abbie arrived on New York’s Lower East Side convinced that America desperately needed to be more free. The sexual revolution, the drugs, the music, and even new clothing styles and long hair represented chinks in the walls of the power structure, and thus were the building blocks of a new nation. If all the fun, all the excitement, all the good sex could be on our side, we could not lose the battle for the hearts and minds of the people—and that, after all, was what he was fighting for. Abbie wasn’t a hippie and he wasn’t even a typical Lower East Sider. He was still, compared to his new crowd, a pretty straight-looking SNCC staffer, a politico, who believed you could solve problems through discussion and hard work. But his openness to experience pushed him right into the middle of what was happening anyway.
He opened Liberty House in the West Village as a continuation of a project he had begun in Worcester, selling handicrafts from the Poor People’s Corporation of Mississippi as a way to raise consciousness in the North and generate cash to send back down south to support worker-owned enterprises. He lived with a roommate on Avenue C and Eleventh Street in a $49-a-month railroad apartment and called himself a Marxist.
That fall Joan and I were just getting to know one another as husband and wife, and we often visited her parents on Long Island. Abbie always made sure he was on our itinerary, calling us before we left home, then calling Joan’s parents to see if we’d arrived. He wanted to show me the changes going on in and around him.
On our way to dinner in Manhattan, Joan and I would show up at Abbie’s apartment in our dining-out-in-New-York smartest clothes, and walk in to hear strange music, smell a mixture of dope and incense, and then see Abbie, his roommate Harvey, and a few other people sprawled around the apartment. Abbie might be zonked out on acid. And almost before we had a chance to sit down, and without actually saying hello, he would launch into what sounded like a speech—“the new cultural revolution is coming,” etc.
It looked to me like Abbie was just having fun. I didn’t take it any further than that; when I tried, I felt confused. I was working to make a success out of a business and a marriage. Abbie had left his marriage and job behind him. I wasn’t angry at him. But for the moment, Abbie’s world and mine seemed to have nothing in common. Abbie was still a part of my life, but not in a way that could make sense to me. I felt as if together we were mourning the passing of a loved one. Not him or me exactly. . . . Our past, I suppose, suddenly seemed closed to us, and I couldn’t do anything about it.
In 1966 the civil rights movement that Abbie loved was rapidly changing. Its core was becoming more militant as the Black Power movement gained momentum, while middle-class whites were turning to the anti-war effort on one hand, and a freer lifestyle on the other. Abbie saw both the increased political will and the new culture as equally important to what he increasingly saw as a second American Revolution in the making.
That winter at a National SNCC conference all white members were purged from the organization. Abbie was outraged and decided to go public in a long essay that was published by the Village Voice, on December 15, 1966. Despite racism, Abbie argued, most of the nation’s poor were still white, and as activists it was still important to frame the struggle along class lines, not race lines.
The previous summer Abbie and SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael had been beaten up by police at the Newport Folk Festival. More recently they had shared a panel on Johnson’s War in Asia, at which Stokely had thrown his arms around Abbie and announced to everyone present, “Abbie’s in SNCC, he’s white and he’s beautiful.” Abbie considered Stokely to be a friend, but he also thought Stokely was wrong to throw aside SNCC’s original biracial philosophy and didn’t mind saying so in a public forum. In the Village Voice piece, he wrote:
One thing that has always been present in the Movement has been the attitude that if you feel something is wrong you say so regardless of the consequences. . . .
I feel recent SNCC decisions have hurt the chances of seeking the radical kinds of changes in this system which most of the New Left seeks. It has turned its back on the concept of class struggle, negated the moral battle of good vs. evil, and instead substituted a racism that even Malcolm X in his last few months had turned his back on. . . .
I am interested in fundamental changes in American society, in building a system on love, trust, brotherhood, and all the other beautiful things we sang about. Trust is a sharing thing and as long as Stokely says he doesn’t trust any white people I personally can’t trust him. It doesn’t matter how beautiful he thinks I am.
