I DIDN’T SPEND all my evenings and weekends in Los Angeles, a city I was gradually beginning to hate. A city of few really decent restaurants, little transportation—buses were a rarity—and four million strangers.
On the weekends I usually grabbed a flight to San Diego and spent a few days with Earl Kemp (Hamling’s right-hand man) and his family. His backyard was one huge swimming pool with a twelve-foot fence so none of the neighbors could see in. The pool was usually filled with naked teenagers and young men in their early twenties. Earl’s wife, Nancy, cooked for the mob—she eventually tired of it but not for years, when she remarried.
Occasionally Earl and I, along with a couple of kids, would grab sleeping bags and go down to Baja California.
On one such trip, we found a stream and followed it for a few miles, slipping on an occasional rock. One of the kids, Robbie, had shed his cutoffs, and an occasional flash of moonlight would catch his bare butt.
We finally found what Earl considered a suitable campsite and spread out our sleeping bags, all in utter darkness, since Earl’s flashlight had burned out its batteries days before.
Morning was a shock. We had camped in the middle of a garbage dump. The days were hot enough so leftover footstuffs had long since baked away. Other campers had thoughtfully left their tin cans in little mounds, which we had luckily avoided.
We trudged over some sand dunes to the ocean and met a German couple and their kids who were skinny-dipping. They invited us in, and Earl and Robbie shed what little clothing they had on and ran into the water. So did I—but I kept on my Cooper-Jockeys, much to everybody’s amusement. (I was much too shy—a lifelong handicap.)
Sometimes I, Earl, and a young friend named Steve would go down to Tijuana. At that time it was a run-down, poverty-stricken town stitched together with dirt roads. Nevertheless, it had some great restaurants. (The cheaper joints, crowded with American sailors, had floor shows that left nothing to anybody’s imagination. When they brought out the donkey, I left.)
Back at Cavalier, a new hire, Peter Martin, had taken a weekend trip to San Francisco and came back wildly enthusiastic about a “Human Be-In” that had taken place—twenty-five thousand hippies making music, dancing, dropping tabs of acid, and smoking pot in one of the meadows in Golden Gate Park.
“It was the biggest block party in the world!” Martin enthused.
According to Peter, people on Haight Street, the center of it all, were long-haired, friendly, quick to offer you a toke, and were devoted fans of the various rock groups in the city—the Grateful Dead, the Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother and the Holding Company, etc.
A party, I thought. Free food, rock bands. And most of all, twenty-five thousand people in one place having a great time. It was something brand new for the country; it hit the media like a boulder thrown in a pond of water, and the waves soon flooded the country. First the underground press—the Los Angeles Free Press, the Oracle, and the Berkeley Barb enthused about it, and then the major media joined in. The San Francisco hippies were the new Christians.
Another “be-in” was held in Los Angeles, and I think it was then that Lou had his Big Idea. He was not one to let a new cultural craze pass unnoticed, and soon we came out with a few issues of a magazine titled Paperbag. It was printed on a form of rough kraft paper and carried articles by us fraudulent hippies on staff such as “The Death of Haight,” “Playing It Cool About Pot,” and a homage to the death of “Chocolate George,” a friendly Hell’s Angel whose nickname came from his taste for chocolate milk. One of the meadows in the park filled up with mourners, the Grateful Dead played, joints were passed around, and everybody had a great time.
I think our circulation could have been counted in the hundreds. The hippies could smell a fake a mile away, and nobody had gone out there to read magazines anyway. If they read anything it was the Oracle, a colorful underground paper that reached a circulation of a hundred thousand, and Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, which quickly became a bible for the crowds of adventure seekers and runaways who soon came to the Haight.
In my free time, I went back to writing fiction. I’d found four pages of a story in the bottom of my trunk and decided to finish it. The story had been intended for Astounding, which paid three cents a word. At twenty thousand words that came to $600, which I could really use.
My agent didn’t send it to Astounding—she sent it to Playboy. They said cut it by five thousand words and they’d run it. As a lead.
For three grand.
After all those years at a penny or two a word, I’d finally hit the big time.
Cavalier was going down the tubes by this time, and the end came quickly. Bob Shea joined Arthur Kretchmer (Bob had become editor of Cavalier when Kretchmer had departed for Playboy), and Peter Martin, our new hire, decided to become an investigative reporter and followed a story down on Union Street.
Aside from Peter, the first time I heard about the Haight was at a party in Los Angeles. I was with a group of Hollywood hippies—beads, bells, Jesus hair, and $100 worth of the latest mod clothing—who were counseling a young navy deserter on what he should do next. When we were alone I asked him if there was any difference between Hollywood hippies and the San Francisco type.
“They’re a lot more real, man—they took good care of me. Look up Emmett Grogan when you get there. He’ll tell you what it’s like.”
I had a little money now and decided to go to San Francisco to see what the noise was all about.
On the trip to Frisco with a friend, we picked up a Mexican whore. She was dumpy and weathered, midforties, and said she’d once knifed a Hell’s Angel who had beaten her up. She rhapsodized about the early Diggers. “They feed me, they give me clothes, they real nice to me.”
