Sleeping Where I Fall: A Chronicle

by Peter Coyote

  Next, he’d offer some variant of “Okay, I’ve shown you one, you do the next.” I had no idea how to begin, or why if bus A headed north at fifty-two miles an hour and bus B headed south at forty-seven miles an hour, anyone cared when they would meet. Inevitably, Morris would become impatient with my fumbling—and then abusive. His fervent unanswerable questions—“How can you be so fucking stupid? How can anyone be so fucking stupid?”—paralyzed me, and my inability to respond in turn stimulated his fear that I might actually be stupid. Panic provoked threats to “snap your fucking thumbs” or “break your knees” or, most chilling of all, send me to reform school.

  His yelling invariably attracted my mother, who entered the fray on my behalf, moved by maternal pity and also convinced by reading Freud that childhood traumas produce lasting emotional damage (and sometimes alcohol and drug abuse!). As she got older she was less intimidated by Morris and found the courage to intervene, however ineffectively. Grateful as I might have been for her intervention, there were now two of them, book-ending me and screaming at one another like harpies.

  “Morrie, you’re making him crazy!”

  “Shut up, Ruthie, you’re using up the oxygen in the room.”

  My role was reduced to sitting there, looking out the window, studying the other homes lining our street, wondering if each had a similar quotient of domestic horrors—or was mine unique?

  As I matured, I discovered that my childhood experiences were not all that different from those of many others, and far milder and less damaging than many. I offer no excuses for my personal faults and shortcomings, nor do I blame my parents, who did their best with what they had inherited from their own parents. During the time these stories took place, I was older than my mother had been when she bore me, and consequently fully responsible. Fairness, however, demands that I point out that millions of young people did not accidentally or spontaneously express a decade of rage and disappointment like gas after a bad meal. My generation’s disillusion over social injustice and its fervent desire to make the world a more compassionate place must have had some antecedents. It does not seem foolish to search for that evidence inside the nation’s homes, where the young were bent, stretched, folded, stapled, and stressed by the social and political costs of the Cold War and the seductive, ridiculously inflated promises of Midas-like wealth. One way or another, such forces took their toll, and my household was no exception.

  My father, for all his excesses and fulminations, was a decent, honest man. But after a lifetime of habitually closing myself down for fear of arousing his ire or violence, it’s not surprising to me that his death did not immediately release a flood of feelings. They appeared about eight years later, the first time I could bring myself to visit his grave, after I was forced to acknowledge that I had failed to save his beloved Turkey Ridge Farm from the debt to which he’d mortgaged and remortgaged it and failed, too, in my attempts to rebury him there, at his favorite place on earth.

  One day in 1978, I drove to the cemetery in New Jersey where he was buried in a subsection of his brother-in-law’s plot. What an affront his fierce autonomy and pride would have experienced had he, the family patriarch, known that his presence was indicated by a shoe-box-sized granite plate in the lawn, shadowed by his brother-in-law’s far grander standing tombstone. Death does play tricks like that on self-importance.

  When I finally located the site, I was stunned to find his grave bare—nothing on its surface but lumpy dirt. When I inquired, I was told that it had sunk several days before and the groundskeepers had stripped the sod and refilled it to ground level. The engraved letters on his stone—

  MORRIS COHON

  1904–1971

  —and the title of his favorite poem by Dylan Thomas—

  “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night”

  —were clotted and obscured with dried clay from the groundsmen’s boots.

  I dropped to my knees and began prying the dirt out of the letters with a twig. It was not until drops were muddying the granite beneath me that I realized I was crying and speaking aloud. I had not recognized my own voice: a high, keening, tiny sound, strangled in my throat. It was the voice of a frightened, disappointed child, nakedly entreating his father for affection and respect. I was telling him how much I loved and admired him and how much I needed him to love me the way I was, even though I might not be as smart as he was and didn’t enjoy hurting people. I cried and talked and chipped at the clay for over an hour. I didn’t think a body could warehouse such an inventory of tears.

