Another Little Piece of My Heart

by Richard Goldstein

  Freed from the standards of scholarship, he dispensed pronouncements with no attempt to prove them. For example, he proffered LSD as a cure for homosexuality. I tried to imagine Allen Ginsberg dosed straight, or Tennessee Williams newly enlightened and rewriting Stanley Kowalski as a rock star with fire spurting from his headdress. I’m going on about this because it was so emblematic of the unraveling, the dance of expectation and ecstasy, the indifference to the consequences of our schemes. And there were consequences, believe me.

  On acid the magic of infancy returns in HD. Colors prismatize, sounds resonate with overtones, the shapes and patterns that allow us to function become suggestive. Something like driving is impossible, at least on planet Earth. (I understood that very well, having survived a road trip with Dennis Wilson tripping at the wheel.) Having children, however, is something LSD does not impede, and lots of stoners did. Childhood had a special status in hippie culture. It was the state of innocent wonder to which everyone longed to return. I never knew anyone who fed their babies LSD, despite many rumors to that effect. It was commonly believed that the benefits of the drug came naturally to kids. They were vectors of love, and a great deal of affection was showered on them. These were not the cleanest girls and boys, but they were less unruly than you might think, considering that they ran around freely and were clearly the center of attention. I know a number of people—some quite famous now—who grew up in such households. They’ve got their resentments (what kid doesn’t), but they’re very close to their parents.

  However, raising children requires skills that tripping is likely to suspend, such as keeping an eye on the little ones. That was a lesson Leary and his largely childless cohort didn’t think to teach, and this lapse led to some devastating incidents. One of them involved a three-year-old boy named Godo. He’d been described in Life magazine as “the most beautiful child in creation, with pure blond hair to his shoulders, pudgy little cheeks and blue eyes that are steady and make you want to weep.” In the photo that ran with this piece, Godo is posing with his father, Vito, an artist and dancer who was a star of the L.A. freak scene. Bohemians there have always attracted the wrong kind of attention—think beatnik movies set in Venice—and in 1966, Vito was a regular on the kind of TV show where the host berates his dissident guests. He was also a darling of skin mags with pretensions to interests higher than flesh. “A name that represents nonconformity, artistic freedom, originality,” one journal of ass and the arts gushed about him. “One of the most diversified sculptors the world has ever known.” (I don’t think any museum agreed.)

  Godo was raised to expect the spotlight, and his exploits only added to his legend. It was said that if the police showed up at his parents’ place, a bead-curtained loft that looked a lot like the set of a beatnik movie, this magic child would answer the door. “Fuck off, cop,” he’d snarl, and the officers would leave. I believed those stories because I knew how indifferent most cops and city bureaucrats were to the lives of hippies. As a result, no one inspected Vito’s loft for safety hazards. At some point a trap door on the roof gave way, and Godo fell through.

  A few months afterward, I was in L.A. to cover a hippie riot, something I regarded as inevitable, though I didn’t think it would happen on the Sunset Strip. I associated that boulevard with delta-wing diners and relentless glare. But its disposable identity made the Strip a perfect gathering place for kids—not the Laurel Canyon crowd, but flotsam from the endless suburbs, who looked like neon butterflies. They staked their claim to turf around a club called Pandora’s Box. By the time the police moved in to clear them, there were maybe a thousand longhairs hanging out on the pavement. The confrontation that followed wasn’t violent by the standards of, say, the Watts riot, but it was bloodier than anything these strays had seen. Night after night of protest followed. A song by Buffalo Springfield summed up the mood of darkening paranoia.

  It starts when you’re always afraid

  Step out of line, the man come and take you away.

  Suddenly, the hippies were being lumped together with rampaging blacks in a city gripped by anxiety. It wasn’t just the fear that another race riot was imminent and that this time a dusky mob would surge out of the ghettos and torch West Hollywood. There were huge antiwar demos, one of which, along the Avenue of the Stars, had been broken up by club-swinging police, leaving hundreds injured. Maintaining order on the streets was an obsession. Long-haired loiterers were busted on a charge that had been used for vagrants strolling in pricey districts. It was called “suspicion.” (The courts would later deem it unconstitutional.) L.A. cops, in those days, were the closest America got to the spirit of a Leni Riefenstahl movie: leather-clad storm troopers on motorcycles, impassive behind wraparound shades. “Whip-dick” was their favorite word for hippies, and bashing these kids was a sport for them. No one in charge intervened.

  During a lull in the protests I contacted Vito. He was eager to be interviewed, which struck me as odd, since I thought he’d want to be left alone with his grief. I showed up at his loft feeling like an intruder, but he didn’t look like he was in mourning. We Jews sit on crates for seven days after someone in the family dies, and we say the kaddish for eleven months. Vito was ebullient. He seemed more like a press agent than a bereaved parent, and he had a lot of Godo memorabilia to show me. Nothing was off-limits, not even his most painful recollection of the child. He told me about the last time he’d seen Godo, lying on a metal hospital table, strapped down and spread-eagled, a towel covering the hole in his head, his fists clenched. “Help me!” Godo cried. An hour later, he was dead.

