Panic. It made its way along my central nervous system slowly, transforming my sluggish hangover into the fleeting butterflies of a speed trip. It was time to take stock of my situation. I kicked aside the empty liquor bottles and beer cans as I made my way across the room to my rental typewriter. I had been in town for only three days, and those three days had only served to reassert the inherent misgivings I had with this story. The past few months had been a high speed burn across the nation, consisting of late nights fueled by cocaine and pep pills followed by early mornings consisting of hash smoke and square tabs of LSD. Now, as I try to find some space in the overflowing ashtray for my cigarette butt, I reach a blinding moment of realization that sums up the story in total: I’m fucked.
My trip was not the epic quest for the American Dream, as my editors may have been under the impression of. It was much bigger than that, consisting of an analysis of both present and past to construct not only the American Dream, but the state of the union in general. It was to be a retelling of the most amazing moments of American history, and the investigation of how those moments left us here, high and dry in so many more ways than one.
The assignment had been dreamt up late one night as a duo of old friends stumbled with me through the streets of San Francisco in the middle of an all night beer binge. There are few things so simultaneously depressing and inspiring than the depths of a stupor inspired by drink, and there are precious few of us left who subscribe to value of alcohol consumption. Ever since the discovery of the disease of alcoholism, excessive drink has been increasingly frowned upon, in even the most liberal areas of the nation. Productive members of society simply don’t drink themselves into a stupor anymore. At least, not in public. Like most fun things, the bottle has been driven to the back of a hidden lower drawer under a stack of old documents, right next to the bag of grass.
But we were talking about San Francisco, once the bastion of free living and the earthly conception of peace and love, ideals that had once enthralled a nation for a few fleeting years, when it seemed like anything was possible. And we were walking through ground zero, the beginning of the end, where, in the kaleidoscope world of the 1960s, the nexus of free love and thought was located. My drunken companions and I stepped to the side of the road to relieve ourselves on a colorful wall mural near the corner of Haight and Ashbury.
Sometime around the year 1966, the center of power for what would forevermore be known simply as the “hippie” culture moved to the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco (often referred to as “Hashbury”). Fueled by marijuana and LSD, the entire 40-block area was, for a short time, ground zero for the New-Left revolution and the waves of peace and love that young people were sure they could carry across the country in Volkswagen Busses and sugar cubes. Almost everyone who was there during that magical time will admit, whether they were for or against what the hippies were preaching, that something incredible was happening in the bayside district.
So many people agreed, in fact, that the Haight-Ashbury became a tourist attraction in almost no time. The normal people would come by in busses to gawk at the freak culture at work. To this day the Haight has a section in any San Francisco guidebook, and the same vendors you might see in Times Square hawking their wares to tourists abound.
At the one place in all of America where money was not a necessity, the almighty dollar has come to rule all. Hasn’t that been the case with every American endeavor? Whenever something new, fresh, and revitalizing comes hurtling down the gauntlet, dollars and cents are the inevitable backstop. In a time when dreams were becoming indistinguishable from reality, that stubborn American Dream of money and power came down and squashed it.
So here we find ourselves, nearly four decades later, submerged once again in the muck and mire of war, dirty politics, and the American Dream. Looking around, it can sometimes be hard to calculate how far we have really come from the dark ages, from the tumultuous ‘60s. America’s slogan has become that of the nine to five manual laborer: Same shit, different day.
And here I find myself, in a hotel room in Buffalo, NY, staring at a bed full of vomit and a toilet stopped up with a bag of candy corn. It’s the ‘60s all over again in this particular hotel room, but my excursions into the outside world have convinced me the exact opposite is true for the future of the nation. I had raced into town in the dead of night three days ago, fueled by a steady supply of speed and warm beer. A green highway sign greeted my arrival:
BUFFALO
AN ALL AMERICA CITY
What better place to determine the state of this country than “An All America City?” I blew through the tollbooths and into town, half expecting to see an apple pie cooling on every windowsill. That’s not what I would find at my intended destination, however. I was headed towards the University at Buffalo, more affectionately known to its students as UB, to take a fresh new look at what had once been America’s strangest and most unpredictable generation: the youth.
When I arrived on campus at Buffalo, however, the scene only served to reaffirm the beliefs I had already formulated at a dozen other institutions of higher learning across the country. Times had changed. The typically snowy campus had been the site of riots, sit-ins, student strikes, and a firebombing in 1970. For a short time it had been just as active in the New-Left revolution as the more popular west coast institutions.
