My Beautiful Hippie

A
LSO BY
J
ANET
N
ICHOLS
L
YNCH

Messed Up

Addicted to Her

Racing California

JANET
NICHOLS LYNCH

This is a work of fiction. Names and characters are
the product of the author's imagination. Any resemblance
to actual persons is coincidental.

Text copyright © 2013 by Janet Nichols Lynch
All Rights Reserved
HOLIDAY HOUSE is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
www.holidayhouse.com

ISBN 978-0-8234-2800-7 (ebook)w
ISBN 978-0-8234-2799-4 (ebook)r

Library of Congress cataloging-in-publication data

Lynch, Janet Nichols, 1952-
My beautiful hippie / Janet Nichols Lynch. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary Fifteen-year-old Joanne, raised in San Francisco's Haight District, becomes involved with Martin, a hippie, and various aspects of the late 1960s cultural revolution despite her middle-class upbringing.
ISBN 978-0-8234-2603-4 (hardcover)
[1. Coming of age—Fiction.    2. Hippies—Fiction.    3. Family life—
California—Fiction.    4. Piantists—Fiction.    5. Feminism—Fiction.
6. Vietnam War, 1961-1975—Fiction.    7. San Francisco (Calif.)—
History—20th century—Fiction.]
I. Title.
PZ7.L9847My 2013

[Fic]—dc23
2012016563

To my girlfriends
Tina, Marsha, Caryl, Jeffra,
Patricia, and Regina
because you were there
for me then

I was in a hurry as usual, rushing down the hill on Ashbury Street. Only minutes before Denise's bridal shower was about to start, my mother had sent me to the Sunrise Market for a tub of Cool Whip. I turned the corner on Haight Street and smacked right into him. I looked up into eyes of the palest blue, sparkly with humor, soft with caring. The sun lit up his wavy, honey-brown shoulder-length hair so that its outline appeared like a golden aura. Diagonally across his gauzy shirt was the rainbow strap of the guitar slung on his back.

He was gorgeous, and what did I look like to him? The hem of the turquoise dotted-swiss dress my mother had made hit the middle of my knees, while all around me miniskirts were thigh-high. I wanted to be cool more than anything, but how was that possible with my mother dressing me?

“Spare change?” he asked, palm extended.

“Uh . . . no.” My fingers tightened around two quarters and three pennies, exact change. My mom knew what things cost. My dad had ordered me never to give money to panhandlers. I glanced at the boy's bare feet. If they were clean, he was just some neighborhood kid playing hippie for the weekend, but filthy black and callused meant the real thing. His feet were somewhere in between.

“Sorry,” I said.

“Peace.” He splayed two fingers in farewell, about to slip away from me.

“I play the guitar,” I blurted. I was teaching myself.

“Far out.”

“And the piano.” It was my life.

“Ah, a kindred spirit! The soul of a musician.” His gaze searched my eyes. “You're beautiful.” He removed his strand of love beads and placed them over my head.

Next, I was paying for the Cool Whip and didn't even remember walking into the market. Heading back on Haight Street, I nearly stumbled over the bodies that were sitting or lying on the sidewalk. It was 1967, the Summer of Love, and I was fifteen. The Haight District, the San Francisco neighborhood I had grown up in, was crowded with hippies, freaks, heads, beautiful people, flower children—they were called all those things—and the straights who gawked at them from cars and tour buses.

I looked for my beautiful hippie, but he had been swallowed up in the mash of humanity and traffic. Hippies called everyone beautiful, I told myself, but I had already plunged headlong into a deep crush.

Trudging up Ashbury, I tucked the love beads inside the neckline of my dress so my mom wouldn't start asking questions. Two blocks up the hill from commercial Haight Street, I turned left on Frederick, my street, where things were a lot quieter. The hippies tended to swarm over the flatlands: Golden Gate Park to the west, and to the north, Page Street, Oak Street, and the Panhandle, the milelong skinny strip of green jutting out from the park.

