Sleeping Where I Fall: A Chronicle

by Peter Coyote

  I was stunned by Joe’s proposal. I knew absolutely nothing about money or business. In fact, my father had always discouraged any curiosity about financial affairs. Both my parents were cultured people who had nurtured me with plays and movies, museums and concerts. Morris romanticized my imagination and protected and nurtured it, exaggerating my impracticality as a subtle justification for his own rapaciousness in business. He imagined that I would be an English professor at some fine Ivy League university, dressed in elegantly rumpled tweeds, while he sent stipends wrested from his daily wars on Wall Street to ensure that my life would not be deprived of amenities. It would be a kind of partnership, he assured me—he was a salesman too, remember. His pitch sounded elevated, worthy, and carefree, offering abundant time to write and travel.

  Since I had no glimmers of my own concerning what adult life might be like, his version seemed viable enough, and without either accepting or rejecting it, I moved toward my majority under its dominion. I realize today how many people might cherish such an offer, and lest I appear ungrateful, there was fine print in the contract. Implicit in the bargain, since he was the producer, was the right to cast the drama according to his predilections. He would get to play Odysseus, the cunning, resourceful, sexually potent adventurer pillaging the world for treasure and adventure, and I would play the faithful dog waiting at home to wag its tail when the master returned. He never actually said, “Sign here and check your balls at the door,” but that was definitely implied in the fine print.

  To prepare me for my role as an exemplar of the life of the mind, he inculcated in me a princely disregard for all things mundane, practical, and vital to autonomy, such as earning a living. He refused to discuss how he made his money or even what the simplest things cost, rebuffing my curiosity with the reproach that such concerns were vulgar. The Diggers and Free Family obviated my fiscal ignorance by offering a mode of life without money. Now, Joe Konwiser was asking me to be the titular head of a complicated finance business that had bankrupted my father. That was one problem.

  The second problem was that my community had very definite ideas about accruing wealth and the nature of worthwhile work in the world. How would they accept my debenture to Wall Street? What could I say to them, and how could I explain to myself such an about-face of every premise I had held sacred for the last ten years? Would I be excommunicated from the only community I had ever known? It was disorienting to consider; an astronaut returning to the stresses of gravity after prolonged weightlessness must feel as I did.

  My mother was floundering, though, and I had only three options: I could stand on her shoulders and accelerate her drowning, I could step aside and watch her sink, or I could offer her my shoulders to stand on to keep her head above the rising tide.

  I agreed to go to Wall Street.

  22

  a moment’s float

  When I moved out to Turkey Ridge, my mother had been quite firm that I was not to overrun the place with friends. “None” was her negotiating floor, I believe. On the other hand, I could not leave Turkey Ridge for Wall Street and allow Sam and Ariel to remain isolated all week. They knew no one, and Ariel was too young for school, so she would be without other children and Sam would be a single parent without respite. Being a single mother is difficult enough; being an isolated single mother, more difficult still; but an isolated single mother with a quixotic nervous system, who read ominous portents into the shadows of birds, simply could not be left alone.

  While I was pondering my options one afternoon, a battered, eggplant-colored moving van turned into the long driveway and stopped at the house. It carried Samurai Bob, his current lover “Sigh” (Peggy Darm), and Owl, whose father, J. P. Pickens, had recently been killed jumping from a window escaping a police raid. He died not from the second-story leap but from his fleeing partners landing on top of him. If it had been a movie, it would have been funny.

  They had spent ten months crossing the country without money, trading labor for gas and food and spreading the gospel of “free” wherever they went. They arrived with the assumption that they would be allowed to stay. We were, after all, the Free Family.

  Samurai Bob was an infamous denizen of Haight Street, a taciturn, acerbic ex-marine, easy to recognize because of his Japanese fireman’s coat, bamboo flute, and nunchakus (fighting sticks) stuck in his belt. He possessed unlimited reservoirs of anger toward all forms of authority and lived an apparently random life, moving from place to place with his small bundle of gear as peripatetically as a gypsy.

