Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.
—Kurt Vonnegut
About a month after I got back to Detroit from Europe for my final year in medical school, I took a date to a performance of the Living Theatre, a touring anarchist troupe that had been producing works of Bertolt Brecht, Jean Cocteau, and Gertrude Stein. I had not seen Elaine in more than three years. But somehow there she was, my Elaine, looking radiant, sitting directly in front of me in the theater, with somebody else, another date. For some reason I am unable to explain, I had carried a large, ripe red pomegranate with me to the show. I know not everyone goes to the theater carrying a pomegranate, but it was what I had at that moment, and when I saw Elaine sitting there with someone else, I was so thrilled to see her I just handed her the pomegranate. Our dates could never have understood the meaning of that pomegranate, but we did because we used to talk about pomegranates lying in the back of my father’s station wagon discussing Greek mythology among other things. Within a few days, we gave up any pretense that we were not meant to be together and Elaine moved into my apartment near the medical school, and—by the standards of the time—we began living in sin.
To avoid confronting our mothers, we installed two separate phone lines, one in her name and one in mine. When Elaine’s mother called her and asked, “Have you seen Larry lately?” she would look over at me on the couch and say truthfully, “I expect to see him soon.” Ditto if my mom called. We kept a bowl of pomegranates in our sinful apartment. Neither of us can remember who our other dates to the Living Theatre were on pomegranate night.
Though I proposed soon after, Elaine was too smart to marry me while I was still in medical school—it had become cliché that the minute a guy got his M.D. he would divorce long-suffering wife number one who had supported him in school and move on to marriage number two. After Elaine had finished her master’s degree in psychology at the University of Michigan and I graduated from medical school, we got married and had two ceremonies. One was Jewish—rabbi, chupah, glass breaking, and marriage contract for our parents and their friends. The second wedding was later that night, a hippie reception at a rent-a-mansion, the Gar Wood estate on Grayhaven Island, in the middle of the Detroit River. The island had a bridge that we could gate when the party began, to keep the police away. I arranged for a Good Humor ice cream truck and local band Savage Grace as well as musicians from MC5, a Detroit favorite. Our wedding cake sported a huge candy peace sign. Friends brought two punch bowls, filling one with ordinary Kool-Aid and spiking the other with LSD; they posted a big “Electric Punch” warning sign over the spiked bowl. It was a grand party with only one mishap. Grandma Ida, who was game enough to come to both parties, did not know what “electric punch” was, and so she drank from the wrong bowl. She told me a year later that she had the time of her life at our wedding party. She may have been from the old country, but I think she knew quite well why she had such a good time.
I landed an internship in San Francisco, so we packed our apartment and loaded the VW camper for our honeymoon drive west. We drove slowly across the country, sleeping in national parks and exploring. On the drive, rainbows were ubiquitous—on the back window of every VW Beetle or van like ours, hand-embroidered on Levi’s jackets and backpacks, on posters for rock shows, on record albums, painted on bodies at festivals. Well before the rainbow flag represented the gay rights movement, the rainbow represented peace, hippies, yippies, the Summer of Love, or simply love. I was taught in Hebrew school that rainbows were God’s message of hope. God had summoned Noah and told him that humanity was wicked. Disappointed in his creation, God was going to destroy the world by flooding it. But he wanted to save a few good people and each animal species to repopulate the world after the waters receded. Noah’s job was to build an ark to carry those people and animals to safety.
Noah declined. “How do I know that you won’t destroy the world the next time you get angry?” God answered, “Well, I wouldn’t destroy the world if all of humanity were good, but they’re not.” Noah started negotiating: “Okay, what if there was one good man in the world. Would you spare the world for his sake?”
God said, “No.”
