first 30 pages of the novel
full novel: 85,000 words
© David L. Morgan

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TENTH AVENUE

CHAPTER ONE

OK, here we go. Chapter one. It starts with me floating on my back in the Pacific Ocean. Damned if I can remember for sure whether I was on an air mattress or just floating on my own. I think I was on an air mattress. It must have been borrowed.

I was thinking about Alan Watts, Camus, the New York police, the inventor who lived in the bus next to our van, and I asked myself – for the first time really asked myself with an open mind as to the answer – is it all true?

Once I dared to ask the question, the answer was obvious: of course not. Did God come down (in the form of his only begotten son) to die on the cross for our sins so that everyone who was baptized and stuck to the rules could spend all eternity in eternal happiness, while the rest of humanity – Buddhists, Muslims, pagans, unbelievers and rule breakers – would burn in absolute pain and torment forever and ever amen? Ridiculous. Of course it wasn’t true. And if by some weird twilight zone twist, it were true, then god was an evil bastard who should be fought against at every turn.

I guess this is where to start the story, since it is the beginning of my life as an adult, the time when I shucked off all the baggage laid on me as a kid and tried to figure things out for myself. It would make a nice visual start for the movie too: we were camped out on the Malibu coast in a large orange van, a second-hand United Parcel truck. (They had to paint them orange before they were resold, so you couldn’t impersonate United Parcel, I guess.) Bert and I had come down from Seattle to check out the scene, the girls – and so I could go around to the record companies with my songs and give them a chance to make me rich and famous.

These were the days when you could drop into the A&R departments of major record labels, leave a tape and come back in a few days to see what they thought. What they mostly thought about me was that I should go back to Seattle. The best comment I got was: good songs, but what we’re looking for is an original-sounding voice; for instance, why couldn’t you sound more like Joe Cocker?

There were three of us in the van: me, my best friend, Bert, and Judy Blue Eyes. Judy was a chick (soon to be called woman) who had answered our ad in the paper. We were looking for passengers; she was looking for adventure. We took a slow drive down the coast, camping out along the way. Just south of Frisco we picked up a hippie couple with a very small baby and a stash of Panama Red. The trip from Frisco to Malibu was like driving into a hallucination. I drove most of the way – I loved to drive stoned.

We camped out by a stream on the coast of Big Sur. Couldn’t see what the big fuss was about. Compared to the Oregon coast we’d just driven through, Big Sur was a bit boring, but the Panama Red made up for it. In the morning, we built a campfire and made coffee and oatmeal. The hippie couple washed their baby by holding onto his ankles and dumping him headfirst into the freezing cold stream, sort of like how Thetis bathed Achilles in the river Styx. Don’t know how Achilles felt about it, but this baby was so shocked, he just opened his mouth and couldn’t make a sound. Then they held him by either end and dried him over the campfire. By the time he was dry, he was gurgling and laughing. A happy baby, and plenty tough.

We dropped off the hippie couple at the top of a hill in Big Sur that was supposed to be a mountain and did the last leg of the trip to L.A. on the natch (no drugs), because we couldn’t get the hippie couple to give us even a tiny joint. It was hard to score good dope in those days – now it’s hard to get away from it. We ended up, by luck, on the only patch of Malibu that was still open to squatters. We stayed a month and a half. There were a few other squatters there off and on, but the one constant neighbor was an inventor, who had kitted out an old school bus into a mobile home. He would invent shit in his spare time and live off the proceeds. Had some great talks with him, mostly about politics.

I read three books while we were there: The Myth of Sisyphus by Camus, a book on the history of the New York police department by don’t remember who, and On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are by Alan Watts.

The Myth of Sisyphus was about revolutionary suicide. The first half of the book was about the absurdity of life and how the only truly logical response would be to commit suicide. The second half of the book was about why we shouldn’t commit suicide after all. The first half of the book made total sense; the second half just didn’t hold up. That was my opinion, anyway, although I wasn’t much inclined to act on it.

The book about the history of the NYPD had a big influence on me. It showed that in the entire history of the NYPD, no policeman had ever been done for excessive use of force in the line of duty. It documented a lot of cases where excessive force was not only a fair call but actually a huge understatement. The point made in the book was that it didn’t make sense to join the system and try to change it from within, because the system was geared to absorb internal reforms and spit them back out as the same old shit with a more liberal covering. As the year wore on, I came to believe that this point applied to the system as a whole.

The day before we left for California, I finished reading a book my girlfriend, Kathleen, had given me by Michael Harrington. It called for a peaceful revolution in the United States. I had been astounded. Revolution?

“Do you think we need revolution in this country?” I asked her.

“Don’t you?”

Kathleen was too young for me. She had just finished her junior year in high school when I met her. I was twenty-one, but I had grown up in Hicksville and she had grown up in the big city – Seattle. Her dad was a high school science teacher, and she was already a high school dropout. She was more sophisticated than I in lots of ways. But she had never been kicked out of the University of Chicago as I had – I reckoned that was pretty cool. She thought so too.

Anyway, by the time we got to Malibu, I was giving some serious thought to revolution – the NYPD book made me think about it more.

“The problem is,” I told Bert and Judy and the inventor while we were sitting around the campfire one night, “if we had a revolution here, the Russians would take advantage of it and invade.”

“I don’t think you have to worry about that,” said the inventor. “The Russians want the same thing as America – control of colonies. If we had a revolution here, the Russians would move in on our colonies all around the world, but they wouldn’t be bothered to invade the U.S.”

It made sense to me at the time.

The third book I read on the beach – the one by Alan Watts – made the biggest impression on me. I dug that you-are-me-and-I-am-we-fool-on-the-hill stuff. I liked philosophy. I’d read Thomas Aquinas in the seminary. (Yes, I studied to be a priest for two years, age 14-15 – get ’em young and train ’em right.) In fact, I had been studying philosophical psychology at Chicago so I could achieve my life mission of reconciling the concept of free will with scientific determinism. When I stopped being a Catholic (on Tuesday, April 26, 1970, at 2:43 in the afternoon), I immediately started thinking about the philosophical implications, which were, as I saw it:

“If it’s all bullshit and there is no God, then I can do any goddamn thing I want.”

I think it’s important to explain about Saint Augustine here. He was a sinner until the age of thirty-three, when he repented, became saintly and earned a berth in the eternal balls-out happiness of heaven. That sounded like a good deal to me. When I was confirmed, I chose Augustine as my patron saint. I was thirteen years old. By my reckoning that gave me twenty years of good solid fun before I had to knuckle down and become saintly. The nuns were horrified when I explained this to them, but by then I had already been confirmed and it was too late to make me pick another name.

I thought I was being clever, but actually I had fallen into a deadly trap. Here’s the deal: you can be a sinner all your life and still go to heaven if you repent on your deathbed and receive the sacrament of confession. But. The catch is… actually there are two catches. The obvious one is that if you get run over by a truck and die without repenting, you’ll go straight to hell for all eternity. So I resolved to always look both ways before crossing the street. But the real catch is much more subtle and insidious. You see, as the nuns explained to me, faith is a gift from god. If you piss on his generosity and do lots of sinning, he may take that gift back. Then when you die, you won’t make a confession even if you have lots of time, because you don’t believe in that shit anymore. So you go to hell.

I resolved to dodge that trap by holding tightly tightly tightly onto my faith and never questioning it. But of course, that was the trap. And I was stuck in it, believing all this mad theology until my road to Malibu moment at the age of twenty-one. Of course I got lots of sinning in, but my mind was in shackles. My sisters, who were good and followed almost all the rules almost all the time, stopped believing when they were about the same age as I was when I chose the Saint Augustine route. The way my older sister put it years later: when the priest came in and said it wasn’t a sin to kiss a boy, but if you started enjoying it and still kept on kissing, that was a mortal sin, she thought, “Well, what’s the point of that?”

Kathleen was the same as my sisters – on this anyway. She quit believing at about the same time as they did for more or less the same reasons – it just didn’t make sense. I was madly in love with Kathleen. She was seventeen when I met her, but it took me months to get into her pants, so I’m pretty sure I didn’t commit statutory rape. I was her first. She was my first ever true, deep love – someone I could talk to about Plato or Aquinas or just hang out with and listen to music. We both hated jocks. (I guess I should mention, in case you’re living in the U.K., a jock is not a Scotsman. Jock refers to jock strap; jocks are the kids in high school who are on the football team, sit together at lunch, spend a lot of time being cool, slapping each other on the ass and going out with cheerleaders.)

