The Sixties, part 1: The Men

A Sixties-Theme Party

   For those of us who were there, it was a good time, even when  things went bad. I think Leonard Cohen said something about that in one his songs.  The premise was that everyone should have a good time, no questions asked. Of course, the failure to be “judgmental” occasionally produced disastrous consequences, since any gathering, whether at someone's house, a park, or a peace rally, drew the unsavory and the criminal along with the peace-loving and tree-hugging. The real social misfits never failed to find their way to free food and free dope. At the time, however, “bad vibes” was a cool, nonjudgmental way of characterizing the disturbances they wrought. In Austin, Texas, in 1968, when I was in grad school there, despite occasional bad vibes, things were pretty loose and cool, with everybody doing his or her own thing. It was not really what Time magazine termed the "drop-out culture." It was really a drop-in culture, and not only among the hippies who formed a large presence on and around the campus. The news that a party was taking place went out and was passed from mouth to mouth like the old prairie post. You needed only the slightest affiliation, the merest acquaintance with a party-giver –– maybe you were a friend of someone who knew somebody who was planning, maybe, to “show up” –– to turn up yourself, with your bottle of wine or your dope and check out the “scene.”

    For socially inexperienced women like myself, there was no longer a need to feel self-conscious about going to a party where you didn't know anyone and weren't invited, since anyone and everyone was welcome, although the word “welcome” scarcely did justice to the situation. You could just stand around by yourself at these gatherings, forming a party of one, staring into space, and people would say you were being profound. The important thing was not to look tied down, but simply to be open to “possibilities.”    Whether the music level was throbbing at ear-splitting decibel level or was sweet and plaintive, it heightened the sense of possibility, if obscuring the form it might take. You had to create for yourself whatever you took home from the occasion. As if to indicate that the hosts (again, if you could call them that) were taking no responsibility for their guests (ditto), the furnishings were minimal, thereby making clear that this was not one of those gatherings of hung-up types like our parents with all their rigid social conventions. Alongside psychedelic posters, there might be a beanbag chair or two or a couch purchased at Goodwill the week before or even dragged in from the street. The bare floor was a perfectly suitable place to occupy, crowded around the coffee table, which, despite being full of ashtrays and burning candles, was a good place for rolling joints. The brightly lit kitchen was also a popular gathering place.

    The lights there were bright because of the absence of a shade over the light bulb, another deficit of middle-class amenities. And the brownies, which instead of being nicely arranged on a platter, spilled onto the counter from the aluminum sheet on which they had been baked. The countertop didn't look any too clean, either (while the bathroom didn’t bear thinking about). But never mind, maybe the brownies were sterilized from the heat of the oven. Food, in any case, was a way to get into things with the assortment of types standing around in the oasis of bright light and shooting the breeze. The words “craving” and “nosh" became an active part of my vocabulary at this time, physical hunger for salty chips or outrageously sweet desserts or even peanut butter on a Ritz cracker. Alcohol helped to reduce any social unease.

    Among hippies, the talk followed an aimless and anarchic course and was miles removed from the decorous way I had learned to speak in the 1950s. The old ways of communicating were now passé, and my own reflexive attempts at polite conversation invariably brought a twinkle to the eyes behind a pair of granny glasses.

    The abeyance of social protocol added to the non-judgmental character of the time. Everything that was said was accepted, no matter how weird, no questions asked. In fact, the weirder it was, the more likely the word “cool” would be uttered as a kind of benediction. The obscene profits of oil companies were jumbled together with assertions concerning the power of apricot pits to halt the growth of cancerous tumors. If someone said Lyndon Johnson was a war criminal, so be it. If another person came up with an anecdote that showed Johnson in a sympathetic light –– his hard-scrabble origins, his civil rights legislation –– it in no way eradicated the war criminal aspect, but it too stood there, part of the mysteries of life that the brain had to juggle if good vibrations were to be maintained.

Nevertheless, at parties, besides the mellow types, sitting around stoned and listening to Donovan, grooving, smiling, nodding sagely at whatever outrageous or off-the-wall comments were made, there were guys –– and they were always guys –– who stood out, who lifted themselves above the circumambient mass of smiling and grooving. They were the ones holding court around the refrigerator in the kitchen with a bottle of beer in their hand.
 

   Ah, the men.

    They were manly in the dressed-down way of men who look good in blue work shirts or in plaid flannel ones. They were the guys who knew what to look for when they peered under the hood of a car, who could hammer a nail straight, who weren’t squeamish when it came to unplugging a stopped-up toilet. They were the guys who did what needed to be done. It was probably the last time that men, as a whole, were outright manly. In war they were the best soldiers and officers, and in peace the best providers. Even a few years earlier most of them would have completed their military service or had their exemptions and been turning their thoughts toward marrying and embarking on a career and family.

    The career goals, indeed the lives, of many of these young men had been put on hold by the effort they applied to avoid being among the dozens of casualty figures released weekly by the Pentagon. Another reason for resistance to following the Pentagon’s orders, and one I don’t think anyone has yet suggested, was the effect of the Pill. The outright rejection of the war in Vietnam was another byproduct of the sexual revolution. With women taking responsibility for birth control, it must have entered men’s heads that women could no longer be counted on to be faithful. Who wanted to be dodging bullets in Vietnam when ambitious young women were getting on with their lives, entering law and graduate school? No one would have been so cynical as express the matter in those terms. It was easer to echo what the radicals were saying, that the war in Vietnam profited only the military-industrial complex.

    This rejection led to a heady atmosphere, one of postponement, idleness, and abandon, which was evident in the intoxicating melange of talk that took place in the midst of alcohol, drugs, and sex. The talk of the men around the fridge, colored by the era we were living in, was also of a different nature from that of my parents and their friends in the 1950s. These men were not what women would call conversationalists, though some were pretty good raconteurs. When they talked there was a forward-thrusting cascade of words, a trumpeting and a trumping with language, outrageous, often weird stories and anecdotes that gave evidence of men's strong need to match their resources against their environment.

    In the years that followed, especially after traveling in different parts of the world, I met many guys who got their start in adult social life in front of the refrigerators of the Sixties. They had got older by then, if not more mature, and you had the feeling they were stuck, mentally, under the bare light bulbs of kitchens in cockroach-infested apartments in which the smell of marijuana mingled with that of body odor. They had stories, say, about the time they had shared a cab to Orly Airport with Shirley MacLaine. In 1968 I thought the story was spontaneous, but later I learned that it had been told so many times that it had become as well oiled and smooth as the gears of a Mercedes. Or, speaking of a Mercedes, a guy would tell about his perfect 1955 Mercedes, 33,000 miles on it, owned by an old geezer who only drove it to pick up his mail in town twice a week, a steal at $1,500. It was a polished little gem of a story, repeated so many times it could be told backward. Or about the woman he met in Kabul whose ring finger had been hacked off by bandits when she traveled through the Kyber Pass because she couldn't get her rings off fast enough. Or about the best hashish in Southeast Asia.

To be continued.

Picture Credit: The Mixer