Abbie was roundly attacked from some quarters within the Movement for having with those words exposed divisions within the Left for all to see, and along racial lines. In other circles he found high praise, and that week his article was the talk of the town on the liberal cocktail party circuit. Playing on his newfound notoriety, Abbie penned a longer, and in many ways stronger article that appeared the following week, in the December 22 issue of the Voice:
There is nothing in the system out there that demonstrates that love is a force that can win. Our American system tells a black man that if he wants something, he has to riot to get it. He has to kill. He has to kill white people. It says it over and over again. There are those of us, however, who listen to a different drummer, who listen to our own system. That is, we look inward and do as the spirit says do. I learned that very clearly when all the major news media descended upon me for the “inside dope on SNCC.” I told them all the same thing: “[President] Johnson is a bastard. This is a family quarrel and you’re not members of the family.”
Abbie’s vision was growing into a highly idiosyncratic, global, and somewhat playful vision of an ongoing class war waged by people of all kinds, with beautiful ideas, emotions, and desires against a fixed and lifeless, materialistic, warmongering, prudish, and morally bankrupt status quo. It was a wonderful vision because it was so deeply optimistic, taking for granted that, at heart, most people were on the same side, the side of life, which meant the side of equality, justice, and peace.
Not long after the Voice articles appeared, Abbie and Stokely were both in Washington, D.C., visiting the home of SNCC leader George Brown. Stokely ribbed Abbie about the Voice pieces, and Abbie countered by joking about an ad executive who was trying to get Stokely to pose in a print ad campaign for a new line of clothing with the caption “Black Is Beautiful.” “Only in America,” Abbie and Stokely agreed.
In the spring of 1967, Abbie acceded to Stokely’s request that he turn over Liberty House to black management, get out of the civil rights movement, and concentrate on ending the war in Vietnam.
As Abbie began to get the feel of his new neighborhood, he sometimes played pool at the local pool hall with local police officers. And he was friendly enough to the local precinct captain, a guy named Fink, for Fink, in Abbie’s words, to start “constantly worrying about me.”1 At the other end of the spectrum, he looked on local drug dealers as benign and sometimes prominent members of the underground community—so much so that at least once he used money from a bail fund to bail one out of jail.2 And though he never identified with the hippies—once calling them “fags” on national television, and always considering “dropping out” as “copping out”—Abbie tried to get runaway hippies, who were gravitating in increasing numbers to the Lower East Side, involved in local political issues. No one was excluded from Abbie’s vision of a new America; he just expected that everyone could change a lot.
And Abbie was reading voraciously. Some of Marshall McLuhan’s insights corresponded so neatly with his own that he began, with McLuhan, to see communication as having the same paramount importance in the contemporary world as labor had had in the industrial world. If Marx’s means of production corresponded today to information, then, Abbie reasoned, “a modem revolutionary group headed for the television station, not for the factory.”3 And following that idea to its logical conclusion, Abbie decided that the entertainment factor could not be ignored by any serious politico. “If we were the TV generation, wasn’t there a way of speaking that evoked visual images, rather than spewing forth dead words in rhythmic, religious procession that bounced off dulled eardrums and dissipated into empty space?”4
Part of the answer to his question came to Abbie from San Francisco, where the San Francisco Mime Troupe and others in the Haight-Ashbury community were beginning to develop a whole new approach to societal problems. Calling themselves “Diggers” after an eighteenth-century English uprising, they used theater and spectacle to envision revolution as a celebration, thereby inviting participation, and effacing the contradiction between serious political action and great fun. To protest the local government’s sluggishness when dealing with the rising rat population in the Haight, they descended on City Hall, playing penny whistles and dressed in pied piper costumes. In 1967, they opened a soup kitchen in Golden Gate Park with food donated from local restaurants, but also added their own music and dance to turn the soup lines into a social gathering. And they promoted the idea of a free, moneyless society by organizing a distribution network for free clothes and free housing.
