Sleeping Where I Fall: A Chronicle

by Peter Coyote

  The Disciples of Thunder commune is disgusting. A crash pad filled with pimply dopo-winos disguising sloth behind proto–New Age bullshit. I overheard someone actually say, “Oh, God, that was cosmic, man.”

  One fellow there named Harvey, a dignified, self-possessed biker type, seems truthful. We hit it off and drink wine together. The main mouth of the place, a skinny kid with corrosive sensibilities and a bad attitude [probably the Peter Coyote of Elko] starts playing mental marbles with Fosmo and me.

  “You Californians think you’re so far out, so macho and physical. You don’t understand the New Age at all. Your stories sound like bullshit to me, bullshit, and I’m not going for it.”

  I had been chatting about California with Harvey and a few kids who were listening, just trying to get the feel of the place, and this rodent starts chewing my lips, getting progressively ruder and more belligerent. I try calming him like you would a riled-up terrier, but he has his own leash in his teeth and is behaving as if I’m threatening a position he has to maintain in front of the others. He crosses the line when he sticks his face right into mine, and I smack him in the jaw, not brutally, just kind of a lazy sock, to say, “Get outta my face and wake up.”

  He erupts, screaming hysterically, voice rising to a sustained falsetto, “You hit me. You hit me!”

  People run around uncertainly, knocking over tables and ashtrays. Some are screaming at me, some at each other, others are trying to calm everything down. I back up against the sink, waiting to see what the next move will be, and am pleased to see Harvey jump to his feet and stand beside me. When nothing but noise materializes, we drink some more wine.

  Soon I’m half in the bag and angry at these shiftless people sitting around calling Elko a hole, ranting about the “pigs” while they have made no apparent effort to get their own house in order nor paid any attention to the jeopardy in which their behavior places Rolling Thunder’s property and reputation. I tell them exactly how I feel. Things calm down. I’m tired and finally too drunk to talk, so I go outside and play guitar and sing to myself.

  Fourth Day

  R. T. returns from work and we go to see Oscar Johnny, respected man of the Shoshone tribe. He has a Ford Falcon with a blown engine and needs help. Lots of men there standing around forlornly. Not much work getting done. I have tools with me, so I check the car and offer to help. They look at me and look away. The wind kicks up dust devils and sighs. No one moves. Something’s going on. I fade back into the crowd. Later that afternoon we learn that Oscar’s younger brother had just murdered his sweetheart and then killed himself.

  Stop by the commune again. The place is bustling. Everyone is cleaning, cheerful. The girls have made curtains and papered the shelves, the place is swept clean and been put in order, bright blankets cover the threadbare furniture, pictures are on the wall. The yard is picked clean of trash, and everyone greets us warmly, even motormouth.

  Sixth Day

  Long, abandoned dirt road between Willetstown and Gardner, Colorado. Two tires go flat. We sit and cook breakfast in the road. Hoping to see elk, but six mule deer pass in stately procession, curious about the lumpy, lopsided vehicle. We force our way into an abandoned summerhouse to call for help. A scumbag up the road wants thirty dollars for a tire, twenty dollars just to come and look—half of what we have between us. We change one tire and nurse the car at a creep about three miles to town, aware that we are ruining the tire but unwilling to abandon the truck and all our camping gear to whatever predators might come down the pike. In town, small Portuguese fellow named Raymond changes the tires with two tire irons—zip-zip, it’s done . . . one dollar!

  We head up the road to Libré, a famous Southwestern commune. The clay road is like a mud river that we’re forced to negotiate at speed, hammer down, fishtailing right and left, Fosmo spread-eagled over the load as ballast, struggling for purchase on the back bumper. We lose our momentum and stick fast about a mile from our destination. It was spring when we left California, and we’re dressed for that weather in the cold Colorado snow, trudging in the mud and suffocating in the thinner air thousands of feet above sea level.

  At Libré I meet Steve Raines, someone I remember from the Haight. He has a fine adobe house and fireplace. Huge tree trunk in the center holding up radiating vigas supporting a wooden second floor. His wife Pat, though complaining about how many visitors they’ve had, offers us a place to spend the night. We sleep in their fireplace for warmth.

