Sleeping Where I Fall: A Chronicle
Page 1
PETER COYOTE
Third edition copyright © 2015 by Peter Coyote
Copyright © 1998 by Peter Coyote
First paperback edition 1999
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the Publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
The author wishes to thank the editors and publishers of Pequod, Steelhead, and Zyzzyva, where portions of this text have appeared in slightly different form.
The author gratefully acknowledges permission to reprint excerpted materials: Pages 17, 36, 59: Excerpt from The San Francisco Mime Troupe: The First Ten Years by R. G. Davis (Palo Alto, Calif.: Ramparts Press), copyright © 1975 by R. G. Davis, reprinted courtesy of Ronald G. Davis. Page 59: Excerpt from song lyric “Tangled Up in Blue” reprinted courtesy of Bob Dylan. Page 311: Excerpt from “Next, Please” in The Less Deceived by Philip Larkin copyright © 1955. Permission pending from the Marvell Press. Pages 327, 347: Excerpt from Sonnets to Orpheus by Rainer Maria Rilke. Copyright 1942 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., renewed © 1970 by M. D. Herter Norton. Reprinted by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
The author notes: some names of individuals in the text have been changed to protect the guilty.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Coyote, Peter.
Sleeping where I fall : a chronicle / Peter Coyote.
Includes index.
1. Coyote, Peter. 2. Hippies—California—San Francisco—Biography. 3. Subculture—California—San Francisco—History—20th century. 4. San Francisco (Calif.)—Social life and customs. 5. San Francisco (Calif.)—Biography. 6. Communal living—California—San Francisco—History—20th century. I. Title.
F869.S353C69 1998
979.4’61053’092—dc21
[B]97-47740
Book and jacket design by David Bullen
Composition by Wilsted & Taylor Publishing Services
COUNTERPOINT
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Berkeley, CA 94710
www.counterpointpress.com
Distributed by Publishers Group West
10987654321
e-book ISBN 978-1-61902-624-7
To Ruth,
To Morris,
To Ariel and Nick
Incomprehensible gaiety and dread
Attended what we did. Behind, before
Lay all the lovely postures of the dead;
The spirit and the flesh cried out for more.
We. . . together on a darkening day
Took Arms against our own obscurity.
THEODORE ROETHKE, “Four for Sir John Davies”
contents
Acknowledgments
Preface
Introduction: You Have to Start Somewhere
1.Themes and Anticipations
2.The Perpetual Present
3.Home Is Hard
4.Breaking the Glass
5.The Minstrel Show
6.Growing a New Skin
7.Emmett: A Life Played for Keeps
8.The Invisible Circus
9.Edge City
10.Crossing the Free Frame of Reference
11.Biker Blues
12.Sweet William’s Story
13.The Red House
14.Black Bear Ranch
15.Dr. Feelgood’s Walking Cure
16.Slipping to the Edge of the World
17.Free Fall
18.Full Bloom
19.Approaching Terminal Velocity
20.Top of the Arc
21.Roman Candle
22.A Moment’s Float
23.Gravity Wins
24.Splatter
25.Stepping Out of the Wind
Afterword: Time to Take a Break
Postscript
Index
acknowledgments
Several people bear more responsibility for the existence of this book than they may know. Howard Junker, intrepid editor of Zyzzyva magazine, solicited a piece for his journal that was published in 1989. Its title serves as the title of this book. Jack Shoemaker, then editor-in-chief of North Point Press, read that piece and urged me to expand it. Following his suggestion, I began writing. When a piece called “Carla’s Story,” also published in Zyzzyva (and incorporated in the present text), won the 1993–94 Pushcart Prize for non-fiction, it offered me sufficient encouragement to complete what had by then become a daunting task.
My literary agents, Joe Spieler and Lisa Ross, have guided my efforts with great patience and delicacy, and Lisa in particular did yeowoman’s work in helping me edit the first half of the text. While they may have wished for a simpler book and one easier to sell, they understood and supported my intentions from the beginning.
My old comrade, novelist Terry Bisson, an award-winning and elegant writer, went through the text four times and suggested cuts, shifts of material, and condensing that have given the book its present shape. Not only have Terry and I been best friends for thirty-eight years, but as a fellow communard who adheres to his political principles with courage and tenacity, he has understood as perhaps no one else the essential political intentions of the manuscript. Everyone should have a friend like Terry.
The staff at Counterpoint was enthusiastic and helpful beyond all my expectations. Trish Hoard, Becky Clark, and Jessica Francis Kane were acute, dedicated, and charming in equal measures. Managing editor Carole McCurdy, despite having other authors under her charge, made me feel that there was limitless time for my queries and concerns, even as she ensured, with graceful skill, that I and the project remain on point.
Line editor Nancy Palmer Jones is the most fastidious reader I have ever encountered; her suggestions and questions never failed to make my intended meaning clearer, more graceful, and succinct. She is an author’s treasure.
Thanks to Jack Shoemaker, now editor-in-chief of Counterpoint, for his unwavering and selfless support of this project and for assembling such an impeccable team to assist its birth.
