Free Spirit

by Joshua Safran

  My mother wrote of the parade in a long letter to Elizabeth:

  [I] jumped on a flatbed truck containing the nuclear altar.… People made a beeline for me: the float people wanted to know why we couldn’t relocate the control panel; Susan S. wanted to know where the children’s truck was; and, somebody else wanted a parade outline, a script for a theatre part, and some tape… Josh and Tony arrived needing immediate hugs. Josh had been traded off between daddy 1 and daddy 2 for the three days preceding.

  Claudia was surrounded by a frenzied swarm of raggedy activists. She called out orders like a line officer, huddling and unhuddling, pointing and guiding with hand gestures. I was proud of her but disappointed that no one knew I was the captain’s son. On the ground near her crew were an untidy heap of protest signs and a disassembled Trident submarine monster composed of a massive harness the length of a football field and studded with black flags. I knew that each flag represented one bomb, and each bomb was equivalent to five Hiroshima blasts. That much fire power made me nervous.

  Claudia’s letter continued:

  A monitor runs up and tells me Wavy Gravy is here and looking for the children. Where the hell is Allan with the kids’ truck? I run to find Wavy and he’s already found the pole marked “Children.” No problem except trying to make eye contact through the clown costume. Andy Hawkinson of the atomic vets arrives and is excited by the crowd which is now undeniably large. We hug and Starhawk goes off to be interviewed by the press for the second time this morning.

  Uncle Tony looked at his watch. “OK, Josh. I have to go to work for a change. Tell Claudia I’m not bailing her out if she gets arrested. I’m leaving you with Wavy Gravy and these other children.”

  Wavy Gravy was a nearly toothless, balding, fat, tie-dyed political clown who was universally beloved as an icon of the Left.

  “OK, little freaks! What are we here to do today!?”

  We kids stared back at Wavy Gravy in stunned silence.

  “Fight nuclear power! Who needs nuclear power when you can do this?” Wavy Gravy jumped up like a whale gasping for air, and hit himself on the head with the butt of a red and yellow horn that squeaked on impact. We stared back in horror. “Jeez, tough crowd. Hey, kids! Here’s Allan with the kids’ truck, finally. About time, Allan. What happened, you smoke out with your dog again?”

  The kids’ truck was a little orange Toyota pickup. We were stuffed into the bed of the truck like crates of organic broccoli. Allan, the sweaty, bearded driver, slammed the gate shut and waved a finger at us: “No one fall out!”

  “Hear that, kids!” cackled Wavy Gravy. “No falling out.”

  The truck lurched forward with a deep groan, and a belch of diesel exhaust slithered over us.

  Claudia wrote:

  A woman in fatigues with buttons and literature from the People’s Workers Proletarian Whoosis Whatsis Vanguard stares hard at her “question authority” button and refuses eye contact. Finally she walks right past me. I don’t exist. I can’t stand it. I say: “Hey, I’m also a person.” She looks like she might cry. Oh well. John has arrived with his spectacular solar microphone and Jason the professional whistler who is wearing a Guatemalan sunburst shirt… I use [the solar microphone] to get things underway:…

  “Um, yummy. This is a solar microphone,” I say. “Nobody has to die of radiation.”

  Somebody sees authority and shouts: “I hope you have all the answers.”

  I say: “Somebody just said he hoped I had all the answers. I don’t have answers. It’s got to be all of us together providing answers. There’s just too damn much at stake.” It’s quarter to noon. Some women near me are smiling at me, and I’m all turned on. “OK. Let’s get this thing on the street! Nothing’s happening in the park anymore. Let’s get it into the streets!”

  We children found ourselves packed tight against one another in the back of the idling kids’ truck. The unrelenting sun and smell of diesel were making me nauseated.

  “Why are you here?” I asked the boy sitting on my foot, hoping that he would ask me the same question.

  “My mom made me come,” he said. Silence.

  “My mother is Claudia. She’s the organizer of the parade,” I said proudly.

  “My mom’s a dyke,” said the boy.

  The truck lurched forward violently, and I cracked skulls with the son of a dyke. We both winced but showed each other we were too tough to cry.