We let her out at the Embarcadero, bought her a cup of coffee, and then she blew our minds by giving us an Indian head penny “from my coin collection.”
That night I spent at a hole-in-the-wall in North Beach, trying to ignore the cries of the barkers below and the noise of the tourists leaving Carol Doda’s topless club.
I didn’t know much about the Haight, but decided I’d like to live close to it but not in it.
For $70 a month I found a small basement apartment—1492 Sixth Avenue (easy number to remember). I had made myself comfortable when there was a scratching at the door. I opened it and a skinny cat stalked in, looked around, and then at me. We had a staring contest for a moment, then he settled down in a corner and ignored me. (I found out later on that raccoons would come around late at night, and if they found a cat, they’d take it apart.)
The cat looked perfectly comfortable in the corner and I decided the apartment belonged to it. The previous tenants had obviously left it behind. My duty was to feed it and give it water and then it would tolerate me.
I said, “Hey, cat,” and it turned and looked at me and I guessed that was what the previous tenants had called it.
That afternoon I walked down Haight Street past Ashbury, where the Grateful Dead were supposed to be living—there was a guitar nailed to the front door—and somebody waved at me. I waved back, thinking it was probably Bob Weir, a member of the band.
Lou had given me the address of Mouse and Kelly, the two most prominent artists of rock posters. I think it was Mouse who opened the door and asked me what I wanted. There were about a dozen people in the living room, and the smoke was fairly heavy.
“Lou Kimzey said I should drop by and say hello.”
I had everybody’s attention then. “That son of a bitch!” Mouse screamed. “He still owes us money!”
It seemed Lou had bought cartoons from them for some of his magazines and forgot about payment. He was thousands of miles away, and what was their hurry anyway?
“What the hell do you do?” I think it was Kelly, but they were all curious—it was obvious I’d just come to town. “You a friend of the bastard?”
I got smart very fast. “He published an article or two of mine,” I said. “I usually write science fiction.”
The tension in the room immediately simmered down, and I was waved to a spot in the circle. When the joint came around, I took a huge puff and fought like mad to keep from coughing. (I couldn’t help thinking of the time at Rogue when I had warned the staff that anybody caught smoking weed would automatically be canned.) Apparently most of my new friends were science fiction buffs, and if writing it was what I did, I must be okay.
I left and wandered down Haight Street to Golden Gate Park. Most of the apartment windows were open, and “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” was blasting out. The people on the street frowned at me—I was out of place, a stranger from another world they’d left a few months ago or maybe only a few weeks.
Just past the entrance to the park was a lagoon and a hill that had been nicknamed “Hippie Hill.” It was dotted with a few dozen guys sunning themselves, passing a joint around, and watching the parade on the sidewalk below.
“Hey, Frank!” somebody shouted. “Come on up!”
I glanced up the hill—it took me a moment to place him. A photographer whom we had given a few assignments to at Rogue. He was sitting next to another contributor who had been briefly on our masthead, Jim Sagebiel.
I stretched out on what was left of the grass, unbuttoned my shirt, and let the sun shine through. Strange world, I thought—a lot different from L.A. I had a hunch I’d be there for a few months.
I had no idea it would be two years.
“You’re out of uniform,” the photographer said.
“I didn’t know you had one.”
“Jesus, look down there.” A few black kids were playing bongo drums at the foot of the hill, and a girl in a multicolored ankle-length dress was walking past followed by a young man in torn Levi’s and a bell around his neck.
“You’re a little late,” Jim said. “It’s changed a lot and it’s still changing.” He was sunburned and thinner than I remembered, and his eyes looked very bright.
“I’ve got an idea for a magazine,” he said. “San Francisco Arts. You want to work with me on it?”
I shrugged. “Sure—why not?”
We would get as far as the cover, a good one—a promising start. But that was it. Jim disappeared and I decided I’d had enough of working on magazines.
I spent the next month exploring, finding out where the bank was, the grocery store, the coffee shops, and getting a history of the area from the few old-timers who’d hung on while the district changed—radically.
The original Haight-Ashbury was a middle-class section of the city, most famous primarily because it was the entrance to Golden Gate Park. It was a mixture of blue-collars and blacks slowly slipping toward a middle-aged gentility. Old Victorians made up the bulk of the housing.
The area was ready for a makeover—and it got one it had least expected. Students from San Francisco State started to sift in, attracted by the low rents. So did some of the beats, forced out of North Beach by higher rents and plunging necklines. Added to the mix were the nascent rock groups who would rent an inexpensive Victorian where they could live and practice together. It was the bands that created the concept of sharing—if one hit it, they shared their good fortune with others who weren’t so lucky.
Leavening the mix were the Diggers and the Mime Troupe and a few beats who had gotten to the area early. There were also some of the middle-class types who had a little money and wanted to buy a Victorian and remodel it. Few of them held on to the bitter end.
Drugs were common, and some of the users went overboard. (Later, almost all did.) Pot was illegal, though Timothy Leary’s development of LSD was gradually becoming popular. Leary insisted that taking it was a religious sacrament, a way to find the soul within. As a sign you had taken the “trip,” a friend who had taken it previously gave you a string of beads to wear around your neck.
