Chapter Two - The Haight

September 1965. I moved in with a family friend named Sylvia Steingart who lived in a flat on Ashbury Street a half block up from Haight. The plan was to stay with her until I found something of my own. Sylvia had been a close friend of Ethyl and Julius Rosenberg and was keeping some of their things to be handed down to their children, including the bed in which I slept — the bed they probably made love in the night before they were arrested and ultimately put to death in the electric chair.

Sylvia was a jobber. She drove all over the state in her Chrysler New Yorker re-stocking products in drug stores. She’d load the trunk with Stay-Bright eyeglass cleaners, lip gloss and nail polish and drive the length of the central state. She was a Jewish New Yorker. According to Sylvia, if Julius gave secrets to the Russians they would have pertained to something like radar and not as was claimed the Bomb. He possessed no secrets and Ethyl knew nothing. She was arrested to pressure Julius into confessing. When that didn’t happen Ethyl had to die.

Sylvia had a husband named Harry who lived in Los Angeles. The two had been questioned by the FBI and the House UnAmerican Activities Committee and refused to cooperate. Sylvia like Ethyl had nothing to provide anyway but these were unpredictable times and such action took courage.

My dad, Big Harry, met Sylvia during a brief membership in the American Communist Party. He made several long term friends via that route. All had joined as a reaction to Mccarthyism which they viewed as a threat to democracy and all had soon decided that communism per se wasn’t the answer. They favored some aspects of socialism, along the lines of public as opposed to corporate ownership of big business as a means of protecting free enterprise.

A month into the quarter, looking out the kitchen window, I saw people moving out of an apartment a block away on Clayton. A week later I was living there with some friends from school, Richard P and Ron C. It was the entire top floor of an early twentieth century building. A flight of stairs went straight up to the third floor from a glass door at street level. The door could be opened from above with a handle on the landing. There were hardwood floors, bay windows and a fireplace in my bedroom.

I had known Richard since high school. He was an aspiring actor and was rarely around.

I had only recently met Ron. Ron used to stutter. Then he took LSD with Richard Alpert and stopped stuttering. This made him a bit of a celebrity around town. He was a double major student. Film and psychology.

Ron and I were lying on the living room floor in front of a portable stereo. The lights were out. Albert Schweitzer was playing the pipe organ. “LSD” he said. “It’s a whole new world”.

“For you maybe.”

“Peace starts from within, brother.”

“How’s that?”

“The four noble truths, starting with ending Dukkha, you know, craving, attachment, seeing ourselves as separated from everything”.

“And?”

“It’s about loving compassion, understanding the true nature of things. Greed, hatred and delusion will make you miserable. We should strive to be good and useful in our thoughts, words and deeds. The last step is samadhi – meditation, absorption and union.”

We needed one more roommate so we brought in a friend of a friend, a guy named Denis S. “Denis with one N” he proclaimed. “The French spelling”. Denis was a recent graduate of Stanford and seemed like the perfect roommate.

Racing a couple of other bikes past the Conservatory in Golden Gate Park on a wide four lane road with great visibility and no traffic, I pulled ahead and thought it would be cute to stop and get off, casually waiting for them to catch up.

A motorcycle appeared but it wasn’t one of my friends. It was a cop. There was no siren, no flashing red light. He pulled up and stopped and slowly got off his bike, a big beautiful Harley. He smiled and asked “What kind of motorcycle is this?”

“It’s a Norton Atlas.”

“Fast huh?” There was a pause. The cop appeared to be in his fifties. “I wasn’t trying to catch you, you know. I’m not that foolish. The speed limit throughout Golden Gate Park is 25 mph and you were doing about 130. You were exceeding the speed limit by 105 miles per hour. I can’t just give you a ticket I’d have to arrest you.” Another pause. “But I don’t want to do that.”

“Wow. Thank you!”

“Let me tell you a little story though.” He proceeded with an episode in which a friend of his, a fellow cop, was involved and a high speed chase. “Seems like it’s always a car turning in front of you. I was first on the scene. He died on the spot of internal injuries. You’re a young guy with your whole life ahead of you. How smart do you think it is to place it all on the line for a brief thrill? It’s your choice. You might also consider that when you drive like that you place other people at risk. Maybe someone swerves to avoid you. Maybe some poor cop is fool enough to chase you. Be a good citizen. Slow down.” I put the mufflers back on the bike.

I was standing in front of the draft board for the first time, my student deferment being challenged.

