Another Little Piece of My Heart

by Richard Goldstein

  Nothing in my experience had dislodged the feeling that it was risky to cherish people. The only way I could handle it was to argue with those I cared for, as I did with Don, incessantly. We had running debates about the fate of hippie culture and the proper strategy of resistance to fascism—that word was on everyone’s lips. He seemed so out of touch with what was really “going down,” yet I longed to believe that he was right. After all, I’d come of age in the civil rights movement. I wanted us to overcome. But the unrest fostered rage where hope should have been—and I was bursting with it.

  Some of the fury was righteous, some compensatory. I was pissed at the government for saddling my generation with a wicked war. But I was also angry about being forced to reveal my homosexual feelings in order to avoid the draft, thereby acknowledging, if only to the army doctors, something that still shamed me. One of my greatest satisfactions is that no young person today will experience the ordeal of “queering out” of the military. Though I didn’t realize it at the time, this act of desperation seared itself into my personality. In the project where I grew up, the word faggot had a double meaning, as it does in many working-class communities; it was what you called a queer, but also a weakling—and that’s what I was in the eyes of the army. I wasn’t good enough to be a soldier. At first I felt immense relief. I came home after my draft-board physical and fell into an exhausted sleep. But I had the most unlikely dream. I was in Vietnam, fighting alongside the other guys, dodging bullets and scurrying under barbed wire, having a hell of a time. This was a dream of belonging, not combat, but I woke up horrified.

  The dream revealed that I was psyched for warfare. The only problem was finding the right enemy. Like most of my friends I thought Ho Chi Minh was cool, a poet who had once lived in Harlem and worked in a Chinese restaurant. How could I hate someone who looked like my image of an Asian sage? Better to strike out against the system whose might was at the core of this unjust war, of poisonous coups by the CIA, of FBI provocateurs planted in groups that were dedicated to change. This was the nation we had come to call AmeriKKKa.

  The same passions that once drew me to rock, the lust for ecstasy and the need to escape from myself, now fed a fascination with the Revolution. I was on my way to becoming what the Rolling Stones called, somewhat derisively, a “street fighting man.” (I didn’t appreciate Mick Jagger’s irony—after all, he wasn’t being drafted.) The new counterculture of resistance was immensely attractive. It summoned me. And what it said was: Don’t hustle, don’t seethe, don’t be-here-now. Act.

  By the end of the decade I would be faced with situations that required me to make a choice between reporting what I knew and hiding salient facts. Sometimes I chose to do the latter because telling the truth would have blown the cover of activists accused of crimes, people whose safety I valued more than the rules I’d learned in j-school. It wasn’t an easy decision—I took the ethics of reporting very seriously—but hopefully this chapter will explain why I acted as I did. I witnessed the violent reaction of the authorities firsthand, and it destroyed my confidence in American justice. I saw black defendants mistreated in courtrooms, and it made racism feel concrete and systematic. I watched young people who were in every sense like me—my long-haired peers—clubbed before my eyes, and it made the police seem as irrational as the men conducting the war in Vietnam; in fact, their brutality felt like part of the war, and it unleashed the solider within me.

  Still, I carried a press card, and that gave me immunity. All I had to do was show my credentials and the cops would let me pass or swing their clubs at someone else. This was a profoundly guilt-inducing privilege, but it also allowed me to observe the mayhem without feeling personally at risk. I could vent my emotions safely, unlike the protesters, and I loved running alongside them as they went wild in the streets. My political commitment was real, but so was the rush I experienced, a surge of adrenaline and a sense of transcendence that I’d only felt from music. I began to transfer my awe from rock stars to radicals.

  I admired their stringent thinking, especially after the mushy logic of the hippies. I saw their certainty as sexy in a completely different way. The Movement’s leadership was pretty much a fellowship, and, whatever the limitations of such an arrangement, hanging out with these guys felt like I was finally part of the combat unit that the army had declared me unfit to join. Of course, we warriors were committed to nonviolence—at least at first—but our idea of passive resistance didn’t involve joining hands and singing hymns. Peacefulness was a tactic, not an inviolate principle. We were prepared to be as violent as we had to be, no more, but no less. Our major inspiration was Malcolm X’s admonition “By any means necessary.” I never thought that, when he excoriated white people, he meant me. I saw him as a big brother, and I think that’s how many white activists felt about the black militants who maintained a distant but potent alliance with the antiwar movement. They were a manly example to nerds like us. The counterculture had transformed dorkiness into freakiness, which was a good thing, but adapting the Black Power attitude meant we could also do battle, and that felt very good indeed.

