Sleeping Where I Fall: A Chronicle

by Peter Coyote

  We were given Paul Simon’s apartment for another meeting. Emmett told me that David Padwa, a wealthy stockbroker, wanted to “give us ten grand” and asked me to “pick it up.” Of course, receiving such donations was one of the inevitable internal contradictions of the Digger position. Money was necessary to operate at all, and if we were to be able to create “free” events (or sustain ourselves to create free events) the cash had to come from somewhere. We viewed our wooing of donors as an opportunity to engage them in a new social arrangement as much as an opportunity to get funds for our work.

  Emmett himself had another engagement that night, so Danny Rifkin, manager of the Grateful Dead (also Paul’s houseguest), and I agreed to stay and meet Padwa. Leaving the apartment with Emmett, Paul Simon walked into a large wooden horse from an old carousel he had mounted on rockers. Rubbing his shin, he said, “God, I hate that damn thing” and limped out. Emmett was right behind him.

  Padwa arrived shortly afterward with poet Leonard Cohen and Andy Warhol “star” Ultraviolet. They appraised us coolly and listened politely as Danny and I told them about the Diggers. Suddenly, Leonard Cohen leaped to his feet and announced dramatically, “David, these men are lying. This is not a leaderless group at all. I am a novelist and reader of men. These men are leaders,” stressing this last word as if it were a communicable disease.

  It occurred to me that Cohen (a poet and songwriter whose work I admire) was probably hustling Padwa for something himself and feared competition. Danny and I ignored his rant and continued, offering, “So what we’ll do with your ten grand is . . .”

  The room temperature dropped perceptibly when Padwa interjected in an icy tone—“What ten grand?” I was about three stammers into a confused response when I realized that he had not visited intending to give support to the Diggers but had probably been invited simply to meet us. The situation was a classic Emmett move. He had guessed that David might give us money, and rather than risk his own status by asking, he had sacrificed Danny and me to the task, so that we could be written off later if it became a problem between David and Emmett.

  As this revelation crystallized, shattered, and fell apart in me, Padwa rose gravely, said, “I don’t give money,” and he and his entourage walked out, leaving Danny and me as embarrassed as if we had been caught masturbating in front of a mirror.

  Three hours later, Emmett stormed in. “Hurry up, the truck’s downstairs. Gimme a hand!” he said, barely concealing his delight at some mischief he had planned and effectively changing the subject before Danny and I could confront him about the evening’s betrayal. Emmett had arranged for a truck, and we loaded Simon’s hated carousel horse onto it, piled in behind it, and drove north to Woodstock, New York, where we deposited it in the early morning hours on Bob Dylan’s front porch as an anonymous gift to his children. Dylan was Simon’s bête noire in those years.

  Twenty years later, I saw Paul Simon across the room in a New York restaurant. I had the waiter slip him a note that read, “Didn’t you ever wonder what happened to the rocking horse?” I saw him read it and scan the room for the sender. Recognizing me, he asked me over and introduced me to a journalist interviewing him for the New York Times. I told him the story, and he confessed that while he had known that we had taken it, he hadn’t known its destination until that moment. I imagined the journalist framing a mini-headline in her mind: “Other Shoe Takes 20 Years to Fall.”

  The partying, hustling, and scamming were fun, but they were, after all, a sideshow to the real work of the Diggers, which was to create free life amid the desert of industrial capitalism. New York was too large, too anarchic, too entrenched in various levels of corruption and territoriality for us to gain much of a purchase on the city beyond our person-to-person travel through it. We required a more manageable stage and a larger support system, and that meant returning to San Francisco.

  11

  biker blues

  At the end of that summer of 1968, Emmett and I returned to San Francisco. Sam and I had separated during one of our innumerable spats, perhaps because I refused to take her with me to New York. She had moved out of our small cabin overlooking Dolores Park and was staying at Paula McCoy’s classy Victorian across the street from the Grateful Dead house on Ashbury Street. She had taken our nine cats with her, which bizarrely died of distemper one after another soon after she moved into Paula’s. On each visit there, part of my time was spent poking through the garage (where the cats always seemed to prefer to die), seeking the source of a stench.

