Sleeping Where I Fall: A Chronicle

by Peter Coyote

  Digger papers had several modes. They could be as simple as a photograph of a human spine bracketed by the words “INVISIBLE GOVERNMENT”; they could be succinct expressions of true insight or blather that required concentrated effort to decipher. Consider the following:

  THERE IS A GREAT DEAL TO BE SILENT ABOUT Contemporary history is a money conspiracy—the key to the atom. The facade of present seeming normalcy shows signs of weathering; each day the cement crumbles a little more—portents of chaos everywhere as we grow aware of our own nakedness and impotence, our nothingness—time is shrinking into itself. Only the present seems to hold possibility. . . . Chaos is real world—shifting, changing, slipping out of grasp. Meaning only found beyond experience. Basic impulse always religious—a cold light on our own incompleteness. Like a debauched child’s face.

  printed 5/29/67 by the communication company (ups) chicken little was right.

  At other times they were very clear, such as this response to a pronouncement by a local judge:

  Still others were an opportunity to share a vision and disseminate ideas for public colloquy, as in the following excerpt:

  Claude’s “thing” was to offer his printing services to groups with which he was in sympathy, and one day two young black men came to discuss a printing request. The older of the two and the obvious leader was a sturdy, handsome man of about twenty-five with an open, intelligent face and a passion in his speech that compelled attention. His companion could not have been more than sixteen. Huey Newton, commander in chief, and Bobby Hutton, a foot soldier in the newly formed Black Panther party, had decided that their organization needed a newspaper and had come to see the Diggers about helping them produce one. (Bobby died in a hail of police bullets not long after our meeting.)

  We spoke at length, and as a result of that day’s conversation, the first and (I think) the second issues of the Black Panther party newspaper were printed by the Communication Company.

  The relationship that developed between the Diggers and the Black Panthers was only tangentially political. The Diggers were not “serving” black causes out of ideological loyalty. The Haight-Ashbury district bordered the Fillmore, the black ghetto of San Francisco, and black people mingled freely in the Haight Street counterculture. We shared the same place, followed our respective visions, and were allied by territory and a common love of freedom. Because our visions were congruent at least in these ways, because we faced common enemies, and perhaps primarily because we were neighbors, we forged an alliance.

  The Diggers created a series of “free stores,” which were little more than bins of take-what-you-like goods. Peter Berg refined Arthur Lisch’s original free store on Frederick Street with Trip Without a Ticket, a free store designed to encourage reflection on the relationships among goods and roles—owner, employee, customer—implied by a store. A number of us agreed to help him, and we begged the money from a patron and rented a building at the corner of Cole and Carl Streets. We painted the Free Store interior a tasteful white with donated paint, scavenged counters, racks, and hangers, and began filling them with the available detritus of an industrial culture: clothes, jewelry, televisions, kitchen implements, discarded skis and trunks, tennis rackets, and waffle irons. The store’s existence advertised its own premise: “stuff” is easy to acquire; why trade time in thrall in order to get it?

  Not only were the goods in the Free Store free but so were the roles. Customers might ask to see the manager and be informed that they were the manager. Some people then froze, unsure how to respond. Some would leave, but some “got it” and accepted the invitation to redo the store according to their own plan, which was the point. Your life was your own, and if you could leap the hurdles of programmed expectations and self-imposed limits, the future promised boundless possibilities. If you couldn’t, you had to understand this either as a natural limit or as one to be remedied. There was no one or no system to blame. The condition of freedom was presented as an actual possibility, not “a message,” the subtext of a play or literary tract. Transmission through action, heightened by the reality that we were living in the liberated commons of the Haight, made the situation potent and its implications radical.

  One day, on my shift as “manager,” I noticed an obviously poor black woman furtively stuffing clothing into a large paper bag. When I approached her, she turned away from the bag coolly, pretending that it wasn’t hers. Smiling pleasantly, I returned the bag to her. “You can’t steal here,” I said.

  She became indignant. “I wasn’t stealing!”

