The Balloon Man (A Message to My Gen-Y Stepson)
I saw the balloon man for the first time on an autumn evening in 1968. It was at that annual twilight moment of saturated salmon sky when I finally smell winter coming on and realize once again that I’m not ready for it. He was strolling slowly up the east side of Wisconsin Avenue, just north of M St., in the Georgetown section of Washington, D.C., the fed-a-rahl cit-tay, as my friend, John, and I liked to call it then, in our desire to be urban, black, and hip instead of suburban, white, and middle-class. We were freshmen at a nearly all-white Georgetown University, the year after Bill Clinton graduated.
The balloon man was not a Georgetown student. He was very black and very strange.
“Buy a pretty balloooon. They are red. They are blue. They are byooteeful.”
A man somehow of indeterminate age, he carried dozens of helium balloons and seemed at least as high as his product, but this was not our kind of high. He wasn’t looking for things that weren’t there. He was refusing to see things right in front of him, things like us. He would look past us and nod, apparently without meaning, like his balloons on their sticks in that cool Autumn air.
We learned to keep an eye for the balloon man. Every couple of weeks or so, as we were bar hopping, we’d see him and he would remind us of something, though we weren’t quite sure what. It was an experience like that of Fitzgerald’s Nick Carraway as he drove past the bespectacled billboard eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg.
But he was really more out of Ellison’s Invisible Man, which we’d catch up to as sophomores. Was he making fun of us with his “byooteeful” like the drunken white woman who kept asking the “booful” invisible man to rape her? Was he letting us know how dispensable we were in his world?
In the Fall of 1968, we were constantly reminded of our absurd dispensability. We were too young to vote but old enough to die in a jungle. And fat chance of that. We were anti-war and anti-government. It was the year of the Tet Offensive and total clarity for us. We knew more about the war than anything Johnson, Humphrey, McNamara, Westmoreland, and Colby had to tell us. We knew that our lives were in the hands of liars and fools. It would take McNamara thirty years to admit what we could have told him over a few pitchers of beer. To be eighteen and know more about a war than the leaders of your nation is an experience of permanent impact.
Or maybe we just cared more.
1968. MLK finally killed by racists after years of attempted blackmail by closet queen J. Edgar Hoover and empty posturing by Eisenhower and Kennedy. Paul Monette would later (Becoming a Man, 1992) honor Hoover, Cardinal Spellman, and Roy Cohn as the homo death squad—postwar division, “three closeted mama’s boys, ensuring that the Aryan dream of elimination would continue.”
A decade earlier, Eisenhower, the laissez-faire president, had said, “You can’t legislate morality,” in the face of vicious racism in Little Rock, thereby prolonging the struggle for school integration. Strange, he had found it a lot easier to use force to overthrow democratically elected governments in Guatemala and Iran. Ike, if you can’t legislate morality, what exactly is the purpose of a law? Were these politicians really that stupid? Or mendacious? Or both? If both, in what proportion? This would become a different question with Nixon. How many parts liar, and how many paranoiac?
Our man, Gene McCarthy, tottered on the edge of whimsical egotism. He would reveal himself as someone unworthy of the passion so many of us brought to his campaign. Bobby Kennedy, a vindictive, articulate chameleon and opportunist, sold himself to a starstruck press as a liberal hero, but lost his head. George McGovern, a decent man and progressive, wouldn’t get traction ‘til ’72. We were left with Hubert Humphrey, his balls in LBJ’s pocket, and George Wallace, for God’s sake, and Richard Nixon–the new Nixon with the secret peace plan. If Amerika was dumb enough to fall for Nixon’s bullshit, we were smart enough to drop out of Amerika.
We marched and they gassed us. We chanted and they beat us and jailed us. We weren’t their children anymore. We didn’t belong to their nation. We were finding our own in Chicago and Berkely and Oakland, in Madison and Ann Arbor, in Brooklyn and at Woodstock, and in hitchhiking all over America and finding that most people were all right but just too buffaloed by all the crap they’d learned in high school and seen on television.
