a glass barrier could be installed.)

While we enjoyed the theater of the inspired chaos threatening the status quo, Syracuse students remained pretty sedated. The male freak scene there, such as it was, consisted of fashionable young dudes maybe with sprouting sideburns and hair creeping over the collar, if only in response to high-school dress codes no longer in force. Revolution came slowly in the gray skies of Upstate New York: The passive intelligentsia were content with having their letters published in the school newspaper and in observing from the fringes the Saturday-afternoon football fracas. A ready supply of drugs—nothing more potent than rather mediocre pot—supplemented the alcoholic beverages of choice available to all in the many campus bars. Syracuse police avoided campus confrontation, undoubtedly to avoid busting anybody whose family might be of import. An uneasy peace settled in at SU while elsewhere campus demonstrations built in size and intensity in protest of the war. Events in the spring of 1968, however, soon heated things up.

At the end of March, President Lyndon Johnson, beset by seething racial resentment in the country and antiwar fervor, declared he would not seek reelection. What looked to be a hummer of a contest loomed. Just five days later, Martin
Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, precipitating another round of race riots in a hundred cities nationwide. In our Syracuse dorm floor of some fifty males, the only two black guys shared a room in a corner by themselves. I knew one peripherally, as we played together on our intramural basketball team. In a naked show of solidarity, I took a small stash of hashish I had to their room and smoked them out. They seemed to appreciate the gesture.

But the upcoming election aroused me like nothing else, as steeped in politics as I had become. Vice President Hubert Humphrey, a genial political hack, would no doubt run. Eugene McCarthy, long a leader in antiwar politics and a darling of intellectuals, had assembled a rag-tag army to do battle with LBJ. But even as Johnson quit the field, McCarthy faced the problem of not being a saleable commodity. Nobody could know for sure how strong the middle-America backlash was to the racial unrest and campus demonstrations—and the Democratic party bosses weren’t about to gamble. Bobby Kennedy appeared the heir apparent, whipping McCarthy in the primaries straight out to June primaries in California. But Sirhan Sirhan blew him away during the celebration.

On the Republican side, politicians like George Wallace and Richard Nixon campaigned on restoring law and order to a “silent majority” troubled by the unrest, bad blood kept a-simmer until it boiled over at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. There, in an immense, farcical horror show staged by Chicago police and Mayor Richard Daley, Hubert Humphrey won the Democratic nomination. The whole scenario played out like something out of a wild, Republican dirty-tricks campaign.

Demonstrators flocked in to disrupt the convention in Chicago: In April the city had undergone two days of rioting after the death of Martin Luther King, leaving 11 dead, 48 wounded by police gunfire, 90 policemen injured, and more than 2,000 people arrested. During the race riots, Democratic machine boss Mayor Daley gave police the authority “to shoot to kill any arsonist or anyone with a Molotov cocktail in his hand . . . and . . . to shoot to maim or cripple anyone looting any stores in our city.” Against that backdrop, Daley vowed that “law and order will be maintained” during the convention.

Events began humorously enough, as Jerry Rubin and friends attempted to nominate Pigasus the Pig as Yippie candidate for president. Several hundred spectators and reporters had gathered to witness the staged media event, and police who were already there waiting arrested Rubin, folk singer Phil Ochs, and five other Yippies. He also promised, on behalf of Pigasus, a fair election campaign—and if Pigasus won he would be eaten. Rubin avowed this would reverse the usual democratic process in which the pig is elected “and proceeds to eat the people.”

Conditions deteriorated in the ensuing days, as tempers flared and actions grew more outrageous, with the whole world watching. In incidents later characterized in the Walker Report as a “police riot,” demonstrators—along with TV reporters, doctors, and whoever else happened along—were beaten senseless by the cops. In Miami and the Siege of Chicago, Norman Mailer wrote:

The military spine of a great liberal party had finally separated from the skin . . . the power had decided, “No, do not let them march another ten blocks and then disperse them on some quiet street, no, let it happen before all the land, let everybody see that their dissent will soon be equal to their own blood; let them realize that the power is implacable, and will beat and crush and imprison and yet kill before it will ever relinquish the power. So let them see before their own eyes what it will cost to continue to mock us, to defy us, and resist . . . There are more cowards alive than the brave.”

In that climate, what right-thinking, middle-of-the-road American could have believed that chirpy Democratic lackey Hubie could measure up to the turbulent times as they were? At least they accepted that Nixon could be an asshole when necessary. This asshole factor might well have ultimately turned the tide of the election: an attempt to bring back the staid Eisenhower years of sedate nihility, all in the guise of law and order. When the votes were counted, it was decided that maybe the kids had gone too far. . . .

