From the Eden of Rock N Roll to an Endless Funeral
The Decimation of Joy in the 1980’s
By
David Gottfried
In the Spring of 1979, in my senior year of college, I was in an Honor’s Class on the study of Civilizations Fully one-fifth of the class, or, more specifically, two girls and one guy out of 15 people, had crushes on me and repeatedly made passes at me.
When I disagreed with the Professor on the politics of Leon Blum or German Expressionism or anything else, the two girls in the class competed with each other, like melodramatic divas in a cat fight, to most decisively crush the Professor’s point of view and reaffirm the validity of gallant Gottfried’s judgments. The guy who had a crush on me had too much self-respect to behave like a dog kneeling before knightly, princely Gottfried. I went with the guy, and we got an apartment together at the end of the semester.
And then the eighties came, and my entire life darkened. While the Seventies were in progress, I claimed to despise that apolitical decade of disco and the Mary Tyler Moore Show, but it had its good points: All I have to do is look at the word “Seventies” printed on a page, the “S” swerving like a woman with big hips shaking her stuff in a short black dress, and the V spreading its arms in an ecstatic expression of victory, and fillips of joy course through my blood. It makes me remember the most romantic song of the early seventies, “It Never Rains in Southern California,” and I am on the beach, on my stomach fucking the sand, until my muscles and my moxie and my manic buoyant brain seduce the gilded offspring of the Golden State. I dream I am with my pal, Bobby Kennedy, cascading on California waves like surfers from a Beach Boys’ song. In the 60’s, we savored the ideas of countercultural heroes; in the hedonistic 70’s, we relished the rebellious eros of our heroes.
But then the 80’s came.
The Eighties were first and foremost Reagan’s AIDS Eighties.
And the problem ensnared progressives too, even before most of us knew a new disease was on the war path. The problem was in Susan Sontag who, in 1981, made a speech in New York’s Town Hall in which she defected to the political right like a French Partisan suddenly falling in love with Marshall Petain. I got ill when Sontag said, “It is time that everyone just did his work.” She said that we should forget about political projects and community alliances and anything as infantile and grandiose as changing the world. And in her choice of words, “Just do your work,” she seemed to mimic a paralyzing school marm telling you to just study your spelling and to forget about anything as bold as playing baseball or marching for civil rights. As her message changed, her looks changed. Sontag suddenly sported a huge clump of white hair, looked like a born-again witch, and our confidence was whittled down like a cock shriveled under cold water.
And Susan Sontag segued into law school, which I started in 1982. My law school, NYU law school, was situated in New York’s Greenwich Village, and the building, which housed the law school, was adjacent to Washington Square Park, an Eden of marijuana and peace protests, a field of green eternally scented with the perfume of Joni Mitchell songs. And the law school seemed to be a force that, notwithstanding its alleged progressive politics, wanted to bulldoze the Park and “put up a parking lot” as lamented by Joni Mitchell in her song “Taxi.”
If my Torts professor, Mr. Nelson, deigned to compliment us, he would haughtily declaim, “You did not turn out like them, the rabble,” and as he uttered the word “rabble,” he pointed towards Washington Square Park, and, like a menacing method actor, contorted his face into an expression of disgust and contempt.
Even if NYU law school perfectly mimicked the maxims of Mao’s China, it would always find its true place in the Eighteenth Century, in a lavish, palatial room, febrile with intrigue and frigid from sexlessness, where men in white wigs praised the Bourbon dynasty and the guillotine. The law school reminded me of a line from William Blake’s, “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”: “Prudence is an Ugly Old Maid Courted by Incapacity.” The NYU staff and students seemed to be a gaggle of little, girlish liberals. They always did the right thing. And their sexual organs seemed ready to atrophy, dry-up and fall into the sewer along with all the other detritus from the free-spirited Sixties and Seventies.
Although many people find gay people immature, I found that going from the gay world I had experienced to law school was like going from adulthood to a special second childhood and nature preserve for maladjusted over-achievers. Very simply, an enormous proportion of the law school seemed, in all respects, utterly virginal. But they were not the virgins of blushing sweet sixteen succulence, as tasty as a strawberry sliding down one’s tongue. They were well on their way toward becoming neurotic twenty-somethings who, with each passing day, looked a little bit less like Mary Tyler Moore and more like her jaded neighbors Rhoda Morgenstern and Phylis what’s her name.
Somehow, upon entering law school, I relearned what I had learned as an upwardly mobile Brooklyn Jew, chastened and encased in a prison of expectations and obligations: Break 750 on the Math Section of the SATs, get into Harvard or Yale, get a house in Long Island. Repeat with the next generation.
This wasn’t normal competitiveness. This was competitiveness honed and refined to the excruciating exactitude of Japanese suicide bombers dying for the Emperor. For example, when I was 11, I knew a very brilliant Jewish girl who was praised for her extraordinary command of the Hebrew language. The Rabbi and her father told her she could, and she must, become some very special poetess, something like an Emma Lazarus for Hebrew. At the age of 9, the girl got such a severe ulcer, and lost so much weight, that she could no longer walk. Her Father simply carried her to school, to the synagogue, wherever. (I think her father loved her helplessness.) Ah, but she was too fine and precious for the rough and tumble world of walking.
