Enter the Green Bummer

By John Bruce | Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Editor’s Note: TDR presents the next chapter of “The Dartmouth Conundrum,” a memoir. Some names have been changed, but the events are true.

Larry Burlingame was actually the one person I knew well, or thought I knew well, over the whole four years I was at Dartmouth. Beyond that, Larry was one of the people who took over Parkhurst Hall, just before we both graduated in 1969, and that will be an important part of this narrative.

I met Larry because we were both in Hinman Hall, a horrible new dorm with cinder-block walls down by the Connecticut River, maybe half a mile from the rest of the campus. Hinman has since been demolished, I’m sure without regrets, a Cabrini-Green of student life. I got out of Hinman after my freshman year; Larry stayed there, I think mainly because the place was out-of-the-way, and he was less likely to draw attention to himself. Larry was, shall we say, something of a hippie. I remember him sitting in his room late at night, noticing a car slowly driving along Tuck Mall toward the river dorms. Something reflected dimly off a light bar on the car’s roof. Campus police. “The Green Bummer”, murmured Larry.

But if Larry referred to the campus police as the Green Bummer, you shouldn’t conclude that the term “Green Bummer” referred only to the campus police. The Green Bummer was a synecdoche, a part—the campus police—that referred to the whole, which was what you might call Official Dartmouth. The thought processes that Larry favored didn’t necessarily involve rigorous precision, so at this remove I probably need to engage in some redaction and clarification of what I believe he meant, the sort of thing that he always thought was among my more irritating habits. (And if he reads this, he’ll already have gone ballistic at the word synecdoche.) But, pace Larry, here we go.

The Green Bummer is a constellation of beliefs, obligations, attitudes, and aspirations that center on convocations, commencements, deans, classes, transcripts, grades, disciplinary actions, dining halls, awards, athletic events, the Daily Dartmouth, campus police (of course), fees, fines, professors, parking lots, fraternities, senior societies, the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine, assorted other alumni shakedowns, and licensed merchandise.

I mention licensed merchandise because it seems to have such a prominent place in this culture. One of my early exposures to Dartmouth, in fact, was about 1960, when I worked as a babysitter. The paterfamilias for whom I babysat was a Dartmouth grad. There was a little alcove in his home—it was one of those very WASPy homes with all sorts of inglenooks and built-in bookshelves—that I can only describe as a kind of shrine to Dartmouth. It had a rocking chair with the College seal on it.

The officially licensed rocking chair must have cost a pretty penny: you can order several versions now from the Alumni Magazine; the one with the silk-screened College seal, the cheapest, is $400. A couple of straight chairs and a table with the College seal will set you back $1300 or so. Nobody, it goes without saying, sits in furniture to which the College seal has been applied. It’s meant for ceremonial display in WASPy alcoves, part of the shrines that alumni of a certain type maintain to the College in their homes. I’ve never lived in a place with inglenooks, though, so it’s something I’ve missed out on.

I remember back issues of the Alumni Mag in stacks on the officially licensed table in that guy’s house, along with officially licensed beer steins, ashtrays, and other miscellaneous objets, not to exclude illustrations of Old Dartmouth Hall and the already mentioned Baker Library. There were framed photographs of the paterfamilias in various congratulatory poses with assorted bigshots, after the mode of self-regarding WASPs. This was all, in Larry’s view, part of the Green Bummer.

Much more recently I saw a program on PBS, where a pair of antique dealers visits the homes of the haute bourgeoisie and those who aspire to that station and blesses their artifacts. One couple, clearly thrilled at the visit, displayed their vintage pinball machine—made in only 400 units between 1962 and 1964, value (for insurance purposes) $700—and their armoire, a gift from the wife’s mother, which unfortunately was only a contemporary replica, value (politely) $150—but among the collection, not even mentioned, was a green DARTMOUTH banner, prominently displayed on the wall, the value of the banner $150,000 give or take, not to mention the price of the adolescence spent in artful maneuver and self-denial. For some, it’s the Green Bummer; for others, it’s the sublime jewel of their desire.

