the drug bust was the worst thing that ever happened to the Hoffman family. We received it as you would a natural disaster. You don’t try to fight off an earthquake or a hurricane; you wait until it’s over and then try and clean up the mess. We didn’t talk much about what had happened—not in those winter months of 1973 and not in the years afterward, either. Even Dad was silent on the subject of the bust. We all were silenced by what had happened. What was there to say?
People in Worcester who had hated and scorned Abbie and our whole family for his politics seemed to get suddenly quiet, too. Whereas before, Abbie had been holding up a mirror, making them look into the eye of their tragedy, now the only thing for them to see was our family’s troubles, and so their sense of neighborly decorum returned and they stopped complaining about us. They understood the drug bust—proleptically, smartly, coldly, with the gossip’s good intuition—as a kind of suicide: Abbie had taken himself out of play. Worcester’s political conservatives breathed a communal sigh of wonderment, as if what had happened was so magical, so unexpected, so bizarre, that it was a kind of divine kindness, a right-wing epiphany.
Then the cosmic accident of the drug bust was followed, as by an equal and opposite reaction, by Abbie’s cockeyed, if understandable, decision to flee, threatening to extend the period of our grief indefinitely, as if we were mourning a lost loved one whose body could not be found. Abbie simply didn’t have the temperament that would have allowed him to bow his head and accept what had happened, regardless of the circumstances. His personality was unsuited to submission. So he had to flee the scene of such an overwhelming personal catastrophe. Had he stayed and gone to trial, Abbie would have done so unrepentant, and for that, even more than for his crime itself, he really might have been crushed.
Sometime in September or October 1973, our sister Phyllis received a letter at her home in Mexico City, where she lived with her husband Hilario, a cabinet-level agriculture minister, and their son, Hilario Jr. Inside the envelope, which was postmarked in Mexico, was the familiar lined yellow sheet. Abbie nearly always wrote his letters with a black pen on yellow legal pads. And the letter might have been from Abbie, since he was out on bail, awaiting trial. But the short note was signed “Howard” and was in a hand different from Abbie’s. It began: “Dear Phyllis, would you be willing to help someone who might possibly be a fugitive and whose life is in danger?” More than a little frightened, Phyllis burned the letter and flushed the ashes down the toilet.
She was sure the letter was from Abbie, and it annoyed her that he hadn’t signed it. She found something creepy about getting an anonymous letter from her own brother. Later, Abbie would tell Phyllis that the letter had indeed been from him and that he had written it with his left hand to disguise his handwriting. He had come south of the border for a few days on a sort of scouting expedition, and writing to her was his way of preparing her for the likelihood that he might return soon and more permanently.
Back in New York, Abbie requested a meeting with the Weather Underground. He wanted them to know he was planning to join those who had gone underground before him; in case he ever needed their help, he wanted to be able to call on them. The meeting took place in a darkened movie theater in Brooklyn, during a showing of The Way We Were. The Weather member asked questions, offered advice, and cautioned Abbie about the difficulty of the underground life in general and of the increased challenge of Abbie’s particular case because of his being somewhat older and so well known. When Abbie mentioned that he didn’t think Anita would be joining him, at least not at first, the conversation turned gloomy. “Alone is very tough. None of our people make it alone,” the Weatherman offered.1
On December 4, 1973, Judge Gignoux, who eight months earlier had denied motions for dismissal by the Chicago defendants, now acquitted Abbie on three of the five contempt charges, but still found him guilty of the last two.2 Two days later, on December 6, 1973, he threw out the entire case against all the defendants. This was a complete vindication of the Chicago 8 and a strong tacit condemnation of Judge Hoffman visited upon him by a colleague.
A few days later, Abbie, Anita, and america visited Phyllis in Mexico City. The first night he laid it all out for Phyllis and Hilario. He was facing fifteen or twenty-five years if he went to trial for the cocaine and got convicted and sentenced to hard time. If he was sent to Attica, Abbie was convinced that he would be killed. None of his lawyers were promising he would beat the rap, and Abbie wasn’t willing to risk doing the time.
Overtures had been made to Albania, Algeria, Cuba, Israel, North Korea, North Vietnam, and Sweden to obtain asylum, Abbie explained. Only Israel had said no. The consensus was that Sweden would be the most livable country, but Abbie nixed that idea. He felt it was too far and would be too cold for too many months of year. A little surprisingly, Abbie decided against Cuba as well. He felt that going to a Communist country would close the door forever on his hopes of eventually returning and obtaining a pardon for the coke bust.
Hilario offered to make inquiries about obtaining political asylum in Mexico but said that any such process in Mexico would take six months to arrange. Abbie didn’t feel he could wait that long. But he seemed to be inclined toward Mexico anyway. By the time Abbie left a few days later, Phyllis was convinced he’d made his decision. “I had no idea how or when, but I knew he was coming to Mexico.” The thought frightened her. “I began to feel scared,” she told me recently, “for me, for my son, for my husband.”
During Abbie’s earlier meeting with the Weather Underground in Brooklyn, he’d expressed his support for Anita’s decision not to go underground with him. “It’s too hard on the kid,” he’d said. “[Anita’s] tired of doing my thing. We’ll try a year apart and see.”3 Initially, Abbie may even have liked the idea of making a clean break. But now as the day of his departure neared, the prospect of leaving without Anita and america, perhaps never seeing them again, became increasingly unbearable to him. Up until the very last moment, he wished that she would insist on going with him—“Inside I begged she would change her mind.”4 But he refused to say anything that might influence her. It was too large and terrible a decision to make jointly, one that had to be made by each of them for himself or herself.
Speaking of the months before going underground, he would later say, “I was miserable before I left; it was like falling off a cliff. For two months before I left, I was impotent, never happened before, just wouldn’t get stiffo . . . it was interesting.”5 The gloom that had descended over the whole family had hit Abbie the worst. As he prepared to begin his life as a fugitive, he wasn’t only running from the FBI but also from an urgent inner misery, part circumstantial nightmare, part biochemical depression.
In early January 1974, Abbie asked Phyllis to meet him and me in San Antonio, Texas, on January 17. When the time came, Abbie and I flew down together; Phyllis drove the 1,500 miles up from Mexico City. That evening, the three of us got drunk on tequila, smoked dope, and caroused through the town. Each time Abbie poured himself a shot, he torched the tequila with a cigarette lighter and then gulped it, flame and all. It snowed that night in San Antonio. Back in the hotel room, Abbie showed us $20,000 in cash that had been raised by donations from friends, and that he wanted Phyllis and me to stash away for him in Mexico. Drunk and stoned, we spilled the money all over the bed, throwing it at each other and laughing hysterically. Then we cried ourselves to sleep.
The next day we said our good-byes, wondering if we’d ever see each other again. I thought then that probably we never would; I looked toward the future with a hollow feeling, like a hangover that was going to last for the rest of my life with Abbie out of it. Strangely, that day, January 18, following Judge Gignoux’s action a month earlier, the government dropped all remaining charges against the Chicago 8. Abbie told us the news, reciting it without interest, as if it were a bulletin from a past life. Phyllis and I looked at each other, uncomfortable that we should be happier about Abbie’s news than he was, and feeling sad for him.
Phyllis and I took the $20,000 and drove to Mexico. As we waited in her new green Porsche in the line of cars at the border, Phyllis said she felt scared. I didn’t know if it was fear of losing Abbie forever or terror of having him hanging around. The next day, after she had returned to Mexico City, Phyllis set up a mail drop and an emergency telephone contact, all according to Abbie’s detailed instructions.
