Up Against the Wall Motherf**er

by Osha Neumann

  Our presence in Canjilón did not go unnoticed by the authorities. The police started cruising by our house on a regular basis. One day I was working on a truck out on the road in front of our house when a police car stopped and two sheriffs got out. My hands were covered in grease. My hair hung down below my shoulders. Without explanation or excuse, they ordered me to stand up and put down my tools. Then they searched me, handcuffed me, and hustled me into their patrol car. They drove me to their little one room station house and locked me in a holding cell. I gave a false name and spent the next hours rubbing my fingertips against the cement wall in an effort to erase my fingerprints. After some time they took me out of the cell, took my photograph and fingerprints, and then locked me back up. Hours later, they ushered me out of my cell, handed me my back my wallet and my shoes, and let me go.

  Ben maintained a good relationship with Juan and Tony. They took him out hunting for deer and elk and on occasion he joined them on an expedition to round up the wild horses that roamed in the high meadows of the national forest. We helped haphazardly when it was time to bring in the hay, but by and large we lived apart from the townspeople, with whom we had very little communication. One evening as we were lounging outside our house, we heard little explosions in the distance. Something wushed by our heads. It took me a moment to realize that someone was shooting at us. The shots seemed to come from the direction of a clump of houses at the other side of a field. We ran and got our guns and fired back in the general direction of the houses from which the shots had come. I took the incident as a sign that we were no longer welcome, but Juan reassured Ben that we had just gotten caught in an argument between him and people in the village who didn’t like him. Despite his assurances, we were part of the problem. The argument had a political dimension. Not everyone in Canjilón was prepared to plot another insurrection, nor happy with Juan’s choice of hippy weirdoes as comrades in arms.

  Even I, most committed of Motherfuckers, was beginning to realize that Canjilón was a dead end. Yeshi had given up her job at Mobilization for Youth to come with me to New Mexico. Her patience with the Motherfuckers, close to non-existent to begin with, wore out long before mine did. She and Ben’s partner, Joan, cooked for the men. There was no running hot water. After six months in New Mexico she developed a bad case of hepatitis and left to recover with her sister in La Jolla. I visited her. We made love. She conceived our first child. I returned to New Mexico. She wrote me telling me she was pregnant, and announced she was not returning to the Motherfuckers. I could stay with them or I could go with her. I couldn’t do both. I chose the mother over the fuckers. We packed the red VW bus she had borrowed from her sister and I left the Motherfuckers for good. It felt like I was stepping off the edge of the earth.

  Not long after we left, the Motherfuckers pulled up stakes and moved out of Canjilón. The group was beginning to dwindle away. Ben was spending more and more time in the mountains, hunting, gathering, and learning how to survive in the woods. For the time being he was done living in square houses. He planned to caravan with the remaining Motherfuckers around Northern New Mexico, buy or trade for horses, and then take off into the National Forest to see if he could survive off the land.

  Death was not done stalking the Motherfuckers. Ritchie had been with the Motherfuckers on and off since the Columbia University strike. He had joined the small band that followed Ben into the mountains. He left after Ben and he had an argument over his shooting of a rabbit with a high-powered rifle at a time when Ben was trying to travel without attracting notice. A few months after he left, Ritchie fell and injured his leg. He was living in a cabin with a woman, Lyric, and they’d had kids together. The wound wouldn’t heal, and he wouldn’t go to the hospital. He watched it turn purple and ugly, and did nothing while a red line worked its way up his leg. By the time he finally went to the clinic in Mora it was too late. He died of septicemia.

  Barry left the Motherfuckers to form his own small band of armed banditos. Ben tried to get Barry to stay with him, but he refused. The lure of the thug life was too great. Within months Barry was shot to death trying to rip off a dope deal in Albuquerque.

  A Sicilian kid from New York who went by the name Sunshine hooked up with the remnants of the Motherfuckers after Ben left Canjilón. Sunshine rode with Ben for a while and changed his name to Lobo. After a while he decided to break away and form his own band of armed banditos. They rode into El Rio and got into a gunfight with state police. Lobo was shot in the leg, but managed to escape. Later he was killed by members of his own gang.

