My Beautiful Hippie (4 page)

The houselights were down, and two adult Negroes were on the lit stage, holding scripts and yelling gross language that embarrassed me. There were about fifty people sitting in the first three rows of the theater. Rena nudged me with her hip to take a seat toward the middle.

The actors finished their reading and the director, a paunchy white guy, looked at his clipboard and called out two names. Two other Negroes came up and began to read the same scene.

Rena whispered, “I'm not on the list, Jo.”

I whispered back, “Go put your name in.”

“Naw, I'll just wait till a break.”

Several people turned around and gave us stern looks for talking. The director called out two more names, and two Negro women took the stage to spew obscenities at each other. I stared at the silhouettes of the people seated before us, a row of round Afros, like the heads of dandelions, and a realization slowly crept over the back of my head.

When the female readers finished, I grabbed Rena's hand. “We're leaving,” I whispered. I got up and yanked her out of her seat.

“Are you crazy? I want to audition!”

“No, you don't,” I said emphatically into her face. As I tried to pull her along, she planted her feet and stuck out her butt. Our commotion attracted the attention of some of the people, who began to laugh and mutter among themselves.

The director half-called, half-chuckled, “Can I help you girls?”

“No!” I shouted back. “We were just watching.” With one mighty pull, I dragged Rena through the foyer and out the door. I ran down the steep hill, through the park, Rena following.

“Dammit it, Jo. What's wrong?” she asked breathlessly. “Is it the cussing?”

“What did you say the play was?”

“
The Blacks
.”

“That's what wrong.”

Rena stopped, stared at me a moment, then flung her hands to her face. “Oh, my God! I'm ruined!”

I released a strangled laugh that sounded more like a yelp.

“Joanne! How will I ever be able to go to another audition in this city? Every time I show up they'll be pointing at me and saying, ‘There's the white girl who tried out for ‘
The Blacks
.' ” She pointed ahead of her for emphasis.

I followed her finger to three guys walking down Haight Street. “There he is!” I exclaimed.

Rena didn't have to ask who. She squinted in the dusk. “Which one?”

“The middle one.” This time my beautiful hippie was not wearing a guitar, but an Edwardian top hat, the wind gently lifting his hair beneath it. I fingered the love beads I had worn since the day he had given them to me. When I was at home, around my family, I kept them hidden under my clothes, but when I was out on the street, I displayed them. It was hard to remember to keep adjusting them, and once, Denise had caught me with them. She had questioned me sternly, and I'd lied, saying Rena had made them for me. Apparently Denise hadn't mentioned them to Mom or I'd have been in trouble.

“Let's go talk to him,” Rena said.

I quickened my step. “What will we say?”

“Something hip!”

“Something cool!”

We broke into a run. The tramping of our feet and our shrieks of laughter caused him to turn. I grabbed a wad of the loose material on Rena's shoulder and yanked her around the corner of the Drogstore Cafe. “Why do we have to hide?” she whispered.

“I don't know!” We were anything but cool. Just trying to be cool made it impossible to be cool.

I peered through the side and front windows of the Drogstore, over the rows of antique apothecary jars. My hippie and his two companions were waiting at the trolley stop. “What if they get on?” I asked.

“Then we get on,” said Rena.

“We're either on the bus or off the bus,” we recited together.

When the trolley arrived, the three guys settled in seats toward the front, while we scurried past them and sat toward the back. As we rambled through the city, the three guys talked loudly to one another and shifted in their seats. Whenever my hippie turned to look at the guy behind him, we ducked. I didn't know why.

Rena began, “The guy with the beard, sitting next to your guy—”

“Shhh!” My face burned at the expression “your guy.” I was acting like a silly teenybopper, but I couldn't help it.

“—looks like Gus Abbott of Roach.”

“Get real! A rock star riding the streetcar? He'd have a limo.”

