Love & Haight

by mtmynd

Posted to Stories on 2003-08-29 20:32:00

I could have sworn I just entered into some kinda “Twilight Zone”… never have I seen so many happy individuals in one place… live music in the streets, the storefronts wide open, the patchouli drifting out the doors… freaks and troubadors from all over the country, hell – all over the world! I felt at home somehow… comfortable, belonging to ‘something’.

It was the Summer of 1967, and my buddy and me were in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. It was nighttime. The neighborhood was alive.

“The Poster Store”. “Magnolia Thunderpussy”. The cross streets of Haight and Ashbury, people just diggin life… an occasional busload of tourists gauking out the windows at all the freaks… It was a street carnival that ran all day long and most of the night…

I felt a high that I had never reached before.

“Let’s buy some marijuana.” says Book.

“Where from?” I hadn’t a clue. I was a reefer virgin. So was Book.

“Hell, I guess we just ask somebody…” his voice trailing off and his eyes searching the scene for something… anything resembling a connection.

He says, “Let’s ask that guy,” his head nodding towards some guy.

After being in this place… this fantasy world, I thought some pot would be appropriate… a great place to first try the herb for the first time.

“Sure, I can score a bag for ya’. It’ll cost ya ten bills,” says the ‘pusher’… “Give me the money and I’ll go get it…” Sure. But we took a chance. Maybe there was some honesty in the Haight… he could, ya know? Five bucks each, we give it to the stranger and watch him walk down the street to the first corner… right turn and bip! the last we ever saw of him. We waited no more than a half an hour just to make sure, but we knew we had been screwed… you just know these things.

Book spots this happy lookin’ fellow trippin down the street. “Hey, you got any pot for sale?”

“I don’t sell pot.” He looks long into each of us, a sincere smile on his face… “but I’ll turn ya on if you wanna…”

We ended up in Berkeley in the attic of a house firing up our first doobie…. then our second… the hippy was amused… we were high.

We had smoked our first pot. I felt good, damned good. The world was new and the life had taken on a new slant. Was it the pot or was it the Haight? It really didn’t matter. Just to be in this place at this time was all that really mattered at that point.

Telegraph Avenue was another ‘tripped out’ place… an air of peace and unity was also across the Bay. It was all so new and mind-blowing for a guy who had just spent 18 months on Guam whose only thrill was boo-koo booze, period.

I spent the summer of 1967 in the Bay area while the U.S.S. Coral Sea underwent it’s redo – new paint, new deck tiles… a new face for another cruise across the Pacific.

We left for another tour, Fall of 1967… but I left my heart there in the Bay Area. I had to return. I’d been ‘reborn’ that summer, and it wasn’t just the pot… a magic was in the air. San Francisco had cast it’s spell.