Atomic Hula - 1966 Book

If you're going to San Francisco....leave the driving to us....

Having never hopped a 'Hound before, Mike discovered, that a ride on a scenic cruiser can be, and is, an emotional bruiser.and there is no silver aluminum lining. On the oher hand, contrary to your initial reaction to being transported in what amounts to the confines of a hobo stove coffee can, there is sometihng intoxicatng about them, similar to the feeling experienced after consuming and downing a cheap bottle of bum wine. This one shot up the coast highway like a giant silver suppository working it's way up north through California. Night was falling, the sun was sinking, and Mike and Olviia's hearts were racing. Leaving L.A., hey, hey. That in itself filled them with the joy of a person who has just experienced an epiphany of life-changing proportions. The silver bullet bus matched the silver sliver of moon high in the sky over the Pacific Ocean at night.

The bus talk, subdued to murmurs soon enough as one another met one another and would never see one another in another life, ever. Cowboy wannabe's sparked up convo's with old ladies and young men who just wanted to be left alone. Amazingly how people, complete strangers can meet on a bus or a train, not so much on a plane, and disect their lives open as though frogs in a high school science lab. Guts and all. Soon, the talk subsides, the lights dim over the seats one by one, and one lone dark shadow an hour makes it way down the aisle, amid paper cups and plastic wrap, weaving their way to the bathroom in the back, an outhouse powered by diesel rolling along at 65 mph.

Droning silencio...the ho-hum hum of thick rubber tires gripping the roadway, followed by a gentle rocking to-fro motion of the behemoth mo'sheen asphalt mile after concrete mile, mile markers and all, and all is quiet on the far western front. Mike and Olivia snuggled under his leather jacket, used deceptively as a blanket in the backseat, more of curtain in reality to keep out prying, inquisitive, small town eyes of the village gossips, she against him, he against the window, and craddling her while cupping her young soft fleshy breast in his hand, massaging and kneading it as soft bread dough is manipulated, then she breathed contented riding aboard the silver coast ghost resting knowing she was in good hands, good hands indeed she smiled. The ride pursued a course of magnetic compass needle north, up the coast road, past Monterey, where Steinbeck got drunk and wrote and won a Pulitzer prize writing about displaced Okies, dustbowl storms and rivers of immigrants setting sail on the high seas of 66. The two young people were now on a similar voyage to a better life, percieved, he, Tom Joad, she, a gentle Bhudda poet. The coast was swept with wind, bent trees yearning for the horizon twisted like old crones who have lost their hair and their youth, trying to reach out for the past but never within reach. . .

The bus driver was silent all the way. Nary a word, discouraging or otherwise, nor did he look anything like Ralph Kramden. You see, you get this pictures in your head of someone or their profession and there is a mental template that you think everything will fit into, but most of the time doesn't, like an autoplant, you have to cease production, re-think, retool, before you can roll the lines again. Olivia slept, soundly, in a cocoon of protection, as Mike peered out of bus glass into void outside racing past. L.A. receded on the riptide of asphalt as the 'Hound rode the crest of the wave to San Francisco. Mike wondered if it would be more like Honolulu, or L.A. If Doc was here, he'd fill him in. Doc's been everywhere, and in the years to come, Doc was somehow always with Mike in his travels, and he always felt he could feel Doc watching him write when he began to write in earnest. He'd turn around to look, but, no Doc, but Doc was there nonetheless. Always watching, guiding.

The first golden sliver of dawn was rising over the Sierra's to the east. The snowy mountain tops not visible from that distance, but the sun bathed their still snowy peaks in morning glow, just as it did the sandy coastline of California. San Francisco was not too much further north and Olivia began to stir under the jacket, and the stirring was a gentle awakening to a new dawn, in the arms of love as neither had known at the time. Young souls, not lost, not found, but exploring and finding, in their own personal age of discovery of themselves, each other and the world at large and at small.

As the broken day of daybreak broke, San Jose was looming in the foreground. Due north, the compass spun wildly, wobbly, and eventually gently rocked back and forth on it's pivot and settled straight ahead deadhead dead-a-head towards San Francisco. The bus had made air brake stop after stop, station after station, brakes huffing and puffing as the big machine would pull into it's stall, numbered for north and southbound traffic. Sleepy wee small hour passengers would stand up, slowly and sleepily, grab what overhead luggage they had, usually just a small satchel or paper bag with apples that had gotten warm as they were unattended and obviously uneaten during the journey. The bag or satchel may have a half a carton of cigarettes, but no matches so you had to bum a light at every stop from a complete stranger who would eyeball you and assess you as either friend or foe. Eeire shadow bums on bikes riding through the outside of the back of the terminal, looking for unattended baggage to heist, and to bum a cigarette from the smoking crowd huddled by the filthy door to the inside of the depot and a buck or coin or two, spare change is you must, if you can kind sirs and madams, for food of course, not booze needles, no sir, no ma'am.

