He stands in the empty arch to his human home

“We'll go down in history as the first society that wouldn't save itself because it wasn't cost-effective." — Kurt Vonnegut

And howls at the doorway,

Flames still licking at the burnt-out jamb.

At sundown he ceases to protest his abandonment.

Head bowed low from fatigue,

Fur singed, paws sore from jagged terrain,

He turns his heavy head toward the smoke-hazed ocean

In time to watch a sperm whale breach,

An ecstatic leap captured in midair,

Frozen against the radiant wafer of a setting sun.

Life! Energetic, graceful, glistening from across the infinity of decimated dwellings, desiccated ash, and the tranquil Pacific.

The old dog settles in his curling canine fashion beneath the once-majestic arch.

And waits.

Morning brings burnt red sunlight,

Smoke, smelling acrid, wet, unnatural,

A man, smelling of carbon, sweat, unnatural,

Words spoken with unfamiliar tone.

Too weary to move,

The old dog allows the man to scoop him into canvas-clad arms

And carry him to water and soothing hands.

He recognizes love and waits for his humans,

his own humans,

To return home.

# # #

In the early 1970s, I landed back in San Francisco. For three years, me, my partner and her two children had been living a gypsy life, traveling from one collective household to another, from San Francisco to the Colorado Rockies, to western Massachusetts and finally, back to San Francisco. Read all about it in The Kitchen.

During all that meandering, we retained a few tribal rituals from the late ’60s.

One of those rituals revolved around the summer solstice and its many implications. To celebrate the awesome power of the sun on the longest day of the year, we few, we tribal few, would sit around the kitchen table with a cork, a needle, a burning candle, and a bottle of tequila.

Clutching a solstice token of our choice — a post, a ring, or a stud — we would sit in the throne (a liberated straight-back chair) and our brother in song, stage, and spiel would take a belt of tequila, pass it to the initiate who slugged a shot, passed the needle through the candle, placed the cork behind the ear lobe, and, with a wolfen growl, pierced the earlobe of the solstice celebrant, and inserted the post, ring, or stud through the newly pierced lobe.

Despite our meanderings, the tribe gathered each solstice to drink tequila and take another shot to the ear. Solstice by solstice, my array of posts, rings, and a gold hoop with the foot bone of a fox climbed up the gristle of my ear in a five-pierced arc.

Time passed. Year by year, the holes closed and my willingness to have the holes re-opened diminished. Finally, although the molten core of resistance, rebellion, and love continued to burn, the solstice days relaxed into a toast with a joint and a glass of wine. And that is the story of my piercings.

# # #

I lived in Colorado for two winters. We referred to “winters” rather than years because the months from September to May often carried winter weather. Ward, the old mining town I lived in lay in a canyon close to the Continental Divide. The mountain peaks above us topped out at about 14,000 feet. At times, the jet stream would flow close to the Continental Divide’s peaks, creating a narrow opening between mountaintops and the jet stream above.

We lay in bed, listening to the wind scream around the sturdy little cabin

Occasionally, massive airflows moved in from the northwest, propelled across Canada from Alaska. When these tides of dense air reached the Divide, they would squeeze between the peaks below and the jet stream above, a fluid compression known as the Venturi effect. In the same way a river speeds up when it is funneled between boulders and rapids, these Alaskan masses would accelerate…precipitously.

Down in town, we would feel the wind pick up, first in gusts. By afternoon, the gusts had increased in force and frequency, causing the town’s denizens to glance at each other warily. We knew the gusts were harbingers of what was to come. By evening, as the air cooled and became denser, the gusts would merge into a steady flow.

The town would begin to shriek as the cold air hugged the landscape and flowed downhill. It whipped around building corners and cornices. Any fallen snow would be blown before the onslaught, stripping the ground bare. No one ever had to sweep the streets or their porches during a jet stream event. The wind blew everything down the canyon.

By nightfall, the wind speed would increase from 60 to 80 miles per hour. Gusts would reach 100 mph. These banshees would hit our little cabin and lift the windward side of the cabin off its foundation. Blow, lift, clunk back down. We lay in bed, listening to the wind scream around the sturdy little cabin, punctuated by blows, lifts, and clunks.

Morning would bring no respite. The kids couldn’t make it up the hill to the school bus stop. The wind was too ferocious. I would either drive them to school or they would stay home. The wind continued, unabated. It was nearly impossible to do any work. For a short time, I worked in an abandoned silver mine (see “Can’t Bust ‘Ems) that offered an unobstructed view of the continental divide and an unobstructed target for the wind.

At one point, I looked up at the mineshaft headframe to see my pal Eddy strapped to the structure. The chainsaw he was using was tied to the headframe with the wind blowing the heavy Stihl chainsaw out horizontal on the end of its tether.

After a day and a night and another day, the wind would begin to get on our nerves. It would tighten our necks and the back of our heads. We began to grimace and grind our teeth. Conversations turned clipped and snarly. The wind didn’t give a damn. Its faceless persistence reduced us to helpless jitters. We had no choice but to ride it out.

