by Peter Coyote
Years later he explained how he had tried his normal procedure of clicking the rifle bolt to frighten the bear away. It had not worked as usual that day, and the bear stood its ground, gazing at Efrem with a disquieting directness, until he grudgingly killed it with a single shot through the heart. When the bear was skinned, its body looked so human that Efrem was shaken to his core and resolved never to kill anything again. In that moment he made a decision to forswear violence and change his life, and he credits his career as a healer partially to the bear’s intention to sacrifice itself for his awakening.
Efrem and Harriet returned to California and began a medical practice that expanded to include the sale of Chinese herbal tinctures to other acupuncturists and the training of Western doctors in holistic medical theory and techniques. Efrem became a member of the state of California board that certifies acupuncturists for state licenses.
In 1975, not so many years after the bear’s death, I returned to California from the East. I inherited a tiny flat from Michael Tierra over a garage directly behind Efrem and Harriet’s light and orderly apartment. Their newborn son had a hole in his heart requiring immediate surgery. Furthermore, he had a curious malformation of his thumbs and fingers that made his hands vaguely resemble paws. Efrem and Harriet were anguished about the impending surgery and the shots, catheters, and suffering they would inevitably inflict on a child too young to understand the pain he must endure. I was sitting with them during this crisis, wordlessly lending support, when Efrem turned to me and said softly, “Did you know his name is Bear?” He turned away, and I had to catch my breath to choke off a sob.
I was ashamed of my bitter thoughts about Efrem, ashamed at how easily I had judged him and imputed to him motives less beneficent and noble than my own. I too had used the bear, to some degree, as a way of suggesting that I cared more passionately and deeply about living in harmony with other species than he did. Without referring to it directly, Efrem let me know that he sensed that the spirit of the bear had entered his son and that it would take not only this suffering but also his lifetime of care and parenting to redress the wrong he had committed by taking the bear’s life. By acknowledging its spirit in his son, he was apologizing to the bear itself. The generosity and humility of his act and the depth of his commitment made me ashamed of my harsh and self-centered stinginess.
He has remained my doctor all these years, even after I moved away from the city. Often as I lay wincing at his needles, I would marvel at the curious karma that had connected us—and not only him and me but all the various factions and subsets of the Free Family—and wondered at the bizarre, unpredictable, and often tortuous routes on which we have, as a group, lived and died, groping our way to maturity.
Year after year, like a tree accumulating mass that includes scars, bolls, and torsion twists, Black Bear Ranch became more organized; people became more mature and responsible, and relationships lost their adolescent raggedness. Homesteaders overflowed the borders of the ranch proper and migrated along the Salmon and Klamath Rivers, making individual homes there, creating smaller cooperatives to board children of more distant family members to facilitate the children’s schooling. Some hired on to the Forest Service, while others staked small gold-mining claims, panning or digging just enough gold to justify homestead requirements.
Recently, the Forest Service has been driving people off those claims, without mercy trampling gardens, burning the houses where the homesteaders have lived for years, and for extra measure destroying the bridges to their homes, which cross over the turbulent river. The rangers have specious legal excuses, but the real reason is that this community has become the backbone of environmental resistance to and criticism of Forest Service policies. Such policies have raped this area in the name of political and economic agendas that serve no one but corporate shareholders, allowing logging on totally inappropriate soils and slopes. The resultant runoffs and siltation have collapsed roads and decimated fish and wildlife habitats, and the Black Bear people have been articulate and educated on-site witnesses to this betrayal of the public trust.
They were also active in the struggle to stop the Gasquet-Orleans road, an asphalt spike piercing the heart of the country most sacred to the Hupa, Yurok, and Karok Indians. Incredibly, in reviewing the case, the Supreme Court rejected the concept of land as a basic spiritual necessity protected by the Constitution. It would be interesting to know what a spiritual necessity might be and why, if a building can be protected as a place of worship, the land it stands on should be exempt.
