Tag Archives: Summer of Love

DESPERADO DECONSTRUCTED–1969-70, Part 2 of 3

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A picture drawn in 1968 of my older brother Jerry, which also reflects how I saw myself, especially after our dreams for the “Summer of Love” began to crumble and fall apart.

After returning to Fort Worth from Haight-Ashbury in the summer of 1968, I was in an emotional and mental crisis. I had seen, and partially registered, some of the inconsistencies, some of the dysfunction, and the short-sightedness of the youth revolution in San Francisco at one of its central meccas; and yet I was also still alienated from my parents and their version of culture, religion, and life as well. They saw that I was suicidal for a while and, I am sure, prayed for me a lot. Yet, by the time the fall semester of what would be my first year in college rolled around, I had decided to make another stab at posing for the revolution with my old friends. I tried to register for the Vietnam draft as a conscientious objector in downtown Fort Worth; but was rejected and put into the normal lottery with everyone else, number 165. I moved into an apartment on the campus of the University of Texas at Arlington with a couple of friends, and our place became a hangout for a group of about twenty like-minded comrades. We formed a rock band, took drugs, played concerts at area colleges, preached and practiced “free love,” and looked for ways to make our mark as campus revolutionaries.

At the same time, I was constantly troubled by what, at an increasingly conscious level, I recognized as the weakness, ignorance, and arrogance of my and my friends’ positions. And I continued to read in secret other sources that put me in contact with a Christian view of things. Most significant in this regard was the Gospel of John, which gave me a window into the life of a person whose faithfulness was unlike anything or anyone else I knew, both scary and somehow reassuring. But I was in a state of cognitive dissonance, still trying to keep up appearances as a heroic young revolutionary. There was still a good deal of deconstruction left to do in my life, much more than I could have imagined.

As part of our revolutionary effort, I and several others in our group joined and helped to start the UTA chapter of the “Students for a Democratic Society” (SDS). This was a counterpart at that time to the kind of political philosophy one hears of today (in 2020) from people like A.O.C., Black Lives Matter, and others on the Left. Our group organized and participated in various public demonstrations, joining our voices with what were, in retrospect, perhaps sometimes “righteous” and sometimes not so righteous causes. We organized, for example, a “Pro Castro Rally” in one of Arlington’s public parks. We put up posters and sent out brochures. Bernie Sanders would have fit right in. On the day of the rally, as our speakers tried to hail the virtues of Castro and communist Cuba through a public address system, we were surprised to find that a large group of anti-Castro Cuban refugees (who had lost their homes, sometimes their families, and their country to Castro’s regime) showed up to shout and stare us down. I think we thought the crowd that day would be mostly other college kids out to demonstrate their political consciousness (like many of the “woke” today).

As I stood in the front line on our side, I looked across the gap between the two groups of demonstrators and saw my father looking back at me. He was standing in the second row of the counter-protestors, but he was not shouting. His face showed concern. When the rally was over, my friends and I went back to our apartment, proud of our demonstration and fairly sure of our righteousness though, truth be told, I could not at that time have told you anything beyond what our SDS speaker had asserted about Castro’s ideas, or what Castro had actually done on the island of Cuba. And I’m pretty sure the same could be said for most, if not all, of my friends. Being ill-informed and dogmatic is a heady, but a dangerous, cocktail. Dad never spoke to me about that day, or asked me any questions about it, though he had majored in International Law at UT Austin in his college days, and had also made a special study of Cuba, as I later learned.

I suppose someone reading this might interject, “Well, you were just being a normal adolescent, rebelling, striking out to find your own identity, etc.” And that would be true as far as it goes. But, remember, like those who are demonstrating and sometimes rioting today, we were taking positions on pivotal political issues, and we were beginning to vote, and to shape the future of this country. Indeed, the future we shaped then is in many ways fully visible in the present we are all living now. Yet, very often we were motivated (as seems also to be the case today) by little more than our hormones and a desire to appear bold and brave at the demonstration.

