THE YOUNG: Their Cause and Cure ll-FAUST IN THE HASHBURY
Mayer, Milton
THE YOUNG: Their Cause and Cure II-FAUST IN THE HASHBURY by MILTON MAYER A doctoral dissertation by a University of California sociologist reveals that every hippie in the Haight-Ashbury...
...Legalize it and its use will not decrease (any more than whiskey's) if it assuages an unbearable pain...
...The easiest way is to show up and put on a freak-out...
...Its variants are world-wide, and the "existentialists" of Paris, the mods and the rockers of London, and Moscow's guitar-playing "hoodlums" are at least as old as the domestic variety...
...When he sobers up he knows that it was his bladder, not his brain, that was expanded...
...Every Negro seventh-grader in San Francisco's integrated Roosevelt Junior High, in an essay, "My Thoughts on the Hippies," said, "They're dirty...
...Like the hippies, I was an attention-getting device in my childhood, but I do not recall that I got the attention after I'd cut my second teeth...
...Like booze, dope releases the cultural inhibitions, but, like booze, it induces a euphoria that is antaphro-disiac...
...happiness is a warm kitten, and a cuddle a commune...
...No wonder the hippies never laugh sober...
...When the navel shrivels for wrant of sustenance, they go back more resentful than ever to hook the innocents they left behind them...
...They are nearly all hop-heads, but a majority of them hit it weekends (as we do the bottle), a minority evenings, and only a hard-case few full time...
...They don't care...
...Sensuality's pay-off ends when the trip ends, when the money ends, when the law begins, when the VD gets you, when you have to feed both the chick and the child, when the draft board calls...
...The quick-change artists—Look, Mom, no crucible—have yet to produce the quick change...
...The grass and the acid cost money...
...what he does does more harm than good, and what he won't do would do more good than harm...
...A lot less responsive...
...You preen in your pad and hit the street...
...Love is the fruit of agony, never ripened, never ready...
...All they have to do is do what Dad won't do and refuse to do what he does...
...They go where it's beautiful, man, beautiful...
...The right answer is Yes to the question, "Is this all there is to it...
...John J. Thompson, the twenty-two-year-old tyke credited with the Dirty Word outbreak in Berkeley: "I was trying to arouse adults"—your hippie is the World's Oldest Teenager —"to the fact that a four-letter-word like 'kill' is respectable and mine isn't...
...They animate each other in a desultory way...
...But it was the hippies, who Chicago Sun-Times "What I can't stand about him is his 'more alienated than thou' attitude" have quit wearing the buttons, who gave the racket its saturnine spur...
...Of course I violated the values...
...and Vegas to "service" the neighborhood, adulterate it with cocaine and heroin to expedite the addiction...
...But I wouldn't let them out of my arms...
...Their "let it happen" is the token of their flexibility...
...One of the Founding Fathers of hip-piedom told me that not one "kid"— they're all "kids" to one another—has been drafted from the Hashbury in the three years he's been there...
...They're runaways...
...they care for Careless Love...
...Somebody wants more than somebody else, somebody else a Red Mustang or a groovier pair of boots...
...They're bucking all the odds—not only Old Corrosion...
...Not by splitting the scene for Canada, but by faking addiction, "psych," or "homo...
...The CBS man concluded his Big Report on hippies with, "Granted the shortcomings of our society...
...When he is not teaching, his base is Carmel, California...
...And the intervals between trips, as the pain abates the pleasure, grow shorter in the Hashbury as they do everywhere else...
...Their jewelry includes all kinds of icon, but never, ever, a representation of the Passion...
...They don't, in their argot, "go to the opera...
...Hippies are not orthodox rebels...
...By virtue of its being forbidden (one to ten years in most states) the hippies have sown its seeds across the country...
...The drinker (unless he's shot) does not use drink as life itself and does not, therefore, have to develop a compensatory illusion about life...
...The responsible citizens who spawned them, and whose responsibility consists of Supporting Our President, Our Local Police Force, and Our Boys in Vietnam, hope that they will come back and settle down on the burning fuse under the wall-to-wall carpet...
