by Peter Coyote
The meager funds were allocated at group meetings where men and women struggled individually and collectively to win financing for competing interests. Since everyone knew everyone else’s business, it was difficult to bullshit, and decisions were made by perceived consensus.
Roles were generally divided along traditional male-female lines, with the women looking after the food, houses, and children and the men looking after the trucks and physical plant. The roles were chosen according to personal predilections, however, and there were women who worked on trucks and men who preferred the kitchens. Everyone helped with the children, but out of necessity, the Digger women, specifically Nina Blasenheim, Judy Goldhaft, Phyllis Wilner, Myeba, Siena Riffia (aka Natural Suzanne), Roselee, and Vicky Pollack, attended by a rotating “staff” of allies, perfected the art and sustained the effort necessary to glean surpluses from the various grocers at the Farmers’ Market. The Italians who controlled the market simply would not give free food to able-bodied men, and consequently the women became our conduit to this basic necessity, which afforded them power and high status in our community. Judgments about inequality and injustice, loafing, slacking, cheating, and stealing were usually vocalized at the moment, and no one braved the ridicule and scorn of Digger women for long without shaping up or shipping out.
The women’s movement was beginning to coalesce, and the new consciousness was forcing reconsideration of sexual patterns and stereotypes. Much of the women’s movement, as reported in the media, seemed (to this observer) more concerned with winning a share of the economic pie than with altering the status quo toward one in which women’s particular skills and genius would be appreciated, by creating alternative forms of work and social and personal relationships. We were so removed from the marketplace that our concerns were different. We had chosen this life and accepted its consequent hardships more or less good-naturedly. There was so much work to do and so little money with which to accomplish it that everyone was equally pressured to win the rewards of a free life. It was this sense of free will, and of being under equal duress, that protected our households from the internecine gender warfare emerging as women understood that their lot in life was an arbitrary social convention and not a preordained natural state.
Survival takes work everywhere, but it seemed more interesting than a “job” to spend half a day in a junkyard dismantling an old truck for parts, replacing something broken with something close to new, lovingly cleaned, repaired, and repainted. The investiture of time conferred value, and for this reason many of our trucks were perfectly running specimens, whimsically decorated and impeccably cared for. Who but a free person had the time to wire brush and lovingly retrofit each old part necessary to the reassembly of a vehicle? We were happy to live with society’s garbage because we had the time to recycle and reclaim it.
Each Free Family site had its own genesis, stories, and movable feast of characters. The folly of trying to unravel even a small part of our collective history is clear to me every time I make the attempt. Each house took on something of its own character and tone, attracting consonant people. Each house had its particular predilections and modalities of work and play. There were common denominators, however, so perhaps the best way to express the variety of communal life is through some specific examples, beginning with the Red House, in Forest Knolls, owned by brothers Ron and Jay Thelin, the founders of the Psychedelic Shop, and Ron’s wife Marsha.
Ron Thelin was a San Francisco native son. His father was the manager of the Haight-Ashbury Woolworth’s, directly across the street from what would become the site of his sons’ Psychedelic Shop.
In Ron’s senior year of high school, he met Marsha Allread, a perky, optimistic freshman with a wacky sense of humor. They were to be primarily together for the next thirty years.
Ron possessed the kind of archetypal American face Norman Rockwell might have drawn. He and his brother Jay won Bibles for attendance at church. They were white-bread, all-American boys in all but one critical degree, which is that they didn’t care fuck-all about material wealth.
Ron took his first acid trip in 1965, swallowing one of master LSD chemist Stanley “Bear” Owsley’s sugar cubes given to him by Allen Cohen, editor of The Oracle. Ron’s frame of reference for the event was spiritual—the literature of Aldous Huxley had placed psychedelic drugs in that context—and like most early voyagers he undertook these journeys with the highest of intentions. His experience was transformative, blissful, unifying, and instructive—and Ron wanted to spread the word.
