Sleeping Where I Fall: A Chronicle

by Peter Coyote

  The core of the Digger gang assembled to organize the event: Emmett and I, Peter Berg and Judy Goldhaft, poet Lenore Kandel and her lover Bill Fritsch, a couple so charismatic they could stop conversation simply by entering a room. Kent Minault arrived with his pal and psychic twin, Brooks Butcher, a Dionysianly handsome, high-energy fellow with merry eyes and curly brown hair whose life was dedicated to “revolution.” Brooks brought his girlfriend Pam Parker, a stunning redhead with fearless humor and a steel-trap mind. An heir to the Parker Pen company, she cemented her relationship with us by springing for a Chevy pickup that the Diggers needed desperately but could not afford. Ever afterward, however, she “paid” her way with her imagination, not her checkbook.

  Claude Hayward, dressed in an Italian anarchist black coat, represented Ramparts magazine. Nina Blasenheim, Phyllis Wilner, Sam, my live-in girlfriend and eventually the mother of my daughter, and Natural Suzanne (Siena Riffia) were there as well. Earlier in the day, I had stopped to pull the coat of poet and author Richard Brautigan, a tall, mustachioed wraith who wandered the Haight gravely peering at everything through round, frameless glasses. I’d asked him to join us, and now he stood owlishly at the rear of the room, swiveling his head as if he were seeking the sources of sound.

  The rest were artists and social visionaries of every stripe, members of the vital community that was making San Francisco the locus of this emerging cultural force. No art or culture flourishes without such a community, and while I have singled out the individuals who were my friends, this is not to suggest that they were more important than the others in that room.

  People began volunteering ideas, and before long all of Glide Church had been imaginatively divided into “territories,” with people claiming responsibility for what might occur at each spot. Discussions were punctuated by whoops of delight as everyone vied to suggest more improbable and outrageous events. We were animated by a healthy sense of competition with the Human Be-In, hoping to create an event that would more accurately demonstrate what a free city celebration might be.

  It was decided that a full weekend was required to immerse people into “assuming freedom.” It was also agreed that except for a few handbills to announce the event, now named “The Invisible Circus: The Right of Spring,” all advertisement would be by word of mouth.

  On February 24, the night of the event, I was confined by illness to my cabin above Dolores Park, where I had landed after moving from Jessie’s and my old apartment on Fell Street. The Invisible Circus was described in Emmett Grogan’s book, Ringolevio, and since I wasn’t there, I’ll refer the curious to his account. Suffice it to say, the party got completely out of hand, with a couple fornicating in front of a staid Commission on Pornography discussion, naked belly dancers cavorting through the crowd, and the crowd itself practicing every conceivable excess in every available nook of the building. Richard Brautigan and Claude Hayward established a printing press in one room, and Richard wandered the floors, observing the madness, and then rushed back to print and distribute special handbills commenting on and alerting others to what he had observed, linking the participants in a prototypical World Wide Web. Horrified Glide administrators smothered the event in the wee hours of the first morning, but the players were partying in high gear by that time and retired to the beach to continue the festivities until the sun rose.

  All the excesses, crudities, fantasies, and experimentation of this Digger party were consonant with the emerging spirit of the times and with our intention to stretch the envelope of cultural possibilities. Permission was the rule, and despite the chaos, the conflagration of taboos and bizarre behavior, no one was hurt, wounded, shunned, or scorned. I don’t mean to suggest that bizarre behavior is the inevitable result of personal freedom or violating taboos, but in this case, it was simply like letting the steam out of a pressure cooker: once accomplished, it was not necessary to repeat.