It didn’t take long for Abbie to search out and meet some Diggers visiting New York, and to start putting his own mark on the Digger-like activities he organized with a New York twist. That spring, together with Jim Fouratt, Marty, and Susan Carey and others, Abbie opened a Free Store on the Lower East Side in which all items—mostly used clothes—were free. Local media began to dote on Abbie, and after an appearance on The David Susskind Show, the New York Post dubbed him its favorite “happy,” meaning a hippie who didn’t drag his feet. More and more involved in the street life of the Lower East Side neighborhood in which he lived, Abbie came up with a string of ideas for events that would help bring the power in the community to the people who actually lived there. These included blocking St. Mark’s Place to traffic, setting up a music-filled pedestrian mall there instead (until the police broke up the party), and symbolic tree plantings.
On one occasion he came up with the idea of bringing clothes to Macy’s department store and giving them away there to shoppers. When most shoppers refused to accept the free clothes, Abbie reveled in what he viewed as the complete success of the action: It had demonstrated to the shoppers their own misery and contrasted it with the generousness of the Digger way of life, thus serving as a lesson on the difficulty of change and an invitation to change as well.
One Saturday night, a group of around twenty local black kids from the neighborhood were arrested for smoking pot. As soon as he heard the news, Abbie pulled on his cowboy boots, grabbed three or four people who were hanging around, including our sister Phyllis who was in New York that year teaching at City College, and went down to the precinct house to lobby for their release.
First Abbie lay down in front of the stationhouse door, preventing people from leaving or entering. When Captain Fink arrived and complained to Abbie that he shouldn’t be making a fuss since the arrested youths weren’t hippies, Abbie responded, “What do you mean, ‘hippie’? I’m a nigger and I was smoking pot with them. Arrest me or let them go.” That got Abbie detained but not arrested. So Abbie threatened to burn down the precinct house. Fink still wouldn’t arrest him, walking out of the detaining room instead. Abbie followed Fink into the main lobby, shouting, “Am I under arrest or not?” Still no response from the police captain.
In the middle of the lobby was a shining glass trophy case lined with trophies and medals. Abbie took one look at it, raised his boot, and kicked it to pieces.
“You’re under arrest,” Fink screamed at him.
“It’s about fuckin’ time,” Abbie yelled back.
He’d gotten what he wanted, which was to show the kids he was on their side and outwit the divide-and-conquer law-and-order mentality of the police. And that earned him another night in The Tombs, sleeping the untroubled sleep of the just.
In early 1967, Abbie met Anita Kushner, a bright, young Jewish graduate fellow in English at Columbia, who had switched into a master’s program in psychology at Yeshiva University, then worked for the local ACLU chapter, and was now a volunteer at Liberty House. Abbie walked in and swept her off her feet. Within a few weeks they were madly in love and renting an apartment together right on St. Mark’s Place. Abbie admired Anita because she had all it took to be successful in the materialistic status quo world, and loved her for wanting to give all that up for a spot in his world. She was straight when he met her, had never tried pot or acid or participated in a demonstration. He gave her a crash course. Before long she was earning money stringing beads and accompanying Abbie to every event and demonstration.
Here’s how he describes their meeting:
About a year and a half ago, while I was working at Liberty House, a girl came in to volunteer. We got to talking about civil rights, the South and so on. She asked me about drugs. I asked if she had ever taken LSD. When she responded that she hadn’t, I threw her a white capsule. She juggled it the way you would a lighted firecracker. That night we made love and we’ve been doing it ever since. . . . I fell in love with her when she told me she didn’t want to do anything. She is a true drop-out, a dropout that could have made it, and made it big in the other world.5
Smart, lovely, and capable, Anita was as new to the fresh world of drugs, sex, and politics as Abbie had been to bohemia ten years earlier when he met Sheila. Only this time, Abbie was the teacher. With Anita, there was love and sex in abundance, instead of arguments and battles. So in love was Abbie, in fact, that a year later when he tried to describe his feeling for Anita in Revolution for the Hell of It, this was the only part of the book he felt dissatisfied with. And in a footnote he explained, “Love is the one thing easiest to do and most difficult to talk about.”6
Periodically, Abbie wrote back to the counterculture Worcester paper Punch to update his old friends on what he was doing. In April 1967, Abbie published two poems in Punch describing his New York home. What hits me now as I read them again is how comfortable Abbie already felt in his new environment—as if the glove finally fit, perfectly.
