Sleeping Where I Fall: A Chronicle

by Peter Coyote

  Her life with Kent deteriorated at the same time. The qualities that made Kent a fabulous companion—his abundant energy and unflappable rationality—made him of no use to Nina; his compulsive detachment from emotional “messiness” was like a brush scrubbing the raw wound of her depression. Unable to get the succor she needed from their relationship, Nina fell into a despair so fixed as to resemble catatonia. Kent decided to leave, and Nina refused to go with him, feeling that her support system was the women at Turkey Ridge. He drove off into the cold, and she stayed by the fire.

  Perhaps, before the rest of us could or would acknowledge it, she intuited that our “tribe” was not going to be a workable option for much longer. The demands of growing children, their educational needs and varying requirements, were already stressing group coherence. She knew for sure that her own nuclear family was disintegrating and that no one on the face of the earth could help her. Day by day she slipped deeper and deeper into her psyche, surrendering like a swan diver to wherever gravity was dragging her down.

  Nina is grateful today for the respite from responsibility that communal life afforded her. Had there been no support system, had her daughter not been looked after, had food and laundry not been attended to, she would have been forced to repress whatever she was dealing with then or seek the consoling refuge of madness. Her reemergence the following summer catalyzed events dramatically, but that story must await its proper place in the narrative.

  The hard work continued for the rest of us: six children to be looked after, meals to be prepared and cleared, vehicles to be repaired; split knuckles, dirty hands, staph sores, and, nagging away like an insistent toothache, the inevitable struggles for money. Meals reached the table every day, laundry was managed, fires laid, cows milked, yogurt cultured—but people were not happy. We still made music but more rarely, and for Nichole and I going down together, there were hard drugs.

  Occasionally, the fates dictated diversion, and for that we occasionally had the FBI, searching for Joanna’s sister Kathleen. Kathleen was a fugitive radical, and the fact that it was she and not Joanna was a curious turn of events, because of the two girls, Joanna had always been the political one. She went to Goucher College, got involved in the SDS and political demonstrations, was arrested on Saturday nights the way other students went to the drive-in. Kathleen wanted to be like the other kids and belong, while Joanna reveled in her differences.

  Consequently, it surprised Joanna when Kathleen began seeing Don, a very political guy who decided that his contribution to world revolution would be demolishing symbols of imperialism. When their fingerprints were found on remnants of a bomb that exploded at a Bank of America in Berkeley, Kathleen fled the country and stayed underground for seventeen years, raising two children in a succession of countries, under a succession of identities.

  During their fruitless searches for Kathleen, the FBI appeared at Turkey Ridge from time to time. As our domestic Doberman, Joanna dogged the suited representatives of “lawn order” on their forays around the place, critiquing their abilities and strategies. Once, at the foot of a large empty silo whose only access was a ladder that disappeared into a long, dark cover of corrugated tin, the duo stopped and peered inside as Joanna watched and offered a wry, running commentary: “So who gets the Efrem Zimbalist Jr. award? Which big brave agent gets to crawl into the dark, scary tunnel alone, eh?”

  The agents finally concluded that we were harboring nothing more lethal than bizarre yeast cultures—or else they grew tired of the chickens pecking at their shiny brown shoes, and eventually their visits stopped.

  Eventually the bare Pennsylvania trees began to sprout fuzzy buds. The soil pushed up more rocks, and the cycle of plowing, hauling, raking, and planting began again. The weather became balmy and then hot. The air buzzed and pulsed with the songs of cicadas and crickets; frog choirs chorused in the lake.

  The Wall Street business collapsed for good in 1973 and I was freed from my imprisonment. Turkey Ridge was advertised for sale, and I began courting purchasers for luxury fifty-acre lots. This was my plan to keep the population down and the ecology of the ridge intact and, not incidentally, to preserve the original 150-acre homestead as a final resting place for my father.

  One fine summer day, Nina awoke from her spell. She left her seat by the fireplace, dressed, mounted a bicycle, and rode hard. When she returned, drenched in sweat, she dived into the frigid, springwater pool and surfaced from that ersatz baptism shimmering as if covered with new skin. She was cured. Life (“the force that through the green fuse drives the flower”) was again flowing through her body like sap. Her eyes sparkled with mischief. She was sultry. She was languorous. She was a hot single woman in the midst of a commune of couples.

