by Randy Mixter
He opened a savings account at Monumental Savings and Loan on Haight Street, depositing fifty dollars every other Friday.
Early in the morning of July the 16th, a large group of San Francisco Police Officers and men in dark business suits raided the house three doors down from theirs. Alex, who watched the action go down from the relative safety of his porch, saw at least twenty young people escorted out of the house in handcuffs and pushed into two paddy wagons. The wagons and the officers pulled away quickly but the men in suits stuck around for a spell. Every so often, one would leave the house hauling a large full plastic bag behind them. After several trips back and forth, the men left in three cars with a good portion of the house’s contents in the trunks.
Alex decided, against his better judgment, to wake Chick with the news.
The house was beginning to stir as he approached Chick’s bedroom. He heard voices from the room where Sarah slept. One of the voices sounded like Sarah. He did not doubt it. She was usually the second in the house to rise, right behind him. Sometimes she even beat him to the bathroom in the morning.
Chick, however, was another story. He was often the last houseguest to wake. It was not uncommon for Chick to stagger down the stairs at the break of noon, justifying the trepidation Alex felt as he neared the bedroom door.
He thought he heard movement inside the room before he knocked. Maybe he caught Chick on the rare morning when he actually had plans for the day. Nonetheless, he knocked as softly as he could, hoping he would be heard.
There was again a commotion from inside the door. When the door opened, a few seconds later, Belladonna stood at the entrance, as naked as the day she was born.
He was as flustered as he had ever been. The only thing he could think to say was “I’m sorry. I was looking for Chick.”
Belladonna stared at him for a minute, one hand on the door, the other on her hip.
“You are a very apologetic person,” she finally said.
Alex did his best to keep his eyes on her face. He did not want to look her in the eye, given their short history however, it was significantly better than daring a peek below her neck.
Realizing this awkward moment could easily move from annoyance to agitation, he composed himself to the degree where he could speak in complete sentences.
“There was a raid on the house three doors down. I just saw it.”
Belladonna stared at him a second longer, then turned.
“Chick,” she said. The bed remained still.
“Chick!” she said again, this time with some anger behind it.
The bed rustled. From somewhere under the covers, a voice said something that sounded like “whaaa.”
“You might want to hear this,” she told him as she turned toward the bed.
He did steal a glance then. It was a little too quick to see much, but Belladonna obliged him further by walking back to the bed and giving Chick a rough shake. Alex turned his head after that, not risking the slim chance of an extra set of eyes in the back of her head. He could finally say he saw a girl naked after almost a month in Haight-Ashbury. He was pretty sure it was a record of sorts.
Chick was at least discreet enough to wrap himself in a blanket. He woke up quickly when Alex gave him all the details on the bust.
“We’d better hide the stuff under the porch for a couple days.” Belladonna nodded as she dressed.
“I’ll spread the word around the house just in case.”
He put a hand on Alex’s shoulder. “I’m glad you’re an early riser, man.”
Before the hour had passed, the porch supports received the additional fortification of as much marijuana and other assorted drugs and paraphernalia as Alex had ever seen in one place.
Alex watched the entire operation, which reminded him of a scene from the movie ‘The Great Escape’, from the safety of the porch. Benny kept a lookout on the front lawn while Skip handed the stuff to Cowboy, who was hidden somewhere in the dark dirty recesses of the foundation.
The word of the raid must have spread like wildfire. He saw two other houses in the block engaged in the same below the porch activity.
Sarah, a glass of milk in hand, joined him.
“You’ve caused quite a commotion,” she remarked, breaking into a white mustached smile.
A young man and woman hurried out the door carrying a cardboard box between them. Alex did not recognize either. He looked at Sarah, who shrugged her shoulders.
“Never seen them before,” she said, before walking to the railing.
“This should be an interesting day or two. Straight hippies. What an unusual concept.” Sarah turned toward Alex. “Would you care to place a wager on who succumbs to temptation and visits the underworld of the porch first?”
He did not hesitate. “Chick,” he said.
“Good choice,” Sarah said as she finished her glass of milk.
“But I’m thinking our friend Cowboy will indulge himself before he re-enters the world of sunlight. It is a crime of opportunity.”
“Damn!” Alex shook his head. “I didn’t think of that.”
Sarah stared out at Ashbury Street for several seconds before turning to walk past him.
“You should have,” she said to him, pointing to the smoke filtering through the floorboards, as she moved into the doorway.
SHERRY
The word on the street, according to Chick, was that the raided house had become a haven for runaways, some under aged, and had been under observation by the authorities for some time.
This news pacified Chick and the other houseguests to a certain degree, though none felt confident enough to remove their stash from its dark hiding place. For the next three days, many a houseguest would enter the residence brushing dirt from their clothing.
After what was deemed a safe period of time, Cowboy was again sent below the porch and the recovery operation began in earnest. Within the week, the house was fully functional. Those who wished to be high did so with relative impunity. Short-term memory loss, it seemed, was a trait shared by many of the Haight’s inhabitants.
