CONFESSIONS OF A FLOWER ADULT

                                                   A Memoir of Hippiedom 

                                                                by Stephen Mo Hanan

The gamble I made around 1970 didn’t even seem like one at the time, although the stakes were nothing less than my life. From today’s forty-year-plus perspective, it would be easy to call that gamble a mistake, but somehow I’m not convinced. I hope writing this book will lead me to a place of discovery, where the rekindled flame of those years in the Yellow House will shed light on what they ultimately were: either frivolity and madness, or a summons to greater sanity and wisdom.

But I get ahead of myself. 

                                                                  JERUSALEM

                                                                            1.

I showed up in New York at age thirty looking like a Biblical prophet: long wavy locks, abundant facial hair. A prophet who wore tie-dyed tunics, bell-bottom jeans and love beads. For most of the Seventies I’d been a San Francisco street performer. Though I shouldn’t presume to call my act unique, if there was ever another Harvard-educated Fulbright scholar who played concertina and sang for the crowds waiting to board the Sausalito Ferry, I haven’t met him.

For over six years I had been living communally in a compact pre-earthquake house a short stroll from Golden Gate Park at the western edge of Haight-Ashbury. I was the senior member, having outlasted housemates who stayed for more than three years, and others for barely a month. During my time the Yellow House had almost thirty occupants, though never more than five at a time. The individuals changed, but the peaceful, coöperative, nurturing vibe remained constant, offering welcome to all who entered.

(Well, mostly. The eviction of Emily and her baby “Pockets” comes further on.)

The Ferry provided my paying gig, but once I had a concertina repertoire of a few dozen songs at my fingertips, there was no shutting me up. I had a powerful and (evidently) pleasing voice that I enjoyed unleashing in show tunes, original songs and especially operatic arias. Introversion was never an issue. I serenaded Luciano Pavarotti at the stage door of the San Francisco Opera House (“Che bella voce!” he exclaimed and took me briefly under his hefty wing). I serenaded the opera lovers waiting in the lobby for standing room tickets, with no thought of passing the hat. On line like the rest, I just loved that rousing music and loved to send it forth, and if there was something incongruous about a shaggy wide-eyed hippie earning applause for belting Verdi with a squeezebox, I loved that, too.

But after years of hearing people tell me I should be on Broadway, at thirty it seemed time to give it a shot. Furthermore, my first play had been produced in San Francisco by the American Conservatory Theater and was scheduled for a New York reading at Joseph Papp’s place. It was my turn to be the departing housemate. I stored some stuff in boxes in the basement garage and boarded the Grey Rabbit bus for New York City. 

Once I discovered the standing room lines at the Metropolitan Opera House, they seemed a perfect lab to test whether New York would be as welcoming as my San Francisco home. On a sunny October morning I slung the concertina over my shoulder in its leather-strapped bag, and headed for Lincoln Center. I forget what the show was, but some hundred people were already standing in a line that snaked along the front lobby toward the shuttered box office window.

They were reading the morning paper, sipping hot beverages, chatting softly and amiably and wafting a low murmuring buzz around the lofty marble and glass foyer. I sized up the scene, took a few deep breaths, unbuckled the concertina bag, folded back the velvet lining and withdrew my instrument. I gave it a few silent tugs and squeezes to let it breathe, closed my eyes and mentally rehearsed my habitual pre-show invocation: “May this performance demonstrate the beauty, joy and freedom of the Holy Spirit.”

A petite blonde woman standing beside me was starting to ask what I was doing when my introductory oom-pah-pah cut her off, and after two bars I launched into that catchiest of chestnuts, “La donna è mobile.” There was of course the instant swoosh of heads turning in my direction, with surprised faces that mainly shifted into smiles. I sang only the first verse, but tacked on a big finish and got a hearty round of applause and scattered Bravos.

I was considering what to sing next when there approached an aged usher with a brass-buttoned crimson uniform and a colorless face, his small frame quivering with outrage. “What’s dat supposed to be?” he barked. Without waiting for reply, he ordered me to put dat ting away and pipe down.

I contemplated him quizzically and the blonde woman said, “Oh come on, that was nice.” He ignored her and persisted in insisting that I desist. A tweedy fellow with a gradstudent beard and then others nearby began to protest. The sentiment spread. But the dour old usher stayed relentlessly on message until voices from the back began to boo him.

“Ya see?” he lectured me, “ now yer creatin’ a distoibance.”

“Actually I’d say you’re the one creating the disturbance,” I suggested.

He glared at me, his eyes frosty with veto, and said, “You can’t sing in here. Dis is an opera house!” 

                                                                       2.

This was hardly my first clash with an authority figure who clamped down on music I was making in public. In my home town of Washington, D.C., I was arrested for singing and hauled off to a police lockup (it was the Nixon era). In Palenque, Mexico, my arrest by the local sheriff and his thugs was aborted by a mob of well-disposed townsfolk who rescued me, whisking me off to a secluded cabin that turned out to be a storehouse of magic mushrooms. (Turn the pages for more on altered states.)

The Palenque incident was a climax to some four months of backpacking across Mexico and Guatemala that began in December of 1973. The commune on Shrader Street had reached a plateau of smooth running that easily would continue without me (or so I was eager to believe), and I’d made enough money that summer and fall at the Ferry to take off until spring brought the tourists back.

On a good weekend at the Ferry, from April through October, passengers for Sausalito would start lining up about half an hour before departure. The old terminal at the foot of Market Street funneled ticket holders into a long passageway, walled to a height of four feet, with a blue-and-white striped awning for shade. It led to the gate where at loading time they surrendered their tickets and boarded the boat.

Facing this captive audience, in bright sunlight, was an empty asphalt lot in which for years I cavorted around, singing a cappella (at first) or improvising (initially) snappy patter. With each fresh boatload the bills and coins and occasional contraband would pour into my upturned hat, at intervals of ninety minutes four or five times a day. A good weekend added up to anywhere between two and three hundred bucks. This at a time when my share of the rent was fifty-five dollars a month.

If I’d been paying taxes in those days I might have written off the Mexico trip as a business expense. From the live recording a friend made of the act that summer (he brought his eight-track recorder down to the Ferry), it was obvious that some kind of accompaniment would help to anchor my renditions of famous ditties that too often drifted into unforeseen keys. I had never learned to play an instrument, could barely read music beyond a fourth-grade level, but had a good ear. And then the perfect solution, a concertina, portable and picturesque, came my way for a paltry fifteen bucks. But it soon became clear that San Francisco’s endless distractions would hinder my learning to play it. 

So, at 26, armed with “Mastering the Concertina,” a pamphlet from 1902 that I paid fifty cents for in a Market Street pawnshop, I headed for Yelapa, a remote fishing village I knew, some ways down the Pacific coast from Puerto Vallarta. “Mastering” wasn’t crucial; my plan was to assemble enough adequately backed-up repertoire to fill twenty-five to thirty minutes between the start of my singing act and the boarding of the boat.

Built on steep hills overlooking a lushly sheltered bay, Yelapa had no roads, cars, or electricity and was awash (so to speak) with roving hippies. There I rented a primitive hillside house for sixteen dollars a month. It came with a hammock in which I swung day after day, admiring the ocean view, drawing or writing in my journal and applying my weed-focused mind to studying the pamphlet and the tidy little six-sided box of reeds, buttons and bellows that was my new companion.

One morning in town, a few weeks in, I met the great Nicole, ten years my senior, who played the dulcimer and encouraged me to jam with her. It was a celestial pairing of sounds. Her metal strings shimmered where my reeds tootled. She was a classically trained pianist and taught me much about relationships, musical and otherwise. She had written a song called “Bring Out the Gold in Everyone,” which struck me as terrific advice.

With her encouragement I was soon confident enough to try accompanying myself in public. Electronic media being absent, there wasn’t much entertainment in town to compete with, and my auditors, whether native Yelapans or mellow Californian expats, responded with enthusiasm. Before long Nicole and I hit the road, traveling to Acapulco and Oaxaca, playing for ourselves or passersby, and when she went home to Mendocino I struck out alone and made my way south, eager to visit the famous Mayan ruins near the town of Palenque, where the jail-happy sheriff was in charge.

But I get ahead of myself.

                                                                      3.

The Yellow House at 724 Shrader Street was in fact yellow and white, but there was so much more of the former (everything except the gingerbread trim) that it gave its name to the building itself. It was buttercup yellow when every other house on the block was still beige or grey, a full year before San Francisco started flinging money at housepainters on acid, birthing the mid-70s rainbow eruption of polychrome Victorians.

I moved into it in October of 1971 with three others. It felt like home from the moment I first stepped through the door. Yet I might have never done so, except for being arrested while singing on the street in Washington a few months earlier. Why, you may ask (my parents did), was I even doing that?

                                                                       4.

I’m not sure when it first occurred to me that my generation was witnessing the birth of a new level of consciousness. I entered Harvard in the fall of 1964 a Goldwater Republican, aping my father. And like him, if I even thought about consciousness at all, it was simply something that I regained after sleep. That autumn the Beatles still performed in suits and LBJ ran as the anti-war candidate. Sergeant Pepper, pot’s sweep through Harvard, and the Summer of Love were three years away; the Stonewall riots, Woodstock and the first photographs of Earth from space yet two years further beyond. The possibility that I, a child of Orthodox Judaism, might one day find myself singing on the street, let alone roaming in a loincloth through a Mendocino redwood grove hung with tie-dyed banners marking the summer encampment of a tribe of free-spirited, guitar-strumming, I Ching-consulting, natural foods-eating, psychedelically awakened, consistently amiable clothes-optional hippies seemed as remote as the likelihood of an African-American winning the White House.

History hasn’t been kind to the movement that proclaimed an alternate culture that would deliver America and indeed the planet from the evils attendant upon materialism, Puritanism and greed. Although pop culture has worked hard to bury the Puritans, it seems that for every Tina Turner there’s still a Bill O’Reilly. Materialism and greed are clearly still with us, more toxic than ever. But for a memorable if brief time there were ubiquitous nests of an alternate “life style” (it’s how the term came into general use) that were really fun to be part of, and into which I plunged with bells on.

How did I give myself permission to loosen up so much? The changes operating within my own head wouldn’t have done it without the example of so many of my peers following a similar path. The Yellow House prospered for as long as it did, years after I left it for New York, because there was a reservoir of kindred souls to channel into it, year after year. What held us together was neither religion, ethnicity, formal education or class, nor even “ideology,” but a way of looking at the world that was new and bold, love-saturated and full of joy. Pity it hasn’t caught on.

For there was a time when it seemed to be spreading through the industrialized West like yeast lifting a sodden lump of dough. Appearing as if from nowhere, in a handful of years its signs were everywhere: in music, dress, language, values, attitudes. On the 1970 billboard promoting Grand Funk Railroad, where, for the first time, giant hippie heads loomed over Times Square. In the emerging world of alternative FM radio. In the books you encountered and the faces of the people reading them. An object of mockery or nostalgia today, this movement was once taken seriously enough to be viewed by its opponents as dangerous, a subversive threat to the status quo. As late as 1994, the newly triumphant Newt Gingrich announced his intention to wipe out “all the McGoverniks.”

None of us hippies imagined at the time how the rift we opened in society through our defiant originality would provoke the extremes of reaction that have stamped the past three decades. The root, I believe, was two conflicting definitions of freedom. To us it meant release from the mindsets of fear and convention, achieved through examining the psyche in its fullness. To the opposition, freedom was (and remains) merely an extension of the ego’s drive for control, acquisition and conquest, achieved through subduing or defeating others.

When flower children first bloomed across the globe, the key to our ultimate success looked to be not violence but the cultural absorption and transformation of the next generational wave. Mammals didn’t fight the dinosaurs, they ate their eggs. I continue to believe that humanity’s survival instinct will direct us to a higher and more peaceful evolutionary level, though from time to time I wonder: when the meek inherit the earth will it still be in good shape?

But I get ahead of myself.

                                                                           5.

My father, Jonah Kaplan (I dropped the patronymic when my first play was produced), was born in Lithuania in 1901, the year that Queen Victoria died. Lithuania was then a province of Czarist Russia, and its capital, Vilna (now Vilnius), where Jonah grew up, one of the great centers of Jewish learning and culture in the pre-Hitler world. His mother was the daughter of a well-to-do lumber merchant, his father an aspiring if second-rate cantor who was lucky to have married into affluence. Jonah used to talk about how he loved as a boy to scramble over the great stacks of lumber in his grandfather’s yard (this was usually in rebuke to my perceived lack of athletic prowess). He was the only son among three sisters, and was almost Bar Mitzvah when, in the summer of 1914, his father left to accept a synagogue engagement in Brooklyn, New York. No one imagined that little Jonah’s stint as Man of the House would last more than the few months required for Papa to accumulate the cash to bring over the whole family, but no one foresaw the outbreak of World War One.

Being Man of the House became a very different matter, and it cemented into Jonah a sense of responsibility (and danger) that never left him. He witnessed cavalry charges and artillery battles as Vilna was repeatedly attacked and defended by Russians, Germans and Poles. He saw the family’s livelihood collapse as the lumber yard was appropriated by successive invading armies, whose languages he aptly acquired. He ventured on foot into open country, walking miles to bring home a sack of potatoes from the outlying farm villages, an exploit he spoke of repeatedly. Once, with a pistol at his head, he was paraded down the street to headquarters by a Polish army officer who then let him go (he spoke less of this). And when it seemed that peace had finally come, it was blown away by the cavalry charges, artillery battles and further traumas of the Russian Revolution.

The family was reunited during the Administration of Warren Harding. Jonah always remembered with pride that they didn’t have to suffer the indignities of Ellis Island because Papa had booked their passage in a private stateroom. He was twenty, hadn’t seen his father in seven years, and missed him at the pier because the boat docked on Saturday and Papa was davening at his Brooklyn shul. Jonah characteristically took charge, hailed a taxi and shepherded his mother and three sisters to their new home. I have no idea how much English he had at his command then, but obviously it sufficed. His intelligence and grit more than sufficed as he worked his way through night school, law school and pharmacy school and eventually, during the Depression, ran his own drug store in Forest Hills. If filling prescriptions asked less of his adversarial mind than lawyering would have, he found other ways to do battle. Domestic ways.

Like most young Jewish immigrants in the Thirties Jonah was ardently pro-FDR. Then one summer his buddy Abe Rekant took him to a camp in the Catskills for young leftie singles. And there, for the first time in his life, he encountered interracial couples 

making out. The sight so repelled him that he fled into the arms of the GOP. Like MGM’s Louis B. Mayer, whom he strikingly resembled, he supposed that being Republican would mark him a true-blue American. Abandoning his former friends, he worked hard and married late, was past forty when he met Lottie Klein, who became his wife and my mother.

                                                                            6.

If the drama of Jonah’s upbringing was tinged with war, Lottie’s was broadly peaceful. Born on the lower East Side of Manhattan, she was the adored baby of her family, sole offspring of her father’s second wife (the first wife expired, perhaps gratefully, after giving birth to ten girls and boys, of whom six survived infancy). The father, a lavishly bearded Hungarian immigrant named Bernard Klein, was by all accounts a perpetually cheerful ne’er-do-well. Though not an ordained rabbi he was qualified to officiate at circumcisions, weddings and funerals. He frequently accepted barter for his services and when enough inventory accumulated would sell it from a pushcart along Avenue C.

His two eldest children were married and out of the house by the time Lottie came along in 1909. This left five kids in a two-room coldwater tenement and Bernard was eager to marry off the next one, a daughter named Rose with nothing but her beauty for a dowry. One day he brought home a potential suitor, quite well off but several decades older than Rose. After the meeting, Bernard asked her what she thought of the guy. She quite naturally objected that he seemed awful old, Papa.

“Did you hear him breathing?” he replied. “Marry him and in six months you’ll be a rich widow.”

And so it came to pass. But it was customary among these Old World families that a respectable young woman, even a rich widow, didn’t live alone, and Rose moved reluctantly back into the Klein tenement. She was as anxious to leave as the others were to be rid of her, so Bernard went husband-hunting once more. But this time the money was on the other foot and he was determined that no mere fortune-hunter would nab young Rose. Eventually she was courted by a young man even richer than she was, and the ensuing marriage brought her a swanky uptown apartment and a baby girl of her own.

But it didn’t last. Husband Number Two suffered a stroke while bowling (I always thought it should have been a strike) and subsequently died. Respectable Rose had no choice but to move back into the tenement, only this time she brought not only the infant Blanche but several racks of clothing from Bendel’s and Bonwit Teller, including a half dozen coats and stoles of mink and chinchilla. If this wasn’t enough to pique the neighborhood’s curiosity, she had a town car parked out front, kept immaculate by a uniformed chauffeur. (Rose’s eventual third marriage was long-lasting and even more prosperous.)

Lottie recalled this phase of her girlhood with glee. Rose took the family for rides all over town as well as into the fresh air of the countryside. She introduced her half-sister to the magic of Broadway and the songs of Gershwin and Rodgers and Hart which Lottie, whose voice was lovely, sang with gusto well into her eighties. In harsh weather she and her half-siblings Sadie, Sidney and Jerome were driven to school and escorted home by the chauffeur. If there was any cognitive dissonance between this and sleeping at home doubled up in screened-off beds, they never mentioned it.

However there was some cognitive dissonance on the part of Reznick, the kosher butcher in the tenement next door. He would peer from his window, seething with envy because “that nothing Klein’s daughter has a chauffeur with a fancy car, and mine not.” The perceived affront to his self-worth finally exploded in an act of madness. With savings that should have moved his family up to the Grand Concourse, he splurged on an identical town car and a uniformed chauffeur to tend it. Now there were two limos parked nose to nose before the tenements, with gangs of Yiddish-speaking urchins in kneebritches playing stickball beside the gleaming hubcaps.

Lottie’s mother Sophie was a self-taught lover of German and English literature who introduced her to Goethe and Dickens and the glory of books. Lottie became the first member of her family to attend college, CCNY. With her education degree she moved in 1937 to Washington, D.C., where high school English teachers were in demand. She lived for a while in a kosher boarding house where she met Jonah’s married sister, who played matchmaker. Lottie was a dish, as old photos proclaim, with large blue-gray eyes, shoulder-length wavy hair, a kindly and sensuous mouth, a lively mind and great legs. Jonah was smitten. Of the details of their courtship I know little, but they married in 1943. Fifty years later, following Jonah’s death, Lottie talked more freely about their marriage, shedding light that clarified an enigma of my childhood.

But again, I get ahead of myself.  

                                                                           7.

Unlikely as these origins were to launch me into the Age of Aquarius, there was some continuity. Sabbath observance, though full of annoying restrictions (I was president of my high school class but forbidden to attend Senior Prom on a Friday night), invested our home with a tangible sense of sanctity on a regular weekly basis. The lighting of the ceremonial candles, and my childhood fascination with staying up until they burned out and plunged the room into darkness, kindled a respect for ritual and mystery that invoked a world beyond the material plane, a world from which peace and blessing could arise when called upon. Years in Hebrew school forged a solid link between life of the mind and life of the spirit.

On the other hand, when I left home to join the Harvard Class of 1968, the material plane widened to reveal unanticipated riches. After a couple of years, I lost patience with the dietary laws that condemned me to a steady regime of cottage cheese, tuna fish or peanut butter sandwiches when everybody else in the Adams House dining hall was feasting on its delectable pork chops, crab cakes or unsanctified steak. But by then I had a reputation for being kosher, so I ducked out to a different house to conceal my first violation of the ancient biblical rules. This should have taught me something about the unhealthy alliance between religious scruple, guilt and egotism, but my awareness was too uncritical to make the jump. It was enough to escape death by lightning bolt for mixing meat and dairy. A taste for tofu and alfalfa sprouts was well in the future; at nineteen, my first cheeseburger was a revelation.

More so was my exposure to Harvard’s literary and theatrical communities. Back home I’d been writing and performing in the usual public school outlets, but the level of talent I encountered at Harvard was truly stellar. Awe-inspiring, even. (Some of my contemporaries there have reaped global renown and well-deserved wealth. I won’t identify them. Name-dropping is tacky, as Meryl Streep once told me.)

The encouragement I got as a college actor led me during senior year to apply for a Fulbright fellowship to study the craft at LAMDA, the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. To my parents’ dismay, I got the grant. The same government that was sending thousands of American boys to Vietnam sent me to a British acting school. Go figure.  

When the Class of ’68 returned to Harvard for its Twenty-fifth Reunion, there were seminars about the legacy of Vietnam. Everyone remembered the twin traumas of that year: Martin Luther King was to have been our Class Day speaker and Bobby Kennedy was shot just a few days before Commencement. What had slipped most minds, however, was that the year 1968 began with elimination of the automatic grad school deferment. Only medical or divinity school students were exempt from the draft. Student protest reached new levels, along with scams to evade conscription. Mine was to exaggerate a slight knee injury I’d received playing Ko-Ko in The Mikado and build up a medical record of extensive physical therapy. I also paid several visits to a Boston hypnotist, Ferris Moses by name, hoping that by post-hypnotic suggestion he could make me deaf in one ear long enough to flunk the physical. It didn’t take, but initiation into the trance state would have significant repercussions down the line.

On the strength of the knee story my local draft board let me leave for England to start my Fulbright and take the physical over there when my number was called. The U.S. Army doctor at Oxford found nothing wrong with my knee and classified me 1-A. But before the summons could arrive, some audacious anti-war rebels back home vandalized my draft board, drenching the file cabinets in bovine blood, and I never heard from the Army again. (Years later the same knee gave me so much trouble I had to have arthroscopy to repair a torn meniscus. Karma works in mysterious ways.)

I may have escaped, but it didn’t diminish my recoil at the insanity in American society that was becoming more evident daily. Sitting on top of a double-decker London bus that summer, I read the International Herald Tribune account of police violence outside the Chicago Democratic Convention and was so enraged I almost punched the innocent old lady seated next to me. From across the Atlantic I watched Richard Nixon win the White House and wondered if my country would ever make sense to me again.

That it did so, at least for a while, was due to a now-legendary event that coincided with my return. Fulbright scholars were offered the option of ocean travel, and my ship, the brand new QE2, docked at New York on the very same August 1969 weekend that the Woodstock Music Festival took off upstate. I knew nothing about it until back in Washington I started talking with mind-blown friends who had been transformed by the experience. By the time the movie came out a year later, I, too, was transformed. 

                                                                         8.

LAMDA had instilled in me a deeply idealistic view of acting and I was less interested in fame and fortune than in perfecting my craft by joining some regional company (there were so many back then) and playing lots of different parts in a season. But by the time I returned to the States the coming season’s casting was over. In the fall of 1969 John L, a Harvard pal, who had won a Fulbright to LAMDA the year before me, was at the McCarter Theater in Princeton and offered me a part in a children’s show he was directing. For a few months it would tour schools in southern New Jersey on a Title II grant, and it offered coveted membership in Actors Equity, the professional union. This enabled me not only to earn money by acting but to demonstrate the possibility of same to my still-skeptical parents. With a fellow actor, on a warm October day off from performing, I ingested a psychedelic for the first time, but that’s another story.

Or maybe it isn’t. Michael, a few years my senior, had also been with me at LAMDA. His background was Noo Yawk woiking-class Italian, with a brother in the priesthood. A seemingly irresistible ladies’ man with large hazel eyes, a sensual mouth and trimly athletic build, he had (as he put it) “gotten his end wet” with almost every female at school. The very prototype of the lovable rogue, he supplied the capsule of mescaline for our trip, which involved a very long, very leisurely walk up the beach from Margate to Atlantic City. It changed the ocean and sky in ways I could never have imagined and would never lose.

What was known as mescaline in those days was a chemical synthesis of peyote buttons. Its reputation for being “mellow” sprang from the absence of those jazzy visuals associated with its garish cousin LSD, and from its ability to pull the mind into deep but gentle reflection on cosmic themes. I haven’t thought about that trip in many years, but now, sitting at my laptop (sci-fi in those days), I recall with vivid clarity every sensation, starting with the flow of energy along my spinal cord that made my backbone seem to fuse and pleasantly melt. Up until that day I lived with the common intellectual trait of sorting and filtering my experience into preordained categories with rational labels. (Thanks, Harvard!) That afternoon I felt directly the infinity of ever-cresting waves, the vast depth of the sky, the soaring vitality of the circling gulls. The majesty of nature dissolved every mental filter I had imposed on it and for the first time since boyhood I felt the delicious humility of wonder. Hanan – 

And rollicking laughter. Michael was always a light-hearted soul, and on this occasion his humor, in fact all humor, seemed to flow from a sudden realization that there isn’t a shred of evidence in support of the view that life is serious. We sat on a raised wooden platform in the sand, about ten feet square, which for the longest time transformed us into the comic tramps from Waiting for Godot. Only instead of existential angst, we were immersed in the wondrous perfection of the ever-unfolding present. Lying on your back you could hang your head off the eastern side and watch gulls flying through an upside-down sky with surf crashing at the top of an upside-down ocean.

When at last we dismounted to walk up the beach, funny/sad things kept happening. Toddlers lost their bathing suits and bawled. Elaborate sand castles collapsed in the tide, to their young makers’ chagrin. As we walked along we encountered a cross-country team of several dozen high school kids, boys and girls in identical track suits, running toward us. They looked fairly depleted, and the grim purposefulness of their expressions ill suited their perky red and yellow uniforms. “Fellini,” Michael said, and the Italian director’s visually gleeful presence continued as the red and yellow stragglers showed up, with perfect timing, in twos or threes or less. Just when we thought we’d seen the last one, another showed up panting and sweating but game to the end. Their forlorn, heroic determination was simultaneously noble and hilarious. It was a splendid metaphor for the human condition, all the better as we recognized ourselves in it.

As the trip climaxed, Atlantic City greeted us with a gaudy sunset fit for framing at Woolworth’s. The boardwalk was alive with strangers who seemed not so strange, unwitting players in the human comedy on a stage our minds had created just for the fun of it. For days afterward it was a shared secret between Michael and me, leavening the drudgery of shlepping from town to town, performing a silly play for noisy audiences in shabby auditoriums.

The tour ended at Thanksgiving and, Equity card in hand, I had my first go at New York, where another college friend invited me to crash on his living room sofa. I had no success finding work. Though the tour had provided enough money to live on for a while, it was a dismally depressing winter. Agents and auditions were hard to come by. When they did it was typically for a mouthwash or deodorant commercial. Waiting by the phone to find out if I booked one was a painful comedown from dreams of Shakespeare, 

Chekhov and Shaw. Also a repudiation of the countercultural ideals that were flourishing in this heyday of Sergeant Pepperdom. What was a worse sellout than commercials?

Salvation came with the spring, when a director from school offered me the lead in a non-professional Cambridge production of a rare Ben Jonson comedy. There was no money, but I got to apply my British training and strut my stuff and get lots of validation from old friends who saw the growth in my work. Spring was afoot and my self-confidence seemed to return with it. In this context I received an invitation from my anxious parents to join them on a Passover trip to Israel. What followed put my Jersey beach trip in the shade and pointed me inevitably to San Francisco and the Yellow House, Mexico and points beyond.

                                                                        9.

For Lottie and Jonah my changes were disturbing, to say the least. An expensive Harvard education plus a year in London had brought forth an aimless long-haired beatnik who had quite possibly stopped keeping kosher. In an attempt to bring their only child back into the fold, they offered to take me with them on their first trip to Israel, in April of 1970. I had gone there on my own in 1968-9, during the three-week Christmas break from LAMDA, and written ecstatic letters home about the experience. Kosher or not, I was enough of a Jew to be moved by the ancient home of my ancestors.

I was born just two years after the war’s end, raised to believe not only in the tenets of Orthodox Judaism but in the contemporary miracle of Israel’s statehood in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Returning from centuries of exile, irrigating, cultivating, planting hillsides with new forests, my people seemed to be repaying the land for all the years that the memory of it had sustained them. With heroes and tales from the Old Testament rooted in my imagination, at twenty-two I saw the Jewish state as the latest flowering of an epic saga, three thousand years in the telling.

Of course, this was before the plight of the displaced Palestinian people entered global awareness, still longer before I could suppose that Zionist zealotry might have unforeseen tragic consequences. Or that nationalism itself might be the problem. Where Israel was concerned, I was then a naïve romantic. After all, three different religions testify that the city of Jerusalem gives off a powerful vibe, and the surrounding landscape, so fierce and so timeless, hurls the mind well beyond rational thought. 

Mind-hurling was fine on my own; the parents’ company was another matter. Travel with them had never been especially enjoyable, even in the family car, which Lottie never learned to drive. Lottie was a peach for new experiences but she always deferred to Jonah, a world-class control freak. After an adolescence like his, who wouldn’t be? But it was years before I reached that level of comprehension, and in the meantime his wariness of impending mishap could spoil even a walk in the park. Their Israel venture, though, was as part of a group tour, meaning I could stay off the bus and pursue my own independent agenda.

This possibility was enriched by Colette, the girlfriend of yet another Harvard classmate, with whom I was hanging out on the very day my parents extended their invitation. She gave me a hit of mescaline, in the form of a bright pink pill, to put the “trip” in my upcoming trip. She didn’t mention that its power would change my life forever, but that’s what happened. Thanks, Colette.

At first I wasn’t sure that taking it was a good idea. I had tripped twice since the walk on the beach with Michael, later in the autumn with Harvard friends in rural New Jersey and then the Hudson Valley woods. Mescaline was opening my mind to questions about the universe, the natural world and my place in it that I’d never previously asked. No answers appeared, though the questions (like “How come there’s anything?”) were very interesting. But the frustration and anxious gloom of the winter just past were still fresh in my mind, and who knew what dark matter a psychedelic could flush forth? What psychotic episode? There were bad trip stories galore, exploited in the media with greater relish than the good news, which depended on word of mouth from an actual partaker.

To help decide, I defied Israeli customs with three joints cocooned in Saran wrap inside a large tube of shaving cream. The tour group checked into a Jerusalem hotel, and at the first moment of privacy, I unrolled the violated end of the tube and removed the contraband. Now I had some equipment to cope with the part of my mind I dubbed “Aunt Sadie.”

Sadie Klein Frank Mittman, Lottie’s nearest sister in age, twice-married, was an uneducated peroxide blonde with an oversized head, false teeth, large extremities and an unfailing instinct for sarcasm, scorn and belittlement. Life had dealt her some lousy hands: at five the accidental death of her infant brother Willy whom, in play, she shoved down the tenement stairs on a sled; a first husband who prior to marriage served in France during World War I and contracted syphilis there, a fact he concealed from his bride until the appearance of strange symptoms in their baby forced a confession; the suicide of this same remorseful husband; the uncertain fate of the child, Stanley, who survived despite being both physically and mentally compromised until his death at twentyfour. That Sadie endured these guilt- and grief-ridden ordeals with her coarse laugh intact was a tribute to the success of her second, childless marriage, but the wounds cost her. The hush-up of family shame cloaking her past led to a painful inauthenticity in the present, and when she showed humor it was rooted in mockery and fault-finding. Nothing was ever good enough for Aunt Sadie; there was always something to bitch about, even her favorite, Lawrence Welk (“those stinkin’ bubbles”). After her second husband died, she caved entirely. She hung on till eighty-nine, shriveled and cursing in a nursing home.

After smoking grass taught me to isolate the fault-finding voice in my own psyche, and to see how useless and even destructive it was, I began to label it “Aunt Sadie.” Perhaps I owed that voice a bit more respect. My best friend at Harvard once told me, “Your trouble, Steve, is the tendency you always have to minimize your shortcomings.” My clueless reply was, “Well, that’s a good thing, isn’t it?” Whether it is or not remains one of the questions that I hope writing this book will answer.

But still I get ahead of myself.

                                                                     10.

In honor of the biblical patriarchs who launched the Jewish people in the land of Canaan, I christened my three joints Abraham, Isaac and Jake. The day after arrival Lottie and Jonah joined their group on a tour of Tel Aviv-Jaffa and I stayed behind in Jerusalem, where I made a pilgrimage to the tomb of Theodore Herzl and fired up Abraham.

Herzl, a nineteenth-century secular Jew from Budapest, is revered as the founder of political Zionism, and soon after his dream became reality in 1948 his remains were brought to an imposing hilltop plaza beneath a great slab of black granite. I had visited it in January of the previous year but on this bright April day, with a little boost from Abraham, the site was vivid with flowers in full spring pop, yellow and magenta, pink and white, daisies, roses, petunias, flowering iceplant, plus choirs of birds holding forth in cypress trees that sprang from the earth like green flames. My heart sang right along. 

This encouraged me to try the mescaline a couple of days later, when Lottie and Jonah would be away in Galilee. But the day arrived with torrential rain framing brief sunny intervals. Bummer. “Aunt Sadie” persuaded me to scrap the mescaline plan. Instead, equipped with Isaac and an umbrella, I ventured to the Holyland Hotel, where an elaborate miniature model of biblical Jerusalem sprawled along the adjoining hillside. Built to the scale of a human being about an inch and a half high, it overlooks a panorama of rolling hills and valleys that in 1970 was undeveloped, as it might have looked 1900 years before. Both space and time were thus condensed, especially with a little help from Isaac.

The rain let up shortly after I arrived, and the force of sun and wind began to scatter an army of vanquished clouds eastward, chasing giant battalions of shadow and light across, down, up, and over the hillsides. Three thousand years ago, with the force of sword and spear King David chased real armies over such terrain, or sat still as the force of inspiration poured from this landscape into the mind that composed the Psalms, poetic tributes to the spiritual power of the natural world, read throughout the life of every worshipping Jew.

The model was not quite finished, and at one corner of the wall I met a stonemason cementing small blocks of buff-colored Jerusalem stone, some no bigger than pebbles, into a rising tower. He was shorter than me and I guessed a few years older, dark-skinned with a thick swirl of black hair poking out of his grey khaki workshirt. He wore a green New York Yankees baseball cap.

“Nice work,” I told him.

“Three years four men and myself is making this. Only before two months we finish. The Temple still we don’t finish it all.”

I asked him who designed it.

“We get drawings from—” and he hesitated. “Planners that draw.”

“Architects?”

“Architects. But we have plenty ideas ourself.” He grinned slyly. “And we have the stones.”

It always helps to have the stones, Isaac reminded me.

“I come to Israel from Yemen, they make me lay down bricks. Then sending me here I like it better. Is more nice job.” He turned his gaze toward the clusters of Holy Week tourists roundabout. “Here every day now people comes to look, and they like. They goes away happy. So they don’t salute me, don’t say, ‘Perez makes this,’ so what? Is that they grateful and happy, what matters.” He swept his trowel across the vast tiny city. “After you and me is dead, this still stands.” He leaned in confidentially. “Now I do only crazy work.”

I asked what he meant.

Perez pulled a photo from his shirt pocket, with two small children standing in back of a small imaginary city. “I show you. Come.” He walked me to a shed next to the souvenir shop. Inside was a plank table carrying dozens of architectural gems: imaginary Crusader fortifications rich with detail, with concealed tunnels, ramps and rough stairways, turrets with spy windows, parapets and barbicans, like Escher in stone. Whole villages with houses and stalls, courtyards, wells and fences, made of stones as small as grains of barley. At the far end a miniature Wailing Wall with a fore-pavement containing sunken holders for Hanukkah candles.

“Wow,” was all I could come up with, and eventually, “Do you sell these?”

“People wants to buy but every time I sell goes with it a piece of my heart. Is really for myself.” He shrugged, flinging palms to the sky. “My crazy work”.

                                                                     11.

The next evening I sat on a beach near Tel Aviv, puffing on Jake and watching the sun slip toward the western horizon. There was a lot to think about. The first Earth Day (April 22, 1970) was drawing to a close. The sea was calm and the sky an absolutely clear, empty slate for the jottings of my mind. I was wondering how much of my reality was built on credos and assumptions that weren’t necessarily true. A bright and talented only child carries his parents’ aspirations as well as his own. Exposure to the sons and daughters of privilege who throng to Harvard inflated these aspirations tenfold. But now I had to wonder about lifetime goals like fame or wealth, about struggling for success, about having to prove something and to whom, about the shell of loneliness that clung to me like an invisible second skin, about what it would mean to be really myself, whoever that was.

For almost as long as I could remember I suspected that I was switched at birth without my parents’ knowledge, so different was my temperament from theirs. Though they diverged in many obvious ways, Lottie and Jonah were both deeply conventional, self-effacing, tame (except for his intermittent tirades), and both put a high premium on respectability. Me, no.

Jonah liked to accuse me of being a dreamer. His feet were planted firmly on the ground, he insisted. I thought he wasn’t so much planted as stuck, in a different kind of dream, a dangerous dream he shared with millions of others, men whose imaginations had atrophied from want of exercise. I was too young then to understand that it wasn’t his fault, that his wartime youth had marked him with an obsessive need for stability and security, yoked to an obsessive dread that both might vanish in an instant. Like so many of his generation he was, in Buckminster Fuller’s phrase, “backing into the future.”

But I was also too young to understand that from the vantage point of fatherhood the future equals children, and as such I wasn’t inspiring much confidence. When a parent thinks of a child as an investment, not a person, the question of return obså

“Well I doubt their parents got much satisfaction from them,” was his prompt reply.

As the western sky gave up its last flares of color and darkened into night, I pondered this. There was no question that I owed much to my parents, but was there any limit to it? What did I owe myself? What did I owe the planet? From the edge of the shore the vastness of the sea stretched away, and from the edge of the sea an even vaster starry cosmos, and what did it matter to them? Were they indifferent, or beckoning me to something vaster still, the true source and commander of my allegiance? Or was I just really stoned?

The following day I got to find out. The weather was glorious, Easter and Passover were entwined, Jonah and Lottie were on a bus to Haifa, and in my jeans pocket (bellbottoms, natch) was the hit of mescaline. I walked from the hotel down to the bus terminal, stopping at an Arab street market to buy water and a bag of strawberries. Met a bus heading to the Mount of Olives and boarded it. Looked out the window at the passing city, its ancient and medieval stones as ochre and golden as Perez’ toy city. Man and woman, adult and child, Jew, Arab and Christian went about their business without evident conflict or tension. With the flip of a mental switch, curiosity overcame anxiety and Aunt Sadie was mum. I pulled the pink pill from my pocket and washed it down. 

Before chronicling the next few hours’ events, I need to tackle “God.” It’s a word I prefer to avoid for any number of reasons:

1. It starts unnecessary arguments and closes minds.

2. It tends to personalize and otherwise pin down the mysterious Source of Vitality which pours life perpetually into the world.

3. It has inescapably male, patriarchal and authoritarian overtones that summon equally creaky alternatives like “Goddess.”

4. It lends itself to an “ours” versus “yours” mindset which makes idols of cultural products like books.

5. Neutering or feminizing the masculine pronoun associated with it would kill the punch line of a joke like “If you want to make God laugh, tell Him your plans.”

There are others, but these will do.

Nevertheless throughout the Seventies (and even later) I employed “God” myself. So my private understanding of the term—and its male modifiers “Lord, Father, He, Etc.”—was gender-neutral, no biggie. Habits of speech are hard to break and bucking verbal trends is often more trouble than it’s worth. By whom is “whom” still used?

What term do I prefer? “Source, Being, Spirit, Life Force, Tao, Buddha Nature, Big Mind” all have their place. I’m partial to Divinity, or “Div” for short, but when accurately quoting thoughts or remarks from the past, the old-timey moniker must intrude. In 1970 I wouldn’t have uttered the words, “Mother, today I saw Div.”

                                                                      12.

The Mount of Olives is well under three thousand feet, not steep, and even halfway up affords a view toward the west of the Old City and its crowning Temple Mount with the great golden Dome of the Rock. I got off the bus near the Russian Orthodox Church, with its seven golden domes, like a family of shiny onions. A stony trail led toward a secluded patch on the hillside where I could stretch out on the grass, enjoy the sun’s warmth and scope the panorama. I peeled off my Indian cotton tunic and basked.

The sky was a brilliant blue, the air comfortably warm with no humidity, a perfect spring day. Sprawling on the hills before me was an ancient yet modern city, long revered by assorted faiths, with mosques, synagogues and churches, Crusader walls and Islamic spires all rising to greet that brilliant blue. In the Kidron Valley below, pilgrimage buses were pulling up in a steady flow alongside the Church of All Nations, next door to the Garden of Gethsemane, which even a Jew had heard of, a Jew who at this juncture was throwing overripe strawberries at a nearby boulder, enjoying each burst of vivid red juice that splashed across the pale and dusty stone.

The mescaline had kicked in, tuning my mind to a new but by now familiar frequency, deeply peaceful, playful, fascinated, welcoming. On the slopes below me two contrasting groves of green called out: imposing spears of cypress, dark toward blackness, and way down at the foot of the mountain the silvery pastel shimmer of the ancient olive trees in Gethsemane itself. They persuaded me it was time to wipe my torso dry, slip the tunic back on and take a downhill stroll.

The entrance to the Garden of Gethsemane was a gate in the stone wall to my left. The moment I walked through, surrounded by opulently flowering rose bushes and olive trees approaching two millennia in age, I picked up another frequency, familiar but in a different way.

When I was a boy but finally old enough to fast for the full twenty-four hours of Yom Kippur, the final moment of that solemn service was always magic. I accepted without question the teaching that on Yom Kippur “God” would decide, sternly but fairly, whether our repentance in that sacred season had been genuine enough to buy us a coming year free from calamity, both nationally and individually. The psychological weight of this decision, aided by the light-headedness of a full day without food or drink, reliably drove me to a sense of looming import which, as the shofar’s blast pierced the silence, flipped over into sheer magical awe. A thrill in the body. A power pulling the mind out of its self-absorption toward the possibility of encountering something more alive.

Now, at age twenty-three, awe was the frequency again. By the time I reached the garden’s western edge I was no longer capable of standing. Among these ancient and silent witnesses, I felt that “God” was about to speak. How can you respond to such a feeling but with, “Okay, I’m listening?” Trembling in front of a yellow rosebush with the largest blooms I’d ever seen, I dropped to my knees. Beyond was a low wall, past which I saw Temple Mount rising in the distance, the golden dome, and in the sky above it the late afternoon sun, screened by branches of the foreground rosebush. A breeze stirred the branches, the sun blazed full in my face and I, as the saying goes, lost consciousness. Fainted. Blacked out.

Inwardly, anything but. My mindscreen blazed with a vast multitude of fiery Hebrew letters streaming towards “me” from every corner and direction of infinite space. The letters were Kuph, Dalet, Shin, spelling out KoDeSH, the Hebrew for “holiness” or “the sacred.” Simultaneous with this light show dawned a feeling of prodigious joy, and a direct witnessing that the entire manifest cosmos springs from a single, conscious, nonphysical Source with twin attributes that are yet one: Love and Intelligence.

Don’t ask how this took me over, it just did. As if I’d been scuba diving and out of nowhere a whale appeared at arm’s length. It was suddenly there, self-evident, incontrovertible, ultimate, the new commander of my allegiance. And indeed, the true source. And I didn’t even know its name.

To this day I have no idea how long the experience lasted, seconds, minutes, an actual eternity which halted time altogether. When five-sense awareness returned I was flat on my face in the dirt beside the rosebush. Ever theatrical, I asked myself, “So what’s the finish?” and right on cue the adjoining Church of All Nations’ bells rang out, sweeping me back into the realm of prodigious, miraculous bliss. I laughed helplessly as joytears streamed down my face.

The first thought I had was that an experience of such magnitude could hardly have come from inside a small pink pill. I had just accessed the interior state that the Beatles and other psychedelic mavens had discovered within, and were encouraging anyone who’d listen to locate for themselves: the place where Love begins. I remembered the Bible story of Jacob’s ladder dream. He woke from its blissful images and said, “Truly [Divinity] was in this place, but I knew it not.” If “this place” means your actual body/mind unit, Jacob was neither the first nor the last to “know it not.” It sure took me by surprise.

Somehow I got back on my feet without losing my connection to this indwelling, all-enfolding love thing, and, dazed, walked out of the garden. A brown-robed friar passed me at the gate, and although I thought of asking him to bless me, Aunt Sadie whispered that it wasn’t kosher; inwardly I blessed him instead. Ambling along the Kidron Valley road, I looked out at a world transformed, ablaze with love and ripe for the mutual flow of blessedness. The song of birds, the sky and sunlight, the monks and tour buses, the schoolchildren at play, the Hasidic father chastising his small son, the very foliage and stones and hills of Jerusalem, anything my gaze included, seemed connected to me with raging bonds of empathy.

The realization that followed knocked the breath out of me. I came to a sudden halt, frozen where I stood. A source of grievance and anxiety that had afflicted me for a decade started to relax. A mountain of guilt began to melt. Ten years previous, in the sticky moments after my first ejaculation (a load shot spontaneously at thirteen, heart pounding at the sight of a particular bare-chested actor on TV), I had labeled myself “a homosexual.” Never spoke of it, never acted on it, coped by becoming an orgasm junkie, burdened by self-enforced silence, furtive desire and private shame.

Now I had been shown that the true and authentic me, sexual self included, is worthy of the greatest gift the universe has to offer. Not condemned, cursed, doomed or outcast. Every element of my nature is present for Spirit’s use. Being and I are interwoven, one. There is nowhere to hide nor any need. There is no Other. I sink to the ground and weep some more, tears of gratitude and relief, tears of dawning wholeness. I declare that if I die at this moment, fine, I’m ready to go; life could never be sweeter or happier.

                                                                          13.

I regretted that declaration about half an hour later, clinging precariously to the side of a cliff. I’d left the valley road for what looked like a shortcut up Temple Mount, and in my continuing state of enthusiasm failed to notice how steep and rough the path was getting. Given what had just gone down, my sense perceptions were iffy anyhow. I had reached a slope where it was too steep to see my next move and too crumbly to back down. A sheer drop. Paused to collect myself. Speculated that if Being had caught the declaration, the joke was on me and my sentimental bravado. “I take it back, I take it back,” I volunteered, now that we were on intimate terms.

At last I found handholds reliable enough to pull myself up a yard or two and hoist myself over a ledge. The ledge turned out to be just beneath the old Crusader wall; my shortcut had actually paid off. Not only that, but I had just escaped death. Far out. The whole day was looking far out. But now what? Hanan – CONFESSIONS - 25

I brushed most of the dirt off, sat with my back to the wall and looked across at where I had just been. The mountain and the garden, the trees and the church all looked so small now, but they contained a vastness that I never dreamed existed, nor guessed my own my brain could accommodate. I looked for the spot where I’d knelt and thought: that rose bush, that one? Couldn’t be sure. Couldn’t be sure of anything, really. Except one thing. Or rather, One Thing.

I was still tripping, no doubt. There weren’t any fiery projectile words shooting through the foreground, but I felt high and alert, powerful and light. If asked, I could name the President or sing a memorized lyric or recite Shakespeare, but I knew I was no longer the person I had supposed myself to be.

I wondered what this revelation was pointing me towards.

I wondered what I should say, if anything, to Jonah and Lottie.

I wondered if the experience was repeatable.

I wondered, since “It” lived inside me somewhere (remarkable for something so immense), if access to It necessarily required a drug? Worth investigating.

I wondered how to share the news. I wanted my friends to hear about it. But I didn’t know what to say. I was an evangelical without a theology. I wondered if I needed one. I wondered if there was any kind of intellectual framework I could use to talk about this experience, to persuade others of its availability. Everyone! There was a zonked-out bliss train moving through youth culture and I was ready to hop aboard.

I wondered if there were any books I could read to help me understand what exactly had happened to me in that garden over there just now. Little did I imagine how many sources I would find, consume and be nourished by in those first weeks, months and years.

Decades, in fact.

But I get ahead of myself.

                                                      ADVENTURE IN LIVING

                                                                      14.

Lottie and Jonah’s plan to bring me back into the fold clearly tanked. Barely had we returned to Washington when the tensions started to feel like a Tennessee Williams play with Jews. The shootings of student protesters at Kent State filled me with horror that morphed into rage against anyone who represented the status quo, parents included. By this time they had sold the split-level of my childhood and moved into a high-rise twobedroom apartment in Silver Spring, Maryland, making refuge even harder to obtain. I had to get away from their baleful, badgering vibes.

Like their personalities, their intimidation techniques were very different. Jonah had by far the shorter fuse. His rages were puzzling. A virgin myself, I couldn’t have supposed that he and my mother were sexually at odds. I knew that in his bachelor thirties Jonah had swung far from Orthodoxy, returning to it only because Lottie insisted. But I never thought about what that compact might have meant to him or cost him, whether going to shul every Saturday was a drag (though he had an ear for a fine cantor); whether he missed the food and the freedoms he had given up (or resented my presumed recovery of them); whether his and Lottie’s agreement had an unspoken side, something dire, beyond my virginal ken. Like they were just my parents, man.

Though in my childhood Jonah occasionally threatened “the strap,” he never struck me, but I’d grown used to the possibility that my most innocent remark, or even quizzical look, could set off a storm of fury and accusation in three languages (focused on the theme of “disrespect”) that with door-slamming intervals might last an hour or more and never be subsequently owned up to. These rages were painful to endure, and two things made them still worse: their utter unpredictability, and his skill in presenting himself to everyone outside our domestic trio as a smooth-tempered charmer. But, thank Div, I had the clarity to see that the tantrums weren’t my fault, that I wasn’t a terrible person, that I had intended no harm or mockery despite his wrath. This insight was a gift, whether planned by Jonah or not. I was well on the way to minimizing my shortcomings. He was nuts but I was okay. Wronged, but okay. 

What stung was that Lottie never once intervened. I looked to her for defense or at least support and got silence instead. It was devastating, because I was pretty sure she loved me. Only after his death, when I was forty-six, did she reveal that in the early years of their marriage his furious outbursts had been directed at her. He didn’t like her friends or her family and pressed all the now-useful religious buttons to keep her docile and subservient. When I showed up and graduated from the adorably helpless stage to being old enough for him to chastise, she must have been so relieved to escape his tantrums that she said nothing, however she may have squirmed within.

(After he died she also revealed how much it annoyed her that in his dotage Jonah repeatedly dropped his pants and exposed himself to her by way of signaling erotic interest. I thought it was cool–and genetically encouraging–that he was still randy at that age, though Lottie’s response was, “Who wants to have sex with a ninety year old man?” She was eighty-four at the time.)