  “We’re up,” Wavy Gravy shouted back through the sliding window in the cab. “Hang on, little freakies.”

  The truck stopped suddenly. A flatbed truck passed in front of us with a huge gray papier-mâché nuclear cooling tower tethered to its back. It belched forth smoke.

  “I made that,” I told the boy. He stared at the faux reactor in silence. A rumble of drums filled the air. A massive black jumble of platforms floated by, bearing the drummers. They were Japanese people in dark robes. Their faces were painted white and set like stone. As the drums began to die down, a truck passed bearing nuclear grim reapers wearing frightening masks and waving scythes.

  “I’m scared,” he confided in me. I nodded. I was scared too.

  The truck lurched forward again, and this time we let out a collective shriek.

  The kids’ truck bucked sharply when it hit the base of a hill. Suddenly I was pitched forward, and a crushing mass of heads and elbows and feet hammered against my back. We all slid along the bed of the truck, shrieking in terror. I struggled to right myself, but the truck seemed to be climbing vertically. Gravity was beckoning us over the tailgate, and we tried to press ourselves against the bed of the truck. But there were too many of us to lie flat. We clung to the sides of the truck, to each other, clawing at any little handhold we could find. As the truck fought its way up the incline, we heard the grinding of gears and the straining howl of the engine. The truck lurched backward a couple of times, as Allan tried to find a gear low enough to keep us from careening backward down the hill and into a flatbed truck full of transvestite nuns. With each lurch it felt like the bottom of the Earth was falling away beneath me. This was the first time I discovered prayer. I was bargaining in my mind: “If you let this truck get to the end of the parade without me falling out and dying, I won’t even complain once if a nuclear winter comes.”

  Claudia continued:

  I look back. The parade is stretched out all the way down the hill and half way up the next one. Blocks and blocks. Banners sparkling in the sun. The next day’s TV said 1,000 people. The Examiner estimates 2,500. The Chronicle says 4,000. Add a thousand or two, considering who owns the press.

  I’m crying now. Watch faces of the spectators. We’re in the Fillmore now. A small group of women is reading the sign about irreversible genetic damage, jaws tight. The parade passes and passes. One man is about to enter his car but freezes on the spot. He listens to the entire altar script, is extremely moved. (Too much a “man” to cry.) Suddenly shakes himself out of it, jumps into his car in a hurry.

  The Union of Concerned Comics are dressed as soldiers and chanting: “Look up, bend down, get pushed around!”… The new day banner. A peal of pleasant bells and song. We are alive. Let it begin now, a world of plenty. Let it begin now, a world of love. Let it begin now!

  The water dragon hugs me. Don’t know who you are but you’re beautiful. Turns out to be a guy I slept with New Year’s Eve. The Goddess float—a woman wearing a huge Goddess mask, the face of a black woman. The costume includes enormous breasts. No one laughs. The women start chanting: “No Nukes, More Dykes!” On and on to the end of the parade… Stop for a while to take a turn pulling a heavy white coffin. The letters on the side say “Capitalism” in bright red. The kids want to know who’s in there.

  “Rich people!” I say.

  After the sickening, lurching series of free-falls up and down a dozen hills, the kids’ truck finally pulled into the panhandle part of Golden Gate Park, its transmission smoldering under the hood. Wavy Gravy unloaded us, and we kids panted in a g
roup, catching our breaths and dismissing as silly the various vows and oaths we swore to our gods to get us through the ordeal. A sudden break in the crowd revealed a frenzied mob screaming and descending on the nuclear cooling tower I helped build. They smashed it apart with sticks and ripped at its papier-mâché skin with their hands. It was the most violence I’d ever witnessed. I turned my face away and looked around hopefully for my mother.

  Claudia’s letter concluded:

  I announce there is a closing ritual. Closing ritual a tug of war—two groups pull at the altar in opposite directions. It rips apart. A huge roar…“We are alive, let it begin now!” over and over. I stop trying to make it take any sort of form, stop organizing. Feel that I’m holding hands with Morning Glory—a witch from Greenfield Ranch. Morning Glory can’t hold another hand. She’s carrying a scepter, a long stick with the skull of a small animal at the top of it. One of the transvestite nuns bowed to her as she passed. We sing and sing and finally the parade is over. Joshey says: “And now there’s no nuclear power anywhere on Earth!”