Meanwhile, back in Syracuse, my dabble in SDS had pretty much soured me on the local version, and as for the Peace and Freedom Party, not much can be said. The only time I saw them in action played out the next fall when Democratic vice presidential candidate Edmund Muskie came to the university to speak. The PFP candidate for VP (I can’t for the life of me remember her name) showed up with a bullhorn, shouting down old Ed whenever he tried to say anything. Ultimately, my sense of fair play saw me siding with the crowd when they grew annoyed with this tactic and told her to clam up and shove off. So much for my Syracuse activism.

Social life at the U had proved much more engaging. Freshman year, by the spring of 1968, had devolved into barely restrained boorishness courtesy of our dorm-floor denizens, a succession of antics blowing off steam (as is generally the wont of young Big Men on the Campus). By then, the habitués of our ward had cultivated a rep as campus bad boys. Every week there’d be new stories about what happened over the weekend when Vic and Dave got drunk, came back with outlandish tales or an appropriated street sign or other memento. And we lived, as always, for the perfect practical joke.

One day, while Vic was in the floor phone booth talking to a girlfriend, pranksters piled up all the lounge furniture and sealed him in. Mark then grabbed one of the floor fire extinguishers and proceeded to hose him down through available openings. As happened, the curses and blandishments of said victim were met with uproarious laughter and a hardy: “What’s that, Vic? You say you want more?” No mercy.

The floor RA (resident adviser) only happened to be around when it came time to clean up the messes.

Another hapless fellow, seen on the floor as too cool by half, happened to get his door jammed one evening so he couldn’t get out of his room. His screams of rage and protestation echoed down the halls as a number of inebriated floor fiends, upon discovering his dilemma, filled galvanized garbage cans with water and poured them under his door. His worst longshoreman dialectic brought only guffaws and the refrain: “What’s that, Bob? You say you want more?”

Amused as I was by the floor antics, I had to husband the limited funds gleaned from my ghostwriting business and couldn’t often partake in the liberal lubrication leading to said buffoonery. Others in the dorm received allowances that gave them free rein to imbibe on weekends and cut loose. But they sometimes shared in their good fortune: On one occasion, Vic and Dave enlisted my aid in the polishing off of a gallon of Gallo cream sherry. To one like myself, not yet familiar with the ups and downs of alcohol consumption, it was an experience never forgotten—and one of the few times in my life when I could not, try as I might, walk a straight line afterwards, bouncing from wall to wall in the dormitory. I awoke that night from a sound sleep, jolted to semi-sensibility by my abrupt fall from bed. After a hurried stumble to the bathroom, I discovered that cream sherry tastes as sweet coming up as it does going down. You live and learn.

My weekends that spring often entailed a different adventure—hitchhiking the ninety miles back to Canandaigua to visit the nascent hip community in our small town. Or catching a Greyhound bus for a trip to the city to see how Carlito was getting on. That spring, he and I exchanged visits on a couple weekends, him escaping New York or me Syracuse. By that time, my roommate had flunked out, and I had an extra bed anyway should he care to drop in.

For one particular visit, I scored some tickets to our first rock concert together: the Young Rascals and Martha and the Vandellas. We sat somewhere towards the back and side, but our vision was in no way aided by our chemically fogged perceptions. We spent much of the show trying to figure out if Felix, lead singer of the Rascals, had grown a beard.

The bus trips to and from New York City, as we exchanged visits, made it really hard to go for just a weekend. The Greyhound route through Pennsylvania made for hours of ossifying boredom, a six-hour vigil, minimum. One ride—the best, cause I remember it least—was spent passed out on the floor of the bus. I had had to catch a midnight bus (during a holiday weekend) and did not want to lose any sleep. So I went out that Friday and got properly polluted. When I finally boarded, all the seats were taken, so I lay down on the floor in the back and fell sound asleep. Next thing I remembered, someone shook me to wake me up for the New York stop. No hangover, felt great, great ride. Ah, youth.

The first time I ever tried acid was on a bus to the city. Needless to say, it was a trip. I happily rode through the evening hours, watching the lights flit by, and, thank you, I enjoyed the show.

Later on, when a second high school buddy, Ricky V., moved into a new apartment with Carlito on the Lower East Side of New York, we expanded our repertoire. Ricky V. smoked cigarettes, which were then allowed on Greyhounds, and he devised a method for surreptitiously smoking pot en route. For even if you sat in the toilet in the rear and blew smoke out the window, the smell of pot quickly permeated the bus. Not a good thing in Rockefeller’s New York. Ricky V. solved that with generous, noxious clouds of a fifty-cent cigar, which had the tendency to move decent folk to the front of the bus as well as blanket the tiny marijuana smell emanating from the bathroom.

Meanwhile, I had managed to establish a toehold at Syracuse U. Freshman year had served to acclimate me to the “rigors” of college life and form friendships in the dorm. The fall semester of 1968, however, started out badly. That spring, my mother had neglected to send in the hundred-dollar advance fee then required by Syracuse to reserve the next year’s studentship. I didn’t remember having paid it before freshmen year, with all the money that changed hands, and I myself never received any notice that it had to be paid.

