When First I Knocked

...I just didn't care...

...All of this was happening quite early on— the time of junior high—but I would not say that it was the real beginning of the sixties 96 n DISSENT / Fall 1998 phenomenon...

...I knew a bit about drugs, marijuana, though I had never tried it—the opportunity had not yet come up...

...In Winchester I spent a night with an old Cranbrook friend and fell madly—if briefly— in love with a beautiful Pakistani girl who went to school at nearby St...

...The sounds, the lyrics, were charged with it, and I think I would have found my way there even without guidance...

...But where the later seasons were generally obscure, hormonal, without outline or specific origin, this one grew out of a clear affront...

...Certainly we all remember the feeling of the Beatles being "in the air"—first as something new, then as an irresistible ongoing public performance...

...It was a perfect cliché—my furiously judgmental fifteen-yearold's perception of the lives around me, and the righteousness with which I excluded myself...

...At that time there were two alternative FM stations in Detroit, WABX and WRIF...

...I was full to the brim with rage, but it was a confused rage...

...Now I get a picture of that early morning— the two of us shivering and grinning and not much more than a misplaced step from terrible injury or death—and I see it as an image extracted from a continuum, or, less politely, a free fall that would only break, months later, in a cheap room in Barcelona, when I sat on my bed and wept in frustration because I knew that I could not see my plan through, that I would have to return home, that my grand escape was a fiasco...

...But at that moment, high, determined to outfox the whole mad system, I was sure that I was on the very brink of liberation, and that some astonishing consummation was imminent...

...DISSENT /Fall 1998 n 101...

...98 n DISSENT / Fail 1998 College...

...Here were the long cuts, the real cuts, the songs that by sheer virtue of length repudiated the whole canned ethos of Top-40...

...Hippies were drifting everywhere, starting communes, living on the road, trekking toward the Himalayas...

...I would be a gypsy, right up against the fresh pulse of things...

...I was ready to say goodbye to America, sell my passport on the black market, and live on the bum...

...Or was it a butterfly that fell asleep and dreamed it was Professor Crump...

...My eyes are closed, the sound is way high—I must be the only one home...

...It was at some point during these months that I began to read Henry Miller and to claim him as the voice of my liberation...

...This was music made for itself, not for profit...

...There we drank with a table full of Algerians, who enjoyed our grunting and pointing enormously until a phalanx of Guardia Civil suddenly rushed through the door and with sticks and kicks herded them into the alley, whereupon they were all loaded into a truck and taken away...

...And I missed my family...

...For it was at this time, in this unstructured receptivity, when I was focused upon discerning what might be next, that I registered the first real tremors, the original signals of what would be an eruption unlike anything I had known...

...And then I was off to meet Whitney...

...Dorm life was done with and I was back home...

...I linger here, not quite willing to let this odd miasmic period go...

...Whitney would shuffle a few feet ahead, I would follow...

...The song is "I Shall Be Released"—Bob Dylan's song, but done in eerie high harmony by a group identified as the Animal Crackers— the group, soon to be rechristened The Band, that had been working as Dylan's backup band...

...THEN, at some point during that long first year at Cranbook, I found my way to FM radio...

...The music, the culture, the sly low confiding style of talk, and the winking suggestion offered at every turn that a whole other world existed and that these songs were its advertisement...

...I was going to expatriate myself—simply not come back from my summer travels in Europe...

...Whitney and I—and my other great friend, Marcus—we were then still buying the youth-culture promise that a total revolution of being was in the offing...

...Instead of going to classes, I had been staying up all night, sitting in the undergraduate library paging through the big world atlas, or reading my Henry Miller, or hiding away in a carrel up in the stacks with my notebook and a contraband bottle of Ripple wine...

...But no, I filled journal after journal with lists of what I would need...

...Nor had it revealed itself, quite, in 1967, when I entered upon what would be the first of many seasons of deep disaffection...

...I was alone...

...And for an hour or two, abroad in the May sunshine, I convinced myself that I had never been more true to myself, or freer...

...It had taken me all that traveling to understand that...

...I felt a fluttery agitation...

...and "Ho-Ho-Ho Chi Minh, NLF is gonna win—" I'm not sure I could have told you much about what the NLF was or what half of the rhetoric was about...