  He had visited Olema once to deliver Kaliflower, a multicolored inter-communal free newspaper printed by Irving Rosenthal and the commune on Sutter, then Scott, and finally Shotwell Street. It was delivered by hand and placed in bamboo tube receptacles mounted in far-flung communes and group houses—tubes that served the same function as the plastic cylinders for newspapers that line country roads. Kaliflower’s artwork was impeccable, the information useful, and the subscription list a utilitarian way of networking like-minded folk. Bob began appearing at Olema regularly, stayed for a while, then drifted to the Red House in Forest Knolls, where he moved in with Judi Quick. They became a couple and had a child named Alli.

  Samurai Bob was a stubborn, difficult man who drank a lot and had a pronounced judgmental streak. I liked him, but the Red House women were not fond of his macho manner and shirking of cooperative work. He appointed himself arbiter of revolutionary purity and his severe judgments often made people uncomfortable, Judi among them. One Sunday morning at Forest Knolls, she came downstairs and handed Bob a quarter, saying, “Get me a paper.” When he inquired which paper, she said the Cleveland Register. Bob took the hint and left.

  His arrival at Turkey Ridge was a mixed blessing. I enjoyed his company and radical propensities on political issues. He was a good companion for the long philosophical inquiries that occupied about 30 percent of every waking day, but he could be insensitive, even pitiless. It was Bob, for instance, who suggested that we sue my mother to win the farm from her and “free” the land. It was Bob who unilaterally removed the doors from all the kitchen cabinets so that it would be “easier” to store and retrieve their contents. The fact that this marred the beauty of the kitchen was dismissed as a bourgeois concern.

  We were free people, and he felt free to act. There was no way for me to insist on more respectful behavior without asserting the prerogatives of ownership which would have violated the principles of community, so I remained silent, and in this manner abetted the transformation of Turkey Ridge from the crown jewel of Morris’s possessions into another tawdry Digger way station.

  Bob’s companion, Sigh, was many years younger than he, a tawny cream puff of a girl with extremely poor eyesight, which made her squint distractingly as if she were examining your face for zits. Her shyness veiled an anger that matched his. Recently departed from a women’s cooperative in the Pacific Northwest, she unnerved Sam by telling her assertively shortly after they met that she had just emerged from a long affair with a woman. Her primary, and apparently only, garment was a pair of overlarge Levi coveralls that offered tantalizing glimpses of her extremely ample breasts. She was one good-looking blonde too many for Sam, and tension developed between them immediately.

  Not long after the arrival of Bob’s van, Kent Minault and Nina Blasenheim arrived with their daughter Angeline, six months younger than Ariel. Kent’s house-truck, the Big Fucker, was a two-and-a-half-ton GMC with a six-foot Plexiglas bubble mounted on the face of the cargo vault that canti-levered over the cab. Kent and Nina, close friends from Mime Troupe days, were a welcome and sane addition to the claustrophobic atmosphere developing between Sam and me (and Sam and Sigh). Now Ariel had Angeline to play with; Kent was a willing worker undaunted by the scale of any project; and Nina, as one of the triumvirate of women who had run the Red House, was extremely competent and expert at maintaining harmony in collective life. They were lovely, grounded people.

  It’s a mark of the impression that
Peter Berg’s friendship and ideas had on me that I felt it necessary to discuss my pending Wall Street adventure with him. His indefatigable revolutionary analysis served as an ideological plumb line, and it was important for me to know what he might have to say about my decision, even though it had already been made.

  Peter, of course, could not have known the status he held in my imagination, and he seemed puzzled by my call. He understood the problem immediately and the necessity behind Joe’s request. He urged me to go and marveled with me at the bizarre turn my life was taking. His approbation and support strengthened my resolve, so I went next to visit my mother in Englewood and attend to the practicalities of going to Wall Street.

  I cut my hair short and bought two suits of the sort that passed for stylish in 1971. My only concession to Free Family style was that I left one of my six earrings in place.

