Given such a mood, going to Cuba in November was not that wild. Besides, what else was there to do? Like all restless people I thought life was better somewhere I was not. I wanted to check it out. Since the few-hundred-something dollars for airfare and lodgings were a gift from a benefactor, the trip fit nicely into my budget. True, travel to Cuba was not legal. But who on earth would make a public ass of himself by tossing me in jail for curiosity? So I left with the New York contingent of a larger group totaling two hundred sixteen, first to Montreal then to Mexico City. From there we took flight on a fat little plane headed for Havana.

The airstrip blazed white, the heat was fierce. My brain felt like burned marshmallows. In front of the hangar our hosts appeared to be dancing in welcome waving and grinning like they knew us already. They wore orange T-shirts and pressed khaki trousers, and they held banners that said “Welcome Venceremos Brigade” or ” Diez Milliones Van.”

We, two hundred sixteen of us, had a name: the Venceremos Brigade. We were in Cuba to participate in the 1970 harvest which was to top all others with a ten-million ton yield. It also had a name: the Zafra. In Cuba where they named years–1968 had been The Year of the Heroic Guerrilla–1970 was The Year of the Ten-Million Tons. As it turned out the year of the ten-million failed, but no one knew that yet. We were still in 1969. But time skipped ahead in Cuba. They were already in the future.

After lunch on Christmas Day I was outside the cafeteria, my straw hat tilted against the glare that seemed to flatten objects. I had a fresh pack of Fuertes, a filterless cigarette stronger than a Camel but not as foul as a Gauloise. The wrapper was pleasantly squared and substantial. I tore off a corner of the pack, plucked a Fuerte, and shoved it in the corner of my mouth. Striking a small wax match, I held tip to flame. I sucked smoke, rich and heavy with taste–residual cow shit perhaps–manure, mulch, the truth of leaves grown and harvested. Ah stench. Oh cloud of gas and keening lungs. Gravel crunched. Others were leaving the lunch tent; and behind them the clean-up sounds of clanking pans, silverware ringing against plates, the low buzz of dinner talk. My friend Joe waddled up rubbing his hands.

” He’s here.”

I blew a smoke ring.

“How do you know?”

For weeks there had been a rumor that Fidel would visit us on Christmas day as a special present. The gift of him was meant to compensate for the holiday festivities which had been canceled, not just for the Brigade but for the whole country because of the Zafra. I don’t think many of us cared as much as the Cubans about missing Christmas. Many of our group were Jews and thought little of Christmas. Of the black participants a few were Muslims of the Elijah Mohammed persuasion. Others–and I fell into this group–were content to skip Christmas, whatever the reason. But we liked that the Cubans thought of us, considered what might have been our feelings, made extra efforts to please.

Joe and I scurried across the encampment, batches of tidy white sleeping tent on one side; on the other, a road lined with cathedral palm trees; and beyond these, fields the color of blue-grass and alfalfa. On the border of a cane field, straight ahead, stood a low watch tower with armed guards we rarely noticed. We rustled through a path on either side of which bamboo-green cane grew taller than us. After more tramping we reached a clearing shaped like a box in the center of which we saw Fidel, machete in hand, under a mirage-like sky that shimmered in the high heat.

He was very tall wearing traditional army fatigues. I don’t remember if he had a hat, but I think he did have a straw hat like the ones we had been issued. Then again it could have been an olive-drab cap, or maybe he was hatless. He was pale as chalk, flushed at the cheekbones, and his hair was abundant, chestnut-black and very curly. He had a full beard,of course. Broad through the shoulders and chest, Fidel was heavy but not fat.

He was surrounded by Americans, all men, and he let them get very close–close as possible without kissing or hugging, I thought. Joe melted into this group and disappeared. Many of the men, also tall, were almost bashful in the presence of Fidel Castro. They flapped and bantered with ease, but their eyes shone and their mouths made delighted but reverential grins. There were questions and answers the gist of which I did not catch since I stood on the periphery out of earshot. I knew how easy it was to slide in a current of adulation–had done it before–and I kept distance when I felt the worshipful urge upon me. Malleable as play dough, I also knew how little I knew, and I didn’t want to embarrass myself by showing it. Besides what do you say to a head of fucking state?

In addition to being tall and thus commanding a good view , Fidel had a certain bird-like quality. Interrupting talk he beady-eyed the whole gaggle of us, one by one, stragglers like me included. Perhaps he wanted to know what was not being said, who was not saying it, why. Perhaps he was looking at girls. But in a moment of fear and relief–similar to what school kids feel when they have not done homework and the teacher mercifully calls on someone else–in a moment like that I saw myself from the outside, sullen and suspicious. Why stand apart? I thought. Why so much holding back? I was attracted-repelled by Fidel, paralyzed, as if in a witches’ circle.

Gawking had its limits and I started to feel like a camp follower or as if at an Elvis sighting. It was time to leave. Joe stayed on, but I could not imagine why. He was small, pudgy, almost feminine, easy to talk to and just as easily shunted aside by the brawnier types. In appearance and style Joe was polar opposite to Fidel, and I could not fathom what they would have to say to each other. But then, Joe was a good socialist.