  Why was the child strapped down to a table; why wasn’t a tracheotomy performed; why was the trap door on the roof left to rust? These were plausible questions, but they came with delusions of persecution, as if some diabolic force had failed to treat Godo or fix the door. Vito saw himself as the victim of a fascist conspiracy to demonize the freaks by framing him. This rap went beyond the anguish of a parent dealing with guilt. I decided that he was one of those people—I’d run into many—whose identity hinges on playing to the media. He was already producing the next sensation, another magic child. That’s why he was so glad to see me; he wanted the world to know the auspicious news. His eyes shining, he pointed to his wife’s belly. “My baby is already dancing in her stomach,” he said with a delight that spoke of radical detachment from the tragedy in his midst. I was used to the rote optimism that passed for hippie style, but this went far beyond the usual buoyancy. It struck me as a perfect example of the attitude I saw all around me, a desperate clinging to joy in the face of looming chaos.

  I worried about turning into Joan Didion, whose literary career consisted of compiling grotesque examples of the unraveling of reason, so that sensible readers could be horrified and amused by it all. I hated her perspective because it came from far above and outside the counterculture. She had the symptoms right, but not the causes. She saw the widening gyre, but not its axis. In order to understand why people behaved as they did you had to experience it on the ground, and that was where I drew my conclusions from.

  Many kids around me thought we were entering a revolutionary situation. I agreed, up to a point. But it seemed to me that this was different from the insurrections of the past and the uprisings in what was then called the Third World. Our revolution was sparked by promo and hype as much as ideology. This combination had a huge influence on how people processed the circumstances around them. It heightened feelings of personal power and diminished the ability to make judgments that were urgent and necessary. It occurred to me that advertising had something in common with acid: they both distorted the relationship between impulse and reality, novelty and change. For hippies whose rebellion wasn’t grounded in concrete politics, this confusion was profound. Moving among them felt like being in the middle of a commercial for a future that would never exist outside of merchandising. Everything is beautiful in its own way. Banal ballads are actually wise. Life is transient and transferable. Of all the
gauzy rock songs that were called progressive, the one that best captured the tenor of the late sixties didn’t appear until 1977. I can still recall its melancholy refrain: “All we are is dust in the wind.”

  I didn’t believe that. We weren’t dust in the wind; we only had dust in our eyes. And yet … and yet. I couldn’t forget the kids I’d met in the Haight, the softness in their faces, unencumbered by the ambition that seethed within me; how deeply they moved me and how much I wanted to protect them. What would happen to these kids once the dust hit the fan?

  Groucho Marxism

  I’m not saying there was no great music after the Summer of Love. The encroaching sense of danger was a perfect setting for rock, and I found a lot to get excited about: John Lennon’s wicked ruminations, the wry romanticism of Joni Mitchell (at her best when she wasn’t trying to be anthemic), John Fogerty’s neo-Americana. His song “Bad Moon Rising,” with its nod to horror films, vividly depicts the ominous mood of 1968:

  Don’t go ’round tonight

  It’s bound to take your life

  I still wrote about music, but now it was only part of my beat. The real action in youth culture was in the streets. The hippie riots on Sunset Strip were soon replicated in other cities as nomadic tribes of freaks met the forces of law, order, and real estate development. Even Toronto, that bastion of Canadian sanity, experienced a nasty crackdown. Only the quiet contempt that passes for tolerance in New York kept the local hippies from receiving the same treatment (for the moment). But the greatest threat to their safety came from civilians who were out for pussy or prey. Hippie chicks, as they were already called, became easy pickings, and rape was a major problem for kids living on the street. So were hard drugs like speed and heroin, as well as the sinister presence of the Hell’s Angels. In those days, their lifestyle was less about freedom than authority. For me, biker brutality would be embodied by the infamous Altamont concert of 1969, when the Angels who had been hired to provide security stabbed an acid-addled fan to death. The incident occurred just below the stage as the Rolling Stones performed, and it was captured on film. You can see the look on Mick Jagger’s face as he watches the murder after the fact, on an editing console. There’s a shock of … is that recognition? For a moment he looks like he’s pondering his role in the enveloping madness. Then he recovers his composure—ever the pro.

  I wasn’t surprised by this turn of events. The insulation of urban hippies prevented them from seeing their privileged position in neighborhoods where poverty was endemic. Spiritual or not, these kids were targets for the anger that welled up in residents who had no choice about where they lived. The police had a similar attitude, and all that was necessary for them to exercise it was tacit permission from their commanders. Soon everyone I knew had a friend who’d been roughed up by cops or ripped off by thugs. It was as if the blood of hippies was being offered to the entire society as an outlet for its anxieties. The hippies reacted to their new role by refusing to be sacrificed. Though passive resistance was the strategy of choice, it became hard to maintain once the brutality landed on them from all sides. Enlightenment was proving insufficient to resolve the conflict between the hip and straight worlds. Now it was time to put up a fight.