The first poem describes the poverty and degradation of the Lower East Side, and then strikes a heroic pose: “When there is so much to do / To change the way the wheels spin / So far to go before we win.” The second poem, “Venceremos”—We shall overcome—ends in a powerful image of martyrdom in the battle between good and evil: “But now the Pentagon Power plans to see/just how many pins can fit in an angel’s head, How many pins before he’s dead.”
At the same time that his credo expressed almost blind optimism, he began to encase himself in a contradictory personal vision of ultimate sacrifice, seeing himself as that martyred angel of the revolution, killed in the struggle and glorified in death. It was a destiny that he could accept—entering history as the Che Guevara of the second American Revolution.
Together with Jim Fouratt, Abbie organized a “Flower Brigade” to subversively participate in a “Support Our Boys in Vietnam” march organized by the Veterans of Foreign Wars for April 29, 1967. As Abbie expected, the fewer than twenty anti-war marchers were badly beaten up. Abbie marked the occasion a victory after the media, alerted by Abbie the day before, featured harmless hippies being beaten up by the war-mongers. And in the next issue of WIN, a national Movement weekly, Abbie could quip: “We were poorly equipped with flowers from uptown florists. Already there is talk of growing our own. . . . The cry of ‘Flower Power’ echoes through the land. We shall not wilt.”7
On Easter Sunday, Abbie, Fouratt, and other East Coast Diggers gathered together thousands of participants in Central Park’s Sheep Meadow for a Be-In, inspired again by the Haight-Ashbury group, which in January had organized the first Be-In in Golden Gate Park. What was notable at the East Coast Be-In was that unlike its West Coast predecessor, it had no definable center—it wasn’t based around a concert by name bands or readings by counterculture celebrities. Instead, people of all stripes simply gathered in the Sheep Meadow and were-in, getting high and getting to know one another. In a letter to Punch describing the Be-In for the June 1 issue, under the heading, “Hallucinations from the Real World,” Abbie ecstasized:
Spring is here and things are popping. . . . On Easter Sunday there was a huge BE-IN in Central Park. There were probably 30,000 people that WAS-IN. . . . Everybody high on something: balloons, acid, bananas, kids, sky, flowers, dancing, kissing. I had a ball—totally zonked. . . . Leaving the park, I strolled down Fifth Avenue singing “In your Easter Bonnet. . . .” A line of cops [outside of St. Patrick’s Cathedral] wiggling their index fingers, [saying] “You can’t go in with that uniform” (flowers, gold paint, Easter bunny). Why not officer, you can go in with yours. . . .
I’ve tried LSD six times in the past three years. Feel it is worthwhile—but no illusions. It’s what you do in between trips that counts and life is still a greater high than acid. If you’re looking for an easy way out or a solution for life, you’re not going to find it in any sugar cube. That’s just mainstream American bullshit. “Things go better with coke.” Things go better with things. I don’t want to fall into the preacher bag. I urge everybody to try anything they feel like trying. The only thing I’m against, I guess, is people getting high on napalming villages. But life is more real than LSD. . . . [While I was co-hosting an all-night radio show] a guy called up and said, “Hell, I know how to get high on grapefruits. You just cut ’em in half and eat ’em.” That’s where it’s at.
It was the year of America’s cultural upheaval and the beginning of the Summer of Love. Around the corner from Abbie and Anita’s pad, Bill Graham’s Fillmore East was introducing the East Coast to Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, The Grateful Dead, and The Band, among others. The Psychedelicatessen, the country’s first head shop east of Haight-Ashbury, was over on Tenth Street and Avenue A, next door to the Button Shop, where for a few dollars owner Randy Wicker would make you hundreds or thousands of buttons for your favorite cause. Paul Krassner’s The Realist and the East Village Other were local counterculture institutions, as were Ellen Stewart’s La Mama and The Living Theater, with street theater an essential element. There were free clinics, and free lawyers, and a commune called Food, which passed out free food in Tompkins Square Park.
