I began getting seriously interested in David Harris when he came to visit me at Santa Rita Rehabilitation Center in 1967. My mother and I, along with sixty-seven other women, had been arrested for supporting the young men who refused induction. The price for me, after all, was small: forty-five days in the equivalent of a girls’ summer camp. During my first stay in October of that year, a short but informative ten days, David had been there as well, on the men’s side. But this time, he had kept out of jail to prepare himself to refuse induction. When he came to see me in the cage (the little visiting stall where a half dozen of us were crammed at a time), he was wearing a cowboy hat and was looking six foot three, which he is. His smile was one of the sweetest in the world and his eyes were a shade that a friend of mine calls “unfair blue.” Instead of a prison uniform, I was wearing my own dress which I had ironed inside the cage, and earrings made out of fresh red berries and broom straw. My eyes were painted up with mascara I’d made from charcoal and toothpaste. I was ready for something terrific.
When visiting time was over, a black inmate asked me who the cowboy was, and I told her he was a leader of the movement against the draft. My ears were ringing from the din of inmates shouting to their visitors. I went back to my bunk and thought about David. We were involved in the same political work. He had a good mind. He cared about little kids dying under our bombs in Vietnam, and sometimes all I could think about was those kids. I decided to see him after I got out.
Fifteen days before our time was up, my mother and I were kicked out of jail. The prison officials, torn between teaching us a lesson by keeping us the full forty-five days and disposing of us early, had chosen the latter. They wanted to avoid any more celebrity visitors and the press conference planned for our release date. When I tried to place a telephone call to arrange a ride home, the lieutenant said no and accused me of wanting to alert the press. “Don’t worry,” she said. “We have a ride for you.” They had a ride for us, all right, all the way to nowhere. We were dumped at a nearly deserted bus station in Oakland. Mother and I ordered some breakfast, and I went to a phone and called the person who would arrange a press conference. Two hours later, we had our press conference in a small room filled to overflowing. Then I went to another phone and called David.
David. He was handsome and bright and appealing. He was clumsy, messy, and sweet. Most of all, he shared my passion for nonviolence. He was a brilliant speaker. He spoke of eliminating the draft in this country, and then tackling the military here and around the world. The military, as he put it, was a house of cards. America owned most of the deck. If you pulled out her cards, the house would automatically fall. He had a lovely mouth. When he stopped preaching long enough, it was a kissable mouth. Maybe he’s what I need, I told myself. Someone as strong as me, or stronger. Someone I don’t just crave because his hair falls a certain way and his lips have a cupid’s curl.
I went to live with him for a while in the resistance commune in the hills above Stanford. I launched into my customary “Beware of Joanie” routine and warned him what a terrible tiger I was and how he had better not get any big ideas about owning me. He said if I attempted to castrate him, to please not wrap him around a tree first the way the last girl had done.
David and Ira and I went on the road. David had already received his indictment and we knew that jail would be inevitable in the near future. I would sing a song or two and give a brief talk about nonviolence, and Ira would speak, but David was the headliner. I loved watching him speak. I was infatuated.
We’d known each other three months and been on the road two weeks. One night in bed in a motel in Wisconsin, we started discussing children’s names. I asked David if he realized what we were doing. He said, “Christ,” and that’s when we decided to get married. I called my mom out west. “Guess what? I’m gonna get married.” She said, “To whom?” And I said, “David,” and she said, “Oh no.” The last she’d heard of David was about a fight we’d had when I was fed up with him and said he was a dumb ox. After I hung up, David developed a fever and complained of aching muscles, and by morning had to be taken to the local receiving ward where they said he had a bad case of the flu. I was, of course, convinced that it was psychosomatic. My time was to come.
A week later we were in New York. The hotel phone rang at seven-thirty in the morning. It was Associated Press, who wanted to know if David and I were getting married.
“David,” I said. “A.P. wants to know if we’re getting married.”
He rolled over, scratched his head, and said, “What the hell?” So I told the reporter the rumor was probably true, but there were no plans as yet.
