Sleeping Where I Fall: A Chronicle

by Peter Coyote

  From our point of view, freedom involved first liberating the imagination from economic assumptions of profit and private property that demanded existence at the expense of personal truthfulness and honor, then living according to personal authenticity and fidelity to inner directives and impulses. If enough people began to behave in this way, we believed, the culture would invariably change to accommodate them and become more compassionate and more human in the process.

  There were two important corollaries to this assumption. Since we were all products of this culture and often could not be certain whether our impulses were truly self-generated and not unconsciously conditioned, we expanded the idea of freedom to include, first, anonymity (freedom from fame) and, second, freedom from money as both a clear dividing line between us and the majority culture, and as a test of our integrity. By eschewing payment and credit for what we did, we tried to guarantee that personal acts were never unconsciously predicated on the desire for fame or wealth. After all, if we were getting rich and/or famous from our activities, it would be hard to say that we were doing them for free.

  Our hope was that if we were imaginative enough in creating social paradigms as free men and women, the example would be infectious and might produce self-directed (as opposed to coerced or manipulated) social change. People enjoying an existence that they imagined as best for them would be loath to surrender it and would be more likely to defend it. If this were to occur en masse, it would engender significant changes in our society.

  From the Digger perspective, ideological analysis was often one more means of delaying the action necessary to manifest an alternative. Furthermore, ideological perspectives always devalue individuals and serve as the justification to sacrifice them when the ideology is threatened. As a case in point, consider Robert McNamara, sacrificing a generation of youth in Vietnam after concluding that the war was pointless, because he did not want to tarnish the dignity of the nation’s leaders by criticizing them. We used to joke among ourselves that the Diggers would be “put up against the wall” not by the FBI or other forces of domestic oppression but by our peers on the Left who would readily sacrifice anyone who created impediments to their power and authority.

  I remember vividly the first day in 1966 that I went to the Panhandle with Emmett to visit the Digger Free Food. Hearty stew was being ladled out of large steel milk cans and dispensed to a long line of ragged street people. Each portion was accompanied by a small loaf of bread resembling a mushroom because it had been baked in a one-pound coffee can and had expanded over the top to form a cap. The morning fog stung my cheeks, and my senses were sharpened by the spice of eucalyptus in the air. Emmett and I stood to one side. The line of waiting people, clutching their ubiquitous tin cups, passed through a large square constructed from six-foot-long bright yellow two-by-fours: the “Free Frame of Reference.” In order to receive a meal, one stepped through and received a tiny yellow replica about two inches square, attached to a cord for wearing. People were encouraged to look through it and “frame” any piece of reality through this “free frame of reference,” which allowed them a physical metaphor to reconstruct (or deconstruct) their worldview at their own pace and direction.

  Emmett asked me if I’d like something to eat, and I said, “No, I’ll leave it for people who need it.”

  He looked at me sharply. “That’s not the point,” he said, and his words pried open a door in my mind. The point was to do something that you wanted to do, for your own reasons. If you wanted to live in a world with free food, then create it and participate in it. Feeding people was not an act of charity but an act of responsibility to a personal vision.

  In John Neihardt’s book Black Elk Speaks, he describes how Black Elk’s village acted out the dreams of the shaman, assuming roles and costumes and behaving according to his directions. This realization of a dream in the flesh is precisely what the Diggers sought to accomplish.

  The deeper implications of anonymity were lost on Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, both of whom came to investigate our activities in late 1966. Abbie returned to New York and published a book (for sale) called Free, which catalogued every free service in the city of New York that supported truly needy people; these services were immediately swamped by an influx of suburban kids into the Lower East Side. He plastered his own name and picture on the book, thus advertising himself as a “leader” of the free counterculture. While egocentricity may be as authentic as anything else, performing under its influence does not represent a new form of any kind, and we criticized Abbie for confusing the issue.

  Abbie was and remained a close friend of mine until his disappearance underground after selling drugs to an undercover narcotics cop, but a friend with whom the Diggers had pronounced disagreements. One morning he woke up Peter Berg by pounding on the door and shouting in his pronounced New England twang, “Petah, Petah, I bet you think I stole everything from ya, doncha?” This was indisputably true. Berg stumbled to the door, regarded the cheerful hairball before him as if he were sucking a lemon, then responded sleepily, “No, Abbie. I feel like I gave a good tool to an idiot.” He closed the door, and that was the last time they spoke.

  Emmett’s personal relationships to the concepts of “anonymous” and “free” were always complex and ambiguous. His notion of anonymity was to give his name away and have others use it as their own. So many people claimed it for so many purposes that eventually some reporters asserted that there was no Emmett Grogan and that the name was a fiction created by the Diggers to confound the straight world. While Emmett’s largesse was one way of demonstrating lack of attachment, it also made his name ubiquitous, and thus famous, among the cognoscenti.