Kathleen had blue green eyes and dark curly hair. She was a bit of a tomboy. I used to tell her she was like a cross between the boy next door and a French bohemian. She really liked that. Kathleen was beautiful. I told her this once – the first time we made love – and never again. I was a pretty fucked up kid when it came to love. Low self-esteem, they would say nowadays. If someone was attracted to me, I immediately started to wonder what their problem was. I wondered what Kathleen’s problem was all the way up until we left for L.A.; then I started longing for her. The further away we got, the more I ached. I actually wrote her letters – two at least. We’d been camped out in Malibu for a month and a half when her reply came back, sent post restante, to the Hollywood post office. It said, “I think it’s good for my head to have some space away from you.”

Two days later, we left for Seattle. It took me that long to talk Bert and Judy into the idea that now was the time to go back. I don’t think they were too happy about it, especially Judy, who had signed on for adventure and had only gotten Malibu, but I was going crazy, worrying about why my being gone was good for Kathleen’s head. I drove all the way back: there was no point in letting anyone else drive, it was clear I wouldn’t be able to sleep a wink until I got back to Kathleen.

CHAPTER TWO

The old man who had sold us the orange van said it would go forever as long as we never took it over fifty miles an hour. I drove for twenty hours at seventy miles per hour nonstop from L.A. to just outside of Olympia where the orange van died, never to rise again. Bert’s dad drove out from Seattle and towed us back in. As soon as we got back, we stashed the van – and Judy – and headed for Volunteer Park.

Volunteer Park was cool. Maybe the coolest spot in the city. It was on the north end of Capitol Hill. It had an art museum and a big donut sculpture that you could look through and see the Space Needle. It had a reservoir with barbed wire around it – the result of a hippie on acid taking an unauthorized swim in it one day a few years back. The main spot in the park was a long sloping hill with soft grass and big shady trees around the edges. On hot, sunny days, there would be a bunch of people gathered in the center, playing drums, guitars, flutes, bottles, tin cans… anything that made a noise. We spent so many afternoons there – Bert and Allie, Kathleen and me – that it felt like our own special garden.

Allie was Kathleen’s best friend. It was Bert who met Kathleen and first dated her. She brought along her best friend Allie for me. But Kathleen and I were made for each other, and Bert and Allie seemed to get along just fine, so somewhere in the middle of the third or fourth date without any planning or discussion or even a clear decision, we switched. The night started out with Bert and Kathleen, Fred and Allie; by the end of the night it was Bert and Allie, Fred and Kathleen. The big switch happened one night in Volunteer Park. Bert and Allie were walking ahead; I pulled Kathleen into the cover of a low hanging cedar tree, and we kissed. The four of us spent a lot of time in the park – whenever it wasn’t raining.

It wasn’t raining the day we got back from Big Sur. It was a hot, sunny Sunday and we knew Kathleen and Allie would be in the park, but we stopped at Kathleen’s apartment on the way, just to be sure. She had moved out of her parents’ house. She’d found a one room apartment just a block off Broadway – the main drag on Capitol Hill. She loved that place. So did I. We first made love there. In fact, it’s almost the only place we did make love. No airplanes alleys, or other rendezvous, no need for spicing things up –every minute of it was an adventure.

Sure enough, the apartment was empty and Bert and I headed on up to the park. It was full of people, mostly young hippies taking in the sun. The drumming circle was in full swing. Marijuana smoke floated like a friendly genie over the field. We raced to the spot where we knew we would find Kathleen and Allie, and sure enough, there they were, facing downhill towards the drummers, so their backs were to us. Bert walked, but I ran down the hill. I was about twenty feet away and closing fast when Kathleen turned to the guy sitting next to her – I hadn’t even noticed him up until then – threw her arms around him and kissed him. My whole world went dark.

It was Sunday, May 3rd, 1970. We didn’t know it at the time – we had had no radio, no newspapers, and no idea what was going on beyond the world of Malibu beach – but the Thursday before, Nixon had invaded Cambodia. That’s the way it was said anyhow, but of course Nixon didn’t get anywhere near Cambodia; he didn’t invade anything; he signed a few papers, made a phone call, gave some orders to the nearest toady – whatever – tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers did the invading for him. Friday there had been a small anti-war demonstration to protest the invasion. It had ended up on Capitol Hill and the cops chased the protesters into Volunteer Park. On Sunday, there were tire tracks of torn out sod where the pigs had raced through our field. They didn’t give a shit about the grass in the park. They probably would have liked to plough it up and sow salt in the ground to keep anything from ever growing there again. These were the days when beating up protesters was considered good sport – if not a patriotic duty.

Anyway, big, big things were happening in the world and Bert and I didn’t have a clue. We must have found out that day about the invasion, but I don’t remember who told us or when. I don’t remember anything else about that weekend or the following day. It’s like I blacked out and the next thing I remember, Bert and I were crashed out at his mom’s place in Sand Point Way until we could find an apartment. By then, we knew about the invasion, the demonstration, the tire tracks, and I knew that this guy sitting next to Kathleen, the guy she had hugged and kissed, who looked like a wet rat with red whiskers, had moved into her apartment. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep. I would be driving down the road and have to pull over because I would start crying and couldn’t stop.

Monday night we watched the news and, like most of the rest of the country, were stunned. There had been anti-war protests all over the United States and the numbers were growing, but the big news came out of Ohio. The National Guard, called out to disperse protests at Kent State University, had turned and fired on the students, killing four and wounding nine. The level of protest was now set to go off the scale. I hardly noticed. I hardly noticed anything. I just remember walking around inside a black cloud of despair.

Bert was planning on going back to college in the autumn, and now that we were back, he wanted to get started on registration. Tuesday, I went out to the UW Campus with him, just because I had absolutely no idea what I was going to do with the rest of my life. Bert went off to register and I sat down somewhere outside and stared at the grass. Then I heard some yelling and jeering and looked up to see a crowd of angry students marching through the campus. I followed. They went to the University president’s office and yelled abuse at him through the open windows. Naturally, I joined in. Then the crowd headed towards University Ave and marched up the avenue towards 45th street. By now, it was more than just a crowd, it was swelling into a large demo, about the biggest I had ever seen in Seattle Up to then.

When we got to 45th street, it was decision time. A right turn on 45th would take us back to the campus. A left turn would take us towards the freeway. A whisper started in the crowd that turned into a roar: “The freeway… the freeway… let’s block the freeway.”

The SWP (Socialist Workers Party) was leading the demonstration. Don’t know if they had called it or just joined it, but they were there now at the head of the march, leading it with their big SWP banner unfurled. When we got to 45th, they turned right (how appropriate) to lead us back onto the campus – and everybody else turned left. When they looked behind them, there was no one there; we were all headed the other direction. So they rolled up their banners and ran back to the head of the march, unrolled their banners and “led” us towards the freeway. This was my first contact with the SWP, the leading Trotskyite party in the U.S. at the time, and I hated them from the start. I knew nothing about Trotskyism, Communism, or any of the other ism’s, but this first encounter taught me everything I needed to know about the SWP.

By the time we got to the freeway, the demo, stretched out along the wide road, didn’t look so big, but to my amazement, it turned and started to march down the ramp that led onto the freeway. I stood on the bridge overlooking the freeway, wondering what to do. Seattle was a long narrow city and the freeway was its artery. Blocking the freeway would be a little bit like tampering with god. I hesitated for about two minutes, then ran down onto the freeway and joined the revolution.

The revolution was televised on the 6 o’clock news. It showed what now looked like a tiny band – dwarfed by the wide open space of the freeway – marching down the on ramp and into the path of the cars. Some whizzed past, some seemed pretty keen on running a few hippies over, but most slowed down. This eventually clogged up the lanes enough so that we were able to get the whole band in front and bring traffic to a stop. Then we began to march toward the federal courthouse downtown. By the time we got to the Roanoke Street exit, there was a line of cops spread out across the freeway and blocking our march. The southbound freeway had been brought to a complete stop. What an amazing feeling of power – like the whole system could be brought to a stop just by throwing in a few monkey wrenches. There was a stand-off between us and the cops for about a half hour, with the SWP doing what I came to recognize as their usual number of playing leader and negotiating with the cops, while trying to keep a lid on things. Finally they (the SWP) were able to persuade the demonstration to march up the off ramp at Roanoke and continue on to city hall by normal streets.

I don’t remember anything else about that march; it’s been washed out of my memory by other similar but bigger marches that happened over the same terrain in the days that followed. But nothing in my life has ever equaled the feeling of power and… significance… that came when we marched down the ramp and onto the freeway. Everything changed from that day, in the country, in my life… I was still in an almost terminal state of depression, still broke into tears at the most inconvenient times, but I knew – and everybody around me knew – that we were living in the most important time of our lives. Everything seemed possible. Suddenly, we were afraid of nothing.

The next day I was back on the UW campus for another march. This time Bert came with me. The SWP and whoever else made the big decisions had carefully planned a route that kept us safely away from the freeway. We were about ten thousand strong by the time we got downtown. All the way there, people would break into the long wailing chant – what became the most important four words in my life: p-o-w-e-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r to the people. And it felt powerful. The streets were packed from one side to the other and as far back as could be seen. I’d been in bigger marches in San Francisco and Oakland, but I’d been there as a commuter, a tourist almost, come down to support the cause, but not really fully part of it. And this wasn’t one big national gathering; it was Seattle, and the same thing was happening in cities all over the country.