This, of course, I didn’t find out until I went to register that fall. After having gone through the whole ordeal, standing in long lines to sign up for each class, finally elbowing my way through to the payoff window, I was informed my name wasn’t on the list and I couldn’t register.

After my mother’s ensuing frantic scramble to raise the loot and ship it on down the line, I registered—dead last, before they folded up the tables and closed down. It was a godawful schedule: eight o’clock classes five days a week and a nine o’clock French class Saturday morning.

And the courses left when I finally got to register were the absolute bottom of the barrel. One delight, a fine arts course on Renaissance painters, consisted of a two-hour lecture, twice a week, to eight hundred students. Three exams for the semester made up your grade. Required reading for the class, the professor’s own book, was a handsomely bound goliath that made War and Peace read like Mother Goose.

The one course I held out any hope for was in religion, at a time when I began to experience some spiritual awakenings. As it turned out, the class was light years from religion as spiritualism, more an exercise in bloviation. The professor reveled in constructing each sentence of his lecture in obscure sagacity, designed, no doubt, to impress the coeds. Though I prided myself on my own vocabulary—wont to pontificate in my own right (while cranking out English papers at any level of bullshit)—this guy left me feeling like a slobbering idiot. I only understood him on vague levels of cosmic cognition, like the comprehension of a Southern Baptist confronted by his first Buddhist topknot. I wore out the pages of my dictionary and thesaurus trying to write papers in his vernacular.

That probably sums up my feeling towards the majority of college courses at the time. In succeeding years, great effort went into making college more germane and pertinent. But back then, college revolved around dull professors who took themselves and their subjects very seriously, usually because they were scared half to death to be up front of the class. Which usually resulted in cascades of showy dialectic—the old veteran showing the kids what he’s got, an exercise in auto-eroticism. By that time, the only students still nodding and smiling along were the kiss-asses and the twelve-year-old child geniuses.

Then as now, most college kids aren’t, basically, overly bright. College, we were told, is just what you’ve got to do to keep from having to doing manual labor. “Dumb” people don’t go to college. But people perhaps written off as “not college material” earn a good living as plumbers, electricians, carpenters, mechanics, and the like. Legions of students tend to blunder their way through college into life. They work a lot of public service jobs and drive a lot of Ford Focuses. Those with connections work at the country club and drive Cadillacs.

College, in reality, is basically the time spent between classes. If it weren’t for the classes, college would be a lot of fun. All those fledgling boys and girls—their only discipline forevermore their own devise. And self-discipline usually takes years to perfect.

I struggled in my attempts to maintain, in the face of unremitting boredom that settled in. For the entire fall of 1968, I plodded through one stultifying class after another, each consisting mostly of lectures to the masses in a ponderous auditorium with the occasional test determining grades. My living conditions further compounded the situation with a growing feeling of isolation. I no longer tucked into the friendly confines of the dorm, with its attendant built-in friendships; finances dictated I now inhabited a room with three new faces in a funky apartment building on the edge of campus. My little area did have a door on it, though, so I only had to share a bathroom with three others.

My “suite” was a small room divided to appear larger, like two closets, with a sink and a counter, which I adorned with a pair of pet gerbils I acquired for comic relief and companionship. Gerbils make a great little pet—low maintenance, cheap to feed—though they littered every couple months. I finally tired of giving away the current litter as they aged out and passed it all on to the next sucker. Gerbils go on forever—they’re like a chain letter.

The Zenith Circle of Sound stereo record player I had positioned on my footlocker next to the bed played a lot of the Beatles’ white album that semester. Some of the old gang from the dorm would drop by, get high, and listen to all four sides. My copy of the album cover was stained by the bottom of a large wine jug, a circular, labyrinth pattern. Since this was the era of the trick, pop-art album covers, we told one of the guys that you were supposed to immerse the Beatle cover in vineagar and salt, and a portrait would emerge. We told him I forgot to put the salt in mine and fucked it up. We also planned on telling him later on in the evening that it was a joke but forgot—and didn’t get back to him till after his cover had been soaked to a soggy pulp. Just like the good old days in the dorm.

But life had changed in college without the dorm rats offering proximal support. A little bit of time had ticked off and everything had changed. It was a disillusionment along the same lines as my one-and-only panty raid in freshman year.

It must have been the first week we’d moved into the dorm when word spread that a raid was on (no doubt something upperclassmen propagated to make the newbies feel part of something). Quickly, several hundred young freshman studs assembled and surrounded a handy girls’ dorm and chanted for panties. Probably one bra and a water balloon later, I put my hands in my pockets and casually walked away. I was starting to feel like a real asshole. Another part of moving into Syracuse U. also involved a little beanie that all frosh were supposed to wear around. These quickly found a home in the dorm trashcan.