That afternoon the announcement of our marriage was on the front page of the New York Post with my picture, and was amply covered in the New York Times and most papers in the rest of the country. So we decided to wrap things up as soon as possible and began looking for a movement preacher, preferably a pacifist. We would have to have a real wedding, we figured, and that meant our four parents, my two sisters, my aunt, his brother, a few of my personal friends, and half of the West Coast draft resistance. We made plans to fly everybody east, and I went shopping for a wedding dress. I was deliriously excited and terrified at the same time. I began getting ghastly stomachaches. David held up pretty well. We found an actual pacifist minister and a funky little church with peace symbols all over it where we would be married on a stage set designed for a play. There was a beautiful tree in the center of the stage covered with paper flowers. Together with the preacher, we planned a combination of an Episcopalian and a Quaker ceremony. David bought a suit after much hunting and altering, and I flew around Saks Fifth Avenue gulping Kaopectate and outfitting my family and trying to memorize my half of the Quaker marriage speech. “I, Joan, take thee David, ...” etc. We took out the word “promise” and said “will try,” and changed “for as long as we both shall live” to something a little less terrifying, though I don’t remember what.
The day before the actual ceremony, my stomach was a wreck, and I had regressed to about age six. Members of the family hung nervously around my bed and decided to call a doctor. The doctor came. I told him what was wrong with me. “I’m getting married tomorrow, and I’m scared stiff, and I have developed a spastic colon and diarrhea, but it’s all psychosomatic and all you really need to do is tell me that I will be all right and I don’t have the flu or something.”
“Do you mind if I make my own modest diagnosis?” he asked, hoisting my nightgown and poking my abdomen. “I would like to rest assured that you don’t need an appendectomy, for instance.”
“I don’t have a fever,” I warned him. “That is, as long as I don’t have a fever, I’ll be all right. Anyway, I don’t.” He didn’t say “Shut up.” He just put a thermometer in my mouth and checked his watch. After a minute or two, he retrieved the thermometer, looked at it and grunted again.
“Well?” I said.
“Hundred and two point six,” he announced, and washed off the thermometer.
“I want to die,” I said. He looked very sympathetic.
“Would it help any,” he asked, standing there with his head cocked, “if I told you that I had a fever of one hundred and three and a half the night before I got married?”
“Depends,” I said. “Are you still married?”
“Yes, I am,” he replied. I thought he was lying, but I didn’t care. He had said the right thing.
He gave me some Thorazine, convinced me that it wouldn’t make me throw up, got me to swallow it right there on the spot, and I entered the land of floating swans.
If I had ever wondered whether David would be kind or devoted, I found out that night. I floated blissfully in and out of sleep, waking occasionally to the nausea of an empty stomach. I would moan a little, and David would hulk out of his bed and slip a teaspoon of Jell-O or an ice cube into my mouth. Within seconds the nausea would subside, and I’d go back to sleep. I don’t believe David slept much in between. He couldn’t go down the hall and get drunk with his friends because I was demanding all of his attention, and probably also because it would be too embarrassing for him.
Dear David, did I ever thank you for that night? It wasn’t a very fun way to spend the night before a wedding, especially our own, but even after our roller coaster years together and the tumultuous times directly following, I’ve said that you were on the side of the angels ...
Wedding day. David was very nervous. He still had his walrus sideburns and moustache. He wore cologne, his suit fit well, and his shoes squeaked. I wore a Grecian-style, off-white, floor-length dress and bare feet. I gazed at David a lot. I also swallowed a lot of Kaopectate. We realized that we hadn’t bothered to get rings, so we ripped off ones we were wearing and hurled them at my secretary, and she went out and bought two gold bands. A little after the appointed hour, we piled into a limousine and headed for the church. I was wearing the black velvet cape that my mother had worn to her own wedding.
