by Peter Coyote
One morning she dropped by as I was cooking, I asked her if she was hungry and she said nothing. When I asked a third time, she said, “Don’t make people say that they’re hungry. Put food in front of them. If they’re hungry, they’ll eat.”
This protocol attending the offering of food interested me. It highlighted our culture’s carelessness about food (which has resulted in an obsession with obesity). Living on the road, I’d noticed that you could visit a white person’s home and wait for hours before being offered food or water. This was equally true in many counterculture homes. White people assumed that people ate or drank when they wanted to; they were not being deliberately rude, they just never had to think about hunger. Travelers in need learn to search out people of color—black people, Chicanos, and Indians—who rarely let you sit long without putting something to eat or drink in front of you.
Nichole and I patched things up temporarily when I returned to the city, but I was ready to move on, in a number of ways. The sixties had turned into the seventies, and the hard life had changed a lot of things. A lot of friends were dead: Richard Brautigan by suicide; Kirby Doyle’s lover Tracy the midwife, of an overdose; Marcus, Bill Lyndon, Billy Batman from gunshot wounds; Pete Knell of cancer; Paula McCoy thrown off the roof of a hotel in Terra Linda during a soured drug deal; J. P. Pickens; Janis Joplin from an overdose. The list is longer than I have the heart to type. Brooks Butcher, boyfriend of Pam Parker who bought the Diggers a truck, wound up in a state hospital after blinding himself on an acid trip from which he never returned; he drowned trying to escape. Moose was lost somewhere in the FBI witness protection program.
Faced with these cautionary episodes, a lot of people got well. In the late seventies Phyllis went to school and became a nurse and a college professor; Natural Suzanne became a public defender who litigates for her indigent clients with the passion of one who feels that except for luck, she might be in their place. Nina, Freeman, David Simpson, and Jane Lapiner moved upstate to the Mattole River and today defend their watershed while they labor at the slow, careful work of creating the cultural détentes among ranchers, loggers, hippies, and New Agers required for a sustainable existence.
Somewhere in these transformations, Emmett got lost. I went to see him once, in 1973 or 1974 shortly after the publication of his autobiography, Ringolevio, in which we all figured prominently. He was riding high, married to a beautiful French-Canadian actress and living in a luxurious apartment in Brooklyn Heights. He was proud of having returned home wealthy and famous—“so near and yet so far” was how he put it.
I admit to feeling envious of him then. I was completely without money, living at Turkey Ridge, still using street drugs and the occasional bottle of Demerol. Most of my energy was absorbed by the splintering relationship with Sam, the simmering tensions of communal life, and group survival.
I couldn’t help feeling that it was our collective life that had paid for Emmett’s laundered sheets, elegant rooms, and well-stocked refrigerator and bar. Proud as I was of his success, I was sore about the egocentric tone of his book and agreed with Kent Minault’s sardonic assessment of it: “Oh, yeah, Emmett sauntered while we all walked!”
Consequently, on this visit, when I saw that Emmett’s eyes were “pinned” and knew that he was using heroin again, I allowed myself to blow up. Louise smiled beside him in bed—pleased, I think, that someone was telling him what she could not. I told him that I didn’t care if he wanted to die, but if he did, why did he want to die such a boring, useless death? If he wanted to go out, why didn’t he die for something and take on the system? I called him “a boring motherfucker” and left, too cloaked in self-righteousness to admit the degree to which jealousy had informed my anger.
From that time on, our relationship changed, and Emmett related to me as if I were another audience for him to win over. He was proud to tell me he had begun writing songs (the Band even recorded two) and that Etta James might record one. He had been spending a lot of time with Robbie Robertson and the Band and consequently was going with them to “The Last Waltz,” the Band’s farewell concert at San Francisco’s Winterland auditorium on Thanksgiving Day, 1976. I declined his invitation to join them because, as I told him, I was bored with rock and roll’s self-congratulatory pretensions. This was a high-status cheap shot on my part, suggesting that while he may have been seduced by the glitz of rock and roll, I was not. But after Emmett arranged for a number of San Francisco poets to read there I relented, attended the event, and had a fine time.