  Vivid memories flooded me. Occasionally at Turkey Ridge, when the sky was lowering gray as the afternoon rains of summer swept in, my father would summon me to one of our barns to nap with him. It was usually the bull barn that he had designed and built of pungent rough-milled beams sawn from our own native black and white oaks and covered with aluminum sheeting. We would climb into the haymow together, and he would wrap the two of us deliciously close in an old horse blanket. He would drink pear brandy, and I would rest against him, overjoyed to be tucked against his massive body, protected rather than assailed by the crook of his arm. He would sleep that way while I tried to stay awake, relishing the pattering of rain on the metal roof. In those rare moments, I felt content and proud, the way I imagined other boys felt when I watched them playing with their fathers. My world was loving and, better still, safe.

  The fact that so much of my childhood was wasted trying to make him notice me does not blind me to the fact that in his own way he treasured and appreciated me more than I realized at the time. Now, beside his grave, I could acknowledge that his spot in the universe was empty, and I was engulfed by a profound sense of loss and frailty, as if I were a helpless witness to the sight of a loved one slipping irretrievably into quicksand. The cause of both my joys and terrors was gone, sucked away with the pitiless neutrality of a Kansas tornado chewing through a trailer park.

  Little of this was apparent to me that day in Boulder, however. It would be nearly two months more before I reached my mother’s house in the East, two months of playing out the caravan, finishing the hand I had dealt myself.

  20

  top of the arc

  Two nights after I learned of my dad’s death, we were camped in the mountains above Boulder in a big wooded meadow. The trucks were parked in a large circle, and we’d constructed a camp kitchen and fire pit in the center. A friend from the East, Lewis John Carlino, appeared unexpectedly, mysteriously out of place. He had met my parents when he’d arrived in New York from Los Angeles about ten years before, a penniless writer. He needed a place to write, and my folks had given him Turkey Ridge gratis for a winter, where he’d composed two one-act plays, Snow Angel and Epiphany, both dedicated to Ruth and Morris, and then a three-act play, Telemachus Clay, which had won an Obie and brought him to the attention of Hollywood. Later, he went on to direct several films, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea and The Great Santini among them. He made good money and bought his own farm near Turkey Ridge in the Delaware Water Gap, where he lived with his crazy wife Natale and their three children. To this day, I do not know what Lew was doing in Colorado or how he found our camp.

  It was Owl’s birthday, and I’d made him a necklace of deer bones as a gift. Local people dropped by our campsite throughout the day, curious about this gathering of strangers who had appeared from nowhere. We began to drink, and as a party developed I declared the night a wake for my father.

  The music that evening was inspired and the women’s dancing powerful, their bellies glowing ember red in the firelight. Carla in particular was possessed. She sweated and shone like chrome, giving herself away to the gods. Gristle passed out LSD-dosed marshmallows that kicked the night into overdrive.

  Sometime later, I was lying with my head in Gristle’s partner Carol’s lap. She was sucking my fingers. Gristle appeared in the periphery of my vision demanding to settle some previous argument with Carol immediately. A fight started between them, and Sam stepped into
the middle of it to arbitrate. The savagery of Gristle’s response terrified her, and she stayed close to me, gasping like a fish out of water until she finally fell asleep. I sat on the tailgate of the Meat and Bone Wagon, watching the stars turn, trying to comfort Sam, listening to Gristle smash things and Carol screaming at him. The congas and guitars were an insistent pulse. Clouds and trees jittered before me, and everything in my field of vision writhed and folded on itself. An unquiet spirit raged through the camp. It was a fit memorial for my father. “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night,” indeed, old man.

  The next day I was up at dawn, still high from the acid, running through the camp nearly naked, hair tangled with twigs and down from somewhere, wiggling my finger and speaking like Pantalone, transmitting his essential insight into the nature of reality—“It viggles, it viggles.” I was referring to the universe, of course—making people laugh, and easing our collective reentry into the day.

