Another Little Piece of My Heart (25 page)

A similar shift went on in the black community, where the pacifist teachings of Martin Luther King had been supplanted by the bark of Black Power. The ideological rift between the old militance and the new was clear, but the difference in sensibility seemed just as interesting to me. This wasn’t only a new attitude toward violence; it was a new style that owed as much to the counterculture as it did to Malcolm X. Afros and dashikis were a corollary to long hair and tie-dyes, with a different meaning, certainly, but serving the same purpose of creating a group identity. Meanwhile, the counterculture borrowed many of its slogans and much of its slang from blacks. These two groups moved in separate spaces, but their consciousness crossed over. As a result, the Aquarian Age, if it ever existed apart from the musical
Hair
, gave way to a white version of Black Power—the image of a hippie with a Molotov cocktail.

A year earlier, the kids I wrote about were “too busy grooving to put anybody down,” as the Monkees warbled. Now they saw themselves as part of a global struggle. Someone borrowed a page from the Vietcong playbook and called 1968 “the year of the heroic guerrilla.” The term applied not just to Third-World revolutionaries and insurrectionary
blacks but also to students resisting the war, and even to hippies. It wasn’t a vanity. People who are subject to the same treatment soon conceive of themselves as a class, and the perception widely held was that everyone who wasn’t white and straight (i.e., normal) faced the same enemy, embodied in the cop with a club. The ability to identify one’s oppression with a much larger situation was as pretentious as anything else in youth culture, but it was also a real expression of the empathy with the underdog that many young people felt. The result was a new political formation that went by an amorphous but inclusive name: the Movement. I was glad to see this fusion take shape, and I wondered what role rock would play in it. The answer was blowing in the tear gas.

I don’t want to give the impression that no one believed in the pacifist hippie vision. One of them was Don McNeill, my best friend at the
Voice.
We were pretty much the same age, and we formed a kind of triumvirate with another young writer, a disillusioned West Point cadet named Lucian Truscott IV. He’d come to the
Voice
after writing a series of letters with a distinctly conservative slant. Naturally he was invited to the paper’s Christmas party, and he showed up in a full-dress uniform and sandals. Lucian was the scion of an illustrious military family—the only person I’d ever met with a number in his name—but he soon broke with his legacy (you can find the details online; they’re worth checking out), and he fit right in at the
Voice.
He was hard-drinking but deeply caring, the perfect foil for Don, with whom he immediately bonded. Both of us saw Don as a model of the alternative-press ideal: he lived what he wrote about.

The hustle didn’t exist for Don, which made him an unlikely New Yorker. In fact, he’d been raised in Alaska, the son of a journalist, and he inherited the itch to report, along with a set of values that drew him to the counterculture. Why he came to the hardest place for such a project to succeed, instead of joining the trek to San Francisco, I’ll never understand. But he was the
Voice
’s correspondent in the hippie trenches—literally, since he was homeless. Once in a while he took a room at a midtown hotel, but many nights he relied on a bed in an unused upper floor of the office, or he moved among the crash pads of the East Village. One of the most distinctive things about the
Voice
was its willingness to hire people who were partisans of the subjects they wrote about. I felt that way about rock, at least at the start, and Don was just as dedicated
to the hippie scene. Nearly every week he filed a piece about something I hadn’t noticed, radical experiments in communal living and the kind of activism that would never reach the desks of journalists busy covering the more colorful manifestations of the mess.

Don managed to be both accurate and sympathetic to the people he wrote about. His attitude was a striking contrast to my fretful ambivalence. It rekindled the sentiments I’d felt in the Haight and repressed on the pavement of Manhattan. I suppose he signified upward mobility to me—he was so securely middle-class that he could afford to be indigent. In any case, we saw the struggle very differently. He believed in consciousness; I believed in fighting back.

