by Peter Coyote
There was no hint in Lew’s joy that day that not long afterward he would leave his wallet and a note in Gary Snyder’s kitchen and walk into the Sierra foothills with his rifle to commit suicide. If he hid his private griefs in life, he remained consistent in death. To this day, his body has never been found.
Lew was fascinated with Snyder lore. Grinning and sitting cross-legged, the softness of his moist eyes contrasting with his chiseled Irish face, he would recount story after story about Gary in a manner that was at times incredulous, at times awestruck, and at other times tinged with a note of competitiveness. It was easy to see that Gary exerted a powerful hold on this singularly intelligent and talented poet, but it was not until sometime after Lew arranged an introduction to Gary that I understood the power of that attraction.
It’s embarrassing to remember my first impression as I watched Gary’s pristine Volkswagen camper pick its careful way over the rutted road to our ranch house. “How could Gary Snyder be driving a new camper?” I thought. “So bourgeois!” It came to a stop under the willow tree at the edge of the yard, Lew hopped out with his customary manic enthusiasm, and I ambled over, lord of the manor. Salutations were exchanged, and Gary threw open the side door and invited me inside. Before I had climbed on board, he had already opened some peanut butter and a box of crackers.
He was wearing an old straw hat that shaded his eyes, and I remember him cocking his head to one side to look at me. His look was so clearly appraising, so without social camouflage as to be startling. The visit was uneventful. We ate crackers and talked. Gary was not overweening, and he made interesting conversation—in the parlance of the time, he was “together.” His body was muscular and lithe. His eyes crinkled pleasantly when he smiled. His voice was cultivated, and his speech was very precise and peppered with geological terms like schist, upthrusts, and substrate.
I was a little crestfallen by this initial encounter. He had not congratulated me for carrying the banner of Beat liberation struggles onto new battlefields, nor acknowledged me as a peer, nor questioned me in any way about my revolutionary lifestyle and politics. All he had done was look me over as if asking himself, “What’s this guy about?” He did not find it necessary to locate me philosophically or politically. In fact, he did not seem to find it necessary to define himself in relationship to me at all! I had shared some peanut butter and crackers and a pleasant time with him, and that was that. After he had driven off, little remained in my memory except that initial penetrating visual query. It made me squirm mentally and I did not know why.
In the torrential rains of the winter of 1969–70, during the last year of Olema, my father came to visit. It had poured relentlessly for days, and the road to the ranch was a quagmire. The house was overcrowded with restless people irritable from their damp, steaming clothes and enforced idleness. Some Hell’s Angels were visiting. My parents appeared out of the storm in a clay-smeared rented car. My father’s pockets were stuffed with Seconals, he was lugging a case of Scotch for the weekend, and he was already drunk.
They dived into the turmoil of the farmhouse, and it could not have been easy for them. People were stacked like cordwood. Joints were rolled and passed around continuously, chased by jugs of red wine. There was a sullenness in the atmosphere: too many people trapped in too small a space for too long.
Morris sat at the table, punching holes in his Seconals with a pocketknife, sharing them with a couple of the Angels. “When I need ’em, I want ’em to work in a hurry,” he explained to one who asked why he punctured them. When people stood too close to him, he jerked his shoulders as if to shake them off; he muttered, “Faggots” under his breath when a Hell’s Angel’s swagger got on his nerves. He was pushy and belligerent, and I was certain he would provoke a fight. I considered that this might be his preferred way of dying and was preternaturally alert because I knew that if a fight broke out between him and the Angels, I would have to go down with him.
At one point, Morris collared my friend Gristle, one of the Gypsy Truckers, and said bluntly, “Get Peter for me.”
“Get him yourself,” Gristle replied blandly. He laughed when he recalled for me how Morris had then propped a hand on his shoulder, fixed his feral eyes on him, and said, “I like you, fella. You know why? Because you’re not afraid to die!”
