Slipping and Sliding Away
Stein, Benjamin
Benjamin Stein Slipping and Sliding Away Beginnings and endings are hard to locate with precision. That difficulty is compounded when dealing with something as amorphous as what is laughingly...
...That particular campus may just be the most beautiful academic setting ever struck off by the combined work of God and man...
...No one was smoking dope...
...Practically everybody in college smokes dope, so that wasn't the unusual part...
...I went to the party, which, absolutely perfectly, was held at the home of a Beverly Hills psychiatrist...
...I do know that -what I see of its replacement, the downer generation, detached and belonging to no culture, or counterculture, seems to me no better...
...a few more went swimming nude...
...Recently, alas, after much wandering from place to place, I found myself back with several of the old gang from College V on a vacation in Los Angeles...
...He and his wife wore little name plates identifying them as the parents of the college-age boys who were the hosts...
...When I traced it to its source, there were a group of boys and girls of varying ages, sprawled in a dormitory room...
...This was just the first of many examples of really extraordinary friendliness and openness shown to me, by groups and individuals, at Santa Cruz...
...However, the high water mark of my excursus into the counterculture did not come until I had been at the campus forabout sac months...
...20 The Alternative: An American Spectator March 1976...
...As the school year wore on, there were more abrasive episodes, but the fundamental mood of the place remained wildly more joyful and relaxed than anywhere else I had ever known...
...But I am able at least to point out some of the signs that showed me near where it started and where it seemed to have reached the end...
...I suppose that I have never seen happier people than Larry Wilson and his merry band of boys and girls...
...One couple seemed to be actuallycoupling under a blanket in the slip' n' -slide room...
...What does all of this mean...
...not much happened...
...That difficulty is compounded when dealing with something as amorphous as what is laughingly called "The Counterculture...
...Apparently no one went berserk from the strain or excitement of it all, and the people involved were all able to look each other in the eye the next day...
...Teaching there, like all good things, had to come to an end, and so I gave my resignation, and started packing to return to musty Washington...
...The campus drew different stripes of kids, more or less frivolous, more or less conventional and otherworldly...
...About a week before I was slated to fly back to the corridors of impotence, I -was invited to a slip'n'slide...
...At the time I was teaching there, Santa Cruz was the most selective of all the University of California campuses...
...There was a dense pall of marijuana smoke which hung over 'the hallways of the dormitory starting early in the evening...
...themselves at College V of the University campus, which at the time was divided into eight colleges...
...The corridors in the College V dormitory were about four feet wide, perhaps five feet...
...Everybody was fairly drugged, and the atmosphere was extremely sensuous...
...Like other cultures, the counterculture at Santa Cruz had its insiders and outsiders...
...But most of the guests, still in their teens, awkwardly stood around looking out the windows at the few nude swimmers...
...For its fodder, the campus drew bright kids from all over the state and even a few from outside the state...
...The parents soon demurely went to their rooms, and...
...The party was over...
...This event, which I will describe directly, was a regular yearly amusement at College V, and this one was apparently being held at that particular time to honor my departure...
...Instead, their idea was to recreate innocence and childishness and a world without "inhibitions and hangups...
...For one brief shining Moment, sheltered from thetrials of real life, I encountered a flowering of the counterculture...
...A few girls and boys went into the Jacuzzi without any clothes...
...Huge groves of redwood give the air a scent which perfumers would give their Louis Vuitton handbags to capture and sell at Bloomingdale's...
...You knew that it would pass...
...One student wrote a paper about it and received college credit for it...
...There were several narcissistic teenage homosexuals petting in one room and others sulking in another room...
...Coming from the grim corridors of the bureaucracy, and before that, the even grimmer corridors of Yale and Columbia, I was shocked and delighted...
...Even when Larry Wilson went nude from room to room to rouse the troops, they could not be roused...
...The entrepreneur of College V amusements, 18-year-old Larry Wilson, had obtained long plastic sheeting and lined the floor and walls of the hallway on one floor to form an artificial creekbed...
...The Alternative: An American Spectator March 1976 19 Those were the glory days of the counterculture...
...There was no wild clutching of genitalia...
...Some even became downright hostile...
...Later on that night, a student who was down for the weekend from College V said that now people are studying hard to get into med school and law school...
...The creekbed was then filled to a depth of several inches with a mixture of warm water and K-Y Jelly...
...When some of the local politicos learned that I wasn't kidding when I said I liked Nixon, their friendliness waned...
...There were no Quaaludes, no acid, no cocaine...
...About forty students, twenty boys and twenty girls, plus one superannuated teacher, were led into the slip'n'slide area, where clothes were removed and people started slipping and sliding around on each other...
...The most far out, disorganized, hippiesque students generally found...
...An almost undreaint-of license and lack of restraint did not produce any wounds that I saw...
...In that hothouse at Santa Cruz, some beautiful things were growing and I think they're dead now, and it's a shame...
...The unusual part was the incredible friendliness and warmth with which the students greeted me and made me a part of their smoking circle...
...Larry Wilson, still an impresario, was organizing a Halloween party that was supposed to feature a round of totally nude swimming and then a slip'n' - slide...
...I taught and lived at College V. The first inkling I got that something different from my normal way of life wasgoing on came even before all the students arrived...
...In the spring of 1973, between stints as a trial lawyer for' a large and ineffectual federal agency, I was a teacher at the University of California at Santa Cruz...
...I do not know why that is all gone now, if it is all gone...
...It was not a dynamo of creativity like the Florentine Renaissance, yet there was something lovely about the friendliness and openness of the people who were part 'of the movement...
...It was extremely slippery...
...Cocaine, the snow of yesteryear...
...But their hostility 'was out front, as we used to say, and it had a delightful similarity to a small child's pique...
...It lies on the slopes of majestic mountains overlooking the Pacific Ocean and the Bay of Monterey, about eighty miles south of San Francisco...
Vol. 9 • March 1976 • No. 6