...I was fifteen and knew little—but now I knew that something was coming...

...How painful these occasions were for both of us—me desperate for the hour to be over so that I wouldn't be spotted with my suit-wearing father, and my father trying his hardest—and not always succeeding—to keep to himself his comments about the way I looked...

...But the distance was too great...

...I no longer remember the string of events that got me and my friend Whitney up there, but one very early morning in the spring of 1970, still somewhat high from the mescaline we had dropped the night before, we were balancing our way across, daring each other on, trying not to focus too comprehendingly on the Huron River moving in shadow far below us...

...And against that there was no defense...

...The university was just part of the system, the same system that was dropping bombs on the North Vietnamese, that sponsored the ROTC program just a few buildings over...

...But Uncle Russ, consummate mellow-voiced—"stoned-voiced"—host, was there to weave it all together...

...I trusted NOTEBOOK that the path would be shown to me when the time was right...

...The very first hints of this culture—and promise—had reached me and most of my friends by way of the transistor radios we held pressed to our ears from earliest junior high DISSENT / Fall 1998 n 95 NOTEBOOK on...

...Then I hitched back to London, met Marcus, and the two of us bounced around the same basic places, carrying on an elaborate fantasy in which he was called the "Dover Pro" and I was his sidekick, Billy, and we were hunting for girls to fall in love with...

...I was unhappy, terribly lonely, yet—if this is not too overt of a contradiction— I also loved my exile...

...I would sleep in fields, work for my meals...

...Donovan— daydreaming and reading...

...And one day I would write about it...

...Whitney was landing in Luxembourg some weeks later...

...But no, inside the dressing room, surreptitious and purposeful, the event is preparing itself...

...I remember sleeping through countless classes and actually convincing myself that my dereliction was a political act...

...I resented this, of course, and I made my resentment obvious...

...I could not suddenly pretend to be like them...

...I was getting high every night, it seemed, and barely getting through my classes...

...I mean you will do nothing of the kind...

...For part of that year, I remember, my father had brought his mother, Merija, then quite old, over from Latvia to visit...

...But there is something about that interim phase—that dull, inert-looking cocoon— that seems right...

...Creedence Clearwater's interminable "Susie-Q," "Time Has Come Today," by the Chambers Brothers, "Crossroads," by Cream, strange things from San Francisco, from the Grateful Dead, from Jefferson Airplane...

...I listened for the revelation of the music, the deep saturations of sound that were so utterly unlike what I had been listening to before...

...It no longer mattered that I would finish out my freshman year with a string of incompletes—each was further proof of my determination to not look back...

...I would shortly be taking incompletes in most of my courses, scrawling what I thought were revolutionary witticisms in my blue books...

...It was like a fuzzy signal resolving itself into a clear note...

...His anecdotalizing, in the same voice, put a thrilling new spin on the most mundane bits of chat: "Man, I was out riding yesterday with my lady . . ." or "I ran into some freaks, some brothers, on the corner and they sure had a funny look . . ." Now I suspect that Uncle Russ was an easygoing fraud, giving suburban kids what they were wanting, and that he had no special key to the doings of this subculture...

...I had picked up a little paperback somewhere called Quiet Days in Clichy, and I was dipping into it while waiting for an afternoon concert to begin...

...After spending a few nights in a cheap doss house off Piccadilly Circus, I hitched around southern England—fancied myself quite the roguish tramp as I sneaked around residential neighborhoods stealing milk bottles from front porches...

...Coming when it did—I was fifteen—it gave me the most intense and promissory intimations of self...

...Here was another one for the books...

...I would follow the plan anyway...

...But I was cool, and being cool meant having your body out there to swell the crowd...

...What a relief I felt when he said goodbye and headed off to the art and architecture building and I could hurry around the nearest corner to light up a cigarette...

...I had been listening—starting with pop music—ever since I had been given my first transistor in seventh grade...

...Not that I would, for an instant, liken my emergence into the sixties to the ordained unfurling of the butterfly...

...Elsewhere—in San Francisco, New York, on certain corners in DeDISSENT /Fall 1998 n 97 NOTEBOOK troit—was a life, a strange new rising energy, that had absolutely nothing to do with the safe and affluent and complacent world it was my sorry fate to inhabit...