The stations too, depots, they call them, weren't the Harvey House havens of ham sandwichies of the past. Gone too, were the Harvey Girls of Judy Garland fame, disappearing over the rainbow they went, like female impersonators of the cabaret past. Also missing in action, the gender bending leather jacketed sexy (oo la la) Phillips 66 girls who cruised the concrete of the southwest helping hapless motorists, Amelia adrogynous Earharts circling the asphalt globe. Even the man who wears the Texaco star had faded to a burnt out cinder of nostalgia. In the Fifties by the old city county building in downtown Detroit you got a wrapped sandwich, dried out cheese and ham, a bag of oily chips, flat uncarbonated pop, passed off as carbonated pop, though not, and could even shoot a game of pool with hustlers hustling all around, circling like eight ball buzzards in the green felt desert above a cue ball carcass. There was always someone who talked to themselves incessantly, knowingly, prophetlike, and it made sense to you. What better way to keep the rubber room insane of society's asyslum away from you, then to be the biggest crazy of all. The floors were always sticky too, like flypaper or a spiderweb ready to catch you for edible disposal The water fountains pissed a drink in a warm trickle, and exhausted bus engines, fumed as fumes infiltrated and permeated the depot, Jews, catholics and gypsy's heading for the gas chambers for the final solution. Auswitz? Grehound! It would be good to get the hell off the hellbound Hound once and for all....but there were still miles of bay to go to the route's terminus in San Fran-Freakin-Cisco, Kid.

The bay rolled by, like an old drunk falling down concrete steps, and soon, her majesty majestically welcomed the the wandering waifs into the protective claok of the folds of her satin gown.The bus foreplayed itself around her outer city edges before penetrating her high-rise inner canyons, then finally, orgasmically, the bus went deep into her terminal, and with a sudden shudder, the engine expelled heavy volumns of black smoke, stopped, and wanted to cool down before starting up again. It was diesel afterglow as the driver got off first, lit a smoke and opened the storage on the outside of the bus for passengers to grab their bags, and hoof it hightail like out of there...glad to have two feet on the ground going anywhere but back on the bus.

Mike reached inside the bus belly, grabbed their back packs, hoisted them on, walked into the terminal, bought a pack of cigarettes as they were almost out, and an Orange drink, then walked out into the foggy, but clearing morning of their first city by the bay day. San Francisco was the white washed, Victorian art colony of poets, writers, prophets, painters and other ungodly un-gods. They headed out to Market St., the main arterial of the big beat city, and looked about in every direction in amazement, awe, and amusement. Up the buildings, down the streets, around the corners..a real Yardbirds, Over-Under-Sideways-Down moment. The city was as beautiful as any city can be, only more so. The fog was patchy, but you could see sunlight in the fabric of that breaking patchework quilt with holes punched in it to give a striptease peek of the feather dancer hidden behind the curtains.in a private fantasy booth leered at by dockworkers with coats over their laps who've been in the shipping holds too long coming down with hangovers, a hangover from breakfast at the little bar on the wharf. in an area they called the "fish docks."

Spanning the waters, and the centuries from and since the city was called Yerba Buena, (It means "Good Herb", by the way, and in the Sixties, make that plural and good herbs it was, and lots of it!) was Oakland. Hiding out in the literary bar rooms of Jack London, next door to cinder block black holes in the walls of Hells Angels, and the lair of the pacing panther of black. The Bay Bridge was an erector set of heavy metal steel girders, if it were human, it would have powerful biceps and a no-nonsense take no prisoners of war attititude when it came to traffic. Move them along on upper and lower decks, blood flowing into the heart and back out again, eastbay to peninsula, and back again, over the bay stretched like silly putty in a sea swarming with tail-lights like little fish feeding on kelp, all not moving in step-on-the-brakes you-aint-goin' no where mode, turning a vein of fluid traffic into a living parking lot as thick as plasma, inching along to go to work, go back home, and die eventually, with most life spent in traffic jams listening to Stefan Ponik on KSAN radio. Oakland, grit and grime and crime.

On the other side of the socio-political and geographic compass point, there goes, but for the grace of God, jaunty Marin County. The sleepy eyed village of saucy Sausalito with her rhapsody of bohemian houseboats, artful ant colonies and shhhh quiet roads that meander in the truest sense as far as a road can meander without getting caught under the sheets doing it all alone in the dark. north, across the elegant span of the Golden Gate, the goddess of bridges, and caused engineering penis envy among all the engineers, as her long span made them masturbate to newly discovered equations of science. Her orange brilliance, and reddish glow applied to her iron cheeks, ands well as her bends and curves, as not so subtle as the bends and curves on Jane Mansfield, and what a field she was for a man.

Even the traffic nuances of noise were different from thsoe of southern California, where it was frenetic with short circuits, yet in the acme north of California's golden mane, it was gently rolliing like two bodies in a waterbed in heat, and in motion, going up hills and down hills, as you topped a comcrete peak and began a motorized descent, the bay laid out k.o.'d down for the count on the mat in front of you, a geogrpahic paint by numbers. They walked across the busy thoroughfare of Market Street and past a trolley car station where tourists lined up, an Upton Sinclair portrait of Chicago packing houses at the turn of the century, where imimigrants toil in filth, livestock blood and brains, but these were vacationers, this time waiting to board the ultimate symbol of the city, it's trolley, it's tourist tiara. IN the distance there was Lombard Street, a plumbers snake of a street, making it's way down the automotive tobaggon hill, one way away from heaven, downward towards the direction of hell, past garden courtyards, sweet, fragrant gardens wafting as you weaved on a dowward spiral to the base and eject somewhere near North Beach. Coit Tower standing phallically erect, from any position in the city. Originally designed to be the nozzle of a fire hose in honor of a certain Ms. Coit who would follow fire-trucks through the city, a firefighter groupie if ever there was, seems the old dame died and devoted an amount of cash outlay for a tribute to herself, and her passion for fire fighting. The ultimate design came out look more like a firemans penis that his hose nozzle.

