Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world . . .
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand . . .
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
\u2014W.B. Yeats<\/p>\n
The center was not holding. It was a country of bankruptcy notices and public-auction announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes and vandals who misspelled even the four-letter words they scrawled. It was a country in which families routinely disappeared, trailing bad checks and repossession papers. Adolescents drifted from city to torn city, sloughing off both the past and the future as snakes shed their skins, children who were never taught and would never now learn the games that had held the society together. People were missing. Children were missing. Parents were missing. Those who were left behind filed desultory missing-persons reports, then moved on themselves.<\/p>\n
It was not a country in open revolution. It was not a country under enemy siege. It was the United States of America in the year 1967, and the market was steady and the GNP high, and a great many articulate people seemed to have a sense of high social purpose, and it might have been a year of brave hopes and national promise, but it was not, and more and more people had the uneasy apprehension that it was not. All that seemed clear was that at some point we had aborted ourselves and butchered the job, and because nothing else seemed so relevant I decided to go to San Francisco. San Francisco was where the social hemorrhaging was showing up. San Francisco was where the missing children were gathering and calling themselves \u201chippies.\u201d When I first went to San Francisco, I did not even know what I wanted to find out, and so I just stayed around awhile and made a few friends.<\/p>\n
\n\t\t\t\t\t\tSubscribe and get unlimited access to our online magazine archive.\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
A sign on Haight Street, San Francisco:
Last Easter Day
My Christopher Robin wandered away.
He called April 10th
But he hasn\u2019t called since
He said he was coming home
But he hasn\u2019t shown.<\/p>\n
If you see him on Haight
Please tell him not to wait
I need him now
I don\u2019t care how
If he needs the bread
I\u2019ll send it ahead.<\/p>\n
If there\u2019s hope
Please write me a note
If he\u2019s still there
Tell him how much I care
Where he\u2019s at I need to know
For I really love him so!<\/p>\n
Deeply,
Marla<\/p>\n
I am looking for somebody called Deadeye (all single names in this story are fictitious; full names are real), and I hear he is on the Street this afternoon doing a little business, so I keep an eye out for him and pretend to read the signs in the Psychedelic Shop on Haight Street when a kid, 16, 17, comes in and sits on the floor beside me.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat are you looking for?\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
I say nothing much.<\/p>\n
\u201cI been out of my mind for three days,\u201d he says. He tells me he\u2019s been shooting crystal, which I pretty much know because he does not bother to keep his sleeves rolled down over the needle tracks. He came up from Los Angeles some number of weeks ago, he doesn\u2019t remember what number, and now he\u2019ll take off for New York, if he can find a ride. I show him a sign on the wall offering a ride to Chicago. He wonders where Chicago is. I ask where he comes from. \u201cHere,\u201d he says. I mean before here. \u201cSan Jose. Chula Vista, I dunno,\u201d he says. \u201cMy mother\u2019s in Chula Vista.\u201d<\/p>\n
A few days later I see him in Golden Gate Park. I ask if he has found a ride to New York. \u201cI hear New York\u2019s a bummer,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Deadeye never showed up that day, and somebody says maybe I can find him at his place. It is three o\u2019clock and Deadeye is in bed. Somebody else is asleep on the living-room couch, and a girl is sleeping on the floor beneath a poster of Allen Ginsberg, and there are a couple of girls in pajamas making instant coffee. One of the girls introduces me to the friend on the couch, who extends one arm but does not get up because he is naked. Deadeye and I have a mutual acquaintance, but he does not mention his name in front of the others. \u201cThe man you talked to,\u201d he says, or \u201cthat man I was referring to earlier.\u201d The man is a cop.<\/p>\n
The room is overheated and the girl on the floor is sick. Deadeye says she has been sleeping for 24 hours. \u201cLemme ask you something,\u201d he says. \u201cYou want some grass?\u201d I say I have to be moving on. \u201cYou want it,\u201d Deadeye says, \u201cit\u2019s yours.\u201d Deadeye used to be a Hell\u2019s Angel around Los Angeles, but that was a few years ago. \u201cRight now,\u201d he says, \u201cI\u2019m trying to set up this groovy religious group \u2014 \u2018Teen-age Evangelism.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Don and Max want to go out to dinner, but Don is on a macrobiotic diet so we end up in Japantown. Max is telling me how he lives free of all the old middle-class Freudian hang-ups. \u201cI\u2019ve had this old lady for a couple of months now, maybe she makes something special for my dinner, and I come in three days late and tell her I\u2019ve been with some other chick, well, maybe she shouts a little but then I say, \u2018That\u2019s me, baby,\u2019 and she laughs and says, \u2018That\u2019s you, Max. \u2018\u201c Max says it works both ways. \u201cI mean, if she comes in and tells me she wants to have Don, maybe, I say, \u2018OK, baby, it\u2019s your trip.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Max sees his life as a triumph over \u201cdon\u2019ts.\u201d The don\u2019ts he had done before he was 21 were peyote, alcohol, mescaline, and Methedrine. He was on a Meth trip for three years in New York and Tangier before he found acid. He first tried peyote when he was in an Arkansas boys\u2019 school and got down to the Gulf and met \u201can Indian kid who was doing a don\u2019t. Then every weekend I could get loose I\u2019d hitchhike 700 miles to Brownsville, Texas, so I could pop peyote. Peyote went for thirty cents a button down in Brownsville on the street.\u201d Max dropped in and out of most of the schools and fashionable clinics in the eastern half of America, his standard technique for dealing with boredom being to leave. Example: Max was in a hospital in New York, and \u201cthe night nurse was a groovy spade, and in the afternoon for therapy there was a chick from Israel who was interesting, but there was nothing much to do in the morning, so I left.\u201d<\/p>\n
We drink some more green tea and talk about going up to Malakoff Diggins, a park in Nevada County, because some people are starting a commune there and Max thinks it would be a groove to take acid there. He says maybe we could go next week, or the week after, or anyway sometime before his case comes up. Almost everybody I meet in San Francisco has to go to court at some point in the middle future. I never ask why.<\/p>\n
I am still interested in how Max got rid of his middle-class Freudian hang-ups, and I ask if he is now completely free.<\/p>\n
\u201cNah,\u201d he says. \u201cI got acid.\u201d<\/p>\n
Max drops a 250- or 350-microgram tab every six or seven days.<\/p>\n
Max and Don share a joint in the car, and we go over to North Beach to find out if Otto, who has a temporary job there, wants to go to Malakoff Diggins. Otto is trying to sell something to some electronics engineers. The engineers view our arrival with some interest, maybe, I think, because Max is wearing bells and an Indian headband. Max has a low tolerance for straight engineers and their Freudian hang-ups. \u201cLook at \u2019em,\u201d he says. \u201cThey\u2019re always yelling \u2018queer,\u2019 and then they come prowling into the Haight-Ashbury trying to get a hippie chick.\u201d<\/p>\n
We do not get around to asking Otto about Malakoff Diggins because he wants to tell me about a 14-year-old he knows who got busted in the Park the other day. She was just walking through the Park, he says, minding her own, carrying her schoolbooks, when the cops took her in and booked her and gave her a pelvic. \u201cFourteen years old,\u201d Otto says. \u201cA pelvic.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cComing down from acid,\u201d he adds, \u201cthat could be a real bad trip.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
I call Otto the next afternoon to see if he can reach the 14-year-old. It turns out she is tied up with rehearsals for her junior-high-school play, The Wizard of Oz. \u201cYellow-brick-road time,\u201d Otto says. Otto was sick all day. He thinks it was some cocaine somebody gave him.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
There are always little girls around rock groups \u2014 the same little girls who used to hang around saxophone players, girls who live on the celebrity and power and sex a band projects when it plays \u2014 and there are three of them out here this afternoon in Sausalito where a rock group, the Grateful Dead, rehearses. They are all pretty and two of them still have baby fat and one of them dances by herself with her eyes closed.<\/p>\n
