20 June 2007
I couldn’t wait to escape Bellflower. There was a whole world waiting for me out there and I just wanted to get on with it. Within weeks of my graduation from high school, at the age of seventeen, I left home and never went back.
The first stop on my Voyage of Life was a Road Trip. My friend Chris and I decided to spend the summer as hippie vagabonds making our way up the coast of California and Oregon and ending up in Tacoma, Washington where she had a boyfriend, a friend of my brother’s called Mike Bly. (Did my brother supply all the boyfriends to my pals and I? Guess so.) We never got further than San Francisco.
We packed the obligatory backpacks (taking too much stuff as I had yet to learn how to pack light, even when confronted with the prospect of carrying it all on my back!) and boarded a Greyhound bus to San Francisco, a pilgrimage all hippies of the time were obliged to make during their lifetime or forfeit their right to wear love beads and burn incense.
It was a beautiful summer, three years after the Summer of Love, and San Francisco was to me a kind of Paradise. On the very first day, my friend Chris got talking to some people who invited us to stay at their cosy little urban commune while we were in the city. Now Chris was a very beautiful woman. So all it took was a really beautiful man, a charismatic musician (a crap musician I have to add, but who cares if you’re beautiful right?) to ban all thoughts from her mind of Mike Bly, Tacoma or our Road Trip up the coast to Washington.
Peace and love only got you so far, so within a few days I was turfed out of the commune. I was on my own, a very un-streetwise seventeen-year-old with no idea what to do next and determined on no account to return home.
There were a lot of “street people” in the cities in those days; young hippies who chose to be rootless and homeless, whose social life was carried out in soup kitchens, free churches and free clinics and who survived by begging and doing casual work. I was told that anybody could live on the street across the bay in Berkeley so I stuck out my thumb and arrived there with absolutely no idea what was going to happen next. As it was, quite a lot happened.
Berkeley was hotbed of left-wing activity at the time and the Mecca of hippie culture. All I had to do was hang around the UC Berkeley student union and finding a place to stay was no problem. I met a very nice guy from Pennsylvania and we hung out for a few days. He showed me where to get free food, medical care and a place to crash (a burnt out, condemned house on one occasion!); and by the time he left, I knew my way around.
Finding a place to crash was the trickiest task to master, because Free Love was a hippie creed and I was a virgin and determined to stay that way until I was bloody well ready to be anything else. In order to achieve this, I needed to be creative. Fortunately this was when word had got round that a lot of guys were coming home from Vietnam with a strain of the Clap that was immune to antibiotics. I doubt it was true, but it was widely believed. After being taken back to a guy’s pad, all I had to do was confess (tearfully if necessary) that I was in Berkeley to be part of an experimental program to treat this vicious strain of the disease that I had contracted and, even though I really wanted to have sex with the him, it wouldn’t be fair to expose him to a fate like Incurable Clap. Nobody thought of condoms in those days. Nobody wore condoms in those days! (Women were expected to be on the Pill. What liberated times, eh?) So I slept alone and well. I must have been insane to take a risk like that, but I was rarely without a bed. That is, until I acquired a dog.
Walking down University Avenue, I saw a scrawny, mangy-looking animal dash across the street and get clipped by a passing car. I ran over to see if the dog was okay. She was. But she had decided she needed a new owner and I was it. She was the most hyper of animals, in the habit of peeing every time she got excited, which was a lot of the time. And, in the hippie spirit of giving pets inappropriate and unacceptable names, I called her “Methedrine”.
After that, although I managed to get a bed with clean sheets one night by claiming to be a teenage runaway at a runaway shelter, it was obvious that outdoor living was going to be the order of the day for me and my new canine friend. I was told by people at the free church that there was a large porch attached to the Presbyterian church where you could sleep undisturbed with the permission of the pastor. That sounded safe enough to me so Methedrine and I made our way there and bedded down for what should have been a peaceful night.
One thing I did notice about the Peace and Love generation was that not everyone was peaceful and loving, and quite a lot of them, despite their antipathy to anything not organic and natural, were quite happy to put any number of harmful chemicals into their bodies with absolutely no concern about what might then happen to their brains. Well, two of the street people sleeping there had brains that were affected in this way and chose to express their cosmic experience by battering the hell out of each other.
