His courage reached mythic proportions one night in a greasy spoon on Haight Street near Fillmore. It was the kind of place, in a poor black neighborhood, where hippies could feel safe from pigs and/or rednecks.
Bernie stopped our conversation in a back booth by staring over my shoulder then suddenly leaping out of his seat. I turned around to watch him head for the shop front, where a muscular young black man in a raspberry bellbottoms-and-vest combo with matching cap, stood inside the open door, looking down at a hippy couple at a table by the window, who, terrified speechless, were looking up at him.
On the sidewalk outside, another young black man watched the couple intently, then glanced quickly up and down the street, then back at them. As Bernie approached, the young man in the combo turned toward him, revealing that he had a knife in one hand and money in the other. Bernie raised a finger toward the ceiling as if about to make a debating point.
“Bwuthuh, thith ith countuh-wevoluionawy ( Brother this is counter-revolutionary ) ,” he said in a gently scolding tone.
Alarm flashed across the thief’s glistening sweaty face. He thought Bernie was going to challenge him. But Bernie stopped at a tactful distance.
“You can thee theeth awe hip peepo (… see these are people ). They haven’t got any mouh (more) than you,” he said gesturing toward the dazed couple in their long hair and indigo pea coats.
The bewildered thief stared hard at Bernie who was the least frightened of them all. Outside, the lookout was staring down the street.
“You and them and me, we’uh awe (we‘re all) fighting the thame (same) enemy. If you hafta do thith (this), at leatht (least) do it to thtwaight peepo (straight people) .”
Bernie always had a messianic attitude toward the counter-culture, often referring to the moral obligations of “we hip people.”
Fear switched to anger as it occurred to the thief that he might be the butt of a joke. A mean smirk slowly appeared. Then the lookout opened the door, leaned in, quietly spat an order, and retreated. The thief followed the lookout through the door, but before he disappeared, the thief glanced back through the window at Bernie, anger having reverted to confusion and suspicion.
The kid with the lisp, a magnet for bullies, became the man who could not be intimidated. Except that he was being intimidated. And now he was fleeing to the other side of the world, and his plane was leaving the next morning, and I had invited him to David’s in a last ditch effort to get him to change his mind. Jenny, his wife, a close friend of mine, and the mother of their son, was counting on me. But he countered all my arguments by repeating that there were things he couldn’t tell me.
