How weird were the 1970s? I grew up in the era. As a 17-year-old in 1973, I concluded that sex of every stripe and variety was my birthright. And that wasn't just because my glands were pumping out male hormones like a kegger on St. Patrick's Day but because I'd taken a look around and seen my fellow citizens humping like toy poodles.
I also was a relatively well-read kid so I kept up with every advancement made by one oppressed minority or another. This new era thrilled me. Blacks were slowly but surely gaining rights and opportunities. Women were standing up. Gays and lesbians were peeking out of the closet.
I wanted in on the party so I searched for the ugly brutality that had been keeping me down. I longed to thrust my first in the air and declare death to The Man. Unfortunately, I was a white male growing up in a middle class family in a comfortable bungalow. There wasn't a right or privilege envisioned by Jefferson or Douglas or Freidan or even Abbie Hoffman (my idol - I insisted my friends call me Abbie) that I did not already possess. I was in no position to fight The Man; I was only a couple of years away from becoming The Man.
But I was a clever revolutionary tyro. Why, I'd simply become a member of an oppressed class, like magic! So I pondered who I should become. I had a beard worthy of the Smith Bros. so telling people I was a woman was out. My hair was kinky (my grade school nickname was Nigger Hair) and I became rather dark in the summer but I realized few would believe my ancestors came from the Ivory Coast. Then it hit me.
I'd discovered Woody Allen's movies around that time. He not only talked openly about being a Jew but he elevated Jewishness to an art form. And, yeah, I had the kinky hair. That's it - I'm a Jew!
The fellows at my Roman Catholic high school were immediately skeptical when I adopted a trace of a New York accent and interspersed my conversation with Yiddishisms. One Friday in the lunchroom, my pal Bronson (who'd taken his nickname from the motorcycle-riding drifter in the television show "Then Came Bronson") ran up and told me he'd gotten tickets to see the bands War and Parliament at the old International Amphitheater that night.
"Let's go, Abbie," he gushed. "It's gonna be dynamite!"
"Oy," I moaned. "If only I could. Such a drive! And the noise! You want I should have a headache for the next three days?"
"Abbie," Bronson said firmly, "you're not a Jew."
My face turned red. After a beat, I admitted in a low voice, "I know." Thus ended my flirtation with the tribe of Abraham.
Next, I decided to become gay. Well, not in practice, for god's sake. Only in my public pronouncements. And not fully gay either. My pals and I were sitting on a bench in Amundsen Park, palming a joint, when I blurted an announcement. "I gotta move down by the lake," I said, trying to keep the toke down. "Gotta be around my own kind. I'm bi."
This statement was met with less than rousing enthusiasm. In fact, later that night, Fat Marc, the toughest guy in the neighborhood and heretofore one of my best friends, blackened both my eyes.
Finally I concluded I was sexually oppressed. Heterosexually oppressed, that is. After all, I thought about the subject night and day yet I was no nearer to tasting its pleasures than I was to leaping to the top of the new Standard Oil Building. Society was keeping me down, man! This sick, repressive, puritanical country was denying me my basic right to ecstasy. I was ready to take to the streets.
No matter that I was a gawky, pimply-faced dweeb with moves that would have made Julius Kelp look like George Clooney. That wasn't keeping me chaste. It was The Man.
Even though I had all the zeal of a newly converted revolutionary, I still couldn't get laid. But I talked a great game. I announced that I planned to have sex with as many human beings as possible. I'd do it in beds, on kitchen countertops, in parks, on sunlit hills, in misty forests, in luxury hotels, in confessionals, in the soup aisle, and in the bleachers.
Especially in the bleachers. It would combine the two loves of my life - baseball and sex. I might be assumed into heaven had I the opportunity to display my swordsmanship under a blanket in the sparsely populated centerfield bleachers. Heck, the camera might even catch me at work and Jack Brickhouse might say, enviously, "Now there's a young man who knows what he's doing!"
It was at this time I read about Fritz Peterson and Mike Kekich. They and their wives had attended a wife-swapping party one night and gotten into the spirit of things. Next thing they knew, each had fallen in love with the other's mate and vice versa. Soon, the moving vans were on the way.
Sportswriters and other establishment types had apoplexy. The world, they predicted, was about to spin wildly out of its orbit. I loved it. Peterson and Kekich became my favorite baseball players.
They knew how to stick it to The Man.
