Orphans Of The Storm

By Morgan M. Morgan, Eric Leif Davin, Anita D. Alverio and Lobo

A shared memoir of street people in the Seventies, the People's Party, and draft resistance during the Vietnam War.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Feb 16, 2021
• ISBN: 9781716263620

Book preview

prison.

Midnight in Harvard Square

Fall, 1969

Eric: It was midnight in Harvard Square when the drunk staggered into The Tasty. He was early. Usually they didn’t stagger in until after 1 a.m. when the bars closed. I had the last shift, from 9 p.m. until 3 a.m., at which time I cleaned up and closed up. I’d been at the diner for a few months and had gotten used to the late night parade of drunks who claimed the stools in the wee hours after the bars kicked them out. It was a nightly ritual. Usually they were no problem. I gave them their coffee and they slurped it down while I began my clean up. Then they would stagger out into the night and I closed up. But, that was after the bars closed. This one was early, and I hoped he wouldn’t make any trouble for me as the night dragged on. I still had three hours on my shift.

The drunk plopped down on one of the two stools along the short leg of the L-shaped counter near the big window looking out on the Square. He slumped like a sack of soiled laundry and tried to focus his eyes on me. Gimme a cuppa coffee, he demanded.

I poured him a cup from the urn, pure black with no cream or sugar, and set it down in front of him. I was glad he didn’t want any food. Here ya go, pal, I said, drink up. No charge. Perhaps it would help sober him up. I stepped back and watched him.

He stared at the cup, as if seeing coffee for the first time. He picked it up with a trembling hand and tried to slurp the sloshing liquid. He got it to his lips, then he yowled with pain. He sprayed his mouthful in my direction. Damn! Thas’ hot! Ya tryin’ to kill me, ya bastid?

Then he dropped the cup. It shattered on the yellow linoleum counter, splashing coffee everywhere. Then he fell off his stool and dropped to the dirty tiled floor. I stepped up to the counter and peered over at him. He was splayed out as if making a snow angel on the filthy tile. He was already snoring. Some of the coffee was slowly dripping from the edge of the counter down onto him. That’s just great, I thought. Now I’ve got a drunk sleeping on my floor. I hope Ed, the night beat cop, happens to walk by.

The Tasty was a tiny hole-in-the-wall greasy spoon right on Cambridge’s Harvard Square where Boylston Street, now JFK Street, met Mass Ave. Once upon a time the house of Anne Bradstreet, America’s first published poet, stood on the site. But that was back in Colonial times, and there was nothing poetic about The Tasty. It opened for business in 1916, in the middle of the Great War, and hadn’t changed much since then. It was one small room, seven feet wide and thirty feet long, just big enough for fourteen stools, seven at a shelf against a wall and seven counter stools at the L-shaped counter. Behind the counter was the grill. At the end of the counter was a counter leaf you could raise to enter or exit. Beyond that an alcove served as our minuscule office. Behind the counter was a trapdoor that led down to the basement, where we stored supplies. There were also rats in the basement.

Right across the Square was Nini’s Corner, a small newsstand with most of its ware displayed on the sidewalk. Next to it was the Harvard Coop, a large department and bookstore. It had a great alcove entrance with wonderful acoustics, so street musicians often stood there and played for the passing pedestrians. In the middle of the Square was a traffic island featuring the Out-Of-Town News, offering newspapers and magazines from everywhere. The metal kiosk housing the Out-Of-Town News looked like something from the 1920s or 1930s, but it dated from only 1955. The island was also the entrance to the Harvard Square stop on the subway, the end of the line if you’re coming from Boston. During the day the island was crowded, as was the Square itself. But, it was midnight, it was snowing, and there was no one awake in Harvard Square but me and, now, not even the drunk.

I’d stumbled into the night shift job at The Tasty not long after arriving in Cambridge from Phoenix. I had very little money and the food was cheap, so I became a regular. Sometimes this was during the day; mostly it was late at night, on my way home after rehearsals at Harvard’s Loeb Theater on Brattle Street. The counter man on the night shift was a tall townie named Alan who spoke with a thick Boston accent. He smiled a lot and liked to talk while throwing together a Western omelet on the grill, mixing in jokes and chatter with the eggs, chopped onions, and chopped ham. He said I had a Western accent and asked where I was from. Arizona, I told him.

You’re a long way from home. What brings you to Cambridge?

Because I could tell he was a townie, and didn’t want to put him off, I didn’t want to tell him that it was Harvard that brought me to Cambridge. So I said, I came for the adventure.

Alan snorted. What adventure? There’s no adventure here. It’s just the same old same old.

I was misinformed.

He laughed. It didn’t take much to make him laugh. We got along great, and he became one of my first friends in the strange new town. He learned that I was almost dead broke, and so didn’t charge me for dogs or burgers if we were alone in the place. Then he got a better job. However, before he left, he introduced me to his boss, George Avis, the Greek who owned the place. This is the guy I want to take over my job, Alan told him.

You ever cook in a diner? Avis asked.

Yeah, I’ve done it, I lied. Avis looked dubious.

I can teach him everything he needs to know, Alan said.

Avis nodded at that. Alan was leaving soon, and somebody had to replace him. Avis didn’t have anyone else. Yeah, OK. Start training him tonight.

And so at nine that night I showed up wearing a long-sleeved white cotton shirt, like Alan’s. I tied a white apron around my waist and stepped behind the counter as Alan’s assistant cook. Making the diner’s food wasn’t hard to learn. There were donuts and slices of pie on small plates in the freestanding pedestals covered with clear plastic lids on the counter. Sodas and coffee were self-evident. There was a toaster for the toast. The menu, written on a big sign above the grill, was limited: Burgers, hot dogs, sausage or bacon and eggs, omelets. Most customers wanted a dog or a burger, and Alan sometimes served hundreds of them on the night shift. But, omelets were also popular.