I ask a couple of the girls what they do.<\/p>\n
\u201cI just kind of come out here a lot,\u201d one of the girls says.<\/p>\n
\u201cI just sort of know the Dead,\u201d the other says.<\/p>\n
The one who just sort of knows the Dead starts cutting up a loaf of French bread on the piano bench. The boys take a break, and one of them talks about playing at the Los Angeles Cheetah, which is in the old Aragon Ballroom. \u201cWe were up there drinking beer where Lawrence Welk used to sit,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
The little girl who was dancing by herself giggles. \u201cToo much,\u201d she says softly. Her eyes are still closed.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Somebody said that if I was going to meet some runaways I better pick up a few hamburgers, cola, and French fries on the way, so I did, and we are eating them in the Park together, me, Debbie, who is 15, and Jeff, who is 16. Debbie and Jeff ran away 12 days ago, walked out of school one morning with $100 between them. Because a missing-juvenile is out on Debbie \u2014 she was already on probation because her mother had once taken her to the police station and declared her incorrigible \u2014 this is only the second time they have been out of a friend\u2019s apartment since they got to San Francisco. The first time they went over to the Fairmont Hotel and rode the outside elevator, three times up and three times down. \u201cWow,\u201d Jeff says, and that is all he can think of to say about that.<\/p>\n
I ask why they ran away.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy parents said I had to go to church,\u201d Debbie says. \u201cAnd they wouldn\u2019t let me dress the way I wanted. In the seventh grade my skirts were longer than anybody\u2019s \u2014 it got better in the eighth grade, but still.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYour mother was kind of a bummer,\u201d Jeff says to her.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey didn\u2019t like Jeff. They didn\u2019t like my girl friends. I had a C average and my father told me I couldn\u2019t date until I raised it, and that bugged me a lot too.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cMy mother was just a genuine all-American bitch.\u201d Jeff says. \u201cShe was really troublesome about hair. Also, she didn\u2019t like boots. It was really weird.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cTell about the chores,\u201d Debbie says.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor example, I had chores. If I didn\u2019t finish ironing my shirts for the week, I couldn\u2019t go out for the weekend. It was weird. Wow.\u201d<\/p>\n
Debbie giggles and shakes her head. \u201cThis year\u2019s gonna be wild.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re just gonna let it all happen,\u201d Jeff says. \u201cEverything\u2019s in the future, you can\u2019t pre-plan it, you know. First we get jobs, then a place to live. Then, I dunno.\u201d<\/p>\n
Jeff finishes off the French fries and gives some thought to what kind of job he could get. \u201cI always kinda dug metal shop, welding, stuff like that.\u201d Maybe he could work on cars, I say. \u201cBut I\u2019m not too mechanically minded,\u201d he says. \u201cAnyway, you can\u2019t pre-plan.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI could get a job baby-sitting,\u201d Debbie says. \u201cOr in a dime store.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019re always talking about getting a job in a dime store,\u201d Jeff says.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s because I worked in a dime store already,\u201d Debbie says.<\/p>\n
Debbie is buffing her fingernails with the belt to her suede jacket. She is annoyed because she chipped a nail and because I do not have any polish remover in the car. I promise to get her to a friend\u2019s apartment so that she can redo her manicure, but something has been bothering me, and as I fiddle with the ignition, I finally ask it. I ask them to think back to when they were children, to tell me what they had wanted to be when they were grown up, how they had seen the future then.<\/p>\n
Jeff throws a cola bottle out the car window. \u201cI can\u2019t remember I ever thought about it,\u201d he says. \u201cI remember I wanted to be a veterinarian once,\u201d Debbie says. \u201cBut now I\u2019m more or less working in the vein of being an artist or a model or a cosmetologist. Or something.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
I hear quite a bit about one cop, Officer Arthur Gerrans, whose name has become a synonym for zealotry on the Street. Max is not personally wild about Officer Gerrans because Officer Gerrans took Max in after the Human Be-In last winter, that\u2019s the big Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park where 20,000 people got turned on free, or 10,000 did, or some number did, but then Officer Gerrans has busted almost everyone in the District at one time or another. Presumably to forestall a cult of personality, Gerrans was transferred out of the District not long ago, and when I see him it is not at the Park Station but at the Central Station.<\/p>\n
We are in an interrogation room, and I am interrogating Gerrans. He is young, blond, and wary and I go in slow. I wonder what he thinks the major problems in the Haight area are.<\/p>\n
Officer Gerrans thinks it over. \u201cI would say the major problems there,\u201d he says finally, \u201cthe major problems are narcotics and juveniles. Juveniles and narcotics, those are your major problems.\u201d<\/p>\n
I write that down.<\/p>\n
\u201cJust one moment,\u201d Officer Gerrans says, and leaves the room. When he comes back he tells me that I cannot talk to him without permission from Chief Thomas Cahill.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn the meantime,\u201d Officer Gerrans adds, pointing at the notebook in which I have written major problems, juveniles, narcotics, \u201cI\u2019ll take those notes.\u201d<\/p>\n
The next day I apply for permission to talk to Officer Gerrans and also to Chief Cahill. A few days later a sergeant returns my call.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have finally received clearance from the chief per your request,\u201d the sergeant says, \u201cand that is taboo.\u201d<\/p>\n
I wonder why it is taboo to talk to Officer Gerrans.<\/p>\n
Officer Gerrans is involved in court cases coming to trial.<\/p>\n
I wonder why it is taboo to talk to Chief Cahill.<\/p>\n
The chief has pressing police business.<\/p>\n
I wonder if I can talk to anyone at all in the police department.<\/p>\n
\u201cNo,\u201d the sergeant says, \u201cnot at the particular moment.\u201d<\/p>\n
Which was my last official contact with the San Francisco Police Department.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Norris and I are standing around the Panhandle, and Norris is telling me how it is all set up for a friend to take me to Big Sur. I say what I really want to do is spend a few days with Norris and his wife and the rest of the people in their house. Norris says it would be a lot easier if I\u2019d take some acid. I say I\u2019m unstable. Norris says, all right, anyway, grass, and he squeezes my hand.<\/p>\n
One day Norris asks how old I am. I tell him I am 32. It takes a few minutes, but he rises to it. \u201cDon\u2019t worry,\u201d he says at last. \u201cThere\u2019s old hippies too.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
It is a pretty nice evening, nothing much is happening and Max brings his old lady, Sharon, over to the Warehouse. The Warehouse, which is where Don and a floating number of other people live, is not actually a warehouse but the garage of a condemned hotel. The Warehouse was conceived as total theater, a continual happening, and I always feel good there. Somebody is usually doing something interesting, like working on a light show, and there are a lot of interesting things around, like an old touring car which is used as a bed and a vast American flag fluttering up in the shadows and an overstuffed chair suspended like a swing from the rafters.<\/p>\n
One reason I particularly like the Warehouse is that a child named Michael is staying there now. Michael\u2019s mother, Sue Ann, is a sweet, wan girl who is always in the kitchen cooking seaweed or baking macrobiotic bread while Michael amuses himself with joss sticks or an old tambourine or an old rocking horse. The first time I ever saw Michael was on that rocking horse, a very blond and pale and dirty child on a rocking horse with no paint. A blue theatrical spotlight was the only light in the Warehouse that afternoon, and there was Michael in it, crooning softly to the wooden horse. Michael is three years old. He is a bright child but does not yet talk.<\/p>\n
