Writing the Past

 "A liberal is a man too broad-minded to take his own side in a quarrel." — Robert Frost

I'm sitting here watching a documentary about the early days of the Rolling Stones, which came about in the mostly fictional time and place called The Late Sixties. A long and nasty war swept up kids and ate them like the monsters in bad fairy tales and villagers put signs in their windows saying, "I gave my son for freedom."
      And such shit as that.
     Cities were burning at home, too, in places like Watts, Philadelphia and Detroit. Free Will became a dangerous narcotic and The Movement, a loosely organized and mostly White rhetorical revolution, went from its Bi-Polar best at Woodstock to its worst in Altamont in barely four months.
     Nihilism trumped reason. Hard Hats beat up Hippies. The Weathermen blew up buildings, usually killing no one but the janitor. Demonstrations became riots, tear gas swirled in a thick mist while Jackie Gleason and Anita Bryant pushed themselves as Role Models and Jim Morrison got busted at a show in Miami. All this in a decade.
     Bryant went from spokesperson for the orange juice industry to the anti-gay superstar of the Right when, in 1977, she said things like, "As a mother, I know that homosexuals cannot biologically reproduce children; therefore, they must recruit our children."
     Think back. Frank Zappa competed for airplay with Bobby Sherman and the 1910 Fruit Gum Company. We were a schizophrenic nation with nothing but self-prescribed  medication, fear building with each new assassination, each bungled war. Whiskey drinking adults feared pot smoking kids. Suddenly there were Flower Children and there was The Summer of Love. Squalor and gangs and Charles Manson were intermingled with feather boas and Nehru jackets, mimes held court on the sidewalks and Black Panthers cruised the streets alongside Klansmen, though in street clothes there was no way to know who was whom.
     This was the world I knew, from joining the military in 1966 to getting out in 1969 I watched my world change completely. Coming from a dirt road town in the Deep South to a club in Old Town, Chicago; watching blacks and whites making out and dancing together, breathless with all this new information I wondered, "Is that legal?"
     The first time I heard someone (Stewart Brand, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog) say ‘fuck' on purpose from the stage of a crowded auditorium without anyone seeming to mind was a marker of that time for me. As hard as it might be to believe now, the censorship of books, films and speech was the norm. Lenny Bruce was hounded to death because of his insistence that he, a returning Navy veteran from World War Two, should be allowed to speak freely in public. Grove Press, through its Evergreen line, published The Complete Works of the Marquis de Sade, and risked a lengthy court battle with the United States government.
     Those of us on the road tried hard to call home at least once a month to let loved ones know we were okay. There were no cell phones. Telephones were leased from the phone company. It was illegal to ‘own' one.
     All this from watching a few minutes of ancient film footage of the Rolling Stones.
     It was my time. I was there. I tried once to write a novel about it, about a guy named Gideon who, freshly out of the military and green as a salad, becomes the accidental leader of The Revolution. I finished writing it 40 years ago and still pull it from a drawer on occasion to glance through it. No one besides Maggie has ever read it. I doubt anyone ever will. It was my first finished novel, and the only way I could write about those times was as a fairy tale. Nothing seemed real about it when I was immersed in it, and none of it seems real now.
     Writing ‘what you know' is very important, but it isn't the only thing you need to know when writing. If I tried writing the same book today, all these years later, it would still be that same jumbled fairy tale today because that's how I still remember it.
     So write what you know, but unless it's a memoir you need to disconnect from the story. If you can't then maybe the story needs to stay in the bottom drawer.
     Just my opinion.