Stonewall (23 page)

Soon after, Jim hooked up with Joe Chaikin's experimental group, the Open Theater. Distrustful of the theater's traditional reliance on words, Chaikin had begun to use intense physical exercises to explore nonverbal forms of communication; his brilliant production of
The Serpent
in the late sixties would make the Open Theater the most admired of all the experimental companies. But by then, Jim, typically, had already left—this time sparking off to do an electric “up-to-the-minute” column for a Hearst publication called
Eye
. Since it
had a three-month lead time, Jim would make up events and then, with his friends, see to it that they came true in time for the column to appear.

His most consistent (though never singular) commitment in the mid-to-late sixties remained with Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies, and he played a central role in several of the “spontaneous” actions that all at once imaginatively protested the inequities and deformities of American life and the escalating war in Vietnam, “blew the minds” of the Yippies' straight-shooting comrades on the left, and made the Yippies media celebrities and countercultural heroes.

In June 1967 Jim, wearing purple pants, accompanied Abbie (in his now
de rigueur
beads and bell-bottoms) to the SDS “Drawing Board” conference in Michigan. The gathering had been called mostly to redefine the New Left's relationship to an emergent “black power” movement that advised whites henceforth to work in their own communities. The New York Yippies were joined in Michigan by a delegation from the San Francisco Diggers, led by Emmett Grogan, and together they managed to wreak havoc with the “rational discourse” favored by SDS.

After Tom Hayden had finished his evaluation of white organizing efforts in the black ghetto of Newark, the Digger contingent disrupted the meeting with assorted shouts and antics. Emmett Grogan told the crowd (in Grogan's recollection) “about the importance of anonymity to persons who seriously attempted to effect relevant changes in any social order,” and he made fun of the fondness of Abbie Hoffman and others for the limelight. When Abbie countered that Grogan would end up on the cover of
Time
magazine, Grogan vehemently denied it, and to punctuate his point kicked over a Formica table, punched and slapped people, yelled that they were all “fags,” that they didn't have “the balls to go mad” or to make a real revolution, that they would “piss in their pants” if violence ever erupted. Then he read aloud Gary Snyder's poem “Day of Judgment upon Us.”
³³

The Diggers, the Yippies, and some SDSers then proceeded to get stoned (Jim was known in Yippie circles as comparatively abstemious), and talk till dawn about the need for the New Left to understand that a revolution in consciousness had to precede, or at the least accompany, any hoped-for revolution in social arrangements. According to one printed account—which Jim decries as apocryphal—he tried to make the countercultural point concrete by abruptly kissing the square-rigger SDS leader, Bob Ross, full on the
lips. When the stunned Ross purportedly recoiled, Jim is said to have explained that he had always been powerfully attracted to Jewish men.
³⁴

Back in New York, Jim and Abbie led a series of daringly theatrical actions that employed the symbols of authority in order to discredit them. In a Flower Power demonstration, perhaps the very first dramatization of ecological concerns, they set off soot bombs at Con Edison headquarters and, to the accompaniment of a rock band playing from a nearby flatbed truck, planted a tree in front of the popular disco the Electric Circus, as a way of protesting the city's lack of greenery. But their most imaginative and best-publicized action took place at the New York Stock Exchange.

The original idea for the action had been Jim's, but Abbie, as was his disconcerting way, soon claimed it for his own. Alerting the media in advance, a group of eighteen Yippies simply joined the line of tourists and thus made their way into the gallery overlooking the trading floor. They then started throwing wads of dollar bills down onto the floor below. The ticker tape stopped; the brokers stared up at the balcony in disbelief; and then a number of them rushed to scoop up the dollar bills, as the Yippies rapturously applauded—until the guards collared and ejected them. (In 1989, apparently unaware of the earlier precedent, members of ACT UP threw thousands of fake hundred-dollar bills onto the floor of the Stock Exchange.) Back out in front of the Exchange, the Yippies, for the further edification of the gathered reporters, burned a final bundle of bills in symbolic disdain for the material life.