...After the "trip," usually on marijuana, he remembers that the conversation was brilliant and the good feeling pervasive...
...nor would we if we had their sweet candor...
...They have brains and feeling and guts enough to have tried to make some sort of break...
...The art of the independent hippie is the wiliness of the dependent...
...They hired a million extra coppers and actually hid the National Guard in the Armory...
...He," I was told, "is with it...
...What's he doing...
...My little one" —age twenty-two—"isn't taking care of himself...
...and when it was over the Monterey police chief testified that there never had been so orderly a gathering...
...Some "groups" fall apart...
...The dry-ball at the cocktail party found the din unbearable, the conversation witless, and the feeling antagonistic...
...and when an Angel was killed in San Francisco, the Grateful Dead played a "big music" memorial concert...
...I have known a few of these transfiguration pushers fairly intimately...
...Eyes and ears hurt...
...There is no way to get at the junk but to get at the pain...
...The truest-blue hippie would rather switch than fight...
...The Hell's Angels saga is even more marvelous: Nobody, but nobody, has been able to make contact with the demonic Angels on their stolen "bikes," but the hippies got to them (with acid) and now they're the Hashbury bodyguard...
...Buddhist non-attachment "interests" them, and they carry those old Buddhists, Kirkegaard and Hesse, around with them...
...And more than a few million marching to their anti-success anti-music...
...But they're betting on not having to live to be sixty...
...I don't suppose that we are going to change our lives—comme nous, le deluge—and without changing our lives we cannot make life bearable for our kids...
...one way or another they get themselves stoned...
...And they are idiocies, the draft law among them...
...Maybe they won't...
...Pretty soon I'd grow up— or I wouldn't—and be off their backs and they could settle down to a little serious cribbage...
...Their creations are created when they're high, "out of the psychedelic experience...
...When I was "high," my old man told me to get out and come back when I could behave myself, and when I was "down" he told me to get out and come back when I could be sociable...
...How can they help doing more good than harm...
...A municipal judge, continuing a case against a hippie, said to the defendant, "The next time you come in here, take those stupid beads off," and the hippie replied, "I will if you'll take that stupid necktie off...
...Outside are Hunters Point and Vietnam...
...But what caused them—you and I— will still be there...
...But booze is defensible by the species' addiction to it: The drink and the drinker exercise a mutual control...
...So—so—immediate...
...The characteristic hippie expression is joyless, his decibel panic a painful retort to the sonic boom and the Musak and the missile...
...They have the cheapest come-on yet, requiring for its raw materials nothing but the totems and taboos of primitive American society...
...Oh, grant the shortcomings of our society quick, and get on to the nevertheless...
...But Mom and Dad live there with them, on their backs (as our ancestors live on ours...
...as adolescents of twenty-five they are down to one, "groovy...
...A good time...
...A team of seven hundred Columbia sexologists (on a Ford Foundation grant) found that there is less fornication (and masturbation) in the Hashbury than there is on Nob Hill (or at Columbia...
...Leave the sordid "static" of tribulation and despair behind you...
...If the Flower Children wilt, they will be succeeded by something much less presentable, much less entertaining, and much more expensive...
...the chant itself is enchanting...
...Why let Khrushchev or your wife bury you...
...There's no Monday morning in the Hashbury...
...Outside the commune are the ashes of their fathers and the temples of their gods...
...They weren't...
...If they blow up, or drift off, we'll be exactly as happy as we are the day after the tanks shoot down the riots in Newark and Detroit...
...not wanting, but willing, the good of the other...
...Their only motivation, and it isn't a bad one, all things considered, is to be what I'm not and to drive me wild...
...Not on your life...
...Oh, but they do...
...We and our ambitions "for them" have made our kids' lives unbearable...
...Dad did give him the car key, so pot must be something else...
...So they smoke their wild oats, sow their poppyseeds, spin their bright cobwebs, and grunt their starved vernacular...
...Mea culpa...
...Their candor has produced the only humor to be found nowadays on the American scene, in the form of the two-bit buttons that have made American Button Consolidated rich...
