17. The Scene
JOHN
In the spring of 1989, Abbie Hoffman died; on accident, as my kids used to say. I felt that I had lost a good friend, and so had my generation. He was a surprisingly kind and gentle person who also loved to shout a lot. He provided an enlightened and rousingly important sort of misbehavior.
I remember running around the West Village with him one summer in 1973 trying to unload zip-lock baggies of frozen mushrooms before they melted down and turned into a disgusting mottled swill. But then, after they inevitably did, his perky question became, "Was the value increased?" Of course this kind of question, as well as most all others, got more serpentine the more of the product that we ourselves consumed. Eventually there was nothing left but a wet stain on the floor of my car. As anyone will tell you, including the FBI, as a dealer in drugs, Abbie was a complete washout. As a provocateur of conscience, he was one of the sweetest and best.
I thought about him a lot the night he died. He had been a remarkable and totally energized commentator on the conditions of the day. With him gone, it will be like missing an important trick card in a Tarot deck. I had a hard time getting to sleep, and the next day, as if ambushed, I woke up to the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of another social commentary, my father's book The Grapes of Wrath. More death and coincidence, I suspect.
I don't necessarily want to sing a paean to Abbie Hoffman, but he was a force for an awareness that had not been mine before I was drafted. I don't know what would have happened to me without him or others in the sixties like him. I might have become just another button-down soul and grown prematurely complacent. I know for sure that the times would have been dumber and duller. He was a hard man to satisfy and it is sad that he is gone. For the most part, despondency was not one of Hoffman's public trademarks. It took just plain bad medicine to take him from us.
When asked once by the "Authorities" just what the hell he thought he was doing, Hoffman said, ''I'm just shouting 'theater' in a crowded fire." It was a fire, but for many of us, the fire was also on the inside, and it would smolder for years, camouflaged as rage toward the fixtures of any discerned official oppression.
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As this book has me casting backward and forward trying to figure out who I am and where I come from, to be honest I need to begin to get into what kind of person I began to make of myself, apart from the torque of my parents and childhood. My natural environment stretches from those formative days to the present, but despite my upbringing, I'm now responsible for the majority of the stretching. It's a bit like the journalistic quandary of when does the story become part of the event?
Definitely, when I was a young teenager, I felt dispossessed and betrayed by forces beyond my control. These feelings come cruising back from time to time. Without a doubt, a lot of this has to do with the crazy episodes that defined my childhood as well as the events that were compounded by the ricochet of my own erratic solutions. With Abbie Hoffman's death, however, I'm forced to remember that though I may have been clever, I wasn't really all that smart. I didn't have a lot of information to go on outside of the reactionary snap of witness abuse. I just knew something was disarranged.
At first I thought perhaps the chief problem was with me. That's how a program of borrowed shame frequently translates and transfers itself anyway. You witness people acting shamelessly and then you take it on as your own stuff. Typically, it starts with witnessing your parents acting out, and pretty soon you're carrying around a load of shame that was transferred from their shoulders onto yours, while they continue to blissfully ignore their abuses.
Then, right on schedule in the early sixties, my youth and opinions really began to mount as I grew into a "know-it-all" adult. It wasn't until later that I experienced the possibility of real conscious blame upon my perpetrators. Along with my peers, I knew something was about to break open. I didn't know what, but I began to feel nameless discontent just before the spark of articulation. And even when it started to happen, there wasn't a breaking open of floodgates, but just the bestirring of complaint; the old generic type of institutional anger that starts by way of a slow under-chorus, like the way babies begin to cry while parked next to each other in their baby carriages. First, they hear the noise of one comrade crying. Then, by way of imitation, one or two more rise to the wonderful sound of pure emotion, and before you know it, twelve babies are screaming bloody murder.
By the time I first returned from Vietnam, a curtain of betrayal hung everywhere. We were way past the gripe stage by then. From our side, it was largely due to what we felt were patriotically enforced lies about America's actions throughout the whole of the past, compounded with other crimes that were born of a decrepit white horror and a facile sense of superiority. We soon realized that even Saint JFK had been jerking off to his ballad of the Green Berets, or screwing Marilyn and reading James Bond every night, for chrissake!
