Not So Good a Gay Man

by Frank M. Robinson

  I ran into a reporter for Look and asked him what he thought.

  “It’s a lot of bullshit, man, it’s just a lot of bullshit.”

  I asked him how many people he thought would be there and he shrugged and said, “Maybe ten thousand—and I’m being generous.”

  Final estimates were about thirty-five thousand.

  They were starting to make speeches now and I figured that would go on for a while, so I started to check what would be waiting for people along the line of march. I squeezed up to the head of the crowd and noted that the Highway Patrol was closing off the side streets.

  I couldn’t put my finger on it at first, but there was the faint air of carnival in the air. The photographer and I ran up the side streets to Shattuck and University to see what was up.

  The California Highway Patrol was in single file in front of the university grounds. The National Guard was at the intersection, waiting. The marchers were still a few blocks away, but one guy was already setting up a lemonade stand.

  Not much hostility—just the CHP and the National Guard and Berkeley cops waiting for the unexpected. Then we were on Telegraph and hurrying up the street to the original People’s Park. We couldn’t go any farther.

  Barbed wire on the residential streets of a quiet American city! And behind the wire the unsmiling faces of more National Guard. What struck me was that the guardsmen were not big men but kids, like most of the marchers.

  We went down a side street to get a good view of People’s Park No. 1. Not much to see—some playground equipment, dying plants, tents for the guardsmen. It wasn’t much of a park, really, and I felt surprised. This was what the fuss was all about? And James Rector dead and Alan Blanchard sightless. Behind my disbelief was a growing horror.

  The rest of the afternoon was an anticlimax. The marchers came up and circled the park, and the atmosphere of carnival deepened. A few of the marchers chopped holes in the asphalt street and planted some small trees and some assholes showed their hippie patriotism by sitting in the middle of the street.

  The barbed wire was soon decorated with flowers and a few of the girls yoo-hooed at the Guard and stuffed flowers down the muzzles of their rifles. Some of the braver ones went topless and the guardsmen immediately snapped to an alert. The cops on the side streets lounged against their cars, bored, and some old ladies served iced tea to the kids and everybody had a fine time.

  What a lovely way to fight a war!

  That night there was a party in People’s Park No. 2. There was a lot of pot, some of the musically inclined were beating bongo drums, and gallons of Red Mountain were passed around. A lot of people were shouting “Jesus, we won!” There must have been more than thirty-five thousand people there.

  Some of the chicks were balling strangers in the tents, and many of the guardsmen were thanking God for the assignment.

  People’s Park was thrown together without much thought, and at least one ecologist said that the plants would never have grown. “It was a grand gesture designed to fail.” Mayor Johnson was horrified to discover that lots of pot had been planted, and I thought that confrontation would have come sooner or later. The cops would eventually have had to bust the park, and once again it would have been the cops against the kids.

  I’ve got nothing good to say about Reagan (governor at the time) or the asshole who ordered the gassing of Sproul Plaza or the sheriff who was scared witless and ordered one of his men to murder.

  The thing that bugged me all day about the People’s Park march in Berkeley was that it was great theater.

  And not much else.

  But it did predict the shape of things to come.

  In May 1970 nervous members of the National Guard fired on a group of students at Kent State, Ohio, who were protesting the Vietnam War. They killed four and wounded nine.

  The student strikes that followed resulted in hundreds of universities and colleges closing in protest.

  The reasons for the protests against the Vietnam War (and those that were to follow) were—in my opinion—simple:

  The government had failed to sell its various wars to the people they expected to fight them.

  XVII

  I HAD SPENT almost a year in the Haight, far longer than I had expected, and I was running out of money. In the early days, I had dealt—once. Pressured by a friend in Chicago, I scored two kilos of pot, wrapped them carefully in tinfoil, and shipped them to Chicago in a Random House dictionary box (the box for the unabridged dictionary), giving the return address as the English Department at San Francisco State.