A second night of wind could howl down the chimney, scattering sparks onto the floor from the wood cooking stove or the big coal heater. No sleep for me. The fear of fire held our attention hostage. By the third day, the ceaseless nature of the rise and fall, punctuated by stupendous gusts became a monstrous adversary. But there was no fighting that wind. Madness flew through the town like a windblown bat.

Then, one morning, it might take a moment, a minute, an hour to realize…the wind had stopped. Silence.

The little town sat back down on its hillside. Nothing moved. The sky shone bright blue and placid in the cold, dense silence. The back of the skull relaxed. Shoulders dropped. Jaws relaxed. People shouted to one another as they emerged from their shelters. It felt as if the enemy had stopped shelling us and had withdrawn.

Now, I recall that silence, that sudden peace, and I strive to embrace that immobility in my meditation or anytime I need the world to stop spinning. Silence. Tranquility. The Zen of perfect stillness.

# # #

Nineteen sixty three unfolded into a year of beginnings. After years of post-adolescent frustration, I had sex for the first time. Having grown up in New England in the 1950s, nobody had told me or anyone else about the mysteries and techniques of copulation. There was no Joy of Sex, literally or figuratively. My parents could talk politics, science, and history, gossip about our small town’s antics, they could joke about sex but were not inclined to talk to their kids about it. Hence, I “entered” my maiden voyage on the storm-tossed seas of sexual intercourse with an athletic young woman who knew much more about having a good time in bed than I did.

I finished my freshman year of college that year. By the beginning of 1963, we had survived the end of the world as defined by the media as the Cuban missile crisis. At fair Harvard, cliques had set, the freaks had circled the wagons, and the study rate dropped to 33 percent.

Beyond the sheltering walls of Harvard Yard, our nation was embarking on a surge in the struggle for civil rights. Strategists in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference planned 1963 as a year for direct action — voter registration in Southern states, lunch counter sit-ins, marches to out Jim Crow to northerners. They organized a Birmingham, Alabama march for civil rights that was met with Birmingham Sheriff Bull Conner’s riot sticks, firehoses, and police dogs.

Hundreds were arrested, including Martin Luther King. His “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” began as a response to indignant white clergymen, but King’s letter became a manifesto for nonviolent protest and the need to end racial injustice in the United States. King’s letter, the reports and photos of that demonstration resonated ‘round the world.

Despite bloody, chaotic, and cruel treatment, these early non-violent protests succeeded. King and the SCLC had planned to be arrested and jailed. The arrests forced racial injustice into the system through unimpeachable lawsuits focused on the unconstitutional violation of American citizens’ civil rights. In the courts, the SCLC reasoned, the evidence of Jim Crow would be exposed for the nation to see. From the court cases, civil rights strategists hoped to bring Jim Crow to the attention of Congress.

Sixties America had begun to heat up. Freshman silliness prevailed in my Harvard dormitories but we read the papers and watched Freedom Riders’ buses burn from afar. We still spent more time listening to the fractious comedy of Lenny Bruce and Mort Saul and reading Paul Krasner’s satirical broadside “The Realist.” But within the sanctuary of Harvard Yard, rising social inequity and bad hygiene bred insanity that soaked into our lives like microbes through a semipermeable membrane.

Dennis, one of my freshman college roommates, a gay, working-class Trotskyite from Cleveland, had taken to sniffing glue and reading Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men —over and over. Dennis had become paranoid. Who could blame him? Gay, working class, a commie in Harvard’s hallowed halls?  I believe Harvard had admitted Dennis as a social experiment.

By April, Dennis had landed in the university infirmary. When we entered his room, he desperately shushed us up from his hospital bed. “Shusssssh,” he whispered. “They’re listening.” He frantically instructed us to return to our dormitory room and destroy all his papers. “What papers,” we asked. “All of them!” His whisper was more of a scream than anything else.

Dismayed, we returned to the dorm and boxed up the clutter of papers in his desk. There was nothing worth hiding, just lists, diagrams, glue-inspired dribbles and doodles. Certainly nothing academic. Absolutely un-seditious. I don’t think the guy had cracked a book.

Dennis disappeared, never to be seen again. I’ve looked for him over the years, thought he might have become the Unabomber, but the spelling of the last name was off, and the lead fizzled out. So much for my bright but crazy roommate. I finished freshman year and immediately departed for California.

My cousin and I had been swapping letters over the year. He began UC Berkeley just as I began Harvard, and we had been corresponding over the semesters. I had been to California as an impressionable child and found it to be a wonderland. My cousin’s letters had morphed from rational narrative in architect’s block print into sweeping psychedelic drawings. My return to Berkeley in the summer of ’63, although nine years after my initial visit, proved that California had turned into a brave new world.

I joined my cousin in his passion for landscape gardening, cavorting in small work boats on the San Francisco Bay, exploring whaling stations and moored WWII Liberty ships. We took overnight drives to the Sierras and hiked into Yosemite’s high country. There, we tried to kill ourselves by embarking on hair-raising technical climbs that afforded views of 2000-foot views — euphemistically called “exposure — that demonstrated where your body would land on the talus slopes below, viewed between your boot-shod legs.

