Levinson, Barry Sixty-Six ISBN 13: 9780767915335

Sixty-Six - Hardcover

9780767915335: Sixty-Six
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Welcome to Baltimore, 1966, a quiet Eastern city of row houses, blue-collar neighborhoods, and burgeoning suburbs, a place as yet untouched by the upheavals of 1960's America.

A place where everything is about to change.

What was once so simple now seems complicated. Delicatessens that served delicious slabs of pastrami are now serving sprouts. Song lyrics are angry and raw. Acid is being dropped and the normal life paths—school, marriage, a safe career—seem irrelevant. Or, worse, boring.

Even friendship is more complicated.

As society's shifts begin to take hold, the people at the heart of Sixty-Six know they have something to hold on to: each other . . . Bobby Shine, an intern at the local television station; the soulful and rebellious Neil; Ben Kallin, the "King of the Teenagers"; Turko and Eggy, comic philosophers extraordinaire. They spend their time together hanging out at the Hilltop Diner, wisecracking, coping, falling in and out of love, planning for a glorious future.

As the decade explodes, however, these young people are caught between the staid and traditional values of the fifties, and the confusion, turbulence, and exhilaration of the sixties. As the fighting in Vietnam escalates and the antiwar movement at home reaches fever pitch, their insular world will be rocked by violence and tragedy. As the growing Civil Rights movement sweeps across the country, they will see the best and worst of their parents’ generation. And as the hippie movement rockets across the cultural landscape, they will both embrace and be torn apart by the new freedoms afforded them. Together, they will have to confront as bewildering and wrenching a set of transformations as America has ever faced_—and each one of them will leave 1966 changed forever.

Barry Levinson has moved us with such superb films as Rain Man, Good Morning, Vietnam, The Natural, and, of course, the much-loved Diner. With the same humor, depth of insight, affection for his characters, and glorious dialogue that make his movies so memorable, Levinson has written a first novel of enormous heart, a book that takes us back to a time in our history when everything was at stake and nothing would ever be the same.

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Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
One

Neil lived up the street from me, from the time we used to live in the old neighborhood--with row houses that went on for miles, to the end of the horizon--and then even after we moved to the new neighborhood, where there were three-story wood homes covered in shingle, and front lawns with hedges, and big trees that seemed to stretch on forever.

My first awareness--my first memory of Neil--was somewhere around the age of three. I had cut the index finger on my left hand very badly, and it was taped up in an elaborate bandage. Neil had cut the index finger on his right hand, and it too was taped in a very large bandage. My cut was vertical and ran the length of my finger. His was horizontal and cut into the bone. We were lucky in one respect--I was right-handed and he was left-handed. So there we were, two three-year-olds who liked to duel, using our bandaged fingers as swords. On occasion, if I blocked Neil's finger thrusts too strenuously, I felt a little bit of a stinging sensation that ran down the whole length of my arm and straight up to my brain.

We moved to suburbia when I was six. There, we lived almost parallel to one another, separated by one block. I would run out my front door, down the steps, across the front walkway, jump across the evergreen bush, across the street through the neighbor's front yard, zigzag around the back of their garage, watching out for the clothesline, through the alley, through the back of another house, around the front, across Main Avenue, up Neil's walk and then finally his brick steps. It was about a minute and thirty seconds, depending on ground conditions. Sometimes, if it rained, the little puddles that I had to sidestep slowed me down.

Neil was six weeks older than me. Those weeks separated us the most in our early lives--he was able to start the first grade in February, and I had to wait until the following September. Because of that, we never attended the same class. He started junior high and high school before I did, and then, because of those six weeks, ultimately he was drafted for Vietnam and I was not. Six little weeks.

Neil and I saw each other almost every day for at least sixteen years. Even when we were sick, we still found a way to play together. We both came down with the flu one time and played tic-tac-toe over the telephone. We each had a tic-tac-toe grid with numbered boxes--upper left was a 1, upper middle a 2, upper right a 3, middle left a 4, and so on.

As soon as our mothers were out the door, we got on the phone and the games began.

"O on 6."

"X on 3."

"O on 9."

My mother had a fit when she came home later that day. She was trying to call the house and couldn't get through for four hours.

"How could you tie up the line like that?"

Logic was on my side. "It's free, Ma. They don't charge to call a block."

"Someone could have been run over or something and I'd never have got through. Tic-tac-toe on the phone! How high is your fever?"

"I don't know. I'm winning 138 games to 96."

"Get the thermometer."

Then there's a gap.

I can't remember how long the flu lasted; I don't know whether we ever played tic-tac-toe on the phone again.

I do remember that, in school, I always wanted to write "5/5/55" at the top of my paper. The entire spring, I looked forward to May 5, 1955, and writing "5/5/55." But I never did. I got sick and missed school that day. I actually tried to hide the fact that I was sick. I got dressed, thinking 5/5/55 the whole time. I came down to have breakfast, and knew I had a fever. I even started shaking at the table the way you do when your temperature gets high. I tried to make as if I was just cold, but my grandmother immediately knew something was wrong. I saw the hand reaching out to feel my forehead. I tried to block her, but I couldn't. Then I heard the words, those terrible words: "Oh my God, he's burning up." She looked at my mother. "He's burning up."

I could see 5/5/55 slipping away. I put my own hand to my forehead and said, "No, your hands are cold," but I could see my mother wasn't buying it.

She stared at me across the table. "His eyes look glassy."

That's when you know you're in trouble, when they talk about you in the third person. "His eyes." Goodbye 5/5/55.