Later that evening at the big group meeting in the dining hall, Fidel was wearing a different hat–a broad-brimmed straw with the brim rolled and a black power symbol affixed to one side: a raised black fist on a red background. I believe this hat originally belonged to James-From-Chicago who hated white people. The hat must have been a gift, and there must have been a separate meeting, black only, in which the hat changed hands.

On a raised platform Fidel chatted and laughed with the camp officials flanked on either side. I say “officials”. There are officials and then there are officials. These officials were young, good-looking, of many and mixed ethnicities, in semi-military attire. They were groomed to the extreme of male vanity. They packed pistols. It would be a lie to say that Cuban machismo in this form was totally unattractive. In your basic middle-class leftist I would have found it horrible. But the Cubans wore it well.

Fidel was smoking a big Cuban cigar. With crumpled clothes and shirt untucked he was the messiest of the lot. His gestures exuded the bold sweep of the Sierra Maestra, or so went my romantic thoughts at the time. Leaning to the mike he flashed a sly smile. He said he liked cutting sugar cane. He liked it because it kept him from getting too bourgeois. The crowd went crazy, screaming cheering, clapping stamping. I went crazy with them.

Even though we were not close, when my brother slipped a disc and wound up in traction, I felt sorry for him. He was flat on his back, one leg in the air, with a tricky system of pulleys to hoist his body parts up and down with – housebound in his apartment on 92nd St. between Madison and Fifth, right across from the park, almost. To help out I became his grocery slave. When I volunteered my services I didn’t know how picky my brother was about his grocery shopping – brands, quantities, container sizes. His pickiness led to a spat over a canned ham. He called me at my mother-in-law’s place on Park Avenue and 89th Street to complain about my buying the wrong ham, and one thing led to another, and I finally told him to fuck his ham and hung up on him.

Of course I felt guilty, and he was upset. So after apologies all around and when he was more mobile, as a gesture of reconciliation, he invited me over to his place to meet a friend. The friend was already half in the wrapper when I got there. One of my brother’s pals from Harvard, he looked like a young George Plimpton – rangy and tall – handsome in a boney boyish way. He wore a pink oxford shirt with the sleeves rolled up, grey trousers and loafers, nicely broken in with the dull sheen of good saddle bags.

He spoke as if with a mouth full of marbles and he thought himself quite the rake. ” How did an ugly son of a bitch like you get a beautiful sister like this?” he asked, waving his drink around.

My brother, dressed identically as his friend, gave one of those muggy smiles, chin stuck out and lips curled in like he was hiding false teeth. We were in the livingroom, which my brother had decorated with fuss and care. The ceiling was high with complex moldings, the walls had panels set in great impressive rectangles, all painted a pale sort of Federalist green. There was a huge working fireplace too, with birch logs and burnished andirons, winged chairs, and patrician doo- dads – crystal decanters, a cut-glass chandelier and such.

My brother’s three cats – a Siamese, an Abyssinian, and an Alley–wove around our legs. It turned out the friend was a world-traveler with a way of showing up in countries just as they flared into revolution. He had been in the Dominican Republic right before the marines landed in 1963, and he just happened to be in Havana, he said, in 1959, on the day Fidel Castro and his band of guerrillas marched through the streets in victory. He had also spent time in Southeast Asia. “Just revolution hopping,” I said flashing one of those pink-gummed Jackie Kennedy grins.

The two men giggled. They were entranced by the CIA, their current passion the pursuit of Che Guevara. My brother recounted the agency’s efforts to recruit the best and brightest over at Harvard while he was a student there. ” I’d like to get Che,” he said.

The friend nodded, and it seemed that they were paying a compliment to Che. He was a worthy opponent, a trophy of sorts. The conversation turned to Bolivia, Che’s whereabouts in the mountains, what it was like to hunt communist guerrillas in such terrain, what kind of support Che had from the locals (not much), the competence of the Bolivian military. He didn’t have a chance, they said, and the CIA was closing in.

So what was the fun in “getting” a man who didn’t have a chance? I thought. Where was the sport?

The following Spring my brother got stranded at the Cannes Film Festival because of the General Strike in France, led by Danny the Red ( Cohn-Bendit.) The airports shut down and the French, according to their special delight, manned the barricades. The New York Times said that everyone in France was reading The Mass Psychology of Fascism, by Wilhelm Reich, because it was Danny the Red’s favorite book.

Closer to home the Columbia Strike polarized the city and woke up my feral instincts. I loped across the Columbia campus pausing to watch Mark Rudd wave his arms around on the sundial ( an egomaniac, I thought.) I spent a night at Fayerweather Hall. I fled my marriage and my mother-in-law on Park Avenue. Things fell apart.

I also house-sat for my brother while he was in France (he didn’t trust me with the cats so he boarded them out.) One day , while rifling through my brother’s mail, I came across a Life magazine, all about Che. They got him after all and, to prove it, there was a many-page spread featuring death photos complete with bullet holes and bruises. Even dead Che looked better than any live political person I ever saw on TV or in the newspaper.

