Sleeping Where I Fall: A Chronicle

by Peter Coyote

  J. P. had also colonized half of an old shed beside the kitchen. Bryden had claimed the other half. Bryden was working on a large painting of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, a vivid and arresting canvas featuring four skeletons riding white horses and enjoying the hell out of themselves. Bryden’s model was a human skull with a candle on the dome of its head, resting at eye level on a stepladder. Since Bryden’s drug of choice was heroin, he would nod off occasionally, then glide back into the present moment with a little bob, and paint a bit more.

  It might have been cozy except that Bryden and J. P. loathed each other. Bryden considered J. P. a noisy speed-freak dwarf and accused him of stealing (conveniently forgetting that Bryden himself had swindled some irate teenagers out of marijuana money, leaving them to await his nonexistent return in my house while I was on tour, which resulted in the theft of my guitar and guns). He would later gut my daughter’s piggybank and leave an IOU.

  J. P. thought Bryden was a “junkie fuck” (if I remember the exact phrase), and the misunderstandings between them eroded their mutual civility until they painted a white line down the center of the shed, and each commanded the other to stay on his respective side. One morning, carrying my first coffee of the day out of the kitchen door and into the anemic morning light, I observed J. P. tiptoeing around the corner of the shed, alert as a weasel, pistol in hand. He slipped stealthily along the wall and around the corner, nodding a greeting at me. No sooner had he disappeared than Bryden showed up, similarly armed, stalking J. P. It was a Keystone Kops routine with dangerous potential. Being a skillful leader, I intercepted the pending catastrophe by inserting myself between them, screaming “stupid motherfucking dirt-bag assholes” at the top of my terrified lungs and demanding their weapons, which, amazingly, they delivered.

  Like it or not, I was considered a leader at Olema, or at least impartial enough to be called on to arbitrate disputes. I was painfully aware that I had little vision or wisdom to offer my “followers” and was, in fact, the victim of a dynamic I had unconsciously allowed to develop. As the “leader” I had permission to define the game, set the vocabulary, pontificate about it, and inspire others with fervid visions of what we were accomplishing collectively. “Followers,” at least those who paid any attention to me at all, were more than willing to pitch in and bring these compelling visions to glorious fruition. The flaw in this system was that if the leader did not consistently supply visionary energy and inducement, the followers dropped everything for the predilections of the moment, and the brave new world faltered and then stopped dead. I had so appropriated the collective vision that I deprived others of the opportunity of developing their own; I had unwittingly assumed the full responsibility for actualizing Olema’s potential. If that potential failed to materialize, Olema was little more than a grubby, overcrowded dirt farm with a large, licentious, dysfunctional family alternately groping for sanity and destroying itself in small increments. Since I refused to see myself and my efforts so minimalized, I was forced to keep everyone else on track with “the big picture.”

  Consequently I was already exhausted when J. P. pulled an ugly little nickled pistol on Dick the Burglar and demanded that he keep away from his family.

  Dick was a handsome, muscular, Nordic type Bruce Weber would have loved to photograph. He had spent approximately nineteen of his twenty-six years in institutions and had been toughened to the core by it. What saved us all from being at his mercy, besides a certain innate sweetness, were his insecurity and difficulty with speech. When he did speak, which was a rare enough occasion, words tumbled out of his mouth and over one another with such intensity that they spent their energy in a formless avalanche. Also, since he had been raised under absolute authority his entire life, he overestimated mine and never challenged it.

  Dick was with J. P.’s family because J. P. was not, and though his relationship with J. P.’s wife Maryanne was purely friendship based on a mutual need for kindness, J. P.’s speed-shredded nervous system read their camaraderie as a personal reproach. So one night, sweating and shaking, he pointed his pistol at Dick, screaming, “Stay the fuck away from my family,” while Dick faced him down, chanting over and over again, “So who’s got the gun? Who’s the cop, J. P.? Who?” until I intervened, standing between the gun and Dick, hoping that J. P. would remember that we were friends.

