FRESH YARN PRESENTS:

I Blame Dennis Hopper
By Illeana Douglas

I blame Dennis Hopper. He's the reason we became poor. It was 1969 and the movie Easy Rider had come out. It was changing people's lives. It certainly changed mine. My father had an epiphany while watching Easy Rider. He started coming home from work, and when I say work, I mean high paying, high level, white collar work, and saying things like, "He knows what it's all about, man," meaning Dennis Hopper, or, "We've become too materialistic, man!"

My sole dreams as a child involved adding to my Madame Alexander doll collection, or getting an Easy Bake Oven. So when my father tore my brother's Hot Wheels set from his screaming hands and shouted, "We don't promote plastic in this house. Not anymore!" I was terrified.

"Mom, what does materialistic mean?" I asked, as I watched my father stuff orange Hot Wheels track in the garbage.

It meant we were rich. I didn't even know we were rich until we became poor, and we became poor because of Dennis Hopper.

"Kids," Dad said enthusiastically one afternoon, "I go to work every day and you know what it means? It's just more garbage cans, man! I mean we started out with one garbage can, and then we had two garbage cans, and now we're up to three garbage cans, man! So I've quit my job and we're all going to be hippies!"

To reflect his independence, he bought a gigantic American flag like they had in Easy Rider. He wanted to hang it down the front of our house, but my mother wouldn't let him, so he bought a gigantic poster of Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda riding their choppers and hung it in the living room instead. He started to grow a mustache. Coping with my father growing a mustache and talking like Dennis Hopper had been bad enough but now he had quit his job and we were all going to be hippies.

The theme song in Easy Rider was "Born to Be Wild" by Steppenwolf. My father played "Born to Be Wild" incessantly on the stereo. I don't remember any other songs on that Steppenwolf album. Were there any other songs on that album? And, so, with "Born to Be Wild" blaring in the background, my father explained his next epiphany to us.

"Kids," he said, "We're going to live off the land! Support ourselves. Start a commune, chickens, goats, this is what it's all about, man! Born to be Wild!!!!"

I blame Dennis Hopper for making me hate that song.

I guess I could have gotten some kind of job. You know, if this were the turn of the century or a Dickens novel. I was four. My brothers were five and six. I did have one job. I became pretty good at rolling joints. Those tiny fingers did the trick for all the hippies that started invading our house. They'd listen to the Beatles Revolution, shout, "This is what it's all about, man," and then they'd come in the kitchen and ask my mother what there was to eat.

At first it was a challenge for my father to even find some hippies. You have to remember there was no hippie handbook at the time to guide people. Eventually my father found a hippie, and brought him home for dinner. Tom was the first hippie I ever saw. He had long hair, aviator sunglasses and rode a chopper like Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider. Are you surprised? Tom didn't work either, so he and my father became fast friends. They'd get in Tom's orange van with another hippie named Annette and go to peace rallies together.

My father went to so many peace rallies I thought that was his work. Of course I also thought he invented Earth Day.

Tom got my father off Steppenwolf by turning him on to Neil Young and Bob Dylan so I do credit him with that.

My mother seemed pretty accepting of Tom. I only remember her admonishing him once. They were in the kitchen and she was cooking, and Tom kept saying, "It's so beautiful, man." And my mother said, "I don't need to take drugs to see it's beautiful, Tom", and then she made Tom and my father a lovely dinner.

Annette was friends with Jane, who then brought her boyfriend, Michael, who was friends with Mark, the one who chased my father around with an axe after a bad acid trip.

Anyway, one day my mother and I came home from shopping, and there were a hundred hippies in our house. My mother started frantically searching for my brother. She found him upstairs with a scary looking dude smoking a joint and teaching him how to play the guitar. "Look, Mom. He taught me!" That was it for her. No more hippies in the house.

So my father built a commune on our property called The Studio. There were goats, chickens, and lots of female college students making pottery and smoking pot. There was a lot of free love. Well, it wasn't exactly free. Turns out free love is expensive! Being a carefree hippie is not cheap, and the ease with which we slipped from being rich and privileged to poor and on welfare was swift.

The hippie girls at The Studio wore ponchos. I wanted a poncho but my mother said we couldn't afford it. It was the first time I had ever heard her use that expression. It didn't sound good. "We're poor now. We can't afford it," she said. It was like an official news bulletin my mother kept repeating. "We're poor now. We can't afford it. We're going to have to keep the thermostat at 68 degrees." "We can't afford it. We're poor now, we're going to have to sell the car." She sold our brand new Buick Skylark convertible and got a used Volkswagen bug and it was official. The last vestige of middle class, the Buick, was gone. The bug -- genuine poor hippie transpo.

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