Sleeping Where I Fall A Chronicle

by Coyote, Peter

• ISBN13: 9781582430119
• ISBN10: 158243011X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1999-04-16
• Publisher: Counterpoint

Summary

In this intelligent memoir, Peter Coyote relives his ride through the heart of the counterculture--a journey that took him from the quiet rooms of privilege in New York to the riotous political street theater in San Francisco. Chronicling the revolutionary theories of the Diggers and the encampments of the extended Free Family, Coyote offers blunt and affectionate portraits of friends, lovers, and fellow travelers. In prose that is graphic and unsentimental, Coyote also reveals the corrosive side of love that was once called "free," the terror evoked by bikers who came on late-night visits looking for drugs, and Coyote's own quest for the next high. His road through revolution taught him to be a player and a strategist: from radical communard to the chairman of the California Arts Council; from a street theater apprentice to a motion-picture star. Sleeping Where I Fall pays honest tribute to the spiritual search of a generation that had become morally estranged from the dominant culture, a generation that transformed the politics--then the heart and soul--of America. Book jacket.

Author Biography

Peter Coyote has performed in more than fifty films, including E.T., Jagged Edge, Kika, Bitter Moon, Outrageous Fortune, and Patch Adams and has narrated scores of documentaries. His work with the San Francisco Mime Troupe was honored with a special OBIE, and he won a Pushcart Prize in nonfiction 1994.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. xi
Preface	p. xiii
Introduction: You Have to Start Somewhere	p. 3
Themes and Anticipations	p. 6
The Perpetual Present	p. 16
Home Is Hard	p. 22
Breaking the Glass	p. 32
The Minstrel Show	p. 39
Growing a New Skin	p. 57
Emmett: A Life Played for Keeps	p. 67
The Invisible Circus	p. 74
Edge City	p. 84
Crossing the Free Frame of Reference	p. 94
Biker Blues	p. 107
Sweet William's Story	p. 113
The Red House	p. 130
Black Bear Ranch	p. 143
Dr. Feelgood's Walking Cure	p. 159
Slipping to the Edge of the World	p. 167
Free Fall	p. 179
Full Bloom	p. 201
Approaching Terminal Velocity	p. 214
Top of the Arc	p. 242
Roman Candle	p. 263
A Moment's Float	p. 274
Gravity Wins	p. 291
Splatter	p. 311
Stepping Out of the Wind	p. 327
Afterword: Time to Take a Break	p. 347
Index	p. 353
Table of Contents provided by Syndetics. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

Chapter One

themes and anticipations

I feel like a word in the breath of a voice.

JOHN BERGER

While still an undergraduate at Grinnell College, I had fallen in love with Jessie Benton, a captivating woman I met one summer on Martha's Vineyard. In 1964, after graduating, I moved to San Francisco to pursue a master's degree in creative writing at San Francisco State College. Jessie was going to move out and join me, bringing her young son Anthony. My life as an adult seemed about to begin.

    Jessie was raised in Kansas City, Missouri. Her father, the painter Thomas Hart Benton, was a local hero, a crony of Truman and his smoke-tanned pols. Benton's fluid and colorful murals feature working people in their daily lives. He believed in the importance of detail. A few years before his death, when he was about eighty, I visited him in Kansas City while he was working on an epic canvas of the Teton Mountains. The floor surrounding his easel was littered with notebooks filled with botanically accurate sketches of shrubs and wildflowers collected during an expedition west the previous summer. He was also a flinty character who once removed one of his paintings from a museum and placed it in a bar, claiming that a better class of people would see it there.

    Jessie was heir to this cranky sensibility. She was a natural aristocrat, haughty and achingly beautiful, blessed by her Italian mother with dark, tangled hair and a Caravaggio mouth. Her unerring instinct for the first-rate and the precision of her dismissive ridicule invigorated any room she entered, charging the atmosphere and alerting people to impending adventure or disgrace. Her behavior was restless and bold, and her natural incandescence made others pale by comparison. Her gifts were so abundant that her peers (the best and the brightest of Radcliffe and Harvard) seemed to accept as just her uncontested status as reigning queen.

    She was pursued by men, many of them rich and powerful, but she dismissed them all with a laugh and, for incomprehensible reasons, chose me, a larval, overeager stripling, as her consort.

    Perhaps she fell in love with a passionate letter I wrote her once or the fact that I made a bone-chilling midwinter drive from Iowa to Kansas City just to say hello. It couldn't have been much else. I was tall and stringy, with a wispy mustache barely past requiring judicious touches of eyebrow pencil to be visible. I affected a pipe and was as obstinately opinionated as I am today, but less graceful at insinuating my perspectives into conversation.

