Part 1: CURLY'S EXPERIMENT
Part 3: THE SUMMER BEFORE LOVE
© Copyright 2008
by John Curl. All rights
reserved.
Ed the Fed and I arrived in New York City’s Lower East Side near the
middle of August, 1969. We cruised down Second Avenue, lined with
Puerto Rican and Ukrainian Jewish storefronts, an occasional East
Village art gallery or coffee shop. He double-parked his little Karmann
Ghia on a sidestreet, in front of the building where Patt was staying
with her friend. Fed ran upstairs with me to give Patt a hug. We stood
in the open doorway talking.
“Why don’t you two just drop everything and come with me. It’ll be a
blast.”
“There’ll be too many druggy people there,” Patt replied. “And the
tickets are expensive.”
All the way across country Fed had tried to convince me to go with him
to the generational gathering ritually closing the decade at Woodstock,
which was about to begin a few hours drive north, but I didn’t really
want to go. I needed to commune alone with Patt.
Ed the Fed pushed back his red handkerchief headband. “I’m not buying a
ticket. Fuck tickets. We don’t need tickets.”
“What are you going to tell them at the gate?”
“That I’m from Drop City. If they don’t want to let me in, fuck them.
There’s going to be thousands of us without tickets. We’ll tear down
the fence.” He took off down the stairs three steps at a time.
I glanced around the room. “You weren’t kidding. This place is as tiny
as our dome.”
“I wish you could stay here too, but, as you can see, three people in
here is claustrophobic. I try to act invisible when Rhoda’s here. I’ve
been staying at my parents’ too, so I don’t overstay my welcome.”
“But it’s okay for me to sleep here tonight, isn’t it?” I felt awkward
and estranged.
“Tonight she’s at her boyfriend’s. But she’ll be back tomorrow.”
“Have you been in touch with Kugo and Frinki? Kugo said I can crash
there tomorrow. Have you seen their new pad?”
“A couple of weeks ago. It’s a big improvement on their old apartment.
A lot roomier. They’ve fixed it up. They seem much happier. At least
she does. It’s much more of a family neighborhood.”
“It’s somewhere up in the Seventies, isn’t it?”
“Upper west side, west of Broadway.” Then she added, “That was awful
about Marigold. What could she have been thinking? She was such a
beautiful girl.”
“I think she just hit a low and didn’t know how to get out of it.”
“She had her whole life ahead of her. It’s so pointless. It didn’t have
to happen. Drop City must be in a terrible state.”
“Everybody’s walking around in a daze.”
“Mourning. I knew something terrible would happen, with everybody
always on the edge. We’re all to blame. I’m not going back.” Then
without missing a beat, she asked, “Did you miss me?”
“I’m very attached to you,” I said. “I spent a lot of time thinking
about you.”
“I thought about you a lot too.”
In a few minutes we were under a sheet.
“Did you get together with any girls while you were alone?”
“Did you get together with any men?”
“I want to be with you. I want us to be together. I’d like to put all
that behind us. I’m not interested in other men.”
“Well, I’m not interested in other women.”
“There’s something between us that I can’t quite touch or hold on to,
but I know it’s there. It sneaked up on me.”
“It’s taken me a while too, but I know now you’re a part of my life.”
“There are still things that really bother me about you, and I know you
say the same about me, but I guess we just have to accept them and work
on them together.” We began making love. Suddenly she said, “But we
can’t go on living like we were.”
“We can work things out. We can find a way. Let’s start trying to make
a baby,” I said.
“Not so fast. We’ve got a lot to talk about. I have to be someplace
where I can go to school. Maybe New York.”
“I’m not ready to move back here.”
“We could try Boulder.”
“It gets too cold there.”
“Or New Mexico, or California.”
“We don’t have to decide now. We’ve got to go back to Drop City anyway,
to settle things and get our stuff.”
She said, “I’ll go back only if we agree to stay just long enough to
figure things out.”
“You like?” Kugo waved a hand, displaying a big toothy grin.
“This is quite a change from your old pad on the Lower East Side.”
“How’s that?”
“It feels so homey...lived in.”
“We were never really living in that old apartment. We were just
camping out there.”