On this night Michael is trying to light his joss sticks and there are the usual number of people floating through and they all drift in and sit on the bed and pass joints. Sharon is very excited when she arrives. \u201cDon,\u201d she cries breathlessly, \u201cwe got some STP today.\u201d At this time STP, a hallucinogenic drug, is a pretty big deal; remember, nobody yet knew what it was and it was relatively, although just relatively, hard to come by. Sharon is blonde and scrubbed and probably 17, but Max is a little vague about that since his court case comes up in a month or so, and he doesn\u2019t need statutory rape on top of it. Sharon\u2019s parents were living apart when she last saw them. She does not miss school or anything much about her past, except her younger brother. \u201cI want to turn him on,\u201d she confided one day. \u201cHe\u2019s 14 now, that\u2019s the perfect age. I know where he goes to high school and someday I\u2019ll just go get him.\u201d<\/p>\n
Time passes and I lose the thread and when I pick it up again Max seems to be talking about what a beautiful thing it is the way that Sharon washes dishes.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is beautiful,\u201d she says. \u201cEverything is. You watch that blue detergent blob run on the plate, watch the grease cut \u2014 well, it can be a real trip.\u201d<\/p>\n
Pretty soon now, maybe next month, maybe later, Max and Sharon plan to leave for Africa and India, where they can live off the land. \u201cI got this little trust fund, see,\u201d Max says, \u201cwhich is useful in that it tells cops and border patrols I\u2019m OK, but living off the land is the thing. You can get your high and get your dope in the city, OK, but we gotta get out somewhere and live organically.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cRoots and things,\u201d Sharon says, lighting a joss stick for Michael. Michael\u2019s mother is still in the kitchen cooking seaweed. \u201cYou can eat them.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"Hippie](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/2017-06-14-hippie-500x558.jpg\")
Ted Streshinsky, \u00a9 SEPS<\/p>\n
Maybe eleven o\u2019clock, we move from the Warehouse to the place where Max and Sharon live with a couple named Tom and Barbara. Sharon is pleased to get home (\u201cI hope you got some hash joints fixed in the kitchen,\u201d she says to Barbara by way of greeting), and everybody is pleased to show off the apartment, which has a lot of flowers and candles and paisleys. Max and Sharon and Tom and Barbara get pretty high on hash, and everyone dances a little and we do some liquid projections and set up a strobe and take turns getting a high on that. Quite late, somebody called Steve comes in with a pretty, dark girl. They have been to a meeting of people who practice a western yoga, but they do not seem to want to talk about that. They lie on the floor awhile, and then Steve stands up.<\/p>\n
\u201cMax,\u201d he says, \u201cI want to say one thing.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s your trip.\u201d Max is edgy.<\/p>\n
\u201cI found love on acid. But I lost it. And now I\u2019m finding it again. With nothing but grass.\u201d<\/p>\n
Max mutters that heaven and hell are both in one\u2019s karma.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s what bugs me about psychedelic art,\u201d Steve says.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat about psychedelic art?\u201d Max says. \u201cI haven\u2019t seen much psychedelic art.\u201d<\/p>\n
Max is lying on a bed with Sharon, and Steve leans down. \u201cGroove, baby,\u201d he says. \u201cYou\u2019re a groove.\u201d<\/p>\n
Steve sits down then and tells me about one summer when he was at a school of design in Rhode Island and took 30 trips, the last ones all bad. I ask why they were bad. \u201cI could tell you it was my neuroses,\u201d he says, \u201cbut forget it.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
A few days later I drop by to see Steve in his apartment. He paces nervously around the room he uses as a studio and shows me some paintings. We do not seem to be getting to the point.<\/p>\n
\u201cMaybe you noticed something going on at Max\u2019s,\u201d he says abruptly.<\/p>\n
It seems that the girl he brought, the dark, pretty one, had once been Max\u2019s girl. She had followed him to Tangier and now to San Francisco. But Max has Sharon. \u201cSo the girl is kind of staying around here,\u201d Steve says.<\/p>\n
Steve is troubled by a lot of things. He is 23, was raised in Virginia and has the idea that California is the beginning of the end. \u201cI feel it\u2019s insane,\u201d he says, and his voice drops. \u201cThis chick tells me there\u2019s no meaning to life, but it doesn\u2019t matter, we\u2019ll just flow right out. There\u2019ve been times I felt like packing up and taking off for the East Coast again. At least there I had a target. At least there you expect that it\u2019s going to happen.\u201d He lights a cigarette for me and his hands shake. \u201cHere you know it\u2019s not going to.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat is supposed to happen?\u201d I ask.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t know. Something. Anything.\u201d<\/p>\n
Arthur Lisch is on the telephone in his kitchen, trying to sell VISTA a program for the District. \u201cWe\u2019ve already got an emergency,\u201d he is saying into the telephone, meanwhile trying to disentangle his daughter, age one and a half, from the cord. \u201cWe don\u2019t get help here, nobody can guarantee what\u2019s going to happen. We\u2019ve got people sleeping in the streets here. We\u2019ve got people starving to death.\u201d He pauses. \u201cAll right,\u201d he says then, and his voice rises. \u201cSo they\u2019re doing it by choice. So what?\u201d<\/p>\n
By the time he hangs up he has limned what strikes me as a pretty Dickensian picture of life on the edge of Golden Gate Park, but then this is my first exposure to Arthur Lisch\u2019s \u201criot-on-the-Street-unless\u201d pitch. Arthur Lisch is a kind of leader of the Diggers, who, in the official District mythology, are supposed to be a group of anonymous good guys with no thought in their collective head but to lend a helping hand. The official District mythology also has it that the Diggers have no \u201cleaders,\u201d but nonetheless Arthur Lisch is one. Arthur Lisch is also a paid worker for the American Friends\u2019 Service Committee, and he lives with his wife, Jane, and their two small children in a railroad flat, which on this particular day lacks organization. For one thing, the telephone keeps ringing. Arthur promises to attend a hearing at city hall. Arthur promises to \u201csend Edward, he\u2019s OK.\u201d Arthur promises to get a good group, maybe the Loading Zone, to play free for a Jewish benefit. For a second thing, the baby is crying, and she does not stop until Jane appears with a jar of Gerber\u2019s Chicken Noodle Dinner. Another confusing element is somebody named Bob, who just sits in the living room and looks at his toes. First he looks at the toes on one foot, then at the toes on the other. I make several attempts to include Bob before I realize he is on a bad trip. Moreover, there are two people hacking up what looks like a side of beef on the kitchen floor, the idea being that when it gets hacked up, Jane Lisch can cook it for the daily Digger feed in the park.<\/p>\n
Arthur Lisch does not seem to notice any of this. He just keeps talking about cybernated societies and the guaranteed annual wage and riot on the Street, unless.<\/p>\n
I call the Lisches a day or so later and ask for Arthur. Jane Lisch says he\u2019s next door taking a shower because somebody is coming down from a bad trip in their bathroom. Besides the freak-out in the bathroom, they are expecting a psychiatrist in to look at Bob. Also a doctor for Edward, who is not OK at all but has the flu. Jane says maybe I should talk to Chester Anderson. She will not give me his number.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Chester Anderson is a legacy of the Beat Generation, a man in his middle 30s whose peculiar hold on the District derives from his possession of a mimeograph machine, on which he prints communiqu\u00e9s signed \u201cthe communication company.\u201d It is another tenet of the official District mythology that the communication company will print anything anybody has to say, but in fact Chester Anderson prints only what he writes himself, agrees with, or considers harmless or dead matter. His statements, which are left in piles and pasted on windows around Haight Street, are regarded with some apprehension in the District and with considerable interest by outsiders, who study them, like China watchers, for subtle shifts in obscure ideologies. An Anderson communiqu\u00e9 might be as specific as fingering someone who is said to have set up a marijuana bust, or it might be in a more general vein:<\/p>\n
