Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
friendly and tolerant and more or less stoned with an open kitchen and brown rice on the
stove and coffee on, and if you could make a contribution, all the better.
I got warned to look both ways before crossing the street—any street. I sensed an early
and rare opportunity to apply my degree and got further warned against stop signs and traffic
lights appearing to manage traffic. Do not trust stop signs or traffic lights. The neighborhood
had discovered reds, not commies but downers—Seconal—rendering many people numb or
half asleep or dead, and some of those people were still driving cars. This development un-
dermined my faith that marijuana and LSD would be our platform of redemption. Downers
seemed wrong by sheer logic. How could you get high if you were down? That was tough to
figure, considering how many people smoked dope with their downers.
Still, anybody could see that it took a place like San Francisco for everything to actually
be everything, with brotherhood and sisterhood and an entire generation standing against a
war so blatantly corrupt. Widespread consensus sustained the values and commitment of the
times across the land—the Bay Area land. The spirit was naïve and simple and deadly accur-
ate. Walk out to the road and stick your thumb out. Walk into the kitchen and pour another
cup of coffee to perk up for another joint. Walk outside with a paper cup and ask a brother or
sister for some spare change.
It worked, kind of, but broke down substantially with the Tate-La Bianca murders in Los
Angeles. The murderers looked, spoke and acted like hippies; hardly the first whack job hip-
pies with delusional psychosis, but their grisly behavior threatened to end the love all around
us on a single night. It was official: we were not all brothers and sisters, and the times had be-
gun to change back around.
The only positive aspect of that cultural milestone was the absence of 24/7 news channels,
cell phones and the Internet. It was big news on all three networks for a half hour a day,
without horrific images dividing rampantly as aberrant cells and metastasizing through the
system.
Most streets in Berkeley were under construction that summer, torn up with deep ditches
for one amazing convenience or another. Dirt and rubble got piled alongside every ditch and
diverted pedestrian traffic to spaces available against building walls or weaving around parked
cars or into traffic. Traffic sounds and jackhammers allowed murmurs here and there, “Spare
change.”
“Help a brother out.”
“Got twenty-seven cents?”
“Speed. Acid. Weed.”
“Spare change?”
It was crowded, and the love all around us was hot and tired and pissed of to the verge of
violence but not like the jungle war.