That night, Morris fell out of the loft bed that someone had surrendered for him and my mother. Stoned on Seconals, he climbed out the wrong side, fell six feet, and cracked a toe. He was cranky about it but otherwise resigned. Perhaps he was too stoned to notice. Ruth was acutely uncomfortable and uncharacteristically silent during most of the weekend. God knows what she felt about the shabby environment, her adored grandchild Ariel picking her way over stupefied freaks and bikers, the women dressed like girls she had been taught to avoid. Olema was always as raw and vulgar as hunger. My mother was refined; she spoke in a deep, cultured voice like Claire Trevor and years earlier had traded in her home in the Jewish ghetto in the Bronx for the “modern” world and a starring role in her own personal Fred Astaire film, smoking elegantly and referring to people as “darling” as she soaked up the culture she had longed for as a girl. She obviously preferred the glamour of the thirties and forties to the squalor of our sixties commune, but she never ever missed what was under her nose.
On the Sunday they were to leave, my dad and I were sitting together at the kitchen table. The kerosene lamp cast a yellow pallor on his skin, and the storm outside offered a subdued howl as a score for the scene. His eyes were hooded, and his hair, only recently streaked with gray, was combed straight back in his usual Latin manner. He was half in his cups when he caught my attention by saying, “You know, son . . . ,” and then drifted off on a nod before he’d finished the thought.
There was a long pause while he appeared to be checking the insides of his eyelids for news; then he lifted his head abruptly and looked at me squarely. His face was completely serious. “I gotta tip my hat to you, boy,” he said roughly. “You’re a better man than I am.” He looked away, perhaps politely, so that he wouldn’t witness my confusion. I didn’t know how to respond.
He continued, as if addressing the wall, “If I was your age again, this” (indicating the environs with a motion of his arm) “is what I would be doing.”
I was stunned. I had never received such direct and unequivocal approbation from him before, and certainly not for something about which I had many ambivalent feelings. I mean, the idea of Olema, the idea of the Free Family, revitalizing and reinventing the culture and the economy, was compelling and seemed the only worthwhile thing to be doing with my life. The actuality, however, was full of contradictions, embarrassments, and confusions. I might excuse our imperfections as those of a work in progress, but compared to my father’s standards of elegance, Olema was a pigsty. I could not imagine how he had construed this swirling chaos in order to justify what he had just said to me.
I told him how pleased I was to hear this, and how moved, and then confessed my own lack of direction and insight. I asked him for advice. He hunkered down for another long silence, and then he uttered what were, in effect, his last words to me. More than twenty years later I remember them vividly:
Capitalism is dying, boy. It’s dying of its own internal contradictions. [He was, after all, a Wall Street financier, so I listened carefully.] You think that the revolution’s gonna take five years. It’s gonna take fifty! So keep your head down and hang in for the long haul, because I’ll tell you something. The sons of bitches running things don’t give a shit about their children or their grandchildren, and they certainly don’t give a shit about you! They’ve paid their dues, and they want to get out with theirs! They’re gonna sell off everything that’s not nailed down to the highest bidder. Don’t get crushed when it topples down. Take care of yourself and your family. If you can make a difference, do it, but there are huge forces at work here, and they have to play themselves out according to their own design, not yours. Watch yourself.
As far as I can determine, everything he prophesied has come true.
There was another “free land” commune in nearby Marshall, called Wheeler’s Ranch, and when its members came to visit we would feast and party and take LSD and make music for nine or ten hours at a time. Once we improvised a sweat lodge for fifty people; usually, we dragged an old cattle trough over a fire pit and heated water to make a rudimentary hot tub for ten or fifteen people in shifts.