I heard the definitive on Nixon’s election while taking a shower in my dorm. Secret peace plan, my ass. I started thinking about it would feel like to have a bullet rip through my guts. Hey, there was no way I was fighting against revolutionaries, especially those inspired by the Declaration of Independence. Phil Ochs sang, “We were born in a revolution and died in a wasted war…it’s gone that way before.” We screamed at the president as we marched past the White House, “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?”
Meanwhile, the balloon man did his thing like a guard at Buckingham Palace or the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. In his minimally communicative chant, he represented some fragile majesty that would be deflated by conversation. He had the dark shades of the jazzman for whom music was the only possible expression. Talk was cheap and getting cheaper every year.
But my friends and I were in a world of words. In the classroom, in books, and at demonstrations where long-haired orators jockeyed for position before the microphone or bullhorn. We postured for position, for prominence, for glory and for the chance to score with Grace Slick or Weatherwoman Bernadine Dohrn or someone who looked like them. Or maybe someone a little less threatening.
Someone like Marian, a friend we had made at Trinity College, a small Catholic women’s college–we called it a girl’s school then. Marian was a feminine, pretty, almost hippie who could never quite let go of her upper middle-class, Indianapolis, Republican roots. By 1976 she would be an enthusiastic Reagan supporter. But that was not surprising-she always came to embrace the politics of the last man she embraced. In 1971, after several sad affairs with mustachioed drunken radicals, she started hanging out at the Watergate complex with middle-aged men from the outer circles of the Nixon administration. She became a bit male-identified, in the language of the ’70s.
We called each other Brother Jim, Brother John, Sister Pam, Sister Marian. Who were we then, Sherwood Forest outlaws, robbing the corrupt sheriff? Or disciples of Christ, robbing the Romana, the Sanhedrin, and their lackeys of legitimacy? Or Black Muslims? Or white Negroes?
Who to be? How could we be anything but what our parents insisted that we be? And our parents wanted us dead, or at least dead before dishonored. Our fathers were Abraham dragging Isaac up the mountain. But where are we going, father? Have you thought about this sacrifice, father? Have you bothered to ask for a second opinion? Have you asked me how I feel about this? Hey, I don’t hear any voice. Hey, old man, maybe you’re just crazy: And no, I don’t care what your colleagues and neighbors will think if I avoid the draft, or whether you will lose your exalted position as a headman, you son of a bitch.
During those years we partied and protested with longhaired young vets who returned from Vietnam to the Crazy Horse, a rocking county bar on M Street, right across the Potomac from Virginia, from Dixie. Should we do some crazy horse? Could we be Crazy Horse? American Indians were cool. We would wear our hair like them, get close to the land, the Great Spirit, a spirituality before the advent of the machine men, the hollow men,,our fathers. We would go back to the land to annihilate the Great White Father in our heads.
Or Confederates? I walked through the battlefields of Gettysburg in October 1969 and believed for the first time in reincarnation. It was all so familiar. In my fantasy I had been there as a rebel, but one opposed to slavery. Hey, it was my fantasy. I would have fought against the cold Northern industrialists–the rational, the modern, the heartless. I was Virgil Cain.
In our own reading we rattled around with Hesse as wildmen bouncing between the bourgeois life and the magic theater. As Siddhartha waiting and willing nonattachment in a world of empty pleasure, madness, and sorrow. As Narcissus, the ascetic intellectual in his sane and safe microcosm. As Goldmund in the whirl of the senses and seasons, the artist in search of his anima. Or as Knecht, the servant, trying to learn that we could find our lives only by losing them. Does it matter at all or is it all a dream, we wondered, through nights in our own opium dens. Cheap wine and pot, hashish from the big harbor in Baltimore, crystal meth, cocaine, sex, and a rock and roll fantasy. What.is reality? And should we care? Do we dare?
