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By Root 1430 0

stages one and two, though in fact a few of the more committed revellers were already engaged in gutter serenades. I picked my way through the weaving throngs in downtown Iowa City asking people at random if they knew the way to Fitzpatrick’s Bar. No-one seemed to have heard of it – but then many of the people I encountered probably could not have identified themselves in a roomful of mirrors. Eventually I stumbled on the bar myself. Like all bars in Iowa City on a Friday night, it was packed to the rafters. Everybody looked to be fourteen years old, except one person – my friend John Horner, who was standing at the bar looking all of his thirty-five years. There is nothing like a college town to make you feel old before your time. I joined Horner at the bar. He hadn’t changed a lot. He was now a pharmacist and a respectable member of the community, though there was still a semi-wild glint in his eye. In his day, he had been one of the most committed drug takers in the community. Indeed, although he always strenuously denied it, everyone knew that his motive for studying pharmacology was to be able to create a more exotic blend of hallucinogenic drugs. We had been friends almost forever, since first grade at least. We exchanged broad smiles and warm handshakes and tried to talk, but there was so much noise and throbbing music that we were just two men watching each other’s mouths move. So we gave up trying to talk and instead had a beer and stood smiling inanely at each other, the way you do with someone you haven’t seen for years, and watching the people around us. I couldn’t get over how young and fresh-looking they all seemed. Everything about them looked brand new and unused – their clothes, their faces, their bodies. When we had drained our beer bottles, Horner and I stepped out on to the street and walked to his car. The fresh air felt wonderful. People were leaning against buildings everywhere and puking. ‘Have you ever seen so many twerpy little assholes in all your life?’ Horner asked me rhetorically.

‘And they’re all just fourteen years old,’ I added.

‘Physically they are fourteen years old,’ he corrected me, ‘but emotionally and intellectually they are still somewhere shy of their eighth birthday.’

‘Were we like that at their age?’

‘I used to wonder that, but I don’t think so. I may have been that stupid once, but I was never that shallow. These kids wear button-down collar shirts and penny loafers. They look like they’re on their way to an Osmonds concert. And they don’t know anything. You talk to them in a bar and they don’t even know who’s running for President. They’ve never heard of Nicaragua. It’s scary.’

We walked along thinking about the scariness of it all. ‘But there’s something even worse,’ Homer added. We were at his car. I looked at him across the top of it. ‘What’s that?’ I asked.

‘They don’t smoke dope. Can you believe that?’

Well, I couldn’t. The idea of students at the University of Iowa not smoking dope is . . . well, simply inconceivable. On any list of reasons for going to the University of Iowa, smoking dope took up at least two of the first five places. ‘Then what are they here for?’

‘They’re getting an education,’ Horner said in a tone of wonder. ‘Can you believe that? They want to be insurance salesmen and computer programmers. That’s their dream in life. They want to make a lot of money so they can go out and buy more penny loafers and Madonna albums. It terrifies me sometimes.’

We got in his car and drove through dark streets to his house. Horner explained to me how the world had changed. When I left America for England, Iowa City was full of hippies. Difficult as it may be to believe, out here amid all these cornfields, the University of Iowa was for many years one of the most radical colleges in the country, at its peak exceeded in radicalness only by Berkeley and Columbia. Everybody there was a hippie, the professors as much as the students. It wasn’t just that they smoked dope and frequently rioted; they were also open-minded and intellectual. People cared about things like