In January of 1966, he and Jay took their five-hundred-dollar savings and leased a storefront at 1535 Haight Street. They covered the walls with burlap, assembled crafts from local artisans, and offered books by Richard Alpert, Timothy Leary, Joseph Campbell, Aldous Huxley, and the Wassons, the latter famous researchers of the mushroom, including psychotropic varieties. They were, to say the least, in the right place at the right time.
In the summer of 1966 Ron and Marsha were living with friends on Clayton Street when one of their roommates, John Detata, had a particularly bad day. He had just flunked out of San Francisco State and broken up with his girlfriend. He had a virulent case of poison oak and a broken arm in a sweaty, moldering cast. It was definitely not a day for him to take LSD, but he did and became the three hundredth person to leap to his death from the Golden Gate Bridge.
Marsha was frightened by John’s death and wanted to leave the city. Ron began to look for a new home and discovered the sleepy west Marin town of Forest Knolls. They located a large shambling red house on Resaca Street, the dream home of a retired ship captain, with several outbuildings. They bought it for $24,500, and Ron, Jay, Marsha, her brothers Gary and Artie Allread, her sisters Susie and Charlene, and Charlene’s daughter Holly moved in together.
It took forty-five minutes to drive from Forest Knolls to the store on Haight Street. Ron would fire up a joint, get high, and enjoy the drive, speculating about what miracle the day might hold.
It was about this time that Ron and I met. Walking on Haight Street one day I discovered the Psychedelic Shop. The walls were dotted with photos of local musicians posed in front of a wall of faux hieroglyphics, the shelves stacked with interesting books, and Ron seemed like a nice chap. I mentioned that I had a friend named Duane Benton who made arguably the world’s loveliest candles; I thought Ron might be interested in them. We chatted for a while, and our friendship began.
Ron met Peter Berg about the same time. Obsessed with seeking forms that might foster new social relationships, Berg challenged Thelin about the Psychedelic Shop. “Does this store express the [psychedelic] experience?” he demanded. Berg, as always, possessed the power to stimulate people to see things anew, and Ron had an epiphany, understanding instantly that “storeness” did not interest him.
On October 6, 1967, laws against LSD went into effect. On October 10, my birthday, a “Death of Hippie” event was held in the Panhandle of Golden Gate Park. Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company performed, and people brought bells, beads, bongs, and plenty of acid to commemorate the event. A procession marched down Haight Street carrying a black coffin with the words “Hippie, Son of Media” painted on the side; at the parade’s end the coffin was cremated.
Ron kept the store open all night and gave away every single thing in it. “Everything went,” Ron remembered later, laughing. “Even the stuff on consignment.”
Two weeks after closing the shop, Ron cashed in his life insurance, bought a white panel truck he christened the Free News, and took off with a gallon jug of wine and two friends to join the “Exorcism of the Pentagon” in Washington, D.C. This antiwar event would produce the indelible images of young women placing flowers in the muzzles of rifles held by equally young soldiers.
When Ron returned from Washington, things at home had deteriorated. Marsha had grown tired of his drinking and philandering and moved to a commune in Placitas, New Mexico. Ron stayed behind, consoling himself with the affectio
ns of Lynn Ferrer, an Oracle staffer. They created a baby together, later named Deva Star, but according to Ron, “everything had changed. It wasn’t there. It was over.” It, to Ron, was the promise of the Haight-Ashbury and its dominance as an influence in his life, and he foresaw the end even before the Summer of Love had begun.
Ron was living in the Red House, as the home in Forest Knolls was known, along with the members of the Sons of Champlin rock band, who had moved in after Marsha fled. Marsha returned one day with a new boyfriend, Richard Farner. She had come, she said, to sell the house, and she refused to leave. She moved into a room with Richard. Ron stayed in his room, drinking red wine all day and playing the piano for hours at a time. When the atmosphere in the house became too intense, Marsha moved to San Francisco for a while. Ron shuffled over to visit her one hangdog night, and something about his loneliness and dislocation must have touched her, because this was the night their son, Jasper Starfire, was conceived. They moved back to the Red House together, and poor Richard moved on.
