Chapter 8: Flower Children
Chapter Eight Flower Children
By July 1964, having left Paris behind, my mind cleared like an old painting found in a corner and dusted off. Enduring the hideous heat of a New York summer (for the fourth and last time in my life) in the little walk-up apartment in the East Village, I regained my health by force feeding into my face endless bananas, orange and V-8 juice, buttermilk, and bowls of wheat germ cereal laced with milk and raisins. Late that month my old friend from Indiana and her new husband came to town, and we rented a storefront together in the same neighborhood. Felix arrived from Europe in mid-August and decided to get his own apartment nearby. He got a job at an art gallery uptown and a scholarship to Brooklyn Museum Art School and told me he was no longer in love. I was sad, but the bond between us was not yet broken and I decided to stay on in New York, finding work that fall in an office in downtown Manhattan proofreading for a typing service for $75/week.
It was a creative little stretch of time in my small world, a lot of poetry writing and an eclectic group of artist friends I'd met along the way - Michael Frimkess, a potter from Emerson College days; Chuck Ross, a sculptor met in Berkeley when I was still married; Marzette Watts, musician and painter, who had been a neighbor when Felix and I first lived together on the Lower East Side; and my roommate, who is today a painter in the Bay Area named Electra Long. Except for her, I lost touch with all of them when I left New York.
The decision to go was forced when I moved into an apartment of my own and developed a hernia hauling furniture up the stairs. I wound up in Bellevue Hospital for surgery during a snowstorm in early November and spent nearly a week there recuperating. Exhausted, I headed to Oregon to spend December with my family on the way back to California and the warm yellow sun. The new year found me in San Francisco living with old friends from Emerson College in a flat that looked out toward the Bay Bridge. Felix arrived toward the end of the month to enroll at the San Francisco Art Institute, and I signed up once again with a temp agency for office jobs. Back in New York that month, Dylan was laying down the tracks for Bringing It All Back Home, his first electric folk-rock album; in Alabama the SCLC launched a voter drive in Selma that would escalate into a nationwide protest movement; Lyndon Johnson began a massive bombing campaign in North Vietman, and I had not yet heard of the Haight-Ashbury. (Some fascinating commentary by Kenneth Rexroth from 1965)
My first job with the agency was at Grace Cathedral in Bishop James Pike's office. This particular Episcopal church was renowned for its liberal programs and Bishop Pike himself was quite a revolutionary figure who would make the cover of Time magazine just two years later. By February I had another temporary job with an Irish paper company and was writing my parents that Felix and I were going to live apart. He had taken a hotel room nearby and begun classes at the Art Institute. Then, as the bond between us was most fragile, I became pregnant through circumstances that I will keep to my own memory. Like wind catching in the snow, a child took root between my heart and hands, and I decided I was ready at 26 to become a mother.
In Oregon, my parents were making the hard decision to leave the farm after 20 years there and move into town, putting my grandfather in a retirement home, but they accepted my situation calmly. I moved alone into a tiny two-room apartment in a hotel in North Beach. The attitude at the time toward unmarried mothers was still pretty disapproving, and a few of the doctors I would see suggested adoption. It would be another two years before therapeutic abortion would be legal in California, so that was not even suggested nor did I think of it. In May, Felix moved in with me for the month and during that time he was attentive and loving and talked about marriage, but I had lost trust. At the end of the month when he was done with his first year at the Art Institute, he flew to France to work on some kind of job there and was gone until the last few weeks of my pregnancy.
Barreling down the road of least resistance, I connected with the Florence Crittendon Home for unwed mothers, which helped me get registered at UC Hospital and hook up with one specific doctor there. That same month, the Episcopal Diocese called me back to work again and agreed to keep me on until the baby was born. I made up a story for them that my husband was in Vietnam and I hauled my belly up the hill on the bus each day alone. And although I hadn't been devastated to see him go, I began to miss Felix. The plan became that we would live together again when he returned. I was very healthy through this time with the help of the popular Adele Davis diet that was strong on liver and wheat germ and brewer's yeast and vegetables. Slowly, I began saving all the money for the birth. During this summer word from home was that my dad had gone back to school to obtain a license to be an employment counselor after years away from any educational endeavors. He had to live away from home and it was a really hard time for him as well. By July, when I turned 26, my baby had begun kicking hard. In a diary, I wrote at the end of that August, "I feel so alone, working on and on, trying to plan without knowing if my child will have any kind of a father at all, even a very young and irresponsible one. I can only wait in complete ignorance of the future, except for the reality of being huge with child. Can anything explain or reconcile to me the solitariness of these months which could have been the most beautiful of my life." Felix was far away and sending only occasional postcards. I was becoming frightened, angry and bitter.
