That Hippie Free School, and the Rigid Position

I strongly advise reading the whole comment thread to the previous post. Lots of wonderful thoughtful stuff.

This made me laugh: Or, you could just become gay. Solves the "ugly sex" problem! Creates others ... from Jarrett.

During the the years at my boarding school -- what I fondly refer to as "my hippie free school" -- one of the many wonderful things that happened to me was encountering openly gay men. That was not so common, in the early 70s, as it is now. I barely knew homosexuals existed: I certainly had no clue that I actually knew any of them.

But my room mate was gay, and our school was one of the few safe places in Spokane, Washington, at the time. Gay boys and men were in the house a lot. So it was my very good fortune to meet the people before I met the stereotypes. There were, of course, people I liked and people I didn't. But I was on my home ground, surrounded by friends, so I felt entirely safe. I could absorb the culture without any fear of getting lost in it; I could flirt without committing myself to any identity.

My orientation was obvious to me. I liked girls. I've always liked girls. The supposed latency period that Freud mentions, when boys purport not to like girls? I skipped that. There has never been a time in my life, since first grade, when I haven't had a serious crush on someone female. I am, as an old friend of mine once put it (in mild exasperation), "heterosexual to a fault."

So the wonderfulness of being around gay men had nothing to do with discovering my orientation. It had to do with being an object of admiration. I was a weird kid, in middle school. A dork. I read books all the time. My hair was too long. I am congenitally incapable of following a party line, any party line: I was out of place even among the weird kids and the outcasts. Being associated with me in any way was a social death sentence.

And then -- there I was at my hippie free school, fourteen years old, plump and inarticulate, with gorgeous flowing blond hair -- and I was the toast of the town. People admired me. They sought me out and chatted me up.

I blossomed. I suddenly found that I could talk. One of the longstanding reasons for my stumbling, almost stammering speech, was that I always dumbed it down. You didn't want to be using fancy words, if you were a teenager in Springfield, Oregon. You didn't want to let a word such as "inadvertent" or "malevolent" fall from your lips. You didn't want to get too clever.

But among these people, clever was a good thing. Words came pouring out of my mouth. I had, it turned out, lots and lots to say. (No doubt much of it was tiresome, but much is forgiven in a glowing teenager.) My hands came to life: I could gesture. I could throw my head back and laugh. I could unlock my wrists and hips and ribs, and let them sway. I could brush my hair out of my face, rapidly or languidly. My words and my body, for the first time, were free. The experience was transformative. I no longer had to hold myself like R. Crumb's Whiteman. I could be someone else.

Eruptions from the Past

My sister would have been fifty-five years old, today. It's as difficult to imagine her being fifty-five as it is to imagine John Lennon being seventy. The good die young, / And those whose hearts are dry as summer dust / Burn to the socket. (If anyone should know, it's you, Mr Wordsworth!)

I grope hesitantly towards a new life. Or more precisely, maybe, I grope towards an old life that I never really lived.

Strange eruptions from the past. People prate about the evils of Facebook, its transcience and inanity – as if all this doodling were not transient and inane – but its real powers are just beginning to reveal themselves, and – to confound all of our knavish tricks – they turn out to be historical powers. The dead past isn't dead, Faulkner insisted; it isn't even past. And nothing proves it like old friends from high school or college surfacing, and tagging you with pictures.

My friends Norman and Marcel, from my hippie free school, had started up a design studio in Seattle. I visited them, and here is a polaroid picture of me examining a polaroid picture there. (Ask your grandparents what a polaroid picture is.)

Notice the luxuriant hair and scanty beard: now the hair is scanty and the beard is – well, at least respectable. That was my favorite shirt. A strange pale green, a color without a common name. A knit turtleneck. I always shoved the sleeves up over my elbow. I imagined, at the time, that it gave me a raffish yet practical look. You roll up your sleeves to drop your pretensions and get to work, right? But to me, this photo is all about pretension. I was in awe of Norman and Marcel. I knew that they understood the world of visual art in a way that I never would. They had passionate responses to design that I never understood, or rather, understood just enough to know that my eye settled for the hackneyed and conventional, while they were stirred to go beyond that to things more complex and more important. No doubt I had been looking at graphic designs all day and pretending to be able appreciate what I was seeing. I was out of my depth, bewildered by the big city and my sophisticated friends: I was just a yokel from Springfield, after all. I longed for the glamour of Seattle, but I knew I wasn't really up to it. I couldn't hold my liquor, I got confused by dark bars with pointy lights that lit nothing up, and I got maybe a third of their jokes, though of course I laughed at all of them. I pretended to be a writer, because that's almost cool like an artist, so long as nobody reads the grandiloquent, hectoring opening chapters of your plotless and unfinishable fantasy novels, and of course there was small danger of that.