“Mr. Branch, we’ve been reviewing your school records and we don’t feel that the classes you’ve been taking justify a deferment. You don’t get a deferment from military service to take literature classes. And what’s this? Philosophy? You’re allowed to go to school to become more valuable to your country, not for your own entertainment.”

“I’m working on it sir. It’s hard to get the classes you want your first year.”

Back in San Francisco I told Richard of my day before the draft board. Richard by studying acting was also losing his deferment. “I’m going to mail them my trigger finger” He said. “Would you help me? I’m serious. I need to learn a few things but basically take a cleaver to it. A cleaver and a hammer. I expect we’ll use a tourniquet and then you’ll take me to the hospital.”

As it turned out, a week later Richard learned that he had a heart murmur and would be classified 4-F. We had a party. Congratulations Richard. You have a heart murmur.

By December of 1965 there were nearly a quarter million US military personnel in Vietnam. Malcolm X began openly criticizing US intentions.

The Beatles were still at it. Song after song hit the airwaves. Baby you can drive my car. I lit the fire, isn’t it good, Norwegian wood. You won’t see me. Nowhere man. Think for yourself. The word. Michelle, my belle. What goes on. Girl. I’m looking through you. In my life. Wait. It seemed like the Beatles were the only thing on the radio. Their talent was limitless. Local rock bands began to sprout Beatles hairdos. In December the Beatles album Rubber Soul was released. It was a compilation of songs that had been released as singles over the previous year.

Sitting on the library steps I noticed a tall redhead crossing the campus. “Lucille Ball” I thought. “Heading toward the science building”. I followed and there she was in my Inorganic Chemistry class.

Monday morning, 7:55. I crash down the stairs and jump on the Norton, rolling it down the hill. The motor starts when I release the clutch. I hold tight with arms and legs, turn and head toward Twin Peaks. On the far side, topping 100, a lady backs a big car out of her driveway. I’m up on the sidewalk to avoid her, back into the street, full throttle, passing a cop going the other way. I see him start to turn around. Heading down toward the ocean I lean into a head wind and some traffic congestion and maneuver the horse between cars and make the final run to the college where I park next to the door leading directly into the classroom. I’m in my seat as the clock hits 8:10 and the door is closed and locked. A man in black skin-tight leather pants using exaggeratedly feminine gestures is explaining how to balance equations. I’m sketching in the back row. A hundred people shuffle in their seats. The air feels stagnant.

As fate would have it the gorgeous redhead became my lab partner. After class I offered her a ride home. We stopped for dinner at Andy’s, a small Russian restaurant on Haight Street. Dinner of borsch, piroshki and tea for a dollar ten each. Then it was back on the Norton.

We’re tearing up the night, splitting the silence with an exhilarating roar. Marty’s body is clinging to my back, the beast thundering below. Down Parnassius I gun it and we’re off, the length of a block in the blink of an eye. We pass through the intersection and leave the ground, lighting up the street and sidewalks and houses on both sides with fire from the exhaust pipes. The bike’s rear wheel settles to the ground just in time to scream through another intersection and leave the ground again, shooting fire into the air below. I can’t stop. I can’t even slow down. The street is ending. We skid up a driveway, crash through a small hedge and end up on a lawn. Marty screams “Wow. That was so much fun! Let’s do it again.” That wasn’t about to happen.

Back at Marty’s we reviewed chemistry which she understood as well as I didn’t. She tried to teach me but it was hopeless. “No Harry, the parenthesis are there so we divide here first”. The thick wavy red hair flowing over her shoulders was too much of a distraction. She lived in a beautiful flat overlooking Golden Gate Park. The ceiling of her bedroom was painted red.

Marty’s roommates picked up a copy of Rubber Soul. That night some friends gathered at their place. Dinner was a big bowl of spaghetti and a big pot of tomato and vegetable sauce. “Carrots?” I wondered. “In spaghetti?”

“Yes” said Marty. “They’re good for you.”

After dinner everyone gathered around a stereo record player. We listened to both sides of the LP, again and again. “And when I awoke I was alone this bird had flown. So I lit the fire isn’t it good, Norwegian Wood. What’s that about?”

“He burned up her place. What’s not to understand”

“That’s kind of creepy isn’t it?”

“It’s a joke, I’m sure. Say the word and you’ll be free. Say the word and be like me.”

“It’s so fine, sunshine. Say the word, love.”