I might have continued to live, party, demonstrate, and accept the superficiality of our political and historical analyses at that time for who knows how long, had my own personal life not also been caught up in the inconsistency and self-indulgence of the scene. My friends and I saw, or at least we admitted, no contradiction between our high moral claims on selected social issues while, at the same time, rejecting any moral claims that might be placed upon our personal and sexual behavior. But in this, I reluctantly came to believe, we didn’t take account of the ways of the human heart, how we as human beings are made to live and love, and the need for faithfulness and commitment in any love that is worth having.

This finally came home to me when a young woman I was with at the time became pregnant, and we decided to have an abortion. I (and I think she) didn’t want to be tied down right then to a family, and I was already on the verge of taking up with someone else. But I also knew, somewhere in my gasping conscience, that there was something deeply wrong in all of this. Though my friends had no problem with it, it became a torment to me. I was reading The Problem of Pain, and realizing that much of our pain we bring upon ourselves, a lesson I had “learned” before. And I saw Jesus in the Gospel saying to the woman caught in adultery, “Neither do I condemn you. Go and sin no more.”

I wish I could say that I saw the light and decided to do the right thing, to marry this young woman, and to bring that child into the world. But I did not. She had the abortion, and I moved along to another relationship, which also later foundered. But in my secret reading of the Gospels, and in the beginning rudiments of prayer, I began to see myself for what I was. What I had become. Yet also to see a picture, in the face of Jesus the King, of the kind of person I might become. And, slowly, something began to turn inside of me. I finally came to a place with my “revolutionary” friends where, sitting together in a room of an evening, and listening to one of our more vocal leaders tell of how we were going to change the world, I objected. To everyone’s surprise, including mine, I found myself saying, “Do you really think that we are going to change anything?” Everyone’s jaws dropped open. But no one said anything.

Over the next two years, I continued to read, to think, to pray, to begin to apply myself to study, and gradually to separate from my old crowd as I found other people like myself who were trying to figure out what it would look like to care about social and political issues and yet, also, to be a Christian, a person of faith and of faithful relationships. And I continued to write songs, one of which was the story of the SLO. CO. JAIL, only now told with a further layer of deconstruction in place, and at least a hint of what reconstruction might look like. I realized even then, looking back on my journey since Haight-Ashbury, that I had gotten out of the SLO. CO. JAIL a long time ago; but I was still in jail in my heart and life.

THE SLO CO JAIL

Summer of 1968, San Luis Obispo County,

Peanut butter and jelly, standing on the street, waiting for him.

We stepped into a chapel and found the perfect gift

To set his mind on freedom.

It was Jesus, in a blood-red ruby stone.*

But the SLO CO JAIL, it’s a lonely place.

O, the men inside have such a lonely face.

Driving down the coast road, staring at the ocean.

And it’s so beautiful with the sun upon its motion.

We were heading down to Mexico, gonna make our fortune.

But we’re so fortunate we never made it.

  And the SLO CO JAIL, it’s a lonely place.

O, the men inside have such a lonely face.

What are those cagey shadows hanging on my wall?

No, I don’t think I’ve been here before.

And wild geese flying toward heaven, and Jesus in a blood-red ruby stone,

Cannot free this heart of mine.

But just as iron bars do not a prison make, neither can blue skies give freedom.

What are those cagey shadows hanging round my heart?

And wild geese flying toward heaven could only remind me

Of my desire for freedom.

But Jesus’s blood, dripping on the stones, set me free to soar.

And the SLO. CO. JAIL, it’s a lonely place.

O, the men inside, have such a lonely face.

And the SLO. CO. WORLD would be a lonely place

Had the Lion himself never shown his face.

*The reference to “Jesus, in a blood-red ruby stone” is about a trinket that one of our group bought in a small Catholic chapel to give to Jerry while we were waiting on the street in San Luis Obispo for him to be released. It appears in my 1968 drawing in the lower left corner.

In Part 3 of this reflection, I will take back up what it means to say that, unlike the trinket for Jerry, “Jesus’ blood dripping on the stones set me free to soar.” For that is finally what this reflection is all about. How the Gospel of Jesus’ death and resurrection has the power not only to deconstruct us from the false narratives, and the superficial posturing to which we become bound, but also to reconstruct us as the unique individuals that each of us is in the image of our Creator, who made and loves each one of us. Though that process may for some of us take a considerable amount of time.