A film crew was at the church. I think all they got of me were shots of my hand raising the indispensable green medicine bottle to my lips. David was talking politics in another part of the same room. My sisters arrived. I remember thinking how beautiful everyone looked. My mother and father resigned themselves to the marriage of their second daughter and were truly dignified and stunning to behold. David’s mother looked lovely and benevolent in the best sense of the word, and his father looked strained, but pleased. He’d been seventeen years in the military and his son was marrying a peacenik. David’s older brother looked shy and sweet, which he is, and my sisters looked like princesses, which they are. Tia looked happy, because she is an optimist and because she was glad I wasn’t marrying a junkie or a tightrope walker from the local circus. The minister’s hands were shaking, and he was so nice that I wanted to cry. I forgot the words when it came to “in sickness and in health,” and I said, “Oh, shit,” and the minister whispered them to me, and the whole time David was smiling this immense smile, partly out of nervousness and partly because it is truly the most natural position for his face. We were gripping each other’s hands for strength, and we ended the whole ceremony with a prolonged French kiss which was interrupted by a harrumph from my father and an outburst of giggles from everyone else. Then everybody clapped and the champagne was brought out, and Judy Collins, a good friend of all three Baez girls, sang, and my father took some rolls of photographs which for some reason came out all black.
I drank champagne, glued myself to David’s side between chatting with relatives, and twisted the new gold band around the third finger of my left hand thinking what fun it was to have a new name. The concept of keeping one’s name, not to mention identity, was not yet born in me. But the idea of becoming a wife, and, hopefully, a mother, was thrilling. I was going to be Joan Harris, and David and I were going to have bushels of babies and save the world at the same time. On the third finger of my right hand I was still wearing the gold and alexandrite ring.
How kind you were, David! I was a crazy person. You married a crazy person. I was out on the hillside one evening with your mother, the night she told me I could call her Elaine, and the moon started to come up and I thought it might suddenly go back down again if I concentrated hard enough. And that idea frightened me. When she went to bed, I lay down by the roadside between the garbage cans with my knees tucked up under my chin and might have stayed there for hours, but you came out and called for me, and I said, “Over here,” and you carried me back into the house and lit a fire and read to me from Alice in Wonderland. One night, to please you, I smoked some dope, but it made me even crazier, and I got hot and cold flashes and was terrified by your mouth as you read out loud. I had to run around the house and stay away from the windows because I might suddenly jump out. You said, “C’mon, let’s go outside and get some air”; I said, “No, I’m scared I’ll be too cold.” “Well, here, let’s put this sweater on,” you said, and I started to cry. “No, I’m scared I’ll get too hot.” Then I started to really boohoo, and you put your arm around me and talked me outside, where the air felt good on my face. I had to pee and you said, “Sure, why not?” and began to laugh but tried to stop yourself so my feelings wouldn’t get hurt; but I was squatting down in the petunias and had begun to feel a little better, so I said, “What’s so funny?” and you said, “We just spent ten thousand dollars rebuilding the bathroom, and you come out here to pee.”
We lived in the Los Altos Hills on a quarter-acre of land we called Struggle Mountain. Ours was a shacklike house attached to another just like it. A couple hundred yards away was a very old two-story house in which eight or nine people lived communally. We were all vegetarian, and we all had gardens. David and I used to sit out front on the stoop by the petunia bed, and God-knows-who would come by and invite themselves to sit down. Most often we’d make them tea, and David would talk about The Resistance and I’d listen and then get up and wander around and go make bread. Next door lived Robert and Christy. Robert was a draft resister, but his number never came up. He and Christy didn’t wear any clothes in the summer. Later, when Robert and Christy were more like family, he’d come in to use the pencil sharpener, and sitting down at the kitchen table I’d be eye level and two feet away from his groin, and could watch or not when he sharpened his pencil. For a while after David’s arrest, I stopped wearing anything either, and so did most of the Struggle Mountain commune people who shared the property. One day the fire truck pulled up outside the fence and about fifteen firemen pretended to be looking for brush fires, but while glancing into the telescope, they also glanced over the fence, and I didn’t feel uninhibited at all. I felt the way you do in a dream when all of a sudden you are naked and walking down Broadway.
I tried so hard to be a good wife. My demons attacked me ferociously, and I spent hours at the psychiatrist’s trying to change myself from being Queenie into being Wife.