  She came to me one day soon afterward and announced that she had picked me to be her lover. I couldn’t deal with it. I had barely survived two wives at once the prior autumn, and the prospect of resurrecting a similar tension-riddled triangulation filled me with dread. I muttered something about Nichole, about my confusion, about—who knows. Nina listened calmly, smiling sardonically, knowing me better than I knew myself. She announced her plans to Nichole as well, who responded by leaving to spend the summer in Woodstock. With my characteristic iron will and steadfast sense of purpose, I abandoned all prior declarations and embarked on an affair with Nina that had disastrous consequences for everyone.

  That is how I remembered the beginning of our affair. After reviewing a draft of this chapter, Nina smiled at me and purred, “I never hit on anyone that directly in my life. I seem to remember you appearing at my door one night wrapped in a towel.” I was stunned. My memory had been so clear! I looked at Nina, who today still causes teenage boys to stammer when she saunters past, and know that she is a woman who has never had to ask for attention from men. I have absolutely no memory of that door or towel, but Nina is one of the most honest people I know and I may have misremembered my part. Whichever version is true is immaterial; what matters is what followed.

  It’s a psychological truism that when one member of a dysfunctional family changes their behavior, the other actors in the drama scramble to recreate the familiar equilibrium by maneuvering the miscreant back into their customary role. In this instance, however, one of the roles was invisible to the rest of us because it was secret.

  Unbeknownst to everyone, Vinnie had for a long time nursed a deep and abiding love for Nina. They had been mates on the food runs, driving to and from the farmers’ markets early in the morning. They had lived at the Red House for years, where Vinnie’s constant flirtatious banter with Nina had been dismissed as generic lust. It had been such a fixture of our group dynamic that Vinnie’s wife Joanna could even comment on it blandly: “There’s always been a thing with Nina and Vinnie. She understood him when other people didn’t. She knew how to manage him when he was being weird. It wasn’t threatening to me, and in fact it was almost an honor. . . . I always thought it was transitory.”

  But it wasn’t. When Nina and I became lovers, Vinnie was devastated. The depth of his attachment became visible, frightening Joanna, who confronted Nina, “You opened this up, you close it down so that it’s okay.” But there was no way to make it okay. Joanna had always allowed Vinnie a very long leash for what she called his “chuckle-fucks,” trusting that good sense and the strength of their personal relationship would always call him home. This was different. Vinnie was grievously wounded, and his despair was piercing Joanna’s certainty about their relationship and sundering the community.

  One night at dusk we heard a loud splash. Joanna had thrown herself into the old swimming pool in a suicide attempt so hapless (the water was only five feet deep) that it was transparent as a cry of pain.

  Vinnie was furious with me and embittered, convinced that I had seduced Nina to bolster my own ego. He shadowed me around Turkey Ridge scowling, unnervingly close on my heels. When people arrived with whom I had to speak, he would squat behind me spitting, interrupting the conversations
, calling me “Mr. Bullshit,” and laughing scornfully if those conversations happened to touch on a common purpose or our family’s future. I had lost the benefit of the doubt, one of those intangible precious currencies in a relationship you never value until it disappears.

  Group life was fractured, and we possessed no tools or skills to remedy the situation. I had received boundless emotional support and unconditional love from this family. They had seen me at my worst, knew my secrets, and loved and accepted me anyway. When that love became conditional, the loss was horrific; it was like standing in the center of your house as it is being decimated by a tornado, watching treasures that were there moments before whisked into the void.

  A group meeting was assembled in the workshop to try and staunch the hemorrhage of goodwill. In the grip of heightened emotion, trying to demonstrate the seriousness of my intentions to Vinnie, I became carried away and blurted out that I was in love with Nina. Nina’s eyebrows shot skyward skeptically, and she snorted, “Love?” with an ironic laugh, indicating that love had nothing to do with it. She was being candid, but her detachment twisted the dagger in Vinnie’s heart; he spat disgustedly and looked away, refusing to participate. Joanna appeared deflated and wretched. The four of us stood there estranged, all looking in separate directions, in a room full of tools that could repair anything made of wood or metal. We were members of an organism riddled with cancer that no tool or surgeon, no shaman or therapist could cure.