But it wasn’t the way he looked that got me. It was something about my brother and his friend and the way they had said “get him.” Like getting Che meant they had a part of him for themselves; a wildness, some crazy love or bristly stuff you can’t catch hold of – like electricity making a cat’s fur sparkle. Later when my brother came back from France he took his cats and moved to Europe permanently. Over the years he became a liberal – the influence of his children perhaps. I never saw his friend again. As for me, the jury is still out.

It was late spring in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and warm breezes stirred up dust on Franklin Street, one side of which was a no-man’s-land of trampled grass sloping up to the back ends of stores on Mass. Avenue; on the other, low clapboard houses with clinking wind chimes and bright Marimekko curtains had a pleasant trashy feel. The heat felt good on my skin and the dust felt good sticking to my face and hair and if I had been a dog I would have rolled in the dirt for joy.

I was hurrying along with my friend Naomi who was a year younger than me and six feet tall with haystack hair that she frizzed by braiding it wet and letting it dry and then taking out the braids. Naomi was telling me about this party and a guy she met who was so gorgeous she almost fell over when she saw him, a potter or an artist or something. I calculated days, arriving at the fact that the party was on a school night, and this both thrilled and unsettled me. Her boyfriend had also been at the party and the two of them had fucked among the jackets piled in the bed room–an act Naomi described in agonizing detail, each stroke punctuated with high-pitched hoots and cackles razoring my speed-brain. Then she grabbed my arm and said, "That’s him. What did I tell you?"

She was right: he was gorgeous. He had large wide-set eyes, haggard cheekbones, a sensuous mouth like Antonin Artaud, only an Artaud who lifted weights. He was a few yards in front of us reciting, "Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means…" to his friend, George– who was almost crying from laughing so hard– and he was under the influence, I believe, because there was great pathos in his voice, the kind that often has a chemical base. I had my mouth gaping—like, holy shit where have you been all my life?–and he sauntered up and put his arm around me as if I were a dear, long-lost cousin.

That’s how I met Lance.

Later that afternoon Lance and I ended up in bed at his wife’s apartment lunging at each other like professional wrestlers on a dismal clot of sheets. I described it to Naomi as being "athletic" when she demanded details a few weeks afterwards. Perhaps I was too immature for sex or my hormones were as fried as the rest of me from all the amphetamine I took . Either way it was hump-hump-and-slammin’-the-mat.

By this time George had gone home and Naomi was sitting alone outside the bedroom, listening. It was a tangible, sticky listening and, even though I kept telling myself that she was out there and I was in here, and he chose me and not to worry, I was half expecting it when Naomi sidled in all simpering smiles. Then silently plopping herself between us, she moon-eyed Lance and stuck her lips out at me; she stroked his face as if sculpting the bones; and then the two of them had a go at it.

I was stunned. Snatching my gear I retreated to the room where Naomi had been a few minutes earlier. The floor was splintery and bare, with toys and books and clothing scattered about in untidy snarls. I wanted a delicious treat, like cake, but there was no food in the kitchen cabinets. Then, crouched before the open refrigerator and gazing at a half-stick of margarine perched on a metal rack among crumbs and yellowed celery leaves, my heart started to race and I knew I had to get out of there; only to go out the front door, I had to pass the bed room which now emitted the creak of bed slats and rustling noises each one of which provoked a minor swell of nausea in me. My heart was pounding so loud it echoed in my ears. I should have foamed at the mouth, but I didn’t. I climbed on the kitchen counter, squeezed out a dwarf-sized window, fell in a bramble patch, and lurched off leaving my shoes behind in the sink.

Over the next few days I played the episode back to myself to figure out what had gone wrong, why I felt so incriminated and puny, so undignified. This was a tough question. Really, how can anyone know why she or anyone else did something after it’s already happened and they’ve all done what they were going to anyway? Unless a person is set on inventing some rule to follow so it will not happen again, whatever it was. I didn’t have rules and it was not clear to me that I wanted to avoid everything that had happened, only the painful parts.

So I thought about rules as I visited Lance and George at The Cambridge Potters, their shop and studio on Mass. Avenue; even as I examined the oozing clay pots wet on the wheel or massive pots ready for firing with woolly mammoths and dancing minotaurs drawn on. I contemplated my rules while hiking over to the slums of the South End where Lance and George were rebuilding a house, unremarkable outside; but inside, whitewashed and shaped like a church — a molded church as if growing spiraled similar to the inside walls of the Guggenheim Museum. I considered my rules while listening to him and George in the studio and at the construction site as they belted out "Mr. Tambourine Man" along with a scratchy recording of Bob Dylan. And rules were in the back of my mind when Lance did wine-powered encores of "Fern Hill" while George leered and I watched spellbound and delighted and wounded all at the same time.

