My 1964 The Year of Sex and Fiction

My 1964

The Year of Sex and Fiction

Stephen Leon White

SUNSWEPT PRESS

Copyright © 2016 by Stephen Leon White.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the author or publisher.

Sunswept Press

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Studio City, Ca. 91614

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First Ebook Edition: January 2016

Smashwords Edition

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Praise from Simon Winchester for My 1964

From: Simon Winchester

To: Stephen White

Sent: Sat, Sep 27, 2014 11:15 am

Subject: 1964

I finished your book in two glorious hours, and as we prepare to land at Newark just want to tell you that I truly loved it.

Please know that I think it is a quite beautifully crafted work, and you–and Mus, despite her understandable embarrassment at all that youthful intimacies you reveal–should be enormously proud of it.

With heartfelt congratulations.

Simon

Simon Winchester

Author, The Professor and the Madman

Contents

Prologue

Part One: Copenhagen

Part Two: The Writing Life

Part Three: My Decisive Moment

Postscript

About the Author

Note: My contemporary comments appear in regular typeface; my writings from the past are in italics; and letters written by others to me appear in monospace typeface.

Prologue

I’ll make it. I don’t know how or when or where, but by god this shitty world isn’t going to hang me, not if I can help it. I am more resolved, as they say.

I wrote this vow, an expletive really, to my mother on June 18, 1965, waving my fist at the world to let it know that I, Stephen Leon White, at last stood tall, grounded in the earth, a stronger man after an extraordinary year. In 1964, a seminal year in a raucous decade, three civil rights workers were murdered in Mississippi, Lyndon Johnson was elected president over Barry Goldwater, Dr. Martin Luther King received the Nobel Peace Prize, the summer Olympics took place in Tokyo—the first in Asia, and the first to bar the participation of South Africa—and the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution marked the official start of the Vietnam War. Meanwhile, the Beatles filled the airwaves with She Loves You and I Feel Fine.

Except for the Beatles, none of those events had entered my psyche. I did not experience that year as a string of days between two points on the calendar marked by events. My 1964 was more like a flimsy bridge suspended over an abyss, and I was like a man holding on to the ropes, terrified that he might lose his life and his dreams if he let go. Those dreams did indeed begin to shatter when, at the age of twenty-six, I released my grip and stepped into an uncertain future. Fifty years have now passed and I have become a man in his seventies, peering back to view one fateful year in the life of a young man trying to find his way in a world filled with the ordinary and the magical.

For me, coming of age means finding one’s sense of equilibrium, an internal balance necessary to build a reasonable and consistent worldview. The words I first found to tell my story, written so long ago, relay the confusion, fear, anxiety, and occasional triumph experienced by many of my generation. We who grew up without any clear direction or guidance were rebellious and insecure, lacking faith in ourselves, and we often covered our inadequacies with bravado and self-delusional arrogance. The beatniks had their ways and the hippies sought a different level of experience, but some of us, not really allied with any movement or philosophy, wandered around like Moses in the desert. Today, I understand that the turmoil I experienced and portrayed in my letters and writings was far from exceptional. But when we are young, we tend to see the world only in relation to ourselves, rather than the other way around.

As a young man, I lived on dreams, but not practical dreams like becoming a great lawyer or doctor, a successful businessman, or a straight-A student. I wanted to unlock doors that would bring me wisdom. My dreams focused on writing successful novels and powerful poetry as I found my rightful place at the top of the writing hierarchy. I dreamed to locate my true nature, be a great lover, become reincarnated in a good way, develop intimate and loving relationships with friends, and one day fall in love with my dream girl.

In 1959, during my sophomore year at San Francisco State College, I took a course in novel writing. At first I wanted to write like J. D. Salinger, but just a few years later my writing drew inspiration from the works of Hermann Hesse, Rilke, Knut Hamsun, Pär Lagerkvist, and Nikos Kazantzakis. As part of the course work, we were expected to begin writing a novel. Mine, which I went on to complete, recounted a one-month experience four years earlier at a military academy in Bryan, Texas, during my senior year of high school. The book, thinly fictionalized, included my adventures on the road home after running away from the school and hitching back to California at the age of seventeen. My protagonist narrated the events in a Caulfield-like style:

Whenever I went to a play or concert, it was by myself. I knew other kids at school

but for some reason it seemed I could never become close friends with them. Even the guys in the club I belonged to weren’t close friends. So if I went to Texas, what would I leave behind? Not much. Just my mother, brother, and Ray. I decided to go to Texas, but I would make my mother work hard before she got me to consent.

