I HAD SPENT almost a year in the Haight, far longer than I had expected, and I was running out of money. In the early days, I had dealt—once. Pressured by a friend in Chicago, I scored two kilos of pot, wrapped them carefully in tinfoil, and shipped them to Chicago in a Random House dictionary box (the box for the unabridged dictionary), giving the return address as the English Department at San Francisco State.
The box never made it to Chicago. I suspected the hippies in the post office who were more familiar with drug shipments than any pot-sniffing dog. Or, possibly, the box was returned to S.F. State and some astonished (and delighted) students in the English Department opened it.
Much to my surprise, the man who would come to my rescue moneywise was Hamling. Stanley Fleishman, his lawyer (and the lawyer for most of the porn publishers in California), wanted to put out a digest-size magazine titled Censorship Today. It would be a ninety-page summary of the censorship activities in the United States and around the world. The magazine was intended for librarians in the United States.
Hamling suggested me as a cheap one-man staff. I edited the copy, pasted up the pages, inserted photographs and captions, and sent the results to a printer in Southern California, who printed three or four thousand copies and sent them to various librarians in the country.
I flattered myself that the printers were glad to get something “decent” instead of the usual publications they handled, even if it was pro bono.
The seventh issue was the last—and it was all my fault. I thought the librarians should see some of the crap that should be censored and reprinted a typical Tijuana cartoon. The circulation dropped to zero overnight. I should have checked with Stanley beforehand but hadn’t.
My sincere apologies to the shade of Stanley Fleishman for killing the magazine of which he was justly proud.
In an effort to become more a part of the community, I’d bought a fifteen-gallon iron cooking pot to make spaghetti. Once a week I’d buy a gallon of Red Mountain, make spaghetti, and invite the hungriest-looking hippies on the street. On Sundays I usually lugged the pot up to the free medical clinic and made spaghetti for the staff.
Holidays were tough—the make-believe hippies were all home opening presents and eating turkey. (The weekend panhandlers usually came from good families, dressed in the appropriate rags, but you could tell who they were by their blank looks and the new shoes they wore.)
This day was Thanksgiving, and the tourists were anyplace but in the Haight. There was nobody around but the poor and hungry street kids. Love would usually roast a turkey, but this Thanksgiving she was broke. She confided it to Norm Fitzgerald of F&S Distributing (the poster shop), who tapped the till for twenty bucks and ran down to the butcher shop for the biggest turkey they had.
He didn’t bother to have it wrapped, but holding it by its legs ran back to the hamburger stand, gave it to Love, and told her to do her thing.
The ovens in the back of the hamburger stand could handle a turkey, and pretty soon the street kids started to gather around. One of them went to the grocery store and liberated half a dozen cans of cranberry sauce, while others found stale bread and spices for the dressing. Love boiled up some rice as a side dish with turkey gravy. By five o’clock she was carving up turkey until her arms were ready to drop. Everybody showed up, both blacks and whites. A cop from Park Station came over to check up on the whooping and hollering and assured Love she was golden for the day.
There was pathos on the street but also comedy. One spaced-out kid tried to hold up the Bank of America with a bag of dirty laundry he claimed was dynamite. He got six months but he and his girlfriend exchanged letters that were posted on the bulletin board at the Psych Shop and followed avidly by the street kids—they now had their own Romeo and Juliet.
For most of the kids, life was pretty grim. I put up one French-Canadian kid who was on a really bad trip. He considered himself a poet and wrote poetry all over the photographs and type in an issue of Time magazine. He could read the poems but nobody else could.
He ended up in the bathtub with a pillow and blanket, staring at the ceiling.
I asked him if it was okay if I turned off the light. He nodded “Yes,” and when I did, he screamed.
The Haight was still big news in the eyes of the media, and it was the rare Digger who wasn’t willing to talk about the philosophy underlying the community, though most of it had evaporated. The media would always talk about the prevalent dope business but seldom asked questions about the people doing it.
LSD had lost much of its religious overtones but was readily available at parties and concerts, where tabs were frequently given away free. Pot was illegal, which meant it was the big-ticket item. Bad trips frequently resulted from acid—or what was passed off as acid. Pot was generally regarded as a safe drug.
It was the first anniversary of the Haight, and the media swarmed around it like flies. One rumor had it that a reporter had balled a couple of kids before interviewing them. I didn’t know the truth of it, but I knew that of all the things that were important to the hippies, sex was usually at the bottom of the list.
Money was at the top.