I loved our house on its tranquil block. It was a Victorian built in the late 1800s, one of the few that had survived the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire. On the left was an octagonal turret with its third-story window, and on the right were two stacked and gabled bay windows. The facade was covered with scalloped shingles, and the whole structure was painted slate gray with white trim. At the street level was a three-foot retaining wall, topped with a wrought-iron fence enclosing our little yard. I scampered up the concrete steps leading to the gate, let myself
in, and instead of mounting the sixteen steep stairs leading to the front porch, I took the walkway to the back door. As I entered the kitchen, I pressed my fingers to my love beads through my dress.

“Finally, Joanne!” Mom greeted me. “What took you so long? I had expected some help around here.” She was short, with low-slung breasts and a bulging stomach, not particularly fat, but rather a natural product of over forty years of gravitational pull. She was wearing the new pink polyester knit dress she had made and a frilly hostess apron. Her swollen feet oozed out of matching pink high heels and her hair was a lacquered bubble; she had it done every Friday afternoon at the beauty salon.

I set the brown sack of Cool Whip on the counter.

“Not there, Joanne, the refrigerator! Haven't you got any sense?”

I opened the fridge and placed the Cool Whip on top of two other containers of Cool Whip. It was a bad sign. Mom in a panic over Cool Whip. Whenever she entertained, she had to have everything just right, like those pictures of food in
Ladies' Home Journal
.

The doorbell rang, and she dashed out of the kitchen to answer it. She scurried back in, yanked off her apron, and hurried out again.

Jerry Westfield, the groom-to-be, slunk through the back door. “Oh, hi, Beethoven.”

“You're not supposed to be here!”

“Hi, Jerry, nice to see you,” he said in a falsetto, then hooked an incisor over his lower lip. He was cute, tall and lanky, with big brown eyes and a single, reluctant dimple. My mother referred to him as a “catch.” He hovered over the hors d'oeuvres platter and began plucking the pickled herring out of Mom's meticulous arrangement.

“Hey, leave some for somebody else.” I grabbed a dish towel, twisted it from the ends, and snapped it at his butt.

“Hey, you! Gimme that!”

I shrieked as he chased me around the table.

Mom returned to the kitchen, her fingertips pressed into her temples. “Heavens, Joanne! Stop that roughhousing.”

I pointed at Jerry. “He started it.”

“Falsely accused!” He was laughing, the sour cream dressing from the herring wedged in the crease of his mouth.

Mom handed him a tray of manly sandwiches, still bearing crusts, and steered him toward the den, where my dad and my brother, Dan, were already glommed onto the boob tube, watching the Giants game. Mom dabbed fondly at Jerry's mouth and reached up behind him to touch a dark brown curl that had inched over the button-down collar of his white Oxford shirt. “You're going to need a haircut before the wedding. We don't want you looking shaggy in the photographs.”

“Sure thing, Helen.”

She placed a double-decker bowl of chips and dips in his other hand.

“Where's the beer?” he asked.

The doorbell rang.

“Heavens!” Tiny beads of sweat appeared above Mom's lip. “I'll bring it in, Jerry.”

As soon as he left, Mom addressed me in a hushed, frantic tone. “Go see what's keeping your sister. I expected some help around here.”

“Oh, Mommy! Everything looks perfect!”

As I mounted the stairs, I heard shrieks of greetings and laughter erupt from the foyer and saw our fat black-and-white cat, Snoopy, scurrying beneath the furniture, back slung low and ears flattened. Denise was in our bedroom, seated at her vanity on the gold swivel stool with the furry pink seat, staring vacantly into the mirror. Only one of the orange juice cans that she used as rollers had been removed, the others still bobby-pinned together in neat rows over her head.

“What are you doing?” I asked. “Mom is down there having a cow.”

She offered the single long tendril of released hair. “Feel it. I've been wearing these things twenty-eight hours, and my hair is still damp.”

“Bummer.” I hated sleeping on rollers, and anyway, my plain
brown hair looked cool long, straight, and parted down the middle. “Can't you hear all those ladies?” I reached for a bobby pin.

“Stop it, Joanne! I'm not going down there with wet hair.” Miss Perfect. A few weeks earlier, she had come home crying because she didn't weigh enough to be allowed to join Weight Watchers; she went on Dr. Stillman's Quick-Weight-Loss Diet and nearly floated away on all the water she drank. She used to be smart and witty, a big sister I could look up to, but falling head over heels for Jerry Westfield had turned her into a ninny.