They haggled night and day, day and night, finally reaching an agreement: If there were thirty-six good humans, God would not destroy the world. In Hebrew, thirty-six is lamed vov, and “The Lamed Vov” became the name given to these righteous beings. In Jewish mysticism, these saints, whose identity is always secret, protect the world by leading a righteous life. The rainbow was the symbol for this new covenant. The thirty-six righteous ones was for me a kind of shorthand for the rainbow of faces, the rainbow of faiths, that infused the counterculture movement. I have always felt that the love of the righteous would prevail over the centrifugal forces of greed and corruption, anger and hate, selfishness and violence.
Presbyterian Hospital in Pacific Heights, a very wealthy enclave in the very heart of the San Francisco establishment, was where I began my internship, as all internships begin, on July 1. As I walked eagerly through the hospital, it was impossible to miss the message in the welcome the hospital laid out for me: the cover of a 1969 Medical World News magazine had been reproduced and pinned up on bulletin boards all over the building.
“Watch out!” the cover declared. “These radical MDs are going to take over medicine.” Five of us long-haired, wild-eyed radical medical students were the subjects of the story and the cover photo for this conservative medical journal. I was squatting right in the center, chest out, eyes wide. Someone had gathered copies of that cover photo and displayed them prominently. On a few, maybe for emphasis, a hypodermic needle was stuck in my nose, pinning to it a warning: “Presbyterian Hospital welcomes its new intern, Dr. Brilliant, here to save the world!”
Welcome to San Francisco, land of rainbows.
Elaine began work as a juvenile probation officer in the East Bay. I worked nonstop at the hospital but found time to volunteer some nights at the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic helping addicts. I kept close ties with MCHR. I taught an extension course for the University of California called Drugs and the Mystical Experience, and prayed that no one from the hospital would learn I was teaching it. Elaine was accepted into law school and was to start the following September.
San Francisco was awash with social experiments, cults and karasses, T-groups and encounter groups, Hindu teachers and Tibetan lamas with their satsangs and sanghas. There were yoga classes everywhere, dozens of communes, and on Hippie Hill more exotic characters than at Speakers’ Corner in London’s Hyde Park.
At the hospital in between civil rights and antiwar marches I took patient care very seriously. It was the first time I had hands-on responsibility for the health, and sometimes for the lives, of patients. In a few instances I got into trouble for having long hair, going to antiwar marches, and for taking time off to attend hippie spiritual lectures by a fellow named Baba Ram Dass who had just returned from a transformative experience in India.
At one antiwar march in Union Square, a photographer took my picture and it wound up on the front page of the paper. That was bad publicity. A few of the older attending physicians wanted to kick me out of my internship, which would have pretty much ended my medical career. I found out later that two of the youngest staff doctors—Marty Brotman and Keith Cohn—had risked their own careers by speaking up for me.
I was pursuing a surgical internship. I was particularly fascinated with the work of one surgeon, Dr. Victor Richards, who had the swiftest and smoothest scalpel in the West. After assisting during one of his operations, an intern in my group said, “It’s as if the patient’s flesh opened in eager anticipation of his knife.” I wanted to be by Dr. Richards’s side as often as possible. One morning I was assisting on a patient with intestinal cancer. Dr. Richards had to remove part of the colon and create a bypass—a long and complicated surgery, perhaps ten or twelve hours standing and cutting. Several hours in, while I was holding parts of the intestines back with retractor clamps, my right leg buckled and I collapsed, toppling the anesthesia cart and sending bottles of IV fluids spraying everywhere. Lying on the operating room floor I recall thinking, The tiles are so much colder than they seem when you stand on them.
Many interns pass out during their first long surgery. But this was different. Long after I was able to get up from the floor, I continued to experience short bouts of paralysis in both legs; I tired easily, and from time to time, my thinking was muddled. Dr. Richards took me on as his patient. Blood tests revealed a very high level of calcium, which would explain the lethargy, slowed thinking, and perhaps the muscle weakness in my legs. But why had my calcium levels skyrocketed?