Someone called the police and we all had to scarper and I ended up bunking up with a scruffy teenager called Bill under the awning of the back door of some sort of industrial building where we talked all night about food and how crap the meals at the soup kitchen were and how much we missed having a decent meal.
The next morning Bill wanted to take me to breakfast. I was puzzled because he didn’t look like he could afford to, but looks can deceive and he did insist.
We found a very nice looking coffee shop where he insisted on me having whatever I liked, as much as I wanted; eggs, bacon, sausages, blueberry pancakes, juice, coffee. By the time I’d finished I thought I wouldn’t have to eat again for a week.
The bill came and he looked at it quietly as if checking it to make sure it had been added up properly. He then suggested I take the opportunity to go to the Ladies’ room. I said I didn’t need to go.
“I think you do,” he said charmingly. I wasn’t at all sure what he meant, but I got up to go anyway. More strangely still, he asked me to put the bill in my handbag and afterwards to go untie the dog out front and he’d meet me there.
When I came out of the Ladies’ room, I saw him calmly putting a generous tip on the table. I went outside as he’d asked and untied the dog. When Bill came out a minute later he took my arm and started to walk calmly away.
“Okay,” he said, “we’re just gonna walk real quiet to the corner where we’ll be out of sight and then we’re gonna run like hell.”
We turned the corner and ran like hell.
When we’d run about a block, he stopped as abruptly as he’d started and began to walk calmly again, still breathless.
“Er…you didn’t pay for that breakfast,” I guessed.
“Of course not,” he said, “You think I’ve got that kind of money?”
I thought about this for a minute.
“Why did you leave a tip?”
“If you leave a tip, they think you’ve paid already. And it’s only right. The waitress gave us good service.”
We hung out a lot after that. He was from Maryland, near Washington D.C. and was going to be heading back there soon. He said he was twenty, but was definitely younger. He showed me a scar on his stomach and said he’d got it in a fight, but it looked an awful lot like an appendix scar to me. I couldn’t trust anything he said, but who cared? He was a guy who knew how to get out of a restaurant without paying.
A few nights later we were coming out of the free church, which served as a kind of community centre for street people. Methedrine saw a cat and dashed across University Avenue in pursuit, right in front of a car. I called her back but there was a screech of brakes and I saw her go under the car. The driver pushed on without stopping as I screamed. Methedrine survived the impact, having gone under the chassis, got up and ran off howling into the night, taking no notice of my desperately shrieking at her to come back.
We looked everywhere for her; all the places she’d been with me that she might have gone back to: the student union, the free clinic, the Presbyterian church, the soup kitchen. All the while I was calling out, “Methedrine! Methedrine!” And although we attracted the attention of every addict and dealer in Berkeley, and a neighbourhood full of concerned citizens who were jamming the police switchboard as we walked through the night shadowed streets, that scrawny, mangy mutt was nowhere to be found. (Though I did resolve that if I ever found her again, I’d definitely change her name.) With only the two of us to search for her, the task looked hopeless.
I decided that my only chance of finding her was to put together a search party; so I went back into the free church and pleaded with the street people there to come help me find my dog. But somebody had just lit up a joint and no one was going anywhere. I think that’s when I cried.
Bill looked pensive as we walked down the road, but said nothing. He stopped walking as we passed a large grocery store, looked at me and said, “I’ll just be a minute.”
I waited for him on the corner for almost twenty, until he finally emerged. Inexplicably, he was carrying a case of beer.
“Okay,” he said, “we’re just gonna walk real quiet to the corner where we’ll be out of sight and then we’re gonna run like hell.”
We went back to the free church, where Bill plonked the case of beer down on the counter in front of the gathered hippies. He raised his hand to get their attention, but he’d already got it.
“There’s a case of beer for whoever finds the dog!”
She was found less than an hour later. And I had fallen in love.
If you would like to comment on this post, please click on the word "Comments" below.