  Life with Grogan was a daily exercise in such contradictions, a constant refinement of my understanding of “truth.” I was never sure precisely where and how the hair might be split. Arriving late for a meeting, he might excuse himself by telling a story about being attacked by street toughs out for revenge over some earlier event, the subtext being that everyone knew Emmett and had strong opinions about him. His friends usually accepted these stories without challenge, if “with a grain of salt,” simply enjoying the drama of his life. If, however, a particularly outrageous claim pushed you to confront Emmett, he would always have a backup ready; he might remove his dark glasses with the air of a smug magician, revealing a blackened eye and wounds. The wounds were definitely real, but was the story? If it was true, was it completely or partially true? I never knew for sure.

  “Never let them catch you in a lie,” he said to me once, alerting me that he was aware of his self-dramatizing and also the extent to which “theater” was necessary to his work.

  That work was to “act out” the life of your own hero, to live as you wanted to, to deny defeat and the myriad excuses that most people tender for their inability to be who they want. Since this idea of who we wanted to be was engendered in the imagination, imagination was the primary tool for its materialization.

  All artists desire an audience, and while we might criticize our culture, some part of us wants at the same time to be acknowledged by it. For Emmett, this contradiction—this simultaneous spurning and yearning—became the crucifix on which he impaled himself. It does not require much imagination to see in the shape of a crucifix the outline of a syringe, and it is that ambivalent symbol of healing and death that symbolizes Emmett’s dark side—his addiction to heroin and the indenturing of his personal autonomy to it.

  Inventing a culture from scratch is an exhausting process, since everything must be reinvestigated. When the investigation is coupled to a belief in a noble mission, no limit or taboo can be accepted. If imagination knows no limits, why should we be concerned with the limits of our bodies? Drugs were utilized as tools in the quest for an imaginative and physical renaissance.

  As edge dwellers, we were proud of being tougher, more experimental, more truthful, and less compromised than our peers, most of whom seemed more interested in easy assimilations—dope-and-lo
ng-hair-at-the-office or the marketing possibilities of the counterculture—than in real social alternatives. If their Hallmark Card philosophies were fueled by acid, grass, and hashish, we had all of these, plus heroin and amphetamines—the allies of such blues-life champions as Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday, foot soldiers in ’Nam, and all others who had faced the beast at close quarters and been consumed in the flames through which they tried to signal.

  Hindsight has taught me that there is a ravenous, invisible twin haunting each of us. Despite “good works” and selfless sacrifice for noble causes, without unremitting vigilance, even tiny indulgences will betray high aims and deflect nourishment to this parasitic companion. Unfortunately, not even hindsight frees us from the consequences of such indulgence.

  Emmett stuck me with a needle twice. The first time, he pierced my ear. “It’ll change you,” he said. We were in Sweet William’s kitchen, not too long before he became a Hell’s Angel. Lenore Kandel, William’s olive-skinned poet-lover with her thick shiny braid, inscrutable smile, and fertile erotic imagination, hummed contentedly while she strung beads for the glittering curtains that festooned every window in the house. Sweet William’s presence created ceremony; his grave face, with its high Mayan cheekbones and dark eyes, bore solemn witness as Emmett pierced my ear. Today it seems like no big deal, but Emmett was right. It did change me; it marked me as an outsider, drew me deeper into our confederation and a little farther from the pasty grip of civilian life.

  The second time was in the living room of a famous bad-boy Hollywood movie star. This time the needle was a syringe, loaded with heroin. “It’ll change ya,” Emmett said, and it did. It changed a lot.

  8

  the invisible circus

  I returned from the Mime Troupe tour in late 1967 and felt with the changing season a pleasing sense of spaciousness inside myself. Leaves had fallen from the trees in the Pennsylvania mountains bordering Turkey Ridge, and just as one could see greater distances through the bare branches, I felt that my life was revealing itself as new and open. For the first time since kindergarten, I was completely purposeless, rootless. I was free.

  The draft was no longer an issue. At eighteen I had applied for conscientious objector status, but my application had been dismissed because my religious affiliations were not formal. In 1965, when I left graduate school, opposition to the war was appearing on all fronts. I had been summoned for my draft physical but a sympathetic army psychiatrist practically told me how to answer his questions so that he could give me a 1-Y deferment on psychological grounds. With that threat removed, and liberated from academia and the rigors of touring, I felt that my life was mine again to invent.

  By 1967, San Francisco had become a symbol of freedom and license to the rest of the nation. I was straddling two worlds—still in the Mime Troupe but increasingly fascinated with the free-form, more radical street life of the Diggers.

  The Diggers’ home turf was San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, a working-class, pleasantly interracial neighborhood of old Victorian homes bordering Golden Gate Park and near enough to the University of California Medical Center to offer cheap housing intended for med students. It was being inundated with young people from all over the country, and the city capitalized on the phenomenon: the national media were filled with articles about San Francisco, the Haight-Ashbury, and its Psychedelic Shop. The San Francisco Mime Troupe was even on the cover of a chamber of commerce brochure, despite the fact that the city had arrested and prosecuted the company! The counterculture was the “new thing.”