Pretty little 16-year-old middle-class chick comes to the Haight to see what it\u2019s all about and gets picked up by a 17-year-old street dealer who spends all day shooting her full of speed again and again, then feeds her 3,000 mikes & raffles off her temporarily unemployed body for the biggest Haight Street . . . . since the night before last. The politics and ethics of ecstasy. Rape is as common as . . . . on Haight Street. Kids are starving on the Street. Minds and bodies are being maimed as we watch, a scale model of Vietnam.<\/p>\n
Somebody other than Jane Lisch gave me an address for Chester Anderson, 443 Arguello, but 443 Arguello does not exist. I telephone the wife of the man who gave me 443 Arguello and she says it\u2019s 742 Arguello.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut don\u2019t go up there,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
I say I\u2019ll telephone.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s no number,\u201d she says. \u201cI can\u2019t give it to you.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201c742 Arguello,\u201d I say.<\/p>\n
\u201cNo,\u201d she says. \u201cI don\u2019t know. And don\u2019t go there. And don\u2019t use either my name or my husband\u2019s name if you do.\u201d<\/p>\n
She is the wife of a full professor of English at San Francisco State College. I decide to lie low on the question of Chester Anderson for a while.<\/p>\n
Paranoia strikes deep \u2014
Into your life it will creep \u2014
is a song the Buffalo
Springfield sings.<\/p>\n
The appeal of Malakoff Diggins has kind of faded out, but Max says why don\u2019t I come to his place, just be there, the next time he takes acid. Tom will take it too, probably Sharon, maybe Barbara. We can\u2019t do it for six or seven days because Max and Tom are in STP space now. They are not crazy about STP, but it has advantages. \u201cYou\u2019ve still got your forebrain.\u201d Tom says. \u201cI could write behind STP, but not behind acid.\u201d This is the first time I have heard that Tom writes.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Otto is feeling better because he discovered it wasn\u2019t the cocaine that made him sick. It was the chicken pox, which he caught while baby-sitting for Big Brother and the Holding Company one night when they were playing. I go over to see him and meet Vicki, who sings now and then with a group called the Jook Savages and lives at Otto\u2019s place. Vicki dropped out of Laguna High \u201cbecause I had mono,\u201d followed the Grateful Dead up to San Francisco one time, and has been here \u201cfor a while.\u201d Her mother and father are divorced, and she does not see her father, who works for a network in New York. A few months ago he came out to do a documentary on the District and tried to find her, but couldn\u2019t. Later he wrote her a letter in care of her mother urging her to go back to school. Vicki guesses maybe she will go back sometime, but she doesn\u2019t see much point in it right now.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
We are eating a little tempura in Japantown, Chet Helms and I, and he is sharing some of his insights with me. Until a couple of years ago Chet Helms never did much besides hitchhiking, but now he runs the Avalon Ballroom and flies over the Pole to check out the London scene and says things like, \u201cJust for the sake of clarity I\u2019d like to categorize the aspects of primitive religion as I see it.\u201d Right now he is talking about Marshall McLuhan and how the printed word is finished, out, over. But then he considers the East Village Other, an \u201cunderground\u201d biweekly published in New York. \u201cThe EVO is one of the few papers in America whose books are in the black,\u201d he says. \u201cI know that from reading Barron\u2019s.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
A new group is supposed to play today in the Panhandle, a section of Golden Gate Park, but they are having trouble with the amplifier and I sit in the sun listening to a couple of little girls, maybe 17 years old. One of them has a lot of makeup and the other wears Levi\u2019s and cowboy boots. The boots do not look like an affectation, they look like she came up off a ranch about two weeks ago. I wonder what she is doing here in the Panhandle, trying to make friends with a city girl who is snubbing her, but I do not wonder long, because she is homely and awkward, and I think of her going all the way through the consolidated union high school out there where she comes from, and nobody ever asking her to go into Reno on Saturday night for a drive-in movie and a beer on the riverbank, so she runs. \u201cI know a thing about dollar bills,\u201d she is saying now. \u201cYou get one that says \u20181111\u2019 in one corner and \u20181111\u2019 in another, you take it down to Dallas, Texas, and they\u2019ll give you $15 for it.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWho will?\u201d the city girl asks.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t know.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are only three significant pieces of data in the world today,\u201d is another thing Chet Helms told me one night. We were at the Avalon and the big strobe was going and so were the colored lights and the Day-Glo painting, and the place was full of high-school kids trying to look turned on. The Avalon sound system projects 126 decibels at 100 feet but to Chet Helms the sound is just there, like the air, and he talks through it. \u201cThe first is,\u201d he said, \u201cGod died last year and was obited by the press. The second is, 50 percent of the population is or will be under 25.\u201d A boy shook a tambourine toward us and Chet smiled benevolently at him. \u201cThe third,\u201d he said, \u201cis that they got 20 billion irresponsible dollars to spend.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Thursday comes, some Thursday, and Max and Tom and Sharon and maybe Barbara are going to take some acid. They want to drop it about three o\u2019clock. Barbara has baked fresh bread, Max has gone to the Park for fresh flowers, and Sharon is busy making a sign for the door which reads, DO NOT DISTURB, RING, KNOCK, OR IN ANY OTHER WAY DISTURB. LOVE. This is not how I would put it to either the health inspector, who is due this week, or any of the several score of narcotics agents in the neighborhood, but I figure the sign is Sharon\u2019s trip.<\/p>\n
Once the sign is finished Sharon gets restless. \u201cCan I at least play the new record?\u201d she asks Max.<\/p>\n
\u201cTom and Barbara want to save it for when we\u2019re high.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m getting bored, just sitting around here.\u201d<\/p>\n
Max watches her jump up and walk out. \u201cThat\u2019s what you call pre-acid uptight jitters,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
Barbara is not in evidence. Tom keeps walking in and out. \u201cAll these innumerable last-minute things you have to do,\u201d he mutters.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a tricky thing, acid,\u201d Max says after a while. He is turning the stereo on and off. \u201cWhen a chick takes acid, it\u2019s all right if she\u2019s alone, but when she\u2019s living with somebody this edginess comes out. And if the hour-and-a-half process before you take the acid doesn\u2019t go smooth. . . .\u201d He picks up a marijuana butt and studies it, then adds, \u201cThey\u2019re having a little thing back there with Barbara.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sharon and Tom walk in.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou bugged too?\u201d Max asks Sharon.<\/p>\n
Sharon does not answer.<\/p>\n
Max turns to Tom. \u201cIs she all right?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYeh.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cCan we take acid?\u201d Max is on edge.<\/p>\n
\u201cI just don\u2019t know what she\u2019s going to do.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat do you want to do?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat I want to do depends on what she wants to do.\u201d Tom is rolling some joints, first rubbing the papers with a marijuana resin he makes himself. He takes the joints back to the bedroom, and Sharon goes with him.<\/p>\n
\u201cSomething like this happens every time people take acid,\u201d Max says. After a while he brightens and develops a theory around it. \u201cSome people don\u2019t like to go out of themselves, that\u2019s the trouble. You probably wouldn\u2019t. You\u2019d probably like only a quarter of a tab. There\u2019s still an ego on a quarter tab, and it wants things. Now if that thing is sex\u2014 and your old lady or your old man is off somewhere flashing and doesn\u2019t want to be touched \u2014 well, you get put down on acid, you can be on a bummer for months.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sharon drifts in, smiling. \u201cBarbara might take some acid, we\u2019re all feeling better, we smoked a joint.\u201d<\/p>\n