  Seventh Day

  Meet Peter Rabbit, a reserved, tall, slender man who looks at you as if he’s gazing down from a great height, trying to decide whether or not you’re worthy of his intimacy. We have been visiting various houses at Libré a full day, and no one but Steve and Pat has offered food, water, or a place to dry ourselves. We are nobodies.

  The distributor rotor has broken in our hard-luck Ford and resists my pathetic efforts to tape or glue it together. We are standing disconsolately at the edge of the road when a young guy in a truck approaches. He tells us that he has “nothing to do, nowhere to go,” but will not give us a lift and thinks nothing of letting us walk ten miles down the dirt road to hitch thirty more miles for the rotor we need. He refuses to turn his car around on the grass because he “loves the earth.” We browbeat him into running us at least to the main road. Waiting for a ride at the county road, a dusty old VW bus full of people pulls up, and my intimate college friend, Terry Bisson, fellow traveler from my first peyote trip at Grinnell College, pops out. I haven’t seen him in years and discover that he is living nearby with a commune called the Red Rockers, many from Beverly Hills [among whom was David Ansen, currently film critic for Newsweek]. They are occupying an old house, waiting to move onto their land.

  We buy a case of beer and lots of cigarettes as a welcome gift and go with them. There are eleven people living in a three-room house. Terry’s girlfriend is Mary Corey, a New Yorker from the world of fashion with a high-speed mind and dangerous mouth. We get in an argument while I am drinking, and she is running rings around me until, in frustration, I say something rude and intemperate. She responds directly in my face with “Fuck you,” and I’ve hauled back to smack her when I realize that everyone is looking at me aghast. I am defenseless before my own crassness. I have never hit a woman before, but cannot explain this or expect to be believed at the moment. I try to explain myself, insist that words have meaning and relationship to life, are like acts, but I have crossed the line and am no longer consequential enough to be attended.

  Terry and I stay up all night talking about the event. He says, “Relationships with women are the last bridge to freedom.”

  Eighth Day

  Fosmo, up early, lays a boardwalk over the muddy slough. He and I make a bin to store grains and try to order their kitchen a little, while the others are busy making preparations to move to the land. Terry tells me everybody in the house thinks that Fosmo is very “high” (slang for enlightened) and that I’m “together” but a shit-head. [Together was one of those imprecise terms that meant some combination of competent and responsible.] The family loves Mary and is angry at the bad feelings that I generated in their home. I apologize honestly to Mary and the family. This is easy because I am honestly chagrined, and things mellow out. Terry explains to the group about our peyote journey together years ago, how I turned into a little wolf, and how appropriate it is to him that my name is now Coyote.

  Eleventh Day

  Walk around the plaza in Santa Fe. Indian women all want to see the cache of fox pelts I’ve tanned from roadkills and call us over. I say that they’re not for sale, and as if that were a signal, trading is initiated. A one-legged Indian man is selling peyote ritual paraphernalia. He indicates my fox skins and tells me they stink. I tell him he’s smelling the tour buses.

  The Santo Domingo Indians are hustling, working the tourists for money. The unwary may buy bits of Clorox bottles and glass for turquoise, old 78 records for onyx. Old women, wrapped in shawls, stony-faced, eyes askanc
e, always observant. One woman offers one necklace for two fox and wants more. I tell her I have to go for the others, and she wheedles and tries to get me to leave them with her. They run white-boy numbers on us. It’s our first day, so we fade back to our camp.

  Twelfth Day

  Back to the plaza and trade all day. Today there are no more numbers; the Indians are ready to trade. When they discuss our goods in their native language, Fosmo and I converse in tutno, an impenetrable kids’ language like pig Latin. The trades get down, hourlong, back and forth, placing and taking away things on the colored blankets. Stopping to smoke. This is the season of the Green Corn dance, where young men of the pueblo are initiated and must wear fox skins as part of their sacred regalia. I trade skins for three necklaces, a bracelet, and earrings, all good silver and turquoise. We shake hands. Everyone is happy, and it’s a good trade.

