Knock Wood

by Bergen, Candice

  Ram Dass seemed quietly amused at the discomfort he caused in people; me especially. With his still, clear eyes like long, cool tunnels to a mind that had traveled places most men give their lives not to see, he watched the incipient hysteria in our faces, our thoughts racing like road runners, our eyes, blind with fear, flicking wildly round the room. Not seeing. Not hearing. Not being here now. And I know he knows; I am not here now. But everywhere else I can get my mind on; too frightened to stay put. Unable just to be myself for fear there’s no one there.

  He talked easily, with Robin’s urging, of everyday events in India. Minor miracles that had become, for him, ordinary happenings but that sounded to me like loaves and fishes. And I wondered at the worlds I was missing with my darting to and fro.

  When evening came and Ram Dass got up to leave, I was both sad and relieved to see him go. I picked up the clean-chewed stick of the Sugar Daddy from the ashtray and put it in my wallet, where it stayed for years in the hope that someday I could BEHERENOW.

  That night we drove north to Joan Baez’ house for dinner to discuss her Institute for the Study of Nonviolence; she wanted Robin to help her plan a fund-raiser and discuss protest strategy against the war.

  It was a cozy cottage in a peaceful valley: rolling hills and farmland, horses and white fences. She came to the door, her son, Gabriel, charging past—a beautiful woman, strong and sure and smiling, standing with slender brown bare feet on hardwood floors in a simple house filled with women, all of them busy.

  I liked her at once: her directness and clean intelligence, her courage and her humor. She was someone who had taken risks for what she believed in, put herself on the line, I thought, as she talked about her life with Dylan—feeding him with a spoon while he wrote because he forgot to eat or sleep, laughing and caring and seeming very much alive.

  In one weekend, I’d met Huey Newton, Baba Ram Dass and Joan Baez. Arriving back at Robin’s house from the airport, my mind was still on “spin cycle.”

  As we came in the door, we heard a low cackle and a rasping “Hiya.” Alone in the living room, draped, toga-like, in a sheet, one end flung across one shoulder, sat Abbie Hoffman—a casual Caesar who had conquered Chicago.

  He was not then underground but always on the run, a radical foster child in need of hideouts, handouts, and hugs. Who better to come to than Robin—whose house was always open to friends in need? In return, you got a jolt of energy, manic good cheer, a kind of crazed camaraderie that concealed the anger and tough intelligence. The Boston social worker who played court jester in the Revolution, and played it brilliantly.

  “Bergen has a date tonight that might interest you,” Robin was telling Abbie after we’d settled down to talk.

  Abbie peered through his pile of hair and flashed a crooked grin. “Oh yeah?”

  Robin chuckled, moving giraffe-like around the pool table, cracking off shots. “Yeah, she’s got a date with Henry. You know, Kissinger. The one with the war.”

  Abbie jumped up, stepping on his sheet, clutching at it, then tugging it from under his feet. His eyes were bright and beady, dancing with the fever of the hunt. “How’d you do it? Why didn’t you tell me? If you’d told me sooner, if I’d known ahead—we coulda’ organized somethin’. We coulda’ put acid in his Tab, anything. What an opportunity—-wasted. Shit. Can’t you move it?”

  I couldn’t. Nor did I want to be an accomplice to sending the Secretary of State on an acid trip. I didn’t much want to be going on this date at all, had in fact declined both a letter and a phone call inviting me to dinner. Though I was curious to meet Kissinger, it seemed a clear case of consorting with the enemy.

  But when I’d told Robin, he’d disagreed. “It’s too good to pass up, Bergen. When he calls again,” he said, smiling, “and he will, tell him you’ll go. Find out all you can about him. Confront him about the war. It’s an incredible chance to have some input.”

  Somehow, I didn’t think input, mine at least, was what he had in mind. But the next time he called, yes, I said, I’d like to have dinner.

  I went home to change, checking facts, preparing questions, nervous about my mission. Henry was late, and he telephoned, explaining that the Secret Service were having trouble finding Beverly Hills.