After following Lance around trying to figure a way to be close without feeling too humiliated, I decided that some men are good for boyfriends, some for friends, some for teachers–a simple matter of who was good for what. After all, Lance was a genius. He had secrets, special tricks that only geniuses know, things I could not get from school or from ordinary people. I could absorb it all by osmosis, take Lance-lessons, append him to myself. Considering this, it was best to ignore the painful incident with Naomi. Anyway a new genius-friend was a prize catch. I proposed this friendship and he accepted. Then there were the prints, a series of five large crazy lithographs on brown wrapping paper. He had drawn them in a metal plate, whipped off one of each, and I wanted one. As he was now my friend, I decided to ask Lance if I could have one.

So on a sultry night, across the street from the house in the South End, while we sat on stone steps surrounded by tall weeds, Lance expounded on his own rules: how no one could take anything from him he wouldn’t willingly give. No one. Somehow the force of his will made giving and receiving less a rip off; as if willful consent shaped both these acts recasting them as aspects of Lance himself. Considering his drift, it was not that easy to bring up the lithographs, but I asked anyway. He said, "Yes, I’ll give you one because I know you will take care of it."

Later he chose a print that was not my favorite. It was an abstract-looking guy waving hands around at another guy, only there were large penises instead of fingers and big butt cracks shaped into the hand meats on the bottom– not the kind of thing to show your mother or try to impress strangers with. It was called "Two Men Arguing Over Coffee", measured three and a half feet square, and was rolled up in a cardboard cylinder.

When I last saw Lance in New York on St. Marks Place–outside the Electric Circus (a hulking structure, which is now painted black and boarded up, and will soon be condos) — I was twenty-two; it was 1969; and I asked him why he had fucked Naomi that time; and didn’t he know how much I liked him back then. He said, "Why didn’t you just tell me to stop?" I remembered the logy feeling I had traipsing back and forth across that kitchen before I pitched out the window. I remembered telling myself to rise above what was happening. I remembered rage and fear canceling each other out; the sense of powerlessness; not knowing what I wanted or how to fight for it or even if I wanted to fight, period. I said," Really, you would have stopped?" He said, "Yuh. "

Lance went to Hollywood and got into movies. He was in Aliens and recently had his own TV series, an X-Files knockoff about serial killers. "Two Men Arguing Over Coffee" survived framings, peelings off pressboard, cleanings of corrosive glue. My husbands have all been fond of the penis hands although I never told them the exact nature of my friendship with their creator. I wasn’t lying; I’m not sure I know myself.

Here is the painting:

The second time I saw Billy he was with the same bad company loitering about the dirt road where I’d last seen them. Earl didn’t say anything this time. He just strode up, flicked his shoulder length tresses, and wrenched the rifle away while the others watched rubber faced and expressionless.

“Give it back. It’s mine,” I said.

“Yuh, whuduhyuhgonnadewabowdit?” said Earl.

Then Billy asked if I didn’t have any other clothes. I was wearing a Mexican wedding shirt made from coarse cotton and a pair of disintegrating jeans. Oats fell from my pockets, hay, horse treats. I was one with quadrupeds and didn’t think much about clothes.

So the next time I saw him, Billy gave me a pair of jeans. He said, “Here” and tossed me a bundle, which turned out to be stiff new Levis folded neatly into a square. There was no thank you from me. I liked to think I could radiate something greater than manners–a trust in the benevolent cosmos. I did this by emanation whose willed force I hoped would meld me to the great being himself. A shot in the dark, a hypothesis of the imagination– whatever it was, Billy emanated it too, blank-eyed and goofy-jawed. I took his imitation of my imitation as shared feeling. And later, on the crest of a small hill, sage brush tumbling by, and silhouetted against the sunset, golden saxophone gleaming–when Billy played his one perfectly clear, lugubrious line, I thought he was an artist. This line was the only one he could play. But I didn’t know that yet. There was a lot I didn’t know.

Soon after, the banditos crossed an invisible line. Sunshine shot Davy by accident when he was trying to shoot Earl , and that was after an all-nighter of drinking and extravagant drugging when they very intelligently shot holes into every room of an adobe longhouse. The dog was the superior being among the banditos, so I mourned Davy; but Sunshine always did have a hand-eye problem, requiring horn-rimmed spectacles thick as plate glass, which made him fun to beat when shooting at cans. Earl went back to L.A., and, even before all this happened, Billy ran out of money and left for New York.

I left too. I left Chinito, who had grown fat and sassy grazing on summer grass. I left the hippies living in teepees and the banditos’ girlfriends who had stayed behind. I left the hot springs in Jemes and in Taos where the Chicanos hid in bushes and drank beer while watching the naked women frolic. I left drinking whiskey alone in the woods and swearing at shadows and peeing under trees and in wooden outhouses under the stars in the cold dry winter. I left summer lightning storms that scratched and crackled across the night sky like giant claws. I left mountain coffee brewed with salt and egg shells. I left visions of strange animals gleaming in the moonlight. And I never did say goodbye to the Hog Farm, a commune started by Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, which was one town over from Ojo Sarco. But no great loss. I showed up in New York. That’s where I saw Billy Brooks again. Sometimes I wish I hadn’t, but I did.

