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.