C i n n a m o n K i s s
“That was just a dream, baby. Just a dream. You got a big house and lots of people who love you. Love you.” I had to say the words twice.
“I know,” she said. “But the dream scared me and I thought that you might really be gone.”
“I’m right here, honey. I’m comin’ home tomorrow. You can count on that.”
The phone made a weightless noise and Bonnie was on the line again.
“She’s tired, Easy. Almost asleep now that she’s talked to you.”
“I better be goin’,” I said.
“Did you want to talk about the job?” Bonnie asked.
“I’m beat. I better get to bed,” I said.
Just before I took the receiver from my ear I heard Bonnie say, “Oh.”
8 3
13
The Haight, as it came to be called, was teeming with hippie life. But this wasn’t like Derby. Most of the people on that Berkeley block still had one foot in real life at a job or the university. But the majority of the people down along Haight had completely dropped out. There was more dirt here, but that’s not what made things different. Here you could distinguish different kinds of hippies. There were the clean-cut ones who washed their hair and ironed their hippie frocks. There were the dirty bearded ones on Harley-Davidson motorcycles. There were the drug users, the angry ones. There were the young (very young) runaways who had come here to blend in behind the free love philosophy.
Bright colors and all that hair is what I remember mainly.
A young man wearing only a loincloth stood in the middle of a busy intersection holding up a sign that read end the war. Nobody paid much attention to him. Cars drove around him.
8 4
C i n n a m o n K i s s
“Hey, mister, you got some spare change?” a lovely young raven-haired girl asked me. She wore a purple dress that barely made it to her thighs.
“Sorry,” I said. “I’m strapped.”
“That’s cool,” she replied and walked on.
Psychedelic posters for concerts were plastered to walls. Here and there brave knots of tourists walked through, marveling at the counterculture they’d discovered.
I was reminded of a day when a mortar shell in the ammuni-tion hut of our base camp in northern Italy exploded for no ap-parent reason. No one was killed but a shock ran through the whole company. All of a sudden whatever we had been doing or thinking, wherever we had been going, was forgotten. One man started laughing uncontrollably, another went to the mess tent and wrote a letter to his mother. I kept noticing things that I’d never seen before. For instance, the hand-painted sign above the infirmary read hospital, all in capital letters except for the t.
That one character was in lower case. I had seen that sign a thousand times but only after the explosion did I really look at it.
The Haight was another kind of explosion, a stunning surge of intuition that broke down all the ways you thought life had to be.
In other circumstances I might have stayed around for a while and talked to the people, trying to figure out how they got there.
But I didn’t have the time to wander and explore.
I’d gotten the address of the People’s Legal Aid Center from the information operator. It had been a storefront at one time where a family named Gnocci sold fresh vegetables. There wasn’t even a door, just a heavy canvas curtain that the grocer raised when he was open for business.
The store was open and three desks sat there in the recess.
Two professional women and one man talked to their clients.
8 5
W a lt e r M o s l e y
The man, who was white with short hair, wore a dark suit with a white shirt and a slate-blue tie. He was talking to a fat hippie mama who had a babe in arms and a small boy and girl clutching the hem of her Indian printed dress.
“They’re evicting me,” the woman was saying in a white Texan drawl I knew and feared. “What they expect me to do with these kids? Live in the street?”
“What is the landlord’s name, Miss Braxton?” the street lawyer asked.
“Shit,” she said and the little girl giggled.
At that moment the boy decided to run across the sidewalk, headed for the street.
“Aldous!” the hippie mama yelled, reaching out unsuccess-fully for the boy.
I bent down on reflex, scooping the child up in my arms as I had done hundreds of times with Feather when she was smaller, and with Jesus before that.
“Thank you, mister. Thank you,” the mother was saying. She had lifted her bulk from the lawyer’s folding chair and was now taking the grinning boy from my arms. I could see in his face that he wasn’t what other Texans would call a white child.
The woman smiled at me and patted my forearm.
“Thank you,” she said again.
Her looking into my eyes with such deep gratitude was to be the defining moment in my hippie experience. Her gaze held no fear or condescension, even though her accent meant that she had to have been raised among a people who held themselves apart from mine. She didn’t want to give me a tip but only to touch me.
I knew that if I had been twenty years younger, I would have been a hippie too.
8 6
C i n n a m o n K i s s
“May I help you?” a woman’s voice asked.
She was of medium height with a more or less normal frame, but somewhere in the mix there must have been a Teutonic Valkyrie because she had the figure of a Norse fertility goddess.
Her eyes were a deep ocean blue and though her face was not particularly attractive there was something otherworldly about it.
As far as clothes were concerned she was conservatively dressed in a cranberry dress that went down below her knees and wore a cream-colored woolen jacket over that. There was a silver strand around her neck from which hung a largish pearl with a dark nacre hue. Her glasses were framed in white.
All in all she was a Poindexter built like Jayne Mansfield.
“Hi. My name is Ezekiel P. Rawlins.” I held out a hand.
A big grin came across her stern face but somehow the mirth didn’t make it to her eyes. She shook my hand.
“How can I help you?”
“I’m a private detective from down in L.A.,” I said. “I’ve been hired to find a woman named Philomena Cargill . . . by her family.”
“Cinnamon,” the woman said without hesitation. “Axel’s friend.”
“That’s Axel Bowers?”
“Yes. He’s my partner here.”
She looked around the storefront. I did too.
“Not a very lucrative business,” I speculated.
The woman laughed. It was a real laugh.
“That depends on what you see as profit, Mr. Rawlins. Axel and I are committed to helping the poor people of this society get a fair shake from the legal system.”
“You’re both lawyers?”
“Yes,” she said. “I got my degree from UCLA and Axel got his across the Bay in Berkeley. I worked for the state for a while but 8 7
W a lt e r M o s l e y
I didn’t feel very good about that. When Axel asked me to join him I jumped at the chance.”
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Oh. Excuse my manners. My name is Cynthia Aubec.”
“French?”
“I was born in Canada,” she said. “Montreal.”
“Have you seen your partner lately?” I asked.
“Come on in,” she replied.
She turned to go through another canvas flap, this one standing as a door to the back room of the defunct grocery.
There were two desks at opposite ends of the long room we entered. It was gloomy in there, and the floors had sawdust on them as if it were still a vegetable stand.
“We keep sawdust on the floor because the garage next door sometimes uses too much water and it seeps under the wall on our floor,” she said, noticing my inspection.
“I see.”
“Have a seat.”
She switched on a desk lamp and I was gone from the hippie world of Haight Street. I wasn’t in modern America at all. Cynthia Aubec, who was French Canadian but had no accent, lived earlier in the century, walking on sawdust and working for the poor.