A group of five black kids hung out on Clayton Street in front of our place. The youngest was about ten. The oldest girl who was about twelve was the ring leader, kind of like Lucy in the Peanuts comics. One day I pulled up on the Norton, turned it off and backed down onto the kick stand up against the curb. Lucy approached and said: “Hey mistah, is that yo mono-psycho?”

“It surely is.”

“You take me for a ride?”

“Sure what the heck.” I raised the kick starter and pumped it to find the high spot, stood up on the steel souled boot and jumped downward with all my weight. The bike roared to life. She got on the back and I said “You’re going to have to hold on.” When I felt her take hold of my shirt I kicked the bike forward off its stand and started up the hill.

The bike had a lot of torque. She grabbed me hard around the waist. Now we could go. I opened up the accelerator and the bike roared, g-forces doing their work. I had a good grip and so did Lucy. After a four block circuit we returned to Clayton and re-parked the bike. Lucy got off , visibly shaken.

“You’re crazy mister. Craazzyy!”

Denis also had a motorcycle if you could call it that. A Honda 90. One day Lucy and her friends were making noise in the street below. Denis stuck his head out the window and yelled “All you little brats get away from that motorcycle.”

“What’s up Denis” Ron asked.

“Little monsters were playing on my bike.”

A short time later the doorbell rang. Denis went to the balcony and looked down at Lucy and her friends who were peering through the glass door. He pulled the handle and it opened. Lucy could be heard two flights below counting “one two three” and then in unison they yelled “White Pig!”

We laughed. Denis frowned. “You guys owe me for the phone bill”.

Denis never fit in. He was aloof and moody. One afternoon I came home to find the apartment nearly empty. Much of the furniture, Ron’s stereo, his records, his bed were all gone. A small table remained in Denis’ room. A drawer in the table was stuffed with phone and power bills we thought he had been paying for the previous two months. The last bills in the stack were notices that everything would be turned off beginning the following week for non-payment. Denis had hit a friend of mine up for a ride to the airport and was gone. A receipt indicated that he’d pawned Ron’s things. The pawn shop even brought a truck to haul it all away. We were advised to hire a lawyer if we wanted anything back.

January 1966. Ron heard of a vacant flat that would be cheaper. We moved immediately to 410 Cole, the top two floors of one end of an enormous Victorian overlooking the Golden Gate panhandle. Richard, Ron, myself, a friend of a friend named Don and a friend of Ron’s named Ernie Fosselius moved in. The rent was $135.00 per month or $27.00 each.

My room, in the upper corner, had sloping ceilings except for the circular area that formed one of the towers. The walls and ceiling were papered with old Danish newspapers coated with yellowing shellac. Pigeons could often be heard hopping and pecking on the roof. Decades of painted, chipped, scraped, sanded and painted again woodwork and old cracked plaster, it was a beautiful place with lots of history.

Ernie’s long, straight, dark hair topped a long thin face, topping a tall thin frame. He and his friend Bob Knickerbocker who was equally tall and thin with equally long straight hair, were an impressive sight. They had a band that played a concoction of painfully loud electronic noise. They looked good and played occasionally at clubs on Haight Street.

Bob Knickerbocker spent a lot of time around the place with his girlfriend Jane Dornacker. Jane was a dancer. During the contest for homecoming queen at SF State she turned over a garbage can and climbed atop and declared “My name is Earth Mother and I’m announcing my candidacy”. She danced a sort of hula/belly dance to cheers from the gathering crowd. Jane ultimately won and attended a football game and was sickened by the violence and gave up her crown.

She had done her dance in front of what would become the Speaker’s Platform, the spot where speakers expounded on social and philosophical topics and ultimately the war. It was the spot where demonstrations began and the spot where S.I. Hayakawa, Ronald Reagan’s appointed president of the college, declared student resistance over.

Jane was a superb dancer and hilarious comedian. Years later Jane Dornaker, Earth Mother, Leila the Snake, became a New York traffic lady, broadcasting from a helicopter. They crashed and she survived. They crashed again and she didn’t.

There was a party in the Fillmore district put on by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, SNCC. It was a large run down Victorian, full of hundreds of people, coming and going, dancing to a big stereo. I danced a few songs with a beautiful black girl when a slow dance came on and I held her body against mine and laid my face against her downy afro. I asked her for her phone number and she declined..

