by Robert Stone
patent delusion on my part to take any of this personally. But I had not forgotten Highspire. We were all logrolling down the rapids of the nineteen sixties, a broil which, as often as it has been analyzed and derived, retains some of its ineffability. Anyone paying attention in those days re- members institutions that had seemed immune to public pressure appearing to give way at an angry cry from the street. Responsibil- ity was demanded from quarters that had hitherto answered to no one, “empowerments,” statutory or otherwise, of all kinds were de- fined and appeared about to be enforced. Nearly fatal crises of corpo- rate culture suddenly struck outfits such as IBM and the Detroit carmakers, threatening their dominance, and even their survival. The quaintness of Japanese industrial traditions all at once seemed less otherworldly. On the other hand, the annoying eccentricity of the high-tech start-ups in northern California offered competition that had a faintly extraterrestrial quality. And always, Vietnam, en- gendering between elements of the population hatred not seen in America for a hundred years. Could all these phenomena be some- how connected? Nothing personal. Organizational and technical changes in movies and television co- incided with or perhaps reflected social changes on the street. The many long-haired kids from all over, who had been showing up in San Francisco, appeared now in Los Angeles. California city streets were landscapes I never learned to read, but even to a New York per- son like myself, the similarities between Los Angeles and San Fran- cisco seemed superficial. For decades, wandering youths had been showing up in L.A. headed, as they thought, for Movieland. The infantile association of the place with fun was of course a commercial delusion. Money and prime green: remembering the sixties 185
sex and privilege were brandished. Maybe they were less securely en- joyed there than anywhere else in America. Bohemian style, or an imitation of it, was not much admired. People worked hard, hustled hard, and stole just as they did anywhere else, but the stakes seemed higher. And the place had a culture of predation all its own. It was not a city one went to to find friends, and to abandon precaution there was folly. The changes hit the longtime steady employees of the studio sys- tem harder than they did people at the top. Everything from experi- mental lighting to scatalogical language and “adult” themes annoyed the technicians and secretaries at the reorganizing studios. At the same time, liberation from the failing grip of the censors did not seem to be making pictures any better. In fact, it seemed in- creasingly permissible to trivialize on a more complex level, and to employ obviousness in treating stories whose point was their ambi- guity. A self-conscious, uneasy world became more so. I was having some anxiety about the transition of A Hall of Mirrors to film. I had my alibis early, and by God I’m sticking to them. 186 robert stone
FIFTEEN Janice and the children arrived at last, and in the summer of 1969 we left Hollywood to spend some time in Palo Alto. The revolution was in progress—there were spray-painted slogans on Dinkelspiel Auditorium and broken glass in the fountains. My closest friends seemed all in various ways involved with Maoism, as trade union lawyers, as therapists, and in other so- cially activist endeavors. No visible improvements seemed to be coming out of this, but it was good to see our friends again. Kesey had been to jail and was now living on the family farm in Oregon, still pondering cultural moves, while raising his
kids and pursuing the life of a dairy farmer, somewhat. Our main daily chore while visiting him up in Springfield was an activity known as moving the water. This consisted of carrying and recon- necting the irrigation pipes that made the grazing fields green for the dairy herd. Somehow we spun it into an all-day endeavor. One day a biker came up the road in a dusty uniform with earflaps and goggles like a time-traveling dispatch rider from the Marne. Open- ing one of his bulging saddlebags, he removed two tiny packets of heroin and presented them with martial éclat. Then he saluted, climbed back on his bike, and headed north. We passed some time snorting it. During that summer, while the Vietnam War was settling into its second or third stalemate, the first manned moonshot was scheduled to take place, followed by the first moonwalk. It was as though a desperate attempt to keep things positive was being directed from somewhere on high. At the same time, without any intention of reflecting activities on the moon, three of us set out on a walk across a piece of the earth. Peter ran a bookstore in Santa Cruz, Jim would one day be a judge when appointed by Jerry Brown, and I was a one-book novelist with a shaky future in the movies. Our objective was to walk from Big Sur on the coast south of Monterey inland across the Santa Cruz Mountains. We would go into the mountains at Big Sur State Park and cross the coast range to the Zen monastery at Tassajara Hot Springs. Checking into the park, we were told by the ranger that there were supposedly some panthers and bears in the park, but the only animals likely to give us trouble were the wild boars. Tassajara boars, they were called, and were descended, some said, from local wild pigs, feral Appalachian hogs, and boars imported from Siberia to improve the breed, back when the forest was owned by a British 188 robert stone