Dr. Richards diagnosed a tumor of the parathyroids, the four pea-size endocrine glands buried in the four corners of the thyroid at the base of the neck just above the collarbone. He would not be able to distinguish between a benign tumor, an adenoma, or cancer, an adenocarcinoma, until he opened me up and removed samples of the glands for tissue studies. Either way, it was likely that all four glands, which regulate calcium and potassium in the body, would have to be removed. I had assumed that a surgical residency would be the next step in my training, but it was surgery, not training, that was next for me. Richards suggested I take a year off from seeking a residency and schedule the operation for the fall.
As my internship was coming to an end, the local news became fixated on the events happening on the small island of Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay. The infamous prison there had closed six years earlier, and the federal government had declared the land surplus property. In November 1969 a group of American Indians occupied the island and demanded that it be deemed once again “Indian land” on the basis of the hundred-year-old Treaty of Fort Laramie, which had stipulated that all Indian land that had been taken over by the U.S. government and then declared “surplus” must be returned to the original tribal owners. The occupiers, who called themselves the “Indians of All Tribes,” demanded that the island be used as a center for Native American spirituality and study and a museum of Indian culture.
At the peak of the Alcatraz occupation, about four hundred Indian occupiers were on the island—many arrived there by jumping off of boats and swimming. They were joined eventually by John Trudell, a Sioux poet who broadcasted daily on Radio Free Alcatraz, providing information for national news coverage. Because of his activism, it was later rumored that John had the thickest FBI file in history. He continuously spoke out against the hypocrisy of the American promotion of freedom abroad while his people were trapped and dying on reservations. He took a leadership role on Alcatraz.
According to a poll, 80 percent of San Franciscans cheered for the Indians to win their standoff with the U.S. government—San Franciscans were shocked by U.S. government policies that continued to strip Native Americans of land and resources. So were many in the Coast Guard. Members of the tony San Francisco Yacht Club ran through Coast Guard blockades to take provisions to the island while the Coast Guard pretended to stop them. But by the middle of the summer of 1970, the Indians on Alcatraz were in trouble. The sympathetic sailors from the yacht club had gone back to their day jobs, and the occupiers were running out of supplies.
The legendary San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen often wrote in support of the occupation of the island, calling with limited success for doctors to provide medical care on the island. John Trudell’s wife, Lou, was pregnant; they wanted their baby to be born on Alcatraz, which would make him the first Native American child to be born on Indian-freed land in two hundred years. Herb Caen wrote, “Is there no doctor who will help her deliver her baby on free Indian land?” There was no water, no electricity, scarce food, and little medicine. Sounded like the perfect assignment to me.
My illness, though pressing, was not a medical emergency. I could hold off surgery for a few weeks, or months, but I wasn’t allowed to practice at the hospital until I underwent the procedure. Volunteering to go to Alcatraz was a chance to get back to activism while doing something with my medical degree, so I offered to make the house call. At first, I went to the island in the morning on a Coast Guard helicopter and came back on a boat each night. Two nurses from the Medical Committee for Human Rights stayed on Alcatraz as Lou got closer to her due date. I moved out there soon after for what would turn out to be a three-week stay.
On July 20, 1970, in the former superintendent’s house, on a hill overlooking the bay, Lou Trudell gave birth to a boy that they named Wovoka. We had limited clean sheets and water and some emergency medical supplies. When the baby was crowning, when one more push would bring this historical child into a world of spiritual and political import, something made me realize that the father’s hands, an Indian’s, not a white guy’s hands, should be first to touch this baby. The delivery was smooth; perhaps the biggest medical challenge I had was to persuade John Trudell to wear gloves, as the old prison was filled with hiding places for tetanus bacillus, a common cause of infant death in the developing world. I was not going to lose this baby to that bacterium. John caught his son as Lou made a final push. We cleaned the baby up and John hovered over his wife and child, smiling. I had done my job, assisted by the two MCHR nurses, and there didn’t seem to be any complications. Lou took her time to caress and bond with her new baby, and then stood up, looked around at the dozen or so people in the living room, and proclaimed: “Is anyone else hungry? Who wants bacon? I’m going to make breakfast!”