Elsa is a grandmother now. One of her children lives in Paris, pursuing a master’s degree in French. Her daughters are both mothers, and Elsa has returned from a three-year sojourn in the People’s Republic of China, painting with a Chinese artist named Chen Ke Liang who came to America with her. They work together on fine Chinese paper, he with traditional inks and she with acrylics and oils. They call their large, abstract, intensely beautiful canvases “Joint Projects” and see them as a marriage of Eastern and Western sensibilities, precursors of deeper understanding between the two cultures.
Elsa is still an edge dweller. Her eyes have never lost their excited optimism about the very next moment. She dresses stylishly and imaginatively, with her bohemian traditions still visible in her choices. Her hair is gray, and she appears grandmotherly, plump as a succulent blueberry muffin. I am certain that her young art students have no idea of the wild life their presently decorous and soft-spoken professor has lived.
15
dr. feelgood’s walking cure
Closer to San Francisco, things were marginally less bizarre than at Black Bear. Our reputation as edge dwellers and visionaries was solid and we were widely credited not only with understanding the counterculture but also with having the insight and skills to help shape it in positive and more radical directions.
Would that my personal life was as exalted and impeccable as these visions of the future. Sam and I had gone East to visit my parents and things had not been good. The issue of “other women” kept appearing with regularity (and with good reason) in our discussions and I was feeling suffocated by the intensity of her attachment and the commitment she wanted in return. She announced her intention to have a child “with someone.” My response was a classic of ambiguity: “And I suppose you’re just going to go off and have one then?” She reminded me pointedly that it was my child she wanted, and somehow I managed to reconcile my desire for space between us with our sleeping together. By the time we returned to the West Coast, Sam was pregnant with our daughter Ariel. We were soon estranged again, though, and Sam moved in with Paula McCoy, the Diggers’ wealthy and elegant hostess, who maintained a salon in her beautifully refurbished Victorian home on Clayton Street across the street from the Grateful Dead’s house. Sam’s two most enduring memories of that time are Paula retiring to her bedroom with all the men at six every night to watch the news “and laugh,” and foraging for food in the stuffed refrigerator only to discover that every container in it was empty.
Things got so crazy at Paula’s one morning that Vinnie Rinaldi, a temporary immigrant from the Red House, ran through the rooms shirtless and barefoot, screaming “Chick-a-dee, Chick-a-daa” over and over again at the top of his lungs. He threw open the sliding doors and ran up and down Clayton Street chanting his crazy, shamanic healing mantra of mood-altering nonsense, which actually worked because everyone collapsed in laughter watching him.
The scene was too much for Sam, and she hitched a ride out of town with a friend of Paula’s named Phil, a tough labor organizer who took her to Ward, Colorado, where he subsequently disappeared; it was believed he was murdered in the course of his work.
I moved to an abandoned ranch about an hour north of the city, in Olema, California. I was living in isolation with my buddy Bob Slade and his girlfriend, Eileen Law, when, in the winter of 1968–69, I was invited on a trip to England by the Grateful Dead, to accompany Emmett, Paula McCoy, Ken Kesey and some of his Merry Pran
ksters, and Hell’s Angels Sweet William and Pete Knell. The Dead had mounted a cultural mission to “check out” the Beatles and determine if they were as socially inventive and progressive as their music suggested.
I realize that it sounds arrogant to assert that a famous rock band might enhance its status by association with an impoverished band of anarchists, but the social climate in the sixties was nothing if not complex. The Dead were a “people’s band,” proud of their dedication to psychedelic illumination, the premises of the counterculture, and their relationship to their community. They were also wealthy and successful, and a consequence of that was that they had moved to elegant digs in Marin County and were now somewhat removed from the cutting edge and hardscrabble life of the streets, the theater where the Diggers excelled. The Diggers, like our counterparts in Holland, the Provos, were internationally known within the counterculture at this point, and bringing us along would reinforce the Dead’s bona fides, “sending a signal” in the parlance of politics, about the Dead’s affiliations. At the same time it would afford the Dead access to our analysis and social inventiveness. It seemed like a good arrangement, and since the Dead were picking up the tab, I decided to go. The only problem was that I had a serious case of serum hepatitis from shooting drugs and my body had the color and integrity of an overripe banana. The Dead provided an apparent solution by bankrolling a trip to a notorious celebrity doctor in New York, famous for his “walk around” hepatitis cure.