I’d never made omelets before, but they were easy: Crack the two eggs on the grill, mix in the already chopped onions and ham, the chopped green peppers, pepper lightly, cook until ready, scoop it up with the spatula. By then the toast had popped up. Slather on some butter, grab a couple of small tubs of jelly, put it all down in front of the customer. It wasn’t gourmet cooking.

What I hated, though, was cleaning up. The grill was worst of all. Once it cooled down after turning it off, you had to scrape off the accumulated grease and charred food remnants until the surface was smooth and shiny, all ready for the morning crew. Three days of training and Alan was out of there. I was on my own.

Before he left he gave me his best advice on dealing with the drunks. Never step out from behind the counter. So long as you’re behind the counter, and you speak with the voice of authority, you’ll be OK. You step out from behind the counter to deal with one of them, and you’ll have a fight on your hands. You’re not being paid to fight. That’s what the cops are for.

And so I became friends with the cops who walked the Square, especially Ed, the main guy on the night beat. They dropped into The Tasty all the time for a donut, a burger, a cup of coffee, whatever they wanted. They got it free. We never charged them. They paid for it with their presence in the diner; they paid for it by being in the vicinity. They paid for it late at night by taking care of the drunks when they collapsed on the filthy tiled floor.

The door opened and a blast of cold air and snow blew into the diner. I glanced up from the guy on the floor, hoping it was Ed coming to claim the drunk.

It was another drunk. He didn’t see his fellow inebriant on the floor as he stumbled in, and so tripped over the snoring body. Down he went beside his buddy. What the fuck? he cursed as he flopped around on the floor. You tryin’ to kill me, or somethin’?

I peered over the counter at him still on the floor, struggling to get up. You think it’s funny, you sumbitch? he yelled, looking up at me. I’ll show you what’s funny! He pulled something from his pocket as he leveraged himself up off the floor with the help of one of the stools. He rose and stood swaying back and forth unsteadily on the other side of the counter. He had a big-ass Bowie knife in his hand. As he waved the big blade from side to side I wondered, where the hell did he get something like that? You think it’s funny? he repeated. I’ll show you what’s funny! Then he began jabbing the knife toward me, stabbing the air and grunting with each thrust.

I stepped back away from the counter, and remembered what Alan had told me. Always stay behind the counter. Never step out from behind the counter. Always keep it between you and the drunk. I raised both hands, palms outward, in what I hoped was a calming gesture. Hey, buddy, take it easy. Nobody’s laughing at you.

Where was Ed, I wondered? Dammit, there’s never a cop around when you need one. That was when Ed burst through the door, gun drawn. Drop the knife! he yelled at the drunk. Drop it now!

The drunk turned groggily toward Ed. For an instant they were a motionless tableau before me, the cop with the gun pointed at the unsteady drunk with the knife. I just knew the drunk was going to lunge toward Ed and be blown away right there before me in The Tasty. Then, miraculously, some shadow of rational thought flickered through the drunk’s brain and he dropped the knife.

Down on your knees, now! Ed yelled, gun still pointed with both hands at the drunk. The drunk sagged to his knees. Then he toppled face forward to the tiled floor, unconscious. Ed cautiously approached him, gun pointing at the motionless figure sprawled on the floor. With one hand he pulled his handcuffs from their holster at his belt and snapped one of the cuffs on one of the drunk’s wrists. Then he pulled up the drunk’s other wrist and snapped the cuff on it. Then he straightened up and lowered his gun. I put down my hands, which I’d kept raised during the whole confrontation.

Was he trying to rob you? Ed asked.

No, he was just a belligerent drunk. He didn’t know what he was doing.

Ed glanced at the other drunk, still snoring on the floor. Was that one with him?

No, they came in separately. The one with the knife was angry because he stumbled over the other one.

Well, I’ll take’em both in. Ed pulled out his walkie-talkie and called for backup. Then he eyed me closely. You OK?

Oh, yeah. It’s just another great night at The Tasty.

Well, this was quite a night for you.

Yeah. And you know what, Ed? This is my last night at The Tasty. I told Alan I came to Cambridge looking for adventure, but The Tasty has too much adventure for my taste.

Ed laughed. Too bad. I’m gonna miss ya, kid.

A Night At the Opera

Eric: It was the war in Vietnam, and it was theater, that took me from Phoenix and Arizona State University, where I’d been a student, to Cambridge and Harvard. They were connected, as I thought theater could help end the war. I knew my history and I knew that theater was powerful. It could start a revolution. It could even create a nation.

After the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815, the victorious powers restored the Bourbon monarchy in France that the Revolution had overthrown. However, as the French diplomat Talleyrand remarked of the Bourbons, They had learned nothing and had forgotten nothing. They reimposed absolutist monarchical rule upon a people that had already executed a Bourbon king, and this brought about their overthrow in the July Revolution of 1830.

This second French Revolution inspired similar discontent with the status quo in the Catholic south of the adjacent Protestant-ruled United Kingdom of the Netherlands. In Brussels on the night of August 25th, 1830, the company of the Theatre Royal de la Monnaie presented Daniel Auber’s opera, La Muette de Portici, The Mute Girl of Portici. This was a powerful patriotic opera set during the nationalist revolt against the Spanish masters of Naples in the Seventeenth Century. The increasingly agitated audience became excited by the duet, Amour Sacre de la Patrie, Sacred Love of the Fatherland, and immediately afterward stormed out into the streets shouting patriotic slogans. They occupied government buildings and called upon the people of Brussels to join them in revolt against their Protestant Dutch masters.

