Sleeping Where I Fall: A Chronicle

by Peter Coyote

  Sweet William was desperate. He went backstage for the Stones, fearful that delaying their appearance would unleash a maelstrom. “They were tuning up,” Bill recalls. “Chatting. Their little band. I recognized Mick Jagger. I didn’t realize he was just a little fart. I told him, ‘You better get the fuck out there before the place blows beyond sanity. You’ve tuned up enough.’ ”

  Jagger told him that they were “preparing” and would go when they were good and ready. “I’m getting really pissed at this little fuck now,” Bill says. “I want to slap his face. I told him, ‘I’m tellin’ you, people are gonna die out there. Get out there! You been told.’ ”

  Bill returned to the stage and was standing there when Hunter’s murder took place, recorded for all to see in the Maysles brothers’ film Gimme Shelter. “All of a sudden there’s a scuffle off to my left,” Bill says. “I saw a flash, the gun going off, but it [the music] was so loud you couldn’t hear it.” Meredith Hunter was standing there with a pistol, stark naked, loaded out of his mind, when Allen Pizzaro made his move.

  Allen was a strange guy from San Jose. He had been a member of a club called the Gypsy Jokers that had been obliterated by the Angels. He had prospected as an Angel with the San Francisco chapter for eight months, but never owned a bike. On the night he was to be voted in, he answered an ad in the paper for a Harley Davidson, beat the owner senseless, and took the bike to his initiation. “He was a wild guy,” Bill says. “He’d do anything.” Not too many years later, his dead body was fished out of a reservoir, where he’d been dumped for some “anything.” This day, however, he was the star, center stage, on film.

  Allen grabbed Meredith’s arm. “He fired one shot with Allen holding him,” Bill says. “It’s what saved Allen from the death penalty.” Allen twisted the arm away, at the same time reaching back with his free hand and drawing his hunting knife from a belt scabbard. He swung Meredith around—“a classic street move,” Bill calls it—and stabbed him.

  The music stopped for a moment. A girl screamed, “a forlorn, wailing scream, like a rabbit dying,” Bill remembers. “You never forget it. Then they were passing his body over the crowd. It was bobbing and floating like a body going downstream in a riptide. It was like a Greek play. Everything was classical. The hunger of the people for somethin’ that didn’t exist. Why come on the stage? Why!?”

  In the ensuing melee, my friend Denise Kaufman, a local musician with the all-girl Ace of Cups band, was hit in the temple by a thrown bottle, fracturing bone and causing a severe concussion. Denise was eight and a half months pregnant at the time, and the Stones were approached for permission to use their helicopter to carry her to a hospital. They refused. Denise was ferried on a long grueling trip by car, after which, due to her advanced pregnancy, she was operated on without anesthetic. Both she and her daughter survived undamaged, but for those who know and love her, the same could not be said of the local reputation of the Rolling Stones.

  The Angels took the heat for Hunter’s murder in the press, but they felt betrayed by Cutler. Word circulated for a while that Cutler’s life was to be forfeited and he moved to Texas abruptly. The bizarre, appropriately show-business finish to events occurred a few days later when the Maysles brothers visited Paula McCoy’s house, where Bill happened to be staying at the time, to see what “piece” of Gimme Shelter the club wanted. They obviously had no idea of the organization’s mood when they described the film enthusiastically. “We knew the Angels were a draw,” one of the brothers said breathlessly, “but we didn’t know that we’d get lucky.” At that point, Angel Jerry Genly rose and kicked him square in the balls. “I think that was the end of the meeting,” Bill says, laughing.

  If you were forced to select an event that “ended” the optimistic promise of the Haight-Ashbury era, Altamont would be as good as any. After that, the party was definitely over, and what ensued, in the streets, in the Hell’s Angels, and across America, was harder, colder, and all business.

  Pete Knell used to say, “If you wanna know anything about America, look at the club. It’s a reflection of America on all levels: high idealism and murder.” The club was a cross section of blue-collar values and neuroses, and something murderous was afoot in both nations.