Berkeley, too, had burgeoned. There were beatniks and hipsters and anarchists and the beginnings of the Free Speech Movement. There were coffee houses and bookstores full of Ferlinghetti and Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg and — gasp — even a woman beat poet named Diane DiPrima. Folk music was everywhere, and my traditional folk music world had been turned upside down by Bob Dylan.

The Safeway grocery stores were open 24 hours a day, so the night people would come out to buy their oddities. Oh, and the women and girls were exotic, beautiful, and… largely unavailable. Like most late-blooming teenagers, I was hopeless at making moves. I did, however, find solace with the lovely daughter of a tugboat captain. I played the guitar under her window and— as Bob Dylan wrote two years later — she “invited me into her room.”

In late August, I said goodbye to my California family and began the long, hot haul back across the continent to Cambridge. I had not wanted to say goodbye to cousins and the California life that daily grew more adventurous in its love affair with nature, marijuana, and the mutual recognition of what we then called “freaks.” We proudly referred to ourselves as freaks,  scruffy outsiders who were beginning to recognize one another as we stepped over the lines of societal propriety, to invent lives, “beyond the fringe.”

The cross-country drive froze into a highway duet — engine and tires — at 50 mph, no more, no less. Harriet had picked me up on a Berkeley billboard where notices for riders and rides fluttered in the breeze. She drove a Nash Rambler and was returning to Smith College. We had little to say to each other. Harriet gazed out the window, hot wind blowing her hair. She had little to say to her scruffy travellng companion. I was moody and silent, too. I liked the tugboat captain’s daughter. Most important, I didn’t want to go back to Cambridge.

In the Midwest, busses began to pass Harriet’s Rambler. Each bus sported a large banner saying things like “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom,” or “Civil Rights Now — No More Waiting!” Bus after bus roared past us. We could hear people singing over the roar of the buses, the highway noise, and our own tiny engine. Something was going on.

By the time we hit Ohio, the Rambler’s AM reported a “largest ever” crowd gathering in the heart of Washington, D.C. It sounded exciting! The busses were headed for Washington and the Reflection Pool that lay between the Lincoln and Washington Monuments. “Hey,” I said to Harriet. “Let’s follow them. It’s not that far off our route.”

Harriet crossed her arms. She shook her head. Harriet was headed for Smith College, not Washington, D.C.

“But look!”  I said. Another convoy of busses passed. “There’s something happening here…”

Harriet reminded me that I was driving her car. “We’re going to Amherst.” So…

I never made it to the March on Washington. Such are the turns of fate that shape our lives.

Cambridge seemed dirty, droopy, tired of its long, humid summer. The narrow streets felt constricting after my California summer full of sunshine, suntans, alpine challenges, and Berkeley weirdness. The “authorities” had turned down my request to join several pals in Adams House. Instead, they had shunted me off to the cinderblock-dreary confines of Quincy House. I never considered appealing the decision. The housing office had spoken. I felt better, however, standing in the Quincy House yard. I rejoined my embryonic hipsters, traded matchboxes of weed, and listened to the Isley Brothers  sing “Twist and Shout” over a hi-fi speakers jammed into the stingy Quincy House windows. However…

The performers weren’t the Isley Brothers; they were the Beatles. After playing folk music and listening to the blues for an impressive four years, I thought I had an ear to distinguish between white covers (bad) of black tunes (good). But the Beatles had me fooled. I’d never heard the band before, and they rocked “Twist and Shout.”  I was impressed. As with so much of 1963, we had no idea what was about to happen — with the Beatles, the civil rights movement, the Presidency. Vietnam was still a mystery: Where was Saigon, and why were Buddhist monks burning themselves in public squares?

In their wisdom, the authorities had chosen to team me up with two preppy football players from Connecticut. The mismatch was so sharp that I couldn’t help but feel that I was being sabotaged. We had nothing in common and, when together, the two blond bruisers were insufferable. I grabbed the single bedroom, closed the door and listened to Dylan records while I studied and daydreamed, staring out of the slit windows that symbolized the claustrophobia I felt.

Football season came. The files of happy Harvardians with their Cliffie companions trooped beneath my windows to the stadium every Saturday while I remained dateless. I did, however, manage to escape the nasty hilarity of my jock roommates to hang out with a covey of folk musicians on the floor above me.

Contrary to popular claims, I don’t remember where I was when Kennedy was shot. I suspect I was in the dorm. I do recall watching the aftermath, the waiting, the final death verdict, Cronkite’s speculations on the black-and-white television. I remember being alone. I don’t remember speaking to anyone, just watching, suspended in the numbness that had enshrouded me during the October days of the Cuban missile crisis. I recall wandering up to the Square, to the newsstand at the subway entrance. Someone snapped a photo of me that showed up in the 1964 Harvard Yearbook. I must have been looking appropriately sad.

Two days later, I stood stock still in the wretched lobby of my Quincy House dorm and watched — in real time — as some fat guy in a fedora pushed through the crowd in the basement of the Dallas courthouse and shot Lee Harvey Oswald in the gut. I thought Oswald was a patsy even then; I knew that somewhere, there were bigger fish to fry.

