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Haight Crime
By
Mark Jacobs
There was a brown bloodstain
on the sidewalk around a yellow firehydrant
on the southeast corner of
Haight and Clayton Streets a block from
the intersection of Haight and Ashbury
and throughout that summer of 1967
the Summer of Love
I couldn’t walk by it
without remembering the murder I witnessed there
before the summer began
It was a sweltering hot night
rare in San Francisco any time but
especially in spring
I was coming from
Schrader Street where I had gotten very stoned
on hash with friends and now
I was seeing through
the wrong end of binoculars and hearing through
a warped-wavy phonograph record while navigating a sidewalk clogged with more people than I had ever seen on Haight Street
at one time
Weaving
around each other, leaning
against walls, sitting on
the sidewalk, laying on
the hoods of cars with blaring radios
It was a spontaneous
party for Spring
I was wearing
a light blue, stylized military jacket like
those of high school marching bands
I had marched in one myself
only a couple years before The Beatles
would soon make them popular on the cover of
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
though for weeks before its debut those jackets were seen in the Haight
I was ascetic and reserved in personal as well as clothing style and now in
my usual sandals, levi's, and a T-shirt
the coat felt like a costume
I had tried it on at my friend’s
who got it in a thrift shop
and when I was about to take it off to leave
he insisted I wear it
and bring it back next time I visited
And now I was in it vibrating to the luxuriously tropical night
At first
I recoiled from the attention
the jacket drew but within a block or so
I relaxed into it a block or so more
and I was reveling in it When eventually
I was sweating and uncomfortable
I didn’t take it off
Then I was in a crosswalk
on Haight Street more than halfway to Clayton
when a chick yelled
I’m tired of you niggers buggin’ me!
and then a different chick screamed
I froze
Thirty feet to my right
up Clayton Street
a mountainous young black man
maybe three hundred pounds
squatted on a yellow firehydrant
hands wedged in levis pockets
at the center of his chest a black hole
the apex of a triangle of blood purple
in the lunar street light and running down
a glowing white tee shirt
his bulging eyes
stunned…… unbelieving…....
fading……….
A short blonde teenybopper
ran east down Haight Street
a hunting knife in her hand
The scream
had come from one of the half dozen or so people around the victim
all
like me frozen with shock
It may only have been a second or two but
it was a noticeable length of time before
anyone recovered enough
to help the victim
lay down on the hood of a car
As the teenybopper disappeared into the milling crowd
which was unaware of what had just happened around the corner on Clayton she threw the knife into the gutter
where for some reason
it was full of shredded newspaper
A freak
stopped a cruising cop car which then pulled
onto the sidewalk
One cop ran to the victim
the other talked on the car radio
Then both
examined the victim and one
ran back to the car radio and the other
took a pen and tablet from a breast pocket
and talked to witnesses
A chick
perhaps the one who screamed pointed
to the corner around which
the teenybopper had escaped
and where
I now stood
able to look down both Haight and Clayton streets
I realized
I was the only one
who had seen the knife
tossed
I stepped over
and pointed down at it
and looked at the cop
with the pen and tablet
I didn’t speak
I knew eventually
he would look in my direction
which he did then he came over
and looked down at the knife
I stopped pointing and headed home
A couple blocks east an ambulance shrieked west Later that night
the radio reported the black man
died on the way to the hospital
and the chick
surrendered at a church
My roommate had been in the South
during Freedom Summer which he had to flee
because of Klan threats
and now we knew
even here in the most sympathetic neighborhood
in all of white America a black man could be killed for his race
in this case
by an out-of-place
redneck runaway
Copyright © 2007 Mark Jacobs
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