The Sixties (After Leonard
Michaels's "In the Fifties")
The sixties--which as everybody
knows, began in 1963 and ended in 1974--happened, like a sitcom, in the middle of my
livingroom.
I was student-body president of one of the first desegregated
elementary schools in California, and when the BBC came to interview me, I spoke so
passionately that they had to stop the film because the cameraman was crying.
By the end of seventh grade it was a profound social
embarrassment if you hadn't "gotten married," which meant lost your virginity.
The third-floor roof of our high school overlooked the pool in
the middle of the courtyard. People who were tripping would jump off the top of the roof
into the pool on Saturday nights. Occasionally the pool would have been drained. If
someone dove into the empty pool, it was called a "header."
Yvonne, who wore miniskirts and leather jackets and was by far
the school's best girl swimmer, drowned when she tried to swim from Lido Isle all the way
out to Catalina immediately after a huge lunch of hash brownies.
A married couple who worked for the McGovern campaign, Janice
and Michael, came down from Seattle and stayed in our house from the California primary
until the general election. I had such a bad crush on Janice that, on the night of Nixon's
landslide, I disconnected the car radio so she'd still be in a good enough mood to come
with me as I took old people around to the polls until closing.
I wrote so many satires about capital punishment for the high
school newspaper that students who didn't read carefully started calling me "The
Beheader."
I heard a rumor that Smith-Corona also made munitions and
immediately switched to Olivetti.
As the editor of The Observer, the newspaper of the
California Democratic Council, my father was at times caught in the middle between
opponents and defenders of the Vietnam War. He finally ran a cartoon that showed LBJ
surfing off the coast of Cambodia, which made the point about American imperialism. The
caption my father wrote was "Up Surf." He was fired within a month, not because
of the content of the cartoon but because he didn't know the idiom.
The majority of my nieces and nephews on both sides of my family
have first names that are either colors, animals, or trees, or some combination of colors,
animals, or trees.
Freshman year of high school we all had to take World Geography,
and the first day of class we all had to come up on stage and tell "Glen" what
kind of animal we were, then portray this animal for a few seconds. The entire semester
there was no mention of anything even remotely related to world geography.
The ecology club held a massive demonstration and littered the
courtyard with so many placards that for once I abandoned my capital-punishment theme and
wrote a satire about the event. The ecology club retaliated by toilet-papering my house.
My cousin had a phrase, "Tain't no big thang." No one
knew where he got it, whether or when it was meant sincerely or ironically, but he said it
in response to almost every possible development.
Just before graduating college, he and his girlfriend were
arrested for possession of a thousand tabs of acid. His girlfriend told the cops she was
going to use them to decorate a Christmas tree. "In June?" one cop asked.
"Tain't no big thang," my cousin said.
For sociology class I interviewed sixteen different cliques in
our high school and found that precisely three-quarters of the groups made
"insider/outcast" distinctions not on the basis of money, appearance, academics,
after-school job, or sports. Precisely three-quarters of the groups made
"insider/outcast" distinctions on the basis of what kind of drugs you used.
In an article in Newsweek, our high school was reported
to have the highest drug use per capita of any high school in the United States, and
people threw parties for a month straight to protect our number one ranking.
My sister and her best friend had a bitter fight, from which the
relationship never fully recovered, over who was the cutest Monkee, Davy or Mickey.
A friend of my father's lived less than a block from where the
Symbionese Liberation Army was being busted on a live TV, so we all hurried over to this
friend's house, with one eye on the television and the other out the window. "It's so
real I feel like I can almost feel smoke," someone said. "You can smell
the smoke," my father said. The SLA was burning to death and smoke was pouring in an
open window.
In the fall of 1974 I left Los Angeles to go to school in
Providence, Rhode Island--what I understood to be a heavenly city populated by seraphic
souls. I imagined Rhode Island as an actual island, the exotic edge of the eastern coast.
And I saw Brown as enclosed, paradisal space in which strong boys played rugby on fields
of snow and then perused Ruskin by gas lamps in marble libraries too old to close; and
girls, with thick black hair, good bodies, and great minds, talked about Turgenev at
breakfast. The first month of my first semester, black students occupied the
administration building and demanded increases in black student enrollment and financial
aid. These seemed to me laudable goals, so I went over to become part of the picket line
outside the administration building and marched in a circle, chanting, for a few minutes,
but the whole event seemed like a really weak imitation of all the demonstrations I'd been
going to since I was six years old, and I wanted to get away from groups and the West
Coast and my former milieu for a while. A few people from my dormitory hall were tossing
around a Frisbee on the back side of the green, and I left the picket line to go join
them. That, for me, was the end of the sixties.
David Shields
(Seattle)
Copyright ©
"The Sixties" was first published in the author's collection, A
Handbook for Drowning,published by Alfred A. Knopf (1991).