His waiting room could have been glassed in as a diorama labeled “Geriatric Preservation Practices, Park Avenue, 1920–50.” The room was a collage of tatty Empire reminiscences and patterned silk wallpaper. Four or five desiccated older women overwhelmed by lusterless furs were immobilized in chairs with small, apparently mummified dogs at their feet. None of them betrayed signs of life. The room was petrified. The only apparent motion was the dust motes suspended in the winter light gumming its way weakly through the gauze curtains before collapsing onto the ravaged cheeks of Dr. Feelgood’s patients.
I was no picture of beauty either. I am six foot three, and my weight had fallen to 170 pounds. My hair was long enough to sit on. I sported a Charlie Chan mustache and goatee and was dressed per usual, in stained leathers and a cutoff jean jacket with a silk-screened photo of Malcolm X sewn on the breast. The women might well have wondered what they were doing in the office of a doctor who would even see someone like me.
A tall and exaggeratedly curvaceous blonde wearing what appeared to be a miniskirted nurse’s uniform summoned an elderly patient into the inner sanctum. A few minutes later the old woman emerged, amazingly reanimated, chattering like a canary, bright-eyed, and gay. Even her fur coat and musty dog were transformed, the coat gleaming and the dog’s claws clicking animatedly over the wood floor as they passed out the door onto the streets of the living. This transformation was repeated with each patient until the room was empty, except for me.
My turn. Dagmar (as I’d named her in my erotic fantasy) admitted me to a spacious, blue-tiled room. On my right were two industrial-sized stainless steel refrigerators. In the center of the room was an expansive desk behind which Dr. F. sat in a white Marcus Welby uniform with (I swear) a round dentist’s reflector on his forehead. He was magnificent, with an imposing head topped by generous amounts of styled silver hair like the television evangelist Dr. Robert Schuller.
“So,” he said in a thick German accent (again, I swear it’s true), “you vant some speed?”
I was dumbfounded. “No,” I said. “No, not at all. I’m sick! My liver is messed up.”
“Methedrine does not hurt ze livah. Ze livah loves speed,” he said confidently.
I thought, “Where the fuck am I?” But he was the doctor, so I told him of my pending trip to Europe and my present physical difficulties.
The doctor listened, nodding sagely, then crossed the room to one of his refrigerators and began selecting small vials of injectable vitamins from its stocked interior. He filled a syringe the size of a baby bottle, instructing his nurse to write down the contents and amounts so that I could duplicate the procedure on my own in England. When the behemoth was almost full, he turned to me and asked in a kindly tone, “Do you vant a little speed in this?”
“Is it okay to do that?” I asked, thinking to myself, “How often do you get drugstore methedrine?” (Much too often, I was to learn.)
“Absolutely!” he said emphatically and opened the second refrigerator, which was filled to overflowing with row upon row of small bombillas (glass ampules) filled with methedrine, resting snugly in Styrofoam containers of a dozen each, like the eggs from a druggie’s fantasy of the Easter Bunny. He sucked the contents of one of these into his vitamin cocktail and instructed Dagmar to tie off my arm for an injection.
As he squeezed the contents of this horse syringe into my bloodstream, the niacin and B-complex vitamins announced themselves with a hot flush and sweat, making me dizzy. The effects of the methedrine followed like a dog chasing a rabbit, accelerating my pulse as if it had been turbocharged. My breathing became deep and rapid, and I started sucking air like a marathon runner. I must have looked like I was enjoying myself, because the good doctor clutched my arm, placed his lips close to my ear, and in a deep, upwardly inflected, sexually charged whisper, said not once but twice: “Niiice? . . . Niiiice?!”