  Despite its high jinks and fun-loving spirit, the Haight was experiencing violent social spasms. It had become the geographical locus and metaphor for a burgeoning national movement. New shops catering to the “head” crowd lined the formerly mundane street, supplying the locals and luring tourists with the accoutrements of the new lifestyle: Mnasidika (leathers); In Gear (mod clothes); the Blushing Peony (boutique); the I/Thou (coffee shop); the Psychedelic Shop (enlightened literature and accoutrements); the House of Richard (Mexican drag); the Blue Unicorn (a coffee shop dating from Beatnik times that Bob Stubbs had started for a hundred dollars and maintained by selling used books, records, and secondhand clothes, as well as coffee and staples); and the Print Mint (art supplies and staples). These new shops featured colorful signs and window displays and ubiquitous advertising posters in psychedelic graphics; they transformed the neighborhood.

  The merchants had a problem, however, because the burgeoning population of street people had no money. The proprietors accused them of intimidating paying customers by begging in the doorways. (Sound familiar?) Some shop owners, like the Thelin brothers at the Psychedelic Shop and the crew at the Blue Unicorn, remained loyal to the street culture and offered quiet spaces where people could detox from chemical or sensory overload. Other merchants hired street people at feudal wages to keep the rest of the poor away. Various charities like the Haight-Ashbury Switchboard (which located bed space, lawyers, and bail and served as a message drop) and the HIP Job Co-op were established to address the problems caused by the unmanageable influx of new souls and the alienation growing between them and the merchants. These were well intended but essentially Band-Aid measures. The Diggers were particularly piqued with the HIP Job Co-op, which took advantage of the desperation of runaways by offering them sweatshop wages to make the “love” objects sold in local stores.

  Tourist buses began including Haight Street in their itineraries, and middle-class people from faraway places began photographing us as if we were exotic natives observed on safari. (The tourism diminished when we responded by spray painting the windows of the buses and the camera lenses.)

  The police were rousting street people in a heavy-handed manner. The same kids magnetizing the tourist dollars were being swept off the streets while the media simultaneously baited feature stories about San Francisco with their photos. This galvanized us to action, and the Digger Free Food, free medical clinics, free crash pads, and Free Store were responses to this hypocrisy.

  The police response to the problems was the creation of a unit called the S-Squad, shortened to SS by the street people. It developed a well-earned reputation for brutality and nastiness. But the overzealousness of the police exacerbated difficulties for the merchants when customers were arrested along with the indigent. (The two groups were, after all, indistinguishable.) Before long, the Haight merchants were meeting with the police to “improve community relations,” and this cooperation with the authorities created some definite advantages for them. Newspapers, reporting on the meetings and the spirit of cooperation among the “good hippies,” printed the names of the shopkeepers and their shops and the merchandise they offered for sale. Greyline tourist buses rolled through the neighborhood once again.

  Exploited and divided as it was, the Haight bustled with life for those in tune with it. The street itself was the real scene: a down-and-dirty, do-your-own-thing public stage running between Stanyan and Masonic Streets. You could sing, beg, get high, cruise for sex partners, plot the overthrow of the government, sleep, be mad, or do what you would there. It was liberated turf. One night, fellow Minstrel Show performers Willie B., Jason, and I were lounging and singing a cappella on Haight Street near Ashbury. People gathered to listen, and as they clapped in rhythm and expressed their appreciation, the spirit became infectious. Almost imperceptibly, the street filled with partying people who transformed it into an impromptu mall. A volleyball game materialized, using the high-tension bus lines as a net. Groups of black people wandered cautiously up from the Fillmore, testing the atmosphere to determine if they were welcome. Discovering that they
were, they joined the party, raising the stakes in the doo-wop competitions, joining the volleyball game and the dancing hordes of people who had claimed the street as their own.

  The police were dumbfounded and finally erected barricades at the two “ends” of Haight Street, letting the party roll on rather than risk a riot. Long before Woodstock, dozens of such spontaneous dress rehearsals were expressing people’s desires for social harmony and real community.

  One morning San Francisco awoke to discover that walls, freeway columns, and fences had been plastered with five-foot-high posters of two enigmatic Chinese men in pajamas, lounging on a street corner in the relaxed and at-home posture of hipsters everywhere. Over their heads was the Chinese ideogram for revolution, and under their feet were the cryptic words “1% Free.” The poster was designed by Peter Berg, executed with stencils by artist Mike McKibbon (drawn from a turn-of-the-century photo of tong hit men found in a library book), and a group of us had spent a long night pasting them up in every neighborhood in the city.