  A similar shift went on in the black community, where the pacifist teachings of Martin Luther King had been supplanted by the bark of Black Power. The ideological rift between the old militance and the new was clear, but the difference in sensibility seemed just as interesting to me. This wasn’t only a new attitude toward violence; it was a new style that owed as much to the counterculture as it did to Malcolm X. Afros and dashikis were a corollary to long hair and tie-dyes, with a different meaning, certainly, but serving the same purpose of creating a group identity. Meanwhile, the counterculture borrowed many of its slogans and much of its slang from blacks. These two groups moved in separate spaces, but their consciousness crossed over. As a result, the Aquarian Age, if it ever existed apart from the musical Hair, gave way to a white version of Black Power—the image of a hippie with a Molotov cocktail.

  A year earlier, the kids I wrote about were “too busy grooving to put anybody down,” as the Monkees warbled. Now they saw themselves as part of a global struggle. Someone borrowed a page from the Vietcong playbook and called 1968 “the year of the heroic guerrilla.” The term applied not just to Third-World revolutionaries and insurrectionary blacks but also to students resisting the war, and even to hippies. It wasn’t a vanity. People who are subject to the same treatment soon conceive of themselves as a class, and the perception widely held was that everyone who wasn’t white and straight (i.e., normal) faced the same enemy, embodied in the cop with a club. The ability to identify one’s oppression with a much larger situation was as pretentious as anything else in youth culture, but it was also a real expression of the empathy with the underdog that many young people felt. The result was a new political formation that went by an amorphous but inclusive name: the Movement. I was glad to see this fusion take shape, and I wondered what role rock would play in it. The answer was blowing in the tear gas.

  I don’t want to give the impression that no one believed in the pacifist hippie vision. One of them was Don McNeill, my best friend at the Voice. We were pretty much the same age, and we formed a kind of triumvirate with another young writer, a disillusioned West Point cadet named Lucian Truscott IV. He’d come to the Voice after writing a series of letters with a distinctly conservative slant. Naturally he was invited to the paper’s Christmas party, and he showed up in a full-dress uniform and sandals. Lucian was the scion of an illustrious military family—the only person I’d ever met with a number in his name—but he soon broke with his legacy (you can find the details online; they’re worth checking out), and he fit right in at the Voice. He was hard-drinking but deeply caring, the perfect foil for Don, with whom he immediately bonded. Both of us saw Don as a model of the alternative-press ideal: he lived what he wrote about.

  The hustle didn’t exist for Don, which made him an unlikely New Yorker. In fact, he’d been raised in Alaska, the son of a journalist, and he inherited the itch to report, along with a set of values that drew him to the counterculture. Why he came to the hardest place for such a project to succeed, instead of joining the trek to San Francisco, I’ll never understand. But he was the Voice’s correspondent in the hippie trenches—literally, since he was homeless. Once in a while he took a room at a midtown hotel, but many nights he relied on a bed in an unused upper floor of the office, or he moved among the crash pads of the East Village. One of the most distinctive things about the Voice was its willingness to hire people who were partisans of the subjects they wrote about. I felt that way about rock, at least at the start, and Don was just as dedicated to the hippie scene. Nearly every week he filed a piece about something I hadn’t noticed, radical experiments in communal living and the kind of activism that would never reach the desks of journalists busy covering the more colorful manifestations of the mess.

  Don managed to be both accurate and sympathetic to the people he wrote about. His attitude was a striking contrast to my fretful ambivalence. It rekindled the sentiments I’d felt in the Haight and repressed on the pavement of Manhattan. I suppose he signified upward mobility to me—he was so securely middle-class that he could afford to be indigent. In any case, we saw the struggle very differently. He believed in consciousness; I believed in fighting back.

  The detachment I was so proud of, the mark of my rationality in the face of mental goo, was beginning to seem like the greatest of all illusions. There was no way to justify remaining outside the battle. The draft was an omnipresent threat, the war a patent danger to everything I stood for. I hated the lies that rationalized it, and the pretense of reason that masked a blind madness. Like millions of people, I was appalled by the photos of naked children fleeing from a wall of burning napalm; the Zippo lighters setting fire to peasant huts; the bodies coming home, which the military hadn’t yet learned to hide. It was enraging and frightening to
behold. Worse still for someone with my politics, the war was being prosecuted by the most progressive president since FDR, the man who’d led the drive to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 despite his prediction that the Democrats would lose the South as a result. (They eventually did.) That contradiction stoked my fury. Liberalism, the religion of my youth, was now a nice word for hypocrisy. The president had a crack in his moral center, and we, the young, had a duty—to each other, if not history—to drive a sword through it.

  My shift from observer to participant in the uprising that came to be called the Revolution was a long and perilous process. Don McNeill played an important part in it. He was the reporter I most wanted to be. Craft and empathy were conjoined in his work; he witnessed and he empathized. His politics were in his limpid eyes. Though he never sported bell-bottoms and beads, he had a certain style in the only clothing he wore, a leather jacket, dark pullover, and jeans. His long hair brushed against the press card dangling around his neck, and he was skinny the way people who don’t think much about eating are. I didn’t think of him as a sex object. Though he was certainly my type, he didn’t project an erotic aura. But I often found myself offering him a sandwich or a donut. I think it was my way of hovering over him.