...Listen to Mr...
...The sick physician needs a drink, the sick salesman a bottle, the sick Senator a case...
...We have the money, and with the money we have them by the long hairs...
...others start talking about getting out of the "phony" Hashbury and moving to the Russian River up north, or to Santa Fe, or New York...
...What draws the chick from Peoria is the bed-hop, and what sends her from bed to unsatisfied bed is the dream of being happily unmarried...
...There are communes in Berkeley, but the hippies are outside the University of California protest movement (or "syndrome...
...Dali did it better, and sober...
...In the straight world the "American ethic" of work has given way to work for a Tiffany tiara...
...Until you find yourself you cannot be involved...
...but they had their own little lives to "lead," Pa on the streetcar with his paper-box samples and Ma over the washtub in the basement...
...No "straight," no "groovy...
...Even the slogans now come out of the gag factories...
...Marijuana (or Mary Jane) is physiologically non-addictive—but your gone junkie usually began on it...
...The sick physician goes on to rebut the hippie campaign for the legalization of marijuana by reciting the horrors of alcohol...
...but whoever wore a costume except to be seen in it...
...unlike the Buddha, they have no attention span sober...
...The Void may have been a nicer place to visit than the Gracious Monterey Peninsula of California, which ten thousand hippies invaded last summer for an acid-rock festival...
...the genuine fag (whose capital is San Francisco) cruises the Hashbury disappointed...
...the bright ones, not the future Marines and used-car salesmen...
...So even before it ends it operates on appearances, psychedelic or just plain carnival...
...The pursuit of the tiara gets you a coronary...
...It's too much...
...They will sleep the clock half-way around and arise only to resume their languid tomfoolery...
...I asked, of a male writhing in front of a group...
...Just scream or go glassy...
...They have enrolled, for a season, or for all seasons, in the College of Soft Knocks to study their own (and one another's) navels...
...Instead of beating them lightly and sending them to the salt mines to earn their own dime for the movie, I bought their sulks and their pets^ celebrated their birthdays instead of the saints' and the martyrs', and took them on bum trips so that they could have the advantages of the Profligate Society...
...It's so—so...
...The sauce is a subsidiary—however absolutely necessary— of a life lived sober...
...Ma dropped me in the suds every night and got my farina down me...
...One way to have the straights on is to keep them off balance...
...The hippies don't go to Mississippi...
...The straight world's scary analysis scares the part-timers off it...
...In the Profligate Society it's a gas...
...sampling puts its campus use at ten to fifteen per cent of the college students...
...Maybe they will...
...Sensuality, with its by-products, is all there is to hippieism...
...The Wild Flower Children are on a berserk search for the orthodoxy we pulled out from under them and the humanity we surrendered when we surrendered the liberal arts for the straitjacket of specialization...
...But the full-timers are no more to be scared than their parents by the "unpredictable" effects of booze...
...Why use a five-letter-word like "louse" to indict a loused-up society when a four will do...
...We ought to be afraid that they'll pass...
...They won't...
...the modern Delilah leaves him his hair...
...He's a pacifist...
...THE YOUNG: Their Cause and Cure II-FAUST IN THE HASHBURY by MILTON MAYER A doctoral dissertation by a University of California sociologist reveals that every hippie in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco has now been interviewed 12.32 times by University of California sociologists, whose uniform conclusion is that a Flower Child—you grow 'em, we throw 'em—is a white American with dirty feet who thinks that love is wonderful...
...and so on to the next trip to Nirvana by way of Nepenthe...
...MILTON MAYER is a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts...
...In the Hashburys they are dropouts by choice...
...But it's there—they wouldn't be hippies if they weren't indignant—and their passive hostility comes smiling through...
...All empirical investigations indicate that alcohol constitutes a far greater social danger than marijuana...
...You have your poison," says the hippie, "and I have mine, and mine is cheaper and quicker...
...Monday morning is the Lost Weekday...
...Tell us all about the horrors of LSD...
...All credit to us...