  “I know,” I said amiably, “but you thought you were stealing. You can’t steal here because it’s a Free Store. Read the sign—everything is free! You can have the whole fucking store if you feel like it. You can take over and tell me to get lost.”

  She looked at me long and hard, and I went to the rack and fingered a thick sweater. “This?” I queried. She looked at it critically, then shook her head. “No, I don’t like the color. What about that one?” We spent a good part of the morning “shopping” together. About a week later, she returned with a tray of doughnuts, probably day-olds from a bakery somewhere. She strolled in casually, set them on the counter for others to share, and went to browse the racks. She knew which end was up.

  More than a few times, soldiers used the Free Store as a trampoline from which they could bounce out of the military. The Diggers felt that the war in Vietnam benefited a class of people who were neither our allies nor our friends. Unlike some who opposed the war, we respected the boys who went over there and did not presume to judge their intentions or morality. We preferred them alive and unscarred, however, so when we encountered soldiers who had changed their minds about military service, we did what we could to help.

  Through the antiwar underground, we had acquired a number of draft card blanks and the coded information for filling them in so that they would pass inspection. We had inherited a couple of “liberated” seals from draft offices in other states, and whispers circulated on the street that if someone from the armed forces felt moved to register a personal protest against the war by leaving the service, the Free Store was the place to go. On my watch, several men entered in uniform, picked civilian clothes off the rack, changed, and left behind their army-issue duds. After a few minutes of elliptical conversation, Billy from Iowa might leave as Phil from Florida, and William from Minneapolis as Robert from Memphis. They slipped into the maelstrom of Haight Street, disappearing into whatever future they imagined for themselves.

  The Free Store was only one “theater” in the struggle to create escape hatches in daily life. Others did the same work differently. One morning, Ron Thelin, founder of the Psychedelic Shop, and Arthur Lisch, the Quaker mediator between the Diggers and Glide Church, set up an impeccably prepared breakfast table on the shoulder of Highway 101 during morning rush hour. Dazed commuters on their way to work were startled to see a table with four chairs, lovely crystal and linen, orange juice, coffee, and a full breakfast at the side of the road. Ron and Arthur sat calmly reading the papers, three feet from the flow of traffic. Two empty chairs and full place settings provided an invitation to anyone brave enough to stop the car and reinvent his or her life. No one did.

  Another afternoon Peter Berg and Judy Goldhaft filled a flatbed truck with half-naked belly dancers and conga drummers and drove down the middle of Montgomery Street, the city’s financial section. The women swayed invitingly, the music pulsed, wine and marijuana were passed around and offered to open-mouthed bystanders. Invitations were extended to anyone who felt like “climbing on the bandwagon.”

  The instruments of change were not necessarily events but sometimes individuals. One day, as I was helping unload the free food in the Panhandle, a young woman with a radiant smile appeared at my side, waiting to receive a tray of food to pass on. Dressed in a yellow India-print dress, her round face framed by an unruly mop of sandy hair, she radiated a captivating enthusiasm and joy.

  “Who’s she?” I asked
Emmett, whose response was a proprietary: “Stay away from her.” I guessed that he had already taken her under his personal purview, or was planning to, or might want to, or might want me to think that he had, but from that day on she and I became intimate friends. Her name was Phyllis Wilner, and she was a first among equals in the Diggers.

  Phyllis had fled New York and the chaos of life with a clinically schizophrenic mother at fourteen, opting for the safer unpredictability of life on the streets. She possessed a wacky and sunny personality, and the sheer number of fortunate events that occurred randomly to and around her made me believe that she was attended by a magical grace. I remember her leaving the Treat Street communal house one morning, saying, “I wish I had a bicycle.” She returned that evening wheeling an expensive ten-speed through the door and recounted a tale of being picked up hitchhiking by a young man (whose life story and metaphysical beliefs she recounted in great detail) en route to deliver his bike to the Goodwill because he was moving out of town and could not take it with him.

