Writers Guild Office Boy 1971 (xxiv)

In early 1971, the outside accountant who handled the annual financial statement filing and annual financial auditing for the Writers Guild, a guy with glasses and in his early to late 40s named Mike, started to appear daily in the Writers Guild office. Mike was a male chauvinist who, in the early 1970s, still referred to women as “broads.” But he was still hip enough to have developed a way of living, doing independent freelance accounting for liberal non-profit clients like the Writers Guild, that enabled him to avoid having to spend his Monday to Friday days chained to a desk from 9 to 5 in a conventional accounting firm or accounting department corporate office, dressed up in a suit and tie.

But by the time I met Mike he was cynical about everything and too cynical about people to believe that they were capable of ever changing society. In addition, Mike was too old to have spent his college years among people who had smoked pot instead of just drinking beer and booze. So he didn’t feel any kind of identification with people who were involved in the Beat Generation subculture, the 1960s hippie subculture or the early 1970s anti-war counter-culture. But when Mike wished to take a long break from his financial auditing work at the Guild office, he would, occasionally, spend time having some long conversations with me about the state of the world in early 1971.