I couldn’t wait to escape Bellflower. There was a whole world waiting for me out there and I just wanted to get on with it. Within weeks of my graduation from high school, at the age of seventeen, I left home and never went back.
The first stop on my Voyage of Life was a Road Trip. My friend Chris and I decided to spend the summer as hippie vagabonds making our way up the coast of California and Oregon and ending up in Tacoma, Washington where she had a boyfriend, a friend of my brother’s called Mike Bly. (Did my brother supply all the boyfriends to my pals and I? Guess so.) We never got further than San Francisco.
We packed the obligatory backpacks (taking too much stuff as I had yet to learn how to pack light, even when confronted with the prospect of carrying it all on my back!) and boarded a Greyhound bus to San Francisco, a pilgrimage all hippies of the time were obliged to make during their lifetime or forfeit their right to wear love beads and burn incense.
It was a beautiful summer, three years after the Summer of Love, and San Francisco was to me a kind of Paradise. On the very first day, my friend Chris got talking to some people who invited us to stay at their cosy little urban commune while we were in the city. Now Chris was a very beautiful woman. So all it took was a really beautiful man, a charismatic musician (a crap musician I have to add, but who cares if you’re beautiful right?) to ban all thoughts from her mind of Mike Bly, Tacoma or our Road Trip up the coast to Washington.
Peace and love only got you so far, so within a few days I was turfed out of the commune. I was on my own, a very un-streetwise seventeen-year-old with no idea what to do next and determined on no account to return home.
There were a lot of “street people” in the cities in those days; young hippies who chose to be rootless and homeless, whose social life was carried out in soup kitchens, free churches and free clinics and who survived by begging and doing casual work. I was told that anybody could live on the street across the bay in Berkeley so I stuck out my thumb and arrived there with absolutely no idea what was going to happen next. As it was, quite a lot happened.
Berkeley was hotbed of left-wing activity at the time and the Mecca of hippie culture. All I had to do was hang around the UC Berkeley student union and finding a place to stay was no problem. I met a very nice guy from Pennsylvania and we hung out for a few days. He showed me where to get free food, medical care and a place to crash (a burnt out, condemned house on one occasion!); and by the time he left, I knew my way around.
Finding a place to crash was the trickiest task to master, because Free Love was a hippie creed and I was a virgin and determined to stay that way until I was bloody well ready to be anything else. In order to achieve this, I needed to be creative. Fortunately this was when word had got round that a lot of guys were coming home from Vietnam with a strain of the Clap that was immune to antibiotics. I doubt it was true, but it was widely believed. After being taken back to a guy’s pad, all I had to do was confess (tearfully if necessary) that I was in Berkeley to be part of an experimental program to treat this vicious strain of the disease that I had contracted and, even though I really wanted to have sex with the him, it wouldn’t be fair to expose him to a fate like Incurable Clap. Nobody thought of condoms in those days. Nobody wore condoms in those days! (Women were expected to be on the Pill. What liberated times, eh?) So I slept alone and well. I must have been insane to take a risk like that, but I was rarely without a bed. That is, until I acquired a dog.
Walking down University Avenue, I saw a scrawny, mangy-looking animal dash across the street and get clipped by a passing car. I ran over to see if the dog was okay. She was. But she had decided she needed a new owner and I was it. She was the most hyper of animals, in the habit of peeing every time she got excited, which was a lot of the time. And, in the hippie spirit of giving pets inappropriate and unacceptable names, I called her “Methedrine”.
After that, although I managed to get a bed with clean sheets one night by claiming to be a teenage runaway at a runaway shelter, it was obvious that outdoor living was going to be the order of the day for me and my new canine friend. I was told by people at the free church that there was a large porch attached to the Presbyterian church where you could sleep undisturbed with the permission of the pastor. That sounded safe enough to me so Methedrine and I made our way there and bedded down for what should have been a peaceful night.
One thing I did notice about the Peace and Love generation was that not everyone was peaceful and loving, and quite a lot of them, despite their antipathy to anything not organic and natural, were quite happy to put any number of harmful chemicals into their bodies with absolutely no concern about what might then happen to their brains. Well, two of the street people sleeping there had brains that were affected in this way and chose to express their cosmic experience by battering the hell out of each other.