LA had a gasoline and oil smell to hit, along with a smoggy smugness to it. San Francisco, on the other hand, had marked it's neighborhoods with the scents of foods. Chinatown, Tong-town,Chinese for Chinatown, Mexi in the Mission District, Korean and Japanese in their quadrants, bbq in the Filmore and of course, the delightful dago scents of North Beach. The North Beach District was beats, boobs and booze. Tit's and poetry mingled with the prose of topless dancers who performed their own kind of literary ass art with thongs disappearing in their backsides and tassles sparkling like the Fourth of July pink and brown, nipples large and small, each one dancing tirelessly, erotically and with a faint smile on their faces and fainter traces of beaded sweat, as sweet as honey, running down thier upper inner thighs, a sensuous waterfall cascading in rivulets from a topless tropical forest. Daytime uppers and nighttime downers.North Beach was also home to Lenny the Bruce, a real fuckin' Father Flotski, doing his time at the "i" with a side order of onions, dressed in drag, as he was in the navy to get a discharge during the big one before a Jewish Billy the Kid shot down and dead the Masked Man and poor Lenny himself, on a bathroom floor in August of 1966. Who said it? "Now that's obscene."

San Francisco's sensory overload was dizzying, almost as much as the Eli Wallach scene in "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" running in circles in the cemetary to locate the grave of Arch Stanton, and therefore, the buried gold before Blondie and Angel Eyes did. The bay sparkled brilliantly as the sun assumed it's lofty place in the sky above all else on it's hydrogen powered solar throne. As it rose, it drew arching angles, as it did, it deepened the hues of the waters blues and greens. Hand in hand, heart in heart, Mike and Olivia float-walked along the Embarcadero, past the Ferry Building and it's pinacled clockworks ,and they inhaled deep the salt air, listening to the music of gulls on the wing, trolleys on the tracks, clanging bells and clacking along.Two-wheeled people on bicycles zipped by, silent ghosts, apparitions that passed thorugh your body, leaving a trail of chills and elation at the same time, and the air was filled like an old paper bag with the smells of sourdough bread, chacolate, sausages, fish, kelp and marine oil and gasoline mixtures.

There were parks with flying kites in them with stings held fast in little hands. One park, the Washington Square park, had music, people lying on blankets, harmonica's and guitars playing and people in animated conversations. The big church across from the park looked over everything protectively, a benevolent dago old world Gadfather, and as it was a Sunday morning, parishioners were exiting the church through large, massive wooden doors, newly sanctified, confessed and communioned for another week. A religious tune-up by catholic mechanics who hoist you up on the rack and inquisitively pry into your sinful deeds of the week of the weak, checking to make sure your brakes are in good working order to avoid a head-on crash with mortal sin...venials are ok, minor damage, but mortals..look at the word itself...

They spent the day exploring, places like Fishermens Wharf and decided that night to sleep on the beach at the marina behind large rocks where they wouldn't be noticed. Camping out in the city is no different than tossing a sleeping bag out in the forest. They had a messkit, plenty of matches and there was plenty of kindling about for a small fire that wouldn't attract attention, or at least not a lot of it. So as the day headed for it's demise, and the night would take over they set about setting up camp on the beach on the bay to watch the sunset set, the stars appear in the sky overhead one by one, and the city itself with it's diamond lights coming on the darker it got, it's own form of stars twinkling, then the dance of Aphrodite as the fog enveloped the city protectively at the end of the day.

Soon the streets around the marina quieted, while it picked up in the Tenderloin, Mission and North Beach, far removed from the little campsite. The bars were awakening, the flesh was tempting, the booze was flowing, and electricity ran rampant through the streets. Mike and Olivia settled back on the beach agains the largest rock, began their little campfire to worm them and fix a pot of beans and rice, along with green tea and a slab of sourdough bread they had bought earlier.

Tonite they would eat, make love in the fog, and sleep as children do. Tomorrow, they would awaken, pack up and hit the beach...North Beach, where the beat goes on with offbeat poetry howling at the heels of Ginsberg...all ready now to herald in the tie-dyed Sixties that was about to emerge and overpower and meld with the beat generation. beatniks battening down the hatches in North Beach as the Hipsters of the Haight were about to mutiny and take over the ship...sailing it into the waters of protest, LSD and Vietnam.

The Atomic Hula - 1966

Chapter Two

North Beach is a bitch in heat, Old Italiano's and new bohemians make up the mix and sit at tables on the street and at smaller tables inside the bars. like Vesuvio's, across the alley from the beat bookstore illuminated by the lights of the city. The bards of Barbary held forth with a Virgil like vigilance, and the coast was cleared. Setting sail on liteary seas, Columbus discovered yet another Avenue of exploration named in his honor. The writers circled the waters off bar shores, sharks waiting to attack words and mores. Philosphers all, Pliny, Socrates, and Testicles, Huey, Dewey and Louie, and of course, Larry, Moe and Curly. We humans rather fancy our own importance, eh?