  I stopped thinking about hippies and their plan to save the world by expanding consciousness. Only action in the streets could accomplish that. I decided that pacifism was the essence of bourgeois spirituality in soft times. But the times weren’t soft for millions of people in the Third World; nor for U.S. soldiers in peril and the people they killed by the thousands, the ten thousands, the hundred thousands. Not for the wretched of the earth, including Newark and Watts. Yet even as I felt drawn to the earthly delights of insurrection, one thing about the hippie spiel stuck with me. It had to do with giving myself in sex.

  That was difficult for a twenty-four-year-old with a narcissistic personality. At first I had to force myself to concentrate on pleasuring women. The need to come pounded within me like Keith Moon’s drums, and it was hard to hold back. But the real difficulty was focusing emotionally on the person beside me. It felt perilous in a way that the particulars of sex didn’t. It wasn’t just a matter of muff diving. I liked the smell and feeling of a clitoris on my tongue, but to really consider a woman’s gratification meant daring to experience the undertones I wanted to deny. Was there a relationship between these feelings and the mild buzz I had when holding my mother’s hand to help her across the street? (She was on the way to becoming lame and blind.) Had she experienced waves of ecstasy while holding me as a baby? I was only wading in the shallows of these emotions, but once I allowed them to register they flowed through me, heightening my pleasure. The bliss of connection rivaled the joy of rock. As a result I had a lot more sex, and not just with my wife. (What else can you do on a waterbed at midnight?). But with Judith it was special. When my delayed climax finally erupted, I would shake wildly in a head-to-toe spasm. I began to think of this as the mother load.

  Then I would leap out of bed and race to the fridge, because suddenly I was hungry. I would sit at the table, spooning something sweet and creamy into my mouth, letting it lull me into forgetting the intensity. Something always stopped me from keeping that feeling in mind, which was probably why it was easy to transfer my sexual affections. There was a barrier to intimacy that I couldn’t surmount or even detect. In other words, I had room in my life for the Revolution. And by now it merited a capital R.

  Don McNeill was changing, at least in his affect. He often looked grim, and his responses to my arguments seemed less confident. He fretted over the people he wrote about, how easy it was for them to shift from pacifism to respect for righteous violence. His uneasiness deepened my melancholy. It was a poignant reminder of the unraveling I’d observed for the better part of a year, which had swept up even die-hard hippies. Every incident of police brutality, every kid in a tie-dye with a bloody head, was a shot to the heart of love. The communes were ripe for organizing, and a new group arose within the Movement to accommodate that possibility, a cadre of media-savvy freaks who called themselves the Youth International Party, a
ka the Yippies.

  From the start, the New Left distinguished itself from the old one by incorporating rituals of theatrical disruption. We didn’t just march with banners and raised fists; we wiggled and whooped, shouted nonsense slogans, and pulled pranks that revealed the contradictions of power. Play was the key—it was part of the ideology of childishness that had been so important to the hippies and still was to us. But it also reflected the surrealist tradition, which I was familiar with from my time in the cultural underground. I watched the Yippie leader Jerry Rubin create a Dada event by showing up at a congressional hearing in a Revolutionary War uniform. A prior generation of radicals had been hounded by this same committee, and many of them showed great dignity under immense pressure. But Rubin’s antics—at the witness table, he blew bubbles with his gum—completely degraded the proceedings. I have a vivid memory of him running giddily through the corridors outside the hearing room as stunned office workers peered.

