“In the middle of the redwood forest, tell him!” Snyder shouted.
Bowen reached for the phone. “It’s really far out here, man,” Bowen said.
Ginsberg peered at the television man, who was crawling around him with a long microphone cord in one hand.
“Take the phone call, for example,” Ginsberg told the television man. “It’s like we’ve bridged the gap between all sorts of people with this—this kind of community festival. I thought it was very Edenlike today, actually. Kind of like Blake’s vision of Eden. Music. Babies. People just sort of floating around having a good time and everybody happy and smiling and touching and turning each other on and a lot of groovy chicks dressed up in their best clothes and…”
“But will it last?” the television man asked.
Ginsberg shrugged. “How do I know if it will last?” he said. “And if it doesn’t turn out, who cares?”
“I met a policeman at the park who really dug the consciousness today,” a boy in a plaid blanket whispered from across the room. “He told me that he thought today was beautiful.”
“Even the Hell’s Angels dug the consciousness,” Ginsberg added, nodding. “Like they were all turned into big, happy, benevolent beings.”
The television man wanted to know how important LSD was to this new benevolence.
“Come on, there are other yogas besides LSD, you know,” Ginsberg said. “Chanting, for one. Sex. Love. Giving up smoking. And running laps—that’s also yoga.” Ginsberg stopped to pat a baby who had crawled into the meditation room and was reaching for his beard, gurgling with curiosity.
“Acid just happened to turn up as the product of this particular society, to correct its own excesses,” Snyder said.
The television man signaled to his partner, who had moved back to the door and was standing there with a hand-held camera, to start shooting. They worked for half an hour, and just as they ran out of film, Timothy Leary, in a bright-red Aran Islands sweater, rushed into the room. Leary was a little out of breath, and so was his Los Angeles lawyer, a man in a pink shirt and a tweed Eisenhower jacket, who ran in after him.
“Out there, on the street!” the lawyer, whose name was Seymour Lazar, called to the meditators. “Five paddy wagons! At least five. And they’re arresting kids right and left.”
“What for now?” Ginsberg asked them.
“Non-dispersal, or something,” Leary said. “All I know is that we were taking a walk up Haight Street and heard a group of kids singing outside the Psychedelic Shop, and then suddenly the police arrived, out of nowhere, and started busting everybody.”
“Well, they’re not busting us,” Snyder said.
“But they’re grabbing hostages, and for a reason,” Bowen, who was pulling on his jerkin, said. “Terror’s the reason, man.”
Most of the people in the room nodded.
“Oh, come on,” Ginsberg said, getting up and heading for the stairs. “The police are people. They’re just a little paranoid. Something must have scared them. Anyway, I’m going down and have a look around.”
Ginsberg left with Leary, Lazar, and perhaps ten people from the party. He returned about ten minutes later, stuck his head into the meditation room to say “Someone threw a bottle, or something,” and then went into a huddle with Lazar and Leary on the kitchen table. He told Lazar that the Haight needed to organize and hire a lawyer to handle its troubles with the police.
“You see, if you’ve got trouble—LSD, marijuana, prostitution—just talk to Seymour,” Leary told some boys and girls who had followed the men to the kitchen and were standing at the door, listening.
“Well, there’s nothing we can do about the busts tonight,” Ginsberg said, finally. He was perched on the table, in between several loaves of fresh natural bread.
“Tell me something, Allen,” Lazar, who had been watching Ginsberg, said suddenly. “You must have a little money now. You can afford things. Tell me why you stay in such funky places.”
“How do you know?” Ginsberg demanded. “You ever been to one of our funky places?” He began chanting, cheerfully, at the lawyer.
“And all this chanting,” Lazar said.
Ginsberg shrugged. “It’s kicks,” he said. “Hare Krishna, Seymour.”
Ginsberg hopped off the table and, still chanting, padded barefoot back into the meditation room and sat down on a mattress. Snyder welcomed him with a blast from a conch horn that he had blown to the four winds at the be-in that afternoon. The conch horn was wrapped in blue net and garlanded with wild flowers, and Ginsberg said that he thought it looked very magical. Then he began talking to it. “Tell me, O Conch, will I have to give up love at the fourth level of enlightenment?” He held the conch to his ear and waited for an answer.