I suppose we were boring since we had a similar set of manners that were sort of old-fashioned. In conversation one person spoke and the other one listened and then the other way around. You could never count on anything this mundane with the other Ridiculous cast members. They hijacked a dialogue and flew it over the edge. Claude and I played it safe because that was what we had been taught to do.

It was better that way since people who distinguished themselves as fabulous were likely to come under the lash of John Vacarro, the director over at The Playhouse of the R. He ran rehearsals at his loft on Great Jones Street like the regime of an absolute dictator, and he had an uncomfortable way of breaking down the people from whom he expected great things . He sneered and cajoled and told them straight out that they “stunk”. Not so for Claude and I, who were tractable on top but unreachable underneath.

Beyond manners, though, there was some truth to what they said about Claude and me. Claude did tend to be pedantic about his own projects, the movies he intended to make, his undying hatred for a particular customer at the record store where he worked. As for me I had few interests beyond the contours of my own face which, under the influence of LSD, I could gaze at for hours: the way it resolved itself to hairline cracks then broke into canyons that melted puddling and realigning over and over again.

I suppose it was inevitable that Claude and I would become friends. Claude was gay and I liked the company of men. I just didn’t want sex from them. Claude felt the same way about women. He was also black, by race if not by color. Claude was the color of coffee when half the cup is full of cream. He had close-cropped shiny and abundant black hair, a high forehead, and the hooded black eyes of a madman. His facial bones were fine with prominent cheekbones, his mouth dramatically sculpted. He was tall and slender and could dance.

I tried playing shrink with Claude — only once. We were sitting in his apartment, which was in the far reaches of the West Village fronting the river. You could see the cargo trucks lined up across the street like box cars in a train depot. Beyond that, the docks and the turbid brown river. This was a convenient location for Claude since at the time it was a choice gay cruising area.

Claude was telling me about supplementing his income with blow jobs he gave on 42nd Street for $10 a throw. This was back in 1968 so $10 meant more then than it does now. “But Claude,” I said trying to resolve the University of Chicago graduate in front of me with the street hussy in the story, ” do you like giving blow jobs on 42nd St.?” He thought it over for a while and said, yes, he did quite like giving blow jobs for ten bucks.

Then, since he had a taste for the occult, Claude said he wanted to do a ceremony to cause serious mishap in the life of the record store customer he hated. He lit candles and invoked the prince of darkness and he tossed foul smelling incense salts into the flame. Pfft, pop. ” May he break his leg and have a heart attack,” he chanted gleefully, with me, shamefaced, mouthing the words along with him.

Claude didn’t have to worry about record stores and customers much longer.

My former husband had agreed to pay for the services of a psychiatrist in return for a letter saying I was far too fragile to be left without his support. I didn’t have his support in the first place, but I agreed to help him sleaze out of the war in Viet Nam.

This turn of events brought me to the tony office of a Southern gentleman named Jesse something-or-other, psychiatrist. The office was in a spotless old building on the low end of 5th Avenue, I think, and it had an awning, a doorman, and shiny brass accouterments.

Dr. Jesse was young and cute and flaxen-haired. But he had an odd habit of eating from a loaf of Pepperidge Farm white bread that he kept on an antique table next to his comfy stuffed leather chair. This gave me the feeling that, in the eyes of the doctor, I was some kind of cartoon show.

Thing was, Dr. Jesse liked stories, any story would do, it didn’t even have to be true. I told stories and he ate bread and all and all we were happy with the arrangement. He said the letter for my husband was no problem but shouldn’t I be thinking about a more dependable source of income. How about the dole?

I kept Claude posted on this relationship, and he thought it was really funny. He even gave me a few ideas about the kinds of stories to share with Dr. Jesse. When he found out about the dole, Claude said he thought he would like to have a psychiatrist too. This was even better than before since having the same psychiatrist gave Claude and me plenty to talk about–not to mention relief from the burden of rent.

Claude did finally wangle himself a full scholarship at NYU Film School and he did make his movie. He also gave me the best piece of prose I ever saw , his version of “Gimme Shelter” a la Jack Kerouac’s spontaneous writing.

I lost it after I left New York.

They forgot to talk to me.

Not that I hunked any lungers, but I did lob some slime after listening to a story about a small Vietnamese child who, by appearing out of some underbrush, uncorking a grenade, and running toward some soldiers, turned himself into “the enemy.” It was a survival tale, an us-or-them, told by a returning vet named Craig. “Too bad he didn’t kill you,” I said.

This was 1970 in Cambridge, where I had returned to from New York after a long absence. The friends I was visiting, also friends of Craig, couldn’t believe what I’d said. They were mute. They laughed helplessly–without actual sound–sides pumping in and out, they way you laugh when it hurts to do it.

I never got a chance to apologize to Craig. At the time I didn’t think I should or that there was anything wrong with my attitude. It seemed natural wanting people who didn’t agree with me to drop dead–or to have been dropped dead without the moral turmoil of my actual participation. Anyway I was just repeating the general tenor of what had been said to me by one or two white radicals.