But in 1970, Lottie’s genuine concern for my well-being came wrapped in appeals to guilt that turned me off even more than Jonah’s rages. Not realizing then how mean he had been to her, I couldn’t understand her need to feel pitied, by inducing blame if necessary. When in childhood I entreated her to divorce him, there were hints of sympathy beneath her distress, but my efforts in early adulthood to be helpful and constructive (such as preparing meals for them) were grudgingly received by both. Nothing would please them but obedience. The vision of self-evident human connectedness that had stirred me in Jerusalem was being sniped at in my own home. If that’s what it still was.

Seeking escape, I spend as much time as possible with friends from high school who are beginning unmapped journeys of their own. Woodstock the Movie is released that spring; we see it often, on a big screen with rapture-stoned audiences. It’s a pilgrimage for the converted, even more than 1968’s 2001. Approaching the movie house, the gaudy and whimsical clothes, festooned with beads and fringe and feathers, patches and slogan buttons, proclaim kinship from afar. The perfect tribal antidote to the parental scene. (That year Neil Young sang:

Don’t let it bring you down It’s only castles burning Find someone who’s turning And you will come around.

And we did.) 

The atmosphere in a theater filled with one’s fellow freaks (friendly term, as the film itself makes clear) is giddy, and gets giddier as more freaks, some famous, some not, show up onscreen. It’s cool that the guy in orange shades holding a huge joint toward the camera and saying, “Marijuana: Exhibit A,” is no furry anonymous hippie but Jerry Garcia himself; still it’s the sheer head count that amazes. And the conviviality. Gatherings of freaks in our dozens or hundreds are a commonplace in most urban parks by now, but the traveling aerial shot of Woodstock’s immense multitude, spreading to the border of infinity, seems fraught with social resonance (no doubt troubling to some). After forty years that shot is a cliché of Sixties Nostalgia, but to its contemporary audiences it signals a generation’s capacity to shift the culture of America. There are so many of us! And we all want the same thing!

Do we? A simplification, sure, yet the movie makes a persuasive case for it. Peacefulness, for one thing. Music, for another. The mutuality of the two, reflected in the intercutting from stage to audience, youthful listeners, rapt, absorbing the genius of equally youthful music makers. Crosby, Stills & Nash, The Who, Santana, Hendrix. Music such as never dreamed of existing. Music bounding like Hercules out of its cradle. Music of global sweep, raw with yearning and protest, sweet with harmony, bright with hope.

Along with the music, there are personal spurs to radically new thinking. A young hippie asks the camera, “What’s so great about taking all the earth’s resources and turning them into dollar bills?” The alternative is clear. Sharing, not hoarding. All these freaky folks onscreen have discovered, and demonstrate, that we could create a life relatively free of hassle if we’d just like each other more.

Why must we charge one another to live here? Why must human relations be imprisoned by an accounting system? You sense possibility in every frame. The movie’s amazingly inventive use of split-screen images fuses with the music, coaxing the willing mind out of its linear habits into a more comprehensive way of seeing. Joe Cocker and Swami Satchidananda vie for the eye in a single moment. Skinny-dipping forms a triptych with group yoga and pagan drumming. Perhaps it’s time to evolve a collective consciousness rooted in reverence and mirth. Time to bring out the gold in everyone.

                                                                     15.

Through the agency of my junior high drama teacher I auditioned for an Equity job at the Olney Theater, playing summer stock in farm country a few miles north of Washington. They made it known that final casting wouldn’t be announced for ten days, and I seized the interim to escape up to Cambridge and crash with Peter, Colton and Liz, former classmates who were sharing a roomy post-graduate house on Hancock Street. There I cemented a friendship which brought out gold galore, but also woke a demon.

In the dim and distant era when Harvard guys and Radcliffe chicks were segregated in dorms a considerable trek apart, a system of male bonding, monastic yet raucous, grew up in enclaves like the final clubs, Signet Society, Hasty Pudding, Lampoon, et cetera. It even stamped the theater crowd, where mixed company was more the norm. I don’t know what it was like in that repressed age for other closeted males but I personally dismissed even the possibility of getting it on with any of the men I was meeting. I wouldn’t have known how to read the signals. Back then the term “coming out” applied to debutantes.

But what an environment for intellectual development! Mental stimulation! Perspective! No better place to lose the adolescent grandiosity of considering oneself the smartest guy in the room. So many bright, talented, articulate and lively fellows. Even a celibate can thrive when supported by a community of inspiring minds, talking, investigating, laughing, creating. Foremost among these was Colton, for forty-plus years now a star in my firmament.

He was a scion of the Greenwich, Connecticut WASP gentry (at Harvard some of my best friends were Episcopalians) and possessed a range of knowledge, artistic talent and intellectual acumen that seized my attention. He was also very good-looking, which didn’t hurt his appeal. Tall and trim with luminous blue eyes, broad shoulders and masses of straight dark hair adding a poetic frame to his aristocratic face.

Like many of our friends, he and I had our first exposure to pot during early June 1967, when Sergeant Pepper was released. After graduation his elastic mind stretched into ever more esoteric fields. He turned me on to Buckminster Fuller, The Whole Earth Catalog, the I Ching, and the noting of solstices and equinoxes. Not your typical Harvard grad, but these were not typical times.

Upon graduation Harvard had awarded him a coveted Shaw Fellowship, underwriting a year’s travel in Europe, but he didn’t use it right away. While I was reaping my 

Fulbright in London, Colton trekked back and forth between Connecticut and Massachusetts, less sure of his draft board’s leniency than I of mine. Finally a friend hooked him up with one of the many anti-war psychiatrists then in practice, who wrote a letter, backed up with some expert coaching, which eventually earned him a 1-Y deferment. Meantime he roomed with Peter and Liz at the Hancock Street house, designing sets for a variety of Cambridge productions and squiring a variety of beautiful women or, as they then were known, girls.

One evening, the same spring that I went to Israel, Colton sat in on a dispute between two recent alums we knew, Tim and Andy, that turned his life around. Tim had been an undergrad theater director of rare genius and devastating (in every sense) wit. Although it was he who first introduced both Colton and me to marijuana–once we were stoned he played us all of Sgt. Pepper followed by the Gods’ Entry into Valhalla from Das Rheingold (there’s Harvard for you)–Tim was sneering at Andy’s claim that not only pot but psychedelics were of immense value in reclaiming suppressed areas of the mind.

Andy was a recent Med School graduate beginning work at the National Institute of Mental Health outside Washington. He had acted in a number of student productions and was funny onstage and off, but here he was deeply in earnest. There are psychic realms outside the sphere of rational thought and it’s stupid to ignore their gifts. Tim thought it was stupid to imagine them. (Spirituality has always been either incomprehensible or a threat to purely intellectual minds closed to data from beyond the five senses.)

Tim had been Colton’s roommate, though two years older, and by virtue of his sheer brilliance and mesmerizing personality had made the lad into a virtual disciple. Tim had a deftly cultivated circle of acolytes, but on this occasion Colton’s esteem began to wane. Andy was constellating ideas from an unfamiliar galaxy of articulate love-drunk “mystics”: Alan Watts and Joseph Campbell, Blake and Gurdjieff and Yogananda, and Colton ate it up. He began to suspect that conditioned cynicism, however fashionable, was an emotional dead end, which psychedelics (or “entheogens”) might bypass.

When I told him about the Mount of Olives trip, he was eagerness itself. Before long both of us were visiting Andy in semirural Virginia, trying LSD and learning that the state of cosmic well-being it awakens has been known for eons by shamans and sages, Kabalists and yogis, Sufis in the East and alchemists in the West, and that Ken Kesey and Timothy Leary were only the latest zealots in a long procession of God-intoxicated rebels stretching back countless generations.

So my stay with Colton at Hancock Street felt like a karmic bonding of newly awakening minds. The house had a spacious attic leading to a sunshiny deck above the kitchen. From all over Cambridge came the fragrance of blossoming lilac. One corner of the attic doubled as meditation alcove and crash pad; there I slept. We ate breakfast on the deck, playing Let It Be or Déjà Vu on the KLH. One morning the acid kicked in sufficiently to stall my first bite: I was sure the music was coming out of the cantaloupe.

Another of Andy’s gifts to us was interest in the Tarot deck, chiefly the esoteric psychological coding of the Major Arcana. (We’re talking about three Harvard grads, in case you forgot.) Colton was a gifted painter and came from a family where reading aloud was encouraged. I was interested in examining the story of King David, whose kinship and even presence I had felt in Jerusalem. So we spent a good amount of time with me reading the Bible story aloud while Colton worked on handpainting a deck of Tarot cards. We would interrupt to discuss content or note parallels between something in the story and an insight Colton might glean from the cards. He could be very Talmudic for an Episcopalian.

We met near the end of freshman year and had been fast friends since. We had done lots of different student productions together and our mutual regard amped steadily up, but during this new flowering of awareness there was no mistaking that what we felt was a love bond, nothing less. It was as though two trusting and admiring brothers were reinforcing each other’s odyssey. It was profound and truly grace-infused. I omit “perfect” or “ideal” because of one glaring complication: I was desperately in love with him.

It’s painful to love somebody when you’re afraid that if they knew how you truly felt they would recoil.

                                                                    16.

A few years later, at the Shrader Street commune in the week prior to Easter, somebody brought home an eight-inch high chocolate bunny in a pink box with a clear cellophane window in front. It sat on top of the refrigerator for over a month, an ornamental presence too cute to eat. Hanan – CONFESSIONS - 32

One afternoon I was home alone and my famished gaze fell upon the bunny. I thought if I slipped it out of its box I could nab a chunk from the back and nobody would be the wiser. But all I got for my stealth was the discovery that hands unknown had beat me to it. Not only was there a huge crater in the bunny’s back, it was obvious that despite what I had supposed the bunny was hollow. The image it presented to onlookers wasn’t consistent with the truth.

I sat down in shock, not only deprived of my furtive treat but struck with the realization that before coming out, I had been that bunny.

                                                                     17.

But in 1970 the issue was tabled when later in June I got the call from Washington offering me the part I’d auditioned for. At the same time Colton was invited to work on a movie yet another classmate was directing on the West Coast. We gave each other the customary warm hippie hug and went our separate ways for a while. Though I couldn’t easily get him out of my mind, at least he was out of sight.

The play was Jules Feiffer’s Little Murders, a blackly funny satire of urban paranoia, family dysfunction and random violence. The theater was the Olney, in what was then rural Montgomery County, where in prior years one or both parents had taken me to see wonderful plays as a summer evening treat. I saw the dashing young Philip Bosco in Shaw’s Man and Superman and the awesome Anne Revere as Brecht’s Mother Courage, among innumerable others. Now I was working there myself, with an Equity contract (housing included), and having a simultaneous retreat surrounded by cornfields, green pastures and country lanes.

After forty years it’s hard to say what shaped me more that summer, professional theater work or the immersion in nature. I had been a bookish child, not interested in sports, and though we took summer vacations at the beach or the mountains of upstate New York, I had never listened closely to the outdoors. Pretty scenery was nice, but I didn’t exactly get where it was coming from. The Mount of Olives changed all that.

My role as Lieutenant Practice, a harried police detective, is a choice comic turn with just one fat scene near the end (Alan Arkin takes it in the movie version), so I had a lot of free time to wander, and new friends to wander with. Foremost was a zaftig Italian brunette of about my age. Daniela was interning as a costume assistant, a summer abroad from her design college in Rome, and we were instant pals. She was bright, beautiful, lively, creative and kind, and her ease in teaching me to batik a tunic proved that the hippie ethic as well as hippie style had reached at least to the mid-Mediterranean. She was also vegetarian, and cooked no end of persuasive dishes.

Her English was far better than my Italian, which mainly consisted of phrases assimilated from Rigoletto or Aida. She loved nature, she loved theater and she loved to dance. In the common room we’d stack Creedence, the Dead, Moody Blues, Incredible String Band and more on the spindle and boogie a rainy afternoon away.

If the music got too loud we’d be chastised for disturbing the naptime of our leading actor, the veteran John McGiver. I had seen him in Breakfast at Tiffany’s and The Manchurian Candidate as well as on The Patty Duke Show. In our production he didn’t stretch beyond the patented gruff and owlish shtick that kept him perpetually employed, but it was easy to admire his craft. It was downright thrilling to listen to his anecdotes of famous stars and directors he’d worked with, most recently “Dustie” Hofmann in Midnight Cowboy (“He couldn’t fail to get nominated for that part–a cross between Camille and the Hunchback of Notre Dame.”). It was my introduction to the theater’s oral tradition, inside stories of legendary names circulated within the tribe.

If Daniela or the others were busy, I was perfectly happy to sit reading on a blanket in a meadow, no sound but cicadas and the rare passing vehicle. Following Andy and Colton’s tip, I was reading Paul Foster Case’s book on the Tarot. It was full of illuminating observations about the nature and operation of consciousness, and it pointed me to a book that shook my life, William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience.

Here was a Harvard professor of the late nineteenth century documenting instances throughout history in all parts of the globe of people encountering, as I just had, a loveinfused inner guidance domain. James notes the striking similarity both of the reports of such encounters, and of their consequences in the lives of those reporting, and claims that it teaches us more about the nature of Divinity than any doctrine or dogma. These blissful experiences, rather than some argument in refutable theology, confirm the existence of a connective reality beyond ordinary consciousness. St. Teresa, Abu Al-Ghazali and Walt Whitman are all dancing to the same tune.

Whether the melody was chemically generated seems unlikely. I knew that in his Cambridge parlor William James had delved deep into nitrous oxide (he claims it enabled Hanan – CONFESSIONS - 34

him at last to comprehend Hegel) but he also was keen on yoga and that intrigued me. That summer, on a blanket in green pastures across from a summer theater, I launched a practice whose benefits for health, flexibility and equanimity have buoyed me for forty years. Thanks, William.

Except for a faint glow from Washington to the south, the night sky around the Olney was perfect for stargazing, and I bought a Golden Nature Book guide to teach myself the constellations of summer. I learned how to hunt the planets through the Zodiac. I learned that the naming of Cassiopeia, Andromeda, Pegasus and Perseus was done to tell a story in the sky. Night after clear night, the Milky Way was there; the great triangle points of Deneb in Cygnus, Vega in Lyra and Altair in Aquila have been friends every summer since.

And yet on one of those stargazing nights I allowed Aunt Sadie to slam shut a door whose opening would have transformed my life. Daniela and I had been spending time with her friend Kim, though “friend” may be a generous term for someone of whom she said, “I’m not sure if he’s superficial or just stupid.” In Kim’s case it didn’t matter since his thick golden locks, princely face and sculpted physique compensated plenty. He was undeniably the type to make me wish I could see through fabric. An aspiring actor, he ushered from time to time and slept in a VW van rigged with a hippie-style futon.

One clear August night he showed up with his cousin Ryan and after the show the four of us climbed the hill that offered the best sky view. I don’t recall who brought the joint that circulated (Daniela abstaining), but it was primo. As we lay on our backs gazing silently upward, the gleaming vastness overhead, the aural shimmer of cricket and cicada, the warm, pliant earth supporting us, all invited more than customary ease. Before I knew what was happening, Kim’s hand was tracing eager filigree along my thigh.

I panicked. Nobody had hit on me since high school (and that was Ada, who thrust her tongue in my mouth in the back seat of a double date). I had classified Kim as the latest link in a great chain of unavailable gorgeous men. If prior to that moment he let loose even a blip of being queer it was too subtle for my virginally obtuse gaydar. He was wicked hot, and here he was coming on to me, and I was too stunned to respond. Rather than admit and explore the mutuality of desire, I turned away and began embracing Daniela. 

She hugged me back. Kim took the hint and soon he and Ryan were emitting make-out noises that faded into the crickety darkness. Daniela liked kissing me but I was feeling only confusion. I could have lost it with an Adonis, but I didn’t feel any inner connection with him, whereas I deeply did love this woman for whom I felt no physical desire whatsoever. A gulf opened between love and lovemaking that would take me a while to comprehend. Sex is meant for someone you love, right? But suppose you love everybody? Or aspire to?

Just because Divinity approved of my orientation didn’t mean I knew what to do about it.

                                                                         18.

Too bad I can’t remember word for word the fight with Jonah that led to my moving out. It was epic. It started within a month of my returning home. The play had closed. (They always do, even the long-lived Cats, though many years after I left its original cast.) I had saved some money and wasn’t too concerned about my next job. What mattered was learning how to develop and extend the new internal freedom I had been investigating.

Among several opened envelopes in my bedroom desk drawer was a letter from a psychedelically generous friend–I could drop his name but won’t–which included a small blotter bearing a dozen hits of LSD, each stamped with a purple lightning bolt. Or rather, it included the blotter when first opened, but a few days later when I took another look, the acid had mysteriously disappeared from the envelope. Except that it wasn’t really a mystery.

CUT TO: I emerge from my bedroom, having scoured the drawer in vain, and confront Lottie and Jonah in the living room. With all the fake innocence at my disposal, I inquire about some missing art in a letter I got.

“Art, shmart,” would be an appropriate reply, but Jonah is too outraged to add even unintentional levity.

He claims to know exactly what was on that paper, which he flushed down the toilet.

I want to know what he was doing looking through my mail.

He wants to know how dare I bring illegal drugs into his house. 

I insist that the real offense is invading my private stuff without asking.

His position is that as father he doesn’t have to ask my permission for anything. The temperature escalates from there. Literally, because somehow I strip down to my briefs in the act of releasing a lifetime of rage. It’s early September but the heat isn’t coming from outside. Maybe I’ve forgotten the actual language because after forty years I see the fight is about neither drugs nor privacy.

Jonah means: Why do you have to be the latest example of the shit life has dealt me?

I mean: Why don’t you show me more love?

Each of us in his own aching heart is utterly right. Nobody can win.

I call him a pig (1970, remember). I confess what I’ve never spoken of to anyone, that his verbal abuse made me so miserable that at the age of twelve I tried to kill myself (swallowing a half dozen tablets of St. Joseph’s children’s aspirin, which had no effect, in case you were wondering). Lottie looks as if she’d been punched in the heart. Maybe I’ve stripped down because I want them to see me, actually see me, not as some role fulfiller but for who I really am. Though not entirely.

Lottie suddenly speaks up, changing the subject with blasting swiftness. “Are you a homosexual?” (It’s a cliché, but mothers always know.)

This is another moment that rocks my life, not because of what I do. Because of what I subsequently resolve never to do again.

“No!” I protest. Now I’m really sweating. For years my fear of discovery prompted me to manufacture a passably butch demeanor. Why did she ask? How does she know? Because I don’t date and, apart from a smoke-screen crush on Ava Gardner, never talk about girls? Because toward adolescence I danced around the room to Gilbert and Sullivan records? Because I like Maria Callas and Ethel Merman? Has she unearthed my stash of bare-chested movie stars? That I’d have heard about. I’m sure she’s just guessing, just as I’m sure neither of them could handle the truth. How could they, when I can’t? So the lie stands.

For now.

But it doesn’t take an Ivy League education to figure that this living arrangement is doomed. I contemplate my bank account and estimate the kind of furnished apartment I can afford. Then it turns out more money is on tap from Doug, a classmate who needs writers for the magazine he’s started, the National Lampoon (there an Ivy League education comes in handy). Come to think of it, a trove of savings bonds I’d gotten as Bar Mitzvah gifts have matured and then some. I find a perfectly adequate one-bedroom near Dupont Circle, which is becoming Washington’s Hippie Central.

Remember Aunt Rose? Lottie’s widowed sister with the town car? Lottie and Jonah came from the world of adult children staying at home until marriage, and my intended departure did not please. Their arguments were economic, but their transparent motivation was anxiety over the trouble I’d get into living on my own, trouble I was more than eager to pursue.

I can see now that on some level, without intending to, I broke my parents’ hearts. Not just once but overall. Subsequent Broadway success alleviated but never quite healed their disappointment over my life path, let alone the absence of grandchildren. (On the opening night of Cats, where my role was showy enough to garner an eventual Tony nomination, one of my friends asked Lottie how she liked my performance. Her reply: “He was better at his Bar Mitzvah.”)

But time has taught me that on the deeper level, nobody can break your heart unless you let them. I offer this observation, for what it’s worth, not as an excuse for the past but a prescription for the present.

                                                                      19.

The month I decided to move, The New Yorker, which Lottie read avidly, published a long excerpt of a book that became a huge best-seller, The Greening of America. I read it with astonishment. Somebody named Charles A. Reich saw the hippie movement, which was already being dubbed the counterculture, as a transformative shift in consciousness with the potential to create another American revolution, freeing freedom itself from the straitjacket of consumerism in which the Corporate State had confined it.

I finished the article and thought, “This guy is saying everything I’ve been thinking about, and he’s both logical and optimistic. I’m not crazy.” Lottie and Jonah naturally disagreed. I pleaded with them to read the article, later the book, but it wasn’t for them. All that mishmash about Consciousness I, II and III was impenetrable to them. Psychological delving wasn’t something either of them cared for. Jonah once remarked about mental self-examination, “That kind of thing makes you very sad.” Hanan – CONFESSIONS - 38

Nevertheless, my decision to get my own apartment without having a steady job made them so sure I was bonkers, they prodded me into seeing a psychiatrist with them, on condition I’d abide by his decree. I thought it would be a gas. After four years at Harvard I’d heard plenty about shrinks and was pretty sure they didn’t issue decrees, except when it was necessary to have someone put away, an outcome I didn’t seriously anticipate. If the interview had been a year later, I would have asked them to meet me at Esalen, though the thought of Lottie and Jonah joining me nude in a hot tub at the edge of a cliff in Big Sur was impossibly farfetched, no matter how much hash in the brownie.

When we visited the shrink’s office on a lovely 1970 autumn day in downtown D.C., these were among the things I didn’t know about psychotherapy:

1. There are competing schools.

2. In addition to Freudians and behaviorists there is a newer movement underway.

3. This movement is known as humanistic or Third Force psychology and it has a lot of cool enthusiasts.

4. Jungian analytical psychology is cooler still.

5. On the other hand, there’s Valium.

The office in question was dark and somber with maroon leather upholstery and it didn’t take me long to suspect that Dr. Whatsis had similar upholstery inside his brain. He was as stiff as a funeral director, without the empathy. The cut of his hair as well as of his suit implied that the only thing he might like about the counterculture was the business it would drum up if more parents felt like mine. (This was the era when liberal males who were anti-war but not quite bold enough to forego haircuts and shaves grew tamely prudent sideburns.) Given two Orthodox Jews and one Orthodox Freudian, I was outnumbered three to one. Grownups, no less.

The first part of the interview consisted of Lottie and Jonah recounting their grievances in tandem; then he asked them to leave so we could speak privately, and asked me what I thought of their accusations. I told him the kind of performance he’d just witnessed was my reason for leaving home. I told him I’d recently discovered there was much to be gained from cultivating inner peace and harmony and it was more important than filial obedience or making money. I never mentioned sex or drugs, but we got into some heavy shit when God came up. Even if I’d said “Divinity” to this man, he’d have recoiled. I might as well have told him about my latest unicorn ride. I asked him whether he thought God wants us to be happy or only well-behaved.

He stared at me as if I’d just bitten the head off a gecko.

“Actually, I don’t believe in God at all.”

“Would you like me to rephrase the question?”

“How would you do that?”

“Oh, you know, Cosmic Intelligence, the Being that sets the universe in motion. The heart of reality. Like that.”

“To a rational person what you’re describing is nothing but a myth.”

“Well, yes, and look where rationality has landed us.”

(Very Sixties. But anybody who would agree with the doctor has probably abandoned this book by now, so I guess the rest of us can talk.)

For a while I bent Doc’s ear with speculations about human destiny, the evolution of conscious beings on the planet, the follies of consumerism and so forth. Then he asked me to call my parents in for a conference with them alone. We shook hands. He had Time, Newsweek and Look in the waiting room.

When Lottie and Jonah came out they didn’t look chipper. I asked what he said and Lottie said we’d talk about it in the car. During the drive home Jonah took the wheel in silence while she summarized the doctor’s verdict: I was in a state of advanced euphoria (I wanted to ask how advanced but held my tongue). I was anti-authoritarian (How much did they pay for that nugget?). I was bound to come down from these delusional flights but in the meantime I was quite lucid (okay, I’m adding the “quite”). Lucid, and capable of managing my affairs.

Not that I was about to have any. Not till San Francisco.

                                                                      20.

Washington is a southern city and when I moved into the converted brownstone on R Street, October was still mild enough to roam about in a T-shirt. Dupont Circle and its fountain brimmed with tie-dye, headbands, bell-bottoms and Birkenstocks. The freaky streets were full of like-minded, guitar-toting, exotically dressed, cheerful young people. (Nowadays so many people, especially men, shun bright colors and bold patterns and consider hippie garb laughable. Laugh away. Morose is better? I’ve never understood why so many sophisticated or respectable types dress as if they might at any moment be summoned to a funeral. Color is life.)

Of course there were also sullen office workers, uptight Nixon supporters, sweaty neurotics of the kind cartoonist R. Crumb enshrined as Mr. Natural’s fall guy Flakey Foont, Agnew-loving cops, and other assorted urban what-have-yous. It heralded a division into two Americas, and I knew for sure which one I wanted to live in.

My apartment was on the second of three floors, facing a gorgeous Beaux-Arts facade across the street, a few blocks north of the Circle and east of Connecticut Avenue. A brief walk in any direction passed a lovely variety of tree-shaded turn-of-the-century buildings, townhouses and consulates, rarely more than three or four stories high, and led to book shops, markets, movie theaters, cafés, a laundromat and a brand new natural food store, Earth Harvest.

Across the hall from me was a tiny cutie from Caracas named Anita and her roommate Irene from Quito (“In spring the streets are littered with mango pits”). They both were secretaries at a Latin American import company; their boss was a balding American named Dave who wore suits and sneakers to work and often visited after hours or on weekends with a lot of very good weed he enjoyed sharing.

Upstairs from them was Marty, a first year student at GW Medical School. His hair and beard were of Renaissance/biblical length, his attitude as casual as his hair style. Directly above me was a Hispanic couple: Raoul, Puerto Rican, who drove an exterminator truck, and his wife Olga, an accountant. She was half Panamanian and half Chinese (surname Chung) and introduced me to the unique hybrid cuisine of her ancestry. She could also work as fast on an abacus as her co-workers with pocket calculators.

Anita and Irene kept their door open and pretty soon the place seemed like a big commune with everybody swarming back and forth, upstairs and down, sharing meals, records and ideas. Nobody had a TV. Not even George on the first floor, slightly older (meaning thirty!), a clerk at the Library of Congress with a pot belly and stringy black hair like Olivier’s Richard III wig.

My space had bright southern exposure, one large room that had been chopped in two to create a small bedroom with a bay window, and furnished in grad student style: desk and chair, tweedy plaid couch, barely adequate coffee table, a kitchenette set off by a formica-topped counter. The landlord was a large middle-aged man known simply as Ray, who lived on the basement/garden floor with his wife Betty. They were as easygoing as their tenants. I had never felt more comfortable anywhere. It was going to be an adventure in living.

Among my first discoveries was a Kundalini yoga ashram that offered classes a couple of blocks away. Yoga hadn’t yet achieved its trendy middle-class status and classes were attended exclusively by what Strom Thurmond on the Senate floor had recently called “young people of the so-called hippie type.” The teachers were impressively serene, eager to impart their drug-free mind-expanding techniques. American to a man, they favored turbans as well as beards, and every ashram member, male or female, dressed chastely in white. Sometimes there was a gap between their Sikh-style austerity and the looser standards of the drop-in dropout students. One evening a young redhead caused quite a stir by shedding her blouse and jeans and sitting on the mat wearing only a tank top and panties. After some quiet clucking a house mother approached her and asked, “Excuse me, but is that your underwear you’re wearing?”

“Actually, no,” she replied. “I borrowed it from a friend.”

The ashram turned out to be a great place to meet kindred souls, like Joe and Sara. He taught at a progressive high school, wore a close-cropped beard and longer hair than any of his students, male or female. She was an abortion counselor at a newly opened clinic. More on both shortly.

The spiritual questing wasn’t limited to yoga. Someone gave me a copy of Aldous Huxley’s Doors of Perception, and suggested that I read it stoned. I discovered that I got stoned just by reading it. There was a cornucopia of books by and for cosmicconsciousness fans that had the same effect. From Huxley I graduated to Man and His Symbols (Jung), The Teachings of Don Juan (peyote), Tales of the Dervishes (Sufism), Tales of the Hasidim (Buber), and other titles from the typical hippie knapsack that no self-respecting Harvard intellectual would dream of reading outside of Divinity School. Of course I was starting to believe that the whole world is a kind of “Divinity” school, in which most people don’t realize they’re enrolled.

Martin Buber’s Tales of the Hasidim, also his Legend of the Baal-Shem, had special power for me, because they showed how the religion I was raised in could still speak to me; Buber depicted a folk tradition of worshipful joy rooted in daily experience, without theological baggage. The most commonplace activity, soulfully performed, can be a hymn to life. There’s a story I love about a famous rebbe, one of whose devotees gets married. After the wedding night he rises as always before dawn to go and sit at his teacher’s feet. He does this the next morning, and the next, and so on. Not the honeymoon his young wife had envisioned. Finally her frustration boils over and she asks her husband if he could at least pass along some of the rebbe’s teachings so she could benefit as well.

“It’s not the teachings,” he tells her. “I want to watch the way he ties his shoes.”

More and more new people were coming into my life I could have said the same thing about. Except they mostly wore sandals.

                                                                      21.

Earth Harvest maintained a bulletin board posting local events and resources of interest to the burgeoning community of so-called “so-called hippie types.” One of them was a switchboard where potential hosts could offer crash space for kids passing through town. I gave them my number with the idea that hospitality was both a spiritual and a communal obligation. A mitzvah.

If there’s an Aunt Sadie in your head it’s probably whispering that my subconscious motive was getting laid. If so, it never reached the conscious level. The egg of gay self-acceptance had materialized but was yet to crack open. In “so-called hippie” circles, gay reference wasn’t all that prevalent yet. Calling a person “straight” meant square, not hetero. Although the hardhat and redneck scoffmongers of that era used “hippie faggot” as if the two were interchangeable, they were wrong. Long hair and gentle ways were no guarantee that a guy was open to another guy’s advances. Gay men of my generation had no media role models to impart either courage, confidence or seduction technique. Anyhow I was still fleeing sex, not pursuing it. I thought of myself as a spiritual seeker who was above that sort of thing, horny but pure. It was chocolate bunny time.

Now that I’ve lived for years with a man I adore, the clash between sex and spirituality seems a Puritan crock, invented by chastity junkies who are obsessed with what they renounce, but back then it came with perks as well as penalties. Post-Jerusalem, I was Divinity’s playmate, certain that loveless sex (like anything loveless) was a waste of time. There’s an infinity of ways to express love, and exploring the non-sexual ones kept Hanan me busy as well as (mostly) happy. The bunny was smiling. My self-reliance flourished, as did my creativity. I discovered how much more enjoyable learning and study could be when they didn’t involve exams and reports. I fed my head with music and art as well as books. “Scholars promote peace in the world,” say the Hebrew sages, and I figured it was worth a try.

Lottie and Jonah deserve some credit here for instilling in me a studious habit of mind, even if the subjects I chose bugged the hell out of them. They were cultured, by the standards of their day, and intelligent by the standards of any. They gave me lots of great opportunities (going to Harvard obviously being one), so don’t think my life with them was one long Dickensian downer. It was largely enjoyable except for the occasional odd eruption. But now the eruptions were at the other end of town. (It didn’t occur to me that it would be Lottie’s turn to put up with them.)

Part of my studies was painting, with tiny brushes and tubes of gouache, my own Tarot deck, from a California-based correspondence course Colton had turned me on to. After an eye-opening summer exploring the West Coast (“People there are actually living their fantasies”), he had left on the autumn equinox for his year in Europe, and though I missed him a lot I had plenty to do simply to become myself. When liberated from the banalities of fortune-telling, Tarot’s 22 Major Keys proved to be an endlessly fascinating illustrated manual of what Huxley called the perennial philosophy. By the week before Christmas I’d gotten up to the Hermit, when the phone rang.

A young woman named Moonbeam (obviously one of the so-called type) had gotten my number from the switchboard and wanted to know if she could crash for a few days. She had a sleeping bag and was hitchhiking home to Nashville but wanted to visit the Smithsonian first. She sounded groovy so I told her to come right over and in less than ten minutes she did. She was around my age (wasn’t everybody then?), short and glowing, her tangles of curly brown hair held captive by a paisley scarf trimmed with silk fringe. She had a backpack, a bedroll, and an Afghan shoulder satchel from which she withdrew two oranges and the biggest bag of trail mix I had ever seen. She offered me one of the oranges and after fishing around in the trail mix pulled out a baggie bulging with what looked like Panama Red. “Wanna get high?” she said.

I already was, but what the fuck. 

Shortly thereafter, on the KLH portable FM stereo turntable that was my sole entertainment medium, we were listening to “Isn’t It a Pity?” from George Harrison’s new album All Things Must Pass. George was singing:

Some things take so long But how do I explain When not too many people Can see we're all the same when the phone rang again. It was another so-called from the switchboard, a guy this time, name of Toby calling for his brother and himself. My living room was about 12x15 with somewhat adjustable floor space. I asked Moonbeam how she felt about company.

“Shit, man, it’s your pad,” was her astute reply.

I gave Toby the address and bade him approach. He soon arrived with brother Terry in tow, or it might have been the other way around, as they were identical twins. Big Norse types from Minnesota, they had a lot of wavy blond hair, which one kept in a ponytail and the other let spread. Beside the beards, backpacks and bedrolls, each had a guitar. George Harrison ceased on the turntable while Toby and Terry ran through what they knew of Tea for the Tillerman, John Barleycorn Must Die and others. They could really play. By the time they got to Bridge Over Troubled Water Anita and Irene had looked in from across the hall, as well as Marty from upstairs. We were all singing along, a hootenanny. Then the phone rang.

By the next morning there were eight so-calleds crashed on my living room floor. I put away the Hermit and switched to another art project. Under the circumstances it occurred to me that there might be an emerging market for psychedelic welcome mats. I had an idea for making the W in “welcome” into a clown with a pointed hat and raised arms. My desk was in a corner of the room with the window at my left facing the cold and rainy street. As I sketched, behind me and to my right the so-calleds, in a welter of bright color and gaudy patterns worthy of Matisse, were doing their thing, exchanging paperbacks (swapping The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest), teaching macramé knots, quoting Doonesbury, rolling and igniting doobies, and rapping. Moonbeam had a bundle of yarrow sticks and was demonstrating the traditional method of consulting the I Ching. Now and then I’d turn to face the room and take it all in before returning to the Welcoming Clown painting. Hanan – CONFESSIONS - 45

I don’t remember the names of the others but the substance of the rapping stayed with me. My education had to some extent made me an intellectual snob, and now I was learning not to be. It struck me how well-informed they were, these itinerant self-educated gypsies. They understood the roots of the catastrophe in Vietnam, and its relationship to corporate greed and the unquestioned beliefs of consumerism. Somebody quoted a line from Marx to the effect that everything is either a spur or an antidote to consciousness. This turned into a game where someone would suggest a word and everyone got to vote, spur or antidote. Remarkable unanimity. Laugh-In was a spur, Bonanza an antidote. Cannabis was a spur, alcohol an antidote. Joni Mitchell, spur, Martha Mitchell, antidote.

A boy and girl who were traveling together collected funds and went out on a grocery run. They returned with coffee, tomatoes, pretzels, dried figs, cole slaw, a loaf of bread and assorted sandwich filler like hummus, tofu spread, peanut butter and jelly. None of these so-calleds claimed to have been at Woodstock, but they showed a natural instinct for adapting to close quarters. There was nothing but courtesy, patience and humor, even where the toilet was concerned. Voices were raised only in song, or laughter. To the cynics, young and old, who were arguing that Woodstock Nation had perished at Altamont, this was a forceful and lovely rebuttal.

Over the next day or two, singly or in pairs, they dispersed. It had been trippy but I was glad to have my apartment back. After finishing the Welcoming Clown, who to this day hangs on my wall, I turned once again to painting (as well as playing) the Hermit.

                                                                        22.

Meanwhile back at the ashram, Joe and Sara had become an item. A picturesque one, he being well over six feet and she just under five. The Hawthorne School where Joe taught (he was a Dartmouth grad) wanted students to engage with the world outside the classroom. One night the three of us came up with an idea to stage a street theater happening at the White House. We wanted to draw attention to what we regarded as the mockability of the Nixon regime. We picked a date in early spring and actually got a permit to picket in front of the White House, calling our group Concerned Citizens for a More Humorous Government.

The spring of 1971 was wildly eventful. Copies of Baba Ram Dass’ Be Here Now, the new hippie bible, were showing up everywhere. Lt. Calley was convicted for the My 

Lai massacre and the Pentagon Papers appeared. A year and a day after my Jerusalem awakening, 500,000 protestors against the war in Vietnam, largely drawn from the socalled tribe, gathered on the Mall before the Capitol, waved signs, made speeches and climbed all over the statuary. Two weeks earlier, on Easter Sunday, though still a virgin I surprised myself by coming out to a group of friends. In May I was arrested and then again in June. And I began singing on the streets.

I’ll attend to each of these but first I have to give my home town a boost. Over the years I’ve been blessed to witness the spring in New York, Cambridge, London, Paris, L.A., Florence, Jerusalem, Delphi, San Francisco, Rome, Venice, Santorini, Westport, Montreal, Mykonos, and I’ll stop there, but for pure floral gorgeousness Washington D.C. can’t be beat. From the cantilevered cherry blossom boughs framing the Jefferson Memorial to the opulent Watergate tulip beds to the National Gallery gripped by massive wisteria vines, to Montrose Park, the eye fills with color and signals of rebirth.

It was easy to get around on foot and by bus or thumb; if you looked like a socalled, other so-calleds would pick you up. (The Metro was years away, though construction at Dupont Circle made lots of noise.) I didn’t think much about spring in the countryside until Ron and Sally and Desmond invited Joe and me (Sara was away) to spend Easter weekend at The Farm, their commune near the Pennsylvania line. We’d met them over the winter at the ashram and were steadily better friends. They lived with seven others in what they called a spiritual household: communal, vegetarian, peace-loving, the whole nine Aquarian Age yards.

Ron and Sally were a couple, born Jewish but currently in a Hindu phase with Sufi overtones. Desmond was a heavy-set Viking with shoulder-length blond hair and a Frank Zappa soul patch; a bearskin cloak would have looked perfectly at home. He had studied physics at UC Santa Cruz with Fritjof Capra and was the first person I met who could talk science and “mysticism” with equally inexhaustible fluency. He knew from Teilhard de Chardin, Samuel R. Delaney, Margaret Mead and most certainly Buckminster Fuller. He was fond of saying, “If you can’t laugh at it, you’re too involved in it.” With his blend of erudition, benevolence and mirth he was the very picture of hippie sainthood.

I felt perfectly at home with all three of them, and their housemates. The house was roomy, simply furnished and hung like a Hindu temple with beads, draperies, images of Krishna, Shakti, Ganesha and here and there something Kabalistic, if not Hopi. There was Bones, a tan German shepherd who kept deer away from the garden and flowerbeds, where daffodils were flaunting themselves white and yellow. There was Ruby, nursing her three white puppies. The land was gently rolling, with a small tumbling creek and forests clad in that early chartreuse haze. The vibes at Easter were ideal.

Our half of the planet was awakening from its seasonal siesta and around the breakfast table we talked about a parallel awakening of human consciousness, how inevitable it must be as an evolutionary step, and how exciting it was to take part in the reveille. Desmond had brought some topnotch mescaline and everybody decided to trip, in honor of the resurrection.

Over the winter I had dropped an entheogen about once a week, either with friends or by myself. No city was ever set up better for tripping (I boast again on my home town’s behalf). The art galleries, museums, parks and vistas! The lofty ideals enshrined (though often in rebuke to the squalid reality). LAWS AND INSTITUTIONS MUST GO HAND IN HAND WITH THE PROGRESS OF THE HUMAN MIND, along with ALMIGHTY GOD HATH CREATED THE MIND FREE, are the words of Jefferson. Drop some orange sunshine and they burn so bright you wonder why Nixon and Agnew and John Mitchell haven’t yanked them off the walls of his domed memorial.

But it had been a long time since I tripped in nature, without a DON’T WALK sign or growling motor to distract from the spell of primal beauty unfolding just for the sake of itself. Can you say “bucolic?” There were Sally and Ron and Desmond and Buck and Janika and Joe and me, genuine friends all, trucking down a wooded slope towards the creek, and I really don’t remember when I started freaking out.

There were at least two simultaneous conversations shifting across space as the meanderings of the trail would reconfigure the group. Soon after my dose kicked in I fancied that the various remarks I overheard were all directed toward me in not-so-veiled disapproval, but without actually addressing me. Textbook paranoia: I thought they were talking about me as if I wasn’t there. The stealthy hints added up to this: they all knew I was gay and that was fine, but only if I stopped hiding and admitted it. I was being psychically manipulated to come out by these suddenly scary friends.

Ever since puberty transformed my encounter with the locker rooms of junior high, nothing intimidated me more than being in a group of rowdy guys talking about “chicks.” I assumed that my inexperience would be obvious, but at least if I kept quiet, or uttered nothing more than like-minded grunts and knowing chuckles, my “problem” could remain a secret.

Now the secret was being forced out of me. (Later on I would see that the force was my own inner-being projecting Aunt Sadie onto my companions, challenging me to trust them with the truth.) I tried to escape, turning away from the group, but then I decided that would be an admission of guilt. I went around in circles with my hands over my ears and then someone heard me say “What a bummer!” and when everybody turned toward me I scanned their faces, gulped, and said “I’m gay.”

I sat on the ground and started to cry and laugh and they gathered around with tenderness and acceptance and lots of hugs, letting me babble. We were close enough to the creek for Joe to fetch water and sprinkle it over my head, a congratulatory baptism. I have a group photo taken that day at sundown in front of the house and the expression on my twenty-four year-old face is the sweetest mixture of gratitude, relief and peace. A great boulder had rolled away.

Easter. Who knew?

                                                                        23.

About a week later the Concerned Citizens for More Humorous Government took to the streets of our Nation’s Capitol. Joe and I and Nick, his star pupil at Hawthorne, had enlisted about a dozen friends to participate. The first planning circle generated lots of activity. In those days Pennsylvania Avenue and the sidewalk alongside the White House fence were open to cars or pedestrian traffic. We had a two-hour permit at lunchtime from the National Park Service. We wanted to create some kind of controlled anarchy that would make a political statement but a cultural one, too, We wanted to project an alternative to uptightness whether on the right or the left. We would have a maypole dance.

We came up with a few slogans so signs had to be made (the Park Service dictated the maximum placard size), including a sandwich board reading on one side

WATCH FOR OUR BIG POST-ELECTION DAY $ALE and

CLOSING DOWN; EVERYTHING MUST GO on the reverse. Individual placards read, among others:

MONEY IS OUR MOST IMPORTANT PRODUCT

40% OFF ON ABM’S 

SUPREME COURT SEATS SLASHED and so forth.

The assortment of oddball getups included my high school friend Mack’s original Boy Scout uniform (the short-shorts kind), which still fit his beanpole frame, with an enormous nimbus of frizzy hair sprouting above it; the orange dashiki and maroon velvet harem pants worn by Jerell, an African-American friend of towering height with a marked resemblance to his idol Jimi Hendrix, concealed on this occasion by a cheap plastic Nixon mask worn with a pink babushka; tall, slender Maureen looking like a benevolent witch in a grey nurse’s uniform from the Thirties, with her torrent of waist-length brown locks pouring over a floor-length red satin cape; other young men and women in overalls, Civil War uniforms, jellabas, and more.

My hair by now was nearly shoulder length, thick and wavy enough to stick out like elbows from either side. Ten inches were added to my height by a jug-shaped hat of orange and gold felt, vaguely Assyrian in style, salvaged from some Harvard theatrical. My double-breasted linen ice cream suit was the other Harvard touch, plus a very wide, very purple necktie handpainted with a voluptuous half-naked babe waving a martini glass.

The day was pleasantly cool with a high overcast. We assembled pretty much on schedule and while setting up our maypole and banner (“A Concerned Citizens for More Humorous Government Production”) discovered that we had displaced a group of about twenty Quakers who for weeks had been protesting the war in silent vigil. Our permit trumped their vigil and they were obliged for the two hour span to wait on the opposite side of Pennsylvania Avenue. “Lurk” conveys their attitude better. It’s not so easy to frolic under the withering gaze of a gang of irate Quakers.

Nevertheless, frolic we did, with the maypole and streamers, someone doing yo-yo tricks, a guy dressed as a gas-station attendant assembling and handing out balloon animals, Boy Scout Mack on old-fashioned roller-skates weaving in and out of everybody, and chants of “2, 4, 6, 8, How’s life in the Corporate State?” From time to time I would whip out an APPLAUSE sign. We got cheers and peace flashes and indeed applause from passersby, both on foot and in buses, and honks from passing drivers. Others walked rigidly past as if we weren’t there. Maybe they looked at the signs. One or two roving freaks got into the swing of things and danced along when Maureen the benevolent witch shook her tambourine. Only the Quakers were scowling. 

                                                                           24.

In the lead-up to the Concerned Citizens escapade I also began to think about one-man guerilla street theater. I missed performing and reasoned that if painters and writers can do their thing without waiting for someone to hire them, why not a performer? Obviously I wasn’t going to play Tartuffe or Bottom unless the plays were produced somewhere, but there was no such constraint regarding two things I enjoyed and did really well: clowning and singing.

What with all the Sabbath hymns and Graces after meals, Orthodox Jewish kids hear singing in the home from birth. It helped that Lottie’s voice was rich and warm, lending equal beauty to a Psalm or a Berlin ballad. She and Jonah shared a love of classical music and often listened to the Saturday afternoon Metropolitan Opera broadcasts, even though playing the radio should have been a Shabbat no-no (if there was a Jewish singer, like Jan Peerce or Roberta Peters, I guess that made it kosher). I had a quick ear for melody and words alike, and no doubt created a quizzical stir throughout third-grade show & tell by continually offering yet another Gilbert and Sullivan number, memorized from records. Including once actually singing my way through the entire Mikado overture, a cappella. Try it some time.

The piano teacher to whom Lottie toted me decreed that since I had a leaden ear for pitch, lessons would be pointless (surely a seed event for my coming distrust of authority). As a consequence the voice remained my sole instrument, that is until the concertina came along. Ah, the concertina. This would be a great place to get ahead of myself, but for now I’ll refrain.

Grandpa, Jonah’s father, was in his seventies by the time I heard him strut his cantorial stuff at the dinner table; though occasionally flat, his volume was awesome–the walls truly shook. If this was hereditary, it took a while to find out. As a college actor I couldn’t be heard in the back row without straining. A year with Elizabeth Wilmer, the voice teacher at LAMDA, changed that, and it’s to her as well as to Grandpa’s DNA that I owe the fruits of my vastly improved projection. (Years later when she and her husband visited New York I got them house seats for Cats. Elizabeth was pleased to learn that when the time came for my big second act aria the sound technicians would turn down my body mike, lest I overwhelm the orchestra.

The first big sign of improvement was at the R Street apartment. My neighbors would hear me singing in the shower and invite me to come sing in their shower. My newfound resonance, enabling my corniest tendencies, lent itself to lush and romantic show tunes rather than rock, and after rediscovering opera at Harvard I picked up a bunch of catchy arias and when necessary transposed the keys, singing Italian, French or German gibberish as called for. The exuberance and emotional directness of mid-nineteenth century European melody sent me, and does to this day. “The joy of the heart begets song,” says the Talmud, and in my heart just then there was a great deal of both. The stone that rolled away at Easter helped the music escape.

Virgin or no, it was a huge relief just to start letting people know I was gay. A relief to be that much more open with everybody in my circle. Everybody that is except Lottie and Jonah, and anyone who might report to Colton, still trucking around Europe. (One of his letters said, “All that we need to make this world heaven is to be worthy of each other’s trust.” I agreed on the one hand but dreaded its implications on the other.) Where Lottie and Jonah were concerned, I thought a spontaneous confession would pain them terribly, but, after responding falsely to Lottie’s query, I had promised myself that if they ever asked again I would answer with the truth.

Although some friends were more comfortable than others with knowing, nobody ever recoiled or cut me off. Straights were also starting to change. “Are ya?” said one, cocking a jaunty eyebrow as if my revelation was no surprise. Newer friends in the hippie world were naturally the most accepting, people on whom shame in general was losing its grip. A woman named Joanne who for months had been trying to ratchet our friendship towards seduction laughed in disbelief when I told her. I didn’t know whether to be flattered or discouraged. But life was getting richer.

So I wanted to give some away. It was the people who walked zombie-like past the White House maypole who got me thinking the most. Their behavior confirmed what The Greening of America said about creeping dehumanization, the cultural conditioning that shuts down whatever parts of the self challenge the dreary status quo: curiosity, imagination, spontaneity, play, wonder. How eccentric was I willing to be to make city life less predictably conformist? How silly?

Well, for one thing, I was willing to walk around singing. Not setting up on a corner with an upturned hat, just going about my daily chores in full melodic throttle, weather permitting. Back then you didn’t see throngs of people with wires hanging off their ears piping in music to an audience of one. How would passersby respond? And was my interest in that question the only thing distinguishing me from some nut who walks around singing?

I kept my eyes and ears open as well as my mouth.

                                                                          25.

Of the hippie era’s many rude shocks, I think the most startling was that happiness can repel as well as inspire. For a sorrowful subset of our species, happiness is tolerable in children, but its persistence into adulthood is fraught with ambivalence. Not because it’s so gooey, which only happens when it’s inauthentic, but because it’s so challenging when authentic. People who radiate joy alarm those who would bury it. Or who know it only through conquest. Every mythic battle between light and darkness may come down to just this. (Whew! I’m so fucking deep I can hear my own echo.)