  There were by now too many men with guns and horses living in the mountains to avoid the attentions of the authorities. Ben decided to leave northern New Mexico and head for Colorado.

  As Ben headed off to Colorado and those who remained behind began dying, Yeshi and I drove around Northern New Mexico, looking for a place to have a baby. We stayed for a few months in a cabin in a mountain valley outside of Mora on the eastern slopes of the Sangre De Cristo mountains. I have never lived in a more beautiful place. From our front door we could look out over the valley and see the silver strands of waterfalls, plunging off the edge of the snowcapped peaks surrounding the Pecos wilderness. We shared the valley with an old couple who kept goats. They had a dog whose job it was to herd the goats, which she did with wonderful skill and enthusiasm.

  One day Yeshi and I jumped naked into an ice-cold mountain lake, scrambled out onto the bank and declared ourselves married. We would have been happy to stay in our valley, but winter was coming on and we would have been snowed in when the baby was due. We packed up and headed for California. On the last day of 1970 in Berkeley, California, my first daughter was born at home in a little cottage on Regent Street on a bed covered with a blue blanket on which Yeshi had embroidered a red eagle. We named her Rainbow, a perfect hippy name she promptly discarded in favor of Rachel when she hit high school, having grown tired of all the rainbow-themed presents with which she’d be inundated on her birthdays.

  AFTER THE REVOLUTION THAT DIDN’T HAPPEN, LIFE GOES ON

  For a while after Rachel’s birth, Yeshi and I prolonged our countercultural existence at Black Bear Ranch, a rural commune in Northern California, set high in a mountain valley an hour’s drive by logging road from the wild rock-sculpting, fish spawning, Salmon River. We were snowed-in in the winter. We had no telephone. We generated all our electricity with Pelton wheels driven by water we channeled from the creeks that ran through the property.

  Black Bear had once been a thriving mining community. Black Bear Mine, abandoned by the time we arrived, had been one of the most profitable gold mines in California. Our Main House was a rambling two-story wood-frame building, which had been the home of the mine owner, John Daggett, who made his fortune mining and subsequently rose to become Lt. Governor of California. Our wood shop had been the community’s post office.

  The entire first floor of our Main House was one big L shaped room. At one end was the kitchen where we cooked on a huge cast-iron wood-burning stove. In the rest of the room we ate together at a long wooden table, hung out, held meetings, and played music in the evenings. We all chopped wood, cared for the children, learned to fix our trucks and run our chain saws. In the mornings and evenings we milked our herd of goats. We earned a little money planting trees in clearcuts for the Forest Service, and fighting forest fires. All the money we earned went into a collective pot.

  We slept together in communal houses and experimented with non-monogamy. In the summer we ran around naked. We had first hand knowledge of each other’s breasts and butts, penises and pubic hairs. We peed wherever we happened to be. I was very good at peeing while walking down the road. Women squatted wherever the urge came over them, and piss would stream in little rivulets out between their legs.

  The goats had the run of the land. We fenced in the gardens to keep them out and let them graze. They shat black fibrous pellets that came out like licorice gumballs from a penny gum machine. We, the humans shat side
by side in a hexagonal shitter we built above the Main House. It had smoothly sanded holes, and wooden lids with which to cover the holes when you were done. We shat together in the heat of summer and the cold of winter, shat evening shits after dinner, and morning shits after breakfast. We shat with the children sitting on the smaller kids’ shitter holes looking up at us, their eyes large and inscrutable like the eyes of animals while our turds fell with a soft thud onto a peeked, somehow comforting mound below, mixed in with paper and topped with a sprinkle of white lime.

  Our bodies excreted next to other bodies similarly excreting, some easily, some straining, doing it together in a kind of communal privacy emblematic of our mode of conducting the intercourse between our public and private lives. We shared shitting as we shared the sounds of fucking in the night, and the glimpses of humping bodies by the light of a kerosene lamp. We knew each other in an extended intimacy I have never encountered at any other time or place. Gradually, I unbuckled the emotional armor I had learned to wear around men during the Motherfucker days.