...but to say that they're lazy is wrong: nobody's that lazy...
...The straights wag their hard heads: Life finds you, Hunters Point finds you, Vietnam finds you, the landlord finds you, the electric light company finds you, the draft board finds you, the VD finds you...
...The hippie rejection is a spectacular discontinuum in an age whose hallmark is discontinuity in practice and continuity in pretense...
...In a world whose thermonuclear creation consumes all its others, non-creation may have something to be said for it...
...A commune not of Lovers but of fun-Lovers, like Palm Beach, the Tuileries, and the Winter Palace...
...The female is only slovenly...
...Haight Street is "shamelessly" panhandled from end to end and the mendicant Diggers feed their kind from the back door of the supermarkets...
...But they don't read...
...But Christianity without the Cross is not the invention of the hippies...
...The sugar-cube set even cleaned up their litter before they left Monterey...
...The symbiosis (ah, there, Berkeley) has us living off each other...
...As children of fifteen they had two adjectives, "neat" and "keen...
...They turn up their Hare Krishna until it brings the cops...
...Does the sick physician conclude that alcohol ought to be illegalized...
...We pay the Jefferson Airplane $5,000 for a concert and the Grateful Dead $10,000 for a recording...
...Besides, "A fellow's got to live...
...The free Hashbury clinic in San Francisco, making "contact," like the padres, had just under ten thousand visits June 9-September 5. Its unpaid doctors were amazed, not at the incidence of gonorrhea (up fourfold in five years) but at the prevalence of caries and malnutrition and the universal susceptibility to upper respiratory infections...
...They get high on our poison, too: Last summer's non-hippie looting spree on Fifth Avenue had as its objective a shop that sells fifty-six dollar alpaca sweaters...
...You bet he isn't...
...In desperation they had to jump for it and land on their heads in the Hashbury, the great post-adolescent temper tantrum...
...Jesus Saves Green Stamps," "I Am a Human Being—Do Not Fold, Spindle, or Mutilate," "The Governor of Alabama Is a Mother," "Support Mental Health or I'll Kill You," "Wear Pink Underwear and Avoid the Draft," "Smoking Is Safer Than Breathing," "God Is a Teeny-Bopper," "Kill a Commie for Christ," "Anastasia, Hitler, Judge Crater, Stalin, Amelia Earhart, Trotsky, Dragula, and God Are Alive and Well in Transylvania," "Don't Masturbate — Fornicate/' "Draft Beer—Not Students," "Help Stamp Out Thinking,"—this is social commentary, as savage as Swift's and a lot more cryptic...
...They won't work...
...There isn't a trace of asceticism or self-denial in it...
...But as long as we go on over-reacting to them, we'll keep them fixed in their follies: "The hippies," says one "liberal" columnist, "are a distasteful and meaningless collection of misfits . . . totally dependent upon dope for their philosophy, their religion, and their escape...
...In order to get what it takes, you have to promise the old folks whatever they want and "do your thing" on the sneak...
...Alienation is inheriting the earth, and there is no more communication between the young and the old than there was between Marx's bourgeois and his proletariat...
...We ought to be thankful for the privilege they afford us of seeing ourselves in caricature...
...The cars cost money (Hippies "don't feel like walking...
...But they're hung up on the theological error of angelism: they cannot face the hard-rock reality of conflict, in others or in themselves...
...We are better do-it-yourself technicians than the Romans: We are our own barbarians...
...Don't ask them where they're going: "We live where we are...
...Or: When the San Francisco Health Department raided the Hashbury, its inspectors came back with the disheartening report that ninety per cent of the violations they found were in domiciles occupied by the same family for ten years or more...
...Almost none of them has dropped off his parents' backs...
...and then we sit back and wait for Old Corrosion to take effect...
...the teeny gets a free drag on a reefer...
...In such a society you have only to do what comes unnaturally on a twenty-four-hour show-and-tell basis, and you have it mesmerized...
...The trouble with the paralyzed life is that man does not live by day-old bread alone...
...After two or three years of acid-rock they are just about what they were two or three years ago, or ten or fifteen, when they came bouncing into the house hollering, "School's out...
