Sleeping Where I Fall : A Chronicle

In his energetic, funny, and intelligent memoir, Peter Coyote relives his fifteen–year ride through the heart of the counterculture—a journey that took him from the quiet rooms of privilege as the son of an East Coast stockbroker to the riotous life of political street theater and the self–imposed poverty of the West Coast communal movement known as The Diggers. With this innovative collective of artist–anarchists who had assumed as their task nothing less than the re–creation of the nation's political and social soul, Coyote and his companions soon became power players. In prose both graphic and unsentimental, Coyote reveals the corrosive side of love that was once called "free"; the anxieties and occasional terrors of late–night, drug–fueled visits of biker gangs looking to party; and his own quest for the next high. His road through revolution brought him to adulthood and to his major role as a political strategist: from radical communard to the chairman of the California Arts Council, from a street theater apprentice to a motion–picture star. Actor Peter Coyote has always managed to embrace the times he has lived in. In the sixties this included the exhilarating highs of breaking the rules of staid, status-conscious America. It also included the material and spiritual wear that a personal and thorough research of drugs can produce. In this memoir, Coyote relives his fifteen-year ride through the heart of the counterculture - a journey that took him from the quiet rooms of privilege as the son of an East Coast stockbroker to the riotous life of political street theater and the self-imposed poverty of West Coast communal movements. He performed on the barricades with the San Francisco Mime Troupe, then went on the road with the Diggers, a radical collective that was seeking nothing less than the transformation of American values. Here too the blunt, affectionate, and often comic portraits of the counterculture's stars, Paul Simon and Janis Joplin, Emmett Grogan and Peter Berg - and of Natural Suzanne, Sweet William, Moose, Gristle, and Carla, those who moved along quietly, leaving no indelible marks. Coyote's road through revolution taught him to be a player and a strategist: he began as a radical communard and became chairman of the California Arts Council; he apprenticed in improvisational street theater and became a motion-picture star in such movies as E.T. and Jagged Edge, working with directors from Steven Spielberg and Barry Levinson to Pedro Almodovar and Roman Polanski. This memoir is his attempt to understand the road he traveled, and the distance between the extremes of a life spectacularly well-lived. While still an undergraduate at Grinnell College, I had fallen in love with Jessie Benton, a captivating woman I met one summer on Martha's Vineyard.