Once a group of Hell’s Angels arrived at the same time as our Wheeler’s Ranch friends. It was an uneasy mix, and many of the Wheeler’s people were frightened by the ominous bikers and their hard intentions. Alisha Bay-Laurel, a good fiddle player and author of a popular cookbook, and I, and several others, began to play music on the porch. The music created a fragile cohesion between the dissonant groups, as if the rhythms and melodies were stitching together a protective shield beneath which nothing could go awry. The musicians sensed the incipient tension and played as if possessed, attempting to forestall what felt like a gathering storm of potential violence. We carried the responsibility consciously, playing for nearly eight straight hours, barely pausing, until our blistered fingers and sore throats could no longer follow the peaks and valleys of melody.
At one point, Angel Pete Knell burst onto the porch. “Coyote,” he yelled hoarsely, “a nigger’s following your old lady around!” I had no idea what he was talking about and continued playing, but he was insistent. “I said, a nigger’s following your old lady.” I looked through the door and sure enough, my old Mime Troupe partner Willie B. was following Sam, talking to her while she was preparing food. I shouted over the fiddles, tambourines, and guitars that it was okay, that he was a good friend, and a look of total incomprehension crossed Knell’s face, so pure it was painful to behold. He looked at me, then at B. again, shook his head incredulously, and reentered the house, which was pulsing with dancers and overflow musicians who could not fit on the porch.
A visitor jumped onto a table in the living room and began an Elvis Presley routine, definitely grabbing the role of Mr. Centerstage. Some Olema people hollered for me to join him, wanting their own champion to contend for the spotlight. Before I had a chance to decline, Pete and two Angels filled the doorway, looking at me levelly. Pointing derisively with his thumb to the exhibitionist behind him, Pete challenged me: “Is this [self-aggrandizement] what it’s about, then?” The Angels never kidded around about personal authenticity, nor did they ever stop testing it. They knew I was very high, and they wanted to learn what my unguarded response would be.
I checked out the guy’s Vegas moves, shook my head, and returned my attention to the group with whom I was playing, reaffirming my dedication to preserve the day, which continued to be punctuated uneasily by such acerbic ruptures and challenges.
At dusk, Little Mike, normally a happy-go-lucky Hell’s Angel, beat someone senseless for refusing to gather firewood for him. This tipped the balance irretrievably, and the Wheeler’s people left while the Angels partied among themselves, oblivious. It had been the type of party for which Olema was locally known: eclectic, unpredictable, free-form, and high risk. We were proud of this reputation—until the day the Angels dramatically redefined “high risk.”
In the late winter of 1970 Sweet William was about to be released from the hospital where he had been recovering from his near-execution, and Moose asked me if the Angels might throw a welcome-home party for him at Olema. I had been involved with the club for so long that I didn’t think twice about agreeing. I should have. I had been a fly on the wall for too many conversations not to have been aware that there were people in the club who resented my access and might make it an issue. As Emmett used to say, “life is hard for the stupid.”
On the appointed day, approximately forty bikes rumbled up the dirt road in a dense, ominous phalanx. Eeja, my coyote puppy, now almost full grown, danced and whined on the hill, made nervous by the approaching roar of so many engines. I did not recognize over half the riders. Before greetings could be exchanged, automatic and semiautomatic weapons were being fired into the air and ground. Bullets tore into the hillside, kicking up the dirt around the terrified coyote, sending him fleeing for his life and me running directly in front of the muzzles of the guns, waving my arms to stop their fire.
Events skidded out of control instantly. Fosmo and I had hunted the Coast Range for two rainy days prior to the party, killed and dressed a deer and constructed a large fire pit to barbecue it whole for Sweet William. But he was not there; he had been taken to a motel somewhere else for the real welcome home. This event had nothing to do with Bill and everything to do with distancing the club from its hippie “friends.”