The Haight-Ashbury was where the real fabric of American life was being unraveled, and many of the kids discovered too late that some of the threads of that fabric were stitched right through their bellies.
There was a certain uneasiness about some of the new kids coming in. As one older hippie put it, “They never cry and they seldom laugh and if they’re bright, they’re witty and brilliant and cynical—and essentially empty.”
Many of the kids came to San Francisco with no money and no plans for a place to stay—they were counting on everything to be free. It always had been so at home, and from what they had heard, it was the same here. They didn’t think the generosity of the original hippies was unusual at all. Even as they mouthed the standard thank-you—“Wow, man, thanks, you’re really beautiful!”—their eyes were curiously blank of gratitude.
Rick was a thin, blond-haired kid whom I met on Hippie Hill. His father and mother had separated just before they put Rick in an outpatient psychiatric clinic. He was turned on to grass by the other kids in the clinic. “It was great, man—I could see the bag that I was in but I could also look at other people and see the bags that they were in.” It was dope that gave Rick confidence, dope that gave him what insight he had into other people, and dope that gave him status among his contemporaries.
David looked like a runaway, one of the hundreds who came into the Haight with nothing because they figured everything was already there. I told him I was serving spaghetti that night and that he was welcome. He showed up early, complete with sleeping bag and suitcase, and asked to crash. He wasn’t a runaway, and he wasn’t the usual crasher—he had $400 in traveler’s checks and had been bumming his way across the country as a lark. His father was a bank executive, and David had thousands waiting for him at the other end of a phone call. He wasn’t interested in the hippie culture and only mildly interested in drugs. He had a tab of white lightning hidden in the end of a ballpoint pen and finally dropped it while in Golden Gate Park.
It was a good “beauty trip,” but he doubted he would ever trip again. He had now “done” drugs—what else did the world have to offer? He was good-looking, and bright as far as attitude went to get along in the straight world.
“I play a lot of games,” he said casually. “I’m good at playing games. I usually win them.”
David and the original hippies would have had little to say to each other.
Dick was from Oklahoma City, a quiet kid with thick glasses and a scraggly beard who was a natural attraction for highway cops. Hitchhiking to San Francisco had been a series of short hops and overnight stays in various small-town jails. He was from a good family, got along well with his classmates, but was remote from his father and hated his mother. Unlike David, Dick was not good at society’s games. For a handsome eighteen-year-old he hadn’t been successful with the girls. His first try was traumatic and he was properly outraged by it. “She was a lesbian and when it came right down to it, she didn’t like it at all!”
Life since then had been futile attempts to recoup his lost pride and self-confidence.
Harold had come to the Haight as a rebellion against his father—a wealthy, gun-collecting Bircher type. What Harold wanted was to prove that he was independent of his father’s money (at least until school started in the fall). He sold hippie newspapers and worked in the local hot dog stand. After a month Harold’s father ransomed him from the Haight by paying him $4 an hour to work in his uncle’s auto repair shop.
Jimmy was a real pothead—a small, thin kid from Massachusetts, he had come to the Haight primarily for cheap dope. He had never tried smack or speed but was familiar with everything else in the Haight pharamacopoeia—acid, pot, mescaline, hashish—you name it, Jimmy had either smoked it or swallowed it. “I want to get high and stay there,” he said with a smile an ad agency would have paid a fortune for. He came from middle-class, intensely religious parents, and back east had been a capable apprentice machinist—but for him that had been strictly a drag. He was a master of the Haight teenybopper vocabulary—“Wow! Outtasight! Blow your mind! Groovy!” The Haight for him was not so much love but free dope on Hippie Hill. He could work through the better part of a lid in a day. He crashed at various pads until his welcome was thoroughly worn out. Money was a hang-up. Working was out of the question, and selling hippie newspapers was a bore. Dealing was the logical way of getting money, but Jimmy was very righteous about it. “I’ll never deal—it’s too much of a paranoid trip.” But later on he became a dealer—after burning a crippled shopkeeper for the money to buy his first kilo.
Allen was hung up on drugs and philosophy and for him the Haight was a mystical magic trip except for brief spells of reality when he came down with clap.
Peter, with the piercing eyes and wide cheekbones of a Native American, was a man for whom the Haight was also a trip, but on his last day there, sober and cool, said he was returning to New York because he had some lectures to give.
One of the last crashers I let stay over was Mark. He wasn’t handsome—he was what my mother would have called “nice-looking.” What gave me pause was that he seemed a little slow. I had a spare sleeping bag and made him up a bed, then turned in, dead tired. It was all of an hour before he climbed into bed with me.