  That day, we were reborn from our undifferentiated bondedness into singularity, separated from our comfortable illusions with the same contractions and pains, terror and disorientation that accompany a rudely delivered infant. Though it was a birth into a new, perhaps more mature reality, it was mournful as a death. It was a death—of a fond and cherished dream. With the dream gone, what remained were four adults who knew too much about one another, standing emotionally naked in the midst of a desolate cinder-block chamber stinking of grease, gasoline, and cold concrete. The only reason to fix the trucks now was to escape from one another.

  24

  splatter

  Only one ship is seeking us, a black-Sailed unfamiliar, towing at her back A huge and birdless silence. In her wake No waters breed or break.

  PHILIP LARKIN, “NEXT, PLEASE”

  Life continues after something dies, it simply does not continue in the same way. We maintained our chores and responsibilities, but the activity was pro forma, the purpose eviscerated. Everyone knew that the Free Family as a source of future security was a fiction.

  My personal future arrived with Danny Rifkin one evening. Danny had taken another of his habitual hiatuses as manager of the Grateful Dead and traveled to Guatemala. There he met a lovely young girl with a freckled Irish face, sexy overbite, and quiet watchful intensity named Marilyn McCann, who had left a teaching job in her native Ohio to travel down the Amazon by herself. She had abandoned that journey in Guatemala when she met Reina Ícu, a native weaver who took her home and gave her a small house of her own, and she spent the next year in the Guatemalan mountain village of Comalapa learning the intricate native weaving of the indigenous people. While there, she met Danny, and they began traveling together as a couple. Hitchhiking in Guatemala one day, she was given a ride by a serene, totally bald American man. After talking with him for a while, Marilyn thought, with her characteristic intuitive precision, “This guy knows something.” She was right. The driver was Zen master Philip Kapleau, and after their meeting Marilyn resolved to study Zen Buddhism when she returned to the United States.

  Danny was living at an old homestead on the rugged Marin County coast called Slide Ranch, next door to Green Gulch Zen Center, and he invited her to join him there. They were en route West when they stopped in to visit.

  The night they arrived at Turkey Ridge, we were preparing a group sauna, and I could see that Marilyn was uneasy about joining us. I told her there was no need to sauna if she didn’t want to and that it would be a real service if she would mind the phone while the rest of us sweated. Shy and very private, she was relieved by this easy out, and the smile she flashed was more than sufficient reward for my intuition.

  The next day, I drove the two of them to the bus to begin their journey back to San Francisco, Danny to rejoin the Dead and Marilyn to investigate Zen practice. While Danny went into the drugstore to buy gum, I made what was, to me, a casually complimentary remark to Marilyn. I told her I appreciated the way that she came into a room, kept her mouth shut and her eyes open, and didn’t seem to worry about creating an impression. I told her that I got the feeling from watching her that she didn’t miss a trick and perceived things on a deep level. Consequently, I was curious to know her thoughts about Turkey Ridge.

  There was no time to pursue the conversation because Danny and the bus arrived simultaneously. I said good-bye to them, unaware of the degree to which my remarks had affected her. She said later to a mutual friend that she felt that she had been “seen” by someone, and that she knew at that moment that I would figure importantly in her life. Again, she was right.

  Turkey Ridge was under a dark enchantment, and in this new and poisonous environment, demons manifested spontaneously. Tommy Lavigne, for instance. Tommy was a window dresser from Manhattan, a slight, dapper Italian with a miserably spoiled teenage daughter. Tommy was not at all “country” and would never have stayed or been tolerated at Turkey Ridge had it not been for his ability to procure drugs. Nichole returned from her summer in Woodstock, and she, Tommy, and I formed our own little doper’s ghetto within Turkey Ridge.