David got a Samoyed named Moondog who was terribly appealing if not too bright. He was untrainable, but had a winning smile, and David let him wander in and out of our tiny house at will, smiling and tracking mud onto the kitchen floor and the triple pile rug that covered the living room. One day I blew up because I had just vacuumed the house when Moonie scratched once and yelped twice and David let him in. I cursed at the mud tracks, “Goddammit, David, I just finished cleaning, plus that dog is scratching holes in the door.”
David asked which was more important, the dog or a plank of wood, and I said, “You are forgetting something. Me. I’m more important.” But David said I was anal-retentive, and I said I needed to be taken out to dinner. He said being waited on in a restaurant was counterrevolutionary, and I said I still needed to be taken out. I said he bought books and buying books was a bourgeois luxury that poor people couldn’t afford, and if he was spending thirty dollars a month on books, he could spend the same amount on me. It was mostly my money anyway. I just wanted him to make a fuss, over me!
One day three women’s libbers came up to register some complaints. They didn’t like the poster The Resistance had put out. It was a picture of Pauline and Mimi and me all wearing hats and looking like the three little maids from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance, and the caption said, “GIRLS SAY YES TO BOYS WHO SAY NO.” I thought it was clever. The feminists hated it because it said “girls” and because the women shouldn’t have to answer to anyone, especially men, not yes or no. They wanted the poster taken off the market. I honest to God didn’t know what they were talking about. But I kept running back and forth to the kitchen, fixing them sandwiches and lemonade, while they nudged each other and looked in exasperation at the ceiling. David raved on about The Resistance and called women “chicks.”
In spite of our troubles, I was faithful, very faithful, even when nothing was working, and I cried a lot at night, and he was endlessly patient and hoped everything would work out. Sometimes it did work out, and I was so proud. Proud that I could actually be a wife and feel calm and happy for a while.
David’s indictment had come quickly after he refused induction. By the time his trial came up, the judges had quit expecting everyone to stand when they walked into the courtroom. We did, though, out of respect for his lawyer, Francis Heisler, a well-known, much respected old man with Einstein hair and a wit like a saber, who could have gotten David off on a technicality. He was torn because he knew that David was making his stand in the trial on moral grounds, and Francis would have loved to show his prowess on technical ones. The courtroom smelled of patchouli, mothers nursed their babies, and we all wore flowers and sang in the halls.
David was beautiful. Once the prosecutor asked him if there had been anything obstructing his way into the induction center. Yes, David, I thought, closing my eyes. Yes, David, you were. You were obstructing your own way. David started to answer the question and stopped, and said, “Yeah, wait a minute. I was obstructing my way.” When the jury came in with the verdict, I began to shake. There was a Quaker woman on the jury we’d all been hoping against hope would call upon her Quakerism and defy the judge’s instructions. The verdict was Guilty, and David made them all say it one by one, and when she said “Guilty,” we all felt betrayed.
We were on a speaking tour when I got pregnant. We went to colleges, and I’d sing and David would speak and the kids would get mesmerized. I thought David was going to turn the world around singlehandedly, and if he could have done it with charisma alone, it would have been done overnight. Sometimes I didn’t understand what he was saying, and later I found out that other people didn’t either, but it didn’t stop us from sitting and watching him with our mouths open.
Anyway, we were in North Carolina, and I was taking my temperature every night and morning with the special get-pregnant thermometer, and the graph told me we were right at the crucial time. It wasn’t the most romantic thing in the world, yanking the thermometer out of my mouth and saying, “Now!” The next morning, I was doing dishes with Betsy, an old friend. She had always loved my alexandrite ring, which I had worn since the days of Kimmie, and all of a sudden I took it off my soapy hand and asked her if she’d like to have it. She was astonished, knowing that I never took that ring off. In fact, she knew I had had four duplicates made of it: one in topaz, one padparaja, one a blue stone, and I forget the fourth. I never wore any of them much, because I preferred the purple one. She looked at the beautiful gypsy ring I held out in my palm, and took it. That’s when I knew I was pregnant.
