PLATO’S CAVE
In March of 1968 I was sitting in my apartment on Ash Avenue watching a black-and-white TV when President Lyndon Johnson spoke to the American people. I recall vaguely his reiterating that he would not accept a nomination to run for president again and repeated that he would step down at the end of his present term. The police riot at the Chicago Democratic convention was months away. Since I was self-absorbed in the disastrous relationship with my estranged wife and with the ongoing passion of an affair with a married woman, Marlene, I had no time for the political theater erupting all about me. I was oblivious. Given the life I had lived in my twenties, I was unaware of much of the political happenings about me. It wasn’t that I was desensitized to it. The fact is that I did not have a real self to realize what was happening. I had no real center with which to grasp its import. I lacked inner calm and, consequently, I did not register America. I did not register myself, which says it all.
In 1963 I was married and about a month away from being drafted. I had gone down to the famous Whitehall Street for medical and intellectual tests. Humorously I recall the young kid next to me trying to crib answers from my IQ test and another trying to get a urine sample from his “pals” since he could not piss. Several contributed to his vial. I was prepared to be sent off when Kennedy issued an order that any men who were married would be deferred from the Draft. (Having spent a few miserable months in the ROTC on the Queens College campus, I thought that if I were drafted I would go in as a second lieutenant.) And so I never went off to war. If I had been sent, I would have gone complacently, dumbly, for I was mass man at that time, raised in a culture that had a peacetime draft for years under Ike.
From March to June I acted out in school, teaching poorly, being an infant, running around at night in my Mustang, spritzing my neck, face, underarms and crotch with cologne so that I would be “appetizing,” having sex in cars and parking lots and, eventually, in my apartment. Obsessed with “freedom!” At last I was involved with a woman who could be lusty in bed and who did things to me that were new and exciting, including my first oral sex. I fell in love with love, the affair serving as the avenue for escaping a dreadful marriage. Years later I determined that my first wife was bi-polar which goes a very long way to explain her outbursts and crazed behavior, without excusing my affair. Since I do not believe in a god or organized religion, that matter has to be resolved by me and me alone. I am confirmed in the belief that we often marry our sickness.
As to the affair, Marlene was 24 going on 15 and I was 28 going on 10. The affair itself was the driving engine of the relationship. We did not really talk to one another or seek to find some answers for the questions that drove us headlong into this wild and risky fling. There is an inordinate excitement to an affair, especially since it is transgressing, and all of it is immensely gratifying. Gestures are writ large, feelings are inflamed, sensibility crashes to the sidewalk, moods intensify, feelings become pugilistic. And the center does not hold.
With the waning monies I had at the time, we wined and dined, experiencing each other ravenously, secretly and surreptitiously since her husband was unaware, trying to carve out time for one another. Danger and theater were in the air. While I counted the days before summer recess so that I could be free once more, I “chose” to avoid anything political or social that would impinge on my enjoying my covert affair. I wanted to be unencumbered. The affair was everything, and while participating in it I was very insensitive to my students and to my daughter. I was self-absorbed. Regretfully, I am responsible for damaging the relationship between my young daughter, who was then 4 years old, and myself, because I was greedily involved with my own neediness. I did not reflect, I did not think, I acted out and in so doing I hurt my child and others. I was a bull in a china shop.
By the summer of ’68, I can pretty well assess almost five decades later, what kind of person I was. It is chilling. The intake presents it in a clinical way. I will go about it differently, as if one turns a snow globe over and snowflakes come from everywhere and nowhere, drifting down aberrantly. I was behaving in an unbridled way, being too expansive so that to others, I imagine, I was a fool or out of control. That says it. I was out of control, having experienced a very controlled personality all my young life. The conditioned me was becoming unconditioned, but not with reason, just emotionally explosive and that was not good at all. I simply did not care. If you are coherent that can be liberating. I think I was not a little crazy. Hal once said to me that he feared for me, that my behavior was meshuga at moments. Probably right. They didn’t have this stuff then, but I needed to be epoxied as a human being. I was composed of shards, tesserae.