Alex’s status as a valuable member of the house grew with the incident. He had acquired the reputation of a neighborhood watchdog of sorts. Bleary-eyed houseguests approached him almost every morning, as he wrote his weekly article on the porch, asking him if ‘the coast was clear’.
Even the ultra-suspicious duo of Skip and Benny, who had taken him under their wing within the last couple of weeks, felt the need to confess.
“We thought you were a narc at first,” Benny told Alex, as reason for their delay in friendship.
Chick and his new constant companion, Belladonna, were visiting friends on Fulton Street one warm sunny late July afternoon. Sarah was putting in some hours at the Free Clinic.
Alex had more or less decided to spend the day wandering Haight Street, in search of good story lines, when Skip and Benny approached him.
“We’re heading to the Panhandle to grab something to eat. Word is the Diggers are set up and serving.”
The Panhandle was as good as Haight Street to Alex, and he was a bit hungry.
Skip and Benny were two rather normal guys before they arrived in San Francisco. Skip worked for his father at his food processing plant. Skip liked working there due to the many hiding places and large quantities of free food. The promise of free dope eventually outweighed the acquisition of free food and he left Austin, Texas for California in time to see, as he called it, the real summer of love.
Benny was not far behind him, although he lived a few states away in Virginia. Benny was working at a local auto parts warehouse with several other young men his age. His plan was to save enough to get him through at least one year of college.
Things fell apart when a vicious rumor spread through the warehouse stating that all the teenagers who worked there would be receiving draft notices within the month. Rather than take a chance on the rumors validity, Benny quit the next day, hopping a bus west.
; Both credited the three days they attended the Monterey Pop Festival as the defining moment in their transformation to the Bohemian lifestyle.
“We are sticking it out to the bitter end, whenever it happens to be,” Skip said as they neared the Panhandle. “We have nowhere else to go.”
The Panhandle is a narrow strip of park about a block wide and eight blocks long. The park is located directly off the much larger Golden Gate Park. It is three blocks up from Haight Street.
Much like the Golden Gate Park, home of Hippie Hill, the Panhandle in 1967 was a popular meeting place for the free spirits of the Haight-Ashbury community. Being a flat piece of land, it became a perfect locale for impromptu concerts, dances, and other gatherings of interest.
The Diggers were an eclectic group of individuals. Primarily they were actors and the Haight-Ashbury was their stage. The Diggers sponsored or had their hand in most of the happenings during the heyday of the Haight.
One of the events was the daily distribution of free food in the Panhandle. None were turned away from these giveaways, no matter what their appearance or mindset. The Diggers only agenda in the Panhandle was to feed the hungry and perhaps engage in a performance or two. Their philosophy of giving without question was responsible for erasing some of the negativity felt by many of the area’s established residents toward their new neighbors.
A line had formed in front of the two long tables of food set up on the park grass. No sooner had Alex thought of Sherry and her bean soup than he saw her behind a table, and she was indeed ladling out soup.
The three joined the queue, Skip and Benny’s stomachs growled while Alex felt the first signs of indigestion at the prospect of seeing Sherry again. She probably won’t even remember me, he thought to himself as he neared the table. She wore another tight fitting tee shirt and low on the hip jeans. He could see she was once again braless. He began rubbing his arm without thinking as he stared at her barely covered chest.
The Diggers had sandwiches already made and wrapped at the table. Today’s choice was ham and cheese or peanut butter and jelly. From the looks of things, the pp and j sandwiches were winning the day by a significant number. At the second table, Sherry plied her trade over a large aluminum soup pot. He was close to passing up the soup when his eyes again zeroed in on Sherry’s tee shirt and the contents within.
With cardboard bowl and plastic spoon in hand, he waited his turn.
“Alex,” she said as he stood in front of her. “What took you so long?”
He was somewhat astonished she remembered him and was about to offer an apology when he recalled Belladonna’s admonishments.
“I was here a couple of times but I didn’t see you.” He was not proud of lying to her, but still hoped it took.
“I’m not here all the time. I’m sorry we didn’t meet up.”
She took his bowl hand and moved it over the container. The ladle went deep into the pot. When she removed the ladle, it indeed contained a considerable amount of beans.
“Thanks,” was all he could think to say as the cardboard bowl now weighed hot and heavy in his hand.
“What are you doing after lunch?” she asked as she dipped again for the next in line.
He had a witty line concerning flatulence in mind but said, “I don’t have any plans.”
“Good. Stick around. We’ll talk for a while.”
Alex sat, with his two friends, under a tree and watched Sherry work. She was right about the soup. It was quite good. They were breaking down the tables and loading the supplies into a van. There was no food to take back. Every last bit of it had been eaten.
Some of the diners left the Panhandle, but many stayed. Skip and Benny had made plans to thumb to either the zoo or the wharf, whichever was the easiest. He begged off, telling them he was content to laze under the shade of the oak and nap for a spell.
He was glad when they left. If they saw him talking to Sherry, the word might get back to Sarah. He knew Skip and Benny well enough to believe the truth would go through significant changes before reaching her ears.
