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I needed the shunning by Evelyn to get me out of the Haight. A couple days after, a direction, a destination was provided by crashers, a couple from New Orleans. After the chick fell asleep on Tim’s bed, the cat and I got deep into a stoned conversation about the spreading hip scene. We sat on the floor next to a lit candle, KMPX barely-audible. His dark hair was brushed into flames by San Francisco wind and his eyes dilated with visionary rapture as he said, “I know that New Orleans is ripe for a scene like this.” He held his breath as he handed me the joint. His ol’ lady was cute and had hair shorter than his, which reminded me of Ruth and I. He gushed smoke and said, “All they need is someone to show them how.” “The cat who used to live here with me was down in the South a few years back. He and his wife were members of C.O.R.E. in New Orleans.” I was boasting about Tim, and also testing this southern cat, seeing how he reacted to, or if he even knew about, CORE. But I couldn’t read him. “Some friends of his were killed … and tortured,” I added. “The Klan started following him around and he had to get out of there.” I handed back the joint, holding in a toke, noticing a favorite on KMPX, Big Brother and the Holding Company’s instrumental Hall of the Mountain King. “Yeah, that’s true, it is kinda dangerous outside of New Orleans. But the city is kind of an island and I know they’re ready for this,” he said, gesturing out of the apartment to the Haight. Well, I did have to get out of there, and I was curious to see Tim’s old battleground for myself. Of course, I knew that I was also running away from my state of mind, running panic-stricken and directionless, like my clothes were on fire. Also, I had nothing better to do. The cat picked up on my interest and said, leaning toward me, crossed-legged, “I guarantee you’ll have a free place to crash.” “How much is acid goin’ for down there?” I asked. He was surprised, then delighted. “They’re desperate for acid. It’s about ten bucks a hit.” I knew some messianic dealers who would front me a few dozen hits. I had enough money to get there by hitchhiking, and with proceeds from the acid, I could support myself for a while. I was eager to tell Tim about my trip to New Orleans, but when I called, his father told me, voice taut with anger, that Tim was in Camarillo State Mental Hospital. I shouldn’t have been, but I was surprised, and though I wanted to know more, I was afraid of his father’s anger, so I just thanked him and got off the phone. I found out later his parents blamed me completely for Tim’s drug problems. Tim would spend a couple decades, long after both parents died, in and out of major mental hospitals on both coasts. I would live about seven years with an ever-present ambush-threat of paranoia paralysis, a flashback to the speed crashes. I became fluent in coughs, snorts, sniffs, throat-clearings, gulps, shoe-sole scuffings, all the freighted nonverbal communication. A loud gulp in a crowded silent elevator, every time without exception, provokes an answering cough. I was now saddle-broken. Fleeing pain more than pursuing truth. Shortly after Tim moved out, the apartment behind ours emptied. Christine left the city and the memories. Almost at the same time, Don Ed caught-on to Cookie’s infidelities and they broke up and moved out. A mixed race couple and their baby moved in. The black husband and I shared an esoteric interest: the single-panel magazine cartoon. We got to the level where either one could quote only the caption and both would break into laughter. Yet, despite this easy rapport, I started noticing something in myself that alarmed me whenever I was around him (and later other black people): fear. I had always felt comfortable around blacks. In the fall of ’66, I walked through the Fillmore District observing the riots and got only a single threat. I wondered now could I be racist against my will? Had I been contaminated by the rednecks? Had there been toxic seepage into my subconscious? Was a piker hiding in me? How could I not be infected? No, it wasn’t racism, I eventually realized. What I feared wasn’t black people themselves. It was their pain. My new role as missionary to the rednecks would require a haircut. Without one, I probably wouldn’t make it out of California alive, let alone across the Deep South. I was depressed but not suicidal, so I went to the only remaining barbershop on Haight Street. Needless to say, there was no wait and the barber was smug. My hair grew more out than down, but it was almost shoulder-length. As his scissors bit into it, a freak couple stopped in front of the shop window, and for a shocked moment, stared at me, the parade of Haight Street flowing behind them. Then they mimed a plea of “Don’t do it!” But I could only shrug and look apologetic. Cutting my hair had no other significance for me than as a survival stratagem. As I told my parents when I wrote announcing my trip to the South: “The Haight is rotting into a circus. I’m tired of giggling, ogling tourists bumper-to-bumper for blocks in all directions. This doesn’t mean I’ll stop being a beatnik. I was born for that (though I know you don’t agree).” After I left the barbershop, I did my rounds of the Haight one last time, feeling the wind in places I hadn’t for a year and a half. Though I felt uncomfortable disguised as a straight, I needed to walk and think. It was the afternoon before the morning I would hitchhike south. I had already completed my disguise by adding a plaid shirt and a duffle bag and shoes from an Army surplus store. The bag was packed at the pad, which I was giving to friends, furniture, food, kitchenware, and all. At one point, I stopped and sat on the sloping lawn of Buena Vista Park, across Haight Street from the Christian Science Reading Room, several blocks from the center of the action. After a while, a big, late-model, family station wagon with fake-wood side-paneling parked in front of me. Four straight, shorthaired teenagers got out, donned headbands, wrapped themselves in blankets, and then walked single file along Haight Street toward the action.
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