Someone called the police and we all had to scarper and I ended up bunking up with a scruffy teenager called Bill under the awning of the back door of some sort of industrial building where we talked all night about food and how crap the meals at the soup kitchen were and how much we missed having a decent meal.
The next morning Bill wanted to take me to breakfast. I was puzzled because he didn’t look like he could afford to, but looks can deceive and he did insist.
We found a very nice looking coffee shop where he insisted on me having whatever I liked, as much as I wanted; eggs, bacon, sausages, blueberry pancakes, juice, coffee. By the time I’d finished I thought I wouldn’t have to eat again for a week.
The bill came and he looked at it quietly as if checking it to make sure it had been added up properly. He then suggested I take the opportunity to go to the Ladies’ room. I said I didn’t need to go.
“I think you do,” he said charmingly. I wasn’t at all sure what he meant, but I got up to go anyway. More strangely still, he asked me to put the bill in my handbag and afterwards to go untie the dog out front and he’d meet me there.
When I came out of the Ladies’ room, I saw him calmly putting a generous tip on the table. I went outside as he’d asked and untied the dog. When Bill came out a minute later he took my arm and started to walk calmly away.
“Okay,” he said, “we’re just gonna walk real quiet to the corner where we’ll be out of sight and then we’re gonna run like hell.”
We turned the corner and ran like hell.
When we’d run about a block, he stopped as abruptly as he’d started and began to walk calmly again, still breathless.
“Er…you didn’t pay for that breakfast,” I guessed.
“Of course not,” he said, “You think I’ve got that kind of money?”
I thought about this for a minute.
“Why did you leave a tip?”
“If you leave a tip, they think you’ve paid already. And it’s only right. The waitress gave us good service.”
We hung out a lot after that. He was from Maryland, near Washington D.C. and was going to be heading back there soon. He said he was twenty, but was definitely younger. He showed me a scar on his stomach and said he’d got it in a fight, but it looked an awful lot like an appendix scar to me. I couldn’t trust anything he said, but who cared? He was a guy who knew how to get out of a restaurant without paying.
A few nights later we were coming out of the free church, which served as a kind of community centre for street people. Methedrine saw a cat and dashed across University Avenue in pursuit, right in front of a car. I called her back but there was a screech of brakes and I saw her go under the car. The driver pushed on without stopping as I screamed. Methedrine survived the impact, having gone under the chassis, got up and ran off howling into the night, taking no notice of my desperately shrieking at her to come back.
We looked everywhere for her; all the places she’d been with me that she might have gone back to: the student union, the free clinic, the Presbyterian church, the soup kitchen. All the while I was calling out, “Methedrine! Methedrine!” And although we attracted the attention of every addict and dealer in Berkeley, and a neighbourhood full of concerned citizens who were jamming the police switchboard as we walked through the night shadowed streets, that scrawny, mangy mutt was nowhere to be found. (Though I did resolve that if I ever found her again, I’d definitely change her name.) With only the two of us to search for her, the task looked hopeless.
I decided that my only chance of finding her was to put together a search party; so I went back into the free church and pleaded with the street people there to come help me find my dog. But somebody had just lit up a joint and no one was going anywhere. I think that’s when I cried.
Bill looked pensive as we walked down the road, but said nothing. He stopped walking as we passed a large grocery store, looked at me and said, “I’ll just be a minute.”
I waited for him on the corner for almost twenty, until he finally emerged. Inexplicably, he was carrying a case of beer.
“Okay,” he said, “we’re just gonna walk real quiet to the corner where we’ll be out of sight and then we’re gonna run like hell.”
We went back to the free church, where Bill plonked the case of beer down on the counter in front of the gathered hippies. He raised his hand to get their attention, but he’d already got it.
“There’s a case of beer for whoever finds the dog!”
She was found less than an hour later. And I had fallen in love.
If you would like to comment on this post, please click on the word "Comments" below.
1 comment:
brilliant. i think this is my favourite so far. it's like a film.
Post a Comment