Summer of Love, a Time Travel (9 page)

Leo
Gorgon was invited to sit on the council. Gorgon had journeyed from New York
City to San Francisco in the winter of ’66 for the New Year’s Eve Bash and has
done his Digger thing in town ever since.

But
here’s the trouble: Ruby was
not
invited to sit on the Council for a
Summer of Love, even though she’s lived in the San Francisco Bay Area her whole
life and owned a hip business in the Haight-Ashbury since 1962.

Why
not?

Dig
It:

The
Council for a Summer of Love invited only men. Like Leo Gorgon, they are all
tall, good-looking, and white. They like to party. They’ve been partying with
each other since forever. Well, six months
feels
like forever when
you’re wasted from morn till eve.

The
boys are pleased with themselves. They publish proclamations. They hold press
conferences, which get televised and covered by the papers. They’ve declared
that two hundred thousand flower children are about to descend on the
Haight-Ashbury.

At
first, Ruby was stung by the council’s failure to invite her, which she had
trouble understanding till she got it: she’s an uppity bitch. Wait, wait. She’s
an uppity
colored
bitch. Two-hundred-thousand flower children are about
to descend on her neighborhood? Far out. She wants five dollars from each and
every one of them.

No
wonder a Digger like Leo Gorgon is sniffing around her skirts. Who believes his
shuck that money is dead?

*  
*   *

Ruby
climbs the stairs to her apartment. Two stories of Victorian manse, all for
her. Pa would have been so proud to see her success as a grown woman. Ma would
have been proud, too, knowing how her hard work at Marinship during the war and
the settlement money after her shameful death had provided for her daughter.

She
heads for her kitchen, retrieves that fine bottle of Chablis, takes glass and
bottle to the living room, and lights a log in the fireplace.

She settles
on her comfy couch, and her cats rouse themselves from all over the apartment
to join her. There slinks Sita, a tiny seal point queen, and Luna, a blue point
princess. Rama, a regal seal point king, perches on the arm of the couch next
to Ara, a flame point prince, all amber and ivory. Now Alana, the Angora,
bounds onto her lap, a lithe little beauty with golden eyes, silky white fur,
and a plumy tail. The cats crowd around, nuzzling her fingers, trilling and
purring.

“My
babies,” Ruby croons.

The
comforts of home tug at Ruby’s heart more powerfully these days than adventures
out there, in the world. But, sweet Isis, in the old days, she had herself a
time.

North
Beach in the late fifties: the Beats ranted and raved, they were a crazy cabal,
but they inflicted their neuroses mostly on each other and they read books.
They took pride in the intellect, schooled or self-taught. They actually read
and wrote poetry. Words, jazz, and ideas turned them on. Oh, the Beats smoked
grass and drank peyote-button tea. In her twenties, Ruby tried just about
everything there was to try in those days. She regretted nothing. It was part
of the exotic philosophies, otherworldly cultures, and experiments on life’s
odyssey.

Beat
for Ruby meant the quest for freedom.

The
junk scene happened then, too, as Ruby well knew. Junk had blown through the
underground a long, long time. A few got into it; a few lost their way to it.
But the hip in late fifties California generally disdained habits. Habits hung
up your freedom. A square gig on Monkey Street or a spike in your valley both boiled
down to the same thing: trips that stole your mind and your time and eventually
your soul.

By
1962, North Beach was getting too wild and too mean. It got so you couldn’t
stage a decent Blabbermouth Night without some drunk taking a swing at a Poet
and bringing down the house.

So
Ruby and a lot of folks split to the Haight-Ashbury, where the rents were
ridiculously low, the air fresh and chilly, the park gorgeous. The neighborhood
was strictly lowbrow, on the wide, full lip of the Fillmore, a scary black
ghetto. She and her friends set up shops, studios, cafes. They smoked some more
grass and drank a whole lot more Papa Cribari Red, in spite of the hangover.

The
colony was cool in ’62, private and civilized. No one chased after the media. No
one wanted to be pigeonholed, let alone holed up in a prison cell at the Big Q.
The colony got behind poetry and art and novels, philosophy and jazz and folk
music. People formed makeshift families of all kinds behind closed doors; they
cherished their privacy. The scene was  really rather Zen.

Ruby
called it the personal revolution.

And
dope was not some monstrous, all-consuming demonic force. A cultural demigod. A
cruel, obsessive commerce. A standard by which folks associated or did not
associate with each other.

Ruby,
sipping her wine, cuddling her cats around her, wonders: When did it change?

Grandmother Says:
Meng (Youthful Folly)

The
Image:
A spring wells at the foot of the mountain.

The
spring escapes stagnation by filling the hollow places in its path.

The
Oracle:
Youthful folly may succeed, provided truth is sought.

In
the time of youth, folly may not be an evil. This is the initial stage of all
things. But one must seek experienced teachers and maintain property attitudes.
Such attitudes include modesty, receptivity, and perseverance.

Hexagram 4, The
I
Ching
or Book of Changes

Ruby
remembers the next new group infiltrating the scene, hot and restless at twenty
years old. Junior hipsters, the Beats mocked them. Hippies. They were a new
breed of drifter, kids on the road. Teens who shot junk, did time in juvie, ran
with biker gangs in New York City, New Orleans, Los Angeles. They slid in and
out of the nuthouse. A whole underclass who aspired to much and received little
in chicken-in-every-pot America. But these kids were discovering that drifting
could be all right. A groove, in fact. Hell, this is America. Rebels built the
place.