Biologically, a seemingly drastic "punctuated equilibrium" happens all the time, and as the word implies, it's hardly ever a smooth transition, even for a mollusk. In freethinking people, the big lurch forward has the distinct sensation of a real double cross. Perhaps it was inevitable and maybe essential. Then bitterness and anger became ornaments that were pleasing to wear.
Our parents weren't really all that stupid. They suspected correctly that we were about to abandon them to their vanity, their fear, and their dusty domino games. So, by 1966, though we didn't know exactly what was going on, young people definitely felt something, and in my generation, the likes of Abbie Hoffman and Bob Dylan were some of the first babies that screamed foul.
Today, I get a little worried wondering what is going to happen in a world where a lot of younger people think that the Holocaust is a Jewish holiday, and the DMZ was a pre-rap rock group who performed at Vietnam, an unpopular but famous antiwar demonstration somewhere near Woodstock. I have met people who think that the Black Panthers were some sort of an expansion team, and the Dalai Lama is a Peruvian newspaper. I know that before his death, Abbie was somewhat dazed about this sort of thing, too. Without a blink, I saw him say on TV that now he didn't trust anyone under thirty. However, the twinkle in his eye was soothing, as if to say we could educate the young and give them some more time to see what a pickle they might really be in.
Because of the many habits that began to overwhelm me in the seventies, it had been a while since I thought about all of this, but shortly after Hoffman's death, my sixteen-year- old son, Michael, was sitting in the back of the car with his Walkman on, trying to compete with whatever it was that I was blasting over the other system. As I glanced back at him atonally mouthing lyrics, I saw a look of what seemed like rapture and certainty. His jaw was set and his eyes moist. His face was transfixed on a vision floating somewhere just over the horizon of his experience. Curious, I turned off "Hotel California" in time to hear him fervently declare (in that self-centered a capella Walkman way), "The Answer my friend is blowin' in the wind; the Answer is blowin' in the wind." I got a wonderful lump in my throat. At his age, the proclamation of truth is fearless, and the assumption of a basic goodness is basic in itself. It is unconditioned by the questionable kindness or the gauged decencies portioned out from the adult above.
At times, I've seen younger generations look at mine with the hilarity and slightly embarrassed terror of a high school football team from Nebraska watching a serious Japanese porno movie. The sixties and our fine youth recede into caricature as the "No Longer Suited for Prime Time Players." A realm of the senses perhaps, but it was no movie. It was our lives, and it was so tangible; the very Life of Life.
Everyone who was there remembers the burst of energy that brought us the likes of Abbie Hoffman, though they now remember it with varying degrees of fondness. Memories sometimes suffer. For a while it seemed the only way to grasp the era was to pick it up by its shoulder-length hair and dangle it, a sour and silly morsel, over the maw of the eighties. But euphoric recall aside, I can remember the energy and goodness of the time. Our society is still permeated with many of the holistic values and qualities that were distilled in my youth. They linger like the fragrance of perfume in an empty bottle. There were flashes of serenity, and perhaps even an inevitable enlightenment. There was also a notion that happiness or even mere Being, would or could suffice. Maybe, in its quiescence it was superior to action! This was not entirely laziness or hesitation, but a fine caution as the message we were getting was that even excellence seemed apocalyptically suspect. The mastery of science looked like it could be the route of pollution, madness, and nuclear destruction. So ... "Let It Be."
The social and political stops along the way to the present might just seem like a convoluted game of Hippie Trivial Pursuit, however the movements of the day hadn't come out of nowhere. It is true that the little eddies of revulsion and revolution looked like they were coming from youngsters like myself, but a deeper maelstrom had really been a long time swirling and coming, way before Berkeley's free speech movement or Vietnam. Neither did the unmistakable vortex have an epicenter other than the human heart of dissatisfaction. Baby doctor Benjamin Spock and psychologist Abraham Maslow were no kids; and New Lefties like David Dellenger, feminist Betty Friedan, and San Diego's Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse weren't either. They had all spent decades shouldering the Old Left's rugged cross. The Beats, with their Emerson-tinged Eastern religion, had been "on the road" for some time already.