At 3:30 that afternoon Max, Tom, and Sharon placed tabs under their tongues and sat down together in the living room to wait for the flash. Barbara stayed in the bedroom, smoking hash. During the next four hours a window banged once in Barbara\u2019s room, and about 5:30 some children had a fight on the street. A curtain billowed in the afternoon wind. A cat scratched a beagle in Sharon\u2019s lap. Except for the sitar music on the stereo there was no other sound or movement until 7:30, when Max said, \u201cWow.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"Hippies](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/2017-06-14-hippies-500x618.jpg\")
Ted Streshinsky, \u00a9 SEPS<\/p>\n
I spot Deadeye on Haight Street, and he gets in the car. Until we get off the Street he sits very low and inconspicuous. Deadeye wants me to meet his old lady, but first he wants to talk to me about how he got hip to helping people.<\/p>\n
\u201cHere I was, just a tough kid on a motorcycle,\u201d he says, \u201cand suddenly I see that young people don\u2019t have to walk alone.\u201d Deadeye has a clear evangelistic gaze and the reasonable rhetoric of a car salesman. He is society\u2019s model product. I try to meet his gaze directly because he once told me he could read character in people\u2019s eyes, particularly if he has just dropped acid, which he did about nine o\u2019clock that morning. \u201cThey just have to remember one thing,\u201d he says. \u201cThe Lord\u2019s Prayer. And that can help them in more ways than one.\u201d<\/p>\n
He takes a much-folded letter from his wallet. The letter is from a little girl he helped. \u201cMy loving brother,\u201d it begins. \u201cI thought I\u2019d write you a letter since I\u2019m a part of you. Remember that: When you feel happiness, I do, when you feel . . .\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat I want to do now,\u201d Deadeye says, \u201cis set up a house where a person of any age can come, spend a few days, talk over his problems. Any age. People your age, they\u2019ve got problems too.\u201d<\/p>\n
I say a house will take money.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve found a way to make money,\u201d Deadeye says. He hesitates only a few seconds. \u201cI could\u2019ve made $85 on the Street just then. See, in my pocket I had a hundred tabs of acid. I had to come up with $20 by tonight or we\u2019re out of the house we\u2019re in, so I knew somebody who had acid, and I knew somebody who wanted it, so I made the connection.<\/p>\n
\u201cSince the Mafia moved into the LSD racket, the quantity is up and the quality is down. . . .
\u201cHistorian Arnold Toynbee celebrated his 78th birthday Friday night by snapping his fingers and tapping his toes to the Quicksilver Messenger Service . . .\u201d<\/p>\n
are a couple of items from Herb Caen\u2019s column one morning as the West declined in the year 1967.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
When I was in San Francisco a tab, or a cap, of LSD-25 sold for three to five dollars, depending upon the seller and the district. LSD was slightly cheaper in the Haight-Ashbury than in the Fillmore, where it was used rarely, mainly as a sexual ploy, and sold by pushers of hard drugs, e.g., heroin, or \u201csmack.\u201d A great deal of acid was being cut with Methedrine, which is the trade name for an amphetamine, because Methedrine can simulate the flash that low-quality acid lacks. Nobody knows how much LSD is actually in a tab, but the standard trip is supposed to be 250 micrograms. Grass was running $10 a lid, $5 a matchbox. Hash was considered \u201ca luxury item.\u201d All the amphetamines, or \u201cspeed\u201d \u2014 Benzedrine, Dexedrine, and particularly Methedrine (\u201ccrystal\u201d) \u2014 were in common use. There was not only more tolerance of speed but there was a general agreement that heroin was now on the scene. Some attributed this to the presence of the Syndicate; others to a general deterioration of the scene, to the incursions of gangs and younger part-time, or \u201cplastic,\u201d hippies, who like the amphetamines and the illusions of action and power they give. Where Methedrine is in wide use, heroin tends to be available, because, I was told, \u201cYou can get awful damn high shooting crystal, and smack can be used to bring you down.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Deadeye\u2019s old lady, Gerry, meets us at the door of their place. She is a big, hearty girl who has always counseled at Girl Scout camps during summer vacations and was \u201cin social welfare\u201d at the University of Washington when she decided that she \u201cjust hadn\u2019t done enough living\u201d and came to San Francisco. \u201cActually, the heat was bad in Seattle,\u201d she adds.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe first night I got down here,\u201d she says, \u201cI stayed with a gal I met over at the Blue Unicorn. I looked like I\u2019d just arrived, had a knapsack and stuff.\u201d After that Gerry stayed at a house the Diggers were running, where she met Deadeye. \u201cThen it took time to get my bearings, so I haven\u2019t done much work yet.\u201d<\/p>\n
I ask Gerry what work she does. \u201cBasically I\u2019m a poet, but I had my guitar stolen right after I arrived, and that kind of hung up my thing.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cGet your books,\u201d Deadeye orders. \u201cShow her your books.\u201d<\/p>\n
Gerry demurs, then goes into the bedroom and comes back with several theme books full of verse. I leaf through them but Deadeye is still talking about helping people. \u201cAny kid that\u2019s on speed,\u201d he says, \u201cI\u2019ll try to get him off it. The only advantage to it from the kids\u2019 point of view is that you don\u2019t have to worry about sleeping or eating.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cOr sex,\u201d Gerry adds.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s right. When you\u2019re strung out on crystal you don\u2019t need nothing.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt can lead to the hard stuff,\u201d Gerry says. \u201cTake your average Meth freak, once he\u2019s started putting the needle in his arm, it\u2019s not too hard to say, well, let\u2019s shoot a little smack.\u201d<\/p>\n
All the while I am looking at Gerry\u2019s poems. They are a very young girl\u2019s poems, each written out in a neat hand and finished off with a curlicue. Dawns are roseate, skies silver-tinted. When she writes \u201ccrystal\u201d in her books, she does not mean Meth.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou gotta get back to your writing,\u201d Deadeye says fondly, but Gerry ignores this. She is telling about somebody who propositioned her yesterday. \u201cHe just walked up to me on the Street, offered me $600 to go to Reno and do the thing.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019re not the only one he approached,\u201d Deadeye says.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf some chick wants to go with him, fine,\u201d Gerry says. \u201cJust don\u2019t bum my trip.\u201d She empties the tuna-fish can we are using for an ashtray and goes over to look at a girl who is asleep on the floor. It is the same girl who was asleep on the floor the first day I came to Deadeye\u2019s place. She has been sick a week now, 10 days. \u201cUsually when somebody comes up to me on the Street like that,\u201d Gerry adds, \u201cI hit him for some change.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
When I saw Gerry in the Park the next day I asked her about the sick girl, and Gerry said cheerfully that she was in the hospital with pneumonia.<\/p>\n
Max tells me about how he and Sharon got together. \u201cWhen I saw her the first time on Haight Street, I flashed. I mean flashed. So I started some conversation with her about her beads, see, but I didn\u2019t care about her beads.\u201d Sharon lived in a house where a friend of Max\u2019s lived, and the next time he saw her was when he took the friend some bananas. \u201cSharon and I were like kids \u2014 we smoked bananas and looked at each other and smoked more bananas and looked at each other.\u201d<\/p>\n
But Max hesitated. For one thing, he thought Sharon was his friend\u2019s girl. \u201cFor another I didn\u2019t know if I wanted to get hung up with an old lady.\u201d But the next time he visited the house, Sharon was on acid.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo everybody yelled, \u2018Here comes the banana man,\u2019\u201d Sharon interrupts, \u201cand I got all excited.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cShe was living in this crazy house,\u201d Max continues. \u201cThere was this one kid, all he did was scream. His whole trip was to practice screams. It was too much.\u201d Max still hung back from Sharon. \u201cBut then Sharon offered me a tab, and I knew.\u201d<\/p>\n
Max walked to the kitchen and back with the tab, wondering whether to take it. \u201cAnd then I decided to flow with it, and that was that. Because once you drop acid with somebody, you flash on, you see the whole world melt in her eyes.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s stronger than anything in the world,\u201d Sharon says.<\/p>\n
\u201cNothing can break it up,\u201d Max says. \u201cAs long as it lasts.\u201d<\/p>\n
No milk today \u2014
My love has gone away . . .
