Coyote, a distinguished stage and screen actor who has worked with directors like Roman Polanski and Pedro Almodóvar, has also been a lifelong writer. His first book, a beautifully-written, often hilarious memoir called Sleeping Where I Fall, begins:

During the period covered by this book, I was a member of an anarchic West Coast community that had taken as its collective task the rethinking and re-creation of our national culture. Such intentions were not unique; my generation was struggling openly with problems of racism, grossly inequitable distribution of goods and services, dishonorable foreign policies, and the war in Vietnam. Many people, dissatisfied to the point of despair with the available options of being either a "consumer" or an "employee," were searching for new and more liberating social structures. My peers and I were calling in the nation's markers on promises of social justice, and change was in the air.

The book as a whole deals with change, particularly with what Coyote calls "the nine-hundred-pound gorilla of changing one's...life."

Born Peter Cohon in 1941, Coyote grew up a "rich kid." "I remember the embarrassment of being delivered to school in a chauffeur-driven limousine," he writes; "wealth, to a child, is something that sets you apart, something other children tease you about." As a child possessing "no personal money, authority, or autonomy whatsoever," he wondered why "all my ‘wonderful' things made me feel so powerless."

Worse, Peter's father Morris was a brilliant, cultured, over-achieving, passionately Jewish, "large, dangerous man" whose wrestling lessons taught his son "the potential cost of any challenges to his authority." The child's mother, Ruth, did not help matters. She tells her son, "You and I are not like your father, darling. He has to win. We are the gentle people. We are the losers." Peter's response to this was not only shame but a deep sense of his mother's lack of support and an equally deep determination "not to play": "I...vowed deeply, the way children sometimes do, never to play, never to enter the realm of winning and losing. Of course, I had no inkling of the consequences of such a decision and certainly no awareness that my vows were banishing me from life as it is conventionally understood by most people."

Arriving in San Francisco in 1964, Peter "was writing poems in the mornings and rehearsing afternoons and evenings at the Actor's Workshop." Discouraged about his poetry after some classes with Robert Duncan—"my future as a poet was limited," he comments—he became entranced with the San Francisco Mime Troupe's brand of "radical agit-prop theater." "This," he says, "was the abrasive, cutting voice of the 1960s," "uncompromising, fearless, rude, truthful, iconoclastic, and unswerving." The Mime Troupe "was shock therapy and a crash course in a new curriculum. It would be the portal through which I would enter my adulthood."

For the first time, Peter began to see his father "as the prisoner of a received vision...I was developing a political point of view from which to investigate my present and my past, and I was determined to honor my own observations and conclusions." His life, he felt, "might possibly redeem" his father's "and in the process liberate others from the thrall of the dominant culture's prefabricated visions." The Mime Troupe removed Peter from "the assumed stability and order of my family's reality" and ushered him into "the playful possibilities of existing spontaneously in the perpetual present." It gave him a way in which he could truly play. Mime Troupe productions "[switched] sides and points of view too quickly for [the audience] to take refuge in canned attitudes,...the ‘safe' ground was constantly being chipped away."

The Mime Troupe was a great success and soon became famous, but, disconcertingly, it found itself lionized by the very people it was attacking. "The problem," Peter felt, "seemed to lie with the very idea of theater itself." He found himself deeply attracted to the ideas of the Diggers, "an anarchistic experiment dedicated to creating and clarifying distinctions between society's business-as-usual and our own imaginings of what-it-might- be, in the most potent way we could devise." The Diggers reasoned that "part of the power and flexibility of our profit-oriented economy is that it can co- opt nearly everything. Everything but doing things for free...What could not be co-opted was doing things...without money." One of the Diggers, Peter Berg, "found it possible not only to create events that clarified the line separating inside and outside but also to do so in a manner that changed people from audience to participants." The Diggers believed that "the antidote to...conditioning was personal authenticity: honoring one's inner directives and dreams by living in accord with them, no matter the consequence...A further refinement required conscious creation of a character, a persona for everyday life, who embodied one's highest social and spiritual aspirations; we wanted to imagine our most authentic and admirable self and act him or her out every day. In this way, each of us might become his or her own hero, as well as an engine of social change."

The Diggers were "fascinated by what life might be like if lived in a consistently improvisatinal manner," and they deliberately obliterated the distinctions between life and art:

we expanded the idea of freedom to include first anonymity (freedom from fame) and, second, freedom from money as both a clear dividing line between us and the majority culture, and as a test of our integrity. By eschewing payments for what we did, we tried to guarantee that personal acts were never unconsciously predicated on the desire for fame or wealth. After all, if we were getting rich and/or famous from our activities, it would be hard to say that we were doing them for free.
Our hope was that if we were imaginative enough in creating paradigms of existence as free men and women, the example would be infectious and would produce self-directed (as opposed to coerced or manipulated) social change.

Digger ideas "led us off the stage and into the streets." "In retrospect," Peter writes at the end of the book, "the Diggers might be criticized as a decade-long performance art piece...we allowed our commitment to ‘authenticity' to overwhelm our sensitivity to the needs and aspirations of many who were not interested in being artists, or special, or anything other than out from under the heel of an oppressive system."

None of that was clear at the time, however, especially given the heady sense of imaginative release. In 1967, "around the time" he left The Mime Troupe, Peter recollected a peyote experience at Grinell College in which he felt himself transformed into "a small wolf"—later understood to be a coyote. "Without fully understanding why, or what it might mean to me, but needing to mark the occasion somehow, I began using Coyote as a last name."