  The box never made it to Chicago. I suspected the hippies in the post office who were more familiar with drug shipments than any pot-sniffing dog. Or, possibly, the box was returned to S.F. State and some astonished (and delighted) students in the English Department opened it.

  Much to my surprise, the man who would come to my rescue moneywise was Hamling. Stanley Fleishman, his lawyer (and the lawyer for most of the porn publishers in California), wanted to put out a digest-size magazine titled Censorship Today. It would be a ninety-page summary of the censorship activities in the United States and around the world. The magazine was intended for librarians in the United States.

  Hamling suggested me as a cheap one-man staff. I edited the copy, pasted up the pages, inserted photographs and captions, and sent the results to a printer in Southern California, who printed three or four thousand copies and sent them to various librarians in the country.

  I flattered myself that the printers were glad to get something “decent” instead of the usual publications they handled, even if it was pro bono.

  The seventh issue was the last—and it was all my fault. I thought the librarians should see some of the crap that should be censored and reprinted a typical Tijuana cartoon. The circulation dropped to zero overnight. I should have checked with Stanley beforehand but hadn’t.

  My sincere apologies to the shade of Stanley Fleishman for killing the magazine of which he was justly proud.

  In an effort to become more a part of the community, I’d bought a fifteen-gallon iron cooking pot to make spaghetti. Once a week I’d buy a gallon of Red Mountain, make spaghetti, and invite the hungriest-looking hippies on the street. On Sundays I usually lugged the pot up to the free medical clinic and made spaghetti for the staff.

  Holidays were tough—the make-believe hippies were all home opening presents and eating turkey. (The weekend panhandlers usually came from good families, dressed in the appropriate rags, but you could tell who they were by their blank looks and the new shoes they wore.)

  This day was Thanksgiving, and the tourists were anyplace but in the Haight. There was nobody around but the poor and hungry street kids. Love would usually roast a turkey, but this Thanksgiving she was broke. She confided it to Norm Fitzgerald of F&S Distributing (the poster shop), who tapped the till for twenty bucks and ran down to the butcher shop for the biggest turkey they had.

  He didn’t bother to have it wrapped, but holding it by its legs ran back to the hamburger stand, gave it to Love, and told her to do her thing.

  The ovens in the back of the hamburger stand could handle a turkey, and pretty soon the street kids started to gather around. One of them went to the grocery store and liberated half a dozen cans of cranberry sauce, while others found stale bread and spices for the dressing. Love boiled up some rice as a side dish with turkey gravy. By five o’clock she was carving up turkey until her arms were ready to drop. Everybody showed up, both blacks and whites. A cop from Park Station came over to check up on the whooping and hollering and assured Love she was golden for the day.

  There was pathos on the street but also comedy. One spaced-out kid tried to hold up the Bank of America with a bag of dirty laundry he claimed was dynamite. He got six months but he and his girlfriend exchanged letters that were posted on the bulletin board at the Psych Shop and followed avidly by the street kids—they now had their own Romeo and Juliet.

  For most of the kids, life was
pretty grim. I put up one French-Canadian kid who was on a really bad trip. He considered himself a poet and wrote poetry all over the photographs and type in an issue of Time magazine. He could read the poems but nobody else could.

  He ended up in the bathtub with a pillow and blanket, staring at the ceiling.

  I asked him if it was okay if I turned off the light. He nodded “Yes,” and when I did, he sceamed.

  The Haight was still big news in the eyes of the media, and it was the rare Digger who wasn’t willing to talk about the philosophy underlying the community, though most of it had evaporated. The media would always talk about the prevalent dope business but seldom asked questions about the people doing it.

  LSD had lost much of its religious overtones but was readily available at parties and concerts, where tabs were frequently given away free. Pot was illegal, which meant it was the big-ticket item. Bad trips frequently resulted from acid—or what was passed off as acid. Pot was generally regarded as a safe drug.

