staring down the barrel of forty years of stultifying suburban life out of a Cheever novel.
So my mother ameliorated her pain with a haze of prescription drugs. She was more or less addicted to tranquilizers and barbiturates throughout my high school years. My father the doctor kept the medicine cabinet well stocked, making it easy for her. I don’t know if he was consciously medicating her, but it was certainly conventional for that generation to do this to themselves and sometimes to their children. The humorist S. J. Perelman was my father’s patient, but it wasn’t for that reason alone my father kept an autographed copy of The Road to Miltown on the living room coffee table. My generation’s (and my) later much more public experiments with drugs don’t seem so astonishing when juxtaposed with this secret reality of the Fifties, which sometimes bubbled to the surface in New Yorker cartoons. Maybe we were only making explicit what our parents had kept hidden.
Although my father came from that Orthodox immigrant home back in Lawrence, my parents’ lifestyle, particularly in Scarsdale, was Jewish-WASP. They rarely went to synagogue or discussed religion at home; they liked to entertain formally and were members of a country club. Surfaces were of paramount importance. Even in the social sphere, things had to be dealt with in a decorous manner. My parents were Stevenson Democrats but I can’t remember them actively lobbying for any political cause or even going to a meeting. Their involvement in the growing civil rights struggle was only peripheral. They sent me to visit family friends in Louisiana when I was thirteen, but when I returned, aghast, with my stories of “colored” water fountains and other Jim Crow horrors, they merely clucked their disapproval. They never did anything about it. The two exceptions came from my father’s aforementioned professional interest in nuclear energy and his usually unspoken fascination with the Holocaust.
This kind of repressed behavior and hypocrisy is of course popularly associated with the Fifties. When, shortly after college, I read Yale psychologist Kenneth Kenniston’s The Young Radicals—which defined the left-wing youth of my generation as being in rebellion against liberal parents who rarely acted on their values—I thought I’d found the academic version of my own autobiography. And for those days, I had. But the dialectic moves on and I had no idea how my view of my parents, particularly of my father, would circle back on itself. I am far more sympathetic to him now and recognize that his activities with the Atomic Energy Commission were in many ways heroic. He was a committed man in the sense that he believed that, on balance, the values of this country are positive and its role in the world necessary. He wanted to defend and protect it through his scientific work.
At that time, however, I was in Kenniston-style rebellion. By my sophomore year at Dartmouth I had become roommates with Alan Coggeshall, a tow-headed, angular character who resembled a latter-day Ichabod Crane and even came from Peekskill, New York, not far from Washington Irving’s Sleepy Hollow. These were the days (1962) when we were first getting an inkling of the existence of psychedelic drugs and Alan, less risk-averse than I, would head off to Cambridge on weekends to participate in the early LSD experiments of Harvard psych professors Richard Alpert and Timothy Leary. When I listened to his tales of rainbows exploding to Bach cantatas, I never dreamed that Leary himself would be one of my closer friends in Hollywood in the Eighties, or that Alan would be dead the year after we graduated. He was in the back of a car that went flying off the road on its way to Bennington. I always assumed the driver was stoned, but don’t know for sure.
What I do know is that Alan’s LSD tales, fascinating though they were, made me nervous. Was I ready for explosions in my brain? Would I come back again? I remember feeling waves of apprehension when a package Alan had ordered arrived at our dorm room from Smith Cactus Farm in Laredo, Texas. It was peyote. Though the psychedelic cactus wasn’t yet illegal, I could hardly believe it had actually arrived—dozens of scuzzy little dirt-covered buds inside a flimsy cardboard box wrapped in twine, all for about five dollars post paid. Save some die-hard Aldous Huxley fans, almost no one had heard of the plant then, in the early Sixties.
Among our minute group of incipient Dartmouth hipsters, however, a few were claiming already to have ingested the cactus. Eating it straight was supposed to be a one-way ticket to the vomitorium, so they said they’d either ground it into a paste for cookies or whirled it with ice cream and milk into a shake. One, an aspiring poet from West Virginia, had described his experience to me in glowing terms. Yes, he was sick for an hour or two and threw up all over the bathroom, and, yes, there was a period when all he could see were giant beetles coming out of his toilet … but then the visions … ah, the visions. He waved his hand at the transcendent magic of it all and gazed at me as if I were hopelessly square and hopelessly cowardly.
I didn’t know whether to believe him or not, but he certainly had a point about my being scared. When the time came to turn on to our cactus stash, I pretended to eat while nipping tentatively at the skin of one of the buds as if the flesh beneath were imbued with rattlesnake venom, not mescaline. Then, when I thought no one was looking, I stuffed the cactus in my pocket. I waited until others began to report a “buzz” before nodding my concurrence. Yes, I said, those street lights outside our dorm did glow with incredible colors. The group clustered in our room that night was probably suspicious of me, but I just had to live with it. I wasn’t ready for my first hallucinogenic trip and wouldn’t be for some time to come.
Turned on or not, as my years at Dartmouth wore on, I felt increasingly isolated in Hanover, New Hampshire. Many of the more interesting upperclassmen like Geller had left and the world was changing at a rapid clip, the epicenter of the student universe moving west to Berkeley and the Free Speech Movement. By the time I entered the Yale Drama School in fall 1965, I was relieved to be in New Haven. There was a Berkeley girl in my playwriting class—Dyanne Asimow—and I quickly fell in love with her, knowing she would be a good companion in my growing desire to explore this new world and be part of the “My Generation,” as the Who sang. And for a while, she was. But in those days, and in Hollywood especially, staying together wasn’t easy.
3
MOSES WINE IS BORN
Recollecting the morning of September 11, 2001, I sometimes think that my fictional hero, my alter ego, detective Moses Wine, was among the tragic, desperate figures plunging down the façade of the World Trade Center. Even that day, I sensed it. The values and worldview of the left-wing hippie detective—the “stoned Sam Spade” as the Los Angeles Times called him years ago—had been battered practically beyond recognition, as had mine. I tried to explain this in my eighth Moses Wine novel, Director’s Cut, but the book received the least attention and some of the most mediocre reviews of any I had written. Moses Wine’s fans didn’t want a revised Moses—at least a fair percentage of them didn’t.
I owed a lot to Moses, and still do. I had invented him almost on a whim twenty-nine years before that September, sitting in my backyard in the Echo Park district of Los Angeles, sharing a joint with Alan Rinzler. It was like a scene from some Sergeant Pepper rerun—two lost Jewish members of the Beatles, me with a John Lennon beard and long, scraggly (but already prematurely thinning) hair, Alan with an Afro à la Abbie Hoffman or Dylan—giggling from marijuana.
Inside, I wasn’t so happy. Alan, the editor of my first two novels, was rejecting my third. He had just become the head of Straight Arrow Books, the new publishing arm of Rolling Stone, and his “business guy” had said my latest effort—a grim, Simenon-like tale of an anti-Castro Cuban in LA kidnapping the child of the radical lawyer next door on the anniversary of the Bay of Pigs—was not commercial. No doubt his “business guy” was right. I knew it even then. Alan felt guilty, however. We were friends, and he didn’t want to reject me. The other books I’d done for him were successful, relatively, anyway. And the Cuban one might have been better written than the previous two books. But this time he was working for a new publisher. Indeed, he was almost the publisher himself, as long as he stayed in the good graces of Jann Wenner, the young