Thanks to Stefanie Pleet, my adored life partner and spiritual plumb line, whose meticulous sense of language and clarity of thought have rescued me in these pages and beyond on numerous occasions.
Special thanks to Gary Snyder for taking the time from his own work and daunting schedule to read a seven-hundred-page rough draft and offer clarifying insights and much-needed encouragement. It is he, more than anyone else, who inspired me to document this West Coast cultural history and relate my experiences in the sixties to my forebears of the Beat Generation. Gary has been a constant reference point in my creative and spiritual growth for more than thirty years, and a fine and fast friend.
I hope the reader will find these pages worth this bounty of attention from such sterling people.
preface
During the period covered by this book, I was a member of an anarchic West Coast community that had taken as its collective task the rethinking and recreation of our national culture. Such intentions were not unique; my generation was struggling openly with problems of racism, grossly inequitable distribution of goods and services, dishonorable foreign policies, and the war in Vietnam. Many people, dissatisfied to the point of despair with the available options of being either a “consumer” or an “employee,” were searching for new and more liberating social structures. My peers and I were calling in the nation’s markers on promises of social justice, and change was in the air.
These stories focus on a West Coast subset of this critical generation—a group whose original nexus was the San Francisco Mime Troupe, a radical street-theat
er company, from which several members spun off and evolved into the Diggers. The Diggers, in turn, became the larger Free Family.
This book attempts to describe what the pursuit of absolute freedom felt like, what it taught me, and what it cost. It is neither an apologia for nor a romance of the sixties. Coming to understand the necessity and value of limits should not be construed as either a defense of the status quo or as the contrite repentance of someone who has flapped his wings a few times and decided that flight was impossible.
Every culture has its priests and devils, its intoxications and follies, and the counterculture we created was neither more nor less ethical, diverse, or contradictory than the majority culture. You can’t grow tomatoes without shit, they say, and while we may have had much of the latter, we also had plentiful tomatoes. The ideas and moral positions that emerged during this period—the civil rights movement, the peace movement, the ecology movement, feminism, holistic medicine, organic farming, numerous alternative physical and spiritual therapies and disciplines, and perhaps most important, bioregional or watershed political organization—were abetted by agents like the people remembered here: flawed and imperfect people certainly, but genuinely dedicated to creating more enlightened options for themselves and others.
One side of the story should not be sacrificed to the other. We may not approve of the fact that Sigmund Freud was shooting cocaine and writing randy letters during his investigations of the psyche or that the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. may have enjoyed sex outside of marriage, but these very combinations and conjunctions of aspiration and frailty reveal the complex humanity of such stellar people and allow us to believe that we too, flaws and all, can mature and contribute something of worth.
I apologize to the numerous friends who should have been included or more fully represented in these pages. Such failures are due solely to the thrust of the narrative and the vagaries of memory, which could not always retrieve the appropriate story that included a valued friend. To those who may feel that I have misrepresented them, I can only say that this is how I perceived things: This is my own truth.
Peter Coyote
Mill Valley
March 1997
INTRODUCTION
you have to start somewhere
The thwack-thwack-thwack of the choppers hovering over the aerial balloons, angling for clear shots, made it hard to hear the guitars. The pool had been covered with a temporary black and white parquet floor, and rows of white cane chairs were arranged to create an aisle leading to the bridal bower. Resting on alternate chairs, fans of white feathers were available to whisk the grimy Los Angeles heat away from some of the most famous faces in the world. Liveried waiters and waitresses, most of them beautiful enough to be prom kings and queens in their hometowns, served the silver trays of chicken satay, miniature egg rolls, pancetta pizzas, and minced vegetables to the crowd of men and women who, with a simple nod or favor, might change their fortunes forever. Security men with discreet gold buttons in their lapels screened arrivals in a small black tent that featured a prominent sign reading, “NO CAMERAS, NO BULLSHIT.”
A suited security guard handed me a white book of advertising photos of myself taken in Paris for fashion designer and good friend Nino Cerruti, whose clothes I represented for a year. The guard asked me to autograph it as a wedding present for the bride. I was the date of Ellen Sebastian, a sleepy-eyed, dangerously witty director and writer who was an old friend of the bride’s and had written many of her performance works. We were issued purple lapel pins giving us highest security clearance and told that the bride was expecting us in her bedroom.
Whoopi Goldberg, at one point or another the highest-paid woman in Hollywood, was marrying Lyle Trachtenberg, a union organizer. The year was 1994. The guests included her old friends from the Blake Street Hawkeyes, a theater company in Berkeley where we met in the seventies, and new friends from the stratosphere of the entertainment world, among them Steven Spielberg, Robin Williams, and Quincy Jones. Ellen and I were ranked somewhere between the sea level of her early days and the rarefied peaks of the present. Where we lived, the air was still breathable and people still had dirt clinging to their shoes.
After visiting with Whoopi as she was being readied to appear, I wandered through the crowd of guests, making small talk, and had a long chat with Steven Spielberg, whom I had not spoken to since he had hired me to perform the role of the compassionate scientist in E. T. He had a bit more gray in his beard, as did I, but remained the same generous, present soul who had allowed me, as a neophyte, to criticize and rewrite a central scene in the film and who then, after the film’s unprecedented success, sent a “thank-you” check amounting to nearly 50 percent of my original salary.