The name Wovoka was an intentional choice, meant to send a mystical message to Native Americans across the country. Eighty years earlier, a Northern Paiute medicine man called Wovoka—which means “cutter”—had created the Ghost Dance religion, which Sitting Bull and Geronimo later joined in force. Wovoka prophesized that after he died he would rotate around the Earth, in a kind of heaven. When he was reborn, he said, it would herald the return of the buffalo, the return of the Indian way, and the end of the white man’s way.
“Wovoka lives!” shouted a tall lean Indian who had come back from fighting in Vietnam—ex–special forces, Green Beret. He seemed drunk or stoned—he later said he was high on acid. The former Green Beret scanned the room—Lou, John, Wovoka—and then saw me, a white guy in scrubs, a blemish in the Indian painting, something to be edited out of the story. Alcatraz had been taken. Wovoka had returned as prophesied. I was a problem to be solved. He pulled out a hunting knife so fast I hardly saw it, and then had me in a headlock, waving the knife toward my neck when anyone moved.
“Stop it!” John screamed. “Stop it! He’s the doctor! He delivered Wovoka!” But this skinny, intellectual poet was no match for the Green Beret, and the Green Beret knew it. “If I can’t kill the white man, I’ll cut myself! Wovoka was a cutter. I am a cutter too!” he shouted. People poured into the room. Several Indians jumped the Green Beret and pulled him off me. After struggling free of their hold, he slashed his left forearm, spraying blood everywhere like a kid squirting a garden hose. His friends held him down; I sewed him up. He pulled the stitches out and started bleeding again. I sewed him up again. We did this dance three times. Finally, he grabbed me, blood still spurting out of his arm and onto my face, the knife again at my neck. Everyone was drenched in red.
“Wovoka is born! We don’t need any of these fucking white bastards on the island!”
I do not remember very much until I heard a shout. “Give me the knife,” said Charley, a slight five-foot-two-inch Indian who moved slowly toward the Green Beret on hand crutches, his legs weak from polio. “Give me the knife. Give me the knife,” he repeated quietly. And just like that, the Green Beret gave up his knife. Charley lightly cut his own forearm, casually, like he was slicing pastrami, and held his bloody arm against a cut on my face. “Now there’s no white man here. Just our blood,” Charley said. “Okay?”
Things calmed down for a while and I began to think I might make it off the island without more drama. But the Green Beret started fiddling with his wounds again, tugging at the sutures saying, “I’m ready to die.” Blood sprayed everywhere again. If we didn’t get him to a hospital, I feared, he would bleed to death.
One of John’s friends sprinted off to the dock to the only working telephone, set up by the Coast Guard for emergencies or, they hoped, for when the Indians were ready to surrender. Soon a Coast Guard cutter pulled up at the wharf and we bundled the Green Beret in sheets and got him onto the boat.
A ship bumping through rough waters is not ideal for putting a ligature on an arterial bleeder. To make matters worse, the Green Beret—still tripping on whatever he had taken—continued to pull out his stitches as fast as I could get them in. What should have been a very short ride from Alcatraz to the San Francisco piers seemed to last forever as the sheets got redder and the Green Beret got paler. An ambulance met us at the dock and sped away to San Francisco General, where he was sedated, sewn up, and held on suicide watch. I never saw him again.
Back on the San Francisco dock, news cameras appeared out of nowhere. Reporters pointed microphones at me, asking, “What do the Indians want?” I had never met an Indian until I showed up on Alcatraz, but I ended up on the front page of the San Francisco Examiner and all over TV news. A local doctor saw the coverage and contacted a radio DJ, Tom Donahue, who was producing a movie called Medicine Ball Caravan with Warner Bros. It was about rock-and-roll bands traveling across America and the hippie fans following them in psychedelic buses, camping in teepees, staging rock-and-roll concerts. The doctor, Bob Baron, had already signed up as both medic and extra for the film and suggested to Donahue that Warner Bros. hire me to be a second doctor for the film caravan. It was supposed to be, as the Oakland Tribune called it, Woodstock on Wheels. There would be a final blowout concert in Canterbury, England, with Pink Floyd. Warner Bros. offered to fund the clinic I had set up for the Indians on Alcatraz if I agreed to come along without being paid. Elaine and I agreed, packed up our life in San Francisco, turned over management of The Body Politic, handed off our apartment to our new tenant, and ran away with the circus for what we thought would be a summer vacation.