  Janis Joplin and Jimmy Hendrix were dead of overdoses. Hell’s Angels Terry the Tramp and Harry the Horse were murdered. Vietnam veterans were returning from the atrocities of jungle warfare, some with psyches ablaze with what they’d seen and had to do there to survive. A new element had risen to prominence in the club. A San Francisco homeboy, back from ’Nam crazy-dangerous, had opened a bike shop, prospected into the club, and climbed the ladder of power there with murderous ruthlessness. Little Bill, a physically sweet and beautiful club member, an amateur magician, got into a fracas in a Mission District bar one night. As he was leaving, three guys followed him to the street, bent him over his bike, and summarily executed him. The Angels retaliated by blowing away one of his killers in nearby Precita Park. Members stopped wearing their colors in the streets and affected jean jackets and hooded sweatshirts. Things got closer, tighter, more dangerous. “It was a cut-dog rotten bunch of shit” is all Sweet William will offer about that period. Murders became endemic. Expediency became the law.

  Sweet William was running around with a girl from Fresno and biked down there one day to sell some cocaine. Pete Knell warned him not to go alone, but Bill was fearless. He and the girl ended up at a house party organized to raise money for the African Student Movement. Bill must have felt bulletproof to enter the all-black party alone in full Angels’ colors, for the Angels were an unabashedly “white” organization that would not even allow black people who were personal friends of members to sit with them in public. He was led through a gauntlet of curious stares in the suddenly silent room and down to the cellar. He remembers a table and a drug scale and about a dozen men crowded together watching the count. After weighing out the cocaine, one of the black men said, “We’re taking you off, white boy.”

  “No, you’re not,” Bill answered, and the fight started. “I wrecked that fucking room,” Bill says, “fighting twelve niggers by myself. Then one of them reached over the top of the crowd that was piled on me and ‘boom,’ it was like a white flash. When I woke up I was in the Fresno County Hospital.”

  The “students” had shot him and left him for dead. Someone upstairs heard the ruckus and called the cops, and the cops discovered a pulse in Bill and called an ambulance. The bullet had entered his brain, ripping a path to a nest where it remains today. It was an expensive ticket for a trip of just a few inches: it paralyzed half his body.

  When I visited him in the hospital shortly afterward, he was a wraith. His hair had been shaved off. He was blue-white, his face as taut and translucent as the skin of a drum. He was suffering terrifying hallucinations and felt that he was on the verge of comprehending secret profundities that evaporated just before he could own them.

  He left the hospital a hero to the Angels, bought a three-wheeled motorcycle, and continued to party with them, but his life was shrouded in darkness. He moved in with Dee, a crazy, Faye Dunaway–lookalike witch from Georgia, and they grew so psychosexually drug entwined as to be indistinguishable. Bill began shooting heroin again, in direct contravention of Angel law.

  In late October of 1980, Bill crossed the path of Pussy Paul, who owed him money. Bill held him prisoner in his apartment all night, and when he released him the next day, Paul “dropped a dime” and turned Bill in to the cops. Several nights later, on Halloween, the cops broke into Bill’s place and beat him so badly that they fractured his hand and shoulder. The cops were just punctuating a lesson to Bill, but it makes you wonder what kind of men would kick in the door to pummel a cripple.

  He was recovering from these wounds when a fellow Angel, Flash, called to inform him that Moose had rolled over for the police and was testifying against the club. The Angels needed Bill at the trial to verify a piece of information for the defense.

&nb
sp; Bill refused to believe that Moose, an archetypal Angel, had rolled over. Everyone loved and admired Moose. He was fearless and roly-poly, with flaxen hair and a wispy blond mustache; when he arrived in his white Cadillac or on his white Harley with the red cross on the tank, it invariably signaled festive occasions. Moose was married at our Olema commune in a ceremony performed by poet Gregory Corso. My conversations with him had sometimes continued for days. He would often arrive at night and kidnap me with no warning. Once we left so quickly that I had no shoes, so he stopped at Tattoo Larry’s house and commandeered a fine pair of Chippewa work boots that I still use.

  Moose (real name Lorenzo) had been running an amphetamine laboratory, manufacturing white-crossed tablets from his home where his mother, his hillbilly Uncle Charlie, and Moose’s slightly retarded son lived. One story he circulated about his arrest was that the police had discovered his laboratory. Another was that the cops had learned his mother had soaked the stamps on letters she sent him in LSD. He said the cops had threatened to put his mom and Uncle Charlie away, so he rolled over and gave evidence against his brothers in more than a hundred cases.