Kerouac got drunk here while marooned on the beach, wrote about her as the captor of rapture, and of the social mutiny of the crew of the beat generation, as they rose their mighty middle finger at the heavy as lead air post-war opulence, plenty, and authority of those semi-fabulous Eisenhowitzer nifty Fifties and trying to act out Gorgeous George and tried to body slam and krush Kruschev and Dennis the Red Menace and thus and hence, avoid armed conflict which would lead to a planetary warehouse full of dead red's and capitalists alike, and those not to blame, not with religion or politics, but just want to be left alone in peace and solace in yurts and alleys. Modern day Bedouins looking only for waterholes and an oasis to strip and bathe with maidens.

The revolution of the rucksack was already in rocking motion, fueled by "On the Road" and "Dharmabums", yet, this new generation of boomers was beginning to flower to power, fueled by the Kerouac Gospel set forth as ten commandments in Jack's books, looking for salvation in his words, and the key to paradise, Sal, but now these young disciples, sheep being led to a slaughter, were being kicked out of the temple by Jesus Jack. "Find your own hero's" he admonished and began his own personal Dunkirk, retreating from his friends, moved back with Memere in the east, embraced Catholicism once again, beame a Republican (ala Nixon, McCarthy & Bush) and supported the Vietnam war, before he drank himself to death at 47 in 1969. The rucksackians, oblivious to the change in their hero, embraced in his abscense instead the satellites of that previous generation...Ginsberg, Corso, Ferlinghetti, et al. In later years when Mike was writing about his own days "on the road" he remembered that with three years on the road under his own belt, he had not even heard of Kerouac until later that year in 1966 when he finally picked up a battered paperback copy of the Jacks tome, so when he was writing about it in the Peyote Coyote and the Atomic Hula, he was living his own life, and not vicariously through someone else of near mythical stature.

Each generation has it's "voice"...F. Scott Fitzgerald for his, Huxley, London, Poe, Mailer, Joyce, others for theirs respectively. The new voice was the merry prankster Kesey, who along with Neal Cassidy, Jacks hero in the third person. and others flew over the cuckoo's nest and went just a little bit further than the beats. along for the ride was a whole new generation, including Mike and Olivia. They awoke to a foggy morning, with waves lapping gently on shore. Mike got up, splashed salt wqter from the bay on his face and wet his hair before starting a small kindling fire for the morning tea to go with the last of the sourdough to start their day before they headed off to North Beach to establish their base camp in San Francisco.

The fog and dew left a thick layer of moisture on their sleeping bags, and they wanted to dry them off before rolling them up, but that would take all day, so they just put them over them, royal robes of nylon to face the air and elements to dry out before they rotted over time being exposed in that manner. It was a wonderful walk to Columbus Avenue. Wherever you looked Coit Tower was a beckoning beacon on the hill, and the tiara of the Golden Gate Bridge always visible from the opposite direction. The gulls marked their territory with inhuman laugh-cries, and the trolley bells let you know which way was landward. It was a sensory compass the likes of which Mike had never felt or experienced before. North, south, east, west, all clear now, without compass or pocketwatch to mark the direction. James Fennimore Cooper would have had a field day writing about this. Mike was now the pathfinder and the path led straight into a riotous garden of radicalism, LSD, sex and protest, although no one was protesting the sex, or the drugs..just war, among other things, check the menu of civil and human rights, and choose one from column A and one or two from column B. No eggroll....

They cut past Safeway and old Fort Mason, making their way in the damp fog that held the promise of warm sunshine, even though still just early spring in San Francisco. It was also amazing how just a little tea and bread in the morning will keep you going, and moderate bits and bites to eat throughout the day. No midwestern by the numbers by the clock meal times where you had to clean the plate because people were starving in China, on a five year plan no doubt with a Russian accent. The wharf of fishermen was also coming to early morning life with stalls opening to fill with marine cuisine for the tourist and local alike later in the day. Giftshops, still to early open, were waiting at the starting gate, and busy people with ties, brown hard shoes and briefcases were descending on the city, locusts of big and small business to be absorbed in tall buildings and fastned securely to their seat in a cubicle no larger than a jail cell in old cockroach Mexico.

Olivia was getting concerned. L.A. was second nature to her, glitzed and glammed, an architectural falsie, but, San Francisco was as real as a cheerleaders breasts. San Fran, Frisy Frisco had a different scent about her altogether, more of a natural pubic musk, the kind that is produced right after sex, and Olivia, didn't quite know what to make of it. L.A. fit her like a pair of cheap capri's and a form fitting bra, but Lady Frisco, ah, she was different. She left you bra-less and flawless, naked and exposed to the public.