For a while, Abbie and Jim Fouratt got themselves on the city payroll, serving as liaisons between Mayor John Lindsay’s City Hall and the East Village. In that capacity, Abbie wrote a pamphlet he called “Fuck the System”—a guide to things that were free or could be stolen without getting caught—which would become the seed for his masterwork Steal This Book. But the two were fired after a few months.
On June 8, Abbie and Anita were married by their friend Linn House in a flower child wedding in Central Park behind the Metropolitan Museum. The ceremony was covered in the national press and started a trend of outside weddings in New York parks that year. Three weeks later, on July 2, they went before a rabbi on the Upper East Side and repeated the ceremony, with Abbie even stepping on the glass, as tradition demanded.
Increasingly enthusiastic about dreaming up actions that exposed contradictions in the conventional world, Abbie devoted more and more energy to what would come to be called—cynically, he always felt—his antics. The point, as he saw it, was reaching people, and if actions could be conceived in a way that would attract media attention, that meant you reached more people. It was as simple as that. Abbie cringed at accusations that he liked to grandstand for the media for personal rather than political reasons. To Abbie, his grand jests were grassroots organizing on a larger scale, pure and revolutionary acts, no less serious for being fun.
Before each action—sometimes the night before, sometimes a week before—Abbie would call the Worcester Medical office to tell us what he was going to do. He and I would talk, and then, almost shyly, Abbie would ask if Dad was there, and, feeling that this was the real point of the call, I’d say something like, “Yeah, he’s right here; why don’t you say hello.” Dad would get on the phone, then he’d be quiet, listening, and I knew that Abbie was talking a mile a minute, telling Dad about the next day’s action, trying to show him what a great thing it was going to be. And then I’d hear Dad say, through his clenched teeth, “You must be right, Abbie, and the whole world is wrong.”
This was the year of our greatest difficulty at the business, with urban renewal programs forcing us to leave the premises we’d occupied for the last fifteen years and our best customers starting to buy directly from the pharmaceutical companies, cutting us out. And it was the year of Dad’s first heart attack. With all that going on, Abbie’s “achievements” were salt in Dad’s wounds. And Abbie knew how hard things were for us. Maybe in his own mind that’s partly why he made those calls, to try and cheer us up, let us know that at least one Hoffman family member was doing things we could all be proud of. But Dad didn’t look at it that way.
In the third week of August came the first of a string of actions that would attract national media attention. Abbie placed a call to the New York Stock Exchange and asked for information about the public tour, using his favorite pseudonym, George Metesky (under which he’d written “Fuck the System”). Then, on August 24, he pulled together $300 and changed it into $1 bills, gathered together a dozen or so friends dressed in extreme hippie attire, and let sympathetic members of the press know that there was going to be something interesting happening down at the Stock Exchange. When the crowd of tourists, agitators, and journalists reached the gallery that overlooked the Stock Exchange floor, Abbie’s group tossed out dollar bills by the handful. “Stock brokers scrambled over the floor like worried mice, scurrying after the money. Greed had burst through the business-as-usual facade.”8
Almost immediately, guards pressed the troublemakers out of the Stock Exchange into the street. No law had been broken. No one had been hurt. Nothing had been stolen or damaged. And yet something extraordinary had happened, unlike anything in the country’s history before or since: The logic, or illogic, of Wall Street and thus of capitalist America, had been exposed, ridiculed, and weakened, elegantly, almost scientifically, and through a performance. Abbie didn’t see a distinction between making art and doing politics.
Outside the Stock Exchange, Abbie, Jerry Rubin, whom Abbie had only just met, and other jesters, burned remaining dollar bills for the television network cameras, which had not been allowed onto the Stock Exchange gallery. And since the cameras hadn’t been allowed onto the gallery itself, the Stock Exchange gag immediately leapt into the realm of myth, with different networks offering different versions: One channel reported that the money had been in $100 denominations, another that it had been worthless Monopoly money. A visiting Missourian was quoted as saying he’d joined in since he’d been throwing away money in New York for several days and found Abbie’s way to be quicker and more fun. Abbie would henceforth refer to August 24 as the day “the stock market crashed” in the minds of America’s youth, and the day he declared an “image war” against “the system.”