  When Bill heard Moose say it with his own ears—“I rolled over in February”—he was shattered. “I couldn’t fuckin’ believe it!” he stammers. “It was like the blackness of the sky opened up and swallowed me. I wept for that. Really. I wept and thought, if that could happen to Moose, to Moose, there but for the grace of God . . .” As in all matters like these, only Moose knows what really happened. Those who had observed Moose’s lethal side, including myself, suspect that the police must have had a much heavier beef over his head than a simple dope bust—big-time heavier.

  I got a sense of the fear Moose could inspire some time later, about 1970. Our part of the Free Family was organizing a caravan, and I was forced to sell my bike to raise the funds to ready my truck. A couple of San Rafael bikers came out to Forest Knolls in Western Marin County to appraise it. They were tough rummies, but rummies. One fellow’s pistol fell out of his pocket when he squatted down to inspect my oil pan. It fell in the soft dirt of a flower bed and he didn’t notice it, so I retrieved it and stashed it in my pocket until the negotiations were over. I had been asking $1,200 for the bike, a fair price, but these guys were disparaging it as a prelude to bargaining. One of them walked over to me threateningly and then noticed my earrings with little fox toe bones dangling from them. Few people wore more than one in those days, and three in each ear were distinctive.

  He stopped short and asked, “Ain’t you that guy that runs around with Moose?” I nodded. The two looked at each other, something wordless passed between them, and they pulled out a wad of hundreds, peeling off twelve without another sound. We signed the papers, and I kicked the bike into life one last time. Just before the one fellow rode off, I handed him back his pistol. It was a nice moment, but orchestrated by Moose’s power, not mine.

  We are at the boardinghouse. Bill is sitting on the fetid bed in his undershirt. Tattoos on his chest of the Hell’s Angels’ winged skull and the Tibetan dorje thunderbolt on his chest have blurred with time. Under the Angels’ death’s-head are two words, too small to read, and next to them, slightly larger, “Out 8/23.” “Protocol,” Bill says, referring to his ouster from the club after fourteen years. I question him about it, and he looks away. “It was on me,” he says. “I was tied up with a woman with a bad reputation for drugs and shit. They told me to drop her and I said I did. But we were tied together economically and in some other crazy fucking ways and I didn’t. When they found out, they booted me out. I gave my word and broke it. It’s as simple as that.”

  Whatever life is, it isn’t simple. I look at him, grim and grizzled, surrounded by obscure mementos, one arm lying useless on his lap. He used to laugh often and easily, with a smile so luminous it felt like a reward. Now when I manage to slip through his defenses and catch him off guard with a funny memory or remark, his face lights up again, shedding its haggard mien, splitting into creases and an engaging, shiny-toothed, Cheshire-cat grin. All his old power resides in that smile, just below the surface. It is hoarded now, no longer spent exuberantly. We have both changed that way, have both learned that errors have costs and that nothing is replenished forever. There are limits. Bill’s are simply more obvious because he wears them on the surface of his body.

  I know deep in my heart that had the Angels not changed, Bill would never have broken his word to them. His action sounds to me like one of those things we do when we desire a certain result but are not prepared to take responsibility for it. The Angels took Bill’s voracious hunger for truth and manliness, his health and wholeness, and he offered them willingly to a vision of camaraderie and autonomy in which he wholeheartedly believed. When that vision soured, I believe it was too much to face, and drugs supplied the necessary anesthetic. On my lap lies a book of Bill’s poems, and I am rereading one I’d first read nearly twenty-five years ago when he was still hale and whole.

  THE IMAGE ROLE

  (Thinking of All My Digger Friends)

  Lookee where you put me up on an image of myself gaping in the

  yawn of your

  lazy afternoon.

  Lookee where you found me up on a pedestal

  drowning in the fog

  of your own blind eyes.

  Lookee here, I’m a hero now

  I got it made

  I even remember panty raids

  coolin’ it behind my Hollywood shades

  Yeah, I’m a jelly bean, sweet and mean

  I’m a hero, famous—a myth in my own time

  A father mother figure outta line

  A swingin’ singin’ holy man set afire

  The gun in my pocket ain’t for hire.