  It was the first anniversary of the Haight, and the media swarmed around it like flies. One rumor had it that a reporter had balled a couple of kids before interviewing them. I didn’t know the truth of it, but I knew that of all the things that were important to the hippies, sex was usually at the bottom of the list.

  Money was at the top.

  The Haight-Ashbury was where the real fabric of American life was being unraveled, and many of the kids discovered too late that some of the threads of that fabric were stitched right through their bellies.

  There was a certain uneasiness about some of the new kids coming in. As one older hippie put it, “They never cry and they seldom laugh and if they’re bright, they’re witty and brilliant and cynical—and essentially empty.”

  Many of the kids came to San Francisco with no money and no plans for a place to stay—they were counting on everything to be free. It always had been so at home, and from what they had heard, it was the same here. They didn’t think the generosity of the original hippies was unusual at all. Even as they mouthed the standard thank-you—“Wow, man, thanks, you’re really beautiful!”—their eyes were curiously blank of gratitude.

  Rick was a thin, blond-haired kid whom I met on Hippie Hill. His father and mother had separated just before they put Rick in an outpatient psychiatric clinic. He was turned on to grass by the other kids in the clinic. “It was great, man—I could see the bag that I was in but I could also look at other people and see the bags that they were in.” It was dope that gave Rick confidence, dope that gave him what insight he had into other people, and dope that gave him status among his contemporaries.

  David looked like a runaway, one of the hundreds who came into the Haight with nothing because they figured everything was already there. I told him I was serving spaghetti that night and that he was welcome. He showed up early, complete with sleeping bag and suitcase, and asked to crash. He wasn’t a runaway, and he wasn’t the usual crasher—he had $400 in traveler’s checks and had been bumming his way across the country as a lark. His father was a bank executive, and David had thousands waiting for him at the other end of a phone call. He wasn’t interested in the hippie culture and only mildly interested in drugs. He had a tab of white lightning hidden in the end of a ballpoint pen and finally dropped it while in Golden Gate Park.

  It was a good “beauty trip,” but he doubted he would ever trip again. He had now “done” drugs—what else did the world have to offer? He was good-looking, and bright as far as attitude went to get along in the straight world.

  “I play a lot of games,” he said casually. “I’m good at playing games. I usually win them.”

  David and the original hippies would have had little to say to each other.

  Dick was from Oklahoma City, a quiet kid with thick glasses and a scraggly beard who was a natural attraction for highway cops. Hitchhiking to San Francisco had been a series of short hops and overnight stays in various small-town jails. He was from a good family, got along well with his classmates, but was remote from his father and hated his mother. Unlike David, Dick was not good at society’s games. For a handsome eighteen-year-old he hadn’t been successful with the girls. His first try was traumatic and he was properly outraged by it. “She was a lesbian and when it came right down to it, she didn’t like it at all!”

  Life since then had been futile attempts to recoup his lost pride and self-confidence.

  Harold had come to the Haight as a rebellion against his father—a wealthy, gun-collecting Bircher type. What Harold wanted was to prove that he was independent of his father’s money (at least until school started in the fall). He sold hippie newspapers and worked in the local hot dog stand. After a month Harold’s father ransomed him from the Haight by paying him $4 an hour to work in his uncle’s auto repair shop.

  Jimmy was a real pothead—a small, thin kid from Massachusetts, he had come to the Haight primarily for cheap dope. He had never tried smack or speed but was familiar with everything else in the Haight pharamacopoeia—acid, pot, mescaline, hashish—you name it, Jimmy had either smoked it or swallowed it. “I want to get high and stay there,” he said with a smile an ad agency would have paid a fortune for. He came from middle-class, intensely religious parents, and back east had been a capable apprentice machinist—but for him that had been strictly a drag. He was a master of the Haight teenybopper vocabulary—“Wow! Outtasight! Blow your mind! Groovy!” The Haight for him was not so much love but free dope on Hippie Hill. He could work through the better part of a lid in a day. He crashed at various pads until his welcome was thoroughly worn out. Money was a hang-up. Working was out of the question, and selling hippie newspapers was a bore. Dealing was the logical way of getting money, but Jimmy was very righteous about it. “I’ll never deal—it’s too much of a paranoid trip.” But later on he became a dealer—after burning a crippled shopkeeper for the money to buy his first kilo.

