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.
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