Vignettes of the Sixties

1. a raid

     In the late sixties they lived in an old building in Chicago close enough to Lake Michigan that the sound of the water lapping on the shore was audible at night. Except for the front apartment on each floor, the building was made up of studios with little kitchenettes and Murphy beds in the closets. The elderly widows who occupied most of the units sometimes would call on him for aid with such chores as replacing lightbulbs. He and his wife were there largely because it was cheap and the management allowed their cat.
     A few other tenants of their own generation lived there with whom they soon became acquainted. The first-floor front apartment, right by the building’s entrance, was occupied by two young women of spirits so buoyant and innocent that they drove a Volkswagen Beetle covered with hearts and daisies and slogans such as “make love not war” and “smoke pot.” No one could have been more amiable, and the two were masseuses as well, though the car in the street did seem rather uncool. After all, in those days really substantial penalties were exacted for simple possession, though in this particular city, cash could resolve most cases.
     They also met Gino, a flamboyant hair stylist who also lived on the first floor. Something of an interior decorator as well as a coiffeur, he had covered all his walls with metal foil. Serious about his profession, he designed original looks and hairdressing magazines were scattered about his place along with gay pornography. They had some pleasant sociable evenings with these three.
     But, one night came a knock that somehow sounded troubled even before they had opened the door. It was Gino who breathlessly informed them that the police were raiding the women’s place at that very moment. He had managed to slip down to the end of the hall where there was a small closet with a garbage chute near which he had concealed his stash before coming like Paul Revere to alert them on the fourth floor.
     As it happened at that moment they had a miscellany of minor contraband: half an ounce of decent pot, a bit of a better variety, a chunk of hash, a few psychedelics and amphetamines for a rainy day, nothing big, but enough to be very expensive in the corrupt city in which they lived. He wasn’t sure what to do. He knew he did not want to lose his little collection. Or get busted. The garbage room seemed risky, especially if the cops had managed to turn up Gino’s stuff. With the foolish bravado of youth, he strode to his back stairway and descended decisively into the alley’s welcoming darkness.
     Of course, had it been a serious police operation the back door would have been the most obvious place to keep an eye on, but as it happened he walked on unimpeded to the home of nearby friends where he left his stash for safekeeping.
     Upon his return he found that the poor women had been arrested. The officers had visited Gino as well, but his place was clean by then and the putatively straight cops had such a rollicking time examining his gay oriented magazines that they had no wish to hassle him further.
     He was not surprised, upon recovering his stuff from its guardians, to find that the pot had palpably diminished.


2. a demonstration

     My friend’s parents in some ways typified their generation. His father, whose own parents were urban and working class, flew in World War II and came home from a German POW camp to the possibilities suggested by the GI Bill. He acquired some college, then a white collar job with a major corporation and, after a bit, a substantial brick home in a prestigious suburb.
     He must have felt that America was working out pretty well for him. He was a purchaser, a position which by his own account consisted largely of three-martini lunches with salesmen who had long been suppliers and then renewing or signing a deal. His work consisted largely of socializing, of which he was naturally fond, and of which he became fonder.
     He and his wife were easy-going people, unfailingly pleasant and hospitable, but, as the sixties wore on, it seemed that something was not right. The war in Vietnam was expanding in an alarming way, dominating the news, and threatening the comfortable security of their son. Somehow it seemed very different from the war of their youth. And people’s reactions seemed different, sometimes difficult to understand, especially the attitudes of the youth.
     I and my friends had gathered at their house from our various colleges on Friday night, March 24, 1967. We had come to our parental homes in the suburbs for this weekend because the following day an antiwar march was planned for Chicago. As it turned out, it attracted about 5000 people which was a good crowd in those days, doubtless boosted in this case by Martin Luther King’s leading the parade and then speaking at the Coliseum. He had spent the previous summer in Chicago working for open housing.
     That is, however, only background for Ben’s story. Maybe a dozen of us were lounging about our friend’s TV room when his parents returned home in high spirits after a night out. They courteously came in to chat with us before retiring. After we had exchanged a few pleasantries, though, a frown crossed the woman’s face.
     “What is going on, that’s what I’d like to know. You’re all a bunch of good kids, but you want to go ‘round looking like bums. I don’t get it.”
     She paused, ruefully looking across the room. Her eyes lit on Ben, the only one of the group who wore short hair and a preppy sport coat. “Look at Ben,” she said. “Why can’t you all take care of yourself like Ben does. Anyone can tell he’s a good boy.”
     This kind of talk, while common in those days, had a certain irony to my ear. We all knew, while she did not, that Ben was so well-groomed because he was a member of the Communist Party, USA which has never much cared for bohemians, though some bohemians have cared a good deal for the Party. His appearance was meant to facilitate his organizing efforts. The Maoists in Progressive Labor were similarly distinguishable in youth movement circles due to their effort to be indistinguishable from the mainstream.


3. a work of art

     After I finished my B.A. in 1967 I skipped the graduation ceremonies and drove nonstop in a driveaway car (does anyone do that today? do the youth even know what that is?) with four friends to the Haight-Ashbury where, sure enough, at the moment of our breathless arrival, the Diggers were serving food in the park and we found we had arrived just in time to dine.
     Dine we did. We were crashing with a onetime classmate who had left before finishing his degree. He was very proud of his cat. He had been listening to KMPX (at the time so very freeform that it seemed one could wander in off the street and take the microphone). The station had received word that Grace Slick’s cat had had kittens and they were being offered to good homes. He ran the few blocks over, knocked on her door, and, sure enough, was given a cat.
     We petted the cat and ate short-grain brown rice and vegetables. Our host’s girlfriend made jewelry which she sold to a store on Haight Street. Most of the people about had even less visible form of support. They had, however, in compensation, many ideas. We heard that we should look in on a guy named Raphael whose art was said to be mind-blowing. Though we did not know anyone in the building, we went to call on him. Without hesitation we were conducted to his home and gallery, though in fact it was little like either a home or a gallery. Raphael slept in a storage closet on the landing of a Victorian home’s stairway, an oddly shaped space in which the roof met the floor and one could not stand upright. It was an imaginative person’s idea of a sublet. Though three in his space made a tiught squeeze, Raphael received us graciously.
     His art was all about. His sole oeuvre. He had hung hundreds of small objects – pieces of mechanical watches, transistors, indescribable bits of tiny and delicate debris – from his low ceiling with fine filaments. They were arranged in careful patterns to state a theme, repeat it, vary it. It was as though one found oneself inside a concrete representation of a Brandenburg Concerto. Raphael gently blew and it seemed the whole environment was jiving. We were now in an Ub Iwerks cartoon, though Bach’s soundtrack continued. The entire Haight-Ashbury neighborhood surely pulsed in harmonic sympathy. The new America and a new art were, it seemed at that moment, unquestionably emerging. New possibilities were daily blooming. Raphael and his art have never been mentioned until now.