  I had to mediate again when Dick, for unknown reasons, began head-butting Tattoo Larry around the living room, trying to provoke sweet, shambling Larry into throwing what would have been a decidedly ill-advised punch. I feigned indifference, stalling for time, while I tried to figure out how to rescue Larry without putting myself directly in the path of Dick’s bad intentions. I did not want to lose whatever meager authority I possessed by being beaten to a pulp under Dick’s hammer fists.

  “Why don’t you split his head open with the axe and save your own, Dick?” I asked casually. “Or better yet, if you’ve got all this energy, why don’t we go haul some firewood?” This non sequitur derailed him long enough for Larry to disappear, and like a cat leaving a dead mouse, Dick turned his attention to something else.

  Another explosive ingredient appeared one day in the form of a swarthy, handsome, and very streetwise troublemaker named Gregg. He had a practiced charm and soon inveigled a place for himself and his girlfriend among us. He set up a small camp under the trees in front of the house. He had a penchant for heroin, so occasionally we would get high together, and during these hiatuses he revealed his personal history: a long stint in reform school and a hustler’s life on the streets.

  Gregg was definitely not a follower. He soon developed a very pronounced intention to inhabit my role as chief and proceeded to test me and the security of my perceived position. One day I noticed that a set of my axle stands—steel tripods that hold a truck securely aloft in order to provide space under it for work—had moved from inside to outside the barn where I’d stored them. I marked it in passing. A day later they had moved again. One now rested about ten feet away from Gregg’s camp, and he was using the other under his truck.

  “Stick ’em back inside when you’re done with ’em,” I said, a bit piqued that he had not asked permission to use them. Despite our intention to abolish private property, it was a generally respected principle that personal possessions and particularly tools were exempt from collective ownership.

  “Sure thing,” he answered noncommittally, and continued with his work. The next morning the axle stands had been joined by my four-ton hydraulic jack. All three were plainly visible but had been moved quite definitely within the invisible boundaries of Gregg’s camp. I couldn’t accuse him of stealing because they were in plain sight, and I didn’t have any use for them at that moment that would justify taking them back. Making a big deal out of his using them would have appeared overly concerned, but I did know that a play was being made, and I was determined to do something about it.

  I mentioned my conundrum to Moose, my Hell’s Angel mentor, during a visit several nights after the second “move” of my parts, and he looked at me as if I were an idiot. “They moved once,” he said. “They’ll move again.”

  The next day, the axle stands and the jack were gone. I asked Gregg about them, and he said he had returned them and hadn’t seen them since. He was packing to move because he and his girlfriend had made themselves unpopular, commandeering the kitchen to fix their meals and barring others from entering while they cooked. They hoarded and labeled personal supplies and threw tantrums if they suspected that they had been disturbed. The tension between us had become thick and corrosive, but I didn’t know how seriously the situation had deteriorated until it was almost too late.

  It had been a tough day. Gregg and I had been arguing a lot, and the place felt emotionally chaotic. A Hell’s Angel friend named Larry had come to visit and had returned from a walk with the body of a great horned owl he had shot out of a tree. I felt like my insides had been ripped open. I knew and revered that bird. It was the totem of J. P
.’s son, Owl, and an unspoken agreement existed that nothing was ever hunted on our land. I set out feed plants in the cattle ponds for the migrating ducks and had appointed myself God’s own janitor of the local roads, removing dead animals from the right of way, smoking tobacco ritually and praying over them. In return I took whatever feathers, fur, bones, or talons I needed to make talismans. If they were exotic, like the occasional red fox or badger, I would tie ribbons around the legs, wrap the body in chicken wire, and bury it in the oak leaves for a year. The shiny black beetles (the same species they use to clean museum specimens) would strip and polish the bones until they gleamed, and I would convert them into jewelry and power objects for friends.

  More important, the owl was my daughter’s namesake. The stormy night Sam went into labor, Chuck Gould and I raced from the city over the tortuous coast road to the tiny town of Marshall at the edge of Tomales Bay, to get the midwife who was to attend the birth. The night was extremely blustery and rainy, and animals were crossing the road in such numbers that Chuck and I remarked on it.

