Sleeping Where I Fall: A Chronicle

by Peter Coyote

  The establishment would like to pretend that nothing has changed, that the hippies have all cut their hair and “grown up” into chic consumers. This is the same propagandistic impulse to reduce the complex politics of the sixties into tasteless jewelry, peace symbols, and bell-bottom pants. In fact, a great deal has changed and my generation can tally a significant number of victories.

  However, our victories occurred in the deep waters of culture and not the frothy white water of current events, so they rarely surface in the media, which is such a dominant factor in establishing public reality. The way people view health issues, the environment, human rights, spirituality, agriculture, women, and consciousness itself has been redefined by my generation. These changes are as ubiquitous and invisible as the atmosphere these boys breathe; they can have little idea of either the accomplishments or costs.

  At the same time, much has been lost, at least for now. Conservative zealots have labeled selflessness and compassion as social afflictions to be stamped out and substituted in their stead selective, vindictive punishment of the poor. Black people, once the moral center of the civil rights movements (and the nation), have become, with the exception of a modest middle class and more minuscule celebrity class, fodder for the criminal justice industry, abandoned in decrepit inner cities. America is now the sole superpower, and her exploitation of Third World countries via the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund continues virtually unchecked. While the economy grows vigorously, and rewards the capital-owning class, American labor has been driven backward, sold out by the political class and forced into competition with the world’s poorest folk. On the global scale, the downsizing of America is probably overdue, but the fact that the readjustments are being borne only by labor and the poor is unfair, disloyal, and overdue for condemnation.

  With hindsight, our idea of a counterculture appears an isolating, romantic confection. The Diggers understood fundamentals about the relationship between culture and imagination, and culture and politics, but our spurning of more traditional political alliances was, I believe, somewhat snobbish and counterproductive, since it deprived us of analytical skills and traditional organizing techniques. In retrospect, the Diggers might be criticized as a decade-long performance art piece. We were, I believe, first and foremost artists, and while we were addressing real fundamentals, we allowed our commitment to “authenticity” to blunt our sensitivity to the needs and aspirations of many who were not interested in being artists, or special, or anything other than out from under the heel of an oppressive system.

  The failure to curb personal indulgence was a major collective error. Our journeys down the path along which Verlaine and Rimbaud disordered their senses wasted young lives and often sabotaged what we labored so diligently to construct. Verlaine and Rimbaud were reacting to the oppressive correctness of the bourgeoisie of their time and were perhaps its necessary antidote. In our time, the bourgeoisie borders on the sociopathic, and it is the artist’s responsibility to manifest sanity and health—something we did not fully understand. Neither we nor the people who supported our endeavors were fools. Many were successful hustlers in their own right, legitimate or otherwise, who believed or wanted to believe in higher ideals and a better future. Others simply wanted an interesting diversion. They saw in us what they chose to see and were never wrong because so many contradictory qualities inhabited any given moment of Digger reality. Those who saw altruism were no more mistaken than those who saw cynicism and personal opportunism. Our contradictory behavior was like Penelope, holding her suitors at bay by unweaving at night what she constructed by day. The difference between her and us was that we were not aware of our own double-handedness.

  Having confessed this, however, I want to state unequivocally that hippies did not kill three million Vietnamese (and fifty thousand Americans) and defoliate a nation with toxic chemicals in a pointless war. Hippies did not open the henhouse and allow the savings-and-loan foxes to wipe out the bank accounts of millions of trusting citizens. Hippies did not pay for and orchestrate and condone, as our government did, the murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent Guatemalan and Nicaraguan civilians—men, women, and children living in inconceivable poverty, and struggling for food. Nor did they allow cocktails of lethal chemistry to poison the nation’s air, water, and soft tissues of fellow Americans, creating an epidemic of cancer.

  It was not hippies but financiers and their political lackeys who ruined one American industry after another, freezing American wages at 1973 levels, forcing both parents to work in order to support one household and transforming the nation’s children into unsupervised and angry phantoms.

  While we may have taken drugs excessively, we did not allow tons of heroin and cocaine to flood the nation’s inner cities so that profits from their sale might fund secret wars the voters had publicly rejected. The true cost of this chicanery was an epidemic of murder and toxicity. The true cost was a generation of inner-city youth.

  Our relative innocence and the impending century of struggle I envision as the heritage for these boys and their children is cold comfort as I gaze out over the Olema hills. The world is not as I once imagined it or hoped it would be, but then neither am I. Neither revelation is a total disappointment. We are, finally, our intention, and we will be known by the footprints those intentions leave. In this moment, what I can attend to is these boys.

  I hustle them up with a promise of hot chocolate in town, and we start our sideways scuttle down the steep hill and back to the car. Looking back as we leave, I can see that what is left at Olema is what was always there. I found no trace of our presence save for an old truck carburetor. I cannot conceive how such a flamboyant people—Emmett, Elsa, Sweet William, Moose, Gristle, Carla, J. P. Bryden, Billy Batman, and Sam—people so visible in the moment, can be invisible to history, can have left no indelible mark. This book, if it is anything, is my attempt at carving a petroglyph, at creating some record of the tribes of free people who passed through here, along with the now unseen sides of myself, into that invisible half of the smoky moon.

