Dream Catcher: A Memoir (55 page)

Domine Jesu Christe, Rex gloriae, libera animas omnium fidelium de poenis inferni et de profundo lacu: libera eas de ore leonis, ne absorbeat eas tartarus, ne cadant in obscurum: sed signifer sanctus Michael repraesentet eas in lucem sanctam. Quam olim Abrahae promisisti et semini ejus.
¹

Or, please say the Mourners’ Kaddish, which concludes:

O’seh shalom beem-romav, hoo ya’ah-seh shalom aleynu v’al kol Yisrael, ve’imru amen.
(Let He who makes peace in the heavens, grant peace to all of us and to all Israel. Let us say Amen.)

1
. “Lord Jesus Christ, King of Glory, deliver all faithful souls from pain infernal and from the bottomless abyss: deliver us from the jaws of the Lion, let not her teeth devour us and swallow us down into dark oblivion: let St. Michael lead us into holy light. As Thou promised of old to Abraham and to his seed.” From the Latin Mass for the Dead.

On either side the river lie

Long fields of barley and of rye,

That clothe the wold and meet the sky;

And thro’ the field the road runs by

To many-tower’d Camelot.

L
IZA, MY FRIEND FROM SKI
camp, called to tell me the big news: there was going to be a music festival not too far from her house, on Yasgur’s farm. Could I come? Wild horses . . . There was only one problem; when I told my father about the festival, he said it sounded like fun and wanted to come along. Okay, forget for a moment that you think Holden’s creator is the coolest guy in the universe. Imagine it was
your
dad who wanted to join the fun. Oh, boy! Later that week, he decided he had too much work piled up on his desk to take a break and go with us. Gee, Dad, that’s too bad, really. I called Liza and told her the bad news: WE’RE SAVED!!!

I arrived at their house with a small bag containing what would be my uniform for the next three years: blue jeans and my dad’s button-down oxford shirts worn untucked. A few days before the festival, Liza and I were devastated to learn that her parents had no intention of letting us stay the night at Woodstock—notwithstanding my howls of “But my dad would have let me.” Mrs. R. knew the back way to the farm and dropped us off each morning within about a mile or so of the concert field and picked us up each evening at the same
meeting spot. Liza and I slipped right into the gentle crowd and were gone. “We are stardust, we are golden, and we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.”

I don’t care how impossible it is to believe, Woodstock really was a momentary glimpse of paradise on earth. I find it hard to write about, because so many of the things I want to say that were beautiful are things that in any other context make me squirm, such as being all brothers and sisters, sharing food, sharing hugs; even the word
sharing
now sets off my cult-alert button. Then, however, it was as though the entire natural world declared a three-day cease-fire on carnivorous activity. I have never before or since felt so able to “let my hair down” and be myself in public. Boundaries could come down because there was such an extraordinary absence of predatory trespassing. And I’m not talking about those gatherings and workshops where people are coerced into “open” behavior, mandated “sharing time,” like being caught passing notes in school and the teacher asks you if you’d like to come up front and
share
it with the rest of the class. At Woodstock, for a few moments, there was no pressure to conform and no pressure to nonconform. If you wanted to take your clothes off and go swimming, that was cool; if you weren’t comfortable with that, you could wear your underwear or go in dressed, whatever. I could smile at a stranger and not feel like, Oh, shit, now I’ll never get rid of him. So strong was the ethic of live and let live, do your thing but don’t step on someone else’s toes, I felt free to say no. You could say stuff like “Okay, I’m done talking now, I’m going to go for a walk,” and the person would just say, “That’s cool,” wish you well, and move on. I remember the public service announcements that would come over the sound system: “Hey, we hear there’s some brown acid out there that’s not great. It isn’t poison, so don’t trip out, it just isn’t made so clean, so you might want to avoid it. I mean it’s your trip so you do what you want, but if you’re going to do it, we suggest you just do half. . . . Joe Griggs, come to the medic’s tent to the left of the speakers, your old lady is having a baby. . . . Sharon Schwartz, call your father.”

Doing your own thing usually seems to amount to some jerk smoking a stinky cigar upwind from you or pissing upstream, but not here. People were so incredibly polite at Woodstock. That’s what the townspeople kept saying in amazement, those kids with all the long hair and stuff, they’re so polite. The chief of police even said, Don’t get caught up
in what they look like—that’s just on the outside—inside I’ve never seen such a bunch of real good American citizens. Another old guy in the documentary
Woodstock
said, Can you imagine if you got five hundred of us adults together with booze? You’d have a nightmare on your hands, and here there are five hundred thousand of these kids and not one fight, not one incident.

Why sometimes an absence of normal rules brings out a rampaging hell of looting, rapine, and murder, and other times a green pasture where the lamb lies down with the lion, and the scorpion has no sting, is a mystery to me. I surely need a piece of Woodstock to get me through the evening news sometimes. Remembrance of sweet apple blossoms and bees, and dancing in the rye.