  The slogan “1% Free” was ambiguously received. Some thought it meant that the Haight merchants should dedicate 1 percent of their profits to the community, while others felt it meant that only 1 percent of the population lived autonomously. The L.A. Free Press misread the posters and published a piece declaring the Diggers to be common stickup artists out for a piece of the pie. After the Free Press story broke, local media swarmed us like flies, trying to reach Emmett or other Digger “spokespersons.” Someone steered them to me at the Mime Troupe. Producer Zev Putterman wanted me for a new TV talk-show pilot to be called The Les Crane Show. Bart Lytton, the chairman of Lytton Industries, and I were to debate for the TV audience. “It will be good for your group,” Putterman crooned smoothly, ignorant of our intentions, “it’ll get your point of view across.”

  I certainly could not appear on television as a Digger, since offering myself as a spokesperson would have violated the truth and group precepts, so I agreed to appear only as a member of the San Francisco Mime Troupe. I was already familiar with Bertolt Brecht’s warning that attempting to use the media self-servingly is self-deception. But my head was turned at the prospect of a national audience for radical ideas, and being a zealous young man with something to say, I jumped at the opportunity. Knowing I was only a cultural Ritz cracker, I smeared myself with myself and offered the tidbit to the maw of television.

  Les Crane was an edgeless fellow of the type that TV talk shows tend to favor, the kind of man who demonstrated his hipness by wearing bluejeans below his suit jacket when he interviewed Bob Dylan. Bart Lytton was a thickly built, mischievous rogue. The show was going to pit Bart and me against each other like unequal gladiators: a mature, corporate chief executive millionaire to represent democratic capitalism, and myself, a callow, unknown, penniless actor representing social change. Despite producer Putterman’s loading the deck in favor of the status quo, I did not behave as the frothing antagonist they had expected. I managed to hold my ground and be charming and quick-witted enough that, at the close of the show, Bart tipped his head to me on camera and graciously said “touché,” indicating that he felt that I had acquitted myself well. Others must have felt that the show was interesting, because it did go on to national syndication. In what might have been a cautionary episode about my future life in show business, I found myself, with Peter Berg and Sweet William, stranded, absolutely broke, and hungry in Los Angeles the following year. I contacted Zev Putterman and asked for a hundred dollars to get us fed and home, feeling that I had contributed in some manner to his success as the producer of a national show. His response was, “I only give money to Synanon” and he hung up. (Synanon was a drug treatment center fashionable at the time.)

  As the summer of 1967 (trumpeted by the Haight merchants as the “Summer of Love”) approached, a number of older hands realized that the area was poised to become unlivable due to the accelerated influx of new residents. Furthermore, the street itself was no longer necessary as the primary staging area for anyone but the Haight merchants. It was obvious that we could not craft an autonomous life on top of the asphalt, and many people planned moves to the country or, like myself, simply moved to cheaper, less crowded neighborhoods.

  9

  edge city

  My first move out of the Haight was only as far as the intersection of Pine and Divisadero, to a railroad flat, a series of rooms strung on a long hallway in a wooden Victorian two-family house. Karl Rosenberg and I had been evicted from Mrs. Beltramo’s Steiner Street penthouse for allowing the tiny kitchen to be used as a Digger galley, and it was here, just before I left for my last tour with the Mime Troupe, that I met a woman who was to figure prominently in my life, and moved her in to share the flat with me.

  Eileen Ewing was the firstborn of a prosperous Louisiana doctor who had wanted a son and consequently nicknamed his daughter Sam. She had, in her family’s estimation, made a mess of her life, quitting college to run off with artists, freaks, and hippies. She was tall and willowy, proud of her stunning figure, with the kind of Scandinavian coloring and chiseled features that grace fashion magazine covers. The day she accompanied a girlfriend I was seeing into the Mime Troupe office, I knew only that we were attracted to each other. I learned later that she couldn’t spell consequences, and I couldn’t have cared less about them.

