Was it the best of times? It certainly wasn’t the worst of times. They were for damned sure interesting times.
But no, “breaking down monogamy” probably didn’t mean whatever you think it means. Not in context. I should know. I was there, in the middle of it.
North Baltimore, near Johns Hopkins
I was living at 2935 N. Calvert St. in Baltimore, two blocks away from the campus of The Johns Hopkins University. I’d finished my undergraduate work there and was now working on a master’s degree while performing alternative service in the Chaplain’s Office at Hopkins. It was during the Vietnam War era, and I’d drawn a 12 in the draft lottery. I’d actually had my preinduction physical exam – the best hearing, off the charts, you wouldn’t believe how good – but didn’t serve in the army. Rather, I’d declared myself to be a conscientious objector to military service and was allowed to perform two years of civilian service, which I did in the Chaplain’s Office.
During that period I often went to Sunday afternoon jazz concerts in the Famous Ballroom. Those concerts, which were sponsored by the Left Bank Jazz Society, were the first time I regularly found myself in a majority black setting. It was during that period that I had my first (and only) LSD trip, which played a crucial, but obscure, role in my work on Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.” However important those things were, this is not about them.
This is about a community I belonged to. That community was not large – most real communities aren’t – and it was about various things. One of them was something called “breaking down monogamy.” Lots of discussions about that. I listened in on some of them, and maybe I even made a remark or three. But, well, rather than try to explain further, perhaps I should just get on with the story.
Burned Out
As I said, I was living at 2935 N. Calvert St. It was a three-floor brownstone that had been divided into six apartments, two on each floor. I lived in the third-floor rear. One evening there was a fire in the building. I forget whether it was on the first or second floor, or perhaps both, but, while fire didn’t make it the third floor, smoke certainly did. And so did firemen. At least one came in through a rear window and stomped in the middle of my turntable. My apartment was a wreck.
I forget just what happened next. But for the sake of getting on with the story, let’s say that a number of people gathered in front of the building and some of my friends were among them. They invited me to sleep at their place for the night. An invitation I gratefully accepted.
The next day me and my friends, the ones I’d stayed with, but others as well, trooped over to my wreck of an apartment and started moving my stuff into their basement, by which I mean the basement of the place where I’d spent the night. For one thing, my stuff had to go someplace, and so did I. Somehow fate had decided that I would live with my friends for a while. Just how fate channeled that decision through us humans, I don’t remember.
So there we were. We got boxes from some place, carried them to my apartment, and filled them with my books, I had more than a few, and records, ditto. That took a lot of heavy boxes, each carried by one person, down two flights of stairs, out the door, around the corner and over a block to Guilford Ave., and then North two blocks. Since my apartment had been furnished, after a rather cheap fashion (student apartment), I didn’t have any furniture. Just my books, records, clothes, dishes, some paintings, and a bit of this that and the other. Not a whole lot of stuff. But it took us awhile, a half day, a day, I don’t remember. How many of us? A half dozen, maybe one or two more. It was drizzling at least part of the day. Beyond that, I can’t recall.
By the end of the day, I was living on Guildford Ave. in Baltimore, MD. I was now breaking down monogamy. Or at any rate, I was right next to the process.
Monogamy, according to the dictionary on my computer, is “the practice or state of having a sexual relationship with only one partner at a time.” That is a minimal definition. More loosely, it is about child-rearing and living arrangements. A monogamous couple lives with their children in a single dwelling unit, an apartment or a single-family home, that’s monogamy. In this sense, monogamy has been the foundation of Western society since forever. From that you may infer that breaking down monogamy has something to do with questioning the foundations of Western society. Breaking down monogamy as it was understood in this particular community was thus a political act.
The Personal is Political
I was part of a community for whom “the personal is political,” as the phrase goes. Here’s what Wikipedia says about that phrase:
In the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s, it was seen as a challenge to the patriarchy, nuclear family and family values. The phrase was popularized by the publication of feminist activist Carol Hanisch's 1969 essay, “The Personal Is Political.” The phrase and idea have been repeatedly described as a defining characterization of second-wave feminism, radical feminism, women's studies, or feminism in general.
