by Peter Coyote
The Mime Troupe was passionately and collectively political; it was here that I first learned to extrapolate social phenomena, such as poverty, foreign policy, and racism, from their political and economic causes. The troupe’s bias was decidedly leftist and anarchic, yet while conservatives might have assumed that we were Communists (or worse) because of our social critiques, the truth was that no party line could have survived the company’s ideological mongrelism. Our politics sprang from a passionate dedication to principles that our nation expounded at home and abroad. It was the troupe’s expectation that America should live up to her promises and play by her stated rules—and we intended to provoke her until she did.
The intellectual brouhaha was exciting. The diverse demographics of troupe members, perhaps twenty people at the core of a larger, loose community, included dockworkers, college students, socialist organizers, market analysts, musicians, opera singers, vegetarians, drug addicts, ballet dancers, criminals, and bona fide eccentrics. (I am reminded here of Stewart Brand’s apt adage about outlaw communities simultaneously attracting the best and worst of people.) In his introduction to Ronnie’s book, The San Francisco Mime Troupe, journalist Robert Scheer offers an accurate picture of what the troupe felt like in those days:
It would be difficult to exaggerate the staggering number of hours that went into the ideas and form of new plays. Outsiders were brought in to give talks, reading lists appeared, and endless committees functioned or malfunctioned. To be sure there were wine and spaghetti feeds and the best parties in town and numerous romantic affairs and occasional bouts with drugs and nature. There were also obviously periods of laziness, incompetence, trucks crashed, scripts lost, tempers thrown. In a certain way Mime Troupers, Davis included, didn’t take themselves too seriously—they were (and still are) a ribald and genuinely nonpretentious group. You would want to go to a Mime Troupe party. They were just a lot more fun to be with than most other groups, given to impromptu bands, general spontaneity, and a more diverse and interesting bunch of characters than one expected around the Left.
At the same time, this ragtag beggars’ army . . . was more responsible and less high-handed in its political commitment than any group which I encountered around the Bay Area’s new Left. I think it was an awareness of this that caused the normally fratricidal Left to be united in its appreciation of the Mime Troupe.
In June of 1966, Jessie and Anthony left to spend the summer at her family’s compound on Martha’s Vineyard, and I let Karl Rosenberg, a Mime Troupe friend, move into our apartment. His wife, Judy Goldhaft, also a Mime Troupe member, had left him when she fell in love with the troupe’s preeminent (after Ronnie) writer-director, Peter Berg. Peter was then, as he is today, a penetrating thinker, hypnotically articulate and animated by a moral outrage expressed in rapid-fire, highly associative dialogue and mad humor of the low-German, slapstick variety. Mercurial, charming, coercive, subliminally menacing, and intellectually uncompromising, he frightened people who did not know him well. For anyone who did, it was easy to understand why Judy fell in love with him.
Judy’s husband Karl was Berg’s opposite: a wiry visual artist whose habitual costume consisted of a painter’s white coveralls and a floppy white cap jammed over his unruly black hair. He was quietly ambitious, politically uninvolved, and drawn to complicated and daunting physical tasks. When I first met him, he was painting large canvases of Judy—sensuous nudes that accentuated her dreamy demeanor and lissome dancer’s body. If you knew nothing else about their relationship, you could discern from these paintings that Judy’s departure was a serious loss to Karl.
Judy, like me, was a refugee from a privileged background, determined to fulfill her own vision of an authentic life. A skilled dancer and actress, she moved beautifully; beneath her cultured voice and ethereal demeanor lay a steely dedication to principle. She was as avowedly political as Karl was not, and with no fault or blame, their roads simply forked.
She, Karl, and their son Aaron had been living in a shabby little red-and-white-trimmed cabin in the stratospheric heights of San Francisco’s Mars or Saturn streets (I forget which). When Karl moved out, Peter moved in. Meanwhile, personal affairs in my life, as in theirs, were being dramatically realigned.
