Love and Haight (working title)

The Avalon Ballroom 1966

Friday.  I looked down at the pile of clothes on my bed.  What to wear?  I held up a pair of dark green corduroy Levis I hadn’t worn yet.  They were the best ones I owned.  I lifted out a silk and lace bedjacket I scored at my favorite thrift store in Long Beach and hunted around for a pair of clean sox.  Grateful for my mother’s generosity, I zipped up the knee high Italian leather boots she bought me for my birthday and threw on my suede jacket, a graduation gift.  At the last minute I hung a couple of strands of beads from Oaxaca around my neck. My gold hoops peeked out from my hair, which I brushed out and left loose.  I nodded my head, smiling at the reflection of a girl with a purpose.

It took two bus transfers to get downtown to the Avalon Ballroom.  I followed Jeffrey, listening carefully as he explained where we were going.  “The Avalon is in Polk Gulch on Sutter Street.  It was a dance hall in during World War II but it’s been empty for a few years.  That’s why Chet got it so cheap.”

Down a side street, wide stairs led up to tall, carved double doors.  At a small window, Jeffrey stopped and leaned in to talk to someone.  He came over to me and pushed the doors open.  Plush red carpeting spread across the lobby, stopping at the tall arched openings to the dance floor.  Peering through one, I saw an elevated proscenium style stage against the far wall, flanked by deep red velvet curtains.  It was very elegant.

“I met Chet Helms when he came out from Texas with his brothers.  They had a commune down at 1090 Page Street and some of us used to hang out and listen to the bands in the basement.  After the Trips Festivals, he decided to rent this hall and hold dances.”

As we walked across the dance floor Jeffrey turned to me and said, “I have to go backstage and talk to Chet.  If you can’t find me later, do you think you can find your way back to the Haight?

“Oh, yeah, sure, it’s cool.  Don’t worry about me.”

“Cool.  If you get confused, just ask someone and they’ll tell you which bus to take.”

Jeffrey walked to the edge of the stage and up a short stairway.  As he disappeared behind the curtains I mumbled, “Bummer,” and then looked around to make sure no one heard me.  I could get back to Oak Street.  I’d just follow everyone else, but that wasn’t the point. 

There was a flurry of activity on the stage as the first band, Quicksilver Messenger Service, took up their instruments.  Suddenly music blasted out from the speakers and people crowded onto the dance floor.  The lead guitar player, tall and impossibly thin with hair to his waist, stepped up to the microphone.  John Cipollina’s voice filled the auditorium and I moved to the music along with everyone else.  Soon it was a sea of flailing arms and whirling colors.  Before we left the Haight, Super had put a little tab of acid on my tongue whispering, “New batch, Babe.”  Stanley Owsley, the mad chemist, made the purest most powerful acid on the street.  His name was synonymous with quality.  Now I felt waves of energy moving up and down and all around me as the bodies on the dance floor melted into one.  The band played Mona and the floor pulsed, breathing with the unified movement of hundreds of stomping feet.  Mona went on forever in wave after wave of guitar breaks, the band in a contact high that culminated in a wild drum solo and finally resolved into the first, simple opening bars.  I could dance all night.

As Quicksilver left the stage at the end of their set, several people in black gathered in the center and began silent, measured, simultaneous movement, slowly turning clockwise on themselves, swaying from side to side.  I was mesmerized.  From behind me, over my shoulder, someone whispered in my ear, “It’s called Tai Chi.  It’s an ancient form of meditation and the movements all have names.  That’s Grasp the Sparrow’s Tail, and now they are doing White Crane Spreads It’s Wings.”  All of the dancers lifted their arms in unison and I saw them turn into wings and flow into the next movement.  Daisy’s kiss brushed my cheek in a whisper sigh as she slipped into the sea of people behind me.

The Grateful Dead took the stage.  They tuned for a long time before I realized they were actually playing something.  As the crowd recognized the tune, they moved as one.  My hair spun around my face, blocking out my vision and as I waved my hands above my head, cosmic light trails sped off my fingertips.  Yup, I was stoned again. 

I danced through another round of music and then left the floor for the lobby.  As I climbed the stairs to the balcony that ran across the back of the auditorium, the sound from the floor below faded.  At the concession stand I recognized the people who owned the deli on Haight Street.  I wasn’t really hungry, but I bought some halvah, which set off fireworks of images as the grainy combination of flavors rolled around my mouth.  As I stared at the sticky confection in my hand, I collided with a troll-like man in coveralls coming out of the door across the hall. 

“Do you want to work on the light show?”

“Me?”

The swarthy little man opened the door to a dark room.  Inside the cave, overhead light projectors lined a long table.  Shallow bowls beneath each projector held water on which a film of oil undulated.  Next to the bowls an array of squeeze bottles filled with pigments waited.  The troll picked up a dish and squirted some food coloring into it, and moved it around in the shallow water.

“Just move it around like this.”

I handed him the halvah, wiping my hand on my pants.

“Look!”  He pointed out the window of the light booth. 

“Freaky!”  I lifted the dish and carefully put it back down, reaching for more color.

A giant movie screen hung behind the musicians on the stage.  The colored blobs from the trays in front of me grew and shrunk in time to the music as our movements were projected on the screen.  A clicking whir came from my left as a projector reeled off an old black and white movie.  When the song was over, I paused for a moment, transfixed by the multitude of colors and lights, the heaving bodies on the floor below.  I slipped outside into the corridor, breathless from the acid, the music and the light show.

My body was saturated with acid.  I leaned against the wall, reduced to a non-verbal, throbbing organism, aware of my breathing, aware of everything.  I felt a surge of panic.  To my right the light from a small room beckoned me.  Peering around the corner, I saw two comfy looking overstuffed chairs.  In front of me stood a miniature stage.  The purplish glow of black light seeped out as the curtains opened to reveal an Egyptian dancer moving across the stage.  I sunk into a chair.  As the dancer exited, Scheherazade sat down to tell her tales to a magnificent prince with a turban topped by a perfectly proportioned peacock feather.  Aladdin sat at the opposite side of the stage, rubbing a tiny golden lamp, and in a flash of light, a genie appeared.  

As a voice spun a story from the Arabian Nights, the marionettes pranced across the stage, turning their faces to address me when they spoke. 

When the show was done the puppeteer came out from behind his stage and sat down next to me.  His curly black hair and sparkling eyes were as mysterious and exotic as his puppet show.

“I’m Dimitri.  Is this your first time here?” 

As he spoke, his hands moved with dazzling speed through a series of yo-yo tricks.  I stared at the ball in his hands.  When I looked up, he said, “I was the yo-yo champion of Chicago for two years in a row.”

He was familiar, funny and attractive.  Mischief wriggled all over his short muscular body.  He laid a hand on my arm.

 “If you wait for me to finish, I’ll drive you home?” 

I settled back into the cozy loge seat and watched his last show.  People wandered in and out, but few stayed for very long.  When he finally packed away his puppets, I followed him to his car.