  When he finally arrived at the Aviary, loud music was coming from the poolside speakers of the house across the canyon. As I answered the doorbell, I could hear that the music was Dylan, at full volume, singing, “Something’s happening and you don’t know what it is, do you, Mister Jones?” In the darkness, I could just make out Robin and Abbie, stretched out on chaise longues, smiling and passing a joint.

  We drove off in the simple, unmarked Secret Service car, two simple Secret Service men sitting, like twin ramrods, in the front. They put Henry on the right back seat and locked the doors. I asked if they put him on that side so the guy in front could fling his body over Henry in case of attack. It seemed only practical. They smiled thinly and stared ahead. Kissinger had two ballpoint pens clipped to his jacket pocket and seemed at once a little uneasy and solidly self-assured.

  Dinner, given by old friends of my parents in honor of Kissinger’s return from his first trip to China with Nixon, was an intimate, elegant affair; Frank Sinatra was among the guests who listened, rapt, to the world of Henry’s Orient.

  The night belonged to Kissinger. Spinning stories, weaving tales of his trip, adroitly answering careful questions, he was clearly a man at home in his glory, confidently commanding center stage. Sinatra was the first to leave.

  I found myself wishing that Kissinger weren’t The Enemy. He was funny and charming and all too good—too agile, too articulate, too tough to trap.

  And I’m charged with “input.” Oh, fine. The perfect opponent. Let’s just define policy in Southeast Asia, Henry, here in the back of an unmarked car, while you take the actress back to her Aviary. How about Cambodia? Haiphong?

  He was predictably polite and patient, adept with this raving dove in the back seat—perhaps accustomed, by then, to these antiwar monologues making dents in his dates. He even gave me the sense of shared secrets—probably the same set he gave every antiwar actress—which, as soon as he dropped me at home, I ran back to tell the boys.

  Days passed quickly now and life had never seemed so full of force or promise. In a few intense weeks, Robin had become the main fix and focus of my life, almost to the exclusion of everything else—though I didn’t go down without a fight. But my resistance was no match for Robin, who rolled over it like a Panzer division, tackling me when I retreated into safe, silent corners, coming in after me like some encounter-group commando.

  In the face of my sullen silence, he would say, “Don’t shut me out, Bergen. I won’t let you do it. I’m going to keep coming in after you. The more you pull back. I’m not giving up on this.” His lion’s head loomed two inches from my face. “Talk to me. Talk to me now about what’s going on. Tell me what you’re feeling.”

  And through tightly clenched teeth, “I’m feeling claustrophobic, if you really want to know, that’s all. I’m feeling like you’re smothering me, sticking your head in my face and sucking up all the oxygen. I’m feeling like it would be good if you’d back off.”

  But it wasn’t in him to back off; he would confront me until my defenses crumbled and I was thrilled to give in. Never was anyone happier to surrender and have their “no’s” fall on deaf ears. This was what I had waited for: a man who wanted to take care of me; a man who wouldn’t take any lip.

  At his constant urging, I was at Robin’s much of the time now, burrowed in among his books: Perls, Maslow, Erikson, Reich, Jung, Ram Dass, Castaneda, Watts, Lilly, Gurdjieff, Mao, Newton, Marx, Hegel. Summer reading for the New Mystical Left. The bookcase bulged with volumes on behavior modification, LSD therapy, subjugation of jealousy and maps on open marriage. I guess with so many books on the shelf, I couldn’t see the writing on the wall.

  Robin was up early every morning, at six-thirty or seven, rattling the
papers impatiently, giving his morning editorials. Then he was off to run his empire, tucking a fresh hanky in his hip pocket, a childhood anachronism that floored me, hugging, kissing me goodbye as I, the Little Woman, trailed him to the garage to see him off. We talked three or four times a day as I scampered around town, busy now buying groceries and Osterizers, candles and flowers.

  And every evening at seven I waited impatiently, fluffing flowers, lighting candles, for the whine of his Porsche up the hill. I had the sauna ready and we’d take one together, have a quick swim, then read through whatever he brought home from the office and discuss the day. His day, mainly, since mine had become shirts and sheets, and I listened, rapt and awestruck, asking questions, making suggestions, sincerely excited by the life of this lanky man.