The world had been burning up. Death daily dominated the news. People in Vietnam were dying in their homes. Bombs and rockets from the air. Sudden sweeping invasions of the countryside by land and water. A sad sport tallied at the end of the day in a daily body count, commies on the left, American and government forces on the right.

We all wondered: What if I’m drafted? I’ll change my name and go underground. I’ll go to Canada. I’ll become a guerrilla fighter and move to the ghetto. There was a protest march in Berkeley. Then there was one in San Francisco. Then there was one in Berkeley again and this time a group of Hells Angels drove their motorcycles into the crowd and dismounted like a bunch of Vikings, swinging chains and clubs and instilling panic on the crowd.

The following week I was heading south, mufflers on, driving in the slow lane. Behind I could see what looked like fire flies approaching. A hundred Harley Davidson motorcycles passed in the fast lane doing a hundred and making a hellacious roar. The Angels from Hell out for a ride, above all laws. No cop would be looney enough or able to give this army a speeding ticket.

The Hells Angels had been at war with the Gypsy Jokers. Literally at war. There were shootouts in which people had died and the Gypsy Jokers were on the verge of becoming extinct. People in San Jose avoided the street on which the Hell’s Angels lived.

My folks had gone off on a voyage to visit my sister and her husband Eric who were doing field work toward his PhD in Anthropology. I wrote a letter to my mother on Honiara, a remote Pacific Island: “In your letters, you ask about the war in Vietnam. I don’t know what you hear. We’re bombing north of Hanoi near the China border. The guy in charge, Nguyen Thieu or Ky or whoever, was talking this week about a land invasion of North Vietnam. He’s a number one mad-man so we really dig him. Says he’ll personally execute anyone engaging in crimes as minor as fraud. They still torture suspected Viet Cong.” I later added a second page: “P.S. We bombed parts of South Vietnam today with B-52s (our biggest bombers) with tons of high explosives. It was a “spoiling mission”, designed to harass the enemy and disrupt their operations, facilities, communications and morale”.

Jim was a childhood buddy. He lived with his mom in a downtown flat. His dad lived in the east side foothills. Jim had a great propensity for electronics. When he was 13 he wired the apartment with a high end sound system of his own design. He made radios. Jim was a genius.

Now Jim was backed into a corner by the draft. I wondered, isn’t there some kind of genius deferment? He figured that: “If I’m going to get drafted anyway, by signing up I can do something with radios and avoid combat. I have no choice. Guys who get drafted get a ticket to the front line.”

A few years earlier the bicycle had changed everything. Suddenly, a kid had mobility. You could ride from Alum Rock to the East to Los Gatos to the West and from the Italian neighborhood around Willow Glen or the Japanese neighborhood around Jackson Street.

In high school I bought a velodrome race bike at the Salvation Army thrift shop, with a single high gear and no brakes. After the addition of a hand brake, the world opened up.

My parents’s basement was one big room. Jim acquired an old juke box and we made it into a party room. Every Friday night a bunch of kids would gather there and dance. The Shirelles were a favorite. Dedicated to the one I Love, Tonight’s the Night, Will You Love Me Tomorrow, Baby It’s You, Foolish Little Girl. Jim converted an old jukebox to a truly dynamite sound system.

The Municipal Stadium was the location in 1962 of a concert by The Beach Boys and Ricky Nelson. Mom offered to drive a gang to the show. Prior to the gate opening a crowd formed. We were in the center of the melee getting pushed left and right and crushed from behind. Mother turned to the girl behind her and said “Stop pushing me.” The girl was pushed again and once again pushed mom from behind, this time a little more forcefully. She turned and punched the girl on the jaw, knocking her to the ground. The crowd screamed and panic erupted. Ultimately everyone made their way in. It was a great show.

Now Jim was going into the army. We stood in silence around a dimly lit kitchen table.

In October 1965 I attended a march on the Oakland Army induction center. As we approached we were blocked by hundreds of Oakland police wearing riot helmets. There was another demonstration the following day some members of the Hell’s Angels motorcycle club again attacked the group. This was becoming a regular thing.

While crossing the San Jose State campus some time later I saw a small notice that there would be a debate between Alan Ginsberg and Sonny Barger, the leader of the Hells Angels, about the merits of the Vietnam War. What was a beatnik poet’s concern about the war? I had to see this, whatever it would be. Sure enough, the two arrived at the stated time and took seats on a stage in the center of the campus. Sonny Barger spoke first. He articulated his perspective with surprising skill. Protestors had no respect for veterans. Protestors were unpatriotic, not honoring the sacrifices of those who came before.

