Cool, Calm & Contentious - Merrill Markoe [35]
It took me a couple of weeks of scrutinizing these kids to get the lay of the land. Then I made a run at emulating two beautiful, haunted-looking drama class seniors, who wore black turtlenecks, black tights, dangling earrings, dark eyeliner, and long, straight hair parted down the middle. They were the pale, hollow-cheeked, teenage avant-garde devotees of every artistic rebellious subculture the United States had to offer at that point: part Greenwich Village, part Haight-Ashbury, part Carnaby Street. “Nonconformists” was what my mother called them, with a sneer. I wasn’t sure what that meant, but I wanted to be just like them.
So I dove headlong into an overnight transformation from sorority girl to jaded boho chick, hoping to make it instantly appear that I’d been like this for years. When one of my new role models helped ease my transition by giving me a couple of pairs of her old dangly earrings, I was so appreciative that I tried to sit at my desk exactly the same way she sat at hers, bouncing one shoe off the end of my foot. If I could have gotten her mother, who was an author, to agree to let me join their bloodline in progress, I would have turned my back on my own family in a heartbeat. Especially since I was already very concerned that the stable, boring lives of my middle-class parents were fatally undermining my artistic credibility.
“I come from a happy, middle-class family of above-average intelligence and we live in the most supremely mundane and mediocre of all possible horrible suburbias,” I wrote in my diary in the winter of my sophomore year. “I don’t know why I used the word ‘happy’ because it is an environment that has never made me happy. I don’t think, feel, or want what the rest of my family wants. I don’t even want to want what they want. I hate going on long drives with them and listening to my father explain about how boys are attracted to feminine, neatly dressed young ladies who take pride in their appearances.”
I was banking on my father being wrong, because that definitely wasn’t my agenda anymore, even though that pesky boy problem was far from under control. “The first and only relationship I have ever had with a boy was this year,” I wrote, “if you can even call it a relationship.”
I was talking about Bob, a long-haired, redheaded, freckle-faced, pre-drowning Brian Jones look-alike who went to another school. On the bright side, Bob represented progress, since I had, in fact, actually met him! He was friends with my new drama-crowd friend Ned, a guy so cool that he had an American flag for a bedspread. (And don’t forget: this was the sixties, when a kid using an American flag for room décor meant rebellion and nihilism, not conservative family values.) Ned was a dazzling compendium of hip, artistic details. He wrote with a Rapidograph pen, using colored ink. Pretty soon, so did I. He wore a real navy peacoat with jeans and a scarf and a cap and motorcycle boots. I got as many of those as my mother would pay for. And because he worked after school in the scenery department of a small community theater, I volunteered my services there, too.
And there was Bob: a shy, morose, peace-pin-wearing conscientious objector. Once I learned he could draw, I didn’t need to know more. I was deeply in love.
But it was after he held my hand during a Smothers Brothers–Pete Seeger concert at Stanford that our love was firmly etched onto the pages of history. Eventually