The end of my hopes \u2014
The end of all my dreams \u2014<\/p>\n
is a song I heard on many mornings in 1967 on KFRC, the Flower Power Station, San Francisco.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Deadeye and Gerry tell me that they plan to be married. An Episcopal priest in the District has promised to perform the wedding in Golden Gate Park, and they will have a few rock groups there, \u201ca real community thing.\u201d Gerry\u2019s brother is also getting married, in Seattle. \u201cKind of interesting,\u201d Gerry muses, \u201cbecause, you know, his is the traditional straight wedding, and then you have the contrast with ours.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ll have to wear a tie to his,\u201d Deadeye says.<\/p>\n
\u201cRight,\u201d Gerry says.<\/p>\n
\u201cHer parents came down to meet me, but they weren\u2019t ready for me,\u201d Deadeye notes philosophically.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey finally gave it their blessing,\u201d Gerry says. \u201cIn a way.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThey came to me and her father said, \u2018Take care of her,\u2019 \u201cDeadeye reminisces. \u201cAnd her mother said, \u2018Don\u2019t let her go to jail.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Barbara has baked a macrobiotic apple pie \u2014 one made without sweets and with whole-wheat flour \u2014 and she and Tom and Max and Sharon and I are eating it. Barbara tells me how she learned to find happiness in \u201cthe woman\u2019s thing.\u201d She and Tom had gone somewhere to live with the Indians, and although she first found it hard to be shunted off with the women and never to enter into any of the men\u2019s talk, she soon got the point. \u201cThat was where the trip was,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
Barbara is on what is called the woman\u2019s trip to the exclusion of almost everything else. When she and Tom and Max and Sharon need money, Barbara will take a part-time job, modeling or teaching kindergarten, but she dislikes earning more than $10 or $20 a week. Most of the time she keeps house and bakes. \u201cDoing something that shows your love that way,\u201d she says, \u201cis just about the most beautiful thing I know.\u201d Whenever I hear about the woman\u2019s trip, which is often, I think a lot about nothin\u2019-says-lovin\u2019-like-something-from-the-oven and the Feminine Mystique and how it is possible for people to be the unconscious instruments of values they would strenuously reject on a conscious level, but I do not mention this to Barbara.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
It is a pretty nice day and I am just driving down the Street and I see Barbara at a light.<\/p>\n
What am I doing, she wants to know.<\/p>\n
I am just driving around.<\/p>\n
\u201cGroovy,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
This is quite a beautiful day, I say.<\/p>\n
\u201cGroovy,\u201d she agrees.<\/p>\n
She wants to know if I will come over. Sometime soon, I say.<\/p>\n
\u201cGroovy,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
I ask if she wants to drive in the Park but she is too busy. She is out to buy wool for her loom.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Arthur Lisch gets pretty nervous whenever he sees me now because the Digger line this week is that they aren\u2019t talking to \u201cmedia poisoners,\u201d which is me. So I still don\u2019t have a tap on Chester Anderson, but one day in the Panhandle I run into a kid who says he is Chester\u2019s \u201cassociate.\u201d He has on a black cape, black slouch hat, mauve Job\u2019s Daughters\u2019 sweatshirt and dark glasses, and he says his name is Claude Hayward, but never mind that because I think of him just as The Connection. The Connection offers to \u201ccheck me out.\u201d<\/p>\n
I take off my dark glasses so he can see my eyes. He leaves his on.<\/p>\n
\u201cHow much you get paid for doing this kind of media poisoning?\u201d he says for openers.<\/p>\n
I put my dark glasses back on.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s only one way to find out where it\u2019s at,\u201d The Connection says, and jerks his thumb at the photographer I\u2019m with. \u201cDump him and get out on the Street. Don\u2019t take money. You won\u2019t need money.\u201d He reaches into his cape and pulls out a mimeographed sheet announcing a series of classes at the Digger Free Store on How to Avoid Getting Busted, VD, Rape, Pregnancy, Beatings and Starvation. \u201cYou oughta come,\u201d The Connection says. \u201cYou\u2019ll need it.\u201d<\/p>\n
I say maybe, but meanwhile I would like to talk to Chester Anderson.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf we decide to get in touch with you at all,\u201d The Connection says, \u201cwe\u2019ll get in touch with you real quick.\u201d He kept an eye on me in the Park after that, but he never did call the number I gave him.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
It is twilight and cold and too early to find Deadeye at the Blue Unicorn so I ring Max\u2019s bell. Barbara comes to the door.<\/p>\n
\u201cMax and Tom are seeing somebody on a kind of business thing,\u201d she says. \u201cCan you come back a little later?\u201d I am hard put to think what Max and Tom might be seeing somebody about in the way of business, but a few days later in the Park I find out.<\/p>\n
\u201cHey,\u201d Tom calls. \u201cSorry you couldn\u2019t come up the other day, but business was being done.\u201d This time I get the point. \u201cWe got some great stuff,\u201d he adds, and begins to elaborate. Every third person in the Park this afternoon looks like a narcotics agent and I try to change the subject. Later I suggest to Max that he be more wary in public. \u201cListen, I\u2019m very cautious,\u201d he says. \u201cYou can\u2019t be too careful.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
By now I have an unofficial taboo contact with the San Francisco Police Department. What happens is that this cop and I meet in various late-movie ways, like I happen to be sitting in the bleachers at a baseball game and he happens to sit down next to me, and we exchange guarded generalities. No information actually passes between us, but after a while we get to kind of like each other.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe kids aren\u2019t too bright,\u201d he is telling me on this particular day. \u201cThey\u2019ll tell you they can always spot an undercover, they\u2019ll tell you about \u2018the kind of car he drives.\u2019 They aren\u2019t talking about undercovers, they\u2019re talking about plainclothesmen who just happen to drive unmarked cars, like I do. They can\u2019t tell an undercover. An undercover doesn\u2019t drive some black Ford with a two-way radio.\u201d<\/p>\n
He tells me about an undercover who was taken out of the District because he was believed to be over-exposed, too familiar. He was transferred to the narcotics squad, and by error was immediately sent back into the District as a narcotics undercover.<\/p>\n
The cop plays with his keys. \u201cYou want to know how smart these kids are?\u201d he says finally. \u201cThe first week, this guy makes 43 cases.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Some kid with braces on his teeth is playing his guitar and boasting that he got the last of the STP from Mr. X himself, and someone else is talking about some acid that will be available within the next month, and you can see that nothing much is happening around the San Francisco Oracle office this afternoon. A boy sits at a drawing board drawing the infinitesimal figures that people do on speed, and the kid with the braces watches him. \u201cI\u2019m gonna shoot my wo\u2013man,\u201d he sings softly. \u201cShe been with a\u2013noth\u2013er man.\u201d Someone works out the numerology of my name and the name of the photographer I\u2019m with. The photographer\u2019s is all white and the sea (\u201cIf I were to make you some beads, see, I\u2019d do it mainly in white,\u201d he is told), but mine has a double death symbol. The afternoon does not seem to be getting anywhere, so it\u2019s suggested we get in touch with a man named Sandy. We are told he will take us to the Zen temple.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Four boys and one middle-aged man are sitting on a grass mat at Sandy\u2019s place, sipping anise tea and listening to Sandy read Laura Huxley\u2019s You Are Not the Target.<\/p>\n
We sit down and have some anise tea. \u201cMeditation turns us on,\u201d Sandy says. He has a shaved head and the kind of cherubic face usually seen in newspaper photographs of mass murderers. The middle-aged man, whose name is George, is making me uneasy because he is in a trance next to me and he stares at me without seeing me.<\/p>\n
I feel that my mind is going \u2014 George is dead, or we all are \u2014 when the telephone suddenly rings.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s for George,\u201d Sandy says.<\/p>\n
\u201cGeorge, telephone.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cGeorge.\u201d<\/p>\n
Somebody waves his hand in front of George and George finally gets up, bows, and moves toward the door on the balls of his feet.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think I\u2019ll take George\u2019s tea,\u201d somebody says. \u201cGeorge \u2014 are you coming back?\u201d<\/p>\n
George stops at the door and stares at each of us in turn. \u201cIn a moment,\u201d he snaps.<\/p>\n
Do you know who is the first eternal spaceman of this universe?
