What brought Bill and I together was that we shared certain distrust of the world, a certain sense of melancholy and the inherent injustice of the world that attracted us to the music of Van Dyke Parks and Randy Newman and Ry Cooder. My own brooding was tempered by a persistent idealism that refused to believe humans couldn't do better and his was backgrounded by an obsessive desire to know things to their most intimate core. Neither of us ever grew up listening to Elvis. Elvis, to us, wasn't remotely the king of anything. He was the cute and entertaining guy we watched in the movies they showed us during lunch break in junior high. We both listened to jazz.
I used to refer to us as Plato and Aristotle, as we made the rounds of apartments and parties or took his mother’s Honda on long trips across the northern Ohio countrysides. We agreed and disagreed on everything. We made up poetry based on highway signs. Bill preceded me into most areas of exploration but his daring and curiosity was backed by my own enthusiasm for things with new possibilities.
We were a form of Mutt and Jeff out in a world that had become uncomfortable and perhaps somewhat unreliable with the deaths of fathers and grandparents and the abandonment of siblings. On top of this we met in the middle of the sixties. It was precisely at that cusp where the dams holding back the rising angst of a generation were cracking under our exposure to wider contexts of history and in the glow of television screens. We were witnesses to assassinations and race riots and the liberation movements sweeping across Europe and we were caught up in the rise of privileged protest. Having been programmed toward college by the GI Bills our parents inherited out of World War II we were destined to question every institution that held up society, ungrateful wretches that we were.
The bull roarer. The hat. the box. The commune.
My own obsessions ran toward the pursuit of obscure trains of philosophical thinking. By nature a religiously inclined personality. I had given up religion in a controversial move some years earlier, although I would return later to aggressively question the fundamental motives and morals of the church when I wasn't invited. I plowed through piles and piles of books and journals following tangents wherever they led, until whatever was my original quest became obscured. At times my quest was nothing short of neurotic. I couldn't pick up a magazine or a book unless I could the whole thing from cover to cover. To this day I find it impossible to start anything in the middle. To understand anything I had to trace it back to the point of origin. This was combined with a desire to understand everything which made it impossible to pursue any course of study to its detailed depths, rather I sought out the links between things in order to understand them. It made me an impossible student.
Bill’s obsessions emerged out of being born into a family of craft persons. His father was an artist who worked for Hallmark Cards most of his career and his older brother had won an award for making a shirt movie about his impending divorce. His mother was an expert gardener and master of household crafts. My sense was that he had been abandoned rather early by his father due to death and by his siblings due to their various successes that took them to other cities. Bills life was wrapped in his mothers as he appears to have taken the place of his father in his role as companion and adversary. I sensed that he was in competition with his brother and sister whom I never met. He learned photography by building a camera. He learned how to sew by building a loom and then weaving his own material. Whenever I cruised over to his house after school we would retreat to his upstairs bedroom refuge where he had installed his fathers stereo and we would listen to music and smoke while he introduced me to all sorts of ephemera, from experimental music to underground film making to politics. At various times he was into Rudolph Steiner’s rituals for biodynamic gardening methods, homeopathy, extraterrestrial intelligence and later on dowsing. He and his mother introduced me to wheat grass and carrot juice and avocados eaten with vanilla ice cream.
He went to Chicago for the Democratic Convention in 1965 and experienced the police riots first hand. He introduced me to the activities of a small group of young socialist intellectuals led by an old union fighter and veteran of the Spanish Revolution. We attended early demonstrations against the Vietnam War where there was two plainclothes policemen for every marcher. We started an underground magazine in high school for which we were eventually disciplined.
We were odd balls who had little interest in the activities of our friends unless we were leading them, and we were generally too shy to do that. Bill's shyness was born out of his unresolved homosexuality and mine came out of a mixture of nerd like insecurity wed to an insufferable arrogance. We both saw the world in ways that were substantially different from most of our peers and this above all is what we recognized in each other.
Halas was the youngest of three, one brother and one sister, and the last to leave the house. His father, who died some years before, had been an illustrator at Hallmark Cards and encouraged an artistic and intellectual bent in his children. A sister married and moved to the east and an older brother had gone to film school in San Francisco and made an award winning short documentary about his divorce. The family lived in a thoroughly middle-class neighborhood but carried an exceptional and iconoclastic view of the world.
My own teenaged life was made unusual by an experience of having been recruited for a government program that was part of President Johnson’s War On Poverty. Called Upward Bound, the program took kids with high IQ’s from lower income families who were performing below par in school and sent them to spend the summer on a college campus taking college prep courses and generally getting exposed to a wider world. Most of the kids were black, with a sprinkling of Puerto Rican’s and whites like me. The counselors were all veterans of the civil right’s struggles of the early sixties, and we all made friends and romped far away from our natural element, learning lessons about the world far outside the milieu of our natural peers.
We had both been exposed to what were for most people exotic modes of viewing the world. His was familial and mine was institutional. We both attended classes in a thoroughly respectable and highly rated public high school that perched at the edges of the suburbs, with a student body made up of the usual cross section of those bound for the factory or for college. My own group was part of an esoteric order made up of the designated “one’s” and “two’s,” that is, the most promising in terms of future societal status. I was a “two,” having a mixed grade average and having transferred in from another lower status school, while most of my friends were “ones,” as they tended to include more of the independent thinkers and those with whom I’d attended special classes in Junior High.
Raging in the background of all of our friendships were the Civil Rights insurrections of the sixties and the War in Vietnam. Everything else was going on as well. A society that had up until our time been characterized by the regimentation and triumphalist progress that followed World War Two was beginning to divide our once conservative culture into a bewildering infinitude of choices and potential destinies. Halas might have been a short skip ahead of a lot of people in perceiving the dissolution of certainty, and my own life had been laid wide open with disorienting uncertainties, but for neither of us was it a pathway to resolution. Pretty soon just about everyone would be compelled to come along as American culture poured over the edge.
The edge is where I knew Halas. He later went over and disappeared into the mixed up milieu of the mid seventies. The culture of change met up with the culture of commerce and the revolution became the basis for a generation of marketing strategies. The baby boomers hit the sharp upward incline of the bell curve while politics devolved into cynicism, and while we were looking in our pockets for a new direction or retreating into spiritual communities, the Age of Reagan was upon us. My friend Halas, caught between revelation and paranoia, visionary release and sexual ambiguity fled into the Vermont woods and was never seen or heard from again.
I had a girlfriend once who did that. She just vanished one day, out of my life, no explanation, no preliminaries. Although perhaps Bill's was a more complete vanishing, from my life and the lives of others. Still, the effect was the same. No mourning and no resolution, just a vacuum waiting to be filled.