Despite these activities and interests, nothing was sustaining Emmett. The “play” had changed with the decade, and the perfect role he’d crafted for himself had become anachronistic. His inability to produce something new and grand was diminishing his confidence. Trapped by the glamour of his persona, he needed time to disappear, to take beginner’s steps in new directions, free of his old role and beyond the glare of public attention. But he seemed preoccupied with maintaining his old identity and status. He developed curious mannerisms, particularly a knowing wink he overused to suggest that his last remark had a deeper, hipper side easily missed without this alert. It was as if he sensed his act growing threadbare, and instead of reformulating it, resorted to tricks that suggested that it was the audience’s perceptions that were faulty, not his performance.
The last time I saw him, in the winter of 1978, our situations had reversed. I was then the chairman of the California State Arts Council, pressing an exciting and radical agenda through the state legislature, and Emmett was adrift, looking for a new game. I kept a rendezvous with him at a Malibu beach house. When no one answered repeated knocks and yells, I peered through a window and spied Emmett passed out in bed. I broke in, checked the pulse at his throat, and satisfied that he was living, shook the place down as only a druggie can, checking the light wells and behind the toilet ball, the heat vents and the undersides of drawers, and found enough drugs to open a small pharmacy. I woke him and we had a corrosive fight about it. As a strategy for getting me off his back, Emmett confessed to a suicide attempt the previous day. I didn’t believe it (despite the fact that heroin use is suicide on an extended-payment plan), but I was stunned nonetheless. Even as a ploy, Emmett was asking me to feel sorry for him, and that was so uncharacteristic that it frightened me.
Because I lived four hundred miles away, I called a friend who lived close enough to monitor him. Duvall Lewis was a brilliant young black man who had served as staff on the arts council with me. A tall and charming hipster with a devilish sense of humor, Duvall was fearless and never missed the joke. I thought he and Emmett would like each other; they did and began hanging out together.
It was Duvall who called with the news of Emmett’s death, his call just one in a series that crisscrossed the country, stitching old friends into a new sorrow. Not many years later, Duvall himself died by his own hand. Their two lives and two deaths haunt me as unnervingly similar, and I can never think of either of them without understanding what Allen Ginsberg meant when he opened his epic poem Howl with the line, “I have seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness.”
Emmett told you what he thought. He was stand-up. He was extreme and contradictory, quarrelsome and kind, charismatic and self-destructive. He willed himself to be a hero and died trying to honor that self-imposed responsibility.
It might be enough for most people to have been a living legend, to have Bob Dylan dedicate an album to you (Street Legal), to be an icon of freedom and known to Puerto Rican gang leaders, presidents of recording companies, professional thieves, movie stars, Black Panthers, and Hell’s Angels, but Emmett was chasing his own self-perfection, and each achievement raised the standard for the next.
Emmett was a guidon, the emblem carried into battle behind which people rallied their imaginations. He proved with his existence that each of us could act out the life of our highest fantasies. This was his goal and his compassionate legacy, which I will not minimize, despite his inconsistencies and f
laws. When that example was still untarnished, its luster summoned me and many others from safe havens and comfortable futures into the chaotic, unpredictable hard-rock moment of life in the streets. Without his example I might have remained domesticated.
25
stepping out of the wind
Only he who has eaten poppies with the dead will not lose ever again the gentle cord.
RILKE, Sonnets to Orpheus, IX
When I returned from Washington, I inherited Michael Tierra’s tiny apartment over a garage behind the house where Efrem and Harriet Korngold lived and practiced acupuncture. The neighborhood was Bernal Heights, a working-class, multiracial clutter with the kind of sleepy anonymity that made it a perfect place to disappear. It was here that the FBI captured Patricia Hearst after incinerating her fellow Symbionese Liberation Front soldiers in Los Angeles the year before. I had no space there for my trailer, so I loaned it to a friend and unfortunately lost track of it.