In the spring of 1971, as I strolled around the city, singing or clowning as the fit struck me, I had complete confidence that the forces of light and joy would prevail upon the earth. What’s taking them so long, you may ask. As do I. Recent reactionary decades have buffeted but not dislodged my confidence. It’s a wobbly planet, but if you start with the first stirrings of life in Precambrian times, the consciousness trend has been upward for a long time. Much longer than the unfortunate harnessing of industrialism to greed and violence, a mere two centuries ago. Human beings are too smart, and too lifeoriented, to ignore the obvious indefinitely. We shall overcome.

                                                                         26.

To document and explain (and even celebrate) my process, I wrote an essay called The Street Actor, or the Marx Brothers Meet Meher Baba and sent it along with my resumé to a bunch of regional theaters that were casting for the coming season. I was hoping to kindle interest at a workplace that shared my values, or would at least offer an audition to an articulate if eccentric LAMDA-trained hippie. In addition to describing a few of my pranks, the essay is a manifesto in praise of anarchic humor (hence “Marx”) and spiritual awakening (hence “Meher”). Reading it over now, I’m agog at my blend of naïvete and chutzpah in imagining that any theater professional who read it would hire me even as an usher. But the combination of naïvete and chutzpah probably reflected the counterculture even more than Birkenstocks and granola. Nevertheless, I got two responses, one from the shop that brought me to San Francisco and the yellow house where I spent the remainder of my twenties.

This is The Street Actor verbatim:

Formerly I would sing outdoors if there was no one in the immediate vicinity. Now I sing whenever the urge hits, which is often; the most crowded downtown street is no deterrent. I favor the Italian repertoire, transposing favorite tenor arias into my high baritone register [if I sang in English the words would distract from the point]...

It is delightful to watch reactions to this. People think me a self-absorbed nut until they catch me beaming at them, acknowledging and welcoming their presence. Then they smile back, wave, applaud, yell Bravo, join in. Once I paused to clear my throat, and two middle-aged ladies who were passing said, “Oh, don’t stop.” There have been many variations of “That sounds real nice.”

Of course, there were also objections, usually in uniform. That spring Washington was swarming with the officers of coercion known as “pigs” in less fastidious circles. On the 24th of April some 500,000 antiwar demonstrators massed on the Mall, and the Nixon Administration didn’t expect them to be polite.

Ten days later I was jarred awake by a sound I recognized from war footage on the evening news: just outside of my window were low-flying helicopters, surveying Dupont Circle. This was Monday, the fourth of May, 1971, when the so-called May Day Tribe filled the streets with over ten thousand protestors determined to disrupt the government by blocking access to federal buildings, and Attorney General John Mitchell told the DC police to hide their badges, screw the Constitution and sweep those fucking bastards off the street. Or words to that effect.

The previous day the Administration had revoked the permit of some 35,000 protestors camped along the Mall monuments. Police in riot gear raided the encampments, smashing tents and firing tear gas into the crowd. All this Federal muscle failed to disperse the full tribal complement, so next day the National Guard was brought in, as well as several thousand marines and paratroopers deployed by chopper. It was like waking up in a war zone. 

I dress hurriedly, wolf down breakfast and truck over to Dupont Circle, little imagining that I’ll spend the remainder of this day and some of the next locked up with eight or nine thousand freaks at RFK Stadium and the Washington Coliseum.

The surveillance choppers are hovering in a clear blue spring sky. The entire perimeter of Dupont Circle is blocked off by a ring of soldiers at port arms position. They’re all my age or slightly younger and I wonder how to best communicate with them. Singing Verdi in ersatz Italian? Probably not. So I walk up to one of them and in an affable manner from a respectful distance ask, “What are you defending?” He makes no response so I move counterclockwise and ask the next boy the same question. This repeats three or four more times until a cop emerges from behind the troops, grabs my arm and neck and pulls me inside the ring. Without a word he takes me to a commandeered DC Transit bus parked on the grass, crushing a bed of newly planted marigolds, and pushes me into it.

When the bus gets full, it transfers all of us to the stadium, where a tall chain link fence encloses an outdoor holding pen. Nobody I speak with was officially arrested or charged in any way, and nobody had been able to identify, by name or number, the arresting officer. Cops had entered drugstores and seized young men sitting on lunch counter stools, their offense being the wearing of long hair or imaginative apparel.

The holding pen gets ever more crowded as the morning wears on. I gravitate toward a knot of so-calleds surrounding a tall, bearded older guy in a business suit, none other than Dr. Benjamin Spock, seized while standing in a chain of linked arms on Pennsylvania Avenue. He is calm and genial, holding forth with great optimism and verve about the legacy of Gandhi and King, when a loud female voice from behind shouts, “Ben!” He looks over our heads toward the sound and shouts back, “Bella!”

It’s Bella Abzug, congresswoman from New York, a fireplug in a broad-brimmed polka-dotted hat, who approaches and gives Ben a warm hug. “How could they do this?” she bellows. “It’s totally unconstitutional.”

“You think that’s one of Mitchell’s issues?” Ben replies. “Or Nixon’s? You know these guys.”

“I’m gonna make a speech in the House tomorrow that’ll blister their asses!” Then she signs a few autographs and vanishes. By mid-afternoon rumors are spreading, as are hunger and thirst. Whatever food and drink (and contraband) we prisoners had on our persons, shared or otherwise, is long gone. It’s obvious that the DC jail system can’t accommodate this enormous crowd; no one has a clue how and when we might be released. The FBI is going to fingerprint us all; the ACLU is suing the Supreme Court; all the guys will be drafted, etc. A cell phone would come in handy, if only they existed. Twilight is approaching when the police begin herding us into buses again, which transfer the whole gang indoors to the Coliseum, where volunteers from several Unitarian, black Baptist and other anti-war churches are showing up with cases of bottled water, plastic trash barrels filled with wrapped sandwiches, cheese, baloney or peanut butter and jelly, and blankets. And there are toilets!

We have free reign of the Coliseum’s concrete floor but aren’t allowed into the seating area. Water and sandwiches continue to arrive throughout the night. Thus fortified, the imprisoned masses turn the event into a party. Guitars are strummed, songs sung, jokes told, line dances improvised and frisbees hurled across the vast hall. I lie on a blanket shared with two others and sleep as well as concrete below and chaos above permit.

When morning comes there’s still no news of release. My bones ache and I’m famished. The sleepless hours crawl by, dampening the mirth of all but a few. Was I among the damp? Don’t ask.

                                                                            27.

I have no memory of how we were set free. I guess I was zoned by the time the doors opened, but I must have given my name to somebody, because years later I got an invitation to join a class action suit against the government, which eventually yielded a small check and a lot of satisfaction.

What I do remember is the luscious joy of returning to my own apartment, even though the previous morning’s breakfast dishes were still in the sink. There was a piece of music that perfectly expressed my feelings and I put it on the turntable at once: the chorus of prisoners emerging from their cells into the sunlight from Beethoven’s opera Fidelio.

Oh what joy, to breathe Freely again in the open air!

Only here is there life!

The dungeon is a tomb. 

After an orchestral intro hushed with amazement, the men enter, a few voices at a time, and then burst forth in an anthem of gratefulness and relief. Then the chorus is interrupted by two solo voices, opposite poles of consciousness. The First Prisoner sings: We shall be confident And trust in Divinity’s help!

Hope whispers to me softly:

We shall be free, we shall find peace.

The music suddenly turns withdrawn and spooky, and the Second Prisoner sings:

Speak softly! Be on your guard!

Ears and eyes are everywhere.

The shift into musical paranoia pulled my thoughts back to the scene at the Coliseum, so aptly named. The hippies were the Christian martyrs and the police were the Roman guards. The martyrs were cheerful (for the most part), turning their predicament into an adventure, but the guards were tense and grim-looking. I realized that in any situation, however dire or joyous, it’s the individual who chooses to be either the First or the Second Prisoner. If enough individual minds pivot toward peace and freedom, love even, a group mind forms and moves the world in a positive, healing direction. There’s also a group mind rooted in fear, a mind that needs guns or surveillance or raging lions to ward off danger and control subversion. But where’s the danger in a bunch of benignly unconventional young folks who just want to share a nice time here on earth?

About a month later I got an unexpected answer to my rhetorical question.

I was in a buoyant frame of mind. San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater had invited me to come and audition for their company in late August. This gave the parents (and me) a glimmer of hope that I’d be a salaried actor again. Having never been west of Chicago, I could finally visit California, where Colton had drunk deep the previous summer. En route I could stay with a college friend at his mother’s dude ranch in the mountains of Wyoming, and with Ron and Sally someplace in Colorado called Crested Butte. It was a fine June evening with magnolia scenting the air. I was walking along, a block or two from my house, belting something or other. Approaching Connecticut Avenue I heard a voice from across the street shout, “Hey, come here! You! Singer!”

The voice came from a guy about my age, having dinner with three friends, male and female, at a sidewalk café. They beckoned insistently and I approached.

“We’ve heard you pass by before. Why don’t you stay and sing for us?” 

I was about to quote the old vaudeville adage, “We’re no fools; we keep moving,” when scattered applause from the adjoining tables changed my mind. I asked what they wanted to hear.

“That opera stuff you like is fine.” More applause. Wine bottles were waved.

A Verdi maven at the next table asked for “La donna è mobile.” Always a safe bet. Or so I thought. I wasn’t quite halfway through it (as usual, making up words when I didn’t know the real ones–luckily nobody seemed to care) when a short, black policeman approached and instructed me to shut up.

“Excuse me?” I said, in mid-prep for a high note.

“You heard me, you’re disturbing the peace.”

“Somebody complained?”

“I’m complaining.”

“Yes, I know, but the good people here requested it so I think you’re outnumbered.” Perhaps this could have been more deferential. Anyway:

“I’m the one with the badge. So shut the fuck up or I’ll take you in.” As he walked away, some of the café patrons (who had watched all this in silence) began to boo in his direction. He continued down the dark street.

“Democracy, brother,” I yelled after him. When he vanished I turned back to the patrons, said, “Where was I?” and continued from where I’d stopped.

I didn’t get very far. (This would have been a great time to get ahead of myself, just to see what was coming, but no such luck.) Before I could fully read the alarm on the faces of my audience, a different cop grabbed my arms from behind (mid-gesture, no less) and the first one, nightstick drawn, stuck his face in mine and said, “One warning is all I do.” Then they slammed me against a car, cuffed me, and began to lead me away.

“Just a moment,” said the fellow who’d hailed me in the first place. “I’m at GW Law School, and you haven’t informed him of his rights.”

“I haven’t interrogated him, either, asshole,” the short cop shot back. The second cop pushed me into the back of the squad car and slid into the passenger seat while an argument between the first cop and the law student came to nothing. Then we drove off.

“How come you’re not singing?” asked the first cop.

“I haven’t heard a request, brother.” I can truly be an incorrigible idiot.

“Don’t call me brother is my request. And shut up.” 

This was a bad vibe downer with oy-vey overtones. At the station, a few blocks away, I was offered the choice of paying a fine (ten times the cash I was carrying) or spending the night behind bars. My permitted phone call was intercepted by Joe’s answering service, with whom I left a terse message and retired to sulk in a basement cell. At least (searching for a bright side) I had it to myself.

But not for long.

After ten minutes or so (like the rebels of Easy Rider, I no longer wore a watch), a new cop came down and led me upstairs. The law student, Mitch, and five of his friends had arrived at the station and paid my way out. They took me back to Mitch’s off-campus apartment where we sat in an oval, passed a couple of joints around, and listened to Tapestry and 4 Way Street while swapping stories. When I mentioned my forthcoming California trip, Mitch said that two friends of his were shortly driving west and looking for a rider to share expenses.

And that’s how I left for San Francisco.

                                                            THE WAY WEST

                                                                      28.

After finding a sublettor for July and August by way of the Earth Harvest switchboard I was ready to go. Mitch’s friends left Washington in a cherry-red VW bug with me and assorted baggage stuffed in the back seat. Until my Fulbright year overseas, I’d spent all my life on the East Coast except for a wedding in Chicago and a Bar Mitzvah in Hickory, North Carolina (a grandson of Aunt Rose, she of the tenement town car). As we rolled across the farmland of southern Pennsylvania and Ohio, I stared in wonderment. So this is heartland America! Mile after mile of young cornfields, ribbing the land like green corduroy, brought to mind all the vegetation imagery in the Tarot, where it stands for the initiating power of the Life Force, where photosynthesis makes the higher levels of material existence possible. I wondered how much of the corn ends up as Fritos.

Mitch’s friends were two brothers heading west, all right, but no further than Iowa. We crashed the first night with friends of theirs in Indianapolis, and next day took off for Des Moines, where they would visit with their buddy Winston, recently back from ‘Nam. I had started keeping a journal by then, and said of the Iowa State Capitol’s gilded baroque dome, “At a distance it rises from the corn like a wealthy dowager exhibiting jewelry to her poor relations.”

Winston lived within sight of this dome, and when we arrived he was glowing with excitement. The huge Pioneer speakers he bought on R&R in Japan had just arrived, shipped from Vietnam to his doorstep by the US Army. We all grooved appreciatively as he removed the big boxy trophies from their packaging. “That’s not even the best part,” Winston purred, and after unscrewing the rear panels he withdrew from each speaker a two-pound bag of killer Thai stick, dipped, he claimed, in hash oil. “Finally something to thank the Army for,” he added.

Next morning he gave me a smartly wrapped ounce to season my journey with, which at that potency was likely to take me to California before I even got there.

I was now on my own with backpack, sleeping bag and thumb. At the approach to the Interstate I used the same attention-getting techniques that worked for hitching around Washington, standing on one leg or singing or doing a little jig, and in no time was picked up by a VW bus with Tennessee plates, psychedelic swirls, and on the passenger side the word EUPHORIA in letters half a foot high underlined by a forward-pointing arrow. “Have a lift,” were the driver’s first words.

There were a dozen eight-track cartridges scattered in the back (Layla was playing) and well-thumbed copies of The Greening of America and Be Here Now. The driver was a profoundly genial young hippie named Bernie who was heading with his friends Cindy and John to a campground in the Black Hills of South Dakota. We drove north on US 29 and were soon passing by Sioux City, where below a large warehouse sign reading

NIXON FEEDS

someone had scrawled the graffito “Nixon Sucks.” I watched the passing cars and began to see a consistent pattern. When a family car passed our swirly bus with the handpainted EUPHORIA sign, the parents would stare grimly ahead while the kids in back, any between seven and their late teens, would gaze in awe at the hippie vehicle, and if we waved at them would respond by flashing a surreptitious peace sign. The wave of the future, I thought. The future, as usual, would have some surprises up its sleeve.

In fact, reading my battered old journal after four decades is both an embarrassment and a treat. It’s a bound sketch book, 81 / 2 x11 and an inch thick, written and drawn on the blank pages with brown, green, orange, yellow and purple fine line markers, and if that sounds giddy, try the content. The author is madly in love with life. Everything is a huge turn-on. The Badlands of South Dakota! The Black Hills! Mount Rushmore! Though I hadn’t discovered Walt Whitman yet, I gush like him. And in more than one language.

Interspersed among the neatly spaced lines of prose is a hodgepodge of maxims drawn from Shakespeare, Shaw, the Hebrew liturgy (so much praise for Nature in the Psalms), or culled from my own brain (“When you stop talking to yourself, your Self starts talking to you”), in block letters or attempts at psychedelic calligraphy, rhetorical questions (“Is Italian Buddhism the answer?”), multicolored mandalas, pentagram symbols, sketches of landscapes and faces, and occasional parody song lyrics:

I am a happy wanderer, A smile is on my face, If it were on my elbow It would sure be out of place.

Valderi, Valdera, etc. 

And there are observations that only an impudent novice could make. I single out the tourists at the “world-famous” Wall Drug Store (where I noticed how nobody has to say “the world-famous Vatican”), mocking the junk they buy: “Souvenirs convert experiences into things,” I jeer. “Anticipating a future in which you’ll recollect the past.”

Now I appreciate the Now as much as the next pantheist, but I’m here to tell my young whippersnapper of a self that the future has arrived and not only am I recollecting the past, I’m writing about it. So there.

                                                                        29.

For three days and nights the EUPHORIA crew explored South Dakota, camping at Lake Herman, where the setting sun burned a gash across the lake like a giant sparkler, at Pactola Lake, where we slept in a fragrant grove of Ponderosa Pine, their windblown crowns slithering back and forth across the sky, and finally at Custer State Park, with its Valhalla-like Needles and rolling meadows where buffalo and pronghorn antelope roam.

The summer before my Fulbright began, I had traveled around England and Scotland, seen the Lake District and the Isle of Skye, but other than the Mount of Olives no outdoor experience had ever grabbed at my heart quite like the days and nights with EUPHORIA. The scenery and wildlife and nocturnal sky (filled with planets and constellations I knew by name) were amazing, and the company delightful.

Cindy and John were sweet, but Bernie left an impression I can still summon. He was a superb host, radiating serenity and ease like a Harvard Club steward with a good ol’ boy accent. He did all the driving, repaired the bus cheerfully whenever it misbehaved, built the campfires, read the maps, steered the overall vibe invariably toward enthusiasm. He was short, skinny, toothy, with granny specs, curly brown hair wrestled into a ponytail, and a feeble excuse for a beard, but his face was so lit with kindness and humor that you had to love it. I wasn’t yet familiar with the Buddhist concept of the bodhisattva, but I knew about the Jewish lamed-vavniks, thirty-six humbly anonymous individuals whose sublime ethical conduct pumps life into the world (the Jewish version) or saints who incarnate to foster enlightenment among all beings (the Buddhist one). Bernie might have been either, or both. Thanks, Bernie! Where are you today?

My subsequent hitch was at the other extreme. Short of actual mayhem, two more ghastly companions would be hard to invent. Steve and Izzy, en route from Stonybrook to Berkeley in an ash-grey Rambler sedan, were about to start graduate work in physics. Their contempt for metaphysics was unsparing. They looked like hippies but for liberality of outlook they were more like Don Rickles without the jokes. Parody New Yorkers, Steve was pedantic and inflexible while Izzy, the driver, was cold, inconsiderate, suspicious, whiny, argumentative, fearful of strangers and cheap. Unlike Bernie’s “Have a lift,” his greeting was, “Can you cough up for gas?” .

It didn’t behoove a guest to scream “Will you guys lighten up?” from the back seat, so I bailed from conversing when I saw that references to Ram Dass and Jung wouldn’t fly. I stared out the window and tried to pay less attention to what was striking my ears than my eyes: the first sighting of the Rockies, as purple as the anthem says, and ever larger as we approached. We stopped for the night outside Cody, Wyoming, an hour from Yellowstone National Park. There was a gaudy neon sunset over the Rockies, orange and maroon clouds so vivid you could almost hear them singing. Steve was impressed but all Izzy said was, “I bet those are rain clouds.” They weren’t.

We sat around a small campfire and it turned out they liked show tunes. I was then too naïve (and too mentally closeted) to take this as a hint about their orientation, and it may not have been. They were just a couple of male yentas. But at least the singing was fun, though Izzy’s timbre and pitch were as abrasive as his personality. As above, so below, the Kabalists say. As within, so without.

The next day we drove around Yellowstone together. At the wheel Izzy reverted to control freak mode (a reminder that I needed to call Jonah and Lottie) and, without a trace of irony, complained tirelessly about Park traffic. He imposed a strict timetable on our stops at Old Faithful, Mammoth Hot Springs, Grand Canyon and Yellowstone Falls, the better to be on our way before dark. He was annoying, but it also saddened me to see someone cling to a self-barricade so thick that not one of these marvels could pierce it to release wonder. He was indeed a young version of Jonah, the personification of Aunt Sadie, and the diametric opposite of the hippies locked up in the DC Coliseum. I recalled the words of Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost:

The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven. 

                                                                       30.

We pulled up to the Lake General Store to stock up. Izzy was pressing on to the Tetons and though I was eager to see them I had decided that I’d rather take my chances thumbing than continue with this Miltonic self-tormentor. Years later, in The Way of Life, I found Lao-tse’s dictum, “I find good people good, and I find bad people good if I am good enough.” Clearly, where Izzy was concerned, I wasn’t good enough yet.

But before I could announce my intention, I was serendipitized by encountering two friends from DC in front of the General Store. Jerell, the tall Hendrix lookalike from the Concerned Citizens maypole event, and his buddy Jim, a squat and ruddy Anglo-Saxon type. They were going to hike three miles down to Elk Point on Yellowstone Lake and I happily accepted the invitation to come along.

It’s always great to meet old friends in a new place, but when the place ranks with the earth’s loveliest, it’s like a magic carpet brought you there. Jerell and Jim were partial to junk food, with which the General Store was amply stocked, so we loaded up a couple days’ worth of snacks and set off through the woods with our packs and sleeping bags. No tent.

When we arrived lakeside (some lake!) we met a scout troop just packing up from a fishing trip. Their haul of Yellowstone cutthroat trout was over the legal limit. They gave us a couple whoppers apiece, already cleaned. They gave us a spare grill. We gave no further thought to the processed turkey breast, cheese goo, textureless white bread and Ring-dings, but set to work building a fire and cooking the trout. On the far side of the lake the last rays of the sun were slipping behind the mountains, burnishing the water, a sublime setting for an unexpected and delectable feast. When darkness fell, the far shore sparkled with a faint chain of campfires, and it occurred to me that from their perspective our fire must be a distant jewel in just such a necklace.

Next day the guys shared their orange sunshine. Tripping, I dove into the lake, water so icy that my brain turned an electric blue and my body buzzed to the marrow with cold. I yelped even before breaking the surface and retreated to shore, where a hostility of mosquitos materialized. “Gotta stay ahead of ‘em, Steve,” said Jerell, slapping away.

“But as long as you pay attention to ‘em, they’re winning,” offered Jim, as unruffled as Buddha. 

There was an uncomfortable moment when, as with my Easter Sunday tripmates, I construed some remarks of Jim and Jerell, to whom I wasn’t officially out, as veiled gay taunts. So I came out then and there. They were fine with it but didn’t understand why I brought it up. We spent the remainder of the day hiking along the lake, laughter restored, but later, in reflection, I could see that my psyche was still unsure about sexuality. Getting laid seemed a useful start. But how? When? With whom? A stranger I’d meet in a bar? The absent Colton, whose affectionate letters from Europe stirred a false hope?

Three days later, they dropped me off at Grand Teton Park on their way south. I hiked the trail to Hidden Falls and justly-named Inspiration Point and found an off-trail spot with a fire pit. There I spent my first ever night completely alone in the woods. Except that I had a noisy neighbor: a two hundred-foot cascade that seemed in a powerful hurry to pour itself into Jenny Lake. It roared and roared without a break; I never knew gravity could be that loud.

I didn’t last long as a Cub Scout and was too unathletic for camp, so my exposure to wilderness had been limited to reading Walden. But here I was on the side of a mountain, calling my sleeping bag home, and loving it. I had ditched the junk food in favor of trail mix and dried fruit. Water was abundant, as long as I didn’t slip getting to it. I’d observed my travel companions’ technique closely and ultimately succeeded in getting a fire built. Had I thought about it I might have been afraid of critters and beasts, but I didn’t think. I sang. I hadn’t unleashed my voice in a while and it felt rich and full and the dark woods rang with it and it brought enormous pleasure to an audience of me. And maybe any critters and beasts within earshot.

My singing didn’t shush the Falls, but they and it seemed to be of a piece. Even without chemical assistance, my mind was altering. I could feel myself becoming someone new, ever more inclusive, large enough to encompass the scenic wonders of the past few days, the dynamic energy of firelight and starlight and rushing water and jumping fish, the music that poured out of the earth and out of me. It was all one, and what it was was love, and I knew it could remake the world.

                                                                          31.

My Harvard friend Brian had a summer retreat called Spring Ranch in the Wind River mountains southeast of Grand Teton, an easy hitch away. It was downhill from  Ring Lake Ranch, his mother’s place, a sort of ecumenical dude ranch, where visiting progressive clergy might gather to reflect, cross-pollinate or just kick back in Christ. Brian, a talented writer and film-maker, had invited a handful of his friends to create a floating mini-commune over the summer at his place.

A graduate of the National Outdoor Leadership School, Brian was a whiz on group hikes. Hikes, shmikes, he actually got me up on a horse for a trail ride through the Winds. He could identify plants, point out petrified forests and blue chert or explain how watermelon algae turned snow sherbet-pink. At campsites he would bake bread in a coffee can over the fire and for dessert whip up fresh peach cobbler. He also knew when to let the terrain speak silently. “Put your mind here,” say the mountains. It was after we spent a day at 12,000 feet that I captured the mood in a maxim, “The higher you get, the more you can see.”

I stayed at Spring Ranch for over two weeks and grew familiar with the world above the timber line, where That Which Has No Dimension breathes out the vast mystery of space. Looking west to see the now-familiar silhouette of the Tetons rise like ghostly iceberg peaks eighty miles across an ocean of sky made me fall to my knees. And there I was drawn into the fragrant, delicate color-dance of alpine flowers, tiny-petaled miracles of the opposite scale: shooting star and phlox, lupine, forget-me-not and silky phacelia. A fragrance counter at the brink of heaven.

Space without boundary, indivisible time. But try getting caught there in a thunderstorm, with hailstones for extra percussion. Peaks and ranges both near and far magically vanish behind sheets of rain or great smoky mists rising from the valleys. Huge panoramas shrink and expand like elastic. Lightning crackles close ahead, but the thunderclap is far behind. I’m up there with Brian’s cousin Sara and a lot of bighorn sheep and, soaking wet under inadequate parkas, we decide to get the flock out of there.

Scrambling over slippery rocks when your pants are so waterlogged they won’t stay up crushes the romance of nature in a hurry. Wilderness is a great thing, but it would help if the trail for home didn’t keep disappearing in fog. We press on and finally the rain abates, the rocks give way to meadows with tranquil cattle, light appears above the distant western hills. The clouds linger just long enough to fill the sky with blazing color as we reach the gate to the ranch. 

Among Brian’s other guests was Tim, my former roommate, then an LA-bound film-maker. He was the first Harvard friend I came out to, counting on the reliably liberal streak he inherited from his once-blacklisted father. I not only came out to Tim, but confessed my supercrush on our mutual friend Colton. (Freshman year I had a less obsessive crush on Tim but he didn’t know about it, and won’t till he reads this.) Tim had directed Colton in a student film; knew him well; found my attitude plausible but doomed. If the doom trope hadn’t been so alien to my nature, I’d have let the truth sink in and saved some grief down the line. As the saying goes, you can always tell a Harvard man but you can’t tell him much.

In those pre-digital days, intellectuals, even zonked-out ones, gravitated toward books. Mountainous Wyoming, home to a recent reactionary Vice-President, may seem an unlikely setting for checking out a radically unorthodox Freudian Marxist, but the Ring Lake Ranch bookshelves held a copy of Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man and I read it whenever I wasn’t on horseback. I knew that some of The Greening of America was Marcuse Lite and I wanted to sample the real thing.

Before he became a teacher of political philosophy, Marcuse worked for the OSS and State Department during the war and into the McCarthy era and he knew personally the kind of paranoid insiders whose grip on post-war culture he wanted to help loosen. His fans in my generation responded to him because he articulated the psychological underpinnings of politics, showing that repression and revolution alike are rooted in the mind, or what we freaks liked to call consciousness. He noticed how corporate capitalism, in collusion with advertising media and lackey governments, was turning the general public into a herd of compulsive consumers blind to the needs of the planet and their fellows and to their own innate sources of well-being. True human liberation was being stifled under capitalism and communism alike. Marcuse wrote:

THE MOST EFFECTIVE AND ENDURING FORM OF WARFARE AGAINST LIBERATION IS THE IMPLANTING OF MATERIAL AND INTELLECTUAL NEEDS THAT PERPETUATE OBSOLETE FORMS OF THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE.

This is nothing if not highfalutin hippie talk. The folks from EUPHORIA may not have used “implanting” and “perpetuate” in daily discourse, but they were living the idea. Free your inner self and the urge to collaborate and coöperate springs forth. Hard-core individualism, the Ayn Rand-ish rubbish, is ultimately derived from fear. Fear of others, fear of failure, fear of death. Big waste of energy when there’s a planet that needs cleansing.

Also in the ranch library I found a companion volume to Marcuse, though it was written six hundred years earlier. Where Marcuse focused my mind, The Cloud of Unknowing, by an anonymous 14th-century English monk, expanded my heart. Though sprung from medieval Christian tradition (conceiving “God” as “He/Him/His”) the lessons of the book are quite compatible with Zen, Jung or Ram Dass. Divinity can be neither experienced nor comprehended through the rational mind. It dwells behind a mental veil, a “cloud of unknowing” that can be pierced only by the arrow of love. Love springs out of a heart yearning for connection at its finest. With the silencing of critical, conceptual thought, be it wordless prayer or meditation or simple stillness, the heart rises, the veil lifts, and the mystery appears, says the author. So fuck theology (or Middle English words to that effect).

“Let Love Carry You Along” sang the 70s band Joy of Cooking, and this is the link I perceive between the two books. Both religious dogma and competitive materialism are obstacles to the flowering of the soul. The quest for a truly fulfilling alternative to the conventional wisdom of their day unites the English monk and the radical professor. The vocabulary of transformed consciousness may evolve, but the goal, spanning centuries, remains the same. The higher you get, the more you can see.

                                                                         32.

I had an audition scheduled on August 10th for the Seattle Rep and said goodbye to the ranch a few days before. My first lift, back through Yellowstone and some hundred miles into Montana, was from the memorably mellow George Lampman, practitioner of a trade I had never previously encountered. He was an inseminator of cattle. Despite over a decade of inseminating used socks, I had never viewed the pastime as gateway to a profession. Only in America!

In a field under a tree near George’s turnoff I unrolled my sleeping bag and spent a drizzly misery of a night alternately escaping from an overheated mummy bag and retreating back into it under intense mosquito assault. There was intermittent aesthetic relief as the full moon would briefly light up an army of rainclouds and then duck behind them again. But mostly biting and buzzing and steaming and soaking. 

I woke to a golden Montana morning near the headwaters of the Missouri River at Three Forks, the rising sun reflected by snow-capped mountains to the west. Campers nearby offered me water, coffee, breakfast and conversation. After that grim night, their kindness so stirred me that I gushed once more, entering into my journal a passage that I now read with discomfort. This is it:

Dear Lord, You must have a high opinion of me, for You are always sending me more than I feel I deserve. Let me rest always in your sweet care, and tell of your splendors and kindness. Halleluiah!

I’m trying to figure out why this makes me squirm a little inside. Today I’m not so sure that Divinity has sent me more than I deserve, at least not “always.” Occasionally, but always? I envy the boy writer’s innocence, but it also makes me feel sorry for him, knowing as I do that Div’s “sweet care” can take the form of harsh lessons and scathing shocks that sometimes you just want to scream about. Telling of splendors be damned.

The Old Testament undercurrent, from “Lord” to “Halleluiah,” no longer feels comfortable, either. I hadn’t fully emerged from the roots of my tradition. To this day bits of the soil still cling. “Halleluiah” is just as good as “Yippee” when you feel great. Summer of 71, I was toting a Hebrew-English edition of the Psalms, and I guess some of the lingo rubbed off. Unfortunately the hijacking of the Bible for political purposes has intervened since I wrote those words.

I share the qualms many secular people have about old-time religion. I don’t mind the spiritual core. The danger comes when religious indoctrination yokes your very selfhood to cultural norms handed down over generations. Anything that updates them seems a personal threat. Revering the past is okay for a while, but there’s no future in it.

It’s also the implicit “God the Father” trope that unsettles me. I wonder now if I was packaging the Tao as a caring father to compensate for the one I missed growing up. The Life Force that zapped me on the Mount of Olives has long ruled the JudeoChristian-Islamic cultures as a father figure but other views are more comprehensive.

As the Greek, Hindu and pagan pantheons affirm, Divinity is yin as well as yang, forceful but also a womb. And it’s not personal, neither in favor nor misfortune. It’s just a perpetually unfolding wholeness which invites us to join, and bring our best self to the dance. Time after time, whether we RSVP or not, whether we stumble or not, the invitation keeps coming. With each breath (or each rebirth, if you will) we get another chance. 

The writer boy from that 1971 summer may seem naïve now, but I have to admire his sense of safety and ease and gratitude. Trusting in the benevolence of the cosmos had paid off: I hitchhiked the 1800 miles from Des Moines to Seattle with days to spare and without harmful incident. Unless you count the Montana cowboys who hurled obscenities and a can of beer at me as their black Chevy pickup raced by. The projectile landed at my feet and sprayed me, a useful reminder that America was not entirely the land of the groovy. The “Love It or Leave It” crowd, whether Westerners in Stetsons or New Yorkers in hardhats (or DC police), could still be enraged by the mere sight of an easygoing longhair, beaming in beads and frivolous in fringe.

The hippie look didn’t go over at my Seattle audition, either. Per request, I prepared a classical and a modern speech: Leontes from The Winter’s Tale and Arturo Ui from Brecht’s play of that name (when Brecht could still pass as modern). Between them, the range of feeling and technique was huge, from tense paranoia and self-pity to frenzied comic bluster. But my playing didn’t please the cheerless director of the Rep; his facial expression reminded me of the bypassers at the White House who ignored the maypole. When I finished, in place of a curt “Thank you” he actually gave me a rant, culminating with, “People are goal-oriented and when a goal is realized or frustrated, that alone produces emotion.”

ME: (defending the inner life) I’m afraid Jung would disagree with you.

HE: (emphatically) Jung was wrong!

(Exit Me.)

No point in debating. The jig was up. Anyway, I’d thought of this audition as primarily a warm-up for the one in San Francisco, and it was obvious that this director and I were ill-suited. He was creepy and uptight, and at 24 I hadn’t acquired the knack of feigning another me for the sake of a job. In fact, to do so would be a violation of the hippie ethic. That’s why I sent The Marx Brothers Meet Meher Baba along with my resumés. At Harvard it was a persistent maxim that hypocrisy was the K-Y of social intercourse, but we so-called types considered authenticity more wholesome. As indeed it is.

Audition apart, Seattle was great. I had arrived from the East at twilight, as lights were flecking the edge of the lake. Then the initial charm turned to shock. For the first time in a month I was back in the world of city people, masses of them regulating their lives to the mechanical pulse of transport and commerce. Fortunately there were freaks everywhere you looked, and a couple named Tim and Sharon helped me to my first West Coast crash pad, where Tim won our welcome with his wizardrous guitar.

Next day’s digs were even better. Picking wild blackberries on a hillside beneath the freeway I met Tony, Ginny and Bill, a couple and her brother who lived in the houseboat they were building on Lake Union. Within its partially walled shell, fine points of carpentry, wiring and plumbing were steadily emerging. On the lake beyond, masts of every height would bob like metronomes through the roll of a wake. You could beat the heat with a plunge off the side. There was a red, yellow and blue parrot named Mocoso whose startling poses and quizzical expressions I repeatedly sketched. And at dinnertime they unmoored the sailboat and we dined aboard for a sunset cruise!

It was divine.

                                                                         33.

Ron and Sally, on whose Maryland farm I spent that memorable Easter Sunday, left the East Coast in May and were in Colorado by June. We had planned a midsummer rendezvous at Crested Butte, an old mining town they’d heard about that had been overrun by hippies. Freaks did indeed dominate the local government, but the local weather was out of their hands and even freakier. After an early-June snowstorm and bitter cold, Ron and Sally bailed on the Butte.

A friend of Sally’s who lived in San Francisco told her we could all spend the summer at the Navarro River on private land owned by a big corporation in Mendocino County. A spontaneously forming hippie tribe had begun to assemble among the redwoods on the north side of the river. You may recall the tie-dyed, free-spirited, guitarstrumming, I Ching-consulting, natural foods-eating, psychedelically awakened, consistently amiable clothes-optional hippies mentioned earlier. The Navarro was their turf, where I found Ron and Sally on the 12th of August, my first day in California.

The night before, I had unrolled my sleeping bag in a grove of dwarf pines near a picnic site halfway down the Oregon coast. The Pacific could be heard but not seen, shrouded in a dense grey fog. All night long the breakers smashed the shore, and the salt tang of ocean filled the air, soldering my breath to my blood. “Prana” is the yogic term for breath as the giver of life, and on that night it was particularly pungent. 

In the morning I joined four other so-calleds in the back of a Mendocino-bound pickup truck. Gradually the Oregon sun dispersed the fog bank, and startling views of the coast blew our collective mind. As we sped south on US-101, the vast ocean that poet Robinson Jeffers called the Eye of the Earth fluctuated from green velvet to blue diamonds, flashing with silver when it reared itself to crash and scatter into bubbles. The breakers were the biggest I’d ever seen, and beyond them towering cliffs of rock burst out of the ocean like missiles, some bald, some broad enough on top to feature the rippling of tall grass toupees.

It was just past noon when we entered California, and from then on the Pacific sparkled and signaled with reflected sunlight. I was giddy with joy, having crossed from sea to shining sea. If only this great land could indeed be crowned with brotherhood! The surging beauty of the coastline and its forests and cliffs and startling grey beaches gladdened my soul with the promise of new life. By day’s end I’d be reunited with my beloved Sally and Ron, and soon thereafter seek the next turn of Fortune’s wheel in the hippie mecca San Francisco.

But first came the redwoods. Our vehicle veered off 101 to take a two-lane scenic route that wound through thirty miles of redwood forest bordered by the Eel River and lit by slanted beams of the westering sun. The driver said it was called the Avenue of the Giants, but I thought its storybook magic was just as likely home to the Seven Dwarfs. From the back of the truck we could see the treetops soaring above us to unimaginable heights, lifting the heart and vanquishing the sky. I recalled the vaunted Ronald Reagan line, when you’ve seen one redwood you’ve seen them all, and wondered how the California Governor could believe that, if he did. How could anybody be that unconscious?

This was hardly the last time his triumphant insensitivity would amaze and perplex.

                                                                     34.

Twenty adults and a handful of kids comprised the Navarro River Tribe when Ron and Sally arrived in mid-June. Two months later the number had tripled, spreading along the north bank in a welter of quirky campsites. Tie-dyed banners and batik fabrics vied with feather mandalas, dream catchers, canvas canopies and improvised leaf shelters to mark turf in a climate reliably free of summer rain. (Tents served no purpose but privacy, and sounds of shared glee, the male-female variety, would often erupt through the fabric.) 

Ron and Sally had created a “tree house” for themselves. It was at ground level within one of those intimate rings of trees that here and there lend such a deep family feeling to the redwood groves. They looked about as happy as a pair of people can look. We hadn’t seen each other in over three months but the moment we found each other in the forest (I was singing an aria and they followed the sound) we all felt as though no time had passed and our friendship resumed exactly where we’d left off; no catch-up necessary.

I was beginning to see that we carry inside ourselves the imprint of people we love, not just as memorized images but as actual psychic energy (unfortunately also true of those we fear or hate). They are present inside us and in that sense there is no separation. Now that I, too, had made it to California, my thoughts turned to all I’d learned and all I hoped for from my absent soul brother Colton, whose year in Europe would soon be up. I wondered how he’d take to this Eden I had chanced upon.

For paradise it most certainly was. The Navarro River encampment was an object lesson in gentle human interaction with one another and with nature. The redwood forest brought peace and beauty and a mysterious stillness to everything it sheltered. It was beyond the reach of coastal fog. From the first golden rays of morning, electric on the underside of needles high overhead, the day would wind past the scent of bay laurel, through ferns and moss and soft needles underfoot, toward the white sandy beach, broad here, narrow there, idling alongside a river green as liquid emerald in its swimmable pools, clear as a window in its wading shallows. On the opposite bank, trails vanished into the gigantic trees climbing toward a peak too far off to see.

Butterflies of luscious orange and intense white darted around the woods, ravens honked, geckos crept, blue jays attempted camp robbery, and every now and then a great blue heron would cast its spell, nesting motionless or gliding downriver, mirrored in the surface below. No Never-Land of childhood ever brought Peter Pan and Tinker Bell closer than they seemed to be here in the dim violet light as evening fell.

I was always invited to dinner over Ron and Sally’s fire. Sally was a supreme outdoor housekeeper, organized and well-equipped. She brought to mind a multi-armed Hindu deity with a pot in every hand. If there was something edible growing anywhere, root or fungus, she could turn it into a tasty dish. On grocery runs into nearby Albion we’d get salmon steaks to vary the otherwise vegetarian fare that prevailed among most of the Navarro Tribe. There was potluck feasting constantly and everywhere, depending on whom you hung with that afternoon. Ron and Sally brought me to meet their new friend Mae Margaret, whose commune in San Francisco would offer hospitality down the line. She was from the deep south and, grinning over a campfire, cooked my first messes of black-eyed peas, collard greens and hominy grits.

Everybody was relaxed and friendly. To this there were no exceptions, other than the occasional petulant child, soon soothed. As for the clothes-optional factor, it was exactly that. Especially at Bare-Ass Beach, disrobing was common, but nobody was dissed who didn’t. Of course there were bodies on view that inspired lust, and more often envy. The filmed nudity in Woodstock was one thing, but this was the real deal, in the up-close and personal flesh. I was a chunky child, and though I’d dropped fifteen pounds at acting school, I never stopped believing (to this day) that I need to lose at least another five. Even so, it didn’t take long to shrink from cutoffs to loincloth to zip.

Permission came from absorbing the comfort others nearby displayed, regardless of body type or intimate endowment, with being “skyclad.” Showing off a desirable body wasn’t the point. Whatever their shape or age (and there were notable deviations from the prevalence of young and trim), the tribefolk seemed to occupy their bodies with a poise that created its own beauty, clothed or otherwise. They might not have graced a magazine cover or sold a product, but so what? In that pre-sunblock era, why not let every inch of your body be burnished by the giver of all life on earth, why bar some taboo region from its reach! Tits and butts and pubes and dicks and snatches galore, and nobody mortified or uptight. Just don’t get burned.

All around were people who were seeing life from a perspective unlike the one they (or I) had been raised with. Jollier and less judgmental. More attuned to the present, dismissive of anxiety. Willing to extend trust and be worthy of it. An attitude the Nixonian camp would revile as permissiveness, as if it were wrong somehow for a prohibition to become obsolete. Not only behavioral prohibitions but cultural and mental ones.

For if any one theme united the community, it was agreement with Be Here Now that the rational mind is “a perfect servant and a lousy master;” that much of the planet’s woe, political and ecological, was due to a mechanistic reduction of life that repudiated mystery, wonder, connection and joy. The remedy was a quest for wisdom and meaning in traditions and practices alien to the mindset of the Industrial Revolution: Buddhism and yoga, Tarot and Tai Chi, astrology and wicca, Native American and Sufi. Traditions and practices that I would have sneered at only a few years earlier, and that intellectuals of both left and right continue to sneer at forty years later.

The Navarro Tribe didn’t go in for sneering. They swapped books, traded ideas, shared crafts. People unashamed to wear their hearts on their sleeves, whether they had sleeves or not. Powder, a bearded man-child minstrel, clad like Robin Hood in fringed soft boots and a feathered cap, playing the mandolin as he sang his songs of elves and sprites and inns built under hills; wide-eyed Nadia, with wavy auburn tresses like a pre-Raphaelite muse, concocting herbal teas and poultices for anything from a headache to a gashed foot; feline Reuben, gaily dispensing his never-ending stream of purest Owsley window pane; Nancy, built like a prehistoric fertility goddess with as vast a heart; Carl, the tribe’s leader in all but name, long-haired and golden-bearded, handsome, muscular, modest, unfailingly kind and fair and knowledgeable, a leader by his sheer presence and example.

To be in a redwood grove among human beings as evolved as they were was close enough to heaven to make earth its equal. But after six celestial days I had to move on. There was an audition scheduled in San Francisco, not to mention an entirely unexpected three-way cherry busting.

                                                                        35.

Mae Margaret offered me a ride from Mendocino to San Francisco as well as crash space in the attic of her communal apartment in the Mission district. A real San Francisco commune! A seat on the NYSE couldn’t have tickled a Harvard MBA more.

We drove southeast under a sky of brilliant blue, winding through the ripening vineyards and orchards of Route 128. There were waving hills of a uniform golden color, their sunbaked flanks splotched with shadowy jade by California live oaks. Every turn, dip and rise of the roller-coaster road revealed another beautiful rustic scene. By the time 128 merged into US-101, I had merged into Northern California for life.

When the City and Bay and Golden Gate Bridge first popped into view from Marin County, I felt like Dorothy and her companions gazing in awe at the Emerald City. Or maybe eagle-eyed Cortez, silent, upon a peak in Darien (Keats, dudes). Gleaming white in the distance was the rising Transamerica Pyramid, a year from completion and already an incomparable landmark. What kind of city would build a skyscraper like that? So cosmic! So whimsical! So bold! It already felt like home and we hadn’t even crossed the bridge.

Mae Margaret’s attic enclosed an amazing span of vast dark corners, bare wood rafters and a windowed turret providing the only light. In spite of the cobwebs and gloom, the companionship among friends crashing there made it seem like an extension of the Navarro River camp, the same effortless demonstrations of spiritual grace in abundance. The same informality and cordial fellowship with total strangers. Ease.

I only stayed for a few nights, though. There was a full week before my audition with the American Conservatory Theater, and meanwhile I had a friend from DC to look up. Joanne, the single-minded woman who laughed in disbelief when I told her I was gay, had come to San Francisco to try living with Mike, the doctor with whom she’d been having a long-distance affair. He was divorced, with custody of his three pre-Bar Mitzvah age kids. When I called Joanne at his house in Diamond Heights, they invited me to join the whole family for dinner at a fabulous Chinatown restaurant.

Mike was 38, with prematurely grey close-cropped hair and beard, handsome with a classic Semitic profile, easy brown eyes, an athletic build and seemingly endless reserves of charm. The kids, two boys and a girl, were delightful. It was all very congenial and relaxed. Once home the kids were put to bed, the cannabis appeared and, as we sprawled California-style on the plush carpet, things got even more congenial and relaxed.

I’m not going to recount blow-by-blow (as it were) the loss of my virginity, except to say that Joanne was the catalyst. She had revealed that she and Mike had previously “swung” (1971, remember) with another woman. When he left to fetch another bottle of Chenin blanc I told her in all innocence, by way of approving her choice, how much I liked him. She repeated this, less innocently, when Mike returned, and he said the feeling was mutual. There on the rug, one stroke led to another. Sweet exchanges of tenderness. I’ll draw the veil at the dispersal of clothing.

The truth is, I wouldn’t/couldn’t have done it if he hadn’t been there, and he couldn’t/wouldn’t have done it if she hadn’t been there. Nevertheless it broke the ice. I felt great. That night I slept alone in their guest room; we never repeated the ménage. I would have happily invited Mike for a duo (and did) but he wasn’t interested. We remained close friends, the three kids included, and for years I was a frequent houseguest after he and Joanne were married.

So my loss of “innocence” was actually an introduction to a different kind of innocence, one where sex wasn’t such a big deal, just a part (a very engaging part) of the overall love project.

This realization didn’t come overnight. Freedom of opportunity, confidence and an urge to make up for lost time pointed me directly to the primrose path, which in San Francisco was freeway-sized. But my schoolboy romantic nature shielded me from what, for so many of my brothers, was promiscuity’s lethal consequence. I went to the baths a little but was chagrined by the atmosphere. Eye contact tended to be eclipsed by gazes directed crotchward. In bars or parks I was clumsy at flirting and inept at picking up signals. A losing combination.

Now and then a chance encounter would click, at least briefly. I learned to my woe, but also to my restraint, that having great sex with someone I barely knew didn’t guarantee a second date, let alone what I wanted: a continuing bond. Sometimes the only memento was an itching that required pharmaceutical relief. Even this embarrassment couldn’t curb my tendency to fall in love at the drop of a trouser.

There was plenty of stumbling before sex, or its absence, ceased to frustrate. I was helped by the loving kinship I was sharing with a growing community of gentle brothers and sisters. As at Harvard (though now I knew what I was missing), a reluctant celibate could thrive when nurtured by good companions. Lucky thing, or I would have crashed on the blunt rock of Colton’s return.

But I get ahead of myself.

                                                                      36.

ACT was downtown San Francisco’s establishment theatre company, proudly professional, corporate-sponsored and housed in the venerable Geary Theatre. (Eighteen years later I was performing in a show there, singing—while spinning every which way, even upside down, in a floor-mounted gyroscope—until the run was abruptly cancelled after the 1989 Loma Prieta/World Series Earthquake wiped out much of the Geary’s interior, and even though said cancellation resulted in my playing Captain Hook opposite Cathy Rigby for over a year on the road and on Broadway, this is not the place for so elaborate and consequential a digression.)

My preliminary audition as Leontes/Arturo was on a Saturday morning and after a few minutes’ wait I was asked to strut my stuff again the following Thursday for head honchos Fletcher, Hastings and Ball. Whatever the outcome, an alternate fate was sealed that same Saturday afternoon.

The callback offer made me jubilant and a mere two blocks away was Union Square, where all manner of street performers held forth perpetually. San Francisco and Berkeley teemed with interesting acts, inevitably fronted by an upturned receptacle, hat or guitar case, accumulating contributions. In my subdued but colorful audition drag (and eager to proclaim my arrival in town) I hopped up on a stone bench in a corner of the square and punched out the tail end of “Nessun dorma,” all that “vincero, vincero” stuff about triumph on the morrow. There was applause and a movement of bodies in my direction but I waved, hopped right off and dashed for the nearest cable car.

It deposited me at Ghirardelli Square where in no time I came upon a bocce ball court where a covey of white-haired men were playing and schmoozing (if Italians schmooze). I thought these guys might go for the more esoteric stuff and, again benchboosted, offered a tidbit from “La Gioconda.” The sound of lustily sung Italian, I blush to say, made their balls drop. They cheered and bravoed and waved their arms in the air.

I was so happy to be playing to a crowd that I kept it up for a good fifteen minutes, trotting out whatever Italian aria I could remember, hoping the guys wouldn’t notice when I substituted gibberish Italian for text I didn’t necessarily know. An additional crowd of about a dozen people had gathered around the bench. When I finally said “Thanks, that’s it,” and stepped to the ground, one of the white-haired guys came by to offer me the contents of the baseball cap he had circulated: in bills and change close to ten dollars (serious purchasing power back then)!

The passing decades haven’t blurred the memory of my immediate thought: if I get arrested in Washington and paid in San Francisco for the same thing, it’s a cinch where I ought to be living. 