.jpg)
Finally, in mid-September, Felix wired that he would arrive in San Francisco after another week. By the end of the month he was back, but he was broke and not able to be supportive or understanding of what I'd been through. By this time, I had stopped working to wait for the birth. I decided to spend the last few weeks alone and sent him away. My mother arrived from Oregon and the two of them met and were barely civil to each other. But on October 27th after a taxi ride with my mother to the hospital and 13 hours of labor mitigated by breathing lessons from an intern and morphine, Jane was born at 9 lbs. 11 oz. and she was perfect. Felix was tracked down and summoned and he came to visit. For the next few days in the hospital, I learned all those things a new mother learns for the first time - how to diaper, how to nurse, how to sit in a sitz bath, how to walk without a watermelon in the belly. I felt as though I'd been forgiven for anything I had ever done wrong. And maybe I had.
(A little added detail: Felix was just short of 21 that fall when we lay in wait of our first child in the world. You would have thought I was the stronger for the five plus years I had on him, but you'd be wrong. Deeper maybe, but not so likely to leap tall buildings. In fact, you just couldn't keep him on the ground for long. Still, my mother was his match. She could charm the hairs out of your nose one minute and breathe fire through her own the next. She was smaller and older and grayer than he was for sure, but she could more than meet a challenge. Hell, she'd been a communist in her youth and pretty much hadn't slowed down since then when it came to fighting the Good Fights. And it was her territory really, her one child was having a child and it was only going to happen the first time once. She'd been knocked off the dock for sure when I left my promising marriage to a husband she approved of and ran off to the other side of the planet with a boy-man she'd never even met yet and a foreigner to boot. Interestingly, as my daughter (who was about to be born then) recently pointed out, they were both Aquarians, a sign noted for its big-picture take on things. But this was a very small picture at that moment, contained inside an apartment that didn't really classify as more than a place to eat and sleep. It had two rooms - the windows from each looked out on rooftops and stairwells. Actually, I've always liked cubbyhole kind of places I can wrap around myself. I like to be able to reach out and touch a wall no matter where I'm sitting. Makes me feel more solid and on balance. But that October when the two most formidable people in my life took up breathing room inside my tiny shelter with me, it was almost more than I could do not to gasp for air. Considering all the dynamics of the plot, they actually surprised me. In some kind of dance, they stepped out, turned, found an awkward rhythm, and performed a minor alchemy of accommodation. It was hot and water was dripping in the sink and we ate from paper plates and I tried to remember that the reason we all three were there was love.)
By Thanksgiving Felix was gone again, traveling with Tinguely on an art tour through Canada. My mother went home to Oregon and Jane and I holed up in our tiny apartment. Jane smiled in her sleep and in the hall outside the cat warmed her three kittens who smiled in their sleep. At Christmas we traveled home to Oregon where Jane was pressed to the heart of the family. Back again to North Beach, where I nursed her through colic and introduced baby food. This began the period of my life when we were on welfare, applied for after Jane was born at the suggestion of a hospital social worker so that I could stay home with her. This kind of assistance has become reviled in recent years; at the time, there seemed to me no question that I must be able to nurse her and care for her myself through her infancy. Felix had actually gone to their office with me to say that he was not a citizen, would not be staying, and was not going to be able to offer financial support.That summer I turned 27. I had friends, but I was lonely and adrift. In the fall, after a last summer visit to Oregon and the farm before my parents moved into town, I left my North Beach cubbyhole to share a little house on Russian Hill with a friend, who was also a single mother, and her baby who was just a little older than Jane.
As 1966 ended, there was a growing rumbling of a new energy come to replace the old. On the political landscape that year, the Black Panthers were organizing in Oakland, Cesar Chavez had created the United Farm Workers, and Reagan was elected governor. The Vietnam War was still in its infancy but 200,000 U.S. troops had been committed that year and the anti-war movement was underway. Simultaneous with the militant protest energy was the "peace and love" stance taken by a growing number of young people who seemed to be converging on San Francisco. And a new drug had hit the streets that would create a whole psychedelic framework for what followed. As for me, trolling along still on the very edge of this stream, it took awhile for the ripples to reach me, but in that last month of the year with some trepidation I "dropped acid." This was the first batch of synthesized crystal LSD manufactured by the infamous Owsley Stanley and distributed that year for the first time. It was being talked about a lot though people were much more careful about taking it in the beginning than they were later on, making sure they weren't alone, planning what to do, considering it a spiritual experience. I remember that I went out that night for a walk down the street and was enchanted by the buses and trolleys. It all seemed metaphysical, magical, scary,innocent, out of control. I had very mixed feelings about it. In October it had become illegal in California, but I don't believe I was aware of that at the time. Word was starting to arrive in my world that the place to be was further west in a low-rent subdivision of the city. The terms "flower children" and "hippie" had been coined the year before, and it seemed I had stepped across an invisible line and become one of them.