A little girl’s voice called out, “Mommy, there’s a man here.” I caught
a glimpse of her ducking into a back doorway.
“Kugo, you’ve become middle class.”
“Man, you’re putting me down. I’ve always been like this. You just
never knew me when I had bread.”
“To what do you attribute your affluence now?”
“I’m not dealing acid, if that’s what you’re thinking. I reached a dead
end with that stuff. I know when I’ve seen enough. Too many bummers.
I’m through with psychedelics. I’m never going to trip again.”
“I hear you, man. I’m finished tripping too.”
“Anyway, I’m working. I got a job. A straight job.”
“Doing what?”
“I’m a salesman.”
“Of what?”
“Vacuum cleaners.”
“In a store?”
He made a face. “Door-to-door. I actually like it. I’m good at it. I
couldn’t survive all day in a store. We’ve got a good product. Would
you like a demonstration?”
“Ishmael!” Frinki appeared in the doorway, in a flowered housedress,
looking very pretty. I extended my hand.
“Don’t I get a hug?”
“Of course.” We wrapped our arms and bodies for an instant.
“So you and Lard the only ones left of the old gang back at Drop City.
I never would have guessed that.”
“I wouldn’t have either. This is a great place. I’m glad for you. You
two have really pulled yourselves together.”
“We realized we needed each other,” Kugo said.
Clard and Suzie Spotless were staying in a loft in Soho that was paid
for by the poster company he was working for. They seemed happy, though
Suzie didn’t know what to do with herself besides going shopping.
“This is a great neighborhood. Cheap and full of artists. But the
developers are moving in. Everything’s getting ritzy and phony fast.
The real artists are being pushed out. I wish there was something we
could do to stop it.”
“Not in New York, you can’t.”
“If there was only some way to have Drop City here. Just one building
is all we’d need.”
“Drop City cost three hundred fifty dollars,” I said. “Do you know how
much a building here goes for?”
“It doesn’t matter. The ideas behind Drop City are right, I know they
are. They’ll prove themselves somehow, in some way we haven’t thought
of yet. It’s just a matter of time.”
“Those Chicago police were wild!” Giovanni exclaimed, brushing Bubbles.
“I’m so proud of my Giovanni-boy.” Otis drew his elbows in, his hands
up and wide. “Threw those teargas canisters right back at those big bad
storm troopers. He was brave.”
After the Democratic National Convention, Giovanni and Otis had
continued on to New York and taken a pretty little flat together near
Washington Square. They seemed a happy enough couple. I didn’t ask too
many personal questions.
“Chicago was the first time I ever really fought back,” Giovanni said.
“It was empowering. Got me ready for Stonewall. It happened right near
here. We were in the middle of it.”
“What’s Stonewall?”
“You’ve really been hiding in those bad old sticks,” Otis intoned.
“Stonewall’s a gay bar a few blocks away. The police raided and tried
to arrest a few drag queens. Everybody had taken so much shit for so
long, everybody just decided they’d had enough. It was spontaneous. A
crowd gathered in the street. Trapped the police in their patrol car.”
“We were here at home,” Otis picked up. “We could hear the ruckus from
here. We ran down. Everybody was throwing bottles, beer cans, garbage,
cobblestones, anything they could find. It was glorious.” He sighed.
“Carried on for two nights.”
“I’ve never felt like this before,” Giovanni said. “Those pigs think
twice before they mess with us now. We are powerful! I’m so proud to be
gay.”
Patt and I spent many hours communing about our hearts and lives,
walking along New York streets and parks, in cafes and in her friend’s
tiny apartment.
Ed the Fed appeared one day with a girl he’d picked up at the Woodstock
Festival. We all squeezed into his little car and drove up to Vermont
to visit our old Dropper friends Fletcher, Nancy, their kids, and Jim
Quim at Mullein Hill commune in Vermont. It was very beautiful and we
were glad they were doing so well.
Fed’s girl decided to sojourn at Mullein Hill, while Patt, Fed, and I
continued across Canada, through forests where moose grazed alongside
the highway, and plains where billows of black flies clouded the road
and smeared our windshield, to Calgary, where we stopped for the annual
Stampede, part rodeo, part carnival and sideshow, then down the
continental divide, through Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons.
