Amateur Insanity

Humanity’s Tail

 

In that Sierra mill town, I was a freak, a strayed gene, an unexplainable fluke to everyone including relatives and parents. I was obsessed with poetry and only an equal obsession with girls kept me from being considered “funny.” At fifteen, I was reading and understanding Sartre and Camus, which was beyond any adult I knew. After a boyhood of scorn and sporadic hazing, I reached Haight-Ashbury choking with hatred for rednecks.   

The redneck: humanity’s tail.

Though our California variety isn’t a nigger-lyncher, it is an identifiable subspecies with its own unique brutishness. Rural Californians were called “Pikers” in the latter nineteenth century. According to a journalist of the time, Bayard Taylor, the Piker was “the Anglo-Saxon relapsed into semi-barbarism. . . . He takes naturally to whiskey. . . He has little respect for the rights of others; he distrusts men in ‘store clothes’. . . Finally, he has an implacable dislike for trees.”  Other writers confirmed this, including Horace Greeley in An Overland Journey. Journalist Stephen Powers maintained that even Pikers who made a lot of money farming were “the most shiftless, thriftless men of the class found in the Union, except, perhaps, in Texas.” There was concern that the low quality of the labor force would impede economic development.

Take some Piker descendants, stir-in some Thirties Okies, add a few Mexicans and remnants of the Mi-Wuk Indians, and you get my home town, Summerville. Dying before I was born, at the dead-end of a highway, it didn’t even get the slight rejuvenation of drive-through tourism. So it was considered backward even by neighboring Piker towns.

No place was safe from rednecks, not even the Haight. Besides that warm spring night of the little murderess, I witnessed other redneck incursions.

On a sunny afternoon at the height of the summer, I was walking west on Haight Street, approaching Schrader Street, about a block from Golden Gate Park, when I was stopped by the sight of a redneck with a rifle.

Mid-twenties, crew-cut under a baseball cap and wobbly gut under a T shirt, he had just arrived at the curb and was apparently resuming an exchange of angry shouts with a freak on the opposite side of Haight Street.

“Yeah?! How’s this asshole?!” the redneck shouted shaking the rifle in the air.

There was a suspended second when the freak, and everyone watching, wondered how he would respond. Then he flipped the redneck off. Before the redneck could react, he noticed the audience of dozens all around him. Then he started retreating south down Schrader toward Waller Street. I was transported with outrage and started following him, all the while close-reading his face and ready to retreat. But then the fear steering his body emerged on his face and I felt bold enough to look around and saw across Schrader on the west side, also advancing on him, a couple of other freaks, among them the one who flipped him off.

The redneck turned the corner and fast-walked west down Waller toward a tan Buick convertible parked across a driveway. The engine was running and a trimmer redneck also in a baseball cap sat on the passenger side of the front seat. As the fat one reached the Buick, he was looking up and down the street for a cop. Then he tossed the rifle on the back seat and opened the door and shouted at the freak who had flipped him off, “You… you… fuckin’… freak!!!”

“C’mon, les get outta here,” said the other redneck.

As they drove off, I searched my pockets for something to write down the license number and found nothing. I was about to ask a freak standing nearby, when I saw a chick across the street writing it down.I didn’t see a cop the rest of the day and forgot about it.

A late night encounter the previous winter came even closer to inflicting physical harm on me.
I was walking up and down the hills of the Haight with a cat, Greg, who I had met in a philosophy class at State. We were both high on acid and sharing insights and extolling discoveries and favorite books by favorite authors and finding nothing whatsoever to disagree about as we aimlessly roamed the sidewalks. A couple nights a week, I would be in a similar conversation, usually at a coffeehouse. Frequently I closed the Drogstore Café at Haight and Masonic with half-a-dozen or so others who had pushed together their tables.

Tonight, however, I was under a clear, cold, winter night sky, and as we were descending into Buena Vista Park, crossing it to Haight Street, we entered an area well-lit by several surrounding street lights. That was when two straight teens one on each side of us came at us out of nowhere. On my side was a husky blond with a crowbar and a face so red and knotted with rage that he seemed on the verge of bursting out a held breath. If the other assailant also had a weapon, I didn’t notice.

But almost before the threat could register, a guy yelled up from Haight Street, “Hey!!! Knock that off!”

Then he crossed the street, leapt the low retaining wall, and headed up the slope at a trot. The two assailants and Greg and I froze, watching the guy approach. He was short but well-built.

He went to the kid with the crowbar and grabbed it,”Gimme that! Whadya think your doing! What is wrong with you? How could you do such a thing?!” He turned to Greg and I and asked in a low concerned tone,” You guys alright?”

We nodded dumbly.

Our rescuer turned and glared at the other assailant and then turned back to the crowbar wielder and shouted, ”Go on, get outta here! And don’t let me see you around here again! You should be ashamed of yourselves. Why would you do something that stupid?”

The two assailants, confused and thoroughly deflated, turned around and left without a word.

“Dumb kids,” the rescuer muttered and started down the slope back to Haight Street, crow bar in hand.

The weirdest part of this wasn’t what the rescuer did but what he looked like. From his flawless greased pompadour to his black turtleneck to his gray slacks, his whole aspect was a composite of the heroes (private detectives, adventurers, soldiers-of-fortune, etc.) that I grew up watching on a black-and-white TV and who routinely performed similar last-second rescues.

When he reached Haight Street, the rescuer got into and then drove off in a black Corvette, as much a stock prop as the pompadour. If it wasn’t for his skin tone I couldn’t have been sure he wasn’t a hallucination. The only rational explanation I could imagine was that he was a straight who had modeled his appearance and behavior on those very TV heroes, and maybe he had just been visiting hip friends or a hip chick that he was high-on. I knew immediately that I would have to tag this memory, “This really happened.” But then, nothing that strange could be invented.

Outside the Haight, rednecks wereif anything even more lethal, as Tim and I and another friend discovered a couple weeks before the end of my summer of love, when we drove to LA on acid in the middle of the night and carelessly stopped at a truckers’ cafe. We called that “crossing Nazi-Occupied-Territory.”