The Wall Street action was widely covered in the media—with the usual discrepancies. Some of the accounts had the Yippies tossing Monopoly money, others twenty-dollar bills, and still others ripped-up singles. “It was the perfect mythical event,” Abbie later gloated, and he took special delight in the CBS report, which alone among the networks accurately reported his insistence that he was really Cardinal Spellman and had tossed at least a thousand dollars in small bills onto the trading floor.
³⁵

Jim's growing prominence as a result of his Yippie activities did not go unnoticed by the FBI. Deciding to gather additional information on him, the Bureau sent two FBI agents to his parents' home in Rhode Island. Not finding his mother in, they went to the Newport restaurant where Jim's stepfather worked as a chef and told him that Jim was wanted for a bank robbery. His stepfather begged the FBI agents not to bother Jim's mother; she had recently been hospitalized
after a breakdown and was still in fragile shape. The agents promised to leave her alone, and promptly returned to her house. This time she was in, and the agents convinced the trembling woman that she could best protect her son by turning over everything that related to him—pictures, letters, whatever. Which she did.

Jim was furious when he heard about the cruel intimidation. Except for an occasional telephone call or postcard, he hadn't been in regular contact with his parents for some time. They knew nothing about his political life except that he was against the war in Vietnam—which they supported, as they supported all official acts of the government. The FBI visit put an end to their innocence. Hearing from Jim that he had never been involved in a bank robbery, and from her husband that the FBI had promised
not
to bother her, Jim's mother wrung her hands in guilty remorse over having cooperated with the agents. Jim quieted her down, but the FBI's casual disregard for the defenseless woman's well-being got emotionally linked in his mind with the fate of defenseless Vietnamese peasants. It further hardened his determination to resist the impervious, cold-hearted men in Washington.

But his next major action, on March 22, 1968, ended in disaster. The Yippies decided to stage a “celebration of the spring equinox” in the heart of the working world's bustle: Grand Central Station. The demonstration drew a large crowd of some six thousand, and soon veered from benign antics to heated confrontation. Several people—possibly provocateurs, possibly members of the anarchist East Village group Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers, who believed in confrontational tactics—scrambled on top of the information booth in the center of the huge main hall, started chanting “Burn, baby, burn!” and tore the hands off the booth's clock. Then two cherry bombs went off, and a large contingent of police charged the crowd, flailing about with their nightsticks, clubbing those already fallen. They rammed a
Village Voice
reporter headfirst into a glass door and beat Abbie (who had come dressed as an American Indian) into unconsciousness. He nonetheless hailed the event for putting Yippies “on the map.”
³⁶

Jim was not nearly so sanguine. Having helped to announce the event on WBAI and organize it through handouts of his paper,
The Communications Company
, he felt personally responsible for the debacle. And he was deeply shaken by it as a possible harbinger of what might happen that summer at the planned “Festival of Life” demonstration during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Jim's politics
did not encompass violence, revolutionary or otherwise. His activism, as he saw it, derived from moral imperatives and was concerned above all with the transformation of consciousness—and he even defined his work in avant-garde theater as further feeding into that “revolution in feeling.” He was now worried that there would be another explosive confrontation at the Democratic convention and that it would put everything he valued in jeopardy.

Abbie reassured him that the Yippie presence in Chicago would focus (as the posters promised) on “Lights-Theater-Magic-Free Music,” thereby abetting precisely the cultural renovation Jim had been working for. But Abbie's giddy talk to the press about slipping LSD into the water supply, fucking openly in the parks, and releasing greased pigs on the convention floor, struck Jim as irresponsible and heightened his anxiety. As the time for the convention drew near, he became increasingly convinced that confrontation, not celebration, would be the end result. During Yippie planning sessions, he openly predicted a “bloodbath” and insisted that if people were going to have to fight in the streets then they damn well, ought to be told what was coming so they could prepare for it—instead of being encouraged to believe, as official Yippie releases had it, that some wondrously benign love-in was afoot.