  (Years later, in Hollywood, working on a film called Heartbreakers, the art director, David Nichols, approached me one day “This may sound weird,” he began, “but were you ever camped out in the mountains above Boulder partying with a bunch of trucks and crazy people?” When I admitted that I was, he told how he had walked out of the woods by chance the night of the wake and stumbled into our camp. “I was terrified,” he confessed. “I’d never seen a group of people that wild. It changed my life.” I could believe him; it had changed mine.)

  We lolled around Colorado a while longer and encountered former Mime Trouper Charlie Degelman living in the remote mountain town of Ward. Sam had lived there for a while when she left me the last time, and this was enough of a connection for a couple of good parties, where we swapped songs and stories. True to our intentions, we introduced Lew Carlino to the Ward people and the Ward people to folks we’d met while camping near Summerhill and Gold Hill. Intragroup tensions evaporated, and by the time of the last party, the caravan people were in high spirits as we prepared to leave. At that party, while I was playing congas, driving the dancers, I saw Sam and Mai-Ting dancing together like light and dark Gemini twins. Mai was shaking her whole body like a flapping rug. She was strong as a camel, with a funky-toothed grin; she and Sam were locked onto one another with a magnetic witchy energy. Their mutual appreciation was hypnotizing, and the Ward people seemed stunned by the rawness of their feelings for each other; feelings that could and would spin out of control shortly. By evening’s end, I was drunk, my fingertips split and bleeding, and Sam drove me home. I fell asleep, and in a dream, Hell’s Angel Moose drove me around in a ghostly shimmering Cadillac, instructing me about women. I woke up with one of his admonitions lingering like a glaze on the morning: “Get rid of the one who isn’t having a good time.”

  After final good-byes and a hair-raising public fight in the street between Mai-Ting and Sam about a spoon, the caravan crawled toward our final destination, the Huerfano Valley in southern Colorado.

  We drove together as far as Boulder, where we made a long, insane gas stop: eleven kids running around the station, baby clothes washed in the water fountain, nine trucks being filled nearly simultaneously, and the yokel attendants too mesmerized by the confusion to check the hot credit card. Then, just as we coalesced into a coherent unit again, several caravaners decided to travel to Paonia on the eastern slope of the Rockies to pick and dry apricots so that we would have a gift to bring with us to Libré. Some other vehicles required minor repairs, and their riders said that they would catch up later.

  Near Pueblo, Jeff and Carla’s truck collapsed a valve lifter and I pulled over to help them. While repairing it we received word that Gristle had blown his starter motor, so someone was sent back to fetch him, while J. P.’s truck was sent forward with the children to scout for a campsite. By the time Jeff’s vehicle was repaired our two trucks were alone. We cruised the towns of Walsenburg, Gardner, and Farasita looking for our companions or signs of them, but to no avail.

  The next morning, we cooked breakfast by the side of a dirt road, and Peter Berg passed by in a strange pickup driven by some Chicano guy. He waved and flashed his necrotic, crack-toothed grin but didn’t stop. “He must have found a way to score here,” I marveled to myself. We followed his tracks backward and found Judy Goldhaft also making breakfast by the road. We were snacking on her fried potatoes when the psychedelically painted school bus of a local commune, the Triple A, pulled up with everyone aboard still wired from an all-night acid-rock party in Pueblo.

  Expecting hostility after our communiqués from Libré, we were surprised when this group greeted us warmly and made us welcome. They told us pointedly about an abandoned commune called Ortiviz Ranch not far away and suggested that we camp there, recommending it as neutral turf. They also announced a birthday party for Peter Rabbit at Libré, and we decided mutually that I should attend alone and announce the caravan’s arrival and our intention to camp at Ortiviz, hoping that this might diffuse Libré’s anxiety about our presence.

