Another Little Piece of My Heart (24 page)

He had that floaty look. There was dried pigeon shit on his sweater. But he also radiated the sleek serenity of a yogi and the well-tanned face of a movie star. He’d come a long way since his days as a professor at Harvard, which had severed its connection with him, ostensibly because of his very public experiments with LSD. Listening to his rap, I concluded that the real reason was intellectual mediocrity. His spiel was a blend of ideas bobbing around in the cultural soup. I could hear chunks of Jim Morrison and Susan Sontag, along with New Age rhetoric via the New Left, in the quotable lines he flung at me. As in: “The police-state mentality always tries to repress sensual experience; it never works.” Or: “The average man has got to come to his senses.” There was no personal dimension to our conversation; he was as slick and mediagenic as any celebrity intellectual. Indeed, he was following the trail blazed by Marshall McLuhan, whom he admired, up to a point. “He knows about psychedelic art,” Leary said, “but he’s all external; he hasn’t seen the inside yet. It’ll be fascinating to see what happens when he finally takes LSD.” This was the way he divided up the world. There were those who sensed the truth and those who truly grasped it on acid. He might as well have been a Christian missionary bringing the light to pagans.

As for the media’s response to his preaching—the usual combo of fascination and feigned horror—he seemed to regard it as something of a miracle. “When you think of the history of new movements,” he said, “no country has ever been as tolerant as America of a force that’s going to wipe it out. In any other time or place we’d be in danger of our lives.” He’d already done a stint in jail as a “narcotics offender,” but prison was something many activists endured with far less attention than he got. He wasn’t political enough to be in real danger. I wanted to hurl that accusation at him, but, as usual, I saved my wrath for the article.

I think I reacted the way I did to Leary because his narcissism cor-responded to a part of me that I despised. But unlike me, he had no
capacity for self-doubt, and without that it’s possible to believe in anything. There was a sweeping certitude to his ideas, and beneath it an even more offensive philistinism. He blithely explained that the theater had been taken over by careerist intellectuals. “Plays by Tennessee Williams, for instance, are the memoirs of a neurotic, not art. Art must involve the senses. All original drama is psychedelic. The theater, remember, was originally a religious experience. It all stems back to religious motives—someone with a vision turns other people on.” This was the same old shaman routine, much less attractively packaged than Morrison’s, but, then, Leary didn’t have an original thought in his head. His ability to think systematically had been undermined, not by drugs (there were plenty of smart acid-heads), but by fame. He was caught up in the vortex of the time, the conviction that his own impulses were more important than reasoning. I was quite familiar with these illusions, but I was only an expert on pop culture. He was an expert on the death of the mind.

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?

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.