  Mill Valley, California/Gordes, France

  February 1997

  postscript—2009

  When Sleeping Where I Fall was published in 1998, I was three years shy of sixty. Sixty is the watershed birthday which forces even the most stubborn denier-of-death to acknowledge that, not being able to identify any 120-year-old people, “middle age” is pretty definitely over. At sixty, one is approaching, at best, the last third of one’s life; the cards have been dealt, and the future, in all likelihood, will mean playing the hand one holds. There will be no more draws or infusions of capital to back new plays. A man down to his last cards observes the game with intense concentration.

  Long ago, I had a dream concerning my future. I was traveling (in reality and the dream) with a group of fellows, in a truck caravan, in the hardscrabble country of New Mexico. We were living rough, visiting communes, attempting to stitch together an alternate economy based on trade. In the dream, we were bound together by beams of light connecting our navels. One of the group, a hyper-aggressive macho guy, was constantly challenging me to fight, getting in my face, smacking his fist into his open palm, demanding, “You ready to get it on? You ready to fight me?”

  In the illogical manner of dreams, I was suddenly standing at the edge of a basketball court inside a large gymnasium. Instead of the normal wooden surface, the floor was a pale, grey-green, ground glass. (Identical to the “blackboards” in my fourth grade classroom, where my beautiful Asian teacher, Mrs. Cella, wrote in charcoal). The glass floor was surrounded on all four sides by a narrow border of traditional blond flooring. The ground glass was incised with black lines forming two-by-two-inch squares, so that it resembled the board used in the Japanese game of GO, or a checkerboard where all the squares were the same color.

  Lying before me at the join of glass and wood were two small, differently shaped objects made of heavy black slate that I understood were to be use
d as playing pieces in a pending “game.” One was rectangular with rounded corners, about two inches by one inch, tapering from a thick center to thin edges. It resembled the leathery packets of stingray eggs one finds washed ashore on Atlantic beaches. The other was a traditional round Japanese GO stone, plump as a hard candy, but also with a sharp outer edge. Both were made of flawless black slate.

  Next to the stones was a pair of curious slippers, constructed of white cotton flannel. A stitched pocket enclosed the toes, but instead of a cupped area to enclose the heels, the flat cloth sole divided into two white cords. I understood that I was to fold up “the sole” around my heel and fasten the cords around the ankles. Standing beside me on the board were two mute assistants dressed entirely in tight-fitting black clothing. They communicated with me by gesture, and they indicated that the slippers were to be worn on the glass surface during play.

  At the far left-hand corner of the room, a pale and lovely Asian woman (resembling my former teacher) was kneeling in seiza (the traditional Japanese posture where the buttocks rest on the backs of the heels). She sat in perfect repose at the edge of the board and her meditative absorption was unbending. Her chasuble, sash, and mozzetta (a short cape worn in some Catholic ceremonies), were constructed of bright red silk. She wore a peaked mitre, the double-pointed hat worn on occasion by bishops and popes, but on hers, small, ivory skulls were attached to both sides ascending to the pointed peak. Severe bangs and black hair squared at her jawline, framing and highlighting her powdered white skin. I understood immediately that this concentrated, unapproachable woman could never be defeated. She was my death.

  Contrasted with her power, my noisy adversary (who I referred to as “The Hassler”) diminished in significance and disappeared from the dream. Though I had no idea how the board game was to be played, and though my eventual loss was preordained, I understood that the silent assistants were allies and that they were committed to helping me. Furthermore, I could see that it was a huge field of play and that patterns would take some time to become apparent. I intuited that if I were cautious and alert, I might extend my play for a long time. The dream ended as I placed one of my feet in a cotton slipper and dropped to one knee to fasten the ties around my ankle.

  Years later, I have by now played across sizable sections of the board, making my choices and mistakes and devising strategic gambits as best I could. Patterns and potential threats have clarified alongside my victories. My opponent remains unruffled, undiminished, and unmarked by time, while I am now lined and seamed. My eyebrows, if unattended, grow long and gnarly. I have liver spots on the backs of my hands, and if I’m not attentive, stray hairs will tuft in my ears, as they did in my grandfather’s. Women who once obliterated all thoughts save winning their favor, smile at me today, eyes twinkling through crow’s feet and, like me, they carry more heft in their mid-regions. My gay and fearless companions, those still alive, remind me of gnarled trees flaunting scars and age with equal dignity. It is my hope that my life has made me worthy to stand as tall in their estimation as they stand in mine. These are the observations and concerns of a man considering mortality. The signs of my diminution are unmistakable, but though the territory I command on the board is shrinking, I am, after many struggles, temporary victories, and defeats—and this is the point—still “in play.”

