Sleeping Where I Fall: A Chronicle

by Peter Coyote

  This scene turned audiences inside out, switching sides and points of view too quickly for them to take refuge in canned attitudes. They didn’t know where to stand or how to be hip, because the “safe” ground was constantly being chipped away. They did know that they loved it, though—and we were just getting started.

  Near the end of the first act, a ten-minute film played in which a watermelon is kicked, stabbed, hacked, run over, disemboweled, and dropped from high windows. It eventually reassembles its parts and drives away its tormentors. The soundtrack, written by avant-garde composer Steve Reich (one of the many talented people the troupe attracted into its orbit in those days), was performed live by the company. Three tiers of minstrels seated stage right of the screen sang the words “Wa-DUH-Me-LON, Wa-DUH-Me-LON,” in a four-note round, each tier beginning its “Wa” on the “DUH” of the tier in front of it. The effect was hypnotic, deconstructing the word watermelon into a shimmer of rhythms. The film O Dem Watermelons won many awards at film festivals and often played on its own as a short.

  During intermission, the minstrels assaulted the audience, breaking through the “fourth wall” of the theater by climbing off the stage to dance, tease, flirt, and generally raise hell. This alerted the audience in visceral terms that we were “among” them now and could no longer be “managed.” Intermission was also the critical time for touring actors to score dates and places to sleep after the show. Shyness in this fifteen-minute window of opportunity was detrimental to rest.

  The show was definitely on the cutting edge, and word about it spread rapidly. One night I was flabbergasted to see Harry Belafonte and Nipsey Russell in the audience, falling out of their chairs with laughter.

  Despite these successes, there was no way the troupe could support itself with its current audience. The only way to make enough money to support our members and expand our repertoire was to mount a tour. In 1966 Ronnie decided that the play to export should be The Minstrel Show and made it my responsibility to assemble a road company and direct the production. I felt nowhere near ready to do this, but the troupe rarely honored niceties like personal reticence. Motivated by necessity, I began supervising auditions and the complex task of assembling a touring company, melding veterans and new performers to go on the road.

  The troupe members were a varied and colorful bunch and attracted similar folk, which made my job of assembling a road company considerably easier. The indisputable stars of the original Minstrel Show were two prodigiously talented black actors, Willie B. Hart and Jason Marc-Alexander. Willie was about six-four, very dark-skinned, with an erect, relaxed posture. We nicknamed him “the Prince” because of his natural dignity and unflappable calm. He had a glass eye that imparted a loopy expression to his face that he utilized skillfully in real life and with genius onstage. His fortes were “Step’n Fetchit” characters, apparently stupid as a post. After establishing his character’s mental limits, he would shuffle around waiting for the moment to lock his IQ-less gaze on his victim. With no apparent movement or change of expression, he could intend you to see a situation as he did and seismically shift the ground of assumptions, highlighting his actual mastery of the situation and the density of the other character. It was a magical capacity, and to this day, I do not understand how he accomplished it.

  Jason was his perfect foil, as sparky and erratic as Willie was solid and grounded. Light-skinned, with thick hair piled high on his head like a hat, he walked with a springy stoop, like a bobbing question mark. He had an explosive laugh that sounded like something breaking against a wall, and his angular body was always in motion. He was a true clown, and as with all clowns, his humor seemed to be a survival mechanism protecting a deep wound. He and Ronnie fought often and abrasively; arguments ended in tears, with apologies and protestations of affection as sincere as the anger had been moments before. It was Jason who played the Stud with such relish and exaggerated sexual braggadocio that he never failed to win an ovation.

  The third black minstrel was played by a different actor on each tour. Earl “Robbie” Robertson was an elegant man then in his late thirties. He sported a tidy goatee and had a precise, slightly effeminate voice and a sardonic sense of humor. He maintained a quiet reserve that discouraged the normally easy swap of anecdotes and personal life histories, perhaps because he was older than the rest of us.

