Another Little Piece of My Heart (26 page)

From the start, the New Left distinguished itself from the old one by incorporating rituals of theatrical disruption. We didn’t just march with banners and raised fists; we wiggled and whooped, shouted nonsense slogans, and pulled pranks that revealed the contradictions of power. Play was the key—it was part of the ideology of childishness that had been so important to the hippies and still was to us. But it also reflected the surrealist tradition, which I was familiar with from my time in the cultural underground. I watched the Yippie leader Jerry Rubin create a Dada event by showing up at a congressional hearing in a Revolutionary War uniform. A prior generation of radicals had been hounded by this same committee, and many of them showed great dignity under immense pressure. But Rubin’s antics—at the witness table, he blew bubbles with his gum—completely degraded the proceedings. I have a vivid memory of him running giddily through the corridors outside the hearing room as stunned office workers peered.

The media lapped up these antics, especially when other Yippie leaders wore shirts made from American flags. Today flag neckties are the height of patriotic fashion for right-wing pols, but in those days such displays were considered defacement, and they were a crime. This created a perfect opening for the most creative radical activist of the sixties. He often appeared in a flag shirt; in fact, he was arrested for wearing one.
“I only regret,” he said after his trial, “that I have but one shirt to give to my country.” His name was Abbie Hoffman.

With his mane of curly hair (sometimes called a Jewfro), his thick and crooked nose, which had been broken a number of times by the police, and his streetwise Boston accent, he was the face of revolutionary action for my kind. It was Abbie who thought of sneaking onto the balcony of the New York Stock Exchange and tossing a barrage of dollar bills onto the floor. He hadn’t devised such strategies from the Dada playbook, but from a close reading of McLuhan—the old pundit was good for something after all. Abbie was blunt about his intention to use television as a tool of subversion. Though he lacked the cool demeanor that McLuhan regarded as optimal for the new medium, he had a quicksilver tongue and a folksy persona that played great on camera. Watching him on a chat show was like seeing a political version of that Jewish funny-man type known as the tummler. But Abbie had honed his skills as a civil rights activist in the South. He’d been arrested dozens of times and menaced by police dogs. There’s a Richard Avedon photo of him that shows the full impact of these experiences on his face. He was wizened, intrepid, and feisty, even in his writing. Few characters in literature are as true to their author’s lifestyle as the one he created in his memoir
Revolution For the Hell of It
and its brazenly titled sequel,
Steal This Book
. The other leaders of the youth movement were either serious militants or jesters like Rubin. Abbie was a guerrilla clown, and he presented a new model for the revolutionary.

I met him on Fire Island, my favorite retreat from the streets. There, I swam nude, ate fish fresh from the sea, and hung out with people who were mellow in a way they couldn’t be in the city. Cars weren’t allowed on Fire Island, so it was easy to forget the tumult. My adrenal glands were on holiday—until I met a firebrand black feminist named Flo Kennedy. I remember her best for introducing me to the phrase “lateral oppression,” which described the practice of minorities attacking each other. She also introduced me to her weekend guest, whom I recognized from the pictures I’d seen of him in action. At the moment I badly needed Abbie’s help.

I had left my dog in the small cabin where I was staying. The dog was large and easily agitated; I’d bought him from a prior owner who had abused him. The vet called him a “fear biter.” (I would often apply this term to cops.) When I returned to the cabin after an afternoon at the
beach I realized that I’d forgotten to take my keys. The dog was locked inside. Since I was afraid of heights—a lifelong phobia—I wasn’t about to climb up to the window and lower myself inside. I mentioned this to Abbie, who agreed to do the job. I told him he was crazy, but the look on face said,
Don’t tell me about vicious dogs; I’ve seen ’em, smelled ’em, wiped their drool off my pants.
He hoisted himself to the window and disappeared. I expected to hear screaming, but instead the door opened and he stood there, holding the docile doggie by the collar. It was a fear biter, but Abbie was unafraid.

