My toxic heart

I remember the first time someone told me, in effect, that I was an asshole.  “I see you don’t suffer fools gladly,” a fellow barfly at the Lion’s Head bar remarked one night. The Lion’s Head was at that time, the early 70’s, the famous “writer’s bar” on Sheridan Square in Greenwich Village, and the guy who made that sage observation about yours truly was one of the older sages we younger writers looked up to.  He was a newspaperman, naturally, with an emphasis on “man” as nearly every single newspaper writing job in the city was filled by men in those days.  (Women at the New York Times, Time, and Newsweek would have to go to court to begin the long slog to achieve parity as journalists at the established news publications in town, and that day had not yet come.)

I think the guy at the bar next to me had written a novel, or maybe it was a couple of non-fiction books, but I do recall that at least one of his book jackets adorned the wall across from the bar, the place of honor for the writers who drank at the Lion’s Head, or was it the drinkers who wrote, as the joke went in the days when being an alcoholic could still get laughs as the punch line in a standup’s joke.  I don’t know what I had done to earn the comment – probably cut off some civilian boring me with how much he liked my last Voice piece and dreams that he, too, wanted to be a writer.  But the comment from the graying sage was said admiringly.  I was behaving the way we serious writers were supposed to behave.  We didn’t have time for the idle chatter of the plebes.  We were at the Lion’s Head to drink seriously and talk seriously about serious topics and accept honors due us when they came from our fellow “scribblers” as we sometimes called ourselves with exaggeratedly mock modesty.

I hadn’t thought of myself that way until the eminence gris bestowed his blessing upon me using those immortal words, but it was true.  I had never been patient with people whom I considered my inferiors intellectually, and get thee away from me if you came across as straight rather than hip, which was a mandatory qualification if you wanted to be in our crowd in those days.  Woe be unto you if you didn’t catch some glancing reference to a lyric to an obscure Dylan song that wasn’t usually known to commoners, or if you referred to your girlfriend as your girlfriend rather than as your old lady.  Hip was like being in a club you couldn’t apply to join; you had to be invited.  You didn’t have to be told what was hip and what wasn’t.  You just knew.  And if you didn’t, you got the kind of treatment I had apparently given the guy at the bar who I considered was bothering me, not worth my time, not worthy of my attention not to mention my respect.

In fact, being an asshole was part and parcel of hipness.  You were supposed to laugh at the put-downs of reporters and hangers-on executed by Dylan in the film about his 1966 tour of England, “Don’t Look Back” because you were in on the joke.  That’s what being hip was.  The rest of the world was ambling along living in the world, but you knew what was really going on.  The Dylan line, “Something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is/ Do you, Mr. Jones?” captured the feeling with his typical precision and biting irony.  In fact, we could have called what we aspired to “biting irony” instead of “hip.”  They were the same thing, and if you didn’t get the irony in the everyday-ness of the world around you, forget it, man.

The problem of course was that not suffering fools gladly made for a life of subtraction rather than addition.  I cut off the civilian at the Lion’s Head rather than listen to what he had to say and engage him, after all. To this day, I don’t remember who he was, and he might have gone on to become a writer and may have written something I read and admired for all I know.  But I don’t know, because I didn’t have the patience or the good manners or the simple grace of being decent to treat him as a fellow human being rather than a lesser form of life not worth my time or energy.

I often wonder what I’ve missed as I blundered through life thinking I was better than those around me, above it all in my perch as a published writer with an admiring readership.  It was the vote in the Kansas referendum that made me remember that night in the Lion’s Head and my years and years of not suffering fools gladly, because that’s exactly what the voters of Kansas did on Tuesday – they listened to each other and came together at least on the issue of abortion, 59 percent of them did, anyway, agreeing across party lines and gender and the chasm of the culture wars that women have the basic right of what the Kansas Supreme Court had called “autonomy” over their lives, and that included their bodies. 

They found something they agreed on, and they meant it.  Coverage on election day described lines of voters that went out of polling places onto the street and around corners in 100-degree heat.  The last voter in one precinct in a small town in central Kansas cast her vote at 9:30 at night, more than two hours after the polls closed. 

I don’t think the vote would have gone that way if people in Kansas hadn’t done something extraordinary:  people who previously had considered each other fools came together.  Kansas has always been considered a place people got away from so they could have real lives of meaning and importance in places like New York and L.A. and San Francisco.  Kansas wasn’t hip, it was square.

Not this time.  Kansas showed the way for the rest of the country.  They not only suffered fools gladly, they did it with their votes, and they strengthened Democracy in the process.  That is something worth celebrating.  That’s hip.