By now I have an unofficial taboo contact with the San Francisco Police Department. What happens is that this cop and I meet in various late-movie ways, like I happen to be sitting in the bleachers at a baseball game and he happens to sit down next to me, and we exchange guarded generalities. No information actually passes between us, but after a while we get to kind of like each other.
“The kids aren’t too bright,” he is telling me on this particular day. “They’ll tell you they can always spot an undercover, they’ll tell you about ‘the kind of car he drives. ’ They aren’t talking about undercovers, they’re talking about plainclothesmen who just happen to drive unmarked cars, like I do. They can’t tell an undercover. An undercover doesn’t drive some black Ford with a two-way radio.”
He tells me about an undercover who was taken out of the District because he was believed to be overexposed, too familiar. He was transferred to the narcotics squad, and by error was sent immediately back into the District as a narcotics undercover.
The cop plays with his keys. “You want to know how smart these kids are?” he says finally. “The first week, this guy makes forty-three cases.”
The Jook Savages are supposed to be having a May Day party in Larkspur and I go by the Warehouse and Don and Sue Ann think it would be nice to drive over there because Sue Ann’s three-year-old, Michael, hasn’t been out lately. The air is soft and there is a sunset haze around the Golden Gate and Don asks Sue Ann how many flavors she can detect in a single grain of rice and Sue Ann tells Don maybe she better learn to cook yang, maybe they are all too yin at the Warehouse, and I try to teach Michael “Frere Jacques.”We each have our own trip and it is a nice drive. Which is just as well because there is nobody at all at the Jook Savages’ place, not even the Jook Savages. When we get back Sue Ann decides to cook up a lot of apples they have around the Warehouse and Don starts working with his light show and I go down to see Max for a minute. “Out of sight,” Max says about the Larkspur caper. “Somebody thinks it would be groovy to turn on five hundred people the first day in May, and it would be, but then they turn on the last day in April instead, so it doesn’t happen. If it happens, it happens. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t. Who cares. Nobody cares.”
Some kid with braces on his teeth is playing his guitar and boasting that he got the last of the STP from Mr. Q himself and somebody else is talking about how five grams of acid will be liberated within the next month and you can see that nothing much is happening this afternoon around the San Francisco Oracle office. A boy sits at a drawing board drawing the infinitesimal figures that people do on speed, and the kid with the braces watches him.” I’m gonna shoot my wo — man” he sings softly. “She been with a — noth — er man!’ Someone works out the numerology of my name and the name of the photographer I’m with. The photographers is all wliite and the sea (“If I were to make you some beads, see, I’d do it mainly in white,” he is told), but mine has a double death symbol. The afternoon does not seem to be getting anywhere, so it is suggested that we go over to Japantown and find somebody named Sandy who will take us to the Zen temple.
Four boys and one middle-aged man are sitting on a grass mat at Sandy s place, sipping anise tea and watching Sandy read Laura Huxley’s You Are Not the Target.
We sit down and have some anise tea. “Meditation turns us on,” Sandy says. He has a shaved head and the kind of cherubic face usually seen in newspaper photographs of mass murderers. The middle-aged man, whose name is George, is making me uneasy because he is in a trance next to me and stares at me without seeing me.
I feel that my mind is going — George is dead, or we all are— when the telephone rings.
“It’s for George,” Sandy says.
“George, te/ephone.”
“George!’
Somebody waves his hand in front of George and George finally gets up, bows, and moves toward the door on the balls of his feet.
“I think I’ll take George’s tea,” somebody says. “George — are you coming back?”
George stops at the door and stares at each of us in turn. “In a moment,” he snaps.
Do you know who is the first eternal spaceman of this universe?
The first to send his wild wild vibrations
To all those cosmic superstations?
For the song he always shouts
Sends the planets flipping out…
But I’ll tell you before you think me loony
That I’m talking about Narada Muni…
Singing
HARE KRISHNA HARE KRISHNA
KRISHNA KRISHNA HARE HARE
HARE RAMA HARE RAMA
RAMA RAMA HARE HARE
is a Krishna song. Words by
Howard Wheeler and music by
Michael Grant.
Maybe the trip is not in Zen but in Krishna, so I pay a visit to Michael Grant, the Swami A. C. Bhaktivedanta’s leading disciple in San Francisco. Michael Grant is at home with his brother-in-law and his wife, a pretty girl wearing a cashmere pullover, a jumper, and a red caste mark on her forehead.
“I’ve been associated with the Swami since about last July,” Michael says. “See, the Swami came here from India and he was at this ashram in upstate New York and he just kept to himself and chanted a lot. For a couple of months. Pretty soon I helped him get his storefront in New York. Now it’s an international movement, which we spread by teaching this chant.” Michael is fingering his red wooden beads and I notice that I am the only person in the room with shoes on. “It’s catching on like wildfire.”
“If everybody chanted,” the brother-in-law says, “there wouldn’t be any problem with the police or anybody.”
“Ginsberg calls the chant ecstasy, but the Swami says that’s not exactly it.” Michael walks across the room and straightens a picture of Krishna as a baby. “Too bad you can’t meet the Swami,” he adds. “The Swami’s in New York now.”
“Ecstasy’s not the right word at all,” says the brother-in-law, who has been thinking about it. “It makes you think of some…mundane ecstasy.”
The next day I drop by Max and Sharon’s, and find them in bed smoking a little morning hash. Sharon once advised me that half a joint even of grass would make getting up in the morning a beautiful thing. I ask Max how Krishna strikes him.
“You can get a high on a mantra,” he says. “But I’m holy on acid.”
Max passes the joint to Sharon and leans back. “Too bad you couldn’t meet the Swami,” he says. “The Swami was the turn-on.”
Anybody who thinks this is all about drugs has his head in a bag. It’s a social movement, quintessential romantic, the kind that recurs in times of real social crisis. The themes are always the same. A return to innocence. The invocation of an earlier authority and control. The mysteries of the blood. An itch for the transcendental, for purification. Right there you’ve got the ways that romanticism historically ends up in trouble, lends itself to authoritarianism. When the direction appears. How long do you think it’ll take for that to happen? is a question a San Francisco psychiatrist asked me.