The Yippies—not to be confused with yuppies or any cohort of new money that calls itself hip and vibrant—the Yippies were, well, I never really knew what they were, except that they smoked dope, watched a lot of TV, and plotted the overthrow of the government. Over the next year, I got to know Abbie and his wife, Anita, quite well. I would stop by their apartment on St. Mark’s Place from time to time, and through them I got to meet other radical leaders including Jerry Rubin (who later became a stockbroker and marketeer) and Tom Hayden (sexy despite his terminal earnestness; I saw what Jane Fonda would see in him). These activists were among the defendants who came to be known as the Chicago Seven. They were tried on charges of conspiring to start the riot that sullied the Democratic Party convention in 1968. Because I had witnessed several meetings of these alleged plotters—I’d earned their trust as a journalist—I was summoned to testify at their trial. That subpoena is one of the few artifacts from my youth that I held on to, and I still regard it as a mark of pride. To my regret I never got called to the witness stand, but even without my help all the defendants were acquitted of the conspiracy charges. Only Abbie spent time in jail. He’d taunted the bemused judge, a hack named Julius Hoffman, even scolding him for having the same last name. (He called it a
shonder fur de goyim,
a shame in front of Gentiles.) Finally the judge had enough. As Abbie was carted off for contempt of court, I heard him shout to his wife, “Water the plants!”

One member of the Chicago Seven suffered a special fate. Bobby Seale, a founder of the Black Panthers, was part of the coalition that had led the protest at the convention. Like several of his white codefendants, Seale was verbally disruptive at the trial, but unlike them he was chained to a chair and finally gagged. I would see several black men receive this treatment in court—and worse. I was present at a hearing for George
Jackson, a felon who had written an eloquent memoir called
Soledad Brother
. I won’t go into the contention of prison officials that Jackson was violent toward his guards; such things were often acts of self-defense. But at this hearing he was shackled to a chair. Suddenly the lights went out. Everyone hit the floor, and I heard the sounds of a scuffle. When the lights came on again, Jackson was bloody; he’d been beaten by guards. The official explanation was that he planned to escape, but it would have been impossible in the heavily secured courtroom. Still, there had been several attempts to spring him, including one by his younger brother that turned violent. In the ensuing shootout, a judge who had been taken hostage was killed, along with his abductors. It was very complicated, but not if you were sitting, as I was, near George Jackson’s mother. I saw the look on her face as her son emerged from the darkness, helpless and bleeding.

Images like that were seared into my mind—black men muzzled and chained while a white judge, white guards, and nearly always a white jury proceeded blithely with the proceedings. Perhaps I should have considered whether it was necessary to restrain men who were, in some cases, capable of violence. But no one raised on news photos of lynchings could have assimilated these sights. They convinced me that I was living in a racist state where black men were the objects of fear and loathing. The evidence was manacled before me. And my own freedom to behave as badly as I pleased only added to my rage.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch of New Journalism, I was about to lose the last of my literary heroes. The celebratory tone of Tom Wolfe’s work had turned acidic, and he no longer wrote about the zany individualists who created the style of the sixties. Now his dominant subject was the Manhattan cultural establishment, and he skewered its pretensions in gleeful detail. I relished his exposé of the
New Yorker
, in which he described the hothouse environment around its editor, William Shawn. My friend Ellen Willis, a pioneering feminist and the first significant woman rock critic, wrote for that magazine, and she had hilarious tales about what couldn’t be said in its decorous pages. She wasn’t allowed to use the word
wig
or refer to anyone as short. (Shawn was a diminutive man.) Another friend, the pop music critic Jon Pareles, had a similar ordeal at the
Times,
where the honorific
Mr.
had to be used before every male name. Pareles
fumed about this rule well into the seventies. Would he have to call Iggy Pop of the Stooges “Mr. Pop”? Or Meat Loaf “Mr. Loaf”? No, he wouldn’t, but the problem showed how far mainstream publications were from the spirit and letter of youth culture. Tom Wolfe had an unerring ear for that sort of contradiction, and he used it to devastating effect when he covered a fund-raiser for the Black Panther Party at the home of Leonard Bernstein. Wolfe captured the strange interplay between the militants and the culturati whose patronage they were soliciting. The result was one of his most famous pieces, “Radical Chic.” It was a great read, but Lenny was an easy target, and Wolfe couldn’t—or wouldn’t—grasp the complexity of the situation. It didn’t suit his purpose to imagine that someone like Bernstein might have real feelings of solidarity with the Panthers. I knew otherwise because I, too, admired them.