The starting point for the Medicine Ball Caravan was on a pier right near the Ferry Building. There were more than a dozen forty-foot buses, loads of band equipment, movie cameras, and wannabe movie extras gathered on the San Francisco waterfront. My first duty was to vaccinate the film crew and all the musicians against smallpox. At the time there was no smallpox in the United States, and I thought then that the vaccinations were overkill. But Warner Bros. expected the cast and crew to go to England for the final concert, and in order to get back into the States everyone needed one of those yellow immunization cards with proof of a recent vaccination. There was a chance some of the caravan might continue on through Europe to India where there was still a lot of smallpox. I did not know much about smallpox and had never given anyone a smallpox vaccination, but it was easy enough.
The first time I met Wavy Gravy was while he waited his turn for vaccination. He put out his arm for me to vaccinate him and his face lit up with a huge smile, his mouth a rainbow, a row of multicolored false teeth he’d convinced a dentist friend to make for him. He was wearing a duckbill hat with an actual duck’s bill and a hand-sewn jumpsuit made of patches of American flags, blue sky, and stars. Next to him stood his stunning wife, née Bonnie Jean Beecher, rumored to be the Minnesota beauty of Bob Dylan’s “Girl from the North Country.” She had abandoned life as a starlet—after appearances in Star Trek and The Twilight Zone—to be with the poet Hugh Romney. Then Hugh Romney the poet and stand-up comic morphed into Wavy Gravy the fool, the clown, and Renaissance man—a kind, smart, compassionate, hilarious force of nature. The police had beaten Wavy so badly, and so regularly, at protests and sit-ins, that his back was broken several times; later he would need multiple spinal fusions and full body casts. When Wavy figured out that cops do not like to beat up—or be seen beating up—clowns, Santa Claus, or the Easter Bunny, Wavy adopted a clown or holiday persona as the season allowed.
A year before he had been Chief of Please at Woodstock, where he and the Hog Farm, the counterculture descendants of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, were in charge of security for hundreds of thousands of revelers. “How are you going to provide security without weapons?” a skeptical reporter wanted to know. Wavy said that they would form a “please force.” A reporter laughed and said he was silly.
“Do you feel secure now?” Wavy asked.
“Yes,” the reporter replied.
“Well, you see, my plan is working.”
When rain and mud from an overnight storm threatened to unleash chaos at the festival, Wavy got on stage and uttered the line that defined him and the event: “What I have in mind is breakfast in bed for four hundred thousand of us.” The Hog Farm commune, with lots of help, delivered a cup of granola to each person in every tent so that nobody tried to navigate the mess left behind from the storms. This was Wavy’s magic. Love and generosity kept things peaceful. “Peaceful” and “Woodstock” became synonyms and opened the door to the possibility of other large gatherings and music events that became part of American culture.
The movie caravan left San Francisco headed for Washington, DC. Along the way the hippies of the Medicine Ball Caravan met small-town Americans, in the Southwest, in the plains states, and in the Midwest. Some of the greats of the day, B.B. King, Alice Cooper, Joni Mitchell, Hot Tuna, Pink Floyd, Rod Stewart, members of Jefferson Airplane, and others, made appearances. The Grateful Dead had dropped out of the caravan before the first bus pulled out, but Tom Donahue and Warner Bros. had too much invested to pull the plug, so our wagon train started “Eastward Ho” without them. After the final concert in Washington, DC, the crew would fly to London for the final concert at Canterbury.
