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last, injected. And that’s as far as Spiegel got. A dizzying acid trip, which left him lying naked in January on a cot in the unheated attic of a downtown crash pad, pulling his hair out by the roots and sobbing, afraid of death and afraid to go on living, shook him so deeply that he left school in the middle of the semester, with all the belongings he would need stuffed into paper bags piled onto the seat beside him on the Greyhound. By that time, he knew almost no one in the college, anyway. One after another, his friends had dropped out and disappeared into the warrens of lower Manhattan, the remote hilltop villages of the Adirondacks, or the sun-bleached cities of the Far West. He set out to join some of them in a commune on an abandoned Ohio beet farm, where the barn had been converted into a Shinto temple.
    He thought it would be the perfect place to strain the acid out of his skin, his veins. The life was quiet, regimented, pacific. Everyone shared in the cooking, cleaning, farming, and decision-making. Each evening, they gathered for a community meeting, at which they would discuss such issues as whether to replace the oil furnace, when to plant the rye, whether it would be morally correct to raise worms for bait. Spiegel hated every minute of this life. He was not designed to till the soil. At the end of each day, his back was killing him and his mind was numbed. If man must live by the sweat of his brow, what is man to do with his eyeglasses? Spiegel wondered. His were so covered with salt streaks by late afternoon that he couldn’t see to plant straight, and he was quite as likely to chop up a potato patch or a corn row as to hoe out any weeds. Besides, his draft situation was a bit tenuous, and “agrarian worker” was not an acceptable deferment. So one morning in August he turned in his bandanna, said his last devotions to the Buddha, stuffed what he could seem to recall as his former belongings into some bags that had been set aside for recycling, and headed east along the lakeshore to the university, with every intention of staying clean, making good.
    But meeting Iris had changed everything. She enlisted him in her own troops, fighting the war against the war, and for this Spiegel was entirely unprepared. Although the first tidal wave of the sixties, the acid revolution, had knocked him off his feet and sent him into retreat on the Shinto farm, he had till then successfully sheltered himself from the buffeting winds of the next great storm. The fury that hit the American campuses as Johnson and McNamara built the war machine into an unimaginable monstrosity, the firestorm after the police clubbed their way through the peaceful protesters in Chicago, he had missed all of this, digging in the cornfields. He was astonished by the fervor, and even the sophistication, of the organized student left—if organized was the word, for at times it seemed a most disorganized, anarchic gathering of tribes, a giant beehive full of buzzing, in which everyone zipped back and forth, this way and that, from meeting to seminar to self-study to rally to picket to who knows what, never stopping for a moment, never listening or absorbing or learning, for who had time for reflection with war in the air?
    Once Spiegel moved in with Iris, he found himself caught up in the same vortex. He felt as if he had been lifted from the earth, like a leaf in a storm, and he didn’t mind, so long as he could be near Iris. In the mornings, she took him along with her to the factory gates where she sold copies of the Workers World, then to the Students United steering committee where he would listen as the brain trust of the movement planned tactics and strategy, and later to one of the dingy bars near the Black Rock Canal where they would talk, late into the night, always with a group, mostly students and a ragged few recruited from the nearby battery factory, the token worker who had little to say while he sucked on a longneck but whose