Misdemeanors for the Revolution

It’s well known that in my final year of college, I became the most celebrated music critic of my generation. I think of this sometimes when I see the commercial in which an old black hipster speaks of pretending to like Peter Cetera because “the ladies” do. Pete (I call him Pete) was of course one of the lead singers for Chicago, one of the first groups I reviewed for the Los Angeles Times. The other, the evening before, had been Spirit, one of whose claims to fame was that their drummer, the stepfather of guitarist Randy California, was inconceivably ancient — which is to say maybe 20 years younger than I am at this writing.

What isn’t so well known is that during my final year of college, I committed myself to lawlessness, believing that it was the least I could do on behalf of what at the time was popularly known as The Revolution. I have already admitted here that I attended some lectures barefoot, and that I used illegal drugs. What I have not yet admitted is that I also committed a variety of misdemeanors intended to annoy and confound what we knew in those days as The Man.

It all started when I and other dissident undergraduates crossed Sunset Blvd. and trespassed on the gorgeously manicured grounds of the Bel-Air Country Club, on which noted Republican legislators were said to enjoy playing “a few holes.” I can’t say for sure whether Los Angeles mayor Sam Yorty was one of them, but I can tell you that I had years before auditioned for a band being formed by his son, who owned an imported copy of the first Who album months before I was mesmerized by the American version.

Chuck Manson’s acolytes wouldn’t go on their infamous rampages for several months, so it was still relatively easy to break into the homes of the rich and famous. I was always uncomfortable with the idea of stealing things, but had no compunctions whatever about switching the contents of Bedrooms A and B, for instance. My thought was that when they got home from their vacations in the Third World, the rich pigs whose homes we broke into would have their minds no less blown to find rooms transposed than if we’d scrawled Die Pigs Die in feces on the walls.

Sometimes, if we were especially consumed by class resentment, we would take everything out of a particular drawer in the kitchen, and replace it in another, a couple of drawers down — at least until it occurred to us that those most likely to be discombobulated weren’t the wives of rich pig industrialists and Republicans, but their brown- or darker-skinned housekeepers and cooks, on whose behalf we imagined ourselves to be fighting.

One of my fellow revolutionaries hit on the idea of defecating in the middle of our unwitting hosts’ living rooms, all over the white cashmere carpeting, but I had been taught from infancy that elimination is dirty and shameful, so while my comrades were busy in the living room, I would seek out the bathroom adjacent to the master bedroom. The first few times, I couldn’t even bring myself to not flush, but eventually my animus toward The Man empowered me not to do so.

When I was caught, convicted, and sentenced to a year in the Lompoc Federal Correctional Complex, I discovered that what you always heard about prison life in television police dramas — that handsome young men could count on having their rectums forcibly enlarged — was inaccurate. The most intimidating inmates all seemed to pride themselves on their chivalrousness, and never demanded more than what the British would call a kiss and a cuddle. It felt a little weird, but it was the least I could do for The Revolution.