The more time I spent in DC, and the more I knew what kind of lawyer I wanted to be—the kind who fought the injustices I witnessed during the marches on Washington—the more claustrophobic the Hillman family plan made me. I loved Audrey, but I didn’t want my life scripted for me. I didn’t want to be a corporate lawyer. And I sure as hell didn’t want to be a politician.
Audrey visited me in DC frequently—she was in Pittsburgh—and with each visit the feeling nagged at me more. In the end I did the ungentlemanly thing and broke it off on the phone.
Without her in my life, I needed to connect with my closest friends more than ever, and I made frequent trips to San Francisco. Michael was there, thriving in the Bay Area music scene. The Crystal Palace Guard had disbanded, but he was teaching guitar lessons to soon-to-be guitar greats William “Willie” Ackerman and Alex de Grassi. I also reconnected with Punky, my pal from Palo Alto High, who was in grad school at UC Berkeley. She had attended Smith College in Massachusetts before, and her roommate in the Bay Area was a Smith classmate, Deborah Beeler from Philadelphia. Like Audrey, Debbie came from an upper-class family, and she was just as pretty, with brown eyes and long brown hair she parted down the middle. The night we met we stayed up talking until 4:00 AM on Punky’s couch. We talked a lot about the war, which was getting worse, the body counts rising. And we talked about prisoners’ rights, something we were both passionate about. We also learned we were both vehemently against the death penalty. We clicked mentally, politically, and physically. She was working on a master’s degree in English education and was so easy to talk to and so smart—intellectual in a way that no other girlfriend I’d ever had was.
She lived in Haight-Ashbury, which in 1969 was the red-hot center of the hippie universe. I started to stay at her apartment, and we’d walked up and down the street, taking it all in. I was struck by her kindness toward strangers. If we came across a homeless man, she would stop and engage him in conversation. And if she had spare change, she would hand it over. It was almost alarming how open she was, how trusting. At Christmas she joined me for a holiday party at my parents’ house. I have a photo from that party that my dad took of her sitting on my lap.
I returned to DC, and we maintained a long-distance relationship, talking on the phone, occasionally exchanging letters. When Debbie came out east to see her family, we connected in her hometown of Philadelphia. I met her parents, John and Elizabeth, who had a beautiful home in the tony neighborhood of Chestnut Hill. John, like my father, was an engineer, and was president of Precision Tool Company.
Debbie and I talked a lot on that trip about what we wanted out of our relationship. We weren’t anywhere near where Audrey and I had been. We weren’t ready to get engaged, but we knew we loved being around each other, even if we had lives on separate coasts. She was excited about the intern program to which she’d been accepted, teaching English at Oakland Technical High School. And I was excited about a new program I’d just started with my law school pal Allen Ressler in DC.