                                                                       37.

The intervening days before my callback for the top ACT brass brought more revelations about the Bay Area, most, if not all, of them pleasant. There was a stunning sundrenched trip with a couple of new friends to Point Reyes and Drake’s Bay. There was a Harvard classmate in Berkeley, now Zen-steeped, who turned me on to the books of Alan Watts. And there was Golden Gate Park.

By the end of August the fog had receded, burnishing the Park in that sweet mellow light usually reserved for September. Smiling hippies were everywhere, playing frisbee, jamming in the shade of Monterey pine and cypress trees, rolling down the slopes by the Conservatory of Flowers, tripping through the tree fern grove, a kaleidoscope of frolic. I wasn’t sure if the climate actually made people happy or merely attracted people who were happy to begin with, but I knew this was my destined home. Being attacked physically did nothing to shake that conviction.

My attackers were a gang of five or six black boys of early teen age, who suddenly accosted me in a eucalyptus grove as I was alone, climbing Strawberry Hill above Stow Lake. They asked for money and I told them I’d given away my last spare change.

“We get everything in your pocket then,” the ringleader said.

“No you don’t,” I proposed.

“Yes we do,” they chorused, and moved in closer. They weren’t smiling. I had a theory that aggression could be non-violently derailed by a display of unexpected brio, a warping of the aggressor’s reality. I called it the Cartwheel Syndrome and here was my chance to test it. I launched into Otello’s entrance from the Verdi opera, a formidable bellow which might have intimidated the Saracen horde, but provoked these kids to further assault. They started throwing rocks, which I dodged in a gamesome style that only increased their hostility. My theory wasn’t working and I fled up the hill. I heard one of them shout “I’ll bust his ass,” and a pointed tree branch hurled from behind grazed my right arm.

At that point it seemed advisable to keep an eye on this bunch and, turning, I saw that three of them were hoisting big rocks. I glared at them, hoping that eye contact would have a deterrent effect, and, groping for an improved cultural fit, started to sing the Shirelles’ “Mama Said There'd Be Days Like This.” While I was thus occupied, the ringleader got behind me, stuffed his hand into my back pocket, nabbed the bills he found (a Washington and a Lincoln) and ran away with the others in tow. Amid raucous laughter, “Hippie faggot” was their predictable parting shot.

The incident spawned a deep sense of misgiving, occurring as it did within the significance-enhancing purview of an LSD trip. Getting mugged and ripped off on acid is inarguably a bummer. I soldiered on to the top of the hill, took in the magnificent wraparound view of the Bay, Golden Gate Bridge and the Pacific, and sat down to meditate, or at least collect my churning thoughts. Then I noticed that the shirt I planned to wear to my callback was torn and the scratch on my arm drew blood. Ripped off, indeed!

In those days I was much more in thrall to omens than I’ve since become, constantly tracking what sign the moon was in and what planets were in opposition or conjunction. I had noted every positive coincidence that assured me I’d get the job at ACT, and this encounter with the little robbers of Strawberry Hill had me in a psychedelic tizzy. I decided I’d better do something right away to turn the bad vibes around.

I skimmed down the hill and across the park to the Music Concourse, stood on the steps of the Academy of Sciences and sang to the exiting crowds. Although I wasn’t in the habit of singing directly for money and hadn’t devised the witty pitch that would eventually enrich my years at the Ferry Building, I told the gathered audience what had happened, displaying my tattered sleeve and bloodied arm, and fairly soon almost doubled the amount stolen! My voice was by then more ragged than my shirt, but I had emerged from the brambles of defeat clutching a banner of victory. Still tripping, I knelt before the Verdi monument and uttered a hymn of thanks.

A few days later, with a new shirt and a restored voice, I had my callback. Of my three auditors, two were obviously delighted and one was grimly uninterested.

Unfortunately, he was the main man and I did not get the job.

                                                                            38.

There was a backup option. The Zen-steeped classmate from Berkeley was friends with the management of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, and he made a call which yielded an immediate audition. The Mime Troupe was (and remains) a politically savvy company, offering both speech and song despite their name, dedicated to free outdoor performances of original satirical work which combined low comedy with agitprop. I showed them a routine I had created and performed in DC during the May Day protests, an edit of Nixon’s Inaugural address (“The American dream does not come to those who fall asleep”) delivered in a style which grew increasingly manic until it resembled the oratory of Adolf Hitler.

This suited them to a T, and they offered me a place in their post-tour fall season. Not exactly an Equity job of ACT caliber (money wasn’t even discussed), but enough for me to call Lottie and Jonah with the news that I’d be moving to San Francisco for theater work. They’d been on my mind ever since a phone call earlier in the summer, when they announced they were leaving Washington for good.

Lottie had reached retirement age from the DC school system and Jonah was approaching seventy, though I didn’t know that at the time, since he never revealed his age until his ninetieth birthday finally forced it out of him. Over the spring and summer they had decided to move to Long Beach, a largely kosher resort town on Long Island where we had vacationed in my childhood. The decision took me by surprise and I had no idea of my part in it. Much later Lottie admitted that the primary motive for their move was ducking questions from Washington friends and relatives that obliged them to invent stories rather than acknowledge the embarrassing truth about their promising son’s drift into hippiedom.

Luckily the phone in their new apartment by the ocean had been turned on the day before I called them with the Mime Troupe story. The joy in their voices when they learned I’d landed a steady job brought tears to my eyes. It was ages since we’d had a conversation that wasn’t spoiled by their discontent, rebuke and veiled heartbreak. Jonah’s customary accusations of ingratitude and spite had become so familiar that by contrast hearing him sound happy made me wonder if I was stoned. (I wasn’t.)

Even though it looked like I had abandoned them, I didn’t hate them. Far from it. The journal is full of regard for Mother and Dad and hope for an end to their suffering and doubt, with the expressed wish to give them new lives for old. I wanted them to be happy and, if possible, to be proud of me. But I wanted to succeed on my own terms, terms now so remote from their expectations that common ground seemed almost impossible. (They should have seen it coming: when school authorities invited me to skip third grade, I declined because I didn’t want to desert my friends.)

Compared to the awakening vision of community I had been increasingly drawn into, the parental definition of success, like the standard cultural definition, seemed 

rooted in attaining some kind of competitive advantage over one’s fellows. The point of education was to purchase just such an advantage. I was not alone of my generation to suspect there had to be alternative definitions. Success could be reconceived as the success of the human species as a whole. Education could mean questioning all sorts of received authoritarian wisdom, even if doing so challenges some tenets of Western religion, capitalism and consumerism included.

So I don’t put a high priority on obedience for its own sake, so sue me. If a rule is sensible I honor it. Traffic lights are a must. I don’t have children but I’ve watched enough friends raise theirs to see how tricky it is to instill a sense of prudence and accountability without squashing boldness and independence. No easy task, but on the global scale as well as the personal, we must do it if our species is to survive. This is a certainty.

Love, the awakening to our function within Connective Reality, will make it possible. Or so it appeared that September of 1971.

                                                                            39.

Just after sundown on the eighth, I throw my stuff into “Betsy,” Buck’s beater of a Chevy Impala and we two set off for the East Coast. Buck was with Ron and Sally at the farm on that crucial Easter Sunday and witnessed my coming out, and lately he’s been hanging out both in Frisco (as he insists on calling it) and upstate with the Navarro River tribe. He’s one of the perpetually stoned who make up in benevolence what they lack in depth. His eyelids are droopier than Robert Mitchum’s, his smile drowsier and his beard scruffier. His quest for freedom focuses chiefly on balling chicks.

The plan is to drive non-stop some thousand miles eastward and on the next evening meet up with Desmond, the Viking-style housemate from the farm who has spent the summer in freak-laden Crested Butte. He has obtained several blotters of pure window-pane acid and has cajoled Buck into delivering them to an interested party in Baltimore. After a short stay in Colorado, we’ll drive non-stop to DC, and after dropping me off Buck will proceed to unload the contraband.

My paper wraps Buck’s rock, so he draws the all-night shift. Traffic is light, darkness soon swallows the scenery and my mind jumps to the East Coast. All summer I’ve been traveling west. Three years before, on my first big voyage, I crossed the Atlantic for England, unaware that the significance of the four directions extends beyond the points of the compass. Now I’ve learned their function as archetypes: East is the home of origins, as West is home to outcomes. East is cause; West is effect, sunrise, sunset. I’m on my way to revisit the city of my birth, take leave of friends and parents and teachers, and gather my few possessions for a move to a new and exotic city that, though it withheld the prize I sought, offers me unforeseen welcome.

All summer my rides have been chased by nightfall. Now we drive into unfolding night (its darkness shattered by the preposterous dazzle of Reno) and onward into the lemon-yellow light of the waning gibbous moon up ahead. Ever eastward into sunrise, pearly above the scrubby Nevada hills. We stop at a vantage point that pulls us both out of the car: before us the Great Salt Lake Desert stretches in barren flatness to the distant horizon, blazing with light from a cloudless sky. A universe of white and blue, equally fierce, not a speck of living green.

With nobody around, Buck and I soak the terrain (“Piss on you, desert”) and then he opts for crashing in the back seat. I drive due east on Interstate 80, intending to bypass Salt Lake City for a marketing stop in Provo, popping Every Picture Tells a Story, Abraxas, Firesign Theatre and Sticky Fingers in and out of the eight-track player. All is breezy until about forty miles into the state a Utah Highway Patrol car pulls behind and starts flashing its light.

I wake Buck. Then I decide that "Sister Morphine" is an unfortunate sound track choice. While pulling over I shut the tape off, switch on the radio and fiddle briefly with the dial, landing on a country station where Dolly Parton’s “Joshua” plays. My thoughts turn to the foil-wrapped pipe with the conspicuous lump of blonde hash, cradled in the glove compartment ever since we swapped drivers.

I roll my window down as the cop approaches. I haven’t interacted with an officer of the law since being busted for singing in DC. On a prior occasion I had devised a successful method of neutralizing police aggression, and resolve to try it here. On the radio, Dolly sings:

When he spoke his voice was low and deep But he just didn't frighten me 'Cause somehow I just knew he wasn't mean This seems like a good omen. The patrolman wants to look tough beneath the flat wide brim of his trooper hat but Smokey the Bear comes encouragingly to mind. 

“Where ya headin, kid?” “Provo, officer.” At first he doesn’t catch it because I’m imitating the liability of a cleft palate, a skill acquired from a college production of Feydeau’s A Flea in Her Ear. I say it again. His face dawns with the light of recognizing my supposed affliction, a light he hastily dims, lest the recognition embarrass me. I recall this kindhearted fade from the prior occasion, and some of my anxiety disperses.

“We don’t see many Maryland plates.” He seems disappointed that a hippie he hoped to harass is now an object of sympathy. I decide to be a pal.

“Come visit us sometime. It’s a beautiful state. More greenery.” “Greenery” sounds especially bizarre in my distorted speech and Buck laughs out loud from the back seat. The trooper takes a closer look at Buck, groggy and grinning as usual.

“What’s so funny?”

“He said the same thing not five minutes ago,” I interpose. “Greenery. Lots more in Maryland.” I’m starting to wonder how long I can keep this up. Also if the cop’s wondering the same.

“Mind showing me your license?” he decides.

I reach into the inside of my Nehru vest and hand him my passport. “I’m sorry, but this is all I have,” I moan.

“Where’s your driver’s license?”

The truth is that I lost my wallet the previous day hitching to meet Buck in Mendocino. I’m pretty sure it’s in the car of a Berkeley sociology student named George who dropped me off on 128 after hitting on me. He looked like a Chinese-Mexican headwaiter with underworld connections (not really my type), but on the other hand I’d never been propositioned before (“Think how relaxed you’d feel afterwards,” “I’m relaxed already”). After a brief ethical hesitation, with the cockiness of the newly deflowered I accepted with thanks his fellatiary offer. Whether the wallet, lost in the descent of my jeans, constitutes a karmic warning about such conduct has occupied my mind ever since, but not in a way I want to share with a Utah Highway patrolman.

So I improvise some elaborate rigmarole liberally laced with cleft-palate flapdoodle and, as on the prior cop encounters, my interrogator quickly loses patience. He riffles through my passport one more time and hands it back to me. The radio perks him up. “You a Dolly Parton fan?” 

Mm, I grunt.

“She’s the best.”

“Nice rack, too,” I venture, feeling my butchest oats.

“Got that right, pal,” he winks, walks away and drives off.

Buck and I trade looks, crack up, thank Dolly, put the Stones back on, and break out the hash pipe.

                                                                   40.

After a summer spent among the hip and the hippie-dippy, Provo is an immersion in the scrubbed world of My Three Sons. Our grocery stop morphs into a picnic lunch on the County Courthouse lawn, where we shaggy two are objects of repressed fascination. Amid the spotless lawns, shiny cars and somber, well-groomed people, we fit in like a psychedelic bus at the Vatican. The looks we get from passersby aren’t hostile, just furtive. Waving at anyone caught looking is guaranteed to turn their attention elsewhere, redrawing their faces into a rehearsed doll-like blankness. Resisting the temptation to shout, “We didn’t see you, either,” I focus on my soggy tuna salad sandwich. The other America is very much alive, if not persuasively well.

Is this the great Silent Majority Nixon preaches about? Men without heartiness or curiosity, bland subservient women, stiff-bodied zombies stoned on Hallmark cards. People who do as they’re told: conform, consume, kill or die among Asian strangers for the greater good of the USA. And yet banked within each of them is the very same fire of ecstasy that I and my co-conspirators in bliss have discovered, the creative force of the universe. What will it take to kindle this flame, this revelation that will redeem the world, end the rule of violence and replace it with global connectedness and love? If the soulstirring beauty of the Alpine peaks towering above this plastic town hasn’t done it, what can? LSD in the drinking water? Somehow I’m dubious.

I’ll take up the question with wise Desmond when we reach Crested Butte, still a full seven hours away. Once we reach US 50, the flanks of awesome Kings Canyon are lit with the golden glow of late afternoon. No sign of human habitation anywhere. Climbing, we cross into Colorado as the sun vanishes behind us and indigo shadows sweep up the mountainsides. Ears pop again and again as we approach 8000 feet, night gulping the sky. Here come the flashing jewels: Jupiter and Arcturus, Mars, the constellations and Milky Way. I relinquish the wheel to Buck after twelve straight hours of driving (well, not that straight; there’s been a lot of hash consumed). Behind us, a reddish tinge still lingers above the western mountains. We are very high, indeed.

And the air is cold. Cold! A long way from yesterday’s redwood paradise. Desmond welcomes us with a fire in the Franklin stove of his Crested Butte coal shack, and we fall into such deep sleep as rewards only the weary.

Next day we breakfast at a freak-filled café, as genial and informal as Provo was uptight (on the wall of the men’s room someone has scribbled “Fighting for Peace is like Fucking for Chastity”). Then Desmond treats us to a climb up Red Lady, the local peak, enhanced and enlivened by a hit of the window-pane Buck will transport to Baltimore. We peak on the peak, amazing! Summer’s work is done and autumn’s edge is already pushing through the woods, yellowing the aspen. Among his limitless fields of expertise, Desmond is a knowing mineralogist, and he has brought his rock hammer along. From time to time he strikes a rock that strikes him, and they burst open like ripe fruit to reveal hidden treasure: crystalline quartz, carnelian, topaz, beryl, amethyst, onyx.

These shining stones strike me as a metaphor for the unsuspected epiphanies tucked away inside the mind (we are tripping, after all), and I share this thought with Desmond. As usual, he’s a step or two ahead of me:

“That’s the esoteric meaning of the twelve stones on the breastplate of the High Priest in the Old Testament.”

“The ephod,” I concur. I know this not only from Hebrew school, but from an accident of birth. Through Jonah I inherit from past generations the Hebrew appellative “haKohen,” placing us among the supposed descendants of Moses’ brother Aaron. Adult males so named are required on holy days to come forward and chant the threefold priestly blessing before the entire congregation. After Bar Mitzvah, it was my first rush of being on stage.

“Twelve for the Tribes of Israel,” this certified goy continues, “but also the Apostles and the signs of the Zodiac, the hours of day or night, the astrological houses. Twelve represents the full completion of a cycle. Wearing twelve gemstones next to the heart shows that the priest has released the power of unconditional love at the culmination of the soul’s journey.”

“You think every priest actually got there?”

His wicked grin precedes his response. “Depends how many mushrooms they ate.” “You think we as a generation will get there?” “We have to. The survival of life on the planet depends on it.”

This, of course, is the first article of hippie faith. The transformation of global consciousness, the awareness released not only by mind-expanding substances but by exposure to Eastern practices, Native American spirituality, even the more esoteric Western traditions, is the next goal of human evolution, answering the urgent wake-up call of Mother Earth to her children.

“There’ll be a lot of resistance; who knows how scared the powerful will get,” Desmond continues. “The changes are so rapid now. Evolution no longer needs eons of time to develop consciousness by morphological change. We can make tools to do the bidding of our minds. Getting the masters of industry to renounce the tools of violence is the challenge of our generation. Anyone who refuses the challenge will eventually go the way of the dinosaurs.” At this moment, a yellow-bellied marmot clambers into view on the rim of the scaffolding around an old mine shaft. “See that? We’re the mammals.”

I must admit that at the time neither of us foresaw the dinosaurs’ masterful manipulation of anti-mammal media.

The next day Buck and I pile into Betsy and by dint of blitz nocturnal driving across Kansas and Missouri reach Rockville, Maryland in thirty-five hours. We crash at a friend’s place, then Buck drops me off at home and continues on to Baltimore where, so far as I know, he brought Desmond’s window-pane to a passel of mammals.

                                                                          41.

A very pleasant surprise greeted me upon return to the R street apartment. Noting the address on my driver’s license, George had mailed back my wallet, cash included. I sent a thank you note to his return address, without mentioning that I was moving to the Bay Area. Despite his kindness I wasn’t interested in seeing him again. Besides, I had no idea where I’d be living. Or how.

Throughout my childhood and adolescence Jonah’s skill with European languages brought to his drug store any number of foreign diplomats, who consistently reported that Washington was the second most beautiful city in America after San Francisco. Now that I’d discovered the truth of this I was no longer content with second best. And after a summer out west I found the DC humidity oppressive, even in late September. Nature seemed a bit grimy, like a poorly kept garage back of the Pacific Coast mansion. Already a few yellow leaves littered the sidewalk beneath the weary-looking elm trees. I couldn’t wait to get back to the Bay Area where I was convinced, as only a young dreamer can be, that my destiny awaited.

But first there were obligations to meet, above all a farewell parental visit, coinciding with the Days of Repentance, between the High Holy Days of the Jewish New Year. I hitchhiked up to New York and toward the end of the New Jersey Turnpike was busted by a highway cop. Once again I pulled the cleft palate act and he not only apologized but drove me to the Lincoln Tunnel exit. Another smudge on my repentance card.

New York seemed a dismal place. A pair of gigantic margarine sticks were looming over the downtown skyline like alien invaders. Compared to San Francisco’s breezy atmosphere, fear stalked the streets. Maybe it was the aftermath of the Attica prison riots, maybe it’s just the way of New Yorkers. I took a long walk down Fifth Avenue, noticing that the people “look very hip but nobody looks you in the eye.” At least Washington Square was alive with frisbees, bongos and festivity. I started imagining what a magnificent human center New York could be if all that energy and intelligence would shift from negative to positive, from anxiety to trust, from competition to coöperation. Of course, one could say the same thing of planet Earth as a whole. One often does.

After checking in with every Manhattan friend and former classmate I could reach, incidentally inquiring if anyone had news of Colton (nobody did), I took the 50-minute train ride out to Long Beach and saw Lottie and Jonah’s new digs, a comfortable onebedroom with a balcony overlooking the Atlantic, the breakers feeble compared to the Pacific’s but the horizon line hypnotic as always. I hoped that this peaceful location would mellow them out, but judging by Jonah’s eruption over my untrimmed hair and beard the mellowing hadn’t started yet. At the peak of his tantrum I tried to enfold him in my embrace and he struggled against it like a raging child. And this was the day after Rosh Hashanah, when observant believers are meant to begin monitoring their hearts for thoughts that yield unkind actions. Of course, as he saw it, I was the unkind one.

I stayed two nights, giving them a judiciously edited version of my adventures and trying to coax them toward an understanding of my altered value system. I felt an instinctive and genuine affection from Lottie with the potential to transcend conflict of opinion, however distressing. She was still athletic and we went for swims in the ocean together. She wanted me to stay and apply to the Yale Drama School. Her burden was grief; Jonah’s was rage. His distrust and even contempt for his fellow human beings had turned him into a mean-hearted, alienated pinchsoul with whom there was apparently no path to communication in depth.

But I wasn’t ready to give up. On the third morning they accompanied me to the train station and not knowing how long we’d be apart I asked Jonah for his blessing. I had no idea what form it might take, but I felt impelled to ask. To my surprise, he raised his hands and began to recite the same threefold invocation that we had chanted together before the congregation in our priestly role on major holidays: The Lord bless you and keep you, et cetera.

He got about halfway through and ground to a halt. He was saying it by rote and lacked the conviction to continue, words drifting away like the yellow leaves. It was embarrassing. None of us could speak. The train’s warning bell broke the silence. I said I would call them before I left for California, turned away and got on board.

At Penn Station I had an hour’s wait before catching the southbound Senator to DC. Among the drab suits and skirts the waiting room was peppered with funky freaky hippies, male or female in sandals, bell-bottoms, tunics, batiked and tie-dyed T-shirts, Tibetan vests, with bedrolls, back-packs, guitars, flutes. How many of them, I wondered, had endured fights with fulminating parents who disapproved of their hair, their language, their companions, their taste in music and dress and demeanor, their imagined depravity, their unconventional spiritual quests and mystical dabbling? Was my whole generation on trial?

Whatever the outcome, I was determined to join the great experiment. I was ready to shelve the dream of “making it” in New York theater. The few months when I had tried in early 1970 had led nowhere. I promised myself to forget about that world unless someone entrenched within it summoned me back. That would be a sign. Six years were to pass before it came.

As the train sped through New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware, meadows with cattle grazing, wildflowers yellow and red, a discernible loss of sheen spreading among the trees, I pondered the significance of drugs as catalyst to all these generational changes. Could the dawning Age of Peace and Love be no more than a chemically induced hallucination? Why did it feel so real, so revelatory? I never snorted cocaine, took speed or shot up heroin, nor knew anyone who did. That’s the behavior I construed as “drug abuse,” implying that alternatively there was such a thing as drug use. In particular a social role for cannabis and entheogens, breaking through the rigid habits of thought and stressful emotions that so often impede access to joy, laughter and creative imagination. Would a couple of hash brownies change Jonah and Lottie’s perspective on the situation? On any situation?

Hollywood’s I Love You, Alice B. Toklas as early as 1968 showed a pair of anxietyridden Jewish parents surrendering to unrestrained hilarity after such fare, but I was skeptical. Getting parents stoned by deceit and without their consent wasn’t kosher. Mine would certainly never ingest on purpose, and neither was a smoker. Besides, there were other alternatives.

There was a smorgasbord of wisdom tradition that I’d been sampling for over a year. Training the body and nervous system with Kundalini yoga and Tai Chi; anchoring the mind with concepts from Zen, Sufism, Buddhism; bypassing concepts altogether with contemplative prayer and meditation; exploring the paths to psychological healing in Jung, Gurdjieff, Fritz Perls, Alan Watts and Ram Dass. Even Buber. But Jonah would have to admit something needed healing before he would consent to be healed, and that was out of the question. A father doesn’t accept criticism from a son.

Twenty years later, when the advance of Alzheimer’s was deleting swarms of his memories, he began to heal in spite of himself by forgetting his lifelong grudges. There were the usual storms brought on by the disease, but there were also times when an exquisitely childlike innocence blossomed on his face. One afternoon he opened his eyes after a nap and the gaze he offered me was as helpless, sweet and open as a baby’s. In that moment we loved each other without role or restraint, until the lasso of his accustomed parental identity pulled him out of it. If only he had learned to access that state earlier, and more consistently, by releasing his grudges on purpose, he would have enjoyed life so much more.

Who wouldn’t? 

                                                                         42.

The rent at R Street was paid up through September. Betty, the landlord’s wife, took $20 off in exchange for an ounce of grass (ah, the prices of yesteryear!). I had exactly a week to sort, discard, pack, store or ship my worldly goods, and bid farewell to the city of my birth. A ride to San Francisco materialized via the Earth Harvest switchboard, karmic dividend for my repeated hosting of itinerant crashers. A sweet hippie girl named Candy with blonde hair as straight as Mary Travers’ was driving to SF in a VW van with room for me and some of my stuff. She was leaving on October second.

Joanne, the very same who coöperatively with Mike took my virginity, was also back in Washington (the romance was still bicoastal, though in my case the “bi” was double-edged), and offered her attic for storing my boxes. So I brought over a lot of books I hadn’t opened all year, as well as literary mementos like saved high school newspapers (ravishing in their inanity), college notes on Shakespeare, Milton, Moliere and Shaw (whose Complete Plays and Prefaces I had the foresight to take West), and possibly my Harvard diploma, but Div knows where that eventually went.

Even so, there remained 210 pounds of possessions to ship via Greyhound, a number that at the time exceeded my body weight by a mere 40% (an unlikely possessions-toself ratio today). Boxes of LPs, both classical and rock (a wealth of musical information that today could fit on an iPod), books (a separate carton just for the “sacred” texts), costumes and props and other theatrical memorabilia (did someone say “Anticipating a future in which one will recollect the past?”). And all of it headed temporarily for Mae Margaret’s house, because I had no idea where I was going to live.

What I did know was that Washington was full of people I knew well and wanted to say goodbye to. Lottie had two older brothers and a sister (the luckless Sadie) living there. She made me promise to tell them goodbye over the phone so they wouldn’t see what I had turned into. I didn’t mind so much about Sadie or Sidney, but I was very fond of Uncle Jerry and Aunt Pearl. They were the only childless couple among Lottie’s many siblings and had always gilded my life with Favorite Nephew status. Nevertheless to avoid blemishing the escutcheon I kept my promise.

There were local friends going back to grade school or junior high to whom I was still close, especially the ones who, like me, had turned into full-tilt so-calleds, Lenny and Marc, Beverly, Mack, others. Still others like Harvey, Danny and Gary, having survived the recent draft lottery, made it to Law School where they were exploring the possibility of changing the system from within. That summer the Pentagon Papers had been published, the voting age was lowered to eighteen, Gloria Steinem made an amazing speech challenging patriarchy and Nixon imposed wage and price controls (and Kissinger went secretly to Beijing). The world was changing indeed.

The newest feature in Washington was the just-opened Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. As a self-certified high culture maven I had to take a look. Maybe because the neighboring Watergate Apartments are so swirly, the architect had made a giant box, rectilinearity made mammoth. It was to a horizontal axis what the World Trade Center was to the vertical, equally enormous and equally uninspired. Would patrons ever dance in the aisles here? I doubted it. It was too much like a glorified high-rise apartment lobby.

Nevertheless I planted myself between the fountains and once again poured forth the “Esultate,” Otello’s formidable bellow, as much heroic bravado as Verdi could pack into twelve bars of music. Now I could tell people I’d sung at the Kennedy Center Opera House. Literally at it.

To spend time in Washington DC as an alert and curious child (and flower adult) is to make friends not only with people but with places: parks, museums, monuments. I took time to bid farewell to the Smithsonian, the Mellon, the Freer, the Corcoran, to Lincoln and Jefferson, to Montrose and Rock Creek Parks, the Farm Women’s Market, the Masonic Temple, so many amazing places, tripping or otherwise!

The friends I’d made since moving to 1765 R Street were among the dearest: the bonds, though recent, were the first of my adult independence. Upstairs, I had a great last meal with Raoul and Olga (she’d taught me all year about cooking). The teachers at the ashram told me where to find Kundalini yoga classes in San Francisco. Best of all Joe, of Concerned Citizens, having split with Sara had taken Ron and Sally’s advice and was moving to San Francisco, a temporary sublet. We resolved to find a communal house together.

Wednesday was Yom Kippur. Its theology centers around placating a sort of celestially enthroned prosecutor (male) in whom as such I no longer believed, but its methodology is of self-examination, always useful. I didn’t enter a synagogue but I fasted (the cupboard was of necessity getting bare and fasting is nothing if not non-denominational). The year before on Yom Kippur I was putting up bookshelves; now I took them down. The record player was already lodged in Candy’s van; the silence was broken only by street noise, softly falling rain, and the arias in my head.

The arias morphed into a sonnet, specifically Number VII by John Milton, written when he was turning 24 (my age!). In it the poet laments his “late spring,” the failure to manifest his felt potential in some visible way. On the train home I had inscribed it into my journal with funky calligraphy and rebus-like illustrations. Guess it grabbed me. I was (and continue to be) inspired by the humility and surrender of the last six lines:

Yet be it less or more, or soon or slow, It shall be still in strictest measure ev'n To that same lot, however mean or high, Toward which Time leads me, and the will of Heav'n:

All is, if I have grace to use it so, As ever in my great Task-Master's eye.

I was never a stranger to ambition. From childhood something deep inside me was pulled to the extraordinary. The lure of greatness mesmerized me early on. But I was beginning to see more rewarding possibilities in a view that understood everybody to be special, that being special is nothing special. Besides, the typical perks mainstream culture offered for artistic recognition struck me then (and often still do) as hollow, specious and irrelevant. Lucrative, but hollow, specious and irrelevant. The great Task-Master may have something quite different in mind.

For a year in this now all-but empty apartment I had made a life as a kind of scholar gypsy, studying a host of wise thinkers and cavorting through the pathways of my own freaky head. Then I flung myself across the American continent, climbing, swimming, camping, marveling. I found the kind of joyous, accepting community I’d been dreaming about, people threw money at me when I sang, and I stepped awkwardly but irrevocably into the world of sex. In my journal the night before setting off I wrote, “There is more love in my life than there has ever been.”

If Milton meant something else by “having grace” I can’t imagine what. The TaskMaster’s eye is where all the love comes from.

                                                         THE YELLOW HOUSE

                                                                         43.

The house on Shrader Street, as I observed several dozen pages ago, felt like home from the moment I first stepped through the door. I was brought there by Joe, who heard about it from Chuck and Barbara, a divorced couple who, out of unwarranted optimism born of financial need, thought they could thrive together in a four-person household. They seemed pleasant enough at first and, though they eventually drove me to thoughts of double homicide, the gap of decades enables me now to thank them for introducing me to what, after they split, became a wonderful home.

The house sat one block east of Golden Gate Park and a block and a half south of Haight Street, a short walk from the Number 7 Haight bus or the N Judah trolley. Haight-Ashbury was no longer the hippie utopia of the mid-60s, but neither was it the junkie skid row it had devolved into. The Haight was on its way back up, as evidenced by the cheerful demeanor of most people you met in the neighborhood. Faces certainly brightened whenever they beheld the buttercup yellow facade of 724 Shrader.

There were two floors. The first, as in so many San Francisco houses, perched above a street-level garage. To the right a flight of thirteen broad steps led up to the entrance door, beyond a small porch framed by a wooden arch. The parlor, facing the street through a bay window and with an adjoining “salon” room, served as one of the two bedrooms on that floor. Chuck nabbed it, leaving Barbara with the other one (small and dark), separated by a hallway that ran past the bathroom to the back, with the common room on the left, eat-in kitchen and walk-in pantry on the right, and beyond the kitchen an enclosed utility porch from which wooden stairs descended to an ample back yard: a short concrete patio leading from the garage to a neglected grass plot that had obvious garden potential, on one side a huge fuchsia bush, and in a thorny tangle at the back an aggression of blackberry vines.

Up a two-landing U-shaped staircase behind a hallway door was the second floor, with two more bedrooms. I chose the one which overlooked the yard and thence the adjacent yards and backsides of the Victorian frame houses along parallel Cole Street. Joe’s Hanan – CONFESSIONS - 94

room (subsequently Doug’s, Annabel’s, Rich’s, et cetera) was huge, but nothing more than a gloomy unfinished attic, with naked joists, studs and rafters providing atmosphere at the expense of gentility. A small circular window facing the street admitted the only daylight.

The garage was a mystery. Wedged along the entire length of it were three enormous papier-mâché clowns, three times life size, in gaudy circus colors, headless, each lying on its back with legs in the air, the neck of one jammed against the tail of the next, like chickens spitted on a rotisserie. Where they came from no one ever learned. And disposing of them took a back seat to more immediate problems.

Of all the boxes I shipped via Greyhound, one, the most precious, failed to arrive in San Francisco. It was the box packed with my annotated “core” texts: Huxley, Buber, Jung, Ram Dass, William James, Teilhard de Chardin, favorite plays and novels and poetry, everything that served (in the words of the Airplane’s “White Rabbit”) to feed your head. What was the universe telling me by the disappearance of this one box? (In those days I was convinced that the universe was always telling us something; my current hunch is that the universe designed us as a means to investigate itself.) Was this a big lesson in non-attachment, a warning against making books into idols, a reminder that the only truth I needed was already inside me, a cosmic prank, all or none of the above? Greyhound eventually reimbursed me for the loss, without overcoming my sense that the contents were priceless.

Even more alarming was the discovery that the SF Mime Troupe wasn’t going to hire me, after all. I had exactly three hundred dollars to my name, which by a generous estimate could be stretched till New Year’s, and then what? Barbara, the ex-Mrs. Chuck, was the only one of us who had a normal job, in Gump’s accounting office. Joe was living off his Hawthorne School savings. Chuck received monthly ATD checks, a California welfare program (“Aid to the Totally Disabled”) which provided life support to a growing number of hippies clever enough to pass themselves off as mentally defective. Compared to this scam, feigning a cleft palate was kid stuff.

Whether such a scheme is defensible on political or ethical grounds is worth debating. In Act Three of Man and Superman, Shaw speculates with his usual mischievous verve on how the social system would transform “with most beneficial reconstructive results” if more people deliberately chose to live off the state rather than allowing the state to live off them.

Nevertheless, though intrigued, I didn’t try for ATD. I will say this: while other twenty-somethings of my generation set to work establishing “mainstream” careers, I, in the misguided belief that the Corporate State was about to expire (its wretched decline continues to hobble along), embarked on an experiment: discovering what useful skills for an emerging culture a highly energetic, curious, dedicated and creative person could acquire, given supportive companions and just enough income to fund the freedom to explore.

Apparently a lifetime project.

                                                                       44.

The first major speedbump to this Utopian quest was the fallout from a disastrous acid trip on Halloween 1971, a kind of demonic bookend to April 1970 on the Mount of Olives. A lot of the Navarro folk were in the city and someone named Albert with a house in the early Avenues threw a party where there was enough LSD-spiked punch to drown a chicken. Ron and Sally and Joe and Karl and Reuben and Nancy were there and some time after midnight, utterly zonked, I lost hold of myself in a candlelit upstairs room where a solemn ritual seemed to be unfolding, involving Jesus and the Apostles, visiting earth in telepathic form to inaugurate a New Age of human empathy and trust.

I imagined that a sacramental cup was going around and when Joe passed it to me he morphed into the Devil, and meanwhile Jesus turned out to be Colton in disguise. Fear and fixation blocked the flow of love. Ambition jumped in, too; I thought I was being forced to choose between absorption into a spiritual family and the yearning for a personally stellar career. When push came to psychedelic shove, I couldn’t bring myself to give up the latter.

I freaked out, felt I was being psychically stripped, started screaming “What about love, What about love,” flung away my clothes and in general manifested high levels of discomfort which wrecked the ceremony. Through a mix of paranoia and repressed desire, I personally had aborted humanity’s spiritual transformation. When the last candle in the room went out, I thought that Light had left the world forever.

It’s not unusual for an only child with less than ideal parents to assume responsibility for fixing everything, but this was a flushing forth from my psyche of buried guilt and fear that left me stunned for weeks. Something in the dark corners of my mind had opposed benediction with betrayal, arrogance, and chaos. Aunt Sadie’s revenge. When I went back to Albert’s house and discovered that it was empty of furniture and nobody I knew lived there, it was like the nightmare of Rosemary’s Baby bursting into real life.

All my joy vanished, and I moved through a scary hell of unpleasant coincidences and misconstrued remarks. I was Judas, Icarus and Job. Around the house I was useless. Was I a total fraud? Was it a mistake to abandon my old life and come here? Was I better off celibate? Even the fact that the days were getting shorter seemed like my fault. I was a mess.

If this psychic crash was the result of too many dreams coming true at once, and a stubborn ego snapping back from an overload of changes, at least one dream was on the verge of vanishing: we could lose the house.

In mid-November, a month after we moved in, the landlord gave notice that he was putting the house on the market. Actually, he offered it to us first for $1500 down, and $150 a month, but none of us had the bucks. He promised us a month’s notice when he found a buyer. (By the late 70s it sold for a solid six figures. But why cry over spilt real estate?)

Simultaneously, Joe, whose experience of Halloween night was utterly unlike mine, couldn’t understand what was bothering me. This only made me more paranoid. Then one afternoon I came across a quote from Lao-tse, IF YOU NEVER ASSUME IMPORTANCE, YOU NEVER LOSE IT, and the world in my mind began to shift.

I realized that my Colton-obsession was keeping me off center. The journal dwells on him constantly with recorded dreams, salutations, love poems, and so on. I yearn for the return of this wonderful beloved person. I was nurturing the romantic fantasy of a great Revelation Scene: when he returned from Europe and we actually met, I would then confess the whole truth, melt his heart with the sublimity of our proximity, etc. etc.

This I had to give up. I didn’t know where he was, but he was expected home in Connecticut for the Holidays, and I wrote to him there, spilled every last bean, coming out in a letter as honest and well wrought as I had in me. It was a huge and wonderful thing to let go of, and had wondrous consequences.

Joe quit the house to help launch a metaphysical bookstore in Eugene, Oregon with 

Ron and Sally and Desmond. His hasty exit was fueled by a visit to Shrader house from the jealous, baseball-bat wielding boyfriend of a lady Joe had flirted with. Joe’s immediate replacement was a young actor named Doug who saw our notice in the health food store. He was in a show that was about to go into rehearsal for a February run at the Palace of the Legion of Honor, a new musical with the unlikely title of Long Live the Bruegel People. In no time I was cast as well. I had a long-term acting job!

                                                                     45.

Long Live the Bruegel People was the brainchild of Josef and Miranda Marais, a married pair of folk balladeers known professionally as “Marais and Miranda.” Though long in the US, he was originally South African and she was Dutch, and by their own reckoning their chief claim to fame was popularizing an old Boer War song called “Marching to Pretoria.” They had written a bundle of lesser-known songs and stuffed a dozen of them, plus some new ones, into their fledgling theater piece.

They selected three works by the Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel and were in the process of making each one into a musical play for a three-part evening. Other than Bruegel and sporadic references to Flanders there was nothing to link the acts. Benjy the director, stroking his white goatee, was fond of describing the show as a journey through the mind of a great painter. “It puts the trip in triptych,” he would repeatedly repeat.

Benjy was a vigorous fireplug of a guy, old enough to have snow-white hair and very little of it, light on his feet despite the Santa Claus paunch. To the ten young actors he hired he seemed like an old pro with a lot to teach. He constantly urged me to restrain my outsized exuberance, a warning I could appreciate if not necessarily enjoy. He liked to fill rehearsal time with improvisational games, and we were all happy to follow whatever premise he devised. Lucky for him and us, because Josef and Miranda’s script, to put it kindly, needed work.

Pieter Bruegel settled in Antwerp in the 1550s, looked very closely at how people lived, and recorded what he saw in paintings and other graphic works that are invaluable historic documents as well as fascinating art. A Renaissance R. Crumb, he told witty but naked truths about the Church, the courts, the class system, sex, vice and stupidity at every level of society. It is said that some of his drawings were so subversive that on his deathbed he ordered his wife to burn them and forestall political trouble for the family. 

Josef and Miranda (henceforth J&M) had chosen two paintings and a drawing to bring to life on stage. At least that’s what they intended. The paintings were The Fight Between Carnival and Lent and The Fall of Icarus, and The Donkey in School was the drawing. Icarus is a painting so famous poems have been written about it. Its mixture of spectacle, black humor and serene indifference has rarely been equaled, and J&M’s script wasn’t even close. They invented a nonsensical backstory about the boy who wanted to fly, complete with a bogus anthem to “soaring” which sank even faster than Icarus .

There are sheep in the painting, and ships. So the script involved endless repetition of gags confusing the two, such as whether something was “sheepshape” or not, “sheep ahoy,” and so forth, plus Antwerp gags that wore out their welcome at the first reading but survived till Opening Night because J&M laughed aloud every time. But Icarus did have the virtue of being the briefest of the three. The middle play, Donkey in School, was twice as long and three times as feckless.

Bruegel’s drawing places some three dozen children with the faces of middle-aged men in a chaotic classroom where everybody sits or squats on the floor, with the teacher at center spanking the bare butt of a boy crouching at his robe, his head between the teacher’s knees. Behind the teacher a mournful-looking donkey leans in through a window, its left hoof holding a sheet of music. This must have given J&M the idea for a song with nothing in it but braying.

Donkey had no dramatic arc whatsoever. In fact there were no lines of dialogue. It was a succession of pointless children’s games, insipid rhyming songs, and mime sequences that put the “dumb” in dumbshow. “We’ll develop this as rehearsals proceed,” Benjy said, looking uncertain.

The final outrage was Carnival and Lent. Bruegel’s large original depicts an urban square filled with maybe a hundred figures, adults and children, taking part in a festival with food and drink, processions of monks, circle dances and swindles, carousing and praying, and in the foreground a mock joust between an obese man straddling a wine barrel with a meat pie hat on his head (Carnival) and a gaunt woman in a straightback chair (Lent). A riot of color and rich detail, the painting was squeezed by J&M into a soapoperatic melodrama about “Carney” and his abandoned lover “Mad Meg” (from a different Bruegel painting), interspersed with happy-peasant songs about beer and pickled fish. Everybody onstage for the herring number! 

The costumes were the sole saving grace. Their designer, Patrizia von Brandenstein, whose meat-pie hat was amazing, years later went on to fame and an Oscar, and the wardrobe mistress was a superb professional who kept everything looking gorgeous. She also radiated calm and benevolence, which came in handy because as time went on everyone but the writers hated the lame situations and mediocre lines. J&M, who were also performing, were oblivious to the discontent shared by the cast and director. When Benjy’s patience finally ran out and he insisted on changes, the results were disastrous. One of the cast members said it was like drilling holes in a sinking ship.

Through winter’s dark days, company morale plummeted like the mythic Icarus. When a show’s content obviously fails to justify the effort involved in mounting it, anger and hopelessness spread like measles. The atmosphere reeks of blame. In this sense Attack of the Bagel People (as the actors were privately calling it) was an unhappy microcosm of American society in the Vietnam era. It may seem tactless, even crude, to compare a theatrical turkey with a stupid, vicious, unpopular and unwinnable war, but a debacle is a debacle. It’s the aftermath that counts.

Critics didn’t hesitate to call the show a bomb. Audiences clapped feebly if at all, and at the last performance there were more people on stage than in the house. Even though, to my amazement, I got a favorable mention in the Chronicle, my first steady job in a year and a half seemed an almost complete waste of time.

Almost complete, because one saving bonus emerged from the fiasco. Nora James Percival, known as Jimi, was the wardrobe mistress, and her search for a new home brought her soon to Shrader Street, where she began to lift life at the Yellow House onto a far higher plane.

                                                                         46.

As February of 1972 dawned, Shrader Street seemed on its last legs. The only good news was that although the house had been sold the new owner was content to be an absentee landlord with a long-term investment. Mike didn’t even raise the rent. A bearded longhair himself, he was grounded in fairness and empathy and a modest standard of what was enough. Not every capitalist was insatiable, at least not then.

But economics weren’t the problem. Bad vibes were the problem. Bruegel People may have been a fiasco, but out of shared hardship the cast and crew wove a net of mutual support and collaboration, with Jimi’s example inspiring us all. Shrader Street was the exact opposite: the frame of the enterprise was ideal, but there was no human closeness supporting it.

Doug had a girlfriend and was seldom at the house. That left Chuck and Barbara, whose eccentricities could not be overstated (and I’m an expert on eccentricity). They were an odd pair, or former pair, or whatever it was. The two things they had in common were sticklike slimness and a staggering capacity for hyper-intellectual bickering. He was tall and pale, with shoulder-length dark brown wavy locks, perpetually pursed lips and a Vandyck that made him look like a musketeer or some antebellum Beauregard, especially when the weather grew colder and he affected a crimson satin opera cape with a broadbrimmed hat. She was of average height with stringy mouse-blonde hair, a hatchet face, narrow lips capping a witchlike chin, and extremely weak eyes from which light seldom emerged unless she was denouncing some inadequate thinker like Sartre or Freud.

Any challenge to stubborn linear rationalism that might be construed as “mystical” was anathema to both of them. “Love one another” wasn’t exactly their byword. “Impress one another” was more like it, or even “Intimidate one another.” Imagining that we could function as housemates was proof that, up to a point, I could minimize others’ shortcomings as well as my own. But if there was any “gold” to bring out in Chuck and Barbara (and I’m sure way down deep there was), I was the wrong excavator. The residue of my Halloween nightmare persuaded me that they were a punishment I had brought on myself.

This deepened when I came home from rehearsal one evening and Barbara made an almost frenzied confession of her attraction to me. The idea that this icily severe woman was burning with lust for me was at once hilarious and mortifying. I was so confused and disappointed and frustrated by the succession of brief flings I’d had lately with men, foolishly including a Bagel People cast member, that her proposal had all the allure of a maraschino cherry on a pile of shit.

Only time would tell whether my mailed confession of desire for Colton would seem equally ludicrous to him, but at least he and I weren’t living under the same roof. I tried as gently as possible to assure the lady that, though I was flattered, romance, even a quickie, was out of the question. 

Passionate love unrequited has flipped into its opposite since the dawn of humankind’s painful saga; it’s the very stuff of drama, and Barbara’s was no exception. She became increasingly hostile but, feigning indifference to my rejection, took it out on Chuck. He holed up listening to brooding strains of Bartok and Shostakovich in his parlor, on rare occasions bursting into the common area for manically chipper chatter, or glowering silently if she was present.

One chilly Saturday the mail brought Chuck terrible news. His ATD had been cut off. In an irony worthy of O. Henry, the state’s ruling that Chuck was no longer deranged drove him crazy. Screaming, he dragged Barbara out of her room and out onto the street, where Doug was pulling into the driveway. Affable Doug was swiftly manipulated into lending them his car and they split. They returned after midnight, when Chuck tried to put his hand through the windshield and Barbara smashed the car’s front end.

This didn’t exactly fit my pictures of harmonious communal living. Was the whole idea a mistake and did I need a Plan B? But my bedroom window faced east, and the following morning I woke up to the most beautiful sunrise I had ever seen, a sky flooded with billowing rivulets of coral and magenta. My thoughts turned to Key 13 of the Tarot Arcana, the Death card, whose significance lies not so much with the foreground scythetoting skeleton but rather the background sunrise, diffusing the sky with light, new life continually rising to replace the old and obsolete.

Later that day Jimi called and asked if I could help with set construction for a shoestring production of The Tempest she was working on. At the theater with her I began to reflect on the themes of this fascinating play, Shakespeare’s last, including the possibility of developing a state of mind so peaceful that the tempests of the world no longer breed anxiety or hatred.

At day’s end Jimi mentioned that we were only a few blocks from the metaphysical bookstore where there was a free Tarot lecture every Thursday evening. We went, and Jason Lotterhand’s Major Arcana class became a weekly fixture of our San Francisco life. Though his audience was predominantly freaky, Jason was a white-haired, old school gent in business attire, funny, charming, articulate, unassuming and profound. That night he talked about Key 12, the Hanged Man, another card of ominous repute which actually represents the very state I had been reflecting on, the sense-driven mind calmly suspended in contemplation of Div within. Coincidence? Christopher Hitchens, eat your heart out.

Shortly thereafter Chuck and Barbara announced that they were leaving the house and on February 29th they did, never to reappear. Jimi, who was about to enter Berkeley as a spring freshman, was eager to have Chuck’s parlor and for Barbara’s old room via Jason’s class we found Bob, a tall, older guy (40 maybe?) with a bushy black beard and twinkling eyes, who contributed as mightily as Jimi did to Shrader Street’s rising sun of domestic well-being.

                                                                       47.

It was March of 1972 and after barely five months I was now the commune’s senior member. Doug, in the attic room across from mine, was next in line, but forfeited the position by moving in with his Potrero Hill girlfriend. He was replaced by Annabel, from a fledgling theater troupe Doug was starting called Shorter Players, all of whom were under five feet six. A redheaded fireplug juggler/acrobat, she had freckles and a ready smile and was a marvel to watch practicing. Her diet was largely grains and vegetables and she enjoyed preparing them for anyone inclined to share.

The room Bob inherited from Barbara though high-ceilinged was on the cozy side, with one window overlooking a light well (the house next door had three stories). The diagonal wall with the window gave the room a funky shape which in spite of the dim light appealed to some people, evidently Bob, who stayed there for well over a year and later returned for more.

Long before computers made his skills obsolete, he designed meticulous electronic circuitry from a drafting table by the window, picking up gigs all over the Bay Area. He had a VW hippie van (in the popular white-and-burgundy motif) which, with oil at preOPEC crisis prices, he contributed gratis for household errands and jaunts.

Sufi dancing, for example. He and Jimi and I went most every week, to do guided circle dances with a few dozen aspiring dervishes. Or at least kids who wanted to have good clean ecstatic communal fun. With medieval poets like Rumi and Hafiz, the Sufi paradigm of direct personal contact with Divinity thumbs its Islamic nose at theology. It had lots of hippie adherents in that budding New Age era. San Francisco even had a Sufi Choir founded in 1969 by a Div-intoxicated Zen scion of the Rothschild family. A perpetually twinkling, lavishly white-bearded elf widely known as Sufi Sam, he was reputed to have been the model for R. Crumb’s Mister Natural.

