by Osha Neumann
The meeting went on for some time. Ben recalls Bill yelling at us that we’d get our free night over his dead body, to which Ben replied with the little smile he got when he was very serious: “Well, that could be arranged.” Bill looked him in the eye, opened a drawer of his desk and took out a pair of bullets with chrome casings, which he placed on the desk in front of him. The bullets, he said, were sent to him by the Hell’s Angels, who’d once threatened to kill him. He hadn’t been scared of them, and he wasn’t scared of us. Ben replied that those guys just talked big, but if we decided to shut him down we’d shut him down. Carole remembers things somewhat differently. She says I jumped up and down and yelled, and that it was I who pulled out the bullets and they weren’t silver. I don’t remember the bullets at all, but Steve remembers it Ben’s way. Despite his angry defiance, I had the feeling as we left his office that Bill thrived on confrontation and rather liked us. That was probably wishful thinking.
We continued our campaign. Judith Malina and Julian Beck’s Living Theater was scheduled to perform Paradise Now at the Fillmore East as part of an evening of radical theater to benefit the legal defense of students arrested at the Columbia University occupation. Ben decided the Living Theater’s appearance provided the perfect opportunity to show Bill we meant business. Paradise Now was a free form controlled improvisation involving nudity and audience participation. Ben met with Judith and Julian and together they agreed that at the end of the performance the audience would stay and hold the theater. We seeded the audience with contingents of our followers. As the play reached its conclusion, we joined the actors on stage. Richard Goldstein, writing in the Village Voice, described what happened next:Onstage, 100 people were dancing, chanting or stomping away. Many who knew this scenario by heart were stripping in anticipation. . . . The actors too had bared their bodies; they slipped onstage, formed an even circle, and passed the pipe around. Neighborhood kids moved among the actors, whistling and shouting “Naked City.” . . . The performance ended in a huge swirling dance of OM. . . .
At that moment—as though timing were all that was involved—Ben Morea grabbed the microphone and announced on behalf of the Motherfuckers that the Fillmore East had been liberated. He proceeded to demand that Bill Graham turn the house over to “the community” once a week, gratis. Graham’s eyes did a soft role in their sockets as he walked into the spotlight to make the confrontation complete.
The performance came to a halt amidst much pandemonium and shouting. Ben announced: “The show is over, life goes on. We’re not leaving till we get our one free night.” The audience stayed. We drummed and made speeches, some more coherent than others. Much the same argument we had had with Bill in his office now took place in front of an audience. He responded to our demands by saying if we wanted the theater to be free we should buy it, but if we tried to take it by force we would have to kill him first. Finally, well after midnight, Bill took a microphone and announced that if we would leave the theater he would agree to hold a town meeting on our proposal the following Wednesday. We had carried a mimeograph machine to the theater from our office. We brought it on stage and before we left the theater cranked out our cautious response to Bill’s offer:The community needs free space. It needs to survive, grow freaky, breathe, expand, love, struggle, turn on. Bill Graham, hippie entrepreneur . . . may tonight have been a little liberated or he may not. Next Wednesday will tell. One Nite a Week or the Sky’s the Limit.
As it turned out, Bill’s idea of what he had offered and ours were not the same.19
On the day of the town hall meeting we arrived at the theater and saw on the stage, a table on which sat two microphones. Behind each microphone was a folding chair, one for Bill and one for Ben. Bill wanted a structured debate. He and Ben would talk. The rest of us would listen.
We made sure it wasn’t going to happen that way. A Motherfucker event had to include free food, music, spontaneous speeches, call and response. Again we brought a mimeograph machine from our storefront. We set it in the center aisle and, as the event unfolded, churned out fliers commenting on the proceedings. In the face of threats and exhortations from all sides, Bill remained adamantly opposed to giving us our free night. He’d seen what our events looked like and would have none of it. As the night wore on without any discernible progress in the negotiations, people drifted away, and we left, promising to escalate the confrontation.