DESPERADO DECONSTRUCTED–1968, Part 1 of 3

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Desperado

A picture drawn in 1968 of my older brother Jerry, which also reflects how I saw myself, especially after our dreams for the “Summer of Love” began to crumble and fall apart.

In June of 1968 I graduated from high school in Fort Worth, Texas. I stood in the driveway of my family’s house on Danciger Street and bade my father “farewell,” hardly listening to his plea for me to take care of myself. I was heading to San Francisco, along with a couple of friends. I knew my older brother, Jerry, was already there, in the Haight-Ashbury district, and I and my friends couldn’t wait to leave our conventional families and neighborhood behind, and join in the “Summer of Love.” Indeed, I thought (very clearly in my own mind) that I would never return to my family again. I had had it with my parents, my grandparents, the whole scene of traditional religion, culture, and society. My friends and I would join the movement for free love, “make love not war,” “flower power.” We really believed that we might be able to usher in a new “age of Aquarius.” And so, we hit the road and drove to San Francisco. On the way, about the time we drove through Los Angeles, Robert Kennedy was killed there, following in the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in April, and Kennedy’s brother John five years earlier.

As soon as we arrived, we learned rather abruptly that the “District” itself was not entirely free from the world’s problems. We found Jerry and his friends in one of the row houses that we so-called “hippies” occupied for several square blocks around the cross streets of Haight and Ashbury. No one paid rent. No one minded who came and went. The owners and the police had given up trying to enforce normal property laws (just like in Seattle today). On our first evening in the house, we encountered a young black man knocking from outside on the second story window of our house. He was leaning out of the window of the next-door house (those houses were only a few feet apart in many places). We opened the window and he shuttled through, running for the front door, and yelling back over his shoulder as he went that he had just shot someone in the other house, having been caught trying to rob it. Not exactly the welcoming party to the summer of love that we had expected, but perhaps this was just an aberration.

No. The next morning we found that everything we had left in our car parked on the street had been stolen as well, including all of our camping gear and most of our clothing. No problem, this was the place of the New Age, the new world of love, and we were going to make it happen, even if it cost us a little bit here and there. Revolutions do require sacrifice.

I began to have deeper doubts about the depth and soundness of our vision when I sat down with Jerry the next day to talk about our plans: How we were going to change everything for the better in our world of civil rights marches, assassinations, and the Vietnam war. I was only 18 years old, and I hadn’t really been a very committed student of history, philosophy, economics (or anything else, to put it mildly); but even I knew that something was deeply wrong and askew when Jerry explained to me that the way we were going to correct the imbalances of our society was to “Walk into the banks. Rob them. And then just redistribute the money equally to everyone” (a kind of defund the police solution if ever there was one). I remember thinking, though I didn’t say it out loud at the time because Jerry was the closest thing to a “Messiah” that I had, “But, Jerry, what will happen then? How will people behave with all of that cash? Will we all just suddenly become good?” I didn’t ask, so he didn’t get a chance to answer. But, had I asked, I imagine he might have regarded me as rather naïve or uncool, perhaps in need of some more LSD or marijuana, which we were all using a lot.

Jerry’s next plan sounded better, but it ended in disaster. We would take a homemade “house-truck” that belonged to one of his friends and drive down to Mexico. We would purchase a boatload of marijuana, and then bring it back into the country, literally, by boat, landing somewhere in the Big Sur area. We would distribute the weed, make some money, and everyone could get high and celebrate with a great “love-in,” which meant of course lots of sex with whomever was willing. Things went south when we were stopped on Highway 1 for making an illegal U-turn, and then arrested for having drugs in our possession. We were put into the county jail in separate cells at San Luis Obispo County ( or, as the name was ironically abbreviated on the building and on the side of police cars, “SLO. CO. JAIL,” and “SLO. CO. POLICE”). We spent several days in jail before they decided to let us go. They were arresting hundreds of kids every day along the coast, and had nowhere to keep all of us. They let all of us out except Jerry.

