AFTER THE FEW weeks it took to get settled I regularly walked over to the Haight to look up friends who weren’t space cases.
I developed a routine where I’d take the scenic route to Haight Street and either the Garuda or the I/Thou coffeehouses for coffee and doughnuts, depending on who was there.
I walked over to Fifth Avenue and took a sharp left past the flat where a dope dealer named Carter had been dismembered by an angry meth head. Then it was down to Golden Gate Park—on chilly mornings the paths through the park were not very crowded, but sometimes you’d meet hippies who smiled and said “hello,” and on gray days a smile helped a lot.
Once in the park I would keep to the right until I came to the children’s playground, where there was a carousel and a little petting zoo for the kids with goats and rabbits and a weather-beaten old cable car up on blocks in which the kids played on warm days.
The park was almost deserted, and there was nobody sitting on Hippie Hill, but a couple of older teenagers were stretched out on a bench at the front of it. One of them was a deserter from the marines who had asked if he could crash the night before but had never shown up. He apologized, mumbling, “Gee, man, I’m sorry I didn’t show. I got all fucked up.” His pupils were so large there was no irises left. There was no sense rapping when there was nobody home, so I said, “It’s cool, man,” and continued walking up Haight Street.
New stores were popping up even in the past month. The most significant was the Psychedelic Shop, the focal point for newcomers looking for friends or wanting to leave notes for those who’d come before or would come later.
Fat Maxey was already in residence at Garuda with a cup of coffee and a plate of chocolate doughnuts in front of him. Maxey was a good friend and my favorite hippie—though he really wasn’t a hippie. He was a bystander, an observer, a historian of sorts who could tell me what I had missed in the Haight, especially what it had been like if I had only arrived a few months earlier.
“I used to hang out around State and when I drifted over here a few months ago, there was a lot of kids acting out. Some of them did everything but wear a halo.” Two bites of doughnut disappeared. “It’s going downhill fast. I understand the Dead have already pulled up stakes and went to live in Big Sur. Don’t know where the Jefferson Airplane went but they left here about the same time. Probably Sausalito or someplace else in Marin.”
“I wondered about Janis Joplin,” I said.
Maxey looked surprised. “Pushing a baby carriage down Haight Street with a bottle of Southern Comfort in it? Pure bullshit—if you don’t have a story to tell, make one up.” He grinned. “Maybe the kid you saw that night was the real McCoy. Came back to see how God had fucked up his world.”
The first chocolate doughnut had disappeared.
“Some of the other old-timers are leaving—the Diggers for one. They set up a ‘free’ store—they called it the ‘Free Frame of Reference’—and it’s falling apart.”
I looked blank and Maxey said, “They got a garage on Page Street where they handed out free clothing—you leave what you don’t need, take what you do need. Everybody needed, what they left were pretty much rags.”
I remembered passing by it and thinking it was just a junk shop. I glanced at my watch and got up.
Maxey looked surprised. “So soon?”
“Got an interview with Father Harris.”
Haight Street in the morning was at its best. The shopkeepers were opening up, people on the street smiled at you, and nobody was tripping. It was too early for the dealers to swarm the streets, and the flood of tourists had yet to arrive.
Father Harris ran the All Saints Episcopal Church on Waller, a block up from Haight. It was a quiet Sunday morning, and he was ticked off by the latest indignities suffered by one of his parishioners that morning. She was eighty years old and had her purse snatched on her way to church.
“I tried to help them during the summer,” Father Harris said. “It cost the church a lot of support—many of them moved away because they didn’t want to raise their kids here.” He sighed. “The parish used to be noted as one that had a lot of children. I miss the children.”
What did he think would happen to the parish, to which he had devoted his life?
He shrugged. “The bishop knows what we’ve done here. He won’t let the parish sink.”
In a letter to the members of his parish, Father Harris later wrote: “If the church is to be true to itself, it won’t confine its ministrations to those who support it financially. The church is not a private club for like-minded individuals.”
