Not So Good a Gay Man

by Frank M. Robinson

  “You can’t make me not love you! I mean it—you can’t refuse my love!”

  The group’s repeated demands that he go someplace else soon changed to a discussion of whether they should beat him up right on the sidewalk or drag him into the bushes and do it. He was finally pulled away by some friends who had no intentions of letting him start a riot.

  Toward the end of the summer some whites and blacks had teamed up. Many of the hippies really couldn’t go home again—their poverty was very real, and the blacks sensed it. Not all of the hippies had been raised in nice suburban homes—some of them were street types, handy with their fists and who found the trip from hostility to respect to friendship a relatively short one. The more intellectual types sorted each other out over chess games, and finally, some were just friendly, period.

  One day I was playing guard at the Free Frame of Reference shop, trying to keep several young black kids from barging in and grabbing everything in sight. A young girl among them was a spitter, and her aim was perfect.

  My tolerance level quickly sank to zero. It was hard to remind myself that the same thing sometimes happened in Chicago—with gangs of young white kids.

  And sometimes white adults in the Haight were to blame. There was no denying the thefts, the violence, the mutual distrust, but it wasn’t just on one side. I remember going to a meeting of the Communications Company—they handed out leaflets warning hippies against everything it was possible to warn them about. Be careful who you hang with, don’t go out late at night, etc. A lot of it made sense—and a lot of it was pure paranoia.

  The meeting was in an apartment on Masonic, and there was no mistaking that it was sponsored by the Communications Company, which prided itself on being hipper than thou. An open parachute hung from the ceiling, and all of us huddled beneath it.

  The warning for the day was that on good authority (always unnamed, of course) the Black Panthers were going to take over the Haight and hold it for ransom until the government stopped the Vietnam War. It made no practical sense at all, but anything that might bring the war to a halt was worth considering.

  For a minute or two.

  Another time, I was sitting on Hippie Hill watching a muscular black guy in the meadow below playing with a knife. A white friend with me said, “I know the cat—I’ve rapped with him a lot—he’s a good rapper, one of the brightest I’ve ever met. He’s got a degree, but he’s black—Christ, it’s tough enough for us.”

  In the meadow the black guy got into a friendly argument with a younger kid that quickly turned sour. The black rapper suddenly started running after him, waving the knife. He couldn’t run very fast—he was crippled. I sat and watched him for a long time.

  Suzanne and Jean were two blacks who lived together in the Haight. Both wore their hair native style, but Suzanne was statuesque and regal-looking, while Jean was a thin, nervous type, an ex-actress. Both had been married and were now divorced. Suzanne had two kids—one, a little girl named Angel, who was impossible not to love, and five-year-old Johnny, who was a young version of the “hostile spade” stereotype. He would fight, kick, spit, and swear (if his mother wasn’t around).

  Suzanne and Jean had teamed up to share their meager resources—they both wanted to go to Mexico and get their kids away from the hostility and filth of Haight Street.

  One day I went with them to Berkeley to have a picnic. Going home, we decided to visit Johnny’s father, who lived in a small house with his new white wife.

  When they came out to say their good-byes, Johnny was holding onto his father’s trouser leg and bawling—no longer hostile but a pathetic little boy crying for his daddy.

  Of all the groups I both sympathized with and hated, at the head of the list were the police. They had an impossible job and quickly realized they were in a war—the hippies against the cops.

  The drug laws were being violated on a massive scale, the district was filling up with runaways, Park Station was being flooded with parents demanding that their kids be found and returned, and the “good” people in town wanted their city cleaned up—which meant the Haight. Nobody had invited the hippies to come to town, and worst of all, they had arrived hungry and broke. The city was indignant.

  The cop who was so nice to the tourist in North Beach was King Kong in blue when he was assigned to the Haight. If the hippie was young, he was probably a runaway. If he was in his twenties, he was probably a dealer. If you were older than that—well, you should have had the good sense not to be there in the first place. And don’t give the cop all that crap about hippies being nonviolent—if he had drawn duty there the previous summer, he knew better.