So little, so little has changed: I still long to be one of the cool kids, and I still never will be, and I still will cultivate anything but my own garden.

Maybe it's not too late, though. Maybe all this fuss is to some purpose. And I find sometimes, to my surprise, that some of the people from my past remember me with affection, rather than contempt. I walk through dim hallways of memory, searching for doors, searching for clues about how I should have lived my life, how I should live my life now. I think I have to treat that awkward young man more gently, soothe his touchy pride, and coax the real stories from him, the stories he was always too ashamed to tell.

Teenager: Spokane, 1973

Crosby, Stills & Nash is what my mind returns to. I played that album, the one they did before Neil Young joined the band, incessantly. And I waited.

It had everything, all the pieces. The political defiance and despair. The sensual love songs that were about seizing the day, about being willing to lose, rather than about keeping and possessing. The cryptic acid-inspired imagist songs. But it was musically quite simple and tuneful, with lovely harmonies.

"Carry on. Love is coming. Love is coming to us all," they sang. I didn't believe it, but I had to believe it. What else did I have to believe?

I waited for love, for the peaceful revolution, for everything to happen all at once, for a new life to present itself to me. Everyone knew it was glimmering just beyond the horizon. Nobody had a plan, though. No one had a task. No one knew how to work towards it. Our only directions, or the only ones we trusted, were that we should learn to see. "You better free your mind instead." It's funny: after all these years, I still believe it. That the fundamental task is to learn to see.

We tried. God, gurus were a dime a dozen. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi was my brother's. Guru Maharaj Ji had a place around the corner. I spent an evening with the Jesus People on the beach, around a driftwood fire, and a pretty girl assured me that we wouldn't be idle in Heaven. We'd take the battle to the enemy. And she gave me a hug, a hug I still remember, nearly forty years later. The next day I cautiously invited Jesus into my heart. He, presumably aware that what I really wanted was more hugs from more pretty girls, declined to come.

I read Hugh Prather, Carlos Casteneda, Hermann Hesse. For a while my bible was a book called How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World, which recommended uncompromising honesty and militant selfishness. A sort of dumbed-down Ayn Rand.

I knew enough about myself not to meddle with drugs. Everyone else was experimenting with mescaline and hash and acid and speed. I didn't trust myself: I had a shrewd idea that if I started I would never stop. And anyway, I found I could alter my consciousness quite as drastically, and much more cheaply, by simply going without sleep for thirty-plus hours. Waking dreams and hallucinations are not that hard to find. Nor are violent mood swings. Go that long without sleep and hang out with people doing acid, and your mind will indeed go traveling.

Traveling, yes. But not -- not to someplace new. Not to someplace where I was unselfconscious. Wherever I went, I was still shy, still awkward. I still had glut of love on my shelves for which I couldn't find a market. And my body dogged me wherever I went: pudgy, soft, and pale. I knew as well as you do that only slender, tan, catlike people find enlightenment, or love. I was more piglike. I had never lost my puppy fat. I burned and freckled under the sun, but never tanned.

I composed manifestos and declarations. Kept a diary, a precursor of this blog, which I invited people to read. The handwriting changed daily, from small precise printing to a ferocious forward-slanting scrawl. (I had never really learned cursive writing, despite the best efforts of my elementary school teachers. I pretended I didn't care about such a trivial matter, but the truth was that I found it impossible to concentrate on writing one letter while thinking about the next one, which is what you must do to write a neat cursive hand -- you have to know what the next letter is so you'll be able to join this one to it properly. I had always found this, and still do, hellishly difficult. As soon as I started thinking about the next letter, my hand started losing its place in the present letter. I hated the childish writing I produced when I tried this. Soon I simply and flatly refused to write cursive and took to printing, which is how I've written ever since. This trick of disguising my disabilities as the eccentricities of a genius who simply can't be bothered was, and remains, one of my main strategies for getting through life.

But I digress. Where was I? Manifestos. Yes.) One of the peculiarities of the time was the conviction that nobody could be meaningfully happy until everyone was happy. So all my projects for becoming happier were projects for making the world happy. Property had to abolished, authority abrogated, sex roles abandoned, oppression eradicated, before I could begin to become happier. I wouldn't even be able to start until these preliminary steps were accomplished. It was a generous impulse, in its bizarre way, if a useless one. The ambitions were so huge they smothered under their own weight. My solution to being pudgy was to write diatribes about the evils of private property. My solution to injustice was to try to get girls to go to bed with me. It all made sense at the time.

