Looking Back Page 15

  Because they are closer than adults to instinct and because they supposedly haven’t yet discovered the art of deception, children are viewed by my contemporaries, childhood-worshipers on the verge of adulthood, as the bearers of some ultimate wisdom. Children’s books are examined for nonexistent symbolism and their actions are imitated—in clothes and speech and movements and games—as if, by artificially reconstructing childhood, we could restore the innocence that goes along with it. It’s a post-drug, post-free love reaction, maybe, the child vogue—an attempted return to the good old days when rules were laid down and life was simpler.

  MY GENERATION—THE ONE that places so much importance on communication—seems to be abandoning language. Where once a person stopped to breathe or to think, now he fills the gaps with passwords from a kind of code that summons, in an instant, all that’s young and hip and together—rock music, patched blue jeans, bare feet, Herman Hesse, marijuana and yoghurt. We no longer need to say who we are; we can talk in a shorthand that says everything for us. That’s what “you know” really means: you know what I mean, so why should I bother to say it?

  The new language is called colorful and expressive. Often it’s pretty flat and repetitive, the same toneless superlatives and fuzzy adjectives repeated time and again until “Far out” means nothing, because nothing is described as less. The words are few—not enough to fill a dictionary page but enough to build a vocabulary around: trip, hassle, dig, head, man, together, where I’m at, like (half-built bridge to a never-completed simile) and, of course, you know. We no longer strive for eloquence. (Debating—the sport of the aristocracy—has been replaced by rapping. Debaters remind us now of businessmen—three-piece suits, brief cases filled with facts, no room for feelings—whose rhetoric becomes the tool of evasiveness.) Polished speech has come to be regarded almost as a form of snobbery; adjectives, like color TV sets and second cars, seem almost decadent. I find myself cultivating impurities in my speech, diluting thoughts with ums that weren’t there to begin with, mumbling, almost, and slowing down to the new, 33½ rpm as if the thoughts that come out are so complex they required all those pauses for meditation. Few of them do.

  Part of this comes from our return to nature, of course. Language is an artifice and sometimes even a mask for true feelings (do monkeys speak? …) while nonverbal communication, the new catchword, is moving in to take its place. (I was in junior high when the nonverbal business first struck. Suddenly book reports were to be sung or danced or drawn or acted; make a collage, a diorama—anything but a paragraph.) Emphasis has moved from the word to the spectacle, and even Shakespeare, surely the king of words, has been affected. I think of a performance of Measure for Measure I acted in at college, with the Duke making his fifth act entrance by swinging onstage from a rope tied to a tree. The manner of his entrance had no relation to the meaning of his lines, of course; the impact was purely visual. The audience never really heard the speech, in fact, because halfway down, the actor’s rope got stuck on a tree branch and left him hanging in mid-air.

  Drugs have something to do with the new language and the new lethargy it exemplifies. Individual voices have become less and less identifiable in the great leveling-off process that attaches “wise” and “ize” to the ends of nouns (money-wise …), “hopefully” to the beginnings of sentences, and computer talk (“input, feedback”) and clichés like “generation gap” or “peer group” throughout. Communication, too, has become a cliché, but the problem of communicating is now a very real one. As the quality of our language degenerates, so does the quality of communication—and the quality of thought.

  Sometimes I conceal the fact that I’ve never smoked a joint. Occasionally I lie, regretting it later, ashamed that I should be ashamed. Now smoking (grass) has become a second form of virginity, rarer even than the first. There are some people now who’ve been through it all and given up on grass, but their abstinence is different from mine, worldier. I catch myself, sometimes, unwilling to admit that I don’t smoke because we judge by surfaces these days (I do too) and if a person’s liberated and hip and creative-thinking (“liberal-minded” is a dead term now; LBJ was ‘liberal” to us once), then he smokes, and if he’s dull and crew-cut and Republican, if he listens to the Fifth Dimension and Mantovani, then he doesn’t. More important is the corollary, though, by which anyone who smokes is liberated, hip etc. (season ticket to the arts, pass key to Deep Thoughts without philosophy courses), and anyone who doesn’t smoke is, if not crew-cut and Republican, old-fashioned, certainly, and cowardly, probably a tight-lipped churchgoer (though not religious in the cosmic sense of those whose minds are dope-freed, hip to Jesus).