I was at loose ends, trying to earn a living neither on the street nor off, performing in a lusterless production of Paul Sill’s Story Theater, working with several old cronies from the Mime Troupe and the Mime Troupe’s main competitor, an improvisatory comedy group called The Committee. Story Theater was an unthreatening improvisatory confection, and there was much conflict in the company about its lack of political focus between the Mime Troupers and Paul Sills, who was accustomed to being regarded as a genius and resented our critiques. I performed several numbers as a guitarist-singer. Other than that and being cheated out of my salary by Mr. Sills, I remember little of the event.
I needed something to do, and fate dealt me three good cards. The first came from Judy Goldhaft and Peter Berg, who were searching for an artistic expression of the “reinhabitation” concepts. Judy assembled a group of former Mime Troupers and Firesign Theater folk from Minneapolis who had moved to San Francisco after meeting the troupe on tour, and we began exploratory rehearsals at a community center called the Farm.
Bonny Sherk and Jack Wickert had taken over a mammoth abandoned sportswear factory built of incongruous white clapboard and shadowed by an elevated freeway in a bleak intersection of the Hunter’s Point and Mission Districts. Bonny was a fulsome woman with unruly chocolate-colored hair, a dazzling smile, unshakable enthusiasm, and extremely persuasive energy. She lived with Jack, a rail-thin, psychologically vague, sardonic English musician who gave the impression of being unshaven and hastily dressed even when he wasn’t. The two were intent on transforming the old wooden buildings into an urban farm and community center. They begged and borrowed animals, grass, plants, and cages and created a unique indoor barnyard that they offered to local schools as an educational opportunity and to community groups for fund-raising benefits and concerts. They wheedled funding shamelessly and, by hook, crook, and enormous expenditures of energy, kept the institution alive.
Our company met upstairs every morning at the Farm in a large open room, and after warm-up exercises began the arduous process of inventing a new theater piece. Our organizing principle was to use “stories” from our bioregion, both ancient and new. Our perspective would be “multispecies”—telling the tales from the points of view of all local species, not just humans. We researched indigenous legends and creation myths and found several that we felt were suitable for translation into the comedic, commentary-a-second Mime Troupe style.
Judy is a dancer and keenly discriminating about movement. Though nonauthoritarian, she managed to keep our group focused and on schedule. We spent hours at the zoo, studying the movements and gestures of animals and then returning to try our imitations on our friends. Results were often comical and embarrassing, but after countless failures, we refined dominant characteristics, detail by detail, for Bear, Coyote, Fox, Lizard, Bobcat, and a host of other featured players. By improvising and retaining what made our friends laugh, we learned to present our subject in an amusing and interesting way.
As contemporary history, we dramatized a story from Gary Snyder’s homesteading experience: his killing a bobcat that had decimated his chicken flock. Our human characters were Branch and Crystal, New Age hippies played to perfection by Marlow Hotchkiss and Muniera Christian-son. The sinuous and lethal Bobcat was played by Judy herself, feasting on methedrine-manic chickens liberated from factory farms to run wild “in nature.” In what I hope was not too deliberate an irony, I was cast as one of the drug-fuddled chickens.
The show became locally popular, and we began booking small runs out of town, performing in fields, barns, movie houses, and wherever else we could develop a venue. It was fun to act again, working with skilled friends, expressing political ideas we cared about. I had not realized how much I missed the stage, and something in me began to quicken.
My second good card was dealt by the federal government. A local political visionary named John Kreidler convinced a federal agency to use funds from an employment program called the Comprehensive Education and Training Act (CETA) to create a pilot program for the employment of artists. Word of the program filtered through the streets, and since I had no other conceivable trade, I hastened downtown with my longtime pal, fellow Mime Trouper and musician Charlie Degelman, and we joined three thousand others queuing to audition for one hundred job slots.