  Emmett and I had been using large quantities of hard drugs in New York and I was in bad shape, passing out often and unexpectedly, finding myself suddenly on the floor looking up at the bottom of a sink. One night, on a visit to Paula’s, I was flirting with a woman there, much to Sam’s displeasure. Sam was stalking me (which of course made this pursuit extremely difficult), emanating murderous vibes. I don’t know if it was the vibes or my weakened state, but at one moment I was on top of a long stairway and in the next moment I was lying at the bottom, looking up at Sam towering above me, with her hands on her hips and backlit as a glowing silhouette. She regarded me long enough to see that I was still living, then turned and walked off without a word.

  I was drifting, with no fixed abode or relationship, and if I disregarded being loaded or drug-sick, I was having a wonderful time. Our reputation and family were expanding. There were places to visit, people to see, comrades to assist, music to make, and women to love. I decided that a motorcycle would be a dashing addition to my life.

  Pete Knell of the Hell’s Angels lived in the bottom half of a dilapidated two-family house. Billy “Batman” Jahrmarkt lived upstairs, with his wife Joanie and children, Jade, Hassan, Digger, and Caledonia (referred to collectively as the Bat People). It was an unlikely but highly workable arrangement. Pete respected authenticity, even Billy’s all-consuming dedication to heroin, and the arrangement suited the Bat People too, because Pete had a gigantic dog named Eckloff who guarded the house unremittingly. Eckloff was a monster. He appeared to me about the size of a lion and Pete’s downstairs dwelling, always cool and shadowy, made a suitable cave for him.

  Pete’s living room featured a high-backed thronelike chair, a small bar, and a bed in one corner suspended from the ceiling by heavy chains. The decorative motif was strictly functional, since most of the functions held there would have played havoc with furniture and decorations anyway. Steel mesh over the windows protected against retaliatory bombings from rival bike gangs and gave the interior an otherworldly feel. A short corridor led past the bathroom to a small, unfinished back room attached to his garage shop. It was furnished with several mattresses, which Pete offered to let me use while I built my bike. I accepted.

  Pete was an impeccable worker. He built chopped-down Harleys that were light, fast, unobtrusive, and reliable. He was also a very patient teacher. I had recently inherited three thousand dollars from a grandmother’s will. I had given Sweet William a thousand dollars toward his bike, Freeman House and David Simpson something toward building The Bare Minimum, the Diggers’ free fishing boat, and with the remainder, I bought a brand-new 1969 Harley Davidson FLH engine. While we waited for it to arrive, Pete and I located an old but sound 1937 Harley “rigid-frame,” so called because it had no shock absorbers. I spent days sanding it smooth, and Pete showed me how to prime and paint it expertly with spray cans. “Watch the surface,” he said. “Make it shiny and wet, but don’t let it orange-peel or run.” I practiced and soon possessed an electric-blue frame gleaming with kinetic energy.

  Pete showed me how to disassemble the heavy-duty Harley transmission and grind and bevel the locking lugs on the gears so that they clicked rather than clunked into place when shifting. We rebuilt a clutch and bought new discs and a chain for it, then took the clutch cover, the “grasshopper” (a spring-loaded assist for a manual clutch), the tool kit, the headlight, and a few more odds and ends to be chromed. Such errands led me to the fascinating industrial section
of the city, south of Market where replaters took dingy bumpers, valve covers, fuel pumps, and pulleys and resurrected them as the gleaming fantasies of hot-rodders and bikers. Out of these grimy places with oil dirt yards, wormy dogs, and filthy facades the sorriest-looking parts emerged pristine as museum sculptures.