The trolley made stops throughout the North Beach: first on Washington Square near all the coffee shops and Italian restaurants, then on diagonal Columbus Street, notorious for its topless clubs and the improvisational theater troupe the Committee, then near touristy Fisherman's Wharf. On Beach Street, a few blocks west of Ghirardelli Square and the Cannery, one of the guys reached up and pulled the cable to request a stop. They stood to get off the trolley, but my hippie abruptly turned and walked down the aisle of the car to exit through the back door.

As he passed us, he flashed a peace sign and his beautiful smile. His eyes looked into mine, and I thought I detected a spark of recognition, which sent shivers through my body.

The guys crossed the street, entered an opened gate, and climbed a steep walkway leading to a large, shabby Victorian.

Now I was pretty sure I knew where he lived. I sighed deeply. Rena giggled.

Practicing Beethoven's “
Pathétique
” sonata, I bogged down in the long, difficult development section of the first movement. I had started practicing at two o'clock, needed to go to four, but it was only three-twenty. I was bored, restless, wanted to be done. I leaned back so I could look out the bay window. I wanted to be outside searching for
him
. I sighed, stared back at my music. If I truly wanted to be a concert pianist, I had to sit there, suffering and struggling through.

Since the second grade, I had taken piano lessons from Mrs. Scudder, who lived in the neighborhood, on Cole Street. She was sweet and encouraging and never lost patience. When I passed a piece, Mrs. Scudder allowed me to select a sticker from her sticker tray, lick it, and attach it to my music. When I learned ten pieces by heart, she gave me a four-inch bust of a composer, and after nine years, a couple dozen of them were crowded on a shelf in my bedroom.

Last year Mrs. Scudder hadn't had much to say during my lessons. It didn't seem like I was getting any better, nothing close to Suyu Li, a neighborhood girl a year older than me. At our school's spring talent show, Suyu had whipped through Chopin's Revolutionary Etude with such tremendous speed, accuracy, and passion that the audience members had risen to their feet with thunderous applause. Burning with envy, I asked Suyu
afterward how she got so good. She told me it was because of her teacher, Dr. William Harold. She said I would have to audition for him, but she thought I was good enough to get into his studio.

First I had to convince my mother I needed a new piano teacher. Dr. Harold, I found out, charged twice as much as Mrs. Scudder; I would have to attend both a private lesson and a master class with his other students every week, and his studio was in Pacific Heights, two streetcar transfers away. At first my mother gave me a flat-out no. I begged and pleaded with her. I told her I would pay half of my lesson fees from my babysitting money. “What about Mrs. Scudder's feelings?” she asked me. “You would have to tell her you want to quit taking lessons.”

I did tell her, at my last lesson of the school year. “I'm so surprised to hear this, Joanne,” Mrs. Scudder said. “I thought you loved the piano.” I had to look away from her slackened face as she pressed into my hand a statuette I hadn't earned, of a composer I'd never heard of. “I've never had a student make it all the way up to Smetana,” she said.

When I auditioned for Dr. Harold, he didn't have much to say about my playing except “Uh-huh, uh-huh.” He asked me if I had ever played Beethoven's “
Pathétique
,” and when I said I hadn't, I vowed to learn it by heart over the summer and have it ready to play for him at my first lesson in September. Then I got a disappointing letter stating that I wasn't accepted into his studio, but placed on a waiting list as a “promising candidate.”

“I'm sure Mrs. Scudder will take you back,” said Mom.

I wasn't going back. Stoically I practiced on my own for the whole month of June with no prospect of a teacher, until I got a postcard from Dr. Harold, sent from the Aspen Summer Music Festival, where he was teaching and performing, which announced an opening for me in his studio. This was the motivation I needed to work even harder on my Beethoven, but now, on this lazy July afternoon, here I sat with forty more minutes to practice.