Propelled by Maestro Allaudin Mathieu’s sublime and jazzy arrangements of assorted Sufi poems and hymns, the Choir and its small band won fame throughout the Bay Area, a kind of countercultural Up with People. “Sing a song of Glory and you will be the Glory” was a typical lyric, as was “You don’t have to go anywhere to be everywhere.” Americans all, many of them took exotic spiritual names like Moineddin, Zuleikha, and Shabda (I had the hots for Shabda). They sold out big halls, twenty-odd men and women, long of hair or beard and in robes, tunics, pillbox hats and vests of Central Asian origin. Thus attired, they sang at Governor Jerry Brown’s 1975 Inaugural. It’s interesting to imagine the howl of protest such outfits would inspire among Islamophobes today. One member of Congress taking his oath on the Koran was shocking enough.

Choir members often attended the weekly dances, with guitars, doumbek and the occasional tambourine. There was chanting, spinning, partnering and partner exchanging, much interweaving of clockwise and counterclockwise circles and a constant whirl of gleeful faces to share eye contact with, mostly young but not necessarily. I remember one white-haired crone of benevolent aspect who could have been Mrs. Gandalf. Hands clasped at the heart, a complete stranger or a new friend might fling their palms forward and outward and tell you “Yah Fatah!”–May Yah spring your heart open (Yah and Allah being their names for Div)–and by their joy you knew they meant it. Bob became so enamored of this path to bliss that he took a Sufi name, Mevlana, and we gradually acquired the habit of calling him that.

Another frequent destination was the House of Love and Prayer, hippie synagogue extraordinaire. A short ride from our house on the N-Judah trolley, it was a modest building in the Inner Sunset peopled by young followers of the so-called Singing Rabbi, Shlomo Carlebach. He was an internationally renowned singer and guitarist who had abandoned the conventional rabbinic track of his youth in exchange for a concert and recording career, pouring forth an endless stream of jolly and/or soulful melodies in the Hasidic tradition of worship through joy.

Aquarian Ageheads, regardless of religious background, flocked to “the House” whenever Shlomo was in town. Sessions with him were two-pronged. There would be blissful bouts of song with thirty to forty men and women up on our feet clapping, dancing and joining in on his instantly catchy choruses. Scat-singing “Yi-di-di” was fine if you couldn’t follow the Hebrew beyond repetitions of Halleluia. The musical interludes would alternate with just sitting cross-legged on the floor, listening intently as Shlomo spoke or chanted in piquantly accented English about the soul and its yearning for wholeness. He did it so earnestly you could taste the urge in your own heart.

He taught in tales and parables using images from Kabalistic lore, growing from the psychic soil of Judaism but accessible to anyone with a spiritual appetite–witness Jimi and Mevlana’s enthusiasm (subsequently Colton’s, too). Irresistibly charismatic, Shlomo made no claims to perfection, greeted everyone as Holy Brother or Holy Sister, and was as great-hearted an individual as I have ever encountered. Source of a maxim that for decades has stirred me with its depth: “If you care what people think of you, you’re not loving them.” I could fill pages on why I find this so meaningful, but you might get more juice from thinking it over yourself. The repercussions are immense.

Three of Shlomo’s fans we met at the House, Elana, Josh and Hannah, turned out to live directly across from 724 Shrader. Overnight we had a sister commune. Jimi, Annabel, Mevlana and I were free to bring a dish and drop in any time for dinner; the same was true for them. Elana, Josh and Hannah had been observant Jews once, and before their Friday night meal they lit the Shabbas candles, a lovely ritual to return to even, or especially, with a poster of Krishna on the wall.

In those days there seemed to be no limit to the Bay Area’s spiritual offerings. The entire household piled into Mevlana’s van to attend the Berkeley Hare Krishna Festival in early March, with jubilant crowds tossing carnations at each other as the deity’s golden cart progressed down Telegraph Avenue. With all the ecstatic dancing and chanting I completely forgot the caps of psilocybin stashed in my pocket, as did we all. Coals to Newcastle!

Less aerobic but equally uplifting was a lecture given in Berkeley by the 77-year old Dane Rudhyar, a trail-blazing Jungian sage whose clear explication of the dawning planetary mind made him a local hero. His radiant calm flowed over everyone; when he spoke of peace, it filled the room. “Never forget that the universe is beautiful, that it is inside you, and therefore you are beautiful,” he told us. Afterwards I began a long-term project of reading his books. Worth it just to reach an idea like, “Ease is the absence of the ghosts of yesterday.” 

One of those ghosts was behind a disquiet that grew as the vernal equinox approached and there was still no word from Colton. I heard from his father (also called Colton) that he had crossed the Atlantic by sailboat and was now traveling around Mexico. My letter had reached him, but the dropped stone made no answering splash.

                                                                         48.

Two familiar Harvard faces did show up that month: Doug and Towny, friends from the Lampoon. Doug’s National Lampoon magazine venture had become a monster hit, and the negotiated buyout would shortly make him a multi-millionaire, but at Shrader Street he crashed on the common room sofa, a burned-out refugee from both his New York editing duties and his Martha’s Vineyard binges. Since I’d last seen him, his hair had reached his shoulders and his wardrobe had funked up (if not as Afghan/West African as mine), but his sense of humor was intact, more bizarre than ever.

Doug remembered a revue I was in called White Sale from 1968, our final spring at Harvard. It was a scathing musical critique of American society at the time, pulling material from a range of pop culture sources, including an embarrassing World War II ditty called “Remember Pearl Harbor.” (Among the less-than-suave lyrics was “Give ‘em bomb for bomb / Give ‘em shell for shell / Kill a hundred Japs / For every boy that fell.”) Doug dropped acid with me and on an otherwise awestruck stroll through Golden Gate Park he broke into that song while trucking through the Japanese Tea Garden. There were stares, but it’s hard to be embarrassed when you’re laughing that hard.

(Later on there was both more and less to laugh about. I thought I was bold, but Doug was the real envelope pusher. When he went on to write and produce comedies in Hollywood, the subsequent excesses of Animal House and Caddyshack came as no surprise. Unfortunately the excesses of his dependence on cocaine had more negative results.)

Towny, now calling himself Jim, showed up just before Doug went back east. He was a year behind us, a cutie of Italian extraction, charming, bright and funny. He explained that Jim was his birth name and “Towny” was the relic of a more uptight persona he was ditching, now that he had come out. This last tidbit instantly drew my attention.

The moment Doug left the house we jumped each other. 

                                                                           49.

Now that gay kids are coming out so much earlier than in my own tentative dawn of liberation, they may not grasp the bygone delight of a pair of twenty-somethings who’d considered each other straight discovering their mutual error. Scoffmongers of the day may have thought long hair, a beard and a gentle demeanor made a guy queer, but ‘twas not necessarily so. Just sometimes.

Jim and I didn’t really have much in the way of chemistry, but we truly liked each other so we kept trying. The sex was okay, the pillow talk fabulous. A more delightful companion for a day’s outing to Point Reyes would be hard to imagine. He didn’t entirely buy the cosmic stuff but wasn’t a skeptic, either. He had a lot of smarts about sex and politics, and a great deal of love to give, all of which led him inevitably into gay community organizing. By the mid-70s he was campaign manager for Harvey Milk and, though Jim didn’t live to see the film, I was pleased that the actor who played him in Sean Penn’s Milk looked so much like the slender young Harvard man who briefly shared my bed.

He taught me that relationships don’t have to end with tragic heartbreak or even abrupt breakups (or visits to the clinic), that painless endings are possible when both parties agree it’s time to move on. Instead of ending, our relationship just took a new form. We’d lie side by side on the rug in prolonged eye contact, a couple hundred mics of very pure acid engendering a warm affectionate gazing free of sexual compulsion. Honesty and fondness continue, though physical desire wavers and ebbs. His Italian Catholic upbringing easily matches my Orthodox Jewish one in guilt implanting. Thus we first discover in one another how our sexual obsessions and missteps spring from unresolved guilt, drummed into us when we were too young to imagine what lovemaking could be.

“Why do we waste so much energy pursuing pointless fleeting intimacies with people we barely know?” I asked him once.

He sighed theatrically. “There doesn’t seem to be much point–except at the time!” And our laughter over that one was more like a groan.

The same March I was introduced to a man with whom I could certainly have fallen in love, and actually we sort of did, if falling in love can apply where there’s no lust involved. Rich and I had a mutual friend in the neighborhood who thought we’d get along and boy was she right. He was a couple of years older, shaggy and hippified but with a serious academic background, namely a Master’s degree in physics from Yale.

Originally from a blue-collar Catholic family in Ohio, Rich stayed in New Haven to teach physical sciences in a public high school, sharing an apartment with a young priest who was a Yale chaplain involved with the radical Jesuit underground. The Berrigan brothers, activist priests notoriously opposed to the war in Vietnam, were frequent visitors. Rich was eminently draftable and at the urging of his chaplain roommate K. (not his real initial), he enrolled at Yale Divinity School to escape the dread 1-A classification.

This exposed him to a world of thought beyond Catholicism and before you could say “synchronicity” Rich was a Buddhist Jungian with a minor in cannabis. Meanwhile K. fell in love and left the church to marry; the wedding punch was laced with LSD. Rich discovered that two years of Divinity School didn’t pack half the Divinity of five hours on that punch, and in the fall of 1971 he dropped out and after a six-week Mexican trek with a sometime girlfriend moved to San Francisco, the same New Age magnet that had summoned me.

Rich had widely spaced eyes and the wide-open look typical of that era’s awakened young man: a sweet childlike face peeping through a hedge of facial hair. At our first meeting we established that he was straight, I was gay, and it didn’t matter at all. Putting that card on the table from the get-go created space for a soulmate relationship with no taint of the Big Secret that had for so long clouded my feelings for Colton. Rich and I immediately shared a deep and sunny affection, with so much in common that our differences only increased the potential rewards of developing friendship.

Since arriving in the area he had bounced from the East Bay to the City, and when we met he was the housemate of three guys with whom he shared virtually no interests. As spring unfurled he hung out at Shrader Street more and more, and was the obvious candidate for the next available room.

                                                                           50.

My drug-dealing stint was brief and unprofitable.

It began with a call from Buck in Maryland, wondering if I could get my hands on two thousand hits of acid for a friend in DC who’d pay a dollar per hit. At the time (early March) I’d been talking with a couple of Bruegel People survivors about mounting a 

small production of just the first part of Shaw’s rarely staged Back to Methuselah, a sprawling sci-fi epic that starts in the Garden of Eden and ends in 31,920 A.D. Part One (In the Beginning) has a cast of four, a simple set, and a lot to say about life, death, immortality and consciousness. What better way to raise the cost of production than by selling LSD?

My bad trip the previous Halloween had obviously not halted my entheogenic questing, though it left a mark. The crazed encounter with dark personal demons was scary, to say the least. In some ways I ripped myself apart psychically. Nothing like it ever happened again, just as nothing like the Mount of Olives ever happened again. But I felt there was still more to learn from these forbidden alterations.

Provided you survived it, a bad trip was every bit as instructive as a good one. With like-minded companions I wanted to keep investigating the psyche’s hidden pathways, and if I ran into scary again, I wanted to understand it, not let it rip me apart, though it be Aunt Sadie or the shade of death itself. It was all in my mind, after all. What could there be to fear? I had the Mount of Olives to remind me that what seems “apart” is in fact “a part” of a larger whole.

Dane Rudhyar thought of the universe we inhabit as a Unity which is an Entity, where “self-actualization” means marshaling those inner forces that strengthen our sense of connection, and mastering those that don’t. Milton again:

The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.

The more we understand how the sum of our private attitudes shapes the world, the more likely we are to heal the ailing body of humanity. Who could object? (Whoever derives profit or power from the ailing body, that’s who.) Anything that makes us more harmonious and less uptight should be encouraged. If a substantial set of my peers viewed psychedelics as a legitimate therapeutic path to self-knowledge, who was I to hinder their research? Especially since I engaged in it myself? Indeed, why not promote it? Why not even profit from it? And for a good cause, no less?

Why not? For one thing, the I Ching was dire. I threw the hexagram “Darkening of the Light,” and I quote: WITH GRANDIOSE RESOLVE A MAN ENDEAVORS TO SOAR ABOVE ALL OBSTACLES, BUT THUS ENCOUNTERS A HOSTILE FATE. Pretty clear, huh?

But no-o-o, I had to learn the hard way. Mae Margaret put me in touch with Reuben from the Navarro River, who could provide twenty 100-hit sheets of pure Owsley window-pane for $500. This meant a 300% profit for Buck and me to split. He mailed a money order for $250 and it was up to me to front the other half. Strangely enough, this is where Jonah and Lottie stepped in. Earlier that year I celebrated my first quarter century of life, on which occasion they sent a check for $250, along with an urgent plea to mend my ways and come back to school. (I thanked them for the gift and ignored the plea.) The money was still unspent because Bruegel People had paid enough to cover the few expenses of our frugal lifestyle. A dollar went a lot further in hippie times.

Once the contraband was bought, I needed a ride east. This, too, materialized with ease through the local rideboard. A couple named Sig and Kathy were driving their red Ford Maverick to DC and wanted a rider to share expenses. The best feature of the entire episode was the drive on Interstate 40 all the way to Knoxville, Tennessee, where we switched to I-81. We crossed the Mojave Desert, through the towering mesas of Arizona, the adobe huts and hillside missions of New Mexico, just thrilling. Then the endless flat green of the Texas Panhandle with cattle placed artfully around like townspeople in a Rococo view of Venice. The radio assaulted us with an endless barrage of hellfire sermons and what they called Freedom Lectures, anti-Red, anti-welfare, fear-inspired tirades that not even a smoking bowl of hash could render amusing.

Texas gave me another jolt when we drove past the first large stands of bare trees. Having just spent winter in California, I had already forgotten that Eastern trees lose their leaves. I thought they all were dead, mile after mile, until the light bulb of memory switched on. Then in Oklahoma the bare forests were enlivened by sprays of vivid blossoms and the first daring buds of chartreuse, just in time to greet the vernal equinox.

In Arkansas, highway construction pushed us onto back roads, winding along streams and creeks in Ozark country, warm and lazy, bush and hedge bursting with yellow, crimson, pink and white. A landscape made for lying in the sun with a fishing rod, and dropping your final g’s. “Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day,” I remarked as we passed a lakeside angler. “Teach him to fish and he’ll eat for a lifetime.” There were recognition mm-ms in the front seat. “Who was it said that?” I wondered.

“I think it was Saint Paul,” Kathy said.

“Actually,” Sig corrected her, “it was Mrs. Paul.” 

Once we crossed into Virginia, the first clouds to appear since we set out began to spread across the sky. This failed to register with me as an omen, even when a cloudburst hit just as we got to Washington. I was too excited about being there and looking up old friends to imagine that anything could possibly go wrong. For a while nothing did.

I contacted Buck right away and we scheduled a meeting with Jan, the buyer, for the end of the week (we arrived on a Tuesday). I stayed with my former neighbors in Dupont Circle and set up as many reunions as possible, all delightful. Friends were happy and creative in a rainbow of ways, fostering a sense of buoyancy that inflated my natural optimism to the point of quasi-idiotic negligence where business was concerned.

When we finally showed up at Jan’s pad, he broke the news that at the going rate for acid he could no longer pay a dollar per hit, just eighty cents. This meant $800 apiece for Buck and me rather than a thousand, which still seemed a reasonable profit. He then told us he had only a grand on hand and would pay the remaining six hundred after he made the initial sales. Perhaps I should strike “quasi-” from the previous paragraph, but for reasons I no longer recall we agreed to Jan’s proposal. My head isn’t wired for business. Although I remember being uncomfortable with the whole situation, talking nervously and anxious to split the scene, I also remember taking Buck’s word for it that Jan was trustworthy. Buck had successfully unloaded the window pane we brought from Colorado six months earlier, and I figured he knew what he was doing.

We left the pad with $500 each, a doubling of the initial investment. Buck had business of an unspecified nature in New Mexico and next day we took off in Betsy, the decrepit Impala that had conveyed us coast to coast the previous September. On this occasion her name became Miracle Betsy, because by ceaselessly drinking transmission fluid she got us to Albuquerque in forty-eight hours, under cloud cover the whole way (another omen?), but flush with cash and Buck’s perpetual ganja supply. In Albuquerque Buck got a call from a friend of Jan’s explaining that Jan had been busted with all the acid. At the time I was either too trusting or too stoned to harbor any suspicion of the story.

Buck wasn’t suspicious, either, but he was annoyed because if we’d just hung on to what Jan hadn’t paid for he could have unloaded it in Albuquerque. I told him I’d mail him some more from San Francisco. A couple weeks later I sent him $200 worth in a brown manila envelope, and within a week he sent me back a money order for twice that. I cashed it and stashed $400 in a dresser drawer. A few days later someone sneaked into Shrader Street and took it, along with a bag of pot in Mevlana’s room. The I Ching said: WHEN A MAN WHO WISHES TO UNDERTAKE SOMETHING IS CONFRONTED BY

INSURMOUNTABLE LIMITATIONS, HE MUST KNOW WHERE TO STOP. In other words, my karma ran over my dogma. That was the last of my dealing career, and the last of Back to Methuselah.

                                                                          51.

The trip from Albuquerque back to San Francisco had a couple of memorable highlights. Buck dropped me off at an I-40 entrance ramp on a Wednesday morning that threatened rain. My aim was to reach home by early evening Thursday, to attend the Passover service at the House of Love and Prayer. Shlomo was going to preside at my first Seder in San Francisco, and I intended to be there.

From childhood I loved Passover, which we observed religiously, so to speak. Every year, being always the youngest at the table, I got to ask the Four Questions and otherwise show off. Shortly before my tenth birthday The Ten Commandments was released and now the Passover story was in widescreen Technicolor. Subsequently, civil rights, war protests, feminism and environmentalism shook the nation. The central Seder theme of liberation took on renewed significance (typical rap: just as the ten plagues visited on biblical Egypt were mainly agricultural, Divinity was rebuking the industrial West with landfill, pollution, extinction, stagnation, alienation, neurosis, and so on). Previously I likened freaks to the persecuted early Christians, and at Passover I saw ties to the fugitive Hebrew slaves. Nixon, Kissinger and John Mitchell, heartless upholders of the existing power structure, collectively were Pharaoh, with nothing but brute force going for them. Spiritual awakening, now as always, was the true key to freedom; Shlomo, I was sure, would lift the festivities on waves of love to the highest heaven of celebratory glee.

I get a ride quickly from Maureen, a gorgeous young blonde from Pasadena in a cherry red MG Midget. The top’s up and in the passenger seat I find Marquis, a 10-month old fixed shepherd pup. He quite acceptably spends the remainder of our time at my feet or on my lap, as I sink into the soft kidskin bucket seat. Maureen inquires do I get high? and I pull out one of the doobies Buck has rolled me. She loves show tunes and Gilbert and Sullivan and the Beatles and we sing our way into the sunset till it’s time to stop for the night, near the Mojave National Preserve. She pulls up to a fancy motel and wiggles her mother’s credit card around. After my long spell of voluntary poverty, it’s nice to taste the fruits of voluntary affluence.

Mom’s plastic, the first such I’ve ever seen, treats us to dinner out and a very comfortable evening in (sorry, straight folk, that’s as titillating as it gets). Next morning bright and early the sun blazes in a pure blue desert sky and California welcomes us with a perfect day for top-down driving. The gusts toss Maureen’s hair all around. Mine as well. After a couple hours or so, laughing and singing, we reach the end of the I-40 at Barstow, where she turns onto the I-15 for Mom’s Pasadena chateau and I resume thumbing at the turnoff to CA-58 for Bakersfield and the I-5. It’s not even ten and the City is a mere seven hours away. I can almost hear Shlomo’s blessing over the first glass of wine as Seder begins.

By noon, as I continue waiting in the fierce heat, his imagined voice has faded. The landscape of Barstow is flat, bleak and depressing. I have no timepiece but I can see the sun beginning to slip westward from zenith and now it’s a question of just getting home before the end of Seder. If ever. What little traffic passes is mainly patriotic Stetsonwearing redneck types who sneer or even taunt, slowing their pickup trucks to a halt only to zoom off as I get close by. After the first time, this prank gets tired.

At last a psychedelic VW van approaches, but when it stops the side door disgorges two hippie guys and what we then called a chick and continues south on I-15. So now it’s the four of us looking for a ride north, they being Ingrid, Ken and Dave. The heat subsides, western light starts to gild our faces, and still no ride. I’ve been hoarding the last of Buck’s doobies and offer to share it around. No sooner has it burned to a roach when a pickup truck towing a rusty horse trailer pulls over.

The driver is a genial fellow named Sam with bushy auburn sideburns streaked with grey. He tells us the trailer has been recently hosed down and he’ll take us as far as Rosedale, between Bakersfield and the I-5. After nearly eight hours of roadside immobility, this is better than dinner and a movie.

It’s a one-horse rig, strewn with clean-looking hay but with an enduring stable aroma, ventilated by barred rectangular openings at both sides and on the back door. Walls thickly cushioned, ideal for the coming two and a half hour drive. Ingrid is Dave’s old lady and they sit side by side opposite Ken and me. 

“Let’s eat,” Ingrid says, and with that we all four ante up our remaining provisions. Merged in the middle are bags of trail mix, roasted soy beans, dried figs, fresh dates, Monukka raisins, some substantial sweaty hunks of cheddar, gouda and pepper jack, a box of Ritz crackers, a bunch of grapes, water and half a bag of tangerines. I suggest we join hands in gratitude before demolishing this admirable feast. As we do, I suddenly think: This is the Seder! The first one, reborn: an improvised community meal in tandem with flight across the desert. Holy beggars, as Shlomo would say.

At the sight of orange light falling across one corner, I rise to view the sunset. Out the western window a great red solar ball is dropping into the rim of the empty Mojave. Then I recall that Passover always coincides with a full moon and I turn my gaze to the east where across the immense and rosy flatness a pale, luminous disc rises, the two in seeming opposition but lit by the same light. Holding our little getaway vehicle and the whole terrestrial globe in awesome balance.

This is the best Seder ever. As the decades pass, I will attend traditional Seders, revisionist Seders, feminist Seders, New Age Seders, Venetian ghetto Seders, queer Seders, pagan Seders and once even a clothes-optional Seder, but never, ever, another one in a horse trailer, with Ken and Ingrid and Dave.

                                                                           52.

Aside from the drug deal debacle, the trip east offers another shock. I learn from some Harvard pals that Colton’s been traveling up and down the East Coast since February and has called a couple of them. Envy gives birth to distress. Back in San Francisco I imagine that every time the phone rings, this is him. Days go by. Frustration mounts.

Finally I devote three long journal pages to a letter I assume he’ll never read. It’s my attempt to articulate the ingredients of what has evolved since an obsessive schoolboy crush mated with a shared spiritual awakening. I actually list the numbered ideas:

1) I admit the possibility that you could have no physical interest in a man, though I earnestly hope you’d give it the ol’ college try.

2) You are my most valued and beloved friend, I miss you and I want desperately to spend time with you again.

As I write, the condensation of feeling into thought passes through gay guilt and moves on to invoke the psychic closeness, the intense spiritual bond we discovered in Cambridge two springs earlier, a bond of love that his letters from Europe have continually born witness to. (“If I knew how you were construing some of this,” he noted, after reading them decades later, “I would have toned it down.”)

My scribbling continues. Was the bond an illusion? His prolonged silence feeds my fear. Why hasn’t he called? Anxiety, yearning, devotion, apprehension and affirmation collide in line after line across the blank pages. I want to know what he’ll think of this new life I’ve been living. And to what extent he’ll want to be a part of it.

It’s not so much that you have the answers, as that you are the biggest question.

Love can be confusing. Over the years, as the Age of Aquarius has slowed its social momentum, I’ve wondered why so many people find it so difficult to welcome the power of love; why the Connective Reality that I call Divinity seems remote to so many; why people are often reluctant even to think or speak about love, and the price paid by individuals and society for its absence.

Then I see the evidence of my own youthful groping and am reminded that love can perplex and hurt. To achieve the freedom and ease that unconditional love can bring, it may be necessary to confront and overcome deep pain, to discover that grasping is bogus love. These aren’t easy lessons. Not everyone is confident that beyond sorrow there’s a reservoir of joy. In that regard I was lucky. Despite the heartbreak that would later ensue, the last line of my unsent letter points in the right direction:

God bless you, my love. May every note you sing be sweet.

The very next day, Colton calls.

I was so happy to hear his voice I nearly jumped out of my skin. He was calling from Virginia, where he had a new girlfriend, Lynn, with whom he was planning to drive west in mid-May. It wasn’t long into the conversation before I asked if he’d read my letter. He had, and it had taken him completely by surprise (straight guys were a lot more clueless back then, the cautious dawn of gay visibility). He admitted to having qualms about the implications, but was open-minded and sympathetic. At least he wasn’t repelled by the disclosure, so my worst fear was laid to rest, at least for the time being.

Knowing that we’d be face-to-face in about a month released a lot of blocked psychic energy. I looked around. San Francisco was celebrating April with lush floral display. Golden Gate Park was in radiant bloom, with plum blossoms, beds of primrose, towering rhododendrons and on the slopes of the Arboretum’s Succulent Garden, strange hillside armadas of pink and coral stalks with waxy bell-like petals. Beneath the fuchsia bush in our own back yard a clump of calla lilies had emerged in fragrant beauty. The Yellow House was about to enter its first golden age, flower children on the march.

                                                                            53.

The right mix of people had transformed Shrader Street into a countercultural New Jerusalem. We began to consider whether to call ourselves a commune or a cooperative, or whether a label even mattered. Jimi, Mevlana, Annabel and I were deeply in sync about how to live together, and mutual respect took the place of house rules.

Two items were shunned, though mainly from indifference: cigarettes and television. None of us was interested in either, and other than wine or beer on rare occasions, alcohol was absent, as well. Thus we avoided three of America’s most common addictions, replacing them with cannabis and entheogens, which in that era, by freak and foe alike, were seen as gateways to a wider cultural revolution.

Revolutions are always messy and some fell into addiction. Alan Watts’ dictum, “Once you’ve got the message, you can hang up the phone,” is easy to admire and less easy to practice, especially when the ring tones are so nice. Smoking and tripping our way to utopia didn’t quite pan out as expected, but they seemed worth a try at the time. No apology; mirth is its own reward. So is bliss.

Everyone plunked ten bucks a week into the food kitty and we shopped together or in pairs at the Haight Street Food Co-op, devising the week’s menus, like cattle, on the hoof. The household was vegetarian and the contents of pantry and fridge were common property. Cooking was voluntary but we all liked it, and if you cooked dinner you didn’t have to wash dishes afterwards. Eventually the evening meals became so varied and delicious, with inventive casseroles, soups, salads, stir-fries and desserts, that we started to fantasize about opening a restaurant where, hippie-style, none of the crockery or flatware would match.

We ate in the roomy kitchen around an old picnic table with benches attached on either side. I don’t remember how we inherited it but it needed work. Mevlana and I sanded it down in the back yard, stained the five long planks into alternating stripes of cherry and mahogany, painted a band of copper enamel around the edge and lacquered the whole thing to a beautiful finish. It was regal, in a funky sort of way. 

And so was the house. I haven’t mentioned Peaches and Herb, the two plaster cherubim who presided over the passageway from the vestibule into the long hall. On little platforms near the ceiling they stood about nine inches high, clad in Grecian tunics with stubby wings sprouting behind. Peaches plucked a lyre and Herb struck a tambourine. Originally they were the same off-white as the vestibule. One afternoon I mounted an A-frame ladder and painted them with careful attention to detail: the pale turquoise band encircling Herb’s blond hair, Peaches’ green eyes (she became a redhead), her golden lyre, the tiny silver cymbals poking out of the yellow tambourine ring, the symmetrical edging on their tunics. Their fingernails! When they were finished we invited them to a splendid dinner in their honor, which they could attend only in spirit.

Around this time we were having so many visitors that we started to call the place Hotel Shrader. Amiable friends, or friends of friends passed through town from everywhere, crashing for days or even weeks, till the common room couldn’t accommodate them all. Jimi was spending so much time in classes at Berkeley that she decided her double parlor was a waste of space. We created a partition, made the “salon” into her bedroom and the front parlor into an extra guest room.

Inside, all was thoroughly groovy, but the back yard, calla lilies and fuchsia bush notwithstanding, was a mess. Mevlana and I were discussing what to do about it when Annabel came home with news that she’d gotten a summer theater job in Sacramento and was moving out. This meant that the huge attic space opposite my bedroom was available for Rich the Yale dropout, if Jimi didn’t mind being the only woman in the house. She knew Rich and, like the rest of us, thought he was terrific and even beatific, so he was promptly invited and in short order began to apply his gardening skills to transforming the yard.

We never knew who lived at Shrader House before us (presumably the tenants who left the giant papier-mâché clowns in the garage), but they’d seriously neglected the yard. The wooden steps leading down from the utility porch were okay but the banister wobbled. The yard itself, about 18 feet wide and twice as deep, was fenced on either side by 5-foot tall planks of weathered pine. If it didn’t make for good neighbors, it was hardly the fence’s fault.

The family on the left as you faced the yard were not only contemptuous of hippies, they actually mistreated their own dog. She was a perpetually disgruntled black Alsatian named Queenie who apparently got no exercise except running up and down the back stairs, three flights, day after day. No matter how long we lived next door, she never got used to us, barking whenever we appeared, a fierce invader-repelling bark that kept up until someone within her house would holler, “Shut up, Queenie!” She would then subside into a low malevolent growl. After a couple of years she died (or at least vanished) and peace was restored.

But her abusive owners never lightened up. The parents seldom appeared, but they had a couple of rude adolescent boys whose sullen faces suggested that they had spent their formative years shoveling dog shit in the back. At least they didn’t throw any over the fence, but early one morning when Rich was meditating in lotus posture on the grass one of them threw a raw egg at him. It landed unbroken in his lap. After thanking the universe for this gift in a voice resonant enough for the neighbors to hear, he went inside and cooked it for breakfast. That was Rich.

He worked afternoons at the Medical Center Library on Parnassus, just above the Park. This freed up his mornings for yoga, meditation and renovating the yard. The first task was to dig up the pathetic-looking scrub and weeds, which he did one quadrant at a time, replacing each with soft, green grass. Then he cleared out one section of the blackberry tangle to make room for a compost bin. Activities you wouldn’t normally associate with Divinity School, but Rich didn’t so much study Divinity as exemplify it.

When I wasn’t learning music, painting a Tarot deck or studying the I Ching, I’d join him, and the conversations were as mind-expanding as any drug. Rich was (and remains) effortlessly erudite and almost absurdly good-natured. He had all the intellectual virtues (curiosity, etc.) with none of the associated vices (arrogance, etc.); his only weakness was for atrocious puns at inopportune moments (he urged me to investigate the psychoanalytic rock of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Jung).

He also brought to the kitchen The Tassajara Bread Book, launching the great Hotel Shrader tradition of baking our own loaves. Not only did I become an avid baker, but through the process first conceived the idea that consciousness, like yeast, could generate a huge transformation with just a little bit of new life. A metaphor for how the planet itself could wake. Of course, some risings take longer than others. Tick tock, tick tock. 

                                                                      54.

The fullness of spring opened access to more of the Bay Area’s splendor. After seven months in the City, I continued to marvel at the variety of stunning and unanticipated vistas San Francisco offered with every suddenly turned hillside curve. Whenever I reached a height from which I could see the far-away vermilion towers of the Golden Gate Bridge, I thanked Div for guiding me to the most beautiful city on earth, to live with friends I loved and trusted.

But in all those seven months I hadn’t actually crossed the bridge into Marin County. On a warm, sunny mid-April day Josh and Hannah from across the street joined Mevlana and me for a drive across and a hike up Mount Tam. The view from the bridge, whether east toward the bay and its islands or outward to the vast Pacific, was thrilling. After the winter rains the Marin hillsides in every direction were a bold emerald green, a magical transformation from the summer-roasted gold I’d been accustomed to. The trails were often damp with runoff from active springs; pools of fresh water dotted the slopes. At 2500 feet the elevation was nowhere near my Wyoming treks, but the view of the Bay and San Francisco more than compensated.

With the Pyramid and Bank of America’s corrugated monolith the only big skyscrapers of note, the topography undulating beneath the rest of the city was clearly visible. Tiburon, Alcatraz, Angel Island, Treasure Island and others were stepping stones in the Bay. Beyond it to the east stretched the snow-capped Diablo Range. Once again I was amazed that a brain barely the size of an average cantaloupe could reconstruct the spatial vastness transmitted by two tiny optic nerves. What further miracles lie within the mind?

On the way home we stopped in Sausalito for dinner and saw the passenger ferry to San Francisco load and go. I little suspected that within a few months that ferry would prove to be another kind of miracle, one that would change my life, line my pockets and propel Hotel Shrader to a level of creativity worth, so to speak, writing about.

Next day Mevlana and I, still buzzed by the hike, were talking in the common room about what a blessing sight is, and how we take it for granted. He proposed that we investigate its absence, taking a walk thru the park, by turns blindfolded and guiding. The present moment seemed ideal, so we flipped a coin and I got to be blindfolded first. He grabbed the nearest bandanna and tied it over my eyes. It still let some light in so we stuffed it with a washcloth. Mevlana led me down the hall and out the front door. 

Standing on the shaded porch without seeing the customary street scene was bizarre. “Let me try getting down the stairs by myself,” I proposed, grabbing for the railing. I stepped forward and felt the sun on my face, the first indication that it was out.

At the bottom of the stairs, Mevlana took my elbow. There were two routes to the park entrance from our house: past Waller to Haight, then left till it ends at Stanyan, or a prior left onto Waller with a dogleg onto Stanyan. At the corner of Shrader and Waller:

“Which way you wanna go?”

“You’re in charge, Mev, you pick. Spin me around till my sense of direction goes.”

He did, but it didn’t take long to orient myself by the sun. I began to listen carefully for additional information. My sense of spatial distance disappeared altogether, replaced by a succession of street sounds constantly fading up as others faded down. The busy traffic noises told me when we reached Stanyan Street. Even without Mevlana’s guidance I knew when it all stopped for a red light. He helped me cross the street, warned me when we approached the curb, and steered me down the entrance path into the park. Internal combustion engines crossfaded to strummed guitars, chirping birds and tennis court whacks.

For the next hour, we wandered around Golden Gate Park, and from the need to negotiate particular steps and slopes I’d try to guess where we were. I knew the park’s eastern end pretty well by this point; nevertheless my guesses were often wrong. Mevlana would guide me to surfaces he wanted me to touch and identify: walls, trees, vines, pedestals, lampposts, all sorts of things. It was a fascinating exercise, and then we switched.

Putting such complete trust in a companion had been deep, but being guide was more so. Seeing for two, being doubly alert and trustworthy, now that’s a commitment! Another hour passed and we were back at Hotel Shrader, where we continued for another hour each, rediscovering surfaces around the house to which we seldom paid attention, listening to records, experiencing music with heightened clarity, and at the end, sight restored, appreciating the miraculous gift of vision in a brand new light. Friendship also.

The following day I hitched down to Santa Cruz to visit with Tim, the former Harvard roommate who knew about my crush on Colton since my divulging it at the ranch in Wyoming. He was a lecturer in film at UC, sandy-bearded and genial, and showed me around campus, the seaside town and the amazing redwood stands, thicker than any I’d visited since the Navarro days. The rainy season had made the forest floor lush and moist, and at the shore the weather shifted half-hourly, sunshiny sprinkles rinsing the arcades and piers to a fresh clean brightness. There were seals on the beach and a rainbow diving into the horizon. And this was before the mushrooms kicked in!

Tim had a beautiful house in the woods with a yard full of chickens, a long way from his parents’ luxurious Manhattan digs. At school he had introduced me to a world of show biz swank and prestige which we both had fantasies of joining, and here we were, a couple of Northern California hippies. We were preparing to watch Devil’s Bargain, the film Tim made with Colton in summer of 70, when the phone rang. It was Colton, calling from Vermont (where he had followed Lynn), speculating about a mid-May arrival. Moments later his image moved and talked from the screen in Tim’s gripping film.

Before the advent of home video, it was a rarity for most of us to see our loved ones alive on a screen, and after my long, pining separation the virtual Colton was enchanting. He photographed beautifully and was an accomplished actor to boot. So much of his personal grace came through, with charm to spare. Watching him as if present, I remembered with unalloyed happiness how much I loved him. How soon we’d be face to face!

Back at Shrader Street, I came face to face with a spirit guide, courtesy of a newminted entheogen called MDA. Sitting in the back yard on the second anniversary of Mount of Olives Day, I looked up to behold a small and wiry sage in purple silk Chinese attire, floating in the sky and surrounded by an aura of brilliant orange flame. Lao-tse perhaps? He began to rotate slowly towards his right, flashing like the shifting facets of a luminous diamond. As his back turned he gazed benignly at me over his left shoulder, beckoning with right index finger. When I approached mentally he spoke no word but sent a message mind to mind. It was WHEN YOU LOOK AT ANYTHING LOOK FIRST AT ITS HEART. Over time this would prove a helpful touchstone.

                                                                 55.

A few days later a real-life sage, small and wiry but feet on the ground, materialized at Berkeley in the person of Buckminster Fuller. For over five hours the 76 year-old Bucky captivated an overflow crowd of young devotees. Mentally he was anything but earthbound. His vision of the living universe as an upward-trending, brilliantly organized system with humanity as the current avatar of an evolving cosmic consciousness, was broad and compelling. It took effort to follow every twist of his digressions, let alone his multisyllabic loquacitude, but his verve and intelligence swept us all along. He preached a gospel of cooperative technology, considering competition for global necessities both obsolete and counterproductive. Food, shelter and clothing for every human on the planet was technologically available, had we but the political will to provide them, and a wiser attitude toward consumption. He envisioned a democracy of geniuses, where the aim of education was to unleash everyone’s inner Leonardo DaVinci, this to be brought about by “Youth, Truth and Love.”

He also proposed that if humanity was to survive, political resistance to said utopia had to be overcome by 1985. Though that seemed a long way off in 1972, it seems even more distant looking back from this year. What becomes of Bucky’s universe now? What becomes of the great experiment that has produced our species?

It’s because I’d like an answer that I’m writing this book.

                                                                         56.

I thought that my voyage had come to its end at the last limit of my power, that the path before me was closed, that provisions were exhausted, and the time come to take shelter in a silent obscurity.

But I find that thy Will knows no end in me. And when old words die out on the tongue,

new melodies break forth from the heart; And where the old tracks are lost,

new country is revealed with its wonders.

–Rabindranath Tagore, “Closed Path”

Rich turned me on to Tagore, a Bengali poet who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. Rich came to him through his study of Hindu culture, and then it turned out Tagore was also an inspiration for Rabbi Zalman Schachter, an alternative teacher with Shlomo at the House of Love and Prayer. Zalman was an encyclopedia of Huxley’s perennial philosophy. The “old tracks” he lost had originated in the Hasidic community, which sent him as an emissary to college youth in the Sixties but ostracized him when he discovered the “new country” of lysergic acid and its entheogenic cohorts.

Zalman tripped with Timothy Leary and Alan Watts, schmoozed with Thomas Merton, high-fived Swami Satchidananda, studied with Howard Thurman (who brought Gandhi’s ideas to MLK Jr.), and practiced Sufi meditation with Pir Vilayat Khan. Hasidic masters, Christian mystics and Persian sages bloomed side by side in his spiritual garden. If, as the saying goes, “Truth is one; paths are many,” Zalman was (and remains) an avid bushwhacker, his formidable intellect eagerly absorbing any tradition that lets the heart's new melodies break forth.

He was also a committed straight ally of gay liberation, a subject which baffled and stymied Shlomo, not to mention me. Decades before same-sex marriage was an issue on the national stage, Zalman offered to officiate ceremonially whenever I found the fella. In 1972, long before the fella entered my life, the offer, though gratifying, was premature. Without getting a mate, marriage was very remote.

I continued to be a frustrated romantic, continued to fall in love at the drop of a trouser. I didn’t like bars, but discovered one south of Market that catered to hippielooking guys who might even know something about Tarot or yoga. I thought I compared unfavorably to the cuties I encountered, but a beautiful man with the locks and facial hair of Jesus, plus the body of Paul Newman, flirted and danced with me, and took me home.

Scott had a great apartment in the Castro with exposed brick walls. He had shelves of LPs, both rock and classical albums. I fulfilled a long-held fantasy of making extended whoopee to the Madama Butterfly Love Duet. He threw in a chaser from Rosenkavalier. As our night of lovemaking flowed on I sensed a depth of finesse and experience about Scott that led me to ask his age. He said “I’m forty years high.”

Fifteen years my senior! But what a great way to put it! Oh, no doubt, this is just whom I’ve been looking for, so good-humored, so interesting, so hot! We spend the night, wake in each other’s arms, and part lovingly, with phone numbers, after breakfast. Glory halleluia!

Then he doesn’t return my calls.

Was I better off celibate? Would that be more spiritual somehow, or is the question merely a residue of internalized homophobia? Was there an alternative?

I asked these questions of Jimi, on a break from school, and she decided it was high time I tried sleeping with a woman. She promptly volunteered. I hadn’t fared too well with Joanne on my virgin outing, but I was much closer to the fabulous Jimi, and besides she had some very pure window pane.

The rest of the day we fasted and just after sunset dropped the acid. Upstairs my 

bed was a foam mattress on the floor, facing the windows with an unbroken view of sky. On the white wall above my head I had stenciled the Tree of Life, a symmetrical arrangement of ten multi-colored circles representing the Kabalistic path to Divinity. As Jimi and I sat and eventually reclined and eventually disrobed on this bed, the walls glowed with candlelight, the Tree swirled with energy, and Jimi transformed into every woman there has ever been, an eternal force, complementary, bountiful and ageless. She was different and yet the same.

The love that spread between us led to some tentative sexual exploration but no hint of arousal nor urge to kiss deep, so till pre-dawn, when the waning crescent moon glinted through the window, we laughed and cuddled and talked and laughed some more. We checked out a tantric meditation Jimi knew, sitting opposite each other cross-legged, focusing on the flame at the center of the brain, fanning it till it fills the head and spirals down through the Venus and heart chakras, then sending it outwards toward the other’s heart.

Thus we advanced our connection.

The following week was Shavuot, the Jewish holiday near the end of May commemorating Moses’ encounter with Divinity on Mount Sinai. Zalman was conducting hippie-style services in Berkeley. On the way to the hall, I auditioned for the Magic Theatre of Berkeley, and they offered me a plum role in their very next production.

Then Colton showed up.

Later than expected, but that’s a habit four decades have failed to curb.

                                                                             57.

It was June. The month had started beautifully. Pat and Bruce, the only hippie couple I knew who were actually married (and who drove an Audi), celebrated the birth of their 8 lb. 6 oz. daughter. She was the first child whose emergence I had followed from inception in a contemporary friend’s womb, the miracle of pregnancy followed by the miracle of new life. It felt like a further step into adulthood for me, even as I imagined young Lottie and Jonah, twenty-five years before, welcoming newborn me as joyously as Pat and Bruce their wee Mathara Tsaddi. And newborn me staring at the world in equally wide-eyed confusion. Had even Nixon and Mitchell and Kissinger entered life so frail and adorable? What happened? Hanan – CONFESSIONS - 124

Rehearsals at the Magic Theatre were a blast. A cast of five was preparing the premiere of Chamber Piece, by a recent graduate of the Iowa Playwrights Workshop named John O’Keefe. Also directing, he was a running river of far out theater games and rehearsal techniques. His play depicted a haute bourgeois dinner party where the social one-upmanship games weirdly and rapidly degenerated into sexual chaos and a strong hint of vampirism. Way ahead of its time, and by turns hilarious, puzzling and terrifying.

Seeing Colton in Santa Cruz after our two-year separation was just puzzling and terrifying. Hilarious, no.

When he called from Tim’s, the night before I hitched down to meet him (there was a convenient rehearsal break), our conversation should have prepared me, but love is blind, as you may have heard, and apparently deaf as well. Heartbroken over being recently dumped by Lynn, he sounded disoriented, incoherent, uncertain. I expressed my fear and hope to my journal:

I would recognize the Source of my being in your existence.

I would be One with youthough one body desire or one resistI would see in you the One Love that has made us both; that has made us All.

Yes I have put you upon a pedestal.

Will your person equate to your symbol?

Colton, tomorrow will tell.

But tonight, Now, I know that I am so high I could be immortal Because God [sic] has brought us together again.

Love is the eternal fountain, the bridge that spans two years as an instant.

What a giddy boy I am! Heading blithely into shattering loss.

A quick hitch took me to Santa Cruz the next morning, and when there was no answer at Tim’s phone I got another hitch that dropped me at the campus amphitheater, which was starting to fill for a concert. I held forth with a short aria to make my presence known, and settled near the back for the concert.

The afternoon was warm. During the break, a lean, shirtless male figure began to materialize out of the many such below, heading toward me. Its identity resolved itself as slowly and inevitably as a crystal coming out of solution. Bearded, tanned, headbanded, shoulder-length hair sunbleached, Colton walked toward me, expressionless. Our eyes met but not in depth. Glued in silence to my seat, heart pounding, mouth agape like a ventriloquist’s dummy, I stared as he stood briefly before me and then dropped quietly onto the seat at my left.

He put an arm on my shoulder and immediately withdrew it. My eyes moved between him and heaven. His stayed fixed on the stage below. He acknowledged having heard me sing, and we made small talk about Tim’s whereabouts.

We went back to a lemonade stand and lingered in the shade. Colton knelt on the grass and stared straight ahead. I parked myself in front of him and tried to forego the appeal of his bare torso in favor of his face, his eyes now veiled by Ray-Bans. Furtive, they met my gaze for a while despite the shades, and only a corpse could have missed the feeling my look conveyed.

“Stephen, if you only knew,” he said and looked away.

A long silence before I said, “How was your trip?”

“It’s still going on.”

More silence, then he stood up and without a word walked away, all the way down to the front row, without ever turning around.

Colton’s back.

Tim rounded us up after the concert and brought us to his house in the redwoods. It was a beautiful environment for having a miserable time. That only added to the bittersweet equilibrium; the joy generated by my response to Colton’s presence balancing the despair generated by his total indifference to mine. This day and the next were sunk in the shadow of the old “defensive, isolationist WASP Colton” he once was, back before the dawn of ’70. He refused to display even the most common signs of friendship, and our conversations were joyless exercises in the kind of post-collegiate sparring I thought we had evolved beyond.

His negativity shocked me. I knew nothing of Lynn, but it was clear that the loss of her love had severed his connection to Divinity. I was determined that the evident loss of his love wouldn’t do the same to me. But he was deaf to anything I could say about the values I remembered us sharing with such kindred wonder. He was in no mood to have the gold in him brought out. His response was a sharp, “Your net didn’t catch.”

“You don’t know the difference between a net and a bridge.”

“Well, the bridge span isn’t long enough.” 

He was cold, and he brought out shivers of cold in me. Flashes of violent hatred toward his maddening rejection surged through me, a black bitterness it was difficult to paper over with smiling benignity. I realized it was imperative to split. I thanked Tim, wished Colton well, said he knew where to find me, and hit the road.

Waiting for a ride along 101, I not so much sang as bawled my rendition of “Vissi d’arte,” Tosca’s glorious aria of self-pity. “Perché, perché, Signore?” “Why, why, Lord, do you repay me like this?” Wrenching emotion, and a climactic high note to wring tears from an icicle. Though I was too mad to cry.

                                                                     58.

At Shrader Street I was met by Rich, who knew the back story for my trip to Santa Cruz. From the look on my face he didn’t need to ask how it went. I’m sure that in all the months of our growing friendship he had never seen me so despondent. I was physically and emotionally exhausted, as well as confused, hurt and ashamed. I went up to my room and lay in bed not knowing what to do.

Rich came upstairs with a bowl of soup so fragrant it reminded me that I was hungry. But after a few gulps I put it aside and burst out crying. I told him everything that happened. I couldn’t understand how someone I loved so deeply, someone I thought of as a truly wonderful person, a soul brother, could be so callous and mean.

Rich responded with great wisdom. If there was even a whisper of “I told you so” in his mind, it never surfaced. He was so full of love and understanding that the words washed right into my heart. He observed that the truly wonderful person was me, and if anyone failed to see that, it was their problem and not mine. He wrapped his arms around me, lay beside me, held me as I sobbed and shook, and as my grief poured out his unwavering empathy brought light to the empty place in my soul. I counted myself lucky to have such a friend in my hour of need.

Next morning I had to go to Berkeley for a Chamber Piece rehearsal, but I got up early enough to consult the I Ching first. I asked the oracle’s judgment about my future relationship with C. I threw the hexagram “Splitting Apart.” It said: ONE SHOULD SUBMIT TO THE BAD TIME AND REMAIN QUIET…TO AVOID ACTION IS NOT COWARDICE BUT WISDOM.

The off-Broadway cast album of Godspell was being played everywhere that spring, and as I walked from Shattuck Avenue to the theater, I began to sing “Prepare Ye 

the Way of the Lord” softly at first and then with all my might. The catharsis of this simple, joyous tune was clearing space in my mind. I understood “the Way of the Lord” to be the channel through which Unconditional Love flows through the world. “Preparing” it meant locating and taming whatever in your own psyche obstructs that flow. On the Mount of Olives I had learned that this was my purpose in life, and the heartbreak I felt in Santa Cruz was a symptom of how I had let a romantic obsession get in the way. “If you can’t laugh at it, you’re too involved in it,” I recalled. I had to let it go. Completely.

Walking down Shattuck and singing, it dawned on me that if Colton renounced my friendship altogether, if he went back East without a word, if I never saw or heard from him again, that would be fine. Life would go on. My happiness and fulfillment didn’t depend on him. Whatever it was that had turned him into so egregious an asshole, if I allowed it to crush my capacity for joy I was an even bigger asshole. Joy is my birthright, and it’s up to me to claim it. This moment belongs to me. Prepare ye the way of the Div.

When I arrived at rehearsal, cast members remarked that I was glowing and looked different. What had I been up to?

“I think I just dropped seven years’ weight.”

For the next week I made no attempt to contact C. Chamber Piece went into tech and started previews. Audiences were spellbound. Word of mouth filled the houses before we even opened. John’s rehearsal games had helped create an ensemble that grew tighter, funnier, more intimate and alive with every performance. The work was fulfilling.