Behind the scenes, negotiations continued. Other more “responsible” parties, including Wavy Gravy, intervened. Bill finally agreed to allow us to use the theater on Wednesday nights to put on free events for the community.
The first one took place in late November. From our point of view it was an enormous success. The theater was packed.
It felt as if 2nd Avenue had tipped on its side and deposited its entire contents—animate and inanimate—in the theater. Discarded sandwiches, cigarette butts, cans and bottles littered the carpets. Much wine was drunk, much dope was smoked. The program, such as it was, proceeded amidst a chorus of boasts, threats, brags and rambling fantasies shouted out from every corner of the auditorium. Bill Graham’s green-shirted ushers stood by, attempting to make themselves inconspicuous, utterly powerless to control the magnificent chaos of the event. The drug laws of the State of New York were flagrantly violated. There were grievous insults to property. Carpets were stained. Seats were broken. Toilets clogged and overflowed.
After four free community nights, and warnings from the police that they would yank his license, Bill Graham had enough. He circulated an open letter to the community announcing the end of the free nights and urging everyone “to accept our predicament (which is now your reality) with intelligence and grace.”
We quickly cranked out a response on our church donated Gestetner:Situation: Pigs and Bill Graham stop free night. Why? They say we smoke dope, but we know it’s because they are afraid of us. Afraid that we’ll learn it’s ours. Afraid that we’ll get together there to destroy their world and create our own.
The pigs threaten to close Graham down unless he stops our free night. He doesn’t have to worry about the pigs. We’ll close him down. No free night, no pay night. . . .
On a more conciliatory note we asked to use the theater on the Monday before Christmas for a community meeting to discuss the use of dope. When we showed up the doors were locked.e
Electra records had rented the hall for a free concert the day after Christmas to promote their new acquisition, the MC5, a musically mediocre but politically militant rock and roll band out of Detroit. Its manager, John Sinclair, had been one of the founders of the White Panther Party, a small, Black Panther emulating, anarchist collective, whose rhetoric was a clone of ours. John’s White Panther Party Manifesto proclaimed:We are a bunch of arrogant motherfuckers and we don’t give a damn for any cop or any phony-ass authority control-addict creeps who want to put us down. For the first time in America there is a generation of visionary maniac white motherfucker country dope fiend rock and roll freaks who are ready to get down and kick out the jams—ALL THE JAMS—break everything loose and free everybody from their very real and imaginary prisons—even the chumps and punks and honkies who are always fucking with us.
We demand total freedom for everybody! And we will not be stopped until we get it. We are bad.20
The MC5 had played at the last free community night before the shutdown. Radio stations had been giving away free tickets. We demanded 500 tickets for the community. Fearing violence, Graham reluctantly agreed.
On the evening of the concert the theater filled up quickly and when the doors closed there was still a crowd gathered outside demanding to be let in. The crowd chanted, yelled, and pushed. Bill himself stood in the doorway, blocking the entrance. Suddenly, Israel, one of the Puerto Rican street kids who hung out with us, slashed a bicycle chain across his face. Blood began pouring from his nose. Bill fell back.
The concert began. The MC5 played their big number, ‘Kick Out the Jams, Motherfuckers.” We gave s
peeches. The crowd jumped on the stage. Again pandemonium reigned.21 The band got nervous and made a speedy exit in a limousine, much to our disgust. Wayne Kramer, a member of the MC5 remembers:The stage wings were crowded with Motherfuckers waiting for us to give the word to burn the place down. Of course we weren’t about to give any such command and their anger started to turn on us. . . . We finished our set and escaped to the dressing room while the motherfuckers and the street maniacs tried to run out the door with our gear. Our crew valiantly battled to hold on to our stuff and the greatest blunder in record business tactics imaginable happens: two limousines show up to carry the band back to the hotel. The revolutionaries saw red! “Limos!” The symbol of capitalist imperial-ism. Limos. The Motherfucker women were screaming and weeping about how we had sold the revolution out. They were smashing our records against the Cadillac limos tail fins. Crying at the top of their lungs: “Bastards! Pigs! Phonies! Sell-outs!”22
After the MC 5 left, the crowd stayed. Before the night was over one person had been hospitalized after being hit over the head with a microphone stand; a Puerto Rican boy had been stabbed; and one of the ushers had his arm fractured with a metal pipe.23
That night marked the end of our battle with Bill Graham. Bill offered to provide some financial and other support for the community to find some other place to meet, but it never happened. Times were changing and the very brief heyday of the Motherfuckers was nearing its end. I had watched Bill get hit with the chain and felt a door open between our violent rhetoric and reality. I did not want to walk through it. The vulnerability of the flesh of my opponent gave me no pleasure.