In the basement of the Hamilton Methodist Church, the vibes weren’t good. A girl was saying to her friend, “It used to be so nice here—now it’s uptight all the time.”
At a table in the corner, the manager was talking to five punks sprawled out in the chairs around it. “I’ve run this place for nine months and never had any trouble. Then you guys come in. You look like hoods, you act like hoods.”
Outside, the street was beginning to wake up. A kid who’d lived in the area for two years screamed angrily at the world, “Goddamnit, they walk up to you in broad daylight and steal your guitar right out of your hands!” In the Garuda coffee shop, a kid was talking of being mugged on Ashbury, just up from the Panhandle.
The area also had its martyrs. In late spring, Ernest Beatty, a young professor of English at San Francisco State, came to work at the All Saints community affairs office—at his own expense. He had visited the church several times during the spring, admired the work that was being done, and offered to contribute his summer. By this time the Diggers had more or less fallen apart as an organization, and it was Beatty who built up the office. In a few weeks he was heading the entire operation.
On July 11, he was found dead in bed of a massive stroke.
Most of the kids on the street had never heard of Ernest Beatty, or if they had, never remembered his name. For them, the only martyrs on the scene were their fellow dealers who had been busted.
None of them showed up for his services. None of them posted notes or signs regretting his passing.
It wasn’t all bad—not quite. The Straight Theater started opening its doors at night for free happenings. For the people who performed there, the audiences were startling. Margaret Fabrizio gave a harpsichord concert one night, and the theater was packed with teenage hippies who were deathly quiet during the performance and gave her a standing ovation when it was over. Another time the Jane Lapiner Dance Company performed a modern ballet titled Bodies, where five performers (three girls, two men) were nude. Again, rapt attention—no snickers, no catcalls. (The cops tried to bust the performers but the hippie audience crowded in toward the stage and the dancers got away.)
Not every performer got a standing ovation. One night in the I/Thou a kid borrowed a guitar and sang and played and was quietly applauded (he was passably good at both). He thanked the crowd and played again … and again. The crowd got edgy—the kid sounded like he was drunk or on speed—and somebody reclaimed their borrowed guitar, and when the kid started to sing a cappella, the crowd booed him down. There was the general I/Thou hubbub for a few minutes, and then a loud voice said, “Christ, kid, be a man.”
But a man was the one thing the kid couldn’t be, and the I/Thou sat in shocked silence except for the crying of a little queer kid lost in his loneliness.
A week later a photographer and myself trekked over to Berkeley to see what was happening in a protest at People’s Park. At a similar protest some days before, Alameda County sheriff’s deputies had used shotguns to break up a demonstration. A student, James Rector, was killed and carpenter Alan Blanchard permanently blinded. The deputies claimed they had only used birdshot. They had actually used 00 buckshot, which can kill—and did. Buckshot was also used to fire at the backs of fleeing demonstrators.
The buckshot was used, according to the sheriff, because he was undermanned and he didn’t want to abandon Berkeley “to the mob.” He also admitted that some of his deputies were Vietnam War veterans and treated the protesters as if they were Vietcong.
Today was going to be the biggest protest of all. The police were there, and so was the National Guard. The park itself was fenced off with barbed wire. I couldn’t believe it and touched it, pulling back some bloodied fingers.
I thought that some of the protesters would get clubbed, and several killed—maybe a lot of them killed.
Governor Reagan was dead set against “Communist sympathizers, protesters, and sex deviates” taking over the Berkeley campus. (He was obviously in total ignorance of the Haight.) For this demonstration, he had sent in twenty-seven hundred National Guardsmen, and there were also the police and the sheriff’s deputies.
I wondered just where the Vietcong were hiding.
Nobody knew for sure what was going to happen, but I was certain there would be casualties. So was the photographer. The crowd started to gather at about noon. I estimated about five thousand people or more—much more. There were crowds of students, women in flat heels and not too much makeup, medical students with Red Cross armbands, and radicals passing out proclamations or charging a nickel or a dime for them as souvenirs of the occasion.