While Jessie summered in Martha’s Vineyard with her family, she took LSD for the first time. Her guide for this trip was Mel Lyman, a harmonica-playing astrologer and guru to a community of souls centered in and referred to by the name of their locale at Fort Hill, near Boston. They were a high-powered, energetic group, continually building and rebuilding their communal houses to last for eternity. The community published a locally famous counterculture newspaper, The Avatar, and generated wildly bipolar feelings in outsiders. Bruce Chatwin gives a bleak and unflattering portrait of them in his book What Am I Doing Here, but other than losing my lover to them and their playing a few mind games when I visited years later, no members ever harmed me. Furthermore, over the years they have maintained their communal family integrity and are now respected as master builders and artisans. They have constructed homes for such luminaries as David Geffen and Steven Spielberg, and their cohesiveness and fidelity to their original intention are, in my opinion, to be regarded as a triumph.
Jessie had a bad trip. Mel spent the night cleaning up her vomit and witnessing her fear and confusion, and she fell in love with him. She called me not long afterward and told me that she’d found “God” and was moving in with him. She asked me to send her stuff.
“Do you mind?” she asked.
“What’s to do?” I replied realistically (and somewhat dysfunctionally).
“It wouldn’t have worked, you know,” she explained.
“If you say so, I guess not.”
“Are you sad?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, “but you know it wouldn’t have worked.”
What I could not explain to Jessie or even myself at the moment was that what hurt, as much as my insufficiency to her, was the death of my illusion of maturity. I had made a mental pet of the idea that I was embodying the vital life of an artist, with a richly creative, beautiful woman at my side; I had assumed that our united talents would attract the best that the world had to offer. Her decision that the best lay elsewhere had relegated me, in my own mind, to the mediocre.
I packed up her possessions: the wonderful Thomas Hart Benton paintings and sketches in gilded frames; the clothes that had trapped the smells of Vineyard nights; the assorted ceramic containers for hairpins, single earrings, and bangles—all the detritus of a dead relationship. Looking at a suitcase of Anthony’s forlorn toys was so heartbreaking that I vowed never to have a child with someone unless I lived with her for the rest of my life. (A vow twice broken, I’m pained to acknowledge.) It was a melancholy task, emptying drawers, folding socks like bandages for the wounded, listening to bare wire hangers susurrating in closets vacuumed of all trace of my family.
Karl helped me construct large wooden crates in which to ship Jessie’s things back East, and he and I settled down to bachelor austerities in the sunny, cheerless rooms.
I opened the door to the apartment one afternoon a week later and stopped short in bewilderment. A black plastic toy train about three feet long was fixed to one yellow wall, midway between the floor and the ceiling. An open black umbrella was hanging upside down in the upper right corner where two walls and the ceiling created a pyramid-shaped join. One of Karl’s large paintings of Judy with black Hebrew letters was mounted on the opposite wall.
I had two simultaneous experiences of the room. If I thought about what I was looking at, it was surreal and unsettling, but if I took it in without judgment, the forms were beautiful. Karl’s black objects commanded the eye to hop from shape to shape, transferring loyalties in a restless dance. Only a short time earlier, ornate antique frames had lined the walls, dividing the “art” of Thomas Benton’s paintings quite clearly from the “non-art”—the rest of the environment. Karl�
�s assemblage destroyed those easy distinctions and turned the apartment itself into the frame. We were in the art! This was more than redecoration or a change of style. It was an alteration of perception that would inform the rest of my life in some manner—my first (non-drug) experience in crossing this perceptual threshold. In fact, this dissolution of the boundaries between art and life would become the dominant subtext of the next fifteen years for me. At the time, however, my appreciation of Karl’s sensibilities masked the radical transition I was making: from the assumed stability and order of my family’s reality, with its comforting assurances of a predictable future, into the playful possibilities of existing spontaneously in the perpetual present. It was not that the black umbrella and toy train set against a yellow wall signified something profound in themselves; rather, like poet William Carlos Williams’s “red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens,” they precipitated a profound realignment of my sensibilities.