Olivia wanted a spare tire in her trunk for this trip, as a backup for escape, escape back down south to the warmth and smog of L.A. and that, amigo would cost money. "How much money do we have left?" she asked as a guest would ask the host to repeat the question on a television game show. "Well, let's see, Olivia from Los Angeles. We'll just have to fine out, sooooo, Mike how much money do you and Olivia have left? Remember now, answer wrong and the washer and dryer will go to our other contestants and you'll end up back in Detroit, right where you started from, so, please, answer carefully," said Jack Barry, and Mike wasn't sure as he hadn't counted it but reached into his pocket and pulled out a wad of wet bills, dewy, and when the count was done, it added up to exactly "$24.67,"

They had saved as much as they could and for two street kids, that was a lot of money. The 'Hound was rabid, but hadn't eaten them alive, tea and bread cost next to nothing, and besides, you could always find a way to make money on the streets. Olivia figured she could hustle if they really got desperate, Dutchess had put her to work before and showed her how to whore, but the thought of her whoring was not in the picture for Mike. Jailbait pussy was worth it's weight in public and pubic gold, but not this time. He'd sold himself in the past, and wasn't about to see her make the same move. Both had been passed around in the past like cheap bottles of bum wine with screw tops anyway, not even plugged wiith a fine Portuguese cork.

The day was promising to be bright with light from sun and life. Mickey and Olivia walked back to North Beach and past the big baroque church, or as he heard later in life, "If it ain't baroque don't fix it!" Yesterday, it was Sunday and bells were tolling away as a high mass ended and the faithful faithfully emerged from the large carved wooden doors that opened out to the street and overlooked the tiny patch of park that welcomed the parishioners view. Large dago's of the mostly Italian congregation walked out with wives and daughters in lace dresses, white gloves, and hats and see through veils, typical Catholic camoflauge to hid the sins from God's eye.

But today was Monday, and it was a normal workday in San Francisco, so Mike and Olivia walked over into the park and sat on the warming grass, now free from the cold morning dew and let the sun bake their eyelids and rejuvenate them while across the part, a poet read aloud from a piece he had created probably the night before in some starving garret in Paris on the Left Bank, only it was not in Paris at all, but here in America where even in the land of the richest nation on earth, poets and artists still have the freedom to be hungry even amidst the plenty. The poet spoke and flowers flowed from his mouth, then the words formed rainbows in Mikes imagination. The words, the words. They always stuck with him and later as a writer Mike would tell of a dream sequence based on a trip to a small Mexican village in search of drugs, and in the dream, words fell from a pinata, forming sentences, paragraphs, and thoughts, all based on the memory of that poet in the park in San Francisco on a warm spring morning across from the church around the corner from the deli with sausages and cheese and wonderful sourdough bread.

Soon a flute player joined in on a solo at the other end of the small park, and on the park bench along the back secion, an old beat bum from the slum grumbled loudly as he pulled his worn blanket over his head to block out the sound more than the cold. Mike got up first, held Olivia's hand to help her up and off they went to Columbus Ave where the beret scene was in full swing with neo-beats and wanna-beats not beating around the bush with the mannequin poses they were arranged in, as though in a bas relief still scene suitable for hanging. The old beats had moved on, the new not so beats moved in, and looked silly. Berets are from the French only!

Cutting through the Beach, they ended up in Chinatown with it's tongs and wongs and Chinese songs played on lute like instruments. In Hawaii, Mike had gotten his fill of drums and ukelele's, now, deja sort of vu it was a uke and lute like hybrid that was serenading him as he walked past the shops with chickens, paper lanterns, finger puzzles, umbrellas with scenes of swans painted on them, cages with colorful birds from paradise somewhere vegetable stands, banks from the old world of Asia with secretive doors and small restaraurants with real food for real Chinese. Wafts of foo young and young foo, noodles from the factory in the alley and of course, the kookie fortune cookie, here, lookie, look see future. There was also the obligatory Chinese laundry, no tickee no washee, which are as famous as the Chinese opium den used to be in the Old West and the far-out East.

. As they sat back in the park after their morning as tourists, they overheard another pair of young lovers talking about a place they called the Haight. Scary sounding name, this Hate, but as they listened longer to the conversation the other couple were discussing their new apartment in this "Haight" area that they would be moving into and how cheap it was. Mike thought, maybe now he and Olivia could get off the streets and into an apartment. He would probably have to sell marijuana again, but wasn't sure if it was a popular thing to do in San Francisco. The apartments were dirt cheap, $15 a week for one room and Mike could make that and more in a day selling weed, or in a week panhandling.

Mike leaned back and introduced himself to the couple and they talked about the Haight in terms of art, culture, literature, music and yes, dope, and lots of it along with cheap living. They had poster shops, incense coming from just about every window, and a huge park where people gathered on weekends in small groups to play guitars, flutes, (those damn flutes again) and just enjoying an uncrowded alternative existence. Mike was beginning to keep his journal on a daily basis now, so if there were other writers around he would have others to share ideas with. It sounded nice and quiet, a welcome change after years in Honolulu and L.A. hustling the streets for every bite to eat. It wasn't all bad though, as he would say later in life, "I'll do anything at least once, more if I like it."....and that he did too. Just take the 10 North Judah bus to the Haight, when it stops, just walk downhill on the street a couple of blocks and there it is. Can't miss it.