In a little motel in the mountains of Wyoming, with Ed the Fed snoring
in the other room, I whispered to Patt, “I think we’re already married.”
“No we’re not.”
“It feels like we are to me.”
“Not to me.”
“Why not?”
“Because we haven’t had a wedding.”
“What’s the difference? It’s a common-law marriage.”
“We need a ceremony.”
“Why?”
“A ceremony means you’re committed to each other. You’re sharing your
commitment with your family and friends.”
“Okay, let’s have a wedding.”
“Don’t joke.”
“I’m serious.”
We arrived at Drop City on the fall equinox, took a deep breath while
the dust settled and sorted things out in our minds.
We got married in a simple ceremony, with Lard, Jal, Diggy Meg, and
Feather Tom as witnesses, all dressed in our Dropper finery. Feather
Tom had even given himself a new spiral haircut and was wearing his
foxtail sewn to the back of his pants.
We began trying to make a baby. To my surprise—stupid me—it was
amazingly sexy, and bumped us up to an unforeseen erotic level.
Soon after, Feather Tom and Diggy Meg moved to Libertad.
We bought an old 1946 Chevy panel truck, which actually had a hand
crank to start it when the battery was dead.
“I’m pregnant.”
We were both very happy and scared.
We packed our things and left for New Mexico. It was three and a half
years from the time I first walked into Drop City. Of the early
Droppers only Larry Lard was still there.
We found a little house on the desert near the Rio Grande, outside the
town of Bernalillo, just north of Albuquerque, not far from Placitas
and Drop South. Bernalillo looked very ordinary but had the reputation
of being a main stop in the drug trade from Mexico.
I found a job for the first time in three years, laying adobes for a
dollar an hour, and Patt worked cleaning houses.
We became friends with a number of people connected with Drop South,
which was still muddling along. Quite a few former Droppers and Drop
Southers were living in Placitas and vicinity, including Riceman Bill
and Breeze Trees, who’d gotten married.
Months later, on a long weekend we drove to visit some friends in
Boulder, and stopped by Drop City. It was strange and awkward being
there, like seeing an old lover after the fire and smoke are gone.
People we didn’t know had moved into our old dome. We spent the night
with Lard and Jal.
“We’re thinking of moving to Libertad,” Lard said.
Jal had been quietly fussing over a drawing, but that raised her
hackles. “I thought we were keeping that to ourselves.”
“Don’t mention it to anybody here, okay?”
“How many people are up there now?” I asked.
“About twenty.”
“It’s filling up fast.”
“Denton and Leeda’s dome is really coming along, very creative. Have
you seen it?”
“We’ve never been to Libertad.”
“Really? Let’s all go up tomorrow,” Jal said.
“Tom and Meg are still kind of camping out there. Rabbit’s zome
is incredible.”
“We saw the model and some photos at Bear’s,” Patt recalled.
“Looks more like a spaceship than a house,” Jal put in. “He calls it a
launch pad.”
The next day we drove thirty miles north, then headed into the
mountains, through a wooden gate onto a twisting gravel road, and
stopped alongside some other vehicles in the middle of the pine forest.
“They’ve got a rule that you can’t build in sight of anybody else. If
you look close you can see domes peeking out between the trees.”
We followed a hillside thick with brush and shrubs until we found
Feather Tom in a little clearing, working on a shell built out of wire
and cement, a miniature Hollywood Bowl with an incredible mountain
view. Diggy Meg was nearby at a small fire. We all exchanged hugs. They
whipped up some lunch for us, then led us along a trail through a
beautiful meadow to Denton and Leeda’s dome.
We sat around their fire swapping stories, Leeda nestling her baby in a
sling around her neck, moving him from breast to breast.
“Where’s Rabbit’s zome?”
“Over the ridge.” Denton glanced edgily at Leeda. “Did they get back
from Denver?”
“I haven’t seen them since last week.”
“They’re not back yet,” Meg answered.
“Go see their zome,” Denton mumbled. “It’s an amazing palace. I mean
place.”
“Too bad they’re gone.”
