Dark Side of the 60's Moon - Mike Marino (best novels to read in english .txt) 📗

from paradise, rich filled  vegetable stands, banks from the old world of Asia with secretive doors and wafts of foo young and young foo, noodles from the factory in the alley and of course, the kookie fortune cookie. There was also the obligatory Chinese laundry  which are as famous as the fabulous Chinese opium dens used to be in the Old West and the far-out East.

After a few hours we headed back to the small park where we overheard another pair of young lovers talking about a place they called the Haight. Scary sounding name, this Hate, but as we listened longer to the conversation we realized...this was the fabled El Dorado we had heard about.

We listened intently as the other couple were discussing their new apartment in this "Haight" area that they would be moving into and how cheap it was. I thought, maybe now we could get off the streets, stop crashing in the camper  and become landed gentry in our  own apartment. In 1966 the apartments were dirt cheap, $15 - 20 a week in the Haight for  a two roomer and I knew I  could make that and more in a day selling weed, or in a week panhandling.

The Haight held out her hand enticing us with art, culture, literature, music and yes, dope, and lots of it along with cheap living. They had poster shops, incense coming from just about every window, and a huge park where people gathered on weekends in small groups to play guitars, flutes, (those damn flutes again) and just enjoying an uncrowded alternative existence.

We quickly raced back to the camper so we could head to the Haight.  Before we did, I stopped at a small Chinatown shop and  bought Myrika a small necklace. It was a blue stone on a leather necklace, and it was simple and as beautiful as she was inside and out. It was a symbol of our new life together as the Sixties came alive...a time of psychedelic prophets, pseudo-peace (What was Vietnam, chopped liver?) and lust disguised behind a mask called love. Riding shotgun with Flower Power, was a heavily loaded weapon with buckshot pellets of gloom and doom. The revolution of the rucksack was already in rocking motion, fueled by "On the Road" and "Dharmabums", yet, this new generation of boomers were beginning to flower to power, fueled by the Kerouac Gospel set forth as ten commandments in Jack's books, looking for salvation in his words, and the key to paradise, Sal, but now these young disciples, sheep being led to a slaughter, were being kicked out of the temple by Jesus Jack.

We found directions to the neighborhood and the camper bus lumbered through the veins of the city  that had a scent and an air about it, no doubt about it, and we were drinking it in like  kids on a hot day downing in ice cold Kool-aid. Soon...we were there...and without knowing it entered the world beyond the looking glass, to lay our heads down on a surrealistic pillow.

We parked a block away from Haight St. and started to walk down the hill towards the main street below as it had traffic going in both directions and appeared to be the busiest street around the area.

Ashbury Street connected to Haight St.  as smooth a transition as  a needle going into a junkies arm at Haight. As they hit Haight and hung a west coastie left the panorama of the street unfolded before us.

Later on, within the year we  would see  "luminaries" on the street and meet some of them, but not all. John Lennon, Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Roger McGuinn, Eric Burdon, Ashleigh Brilliant, along with the local bands playing at the Fillmore and in the park. The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and Big Brother, Country Joe, Santana and others.

There was that curious colorful bus that only went “further” and the Diggers who fed and clothed the neighborhood absolutely free of charge, utopian usurpers to the crown in mime makeup. Hells Angels and Motorcycle Ritchies, coyotes named Peter, magic men, mad men, and mayhem. Runaways, speed freaks, LSD, mescaline, grass, lava lamps, patchouli incense, the Psychedelic Shoppe, Tracy Donuts, 1090 Page Street, the Panhandle, Golden Gate Park, Park Station Cop Shop, mellow yellow, purple hazed and double dazed days dazed in a daze. There was free food, a free store, a free clinic, free sex, free love, free crashpads, and freedom period. The Family Dog was man's best friend, and Bill was no graham cracker.

The park filled on Sunday's for music, bubbles, kites and drugs. Bare chested and bare breasted the young of the day were mere prey for vultures who would circle around on the periphery waiting to strike, but this was 1966.  The crowds hadn't arrived yet. It was an old neighborhood that had seen better days decades ago, but now, tawdry, old and in the way. The paint was peeling from the old Victorian homes, now apartments, like cheap lipstick and too much eye-liner on an old whore who smelt of too much perfume, the kind an old aunt wears when she comes for holidays. The buildings had many coats of paint on them, the sidewalks were cracked in places, and the stains of spilled pop or beer stained the concrete squares, a baptism of holy carbonated alcohol. Probably old chewing gum too, fossilized for posterity until discovered by archeo's and ologists in the future who can read the past with tea leaves in a Japanese cup in 7 stages.