  Oh, it’s not quite that simple. As smoking dope has become common (grass, hash and pills more easily accessible), membership in the club has come to demand more. Seventh graders, high school cheerleaders, New York executives all smoke, and though we love the sense of a huge fellowship (bred, as we were, from the committee book report on up, to expect and enjoy participation in some kind of group), membership loses value if all exclusiveness is lost. The strongest group alliances are worked for (that Woodstock glow—people who’ve been there say outsiders could never understand—where rain and mud provided for survival of the fittest, so those who stayed through shared something in common, and though they were three hundred thousand, they were one kind of members-only club). It’s no longer distinctive and original enough simply to smoke; entrance to the Elite requires more—which only means that not smoking separates you even further than it used to. The ones who, like me, don’t smoke, may not be seen as square exactly, but a distance is established. A smoker and a nonsmoker are seldom really close. Often I’m spoken to almost as a foreigner—not loud, and slowly, so I’ll understand, but formally, as if I were years younger or deprived of my sense of touch or taste or smell and ignorant, therefore, of a whole realm, as if I were a teacher or a parent or a college admissions officer.

  All this might seem reason enough to smoke. I certainly don’t worry that I’d become addicted, that my mind would blur and my hands begin to shake or, as we used to be warned, that marijuana “leads to the hard stuff.” Marijuana smoking isn’t important enough to rate deliberations (like spending half an hour—will I or won’t I?—agonizing over whether to eat ice cream or not, and then what flavor, jimmies or not, and sugar cone or waffle). But the fact that, for some people (a good many of the ones who use drugs, and that’s what it seems like to me, very often—using) they have taken on this disproportionate importance, that’s what keeps me unindulgent when the people in the room I’m in (often friends) turn on. When everyone around you is high, it’s not a pleasant feeling, being—what is the word?—low? And why should what is natural and normal suddenly be low? What bothers me most is that it matters so much whether you do or not. I once explained my feelings to a boy at school—“Why do people ask whether I smoke, and never whether I listen to Beethoven or what I read or whether I can make a chocolate mousse?”—and at the end of my long, debater-like pronouncement he nodded and said, “Yeah, you’re right. But you still haven’t told me: do you smoke or not?”

  On top of that, many little prejudices. I don’t like what I think of as drug language—those likes and you knows that fill the spaces where people used to breathe and think, and the same lack of precision that affects writing sometimes, when accompanying photographs make description unnecessary, only here the fuzziness comes from the knowledge that we’ve all been there and know what it’s like and no comment is necessary. Drugs have become—like hair length and record collection—a symbol for who you are, and you can’t be all those other things: Progressive and Creative and Free Thinking—without taking that crumpled role of dry brown vegetation and holding it to your lips. You are what you eat—or what you smoke, or what you don’t smoke. And when you say “like, you know” you’re speaking the code, and suddenly the music of the Grateful Dead and the poetry of Bob Dylan and the general brilliance of Ken Kesey all belong to you as if,
in those three fuzzy, mumbled words, you’d created art yourself and uttered the wisdom of the universe.

  One other thing. Almost surely this will sound stuffy and righteous, and once again I feel defensiveness approaching (no, I really am not in the crew-cut league, and I guess I betray my own superficiality of judgment in even caring that I’ll be accused of that). But, all that said, I don’t believe in unearned gifts. The psychological releases that supposedly come from the use of dope—the heightened perceptions, new sounds (“You haven’t really heard Beethoven until you’ve listened to him stoned”), the “far-out” colors—they all seem too easily come by to be deserved, to be true. It’s unacceptable to me that mental and spiritual “enlightenment” may be bought for the price of an ounce of marijuana, and that a simple physical act like lighting up a joint and inhaling (no skill required there) should equip one to listen to the Ninth Symphony with a richness and amplitude that Beethoven himself never enjoyed.

  It’s always seemed odd to me that although not everyone pretends to be interested in art, or drama, or literature or dance, nearly everyone my age claims to be “into” music, meaning, usually, not that they play but that they listen or, more precisely, that they turn on the stereo and take out the night’s chemistry assignment, or that they spend hours flipping through albums at a record store or studying hi-fi magazines, constantly building onto their already enormous system of amplifiers, headphones, turntables and tuners so that the mechanics of music-loving almost drowns out the music. The fact that it is a mostly-male obsession, of course, seems suspicious too (do women actually care less about music?), all of which leads me to believe that genuinely caring about music has very little to do with buying records and speakers.

