I Was a Teenage Existentialist #21: Melancholy Baby

Leaning about Getting Away With It.

There were many catch phrases of emerging consciousness in the 60s. One of them was that we should “try to be at one with the world.” And I have always felt, as I have said, like I was “At Two". I felt like I was an observer, that reality was happening elsewhere, without me, over there, not here, and what I had in front of me was a world that rarely felt real. I was at arm’s length from what was in front of me. We were in Hopkins, reality was in Minneapolis. We were in Minnesota, reality was in New York or Los Angeles or London. Again, I was the fifth of 5 boys, born in 1955, and my oldest brothers were 8 and 6 years older than me. They seemed to be in the real world, they left when I was 10 and 12, and I was left behind, excluded, peering through the cracks, looking for clues, kept away from the good stuff. My closest brother to me, Scott, was not very interested in me, he was more interested in what David and Bruce were doing, plus he was an athlete, a diver on the swim team, which is a very artistic and demanding pursuit, and one teammate was named Craig Lincoln, he got a bronze at the Olympics in 1972. So Scott was committed, he came home exhausted.

Now my mom, she was Liberated: She had a sign on her wall that said “No one should be discriminated against because of the shape of her skin.” Four of her sons became teachers, because she was an excellent teacher, she taught us the love of learning, the love of getting an education, and the joy of teaching others, of sharing what we knew and the excitement of learning it, and the pleasure of knowing that the best way to keep learning was to teach. She saw her own greatest virtue was how she was “enthusiastic!” My mom and I were close, and back then I thought I could never kill myself because it would hurt her too bad.

But I’m 13 in 1968, I’m a new teenager, no one really celebrates birthdays anymore like they did when all 5 of us were home. Celebrations petered out. So my 13th birthday was on the 13th, my Golden Birthday, David and Bruce were away at college, dad could not be bothered, Mom was working, Scott did not want to hang out with his little brother, I guess there was some sort of anti-climactic party, and I remember birthdays as something that I began to note in solitude, a private thing, because it looked like there were not going to be parties any more. So the gap widened, between the real life my brothers had, going hunting with uncles and to Chicago with Grammy and having birthday parties, and me, not ever going hunting or to Chicago and no longer having much of a public birthday. I’m stoic, I accepted it, and just became more private, more withdrawn, quiet.

And the air was thick with dread about The War. The War in Vietnam. Because things are way too serious now. And if my brothers went to college and then they got killed in Vietnam, then what was the point of college? As Chigurh said in No Country for Old Men, “If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?” If it was a patriotic thing, then fine, but we weren’t fighting the Nazis anymore, we were bombing some poor people who could not possibly be a threat to us, there wasn’t going to be any Pearl Harbor from the Vietnamese. I remember the cosmic shock of seeing a news article where Muhammed Ali said “No Viet Cong ever called me Nigger.” That was a profound moment for me. Dr. King was underlining this, saying Black men are being drafted disproportionately and being killed in combat at higher rates, to defend freedom and imagined rights for the South Vietnamese that Black Men could not get in the US.

And I thought, yeah, why should I fight in Viet Nam? I started to have a sinking feeling that we weren’t the Good Guys any more. All those years of playing Army and watching TV shows about war, like Combat! With Vic Morrow (“Cage, take the point!”), a sea change had to happen. And that feeling came up again and again. The pattern held true. I knew enough at 13 to feel sad a lot. I read somewhere that Europeans saw melancholy as a sign of consciousness, of awareness and of wisdom, what Sartre called Nausea; if you were aware of how people lived, and the meaninglessness of their suffering, of Course you’d be sad. Nixon’s election in 1968, the year of assassinations, his ramping up of the war, then Watergate, The Pardoning of Nixon by Vice President Ford, who was on the Warren Commission, Reagan’s Iran-Contra and his Little Holocaust he brought to Central America, the stolen election of Bush v. Gore in 2000, the invasion of Iraq by Halliburton, The Trump Years. New Day, Same Shit, Just Deeper.

So my teen years were marked by a sense of dislocation, a poisoning of the atmosphere that touched everything, infected everything, spoiled everything. I lived outside the law that got us here. I was a good enough student, sure, but what kind of education would I need to get killed in the Army? I was a person of faith, I guess, but what kind of church is in favor of this War? I lived in a decent house in a peaceful, safe neighborhood, sure, but why should I get this privilege if our tax dollars were going into anti-personnel weapons at Honeywell, bombs in Vietnam instead of schools and housing? I could probably make money, yeah, and I could be rich like every White American Guy thinks should be possible, that’s our birthright to be rich, we all grew up with the Gold Rush Mentality in our Cheerios, but how could I make money that was clean, not tainted by ugliness and corruption? I had the class-warfare Democratic vision that “Every great fortune starts with a great crime” and I saw that in the millions made by Honeywell, the Minneapolis defense contractor that made anti-personnel bombs, or 3M, which poured forever chemicals into the water system and made their own city government outside of St. Paul so they would not have to pay city taxes? They were big employers, my friend’s dads worked for them. The schools, the churches, the businesses were all ugly, corrupt operations, and what else is there to train for?

Only Rock and Roll. That was a subculture where you could find meaning and rebellion and the peace movement and liberated independent women and non-compliant draft-resisting men, where you did not have to Sell Out. Long hair wasn’t a style, it was a political statement, the freak flag that said I’d rather go to jail or go underground or go to Canada than join Nixon’s Army. And long hair could get you punched in a bar or pulled over by the cops. Maybe they’d send your pants through a crime lab and arrest you for one micron of pot, like they did to a kid on the West Bank.

Dylan said “To live outside the law, you must be honest,” which is a nice line, it sounds like poetry, but it held no truth for me. I felt like I lived a lie to stay outside the law. I was duplicitous in everything I did. I lived undercover, like a Berrigan Brother (from Duluth) hiding from the FBI in broad daylight, except I did not yet have the honor of draft resistance or pouring pig’s blood on draft records or going inside a nuclear submarine with a wrench and bashing the machinery to pieces; I was just a pot-dealing teenaged shoplifter, a vandal, just a petty criminal. I was honest when I was smoking a cigarette walking to high school, but I was lying to my dad when he gave me the lunch money that I bought them with. I went to high school and took classes so that I would not get in trouble, so I could get into a college and get a college deferment, but that’s where you found someone who was dealing pot, or speed (whites) or acid, maybe hash, whatever you could get your hands on. It’s where you met the guys you’d form a band with, and the bass player was a big guy with a beard, who could pass for 18, the new drinking age, he would smoke a pipe and go in to Humm’s Liquor on Lyndale and get a case of beer and a pint of booze. Joe Orton said his plays are about “getting away with it.” That’s all we knew.

#30#