We had dreams–of endless highs, endless sex, and power to make the world a big park. Earth Day every day just as long as we could still have our burgers and beer. Dreams of escape, freedom, and rebirth. To be born again in the derangement of the senses, to bring an end to the smug and complacent rationality that could calibrate mutually assured destruction. We believed there was no other way to get out alive.
In our sophomore year, John and I moved to a roach-filled railroad apartment in a ghetto neighborhood, a decade or two before gentrification. Most of our Georgetown friends wouldn’t even come to a party at our house. Too fuckin’ scary, man. Of course, at that party, some neighborhood brothers fresh out of Lorton prison wanted in and we said sure. A half hour later one of them pulled a knife to scare a white boy and we had another urban encounter in the middle bedroom.
.
Ours was a first-floor apartment beneath Shirley and her three sons. Shirley was up from Aiken, about twelve miles from Augusta National, home of the Masters and the green jacket. What a place to grow up black. Achin’, South Carolina, and what did she do to be so black and blue? Shirley received occasional male visitors during the day to supplement welfare. This made her man, a sad drunk named Pee-Wee,rather black and blue himself. Pee-Wee? Man,,what a handle.
One night her man-in-waiting, named James,,came by in the service of natural selection. He was takin’ Shirley to bed when Pee-Wee objected. James went upside Pee-Wee’s head with a Louisville Slugger and sent him bouncing down the stairs to slam against our door. We found Pee-Wee bleeding and sobbin’, “Shirley doesn’t love me anymore.”” Given that Shirley didn’t arrive downstairs for about fifteen minutes, that was solid speculation. We called an ambulance as soon as we found him, but Shirley got there way ahead of the ambulance. Hey, it was in the ghetto. And his mama cried.
A lot of heroin addicts in Mt. Pleasant. We looked down at them–they were doing the wrong drug, a drug of death. We were into LIFE, man, like Tim Leary. LSD. When we discovered acid we blew past the balloon man. We saw our own balloons. Beautiful balloooons and Aztec patterns everywhere. We were Indians, yes! Like Mexicans in Michoacan, where the best weed grew, or Mayans from long ago. Yes! we were the beautiful people destroyed by the white men with their metal swords and horses and cannon. We were more beautiful but they had better weapons.
We struggled to feel with the Indians, with the Vietnamese, with the brown, red, and black people of the world, the agony of seeing our women and children raped and murdered by these inferior beasts. The humiliation of our own helplessness against our fathers who knew so little but controlled so much. The keys to the car and the liquor cabinet. He who controls the car keys controls our sex lives: Father? Yes son? I want to kill you. And mother would rather give herself to me than you. She has already given herself to me and I reject both of you.
In time we grew up, and time made monkeys of us all. Man, what we didn’t know. There was no revolution around the corner. We couldn’t get enlightened by messing with our serotonin levels (although related interventions would prove quite useful years later when we struggled with depression). The more sex wasn’t the better. Discipline mattered. We couldn’t easily rid ourselves of our social conditioning. We couldn’t will ourselves out of jealousy, envy and competitiveness. It took a long time for us to realize how well we could jive ourselves to get what we wanted right here, right now.
The political and personal disillusionment was a killer. Some of us were lost to depression and bitterness for a long time, or forever. Some felt they had already seen it all and just waited for death and the astral plane or sought out gurus in the most preposterous forms. Some ran to alcohol to stay high without legal exposure or simply to numb their disappointment and heartbreak.
When the “Sixties” ended, let’s say in ‘75 with the end of the war, some of us raced to get back into the mainstream. Shit, what the hell am I doing way out on this limb? Some began the work of organizing for victories we wouldn’t realize in our lifetime. Some began the work of responding to grace. Slow, painful work. We could have learned from Flannery O’Connor: “Reality is something to which we must be returned at considerable cost.”
