The relationship went quickly nowhere, with little to show for it other than a reading list that included Rand’s novels and selected nonfiction. These carried what was at the time fairly provocative titles, like The Virtue of Selfishness. It was a philosopy ready made for the coming malaise of the 70s, and a precursor to the rightward turn the country would take in the 80s.

I was already well into by the start of classes at the old Purdue Extension building on 38th Street. The campus, across from the Fairgrounds and next door to the old Burger Chef Manager’s school would soon be acronymed out of existence by the combined IUPUI a year later.

It wasn’t long before I noticed mimeographed notices gracing bulletin boards throughout the campus:

In a rut? Try Objectivism, the fresh new approach to life!

I wouldn’t say I was in a rut, but I wasn’t sure about much of anything. Manson, Altamont, and Kent State were recent memories, Bobby Kennedy and MLK were not long in their graves, and people were dying by the thousands in Vietnam. A lot of the old ideas were starting to seem a little worn around the edges. And out of high school and away from parental influence, I was looking around. As were many, many others.

And it was hard to be liberal in Indianapolis in the 70s! Despite a long history of electing moderates, including a young Indianapolis mayor named Dick Lugar, announcing your family’s longtime affiliation with the Democratic party was a sure way to draw harassment from the revolving K-12 roster of schoolboy bullies.

Rand’s views, trending well into the conservative range, made it possible to be both conservative and a rebel. So I pulled one of the the neatly scissored little tabs off the bottom of the page, and blew a dime on a phone call from the lovely hardwood phone booths in the main building.

“Hello?”

And nearly hung up. The voice at the other end was hushed, as though someone were listening in on us. There was a vague sort of suspicion in his voice. I held onto the reciever,  and said I was interested in learning more about Objectivism. I found myself talking quietly, too…

“And you are familiar with the works and ideas of Ayn Rand?”

He pronounced it AYE-n, as opposed to “Ann,” which is how my old girlfriend had pronounced it. Score another thing she didn’t know crap about. I outlined my reading thus far. He went silent for a long moment, as though weighing my fitness.

I seemed to pass the litmus test, because he told me about a group that met on Fridays to listen to recorded lectures, and gave me directions to an apartment on the far west side of the I-465 beltway. I arranged a stand-in for my Friday night shift at the old Central Hardware on Shadeland Avenue and rolled onto I-465.

In those days of thirty-cent gas,the fifty mile circuit of the beltway was a great way to unwind. I took it north, rode it on around past the place where the Pyramids were under construction, and exited just before the I-70 interchange.

Arriving late, I found myself on the periphery of the group, next to the host, a med student at the IU med center downtown. He handed me a Miller longneck, the first of a steady supply. The mysterious mimeograph machine had been kept busy; the little notices were apparently all over both the Purdue and IU extensions, as well as the Butler U. campus. The apartment’s little living room was filled with people in the couches and mismatched chairs: university students and misfits, writers and artists, and another group, that I call the outliers, people whose nature fell outside the usual sampling range.

The notices were the work of one such outlier, the man with the hushed whisper, a small time entrepreneur involved in various multi-level marketing schemes. His latests was a line of costume jewelry that you glued to your earlobes, fingers, cheeks, whatever. A few years ahead of his time, in retrospect… When he wasn’t involved in his various business ventures and recruiting followers, he wrote letters to the editors of local newspapers on abortion (immoral but legal), the draft (also immoral but also illegal), and anything else that crossed his mind as important.

Among them was another outlier, who ate his pizza two pieces at a time, mooshed together cheese-to-cheese, who had joined something called the Libertarian Party. It would be easy to call them wackos, but they were looking for something too, in places farther off and more unusual than university bulletin boards.

It may seem odd to think of an ultra-capitalist, ultra conservative philosophy in Marxist terms, but the similarity is there. Marx took a principle from the philosopher Hegel, who cited the existence of a thesis, an existing condition, that turn spawns its opposition, the antithesis. This in turn creates a new thesis, and the process starts over again.

But that’s how it turned out.

NEXT: New Consensus