Freddie Krauss got blown up at the gas station after school on 5/5/55. Freddie was three years younger than me. What happened was, some gas main exploded up at the Texaco station, which was almost three blocks from my house, and Freddie was the first to go and investigate. He quickly wormed his way through the confused spectators and went right up to the scene of the blast. There was a secondary explosion, and Freddie was blown into the air and suffered a fractured skull. He survived, with just a little scar by his temple where they put in a metal plate. The explosion was so powerful that the shock waves shook my house three blocks away, on 5/5/55.

They say it was a miracle that Freddie survived the blast. Some people said he was actually blown as high as the Texaco station sign. He came down over twenty feet from the actual spot of the explosion. There'll always be a point of contention whether he was blown as high as that sign or not. You couldn't see him clearly, they said, because there was so much dust in the air. But the pages from his notebook came floating down all over the street.

He was just a little crazy after that, but always lucky. He got a Corvette when he was in high school and went racing on Route 29, at over 120 miles an hour, when he lost control of the car. There was nothing left of his Corvette, just little fiberglass pieces sprinkled across the countryside. Paramedic trucks were all over the highway, lights flashing. A low fog hung over the wooded area where the car disintegrated. It looked like the scene of a tragedy. But Freddie stepped out of the night mist with nothing more than a broken finger. His pinkie finger. He held it up to show everyone. Freddie immediately became a legend. He was the Evel Knievel of our neighborhood, the Houdini of disaster.

There was always a sense of awe when you spoke about Freddie. When I heard the story of him being blown up, I tried to visualize it in my mind. Was it like someone being shot out of a cannon? The image I always had was Freddie just floating over the Texaco station sign like some kind of kite. Maybe that's because they said he had a red windbreaker on. Then I wondered how long he was in the air. How long can you stay in the air? Of course, I had a high temperature, and when you have that kind of fever, you have a tendency to hallucinate anyway. I remember those youthful fevers and that dreamlike feeling that went along with them. And I remember that when you had high temperatures back then, for some reason you were always getting baths in alcohol. Not that you actually got into a bathtub, but alcohol was applied to your body . . . or was it vinegar?

So those are my memories of my childhood with Neil and Freddie Krauss . . . and 5/5/55. Most of all, I remember that 5/5/55 was an extremely depressing day, because I knew that on 6/6/66 I would no longer be in school, and therefore that date wouldn't have nearly the same significance.
Two

When 6/6/66 came along, I was still in school--in my next to last year at the University of Baltimore. We didn't have an exam, so there was no need to write "6/6/66" on a piece of paper for any reason. But while the date passed without being documented, I couldn't have been more wrong about its lack of significance. It was, in fact, the most influential day in my first twenty-four years of life. It was on that day that I decided I wasn't going to complete law school. I was not going to be a lawyer.

The evening of 6/6/66 I talked about my decision with the guys at the Hilltop Diner. Ben leaned in when I told him the news, his eyes wide open, checking to see if I was bullshitting him.

I was waiting for him to start a riff on me, put me down, give me some hard knocks--Ben Kallin was famous for that. When you opened yourself up to Ben you always had to take your life in your hands. He'd find whatever weakness was there and belittle you unmercifully. And yet he was a great friend. He would say the most offensive things and somehow you could never get mad at him. He'd flash that smile, pull on his lower eyelid, and say, "You're me." None of us knew where the phrase came from. He'd made it up. But we all knew what it meant. It was a reference to the fact that he was the best. And he was right. For much of my youth he was the coolest, the most hip, the guy we most admired. He was the guy.

From ages fourteen to twenty, his glory years, Ben ruled. Girls found him incredibly attractive. He was voted best-looking in a high school fraternity contest. He was a good athlete and there was always talk that he was getting a scholarship to the University of Maryland in lacrosse, although that never happened. Ben was all about confidence and sarcasm, and during those glory years he was, without question, proclaimed "King of the Teenagers."

As he sat across from me in the booth, he was telling me some of the details of his upcoming wedding plans. At the end of the summer he was getting married to Janet Rawlings, a fairly attractive redhead who was in my senior year at Forest Park High School. I never knew her that well. She was very big in the drama department, turning up in all the school plays. I'm not sure if she was any good or not because she always seemed to be stuck with the role of playing a seventy-five-year-old woman. She would wear a fake gray wig and totter around with a cane, speaking with some kind of screechy voice: "Nooooow boooys . . ." This much I know to be true, no teenager can play a seventy-five-year-old woman. None. Ever. And now Janet was about to play the part of Mrs. Ben Kallin.
From Publishers Weekly:
Film director Levinson (Diner; Rain Man; etc.) returns to Baltimore in a rambling debut about high school buddies trying to cope with grown-up life. It's 1966, and narrator Bobby has decided to ditch law school for a low-paying job at the local TV station, much to his girlfriend's dismay. Enigmatic Neil has declined a deferment and is heading to Vietnam. Ben, one-time "King of the Teenagers," is marrying girlfriend Janet because he's losing his hair and Janet's father has offered him a job in the Cadillac showroom. Odd-couple pals Turk and Eggy are 1950s holdovers marveling at organic foods and loose hippie chicks. The boys help each other deal with it all by meeting at the diner to retell stories they've all heard before. Though Ben presents these anecdotes as sidesplitting or life changing, most come across as pretty dull stuff: a kid plays a pinball machine and doesn't win; the zany diner guys drive a car in reverse and hit some trash cans; Bobby makes up a TV traffic report and gets away with it. From these stories Bobby draws conclusions that are as pedestrian as the episodes themselves: "when we're young we understand so little about what we are"; "[l]ike tears, laughter often comes when you least expect it"; and "destiny is what we make it." It's clear that Levinson is shooting for elegy and wisdom, but even though the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement are mined for drama and relevance, readers will find mostly tedium and platitudes.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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  • PublisherBroadway
  • Publication date2003
  • ISBN 10 076791533X
  • ISBN 13 9780767915335
  • BindingHardcover
  • Number of pages288
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