Eleven days after my period was due, I went to the doctor for a test. Afterwards we sat in her office and she said, “Well, I have some good news for you,” and I started to cry. She said, “I thought this was what you wanted!” and I blubbered, “It is!” and called David, but he wasn’t at home. I drove home lost in fantasies of cribs and sleepytime mobiles and David getting out of prison, though he wasn’t in yet, and us leading a nonviolent movement through the highways and byways of the world, taking turns carrying our little diapered bundle on one hip till it was big enough to toddle on its own and then we’d have more and more and there would be children tumbling all over the floor riding big dogs and cuddling little cats.
The house was empty when I got home, and I dawdled around and made some tea and tried to calm down. I ran to the doorway when I heard the car pull up. David’s mother came up the path with a load of groceries, and David was just behind. She was smiling like a summer morning, and David was too, until I blurted out “I’m gonna have a baby.” Elaine nearly dropped the groceries, and David tried to be thrilled, but he was hurt that I hadn’t told him privately first. I regretted it immediately, but it was too late. Two weeks later, in a concert at San Jose State, I did the same thing. I just couldn’t contain myself for another minute, and toward the end of the concert I announced, “I’m pregnant!” and David read about it the next day back east where he was speaking. He would have liked the private things in our lives to have some real privacy. I’d like to think I’ve changed and would handle things differently now, but I wouldn’t, I know. I’d just blurt it out again.
One day I decided to cut off my hair. My tresses had been a trademark from the time I’d begun singing. I took two Valiums and went to the hairdresser’s and had my hair bobbed, and left feeling like an Italian movie actress.
David came home from tour and said, “You cut your hair off without asking me!” and then tried to make a joke about it, but was hurt again. Our lives rumbled along.
We were ready when they came to arrest David on July 15, 1969. The resistance community seemed to have moved into our front yard. I spent the days baking bread and making pancakes and fruit salads for endless numbers of friends and well-wishers. Their hero would soon be gone, out of reach for the daily coffee and cigarette he was so willing to share with any of them. The day we suspected the sheriff would come for him, we were awakened by the sound of a flute floating to our bedroom windows on the warm, hazy morning air. One of David’s loonier devotees was sitting in a tree like Pan, playing for us. I was tired and edgy and told David I wished the guy would drop dead, but David said, “He’s a good guy, a little whacky, but he means well,” and I softened, only because of David’s kindness. So I got up and began, with the help of Christy, to cook breakfast for the tree dwellers, sun worshippers, sprout eaters, children of the dawn of Aquarius, squatters, resisters, and other loyal friends. I stayed in the kitchen, turning hot and cold at the sound of each passing car and busying myself making coffee and herbal teas.
Mid-morning one of our spies came roaring into the driveway and announced that the patrol car was on its way up the hill. David had that big smile on his face. The waiting was about to end, and his life would become much easier after there was a reality to deal with and not just fantasies to wake him up at night. The sheriff and his assistant were baffled by us. We were friendly, welcoming them with offers of coffee and juice and homemade bread. They declined everything. David, seated on the couch talking with a small group and protected by flanks of welcoming committees, rose and greeted them with a warm handshake which made them feel more sheepish and silly than they already did. David went around the group and hugged everyone. I stood at a distance until the last minute. They put handcuffs on him and he held up his hands in the victory sign just before climbing into the back seat. I hugged him and said some things, but I don’t remember what they were. When they drove off in the heat of that pretty day, the sheriff’s car had a draft resistance bumper sticker plastered just above the license plate. We had our last laugh, and I felt quieter and quieter until I just decided to go for a walk. I walked a long time over those hills, a long time in the heat of that fine, pretty, lonely day up on Struggle Mountain.
