Berrigan’s class moved me ever closer to the concern, the challenge, that Steve Scott had laid out before me in the café: what about the poor? Is there a greater question to be resolved, for a Christian, or anyone, for that matter, than feeding the poor?
Around this time the BCC and HCOB experienced another split. Three households, calling themselves “Bartimaeus Community,” decided to have a “common purse” along the lines of the first century church, in which all possessions were held in common. It was a painful parting, and it also signaled the beginning of the end of the community I’d come to Berkeley looking for. Eventually the various ministries of the Berkeley Christian Coalition separated and only the few larger ministries survived independently. Eventually the House Church and Bartimaeus disbanded.
Some of us had a sense that it had been a fatal error trying to “build a community” in the first place: community, if it happens at all, emerges out of natural sympathy and friendship as people go about their lives. David Fetcho, a poet who had been in both the House Church and then Bartimaeus, reflected on those projects saying that “In our youth we felt that we needed to mandate the structures of love and, as it turns out, love mandates its own structures. Those structures come into being organically over a period of time. And that was a lesson we all had to learn.”
Chapter Four: Fire from Heaven
The election of Ronald Reagan sent shock waves through what was left of the Left, and the Left was still a significant minority of the population, especially in the San Francisco Bay Area. After four years of the bland but somewhat endearing and moderate Evangelicalism of Jimmy Carter, many of us in Berkeley sensed that a brutal change was coming.
I was living in the basement of Calhoun House, the cheapest room in the house. The outer wall of the room still had the initials of one of the house’s earlier residents, Steve Soliah, spray-painted on the wall. Steve was one of the survivors of the Symbionese Liberation Army and former lover of Patty Hearst. I remembered Calhoun Phifer telling us about the day the FBI came looking for Steve.
“I was coming home from work,” he’d told us with a big grin on his face, “and saw these two men with dark sunglasses, black suits, and ties sitting across the street from the house in a new black car. They definitely weren’t from Berkeley!” He laughed. “I went inside and mentioned it to Steve, and he started. His face turned white, and he ran out the back door.” They eventually caught him, but such was the legacy of the house in which we lived in early 1981 as Ronald Reagan took the office of the presidency. Most of the residents of Calhoun House thought of ourselves as inheriting the tradition of revolutionary struggle, and in that moment our faith took on a distinctly apocalyptic hue.
One night in early 1981 I went to hear Carolyn Forché read from her book, The Country Between Us, on the UC campus. I didn’t know Forché’s work so I didn’t know what to expect, a perfect set-up for the sort of surprise I got. I remember the sense of shock, confusion, and awe I felt as I listened to Forché talk about a far away country of El Salvador where the US was pouring in millions of dollars of aid to help the army slaughter its own people. The Salvadoran army was also being trained by US military advisors, so I felt ashamed and angry that I knew nothing and had heard nothing about what she was discussing; I also felt morally outraged, and morally obligated to do something. She read her poems about the military death squads, financed and directed by my country, each poem telling a story more gruesome and shocking, or painfully moving than the previous. It was a wrenching experience for me, and I came out of the reading shaken.
When I got home, I realized I didn’t really know where El Salvador was. I found the country in the index of our house atlas, and I looked it up. It was in Central America, right next to that other country she’d mentioned where they’d just had a revolution: Nicaragua.
I’d already begun looking around for other poets beyond the Christian community to invite in to read at the Radix-sponsored events, and that led me to attend the Left Write conference in San Francisco about that same time. Among the poets I met there were Jack Hirschman, John Curl, and two others with whom I was to have closer and longer-term collaborations, Garry Lambrev and bob rivera.
Garry was a gay man who had spent many years in People’s Temple. He was still recovering from the shock of that experience when I met him outside of Noe Valley Ministry early one evening after a day-long session of the Left Write Conference.1 For some reason our eyes met and we began talking. Within a few minutes we discovered that we had a mutual passion for, of all people, Nicolas Berdyaev! Garry and I started talking about spirituality and politics, Berdyaev’s personalist socialism, poetry, and became immediate and close friends—and we have remained friends ever since.
A week or so later Garry and I went to Talking Leaves bookstore for a meeting of a Union of Left Writers (ULW) that was emerging out of the conference. The bookstore lent its space to us for the meeting and it was also the place where Kush had brought the Cloud House to settle for a while. Cloud House was a regular open “round-robin” poetry reading that went on for over a decade, living up to its name as it floated around San Francisco like the characteristic fog that comes and goes, irregularly flowing through the neighborhoods and down the streets to lend its mystery to the Pacific city.
After the meeting I was talking with strangers—everyone there was a stranger to me—when a tall, dark-skinned man with a big bushy Afro and scarves around his neck, Hendrix-like, interrupted the conversation to contradict something I had just said. Eventually Garry and this new comrade, bob rivera (he refused the use of capital letters—perhaps because they were “capital”?) and I were engaged in an intense conversation about politics, spirituality, sexuality, and I don’t know what else. Bob ended up in the East Bay either that evening or within a matter of days, and the conversation continued as he eventually moved into Calhoun House, on Berkeley Way, pushing what remained of the Christian community there still farther to the left.
Bob, Garry, and I formed the Rosa Luxemburg/Dorothy Day Poetry Brigade of the nascent Union of Left Writers that had emerged out of the Left Write conference, and eventually we held open poetry readings on Telegraph Avenue every Friday afternoon. I was familiar with Dorothy Day’s ideas, of course, but Rosa Luxemburg was still a mystery to me. But not for long. I was moved deeply by her writings, especially after I read “You would have thought the servants of the Church would have been the first to make this task easier for the social democrats. Did not Jesus Christ (whose servants the priests are) teach that ‘it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven?’”2
Around this time I changed jobs, which had the effect of further removing me from the Christian community in Berkeley. I began working as a night desk clerk at the Berkeley City Club, an elegant social club located in a Julia Morgan-designed building on Durant Avenue in Berkeley. Responsibilities were minimal so I spent three nights a week in an excited state of study, feeding my obsessive curiosity a steady diet of whatever it chose to devour. From ten at night until eight in the morning, with only two or so hours of security work, my job was to stay awake at the front desk—not always an easy thing to do during the blue hours before daybreak—and I took advantage of the time to read books on liberation theology, Latin American politics, and poetry. I started translating the poetry of Ernesto Cardenal and other Latin American poets, sitting at the desk all night with my Spanish-English dictionary and my books, drinking coffee to stay awake. It was my idea of heaven.
In those all-night study sessions, I now added onto my list a number of revolutionary classics like Regis Debray’s Revolution in the Revolution, speeches of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, as well as histories of the Cuban revolution. I read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States and had my adolescent intuitions confirmed, that everything I ever thought I knew