We marched to the city hall to demand that Seattle withdraw all support for the war. The mayor had unfortunately been called out of town at the last minute, but the deputy mayor appeared on a high balcony and told us he sympathized with us, but there was nothing the city of Seattle could do; it was out of their jurisdiction. The leader of the SWP in Seattle, appeared on the balcony with the deputy mayor. She said that since the deputy mayor had been so nice as to come out on the balcony and meet us, that it would be bad manners – or something like that – to repay his kindness by trying to block the freeway. Big mistake. As soon as the word “freeway” was out of her mouth, it spread like wildfire through the crowd.

“The freeway. The freeway.”

The city hall was only a couple of blocks from the Cherry Street entrance to the freeway. We raced up the hill. The police had planned for this contingency and were blocking the nearest entrance, but there were ten thousand of us, and the downtown freeway was a rat’s maze of on-ramps and off-ramps. Within minutes of Stephanie’s kindly admonition, the freeway was full of protesters.

Bert and I had long since been separated in the march. He had planned to meet up with Allie, and she arrived with Kathleen who had the wet rat with red whiskers in tow. I faded away into the crowd and tried to lose myself in the moment. P-o-w-e-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r to the people. I fell in with some friends from Seattle University – the school I had entered after I was kicked out of the University of Chicago – and which I had dropped out of a few months previously to become a full-time hippie. By the time we’d gotten to a freeway entrance, most of the Seattle U crowd had faded away. It was just me and an old friend I’d run into – a homie, you might say – we’d been best friends in high school and I’d hung with him at Seattle U for awhile, but we’d gradually drifted apart. I guess this was our final drift. We looked at the freeway entrance where protesters were pouring in. We looked at the police line racing to block the entrance. It was now or never. I looked at him; he looked at me.

“It’s against the law, Fred.”

“Damn right.”

I ran down onto the freeway without him.

This time we were marching against traffic – the police had been successful in blocking off the other direction – and we passed between the cars as we headed north towards the UW. I had an armful of leaflets with me, and I passed them out to the people stuck in their cars. Most of the car people took leaflets and made it clear they were on our side – a little surprising maybe, since they were stuck on the freeway for god knew how long because of us – but the times were so strange that this seemed normal. Some people of course were angry, damned angry, and a few tried to run us over, but we flipped open their hoods and pulled out the distributor wires before they could do any serious damage.

We were halfway back to the campus by the time the cops got their act together. They diverted all traffic from the freeway ahead of us and set up a blockade at the Boylston on-ramp. With a small army of riot police blocking our way, we were forced to exit down the on-ramp. They’d set it up well this time, forcing us to exit single file past a row of cops with long lead-lined clubs. As we filed down the ramp, every now and then a cop would casually flick his club and blood would spurt from another kid’s head. I was one of the ones who didn’t get hit.

CHAPTER THREE

That night there was an open planning meeting on campus. It was held outside because there wasn’t a room big enough to hold the several thousand who wanted to have a say in what to do next. The meeting started in the daylight but went on past dark. I remember it as a torchlight meeting. Could it really have been actual flaming torches? That’s how I remember it, but maybe the flames were in my mind.

We planned to have another, larger demonstration on Friday. There were people at the meeting from all over the city, most of the college campuses, many high schools and even some elementary schools. The plan was to spend all Thursday organizing and then really go for it on Friday. Every school in the city would be covered. We were all keenly aware that this was only a fraction of the city’s population and various schemes were planned to reach out to workplaces, but this wasn’t Paris 1968; the working class would not join the universities in a nationwide strike and we all knew it.

The big argument at the meeting was whether to have a strike on campus and shut down the UW. Some people argued that this would be foolish, that the center of strength for the protests was the universities and that it would be madness to cut ourselves off from our power base by shutting it down. But the more radical element said this was just a right wing cover for trying to keep a lid on things, that going on strike didn’t mean nothing would happen on the campuses, just the opposite: they would be filled with teach-ins, action groups and planning meetings.

In the middle of this big argument Walt Crowley got up to speak. He was a short skinny guy with long hair and a moustache. He had been the editor of the Helix, the longest running underground newspaper in the country until it had shut down the previous year. As editor, he had bought the only poem I had ever sold in my life – for two dollars. Unfortunately, the Helix went out of business before it was printed. Walt had played a big role in organizing the UW drop-in center for the homeless and he was, as we all discovered, a brilliant public speaker. He said we should forget about the argument over whether or not to strike, that he had a better idea.

“I propose we secede from the United States of America and establish a new political entity, Karl Marx city.”

The idea galvanized everybody. We all leapt to our feet, pumped our fists in the air and shouted, “Secede! Secede! Secede!”

That ended the argument. We would neither go on strike nor not go on strike. We would secede from the United States. What this meant exactly wasn’t clear, but it sounded damn cool. It was Walt’s finest hour – and his worst. It was a brilliant exciting speech that caught everyone’s imagination, but the end result was that we would not join the most militant college campuses across the nation who were going on strike. I came to understand this as the essence of centrism: to stay in the middle, be everybody’s friend and to steer things away from a truly radical decision.

Just before the meeting ended, Michael Lerner got up to make a quick announcement. “Anyone interested in joining a Seattle Liberation Front collective should come to such and such a room as soon as this meeting ends.”

I was interested.

The Seattle Liberation Front was an organization that had been formed about six months previously when a group of radical students from Cornell University had come to Seattle to organize for revolution: Chip Marshall, the unofficial spokesperson, distant relative of the Marshall-Fields family; Jeff Dowd, son (or nephew or something) of a famous radical economist; Joe Kelly, the tallest and quietest; and Mike Abels, the youngest, wildest and sexiest. There were others that came up from Cornell, but these were the most famous, because they had recently been indicted on conspiracy charges brought after a demonstration at the federal courthouse had turned violent. The demonstration had been organized for (TDA) the day after the verdicts came down in the Chicago conspiracy trial.

The Chicago Eight, as the Chicago defendants had become known, were indicted on conspiracy charges because they were supposedly responsible for the violent demonstrations at the democratic convention in Chicago, 1968, where Hubert Humphrey had been nominated for president. One of the Chicago Eight, Bobby Seal, was the chairman of the Black Panther party. The judge had refused to let him be his own lawyer, so every day at the start of each session, he would stand up and say quietly, “I demand my constitutional right to defend myself.” The judge responded by ordering him to be chained and gagged for the rest of the trial.

The conspiracy charges were dreamed up as a way of making an example of key radicals in the movement. The whole idea of conspiracy as a criminal offense was pretty dodgy and probably unconstitutional. I think all the conspiracy convictions were eventually overturned, but I’m not going to go into all the ins and outs of the legal niceties; I’ve long since lost all respect for the laws of the United States. If you haven’t, you’ll have to find out for yourself the hard way. Good luck.

The conviction of the Chicago Eight was a foregone conclusion, and radicals all over the country planned for TDA demonstrations. I wasn’t involved in the planning nor even present at the demonstration (I was still studying psychology at Seattle U and working on my plan to save free will from the clutches of determinism), so I can’t say who planned the Seattle demo or what they planned, but the end result was that eight people were indicted in Seattle on the same conspiracy charges they were protesting against. One of them, Michael Justesen, disappeared into the underground. That left seven.

The Seattle Seven conspiracy trial was not the same nationwide news as the Chicago Eight trial, but it was a big enough deal to make the Seattle Seven local celebrities. Besides the “Outside agitators” from Cornell, the other defendants were Suzie Stern and Roger Lippman, who had been leaders in the Weatherman faction of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and Michael Lerner, a young professor at the UW. It was Michael who had invited us to come to room such and such if we wanted to join the Seattle Liberation Front (SLF). By the way, don’t panic at all these initials; I think we’ve just about hit the last of them for the entire book.

There were about a hundred of us crowded into the room by the time Michael got up to make his short speech. The Seattle Liberation Front was named after the National Liberation Front (NLF – sorry, one more set of initials) in Vietnam. It was against imperialism, racism, sexism (in theory at least), for world revolution, and it supported national liberation struggles around the world. It was organized into collectives that were an amalgam of communist cells and hippie communes.

“You don’t have to live together in a collective house,” Michael Lerner said, “but it helps. The important thing is that you have to do actions together and not just be talking shops. Some collectives are organizing in the high schools, others are working on daycare, or organizing the unemployed. You can talk to us for ideas on what to do, but it’s best if you come up with your own. It’s also a good idea – maybe not in the next few days while the shit is coming down, but as soon as possible – to go out in the countryside somewhere and all drop acid together.”

