by Dean Kuipers
Dad’s phone call made it grossly clear just how much of myself I’d been pouring into this drama. I had spent almost two years reporting on the struggle over this park, and I was so focused on the characters and their power relationships with one another I had forgotten that part of everyone’s motivation was to maintain their relationship to the park itself. Every night I saw the same people there—moms pushing strollers, drug dealers, basketball players, punks, poets, homeless people—some of them people who had gotten their heads bashed like me fighting to keep this park open at night and maintain the slimmest connection to their big-S Selves, the Selves that formed part of the overall neighborhood of dirt and trees and gulls. Of course I had been mauled trying to defend the park: it was both land under threat and the kind of political action Dad hated. That was a fight I could not resist.
When I got to New York City in 1987, Alphabet City seemed to tremble with rage. There were loads of empty and bent buildings east of Avenue A, leaning and wobbling and shucking bricks like so many towers of Pisa. Blocks of the bombed-out neighborhood were occupied as squats, festooned with power cords and garden hoses strung building to building and punctuated by the occasional subsistence garden. I lived for a while in a sweat-equity building on East Tenth between B and C that had been homesteaded by the proto-punk hippie band the Fugs, and was formerly the poet Ed Sanders’s Peace Eye Bookstore. I worked for the Fugs photographer Lanny Kenfield at his studio there; he had a giant twenty-foot-long German Velox camera that took up half a floor. My roommate, Brian, and I lived downstairs and could see right into Lanny’s studio through the heavy, ancient planking in the ceiling.
Many of the artists I knew were on a war footing. Lydia Lunch came over one day and urged me to read a typewritten manuscript of what became David Wojnarowicz’s book Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration, and for me that book revealed a truth about what lay under all the rotting buildings in Manhattan. I had come to New York because my ideas about nature and the church and the function of art made me a problem to my rural family back home. Wojnarowicz, like Lunch and so many others, had fled for his life. Wojnarowicz tore open this alienation and inhabited it at a cellular level. He claimed it. New York was full of outcasts looking for a place to be free, but he was also queer, and sick, and he exposed a savagery at the heart of the country. As more and more of my neighbors and friends grew intensely ill and died of HIV/AIDS, we all watched the government and mainstream culture sanction their deaths, blaming them for their own illness. The rivers that bathe the island of Manhattan drew out the heat and kept it from descending into open street fighting, but that could only go on for so long. Sitting in the Odessa diner, I read from Wojnarowicz’s pages: “I wake up every morning in this killing machine called america and I’m carrying this rage like a blood filled egg and there’s a thin line between the inside and the outside a thin line between thought and action and that line is simply made up of blood and muscle and bone.”
Wojnarowicz wrote about flying his motorcycle into that place in the sky where the air itself would receive him and he could disappear. In his writing, all the boundaries became as thin as eggshell. Under enough pressure, dirt and sky could become blood as easy as anything.
I spent my evenings covering meetings with strident housing advocates at war with real estate developers eager to convert the ’hood into pricey condos. The park was the symbol of the resistance. At least once a week I’d have to wake up a homeless person who had stolen my motorcycle cover to use as a tent. I saw it there in the middle of Dinkinsville, spraypainted with “D-E-A-N” in giant block letters, and I waded in among the tents saying, “Hello? I’m back to get my motorcycle cover.” None of the campers ever gave me any grief.
A writer named Bill Weinberg introduced me to the Earth First! Journal, where I first read about the FBI infiltration of the radical Earth First! movement in Arizona, and I immediately flew out there to talk to the target of that investigation, the Earth First! co-founder Dave Foreman, for Spin magazine. These were people putting their bodies in the way of logging and mining and development and dams, people who dismantled machinery in order to protect the last remaining wild places; those places were so deeply a part of the fabric of who I was that I had to know more about who was doing it. The same year as the park riot, 1988, agents of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society had sunk Iceland’s whaling fleet in Reykjavik Harbor, and I had begun to dedicate myself to reporting on this radical cohort. I started following a huge mobilization to save the coastal redwoods of California that would really kick off in 1990 with the car bombing of the activists Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney. I sat in the park under the elms reading Bill Devall and George Sessions’s primer, Deep Ecology, and I saw the basic conflict of the streets being the lost contact with the living earth that lay beneath.
The park was never a dangerous place, to me, until the police moved in during July and August 1988 to impose a one A.M. curfew. On August 6, the neighborhood erupted in bloody street fighting in which bony punks in painted leather jackets and old babushkas teamed up against over four hundred berserk cops. It was the English enclosure movement all over again: cops who had removed their badges or covered them with black tape were taking away access to the only bit of public dirt left open to the night, and, for that and a million other reasons good and bad, residents exploded with fury. I watched a Ukrainian grandma smacking wild-eyed policemen on the head with her handbag, screaming, “Shame on you!” The New York Times ran an editorial titled “Yes, a Police Riot.”