In the last days of summer, Abbie and a friend visited Boston and Worcester—which Abbie had left only twelve months earlier—and made a side trip to the Revolutionary War monument at Concord Bridge early one morning, as if he were seeking some connection to that more distant past to replace the assumptions about America that he’d been discarding one after another with increasing fervor during the past winter and spring:
I stood on [Concord] bridge at 6 a.m. with a follower of Transcendental Meditation and described the [Revolutionary War] battle, joining myself with imaginary musket to the ragged guerrillas that shot from those peaceful hills in Concord on that April morning. The previous day we had stood in Harvard Square passing out free poems hurling curses at the Pentagon gone mad and were attacked by drunk marines as Harvard fairy professors stood in a circle of Adlai Stevensonnothingness and watched and appealed to His Majesty’s protectors of law and order, who finally did something. They took down our names and told us to get our asses out of Cambridge. I came away from sitting on the Concord Bridge . . . knowing that some day I might just have to shoot a few of His Majesty’s gendarmes . . . forgetting those nights of practicing how to protect my head and nuts in pacifist utero position and believing in the Second American Revolution.9
The next major protest was to be a weeklong series of demonstrations in Washington to take place in October, organized by the amalgam of anti-war organizations known as the Mobe, and announced on the day after Abbie and his friends threw money from the Stock Exchange gallery. Jerry Rubin was project director for the October protests, which were to combine acts of civil disobedience with a series of rallies and marches, including one right to the steps of the Pentagon. Abbie suggested a new variation on the idea of marching on the Pentagon. He offered to gather a group of people who would encircle the Pentagon and perform an exorcism ceremony to rid it of evil. Rubin loved the idea enough to include Abbie in the press conference announcing the October protests.
When it came Abbie’s turn to speak at a press conference announcing the Washington demonstrations, he spontaneously extended his idea even further, announcing that during the exorcism the Pentagon would rise one hundred feet in the air, and Jerry backed him up all the way. As October approached, Abbie came up with a number of publicity-grabbing variations on the levitation theme. He visited Washington with his friend Marty Carey and attempted to measure the Pentagon in order to estimate how many people would be necessary to encircle it. He got himself quoted in the press requesting a permit for the levitation, and talked of negotiating a compromise with the generals whereby he would agree to raise the building only ten feet in order to obtain the permit.
In response to threats by the Washington, D.C., police that they would use Mace on the demonstrators, Abbie held a press conference in which he introduced a chemical love compound he called Lace, spraying it on four couples sitting on a couch as a demonstration and then allowing journalists to take notes while the couples uncontrollably tore off their clothes and made love. The more he opposed the materialistic world with an alternative that included fantasy, imagination, and fun, the more his tactics seemed to be working.
On Saturday, October 21, 1967, Abbie, dressed in a Native American outfit under an Uncle Sam hat, and Anita, wearing a Sergeant Pepper outfit, dropped acid and participated in the successful levitation of the Pentagon—sometimes Abbie would say the actual levitation happened at dawn on Sunday. That isn’t how the history books report it, but it’s what Abbie would claim for the rest of his life. Most other people who were there happened to be looking the other way when the building actually rose ten feet in the air. The Fugs, who were chanting in the back of a truck as part of the exorcism, were prevented from getting closer to the building than a second parking lot. And soldiers and M.P.s prevented most of the exorcists from getting near enough to the building to encircle it.
After the exorcism, Abbie and Anita joined the core group of demonstrators sitting in on the Pentagon steps, where most would remain for the next twenty-four hours, until Sunday night. During that period, people came and brought the demonstrators food, there was singing and chanting, and during the night participants rested their heads on the shoulders of whoever happened to be sitting next to them. At first, on late Saturday night, there had been beatings at the hands of the generally much older U.S. marshals. But facing the demonstrators on the Pentagon steps were soldiers from the 82nd Airborne division, who had been flown in to protect the Pentagon, most of whom were kids about the same age as the majority of demonstrators. A camaraderie began to develop, with protesters singing to the soldiers to join them, and individual protesters explaining the reasons for demonstrating against the war to individual soldiers. And before it was over, many felt that the sorcery Abbie had half-jokingly attempted during the exorcism had been made very real and evident on the Pentagon steps.