I do remember a familiar lack of emotion over JFK’s assassination. As with the nuclear nightmare of the U.S. – Soviet arms race and mushroom clouds, or the big showdown off Cuba, the loss of the “Age of Innocence” left me cold. What innocence? What Camelot? I wasn’t a big Kennedy fan. I didn’t think his often-repeated slogans “Ask not what you…” meant much. I didn’t like his attack on Cuba, I thought Bobby Kennedy’s integration plans were disingenuous, and I saw the Peace Corps as a Marshall Plan for kids who would become well-intended advocates for American imperialism. I was old for my age.

I had lost my “age of innocence” when Eisenhower murdered the Rosenbergs. The two communists were people just like my parents. They had joined the communist party during 1930s, when they were in their 20s and socialism seemed possible. As a child I wondered when the FBI — who periodically came to our door — would take my parents away and fry them, the way they had done to the Rosenbergs. My father was blacklisted in 1947 and could never find enough steady work to feed his family before he died in 1964. So, for me, the violence of 1963 seemed linked to the violence of 1953, when McCarthy was at his pinnacle.

Thanksgiving came and went, the nation mourned, Johnson took over, Vietnam began to rumble and then — as we had done in Iran (1947), Guatemala (1954), had tried and failed in Cuba (1961) — the CIA set out to block an election and facilitate a regime change in Vietnam. We succeeded in halting the election that would have unified Vietnam in 1963. One hundred American advisors died in Vietnam that year. We all know what happened after that.

At the semester break, I walked out on the two football players. I had secured a bunk with my folk singing pals in Quincy House and looked forward to taking a year off to work with a new student activist group called SDS —Students for a Democratic Society.  Beginnings had begun.

#  #  #

Buddha statue in Cambodia (Emotions) cambodia,buddha,serenity,smile,statue,head

sit in a chair or

The buddha smile will follow you.

in a comfortable, cross-legged position

on a cushion

breathe in

breathe out

relax your face — forehead, eyes, lips, cheeks, jaw

touch the tip of your tongue to the roof of the mouth

breathe in

breathe out

when all is relaxed and calm

your mouth will smile

effortless

a buddha smile

breathe in

breathe out

move slowly throughout the day

smile at bright moments

smile at your difficulties

the smile will follow you

a buddha smile

“Dying is easy; comedy is hard.” You’ve probably heard this adage, but like most clichés and adages, they present a truth, and their truth justifies their frequency.

...never, never, never step on laughter.

Comedy has been around as long as humanity, and possibly before. Shamen and shawomen, often the disabled, the chronically ill, or the insane, made themselves useful to a community by making people laugh. Shakespeare’s fools, for example, are commonly flawed beings who “sing for their supper” by playing the fool in order to survive.

Fools, as comedians, still fall into two ancient categories: those who make fun of others and those who make fun of themselves. Comedy began as a dangerous game: evoke laughter or be thrown to the dogs if the monarch doesn’t like the punchline. Standup comedians still usually fall into one category or another, from the self-effacing Minnie Pearl or Rodney Dangerfield to the insults and aggressions of Lenny Bruce. The bomb of a joke gone bad always lurks in the next line or slight-of-hand.

Comedy is impossible to write. I took a comedy writing course with Danny Simon, who, among the jewels of wisdom he bestowed, couldn’t stop repeating the fact that he, Danny, not brother Neil, had come up with the idea for The Odd Couple.

Beyond the dubious veracity of Danny Simon’s claim to fame, his cardinal advice remains — don’t try to be funny; no one will laugh and you’ll die trying. Comedy has to emerge organically from character and situation. Hence the term “situation comedy.”

Lines that don’t emerge from those two sources are called “joke jokes,” meaning they’re slapped into the script to evoke a laugh. They generally bomb unless they are about sex or drugs, like cocaine. Scatological references are hit and miss; references to a local person, place, or event can evoke a joke-joke laugh, but it’s not ironclad. Real comedy builds organically, line by line, from character and scene.

Satire offers another razor’s edge for writers and performers. Advocates for social justice, political issues, or humanitarian crises enlist satirical humor — ironic exaggeration or absurdity to expose and humiliate stupidity, greed, and hubris in a culture.

But satire can backfire. It’s power to humiliate may strike at too many sensibilities, resulting in off-putting insult. Assaulting an audience only works for a few comedians and in rare situations. Satire is best used to cheer lead already unified factions.

Satirist Jonathan Swift, in A Modest Proposal, uses self-derogatory comedy to avoid insulting his audience. His earnest, exaggerated, brainless, faux-serious pomposity suggests that cooking and eating the infants of the poor might solve poverty, but never attacks his audience. Instead, Swift takes the blows for this ridiculous suggestion, but the discerning audience can see through the satire to contemplate the cold truths of overpopulation and the lack of social service.

*

Okay, we’ve tripped lightly over the ups and downs of writing comedy. How about performing comedy? I love to act in comedy. There is nothing so satisfying as delivering a punch line or executing a double take that triggers an audience to explode into laughter as one, united organism. Well-delivered laughter can hit the performer like a wave, affirming the performer’s fragile spirit and unifying an audience.

How does comedy unify an audience?  When you make people laugh, they begin to trust you. When they begin to trust you, they open their eyes, ears, and minds to what you are doing and saying. Comedy often carries with it the pen’s most powerful ammunition.

