Julie arrived in August. She wasted no time getting into trouble. While I was at work in the Financial District, Julie went, alone, to Buena Vista Park, which I would never have let her do. In a frightening incident, she had her wallet taken. Someone mailed it back to the address found in it, which was that of her parents in Lemon Grove. This, of course, caused her parents to freak out. They sent her older sister, Verna, and Verna's husband to drive up to San Francisco and bring Julie back with them. Julie might have resisted more strongly, had she not had a bad acid trip while she was with us in the Pierce Street house.
Verna told me some things about Julie that I hadn't known: She had planned to enter a convent after high school, but when the time came, she made herself sick psycho-somatically, and then spent months in bed, translating Vergil. If I had known things like that, I would never have given her the half-dose of LSD that I gave her one night.
Julie loved being in the communal house with my friends. She copied, by hand, a complete multi-page poem that Jane (Campbell Flood, who was at the time quite pregnant but not yet married to another communard, Don Flood). I still have the poem, and will reproduce it here if I can.
Anyway, the long and the short of it is that Julie came, and Julie went.
When I had gotten back from my July vacation, Don and Jane were living in the Pierce Street attic, invited, I think, by Dan. They were a great addition to our "family," and I think they eventually became the heart of it, and very dear friends. Don was a musician, a classically-trained violinist from Chicago. Jane was a gentle, big-hearted young woman from a Christian Scientist family in Boston. She had come into our family via Dan's girlfriend at the time, Sarah (Sally) McCune. Jane had worked as a waitress at the Cedar Alley Cafe with Janis Joplin (when Janis first came to town), and she told me that Janis had given her her first hit of speed.
Here I have to make a little digression. In those days the bands of the psychedelic, San Francisco sound were just becoming well known. I saw all of them, for free, in the panhandle of Golden Gate Park. The first time I saw Janis perform, I didn't know who she was. She was belting out "Down On Me," and chills went up and down my spine. Her voice had a roughness to it, a sort of rasp (probably due to speed and Southern Comfort). Someone, misunderstanding the source of the roughness, shouted at her, "Don't use that mic,it's no good." I said, "Sounds all right to me!" When Janis died, three years later, it had a huge impact on me. That was when I started to get my own life together.
One-eyed Al got a job downtown as an insurance underwriter. He turned out to be very good at it, and the company transferred him to their Seattle office. On his last visit to the communal house before leaving, Al brought a young woman named Bambi to the house. She had a doe-like face, whence the name, I guess. I have a feeling that she was well known in the Haight-Ashbury.
When Al left, it freed up one of the upstairs bedrooms, and Don and Jane moved down from the attic. It wasn't very much later that I came home to find a young couple, "Tim" (I forget his real name) and Nancy, living in our attic. They were fresh out of high school in suburban South San Francisco. Their parents had let them do what they were doing, knowing that otherwise they would do it anyway, on the condition that, instead of being runaways like so many others that summer, they would keep in touch, and let their parents know how they were doing. They also made sure that Nancy had a good supply of birth-control pills. I never met them, but if you ask me, they were enlightened parents. In many ways, Tim and Nancy could not have found a safer place in the Haight than our house.
While we were living at 72 Pierce, there were four fires, and Al and I put all of them out. Clearly, we were the responsible ones. The first was in a bag of trash in the kitchen, and didn't amount to much. The second could potentially have been much worse: Dan fell asleep with a cigarette in the big, overstuffed chair that I had bought at the Purple Heart Thrift Store (along with ALL the other furniture in the house, for which I had paid a total of one hundred dollars). The chair was destroyed, but the house was OK. We still had the sofa that I had paid two dollars for, with a 4x4 under one end because two of its feet were missing.
The third fire was, by far, the most serious. Al and I were talking downstairs in what had once been a parlor, and I mentioned something I had seen in the Oracle (the Haight-Ashbury's psychedelic newspaper, which I'll have more to say about later). I went upstairs to get the article, and smelled smoke. I dashed up to the attic, to find flames coming from Tim and Nancy's mattress. I ran back to the stair railing and called out, "Al, bring water." He immediately understood the situation, and came back with a pitcher of water from the sink. We threw it on the mattress, but it was not enough. He went into the bathroom for more, while I tried to beat out the flames with a blanket. It was a losing battle and the blanket caught fire. I threw the blanket out of the skylight window in the roof, then dropped the rest of the bedding down the stairwell. The burning blanket I had thrown out through the skylight had caught on a cornice of the house and was still burning. Al, with his one eye, crawled out of the skylight, onto the catwalk, unhooked the blanket and threw it down. Inside, the soggy mattress was still burning internally. Al and I carried it, smoldering, down the stairs to the street and left it by the curb. A neighbor arrived with a washtub of water and dumped it on the mattress. A fire truck arrived, but we had already put the fire out.
When Tim and Nancy got back to the house, Tim told me that he had flicked a cigarette and the burning end had come off. He failed to find it, and left the house anyway. Big mistake. I told him that they couldn't have a mattress in the attic (where one wall was now a little charred) anymore. I also told him that they would also have to be responsible for getting rid of the burnt mattress. A couple of days later Daddy and Mommy came in a station wagon and took the mattress away.
(to be continued)
This is yours truly with our friend Mereta Saltrup, who had come over that night wearing a bathrobe and a blanket. Photo by Sara "Sally" McCune, using my Brownie Hawkeye. Mereta and I are sitting on the sofa that I had bought at the Purple Heart Thrift Store for $2. Leaning up against the sofa is my beloved Mexican 12-string that I converted to six strings. I wish I still had it, it was as good as Willie Nelson's "Trigger."
Jack Hirsh and Sally McCune
Sally McCune and Dan Opnicar
L. to R.: One of Noel's friends, whose name I don't remember; Me; Jane Campbell Flood; Don Flood; and Jack Hirsh, on Don and Jane's wedding day, January 10, 1968.
This is the little girl who was born in our communal house in January, 1968: Sarah Flood. It is hard for me to believe that she would now be over fifty years old. This picture was taken in 1977, when Sarah was nine years old, just a few months before Don Flood passed away from cancer. Sarah was doing cartwheels all over my flat in SF. Don said, "She'll be fine." One of the last things Don said before he died was, "You know, people write whole books about how to die; I'm just playing it by ear." Goodbye, my brother. Hope you are resting well.
I did find Jane's poem. It's four pages on legal-size paper. I'll publish it in the next installment of this memoir.
Text and images © 2020 by Donald C. Traxler aka Donald Jacobson Traxler.
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