    I arrived in San Francisco a month before school to make things ready for the arrival of Jessie and Anthony, and rented a small, lusterless apartment on Clayton Street, half a block north of Haight and a few blocks west of Ashbury. The apartment had the charm of a mausoleum, but I was blinded to that by the glamour of being on my own in San Francisco, setting up my first household with a woman and child, and preparing to be a writer. The apartment's only problem, I felt, was that it was not romantically shabby enough. It was, however, practical and adequate, if aesthetically null, a short walk to shops and Laundromat, which I thought would make life easy for Jessie. (Of course it never occurred to me I might do my own laundry; I had a Jewish mother!)

    We only know what we know when we know it. The environs that shimmered with possibility for me became a crypt for Jessie. I can now remember her sitting forlornly in that very same Laundromat, among the chewed and coverless women's magazines, wrapping herself in memories as a shield--or perhaps as a shroud--for our relationship. When she gazed absently out the windows, was she comparing the pocky, littered street to the piazzas of Florence, where she'd once lived?

    At the time I was completely unaware that she was unhappy and starving for grace. I was writing poems in the mornings and rehearsing afternoons and evenings at the Actors' Workshop, where, to my great delight, I had been cast in the lead of their next play. (The founders of the workshop, Herb Blau and Jules Irving, had just moved--with the best actors--to New York to create Lincoln Center, leaving behind the name, the board, a disappointed audience, and a few loyalists eager to recapture the company's earlier glory. These facts might explain the ease of my admission to this once-august ensemble.) I was happy to be out of undergraduate school, removed from my personal history in the East, and beginning what I expected to be the life of an artist. I imagined myself strolling the crooked backstreets of Paris with Hemingway and Henry Miller; I daydreamed casual conversations with Sartre and Neruda. I was certain that poems were germinating in my synapses and that the patterns of pigeons roosting on a wire could be transcribed as musical masterpieces. I enthused about everything that came into my head, unaware of the assault these juvenile raptures made on Jessie. She tried hard, assembling sumptuous Italian meals, organizing soirees of Kansas City pals, and trying to become interested in our neighbors, a sweet, beaten couple with a chronically unhappy child. For a woman accustomed to being the oracle for the best of the East, her demotion to coffee-klatcher with the depressed in the West must have felt like a terminal downward spiral.

    Jessie changed what could be changed and moved us to the third floor of an elegant Victorian house owned by an elderly Italian woman named Mrs. Beltramo that dominated the intersection of Fell Street and Steiner, a block above Fillmore, the main artery of San Francisco's black ghetto. Yet as our living standards rose, other parts of my life took a diametrically different course. My work toward a master's degree in poetry ended. I was spending mind-numbing hours in class deciphering the lectures of Robert Duncan, a poet I had admired as an undergraduate who subsequently became a friend. He bobbed and dashed about the classroom energetically. His magnificent leonine head, topped by an unruly gray mane, featured pronounced walleyes brimming with electricity and humor and animating his flat Slavic face. Those eyes were unnerving; since you could not be sure exactly where he was looking, you never knew whether or not one of his impenetrable questions had just been directed at you. Duncan communicated in waves of association, metaphor, and mythic references in several languages. Students on either side of me nodded sage assent, apparently understanding everything he said, while I remained stupefied and progressively disconsolate at my intellectual failings. (Twenty-five years later I told this story to poet Michael McClure, a good friend of mine and Duncan's. Michael smiled wryly and of the nodding students said, "They lied.") I reluctantly decided that my future as a poet was limited. At least I had the theater--or so I thought.

    My initial triumph over being cast in the lead of the workshop's first post-Blau/Irving production was dashed by the arrival of the company's new artistic director, John Hancock, an endomorphic Harvard grad with slouching shoulders and ill-fitting clothes. Hancock watched one rehearsal and unceremoniously canceled the production, while I was simultaneously demoted to the status of an apprentice and assistant to an assistant director. I had no idea what acting was about; my experience in college, though serving me well in the rudiments of analyzing a scene into "beats" (emotional moments), had not prepared me at all for the subtle reemphasis of aspects of personality needed to create character --the basic building block of drama. I was adrift.

    Serving as assistant to a man barely older than myself was humbling when only days earlier I had been a rising star. But there were recompenses for my disgrace. As in the days of Samuel Johnson, "the silk stocking and white bosoms of ... actresses excite ... amorous propensities," and occasional love affairs and furtive "green room" couplings during performances softened the wounds to my ego.

    In retrospect I can see that there was more to these sexual diversions than Johnson's business-as-usual in the life of actors. Unfaithfulness to Jessie never appeared on my moral radar screen as an issue, nor would sexual fidelity to anyone become either a consideration or a remote possibility for many years. My eagerness for adventure and sensation, my desire to live as I imagined artists and creative people lived, disguised to myself an unsteadiness and an indulgent streak in my character that would not become apparent to me until they had wreaked much more havoc in my personal relationships.