The school’s architects had apparently been badly shaken by the events of 1970, and the new campus, constructed not long after that tumultuous year, reflected their fears. The administration offices were placed high up in buildings, easy to seal off against rioting students. The dorms were set up to deny students places to congregate. Judging by the average college student, however, the founders of UB’s new “North Campus” had no reason to worry.
The students had restrained themselves. The first riots occurred at UB when the Buffalo police were called in to help quell a student protest. The beatniks and hippies wanted nothing to do with the authority of the man. Walking around in the present, though, I saw too many campus police cars to count, and a few patrols from the city as well. The students seemed uninterested. I doubted the community could rise up in riot even if they wanted to. Protest the war? Not with that statistics test tomorrow.
The American youth has obviously decided that studying philosophy, politics, and social sciences is far more important than practicing those things. As was my custom while visiting campuses, I took a stroll by the “Student Union,” a place of congregation for students. This is where many of the mass activities at any university will take place. For UB, it was a massive structure of stone and glass that stretched at least three stories into the sky. In my drugged, sleep-deprived state, it looked extremely uninviting.
It didn’t take long to procure a list of activities scheduled all around campus for the next several weeks. I was appalled at what I saw. Lectures on the dangers of drugs, alcohol, drunk driving, sexual harassment, the list went on and on. Students living in the dormitories could look forward to a lecture on doing your laundry. Try as I might, I could not find major rallies, protests, or speeches against institutionalism, war, famine, or any of the other popular activist subjects. At best, there were marginally progressive lectures scheduled late at night.
The huge number of lectures pertaining to safety was one of the most disturbing things I encountered. What kind of a nation are we raising? There is something good, profound, and above all, valuable about self-education, but that form of learning has been phased out of the institutional learning experience. Except for science labs, most courses do not offer hands-on experience in the classroom or out. Most students will be educated by sitting in classrooms listening to lectures and dreaming up ways to cheat the system.
The same is obviously becoming true for the extracurricular lives of students as well. Not many college students are willing to experience anything MTV doesn’t endorse; giving something the “old college try” rarely happens in college anymore.
But the hippie movement is dead, is it not? One might argue that the hippies knew they were doomed from the start. Haight-Ashbury was the end product of a generation of beatniks who simply got tired trying to play the game on the tilted home field of “the Man.” So instead the mantra became “tune in, turn on, and drop out.” If you recite that passage, which was a rallying point of the acid explosion for so long, on a campus today, most students will look at you like you have three heads. Before long I felt like I did have three heads, judging from the looks I was getting from a generation never exposed to the psychedelic explosion. But who could really blame them? The doors to mass perception had been slammed long ago, not only by the Man, but by the hippie culture itself. Before the ‘70s were out, it had drowned itself in a sea of LSD and dreams.
The whole damn thing just keeps going around in circles, just like this hotel room filled with fast food wrappers and room service bills. Good Lord, how many room service receipts? That was it. Obviously the time to flee had come and gone by that point, it should have come three or four stops ago. I had insisted on full credit so I could get total coverage, and I had received it, but it wouldn’t be long now before my credit cards would raise red lights and sirens once my editors discovered I had bought 25 cans of Beluga Caviar four days before, just to see what it would look like spread along the bottom of the bathtub.
But where to go? Where on earth could I find peace, rest, sanctuary? We might have dodged a bullet with Nixon, but it had long since become clear to me that things will get much worse in the future than they have been in the past. Jesus Christ, maybe the hippies had the right idea. Their movement burned out fast, but while it was a part of American culture it burned so brightly that it outshone the rest of the world for one brief summer of love. And what’s so wrong with that? Maybe it’s better to have lived and lost than to never have lived at all.
I tossed the contents of the room into my suitcases and loaded the car (a huge land shark, an American-made monstrosity capable of holding a wedding band and its equipment), one bag at a time. I knew from experience you never have more than a week before your credit catches up with you, and I was pushing the limits. The sun was creeping across the snow-covered earth like tequila over a kitchen counter as I blasted out of town, my foot all the way down to the floor.
The hammer had finally dropped. The man was laughing over his final victory. And me? Maybe I was just starting to realize that there isn’t any room left in this world for freaks. So I did the only thing left to do. I kept on driving, looking for the next intersection of Haight and Ashbury.
