SoMa Literary Review

The Street

By Mark Jacobs

“I’m so glad, I’m so glad, I’m glad, I’m glad, I’m glad… I’m so glad, I’m so glad, I’m glad, I’m glad, I’m glad…..” That’s the stuck-record chant of Cream in the inner distance while I stroll down Scott Street toward Haight Street . The midday sun pains my eyes as if I had just come out of a matinee instead of just woke up. I can tell it’s the weekend by the traffic up ahead on Haight Street . It’ll be bumper-to-bumper in a five block radius Friday thru Sunday throughout this summer of ’67, the Summer of Love in the Haight-Ashbury .

Hey, Tim isn’t at his post! Beside a stop sign where Haight intersects Scott, a water department hole is straddled by a sawhorse, and my roommate sits on it selling underground newspapers to the stopped tourists. The whole of Upper Haight Street , from Scott to Golden Gate Park , is lined at thirty-or-so yard intervals with freaks selling papers from the curb. Tim is the first in that line. Through much of that summer, he will be the very first Haight-Ashbury “hippie” many tourists see. He sells the papers, however, not for the money but the people he meets, mainly chicks. Sometimes, there are two. If he left the sawhorse this early, he must have met a groovy one, a very groovy one. Good for him.

It may be slight and subtle, but when you turn from a side street onto Haight Street , there is a click, and I feel it now as I turn onto the south side of Haight heading west. Haight Ashbury is Haight Street , and Haight Street is a village square, where the freaks go to bump into friends, be chosen by a possibility, where the paradox is answered yes, where chaos is trusted. When I was standing naked in my bedroom wondering what to do with the day, I knew that whatever else I did, I’d check-in at least once with the Street.

For the next eleven blocks, the length of Haight Street up to Golden Gate Park, I’ll be walking west beside a wall of idling cars, interrupted only at intersections, with windows up and doors locked, full of faces at an aquarium, but aghast, tittering, grim, insulted, threatened, curious, ready. At Divisadero, waiting for the light to change, I look to my right and see I’m on display for a family in a station wagon. With two kids gawking behind her, the wife smirks at me and says something to the husband who turns away from a braless chick on the other side of the intersection and looks at me. Should I flip ‘em off? Or maybe wag my cock at ‘em?! Who was it told me about a cat that ran along side a tour bus holding up a big mirror?

The station wagon has to sit through a green light while I cross. …I’m so glad, I’m so glad, I’m… The climb to Baker Street has me breathing heavily when I finally get level with the plateau of the rest of Haight Street . Then a dash of sea breeze cools the sunshine, flutters my faded green tee shirt, streams through my sandals, jeans, and long hair, and drags over my flesh like a long, airy tongue. Was that the acid? Already? No, it’s too soon. I took a purple Owsley tab. Felt like the right day. Plus, I was helping to lower our inventory. What Tim and I don’t take ourselves or give away, we sell.

Where Buena Vista Park slopes down to Haight Street , just past Lyon , I suddenly stop. Across the street, in front of the Christian Science Reading Room, are eight retarded men, walking in twos, hand in hand, with their familiar tousled hair and khaki uniforms. Some have smiles taut, nearly bursting with delight, while others have the distant amusement of someone being whispered a joke. They’re a Haight Street fixture. Hey, the hooked-nose guy isn’t smiling. He’s not with the Mongoloid today, maybe that’s it. Their attendant leads them around the corner and out of sight, down Lyon Street to the park and a playground.

I cross to the other side of Haight Street and turn left, then cross Central continuing west. From the intersection, I glance down Central two blocks to the Panhandle, a habit since last fall when free rock concerts started in that extension of Golden Gate Park. Usually I hear about it through the grapevine the week before but sometimes not. One of the few things, like the traffic, that make weekends different from week days. Saw an unknown magnetic Janis Joplin at one. At another saw Beat poet Michael McClure sitting between a Hell’s Angel and a nun. Nothin’ there today. So far.