But performing comedy is like riding a bull. You can be thrown at any moment. To survive as a comic actor, I’ve come up with a few rudiments:

1. Know your lines! Comedy depends on timing and timing depends on the actor’s flawless knowledge of what comes before and after any comic line, be it developmental or a punch line.
2. Never step on another actor’s line. Comedy often depends on well-timed dialog where each actor’s line builds to a punch line. Vaudeville and situation comedy depend on perfect sequence and delivery.
3. The same rule applies to physical comedy. Unless you are a lonesome clown or silent mime (ugh), physical comedy often involves a dialog of bodies. Commedia dell’arte and vaudeville are both rife with lazzi, gags that can be inserted to further the action and tell the story. In a physical comedy or lazzi, acrobatic timing is essential with each character knowing which move comes next. For example, one character serves wine at a dinner, but keeps drinking it all before filling the cups of the guests. He feigns shock at the empty bottle, apologizes and runs off to get more wine; and the lazzo repeats.
4. Regardless of the nature of the comedy, a lazzi, a scripted dialog, or improvised scene, never, never, never step on laughter. Let them laugh. The dramatic timing can resume after you feel the laughter subside.
5. The same applies to tragedy or the portrayal of sadness. Generating tears is a good acting exercise. But on stage, the audience doesn’t want to see you cry; they’re not there to comfort you; they want to cry in empathy with your character’s sadness.
6. Be ready for unexpected laughter. Audiences are fickle and often act as a single organism. Thursday’s audience my remain silent through a punchline or pratfall; Friday’s audience may roar.
7. Finally, never step on laughter evoked by another actor’s punch line. They will come after you onstage or off. Your only defense is to run, run, run!

Now that’s comedy!

#  #  #

We’ve all stood at a few crossroads. We all face turning points. Most of the time, we’re aware of them. Turning points can slip up from behind and smack us on the back of the head. If you’re aware, the turning point might, in the best of all worlds, be a change you’ve planned. Or perhaps you didn’t plan it but faced its arrival with excitement…or dread.

All I can safely say is… no one was killed.

Anticipating an argument with a spouse might signal the approach of a turning point. Dressing for a party or watching the sun rise after a night on a cold mountain might bring excitement or relief. Death will certainly arrive as a turning point.

Regardless of how they hit you, turning points are important to people, flora, fauna, and all manner of events and points along the time/space continuum. People write about, sing about, complain about, repress, or fuss over turning points.

Mostly, humans, with their overly busy minds, try to anticipate turning points. The choices involved can be intriguing, obsessive, even a matter of survival. Certainly, turning points can pose a dilemma of anticipatory dread. We can be aware or ignorant of a turning point’s approach, ecstatically or dismally journey through a looming turning point, but… what then?

As any cosmologist who might be hanging around the house can tell you — with a tip of the hat to Albert Einstein and the Hubble telescope — we can look backward in time, experience time as it unfolds, but we can’t overtake the passage of time in some cosmic carpool lane.

If you accept Einstein’s reality, we can’t predict what our turning points will bring. So, I thought I’d try to explore the aftermath of one of my many crossroads. Although I anticipated the approach of this turning point, I had no idea what the result of my decision would be.

After two winters living at 9000+ feet in the Colorado Rockies, I sat alone behind the wheel of a ’56 Chevy panel truck with a decked-out redwood camper on the back. The intersection, my turning point, lay just outside of Cheyanne, Wyoming, at the intersection of Interstate 80 and a three-lane prairie highway that would soon become interstate 75.

The time spent in the Colorado mountains had been exciting, unique, productive, and difficult, particularly for the two kids I had inherited with my long-term girlfriend. We had left San Francisco to live in a derelict mining town that hosted a mixture of crusty Colorado libertarians and a loose collective of hippies, anarchists, draft resisters, ex-drug dealers, reformed academics, and dogs.

With wood and coal stoves for heat, no electricity or running water, we had lived an intriguing but rough life. After the second winter, my girlfriend bundled up the two kids, and took off down the mountain to rejoin her sister in New England.

Two months later I realized I had grown tired of mountain living. I missed my life as an actor and musician, and I missed the kids and my girlfriend (in that order). I finished my last carpentry project and began to pack my spartan kit into the pickup truck. I bid goodbye to Hazel, the hearty octogenarian who had been my landlady and boss, celebrated a drunken farewell with my mountain mates, and took off down the mountain.

I had made my decision to leave, but where was I headed? I drove through Boulder, feeling as if I had never lived 17 miles and 4000 additional feet above the town for two years. I turned north on the highway to Cheyanne, mind whirling.

After two years in a hardscrabble canyon cabin, my partner and I had grown tired and frazzled by the difficult life and took it out on each other. The kids had stood enough high-altitude abuse. They needed a real home and a steady life. I had grown tired of the concern and responsibility for their welfare, but I missed them. They were great kids, although not mine, and I loved them dearly.

As I drove north into the beautiful high plains around Cheyanne, I tossed around my dreams of returning to San Francisco without the burden of a family and a monogamous partner. After years of playing as a folk musician, I wanted to study music seriously and plunge into the burgeoning folk rock scene.  What better place to return to than San Francisco?