Then Alan Ginsberg presented the argument for peace. He urged all to lead a life of meaning and compassion. War is simply heading in the wrong direction.

In the end, Sonny Barger decided that the Hells Angels had no beef with peaceniks. Whether what I saw was actually a debate or not was irrelevant. This was a brand new day. Unity between the angels from hell and the peace movement?

I dropped in at my parents house and turned on the TV. The camera is looking over a soldier’s shoulder out the window of a helicopter. A person can be seen running on the ground. We fly above and begin to shoot at the running man with a machine gun. The man runs fast down the hill jumping from rock to rock as bullets strike the earth around him. He runs to the left of one tree, to the right of another and then under another. He doesn’t come out from under this tree. We turn in a wide arch and fire bullets through the top of the tree. Hundreds of bullets rain down from the machine gun. When we circle farther out a crumpled body is visible. The gunner and pilot exchange some conversation. Looked like an NVA officer.

Feelings of helplessness grew. Crippling daily accounts in major papers, the underground press and TV. Bombs, exploding fragments, jellied gasoline.

Around the end of 1965 the San Francisco Mime Troupe had gotten themselves into a legal bind and Bill Graham, who was their business manager at the time, sponsored a concert to help cover the bills. The show, held at a warehouse in the Mission District, featured new bands with strange names, the Jefferson Airplane, the Great Society and a couple others. The fund raiser raised some funds, Graham saw a buck to be made and followed up with shows at the old Fillmore Auditorium. The Butterfield Blues Band played in March, Elvin Bishop and Michael Bloomfield on guitar. Around the same time Chet Helms formed The Family Dog and started organizing shows at the Avalon Ballroom downtown and in Golden Gate Park.

Our apartment was across the street from the Golden Gate Park panhandle where these shows occurred. I could watch sitting on my bed. Usually it was one of the local bands. I was out of town and missed Jimi Hendrix. I did catch the Mamas and the Papas in October. Mama Cass was every bit as clear and perfect live as on records.

The Diggers promoted free music concerts. They advocated for the elimination of money, gave away food and found free housing for people. They were sometimes critical of the hippie movement, seeing it as a creation of the media industry. The Diggers were a political effort to confront the economic evils of society.

Some including Alan Ginsburg considered some aspects of the anti war movement an effort to start another opposing war. He advocated compassion for one and all, be they honorable or delusional and corrupt. It’s about how we live our daily lives. We become the challenge. In the post fifties clean-cut era, for example, long hair brought on occasional dirty looks and rude treatment, like black people might experience. There was of course a big difference. A man could cut his hair but he couldn’t change the color of his skin.

Living in the Haight Ashbury was like being in a tribe. Everyone seemed to be either a film maker or a musician. The Slick brothers, a couple of film makers, had formed the Great Society as a lark but immediately acquired a following. Jerry’s wife, Grace Slick, had a powerful voice.

Ron entered the kitchen from the back deck and said “Smell that?” A sweet smell followed him in. He and I stepped back out onto the deck, looked over the edge and there she was, Grace Slick smiling up like a Cheshire cat. “Morning boys.” She took a puff on a small opium pipe.

Martin Balin, the primary voice of the Airplane, became the voice of San Francisco. Signe Anderson shared vocals. It’s No Secret. Come Up the Years. Show after show. The ballrooms, the clubs, the park. Over two years at least a hundred shows by Moby Grape, Country Joe and the Fish and other local bands. There were shows by the Velvet Underground and other East Coast and LA bands.

The Great Society played Ken Kesey’s Acid Trips festival at Longshoreman’s Hall along with the Jefferson Airplane. A few weeks later the Great Society ceased to exist, Signe Anderson quit the Jefferson Airplane and Grace Slick joined the Jefferson Airplane. It all melded together over time.

There was another intriguing woman in the chemistry lab. Jan was tall with a slender athletic build and long, straight hair. I asked her once if she’d like to meet sometime and discuss classwork. Her disinterest could not have been more apparent. On another occasion I asked if she’d like to go for a ride on my motorcycle and got a sarcastic smile.

One afternoon I saw her leaving campus in the direction the Norton was parked. I got there ahead of her and as she passed I motioned with my thumb. “You need a ride?”