It kept occurring to me that if Reagan wanted a bloodbath, he just might get one.
I wandered over to People’s Park No. 2 and wasn’t much impressed—it didn’t look much like a park to me. It didn’t compare with empty lots back in Chicago where neighbors got together and turned the lots into vegetable gardens. There were several plants trying to grow in hard-packed dirt, withered flowers, broken green things that the crowd had mashed flat. I wondered if grass could scream.
I ran into a reporter for Look and asked him what he thought.
“It’s a lot of bullshit, man, it’s just a lot of bullshit.”
I asked him how many people he thought would be there and he shrugged and said, “Maybe ten thousand—and I’m being generous.”
Final estimates were about thirty-five thousand.
They were starting to make speeches now and I figured that would go on for a while, so I started to check what would be waiting for people along the line of march. I squeezed up to the head of the crowd and noted that the Highway Patrol was closing off the side streets.
I couldn’t put my finger on it at first, but there was the faint air of carnival in the air. The photographer and I ran up the side streets to Shattuck and University to see what was up.
The California Highway Patrol was in single file in front of the university grounds. The National Guard was at the intersection, waiting. The marchers were still a few blocks away, but one guy was already setting up a lemonade stand.
Not much hostility—just the CHP and the National Guard and Berkeley cops waiting for the unexpected. Then we were on Telegraph and hurrying up the street to the original People’s Park. We couldn’t go any farther.
Barbed wire on the residential streets of a quiet American city! And behind the wire the unsmiling faces of more National Guard. What struck me was that the guardsmen were not big men but kids, like most of the marchers.
We went down a side street to get a good view of People’s Park No. 1. Not much to see—some playground equipment, dying plants, tents for the guardsmen. It wasn’t much of a park, really, and I felt surprised. This was what the fuss was all about? And James Rector dead and Alan Blanchard sightless. Behind my disbelief was a growing horror.
The rest of the afternoon was an anticlimax. The marchers came up and circled the park, and the atmosphere of carnival deepened. A few of the marchers chopped holes in the asphalt street and planted some small trees and some assholes showed their hippie patriotism by sitting in the middle of the street.
The barbed wire was soon decorated with flowers and a few of the girls yoo-hooed at the Guard and stuffed flowers down the muzzles of their rifles. Some of the braver ones went topless and the guardsmen immediately snapped to an alert. The cops on the side streets lounged against their cars, bored, and some old ladies served iced tea to the kids and everybody had a fine time.
What a lovely way to fight a war!
That night there was a party in People’s Park No. 2. There was a lot of pot, some of the musically inclined were beating bongo drums, and gallons of Red Mountain were passed around. A lot of people were shouting “Jesus, we won!” There must have been more than thirty-five thousand people there.
Some of the chicks were balling strangers in the tents, and many of the guardsmen were thanking God for the assignment.
People’s Park was thrown together without much thought, and at least one ecologist said that the plants would never have grown. “It was a grand gesture designed to fail.” Mayor Johnson was horrified to discover that lots of pot had been planted, and I thought that confrontation would have come sooner or later. The cops would eventually have had to bust the park, and once again it would have been the cops against the kids.
I’ve got nothing good to say about Reagan (governor at the time) or the asshole who ordered the gassing of Sproul Plaza or the sheriff who was scared witless and ordered one of his men to murder.
The thing that bugged me all day about the People’s Park march in Berkeley was that it was great theater.
And not much else.
But it did predict the shape of things to come.
In May 1970 nervous members of the National Guard fired on a group of students at Kent State, Ohio, who were protesting the Vietnam War. They killed four and wounded nine.
The student strikes that followed resulted in hundreds of universities and colleges closing in protest.
The reasons for the protests against the Vietnam War (and those that were to follow) were—in my opinion—simple:
The government had failed to sell its various wars to the people they expected to fight them.