“You can just walk in. It’s open. Right down that path.”
Everybody stood except Denton and Leeda.
“Aren’t you coming with us?”
Denton said, “We’ve got to get some things done.”
As we passed back into the tall pines, Tom said, “They’re on the outs.”
“I could see that.”
“You know Rabbit.”
“Yeah. I guess I do,” I said.
Meg shook her head. “It’s ridiculous. Male egos. Power games.”
“Everybody helped Rabbit build his launch pad, but as soon as it was
finished, he was too busy to help other people build theirs. Shit like
that.”
Not long after, Lard and Jal got married and left Drop City. Instead of
moving to Libertad, they found a house near us in Placitas, New Mexico.
Ed the Fed married a woman he met in Albuquerque, and they and their
new baby moved to Western Colorado, near where I had gone to the
Sundance. It seemed like everybody was getting married, and many were
having babies. I guess it was inevitable at that age. After you’re a
couple for a while, you reach a point where either you break up or it
becomes a marriage.
One day Curly Bensen passed through on his way from Lawrence, Kansas,
to the West Coast. This was the first time I’d seen him since he left
Drop City after the Joy Festival. He’d stopped at Drop City on the way
down. More new people had taken it over, and Drop City had become even
more of a crash pad than it had been. We sat around talking about old
times.
“I keep thinking that we blew it.” Curly ran his hand through his wild,
kinky hair. “If we’d have kicked Rabbit out that first fall, maybe
things would have been different.”
“I don’t know. Maybe not really that different. Kicking him out would
probably have changed us all for the worse. In the end I think we’d all
have moved on anyway.”
He shrugged. “Yeah, that’s just the way things are. We were better off
not kicking him out. Rabbit was just a poor slob like the rest of us.
If Rabbit wasn’t the enemy, it would have been you or me.”
“That’s what Clard always used to say,” I replied.
“Man, we were naïve back then,” Curly went on. “We really believed
we could change the world, or, even worse, start over from scratch,
make a whole new world. You can’t make an alternative world. There
aren’t two worlds. There’s only one, with everything and its opposite
in it. Now I can barely see how we ever could have fooled ourselves
into thinking like that. It just sounds loony.”
“There’s only one world, I agree. But like you said to me once, every
morning we start over from scratch. The world does change. And people
do change it. A little.”
He laughed and rolled his eyes. “Right, a little. And it’s always loony
naïve people who do it, who change the world. A little.”
“Tat ti tit,” I said.
“Tat ti tit,” he replied.
Soon Patt and I had a beautiful daughter. I loved being a daddy, though
it was more work than I’d ever dreamed, and Patt and I didn’t see
eye-to-eye about a number of things. I’d cut my hair and landed a
straight job with the county on the local Navajo reservation. I loved
being around the Dine people, but I hated working for the state and
wanted to quit as soon as I got a little ahead. The idea of my quitting
my job threw Patt into a panic. Nonetheless I quit and got a low-paying
oppressive job in a sweat shop cabinet factory. I still thought that a
different kind of family structure, extended or tribal, might be
liberating for us as parents and better for kids. But the experience at
Drop City and the other communes didn’t prove that. The minuses were as
long as the pluses. Our new family wasn’t much different than the ones
we’d grown up in.
Curly and Jo wound up in Montana, where they’d originally looked to
build Drop City. I dropped out of touch with him, but heard that they
had another couple of kids, Curly had become a postman, and Jo worked
in a cooperative school.
Clard and Suzie finally left New York, sojourned in Boulder for a
while, then settled in Denver. He got involved with the university
again. They had two kids and, I heard, separated.
I was walking down Central Avenue in Albuquerque near the university
when I saw Rabbit coming toward me, accompanied by an attractive
African-American woman. He introduced us.
“How’ve you been?” I asked.
“Just great. How about you? Heard you have a baby. How’s Patt?”
“Money problems as always. Hate my job. We still bicker. Other than
that, everything’s fine. How’s Libertad?”
He pulled his red bandanna off his brow, unrolled it and shook it out.
“That place got fucked up. Me and Poly decided to leave.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. What about Denton and Leeda?”
