San Francisco

7.

I returned to Berkeley with Betty in the green Econoline van that I bought on the way out of New York. We visited some shrines along the way. We snuck into Walden Pond after hours and slept by its shores in sleeping bags. We drove through Hibbing, Minnesota, where Bob Dylan grew up. We drive up to Jasper National Park in Canada.

In Jasper, we went on a 7 mile hike deep into the wilderness and made love in a stream bed under the watchful eye of a moose. This is as far away from civilization as we had ever been, but on the way down, we ran into a group of people on horseback, one of whom Betty knew from New York. This incident plunged us into a prescient despair about the shrinking of the wilderness.

We finally reached the Bay Area and drove directly to a little town called Canyon behind the Berkeley hills, dropped acid, and crawled to the cabin nestled in the redwoods, where my childhood friend William squatted with his wife Katherine and wildchild Miklos. Betty and I stayed in the downstairs room, the closest to communal living I would get. I was constructing a novel about being on the bum with William in New Orleans, a cosmic egg of a book which couldn’t seem to lay itself, while William endlessly practiced the sitar and Katherine collected welfare, though William’s father was a millionaire.

A few weeks into our stay at Canyon, I double dated with my friend Mark in his old Renault, me with Betty, him with a revelation of a woman, Sasha, with Frida Khalo eyebrows and a mind like a waterfall, gushing with intellectual clarity. I’d met her briefly in New York when she was a junky, adding to her allure.

The next day I asked Mark’s permission to ask her out. He said “Sure.” The same shrill cynicism that turned me on, turned him off. We went out, who remembers where. We made love, sweet love, our bodies fitting together just so. Next day I inelegantly sent Betty packing, “She’s a real woman,” I told her, adding injury to insult.

I loved how her brown hair with peroxided tips hung way down her back, I loved the passion with which she invoked Chairman Mao, I loved her op-art miniskirt. I loved her even as she stood up to William, who bristled at her commitment to violence.
“Do you know how many people died in the Chinese revolution?”

“Fewer than would have without it,” she said, closing debate.

At one point in her Bernal Heights studio apartment, I mustered the courage to express my own doubts about the Communist thing. I’d been a committed pacifist myself, a conscientious objector, probably the only Zen Buddhist in Waukesha, Wisconsin, where my draft board resided. “Love me, love my dog,” she said. I didn’t know how to argue with her, she was smarter than me, and I did love her. So I loved her dogma, too. I read “On Contradiction” and noticed how similar the dialectic sounded to that of the “I Ching.”

I swapped my apathetic anarchism for revolutionary communism. I stood in awe of her as she developed the “Slumlord of the Month” campaign to present the Chatty Ratty award to such San Francisco liberal icons as Jeramy Ets-Hokins, street theater that the press adored. I took great pride in being known as Sasha’s boyfriend.

She trashed my writing: “What are you writing this FOR? You need to write for the movement.” The novel was foundering anyway, so I just stopped.

The daughter of a famous psychoanalyst, a breakaway disciple of Freud’s, she taught me about feelings, about how to express them. She pulled them out of me in a visceral tug-of-war, as if she were pulling my small intestine out of my mouth. It took me years to discover that she rarely expressed her own.

I loved the fact that she was Jewish, as had been most of my girl friends, six out of nine. It seemed to me perhaps stereotypically that Jewish girls were less puritanical about sex than the wasps and Catholic girls I’d grown up with. My father would reiterate certainly stereotypically how smart they were, the Jews, and Sasha did have all 800 college boards. There was the rebellious piece too, the need to reject my family’s Midwestern conservative values. More importantly, I was drawn to the tragedy of the Holocaust as someone who hated injustice of any kind, drawn irresistibly to look at this horror of skeletal bodies lying in heaps, this irreversible stain on my German heritage. Not that there needs to be a competition between the evilness of horrific crimes against humanity, but this genocide stands apart in its cold, calculated deliberateness.

It was Mark, small and curly-headed, also Jewish, who softened me up for Sasha’s Marxism. He was a red diaper baby like Sasha; his father had edited the West Coast Communist Party newspaper before he died. Mark had left the ideology behind, harshly critical of his parents for sticking with Stalin for so long, yet the sensibility remained.

I had plans to go to Mexico with him the summer that my friend William followed me to California and I was torn apart between my two best friends. I couldn’t tell Mark I didn’t want to go to Mexico because I wanted to hang with my friend William. So my unconscious did the dirty work. On an LSD trip with Mark in Golden Gate Park we strolled together through the Japanese Tea Garden in an uneasy silence, marveling at the veins on the leaves of the cherry trees or the musical swish of the carp between the lily pads in the ponds. Finally, just to break the silence, I said the first thing on my mind, which was: “I’m wondering if they will put that guy in the oven.”
Mark responded thoughtfully., “Hmmm. Could be the Ginger Bread Boy. Could be Hansel and Gretel.” Pause. “Could be a Jew…”

And then he looked at me with that ultimate victim look the hurt of this difference between us zapping off his being like a tiny full-body lightning storm and I crumpled at the abject shame that my consummately evil Hitler-nature had spewed out of me so blatantly and cruelly. An icy distance came between us. We headed back to our shared apartment in the Haight. I tried to apologize. “So much hatred. I don’t know where it came from.” But our friendship had been damaged. Soon Mark left for Europe and around the world. It wasn’t until he was on his way back years later that I wrote him apologizing again and explaining as I only then understood that it was the homoerotic jealousy that came between us, that I wanted to be with William rather than going with him to Mexico.