On November 14, Abbie was arrested outside the Hilton Hotel in Manhattan protesting the arrival of Johnson’s Secretary of State, Dean Rusk—in a melee complete with plastic bags of cow’s blood flying through the air, tape recordings of battle sounds, war paint, fire alarms, and skirmishes between water-pistol-wielding demonstrators and tuxedoed bureaucrats.10 And afterward Abbie decided he would come home to be with the family for Thanksgiving and his birthday. It would be an opportunity to introduce our parents to Anita, and to tell them what he’d been doing. Abbie felt he was achieving things in New York, making his mark, and doing good work. He didn’t think of himself as a troublemaker or a rebel so much as a hardworking patriot. And he was becoming famous. He hoped Dad might understand some part of the whole, and that he might have something good to say to his eldest son. Dad had had his first heart attack in 1967, and Abbie wanted his visit, even if it were only a brief one, to help make Dad feel better.
Joan, Phyllis, and I went to pick up Abbie and Anita at the airport. When he got off the plane, we felt immediately that he was a celebrity. People all around him were staring; everyone seemed to recognize him. At least that was how it seemed to me, still the admiring younger brother. But what struck me more than his apparent celebrity was that he had tucked all his masses of hair under a dark blue woolen stevedore’s hat. I think it may have been the first time I’d ever seen him hide a part of himself—or rather, the first time I’d ever seen him show that he was hiding something, since the hat bulged with hair.
When we got back to the house everything was in the usual disarray, just like old times. The table wasn’t set, and Ma wasn’t dressed. Uncle Schmule (Sam) and Gen, his wife, arrived soon after us, bringing Aunt Rose with them from the nursing home where she lived. Bubbe Anna brought the turkey, the tzimmes, and the soup. Uncle Lou and Aunt Sarah appeared, accompanied by their children, our cousins, Paul, Mark, and Jill. Ma had made the apple pie and baked the potatoes. Abbie and Anita had brought a couple bottles of good wine, not kosher, from New York. And Abbie kept his hat on, partly to avoid having to fend off comments about his hair, and perhaps partly as a sign that he had one foot out the door, and wasn’t above getting right up and leaving if things got too uncomfortable with Dad. I couldn’t stop looking at the hat, trying to figure out what he meant by it. Then it dawned on me that maybe, just maybe, he had covered his head, almost instinctively, as a sign of respect, as if Dad’s house were a temple, as if to say to Dad, “We may believe different things, but we can still respect each other.”
Our parents hadn’t seen Abbie since my wedding over a year earlier—not having been invited to Abbie and Anita’s Central Park and Upper East Side ceremonies. And they were strangely quiet at first, as if in the presence of a stranger. Of course, they would never raise the subject directly of not having been invited to their own son’s wedding. And they were determined to be welcoming on this the occasion of first meeting their daughter-in-law. But there was a coolness in the air nonetheless. It had been a long time since we had all been together.
We all sat down at the long dining room table in the center of which was a wicker cornucopia centerpiece that had taken Dad the better part of three days of hard work to make. It held a beautiful arrangement of gourds, Indian corn, and some flowers. On Thanksgiving, Dad displayed talents we never knew he had the other 364 days of the year. And part of the sense of grace all of us have always associated with Thanksgiving has to do with memories of sitting at the table before the meal was served and taking in Dad’s cornucopia each and every year.
Before long, everybody was talking at the same time, and then Abbie took control, talking about himself, talking away about his recent exploits, about Anita and their marriage, and most recently the levitation of the Pentagon, without any semblance of humility, as if being listened to was his natural-born right, or as if once he got started, he couldn’t stop.
“Well, Abbie, it didn’t rise,” I suggested, teasing him a little in response to something he’d said about the Pentagon action.