Hip
to the dope underground, riding the bicoastal circuit, cooler than cool, these
young hoodies had an entrepreneurial streak that had eluded the Beats. They
didn’t just deal to survive, they dealt to thrive. They had ambition. They knew
how to hustle. If you did it with wit and style, hustling could be fun and
exciting, not to mention lucrative. A beautiful market was opening up. A ripe
market, bigger than big. The college scene, the youth scene, the swinging
scene.

That’s
when it changed, Ruby decides and sips her chablis.

Everyone
began to talk about dope. Write about it, joke about it, sing songs about it,
recommend it, revel in it, glorify it, find salvation in it. She counted a
dozen drug jokes in
A Hard Day’s Night
. No, not the Beatles, packaged up
squeaky-clean for the teenyboppers? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Turn
on, tune in, drop out. Leary is lecturing about it, Kesey is partying on it,
everyone who is anyone is turning on. They say lawyers and doctors and politicians
will be turning on one day. Imagine! And all the laws of the land and scary propaganda
films couldn’t put that shattered value system together again.

But
dope was never the New Explanation. Not to Ruby.

*  
*   *

A
breeze kicks up from the ocean. The wind chimes on the deck off her kitchen
clang. Ruby sets down her glass, unlocks the kitchen door, and steps outside.
The willow and the lemon tree toss about, casting restless shadows across the
backyard. She breathes the damp night air, catches sprinkles of rain in the
palm of her hand.

The
wind chimes are way too loud; she’ll never get to sleep tonight. She reaches for
the redwood bench, drags it over to the deck’s edge. She steps up and reaches
for the chimes. The breeze kicks up again, and suddenly she’s dizzy. The long
day, a sip of wine, the lateness of the hour all conspire to steal her balance.
She wavers, unsteady on her feet.

She
starts to fall!

She
seizes the chimes, which are strung on tiger-tail fishing line. Her foot slips
off the bench, scraping her ankle. Jammed together, the chimes make an awful
clamor. She dangles from the tiger-tail, testing claims that the line can
support up to two hundred pounds. Not that she weighs quite that much, but
dripping wet she’s got some heft to her. She catches herself on the railing,
swings back. She loses her grip, falls down on the bench. “Damn!” she mutters.
Her heart is pounding like a jackhammer. She wipes sweat from her upper lip.

As
she sprawls, breathing heavily, she hears a low hiss, and her eye catches on
something. A tall, dark figure stands in the backyard just inside the wood-slat
fence, arms raised, hands extended, fingers spread. Eerie black sparks flicker
around the fingertips.

A
burglar, a dealer, a drifter, a narc, a cop, the FBI, the CIA, a murderer? Leo
Gorgon? The red-haired dude?

How
many people does she have to be afraid of?

What
is
it?

The
wind moans, and shadows swirl like living things. Where eyes ought to be in the
figure’s face burn two black holes. She can just make out a snarl of a mouth.

A
deep, awful cold rushes up from the yard.

Crazy
thoughts tumble through her mind. Has she fallen off the deck, after all,
broken her neck, and died, and she doesn’t know it yet? Has her double come to
take her soul away?

The
figure takes a step toward her.

No!
She hasn’t fallen! She’s not dead! She runs inside, bangs the door shut, locks
it tight. She slaps the kitchen light off, grabs the phone.

And
call who? Cops who want to bust her?

She
turns and sees a face--sweet Isis, it’s
her
face--smashed against the
glass of the door. Lips writhe off shattered teeth. An eye drips down a cheek.

She
screams.

The
face disappears.

*  
*   *

Ruby
peers through the front-door peephole of the Mystic Eye. The red-haired dude is
still sitting on her stoop, his back propped against the wall, his long legs
stretched out before him. Arms folded over his chest, he nods gently, eyes
closed, chin drooping in the collar of his jacket.

She
cracks open the door with the chain lock still locked.

“Hey,
you,” she whispers. “Wake up. Can you hear me, huh?”

He
yawns, blinks. His eyes flutter open, shiny from the street lights. Human eyes,
not black holes.

“You
tell me why you stayed and watched Leo Gorgon and you tell me right now. What
do you know about him?”

“I
told you,” he says, sitting up and stretching. “I calculated the probabilities.
I. . . .” Big yawn, another stretch. “I calculated.”

“Calculate
your ass over here.” She slaps the door in frustration. “And don’t give me that
probabilities shuck.
No
one outside of the Haight-Ashbury knows about Leo
Gorgon. I’ve never seen you before, sonny. So tell me something good. Convince
me.”

He
stands, loosening his legs. “Convince you of what?”

“That
you’re not the Man, setting me up for a bust ‘cause you don’t like my face.”
She grinds her teeth. “Damn it, sonny, I need somebody. To help me now.”

He
comes over at once and huddles by the door. “I’m not a narc, I swear. Your
sign”—he points up at her blue neon Eye of Horus, which she leaves on all night
for good luck—“is a sign.”

“My
sign is a sign. I’m glad we cleared that up.”

“Yes!
If my calculation is correct, you’re another point of reference. I searched my
Archives after you kicked me out. I’ve got a record of a woman, probably a shop
owner. A quadroon, dark curly hair, light skin.”

“There’s
a
record?
” Ruby’s adrenaline shoots through the ceiling. “Of
me?
”

He
presses his thumb to his lip. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Sonny,
I’m not worrying. I’m panicking.”