Her husband held a politically sensitive government post. I had a factory in Mexico vulnerable to confiscation by the government. And our parents sometimes vacationed in Mexico. By choosing this country for his new life, Phyllis thought Abbie was risking our safety for his own convenience. And yet it moved me to think that Abbie wanted to be in a country where, even if he couldn’t be with us, he still saw nearness to us as a shield against the loneliness he anticipated ahead.
In February or early March 1974, Abbie had a speaking engagement in Richmond, Virginia. From there, he stopped briefly in Atlanta. Then, still not officially a fugitive since his court date was later in the month, he flew to California for a nose job. About ten days later, he was in Mexico City, where Dad and Ma were vacationing, although Abbie didn’t know it. He called Phyllis and arranged to meet her at the Hotel Aristos, downtown.
Seated in the hotel lobby, Phyllis didn’t recognize anyone. Then she found herself staring at a short, dandified man with a swollen nose trying very hard to look like a sophisticated Latin in a sophisticated Latin hotel and failing miserably. The dandy wore a cream-color summer suit, and his hair was very short. When he began to walk toward her, his gait was comical, almost a waddle. Not until he was very near and began to speak to her did Phyllis recognize his voice. Cosmetic surgery had changed Abbie’s nose, but his voice was unmistakable. His first words to his sister were, “This is it,” meaning this was the complete makeover, and how did she like it? She laughed. A few minutes later, she told him that Ma and Dad were only a few blocks away at that very moment.
“Under no circumstances,” Abbie said darkly, “are they to be told that I’m here. It’s going to come down heavy, but I’ll be safe.” He warned Phyllis to be careful, since “they”—the FBI et al.—would be looking for him. Phyllis wasn’t used to seeing Abbie scared, but on that day, missing Anita and america and sensing the protracted isolation to come, Abbie was very scared. Their meeting lasted about half an hour. At the end, Abbie told her he was headed to a safe house in Yelapa, a tiny, beautiful resort town north of Puerto Vallarta. The house was owned by a Columbia Pictures executive and Abbie’s stay there had been arranged by a trusted friend of Abbie’s. He may have been inconsolable, but if he was going to have to suffer he was determined to do it in style. Abbie gave Phyllis the phone number there, to be used only in case of extreme emergency.
That Sunday, Phyllis went to dinner with Ma and Dad in Mexico City. At the end of the meal, Dad suddenly started crying, for no apparent reason. After a while he said to Phyllis, “I think Abbie’s going to come to you for help and I want you to help him.” Phyllis was struck by the similarity between the unusual anxiety she’d seen in Abbie and the equally uncharacteristic sadness our father had expressed to her in his tears and his words. This would be the last time she’d see Dad.
Around the same time, I met with Anita in New York, and we agreed that, for security reasons, we shouldn’t contact each other again for as long as Abbie was underground. Hell, Anita and I had never gotten along anyway. The communal life Abbie had shared with Anita and their friends had been completely disconnected from the one he shared with our family. So Anita may have seen me and our whole family as a kind of threat to the Abbie she knew and loved. With Abbie gone, there was no glue, no reason for us to keep up appearances; the “security reasons” were just our excuse. Now there were no bridges left for me to my brother among his crowd.
Ma and Dad returned home to Worcester. A few days later, Ma called me at the office to say she wanted to talk to me in private, and that she was coming down so I should wait for her out in the parking lot. What Ma wanted to talk to me about was Abbie and Dad. She had gathered from Phyllis that Abbie might be in Mexico and didn’t want me to mention anything about it to Dad. That was all she had to say. It was strange to me that once she broached the subject, she hadn’t wanted to say more. Her concern was practical: she understood Dad’s health to be fragile and didn’t want it shattered by news of Abbie.
The next day, on Saturday, March 23, 1974, Dad took my four-year-old son Justin with him to the men’s club at the YMCA—just like he used to take Abbie and me. I was to meet them afterward. Dad was overweight and had adult-onset diabetes. He had already had two heart attacks and was supposed to be on a strict diet. But when he suggested Weintraub’s deli, I didn’t think to object, since Weintraub’s was our traditional Saturday meeting place. It would turn out to be the last time I would ever see him.
It was early afternoon and Dad and Justin were sitting across from one another at a large table. Dad was wolfing down what we call the Weintraub’s antipasto: chopped liver, chopped herring, salami, a couple of pieces of corned beef and pastrami, egg salad, tuna salad—everything he wasn’t supposed to eat loaded on one plate under a shower of vinegar, oil, and more salt. All designed to get you to Perlman’s Funeral Parlor on the express train. On a side plate, there was kishka, a kind of meatless Jewish sausage made with grain and lots of grease, just to make sure the damage was done. Under the table he had his flask of schnapps. I was mad that day that Dad was drinking around my son and taking so little care of himself. And today, as I remember the sight of him, just days before he died, I am convinced that Abbie never showed more reckless abandon in any courtroom or at any demonstration than Dad did on that day, and on many Saturdays toward the end of his life.
On Monday, March 25, 1974, Abbie’s fugitive years unofficially began when he failed to appear in court at a pretrial hearing. On Wednesday, in the early evening, Dad suffered a heart attack peacefully among his friends in the steam room at the YMCA. After a short ambulance ride, he died at 7:25 p.m. in the local hospital’s emergency room.
Two days later, on Friday, March 29, everyone who was anyone in Worcester turned up at the funeral—the mayor, the chief of police, the chief of the fire department and leading members of the business community, as well as local loansharks and bookmakers, friends and family. Mourners numbered in the hundreds, perhaps as many as a thousand. It was the largest funeral ever held in Temple Emanuel. Of course the local FBI agents were there, standing in the corner, maintaining their standard surveillance of Abbie, without any indication that they might suspect him of being three thousand miles away in Mexico.
I confronted one of the agents, saying he could have left our family in peace for one day. He stood there like a statue, ignoring me. I thought Dad should be the center of attention at his own funeral. Yet everyone I spoke to asked the same question, “Is Abbie coming?”
“I don’t know,” I said to each.
More than one friend of Dad’s approached me at the funeral to whisper a mixture of praise for Dad and put-downs of Abbie—as if it were likely to make me feel better to be reminded of the enduring conflict between them.
A few days after the funeral, Phyllis and her husband Hilario flew to San Francisco, where Abbie had asked her to be in touch with Michael Kennedy, an attorney and Movement figure whom Abbie trusted. Michael was distressed to hear that Abbie had jumped bail; he felt that Abbie could have gone to trial and won.
From San Francisco, Phyllis returned to Mexico, and only then was she able to phone Abbie safely at the emergency number he’d given her.
“Daddy died,” she told him. Abbie said nothing.