London’s Heathrow Airport bristled with police and special services, having been forewarned of the arrival of our entourage. British customs invited me to “stand aside” in a little room they kept available for strip searches and other formal unpleasantries. They were alert for contraband but couldn’t have been prepared for the loony-tunes idiot who appeared before them, carrying his in a brown paper sack under his arm. After an interminable wait, while they investigated seals, checked prescriptions, and questioned me at length, they must have decided that I was too nutty to be smuggling and allowed me to pass into the austere gray charm of a London winter.
The meeting with the Beatles was inauspicious. The management at Apple Records was understandably nervous when our entire group of twenty-odd rockers, bikers, and street people invaded their offices. John and Paul were out of town. Ringo was sweet and quietly loopy, and George made a nervous appearance before us in the Apple foyer to recommend a hotel where “they take anybody.”
Instead of a hotel, we chose to rent a large flat in the Prince of Wales Mansions between Kensington and Battersea Bridges and declared open house. European hipsters, hippies, and freaks from several countries heard of our arrival on the grapevine and came to call. The house was a maelstrom of activity. Stanley Mouse, designer of many Fillmore rock-show posters, was decorating the gas tanks of the Hell’s Angels’ bikes in the foyer. Our salon mistress Paula McCoy, House and Gardens elegant, glided among the rooms, naked under a full-length mink, serving drinks, drugs, and snacks with grace and consummate skill. Pete Knell and Sweet William scoured the streets of London in search of the club’s first English “prospect,” whom they eventually found in the person of Buttons, a sweet Cockney who returned to America with us for his initiation. (Buttons completed his initiation and did become the first English Hell’s Angel, but it didn’t take deeply, and he eventually left the club.)
I developed a crush on a delicate little English wren of a girl, appropriately named Jenny, and passed the days and nights in high spirits, meeting and greeting our European peers. I particularly remember the visit of Simon Vinkenoog, a pale, angular Dutch poet who waltzed in with his tall, dark wife Reineke and her girlfriend. The two women were true exotics, intertwining their arms constantly, laughing easily, humming Mozart while the men talked. Their clothes were constructed of intricate brocades and sashes, and small flowers were woven through their hair. They were groomed to an impeccable finish and appeared to have stepped directly from the canvas of the wonderful Whistler oil The Princess of the Country of Porcelain. They seemed distant and more sophisticated than any women I had ever encountered.
As a diplomatic miss
ion, the trip, on the whole, was a bust. The low point, perhaps, was the Apple Christmas party, to which we had been invited by Beatles’ publicist Derek Taylor. There was no food. Pete Knell wandered around the elegant old London drawing room in his cutoff Levi colors with a pair of tiny white baby booties dangling inexplicably and ominously from his lapels, asking for food with increasing irritation. We were all hungry and had, after all, been invited to a Christmas feast. Pete was pissed off at the cool British aplomb and also at what he perceived as an insult to him and his friends, surmising that the Beatles might be hoping that if we were not fed we might leave.
At a certain point in the afternoon, Pete, Bill, John Lennon, and I were sitting in a corner. John sat on the floor with his hands wrapped around his knees, transfixed by Pete’s story about Charlie Manson visiting the Angels in the early days of the Haight and urging them to enlist on his side in a pending racial Armageddon. Pete was recounting how he had told him to peddle his bullshit somewhere else, saying, “If you want a race war, start it.” He suddenly seemed to remember his appetite and said, “Where the hell is the food? I’m hungry.”
An English twit, blond hair angling across his forehead, aristocratic nose, and pale lemon-colored ascot, took a drag off his cigarette and said, “Oh, really!” in that dismissive English way. “Don’t you know it’s uncool to be hungry?”
The words were barely out of his mouth before Pete’s fist was in it. The guy went down like a demolished building and stayed there, holding his burst lip and paralyzed with fear. Lennon leaped to his feet alarmed and addressed me, “Whut’s the mattuh with him, then?”
Bill had already assumed a defensive position at Pete’s shoulder, “covering his back.” Sensing Lennon’s motion behind him, Pete wheeled around, jerked his thumb at Lennon, and commanded me, “Tell him: he’s next!”