paper company and young executives posted out missed the pig sticking. “They’ll chew their way right up your leg if you get in their way,” one ranger said. It made a vivid picture. The ranger may have been chewing our leg, but there was nothing very amusing about what was coming in over the park’s police radio as we signed in at the west entrance. It was a description of two fugitives who were some- where in the park confines. “All officers alert campers and use caution,” the radio crackled. “Whereabouts thought to be in park’s north quadrant according to last sighting but present exact location undetermined. One of these individuals is a heavyset male in a lumber jacket with shoulder- length hair. He is known to be armed with a high-caliber rifle and probably a sidearm. The second individual is also known to be armed and has resisted officers, firing a weapon. The second one, slight, dark-haired, seems to be wearing a complete German uniform.” I guess it was the complete German uniform that got to us. Com- plete! Like this was one gung ho, regulation Nazi trooper! The rangers made no comment as this distressing broadcast came over the wire- less. Outside, the loveliest of northern California midmornings was in progress. Beyond the cypresses far below us the blue Pacific rolled. Our first camp was at the foot of the westernmost front of the Coast Range, near a narrow falls and a forking of the Big Sur River. It was a popular campsite with good water, roughly a day’s hike from Highway 1, and made a nice overnight. Beyond the falls, the redwood forest thinned out and gave way to sunbaked fields of tule and live oak, punctuated by granite boulders that centuries of earth- quakes had set rolling down from the sierra or beyond. They were the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle whose match might lie on the far side of the Continental Divide. prime green: remembering the sixties 189
The trail was dusty, and its muddied spots showed more hoof- prints than backpackers’ traces. Big, mean western jays squawked above anything that came along, arresting our attention and mount- ing regular reconnaissance dives to check our packs for edibles. The ground around the tangled live oak roots was covered with oak balls, the giant fungoid fruit that fell from among the trees’ tough prickly boughs. These oak balls were a staple of the wild boars’ diet, and where they had worked their way into the earth the pigs would dig them out with their tusks. The Tassajara boar was said to be sizable, but the distance between the gouges in the earth that marked work- ing range of their tusks bespoke animals larger than pigs should be. On this night of the moonwalk, the overnight campsites near the falls were nearly full, but there was nothing like wonderment or cel- ebration or bring the kids and so on. The prevailing mood seemed a little distressed, as though the pilgrims had gathered in protest against the expedition; there was plenty of protest available. The moon rose late, to mixed reactions along the river. There might have been a ragged cheer. There were definitely some groans and catcalls at the now globalized, industrialized, Americanized moon, once fair. People in whose personal plans the moon might once have played a role were probably upset. Others were outraged at anyone’s heckling
the moon. There were fights, marijuana smoke. It could make you think of statehood election night in the California goldfields, but no shots were fired. A wholesome-looking young programmer, who an hour before had been showing me his diver’s watch, now accused me of stealing it. He was very stubborn and would not go away; he also had the habit of resting a hand on his sheathed Dacor diver’s knife like a hot- headed courtier from Verona. Represented by counsel, our friend Jim, we had to insist to him that we felt unable to let him search our 190 robert stone
possessions or allow him to assault us. He cried with rage for his lost watch. Radios carried intermittent communications between the surface of the moon and Houston or somewhere. A network rappor- teur tried to coax the astronauts a little toward poetry to honor the historicity to which we were witness. An officer who had orbited earlier tried to help him out. “With your closer visual contact, Howard, she looks like a big bowl of plaster.” Some people found the astronaut’s diction sexist and anthro- pocentric. Later in the night the half sphere showed a ring, reflecting the ocean damp, maybe signaling its violation. If you jammed your face deep into your sleeping bag, you could almost hear the clink and rattle of the astronauts deploying their krypton tripods and gravity-adjusted calipers. We kept our heads down; we were afraid of what we might see—the flash of a logo or, just for a moment, the Goodyear blimp. Good night, moon. But many watched, I know, from that forest of