A Cavalcade of Lesser Horrors

1972

140 1972 It was a commune of psychologists—young PhD types—in South Minneapolis, and for a while after the war it was home. I’d found it through my job as a benefits counselor on the drug and alcohol ward at the Veterans Administration hospital. One of the psychologists worked there, and the rest—three or four others, the number rose and fell—used a combination of ever-so-slightly post-hippie idealism and gooey graduate school psychology to cohere to the commune. We lived in a five-bedroom house across a quiet street from a dingy little Lithuanian Lutheran church. Between work and graduate school and social lives and romances, commune members were forever coming and going, but we tried to sit down and eat dinner together every evening. There was also a once-a-week house meeting, where any issues were to be brought up and resolved—cooking and cleanup schedules, budgets, stereo volumes, noisy overnight guests—that sort of thing. There were those issues, and then there were the issues underlying those issues. If you were late with your share of the rent, someone in the group was apt to psychoanalyze you. Why were you displaying passive-aggressive tendencies? One PhD had a relationship with a slightly older woman. She was almost always there for dinner and almost always there for breakfast —and almost certainly a sign of something deeply oedipal. One night at a house meeting, one of the PhD women relaxed 1972 141 on the living room couch for five minutes pretending not to notice that one of her breasts had fallen completely out of her housecoat . She knew, all right. She had issues of her own. Finally, one of the PhD men pointed at her breast and asked in a simpy, snide, psychologist’s voice, “Will you please put that thing away?” The commune was my left-handed effort to reconnect with people who hadn’t spent the past five years on the way into and out of Vietnam. Such a sad little dalliance. All it had cost was everything. No one else in my college crowd had gone. Their lives had proceeded unscathed, and I’d come home to find they’d coupled up, married, and settled down. The first babies had arrived while I was gone. One or two couples had bought houses. On the wall in the hallway outside the bathroom in a duplex one of the couples was renting, there was a homemade, felt-on-felt banner left over from their wedding—a wedding that had taken place while I was gone. It read, “We’ve only just begun.” My old college crowd was moving effortlessly into middleclass routines. There they were, building happy, productive lives, fully five years ahead of me. “Think happy today,” went the jingle for one of the local savings and loans, and they were. My friends were all thinking happy today. They had only just begun to consume, to plan and save, to climb that career ladder, to move out of the city into the suburbs and small towns of middle America. In the two and a half years I had been gone, they had become latter-day lotus-eaters. I had become a second-rate Odysseus, bumbling and fumbling my way home to a place where no one was waiting. Normal was surreal. Surreal was normal, palpably so. Here was my life—a crater. Nobody knew the trouble I’d seen, nor was anyone especially interested in hearing about it. They had no idea, none whatsoever. They listened when I tried to tell them. They paused for a moment, then went back to passing around baby pictures. So I moved into the commune of psychologists thinking maybe 142 1972 they could help me work through some of the crap so I, too, could start thinking happy today. My life was a clothesline sagging under a lot of wet, not especially clean laundry. Maybe I could use my brothers and sisters in the commune like those poles my grandmother used to prop up her clothesline on wash day. The flawed assumption, of course, was that the psychologists would be sane and capable of thinking happy themselves, but they, too, were sagging clotheslines. The issues under their issues were real and layered, and now that they had lived communally for a while, their issues overlapped and entangled. If I expected any help...