But then, what about my girlfriend and her kids? After my partner and I had bid each other stoic, bitter goodbyes, and I shared tear-filled farewells with the kids, the trio that had become my family took off down the canyon in my girlfriend’s newly acquired, ’64 Dodge van. She was bound for a farm in Vermont, stewarded by my partner’s more stable younger sister.

After spinning the myriad factors that burnt in my skull like the embers of a bonfire, I approached Cheyanne with no idea which direction I would take. As I headed north, left would take me to San Francisco and an anticipated life full of wine, women, and song; right would take me to Vermont, my surrogate family, and a communal farm with a woodworking shop. Which would it be? Country mouse or city mouse? New beginnings alone in a rapidly changing Bay Area, or familiar faces and a bucolic dwelling with the offer of a cabinet maker’s apprenticeship?

Rock and roll music? Freewheelin’ San Francisco women? A stormy but knowable self-styled family with a woman I had grown to love and live with, learn and laugh with, and hate? And oh, those kids?

I approached the intersection. All thoughts left my burning, buzzing beehive of rationality. Empty of ideas, I turned right, and began the long journey to Vermont, unresolved, without rationality, dread, or anticipation. A numb but familiar rhythm overtook me on the road, and three days later, I had reunited with my homemade family at the beautiful Vermont farm.

Two years later, that same family left the New England communal farm (which had grown stuffy and proprietary — it seemed that all the participating radicals had decided to become like their parents, as quickly and completely as possible).

We lucky few, outlanders to the end, stuffed ourselves, along with a couple of rebellious communards, into a refurbished school bus and drove west, back to San Francisco, the theater, a new calling for me as a studious jazz bassist, and a home we purchased and quickly filled with a motley but energetic cadre of actors, musicians, and kids.

Yes, we spun through several turning points during this restless period, but, in the end, we covered all the bases, from Rocky Mountain highs to Vermont pastorals, to music and theater, to a steady education for the kids, and several of many lives lived and more to be lived. Our turning points were marked with dread and excitement, conflict and beauty, blunders and good choices. As with my mindless turn of the wheel at the Cheyanne crossroads, no one could have anticipated where these various points would lead. All I can safely say is… no one was killed.

#  #  #

I have a friend, a healer, an expert massage therapist, and a fine musician and thinker. He plays guitar, sings, and writes songs. He is also an aroma therapist who concocts fragrant medicines from herbs, flowers, and even wood. His aromatic tonics, tinctures, ointments and sprays can sooth, immunize, and clean your teeth.

We met at the bottom of the crater and began to hug each other and dance.

He also has begun experimenting with total sensory meditation — light, sound, and smell. The idea is to inundate the senses which often distract the mind from unhampered neuroflexibility, where brain functions might be shaken from their normal, often-entrenched routes to open new cognitive pathways. In my ignorance, I like to think of this neuroflexibility meditation as a method to let the brain rebel against its established ways.

[Disclaimer: the above description is criminally lacking in deep analysis. I don’t know anything about neuroscience, but I love my friend’s total-sensory meditation machine; it blows my mind.]

Not so long ago, my friend took a trip to the sub-Saharan nation of Mali, a strange land with outlandish indigenous architecture, strange landscapes, remarkable music and a devastating civil war in its northern regions. Despite the civil war, musicians trek from all over the world to a festival held in an oasis, 300 miles south of Timbuktu. To get there, musicians and aficionados must trek by jeep, river, and foot.

But my friend has been greatly influenced in his own musical work by the musicians of Mali, who include the well-known Ali Farka Touré. We have often listened to and talked about the music of Mali. One day, after submitting to my friend’s neuroflex meditation machine and a deep-tissue massage, I lay on the table, listening to the tinkling of chimes and Malian music and I fell into a daydream.

*

I had teamed up with a group of travelers, all of us strangers to each other. I was leading the line of oddball but good-natured trekkers across a landscape barren of any vegetation. The ground was crusted with a bright-white, salt-like substance, but the air was cool and so we marched along, not knowing where we were or where we were going.

After an unknown interval (no time sense in this daydream) we sighted the rim of a large crater, almost like a desert canyon, the side of which were covered with reddish-brown dirt of the same hue that I had seen in pictures of Mali.

We approached the crater and looked down. Far below, we saw a village, teeming with people in what appeared to be ceremonial dress — robes and decorative accessories. They looked up as we appeared on the rim of their universe. Immediately, a great feeling of wonder and love swept over our group. Below us we could see an agitation among the village’s population that seemed to reflect our own emotions and excitement. They gestured and shouted as if to say “hello!” and “welcome!” and “come down, come down!”

We descended on a narrow ledge, barely able to contain our excitement. We all felt such a powerful attraction for the people we saw below, but we had to take care, the pathway being narrow, rutted, and without guard rails.

As we drew closer, we could hear music rising from the village, the villagers playing groovy rhythms on drums and cymbals. We all met at the bottom of the crater and began to hug each other and dance. There were stringed instruments as well, strange-shaped guitar-like instruments, and I could play them as if I’d played them all my life.