I was part of a political community.
You’d probably guessed that, or something like it, when I told you that I was a conscientious objector to military service. This was the Vietnam era. But it was also the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. That counterculture had two strands, broadly considered. There was the anti-war movement, which protested the war in various ways, and there were the hippies, who were in favor of tuning in, which I did (I played in a rock and roll band), turning on (which I did as well), and dropping out, which I never quite managed.
I joined this community through anti-war activity on the Johns Hopkins campus (I had been a member of SDS, Students for a Democratic Society). Those guys had wives and girlfriends. Those women were central to the feminist movement in Baltimore. Among other things, they produced one of the first feminist journals, Women: A Journal of Liberation.
That’s the community I hung out with. Oh, I hung out other places as well, but yes, and looking back, those people were, for lack of a better term, they were my homies. I visited two homes quite frequently, the place where I moved, and another place, I believe it was on the same street, but a couple blocks away. We’d listen to music, get stoned, sometimes we’d dance, but always, always we talked. One thing we talked about was how the women’s movement was a mediating force between the political movement, anti-war but also civil rights (especially in Baltimore), and the cultural, sex, drugs and rock and roll movement.
Breaking down monogamy was about both culture and politics. Why? Because that’s where the family sits. It is both a cultural and a political institution. To question the family, to breakdown monogamy, is to question the whole damn edifice of Western so-called culture. Wham! What was it that Gandhi said when asked what he thought about Western Civilization? “I think it would be a good idea.” That’s what we thought as well. We were trying to make it work.
And thus it came to pass that two families decided to live in one house. I supposed I could give these families fake names, but for some reason I rather like calling them Family Alpha and Family Beta. By living together in one house, Family Alpha and Family Beta became engaged in breaking down monogamy. They took meals together, hung out together in the living room and front parlor, discussed a lot of things together, and... How were household chores distributed between men and women? I don’t remember exactly. But I assume they were more equitably distributed than was conventionally the case. What else did they do together? I suppose that to some limited extent they participated in raising one another kids together. Family Alpha had a boy of about 10 or so while Family Beta had a boy of six months or so. One thing they did NOT do, is swap wives, or swap husbands, depending on your point of view. There was no sexual or romantic adventuring going on.[1] At least not that I was aware of. Who knows what was going on two or three links away from the people I hung out with.
I don’t know what names went on the mortgage and in what roles. It wasn’t any of my business. But it’s my understanding that the Alphas and Betas owned the house jointly.
By entering that home, if only temporarily, I too became engaged in dismantling monogamy. I forget just how I participated in household chores, though I’m not sure how much that should be attributed to breaking down monogamy and how much to simply being a guest. I do remember that I went into a minor panic when I was asked to prepare a salad for an evening meal. Me? A salad? I mean, I’d been cooking for myself for years, but I never made a salad. Anyhow, I managed to rip apart a head of lettuce, do something else as well, slap some dressing on it, and call it a salad. No one complained.
Tommy
While I’m reluctant to name the adults, I can see no harm in calling Family Beta’s son by his name, Tommy. I remember that one day shortly after I’d moved in Mr. Alpha and I were in the front parlor with young Tommy. We’d set up my stereo speakers on the floor, each was about two feet high, and young Tommy was between them in his little rocker. We got a buzz on, started listening to some music, and watched young Tommy rock out.
Now, I don’t actually remember how Tommy reacted, but I’m pretty sure that if he’d complained, Mr. Alpha and I would have at least turned it down. As I recall, the music played on. We might have been listening to Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, perhaps “Woodstock,” “Teach Your Children,” or “Our House.” No, I don’t actually remember that. But I’ve got a vibe, and that’s it. Moreover, since this IS just a story about things that happened long ago and I don’t really remember them all that well, you’ll forgive me if I claim that young Master Thomas was having the time of his life listening to rock and roll while us two boy-men were grinning from ear to ear and passing a joint back and forth.
