Detroit 1967
It was 1967 and 10,000 people gather in New York City for the Central Park “Be-In,” the oil tanker Torrey Canyon runs aground off the coast of Britain, Charles Manson is released from prison (although he requested to allowed to stay), Israel fights the Six Day War, anti-war rallies and protests are held around the country, Elvis and Priscilla are married, anti-miscegenation laws are declared unconstitutional, China tests its hydrogen bomb, there are riots in Newark, NJ, Minneapolis, Detroit, and Washington DC (many people die), Che Guevara is captured and killed, Allen Ginsberg attempts to “levitate” the Pentagon, Sen. Eugene McCarthy announces his candidacy for president, challenging LBJ — who is counting “how many kids” he killed today. And the Beatles release Sgt. Pepper, Magical Mystery Tour and the single, All You Need is Love.
It was 1967, the “Summer of Love.” The Nobel Peace Prize was not awarded that year.
Be-in
It was 1967 and I was young and idealistic, that is to say, an idiot, and I had a warm relationship with the dean of my college. Warm is perhaps the wrong word. Heated is more precise; I despised him. Do I need to say I was a sophomore?
I was an activist student. I protested the Vietnam War, I published the underground newspaper (the “KMRIA Journal,” named after a passage in James Joyce’s Ulysses), I rankled under many of the restrictions placed by the college on its students. Why was there only a single African-American student and no African-American faculty, when the dining-hall staff was almost entirely Black? It was a Quaker college, after all, and should be more progressive.
I spent many an hour in the dean’s office making demands. There was so much wrong with the world and with the college, and I and my generation knew how to fix things. It was time to end the core curriculum, I told my dean. Who needs to learn a foreign language? Why should I be forced to take a math course when I was an English major?
Then, there was the school’s responsibility in loco parentis. We were all adults, I averred, why should the school prohibit women from traveling off campus unaccompanied? Why should they be forced to wear dresses to dinner, and the men suits and ties? Women were not allowed to smoke “in transit,” meaning, they could puff a ciggie in the parlor, or when standing still outside, but not walking. Who makes this stuff up? The rules seemed especially peculiar for women.
One young woman had been expelled for spending the weekend with her basketball star boyfriend. He, on the other hand, was merely scolded. “Double standard!” I yelled at the poor dean. And what was wrong with the two of them taking a trip together? Hypocrisy, I claimed. Hypocrisy. (I had some self-interest here, having spent some time away on trips with my college girlfriend. The difference: We hadn’t been caught).
Me, “the freak years”
And then, there was Jerry. A class younger than me, Jerry was a charismatic young hippie who bought Romilar cough syrup by the six-pack. A small group of students, including me, were “freaks” on campus, with long hair, bell-bottom jeans, and an uncontained contempt for the buzz-cut, patriotic, church-going straight-arrows of the campus.
For a time in my sophomore year, we became a foursome: my girlfriend, KC, and me; and Jerry and his pan-pneumatic girlfriend, Carol the Barrel. There was cough syrup, marijuana, and gin and Sprite, drunk in the Quaker graveyard, where we poured libations to the grave slab of poet Randall Jarrell.
Jerry had lived a terrible life, he said. His father was a retired Army colonel and now belonged to a religious cult. His father and his brother regularly beat Jerry and sometimes locked him in his room, for up to a week at a time. His mother was also beaten, he said. Getting away to college was salvation. Jerry told us stories about the cult, which wasn’t exactly a Christian sect, but some offshoot, that glorified patriarchal power and the dominion of fatherhood over all his family. Paterfamilias, he called it, modeled on the ancient Roman family structure. “Power of life and death over all of them,” Jerry said.
One day, in his dorm room, Jerry showed me his needle. “I shoot heroin,” he told me. “Don’t let anyone know.” The hypodermic syringe was one of the old-fashioned sort, made from glass and stainless steel, and kept in a velvet-lined box. I wasn’t ready to dive into narcotics.
There was this sliver of time when drug-taking was not merely recreational, at least for the more serious among us. Beer was recreational. Alcohol was the drug for getting a buzz. But smoking weed was — again, for this brief time — sacral. Under the influence of Timothy Leary, drugs were to be used to uncover “alternative realities,” and discover the secrets of the universe. To use drugs simply to get high seemed shallow and unworthy. (We were serious prigs, in our own way.)
The idea of heroin seemed beyond that. It was dangerous. It was criminal in a way we would never consider marijuana. Jerry was the first junkie I ever knew.
One day, Jerry came to my room with a frightened eyes. “My brother is coming,” he said. “They are going to take me and force me back to the cult. I need to hide.”
I told him he could stay in my room for the while. I went to see the dean. I explained Jerry’s situation to him and asked for help. The dean looked disturbed but told me, everything was OK. There was no problem. “Yes,” I said. “There is.”