  “You’re the best, Bergen,” he would say, over and over. And if he said I was “the best,” that’s what I pretended to be. What I wanted was for Robin to love me best, for his past to dim and disappear in my dust. What I wanted, hello, Dad, was to be the Favorite.

  “I didn’t fall in love with you because you were a cook, Bergen,” he said one night, sawing at a steak as I sat, slumped in exhaustion from the effort. “I’m happy to eat out every night. If we want to eat home, Maya can do it.” He tapped idly at the glazed carrots. It was a disguised but desperate plea.

  Maya was our housekeeper. A strong, strapping young thing, sweet and soft-spoken, with long blond hair and Virgo Rising. A Viking flower child who sprinkled alfalfa sprouts like fairy dust and baked cookies called “granola bombs,” tiny, rugged, rocklike things that weighed in like quasars.

  She did not stop at good vibes and karmic health, but went on to saving lives and property. One weekend we came home and couldn’t find Maya anywhere. Going into the backyard, I looked up and saw her, eyes closed, sitting in a half-lotus high on the hill above the house. When I called to her, she opened her eyes, rose quietly and slowly clambered down.

  “I had a vision last night that there would be an earthquake today and that the pool would slide down the hill. So I’ve been up here all day meditating to deflect the quake and I think now the danger is passed,” she said, smiling serenely. Maya wanted to write screenplays.

  It was a new life I was leading now: new worlds, new feelings, conversations late into the night with friends who would come over to sit around the long table in the big brick kitchen: sometimes Dennis Hopper, in from Taos, director Terry Malick, Esquire film critic Jake Brackman, Robin’s tiny Gestalt therapist, and any radicals or political outlaws who happened to be passing through.

  Robin’s friends were people who followed the Spiritual Path, exposed their feelings, showed love, and lived in the Now. People who connected with other people who were open. Instead of closed. Like me—basically of the closed variety—congenitally terrified, but not without promise or potential to be loving and open. At least, that’s what Robin and his friends felt. Somewhere inside me was a soul, frightened but full of feeling, longing to get out. And they tried, God, how they tried, to make me feel loved, to make me feel safe. Jewish welfare with WASPS. I was a tough nut to crack.

  We traveled along the Spiritual Path in the Porsche most times, plowing along the Coast Highway to Big Sur to stay in friends’ houses that hung high on the edge of cliffs where the fog would roll in, thick and pale and all around us, suddenly receding to reveal the sun and the surf below.

  The “consciousness movement” was beginning to find its commercial footing then and there was a veritable smorgasbord of enlightenment techniques. Suspicious soul though I was, it was I, nonetheless, who had the first in a series of Rolfing sessions, stripping down in front of a sad-eyed poet with hands like meathooks who came recommended as “the Rolfer’s Rolfer.”

  While I stood, nude and bemused, he took Polaroids of me before the session to compare my posture with Polaroids to be taken at the end, describing the dramatic difference I would see in the before-and-after snapshots.

  In the first introductory Rolf, he began to break down the fascia connecting the muscles that held a lifetime of emotional and physical trauma. This he did by kneading his knuckles between my ribs, along the muscles of my thighs and into the soles of my feet. He did it sympathetically but with incredible pressure and force, transporting me to new frontiers of pain—much like a compassionate Inquisitor extracting a blanket confession of guilt.

  I carried enough around with me at all times that I would have confessed to anything: Yes, yes, I did it—just leave my fascia alone.

  “Don’t resist the pain,” he said softly as I shrieked. “Try to go through the pain—out to the other side.”

  “Out to the other side!” I screamed, fingernails shredding the tatami, clawing my way to the door.

  At the end of the session, I was grateful to be alive; he helped me to my feet and took another series of Polaroids. As I dressed, he showed them to me: the difference was not only undramatic but almost indiscernible. Still, I felt proud, buoyant, energized, and I ran outside to find Robin, who had been jealously pacing back and forth because a strange man was inside kneading my fascia.

