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By Root 457 0

you see on people when they’re holding a puppy in their hands which is almost too cute to look at, although in this case the response was never that peculiar vocalism, equal parts verbal vomit, drool, and mucus, which people seem to reserve exclusively for little animals and babies. That is not to say that it shouldn’t have been, however. I was being cute in much the same way that a dog or a baby is cute, taking people on insubstantial little trips, mostly centered around things of nature like rivers of the sun's highways, electric gray clouds, black-browned thun-derskies raining soot and the like, trips awakening in them sensations of innocence and the “purity” of esthetically beautiful imagery which, like much of my writing then, wasn’t about a damn thing.

I was, after all, something new in their experience—about all that happened at these parties was that the males made with a lot of intellectual talk in hopes that the chicks would be so impressed with the quality of their minds that they’d wanna ball them that very night. A few made good that way but on the whole the folks just didn’t seem cheerful or eased-up enough even when they were full of booze to warrant any kind of sweeping generalizations, other than that just about everybody (me included, natch) seemed to be polishing up some kind of routine. Lots of beard-strokers and lots of people with the exact same high nasal way of articulating. I always used to see Ben Warston there with his perennial trappings—a dollar gallon of red wine in one hand, his everlasting suede jacket, and a tough little high school chick two-thirds his age, generally some floozie he’d pick up as she was hitchhiking to Jack in the Box or something—as a semiliterate grass-smoking dropout, he was set up straight to take those liberals and artsies for all they were worth. He’d read enough Henry Miller and could drop enough philosophers’ names to intimidate the living hell out of the whole natty bunch when he showed up half-stoned with that sardonic smile on his face. The result was that he got drunk free on the best stuff every weekend.

Most of the others didn’t have it so cushy. I recall one exceedingly esoteric cat with beard sitting straddle-legged on a chair in front of the heater, drinking beer incessantly and eyeing almost everyone, especially the women, with smoldering suspicion until at 4 A.M.,satisfied I suppose that he’d beat all of ‘em that counted, he dropped his last bottle and slumped dead, his chin thudding on the top rim of the chair's back. His routine. I wonder if it ever got him laid.

The only other thing they did at those hip-cool get-togethers was dance. Of course, there were always one or two profs and their wives, discoursing learnedly over precise mixed drinks, making the kids feel simultaneously nervous at the presence of a great mind that all the chicks thought was sexy because of his waxed mustache, and at the same time important because he’d come to their party instead of one with other learned faculty members where he would’ve been able to discourse even more learnedly. As for the professors themselves, the vast majority that I encountered then and later who really tried to “get down to where the students live” came across almost to a man as essentially sheepish figures, struggling to assert themselves among the young generation with wooden attempts at “coolness,” dropping all the latest hip/New Left clichés, coming on strong about drugs and “deconditioning” when they really detested them, making little jokes in whatever fashion was current. Misfits. The dazed, socially atrophied little college professor caught up helplessly in a hated lover of a dream in which he scoffs at the cliché identity of cloistered myopia even as he lives it to the hilt, dropping into classrooms to rattle off the rote of years, spilling facts like tickertape, then scurrying back from the bell to his office, where he might be seen on any day of the week thrashing about in a sea of books and papers and pamphlets and magazines, digging down toward prehistoric strata or snatching publications