To contrast these Weltanschauungs even more graphically, I think it might be useful if I pull a loop here from the weave of this narrative and focus on my family, its values, and my parents’ expectations for my future. They were unconventional, certainly, and to many of my childhood friends appeared colorful and exotic. Compared to the world I was entering, however, my past seemed to me then to be, in the words of Sheldon Zitner, my most influential college professor, “well rounded and half an inch in diameter.”
3
home is hard
When I joined the Mime Troupe, it was not altogether clear to me that I had taken a fork in the road. I had grown up in a political family. During the McCarthy years, my mother’s cousin was forced out of the New York City school system for refusing to answer whether he was or ever had been a Communist. My father, a successful investment banker and underwriter, was friendly with Paul Swayze and Leo Huberman, founders of the socialist Monthly Review. My mother was active in the National Urban League, working for civil rights in the forties and fifties; she took me to hear Martin Luther King Jr. speak at the Englewood Library long before he became a national figure. Our house buzzed with intellectual challenge and a wide range of accents and dialects. Yet the household also embodied the liberal dichotomy between thought and action that remained invisible to me until I joined the Mime Troupe.
My father, Morris Cohon, was a complicated, driven man. He had attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology when he was fifteen, gaining admission through his uncanny facility with numbers; he could perform mental computations faster than I can type them into a calculator today. This talent, coupled with boundless curiosity, natural shrewdness, and prodigious, perhaps compulsive work, had produced some real wealth: thriving cattle ranches, a brokerage house on Wall Street, the presidency of the Hudson-Manhattan Railroad, and the chairmanship of an oil company called Phoenix-Campbell. If he bothered to know anything about a subject, he knew everything about it. He pursued knowledge much as Lenin pursued languages. (Lenin would “break the back,” as he put it, of a new language by memorizing all the words in the dictionary.)
My father had a broad flat face with high cheekbones and Mongolian folds over his eyes. In fact, according to his mother, he was genetically Mongolian, having been born in Mt. Morris Park, New York, with jet black hair and the typical small blue birthmark on his back common to the Mongolian race. His father, Benjamin “Jack,” was an Uzbek or Kazakh. A carnival strongman in his youth, he had developed extraordinary muscles in his back cranking the wheels that powered looms in a weaving mill. As intelligent as he was strong, he invented a gasoline-powered machine gun that did not require brass or gunpowder, and later invented numerous manufacturing techniques to save money and expedite production in a lamp company he created. He was also a fine classical painter who won the Sudan medal for his draftsmanship, who emigrated to America in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Family legend recounts his courtship of my grandmother when she was fourteen. She had five brothers who planned to kill him for what they considered his inappropriate attentions (he was twenty-seven then), but their father, an amateur painter, was so impressed by Jack’s talent that he held his sons at bay. On his deathbed the next year, the father agreed to the marriage, and my father was born when my grandmother, Rose, was sixteen.
Jack lived for a while in Greenwich Village as a protégé of American artist Jacques Lipchitz; after they quarreled, he went to work as a sign painter for the United Cigar stores. He worked his way up to vice president and invested shrewdly in real estate, making a fortune, only to lose it in one day during the stock-market crash of 1929. He walked into the house that afternoon, took a shot of Scotch, walked out again, and took a job as a cab driver. In his fifties he founded several lamp factories in Paterson, New Jersey, fighting union organizers toe-to-toe with baseball bats. One of those factories still supports my uncle’s side of the family.
Contrasts of art and commerce, collective ideals and personal needs, were only a few of the contradictions merged in my family history. There were other rivers and confluences, some dark and quite dangerous. My father inherited a murderous temper from his father Jack, who once punished his horse for biting him by smashing its forehead with a hammer—killing it. He nearly killed his own son as well. One day, Jack stepped on a rake while doing yard work and smacked himself in the face with the handle. My father, just six at the time, laughed at the slapstick of it, and Jack exploded with rage, chasing him into the house and up two flights of stairs. Morris, fleeing for his life, ran into the attic and slammed the door behind him. Unfortunately, he slammed the door on his father’s fingers. When Rose arrived, drawn by the tumult, she discovered the door staved in and her husband stuffing his son through a small round window just beneath the peak of the roof, three stories above the ground. She knocked Jack unconscious with a heavy brass lamp, undoubtedly saving her child’s life. When I heard this story as a little boy, what terrified me even more than my identification with my young father was that my grandmother chuckled bemusedly when she recounted it.