...But what they love is themselves and their pleasuring, so their love doesn't mean much more than an alley cat's...
...They're giving us a bad time, when what we want, and all we want, is a good one...
...Pa honed his razor-strap on me pretty regularly...
...Pot is Dad, to whose bag the hippies are a reaction, not a revolution...
...As you go panting past them on your way to get an extension of the mortgage or a prescription filled for your (or their) cough, you catch snatches of their patter: "Pure molecular energy . . . beyond Maya . . . selective expansion . . . inner participation . . . self-realized reality . . . opens you to God...
...The difference between my kids—it's yours I'm talking about, not mine— and me is that I accepted my parents' values while mine reject mine...
...The difference is not in the violation...
...I was just as reprobate as my kids are...
...We keep telling ourselves that they won't endure...
...They want so badly not to work that they can't...
...But happiness is an abiding state of the soul, not a jolt to the central nervous system...
...death is the straights' bag...
...They don't go to Hunters Point (which is San Francisco's Watts...
...Their powers atrophying, they're as deadly as Dean Rusk, suffering solemnly even when they're jumping to the tom-toms in their jungle...
...Their bacchanalia will have been a charming interlude...
...the thingness of the thing . . . That's IT, man . . ." But your presence, even in passing, is a "roadblock...
...Ma and Pa said that what I was doing was looking for trouble...
...They will tell you that theirs is a religious movement, a kind of Immobilize for Christ...
...Remittance children, playing with poverty and driving Mom and Dad up the wall by getting pasty on a diet of pasta...
...The consequence is the demimonde life of deception...
...My kids, in contrast, have their second teeth into me...
...Rent, VD, bail bond, Pills, boots (fifty bucks for a groovy pair) cost money, and the money has to come, one way or another, from that good old Togetherness chump, your old "pal," Dad...
...You're not, and they are...
...Alas, no pleasure without pain: The dreadful truism, as it drives us to drink, drives them to drug, and when they sober up their devils are waiting for them...
...We sorrowful clowns wear our paint, they theirs...
...If you've got one," said one of the non-hippies, "you fly, you really know what's happening...
...A costume ball...
...You have no idea what it"—or, I suppose, suicide—"can do for you until you've tried it...
...they'd found it...
...He gets to them...
...LSD's effects are "unpredictable," and the Mafia, up from L.A...
...Find yourself...
...And not just live, but live creatively...
...Outside is man killing and being killed and killing himself...
...Nevertheless...
...Nor will banalities like, "Pot is the car key Dad wouldn't give him...
...and "They Thought They Were Free: the Germans, 1933-45...
...I have never met an ex-hippie, only some who have had to land to refuel...
...Involvement conceals existence...
...Hippie homosexual experimentation likewise has a platonic patina...
...It is the invention of the Church Triumphant, perverting grace to gratification and reason to the reasonable...
...As sticks and stones won't break their bones, so names will never hurt them...
...There's nothing they can do...
...If the Flowers bloom until they're sixty they won't smell as good as they do now—not even to each other...
...Now I deplore all experimentation...
...These last (in Haight-Ashbury) favor a joint called the Drog Store, where they spook the Flower October, 1967 29 Children, who don't like what they see in the Drog Store mirror...
...You can't understand" With son-et-lumiere, who doesn't see through a bar glass brightly...
...She winds up emasculating the male...
...It's so what...
...I never did...
...What we have done is reproduce our kind, with pinwheels...
...But what we want is no more Mauldin in Chicago Sun-Times "Young man, you've got nothing there but weeds" attainable than what they want...
...Like all mummery, it is based on antithesis...
...At Monterey they had their own watchful encampment on the hill above the festival, to protect their friends from the bewildered fuzz...
...Here's a sympathetic art critic's try at one of their art shows: "Robert Comings is the house psychedelic painter, in the form of diamond-shaped canvases with a base of prismatic radii and microscopic cell-shapes shooting out from a God's eye, and an overlay of gynecological anatomy, plus a hair bird and what looks like a snake...
