 in French written
by a foreign student, for she was built like a ballerina and glamorous as a magazine
model. Lennox wrote an off-Broadway play, Che!, in which the US President
and Che Guevara dialogue in the Oval Office, in the nude, moderated by a nun, The
Sister of Mercy. The President speaks in advertising slogans, Che in political slogans.
At the opening, I sat next to David Merrick, the famed Broadway producer. Che!
had a surprisingly long run off Broadway even though Lennox was arrested and tried
for obscenity. You must know Lennox—he now lives in your city, Copenhagen.
Kennedy: I had the great pleasure—through your introduction!
Gover: Lennox, Ishmael, Walt Bowart, and I spent a memorable Sunday
afternoon at the home of poet Walter Lowenfels, who’d shared a prize with
e. e. cummings but had been dumped by the literary establishment because he’d
taken a job with the Daily Worker, a communist newspaper. He was broke
and needed income. Later he was raided by an FBI swat team in the wee hours, during
which his wife Lillian suffered a stroke that paralyzed her right side. Walter’s
neighbor Pete Seeger came by and played some of his songs, and I hatched the idea
to do an anthology of Lowenfels’ works. With his stories from the 1930s and
1940s, Lowenfels was a literary father figure to many during the Sixties.
Ish Reed and I shared an interest in Voodoo (which he liked to call hoodoo and spell
a variety of ways).
Kennedy: You wrote a nonfiction book about voodoo—Voodoo
Contra: Contradictory Meanings of the Word.
Gover: Yes, the word means “creator of the universe”
or “energy that permeates the universe” in the original African tongue.
One day while walking down Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, talking voodoo, Ish and
I heard something that stopped us cold: the first sounds of the first album made
by Dr. John, resurrecting old New Orleans voodoo. We rushed into the record store
and each bought a copy and tried to figure whether Dr. John was black or white.
At the time, Ish was living in an unfurnished apartment, having upgraded from an
East Village slum to a teaching job at UC Berkeley. He was teaching a course in
black consciousness in American literature and invited me to put in a guest appearance,
which got him in trouble with the department head because my skin is white. I had
lunch with him and his wife, Carla Blank, in 2000, not long after he’d won
what is called the MacArthur Genius Award.
Walt Bowart resurfaced in my life during the 1980s when we met at a writers’
conference in Monterey, and we hashed over the Sixties when the astounding happened
so often it seemed commonplace. We congratulated each other for surviving those
wild times and talked about becoming better adjusted to these more restrained times.
Walt was making ends meet as editor of Palm Springs Magazine. I had just
gotten together with Carolyn, now my wife of 20 years. Walt and I decided to take
a trip down to Cochise country, the mountains of southeastern Arizona where he owned
a piece of canyon-laced land, upon which we fantasized we might build something
commercially viable. We drove down there in Walt’s SUV, leaving my car with
his girlfriend Becky, and when we got back to his house near Palm Springs, we found
that she had wrecked my Maxima by hot-rodding it off road, a kind of belated punctuation
point to the Sixties.
Kennedy: I cannot help but think our paths must have crossed a
time or two back then, although I was hopelessly unplugged in, a bewildered spectator,
trying to learn to write, while practicing the art of hitchhiking and keeping out
of jail.
Gover: I was bewildered too during the Sixties and often felt out
of it. It’s likely that our paths did cross. I was about 10 years older than
most of the activists I met but did not look my age so “passed” most
of the time. In fact, the momentous events of those times were such that, when I
went to the ’68 Democratic Convention street protests in Chicago, I decided
to bring a movie camera in addition to scribbling notes. I bought an 8mm with a
zoom lens and promptly found it was useless at night, and a hazard because Chicago
policemen were ordered to whack cameras. I have a clear memory of seeing out of
the corner of my eye a cop moving toward me with his club raised. I dodged the movie
camera just in time, then ran. I put together a half-hour documentary and showed
it to a film producer named Bob Story, and he promptly turned it over to government
people who didn’t return it to me for months and only after I signed some
kind of statement promising not to distribute it commercially. I made two copies.
One was stolen from my house in Santa Barbara, the other years later from an apartment
in Penns Grove, New Jersey, where I lived briefly. This was the late-1980s when
I was betwixt and between, going through a variety of difficulties, and struggling
to keep body and soul together. As a shorthand explanation, I sometimes tell people
I stayed too long at the party of the Sixties, but that is an oversimplification.
Kennedy: You mentioned attending the Doors’ concerts. That
must have been fantastic, especially being backstage, although I confess concerts
give me earaches.
Gover: I was not a big concert fan and was mostly interested in
Morrison’s talent and The Doors as a phenomenon. Going to rock concerts gave
me a headache too and I fled when I could. Also, around this time I worked with
a couple of not-so-famous friends, songwriter Bob Harvey and photographer Frank
Mullen, writing and trying to get a musical produced, titled Us Them. Harvey
had played with the original Jefferson Airplane. We never did manage to get the
musical produced, and eventually we lost track of each other but in recent years
both friends have kind of resurfaced in my life. Harvey, now retired from the Navy,
has put together a group and is writing songs and performing again.
During the Sixties, I felt I was witnessing revolutionary change, that the country
would never be the same—that’s how it seemed in California. When the
dust settled around the mid-1970s, I was left feeling somewhat disoriented. Not
only from dashed expectations but also from drugs and booze and too much promiscuous
sex. I thought the money I made then would be enough to last me a lifetime, but
it was blown away by a couple of wrong-headed decisions. I came out of the Sixties
broke and an emotional wreck.
Kennedy: Who else from the Sixties impressed you? Who were the
most impressive?
Gover: Well, two people of note were certainly Abbie Hoffman and
Jerry Rubin. I attended the last House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) Hearing
when their “street theater” antics turned that anti-democratic ritual
into a farce. I was amazed, delighted, and fascinated in October 1967 by Abbie Hoffman,
Jerry Rubin, and their merry band of pranksters, bent on an absolutely whacko project:
“to levitate the Pentagon.” No one believed this was possible, of course,
yet everyone found a role to play in this magnificent spoof. I flew East for the
occasion and my friend Dan Greene introduced me to Abbie and the night before the
big event we spent some hours walking the streets of downtown Washington, DC. Abbie
led us into a sandwich shop for a bite to eat and by the time we left he had everyone
there either confounded, collapsed in laughter, or both.
Top Pentagon officials, who directed the mightiest military the world had ever known,
were totally undone by Hoffman, Rubin, and the estimated 50,000 demonstrators they
brought together for the ha-ha levitation. The media turned out in force. Helicopters
prowled overhead. Soldiers surrounded the Pentagon, faces frozen in deadly determination.
Police cars zoomed back and forth on surrounding streets as throngs of people—many
dressed in mythical costumes (witches, warlocks, voodoo priests, gremlins, Roman
gladiators, etc.)—moved toward the Pentagon’s front entrance, having
been prevented from surrounding it. The atmosphere was electric with slapstick magic.
Out of this day “Flower Power” was born, and the comedy was ordered
continued by the House Un-American Activities Committee, which called before its
august members Abbie, Jerry, and assorted other leaders of the antiwar movement.
Jerry Rubin donned a Revolutionary soldier uniform for his appearance, and on another
day carried a toy M1 rifle that frightened the guards, till they pounded him and
captured the gun and discovered they’d been had.