  It has been my custom for a long time to honor dead friends and family by placing their names on my altar on the anniversary of their passing—“bowing in” before meditating, and offering full sticks of the incense used in the Zen monastery where I began my Buddhist practice, thirty-three years ago. As I begin writing this postscript, in the first week of April, paradoxically a small, black-edged card rests on my altar, bearing the inscription:

  Emmett Grogan

  1942–1978

  Emmett died on April Fool’s Day and his presence is still so vivid, I am shocked to realize that I have not seen his chiseled, freckled face in thirty years. Without him, there would have been no book, for there would have been no life-altering playing-for-keeps with the Diggers and Free Family. There would probably have been no heroin or cocaine, less reckless testing of manhood, less stud-peacock swagger and jaunty bravado. Certainly there would have been less hilarity, magic, and surprise in my life had our trajectories not intersected in the rehearsal studio of the San Francisco Mime Troupe one memorable day in 1966. Our first encounter evolved into a four-mile walk-and-talk, culminating in a friendship that lasted until the end of his life, and memories of which continue in mine.

  Because he died twenty years before Sleeping Where I Fall was published, I never learned what Emmett thought of it. If ancient literature is to be believed, the pursuit of enduring honor and renown are eternal preoccupations of young men, and despite the Digger dedication to anonymity, we were not exempt from such concerns. I like to think he would have been gratified that his brief, luminous arc had been recorded by a witness who understood and loved him. Re-reading Emmett’s chapter, I’m satisfied that it catches something of his power and marks the tensions and contradictions of his personality. It feels true to me. However, there are a few other places in the book that do not.

  I labored diligently to ensure that what I attested was correct and not overly bound to my own ego. I conducted interviews with friends and family to clarify what I could remember and cross-indexed them with old journals and assiduously unraveled memories. Nonetheless, errors did intrude. I misidentified Marty Linhart as the subject of a story about a friend being sent to San Francisco for a vasectomy by a clique of feminists who had taken over Black Bear Commune one winter. Perhaps dreaming of pregnancy-free sex, they collected money and sent him south to get his tubes tied. I described “Marty” appearing “in a dress,” dazed after months in the remote woods, and how his urban brothers convinced him to use the money for his operation to get his teeth fixed. Twenty years later, revisiting the environs for an annual summer reunion, my son, about ten, was enchanted (so the story goes) by the beauty of Marty’s daughter of the same age.

  I used the story, still vivid in my memory, as a cautionary tale. I hoped that it might be charming and help people to pause and consider before making decisions with far-reaching consequences, and thought it made the point perfectly. It may have, but unfortunately, its real protagonist was not Marty. He wrote to me after the book appeared, deeply offended and denying he was the person I had identified. I believe him, and apologize to his heirs in perpetuity for making him an exemplar of wisdom and forbearance. Another actor played the part, and alas, I can no longer retrieve his rightful identity from the overfilled bin my brain has become.

  I make light of this unintentional error, but not of truthfulness. In every memoir, the facts are filtered through memory, and consequently I second the assertion of the person who observed that all biography contains elements of fiction.

  There were a few other mildly discomfiting responses from friends. Usually they did not involve disputes about what was true as much as embarrassment about its being revealed. The ex-junkie friend who plundered my daughter’s piggy bank and left an IOU was more mortified to read the story sober than I was indignant when it occurred. If you have friends who are drug addicts, such things happen. I was embarrassed to hear from my beloved cousin Arthur, a man I am as close to as a brother, that he could not finish the book. I asked him why, and he told me that when he arrived at the tale about my father forcing a driver off the road for cutting him off and then standing beside the man’s car, laying twenty-dollar bills, one after another, on his hood, and offering them to him if he would just get out of the car and take his beating, Arthur had closed the book in disgust. I asked him why again, and was shocked to learn that the story I had recounted from my own point of view had actually happened to him! He had been driving with my father that day, not me. I was disoriented. My cousin does not lie, will not exaggerate even to make a story more dramatic. This tale was such a part of family lore, I had heard it with mingled horror and relish so often, imagi
ned it so deeply, that the details had become resident in my mind as my own memories. I had simply appropriated my cousin’s experience without realizing it and owe both readers and him an apology.

  There was, however, one other blowback from the book, more deeply embarrassing and more life-altering. It shocked me, and much higher stakes were involved. After the book appeared, I received a letter of censure from two sisters correctly taking exception to the casual, one-line mention of their father, a close and intimate friend, as a drug buddy. The scale of our true relationship and his value to my life had been unintentionally whittled away as the book was cut from its original 800-page first draft to its current length. The women were deeply offended by the diminution of his identity. He was in fact a fine musician and deeply involved in the Beat and Counterculture and he should not have been characterized solely by his addiction to Methedrine. In their hurt and anger, they pointedly criticized my behavior with them during the years we lived together communally, when they were teenagers.