  When we reached Marshall, Tracy, the midwife, was feverish from hepatitis and could not come. I was panicky, and as we raced back toward San Francisco, a doe deer stepped into the glare of my headlights and forced us to a complete stop. She looked at me directly, I thought, and it was as if someone had thrown a switch in my mind, shutting down the internal dialogue. She turned away in a leisurely manner and stepped off the road gracefully. Just before she disappeared into the brush, she looked at me again, and her expression gave me the distinct impression she was informing me, “This is where I have my babies.” All my anxiety fell away, I relaxed, and we continued our journey at an easier pace.

  A few minutes later I turned to Chuck and said, “God, what am I gonna name this baby?” As if punctuating that sentence, a large, dark mass materialized out of the storm. It was a great horned owl, flying so low that the knuckles of its talons actually grazed the hood. Chuck and I laughed in astonishment. Although my daughter Ariel temporarily changed her middle name to Lowell in an attempt to blend into the “big-hair” girls in the Texas social landscape of her university, her totemic name, given to her even before her birth and recognized by her extended family, was Low Owl.

  Now this owl lay lifeless before me on the kitchen table. I couldn’t explain all this to Larry and was dumb with sorrow for the great bird and the meaning of its connections to my life. Larry lived in a world of petrochemicals and steel, a world where a nine-sixteenths nut fits a nine-sixteenths bolt. If I could have made him understand the fuzzy mysteries of my world, he would only have felt ashamed. I said nothing directly, except that “we usually don’t hunt here, Larry,” but he could tell I was crushed and spent the rest of the day sitting disconsolately under a tree with his black and white bird dog. When I stumbled past en route to my cabin, he looked at me mournfully. “Nice dog,” I said to be polite.

  “Yeah,” he said kind of abjectly. “But I pushed him too hard and broke his spirit.” I wondered if he was speaking about me or the dog? Was this an oblique criticism, or was I inventing things? I was too confused to pursue it; the day had turned rancid and I was tired of putting the best face on things and wanted off the hook.

  As if on cue, Doc Holiday came by later with some very strong heroin. I got so high that I could not hold my head up at dinner. My incapacity was impossible to disguise, so I excused myself and returned to my cabin. It was dark and cold. I built a fire and sat in the dark musing about the cacophony and disorder around me, trying to reassure myself that it was to be expected, that we were breaking new ground, building something in the ruins of an exhausted old system. Errors, bad habits, and indulgences would be part of the process. “Still,” I told myself, “we are moving forward.”

  My efforts at self-hypnosis proved futile. I had practiced this rap successfully on other people in the past, explaining inconsistencies between present realities and visions of the future as a process. But it was not working that night, and I was glad that the heroin had kidnapped me from myself.

  I awoke some time later, still sitting in my chair, disturbed by an urgent whispering, “Don’t. Moose! Don’t kill him!” I spun around to find Moose and Sweet William pinioning Gregg between them and the rear wall. Moose had a long Nazi dagger he had wrested from Gregg’s hand poised over Gregg’s heart.

  Gregg was gibbering with fear, “I was just gonna show the knife to Coyote, I swear to God.” Neither he nor I nor Sweet William had a doubt that Moose could have snuffed out his life as he’d stub out a cigarette. “I swear to you,” he continued, panic choking his voice, “I swear to you I just wanted to show it to Coyote!”

  Moose kept the war-trophy dagger and let Gregg leave. He and Bill had arrived earlier and heard something about my condition. They had come to my cabin and had been sitting behind me in the pitch dark (waiting for me to wake? guarding me?) when Gregg had slipped into the room carrying a dagger with a swastika crowning the handle. I have no doubt that had they not been there, I would have been murdered. From that night onward, the Hell’s Angels took on a special resonance. They were angels to me—but if so, then surely I was in hell.

  Just before Gregg’s final departure, Sam noticed that her treasured treadle sewing machine was missing. We suspected that he had ferried it to the new camp he was making, and after the knife incident I was in no mood for charity. I assembled a couple of loyal pals—foremost among them Rolling Thunder’s foster son Nick Fosmo—and I woke Gregg just before daylight by sticking my pistol in his snoring mouth.

  “I want the sewing machine” was all I said, and that was the last word anyone uttered for a very tense hour. He and his girlfriend threw on some clothes and woke Frank, their muscular sidekick, and we left the ranch for their new camp near Inverness. There, we loaded the treadle machine, the axle stands, my jack, and several other purloined goodies and backed out carefully, leaving Gregg and company to whatever fate the road would bring them.

