Sleeping Where I Fall: A Chronicle

by Peter Coyote

  Morris’s pride had a crippled twin that I suspect every Jew outside Israel is acquainted with to some degree. It is the certain knowledge that on the deepest level, no matter what degree of success and power you may achieve, you will be known first and foremost as a Jew and, consequently, as an outsider. The evidence of this stain on my father’s self-esteem was the dedication with which he imitated English baronial life. He acquired lands, hounds, silk Oriental carpets, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves stuffed with books (actually read), and fine Colonial furniture and silver. His addiction to “the best” and his costly impulse to identify himself stylistically with the English aristocracy (long before Ralph Lauren) probably contributed to his early death. The pressure of maintaining such a life without the inherited wealth that made it possible would have pulverized granite.

  I was afraid of this man, haunted by images of someone whose face had been “broken open.” I imagined a man with brains slipping like cake batter through fingers vainly attempting to suture his wound. When displeased, Morris would growl, a low animal rumble that rose from his belly while he shook his head slowly from side to side. If I was the source of his displeasure, he’d swear that he would send me to reform school, usually threatening to snap something graphically specific like my knees or my thumbs. I understood reform as “re-form” and imagined a gruesome factory where children were pulled apart and reassembled into something more pleasing to their parents.

  While he would never admit it, even to himself, Morris went to some lengths to ensure that I would remain afraid. Several times a week, to my horror, we would have “wrestling lessons,” a semisadistic perversion of today’s concept of “quality time.” I am sure that in his own mind, Morris felt he was preparing me for the rough world he lived in (and, indeed, helped to create). In reality, however, these lessons demonstrated the potential cost of any challenges to his authority, for he “taught” me by tying me into suffocating knots, my knees jammed under my chin, my back torqued, my neck twisted claustrophobically. He punctuated such lessons with refinements like “Use your wrist bone across his forehead here—it hurts like hell, doesn’t it?” When I struggled, he twisted harder, until finally I learned to stop resisting and send my mind on excursions until he was finished with me.

  I have a son who loves to wrestle, and while it resurrects memories I would rather never confront again, I do wrestle with him because it gives him such obvious delight. I take pains to ensure that he can sometimes triumph over my superior strength and size. I am careful to see that he learns both the limits of his own power and that he can surpass his own expectations and beliefs through perseverance and spirited effort. Confidence can be taught if we can arrange for it to be experienced. I can see the fruits of my efforts in my son’s fearlessness with me. A man who teaches a son that he can never win—whose own competitiveness or fear is such that he can never allow his child a victory, even in fun—inhabits a world of persistent terror and violence. It took me years to understand this reality of my father’s, and, even after understanding it, it took many more years to forgive him these persecutions.

  I must also acknowledge my own childhood cowardice, because my younger sister, though exempted from wrestling lessons (and other expectations to the point of neglect sometimes), was psychologically immune to Morris’s threats. A torment to me in childhood, she was faster, braver, and smarter, and when Morris rampaged through the house, smashing things, she would stand up to him. Once, enraged by her pluck, he jerked her off her feet by her shirtfront, lifting her face level to his own. She stuck her tiny mug in his and said, “Go ahead, hit me. I’ll sue ya!”

  Had I done that, the retribution would have been unimaginable, but Morris was first taken aback, then roared at her fierce bantam-hen spirit, and ended by hugging and kissing her extravagantly. I fumed with jealousy, conflicted as to whether I was angrier at being denied such affection or at being exposed as a coward by a younger girl.

  When I sought comfort or witness to these injustices from my mother, there was little available, because as far as Morris was concerned she too was in over her head. She urged me to “be an adult” and “understand” my father, tried to make me see how desperate and frightened he was beneath his bellicose surface. Once, when I was particularly distraught (I think it was the afternoon he knocked me unconscious during a boxing lesson), she whispered, “You and I are not like your father, darling. He has to win. We are the gentle people. We are the losers.” It was a crushing moment.

  My mother, Ruth Fidler, was the first member of her family to leave an extended household of aunts and grandmothers, an orthodox Jewish home run by a mother who was a fierce gambler and a sweet, gentle father who had studied to be a rabbi before fleeing the Russian draft. Slim, beautiful, and fascinated with the bustle of Manhattan in the thirties, she worked as a model and as a secretary at the Daily Mirror. My father was ten years older than she, and when they met, he seemed to her to be dashingly handsome, already well established in the world, and awesomely competent. By the time she had discovered his failings, she had two young children and a new life far from the nurturing clutter of her family. She believed Morris’s threat that if she ever left him, she would never see my sister and me again. I did not understand her dilemmas when I was young; I knew only that I needed a champion and had none. For many years I held her accountable.

  The losing I experienced at my father’s hands produced feelings so demeaning and debilitating that the idea of inflicting a comparable experience on anyone else by defeating them was inconceivable to me. The only option available to my immature understanding was simply not to play. I realized this one particularly bitter day and vowed deeply, the way children sometimes do, never to play, never to enter the realm of winning and losing. Of course, I had no inkling of the consequences of such a decision and certainly no awareness that my vows were banishing me from life as it is conventionally understood by most people. It took me years even to discover the existence of that crippling vow and more years after that to vanquish it. Until then, I avoided all competitive sports and the childhood contests of my peers. I refused to learn chess and Go (both of which my father played with chess master Edward Lasker every week). This injunction not to play went so deep that my son, when he was ten, could beat me handily at chess and could never understand the curious way I “go to sleep” and stop thinking at the board.