On April 15, Patty Hearst and eight other members of the Symbionese Liberation Army robbed a bank, purposefully not shooting out the bank cameras so that the world would see the newspaper heiress on the side of armed revolution. On April 16, Abbie was officially declared a fugitive, after he failed to appear in a New York court for the third time. His bail was forfeited, and a bench warrant was issued for his immediate arrest. The front page of the New York Post for April 16 carried only two stories: the FBI “Steps Up Hunt For Hearst,” and “Abbie Hoffman Jumps Bail.” The only image on the page is a photo of Abbie, looking like hell, taken right after the bust, with the caption, “The search is on.”6
Along with the FBI, Interpol was also alerted by the New York City Special Narcotics Prosecutor. Nine days later, on April 25, 1974, the FBI filed a separate complaint against Abbie, and a warrant for his arrest was issued in federal court for unlawful flight to avoid prosecution. Also on April 25, an urgent teletype memo was sent from the FBI’s New York office to the regional directors of the FBI offices in Boston, Chicago, and Detroit, requesting that they try to trace Abbie through their New Left and narcotics contacts. The memo ends with the caution that Abbie should be considered a “dangerous-extremist” [sic]. And the next day a cablegram was sent from the FBI in Washington to its Foreign Liaison Unit in Mexico City informing them of the federal warrant issue.7
A car with one or two people in it was now parked at the end of our street at all times. The dark four-door Ford was a constant, and intimidating, reminder to us, and to our neighbors, that we were under surveillance—an eerie and frightening reminder of our vulnerability just when the two strongest forces in our lives—Abbie and Dad—had both been taken from us. We suddenly found our circle of friends was much smaller, and didn’t include most of our neighbors. Our few remaining close friends learned not to ask any questions about Abbie.
In the last week of April 1974, I received a package without a return address. It contained Abbie’s passport, his private address book, and an audiocassette. Immediately, Joan took the address book up to the attic of our house and hid it in the rafters, showing me where it was, so we both knew, “in case something happens to one of us,” she said. That’s how spooked we were. This was the first indication I’d received that he was okay and wanted me to know it.
Joan and I waited until 1:00 a.m. that night and then took turns listening to Abbie’s audiotape on earphones—to avert any possible audio surveillance of the house. The cassette started off with a Cat Stevens song, “Oh Very Young,” followed by Abbie’s voice saying, “Oh what I’d give for a corned beef from Weintraub’s and a sour pickle.” I started crying. With all the anticipation and suspense, and with Dad’s recent death weighing heavily on me, Abbie’s opening line made me feel a rush of confused emotions, and yet his words seemed as good a thing to say as anything else. And funny, they were funny, thank God, I took a deep breath and let myself feel how much I missed him and Dad both.
Abbie went on to describe his life in Guadalajara—without naming the place. He said he had found work teaching English, was living in a nice apartment, and enjoying the weather. He had had cards printed, in English, giving his name as Howie Samuels, a writer with a business called Creative Image Agency—CIA—with the address of Abbie’s real literary agent in New York, Elaine Markson. He still had money stashed away. He even sounded a little grateful, although he didn’t say so, for the time away from everything associated with his old life. His talk was chatty and upbeat. Most of it was no more consequential than, “There’s lots of señoritas here, Jack.” His implicit message with every word was, “Everything’s under control.” And Abbie, being Abbie, took that idea a lot further than anyone else would have. He wanted me to know that the drug bust had forced him to change course but wasn’t going to break his stride. If this were going to be his funeral, there would be fireworks, a party to remember.
Of course, I wasn’t buying it. The more he bragged, the more worried I got. Probably the most reassuring part of the tape was the end, where he briefly touched on Dad’s death, said how much he missed Anita and america, and how he wouldn’t be able to stand this loneliness for long. Then, in his usual way, he loaded me down with instructions. The last thing he said was to be careful, since the government would be watching us, adding that we’d get together, but not any time soon. He also gave me a safe address. So now it was official, I was going to be part of Abbie’s underground support team. I went out behind the house, poured Ronson lighter fluid on the cassette, and burned it so that it would leave no trace.
One morning in Guadalajara, Abbie was reading a Mexican newspaper when he recognized a photograph of someone he had met in New York. She was Johanna Lawrenson, a fashion model Abbie had met through his friend Joe LoGiudice. Abbie looked up Johanna and they began spending time together. By the end of the first week of June 1974—around the time that the Democratic National Committee was awarded $775,000 in damages for the Watergate break-in—Abbie and Johanna moved together to San Miguel Allende, a small village that had become an international hot spot, in the mountains a few hours’ drive north of Mexico City. In San Miguel, Abbie enrolled in Spanish classes, began writing his autobiography, and found himself falling in love with Johanna.
In letters to Anita, Abbie tried to suggest that she accept the distance between them and get on with her life: “Maybe what I’m saying is we probably should separate spiritually as well as physically. . . . Go your way, princess. You’re too smart to cut the mustard with a macho maniac like me. . . . I think maybe my love for you is fading. I wish I could say what I feel. It’s just changing.”8
Anita and Abbie didn’t keep things from one another if they could help it. In response to Abbie’s letter, Anita wrote, “I’ve had an affair or two but nothing earthshaking. . . . Jealous? You should only have cause to be jealous. I could use a little excitement.”9 And finally, in mid-July, Abbie wrote, “I’m not sure how to write about [Angel/Johanna] to you because I’m not sure of all my feelings. . . . I should say that she’s good for me and good for us. I’m just unsure about how to write you about another woman I obviously care about.”10 Anita began her next letter, “Dear man who may love another equally—It’s okay. . . . I can’t be jealous. I want you to be happy.”11
Near the end of the summer, Phyllis called from her home in Mexico City to tell me—in our coded language that I was just getting used to—that “Howie” wanted me and Joan to come down for a little family reunion. One month later, toward the end of September, Joan and I flew down to Monterrey, Mexico, 120 miles south of Laredo, Texas. Then we drove to Saltillo, where I had my factory. I spent one day there partly doing business but mostly to shake any FBI tail. That evening we drove back to Monterrey and flew to Mexico City, where we stayed overnight with Phyllis and Hilario. Early the next morning we headed north in a rental car, and by late morning we were high up in the hills of Guanajuato on our way to San Miguel Allende.
Every detail of our itinerary had been written out by Abbie and sent to us by Phyllis on several sheets of the familiar yellow lined pages, covered in Abbie’s recognizable hand, including which airline to fly, what travel agent to use, where to rent our Volkswagen, which roads to take, where to stop en route and where not to stop, ending with where and when we would all rendezvous in San Miguel. Our mood was up. Surrounded by that beautiful landscape, in Mexico’s crisp, dry, late summer, confident that our various diversions had been enough to throw off any surveillance, Joan and I were happy to be together, happy to be outside the U.S., which in recent months had not felt much like the land of the free, and happy to be on our way to see my brother—who, like some exiled general, had called us to him.
For Joan, it was her first trip south of the border. And for both of us it was a great comfort to be on our way to see Abbie, after the long months during which we didn’t know if a meeting like this would ever take place, or if we were ever going to see Abbie again. We were having our little taste of adventure, and it was just like Abbie to have set things up this way—to have turned the dreadful uncertainty of his being on the run into fun and games.
As we turned into San Miguel, we saw another Volkswagen Beetle parked by the side of the road with a man who could have been Abbie bent over the engine in the back. Joan thought it was Abbie; I didn’t. In any case, our instructions were not to stop for anything. We continued into town, parked in front of the church in the main plaza and waited, following Abbie’s orders. A few minutes later, the Volkswagen we had seen before drove up and Abbie jumped out to the sounds of Joan singing out, “I knew that was you.”
For a minute I just stood and stared. Abbie looked better than I had ever seen him look before—relaxed, calm, at peace. His hair was short, and he’d grown a close-cropped beard that seemed to make his eyes shine even brighter. He seemed slim and fit, with his rugged tan, his cowboy boots, and Western-cut slacks—every bit the prosperous young rancher. It’s embarrassing to think of it now, but one year after reaching his all-time low, the image Abbie was cultivating down in Mexico was that of someone living a life of leisure, someone with money. Despite the new nose, Abbie looked like himself, only successful. I guess it made sense somehow, and he played the part well. In fact, we couldn’t see any sign of disguise whatsoever. But it did occur to us, like a passing cloud during these happy moments, that his very familiarity itself might be a kind of disguise.
