Sleeping Where I Fall: A Chronicle

by Peter Coyote

  The tour ended with a bizarre personal event. After eighty-nine shows in ninety-one days, we finished, exhausted, on the East Coast. I took the cast to Turkey Ridge Farm, the site of my father’s cattle business in the Pocono Mountains, to recuperate.

  It was a glorious eastern autumn afternoon, one of those days when rainbows appear to have been dusted over the hills. The trees blazed in scarlets, russets, siennas, ochers, lime yellows, variegated oranges, and umbers, one outdoing another in the intensity of its annual good-bye. The occasional white-stemmed birch, bright yellow leaves resembling jets of burning propane, flared against this kaleidoscopic background like a marker beacon. The grass felt electrified, sizzling in the lush fields dotted with plump white cattle—the perfect day to unwind by dropping LSD.

  I wandered off to a favorite spot in the far corner of a field. Just behind the stone row separating the field from the shadowy woods, twenty paces into the forest, two Indian grave mounds rested on the leafy ground like hard-boiled egg halves on a tabletop. Each had a pair of pristine white birch trees growing from what I assumed was the head of the grave. As the LSD announced its presence in my system, I stretched out on one, gazing up into the trees. My attention shifted from the twittering leaves to the elastic spaces flexing and contracting between them. My awareness rose like a bubble and burst into those spaces. I lay on my back for an edgeless period of time, letting the wind-whipped leaves sweep my identity away. The tensions and anxieties of the road, no longer contained by a discrete self, evaporated. My mind became wordless, and the husk that had contained it opened wide as a blooming flower.

  At dusk, I walked back to the main house and settled on the front lawn to watch the sun go down. The perfume of the grass was overwhelming, and the earth beneath me, warm from the sun, was a comforting support. Bill Lyndon called to me from the doorway of the house. I was still under the effects of the acid, and his cry advanced toward me as if each sound was traveling on its own individual air current.

  “Pe-e-e-t-e-e-r. T-e-e-le-e-ph-ph-o-n-e.”

  I walked through the shadowy kitchen to the bedroom my dad used when he stayed there. I picked up the phone. The handset resembled a petrified embryo, and my father’s voice crackled out of its head: “Hiya, son.”

  I was not in good shape to speak to him. Things between us were generally edgy and complicated, punctuated by dangerous flares of temper as I grew older. My nervous system was too raw and vulnerable from the acid to deal with him at the moment, and I heard myself blurt out, “I’d rather be outside.” My censors were drugged; the words had leaped out of my mouth, cruel and clear.

  My father’s voice was a tiny vibration locked inside the heavy handset. He performed a little pirouette of self-pity. “Jeesus! Well! Sorry I called, son. I was just . . .”

  I tried to check this corrupt transaction before it gained momentum. I hadn’t intended to make him feel bad. In fact, I had been impeccably trained to protect his feelings, no matter how cruelly or inappropriately he behaved. I stammered, trying to erase the stain I’d made on the moment, and finally, confused by the effort, I confessed, “Listen, Dad, I can’t talk to you right now. I’ve taken LSD. I’m all right, but I just can’t talk.”

  He started to growl, literally, and the telephone swelled with his anger. He began chanting, “The drugs have Got! To! Stop! The drugs have Got To Stop! If you don’t stop them, I’ll stop them. And you know, I can be pretty fucking brutal when I have to be.”

  There it was again, the threat naked and inevitable as an extended talon. Normally, any solidity inside me would have buckled. Perhaps it was the acid, but for the first time now I heard quite clearly, within the armor of his rage, a disabling terror. With his defense transparent to me, I found the language to communicate with him.

  “Listen, Daddy, I’m okay. Really. I’m okay. I love you. I’ll call you back after this wears off, but I swear, I’m okay, I just can’t talk now.” Placated by this reassurance, his fear and anger subsided and he began to mumble, “Okay, okay, son. Take care of yourself, all right? Call me back, though. Okay?” He hung up. The rest of my day was glum, the edge definitely off my high.

  Sometime later, I returned to the room to lie down. I was straight now but still fragile, and just as I settled, the phone rang again.

