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Innocence
is a state perceived only after it is gone; and mine
now seems a mirror image of the nation itself—or at least of the
dominant culture, playing its indolent game of lawn tennis across
a darkening sky. In those last years of latency, my pleasures remained
pensive or interior: fishing with my dad, climbing trees
with my sister to our fort (in actuality, a neighbor's forbidden flat
topped
garage roof), where we read and ate pimiento-cheese or
butter-and-sugar sandwiches and presumed to defend our secret
bivouac. In teaching me casino, a card game based on memory
and sums, my father had cultivated what would be a lifelong love
of numbers; for years, I feigned interest in his venerated stock
pages, both to please him and to prove that I understood fractions.
Having mastered these rudiments of math, I dove headlong
into the elegance of algebra—a place of labyrinthine and serene
precision in an increasingly uncertain world. I remember feeling
an easy relief when I got to binomial theorems and x-factors: Algebra's
arched perfection was a buttress of clarity for a girl whose
showiest asset was her mind. I was short, taciturn, and thoughtful;
I ran for class treasurer instead of the deeply coveted post of
cheerleader. And if math wasn't exactly cool, knowing how to
pass it was. My first education in the casual cruelty of girls came
when a reigning cheerleader invited me to her house to spend the
night, only to ask me, without flinching, to finish her algebra
homework before I left.
Throughout childhood's march, this was the position I would
hold—the kid who read too much, talked too little, cried inconsolably
over novels even as I maintained a steady grip on my own
uneventful life. And then, to my parents' awe and terror, the
changes of puberty threw me into adolescence like a bull rider
out of a gate. The year I turned fourteen, I grew four inches, got
breasts and contact lenses almost in the same week. I started
rolling my eyes at the idiocies of Latin Club and Student Council.
Outfitted with a supply of Marlboros—they were twenty-five
cents a pack—I began hanging out at the local drive-in burger
joint, slouched in the shotgun seat of a friend's Mustang and
looking for action, listening to teenage wipeouts on the radio.
The old 45-rpms my sister and I had worn nearly through, from
"Get a Job" to "The Twist," had been replaced by the Beatles,
who had stormed The Ed Sullivan Show a year earlier; now it was
the sleepy, syrupy sounds of the Four Seasons and the Association
we heard, about to be rendered impotent by the marvelously
dirty lyrics of "Gloria," "Louie Louie," and the Rolling Stones.
What was
happening to me, of course, was taking place all
over America, but that in itself was a marvel: Radio and TV were
creating a mass culture, and my rebellion dovetailed with one of
the great cultural upheavals in modern history. Television's response
to the Kennedy assassination had proved how a country
could be soldered together by the collaborative enterprise of
myth and machine: that technology could transform history simply
by recording it. The airwaves that delivered rock 'n' roll
piped in its language of sedition to every urban alley and backwoods
lane from sea to shining sea, and the listeners waiting
there responded with the frenzy of a mob outside the Bastille. If
Van Morrison's "Brown Eyed Girl" had told us how to make love
in the green grass behind the stadium, then the Stones' bump and-
grind bass gave us the final permission for those hormonal
outrages, and Janis Joplin told us how to scream. For decades,
English teachers had been trying to impart the hidden glories of
theme and symbol to their unwitting students. Now we were
curled up in bed at night with transistor radios to our ears, listening
to one of the great antiheroes of popular culture, Wolfman
Jack, instruct us in the subversive narrative of rock 'n' roll. Now
we were meeting metaphor head-on in the undeniable poetry of
John Lennon and Bob Dylan; Paul Revere's hokey descendant,
poised to foretell another revolution, had taken acid before his
midnight ride. And now, when Country Joe McDonald told us
we were all fixin' to die, he made it sound like an anthem instead
of a eulogy.
Excerpted from A Strong West Wind by Gail Caldwell Copyright © 2006 by Gail Caldwell. Excerpted by permission of Random House, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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