Looking Back Read online

  There were lots of parties from then on, and rumors of goings-on at movies and dances, but I think ninth grade was when our attitudes really changed, when we stopped being shocked, embarrassed voyeurs to whom sex still seemed, most of all, dirty. That spring our English class made a field trip to the city to see Romeo and Juliet performed. The bus ride down was pretty much the same as bus trips since first grade —singing “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall” (all the way down to one), lots of seat-changing and flouncing up and down the aisles, calling the roll, hanging out windows (“Hey, mister, did anybody ever tell you you look like Paul Newman? Well, you don’t”). But on the trip back, softened by the tragedy of young love divided, our stomachs too full of hotdogs and Howard Johnson sundaes for singing, and vaguely carsick, a change took place. Girls had always sat with girls and boys with boys, mixing only to make wisecracks. Halfway home though, Margie, queen of our class from the first grade on, switched seats so she could sit with Buzzy, JV (junior varsity) basketball star, the one we girls loved best of all. Word traveled even to the front that they were holding hands, that they had slid down in the seat, and finally that they were kissing. No one dared turn around to look. Sixty minutes later we pulled in to the high school parking lot and our own Romeo and Juliet emerged—Buzzy to draw his hand across his lips and grin, then to pull the comb from his back pocket and run through his hair, Margie to smooth her skirts and move off to the girls’ room followed by the rest of us, who scrubbed our hands for surely ten minutes while she told us what he’d done, crying finally and saying did we think she was fast and oh, now no one would respect her. But respect no longer mattered so much—the Snow White, fairy princess, only-other-people-do-it image had died and been replaced by something else. Now—far from concealing what we had and were ashamed of, we’d make the most of it.

  THE DAY WE ENTERED high school, we got a long talk from the principal, telling us what a great group we were, and what a great school this was, and another from the vice principal, telling us that he was fair, but, buddy, not to cross him (anticipating already what an ungreat group we were), and still another talk from the guidance counselor, who, anybody with a problem would soon discover, was not a counselor, and would have been surprised, to say the least, if we had come to him with what the nurse called “personal problems”—those were for your clergyman or your doctor. What the guidance counselor did, and would repeat each fall, with only slight alterations, for our sophomore, junior and senior pep talks, was to hold up a blank sheet of paper and, after a long pause he must have learned from TV aspirin commercials, tell us that the blank sheet represented our record so far, “a clean bill of goods, like they say.” And four (or three, two, one years later) when we entered college, it would be filled. What we did now would determine whether we’d enter college or not, and we all had a chance, a fresh start, a whole new ball game.

  It was a good feeling, I suppose, the idea that the slate was really blank, except that of course in a variety of important ways it wasn’t. Our junior high school reputations followed us—old rumors surfaced again, dislikes and friendships remained. Like biology lab planarians who, when their heads or tails are cut off, sprout new ones like the ones they lost, we were already trapped, with a set of junior high school genes that reasserted themselves at our ninth-grade rebirth. What we wore and who our friends were, and what positions in the school our older brothers and sisters had held all determined what slot would be waiting for us. Only a new kid coming in might write his own ticket, but then he’d have to work, to flaunt his credentials without seeming to, and there would be a test, out on the basketball court—or, a subtler one for girls, constant surveillance in the halls, our watching her clothes and hair and how she held her books and what she said to boys who came and swung on her locker door to talk. I could have told, on that first day, sitting in the bleachers and knowing better than to be hopeful, who would be valedictorian and who would score the baskets and who would crash his car and who would end up pregnant—our records weren’t so blank after all.

  In spite of the sense of fatalism, there was an awesome push, from the first, toward college—“the college of your choice.” Those spaces on our application blanks and records left for “extracurricular activities” loomed large when we joined clubs and committees, and threatened us (we visualized a huge black pen filling them in) each time we were discovered skipping gym or trading homework papers. The unfilled-in white sheet, growing steadily grayer, hovered like a ghost.

  So did the SAT exams and the achievement tests, the miles of fill-in-the blanks and vocabulary words and analogies ahead, the nightmare moment when you realize you filled in the number-one answer in the number-two blank, and number two in three … all the way through one hundred, with two minutes left before the bell. The practice file cards of vocabulary words that didn’t do much good (I could never remember halcyon, though it came up every time), the nervous sleep the night before, the superstitious rituals, the sheath of sharpened number-two pencils (the poorest students always carried the most, as if pencils were arrows and the one with the most had the best chance for a bull’s eye). When it was over (sometimes we’d sit through six hours’ worth of tests) we’d gather outside the door, unable, after so long a stretch of testing, to leave it behind, lingering over the questions, reconstructing math problems and comparing answers, with some one-pencil carrier modestly demonstrating what we’d done wrong. And finally, months later, getting our scores back and comparing them, taking the College Entrance Exam Board’s word, above our own, for who we were. We exchanged scores, all of us who’d done well, and acted disappointed that we’d done so terribly. We were card players waiting to see what sort of hands the competition had before laying down our own. And then, like the dissembling show-offs we were, like slim girls who count calories and moan that they’ve got to start dieting, in front of fat ones eating chocolate bars, we’d murmur “730—how awful!” in earshot of those who got 500s and who, with a humility we might well have envied, if we’d had the sense, simply tucked their scores away, relegated to the state university, and resigned to it.