The people did so, resulting in bloody street fighting in Brussels throughout the month of September. However, Catholic army detachments from the south refused to fight against their co-religionists in the city, and deserted to the rebels. The Dutch army then abandoned Brussels and began shelling it. This, in turn, angered the surrounding countryside, which rose in rebellion. The fighting spread throughout the region and on September 26th the rebellious people of Brussels formed a separatist provisional government. On October 4th this provisional government declared its independence from the Netherlands as the new nation of Belgium.

Fighting between the nascent nation of Belgium and Dutch troops stalemated and the Dutch king appealed to surrounding nations for military assistance in suppressing the rebellion. However, fearful of reigniting a new round of larger wars so soon after the end of the Napoleonic wars, no one would come to his aid. Indeed, on December 20th, five great European powers – Britain, France, Russia, Prussia, and Austria-Hungary – met in London and officially recognized the independence of Belgium. The Dutch king then accepted the fait accompli and also recognized the independence of the new Belgian nation. The new nationalist government in Brussels established a constitutional monarchy and offered the crown to Prince Leopold of the German principality of Saxe-Coburg. He accepted, and took the oath of office on July 21, 1831, marking the official end of the revolution and the creation of the nation of Belgium.

Granted, not every opera or play could be expected to inspire revolutionary changes. But the fact that the Belgian revolution was set in motion by an opera demonstrates the power of theater to affect the hearts and minds of an audience. At least that’s what I believed, and I wasn’t alone in believing that.

For instance, Bohemian cultural radicals and striking workers turned to theater to publicize their mutual struggle during the great silk strike in Paterson, New Jersey in 1913. Greenwich Villagers, led by John Reed, joined with the Paterson strikers and leaders of the Industrial Workers of the World, like Big Bill Haywood, to reproduce the salient episodes of the strike in the heart of New York City. In June of 1913 over 7,000 strikers reenacted the story of the strike on the stage of Madison Square Garden to an audience of thousands more in one of the most inspiring moments in American theatrical history.

Then, in the Great Depression of the 1930s, there was an efflorescence of populist plays speaking not only to the people, but attempting to speak for the people. The Federal Theater Project, for example, produced living newspaper plays dramatizing the most important social conflicts of the day. These plays were presented in neighborhood venues and union halls.

In 1935 the Group Theater in New York -- then, as now, America’s theatrical capitol -- launched playwright Clifford Odets, the foremost politically conscious playwright of the age. Odets had helped found the Group Theater in 1931. The idea of the Group was not only to produce socially conscious plays, but also create an acting troupe, a group, that would work together over the long term to transform the concept of what theater could be.

It is no accident, then, that the Group Theater also brought Stanislavsky’s method acting from Moscow to America. Method acting meant that the actor didn’t just go through the motions of enacting an emotion on stage, the actor actually experienced the emotion -- loss, grief, anger, joy -- to deliver a more authentic performance. If the actor was to portray loss, for instance, the actor was encouraged to recall and re-experience on stage the loss of a loved one. Lee Strasberg, another co-founder of the Group Theater, later went on to found the long-lived Actor’s Studio in New York, the method acting training ground of so many famous actors, from Marlon Brando and James Dean onward to Paul Newman, Anne Bancroft, Dennis Hoffman, Al Pacino, and many more. In the 1950s, in an effort to become a more serious actress, Marilyn Monroe went to New York to study method acting with Strasberg at his Actor’s Studio.

Clifford Odets began as an actor, a mediocre one, at the Group Theater. Under the pressure to create new socially conscious plays, the Group searched for appropriate material, and found their greatest resource within their own ranks. In 1934 the Group Theater performed four plays by Odets. These remained his most important plays, which secured the finances of the Group Theater and the reputation of Odets as America’s foremost playwright. All four plays were quickly restaged the next year on Broadway to great acclaim.

The first of these plays, indeed, the first play he ever wrote, was Awake and Sing! which opened on Broadway on February 19th, 1935. Awake and Sing! focused on the hardships of a lower class family and concludes with a dramatic sacrifice by one character to provide a chance to escape from poverty and oppression for another. What arrested the attention of audiences in the plays of Odets, especially as performed by the method actors of the Group Theater, was a rare combination. On the one hand, Odets had a sympathetic insight into characters trapped in the struggle for life in miserable, impoverished conditions and, on the other hand, he had an unerring ability to create the voices and dialog, through which his characters asserted themselves. Audiences were moved by his rich everyday vernacular, an original voice on Broadway.

At the same time, this ability was used to display on a major public stage the Jewish immigrant and second-generation experience. These images had previously been confined to the small world of the Yiddish-speaking theater. Odets presented it on the English-speaking stage to English-speaking audiences for the first time. It was a revelation to Broadway audiences.

About a month after this, on March 26th, two more of his plays, Till the Day I Die and Waiting for Lefty (written in only three days) opened simultaneously on Broadway. Waiting for Lefty, written to support an actual New York taxi strike, soon won the New York Theater League playwriting contest and brought Odets to an even wider theater public. On December 9th, his play Paradise Lost opened on Broadway. In addition, he produced the powerful monologue, I Can’t Sleep, written for a union benefit, in which he traced an ex-radical’s insomnia back to his alienation from his working class roots.

By the end of 1935 critics were hailing Odets as a revolutionary oracle, the darling of the proletariat and the prophet of the Left. The New Yorker profiled him as, Revolution’s Number One Boy. Almost single-handedly, Odets had made radical theater a profitable enterprise in New York, and a major medium for political expression.

In 1938 Awake and Sing! was revived on Broadway as a modern classic. Meanwhile, Waiting for Lefty, his most transparent use of theater as a weapon in the class struggle, was being reproduced all over the world as, in Odets’ words, a kind of light machine gun that you wheeled in to use whenever there was any kind of strike trouble. Further, his anti-Nazi play, Till the Day I Die, dismissed by critics as unnecessarily alarmist in 1935, seemed by 1938 to be prophetic for its depiction of Master Race atrocities.