Before I was drafted there were lots of counterculture seniors, though some had an obvious need for musty control. At first, professors Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, spun round by the double helix, fairly patronized their followers from their Harvard psychology chairs. With mostly good intentions, they imagined a generation locked like pigeons in a Skinner box. They held out a free radical, a key, a chemical/molecular possibility for early liberation, or a least a sugar cube worth of parole. By micrograms we might just forget the box ... dose ... and "break on through to the other side." Such easy fruition was out of sequence, of course, but what a sensate, delicious solution.
Like flies in a fly bottle which had been dashing against the glass, en masse we began to realize that the top was mostly off. The perceived jailers were in the real prison, dumbly guarding the "Outside." We on the inside were free. The fact that there might be bigger bottles ahead that might demand more, even real work at the lid, we didn't exactly foresee. We were very young, and that had its own sweet virtue and leverage.
Though everyone wasn't eighteen years old in 1965, it was the youth(s') movement. It was the kids in their late teens and early twenties who picked up the ball and ran in dizzying circles from goalpost to goalpost, leaving the Keep-the-Faith Old Guard panting and just a little bit worried. For some, it was for the sheer contrary delight of it all. For others, it was far more than just coltishness. A renaissance of organic politics and philosophy were let slip past and through the "dogs of war" at a perfect moment. The millennium by happenstance was colliding in coincidence with the mass adolescent rites of the most populist and reflexively utopian generation in American or world history. If you had survived to this point, it was really great to be alive.
Now "adolescence" is what anthropologists amazingly call a "high-context" culture; a spontaneous medium in which intuitively shared assumptions and formal nuances are so densely packed that every gesture speaks volumes. Overlooking the bloodless sound of it all, this was definitely true. When Bob Dylan sang about people like T. S. Eliot, he wasn't talking about literature; he was reducing progressive demigods to a Saturday night tag-team wrestling match. He could also sing, "The birdies in the trees go tweet-tweet-tweet," and the poetry and the gall were sublime. It was scarcely even the voice of a singer. It was some kind of antivoice, shamanic, invocative, used for sending complex, compelling messages over long distances to anyone with wit to hear. And by the way, if you could read cold lips, Liberalism was dead. The posture of this disregard and indifference that we began to display toward the worn-out righteousness of our immediate elders, also squared the mass family resentments wafting under the surface like a kelp forest.
Without the army to wake up to, my beard grew, I carried a stash, and learned how to tell long meaningful stories about my smallest possessions, like where I got a hole in my clothes. For now, I was becoming a socialized hippie. We hippies felt distinctly abused because of our soft views, and abjured for no good reason whatsoever. For a time, we tried to legitimize ourselves with examples from history. Though I couldn't manage it, there were long-as-you-could-grow-them locks of hair defended as really American, like, you know, Native Americans, the Founding Fathers, the Apostles. No matter the foolishness, what now seems like only style, set off deep, immensely powerful resonances among us.
It was a while before I really "understood" LSD. I had received a liberal education from inspired family sources. I was familiar with the Elizabethans and their King James Bible, as well as the knots and loopholes of Western psychology and philosophy. I loved paradox and Plato, e.e. cummings, and Wallace Stevens. That is to say, I loved the words, but I only understood the meaning in a jazzy, superficial sort of way.
One day, as I was sitting in my bathtub, amicably confused on a certain amount of acid, I began to look at a friend's copy of the Tao Te Ching. This was the jewel in the crown of Chinese thought. My father had exposed me to the works of Chuang Tse and Lao Tse, and I had found the topsy-turvy logic direct and amusing, if bewildering. But as I sat there this day in the clear water, trying to focus on the vibrating point, much less the sense of this Taoist comic book, I was distracted by a bird in the sky, and BAM, I suddenly "got it." Just like it sounds, the scales fell from my eyes, and that was not all. The bathroom exploded into dripping colors, and all the dumb metaphors I had ever heard danced around the room as holy truth. My mind seemed to become absolutely still, and then to fly up, like that bird in the empty sky, happy and free and away from its ancient prison. Oh boy, our species was actually well programmed for transcendence, but there was also the deep mechanism of ego provoking us to grasp and forget.
Looking out the window at the town, all the streets were actually rolling, like a yellow brick road leading to the Emerald City of my primordial being. My God! In my Father's house were many mansions, and they were all suddenly right here in the bathroom. Everything that I had ever read by the Christian mystics, the Taoists, the Sufi poets, the Concordians like Thoreau and Whitman, the Vedas, Vedanta, William Blake, William James, Buddhist Sutras, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell, Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, and the Book of Common Prayer, all of these things were pointed at the same damn thing that was luminescing all around me. It was something, that thing, that was inexpressible, but whole and real and eternal. In its ineffability, it was the answer to the suffering of the world.