But, Sasha. She introduced me to Derrick, a party leader, a tall, muscular Jew with a defiant chin. He impressed me with his practical cynicism. “We need to organize the working class because we need an army,” he would say. “Can you imagine an army made up of college students?”

I couldn’t.

Nor did I know what to do with the rest of my life, now that my writing had run aground on Sasha’s criticism.

Derrick said, “You know, Henry, we need teachers. We want to build a parent-teacher alliance, kind a parallel to the worker-student alliance.”

“Really?” A teacher was about the last thing I had thought of as a career, because by and large I had hated school even when I was good at it, which was only part of the time. But building a revolutionary movement inside the schools, the belly of the beast? There was a challenging, potentially exciting thing to do.

So I did it, I signed up for the teacher training course at Berkeley.

Derrick became a leader of the student strike at San Francisco State where Sasha was enrolled as a student, studying the history of science and other arcane subjects.
I’d been in a lot of demonstrations, against the war, for civil rights. But I’d never seen anything like this: black students, Latino students, and white students all swarming over the campus dodging the clubs of policemen on horseback, day after day.

I flushed with pride when Derrick chose our house to hide out in from the cops and make stink bombs to plant in the classes that weren’t honoring the strike.

Fissures developed between Derrick and Sasha over the strike. Her class wanted to meet off campus, and she wanted to meet with them, but the Party leaders said that was tantamount to capitulation. If classes were meeting, there was not a strike.
“It’s not like the teachers would be paid,” she argued.

“Still, it’s business as usual, fewer people will come to the rallies.” Derrick countered.

By this time, I was all gung ho for the revolution. “The revolution is not a dinner party,” I said, “or an intellectual discussion in a nonstriking venue.”

She ended up not going to class, but in her pout I refused to see trouble ahead.

We were married on the Winter Solstice among the redwoods again – the redwoods drew I toward them as inexorably as gravity – in Hero’s Grove in Golden Gate Park. The day was cool but sunny, we’d lucked out. We had no contingency plans for rain. I dressed in a suede sport jacket, a purple mod shirt with a huge collar, a wide purple and yellow tie. Sasha wore a wool dress she made herself, orange with purple paisley swirls. In the car driving over to the park, terror washed over me, a typical groom at a nontypical wedding. But once we reached the park and saw my friends and family huddled in the woods, I allowed the happiness to embrace me. Some excerpts from our vows:

Friends: We are here this morning to marry this man and this woman. In the midst of defeatism, we affirm our willingness to contine; in the midst of despair, we affirm our determination; in the midst of fear, we affirm our courage. In the midst of the terror and corruption of the past and present, we have come together to plant the flag of the future.

Consider marriage as a continuous process of unity and contradiction – not static, but dynamic and organic -- an ever-changing, ever-growing relationship. Change and growth come about through struggle – a struggle between two persons and the unity that is their marriage; a struggle between the needs of their family and the needs of the people to which they belong.

The law of the unity of opposites is the fundamental law of the universe. Between opposities in a contradiction there is at once unity and struggle, and it is this that impels things to move and change. Contradiction is universal and absolute; it is present in the process of development and permeates every process from beginning to end. …

Within the family, the basis of unity between the opposites in a contradiction is love, or spontaneous affection. For the union of male and female is the origin of of the whole of nature….

Oh
I am thinking
Oh
I am thinking
I have found my lover
I think it is so

Thus were our vows an odd synthesis between the I Ching and Chairman Mao’s On Contradiction. The idea of contradiction did indeed set the tone.

Our wedding day was the best day of my life so far. The day after our wedding was the worst. My sister Nicki, three years older than me and not yet married, convinced me to postpone our honeymoon for a day and hang out with her and her boyfriend who would become her husband 6 months later. She fed us hashish brownies and I went to paranoid city, to some realm of terror that stopped my voice in my throat so I couldn’t speak. I lay on our waterbed, all atremble, with Sasha at my side, but she wasn’t. She was in her own universe. Forcing out the words, I tried to impart to her my vision of our family – me and her – at the center of concentric circles, the party, the movement, the working class, and something about what I said set Sasha off. She attacked me in the harshest terms, with a voice most shrill:

“First off, I want no party mucking up our family. If you equate loyalty to the family to loyalty to the party in any way, the party will eat you alive, eat us alive. You have to choose. It’s me or the party. And you already made your choice in marrying me. You can forget the party You need to promise me now that you’ll never join the party.”

I wanted to say: But you were the one who got me involved, love me love my dogma, and I did fall in love with both and now I’m way to deep into the party to back off now, I’ve pinned all my hopes on them, I’m convinced that only the strictest discipline and boundless commitment can keep the capitalists from destroying the world.

But the hash had destroyed the connection between my brain and my vocal chords and all I could hear was the sound of my dreams shattering on the bedroom floor, the dawn of our marriage holding within it its own doom. All I could do is cry.
We finally made it to the redwoods, those of Big Sur this time, for a short honeymoon, but the bruises still smarted and hope, that sputtering flame of hope that both Sasha and the party had ignited in me smoldered on its way to extinction.