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.