  My pleasures became solitary ones: reading, writing, observing people and animals, and first and foremost, daydreaming. Although the term dropout did not gain currency until the 1960s, my peculiar “not-playing” posture removed me from the world and its binary concerns with high and low status, profit and loss, as effectively as did my later decision to join the counterculture. In fact, the counterculture seemed like the one place where my personal predilection might be, if not totally understood, at least accepted.

  When my father died suddenly years later, leaving his financial affairs in ruin and my mother in a perilous situation, I was little help to her, I’m afraid. My feelings of abandonment and rage had become a corrosive wedge between us. It took years and children of my own before I was able to tender her the love and respect she deserved. Still, some events are never entirely reparable. I didn’t get my champion when I needed one, and I learned to do without. When the tables had turned and my mother needed a son in her corner, I was not there as I should have been.

  She is over eighty now and lives simply in a small apartment with a few good things, memorabilia of a richer time. She has a tiny circle of old friends whom death seems to glean regularly. Today, we are very close and speak often, and I have rediscovered my childhood love for her: her passion, her endurance, her refusal to whimper. Yet I think there is still some trace of a gulf between us, perhaps only a healed scar on the landscape of our relationship. We have healed our relationship again, but that is not the same thing as its never having been wounded. I am certain that her constancy never wavered; I am embarrassed to admit that mine did.

  Had Morri
s been simply a monster, neither she nor I would ever have survived nor, perhaps, would our feelings for him have been complicated by love. But the truth is he could be extraordinarily kind and impulsively, extravagantly generous and thoughtful; he had a keen eye for when people (outside his family) were suffering and took immediate steps to aid them. Sorting papers after his death, my mother discovered that he had quietly helped many people by giving them loans or financing their education. He appeared impervious to status games and afforded people identical measures of respect (or disrespect if they displeased him) regardless of their wealth and social position. He had an uncanny ability to communicate with a catholic variety of people. And I admired his uncompromising fidelity to his own impulses. During my tenure in his household I was not always sure what my impulses were, and when I was clear, it was often necessary to stifle them. Such behavior was unthinkable to Morris.

  While my family may not have been the standard garden-variety, it was, for all its turmoil and discontents, conventional. We played by the rules of the majority culture, and except for what I thought were our personal eccentricities, we appeared to share the same reality as everyone else. My father went to work every day, labored hard, and enjoyed the rewards he accumulated. While he may have been critical of the government’s racist policies or infringements of civil liberties, he did so from the standpoint of a loyal critic and never took it upon himself to radically alter a system that, after all, had been very good to him. I grew up in the shadow of his privileges and beliefs, and it was not until I saw McCarthyism shatter my friends and family and later saw Bull Conner set fire hoses and vicious dogs on black people peacefully demonstrating for their rights that I began to seriously question the validity of our political and economic ground rules.

  When I joined the Mime Troupe, these issues began to cohere in my thinking. I was introduced there to an analytical perspective that explained how money was created and privileges protected by the political process. It explained the root causes of environmental degradation and the oppression of workers, which I felt had no place in a decent country. The analysis corresponded to my own perceptions, and was clear, cogent, and easy to translate into theatrical action. Most of all, heated intellectual debate was a vital part of the heady, stimulating atmosphere at the Mime Troupe, and I was excited by that. For the first time I seemed to know clearly and unmistakably what I felt about my world and why, and this expansion of understanding liberated prodigious energy.

  Unlike most troupe members, I knew firsthand about the personal costs of inauthenticity and unearned privilege. My father was not an English lord but a complicated Sephardic Jew who coveted aristocratic style and confidence with the hunger of a displaced person. This sense of displacement is what enslaved him, I believed. Despite his fidelity to his momentary desires, his imagination of what a life might be had been co-opted and contained, like a fine prizefighter whose struggles enrich his manager. Now I had the opportunity to tell the cautionary tale, with art, ribald humor, youthful vigor, and a sense of play. My life might possibly redeem his and in the process liberate others from the thrall of the dominant culture’s prefabricated visions, allowing them to live congruently with their deepest instincts and beliefs.

  The Mime Troupe helped me to examine the insufficiencies of liberalism: the generosity toward others that is predicated on first sustaining one’s own privilege. Things appeared clear to me and offered hope for constructive change. While a portion of this newfound certainty might be traced to youthful exuberance, I could also see my father clearly for the first time as imprisoned by a received vision, in the same way that most citizens were slotted into preordained roles and relationships. In his quixotic largesse, I saw parallels to the way government doled out favors to disenfranchised and impotent wards. I was developing a political point of view from which to investigate my present and my past, and was determined to honor my own observations and conclusions. I suppose that it never occurred to me that perhaps this determination itself was an inheritance from my father.