I said that Larry was something of a hippie. He came from one of the wealthy university towns near San Francisco, though his father had nothing to do with the school. It was just a very nice place to live. His room was decorated with posters for concerts by the Grateful Dead and the Jefferson Airplane at the Fillmore Auditorium in the city, along with assorted head shop bric-a-brac. If he still has the posters, which he certainly may, they’re worth a bundle. They were probably expensive when he got them. This was one of the points I missed about Larry at the time: he was something of a hippie, but real hippies couldn’t afford Fillmore posters, and they certainly didn’t pay tuition at big-bucks schools like Dartmouth.

I missed that about Larry because it was all new, not just to me, but to everyone. This was 1965, after all. In contrast to Larry, I’d finished high school in Bethesda, Maryland, which was by no means a provincial place, and I traveled in avant-garde student circles there. But Bethesda was a southern outpost of New York intellectual culture, and that meant, at the time, I.F.Stone, Paul Krassner, civil rights, Jules Feiffer, J.D.Salinger, Catch-22, and the early Bob Dylan of the Manhattan clubs. Both sexes wore turtlenecks; the men wore tweeds, the women black tights. Larry, in contrast, was Ken Kesey, Alan Watts, Timothy Leary, City Lights Books, and, of course, Fillmore posters. He favored paisley shirts and bell-bottom jeans. For now, the only other thing I’ll say about him is that his name was actually F. Laurence Burlingame IV. The F stood for Foster.

When I got to college, I learned that Heatherton Bradley was the guy to see about my poetry. At some point I’d switched from being a planless and undisciplined prose writer to a poet. A bad poet. A mutt-like cross between Percy Shelley and T. S.Eliot. I wrote my poems in a little spiral notebook, a medium not conducive to revision, which wouldn’t have helped in any case. My aspiration was actually to be a novelist, but poems were shorter and easier.

Heatherton was the editor of the literary magazine. I got him to read my poems at some point—it must have taken some time, because there were many poems about college by the time he read them. By then I was working on the principle of obscurity: take very personal episodes and discuss them without reference to any understandable context. Ezra Pound, you see, was still alive. Bob Dylan may as well have been his acolyte.

“Your material is so . . . personal,” was Heatherton’s reaction. He put the notebook down perfunctorily. None of it was going to make it into the lit mag. At this remove, I recognize that Heatherton had no vocabulary to describe what I was writing, but to call it “personal” was a little like complaining about the weather by saying “there’s so much . . . oxygen.” He knew my stuff was bad, but he had no way to explain its badness, to himself or anyone else. I knew it was bad, too.

“But do you think there’s any. . . ?” I asked hesitantly.

Heatherton shook his head. “Really,” he said, “you should think about doing something else in life.”

Heatherton was one of the hard-core English students, the ones who went to the department teas and kissed up to the professors. A bunch of them took over a moribund fraternity, the Deke house, and announced they were going to do things according to a new scheme, one that would fix everything that was wrong with the Greek system. It still went belly-up half a dozen years later, but by then, the poets had all gone on to become doctors and lawyers and investment bankers, so it was OK.
Heatherton went to medical school and eventually became a psychiatrist. As far as I can tell, he didn’t keep on with poetry. I dated a clinical psychologist for a while, and she introduced me to some of her psychiatrist colleagues. They were some of the most rigidly conformist people I’d ever met. From what I understand, psychiatrists don’t mess too much with poetry.

I kept on for a while after Heatherton set me straight, thinking I still wanted to be a writer, but he had a point, which I understood. In my ambition to write, the one thing I feared, at a very deep level, was that the aspiration was inauthentic. There are many thousands of people who want to be writers. Almost all of them are fools. They throw good money away to vanity presses and fraudulent agents and contests they can never hope to win; they subscribe to Writer’s Digest. The one thing I didn’t want to do was go through life as that kind of fool.

Other than trying to distill the essence of little moments in my spiral notebook, I didn’t, if I was completely honest with myself, have anything to write about. Turning out a good sentence here and there, a good paragraph, was hardly a sign that I should pursue writing as a career. So, over the course of several years, I resigned myself to the reality that I was no different from all those thousands of other people who thought they wanted to write. At least I could be clear about it and hope for authenticity, if nothing else.

But Larry Burlingame, I’d begun to conclude at around the time I met with Heatherton, was authentic. The real thing. After all, he had the Fillmore posters to prove it.

Enter the Green Bummer

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