  With the parade over, I was confident nuclear war had been averted and the specter of nuclear winter would now dissipate like the Pacific fog on a sunny San Francisco morning.

  Over the next few days, I was shocked to learn that it would not. Apparently, the masses had not been moved to dismantle the military industrial complex. We were still on a collision course for nuclear war because some horrible man named Reagan was set to win the presidency. To add insult to injury, Starhawk, the anarchist Wiccan high priestess, took all the credit for organizing the Three Mile Island parade. In one of her many news interviews, she was asked: “How long did it take you to organize the parade?”

  “Oh, you can’t really organize something like that,” she responded flippantly. “It just happens.” Starhawk’s name vaulted onto Claudia’s shit list, right below Governor Reagan.

  “If he gets elected?” I overheard my mother saying on the telephone. “You mean when he gets elected. Of course they’ll target San Francisco. It’s a major population center.” When she put down the receiver, Claudia announced she was leaving for a month to Mexico. She was going to stay with her friend Elizabeth to help her birth her baby in a village in Michoacán. Elizabeth wanted her newborn to have Mexican citizenship so he could avoid the Draft when the next Vietnam came. And, politically, it was a whole lot better to be a Mexican than an American. Claudia thought rural Mexico might provide the community we’d been looking for. What better place to take refuge when nuclear war with Russia came storming out of the skies?

  My mother left me with Uncle Tony and Claude for the month and, when she returned, she was full of wondrous stories about the poor but poetic and beautiful people of Mexico. In Mexico the children didn’t cry. Boys my age were herding bulls. In Mexico, you said ¡Buenos días! to everyone, even the burro and the drunkard. In Mexico, the people couldn’t understand why we were about to elect Ronald Reagan.

  We visited Uncle Tony after Reagan was officially nominated at the Republican Convention, and Tony and my mother debated who to vote for in the fall. Tony was a diehard Peace and Freedom Party man and had never voted for a mainstream candidate before.

  “Tony, you have to vote for Carter.”

  “But, Claudey, I don’t think he’s a good president. I like Maureen Smith. She’s a dedicated Socialist.”

  “Tony, it’s not about Carter. It’s about Reagan. If Carter doesn’t win, Reagan will. I don’t have to tell you how much worse than Maureen Smith he is.”

  “But, Claudey, I don’t want to vote for the least worst candidate. I want to vote for the person I think would do the best job.”

  “The button, Tony. He will have his finger on that button.” My mother jerked her head in my direction as if to say: “Do it for the kid.”

  Tony sighed and shook his head. But he agreed: “Alright, I’ll vote for Carter. But it’s not going to help. Reagan is winning whether we like it or not.”

  Reagan. The name made me shiver.

  That night I packed carob chips and extra socks into a plastic bag by my bed. If we weren’t wiped out in the first strike, at least I’d be ready for the nuclear winter.

  THREE

  Life as a Verb

  With rent and crime climbing every month, and nuclear war on the horizon, my mother decided that we needed to embark on our exodus from San Francisco now—and a man named Bob DiNardo was the one who would lead us out. We had met Bob in an industrial warehouse building floats for the Three Mile Island parade. He had come for the free food but stayed late to help Claudia and me slather the giant papier-mâché nuclear cooling tower with gray paint. Bob didn’t seem to notice me, but he noticed my mother. They scurried around the base of the nuclear cooling tower, chattering at each other like radical leftist squirrels.

  Claudia told Bob of her belief that public schools were propaganda centers for conscienceless Capitalism. He agreed with her. He was, he said, a schoolteacher, and he was totally disillusioned with the so-called Educational System. She told him of her aching thirst for a rural intentional community. He had the same thirst. He was already living in a commune in Berkeley called the Frog House—but it was too urban. She told him she was ready to head for the hills to keep the Revolution alive. She’d build the community herself if she had to. Bob told her he was ready now too. He was also a builder, and who better to build a community with. He knew some people already living off the land up on Mount Lassen. All they needed were a couple more folks to join them. Bob and Claudia entered the warehouse that night as strangers with two separate visions. They walked out realizing they shared the same one.

