Brown Rice

“Fundamentally, there's just one reason why I left that commune.”

“Which was?” I ask.

“I got sick of eating brown rice every.goddamn.day.”

My friend, for a lark, decided to live in a Berkeley commune in the early 70's when the were popular. He had been ousted from his professor's job in San Diego and decided to drift up north to see what could be had there. He found a small commune and joined it. What he didn't know was that the commune next door, the Peking Man House, was occupied by the Symbionese Liberation Army, the same people who kidnapped Patty Hearst and gave the cops a surprise when they were finally busted with a huge shoot out. The SLA had used automatic weapons for that one. The LAPD, up until then, had never come up against anything like it. My friend had split the whole commune scene before the SLA got that active, though he did become friends with Mizmoon Soltysik, a waif-like and diaphanous hippy chick who also was apparently good with M2 carbines. She sold baubles and the such near the University of California, Berkeley to make a living. In the end, she was shooting up the LAPD from a barricade and died eventually after the police burned the house to the ground.

“It's too bad, she was probably the nicest one of the bunch, if you can call revolutionaries 'nice.'” he adds.

He said here's how the commune worked. The costs there were to be shared equally and the idea was that since the costs were spread out, everyone could use their copious free time to engage in what they wanted. Some spent time on their artwork, others, like Miss Lucy, spent her time making more money by being an underaged whore to wealthy Marin county businessmen. She may have been 16 while living at the commune. Marybeth, who was from Massachusetts as well as B. spent her time trying every latest fad in psychotherapy in order to fix herself. “Marybeth's day could be completely ruined if she broke her shoelace.” He tells me. “But on the whole, she was a decent person, just trying to fix whatever it was that broke her when she was a little girl.” He also tells me there was a guy who lived in the front parlor who had finger cymbals and clanged them while chanting “Ommmmm” for hours on end.

Since few of the hippy members worked enough to gain enough money, most had welfare checks to supplement their income. The whole commune would then pool their cash and send one of them off to buy food for the week. The cheapest staple they could purchase was, brown rice.

“I'll never eat another grain of fuckin' brown rice again” B tells me. It was the daily staple in the commune and he tried, again and again, to get them to add anything, something, to the rice in order to change up it's flavor. As the cooking duties rotated among the members, he occasionally would be in charge and try to make an Italian style rissoto with it, to the joy of the whole house. For once, rice wasn't boring. “Oh, that and goddamn lentils...I hate lentils now.” he adds.

He had had his fill after a while at the commune and returned to Massachusetts to start another job teaching. Not too long later, the SLA in the house next door was shooting people and kidnapping. He said on his way back, he stopped at Urbana/Champaign to teach and join another commune there, as his way back to Massachusetts was of the “long and circuitous route.” But that's when it started to all change he tells me.

The Flower Children of the 60's were harmless. Their goals were lofty and generally easy to get along with, but as this whole thing matured and morphed, it attracted an ugly element he tells me. The drugs the hippies and such enjoyed weren't the type to make you violent nor attract those who were. Also, the black market that provided it wasn't filled with bastards. That changed when heroin showed up.

“While at Urbana/Champaign, that's when I started seeing heroin...and the criminal types who then started to hang around or join these communes. I'd get some very ugly vibes off of some of the people there...I knew it was time to move on. When I started seeing thefts and weapons...that was it.”

**

Up until a few years ago, I had no idea that there were communes much, much earlier than the 60's. I had learned about Utopian towns that were tried in the US, in response to the shit mill towns the Industrialists created for their factory systems. These utopioan towns seemed more attuned to improving the lives of labor. The idea that a commune (back then) was for giving you tons of free time to chase after whatever it was that floated your boat was new to me. Then I found out about Brook Farm in Wext Roxbury, MA which was started in 1840.

Brook Farm was just that. If you could spread the work around equally, pay everyone equally, then the free time created could be spent on better things besides having to grovel to put a roof over your head. The first tenants engaged in lofty arts, literature and the sciences. The women there were treated with equality and they too could engage in whatever it was they wanted too. For a little while, it worked.

The problem was that there was no organization, no real division of labor and the farm went to hell pretty rapidly. You have to plow, plant, weed and harvest crops and that takes a ton of labor and time. When you don't organize it, guess what happens? No crops bearing anything worth selling in the marketplace.

Nathaniel Hawthorne was one time member. He blew it off when he realized Brook Farm would provide no real money to start his life with his new wife. The idea of sweating or freezing your ass off in the fields for crap pay was abhorrent to him.

“...Hawthorne, not only tired of the high minded talk among the residents, he had found also labor on the farm, milking cows, chopping hay, shoveling manure, hoeing vegetables, nearly unbearable. After five months of it, he had fled back to a rooming house in Boston, losing his initial investment in the escape. In his notes about Brook Farm he said: 'It is my opinion that a man's soul may be buried and perish under a dung heap or in a furrow of the field just as well under a pile of money. Even my custom house experience was not such a thralldom and weariness, my mind and my heart were free. Oh, labor is the curse of the world, and nobody can meddle with it without becoming proportionally brutified.'”

Perhaps he was sick of brown rice as well?