Always We'll Remember Graduation Day

I couldn’t bear the thought of being surrounded by another new crop of newly minted freshman hippies, and so before my senior year I moved at last from the dormitory. Alone in the studio apartment I was going to share with two others, I dashed off a diatribe against The Doors out of sheer boredom, and thus was my career as a music critic launched. Within a few short months, I was getting my copy of The Beatles’ white album free, and lots of others besides, and invited to historic parties, such as that at which folk singer Phil Ochs tossed a basket of fruit into Tommy Smothers’ swimming pool — to protest the war in Viet Nam, if memory serves. In those days, the most unlikely tantrums were commonly explained away as a function of the misbehaver’s outrage over the war. Caught cheating on your wife? “I wouldn’t have done it except for this goddamned unjust war!” Caught propositioning male hustlers? The war! Underperforming at work or school? The war!

The next thing I knew I was writing not just for the student newspaper, but for the Los Angeles Times and Rolling Stone, and getting into the Troubadour free, with a tab for drinks, and the Whisky. My little head spun. I asked out Ms. Cynthia Morin, who had the longest, straightest, shiniest chestnut hair in the world, and she said yes.

I and my roommates didn’t get along famously, but it got no worse than one of them chasing me with a carving knife just because I’d punched him in the kisser. He didn’t catch me because he’d had polio as a child. I wouldn’t have punched him if he hadn’t. I could be such an asshole.

Ms. Cynthia Morin decided she wasn’t that fond of me after all, and what a fix I was in. What good did having two free passes to the Troubadour do when there was only one of me? I felt as though back in sophomore year, when I’d bolted my dinner every night to preclude being seen dining alone. But there was no getting into the Troubadour, seeing a performance, and getting the hell out before others could come in and witness my solitude. In the UK, they'd have called me Johnny No-Mates.

Militancy was thick in the air. I joined a mob of people one afternoon marching around shouting, “On strike! Shut it down!” They apparently had a list of non-negotiable demands, as who did not in those days? While marching, I encountered Ms. Annie Sokoloff, who’d been one of Sproul Hall’s universal objects of desire when I’d lived there. To my considerable surprise and delight, I soon found myself making out with her in the library, to the consternation of scholars in the adjacent cubicle. I began turning up at the Troubadour with a universal object of desire on my arm.

She moved in with me; I now officially had...an old lady! But then, a couple of weeks later, she thought better of it, and of LA in general. She didn’t come home all night from her waitressing job in Venice. When she finally did call, it was to say goodbye. I couldn’t win for losing!

Having cut not a single class in four years, having scrupulously done all the recommended reading, and so on, I felt entitled to relax my final quarter of college, and enrolled in the easy-sounding Sociology of Sports, only to discover that the instructor expected an elaborate term paper. I did mine on the sociology of the Will Rogers Beach amateur volleyball scene. I never ventured within miles of Will Rogers Beach, and never spoke to anyone who played volleyball there. My paper got a passing grade anyway and must thus be adjudged one of the most successful of my many, many unpublished works of fiction.

On the last day of my college career, with my degree assured, I had a choice between sitting anonymously in the middle of a big field with a few thousand fellow graduates — with no one shaking our hands or handing us a sheepskin, and nobody calling any of our names — or interviewing my idol, a Mr. Pete Townshend, for the Los Angeles Times in advance of The Who’s life-changing performance of Tommy at the Hollywood Palladium.

I wish all my decisions since could have been that easy to make, though now, all those years later, it occurs to me that my parents might have been sorely disappointed not to be able to attend my graduation. I could be such an asshole.

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