  On our walk home from the warehouse, Claudia told me she’d felt a deep physical and emotional connection with Bob.

  “Why do you like him, Claudia?”

  “He has the same vision we do.”

  “He does?”

  “Yes. He knows schools are no place for kids. He knows we have to go back to the land to keep the Struggle alive. That kind of thing. And Bob has this very yin-yang thing going on, don’t you think? He’s strong, good with his hands, a builder. But he’s also sensitive, a teacher, and, unlike other guys, he isn’t turned off by the fact I have a kid. And he’s fine that I’m on Welfare. In fact, he wanted to know everything about it—what I had to do to qualify for it, how much it is, how often the checks come. I like how responsible he was. When I told him it was time for me to go, he went—without me even asking—and found you talking to the belly dancers. He scooped you up onto his shoulders and brought you to me before I was even finished washing out the paintbrushes. I think he’s a real man of action.”

  In his own way, Bob did turn out to be a man of action. He didn’t believe any good came from standing around talking about things. He believed in doing. When he ran out of grass to smoke, he’d sneak right into the nearest room in the commune and raid someone else’s stash. When he ran out of clean sheets and towels, he’d faux-hobble right into the nearest hospital and take some. When he ran out of gas, he’d saunter right over to the nearest unattended vehicle and siphon some by mouth through a hose into his red gas can.

  Once the Three Mile Island Memorial Parade was over, Bob came to visit my mother regularly. He’d pop his shiny head into the living room, say hello, and then sequester himself in the bedroom with Claudia for an hour or so before sneaking out the front door, silent and sweaty.

  After Claudia returned from Mexico in the summer of 1980, we picked up and moved across the Bay to the Frog House, where we shared Bob’s little ground-floor room. I slept on a foam pad on the floor, sandwiched between Bob’s clothing pile and the jumble of milk crates that served as shelves. The adults claimed the rickety wooden bed that Bob had designed and constructed. Claudia was deeply impressed by the ingenuity and workmanship. “Joshey, Bob built this bed… himself,” she said, running her hand admiringly along the CONTENTS MAY SHIFT stamp on the rough-hewn salvaged lumber. Our little room opened directly onto a heavily trafficked
communal living room. The evening discourse between the drunk and stoned housemates kept me awake at night. But this noise was often a welcome distraction from my mother’s unspeakably disturbing moans as she and Bob grappled in the bed above me.

  I was the only child in the Frog House, but I did my best to make friends with the adults, who weren’t very enthusiastic playmates. James, the emaciated musician, begrudgingly let me play his drum set in the basement, but no one appreciated the volume and arrhythmic cadence I beat out for them. Kevin, the smiley, long-haired white guy and his girlfriend, Cheri, the taciturn dreadlocked black woman, were so young I couldn’t tell whether they were adults or still children. My mother was stirred to her core by the bravery of their biracial love. I forced them to play Go Fish with me after dinner every day, but their alleged bedtime seemed to get earlier and earlier each night. The woman street artist who made the feather jewelry strictly forbade me from playing with her glue, and the tall skinny magician wouldn’t let me touch his magical silver rings. Everyone hated it when I eavesdropped on their conversations and then leapt out from behind the couch to ask questions like “What’s a ‘big boner’? ” The only Frog Houser who tolerated me was the perpetually drunk fifty-year-old biker guy who let me watch The Incredible Hulk with him on his little black-and-white TV. But his snoring was so loud I couldn’t concentrate on the show.

  The one thing the residents of Frog House did seem to appreciate about me was that my mother was paying half of Bob’s share of the rent, which was more than the $0.00 a month that Bob had been kicking in. Apparently this no-rent routine had been going on for some time. And it was wearing thin. Bob’s name was spoken like a swear word around the Frog House: “Bahb!” Or sometimes in combinations: “Fuckin’ Bahb!” or, upon discovery of something missing, “What the… Bahb!?” I took to saying his name this way under my breath when I dropped my banana on the floor or missed the toilet bowl. “Bahb!”