Sort of how I got there

We were the Baby Boomers, the first Atomic Age children.  We learned to hide under desks, to duck and cover.  I lived through the Cold War with fear in my heart that there would be no fallout shelter for me.  My mother was young, different.  I was the daughter of a divorced woman, definitely not cool in the 1950s.  I was cast adrift early, seemingly without the moorings of the normal families around me. I bidded my time.  I held my breath and hoped to be included in someone's circle of play.  I dreamed of the Bomb. There was hardly a time in my life when there was no war, although not real wars like WWII.

As children, we were herded and channeled through school...lunch lines, lines for class, lines for immunizations.  We dressed alike and talked alike.  When TV became a household fact, we all watched the same programs. Ozzie and Harriet, Leave It To Beaver, and Father Knows Best were our models for right living. Girls went to college to find a rich husband, a boy with a future.  Girls became perfect companions and accomplished homemakers.  If we questioned this, someone reminded us of our place, or told us that we would grow out of it. Sooner or later we would settle down.

On the other hand, we were spoiled and pampered and given things our parents never dreamed of having.  Our lives were materially comfortable with the promise of better things in the future, as long as we didn’t ask too many questions or rock the boat.  And some of us wanted more, something else. 

It wasn’t long before the rips in the curtain became larger. The Civil Rights movement got press on TV.  Beatniks writing poetry became the butt of sitcom jokes, but oh how interesting those people looked.   There were vague references to a war and the draft.   Then we picked up copies of On the Road, Catch 22 and science fiction paperbacks with lurid covers, passed surreptitiously from hand to hand, often underlined with margin notes to make sure we got the good parts. There was folk music and art and jazz and none of it was part of our parents’ world.  Some of us slipped away on the weekends to very different lives.

Via an older boyfriend who played tenor sax and wore a trench coat, I hung out in the jazz clubs of LA and started smoking pot.  He also told me about taking LSD, and warned me that it was very powerful, that he saw walls move.  Rather than run away, I couldn’t wait to try it.  Then came my escape, 18 years old, hitchhiking up the highway to San Frnacisco.  It didn’t take long before I was lost in the cosmic ozone.  The Haight was full of broken souls running from families that didn’t fit them, looking for a better home.

We learned new ways to be together in the Haight.  We got sick together and got high together, and had fun together.  We discovered things at the same time, as if we were taping into a giant over-mind;  group consciousness.  I had nothing but spare time so I read voraciously; Gestalt, Jung, eastern mysticism, poetry, the Beats. Winnie the Pooh took on a whole new meaning.

The legalization of the pill in 1960 meant women could have sex without the fear of pregnancy.  For the first time we took responsibility for our own bodies and our own sexuality.  We stopped being victims, no longer relegated to the chairs by the wall, waiting to be asked.  We experimented with many types of love; women for women and men for men, group love, nothing was forbidden.  We changed partners frequently and tossed around phrases like open relationship, group marriage, non-attachment.  In that tiny microcosm of time, we experienced entire relationships in a few days.  We lived every day as if it was our last.  Time was suspended.  Food and shelter only distracted us from the important stuff, the real stuff, the street, the intrigue.  It was enough just to be; just to be on the street, in some funky commune, dancing our crazy day-glo asses off, caught in the music, the wild and rocking music.

The streets of the Haight abounded with characters, little magnets that attracted and repelled. We moved quickly from person to person, because it was okay to change your name, your past, your story.  The pain and joy and sorrow of connecting and parting happened daily.  Those feelings were so real and so intense that they still call to me.  I still hunger for that power, the recognition of kinship and feelings of rapport.  This was Family.  To accept a person as someone you have known for years because you have, but not for these years...these waking years...but from previous incarnations because reincarnation was real.  How else could we explain it?  We tested our boundaries, our limits, physical and emotional.  How much can a body endure and still carry its spirit through the night?  For many of us the answer was not much.

No matter how much LSD I took, my feet were set firmly on this path way before I took my first puff of pot or my first psychedelic adventure.  I saw these experiences as part of a great spiritual journey.  I wanted more from drugs than escape.  I was not escaping from something, but rather to something else, to something more.  I sought to enhance the ordinary and suffuse it with divine enlightenment.  I longed for grand revelations and grander journeys.  I wanted them to be magnificent, profound!  I believed that the endeavor to become enlightened was the only worthwhile pursuit in life.  It transcended everything in importance and I believed that everyone in the Haight was on the same spiritual odyssey.  I was wrong.  Many passed through that time and place untouched.  Many of my acquaintances became the people I despised and embraced the things I sought to change.  I sought a deeper meaning, but I was young and insecure and thought the people around me had it all figured out.  They were smarter, quicker, and more enlightened than me, they had all the answers when really they had none and weren’t seeking any.  Acid was a game for them, a fun trip.  They were just as fucked up, just as confused as me, but they didn’t care.  And while I had my moments of soaring delight, I had a fair share of the Inferno.  Where to sleep, what to eat, what to do?  Eating food wasn't the issue, you know, eating life was much more important.  I learned to bite off more than I could chew, to wash it down with cheap wine, wipe the excess off my chin and toddle on my way.