Then Colton called. Another Santa Cruz friend had told him about Shlomo, who would be appearing at the House of Love and Prayer in two days. Was I interested in meeting them there? That night Chamber Piece would be dark. I said sure.

Jimi, Rich and Mevlana (moral support?) accompanied me to the HLP, which was packed with devotees Jewish and otherwise, and Colton and friend showed up shortly thereafter. Shlomo was in top form, spirit blithe, his soulful tales and parables interspersed with music that got everyone singing and clapping and dancing with glee. It was magical, and Colton was anything but melancholy. He was once again the bright light I had bonded with, though now I saw him with a new set of eyes.

He met the other housemates and asked if he’d be welcome to stay at Hotel Shrader if he drove up next week. We parted with warm hugs and the next day Colton called from Santa Cruz and plans for his visit were laid. Hanan – CONFESSIONS - 128

Not only the plans were laid. It turned out that Colton and Jimi had chemistry. C & J. An unforeseen opportunity to walk the talk where my recent breakthrough was concerned. A cosmic joke which in this instance I was willing to laugh over. Days passed affectionately, yoga and meditation in the back yard, exploring the Park and the city, visiting New Age bookstores and head shops, meeting cool friends, rapping and cooking and listening to music and rapping more. The breadth and sensitivity of Colton’s mind, the clarity of his eyes, were whetstones to me (undiminished by the decades, Div be praised). Of course I felt a smidgeon of disharmony when at evening C & J said good night and withdrew to her room. But that, too, could be let go of. Their attraction to each other, however ill-timed, wasn’t an affront to me unless I chose to see it that way. (I’ve always liked the Clifford Odets character who says, “You can’t insult me, I’m too ignorant.”) And they were tactful.

Then came the summer Solstice and in the wee hours the three of us drove across the Bridge to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Marin Civic Center, dropped acid en route, and climbed the hill above the dome and golden spire in time to peak for the sunrise. The shortest night of the year was over. The sun restored warmth. We hugged and laughed and whooped the praise of the power that made us. At some point the love swerved into a more exploratory physicality, more commonly known as a three-way. C & J & I. Or you might call it a trinity. A divinity trinity. Quanta of love energy older than Atlantis.

Unlike my virginal encounter with Mike and Joanne, clothing wasn’t much dispersed; it was broad daylight after all. But it was the fulfillment of a thousand dreams, too. And, as it turned out, an opening to the next step forward in a brand new direction.

Shortly after this electric Solstice, a young fellow stepped briefly but decisively into my life. His name was Jordan and he was a street performer. We had originally met through Annabel, and at the beginning of July he showed up at a performance of Chamber Piece. He was leaving town and wondered if I still worked the street, because he had a terrifically lucrative spot he thought I could put to good use.

And so the Golden Gate Ferry Terminal came into my life, and I into its.

                                                            GOING TRIBAL

                                                                    59.

Saturday mornings if the weather is promising I don my street show costume and take the 7 Haight bus downhill and east to the foot of Market Street. My costume, working from ground up, is a pair of high Robin Hood boots in brown suede, narrow-wale corduroy jeans with sergeant stripes appliquéd in front, some kind of ethnically colorful tunic cinched at the waist with a woven sash, and crowning my furry face a broadbrimmed brown leather hat with an aviary of feathers sprouting at one side, pheasant, crow, hawk, eye of peacock and others, held together with a glazed ceramic butterfly pin.

In San Francisco in the seventies this getup attracts little attention on the bus.

(When I finally retired from the Ferry and tried to calculate how much coin and cash had landed in that leather hat over the years, it was in the hefty thousands. Putting the hat to use was, needless to say, the climax of the act. To continue:)

I get off at the end of the line and walk across Justin Herman Plaza, on my left the brand new Hyatt Regency (freaks call it the Typewriter Building), ahead of me the multilevel Vaillancourt Fountain (a tilted boxy mess), and sprawled all around the pink brick plaza a community of artist-vendors offering such wares as leather-craft belts and bags, woodwork, metalwork, beadwork, ceramics, macramé, textiles, photography and a feast of other arts. The 280-pound Dolores, red-faced, blue-eyed, waist-length orange-blonde hair worn in pigtails, sporting one of her tie-dyed T-shirts in vivid hues, an orgy of color in every size from obesity to infancy on display at her booth. John, dewy-eyed Jesus look-alike, maker of intricate string mandalas, woven on tiny nails arranged on a black felt background, hand-drafted without computer assistance, a much quieter orgy of color. Many others, each unique, all friendly. More than a community. A planetary tribe.

After passing the fountain, I wait at the intersection beneath the double-decker Embarcadero Freeway (little imagining that someday an earthquake will force its removal), and when the light changes I cross to the north end of the venerable Ferry Building. The clock tower says ten. The first boat of the day departs at ten-forty. Though seldom as big as the next two boatloads, there’s usually an adequate line of Sausalito-bound passengers waiting in the chute under the awning. This permits me to start my day with an easy vocal warm-up and no need to project much. If at this hour there’s thirty people, there’ll be twice that number by the time the gate opens and they start to load the boat. More on a really busy morning.

My asphalt playing area is bounded by wooden beams a foot thick, lying end-to-end to form a crude barrier that keeps cars out (lucky me). I step onto a beam where I can see the whole line, and vice versa. I turn my back, close my eyes, and whisper, “May this performance demonstrate the beauty, joy and freedom of the Holy Spirit.” I turn back around, find the place in my voice where the more or less correct pitch lies (this becomes exact once I acquire the concertina), and I give forth, in rotund Italian, the tail end of a showstopper aria from Don Carlo, eight bars of Verdi razzmatazz with a couple of startling high notes that always turn heads. Then I declaim:

“Brothers and sisters!

“San Franciscans and visitors!

“Fellow humans!

“The Phantom Baritone strikes again.

“With a few operatic tidbits, and other musical treats,

“For your listening pleasure,

“As you await…

“The boat!”

I hop off my platform and immediately start to sing Verdi’s familiar “La donna è mobile.” Big hand. Lots of smiles. A man flings a couple of quarters at me.

“Control yourself, my friend. Your time will come in due course. In fact, you can all participate. Which brings me to my next number. Something I picked up in Mexico. Everybody can sing along, but first I have to teach you four Spanish words. The first one is ‘Ay,’ repeat after me”–they do–“and the next three are ‘Yi,’ ‘Yi,’ and ‘Yi.’”

Those in the know guess the melody at once, and pretty soon the whole line is practicing the chorus of “Cielito Lindo.” (Actually there’s always a few holdouts, but they can write their own book.) Then to set them up I sing the eight-bar verse and right on cue the passengers pitch in with their “Ay-yi-yi-yi.” I invite them to repeat. Inevitably I look disappointed and say, “That was terrible. If you can’t sing better than that, I won’t give you any money.” Hanan – CONFESSIONS - 131

Big laugh. And so it goes with “Sorrento,” “O Sole Mio,” “Santa Lucia” (which I translate as “Over the gentle waves / Breezes are playing / Soon on the open deck / You will be swaying,” etc.), “Funiculi, Funicula” (“Some say the world was made for fun and frolic / And so do I”), the Drinking Song from La Traviata, here a little Mozart, there a little Donizetti, until I spy the great white hull of the Golden Gate Ferry rounding into view beyond the audience. Counting the passengers on deck I can pretty accurately calculate the unloading time and consequently how soon to launch into my spiel:

“Now folks, I can no longer ignore the puzzlement I see on more than a few faces. No doubt some of you are wondering: why, on a balmy day like this, is this young man wearing…a hat?” I sweep the hat grandly off my head and forward into an upturned position, batting my lashes. And hold for the laugh.

“It’s not what you think. I’m down here this morning on the instructions of my therapist, who suggested that this would be a good way to overcome my natural shyness.” I do shameless pseudo-embarrassment shtick, pouting head hung despondently, one foot rubbing the calf of the other leg. Then snap out of it:

“And it seems to be working! But just to make sure, I shall pass along the line, and for those of you who wish to show your appreciation, this is the real audience participation part of the program.”

I sweep the line and collect. If the line is very long, I’ll leave the hat balanced firmly on the fence by the gate so I can keep singing and give the latecomers a reason to donate. When the last passenger passes through, I retrieve my hat, extract the bills (mostly singles but occasional fives and tens and even twenties!) and put them in face-up order. Coins go into a large cowhide change purse bought from a Plaza craftsman. Then the boat whistle blasts, I hop back up on the barrier to face the departing ferry, fire off the last bars of “Santa Lucia” and wave my hat to my benefactors, who are smiling, clapping, taking pictures and cheering back. A crowd has been transformed into an audience, and all it took was me being me.

I sit on the barrier and count change, arranging the quarters in two-dollar piles. Round trip to Sausalito costs $1.50 and the ticket office needs a steady supply of quarters, which I happily provide in exchange for big bills. We swap the same quarters, some blotched with daubs of red, back and forth all day long. 

Enacted four or five times a day (depending on turnout), every Saturday, Sunday and Holiday, this routine supports me in opulent hippie style for over five years. It pays for a lot of free time, including a four-month vacation in Mexico, devoted to mastering the concertina

But I get ahead of myself.

                                                                        60.

In mid-July Rich and I loaded up our backpacks and hitched down to Big Sur, a jubilant first for us both. The mountains soaring above the sea, headland after forested headland plunging into the blue water, made a mind-blowing sight. We hiked up to Prewitt Ridge in the Los Padres National Forest, an “undeveloped” campsite 3000 feet above sea level. We watched the sun melt into the vast Pacific below us. Next morning, where the ocean used to be there was only an enormous fleecy bedspread of white fog as far as eyes could reach.

Our angle on the fog seemed a perfect metaphor for the relationship between the awakened spirit and the ego, the small mind lost in the veils of its isolation, watched with regret and compassion by the Greater Mind, the life-giving sun, lighting the open sky with a fullness whose healing power the ego fails to imagine. Wrapped in fog’s egowoven veil was the old American culture, with Nixon preparing to run for a second term (and simultaneously masterminding the Watergate cover-up that would cost him his office), with bombs falling on southeast Asia, with urban rioting, protest and racial invective vying with consumerist indoctrination for the public’s attention, an interminable charade of woes, lies, neuroses and inanities. And yet…And yet…

From our vantage it was obvious that beyond the fog an unsuspected, soulenhancing reality is readily available. Just past the cloud of unknowing. President and plumber, pope and atheist, scholar and cop have a direct channel one and all to this realm of truth, this joyland, this unity state of mind. For millennia it’s been the special province of shamans, prophets and artists. Now it appears to be spreading across the planet. Waves of agony and chaos notwithstanding, prophecy and art, love-propelled, are emerging from unlikely places. The American evolution. In a culture seemingly hooked on destructiveness, creativity will sprout, rise and play a transformative role. Can I play, too? Can I help? 

The higher you get, the more you can see. From Prewitt Ridge the green-and-gold of forest and parched field stretches in every direction, valleys and ridges undulating like the drapery of an enormous giantess. City life is forgotten as the surrounding natural beauty brings me back to earth’s harmonies. Under cover of night, a cloudless, moonless sky parades every constellation of the Zodiac except Gemini and Cancer, as well as Jupiter, Mars, Saturn, and shooting stars galore. Dawn brings the return of terrestrial Creation, magnificent and ego-free, calling forth my own deepest Self.

FLASH: connecting to that Self is so much more challenging in a city because the glut of ego-driven behavior creates an isolating vibration to which the ego avidly responds. Birds of a feather, or misery loves company. Yet even within the urban fog zone there is potential, plenty of it (Hotel Shrader being just one example), as individual awakenings tilt the culture toward kindness, fellow-feeling, reverence for nature.

Rich took the opportunity to read passages from Walt Whitman—my first exposure to this prophetic poetic wizard. We were in the shade of a great ancestral tree that dominated the ridge. All the same our perch above the coastal fog was no Nirvana. By late morning the temperature had reached 105° and, as our canteens rang hollow, the absence of water made the moisture below us look pretty appetizing. The drier we got, the more we fantasized about permutations of pineapple and melon salad. Mangoes. Nectarines. Tomatoes. The slurpier the better.

We were on the verge of maddening thirst when an old Ford pickup came into view, bearing a Santa Cruz hippie pair called Wayne and Mabel. The gallon of cold water they shared with us was as tasty as any ambrosia. That night we combined our resources for a campfire feast of figs, bread, cream cheese and oatmeal cookies, and the following morning they gave us a lift down to Kirk Creek, a few hundred feet above the fog’s upper reaches.

It was still sunny, but much cooler, with a welcome moisture in the air. We wandered into a redwood grove nurtured to lushness by the coastal climate, a storybook setting of flowers, ferns, fallen trees, and what begs to be called a babbling brook, since in our adjusted state it literally gave the impression of spewing forth chat in a language unknown.

By the time we were ready to hit the road for home the fog had burned off, and we were once again treated to the shifting vistas and coastal swerves of Highway 1. We rode 

in the VW bug of a man in his late thirties who managed to seem both jovial and sinister at the same time. He had the unlikely look of a bearded Richard Nixon, and his driving was as devious as Nixon was. He was headed nowhere in particular but spent his day driving in either direction on the highway, chauffeuring hitchhikers. When speaking of people or things he disapproved of, his tube-curled tongue would dart out of his mouth and back again, like a frog nabbing a fly. We were glad to part company when he dropped us off at the entrance to the Esalen Institute, that sleek, swank mecca of humanistic therapy.

Here we watched the full palette of sunset color wash over the sky and paint a reflection upon the canopy of returning fog. We dropped by a psychedelically painted school bus whose occupants, Paul and Bill, invited us in to supper. They were omnivorous feeders at the spiritual smorgasbord, and we had a great time exhausting the menu from astrology to Zen. They told us that the management of Esalen was obliged to open their doors at 1 a.m. for locals to enjoy the hot springs.

There was another development to rejoice in. We heard George McGovern had won the Democratic nomination. A real peace candidate had a shot at the White House.

                                                                     61.

As I write this, the media are noting the fiftieth anniversary of JFK’s 1961 inauguration. I shared that bitter cold but sunlit moment in a nearby press box, covering it for my junior high school paper. Only a few days before, Eisenhower gave the farewell address which put “military-industrial complex” into our collective lexicon. In 1972, a mere eleven years later, the M-IC’s costliest devices had failed to subdue the Vietnamese insurgency or prevent massive American casualties, and Senator McGovern’s platform included an across-the-board 37% reduction in military spending over three years. Was it his resounding defeat that squelched the possibility of any similar proposal ever since? And allowed for the budget-busting “defense” increases with which Ronald Reagan stabbed the body politic?

A McGovern defeat was the farthest thing from the collective mind of Esalen’s throng that July night. We were oblivious to the damage done by the post-midnight delay of his televised acceptance speech, and the Eagleton debacle was weeks in the future. To the devotees of self-actualization, bodywork, Gestalt therapy, and all-inclusive bliss who Hanan – CONFESSIONS - 135

lounged in the hot springs at the edge of a sea-battered cliff, Senator McGovern was the next best thing to the Messiah. Obviously, given the outcome, they didn’t represent the American people as a whole. Apart from us gate-crashers, the Esalen crowd was composed of those whom Spiro Agnew mocked as “limousine liberals.” At Esalen the personal was not only political, it was pricey.

Nevertheless, they were advocates for democracy, social justice, and an end to the war. By 1972 enough critical thinking had spread through the culture to make it obvious, to those among the well-off who didn’t have a stake in the combat, not only that we couldn’t “win” in Vietnam, but that the government’s justification for the war was a tissue of bullshit.

McGovern tapped into this sentiment during his primary run by quoting a scene from Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, which deals with the 1692 Salem witch trials. Near the end of the play, when twelve prisoners have been executed for witchcraft and seven more await hanging, the town fathers tell Danforth, the presiding magistrate, that public support has evaporated and the executions need to be, at least, postponed. Danforth replies that to do so would undermine the authority of the court and the government. “Reprieve or pardon must cast doubt upon the guilt of them that died till now.” In other words, rather than admit wrongdoing, the state must persist in it, to save face.

The McGovern candidacy looked like a chance to reverse this lethal course, even if it meant exposing some ugly truths unexamined by mainstream America: the hypocrisy of power, the folly of militarism, the fomenting of anti-communist hysteria to disguise the alliance between state policy and corporate greed. McGovern stood for the possibility that as people and as a country we could do better than this, that the morality of Martin Luther King could trump the amorality of Richard Nixon. Needless to say, the movement fared about as well as the Christians under Nero.

Why, in an overwhelmingly Christian country, is Jesus’ injunction to Love One Another given so little public weight? Lip service, if that? As McGovern and his anarchic children’s crusade were derided from pulpit after pulpit throughout that summer and fall, I weighed this question more and more. It occurred to me that I should maybe improve my acquaintance with Christianity.

In Be Here Now, Ram Dass recommends reading those sections of the Bible where Jesus’ actual words are printed in red. Absorb the teachings directly without the theological overlay. But first, as a lifelong admirer of George Bernard Shaw, I pulled out his collected Prefaces, a volume heavier than the New Testament by several pounds, and read the Preface to Androcles and the Lion, a lengthy and fascinating analysis of the rise and spread of early Christianity. It was a revelation (no pun intended). Shaw dissects the Gospels with a surgeon’s skill, separating the ethical and instructive from the legendary and miraculous. (“If his mission had been simply to demonstrate a new method of restoring lost eyesight, the miracle of curing the blind would have been entirely relevant. But to say ‘You should love your enemies, and to convince you of this I will now proceed to cure this gentleman of cataract,’ would have been, to a person of Jesus’ intelligence, the proposition of an idiot.”)

Yet in humanizing Jesus (he calls him “an artist and a Bohemian in his manner of life”), Shaw stresses reverence for the Life Force (God the Father, Div, whatever) whose innate presence Jesus proclaimed. Shaw, the notorious rationalist, doesn’t blush to speak of “the miracle of the seed, the growth, and the harvest, still the most wonderful of all the miracles and as inexplicable as ever.” Then, after portraying Jesus as a profoundly radical thinker with a great sense of humor, he shows how Jesus’ emphasis on interpersonal conduct was corrupted by Paul and the theologians into a dogmatic belief system about damnation, salvation, resurrection and “faith” which Shaw dubbed Crosstianity.

Blown away by the range and originality of this Preface, I opened the Gospel of Matthew for the first time in my life and discovered the complete Sermon on the Mount. It made so much sense! I couldn’t understand why its principles weren’t more widely practiced in a culture that claimed Jesus as inspiration. Why doesn’t everybody live like this? Why does our economic system pay so little heed to it? As a prescription for leading a life of joyous usefulness, free from anxiety and grudges, focused on the present, promoting peace and trusting life, unconcerned with status, it was sublime. Filter out the patriarchal jive about divorce and adultery and it was like an Esalen seminar that didn’t cost anything.

It seemed to me that Alan Watts was right: creating a worship cult around the author of these ideas instead of putting them into daily practice was like climbing up a sign post instead of going where it points. It brought to mind the then-current New Agey adage that if the founders of all the world’s religions ever met they’d have a terrific time comparing notes; their disciples, on the other hand, would start a war. Hanan – CONFESSIONS - 137

A few days later I ducked just such a skirmish in a first encounter with a Shrader Street neighbor. The house next door contained three floor-thru flats, and one of them was occupied by a small group of what back then we called Jesus freaks. They looked like garden variety hippies, but whatever cosmic consciousness encounters they may have had were channeled into an exclusively Christianist framework. This I discovered when I came home from the park one afternoon and found one of them sitting on his front stoop. After a short exchange of greetings, he got right to the point.

“Have you invited Jesus into your heart?”

I briefly pondered what an accurate response might be, and said, “As I matter of fact I have, but he said he wouldn’t come unless I also invited Moses, Buddha, Mohammed, Krishna and Lao-tse.”

He looked dubious and told me, “I don’t think the Lord would have said that.”

Certain that this exchange would go nowhere if taken literally, I replied, “Well, he didn’t speak English so I may have gotten it wrong.”

I withdrew into my house. A few weeks later their group dispersed and that was that.

                                                                       62.

Hotel Shrader was also going through some personnel changes. During the summer of ’72 Rich got a call from his former girlfriend Janet, who had traveled with him through Mexico and then stayed on to explore Guatemala and Honduras on her own. She was back in the USA, California in fact, and eager to resume their relationship. Rich had undertaken brahmacharya, a yoga-inspired celibacy, but once Janet appeared at the door, brahmacharya went out the window.

Janet was slender, blonde and blue-eyed, a classic American girl next door. And she literally was next door. In Rich’s attic space just across from my room, they fucked like bunnies, only louder. Their amorous clamor was dismaying at first, an inescapable reminder of my own dearth of nookie, but there were compensations. Janet was lovely to look at, soft-spoken, amiable, funny, enchanted by San Francisco, and a terrific cook, with a banquet of culinary ideas she brought from travel in Central America. She joined the household with ease.

Then Jimi announced that she was moving to Berkeley for the fall semester, to shack up with a boy she met at school. There was no waiting list for her room, so we posted a notice at Stanyan Street Natural Foods. It was answered by a stout young woman called Emily whom everyone liked. She plunked down a month’s rent and said she’d move in the following day.

She arrived with two items she hadn’t mentioned, entities never previously encountered in our house. One was a small television. The other, even smaller, was a baby.

To the rest of us it seemed odd, to say the least, that Emily hadn’t mentioned this baby, an eight-month old boy whose unlikely name was Pockets. It’s hard to say which was less anticipated, the baby or the TV, though the TV was definitely less welcome. But since Emily promised to keep both of them in her room, we gave her a pass. Hippies are like that. Or were.

It didn’t last. The unanticipated accessories were only one aspect of Emily’s pervasive negligence. As single mothers go, she was pathetic. Pockets was a quiet baby, never underfoot because he didn’t crawl yet. But Emily took advantage of his immobility by leaving him alone in her room, with the blaring TV for company, while she went out looking for work, or whatever else she was up to.

This was a psychic burden on the household as well as an aural one. From behind Emily’s door the TV’s unrelenting blather was a nuisance and it continued even when she was home. We believed that most of America was narcotized by television, and starting an eight-month old down that particular road to serfdom was a harbinger of worse things to come. Talk about an antidote to consciousness!

As days passed, it was obvious that Emily wasn’t so much a cute airhead as a loose cannon. She reneged on the basic agreements about meals, neatness, dishwashing and other chores, always using Pockets as a convenient excuse. She was furtive in conversation, especially where the baby’s father was concerned. The term “passive-aggressive” wasn’t widely in use at the time, but if you looked it up in the dictionary there might well have been a picture of Emily. A far cry from the departed Jimi.

In her absence we had a house meeting and unanimously agreed she had to go.

As senior member, it fell to me to break the news.

I hoped to couch the ejection in impersonal language, but it was tricky to calibrate. Taking a higher consciousness viewpoint with someone who doesn’t share it (or pooh-poohs it) is fraught with peril, as New Age partisans have discovered time and again. Un

less you scrupulously walk the talk, it’s easy to appear arrogant, sanctimonious and smug. But how do you tell someone you’ve invited into your home that her conduct and vibes are unacceptable, without violating the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount? How do you deal fairly with someone who’s acted unfairly? And what karma would we generate by kicking out a hapless single mother and her infant, even if its name was Pockets?

In the event, it was easier to avoid ethical philosophizing altogether and lay some of the blame on ourselves. “Emily,” I told her, “we really weren’t prepared to have Pockets in the house, or a TV.” I tactfully omitted any suggestion that preparing us might have been her task.

“I didn’t think it was that big a deal,” she shrugged. In later years I might have asked what was she smoking, but since back then we all were, the phrase didn’t come to mind.

“Yeah, well, I’m afraid it is.” There was silence as she considered the implication.

“I guess I could get rid of the TV.”

“Actually, we think it would be better if you found another place to live.” The bullet was bitten.

“Do I have to go right away?” Interesting that she didn’t say “we.”

“Oh no,” I assured her, grateful for a way to appear accommodating. “You’re entitled to the month you paid for.”

“I don’t want to be here if I’m not welcome.” There was a petulance in her tone that offered a possible key to the disappearance of Pockets’ father.

“Well, it’s really up to you. We’ll refund the balance if you find something sooner.”

She did and we did. It was the first eviction in the history of Hotel Shrader, and the last.

                                                                          63.

Roberta, her replacement, was a gem who stayed for almost a year. Back in Minnesota her name was Robin, but, like so many Bay Area newcomers, she highlighted the change of place with a change of name. She was movie-star gorgeous, except there was no manufactured glamour in her beauty; it poured straight from her character. Tall, with chestnut brown tresses parted in the middle, warm brown eyes, a generous smile lighting Hanan – CONFESSIONS - 140

her oval face, she exuded gracious serenity and a sense of groundedness perhaps the legacy of a long-past Lakota ancestor. She was in this world, but not of it.

She had a brief fling with Mevlana across the hall. Recalling their original names, Rich dubbed them “Bob ‘n’ Robin.” Once it ended by mutual consent, it didn’t screw up their ability to remain pals. The era of Rich, Janet, Roberta, Mevlana and me set the standard for the Yellow House at its best.

The common room, directly beneath mine, overlooked the back yard from a broad, cushioned window seat at the base of a pair of tall windows. The molding around them continued as a motif around the room, culminating on the opposite wall in a mantel counter and built-in bookshelves. The original redwood had been painted over in the Twenties, when apparently such idiocy was in vogue. We occasionally discussed the effort and cost that stripping all that redwood would entail. It never happened.

As we sat around the room listening to records—the albums conveniently fit the built-in shelves, with the turntable on the counter beneath—and rapping, it was clear we had to do something about the crumbling panel on the wall that divided us from the kitchen. A door cut in this wall near the hallway entrance left enough room on its left for a couch and a wall hanging, but on its right the wall ended abruptly after three feet and opened onto the hallway. Above the wainscoting there was a pleasant and useful sconce, but the plaster in a three-foot square panel at the bottom was grossly gouged and pitted. The easiest way to fix it would be to cover it up. (A scheme that would shortly spell doom for the Nixon Administration.) But with what? At that level, fabric or art would get filthy.

Upstairs under the rafters in the far reaches of the attic was a four by three foot mirror in a simple wood frame. I found it when I moved in, the diagonal crack running from top to bottom obviously the reason for its abandonment. One day I remembered it and proposed we break the mirror into free-form pieces and glue them onto the panel downstairs in whatever form the pieces would evoke.

Practical Janet asked what was the use of a mirror you had to crouch on your knees to look at.

“Curtailing vanity,” Roberta said.

Rich suggested we spackle the most egregious spots first. Next to one of the garage clowns Mevlana found a can of fire-engine red glossy paint, and thought as a background color it would call attention to the mirror mandala, which apparently was about to exist. As soon as the spackle dried I painted the panel (I’m meticulous with corners) and was immediately sorry. That red was relentless. “”Tibetan Red,” Mevlana called it. “Ouch Red,” Rich preferred. Mevlana said wait till it’s just background, ye of little faith.

One morning when the ladies were at their jobs, Rich and I carried the very heavy mirror downstairs and Mevlana, the butchest of us, volunteered to strike the first blow. We wrapped the whole thing tightly in newspaper, lay it flat on the common room floor, and Mevlana, with hammer and chisel and a deft touch made three sharp taps across the surface. He unwrapped it carefully and we started sorting the shards by size and shape in bewildering variety. There were lots of clean breaks and no evident splinters, however close we looked. Lots of interesting sharp angles with asymmetrical sunburst potential. No circles, but two jagged pieces sort of complemented each other in an angular yin-yang way, and they were designated central.

Shuffling and shaping shards on more newspaper, the three of us collaborated on a layout that took about half an hour to please, with about two dozen assorted pieces, large and small, of mirror-backed glass. We placed our collective art project carefully on the floor at the foot of Relentless Red.

“Of course, you have to imagine it vertical,” I helpfully observed.

Roberta and Janet made a few adjustments when they got home and after dinner that night Mevlana got out the epoxy and we took turns transferring the shards to the wall. The result was smashing. (Ha.) But it really was. By reflecting the floor it made the common room stretch. The broken pieces formed a shifting mosaic from any angle. At certain times of morning the sun would hit it and scatter glimmers of reflected light far and near. If you sat down to look, your face broke up into two dozen pieces, interlaced with a far-out abstractly shaped network of a vivid and mesmerizing red.

Vindication Red, it became. And we took great pleasure in timing how long it took newcomers to notice our floor-level mirror mandala. Nine out of ten visitors crouched, knelt, stooped or sat in front of it.

Household bliss was contagious. Dinner guests quickly adapted to our custom of holding hands around the table in silent blessing at the start of dinner. One night Rich had a dream about a house with a self-filling refrigerator, and that about summed it up. With a minimum of effort and anxiety, a beautiful family was creating itself. 

                                                                     64.

Thanks to Rich the back yard was now a pleasant, grassy lawn with strawberry plants spreading along one fence. Thanks to everyone we were sharing delicious, festive meals, hearty laughs and illuminating conversation. Thanks to the Sausalito Ferry crowds I had enough money to purchase extensive leisure and I could start writing the play I’d been thinking about for over two years.

As a wee kid in Hebrew school I learned a traditional jingle which translates as “David, King of Israel, lives, lives, and goes on.” When the Mount of Olives reoriented my life in April 1970, I felt instantly that King David was present. Jerusalem for millennia has been called his city. As I walked its streets later that day, I heard kids in a school yard intoning the same jingle, improvising dance moves to its hand-clapping rhythm.

Back at the hotel, the inevitable Bible was for once a sought-after tool (this being a kosher hotel, the New Testament was unavailable). In 1 Samuel, 16, I found the high dramatic scene where David first appears. The place is Bethlehem, and he’s herding his father Jesse’s sheep when the holy prophet Samuel (the Gandalf of his day) appears out of the blue. King Saul’s reign is foundering, and Samuel is on a mission from Divinity to find a successor. After rejecting each of David’s seven older brothers, he identifies the runt of the litter as the chosen one. He anoints David in full view of his family, and the narrative thereupon states that “the spirit of [Div] came upon David and was with him from that day onwards.”

That was good enough for me.

Over the next few days I read the entire David story and was captivated. A few weeks later in Cambridge I was reading it aloud to Colton as he painted a Tarot deck between tokes. Who doesn’t appreciate the sheer chutzpah of facing Goliath with a slingshot? And the drama of becoming palace harp player to medicate the bipolar King Saul, forging a bond of brotherhood with Saul’s son Jonathan, a bond tested to its limit by Saul’s homicidal paranoia, having to flee for his life on numerous occasions, escaping by dint of quick wit and bold action, while somehow finding time to write the Psalms, a cycle of devotional poetry as lovely as any the world has ever known.

I promised myself that one day I’d express my thanks by retelling his story for the contemporary stage, and spread a little blessing in the process. I felt summoned to this.

In the late summer of 72 it was time to begin. Hanan – CONFESSIONS - 143

Chamber Piece had been an enormous hit at the Magic Theater and a positive experience in every way. The top brass of ACT came and showered us with praise. I saw not only how the David play could fit on the Magic Theater stage but how perfectly every actor in Chamber Piece matched a role in the story (I would write the title role for myself; no ego there).

And bear in mind how the odds against McGovern seemed to echo the tale of David and Goliath, at least among those of us rooting for the giant’s fall. (Little did anyone guess that the lethal slingshot would come from Nixon’s own hand, in the guise of a boomerang.) I imagined that if I could get the first draft finished in time it might influence the election result. (No ego there.) As a matter of fact I did complete the David & Goliath sequence (a Bread & Puppet homage) prior to November 7, but Nixon won anyway.

Nevertheless by the Holidays I had a finished two-act play in front of me, in longhand, in a lined, 100-page spiral notebook with a green cardboard cover. I called it David Dances.

It borrowed the scene structure of a Shakespearean chronicle play, shifting from place to place on a simple unit set, contemporary lingo mixing with heightened speech and even song, with an ensemble performing in smaller roles and functioning as chorus or participants in scenes of ritual ardor (a bow to the Living Theatre).

In the Bible, the context of the David and Saul drama is an invasion of their land by the Philistines, who continue to harass Israel even after the Goliath fiasco. With the war in Vietnam still raging, it was easy to imagine the Philistines as a technologically superior power meeting the dogged resistance of haphazardly armed locals. Hence I chose to dress military personnel, from Saul on down, in fatigues and have them carry guns (careful always to call them “weapons”). One inspiration was those medieval paintings of Bible scenes with onlookers wearing a mix of ancient and up-to-the-minute gear.

At first, I opened the play with King David reminiscing toward the close of his long life, but the body of David Dances sticks to his early years, ending at thirty with accession to the throne, when he dances at the head of the procession (in the buff, the Bible suggests). Years in power would corrupt David (Bathsheba, anyone?) and treachery (Absalom) would stun him. In David’s life there’s drama enough for at least two more plays, but the one I actually wrote ends with him dancing, an avatar of the new. 

For above all, I saw the legend of Saul and David as a vision of the old order’s passing, the breakthrough of a loving, Div-intoxicated consciousness as fear brings about its own preordained demise. Enact such a drama on stage and let life imitate art in the onlookers’ minds, and thence spread to the wider world. This is my quest. This is the life within me responding to the life around me.

The personal element drew me no less than the mythic; Saul may be a tragic companion to Priam and Lear, but I couldn’t miss the similarities between Saul’s sudden storms of rage and the ones I grew up with; there’s a lot of Jonah in Saul and, along with his menace, I tried to understand his sorrow as I wrote.

When the last page was done I invited the household to hear me read it. Once everyone could gather, it went over big time. Not least, they laughed at all the jokes.

I felt as though I’d given birth.

                                                                      65.

It was the first full-length play I had written since a freak eruption at the age of eleven. As a kid I had an alarmingly keen interest in Aesop’s fables, to the point of finding out everything I could about him (a freed slave, hobnobbing with the best minds of ancient Greece) and collecting all the facts or legends into a three-act melodrama called The Slave of Iadmon. I went on to write all sorts of skits and parodies for school shows, sketches for the Lampoon and assorted Harvard revues, but David Dances was something else entirely: a claim I was staking to being a playwright in real life.

At the time I had no idea that this claim would put an end to my years at Shrader Street. But even then I knew it would be smart to get briefly out of town, just to stow the manuscript for a bit before taking a fresh look. January was too raw and rainy even to think of playing at the Ferry, and I was fascinated by Rich and Janet’s sunny accounts of Puerto Vallarta on Mexico’s Pacific coast, a few hours’ flight to the south. Roberta recommended a small village near Vallarta called Yelapa, devoid of cars and full of cool hippie expatriates. I looked at the funds at my disposal and decided to splurge for a week.

Puerto Vallarta was great. I even got laid. The fellow (I forget his name–how sad is that?) was staying at the youth hostel where I spent my first two nights and then he went home to Vancouver. In the meantime I made friends with a married American couple who had a house of their own down the block. Their names were Jim and Terry and they were older, in their late thirties. They invited me to stay in the guest room of their lovely, airy home. Ceiling fans, pastel walls and bright cushions, a lush private courtyard with fruit-bearing orange and avocado trees.

They were a fascinating pair, members of a rootless generation too young for Pearl Harbor and too old for Woodstock. He was a writer who lived off his wife’s money. Both of them were drunks. Jim loved good talk and wanted to be hip and liberal but a demon interfered. He was a congenial tour guide and a charming host, until his after-dinner boozing unleashed waves of self-loathing dressed as world-weary cynicism. Terry, for her part, was cynical around the clock. Though redeemed by her love of classical music. She had dozens of cassettes, and the more we listened the less we argued.

Their friend next door was a much older American woman called Katie. She had a warm spiritual aura that provided a welcome alternative to Jim and Terry’s discord. A retired painter, one of whose works hung at Nixon’s San Clemente White House, Katie took an instant liking to me and asked me to sit for her. We scheduled an appointment for the end of the week, after I’d had my fill of beach time.

The beach was amazing. The Pacific was a lot warmer than at the edge of San Francisco, where even in summer I seldom ventured past ankle depth. At Vallarta the allure of tropical waters snared me for life. The fierce angle of the sun was higher than I’d ever seen, the sky brighter, the water clearer, the sand finer. Glory in every direction. Miles to the west the distant horizon line was broken by the looming Marietas Islands. The far-flung arms of the Bay of Banderas were shimmering sentinels reaching north and south, and east of the bustling town were lofty mountains clad and crowned with the curvy green of palm trees. Could Yelapa really be better than this?

It was. A remote village on the edge of the jungle, it was built on a hillside rising steeply from a sheltered cove at the southwestern end of Banderas Bay, accessible only by boat from Vallarta. The ride took forty-five minutes, passing by a spectacular group of island cliffs called Los Arcos as well as the occasional breaching humpback whale. Once the Vallarta packet came to rest there wasn’t another internal combustion engine to be seen or heard for miles around. The loudest sound was the tumble of surf on a broad and pristine beach, mixed with the shrieking of boobies and pelicans.

Roberta had instructed me to look up a retired administrator from UC Santa Cruz named Isabel. Mention her name to anybody and they’ll point her out, she said. Isabel lived in a sprawling palapa high up the hillside, which was open all the time. Literally. It had no walls higher than a couple of feet (for keeping out the pigs that roamed throughout the village), out of which sprang intermittent posts that supported a roof of palm leaves. Ocean breezes circulated throughout the space. Laid-back Polynesian splendor was the order of the day chez Isabel, and she invited me to partake for as long as I wished.

I spent one night there, devouring the warmth, the stillness, the magnificence of sunset and dawn, above all the friendliness of everyone I encountered regardless of their native tongue. My singing made a hit. Next day I took the boat back to Vallarta, promising myself that some day I’d come back to Yelapa for a longer stay (a promise I kept before the year was out). I tried to convey the Yelapa experience to Jim and Terry, who’d never been there. Jim was interested but Terry pronounced the scene too primitive for her, as she subsided into another tequila daiquiri.

Next day I sat for Katie in the shade of her patio. She set up an easel and spent an hour or so making a life-size portrait on paper in conte crayon, filling the time with questions about my life story and answers about her own. She combined the wisdom of a crone with the graciousness of a queen. Besides her painting career she’d been a celebrated interior decorator in Hollywood but left it all behind after she felt a spiritual call to study organic farming. She gave me a lot of tips that came in handy when spring planting time arrived at Hotel Shrader.

When at last she invited me to get up and see her handiwork, I was blown away. The portrait, which ended at the shoulder line, captured an expression that was not so much a likeness as a summons to higher clarity. There was a deep serenity to it, an effortless confidence. The mouth seemed resolute but free of tension, the large magnetic eyes (deftly highlit) fixed on some distant lofty goal. Beard and wavy hair had a biblical grandeur. She flattered my nose and my already thinning hairline, but she also mined something heroic and inspiring that over the years (she gave me the drawing to take home) has served as a challenge to live up to. Limned by a woman of seventy, is that brave, innocent youth still inside me today? Can I still draw on his essence in spite of lofty goals unmet? Can I still see the world as he did, and dream his dreams? And not just me. In the private spheres of thought, how many minds of my disheartened generation ponder questions like these? 

With Katie’s treasured gift carefully rolled in a mailing tube I arrived at Shrader Street the following day, bearing Mexican shirts or sashes for everyone in the house. I was all set to pull David Dances out of hibernation, maybe send it to the Magic Theater, when a big surprise announced itself. Lottie and Jonah were coming to San Francisco.

                                                                             66.

It was nearly a year and a half since we parted at the Long Beach train station, but we had spoken often by phone. Not always pleasantly. I would call them on the eve of all the Jewish holidays, if only to offer reassurance that I’d be observing them. (Not that they were likely to approve of the raucous goings-on at the House of Love and Prayer, even if they recognized the liturgy.) I called dutifully on Mother’s and Father’s Days, despite my countercultural conviction that both occasions were the fraudulent spawn of the greeting card and florist associations.

When I called in late summer of 72 to notify them of my first $200+ weekend at the Ferry, their enthusiasm was sadly short of mine. I should have known better. I guess I imagined that a sum which for the time was quite impressive would outweigh their repugnance at my busking in the first place. It didn’t.

When they called me, it was invariably Lottie on the phone. She quickly got used to the other voices that might answer (the phone was in the kitchen, on the wall next to the porch door) and would greet them with “Is Stephen there? This is his mother.” I would then take the mouthpiece out to the porch and shut the door, as everyone did who wanted privacy. Whether by phone or by post, Lottie always acted the intermediary between Jonah and me. She signed every letter Your loving parents, but he never wrote a word. On the phone I’d always inquire after his health, but he usually declined to speak with me.

They really, really hated the way I was living. Every call or letter occupied the same limited range between pleading and insisting (depending on the ratio of shamemongering to anxiety) that I change my ways and come back to the fold. Look, they were getting older and I was their only child. I could hardly blame them. Unless considering someone a pain in the ass is a form of blame. There was just no way to convince them that American consumerism had created a lethal culture and the only way forward was via a radically alternative value system replacing competition with cooperation, pretense with authenticity, and so on and so on. Not for them. The hippiesque fusion of Utopianism with critical thinking left them, like so much of middle America, perplexed and skeptical to the verge of hostility, and beyond.

Nevertheless I was looking forward to their visit. Glad they were in good health (sixty plus seemed so old back then) and hopeful that when they saw what a nurturing environment Hotel Shrader was, they’d mellow out somewhat. And there was the distinct advantage of introducing them to the splendors of San Francisco, and in February no less, when the first petals of spring are everywhere.

Mevlana drove me out to the airport to meet them. The presence of this very tall and lanky man, a perpetual Birkenstock wearer with a slightly graying ZZ Top beard, turned out to be less intimidating than I feared. Mainly because they were too shocked by me to notice him. My hair was a year and a half longer and too wavy to stay in a ponytail for long. Jonah always traveled in a jacket and tie and my attire was at once more casual and more colorful, although as conservative as I could then muster. Probably a military tunic of the Sgt. Pepper variety. Did I even own a necktie any more?

We brought them to a kosher guest house they had located, up on Parnassus not far from Shrader Street, and Mevlana left me to help them get settled. The waves of rebuke flowed immediately. I insisted that this was a happy city and they needed to spend at least some of their time soaking up the happiness for themselves, so why not start now?

It was a bright sunny day in the low 70s. I proposed that we take a walk downhill and visit Golden Gate Park on the way to having dinner at Shrader Street. They were dressed for East Coast winter and changed into lighter garb. We were high enough on the hill to have a great view to the north, and I pointed out the towers of Golden Gate Bridge rising beyond the Presidio tree line. I reminded Jonah of the foreign diplomats who used to tell him of San Francisco’s beauty, and he instantly quoted Mikhail Menshikov, the Soviet Ambassador who frequented his pharmacy, on the subject of the unique light.

“Let there be light,” I enthused, “and plenty of it.” And there was.

The Park was in radiant bloom. We detoured through the Japanese Tea Garden, as irresistibly quaint as always, with apple and plum blossoms at peak display. Lottie always liked flowers and the glassed-in Conservatory wowed her, especially the giant rain forest flora in the central gallery. Jonah was impressed by the towering philodendrons, banana plants and huge palms forming a canopy high above us. Large vegetation does have a way of communicating essentials. Unfortunately, the route home inevitably passed a rundown block that after time spent in the park always made me wonder “Who invented squalor?” I hurried Jonah and Lottie along till we came to the corner that offered a view of 724 Shrader in its full yellow and white gleam, with Mevlana’s van jutting from the garage driveway.

“That’s our house,” I pointed, ushering them toward and inside it.

The combined aromas emanating from the kitchen greatly enhanced our entrance. There had been a comprehensive group housecleaning the day before, sweeping in corners seldom swept, polishing the mirror mandala. Mevlana and Roberta were in their respective rooms, doors open, and waved hello as we walked by. Introductions as we passed down the hall to the common room and kitchen, where Rich and Janet were cooking. More introductions. Up the U-shaped stairs to my room.

Lottie stared at my mattress. “You sleep on the floor?” She made no inquiry about the Kabbalistic Tree of Life stenciled on the wall above my head. He was silent.

The dinner that awaited us was sumptuous, as often, and vegetarian, as always, so kosher issues didn’t intrude. Making a spinach pie the previous Thanksgiving I learned to use phyllo dough; to welcome Jonah and Lottie I had assembled two rolls of strudel that morning: a traditional apple one and my own recipe, a roll filled with dates, chopped pecans, toasted coconut, carob chips and grated orange peel. These went into the oven once we arrived, to be served warm with vanilla ice cream after Rich and Janet’s meal: lentil soup with leeks and green tomatoes, fresh guacamole with homemade chips and a broccoli-cauliflower noodle casserole baked in dill-nutmeg-gruyere sauce.

Mevlana and Roberta were going Sufi dancing but he offered Jonah and Lottie a ride up the hill first. Since their body clocks were still three hours ahead of us they were more than ready for bed and accepted his offer. I made a date to pick them up next morning for a day of sightseeing.

“They’re nice,” Janet said, once they were gone.

“Can be,” I quasi-affirmed.

                                                                            67.

The next morning dawns even warmer and brighter. I dress for a performance I’m scheduled to give in the afternoon, as there won’t be time to change. Consequently I show up at the guest house wearing a Russian-style high-collared minstrel shirt of plum colored satin with pirate sleeves and a tight cuff. I explain the occasion of the outfit and hasten Jonah and Lottie outside. Dressed as I am, the longer we loiter behind doors, the likelier a Jonic outburst of some kind. Keeping them occupied with touristy stuff is not just advisable but easy and we make all the usual stops: City Hall, Nob Hill, Russian Hill, Coit Tower, cable cars uphill and down (but purposely avoiding the Golden Gate Ferry terminal–they know me there). We have lunch at Fisherman’s Wharf, where, alas, any kind of shellfish is kosherly de trop, but the salmon and flounder are delicious.

My engagement that afternoon is in the Outer Richmond at a home for aged Russians. An administrator there caught my act at the Ferry and left a note in my hat asking if I would sing to his charges. They have no money to offer, but hey, why not do a mitzvah when the parents in particular can watch? The administrator greets us and Jonah instinctively addresses him in Russian. They go at that for a while till our host brings over the geezer whose birthday we are celebrating this very day. Eighty-five, without a tooth in his head. He makes Jonah feel young and they schmooze in Russian for a while.

Finally the host gives me an intro and for a mostly female audience of about thirty whose average age is way up there, I sing for about fifteen minutes, unaccompanied, some Italian arias, “If I Were a Rich Man” from Fiddler on the Roof, I forget what else. The audience is highly appreciative (wheel chairs are thrown) and then we all sing Happy Birthday to Yascha and have cake. As we leave, the host presses a folded ten-dollar bill in my hand.

I hail a cab on Geary and we’re off to the nearby Palace of the Legion of Honor. The site and the surrounding landscape are magnificent and the museum galleries opulent (though my Vertigo reference draws a blank). They haven’t said anything about the performance. It’s been a long, tiring day and when they opt for dinner back at their lodgings, I say goodbye till tomorrow. They intend to meet me at Shrader Street after breakfast. “We have something we want to discuss with you,” Lottie announces.

They arrive at 9:30. Everybody’s out but Rich, upstairs in his room reading. Jonah, still in jacket and tie, and Lottie in a beige knit dress, settle onto the common room sofa. She asks me to put some music on, preferably Vivaldi. There isn’t any, so I put on the closest thing I can find, The Incredible String Band. What the fuck am I thinking?

Unperturbed, she begins by saying that the conclusion they have drawn from my performance yesterday is that I have real talent and should be training it at any drama or Hanan – CONFESSIONS - 151

music school of my choice, not wasting it here in this awful house.

I thank her for the generous offer but question why this is an awful house.

“You could be doing something so much better with your life. You could make something of yourself. Don’t you want us to be proud of you?”

Before I can respond, Jonah blurts out, “Can’t you see he doesn’t care about us? I told you this was pointless. He’s a selfish spiteful ungrateful bastard. But no, you had to come all the way out here and investigate for yourself. I hope you’re satisfied!”

His voice rises ever higher and I ask him to lower it. “Please, Dad,” I say, “this is a house of peace. Can you just respect that?”

“You have the chutzpah to scold me for respect? You who don’t know the meaning of the word!”

And in the stillness that follows, Lottie repeats the question that stopped time almost three years before, and does so once again. “Are you a homosexual?”

The swiftly disappearing room turns into a vast, empty, pale blue space where there’s nothing but me and the promise I gave myself not to lie next time. This is next time.

The moment doesn’t seem to open into eternity as on the Mount of Olives. The epiphany is brief, yet it holds all the world, the kernel of every choice there could ever be between truth and deception, integrity and pretense. That simple. Honest. As I must be now.

“Yes.”

I feel suddenly transported to some lighter celestial body where gravity is reduced and breath refreshes more deeply. On the other hand, I might pass out. Jonah and Lottie look like the wind has been knocked clear out of them. He is first to speak.

“Well you certainly didn’t get it from me.”

This response strikes me as so clueless and absurd that I could burst out laughing if the situation were any less fraught. Instead I hold silence, wondering who will say what next. Lottie pipes up.

“Do you have affairs with men?” she wants to know.

“Not yet, but I’m workin’ on it,” would be the perfect reply, but I don’t have that much presence of mind. I just say no. 

It then occurs to me that I want some help or congenial company or just a way out of the pressure cooker the common room has turned into. I charge upstairs and tell Rich that I’ve just come out to my parents and would appreciate it if he would intervene.

Rich is as indifferent to gayness as everybody in my circle, and therefore a bit reluctant to get involved in what for him is a non-issue. “What do you want me to say?” is his reasonable reaction.

“I don’t know. They look like their world just ended. Maybe you could change the subject.”

“I’ll come down as soon as I think of something.”

I return to find Jonah and Lottie sitting exactly as they were when I left. At least she isn’t crying.

“I asked you once before and you said no,” she finally says.

“I didn’t think you were ready for the truth.”

“So now we are?” “I don’t know. That’s up to you. But I can’t lie any more about who I am.”

At this point Rich appears, announces that he’s going to make a cheese and sprouts and tomato sandwich and would anybody else like one.

But no one has any appetite. They get up to go and ask me to pick them up in a couple of hours. Of all things, Lottie wants to go see the Pacific Ocean. I just want to get stoned.

                                                                         68.