Motherfucker flier with information about our battle with Bill Graham.
ENDGAME
By 1969, it was becoming clear that the cultural weather was changing. The season of love, rage, and extravagant expectations was coming to an end. On the streets of the Lower East Side, hard drugs began to replace LSD. The young dropouts had a nervous jagged edge. We had opened up our free store as a nighttime crashpad. It would fill with drunks who’d wake in the middle of the night, and go after each other with broken wine bottles. Optimism was giving way to a tight-lipped struggle for survival. The emotional tone of the Motherfuckers darkened. Our stash of guns was a source of endless paranoia. We were constantly moving it from one hiding place to another.
Some months after the last of our Fillmore East nights, Ben was standing with his girlfriend, Joan, on the corner of 10th Street and 3rd Avenue when a car pulled up across the street with three men in it. A heavyset guy got out, walked over to Ben and said: “We’ve been hired to kill you.” Joan ran off towards Gem’s Spa two blocks away to get help and soon returned with ten to fifteen people. Ben said to the guys in the car: “If you try to kill me you better make sure I die.” They drove off.
At the end of one of our numerous confrontations with the police on St. Marks Place, I was arrested and taken to the Ninth precinct. I was handcuffed with my hands behind my back to a chair in the middle of the squad room. The room was full of officers from the Tactical Patrol Force. The cops dragged in a young street kid. He was thin and frail, had long black hair, and was wearing a shirt that had been made from an American flag. The cops gathered around him. They didn’t say a word. In the corner of the room was a machine for polishing shoes. It had wheel with bristles at floor level, which spun when the switch was turned on. One of the cops led the boy over to the machine, pressed his face against the wheel and pushed the switch. It lasted for only a moment or two. The boy didn’t make a sound. I was too afraid to protest. When it was over a cop came over and casually slapped me a couple of times in the face. I had a sinking feeling that my whole world of fantasized violence was about to descend on me in earnest. But the moment passed.
I was not the only one who was emotionally unprepared for real violence. Charlie always endeavored to be the perfect Motherfucker, despite a gentle and introspective nature. He was fiercely loyal to Ben. In 1961 he had participated in the Freedom Rides organized by CORE. When he came back he had drifted away from politics, and found work as a market researcher. He took to wearing cashmere coats and a beret. His conversion experience came when he met Ben at Back Mask’s “Change Wall Street to War Street” demonstration. In short order he ditched his cashmere coat for a black leather jacket, grew a full beard and moved in with the Motherfuckers, accompanied by Carole and her new born baby Chacha.
Carole and Charlie had met in an earlier life when they were both acting in amateur Comedia del Arte productions. Carole had been going to college, living with a man considerably older than herself, and waitressing at a Middle Eastern Restaurant in Greenwich Village. It took one very good LSD trip to change her from a “regular person” wearing skirts and blouses to a hippie who wrapped herself in the curtains from her apartment. In quick succession she quit her job, dropped out of college, moved to Timothy Leary’s ashram at Mill-brook, got pregnant, moved back to New York, and delivered Cha Cha by Cesarean section in the maternity ward of a public hospital. She had lost track of Charlie, but as she was staggering back from the hospital, carrying her baby in her arms, holding herself up by the buildings, Charlie happened to pass by in a beat up pickup truck he was using to collect food for a free Motherfucker community feed. Charlie and Carole got back together and moved into an apartment with Alfonso and Alan on Avenue B.