  The San Francisco Harley dealership was managed by a terse, bald fireplug of a man named Dave. Pete described him as “a guy who don’t like to fight, but if he does, you know that he’ll take care of business.” Pete’s guarantee was enough to establish my credit for the purchase of taillights, foot pedals, brake and clutch clamps, and the myriad pieces of hardware necessary to build a working “putt,” as Pete referred to his bikes. This extension of Pete’s credit was nothing to be taken lightly. Though an “outlaw,” Pete was strict about obligations that the Diggers often dismissed casually. He paid his bills to the penny, while—to name one example—we took advantage of substantial traffic in telephone credit cards. For us, it was a victory to “liberate” a famous politician’s or a corporate telephone card for “free” calls. Ditto for gasoline and bank credit cards, which often underwrote our long journeys and deliveries of supplies to the growing number of Digger family houses. Scruples about such behavior were anesthetized by our image of ourselves as guerrilla warriors living off the enemy. This was not a position that would bear overmuch scrutiny, and it was definitely not shared by Pete Knell. He was an outlaw, but his life outside the law was marked by a fixed, though contrary, relationship to it.

  Like most people, I consider myself an honorable person. What strikes me in hindsight about my ethical transgressions at this time is not the revelation of a flaw in my character but the ease with which anyone can sweep away ethical concerns in pursuit of a noble goal. The facility with which I performed these sleights of mind informs my caution today when I review the noble utterances of politicians and reformers. If I was able to justify personal misconduct as a way of redressing systemic wrongs, I suppose anyone can, so it no longer surprises me when prevalently high-sounding goals become transformed into justifications for malfeasance.

  Pete identified with the country, its goals, and its institutions. While he thought that much of its behavior was rife with self-serving bullshit, he did not consider these critiques to be excuses for personal dishonesty, and I was chastened by his example. The irony of being tutored on civic responsibility by an outlaw was not lost on me.

  The time I spent at Pete Knell’s was unnerving and stressful. Having to be preternaturally alert all the time around the Angels was exhausting and required even more self-medication. Freedom from the responsibilities of the Mime Troupe and a stable relationship left me ample opportunity to use heroin and methedrine whenever I wanted (which was often), and consequently my health was suffering. Signs of liver trouble appeared, and I chewed 90 percent protein tablets all day long as a junkie’s tonic for avoiding cirrhosis.

  My status at Pete’s house was curious. Because I was not a “prospect” seeking admission to the Hell’s Angels, there was much club business that I was not privy to. When three or four Angels congregated in his living room and the wooden soup bowl of pills was passed around, it was never long before someone wheeled around demanding to know just “what the fuck” I was doing there. I learned to discern pretty accurately when to get lost.

  There was some dissension among club members about Emmett’s intimate access as well. He had his own relationship with Pete and we were friends, so he was around often. For him, like me, the Angels were a kind of test to pass, a way of measuring our courage as well as forging an alliance that supported our social agenda. One night several members decided to give Emmett a beating as a warning to the rest of us about getting too close. They invited him to ride with them to Santa Cruz, and were drinking in a bar there when something triggered Emmett’s receptors to danger. Excusing himself to get something from his bike, he walked outside, rode back to San Francisco without hesitating, and lay low until things cooled down.

  Pete liked me and trusted me to keep my lip buttoned. When some members inquired whether or not they could steal the parts of my bike being stored in his garage, Pete stood up for me. One of the reasons he liked me, I think, was because of our free-ranging discussions. While not formally educated, Pete was razor sharp, well informed, and very curious. He liked to test his ideas against mine. We had many discussions about politics and he could never understand what he perceived as the “carelessness” of the Diggers. He felt that we were reckless in assuming that our intention to construct a counterculture would protect us from failures of strategy in dealing with the majority culture. He discounted all leftist revolutionary rhetoric, pointing out that most people calling for the revolution failed to live alertly and cautiously as warriors and consequently were no threat to anyone. He did not understand how we could be unconcerned with organization and structure, though he had to agree that it was the Diggers’ lack of structure that made infiltration by government programs like Cointelpro impossible. He appreciated my interest in his life and in motorcycles but was ambivalent about Bryden Bullington’s painting on my gas tank: a voluptuous bare-breasted blonde angel with flowing white wings, creating a pentangle at the tip of her index finger. The image sparked Pete’s proprietary concerns about the club’s identity.

