“We have finally received clearance from the Chief per your request,” the sergeant says, “and that is taboo.”
I wonder why it is taboo to talk to Officer Gerrans. Officer Gerrans is involved in court cases coming to trial. I wonder why it is taboo to talk to Chief Cahill. The Chief has pressing police business. I wonder if I can talk to anyone at all in the Police Department. “No,” the sergeant says, “not at the particular moment.” Which was my last official contact with the San Francisco Police Department.
Norris and I are standing around the Panhandle and Norris is telling me how it is all set up for a friend to take me to Big Sur. I say what I really want to do is spend a few days with Norris and his wife and the rest of the people in their house. Norris says it would be a lot easier if I’d take some acid. I say I’m unstable. Norris says all right, anyway, grass, and he squeezes my hand.
One day Norris asks how old I am. I tell him I am thirty-two. It takes a few minutes, but Norris rises to it. “Don’t worry” he says at last. “There’s old hippies too.”
It is a pretty nice evening and nothing much happening and Max brings his old lady, Sharon, over to the Warehouse. The Warehouse, which is where Don and a floating number of other people live, is not actually a warehouse but the garage of a condemned hotel. The Warehouse was conceived as total theater, a continual happening, and I always feel good there. What happened ten minutes ago or what is going to happen a half hour from now tends to fade from mind in the Warehouse. Somebody is usually doing something interesting, like working on a light show, and there are a lot of interesting things around, hke an old Chevrolet touring car which is used as a bed and a vast American flag fluttering up in the shadows and an overstuffed chair suspended Hke a swing from the rafters, the point of that being that it gives you a sensory-deprivation high.
One reason I particularly like the Warehouse is that a child named Michael is staying there now. Michael’s mother, Sue Ann, is a sweet wan girl who is always in the kitchen cooking seaweed or baking macrobiotic bread while Michael amuses himself with joss sticks or an old tambourine or a rocking horse with the paint worn off. The first time I ever saw Michael was on that rocking horse, a very blond and pale and dirty child on a rocking horse with no paint. A blue theatrical spotlight was the only light in the Warehouse that afternoon, and there was Michael in it, crooning softly to the wooden horse. Michael is three years old. He is a bright child but does not yet talk.
This particular night Michael is trying to light his joss sticks and there are the usual number of people floating through and they all drift into Dons room and sit on the bed and pass joints. Sharon is very excited when she arrives. “Don,” she cries, breathless. “We got some STP today.” At this time STP is a pretty big deal, remember; nobody yet knew what it was and it was relatively, although just relatively, hard to come by. Sharon is blond and scrubbed and probably seventeen, but Max is a little vague about that since his court case comes up in a month or so and he doesn’t need statutory rape on top of it. Sharon’s parents were living apart when last she saw them. She does not miss school or anything much about her past, except her younger brother. “I want to turn him on,” she confided one day. “He’s fourteen now, that’s the perfect age. I know where he goes to high school and someday I’ll just go get him.”
Time passes and I lose the thread and when I pick it up again Max seems to be talking about what a beautiful thing it is the way Sharon washes dishes.
“Well it is beautiful,” Sharon says. “Everything is. I mean you watch that blue detergent blob run on the plate, watch the grease cut — well, it can be a real trip.”
Pretty soon now, maybe next month, maybe later, Max and Sharon plan to leave for Africa and India, where they can live off the land. “I got this little trust fund, see,” Max says, “which is useful in that it tells cops and border patrols I’m O. K., but living off the land is the thing. You can get your high and get your dope in the city, O. K., but we gotta get out somewhere and live organically.”
“Roots and things,” Sharon says, lighting another joss stick for Michael. Michael’s mother is still in the kitchen cooking seaweed. “You can eat them.”