My first job after David went to prison was to finish the film we were making jointly, called Carry It On. The film crew followed me on an entire tour of the United States, from Denver to Madison Square Garden. I was charging two dollars a ticket and giving what money I made to The Resistance. Two resisters were working with me: Jeffrey Shurtleff, of the madras slipover shirts and rubber beach sandals, who sang with a voice of honey and silver; and Fondle, a tousle-headed slow-moving guitar player whose real name was something else. Our road manager was the lunatic who had been in the tree playing the flute on Struggle Mountain the day David was taken away. He would leap up from the table at a truck stop and start clearing the dishes, while a row of two-hundred-pound truckers turned and stared. He would also remove all the furniture from his hotel room as soon as he checked in, hang a picture of a mandala on the wall, light up incense and candles, and sit in the lotus position for forty-five minutes. Jeffrey would join him and the two of them would cook brown rice on some device they’d bought at a health food store, and then they’d boil up some ginseng tea and have themselves a little feast. Fondle and I would order hamburgers. Jeffrey sat in the lotus position onstage and battled with himself in outdoor venues when he was attacked by mosquitoes, not because of his respect for life, I don’t think, but because of his obsession with self-discipline.
In southern California I decided, at the suggestion of some resisters, to include a demonstration in my concert. One young man had deliberated a long time and decided to turn in his draft card. He wanted to “go public,” and was hoping that I would accept his card in a little ceremony in front of the audience. I said fine, and worked out a bit of theater. Midway through the program, I would announce that the next song was dedicated to the draft resisters. If there was anyone in the house who wanted to turn in his card right then and there, I’d be happy to accept it. At that point, the young man would come forward and hand me his card. It worked fine, except that thirty other young men also came forward and handed in their cards. I knew they were not ready to refuse, and I handed all their cards back, told them where they could get draft counseling (namely, backstage), and took an intermission.
I decided to make a record for David. It would be a nice gift. I went to Nashville again and recorded twelve country and western selections. I had drawn pages of David’s profile in the evenings when he sat reading, and I now chose the best of them and designed a record cover with his portrait in the center surrounded by a three-and-a-half-inch-thick border of multicolored images from tarot cards making up a flowering band. The background was silver. It was a big project, especially because I recorded a double album of all Dylan at the same time. I went home and got serious about the coming baby.
We have a picture of me sitting out in front of the house shortly before Gabe was born. It was taken just after a storm had blown things all over the yard and the sky was still dark. I am sitting on a toilet that Robert had been planning to fix for a long time. My hair is growing out and I am waving at the camera. Mom would say those were my “hippie days.”
Gail Zermeno came to the Institute for Nonviolence from her college at Berkeley. She stayed on in California as a working member of our draft resistance and nonviolent community, eventually becoming my personal aide and close friend.
I took the Lamaze natural childbirth course with Gail as my helper. One night I woke up with cramps and my heart started to race out of control. I put my hand to my mouth in excitement and disbelief and said, “Calm yourself.” I got up slowly to see if the cramps stopped. They did not. I decided to go into the kitchen and make some Jell-O. I filled a small pot of water, opened a box of strawberry Jell-O, spilled half of it on the floor, emptied the rest into a bowl, put the wrapping into the boiling water, and burnt my fingers fishing it out. I gave up and went back to bed, and the cramps must have stopped because I slept until about seven. They woke me up again. It was a Tuesday. David called on Tuesdays. Gail came over and we went down the hill to the clinic. The doctor said it would be a long wait, so we went back up the hill. It was a twenty-five-minute ride, but I was still hoping for David’s call. I plunked myself on the couch and began breathing over the pains. Many hours went by, and friends from the commune came and went. When I was puffing too hard to talk, I’d signal by putting my hand in the air so they’d know I was busy. We waited until the pains were a minute and a half apart, and then headed down the hill again, my hand more often in the air than not. David called five minutes after we’d left.