Some got really lost in the booze or drugs and couldn’t find their way out. By “76, Phil Ochs had become the drunkard who staggers out the door; he mocked his own sell-out and hanged himself. Abbie Hoffman would kill himself much later during a depressive episode, after surviving years as an underground fugitive from a coke bust. I went to his funeral in Worcester and walked in a procession with Jerry Rubin and Bill Walton. Rubin was in a fabulous suit and his hair was perfect. He would later get run down by a car while networking his way across a Manhattan avenue. Oh man, no wonder we had wanted so much to stay high.
As for myself, after I graduated from Georgetown, I joined the “back to the land” movement by heading to Vermont and a chance to find myself in a special place and on a human scale. Then on to graduate school in Madison, the torturous path to a Ph.D. and a teaching career until I discovered AA and sobriety and slowly moved toward work as a therapist. But you know most of that story.
There was something about the balloon man that I couldn’t comprehend when I was eighteen. He wasn’t on top of the world, but he was out there, making a living and giving people something beautiful. He knew he was entertaining us. I like to think he knew he was slipping deeper into our consciousness. Most of all he was out there, even when it was cold for balloons. We could tell he had been through a lot and had maintained something essential about himself. He had endured. Maybe more than endured. Have you read Camus’ Myth of Sisyphus? Or Faulkner’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech. If not, you might want to check them out.
The balloon man seemed to have patience and some sort of hope, despite the difficulties of his life. In my youth I wanted most to be subversive of unjust authority. I still do, but now I see despair as an equally formidable enemy. I have seen too many of my heroes and friends taken down by it. I have survived, at least ‘til now, to keep trying to walk that razor’s edge between presumption and despair. Thank God I got vaccinated with Gerard Manley Hopkins at a Jesuit high school and at Georgetown. No, carrion comfort, despair, no feasting on thee.
Today, in what I kid myself is the middle of my life, I identify with Janus, looking simultaneously to the past and future. I mourn my youth and the friends I have lost with age and disagreements too essential or too long-lasting; and other friends lost to booze, resentments, and narcissism, theirs and mine. As for the future, I don’t want to live through my children and most of my friends don’t want that either. That was our parents’ trap. We may try to be superparents to avoid the normative abuse and neglect that many of us experienced, and we know we may be screwing up in ways different from what they experienced or feared. But in the end, hard as we try, a generation can’t help but measure its progress by looking at the next one.
So, I look at my children, at you and your young sisters. I hold these daughters, barely able now to fit them on my lap, and I am grateful beyond words for their existence. I look at all our children. You are young, you are bold, you are beautiful. The turnings so painful and important to me and my peers mean so little to you. But whatever victories we achieved have made your lives a little bit better. If we are saner than our parents, our children are happier and less burdened.
You are a bright and principled young man who can feel and express his feelings, a college student of a new era, one without a war, without a daily nuclear threat, and without the kind of segregation we experienced. You have grown up in a culture less sexist, less racist; not perfect, but better.
The pop sociology of the day suggests that your generation has an identity crisis and an inferiority complex, that you don’t have a cause to inspire you as we had, that you are nostalgic for a period before you were born. I don’t think so.
You and your friends seem a lot freer to me, with more friendships across the gender gap, less homophobia, less angst about life in America. You seem to recognize the problems of inequality and racism, of environmental damage and risks. Maybe it’s because the women are so much more empowered, and that men and women take that empowerment as a given, but your generation seems less paralyzed by rage and self-doubt.
I hope you can learn from our experience, although I always had to learn the important things from my own mistakes. I’m struggling now to make the transition to learn from your experience. And I hope you can do for us what we’ll need you to do, more and more as time goes by: pay attention and share with us everything you’ve learned even when we don’t know we need it.
This will require a lot of patience on your part, but that is something worth cultivating. As the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr once wrote, “nothing that is worth anything can be achieved in a lifetime.” I guess at the time he wasn’t thinking about parenthood.
Stay in touch.