Abbie later claimed that the Grand Central Station Massacre had “let the whole world know there would be blood on the streets of Chicago” and that anyone who came there knew full well in advance “that they were risking their life.” It is certainly true that others besides Jim—if not Abbie himself—gave ample warning that events in the Windy City could take a violent turn. Abe Peck, editor of the underground publication
Seed
, had written, for example, “If you're coming to Chicago, be sure to wear some armor in your hair.” And those warnings were ultimately heard. No more than a couple of thousand young people showed up for the Festival of Life.
³⁷

Abbie did finally arrange for medical and legal assistance at the planned Lincoln Park and Grant Park gathering sites, but he apparently continued to believe—such was his optimistic nature—in a peaceful outcome. If so, he hadn't reckoned on Richard J. Daley, Chicago's mayor. Many months before the Democratic delegates were due to arrive, Daley talked as if a berserk cadre of “hoodlums and Communists” was determined on a bloody takeover of the city, and he darkly hinted at assassination plots against the leading presidential candidates. To meet this wildly exaggerated threat, Daley armed his police to the teeth and set the city's nerves on edge with his doomsday
rhetoric. When, just a few months before the Democrats were due to convene, Robert F. Kennedy was gunned down, the apocalyptic mood deepened.

Daley proved a self-fulfilling prophet. For the better part of a week, the police, with little or no provocation, literally assaulted antiwar demonstrators and yippies alike, spilling so much blood, and bashing onlookers, reporters, and “freaks” so indiscriminately, that TV images of their rampaging brutality produced national revulsion. A number of convention delegates expressed open horror at the police riot, but the convention nonetheless proceeded to vote down a peace plank and to nominate Hubert Humphrey, closely identified with the Vietnam War, as the Democratic presidential candidate.

As much as Jim deplored on all counts the outcome at Chicago, he recognized, with some satisfaction, that hordes of “mere” liberals had been driven leftward and that the heightened polarization of the country held out the eventual promise of its rejuvenation.

PART  FIVE

THE LATE SIXTIES

YVONNE

Y
vonne felt that being single was a temporary state. As she put it, “I was always falling in love and there was always somebody ready to fall in love, too. And there were always women ready for sex.” In retrospect she thinks of herself as having been “compulsively romantic” in the mid-sixties, “always having two or three affairs going on at the same time.… I was used to the insanity. Good old dyke drama.”

Her intense interactions were almost entirely with other black women; over the years she became involved with only three or four women who were white. She found black women more political (“If she doesn't have any politics I'm not even interested in her”), more mature emotionally, and with greater “energy for living, for dancing, for life, for people.… There are so many things about me they understand, where it comes from, what it's about, so I can cut across a whole lot of stuff.”
¹

After Anne left her in 1963, Yvonne still came into Manhattan often from Brooklyn; she had a passion for museums and galleries, for staring transfixed at buildings and bridges (“My eyes were hungry”)—and, of course, she came to hang out in the gay clubs and to hear her beloved jazz. She heard “every musician who was anybody who passed through New York”—including, at the Five Spot, one of the last appearances by Coleman Hawkins and one of the first by Ornette Coleman. For a week, jazz aficionados showed up for every one of Ornette Coleman's sets, but true to the supercool style of the
clubs would only allow as how “this dude with the plastic horn, you'd have to say, it ain't bad.”

Following a midnight set, Yvonne would take off, say, for a dance given by the M.C. Social Club in the Bronx or at the Audubon Ballroom in Manhattan; and, when that party ended at three
A
.
M
. or so, would go on to an all-women's after-hours place like Snooky's, and dance, eat, and drink till daybreak. But she found more time for studying than she had when younger, and it took her no more than the usual two years to get her O.T. (occupational therapy) graduate certificate from NYU, in 1966.

But it was a close call. In her last term before graduating, Yvonne developed a huge fibroid tumor and several gynecological cysts, and had to have major surgery. Unable to attend classes for the final weeks of the semester, she nonetheless managed, with the help of classmates and friends, to complete her assignments and graduate in June.