  What we are interested in is music, all right—art, culture, sensitivity—but not all of us have it; some people are simply born with tin ears, some people would be well advised to stick to medicine or math, not poetry. Being sensitive and “artsy” is important just now though, and, while it’s impossible to fake it with a violin or a piano, anyone who has the money can buy a stereo and listen—a passive poet soul. Suddenly the arts and everything they represent—passion and romance, and, in an odd way, sex (if a boy can’t turn on a girl, maybe Mozart or the Stones can)—suddenly all that is as purchasable as a car. As once, I suppose, some people decorated their walls with the suitable books, in all the right bindings, now we buy listening apparatus. Not that we don’t really listen, and like to listen, and not that the music isn’t, sometimes, really worth listening to. Music has become a status-building device, though. I feel it in myself—pride at my own wall of albums and curiosity about the musical tastes of acquaintances. And if their wall matches mine, I think more of them, and if their collection is inferior, or their record player weak, I must fight the impulse to reject their sensitivities. That’s wrong, I know. Not loving music doesn’t make one boorish, first of all, and not playing records doesn’t mean one doesn’t love music. We, with our overindulged senses, forget that sometimes; we feel the need for constant sensory stimulation, a bombardment, from all sides, of sounds and tastes and colors, which amounts not to the heightened perceptivity we boast of, but finally to numbness, anaesthesia.

  FOR ABOUT THREE WEEKS of my freshman year at college I had two roommates instead of one—the girl in the bottom bunk and her friend, who made our quarters especially cramped because, in addition to being six feet tall with lots of luggage, he was male. We slept in shifts—they together, until I came back to the room at night, then he outside in the living room on the couch, until she got up, then he in her bed and I in mine, or I in hers and he in mine, because it was easier for me to get out from the bottom without waking him, and he needed his sleep.… We never made it a threesome, but the awkwardness was always there (those squeaking bed-springs …), as it was for many girls I knew, and many boys. Coming back to the room and announcing my presence loudly with a well-directed, well-projected cough or a casual murmur, “Hmmm—I think I’ll go to my room now,” it occurred to me that it wasn’t my roommate but I—the one who slept alone, the one whose only pills were vitamins and aspirin—I was the embarrassed one. How has it happened, what have we come to, that the scarlet letter these days isn’t A, but V?

  In the beginning, of course, everyone’s a virgin. You start on equal footing with everyone else (sex is something comic and dirty—the subject of jokes and slumber-party gossip), but pretty soon the divisions form. (Sex is still dirty, but less unthinkable, sort of thrilling.) There’s the girl with the older boy friend (he’s in ninth grade); the girl who went away to summer camp and fell in love; the girl who kisses boys right out there on the dance floor for all the junior high to see. (That’s the point, of course. If she wanted it to be a secret, she’d have gone out to the Coke machine with him, the way the other couples do.) But everybody’s still a virgin. The question isn’t even asked.

  The first to go is usually a secretarial student, the one who started wearing bras in fourth grade, the one who pierced her ears in sixth, the one who wears purple eyeshadow to school. She doesn’t talk about it, but she doesn’t make a big thing of keeping it quiet either, so word gets around, and all the good girls whisper about her—they knew it all the time, what can you expect? She’s probably older anyway, she must have stayed back a couple of years.…

  Then, maybe in tenth grade, or eleventh, (if you live in a city, make that ninth), it’s a good girl, one of your crowd. (You know because she called her best friend up the next day and—promise not to tell—told her.) At first you think it was a mistake: he took advantage of her, she didn’t know what was happening—and you feel terribly, terribly sorry for her and wonder how she’ll ever face him again. But she does; in fact, she’s with him all the time now—doing it again most likely. You stare at her in the halls (“she doesn’t look any different”) and, though she’s still your friend—you still pass notes in math class—there’s a distance between you now. Woman of the world and little girl—hot ticket and (for the first time, the word sounds slightly unpleasant) virgin.