I also wrote a piece for the college paper, the Golden Gator, which clarified my impression of the low standards of public education. In those days, I tended to put all the blame for my shortcomings squarely on the world’s shoulders.

What Education Did to Me

by Stephen White

This is the story of what the modern schools with their social education did for me.

The day I graduated high school I got drunk at the graduation party. I had just finished the prescribed education course and I never wanted to see another school again. I hated education and I was sure education hated me. Why?

This is not an easy question to answer. It may have started in the first and second grades, while attending a grammar school in San Jose. I was the head of the class. Every time the teacher asked a question I knew the answer and raised my hand. She got tired of calling on me and soon afterward I got tired of raising my hand. After that, I never could devote myself fully to learning. I could see no reward in it.

I developed as well as could be expected in the next five years. By ninth grade, it was necessary to belong to something. I had my choice: I could join the rough guys who went around smoking and fighting or try to break into one of the social cliques. I decided on the social cliques and ran for vice-president of my class. I got twelve votes, and people laughed when they heard that. They certainly wouldn’t accept anyone with only twelve votes into their clique, so there was only one way I could turn.

My first year of high school I was a tough guy. I ran around with tough guys, smoked, and shot dice behind the bleachers at school. I wore long hair and low pants and tried to convince myself I was tough. But I wasn’t. When it came time to fight, I couldn’t fight, and who wanted a tough guy who was a coward?

Other things happened that first year in high school. I flunked geometry, the first subject I had ever failed. And finally at the age of fifteen I began to learn about sex. But I didn’t learn in school.

As long as I stayed in class and kept my nose clean, the school was satisfied. They didn’t have time to wet-nurse a sensitive, confused, emotional kid of sixteen. So I withdrew even deeper into the shell the world had set up for me.

All I had in the world at sixteen was my mother and brother (both of whom I fought with constantly), the baseball scores, and a friend I used to go to the racetrack with.

Finally at the beginning of my last year in high school, my mother couldn’t control me anymore. So she sent me to a military school in Texas. But I couldn’t adjust to that either and I hitchhiked home from there after four weeks.

I tried going to a different high school upon my return home, but they said I wouldn’t graduate at the end of the year, so I returned once more to my old high school and the mental tortures it inflicted.

The last year was spent waiting. I and others longed for the day we could get out. We were in a cage that restrained us from such things as being married, joining the army, or working for someone in order to buy a new car. We weren’t interested in the dull curriculum and bad teachers.

What did I learn in high school? Not much. The caliber of teachers was poor: One had been teaching there for thirty years, another was placed in a mental institution, and yet a third was picked up for shoplifting. I had learned little, accomplished little.

Finally, in June of 1956, we graduated, most of us utterly unprepared for college or for the world, and not as socially adjusted as the modern educators would have you believe. Now, at college, I am wondering if the high educators are going to do anything about an educational system that does not educate.

Despite my earlier education experiences, I thrived in a college environment, not so much in the grading system, but in finding intellectual doors to a broad range of new and stimulating interests. College did exactly what it was supposed to do—open my eyes.

Two weeks after the Golden Gator article appeared, reflecting my newly evolved thinking, I wrote a letter to my mother outlining my philosophy of life. When I reread it not long ago, it stunned me. I would definitely express the ideas differently today, and could cite specific influences, but my point of view has not shifted significantly.

January 19, 1959

Let me once again comment upon your letter and evoke a bit more of my philosophy …

There is one thing in particular that seems especially significant to me. In principle, it is that I can accept the fact that mine and any other life is insignificant. That there is no purpose or plan to our living, and though each generation absorbs and elaborates on past generations, there is no eventual goal. For if there were, why has it not presented itself already? Millions of people have lived each century, and yet they are referred to simply as an era. It seems hard to accept these as facts and we live our lives in vain, but I can accept them. I know this sounds like stoicism, but it really goes much deeper than that. If this letter doesn’t follow a pattern it is because I have been thinking these things out, and they strike me as so complex I am having difficulty putting them down on paper.

Actually, approaching life from this point of view would normally be highly disastrous for most people. The thought that a hundred years from now, life will be functioning and we will not be among the thoughts of men is hard to accept, for it means that we might as well not have lived.

But I feel it is wrong to be pessimistic even if we accept my above statements as truths. For there are a million different ways to enjoy life for a million different people, and each way of life is based on the person’s understanding of it. To use an analogy, a farmer might be content to till his field, and even though he may be illiterate, he can appreciate his life and accept the fullness of it. Yet for a philosopher, to try to find an answer to the riddles that foster our existence might be his only way of expressing his joy of life. There is no meaning to what the philosopher is doing, not any more than the farmer, but if it means happiness for the individual, that should be important enough for him to pursue it.