  She moved a mattress onto the tiny back porch of our Pine Street apartment for a while, radiating optimism and cheer through the house until she moved on to another and then another Free Family abode in nomadic fashion. If a problem existed somewhere in the community, such as Natural Suzanne delivering twins and having no husband, Phyllis solved it by moving in to care for the household until something else could be arranged, even if that “something else” might take months.

  After many years of this peripatetic life, which included spending time with the Hell’s Angels, homesteading in the New Mexico wilderness, making numerous cross-country jaunts to New York City and then back, baking at the Free Bakery in Oakland, and gardening and looking after babies at Black Bear Ranch in the Trinity-Siskiyou Wilderness, Phyllis returned to school. She took a high school equivalency test, completed nursing school, and somehow made her way to a refugee camp in the Himalayas, where she aided Tibetan refugees. She returned a year later, covered with bangles and carrying presents for almost everyone. (Mine were left in a car she’d hitched home in.) She took a job in the psychiatric ward at San Francisco General. Given her empathy and fluid sense of reality, it was not surprising that she became a favorite with the patients. Once she calmed a man who had been terrorizing the floor, complaining constantly about being cold and damaging his room by building a small fire in his metal wastebasket. Phyllis hunkered over it, warming her hands and talking brightly to him, until he joined her. Having finally been acknowledged, he was open to discourse, and they agreed that he might modify some of the more objectionable aspects of his behavior. This was her technique with everyone.

  In 1974 she fell in love with and married John Chesbro, a droll, quiet man with a penchant for carpentry and a demon chewing on the back of his head that had once driven him to a suicide attempt and short residence in a psych ward. Phyllis seemed able to placate it, and they moved north to live near the hip college town of Arcata, California, where they built a fairytale life in a north woods cottage, berrying and harvesting wild clams and mussels.

  Some years later, as their paths were diverging, John granted himself a total divorce from everything by committing suicide. Phyllis attended to the sad business of sorting out and disposing of the artifacts of their life and eventually found her way to Lynn, a woman friend, an Olympic-class athlete and professor at Humboldt State College with whom she began to share a house. Today, Phyllis is still “helping out,” serving in an emergency mobile crisis center, teaching, helping a sick friend, and keeping herself healthy. She still burns like a sun, and her example informs my anger whenever pundits dismiss the sixties as a playpen for lethargic, self-indulgent people and blame them for today’s social problems.

  There is, of course, a political agenda motivating such misinformation. Phyllis was one among many, and each one had an equally colorful story and contributed something of worth. Our collective energy was changing the Haight. The free food services had been assumed by a local church; Dr. David Smith had established the Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic; The Trip Without a Ticket was serving scores of customers and many local stores had instituted “free” boxes of cast-offs or couldn’t-sells free for the taking. The Diggers had created palpable change and were widely respected and regarded. Our advice was sought, we were interviewed and queried for articles and books, and no matter how diligently we pursued anonymity, we were, in the counterculture at least, becoming famous.

  10

  crossing the free frame of reference

  A feeling of potential charged the air like pollen in 1967. It was ubiquitous, random, and shimmering with promise. Ideas seemed nourishing enough to sustain life. I felt as if I had emerged from a chrysalis and was stretching new wings at the edge of a boundless savanna.

  As the potentials for change implied by Digger action and philosophy became clearer, it was difficult for me to remain in the limited context of the Mime Troupe. Life outside the theater appeared more challenging, and my talents as an actor were bringing me personal notoriety that conflicted with the Diggers’ goal of perfect anonymity. I bade a bittersweet good-bye to Ronnie and the company of dear friends and abandoned myself to an undefined future.

  The Digger family released spores everywhere. The call to be “free” was infectious, and people across the country accepted the challenge of playing life in that key. Small communities coalesced everywhere, intuitively connected to the new sensibility and working to express it more fully. The Diggers were only one such.