It was a reverse pilgrimage in which we set up camps of tie-dyed teepees, and threw big, free rock-and-roll concerts in the middle of nowhere. To many we were the first live hippies they had ever seen. But there were only a few clashes of the Easy Rider kind. We were there to spread the joy of Rock and Roll and with some dramatic exceptions, most were happy to receive us. To the good folks in Placitas, New Mexico; Boulder, Colorado; and Yellow Springs, Ohio, we were weird, but we were not boring.
To Wavy and the Hog Farm, I must have seemed pretty square. Despite my growing involvement in the counterculture and the Movement, to them I was still Dr. Brilliant, a professional, an adult. I had long hair, but Elaine and I had no intention of staying with the caravan for the trip they planned to take overland to Asia after the final concert in Canterbury. We were one of very few married couples. I wanted to get my parathyroid surgery over with and get back to finding a residency program, and Elaine was slated to start law school at the University of California immediately after the last concert.
After the final American concert in DC with Hot Tuna, B.B. King, and Stoneground, we boarded an Air India jumbo jet to fly to London. Warner Bros. insisted on Air India because it was one of the few ways the company could spend all the Indian rupees it had accumulated as the primary film distributor in the pre-Bollywood era. The company couldn’t take the money out of the country any other way.
Halfway across the ocean the Indian captain smelled pot, left the cockpit, and marched straight toward the film crew in his crisply pressed uniform and white turban with the stern look of a policeman. He was tall, bearded, well-built, and we were intimidated.
“What are you doing?” he demanded to know.
“Smoking hash.”
There was an awkward silence.
Then one chippy hippie blurted out, “Want some?”
“Of course,” he replied and sat down with us. It was a hell of a lot scarier watching the pilot get stoned than worrying about getting busted by the captain. Somehow, we landed in London safe and sound.
Most of what I did as a doctor with the caravan between concerts was treat colds and flus, help people out whose trips had pushed their minds too far, and stitch up cuts from minor tumbles. It was an easy way to become friends with all these lovable characters. But it was a different story when I did my job as a Rock Doc at the concerts. The drug of choice was migrating from the gentler mushrooms to the dangerous methamphetamine. During one concert near Boulder the speed junkies were out in full force. A guy showed up with the metal teeth of a bear trap still stuck in his shoulder. He got into a knife fight, which started over two dogs who had been going after each other. Wavy brought both protagonists and their dogs onstage and praised each for protecting the honor of their dog; somehow, the clown got the two fighters to hug, and the audience responded with a standing ovation. That was Wavy Gravy, peacemaker. I will never understand how he pulled that off.
At the same concert in the Colorado hills, I had to help a woman who had been assaulted. Her labia had been sliced off by a crazed meth junkie with a knife, one of the saddest and most gruesome memories of my life. I kept her from bleeding out while we waited for the helicopter to medevac her to the hospital. I suspect she would have bled to death if we hadn’t had the helicopter. Survival is one thing, but I have no idea of the emotional scars that followed her through her life. What kind of man could do something like this? I only know that he was on a long-acting amphetamine called STP—named after the automobile lubricant. I know this because he was wearing a shirt that read “STP” and he was part of an off-the-grid community from the woods outside of Boulder that called themselves the “STP family.” What a fucking evil drug.
The freedom of the Summer of Love led to many wonderful things, but also to this. I learned the lesson that every society has had to learn: each emergent community must have rules. The pendulum swings between individual freedom and law. There are beautiful and ugly things about the human spirit, and we need protection from horrible people who commit horrible acts of depravity.
The peace movement was spontaneous, safe, generous, and free, until the murders: JFK, RFK, MLK, black and white civil rights activists. Kent State. And Altamont, the anti-Woodstock, where the Rolling Stones hired the Hells Angels for security and paid them in beer. Four people were killed, scores were injured, cars were stolen and abandoned. The days of pure peace and love were becoming complicated.