We are all equal no matter what our lot in life, and if happiness is achieved through this lot, then what more meaning does life need?

How does this apply to me? Well, mainly in that I can accept the above. I don’t know yet what my lot is, but whether it be scholar, historian, or writer, I will be happy. For as long as I have my world of learning, creating, and love, I will have beauty in my life.

Looking for material to jog my memory about those early days, I entered our double garage. My mission was to sift through two slightly rusted, four-drawer metal file cabinets that had remained in a corner of the garage since we moved into our present house at the start of the new millennium, thirteen years earlier. I had dragged those file cabinets around since the 1970s, moving them from house to house without much thought about their contents. I knew they held manuscripts from my years of fiction writing, as well as letters I’d saved from that time. But I had always been too busy or involved in making a living to revisit them.

As I pulled out files and stacks of writing, I discovered a buried treasure: letters that had been written fifty years earlier by and to a confused young man in search of himself. I present him to the reader here in the third person, because he represents what I was at that time, not the person I am today: At twenty-five, he seemed desperate to find his place in the world as an artist and as a person. He appeared to suffer from a mild case of ADD. He stood on shaky ground, fragmented emotionally, and limited economically, but with a desperate longing to put himself together and leave behind his Humpty Dumpty existence.

The letters he wrote at that time revealed his innermost thoughts, experiences, prejudices, illusions, dreams, and fantasies. Letters written to him revealed the prevalent mood of the time; many came from his closest friends, a few from new acquaintances met on the road, and a large number from his mother, his closest friend and the one person who always stood by him with her moral support and encouragement.

I also discovered letters of rejection and encouragement from publishers, agents, magazines, and even a famous movie director, illuminating the young writer’s constant struggle for recognition. Read as a whole, the archive plotted events that occurred over a short few years of his life, on an almost daily basis.

As I organized the letters chronologically, read through them, and revisited essays that delineated small chunks of my youthful thinking, I reacted with disbelief. I could not be the writer. My life is so together, and has been for so many years. To use a photographic metaphor, this kid lived a life out of focus, though he seemed desperate to emerge from the fog that filled his day-to-day existence. How had the intervening years calmed his soul and transformed him into the person I am today? And what kept him moving along a certain path when so many of his friends wandered off in other directions?

As I spent weeks reading through the correspondence, I concluded that it offered nothing relevant to my present life. I had found a treasure that I could craft into a story, but I felt as detached from the writer as if I’d stumbled onto a garage sale and discovered a fascinating batch of letters written to and by a stranger.

The exchange of letters between my mother and me was mostly typed single-spaced on both sides of the paper to minimize stamp costs. I had saved my mother’s letters to me and, some thirty years later, she had returned the letters I’d written to her. I had not looked at them since.

In one of the files I found a seventy-page fragment written while I was living in Copenhagen in the winter of 1964, recounting events that transpired in California and on the ship across the Atlantic, and relating details of the first difficult days spent living in that city. This was either the real story or a romanticized version I created. Without specific memories of many of the incidents, and realizing that not all events are corroborated by letters written by me at the time, I can only ask the reader to indulge the narrative. The text cuts off abruptly a few short weeks after my arrival.

If anyone had asked me to write down all that I recalled about the year 1964 without access to the letters and this narrative, I suspect I could have filled no more than a few pages. Certainly, I remembered the sequence of physical shifts from place to place, highlights of travel in Europe, experiences that planted themselves permanently in my psyche, such as the nightmare series of events that surrounded my first Danish conquest, or the time a gay man picked me up in Germany, and how I managed to disarm him and save myself great distress. But I could not have provided the many details, or emotional states, that are present here.

Perhaps the collection in the garage was only a fiction I had created about myself. Don’t we tend to idealize who we are? Events detailed on the pages were sometimes no better than ghost memories. Successive events had piled up in the five decades that separated past from present, and whatever trials and tribulations occurred in the distant past had receded into the far depths of my mind. I somehow had to confront this archive, these fragments of essays written on personal concerns or social topics, and the sometimes typed, sometimes handwritten letters postmarked from here and there, as well as a collection of poems, and even the stack of novels that had absorbed years of my life. Taken as a whole, the trove brought me face to face with the young man I had been five decades earlier. Intrigued by this early mirror thrust in my face, I began to focus on that most explosive of years, 1964.