  Doing poorly on an achievement test was bad enough, but there at least you could blame it on not studying, on not “living up to your potential.” But a mediocre aptitude score was devastating; a score of 540 had to mean that 540 ran in your veins and in your chromosomes, and no matter what you did, you couldn’t change it, so you might as well not try.

  And when the whole college push was over, the tests studied for and taken, the scores in, the teacher recommendations and the questions filled out (“The most valuable experience in my life …” “If I were going to write a book …”), when the last campus tour and college interview was over—a firm handshake, to show energy; look-him-in-the-eye, for honesty and straightforwardness; a calm, unhysterical laugh to show a good sense of humor, and a conservative-length skirt to show that what you’re interested in isn’t the boys—when all that was over I discovered the final irony, not just for me, but for many: that getting into college no longer mattered as it used to. If I got in I’d go, and if I didn’t, I’d go out into what prep school kids call the real world (I imagined myself at some Iowa truck stop, sizzling cheeseburgers, talking straight and gutsy with truck driver sages). For the first time, some of us began to examine the Diploma Mystique—the fact of life we’d never thought to question, that of course you finish high school and of course you go to college and choose a major and graduate, and if you don’t go on to graduate school, you get a job. School and education had little to do with each other, often enough—we knew that. More and more, though, it was education that we cared about, and a kind of pure knowledge that sometimes seemed unrelated to what went on at college. “A” students, honor roll types I knew, dropped out of high school in their senior year to study on their own, college-prepped private school boys graduated and went off to learn automobile mechanics or to apprentice with carpenters, or to farm.

  What changed quite suddenly, I think, was (i
t must sound hopelessly large and generalized) our whole set of values. Not all of us, by any means, but a great many at the end of the sixties turned away from the old goals, the old definitions of success and happiness. I found it in myself—a lightning-bolt kind of revelation that I’d never really asked myself whether a college degree was what I wanted. Or, more precisely, I’d never considered that I might not want one. College was presented to us as a not-necessarily-accessible, but naturally desirable goal, long before the ninth-grade, college-of-your-choice speech, and long after. The fact that college is not right for everyone—not just because they can’t get in or because they want business school instead—seems pretty obvious, but it’s a neglected fact, I think.

  Everything from high school on splits down the middle on the college or non-college issue, and it determines the courses you take and the friends you have, and when you’re likely to get married and what your chances of getting shot in some war are. Kids my age are college snobs, identifying themselves, at parties, by the school they go to, especially if it’s a name with ivy on it. People who would never dream of announcing “Hello, I’m very bright. How smart are you?” will wait for any opening (kidding themselves that the admission has a certain aptness) to say “I go to Harvard. Where do you go?” which comes down to the same thing. The ones who don’t go on to college are understandably resentful of the split. (I’ve learned, from hitchhiking, never to identify myself to beat-up Chevy drivers as a student. I am a secretary, or a waitress, and we stay friendly.) In spite of scholarships and minority recruiting, college campuses are, to many, the territory of the enemy. It makes for political and social divisions, and it perpetuates itself down through the generations. Often the children of non-college-goers will be raised with the unquestioned assumption that college is not for them, (just as I grew up, unquestioning, that college was for me). They will be classed, early in school, as “underachievers” and trained accordingly, advised to take shop and home economics courses, categorized by other students and by teachers and finally by each other, and their underachieving will often have lots more to do with what’s expected (or not expected) of them than with what they can really do. To them, the talk of fresh starts and an equal chance for all at getting into college must sound pretty funny.

  A MOVIE OF THE Monterrey Pop Music Festival came out in 1967. The first song they played was “If You’re Going to San Francisco” (“Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair … cause summertime will be a love-in there …”). The music was soft, almost music-box pretty, with lots of harmonies and gentle guitars. And what they meant by love-in (the word has disappeared now) were the tame, Sunday-in-the-park-type gatherings with lots of kites and balloons and bubble blowing and marijuana. We called it pot, and wore buttons—the brave ones, the really way-out types, at least—that said “this country’s going to pot.” Drugs, back then, meant marijuana still. Heroin and cocaine were for thin, red-eyed unshaven men with switchblades in their pockets, not love children with flowers in their hair.