...Something hidden from us was still ripening...

...They came by way of the radio...

...I honestly saw myself living a glorified tramp's life—in Paris, in London, on the Greek islands, in Spain...

...I repeated to myself for the thousandth time the lines from the opening of Tropic of Cancer: "I have no money, no resources, no hopes...

...The partying continued, intensified, as the fall semester went on...

...I took in Motown, the Beatles, the later British bands, early West Coast rock like Buffalo Springfield, the Byrds...

...Finally, riding the good feeling that seemed to be between us, I let on, with great casualness, that I had some ideas about staying in Europe for a time...

...There is no point in trying to order events from that long year—only the general trajectory matters...

...MY RELATIONS with my father were probably at their most strained during this year and the next...

...Wandering was in the air...

...Swithun's...

...At least so far as my friends and I were concerned...

...I lay on my bed, turned away from Whitney, tears streaming down my cheeks...

...I would drift where situations took me, take what jobs I found, live on my wits...

...I must have appeared to be a good kid—docile, compliant— and my parents must have thought that their plan was working...

...My sympathies were with the radicals, of course...

...The thing just sits there, like something shat onto a twig...

...I lay with my head between the stereo speakers, feeling the knife-edge of sadness and alienNOTEBOOK ation, but when I rolled over and saw the trees blowing outside my window, I felt the gift of the future was somewhere being wrapped for me...

...Therefore, to march and chant and pump my fist in the air, and then to sit in someone's parked van and get drunk on Ripple wine—it was all the same thing...

...I got my parents to pay for a rental guitar—an electric Gibson, cherry red—from Grinners...

...I had the same hunger...

...My father was on Nixon's side—he despised the unruly decadence of the NOTEBOOK whole youth movement...

...We spent days walking side by side down rural roads, scheming, confiding ourselves, screaming insults at the motorists who blew by us...

...Of the evening—our "trip"—I remember nothing...

...And so we pointed ourselves toward Spain, ending up one glorious molten evening on the Rambles in Barcelona, stunned by the sight of so much fruit, so many birdcages, the smells in the air...

...Given the finality of the step I was planning, I marvel at how normal I acted around my family...

...I would go to Europe, not to travel, but to live...

...My parents, unhappy with what they saw of Groves, the large public high school I now attended, and the kids I was spending my time with—my rock-loving, smoke-frenzied compatriots— decided after long deliberation to send me to Cranbrook, the all-boys private school just down the road...

...But I think now that I was just husbanding my energies, sharpening my sense of grievance...

...But it was clear the moment we got there—we saw how the shopkeepers folded their arms and stared at us, how the beautiful women did not even know we were on the sidewalk—that we did not belong...

...Out of the blur that represents so much of this time in memory comes the bright image of myself lying on my back on the white carpet in our upstairs living room...

...The point...

...Probably it was not so neat as that—these things all flowed together...

...One night, at dinner, I announced to everyone that yes, I thought marijuana should be made legal, that I smoked it all the time, and so did everyone I knew...

...Some of the elements were in play, but the feeling was not yet there...

...I paused only long enough to see that he was looking at me with a pained I00 ir DISSENT / Fall 1998 and inquisitive expression...

...and without clarity there, much that follows must also remain obscure...

...My ticket was round-trip, and my parents had no idea that I did not intend to use the return...

...Russ obviously knew a great deal about it...

...This long season of self-submergence, this period of indrawn breath, was where my sixties began...

...Everything was an adventure, a story to tell Marcus and Whitney...

...It was somehow getting at my father, even though he likely did not know I had left my dorm and was halfway across the country...

...But I also remember standing in Ed Downing's pharmacy right across from Walnut Lake School and hearing erupt from somebody's transistor the first buzzing guitar notes of "Satisfaction," knowing at that moment that some barrier had been breached and that something new and unsettling was out in the world, something that could not be sucked back into the radio and unplayed, ever...

...I was shoplifting—liberating"— books and other necessities from campus stores on an almost daily basis...

...Suddenly I forgot everything I was doing and intending...

...Then I nodded, half bowed, and left the room...

...The life I was asked to live was a fraud...

...There, too, in the cheap room we rented, I broke down...

...I would check out of this corrupt system, get away from the sneers and criticisms of my father...