While I was out reporting for Downtown, a girlfriend from Kalamazoo and I were overrun by a cordon of police. As they shoved us in the back with sticks and told us to move on down St. Mark’s Place, pushing us away from the park, a couple of them said some racist and nasty things to my girlfriend, who was black. When I turned to explain I was a reporter, the police surged forward and pinned me down on my back in the middle of the street and pounded me, while the sharp hooves of police horses danced within inches of my head. One of them punched or kicked me in the balls. It’s hard to pull out your reporter’s notebook when the constables are smashing you in the face. While my girlfriend looked on with her hands over her mouth, a cop stepped up behind her and clubbed her on the back of the head, dropping her to the concrete. She got up with an oozy head gash, and I was left with a spreading purple horror in my chest that looked like death. They didn’t arrest me. I guess we were lucky to get up and hobble away, but we were even luckier that Clayton Patterson—the legendary Lower East Side video artist who famously makes his own hats—happened to be on the same street and got most of it on tape.
The whole thing gave me a crazy sense of belonging. The thin line had been crossed, the inside had become the outside, and I was exactly where I needed to be: beaten bloody, filthy, impoverished, a jean jacket for a winter coat, one pair of leaky running shoes, finding love in the trenches, defending a patch of dirt. A lot of nights I was in some squatter’s pad talking housing strategy while their kids did homework, or I was meeting with other reporters at Downtown’s tiny offices or at one of the poet Allen Ginsberg’s three apartments on Twelfth Street as he tried to transform the rage in the streets into meaningful and peaceful action. The struggle was embodied. It was the Paris Commune of 1968, but with shittier wine.
I sent copies of the stories I wrote to Dad and also a letter, in which I explained I was trying to be “part of the solution” to these issues, but he didn’t reply. Years later, I would find that he had saved them, carefully filing them away.
It was easy to see that the Ukrainian and Puerto Rican families and the poets and punks who lived in the tenements would get pushed off Manhattan by dreaded yuppies (my Spin editor and mentor, Legs McNeil, was then writing a very funny satirical book called Yuppie Like Me). I was one of the people fighting back. I saw the park as habitat. But what was I doing to take care of my own family? Nothing. I had abandoned my family back in Michigan. I was shoulder to shoulder with strangers getting billy club
bed and trampled by horses and bombed with beer bottles and M-80s over a piece of land no one in my Michigan life had ever even seen. To this day, none of them except my mom have been to New York City. But here was Bruce, my actual father, who was making a bid for renewed life by proffering a chunk of feral Michigan swamp, and I was turning my back on him.
Maybe Dad and I were the same: we could relate to people only through a piece of land. If he wanted to renew a relationship to me, I needed him to drive out to New York and talk to me, to take an interest in my life. Not laugh at it. But he couldn’t do that. He didn’t see love naturally residing in himself or in us as a family; he saw it waiting out there, always separated from the things that threatened him, in a remote piece of dirt. And I wasn’t about to go see him, either. I’d rather pitch in on this fight over Tompkins Square Park.
During the summer of Dad’s phone call, the quasi-permanent homeless encampment had been routed out of the park, evidence that bigger changes were imminent in the neighborhood, and the land felt haunted. The ungrassed dirt shone through, soil packed by about three hundred years of immigrant boots. For the community that had been camped there for the previous several years, relatedness was certainly a function of the land; without it, the community was forcibly unraveled.
This idea of relatedness had become part of my obsession with assessing habitat. When I sat in the park at night, I thought of everything I saw as an ecology of relations. The people who hung out there. Pigeons. Buildings. How were love and families made out of that? It seemed more and more clear to me that love happened in a place. It might even be a function of place. It didn’t just involve person meeting person but also the night sky and trees and crows and taxis. Did that mean Dad was right to trust place above all else? How were nonhuman elements involved? If love needed place-ful-ness in which to happen, did the rest of our emotions and our minds themselves also need place-ful-ness?
Was the structure of our minds and our fragile sanity actually a product of the material world, an amalgam of parks and dreams and graffiti and a plenary of consciousness?
I was an avid reader on ecology since my middle teens, caught up in the excitement of the environmental movement that I’d witnessed changing Michigan. When I was about six or seven, my mother took a photo of me holding a cardboard sign I’d made that said stop pollution, and ecology was a hot topic in school. I’d come across a 1961 essay titled “The Role of the Nonhuman Environment,” by the psychoanalyst Harold Searles. In it, Searles opined that good mental health required a “mature relatedness” with both people and the environment around us. The psyche, he said, wasn’t just in our heads: it was a product of the land and the buildings and streets. This interested me intensely. I found his essay in a 1971 book I treasured titled Environ/mental, edited by the well-known ecologists Paul Shepard and Daniel McKinley. In this essay and other writings, Searles laid out his hypothesis that the human being has a psychic relationship to the nonhuman world that he ignores “at peril to his psychological well-being.” The maturity Searles described is not understood simply as an ability to get along in adult human society but involves a “readiness to face the question of what is one’s position about this great portion of one’s total environment.”
The context of the essay, and the book, was that a global ecological crisis, in which wild creatures died and humans lived mired in pollution, might be driving us all mad. I understood from it that one’s surroundings actively co-created one’s psyche.