The NLF and the Viet Cong, on the other hand, went to great lengths to make a distinction between the U.S. government, its policies, and its people. They expressed “solidarity” with the US people; they assured us that they did not see us as the enemy. Some view this as cynical manipulation. I don’t. It seemed to me then–and it still does– that a protracted engagement such as the one fought in Vietnam –required a positive vision of the future–a weird leap of faith — a gamble on the creative up-side of solidarity rather than the dehumanized down-side of cash nexus–a power greater than hate– to sustain it.

This was the first time I had heard of supporting a people, but not the homicidal choices of its government. And I admit I find it easier to accept the benefit of the doubt than to grant it. Our boys in Iraq, for example. If they identify with our government’s will to rule the world and are so bamboozled by slogans like “keeping the world safe for democracy” or “war of liberation”– how could they ever know it? They and the bamboozling are one in the same package . So supporting them is like supporting zombies. But if it is just a matter of ignorance and our boys don’t know their “war of liberation” is a false cause or that there is anything wrong with killing people because you don’t like their political leaders, I should feel bad about their lives being wasted as cannon fodder, objects, things, cogs in a bully-machine. But I do and I don’t feel bad. And they don’t seem to feel too bad about it themselves.

A few months ago I met a student-soldier. A handsome kid and a member of the Reserves, he was at a peace meeting, and he told me and a group of other middle-aged ladies that he’d die for us. He was about twenty-two and he was only at the meeting, he said, because he was not convinced that there actually were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. He hadn’t seen compelling evidence. Then he dropped the I’d-die-for-you thing and all conversation slid off the table. He didn’t say, “I love you to the death”. But it felt the same for some bizarre reason, just as romantic and vulnerable and doomed and full of passion. Part of me wanted to leap up and dissolve in his sudden patriotic ardor.

So last Tuesday, at lunch time, when I was at a peace demonstration outside the Post Office in Salem, a town north of Boston, and holding a “No War” sign, I mentioned the die-for-you kid to another middle-aged lady who was also holding a sign, and who had also been at the meeting. She said that she had had the same reaction, robbed of her power of speech somehow–but that she would like to have told him she didn’t want anyone to die for her–him or Iraqi children or anyone. She wanted them all to live. I agreed with her.

There weren’t too many of us there: a few academics of a certain age; a handful of middle aged ladies, one of whom had gone to El Salvador to monitor elections on behalf of the UN many years ago; a bespectacled whipper-snapper or two of the male persuasion; a slender black lab with a glossy coat and a strap around his snout; a WWII veteran who was not a pacifist but found this war repellent. “It’s an unjust war,” he said. But he feared the jingoists of his own town so stood with us.

The American flag flapped above us on a thick white pole and, behind this, a long, red- brick post office of three or four stories. On the plaza around were a few bedraggled leafless trees. Several lanes of traffic whirred in front, and the sky was soggy New-England gray.

Dozens of people honked in support as they drove by–one of the signs told them to. And, predictably, a lot of over-testosteroned pick-up trucks slowed down so their owners could flip the bird or yell an imprecation; nothing too severe –things like, ” Our boys are dying so you can stand there,” and “Go to Iraq,” or “Commie,” or “Fuck you.” The best one was, “You shit heads; you smell bad; go help Saddam.”

Mostly the insults were funny, but after awhile the yelling started to get on my nerves. Plus it seemed that the muscle queens driving the trucks were really frantic trying to think of something bad enough to say–usually after they pulled a little American flag off the dash and waved it menacingly in our general direction. I sensed weakness. The lab who, by this time had her muzzle off, was similarly unimpressed.

A pick up truck buzzed by, ” You… you… hippies,” screeched a dark-haired guy with prodigious bicep.” Get a job.”

“Oh yeah. Hippie!” I howled back like Mike Meyers in Goldmember.

“Go to Iraq,” yelled another one.

“Oh yeah –okay.”

I was starting to dislike these people, but I also liked disliking them. Peace and hate; it was better than Prozac. “Fuck you,” croaked another thumb-head in yet another four by four. I had already told the guy on my left–a socialist with gold-rimmed glasses–about my closet desire to do away with people who don’t agree with me, and how at these times I remind myself of George Bush. It was growing by the second and with it the thrilling sense that I knew who I was.

“Bang,” I whispered to the socialist. I dropped my peace sign to one side and squeezed together my index and middle finger to mime a gun pointed at the heckler. “Bang bang.” And the next one too. “Bang, you’re dead.”

In the summer of 1968 I had an apartment on East 6th Street between 1st and 2nd Avenues. The rent was cheap, and it was on the top floor of a tenement which meant there was a sooty patch of skylight in my bathroom and a tub with feet where I could sit and contemplate the black starless sky.

Decorating was minimal. I painted the floor and radiator and all visible pipes a flat plum; the walls were white; and my mattress lay on crude pallets from large wooden packing crates. There were a few gaudy flourishes–a large antique mirror with ornate gilt frame–a black and white poster of Mick Jagger kissing a microphone.