From the patio where we noshed and talked, I had a superb overview of the party. Scattered around the yard were numerous people from my own past, which had intersected Whoopi’s from an unusual angle. David Crosby was standing in front of the band, greeting old friends on their way to the bar as if it were a receiving line. The last time I had seen him was in 1967 at the Grateful Dead’s ranch, when I skinned a squirrel he’d just shot and didn’t know how to prepare.
Joan Shirle from the Del Arte School of Physical Theater in Blue Lake was there, representing my days with the San Francisco Mime Troupe. Dancers and choreographers John LeFan and Freddie Lum had run Theater Artaud in San Francisco while I was chairman of the California State Arts Council during Jerry Brown’s tenure as governor. They now lived in the small logging town of Willits, once a regular rest stop during the many long road trips I made to North Coast communes and friends during the sixties. LeFan and Lum danced through the crowd with their old pal Bob Ernst, who had been with Whoopi and my date Ellen Sebastian in the Blake Street Hawkeyes when the arts council was giving them their first grants. If this was Whoopi’s life, it was also mine.
I knew most of the actors there, though I did manage to confuse Harry Hamlin with Peter Gallagher. Harry’s riposte when I apologized with a lame “Of course, what was I thinking” was a quick-witted “You must have been thinking of yourself.” The rest—the family, agents, and producers—may have known something about me from the films I’d made; Roman Polanski’s Bitter Moon and Pedro Almodóvar’s Kika had played simultaneously that year and garnered me some press. No one there, however—not my old theater comrades, nor my compatriots from the Left, nor the sleek and sexy men and women who were hunting power with such perseverance and polished charm—had the slightest idea of the circuitous route I had taken to join them that day.
People in Hollywood knew I had “done the sixties,” but beyond that I was a cipher, living “up north” in Marin County and spending much of my professional career in Europe. I was distanced from them—not through my own judgment, for I respect and value their extraordinary talent and skill—but by indelible experiences and intentions so removed from their reality that even I could barely understand how I had arrived there.
I came to be a guest at this wedding by way of my own meandering search for understanding and wisdom. This book is an attempt to understand how far apart the borders of my life stand to date, and to make comprehensible, as best I can, what rests between them.
1
themes and anticipations
I feel like a word in the breath of a voice.
JOHN BERGER
While still an undergraduate at Grinnell College, I had fallen in love with Jessie Benton, a captivating woman I met one summer on Martha’s Vineyard. In 1964, after graduating, I moved to San Francisco to pursue a master’s degree in creative writing at San Francisco State College. Jessie was going to move out and join me, bringing her young son Anthony. My life as an adult seemed about to begin.
Jessie was raised in Kansas City, Missouri. Her father, the painter Thomas Hart Benton, was a local hero, a crony of Truman and his smoke-tanned pols. Benton’s fluid and colorful murals feature working people in their daily lives. He believed in the importance of detail. A few years before his d
eath, when he was about eighty, I visited him in Kansas City while he was working on an epic canvas of the Teton Mountains. The floor surrounding his easel was littered with notebooks filled with botanically accurate sketches of shrubs and wildflowers collected during an expedition west the previous summer. He was also a flinty character who once removed one of his paintings from a museum and placed it in a bar, claiming that a better class of people would see it there.
Jessie was heir to this cranky sensibility. She was a natural aristocrat, haughty and achingly beautiful, blessed by her Italian mother with dark, tangled hair and a Caravaggio mouth. Her unerring instinct for the first-rate and the precision of her dismissive ridicule invigorated any room she entered, charging the atmosphere and alerting people to impending adventure or disgrace. Her behavior was restless and bold, and her natural incandescence made others pale by comparison. Her gifts were so abundant that her peers (the best and the brightest of Radcliffe and Harvard) seemed to accept as just her uncontested status as reigning queen.
She was pursued by men, many of them rich and powerful, but she dismissed them all with a laugh and, for incomprehensible reasons, chose me, a larval, overeager stripling, as her consort.
Perhaps she fell in love with a passionate letter I wrote her once or the fact that I made a bone-chilling midwinter drive from Iowa to Kansas City just to say hello. It couldn’t have been much else. I was tall and stringy, with a wispy mustache barely past requiring judicious touches of eyebrow pencil to be visible. I affected a pipe and was as obstinately opinionated as I am today, but less graceful at insinuating my perspectives into conversation.
I arrived in San Francisco a month before school to make things ready for the arrival of Jessie and Anthony, and rented a small, lusterless apartment on Clayton Street, half a block north of Haight and a few blocks west of Ashbury. The apartment had the charm of a mausoleum, but I was blinded to that by the glamour of being on my own in San Francisco, setting up my first household with a woman and child, and preparing to be a writer. The apartment’s only problem, I felt, was that it was not romantically shabby enough. It was, however, practical and adequate, if aesthetically null, a short walk to shops and Laundromat, which I thought would make life easy for Jessie. (Of course it never occurred to me I might do my own laundry; I had a Jewish mother!)