But sophomore year, all that had changed. No longer in the dorm, I couldn’t just walk down to the lounge in the evening to watch Star Trek or the Smothers brothers. Nobody who lived in those rickety old apartments could afford a TV. A majority of the occupants of the old building were art students (the starving artist ethic and all). Actually, it was pretty hip to live there; it was hip to be poor and wear blue jeans and work shirts. I was hip.

Semi-aroused by a politics professor who managed to make one class interesting, I put in some more hours stuffing envelopes and calling registered democrats for the Hubert Humphrey campaign. The prof hated Nixon and railed long and bitter about his antics in the Alger Hiss era. I had worked on the 1960 campaign, after all, stuffing envelopes and running errands, extolling the virtues of one John F. Kennedy to all my classmates. And when the election results rolled in late that night at party HQ, I rejoiced with the local hacks, seeing it as somewhat as a personal victory, given my efforts.

My minimal involvement at Syracuse sustained my interest in an otherwise dull election in ’68. The two main campaign characters excited little enthusiasm. But stuffing envelopes in a tawdry little office was in no way like leading a charge downhill on a white stallion, something my youthful idealism yearned for, so I soon retired my stuffer. I even stopped at a sidewalk stand and this time seriously read through piles of pamphlets and brochures on the rewarding life in the Peace Corps. Nah.

Being disinterested was rapidly becoming very hip. It took a Spiro Agnew to jolt the jaded back to reality. The growing unrest on campuses and increasingly vocal young militants provided fodder for the Agnews of the world to use in fears to come, whipping up the grumbles of a “silent majority” patriotism into a voting force—my country right or wrong. Hippies weren’t exactly idolized in bedrock America anyway: It figured someone like Spiro would want to cash in on that.

Otherwise, the election had devolved into a rather Tweedledee–Tweedledum affair, though old Hubie showed a slight edge in moral fiber. After JFK was blown away, things had started to go downhill for me politically. For starters, Lyndon Johnson was about as inspiring as creamed spinach, and so far out in front of old weird Barry Goldwater that he surely didn’t need my help in the ’64 campaign. After JFK’s Camelot, the political arena seemed stiflingly mundane.

Nixon managed to ignite a little of the liberal fire on campus. When he came to campaign in downtown Syracuse, we marched in a candlelight parade to a designated section at the very back of the auditorium where he appeared. The main complaint students voiced with Dick’s campaign was that he said over and again that we would fix things if elected, ending the war in Vietnam, but never saying how—a secret plan. So, cleverly weaving this thematic statement into tasteful protest, we waited in the auditorium till Nixon rose to speak, then all stood and sang “The Sounds of Silence.” In his inimitable greasy style, Nixon calmed the Republican majority in attendance by telling them to let us have our say.

In the months before the Nixon administration assumed control and began drawing lines, there seemed to be an immense, psychic lame-duck trough of despond, a cosmic lull before the storm. The movement had picked up some crazies along the way, and some of what you heard from both directions was surreal. It seemed like the mood of the country was at a hard boil, but it was to be nothing more than the first bubbles and wisps of steam for what was to come.

In school, the courses began taking their toll on me. My basketball game was way off; my gerbils were gone. My memory banks were short-circuited by attempting to jam too much useless information into them at one time. Inexorably, finals in the fall of 1968 approached. My grades, never of a solid stature that semester because of an insidious lassitude, teetered on the outcome of the final set of tests.

It shaped up into being a monumental week of sleepless nights wired on No-Doz, cramming for the frantic days outputting data. The day before finals week, when I should have been girding my loins for the looming battles, I caved instead. I started looking for another way out. Truth be told, I carried a 3.6 GPA from freshman year—down from my own expectations—and didn’t want it to slip further. I somehow figured that these grades would convey if I started up anew at another school, a foolish assumption of youth.

I went down to my counselor’s office and withdrew.

I was a man with a plan. I called Carlito and Ricky V. in New York to invite myself in as a charter roommate at their deluxe East Third Street apartment. I called my father and gained asylum from “college”—at the School of Visual Arts, an art and photography school of some repute. My father taught photography there, so I wouldn’t have to pay any tuition.

Dad, of course, was tickled pink that his young’un wanted to take up photography. When I had told him the summer before that I was taking a photojournalism class at Syracuse, he sent me a mammoth trunk full of paper, film, utensils, glassine envelopes for storing negatives, developing tanks, light meters, and even an old Nikon camera once owned by Pete Turner, a former student of his.

Mom was not real happy. Her one son who could crank out the grades and had a chance of being the lawyer (and politician) he planned to be turned into a scruffy photographer overnight. She lamented my youthful impetuosity, but, to her credit, gave way and let me decide. I would find my own way.