As I danced, I followed other dancers into the village buildings. These were no huts, but elaborate, tall structures with balconies, ladders, rooftop porches, and hallways. There was not a straight line or right angle to be seen. The inside of each house had its own fragrance, familiar from my friend’s collection of aromatic oils, tinctures, and sprays.

The feeling of love and delight seemed mutual. The villagers seemed as happy and rejuvenated to see us as we were of them. The singing and dancing and playing continued, along with the joy until I emerged from my daydream.

*

The room was dark, my friend was gone. In the kitchen I could hear pots and pans rattling. I slid off the massage table, shivered in my nakedness, pulled on my clothes and wobbled into my friend’s kitchen to say goodbye.

The feeling of love and community clung to me as I drove alone past the bungalows and pop-up shops of Echo Park, past the strolling couples, past the homeless encampments huddled beneath Sunset Boulevard’s dusky Los Angeles twilight.

# #  #

During the Vietnam War, I was one of the fortunate young men of draft age who saw through the lies and hypocrisy that surrounded the violence against a small, agrarian nation. Vietnam wanted— after centuries of occupation by the Chinese, the French, the Japanese, the French reprised, and the Americans — to determine its own destiny through democratic means.

Support Our Troops / Bring Them Home

The Vietnamese, after so many battles for independence, called our twisted invasion simply “The American War.” Back home, many young men mistook the Vietnam war as a struggle similar to the “good war” our parents had fought against fascism in Europe, Africa, and the Pacific.

During the Vietnam war, all men between the ages of 18 and 26 were required to register with the Selective Service and were subject to recruitment into the U.S. army. Once drafted, we would be trained and stamped as G.I.s, short for “Government Issue.”

There were plenty of exceptions, but the draft hung over most males during the war years. As the war grew, anti-war protest grew. Many of us refused to go through the military induction process that stamped us as “Government Issue — GIs — as if we were pieces of meat, trained to kill.

As the war cycled through recruits and draftees, soldiers who had fought in Vietnam began to return home. Amidst the growing protests, war-weary soldiers often disembarked at American airports to be greeted by their friends, families and — so the myth goes — antiwar protesters who spat on the veterans and called them “baby killers.”

Bullshit.

The spitting myth flies in the face of the deep understanding that most of our generation shared — that a large percentage of returning veterans had been drafted into the war against their will, their beliefs, and their everyday lives.

Contrary to the implications of the spitting, baby-killer myth, support for the troops in Vietnam became a powerful position in the antiwar movement. “Support the troops Bring them home” became a familiar slogan, sign, and bumper sticker.

One Vietnam vet, a sociology professor named Jerry Lembcke began to research the spit myth. As a returning vet, he had never experienced any negative sentiment from antiwar protestors and could find no credible instances of anti-war activists spitting on veterans. Instead, he found what we activists already knew, that a supportive, empathetic relationship grew quickly and deeply between veterans and anti-war forces. Together, protestors and vets exposed government and military leaders as the real villains, not the returning “grunts,” as Vietnam-era soldiers were called.

G.I. coffee houses sprung up outside military bases, refuges where soldiers could relax, meet antiwar activists and returned veterans, leaf through the proliferation of underground newspapers, and just hang out.

In 1971, while the war was in full swing, hundreds of Vietnam veterans gathered outside Nixon’s White House, and threw their medals over the walls and gates that had been erected to protect the war’s perpetrators from angry protesters. These vets did not want to be rewarded for what they had done in Vietnam.

In 1998, Lembke published The Spitting Image, where he reported his findings. The Spitting Image also describes the Nixon administration’s perpetration of the spitting myth as a tool to drive a wedge between military service members and the anti-war movement by portraying democratic dissent as a betrayal of the troops.

So, let’s not simply celebrate the “service” of the U.S. military as a force for extending American policy abroad, to increase our “national security” — whatever that is. A military presence anywhere can protect and serve or create horrendous violence and injustice. And in the spirit of Veterans Day, let’s respect the reality that military action and service can wreak terrible damage on the men and women who enforce our presence in the world.

#  #  #

Ward Community Center

As the 1960s sunk into the next decade, I decided to leave San Francisco, to “get my head together.” A friend knew I had carpentry skills and suggested I contact a woman who owned property in the Colorado Rockies above Boulder. She needed a handyman. A cabin was available. That seemed attractive. To get away from the protests and the war, live the simple life, and work with my hands.

I wrote to my friend’s contact and received a shaky-handed but ladylike postcard from Hazel Schmoll, the property owner in Colorado.

So, we headed for Ward, Colorado, a town that had been built around the mines that dotted the Colorado canyon landscape. Rusting headframes and pyramid-shaped mine dumps flowed down the hills from the old mines.

When we arrived, we found a semi-habitable cabin in a lovely location with a wood stove in the kitchen, an ancient coal stove in a second room, no running water, and no electricity. Welcome to country livin’.

I met with Hazel, a delicate but lively lady who had been the Colorado State Botanist for several decades. She was a crafty woman who looked at me knowingly through rheumy eyes. After a sweet conversation over iced tea, she had ascertained that I would suffice as a carpenter for the many tasks that awaited me at her “summer places.”

She owned a large hostel, a former resort, up in the national forest. In town, she owned several cabins refurbished with 1920s plumbing, and what she called her “commercial property” on Main Street. She wanted me to spruce up the aging storefront to make it attractive to potential businesses that might want to land in the abandoned mining town.