I can only guess how they spent the intervening time, but it obviously included a decision to drop the subject. They made no reference to sexuality for the remainder of their stay (that Egyptian river comes to mind). “Why must they be so Victorian?” I wrote in my diary when I was fourteen, and they never evolved. After Jonah died in 1993, Lottie told me she had refused intercourse with him ever since 1960; their conjugal situation surely soured their perspective where sex was concerned. Confirming that their son was queer didn’t help. It was a calamity not only because it made me a Bible-flouting pervert in their eyes but, perhaps more importantly, because just when old age was lurking around the corner it killed their hope of posterity (this was decades before gay parenting or same-sex marriage were even dreamed of). 

Oddly enough, now that the cat was out of the closet, for the rest of the visit we had a good time, or pretended to. I showed them Muir Woods and Berkeley and the grand homes of Pacific Heights and Seacliff. We went to Chinatown and they decided to try Chinese food (presumably being the last Jews who hadn’t) as long as no meat was involved. I took them to a place on Powell Street and ordered a variety of vegetarian dishes and a whole crispy sea bass. Jonah was always a fussy eater (he thought mushrooms were “slimy”) and the first dishes to arrive looked too unfamiliar so he only ate the unadorned white rice, with feigned gusto. Lottie gobbled everything and finally asked him if he was really content with just the rice.

“It’s very bland,” he admitted.

“You’re supposed to put the vegetables over it,” she explained, now a Mandarin maven.

When the fish was brought to table it looked recognizable enough for Jonah to try a bite. He loved it. She loved it. By the time we were done it looked like a skeleton after a piranha attack. My fortune cookie, which I couldn’t help but read aloud, advised that “Honesty is the best policy.”

One last revealing incident when they left for home: I accompanied them to the airport and walked them all the way to the gate, as was feasible in those days. Just as at the Long Beach train station, we had parting hugs, only this time Lottie suddenly seized my wrist and with her other hand pushed my shirtsleeve up to the elbow, silently scanning my arm for telltale tracks.

I was stunned, but strangely amused. That she could even suspect me of shooting up seemed so ridiculous that I made no comment at the time. On the way home I thought about the gulf that yawned between the reality of casual marijuana users and the fictions of anti-pot propaganda that helped to demonize everything else the counterculture stood for. I wondered if the even wider gulf between visionary and hidebound viewpoints could ever be bridged. I’m still wondering. Why else write this?

                                                                      69.

With the coming of spring, Shrader life took on a new focus: the garden. Jimi came over from Berkeley with an illustrated book about Biodynamic-French Intensive gardening, an organic technique for getting maximum yield from small spaces. Colton, who was now living in Santa Cruz with a woman named Karan who kept horses, brought up a vanload of manure. We turned it into the compost bin which over the winter had broken down into a beautiful steaming muck.

We decided to plant vegetables in the front half of the yard and flowers around the perimeter, keeping the remainder for sunbathing, yoga, tai chi, picnics and such. For the vegetables we created six raised beds with troughs between, which would facilitate weeding, as well as stretching and aerating the roots. Crowds were returning to the Ferry and with the cash rolling in, it was my pleasure to splurge at the local nursery for gardening tools, seed packets and flats. I even sprang for two fruit trees, apple and apricot, which within a couple of years flowered and went on to bear immensely gratifying fruit. I imagined myself a gentleman farmer, though a rather funky gent by conventional norms.

This was a far more elaborate enterprise than the previous year’s garden, which, beside the strawberries, didn’t yield much more than the knowledge that summer in the Haight was too foggy for tomatoes or melons to thrive. For the second go-round we planted peas and discovered they’d produce all summer long. Beets, broccoli and chard did well, and some zucchini approached two feet in length before we harvested and stuffed them. We even discovered the aptly named San Francisco Fog tomato, small but very tasty. And from the pit of a date in the compost, the shoot of a palm tree emerged, though not for long.

Looking after a vegetable garden was one of the most satisfying experiences of my life. I can still remember the joy of first tasting a beet pulled from ground planted and tended by our own hands, in direct relationship to what Shaw called “the miracle of the seed, the growth, and the harvest.” And throughout the process there were lessons to learn, not always easy ones. Weeding comes to mind. Aggressive four o’ clocks tended to choke anything we planted along the north fence and were hard to get rid of. Roberta and I once spent most of a day tearing them out, along with every other weed we saw. No sooner had we congratulated ourselves on a job well done than they sprouted up again. Day after day.

I took the whole process metaphorically. The psyche is a garden, too, with some elements worth encouraging and others less welcome. Constant attention is required to prevent the latter from overwhelming the former. One day, kneeling and weeding for the umpteenth time, I realized that this is what the I Ching meant by the daily renewal of character: one revelation on a far-off mountain may clear away an undesirable psychic tangle, but maintaining and even cultivating the resultant clarity is the task of a lifetime.

On the other hand, I never found any metaphorical relevance for the revolting presence of snails. It turned out they were the bane of gardens all over San Francisco. They were ravenous nocturnal pests, vanishing at dawn like vampires, leaving trails of slime after the night’s banquet of vegetation. Marigolds we had planted as aphid-deterring companions to the tomato plants became flowerless stems overnight. Emerging leaves of chard were smitten with holes like the death car of Bonnie and Clyde.

We were determined to avoid toxic chemicals but the alternatives were imperfectly effective. Surrounding the endangered plants with crushed eggshell (a surface supposedly inhospitable to snails’ tender undersides) was temporary at best. Rings of salt were likewise scattered by wind and weather. Saucers of beer buried at ground level attracted and drowned an intoxicated few, but had to be constantly replenished. At one point we even considered buying a goose, but its likely effect on the miserable barking dog next door ruled that out.

Finally we resorted to predawn raids. Mevlana and I came out with flashlights, picked the intruders by hand, and dropped them into a bucket of water. Dozens of them. It was disgusting, and the presence of slugs made it worse. So much for romanticizing nature. (Years later I had an even more memorable encounter with Mother Nature’s yucky side, my left leg painfully blistered by a scuba collision with a Portuguese man-of-war. It ached for weeks, but that’s another story.)

All this invertebrate slaughter forced us to reconsider some basic hippie doctrine about where to draw the line of non-violence. Those Hindu fakirs who scrupulously refrain from stepping on ants or swatting mosquitoes probably never had a garden plot decimated by slugs. Dream as we may of a perfect world stocked with easy answers, it’s not the one we live in. And even where perfection exists, it’s a hint more often than a remedy.

                                                                    70.

At the end of May, 1973, everybody but me moved out of the house.

Rich and Janet broke up and she left. Mevlana went to a Sufi meditation retreat at Chamounix in the French Alps and though he planned to return at summer’s end he 

couldn’t afford to keep his room without subletting it. Roberta went to spend the summer at her family’s cabin in Minnesota, not sure she would return. Then Rich got a job teaching physical science at a parochial school in Baranquilla, Colombia.

The bond Rich and I had forged in our year together was very special, giving every indication of lasting a lifetime (as indeed it has). We wanted to mark his departure with a special adventure, and we set forth on an eight-day wonder hitch through California. Big Sur sparkled with spring bloom and at Joshua Tree a full moon lit the desert night, but the climax was a few days camping among the giant sequoia of King’s Canyon. In the shade of the planet’s oldest and biggest living inhabitants, I studied the Tarot deck that I had just finished hand-painting after a year-long correspondence course. Rich lent his finelytuned Jungian mind to linking the ageless wisdom of the cards to the natural living splendors roundabout. The world was enchanted and fine.

On the date appointed we reluctantly set out homeward, stopping for an evening bite at a small gas-and-snack joint east of Fresno. The place was too cramped to accommodate our backpacks and sleeping bags, which at the owner’s request we left outside by the door. When we were finished and paid up we left the place and discovered that our possessions had vanished. A couple of cowboys sped into the night in their pickup truck.

“My Tarot cards!” I yelped. They were in a side pocket of my pack. A year of meticulous labor and study trashed by faceless varmints who didn’t give a shit. I was devastated. Violated. Forced to confront an unfairness that had no place in my view of reality. Forced once more to accommodate, like it or not.

We called the police, told the story and gave them our phone number, but taking note of our appearance they doubted the packs would ever be found, and they were right.

Luckily the night was warm and in a nearby grove of trees we slept on a tarp the store owner lent us. When morning came, bright and blue, we discovered the grove abounded in oranges and avocados, breakfast for the picking.

Glum finish to an otherwise glorious trip. If only we hadn’t stopped at that joint. If only this, if only that. But what’s the point of ageless wisdom if it doesn’t help you to let go and live in the moment? We looked at each other, at the clear blue sky and the lush groves of orange and avocado and then, in an image right out of a Chaplin comedy, we shrugged and walked unencumbered down the road. 

Back at home I went to the health food store on Stanyan Street and posted a notice reading “Room Available June 1st in Spiritual Household Where Every Day Is Christmas.” What did I know from Christmas, you may ask. Five months earlier, as a consequence of Janet’s Yuletide zeal, I’d had my first experience of how lovely Christmas at home can be. At the crack of December she put up an advent calendar (I didn’t spot the tiny windows till she began to open them). She started baking holiday butter cookies and the aroma filled the house for weeks. Rich and I went to Golden Gate Park, found a seven foot long branch of Monterey pine abandoned by the pruning crew and dragged it home. It fit perfectly in a corner by the common room window and we decorated it with popcorn, cranberries and little Buddhist prayer flags.

Given the improvised tree, it made perfect sense for a bunch of pagans to celebrate Christmas. Given that good cheer prevailed at Hotel Shrader all the time (except when drowning snails), December 25 was just more of the same with a few extra goodies and gewgaws. And what use is a god who’s born only once a year anyway, instead of daily, hourly, minute by minute?

So I posted the notice as written and fortunately there were plenty of applicants, none of whom had to gain the approval of any householder except me. Of course, I had to calculate how the new mix would work. It was a little like improvising a recipe for a dish I would not just eat but live with. It helped to distract me from obsessing over my lost Tarot deck (once the transition was complete I started painting a new one).

Mevlana left shortly after Janet. Rich was around for another week and then it was just Roberta and me. Our series of farewell dinners, joyful but macabre, smacked of “Ten Little Indians.” Finally Roberta left at month’s end and I was alone in the house for a day and a night.

And that was more macabre. Walking around in the stillness and looking at the mainly empty rooms reminded me oddly of my blindfold outing with Mevlana. I could see, yet I felt as isolated as when I couldn’t. I had the same impulse to listen carefully to everything, upstairs and down. It was easy to imagine that there were angels in the rafters just out of earshot, whispering stories about all the tenants who had ever lived here, back before the earthquake, or during the World Wars. Who was here for the 1934 General Strike? Who was here for the Summer of Love? 

I tiptoed around with a candle in my hand and listened very closely, but the only sounds I heard were the shifts and creaks as the house breathed. Could anyone really own this house, or was it a larger living being, a host, like the planet itself, through which cycle after cycle of human individuals steadily passed? Or was I just really stoned?

Rich’s attic space went to a transplanted Englishman called Peter who was deeply involved with Transcendental Meditation. Unlike the Beatles, he hadn’t imbibed TM directly from the Maharishi, but his eyes were filled with light all the same. He was a recent UCLA graduate with the same barber as Jesus and a disposition to match. Soft-spoken, unfailingly witty, heartfelt and empathetic, he flipped out (in his understated British way) when he saw the garden and couldn’t wait to start digging.

Mevlana’s room was claimed by Elana, the woman from the sister commune across the street whom I knew from the House of Love and Prayer. I also knew she was tidy, funny, and a superb cook (fondues her specialty). Her household was breaking up and she was happy to move in, even if it was only temporary. “What isn’t?” as she Zenly opined.

Jimmy and Inga, young marrieds from Oklahoma, took the salon room across the hall where Roberta had been. They were an odd match, like Jack Sprat and his missus. He was a beanpole with long stringy blond hair and looked like R. Crumb drew him. She was short, plump and dressed like a bank teller, which she was. He was perpetually easygoing, uneducated but deeply curious about everything, a friend to all. She was chronically uptight and, as it turned out, dubious about communal living, though Jimmy loved it. For him every day was Christmas. For her every day was Ash Wednesday.

They brought a TV along, though it provoked less censure than Emily’s, for one thing because there was no baby sitting in front of it throughout the day, but mainly because the Senate Watergate hearings were just being televised and none of us could get enough of Sam Ervin and the ill wind blowing toward Nixon’s White House. At last, something worth watching. And no commercials!

Inga took the TV when she left a few months later. She and Jimmy had been high school sweethearts and married before they realized their lives were doomed to diverge. Over the summer the sound of argument emerged from their space with increasing force. Inga did most of the shouting and only rarely did Jimmy match her in volume. He was no door slammer. 

One day he came out to the garden where Peter and I were shoring up the drooping tomato branches. “I guess you guys know Inga isn’t very happy these days.”

“How are you doing, Jimmy?” Peter asked, ever solicitous.

“Hey, I love it here. This house is great and it just makes me sad that Inga can’t appreciate it.”

I asked if there was anything we could do to help.

“We’ve decided to separate. I think it would have happened anyway. Moving here just speeded things up. But I want to stay if that’s okay with you.”

I looked at Peter and we spontaneously pulled Jimmy into a hug. We’d have to see if Elana would mind being the house’s sole female, but the answer was predictable. She would no longer be across the hall from Inga’s tantrums. And her temperament already showed a certain inclination to play Queen Bee. She was delighted when Inga left, but not nearly so much as Jimmy.

He channeled whatever disappointment he was feeling into an outburst of creativity. Jimmy painted on the flat surfaces of rocks. He collected them in diameters from five to ten inches across and adorned them with miniature landscapes in bright acrylic colors. Irregularities in the surface would inspire him to create cliffs, trees, waterfalls, towers, rainbows, forts, comets, dazzling in their variety, detail and charm. In no time his room was filled with them, giving all the delight art ever needs to give.

“You should take these down to Embarcadero Plaza,” I told him. “Come to the Ferry with me and I’ll introduce you to a craftsman who’ll tell you how to get a vendor’s license.”

The rockscapes, as he called them, were an instant hit with tourists and locals alike. He couldn’t turn them out fast enough. Some weekends he pulled in as much as I did.

At least I didn’t have to shlep rocks around.

                                                                             71.

Mark Twain famously remarked that the coldest winter he ever spent was the summer in San Francisco. This made sense within the fog belt, but down by the Embarcadero the weather was beautiful, tourists jammed the Ferry and I was getting better and better at turning a crowd into an audience. By now I had a large repertoire of favorite arias and ditties and was learning how to goose the crowd pleasers. I also learned that on very busy days if the return boat took longer than usual to unload, throwing in “The Impossible Dream” or “If I Were a Rich Man” was worth an extra ten bucks in the hat every time.

Passersby would occasionally toss a business card or scribbled phone number into the hat, as well as money. Though I hoped that at least one such would guide me to the fabled paradise where true love and torrid romance were one and the same, no such luck. What I mostly ended up with was invitations to sing at a party or benefit. One of these was a hippie double wedding high on Mount Tam on a magnificent early September day, hot and clear with a glorious view of city, bay and ocean. The two couples and the celebrant wore kaftans and beads and stood at the foot of a tree in a circle of ferns and flowers. The ceremony was attended by a director from ACT whom I told about David Dances (which the Magic Theater had considered “too religious”) and who asked me to send him the script. Months went by before I heard from him, but it turned out to be worth the wait.

Another gift that summer was someone’s extra ticket to the touring production of Godspell playing downtown. Despite the soul-saving benefit I had reaped from “Prepare Ye the Way of the Lord,” the show disappointed. It was tuneful and energetic but didn’t offer much mental stimulation. Too much candy and not enough meat (even for a vegetarian). But I ran into Roger, a Harvard classmate, who traveled with the show as an understudy and assistant stage manager. He was making lots of money but was otherwise royally bored with the work. If I were to work in professional theater as writer or performer, I wanted more than that. But what exactly? Would David Dances help me find it?

Meanwhile another hat-retrieved phone number led me to a couple of longhair gay boys named Blaze and Erik who had a mission. There was a shuttered movie theater on Haight Street, ironically called the Straight, and they were hoping to convert it into a community cultural center. They had arranged a benefit show at the Great American Music Hall and wanted me to participate. The performers were street acts: jugglers, clowns, mimes (ugh!), fire-eaters, acrobats and the like, with musicians thrown in for variety: ragtime piano, blues harp, even a brass quintet. The Human Jukebox did his Ghirardelli Square thing. I opened the show by confessing to the audience that I didn’t usually work indoors, and asked them to recreate the ambience of the Sausalito Ferry landing. One side of the hall imitated the sound of seagulls or waves crashing; the other made traffic noises, sirens, etc. They threw themselves into it with gusto and the evening took off from there. 

Blaze and Erik were very pleased and decided to produce an even more elaborate spectacle. They secured the U.C. Extension Campus theater and assembled a bizarre menagerie of performers for what they dubbed the Very Very Vaudeville Show. By far the standout was a Zen archer who called himself Adam Son of Ra. He was a huge African-American, built like a fullback with massive dreadlocks and a red beard. His “assistants” were six white women of barely marriageable age who lived communally with him in an arrangement that whiffed strongly of polygamy. When Adam took his position stage right, hefting a large crossbow with steel-tipped arrows, the ladies took turns in front of a board, stage left, holding balloons in a variety of alarming positions (above their heads, nestled at the crotch or, standing in profile, in their teeth) and waited devotedly, serenely for Adam to shoot the balloons from thirty feet away.

Throughout rehearsals Blaze and Erik kept telling us about Adam’s act, but he never showed up till the final dress. The tension as the rest of us watched him and his troupe prepare was almost painful. He never missed (just imagine the consequences if he had). The courage, confidence and mastery of everyone involved was awe-inspiring. At the same time, it was a tough act to follow.

What did follow it was a song I had written a couple of weeks earlier, one morning before I got out of bed. I must have been very stoned the previous night, because I dreamed of a cartoon turtle performing a striptease while singing “I’m coming out of my shell.” A burlesque-type melody was running through my head and I immediately wrote lyrics to anchor the tune. In the show we had a curly blonde, wide-eyed dancer who called herself Q. P. Dahl, as ripely voluptuous as Playboy’s Little Annie Fanny. I figured if Blaze, a master of wacky drag outfits, could design a plausible turtle costume and Q.P. stripped down to pasties and a G-string while singing the song, it would stop the show.

I brought it to Rob, a genial guitarist who was going to accompany me on the Gypsy Song from Carmen. He pointed out that my tune automatically self-chorded with three predictable blues changes, and we played it for Blaze and Erik and Q.P., who couldn’t wait to use it.

Singing with Rob confirmed my sense that my a cappella days were numbered. The recording a friend had made one afternoon at the Ferry suggested that some kind of accompaniment would really improve my act. With Rob’s instrumental support my voice was more relaxed and my phrasing looser. But guitar-strumming buskers were as ubiquitous as joints in the park, and I didn’t know what else might serve until one day on the way to rehearsal I spotted a concertina in the window of a Fillmore Street music store. “Perfect,” I thought, till I learned to my dismay how expensive they were.

The Very Very Vaudeville Show was a huge success, although at the first of three scheduled performances Adam Son of Ra nearly caused a riot. The tension we felt at the final dress was amplified by a packed house, who responded with boos, hisses and catcalls. Feminists in particular were outraged, screaming at the stage, demanding that Adam let the assistants shoot at him instead. Afterwards I suggested that Adam offer some introductory explanation of the principle behind Zen archery (briefly, that the archer and target become one), followed by a few passes at tacked-up balloons prior to the entrance of the ladies. With this adjustment the remaining shows went swimmingly.

As for the Turtle Song, it was a smash. Q.P. entered in a shell of olive green upholstery fabric covering her from shoulder to knee. Jim, the choreographer, backed her up with a line of four chorus boys in top hats, tails and ruby-headed canes, singing lyrics like:

Come on, baby, come out of your shell, We know that you’re a charmer Beneath your sturdy armor, Or:

Although you are reptilian We think you’re worth a million, And by the end, with Q.P.’s feminine pulchritude on substantial display, the audience went wild. Guys threw their shoes in the air. This is what success is, I thought; everybody around feels good. Profundity has its place, but playfulness should be close by.

At the cast party, I was approached by the stage manager. “I hear you’re looking for a concertina,” she said. “I’ve got a brand-new one I was given and never learned to play. You can have it for the price of an alto recorder.”

That turned out to be fifteen dollars, and it changed my life.

                                                                      72.

In the late summer and fall of ‘73, Reb Zalman was much in evidence at both the House of Love and Prayer and Hotel Shrader. Especially when Elana was around, because he was privately courting her (they eventually married). It was thrilling to be an intimate friend of such an inspiring teacher. An unrepentant hippie despite approaching age fifty, he put the high in High Holidays. His raps (no other word quite serves) reminded me of Buckminster Fuller, presenting a series of startling intellectual concepts persuasive enough to push the mind to a realm beyond rational thinking, where the head touches the heart. One of his experiments was to lead a liturgical service where every masculine pronoun referring to “God” was replaced with a feminine one. This is now standard practice in many New Age and Jewish Renewal communities, but at the time it was a revelation. A subliminal but enduring way for patriarchy to shore up its power is by portraying Divinity as one of the guys.

Zalman’s courtship of Elana led to her leaving the house and moving with him to Winnipeg, where he taught at the University of Manitoba. That same month (October) Roberta returned from Minnesota and wanted her old room back. Jimmy graciously volunteered to move into the front parlor, and there was more shuffling with yet another new and amiable face.

I had already decided to get away for a few months myself. I would go adventuring. Summer at the Ferry had been very lucrative and I had stashed a lot of acorns. I planned to take my brand new concertina to Yelapa and learn to play it, then travel further south and visit Rich at the school in Colombia, returning in April to serenade the next wave of tourists. I took it for granted no one would claim my spot.

There had been some forward motion with David Dances which also allowed for a break. In early October the phone rang and a voice said, “Hi, this is Bobby Bonaventura from ACT. We met at the wedding on Mount Tam and you sent me your play.”

“Sure.”

“I apologize for taking so long, but I had a huge stack of scripts to get through. I just read yours and I love it. Could you come in tomorrow? I’ll read it again tonight.”

“Wow,” I said, or words to that effect. Next day, the same day Spiro Agnew was forced to resign in disgrace (bringing joy to millions of nattering nabobs), I went to Bobby’s office. He was very excited about the play and lavished it with praise. ACT had a program called Plays-in-Progress where they produced new works by beginning playwrights in a black box studio. This season was already booked, but he wanted to schedule it for the coming one. Meanwhile, would it be okay if he sent it to the Squaw Valley Writers’ Conference, where they might do a reading next summer at Lake Tahoe?

It would be more than okay. It would be far out, man. 

A great day, all told.

At the end of October Colton called to invite me to Santa Cruz for a few days. He had gotten some peyote buttons which Karan wasn’t into and he didn’t want to trip alone. We fasted for two days prior but the result was disappointing: a pleasant buzz and a vivid sense of internal cleansing but nothing for Carlos Castaneda to write a book about. What was trippier in some ways was reading the Harvard Fifth Reunion Class Report, a redbound volume that had arrived in the mail (and updated would continue to do so every five years in apparent perpetuity). A sizable minority of classmates bore witness to countercultural values, spiritual breakthroughs, radical politics, environmentalism, or at least playing in a garage band, but most were pursuing well-trodden paths of business, law, academic or corporate security and marriage. Some were already parents! Or even divorced. Colton and I speculated much on what long-term changes our generation might bring as the awakening of planetary consciousness gained traction. (“as,” not “if.” Inevitability appeals to the young.)

Colton drove me back to the City and handed me a new book to read aloud en route. He had just acquired Shumacher’s Small Is Beautiful, recently published and already gaining momentum as the Bible of New Age economic theory. In his critique of consumerism-for-profit as a global system, here was the British Coal Board’s ace economist on the challenge of establishing what he called “the economic foundations of peace.”

“Where can one find the strength to go on working against such obviously appalling odds? What is more: where can one find the strength to overcome the violence of greed, envy, hate, and lust within oneself?

“I think Gandhi has given the answer: ‘There must be recognition of the existence of the soul apart from the body, and of its permanent nature, and this recognition must amount to a living faith; and, in the last resort, non-violence does not avail those who do not possess a living faith in the God of Love.’”

Schumacher’s ideas as well as his prose were spellbinding. A credentialed economist censuring the spiritual blindness of his profession! I read non-stop as Colton wound through the mountains, the sun’s low angle on fading shades of greenery confirming the perpetual cycle of seasons. Sometimes one or both of us would yelp “Yes!” or “Wow!” at a particularly persuasive insight.

At the entrance to 101 North, two freaky guys were holding up their “San Francisco” sign and we stopped for them. Like Colton and me, they sported shoulder length hair, unkempt beards, ponchos, gaudily patched jeans and sandals. They settled into the back of the van, the inevitable joint was passed around, and I resumed reading the chapter “Buddhist Economics”:

Buddhist economics must be very different from the economics of modern materialism, since the Buddhist sees the essence of civilization not in a multiplication of wants but in the purification of human character…As physical resources are everywhere limited, people satisfying their needs by means of a modest use of resources are obviously less likely to be at each other’s throats than people depending upon a high rate of use.

At this moment there was an interruption. One of the riders in the rear leaned forward and said, “Can I ask you something? Did you guys go to college?”

                                                                        73.

Once I decided to set out for Mexico at the end of November there was a lot to get done beforehand. Peter proved to be a model of both responsibility and enthusiasm where caring for the garden was concerned, and he volunteered to look after the rent, phone and gas/electric bills as well. I also told him I’d trust his judgment completely if it became necessary to find a replacement for someone moving out.

“Who’s taking your room?” he asked.

I hadn’t even thought of that. For over two years I had lived in that sweet gabled room overlooking the garden. It was office, refuge, chapel and shrine, and I wanted someone who would preserve the vibe. I found him in the person of a quiet boy named Tony from North Carolina who was in my Tuesday evening men’s rap group. A recent arrival to the city, he seemed trustworthy and genteel, and proved ideal for the space.

Part of the agreement with our benevolent landlord Mike was that he’d keep the rent low if we took care of domestic maintenance. For some time we’d been aware that the bathroom urgently needed treatment with mildew-resistant paint, and I roused everyone to pitch in and get it done before my departure. The bathroom, like every downstairs room in this pre-earthquake house, was ornamented with wainscoting, panel molding and rosettes, and we came up with a tasteful if psychedelic color scheme (white, mustard and fuchsia) that brought out the details. Scrubbing, scraping and scrupulous painting was a two-week group effort. When finished, the room glowed like the tunic of a 19th-century Austrian hussar. Jimmy even stenciled a mandala on the wall above the john. Tribal art wins again!

I bought the necessities for a planned four-month trip: a new sleeping bag, a new back-pack to mount it on, durable jeans and a thousand dollars in Traveler’s Cheques (which turned out to be exactly sufficient). Also a round-trip ticket from LA (cheaper). I went to the nursery and bought a few dozen daffodil, jonquil and tulip bulbs which I planted in the hope that they would rise in April to welcome my return. The Mexican consulate issued me a six-month visa. I listed my occupation as “entertainer.”

Thanksgiving came that year on the 22nd, the tenth anniversary of JFK’s murder. Despite the grim association we had a wonderful vegetarian feast which was also an early farewell party. I made spinach pie again, Roberta made her luscious ratatouille, and there was spiced butternut squash, a salad with homemade sprouts and the last of the garden lettuce, wine, fruit salad, pineapple custard pie and chestnut-puréed ice cream. On Friday Mae Margaret had us over to her house for the traditional version with turkey, mashed potatoes and gravy, candied yams, creamed string beans, stuffing, cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie. I had a feeling I wouldn’t be eating this way in Mexico or Colombia.

On Saturday I went down to the Ferry to start my seasonal closing weekend. The holiday crowds were large and generous but the Sunday show was completely rained out. Just as well, because on Sunday Rich called to say he had quit his teaching job and was on his way home to Ohio. Apparently the headmistress at the parochial school in Baranquilla was the pedagogic counterpart of Nurse Ratched in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and Rich couldn’t take any more of her bullying. He planned to lick his wounds and then investigate ashram life as a disciple of Swami Satchidananda.

For my musical travel plans this meant more time to spend in Mexico practicing the concertina with no deadline for South America. From what little time I had already devoted to the instrument, I figured I could get pretty good at it. Good enough to accompany myself come spring.

I found a ride to LA via the Haight-Ashbury ride board, leaving on December 2nd. I provisioned my backpack, tied on the sleeping bag and got a thumbs-up from the I Ching.

Then the driver called with a change of plans. His vehicle’s license plate ended with an odd number. According to the new rules occasioned by the OPEC oil embargo, he couldn’t buy any gas on an even-numbered date. Could we leave a day early, on the first?

We could and did.

                                                            MORE THAN MEXICO

                                                                          74.

A couple of days after arriving in Vallarta I ran into Isabel on the beach. She invited me once again to stay at her compound in Yelapa. When I told her I was contemplating a much longer visit she lit up (though not literally till we got back to the privacy of her palapa). “We could use some live music!” she said. Then she told me how to find a house of my own.

The “house” was actually four poles stuck into a leveled area high on the side of a steep hill, supporting a second-story sleeping platform accessible by ladder, with an A-frame palapa roof overhead and just enough space to hold the air mattress I bought for a dollar in Vallarta. The aptly named ground floor had a square table with a kerosene lamp and a box of matches on it, a hammock hung diagonally across the space, a broom, a shovel, and a low fence surrounding the poles, for keeping pigs out (they roamed everywhere). There was no running water (I carried it up by the gallon from town) and toilet facilities were anywhere on the hillside I found appropriate. That’s what the shovel was for, though on one occasion it proved unnecessary. I had just finished squatting behind a bush when a pig trotted up, grabbed the turd and split. The original recycling dump.

My landlord was an enterprising native named Juan who maintained a few places like this one (maintenance wasn’t hard) for the unending stream of hippies who passed through Yelapa. However Spartan the accommodation, for sixteen dollars a month it was a bargain, especially when you threw in the stupendous view. Welcomed by jubilant chirping, the morning sun rose over a range of mountains lush with palms and jungle foliage, from which a wide but wadeable river emerged. The view south was framed by the crowns of a couple of coco palms rising from the slope below me to nearly eye level. Beyond them the river opened into a lagoon, then continued westward towards the beach, which it bisected by pouring itself swiftly into the bay. The bay in turn emptied into the Pacific, shimmering with a trail of diamonds as the setting sun flamed into it.

This bay was home to dolphins, manta rays (I once saw a line of twenty baby ones leapfrogging over one another), egrets, pelicans, boobies, frigate birds and the fishes which sustained both them and the village itself. The men’s small boats went out every morning and returned bountifully low in the water. Evenings you could smell grouper, snapper, crabs and the occasional lobster sizzling on a hundred cooking fires. When the wind was still you could even hear the sizzle.

Juan didn’t fish. In addition to his real estate he kept a small stable and for a minimal fee would organize horseback excursions into the jungle. Along the river the trail was mercifully cool and shady till it reached the waterfall, a gigantic cascade into a deep green-gold pool surrounded by canyon walls. Flowers dripped from the rock surfaces. Swimming in fresh water was a refreshing change from the beach. (I would return frequently, on foot.) Higher up in the mountains we came upon remote ranchos where the men sorted ears of dried corn for the women to grind by hand into flour for tortillas. Their kid-filled houses were scarcely better equipped than mine, but they looked happy and full of life. “Who is rich?” the Talmud asks, and replies, “Whoever rejoices in his lot.”

On the return journey I did a great deal of operatic singing on horseback, which initially startled my companions but luckily not my horse. Juan’s aged uncle, whose smile was surprisingly warm despite the absence of several relevant teeth, dubbed me “Alegre,” meaning merry or joyful. I added the word to my steadily improving Spanish vocabulary, which at first was mostly approximated from Italian opera lingo.

Despite diversions like this, I managed to devote several hours every day to practicing on the concertina. I even brought along a jeweler’s screwdriver with which I could take it apart. I discovered that the instrument was essentially an elaborate harmonica through which air was pumped rather than breathed. As in a harmonica, concealed metal reeds are lined up side by side to produce related chords, depending on whether the stream of air is pushed or pulled. Bass notes on the left hand, treble on the right. In addition to playing readily in the keys of C or G major, mine had a third row of buttons with extra flats and sharps, which made many more chords available, once I learned how to find and deploy them. It makes a lot of noise for a wee thing, with a wide range of octaves and a perkily soulful sound, like a calliope for munchkins.

There are many limitations to being self-taught (no doubt I embody them all), but one great advantage is that instead of learning rules you make discoveries. As I swung in my hammock, playing and investigating, reaching a leg over the side to locomote and literally pulling sounds out of the air, the news that specific chord relationships produced reliable effects, either satisfying or startling (or both), made for one “Wow” moment after another. I saw (or rather heard) that music theory can codify these effects, but what really matters is pleasing the ear. As Duke Ellington famously said, “If it sounds good, it is good.” (Mark Twain’s earlier joke was “Wagner’s music is better than it sounds.”)

I had a little spiral notebook of blank staff paper and I started notating the songs I did at the Ferry, deducing from this what chords could go with what notes. Trial and error, emphasis on the latter. One by one I created chord charts for song after song that sounded acceptable to my ear, whether Verdi and Richard Rodgers would approve or not. I even worked my way through all of “Begin the Beguine” (like “Bali Ha’i” a hell of a song to sing on a tropical beach). I didn’t practice melody lines (to this day I don’t play them very well), just rhythmic chords. The melodies came from my throat.

Or even from my heart. No sooner had I acquired the rudiments of concertina technique than an original song burst through me, the first that I ever chorded myself. The tune came first, sweet and forthright, and I wrote words so I could be sure of it. It started out as praise to Div, and midway through the lyric shifted somehow to a more conventional idea, a new “you,” different and yet the same, addressed to someone I was aching to meet. For years I sang it as a solo, and now my fella and I sing it together. With time and patience, many an irritant can become a pearl:

Let the pledge of my devotion Be the love that inspires my song Bring me safe across the ocean Into the haven, into the haven where I belong.

With your love I journey onwards For I know you alone are my goal Your sweet bounty is beyond words In the completion, in the completion of my soul.

In the stillness of my mind I feel you guide me And you thrill me with the message of joy you impart When I look in your eyes you show me inside me The beauty of my own heart.

You and I will not be parted For we truly are one and the same And our lights, our lights were started From a single, from a single holy flame. 

                                                                       75.

The first week of January, 1974 was supposed to be primo for observing Comet Kohoutek right after sunset. Hyped for months as the “comet of the century,” it inspired a dozen or so of Isabel’s pals to hire some fishing boats and motor out to Las Marietas, a group of three uninhabited volcanic islands about twenty miles offshore. We were going to picnic there, observe the comet and camp out overnight. Landing on the Marietas is prohibited today (bird sanctuary), but back then we were free to explore.

Everyone was in their twenties except Isabel and her sometime beau, Don Pepe, a tall, courtly gentleman nearing seventy who was the grandson of Porfirio Diaz, the dictatorial Mexican president ousted by Pancho Villa in 1911. Don Pepe (nobody but Isabel called him Pepe) wasn’t exactly dictatorial, but his commanding air was the legacy of growing up among the pre-war French aristocracy, with whom his parents and grandfather spent their exile. A Sorbonne grad, he didn’t withhold his disapproval of anything, which was more than intermittent. He could be irresistibly charming and gracious (offered a glass of wine or a slice of cake he would typically say, “Only to please you”), but everything about the counterculture made him shudder and sneer.

Nevertheless he was in love with Isabel and put up with her raffish chums, especially when they could draw him out (as I did) on subjects of aesthetic interest. In Paris his doting parents had taken him to see Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes, though they barred him from The Rite of Spring. As a teenager he knew Picasso, Matisse and Cocteau. He was an avid naturalist and could identify every plant, flower, bird or fish in the vicinity. He was also a superb chef and packed one of the boats with scrumptious preparations for the cookout. He’d have been a complete diamond save for his inner snob. But then who escapes occasional bouts of superiority?

The main Isla Marieta is rock- and reef-bound, with only one beach on the eastern side where we pulled in. Some of the gang immediately went snorkeling while others took LSD. After digesting lunch (fish chowder and coffee cake) I did both. I had never snorkeled before but affable Vic lent me his gear and nothing will ever wipe from my mind the astonishing acid-boosted colors of underwater sunlight hitting coral, and fish more vivid than flowers, or the peculiar sound of “Wow” uttered through a tube.

By late afternoon there were hundreds of birds in the sky. From the beach there was a short, rocky climb to a broad plateau covered with tall grass which sheltered thousands more, thicker than sprinkles on ice cream, blue-footed boobies with sharp beaks and little beady eyes, honking at the nesting ground intruders and whistling warnings to the flock. Some abandoned their eggs in panic, while the braver or more maternal ones stood firm. The island (volcanic) is so hollow that our footsteps striding across it reverberated as if on an enormous drum.

Central to the plateau stood a tall peak, scooped out with caves, and a bunch of us climbed it to watch the sunset and see the comet. Darkness approaching from the east brought still more birds, huge flocks flying home from the mainland to find a half-dozen acid freaks occupying their living room, “watching the color TV,” as Morgan said. The sunset was gorgeous, Venus and Jupiter bright in the sky, but Kohoutek was a dim dud. “If that’s the Comet of the Century, the Singer of the Century is Perry Como,” Bonnie said. Before we got our flashlights out for the trek down, Vic and I stopped to take a leak over the western edge. “Piss on you, Kohoutek,” he said.

Down at the beach a fire was bright and hot. Don Pepe had speared a Pacific sierra big enough to feed us all, served with beans, stewed onions and curried rice, and coffee we drank from shells because nobody remembered to bring cups. Joints of Acapulco’s finest were shared by all but the Don. Most of us were still tripping anyway and gazed with rapture at a night sky ablaze with living equatorial stars.

Then Don Pepe, to his lordly dismay, began to suspect that he’d accidentally eaten a cannabis cookie, for the second time in four days. His head felt spacy and his spine was liquefying, sensations that although now familiar to him were still unwelcome. Unlike the rest of us, he didn’t find this amusing, so Isabel kindly escorted him to an isolated cave at one end of the beach. They returned some while later, and his blissful body language implied that the illicit herb had held some pleasant surprises.

Vic, Bonnie and I climbed back to the plateau and watched through the night. I wanted him, he wanted her and she wanted me. When for each of us this turned out to be a case of “Oh no not again,” we laughed and laughed and let it go. Again I remembered “If you can’t laugh at it, you’re too involved in it.” Humor is the gateway to freedom. All around us, the very silence was magical. Frigate birds glided high above the moonlit plain. The nearby islands and surrounding water glowed and dimmed cinematically as the moon sailed through filmy clouds. All the world’s a sound stage. Gemini rose in the east, then Leo, then Virgo. If we’re the actors, are the constellations our audience? 

My head suddenly revisited a different night sky, the one that spread over the beach at Tel Aviv, a seeming lifetime though not even four years previous. Linked to this moment by the one certainty in life: the perennial Wow of Now. “Be grateful,” I told myself. “This moment encodes all time, as an acorn encodes a tree. Gratitude unlocks the code!”

In the morning there was meditation and yoga on the beach for whoever wished. Then Isabel cooked her famous sourdough banana pancakes and there was more shellimbibed coffee (grown, roasted and ground in the hills above Yelapa). More snorkeling (even without acid the water was window-pane clear), and cave exploration for those who didn’t mind the reek of thickly laminated guano. Then the Mexican boatmen rounded us up like naughty tots and we returned home.

It happened to be my 27th birthday and Isabel volunteered to give me a haircut, the first I’d had in years. I liked it better than the advice that came with it. She wondered if I was using a “good boy” act as a defense mechanism, if there wasn’t some grief and resentment buried deep inside that I didn’t allow to emerge. “No matter how spiritual you are, life won’t fulfill all your expectations–it seldom does, and sometimes the only way to honor the present is by admitting that it sucks. Your darkness won’t hurt you unless you try to ignore it.” I felt she had sniffed out the enduring loneliness that I confided to no one but my journal (in passages it would hurt to read even today, but for Gary). Years would go by, years of involuntary celibacy interrupted sporadically by brief encounters, before I could really own that vulnerability isn’t weakness.

Looking at America today, hiding our insecurities behind a façade of military power, I wonder if Isabel’s advice wasn’t, for some, the scariest principle of the consciousness revolution. Have reactionary politics prevailed for three decades because the journey to transformation demands the courage to look into the face of grief and fear, courage to confront (and not minimize!) our shortcomings, courage deeper than the mere bravado of a bully? Is there a way to move beyond regret, to help each other learn that tears can heal as powerfully as laughter? That we can even be grateful for both?

Both were on display in Yelapa that night at a wedding celebration attended by everyone, natives and gringos together. The little stucco chapel was lit by candles and kerosene lamps and to welcome the bride the priest led the populace in a lusty rendition of “El Señor es mi Pastor, nada mi puede faltar,” which I realized was Spanish for “The Lord is my shepherd.” The bride had a 6-foot train and the groom looked uneasy in his suit and Hanan 

tie, the first I’d seen since arriving in Mexico. There was a party at Eliodoro’s bar with rum, coffee and cookies and a cake shipped in from Vallarta. The town’s sole generator was hooked up to a cassette player, and after some tentative native efforts, we gringos stepped in to fling bod, hippie style, and then everyone boogied like mad.

It beat the tail off Kohoutek.

                                                                         76.

Next day at Isabel’s I met Nicole, the dulcimer player who taught me how to jam and changed my life. She was a divorced mother of three with a house in Mendocino, where her children, in their early teens, were overseen by friends. Friends I knew from my time at the Navarro River! We had even more than that in common. She was what people who fancy such things call an old soul. Right off the bat we felt like buddies from a previous lifetime.

(Brief digression: most Western rationalists pooh-pooh reincarnation. It certainly can’t be proven, and the claims some people make about past lifetimes have a definite aroma of self-congratulation. Typically they were Napoleon, Michelangelo, Cleopatra or Joan of Arc. Nobody’s ever the reincarnation of a janitor. Yet science assures us of the law that energy though transformed is never lost; that fact, plus the intuitive vibe I got with Nicole and many another bonded friend, is good enough for me. Deride away.)

For the next several days we played music and sang together constantly. She was a wonderful teacher, encouraging spontaneity, boosting confidence and correcting harmonic mistakes without a trace of condescension. In no time I was eager to give a free concert and she consented to join me. We were a hit, and with a semi-reluctant farewell to Yelapa we took our show on the road.

Nicole had just a week left in Mexico and wanted to see Acapulco and Oaxaca. It was late January and I was ready for a change of scene, too, so we traveled together. Acapulco was a horror, the beach full of American bozos in cabana suits printed with Schlitz cans. We escaped on a local bus to a northern suburb (passing en route two Denny’s and a Colonel Sanders), Pie de la Cuesta, about six miles away. There was an enormous and nearly deserted beach of shimmering white sand with galleries of empty hammocks and very rough surf, and on the other side a big fresh-water lagoon with exotic waterfowl. The latitude was 16°, way south of Yelapa, with the sun noticeably higher in Hanan – CONFESSIONS - 174

the sky. By this time I was a deep caramel color and didn’t care to get darker so we stayed in the shade and played.

Oaxaca was fantastic. 17th century Colonial architecture, magnificent cathedrals with intricately carved stone facades and gilded interiors (where polychrome angels sprang from the balconies, dropping chandeliers like yo-yos), sidewalk marimba players, mothers and daughters creating richly hued fabrics at backstrap looms, a sprawling central market with enticing displays of baked goods, produce, flowers and tropical fruit, a central square with evening concerts by the excellent town band (they even played Verdi), a vegetarian café with an international hippie clientele, and what have I left out? Oh yes, with an altitude of 5000 feet the air was fresh and the climate invigorating.

Most important, the people were beautiful. Beautiful! This far south the population was as indigenous as I’d ever seen, with native costume, classic faces, and attitudes to match. I’d never experienced a city, San Francisco included, with a more jovial atmosphere. It was Yellow Submarine’s Pepperland with a Zapotec accent. Sitting in the Zócalo, bingeing on sweet rolls and hot chocolate, Nicole and I gazed at one exquisite Indian face after another: intelligence, affability, curiosity, contentment, wisdom personified. What is it that enables people to live together this way? Could you bottle it?

We took a bus to the ruins of Monte Albán, a huge site on a mesa where three valleys meet. Thirteen hundred feet above the valley floor (higher than the Empire State Building), it commanded sweeping views in every direction, in honor of which Nicole offered to split her last tab of acid before returning to California. When it kicked in we were sitting on top of a pyramid, holding hands and breathing in unison. It was weird to feel so utterly transparent and loving with this marvelous lady and yet devoid of erotic buzz, whereas my roving eye greedily ogled any number of passing gents. Why did I feel guilty for this? Was I supposed to be straight? If so, according to whom? Aunt Sadie? What was she doing in Mexico? As for Nicole, I didn’t know what she was feeling, but then female sexuality in general remains a mystery to me. (I hear there are straight guys who make the same complaint.)

Maybe next lifetime.

The site held over a dozen monumental temples and palaces with grand staircases and underground chambers, where after a while we took refuge from the sun. We made our way through narrow twisting passages which under the entheogenic circumstances were reminiscent of the mind’s hidden recesses. Mine were rife with sexual confusion. At last we emerged into sunlight again. On the steps a teen-aged Mexican couple were making out as their radio surged with “Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing” in Spanish. I flung myself onto the broad, scenic plaza and leapt around balletically to the music, shaking the confusion out of my head. Hippie maxim: Divinity respects me when I think, but loves me when I dance. Sometimes it helps to examine your demons, sometimes it’s better to corral them with music.

Distant rain clouds were gathering toward sunset, and we climbed the massive stairs of the westernmost pyramid for a better view. Nearing the top, we heard a flute and the tinkle of hand cymbals: two lithe young blondes from Denmark perched on the temple wall. Behind us to the southeast a rainbow began to curve upward from the valley floor, then far in the north the other end of the arc appeared. Steadily they climbed and met in the middle, stamping glory all across the scene. Was this the best acid ever, or did our companions see it, too? They did, and as the shameless sunset flared and faded we all four sang Alleluia up on the roof of the world, the friendly lights of Oaxaca twinkling in the distance like a cluster of fireflies.

Back at our hotel in town, Nicole and I took showers. We lay in bed, starting to come down. The room was dim with the only light coming through the transom. I decided it was now-or-never where sexual fear was concerned and I reached over with counterfeit passion to initiate an open-mouthed kiss. I slammed my lips into hers and at that moment the room went pitch dark. Somewhere a fuse had blown and all the hotel electricity failed. From the hallway came groans and screams.

“What a kiss!” Nicole said.

We cracked up in laughter which swept my anxiety away. We put on clean clothes and went out for dinner. Next morning she left for the airport, with an invitation to come visit her in Mendocino once I got home, an invitation I happily accepted.

But first I found my way to Palenque, where the figurative feces hit the fan.

                                                                            77.

Palenque is a small town in the state of Chiapas, east of Oaxaca, near the sprawling ruins of a 7th-century Mayan city. The site is renowned not only for its architectural and sculptural wonders but for its location, perched on the bumpy edge of jungle mountains Hanan – CONFESSIONS - 176

with a view to the north and east of a perfectly flat forested plain stretching to the horizon like a green and leafy ocean.

It’s also a magnet for connoisseurs of the psilocybin mushroom, growing abundantly after every rainfall. And it rains a lot.

Getting to Palenque took time. I flew from Oaxaca to the Chiapan capital, Tuxtla Gutiérrez, a large and charmless industrial city from which escape was difficult. I waited for a full day by the side of the road from town, thumbing to no avail. Toward evening I slunk back to the hostel. I should have been discouraged but, having spent most of the day discovering “Song of Myself” and more gems from Leaves of Grass, I wasn’t. I’d never read Walt Whitman in depth and it blew my mind to encounter so kindred a spirit, guiding me to look without fear at the whole texture of life and say Yes and Yes and Yes again.

Next morning I said Yes to cashing another Traveler’s Cheque and climbed into a Cessna four-seater to have my mind blown again, this time by flying low over the Sierra Madre. I wondered what Whitman might have written after seeing the serpentine gorge of the Rio Grande from on high, thickly forested mountains plunging suddenly into deep shadow, sheer granite walls rocketing straight up from heaps of jungle, prodigal beauty lit by sunrays fanning out from the clouds. And at last in the distance the ruined temples and palaces of Palenque itself.

After a smooth landing I caught the bus into town, where I met Gabrielle, scouting Mexican highlights for a German travel agency. She loaded me and my gear into her rented VW bug and we drove out to the ruins. It was the beginning of a lifetime’s fascination with the ancient Maya. A high civilization cradled in the jungle, nobly proportioned structures adorned with superbly carved friezes, lifelike with the grace and rotundities of the human body. And everywhere the fragrance of fruit-bearing orange trees, their little white blossoms merging the scent of lilac and cinnamon.

Gabrielle dropped me off in town and drove on to her next highlight. It was a hot afternoon and with my pack on I dropped down to rest on a stone bench in the small main square. A scrawny, sparsely bearded man in his late thirties who lacked use of his legs pulled near me in his hand-propelled wagon. In spite of his misfortune his eyes were shining with love; his face was radiant. We looked at each other and I began to sing to him softly, a Spanish folk song I’d learned at the beach with Nicole. He grinned even more and bobbed his head in rhythm. The nearby children came closer, followed by more and more locals, the men in front, women at the perimeter.

Are you surprised that at this point I started to work the crowd? I knew a few Spanish tunes by now, and even in Italian “Santa Lucia” was reasonably familiar. But I hadn’t gotten far when a chubby middle-aged sourpuss inserted himself in front of me and demanded an end to the singing. It was the sheriff and he meant business. The crowd protested but he was adamant and I didn’t care to see the inside of a Mexican jail, so I hushed up.

But he hadn’t said anything about playing music with no vocal, so with a mischievous air I pulled my concertina out of the case slung across my shoulder and unleashed it. The crowd cheered and applauded, calling for another, chanting “Otra, otra.” This infuriated the sheriff even more. He laid hands on me and tried to grab the concertina, which I clutched to my chest. A couple of his bravos seized my arms from behind and pulled me off the bench. I landed on my backpack, helpless. Also scared shitless. But I had the presence of mind to go limp, and with the pack I was too heavy to drag away.