Foot traffic thickens the nearer I get to Masonic Street , where the bazaar really begins. To check the Street, first I look into the Drugstore Café on the northeast corner of Masonic and Haight. It‘s difficult seeing through the reflection, so I make a portal of shadow with a cupped hand. Nobody I want to talk to now. I push through panhandlers to the curb and wait for the light-change. There’s that chick. Every weekend she sells underground papers on this choicest corner. Dutifully it almost seems. Wearing jeans under a dress today.

I cross Masonic. Lanky and nineteen, I walk with a stork-hunch, hands in jeans. When I reach the sidewalk, I turn left. Traffic isn’t moving so I cross against the light back to the south side of Haight Street . I then turn right, continuing west, weaving through a dense forest of freaks, huddling dealers, beseeching panhandlers, new arrivals with backpacks, and the few dazed, cringing tourists who have ventured out of their cars. The five blocks from Masonic to the park is a solid din of idling engines, music from windows, crowd murmur and shouted greetings. Some freaks are barefoot, some sit on the sidewalk, some lean against a wall. They lounge on the thoroughfare as if in their own home. It is a livingroom with a freeway through it. The public face, the pretended differences, are ignored here. The freaks bask in a liberation that keeps most of the tourists sealed in their cars.

I cross Ashbury, which I know is Ashbury Street from habit, not because there’s a street sign to read. It keeps getting stolen. I glance down the two blocks to the Panhandle again. Still nothing. Now here are two other checkpoints, the Psychedelic Shop, and across the street, the Print Mint, a cavernous room with posters covering all walls and the ceiling. And the usual crowd is in front of both. Some people seem to never go anywhere else. See ‘em every time I’m down here. Though I pass through Haight Street at least once a day, it’s boring to actually hang out here, as opposed to, say, a coffeehouse or the park or somebody’s pad.

It’s rare at this time that joints are smoked openly on the Street, but I catch whiffs from the clothes of those just arriving from their pads. Along my left, freaks mutter as I pass, “Hash, acid, grass… speed, hash, grass…spare change…grass, acid, hash…..” This is an unpleasant new development. Christ! If ya hafta advertise… Obviously an inferior grade of dealer.

What the …! That chick…! You can see right through her shirt! Wonder if … of course she knows! A chick with swollen breasts stunningly visible through a gauzy blue blouse emerges in front of me from an apartment building, checks to see if she is noticed, is overwhelmed by how much, then retreats back into the building.

The greasy aroma of a “Love Burger” reaches me. Across the street, beside the Print Mint, a cocktail lounge has cut a hole in the wall beside the sidewalk and installed a grill. A plump, middle-aged, straight lady cooks “Love Burgers” on it, and right now she is expounding, spatula in hand, on what was thrown off Tallahatchee Bridge in the lyrics of an AM radio hit. A freak passes in front of her wearing a cheap obvious wig. Sits higher on his head every time I see that cat. Hair must be growing. Just out of jail? Deserter? Conformist?

Anything is possible here, from the most deep-seated, improbable, foolish hopes to murder. As I’m about to cross Clayton, I can’t resist a glance at the concrete at the base of the fire hydrant immediately to my left. Still there. When is it gonna wear away? It’s the blood stain from a murder I witnessed on a hot sultry night in the spring. A young black man squatted on the hydrant as an extremely out-of-place chick, a redneck runaway, plunged a knife into his heart, yelling, “I’m tired of you niggers buggin’ me!” She then fled, later turning herself in at a church. Can’t walk by without looking. Another personal checkpoint.

Crossing Clayton distracted, head down, I almost bump into Peter, a friend from San Francisco State .

“Hey, man.”

He smiles, granny glasses glinting from a black thatch of bangs and beard.

I speak first. “Wha’s happenin’?”

“Not much. You know Benny?”

I look down first onto the part in the middle of his shoulder-length brown hair then at the smile of the short cat beside Peter.

“Oh yeah, hi,” I say. “We met over at Illy’s up on Downey Street .”

“Yeah. Hi.”

“We’re goin’ to my pad to smoke some of Benny’s Nepalese hash. Wanna come?”

I’m flustered, as if someone barged into my room during a private act, in this case brooding.

“Uh… I took some Owsley acid and I’m walking to the park… waiting for it to come on… Uh… I dunno… Nepalese hash sounds outasight but… I better not…”

“O.K. man,” Peter says. “That’s groovy.”