  Miss Sam and Ariel, far away at Olema. The Ranchero is sounding like steel balls bouncing around in a concrete mixer, boiling over consistently. Daydreams of assassinating all Ford heirs.

  Fourteenth Day

  Go to Albuquerque attempting to fix the fucking Ranchero. Radiator and water pump are okay. Decide the head gasket must be blown or the radiator plugged. It’s easier to pull the radiator, so we do that again and it’s still okay. We time the fucker, check the thermostat, pull the housing, and see water move when we start the engine. We conclude that the head has cracked, a thought too horrible (and too expensive) to contemplate. We discuss abandoning the car or rolling it off a cliff.

  We limp back to Placitas, both a town and the locale of a funk city commune by the same name: adobe buildings, tinned-in windows, chickens, burros, horses, cows, big gardens. Our host there, named Ulysses S. Grant, has a problem. Ulysses, an infamous local freak, is running for governor of the state and urges us to support him. We learn from others that half the communal garden is dedicated to feeding the horses on which Ulysses campaigns, and he has inveigled the other communards to do the planting and tending for him. His leverage to accomplish such things is implemented by the fact that he is also the sheriff and his wife is the judge. Furthermore, we are told, he occasionally busts people for possession of marijuana and other chickenshit beefs as a way of maintaining power in the community. That’s their problem.

  Grant’s problem is that his neighbors are taking him to court because his horses break into their yard continually and are ruining their fruit trees and garden. He enlists Fosmo and me to talk to the neighbors and see what can be arranged. The envoys in our delegation of peace are Ulysses, Jerry (a singer with an unnerving, constant giggle), Fos, and me.

  As we approach the neighbors’ house, four giant cowboys emerge, carrying pool cues. One fellow is an ex–bone breaker for the Chicago Bears whose legs are as big as my waist. Ulysses had not informed us that their relationship had deteriorated to the edge of violence, but these men are serious and could be very dangerous. Fosmo and I are, as usual, armed, but the others don’t know that. However, we didn’t come here to shoot anyone, and certainly not over a beef for someone like Ulysses.

  Chicago Bears opens the dialogue by declaring that “hippies are air pollution.” We listen in silence while he fulminates and ticks off a long list of grievances. Fos and I look at each other, and it is clear that we agree that the neighbors have a righteous beef. Grant’s untended horses are waking them at night, pushing through unrepaired fences, and wrecking their neat yard and garden. Every attempt to negotiate a solution has been skewered by stoned freaks laughing at the neighbors about being uptight.

  Ulysses has the worst political instincts of anyone I have met. Insisting stubbornly that he’s correct, he gesticulates wildly and speaks inappropriately and disrespectfully at the top of his lungs. He strains my patience.

  Finally, I tell Ulysses to shut up, and I paraphrase the problem impartially. The cowboys are so startled by a nonpartisan restatement that they mellow, and after a bit more to-and-fro, we manage to work out a compromise. Ulysses will post “close gate” signs on his side of the fence and deploy some of his awesome legal authority to instruct others to mind them. We negotiate a two-week trial period, after which if things have not changed, the neighbors will sue Ulysses in court.

  Back to the tent for a nap. Dream of a woman leaving earth in a golden rocket ship. Miss Sam and Ariel, my tousled blonde daughter. Fosmo misses his horse.

  Fifteenth Day

  The Ranchero is so decrepit that we decide to return to Santa Fe and maybe home. The heater has blown out, we’re freezing, and the car boils over every fifty miles. My daydreams are filled with lurid fantasies about impaling Christina Ford on a manure fork and spreading her entrails along the road while I smash the door (with the sprung lock) on her husband’s balls. At Jim Koller’s in Santa Fe, we review the truck inch by inch once more and discover an almost totally obscured collapsed water hose. We cut a new length of hose from the useless heater, attach it, and start the engine, and the heat gauge drops to normal immediately. The problem is solved; we are ecstatic and decide to celebrate.

  Koller and his lady Cass are preparing for a poetry reading with their friend and neighbor Drummond Hadley and don’t want to come with us, but Cass tells us about a college bar nearby, “full of women,” she says. “A real pussy place.”

