Not the One - Fourth and Final Part

A Long Night in San Francisco

So, Zachary and I start out from the I and Thou Coffee House, down the stairs. Whoa, right then and there, about halfway down the longest stairway in the world, I have my first (and last) actual hallucination. I see overhead the visage of a young woman, shimmering, long hair, all colors of the rainbow in her face, dress, hair, the very air around her. At her breast, a baby. Radiant happiness. I think, "That's me, my future. I will have a baby one day and be radiantly happy."

As you can see in this picture, the I and Thou was at ground level.  It could be then that the stairs we were walking down were fromt he balconey of the Straight Theatre, where we went after leaving the I and Thou.  I had never been in the Straight on a night hen there wasn't a music performance, but a legitimate theater company used the spaces during those times, and this night they were putting on a performance of Julius Caesar.  Zachary and i sat in the balcony while one of the actors ran down the aisle to the stage were Caesar was waiting to be murdered and say his famous line "et tu Brute?"

Then we are outside. The street which I left to walk up the stairs just an hour before is now the most interesting street in the world. A cacophony of sounds, which I realize can be isolated by my will. I can tune in and out of conversations, street noises, feet lifting off the pavement, the very air moving around me. Zachary moves me along, his grin as big as the sky. He knows I am new at this and I can tell he is delighted to take me on this, my first acid trip.

We walk and walk and walk. We are on a street with palm trees; it is an amazing street. How did it get here in San Francisco, City of Cypress, and pine and Eucalyptus? A City of fog.  Zachary keeps us moving and soon the palm tree street (later I learn this street is called Dolores) gives way to a crowded neighborhood of many buildings and people on the street. It seems late at night by now, it seems as though we have been walking down the various streets of the City for hours and hours.

No we come to one of the buildings and go inside and up a flight of stairs.  At the top is an apartment, where many people site and lie on the floor.  A jukebox, silent, but vibrant, alive with color, sits in the corner. Zachary leads me to where a group of people are lying on floor, sleeping.  I am to lie down and go to sleep to.  But how can I go to sleep in this night full of sound and color and electricity?  I lie down and watch the colors and listening to burbling sounds.  Zachary goes into the kitchen while I entertain myself waving my hands in front of my face and watching the trailing images following along.  

Time passes.

Zachary returns and says now, we will go visit a gentle man.  Then I get up from the floor where the others are still sleeping and go with Zachary out into the morning,  It has become morning while I lay unsleeping in that strange house with those strange people "crashed" on the floor.  I think, I have just been in a crash pad!  This makes me feel very adventurous and ready for more.  I am still tripping, but much more quietly.  

We go down this street and that, up this hill and that, and come to a building that is nothing like the building where the crash pad was, nothing like the I and Thou or the Straight Theatre. It is a doorman building.  It is white, gleaming in the sun, which is turning its windows golden as it peeks over the hill from the east.  There is an elevator.

Inside, we take the elevator and a man meets us at the door to an apartment that is white like the building.  He gives us orange juice. His is golden like the sun, a California man.   I sit on a couch while he and Zachary go into yet another kitchen. A few minutes later Zachary reappears and he and the man shake hands.  Then we go back down the elevator and into full morning.

The walk back to the Haight is long and tiring. Somewhere before the end of the walk, the K Ingleside streetcar stops and I get on.  I know now that Zachary will not the be the one. Sometime later i realize that the "vision" I had was not me in the future, but the cover of that week's Oracle (psychedelic newspaper), which several of us hawked for extra cash on Haight Street.  It is several years after that when I realize what was going on that night was a drug deal.  Zachary procured from the Mission Street crash pad and sold to the "gentle man."

And years after that I wonder to myself if maybe Zachary was a "gentle man" himself.

Not the One - Part Three

Next door to the Straight Theater was the I and Thou Coffee House.  It was very hip, or it tried to be. Since I was also trying to be hip, it was perfect.  There I met Zachary, with his beard, wiry frame and impish grin. He was as hip as they got. he was cool. He drank coffee at the I and Thou and he seemed to always be there.

I didn't get any better than that.  When it was down time at the Straight, which was often between shows. And where was the baby? you are asking yourself. Good question.  Probably with the little gnome who also resided in Ingleside and watched the baby before I came along and after I left. 

Did Zachary (always Zachary, never Zach) and i discuss philosophy? Music? Child raising? I don't remember a thing that was said (Ok, there is something to that whole "If you lived through the sixties, you can't remember it" thing), but I am sure it was fascinating and enlightening.

How many nights we sat there drinking coffee and talking I don't remember either, but somewhere along the way I started to get the distinct feel that Zachary was going to be the one. The one I would do "It" with at long last and finally get some mileage out of the birth control pills I'd been using since April, when Jane had taken me to her quack doctor and had me get a prescription. (The doctor was a quack, I now know, because he also handed our scrpts for all manner of "diet pills" without so much as requiring a physical, but I wouldn't be using those for a few more months). 

