Peter Coyote

 

Chapter 18: Full Bloom
Excerpt from Sleeping Where I Fall

(Continued)

In the torrential rains of the winter of 1969-70, during the last year of Olema, my father came to visit. It had poured relentlessly for days, and the road to the ranch was a quagmire. The house was overcrowded with restless people irritable from their damp, steaming clothes and enforced idleness. Some Hell's Angels were visiting. My parents appeared out of the storm in a clay-smeared rented car. My father's pockets were stuffed with Seconals, he was lugging a case of Scotch for the weekend, and he was already drunk.

They dived into the turmoil of the farmhouse, and it could not have been easy for them. People were stacked like cordwood. Joints were rolled and passed around continuously, chased by jugs of red wine. There was a sullenness in the atmosphere: too many people trapped in too small a space for too long.

Morris sat at the table, punching holes in his Seconals with a pocketknife, sharing them with a couple of the Angels. "When I need 'em, I want 'em to work in a hurry," he explained to one who asked why he punctured them. When people stood too close to him, he jerked his shoulders as if to shake them off; he muttered, "Faggots" under his breath when a Hell's Angel's swagger got on his nerves. He was pushy and belligerent, and I was certain he would provoke a fight. I considered that this might be his preferred way of dying and was preternaturally alert because I knew that if a fight broke out between him and the Angels, I'd have to go down with him.

At one point, Morris collared my friend Gristle, one of the Gypsy Truckers, and said bluntly, "Get Peter for me."

"Get him yourself," Gristle replied blandly. He laughed when he recalled for me how Morris had then propped a hand on his shoulder, fixed his feral eyes on him, and said, "I like you, fella. You know why? Because you're not afraid to die!"

That night, Morris fell out of the loft bed that someone had surrendered for him and my mother. Stoned on Seconals, he climbed out the wrong side, fell six feet, and cracked a toe. He was cranky about it but otherwise resigned. Perhaps he was too stoned to notice. Ruth was acutely uncomfortable and uncharastically silent during most of the weekend. God knows what she felt about the shabby environment, her adored grandchild Ariel picking her way over stupefied freaks and bikers, the women dressed like girls she had been taught to avoid. Olema was always as raw and vulgar as hunger. My mother was refined; she spoke in a deep, cultured voice like Claire Trevor and years earlier had traded in her home in the Jewish ghetto in the Bronx for the "modern" world and a starring role in her own personal Fred Astaire film, smoking elegantly and referring to people as "darling" as she soaked up the culture she had longed for as a girl. She obviously preferred the glamour of the thirties and forties to the squalor of our sixties commune, but she never ever missed what was under her nose.

On the Sunday they were to leave, my dad and I were sitting together at the kitchen table. The kerosene lamp cast a yellow pallor on his skin, and the storm outside offered a subdued howl as a score for the scene. His eyes were hooded, and his hair, only recently streaked with gray, was combed straight back in his usual Latin manner. He was half in his cups when he caught my attention by saying, "You know, son...," and then drifted off on a nod before he'd finish the thought.

There was a long pause while he appeared to be checking the insides of his eyelids for news; then he lifted his head abruptly and looked at me squarely. His face was completely serious. "I gotta tip my hat to you, boy," he said roughly. "You're a better man than I am." He looked away, perhaps politely, so that he wouldn't witness my confusion. I didn't know what to say.

He continued, as if addressing the wall, "If I was your age again, this" (indicating the environs with a motion of his arm) "is hat I would be doing."

I was stunned. I had never received such direct and unequivocal approbation from him before, and certainly not for something about which I had many ambivalent feelings. I mean, the idea of Olema, the idea of the Free Family, revitalizing and reinventing the culture and the economy, was compelling and seemed the only worthwhile thing to be doing with my life. The actuality, however, was full of contradictions, embarrassments, and confusions. I might excuse our imperfections as those of a work in progress, but compared to my father's standards of elegance, Olema was a pigsty. I could not imagine how he had construed this swirling chaos in order to justify what he had just said to me.

I told him how pleased I was to hear this, and how moved, and then confessed my own lack of direction and insight. I asked him for advice. He hunkered down for another long silence, and then he uttered what were, in effect, his last words to me. More than twenty years later I remember them vividly:

Capitalism is dying, boy. It's dying of its own internal contradictions. [He was, after all, a Wall Street financier, so I listened carefully.] You think that the revolution's gonna take five years. It's gonna take fifty! So keep your head down and hang in for the long haul, because I'll tell you something. The sons of bitches running things don't give a shit about their children or their grandchildren, and they certainly don't give a shit about you! They've paid their dues, and they want to get out with theirs! They're gonna sell off everything that's not nailed down to the highest bidder. Don't get crushed when it topples down. Take care of yourself and your family. If you can make a difference, do it, but there are huge forces at work here, and they have to play themselves out according to their own design, not yours. Watch yourself.

As far as I can determine, everything he prophesied has come true.

 

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