  “Hello,” I said.

  It was my mother. “Your father’s dead.”

  My mouth dried and my pulse trebled. I had heard her clearly, but still I said, “What?!”

  “I said, ‘Your father’s dead,’ ” she repeated calmly, but her subtext was seething anger.

  “Oh, my God,” I said. “Is he really?”

  “He might as well be,” she said, indicating how grievously I had wounded him.

  This psychic terrain was familiar, secured by known landmarks, and now my anger flared. I felt safe enough with her to attack. “You’re protecting his life with mine again,” I said, and hung up. I was on fire, as incendiary as the trees outside. I was unhappy. I was normal.

  I returned to San Francisco with complicated feelings. Life on the road was fun, to be sure, but grueling. There was no way the troupe could be more pointed in its social critiques, yet it was about to be co-opted by the society it wanted to change. The problem seemed to lie with the very idea of theater itself.

  My commitment to pursue social change wholeheartedly demanded that I break through the fourth wall of the stage and live consistently with my beliefs, not just during performances. Something remarkable was in the air. “Revolution” and “change” were the dominant subtexts of everyday activity. Even sybaritic members of the counterculture who were not committed to social change measured their personal style and behavior by their distance from the standards of “straight” people.

  People were becoming tired of being relegated to watching and reading about the glittering elite who had all the fun and money. Being a “citizen” is a bit like being an audience member at a movie and watching the stars have sex with each other while you imagine yourself in their place. For the price of admission you can get so pumped full of brain candy that you forget you actually spend your days humping rubber at the Goodyear plant or bagging tampons down at the Safeway.

  This social arrangement appeared a meager deal to increasing numbers of people, and the soapboxes of the sixties offered plenty of competitive visions for rectifying it. Utopian communalism vied with anarchism, which competed with revolutionary communism, each clamoring for public attention, each proffering its own perspective as the most useful tool for understanding and changing the status quo. But common to all these philosophical can openers was the underlying assumption that radical change was necessary.

  From the Digger perspective (rapidly becoming my own), theater had been co-opted as another commodity, just as all the arts had become specialized as entertainment and/or decoration. Because audiences paid money at the door, they knew intuitively that what was presented onstage was part of a business and therefore not at all threatening to established values. If you did not like the message of a play, you were free to leave the event as unchanged as you would in leaving a store where you did not like the merchandise. I had come to feel that while an evening at the theater might be intellectually provocative, nothing about a theatrical event nested in the context of economic interchange could challenge the implicit forms and relationships of shop, shopkeeper, and consumer.

  From within, every culture appears as seamless as a dream. To Jívaro warriors, for example, head-hunting is a high social and religious duty, not the barbarity it appears to us. If you accept without question premises of profit and private property and if you pursue those ends, even in the best of faith, then eventually the cultural mall we call America will stand before you, the product of your cumulative actions. No one will know precisely how it was built or for what purpose, and like goldfish in a bowl, we will no longer be able to imagine living outside the aquarium.

  The Diggers believed that the antidote to such conditioning was personal authentici
ty: honoring one’s inner directives and dreams by living in accord with them, no matter the consequences. Theater is obviously an appropriate vehicle for experimenting with such ideas, but the discipline appeared more and more circumscribed by the dominant culture’s values. If theater had been co-opted and turned into another product in the cultural supermarket, weren’t all efforts inside the market fruitless? All your skill and ability were just more packaging, and you wound up as just another product, this one labeled “radical.” If we wanted to create a culture predicated on different premises, a counter-culture, we needed to escape the aquarium.

  The option of standing outside the dominant culture and creating an alternative to it seemed achievable at the time. Visions of limitless possibilities inspired the Diggers much as they inspired the early nuclear fission researchers, who imagined a world without electric meters. And as these visions unleashed potent imaginative forces that affected actual behavior, they became real.

  This line of inquiry evolved, for the Diggers, into the concept of “life acting.” Acting is the way that humans behave and communicate with one another. You know that I am angry because I “act” angry: my voice sharpens, my movements become violent, my eyes express a hostile intention. The ability to notice these changes in my body and behavior offers obvious survival advantages, and humans have highly evolved skills decoding such signals. We are all experts. However, if I pretend to be angry, you will perceive that pretense; it will appear different to you than real anger.