  The faces in the crowd at Monterrey—even the older ones—seem young to me now. I feel, looking at their unaged faces, the way I feel looking at pictures of President Kennedy hours before he was shot, or Hiroshima just before the bomb—the feeling that something could have been prevented if only they’d known what was coming. I feel now, watching that movie again, like someone standing on a mountain top looking down to a pair of eager, unaware climbers and, at the same moment, seeing an avalanche roaring toward them. The hipness of their dress lay still in the accessories (boys in Brooks Brothers shirts with beads around the necks; girls in fashion magazine lipstick and love beads). There was a basic squareness still about that gathering in ’67—small departures from tradition while remaining still within the set of never-questioned structures that were common then. The audience at Monterrey sat on chairs, not blankets, and clapped at the ends of songs because no other form of applause had been invented yet. The idea of questioning the established forms had yet to arise. That’s what explains how such an enormous step—from Monterrey to Woodstock, just two years later—could take place so easily. The distance between sitting in concertgoing clothes or folding chairs and rolling naked in the mud is not as far as it may seem. Only the first move—the suspension of the established taken-for-granted structures of life is hard. Once they’re gone, once the first garter is shyly unfastened, the rest of the striptease comes easily.

  I did not go to Woodstock. But like everyone who was about my age the summer it happened, I followed the festival all through the crowded, rainy days while it lasted, and when it was over, I listened to the kids who’d been there as they straggled home. Over and over again, the same facts proudly reported: that Woodstock was, during the festival, the second largest city in New York, more peaceable than any other of its size. We goaded each other on, feeding cues like members of a comedy act (“Tell about the time when everybody slid in the mud.” “What was it like when Hendrix played?”), because, like countlessly repeated bedtime stories from childhood the Woodstock mythology appealed to us for its familiarity, and for something else too—the notion that a bunch of kids had pulled something like that off so successfully. We were a group who had little to be proud of—no real youth spokesman, no youth painters, youth writers. Our artists had to be musicians—who were successful not in spite of their age, but because of it, which is why we loved them. They spoke for the accomplishment of a spokesman-less group with little else to show for its existence on the earth. Our war protests seemed to us impotent; we had always been regarded in terms of a consumer bloc, good for nothing more than buying records and acne medications. Now at last we’d found something else, seen how many of us there were (“You can’t imagine how big the crowd was,” a friend told me, “all people like us”). It was a false and misleading sense of kinship Woodstock gave us—a password that included anyone who’d been there, seen the movie or bought the record—but it gave us a sense of our own power, and a pride we needed right about then. Today, several years later, kids meeting each other will bring up Woodstock still and, finding that they were both there, will greet like old fraternity brothers. Theirs is the joy that aging basketball stars get when they meet someone who knew them in their glory—the day they scored the winning points, in overtime, from the center of the court with three seconds left to play.

  1969

  IN MY JUNIOR YEAR I had English and algebra and French and art and history, but what I really had was fun. It was a year when I didn’t give a thought to welfare mothers or war or peace or brotherhood; the big questions in my life were whether to cut my hair and what the theme of the junior prom should be. (I left my hair long. We decided on a castle.) Looking back on a year of sitting around just talking and drinking beer and driving around drinking beer and dancing and drinking beer and just drinking beer, I can say “Ah yes, the post-Woodstock disenchantment; the post-Chicago, post-election apathy; the rootlessness of a generation whose leaders had all been killed …” But if that’s what it was, we certainly didn’t know it. Our lives were dominated by parties and pranks and dances and soccer games. (We won the state championship that year. Riding home in a streamer-trailing yellow bus, cheering “We’re Number One,” it never occurred to us that so were forty-nine other schools in forty-nine other states.) It was a time straight out of the goldfish-swallowing fifties, with a difference. We knew just enough to feel guilty, like trick or treaters nervously passing a ghost with a UNICEF box in his hand. We didn’t feel bad enough not to build a twenty-foot cardboard- and crepe-paper castle, but we knew enough to realize, as we ripped it down the next morning, Grecian curls unwinding limply down our backs, that silver painted cardboard and tissue paper carnations weren’t biodegradable.

  HIGH SCHOOL YEARBOOKS LIST club memberships, not grades. Which makes sense because what is remembered, looking back, are hardly ever classes and books read but social events, what guidance counselors refer to as “extracurricular activities.” If you aren’t a part of class meeting
s and outing clubs and Latin banquets (we used to cut up sheets each year, parading in our permanent press togas) then it is the very absence of those things—and not the major themes in Silas Marner—that you’ll think of when you remember high school. My school was full of clubs—the outing club (we drank beer and planned trips that we never took); the pep club, math club, art club, dance club and lots of others—never named or listed in the yearbook, but just as tightly knit and clubbish—the “hippies” (they passed each other bags of chalk dust while the shocked “straights” whispered they were taking opium); the hoods, whose cars seemed always to need tinkering; the cute, the beautiful, the cool, the popular. If anybody doubted who was who, they had only to look up at the lobby wall where every April (Junior Prom time) the names of all the couples who were going were taped up. For some it was announcement of victory, and they will never have so fine a time, be so on top, again.

  At Oyster River, the accomplishments of the debating team went almost unnoticed. There were just four on the team and the debate coach, their file boxes and attaché cases filled with blank paper and sharpened pencils for the scribbling down of points they rarely had rebuttals for. Their wins and, mostly, their losses went unannounced at Oyster River—the team brought no glory, no drama, no violence. The math team did a little better. The manipulation of numbers is maybe a more manly pastime, closer to sport. But even math failed to excite our student body. At our school it was sports that mattered.