redwoods and evergreen oaks, on what they call Piva Dome. Monks, pigs, infantile programmers, poets. The Freikorps Kalifornia Bruderschaft was watching, the Manson Family. They were all out there, I happen to know—all real, every bit as real as Sister Moon, if more transient. Was that the night that brought forth the line “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind”? Or was that another time? Jim and Peter and I discuss this sometimes looking back, as we do now. It has become our countermarch, our earthwalk. The next day we left the company of the river and began a series of climbs and descents to follow the trail inland. The topography of the overland route changes as the walker moves toward or away from the sea. The changes are predictable. In the valleys between ranges prime green: remembering the sixties 191
there are shadowy groves and redwoods, some of them watered with streams that run low or dry up in midsummer. In the deepest groves, where ferns carry the smell of a sunken river, there are mush- rooms so savagely menacing in their ghastly shades and shapes that you can sense the drive to eat them and challenge their poison dreams, and somehow elude their long slow introduction to death. Some of the most spectacular are supposed to be Amanita muscaria, the good mushrooms that the guides call “semipoisonous,” the psy- chedelics. There are certainly false amanitas and other killers, equally psychedelic and probably rich in awful insights. Cooking fires were restricted in the summer of ’69, the needles and manzanita so dry and bristling you could almost hear them crackle in the night. Neither we nor, I think, anyone else needed a tent that summer; the nights were cloudless like the days, prodigiously starry, some- times cold. We had taken to thinking of the sky beyond the tips of the pines as an industrial landscape; we awakened to the drone of jets leaving lacy starlit trails, the twinkling of satellites, all the ac- tion and rapine we could imagine on the moon. But sometimes the silence and enormousness of the night horizon made us feel we our- selves might have been in some quarter of the sky. Mosquitoes varied in size, savagery, persistence. One afternoon we arrived at the creek in late afternoon after an incredibly hot crossing of mesquite uplands. We stripped our backs, fell into the almost still creek, and nearly passed out. Within an hour we were being de- voured. This is not hyperbole and it did not involve mosquitoes. Beetles, your cute little ladybugs, covered us completely from our hair to our socks, and the fiendish things were biting us like marabunta ants. It hurt! We were blinded! It took us three-quarters of an hour to scrape them up and destroy them, and they left us with 192 robert stone
a foul rash. They’re nice when it’s just a few of them. Phloop, fly away home. But get them on top, in huge numbers, they’re not so nice anymore. Biological nature, ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny. Or as William Burroughs used to say: “Insect laughter. Disgust you to see it.” The topography of the coastal mountains repeated itself, chang- ing with the closeness and direction of the ocean and the shifting light of day. In the morning we would break camp and start up the trail through the redwoods. The big evergreens covered the seaboard slopes. As we climbed the lower ridges, there would be meadows and more tule grass, and the live oaks where the boars liked to feed. It grew hot with midday and you would miss the shade but still in- hale the fragrance of hot pine from the outboard canyons. Around the rocky canyons overhead, raptors rode the updrafts. We were on the second day out, happy to have seen no fellow hu- mans. It’s hard not to recall that observation about the pleasing prospects and only man being vile. All at once a troop of enormous pigs came galloping across the far margin of a meadow headed toward us on our side of a slow stream. They came fast, looking like cavalry- men following a guidon. We stopped, and a minute later they did. As though at a command, to a silent trumpet and the flourish of invisi- ble banners, they crossed the stream, splashing, it seemed in columns. In long, deep strides they charged—truly charged—across. A rear guard covered the retreat and fell in behind, and they were gone. The mountaintops, above the shore-facing redwoods on the west slopes and the baked grass and live oaks inland, were treeless except for shrubs, manzanita, and creosote. The going was hard in the ab- sence of shade, and the rocks on the trail were favored in the after- noon by rattlesnakes. We thought about the snakes a lot but never saw or heard one. prime green: remembering the sixties 193