    Near the end of 1965, the company was preparing the world premiere of Bertolt Brecht's Edward the Second --the story of a mad, murderous, homosexual king who refused to forswear his lover and was dethroned by the populace and imprisoned in the sewers. The lead was played by an obsessively heterosexual actor named Barton Heyman, one of the new players imported by Hancock. I wouldn't go so far as to say that Barton was crazy, but he was definitely not wrapped too tightly. Perhaps one small anecdote will defend this assertion.

    In the second act of Edward the Second , the king escapes from the sewer and gives a moving soliloquy Barton decided to heighten his performances by taking LSD during the intermission so that when he emerged from below the street, in rags and smeared with offal, he was , in fact, like the king, quite mad. His dedication to Method acting disadvantaged the other actors who, perhaps lacking Barton's dedication or inventiveness, relied for their dialogue on the script . No one knew what Barton would say, when he would say it, or at what point he might stop. When he did stop finally, it was incumbent on his fellow players to invent logical segues from Barton's last utterance back to the main body of the play. Cast members were not judgmental about Barton's use of drugs. Most people I knew smoked marijuana occasionally, and by 1964 it was ubiquitous. LSD was becoming more prevalent, although I had yet to take my own first trip. What really bothered me about Barton's drug use onstage was how it made him appear brilliant at my expense.

    The workshop constructed a revolving stage for the Brecht production, to spin battle scenes offstage and return court scenes onstage. It was a balky, cumbersome behemoth that created innumerable delays in rehearsals, and during one such delay I ambled down the hill from the Marines Memorial Theater to the company's second stage, the Encore Theater, rented to a funky little acting ensemble called the San Francisco Mime Troupe. I was intrigued by the manner in which they had transfigured our tiny lobby, filling it with photos of the company laughing, cavorting, and performing, interspersed with blowups of reviews and news stories chronicling their arrest for performing in the parks without a permit. They had transformed the space from a bleak transition between the street and the theater into an engaging promise of delights to come. Their colorful commedia dell'arte masks and costumes were bold and provocative, their display radiated irreverence, energy, and fun--and two of the women in the photos were extraordinarily attractive. My curiosity was piqued, and once again, a physical attraction to women was unconsciously organizing a major decision in my life. I never once considered that this might be a problem.

    I convinced the authorities at the workshop that a comparable photo exhibit would enhance our opening night. They agreed to reimburse my out-of-pocket expenses, and I labored mightily to shoot, develop, print, and mount almost eighty images capturing the labor, frustration, humor, and dedication required to create a major theatrical production. On opening day I hung my enlargements in the barren foyer of the theater, proud of the change they wrought in the sterile environment. It now seemed ready for the event.

    The performance was well received, and the postshow gala buzzed with enthusiasm. Canapés disappeared, glasses were filled and emptied with gusto, the roar of conversation swelled the room, gestures were large and emphatic. The reception suggested that the company had recaptured its earlier glory.

    The next day passed and the next, and finally several weeks, without a thank-you or any mention of my efforts at all. I had felt stifled and underappreciated since my demotion to apprentice and had hit upon this photo display as an opportunity to express my creativity and distinguish myself in the company again. Still no one had noticed. I concluded that the Actors' Workshop and I were not a good match and that since the Mime Troupe had been the inspiration for my photos, perhaps they might be a source for an idea about what to do next. That day I went to see them perform for the very first time.

The Panhandle of Golden Gate Park is a Popsicle stick of green attached to the eastern edge of the park's rectangular main body. It is bordered by two broad, busy, one-way streets that are flanked by faded Victorian houses. I arrived in the Panhandle early, drawn by a canvas banner announcing the coming performance. I watched a group remove and assemble a prefabricated stage from the back of a flatbed truck. Stakes were pounded in to secure the guy wires that anchored the frame of a proscenium; then the stage, constructed of large rectangles on a lattice of two-by-fours, was placed on top of overturned wine-barrel halves. An abstractly painted canvas curtain with a slit in the center formed the back wall.

    While construction proceeded, actors dragged costumes and musical instruments from battered trunks. Some changed clothes and applied makeup; others sang, played the recorder or tambourine, joked, and did gymnastics to attract a sizable crowd. Finally, the company warmed up together (unheard of at the workshop) by singing and dancing, generating a palpable energy that flowed among the players and over the stage. During this warm-up, which was a calculated part of the performance, the company members exuded the assurance and bawdy humor of a beggar's opera.