The first to send his wild wild vibrations
To all those cosmic superstations?
For the song he always shouts
Sends the planets flipping out . . .
But I\u2019ll tell you before you think me loony
That I\u2019m talking about Narada Muni . . .
Singing
HARE KRISHNA HARE KRISHNA
KRISHNA KRISHNA HARE HARE
HARE RAMA HARE RAMA
RAMA RAMA HARE HARE<\/p>\n
is a Krishna song. Words by Howard Wheeler and music by Michael Grant.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Maybe the trip is not in Zen but in Krishna, so I visit Michael Grant, the Swami A. C. Bhaktivedanta\u2019s leading disciple in San Francisco. Grant is at home with his brother-in-law and his wife, a pretty girl wearing a cashmere pullover, a jumper and a red caste mark on her forehead.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve been associated with the Swami since about last July,\u201d Michael says. \u201cSee, the Swami came here from India, and he was at this ashram (hermitage) in upstate New York and he just kept to himself and chanted a lot. For a couple of months, pretty soon I helped him get his storefront in New York. Now it\u2019s an international movement, which we spread by teaching this chant.\u201d Michael is fingering his red wooden beads, and I notice that I am the only person in the room who is wearing shoes. \u201cIt\u2019s catching on like wildfire.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIf everybody chanted,\u201d the brother-in-law says, \u201cthere wouldn\u2019t be any problem with the police or anybody.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cGinsberg calls the chant ecstasy, but the Swami says that\u2019s not exactly it.\u201d Michael walks across the room and straightens a picture of Krishna as a baby. \u201cToo bad you can\u2019t meet the Swami,\u201d he adds. \u201cThe Swami\u2019s in New York now.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cEcstasy\u2019s not the right word at all,\u201d says the brother-in-law, who has been thinking about it. \u201cIt makes you think of some mundane ecstasy.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
The next day I drop by Max and Sharon\u2019s, and find them in bed smoking a little morning hash. Sharon once advised me that even half a joint of grass would make getting up in the morning a beautiful thing. I ask Max how Krishna strikes him.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou can get a high on a mantra,\u201d he says. \u201cBut I\u2019m holy on acid.\u201d<\/p>\n
Max passes the joint to Sharon and leans back. \u201cToo bad you couldn\u2019t meet the Swami,\u201d he says. \u201cThe Swami was the turn-on.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAnybody who thinks this is all about drugs has his head in a bag. It\u2019s a social movement, quintessentially romantic, the kind that recurs in times of real social crisis. The themes are always the same. A return to innocence. The invocation of an earlier authority and control. The mysteries of the blood. An itch for the transcendental, for purification. Right there you\u2019ve got the ways that romanticism historically ends up in trouble, lends itself to authoritarianism. When the direction appears. How long do you think it\u2019ll take for that to happen?\u201d<\/p>\n
is a question a San Francisco psychiatrist asked me.<\/p>\n
At the time, I was in San Francisco, the political potential of the movement was just becoming clear. It had always been clear to the revolutionary core of the Diggers, whose guerrilla talent was now bent on open confrontations and the creation of a summer emergency, and it was clear to many of the doctors and priests and sociologists who had occasion to work in the District, and it could rapidly become clear to any outsider who bothered to decode Chester Anderson\u2019s call-to-action communiqu\u00e9s or to watch who was there first at the street skirmishes which now set the tone for life in the District. One did not have to be a political analyst to see it: The boys in the rock groups saw it, because they were often where it was happening. \u201cIn the Park there are always twenty or thirty people below the stand,\u201d one of the Grateful Dead complained to me, \u201cready to take the crowd on some militant trip.\u201d<\/p>\n
But the peculiar beauty of this political potential, as far as the activists were concerned, was that it remained not clear at all to most of the inhabitants of the District. Nor was it clear to the press, which at varying levels of competence continued to report \u201cthe hippie phenomenon\u201d as an extended panty raid; an artistic avant-garde led by such comfortable YMHA regulars as Allen Ginsberg; or a thoughtful protest, not unlike joining the Peace Corps.<\/p>\n
This last, or they\u2019re-trying-to-tell-us-something approach, reached its apogee in July in a Time cover story which revealed that hippies \u201cscorn money \u2014 they call it \u2018bread,\u2019\u201d and remains the most remarkable, if unwitting, extant evidence that the signals between the generations are irrevocably jammed.<\/p>\n
Because the signals the press was getting were immaculate of political possibilities, the tensions of the District went unremarked upon, even during the period when there were so many observers on Haight Street from Life and Look and CBS that they were largely observing one another. The observers believed roughly what the children told them: That they were a generation dropped out of political action, beyond power games, that the New Left was on an ego trip. Ergo, there really were no activists in the Haight-Ashbury, and those things which happened every Sunday were spontaneous demonstrations because, just as the Diggers say, the police are brutal and juveniles have no rights and runaways are deprived of their right to self-determination, and people are starving to death on Haight Street.<\/p>\n
Of course the activists \u2014 not those whose thinking had become rigid, but those whose approach to revolution was imaginatively anarchic \u2014 had long ago grasped the reality which still eluded the press: We were seeing something important. We were seeing the desperate attempt of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community in a social vacuum. Once we had seen these children, we could no longer overlook the vacuum, no longer pretend that the society\u2019s atomization could be reversed. At some point between 1945 and 1967, we had somehow neglected to tell these children the rules of the game we happened to be playing. Maybe we had stopped believing in the rules ourselves, maybe we were having a failure of nerve about the game. Or maybe there were just too few people around to do the telling. These were children who grew up cut loose from the web of cousins and great-aunts and family doctors and lifelong neighbors who had traditionally suggested and enforced the society\u2019s values. They are children who have moved around a lot, San Jose, Chula Vista, here. They are less in rebellion against the society than ignorant of it, able only to feed back certain of its most publicized self-doubts, Vietnam, diet pills, the Bomb.<\/p>\n
They feed back exactly what is given them. Because they do not believe in words \u2014 words are for \u201ctypeheads,\u201d Chester Anderson tells them, and a thought which needs words is just another ego trip \u2014 their only proficient vocabulary is in the society\u2019s platitudes. As it happens, I am still committed to the idea that the ability to think for oneself depends upon one\u2019s mastery of the language, and I am not optimistic about children who will settle for saying, to indicate that their mother and father do not live together, that they come from \u201ca broken home.\u201d They are 14, 15, 16 years old, younger all the time, an army of children waiting to be given the words.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Peter Berg knows a lot of words.<\/p>\n
\u201cIs Peter Berg around?\u201d I ask.<\/p>\n
\u201cMaybe.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAre you Peter Berg?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYeh.\u201d<\/p>\n