Yup, I had gotten it, but within a few hours of trying to discuss it and own it with words, I lost it. I dearly wanted to share all this with my dad, but my gushing enthusiasm no doubt made it seem like I was "on drugs" or something. A true double bind. Nevertheless, I was stunned, and my life was changed forever, and like the dead Pascal's ''This morning, fire everywhere" note found pinned under his hair shirt, I sit here even today, meditating on the fullness of the present to keep the memory green.
All in all though, I guess I was not unique. Why, every head shop in town was testament to the fact that a lot of my contemporaries had been in a bathtub or two themselves. The lyrics to the music of the day, though not referring directly to the Blue Cliff Record of Zen Buddhist transmission, were distinctly pushing the core ideas of instant enlightenment. You know, Satori ... the FLASH.
Some things were profound, and also very funny. While still stationed at the Pentagon after returning from Vietnam, I'd already started calling in "well." Innate happiness often made it absurd for me to go to work, especially for the Defense Department. It now seemed necessary for me to "Drop at Dawn" at least twice a week, just to stay in tune with a micromacro cosmos. One had to wonder how it ever got along without me knowing it was there before.
I began to comport myself with the air of a full-blown mystic. Mind you, this was not just vanity. What I had seen, I had seen. It was worth contemplating forever. I also liked sex and rock 'n' roll.
With my new hippie friends, I appreciated what was becoming a family that would play with me, and one that I didn't have to fear would be blown away at a moment's notice. In Vietnam, getting close to someone was risky business. For the time being, it was actually American to try and "love one another ... smile on your brother ... come on people now ... etc."
And we were Americans, after all. No matter if the Swiss had invented it. even acid was American. Certainly the electric slam of it was much more like football than, say, curling or grouse hunting. We were for and about revolutionary change, both inside and out, and we had all sorts of other electric toys as well. With these we could implement that change. We had the technology and the drugs to manipulate our psychobiological view. We could communicate with Arthur Koestler's "Ghost in the Machine."
There seemed to be a chance to erase centuries of Western mind-lock with one protracted burst of amplified feedback. Yes! Amplify the feedback! Everything became louder, brighter, more overwhelming. Make art, music, love. Make yourself free. Sometimes we all had the feeling that maybe one mighty thought blast of wild-eyed, god drunk sound would tumble the walls. It was the beginning of music becoming impossibly loud, and speeded up or else stretched out, with languorous drifting musical figures. These were shades of yet more things to come: make politics, make language. Make more love. Make new drugs as battering rams against the old order.
The new culture of the sixties was bursting forth from the main body in a megamitosis. Tired of neglect, our "true" nature would now explode out of our own subconscious. Also true, it looked like it could get a bit freaky on the edges, maybe even a bit messy; the timid might get splattered, but at least the blood would be Day-Glo, like in the Iliad, or like in the Upanishads. Yeah ... like that.
The stars were changing positions, perhaps swirling up enough centrifugal force to throw off everything the Western world seemed to represent to our simple prejudice and complex frustrations. I don't think hardly any of us really knew it, but what seemed like sociology or politics was also a surge of emotion of such proportion that the increasingly loaded dope- receptor sites were perhaps the only fit landing zones for the anguished and minimized concepts of the new order.
Despite the bliss-inducing psychedelia, and the copious painkilling, our anger, though it was almost always obscured in smoke, was alive and palpating our unconscious family dreams. There was real hatred for the mad conquest of nature, the worship of inhuman technology. By 1968, the Chinese Year of the Monkey was upon us with all four thumbs, and rage and grief were to eat our spines from the inside out. It was the year of the Tet Offensive, where children of both sides foddered and salted Vietnam's soil as if the fucking Hittites had joined the fray. The Democrats at their convention in Chicago goose-stepped on the bodies of their natural heirs, and it was also the year that Martin Luther King's and Bobby Kennedy's assassins would make us question any sort of providence and the value of human evolution. It was also the year that I returned to Vietnam as a journalist.