    Commedia dell'arte was the sixteenth-century Italian form of street theater--living headlines, Renaissance rap. Masked stock characters such as Pantalone, Arlecchino, and Dottore were recognizable types distinguished by their exaggerated personalities: crankiness, ebullient foolishness, and pomposity. These archetypes had been lovingly researched and resurrected by the troupe to serve radical agit-prop theater. The company spoofed hypocrisy, misuse of power, and official venality with barbed wit, sexual innuendo, and gusto. They were enthralling. The men were physically tuned and athletic, dressed in tattered cloaks and tights. The women's shoulderless bodices exposed tantalizing cleavage they used playfully to befuddle and seduce the male characters, to whom they were clearly superior. Characterizations were as transparent as Punch and Judy, and just as outrageous and wickedly funny. Performances appeared to arise in the moment: if a car horn honked or a voice cried out in the street, it was acknowledged onstage and immediately worked into the show.

    At the end of an hour, the troupe leaped off the stage to wild applause and shamelessly exhorted the audience for money. They made ludicrous promises, obscene proposals, scathing observations, and were as entertaining offstage as on, urging the grateful crowd to give more. They became my heroes on the spot, the closest thing to the primal energy and intellectual acuity I had always imagined theater might possess. They articulated issues that I confronted in my own life, and they expressed them in a direct and passionate manner. Ideas and political positions were analyzed and expounded with partisan fervor, great humor, and few subtleties.

    As Sandy Archer and Kay Hayward took their deep, sweeping bows, I decided then and there that anything that simultaneously allowed for this kind of free expression and the company of such women was irresistible. I was psychically shanghaied.

    Within a few days I had arranged to meet R. G. Davis, founder and organizing genius of the troupe. I dressed in my best "actor's" clothes, a dandyish three-piece houndstooth suit custom-made on the cheap by a drunken Ivy League con man tailor who shipped his measurements off to Hong Kong for assembly. I polished my cumbersome English shoes and pointed them toward the troupe's address on Howard Street, in the city's grimy industrial district.

    The company was housed in a raisin-colored two-story brick building. Each end of the large space had been walled off to make an office and a costume and prop room. The rest had been left open for rehearsals. Light entered slantwise through a wall of sooty windows, illuminating the unpainted girders, the tatty cinderblocks, and the well-worn dance floor. Women flowed to and fro in faded sweats and leotards. Men carrying gigantic papier-mâché animal heads referred me to the office door.

    I entered a gloomy room with a pitted floor and three stained wooden desks. The windows afforded a view of a tangle of trolley and phone wires. R. G. (Ronnie) Davis rose to meet me. He was a compact, precise man bristling with energy and intelligence. His hair was close-cropped and combed forward like Napoleon's, and he was dressed in some variant of a Mao suit in blue denim. He had a large nose and a wacky, erratic way of moving, as if his body were commenting on his speech like an independent critic. His no-nonsense, total dedication might have been oppressive if it had not been frequently punctured by a manic giggle whenever he found something amusing. What made the greatest impression on me, however, was Sandy Archer, the beauty I'd seen performing in the park. She sat at her desk typing, her large, expressive eyes fixed levelly on her work, lips relaxed and perfectly shaped. High cheekbones stretched the skin on her face so that it was tight as a drum. I had seen that face onstage, radiating light, switching instantly from pure buffoonery to intelligent, sexual power. Young Anne Bancroft was already a movie star, but here was the prototype from which she had been struck, laboring in obscurity, shimmering a few feet away from me. The dedication of such beauty and talent to this impoverished company only increased my interest and curiosity.

    Ronnie greeted me cordially, and somehow we began a discussion of Marshall McLuhan, whose writings on media were beginning to attract attention. This was a lucky break for me. I had a mentor at that time, an advertising guru named Howard Gossage whose wife, Sally Kemp, was an actress in the Actor's Workshop. Howard's insight that people would actually read advertising copy if it contained real information had made him wealthy. He had often talked to me about Marshall McLuhan, had introduced him to U.S. audiences, and had even arranged for me to escort one of McLuhan's daughters on several dates.

    Fueled by the desire to impress Sandy Archer, I launched into a blitzkrieg of information and opinion--I was swinging. Ronnie poked and probed at my monologue with his combative intellect, clearly delighted to be tossing around ideas with someone as ardent as he was.

    I have no idea how long we debated, over the click-click of Sandy's typing, but suddenly Ronnie wheeled away and asked her, "Well, Sandy, whaddya think of this guy?"

    Sandy never blinked. Click-click , she continued while I waited for her verdict.

    "Mmmmm," she said finally, without lifting her eyes from the page. "He talks a lot."

(Continues...)

Excerpted from sleeping where I fall by Peter Coyote. Copyright © 1998 by Peter Coyote. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.