  The political activists—San Francisco always had more than its share—saw opportunity in the unmotivated kids. Their job, of course, was to motivate them. The same activists who had urged both sides to “cool it” during the Hunters Point riots now started working for a confrontation between the kids and the cops.

  It wasn’t hard to do. The biggest crime implicating the hippies was dealing or using pot. Everybody used grass, and there was no end to culprits being dragged away. When a skinny eighteen-year-old was dragged off in a pot bust by a cop who looked like Bull Connor, onlookers sympathized 100 percent with the kid. Somebody threw a pop bottle, somebody yelled “Fascist bastard!,” and quicker than you could say Allen Ginsberg, riot squads would show up to haul away more protesting kids.

  The usual flyers would show up on the street urging mass meetings to get together and sue the cops but that was the most empty threat a transient society could make. One time we met, a jug of Red Mountain was passed around, and one witness testified that a girl had been hit by a bottle thrown from the crowd. He was immediately jeered down. Everybody there knew she’d been hit by a cop.

  The agents provocateurs were also quick to appear. As reported in The Haight-Ashbury Tribune, the writer was grabbed and handcuffed by the cops and thrown in the paddy wagon. One of the cops said, “We’re going to show you what fascism is all about,” and the reporter said all he could think about were concentration camps. “One guy was tossed in with a bloody head, and blood was gushing out. Then a girl named Louise was thrown in and I could see her jaw was broken. One of the cops even said ‘You know what? The next thing we’re going to do is turn you into soap.’”

  It all sounded very practiced, but few people doubted the truth of what was said. Few people in the Haight ever doubted what was said against the cops.

  There were some comic overtones. Ballet stars Nureyev and Fonteyn were busted at a pot party, and when the word spread, the upper crust in ’Frisco panicked. Every top lawyer in town was contacted, and the two were hastily released when a comma was found misplaced in the warrant.

  Another time it didn’t concern hippies, it concerned Cat. I had let a couple crash for the night, and since they had a collie with them, I exiled Cat to the backyard. The next morning, when the crashers had left, I opened the window and whistled for Cat. There was no response. I immediately went out, afraid the raccoons had gotten him. I found him in a little nest he’d dug in the dirt. I picked him up and he went limp. I carried him into the house, put out some water and a dish of food, but he wouldn’t eat. Finally I went to the butcher, bought some liver, took it home, fried it up, and cut it into small bits. I then fed Cat by hand. He sniffed it, tasted it, had a mouthful, then dug in, all the time staring at me. I was never to give his home to a dog again, did I understand that?

  Another time there was a free dance at the Fillmore, and leaflets were passed all over the city in hopes that the disgruntled kids who couldn’t get in would tangle with the police. But only one cop showed up, and he jollied the kids, and the show on the outside soon became as good as the show on the inside.

  The case of Randy Buckner wasn’t funny. Late one evening a crowd had gathered a hundred feet from the Straight Theater to listen to a sidewalk guitar player. The cops showed up, Buckner cracked wise, nightsticks flew, and so did blood.

  Buckner’s dr
ied blood could still be seen on the sidewalk the next day. A kid built a shrine of bottles and candles and created a sign saying, “This is where your brother fell.” A cop kicked over the bottles and candles, then leaned against a parking meter a few feet away and stared blandly at this hippie kid Jay, waiting. Jay stared blandly back. The kids grew quiet and watched. Jay outstared the cop, and when he left, rebuilt the shrine. The next day the shrine was enormous. This time the cops left it alone. One of them asked Jay bitterly, “Whatever happened to the good hippies?” “They’re all in jail,” Jay said, just as bitter.

  The cops were pushed to their limit. Once, while booking a kid in Park Station, a cop said, “I’ve got a son just like you in Vietnam.” “I hope he gets killed,” the kid said with a snarl. “If I had been a civilian,” the cop said later, “I think I would have killed him.”