The detachment I was so proud of, the mark of my rationality in the face of mental goo, was beginning to seem like the greatest of all illusions. There was no way to justify remaining outside the battle. The draft was an omnipresent threat, the war a patent danger to everything I stood for. I hated the lies that rationalized it, and the pretense of reason that masked a blind madness. Like millions of people, I was appalled by the photos of naked children fleeing from a wall of burning napalm; the Zippo lighters setting fire to peasant huts; the bodies coming home, which the military hadn’t yet learned to hide. It was enraging and frightening to behold. Worse still for someone with my politics, the war was being prosecuted by the most progressive president since FDR, the man who’d led the drive to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 despite his prediction that the Democrats would lose the South as a result. (They eventually did.) That contradiction stoked my fury. Liberalism, the religion of my youth, was now a nice word for hypocrisy. The president had a crack in his moral center, and we, the young, had a duty—to each other, if not history—to drive a sword through it.

My shift from observer to participant in the uprising that came to be called the Revolution was a long and perilous process. Don McNeill played an important part in it. He was the reporter I most wanted to be. Craft and empathy were conjoined in his work; he witnessed and he empathized. His politics were in his limpid eyes. Though he never sported bell-bottoms and beads, he had a certain style in the only clothing he wore, a leather jacket, dark pullover, and jeans. His long hair brushed against the press card dangling around his neck, and he was skinny the way people who don’t think much about eating are. I didn’t think of him as a sex object. Though he was certainly my type, he didn’t
project an erotic aura. But I often found myself offering him a sandwich or a donut. I think it was my way of hovering over him.

Nothing in my experience had dislodged the feeling that it was risky to cherish people. The only way I could handle it was to argue with those I cared for, as I did with Don, incessantly. We had running debates about the fate of hippie culture and the proper strategy of resistance to fascism—that word was on everyone’s lips. He seemed so out of touch with what was really “going down,” yet I longed to believe that he was right. After all, I’d come of age in the civil rights movement. I wanted us to overcome. But the unrest fostered rage where hope should have been—and I was bursting with it.

Some of the fury was righteous, some compensatory. I was pissed at the government for saddling my generation with a wicked war. But I was also angry about being forced to reveal my homosexual feelings in order to avoid the draft, thereby acknowledging, if only to the army doctors, something that still shamed me. One of my greatest satisfactions is that no young person today will experience the ordeal of “queering out” of the military. Though I didn’t realize it at the time, this act of desperation seared itself into my personality. In the project where I grew up, the word
faggot
had a double meaning, as it does in many working-class communities; it was what you called a queer, but also a weakling—and that’s what I was in the eyes of the army. I wasn’t good enough to be a soldier. At first I felt immense relief. I came home after my draft-board physical and fell into an exhausted sleep. But I had the most unlikely dream. I was in Vietnam, fighting alongside the other guys, dodging bullets and scurrying under barbed wire, having a hell of a time. This was a dream of belonging, not combat, but I woke up horrified.

The dream revealed that I was psyched for warfare. The only problem was finding the right enemy. Like most of my friends I thought Ho Chi Minh was cool, a poet who had once lived in Harlem and worked in a Chinese restaurant. How could I hate someone who looked like my image of an Asian sage? Better to strike out against the system whose might was at the core of this unjust war, of poisonous coups by the CIA, of FBI provocateurs planted in groups that were dedicated to change. This was the nation we had come to call AmeriKKKa.

The same passions that once drew me to rock, the lust for ecstasy and the need to escape from myself, now fed a fascination with the Revolution. I was on my way to becoming what the Rolling Stones called,
somewhat derisively, a “street fighting man.” (I didn’t appreciate Mick Jagger’s irony—after all,
he
wasn’t being drafted.) The new counterculture of resistance was immensely attractive. It summoned me. And what it said was: Don’t hustle, don’t seethe, don’t be-here-now. Act.

By the end of the decade I would be faced with situations that required me to make a choice between reporting what I knew and hiding salient facts. Sometimes I chose to do the latter because telling the truth would have blown the cover of activists accused of crimes, people whose safety I valued more than the rules I’d learned in j-school. It wasn’t an easy decision—I took the ethics of reporting very seriously—but hopefully this chapter will explain why I acted as I did. I witnessed the violent reaction of the authorities firsthand, and it destroyed my confidence in American justice. I saw black defendants mistreated in courtrooms, and it made racism feel concrete and systematic. I watched young people who were in every sense like me—my long-haired peers—clubbed before my eyes, and it made the police seem as irrational as the men conducting the war in Vietnam; in fact, their brutality felt like part of the war, and it unleashed the solider within me.