Somewhat later Tommy and I were on the living room floor. I was playing a pair of bongos. He seemed quite interested. Not that I actually remember that, but if Tommy hadn’t been interested, I don’t see how and why I would have taken the next step. Which was to sit him down in front of the drums, show him how to hit them, and then leave him to explore the drums on his own. Which he did, bop bop bop bop left right left right, pretty much in time. What fun!
Now, that much I DO actually remember. It made a deep impression on me. An infant enjoying himself banging on a drum. That’s important, very.
Finally, there was the time Tommy and I were in the front parlor. He was sitting on the floor playing with his blocks and I was, well, whatever else I was doing, I was watching him. He’d put a square block in his mouth, all the way in, and couldn’t get it out.
He looked anxiously to me. Inside I was going “Yikes!” but outwardly I remained calm, at least I think so. I inserted a finger into his mouth, slowly, gently, and determined that he’d gotten a corner of the block wedged against the roof of his mouth. Somehow, I had to dislodge the block and get it out. Inwardly I was all but panicking. I actually had a crazy idea that I was nowhere near to trying out but I had to think it because what else could I do so I had an image of going in with a very sharp knife and cutting the block to pieces so much pressure sharp blade small mouth clumsy fingers blood blood! so you see an absolutely crazy panic-stricken idea yet somehow I was able to get young Master Thomas to relax his jaw so that I could remove the block.
Whew!
Breaking down monogamy, indeed.
The Mural
I was then, as I am now, an artist. Then I painted with acrylics, psychedelic imagery. Drugs and rock and roll, remember? I forget how the decision was made, but I suspect that somehow Mr. Alpha and I came up with the idea and he got the approval of the other breaking-down-monogamists. I spent a week or so painting a mural on a wall in the front parlor. The ceiling would have been eight or ten feet high, and the mural was probably four feet wide or so.
I don’t have a photo of the mural, nor do I remember much about it. It would have been very colorful, with a wide range of highly saturated colors. But just what it depicted, some surrealistic psychedelic landscape surely, beyond that...well, see that oblong egg-shaped thing with holes, like a distorted reel for a movie, in this drawing (which may be from that period, or shortly after)?
I’m sure there was one of those in it, but it was circular, as circular as I could manage free-handing it. I think that was the dominant image. Probably mountains to the left and right, some water, sky, some magical creatures.
The mural remained for a while after I’d left Baltimore to get a PhD in English (at the State University of New York at Buffalo). I’ve been told that, for a while, there was an annual tour of that neighborhood – just why I can’t imagine – and that mural was on the tour. But eventually it was painted over.
Looking back...
What I miss most are the women, my breaking-down-monogamy women friends. I know, I say very little about them in this essay. But without them, none of these things would have happened. Some things are easier to write about than others.
I still exchange emails with one of the men from that community, the one who took me on that LSD trip. I see Mr. Alpha on Facebook every now and then. But it’s the women I miss the most.
When I think of all the conversations I had in that community, I talked with the women as much, if not more, than I talked with the men. Some of the talk was ordinary social talk. Superficial, but essential. Some of it was about music and art and movies and politics. Some of it was personal.
Thinking about the culture in which I was raised, in which I live, to have such talks with women, but without there being a romantic component in the relationship, that is a bit unusual. Not rare as a hen’s tooth unusual, but not common and routine either. And so the personal becomes political.
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[1] If you do a web search on “breaking down monogamy,” you get a lot of responses, many of them quite recent. The term “polyamory” shows up in many of them. Whatever the phrase suggests down, that’s not what the term implied in that community at that time.
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LATER on March 30: Mr. Alpha read the article and sent me some photos he took of the mural before renovating the house. He didn't get a single image of the whole mural, but I was able to stitch two of his photos together into a single photo:
A little is clipped from the top and somewhat more from the bottom. I'd guess that most of what was clipped from the bottom is that underground sea. The crab would have been whole and there would have been other creatures as well. The color is off. It seems a bit desaturated and the red pigment doesn't seem to have stood up to the sunlight very well. The yellow is washed out as well.
Wonderful memories!
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