...No, I was in fact proud of my incompletes, took great pleasure in the thought I had abandoned the pretense of college life...

...radio brought the first stirrings of the rough beast...

...There we tried to hitch and had poor luck...

...There, inadvertently, we insulted a bar filled with prostitutes (we didn't know) by refusing them, one after the next, when they sat down and asked if we might buy them a drink...

...I had one eye on the speaker, and one eye, always, on some girl in a denim jacket a few feet away...

...Whitney and I, best friends from high school, were in the last week of our freshman year at the University of Michigan, though I don't think it would be possible to have been any less invested in studies or college life than we were...

...Narrow, constructed of massive beams, it was straight out of a cinematographer's imagination, just the sort of place that a romantically suicidal undergraduate would think to go, although I don't know whether anyone ever did successfully— or even unsuccessfully—jump from there...

...that fall to march, it was not U.S...

...His intransigence, his refusal to even hear me out, was making it easier for me...

...I remember sitting down that night and writing a melancholy poem about two friends traveling in different directions, which ended: "Each of us/ Leaving for the world from a corner...

...I would go as a day boy, of course, but I would have to submit to the far more rigorous schedule of classes and activities...

...We turned out in great numbers against ROTC that fall, and the police came out in riot gear to break us up...

...When I traveled with a half million others to Washington, D.C...

...I took all of it, indiscriminately, perhaps because coming in from behind the music was something else—was this intimation that I have been trying so hard to zero in on...

...He looked straight at me, set his jaw, and said, "No...

...I feel that if I cannot understand who I was at this point, then I will be able to make nothing of that exciting and disturbing image of Whitney and myself daredeviling our way across that high trestle...

...But then, thirsty, I inclined my ear to his every syllable and I began to believe the story that he was telling us...

...When we reached the far side, felt the ground come up under us, we looked at each other with that Keatsian "wild surmise...

...The little leatherette-encased plastic box was on all the time...

...My sixties— my counterculture years—were about striking poses, not striking...

...It was then—powerless, trapped, forced to knuckle under to my father's will, which he so loved to exercise—that my rebellion took the form of inner separation...

...I went back to my dorm room and lay on the bed, reading about this free-spirited, resourceful writer-rogue...

...You come back when your ticket says or you don't go at all...

...This essay is adapted from a longer work in progress...

...I took long walks and played with my little brother...

...I was happy to have a few weeks to sleep and read and consider my plans...

...If that's what he wants...

...And although music was the main conduit in the beginning, eventually clothes, hair, books, politics—everything followed...

...Ann Arbor was, after all, the birthplace of Students for a Democratic Society...

...That was the extent of my metaphysics then...

...Effffr —told the listener that he was himself irretrievably stoned...

...everything about it was a lie...

...I'm no longer sure...

...I would write and explain everything...

...But my selfinvolvement was so complete that there were almost no sympathies left to distribute...

...My indrawn solitude, with its music and musing, and the jottings I made after paging through my Ferlinghetti—this was my changing place...

...Then, picking up my pen, smiling to myself, I very carefully drew a picture of a butterfly with wings open...

...And my then-girlfriend, Nina, and I would write to each other about whether we might hook up...

...My sixties were not political...

...I said nothing about my disastrous year at school...

...I wanted nothing more than to be like him, on the bum, hopping from bed to bed, cadging meals, living close to the street, but also utterly tuned in to the hidden momentum of the spirit...

...The itinerary was vague...

...Decision making was part of the long view and I was bent on living as much as I could in the glory of the moment...

...Two weeks later, after ten days of sleeping on the beach on the island of Formentera, after spending an afternoon in jail for nude bathing (I had met up with Nina and she had to bribe the arresting officer with a roll of pesetas), after being denied entry into England for having no shoes (mine had disintegrated, and Nina had to buy some on the other side of customs and throw them across to me), I found my charter group and took my seat for the flight home...

...With Whitney I covered France, north to south, hitchhiking, walking around Paris the whole night because we had no place to sleep—we stole a baguette from an unlocked car—and then hurrying to get out to the countryside...

...SVEN BIRKERTS will publish Readings, his fifth book of essays, early in 1999...

...BUT WHEN did the whole business begin...

