Joan Didion in Haight-Ashbury, 1967 (photo Ted Streshinsky/Corbis)
The first time I read Joan Didion’s iconic 1967 essay about the Summer of Love, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” I felt somewhat underwhelmed. This was because Didion’s trenchant, laconic style has been so widely imitated that it seemed as if I’d been already reading it for years. I was brought up short, however, when she described “High Kindergarten”:
When I finally find Otto he says, “I got something at my place that’ll blow your mind,” and when we get there I see a child on the living-room floor, wearing a reefer coat, reading a comic book. She keeps licking her lips in concentration and the only off thing about her is that she’s wearing white lipstick.
“Five years old,” he says. “On acid.”
The five-year-old’s name is Susan, and she tells me she is in High Kindergarten. She lives with her mother and some other people, just got over the measles, wants a bicycle for Christmas, and particularly likes soda, ice cream, Marty in the Jefferson Airplane, Bob in the Grateful Dead, and the beach. She remembers going to the beach once a long time ago, and wishes she had taken a bucket. For a year, her mother has given her acid and peyote. Susan describes it as getting stoned.
I start to ask if any of the other children in High Kindergarten get stoned, but I falter at the key words.
“She means do the other kids in your class turn on, get stoned,” says the friend of her mother’s who brought her to Otto’s.
“Only Sally and Anne,” Susan says.
“What about Lia?” her mother’s friend prompts.
“Lia,” Susan says, “is not in High Kindergarten.”
Reading this passage for the first time was almost physically upsetting. I have felt the same sensations on some other occasions as well: Once, speeding up the West Side Highway in the rain in a taxicab late at night, passing the whores standing on loading docks in the meatpacking district, I caught a glimpse of one woman with her dark hair tied back demurely, paradoxically exposing her nakedness from beneath an open trenchcoat. On another occasion, I saw an emaciated young woman nodding out on the E train platform in Forest Hills, Queens, swaying on her feet and coming to just as the train pulled away. She pounded with her fists on the closed doors, cursing.
At both of these moments, I felt a sick combination of dread and resignation. It was like looking through a one-way mirror and seeing that the tenderness of our shared humanity has been corrupted in inexorable ways. I felt the same way reading about the child in High Kindergarten. That child, like the West Side prostitute and the Forest Hills junkie, are the collateral damage of our collective dreams of transcendence, so easily diverted into the pit.
In my old city, the mad, and those whose minds have been swarmed by narcotics, careen unchecked through the streets and subways. This is the inevitable outcome of the removal of all limits, and it can become a source of sick fascination for catastrophe tourists and voyeurs. As Billie Holiday said of her audiences, after her release from prison on drug charges: “They’re not coming to hear me, they’re coming to see me fall off the damn bandstand.”
This moralistic voyeurism, though, often goes hand in hand with a deep self-identification with the artist. Surely the legendary love of LGTBQ men for Judy Garland demonstrates this barbed phenomenon.
Garland’s 1969 death by overdose has long been thought of as the spark that lit the fire of the Stonewall riots. Garland was called by the Advocate “the Elvis of homosexuals,” and her death and funeral touched off a wave of collective mourning in the LGBTQ community, including, most consequentially, at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village. Garland’s androgynous, gamine-like charm, along with her wit, vulnerability, and well-known struggles with drugs, fame, and men, made her a kind of gay avatar. As the BBC’s Louis Staples suggests:
Elements of Garland’s story can be found in that of Diana, Princess of Wales, and her mistreatment at the hands of the press; Princess Margaret, with her ongoing substance issues, and marriage to an exploitative man who was rumoured to be gay; and Britney Spears, whose child stardom culminated in a very public divorce and mental health struggles. From Amy Winehouse, Whitney Houston and Kesha, to Lily Allen, Demi Lovato and Garland’s own daughter Liza Minnelli, women continue to be exploited, damaged and, in the worst cases, destroyed by fame.
Staples goes on to caution his fellow Judy stans:
Gay men need to be mindful of our own culpability in this cycle. ‘Friend of Dorothy’ has long been a popular code word for gay men, but not all friends of Dorothy were friends of Judy. . . There is a long history of gay male fan culture latching onto famous women and then turning on them. Queens would come to a Judy Garland concert and then scream at her when she was too drunk to finish it.
And perhaps I, too, am culpable. Perhaps my sorrow over the prostitute on the loading dock in the rain, her dark pubic triangle stark against her pale skin, and the skinny young addict pounding on the doors of the E train, was really remorse over my own culpability in their dehumanization.
As William Blake wrote in his poem “London,” published in 1794 in Songs of Experience:
I wander thro' each charter'd street,
Near where the charter'd Thames does flow.
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
In every cry of every Man,
In every Infants cry of fear,
In every voice: in every ban,
The mind-forg'd manacles I hear
How the Chimney-sweepers cry
Every blackning Church appalls,
And the hapless Soldiers sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls
But most thro' midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlots curse
Blasts the new-born Infants tear
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse
If I think I wouldn’t have come to see Billie fall off the bandstand or scream at Judy for being drunk onstage, I am deluding myself.
Have I ever told you how much I ADORE your writing? Well, I do.
I used to walk up and down on the West Side Highway in the late 1970s, when I was an Engineering (sadly, not Art) student at Cooper Union, and living in Mahattan. I remember WSH as abandoned, devoid of car traffic in those days.
I totally get what you mean in your last sentence, too. My son and I are huge fans of a band called Brian Jonestown Massacre. When we went to see them play live several years back, I will admit that one of the "draws" was the prospect of seeing leader Anton Newcombe berate his fellow band members. And he did not disappoint -- he was savage in his comments to the drummer that night.