  For the next ten days, I pored over the official examination book, preparing myself for the test required to become a registered representative, legally entitled to sell stocks. The simplest ideas about mortgages, interest rates, types of bonds, and classes of stocks were impenetrable to me, and I no more than opened the book each day when I felt an overwhelming impulse to sleep. I solved the problem by memorizing everything in the book with elaborate mnemonics and cartoons. I studied hard, passed the test, and was legally entitled to buy and sell bits and pieces of the American dream. There was a temporary glitch when some old arrests I had forgotten to declare surfaced during my vetting by the Securities and Exchange Commission, but since they were not felonies and since any number of criminals seem to function quite well on Wall Street, I was granted a license.

  That was the easy part. The more difficult part involved living at Turkey Ridge from Thursday evenings until Monday mornings, rising at 5:00 A.M. and dressing for the two-hour bus ride into Manhattan. At the George Washington Bridge I switched to the subway downtown, traversed the entire length of Manhattan, and then walked to the Morris Cohon and Company offices at 19 Rector Street.

  Monday through Wednesday nights, I stayed with my mother, who was now, at fifty-six, working at her first job since she’d married thirty-four years earlier, as a secretary for a vitamin company, shoring up an inept young employer who overworked and underpaid her. It would not have been fun in the best of times but now she labored under a cloud of anxieties about her bills, her future, and pending old age.

  She had sold 90 Booth Avenue after it had been gutted of everything but memory, and moved into a small apartment in a quiet lower-middle-class neighborhood across the street from the public high school where I had graduated after being dismissed from the town’s only private high school for grades that a student with Down’s syndrome could have bettered handily. I spent my nights in her small spare room. Joe had kept his part of the bargain and used the occasion of my arrival at the firm to win a year’s concession on interest payments from the creditors. All I had to do now was—make big money!

  This period of shuttling between Wall Street and Turkey Ridge was one of the darkest and most confusing times of my life. I was completely beyond my abilities in the world of commerce. I did not possess the most rudimentary understanding of how business was conducted; what’s more, my inclinations and political principles were diametrically opposed to the premises and values of the Wall Street milieu.

  Compounding these obstacles were difficulties within the business itself. After my father’s death, the salesmen had divided his prize clients among themselves. They had liberated hundreds of boxes of his aged Cuban cigars from storage and dispensed them as favors and lubricants for sales. The client list had been chewed over and picked clean, and the fundamental asset bestowed on me, the titular owner, was a book about four inches thick, listing the names, addresses, phone numbers, and officers of every corporation in the state of New York that employed two or more people. My job was to go through that book telephoning people and pitching stock to them cold, which in the parlance of sales means without introduction or preparation.

  Imagine how you would respond if your phone rang and a stranger said, “Hello, my name is Peter Cohon from Morris Cohon and Company on Wall Street, and I have a very interesting investment opportunity I’d like to discuss with you.” Everyone I called did what you would do: they hung up.

  Making fifty telephone calls a day is a time-consuming proposition. Making this many calls a day without a single success is demoralizing. After several depressing weeks of this, I began refining my technique, employing my actor’s skills. When the receiver was lifted at the other end, I shouted to an imaginary secretary, “No, I told you he can’t buy more. Fifty thousand is what he gets, period.”

  Cut to the phone: “Oh, excuse me, I’m sorry.” Introduce myself. Cut back to the imaginary secretary: “Absolutely not, Claire. I told you, I’m saving that block for new customers.”

  Cut back to the mark, apologizing profusely about the “action” in our office and begin my pitch. The other salesmen in the big room outside my office (I was the new owner, after all) might not have been able to decipher my incomprehensible ranting, but since all transactions were posted publicly, they knew as well as I did that whatever I was doing I was not making any sales.

  When several weeks of this theatrical idiocy produced no success, I began experimenting with outlandish claims. As soon as my call was answered, I would say, “If you listen to me for sixty seconds, I guarantee that I will make you a million dollars.” This strategy was no more successful than probity. I did not have a knack for selling.

  In the year that I labored on Wall Street, I made one sale. The day it was announced, all $1,200 of it, the salesmen applauded “Morris’s boy” in a sentimental frenzy, praised me extravagantly, and assured me (and by implication themselves) that now things were starting to roll. Considering the bizarre cries emanating from my office, they must have wondered how I had made even that sale.