The idea was that this was a good way to get to know each other, forge close bonds and also a good way to smoke out any undercover cops. It was widely believed that cops – even undercover cops – were afraid of acid. They might smoke dope, but they would never drop acid. Of course, most spies in the movement weren’t undercover cops but paid informers who were often very fond of drugs; in fact that was often their motivation for becoming informers – to get drug money or get out of drug charges. But a lot of us hadn’t figured this out yet.

When Michael had finished his basic orientation and introduced a few of the veteran members of the SLF, he divided the room into quarters and said, “OK, you’re a collective, you’re a collective, you’re a collective and you’re a collective. Power to the people.”

I looked around at twenty-some strangers who were about to become my collective brothers and sisters. We agreed to have a meeting Sunday night, when we thought there’d be a space with no big actions. Then we made plans for the organizing we would do to build for the Friday demo. So far as we knew, no one from Shoreline Junior College had been at the big planning meeting, so we decided to go there the next morning and organize a rally. Afterwards, most of the collective would come back to the campus to see what was shaking, but I knew there was going to be an organizing meeting on the Seattle U campus, and since I had been a student there, it seemed like a good idea for me to go to that meeting. We all gave each other a revolutionary hug and then split for our various homes.

I tried to talk Bert into coming with me the next day, but he was bogged down in the registration process for university, so I went off to Shoreline on my own. I was the first one out there, but Cowboy arrived a few minutes later, and then Bonnie and Clyde. Cowboy was a Vietnam vet. We called him that because he always wore his lucky cowboy hat, even though he was as far away from a Hollywood cowboy as you could imagine. He had been a medic in the army. He’d spent his tour of Vietnam on the front lines and then been sent stateside for a medical discharge as a psycho. He wasn’t crazy, just a really sweet, sensitive guy who had seen too many people die. He was a deeply committed pacifist. There’d already been a bit of a skirmish between him and Bonnie and Clyde. They were rock throwing anarchists, cynical and politically sophisticated compared to me and Cowboy, but pretty down to earth and easy going. We all liked each other from the start – despite the skirmishes.

The four of us went into the student union office. We’d come in at a good time; the president and several other officers happened to be there.

“We’re from the Seattle Liberation Front. We’re here to organize for the big demo tomorrow. We’ll need a PA system so we can hold a rally, and a mimeograph machine so we can put out some leaflets.”

They said, “OK. What else?”

No debate, questions, discussion, just OK, what else? We had no idea what else. We’d never done anything like this before, not even Bonnie and Clyde. I left Cowboy, Bonnie and Clyde in the office working on a leaflet while I went off with the student union president to look at the best location for a rally. It was a no-brainer, really. There was one central spot that almost everybody had to walk through to get to class. It even had a raised area for the platform.

“Were you at the demo yesterday?” I asked him.

“Of course. I wish I’d gone to the meeting at the UW last night, but I didn’t know it was gonna happen.”

“Yeah, we’ve gotta get our lines of communication down.” I said this as if I were a general, just arrived on a new front and figuring out how I would get it organized.

“What’s happening there, now?”

“Don’t know, really. We came straight straight out here this morning. I think some people are going to try to blockade the entrances to campus, but it’s not organized. They didn’t vote for a strike.”

“Too bad. I wish we could have had one here, but there’s too many straight types.”

Shoreline was out in the north of the city in what I thought of as the suburbs. I wasn’t surprised they weren’t striking. In fact, I was kind of stunned that they’d let us come in and take over the office like we had, but that’s how things were that week.

Cowboy, Bonnie and Clyde were still arguing abut the leaflet when we got back. Cowboy wanted to put in a little homily about non-violence but Bonnie and Clyde wouldn’t have any of it.

“Are the Viet Cong non-violent?”

“That’s different. Nobody’s dropping bombs on us.”

“Not yet, but look at what happened at Kent State.”

“I’ve seen enough violence, and I’ve never seen it do any good.”

As more members of our new collective began to arrive, the argument got more heated – and more confusing. We finally settled on a leaflet that just gave the facts: the invasion of Cambodia, the murders at Kent State, the big demo tomorrow and the time and place for the Shoreline rally this afternoon. We printed up a couple hundred copies and rushed out to distribute them. We ran out of leaflets almost instantly. Nobody wanted to take just one. A few people yelled at us. One person took a leaflet and tore it up. But most people wanted a handful to bring home to their friends, bring to the class they were going to – or they just wanted to join us in passing out leaflets around campus. We rushed back to print out more leaflets.

By the time the rally was supposed to start, there were about 500 people waiting for it, and we were nervous as hell. None of us had ever given a speech before. We drew straws to see who was going to speak and – worst of all - who would go first. I drew the short straw.

Although I’d never given a speech before, I’d seen it done, but the only political speech I could remember then, the only one that stuck in my mind, was David Hilliard, the chief of staff of the Black Panther party haranguing the peace march that had gathered in the Golden Gate Park in San Francisco the year before. It had been a sweet mellow day until he gave a speech that was blazing with anger. He had a lot to be angry about. The federal government had begun a systematic extermination of the Panther leadership, and he was the highest ranking member who wasn’t either dead or in jail. He had ruined our mellow, dope-cured vibes that day and I had been one of many who had tried to boo him off the stage. Now it was him I tried to imitate.

“Who rules this country? Do the people rule this country?” I screamed at the top of my lungs. “Hell no they don’t!!!!!”

And so on in a similar manner. I was actually pounding my clenched fist into an open palm through most of the speech. I knocked the mic stand over twice, but that didn’t even slow me down. Mercifully, I’ve forgotten most of what I said. I stepped away from the microphone with the strong impression that I had just made a total ass of myself. Fortunately, Cowboy got up next and gave a calm reasoned explanation of what he’d seen in Vietnam and what he thought of it. We were all moved. He also remembered to give the practical details that I had completely forgotten, like where and when the march would be gathering.

After the rally, I apologized to the rest of the group for giving such a crap speech.

“What are you apologizing for?” said Cowboy. “The people don’t rule this country. It is run by a bunch of madmen.”

Cowboy and the rest of our collective headed back to the UW campus to see what was happening with the blockade. I raced off for the meeting at Seattle U.

By the time I got there, the room was packed and the meeting had already started. There were a couple hundred people packed into a room that must have had a fire limit of half that. Seattle U was a Jesuit university. It was private, expensive and had a pretty good academic reputation. The students tended to be pretty middle class. There were also students from Seattle Community College (SCC), which was only a few blocks away from the Seattle U campus. SCC was – like all community colleges in Washington State – only for the first two years of college. It also had a lot of occupational classes: welding, cooking etc. It was a lot more working class than a full scale university and it was very multi-national. It was also about five times bigger than Seattle U, so even though the meeting was on the Seattle U campus, almost half the students there were from SCC. They were listening in open mouthed amazement to the debate going on between Seattle U students – not very much about the war itself, everybody was against it, but there was no agreement on the demonstration and what to do about it.

“Will it be violent?”

“They broke the law yesterday.”

“What would Jesus say?” (I stole this phrase from the present day, but it or something like it was asked over and over.)

There was a clump of Seattle U students who were angry and wanted to tear the house down and another clump who were committed to a type of pacifism that amounted to just hanging out and praying. Most students were in the middle: they wanted to do something, but weren’t sure what. Some just didn’t want to get into trouble. Others were seriously committed to changing the world but visions of Gandhi and Saint Francis danced in their heads. The mixture produced the most bitter angry debate I’d heard all week.

One of the priests at the meeting offered a “compromise” solution: “Why don’t we all stay on campus? I will offer up a special Mass of the Holy Spirit and we can all receive communion.”

This was the point where the meeting came closest to a full-scale riot. The militant Seattle U students were angry and humiliated: the whole world was turning upside down and they were stuck on a campus that was afraid of its own shadow. The SCC students were a little more detached, like anthropologists studying the strange mating rituals of an almost extinct species.

Suddenly it was my turn to speak. I didn’t intend to make the same mistake I had made earlier. I started out calm and reasonable, explaining why I thought non-violence didn’t mean you couldn’t break any laws, just the opposite: if you didn’t break any laws, how would that be different from everyday life where you just went along with the program? I saw a lot of heads nod at that, which was unfortunate, because it got me going. By the end of the speech I was pounding fist into palm again until the climax where I solemnly assured everybody that “As sure as I’m standing here, there’s gonna be a revolution. Whether it’s peaceful or violent, communist or democratic is up to you. But it’s gonna happen, and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop it.”

By the time I packed up my crystal ball and went back to where I had been standing, one of the SCC students had taken the mic.

“We’ve had enough of this bullshit. SCC students are gonna be on the march tomorrow. We’ll see some of you there, the rest of you might as well fly back to whatever planet you came from. It sure as fuck wasn’t earth. We’re outa’ here.”