...I saw my father trying to contain himself in his mother's presence and I took pleasure in the hurt I inflicted...

...The night before my flight—before I left for six weeks to England and France—my father took me out to Fox & Hounds, a fancy restaurant...

...People like Tom Hayden, David Dellinger, and Rennie Davis were always passing through, giving rally speeches from the steps of the graduate library...

...I did not have the resources, the languages, the skills...

...I lay in bed at night with the earplug tight in my ear...

...I had no circuit, really, no social element from which to draw the clues and the solidarity I needed...

...Below it, taking care with my calligraphy, I wrote: Professor Crump fell asleep and dreamed that he was a butterfly...

...And that was, certainly from my father's perspective—and even the perspective I hold now—resolutely downward...

...The whole fantasy sounds so outlandish now—I can't believe that I was entirely serious...

...I remember getting dropped off at the Birmingham Teen Center by my—or somebody's—mother, and wedging in, front and center, to hear local boy Bob Seger's new band, finding myself queasily fascinated by the guitarist, who not only had the longest hair I'd ever seen on a male, but who was as pretty as a girl...

...For the first time in history the world was being handed over to the young...

...All he cared about was preserving his authority...

...His voice, drawing the call letters of the station forth from his deepest contemplative soul— "W . . . R . . . I...

...I had a few hundred dollars saved, and I would make more over there, selling my return ticket...

...I would stay there, be an expatriate...

...I remember that he would drive to Ann Arbor every Thursday to teach a graduate seminar at the school of architecture, and that on some of these Thursdays we would have lunch together at a place called Dominick's...

...How I loved the sound of that word...

...Which meant, in that first isolated, unbefriended year, that I sat in my room with the door closed, listening to my records—my Bob Dylan...

...It did not matter what my parents thought—so I told myself—for they would get DISSENT /Fall 1998 n 99 NOTEBOOK it eventually...

...There I would busy myself writing out my plans, my fantasies, my Thoreauvian manifestos about a better, truer life...

...I am the happiest man alive...

...From time to time we would gaze at each other with the mocking hilarity of the insane...

...Peter, Paul and Mary...

...I was in junior high then...

...So I simply tuned in, wandering about and fantasizing...

...Shouting would have availed nothing, I knew that, and threats and refusals just excited him to greater displays of strictness...

...We gathered—almost daily, it seemed—on the "Diag" at lunchtime, where speakers got up to decry the war, where petitions were sent around...

...We were "the people," and our truth was getting high and being together and not hurting others...

...I was listening to DJ Dick Purtan's cynical chatter and the countdown hits of the moment...

...Winter would come and I would have nothing, no barrier...

...But we understood each other's vaguenesses back then—we knew the romantic longings that lay behind them...

...He was, I could tell, primed for a man-to-man talk and I tried to hold up my side...

...Whitney would go off traveling that summer, looking for some click of connection, and would end up dangerously ill from dysentery picked up in his wanderings in India and Afghanistan...

...Busily making history...

...But the music knew, and Russ knew, and these people he talked about—the "freaks''—whom I had begun to glimpse here and there, on street corners, driving by in oddly decorated cars on Woodward Avenue, they knew...

...During this time, still living in the freshman dorm, I was smoking marijuana regularly, taking mescaline and LSD with some of my crazier hallmates...

...My attitude grew more sullen, more arrogant...

...I listened to the latter, especially—religiously—to a disc jockey named Uncle Russ...

...I bought albums on the strength of images and associations, and I listened to the music until it became part of the sediment of self...

...Odd—how we make our way into our lives...

...In this spirit—ready, chafing—I scored some quality mescaline and headed over to Whitney's...

...Grades would not be mailed until I was long gone...

...I had been reading Tropic of Cancer and my brain was on fire...

...There were phases and stages, of course, deviations of fashion in one direction and another, but the deeper momentum held steady...

...WHEN I THINK back on these months, the analogy that comes most readily to mind is also the most obvious: that of the metamorphic transformation of caterpillar into cocoon into butterfly...

...Things were different back then...

...We both drank wine, and the more we sat, philosophizing, the more oppressive my secret became...

...I studied maps...

...I could "lose" mine, claim it had been stolen, and get a new one...

...This was no longer AM rock—this was something different, and I found my way in as through a door with my name stenciled on it...