Maybe eleven o’clock, we move from the Warehouse to the place where Max and Sharon live with a couple named Tom and Barbara. Sharon is pleased to get home (“I hope you got some hash joints fixed in the kitchen,” she says to Barbara by way of greeting) and everybody is pleased to show off the apartment, which has a lot of flowers and candles and paisleys. Max and Sharon and Tom and Barbara get pretty high on hash, and everyone dances a little and we do some liquid projections and set up a strobe and take turns getting a high on that. Quite late, somebody called Steve comes in with a pretty, dark girl. They have been to a meeting of people who practice a Western yoga, but they do not seem to want to talk about that. They He on the floor awhile, and then Steve stands up.
“Max,” he says, “I want to say one thing.”
“It’s your trip.” Max is edgy.
“I found love on acid. But I lost it. And now I’m finding it again. With nothing but grass.”
Max mutters that heaven and hell are both in one’s karma.
“That’s what bugs me about psychedelic art,” Steve says.
“What about psychedelic art,” Max says. ^I haven’t seen much psychedelic art.”
Max is lying on a bed with Sharon, and Steve leans down to him. “Groove, baby,” he says. “You’re a groove.”
Steve sits down then and tells me about one summer when he was at a school of design in Rhode Island and took thirty trips, the last ones all bad. I ask why they were bad. “I could tell you it was my neuroses,” he says, “but fuck that.”
A few days later I drop by to see Steve in his apartment. He paces nervously around the room he uses as a studio and shows me some paintings. We do not seem to be getting to the point.
“Maybe you noticed something going on at Max’s,” he says abruptly.
It seems that the girl he brought, the dark pretty one, had once been Max’s girl. She had followed him to Tangier and now to San Francisco. But Max has Sharon. “So she’s kind of staying around here,” Steve says.
Steve is troubled by a lot of things. He is twenty-three, was raised in Virginia, and has the idea that California is the beginning of the end. “I feel it’s insane,” he says, and his voice drops. “This chick tells me there’s no meaning to life but it doesn’t matter, we’ll just flow right out. There’ve been times I felt like packing up and taking off for the East Coast again, at least there I had a target. At least there you expect that it’s going to happen!’ He lights a cigarette for me and his hands shake. “Here you know it’s not going to.”
I ask what it is that is supposed to happen.
“I don’t know,” he says. “Something. Anything.”
Arthur Lisch is on the telephone in his kitchen, trying to sell VISTA a program for the District. “We already got an emergency,” he says into the telephone, meanwhile trying to disentangle his daughter, age one and a half, from the cord. “We don’t get help here, nobody can guarantee what’s going to happen. We’ve got people sleeping in the streets here. We’ve got people starving to death.” He pauses.”All right,” he says then, and his voice rises.”So they’re doing it by choice. So what.”
By the time he hangs up he has limned what strikes me as a pretty Dickensian picture of life on the edge of Golden Gate Park, but then this is my first exposure to Arthur Lisch’s “riot-on-the-Street-unless” pitch. Arthur Lisch is a kind of leader of the Diggers, who, in the official District mythology, are supposed to be a group of anonymous good guys with no thought in their collective head but to lend a helping hand. The official District mythology also has it that the Diggers have no “leaders,” but nonetheless Arthur Lisch is one. Arthur Lisch is also a paid worker for the American Friends’ Service Committee and he lives with his wife, Jane, and their two small children in a railroad flat, which on this particular day lacks organization. For one thing the telephone keeps ringing. Arthur promises to attend a hearing at city hall. Arthur promises to “send Edward, he’s O. K.”Arthur promises to get a good group, maybe the Loading Zone, to play free for a Jewish benefit. For a second thing the baby is crying, and she does not stop until Jane Lisch appears with a jar of Gerber’s Junior Chicken Noodle Dinner. Another confusing element is somebody named Bob, who just sits in the living room and looks at his toes. First he looks at the toes on one foot, then at the toes on the other. I make several attempts to include Bob in the conversation before I realize he is on a bad trip. Moreover, there are two people hacking up what looks like a side of beef on the kitchen floor, the idea being that when it gets hacked up, Jane Lisch can cook it for the daily Digger feed in the Park.