To get what it was like growing up in the second half of the seventies, you have to remember that only eight years or so had passed since the social dreams and upheavals of the late sixties. See, it takes a while for things to shake out. A car will work for a few years, and for bit, maybe a summer or two, you can get away with little income. But, resources are being burned, and the ugly features of difficult relationships began to surface like bones. You'd spend a month visiting your parents. Little by little the larger weight of the culture and economy began to settle. You were just some poor person after all, living in a shotgun shack around some other people. And the space ships were not coming.

But the dream, the dream lingered the way a fog will. And we were not wrong about the great emptiness that was beginning to appear in American downtowns and Fourth of July picnics. Robert Frank had gotten that right. Its just that there was too much to invent really, and we were, anyway, human, which meant social, so pretty much all the communes started to look like small tribes anywhere. Loose aggregates of people, but always, at least where communes survived, some power-tripping guy, or sometimes a woman, sitting at the center, brooding over the scene like a spider.

And if you came of age after 1974, what you heard all the time was that "you shoulda been here back when" and what people used to do, and about the parties all night, like there were beaches everywhere, and every ride led you off up into the hills to Sugar Mountain.

I went to Umass because my girlfriend Pat was there, as well as my best friends from high school, Russell and Tom. I'd turned down my acceptance to Bard College a year earlier (and thus forever missed the doors of John Ashbery and did not enter that romance). Instead I'd worked a year as a dishwasher in different institutions—the IRS office in Andover (dropping bad mescaline with my work-mates and wandering the halls) and the 1^st National Bank building in Boston (working in the basement cafeteria with a mix of white guys from South Boston and Black guys from Dorchester). My brother Bruce and I had a small room and a half in the Charlesgate Hotel near Kenmore Sq. I think the soundtrack was Patti Smith—"Horses" and "Radio Ethiopia" and "Shakin' All Over" from  the Who's "Live at Leads". I remember I made mashed potatoes every night and danced around the room, Patti singing, "Land, when will you be landing?"

Pat, Russell and Tom were all in an alternative living-learning program in a dorm in the Southwest housing complex at UMass (think 10,000 kids in a quarter-square mile complex, with the "Rock and Roll Animal" version of Sweet Jane blasting from the eighteenth floor of a dorm tower, think dodging burning sofas pushed out of the twentieth floor balcony, think book-burning parties at the end of semester, think apocalyptical).

And we heard the same shoulda been here stuff about the living program which (in that way that local connections are woven) had loose ties to a nearby commune in Shelburne Falls called the Renaissance Church, itself the product of an encounter between an Edgar Casey-type rural mystic named Elwood Babbit and a younger Mick Jagger want-to-be named Micahel who'd been living in a tree. And, the Church was loosely tied (the way things were) to a communal house where Richard Alpert (Ram Das) and some bikers from Chicopee Falls lived. So, we were at the edge of some prophetic culture, and the arrivals and departures of people in your kitchen were surprising and wonderful signs.

Of course, by the time I moved into Pierpont in the fall of 1977, it was also mostly about selling and taking drugs. I remember the first week I was there someone discovered a hidden pot field in nearby Hadley. Over the next few days, my dorm-mates raided the field, taking away car loads until the farmer found out and began to wander the fields with a shotgun. Several rooms were, essentially, made into smoke-houses, pot plants hung up and drying. And then by accident a fire started in one of the rooms. Of course, everyone raced around dragging the pot down the hall to the lounge. I remember watching a campus cop, following this trail of stems and leaves down the carpeted hall. He pushed the lounge door open, looked in, and then just shut it again.

I think that was when the campus administrators began to think the learning-living community should be disbanded. What I know is that inside the dorm it had become lawless. What we only dimly understood was that we had nowhere to go. So, in early April, we took over the administration building for two days.

But, what did we do that fall that led up to that? Things like: we got pulled into travelling to Kent State for the ten-year anniversary of the shootings there. A long drive, and then the RSB organizers doing everything they could to get us tear-gassed. As part of the process of building a movement—like, get us angry and polarized.

Shoulda been there.

I shoulda known then it was already over, but we were all looking so hard. We were so stubborn about it.

A squat biker named Steve who'd lived with Ram Das was working as an RA for the living community at Pierpont. He'd spent two years in jail on a drugs charge and that'd leap out every once in a while, but mostly he was into an LSD-shaman thing. Looking for power places in the Holyoke hills, and looking to turn people on. He died maybe nine years later in a bike accident, trying to avoid a deer on a back cut through the forests near Montague. A very fast fuse.

I spent the winter break in his wife's cabin in Orange. She'd just had their son, and I think Steve thought I could help Rayanne with the wood. He was off to Florida with Tom's cousin Amy. Maybe he figured I could use a break from Pat too—things were getting spectacularly rough there. (Say Pat, and some memories flip through--her Mom had dropped dead in front of her when she was six, visiting the grave in Provincetown, her squarehead Dad in his American house looking with such despair at me, Pat playing Red Emma in her kerchief at the Kent State Anniversary.)

Pat had been sleeping with my friend Tom the first semester they were in school (I'd taken a year off), but then had arrived at my rooming house in early Dec. looking for me. Tom's a chiropractor now, and he and his brother were both students of Chogyam Trungpa of Naropa fame. His birthday was the same as Russell's who I'd known since seventh grade (Steve Tatarunas leaning over to laugh with Russell about this guy—me—wearing rubbers to school.) Russell was a sloppy fleshy tuba-playing genius who got into Gurjief and Ouspensky. He and I must have come from some other time or place because we'd fall into these conversations about something he was reading, say Freud and Jung, and I'd just get it fast, and 'd be following him and debating.  A big loose skinned guy with turned out feet and some colossal Lithuanian Catholic guilt, whose Dad ran a screw machine plant in Stoneham. Russell took more drugs than anyone I ever knew (I remember him collapsed in a high school stairwell in tears because the yellow paint there was so sad) and dropped dead with a brain aneurysm in his early forties just after finishing a math PhD.