The van pulled away and Sherry walked toward him.
“I’m really not one of them. I just like to help out from time to time,” she said as she sat next to him.
“We need to take care of each other here,” she added.
Sherry moved closer to Alex, close enough for him to feel the warmth of her body heat.
Unlike Sarah, she told him everything about her past, present, and her plans for the future.
They talked for what seemed like hours. At some point, as he was reminiscing about his childhood in Baltimore, Sherry put her head on his shoulder and closed her eyes. He was afraid to move. His heart was beating fast and he felt he was slurring his words a little.
He was thinking she had fallen asleep when she abruptly asked him if he had a girlfriend. As she said this, her hand went to his leg, and he jerked slightly. If Sherry noticed it, she paid it no mind. Her hand stayed right where it was, occasionally squeezing his thigh.
For the briefest of seconds, Alex contemplated keeping Sarah a secret. After all, Sarah never touched him like this. Sarah never leaned her head on his shoulder or put her hand on his leg. He had the feeling that, at night on a blanket on Hippie Hill, Sherry would do more than kiss him on the forehead. He suspected she would do much more than that.
Still, Sarah had earned her girlfriend status. Despite the lack of serious romance in their relationship, she had found a comfortable place in his heart.
“I am close friends with a girl named Sarah. She lives in our house on Ashbury Street.
Sherry’s hand relaxed on his leg and her eyes opened.
“Does she wear white?”
“Yes,” he said with some apprehension in his voice.
“Does she dance at night on Hippie Hill?”
“And sometimes during the day,” he continued.
Sherry raised her head from Alex’s shoulder. Her hand left his leg.
“I didn’t know you were seeing Sarah of the moon.”
“Sarah of the moon?” Things were going south quickly, and he was not sure why.
“You must be the guy she’s been seen with lately. Everyone here thought Sarah would always keep to herself. She’s been a loner since she arrived here.”
Sherry moved around to face him. She sat cross-legged in front of him and, to Alex’s surprise, appeared more fascinated than mad.
“Has no one told you about her before?”
He shook his head no.
“She came to Haight-Ashbury in 1965. Back then, this place was more a wish than a reality. I understand she was just sixteen when she arrived. She made her mark early on, connecting with the big thinkers and shakers, Allen Cohen, George Hunter, Marty Balin, the Thelin brothers, and more.”
Sherry broke into a smile. “She took them on. A sixteen-year-old girl who had a vision, her vision, of the way things should be. For a while it worked. She was instrumental in those formative years for accomplishing the near impossible. She helped create a utopia in the heart of San Francisco.”
Sherry stared past him. Her eyes seemed to cloud over as she spoke of things that once were.
“Sarah wanted more than that. She wanted the ideas she helped plant to bloom into a flower encompassing the world. She would accept nothing less. When it did not happen, despite her best efforts, she became disillusioned.”
“In her mind, her dream of a perfect world had failed. She took it to heart and retreated to the Golden Gate Park where she found solace and peace on the top of a hill.”
Sherry placed her hand on Alex’s knee, but it felt comforting now. The electricity had abandoned the air.
“We would sometimes watch her as she danced. A beam of moonlight always found her, even on the cloudy nights.”
“As she withdrew and lapsed into silence, her legend grew. Some say she can predict the future, others claim she has the ability to read minds.”
“Has she told you about her past?”
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“No, she hasn’t,” he replied honestly.
“They say her parents were killed in a car accident when she was young. The word is she lived with her uncle and his wife for a time, but she was not treated kindly.”
“Eventually she made her way to San Francisco and a family who cared for her.”
Sherry gripped his knee firmly before removing her hand. “If you ask around, you will only hear good things about her. She wanted change without the protests and altercations. Others felt differently.”
She stood up facing him. Without thinking, his eyes drifted once again to her chest. He quickly looked up at her face.
“I hope it works out with the two of you,” Sherry said once she had his attention. “I should be going now. It was nice talking to you, although I did most of it.”
“You answered some questions I had. Sarah does not talk about the past.” He smiled at her. “Thank you.”
She started to leave, then stopped and turned around. She lifted her tee shirt up to her shoulders for a brief moment before lowering it again.
“One more question answered,” she said and walked away.
ON A MID-SUMMER’S EVENING
Alex took his place on the hill and waited for Sarah to arrive from the Free Clinic. The afternoon spent with Sherry had been enlightening in many ways. He imagined the stories of Sarah’s ability to read minds, or foretell the future, to be nonsense. The events transpiring in the early days of Haight-Ashbury were undoubtedly true and he admired Sarah for her steadfast determination and grit.
He was a bit concerned when it came to this year. Why did she give up on her goals? Was the future that bleak? As always, for every question answered there was a question unresolved. The enigma that was Sarah lived on.
He was early and did not expect her for a time and so he opened the envelope he picked up earlier from the Western Union office and unfolded the papers inside. He had waited until now to read his latest published article, hoping not to find any significant editing in the prose.