So they headed out to find the bus stop that would take them to the Haight district, but before they did, Mike bought Olivia a small cheap necklace at an outdoor merchants stall. It was a blue stone on a leather necklace, and it was simple and as beautiful as Olivia was inside and out. It was a symbol of their new life together, that would soon have them going their separate ways. She, south to become a heroin addict in a few years in L.A., and he forward on a magic carpet ride through the most politically turbulent adn drug filled years of the Sixites.

The Atomic Hula - 1966

Chapter Three

The croaking bus lumbered through the veins of the city past skyscrapers and Victorian neighborhoods. Olivia was hypnotized by the colors of the window trim. "Look at that one. Purple window trim and the door is the really nice green, dark green that I like." Mike liked that color too as that was the color of Olivias eyes set into her near Mediterreanen coloring of her skin, with two large green pools to stare into and drown in. The city had a scent and an air about it, no doubt about it, and they were drinking it in like two kids on a hot day downing ice cold Kool-aid. The bus made its many stops and when it came to the Haight, the driver announced the stop and Mike, Olivia and two others stepped off and without knowing it entered the world beyond the looking glass, to lay his head down on a surrealistic pillow.

They started to walk down the hill a few blocks and could see the main street below as it had traffic going in both directions and appeared to be the busiest street around the area. He checked the street signs as they headed down Ashbury Street to it's junction as a needle going into a junkies arm at Haight. Not Hate, as he had thought, as they both had thought, and he and both of them were wrong. Haight, eh? Ya gotta love it. As they hit Haight and hung a west coastie left the panoramo of the street unfolded before them. Mike had let his hair grow and had usually stood out, but here, hair was everywhere, and he didn't stand out anymore but fit in, the last piece of the jigsaw puzzle completing the picture of Notre Dame cathedral.

One of the first people Mike met on the street was literally literary, and he met him by walking smack into him. It was the writer Richard Brautigan. Tall and lanky, with funny hat, he loomed over the midwest human projectile and asked, "Are you ok?" with a whimsical smile on his face. Mike had seen him before on a book jacket and recognized him immediately. 'Yeah, sure. Wow, are you Mr. Brautigan? Man, I stole one of your books from a library once, "The Confederate General," I mean I read one of them from the library, I just forgot to return it is all. Wow, I can't believe it," Brautigan laughed and thanked him for his literary endeavors. "Now, you take care," Brautigan said as he bounced down the street, with a writers gait, a great writer, and a great gait, Mike thought to himself. "Wow, ain't that a bitch. Fuckin' Brautigan, right here on the street. I can't believe that. He always remembered Brautigan with elfen hat and bouncing gait and mentioned him numerous times in his works, along with Doc Yucatan, another major influence in his life. Probably why he took up trout fishing in later years in Northern Michigan, the land of Hemmingway before Ernesto ate a shotgun for the breakfast of Vonnegut champions.

Later on Mike would see other "luminaries" on the street and meet some of them but not all. John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Geaorge Harrison, Roger McGuinn, Eric Burdon, Ashliegh Brilliant, along with the local bands playing at the Fillmore and in the park. The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and Big Brother, Country Joe, Santana and others. There was that curious bus that only went further and the Diggers who fed and clothed the neighborhood absolutely free of charge, utopian usurpers to the crown in mime makeup. Hells Angels and Motorcycle Ritchies, coyotes named Peter, magic men, mad men, and mayhem. Runaways, speed freaks, LSD, mescaline, grass, lava lamps, patchouli incense, the Psychedelic Shoppe, Tracy Donuts, 1090 Page Street, the Panhandle, Golden Gate Park, Park Station Cop Shop, mellow yellow, purple hazed and double dazed days dazed in a daze. There was free food, a free store, a free clinic, free sex, free love, free crashpads, and freedom period. The Family Dog was man's best friend, and Bill was no graham cracker.

The park filled on Sunday's for music, bubbles, kites and drugs. Bare chested and bare breasted the young of the day were mere prey for vultures who would circle around on the periphery waiting to strike, but this was 1966. The crowds hadn't arrived yet, the so-called hippies as the newspapers called them. Just as the beats before the hipsters had to have their genus of species carved in newsprint before it was final. Categorization is humankinds frailty. If it's not labelled, it can't be trusted, or understood. Humankind has to remove all mystery and awe, before it can accept and consume an idea. The Haight Ashbury flew directly in the face of that and worshipped mystery and the unexplained joy of life.

They continued on their journey down the street and up the Haight. An old neighborhood that had seen better days decades ago, but now, tawdry, old and in the way. The paint was peeling from the old Victorian homes, now apartments, like cheap lipstick and too much eye-liner on an old whore who smelt of too much perfume, the kind an old aunt wears when she comes for holidays. The buildings had many coats of paint on them, the sidewalks were cracked in places, and the stains of spilled pop or beer stained the concrete squares, a baptism of holy carbonated alcohol. Probably old chewing gum too, fossilized for posterity until discovered by archeo's and ologists in the future who can read the past with tea leaves in a Japanese cup in 7 stages.