For the next several weeks, Jerry had the look of a deer in the headlights, and there were phone calls from his father, and I made more visits to the dean. He had to do something, I told him. At each visit, the dean told me to stop worrying. It began to feel as if the dean were part of the conspiracy.
Between moving Jerry from room to room, avoiding calls, hiding out in the woods one day when Jerry’s brother came to get him (he eventually left without Jerry), and my expostulating with the dean and finding new hideouts for Jerry, my schoolwork was suffering, and we were all a little jittery. This felt big.
It came to a climax when I went to the dean’s office and threatened to call the police. The dean — who held cards I knew nothing about — sat me down and said, “There are things I shouldn’t tell you. It’s illegal to discuss another student. There are privacy issues. But you need to understand Jerry is a very disturbed young man.”
“But, his father wants to kidnap him,” I said.
“No, his father is coming to take him back to the hospital.”
“What hospital?”
“Jerry was here provisionally; he had been committed to Butner for several years. They thought he was getting better, but he wasn’t.”
“What do you mean?” I was sideswiped. You mean Jerry had been lying? Making it all up? He had been diagnosed as schizophrenic after an episode in high school. (It was a popular diagnosis back then; nowadays, he would more likely have been called bipolar. That is our popular diagnosis.)
The dean showed me a manila folder with medical records. Physicians’ notices, letters back and forth, even a note from his high school principal.
“What about the needle?”
“Jerry is diabetic,” the dean said. “He takes insulin.”
There is nothing so deflating as punctured indignation. My high horse was a rocking horse. I was flashing cap pistols.
I met Jerry’s brother, who came to take him back home. He seemed as reasonable a human as I could imagine.
“Thank you for caring about Jerry,” he said. “We love Jerry, but he needs help.” There was no cult; there was no abuse.
Later that day, I watched Jerry get in the car with his brother and drive off. I never saw him again.
A few years later, I had the glint of recognition when I read through Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet. The first of four books tells of a doomed love affair as told by an British writer, Darley. The second tells the same story from the point of view of a friend, in possession of more information, so we learn that Darley completely misunderstood everything that has happened to him. The third volume retells the story from the omniscient point of view and we discover that both the previous books were wrong and everything we had come to understand was partial, often totally misguided, and dark with ignorance. (The fourth book, Clea, takes the story past the narrative of the first three books).
The four novels hit me with the force of a brick to the parietal bone: I recognized the syndrome.
Soon after reading the novels, I went through a tortured relationship with a woman I was crazy about (“The only thing blonder than your hair is the sun,” I told her). She ran hot and cold in a way I could never understand, sometimes libidinous, sometimes antsy and standoffish. She finally broke it off with me. I moved away from the city to hibernate (not unlike Darley in Justine), and only found out when I accidentally bumped into her decades later that she had been sexually assaulted by a boss at work, and had gone through a difficult and traumatic trial and had been unable to come to terms with love or sex for years afterward. I did not know what drama had played out behind the scenes of our stumbling courtship.
One could liken it to Kurosawa’s film, Rashomon, except that the movie tells each version of the single story through the self-interest of the parties doing the telling. It is not merely a case of the reality being larger than the parts, but of each person lying to make himself (and herself) look good.
What I am talking about, instead, is the fact that we can never know the wider context, the whole story. We can see some sliver of the world through the chink in our psyches called our senses.
And I am not concerned here with conspiracy theories: That someone is withholding the key facts we need to know and balefully controlling the course of history. If we don’t know the full story of the Kennedy assassination, it isn’t because some cabal is secretly pulling the strings, but because reality is too complex, too messy, too variegated and too ornery to stuff neatly into a poke. If there were a cabal, even they wouldn’t have all the facts.
We are each in a dark hole, with only a little light from above. We peer out at the daylight and can see a few people staring down from the rim. We make relationships, we imagine the world, we tell ourselves stories. But we never have a sure grasp on the whole. The dark whole.
It is why the scariest thing I know is the profession of certainty. Only the ignorant make such a claim.
I am reminded of a chapter in a book by the late Jacob Bronowski, who wrote in his Ascent of Man about the evils of certainty.
After an explanation of Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, Bronowski brings the reader to Auschwitz and shows us a lake bottom muddy with the ashes of those killed there.
For Bronowski, the uncertainty is not merely about electrons, but about all knowledge. Uncertainty breeds humility, he said; certainty breeds arrogance.
“Look for yourself,” he wrote. “This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance. It was done by dogma. It was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave.”
That test in reality means that all knowledge is provisional. And there is always some data that we don’t yet know. Every wife, every girlfriend, every husband, son, confederate, colleague, nemesis, enemy, is a world contained, filled with complexities we will never fully know.
Humility is the only sane response.
Richard Nilsen 