“Naw, you weren’t watching the right network,” Abbie countered, teasing me right back.
Ma was listening and humming approvingly at whatever Abbie said, taking him at his word, ready to rise to his defense. Abbie continued unabated through the soup and the salad. As he talked, Abbie kept his eyes moving around the table, looking at everyone but Dad. Meanwhile, Dad was heading back and forth to and from the kitchen, seeing to the turkey, and not really wanting to have to look at Abbie, either. Rose was talking to herself. Now and then she would address Abbie with a short phrase, following her own idiosyncratic rules of etiquette, usually when she wanted someone to pass her more food: “Abbie, you look good,” or “Abbie, so that’s your wife,” and then, “Please pass the soup.”
Since Sheila and Abbie’s kids spent Thanksgiving elsewhere, there were no grandchildren present, and that meant Abbie, Phyllis, and I were the stand-in grandchildren for another year. Joan and Bubbe traded recipes. The television stayed on the whole time in the other room tuned to the football game. Eventually we got into talking about the war in Vietnam. To our surprise, Uncle Schmule, the World War II veteran, said he questioned our country’s reasons for being in Vietnam. It wasn’t quite a full-blown anti-war statement Schmule was making, but it was a step in that direction—in our direction—and we noticed. Dad kept a grim silence, knowing he was outnumbered. But as he listened he got more and more indignant. Still, without saying a word, he stood up, raised both hands over his head, and then snapped his hands forward toward us, before walking back into the kitchen to check on his turkey. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” was what he wanted to say, using instead the quintessential gesture of powerlessness all Jewish men use when they feel they’re outnumbered and possibly wrong.
We all knew not to ask Dad about how business was, because business was bad, and we didn’t want to get him kvetching. And as the meal wore on, Abbie and I both wanted to see how our bets on the Thanksgiving Day games were doing. Some of our old friends came over after the meal. And Abbie produced a joint that we passed around the table, after all the relatives except Bubbe had retired to the television or left. Bubbe sat with us for a while as we got stoned, not understanding what we were doing or saying, but enjoying our company anyway.
The next day, Joan and I, on our way to New York to visit with Joan’s parents, gave Abbie and Anita a ride home. I was driving and Abbie was telling jokes, Jewish jokes. Abbie, Joan, and I were laughing our heads off. Anita was quiet, deferring to Abbie and not quite sure about Joan and me. Joan remembers that this was the first time she found Abbie relaxed enough to like him. We felt good about the Thanksgiving with the family and felt that all was well somehow. I was happy that Joan was liking my brother; at odd moments—and that drive from Worcester to New York was one of them—he still felt like a part of me.
Abbie was already a Yippie!, although the word didn’t come into being until the very end of 1967, born in discussions aimed at getting people to go to Chicago for the forthcoming 1968 National Democratic Convention. It grew from the ashes of Paul Krassner’s LSD hangover, when Paul noticed something that was, like most post-hallucinatory-voyage revelations, perfectly obvious once you thought about it sober: “When you make the peace sign of the V, the extension of your arm makes it a Y.” Five stoned-out friends were packed together into Abbie and Anita’s tiny living room, including Abbie and Anita, Krassner, Jerry Rubin, and Jerry’s girlfriend Nancy Kurshan. Building on Krassner’s “Y,” someone else suggested Youth International Party. Y.I.P. YIP. Someone else said that hippies are dead. Paul cried out “Yippie!”11
Two weeks later every underground paper was carrying a Yippie! story. The next month “The Yippies are coming” appeared in Newsweek. A full-blown myth was born. Abbie was ecstatic: “Can we change an H to a Y? Can myths involve people to the extent that they will make the journey to far-off Chicago? Can magic media succeed where organizing has failed? Y not?”12
Abbie said being a Yippie! meant you were “A flower child who’s been busted. A stoned-out warrior of the Aquarian Age.”13 The splendid anarchy of the word allowed it to have as many definitions as there were attempts to define it, and all of them could be true. Abbie used to tell me that Yippies were Jewish Hippies.