Knott

     I loved Yale. It inspired my life of curiosity and experiment and being a self-educating person. Having lived on the edge most of my adult life, I feel grateful to be alive, for my wife Janet, and many loving friends.

     I came to California in 1972, on the wave of the sixties’ counterculture. The zeitgeist of enthusiasm for self-knowledge and self-expression blew in during 1965-66, our final year at Yale. Inspired by Al Lowenstein, I marched at Selma. I took a year off in ’64 to hitchhike around the world, via a trans-Pacific job on a Swedish freighter. Somehow, I made it through Yale and was accepted at Harvard Law School. During the middle of law school (1967-68) I received a Rotary scholarship for a year of study in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

     With a little help from psychedelic friends back at Harvard, an experimental life became irrepressible. I made the pilgrimage to Woodstock and knew Richard Alpert who became Ram Das. After graduating with my law degree, I lived a hippie life in Vermont and New Mexico before migrating to Berkeley in ’72 and entered a Tibetan Buddhist monastery for six months. My spiritual teacher encouraged me to “do only good” as a new age lawyer practicing in a storefront in Berkeley, and later in Marin. I started playing rock ‘n roll but lacking musical chops, was drawn to the spoken word and poetry movement that emerged during the eighties in the post-punk art world in Los Angeles. I have been perched on the edge of Mt. Hollywood ever since.

     I produced and hosted a hit cult variety show with myriad performers of the local underground during the mid-1980s in LA, while practicing law just enough to pay the bills. My claim to fame is that my bartender went on to be the Terminator in Terminator 2. I was a member of a five-man poetry ensemble called The Lost Tribe, which evolved into the Carma Bums, and we did several West Coast tours. In the 1990s, I created poetry videos, including Psychic Defense Training for Ex-Lovers, which played on broadcast TV.

     Now in my 70s, I am finally an artist, albeit late-blooming. Having broken free from living in a reverse-world as an “eternal boy,” I got married last year for the first time to Janet after living together for 13 years. Our relationship helped me to heal from the effects of my childhood growing up with a secretly abusive alcoholic father who was a judge and pillar of the community.

     After three decades of writing poetry and fiction, I wrote a one-man theatrical stage show, Last of the Knotts, and have been performing it for the past four years in various cities including LA, NYC, Winnipeg, and San Francisco. I have served as the board president of the literary foundation, Beyond Baroque, for the past three years. After some hard traveling on a twisted road, this poet-performer-mystic-playwright, disguised as a lawyer, has finally found a soft landing. Risking humiliation on stage is a small cost for doing what I love. I hope to be able to continue to tend my creative fires into the great void.  •••

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