The Returned: A New Rip Van Winkle

By Stefan Kanfer

The very village was altered; it was larger and more populous. There were rows of houses which he had never seen before, and those which had been his familiar haunts had disappeared. Strange names were over the doors--strange faces at the windows--everything was strange...the very character of the people seemed changed. There was a busy, bustling disputatious tone about it...A fellow...was haranguing vehemently about rights of citizens--elections--members of Congress --liberty...and other words which were a perfect Babylonish jargon...

WASHINGTON IRVING set his story in the late 18th century, when it took 20 years and an American Revolution to bring about such alterations. With contemporary efficiency and such time-saving devices as the Viet Nam War, change now occurs at quintuple speed. The returning P.O.W.s have been away an average of four years; it is long enough to make them a new breed of Van Winkle, blinking at a world that can hardly believe how profoundly it has changed. Nor will it really believe until it sees itself with the returning P.O.W.s' fresh, hungry eyes.

The little things are what the ex-prisoner will notice first, phenomena that civilians have long since absorbed. That local double bill, for example: Suburban Wives and Tower of Screaming Virgins. Four years ago, it would have been restricted to a few downtown grind-houses. Today, blue-movie palaces are as much a part of the suburbs as the wildly proliferating McDonald'ses. Shaking his head, the new Van Winkle heads for a newsstand. Here, there is still more catching up to do. A copy of Look? No way. Life? No more. How about a copy of Crawdaddy, Screw, Money, Rolling Stone? Rip has heard of none of them. He looks, dazed, at the roster of more undreamt of magazines: Oui, Penthouse, World, Ms. "Pronounced Miz," says the proprietor who starts to elucidate, then drops the subject and the magazine. Who, after all, could explain Gloria Steinem? Ah, but in this roiled world a few bedrocks remain. There it is--the good old Saturday Evening Post. No, it is the good old new old Saturday Evening Post, risen from the grave and swathed in thrift-shop clothing, an item of that rising phenomenon, nostalgia.

Every age has enjoyed a peek in the rear-view mirror.

But in the last few years, total recall has become almost a way of life. Rip examines magazines devoted to trivia, recalling the names of Tarzan's co-stars and the Lone Ranger's genealogy. He sees ads for Buster Keaton festivals and even for Ozymandian musicals like Grease, celebrating the vanished glories of '50s rock 'n' roll. The stranger pushes on; nostalgia--at preposterous prices--peers at him from shop windows. Fashion bends backward with shaped suits and long skirts, wide-brimmed hats, ubiquitous denims and saddle shoes. He has, alas, missed miniskirts and hot pants. He is just in time to see almost all women in long pants. Well, why not? But men in high heels?

He peers in the window of a unisex shop, and then, holding fast to the corner of a building to maintain his balance, he seeks stability at a furniture store. Surely this window will yield a glimpse of the familiar. After all, what is furniture but chairs, tables--and waterbeds? It is time, he feels, to cross the street.

Jesus freaks are gathered at the corner, mixing freely with other louder groups. They carry the perennial banners of militancy, each inscribed with the device, Liberation. Over it are the words Gay, Black, Women's, Chicano and People's. These are the remnants of a great tidal wave of protest that broke in Rip's absence, still sporadically coursing through the streets and campuses. The year 1968 was at once its crest and ebb. Rip was gone when Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis and when 172 cities went up in smoke, when 3,500 were injured and 27,000 arrested. He was gone when Bobby Kennedy was murdered two months later, and when two months afterward, the city of Chicago seemed to become the epicenter for every disaffected demonstrator in America.

Perhaps there was something in the global ionosphere that year, something that still clings like smoke in an empty room. Without benefit of an unpopular war to trigger protest, Paris also was torn by civil disturbances; so were Mexico City and Tokyo. Even in Prague, the people rose up --only to be pushed into submission by armored tanks. Today all protest seems, somehow, to be an echo of that hopeful, dreadful time; but to the new listener there is no resonance, only the flat remnants of unassimilated rage.

A striped pole catches Rip's eye. He settles into a chair--only to hear a fresh diatribe from the barber--who now calls himself a stylist. Once, long hair was the exclusive property of the hippies; they have gone but the hair has remained. Now all the straights sport it. The barber talks on about a world gone into reverse. Nixon has toured Communist China, which is now in the U.N. The Empire State Building is no longer the tallest building in the world. The World Trade Center is. Eighteen-year-olds can vote. The New York Giants will soon play in New Jersey. In the American League, pitchers will no longer bat.

The stock market, Rip learns, has hit 1000, yet the go-go funds and glamour conglomerates are a sere and withered group. Unfamiliar newsworthies are summoned to his attention: Mary Jo Kopechne, Clifford Irving, Arthur Bremer, Vida Blue, Archie Bunker, Angela Davis, Daniel Ellsberg. There are new countries leaping up from the headlines, nations born while he was away:

Bangladesh, Botswana and Qatar. There was another country, too, called Biafra. Like those radioactive elements produced in a laboratory, it was destined for a brief, intense half-life before it vanished forever. But the eyes of its starving children still stare from old magazines--and in the memory.

His hair cropped, or rather, styled--at absurd prices--Rip retires to a bar for refreshment and intelligence. The TV set is in color now, and there is something called Cable that makes the reception better--although for what purpose is not so clear. True, there are no more cigarette commercials, and some programs called Sesame Street and The Electric Company are brightening the day for children. But for adults, it is, as always, lame adventure series and innocuous sitcoms, the halt leading the bland. There are fewer talk shows and more movies made expressly for TV--all of them, it seems, starring James Farentino and George Peppard.

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.

According to the poet, then, we are all behind bars --locked inside the jail of mortality. No matter how bitter his past, the prisoner must find a way to leave the personal desert for the world of common humanity. But how can one enter that world when there are no doors? How can one "praise" what one cannot understand?

"Surely I must be exaggerating," Rip thinks. "Why try to understand it all in one gulp? Why try to overtake history? Start slowly, read the leading fiction bestseller. Escape for a while." He picks up Jonathan Livingston Seagull. The story of a what? Of a goddam bird? His eye roves to the self-help books. Here's one: Primal Scream. He tries it...

The air is cool in the police car, and the cops, although jittery, relax when they see that their passenger is unarmed. They have their own stories to tell, of new ambush attacks, and of strong desires for shotguns to repel something they call the Black Liberation Army. But after they listen to their passenger's story, there is a quiet in the car, and there is no further attempt to educate the new Rip Van Winkle. There is no attempt to go to the station. Rip is, suddenly, a free man all over again, and stuttering, he tries to find praise. Praise for his country, for an America that, despite all the staggering changes, somehow is still America. There is, finally, only one way. "Where to?" asks the driver. Rip looks out the window for a long, lonely moment trying to remember something. "Home," he says. -Stefan Kanfer

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