One Hand Jerking (26 page)

Remember that opening line of
Howl
: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked. . . .” Well, a new biography of Allen Ginsberg—
American Scream
by Jonah Raskin—has a surprising revelation:

“In the mid-1970s, in the midst of the counterculture he had helped to create, he promised to rewrite
Howl
. Now that he was a hippie minstrel and a Pied Piper for the generation that advocated peace and love he would alter
Howl
, he said, so that it might reflect the euphoria of the hippies. He would include a ‘positive redemptive catalogue,' he said.”

In 1982, there was a celebration of the 25th anniversary of Jack Kerouac's
On the Road
, at Naropa, a Buddhist college in Boulder, Colorado, where presumably they refer to his book as
On the Path
. I was invited to moderate a discussion, “Political Fallout of the Beat Generation.” The panelists: Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Abbie Hoffman and Timothy Leary. We were all invited to sign posters for the event. Hoffman wrote his signature extra large, with great care.

“The guy who shot John Lennon,” he explained, “complained that Lennon gave him a sloppy autograph, so I ain't takin' any chances.”

Hoffman had recently “debated” Watergate conspirator G. Gordon Liddy, currently a radio talk-show host.

“Liddy,” he shouted, “I got just one question for you. Do you eat pussy?” The audience cheered. This was really off the wall. “Come on, Liddy, answer me!
Do you eat pussy?
” Liddy couldn't respond over the roar of the crowd. Hoffman
bleated over and over, “
Do you eat pussy? Do you eat pussy?
”—like some kind of sexual street fighter chanting his mantra—“
Do you eat pussy? Do you eat pussy? Do you eat pussy?
” The audience went wild. Hoffman was triumphant.

Finally, Liddy was able to reply: “You have just demonstrated, more than I ever could possibly hope to, the enormous gap which separates me from you.”

Since Leary had also encountered Liddy in a series of debates, Hoffman now asked
him
if Liddy ate pussy.

“I can attest to the fact that he does,” Leary replied. “At least he made it a point at some of our debates to announce that he is definitely
not
monogamous.”

During the Beat Generation panel, Ginsberg said, “I think there was one slight shade of error in describing the Beat movement as primarly a protest movement. That was the thing that Kerouac was always complaining about. He felt the literary aspect or the spiritual aspect or the emotional aspect was not so much protest at all, but a declaration of unconditioned mind beyond protest, beyond resentment, beyond loser, beyond
winner
—
way
beyond winner—beyond winner or loser . . . but the basic thing that I understood and dug Jack for was unconditioned mind, negative capability, totally open mind—beyond victory or defeat. Just awareness, and that was the humor, and that's what the saving grace is. That's why there
will
be political aftereffects, but it doesn't have to win because having to win a revolution is like having to make a milliion dollars.”

As moderator, I asked, “Abbie, since you used to quote Che Guevara saying, ‘In a revolution, one wins or dies,' do you have a response to that?”

Hoffman: “All right, Ginzo. Poems have a lot of different meanings for different people. For me, your poem
Howl
was a call to arms.”

Ginsberg: “A whole boatload of sentimental bullshit.”

Hoffman: “We saw in the sixties a great imbalance of power, and the only way that you could correct that imbalance was to organize people and to fight for power. Power is not a dirty word. The concept of trying to win against social injustice is not a dirty kind of concept. It all depends on how you define the game, how you define winning and how you define losing—that's the Zen trip that was learned by defining that you were the prophets and we were the warriors. I'm saying that you didn't fight, but you were the fighters. And I'll tell you, If you don't think you were a political movement and you don't like winning, the fuckin' lawyer that defended
Howl
in some goddamn obscenity suit—you wanted
him
to be a fuckin' winner, I guarantee you that. That
was
a political debate.”

Abbie would've been shocked to learn that Ginsberg had planned to rewrite
Howl
, this time beginnng with an upbeat line: “I saw the best minds of my generation turned on by music. . . .”