But Odets and the Group Theater were not alone in producing politically conscious theater in New York in the Thirties. There was also the Mercury Theater, led by Orson Welles. For example, the Mercury Theater produced a shocking and famous version of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar updated to the 1930s and taking place in Mussolini’s Fascist Italy. In it, Brutus and his fellow conspirators plotted to assassinate a black-shirted dictator and restore the Republic.

However, no doubt the most politically volatile play that Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater produced was performed on December 5th, 1937. This was The Cradle Will Rock, a musical theater production by composer and playwright Marc Blitzstein. The politically radical theater that Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill produced in Germany’s Weimar Republic in the 1920s deeply influenced Blitzstein. Indeed, it was Blitzstein’s translation of The Threepenny Opera by Brecht and Weill that later played to great success for so many years Off Broadway.

The Cradle Will Rock was a working class operetta taking place in Steeltown, USA, on the night of a union drive against Mr. Mister, the piggish capitalist enemy of the workers. Using recitatives, arias, and chorales, Blitzstein mixed pop music with traditional compositions, and mocked serious events with blues and torch songs, and parodies of serious forms. The play was originally going to be a Federal Theater presentation, produced by John Houseman and under the direction of Orson Welles. However, on the night of the scheduled performance, with the first-night audience already eagerly waiting outside the theater, the producers decided the play was too incendiary, and so cancelled it.

Undeterred, Orson Welles and John Houseman immediately hired the Venice Theater, 20 blocks away, loaded an old piano into the back of a truck, and led the angry audience to the new site, singing and chanting all the way. Poet and critic Archibald MacLeish, part of the audience, described the subsequent performance as, the most exciting evening of theater this generation has seen.

Marc Blitzstein became famous overnight, and the play was quickly restaged in other venues. One of these was at Harvard University, where in 1938 a young Leonard Bernstein oversaw a student production of the working class operetta. In 1999 actor Tim Robbins directed the movie, Cradle Will Rock, with an all-star cast portraying Orson Welles, John Houseman, and others, which used this extraordinary night in American theater as a springboard to present an exhilarating picture of 1930s art, culture, politics and big business.

And, just as the crisis of the Thirties produced a politically radical theater, so did the turmoil of the Sixties. There was a big difference, however, between the political theater of the Thirties and that of the Sixties. The performances at the Group and Mercury Theaters had been produced as actual professional plays, designed to conquer Broadway and reshape the whole of American theater. The political theater of the Sixties was what we called at the time, guerrilla theater. Instead of actual scripted plays, guerrilla theater produced revues or skits performed in non-theatrical settings, such as in fields, public squares, parks, or at political demonstrations. El Teatro Campesino (the Farm Workers’ Theater), for instance, was launched in 1965 as part of the lettuce boycott organized by Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers. It dramatized the conditions of the largely Mexican farm workers, and the reasons they were trying to unionize, and often performed out in the fields to small gatherings of such workers.

Another well-known political theater troupe of the time was the San Francisco Mime Troupe, which actually did much more than mime. It favored broad satire that lampooned the stupidities of the elites with stereotyped characters and easily followed stories. It also usually performed its plays in non-theater settings. Perhaps the best-known veteran of the Troupe is actor Peter Coyote, who has written an evocative memoir of his days with the group entitled, Sleeping Where I Fall.

And there was the Bread and Puppet Theater, which I saw in action at one Boston anti-war demonstration. This troupe specialized in gigantic 20-foot puppets grotesquely mocking the war-mad leaders of our country. At one New England anti-war rally, the Bread and Puppet Theater performed its usual mockery of the war as a prelude to a speech by Father Daniel Berrigan. That radical priest was then on the run from the FBI. He and eight other Catholic pacifists opposed to the Vietnam War, including his brother and fellow priest, Phillip, had destroyed Selective Service records at a draft board in Catonsville, Maryland. Known as The Catonsville Nine, they had been convicted and sentenced to serious prison terms.

However, instead of surrendering meekly to serve his sentence, Father Daniel Berrigan disappeared into the anti-war underground in order to continue agitating against the war. The FBI sought him here, there, everywhere. Nevertheless, he continued to pop up at anti-war rallies to the wild acclaim of the audience and the consternation of the Feds. They made the capture of this high-profile fugitive a priority and closely monitored anti-war rallies, ready to nab him should he appear.

And he did appear at one particular rally. He popped up, he spoke passionately against the war, and then he disappeared, despite the infiltration of the crowd by FBI agents eager to grab him. In this case, Father Berrigan disappeared by dancing out of the rally under the noses of the FBI agents by hiding as a performer inside one of the Bread and Puppet Theater’s giant hollow puppets.

I, too, was against the war. Indeed, I had fought a long and unsuccessful battle with my local draft board in Phoenix for Conscientious Objector status. My board had consistently rejected my C.O. application because I was neither religious, nor was I a pacifist. I just thought the Vietnam War was an immoral war of American aggression against a colonized people fighting to be free, and I refused to be drafted for it. Eventually, however, my board drafted me. By that time, the fall of 1969, I was in Cambridge and was acting on the main stage at Harvard’s Loeb Drama Center, today the home of the American Repertory Theater. I was one of the stars in a triptych of new one-act plays entitled Morning, Noon, and Night, by Israel Horowitz, Terrence McNally, and Leonard Melfi, young playwrights just launching their careers. But, while still acting in these plays, and telling no one of my situation, I also refused induction into the military at the South Boston Army Base.

But, Uncle Sam can do anything, and in December, 1969, he retroactively cancelled my induction orders, thus nullifying the crime of my induction refusal, and ordered my local draft board in Phoenix to reclassify me as a Conscientious Objector. No doubt the Selective Service System didn’t want to prosecute me in Boston, where I committed the crime, because there was already a legal track record there of acquitting draft resisters.

