Things were winding down, and in some ways they were getting ugly. After the election of Mayor Alioto, hard drugs started to flood the Haight. Hippies who were dealing a little grass to pay the rent were getting murdered in gangland-style killings (the famous "Super Spade" is one example). It was time to get out.
Shortly after the birth of Sarah, I did a Saturday-night-to-Sunday-morning acid trip in which I had a mystical experience, or so I thought (what I think now doesn't really matter). When I went to work on Monday, I quit my job. The Personnel Director, Molly Hockett, told me that I would never work on "The Street" (Montgomery Street) again. She was wrong.
I bought an old 1953 GMC pickup for $350, and packed my meager belongings, mostly books, guitar, some clothes and some sound equipment, covered by a used Persian rug, into the back of it. The truck couldn't be locked, because I had improvised a driver's.side window from a piece of plexiglass. When I left in the morning, I found that someone, I think it was Sally, had left a white carnation stuck into the dash. This was going to be hard.
It was winter, and it was cold with no window on the driver's side. I think I took the coast route, because I wanted to see the Big Sur coast again, and because I didn't trust the old truck, with its bald tires, at freeway speeds. By the time I had gone two-thirds of the way, I was cold and exhausted. I checked into a cheap motel. It had a connecting door to the next room, which I made sure was locked on my side. As I hung my clothes up, a woman in the next room, just the other side of the connecting door, was softly and seductively singing, "I wiiish somebody would heeelp me." I knew what kind of help she meant, and I was too tired to be interested.
San Diego was always a very difficult job market for me, while San Francisco has always been easy. Go figure. I was living in my parents' house and trying to support myself by teaching at the SanDiego Berlitz franchise, run by Boris and Nina Zalessky. Eventually I supplemented that paltry income by astrology. When summer came, I used the last of the little money I had in the bank to fly to Seattle to visit Al, and then to San Francisco, to find my old hippie friends. With the help of David Noel Hinojosa, a gay man, poet, and friend of Dan Opincar who had lived in the Pierce St. house for a while, I found them living in a building on Hayes Street. More on that building later.
Back in San Diego, I taught a little, did a lot of astrology, and drank about a gallon a week of Red Mountain jug wine. I also did yoga, and studied Hinduism. I tried to earn a little more money by helping my Dad to prep cars for painting after he had straightened them. I couldn't even get a dishwasher job, because I was over-qualified.
I got a used camper shell for the GMC, and furnished it the way a hippie would, putting the old Persian rug from SF on top of some roofing tar paper, which I imagined would provide insulation between my sleeping bag and the steel truck bed. It didn't.
I had been invited by Jane Flood up to Pacific Grove (near Monterey), where she and Don were then living. I arrived in May. As usual, they had created an alternate reality around them.
I think they were trying to match me up with someone. First I met a woman older than myself, who had been part of the Beatnik movement. She had even lived on Bernal (Carnal) Heights, but on the "good" side of it, with a view facing the lights of downtown SF. She invited me to her house, and I went. The house reeked of cat piss, because she hadn't cleaned the cat boxes. After dinner, she told me that her nine-year-old daughter slept in the same bed with her, and had "seen everything." While I examined the books in her quite impressive library, she went to bed, clearly expecting that I would follow her there. As I looked at a book of beautiful, erotic sculpture from India, I wondered what I should do. I could overlook the cat piss, but I'm pretty old-fashioned, I guess, and I just wasn't about to do "it" with her nine-year-old daughter in the bed. Looking around, I saw that she was already asleep. I quietly slipped out the door. Pacific Grove is built on a steep hill, and her house was near the top of it. Walking back to Don and Jane's place, someone asked me where C Street was. I said, "try up," pointing at the sky.
A few days later I saw that woman again, at a party. She came close, fingering my hippie love beads, and asked me why I had gone the other night. I told her something like, "well, you were already asleep, and I was pretty tired myself, so I thought I should just go."