I was pudgy, but I was not out of shape, actually. I strode briskly for hours around Spokane, racking up ten or twelve miles per day at times, muttering to myself, arguing with myself, laying out frameworks for vast works of philosophy, composing worlds in which epic fantasies would play out. Then, as now, I would suddenly stop stock still and gaze at a crook of waterpipe, or a weed, or a cloud, in astonishment that anything could be so beautiful, so much itself. My senses were as raw and tender as I was. I wanted, desperately, to be loved. To be loved like that, like I loved the waterpipe. Such a thing was clearly both impossible, and urgently necessary.

"Carry on," they sang. I walked on, full of hope or of despair. Maybe I could make the impossible happen, just by wanting it enough. Maybe. Maybe I could.

That Hippie Free School, Again

I see them as if through a tiny window, a teenage boy writing a teenage girl's name in red paint on the wall, the paint trickling down like blood. It can be nothing, in those days, but a reference to the Manson cult murders. The other teenagers in the house profess to think it's funny. What did the adults think? No one knows. The question arises -- as so often, thinking back -- where the hell are the adults? The ruling fiction is that the teenagers are adults. They'll work it out. And they do, of course. They work it out. It costs some of them more than it costs others. They grow up, in some ways, fast. They will take less for granted, all their lives, than those who grew up under authority. They don't assume that anyone else will take care of things, that somebody somewhere has it all under control. It's not under control. That's a lesson worth paying for.

Most of us remember the place with love. Some with intense nostalgia. I and at least one other student I know remain firmly convinced that it saved our lives. We were headed for jail or for one of any number of addictions -- pick one! -- and we found community, of a sort, that made us think a rapprochement with our species might be possible. A shared alienation. It was okay to be smart here, to love art or poetry or philosophy or difficult music -- if you didn't grow up in small-town America you may not understand just how not-okay those things can be. It was okay to think hard about politics, or religion. It was okay to be gay here; in 1970, that counted for a lot. Saved some lives right there. There was a shared body of knowledge about drugs that probably also saved some lives, given that no force on Earth was going to stop these kids from getting stoned repeatedly.

Still, as I read the posts on the Yahoo group, thirty years down the road, I am struck more forcibly by the cost, than by anything else. And what it says about the world these kids were growing up in, that this was a better place than where they came from. The intense, unrelenting sexual pressure on the girls. The violent outbursts of temper. The bad acid trips. The voyages -- scruffy teenagers hitchhiking a thousand miles on a whim, going to Canada, to Mexico, anywhere. You'd get into a car and realize the driver was dead drunk. It's an interesting problem: how do you get out of the car, now, alive? Life skills. You bet.

The leitmotif to me is loneliness. This, I'm sure, isn't the school's fault. Teenagers are all, so far as I can tell, intensely lonely. It goes with the territory. I want to go back and help these kids -- or help the kids, no different from them, right down the street, in 2006 -- or for that matter, the kids playing D & D in my living room -- and I realize, I don't know how. There is no general answer, of course. There's only attending to this child, here, now. They need so much kindness and encouragement, and mostly they don't make it easy to give it to them -- it takes a light touch and a willingness to fail. Sometimes I rise to it and sometimes I don't.

Where I Come From (part two: Bored in Paradise)

We were bored. Hellishly bored, sometimes. There were only some forty of us -- ten boarding students, twenty day students, and "the little kids," the elementary-school-age kids. There were one or two classes per day that we could go to, if we wanted. (The single requirement was that everyone show up for the weekly community meeting. Since it was the only rule we could find to break, Billy and I played hooky one week; we took off and wandered around downtown Spokane, reveling in transgression.)

When people ask me what the best thing about my experience at the school was -- since it doesn't take long talking to me to see that I value the experience, and remain tremendously grateful and loyal to the place, thirty years after -- I say, "being bored." It was analogous, on a different time scale, to sitting zazen, facing a blank wall. We were bored, but without being able to blame it on teachers or parents or bosses. Our boredom was our own. Our failure. An incredible luxury, to be able to discover that.

My time at the New School -- that was the name of it, which makes it impossible to google for: I've never discovered a trace of it on the web -- my time at the New School was a failure. But the richest failure, maybe, of my life. The utopia failed. It was always a fake utopia, of course; we knew that. But even within its own circle, all the wickedness of the world reasserted itself. My family was flush of money at the time, and I received a handsome allowance. I sometimes actually -- I'm ashamed of it to this day, and it takes an effort to write it -- paid Annie, whose family was not flush, a couple times to wash the dishes when it was my turn. A trivial thing, I guess, it might seem -- but it represented a complete betrayal of my communal ideal. And somehow the universal love that I thought we should all be practicing never quite came into focus. There was jealousy, loneliness, misunderstanding. You'll laugh, I know, that I could have expected otherwise. But I did. All evil came from a culture and political structure of domination -- so I earnestly believed then. We had created a little enclave that was supposed to be free of that -- why, then, weren't we happy? Joyful? Ecstatic, even?