“Were the instructions okay?” Abbie asked.
“Perfect,” I said.
Abbie hugged Joan, and he and I shook hands warmly. Then he got back into his car and we followed him about a half mile to a hacienda he was renting, complete with Saltillo tile floors, a gorgeous view of the valley, horses corralled out back, and a Viennese cook who doubled as a housekeeper.
Inside the house, Johanna was waiting for us. My first response on meeting her was embarrassment: She’s gorgeous, I thought. And my next thought was that Abbie had it made; he’d really done it, managed to turn something bad into something good: this idyllic life in Mexico that lacked for nothing. I was impressed and jealous. It hadn’t taken Abbie long to make over his life. It almost didn’t seem right; where was his guilt, his sense of shame? But my disfavor didn’t stay with me for more than a moment. I felt good that Abbie was well and happy.
Johanna really was beautiful. She was also very charming, and had that rare quality that made you feel in her presence that you shared with her some common pool of happiness. She made Joan and me feel welcome from the very first. In our minds we couldn’t help comparing her to her predecessors. We felt that she brought into Abbie’s life something that he needed and that neither of his two wives had been able to give him. Abbie and Johanna seemed close and caring of one another in a way I had never observed with either Sheila or Anita. I’m sure a lot of this closeness was sexual. In later years, Johanna would complain to Joan and me that Abbie needed to have sex with her three times a day in order to be satisfied. But I’m also sure that there were many other elements that contributed to their intense closeness. Johanna had taken him up when, despite appearances, he was down and out. She was someone from outside the Movement who had lived in Europe during most of the ’60s and thus was aware of him only as a man, not a public figure. These were things that would have attracted Abbie. And her willingness to share with him the uncertainty of this outlaw time must have moved Abbie deeply. And, ironically, the circumstances of his exile presented him for the first time in his life with the opportunity to devote himself to one woman without the constant competing demands of his work life.
Johanna’s mother, Helen Lawrenson, was a well-known writer, and her father, Jack Lawrenson, was an important progressive labor leader for the National Maritime Union. Being with Abbie, a writer and political leader, may have approximated a homecoming of sorts after the jet-set lifestyle she had known as a model. And she may have been someone who found what Abbie called the “tension and adventure” of the fugitive life exciting. She was his “shiksie,” as Abbie used to call her, and she referred to him as “my Moses.” They would remain together until death parted them.
That evening Abbie himself donned the apron, locked himself in the kitchen, and created a kind of thick soup with meat and vegetables that was unusual and delicious. At first he wouldn’t say what was in it; then, as he served it to us, he turned to Joan, knowing that she was still a little uneasy with the foreignness of Mexico, and said, “Iguana stew, my dear; just the thing for what ails you.” Joan shuddered and refused to eat the soup. But at the same time, Abbie had made her feel at home with his prank, and she appreciated it.
It was a great relief to be close to Abbie again. As the four of us sat around the dinner table, there were many subjects of conversation that were off limits—the drug bust, Dad’s death, Ma, the future—things too sad or too uncertain to share just yet. But it wasn’t that we were hiding these things, just holding off talking about them for a few hours. What was important first was accepting the fact of being together again, accepting it as a kind of blessing that had nearly been denied us, and being thankful for it.
The next day, we made the short drive to Guanajuato. After dinner the night before, Abbie had regaled us with stories of the mummy museum that is the city’s most famous attraction. The story goes that years ago a poor family could not keep up the small annual rent on its plot in the cemetery and was forced to exhume its dead so that the plot could be rented to somebody else. When the day came to dig up the remains of the dead, the corpses came up fully mummified, right down to the family pets, on account of the composition of the soil here. A whole culture grew up around these mummified figures, centered on the Day of the Dead, the Mexican equivalent of our Halloween.
For Abbie, Johanna, Joan, and me, the macabre humor of the Day of the Dead seemed fitting enough. During the drive to Guanajuato from San Miguel, we smoked a joint in the car, listening to McCartney’s Band on the Run by Paul McCartney and Wings on cassette. In Guanajuato, we consumed an abundance of wine with lunch. As we wandered around the city, suddenly quite proud of our broken Spanish, Abbie kept us laughing, telling us that the other people visiting Guanajuato were there to check up on their ancestors: “Well, they’re all here checking on their Ma and Dad, the dog and the cat, digging them up, making sure they’re fine.” We snacked on mummy candy. And it seemed about as good a way of celebrating a world gone to hell as any other. Dad hadn’t been dead five months, and Abbie and I hadn’t talked about that yet. I guess that at that moment, we weren’t looking for ways to make things less weird. It was enough to have this expression of just how weird things were. Like the little figurine skeletons on sale all over the town, we too felt like we were laughing at death.
That night, back in San Miguel, the four of us went out to the local American nightclub. Among the crowd of American tourists who had come to San Miguel to study Spanish, Abbie and Johanna—the mysterious, dashing writer “Howie Samuels” and his international fashion model companion—were anything but anonymous. To begin with, she was about three inches taller than he was. Dancing together, Johanna dominated the room vertically, while Abbie conquered it horizontally, cutting up the dance floor, needing a lot of space. They were both good dancers, and together they looked glamorous. You didn’t have to be suspicious to wonder who they really were.
When they sat down, Abbie and Johanna told us how a week earlier, at the same nightclub, Abbie had gotten into an argument with a couple of law students on the subject of the Chicago Conspiracy trial. The students had been saying how the defendants had had no choice but to act the way they did, since the judge had systematically denied all their motions. Abbie had defended Judge Julius Hoffman and had even stood up to glare down at the two students to say, “There has to be decorum in the courtroom!” I would have given anything to see Abbie say that. I guess 1974 was just the year that everything got turned upside down.
Sunday morning, after coffee, Abbie and I took a walk around the plaza and talked. He told me that his defense attorneys were preparing motions to have the drug case dismissed, and he felt sure that something would be worked out legally. I took that to mean some way for him to return, to return as Abbie Hoffman, without doing time in prison.
I gave him my impressions of Dad’s funeral, how so many people had come, more than I would have expected, and how I thought Dad himself would have felt proud of the turnout, would have taken it as a tribute to his life, a sign that he’d done good. And as best as I could remember, I told him who had come and who had been absent. And how the question on everybody’s tongue was where was Abbie.
Abbie asked about Ma, and then after I told him she was holding up, he added, “You don’t have to worry about her. She’s a good soldier.” I started to kid him about the soldier routine. I don’t think he’d even realized that he’d started to organize his topsy-turvy world according to good and bad soldiers. After I called him on it, I felt he made a mental note, a reminder that people sometimes resent the “this is a war we’re in” stuff.
Then I kidded him about something else. The day before, Abbie had given me an early draft of the first chapters of his autobiography. Mixed in with the basic story was a continuous stream of exaggerations, while many of the early experiences that I felt were most significant were left out. I told him this now. His response: “Jack, they’ve got to be able to read it in Peoria.” And then, as if to mollify me, he added, “I got you in the book, Jack.” He didn’t mind my criticisms, but he wasn’t looking for advice, either.
In many ways, Abbie had achieved the impossible in the year since the drug bust: He had reinvented himself. And done so with his usual ebullience. It didn’t seem right to drag him back down to earth. The sadness and the shame of the drug bust, of his derailed Movement work, of his two fatherless families—none of that needed to be talked about yet. For now, Abbie was making sure he survived. Even without knowing how long it would last, we felt grateful that things seemed to have gotten this much better so soon.