  Events like these were wearing me down. My confidence in my ability to help anyone was now so insubstantial it could blow away; what I needed was the weight that an infusion of real knowledge might offer.

  Fosmo and I decided that our problem was that we were stupid, or more accurately, I decided that I was stupid (he is one of the sharpest men I’ve ever known) and Fosmo didn’t argue with me. Rolling Thunder had sent him to me immediately after he deserted from the Marine Corps. Fosmo was seventeen, but so practical and grounded, so fearless, that we became close friends quickly. His natural talents, and our friendship I suppose, promoted him into my vague circle of leadership at Olema. But we were being looked to for direction and didn’t know “shit from shinola,” as he put it. We loaded a newly repaired Ranchero (assuring the hapless owners, who had intended to camp with us only long enough to fix it, that we would return in no more than a few days), summoned my dog Josephine, and bid our farewells to Eeja and the others. The populace of Olema assembled in the yard to wave good-bye, a family portrait of simple rural folk, bare-toed in the dust, clutching the young ’uns: Dysfunctional Gothic. They knew we needed a rest, and we knew we had better return with something of value.

  While writing this book, I rediscovered the journal I kept during that trip, which had been lost for twenty years. Some extended quotes from it will convey my state of mind and the particular flavors of that journey:

  First Day

  Gone. Olema can sink or swim without me. Fresh wind in our sails. Smoke cigarettes, good talk and good silences straight through to Pyramid Lake [Nevada]. Bed down on the twinkling desert. Stars so clear they shout. Small fire crackles and smell of sage. Stretched out to sleep and a couple of cowboys ride up in a truck. Revolver under my pillow.

  “OK, boys, just checking,” they say and drive off.

  I uncock the pistol, ease the spring on my California mind.

  Second Day

  Light comes onto the desert from the inside of things, golden and warmed by their dreams. Morning glistens like t
he first day of Creation. I hunt the rim of the lake looking for rabbits. Josephine prances and dances in circles on her back legs—ghost Coyote doing the sagebrush shuffle.

  Fosmo warns me that we’ll be busted hunting on a reservation, so we hide the rifle. We pour a gallon of Olema springwater into Pyramid Lake as an offering.

  Drive around Lovelock, choky-dry town made of dust and wind-burned wood. Fosmo points out sites of childhood adventures. Buy a pail and supplies, window-shop the whorehouses in Winnemucca where the glitter girls turn cold when we try to play with them: “Pay you? Hell, honey, fucking a cowboy would be my idea of work too, but getting high and fucking a hippie? Darlin’, you should pay us!”

  We drive past Battle Mountain. Bad town for longhairs and get to Carlin late to see Rolling Thunder and his lady Helen. They are Fosmo’s foster parents, and we are given a swell welcome.

  R. T. tells us about a group called the Disciples of Thunder who have started a commune in Elko and are trying to live by his teachings. The local cops have rousted everyone badly, and they’re dispirited and want to leave. He has put his house up as bail for some of them and is worried, asks us to check it out. . . .

  [On the way there] a car full of thick-necked young cowboys (“beef-priests,” Gary Snyder calls them) starts tailgating us. They are haw-hawin’ each other as they tap our bumper, trying to scare the piss out of a couple of longhairs they assume to be flower children. We speed up, so do they, slow down, so do they. Bump, bump, they tap us, at speed high enough to be scary. Fosmo reaches under the seats without a word and gets out our two pistols. Lays mine in my lap. He braces his legs against the front [fire wall] and nods at me. I jam the emergency brake, locking the back tires, and cut the wheel so that the truck skids in a full circle, facing backwards in front of the amazed shit-kickers. Fosmo and I jerk the doors open and draw a careful two-handed aim on the car full of suddenly pasty-faced beefers maiming each other getting clear of the line of fire. They skid around us, burning rubber and fishtailing down the road, while Fosmo and I collapse in the dirt, laughing convulsively, wondering what stories they’ll tell in the local bar that night. Perhaps the next hipsters who may be flower children will be left alone. Throughout the day we laugh each time we remember their expressions.