The street wasn't yet crowded with wannabe's and neverwillbe's as it ultimately would be in '67. The pseudo-hip and neo-beats falling from the sky like broken shards of office windows from collapsing skyscrapers, impaling the street culture below and enveloping everything in a cloud of grey dust, smoke, bricks and mortar, steel and then, more glass.

In 1966, the Haight was more communal and quiet with art mostly, and dope, lots of both. Musicians practiced in hidden Victorian apartments, artists painted and mimes acted out on the street. It was life as theater and theater as life, lines blurred pleasantly and the senses weren't yet under siege as they would be the following summer. The summer of love....love hurts.




We were oblivious to all the politics swirling around us like a stew. The tumultuous times would soon catch up with us  albeit in different ways, but for now.... This was also the period that I began writing furiously in my daily journal, without realizing it I was documenting the times from my own personal perspective without even realizing it. Later it would culminate in my first book, "The Roadhead Chronicles" where the vivid realities would take the shape of words and the Woodstock Nation of peace and love would degenerate into bloody Altamont and peaceful protest would end with a hail of National Guard bullets at Kent State leaving a generation in shock. Vietnam would end, but with 50,000 young Americans dead, and soon the social involvement of the Sixties would end with the birth of the digital age and the assault of cable, video games, internet, and cell phones, and the death of effective social activism.

But...for now...there were more pressing problems...where to get some food to eat and where to sleep for the night. Chapter 15 - The Psychedelic Shop

 

 

 

Our first few days in the Haight were spent getting our bearings, but as for housing, we were lucky. We had the Camper. We’d park on a side street near the Panhandle Park so it was quiet at night, at least by Haight Ashbury standards.

The fog at night would roll in on cue across the Golden Gate in a shrouded parade of giants and dwarves leading a contingent of sideshow freaks in a sea of fluffy white, cotton candy from a Pacific coast big top circus waiting to envelope her children for the night, to hide the world they inhabited and to hide what they do in the dark from prying eyes.

In the first afternoon of our arrival, we walked into a poster shop, lured by the strains of strange far off the beaten path eastern music to sit among the sitars and Satyrs of the hip, inhaling giant Catholic lung full's of incense. Inside there stood a gentle bearded sage behind a retail counter, that could have been an altar in another time and world described by the scribe Pericles. The sage, we got to know, Jay Thelin, was surrounded by a Sistine ceiling and a Berlin wall of pulsating posters that glowed in the dark, adorned with colorful imagery of buffalos and buddhas.

A beaded curtain opened in the back to a blacklight lit room laden with lava lamps moving the mind along in a psychedelic flow, in harmony with  the mantra of Indian sitars raising the virgins to dance in melancholia as twing twang emerged from a stylus on a vinyl race track located on an old record player. Inside the room behind the beads, on the floor were people sitting, leaning into each other, staring and not speaking. The three of us sat down in an open area and leaning into each other, exhausted, fell asleep and drifted off led by the muse of the music, the lamps, the incense and each other’s scent into a stroboscopic dream.

He could see we were new and tired so he filled us in on the Haight.

“If you're looking for a place to stay there are a lot of crash pads around that will take you in for a night. maybe two-three, and there's the free store. They have anything, well, most things you'll need, like books, clothing, cigarettes, anything. They also have a bulletin board with listings of places to stay, and there’s a  donut shop down the street that’s loaded with cheap eats, open 24 hours and has a jukebox, so maybe that will help get your compass bearings set.”

We thanked him for the information and the chance to rest. This would not be the last time we’d fell from the sky and crash land behind the beaded curtain. "What's behind the beaded curtain Johnny?" It was a psychedelic game show, a quiz show, and no one, absolutely no one, anyone, knew the answer, nor cared. The answers didn't matter. It was the questions. They were the keys to the inner kingdom. The present alone was of value and counted as taxmen of old counted gold coins as tribute from peasants to royal gentry, until the gentry were gently (in revolution, the term "gently" is all relative, don't you think?) overthrown and murdered in dark basements of old castles.

The past, sat with a Bhuddha stance, in Buddha silence, a rusted out Buddha car in a Colorado field with parables to tell and fabled songs to sing as they keep silent, rusting away.  watching over the east-west, north-south highways shooting for the rest stop of enlightenment, and another tank of gas.. and the future?

It hadn't decided to exist yet, so it could be a custom tailored envisionment, cut to fit like a Chinese suit in Hong Kong, and just as shiny, the kind bankers and pimps used to like to wear in the suburban