He stuck his tongue in his cheek. “They’re still there. They got weird.
I thought I knew who they were, but I hardly knew them at all.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing, really. It just didn’t work out.” He shook his hair.
“How’s Poly doing?”
“Went back to Texas. We broke up. I’m up near Santa Fe now.” His eyes
were sad and piercing. “I think about Drop City a lot now. I’m sorry.
We really fucked up. You know what I mean.”
“Yeah, I’m sorry too. I know what you mean.”
“I knew you would. You and me, we’re a lot alike.”
The next week I went to visit Riceman in Placitas, to see the floor he
was redoing by pouring ox blood all over it. He’d been told by a
Chicano neighbor that this was the traditional way to get a good adobe
floor. It was bizarre, since he was a macrobiotic vegetarian. I think
his neighbor had been putting him on, but Riceman was a very literal
guy. Lard, who was living nearby with Jal, was there helping him.
“Did you hear about Rabbit and Libertad?” Lard asked as I stepped
inside.
“I met him in Albuquerque. Said he and Polly left Libertad, and they
split up.”
Riceman leaned on his mop. “Did he tell you how it happened?”
“Not really.”
“This is the story I heard,” Riceman said, pushing up his horn-rimmed
glasses, which had slid down his nose, “from somebody who was there.
The sheriff and FBI raided one of their pot fields in the national
forest just outside of their land. A lot of Libertad people had plots,
you know, but they only raided one of them. It belonged to these guys
Nestor and Hank.”
“I met them, I think.”
“That night everybody runs off to the fields, stashes anything
smokable, and destroys everything else. At dawn three sheriff’s cars
drive up. With them is that same sleazy FBI agent who harassed us at
Drop City. Some of them head straight for Rabbit’s launching pad, and
the rest of them run up to Denton and Leeda’s dome. After a while they
all come out, confer, then head straight for Nestor and Hank, they know
right where to go, and drag them away in handcuffs. The news flies
around Libertad. As soon as the pigs are gone, everybody gathers in
Rabbit’s launching pad. All kinds of accusations start flying. Denton
and Leeda swear they hadn’t finked. Rabbit is dragged out onto the
carpet. It must have been painful to watch. Finally he admits that he
snitched. But he had to do it, he said, to save Libertad, for sake of
the community, otherwise they would have busted everybody. Denton, who
is always such a peaceful guy, flies across the room like a madman, and
clobbers him. They had to pull them apart. Then they told him to leave.”
“Who?”
“The whole group. The community threw Rabbit out of Libertad.”
“Looks like he’s already picked himself up and moved on,” Lard put in.
“Rabbit’s going to be okay. He’s a survivor.”
Numerous rural communes and intentional communities had sprouted around
the country by this time, but dropping out had not become the mass
social movement we had envisioned. For all the people who dropped out,
others were only too happy to jump in and take their places.
The limitations of the communal movement had become clear. It wasn’t
just a question of what most people wanted, but what was possible
within this economic system. Money and resources were key. Even with
pooling resources, starting a rural community was out of most people’s
reach. Poor folk could join a group but not start one. Americans were
not radicalized to the point of land seizures. Organizing a group
project like this requires a lot of skill, dedication, and luck. Most
people found that even when a community gets going, group living isn’t
easy. Just getting along with one other person is difficult, so group
living in an equal and democratic situation requires a lot of energy.
City people often don’t have a clue about what country living is really
like or how to survive out there. Dr. Parks, the old Drop City
physician, had been right: communes were more a place of temporary
retreat from society for most people, than a method to reform society.
Because of these factors, getting back to the land became primarily a
middle class movement, and there would never be enough rural communes
to really change society. The land remained cut off from working class
city people. Communes would not be a giant step to social revolution or
a way to usher in a new form of social justice. Inspired as a radical
movement to fundamentally change society, the back-to-the-land movement
became a question of lifestyle.
Meanwhile the Viet Nam war kept getting hotter, and anti-war fever
around the country kept building. The TV news showed almost daily
footage of massive demonstrations and radical activities in various hot
spots. However, there really wasn’t much going on in Albuquerque. I
went to a couple of rallies, but they were very small and spiritless. I
was still committed to working for social change, and still could not
accept society as it was. I knew the Revolution wasn’t dead. I just
wasn’t connected with it. I felt a constant longing to find it and
connect with it again.
