My Beautiful Hippie (3 page)

“My mom—she's always using scare tactics to try to get me to behave. She and Dad never worried about Denise doing anything wrong, and they let Dan do stuff cuz he's a boy.”

“Does Jerry know Denise is super-smart? She seems too young to get married.”

“I know, but Jerry's
old
—twenty-three. She probably just wants to give it up and be done with it.”

“You mean, like, her
virginity
?” Rena squealed, rolling her eyes. “We're living in a sexual revolution!”

“Not Denise. I hear her fighting Jerry off downstairs late at night, when they come in from dates. Jerry lives with his aunt in Orinda, and they have no place to go to be alone together.”

“Bummer. Well, at least as a married lady she can use tampons.”

We both hated those big old smelly sanitary napkins, which hooked on the metal stays of an elastic belt and felt like wearing a diaper.

I looked straight into Rena's Twiggy eyes. “Will you help me find him?”

She knew I meant my beautiful hippie. “Where will we look?”

“Around. He's probably roaming the street right now.” I gazed up at the wall hanging I had sewn with yarn on burlap: music notes, a turquoise guitar, and the saying, “Out of my loneliness I will fashion a song, and when I find someone who understands, we will sing it together.” I looked back at Rena and said, “He's perfect for me.”

“How could he be perfect if your dad won't let him in the house?”

That evening after the shower guests left and Jerry and Denise slipped away for a dinner date, my parents, Mrs. Newman, Dan, and I sat among the ruins of the party and scarfed leftovers. Ladies' party food—clam-stuffed marinated mushrooms, surprise meatballs (raspberry preserves was the surprise), curried deviled eggs, rolled watercress and blue cheese sandwiches, and the floating islands of melted rainbow sherbet in the bride's punch—was a rare treat for Dad and Dan, but I was stuffed from eating all afternoon.

“Pass me the deviled eggs, Dick,” Mom said.

“Sure, sure,” said Dad. I wondered why anyone named Richard would want to go by Dick. Didn't Dad know what it meant? It embarrassed me every time my mom used it.

I gazed forlornly at my upright piano in the corner of the room, my Beethoven sonata open on the music rack. I usually practiced at least two hours a day, but with all the frantic preparations for the shower, I hadn't gotten around to it yet and craved the feel of the smooth keys.

Snoopy emerged from his hiding place and rubbed against our legs, purring loudly, and when Dad wasn't looking, I fed him bits of clam stuffing. I leafed through the July 7 issue of
Time
magazine, as if I were not the least bit interested in the cover story “The Hippies: Philosophy of a Subculture,” which I would pore over in private, hoping to glean something I didn't
already know. The words “Haight-Ashbury” seemed to fly off the page. Amazing! Our little neighborhood—the hub of a cultural revolution!

It was warm, and all the windows were open. A trolley rumbled by and made a wide, sweeping turn up the block onto Masonic Avenue. Next, the Gray Line Tour bus roared past, farting nauseous diesel fumes on its Hippie Hop, advertised as “a safari through psychedelphia, and the only foreign tour within the continental limits of the United States.” Apparently the hippies had blocked off traffic on Haight Street, with their chants of “The streets belong to the people,” “We are free,” and “Haight is love.” An overflow of pedestrians roamed our street, and strains of songs, conversation, laughter, flutes, bells, tambourines, and drums wafted into our living room. Hippies had begun moving into the Haight in 1965, and it looked like the party was only getting started. I loved all the excitement, but my parents were fed up and threatened to move.

Looking over the sofa back, out the bay window, my dad scowled at a long-haired couple ambling by arm in arm. “You can't tell the girl from the boy.”

“Hippies are a social disease,” scoffed Dan, the only boy in the Haight sporting a crew cut. In the news, the city's health director, Ellis D. (“LSD”) Sox, had warned that there was a danger in the Haight of epidemic hepatitis, venereal disease, typhus, and malnutrition, but after inspecting dozens of hippie pads and establishments, the health department hadn't found anything wrong. “Hippies are always looking for a free handout,” continued Dan. “They should get a job.”

“
You
should get a job,” I retorted.

Dad slapped his knee. He had a paunch and a bald dome, with a ring of black-and-gray hair curling around it. He was a sales rep for a produce company and made his calls to the grocery stores of the city dressed in a business suit. “You fell right into that one, son.”

Dan scowled at me. “I'm looking for work. I'm not a hippie hypocrite.”

“Meaning what?” I asked.

“Hippies say ‘make love, not war,' but that's just an excuse to have sex all the time.”

Mom held her palms to her ears, shuddering at the word “sex.” “Kids, stop your bickering!”

“They're anti-American,” said Dan. “Can't appreciate what the boys are doing in Vietnam for them. Just wait until they live in a Communist state. Let's see how free they are.”

Dan leaped from the sofa in agitation, dropped to the floor, and began pumping out push-ups. He had recently graduated from high school, where he had been active in JROTC—Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps. He couldn't wait to join the marines and hop over to Nam to take potshots at “Charlie,” but our parents were making him attend City College for two years first. With a student deferment, he had to be satisfied with living the war vicariously through letters from his buddy Jimmy Howe, who was marching through faraway rice paddies to blast away Commie gooks.

“Freedom isn't free,” agreed Dad, who had enlisted in the navy after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, knowing he would be drafted.

“I'll be ready,” said Dan, grunting. “When I test for the marines, I'm going to score the highest in fitness.”

“You have to take a written test, too,” I reminded him.

“I can
read
.” It was true Dan was smart enough. He got Cs and Ds in school only because he didn't try.

He disgusted me—his veins popping out of his arms and neck, the sweat dampening his hair, and the stench of his BO wafting through the room.