He was still taking risks, like the way he’d danced with Johanna at the nightclub—as if every time he pulled things together he had to wrestle with his own wrecker’s impulse to tear them apart again. And the craziness of life underground had begun to take on its own logic: Here he was running from who he was, and then what does he do in his spare time but write an autobiography. You just had this feeling that his life was turning out marvelously and coming undone at the same time. And instead of struggling against the contradictions, Abbie was embracing them.
He made it look easy and fun. That was for the benefit of his “troops,” to keep our morale high. He wanted us to feel that we were on the winning team—and it was working. After Joan and I left that day, on our way back to Mexico City and the flight back to Boston, I couldn’t help feeling proud that my brother was beating the odds, thumbing his nose at the whole world.
But the abnormally extreme circumstances of his life as a fugitive were an almost constant test of his sanity and endurance. Already there were cracks in the surface. His moods had begun to swing back and forth, leaving him often in states of extreme despair and exhaustion. Sometimes he would call Phyllis to chastise her for not being a good soldier in his army. And then Phyllis, outraged, would give me a signal call in Framingham to head for a safe public phone, and when I got there she would vent her anger: “Who does he think he is, Napoleon?” she’d say. I’d laugh and tell Phyllis not to worry. I felt he was back in the driver’s seat, back in charge of his life, at least for the moment, and that went a long way toward consoling me for the grief of the last year. But Phyllis wasn’t wrong to be worried. Abbie could make his fugitive life look fun and easy, but looks were deceiving and despite the bravado of his new life, the things he was running from had a way of not letting him go.
On October 3, 1974, Anita published an article in the Village Voice entitled “Life without Abbie,” describing the hardship of having to raise america alone, in semi-poverty, and in the face of frequent intrusions from large groups of FBI agents searching for Abbie in “our refrigerator” and “the trunk of the Volkswagen.” “The police agencies may succeed in making me a little paranoid,” she wrote, “but they will not succeed in making me afraid. To live in fear of one’s enemies is to let them win. I’ll be damned if I’ll let nightmares of FBI flatfoots disturb my sleep.”12
In a way, Anita fully shared Abbie’s exile, with courage not unlike his, and suffering a comparable degree of isolation. You could even argue that hers was the harder road, largely because she was now left to raise america alone. She worked with a group of indigent young mothers on the Lower East Side. But just surviving economically was proving difficult. In addition, unlike Abbie, the FBI and other government agencies knew exactly where to find Anita. Shortly after Abbie became a fugitive, the IRS informed her that she owed $5,000 in back taxes on the $25,000 that Abbie had donated to the Panther bail fund, and then forfeited when the Panther whose bail he had helped raise skipped town. In the end, Anita would manage, proving that without Abbie she still had the perseverance to tough it out.
That winter, Abbie and Johanna were making frequent, short trips back into the States, to California mostly, and in large part their income came from bringing electronics equipment—stereos, radios, tape decks—back across the border into Mexico where they could sell them for substantially more than what they paid stateside.
In his calls, Abbie had gotten me used to following an elaborate protocol to throw off surveillance. I’d get a one-ring call at any hour that would send me bounding out of the house and into my car for a three-minute drive to a bank of pay phones in Framingham Center, where the phone would be ringing even before I could get out of the car. Abbie would tell me his and Johanna’s latest activities, and then he’d spend most of the call giving me instructions for things he wanted done.
In a letter written to me sometime in 1974 and signed “Alan Ladd,” Abbie wrote that he had no grasp of reality and couldn’t care less.”13
Abbie was, as usual, pushing the limits. But this time the playing field was his very identity. In another letter to me, he wrote that he was very excited about upcoming interviews and the prospect of big-money book deals that were going to allow him to set up hundred-thousand-dollar trusts for each of his three children. Hundred-thousand-dollar trust funds for each of his kids?! Who did he think he was? It was as if he really had lost all sense of reality, just like he’d said in the Alan Ladd letter.
As 1974 ended, Abbie was heading for a full-blown personality crisis. He’d proved to himself that he could outrun the FBI. He’d proved he could do just about anything except look at himself in the mirror. He now traveled with a trunk full of disguises. And he was beginning to question whether any one disguise was more real than the others. He was beginning to suspect that Abbie Hoffman was just another disguise, as artificial as the rest.
Until 1975, the FBI had been unable to apprehend any leftist fugitives at all. An FBI informer by the name of Larry Grathwohl had managed to infiltrate the Weather Underground briefly in early 1970.
But immediately afterward the group tightened its ranks, and no government agent was able to get that close again. Jane Alpert had given herself up in the fall of 1974, but even she had done so out of exhaustion, not fear of imminent capture. Patty Hearst was still on the run. So were around thirty members of the Weather Underground, most of whom became fugitives after Grathwohl’s testimony, facing massive assault and conspiracy charges and successfully evading intense FBI manhunts going on now for five years. Surviving underground itself was part of the Weather Underground strategy—to explode the myth of FBI effectiveness, and with more practical goals as well.
During this period, the Weather Underground had claimed responsibility for over twenty bombings—including that of New York City Police Headquarters, ITT, the State Department building, the Pentagon, and the Capitol. Usually the bombings had come directly after, and in response to, government violence such as the killing of George Jackson, the bombings of Hanoi and Haiphong, and the C.I.A.-supported coup that overthrew Salvador Allende’s democratically elected government in Chile. The ability of the “Weather Bureau” to coordinate actions and refine a party line in the face of the massive commitment of man-hours and money that the Justice Department was devoting to it—including offers of immunity—was one of the few political developments during this period that interested Abbie. And I think it was partly due to these “successes” of the Weather Underground that in 1975 and 1976 Abbie would again begin talking a harder line (as he had for a time after the Chicago protests), saying he was a committed Communist, and that other celebrities should call themselves Communists, too.14
Then the FBI started getting lucky. In early March 1975, they arrested Pat Swinton, a fugitive bombing suspect. On March 13, they arrested six-year fugitive Cameron Bishop. And a few weeks later, they captured Susan Saxe, who had been on the Bureau’s Ten Most Wanted list for over four years. Rumors began circulating that they had cracked the Underground network. And it was during this period that Abbie had been most fearful of capture.
As it turned out, the FBI had not infiltrated the Weather Underground or its overground support system. The flurry of arrests had little to do with FBI effectiveness and much to do with the natural and self-imposed limits on how long an individual can stand the isolation of life underground—usually five years at most.15
Toward the end of 1974, Abbie had contacted people he knew at TVTV (Top Value Television), a counterculture video documentary collective, and struck a deal for a video interview. He asked for $5,000 and some television equipment. They agreed to $3,000. The interview would be taped under conditions to be tightly controlled by Abbie, including the choice of interviewer. Abbie chose Ron Rosenbaum, a journalist he’d known since 1968 in Chicago, and whom he trusted.16
On March 13, 1975, there was a 7:00 a.m. telephone assignation at a phone booth in Hollywood, where Rosenbaum received instructions from Abbie to pick up plane tickets in a nearby garbage Dumpster for himself and video documentary producer Michael Shamberg. Abbie gave the two the aliases Mr. Ray and Mr. Bremer, after Dr. King’s and George Wallace's alleged assassins. Under strict instructions to call or speak to no one, and with Abbie’s warning that they were being watched at all times by female “professionals”—female to ensure against FBI infiltration, since there were as yet no female FBI agents—they were to fly to Sacramento, where more “professionals” would meet them upon deplaning, and pick up their luggage for them.