Jasper was the glue that cemented their relationship, but their life together was not an easy ride for Marsha. Ron’s stubborn and quixotic sense of personal freedom was deeply ingrained, and they had barely returned to Forest Knolls when he became committed to the Diggers. Soon, Diggers were coming by at all hours to talk, play music, or crash in one of the many rooms or on a vacant couch. Meals might be for four or thirty, and there was no way to know in advance. Even after the Sons of Champlin moved out, the house was jammed to the rafters and extremely chaotic. No consensus about what “free” meant existed, and the Red House was transformed into an early laboratory seeking the answer. “You couldn’t go backward, and forward was where?” Ron told me later. “We had to learn how to do this.”
David Simpson and Jane Lapiner—Mime Troupe members now Diggers—moved into a Red House outbuilding that resembled the prow of a ship. Mime Troupers Kent Minault and Nina Blasenheim and their infant daughter Angeline (a new mother herself at this writing) lived in the Red House proper. Kent was tall and patrician, read the Bible in Greek for relaxation, and was dedicated to complex and daunting projects that often involved liberating tons of lumber from building sites. Chuck and Destiny Gould converted an old barbecue shed into a one-room apartment for themselves and Destiny’s daughter Gilian and their child-to-be Solange. Tom Sawyer, a quiet reader, managed to perch like a bat in a cranny somewhere. Gary and Sidney Allread, Marsha’s brother and sister-in-law, built a loft in the Sunshine Room. Roselee, once an NRA sharpshooter, moved in from the Willard Street house in the city. Digger, our eccentric and brilliantly inventive shade-tree mechanic, joined the entourage with his step van and tools. John Albion and his wife Inga migrated down from Black Bear Ranch, while Balew lived with Marsha’s other sister, Charlene. Mary Gannon, the bass player for the Ace of Cups, joined the party with her dewy-eyed lover, Joe Allegra, father-to-be of their baby. Judi Quick, ex of Barton Heyman and a former member of the Mime Troupe, staked a claim on a room with her paramour, Samurai Bob, a taciturn and sardonic ex-marine incarnated into a shamanic drummer who smoked dope continuously and dedicated his days to plotting the overthrow of all private property. Pragmatic and acid-tongued Joanna Bronson left her husband John (who subsequently became a practicing Muslim scholar), and she and her two children became a unit with Vincent Rinaldi, the dark, bearded, whimsical heir of Dionysus and Pan, a lovable source of music and mad antics.
I mention these people by name because most will appear in this narrative again, surfacing haphazardly as the tapestry of our relationships grows increasingly complex. Kent and Nina play a particularly important role, and after my father’s death, along with Samurai Bob, Joanna, and Vinnie, would become the core group of our final commune at my family homestead, Turkey Ridge Farm.
Babies were born in the Red House: Kira and Jasper Thelin, Mary Gannon’s daughter Thelina, and Danny Rifkin’s daughter Marina. The architecture of the house, as well as the large number of blood relations in Marsha’s family, promoted the social cohesion that was the hallmark of this particular Digger camp.
It soon became obvious that the credo of “do your own thing” did not work in an overloaded household. Too many conflicting impulses and intentions in too little space created havoc. Ron and Marsha did not want ownership of the property to be the criterion for their authority, but neither did they want their lives continually disrupted. Various experiments were tried and discarded, but what seemed to work most effectively and least oppressively was the recognition that in any situation, one person in the group was best suited for the leadership of that particular task. “Group intelligence” consisted of the ability to recognize and use individuals’ skills appropriately. A corollary of that insight was that you could not be attached to leadership. Consequently, twenty-five rotating leaders existed at the Red House.
