Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine - Tom Wolfe and the 1970's

Me, me, me, me, ME. The 1970’s were all about me, so much so that it’s often referred to as the Me Decade. Me. Those Erhard Seminars Training (est), group encounter sessions, all those weird self-realization courses that Tanya Roberts’ character Midge kept signing up for on That 70’s Show, yeah, those classes that threatened Bob’s (Don Stark) self-image as head of household? Oh yes, those est sessions, those “lets talk about me and my feelings,” those things really happened, and apparently, they were quite often as funny as depicted on the show. At least, if Tom Wolfe’s (The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test) Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine is to be believed, the 70’s were a fairly amusing era, a self-realized, self-awakened decade. Mauve Gloves consists of various articles, short stories, and sketches by Wolfe for magazines such as The Critic, New York, and Rolling Stone, and is quite funny, especially if one actually remembers the 70’s.

And speaking of est, Wolfe’s The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening starts inside an est encounter, a focused group some 250-strong, lying on some hotel banquet hall carpet - a wall to wall, high traffic area, and yet still clean – a large group of individuals, focusing and sharing what they’d like to eliminate from their lives with the rest of the group. The obvious, usual negatives came flowing out: stress, self-hatred, laziness, alcoholism, hemorrhoids…hemorrhoids? Did this woman, this attractive, powerful, awakened woman just blurt out to the room that she’d like to eliminate hemorrhoids from her life? Oh, yes, she most certainly did, and Wolfe’s description of her face down on the floor, ridding her life of hemorrhoids, well, it’s amusing enough just picturing this, but Wolfe’s Technicolor narrative is laugh-out-loud-funny.

In the meantime, while the Suffering Hottie was sharing her hemorrhoids with the rest of the est group, and while the National Enquirer (Pornoviolence) was selling copy with weird headlines like “Midget Murderer Throws Girl Off Cliff,” America was still fighting a war in Vietnam, and Wolfe let his readers in on what life was like for a newbie stepping out onto the flight deck of an aircraft carrier for the first time: “This is a skillet!-a frying pan!-a short-order grill!” A skillet smeared with skid marks, and good lord is it noisy - jet engine-noisy - nothing but chaos, a “flaming bazooka assembly line.” And yet, as Wolfe points out, this will all seem normal to the trained newcomer, orderly, even, as John Dowd and Garth Flint appear on deck in their flight suits, heading off for a routine patrol that would end in air combat. Indeed, The Truest Sport: Jousting With Sam and Charlie, is a fairly grim, albeit colorfully-written piece about the air war in Vietnam, with Wolfe capturing the outward bravado displayed by fighter pilots, while revealing that, while confident, the near-superstitious pilots never spoke about the possibility of danger or death, and yet it was always present, lingering in the backs of the pilot’s minds much like a remindful, omnipresent shadow.

Whether it’s a short story about a black athlete struggling with the script of a TV commercial – a script making said athlete appear illiterate when in fact he was quite intelligent and well-spoken, albeit rather dry in the personality department – whether it’s an up and coming baseball player struggling inwardly with a bad script, a glamour girl facing down her hemorrhoids on a hotel floor, or an airborne battle over Vietnam, Wolfe captured a big portion of what the Me Decade was like in Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine. It’s yet another amusing Wolfe chronicle of our recent past, and it’s definitely worth a read.