  It was public policy, of course, to harass the hippies. You could be arrested for sleeping in Golden Gate Park, for possession of narcotics (almost all of them carried pot), for assaulting an officer. (What constituted assault? Complaining when arrested?) Once booked, a prisoner could be released on bail or on his own recognizance if he had a job or owned a home, etc. But few hippies had jobs or money or even friends when it came to bail money. It was a pretty stupid hippie who didn’t realize he had fewer rights than a whore.

  The city had finally found a group other than blacks to occupy the bottom rung of the ladder of justice. Maybe the city was even aware of it. But whether the cops were vicious or overworked or just misunderstood didn’t matter to the hippie who drew a heart on the wall next to the Psych Shop and wrote in it a bit of wisdom that nobody could argue with:

  “I love the cops—I’m from L.A. and you don’t know how good you’ve got it!”

  The one group that had a tougher time than the cops were the FBI men trying to track down draft dodgers.

  Joe was a kid who had been institutionalized all of his life. His parents had died when he was five and he became a rent-a-kid—the state paid various families to take care of him, for which his foster families were paid for his food, shelter, and clothing. Affection and love were not included.

  At age nineteen Joe neglected to register for the draft and headed for the Haight. He wanted to meet the beautiful people he had read so much about. After a week or so of crashing, he wasn’t welcome anymore. He was expected to clean up his room, do the dishes, and other tasks that had never occurred to him—he had to be told.

  He adjusted, moving in with some friends and getting a job as a messenger boy downtown. He wasn’t handsome and had difficulty relating to girls. Then things began to go even more sour. He had a frail personality, but the loungers on Hippie Hill didn’t know that—or if they did, didn’t care. One day in Buena Vista Park a black pulled a knife on him and forced him to give a blow job. Joe had a thing about “queers,” and this didn’t help much.

  The next night he burgled a gun shop and the cops caught him within five minutes. He was given two months in the county jail, and the worst thing that could happen to him, happened. He was gangbanged by a group of blacks. Aside from having a sore butt, he thrived in jail. It was a structured situation of the type he had known most of his life. Some speed freak chicks worked him over once he was out, and his personality structure really started to crumble.

  Then there was the draft. Joe couldn’t handle the rest of his life, and handling the draft was out of the question. The FBI man looking for him said if the army had given him a decent psychiatric examination he would never be taken. Joe couldn’t manage to turn himself in and take his chances, so he split and the last anybody heard of him he was selling himself in the Tenderloin.

  “Fuck me, mister, and make me feel wanted for once.”

  The FBI man who picked him up shook his head. “I’m not doing police work down here, I’m doing social work. Christ, the kid wasn’t even good at hustling.”

  XVIII

  IN EARLY 1967 the Human Be-In attracted twenty-five-thousand people. It resulted in the Summer of Love, and a city of seven hundred thousand found itself playing host to a hundred thousand young runaways, throwaways, and those who wanted a more adventurous life than the one they were leading. Hardly any of the new arrivals had any money, few had more than the clothes they wore, and even fewer had marketable skills. The only thing they brought with them were great expectations. And almost all of them wanted to live in Haight-Ashbury.

  The city had been warned—the mass media had greeted the Be-In as if it were a modern version of Disney’s “Pleasure Island” from Pinocchio. It was a relief from writing about wars and depressions—it was fun, it was free, and somehow everybody would be taken care of. The hippies were reincarations of Jesus Christ, and dropping LSD was a sacrament (according to its experimenter and popularizer, Dr. Timothy Leary). The media didn’t feel any responsibility for what it was writing about—after all, there were no Disney monsters hiding behind doors waiting to change the newcomers into donkeys.

  The newcomers managed to do that themselves.

  Some of the more enterprising hippies bought copies of the underground papers for a quarter and sold then to tourists for a dollar. The less enterprising held out their hands and asked for “any spare change?,” then rewarded the giver with a smile and a version of the mantra “Outta sight, man!,” “You’re really beautiful!,” or simply, “Love ya, man!”