Everyone giggled but a young man in a turn-of-the-century merchant-marine dress uniform, who had been staring sullenly at Ginsberg from a mattress across the room. “Here you are, the great Ginsberg, sitting there talking like this was your scene,” the boy said.
“We had some of this scene going ten years ago,” Ginsberg told him. “At least some of us were accomplishing something like this then.”
“Yeah, but then there were ten years when you had nothing to say to the world,” the boy said.
“You’re right.” Ginsberg nodded agreeably.
The boy glared, and added, “Anyway, I didn’t mean this scene, like here tonight. I meant the communal scene.”
“But we had a communal thing going, too,” Ginsberg said, chuckling. “The trouble was that less people wanted to commune.”
Snyder spoke up, looking at the boy. “I’d say the big difference between our old scene and now is this. We had a friend then—a poet—who killed himself, and he took a lot of bad karma, magically speaking, with him when he died. We knew we didn’t need or want that kind of self-defeating scene anymore.”
“Anyway, we did have a big, friendly, family scene,” Ginsberg said. “It’s recorded literary history. Anybody who wants to can look it up.” He glanced around the room. “Like we even took off our clothes at parties.”
“Well, why not now, or on the street, man?” Bowen said enthusiastically.
The boy shrugged. “I take it that you—the older generation—are responsible for this, for the way we live, for—”
“Sure, why not?” Ginsberg said, and, leaning toward the boy, he put his fingertips together and touched them to his forehead, to signify that he recognized and respected the presence of another sentient being in the meditation room.
“The great Ginsberg won’t even let me finish,” the boy complained.
Bowen jumped up. “Hey, man, we don’t get nasty here,” he said.
“What do you want to hurt my feelings for, anyway?” Ginsberg asked the boy. He sounded curious.
Snyder started laughing. “Don’t take it all out on Allen,” he said. “This has been going on since the Stone Age. Why, there’s a chain of us going back to the late Paleolithic. Like Jeffers, and Whitman. They had good scenes going.”
“The only thing is that more people love and kiss and touch now,” Ginsberg said.
“And more people kill and bomb—that’s the other side of Kali,” Bowen broke in. He sounded astonished at his insight.
“But the other side of Kali is Parvati, and she’s beautiful, and dances!” a girl in orange feathers called out from the bottom of a pile of people.
“It’s all one, baby,” Bowen philosophized.
Ginsberg stood up, stretching. Leary had just walked in with the early edition of the next day’s Chronicle, and he handed it to Ginsberg. On the front page, over a picture of the be-in, was the headline “HIPPIES RUN WILD.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Ginsberg said when he had finished reading their reviews. “Like it was an aesthetically very good scene. They should have sent an art critic.”
“It’s a bad bag, reporting,” Snyder mused. “Somehow, I don’t think it’s possible to be in that bag and get anywhere, spiritually speaking.
”
Ginsberg said that, nevertheless, he had “better straighten things out.” He left the meditators debating the spiritual pitfalls of journalism, and, down the hall in Bowen’s studio, where there was another telephone, he dialled the Chronicle and asked for the night editor. Maretta trailed in after him holding a cigarette. He took a long, weary puff.
“What is this nonsense about hippies running wild?” Ginsberg said, scolding the night editor. “Your story has the kind of inaccuracy of tone and language that’s poisoning the community. Is that what you want to do?” He proceeded to dissect the story, word by word. “What do you mean nobody told you that?” he said. “What kind of reporting is that?”
“We sent our hippiest reporter,” the night editor said.
“I don’t know what kind of hippies you’ve got over there at your place,” Ginsberg said, chuckling. “Besides, what is this hippie business? What does ‘hippie’ mean, anyway? These kids aren’t hippies—they’re seekers. Today was a serious religious occasion.”
Maretta nodded vigorously.
Ginsberg gave her a hug. He told the night editor to expect him early Monday morning for a talk with the reporter about an accurate followup.
The editor agreed.
“Well, peace,” Ginsberg said, and he hung up.