Recently, I was a guest lecturer in a popular course at UCLA about the 1960s—“Agitational Communication,” taught by Paul von Blum, who was active in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. A student asked me, “Did you guys really believe what you were saying, or was it all just rhetoric?”

“Both,” I answered. “Countless people were actually living their ideals, personally and in communal situations, but there was lots of rhetoric.”

With the baby boomer generation coming of middle age and putting into perspective their own personal histories, innumerable autobiographies and memoirs have been glutting the literary market. Indeed, a
New Yorker
cartoon depicted an editor at a publishing house saying to a writer, “Congratulations! Your manuscript was the one-millionth personal memoir submitted to us this year.”

In 1999, actor Peter Coyote's
Sleeping Where I Fall
survived that fierce competition, telling the story of his chosen journey from riches to rags—from being delivered to school in a chauffeur-driven, leather-roofed Cadillac limousine, to traveling with hippies in a truck named the “Meat and Bone Wagon,” retrieving radishes, lettuce, tomatoes and squash from a garbage bin behind a Safeway supermarket.

It was with the San Francisco Mime Troupe that Coyote first experienced what was later to become his trademark theatrical pursuit: the dissolution of the boundaries between art and life. And it was there that he met a couple of life actors, Peter Berg (“perhaps the most radical and cranky member of the troupe, and arguably the most brilliant”) and Emmett Grogan (“determined to be a life star . . . moving through a room with the detached concentration of a shark”). They formed the nucleus of what would become the Diggers, a loose confederation of friends who were part psychedelic social workers, helping supply local hippies and new arrivals to the Haight-Ashbury scene with food and shelter, and part practitioners of street theater.

In December 1967, the Diggers sponsored a parade called “The Death of Money.” There they were, without a permit and 4,000 strong, chanting, “The streets belong to the people!” When the police arrested two Hells Angels, the coffin marked with dollar signs that marchers had been carrying was passed around and spontaneously filled with bail money, to the utter surprise of cops and bikers alike. In return, the Angels threw a party in Golden Gate Park on New Year's Day, footing the bill, with free beer and music by the Grateful Dead and Janis Joplin with Big Brother & the Holding Company.

As the Diggers operated at the edges of the counterculture, they expanded through combinations and alliances, such as the one with the Hells Angels. They referred to this larger, centerless coalition as the Free Family, a group that established a series of communes in the Pacific Northwest and Southwest. They sought to create an environment devoted to an alternative lifestyle, one not tied to the conventions of polite behavior.

But it quickly became obvious that the credo of “Do your own thing” didn't work in an overloaded household. Somebody would use someone else's toothbrush, and objecting to that might be regarded as bourgeois. Ideological conflicts invaded the communal spirit. One individual removed the bathroom door, asserting that the fear of being observed was a neurotic vanity to be banished. High aspirations were tainted by petty arguments. There was even a hair-raising public fight over a spoon. Their experiment in communal living continuted to unravel.

“The only reason to fix the trucks now,” Coyote wrote, “was to escape from one another. Life continues after something dies, it simply does not continue in the same way. We maintained our chores and responsbilities, but the activity was pro forma. Everyone knew that the Free Family as a source of future security was a fiction.”

By contrast, The Farm—a commune in Tennessee that also evolved out of a San Francisco community—succeeded in hanging together and working productively. I contacted founder Stephen Gaskin to find out The Farm's accomplishments and the secret of its success.

“As in the Japanese game of
Go
,” he told me, “sometimes one consolidates one's forces in a citadel. Other times one sends out one's stones to larger territories that can be integrated later. We realize that we're doing both of those here on The Farm. We vote in the elections. We are good to our neighbors. We do work for, and are worked for by, the people in the neighborhood, and are seamless
with the web of life in Tennessee. Sometimes a manager in one of the local stores will recognize me and tell me something like, ‘No Farm person has ever bounced a check at this store.' We have Tennessee in-laws.