  The consensus of opinion at Libré too was that the caravan should move to Ortiviz Farm. They intimated that there were problems there that we might be able to help sort out. I returned to camp to discuss that possibility. Caravan folk felt that it was not our job to sort out the valley’s problems but that since we were guests, we should accept the space we were offered.

  In the midst of our discussion, Gristle arrived and recounted the story of Ortiviz Farm as he had learned it from local people. This is the condensed version:

  Four hippies from Cambridge, Massachussetts, had come west to implement a vision of a self-sufficient truck farm. They bought the “Ortiviz place,” couldn’t make it pay, and got bailed out of down-payment trouble by the Red Rockers, the commune nearby where my old friend Terry Bisson lived. At that point, Ortiviz Farm became the focus of a regional counterculture vision to “help the valley get it together.” The three communities—Libré, Red Rockers, and Triple A—pooled their auto wrecks, tools, and spare parts and sent volunteers committed to making the place work. Dissension arose, and Gristle told us authoritatively that the “villain” was one of the original four hippies, a certain Tom—a “male chauvinist pig who likes to sit on his tractor.” Tom had made the unforgivable error of “holding out against a collective vision of the place for a personal vision.” Now everyone but Tom had abandoned the farm, which had become a symbol of everything wrong with the Huerfano Valley.

  While we were pondering our decision about where to locate, we traveled en masse to visit the Red Rockers, who had finally moved out of their overcrowded temporary house and onto their land. They had built an extraordinary geodesic dome there in a high canyon, a huge silver bug eye, sixty feet across and thirty feet high, rising starkly in front of the jutting red butte formation for which their land was named. The floors were rough wood, and a huge sleeping loft on stout log pillars commanded three quarters of the dome’s circumference. They had a well-built kitchen with brick counters and four inset double-burners, as well as a very clean shop area with a VW engine in the process of being surgically reassembled. This was the first house I had ever seen specifically designed for the way we lived, and it was light, airy, and extremely functional.

  From their front porch, you could see the entire expanse of the Huerfano Valley, including its bordering mountains: the Huajatollas (Breasts of God), the Sheep (Little and Big), and the Sangre de Cristos.

  Bisson was away for the moment, but I remet Red Rocker Binjo, whom I had dismissed as a low-riding street hustler the first time we’d met. He was quite different now—simpler, stronger, less cynical, and very friendly. He told me he was “on the peyote road”—had been attending the Native American Church’s peyote meetings for a year and taking it very seriously.

  Our two groups mingled easily, and we spent the day with them explaining our intentions. We played a couple of volleyball games in which their tight teamwork annihilated our anarchic individualism.

  At day’s end, dinner was prepared, and their process greatl
y impressed our caravan. Their gathering exhibited none of the greedy scramble of our camp, where people normally behaved as if food not under their dominion might be lost forever. After a leisurely preparation and a silent moment, dinner was served calmly and elegantly. Compared to us, they were formal, but their house was easy with good feeling and cheer. They were relaxed and unguarded with each other, and for a moment I compared my own people unfavorably, as cranky, eccentric, and self-centered.

  Later in the evening, the subject of the Ortiviz farm surfaced in conversation. That the Red Rockers’ community was riven by competing political and spiritual visions of the world became apparent during the discussion. Some members regarded the situation through a political prism and could not separate their feelings about Tom from how they judged his history and behavior. Binjo and the more spiritual peyoteros felt that they should pray for help in loving the malefactor. Some Red Rock women viewed traditional peyote ceremonies as “male chauvinist bullshit”; others participated in them. Sexual liberation was a dominant theme in their community, and men and women seemed equally committed to transcending role lock. Except for my earlier encounter with Red Rocker Mary the year before, I had never diligently analyzed sexual politics. Digger women, like the men, “assumed” freedom and did not discuss it overmuch. The Rockers’ diligence proved instructive, although it sometimes approached mania, as when one of the women turned to me and complained, “We noticed that some of you were served your dinners by your women.” She had mistaken courtesy or affection for oppression and would have seen the roles reversed just as often had she observed without prejudice.