  Actors use this knowledge to reflect the life of the mind. When belief in a particular scripted moment fails us, we use our imaginations to manipulate our nervous systems so that we are not pretending but expressing actual feelings. Although stimulated by imagined events, these feelings are nonetheless real. The art of acting requires a consciousness of these procedures and the ability to choose or substitute one imaginative premise for another.

  The Diggers attracted actors (trained or not) who wanted to employ these skills in their everyday lives, constructing events outside the theater that were “free,” financially and structurally, so that they might exist outside of conventional expectations and defenses. A further refinement required conscious creation of a character, a persona for everyday life, who embodied one’s highest social and spiritual aspirations; we wanted to imagine our most authentic and admirable self and act him or her out every day. In this way, each of us might become his or her own hero, as well as an engine of social change.

  For me, this process of forming a new identity developed from an experience during college. At Grinnell, my friends Terry Bisson, George Wallace, Bennett Bean, and I sent away for peyote, a hallucinogenic cactus, from a mail order source in Texas. When the cactus arrived—thick, clotty, and deep green, tufted with cotton—we had no idea what to do with it, so we researched the subject in the library and found mention of a nearby peyote church among the local Powshiek Indians. We drove to the reservation in Tama, Iowa, and traded half our stash for instructions on how to prepare and ingest the cactus.

  Peyote tastes something like the green moss at the bottom of a pond must taste. Managing to chew and swallow seven or eight buds apiece was an achievement. Nothing happened for a long while. Disappointed, Bisson rose to leave. Then he turned to the group and said, “Hey, my hands are dizzy.” Everyone understood exactly what he meant and as if by magic we were all simultaneously transported into a realm where such things can be true. We went outside into a cold, dazzlingly starry night, stunned and shocked by the beauty of the world. We separated, wandering off to follow our own personal predilections. I felt as if I had been transformed into a small wolf and spent the greater part of the night dog-trotting effortlessly through the Iowa cornfields, following scents and colors, marveling at these newly heightened powers. At one point I stopped to look down and was amazed to see little dog tracks in the furrowed ground where my footprints should have been.

  This event haunted me for years, and was too palpable to dismiss as a hallucination. Around the time that I left the Mime Troupe in 1967, I met Jim Koller, a fine poet and editor of a respected poetry magazine called Coyote’s Journal. The logo of the journal was a Coyote footprint, and the first time I saw it I recognized it as the paw print I had seen frozen in the Iowa ground. I realized that the “small wolf” that had come alive inside me was actually a coyote. Not long afterwards, I met a Paiute-Shoshone shaman named Rolling Thunder with whom I became quite intimate. When I told him the story, he regarded me seriously and asked me what I was going to “do” about it. I had no idea what he meant or expected at the time, but during the turmoil of leaving the troupe and pondering my deepest intentions, I concluded that I had been offered an extraordinary gift and felt compelled to honor it. Without fully understanding why, or what it might mean to me, but needing to mark the occasion somehow, I began using Coyote as a last name. The change in identity itself would come somewhat later.

  The Diggers were fascinated by what life might be like if lived in a consistently improvisational manner, and we dedicated ourselves to awakening others to this possibility. What might it be like not to be “lonesome for a hero,” as Emmett Grogan used to say when describing “civilians” living by proxy, reveling in the achievements and adventures of others as a compensation for the meagerness of their own existence? This idea of life acting was a kind of mental nuclear fuel, and before it was diluted into the weak tea of lifestyle (which came to mean spend any way you choose), the concept galvanized our community. Our “life actor” par excellence was Grogan, whose response to political, social, and spiritual ferment was to create a unique and completely appropriate personality.

  7

  emmett: a life played for keeps

  One day in early 1966, before Jessie left for good and before the first tours with the Mime Troupe, a lithe, freckled man with flinty Irish features walked in to observe one of our rehearsals. He had an arresting gait with a chiseled face thrust aggressively forward, as if it were impatient with the body behind it. His eyes were a cool blue, his face a mask, suggesting abundant anger and determination. Emmett Grogan had come to audition.