He and I had never gotten along. Growing up, he rarely let me join in his play, but if I was doing something with my friends he wanted to do, he'd bust his way in. During board games, he'd cheat and throw the game pieces if he wasn't winning; I taunted him with “Devil Dan! Devil Dan!” The last couple of years we'd hardly spoken to each other.

“That Maxine Fulmer has gone off the deep end,” said my mother, eager to change the subject.

“She fancies herself a
feminist
.” Mrs. Newman pronounced the word as if she had bitten into something rotten.

“It's a shame,” said Mom. “She's not an unattractive woman, even with all that weight she's gained.”

“Oh, Maxine was simply stunning before she let herself go,” said Mrs. Newman, “and stopped wearing a bra.”

That was it for the guys. Dad and Dan both slunk out of the room. We women started in on the cleanup. When I thought I had done my share, I attempted to slip out the back door.

“Hold it, Joanne. You've got no business out on the street this late,” said Mom.

“It's only seven-thirty. I'm just going down to the store for some gum.”

“You don't need it.”

“Mom, please! I'll be right back.”

She hesitated, but I could tell I was going to win this argument. She and Mrs. Newman were dying to have a heart-to-heart without “talking in a cornfield” with my big ears around. “You have money for gum?”

I pulled a rumpled dollar bill out of my pocket that I had earned by babysitting.

“You break that dollar now and the whole thing will be gone within the week.”

“Here, Joanne, I have a nickel for you.” Mrs. Newman removed her coin purse from her handbag.

“Gee, thanks.”

“That is completely unnecessary, Thelma,” said Mother. “Don't let me forget to pay you back.”

“You're not paying me back, Helen. I won't hear of it.”

I made my escape. Even with Mrs. Newman's nickel, I was breaking that dollar. If I ever got another chance to give spare change to my beautiful hippie, I was going to take it.

I looked and looked for him, in the Good Karma Coffeehouse, in the Psychedelic Store, on Hippie Hill, and all along Haight Street. Could he have been a runaway just passing through? He didn't have a backpack, and he didn't look hungry, filthy, or scared. He didn't even look like he needed the money he was panhandling. Maybe he was just another middle-class kid living with his family like me, but where was he?

On Wednesday evening, I walked a block down Ashbury and turned on Rena's street, Walker. We continued down the hill one more block to Haight, then headed toward the Buena Vista Community Theater.

Rena was wearing a purple paisley minidress with a skirt that rode up nearly to her underpants. My parents would never have let me out of the house dressed like that, but Rena's parents were so busy trying to break up, they never bothered her. They'd nearly succeeded in divorcing five years ago, but had had Rena's little brother, Markie, instead.

Rena pointed up the street. “Hey, there's Lisa and Candy!”

I frowned. “Let's pretend we don't even know them.” During freshman and sophomore years Rena and I had struggled for a position on the fringe of the in crowd. I did Lisa Girardi's homework and gave Candy Lambert the homemade chocolate chip
cookies out of my lunch, but that was over. I was done with that snotty bunch now, even if Rena wasn't.

Rena bit her lip, and her brow creased. “What happened at Kent's wasn't Lisa's fault.”

“I don't care! I hate them all! They're not our friends, and they never will be!” All last year, Lisa's boyfriend, Kent Dougal, had called me “skag.” On the last day of school, he threw a bash because his parents were out of town. It was one of those friends-asking-friends-of-friends affairs, with a garage band playing “Louie, Louie” and “Gloria” and a few other three-chord hits. Kent got on the microphone and announced, “This is a private party, and Joanne Donnelly, you weren't invited.” How could I ever live down such humiliation?

Lisa and Candy went into Love Burgers, and I was glad to avoid them.

“I hope we're not the first ones at the audition,” said Rena.

“We could walk slower.”

Rena hugged herself and pouted. “I don't know why I'm wasting my time. I probably won't get a part.”

“Sure you will.”

“Probably won't even get call backs.”

“You will.”

In front of the Drogstore Cafe, Rena sniffed. As usual, the smell of pot permeated the air. We inhaled deeply and held our breath until we burst out laughing.

“I don't believe there really is such a thing as a contact high,” said Rena. “We'd be stoned all the time.”

“Yeah.” I didn't know what being stoned felt like, but I was pretty sure it hadn't happened to me.

“We gotta get some grass,” said Rena.

“Yeah, but where?”

“Oh, I can't imagine,” said Rena, and we laughed again. Pot was everywhere in the Haight, and cheap, too, but neither of us had the nerve to buy it because we knew that undercover cops, or “narcs,” sometimes pretended to sell it. We wouldn't dare “hold” because if our parents found it, they'd ground us for life.
My mom had read somewhere that marijuana was a “gateway” drug. She warned me that if I took a single puff, I'd be a heroin addict for life.

“Oh, well,” I said. “Someday someone will offer us a hit, and we'll take it.”

“Yeah, and we'll drop acid, too.”

“Oh, I don't know, Rena.”

“Don't you want to have the ultimate psychedelic experience?”

“LSD is scary.” I'd seen a young runaway freaking out on a bad trip in front of the Free Clinic, having not quite made it to the Calm Room inside. She was screaming and writhing on the sidewalk as people held her down, trying to prevent her from ripping out her eyes.

I nearly knocked into a guy in an American flag top hat and pink tutu, juggling bananas. He tossed a banana at Rena and she caught it.

“Which end do you light?” I asked, and we laughed. There was a rumor that smoking dried banana peels had hallucinogenic effects; it was even in Donovan's song “Mellow Yellow.”

Rena peeled the banana and offered it to me. I took a big bite.

We hiked up the steep path through the dense foliage of Buena Vista Park, which indeed had a “good view” overlooking the city and bay. By the time we entered the theater, we were both breathless from the climb.