Starting in the middle of the fall, Russell had decided to Tom Sawyer us into painting the op-art design from Hot Tuna's "Phosphorescent Rat" and its reverse on opposite sides of the hall outside his door. Took us weeks, patiently painting thousands of small black and white dots, folks in Russell's rooms doing whippets (nitrous oxide) while listening to Zappa or the Dead. (Not my favorite sounds, but wired into a moody space in my memory now.) Russell having grandiose ideas and schemes. His little brother, another Ouspensky freak, showing up looking for the White Lodge and some more LSD…

Something came loose in the spring semester. Russell had fallen for fey Joanne (Joanne had six clocks in her room, none of them set to anything close to the right time), and, to impress her, he decided to stage a smoke-in. So, trips back and forth to the Yippie warehouse in the Bowery. Increased paranoia about narcs and spies. Some time that spring Lisa got arrested for throwing a pie at Bobby Riggs (of the Billie Jean King-Bobby Riggs contretemps) who was the guest of honor at a new mall opening. (Later that night I threw a rock at their perfect new sign and hit the pine-tree-in-a-circle logo dead on, leaving a half-moon scar that was still there a year later.) Or, we sat outside a fund-raising dinner arranged for Michael Dukakis, looking each person in the eye and brightly advising, "eat the rich".

Beautiful Pattie-Hearst Joanne inexplicably took up with the craziest in-and-out-of mental hospital/jail newspaper writer, and Russell spiraled even crazier, deciding to pull us all into a Ken Kesey experiment, so that, on top of being nineteen and hormonal, we were also blasting our nervous systems two times a week.

Cut to: me walking out into the waste fields near the dorm in twilight dawn, trying to find the source of a loud thrumming sound, like a huge generator; finding instead, in a small clearing, the trees completely filled with starlings, making this thrumming, this huge flock, so big it took twenty minutes to take off, the thrumming flattening in a whoosh with each wave.

Cut to: me coming into my room, early AM, seeing my roommate asleep (jazz sax player would later play with Archie Shepp and go mad believing a black woman from Africa was giving him life instructions via the astral plane); over his head, poised like a condensation of light, I see what I quickly decided is his awareness. Reach out with my intention and brush it; he rolls over in rhythm to the touch. Pull back and climb to the top bunk, carefully avoiding it so as not to wake him further.

Cut to: Russell, passing out raw lamb that we'd stolen from the supermarket; it’s a full moon Passover Good Friday, and my birthday to boot, and Russell is passing out communion. His face wild in ecstasy and fear, blood-juice running down from his mouth. Amy already flipped out on the walk to Lisa's party thinking we were all vampires (well before we stole the meat by the way), but Russell and I had gone back for one last hit and thus were not with the others when Amy flipped, so we're not vampires. David in the dorm foyer smashing chairs later. Russell runs past, still seeing something none of the rest of us see.

Cut to: the guys from Hingham and me walking to Amherst Center and the ground literally tilting under our feet so that we stumbled; looking at each other, David grimly but honestly says, "we're fucked".

Cut to: the housing people let us know they plan to disband the living community so we do the only thing that make sense, we plan to occupy the administration building: Frank Zappa, Eno, and the Grateful Dead echo down the hallways.

Cut to: the shadow of the library tower falling over the smoke-in like a dark angel's pall. Yippie guitarist making dull electrical-machine noise like the rumble of trucks.

Russell's plan to occupy the admin building is typically grandiose. He wants us to stage a march which will arrive at the admin building. He and a few others will be inside and he will burst out of one of the windows with a flag or something. I say, let's just send some folks into the chancellor's office like we want a meeting and time that with the arrival of the march. The folks inside stage the sit-down and we stage a vigil outside for them.

That's the plan. I lead the march around campus, yelling through a bullhorn and when we get to the admin building I let people know there are seven of us inside. I am so jacked I take off and run around the building completely once, and when I get back, I find that two girls had broken a hastily chained door and we are pushing into the building and crowding up the stairs. There is a cop or two at the door to the chancellor's office but I squeeze through the press into the waiting room and drop excited next to Russell. Soon the cops pull back and the building is ours.

Negotiations immediately start; all the politicos from student government show up fast and take that over. Russell is wandering the halls fantasizing about erasing the university admin computer memory banks with super magnets. I guess some pizzas arrive. I hunker into vigil mode, am not too interested in the negotiations.

We were there two days, but I don't remember a lot except for when Brian and Jimmi leapt up on a secretary's desk and recited Ginsberg's "America". What did I do? Waited until we were allowed to leave. Dawn. Red sky. Awake almost two days.

Years later I tried to retrieve a video tape that'd been made of the whole thing. It was in the Student Newspaper office in a closet, one of those things that you move around for years without ever looking at it. Part of the shape you work around. The video tape was badly damaged, stuck together and decayed in strange plastic blooms.

There wasn't any real reason for us to take over the admin building, except that it was a thing you did. What I found about myself was that I could figure the tactics, if that's what you wanted to do, but not the strategy. We were all headed for Reagan's America. The spaceship was not coming. The living community would be disbanded, and every one of us would drop out, end up working shit jobs in Metheun or Watertown or Hingham, trying to meet car payments, taking on the whole ritual debt. There wasn't anything it in, but somewhere, out past seasons of suburban asphalt and vague parties, there was this thing of being alive, holding the car on the road,

Bare teeth white. Feel the wind flying.

No escape but in the felicities of velocity.