San Francisco 1967
“Summer of Love”
My Summer of Love was bracketed by murders, both committed by rednecks.The second murder, in which my roommate Tim and I were marginally involved, marked the historical end of the Summer of Love, as much as any single event could.
The first murder occurred a little after we moved into our pad on the edge of the Haight Ashbury District. Like the murders that drove Tim out of the South, the first murder was racist and, ironically, committed by an unlikely redneck right on Haight Street a block from the intersection with Ashbury Street.
Throughout that summer there was a brown bloodstain on the sidewalk around a yellow fire hydrant on the southeast corner of Haight and Clayton Streets. Throughout the slow flash and the room-spin of that summer, I never once walked by that stain without remembering what I witnessed there one sweltering spring night.
Around nine, I was coming from Schrader Street where I had gotten very stoned on hash with friends. I was seeing through the wrong end of binoculars and hearing through a warped-wavy phonograph record while navigating a sidewalk clogged with more people than I had ever seen on Haight Street at one time. They were weaving around each other, leaning against walls, sitting on the sidewalk, lying on the hoods of cars with radios blaring. It was a spontaneous party for Spring.
I was wearing a sky blue, stylized military jacket like those worn by high school marching bands. I had marched in one myselfonly a couple years before. The Beatles would make them well known in a few weeks on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. I had a scraggily full dark beard and collar-length hair, was tall, lean, and hunched, and was ascetic in clothing style, usually wearing sandals, Levis, and a T-shirt.
So the coat felt like a costume. I had tried it on at my friend’s, who got it in a thrift shop, and when I was about to take it off to leave, he insisted I wear it and bring it back next time I visited. And now I was in it, vibrating with the festive atmosphere of this rare, luxuriously tropical night. Though at first I recoiled from the attention the jacket drew, within a block or so I relaxed into it. A block more and I was reveling in it. Eventually, though sweating and uncomfortable, I didn’t take it off.
I was in a crosswalk on Haight Street more than halfway to Clayton, when a chick yelled, “I’m tired of you niggers buggin’ me!” And then a different chick screamed. I froze.
Thirty feet to my right, up Clayton Street , a mountainous young black man, maybe three hundred pounds, squatted on a fireplug, hands wedged in Levis pockets. He wore a white tee shirt that glowed purple in the lunar street light, and at the center of his chest was a black hole, the apex of a triangle of blood. His bulging eyes were stunned… unbelieving…. fading……
A short blonde teenybopper in faded Levis ran east down Haight Street with a hunting knife in her hand which she threw it into a pile of shredded newspaper in the gutter. The scream had come from one of the dozen or so people around the victim. All, like me, were frozen with shock. It may only have been a second or two, but it was a noticeable length of time before anyone recovered enough to help the victim lay down on the hood of a car.
Meanwhile, the teenybopper disappeared into the milling crowd on Haight Street, which was unaware of what had just happened around the corner on Clayton. A hippy stopped a cruising cop car which then pulled onto the sidewalk. One cop ran to the victim, the other talked on the car radio. After both examined the victim, one ran back to the car radio and the other, taking a pen and tablet from a breast pocket, started talking to witnesses. A chick, perhaps the one who screamed, pointed at the corner where the assailant had escaped and where I was now standing, able to look down both Haight and Clayton Streets. I looked around and realized I was the only one who had seen the knife tossed.
I stepped over to it and pointed down at it and looked at the cop with the pen and tablet about forty feet away. I didn’t speak. I knew he would look in my direction eventually, which he did. He then came over and looked down at the knife. I stopped pointing and headed home. A couple blocks east, an ambulance shrieked west. Later that night, the radio reported the black man died on the way to the hospital and the chick turned herself in at a church.
This was the first of the murders that bracketed my Summer of Love and it showed that, in1967, even in the most sympathetic neighborhood in all of white America , a black man could be killed for his race, in this case by an out-of-place redneck runaway.