What’s he really thinking? Is he offended?

I say, “I don’t want to dilute the effect of the acid…”

“I can dig it,” he says and starts walking again.

Yeah, he’s offended. Or is he?

“See ya later,” I offer tentatively.

“Yeah,” Peter replies.

Benny smiles up at me and they disappear into the crowd.

I recently took a devastating meth overdose, the worst experience of my life, beyond previous imagining. And I was already damaged from growing up as an irritating foreign object lodged in a redneck Sierra mill town. Now I’m ambushed daily by episodes of drug psychosis with paralyzing paranoia. Continuing west, replaying and analyzing the encounter with Peter, I’m soon in a spiraling nosedive of introspection… Hash sounded nice, but… Can’t get trapped in a social situation… Can’t tell when it’ll strike … Don’t want him to think I don’t like him… Maybe I should tell him what’s happening inside me… But…..

I cross the half-block to Belvedere and then the half-block to Cole before I’m yanked out of myself. Across Haight Street , a short, thin guy with delicate features and a corolla of ratted brown hair is going into the I-Thou Coffeehouse. Jesus Christ, is that! …That asshole! See him a lot lately. Gotta be pretty low to make a career out of impersonating Dylan. Mmmmmm… I smell piroshki, a football-shaped pastry filled with spicy ground beef and costing ten cents at the Russian bakery I’m stopped in front of. But for breakfast? Naw.

A few yards further, on the south side, a mountainous biker wearing a thick fatigue jacket in the hot sunlight stands on the sidewalk beside a pickup with a camper. He’s teasing a couple of teenyboppers who probably snuck here against parents’ orders.

“Oh yeah?” the biker says. “Let’s see …”

He starts unbuttoning the blouse of a pert, freckled blonde beaming ingenuousness. She looks at her girlfriend and giggles and blushes. He spreads open her blouse.

“Hey… hey… c’mere,” he says to a biker friend nearby. “Look at these.”

”Outa sight baby, yer really stacked,” the friend says of two pink-tipped mounds.

The girl’s blush darkens and she turns her head to the side. The biker closes her blouse and kids her some more, then leads her by the hand to the back of the pick up. She exchanges a look with her girlfriend that says, I guess this is what you’re supposed to do on Haight Street . She steps up, stoops, and, with a push on the ass from the biker, enters the low camper doorway. He then follows her in and closes the door. Wow, man! Well, she wasn’t calling for help.

I’m across Schrader and almost to the bowling alley when my stomach growls, as if noticing the supermarket across the street before I do. Shit, that’s right! I haven’t eaten yet. I jaywalk through stalled traffic to the north side of Haight. Ooooooooooooo…. that’s nice. The acid flutters my nerves. Entering the supermarket, I see in the glass door my giddy stoned grin, all-pupil eyes, and hair aflame from the wind. Looks like I’m holding onto sixty thousand watts. Then the door swings open onto a startled middle-aged straight woman.

The muzak! Sounds like there’s an orchestra in the cheese section. In the fruit section, I put some nectarines in a brown paper bag, then grab-in-passing a pint of milk. On the way to the check out stand, I become absorbed in a show tune on the muzak and visualize vast, petticoated chorus lines leaping and whirling. At the end of an aisle, I suddenly stop and look around. Jesus! Was I dancing or just imagining it? A burly checkout clerk eyes me warily. I smile at the idea of a freak dancing down a supermarket aisle, then I start to laugh, and keep laughing harder and harder, and just on the verge of blast off, catch myself. Cool it man!

The checkout line brings me down. Chilling sterility, assembly line efficiency, telepathic ads, massaging muzak. If they could only eat it and shit it for ya…now that would be service. It’s my turn. I struggle with a jeans pocket while the clerk rings up the items. He has a flattop crewcut, and on the sides and back, a long greased d.a. (duck’s ass). His face is locked in a sneer. With his buddies outside the store, he’s an authority on what’s really going-on in the Haight-Ashbury District. I give him some silver disks and he puts them in a drawer with rectangular green paper. Now to get back to the real world…

The wind laves my face and I close my eyes to ride the pulsation of conga drums in the park. I’m waiting for a light-change at Stanyan Street . Man, have I gotta piss. I look at the bowling alley across Haight Street . Shit, that’s right, they’ve locked all the bathrooms around here. Too many junkies shootin’ up in ‘em. Could go to Steve’s pad on Schrader. Naw, have to hang out and rap. Can’t just piss and run. I look across Stanyan to the entrance of Golden Gate Park . I’ll piss in the park somewhere.