  “It’s an earth angel, Pete,” I assured him, but he was never totally satisfied, uneasy that it was an infringement on the motif of his blood brotherhood. This issue of our intentions continued to reside below the surface of our relationship. Poet Michael McClure was riding a yellow and black chopper that Pete had made for him, and Emmett had one as well. Pete must have wondered whether we represented friends, pretenders, or potential adversaries.

  The issue was not enough to create a breach between us. He encouraged me to participate openly in his living-room discussions and to challenge his fellow Angels intellectually and philosophically—not a particularly easy thing to do when they were loaded. The Angels were not given to dialectical subtlety and were often happy to resolve dialectical tension with a quick punch. Later, Pete encouraged younger Angels to stay at the Diggers’ Olema commune periodically, though I was never certain whether he wanted them to study us, report on us, or learn from us. Still, it was always clear that they enjoyed being treated as intelligent men whose ideas mattered, and they understood such treatment as a mark of respect.

  Anyone who comforts himself with easy clichés about “bikers” is deluded. During the years that I had access to the club, I met sculptors, master chemists, machinists, economists, physicists, and poets. I met individuals in the Hell’s Angels who were as brilliant and incisive as anyone I have met since. Generally, they held themselves to a higher standard of honesty and commitment than most civilians I knew. Like the Diggers, they lived life as they imagined it possible. Unlike the Diggers, however, their aspirations and hopes for success extended no further than themselves.

  The Hell’s Angels were a conundrum and a challenge, and to none of the Diggers more so than to Bill Fritsch, our brother known as Sweet Willie Tumbleweed. He perceived in the Angels a standing rebuke to his integrity, because he loved and admired their fearlessness and lack of compromise. He confronted the issue for himself by joining them. What follows is his story, which is once again also mine.

  12

  sweet william’s story

  Sweet William, born Bill Fritsch, came by his passionate, poetic, inflexibly self-confident spirit genetically. His father was a sullen Hungarian house-painter for whom family life was purgatory, and his mother was a devout Russian Communist who had once refused to sell breast milk to the aging J. D. Rockefeller, who, according to Fritsch family legend, spent his days lounging in a motorized chair that tracked the sun in his penthouse atrium, sipping breast milk because he believed it would keep him healthy and vigorous.

  Bill’s parents divorced when he was three, and his mother married a merchant marine left-winger who shaped Bill’s political instincts and class antagonisms quite ear
ly. The remainder of Bill’s early education was contributed by children of the Philadelphia Mafia. It was one of them who crystallized the dynamics of capitalism for Bill when he said, “Free enterprise is as far as your father rules.”

  At New Town High School, an all-boys school in Philadelphia, Bill remembers himself as “an average kid with middling talents.” He tells me this with unembellished honesty as he struggles to get a Camel out of a flattened pack with his good hand. I am uncomfortable watching his difficulty, but Bill handles the moment with aplomb. A few minutes ago I watched him approach, on his way to our meeting in a little San Francisco hamburger joint, a solitary figure framed against a white wall, one arm and one leg flapping uselessly as he placed each foot and his cane with fixity. Despite this physical infirmity, his face still bore the commanding, determined expression I remember from the days when he could have stopped a mob on his own personal authority.

  In the early fifties, Bill left home at sixteen to join the merchant marines and worked his way into the role of union delegate for his ship. When he shipped out, he met Richard Marley, a man who would weave in and out of both of our lives in years to come. Richard was born in England, the son of a famous militant Communist mother. On Bill’s maiden merchant marine voyage, Richard delivered long lectures to him about boycotting the whorehouses in ports. Richard explained how the girls were exploited by the capitalist class and how workers, in solidarity with them, could not participate in their degradation. This was depressing to Bill, whose libido seemed to orchestrate most of his decisions. He is an extraordinarily sincere man, however, and when the boat docked in Manila, he gave up his liberty and remained on the boat for three days and nights, tormented by the tension between his conscience and his body’s desires. He broke on the fourth night, sneaking off the ship like a guilty dog, streaking into the closest whorehouse. There he found Richard Marley in bed with three whores, laughing uproariously as they serviced him with thoroughness and imagination. This was perhaps the last time Bill was susceptible to ideological manipulation.