The street wasn't yet crowded with wannabe's and neverwillbe's as it ulitimately would be in '67. The pseudo-hip and neo-beats falling from the sky like broken shards of office windows from collapsing skyscrapers, impaling the street culture below and enveloping everything in a cloud of grey dust, smoke, bricks and mortor, steel and then, more glass. In 1966, the Haight was more communal and quiet with art mostly, and dope, lots of both. Musicians practiced in hidden Victorian apartments, artists painted and mimes acted out on the street. It was life as theater and theater as life, lines blurred pleasantly and the senses weren't yet under siege as they would be the following summer. The summer of love....love hurts.

Sitting on the concrete like rows of ancient stone guardians ready to commit statuary rape on infidels, were field jacketed young faces, some fresh, some getting aged and stale begged for alms for the poor, a real Hunchback of Notre Dame scene, beggars and jesters, palms out, plaintive cries of "Spare change? Spare change?" It was the money mantra of the pedestrian panhandler in an excruciating effort to obtain a flow of income for food, rent, drugs, booze, sex, all of the above for the below legal aged blue eyed former innocents formerly from the midwest and points rectangular and black and white and in neat little square boxes stacked neatly in the garage on the shelf along with tools, toys and Turtle Wax cans. Mike had some loose change and began handing it to the unbroken line until the change had run out and bills are all that were left. Besides, he and Olivia had to eat too so Mike learned that day, there is no such thing as "spare" change. It's like having two people drowning in the ocean and only one life preserver. The laws of preservation prevail as always.

The Free Speech movement had already been underway in Berkeley with Mario Savio salvo's being lobbed at the establishment as Lenny Bruce fragmentation grenades. Vietnam was ramping up and draftcards were starting to burn in trash barrels in protest, and women were burning bra's in an acclaimed battle for equal rights led by ex-Playboy bunnies free from Hef's hutch. Breasts and nipples now free to expose the underlying male sexism of western culture, but also exposing themselves much to the joy of male voyeurism. "Yep, these women have a right to equal pay, equal status, hell they can even vote now and drink in saloons. Being a progressive sort myself, I also approve of their right to bare their supple breasts at anytime. I dunno, maybe it's just a policitally correct free peep show. Goddam, aint America great! A battlaion of boobs marching on Washington! Damn right I believe in equality! Now, Burn Bra's, Baby, Burn!"

Mike and Olivia were oblivious to all the politics swirling around them like a stew. The tumultuous times would soon catch up with both of them, albeit in different ways, but for now.... This was also the period that Mike began writing furiously in his daily journal, and without realizing was documenting the times from his own personal perspective without even realizing it. Later it would culminate in his first book, "The Roadhead Chronicles" where the vivid realities would take the shape of words and the Woodstock Nation of peace and love would degenerate into bloody Altamont and peaceful protest would end with a hail of National Guard bullets at Kent State leaving a generation in shock. Vietnam would end, but with 50,000 young Americans dead, and soon the social involvement of the Sixties would end with the birth of the digital age and the assault of cable, video games, internet, and cell phones, and the death of effective social activism.

But...for now...there were more pressing problems...where to get some food to eat and where to sleep for the night.

The Atomic Hula - 1966

Chapter Four

The day had them spent, so much human spare change tossed into the collection plate. Money was spent too, farthings and dinars and dollars, seeds and stems, and on top of that the warmth of the Pacific coast sun was dimming, beginning it's decent descent underground, far below the streets of the horizon, where it is dark and dead cold, where the invisible subways run on electric tracks and brakemen if not careful, touch the third rail, light up gaily as a flesh and blood Christmas tree on the holidays, ignite into a pus ball of magnesium blinding incinerating white light and disappear in a puff of smoke.

Even Eskimo's and Innuit knew it, that it would be cold tonight as it was last night, breaking gentle brittle bones and freezing hard whole villages made of ice with lamps aglow from the oil of whales, as the fog rolled in on cue across the Golden Gate in a shrouded parade of giants and dwarves leadng a contingent of sideshow freaks in a sea of fluffy white, cotton candy from a Pacific coast big top circus waiting to envelope her children for the night, to hide the world they inhabited and to hide what they do in the dark from prying eyes and tsk tsk disdainment. They walked into a poster shop, lured by the strains of strange far off the beaten path eastern music to sit among the sitars and Satyrs of the hip, inhaling giant Catholic lungfull's of the churches incessant incense where inside there stood a gentle bearded sage behind a retail counter, that could have been an altar in another time and world described by the scribe Pericles. The sage was surrounded by a Sistine ceiling and a Berlin wall of pulsating posters that glowed in the dark, adorned with colorful imagery of buffalos and bhuddas. A beaded curtain, a portal really, opened in the back to a blacklight lit room laden with lava lamps moving the mind along in a psychedeilic Vesuvian flow, and the droning mantra din of sitars raising the virgins to dance in melancholia as twing twang emerged from a stylus on a vinyl race track located on an old record player. Inside the room behind the beads, on the floor were people sitting, leaning into each other, staring and not speaking. Mike and Olivia sat down in an open area and leaning into each other, exhausted, fell asleep and drifted off led by the muse of the music, the lamps, the incense and each others scent into a stroboscopic dream.