Before moving on, I want to make clear that in retrospect, I've learned not to romanticize anything about drugs (including alcohol). Most of us were young, naive, and ignorant of a lot of the ramifications at the time. What was addictive was the whole spiritual picture, of which drugs were just a part. In January 1967 (just in time for the great Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park where I wandered about with Jane on my hip and listened to the famous bands), we moved to a lower flat in one of those marvelous old Victorians in the Haight-Ashbury. It was like Oz, where you stepped into technicolor after a long black-and-white fall. Surrounded by teenagers from all over the country hellbent to escape suburbia, I was a bit older than the average immigrant. Michael McClure lived on our block. He and the late Richard Brautigan often walked past our house. We had a free box for clothes on our front porch. There were music posters by Peter Max, concerts at the Fillmore, the Diggers free store, David Smith's Free Clinic, and comics by R. Crumb. Various people came and went in our flat, which had two big fireplaces in the huge front room. In due time, the bottom dwellers (dealers, cultists, and various other creepy folks) began to move into the Haight, people who carried guns and drugs cut with amphetamines. In the spring Felix unexpectedly returned and whatever hope I had that we could revisit a relationship died for good. Looking back now, I believe he had become addicted to harder drugs and wasn't able to connect with his baby daughter. He hung around the Haight for awhile and, as I turned 28 that summer, he was gone, for good this time, destined to see his daughter again only when she came looking for him in Switzerland as a teenager. In August Jane and I made another visit to Corvallis to see my parents and other relatives.
When we returned to Downey Street the Summer of Love was transforming into a dark Fall, and one day as I waited in a tiny restaurant for someone to finish their shift, a young man sat down on the seat next to me at the counter and struck up a conversation. He was polite, rather shy, a musician I soon discovered, and at 20 about eight years younger than I. Over the next month we began to see each other. He played saxophone with one of the many local rock bands, and I liked to go and listen to them. He became father of my second child and today is a well-known jazz and rock musician who tours with a famous band, teaches music, and is part of many smaller musical circles. This time the doctors I saw pushed adoption, not only because I was still unwed but because this was a mixed race relationship (the stigma of which hasn't changed all that much today). And this time I was afraid to tell my parents at all until after the birth even though they had raised me to despise racism. While I was dealing with this development, the counterculture was beginning to shut down in the Haight. Early in 1968, the Grateful Dead pulled out and moved to Marin County across the Golden Gate Bridge in the same month as the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. LBJ pulled out of the presidential race so he wouldn't have to run against Robert Kennedy. Tensions were high between the races in America that spring. In April, a month before my son was born, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated and thousands of people gathered at Civic Center in his memory. There were uprisings in 126 cities across the country.
On May 9, 1968, Joshua weighed in at 10 pounds, 2 ounces after a short six-hour labor at Mt. Zion Hospital, and I brought him home to Downey Street. A month later, a woman friend and her little girl moved with me into a flat back in North Beach. I had called my parents in Oregon and told them they now had a grandson and that summer my parents flew down to meet him. They took it all really well but were understandably concerned. In August I had to move again with my two babies. I stayed briefly with an old friend and then in a flat near the Golden Gate Park panhandle with three other women who needed a roommate. The highlights of the two months spent there were attending an encounter group (all the rage that year) and having the stick shift stolen from my car. I came out to my VW bug one night, jumped in, reached for the shift and discovered there was just a hole in the floor. In the six months since Josh's birth, Robert Kennedy had been assassinated, the Democratic National Convention saw violent clashes between protestors and the Chicago police, and Richard Nixon squeaked into the presidency. The Black Panther movement was in full swing and in Oakland Huey Newton was on trial as I turned 29 years old. The Vietnam War was just past dead center in its history and most of the young men I knew were desperately trying to find ways to avoid the draft, including Josh's father. Through it all, I was so engrossed with motherhood that I floated at the rim of the hubbub like a tree at the edge of a wild bright forest.
By December we had moved into a small apartment on the third floor of an old apartment building on the other side of the panhandle. It was during this winter that I decided to make a great effort to move out of the city. Over the next several months I ran an ad looking for someone to help me move to Marin County across the Golden Gate Bridge where I felt life would be safer. I found a young woman with a two-year-old boy and in April we moved to a big house in San Anselmo. For $225/month it had a converted garage which I chose as my space because of sliding glass doors that looked out on a small back yard. There was a large main floor with three bedrooms, living room, and kitchen, and a fourth large bedroom up a few stairs from the main floor. Before much time had passed we rented out the other bedrooms to members of a local rock band. They were a couple who had two young children and a couple who were expecting a baby and were interracial. And it was in the living room of this house that we all gathered on July 20, 1969, four days before I turned 30, to watch Neil Armstrong, having floated through the deep blue sky for a quarter of a million miles, step delicately onto the fine-grained soil of the moon. 
Comments
Post a Comment