  I’ve got this image of myself pasted up on all the walls

  I’m a gypsy a tramp a healer and a vamp

  Everywhere I go people stop and stare

  I’m known everywhere.

  I was invented by MEDIA

  a name that’s pretty trippy

  Even my friends ain’t sure

  who they are anymore.

  They’ve all got a hundred

  million faces

  just like me.

  Whose brand name are you?

  Or do you see

  I’ve got this image built on solid air

  of no name and fame and tricky business games.

  But I’m going, the child is getting old

  and everything it ever was

  is all getting sold.

  The tumble is to! astonish! Oneself!

  13

  the red house

  Our family joined the general migration from the Haight that began in 1967, after the Summer of Love. We were concerned with creating a more durable economic base for ourselves. The practice of doing things “for free” was fine social theater, useful for highlighting values and relationships to commodities, wealth, and fame; appropriate, too, for many transactions, but not a practice that would support what was now a loose confederation of several hundred people. Furthermore, remaining in the Haight was preaching to the converted. We needed land bases from which to integrate ourselves into new communities, to expand our resources and our reach. Since we had no money, we substituted cooperation and energy and helped one another establish a series of camps that we hoped would evolve eventually into networks of support.

  A good deal of the time was spent visiting one another at these family houses: Willard Street, Carl Street, the Red House, Black Bear Ranch, Olema, Salmon River, the Bakery, Trinidad House, Garberville, Arcata, and Willits. By the time this chain of camps was established, we had begun to refer to ourselves as “the Free Family” as often as “the Diggers.” Our diaspora spread north out of San Francisco, and Highway 101 resembled the thread of a beaded necklace that connected us to family sites along its length.

  At every location people were perpetually busy repairing old trucks, locating food and goods to sustain themselves, and making deliveries to
more needy family members in remote locations. Large “runs” were required to gather supplies to enable thirty people to survive a hard winter in isolated communes like Black Bear. We spent weeks scrounging necessities: oil, flour, kerosene, matches, toilet paper, powdered milk, dried fruit and nuts; hustling money and goods; and scouring wrecking yards for parts to prepare our old trucks for the taxing journeys.

  The vehicles of choice were 1949 to 1954 Chevys and GMCs. Not only were they plentiful and the parts relatively interchangeable but the six-cylinder Chevy 235 engine was a paragon of reliability that could be fixed in the dark and tuned without sophisticated tools. Trucks heading north would meet trucks coming south, near Hopland, Healdsburg, or Clover-dale, and pull off the road for an impromptu picnic. Presents and gossip were exchanged, supplies traded, vehicles repaired, and parts swapped. Kids frolicked, impromptu jam sessions materialized, and camp was made and broken at the road’s edge, while the straight world streamed by, intent on being somewhere before sometime, regarding our rowdy assemblages with curiosity while we became increasingly comfortable in the timeless.

  One of the fundamentals of our early economy was the Free Bank. The Free Bank Book, a thick, hand-stitched blue Chinese notebook with lined pages, recorded group finances and personal transactions. Always an imperfect system, flawed by the comic vagaries of our contradictory relationships to money, the Free Bank lasted at least the first three years of the Diggers and served as an organizing principle for numerous debates about group economics and personal character.

  Obviously a Free Bank is an imaginative fiction, so our relationship to it was necessarily imaginative. Consequently, it was a perfect mirror of personal ethics and attitudes toward money. Some people made meticulously honest entries like “$49.50—flour, olive oil, kids’ shoes, canning jars, honey” (you could get a sixty-pound tin of honey for $9.00 in Weed, California), or “$2.10—fan belt.” Each entry would be signed by the person who took the money from the group cookie jar. Then there were others, like Emmett for instance, decidedly less meticulous. Emmett’s entries, day after day, read “$20.00—truck parts.” Everyone knew the money was going for heroin and no one would have countered his right to the money or his use of it. We were touched that he only took twenty dollars and hustled the rest of his needs elsewhere. He could have been honest about it, but perhaps the evasion was not directed toward us, but toward himself.