The next morning I fed him breakfast, told him to take care of himself, and turned him loose on a world that would eat him up in nothing flat.
I worried about him and told the story to Fat Maxey next time I ran into him at Garuda’s some days later. It was Maxey who suggested the obvious.
I went down to the city jail the next morning and bailed Mark out. He had been languishing in the lockup for fifteen days and, oddly, seemed reluctant to leave. Once home, he told me what had happened—everybody else had been smoking pot in the open, so he did, too, only a new cop had spotted him.
He had liked jail, he said. Everybody had been nice to him, they had taught him a lot. He grinned. He could hardly wait until bedtime to show me. I gave him a $10 bill and turned him out. The first time had been a mistake; there would be no second time. I hoped that some nice gay guy would let him crash, maybe let Mark stay until such time that he was smart enough to take care of himself.
Which, I suspected, would be never.
The crashers could usually take care of themselves; the runaways had a tougher time of it. They could go to Huckleberry’s for Runaways and get food and sound advice during the day, but they couldn’t crash there at night unless they had permission from their parents. So fourteen-year-old Skippy spent the days at Huckleberry’s and the nights wandering the streets.
Stephen was fifteen, a gaunt kid who looked much older than he was and who had run away to the Haight with no money and only the T-shirt and the pair of pants he was wearing. He slept in the back of a laundry until discovered by the owner and then crashed with me for a night. I impressed upon him the virtues of Huckleberry’s and convinced him he should go there and have them contact his folks and maybe help iron out their differences. He arrived at Huckleberry’s the next night just in time to walk into the arms of the police, who had chosen that particular night to bust the place.
They were the raggle-taggle gypsies of the Children’s Crusade who had come to the Haight because the Haight promised dope, excitement, and an affectional society. What the straight world never really wanted to understand was that their kids who fled to the Haight went there for all three.
Haight-Ashbury was not an all-white enclave of San Francisco—it hadn’t been for decades. A large number of blacks had been living there in peace and harmony with whites for years. With the largely white invasion, the balance was upset. The streets had been taken over by young strangers who had come from God knew where, rents were going up, familiar grocery stores and hardware stores had disappeared, and in their stead were stores whose signs didn’t make much sense.
It was a cultural invasion, and they didn’t like it. As one young black spokesman said from the stage of the Straight Theater: “I represent the 70 percent of the Haight that’s black—we’re the cats you never see, the ones you never look at.”
The blacks in the Haight were middle class—muni drivers, postmen, government workers, etc. Some of them had brought food to the hill and given it away to the white hippie kids. Others sat on their doorsteps and watched the hippies wandering by; they were as baffled as any middle-class whites watching the scene. Compared to their own recent struggles, what were the hippies bitching about? They had it made.
There were fights and thefts, but then there were fights and thefts among the hippies themselves. Granted, it was still smart to watch yourself at night, but sometimes the violence was provoked. One time I was sitting on Hippie Hill and noticed a group of four blacks walking along the pathway below. They were being followed by a spaced-out kid intent on doing his bit for race relations.
“You can’t make me not love you! I mean it—you can’t refuse my love!”
The group’s repeated demands that he go someplace else soon changed to a discussion of whether they should beat him up right on the sidewalk or drag him into the bushes and do it. He was finally pulled away by some friends who had no intentions of letting him start a riot.
Toward the end of the summer some whites and blacks had teamed up. Many of the hippies really couldn’t go home again—their poverty was very real, and the blacks sensed it. Not all of the hippies had been raised in nice suburban homes—some of them were street types, handy with their fists and who found the trip from hostility to respect to friendship a relatively short one. The more intellectual types sorted each other out over chess games, and finally, some were just friendly, period.
One day I was playing guard at the Free Frame of Reference shop, trying to keep several young black kids from barging in and grabbing everything in sight. A young girl among them was a spitter, and her aim was perfect.
My tolerance level quickly sank to zero. It was hard to remind myself that the same thing sometimes happened in Chicago—with gangs of young white kids.
And sometimes white adults in the Haight were to blame. There was no denying the thefts, the violence, the mutual distrust, but it wasn’t just on one side. I remember going to a meeting of the Communications Company—they handed out leaflets warning hippies against everything it was possible to warn them about. Be careful who you hang with, don’t go out late at night, etc. A lot of it made sense—and a lot of it was pure paranoia.