...it's in the rejection...
...Because if they are, what would "Ellie, I think there's a young man to see you" you, even I, even Faust, not give to be invited...
...What they are is paralyzed...
...And an awful lot less considerate of the everyday "straight" amenities (like taking one of their flowers to an aged lady...
...If you pause, as you pass, they're paralyzed, like toddlers conspiring to steal the jam...
...and a team of one nonsociologist (on a Progressive grant) found that the male hippie, already in rebellion against anthropoid American virility, grows ever more sinuous as the female grows more strident and aggressive...
...They couldn't care less—which means (if you know your Buber) that they couldn't love at all, because the opposite of love is indifference, not hate...
...The psychedelic color has yet to produce the blinding flash of the road to Damascus...
...But courage to stand up to them is outside the Hashbury lexicon...
...He wrote the books "What Can a Man Do...
...But color and noise, as they approach excess, maximize pleasure to the point of pain...
...What's Naples got that Mary Jane hasn't...
...Until then it's a ball...
...They are irresponsible...
...They don't go to the demonstrations or the sit-downs or to Vietnam or to Head Start or Hind Most or the Peace Corps...
...Me too, now...
...By subjecting my analyst to rigorous examination I have been able to recall, dimly, that when I was an adolescent (at seventeen, not twenty-two) I was red-hot to "find myself" by means of experimentation...
...Up and down Haight Street the listless Lovers go, their ankle-bells tinkling to notify some shepherd-to-be that they're there...
...They're not above whimpering: The duplicity is imposed upon them by the straight world with its idiocies...
...A little less bouncy...
...To live on pleasure is to live off capital...
...Be by letting your consciousness expand and letting go of compunction...
...The gracious boobs were scared silly...
...you can't get into Berkeley without saying "syndrome...
...There are a few thousand of them strolling the country's Hashburys, and a few of them on every campus (where their coevals admire them...
...we already know more than we want to know about the horrors of LB J. No credit to the hippies, then...
...We won't have to hear about them any more...
...It proceeds by provocation...
...A little more, perhaps...
...We are, in reverse, the measure of all their things...
...The hippies are this season's a-go-go conversation piece...
...There is only exploitation...
...They glide down to Market and Mission Streets, where their regalia gets them beaten up by sailors...
...And an exhaustive investigation by a team of Stanford psychologists discloses that last summer's influx of 250,000 teeny-boppers (or cub hippies) failed to materialize because word had reached them that all the previously available pads in the Hashbury were now occupied by priests in plain clothes assigned by their bishops to outreach, empathize, and identify...
...They hold their warm kittens to them...
...The intrepid sociologist gets himself an invite...
...Hippieism is seductive to the whole rising generation except for the Young Americans for Goldwater, and all addicts (of anything) are pushers...
...Are they having a good time at the ball...
...By the time the festival was half over the coppers had been canned and the Guard disbanded under cover of night...
...They paint and they tootle and they strum...
...The Berkeley syndrome is orthodox rebellion against orthodox repression...
...That doesn't mean that they won't spread...
...Uninvolvement—can't you see Christ uninvolved, man?—is its watchword...
...There is no such thing as free love, no hedonism on the cheap, no going up without coming down, no getting more out of life (or less out of death) than there's in it, no chemical compound to retard human spoilage, and not even an unsure cure for the mortal affliction of Adam...
...Nothing visible defines a hippie except (in the male) the six inches of hair that have us all shook up...
...Why see Naples and die...
...none of them writes, unlike the beatniks of not-so-old...
...What we are drives them to the Hashbury, and when they get there, there we are in mournful spirit "bringing them down...
...How do they beat it...
...They hate the hippies...
...Becoming stunts being, and what the straights take for being is nothing but becoming...
...If you have to be high to create it, you have to be high to dig it...
...The hippies have turned upon grace and reason, taking the perversion for the pure...
...Their acute consciousness that they're bugging the straights approaches paranoia...
...Monday morning finds you...
...There are a thousand ways to bug the straights...
Vol. 31 • October 1967 • No. 10