Very simply, I learned that there was something inherently virtuous in being miserable, terrified and filled with guilt. When I was in the Second Grade, I decided that it was okay to be happy on Saturday, because one was not in school on the weekends, but that it was only proper to start feeling a bit depressed by late Saturday afternoon as one should feel somewhat overwhelmed by the coming, in less than 48 hours, of the all-powerful school week which seemed to conquer you like the school building itself falling on top of you, all three stories of bricks and wood cracking your ribs and crushing your heart. .
And I was back in frightened, obsessive Brooklyn, in September 1982, at the onset of my law school ordeal. In my civil procedure class, our professor, with only a slight measure of pedagogic pugilism, succeeded in giving a very brilliant girl, Beth Bernstein (who had a perfect LSAT score of 800) an asthma attack by sparring at her with a couple of intellectually sadistic put downs. Beth burst into tears and ran out of the building and collapsed in a heap of breathlessness.
Beth was the most guilt-ridden, conscientious girl in the world. Occasionally she expressed her mostly tamed rebelliousness by daring to eat pork for dinner, and then she would spend the entirety of the evening fretting on the eternity in hell her sinful supper would reap. Goody Two Shoes Beth was always as cute as a 7-year-old Catholic Girl Going to Communion, or whatever rite it is that little Catholic girls go to when they wear frilly white dresses to their Churchy Worches. (When I was 8, I told Mary Mc Morris that her church was nothing but a churchy worchy, and she was horrified and convinced that I was guilty of anti-Chrisitan discrimination.)
Besieged with guilt and the omnipresent sense of imminent catastrophe, I never did well in law school. I ranked in the middle of my class. Of course, there were very bright students in NYU Law Schook, but I thought I should have done better. My IQ, which was a shining, stellar score smoldering with contempt on the far-right end of the bell-shaped curve (Amidst all of our guilt and terror was an insufferable sense of being rarefied, charmed and bejeweled geniuses), should have enabled me to surge and storm to the very apex of the class.
I could not do well because I was too busy working very hard to be very miserable and anxious as a good little slavish twerp should be.
When I was in the Second Grade, my teacher, the imperious Mrs. Honigman, made me realize that I deserved bread and water and agony because I had misplaced some silly fucking folder into which we were to save our homework. I decided that teachers were my number one enemy, that they obtained pleasure by making me fail, and so I obtained pleasure by working obsessively hard to get all the scholastic prizes they wanted to deny me. Before law school, I had always beaten the teachers, getting the highest scores and preening above the masses like someone on a terrace on the highest floor of the 5th Avenue building that Jackie Kennedy had lived in, shouting out his grades and test results through a bullhorn.
But with the advent of the Eighties, a decade of Easters in which I was always accused of having murdered Jesus, I became so emotionally destitute that my personality, which had once speeded with success like a fast car on the freeway, now lumbered like a jalopy. I had become that little Jewish Girl who had ulcers from her Hebrew School because she was afraid she wouldn’t do as well as she was supposed to do. And so she hid insider her ulcers, like a particle of food being burned and drowned by the “sturm und drang” of stomach acid.
And the inexorable expansion of AIDS was an ever-present message that life was and would always get worse. You thought a thousand cases were bad. Now we’ll give you 10,000 cases. Then 100,000 cases, then a million cases, like a logarithmic scale more destructive than an earthquake, like a fissure rising up from hell and severing my body in two, like the hand of G-d becoming a Hitlerite sword.
And AIDS, in a way, reawakened the trauma of my parents’ separation and my Father’s death. When my parents separated, at age two, I saw less of my Father and was sad. And then when my Father died when I was six, and I never saw my Father again, I learned that bad things always got worse. As I saw the number of AIDS cases rise like a parabola on a Cartesian plan, I knew that my earliest pessimistic convictions had been ratified and endorsed by G-d, the Devil and Jerry Fallwell, a triumvirate of tyranny, inflicting bloody, miserable death with glee.
Discombobulated by antithetical sentiments, one minute I was a Macho version of Allen Ginsburg, preaching the gospel of sexual licentiousness and joy; the next minute I was Torquemada howling the hate of the Inquisition. Sometimes, when I see movies about wicked nuns and priests, I think I would really have had the time of my life teaching in a Catholic parochial school. I think I would really get a supreme kick out of whipping lots and lots of people, making other people feel the pain I feel. I’d get my sadistic rocks off by teaching Latin, and my pronunciation of the words would sound like the wicked opening music in “The Omen.” Below is a link to the entire movie. But the haunting music is only in the first few minutes. You are not obliged to watch the whole movie, but you will be whipped if you don’t click on the link and listen to the splendidly spooky music in the beginning of the film. Now listen to the film and write an essay, in the comments section, acknowledging that the music made you tremble with terror and that you will always endeavor to be very, very good. I am sure Mrs. Honigman, wherever she is, is waiting.