Searles argued that psychology itself was unable to face that question and did a disservice to patients by treating them as though their minds resided only in their skulls, when the roots of illness may be in the environment. The total environment had to be considered in psychological treatment. To be mature, then, meant understanding that your relationship to other people happened in a place, and your responsibility to the relationship also involved that place and its well-being. A good relationship between a parent and a child or two lovers required finding the right balance between being individuals and being together, neither merging nor holding too much autonomy; the same was true for the relationship between you and the dirt under your feet. Maintaining a forced dualism with the earth was a path to loneliness. To let the earth go mad was to let yourself go mad.
I read this as a kid trying to make sense of Dad. He was miserably conflicted. He loved wild places, the “good places,” but he saw them as proving grounds. He pitted himself against wildness in order to extract a fish or deer, but he’d never done any habitat work like plant a berry bush for the birds. He had a somewhat similar attitude toward people and family: he loved them in theory, but he constantly stiff-armed everyone so that no one got too close. He very carefully built critic-proof space around himself. He needed to be separate. He sought relatedness, but his distrust of people and nature generated loneliness.
Crowded into a house with us, Dad was a stranger.
Dad made it clear he thought there was something wrong with Mom, and that’s why he slept elsewhere. Something wrong with Joe and Brett and me, too. We weren’t good enough. He wasn’t like us. I read Searles because he raised the prospect that it was the whole culture that worked against us, and not just some failure on our part.
The great American anarchist Edward Abbey is probably not a terrific role model for mature relatedness—by all reports, he had prickly relationships with other people and, like Henry David Thoreau, needed the solitude he so extolled. But in Desert Solitaire, Abbey addressed that need to confront our position vis-à-vis the nonhuman world. He understood that accepting the agency of the material world means risking everything we’ve been taught about our own minds:
I am here not only to evade for a while the clamor and filth and confusion of the cultural apparatus but also to confront, immediately and directly if it’s possible, the bare bones of existence, the elemental and fundamental, the bedrock which sustains us. I want to be able to look at and into a juniper tree, a piece of quartz, a vulture, a spider, and see it as it is in itself, devoid of all humanly ascribed qualities, anti-Katan, even the categories of scientific description. To meet God or Medusa face-to-face, even if it means risking everything human in myself. I dream of a hard and brutal mysticism in which the naked self merges with a non-human world and yet somehow survives still intact, individual, separate. Paradox and bedrock.
Dad’s deer camp was in my head. If he was offering us the chance to actually work those ninety-five acres like Mr. Card did, growing crops, managing trees, confronting the bedrock that sustains us, it would be the kind of habitat project that Joe, Brett, and I would jump at. It would still be a confrontation, but it might be one we needed to have with our father.
On the day of Dad’s call, I ran up and down the East River, and ended up back at Tompkins Square Park, heaving, drenched in filthy city sweat. I noticed a girl sitting on the sidewalk underneath a pay phone with her head down between her knees. She had been there the night before and seemed like she hadn’t moved in about fifteen hours. I walked over to one of the plainclothes cops who worked the park after the riot and asked if he’d go take a look at her.
“What makes you tink ima cop?” he said in a cartoonish Archie Bunker accent. He had on a green polo shirt with a nightstick shoved up the back.
“C’mon, man, can you go check? She hasn’t moved in like a day.”
“Why, you tink she’s dead?”
“Don’t you think it’s worth finding out?”
He looked hard at me. “What’s wrong wich you?” he said.
“What?” I reached up to touch my face and my hand came away full of blood. Blood was pouring out of my nose like a spigot. When I looked down, it spattered my shirt. I went into a bodega to get a handful of napkins, and when I came out the girl was in the exact same fetal position but now tipped over on her side, not looking any more alive, and the cop was crouching next to her, so I tilted my head up to the sooty sky and walked home.
I’d had some nosebleeds after the police bea
ting, but they ended after a week or so. This one didn’t. It bled on and off for months, and I knew it was about this hunting camp. It’s the only psychosomatic illness I can honestly say I’ve ever had, and it was a doozy. It just wouldn’t quit. Maybe the beating broke something inside my head, but it’s important to note that I am ordinarily pretty robust—a reliable chainsawyer of trees, a skier of steeps, a football captain. The commie doctor who had been treating my hematoma—who had introduced himself to me by saying, “First off, I’m a commie doctor, is that going to be okay?”—finally told me I had two choices regarding the nosebleed: leave New York or leave New York. He knew I was a country boy and figured the city was getting to me.
But I knew different. It was Bruce’s sand farm. I’d breached that thin line by starting to care, and everything I’d held away from him threatened to come out in great bouts of soured affection and rage. There was no way I was going to ignore this new dirt he was offering.
I wouldn’t see the deer camp until the following year, in the summer of 1990, when I left New York City for good. That visit would be inspired by Joe’s hard landing at rock bottom, a fraught and maddening introduction, but it would also be the start of a slow and agonizing turn for our family. It wouldn’t be until 1997 that we’d all be there again, after a boycott of seven years, during which I would move to California to cover the radical environmental movement and I’d see Dad only once or twice a year and never see the camp at all. But when we all finally got to the property again, and dug in, we found the fragments of our family already scattered there. And traces in the weather-blasted sand for how they would go back together.