On our third day out we came to the edge of the monastery gar- den. We made ourselves known and went to the Tassajara stream to take our boots off and cool our blistered cankered feet. The stream was intermittently warmed by hot springs and offered any tempera- ture a bather required, from alpine ice to near boiling. Tame trout in the moderate reaches provided restorative nibbling. It was possible to arise at four and sit zazen for the predawn hours. Every day we resolved to do it. It would be pretty to say we did. After a few days Janice picked us up at the end of the dirt road that came up from the Monterey Valley. Descending the valley’s corkscrew road we passed the gilded scions of old San Francisco money, cowboys and cowgirls, hunting boar from the saddle in the golden late afternoon. Servants in white toques piled logs and mesquite for the chuckwagon fires. Scraped gutted boars were hung close by. In those days we knew how oak-fed, fresh, mesquite- smoked boar tasted and made you feel. Like gold honey, like caress- ing cool flesh in warm silk, the smoky turns of love’s canyons, youth and wine. Was it really that good? One of Dante’s condemned has a line about remembering in sorrow the days of joy, the worst, he says, of punishments. I no longer remember the taste of slaughtered boar, only recall, now and then, the wood smoke. The better for me. After a week or so the moon looked the way it always had, and took the same shapes, and we hardly noticed it. And we were back in Hollywood, where you could have any kind of moon, indoor or out- door, you desired. That summer of the moonwalk, the estrangement of Los Angeles from itself continued. Locals complained about all the kids. The boulevards were crowded with young panhandlers. There were hundreds of hitchhikers. “Where are they going?” was 194 robert stone
the jokey question. It was puzzling, because they did seem to disap- pear about where the action ended on the east–west streets. In San Francisco, when the first hippie kids started showing up in the early sixties, local people asked each other, “What do they want here?” It was something of a disingenuous question. San Franciscans knew their city was attractive. Veterans of the Second World War who’d shipped in and out of its port complex re- membered San Francisco with fondness and often wanted to get back. There were many ways in which San Francisco was plainly at- tractive to the young, and the new arrivals represented many sorts. There was the eternal migration of kids from the country looking for a big city. There were also many urban y
oung, not in search of the cosmopolitan but tired of the slog of New York, which in the sixties was getting increasingly crime-ridden and ugly. San Francisco could seem exotic and certainly somewhat more easygoing. I remember two elderly tourists from New York standing in Union Square, look- ing about them and saying: “What well-dressed people!” Seems strange now. Of course there had been Kerouac’s On the Road. San Francisco also had a reputation for left-wing politics, or at least for tolerating it. The self-satisfied question about what all the migrants wanted re- flected fear and irritation, but also the sophisticate’s experience that no city could provide the kind of empty transcendence the newly ar- riving youngsters seemed to be pursuing. San Francisco was just a city, soon to be the third largest in California. “Where are they going?” was the Angelenos’ question about the young thumbing rabble. No one asked, “What do they want here?” Everyone in the world knew the answer to that. Young girls were coming to be “movie stars,” in fact to be prostitutes. The question about their street destination was already an off-color joke. Boys prime green: remembering the sixties 195
were coming to be some kind of “cooler” people, in significant num- bers to be petty criminals, or to escape the rap sheets in their home- towns. Like, wasn’t everything you did in Los Angeles like doing it in the movies, or being a character in a rock song? Then there was the lure of sex, surely the biggest illusion of all, since it had long ago been rationed, arbitraged, and factored in L.A., as everything else would one day be. As expected, like bugs around an electric appliance, the young hopefuls clustered as near to whatever centers they associated with movies, television, and music as they could. As in San Francisco, they learned that they could curry favor with well-off locals by ap- pearing to assume some political attitude or dimension. Protest. The shameless could flaunt their poverty as virtue, like antinomian fri- ars. Not surprisingly, the spirits of the Santa Cruz Mountains were drifting down on the marine layer to contribute their own mystic spookery. As the filming of A Hall of Mirrors (to be released under the title WUSA) proceeded, what looked like an alien presence in Hollywood increased. The technicians, the teamsters and grips at the major stu- dios, arrived at work with horror stories about the kids who had ap- peared on Sunset. They were not like the beatniks down in Venice who knew their place. These kids were dirty, they said, the girls and boys were hustlers, sold drugs. I had no way to judge to what degree these stories were true. Friends of mine would show up in L.A. from time to time and I would give them my version of a studio tour. This always included sullen looks from the film crews. I had an inner office on the Paramount lot, and an outer office with a secretary. The phone rarely rang. When it did, the secretary would pick up and answer, “Mr. Robert Stone’s office.” Usually she would be replied to with a wall of stoned giggles and a hang-up. 196 robert stone