Growing with the antiwar movement was the counterculture. Numerous
young people around the country were getting a taste of collective
organization in anti-war groups and in the early women’s movement. A
collective group had taken over a natural food store where we often
shopped. The idea of a collectively run business was a new and great
concept to me, bringing an alternative style of democracy into the
workplace, without adding the difficulties of living together. Work
collectives seemed to me more suited than communes as a transitional
form to a radically changed American society. They took off where the
communal movement left off.
“Did you see that new billboard down near the Placitas turnoff?” Lard
asked me.
“It’s totally gross. I don’t understand how they get away with
polluting the landscape with that shit.”
“They get away with it because people like us sit around complaining
and don’t just go there at night and saw them down.”
Lard, Riceman, I, and a couple of former Drop South guys became a
little collective action group.
A family means putting down roots, and Patt and I had to decide if New
Mexico was going to be the right spot for us. Besides being very hard
to make a living out there, the lines between cultural groups seemed in
some ways as frozen as they’d been since the first Spaniards and
Anglo-Americans arrived. We were part of a community of post-hippies
spread out over the area. We felt if we had lived there for twenty
years, we’d still be newcomers. We wanted to be in some place where the
social lines were more fluid, where there were more options.
Ernesto wrote us from California. He and Cori had broken up; he’d
married a woman he’d recently met. They and another couple had bought a
tract of beautiful hills near Cazadero, filled with live oaks, and were
starting a community. They invited us to join them, and we decided to
go and check it out.
We stayed there a week. They had many of the same problems we’d seen
over and over again in intentional communities. We’d already been
through that, and didn’t want to repeat it. One of the guys there was a
carpenter, who had a job remodeling a house in the East Bay. He asked
me to help him. We drove down to Berkeley.
Berkeley had been rocked by anti-war rioting and the struggle around
People’s Park. Most of downtown was boarded up, the storefronts covered
with plywood, because so many plate glass windows had been smashed.
There was a radicalism in the air that I’d seen nowhere else.
We settled in the downstairs of a little two-story cottage, behind a
communal house. There were many communal houses around, in various
states of organization or disorganization. The Berkeley Tenants Union
had a chain of cooperative-communal houses they had taken over in the
late sixties, stemming from a rent strike.
I began hiring myself out to do simple carpentry. I knew a bit from
Drop City and my work in New Mexico, though not much about standard
construction.
Patt began taking classes and working hard toward her degree.
The Christmas 1971 bombing of Hanoi brought many hundreds of people out
into the Berkeley streets. That night I learned the local rules of
engagement of urban warfare. If you were running, the police chased
you, but if you walked, they ran right past you. Everybody ducked
around a corner, quickly changed shirts and walked away.
After the first People’s Park riot two years earlier, while we were
still in Drop City, the university had erected a high wire fence around
People’s Park. Now the news came that Nixon had escalated the war again
with the mining of Haiphong harbor. Word spread throughout the
underground community that hundreds of people had gathered around
People’s Park and were tearing down the fence. I hurried up there.
Rioters were running in every direction. Tear gas filled the air. Like
everybody else, I had a wet bandanna tied over my mouth. Police and
National Guardsmen tried to clear the streets, beating and dragging
people away, but we just circled the block and were back. Soon there
were more people filling the streets than the police could handle.
Hundreds of us shook the fence out of its foundations until it fell to
the ground. People’s Park was liberated again.
Berkeley was a hotbed of collectivity. Anti-war groups, women’s groups,
and radical affinity groups seemed to be everywhere, organized by a
system of direct democracy. A “Food Conspiracy” network extended around
the Bay Area. The Haight-Ashbury Food Conspiracy began as a buying club
in San Francisco in 1968, in the aftermath of the Diggers’ free food
giveaways. In 1970 the Organic Food Association opened in the East Bay
and quickly became an umbrella for over twenty food conspiracies
reaching hundreds of households. It was organized around member
participation. You needed to take a turn putting in a little work,
either going to the farmers’ market once a week to buy produce and
cheese or sorting it into boxes or delivering it to the member
households. The Organic Food Association was set up so each
neighborhood conspiracy was responsible for one job each month. It was
cheap and good stuff. The main problem was that it was inconsistent and
you never knew what you were getting or how much.
