When HARLIE Was One Read Free

fascination with despair. I did not have a mysterious birthmark that identified me as the lost heir to the throne of Orstonia. Nor did we have visitations from poltergeists, space aliens, or arcane elder gods. I didn’t even run away to join the circus at thirteen.
    No. None of that.
    Instead, I grew up in a fairly average suburb of Los Angeles, went to a series of fairly average schools, had fairly average teachers, and earned mostly average grades (not because I was average, I was just uninterested; science fiction was a lot more interesting.) Nothing out of the ordinary happened. Ward and June Cleaver would have been bored. My childhood was so whitebread, you could have spread mayonnaise on it and made sandwiches. All right—Jewish rye bread, no mayonnaise. But you get the point.
    I do admit to having had an obsessive-compulsive passion for monster movies and science fiction, but that was normal for teenage boys before video games were invented. The biggest argument I ever had with my parents was about my buying a motorcycle to get to school. I bought it. End of argument. Big deal.
    The lesson—the cliché —told to would-be writers that you should “write what you know” is a very hollow instruction. At that age, who really knows anything? I’m sure I didn’t. My experience with the real world was limited to what I read in books and what I saw at the movies. It was other people’s stories. It wasn’t just secondhand reality. It was other people’s conversations about reality.
    By the time I finished high school and stumbled through the first few years of college, I had learned just how little talent I had as an artist or an actor or even as a storyteller. My social skills weren’t all that terrific either. There wasn’t a lot of evidence to demonstrate that I had any real aptitude at anything, something that more than one instructor felt compelled to point out publicly.
    I did have two things going for me. I had a control freak’s ferocious determination to find out how things work, and I had just enough skill at stringing words together to make an occasionally readable sentence. But I had nothing to say .
    I had nothing to say about life because I hadn’t lived it.
    Which brings me back to that horrendous clash of symbols we called the sixties. If the fifties were about innocence, then the sixties were about losing it. Big time.
    It was a decade that started in promise and stumbled into disaster. The civil rights struggle boiled over into church bombings and violence and murders; President Kennedy was murdered in Dallas; the flower children turned into dropped-out hippies; drug use became hip; Vietnam escalated into a full-blown war; riots broke out in the urban ghettos; draft riots broke out on the college campuses; the peace movement turned violent; LBJ developed a credibility gap; Malcolm X and Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated; Woodstock turned into Altamont; and, as if to seal the deal, a night of horrific murders terrified Los Angeles. There was no escape from the avalanche of time.
    Not even the awe-inspiring sight of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin broadcasting live from the moon could redeem the decade. As the decade collapsed into history, it seemed as if most of us were so scarred and traumatized by what we’d been through that we just wanted to retreat into a nice safe cocoon.
    We had started the decade with a clear sense of who we were. By the end of those years, we had lost our sense of self and it hurt so much we couldn’t stand it.
    So if the sixties was about anything—and it was about a lot of things—it was also about the search for self. At least, that’s how I experienced it. Who am I, anyway? What am I up to? Where do I go from here? And why? (Yes, I was right on schedule.)
    I won’t go into the details of my own personal soap opera, I’ll save that for another time, but it was pretty