I’d planned to have my baby while sitting up, but after the first big contraction, ended up on my back and stayed there for the rest of my labor. Some poor intern came in and covered me up with a sheet, and I kicked it off and said I didn’t want any fucking sheet over me. He left and I never saw him again. I was breathing my Lamaze rhythms like a beached blowfish, and the doctor came in and told me to take it easy or I’d pass out long before delivery. I don’t remember much after that except for a pain shot. I grabbed the doctor’s hand and squeezed it and hollered “FUCK!” at the top of my lungs because nothing is more painful than a pain shot. They were wheeling me somewhere and the doctor kept saying, “Do you feel like pushing?” and I kept lying and saying no, because I was scared. I was hyperventilating, and I thought I heard a cat howling in the next room, but the nurses said it was me, and then finally I was pushing like mad. Oh God, I thought, I must be pushing a mountain out of me, and I heard the doctor say, “Looks like a healthy little boy,” and I was wide awake and all ears and felt wonderful and had no pain and was crying and I wanted to see him. He was purple and gooey, but I reached up for him and started to sing, “Hello Little Friend,” a Joe Cocker hit. They put him on my chest for a minute and I simply did not believe he was mine. Then I got hungry. I had my little boy, and now all I really wanted to do was eat. My mom was in the corridor when they wheeled me out. She’d driven up from Carmel when she got the word, and she kissed me and clutched her hands together, teary-eyed with excitement. I lay in my hospital robe thinking about food, and a nurse came in and said, “Have you tried a little water?”
“I’ve tried a lot of water, and now I want to eat.”
“Have you been nauseated?”
“Yes, most of my life, but not right now.”
She brought me food, and Robert and Christy brought me food, and I gobbled it all down and then called David. “We’ve got a Gabe,” I told him. We had long since decided upon either Gabriel or Joaquin (we had no girl’s name). A week later, I received the most beautiful letter David ever wrote me. He had been waiting for the call from the hospital, walking around the yard in the rain. After it came he just wanted to be alone, so he got into a broom closet and shut the door and sat there. He knew he was smoking because he could see a glow which would flare up now and then and after a while dim and go out, and then flare up again. “We have a Gabe,” I had said to him. Born out of the sixties and out of our haphazard lives, born out of caring, born into our dreams, we had a Gabe.
I traveled a lot soon after Gabriel was born. I have pictures of him lounging in rubber boats in a St. Tropez swimming pool, after having eaten raspberries and champagne mixed together in the portable baby-food grinder. He was carried through the main square in Warsaw and sunned on the beaches of Italy. Gail was my constant companion and Gabe’s surrogate mother. For Gabe’s seventeenth birthday she gave him an emergency road kit for his car and a Chinese wok.
After David had been in prison for ten months and Gabe had been born, I had an affair. I sneaked around, got hot flashes when the phone rang, made mysterious trips to Los Angeles, and worried about being a terrible person. I was frightened of David’s homecoming. One resistance wife called me to say that her husband had gotten out early. He’d just walked in the front door one day and wrapped her up in his arms and taken her off to bed. She sounded ecstatic. I broke out into a sweat. I coveted Gabe. Alone, with him in my arms, I sat at dawn and wrote him a lullaby. Way up there on Struggle Mountain, peering up into the oaks, waiting for the sun to hit the top branches of the eucalyptus trees, I escaped with Gabe on a silent, wingless, flying horse. The grey quiet horse wears the reins of dawn . . . and nobody knows what mountain he’s from ... in his mouth he carries the golden key . . . and nobody knows him but Gabriel and me, Gabriel and me.
It was chilly in Texas the morning we came to the prison to take you home ten months later. Gabe was dressed in blue wool knickers and a camel’s hair coat. I had on a big fuzzy Afghan embroidered coat, and you were wearing the suit I’d brought you. The press was at the San Francisco airport en masse. There was a big party for you at the Institute. Gabe toddled around in the California sunshine and everyone was smiling and looking happy for us, and I was frozen in my own footsteps. Gail took Gabe so that you and I could have some time alone.
Our house was so small, David, and you were so big! I got angry when you told your macho prison stories about all of the seedier and most violent times you’d lived through or heard about. You told them over and over again to adoring groupies and never answered when I asked you what you wanted for dinner. (I was jealous of the adoring groupies, and you didn’t know what you wanted for dinner, no one had asked you for so long.) I didn’t mind sharing Gabe as much as I had thought I would. But that was because I considered him mine, and just on loan to you. When it dawned on me that you were actually his father and had rights to him and to his time and to his love, I was furious.