  Although it had been surfacing in the media for a while, the big announcement of the counterculture’s “arrival” took place earlier that year with a major event. The Human Be-In had occurred on a lovely day, January 14, 1967, and newspapers and magazines transmitted photos and stories of the mass celebration into America’s most remote communities. The nation knew that something was going on “out there.” Paisley banners and flags stenciled with marijuana leaves fluttered in the balmy winds that seemed to be blessing the fifty thousand people assembled before a single stage crowded with celebrities and Haight Independent Proprietors (HIPs). Jerry Rubin was representing the “political aspect” of the counterculture, while Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert represented expanded consciousness and bliss. There were also a few genuine seers and artists like poet Gary Snyder, back from ten years of studying Zen in Japan; his old crony, Allen Ginsberg; and Zen master Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, abbot of the nearby San Francisco Zen Center, solid as a rock, smiling and enjoying himself.

  Fifty thousand people took drugs, danced, painted their faces, dressed in outrageous costumes, crawled into the bushes and made love, fired up barbecues, pitched tents, and sold wares—crystals, tie-dyes, hash pipes, earrings, hair ties, and political tracts. Fifty thousand people played flutes, guitars, tambourines, tablas, bongos, congas, sitars, and saxophones, and sang, harmonized, and reveled in their number and variety, aware that they were an emergent social force.

  The Diggers doubted that the event would benefit the neighborhood much or change its political realities, but a party is a party. It was our neighborhood and our community and also our receptive audience, so we were there too, giving away free turkeys donated by LSD mogul Stanley “Bear” Owsley. We had underestimated the impact this event would have on community solidarity and self-awareness and the ways it would trumpet the existence of the counterculture nationally. Individual freaks, isolated in heartland hometowns, were delighted to discover that there were thousands like them in San Francisco, who were prepared to embrace them as brothers and sisters; they wanted to be there too. More kids began arriving from everywhere. They served themselves up as sweatshop employees to the merchants and as customers to the dope dealers; they begged, scrounged, and hustled in order to survive. The Haight Independent Proprietors appeared at conferences with city officials discussing the “problems” of the community. People making money off the scene—the rock bands, merchants, and dope dealers—felt that publicity about the Haight would “change people’s heads” and automatically generate changes in economic relationships and political structures—a fond hope, easier to entertain than the nine-hundred-pound gorilla of changing one’s own life.

  Time magazine coined the word hippie to describe the new pilgrims, juvenilizing the word hipster and trivializing in the same stroke those seeking alternatives to Time’s official reality.

  The Haight had its own newspaper, the San Francisco Oracle, which for all its radical pretensions once refused to print a poem by Gary Snyder because it was “too negative and too political.” The Oracle was colorful, full of treatises and manifestos, and about equal to any other paper in disguising opinion as fact.

  In September of 1966, a week after the first issue of the Oracle appeared, a white San Francisco policeman had killed a black youth named Mathew Johnson fleeing in a stolen car. Word went out on the street that the boy was shot in the back, and the black community erupted. Social upheaval had been anticipated since the Watts riots in Los Angeles a year earlier, and when it arrived in the Bay Area, it arrived full of vengeance and wrath. The National Guard was called out as the rioting spread into the Fillmore district, which adjoined the Haight. Curfews were extended over both neighborhoods, sparking a flurry of political responses. Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) staged a march down Haight Street urging people to violate the curfew. The Haight merchants countered with signs urging people to stay out of trouble, and the Digger response was, predictably, “Do what you want.” More than one hundred people were arrested on Haight Street for violating the curfew the first night.

  Resistance to authority occurred on other fronts as well. Angered at again being refused money from the city’s hotel-tax fund, in May of 1966 Ronnie Davis organized a large gathering of the city’s artists at our studio to form the Artists’ Liberation Front. Dedicated to “collective defense and offense,” the ALF intended to bypass “official” city-sponsored art and bring recognition to the work of the c
ommunity-based artists and people of color who were being ignored. A third of its members were Mime Troupers; the rest were progressive artists who dedicated their work to a broad range of social issues.

  In response to the Be-In, the Diggers began brainstorming an event to announce and define our terms of engagement to this emergent youth culture. Our intention was to “assume freedom” as opposed to “winning” it. We agreed that the site of the event would be Glide Memorial Church, centrally located in San Francisco’s seedy Tenderloin district. Run by a flamboyant African-American minister named Cecil Williams, who favored Afro “’dos” and tie-dyed dashikis, Glide had a boisterous congregation with a larger than normal representation of pimps, gays, addicts, hustlers, winos, and prostitutes of both sexes. Because of this constituency, Cecil and his church were highly tuned to the realities of the disenfranchised. We simply told them we wanted to have a “happening,” which they assumed would be something like the colorful street fairs the Artists’ Liberation Front had been sponsoring, and agreed to let us use their building.