But, that’s another story. That’s a story of the Sixties, and a story of Phoenix. The present story takes place after my refusal to be inducted; it is a story of the Seventies, and a story of Cambridge. And it is a story, at least in the beginning, of the theater. Like others in the Sixties, I, too, was attracted to theater as a way of opposing the war. Some opposed to the war demonstrated in the streets, and I attended my share of street demonstrations. Some stood in silent vigils against the war, and I stood in my share of silent vigils against the war. Some burned their draft cards, and I, too, burned my draft card. And some, like me, were refusing to be drafted, although I knew no one else in Phoenix who did so.

But refusing to be drafted wasn’t doing enough to stop the war. I felt I had to do more, and that more eventually morphed into a theatrical protest against the war. It was a gradual morphing. In high school I had gotten good grades in my public speaking classes. These gave me experience in extemporaneous speeches, quickly improvised speeches in which you were given a few minutes to organize your thoughts before speaking, as well as formal scripted speeches. I’d never acted in a high school play, but I was at ease with speaking in public.

Then, at Phoenix College, I’d taken more public speaking courses and won some regional college oratory competitions, as well as participating on the school’s debate team. And I also became friends with one of the most astounding student actors at the school, and my girlfriend was an accomplished singer and guitarist. The three of us formed our own little troupe, the Universal Players, and launched our own anti-war guerrilla theater campaign.

The core of our theatrics was the contemporary anti-war poetry in an anthology edited by Walter Lowenfels entitled Where Is Vietnam? We were familiar with the theatrical presentation of poems from Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters. We reasoned that the same type of dramatization could be done with the poems in Lowenfels’ book. So, we worked up a play composed of selected poems, accompanied by songs and music from my girlfriend and, sometimes, an additional male guitarist. It was agit-prop, but artistic agit-prop.

We presented the resulting poem-play around Phoenix at local theater houses and at Arizona State University in Tempe. These performances continued after I graduated from Phoenix College and enrolled at Arizona State University, when we took the show on the road to colleges in southern California. Receiving enthusiastic receptions from large student audiences and rave reviews in all the college newspapers made us feel we were doing our small part to stop the war.

But, I had no formal training in the theater; all I knew was what came naturally and what I had picked up from my public speaking classes. If I was going to do something more with acting and the theater, I needed some training in the art form. Therefore, I applied to an intensive all-aspects theatrical program at Harvard University for the summer of 1969. I wasn’t a great student, so I had no great expectations, but I included in my application the rave reviews of our guerrilla theater production of antiwar poetry from the college newspapers.

And, to my great surprise, Harvard accepted me, complete with a full-tuition scholarship and free housing in a Radcliffe College dorm housing all the other students in the program. I was stunned, but I wasn’t going to turn down Harvard.

And so, in the summer of 1969, I left Phoenix and landed in Cambridge.

Skool’s Out

Summer, 1967-Spring, 1968

Eric: My brother Morgan, eight years younger than me, also ended up in Cambridge, and also ended up in Harvard Square. In large measure this was because I was there, and so it was some place to head for.

Morgan and I came from the same family, the same mother, the same father, although Dad, a carpenter and hard-hat construction worker named Elmer, was Morgan’s bio-dad and my step-dad. We could’ve ended up much the same way, but we did not. I’ve puzzled over that, but who ever really knows why family members end up differently? You can say personalities differ, or family environment differs simply because you came of age at different times. Certainly Morgan grew up in a different, less stable family environment than I did. Or you could say Lady Luck dealt us different cards.

There were seven of us brothers in the family. I was the oldest and there were two brothers, Rick and Bruce, between Morgan and me. When I was growing up there was constant conflict in the family; there was conflict between our parents and us children, and even more conflict between our parents. Over the years the parental marriage slowly shed the traditional rituals and accouterments of marriage until it became simply a co-habitation of two hostile and resentful combatants who eventually found other lodgings.

I escaped from the family chaos in 1966 while I was still a teenager attending Phoenix College. I ran like a fugitive from a chain gang, with the bloodhounds hot on his trail. I never looked back. Shortly thereafter our family fractured and our parents divorced. Morgan was still a kid, just 11-years-old. Mom soon remarried, to a young Mexican named Arturo, but everyone called him, Art. He was just eight years older than me, and 13 years younger than Mom. Perhaps it was inevitable there would be problems.

Brother Rick, now the oldest brother left at home, hated Art and soon moved out. At first he lived in the garage of a neighbor woman, then he lived with me for a short while, then on his own. Perhaps Rick hated Art, as he said, because Art was a Mexican, and his marriage to our mother brought Rick’s latent racism to the surface. Perhaps that was just a rationalization. Rick had a long and tortured Oedipal relationship with Mom, and probably he would have hated anyone who married her. After he moved out, he’d come around late at night to throw bricks through the window of Mom and Art’s bedroom, showering their bed just under the window with broken glass, and curse the Mexican who was in that bed sleeping with our mother.

Rick also incited Morgan and the younger brothers to defy Art’s authority, saying they didn’t have to obey him because, after all, he’s not your real father. And Morgan did defy Art’s authority, perhaps because Art was so young, perhaps just because he was a stepfather.

And then there was the incessant conflict between Art and Mom from almost the moment they married. It was constant chaos, daily drama. They’re both now dead, so only God alone knows why they married. It didn’t help that their backgrounds were so different. Mom was a deeply religious Southern Baptist from Tennessee. Art was a Mexican Catholic. How could there not have been conflict? Mom converted to Catholicism in order to marry Art, but it was just a superficial conversion, it never took. Nothing could eradicate the Southern Baptism in which she had been baptized and raised.

