my generation

I watched the movie Hair on AMC the other night. Some of you know that Hair holds a very special place in my heart. I was a stage door groupie for the Broadway show and even auditioned for it when I was, like, 12 years old. Yeah, really. No, I didn’t get a part.

Anyway, the movie wasn’t great and I haven’t seen it since it came out in 1979, but I was thrilled to see it listed the other night, when I was planning a solo late-night couch party. It was great fun.

Hair depicts the seismic societal changes of the late ‘60s but what the movie brought most strongly to my mind is the very distinct experience of growing up in the 1970s, when I went to see the show over and over, longing for the jubilance of the life of those who came just before me.

My cohort comprises the tail end of the baby boom (I was born in ’58, the boom is generally accepted as ’46-’64). Mine is one of those in-between generations, stuck in a muddy trench between the revolutionary idealism of the ‘60s and the brittle excess of the ‘80s. The 1970s were a dark time, when the drugs really kicked in and the pristine visions of the flower children started looking like snow in New York City, day two—gray with yellow spots and pocked with garbage. Maybe free sex and prodigious drugs weren't such a great idea after all. This was the decade when we figured that out.

A teenager through Watergate, I was acutely aware of it without entirely comprehending what was happening. I just breathed the sour air of corruption, mistrust and anger surrounding it. I didn’t know anyone who went to Vietnam (oddly, now that I think about it) but it flickers on the TV screens of my memories of those days. The nation was hit by inflation and the oil crisis and New York City was deep in the economic crapper.

Drugs and sex were seeping ever more deeply into popular culture but the sex was a lot less jubilant than it seems today. Nobody was used to sexual freedom yet and it all seemed a little bit tawdry--sex clubs and poppers and leather bars. I was too young to be a part of all that but I knew what was going on. (The famous sex club Plato’s Retreat was not very far from my home. Once, a man standing outside asked me if I would go in with him, no strings attached, because single men were not allowed in. I declined.)

Wedged between the nuclear family ‘50s and the loud reinvention of parenting that began in the ‘80s, many of my generation were untethered from their parents. I roamed New York freely, riding graffiti-covered subway cars; getting high with friends in the park, in friends' apartments while their parents were at work, in the staircases of apartment buildings if no place better could be found. I pretended to go to school in the morning but instead met a friend on a patch of grass near the West Side Highway, where we waited until our parents went to work so we could go back home.

That was the '70s NYC-style but I recognize the same style of sad and surly independence in the suburban teen lives depicted in the movie and book The Ice Storm. Tom, who was born in 1960, sees his Texas adolescence in Dazed and Confused—funnier by miles than the Ice Storm (which is devoid of humor) but not exactly depicting a generation on the fast track.

In some ways, the 1970s gave me a dark world view and chopped, diced and spliced my values into a strange amalgam of idealism and cynicism.

I don’t mistrust the government as deeply as some (perhaps the fact that Watergate was uncovered and punished inoculated me against total cynicism) but I believe it bears close watching and that voting is among our most significant responsibilities. I also believe that if newspapers go under, the great loss to society will be unbiased investigative reporting.

I think the era affected how I view sex and drugs. I’ve seen lots of casualties of drugs and so have less of a moral objection to them than a pragmatic one because they do some bad shit. I avoided the harder drugs many of my peers did. I never tripped, but I did do cocaine for a while. I don’t anymore because it killed my brother and I hold a grudge.

Coming of age while culture was in flux perhaps made me more broad minded, more flexible in my rules of morality (for better or worse), than those who came before or after. In general, I am forgiving of our darkest nature, tolerant of transgressions and raw in my assessment of human nature. I don’t think humans are bad. I just think we’re all a little fucked up. And that’s OK.

And, by the way, I miss the ‘70s desperately. Those are my good old days.