  His replacement on the second tour was Ron “the Preacher” Stallings. Ron was a saxophone player who later fronted the band Southern Comfort. His baby face featured large, wistful eyes that camouflaged bountiful reservoirs of impish humor. Like the rest of us, Ron viewed life on the road as an expanded opportunity for sexual search-and-destroy missions. One night just before the curtain rose, he was standing backstage letting his vision graze over an audience generously populated with nubile girls. He turned to me with a transcendent, blissful expression on his face and murmured in a purring, reverent hum, “No survivors.”

  The “white” minstrels, in addition to me, included John Condrin, a three-hundred-pound bartender with a soaring soprano voice and an eagerness to be loved that hinted at sleeping personal horrors which eventually caused his commitment to an asylum.

  Bill Lyndon deserves a book of his own. Small and dapper as a jockey, he was the most irreverent, instinctively antiauthoritarian person I have ever met: a diminutive Lenny Bruce, with equal speed and the same corrosive New York humor. He was playing Pantalone when I joined the troupe, and his character was such a Jewish caricature and so scabrously funny that it was indelibly stamped on my imagination. When I began to play the role myself, I was never able to shake his model and finally surrendered to it as my homage to perfection.

  Bill was a gifted criminal, quick-witted and very cool. He supported a deep fondness for narcotics and amphetamines by working credit cards, money orders, and traveler’s check scams with consummate skill, sometimes driving four or five hundred miles in a single day to hit stores all over the Bay Area before a card “burned down” on the national computers.

  He was married to Anne, a sharp-faced girl with a voice like sandpaper. Love of the wrong side of the street seemed to run in her family—a pistol fell out of her sister’s bra at Bill’s funeral—and like Bill she loved drugs, sex, and crime in some indeterminate order. Their house was either a three-ring circus or a geriatric ward, depending on whether the drugs of choice that day were uppers or downers. You could drop in at any hour and find Bill and Anne on methedrine chewing their lips and constructing puppets, while someone was injecting drugs in the kitchen and others puzzled the deeper meanings of comic books or fussed with musical instruments over and around someone passed out on the couch.

  Not unpredictably, Billy and Annie’s trip disintegrated rapidly. When the VW van that Bill was driving ran off the road and flipped, they lost a baby daughter, too presciently named Velocity Anne. Bill and Anne were never the same after that. Though they later had another child—a sweet, bewildered boy named Mikey—chaos and darkness seeped into their lives like stains on the wallpaper of a cheap hotel. Bill was diagnosed with cancer, and I intuit some connection between that dis-ease and his deep grief over his daughter’s death.

  I helped Bill and Annie move to Santa Cruz, where he began a strict regimen of sunshine, exercise, raw vegetable juices, and fresh air that whipped his cancer into remission. So they moved back to the city, and I went to see him a couple of days after his return. There he was in the center of his kitchen, trembling like a leaf and “cooking” Dilaudids—synthetic heroin pills—in a spoon. He had been celebrating his remission by injecting them for several days; it was clear to me that this was not a man who wanted a long life. His cancer returned with a vengeance, and Billy’s last days were hell.

  I visited his house shortly after the cancer’s return, and the place was a pigsty. Billy was propped in bed hooked to an oxygen tank, weak as a kitten. He was staring through the open door into the filthy kitchen, where the sink overflowed with crusty plates and pots. Annie and some friends were si
tting around the table, directly in Bill’s line of sight, shooting speed and arguing about the division of the dope. I did what I could that day, which was to wash the dishes and straighten the house, but that Dantean diorama remains as vivid today, thirty years later, as it was then.

  The last time I saw Bill, he was in the hospital looking like the leftovers of a burnt offering to the devil. My girlfriend Marilyn (soon to become my wife) offered to scratch his back, and as she rubbed and soothed his tortured skin, Billy sat there, completely whipped and crying quietly. There was nothing to say. As we were leaving, I said reflexively, “I’ll see you later,” but it was bullshit and everyone in the room knew it.