  After that, the pattern becomes more common. The girl, when she breaks up with that first boy, can hardly hold out on his successor. And her ex-boy friend’s new girl friend, naturally, has an expectation to satisfy if she wants a date to the prom. More and more girls are, in the words of those who aren’t, going all the way. As for the ones who still baby-sit on Friday nights, or the ones whose dates are still getting up the courage to kiss them good night, they spend their time speculating—“does she or doesn’t she?” (It’s always the girl who does; not a combined act at all so much as an individual one.) The group of shocked guessers gets smaller and smaller until they—you, if you’re still one of them—realize that the ones to be whispered about, stared at, shocked by, aren’t the others now but themselves. It’s hard to say at what point the moment occurs, but suddenly virginity isn’t fun anymore. The days when it was taken for granted are long gone; so are the days when it was half and half (The Virgins vs. the Nons). The ones who aren’t now take that for granted, and as for the ones who are, well—they don’t talk about it much. Virginity has become not a flower or a jewel, a precious treasure for Prince Charming or a lively, prized and guarded gift, but a dusty relic—an anachronism. Most of all, it’s an embarrassment.

  So here we have this baffled, frightened virgin (she’s third person now; I can’t help wanting to disassociate myself from her category and all it seems to represent). She may not really be a prude or an iceberg (maybe nobody’s ever tried …) but that’s how the world views her. She’s on the same team with Sensible Orthopedic Shoes and Billy Graham and Lawrence Welk and the Republican party. Old ladies—her grandmother’s friends—love her (she can get a date with their favorite nephews any time) and wonder sadly why there aren’t more girls around like that. A certain kind of man (boy) is very fond of her, too. He’s the timid type—just as glad, really, not to feel that he’s expected to perform. (He’s an embarrassed virgin too, and the last thing t
hese two need is each other, perpetuating the breed—as their non-virginal contemporaries, in lovemaking, perpetuate the race—by nonperformance.) The sexual revolution is on, but the virgin isn’t part of it.

  The sexual revolution. It’s a cliché, but it exists all right, and its pressures are everywhere. All the old excuses (“I might get pregnant,” “I’m not that kind of girl”) are gone. Safe and increasingly available contraceptives (for anyone brave and premeditative enough to get them) make premarital sex possible; changing moral standards, an increased naturalness, make it commonplace; elegant models of sexual freedom—Julie Christie, Catherine Deneuve—have made it fashionable. Consider a virgin in the movies. Is there a single pretty young heroine who doesn’t hop unself-consciously into bed? (Who is there left for her to identify with—Doris Day?) Then there are magazines, filled with discussions of intricate sexual problems (the timing of orgasms … do I get one? do I give one?) while the virgin remains on a whole other level—her fears compounded. (Our old, junior high notion of sex was that it got done to you; the girl with the purple eyeshadow just let it happen. Today all kinds of problems in technique make the issue much more complicated for an inexperienced, media-blitzed girl: not just will I but can I.) The people who’ve been making nice, simple love for years now, while the virgin became more and more unique, have, quite understandably, gone on to other things. There is foreplay and afterplay and the 999 positions of the Kamasutra.… The train has left the station before the virgin’s bought her ticket or even, maybe, packed her bags.

  There are other pressures too, less remote than the images on a screen or the words on a page. Though individuality is officially admired, “Peer-group pressure” (a fifties concept) is very real when it comes to sex. Other girls assume a friend’s sexual experience. So, more importantly, do the men she goes out with. The death of the formal date (with dinner and the theater, high heels and a good-night kiss afterward) has put a new ambiguity on male-female relationships. Just sitting around, talking and listening to music, while it may be lots more real and honest and all those other good 1973-type adjectives, is also lots more difficult for a virgin to cope with. If this is someone she likes—but doesn’t love—there isn’t any way for her to demonstrate simple fondness. The kiss that once said “I like you” now seems a promise of something more to come. And if, perhaps, she’s decided that yes, this is someone she would sleep with, she may discover (final irony) that he isn’t eager, when he finds out she’s a virgin, to be the first. The situation seems unresolvable: virginity is a self-perpetuating condition. (Like the unskilled, unemployed worker, the virgin hears—time and again—“Come back when you’ve got some experience.”) The only way out seems to be the crudest, most loveless and mechanical way possible: almost a reverse prostitution. It happens—as once young boys would be initiated in a brothel—because the idea now, for the late-bloomer, the high school baby-sitter—the idea is to get it over with as quickly, painlessly and forgettably as possible.