Some students had already walked out of the meeting; now the trickle became a flood, an organized walkout. I joined in. Outside, the guy from SCC who had given the last speech came up to me with another guy.

“We liked your speech.”

“I got carried away again.”

“It made a nice change,” said one.

“You should do more speeches,” said the other.

I told them about the Shoreline rally and how I had made an ass of myself, copying the Black Panther style.

“Who better to copy from?”

I would have liked to talk longer but I had to race off to rejoin my new collective.

We had set a late meeting for a house in the U District. There were two items of business: planning for the march the next day, and deciding what sort of organizing we would do in the following week. Collectives were supposed to do “actions” together; we had to decide on some actions.

I was almost the last one to get there. Only Bonnie and Clyde were still missing. About half of the original twenty that were in our collective showed up. Some of them had stopped off at the UW on the way to check out the blockade. Cowboy was the most vocal. He had seen plenty and he didn’t like any of it.

“It was just vandalism,” he said. “We are doing something really important here, and some people are just ruining it, throwing rocks through windows, throwing stuff at the police.”

“But they’ve been beating people up”.

“That’s still no excuse. We have to be non-violent. That’s what they learned in the civil rights movement and in India…”

When Bonnie and Clyde got there, the argument heated up. Bonnie and Clyde hadn’t just been spectators at the blockade. They’d joined in. When the police drove off the blockaders, they’d been pushed back towards University Ave. By this time, they’d seen gangs of off-duty cops chasing down isolated longhairs on campus to beat them up. They’d decided to start a little diversion off-campus and had run down the Ave breaking bank windows.

“I thought we all had a commitment to peace,” Cowboy said.

“We do,” said Clyde.

“But you’re being violent”

“Breaking windows isn’t violence,” said Bonnie. “Doing things to people is violence.”

“It’s all violence. I won’t have anything to do with any of it.”

That was Cowboy’s last word – and pretty much the last word in the meeting. It was clear we didn’t have enough unity to be in a collective together. Cowboy would never agree with Bonnie and Clyde, and a lot of the rest of us had no idea which side of the fence we would fall on – we’d only just joined the revolution yesterday. Our collective had lasted almost exactly 24 hours before it exploded, but in that time we’d organized a rally of several hundred people at Shoreline. We would see a lot of them at the big march the next day, but we wouldn’t be marching as a collective. The revolution was more complicated than it had seemed the day before.

The next day was the biggest demonstration that had ever been in Seattle. I remember almost nothing from it, except for one powerful image. I waited on Madison Street with the Seattle U and SCC students for the main march which was coming from the UW campus. There were several thousand of us, and we were expecting a larger group from the UW. Madison is wide and long, and we were in a hollow looking up at the horizon waiting for the march to come over the hill. When it came, it took our breath away: first a trickle of people racing ahead, then the front banners with the crowd around them, spreading across the street and sidewalks, packed solid from wall to wall. It kept coming and coming. By the time the front of the march joined with us, the mass of humanity was still pouring over the horizon. It felt like it would never end.

After the march downtown, the mayor closed the express lanes in the freeway, so we could march back without breaking the law. The bastard.

CHAPTER FOUR

Sunday, Bert and I had a long talk about the what to do next. Bert had been going to all the big marches with Allie – and maybe Kathleen – but he hadn’t jumped into things the way I had. He was planning on going back to the UW in the autumn and needed to find a job for the summer. I had built up enough credits from previous jobs that I could sign up for unemployment compensation. Because the Seattle area was suffering from massive layoffs at Boeing, the whole area was declared an economic emergency zone. This meant unemployment claims would get several extensions. One of the results of this was that the state would end up footing the bill for the first year of my stint as a full time revolutionary.

Meantime, we needed an apartment. We couldn’t stay at Bert’s mom’s place indefinitely. We hit the streets the day after the big demonstration, just walking around Capitol Hill, looking for apartment for rent signs. We found a for rent sign in front of a big house on 11th, a few blocks from Volunteer Park. When we rang for the manager, a small guy with long hair and a thick red beard answered the door.

“You’re the owner?”

“I’m the manager. We get a rent reduction, for taking care of business.”

He showed us the apartment. Two bedrooms, just the right size. We liked it.

The manager said, “Shall we go upstairs and do up a number while we go over the rental agreement?”

“Looks like we’ve found a new home.”

Upstairs we met his partner, Martha. A skinny blond, just my type, or what I thought was my type at the time. I was into blonds. (Kathleen had dark, curly hair, like my mother. Make of that what you will.) George – that was his name – rolled up a joint while Martha put on a new record. Something cool I’d never heard before. It sounded good. After the joint had made a couple rounds, it sounded fantastic.

“Who is that?”

“John Coltrane.”

“You’re kidding. I’ve never heard him play a melody before.”

“Don’t worry, it gets weird pretty soon.”

I had bought a John Coltrane record from the remainders bin when I was seventeen. Expression, I think it was called – just a collection of outtakes put together after he died. I listened to that record sitting right side up, standing on my head, and under the influence of every drug I could lay my hands on. It still didn’t make sense. Now Coltrane was playing “My Favorite Things” from that sickeningly sweet Rogers and Hammerstein musical, The Sound Of Music. Coming from his horn, it didn’t sound sickeningly sweet – just cool.

As George rolled up a second joint, he said, “By the way, the rest of us in this building are in a Seattle Liberation Front collective, would you be interested in joining us?”

“You don’t have to,” Martha interjected. “The apartment’s yours anyway.”

“That’s right,” said George. “Just asking… “

“I’m definitely interested. I was in a collective but it just broke up. Don’t know about Bert…”

“Let’s just see how it goes.” said Bert.

I knew Bert wasn’t interested. He was focused on saving up money and getting back into college. I, on the other hand, had joined the revolution.

It was an enormous house, divided into five sets of apartments:

George and Martha’s at the top

Underneath them, a young married couple who were pretty straight and weren’t really much into the collective. (I couldn’t figure out why they’d joined – just being friendly, I guess.)

The next floor had been made into two small one bedroom apartments. Golda had lived under the married couple for about a year. Danny Deakin, a skinny diabetic, had just moved in next to Golda.

Bert and I were on the ground floor in our two bedroom apartment. Bert took the back bedroom, so he and Allie could have privacy. I didn’t need much privacy – didn’t have anyone to be private with.

That weekend we had our first collective acid trip/house party. There were a couple more people in the collective who didn’t live there. Lois was a journalism student at SCC and worked on the student newspaper. We all called her Lois Lane – I forget what her real last name was. And then there was Gary, a Vietnam vet – as he constantly reminded us – an SCC student like Lois, and unlike her, a total asshole. Everybody called him Gary Go-go or more often just plain Go-go, because he couldn’t sit still – and because he hated it.

“We gotta go out to the country and do this,” he told me.

“Do what?”

“Acid.”

“Oh.”

“You know why?”

“I give up, why?”

“Because when we’re at the barricades, I wanna know who’s got my back.”

“Oh.”

“I gotta know they’re not a pig or some kind of informer.”

“I’m not. I promise.”

“How do I know that?”

“I give up, how?”

“We gotta drop acid together. Pigs are afraid of acid.”

“We’re on acid now.”

“But we’re not in the country.”

“What – are pigs afraid of trees?”

“Ha. Very funny. But if you were pig, you might just palm the acid and pretend to be stoned. Or you might actually take it and then leave quickly to get back to headquarters to take the antidote.”

“I didn’t know there was an antidote to acid.”

“We don’t have one, but who knows what they have.”

I backed out of the kitchen – usually about the best place to meet people at parties – and moved into the living room. A big mistake. There was only one exit from the living room and now Go-go was blocking it.

“You see, if we were out in the country, you couldn’t just walk away – there’d be nowhere to walk to. You might be able to fake being stoned for half an hour or maybe even an hour, but nobody could fake a whole trip… and you’d be too far away from headquarters to get the antidote.”

“What if they liked acid.”

“Pigs are afraid of acid.”

“What about informers, are they afraid of acid?”

“All law enforcement officers are afraid of acid. They’re too straight.”

“What about drug addicts? They’d probably make pretty good informers – the cops could keep them on a string and pay them off with drugs.”

“You’re right… you could be an informer.” He looked at me suspiciously.

“Fred’s not an informer.” That was Lois Lane speaking. She was cool and sweet. I should fall in love with her, she would be a good person to love, but she was chubby – a mortal sin for me. I was decades ahead of my time on this. Now even boys get anorexia, but back then, I was the only guy I knew who was obsessed by weight. I look back at my high school photos. I look skinny, like WW2 soldiers did, but I thought I was fat.

“Lois, how do you know I’m not an informer?” I couldn’t help asking.

“I just know.”

“Got a sixth sense about informers?”

“No. Lots of people could be informers and I wouldn’t know.”