The meeting was in an apartment on Masonic, and there was no mistaking that it was sponsored by the Communications Company, which prided itself on being hipper than thou. An open parachute hung from the ceiling, and all of us huddled beneath it.
The warning for the day was that on good authority (always unnamed, of course) the Black Panthers were going to take over the Haight and hold it for ransom until the government stopped the Vietnam War. It made no practical sense at all, but anything that might bring the war to a halt was worth considering.
For a minute or two.
Another time, I was sitting on Hippie Hill watching a muscular black guy in the meadow below playing with a knife. A white friend with me said, “I know the cat—I’ve rapped with him a lot—he’s a good rapper, one of the brightest I’ve ever met. He’s got a degree, but he’s black—Christ, it’s tough enough for us.”
In the meadow the black guy got into a friendly argument with a younger kid that quickly turned sour. The black rapper suddenly started running after him, waving the knife. He couldn’t run very fast—he was crippled. I sat and watched him for a long time.
Suzanne and Jean were two blacks who lived together in the Haight. Both wore their hair native style, but Suzanne was statuesque and regal-looking, while Jean was a thin, nervous type, an ex-actress. Both had been married and were now divorced. Suzanne had two kids—one, a little girl named Angel, who was impossible not to love, and five-year-old Johnny, who was a young version of the “hostile spade” stereotype. He would fight, kick, spit, and swear (if his mother wasn’t around).
Suzanne and Jean had teamed up to share their meager resources—they both wanted to go to Mexico and get their kids away from the hostility and filth of Haight Street.
One day I went with them to Berkeley to have a picnic. Going home, we decided to visit Johnny’s father, who lived in a small house with his new white wife.
When they came out to say their good-byes, Johnny was holding onto his father’s trouser leg and bawling—no longer hostile but a pathetic little boy crying for his daddy.
Of all the groups I both sympathized with and hated, at the head of the list were the police. They had an impossible job and quickly realized they were in a war—the hippies against the cops.
The drug laws were being violated on a massive scale, the district was filling up with runaways, Park Station was being flooded with parents demanding that their kids be found and returned, and the “good” people in town wanted their city cleaned up—which meant the Haight. Nobody had invited the hippies to come to town, and worst of all, they had arrived hungry and broke. The city was indignant.
The cop who was so nice to the tourist in North Beach was King Kong in blue when he was assigned to the Haight. If the hippie was young, he was probably a runaway. If he was in his twenties, he was probably a dealer. If you were older than that—well, you should have had the good sense not to be there in the first place. And don’t give the cop all that crap about hippies being nonviolent—if he had drawn duty there the previous summer, he knew better.
The political activists—San Francisco always had more than its share—saw opportunity in the unmotivated kids. Their job, of course, was to motivate them. The same activists who had urged both sides to “cool it” during the Hunters Point riots now started working for a confrontation between the kids and the cops.
It wasn’t hard to do. The biggest crime implicating the hippies was dealing or using pot. Everybody used grass, and there was no end to culprits being dragged away. When a skinny eighteen-year-old was dragged off in a pot bust by a cop who looked like Bull Connor, onlookers sympathized 100 percent with the kid. Somebody threw a pop bottle, somebody yelled “Fascist bastard!,” and quicker than you could say Allen Ginsberg, riot squads would show up to haul away more protesting kids.
The usual flyers would show up on the street urging mass meetings to get together and sue the cops but that was the most empty threat a transient society could make. One time we met, a jug of Red Mountain was passed around, and one witness testified that a girl had been hit by a bottle thrown from the crowd. He was immediately jeered down. Everybody there knew she’d been hit by a cop.
The agents provocateurs were also quick to appear. As reported in The Haight-Ashbury Tribune, the writer was grabbed and handcuffed by the cops and thrown in the paddy wagon. One of the cops said, “We’re going to show you what fascism is all about,” and the reporter said all he could think about were concentration camps. “One guy was tossed in with a bloody head, and blood was gushing out. Then a girl named Louise was thrown in and I could see her jaw was broken. One of the cops even said ‘You know what? The next thing we’re going to do is turn you into soap.’”
It all sounded very practiced, but few people doubted the truth of what was said. Few people in the Haight ever doubted what was said against the cops.
There were some comic overtones. Ballet stars Nureyev and Fonteyn were busted at a pot party, and when the word spread, the upper crust in ’Frisco panicked. Every top lawyer in town was contacted, and the two were hastily released when a comma was found misplaced in the warrant.