Charlie and Carole were the perfect Motherfucker couple. When a cop politely suggested Carole could find a more private place to breast-feed than the corner of 2nd Avenue and St. Marks Place, she whipped out her tit and squirted him full in the chest with breast milk. And Charlie was always ready at Ben’s side, to prove himself and do what needed to be done.
It was therefore not surprising that during one of our demonstrations, in which we had taken over St. Marks Place, and filled the street with demonstrators blowing penny whistles, it was Charlie who came to the rescue of little Caesar, one of our entourage of Puerto Rican street kids, when the police grabbed him and attempted to drag him into a patrol car. Charlie ran over, surprised the cops who were holding Caesar, and pulled him loose. Caesar escaped but Charlie was not so lucky. Within seconds the police grabbed him and hustled him into Gem’s Spa. Through the window we could see him being dragged to the back of the store. Ben was as fiercely loyal to Charlie as Charlie was to him. When he saw the police dragging Charlie away he charged through the crowd and kicked in the window of the store. Charlie broke away from the police and jumped through the broken window, but was immediately recaptured. The cops were enraged. They called in reinforcements, marched Charlie into a paddy wagon, and took him to the precinct station.
Charlie never talked to me about what happened there, but he told Carole that he was taken into a back room by cops who were members of the Tactical Patrol Force. One of them took the lead, beating him with a shoe and then a nightstick. One blow fractured his arm and another his skull. The beating Charlie took in that room did something terrible to the core of his being from which he never completely recovered. It was as if the police had reamed him out and filled the emptiness they created with fear. They took away his words. He stopped speaking.
Carole was away in California when the incident happened. When the news reached her, she hurried back to New York and began looking for Charlie. Nobody seemed to know where he was. Finally she discovered him in Alfonso Motherfucker’s apartment, sitting in the bathtub with his broken arm in a cast. He was almost catatonic. He hadn’t eaten. He couldn’t walk. He couldn’t get into bed by himself. He was broken in body and spirit.
When he was somewhat recovered, Charlie took to spending his days with Caesar, sneaking into women’s apartments to steal money and candy. He still didn’t talk. Once when Carole caught him looking through someone’s apartment, he tied her up in a stairwell and left her for two hours. He couldn’t explain why. She determined she had to get him out of New York and away from the Motherfuckers. Ben accused her of betraying the revolution and breaking up the group. She told him s
he didn’t care. She panhandled for two days to get enough money to get out of New York. She and Charlie caught a ride heading west. They drove across the George Washington Bridge, and when they had crossed the Hudson and reached New Jersey, Charlie turned to her and said “So, it’s a pretty nice day, today, isn’t it.” Those were the first words he’d spoken in a month.
That’s Carole’s recollection. I have a slightly different memory of Charlie after his beating. I remember a Charlie who regained his speech, but whose thoughts seemed to drift about like boats cut loose from their anchors, a Charlie who spoke in a soft monotone, as if he had wondered a great distance off and was talking to himself. I remember his voice as an echo in an empty shell. But perhaps Carole is right and the Charlie I remember is the Charlie before the beating, a Charlie who was already a little far away, an echoing shell but not a broken one.
We seemed to be attracting craziness. I felt the balance in the group tip. Some of the older original Motherfuckers drifted away. New recruits were often tough guys from the street, drawn by our rhetoric of violence. Ben felt the need to augment the Motherfuckers with some real muscle. He brought in Barry Motherfucker, who, like Ben, had been a heroin addict, but unlike Ben, was still a user. Barry was a wise cracking Jewish gangster from Brooklyn. His father was rumored to be a powerful lawyer or a judge. I never understood what drew Barry to the Motherfuckers. Perhaps it was, as Steve remembers, that he adored Ben. Whatever it was, it didn’t seem to be our politics.