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Not all movies are made for the tube, announces a defensive film buff down at the other end of the bar. He tells of the emerging genres: black films with superheroes carpet bombing the inner cities; hetero, homo-and bi-sexual hits; Andy Warhol spectaculars that may yet replace Seconal; and of course, the constantly refilled pornucopia.
Yet films can still provide comfort for the weary and overburdened. Rip learns that the stalwarts have not toppled. Gregory Peck, Paul Newman, John Wayne, Steve McQueen are impervious to criticism; throw a rock at them and it still produces sparks. As for the theater, that too has its enduring endearing qualities. There are laments for the passing grandeur of the now tacky Broadway; butter and egg musicals, and Neil Simon comedies still pull in the theater parties. Save for the new nudity, the visitor might never have been away.
Rip wanders from the bar in search of nourishment. Next door is a restaurant; it is not until he examines the menu that he sees the words "health foods"—and by then it is a little late to run. On the shelves are strange labels: Granola, mung beans, Tiger's Milk, lecithin, all at nonsensical prices. Vitamin E, he learns, is expected to cure everything but the common cold; Vitamin C takes care of that. Adelle Davis has become the Brillat-Savarin of the counterculture. Her self-help books beckon from the paperback rack: Let's Get Well, Let's Have Healthy Children, Let's Eat Right To Keep Fit.
Let's not, mutters the ex-prisoner. Abandoning his pepup and soy derivative, he pushes onward to a record store. His favorites have quite literally passed on. Judy Garland, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix—all killed by various ODs. The Beatles? Fragmented. The unheard of Woodstock? While he was gone it was born, matured, grew senile and became a comic epitaph on an old emotion. Some stalwarts remain here too: Streisand, Elvis Presley, Joan Baez, The Stones. But who are the Partridge Family? Cheech and Chong? Dr. Hook and The Medicine Show?
Fighting off a syncope, Rip flees to a bookstore. He is just in time for the revisionist historians. When Rip left the U.S. the faint afterglow of Kennedy magic was still warm to the touch. Then they called it charisma. Now they call it Sha-melot. Such books as Henry Fairlie's The Kennedy Years and David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest sound the knell for the '60s and its leaders. The returnee has missed the spate of Concerned Books: Soul On Ice, Deschooling Society, The Whole Earth Catalog—when Rip left, earth was only dirt—plus almost every float in Norman Mailer's Mr. America Pageant. Lose a few, win a few. He has also missed Love Story, Myra Breckenridge, The Sensuous Woman. He browses through the current paperbacks; words rise up and greet him like so much Urdu: ecology, software, encounter groups, moon rocks, body language, future shock, acupuncture, transcendental meditation, deep zone therapy. His trembling hands try the poetry shelf, but the words of Auden seem as odd as the day he has just lived:
In the deserts of the heart
let the healing fountain start, In the prison of his days
teach the free man how to praise.