  After months of travel, seeking shelter from the cyclones whirling in her skull, Sam had resettled in the Bay Area. Ariel asked about her often, and it had not helped her anxiety that Sam had neither written nor called since leaving. I felt that Ariel needed to be reunited with her mother, at least for a while.

  I no longer owned a vehicle capable of driving cross-country. The Meat and Bone Wagon was on its last legs; a weeklong bus trip seemed too arduous for a young girl and would have cost me an extra week coming back by myself. The solution was to fly, but I had no money.

  I thought of the Grateful Dead, who could sometimes be counted on for aid. It was a dodgy issue because of the low-level status competition between our families, but I needed help for Ariel now, so I went to petition Jonathan Reister, the Dead’s road manager, about springing for round-trip airline tickets to the West Coast. Jonathan was a hickory-tough cowboy-doper with equal amounts of dash and megalomaniacal self-regard. His job was to oversee the on-time delivery, loading, and unloading of tons of amplifiers and loudspeakers for Dead concerts, and he drove his crews like mule trains.

  Jonathan had lived at Olema, we had partied together, and I assumed we were friends, a word with much elasticity in its definition. Once in the midst of friendly banter, he had called me a “Jew bastard.” He’d said it again a little later. I had marked it both times and dismissed it as a tasteless liberty: he was a pal, and I was some kind of Hopi-Jew-Buddhist mongrel anyway. Shortly after the second incident, he said cheerfully, “Hey, I just called you a Jew bastard . . . twice,” playing it as a perverse game point, curious to see what I would do. Had I cared enough, I might have punched him or, if the stakes had been higher, really surprised him and shot his toe away. I regarded him flatly and said, “Yeah, you did. Now I know your hole card.” He laughed it off. Morris once advised me, “People always tell you who they are. If someone laughs and says, ‘Boy, am I a shit!,’ believe them!” I should have remembered.

  The Dead were performing in Manhattan, so I tracked Jonathan down. I told him of my plight, and he assured me it was no problem. The Dead would issue me one round-trip and one one-way ticket through their travel agency. Piece of cake, done deal. A little later, he gave me a number to call and check but declared he had already arranged things. We spent the evening together partying hard, and my sense of relief made me light and happy for the first time in months.

  At the night’s end, as we were separati
ng in the elevator, he reassured me again that everything was taken care of. He took down my number at Turkey Ridge and my travel dates, “just to check.” Some gesture to Jonathan was appropriate at this point. I didn’t have money, but what I did have was a beautiful coral and turquoise Navajo ring my father had given my mother and she had passed on to me. The ring was forty years old and finely made. I gave it to Jonathan impulsively, as a token of gratitude, and he slipped it on his finger just as the elevator doors opened. When he saluted me good night, the ring sparkled on his hand. It was twenty-four years before I saw him again. I never saw the tickets.

  I borrowed the money for two one-way tickets and flew Ariel to the coast for a joyful reunion with her mother, who took her north to Humboldt County where she had made a camp near Gypsy Trucker Jed Sherman.

  While in California, I encountered my old pal James Koller, a poet and the editor of Coyote’s Journal, a well-respected literary magazine, and we decided to drive back to Pennsylvania together. Jim was en route to Maine, where he’d built a small cabin and eked out a living as a landscaper and woodcutter while he wrote poems. He and I were both fascinated by the beauty and totemic power of animal parts—skull, bone, tooth, and pelt. A coyote and a grizzled lone wolf, we traveled east together, competing with each other to be the first to spot gifts from the “highway god”—roadkill that might offer us talismans.

  Just outside Santa Fe, we came upon a cluster of six freshly killed ravens, smacked dead while eating some previous sacrifice to the god of the automotive age. We smoked tobacco, prayed over their bodies, and then buried them after taking the wings, talons, and heads for ourselves. We pinned the wings on the backseat of Jim’s Ford to dry and added the talons to the pile of skins, cedar boughs, feathers, and gris-gris we’d collected on the dashboard. The heads posed a problem, until we thought to put them in a nylon stocking and hang them out the rear window to air dry as we drove. One of those heads, still shiny and iridescent, with a lump of turquoise as an eye, watches me from my desktop altar as I write today.