  In Sam’s personality, boldness cloaked confusion and self-doubt, like a massive bronze constructed around a flawed armature. On the day she moved in with me, she borrowed some money to rescue a trunk with all of her possessions. I noticed later that all her departures tended to be messy and abrupt. Over the years, she has moved more often and more precipitously than anyone I have ever known, abandoning homes, property, and plans in a moment as if her psyche were only one step ahead of a repossessor. The sparks between us eventually produced an adored daughter, much psychic turmoil and suffering, and years of estrangement. She attached herself to me with an ardor that was frightening and sometimes suffocating, and I was about as reliable an anchorage for her hopes as a junkie guarding a drug stash. My casual betrayals of the relationship were exacerbated by the libidinous attitudes of the times and the opportunities I enjoyed as an actor. I couldn’t have remained faithful to Sam if she had tied me to the bed, and my countless infidelities and her imaginative revenges produced predictable fissures in our relationship. Just how deeply those faults had riven the bedrock of her personality, I only discovered when we got together to talk things over for this book, twenty-five years later.

  We began on her back porch with the easy intimacy of people who have shown one another their worst and best and managed to survive. When the subject switched to our personal relationship, however, she became upset as the painful memories overwhelmed her. Her throat swelled with rage, and her speech was venomous and breathtaking in its intensity. I had the lucky intuition to sit silently and let it wash over me like a caustic bath without trying to defend myself. When she was finished, I apologized, sincerely shocked at the extent of the pain I had caused and chastened by seeing my behavior from her point of view. I reminded her that she had always been a special person to me, honored as a skilled artisan and as the mother of our beloved daughter, and that while I had been a young and unconscious fool, my intentions had never been malicious. In that instant, something passed away from her face like the shadow of a cloud racing over a hill, and lightness and youth returned to her spirit; it was a stunning transformation. It made me sad to consider what a fearsome price she had paid for something as evanescent as love, but since that moment, whatever beasts were haunting the space between us moved away for good.

  On my return from the final Mime Troupe tour, the character of our apartment changed with the arrival of Claude Hayward, his feral companion Helene, and the Communication Company. Claude was a ferret-faced guy with an easy laugh and furtive manner who had recently left the staff of Ramparts magazine. Helene was 120 pounds of condensed hostility; her unmanaged thicket of black hair made her look as if s
he had just participated in a classroom experiment on static electricity. She disguised her abundant anger behind honeyed bonhomie and an engaging smile, but she could have swindled a shell-game hustler and would have stolen a wooden leg without compunction. After each of their visits, personal possessions disappeared as if they had been rubbed out by cinematic special effects. Helene would steal your sleeping bag!

  An anarchist by temperament as well as a skilled thief, Claude had somehow come into possession of Gestetner machines, which electronically cut stencils for mimeographing. Before the advent of desktop publishing, these Gestetners were the state of the art, allowing photographs and graphics to be reproduced cheaply on readily available mimeograph equipment. This technology (and these liberated machines) became the foundation of the Communication Company, the public information arm of the Diggers, a service offered by Claude and Chester Anderson to the larger community. Under Claude’s direction, and later for the Free City News under the skilled mentoring of Freeman House and David Simpson, these machines produced such stunning documents that even the Gestetner company (from whom they had been stolen) subscribed for the free handouts, incredulous at how their machines were being used to “paint” and wanting to understand the process.

  The Diggers printed broadsides constantly: free handouts of exhortation and provocation; analysis of contemporary events from a free point of view; the condensed (or expanded) result of late-night jawboning among Berg, Sweet William, Kent, Emmett, me, and whoever ambled in to join us around the Cribari wine jug of an evening. (While women were usually present at such sessions, they more often than not seemed content to chat among themselves or laugh at us, perhaps because they managed the lion’s share of the physical work, a point to be clarified later.)