John McPhee
JUNE 14, 1969 (ARTHUR ASHE, CLARK GRAEBNER)
THE MIND OF ARTHUR ASHE is wandering. It wanders sometimes at crucial moments, such as now—in the second set of the semifinals of the first United States Open Championships, at Forest Hills. Games are six—all. Ashe and Clark Graebner have long since entered the danger zone where any major mistake can mean the loss of the set—and for Ashe, who is down one set already, the probable loss of the match. Ashe has just won three service games while losing only two points. Graebner, in his turn, has just served three games, losing no points at all. Ashe lifts the ball and hits to Graebner’s forehand. Graebner answers down the line. With the premium now maximum on every shot, Ashe is nonetheless thinking of what he considers the ideal dinner—fried chicken, rice, and baked beans. During matches, the ideal dinner is sometimes uppermost in Ashe’s mind. Graebner, like other tennis players, knows this and counts on it. “He’ll always daydream. That’s one of his big hangups. That’s why he escapes to the movies so much. But in a match he won’t dream long enough. I wish he would do it longer.”
At these moments, Ashe thinks primarily of food, but also of parties, places he has been, things he has done, and girls, whom he dates in three colors. “This is my way of relaxing. Other people call it lack of concentration. Which is true. But I do it by habit, instinctively.” Moving up with his racquet low, he picks up Graebner’s forehand drive with a half volley and sends the ball, perhaps irretrievably, to Graebner’s backhand corner.
There is a personally signed photograph of Richard Nixon on Graebner’s desk in his apartment. Watching Nixon on television, Graebner will say, “Doesn’t that make sense? How could anyone be more right? How could anyone fail to be for the guy?”
“Graebner is a straight, true Republican,” Ashe will say. “He seems to tend that way. You think of a person, when you first meet him, in reference points. Clark is tall, strong, white, Protestant, middle-class, conservative. After a while, the adjectives fall away and he’s just Clark. As far as most Negroes are concerned, whites are categorically bad until proved otherwise. My upbringing leads me to think the same way. But Clark is just Clark to me now. I don’t think about it. It’s just Clark over there, not a white man. I don’t think he is a liberal. He’s tight with his money, and he wants to see the poor work for their money. I don’t entirely disagree with him, but he probably doesn’t see all the ramifications. He probably doesn’t care what’s happening in Spanish Harlem….The guy was spoiled rotten when he was a kid. All of us are spoiled to a large degree. Clark played with Charlie Pasarell, doubles. If they lost, Clark’s mother said it was Charlie’s fault. Clark is an only child. He’s high-strung, and he can be very demanding. His speaking style sometimes sounds abrasive, staccatolike, but he doesn’t mean it that way. It sounds pushy. If I’m in a bad mood, it bugs me. But I wouldn’t say he’s ill-tempered. There is no way you could say he is not a nice guy if you had just met him, with no preconceived notions. With his kids, he is like any father—eager to show them off. He’s a nice guy, but he has been accustomed to instant gratification. As soon as he wanted something, he got it. Put all this on a tennis court, and the high-strung part, the conservative, and the need for instant gratification become predominant.”
Running flat out, Graebner hits a superb hard backhand that surprises Ashe and slants past him to win the point. Ashe has been thinking of food, among other things, and did not keep his eye on the ball. Love-fifteen. Graebner feels the surge of possibilities, and tells himself, “I have a chance in this game. I’m ahead now, and Arthur is sleeping.”
Ashe hits a twist to Graebner’s backhand, and Graebner, instead of hitting out, chips the ball back—the cautious thing to do.
“There is not much variety in Clark’s game. It is steady, accurate, and conservative. He makes few errors. He plays stiff, compact, Republican tennis. He’s a damned smart player, a good thinker, but not a limber and flexible thinker. His game is predictable, but he has a sounder volley than I have, and a better forehand—more touch, more power. His forehand is a hell of a weapon. His moves are mediocre. His backhand is underspin, which means he can’t hit it hard. He just can’t hit a heavily top-spun backhand. He hasn’t much flair or finesse, except in the lob. He has the best lob of any of the Americans. He’s solid and consistent. He tries to let you beat yourself.”
Ashe, on his way to the net, picks up the chip and hits it without exceptional force or placement to Graebner’s forehand. Graebner could now probably explode one. He has what is almost a setup on his power side. But instead he tries a careful, hang-in-there, soft crosscourt top-spin dink, and it is Ashe who explodes. The orthodox way to hit a volley is to punch it, with a backswing so short that it begins in front of the player’s body. Ashe now—characteristically—draws his racquet back as far as he can reach and volleys the ball with a full, driving swing. The impact is perfect, and the ball goes past Graebner’s feet like a bullet fired to make him dance. “I hit too soft and short,” Graebner tells himself. “That’s the difference between playing on one level and playing on another. You’ve got to hit it authoritatively.” Fifteen-all.