The night started out like any other. Zachary and I drinking coffee in the I and Thou, talking about this and that, when Zachary gets a twinkle in his already sparkly eyes and says, "Do you want to try something?"  

Ooo, I think., what is he asking me to try. (I already have a filthy mind for an 18 year olf virgin).

He says, "Windowpane," revealing a small square of what looks like cellophane in his hand.

"Really?" I ask. Acid. The good stuff.  I have heard of this, but never been invited on a "trip" before. It was just two months ago, I was right out of Christian college having my first Budweiser in Wendy Kellum's living room.

"We'll split." He produced a razor blade and cut the piee of cellophane right down the middle. "You put it on your tongue." He reched over and put it on mine, then popped the other half in his mouth.

"No what?"

"No we wait."

Sipping coffee, waiting, with Zachary.

Not the One - Part Two

How I almost met Janis Joplin

This will strike people as implausible, but I worked at the Straight Theater for 6 weeks and can't remember a single show that was put on or band that played except for Janis Joplin and Big Brother and Holding Company.  Maybe there is something to that "if you lived through the sixties, you don't remember them" thing after all.

This is how it happened.  Everyone was excited that Janis Joplin was coming to the Straight.  The house was full and all the crew members were backstage. I don't remember the actual concert. Usually someone passed around a joint or two or several.  There was this high school boy who also hung around the Straight, in from the suburbs several nights a week on the bus. 

All I remember is there I was backstage after the concert with the high school kid and a bottle of Jim Beam, unopened, that someone from the band had left behind, where it was rolling around backstage, after everything was cleaned up and everyone else had gone home. This was special.  We had no choice but to open and, sitting there on the stage, in an empty theater on Haight Street, proceed to drink the whole thing, or as much of it as we could, before becoming violently sick. Soon I realized I was the only one left on stage, my young friend (I was 18, he couldn't have been more than 17) had toddled off to catch the last bus. How he could stand up was beyond me, but that may be because my own high school years were spent going to church and youth group, and the the first time alcohol had touched my lips, some three months earlier, had also been the last, once I discovered the much mellower joys of  marijuana. His tolerance as obviously much higher than mine.

Then I heard noises and realized I wasn't truly alone.  One of the crew members or maybe it was a member of the Family Dog who managed a number of the bands that played at the Straight, found me propped up against the rear wall, my eyes going.

"What are you still doing here?" he asked.  I don't recall what I answered other than vaguely waving in the direction of the now half empty bottle lying at my feet.  "Oh," he said, "I'm taking you right home to bed."

If I had paid closer attention to my mother's regular and ongoing admonitions, little warning bells would have gone off in my head. After all, I didn't really know this guy.  He was good looking and he was a regular backstage, so I never thought twice about letting him scoop me up and half carry me to his car outside.  

But I was too out of it to pay attention to mere bells, when my biggest concern was not throwing up all over myself or his nice leather car seats.  Soon I realized we were going over the Golden Gate Bridge, not out to the Avenues, where my own bed awaited.

But I did not protest. In fact, drunk as I was, I was secretly pleased to have attracted the attention of a handsome backstage guy.  Maybe this would be my big break of the love of my life.  If I could manage not to puke, of course.

Soon we were climbing a mountain road. It could have been minutes or hours from the Bridge. (Later I learned it was Mill Valley, a short ride over some twisting roads on the side of Mt. Tamalpais.) Then we had arrived and the handsome man was helping me out of the car, up the stairs into his house and tucking me into a bed. Alone.  He pulled the covers up to my chin and said, "You'll feel better in the morning."

When morning came, I  felt worse, and I didn't smell that good either.  Embarrassed at my unseemly behavior, I all but hid my face in my hands, after showering in the adjacent bathroom and redressing in last night's mussed clothes. Clothes I had slept.

Well, I thought to myself on the ride back to the Straight, a little wistfully, I'll have to tell my mom that not all men who get you in their cars are up to no good.

Not the One - Part one

I went to Haight Ashbury for the Summer of Love. Is this me in this photo? It could be. I was into the whole hippie thing, but this is from a website, Hippies of the Haight.  Yes, I was one of those.  I was that starry eyed romantic young girl, wearing flowers in my hair. But who could keep flowers in your hair for long; they wilted and fell out, and then you were the poor little lank haired barefoot girl once again.

And I didn't have a boyfriend, though not for want of trying. This was the summer I was sure to find The One. The One I would do It with and not be the last virgin on the face of the earth any more. I had just turned nineteen and felt I had wrung all I could out of Cambridge. With the wanderlust of the young and the foolhardiness of the true believer, I set off for San Francisco with three boys I met through friends of friends.  (I know, how stupid!). But I had the luck of the stupid too, and the boys were paragons. So paragon-like were these boys, that when I ran into them on the streets of the Haight a day after leaving them with my share of the gas money, and I asked them for the money back, because the place I was supposed to have been able to stay in - a pad on Cole, if I remember correctly, where Andy Warhol and his doped up crew were filming - didn't have a room, (although I got to sit through an afternoon of filming, in which I sat on the floor as part of a silent dour contingent of druggies and watched Andy behind his one big eye, until it got dark), these paragons of the male gender, these so sweet your mother would love them boys, handed the money back to me, every penny.