“Go-go could be an informer.” This was Golda. She was chubby too, but not as sweet as Lois Lane. Go-go looked stricken. So much so, we all started to wonder about him.

“I’m a Vietnam vet.”

“So?”

“I couldn’t ever be an informer. I saw my buddies get killed.”

“I thought you were in catering, Go-go.” This was Martha. I knew she didn’t much like Go-go; she’d already told me this in the corridor outside the toilet (an even better place to meet people at a party – sooner or later everyone has to go to the toilet). “George, wasn’t Go-go in catering?”

“Sure thing, hon.” It was still OK to call your girlfriend honey back then.

“They still shot at you,” said Go-go. “Didn’t make any difference if you were shooting at them or just ducking.”

“Were you good at ducking, Go-go?” Golda was good at putting in the knife.

“And you guys know I don’t like being called Go-go. My name is Gary.”

“Sorry, Gary, we just call you that because you’re so full of get up and go,” said Martha.

“And because you’re cute as a go-go dancer,” said George.

Gary Go-go glared. I caught Martha’s gaze and rolled my eyes. Martha was practically married. Maybe this was part of the attraction. Maybe… hell. I liked George. But I liked Martha better. Decided I’d better remove myself from temptation. I slid around Go-go and headed down to my apartment.

Bert and Allie were in the living room just finishing off a bottle of wine. I felt the usual stab of pain when I saw Allie – not because of her, but because I always hoped Kathleen would be with her.

I left the door open. The party was kind of in the whole house – people were drifting in and out – but mostly it was on the upper floors.

“How’s the party going?” said Allie.

“How’s the acid?” said Bert.

“The party’s still going strong. There’s more acid upstairs. It’s on the counter in the kitchen.”

“No, thanks. We’re gonna hit the sack pretty soon. Allie’s going back to Queen Anne early tomorrow for some kind of family do…”

“My grandmother’s birthday.”

“Mind if I play the guitar – will that keep you awake?”

“Go for it. We can hardly hear anything from back there.”

I had a nylon string classic guitar. A pretty good one. I’d spent a year saving up for it and borrowing my friends’ guitars while I was in the dorm at Seattle U. I was afraid I would buy a guitar and then lose interest after spending all that money. By the end of a year, I trusted myself enough to make an investment of $100 for a Spanish-made guitar with a wide thin neck and a pretty good action. All I could do was finger pick chords – all I would ever be able to do – but I was pretty good at that. Good enough to drive Bert and Allie into the bedroom.

Playing guitar on acid is pretty absorbing. I got into it for about 20 minutes, then Golda and Danny came into the room.

I sensed that Golda liked me. This made me nervous

“Sounds pretty good,” said Danny.

“A real artist,” said Golda.

I just kept playing. The acid was really beginning to come on now, and the more I was stoned, the less I was able to talk. Golda started dancing to the music. After a couple minutes, Danny joined in, but Golda didn’t seem very interested in him. She swirled around me. As the music would rise in crescendo, she would go, “yes, yes, YES, YES!” As the music dropped, she would go, “NO! NO, no, no.” I concentrated on my guitar strings and tried to imagine I was Paul Horn in the Taj Mahal.

Then Golda started taking off her clothes. In time to the music of course. Danny followed her lead. I concentrated on my guitar strings and tried to imagine I was Paul Horn playing on the moon. I played for a long time without looking up, but finally curiosity got the better of me. Golda was just taking off her panties. Danny was still in his underpants. Golda had big breasts, dark nipples and a dark bush. Danny was skinny as a rail and almost translucent. He was still in his underpants and not making a move to go any further. About the time it became clear he never would take off his underpants, Bert walked back into the room.

“Hey, could you guys keep it down a bit? The guitar’s OK, but all this yellin’…”

Suddenly Golda realized that she was standing naked in a room full of clothed and partly clothed men. A true exhibitionist might have lapped it up, but I don’t think Golda felt real good about her body. So she did the only logical thing: she ran screaming out of the apartment, out of the building and down the street. Danny – still in his underpants – ran after her.

“Shit! Get some help from upstairs, Bert.” I put the guitar down and ran after them.

We were only three blocks from Broadway, the busiest street on Capitol Hill. Naturally Golda headed straight for it, with Danny in hot pursuit. I caught up with Danny after about a block and grabbed hold of him.

“Danny, look at yourself. Do you have any idea how stupid you look? You’re not even naked for god’s sake. You’re still wearing your stupid fucking underpants.”

He looked down sheepishly.

“Go on back to the house. I’ll get Golda.”

He turned back, and I ran after Golda.

Another twenty yards down the road, and I saw a white streak flash by me. It was Danny. He yelled over his shoulder “I’m sorry, Fred, but I’ve made my decision and the time is now!”

The second time I caught up with him, most of the house was with me, except for Bert and Allie who had gone back to bed, and Go-go who must have wandered off looking for barricades. George and Martha escorted Danny gently but firmly back to the house, while the rest of us ran after Golda. By the time we caught up with her, she had run up the stairs to one of the houses where Broadway hits tenth and was pounding on the front door screaming, “Let me in! Let me in!” Fortunately no one was home, or else they were too smart to open the door.

We took her back to the house. Nobody felt like trying to frog march/carry her up the stairs to her own apartment, so we took her to my living room. Bert and Allie came out, looking disgusted. We decided that maybe a shower would help Golda come down. Nobody had dealt with a bad acid trip before – I guess we felt, if it worked for drunks… Martha and Lois led her into the shower, got the water temperature right and left her to it. Then Danny decided to join her. Then Golda threw up. We chased Danny out of the bathroom and Martha and Lois helped her to dress. Getting thrown up on seemed to calm down Danny, but Golda was just getting more and more freaked out. She was humming to herself, staring wildly around and not responding to any of us.

At this point, Martha had the brilliant idea of calling the Open Door Clinic. They said, “Bring her right down.” I found myself in the back seat with Golda. George was driving and Martha was in the front seat.

“What happened to everyone else?” I asked. I had nothing against Golda, but I thought she had the hots for me, and it wasn’t mutual. Why wasn’t Danny here – he’d caused the trouble in the first place. Where was Go-go and his fucking barricades?

“You’re the one who cares the most.” Martha reached into the back seat and squeezed my hand. She looked horny as hell. George drove on as if nothing was happening. Golda turned up the volume on her humming.

The Open Door Clinic, known widely as the OD Clinic, was in the U District, about a five minute drive at that time of night. It was a cool place, staffed mostly by heads who’d been there, seen it, done it and knew what they were talking about. A short guy with thick glasses and long brown hair took George, Martha and me aside and told us, “LSD isn’t poisonous and you can’t physically overdose on it. But you can have a really bad trip if you’re scared and lonely. That’s what’s happening with Golda. She just needs someone to give her a hug, hold her hand and say, ‘Don’t worry. You’re not alone. I’m here, and I like you. I like you.’”

“We tried that, sort of…” said George.

“Not just for a few minutes,” the guy told us.

“How long?”

“The rest of the night, probably.”

I could see it coming. George turned to me. “I’ve gotta work tomorrow, and Martha will have to clean up the house before the landlord sees it.”

“Sorry, Fred,” said Martha. She took my hand and gave it another squeeze.

I went back into the room, put my arms around Golda and gave her a hug. I took her hand. “Don’t worry, Golda. I’m here. I’ll be here all night with you.” I squeezed her hand. I ran my other hand through her hair and put my arm around her shoulder and tried not to cringe. What a creep I am. Just because she might have the hots for me – why should that make me cringe. I tried to imagine how lonely she must be. It wasn’t hard. I imagined how George would feel if I fooled around with Martha. How I felt when I lost Kathleen. How I still felt. Golda’s hair was the same color as Kathleen’s. I started to cry. I didn’t mean to. Golda’s humming slowed down and got quieter. I held her hand until the sun came up. I don’t remember how we got back to Capitol Hill. I guess we took the bus.

CHAPTER FIVE

I used to believe the past was still there, just buried under layers of the more recent past and covered over with a thin film of the present. That may be a bit true for the really famous people whose lives appear in all kinds of documents and in the memories of millions, but now that I’ve tried telling this story, I can see that it isn’t true for everyday people like me. The past is a few documents and a few shards of memory – pitifully few – and even those few shards are mostly fiction, lines invented to connect imagined dots.

The month of May 1970 is a blur of meetings, marches and demonstrations. Most of them I don’t even remember. I know we hardly used the sidewalk at all on Capitol Hill. We’d march down the center of the road chanting, “The streets are for the people.”

I remember that somewhere in that month our collective went to a musical event in the U District. The music must have been crap – I don’t remember any of it – but I remember leaving with Martha to pick up some more beer. We bought an ice cream cone and shared it. I liked Martha. I liked talking to her. I missed Kathleen, I still felt like my heart was breaking, but Martha had long blond hair and was easy to talk to. Outside the store, she stood close to me and looked up into my eyes. I kissed her. When she kissed me back, I held the ice cream cone in one hand, pulled her close to me with my free arm and kissed her again.