H
IGH SCHOOL STARTED OUT
sort of like a continuation of Woodstock, but it went on too long. In the beginning of the year, we had our distinctly 1960s version of the Fresher teas and mixers my mother had told me about. A whole bunch of us would get together, someone would bring wine, someone the cheese or other munchies, another some joints, and we’d all troop off into the woods, find a nice open spot on the pine needles, and sit in a big circle and pass stuff around. These were afternoon forays, garden parties, a time for conversation and laughter, not opportunities to get blitzed—that was for nighttime.

I wasn’t the only one, I found out years later, who didn’t inhale. My dad had told me that marijuana does some kind of damage to the kundalini, a spiritual passage in the spine that opens naturally with meditation but is forced open unnaturally with drugs. My brother said once, when we were in our thirties, that he, too, stayed away from drugs throughout high school because of what Dad had said. It’s just the kind of thing that speaks to an adolescent. None of that corny “killer weed” crap (I’d been smoking Marlboros since I was eight years old, when I figured out that anyone with change for a dollar could get them from the machine at the ski lodge); here was something that could cripple one’s journey toward enlightenment. That spoke to me. But it sure was fun to sit in a circle and pass it around. The spell woven by the scent of
the pine trees and spruce, burning hemp and patchouli, friendship and laughter; I left a little ring of pine needles.

My father’s metaphysical warnings were not the only cause of my avoidance of many things dangerous; I had inherited, for better or for worse, his soldier’s sixth sense for trouble brewing, as well as his interrogator’s fundamental distrust. And for some reason, I never developed the adolescent sense of invulnerability or “not me.” I figured if a piano were to drop out of the sky, I had a great big
X
somewhere on my back. I couldn’t see it, but I knew it was there. My attitude toward others’ disasters ranged from “there but for the grace of God go I,” to my number must be up next.

Several weeks into ninth grade, a friend took a tab of acid (LSD) that he thought was a one-way tab but turned out to be at least triple strength. He stared at the sun and permanently damaged his eyes, not terribly—he became a lawyer I heard—but he will always see spots. After the hospital, he was locked up at McLean’s, a mental institution. I took two buses and a cab to visit him each week. Holy shit, what a terrifying place. He was in a beautiful old mansion with a grand staircase that I had to have a badge to ascend and an escort as well to lock and unlock doors as I made my way through the labyrinth of corridors to where my friend was being kept. He had a room to himself, fit for a grand hotel, but the maids and janitors were running the place and had control of all the keys with access to food and water and toilets and fresh air. My friend told me they were playing mind games with him. He wasn’t stupid and he figured out that it was to increase his resistance to frustration or some damn thing, but it stank. They’d say he could have a certain number of cigarettes and then give him a different number, fewer, and tell him they never promised the original number. The games he told me were dead-on; I’d seen similar myself, as a victim of Kit’s psychological “treatment.” I could tell he needed to rest and get his head together, that was for sure, but I could also tell he wasn’t the kind of crazy where you imagine those things. We wrote up a plan to get him out of there, back and forth on a piece of paper, in case anyone was listening in, and talked out loud about poetry, pretending that’s what we were writing, in case anyone was observing. He was to cooperate and give them exactly what they wanted, methodically, until he gained campus privileges. As soon as he could walk to certain places unescorted,
somebody would meet him in a car by the trees and take him to an apartment where it was safe to crash. He must have slept for three weeks straight on a couch in a room with the curtains drawn, waking only to eat what the people who were living there, or staying there, made for him.

I wonder if teens today have such places where they try to take better care of each other than they’ve ever been taken care of by adults. I can’t tell you how many safe places there were to crash in the sixties and early seventies, how many hippies, friends, both known and unknown, would take you in. It was like that. More food and hugs with no strings attached, nothing expected in payment; I can scarcely imagine it now, it seems like such a different world. Not heaven by any means, lots of deep, dark depression and troubles and loneliness and emptiness, but there sure were a lot of kids taking turn being catchers, a generosity that could make your head stop spinning.

S
HORTLY AFTER MY FRIEND
landed in McLean’s, I received a letter from my dad telling me he found it hard to imagine what my life was like at school. He had heard from my mom that I liked school better than I did at first, which he said probably meant that I was enjoying my friends’ company a lot, which, in turn, made him wonder if their company was worth enjoying. Great, like I have another option? Moving in with the Brontë sisters perhaps? Then followed a major lecture on it’s not who you are with your friends that counts, that’s all an illusion anyway, it’s who you are when you’re alone, what goes through your mind in those moments of aloneness that really counts. All this stuff about some Zen question, “who you were before you were born,” and what is your Original Face. All I could think of was another friend who told me he had had a bad trip one time and saw everyone’s faces melting off their bones as he walked past them. He wanted to put his eyes out but, thank God, didn’t. If that’s the kind of stuff you think about when you’re having one of these moments of aloneness, that or promising the universe for the tenth time this week that you really will eat just cottage cheese and lettuce for lunch every day until those pounds come off, or that if a certain boy doesn’t like you back, you’re really going to die, or that you’ll really
read the important books on religion that you asked your dad to recommend, after you write that note to a certain boy and rip it up a hundred times, then you can have aloneness. Dad talked on and on about Zen and translations, bad and worse, of the Bhagavad Gita, but how can you be mad at someone who takes the time to write you a three-page single-spaced letter that ends I love you, dear old Poogoss (an old nickname of mine).