  For me it was basically all good. I almost learned to love my body. One afternoon I was shoveling hot rocks with a rusty shovel through an opening in a dome of rotting plastic that we used for a steam bath. The rocks glowed red from the fire and were covered with white ash. I was naked. I was enjoying the shoveling. And suddenly I became aware that I felt strong and that my muscles worked well. I realized I liked my naked body and the feel of the air caressing my bare skin and the heat of the fire. I had never imagined as a child or a Motherfucker, that I would have such a body or would feel this good about it.

  I loved the communal life. I loved the fucking. We were freeing ourselves, I thought, from the rigid structuring of intimate relations. Relationships didn’t need to be exclusive. Couples did not have to surround themselves with a zone of privacy. Women have told me since then that they did not always enjoy the evening mating dance, wondering who would go off into the night with whom, and who would be left hanging around the Main House. For many of them, all that non-exclusive fucking (Was it good for you? Did you come? Men never seem to know) was not such a great experience. I thought at the time that our efforts to take communal responsibility for the children were wonderful for the children, who were freed from dependence on one or two parents, who might or might not be available. And it was for some of them. But I know now that some of the children felt lied to and abandoned, and didn’t believe us when we said “we’re all your mothers and fathers.” Others were afraid of some of the men.

  For all our diversity of body types, we were mainly white. My best friend Sabi, who was part Puerto Rican and part Dominican and who grew up in Harlem, had no nostalgia for Black Bear. He arrived at the ranch with his four children and worried about the future, because he knew that for all our protestations of community it wouldn’t last forever. The white people would go off to claim their privilege, and he’d be left fending for himself.

  We who lived at Black Bear remain an extended family, but we no longer, if we ever really did, share the wealth. Some of us have remained close. Others of us have drifted apart. Some of us are making good money. Some of us are just getting by. I treasure my memories: of being naked to each other, of intimate exposure, of a wonderful collective privacy, of a time when we had the expectation that we would take from the common pot what we needed, and pour into it what we could.

  After a couple of years living at Black Bear, I grew dissatisfied with our isolation from the world, and decided to return to the city. Yeshi and Rachel accompanied me. Yeshi went to nursing school. I took up mural painting, inspired to return to making art by the murals I had seen in the Mission district of San Francisco. We had another child, Emma. And then, when Emma was two years old, we divorced. I initiated the break-up because . . . well, the usual becauses—a feeling of being trapped, a building up of resentments. “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” is the famous first line of the first chapter of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, but I’m not sure it’s true. I think unhappiness can be far more banal and generic than happiness. I sat in the car outside our home the evening I left, looked up at the lighted windows, already terribly missing my children, and cried uncontrollably. Banal or not, it hurt.

  Within a year after leaving Yeshi, I moved in with Anna. She and I had been working together on the board of a community arts organization. She was a ceramic artist and singer, and was active in Berkeley politics. I imagined she could be my perfect partner, a warrior for justice, a comrade in arms. It didn’t work out that way. The relationship gradually deteriorated and turned into a nightmare from which Rachel and Emma, who shuttled back and forth between our house and Yeshi’s, longed to escape.

  I left Anna after eight years. Before I’d moved in with her, I’d been occasional lovers with Arisika. When Anna found out she went ballistic. Arisika and I stopped seeing each other altogether. Leaving Anna enabled me to reconnect with Ariska. We discovered we still liked each other. We married in 1993, and have lived together ever since.

  In 1982 I helped organize massive demonstrations against nuclear weapons research at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratories. Over a thousand people were arrested at various times. I spent two and a half weeks in jail with hundreds of other protestors. On one occasion the county jail ran out of room and had to house us in giant circus tents. I was sitting in jail when we heard the news of the massacres of Palestinians in the Lebanese refugee camps at Sabra and Chatilla. The week we got out, a group of us who were Jewish went to the Israeli consulate and got ourselves arrested for blocking the entranceway. In 1985 I participated in anti-apartheid demonstrations at the University of California and was arrested on the steps of Sproul Hall and in front of the chancellor’s office where a shantytown had been built. I’d started law school the year before. I didn’t see how I could make a living painting political murals and doubted my talent. I studied for the bar exam while sitting in a holding tank in the basement of the Federal building after I was arrested for protesting the war in El Salvador. While still in law school, a friend of mine and I decided that when we graduated and got our bar cards, we’d rent a stall in the Berkeley Flea market and offer consults alongside the vendors of pots and pans and secondhand clothing. I was still with Anna. She and some other lawyers joined us. We called ourselves Fleagal Aid. We set up our pin-striped tent, and for a while dispensed the cheapest, and hopefully not the worst, legal advice in town.