The majority of my letters were written to my mother, Ann White. At the time, she was a single woman whose last marriage had ended several years earlier. Despite her own struggles, she remained a supportive, caring person who loved both of her sons more than life itself. Stifled as a creative child by her rigid family, then judged for a bohemian lifestyle, she remained determined not to let similar judgments burden her children. She was a dark-haired beauty, with an intelligent, rounded face and soft brown eyes, whose insecurity was wrapped in a vivacious warmth and humor that drew men to her in a never-ending stream throughout her long life. But my mother eschewed the idea of a comfortable life if that meant sacrificing her individuality to a wealthy man. She would not play the role of the good wife, and dreamed of finding a partner, a soul mate, who could respect her mind and treat her as an equal. She enjoyed material comforts, and money was more important to her than she admitted, but she refused to make a Faustian bargain with anyone to obtain security or the comfort money brought. She went through three husbands, and more men friends than I can count on all fingers.

My mother created a challenging life for our small family, one that kept the three of us dangling in the wind after she left my father. She tried to earn her living as a writer of freelance articles and in promotion and public relations. This occurred at a time when career women were maligned, discriminated against, and rarely offered positions or salaries commensurate with their talents. During my school years we lived in various apartments, guesthouse rentals, and the occasional home, attending new schools with each move. These relocations sometimes coincided with the arrival of a new husband. I attended five elementary schools, two junior highs, and three high schools, if I include the four-week sojourn at the military school in the Lone Star State. And to continue the tradition, I attended six colleges, one of them twice, prior to receiving my degree. My mother saw a physical move as a way to improve her frequently difficult economic situations. I inherited that gene; in my youth I lived in a constant state of geographical flux.

The year 1964 proved pivotal for my mother as well as for me. A couple of years earlier, she had ended a year-long engagement to one of the wealthiest men in the country, Joe Hirshhorn, the man whose art collection formed the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. This engagement had caused her to move from Los Angeles to New York. She stayed on in the city after the breakup, and after my graduation from college in 1962, I moved east to join her. In 1964, she had accepted a job promoting knitwear for a firm in Knoxville, Tennessee, a job that provided a steady income—a rare occurrence for her. But by the end of 1964, she planned to leave her job, which exhausted her, and return to California. That year, she began seeing Jerry H., a professional horse trainer. And in her own search for growth, she studied for and became a minister of spiritual science. She had become increasingly interested in spiritual teachings in a quest to understand her own bad decision-making and shortcomings, as well as to help others with the insights she had gained.

Because she was an unusual mother, we maintained an unusual relationship. Along with my two closest friends, Steve E. and Mike K., she was my rock, a sometimes slippery rock that could wreck us both, but one who always believed in me and whose encouragement kept me going. Steve and Mike shared a love and openness with my mother, as each of them, like me, tried to find his own way comin’ through the rye. The three of them, as well as the other characters who weave in and out of my 1964, had a common desire to find their place in the world.

Truth and fiction merge at some point in any story. Perspective is my foundation. In those early years, bluntness became my primary means of communication. Opinions presented as harsh rants reflect an immature mind; to some, the introspection on display here might appear melodramatic or sophomoric. Eventually I came to write fiction, and my greatest desire for many years was to be respected as a fiction writer. I loved being a writer more than I have ever loved any other profession, and though I attempted to adhere to the highest standards, I failed to achieve success. Now when I look back on my fiction writing, my limitations become painfully clear. I thought content could overcome a lack of craft, but immaturity and anger prevailed. Whether this life story I’ve created for myself is all fact or part fiction, it depicts the only life I’ve lived, and one that for the longest time kept me desperately depressed, lonely, and alienated from the world around me.

Part One: Copenhagen

WRITTEN OCTOBER, 1964

The word had remained on the edge of my tongue for five years, sitting like a lump of sugar through the most foul-tasting experiences of growth. I remember thinking about Copenhagen as early as 1959, after my return from my first disastrous trip across the Atlantic Ocean. I had been moping, mostly on the couch at my mother’s house for a few weeks, when I was told to leave, and sent out with fifty dollars to face the world. I managed to get a job as a croupier trainee at a casino in Reno, where I worked for nine months, dealing dice, often gambling away the money, and living in misery and a permanent sulk. Then I went to Mexico, where I lived for three months, attending school, writing, wanting to run as far as I could. I remember my mother coming to visit me there, and the two of us sitting on the bed in her room at the El Presidente Hotel. I want to go to Copenhagen, I told her. The people are free there. No religion, no moral or political things to tie them down. I want to go there to write and live. Being young, I also wanted her to pay my way, but she couldn’t. I returned to Los Angeles where I had grown up, resumed my education, and continued to dream of paradise.