  Allen was hung up on drugs and philosophy and for him the Haight was a mystical magic trip except for brief spells of reality when he came down with clap.

  Peter, with the piercing eyes and wide cheekbones of a Native American, was a man for whom the Haight was also a trip, but on his last day there, sober and cool, said he was returning to New York because he had some lectures to give.

  One of the last crashers I let stay over was Mark. He wasn’t handsome—he was what my mother would have called “nice-looking.” What gave me pause was that he seemed a little slow. I had a spare sleeping bag and made him up a bed, then turned in, dead tired. It was all of an hour before he climbed into bed with me.

  The next morning I fed him breakfast, told him to take care of himself, and turned him loose on a world that would eat him up in nothing flat.

  I worried about him and told the story to Fat Maxey next time I ran into him at Garuda’s some days later. It was Maxey who suggested the obvious.

  I went down to the city jail the next morning and bailed Mark out. He had been languishing in the lockup for fifteen days and, oddly, seemed reluctant to leave. Once home, he told me what had happened—everybody else had been smoking pot in the open, so he did, too, only a new cop had spotted him.

  He had liked jail, he said. Everybody had been nice to him, they had taught him a lot. He grinned. He could hardly wait until bedtime to show me. I gave him a $10 bill and turned him out. The first time had been a mistake; there would be no second time. I hoped that some nice gay guy would let him crash, maybe let Mark stay until such time that he was smart enough to take care of himself.

  Which, I suspected, would be never.

  The crashers could usually take care of themselves; the runaways had a tougher time of it. They could go to Huckleberry’s for Runaways and get food and sound advice during the day, but they couldn’t crash there at night unless they had permission from their parents. So fourteen-year-old Skippy spent the days at Huckleberry’s and the nights wandering the streets.

  Stephen was fifteen, a gaunt kid who looked much older than he was and
who had run away to the Haight with no money and only the T-shirt and the pair of pants he was wearing. He slept in the back of a laundry until discovered by the owner and then crashed with me for a night. I impressed upon him the virtues of Huckleberry’s and convinced him he should go there and have them contact his folks and maybe help iron out their differences. He arrived at Huckleberry’s the next night just in time to walk into the arms of the police, who had chosen that particular night to bust the place.

  They were the raggle-taggle gypsies of the Children’s Crusade who had come to the Haight because the Haight promised dope, excitement, and an affectional society. What the straight world never really wanted to understand was that their kids who fled to the Haight went there for all three.

  Haight-Ashbury was not an all-white enclave of San Francisco—it hadn’t been for decades. A large number of blacks had been living there in peace and harmony with whites for years. With the largely white invasion, the balance was upset. The streets had been taken over by young strangers who had come from God knew where, rents were going up, familiar grocery stores and hardware stores had disappeared, and in their stead were stores whose signs didn’t make much sense.

  It was a cultural invasion, and they didn’t like it. As one young black spokesman said from the stage of the Straight Theater: “I represent the 70 percent of the Haight that’s black—we’re the cats you never see, the ones you never look at.”

  The blacks in the Haight were middle class—muni drivers, postmen, government workers, etc. Some of them had brought food to the hill and given it away to the white hippie kids. Others sat on their doorsteps and watched the hippies wandering by; they were as baffled as any middle-class whites watching the scene. Compared to their own recent struggles, what were the hippies bitching about? They had it made.

  There were fights and thefts, but then there were fights and thefts among the hippies themselves. Granted, it was still smart to watch yourself at night, but sometimes the violence was provoked. One time I was sitting on Hippie Hill and noticed a group of four blacks walking along the pathway below. They were being followed by a spaced-out kid intent on doing his bit for race relations.