  That slowly changed when the professional hippies moved in—the ones from Hollywood High or UC at Sacramento. If you gave them any money, there would be no “thank you.” The well-dressed hippie with the carefully torn dress or pants and the new shoes and blank face would move on to the next potential customer and repeat the request. No smile, no thank you, no benediction involving the word “love.”

  A friend once figured if he gave a dime for every “spare change” artist from Stanyan to Masonic, he would have coughed up ten bucks.

  One night I had a visitor—a middle-aged, overwrought man who showed me a picture of his daughter and asked if I’d seen her. I had expected him to be angry, even to be accusatory, but he was none of those. He was a father looking for his daughter who’d run away to the Haight. It would have been like looking for needle in a haystack, but he was too distraught to realize that. I had no idea what the trouble may have been between him and his daughter, but it was obvious he loved her very much and would spend days in the Haight looking for her.

  Another time, drinking coffee in the I/Thou with Fat Maxey, we were approached by Sheriff Richard Hongisto, who showed me a picture of a girl and asked if I’d seen her.

  I took a long look, shook my head, then frowned. “She looks strange.”

  “She’s dead,” the sheriff said, and moved along to another coffee drinker.

  This was the first time in my life that I realized people seldom die with their eyes closed. It was like somebody had opened a door and you were looking into a room that was totally empty.

  “The scene’s changing,” Maxey said, “and not for the better. There’s always been a hundred street kids dealing pot, but now the heavy hitters have moved in.” I looked blank and he said, “You can pick up a key for a hundred bucks. And a key will give you about fifty lids you can sell for twenty-five bucks a lid. You do the math. That’s why all the college kids are showing up—a couple of keys they can break up and sell to their friends back home and they’ve paid their tuition.”

  I watched the passing parade for a long moment.

  “Why do you stay here, Maxey?”

  He shrugged.

  “I wanted to go to State and maybe get a degree in English. I didn’t have the money or the dedication so I came here. I wanted to be a part of State, and it hurt when I couldn’t.” He shrugged. “There’s not much to hurt you down here. What about you? And don’t give me any ‘writer’ crap—you could have gotten everything you wanted to know in two weeks.”

  I didn’t have an answer.

  That Sunday I lugged my pot to the free medical clinic to cook up a b
atch of spaghetti for the staff—doing my bit. Maybe Joan Baez would come in again.

  This night, something was wrong. I went through the spaghetti pot, which usually would have been enough, and half the staff were still going hungry. I hid behind a door to watch the substitute cook stirring the pot. He was selling it out the back to a line of hippies for twenty-five cents a plate.

  I was more than pissed. When I confronted him he looked blank for a moment, then got angry. “They’re hungry, too, man. The doctors can afford to buy a meal downtown.”

  I picked up a few cans of spaghetti sauce and a couple pounds of meat and finished my obligation to the staff. The volunteer staffer had disappeared into the grumbling crowd at the bottom of the steps.

  It was a difficult life for all concerned, including the kids who had believed what they’d read in the magazines and now felt shortchanged. They’d been promised a paradise and found themselves in a city that didn’t have the foggiest idea of how to cope with the situation outside of jailing those who smoked or were selling pot.

  Why didn’t the city allow the churches to house some of the kids overnight? I never found an answer to that.

  The hippie powers that be finally thought of a solution—they’d hold a funeral for “hippie,” tell the kids the party was over and they should all go home. The Psychedelic Shop closed its doors and put a sign in the window that said “Nebraska needs you more.”

  Somebody built a large coffin, and a small crowd carried it to the Panhandle, filled it with some tattered rock posters, old clothes, half-empty packs of Zig-Zag cigarette papers (indispensable for the pot smoker), and strings of beads and other symbols of hippie culture. Then they set fire to the coffin and leaped through the flames until the Fire Department arrived and rang down the curtain.