I walked through the place. It was a wreck. Decades of heavy snows and wind had gradually pushed the old structure into a downhill-canted parallelogram. The foundation consisted of assorted mine timbers, pine logs, and rusty steel stanchions cadged from abandoned mine tunnels.

I returned to break the news to Hazel, that her “commercial property” was both unusable and a wreck. She took my report pleasantly, folded her hands in her lap and said simply, “so we shall begin anew.” And that was how my first venture into house building began.

With the aid of new friend, Douglas, a personable peer who had escaped to the sleepy mountain town with his young wife and baby, I began anew by tearing the old building down. Much of the wood was useable, so we stored it across Main Street in an old union meeting hall that creaked in the breeze like an ancient sailing vessel.

First, we poured a concrete slab for the new building’s floor. We hoped to keep the basement open at one end to allow townsfolk, largely pickup-driving refugees from modern life’s rat races, shady pasts, and the war in Vietnam.

Next, we laid cinder block basement walls, including the installation of a behemoth cast iron stove elegantly labeled as a “Chicago Hot Blast.” We framed upwards, using the old material whenever possible until we had recreated Hazel’s commercial property with two large display windows facing Main Street, a spacious front porch to encourage loitering, and a western-style false front.

By early autumn, the aspens had turned yellow, the building was completed, and we celebrated with the townsfolk, gathering around huge pots of venison chili, spaghetti and meatballs, chips, salads, and plenty of beer. We danced into the night, sharing visions of how we could do Hazel right by converting Hazel’s commercial property into Ward’s own community center.

*

“Charlie!” The night air was cold and still. My girlfriend stood at the window in her nightgown. “Get up!”

Tongues of red and orange light flickered on the bedroom wall. Zoom barked at the kitchen door. The sound was explosive. I jumped out of bed, cold air shrinking my skin.

“Something’s burning,” she said. “Look.” She made room for me at the window.

The sky was lit with cinders; they glowed as they slid up a tower of angry smoke. A pickup truck whined past.

“That’s the center of town,” I said, stumbling into my trousers. “My socks,” I cursed, my hands shaking. “Where are my socks!” I scuffled into the street, boots unlaced, our dog Zoom racing up the road ahead of me.

A neighbor pulled up in his truck and I jumped on the running board, my hands freezing in the wind. We roared up Left Hand Canyon Road and rounded the bend.

Flame belched out of every window in Hazel’s brand-new, recycled storefront. Flowers of fire blossomed around the chimney and flew into the sky, reflected from every cabin window on the hillside.

Uphill, headlights gathered at the old barn where the Ward Volunteer Fire department housed the town firefighting equipment, an overloaded Ford pickup equipped with a 400-gallon tank of water.

The neighbor stopped in front of the burning building.

I jumped off.

“Stay here,” he hollered.

I stared at the flames.

“Don’t move,” he shouted.  “You hear me? Don’t do anything stupid. We’ll be right back with the truck.” He powered up the road against the roar of the flames.

Shock ran through my body like electricity but there was nothing I could do. Mute, out of breath, I stood frozen to the ground, protecting my face with a forearm. The heat and angry motion of combustion pushed me back. I watched the rafters ignite while my face tightened with the heat and my ass froze in the cold night air.

The town truck pulled onto the scene, loaded with our motley crew of firefighters. Doug jumped from behind the wheel, grim in his long-johns and cowboy hat.

I glared at him. What kind of a fool wears a cowboy hat to a fire? My building was burning down.

I must be doing it wrong.

I turned superstitious.

I had transgressed against my real life, back in the city — the theater collective, my vow to stop the war. This conflagration was the payback. I caught myself and began to haul the canvas hose out of the truck.

Johnny Adair, our local deputy and fire chief showed up, furious, a parka covering his undershirt. “You see what we got here?” he shouted toothlessly in my face. “We got people running around with their dicks in their hands. Jesus Christ.”

There was no adapter for the hydrant. Amidst shouts and countermands, the volunteers scrambled to find the missing link while the front of Hazel’s community center ate itself for breakfast.

Another neighbor pulled the adapter out from under the passenger’s seat of the truck. With the hoses hooked up, we had water on the fire in minutes. The flames retreated, but not before Hazel’s structure had been badly torched into a cross-hatch tangle of wet, stinking, carbonized sticks.

I trudged downhill to my place. Wooly and Zoom sniffed at my trousers and looked up at me, curious.

“Yeah. That’s fire you smell.” I said and filled their pans with breakfast kibble. “Dad’s night out. The eve of destruction.”

*

Turns out one of our thicker townspeople had been working on his truck in the basement. He had stoked up the Chicago Hot Blast, did his truck repairs and drove off, leaving the Hot Blast roaring. The chimney caught the floor on fire, the floor caught the wall on fire, and away she went.

Well, we rebuilt that sonofabitch building and threw another opening night party. Hazel was back again, dancing delicately to the sounds of “Gimme Shelter,” by the Rolling Stones. And do you know? That building still stands, much the way we built it, back in the crazy days of 1970.

#  #  #