  The media lapped up these antics, especially when other Yippie leaders wore shirts made from American flags. Today flag neckties are the height of patriotic fashion for right-wing pols, but in those days such displays were considered defacement, and they were a crime. This created a perfect opening for the most creative radical activist of the sixties. He often appeared in a flag shirt; in fact, he was arrested for wearing one. “I only regret,” he said after his trial, “that I have but one shirt to give to my country.” His name was Abbie Hoffman.

  With his mane of curly hair (sometimes called a Jewfro), his thick and crooked nose, which had been broken a number of times by the police, and his streetwise Boston accent, he was the face of revolutionary action for my kind. It was Abbie who thought of sneaking onto the balcony of the New York Stock Exchange and tossing a barrage of dollar bills onto the floor. He hadn’t devised such strategies from the Dada playbook, but from a close reading of McLuhan—the old pundit was good for something after all. Abbie was blunt about his intention to use television as a tool of subversion. Though he lacked the cool demeanor that McLuhan regarded as optimal for the new medium, he had a quicksilver tongue and a folksy persona that played great on camera. Watching him on a chat show was like seeing a political version of that Jewish funny-man type known as the tummler. But Abbie had honed his skills as a civil rights activist in the South. He’d been arrested dozens of times and menaced by police dogs. There’s a Richard Avedon photo of him that shows the full impact of these experiences on his face. He was wizened, intrepid, and feisty, even in his writing. Few characters in literature are as true to their author’s lifestyle as the one he created in his memoir Revolution For the Hell of It and its brazenly titled sequel, Steal This Book. The other leaders of the youth movement were either serious militants or jesters like Rubin. Abbie was a guerrilla clown, and he presented a new model for the revolutionary.

  I met him on Fire Island, my favorite retreat from the streets. There, I swam nude, ate fish fresh from the sea, and hung out with people who were mellow in a way they couldn’t be in the city. Cars weren’t allowed on Fire Island, so it was easy to forget the tumult. My adrenal glands were on holiday—until I met a firebrand black feminist named Flo Kennedy. I remember her best for introducing me to the phrase “lateral oppression,” which described the practice of minorities attacking each other. She also introduced me to her weekend guest, whom I recognized from the pictures I’d seen of him in action. At the moment I badly needed Abbie’s help.

  I had left my dog in the small cabin where I was staying. The dog was large and easily agitated; I’d bought him from a prior owner who had abused him. The vet called him a “fear biter.” (I would often apply this term to cops.) When I returned to the cabin after an afternoon at the beach I realized that I’d forgotten to take my keys. The dog was locked inside. Since I was afraid of heights—a lifelong phobia—I wasn’t about to climb up to the window and lower myself inside. I mentioned this to Abbie, who agreed to do the job. I told him he was crazy, but the look on face said, Don’t tell me about vicious dogs; I’ve seen ’em, smelled ’em, wiped their drool off my pants. He hoisted himself to the window and disappeared. I expected to hear screaming, but instead the door opened and he stood there, holding the docile doggie by the collar. It was a fear biter, but Abbie was unafraid.

  The Yippies—not to be confused with yuppies or any cohort of new money that calls itself hip and vibrant—the Yippies were, well, I never really knew what they were, except that they smoked dope, watched a lot of TV, and plotted the overthrow of the government. Over the next year, I got to know Abbie and his wife, Anita, quite well. I would stop by their apartment on St. Mark’s Place from time to time, and through them I got to meet other radical leaders including Jerry Rubin (who later became a stockbroker and marketeer) and Tom Hayden (sexy despite his terminal earnestness; I saw what Jane Fonda would see in him). These activists were among the defendants who came to be known as the Chicago Seven. They were tried on charges of conspiring to start the riot that sullied the Democratic Party convention in 1968. Because I had witnessed several meetings of these alleged plotters—I’d earned their trust as a journalist—I was summoned to testify at their trial. That subpoena is one of the few artifacts from my youth that I held on to, and I still regard it as a mark of pride. To my regret I never got called to the witness stand, but even without my help all the defendants were acquitted of the conspiracy charges. Only Abbie spent time in jail. He’d taunted the bemused judge, a hack named Julius Hoffman, even scolding him for having the same last name. (He called it a shonder fur de goyim, a shame in front of Gentiles.) Finally the judge had enough. As Abbie was carted off for contempt of court, I heard him shout to his wife, “Water the plants!”

