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LEONARD MICHAELS
up with his girl friend. He wasn't nearly as narcissistic as other
men I knew in the fifties. I knew one who, before picking up his
dates, ironed his dollar bills and powdered his testicles. And
another who referred to women as "cockless wonders" and used
only their family names-- for example, "I'm going to meet Gold–
berg, the cockless wonder." Many women thought he was ex–
tremely attractive and became his sexual slaves. Men didn't like
him.
I had a friend who was dragged down a courthouse stairway,
in
San Francisco, by her hair. She'd wanted to attend the House
Un-American hearings. The next morning I crossed the Bay Bridge
to join my first protest demonstration. I felt frightened and em–
barrassed. I was bitter about what had happened to her and the
others she'd been with. I expected to see thirty or forty people
like me, carrying hysterical placards around the courthouse until
the cops bludgeoned us into the pavement. About two thousand
people were there . I marched beside a little kid who had a bag of
marbles to throw under the hooves of the horse cops. His mother
kept saying, "Not yet, not yet." We marched all day. That was the
end of the fifties.
Marge Piercy
THROUGH THE CRACKS
I.
A protracted adolescence, a foreshortened perspective
I think I have some notion how growing up in the fifties
compared with growing up in the sixties, because I arranged to
have two adolescences, one at the normal age, and one again in the
sixties, in SDS. Growing up in the fifties: I never could, exactly.
Part of maturing is strengthening a sense of I as an identity and a
strong project, and then blending that into some larger We. Being