  In the evenings we’d light up, watch the sun set, the moon rise, and roll down the mountain to Nepenthe for dinner and Esalen for hot baths. Nights are cold in Big Sur and Esalen doesn’t call them hot baths for nothing. They sat, steaming, by candlelight on the face of a cliff shot straight out of the sea, filled with quiet people smoking joints and watching the moon on the water.

  They are not watching me; I am virtually certain of this. Yet getting undressed in the soft shadows, and the simple act of walking past them to join friends in the farthest tub is almost more than I can manage. Dropping dignity, along with my clothes, I skitter past the tubs of silent, slumped bathers and hurl myself into the water for cover, gasping and close to losing consciousness in the overpowering heat.

  “How-to” baths, “how-to” books, “how-to” encounter groups—that was all some people seemed to do. How-to homework. Every now and then I’d grow querulous: Whatever happened to just having fun? An old-fashioned, unconscious good time?

  And yet, in spite of myself, I, too, was growing, beginning for the first time to really relax, to discover a sense of my own femininity, my own womanliness. Robin was relentless in his hammering at me to see myself, accept myself, like myself. Talking about “body image,” about “coming to terms with how you look.” In fact, while I’d always fought furiously to keep it, I was thrilled to see each successive piece of armor fall off.

  One morning on a mountain in Big Sur, friends gathered to take a new drug, just out on the market, called MDA. Travel junkie that I was, I had taken LSD before. Having heard tales of incredible kingdoms, of talking animals and paisley-covered trees, I was curious to see them, though cautious about what it might cost. I felt like Columbus in the New World, discovering uncharted continents—a world where the ordinary became astounding. Low plaster ceilings soared like jeweled Byzantine domes over visions of people gliding softly in robes of silver thread, bishops in gold miters, women in glowing Renaissance dress. But there was a Dark Continent as well, where olive trees grabbed at me like live Van Goghs, blue jays loomed like pterodactyls. Once I saw it, I stayed home. I had seen visions enough.

  But this drug, while of psychedelic family, Harvard-born and bred, was not a hallucinogen. The characteristics of the drug, it was explained by those who knew it best, were not flashy, violent, fantastic hallucinations of many colors. This trip was quiet, slow, almost episodic, and the main properties of the drug were introspection and deep, loving feelings. The key feeling it produced, people said, was one of total openness.

  I was game but scared that morning. I hardly knew these other people. I didn’t know this drug at all. And it was cold outside, with a wet, white fog wrapped around the house. Everyone knew you did drugs in the sunshine, not in the fog. We all sat by the fire in the living room. There was a couple from Big Sur and two writers from New York. We talked quietly and then someone handed the capsu
les around and passed a glass of water.

  I waited nervously, once again, for the drug to come on, for the thin snake of energy to slither up my spine and lodge in my jaw as I tried, with yawning motions, to relax it, dispel the tension that settled there, disperse the energy. This was a drug of enlightenment, not special effects, and I worried about what the experience would be.

  “Do you want to take your armor off now, Bergen?” Robin asked.

  “My what?”

  “You know, your big gold loops and that ’Bugs’ sweater—you don’t need all that.”

  I looked around the circle. Everyone but me looked soft, vulnerable. Soft dresses, soft shirts, soft hair and faces. And I had these flashing gold hoops and a knitted nickname. My armor, I thought, smiling, crying a little, quickly taking off my earrings and sweater. And thinking back to my man-tailored hacking jackets with shirt and tie. My armor. My tricky house with all the trimmings. My armor. My cool composure, caustic one-liners, aloof independence. My armor. Jesus, it was everywhere. In everything I said and did. And tears were streaming down my cheeks and I was laughing. And Robin was crying and laughing too.

  The drug, it seemed, was on its way.

  We stayed sitting, talking, crying happily. Years of feeling spilling silently, steadily down my face. And one of the girls took my hand and smiled and held it softly. I said how small and fragile hers felt, how delicate and tiny.

  “Haven’t you ever held a woman’s hand before, Candy?”

  “Well, no, not really.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t really have many close women friends. And women don’t, I mean, women aren’t supposed to hold hands, are they?”

  “Sure they are.”

  “Oh, they are? Well, I guess I thought it always looked … I always felt uncomfortable. Anyway, I never did.”