“On the other hand, we are citizens of the world who reach out for peace, for justice and support for Indians and all native peoples. We work for women's rights and against nuclear fuel cycles all over the world. We have organized a national peace effort from The Farm called Peace Roots Alliance—hippie roots, that is. We put up billboards in major cities and run educational meetings resisting the war in Iraq. This is our work.”

The Farm's relief and development agency, Plenty International, founded in 1974, grew into an earthquake relief program in Guatemala that moved millions of Canadian International Development Agency dollars into kilometers of water-pipe between 1976 and 1981. The Farm organized water projects in South Africa and soy dairies in the Caribbean.

“On the way to doing these things,” Gaskin said, “we learned how to sharpen a chain saw, shoe a horse, plow a field, how to deliver babies [his wife Ina May is the author of
Spiritual Midwifery
], how to take blood pressure, how to feed a thousand people, how to field an International Relief and Development Company, and all the lessons that result in The Farm, still here after 35 years.

“The things we had to learn to feed ourselves and deliver our babies were relevant in the small countries. I think the important factors in The Farm's long term survival was that we tried not to be doctrinaire. We were not Baptists, we were not macrobioticists or Marxists or Jains or Buddhists. We were hippies who wanted to live together and who would accept the level of organization that it took to achieve that. I think that allowed us to bend rather than break when heavy changes happened.”

In 1967, Gaskin was a teaching assistant at San Francisco State College. Some students said they liked him but that he didn't know what was going on, and that they wouldn't be able to take him seriously until he saw The Beatles' movie,
A Hard Day's Night
. He did, and recognized the power of youth as represented by the hippies, resulting in the founding of his “Monday Night Class.” The idea was to compare notes with other trippers about tripping and the whole psychic and psychedelic world. They began as a nucleus of a dozen folks and eventually grew into meetings of as many as 1,500. It was from among these seekers that a convoy to Tennessee was launched.

“The most important thing to come out of the Monday Night Class meetings,”
Gaskin writes in an introduction to a revised version of his 1970 book,
Monday Night Class
, “and the glue that held us together, was a belief in the moral imperative toward altruism that was implied by the telepathic spiritual communion we experienced together. Every decent thing accomplished over the years by the people of Monday Night Class and The Farm—its later incarnation—came from those simple hippie values. It was the basis for our belief in spirit, non-violence, collectivity and social activism.

“I consider myself to be an ethnic hippie. By that I mean that the ethnicity I grew up with was such a white bread, skim milk, gringo experience that it wasn't satisfying for me. It had no moxie. Now, being a hippie, that's another thing. I feel like the Sioux feel about being from the Lakota Nation. I feel like Mario Cuomo feels about being Italian. It makes me feel close with Jews and Rastafarians. I have a tribe, too. I know that the hippies were preceded by the beatniks, the bohemians, the free-thinkers, Voltaire and so on, back to Socrates and Buddha, but the wave of revolution that spoke to me was the hippies. And rock 'n' roll lights my soul and gives a beat to the revolution.”

Time
magazine may have invented the shorthand term “hippies,” but in reality those who participated in the counterculture that exploded out of the 1950s were surfing on an epidemic of idealism, displaying courage and imagination. There was a mass spiritual awakening—a movement away from western religions of repression toward eastern philosophies of liberation—a generation of young pioneers, traveling westward without killing a single Indian along the way.

In 1969, Vassar graduate Roberta Price got a grant to visit communes and photograph them. When she and her boyfriend David visited a commune, Libre, in the Huerfano (means “orphan”) Valley in southern Colorado, its alchemy transformed them from observers into participants. In 1970, Roberta and David got married, left graduate school in Buffalo, moved to Libre and built a house around a huge boulder 9,000 feet high on the side of a mountain overlooking the valley. Roberta's book,
Huerfano: a memoir of life in the counterculture
, published in 2004, serves as a nice slice of countercultural history.