To my surprise she stopped. We talked briefly and she got on. We had a beautiful ride down the great highway and up through Golden Gate Park and stopped for dinner at Andy’s. She had light blue eyes, a pronounced nose, a scar through one eyebrow and another scar under her chin. Jan was a Teutonic goddess, a woman of the Alps. I learned that her father was a Swiss artist named Herman Volz. He went by Roddy. Her mother was a Marin County scion, descended from bohemian antique dealers.

Jan shared that she worked as a ski instructor in Reno on weekends. She had made the Olympic semi-finals in the downhill and missed going to the Olympics by one slot.

On the ride to her place she held her head against mine. “Does this thing go any faster?” she asked. We drove over twin peaks tearing up the night. We stopped on Fillmore for a slice of sweet potato pie. I dropped Jan off at her place and made my way back to Cole Street.

Pat and some friends cooked up a weekend of skiing at Lake Tahoe. I knew Jan’s father would be working and immediately spotted him. It was as if I was seeing through his head to the blue sky beyond. On Jan the sky blue eyes were beautiful. On Roddy they were piercing and unworldly.

Later that week Jan and I pulled up in front of her place on the Norton. Her father had been waiting. He scowled at the motorcycle. Jan headed into her place and Roddy asked “What is this?”

“A Norton Motorcycle” I held out my hand. “My name’s Harry.”

Roddy slowly extended his hand. “My name is Roddy. What is your interest in my daughter?” Roddy had an enormous nose.

“We’re friends. We have a class together.”

Roddy was going to play every card for all it was worth. He was stern and serious. The elder, alpha male. I was an interloper. A bum out to take advantage of his daughter. Later I asked Jan about her dad. “It turned out OK. He’s now with the woman he should have been with all along. And my mom is rid of him.”

I was now dating four women, always running behind and out of sync, trying to catch up. I came down with a virus and was sick in bed. Jan came by every day to see if I was alive. When summer rolled around, there being no snow in the mountains, I asked Jan if she’d like to move to San Jose and work in the cannery.

Cynthia was tired of our now and then affair and was happy to break up. Marty and I had never truly bonded.

But Pat and I had a deeper connection that would now be torn apart. We each would vanish to the other. I told her I was moving in with another woman. We cried and cried. At that moment I loved her more than anything or anyone in the world. “Won’t you reconsider?” This whole one man one woman edict was unnatural and tragic.

I sold the Norton and bought a 1959 Rambler. It had a six cylinder flat head engine and a three speed manual transmission.

All the roommates left for work during the summer so we subleased the Cole and Oak flat to some seemingly normal people who paid cash in advance and promised to take good care of the place. There was nothing of any value there. Seemed like a good idea.

Jan and I rented a small house in San Jose that belonged to a faculty member at the college who was going away for the summer. She took a job sorting fruit with the Mexican ladies. I drove a fork lift. I made $3.75 per hour. Anything over eight hours went to a little over $5 and anything over 60 hours in a week went to $7.50.

Being the third summer driving a forklift, I had some seniority and was offered as much work as I wanted. A typical day began at six pm when I found my forklift, the dayshift driver got off, and I got on. It ended at six am when the process was reversed.

I worked mostly in a nearby warehouse across the tracks, loading empty cans onto trucks. The cans were stacked on pallets that were stacked six high all the way to the ceiling. Getting them out around beams and cables involved some degree of skill and luck. The trucks arrived in groups which allowed time during the night to take a few naps.

A family friend named Linda had married an up and coming banker in his late twenties. He was a pleasant, normal guy. Linda, a nordic goddess, grew bored and left her husband for a guy named Ode, another nordic god, built like a light-heavyweight boxer. Ode was definitely a horse of a different color, having grown up in state reform schools and prisons. Linda soon realized she’d made a big mistake and left a note on the table advising Ode that she was gone to parts unknown.

Ode then showed up at another friend’s house with a gun looking for Linda. Max, a jazz bassist, a genuine beatnik who had played with the likes of Dizzy Gillespie and Woody Herman, recognized the good in Ode and ultimately convinced him that as beautiful as she was, Linda wasn’t worth the cost. Max was like family and within a day Ode joined the long list of lost souls who had moved into my parents’ basement.

One evening I was cooling off in the basement when Ode strode in with exaggerated strides, swinging his shoulders, wearing glasses made up of multiple prisms. He looked like a giant fly.

“Nice glasses” I said.

He removed and examined them. “Oh. I forgot I had these on.”