A popular cooperative supermarket was thriving in Berkeley that had
been started in the 1930s, the Berkeley Co-op, then the largest
consumer co-op in the continental US, with 100,000 members. It was a
great place, though torn between factions, and with a conventional
managerial structure.
A number of work collectives were scattered around Berkeley, all
recently formed. A group of carpenters called Build; auto shops named
Uncle Ho’s Mechanix Rainbow and Movement Motors; a taxi company, Taxi
Unlimited; stores selling natural foods, Alternative Food Store and Ma
Revolution; a store specializing in cheese and bread, the Cheeseboard;
and Uprisings Bakery. These all differed from the way the Berkeley
Co-op was run in that the workers themselves were the members and had
collective management of the operation.
A couple of miles away in Oakland the “Inter-Communalist” Black Panther
Party had organized a whole “survival program,” which included a health
clinic, shoe factory, plumbing service, free food and clothing,
cooperative housing, job-finding service, transportation for elders,
breakfast program for children, busing to prisons for visitors, a
prisoners’ commissary. The program was to run “pending revolution.” All
goods and services were free.
I called the carpentry collective Build and told them I was interested
in joining a group like theirs. They weren’t taking in new members, but
had compiled a list of ten like-minded people. They called a meeting,
explained how Build worked, and suggested we set up a new collective.
That never happened but I met Vern there, and we did a few remodeling
jobs together. When we needed a scaffold for repairing a tar and gravel
roof, Vern knew where we might borrow one, at Bay High.
In the industrial zone of West Berkeley, Bay High had started out a
couple of years earlier as an alternative high school, in which kids
could study on their own and get an education in the trades. Bay had a
print shop, an auto repair shop, wood shop, electronics shop, and
pottery studio, all doing commercial work, as well as a resident
theater troupe. The initial funding for Bay High had come in part from
the Whole Earth Catalog. The shops were training students in skilled
trades in a non-authoritarian environment, while doing actual
commercial work and bringing in a sizable portion of the school’s
income.
When I first walked into Bay High the school was in a crisis. The shops
were all organized as democratic collectives. The school as a whole had
been run by an administration made up mainly of the academic teachers.
There had been regular advisory meetings of shop representatives, but
the real power resided in the administration. A struggle had developed
between the administrators and the shop workers over the
administrators’ refusal to join in sweeping the floors and taking out
the garbage. A few days before I arrived, the workers had staged an
insurrection, and kicked out the administrators. They had taken over
the means of production, and were now trying to figure out how to
complete the revolution. The shops were struggling to function without
anybody telling them what to do. Daily emergency meetings were being
held to decide whether to keep on fighting to stay afloat, or to fold
the whole thing. There were about thirty core people, about twenty
others around the fringes.
I saw an excitement that I had not experienced since Drop City, and
joined the group. We dissolved the school and out of the wreckage
started Bay Warehouse Collective, based on the shops. All income from
the shops went into the central Collective, which paid the workers
salaries according to need. Not much money was flowing, so “need” was
defined as basic survival. Bay Warehouse Collective, like Drop City,
used a consensus system for decision-making. As long as one person was
adamantly opposed, a decision was not made. The women’s movement was
rolling, and Bay Warehouse women really knew how to kick butt.
I joined Bay Woodshop, but soon gravitated over to Bay Printshop, which
was doing work for the anti-war movement and radical groups. The first
edition of the classic book Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary
Anti-Imperialism was printed there. I learned how to do camera work and
run an offset press. In Bay Autoshop I learned to fix my car and grind
my valves. I did some work with the Bay Theater Company. We ran Bay
Duck Food Conspiracy. Bay Warehouse people were active in anti-war,
women’s movement, environmental, solidarity, and other radical groups.
There was also plenty of fun. I, however, had lost my taste for dope
parties, and much preferred playing with my little daughter at home.
