“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
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