Still, I carried a press card, and that gave me immunity. All I had to do was show my credentials and the cops would let me pass or swing their clubs at someone else. This was a profoundly guilt-inducing privilege, but it also allowed me to observe the mayhem without feeling personally at risk. I could vent my emotions safely, unlike the protesters, and I loved running alongside them as they went wild in the streets. My political commitment was real, but so was the rush I experienced, a surge of adrenaline and a sense of transcendence that I’d only felt from music. I began to transfer my awe from rock stars to radicals.

I admired their stringent thinking, especially after the mushy logic of the hippies. I saw their certainty as sexy in a completely different way. The Movement’s leadership was pretty much a fellowship, and, whatever the limitations of such an arrangement, hanging out with these guys felt like I was finally part of the combat unit that the army had declared me unfit to join. Of course, we warriors were committed to nonviolence—at least at first—but our idea of passive resistance didn’t involve joining hands and singing hymns. Peacefulness was a tactic, not an inviolate principle. We were prepared to be as violent as we had to be, no more,
but no less. Our major inspiration was Malcolm X’s admonition “By any means necessary.” I never thought that, when he excoriated white people, he meant me. I saw him as a big brother, and I think that’s how many white activists felt about the black militants who maintained a distant but potent alliance with the antiwar movement. They were a manly example to nerds like us. The counterculture had transformed dorkiness into freakiness, which was a good thing, but adapting the Black Power attitude meant we could also do battle, and that felt very good indeed.

I stopped thinking about hippies and their plan to save the world by expanding consciousness. Only action in the streets could accomplish that. I decided that pacifism was the essence of bourgeois spirituality in soft times. But the times weren’t soft for millions of people in the Third World; nor for U.S. soldiers in peril and the people they killed by the thousands, the ten thousands, the hundred thousands. Not for the wretched of the earth, including Newark and Watts. Yet even as I felt drawn to the earthly delights of insurrection, one thing about the hippie spiel stuck with me. It had to do with giving myself in sex.

That was difficult for a twenty-four-year-old with a narcissistic personality. At first I had to force myself to concentrate on pleasuring women. The need to come pounded within me like Keith Moon’s drums, and it was hard to hold back. But the real difficulty was focusing emotionally on the person beside me. It felt perilous in a way that the particulars of sex didn’t. It wasn’t just a matter of muff diving. I liked the smell and feeling of a clitoris on my tongue, but to really consider a woman’s gratification meant daring to experience the undertones I wanted to deny. Was there a relationship between these feelings and the mild buzz I had when holding my mother’s hand to help her across the street? (She was on the way to becoming lame and blind.) Had she experienced waves of ecstasy while holding me as a baby? I was only wading in the shallows of these emotions, but once I allowed them to register they flowed through me, heightening my pleasure. The bliss of connection rivaled the joy of rock. As a result I had a lot more sex, and not just with my wife. (What else can you do on a waterbed at midnight?). But with Judith it was special. When my delayed climax finally erupted, I would shake wildly in a head-to-toe spasm. I began to think of this as the mother load.

Then I would leap out of bed and race to the fridge, because suddenly I was hungry. I would sit at the table, spooning something sweet and
creamy into my mouth, letting it lull me into forgetting the intensity. Something always stopped me from keeping that feeling in mind, which was probably why it was easy to transfer my sexual affections. There was a barrier to intimacy that I couldn’t surmount or even detect. In other words, I had room in my life for the Revolution. And by now it merited a capital R.

Don McNeill was changing, at least in his affect. He often looked grim, and his responses to my arguments seemed less confident. He fretted over the people he wrote about, how easy it was for them to shift from pacifism to respect for righteous violence. His uneasiness deepened my melancholy. It was a poignant reminder of the unraveling I’d observed for the better part of a year, which had swept up even die-hard hippies. Every incident of police brutality, every kid in a tie-dye with a bloody head, was a shot to the heart of love. The communes were ripe for organizing, and a new group arose within the Movement to accommodate that possibility, a cadre of media-savvy freaks who called themselves the Youth International Party, aka the Yippies.