AC_1965_Web

174 AN T I OC H CO L L E G E C L A S S O F 19 6 5 5 0 t h A N N I V E R S A R Y B O O K T R E I C H L E R You cannot conceive of so much water until it comes sweeping into your life, filling your ears for weeks, covering your books, your clothes, your skin with mold, and disrupt- ing business as usual.The tempera- ture in Madras for most of the year is around 100 degrees Fahrenheit (too hot for Hegel!); during the mon- soon, the temperature drops to the 70s and the Indians bundle up in coats and mufflers.As the monsoon was winding down, I found myself in a growing black depression. I spent one whole day throwing up and weeping horribly and in my journal wrote “awful awful black.”A few days later I had a fever of 104º and “urine the color of coca cola” and was diagnosed with infectious hepatitis. I have to stay in bed for a month and rest and eat no fats at all, and no alcohol, only hard candy to give the liver a rest. My eyes are bright yellow. It’s bad, but what a re- lief! I thought my mind was slipping off to a deep dank kingdom come, and it’s my liver instead. During the year I was in India, the U.S. went through the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was hard to get news and only in retrospect did we realize the true danger of the crisis. News about the other major crisis that year was ubiquitous: the Chinese inva- sion of northern India’s border.The whole country exploded with anti- Chinese words and deeds. In Madras, rallies and demonstrations featured posters reading things like “Chink Stink!” My Indian roommate, Helen, wanted to leave school and go to the front. Her friend, Sari, wanted to go home but wanted everyone to think she’d gone to the front. I ended my year in India by vis- iting my friend, Gladys, and her fam- ily who lived above Darjeeling at the foot of the Himalayas—in which we hiked and picnicked. Then to Bombay (Mumbai), to Rome (Pope John XXIII died during my visit and the whole city closed down), and to London where I met up with Jemi and her boyfriend, Roy, and went with them to Canterbury, Leeds, York and the moors. I sailed home on the Aurelia: what a dump! It was so slow that any wave action caused it to shudder and slide sideways while the passengers threw up.This included my Antiochian cabinmate, Mary Williams, who tried to exert mind over seasickness but at last took Dramamine. Back at Antioch in 1963, Jemi and I were roommates.There were changes: Antioch students were smoking pot, dancing to rock and roll, listening to Dylan and carrying out serious civil disobedience.Then came the day we all remember. On November 22 Wendy Cadden ran into our dorm and shouted “Our president’s been shot!” “Strange,” said my boyfriend at the time,“Who would want to shoot Jim Dixon?” “I think she means Kennedy,” I said, and like the rest of the campus we spent the next several days staring at television sets in complete silence. I’ll say no more about Kennedy’s as- sassination which, along with the two that followed in 1968, are well known to all of us.After that it was something of a relief to spend the next quarter in another world:work- ing in the dead of winter at theWhat Cheer Patriot-Chronicle inWhat Cheer, Iowa (pronounced “WATcher”). For entertainment (if there was a TV, I never found it) I got my ears (incom- petently) pierced by a horse doctor and joined a women’s singing group which performed around the re- gion. I finished up my co-ops with an own plans Christmas phone sales job at Macy’s in San Francisco, living a block from where Haight-Ashbury was becoming Haight-Ashbury. Back on campus I joined the motley crew of students belatedly declaring a ma- jor in philosophy (Karen Mills, Pat Carlone and other intelligent fun- lovers); as we fulfilled our senior seminar requirements (Karen and I wrote a witty paper on altruism for Keeton’s senior ethics seminar), we prepared for our memorable com- mencement and in fits and starts thought about life after Antioch. Wisdom from George Geiger,my faculty advisor, on life after Antioch: “Of course you must go to graduate school—but not, I think, in philos- ophy.” He recommended linguistics but I never quite got it inVicAyoub’s class and was vague about what graduate school actually was, so put it all off and moved to NewYork City. My apartment in a tenement onWest 12th St. between A and B was a fifth- floor walk-up with five rooms at $55 per month: the lower east side was not quite yet the East Village. Sharing the 5th floor were: a cross-dresser with both names on the mailbox; a sweet black drug dealer with a plate in his head whose partner was a nun from Wheeling who’d been se- duced at the convent and then aban- doned in New York City (with her baby) by a visiting math professor; and two very cool jazz musicians, Marion Brown and Pharaoh Sanders, who were unfortunately just moving out. Wanting time to “find myself” or some such, I took only part-time jobs. In addition to a couple of con- ventional jobs at a higher education council and then at NYU, I became a roving Girl Friday, toting my por- table Smith-Corona all around the town to assist old Marxists (refer- ral from Antioch alumni Agnes and Leo Gruliow), mainly Max Eastman of New Masses fame and his crowd of writers and painters, modernists and Madame Blavatsky mystics. I helped out with their manuscripts, Christmas cards, filing, correspon- dence, and so on. Max and his cro- nies were interesting, and when I agreed to go to Martha’s Vineyard that summer to assist him and his wife,Yvette, they provided me with a room, food, and brushes with fame: among others, novelist Nicholas del Banco, New York Times film critic Bowley Crowther and Carly Simon. Life in the Eastman house at Gay Head was agreeable enough until A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z