Another time it didn’t concern hippies, it concerned Cat. I had let a couple crash for the night, and since they had a collie with them, I exiled Cat to the backyard. The next morning, when the crashers had left, I opened the window and whistled for Cat. There was no response. I immediately went out, afraid the raccoons had gotten him. I found him in a little nest he’d dug in the dirt. I picked him up and he went limp. I carried him into the house, put out some water and a dish of food, but he wouldn’t eat. Finally I went to the butcher, bought some liver, took it home, fried it up, and cut it into small bits. I then fed Cat by hand. He sniffed it, tasted it, had a mouthful, then dug in, all the time staring at me. I was never to give his home to a dog again, did I understand that?
Another time there was a free dance at the Fillmore, and leaflets were passed all over the city in hopes that the disgruntled kids who couldn’t get in would tangle with the police. But only one cop showed up, and he jollied the kids, and the show on the outside soon became as good as the show on the inside.
The case of Randy Buckner wasn’t funny. Late one evening a crowd had gathered a hundred feet from the Straight Theater to listen to a sidewalk guitar player. The cops showed up, Buckner cracked wise, nightsticks flew, and so did blood.
Buckner’s dried blood could still be seen on the sidewalk the next day. A kid built a shrine of bottles and candles and created a sign saying, “This is where your brother fell.” A cop kicked over the bottles and candles, then leaned against a parking meter a few feet away and stared blandly at this hippie kid Jay, waiting. Jay stared blandly back. The kids grew quiet and watched. Jay outstared the cop, and when he left, rebuilt the shrine. The next day the shrine was enormous. This time the cops left it alone. One of them asked Jay bitterly, “Whatever happened to the good hippies?” “They’re all in jail,” Jay said, just as bitter.
The cops were pushed to their limit. Once, while booking a kid in Park Station, a cop said, “I’ve got a son just like you in Vietnam.” “I hope he gets killed,” the kid said with a snarl. “If I had been a civilian,” the cop said later, “I think I would have killed him.”
It was public policy, of course, to harass the hippies. You could be arrested for sleeping in Golden Gate Park, for possession of narcotics (almost all of them carried pot), for assaulting an officer. (What constituted assault? Complaining when arrested?) Once booked, a prisoner could be released on bail or on his own recognizance if he had a job or owned a home, etc. But few hippies had jobs or money or even friends when it came to bail money. It was a pretty stupid hippie who didn’t realize he had fewer rights than a whore.
The city had finally found a group other than blacks to occupy the bottom rung of the ladder of justice. Maybe the city was even aware of it. But whether the cops were vicious or overworked or just misunderstood didn’t matter to the hippie who drew a heart on the wall next to the Psych Shop and wrote in it a bit of wisdom that nobody could argue with:
“I love the cops—I’m from L.A. and you don’t know how good you’ve got it!”
The one group that had a tougher time than the cops were the FBI men trying to track down draft dodgers.
Joe was a kid who had been institutionalized all of his life. His parents had died when he was five and he became a rent-a-kid—the state paid various families to take care of him, for which his foster families were paid for his food, shelter, and clothing. Affection and love were not included.
At age nineteen Joe neglected to register for the draft and headed for the Haight. He wanted to meet the beautiful people he had read so much about. After a week or so of crashing, he wasn’t welcome anymore. He was expected to clean up his room, do the dishes, and other tasks that had never occurred to him—he had to be told.
He adjusted, moving in with some friends and getting a job as a messenger boy downtown. He wasn’t handsome and had difficulty relating to girls. Then things began to go even more sour. He had a frail personality, but the loungers on Hippie Hill didn’t know that—or if they did, didn’t care. One day in Buena Vista Park a black pulled a knife on him and forced him to give a blow job. Joe had a thing about “queers,” and this didn’t help much.
The next night he burgled a gun shop and the cops caught him within five minutes. He was given two months in the county jail, and the worst thing that could happen to him, happened. He was gangbanged by a group of blacks. Aside from having a sore butt, he thrived in jail. It was a structured situation of the type he had known most of his life. Some speed freak chicks worked him over once he was out, and his personality structure really started to crumble.
Then there was the draft. Joe couldn’t handle the rest of his life, and handling the draft was out of the question. The FBI man looking for him said if the army had given him a decent psychiatric examination he would never be taken. Joe couldn’t manage to turn himself in and take his chances, so he split and the last anybody heard of him he was selling himself in the Tenderloin.
“Fuck me, mister, and make me feel wanted for once.”
The FBI man who picked him up shook his head. “I’m not doing police work down here, I’m doing social work. Christ, the kid wasn’t even good at hustling.”