Beating the Bushes for Vanished Beatniks

Whither goest thou, man? I mean, whatever happened to all the beatniks?

I don’t mean Allen Ginsberg or Jack Kerouac or Lawrence Ferlinghetti--your celebrity beatniks. I’m talking about the rank and file, the Ozzie-and-Harriet beatnik, the folks who stuck it out through all those poetry readings. Who now from Los Angeles mansions or Philadelphia townhomes or St. Louis one-window hotel rooms, or from most holy, holy Terre Haute, roam the angry streets at dawn looking for Geritol.

I know what happened to the hippies. Every time I attend the opening party for a new restaurant or computer firm or real estate office, I have the same fantasy:

I walk into a roomful of people chatting politely while stuffing themselves with warm goat cheese and swilling down their Sauvignon Blanc--men with stylish crewcuts, string ties and suspenders and loose, gray jackets with sleeves pushed up to the elbows; women in short, tight black skirts and black high heels and oversized sweaters with shoulder pads and loose, gray jackets with sleeves pushed up to the elbows. Then I try to picture them as they would have looked 17 years ago--half naked, hair to the waist, barefoot, Indian bedspread clothes, dancing wildly creative frugs at a Free Huey fund-raiser.

Some say the hippies were just beatniks with more drugs, beatniks who said, “Oooh. Wow. The colors . . .” but it was different. The hippies were a mass phenomenon. Hippies had millions of rock ‘n’ roll records to tell them how to be hippies. Every town and village in America had hippies. But beatniks were a few isolated souls who listened to distant drummers in dim-lit little Birdlands of the heart.

Yeah.

When I was a teen-ager in Chicago, sometimes we’d “go beat.” That meant we’d dress up in black turtlenecks and wear lots of eye makeup and white lipstick and go down to a place called Bug House Square, where crazy people talked about free love and socialism and the Negroes.

Then we would try to get into a nightclub called the College of Complexes, where I believe actual Negroes played jazz while white kids sat with their eyes closed, pounding on the tables. I don’t know. I never got in. The owner never bought our phony ID or our phony act.

At 15, I got an after-school job selling magazine subscriptions on the phone. Anything to get out of the house. I would sit there in the office reading “On the Road,” in between phoning people and saying, “Congratulations! You have just won a free year of Reader’s Digest, Look and Colliers. Now all you have to do is. . . .”

And I would dream of escaping Eisenhower’s America and running away with the beatniks and being a nonconformist. Mostly, I would dream about Sonny Becker. He lived down the block and did nothing all day. He wore a black leather jacket. You could hear jazz music echoing from his room late at night. He was friends with the Negroes. My big sister, Myrna, told me he once offered her some “tea,” and not the kind you drink, either.

Yes, someday Sonny would take me away in a beat-up old convertible, and we would write haiku and play bongos while the dark night of America rolled by the windows. But Sonny’s family moved uptown and Kennedy became President, and I went to college and started writing sonnets and villanelles and thought free verse was “sloppy.”

So, Sonny, man, if you’re listening, what the hell ever happened to you? Did you end up in San Francisco in beatnik heaven or did you get a job?