  One member of the Chicago Seven suffered a special fate. Bobby Seale, a founder of the Black Panthers, was part of the coalition that had led the protest at the convention. Like several of his white codefendants, Seale was verbally disruptive at the trial, but unlike them he was chained to a chair and finally gagged. I would see several black men receive this treatment in court—and worse. I was present at a hearing for George Jackson, a felon who had written an eloquent memoir called Soledad Brother. I won’t go into the contention of prison officials that Jackson was violent toward his guards; such things were often acts of self-defense. But at this hearing he was shackled to a chair. Suddenly the lights went out. Everyone hit the floor, and I heard the sounds of a scuffle. When the lights came on again, Jackson was bloody; he’d been beaten by guards. The official explanation was that he planned to escape, but it would have been impossible in the heavily secured courtroom. Still, there had been several attempts to spring him, including one by his younger brother that turned violent. In the ensuing shootout, a judge who had been taken hostage was killed, along with his abductors. It was very complicated, but not if you were sitting, as I was, near George Jackson’s mother. I saw the look on her face as her son emerged from the darkness, helpless and bleeding.

  Images like that were seared into my mind—black men muzzled and chained while a white judge, white guards, and nearly always a white jury proceeded blithely with the proceedings. Perhaps I should have considered whether it was necessary to restrain men who were, in some cases, capable of violence. But no one raised on news photos of lynchings could have assimilated these sights. They convinced me that I was living in a racist state where black men were the objects of fear and loathing. The evidence was manacled before me. And my own freedom to behave as badly as I pleased only added to my rage.

  Meanwhile, back at the ranch of New Journalism, I was about to lose the last of my literary heroes. The celebratory tone of Tom Wolfe’s work had turned acidic, and he no longer wrote about the zany individualists who created the style of the sixties. Now his dominant subject was the Manhattan cultural establishment, and he skewered its pretensions in gleeful detail. I relished his exposé of the New Yorker, in which he described the hothouse environment around its editor, William Shawn. My friend Ellen Willis, a pioneering feminist a
nd the first significant woman rock critic, wrote for that magazine, and she had hilarious tales about what couldn’t be said in its decorous pages. She wasn’t allowed to use the word wig or refer to anyone as short. (Shawn was a diminutive man.) Another friend, the pop music critic Jon Pareles, had a similar ordeal at the Times, where the honorific Mr. had to be used before every male name. Pareles fumed about this rule well into the seventies. Would he have to call Iggy Pop of the Stooges “Mr. Pop”? Or Meat Loaf “Mr. Loaf”? No, he wouldn’t, but the problem showed how far mainstream publications were from the spirit and letter of youth culture. Tom Wolfe had an unerring ear for that sort of contradiction, and he used it to devastating effect when he covered a fund-raiser for the Black Panther Party at the home of Leonard Bernstein. Wolfe captured the strange interplay between the militants and the culturati whose patronage they were soliciting. The result was one of his most famous pieces, “Radical Chic.” It was a great read, but Lenny was an easy target, and Wolfe couldn’t—or wouldn’t—grasp the complexity of the situation. It didn’t suit his purpose to imagine that someone like Bernstein might have real feelings of solidarity with the Panthers. I knew otherwise because I, too, admired them.

  Today the Black Panthers are part of the retro universe available to anyone with a search engine. For many young people their image is mashed up with the caricatures of blaxploitation films from the seventies. But I got to see the real thing when the cameras weren’t rolling. I often ran into Panthers at Movement meetings, where they were guests of honor. It was a mark of pride for a Panther to attend a demo-planning session. I once spent an afternoon at their office in the Fillmore district of San Francisco, where they ran community programs. There were no media stars in the house, none of their extremely photogenic leaders, just people dropping by to hang out and join the running debate, which was so recondite that I could barely follow it. This was lefty discourse with an internationalist gist. I’d hoped for something more quotably black-and-proud, but I realized that I wasn’t at a James Brown concert. I was watching real-world Marxists discuss ideology, and of course it was boring.