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as classmates from Madison, I was incredulous when they told me that they had thought me one of the prettiest, most popular, and most envied girls in the class. My first impulse was to say, “I wish you had told me that then,” but what I really wished was that I could have told myself these things at the time: You’re pretty. You’re smart. You’re funny. You’re just right the way you are. Be confident. Be yourself. Like yourself. Don’t worry, you’ll date, and then you’ll have different problems.
    I didn’t know those things when I was at Madison. All I could do was keep trying to find my place in the social realm. As it happened, I wasn’t the only teenager attracted to the liberal arts in search of peer acceptance and self-expression. A remarkablenumber of kids from my generation who attended high schools in Brooklyn went on to achieve success in music, film, TV, literature, journalism, theater, and the visual arts. Not only were we supported in such endeavors by our schools and families, but we were only a subway ride away from the array of opportunities awaiting us in New York City. It’s no wonder we were drawn to the city in search of artistic and material success.
    Alongside the culture of material success existed a subculture of alienated, antimaterialistic nonconformists, the literary core of which included Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg on the East Coast, with Kenneth Rexroth, Gregory Corso, Michael McClure, and Philip Lamantia on the West Coast. There was some coast overlap: the first reading by Allen Ginsberg of his avant-garde poem
Howl
took place in 1955 in San Francisco, and Kerouac drank too much on both coasts. Other characters in the Beat generation included Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, who would become a bridge between Beats and hippies.
    I had no idea why it was called the Beat generation. Later I heard that Jack Kerouac coined the phrase in the late forties. Some said he used “beat” in the street sense of cheated or down and out. Others said “beat” was short for beatitude, but with its meaning of exalted happiness and serenity, beatitude seems unlikely—unless Kerouac was being ironic, which is entirely possible. Either way, the subculture became known as the Beat generation, and its members were “beatniks.”
    In 1957, when I was fifteen, the dominant style in the visual arts was abstract expressionism, exemplified by Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, and Helen Frankenthaler. While visual artists created and displayed their work in Greenwich Village, jazz musicians such as Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Tito Puente, Thelonious Monk, andCharles Mingus could be heard at clubs such as the Village Vanguard or the Village Gate.
    That year I sneaked off to Greenwich Village with some of the more daring kids I knew. Unlike suburban kids, we didn’t need a car. We could get anywhere by bus or subway. Walking on Bleecker Street I half expected to see a strung-out junkie on every corner. Because everyone’s parents had seen Reefer Madness , * I kept looking over my shoulder for my father, who I was certain would catch me and ground me for a year. After boldly trying to get into the jazz clubs, only to be turned away, we wound up in a coffee house with no age restriction. There we listened to poetry readings in a room full of people who looked like beatniks. Hanging out in the Village made me feel “cool.”
    One night, notwithstanding my being fifteen and looking twelve, the woman at the door admitted my friends and me to the Vanguard. It was a propitious moment that expanded into a couple of hours of grace during which I witnessed two sets of jazz by players I didn’t know. The music was hot, cool, and mind-blowing. After the Vanguard, my friends and I went to someone’s apartment where they were smoking pot. Other than what I inhaled secondhand, I didn’t partake. I, too, had seen
Reefer Madness
. I was