“Hey, man, can I have a bite of your peach?”

It’s a psychedelic derelict complete with dirt-encrusted bare feet, soiled clothes hanging like Spanish moss, and the long, tangled, matted hair and beard of a saddhu (Hindu holyman). Excellent specimen. He’s holding out a hand.

“It’s a nectarine,” I say. “Here, you can have the whole thing.”

“Thanks!”

The light changes and pedestrians fill all the crosswalks preventing cars from moving. In the empty intersection, heat undulates above the asphalt like an invisible wheat field. As I enter the park, a half dozen shirtless spades on a bench to my right are giving their own free concert in the park with conga drums, bongos, beer cans, and wine bottles. Walking down a sloping lawn between groups of prone sunbathing freaks, I see Ashley Brilliant, in yarmulke and beard, at the foot of the slope, lecturing through a bullhorn on world peace or something. Heard it before, whatever it is. In the small cement pond at the base of the slope, in a common spontaneous gesture of community spirit, several chicks with pant legs rolled are picking up debris in the gray opaque water and piling it on the side.

I’m light and transparent as a dandelion seed ball as I move through the tunnel under Lincoln Avenue with its broken plaster stalactites. I emerge into trees and tremulous sunlight speckles and a new larger sound of congas plus the calliope of a merry-go-round. On the left is a broad meadow with scattered groups of freaks. I forget about the food and even begin to enjoy the pressure on my bladder. The path forks. Left goes to the merry-go-round, a petting zoo, and a playground (the site of many a moonlit acid trip).

I go right, to Hippy Hill which I see at the end of the path. On both sides of the path are people on the grass laughing, cuddling, reading, in yoga positions, playing guitars and flutes. Overhead seagulls and pigeons wheel and swoop. A short, goblet-shaped tree with freaks perched in its flat top passes on the right. And now, just ahead, on benches at the base of the hill, are a dozen pounding congas with orbiting freaks of all sexes who shimmy and pose and whirl.

A ways up Hippie Hill, I drop onto a clearing of unpeopled grass. Farther up still is a cluster of twenty or thirty freaks. A Marlboro cigarette carton full of grass is going the rounds. The mammoth joint is grabbed, collapsed by a Herculean toke that instills instant stupor, and then grabbed again. That’s clever. Like the squirt gun full of liquid acid. I drink the sea breeze and listen to nearby conversations.

“…No man, I’m not an ice cream man anymore. I got fired. I went to work on mescaline and I was drivin’ around wearin’ the uniform and the music was tinklin’ and I was high and the kids were runnin’ out …. I said, shit man, I can’t take money from these people. So I gave all the ice cream away. The boss couldn’t dig that at all…”

“Hey, what the…?!” I exclaim.

A small boy is suddenly climbing all over me as if I were a tree. He drapes himself over my shoulder, hangs from my neck, slithers across my lap, and crawls under the stiffened arms I lean back on. There’s something strange about ‘im… He has the strength of a ten-year-old compressed into the body of a four-year-old. His features are pinched and oddly awry, and he makes distant grunting noises like intelligent baby babble. He’s retarded! I look around. Thirty or so feet away stands a thirty-ish woman with the same chestnut hair as the boy, except hers is down her back and wind-wafted. She’s beautiful, and she smiles at us as I submit to the child’s gentle, ecstatic exploration.

Also by Mark Jacobs on SoMa Literary Review:

Gilroy & Haight Crime

Mark Jacobs has lived in and around San Francisco since 1965 as journalist, filmmaker, and teacher. A collection of his writings on the Summer of Love, Haight-Ashbury, and San Francisco in the Sixties is available at http://www.sanfran60s.com.