It was a loving, affectionate place, in a random, loose-jointed way. We hugged, snuggled, traded backrubs and footrubs. Nobody could be greatly distressed without waves of distress running through the whole little community. But there was no way for me to pretend to myself that this was what I had imagined, at thirteen, dreaming of a secular paradise. It should not be possible to be bored, in paradise. To feel out of place.

Ernie showed up the second year I was there. A heavily pockmarked face and weedy hair. He was thirty-something, with an air of permanent, embittered exile about him. His intensity was unsettling. He wasn't a teacher: a friend of Annie's, maybe, or a connection from the gay men's group that met in the evenings at the school. He chain-smoked, and tended to look away from me uneasily, when our eyes met. He made a proposal at a community meeting -- or was it just talked about? I don't remember for sure -- that we transform the place into a real, sustainable commune. Make our own money, and share what we had. I don't remember if the scheme made any financial sense. Probably not, almost none of those proposed communes did. But I didn't think about that. All I knew was that the idea filled me with dread. I didn't want to lose my room, lose my leisure. I didn't want to work; I didn't know how to work. In my cowardice I wouldn't own to any of that. I wouldn't argue for it or against it. Nor would anyone else. The proposal died in silence. But I knew that utopia had failed, right there, in that silence.

The failure, clearly, was in me (that the utopian project was flawed, I did not allow myself to doubt.) Not only was I not destined to be a great apostle of utopia, I didn't even belong in one. The first order of business, for any prudent utopia I might stumble into, would be to throw me out.

Where I Come From (part one)

It was an big gray three-story house in Spokane, smelling faintly, as old houses will, of damp paper and mold and mouse-droppings. A big wide staircase went up to the second floor, with a dark polished wood rail and balusters. Then a narrow staircase, a servants' staircase, leading up to the third floor, where there were five little bedrooms. The ten of us lived up there.

On the left was the room that Nannette painted deep, deep blue, so that you sank into it as if it were a sea-grotto. Moria shared the room with her at one point.

Second left was the room I shared with Don, smelling comfortably of the cigarettes he rolled. I liked watching him roll cigarettes -- something I had never seen before, growing up in a strictly nonsmoking household: I remember vividly the light blue can of tobacco, the quick sure movements of his fingers. Don had long straight dark hair that hung to the middle of his back, a languid habit of speech and movement, and a slight nasal problem. He would end a sentence, typically, with a long, deliberate sniff. The first openly gay person I knew. He was a couple years older than me -- was he seventeen? eighteen? Terribly old and sophisticated, anyway. Cynical, calm, kindly. A godsend to a wrought-up, self-absorbed, emotionally unstable fourteen year old on the run from his family. A still place in the turbulent world.

Then opposite the stairhead was Marcel's room; later on, the room I shared with Billy. The nicest room, with three windows overlooking the city. We built the fire escape from that window, and we would go and sit on it on warm days, or climb up to the roof (though we weren't supposed to do that) and sunbathe, sometimes nude, on the little flat tar roof.

On the right was my sister's room, which she shared with Annie; later to be Monique's room. It had a lovely wallpaper pattern -- several of the rooms did, old Morris wallpapers. That was the room I stayed in one night, a couple of years later, when I came back for a visit in hopes of being old and sophisticated myself. New students were there. We smoked dope, and watched the smoke curl up through the rays of the late afternoon sun. But the magic was already going, inexorably, draining away. The school's days were numbered; the heyday of free schools had passed; and -- far from being the vanguard we had fondly imagined -- we were become the rearguard, haphazardly covering the retreat of the Sixties.

But in truth an elegiac nostalgia hung over the place from the moment I arrived there. The school had burnt down the year before: and on the first day I went to see the new building, we began our journey by visiting the old, burned-out buildings. People told stories of waking that night, the red wavering light, the tears as they stood outside, watching it burn. The real heart of the school, some hinted, had died that night. It could never be the same.

My heart was fierce and utopian, and I was determined it would be the real school still. We worked together, getting the new building ready. Building the fire escape, among other things. At some point we demolished the ancient garage out back, covering ourselves with black, oily dust. The first day we had the kitchen up and running I happily washed the dishes, and announced -- making it up on the spot -- that I really liked washing dishes. (Within weeks, I was notorious for wriggling out of my turn at the dishes, any way I could. The flush of utopian enthusiasm lasts only so long.)