to a paperback edition of The Myth of Sisyphus which I buy after one of my friend’s sisters tells him it’s cool. It is very cool. But besides Camus, who does blast my thinking out of the corridors of junior high school, my favorites are Beat writers. I have a special shelf with my collection of their works. Kerouac, Ginsberg, Corso. On the Road and Howl, of course, but also Junkie and John Clellon Holmes’s novel Go, plus a complete set of early Evergreen Reviews (my father subscribes) and rare copies of Big Table, where portions of Naked Lunch were first printed. I even have a copy of Kerouac’s first novel, The Town and the City, which I stole out of the Teaneck library.
Lying on my bed in the suburbs, surrounded by all this literature of protest, I try and daydream up a memory of when we lived in Greenwich Village. That’s where we lived before we came out to New Jersey. My father was minister of the Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square. He actually knew Ginsberg and Corso and some of the early Beats. My father used to drink in the San Remo and the Cedar Street bars. I lie on my bed and think about one afternoon when he took me to visit a wild friend of his named John Mitchell. Mitchell was standing in a foot of brown water, digging out a basement on Macdougal Street to turn it into the Gaslight Cafe where the first cafe poetry readings and folk sessions were to be held in New York.
Bob Dylan sings on the phonograph in the corner of my room, his early voice like a jar of razor blades shaking in the amplifier. All I listen to this spring is Dylan. His song “Blowing in the Wind” is becoming popular through a version sung in saccharine style by a group called Peter, Paul and Mary. Dylan got started in the Gaslight Cafe. And I am stuck out in the suburbs, on my way to college, inevitably, two years more struggling upstream like a salmon toward whatever lies on top of that waterfall called college admissions. Why bother? I don’t know. Perhaps because from way back, even before junior high school, teachers were pouring their propaganda about college, especially a good college, into my head. “This is your permanent record,” they told me. “Everything you do in school—your grades, your behavior, your personality records—all these go into this permanent record which goes to the colleges.” And at home it’s the same. Even in my house, there are no exceptions. Study hard, be good, cut your buddy’s throat to get into a first choice college. Higher education has become a religion. I kneel before the altar of College.
In Dylan, in his voice and in his music, you can hear an undercurrent. “Fuck them! Fuck college! Fuck high school and junior high school, drivers’ education and sex education. Run away. Fight. Be a hobo, a bum, a Blind Boy Grunt. What do they know anyway? Didn’t they build the bomb? Didn’t they kill Medgar Evers? All the answers are up for grabs, blowing in the wind.”
In the other corner, my desk sits with my portable typewriter on top. A Christmas present from two years ago. In the desk drawers, hundreds of poems written over these last years are stuffed in envelopes. I am going to be a writer.
Just last week, I finished a short story I call “Max, An American.” It is a satire about growing up, getting a job and getting married. It is quite vulgar. And funny. When I show it to friends they are shocked. Both by the story and by the fact that I was able to write it. This afternoon I sent the story and a cover letter (mentioning, of course, that I am fifteen) to Evergreen Review. There’s a chance, slim but real, they might even accept it. What a thrill that would be. Published at fifteen.
I am thinking about my small envelope of pot. Downstairs, my mother is cooking supper. My brother is watching television. He is eleven. Four years separate us. Now I reach back behind my shelf of Beat writing and locate the envelope. I don’t have any papers so I take a Lucky Strike and slowly grind almost all the tobacco into an ashtray. My parents allow me to smoke. Not like a lot of my friends who have to sneak out to the garage every time they want a few drags of tobacco. But my parents have no idea about the pot. I suck the weed out of the envelope up through the empty cigarette until it is full again, full of finely shredded green material. One twist seals the end. I lick the whole joint and light up. The drug tastes delicious. Too bad tobacco doesn’t taste this good. In a few minutes, I’m lying back in delicate tremors. My stomach is slightly chilled, my mouth dry, my muscles relaxed. Thoughts wander in zigzags.
I wonder what next year will be like. My parents are sending me away to school, to prep school. Getting into prep school is good preparation for getting into college: all the visits, applications, interviews, transcripts, even special high school board exams and then finally the Wait. I apply to five schools. All but one reject me. I am going to my safety school, an academy in Pennsylvania named The Keaton School. What will it be like in prep school? I wonder if I should bring my pot.
I am lying in my room in the suburbs, stoned out of my mind. I long for freedom. Yet I live one of the most comfortable lives imaginable. I have a room stuffed with a hi-fi, a radio, expensive clothes, books, paintings. I am fifteen. But I don’t feel happy, don’t feel free. What’s wrong with me? My guts sometimes quake with rebellion, but I wouldn’t know where to start. Against my parents? Not likely, I love them very much, am always open with them about almost everything (pot’s an exception). They are my greatest allies. Rebel against school? Yes, but…I still feel this longing to go to a good college inside me. Yet, I’m already thinking of dropping out. I have read an article in the newspaper about how Harvard encourages students to take a year off, even two, before coming to the university. I would love a year off, dream of bumming around Europe and America for a year. Harvard! That is the heart pounding in the center of my darkest possibilities. I would love to go to Harvard. My parents would be in ecstasy. To go to Harvard would be revenge on all the lousy teachers, all the guidance counselors who have held sway over me for these past years. Harvard. It sounds like the biggest coup anybody could possibly pull at my age, in this country. It is 1963. I have two hard years of study ahead of me if I am to keep this dream alive.
Great South Beach stretches along the coast of Martha’s Vineyard for miles without a soul. In the marsh behind the beach, we are standing waist-deep in a clear stream holding screwdrivers. Steve, Ray and me. Steve is my best friend from Tenafly. He has already fled from public high school to a private school in Massachusetts called Stockbridge School. Ray teaches woodworking at Stockbridge, is a sculptor, and much older than us. He stands in the stream with a fully developed man’s body, deep tan, a full beard of chestnut whiskers streaked with silver. We are visiting Ray and Alice. They are running the Youth Hostel on the Vineyard this summer.
Ray shows us how to pry the oysters off the submerged rocks. They look just like part of the mossy stone until you feel their sharp edges under the slime. Then you dig with the tip of your screwdriver, trying to keep your hand from slipping and getting cut. We wear sneakers and bathing suits. I trip on a rock and bash my ankle against the jagged shells. When I move into shallower water I see wisps of blood trailing off, feel a little fish nuzzle his nose in the sore. The hot sun beats on our backs. But Ray makes this great fun, treats us with respect even though we are just kids.
When three buckets are full of the sloppy wet oysters, Ray says we have enough. We climb out of the water, hoist the buckets, and walk through the marsh to where we have hidden Ray’s battered and scratched old car. This is private property and we don’t want to get busted for poaching oysters.
The Hostel is only ten minutes away. A two-story wooden house in the center of a clearing, bicycle racks line the front lawn, out back is a huge stump which Ray spends hours hacking and chiseling. Alice is talking to Mercy in the kitchen.
“Surprise!” says Ray, dropping his bucket on the table.
“You got them,” beams Alice.
“Oh, Ray. This will be delicious,” says Mercy, a tall, willowy blonde who also goes to Stockbridge. Her father is a musician and she is a year older than us. Mercy has come to visit with Bill, another Stockbridge student. He is a skinny, quiet guy who acts tough a lot, talks about motorcycles when he talks, and sleeps with Mercy. There are only three private rooms in the Hostel. Ray and Alice have the biggest. Mercy and Bill share another. And Steve and I take the third. There are two enormous dormitories, boys and girls, where the hostelers sleep. These are young people on bike trips