  We walk down the road. It’s dark and crowded with honking cars and fractious energy. Somebody shouts, “Blow it out your ass,” and begins shooting. Fosmo and I are in the line of fire and run into an alley. Cars screech and hump, pedestrians scatter in panic, and the car with the gunman continues down the street, driver leaning out the window, firing with his left hand—a dull pop-pop-pop-pop like drumbeats at an execution.

  We arrive at the bar full of adrenaline, but it’s so crowded the bouncer won’t let us in. We cruise the teeming weekend sidewalks for a while and wander off the main drag into a darker, emptier street. Four cars filled with Chicano guys drive by, check us out. We look ahead, and like a nightmare, the street in front of us is blocked by men, fanning out to form a net. There is nothing to catch but us, so we run for our lives. Eventually, we find Koller’s house again. “Thanks, Cass,” I say, “Real pussy bar.”

  Eighteenth Day

  Dream that I’m in prison.

  Wake up completely frozen in the only shade for a hundred miles. We are in the desert outside the town of Gallup, New Mexico. The Ranchero refuses to start, is immobilized in the middle of the sagebrush, miles from nowhere. I am feeding Josephine the balls of male Ford heirs to the tenth generation while Fosmo sodomizes the daughters with a post-hole digger. We should never have stolen this car.

  Fosmo and I pull the starter, which is ruined, walk the three miles back to town to exchange it, walk back, and it doesn’t fit! We pull it again, walk back to town, exchange it for one with a bolt pattern that is different by about one millimeter, and start back. My foot is hurting from a motorcycle accident and sore as hell after walking nearly twelve miles. No one responds to our hitchhiking attempts, only a fat Indian cop in a white Jeep who takes swipes at us each time he passes, forcing us off the road and making hitchhiking perilous.

  Gallup is the toughest town I’ve ever been in. Indians here so fucked up and over they’ll kick anyone’s ass for a drink. Pawnshop shysters buy their visions and heirlooms for nickels and get rich selling them back to art merchants and upscale tourists going “spiritual.” Pawning work to raise the capital to finance new work is traditional Navajo practice, but the obstacles stacked against Indian people ensures that one event or another will make it impossible for them to reclaim their goods, so they pass into the white world, transformed into “merchandise.” Millions of dollars of wealth float around the Southwest, based on native culture, and the Indians participate in practically none of it.

  [This is truer today than it was then. On several occasions I have suggested to friends who are Indian art dealers that dealers might make some minimal restitution to native peoples by applying a portion of pretax profits to some non
profit entity for native welfare or education, and the idea has been dismissed as ludicrous. Meanwhile, at the native arts shows where rugs and fine crafts are sold for stratospheric amounts and discussed knowledgeably by well-dressed and well-spoken men and women who exude culture and sensitivity, it is rare to encounter even one native person because they cannot afford to buy back their culture as “art.”]

  We repair the car and depart for the Hopi Indian reservation in Hotevilla, Arizona, arriving at dusk. The three mesas where the Hopis live stand upright from the flat desert floor like grand ocean liners in a calm sea. Hotevilla is the most traditional of the villages, where elders systematically uproot water and electricity lines that progressives try to install. Hopis live in land so difficult that they are almost the only people who can live there, and they claim that they are able to do this due to the sincerity of their prayers and the simplicity of their way of life.

  During World War II, when the government drafted enough Hopis so that there were not enough men left to perform a rain dance, it never rained until the conscripts returned and performed the ritual again. The Hopis live a monastic, worshipful life, and Fosmo and I believe that if anyone knows about communal living outside the premises of the industrial paradigm, these people might. We have somehow arranged an introduction to one of the tribal elders, a Snake priest named David Monongye.

  We follow the two-lane blacktop road up the mesa, past the stick fences, stone and adobe buildings ancient as sand. Little plots of corn, beans, and squash, kids yelling “Hippieeees” until we turn off on a dirt track and reach the village itself, a cluster of small, flat-roofed, rectangular stone houses, connected by alleyways carpeted in deep, soft, stoneless dust. Round kivas, spaced intermittently throughout the village, appear like the visible tops of pegs fixing the village to the mesa bedrock. The long ladder rails emerging from inside the kivas pierce the sky like staples.