My needs were few since I did not eat or sleep, which is to say I was typical of most people in New York at that time. A sort of corrupt Taoist, I lived on air and the weird buzzing that seemed to fuel the city. I shoplifted clothes from Saks and Bloomingdales and Bonwit Teller. People gave me drugs. In this regard I had benefactors who, like me, wanted to be dangerous. Two lived in my building: a drug dealer from Texas and an acting student at NYU who was also a member of a motorcycle gang called the Dustbusters (not to be confused with the rival gang on 5th Street, the Dirtdevils.)

These two gangs did things like tie each other up in abandoned buildings and set each other on fire. When not engaged in homicidal acts, the Dustbusters lined their many Harleys in front of the tenement on 6th Street, and the gang–a pack of hirsute sociopaths hung with oily chains, leather vests, and inscribed with tattoos–clanked and banged and tinkered.

At dawn, the hostile spit and manly vroom of ten engines would have woken me up if I had ever slept. It is a safe bet that the Busters didn’t sleep any more than I did. And while they were busy torturing rivals, I tie-dyed my plundered satin shirts from midnight to 4 AM. Joined by invisible threads of amphetamine, we ground our teeth and chewed our respective cuds into the early morning, courtesy of John the acting student and the white pile of crystal meth he doled out so generously.

John didn’t expect sex as payment for his drugs. He was anomalously genteel, and he got his thrills from having each foot in a different world. He was handsome too–pale, blond, hollow-cheeked with fish-belly blue eyes. His greatest fear was turning into a goody-goody. I knew this by instinct. I also knew he was a romantic. And in the same way the Dustbusters fascinated him, so did I. But he didn’t really want the Dustbusters or me. He wanted the spark we set off in his imagination. Under these circumstances sex was irrelevant.

The drug dealer down the hall was a slightly different story. He expected something in return for his tokens. But that was his bad judgment. He specialized in psychedelics, LSD, mescaline– at least that was what he gave away freely. He was short, not much taller than me, and he wore a leather hat with a wide brim, straw-like hair wisping down to his shoulders. He would have been good looking if he were taller or broader or healthy. But there was something of the underfed sharecropper about him. Where he shone was in his own environment, which was a large dun-colored apartment without furniture and black metal gratings on the windows. Here he was the big man or at least the center of attention in a place jammed with people making furtive entrances and exiting with the guilty expression of smiling dogs.

The Texan licked his fingers in between counting leaves of cash, and then he rolled his currency into a thick wad–sometimes he did this many times in a row. And one time, maybe after the fifth counting, someone howled,” Look out they’re coming in the window.” And they were. They looked Puerto Rican in that they were not black or white but a dark coppery color. They had managed to wrench the corner of a grating off and they were making headway on the next and rattling the windows with implements. They were waving some kind of weapons–knives or guns or something. I don’t know because it was dark out there. The drug dealer from Texas did what you would have expected (being from the Lonestar State where the men are men, and the sheep take cover.) He told me I had to help him.

I said okay, and we ran down the hall and bolted ourselves in my apartment with the police lock. I also had a metal door you would have needed a hand grenade to bust through, and my windows fronted 6th Street except for the skylight that for some reason the thieves didn’t bother to find. After that the Texan backed off with amorous expectations. But the motorcycle gang did not go away. And one morning after a zippy night of drawing increasingly intricate little pictures with a fine-liner and tie dying and retie-dying my clothes to hideous shades of green and brown, I experienced what is known to speed freaks as crashing.

In fact, I crashed all the time, but I didn’t know what it was, so I hadn’t isolated it as particular to the act of taking amphetamine. I thought it was part of life. Crashing is a lot like it sounds: a sudden and utter pitch from happy puttering around to the gloomiest edge of rage. Only the rage doesn’t ignite. It sits sodden and immobile and huge. I looked at my fingernails dyed purple with red around the sides. The stove was sloshed with horrible colors. The heap of clothes was as if stained by dung and bile. My drawings were stupid and the fucking motorcycles– vroom vroom vroom–were blasting holes in my teeth. I strode to the window, hoisted it up, shrieking, Shut up you fucking morons.

Well, that didn’t really happen because before shrieking, I looked down and thought, ” They tie people up and burn them.” So instead I suffered into the overly hot afternoon, each noise like a stone bouncing off my tin pate. Shut up. Shut up. Shut up.

While I was separated from my husband I became friendly with an anarchist street gang called the Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers whose leader, Ben, looked like Che Guevara and, unbeknown to me at first, recruited female cadre by sleeping with them. Ben was ardent, persuasive, good in bed. One night the group came knocking at my door on East 6th Street when Ben was there, and about thirty motherfuckers took over my tiny place.

In the bathroom “Mama” Carol Motherfucker–a large woman with a broad forehead, gypsy skirts, and a zillion African bangle bracelets– pointed at the bathtub when I tried to get her to vacate her perch on the toilet where she was sitting deep in conversation with her boyfriend, Charlie, who was half her size and resembled Jim Morrison after a lifelong diet of fluffernutters.