There was one toilet. Setting aside the inconvenience to household members, there were neighbors, who eventually complained about the septic overload seeping down the street. In Marin County, the soil is primarily a nonabsorbent clay, and septic tanks do not leach very well. The ordure of thirty people had drenched the impermeable earth around the commune with enough unpleasantness that in response to complaints, the county placed a lien on the house until the problem was corrected. The Red House was forced to begin what would become a series of numerous and gargantuan public works projects, accomplished in typical Red House fashion.
A sympathetic neighbor donated five hundred dollars to buy a twenty-five-foot strip of land on the south side of the property to make room for additional leach lines. The Red House crew, wielding picks and shovels over many long, beer-swigging, pot-toking afternoons, dug a six-by-six-by-ten-foot-deep gray-water sump beside the house and filled it with discarded kitchen appliances, crank shafts, engine blocks, and domestic flotsam. The “gray water” from dishwashing, baths, and laundry collected here and was siphoned down a thirty-five-foot drop to drive three RAM pumps, which use the fall of the water from some height to power the pumps without electricity. They transported the more offensive effluent two hundred feet to the leach field created in the newly purchased twenty-five-foot strip. The construction of the leach field itself was the excuse for another extended party, and on that day, other family members joined the Red House and hand dug 140 feet (forty feet per legal bedroom) of ditches to bury the leach lines.
Jim Jurick, the county health inspector, a kind and patient man who is still a friend of the Thelin family, dutifully inspected each stage of construction. If he wondered why twenty or more people were always available to work on the project, he never asked, which allowed Ron and company to maintain the fiction that they were simply a single family repairing a single-family house . . . with a little help from their friends.
The total economy of the Red House was sustained by three welfare checks that arrived for the children of the “Big Moppers”—Marsha, Joanna (Bronson) Rinaldi, and Nina. This was a minimal amount of money to support thirty people. The Welfare Department would never have sanctioned a single-family home with so many inhabitants and, to protect taxpayer dollars, the department performed periodic inspections. Had inspectors applied the same diligence to fraudulent and wasteful military expenditures that they did to our living arrangements, the national deficit would not exist. These inspections prompted energetic responses. One family’s bedroom would become the Yoga Room for the day; another’s would become the Music Room, the Workshop, or the Barbecue. People extraneous to the legal definition of “single family” would disappear so that the welfare workers would always discover and dutifully scrutinize three indigent women, living a life filled with rustic but imaginative amenities. As soon as the bureaucrats’ car had disappeared down the hill, inhabitants of the dwelling spaces reappeared to reorganize their possessions and reclaim their homes.
The overriding concerns of these family houses were to learn how to live communally, to expand and deepen the sense of community, and to diminish our per-capita consumption of n
atural resources and energy. These were no easy tasks. Furthermore, American individualism made unanimity and collective cooperation difficult. We challenged ourselves to create systems in which each of us could maintain personal authenticity and still participate in a social unit. Though easy to express, such creations required constant discussion, checking, and rechecking.
The Red House did this more effectively than the more anarchic, end-of-the-world mob that assembled around me at the ranch in Olema. Perhaps because there were so many siblings under the same roof or perhaps because Ron and Marsha were such generous people, things at the Red House always seemed easier and less choleric—chaotic, certainly, and Dionysian at times but without the grudging resentments and flares of ill temper that seemed endemic at Olema. Yet even the best collective life can wear thin. Some people would use anyone’s toothbrush, and objecting to this might be regarded as bourgeois. Vinnie unilaterally removed the bathroom door at the Red House one day, asserting that “the fear of being observed” was a neurotic vanity to be banished.
Who will empty the garbage, clean the toilets, and do the dishes are mundane but vital questions. Ron noticed my lover Sam washing only the tops of the dishes and setting the dirty bottoms on the clean tops below them because she “didn’t want to be bothered.” Differences in personal aesthetics became sources of friction. If I prefer washing my face in a clean sink and someone else doesn’t, it is a difficult issue to resolve from an ideological position, and hours were often wasted in the vain attempt.