  For eight years, from 1984 to 1992, I sat on Berkeley’s Civilian Police Review Commission. The cops hated me. In 1987 I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease affecting my peripheral nervous system. In 1997 I found out I had prostate cancer. In 2005 I was diagnosed with a cancerous blood disorder. These days I totter about, can’t type worth a damn, and have trouble with buttons. Otherwise much remains the same. I represent homeless people and victims of police misconduct. I continue to paint and draw and sculpt and write and protest.

  I am a Motherfucker no more. As I write, pale early morning sunlight illuminates what my letterhead dubs “the Law Offices of Osha Neumann,” a small cluttered room in a fading orange Victorian on the corner of Martin Luther King Jr. Way in Berkeley, California. I’ve lived in Berkeley and North Oakland for over thirty years. I’ve raised my two daughters here. I have two granddaughters.

  I am the sole employee, chief cook, and bottle washer of the Law Offices of Osha Neumann. My desk is forever covered with files of cases that won’t go away and never seem to make any money. Law books lie open on the floor. On the wall over my computer are two of my paintings in black and white acrylic on paper: one depicts three hands shackled together, the other a policeman with a baton at a Black man’s throat. On the wall opposite is a photograph of Diego Rivera working on a mural with brush in one hand, an enamel plate he’s using as a pallet in the other. Above his photo on the wall are more of my paintings and a page from a weekly newspaper with my photograph in front of a shelf of law books. The newspaper named me a “l
ocal hero” and the blurb beneath the photo extols my various nefarious activities as muralist and legal defender of the poor. I am quoted as saying: “There is no good way to live these days, but the best way is in opposition.”

  Much has changed and much remains the same since my Motherfucker days on the Lower East Side. I still love a motherfuckeresque politics of disruption and confrontation. I look forward to the moment when the clash between us and them is in the open, when we cross the line into civil disobedience. I still define the essential struggle we are engaged in as a struggle against fascism, but I know that, despite what I assumed as a child, Jews are not always antifascist nor committed to the universality of truth. Sabra and Chatilla awakened me from my dogmatic slumber on the subject of the relation of Jews to fascism.

  I am no longer plagued by my adolescent fantasies, but still suffer periodically from a crippling obsessiveness. I remain intrigued and puzzled by the relation of the personal to the political, and the mix of reason and irrationality in our politics. The issue of reason, its place in our political and personal lives, its limitations and its strengths, its purity and its perversions, still intrigues me.

  In old movies, pages of a calendar on the wall flutter to the ground to indicate the passage of time. Off-camera, the actor is aged by the make-up artist. He re-appears with gray and thinning hair, wrinkles, liver spots and a bit of a pot.

  Many pages have fluttered to the ground since the Sixties. Somehow, while those calendar pages were falling and my hair was turning white, and before I acquired an autoimmune disease and prostate cancer, a sea change occurred in my relationship with women, which corresponded to an equally profound change in my fantasy life. I was no longer plagued by fantasies of pain, of beating and being beaten. Those fantasies left like the symptoms of an illness that vanish when the fever breaks. They had flourished in the isolation of my body, in the absence of touch. And when I left the Motherfuckers to live with Yeshi, and when Rachel was born in a gush of blood, and we went to Black Bear, and fucked a lot, and worked naked in the hot sun, and when Emma was born eight years after Rachel I was touched, in body and spirit. In that touching, “the real” I had raged and clawed towards was given to me, gently, with tenderness and I was weaned, without even knowing it, from my sadomasochistic fantasies.