“I like you,” she told me.

“I like you. I’ve been wanting you ever since the party.”

“I know. I’ve felt it too.”

“But what would it do to the collective?” Yes, I really did say that.

“This is bigger than the collective.” Yes, she really did say that.

But I wasn’t sure it was bigger than the collective… I wanted the collective to go on forever. We went back to the event. I never kissed her again.

The next day Mack and Liam came by and knocked on my door. I had met them at the Seattle U meeting the night before the big demonstration. Liam turned out to be the editor of the SCC student newspaper and had something to do with a radical bookstore in the market. He was wild and full of ideas. He was an anarchist, had made up his mind – nothing more to think about. He was the one who told me to read Lenin’s The State and Revolution.

“It’s wrong,” he said, “but it’s the best statement of the case against anarchism. It’s important to know your enemy. Know the best thing he can throw at you.”

Anarchist Liam had spent six months in city jail for doing something really stupid when he was drunk – mugging an old man or something like that. He told everybody about it – not bragging – but as a kind of a penance for being so stupid and mean and inexcusable even if he had been dead drunk. The judge had given him 6 months in jail, the longest term possible without being sent to the penitentiary. In city jail there is nothing to do but sit around and roll cigarettes. I think the judge was hoping Liam would go mad and be locked up forever. Instead he came out the best cigarette roller in three states, an enviable talent in those hippie days. Anarchist Liam taught me how to roll cigarettes. I once drew a crowd of about twenty people in the Comet tavern, as they watched me roll the biggest, fattest one paper cigarette anyone could imagine. But anarchist Liam was way better than me. He was as good as Cowboy Bob who could roll a cigarette with one hand while riding his horse into a hurricane.

The other guy, Mack, was about the same age as anarchist Liam – mid-twenties. He’d done time in Vietnam, not directly in combat – he was in transport, I think. But as Go-go was so keen to point out, you didn’t have to be in combat to get shot at. Mack had only been out of the service a few months but his beard and hair were starting to grow and already he looked like a cross between Gabby Hayes and Karl Marx. I liked his laugh. He laughed a lot, which was a good thing, because when he wasn’t laughing, he was usually half asleep. They called him Mack the Nap. He had a brother called Sleepy Sam who I would meet later. Mack worked on the SCC Student newspaper too.

It was early in the morning when they knocked on our door. Bert and Allie were still asleep.

“Hi, remember us?” Liam said.

“You were at the Seattle U. Meeting – the one before the big demo.”

“That’s right. We liked your speech.”

“I remember you said that after the meeting. It wasn’t very militant compared to yours.”

I could tell Liam liked hearing that.

Mack said, “It was militant enough. Did you see the priest jump when you started talking about revolution.”

“I didn’t really know what I was talking about. I think I was still a pacifist then.”

Liam looked worried. “Are you still?”

“Don’t know. My ideas seem to be changing every day now.”

“That’s a good thing,” said Mack. “Shows you’re learning. So am I”

“Wanna go out and sit on the grass,” said Liam. “We’ve got an idea we’d like to talk to you about.”

“Okay. How did you know where to find me?”

“Lois Lane told us. She works on the SCC paper too.”

“Too?”

“I’m the editor. Mack’s a reporter.”

“Sounds like a real hotbed of radicalism.”

“I think that’s probably true for most student newspapers after Kent State.”

“Yeah, I guess everything has changed…”

“No,” said Liam. “The only thing that’s changed is a lot more people are starting to open their eyes.”

“I’d call that a big change,” said Mack. “Free your mind and your ass will follow.”

“Huey Newton?” I asked.

“That’s right. Are you into the Panthers?”

“Don’t know. I’ve still only read a few things… stuff about Vietnam… Michael Harrington…”

“He’s a liberal,” said Mack with a wave of his hand.

“I thought he was a socialist.”

“Even worse,” said Liam.

“You’re not a socialist?”

“The bottom line is that they’re authoritarian, just like the capitalists. Read Orwell on the Spanish Civil War – Homage to Catalonia…”

“I’m not sure the anarchists there were any better,” said Mack. As I would learn, he’d read a lot more than me, but he still hadn’t made up his mind about anything. “You read some of the other accounts of the Spanish Civil War and you can see where the Communists were coming from. It’s hard to fight a battle when you have to have a majority vote before every charge”

“They were doing fine in Spain until Stalin intervened.”

“Until Hitler intervened.”

I could tell I’d walked into an ongoing argument between them. This was an ongoing argument throughout the movement – endless rehashings of the Spanish Civil War, the Kronstadt mutiny in Russia, Lenin vs. Trotsky, both of them vs. Malknov and his peasant uprising in Russia. All of this was necessary, I could see that – it was important to know who and what you were fighting for – but it seemed like it was all so complicated that I’d have to quit organizing and take a PhD in the history of failed revolutions.

“What was it you wanted to talk to me about?”

“Starting an underground newspaper,” said Liam.

That was the big idea. The Helix had folded a few months before. The Helix had been the longest running underground newspaper in the country. It had been the center of the hippie revolution in Seattle, carrying comics, recipes, movement news, real exposures like the Mai Lai massacre and brilliant put-on exposures like the electron crisis, which warned that we had used so much electricity that all the electrons were wearing out and pretty soon everything would collapse.

Nobody had wanted to see the Helix die. Everybody wanted to see it revived. Nothing was happening. Nobody had the money.

But help was coming from just about the most unlikely place imaginable: Spokane. The Spokane Organic was an underground newspaper that had been running for a fairly long time. Not as cool as the Helix, but then what was? A guy on the staff named Kevin had just inherited some money from his grandmother and wanted to invest in expanding the Spokane Organic. He was prepared to front the money to start a Seattle edition of the Organic. He had contacted some of the former Helix staff to see if they were interested. Most were burned out, but a few thought they might be interested, and they offered to try to hook him up with other likely suspects. That’s where Liam and Mack came in. Now they were asking if I wanted to be in on it.

I was thrilled. I’d actually been to a couple of Helix meetings – they were open to anyone – but couldn’t figure out how to plug in. This would be perfect. I wanted to do something for the revolution. I also wanted to write, but it was hard to just sit down in a room with nothing but me and a blank piece of paper. Maybe this would be the kick in the ass I needed. There was going to be a meeting next week. I would be there.

Mack also had another proposition for me. He lived in a big house a few blocks away on Tenth Avenue. The rent was unbelievably cheap - $100/month for 5 bedrooms. There were several vacancies coming up and he wondered if there were anyone in our house interested in moving in.

The reason the house was so cheap was because Safeway was trying to turn the neighborhood into a slum. They owned the property and wanted to build a new supermarket there. The neighbors were dead set against it. They didn’t want their neighborhood flooded with traffic, not just because they didn’t like the idea for themselves, but because the store would be next to Lowell Elementary School, the only grade school in the inner city with facilities for disabled children.

As Safeway bought up the houses needed for the store, they would set a low rent and allow people to move in with no damage deposit or references. Turnover was high, and as wave after wave of dodgy tenants moved in and out, they stripped the houses of anything movable. Fine old houses were becoming run down and filled with the dregs of humanity, like Mack – and now, me. Safeway thought the neighbors would embrace their new store as a welcome alternative to an entire block that had become a hippie colony, but they figured wrong, especially they figured without taking into account Sarah Lawrence, chair of the neighborhood association. She and her friends knocked on every door in the block and asked the residents to join with them in the fight against Safeway.

When Mack opened the door they found a willing ally. Safeway was one of the great hate symbols of the sixties because of their links with the big grape growers of California and their attempts to smash the Farmworkers Union. Working and living conditions for farmworkers in the U.S. were still at Charles Dickens levels of poverty and squalor. Pickets of Safeway stores in support of the Farmworkers strikes were a regular feature of sixties political life. Mack and the rest of us would be glad for another excuse to bring them down.

Bert was fine about me moving out – he and Allie wanted to live together anyway and three was a crowd. Mack’s house was already – in theory – a part of the same nameless collective that I had joined when Bert and I moved into the 11th Avenue house, so I wouldn’t be letting the collective down. In fact, Golda was going to make the move as well. This worried me at first, but when I met Spike and Barnacle Bill, the other residents of the house, I could see that things would work out fine.

Spike was this cool guy who seemed to never leave the house, or even the living room. He just sat there and absorbed everything that was going on in the world – art, culture, politics, personal happenings in the house, neighborhood and city – and then digested them into his great pool of common sense and good taste. Every day he would hold court in the living room as we came through. It was great fun talking to him – well, maybe not great fun, more like relaxing. And educational. I learned Burroughs and Zappa and Commander Cody from him. He also taught me how to read between the lies in the newspapers and figure out what was really going on.