In addition, there was conflict between Art’s macho Mexican heritage and the fact that Mom felt newly empowered after she divorced Elmer. In one respect, at least, she became a different woman. Mom had been a doormat upon which Elmer wiped his feet every day during their marriage. She was determined that would not happen again. During her marriage to Art she asserted her independence, and the fact that Art was so much younger than her probably helped her do so.

In addition, there was never much support in our family for schooling. Elmer, for instance, was deeply suspicious of the fact that I read a lot and had my own small paperback library that I purchased from the spinner racks at the local grocery or convenience store. I paid for these paperbacks, which then cost only a quarter or 35-cents, from my meager newspaper route earnings.

In addition, Mom constantly interrupted the continuity of school attendance for my younger brothers after she married Art. After one of their fierce battles, she’d take off for a week or so, renting a motel room. And, since she viewed her children as extensions of herself, every time she left, she took all her children with her. Most of them didn’t mind, but Brother Dennis did. By then he was attending East Phoenix High School and he loved it. He eventually graduated from high school, the only one of us seven brothers beside myself to do so. He wasn’t a great student, but he was enmeshed in the school’s social activities, which was his way of escaping the family drama. So, it was torture for him to miss a week of school, going stir crazy in a crowded motel room with his brothers watching cartoons on TV, just because Mom and Art were fighting once again.

So, while I was growing up, there was at least a family, although it resembled a battlefield from which one sought shelter. For Morgan, because he was much younger, there wasn’t even a cohesive unit for him to belong to on that battlefield. It was just a chaotic jumble.

I guess it was inevitable that Morgan would get into trouble. I’d gotten into my own share of trouble when a teenager, and had only escaped retribution through fortune’s favor. Lady Luck wasn’t so kind to Morgan. For him, every day was another day in the maelstrom, leading ever deeper into the storm.

But, I’m going to let Morgan tell that story.

**********

Morgan: The summer of 1967 changed me. I guess it was a combination of things. I’d just graduated from 6th grade at Orangedale, the elementary school just across the street from our house, which we all attended, including my brother, Eric. Up to this point, I was a normal student. I enjoyed school and got good grades. But, things were happening. The summer of 1967 was the Summer of Love in San Francisco. That summer my older brothers Eric and Rick also hitchhiked together across the country from Phoenix to our Mom’s ancestral home in Chattanooga, while other people were going to ‘Frisco with flowers in their hair. People seemed to be doing more interesting things everywhere else than I was in doing Phoenix.

Our 51st Street neighborhood in Phoenix was also changing. A biker club moved into a house down the street and, when he returned from Chattanooga, Rick began riding a bike and hanging out with some of them. A Hopi Indian family still lived in back of us, but a young family with two little daughters moved in next to us. The parents played in a band called New Mown Hay, and I began to learn about blues music from them. Next door to them a bunch of hippies moved in. They also played music, partied all the time, and had young girls living with them, so I also often straggled over there to check it out.

And so I began wondering why I was stuck in school while others were out having fun and creating a new culture. As I watched the hippies party and have fun I thought about the long hot days I spent sitting in a stifling classroom listening to boring teachers tell me boring things that seemed to have no connection to what was happening around me. Nothing my teachers said seemed relevant to the changes taking place in America at that time, nor to the changes happening in our neighborhood.

I played drums in the school band, and now my only wish was to get a full drum set and play in a rock band. Gone was the rat-a-tat-tat backing of an out-of-tune school band. It was replaced by Wipe Out by the Safaris, which was soon to be replaced by the drum solo from In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, by Iron Butterfly.

Home life was also becoming crazier. Mom and Art were fighting more and more. Once that summer the family decided to vacation up north in the pine forest around Prescott. Some friends of the family had a cabin in the woods, which they loaned to us. We drove up there in two cars, Art in his Chevy station wagon, and Mom with all five of the brothers still at home crammed into her Nash Ambassador station wagon. Along with us were the dog and our two parrots dangling in their cage from a clothes hook above one of the back doors. We hadn’t been at the cabin for more than an hour when Mom and Art began fighting about something. It continued all night and, by morning, had escalated into a full-scale battle. Art gave up and left in his Chevy.

Mom wasn’t going to let him escape from the full fury of her wrath, so she piled all five brothers, the dog, and the parrots in their cage, into the station wagon and took off after him. However, Art had siphoned most of the gas out of her car, and so we ran out of gas a few miles down the road. Mom managed to get a few gallons from passersby and got into Prescott, where she filled up the station wagon. Then she floored it and drove in a rage, hell bent for leather, down Black Canyon Freeway toward Phoenix.

By then a monsoon rain was flooding the land. Mom didn’t let that slow her down and, on Shea Boulevard back in Phoenix, she splashed into a water-filled trough in the road and the swamped engine of thestation wagon stalled out. Mom finally got someone to tow thestation wagon out of the water an hour later.

By then it was night and Mom headed straight for the Phoenix suburb of Scottsdale and the Old Corral, Art’s favorite tavern. Mom parked thestation wagon in a dark alley down from the Old Corral. Then she told me to sneak down in the pouring monsoon rain to the tavern to see if Art’s Chevy station wagon was in the parking lot. It was there, and just as I arrived I saw Art himself stagger out of the tavern with his arm around a fat and laughing Indian woman.

I ran back to thestation wagon to tell Mom. She rammed thestation wagon into gear and sped toward the parking lot. Art, with the Indian woman next to him, was just pulling out of the parking lot as Mom drove up. He saw us coming and peeled out. Mom floored thestation wagon after him, right on his tail. He sped around the block, with Mom right behind him, skidding and sliding on the rain soaked streets and barely missing cars that scurried out of the way with blaring horns. Inside thestation wagon it was chaos. The dog was barking and jumping around in a frenzy, the parrots were squawking in their swinging cage, Mom clutched the steering wheel in a steel grip, an angry snarl her face, and we brothers cried and braced ourselves inside the swaying car.