One never knew with Ode. He lived in the basement for a year and enrolled at San Jose State studying ceramic arts, producing many beautiful pieces and giving most of them to my parents including a large cookie jar that they treasured.

After Linda, Ode figured that falling in love was not in his best interest. Best to keep them rotating. At a 10% success rate he needed to hit on ten women to get a date. At the laundromat, the grocery store, the gas station, anywhere he saw a prospect he made his pitch. The world was his oyster.

September of 1966 I arrived back at 410 Cole the day before school was scheduled to begin. The sub-leasers were gone. The first day we spent cleaning, though the place wasn’t particularly dirty.

Ron and I wandered up to Haight Street. People were sitting on the sidewalk. Small groups milled around. As we walked along someone said “Grass?”

Ron whispered “Was that a question?”

We walked a ways further and someone else repeated “Grass? Acid?”

Then “Acid, grass, smack?”

“Things have changed” I commented. “A couple of years ago it was panty raids and food fights. Now it’s acid, grass or smack.”

And how the world had changed. Don, a student in the film department, occupied the first bedroom at the top of the stairs. In the darkness of his first night back Don heard the door to his room open. “Who’s that?” he asked. A shot rang out and the figure darted down the stairs and out the door. The shot woke up the rest of the house. Everyone gathered in the hallway. Don was sitting on the floor holding his stomach, his hand covered with blood. “I’ve been shot” he said. We called the cops. The sub-leasers were apparently up to no-good of some kind, which wasn’t much of a surprise. The wound was from a small caliber pistol, a Saturday night special, and Don recovered readily after surgery. The Haight had become seedy. Walking down the street was walking a gauntlet. Jan moved in with her mom in Mill Valley and I began looking for another place.

I was eating a sandwich that I had brought from home in the Gallery Lounge at San Francisco State, as I often did. There were perhaps twenty other people there. A band was playing at one end of the lounge. There was no stage, just floor space. I drew close to a young woman who was screaming into a microphone. The blood veins in her neck protruded and it looked like she might explode. I normally don’t like to walk out mid-song but in this case I left.

Later I asked Ron “What the heck is Big Brother?”

“Big Brother and the Holding Company? Janis Joplin. Why?”

“They were in the Gallery Lounge today.”

“Remember that name, man. She’s going to be famous.”

“I don’t think so.”

September 30, 1966 Jan and I wandered up to the SF State Commons to see Mimi Farina sing at something called the SF State Trips Festival. Trips festivals were popping up everywhere since Ken Kesey’s Acid Trips Festivals at the Longshoreman’s Hall and a couple of other locations around the bay area.

Mimi Farina is the sister of Joan Baez. She and her husband Richard Farina were a folk duo. Richard had been killed on a motorcycle a few months before and this was one of Mimi’s first solo performances. Approaching the Commons we passed a semi truck trailer parked in back emitting a deep hum.

“Looks like somebody’s going to need a little extra electricity.” I commented.

Inside, Mimi Farina’s voice is clear; her pitch perfect, just like her sister’s. I’m thinking “This proves that singers are born not taught. It’s all about genetics.” She sang a few songs and ended the set. Jan and I made our way to the stage, a slightly elevated platform.

A loud voice announced “Ladies and gentlemen, the Grateful Dead” and the band began to play. Loud is hardly the word. The guitarist cut in with searing riffs, cutting off other band members. “Hold on, I have one here that just won’t wait”. The guitar blazes, spinning a web over the dancing throng. Pigpen on harmonica and organ is the grist-work, the gist of the Grateful Dead. Jerry Garcia, the guitar player, is the flair.

I was still in need of a place to live where my roommates didn’t get shot. Word had it that Grace and Jerry Slick were moving out of their apartment in the Mission District and it might be available. I asked Jan what she thought. A couple of days later we moved in. The apartment was the back unit in the twelfth oldest residence in the city, located on Liberty Street half way up Twin Peaks. A large Victorian, it had been divided into three apartments. Ours was on the back side of the building in what must have once been a greenhouse. Tall French windows down one side opened onto a rose garden and on the other to a yard dominated by a large cedar tree.

On campus there were daily speeches at the Speakers Platform. Vietnam, the war, had become more and more enraging. Newspapers like the Berkeley Barb and the Oracle were telling the truth. Even the evening news, although slanted in favor of war, wasn’t painting a pretty picture of our involvement. There was nothing good to be said about the war unless we base success on the daily body-counts. “Today 3000 of the enemy died and only 500 of our guys”.