I needed to urinate. I said this. Carol Motherfucker pointed at the tub again. I said, “No, you get out.” Then Ben’s regular girlfriend, the kind but pie-faced Joanie, made her claims. On my bed Ben and Joanie snuggled like an old married couple motioning affectionately for me to come join them. I stood mute. Romantic love crumbled. I said, “No”: no to Ben and Joanie; no to Ben’s clunky vision of tribe cheerfully crunching down fences–fences between me and you, mine and yours; no to my small piece of turf as communal spoils. No, no, no. It was a very long night.

Even before this, groups gave me the creeps. I was a weasel and couldn’t stand up to them. Personal power, charisma, cliques, and in-groups paralyzed me. I feared the pack–any pack–could always feel it snatching, asserting its loathsome power. My husband felt something similar. A year on a hippie commune had convinced him to become an astronaut. Far away was not far enough. I couldn’t wait to see him.

Always a man of action, Lee had a plan, which he described in a phone conversation. It turned out that after separating from me, he’d been given a Piper Cub by his mother– a cute toy-like plane with a single engine and bright yellow fiberglass skin. This was phase one of astronaut plan: learn to fly it. He had done that and was now supporting himself giving flying lessons. Next he wanted to rack up hours to qualify for a commercial license: phase two–fly back East, solo. After that he intended to amass accomplishments so stunning that NASA would gasp in wonder and awe. So much, so fast, so brilliant! Blinded by his talent, they would forget to notice that Lee had avoided the military even when he was out of school. Lee was a latter day Admiral Byrd, a superhero, and at least he was someone whose selfish ambitions were of a familiar type to me.

Lee’s house was in Placitas, a town tucked in the foothills outside Albuquerque, on a dusty road shaded by a few gnarled cottonwoods. The house was made of reddish clay, which rose from ground the same color. He had two housemates: Rick and Ceil. Ceil was baking whole-wheat bread when I got there. She had long thin hair with blond streaks and malamute eyes. She wore a floor-length shift and bare feet, and she stood sneering in front of the Mexican-tiled sink, bread fumes and cinnamon smells wafting, ready to battle for her seat of power as woman of the house. She should have wielded a rolling pin, but she didn’t.

I hated her without being able to admit to myself I did. I hated her boyfriend, Rick, even more. He reminded me of the inquisitor in “Crime and Punishment.” While feminine ill will ricocheted off the walls of his kitchen, Lee hung back by the stove alternately smiling helplessly and shooting me suspicious side glances. He was a nice guy, Lee. But like most men of his time he didn’t know or didn’t care to know about the turf war unfolding under his nose, how access to and influence over him defined the strength of Ceil and me in his house.

Ours was a meeting from hell. I tried to talk to the housemates and they objected. “You talk so fast,” said Ceil. Rick was a sword swallower and fire eater. But when I attempted to flatter him with abundant interest in his art and trade, he pursed his lips as if biting into a raw lemon. They ate wheat, were mellow and moving back to nature, cleansing themselves of bad things; bad food, bad air, bad thoughts. They wove cloth grew vegetables made their own food and clothing. They must have had an inchoate vision they strove for, some ideal, something beyond words, something wide, holistic. Yet I never saw evidence to support this; more I suspected they were just assholes. Or, like me, they were slinking away from raw choices served up in our greater world…To be or not to be…Part of the problem or part of the solution…Then again, perhaps our failure to communicate was based on something simple–some basic economics; that they were protecting their meal ticket, Lee. And for this reason I was a threat.

I was no real threat though. I shrank from Ceil’s war of the stove and sink. I didn’t have a problem with grain. Whole wheat bread tasted better than balloon bread. True, I was on speed half the time content to glom candy bars and chain-smoke unfiltered Gauloises, which smelled like burning shit, sometimes lighting up one before I had finished the last. True I yapped franticly, but I lived in New York. Everyone talked fast there. Anyway, it was 1969.

The war in Vietnam was raging, the country was splitting apart with racial hatred, the cities were on fire. There were worse things to be than an eater of Snickers or a smoker of rank cigarettes. But not in the eyes of Ceil and Rick. Lee was caught in the middle.

In a play for power, that night I convinced Lee I wanted to try again. So on the roof under a curved black sky, infinities of stars spilling over, as loose niblets of adobe brick dug into my back, we had our last lurching fuck. Just like the old days. A spazzed-out Bull Run. I kept telling myself I liked Lee and to be spontaneous. When this failed I resorted to will power. But his sexual enthusiasm put me off. There was something impersonal about it, onanistic. I could have had a bag over my head, and his thing was a bumptious bald knob, bobbling here, butting there. It would never be different. In a swift ceremony soon after we divorced, amicably. Lee squeezed a discreet tear out his eyehole, and I felt nothing except the suspicion the whole thing had been planned in advance.

Lee flew me from Placitas to New Jersey, and then he drove me to Manhattan. Back in New York I looked for Ben, but he had left for New Mexico. Turns out he had had a vision when reading “Black Elk Speaks”. In his vision it struck Ben that he was the white guy from the East appearing in Black Elk’s prophecy, the guy who was supposed to descend from the clouds and save the Indians.

I read “Black Elk Speaks.”

There is no white-guy-savior from the East.