The reason Peter Berg does not bother to share too many words with me is because two of the words he knows are \u201cmedia poisoning.\u201d Peter Berg wears a gold earring and is perhaps the only person in the District upon whom a gold earring looks obscurely ominous. He belongs to the San Francisco Mime Troupe, some of whose members started the Artist\u2019s Liberation Front for \u201cthose who seek to combine their creative urge with socio-political involvement.\u201d It was out of the Mime Troupe that the Diggers grew, during the 1966 Hunter\u2019s Point riots when it seemed a good idea to give away food and do puppet shows in the streets, making fun of the National Guard. Along with Arthur Lisch, Peter Berg is part of the shadow leadership of the Diggers, and it was he who more or less invented and first introduced to the press the notion that there would be an influx into San Francisco this summer of 200,000 indigent adolescents. The only conversation I ever have with Peter Berg is about how he holds me personally responsible for the way Life captioned Henri Cartier-Bresson\u2019s pictures out of Cuba, but I like to watch him at work in the Park.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Big Brother is playing in the Panhandle, and almost everybody is high, and it is a pretty nice Sunday afternoon between three and six o\u2019clock, which the activists say are the three hours of the week when something is most likely to happen in the Haight-Ashbury, and who turns up but Peter Berg. He is with his wife and six or seven other people, along with Chester Anderson\u2019s associate The Connection, and the first peculiar thing is, they\u2019re in blackface. I mention to Max and Sharon that some members of the Mime Troupe seem to be in blackface.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s street theater,\u201d Sharon assures me. \u201cIt\u2019s supposed to be really groovy.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Mime Troupers get a little closer, and there are some other peculiar things about them. For one thing they are tapping people on the head with dimestore plastic nightsticks, and for another they are wearing signs on their backs: HOW MANY TIMES YOU BEEN RAPED, YOU LOVE FREAKS? and things like that. Then they are distributing communication-company fliers which say:<\/p>\n
& this summer thousands of unwhite un\u2013suburban boppers are going to want to know why you\u2019ve given up what they can\u2019t get & how you get away with it & how come you not a faggot with hair so long & they want haight street one way or the other. IF YOU DON\u2019T KNOW, BY AUGUST HAIGHT STREET WILL BE A CEMETERY.<\/p>\n
Max reads the flier and stands up. \u201cI\u2019m getting bad vibes,\u201d he says, and he and Sharon leave.<\/p>\n
I have to stay around because I\u2019m looking for Otto so I walk over to where the Mime Troupers have formed a circle around a Negro. Peter Berg is saying, if anybody asks, that this is street theater, and I figure the curtain is up because what they are doing right now is jabbing the Negro with the nightsticks. They jab, and they bare their teeth, and they rock on the balls of their feet, and they wait.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m beginning to get annoyed here,\u201d the Negro says. \u201cI\u2019m gonna get mad.\u201d By now there are several Negroes around, reading the signs and watching.<\/p>\n
\u201cJust beginning to get annoyed, are you?\u201d one of the Mime Troupers says. \u201cDon\u2019t you think it\u2019s about time?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cListen, here,\u201d another Negro says. \u201cThere\u2019s room for everybody in the Park.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYeah?\u201d a girl in blackface says. \u201cEverybody who?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhy,\u201d he says, confused. \u201cEverybody. In America.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIn America,\u201dthe blackface girl shrieks. \u201cListen to him talk about America.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cListen,\u201d he says. \u201cListen here.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat\u2019d America ever do for you?\u201d the girl in blackface jeers. \u201cWhite kids here, they can sit in the Park all summer long, listening to music, because their big-shot parents keep sending them money. Who ever sends you money?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cListen,\u201d the Negro says helplessly. \u201cYou\u2019re gonna start something here, this isn\u2019t right \u2014\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYou tell us what\u2019s right, black boy,\u201d the girl says.<\/p>\n
The youngest member of the blackface group, an earnest tall kid about 19, 20, is hanging back at the edge of the scene. I offer him an apple and ask what is going on. \u201cWell,\u201d he says, \u201cI\u2019m new at this, I\u2019m just beginning to study it, but you see the capitalists are taking over the District, and that\u2019s what Peter \u2014 well, ask Peter.\u201d<\/p>\n
I did not ask Peter. It went on for a while. But on that particular Sunday between three and six o\u2019clock everyone was too high, and the weather was too good, and the Hunter\u2019s Point gangs who usually come in between three and six on Sunday afternoon had come in on Saturday instead, and nothing started. While I waited for Otto I asked a little girl I had met a couple of times before what she had thought of it. \u201cIt\u2019s something groovy they call street theater,\u201d she said. I said I had wondered if it might not have political overtones. She is 17 years old, and she worked it around in her mind for a while and finally she remembered a couple of words from somewhere. \u201cMaybe it\u2019s some John Birch thing,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
When I finally find Otto he says, \u201cI got something at my place that\u2019ll blow your mind,\u201d and when we get there I see a child on the living-room floor, wearing a reefer coat, reading a comic book. She keeps licking her lips in concentration and the only off thing about her is that she\u2019s wearing white lipstick.<\/p>\n
\u201cFive years old,\u201d he says. \u201cOn acid.\u201d<\/p>\n
The five-year-old\u2019s name is Susan, and she tells me she is in High Kindergarten. She lives with her mother and some other people, just got over the measles, wants a bicycle for Christmas, and particularly likes soda, ice cream, Marty in the Jefferson Airplane, Bob in the Grateful Dead, and the beach. She remembers going to the beach once a long time ago, and wishes she had taken a bucket. For a year, her mother has given her acid and peyote. Susan describes it as getting stoned.<\/p>\n
I start to ask if any of the other children in High Kindergarten get stoned, but I falter at the key words.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe means do the other kids in your class turn on, get stoned,\u201d says the friend of her mothers who brought her to Otto\u2019s.<\/p>\n
\u201cOnly Sally and Anne,\u201d Susan says.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat about Lia?\u201d her mother\u2019s friend prompts.<\/p>\n
\u201cLia,\u201d Susan says, \u201cis not in High Kindergarten.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Sue Ann\u2019s three-year-old Michael started a fire this morning before anyone was up, but Don got it out before much damage was done. Michael burned his arm, though, which is probably why his mother was so jumpy when she happened to see him chewing on an electric cord. \u201cYou\u2019ll fry like rice,\u201d she screamed. The only people around were Don and one of Sue Ann\u2019s macrobiotic friends and somebody who was on his way to a commune in the Santa Lucias, and they didn\u2019t notice Sue Ann screaming at Michael because they were in the kitchen trying to retrieve some very good Moroccan hash which had dropped down through a floorboard that had been damaged in the fire.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n \u2014Excerpted from \u201cSlouching Towards Bethlehem\u201d by Joan Didion. Copyright \u00a9 1967 by Joan Didion. Originally appeared in the September 23, 1967, issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Reprinted by permission of the author.\u00a0<\/p>\n This article is featured in the July\/August 2017 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Subscribe<\/a> to the magazine for more art, inspiring stories, fiction, humor, and features from our archives.<\/p>\n Yeats Poem\u00a0\u00a9 1924 The Macmillan Company. Renewed 1952 Bertha Georgie Yeats.![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/2017-mj-hippie-generation.jpg\")
<\/a>Read \u201cSlouching Towards Bethlehem\u201d, by Joan Didion. Published September 23, 1967 in the Post<\/a><\/p>\n
\u201cKrishna Song\u201d\u00a0\u00a9 1967 by International Society for Krishna Consciousness
\u201cNo Milk Today\u201d\u00a0\u00a9 1966-1967 Man-Ken Music Ltd.<\/p>\n