Finally, Art stopped circling and headed out on Indian School Road toward the Indian reservation. On a straightaway the oldstation wagon couldn’t keep up with Art’s Chevy and we began falling behind. With her left hand Mom rolled down her window. Then she gestured with her right toward Bruce, who was riding shotgun. He knew what she wanted, and he reached into the glove compartment for the .22 pistol Mom kept in there. She transferred the gun to her left hand and stuck her hand out the window. I couldn’t believe she would actually shoot, with all the other cars on the road, but she began popping off rounds at Art’s Chevy. I saw the Indian woman beside Art duck down in her seat as Art’s Chevy skewed wildly. Suddenly the Chevy shot ahead of us even faster and disappeared toward the reservation.

Mom pulled over to the side of the road and stopped. The dog was still barking, the parrots were still squawking, and we were all crying, but Mom sat in grim silence, gripping the wheel and staring out the window into the wet night. Mom had emptied the .22 at Art’s Chevy and the smell of gunpowder filled the car. Gradually we kids stopped crying and everything grew quiet. Even the dog stopped barking and the parrots stopped squawking. Finally, Mom reached a decision and started the car. We drove home in silence, not daring to say a word to Mom. Once home we filed into the house, all still in silence, and Mom told us to push the living room furniture up against the front door to barricade it.

Mom herded us all into her bedroom, shut the door, and then we sat there, in darkness and in silence, waiting for Art to show up. Eventually, after long hours, he did. He parked out on the street in front of the house. I heard him slam his car door and begin stumbling in the dark toward the house. He was half way across the front yard when I heard a crash as Mom smashed out the bedroom window with the butt of her pistol, stuck out her gun, and began blasting away at Art. I saw him drop to the ground, frantically crawling back to his car, all the while calling out to Mom to stop shooting. Mom, however, kept firing wildly into the night in his direction until her pistol clicked on empty.

Eventually, the cops showed up. They escorted Art into the house, where he packed some of his clothes, and then left with the cops. A few days later, Art came back. By then Mom’s fury had dissolved and all was forgotten, at least for the time being. They couldn’t even remember what had initially sparked the episode, as it was just one more episode in a long series of such episodes.

So, I began the 7th grade in the fall of 1967 a changed person. I was no longer interested in school. Too much else was happening. I grew my hair as long as I could get away with and stayed up late at night. Often I snuck out my bedroom window at night to go party with the hippies two doors down. This left me sleepy during the day, and I began sleeping in class. I was sent to the principal’s office many times because of this, but I continued to fall asleep in class. After a while they gave up on me and just let me sit at a desk in the back of the class and sleep with a coat over my head. By Christmas it was clear that I was not going to pass 7th grade. I never turned in any homework, I never read any of the assigned readings, and I was growing more and more defiant. My hair was even longer and I wore clothes the school had banned.

The last straw came in the spring semester of 1968. The school librarian refused to let me read what I wanted to read. She refused to let me check out a book I wanted, so I told her to fuck off. She sent me to the principal’s office. He began to lecture me on the importance of schooling, and told me I should show more respect to my teachers.

They don’t respect me, I said, so why should I respect them?

Because they’re your teachers.

That’s not good enough. You’ve got to give me a better reason than that.

Because if you don’t respect and obey your teachers, you’re not going to succeed in school.

Well, to hell with that, I said.

Then he told me he was going to give me several swats on my ass with a stout wooden paddle with holes drilled in the end. Supposedly, the holes made your ass sting more when you were swatted. It was the kind of paddle all the grade school principals in Phoenix had at that time, which they used to deliver appropriate physical punishment to deserving delinquents like me. I told him like hell he was, and he should go fuck himself.

He told me I should just accept my punishment and straighten out. Then he left me in his office to think it over, and told me he’d be back in ten minutes. As soon as he left, I also left by a side door and went home.

That was the end of my career at Orangedale. I never returned. A week later Mom got a letter from the school saying that I was officially expelled from school. That was fine with me, as I didn’t want to be in school, anyway. It gave me more time to hang out with the hippies down the street.

One day that May, the spring of ’68, I awoke just before noon and walked around the house looking for something to do. Mom and Art were at work, Rick had moved out, and all my other brothers were in school, so I had the place to myself. I was hungry, so I searched for something to eat. All I found was what I usually found, just a loaf of bread and melted butter in the butter tray. I fished the dead flies out of the butter and slid two slices of bread down into the toaster.

It was a Friday and I could hear the music from the school band that I used to play in floating over from Orangedale just across the street. I knew the school held flag ceremonies every Friday, during which the entire school assembled around the flagpole while the school band played patriotic tunes. The Vietnam War was raging and, even though I was still just twelve, I was already corrupted enough to be against the war. The hippies down the street were against the war and my older brother, Eric, was fighting with his local draft board to be a Conscientious Objector. So, I felt Orangedale’s patriotic assemblies were bullshit political indoctrination.

The hatred I felt for that patriotic bullshit shaded into my hatred for the school’s principal, who I felt had screwed me by kicking me out of school. And as I thought about that injustice, I began to remember some of the rowdy things Rick had done at Orangedale before the same principal had kicked him out. One of the stunts Rick used to do, just for the hell of it, was call in fake bomb scares and force evacuations of the entire student body. Rick usually did this when he wanted to avoid a test. He’d find a public pay phone and make the call and laugh as the whole school marched out. This was decades before 9/11 and things weren’t so sensitive then. Of course, it was still a serious threat.

I laughed at the memory and, since there was nothing else to do, I decided to call in a bomb scare and help those poor kids across the street get out of jail for a little while. The band music had ended, so I knew they were now all back in their classes. I dialed the principal’s office and, when the secretary answered, I yelled, There’s a bomb in your school and you have five minutes to get out!