Rosenbaum and Shamberg accepted the cloak-and-dagger machinations in good fun at first. Arriving in Sacramento, they were hustled out of the terminal into a waiting van, stripped, forced to wear dark glasses with the insides taped over, driven around for hours in physical discomfort, and treated generally more as kidnapping victims than as journalists on their way to an interview. When they finally met Abbie later in the day in a nondescript hotel room—surrounded by props that included posters of Lenin and Patty Hearst, and a copy of Prairie Fire, the secretly published Weather Underground book on building a New Left—Rosenbaum suspected that maybe thus wasn’t Abbie at all, but someone disguised as Abbie Hoffman. To resolve the matter, Abbie began the interview by writing his trademark signature on a chalkboard. Then he informed Rosenbaum and Shamberg that in addition to the half-dozen disguised “professionals” they’d already encountered, there were two outside they hadn’t seen yet who were armed, committed to protecting those within, and they weren’t “gonna throw their hands up if the police entered our perimeters. Far from it.”
General Abbie had gone to great lengths to make it very clear to anyone who eventually read Rosenbaum’s articles or saw Shamberg’s video that behind him there really was a secret army. He further implied that his army was prepared to respond violently to any acts of violence on the part of the police or the FBI. And he wanted to leave Rosenbaum with the impression that he was connected in some way with the Weather Underground, although when questioned directly on that point by Rosenbaum, Abbie would refuse to clarify the nature of the connection. Rosenbaum guessed, probably rightly, that Abbie’s anarchist temperament made him incompatible with Weather discipline.
When the TVTV video interview eventually aired on public television and Rosenbaum’s two-part article appeared in New Times, Abbie’s strategy to create an impression of a secret society, armed, dangerous, and deadly serious, backfired. Instead of impressing Rosenbaum and Shamberg—both of whom began as extremely sympathetic to Abbie’s cause—Abbie had alienated them and turned their initial goodwill into distrust. In both the articles and the video documentary, Abbie’s subterfuges nearly replaced him as the main subject. Had he or had he not been wearing a disguise? Why all the cloak and dagger? Who were his associates? And even, was this really Abbie?
Yet in early April, fresh from what he felt had been the complete success of the TVTV interview, which was still a month away from airing, Abbie decided to repeat the experience. He contacted Ken Kelley, a former underground press editor of the Ann Arbor Argus and the Berkeley Barb who now wrote for Playboy, to see if he might be able to interest the magazine in an interview. The response from Playboy was positive. There followed several weeks of intrigue—instructions by prearranged pay phone connections, code names, addresses in various states—designed to give Kelley the impression of a sophisticated, nationwide, radical underground network, and culminating in a secret rendezvous with Kelley in Phoenix.
Arriving at the airport, Kelley was met by a car driven by Johanna and asked to wear a blindfold for the drive to their destination. When he was finally allowed to take off the blindfold, he was in what looked like a hotel room facing Abbie in the uniform of a New York City police sergeant. When Kelley began to press for “three straight days of Q. and A.” for Playboy, Abbie played hard to get, saying, according to Kelley, “We’ll see. I have to consult my collective, you know, before I can give you a yes or no. I’m a full-fledged Commie now.” Finally it was agreed that Abbie would keep Memorial Day weekend, about a month away, free for Kelley, and the journalist was sent back to the airport with assurances that he would be contacted.17
Meanwhile Abbie had hemorrhoid surgery that left him immobilized and screaming with pain for an entire week. Still not fully recovered, he suddenly decided to take Johanna to Vegas. Shortly after they arrived, Abbie broke down. For hour after hour during most of an entire day and night he yelled out his real name over and over. It was a bona fide nervous breakdown, as if the different parts of his personality were actually colliding head-on.
In the middle of it, standing at a pay phone in the street in Vegas, he called me. I answered the phone to his voice shouting one sentence at me over and over: “Can you believe they don’t believe I’m Abbie Hoffman?” Then Johanna got hold of the receiver, and said to me, simply: “What am I going to do?” I had no idea what was going on other than that Abbie sounded extremely manic. I couldn’t know how bad it was.
Abbie himself would describe his Vegas collapse vividly a few years later:
We have been racing madly for days, a step or two ahead of the body snatchers. Angel is trying to figure out what preparations are needed for what seems like inevitable capture. She’s exhausted from watching the man she loves turn into a monster. My lips are cracked from hours of talk binge. I think that the doctors inserted a transmitting device during the operation. I’m trying to decode the beeps. I crawl rather than walk, avoiding the gaze of the people behind the two-way mirror. . . . The TV set is talking to me. Everything is code. Saigon is being liberated. Dominoes are falling in my head. Soon Las Vegas will fall . . .18
In the end, Johanna was able to get friends from California to come to Vegas to help control him.19 And from there Johanna found a way to convince Abbie to go with her to San Francisco and see a doctor there who prescribed some form of short-term medication.20 Was it here that Abbie was diagnosed as suffering from manic depression? Or did that happen a few years later in 1979? My memory fails me. Somehow, the good times remain more fully differentiated for me. I recall them without confusing either the month or the year. But the outbreaks of mania and depression that would overtake Abbie once or twice a year from 1975 onward blur together for me, since they were largely repetitive, almost seeming to exist outside of time altogether, like recurring nightmares.
By Memorial Day weekend, the date of the first long meeting with Ken Kelley in San Diego, Abbie was still only partially recovered from his breakdown. When Abbie and Johanna arrived, Kelley noticed “there was a choppiness to his gestures; a haunted look would enshroud his eyes from time to time. I couldn’t figure out why, but Abbie scared me.”21 They decided to do the interview by the ocean in Mexico, making the drive from San Diego and arriving in Guyamas on Saturday evening.
While Abbie rested at the hotel, Kelley and Johanna had a drink in town, where a freak accident occurred. A brawl broke out at the far end of the bar. A full can of beer was hurled, missed its intended destination and hit Johanna, opening a gash in her face. Kelley helped get Johanna to a doctor and spent the rest of the evening trying to make sure she was stitched up in a way that would prevent scarring—a major problem for a model. Inside stitching was arranged, with only a butterfly bandage on the outside. A few months later a Miami plastic surgeon would be able to sand away all visible traces of the scar.
Finally back at the hotel, they had to break the news to Abbie. He jumped out of bed and said that they had to return to the United States right away, Kelley and Johanna by plane, Abbie alone in the car. While they passed through the hotel lobby in the predawn hours, a very strange parade of familiar American faces filed through the lobby around them. There was Liza Minnelli, Burt Reynolds, Gene Hackman. This time, Abbie wasn’t hallucinating. It turned out the actors were shooting the film Lucky Lady at the hotel. As soon as Abbie got wind of it, despite the hour, Johanna’s condition, and his own sense of the urgency of their departure, he began acting up for the film crew, doing his best to persuade them that he was a big Hollywood producer. As Kelley tells it, the cast concluded instead that “he was an obnoxious creep.” His manic intensity only increased with each passing hour into the night. By the time he drove them to the airport for their flight, both Kelley and Johanna just wanted to be free of him.
Abbie’s manic phase gradually subsided, and with it his fear that he faced imminent capture. In Kelley’s description, Thanksgiving Day 1975 found Abbie smiling behind dark glasses from the front seat of a white T-Bird tooling along a thin strip of road in the middle of a vast and sprawling ranch in Texas, Johanna next to him driving, Jerry Rubin in the back seat laughing, and Ken Kelley, there to put the finishing touches on the Playboy interview, sitting next to Rubin. Abbie even turned to apologize to Kelley for his behavior in the spring. Those days already seemed far in the past. In Kelley’s description, Abbie is now much better off.22
By January 1976, fleeting visions of Thunderbird grandeur notwithstanding, Abbie and Johanna had in fact graduated from a Volkswagen bug to a Volkswagen minibus. Abbie told me he’d bought it from a guy who won it on The Price Is Right. Abbie and Johanna spent much of their time in the United States in the minibus, and made frequent trips to California, where he had friends and places to stay, where the underground network was strong, and where he felt more comfortable now than he did back East. For several months they lived communally with another couple in Santa Fe, and Abbie worked as a cook.
