BEYOND CHRON - MAY 7, 2015
Peter Coyote: Sixties’
Survivor With Memories Worth Sharing
by Suzanne Gordon
Millions of Americas who listen to radio ads for
Apple or watch public TV have heard—if not heard
of—Peter Coyote. His is the smooth-as-bourbon voice
selling us on the Ipad and narrating Ken Burns
documentaries, like “The Dust Bowl” and “The
Roosevelts.”
Many of us in his own generational cohort (Coyote is
73) still remember his on-camera roles in Hollywood
films like Steven Spielberg’s “E.T.” or European
ones like “A Man in Love,” in which he shared top
billing with Greta Scacchi and Jamie Lee Curtis or
Roman Polanski’s Bitter Moon.
In The Bay Area, the Marin-based actor and Academy
Award winning voice-over artist has a colorful
history of cultural and political activism. He was
an early member of the San Francisco Mime Troupe.
Later in the 1960s, he joined the Diggers, an
“alternative community” which offered free food,
clothes, music, and medical care to newly arrived
residents of The Haight.
During Jerry Brown’s first incarnation as governor,
Coyote became an unlikely member of the California
State Arts Council—and then its controversial
chairman. In the decades since then, he has
continued to lend his name, voice, and energy to a
variety of progressive political causes both
nationally and in California. He also found time to
become a devout student of Zen Buddhism, leading to
his ordination as a priest in 2011.
Adding to this already long and impressive Left
Coast resume, Coyote has, in recent years, become an
accomplished autobiographer. As a genre, Sixties’
memoirs is a big one but I’m generally not a fan.
Remembering one’s glory days–as recalled by assorted
alumni of the Black Panther Party, Weather
Underground, SDS, the women’s movement, et al,–is
not my idea of good senior citizen reading.
However, Coyote’s two over-lapping accounts of his
own life and times are well worth checking out.
Sleeping Where I Fall, just reissued in a third
edition, provides a lively, insightful, and
reflective rendering of the Northern California
counter-culture and rural commune scene back in its
heyday. In Coyote’s just-published, The Rainman’s
Third Cure, we learn more about his troubled
upbringing, amid east coast wealth, before he
escaped to Grinnell College in Iowa and then the
Francisco street theatre scene.
The author’s latest title is lifted from Dylan’s
“Stuck Inside of Mobile,” which included this likely
ode to overdoing things, pharmaceutically, back in
the day:
“Now, the Rainman gave me two cures,
Then he said, “Jump right in.’
The one was Texas Medicine
The other was just Railroad Gin.
And like a fool I mixed them
And it strangled up my mind,
And now people just get uglier
And I have no sense of time.”
Coyote’s own jump right into the personal and
political craziness of the Sixties was pretty big.
In one chilling scene in Sleeping Where I Fall,
Emmett Grogan, a charismatic founder of the Diggers,
casually takes a syringe and injects heroine in
Coyote’s vein promising: “This is gonna change you.”
It certainly did. The author became a heroine addict
and long-term sufferer from Hepatitis C.
Rainman’s Third Cure recounts his successful
struggle to get off drugs, reshape his life, and
come to terms with the difficult childhood briefly
described in his first book, but explored more
deeply in his second. Coyote (nee Cohon) grew up in
Englewood, New Jersey in the 1950s, part of an
exodus-to-the-suburbs by more affluent second
generation Easter European Jews who grew up in New
York City. His father Morris was a brash,
bigger-than-life Wall Street investor who built the
family’s fortune on his relentless energy and
charisma. Unfortunately, he was also a bullying
alpha male, who ended up leaving his family deeply
in debt when he died suddenly after a down-turn in
the market.
As Coyote describes him, his father’s “gaze
communicated a restless, barely sublimated
irritation, as if its subject had already claimed
more attention than it deserved. When he was angry,
his regard could sting like a paper cut. His eyes
moved in small calculating arcs like a blade,
expressing an unmistakable intention to dominate
what they measured.”
Morris Cohon terrified his young son and helped
drive his wife into a severe depression from which
she barely recovered. When Coyote was only two-and-a
half, his mother, Ruth, had a breakdown following
the birth of his sister. She was essentially lost to
her family for several years. “Her weight plummeted
to ninety pounds and she was lobotomized by
depression. She disappeared from my sight and
consciousness.”
Luckily for the author, relatives hired a young
African-American woman, Susie Howard, to take care
of Peter and his sister, Muffet. Although she was
only a teenager, she took over the household,
becoming “a surrogate mother, a stabilizing force in
my daily life, so critical to the stability and
functioning of our home that her absence was
inconceivable.”
Susie Howard became the first in a series of
surrogate parent figures he describes in the book.
When he was 34, he stayed with poet Gary Snyder at
the latter’s home in the Sierras. As he observed the
power of Snyder’s Buddhist practice, he realized
that all his experiences with drugs only ended in a
return to his “habitual self…sapped strength and
energy and finally …what does one do with such
experiences? After you ‘return’ a gap remains
between the drug-induced insights and the
moment-to-moment demands and stressors of daily
life.”
The rest of Rainman’s Third Cure follows Coyote’s
return to the “straight world.” If he failed to kick
heroine, he knew he might end up like friends who
died from an over dose. As a single parent at the
time, he was afraid his daughter, after such a
drug-related death, would be lost to California’s
foster care system. With the help of Buddhist
practice, Coyote learned that there was a “third
cure.” This one helped him navigate his
serendipitous career as a Hollywood actor, in the
U.S. and Europe; a related stint modeling clothes
for the well-known Italian designer Nino Cerutti,
who became another surrogate father to him, and
finally his ordination as a Buddhist priest.
The Rainman’ s Third Cure ends with a deeper look at
Buddhist practice and philosophy. While it makes for
interesting spiritual reading, the most poignant
summing up of lessons learned from his life can be
found in Sleeping Where I Fall. As a grown man,
Coyote takes his eight-year old son Nick back to see
the overgrown ranch in Olema where he and other
refuges from The Haight lived communally for a
spell.
With the boy at his side, he reflects on the tangled
personal lives, failed political schemes, and
chaotic social experiments of his own generation.
But he also pays tribute to what Sixties’ protestors
were able to accomplish in their resistance to the
Vietnam War and subsequent campaigns for social,
environmental and economic justice. What these two
books highlight is that spirituality and political
commitment are not mutually exclusive choices. What
Coyote’s life story teaches us is that making peace
with one’s inner demons can even lead to a deeper
and richer engagement with efforts to change the
world.

[ The
Official Peter
Coyote Web Site ]
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