  It is difficult to reconcile this last view of Bill with my memories of his vitality and energy onstage, but it is a valuable exercise to remember that when you live without the limits of law or convention, you must supply your own. If you don’t, or can’t, formlessness becomes terminal.

  The last performing member of the Minstrel Show cast was Bob Slattery, a fortysomething longshoreman and socialist organizer with rugged, aristocratic features and a bluff, authoritative manner that was perfect for the condescending role of the Interlocutor.

  Because Bob considered himself a “serious” revolutionary, he was perpetually stressed by the rest of the cast’s sexual high jinks on the road—especially those of Ron, Willie B., Jason, and me. Bob had reason to be upset. From our perspective, sex was a necessity transcending hormones. Because the company was so poor, we could not afford hotels and normally were forced to camp on the floor or a couch at the homes of our show’s sponsors—a good incentive to drum up alternatives of our own.

  Our modus operandi was to size up prospects during the opening number. As the singing lines of minstrels cakewalked past one another, claims for intermission conquests would be staked in the pauses for breath. “The redhead in the third row is mine” or “Hands off the blonde with the big tits in the furry sweater.” Desperation often breeds competence, and we became skilled at securing berths during the intermission’s fifteen-minute hiatus. This was before the time when America’s sisters and daughters were lining up to trade anonymous sexual favors for access to rock stars, and groupies were not yet writing books about their “careers.” Sex may have been easy in the sixties, but we were not rich and famous, and for the girls we pursued, sex had to be based on some sort of personal connection, which was not that easy to fabricate in fifteen minutes. We took advantage of our image as a small, dedicated, revolutionary band of players (which we were), and of course we were helped by the show’s enormous popularity.

  Still, neither the audience’s approbation nor our excuses concerning the economics of our situation assuaged Bob’s anger. Day after day as we alleviated the boredom of long drives with inventive hyperboles of the previous night’s bed-wrestling, Bob berated us as “frivolous adventurers” whose sexual politics were “disgraces to the cause.” His hectoring continued until one night a trim undergrad decided that Big Bob was too juicy an Oedipal fantasy to ignore and took him home. The next morning, a freshly showered, impeccably groomed, beaming Bob Slattery burst into the coffee shop where we’d assembled, rubbing his hands energetically and exclaiming, “Let’s get some breakfast, boys. By God, I’m famished!”

  The entire touring production consisted of the six minstrels and the Interlocutor, two banjo players, a tech man, six bentwood café chairs reinforced with plywood seats, six tambourines, and some costumes and wigs. Despite the fact that the show had only three technical cues, to my knowledge we never performed a show without at least one technical mishap. There was almost always a standing ovation at the final curtain.

  I loved the spontaneity of the road. No two days or nights were the same. I enjoyed the deep intimacy that developed among the cast members. While I’d had black friends in high school, the relationships with Willie, Jason, and Ron were deeper and more intense. We ate together, slept together, performed together, and on occasion orgied together. Living this intimately, we developed empathetic communications, as if we were separated from “civilians” by an invisible shield that allowed us to see them but prevented them from seeing us. Conversation simultaneously covered the practical, political, imaginative, and absurd—something I had experienced in college with my small circle of friends, all deeply involved in our apprenticeships as writers, but we were still students. This was the real world.

  It was definitely real. People risked everything for what they wanted. Some were criminals, it’s true, but I was lax about moral judgments then because their crimes were against property, and our prevailing politics attributed most poverty to fiscal conspiracy. We were self-styled guerrillas operating behind enemy lines, and petty theft was considered a way of living off the enemy’s surpluses. I had known many armchair revolutionaries; now I felt that people like Bill Lyndon were the ones with the requisite nerve and pluck to create social change.

  We took these revolutionary intentions seriously, and the style and content of The Minstrel Show were among our most potent weapons. At this point in the midsixties, Lenny Bruce had not yet been hounded to death by New York District Attorney Frank Hogan for his political critiques but he had been arrested for saying “fuck” onstage. The authorities made implicit connections between bad politics and “bad taste”; predictably, the show was closed and we were arrested several times.