But the case of a young woman named Marianne Seaver was quite different. I had already done a birth chart for her. She brought me to her house, said I could sleep with her in her bed, but first I had to take a bath (that part was a good call). So I took a bath in her tub, and then climbed into bed with her. I think I snuggled up behind her, maybe rubbed her back or cupped her breast She said, "Do you want to get sick?" Then she told me that she was pretty sure she had a venereal disease and wanted to go to the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic to have it checked out. Well, OK, and yes, I would take her there
I spent the better part of a week with her, and I did take her to SF to go to the clinic. Don't know if that's actually where she went. Some of her behavior was extremely strange. But when I reported back to Jane and she asked me how things were progressing, I told her about the VD claim. "It isn't true, Jane said." "A couple months ago, Don went over there and ended up spending the night with her. I wanted to scratch her eyes out. But if she had something, we'd have it too, and we don't."
Marianne was sweet, kind, and attractive. She was exactly one month older than Julie (there it is again--the 29th). I was used to strange people, because drugs can make people a bit strange, and we would refer to them as "wiggie." As to drugs, Marianne told me that for a while she had used LSD for birth-control pills, until her hair started falling out. But she told me many things, including that she had a brother, Tom, who played major league baseball. "Maybe you've heard of him?" I told her I thought I had. Soon, everyone who followed the sport would have heard of Tom Seaver. For years I took the story at face value.
Marianne's behavior was extremely erratic and unpredictable. She was definitely "wiggie," to say the least. But you know the old joke: "I may be crazy, but I ain't stupid." I invited her to play gin. She asked me how long I'd been playing, and I told her a few years. She said, I've been playing all my life--I'll kill you. And she did.
One of the last things Marianne got me to do was give her a ride in my old truck from SF down to Carmel, where her parents lived. I did. She didn't invite me into the house. She told me that I needed to get out of there right away, because a vehicle like mine would arouse suspicion in that neighborhood (Carmel is a wealthy community where the houses have names instead of numbers).
I recently did a bit of research and learned a lot more about Marianne. After being "burdened with mental illness all her life," according to the obituary, she had died of brain cancer in 2012.
Marianne had claimed to be an artist, but I never saw any of her art, other than a rather unimpressive little postcard that she sent me around 1971. The obit said nothing about art. Neither did she have any brothers.
And now I'd like to leave my gentle readers with a last, little vignette. In the summer of 1969, an artist friend of mine, who was really more of a friend of Sally, came to my apartment on Hayes St., asking for advice on whether he should hitchhike to Woodstock or just go hiking and camping in the woods. His name was Dangerfield (in different iterations, but always containing that name, which was what most people called him. In 1967 he had told me that he had been in prison. He didn't say why, and I didn't ask. But he said that he was actually grateful to the prison, because they had given him a trade by teaching him to be a printer. What he did not tell me, and I only learned years later, was that he was the one who had taught the staff of the San Francisco Oracle to do the split-fountain printing that had turned the Haight-Ashbury's newspaper into a rainbow of color.
I thought about him hitchhiking three thousand miles, without any money, and advised him to go hiking instead.
We dropped some acid, the very last LSD that I ever did. My cosmic egg had cracked, and I knew that I couldn't do that anymore. The next day, he borrowed my military-surplus mummy bag and went hiking. He woke up the next morning to see a sheriff standing over him, but the bag didn't get searched, which is good, because he was holding.
For years I thought that I had given Dangerfield the wrong advice. But now I know that I gave him the right advice. We had already, in 1967, experienced something far greater than Woodstock. It may be imitated, but it will never, ever be replicated.
Remember Nancy and Tim, who had lived in our communal house on Pierce Street, and almost burned it down? They had formed a three-way relationship with another guy, and the two young men would sometimes play jacks to decide who would get to sleep with Nancy. I also heard that they sometimes painted luminescent paint on the backs of cockroaches, turned the lights out, and watched them move around in the dark.
Twenty years after the Summer of Love, I read a special about it in the San Francisco Chronicle. One of the stories recounted was by a woman named Nancy, in Marin Co. (an upscale part of the Bay Area). When I read her story about the cockroaches and the glow-in-the-dark paint, I knew it was her. She didn't say anything about jacks.
Sandy and I went to the 40th Anniversary celebration, in Golden Gate Park. It was a mix of old people, their middle-aged kids, and their grandchildren, which is as it should be. I didn't get to go to the 50th, because we were living in South America, but one way or another, I plan to be at the 60th.
(to be continued)
San Francisco Oracle, Vol. I Nos, 6, 7, 8. From my collection.
Text and images © 2020 by Donald C. Traxler aka Donald Jacobson Traxler.