Early 1976 was a strange kind of high-water mark for me, a time when positive things resurfaced, magically, after the long hopelessness we had all felt following Abbie’s drug bust and Dad’s death. I was spending more time with Joan and our two children and was preparing to sell Worcester Medical. I felt good in a way I haven’t felt since.
My decision to sell the business was something I felt certain about. The market was right, the business was ripe. I could—and eventually did—get the price I wanted. And I planned to devote more time to my second business, manufacturing operating room disposables, which seemed to me to have more long-term potential. But Ma didn’t want me to sell the company that Dad had built. It had been his whole life’s achievement, and now it was a kind of living memorial to him and to our family that, in Ma’s eyes, I was preparing to demolish.
On Sunday, February 10, 1976, I was in Mexico City on business. I had been awakened around dawn by a shaking. I opened my eyes to see the ceiling fixture swaying. I became fully awake with the certainty that I was going to die, there and then, as if in a dream. I’d never experienced that feeling before. I pulled my pants on with the thought that at least this way they’d find my wallet on me and I’d be identified. Then, barefoot and shirtless, I ran out of the room and down ten flights of stairs. The stairwell was separating from the wall as I descended.
In the lobby was a crowd of shocked European tourists milling about, wrapping themselves in wool blankets being handed out by hotel staff. I called Phyllis. She called Abbie, who happened to be in town. It turned out the earthquake had registered 7.2 on the Richter scale. And while I sat in the lobby with my hands trembling, waiting for somebody to come, I watched the people around me and slowly tried to fathom my own fear of dying as I had just experienced it.
As I began to come around, I found myself wanting to see Abbie very badly. And then, quite suddenly, there he was right next to me inside the Hotel Ángel lobby. Abbie and Johanna had gotten Phyllis’s call and rushed right over. By coincidence, Johanna’s mother was with them. Once they’d gotten me out of the hotel, it was decided that Johanna and her mom would take the van, and Abbie and I would have the day to ourselves.
Abbie insisted we had to do something in honor of the earthquake, and decided we should take a cab ride to the shrine of Guadalupe to join the procession of devotees making the miles-long pilgrimage on their knees. When we arrived, Abbie told me to get on my knees, which I did, and after a little while he joined me. And he was right: Abbie knew something about what quieted the spirit after moments of terror like I’d experienced that morning. Moving down the street on my knees, I felt my strength come back to me.
In Guadalupe I told Abbie I was planning on selling Worcester Medical. He nodded. The company was my affair, not something he would have an opinion about, although I think he appreciated my telling him first. I told him the amount I expected to sell it for—around $350,000—and again he just nodded, as if the subject were one that didn’t interest him. He told me that he and Johanna were living with friends outside Mexico City and traveling around in their Volkswagen van. He didn’t tell me who the friends were, or the places they were visiting, and I didn’t ask.
I would have liked to ask him what he felt about my having taken over the family business, built it into a successful company, and now selling it (the deal would go through the following July). But I knew it was a subject that was too loaded for us to talk about straight out. In his two years underground, much of it spent under duress, Abbie had assumed my loyalty, asked for and received my help, and gotten me to take risks on his behalf many times. But he’d never asked me for money, even when he knew I had it, even though he wasn’t usually shy about asking other people for money when he needed it. I think that instinctively he saw the money I earned through Worcester Medical as Dad’s money, since Dad had started the company. So he would always ask me for the things he knew were all mine—my ideas, my trust, even my anger, but almost never my money. He knew I’d take care of Ma. But if money were going from one to the other, he wanted it to be from him to me, from elder brother to younger brother. Throughout his career, whenever he signed a contract for a book or some other deal, he’d make sure there was some angle in it for me, usually the right to distribute at a good percentage. So now when I was talking about selling the business he just nodded as if he’d rather talk about something else.
Later that day over lunch, Abbie handed me a manila envelope with four or five handwritten sheets inside. It was something he intended as an op ed piece for The Boston Globe that he wanted me to carry back to the States for him, a remembrance of Dad he’d written that he was calling “I Remember Papa.” I’ve always liked the things Abbie wrote when he turned his lights inward, and I wanted to read it right in front of him. But he asked me to wait until I was on the plane.
In “I Remember Papa,” Abbie described how his views on our father kept changing as he worked on his autobiography, even though Dad was already two years dead. “I realize how much my father taught me and how much I miss him now,” he wrote.
I know he tried his best, and I understand it wasn’t his fault he died unhappy. His bitterness about life near the end was not any of his own doing. He adopted America’s values without question, he supported its wars, its courts, its charities, its police, its government. He had great trust in America’s leaders.
Watergate killed my father. He had argued throughout 1972 in support of Nixon, and finally events proved Dad wrong even to himself. Unfortunately, he died before Nixon resigned. He passed away a loyal citizen, but with a lingering doubt that maybe his meshuggener (crazy) son had some good points to make after all.
The Globe would print “I Remember Papa” on the op-ed page on June 28, 1976. It was about Abbie needing to see Dad more clearly in order to see himself clearly. To me, reading it was like seeing Dad and Abbie walking side by side one last time.
I didn’t hear from Abbie for a couple of months. Then suddenly in late April 1976, I got a call at home from Johanna, using her code name, “Jane,” and directing me to one of our safe pay phones. The phone was already ringing as my car pulled up. I answered with the old fear in my gut, to hear Johanna’s voice anxiously repeating my code name.
“Jason?”
“Yes,” I answered.
“Meet me in San Antonio—tomorrow,” she continued in the same breath. “Barry”—Abbie’s code name—“has had an emergency and has had to leave the country. I’ll meet you in San Antonio at . . .” and she named a hotel. Then she hung up, leaving me without a clue other than the fact that they were counting on me.
The next morning I was on a flight to San Antonio, trying not to think about what I was going to find out when I got there. At the hotel, Johanna told me that Playboy had betrayed them. She said they had had to leave all their belongings at my factory near Saltillo, and then Abbie had flown to Canada, while Johanna drove the van to San Antonio. She wanted me to help her sell it.
Johanna didn’t show me the Playboy article. It was already on the stands, and I could have just bought it. But for the moment she needed my help, not my opinion, so I left it alone.
On the first day in San Antonio we couldn’t find a buyer for the van. In the late afternoon, we returned to the motel to find the place overrun with reporters and police. We almost ran. Then I asked someone in the crowd what was going on. He told me they were having a reception for presidential candidate George Wallace. The next day we managed to sell the van and then I took Johanna to the airport. From there she flew east without telling me her exact destination.
In Canada, Abbie was in a manic phase again, convinced that the Playboy article had made him appear, “racist, sexist, and egotistical,” and had revealed hiding places that would now allow the FBI to plug into his underground network. He was ranting against the perceived betrayal by Kelley and Playboy for hours on end, and, without Johanna to ground him, he was out of control.