I flipped backward in the music and thumped through the solemn opening minor chords, making them all
forte
, when I knew some were soft. On the next page I sped up on the runs,
knowing I should keep a steady tempo but enjoying how flashy I sounded. I imagined myself under a spotlight in Carnegie Hall, with the marquee outside reading
PIANIST JOANNE DONNELLY TONIGHT! SOLD OUT!

I glossed over the fingerings I hadn't quite worked out. Dr. Harold wouldn't expect me to be perfect my first lesson. I needed to leave him something to teach me. When I reached the end of the movement, the clock on the mantel read 3:44. I could stand it no longer. I leaped from the piano bench and made a dash for the back door, nearly tripping over the sixty-foot phone cord Mom had installed so she could do her housework while clutching the receiver between her shoulder and ear, delivering to Mrs. Newman up-to-the-minute reports on the progress of her latest sewing project and dinner preparations.

Mom held the receiver to her bosom to ask, “Done already?”

“I practiced two hours! I need to get out of here.”

Without waiting for her reply, I dashed toward Masonic Avenue and didn't stop until I reached Haight Street. I stepped around a guy in a white robe who was painting daisies on the sidewalk in yellow and green Day-Glo paint. He reached out and dotted the top of my shoe with a single petal. I let out a yelp and bunny-hopped away.

I saw a crowd spilling onto the sidewalk in front of the Tangerine Kangaroo. It had the cheapest coffee, used books and magazines to read, chessboards, sewing kits, a piano, a saggy sofa, and a stage. Anyone who wanted to got up and performed as the muse struck them. I stood on tiptoe and peeked through the heads of the crowd, and there was my beautiful hippie onstage, strumming his guitar and crooning Bob Dylan's “The Times They Are A-Changin.' ” His voice was much smoother than Dylan's, yet raspy in places for emotional effect. Between verses he improvised a guitar interlude that was not on Dylan's recording. I loved to hop around and flail my arms to the hard, pounding screech of the acid rockers on the San Francisco scene—Janis Joplin, the Jefferson Airplane, the Doors, the Purple Cockroach, the Grateful Dead—but closer to my heart were the folkies: Dylan, Arlo
Guthrie, Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Peter, Paul and Mary, Judy Collins, Phil Ochs, and my favorites, Simon and Garfunkel, with their flowing melodies, soulful lyrics, and soothing acoustic guitars. Folk rock was something I could do: sit on my bed, strum a few chords, and sing a simple tune.

When my hippie finished the song, he stood, took a bow, and set his guitar down to indicate he was done with his set. People approached him and rained change into his open guitar case. I waited for them to clear before I made my way toward him. I was wearing a homemade outfit of bell-bottom jeans and a flowered cotton blouse with a Peter Pan collar, the top two buttons unfastened to reveal the love beads he'd given me. My heart was hammering and sweat dampened the quarter I clutched in my hand as I tried to think of something to say to him.

Only a skinny hippie girl with a headband of feathers and a skimpy halter dress was still talking to him. She was smiling and staring intently into his eyes, and he was smiling and staring back. Was she his girlfriend? No, she didn't talk like a girlfriend. She was like me, trying to find an excuse to get to know him, her easy chatter peppered with “far out,” “groovy,” and “beautiful.” She had something commercials on the boob tube called sex appeal. In my dorky homemade clothes, I felt I was no match for her. At last the girl sauntered away, and he turned to me.

I tossed my quarter into his guitar case. “I really liked your song.”

“Thanks.”

“You play really good.”

“Yeah?” His pale blue eyes sparkled.

“And sing. You sing better than Dylan.”

He laughed. “Everyone sings better than Dylan.”

“I play guitar.”

“I know. You told me.”

“You remember me?” I nearly shouted in surprise. I wished I could be cool.

“I gave you those beads. It's very important to give, you know? Feeds the soul. But it hurts some people, you know? That's
why I panhandle—not to get, but to give folks an opportunity to give. Uptight straights visiting the Haight. They get a real pinched expression on their faces when they hand over their quarters.”