Ashe hits a big serve. He is not daydreaming now. Graebner blocks back a good return. Ashe, moving in, must half-volley. The shot should be deep—to protect his position, his approach to the net. Instead, he tries one of the most difficult shots in tennis. Basically, it is a foolhardy shot. It is not a percentage shot, and is easier to miss than to make. Players call it a half-volley drop shot. Ashe reaches down, lightly touches the rising ball, and sends it on a slow, sharply angled flight toward the net. The risk is triple—hitting the net, missing the placement, and leaving a sitter for Graebner to put away if he should be able to get to the ball. The ball settles down to a landing in Graebner’s forecourt. Graebner is headed for it at top speed, and he almost gets there in time. He drives the ball into the umpire’s chair, and straightens up with a disgusted look on his face. Ashe’s half-volley drop shot was the sort of thing a person should try once a match, if at all, and hardly in the most vital moments of the second set, when—already losing—he is in imminent peril of falling almost hopelessly behind. It was a loose flick shot, requiring tremendous ball control, and Ashe, in Graebner’s view, was very lucky to succeed with it. “How can he do it?” Graebner asks himself. His shoulders droop as he walks back to the baseline. Thirty-fifteen.
“I’ve never been a flashy stylist, like Arthur. I’m a fundamentalist. Arthur is a bachelor. I am married and conservative. I’m interested in business, in the market, in children’s clothes. It affects the way you play the game. He’s not a steady player. He’s a wristy slapper. Sometimes he doesn’t even know wher
e the ball is going. He’s carefree, lacksadaisical, forgetful. His mind wanders. I’ve never seen Arthur really discipline himself. He plays the game with the lacksadaisical, haphazard mannerisms of a liberal. He’s an underprivileged type who worked his way up. His family are fine people. He’s an average Negro from Richmond, Virginia. There’s something about him that is swashbuckling, loose. He plays the way he thinks. My style is playmaking—consistent, percentage tennis—and his style is shotmaking. He won’t grub around. He doesn’t gut out a lot of points where he has to work real hard, probably because he is concerned about his image. He doesn’t want to appear to be a grubber. He comes out on the court and he’s tight for a while, then he hits a few good shots and he feels the power to surge ahead. He gets looser and more liberal with the shots he tries, and pretty soon he is hitting shots everywhere. He does not play percentage tennis. Nobody in his right mind, really, would try those little dink shots he tries as often as he does. When he hits out, he just slaps. He plays to shoot his wad. He hits the ball so hard that it’s an outright winner or he misses the shot. When he misses, he just shrugs his shoulders. If he were more consistent, he might be easier to play. Negroes are getting more confidence. They are asking for more and more, and they are getting more and more. They are looser. They’re liberal. In a way, ‘liberal’ is a synonym for ‘loose.’ And that’s exactly the way Arthur plays. I’ve always kidded him, saying, ‘If the Negroes take over, please make me a lieutenant. Not a general or a colonel. Just a lieutenant.’ ”
Lieutenant Ashe, USA (stationed at West Point), professes to enjoy the irony of this request, and promises to do what he can. He endorses Graebner’s analysis of his game, and says, “To put it simply, I just blast the ball back and the point’s over. Of course, I miss a lot. Tennis is a means to an end, that’s all. If I could really be what I wanted to be, I would love to be a pro quarterback.” He lifts the ball and hits another hard first serve at Graebner. Almost an ace, it jerks Graebner far off balance, but he hits it back solidly, up the middle. Ashe, moving up, is again confronted with the need to half-volley. For the second time in a row, instead of hitting the deep, correct ball, he tries to pull a drop shot off the grass, and for the second time in a row he succeeds. “Another half-volley drop shot!” Donald Dell comments. “How loose can you get?” Dell is captain of the United States Davis Cup Team, of which Ashe and Graebner are members. Graebner, sprinting, gets to this one, barely, and more or less pushes it down the line—a remarkable effort—but Ashe, standing straight up and not even bothering to stroke with form, flips a slow, looping crosscourt wood-shot forehand into Graebner’s court and just beyond his reach—a stroke that might have been made with a broom handle. Forty-fifteen.
The 60s Page 56