But that was to come. The first thing I noticed about Spike was that he wanted a girlfriend, really really wanted a girlfriend. And I just knew that he and Golda would hook up and the pressure would be off me.

Barnacle Bill was an SCC student and – like Mack – worked on the student newspaper. He was short and balding, with the red nose of a drinker. I think he was born looking middle aged, but it paid off for him. Now we’re all getting old and he still looks middle aged. I have it in mind that Barnacle Bill was a veteran, like Mack, going to school on the GI Bill. But then I also remember him as almost never leaving the house, almost never even getting out of his bathrobe.

“Why don’t you ever take off that bathrobe?”

“You wouldn’t like what was underneath, Fred.”

“I meant – and put something else on.”

“I couldn’t do that…”

He gave me one of his attempts at a sphinx-like smile, and I knew he would wait until the revolution before he explained what that meant – unless I asked him.

“Okay. Why not?”

“I can’t afford to…”

More of the sphinx.

“Okay. Why can’t you afford to?”

“Well let’s just say that you didn’t have to go to Vietnam to have some pretty bad experiences. Some people had a pretty hard time without setting foot there. Sometimes just being on a ship in the harbor was not much fun either.”

So Barnacle Bill had been in the Navy. Now you know as much as I ever learned about it.

“What does this have to do with your bathrobe.”

“Well, I’m not saying what happened to me, but I will tell you it had a silver lining…”

Another pause.

“Okay. Why?”

“Well, the GI Bill isn’t enough to live on. That’s where the bathrobe comes in.”

“You can’t afford to buy clothes?”

“Sure, I can.”

“Then why don’t you ever get out of your bathrobe?”

“You wouldn’t like what you saw, Fred, if I did…”

This was where I came in. I started to get up and leave. When Barnacle Bill saw he was about to lose his audience, he got a bit more chatty.

“I do get out of it, now and then, but they don’t know that. They think I never wear anything but my bathrobe. So every two weeks I go down to the clinic and let them try to convince me to change my clothes. But of course I can’t. That would be crazy - they’d stop paying me to come down then.”

The week before Golda and I moved into Tenth Avenue, our collective finally made it out to the country for the big group acid trip that was supposed to weld us together and screen out any pig spies. Somebody knew somebody who had a cabin on a river. There were about a dozen of us going, including several people I’d never seen before. It took three cars. I ended up in the back seat with a breathtakingly beautiful blond.

“Who are you?” I asked with my usual suave charm. “I’ve never seen you at any of the marches.”

“I know you. You’re Fred.”

Her name was Gretchen. She had taken Michael Lerner’s class at the UW And become involved in the SLF through him. She worked in a clothes boutique on Broadway, and it turned out that she knew Bert and Allie because Allie shopped there sometimes.

Damn, she was beautiful. But more than just beautiful. She had this energy that radiated out from her, like she was a kid in an candy store and couldn’t wait to taste every there. We talked all the way out to the farm. I don’t remember a word she said. I just remember staring at her and drinking in her energy and beauty. This was the kind of girl I was supposed to fall in love with – the blond California type. Kathleen was a perfect match in so many ways, but she had broken my heart – and she wasn’t blond.

The lead driver got totally lost, and we didn’t get there until about three a.m. I was fighting to keep my eyes open, determined not to lose a minute of Gretchen. When we got to the farmhouse, Gretchen followed me up the creaky stairs to an empty room. It was a cold night and the house was freezing. We unzipped our sleeping bags and put them together on the floor. We took off most of our clothes and lay down together. Gretchen turned to me. We wrapped our arms around each other, and she whispered in my ear.

“Oh, I just love to cuddle.”

Then I fell asleep. When I opened my eyes, it was morning. She was gone.

We all dropped acid at the breakfast table – after breakfast, of course. Then we ran around in the woods. There was a wide, shallow river running through the woods, perfect for swimming. We tore off our clothes and started in, but it was so damn cold we all chickened out. I walked all the way out to the center of the river. It was only up to my waist, running real slow, so it would have been fine to just dive in. But I couldn’t make myself do it. I stood there for at least a half hour just trying to make myself dive in. Couldn’t do it. Not even when Gretchen showed up. She had been off at the farm next door where it turned out there were five tall blond handsome hippie types staying. I imagined they had enjoyed the glorious fruit that I had been too sleepy (and too stupid) to taste the night before. But maybe not, because here she was, back with us. Maybe I still had a chance. For some reason I was convinced that if I could just dive in and show her what a man I was that I could swim back to the shore where she would be waiting for me to jump her bones. But I just stood there in the water, unable to take the plunge. I blame the acid

Eventually I waded back to the shore in disgrace. We ran around in the woods and on the shore for hours. The female half of the couple who lived in the big house where we were staying came out, shucked off her clothes and joined us. She had long dark hair and enormous breasts. About half an hour later her boyfriend came out, red in the face and yelling about how the neighbors on the other side of the river would call the police and we’d all get arrested and they – the couple – would lose their lease. I think he was just pissed off that his girlfriend had gotten naked with us.

That night we went out to the hot springs on the other side of the mountains. Gretchen had gone back to the five tall blond handsome hippies for dinner, but showed up at the last minute to join the hot spring caravan. She was alone. Maybe there was still hope. She smiled at me and took my hand.

“That was fun today, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah, great. Where did you go to after?” Why do I ask such dumb questions. I knew where she’d been.

“I was at the farm next door. I’m really interested in farming.”

“Oh.”

She was so beautiful I just wanted to jump on her, but… farming? Kathleen would never talk about farming. What next – football? Kathleen was so perfect for me. Why wasn’t she blond? Why didn’t she love me anymore?

Still, Gretchen was ice cream and peaches beautiful and she was staring up at me from the car waiting for me to slide in next to her. But I was too slow. Go-go elbowed me out of the way.

“There’s room with George and Martha, Fred. I haven’t had a chance to talk to Gretchen much. I want to get to know everyone – need to know who’s gonna be at my back when we’re on the barricades.”

Did he ever think maybe they’d be in front with him at their back? Scary thought.

It took us two hours to make the half hour trip to the hot springs. I spent the whole time musing out loud to George and Martha about what kind of hormonal response had caused me to follow Gretchen around all day when I had nothing in common with her. Martha didn’t talk much.

The hot springs were high enough that there were still patches of snow on the path that ran up to them. It was cold. We got naked and jumped into the water real fast. We were real hippies now. The pool was big enough to swim around in, but only just. I dove in and stood up with Gretchen on my shoulders. She squealed with mock fright. I felt someone behind me. It was Go-go trying to climb up my back to get to Gretchen. Now I knew who would be at my back on the barricades. I spun around and shoved him away, but I lost my balance and we tipped over. When I stood up, I couldn’t see Gretchen for a minute. She was underwater swimming towards me. Then she leapt up in front of me. Her perfect blond hair hung down so thickly that I had to part it to be sure she was facing me. She was. We kissed. Then Go-go climbed onto her back. I pushed him away with my foot. Gretchen came closer and wrapped her arms and legs around me. We kissed, deeply. Then Go-go tried to wrap himself around her from the back. If I’m honest, I have to admit it wasn’t clear to me that she minded, but I damn sure did. This time I kicked him away as hard as I could. Unfortunately, since it was underwater, I couldn’t break any ribs. He climbed back on. I kicked him off. He climbed back on. I kicked him off again.

“It’s really late,” said Martha from behind us. “We’d better get going.” She and George were already out and getting dressed. Everyone else got out. The night was over. I realized I would never sleep with Gretchen – or at least never do anything more than actually sleep with her. This time, Go-go, Gretchen and I ended up in three different cars. By then I didn’t care. When we got back, Gretchen went off to the farmhouse with the five tall blond handsome hippie types. Fucking farmers.

The next morning I got up early so I could walk around before I left. I got to the giant fallen log we had climbed around the day before. Betty Anne was already there. Yesterday was the first time I had ever seen her. She had ridden up to the farmhouse on her bike – she worked in a Harley repair shop. Some people called her Betty Biker, but I think she preferred her real name so I always used it. I believed in calling people whatever they wanted to be called. Go-go was a special case.

Betty Anne had run around in the woods with us, but disappeared before we’d all gotten naked. She hadn’t dropped acid. I think she was more of an alkie than a druggie. She had short hair and looked a bit like a pixie. We waded in the river together. I was in cutoffs and barefoot already. She took off her shoes and pants, but kept on her panties and sweatshirt.

“I guess I still don’t know everyone in the collective,” I said.

“Not sure I’m even in the collective. Maybe I am. Can’t be bothered to go to meetings.”

“Meetings are important sometimes – if you’re gonna give everyone a chance to have their say.”

“I just think I can spend my time more productively at the Blue Moon.”

A cool tavern. I liked her.

(continued in book)

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