Bay Warehouse Collective almost seemed like Drop City all over again.
The counterculture had resurfaced in a new and vital form.
Work collectives kept springing up all over the Bay Area and around the
country. Toward the end of the decade there were over 150 collectives
and cooperatives around San Francisco Bay, involving thousands of
people.
The building that Bay Warehouse Collective rented was too large and
costly for our needs and abilities, and when push came to shove we
couldn’t pay our rent, so in 1974 we disbanded. But each of the three
shops regrouped as an autonomous worker collective, and each moved into
a smaller space with the machinery it inherited. The print shop became
Inkworks Printshop. The auto shop became CarWorld. The woodshop became
Heartwood Cooperative Woodshop, where I continued to work and learned
to do fine custom woodworking.
The collectives began networking through the loose organization we
called the InterCollective. Many of the collectives were in
food-related industries. The network of food collectives circling the
Bay opened a common warehouse, and formed the People’s Food System, to
provide a large-scale alternative to the corporate food system,
connecting collective groups up and down the west coast. The
counterculture was actually making a frontal challenge to the dominant
system, in one of its most vital spots. But many of the volatile forces
of the era met in the Food System, and clashed. Internally, an
ideological battle brewed over organization between anarchists and
Marxists. External forces were also at work. A number of people began
acting strangely disruptive. Rumors flew that Nixon’s Cointelpro
agents, who had destroyed many other progressive and radical groups,
had infiltrated the Food System too.
A number of the food collectives were involved with the prisoners’
rights movement. The California system at the time used “indeterminate
sentencing”: a prisoner with a promise of a job on the outside could
get an early release. The collectives offered that promise. However,
there were competing radical prisoner organizations, in violent
conflict with each other, each accusing the other of being led by
police agents.
In 1977 an all-worker Food System conference was called to discuss the
crisis. Almost as soon as it started it was disrupted and shut down by
a small group which included outsiders from radical groups. Hard on the
heels of this, a gun battle broke out between former prisoners
belonging to feuding prisoner organizations, at Ma Revolution natural
food store on the south-east corner of Telegraph and Dwight in
Berkeley. The Food System came crashing down and, as it did, a
countercultural dream shattered and died.
When the Viet Nam war was finally over, many people who had been active
for years went back to simply living their lives. The war had fueled
much of the radicalism that had been heating the air; the whole society
seemed to take a deep breath and rethink where we wanted to go from
there.
One day Patt and I received a letter from Clard Svensen, who had gotten
into organizing artist cooperatives in the Denver area. Clard explained
that at Drop City there had been a lot of fast turnover among transient
groups for a few years, until finally Drop City had been abandoned. The
buildings were deteriorating fast and something had to be done. He
proposed selling the land and giving the money to an art group called
CrissCross that he, Lard, and Alteresio had formed. He asked that Patt
and I sign over our votes on the board of directors in proxy to him for
that purpose.
We were sad that it had come to this, but glad that someone had taken
the initiative. We didn’t want to make money from selling Drop City, so
signed the proxies.
That Drop City had to die I knew was no reason to mourn. All living
things die. It’s not the death that is important, but the day-by-day
living, what we create in the world. The basic idea of Drop City and
the counterculture, to withdraw energy from the old system and use it
to reshape society and the world, is an undying process. Young people
always have to find their own structures to express their collective
energies. They always turn to each other. Where else can they turn?
I found out later that Curly and Jo had opposed selling Drop City.
Curly had an idea of he and Jo moving back onto the land by themselves,
and starting over again. Clard and the others wouldn’t go along with it.
I also found out later that, in order to sell the land, they had to
remove from the deed the clause that declared the land “forever free
and open to all people.” Forever doesn’t always last very long.
The cattle rancher next door bought the property. All the domes were
eventually dismantled and scavenged. The theater dome was the last
standing. A fitting end. I don’t know if all traces of Drop City have
been wiped off the land, but even if they are, the memory of a small
band of creative young people defying the world and conventional
reason, naïvely striving to liberate themselves, each other and
society, to live in peace to the fullest, will continue to echo in our
cultural memory every time people try, as we used to say, to “live the
Revolution.”
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