Then I slammed down the receiver. I didn’t know how convincing I was, so I ran out into the street to see if the school believed me. I could see that the students were all being evacuated into the schoolyard and everyone was having a grand old time. I climbed up onto the roof of our house to get a better view of the chaos and watched for a while, laughing my ass off as I did so.

Then one of the teachers saw me on the roof and pointed up at me. Heads turned and other teachers also began pointing up at me. Then students began pointing up at me. It was like the scene at the end of the Donald Sutherland version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where all of the pod people are pointing at the one among them who isn’t a pod person and they’re all screeching at him. I could almost hear all those people screeching as they pointed at me. I decided it wasn’t a good idea to be up on the roof, and so I climbed down and went back inside to eat my toast.

About fifteen minutes later a loud pounding began on the front door. I went to the living room window and peaked out. Men in suits were standing on the front porch, banging on the door. I dropped the drapes back in place and stood back. Rick hadn’t told me about this part, and I didn’t know what to do. However, our front door was never locked, as brothers were always running in and out, so the men in suits opened the door and walked right in. They saw me standing in the living room, still wondering what to do. They whipped out their badges, telling me they were federal agents.

As the feds began questioning me, the principal drove up. The front door was still open, so he also just walked into our living room. He called me a smart-ass punk, and said they were going to screw me royal. I hadn’t realized one could get into so much trouble over a bomb scare, and I felt nauseous and began shaking.

Then the principal called Mom at her work told her what I’d done. The feds then got on the phone and told her to have me at the Maricopa County Detention Home come Monday morning. When Mom came home from work she gave me the old, How could you do this to me, where did I go wrong? routine.

Monday morning Mom took me to the County Detention Home. A female officer interviewed me and asked me why I did it. I told her I did it to get even with the school and with the principal for the way they fucked me over. The female officer said I would be placed on probation for six months, and I’d better not call in any more bomb scares. Hey, I was 12-years-old. What else were they going to do?

But, this time I listened to what I was told, and I never again called in a bomb scare to my old school. Besides, it would soon be summer, skool was out for me, and it was 1968. There was a lot more interesting stuff going on in the country, and I meant to be a part of it.

A Series of Lucky Breaks

Summer, 1969-Winter, 1969

Eric: Cambridge in the summer of 1969 was a completely different world from anything I had known. Coming to Cambridge from the desolate desert city of Phoenix was as much a culture shock for me as I suppose Europe would have been to Easterners. It was also liberating. Phoenix had always seemed like a prison to me, and I was glad to have escaped into the free air of Cambridge. Having tasted that freedom, there was no way I was going back to the prison of Phoenix.

The theater program I was in at Harvard’s Loeb Drama Center ended at the end of the summer, and I had to move out of the Radcliffe dorm in which I lived. I was determined, however, to stay in Cambridge. I was also still facing imminent drafting into the military for the Vietnam War. I’d been fighting my local draft board in Phoenix for several years to obtain Conscientious Objector status. That board had rejected that possibility for me because I was an atheist, and they said only those with a religious objection to war could be Conscientious Objectors. So, they classified me One-A, prime beef, the top draft eligibility classification. I knew my time was running out and I’d soon be drafted, but I also knew I was going to refuse induction. I reasoned that I could refuse induction in Cambridge just as easily, perhaps more easily, as in Phoenix.

But, I had no friends in Cambridge, no job, no place to live, and I had absolutely no money. I didn’t know how I could start a new life in Cambridge but, with the confidence and ignorance of youth, I was sure I’d be able to work something out. Harvard accepting me into the summer theater program with a full tuition scholarship was my first lucky break of 1969, and a series of further lucky breaks helped me begin a new life in Cambridge that autumn.

First, I saw an ad in the student newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, which offered free housing for a student in return for light caretaking of an old house just off Brattle Street near Harvard Square. I wasn’t a Harvard student, but I decided to try my luck. I called the phone number and scheduled an interview with the woman who, with a quavering old voice, answered my call.

In Colonial days, Cambridge’s elegant Brattle Street was called Tory Row, because that’s where rich British Loyalists, Tories, lived. I walked west out of Harvard Square and up Brattle Street, past the Loeb and Radcliffe Yard, past the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s big yellow mansion now owned and operated by the National Park Service, and turned left at Willard Street. About three doors down, toward the Charles River, was the house I sought. It was a large two-story clapboard house that I later learned was even older than Longfellow’s mansion. A low white picket fence separated it from the Cambridge Friend’s Meeting House and Longfellow Park next door. I walked up and knocked loudly on the front door.

Eventually, the door slowly opened and I saw before me a small, frail, incredibly old woman with thin and disheveled wispy white hair. I introduced myself, and she invited me in. We seated ourselves in a living room that could have been part of a Colonial museum. There was antique furniture that creaked dangerously when I sat in one of the chairs, the Colonial ceiling was so low it seemed to almost brush my head, and one whole wall was a built-in bookcase jammed with dusty hardcover books.

The old woman introduced herself as Miss Harriet Peet. I learned later that she was 99-years-old and a Radcliffe graduate, perhaps the oldest living ‘Cliffie in Cambridge, perhaps in the world. She was a retired teacher and owned the house with a retired Harvard philosophy professor. She proudly tapped an ancient tome on the small table at which we sat. That’s his book, she said. Take a look at it.

I gently picked it up. Tiny pieces of the binding crumbled into my hands as I did so. The author was someone named Arthur Dewing and was entitled, An Introduction to Modern Philosophy. The philosophy couldn’t be all that modern, I thought, because the date on the title page said Lippincott had published it in 1903. I looked up at Miss Peet. If Dr. Dewing no longer with us? I asked, guessing that was why she needed someone to look after the house.

My question seemed to surprise her. Oh, no, she said. He’s right here. I live in this half of the house, and he lives in the other half. You’ll meet him later. I was surprised in