  In 1966 we were organizing a second autumn tour : three days in Denver, then on to Madison, Chicago, and Philadelphia, culminating in Manhattan’s Town Hall where Dick Gregory was to be our host. We regarded his support of the show as an honor, demonstrating that we had passed the acid test of the progressive black community’s review. The review of my own race would be another matter.

  The first two performances in Denver were benefits for the Young Democrats, and on the second night, September 8, we played before an audience of judges, Democratic bigwigs, attorneys, and local pooh-bahs. The show was particularly hot that evening, and the audience’s appreciation was frenzied. In the middle of our finale, we noticed large numbers of police officers massing in the wings, restraining gasping Doberman pinschers.

  We wasted no time wondering whether the dogs simply had a hankering for some soul theater or whether the cops, stuck with dog-sitting duties, just hadn’t wanted to miss the hippest theater from California and brought them along. After our third encore, I raised my hands for silence and announced to the audience that the police were poised backstage to arrest us. “We are,” I intoned, “the San Francisco Mime Troupe, and we do not intend to be arrested backstage!”

  On that cue, the minstrels and the Interlocutor climbed off the stage and began threading our way through the supportive audience toward the exits. The dumbfounded cops ran onstage with their dogs and milled about uncertainly. From the floor, we applauded them, clapping and whistling, yelling “more” and “encore.” The audience joined us, cheering the comedy of the police wrestling their writhing dogs off the stage as if it were an intentional performance.

  Orchestrating their humiliation did not endear us to the police, and the cops waded into the crowd after us with zeal. To their credit, they managed to capture three of us: Robbie Robertson, Bill Lyndon, and me. (Bob Slattery demanded to go along with us, as I recall.) I was glad I was not the officer who had to explain to his superiors how the other three minstrels, made up in blackface and dressed in sky-blue tuxedos, had been able to “slip away in the crowd.”

  The next morning’s Denver Post featured a prominent picture of us at the police station, still in makeup, regarding the camera with a “Can you believe this shit?” expression. We were bailed out before noon and represented by a local attorney named Walter Gerash, who had seen the show and who took our case pro bono. His forbearance was sorely tested when he was forced to contend with Mime Troupe standards of behavior in court, such as Bill Lyndon giving the finger to an annoying journalist, which promptly became a front-page photo op. We were eventually found innocent of “lewd conduct” (we were, aft
er all, protected by the Bill of Rights), but we did spend ten days on trial before an all-white, very straight jury. My favorite moment was when complainant George Hussey testified, under oath, that “sex is either holy, or in the home.”

  Such legal shenanigans were expensive. Even though the lawyers were pro bono, we had to be flown back to Denver to stand trial, and needed financial support throughout the trial’s duration. In other cases, lawyers had to be paid. The troupe’s business manager, Bill Grishonka (Graham), produced the first four light-show rock-and-roll dances in San Francisco as benefits for the Mime Troupe. They featured such performers as the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Moby Grape, and The Loading Zone. Each of these events was sold out two or three times over, and Bill was so impressed that he leased the Fillmore himself, quit his job at the Mime Troupe, and became a rock promoter, which made him famous. Ronnie considered this a betrayal and never forgave him.

  By late March of 1967 The Minstrel Show had been running for two years, and we were bone tired and broke. Ronnie wanted to cancel the show, but Bob Slattery, who was doubling now as our business manager, booked a quick last tour in April—Buffalo for a week at two thousand dollars, and on the way home one-nighters in Winnipeg, Calgary, and Vancouver. Commedia veteran Kent Minault was to replace John Condrin, who had left the troupe by this time.

  The prairie province of Alberta is the Bible belt of Canada. The leader of the reigning Social Credit party preached fundamentalist sermons on the radio. A moron might have predicted that sending the Mime Troupe to the University of Calgary could engender trouble. But we had no morons in the troupe, so we forged ahead with our plans to perform.