After hours of waiting on line, I was led before a table of well-dressed people who represented the selection committee. Of the group, I remember only two: one was a handsome woman with a proud demeanor whose prematurely gray hair was pulled back severely behind her ears. She had the scrutinizing air of a suspicious French intellectual, which in fact she was. Her name was Anne-Marie Theilen, a decent woman soon to be driven to distraction attempting to supervise my activities. The other was a rumpled, professorial-looking man in a bow tie who changed the course of my life and subsequently became a good friend. His name was Stephen Goldstine.
If such a thing as a selfless patron of the arts has ever existed, Stephen is it. An amateur in the best and most classical sense, he has spent his life studying under various masters for pure pleasure. His childhood photography teacher was Imogen Cunningham, and he pursued the piano under a succession of gifted teachers. He could recite the curriculum vitae and personal history of symphony orchestra musicians the way other people recite sports statistics. Devoted to all forms of excellence, he later became the director of San Francisco’s Art Institute. That morning he looked at me as kindly as Anne-Marie regarded me skeptically, and asked what I had prepared as an audition piece. I was dumbfounded. I told him I had assumed this would be an exploratory session (true!) and that I had brought neither a guitar nor any prepared performance piece. “Well,” he said, “do something!”
I began drumming a polyrhythmic figure on the table, beneath the startled nose of Ms. Theilin, and improvised a song about coming to the meeting and needing the work. I felt like a shoe-shine boy dancing for pennies, but I’d had lots of practice entertaining around campfires and woodstoves, and I surprised them with some clever lyrics. Anne-Marie appeared perplexed and underwhelmed, but Stephen spoke up for me, and I was given my first real job since bartending twelve years earlier, hired as an artist to do something to be invented later. I was to be paid six hundred dollars a month, three times what I’d survived on for the last ten years. I was euphoric.
The CETA artists were a lively group, featuring, among others, future MacArthur “Genius” Award–winner and metaphysical clown Bill Irwin; a brilliant English vaudeville performer named Geoff Hoyle, who later mesmerized Manhattan’s theater critics with a one-man show; Larry Pisoni, founder of the Pickle Family Circus; and ex-chef Peter Frankham, an honest-to-god English gypsy who started Make-a-Circus, a community arts organization designed to create festive local events and teach circus skills. All except Peter, who died prematurely, continue performing today. I mention my closest friends first, but in fact, every one of the CETA grantees—poets, actors, writers, musicians, and artists of every stripe, representing a broad range of cultures—expended extraordinary energy
to raise the general aesthetic sophistication of San Francisco. If the arts are, as I believe, society’s research and development division, exploring the contradictions, common visions, and potential in the culture, the minuscule amount of public money used for this program was well spent and has probably been repaid several times over from the taxes of the initial recipients.
If my public life was perking up, my private life was tepid at best. Nichole and I had broken up for good, so I looked up Marilyn McCann, the shy girl who had visited Turkey Ridge with Danny Rifkin. True to her word, Marilyn was practicing Zen Buddhism at San Francisco’s Zen Center. There was something compelling about her depth and quietness and a wholesome quality to her beauty that I found intriguing. It was obvious that she was not a woman to be trifled with, and after considerable hemming and hawing, backsliding and panics on my part, we became lovers. Her small, tidy apartment next door to the Zen Center felt like an oasis of calm. My daughter was growing older and needed stability, and so did I. A year after we began dating, I asked Marilyn to marry me.
For me, karma, a Sanskrit word sometimes translated as “fate,” is often clearest in the interval between a decision to change and the first rewards from new behavior, a period of time usually much longer than anticipated. Most of us have had the experience of intending to change and being deterred by residue from our past. That momentum carrying past actions into the present is how I understand karma. No sooner had I married Marilyn than Sam dropped Ariel off to live with us. She had chosen to move to Colorado for some reason and wanted Ariel to finish the school year in San Francisco. Although we’d been married less than two months, Marilyn threw herself into being a stepmother with her characteristic dedication. She researched schools for Ariel, enrolled her in ballet lessons, painted and decorated a lovely room with handmade curtains, took her shopping for new clothes (for perhaps the first time in Ariel’s life), and began to teach her the rudiments of civilized behavior.