I joined the Students for Democratic Society and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. In meetings we vented our frustrations and were left feeling more helpless. The War in Vietnam was making normal living impossible for those who knew the truth. The images from the street portrayed the hopelessness and helplessness all were feeling by the late 1960s. Every day there was a teach-in, a march, a sit-in or a music concert. Sometimes all four.

October 1966 the Grateful Dead moved into a house at 710 Ashbury.

John had two friends named Bob — Fiberglass Bob and Weird Bob. Fiberglass Bob had been in a motorcycle accident that had split his head open. He was a miracle of modern medicine. A thick scar began at his left cheek, passed up through his eye and forehead and continued over the top of his head. His scull on top was slightly displaced. The eye through which the scar ran always looked off to the side.

Weird Bob’s left eye also tended to look to the left. Either that, or it looked squarely ahead and the right eye drifted off to the right. One never knew with which eye Weird Bob was looking. Sometimes the right, sometimes the left. Whichever eye he wasn’t using looked off to the side. Both Bobs were Hells Angels. The Bobs and John rented apartments in a building in the Haight.

Owsley LSD was a powerful dose, orders of magnitude stronger than necessary. Nobody understood that at the time. We decided to take an “easy” trip and split a pill between us. After nearly a half hour John said “I’m not feeling anything” and took a second pill. John and I sat looking at each other. He took a drink of milk and opened his mouth and crimson, pink and yellow milk spilled out over his chin. Waves of other dimensions came over both of us.

The Mothers of Invention had recently released Freak Out. We listened and laughed. “I remember ooo ooo, I remember ooo ooo, I remember ooo ooo, they had a swimming pool.” I decided to go for a walk. I went down the stairs, out the front door and turned left. At the corner I turned left again and walked the length of a block. I was again lost but I reasoned “If I walk the direction I came and make a right turn, that would be the opposite of the left turn I made getting here.” I found myself at John’s apartment. I then drove the Rambler back to Liberty Street and dissolved in the bathtub.

November of 1966, my 21st birthday. To celebrate John M, a friend from high school and I hit the clubs on Broadway ultimately ending up at an amateur strip contest. We voted for the pro. The winner was a young amateur with big boobs. At some point in the evening we started hanging out with a couple of tall, slender attractive women. When clubs started closing we decided to get breakfast with our new friends and were having a wonderful time when John leaned over and whispered “I think my date’s beard is showing”.

“Are you girls… guys?” I asked.

“Well sure hon.” We laughed and finished our breakfast

January 1967. No matter how much I intended to, I was never able to apply myself. I had no interest in chemistry. There were continual distractions and my grades suffered. I was on probation. Since this was my third year, a mass of poor grades had accumulated. Only something in the neighborhood of straight As would move such a mass. Since I was destined to flunk out, I decided to have some fun for a change. San Francisco State at the time was home to a top notch film school. I decided to enroll in a class called Film Appreciation.

The first class meeting a student named Paul Brown gave an offbeat funny appraisal of film in general. He walked, talked and breathed Shakespeare. After class I approached him “What are you thinking of doing for a class project?”

Paul replied “I’m going to do a rock documentary. About a band called the Flamin’ Groovies.” We talked for a while and came up with a plan. Paul would direct. I would run the camera. We’d set up scenes in advance and improvise on the spot.

Which is what we did and then spent 24 hours locked in a rented edit suite, splicing AB roles of 16 mm film into “King of the Cuts” a collection of pantomime vignettes. Paul used the pseudonym Cab. We decided to go for a repeat performance. The following semester we produced a second movie “Bruce and the Wolf Car” with the San Francisco Interplayers. Paul officially changed his name to Cab Covey.

Bruce and the Wolf Car was big hit at the Film Finals. Another movie on the bill that night was from UCLA. George Lucas’ THX 1137 received a ho hum audience response. Paul and I were riding high. On top of the world. Hollywood here we come.

In class later that week our prof gave us some kudos. “You guys made a good movie. If the response at finals is an indicator, you’re on your way. But before you get too excited, consider this. The UCLA film, even though it had no plot, no humor and no character development, did have a big budget. If you really want to make movies you’re in the wrong department. Go up the hill and major in business. This Lucas kid understands the money part of it. He can produce shit if he wants. It’s all about the money.”

The Beatles released another album. Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.