The townsfolk were protesting vigorously but the sheriff said something to the effect that scandalous behavior from foreign hippies was forbidden no matter what the people thought. The disabled man pushed his wagon against the sheriff’s legs, knocking him to one side, at which point the menfolk surged forward, encircled me, helped me to my feet and with much hand-shaking, shoulder-patting and apologetic shrugging whisked me out of danger. Someone guided me to a sort of international crash pad on the edge of town. I thought later of the line from the I Ching, “THE SUPERIOR MAN STIRS UP THE PEOPLE AND STRENGTHENS THEIR SPIRIT.” Of course, the superior man isn’t usually depicted lying pathetically on his back with legs in the air like a turtle.

Nor was this my last run-in with Palenque law enforcement. The cabin where I took refuge turned out to be occupied by a tribe of British, French, Dutch and Italian hippies who were harvesting magic mushrooms. They gave me a few and told me about a great place to take them. The ruins closed at dusk, but there was a jungle trail that led past the gate and if you were quiet enough you could investigate the ruins by moonlight. A few nights later I tried it.

The trail led to a campsite by a small waterfall and pool hidden by untamed foliage. I kept very still, listening to the water, the rustling leaves, the nocturnal birdcalls. It was Hanan – CONFESSIONS - 178

Friday night and since I had a couple of candles I imagined, like the sentimental nitwit I so often am, that this was a great place to welcome the Sabbath, spirit of peace.

I had scarcely kindled the lights when six armed patrol guards appeared out of nowhere and threatened me with eviction, Sabbath or not. I rolled up my bag, slipped my pack on and they escorted me to the gate, fondling their guns with obnoxious bravado. As I started trucking down the dark road to town, I could hear them jeering at me, even firing off a couple of shots. As much to release my apprehension as to have the final word, I set my voice free and blasted the night air with “El Señor es mi Pastor, nada mi puede faltar,” closing on a rip-roaring high note.

It effectively shut them up. Nice God-fearing Catholic boys, after all.

                                                                        78.

A sleeping compartment on the overnight train from Palenque to Merida cost five dollars which I happily shelled out. The landscape reportedly was so flat and boring from end to end that sleeping through it would be no loss. Yucatan was a different world in the early 70s, long before the fabrication and promotion of today’s Maya Riviera. Between Merida in the northwest and Chetumal at the southeastern border with Belize there was nothing but marsh and jungle. And a tiny fishing village, Playa del Carmen, with perhaps a few hundred inhabitants. The sole attractions were a series of fabulous, mostly Mayan ruins and a continuous ribbon of immaculate virgin beach along the Caribbean.

Once past Merida there was nothing but two-lane blacktop forcing its way through stubborn jungle. Hitching east from Chichen Itza I got a ride from an upwardly mobile Mexican family, whose father was fluent in English. He worked for the Ministry of Tourism and was checking up on new construction at a site called Cancun, which the government hoped might one day become a tourist hot spot. They were still pouring concrete for the airport. After dark, ocelots would prowl the area for smaller prey.

The Caribbean coast was quite unlike the Pacific. The surf was gentle, barely rippling, the water warmer and a pale turquoise color, here and there darkened by shelves of coral reef. The beaches themselves were nearly deserted; you could stroll for miles and encounter no one. European hippies outnumbered Americans, and natives speaking a Mayan dialect outnumbered both. I’d stand or sit by the road soliciting rides, playing the squeezebox, and young fellows with aquiline noses like the ones carved in relief at Palenque or Uxmal would emerge from the woods, talk to me in Spanish, then with each other in a mysterious flow of clicks and gutturals, offer me mota to smoke or oranges to consume, and direct me to cool ruins or freshwater lagoons.

Tulum was a ruined pre-Columbian fortress built on a cliff at one end of the beach with a high esplanade where you could watch the sun drop into the board-flat western horizon like a coin into a piggy bank. Views from any altitude were scarce in Yucatan, but there was an even better one at a barely excavated site called Cobá, from a pyramid with a cleared staircase rising well over 100 feet. It revealed more pyramids roundabout, every one smothered by jungle vegetation. I wondered how many centuries would have to pass before the Transamerica Pyramid had trees growing out of it.

                                                                              79.

The final month of my trip dawned with March, when I arrived in Guatemala, a place so magical I could have forgotten the previous part of my journey (though clearly I have not). The first two nights were spent in a jungle campground at the legendary ruins of Tikal, home of monkeys, toucans, green parrots, hummingbirds, tapirs, anteaters and now and then the nocturnal roar of the jaguar. Around the mahogany and cedar campfires sat a United Nations of freaks jamming together on guitars, flutes, Jew’s harp, percussion and a lone concertina. Every cliché about the universal connective power of music was here reinforced. Days were occupied in exploring the cloud-thrusting pyramids and temples, their limestone crests towering above the tree canopy at heights of two hundred feet or more. From atop the tallest a strong singing voice could carry for miles. So I was told.

Flying south in a DC-3 with a wooden floor, I left the flat jungle lowlands behind as dozens of volcanoes, some still smoking (though I was not) rose before me. Warned about the urban perils of Guatemala City, I boarded a bus at once for Antigua, the old colonial capital. A small city (25,000?) dwarfed by a 12,000 foot volcano to its immediate south, it was completely enchanting. Farther south than I had ever been, but high in mountainous terrain, it boasted a delicious climate, scented flowers growing out of every surface whether horizontal or vertical, cobblestone streets leading in all directions to Spanish Baroque churches (some of them roofless after 18th-century earthquake damage) and, for some unknown reason, a substantial Chinese populace thriving as restaurateurs. 

My first night there I had a remarkable dream. I had returned to Shrader Street in the middle of the night. After sleeping in the garage, at dawn I walk back into the garden. Stalks with heart-shaped leaves are rising where I planted the bulbs. Roberta greets me with “Surprise, guess who’s living here!” and upstairs I find Lottie and Jonah, happily ensconced in their own room, completely at ease with the arrangement, as is everyone else. Groovy parents! Roberta hands me my back mail, and on top is a letter from the Eugene O’Neill Foundation informing me that David Dances took first place in the summer reading competition.

I awoke feeling dandy. At the time I had no idea how prescient some of this would prove to be, but I realized it was time to send a postcard home announcing my intended first of April return. On the way to the post office I discovered La Merced Church, a giddily ornamented bonanza from 1767, white stucco detail piled upon a buttercup yellow background, the very same color scheme as Hotel Shrader. An intense pang made it clear how eager I was to be home again, 18th century bonanzas or not.

In the courtyard some Indian teens were applying a first coat of plaster to a large Holy Week float (their Lenten task); through a doorway I glimpsed several completed ones, resplendent with molded plaster scrollwork in vibrant blues and yellows, scarlet and gold, with assorted dummy saints robed in velvet and silk brocade. It was like a gigantic prop room, a scene-painting shop, a backstage view of the church as show biz.

I went cosmic: Catholic, Jew, Buddhist, it’s all theater, anyway, be the sets canvas, cardboard and styrofoam or masonry, forest and flesh. This whole timeless pageant is Divinity unfolding itself, playing a game, putting on a show, masquerading as cast, props, scenery, audience and stage management all at once. I can’t figure out the plot, but the characters are great and the sets amazing. (I promise that on this occasion I had done no chemical tampering with my synapses; with a little help from Walt Whitman it was becoming a habitual mode of perception. Habitual, though not yet continuous.)

The last three weeks of March I spent in the town of Panajachel on the shores of Lake Atitlan. It was hippie central. I kept encountering faces I’d seen all along the freak circuit from Yelapa to Oaxaca, Palenque, Tulum, Tikal. “Lovers and friends meet again and again on the dear old battlefield,” as the Incredible String Band sings. Only Panajachel was no battlefield. The native men and women, however poor, however laden with massive slings of firewood or bundles of fabric or crates of produce or burden of tots and infants, went about their labor with serene smiles. Even a square-looking American gent I met one day at a coffee bar could see it. “These people don’t have anything like our standard of living,” he remarked. “But they’re happy! What do they know that we don’t?”

They know their place in the pageant, I was thinking, but I kept silent. I wasn’t sure if I really knew my own. After months and miles of travel I had failed to find romance, and I was way beyond horny; I was wretched. Why was love so easy but sex so difficult? I knew that for many people the problem ran the other way around, but that didn’t help.

Yet I was lucky. When the storms in my mind blew over and the battlefield quieted, the Wow of Now was waiting, like the sun when clouds disperse. I could step out of my head and look around. I was in one of the most gorgeous places I had ever seen. From the volcanic peaks framing the lake to the bougainvillea framing the door, I was immersed in beauty. Mango season had finally begun; every bite was blissful. Joseph’s many-colored coat was nothing to the woven and embroidered garments native to Guatemala that I adorned myself with and purchased for friends back home. Best of all, I had fulfilled my original goal: becoming a competent instrumentalist with enough repertoire to fill my act at the Ferry and then some.

One morning I heard strangely familiar sounds coming from a psychedelic-painted school bus parked by the lake. Inside was a Minnesotan named Cary squeezing a concertina identical to mine except the bellows were yellow. He taught me a lot about playing. His travel mates were musicians, too, and till they left a few days later for Chimaltenango we jammed on Beatles, Donovan and Dylan tunes. Even the Stones sounded mellow when two concertinas were backed by guitar, flute and violin. It was a new world.

Community, creativity, sharing–interrelated ways of moving beyond the nagging limits of self–steered me, as always, to the light. As I set out on the long road back to San Francisco, I knew that these values, besides enriching my life, would shape the revision I had in mind for David Dances. A revision that paid off handsomely when the play came unexpectedly to life.

                                                                       80.

If every day was Christmas at Shrader Street, for my homecoming I got to be Santa Claus. My backpack didn’t have room for all the stuff I’d bought in Guatemala, so I filled a big sack with goodies for the house. Roberta came down from her new digs in Mill Val

ley and Colton up from Santa Cruz, and I made a presentation: out of the sack tumbled sashes and tunics for the guys, blouses and wraparound skirts for the ladies, unisex yoga pants with ikat striping, woven bedspreads and embroidered wall hangings from Solola and Chichicastenango. I felt like a merchant at a Silk Road bazaar, displaying wares in an expanding rainbow-colored heap on the floor.

Peter, indeed a rock, had managed the household superbly. Roberta’s replacement was a bodyworker and psychic healer named Linda, strikingly blonde, intelligent, funny and full of love. Jimmy the rock painter had moved in with a new girlfriend across the Bay and in his front room there was now an adorable couple: Robin, a waitress downtown, and Gordon, manager of a health food store, and their cat, aptly named Harmony. The personnel had shifted but the feel of the house was unchanged. Dinner still began with hands clasped around the table. Co-operation and helpfulness ruled. By the end of April we had planted the summer garden together and felt as if we’d lived together all our lives. Peaches and Herb included.

Hippie spirituality was springing up all over the place. Allen Ginsberg drew overflow crowds in Berkeley. Ram Dass launched a speaking tour and did the same. Jerry Brown, Reagan’s Secretary of State and friend of the Sufi choir, was a candidate for governor. In May Rich came for a visit and talked about the awakenings he encountered in Connecticut, where he was a full-tilt disciple of Swami Satchidananda. Together we hitched up to Mendocino and visited Nicole, whose three kids confirmed her mothering skills. Rich and I sat in a hillside meadow with a view of grazing sheep and I talked about King David, sharing my hope that the play I’d written could give a theater audience the sense of peace and joy we were feeling there beneath the open sky.

Soon after Rich left I got a letter from ACT inviting me to submit David Dances for their 1974-75 Playwrights’ Fellowship Program. The deadline was June 15. The revisions I had in mind dealt with expanding the role of the ensemble, who in the first draft didn’t have much of a through line. My experience of kinship and community in Mayan villages inspired me to add this dimension to the play, emphasizing David’s role as a bringer of unity to a people deeply divided under the paranoid influence of King Saul. Any resemblance to America in the Nixon years was blatantly intentional.

Meanwhile, the new act at the Ferry was a hit. The squeezebox inhibited my gesturing but more than compensated by reinforcing my voice, as well as contributing to my mischievous pirate look. Lucky for me nobody had nabbed the spot in my absence and when someone did try, a juggler in early May, the vigor of my voice upstaged him mercilessly and he nor anyone ever tried again. (In those days there was no portable amplification for cheaters.) I can’t judge the artistry, but financially I did better than ever. On two days of Memorial Day weekend (Monday it rained) I grossed nearly $350, a first.

In mid-June, right after I mailed the revised script, a close friend of Linda who owned a sailboat, the Eos, asked her to crew with him on a race to Tahiti, starting July. She knew the stars well and was going to be navigator. Before we could even put up a notice advertising her room, Mevlana showed up after a year’s absence. After the Sufi retreat in the French Alps he continued on to Greece, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, India and Nepal. A route as popular with cannabis devotees as Palenque was to mushroom mavens. In case anyone doubted that he got high on this trip, he showed us his slides of Mount Everest., to oohs and ahs galore.

He moved into his old room at the beginning of July and immediately took us all Sufi dancing. Then, after a very lucrative Independence Day weekend at the Ferry, I got the letter announcing that David Dances had been chosen for a reading by ACT actors at the Squaw Valley Writers’ Conference, scheduled for the third week of August.

                                                                          81.

The second week of August started with a memorable bang. On the eighth, to be precise, Richard Nixon quit. Gone. Kaput. The boomerang hit him where it hurt the most. You could hear the cheering from one end of San Francisco to the other, with the possible exception of Pacific Heights.

It seemed like a terrific omen for the reading of a play about the advent of redemptive social rebirth after the old order has collapsed. Not that there was anything overtly redemptive about Gerald Ford, but we dramatic poets harvest our allegories where we find them. I hoped that I somehow had a finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist. I was unprepared for how zestfully that pulse would race.

Squaw Valley, a ski resort northwest of Lake Tahoe, was over 6000 feet high in the Sierras. With hiking trails, waterfalls, magnificent views and the fragrance of Jeffrey Pine, it was a challenge to focus entirely on the writer’s workshop. Some very distinguished writers from the Bay Area and elsewhere were gathered for a week of seminars in screenwriting, playwriting and the poetry-prose continuum, whatever that is. I was small fry indeed (still am) and David Dances was only slotted for an afternoon reading at a sparsely attended workshop.

Ed Hastings, the kindly director of ACT’s new plays program, sat me down over lunch and told me how much he liked the play. “But maybe you need to move on,” he said. “It’s a remarkable first effort, but why not think about writing something else? You have more than one play in you.”

I took a hike up the mountain and decided he was right. Once again I was faced with a choice between attachment and letting go and, though I didn’t start singing “Prepare Ye the Way of the Lord,” I came to the same conclusion. Stick the play in a drawer and move on.

It was not to be. The screenwriter Lorenzo Semple had been scheduled to introduce a “prime-time” screening on Thursday night of his new studio film, The Parallax View, but that morning he was detained in Los Angeles and bowed out. Ed proposed a reading of David Dances as a last-minute replacement. There was no time to rehearse, except half an hour to teach three hymn-like songs to Jim (the actor playing David) and run over the choral speaking with the small ensemble. The actors were from either the ACT company or the Conservatory program and they were psyched by the thought of winging it.

Thursday evening at 8 the entire conference, a hundred and fifty people, took their seats. The actors sat on a raised platform at a Last Supper table, with one on the end reading the stage directions. The first time Jim sang, and every time thereafter, the audience began to clap and even join in on repeats of the chorus. There were many interruptions for applause, big laughs, and at the end an immediate standing ovation with bravos and cheers of “Author!”

Afterwards people who’d seemed kind of plastic all week approached me with light beaming from their eyes, full of hugs and praise and the much-repeated desire to see the play fully staged. David was a find, the talk of the remainder of the conference (I could tell because a couple of the most famous writers refused to acknowledge me). A woman grabbed me by the shoulders and said, “You’re going to be on the cover of Time.” (So far she guessed wrong.) A dramaturge from Minneapolis offered to direct it himself at the Guthrie. (That didn’t happen, either. Show biz…)

All the praise was very gratifying, and I tried to steady my head with a favorite quote of Adlai Stevenson’s, claiming that “there’s no harm in flattery, as long you don’t inhale.” Anyway, the best thing was my discovery that the play worked as I hoped it would: there were meaty roles actors could run with, there was narrative speed that swept viewers along, and it made people feel high. Without sanctimony the theater became a temple, where piety and joy were one and the same.

Actually that was the second best thing. The best thing was that ACT put it into production.

                                                                            82.

Phil Blair, a teacher from the ACT Conservatory school, was present at the Squaw Valley reading and decided he wanted to direct David Dances for the Plays-in-Progress program. He liked the play’s “up” feeling. “Phil Blair” is made up; I decline to use his real name because I have so little to say about him that would be complimentary. He put the play on its feet and had some good theatrical instincts but he was a fundamentally trivial thinker devoid of either poetry or spirituality.

(Speaking of names, it was time to change my own. I never liked “Kaplan” as a surname. Even in childhood I created alternatives for when I got famous. After a show at the Ferry, people would sometimes ask my name–I always introduced myself as the Phantom Baritone–and every time I said “Steve Kaplan” the combination of plosives sounded harsh to me. I preferred the smoothness of Hanan, my middle name. In late ‘74, after reading Myself Among Others by the actress/writer who started out as Ruth Gordon Jones, I wrote Jonah and Lottie requesting their permission to create a pen name by dropping my surname, as Ruth had. They were so happy that I was having a play produced instead of cavorting around on the street that they gave their unconditional consent, and I became Stephen Hanan. Where Mo came from is another story.)

To his credit, Phil cast the play well and brought in a good design team, considering the shoestring budget. Two of the best actors in the ACT company, Sydney Walker and Raye Birk, played the crucial roles of Saul and Samuel. Sydney was a Broadway veteran with a number of Shakespearean leads under his belt. He had played with Laurence Olivier, Rosemary Harris, Nancy Marchand and a host of famous names, though none of this warped his charming modesty. A deeply spiritual and kind man, he introduced me to the writings of Krishnamurti, and his personal empathy endowed the violent King Saul with a flavor of repressed heartbreak that lifted the character from villainy to tragedy.

In the role of Samuel, Raye Birk was all I could have wished and more. The Bible’s Samuel is prophet, religious leader and kingmaker, but I didn’t want Hollywood bogus solemnity. I imagined a cross between Carlos Castaneda’s Don Juan and R. Crumb’s Mister Natural: elfin, earthy, possibly dangerous, a poncho-wearing shaman with tricks up his sleeve and no patience for fools, but a big heart all the same. The sparkle in Raye’s eyes could convey all this without his uttering a word.

As David, Jim brought the same passion and intelligence that lit up the Squaw Valley reading, but he was physically miscast, closer to Jimmy Stewart than Jimmy Cagney (who would have been perfect). At the first read-through, shortly before Christmas, he was vocally marvelous, and he worked zealously throughout rehearsal without ever overcoming the flaw of being cast against type. But there were bigger rehearsal challenges.

Phil had no idea how to handle the ritual elements of the play, and they were crucial. The ideas of Peter Brook, Grotowski and the Living Theater were beyond him, though not beyond most of the actors, and there was growing tension between what they knew the play could be and how Phil was staging it. He welcomed me at rehearsals but it was hard to keep still when I could see him missing the point so often or sabotaging, however unintentionally, what an actor tried to do. The actors shared my concern and would ask me to intervene, which Phil didn’t appreciate one bit.

One day I told him that henceforth rather than speak at all I would answer questions in rehearsal only by writing notes. At Shrader Street I had several times undertaken vows of silence lasting a few days or more, a wonderful technique for giving the yakking mind a vacation and learning how to listen better. Phil loved it. He explained to the cast that it wasn’t “out of pique.” My silence began to inform rehearsals with a meditative quality as well as a whimsical one that helped a lot.

Around the same time, Mevlana volunteered as master electrician on a Berkeley theater project which would offer everything Phil’s direction lacked. It was a pageant called the Cosmic Mass, the brainchild of Pir Vilayat Khan, the Oxford- and Sorbonneeducated head of the Sufi Order International. Intended as a multi-media celebration of the unity underlying the planet’s many creeds, it involved hundreds of volunteers acting out parallel myths from the great religions. The director was a woman called Saphira, Hanan who ran a Sufi theater company in Boston. From the moment we met, I knew she’d be the ideal director for David Dances.

Instead, I brought Phil to one of the performances, which Governor-elect Brown also attended. In a gymnasium with audience in risers on both sides, God the Father and the World Mother sat side by side motionless and unchanging for an hour at the top of a wedding-cake pyramid, with successive levels of angels, cherubim, devas and seers moving hypnotically below them in gorgeous costumes, and on the floor images gathered from East and West, Roman crucifiers dancing with Hindu archers, dervishes partnering Hasidim, Navajo and Zen, swirling energy, musical cacophony, and finally everyone in the audience up on their feet dancing and singing along. Hair meets Burning Man. Even Phil got up to boogie, though his moves were more disco than dervish.

Nevertheless, as David dress rehearsals approached it was clear that this version would be a far cry from the ecstatic reading at Squaw Valley. In fairness, some of the rewrites Phil asked for were useful, clarifying relationships (his forte) and tightening scenes, and in future drafts of the play I would retain them. But there were scenes and speeches that he insisted be cut because he couldn’t figure out how to stage them, or was afraid of them, and that pissed me off. But I had to make peace with what was there. Yet again, I had to let go.

It played sixteen performances (no press coverage) and proved a big hit with the ACT subscribers who comprised most of the audiences. I stood by the exit and overheard remarks like “It makes you want to hug everybody on the street.” Lottie and Jonah flew out to see it. She wept. He smiled. If he found the portrait of Saul too close for comfort, he kept it to himself. They probably thought that writing about King David made me a good Jew after all. Maybe it did. Reb Zalman was deeply moved.

Overall I was grateful while also feeling a bit cheated. By softening elements that were disturbing and challenging, Phil robbed the joy of its profundity. Joy heals best when it breaks through a wall of grief. At a talkback with one matinee audience, a dark-haired young woman with a Frida Kahlo unibrow got up angrily and said, “This is a Godintoxicated play and I think the production misses that completely.” I worked hard at holding a neutral expression but in my head I high-fived her. Phil said he wasn’t sure what she meant exactly.

Colton, who had broken up with Karan and moved to Oregon, came down for the 

opening and summed it up acutely when he said, “You wrote the Bhagavad-Gita and he directed The Pajama Game.”

                                                                  83.

A week after the show closed, ACT forwarded a fan letter to me. The stationery proclaimed “Mrs. Irvin Bussing” above a swanky Pacific Heights address. It was an invitation to the author of David Dances to come for tea and discuss “spiritual matters.” I telephoned Mrs. Bussing as requested and made a date.

I walked up the long staircase that flanked a large frame house with “1884” carved under the eaves. I rang the bell and the door was opened by a tall blonde woman in her mid-70s, with a lovely complexion and enormous blue eyes that engulfed me in benevolence. As I told her later, at that moment I knew everything about her that mattered and the subsequent details simply confirmed it.

Elizabeth and her husband Irvin had just celebrated their fiftieth anniversary with a renewal of vows at Grace Cathedral. They had been longtime practitioners of what she called contemplative prayer, and at the renewal ceremony she left her body and floated near the cathedral ceiling, where she heard a voice say, “You do not choose me; I choose you.” As a conduit for boundless goodwill and vitality, Div never chose better.

They were born around the turn of their century to conservative midwestern families. Elizabeth’s grandmother would stop her if she caught the girl pulling her lace gloves on as she went out the door. “A lady doesn’t leave till her gloves are fully on,” was the rebuke. Irvin was a doughboy in World War I. They met at Columbia, stayed in New York and made a lot of money, he in banking, she in advertising, then retired to San Francisco in the early Fifties. They used their spare time in any number of remarkable ways that kept them young. Such as attending the theater and lavishing a young author with praise.

At tea that first afternoon they served bread they baked themselves. On later occasions I sipped their homemade beer and wine. Every autumn they drove up to Napa for the harvest and brought home bushels of grapes that found their way into three huge casks in the basement. The Cabernet took three years to mature, which struck me (in my twenties) as a wonderfully optimistic enterprise for people in their seventies.

They were the most life-affirming old people I had ever met. Irvin, an avid amateur 

carpenter, had recently built a tall grandfather clock from a kit, which inspired Elizabeth to suggest something even more elaborate. She had never played a musical instrument but resolved that if Irvin built her a harpsichord she’d learn to play it. He found the required kit for the job, and at seventy-five she started taking lessons. Within a year she was playing simple Bach pieces for invited friends.

Their friends were an eclectic mix, including Alan Watts and Michael Murphy, one of the founders of Esalen, but I was their entree into hippiedom. They came to Shrader Street for dinner and met the household. Elizabeth was very impressed with the garden, which at that point contained carrots, beets, summer and winter squash, cauliflower, chard, snow peas and green beans. She recalled her childhood kitchen garden in Nebraska, where at supper time her mother told the cook never to pick the corn till the water on the stove was boiling. She brought us a sampler like the one hanging in her own kitchen, with the motto “Flip Not Thy Wig.”

Elizabeth was unfailingly sweet but Irvin added the salt that gave their marriage such piquancy. He had no time for blarney or bullshit. I brought them once to a pot luck party that preceded a bluegrass concert. “These people are all so friendly!” Elizabeth said. Irvin checked out the lavish spread of food and asked if he and his wife were the only ones who didn’t bring something.

“You brought your insouciant charm and good cheer,” I told him.

He looked me over with a raised eyebrow and said, “You can’t eat that.”

I took them to hear the Sufi Choir. They came down to watch my show at the Ferry. No doubt they were surrogate parents for me, elders who regarded me not only with acceptance but joy and esteem. Their minds never froze; they were perpetually curious about everything (in his nineties Irvin learned to use a computer so he could write his memoir). We were fond friends for my remaining years in San Francisco and long afterwards. Elizabeth died just shy of their seventieth anniversary. Irvin, born in 1898, refused to make a fuss over his hundredth birthday on the grounds that it might jinx the landmark he really anticipated, a life in three centuries. He achieved it, surviving into 2002 at a hundred and four, salty to the end.

                                                                       84.

The production of David Dances brought another significant person into my life. 

The actor Nehemiah Persoff had a nephew in the show who summoned him from LA to see it. He loved it and asked me to send him a script so he could promote it. I cobbled a new version together, retaining Phil’s improvements but restoring the cuts his creative limitations had obliged me to accept. Nicky (as Nehemiah was called) liked this version even more than the one he saw and started sending it to the Los Angeles theaters where he had connections, starting with the Mark Taper Forum, where he had starred in an acclaimed production of The Dybbuk, a rarely revived classic originally written in Yiddish.

The Taper’s literary manager liked the script but thought it was too soon to consider another play with a Jewish theme. Jewish theme? I thought the story of Saul’s downfall and David’s rise was a metaphor, a myth-saga illustrating the replacement of fear by love as the psyche’s governing force, whether it unfolded in ancient Israel or Middle Earth. Sure, I was willing to think of David as Jewish-themed (that’s how Nicky saw it) if that would secure another production, and equally willing, for the same goal, to stress its mythic universality. Anything to get it staged again, but it wasn’t up to me.

Nicky kept promoting it. He was indefatigable. He was also a generous host with a lifetime of fascinating theater and film stories to share. Over the course of 1975 and well into ’76 he aroused the interest of two or three smaller venues and I flew down to LA again and again to meet with potential producers and directors. It was a long drawn-out process which resulted in a couple of readings that never jelled into actual productions. But one of them became the passage to New York.

Meanwhile, I was back at the Ferry, but starting to get bored. It was my fourth and then fifth summer performing what had become a fixed routine. The concertina had ceased to be a novelty in my hands. The crowds remained enthusiastic and generous, but I couldn’t help feeling stale when one of the dock hands, a high school kid named Terry, would pass behind me with his push broom and softly repeat along with me, “Why, on a balmy day like this, is this young man wearing…a hat?” He knew all my lines. He even nailed my timing. A smart boy from a poor black family, he called me “Maes,” short for Maestro. “It’s your attitude, Maes,” he used to say. “Don’t matter what you sing.”

There were variations, of course. I always had to think on my feet, like when a grizzled old drunk showed up in my space and in full view of the audience dropped his pants. “Please ignore my agent,” I said, “he just wants a bigger commission.” But humor couldn’t prevail against the distraction of a police helicopter that landed on the far side of the line just as I was starting the pitch, upstaging and drowning me out. Or against the blaring sirens of a cops-and-crooks car chase along the Embarcadero freeway. Or the boat’s fuel pump breaking down and suspending service. Or the MUNI strike, which for over a month in high season ruined the city’s disposition as well as access to the Ferry Building. My receipts dwindled, though when the strike ended they bounced back.

Fortunately it was a busy Sunday when an old friend from Harvard theater turned up on the line. She had recently adopted the name of Stockard Channing and was in town to promote her movie debut, co-starring with Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson in a Mike Nichols film, The Fortune. (I know I previously balked at name-dropping, but facts are facts.) Her face wasn’t famous yet so she attracted no attention when she reached across the railing and said, “I saw this little hop from way down there and I knew it was you.”

Next day I joined her and her fella for drinks and dinner in the Penthouse Suite of the Hyatt Union Square, on Columbia Pictures’ dime. It was a raucous, high-spirited reunion and we had to watch our language when the primly solicitous floor butler showed up to take our dinner order, which featured a lot of lobster. She was the same unspoiled, vibrant, earthy, astute and hilarious pal I knew in Cambridge, and she even claimed that she wished she was doing what I was doing, with all that freedom. I freely confessed to vice versa. I joined them in the limo to the airport, where we reprised duets from our old shows and she invited me to stay at her house in Laurel Canyon.

When next in LA, for a reading of David Dances, I took her up on it. There were some more Harvard theater buddies in town who came to the reading. One of them, an Emmy Award-winning actress (but enough with the name-dropping), liked it so much she took a copy home to New York. Before I could catch my breath, I was summoned to the East Coast, and not once but twice.

                                                                           85.

Saphira, the Sufi director of the Cosmic Mass, called from Boston to ask if I’d come and be playwright-in-residence for a few months to help her group create a new theater piece. They were called the Om Theater Company and under various auspices had operated in Boston since 1966. The literary manager of a newer company, the Manhattan Theatre Club, called around the same time to ask about David Dances, which Ed of ACT had sent him. He introduced himself as Steven Pascal and said he wanted to meet me.

The Ferry terminal was undergoing reconstruction; performance there would be impossible for three months, exactly the period Saphira wanted me for. It seemed the stars were in alignment. On November 1, the fifth anniversary of my move to Shrader Street, I planted bulbs again: crocus, tulip, ranunculus and daffodil. Did yoga in the back yard surrounded by the work of my hands: a wall of geranium, a bed of nasturtium, a fruit-laden apple tree. Next day, Election Day, I took the Red-Eye flight to New York, my first return to the East Coast since the woeful attempt to deal acid. We landed Wednesday morning and learned that Jimmy Carter had won the presidency. Seemed like a blessing at the time.

I called immediately on Steve at the Manhattan Theatre Club. He loved my play but was afraid the size of the cast would bust their budget (their fortunes have mushroomed since). Would I please contact him if I ever wrote a play requiring fewer actors? Sure would.

For the next four months I bounced between Boston, New York and Washington, as if I were back in college. Lottie and Jonah were glad to see me, I guess, although their complaints about my freaky clothes were unrelenting. “Dress nicely,” she would say whenever I planned to visit. Unconditional love just wasn’t their thing.

To them my tie-dye, bell-bottom jeans and Biblical hair and beard seemed as much a regimented uniform as suits with neckties were to me. I suppose they were right. My continued adherence to a group that chose to flout convention rather than uphold it was what really bugged them. Though I wasn’t yet thirty, Lottie called me a “superannuated hippie” (she was an English teacher, after all). Kvetching about my apparel helped to channel their disdain from what was unmentionable: religious apostasy and sexual deviance. The one thing I could do to please them was sing, so I did.

Nevertheless, most encounters degenerated into scoldings from them and selfjustifications from me, so I saw them as infrequently as filial duty permitted. I even got around to toning down the garb if we were out in public (not that I had many “respectable” options). In all three cities there were friends my own age who welcomed me exactly as I was (and even dressed similarly or, more important, thought similarly), and with whom there was plenty of joyous communication. And in Boston, of course, there was work. 

Saphira provided me with a beautiful room in the Khanqa, or Sufi communal house. It was a spacious Victorian in Jamaica Plain, a 19th-century suburb of quasi-mansions, fine lawns and grand old trees, now stripped bare by the New England cold. It occurred to me that maybe people tended to be more optimistic in California because there were no seasonal reminders of the regularity of decay. On my third day in Boston it actually snowed, but the household had the same mellow elan I was accustomed to at Hotel Shrader.

The difference was that, unlike Hotel Shrader’s New Agey spiritual smorgasbord, the residents of the Khanqa, who all belonged to the theater company, were one and all devoted Sufis. I voluntarily immersed myself in their daily regimen of meditation, chanting and physical practices at designated hours. It was a refreshing change from my customary bohemian anarchy. In nearby Connecticut, Rich was living fulltime in Swami Satchidananda’s ashram, and if my brilliant role model could undertake a life of faithful discipline, I could try a few months’ worth. Getting and staying high in the absence of pot was also instructive. It extended my vocal range and cleared my mind.

Saphira wanted to create a piece about awakening, and that was to be the title. My experience on the Mount of Olives was one example and everyone in the company had a similar tale to tell (otherwise they wouldn’t have been there). Strip away the theology and every religious tradition has some equivalent term (enlightenment, being born again, nirvana) for what rises in the mind when the pervasive illusion of separateness is swept away by a blast of cosmic unity. When Love conquers all.

The members of Om Theater were a clear-eyed and open-hearted crew, some quite talented, but mostly amateurish and lacking technique. We spent the first month improvising around people’s individual stories. Saphira was a dynamo and in rehearsal she fostered a vibrant atmosphere of spontaneity and trust, but I wasn’t sure how it would evolve into a play that would awaken, as it were, anybody who wasn’t already awake. She encouraged my input and even let me lead exercises, but ultimately I was just hired help, taking notes and consulting with her until we came up with an outline for an overall dramatic structure. I was dubious but I really liked all the people and tried hard to deliver something they could use.

Frequent side trips to Manhattan pulled me in another direction completely. Some of the old Harvard gang were starting to make names for themselves and they opened a Hanan lot of doors. Literally in the case of Doug, he of the National Lampoon, who went back-and-forth to Hollywood in pre-production meetings for Animal House, and lent me his spacious apartment in Greenwich Village. Kathryn, his girlfriend, was the actress who attended the reading of David Dances in LA and she was circulating the script at the Public Theater, Joe Papp’s joint.

And I got to perform, through a writer friend called Emily who did standup at the Improv club. She booked me for an open mike show there and, concertina in hand, I had the audience reproduce my shtick from the Great American Music Hall, dividing in half to imitate the stereo sounds of the Bay and the traffic around the Ferry terminal. Then I jumped in, sang a few tunes, trotted out the time-tested lines and after two encores left them screaming for more.

I sought out Luciano Pavarotti at the Metropolitan Opera, and he remembered our meeting in San Francisco. He invited me backstage, vocalized me up to a high B-flat, said I was no baritone but a tenor, gave me a few pointers on technique and told me to look him up again after I worked with a teacher for a while.

I wasn’t sure if I liked New York, but it seemed to be liking me.

                                                                            86.

The version of Awakening I gave Saphira consisted of a detailed outline for improv work, several fleshed-out scenes and two extended passages of choral incantation that maybe the Royal Shakespeare Company could have pulled off without sounding pretentious, but the odds were slim. It wasn’t my idea. I just gave Saphira what she wanted.

On the return flight to California at the end of February I processed an awakening of my own. New York and San Francisco were like the two hemispheres of the brain, the rational and the intuitive, Apollo and Dionysus. There was a formality and stateliness to Manhattan’s vintage architecture that along with the city’s intellectual patina made it seem part of Old World cultural tradition in a way that San Francisco wasn’t. San Francisco had been my springboard to the future; New York offered a return to my roots. Must the two polarities compete, or could they work together, like yin and yang, like the black and white sphinxes yoked side by side in the Chariot of the Tarot deck?

Once back at Shrader Street I felt completely at home though there were a couple of new householders. There had been changes throughout ‘75 and ‘76, and now there were Hanan more. Peter had left to see Guatemala for himself; now Terry was in the attic. Kind and earnest, Terry worked at Real Foods, looked like the young Tyrone Power and soon was sleeping with Robin, newly single since Gordon freaked out on bad acid and disappeared into the state mental health system. Then there was Midnight, the Jewish princess turned belly dancer, but enough is enough.

The garden was beautiful, with crocus and ranunculus popping and the apricot and apple trees in virgin flower. The Ferry renovation was done and my first weekend back I made over $200 (my monthly share of the rent had climbed to $72!). Jason Lotterhand continued to teach his weekly Tarot class (my first night back, natch, the Chariot was the topic), the Bussings gave soirees for harpsichord and concertina, we baked bread and held hands before meals, seals swam up on the beach and life rolled along as before.

Then in May I flew back to New York. Kathryn had gotten a director named Jack Hofsiss interested in David Dances as a possibility for Joe Papp’s Public Theater, and he wanted to meet me. In the meantime I had written a new play with only three characters and Steve at Manhattan Theatre Club was interested. Colton was living in Greenwich (his mother had been ill, but recovered) and looking to create an artists’ communal house in Manhattan. Winter had vanished; azaleas and dogwood were running riot all over the place. The pull was very strong. Could I tear myself away from Shrader Street and all it had come to mean? I had just turned thirty. Was it time for a new direction?

Staying at Doug’s in the Village, I wandered over to the Charles Street fair and bumped into Sara from the Kundalini ashram in DC. She had moved to New York, and to celebrate our reunion I pulled out the squeezebox (conveniently hanging from my shoulder) and sang her a song. It was a street fair, after all. When I was done a longhaired middle-aged man came over, introduced himself as Paul Mazursky and asked me to be in a movie he was directing called An Unmarried Woman. So I stayed for an additional week to be one of 184 extras in a crowd scene in Washington Square (my performance survived in a remote corner of the frame).

During that week Steve summoned me to the Manhattan Theatre Club. He liked the new play and was passing it along to Lynne, his boss. I met often with Jack, who thought he could get Mr. Papp to both read and produce David Dances. And I had a literary agent, a genial, white-haired woman called Lois Berman whom Steve put me in touch with. She represented a few rising young playwrights and thought I could join their ranks. She liked Hanan prolonged eye contact, an anomaly in her profession and a very encouraging one.

Six years earlier I had promised myself to forget about the world of New York theater until someone from within it called me back. Now they were calling. Or at least beckoning. And there was another sign. When I called Shrader Street to say I’d be gone an extra week, I learned that over the summer everybody would be moving out. Was Hotel Shrader on its last legs? Had I outgrown it?

I wasn’t ready to write its obituary. Not before tasting a home-grown apricot.

                                                                             87.

Like Mark Twain’s, the obit was premature. The tried-and-true method (“Room Available in Spiritual Household…”) had netted as Midnight’s replacement one of the most wonderful women ever to live at the house. Marlys was a flight attendant for Pan Am with reddish blonde curls, blissful crinkly eyes and a silvery speaking voice that seemed to smile even if she wasn’t. She had grown up in an Oklahoma Baptist family and moved on to enjoy every method on the New Age menu that accorded with her own inclination to flow love steadily and in all directions.

She was joined in quick succession by Bruce, a talented painter who, (after how many years) trashed the giant clowns and set up the garage as a studio, and Terry’s replacement Phil, a soft-spoken Southerner with hair like Michael Bolton’s before he trimmed it. He worked with disabled kids and had a very gentle soul. He also claimed to be an expert carpenter.

Over the years with Rich, Peter, Terry and the others, we talked about installing a skylight to cure the gloom of the attic room, with its aforementioned puny window. We were afraid landlord Mike wouldn’t consent if asked, but Phil was confident that he could do the job sub rosa and Mike, who seldom visited the house and never went upstairs, would be none the wiser. Though it could have led to disaster, Phil’s plan worked. The skylight was a brilliant success. From cutting the hole in the roof to the final sealing, it took him less than a week’s labor. The room was flooded with light. Mike knew nothing about it. By the late Eighties, when last I inquired, it had never leaked.

Literally from basement to attic Hotel Shrader had new life. The camaraderie remained as nurturing as ever. Bruce and Marlys and Phil were terrific. There was just something about that house. Something it would be very, very hard to leave behind. 

In fact I left the house but it hasn’t left me. Some of the old gang I’ve always kept in touch with, some I’ve just recently located, some I’ve lost and wonder about. Mostly I wonder if what we learned by living together still guides our lives. Whether, despite the unpredictable intervening changes, the center has held. Because under that roof, and beyond it, even as our individualities flowered so did our circle of connection. Witness this:

For the Summer Solstice Marlys brought us to an event, organized by her friends, in the hill country near Calistoga, Napa Valley. They called it the Healing Ways Celebration. Hundreds of kindred souls were there, taking seminars that addressed healing on the personal as well as the planetary level. Taoist practitioners of herbal medicine aligned with Native American shamans. The climax of the weekend was the formation of a circle of linked hands that spread across a vast hilltop under a cloudless sky, hundreds of hands, hands of many colors and ages, joined in the desire to embrace all our fellow beings in ever-widening circles of harmony and blessing.

Would New York as the epicenter of mainstream culture respond to such an event with anything but cynical derision? Was there an audience there for the kind of spiritual anthems I knocked out of the park at Healing Ways, with verses like:

When will the world agree to know You, When will the people gladly give the love they owe You?

When fear and greed are laid to rest, And balance reigns in every breast, When all are healed and none oppressed, Our lives will say, Spirit, we love You best.

Were such changes really possible? Was it blatant grandiosity to imagine that I could help them along? Or was it incumbent on every individual to try?

A teacher at the Celebration offered an oblique answer to my questions. She said, “Joy cannot be bought, but it can be shared. What else is the point of living?”

                                                                           88.

The joy I shared at the Ferry that summer filled my hat with more money than ever before. It kept pouring in. At the end of a Fourth of July weekend that collected an unprecedented $630 for six hours’ work, a woman on the line reached out to me, seized my hand and said, “You remind me of David in the Bible. He sang and danced, too, but you’re wearing more clothes than he did.”

I would continue to perform there into October, but the second weekend of July was 

the high point. Not because of money. I arrived for the 11:15 show to find the passengers lined up in a different location. The asphalt in their passageway had caved in and they were corralled behind a rope in the alley next to the Ferry Building. I was much closer to them than usual, with a wall at my back. At first the intimacy helped the performance and I capered back and forth along the line to give everyone a better view. Then the Ferry arrived and I realized the horde of disembarking passengers would have to pass through the same space. Pandemonium would ensue and I’d be swallowed by the throng just before my big crowd pleaser, “The Impossible Dream” from Man of La Mancha.

Acting fast, I found an empty garbage can, turned it over and jumped on top. “You’ve heard of soap-box oratory,” I said, “this is garbage can opera.” The effect on a large crowd of singing “The Impossible Dream” from a high perch on a garbage can pedestal is hard to describe. “This is my quest / To follow that star / No matter how hopeless / No matter how far.” To anyone familiar with Don Quixote, the irony was exquisite, outrageous, heroic, absurd, all at once. Life imitating art. All that was missing was a lance and a windmill.

Throughout the summer everything grew, the vegetables and flowers in the garden, the apricots and apples, the rapport of the new household, and my impatience for news from New York. Now and then I’d call Steve or Jack for the lowdown at their respective theaters, but invariably the scripts were still unread and there was nothing to report. Then at the end of September Saphira called to say Om Theatre needed me back for revisions with the company.

A week later Marlys’ friend Carol asked would I do a free show for the seniors’ recreation program she worked for in San Anselmo. There were twenty of them, quite old, and at first they gave me and my garb the foreseeable suspicious looks, but the first song won them over and in no time they were clapping, cheering and singing along. Looking at the vitality surging across so many aged faces, I recalled what the teacher at Healing Ways had said. What’s the point of living but to share joy, be the audience hundreds, thousands or a couple dozen. Where two or three are gathered in joy, Divinity is there.

Carol drove home over the Golden Gate Bridge on one of those sublime October afternoons, and she dropped me off at Ghirardelli Square, right by the bocce ball court where six years earlier I discovered for the first time that in San Francisco I could make money singing in the open air. This time I had a concertina! Of course I climbed up on a Hanan bench to sing and of course the old Italian guys dropped their balls and of course one of them took up an unsolicited collection and offered me a hatful of change and bills. Six dollars, not quite as much as the first time, but when coming full circle, why nitpick?

The next day Colton called to say that he was working as a print artist for a textile company in Manhattan and rather than commute from Greenwich he wanted to set up a Shrader East on the Upper West Side, and how would I like to be a part of it? It was very tempting.

So tempting that a day later I said yes.

                                                                       89.

I made a reservation on the Grey Rabbit alternative-travel bus for Saturday, October 15, leaving in the afternoon with a midnight stop in LA, then cross-country to New York. I culled from my possessions the maximum allowed in the Rabbit’s luggage compartment, with everything else going into boxes that would be shipped separately, or remain in the newly cleared garage till I had a better idea of where in Manhattan I’d be living and what this “Shrader East” would actually look and feel like.

The first farewell call was to Irvin and Elizabeth, now approaching eighty. My heart was heavy with apprehension I didn’t dare utter, but Irvin could see it welling up in my eyes and said, “Now don’t be sentimental, it won’t fly in New York.” Elizabeth thanked me for everything I had brought into their lives, and I said they had repaid me a hundred times over. “I know we’ll meet again,” she said, and she was right.

I bade farewell to the crew at the Ferry terminal and the community of vendors at Embarcadero Plaza. I climbed Strawberry Hill and sang for Golden Gate Park. Not since leaving Washington six years earlier had I said goodbye to a place with such a soultugging mix of regret and hope. My heart, like Tony Bennett’s, would never leave San Francisco. Its inventory of wonders was embedded in my brain. But it was time to go.

We had a big farewell dinner at Hotel Shrader which I was forbidden to cook for. But there was a bumper crop of ruby chard in the back and, on the grounds that storebought could never taste as sweet, they let me prepare cream of chard and mushroom soup. I also baked a loaf of honey walnut bread to share on the bus. Darryl, my replacement, joined us for my last hand-holding around the refinished picnic table.

On Saturday, after my last crouch before the mirror mandala and farewell kisses to 

Peaches and Herb, everyone gathered on the red “carpet” which years before we had painted up the middle of the front stoop, and we snapped a photo. A few blocks away on Haight Street, I stowed my luggage and boarded the Grey Rabbit.

It was a 1951 Diesel school bus with all the seats torn out. In their place were platforms covered with foam mattresses and a few restaurant style booths which could be covered by hinged bunks for sleeping. There were 21 human passengers plus Quasar, a golden retriever. Seven more folks boarded in Los Angeles. We were all of the so-called hippie type, American, Dutch, German, Israeli, two Swedish devotees of Rajneesh bound for India in their coral-colored garments, a white-water raft guide from Colorado, a chess player from Brooklyn, assorted flute-players, students, potheads and rovers and, in the “honeymoon loft” installed by the rear window, a lesbian couple en route to Boston. They sang a song based on a line from the I Ching, “The Wanderer has no fixed abode, the road, the road is her home.”

The Rabbit ran without pause except for pit and meal stops, one driver at the wheel while the other slept in a sort of horizontal cabinet on the floor behind him. The first night, arrayed like sardines, it was hard to sleep without kicking somebody and vice versa. Eventually we adjusted. More or less.

Sunday morning, people woke gradually to the gathering light of an Arizona desert dawn. In the west the distant mountains were cool and blue and still. The last of California, I thought, and as if in salute the peaks burst into life with flares of gleaming gold. The sun rose quickly and the riders began to bring forth breakfast fruit to share, calling out: Banana! Grapefruit! Orange! It was like a talking slot machine.

Ben, driving on that shift, asked if anyone was in a hurry to get to New York, or should we detour for a look at the Grand Canyon. The yes was loud and unanimous. As soon as we took the turnoff, the road was lined with souvenir shacks. Alex the chess player pointed to a sign reading “50% OFF ON INDIAN JEWELRY” and said, “Must be made by half-breeds.”

Ben parked the Rabbit at the South Rim and allotted half an hour to explore. Shared astonishment overtook us. I wandered off in silence, to gaze upon vistas and perspectives that my mind couldn’t process. They made no visual sense, but there they were. And the monumentality of scope and scale were balanced by the variety of forms and subtlety of colors. The wonder of it. Hanan – CONFESSIONS - 201

I took breath after breath of the air that could contain such immensity. If I could have looked into the future and seen the heartbreak that lay ahead, the disappointments bitter enough to wipe out every taste of success; the juggernaut of spiritually vacant cultural amnesia; the unforgiving plague that would claim its share of my most beloved friends while leaving me baffled but unscathed; the rise of an ignorant and pitiless counterforce bent on promulgating and profiting from fear and hatred, I might have hurled myself over the edge. And days would come, days of personal or political catastrophe and anguish, when I could have wished I had.

But obviously I didn’t.

I looked into the vastness and thought, if flowing water could cut so profoundly into rock a mile deep and eighteen miles across, there’s no miracle that consciousness cannot work upon the density of matter. And this canyon, seemingly so huge, is just a little gash on the surface of our planet, itself a speck in an incomprehensible cosmos which, in spite of the odds, little human minds are learning to comprehend and love.

If Einstein was right and there truly is an interface between space and time, then the volume of the Grand Canyon could easily contain not only the woes but all the riches of the decades to come: the rewards of persistence; the opportunity to befriend and collaborate with fellow artists of the highest caliber; the marriages of friends, births of children and raising of families; the discovery, after years of flying solo, of what it means to be one wing of a couple.

There would be perpetual curiosity and invaluable teachers, there would be profound reconciliations with the man and the woman who gave me life, there would be wonderful roles in shows that passed into theatre legend, there would be world travel, there would be the marvels of growing older in robust good health, there would be music and laughter and golden autumns and welcome springs.

There would be abundant life. Self-contradictory, perplexing, ravishingly abundant life.

But I get ahead of myself.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~