It didn’t take long for newcomers to turn the beads into costume jewelry.
In the winter of 1967 the exiled beats from North Beach, the Mime Troupe, the Diggers, the rock groups, and the displaced hippies held a party in one of the meadows of Golden Gate Park. It turned out to be popular beyond anybody’s expectations. Twenty-five thousand showed up to listen to the bands, have a picnic with the free food, smoke some pot, and a few of the more adventurous took “acid” trips. A number of couples made love in the bushes (having sex was one of the first things to be liberated—saying “yes” was far more prevalent than saying “no”).
It was one terrific party. The motto was DO YOUR THING, and those in the meadow certainly did.
The underground press—the Los Angeles Free Press, the Oracle, the Berkeley Barb—gave it extensive coverage. The mass media wasn’t far behind. This was something to write about besides war and politics.
The white middle class was already registering a massive opposition to the “good life” and especially the war. Younger people had become aware of the vast gap between who they were and who they thought they were, between the lives they were actually leading and the lives they were pretending to lead.
Haight-Ashbury was where an optimistic reality existed, and soon cars and buses, trains and planes were headed for the coast. Things were better out there, and far from least, THINGS WERE FREE!
The sources for things that were free had always been their parents—but then something was expected in return. In Haight-Ashbury the only thing that was expected in return was for you to show up. It was flower power—“I love you, man!” It didn’t take too many months for the mantra to become “Any spare change?”
Nothing was really free, and some of the kids who flooded in had nothing but the clothes they wore and no talents or skills and resorted to selling the one thing they did have: themselves.
The churches tried to help, but the law prevented that—churches weren’t allowed to house you after 10:00 P.M. without permission from your parents. And most of those who had departed home without saying good-bye or were runaways weren’t about to call home for help.
By the time most of the original Haight-Ashbury had folded its tent and stolen away, sex had become a medium of exchange, the same as pot. A few of the kids saw what things were really like and called home for an airline ticket back. For the others, if they were hungry and needed food or were cold and needed shelter and couldn’t find a crash pad that wasn’t already crowded with twenty to a room, the answer was simple. There was always somebody willing to feed them and let them bunk in for the night.
There was no real structure to the Haight; a city of seven hundred thousand hadn’t been prepared for the influx of a hundred thousand of the soon-to-be-disillusioned; there were few city organizations designed to cope with it. It was a case of no mama, no poppa, no Uncle Sam.
The Haight became Lord of the Flies a generation later.
For the rest of the country, it was entertainment.
There was enterprise, of course. The empty storefronts began to sport new signs—the Garuda and the I/Thou coffeehouses, the Insomnia Bookstore, the Krishna Temple, the God’s Eye Ice Cream Parlor, the Print Mint, the Drugstore Café, the Bead Freak, the San Francisco Earthquake Pillow Company, and a month or two later, Love’s Hamburger Stand (Love helped a lot of kids stave off starvation).
Some of the more enterprising kids sold copies of the local underground press—The Haight-Ashbury Tribune, Love Street, and others. These were cluttered with photographs of nudes and ads for young men who wanted to be models. The nude photos were a big help in peddling the papers to the tourists, who came through the area in tour buses or in cars with the windows carefully rolled up. The kids paid a quarter per paper and sold them for a dollar.
(The publisher actually had another business—selling nude photos of boys in his mail-order business. Some of the boys were young, very young.)
Confession: I was a star reporter for both the Berkeley Barb and especially The Haight-Ashbury Tribune (under the pen name of “Harry Happening”). The Barb paid its writers with bananas and sandwiches. It took me a long time before I lost my idealism writing for the Tribune. I thought I was doing a public service telling it like it was when in reality I was merely filler around the nude shots.
There came a time, after a few months, when I seriously questioned what the hell I was doing there.
And then I met Jesus.
It was late one night and I’d just bought some old art nouveau postcards from one of the shops.
Suddenly a kid stepped out of the shadows and handed me a sack of greasy french fries.
“Have one, man—they’re pretty good.”
He looked like the Jesus you saw in Sunday school—soft brown eyes and brown hair falling to his shoulders; thin, handsome face; and a knowing expression in his eyes.
I took one—he’d been right, they were pretty good. Not to be outdone, I held out my postcards. “Take one,” I offered, “any one.” Then I changed my mind and held back on a miniature of Sarah Bernhardt that I really liked and said, “But not that one.” I suddenly realized I’d reneged and said, “Hell, take any one.”
He put his hand on the Bernhardt card and for a moment Haight Street fell away and his eyes held mine like a pin holds a butterfly. “Any one?”
“Sure,” I said stoutly, “any one.”
“Then I’ll take this one,” he said—and took a different card.
He was playing Jesus and probably putting me on, but for a moment I had been caught up in a biblical parable on the honesty of generosity. I was either generous or I wasn’t. Which was it?
I glanced at the remaining cards for a moment, and when I looked up, he was gone. I hadn’t even heard his footsteps when he disappeared into the shadows.
A parable on generosity was the last thing I’d expected in the Haight. I wanted to see him again but I was pretty sure that I wouldn’t.