The night was a horror. The corral fences were torn down and used as fuel for bonfires. Fights flared up everywhere; men wrestled, grunting, through the hot coals and then wandered about, dusted with ash, spectral as ghosts. Our bedrooms were colonized by stupefied bikers. Tiburón (not his real name), a short, round, homicidal Latin Angel, sauntered around casually lighting cherry bombs and dropping them behind people to check their “mud.” Sam’s nervous system was threatening meltdown. “Make him stop,” she pleaded. I hesitated. Tiburón was a man who had terminated an argument with his wife by firing two bullets through her forehead. (Amazingly, she lived and refused to press charges.) Once, discussing possible scenarios in some future Armageddon, he had confided to me, “I’m not worried. I’d find some farmhouse and blow away the farmer. There’d be plenty to eat.” Now he was at Olema, and I was the “farmer.”
Nevertheless, I approached him and requested that he stop because “it was making the women nervous.” He looked right through that piece of patent bullshit, said genially, “Oh, really?,” and dropped a cherry bomb between my feet.
Gunfire was sporadic, erupting unnervingly from the darkness beyond the firelight. Barbiturates were ubiquitous, and it was easy to trip over unconscious bodies in the dark. Sam retrieved a biker’s false teeth from a pool of vomit in front of his comatose form and saved them, “To shame him in the mornin’.” Occasionally a dog barked or shrieked as if kicked. Sometime near false dawn, Sam and I retreated to our room, hoping to sleep until the nightmare was over. A blind drunk couple crashed into the room, unhinging the door. They stumbled out when I challenged them, but we were awake for the duration, watching the glow from the fires flood the ceiling with eerie shadows to a soundtrack of explosions, roars, and the heavy thuds and cheers of combat. Walpurgisnacht.
Morning slunk in, gray, damp, and cold. The house stank of stale alcohol, vomit, and tobacco. People were passed out on every plane surface, and the house and yard were a filthy shambles. Three of the dogs had been stabbed and were limping and shivering with the shock of their wounds.
I was humiliated and angry but not too angry to miss the message. Out in the yard I spoke to the leader of the chapter from another city they’d enlisted for this job. Like me, he was up early, a bearded guy with a hard face and the thousand-mile stare I’d seen on some Vietnam vets. I’d never met him, but he appeared sober, so I called him on class: “This was our home and you were our guests. You abused it. You stabbed our dogs. You burned our fences. There was nothing that we could do to stop you, but I’m calling it for what it was. You guys behaved like trash, and I never expected it from the Hell’s Angels.”
He knew I was right and listened without responding. He’d been called to do a job. Perhaps he knew the reasons for it, and perhaps he didn’t. Whether or not the job was consonant with his personal inclinations, his first allegiance was to the Angels, and we both knew it. He did have the grace to apologize sincerely to me, and then, as if disgusted, he suddenly announced to all within earshot, “Whoever stabbed those dogs is a sick fuck, and if I catch him, he’s hurt!”
I walked into my room as the bikes were revving up to leave, and there, next to my bed, was a brand-new candy bar. I perceived it as a gratuitous insult, someone calling me “a candy ass.” During my sojourn at his house, wh
en I was building my bike, Pete Knell had invited me to prospect for the club, and I had been flattered and thought long and hard about it. I had decided not to, primarily because so many of my friends were frightened by the Angels and because I could not imagine being blood brother to a man who would hospitalize someone for not gathering firewood for him or who would hate someone simply because of his race. I had decided not to because I felt that my predilection for books and solitude would not be understood or respected and, finally, because I was afraid of the mindless violence and blood feuds. I had remained friends, however, with several Angels and in the past had been protected by those friendships. This candy bar was too much, though, and some self-protective instinct in my psyche shredded. I ran outside, beyond caring that there is no such thing as a one-to-one fight with a Hell’s Angel.
“Who left this candy bar in my room?” I demanded with what must have appeared insane vehemence. Flash, a San Francisco Angel I knew well, was astride his chopper, revving the throttle and preparing to leave. His black glasses made his expression impenetrable. “I did,” he said without affect.
I barely had the time to shift my weight toward him when he reached into his breast pocket and took out an identical candy bar.
“Candy,” he said, grinning appreciatively. “I love it. You want some more?”