We didn’t split up over Gabe, or over the affair I’d had, though it had been quite real and not at all a passing fancy. We didn’t split up over politics. We split up, when we did, because I couldn’t breathe, and I couldn’t try anymore to be a wife, and because I belonged alone, which is how I have been since then, with occasional interruptions which are mostly picnics, honeymoons, overnight sprees on tour, and my dreams. What I knew in my bones at the crumbling finale to our erratic three years together I could express consciously to myself ten years later. I am made to live alone. I cannot possibly live in the same house with anyone. This is no longer a great problem for me. Sometimes I am very, very lonely. But I prefer this loneliness to the desperate feeling of failure that I had when I couldn’t manage being your wife.
I am sorry, Gabe, that we couldn’t be a family. I think I have been a good mother. I have loved you very much. Loving you was easy. People warned me about the terrible twos and the threatening threes and the frightful fours, but you never had them. You were fun. Wonderful fun. You were also a heartbreak. Seeing you sleeping peacefully on your back among your stuffed ducks, bears, and basset hounds, a glow of fevery red on your cheeks from playing so hard, would remind me that no matter how good the next day might be, certain moments were gone forever because we could not go backwards in time. So I began to lose you from the moment you were born. I could fill this book with stories about you as a baby, but you would hate that. So I’ll tell just a few. Here’s one you can hate me for: I refused to toilet train you. When we put you in the nursery school, you were too young and they said, “We don’t usually take children who are still in diapers, but when he sees the other kids, you know, it will only be a matter of days or weeks.” But it was weeks and months, and you were in your threes when you took the pins out and handed them to me, and wadded up the diapers and chucked them in the bathroom wastebasket. We never had an accident.
After David and I split up I lived in Woodside. David lived a half an hour away in the hills. Gabe grew up going back and forth between us. None of us liked the arrangement, but since David and I both wanted to spend time with him, this is how it ended up.
I never took Gabe on a peace march. I never took him to a farmworker’s funeral.
One day he announced that the trouble with me was that I didn’t play war enough. I said fine, let’s go play war. We set up little metal soldiers and took up our positions.
“Mine are the good guys,” said Gabe.
“I see. And who might they be?”
“The Americans. You have the bad guys.”
“And who are the bad guys?”
“Ummm, Japanese.”
“Really? You mean like Gene, our gardener?”
“Oh. Well, then they’re Germans.”
“Goodness. You must mean like Shorty. You know, that guy from Germany who made you those tarts on your birthday?”
“Well. Mom, c’mon, you’re wrecking the game.”
“Sorry, Gabe. Let’s see, they are from Denmark, like Rachel in your class who sings to the whole school on birthdays and Christmas.”
“OK.”
“What do we do now?”
“Now we go to war!” he said gleefully.
Making battle sounds with his throat and tongue and gurgling spit, he proceeded to level my lopsided army with one man, slamming into my lines, p’tewy-ing down whole rows at a time. I tried feebly to attack his troops, but everything I did was wrong. Within sixty seconds, it was all over but the burial.
“That was fun, Mom! We should do that more often!”
“Anytime you like, sweetie.”
I suppose I overcompensated in trying to free him of the oppressiveness of being the child of a fanatical pacifist mother and two famous social activists. When he was ten he relieved me by a statement which showed anything but a conventional acceptance of military consciousness. We were watching TV one afternoon, and the news of the day was the arrival and debut of a new missile. Many of the big brass were fondly looking on as it glided out of its shaft toward the camera. I said something appropriate like “Ugh.” Gabe said condescendingly, “I know what you’re thinking, Mom.”
“What am I thinking, Gabe?”
“You’re thinking, ’Look at the big new shiny penis and all the generals standing around getting hard-ons.’ ”
“You’re absolutely right, son,” I said, delighted.
And so how did we manage, at the breakup of what Time magazine called “The Marriage of the Century”? How did we manage with our son? Just the way everyone else does. By fighting and crying with frustration, and tugging and pulling at Gabe’s loyalties, and then breaking down and seeing how miserably we were behaving, and then trying to learn how to trust each other. That trust came, little by little, and with an enormous amount of work. And we worked because we loved Gabe. Neither of us was right or wrong. Both of us were just hopelessly foolish, possessive, and loving parents. We did our absolute best. We are still doing it.