Culture & Community: The Tales of Hoffman

In 1969, Abbie Hoffman lived in a modest ground floor apartment on Sixth Street, just off Second Avenue, in New York’s East Village. This fact wasn’t hidden from anyone. The apartment opened onto the stoop and, in a slot below the buzzer button, there was a card where his name had been written with a ball point pen, presumably in his handwriting.

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In those days I was a “street kid,” usually sleeping in an abandoned apartment building on Third Street, unless I got run-out by the Hell’s Angels whose clubhouse was across the street. All of us street urchins knew where Hoffman lived, and sometimes, when we had nothing better to do, we would make pilgrimages to the apartment just to ring the buzzer to see if he was home. He never was, of course, as he was too busy doing important work for the revolution.

The apartment was remarkable in that the door was partially made of glass that afforded a view into the dwelling. In those days, in that neighborhood (indeed, in all of Manhattan), apartment doors were always reinforced with steel, and secured on the other side, whenever anyone was at home, with a “police lock,” which was a metal bar that wedged between a locked slot on the door and a steel plate on the floor to prevent the door from being kicked-in. There was nothing like that here, and it didn’t even seem odd that none of the neighborhood junkies or dishonest street kids, like some of my friends, ever took advantage of this open invitation to loot the place.

Little Jesus, a scuzzy street kid and wannabe wise guy who was sometimes a member of our gang, swore that he’d once been inside and had met Abbie personally. Most of us didn’t believe him, because experience had taught us that most of what he said was untrue. It’s doubtful that JC, as we called him, knew anything about Hoffman, other than the fact that he was famous to the hippies and that he’d written a book about thievery, which was JC’s favorite past time.

To the rest of the gang, however, Abbie Hoffman was something of a hero, and we would’ve given about anything to actually meet him. Sundance, a kid from New Jersey who was always trying to compel us to commit revolutionary deeds, was always reading to us from a stained and tattered copy of Revolution for the Hell of It, which he always had tucked inside his coat pocket and which was about the only thing he owned. As for me, Woodstock Nation had defined my being and made me understanding that I was like a gypsy, a nationless person in the nation of my birth.

I think it would be a fair assumption to say that none of us agreed with Abbie Hoffman on every issue, probably not even on most issues, which is exactly how he wanted it. His purpose was never to be a leader of Woodstock Nation, but to be the court jester to those who had appointed themselves to be in charge. When the military brass insisted on escalating the war in Vietnam, he went and “levitated the Pentagon,” bringing levity to a grave situation and scaring the hell out of those who ran the war effort. No, brother Abbie was never to be taken too seriously, but like any good court jester, you’d damn well better listen to him.

During his heyday, Hoffman even applied his humor and irrelevance on himself. Chicago Tribune columnist Bob Greene tells the story of the first day of the Chicago Seven (then the Chicago Eight) trial. While waiting for the judge, whose name was also Hoffman, to enter the courtroom, the eight defendants sat in their seats, nervous and glum about the long prison sentences that might await them. Suddenly Abbie rose and turned with a flourish to address the gallery.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “from this day forward I have a new cause. No longer do I protest the war. No longer to I fight racial injustice. From this day on my new cause is....” He paused for a moment, and every reporter in the courtroom sat on the edge of their seats. “...prison reform.”

They say that all comics have a dark side, and Abbie Hoffman certainly had his. In the early 70s he was arrested and became a fugitive from justice for a deal that involved three pounds of cocaine. Although none of us freaks who identified with him wanted to believe it at the time, it turned-out that he was guilty, although probably not as guilty as the police said. In my book, that’s okay, because nearly all heroes, being human, are tainted. Anti-heroes, like Hoffman, have to have character stains; it goes with the territory.

Until the very end, Abbie Hoffman remained true to his convictions. In a speech he made to the National Student Convention at Rutgers University, less than a year before his death in 1989, he spoke about the early days of the student activist movement and pointed-out that he was but a cog in a wheel.

“I look out at you and I think of my comrades,” he said, “not the people you saw in The Big Chill, but people that were great movement organizers. You know some of their names and many others you don't know. They risked not just their careers, marriage plans and ostracism from their family, but their lives. They faced mobs with chains and brass knuckles, the clubs of the police, the dirty tricks and infiltrations of the FBI, the CIA, Army intelligence, Navy intelligence, and local red squads all around the country. They had pressure put on their families. They were prepared for all of this from the moment they decided to go against the grain and take on the powers that be.”

Recently Abbie Hoffman was in the news again, with the release of the movie about his life. I skipped the movie. After all, I’ve got my memories of Little Jesus, Sundance and myself, standing on the stoop and peering through the door panes.

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