So there I was homeless in the Haight, with like $12 and change in my pocket, when I ran into this hippie couple with a baby, who said to me, standing alone on the corner of Haight and Cole, "Hey, you need a place to stay? (How did they know? Was it the just off the bus look in my eyes? My bulging back pack, drooping from one hand, as I gazed around at the psychedelic posters, the wall paintings, the sea of humanity sitting and lying [oh oh can't do that anymore!] all around the gritty sidewalks?) We need someone to watch the baby, while we're working." This was the dad. He indicated the Straight Theater, which happened to be on that very corner.

"We work the lights" he said. "We bring the baby with us but we need someone to watch him. We have a place out in Ingleside" he went on, naming a respectable neighborhood a trolley ride to the west (of course I had no idea what Ingleside was; it might have been a brothel for all I knew. But it was a chance to stay; it was providence.)

With that, I was launched on my own personal Summer of Love.  Soon I would meet Zachary. Find out why he was "not the One" when this Blog returns.

The drugs we did and didn't do

In those days everyone did drugs. There were the drugs we did and the drugs we didn't. We did smoke dope, often and then less often as it became more potent and started having names like Panama Red and Thai Stick, and Maui Wowie.  I liked it when it was plain old grass, and it made you mellow, not all weirded out and spacey and like an elephant was sitting on your chest. or worse, like you might actually die and had to worry about whether to call for an ambulance or just die and not get your friends into trouble.

There was acid until someone told me it made your eyeballs soft, and after that, there was psilocybin, mostly synthetic; which was probably acid really but with a different name.  We got diet pills, Dexedrine, from Crazy Jane's somewhat shady doctor, and then we all discovered Ritalin which had pretty much the same effect, and was also good for cleaning the apartment. I had two and sometimes three roommates in the small Beacon Hill flat in those days, and we would take these drugs and we would sit up all night talking and then go out for big breakfasts on Charles Street when it got light and we were still not ready to go to bed.

There was heroin around us and meth, "speed," but we never touched it.  The junkies I met through my speedfreak boyfriend, who was no kind of boyfriend at all, started hanging around our apartment and one day Bruce with the Jimi Hendrix hair oded in the bathroom and Kathy said, "that's it!" and we all thought, bad karma man, we can't have this in our house. And the junkies had to move on. 

This was when Jane was living in North Beach and somehow she ended up with some of the junkies crashing with her, especially David, who would have been pretty good looking if he wasn't wasted all the time.  One day she asked David to Shoot her up; she wanted to know what it was like and she told me later, it was pretty good, but she probably wouldn't do it again.

None of us, except Jane, had the guts to try hard drugs.   Which was funny when you think about it because Jane was the "straightest" of all of us. Until she moved in with me in the first Beacon Hill flat after my Cambridge flat broke up, she lived with her parents in Winchester, a very well-to-do Boston suburb.  Her father was an accountant and her mother a school teacher, and Jane favored Bonwit Teller dresses and had a canopy bed with her old stuffed animals on it.

She however, was also the only one of us to have had an abortion (2 in fact) for which her father had sent her to Tokyo for, and she was also the only one to have an older married "gentleman friend," Ralph, whom she would see when he came to town on business and now that I think about it, it was Ralph who fixed Jane up with the shady doctor who distributed pills, including birth control pills, which I also received from him.  I mean, how else would I have known where to get any of these things, a good still mostly Christian girl from Gordon College? 

Yes, I had been to the Haight, but I didn't know my way around the local drug scene and would never have had the guts to ask. Things just kind of came you you in those days, and if you were lucky, they were mostly good things, benign or mostly harmless anyway, and if you weren't lucky, well, who knew? 

It wasn't only luck of course. I had ready access to speed and heroin for that matter, but it just seemed so bad for you, and self destruction was not on my agenda.  It may have been on Jane's, or maybe it was pure rebellion, because she did not take pains to hide her indiscretions from her mother, whom she called Mary, but did worry about breaking her father's heart. He was Bernard and she truly adored him.  Why she hated her mother so much I do not to this day understand.

So drugs - we did some and left others alone.  Even Jane knew enough to end her experiment with heroin before it got out of hand. We were mostly pretty tame in those days.  I wish I knew what happened to all those Beacon Hill girls, Rosalie, and Kathy and Amy.

Jane did not stay in North Beach long, moving back to Winchester, where she lives to this day, now with a boyfriend named George and standard Poodle named Pierre.