  One of our self-appointed tasks was the framing of large public celebrations for the solstices and equinoxes to embrace disparate communities into the most generous, inclusive frame of reference possible. In fact, the genius of these festivals (and I remember this as Peter Berg’s contribution) was the assumption of a planetary frame of reference. People often expressed amazement at how thousands of disparate and often antithetical groups—Hell’s Angels, Black Panthers, gay collectives, merchants, runaways, soldiers on leave, flower children, deserters, and civilians—could interact so peacefully at our parties. But accepting the planet as the most inclusive frame of reference subliminally unites rather than divides people, giving them all equal standing under the sun, and diminishes opportunities for contested space, status differentials, and violence.

  In marked contrast to many large commercial events, the free parties we sponsored in Golden Gate Park had a luminous air about them. It was lovely to wander about and witness imagination made manifest as people turned their minds inside out. Jungians would have had a field day categorizing archetypes, as images from all of human history materialized on the green swards of the park: aborigines, Tonto, Inquistor-General Torquemada, Shiva holy men, cowboy bikers, every shade of gender bender, flower children, urban junkies, stockbrokers with cautiously expressed face paint, dentists on dope, real estate agents disguised as flower children. All the local bands played to their own community for free. Music and dance wove everything into a brocade, and the sky became a common tent for activities ranging from the sweet to the bizarre: face painting and clowning for the children, or Roy Ballard and friends from the Black Man’s Free Store, a parallel to the Trip Without a Ticket based in the predominantly black Fillmore district, basting a spitted white mannequin over a charcoal pit.

  Dionysus ruled, and in the ample arena that acceptance created, people partied and danced, shared food, made new friends, and otherwise touched the real and common content of their lives. Freedom forced people to improvise at the edges of their imagination in a common quest for transformation. It was not a bad dream; like all utopian visions it was rooted in high expectations about what people could accomplish when working in concert.

  The Diggers operated at the edges of the counterculture, expanding it through alliances and recombinations that transformed our core group beyond recognition. We came to refer to this larger, centerless alliance as the Free Family. One such conjunction, between the Diggers and the Hell’s Angels, plays an important role in th
e next part of the story. It came about in an improbable way.

  On December 17, 1967, a parade was held in the Haight called “The Death of Money.” Marchers carried a coffin marked with dollar signs and the witness-participants blew penny whistles, flashed car mirrors into the faces of passive onlookers (to symbolize that they were actually watching themselves), and passed out posters with the word NOW printed on them in large black letters. Phyllis Wilner stood on the back of Hell’s Angel Hairy Henry’s motorcycle, and they cruised down the white line between rows of stalled traffic.

  Traffic was stalled because the authorities had not been forewarned about the morning’s “event.” The cops were infuriated: there was no permit for this demonstration and no way to disperse the four-thousand-odd people partying and chanting, “The streets belong to the people.” Enraged, the cops arrested Hank for riding his bike with Phyllis standing on the back.

  Now, Hairy Henry was a very tough guy who had just finished a nine-year stint at San Quentin for armed robbery. He had what the authorities called “an attitude problem”—that is, his attitude was adversely affected by authority. The cops asked to see his license and told him they would return it at the station house. Hank told them to keep it and got back on his bike. When the cops arrested him and started to drag him toward the paddy wagon, another Angel, Chocolate George, leaped into the fray and pulled him out again. George was a big, easygoing guy who liked to hold court in front of Tracy’s Donut Shop and was well known and liked on the street. The cops swarmed the two of them and forced them into the paddy wagon; this angered the crowd, so the whole motley assembly followed the cops to the station house in a chanting parade led by Hell’s Angel Freewheeling Frank and poet Michael McClure playing his autoharp, demanding the release of the two prisoners.

  The cops were flabbergasted when the coffin from the Death of Money demonstration was passed around and rapidly filled with the bail money for the two men. When it was handed over to Pete Knell, president of the Frisco chapter of the Hell’s Angels, it was his turn to be stunned, both by the gesture of community support and by the speed with which it had been accomplished. Since it had been a Digger event, the Angels credited the Diggers for the happy result.