After a semester of college in Los Angeles, I returned to San Francisco to spend another year (I had lived there for a year before going to Europe in 1959) and graduate from college. I shared an apartment with my closest friend, Steve, three years my junior, and originally a friend of my younger brother, Lee. Steve and I shared the same dream for the future: to move to Europe.

Conflicts about the army remained—we had a draft then—until, due to a bad back, I failed my physical. I made friends, lost friends, stayed hidden, concentrated on my work, school, and a few close friends. Then the semester ended and I took off prior to the graduation ceremony. Steve and I went to New York with the idea of working to save up money for Europe.

We each rented a room in a large nine-room apartment my mother had rented with a friend, and I got involved in writing a book. Steve decided to return to school and left for California. After finishing the first draft of the book, in debt to my mother, I took a nightmarish job as a management trainee in the garment district. There I met Mike, a nineteen-year-old student who had come to work in the same place, Lerner Shops, as part of a work-study program at Antioch College.

We developed a close, though lopsided, relationship. I was twenty-four, and Mike viewed me as a kind of father, discussing his many problems, never once aware that anyone else in the world suffered. However, I was lonely, and we went places together as long as he remained in New York. Then he returned to school, which left me alone again. I remained fixated on Europe, dreaming of it constantly, my mind centered above all on Copenhagen, my paradise.

I couldn’t stand the job and quit after five months. I had managed to save a little money, paid a portion back to my mother, and used the balance to survive while I spent the next two months rewriting the ending of my book. Steve had returned, and I became involved with Carol, a girl I met in an existential psychology class taught by the famous Rollo May. She turned into another nightmarish experience. Steve left once again for California to see a girl he knew who had recently married, and Mike came down from Boston, where he’d grown up, to tell me goodbye before he departed for a semester in Europe under his school’s study program.

In early summer 1963, I took a job at a residential treatment center for emotionally disturbed children at Pleasantville, a small town about thirty miles outside New York City. The crises and experiences of the past few years had changed me. Working with the children, I was unleashed and on my own. Now I lived at the school five days a week and came into the city to stay at my mother’s place the other two. Steve returned for the summer and went to work at a camp in Connecticut, where he met Nancy, a Brandeis student who also worked there. They fell in love. At the end of the summer, he returned to New York, found a job on a ship, and left for Europe.

My work, though compelling, exhausted me, and the constant interaction with the kids forced me to confront ugly aspects of my nature. I learned that I wasn’t the gentle, loving person I had wanted to be. Could I be so human?

Despite my difficulties, I generally worked well with the kids, both those in my own cabin, and those in other cabins. I identified more with the children than the authorities. At the same time, I had power and I watched myself use it, often arbitrarily. How little I knew about myself. How much there was to learn.

Meanwhile, Steve and Mike had met up in Paris, where they ran into the girl Steve went to visit on his last trip to California. (Evidently she hadn’t married.) Mike had an affair with her while Steve went off to Spain, and I continued working in the school dreaming of the day I could escape. As fascinating as the work was, I still longed for my freedom.

During the summer, I met Wera, a Danish girl who had taken a summer job at the school. We became friends, and she fired up my imagination even more about moving to Copenhagen.

January 1, 1964. Steve and Mike had returned from Europe and moved to Boston, and on my days off I often went up there, or they came down.

A few months after I arrived at the school, I began a journal on the daily activities in my cottage. My idea was to use the experiences I accumulated as the basis for a book, one I never wrote. At age twenty-five, I acted as one of two house parents, with two back-ups, in a cottage of some fifteen kids between thirteen and-sixteen years of age, each one enormously disturbed in one way or another. We worked shifts, sometimes two house parents together, sometimes alone, and sometimes with one of the roving substitutes. Friday nights a cooked dinner was brought to each cabin, usually the best meal of the week. We had tremendous freedom to deal with the kids, and when we couldn’t handle a problem, the school had supervisors and a disciplinarian to back us up. One of the supervisors, Don F., became my closest friend at the school.

The cottages and buildings all sat on large manicured grounds thick with trees, grass, and flowers, and consisted of sixteen cabins for the residents, plus a large dining room, gymnasium, and offices. The cabins were numbered. I first worked in cottage 16 with a younger group of boys, then moved to cottage 9 to work with the teenagers.

My job had long hours, sometimes from eight in the morning until ten at night, with two days off each week. The housemother in cottage 9 when I began to work there in September 1963 was Miss Litton, a German woman who lived