I hadn’t known it, but Jerry had been arrested a few days earlier for possession of marijuana in San Francisco, and was due for a court appearance. In leaving for Mexico, he had jumped bail and skipped town, so now there was a warrant for his arrest. After our release, the rest of us hung around for a couple of days in San Luis Obispo, before heading back to San Francisco where Jerry had been extradited. Back in Haight-Ashbury, without my brother, no money, and a head full of broken dreams (my Forth Worth friends had long since gone home) I tried to fit into the scene as best I could. But the social scene in the district was pretty much like the social scene anywhere, and the ideals of even a few months earlier were falling into disarray. Everyone pretty much looked out for themselves, and indulged their own appetites. People were taking drugs and having sex with pretty much anyone. And I had not eaten for about three days.

I remember getting very angry about the way things had turned out. At one point, I lay on a bathroom floor, cursing the god in whom I said I did not believe, the god in whom, even then, I did not want to believe. ”Why, god, have you put me in this position? Why did you let me come to this?” And some how, in my own mind, the words came through to me, “Craig, I did not put you here. You did this.”

As I began to starve, I felt I had no choice. I called my father and asked for help, the prodigal who couldn’t even make his own way home. But unlike the biblical prodigal, I wasn’t really repentant yet, or able to register what a fool I had been with all of my pseudo-romantic self-imagery and grandiose ideals. Dad said he would come right away, and told me where he would meet me. So, Dad came to Haight-Ashbury. He got a hotel room. Got some food into me. And then he went to talk with the judge in the court where Jerry was being held.

The judge agreed to release Jerry if Dad would pay the bail and promise to take Jerry out of the state, a deal to which Jerry agreed. The next morning, when Dad went to collect Jerry from the house where he had gone for the night, he was gone. No one knew where. Dad didn’t see Jerry again for at least three years. But he took me back to Fort Worth, where I felt alienated from everyone and everything. I felt I didn’t know my parents anymore. I thought of suicide. All of my dreams and visions had been deconstructed, and what was underneath was really just a desire to appear heroic, to indulge my desires, and to live my life free from the constraint of what others might want or need. All of the veneer of my social visions and commitments had crumbled. My friends and I didn’t really know how to save ourselves, much less the rest of the world. But that didn’t stop me from trying to hold on to the old narrative.

Back in Fort Worth, I took up with my old friends. I knew there were huge gaps in our world view, but where else could I turn? My world had been deconstructed by the raw data of experience; and I didn’t want to admit it. But I began secretly to read and ponder some other things, things that wouldn’t make any sense to my friends who still believed in the summer of love, things like the Gospel of John, C.S. Lewis’s Problem of Pain, and George Herbert’s 17th century poetry. And little by little I began to review the history of my life and to see resonances that I hadn’t seen before. And I began to write songs. One of the first was a surprising reversal of my rejection of family, called “The Hills of Coleman County,” a song about my grandparents’ old place out in the country:

I can still remember, back in my childhood days,

living with Mama and Papa, and eating the country way. . . .

And I am heading for the meadow that lies beyond those hills.

I feel there’s something calling to me, and I’ve got to take my fill.

Also, one of George Herbert’s poems (discovered in freshman English at the University of Texas at Arlington where I went with my friends in the fall) struck me like a shaft of light with images of something very like what had happened to me on the bathroom floor back in Haight-Ashbury some months earlier. I took Herbert’s poem “The Collar,” revised it for contemporary lyrics, and turned it into a rock song that I called “The Table.” This was indeed so very much like me on the floor cursing God:

I hit the table, and shouted, “No more do I want to spend any time
On this blasted living.
Why should I sigh. My lines and life are free, free as the road, loose as the wind.
Sure there was corn before my tears did drown it out.
Sure there was wine before my sighs did find it out.”
But as I grew more fierce and wild with every word, I thought I heard a voice
Calling, “My Child.”   “My Lord.”

In part two of this reflection, I will look further into how coming into contact with the Christian Gospel by various means affected my understanding of my time in San Francisco and the SLO. CO. JAIL.