Even as I write I feel mortification, after all these decades. Memory of oneself is not reparative. I cannot go back and repaint the wall. It is as I left it. Recollection of soured personal relationships and damaging hurt to loved ones, especially my daughter Caryn, cannot be expunged. In 1998 Caryn took her own life. In some way, in some part, I contributed to that. On a daily basis abandoned by her troubled mother, she was also abandoned by me. Given such a short time on this planet, what damage we wreak upon one another. The worst thing I have ever done to another human being was the damage I did to my daughter.
Guilt absolutely serves no use here, for it is a relatively useless emotion. I choose to be harder on myself in other ways. I once read that there is “bad” guilt and there is “good” guilt. So if you went up to Hitler’s crib and blew away his head with a Glock that would be an event in which “good” guilt would be reasonable, taking away a life. If you had a dream of fucking your mother in her ass, to feel guilty about that upon awakening would an example of “bad” guilt, for no one was hurt and your mother was saved from embarrassment. I don’t really buy into this differentiation at all. I don’t accept sin as a viable concept and guilt is a humorless societal parody. I cannot help it if our cortex creates these human ideas or constructs. When I remember, when I recollect and when I have reminiscences, guilt and sin come to mind, but I work on putting them to the side. I also don’t believe Santayana’s bromide that those who fail to study the past are condemned to repeat it. Too tidy for me. In evolutionary psychology terms, the genes combating one another in my DNA couldn’t give a damn. They live and abide in an eternal present.
However, I am responsible in some way for Caryn’s demise. I accept that existentially, no running away from that. I hope as I die and my brain cells are smashed I am able to enunciate her name, “Caryn,” one last time, as an endearing farewell. She was a good person and did no harm to anyone, but she suffered in her life. With her name on my lips, I could ease out of this mortal coil. The memory-sadness of this just crushes me.
The memoir of two summers serves another palette of responses within me. As I have said, I scouted the roads and byways of Woodstock in my first summer there. I came upon Shady, Mt. Tremper and Saugerties, “towns” rather country situations, which I do not recall well since I passed them without too much notice except to learn their names (life as blur). In some way, perhaps I had been given directions by some nameless person. I parked my able golden steed by the side of a road and began to make my way through the bush and woods until I entered a large swimming pond. Therein were many men and women, of all ages, mostly nude, partaking of the waters. I was not ready or prepared to enter willingly. I did not remove my clothes and join in, it was all too shocking to me, a creature of the Fifties. However, voyeuristically, fully dressed, I watched the merry watery and friendly melee of the young in frolic. By the summer of 1969 I would have gladly jumped naked into the pond, but not now. That has stayed in my mind for all these decades, an expression of bodily freedom, unrobed, with limp penises, heavenly and womanly buttocks and breasts cavorting without repression. In some dark recess of my mind I probably felt then that I had come upon a primal scene, an oil by Rousseau.
If I were to drive up the Thruway now and enter Woodstock, I could not find that swimming pond. In some fashion I choose not to find it. It had served a wonderful purpose then and it is now inviolate in my aging mind. It was a place and an event that made me reflect and think about freedom, all kinds of freedom. It made me question my own rigid thinking processes and inhibitions.
A parallel experience with younger people, in their late teens or early twenties, involved another water experience. Doug, Hal’s son (who was about 19 and recently kicked out of college for smoking weed), Wendy (his girlfriend of the moment), Mary (Pangborn’s niece) and her beau, Steve, and I went to a forested waterfall deep in the woods. It was a lovely waterfall, and without hesitation Mary and Steve quickly undressed. Mary and he luxuriated beneath flowing waters. Mary’s breasts were large, her nipples aroused by the water and her furry mons pubis soaked and delightful to my eyes. What made her even more dramatic was her 19th Century model torso: curvy and plump, her thighs thick. I couldn’t do anything but gaze at her, and Mary sensed that and lowered her eyes. Steve and Mary asked the three of us to join them, but we didn’t. Wendy did take off her bra and revealed her large breasts. Mary and Steve had experimented au naturel so often, I imagined, that they were comfortable with it. For me it was all new, and I was not ready to be experimental. It proved titillating at the time, to observe people revealing their bodies in such a fashion. Again I took in, and again I learned.