As soon as he’d arrived in Canada, he’d called the three Movement journalists he felt he could trust at that moment and got them to come immediately to help him launch a media counterattack, calling it an “underground press conference.”23 The three were Jeff Nightbyrd, former editor of The Rat (an alternative newspaper), who had already written about Abbie underground in the December 4, 1975, Austin Sun; Bob Fass of WBAI radio and an old friend; and Abe Peck, elder statesman of Movement journalists and once editor and publisher of the Seed. According to a long article published by Nightbyrd in the May 3 Village Voice, Abbie’s friends were sympathetic but perplexed. Had Abbie been betrayed by Kelley and Playboy, or was he snapping under the pressure and isolation of life as a fugitive? Interestingly, the most powerful material in the Nightbyrd article doesn’t concern the Playboy interview at all, but Abbie’s descriptions of life on the run:
When a fugitive asks someone for help they’re saying, “I trust you with my life.” How many experiences in American society allow for that kind of human interaction? Certainly not jumping into bed with someone, certainly not going into business together. I’d say it makes for a deeper experience than even love. . . . The experience of going underground taught me to ask for help when I needed it.24
Abbie also talked about his (temporary) conversion to Communism, about Johanna, and about Anita. He described Johanna—“Angel”—as equally comfortable hitchhiking across the Midwest or dancing at a debutante ball, and how “Anita and I have a sacred bond between us that’s overcome the craziness of pop love.” It was as if one part of his brain were condemning the betrayal by Playboy while another part was simultaneously constructing—fantasizing—a fugitive paradise out of the shattered pieces of his life.
Abbie’s calls to my house became frequent and suddenly free of any security concerns. His anger at Kelley knew no bounds. And of course he was wrong as hell. He was paranoiacally accusing people who had been trying to help him. In Soon to Be a Major Motion Picture, Abbie describes himself as “terror stricken.”25 I believe it may have been the view in the mirror—his emotional honesty during the interview more than the blown underground cover—that had Abbie terrorized after Playboy hit the stands.
The May Playboy interview that had Abbie so upset all during the spring of 1976 was one of the more frank and unassuming public exhibitions of Abbie’s career. In it, Abbie wasn’t always an inspiration, but he talked straight—about the drug bust, about doing time, a lot about drugs, and a lot about sex. I think that there was something about the venue, something about the fact that it was Playboy that made him treat the interview with real respect. It made a difference to Abbie that Playboy wasn’t a Movement publication, and yet, as Abbie saw it, the magazine was “clearly taking a risk . . . in effect saying that it won’t cooperate with the Government in its attempt to capture and cage me. . . . I think it’s very brave and courageous [of Playboy].”26 In return for the favor, Abbie said a lot of things that were simple, true, and moving.
Describing his 1973 parting from Anita, for example, he said, “At first, we were so busy getting mobilized, in kind of a trance, nothing really hit us. When it did, we just cried. Nothing is as intimate as crying with someone—not loving, not balling.” But something had happened in Abbie’s mind between the time the interview process had begun, in the spring of 1975, and the time the published interview appeared a year later, so that the unusual candor with which he initially approached the interview was no longer tolerable to him.
Meanwhile, Abbie’s jag in Canada continued unabated. After his “press conference,” he left Montreal for a small off-season motel cabin in the Laurentians, about forty miles northwest of Montreal. Phoning anyone and everyone in the Unted States from his hotel room, he ran up a substantial bill that he couldn’t pay. He was hauled off to jail and used his one call to contact Marty Carey in Woodstock, New York. Carey took $300 from his son’s bar mitzvah fund and drove through the night to bail Abbie out.
Then Abbie tried to contact the Cuban Embassy in Ottawa, thinking he would at last take asylum in Cuba. But they froze him out, thinking, Abbie would later claim, that he was a CIA agent impersonating Abbie Hoffman. Carey was able to persuade Abbie to return with him to Woodstock, where, together with neighbors Stew Albert and Ed Sanders, he tried to calm Abbie down. But Abbie was completely paranoid—convinced on one hand that he was about to be captured, and on the other hand drumming up fantastic new projects, including a plan to market Cuban cigars in the Unted States. He claimed that Fidel Castro had granted him an exclusive concession and wanted to bring together some local folk musicians to record a promotional jingle he’d written. He refused to let anyone call him by his real name and walked around carrying a hunting knife.27
Abbie left Carey, returned to Canada to the same off-season resort area in the Laurentians, and rented an apartment. Still desperate, he placed frequent calls to Mayer Vishner, a trusted friend in New York, who became convinced that Abbie was in serious emotional trouble. Vishner consulted with Dave Dellinger, and the two of them made the drive to Abbie’s hideout, to try and help. But Abbie was inconsolable and nothing much had changed by the time Vishner and Dellinger left.
Abbie moved into a fleabag hotel in Montreal and found a job tarring the roof of an apartment building. He began confessing his identity to people he met. But they either didn’t believe him or didn’t know who Abbie Hoffman was.
By his own description, his emotional state was “quite frayed.” But that was an understatement. He and Johanna had agreed to live separately, fearing FBI detection if they surfaced as a couple. But without her, he had come completely undone. His life was hanging by a thread. As the Montreal Olympics began, he would write six years later, “I alternated between being manic, staying up all night, and being extremely depressed, not getting out of bed for long periods, not talking to anyone. For the first time in my life I contemplated suicide. . . . But what brought me to the edge of hysteria was an odd coincidence. One of Canada’s Olympic athletes was a woman middle-distance runner. I’d turn on the TV and stare in bewilderment at an ad that said: ‘Come to Montreal and see Abby run.’ Totally bizarre. I was starting to flip out.”28 In an article he would write for the June 1977 issue of Oui magazine, he described this period even more forcefully:
I cried uncontrollably, realizing that I had chased away everyone I loved and had prepared myself for self-annihilation. I craved death but lacked the energy or initiative to do the deed. Instead I lay in bed and waited. Terror crept through my bones. . . . Every day began with thoughts of suicide and turning myself in; I was convinced that I had failed all those real and imaginary people cheering for me to go the distance.29
One day Abbie met a McGill medical student with an apartment to sublet. Inside the apartment, Abbie noticed a copy of Steal This Book on a shelf. He took it down, pointed to the picture on the back, and said, “I’m him. I’m in trouble. I’m very depressed. I need help,” and collapsed.30 The student settled Abbie into the apartment and put him in touch with a psychiatrist friend who began seeing Abbie on a daily basis and even became his regular tennis partner. Describing his state of mind, Abbie would write, “I’d already identified myself as manic-depressive, and knew it was related to my situation. Living underground is a form of functional schizophrenia. . . . I’d had six different identities. My head was splitting apart, and I had to do something.”31
By late summer 1976, Johanna had destroyed all traces of her previous life with Abbie and moved into her family’s summer cottage on Wellesley Island in the Thousand Island region of New York State, just south of the Canadian border. Her terror that she and Abbie were about to be captured by the FBI had abated. Abbie and Johanna were talking regularly on the phone. They decided that the “loneliness and hardship of being apart was worse than the risk of being together.”32 They agreed she would drive to Montreal, gather Abbie and his television set, and they would reconstruct their lives together. At the border, Abbie claimed for them the unique distinction of having smuggled a TV set into the United States.
That fall, Anita published To america with Love: Letters from the Underground. The book contained letters between Abbie and Anita during the period from April 1974 to March 1975, and it is a beautiful love story. Abbie had little to do with the compiling of To america. It was very much Anita’s book. But Abbie completely endorsed the project. And in the end the book does reveal with great poignancy the tenderness that truly existed between them. By the time of its publication in 1976, whatever Abbie felt for Anita now coexisted with that other great love that he felt for Johanna, upon whom he was now increasingly dependent.