...She was living at our house and I was obliged to go home on certain weekends to spend time with the family...

...I write these words and realize that nothing could sound more vague...

...I said it was against the system, against authority and structure, but much more it was against my father...

...I receded into the corner of my room, sat on the bed strumming my guitar, and if my parents went out I quickly got to my cigarettes and went out behind the house to smoke...

...But—" The familiar tears of frustration— which I so rarely let him see—welled up...

...I, too, hung around at the sock hops (which is what junior high dances were called then) held in the gym after every football or basketball game...

...I have only the picture I began with, the two of us having talked ourselves into the heroics of crossing the railway trestle at sunrise...

...Sitting on the edge of the bed, drinking beer, writing my thoughts in my journal while Whitney read, I suddenly knew I would not be able to fulfill my plan...

...involvement in Vietnam that I was really protesting, but my father's arrogance, the willful, critical way he had acted toward me while I was growing up...

...When I started buying records, it was mainly folk music, which was harder to get on radio...

...I was happy to stand right up by the side of the stage, watching the musicians, studying their hair, their jeans, and trying to memorize the chord progressions they were playing...

...Marcus and I parted by a bridge...

...I was there—we were all there—pumping our fists in the air, chanting things like "Power to the people...

...I had heard, too, that there was a thriving black market for U.S...

...But I loved the album covers, the misfit-looking figures posed with their guitar cases against raw urban backgrounds, the whole magic summed up for me in the words "Bleecker Street...

...I would travel around England for ten days until Marcus arrived, then the two of us would travel for a time...

...But even this was not yet it...

...I was too nervous around girls to even think about dancing...

...From that little book I found my way to others, the two Tropics, the volumes of the Rosy Crucifixion trilogy—Sexus, Plexus, and Nexus—and in fairly short order, ungrounded as I was in any strong sense of reality, I began to conceive of a plan...

...I had big plans, too...

...I decided I would simply carry on my real life deep inside, where he couldn't see it...

...When I flew to London the next afternoon, I was still resolved...

...passports...

...I ENDED THE school year in disgrace—the first time this had ever happened to me, the first time that my intellectual vanity had not kicked in to rescue me...

...All my friends— the kids I chose to hang out with, or hung out with by default because I was not a jock or a surfer-type—were getting interested in bands, starting their own, talking nothing else but guitar and amp trivia and which bands were playing at which school dances...

...It was a ritual, I think, a way we had of sealing a pact, a recognition that most of existence was idiocy, but that in our adventures, our sleepless manias, our exhausted sunrises, we had found the secret way through...

...Then he said, apropos of nothing I had said, "You'll break your mother's heart...

...When spring came, when the weather sharpened my desire to be wandering, I bought my airplane ticket...

...Sitting down to take my last exam, in Chinese literature, I stared long and hard at the question sheet...

...I WAS ENTIRELY On my Own and thrilled...

...It is a truth I'm ashamed to concede, for so many people around me seemed to care passionately about where the country was going...

...I was at once hurt and fortified...

...I knew I was not going to address myself to any of the questions, but still I stared...

...Yes, the radio blared rock and roll as loud as we could get it, and we all practiced striking universal poses of rebellion and disaffection, lighting fresh cigarettes from smoldering butts and chugging our filched cans of beer with the insouciance of sailors on shore leave...

...We crossed to the mainland, and then, after a few days in Amsterdam, during which time we frequented the legal hash bars and roamed along the canals, Marcus met an exotic-looking blonde named Enneka, who offered to travel with him to India...

...Gathering up my rucksack, looking out over the bowed heads of my classmates, I strode up to Professor Crump's desk and set the blue book down...

...But I would wait to see what came my way—where I ended up, who I met—before doing anything final...

...What do you mean...

...When I brushed my teeth in the morning I had my radio on the shelf...

...I would be a part of that vast migratory population...

...If I like it," I said, "I thought I might take some time off from school, find some work My father scarcely missed a beat...

...We lived on bread, cheese, and chocolate, slept in fields, and we made our way in slow spurts down to the French Riviera, where we foolishly imagined we would meet interesting people who would take us in...

...Andale, andale, muchacho," we sputtered back and forth in the cartoon voice of Speedy Gonzalez—don't ask me why...