Normally, my own father’s violence was channeled toward more constructive goals. He was an Olympic-class collegiate wrestler whose competitive hopes were shattered when an opponent snapped his leg during a qualifying match. He loved boxing as well and, in college, worked as a sparring partner for Philadelphia Jack O’Brian. He frequented gymnasiums all his life and enjoyed the rough company of fighters and trainers and the one-on-one competition of handball and wrestling.
Among his friends, Morris was famous for his rages. My mother Ruth tells the story of a drunk who brandished a longshoreman’s hook at her on the subway while she was pregnant with me. Morris beat the man so badly that the engineer was forced to stop the train midtunnel and organize passengers to pull him off in order to save the man’s life.
If Morris’s temper bothered other people, it seemed to give him minimal trouble. His eyes twinkled, his shoulders hunched up, and he dropped into a boxer’s crouch when he described a good fight. The memory of a well-thrown punch would make him cackle with pleasure, and he’d often say, “I hit him and his face broke open like a melon.” Though he was a great reader and lover of literature, he dismissed Hemingway as a phony because he had fought him at Bothner’s Gym one day and found him wanting. As a son who would rather read than hurt people, such stories were disturbing. I was proud of my father’s power and fearlessness, but I couldn’t understand his delight in inflicting pain. And of course I couldn’t help but ponder my own fate if I should anger him.
Childhood with him was peppered with unsettling events. If someone cut his car off in traffic, there was no rest until the offender had been driven off the road. One day, on our way to Long Island to watch the Russian Olympic Wrestling Team (which Morris had helped sponsor on a visit to America), some hapless soul cut him off with the predictable result. But this time, having forced the other man off the highway, Dad got out of the car. The other driver, anticipating what was in store, rolled up his windows and locked his doors. Morri
s bellowed at him, “Get out of the fucking car!” When the man refused, Dad took out his wallet and began laying bills on the fender, accenting each deposit with “I’ll give you fifty dollars to get out of the car. I’ll give you a hundred!” This was so irrational that finally the other driver shrieked through the glass, “Why do you want to pay me to get out of my car?” Morris responded candidly, “So I can tear your fucking head off your body.”
This pugnaciousness did not diminish with age. One summer when I was about twenty and working as a bartender in Martha’s Vineyard, I was visiting my mother one afternoon when we received a call from Morris urgently instructing me to get Sidney Kramer, his lifelong friend and lawyer, and “plenty of cash.” He was under arrest at La Guardia Airport. He had been waiting on line to purchase tickets for the shuttle flight to the Vineyard when the clerk closed the ticket window. Dad complained and somebody behind him in line told him to shut up, calling him “an old Jew bastard” in the process. It was an extremely unfortunate thing for that man to do.
Morris, who was then over fifty, beat the man and his friend (both in their late twenties) so badly that they sued him for assault. For his court appearance, Morris craftily chose a baggy coat and oversized hat that rested on his ears, diminishing his menace considerably. The victims, both in plaster body casts, towered on either side of him. The judge laughed at the disparity in size and age and threw the case out of court. What did he know?
Morris was a Jew and proud of it. In the thirties, he and Jewish friends wielding baseball bats broke up Nazi Bund meetings. His barrel-shaped body was propelled by thin, springy legs and powered by a will that would tolerate no resistance or perceived insult to his dignity. He once obliterated a multimillion-dollar underwriting deal at the signing ceremony, scattering photographers and dignitaries by leaping across the table to throttle his prospective partner for a casually anti-Semitic remark.