  We struck up a conversation that carried us through the afternoon and a long walk back to our respective flats, which, it turned out, were on opposite corners of the same intersection of Fell and Steiner Streets. Emmett was a galvanizing storyteller and a new and immediate friend who subsequently changed my life in ways more profound than anyone I had met before.

  If all of us are life-actors to some degree, Emmett was determined to be a life star. He carried with him the absorption of a born performer. Men and women attended when he arrived, moving through a room with the detached concentration of a shark. He had developed a sense of drama in his bearing, his cupped cigarette, his smoky, hooded eyes, which declared him a man on the wrong side of the law, a man with a past, a man who would not be deterred.

  Emmett, born Eugene Grogan in Brooklyn, had been condemned to a life sentence at hard labor with his soul. He grew up in a culture whose values and goals were so sublimated to material ends as to be indivisible from them. As the son of a clerk who served wealthy clients, Emmett felt consigned to an obscure future, to viewing wealth and power from the wrong side of the counter. What do you do when your culture itself is the enemy? Eugene Grogan created Emmett. And he helped create the Diggers as the vehicle in which Emmett might star.

  The original Digger movement began in England in April of 1649. Oliver “Ironsides” Cromwell, executioner of King Charles I, was now the protector of the empire. Cromwell had participated in the great insurgency that established constitutional monarchy in Britain. For many of his followers, however, this was not enough, and Gerrard Winstanley, a London cloth merchant and dissenting Christian, published a pamphlet, Truth Lifting up Its Head Above the Scandals, which established what became the basic principles of anarchy: that power corrupts; private property and freedom are mutually exclusive; and only in a society without rulers can people be free to act according to th
eir consciences. His pamphlet The Law of Freedom in a Platform was dedicated to Cromwell.

  Winstanley declared that the English civil wars had been fought not only against the king but against the great propertied lords as well and that since Charles had been executed, land should be made available to the very poor. To that end, he led a group of his followers to St. George’s Hill, Surrey, to “dig” and cultivate the common land.

  Food prices had reached record heights in the 1640s, and the number of Diggers very quickly doubled, alarming the Commonwealth government and local landowners. The Diggers were attacked by angry mobs, their spades taken, their crops destroyed, and their houses and carts burned. They were harassed by various legal means as well, but they abjured the use of violence. Though Winstanley’s group was destroyed and he himself disappeared from political life except as a pamphleteer, the principles he espoused remained vital in English Protestant sects and became part of the basic tenets of the socialist tradition.

  The San Francisco Diggers originated in the conjunction of the visionary acuity of Billy Murcott, a reclusive childhood friend of Emmett’s, and Emmett’s own genius as an actor and his flair for public theater. Billy had intuited that people had internalized cultural premises about the sanctity of private property and capital so completely as to have become addicted to wealth and status; the enchantment ran so deep and the identity with job was so absolute as to have eradicated inner wildness and personal expression not condoned by society. A quiet, stooped, curly-headed man with a perennially wistful expression and the ability to be completely invisible in a gathering, Billy read voraciously and spent long hours by himself, driving a cab and thinking. (Eventually he became a diamond cutter. Who knew?)

  To be free, as Billy understood it, was the antidote to such addictions. For most people the word free means simply “without limits.” Harnessed to the term enterprise, however, it has become a global force, intimating limitless wealth; as such it is the dominant engine of U.S. culture. The belief that vanquishing personal and structural limits is not only possible but necessary to successful living is so integral to American ways of thinking that assertions to the contrary are regarded as heretical. In fact, personal freedom, as it is colloquially understood, has lots of limits: it limits aspirations (to adult adjustment, for instance), creates continual cultural and economic upheavals, forces relentless adjustment on an overstressed population, ignores biological and social principles of interdependence and reciprocity, violates the integrity of the family and community, exhausts biological niches, and has strip-mined common courtesy and civility from public life. Freedom within the relentless pressures of a market-driven society appeared impossible precisely because of its stultifying effects on the imagination in all realms but the material.