  Times were tough; these men too were hanging on by their fingernails. Many of them had worked with my father for years and loved and respected him. Customers had deserted the firm after his death, and the point was being revealed to them with brutal clarity daily that without “Moishe’s” brilliance and charisma, the firm was not going to survive. Dad’s lifelong friend, his cashier Eddie Mulligan, was dying of bleeding ulcers trying to untangle the knot of promises, deals, mortgages, and markers that my dad had filed in his head and carried with him to the grave.

  I walked around Wall Street by day cast as the rising star of a respected firm, but in actuality I was a salaried extra paid sixty dollars a week. I exuded failure that repelled people as if I had burned a swastika into my forehead. I visited watering holes where the bright young brokers (and their women) congregated, hoping to meet some companions for these city sojourns. After my close friendships in college, the camaraderie of the Mime Troupe, and the intense society of communes, it was devastating to be so isolated from the simple pleasures of human society. I craved the company and balm of women, but every conversational overture I made fizzled like a match dropped into a wet ashtray.

  I developed a sulky resentment for the trim, laughing girls with good clothes and tasteful appointments, the Muffies and Buffies with boarding school accents and casual glamour, the carefree sexuality they passed out like a gold coin to the boys deemed most promising. Nothing in my life heretofore had prepared me for such consistent failure. No personal charm, no skills as a raconteur or an empathetic listener provoked the slightest interest. The truth was, I was an interloper, an impostor, and they recognized it.

  I had lived without electricity for the past five years, was not conversant with the television sit-coms to which they referred, and rarely read a newspaper (why bother, when my friends and I felt we were the news?). I had scorned their values and aspirations and mocked them from the stage, but now was trying to pass as one of them, and they were too smart to be seduced. I was on “the Street” only to buy my mother a little breathing space and secure my dad’s pittance of insurance mon
ey for her old age. Fate had cast me in a poor role in a rotten play, and I can hardly blame the other actors for not wanting to perform with me.

  Aside from a brief liaison, there was one bright hiatus from my enforced solitude. For a short period near the end of my year-long indenture, I developed a relationship with an elegant, “uptown” woman named Barbara, a handsome brunette with a deep cultured voice, a ready sense of humor, and an illuminated smile. I have not seen her since and eliminate her last name because I have no way of knowing whether or not publication of her identity might cause her pain or embarrassment and I am too much her debtor to chance such a risk. Her tiny apartment became an oasis from my unremitting disappointments, and I cannot forget (or thank her enough for) the balm of resting in her candlelit tub while she bathed me with scented water as devotedly as if I were a private savior, tendering me every imaginable physical and spiritual comfort.

  Unfortunately, I was emotionally useless to her, preoccupied as I was with the affairs of my mother and the Digger family and still living, though tenuously and tempestuously, with Sam. After the business closed its doors for the last time, I was liberated from Wall Street and the necessity of traveling to New York each week. It was the end of our relationship, sealed in a wrenching, tear-stained good-bye. She was generous to a fault, a grand woman, and I gorged on the feast she provided and then cut and ran like a man fleeing the bill in a restaurant. I hope that life has rewarded her as she deserves. I hope she has forgiven me.

  Occasionally my two lives, past and present, Digger and broker, would collide, strewing bizarre wreckage. After several months of slogging through my cold-call phone book, I learned of a realm of business called “venture capital”—the raising of money for new enterprises. Hoping that this might provide a more interesting and appropriate milieu for my creativity, I began researching the possibilities. After meeting eager inventors hawking lotions that prevented the windshields of planes from misting, revolutionary energy modules that ran on water, and geothermal speculators, I fell in with a joker who had invented an automatic record-keeping seal for freight cars and semitrailers. It would record the number of times and the times of day that the doors were opened and closed, theoretically preventing employee theft and thereby (theoretically) reducing insurance premiums. He convinced me, and I decided to raise the money to bring this unwanted product to market.