  4

  breaking the glass

  The most articulate teacher of this new intellectual perspective was Peter Berg, perhaps the most radical and cranky member of the troupe, and arguably the most brilliant. He had an imposing round head with a face plucked from a Breughel painting: high cheekbones and crooked teeth semipermanently revealed in a death’s-head grin. Long, thin blond hair fell across a domed brow, and his eyes, except for their humor, possessed the indignant fury of a raptor. Genghis Khan might have smiled like Berg, and in fact Berg’s nickname was “the Hun.” He walked into the Mime Troupe office by chance one day, wearing a brown suit, and told them that he was a writer-actor-director and that they should give him a chance. He was ushered into the back room where he met William Grishonka, a former New York actor who had discovered a flair for business and was managing the Mime Troupe’s financial affairs. Grishonka gave him a translation of Giordano Bruno’s Il Candelaio and told him that if he could turn it into a three-act corn-media dell’arte piece the troupe could perform, then they would believe he was who he said he was. Peter retreated to his apartment. When he returned with a play, Ronnie Davis liked it and began production.

  One day during rehearsal, Ronnie confessed that they were probably not going to perform the play but intended to get arrested for attempting to perform it without a park permit. Earlier, the troupe had been issued a permit to perform in the city’s parks, but after the park commission had seen one of the shows, it had been revoked. Marshall Krause, the troupe’s lawyer, refused to accept that, claiming censorship. The troupe performed the next week without a permit. On August 7, 1965, Ronnie substituted himself in Luis Valdez’s role and was arrested for “parking on the grass.” Although they lost the case in court (the court refused to address the constitutional issue), it was such an embarrassment to the city that the troupe simply went on performing and no one bothered them again.

  This experience precipitated Peter’s thinking about theater as a vehicle for radical change and led him to the idea of “guerrilla theater”—a small mobile company that would perform at rallies and other public events and instigate a kind of theater that he described as “breaking the glass”:

  Theater as breaking the glass . . . the convention of theater [as] sitting in an audience watching a play was like the convention of being a member of society watching television, or cop opera . . . the enforcement of society. . . . If you broke the glass people would stream through to the other side of the stage and become life-actors. That’s the whole riff.

  The phrase “life-actor” was Peter’s contribution, describing a person who consciously creates the role he or she plays in everyday, offstage life, a person who marshals skill, imagination, and improvisation in order to break free from imposed roles and restrictions and, by example, demonstrate a path that will free others. Timothy Leary’s edict to “turn on, tune in, and drop out” was a less-focused but parallel commitment to breaking the glass.

  When actors perform roles onstage, audiences realize unconsciously that the performance is happening in a protected space but may never consider the implications of that fact. Such protected space is necessary for art and is the reason that paintings and stages are framed and sculpture placed on a pedestal. This is to remind audiences that it is not the reality of their own world they are viewing but an alternate universe with its own premises and rules, and the creation of such a parallel reality is often a useful device for determining characteristics about our own. Despite its utility and necessity, such a remove may prevent audiences from seeing the correspondence between the artificial reality and their own and, more importantly, from fully integrating and responding to the implications of the correspondence.

  If, however, actors were to leave the stage, and leave the theater—performing in the streets and public spaces, offering no clues that these were performances—people would be unprotected by their ideas of art and notions concerning its place in society. They would have to de
termine for themselves what to make of the apparently strange behavior, even if only to determine whether or not self-defense was necessary. Consequently, they would be engaged. In fact, if it is the artist’s intention to highlight distinctions between being inside and outside of society’s dominant values, performing in public is a very appropriate venue.

  In the charged social climate of the sixties, many people struggling for critical social change felt that the lines between what was inside and outside the values of majority culture needed to be clearly drawn. For those of us who rejected the specter of armed revolution and what would certainly be its ghastly consequences, drawing such lines required new forms of creative expression.

  Unfortunately for the Mime Troupe, pursuit of this subject carried Berg out of the troupe and directly into a loose confederation of friends called the Diggers. It would have happened anyway eventually. Both Ronnie and Peter were brilliant, angry, committed guys, and both tended toward autonomous behavior. The troupe was too small for such replication.

  The Diggers was an anarchistic experiment dedicated to creating and clarifying distinctions between society’s business-as-usual and our own imaginings of what-it-might-be, in the most potent way we could devise. It is a feature of youth, I suppose, to distinguish itself and its values from the domination of the adults they are soon to become. Each generation attempts to find a style too outré to be co-opted by the majority culture. Over the years, Beats, hippies, punks, and followers of the “grunge” style have deliberately flouted conventional ideas of taste and propriety to contrast their group’s values from those of the majority. And it was always a matter of only months before their fashions appeared in the pages of Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue and the once-revolutionary distinctions between them and everyone else began to be fuzzed. The cycle led invariably to long-haired dope smokers doing their thing at the corporate office. (We’ve all seen what I call the “bank-teller’s haircut”: short in the front for the customers, with a tidy little ponytail tucked away behind for after work.) Part of the power and flexibility of our profit-oriented economy is that it can co-opt nearly everything. Everything but doing things for free. The Diggers understood that style was infinitely co-optable. What could not be co-opted was doing things for free, without money.