Today the Black Panthers are part of the retro universe available to anyone with a search engine. For many young people their image is mashed up with the caricatures of blaxploitation films from the seventies. But I got to see the real thing when the cameras weren’t rolling. I often ran into Panthers at Movement meetings, where they were guests of honor. It was a mark of pride for a Panther to attend a demo-planning session. I once spent an afternoon at their office in the Fillmore district of San Francisco, where they ran community programs. There were no media stars in the house, none of their extremely photogenic leaders, just people dropping by to hang out and join the running debate, which was so recondite that I could barely follow it. This was lefty discourse with an internationalist gist. I’d hoped for something more quotably black-and-proud, but I realized that I wasn’t at a James Brown concert. I was watching real-world Marxists discuss ideology, and of course it was boring.

The Commies of my youth—my friends’ parents—would never have talked politics in front of me. It was too risky at the height of McCarthyism. In those days, people like them covered their faces when they were dragged before Congress. That changed in the sixties, when the New Left reinvigorated Marxism as a critical system, even as it turned against the Soviet Union. While covering teach-ins on occupied campuses, I saw undergrads fling dialectics around like fastballs at a game. I watched Spartacists and Trotskyists battle over tiny clods of turf, their numbers swelled by the government agents among them. But these were middle-class people, and I never felt comfortable with their jargon.
The Panthers didn’t strike me as middle-class, and so I saw their formality as a marker of upward mobility. I wondered whether they’d trained themselves not to talk ghetto, the way I’d taught myself not to talk Bronx. That would have been a very sixties thing, all of us lifting ourselves through language and being reborn in the Revolution.

Many people reinvented themselves through radical politics in those days, so it didn’t bother me that some of these militants were former criminals. It was what they became that mattered. Unlike black activists who took their cue from Malcolm X, the Panthers pursued alliances with whites, and they welcomed other minorities, including gay people. Though the conflict between blacks and Jews was simmering in the sixties, I never heard a Panther make an anti-Semitic remark. They rejected black nationalism as sectarian, and opposed the Nation of Islam. If I had to place them on the Marxist spectrum I’d call them Mao-oid. They swam in the sea of the people, as the Chairman instructed, but “the people” meant every group that was oppressed, not just a certain class or race. The Revolution would be made by a coalition of the stigmatized, and the Panthers were working to expand its ranks. Best of all, for my purposes, they had an unerring sense of style.

I lavished attention on their long leather coats, black berets, and perfectly coiffed Afros—all part of the Panther mystique, as were their graphics. They created the prime image of the resurgent left, a clenched black fist. It would appear, in many colors, on buttons for all the movements that surfaced in identity politics: fists for students, Chicano and Native American activists, militant feminists, and the Gay Liberation Front. Nearly every form of agitation in the sixties borrowed from the Panthers’ iconography. Their emphasis on community self-defense inspired all sorts of groups, from the Gray Panthers, who advocated for the elderly, to the Pink Panthers, who responded to homophobic assaults. It’s no accident that the Guardian Angels, hardly fans of Black Power, wore red berets. The extent of this influence reflects one of the most salient features of black insurrectionary thinking in the sixties—it motivated all sorts of people who never thought they could stand up for themselves. The Panthers were architects of the future. That was one reason why the government saw them as a threat.

On the fringes of the Movement, menacing rhetoric was an art form in 1968. An anarchist group called Up Against the Wall, Motherfuckers specialized in disrupting orderly demonstrations. Valerie Solanas had a
cadre of one called SCUM (the Society for Cutting Up Men). It got more respect than it deserved, even after she shot Andy Warhol. Then there was the Weather Underground, named for a line in a Dylan song—“You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” They specialized in bombing federal buildings, and though they made an effort not to kill anyone, they didn’t always succeed. Three people died when one of their devices accidentally exploded, demolishing a Greenwich Village brownstone. These were futile acts with fatal results.