Such, in outline, is the beginning of Peter Coyote's story, which is in many ways the story of the sixties. "If imagination knows no limits," he asks, "why should we be concerned with the limits of our bodies?" Sleeping Where I Fall is a powerful answer to that question. Certain words repeat throughout: free, imagination, famous, character, play, fidelity, feral, power, star, maturity, stupid—creating unifying, obsessive resonances as the author seeks to understand what was a determining moment of his life.

The Diggers evolve into "The Free Family," "a larger, centerless alliance" that "transformed our core group beyond recognition." The Hell's Angels enter as important players—and the book contains a harrowing description of the events at Altamont: "If you were forced to select an event that ‘ended' the optimistic promise of the Haight-Ashbury era, Altamont would be as good as any." Danger, risk—the possibility of violent death—remains an element throughout and links Coyote's life as an adult to his childhood. (At one point a Hell's Angel, feeling insulted by someone's rudeness, smashes his fist into the man's face; we suddenly remember that that was exactly the response of Peter's father to being called a "Jew Bastard.") Peter lives on a series of communes, becomes involved with a series of women, fathers a child. Libidinal energy seems to mirror "revolutionary" energy, though the author himself surprisingly links it to the war in Vietnam: "My personal sexual behavior must have been inspired by our country's scorched-earth strategy in Vietnam. ‘No survivors' aptly describes my efforts to have sex with everyone to whom I was attracted." Peter plays guitar, writes songs: "at night, after our boisterous communal meals, we made music until the house vibrated...Fires glowed and crackled in the stone hearths, children played, quarreled, and raced among the players, and snatches of conversation penetrated the lyrics and instrumental solos until our minds expanded to apprehend the whole complex polyphony as the song of our existence." Finally, though, in a very powerful scene, the communal dream ends. "Everyone knew," writes Coyote, "that the Free Family as a source of future security was a fiction":

With the dream gone, what remained were four adults who knew too much about one another, standing emotionally naked in the midst of a desolate cinder-block chamber smelling of grease, gasoline, and cold concrete. The only reason to fix the trucks now was to escape from one another.

L'enfer, c'est les autres ("Hell is other people")!

Coyote begins his book by saying, "I make no other claim than that this is my own truth." Later, he writes, "It has been my experience as an actor that the more particularly and specifically a personal experience is relived, the more universally it may be appreciated. Individual events are hardly personal property; they participate in something larger and more profound that people share, understand, and can empathize with." Both statements are true, and they point towards the book's constant tensions between individual and communal modes. Coyote does not make Heidegger's philosophical leap into an area in which "public" and "private" are in a constant state of dynamic interrelationship—Dasein is "in the world"—but the experiences of his life inevitably move him in that direction. "One of the defining attributes of the sixties," he writes, "was the collective impulse for people to reveal themselves candidly and publicly, confessing their inner visions as their daily life."

For Coyote and his friends, the sixties was a time of radical questioning: "Carol suddenly demanded, ‘What's wrong with incest?'" He describes the period as "islands in time on which to experiment endlessly." The primary problem with the communes is that they are so isolated. "We were creating a culture," someone says, "instead of creating a life." Peter comments, "Our fixation with total freedom condemned us to marginality. While we believed that we were creating ‘alternatives' that the majority culture could take advantage of at a later date, we were actually scoring a line in the sand between our way of life and everyone else's."

Sleeping Where I Fall raises deep questions which it by no means fully answers. In an eloquent passage at the very end of the book Coyote writes,

The failure to curb personal indulgence was a major collective error. Our journeys down the path along which Verlaine and Rimbaud disordered their senses wasted young lives and often sabotaged what we labored so diligently to construct. Verlaine and Rimbaud were reacting to the oppressive correctness of the bourgeoisie of their time and were perhaps its necessary antidote. In our time, the bourgeoisie borders on the sociopathic, and it is the artist's responsibility to manifest sanity and health—something we did not fully understand. Neither we nor the people who supported our endeavors were fools. Many were successful hustlers in their own right, legitimate or otherwise, who believed or wanted to believe in higher ideals and a better future. Others simply wanted an interesting diversion. They saw in us what they chose to see and were never wrong because so many contradictory qualities inhabited any given moment of Digger reality. Those who saw altruism were no more mistaken than those who saw cynicism and personal opportunism. Our contradictory behavior was like Penelope, holding her suitors at bay by unweaving at night what she constructed by day. The difference between her and us was that we were not aware of our own double-handedness.

Having said so much, the author is quick to point out that "hippies did not kill three milion Vietnamese," did not "open the henhouse and allow the savings-and-loan foxes to wipe out the bank accounts of millions of trusting citizens," etc. The concluding passage holds out hope for the future—though no longer a "hippy," Coyote is still an activist—and allows for a deep feeling of nostalgia. How could all that have vanished?

I cannot conceive how such a flamboyant people—Emmett, Elsa, Sweet William, Moose, Gristle, Carla, J.P. Bryden, Billy Batman, and Sam—people so visible in the moment, can be invisible to history, can have left no indelible mark.

The answer, of course, is that they have not vanished—not even the ones who have died. Like Coyote himself, they have "transformed."

Sleeping Where I Fall is an extremely intelligent, balanced, moving report on an enormously important period of our history from someone who was there—and remembers.

Jack Foley