When they awakend around six p.m. the room was almost empty. The sage peered in and asked if they had just gotten to town. They, answering in the affirmative, he, handing each of them a hunk of bread from a large flying saucer of a mound of sourdough. San Francisco excels in sourdough, chocolate and denim. "Thanks," Mike said hungrily with much gratitude. Never talk with your mouth full, unless your broke and starving. Abolishing admonishments in favor of nourishment, Mike decided that protocal be damned. "Where you kids from," inquired the sage or seer, not sure which yet. "Hard to say anymore," Mike offered, "but we just got into town yesterday and slept on the beach, but heard about this place so wanted to see what it was all about. Does everybody just sleep on the streets or the beach here? This is a strange place, I mean, I don't mean, I mean to say, it's strange in a bad way, but strange in a, well strange, but nice way. I know that isn't making any sense at all, but do you follow?" The seer appeared seerlike and looked sagely, if such a look exists, and smiled. "Yes, it is strange, but wait, it only gets stranger, but as you say, strange in a nice way, an undefinable way. Jello is strange, don't you think, much more so than tapioca or fruit from the tropics, strange things, like pomegranates and plaintain fried in a plantain pan or mangoes from mangrove swamps, I think at least they come from mangrove swamps, or maybe it's mangroove, now that is groovy man," he said, and then contimued the thread of thought. "You may get strange too but thats a natural evolution that you can't fight. If you're looking for a place to stay there are a lot of crash pads around that will take you in for a night. maybe two-three, and there's free store. They have anything, well, most things you'll need, like books, clothing, cigarettes, anything you need. They also have a bulletin board with listings of places to stay, and the donut shop is loaded with cheap eats, open 24 hours and has a jukebox, so maybe that will help get your compass bearings set. Theres also a newspaper just started up in spring called the San Francisco Oracle, right here out of the Haight, by a guy named Cohen, Allen Cohen, got some help from the Thelin brothers and that Monkee, Tork or something like that, financed him a bit to keep him going. Anyway, you can get a couple of copies for free to build a stake, buy more and sell them and build some cash, more than that spare change shit. You should check it out. The tourists and the locals buy it...it's not your normal newspaper. It comes from the heart and the art of the soul,"

They thanked him for the information and the chance to rest. This would not be the last time they fell from the sky and crash landed behind the beaded curtain. "What's behind the beaded curtain Johnny?" It was a psychedelic game show, a quiz show, and no one, absolutely no one, anyone, knew the answer, nor cared. The answers didn't matter. It was the questions. They were the keys to the inner kingdom. The present alone was of value and counted as taxmen of old counted gold coins as tribute from peasants to royal gentry, until the gentry were gently (in revolution, the term "gently" is all relative, don't you think?) overthrown and murdered in dark basements of old castles. The past, sat with a Bhudda stance, in Bhudda silence, a rusted out Bhudda car in a Colorado field with parables to tell and fabled songs to sing as they keep silent rusted watch over the east-west, north-south highways shooting for the rest stop of enlightenment, and another tank of gas.. and the future? It hadn't decided to exist yet, so it could be a custom tailored envisionment, cut to fit like a Chinese suit in Hong Kong, and just as shiny, the kind bankers and pimps used to like to wear in the suburban 1950's while crowning themselves with Sinatra hats with a little bands holding a decorative feather, and the band circled the brim, rings of Saturn with moons and debris..

Mike would unwind at the Psychedelic Shop on numerous ocassions, a taughtly wound watch mechanism at times, tick tocking there to rest with Olivia, until Olivia flew south by bus and back to LA. Mike decided to remain and opted to stay and write, and the two young lovers eventually parted like the Red Sea landing on opposite shores. But for now, they were one intermingled inter-urban illusion floating free in a mandala, fused, sand hit by lightning, glass and fulgerites, joined at the hip in the land of the hipsters. Haight Street itself was an arterial flow of abject abstraction, not objectionable in the least, at the most, it was a small whisp of smoke from the campfire of time that would soon burn out altogether. Art, music, literature, street theater, mimes and jugglers. A psychedelic circus under a pharmacologial big top with big tabs and bigger pills and monster joints and mescaline, peyote and acid trips, lightly fantastic with fantastico fantasy's turned inside out into realities. It had a "Fantasia-esque" surreal appeal to Mike that raced through his psyche, after highjacking it at gun point, an addiction of non-conformity that hailed him like a tuxeo'd taxi in a rainy crowded night after the carnival and freak shows at Coney Island, and the ladies and gents were making their way home from the Great White Way. There was an air of bizarre individuality with a communal lisp to it's voice, and MIke was counting on that voice to find them a place to sleep for the night, and not outdoors as the fog can freeze you to your core.

As they walked down the street one of the many pharmacological mobile merchants approached them about scoring some acid and speed. The combination was too much to refuse so they forked over the money and scored two tabs of acid and four hits of speed. What the hell, it was almost dinner time, well past dinner time in suburbia in fact, seven pm in fact, so they dropped the acid and went into the donut shop they had heard about. It was wafer thin and the counter was lined with cheap vinyl clad stools on silver pedestals and you could barely walk between the stools and the wall without bumping into someone or something. In the back of shop, along the right side corner was a jukebox, Bob Dylan playing for a quarter, and everyone did agree...everyone must get stoned and were and then some, and as you veered to the physical and political left of the jukebox, (jukeboxes are notorious bolsheviks) along the wall it went straight again to the bathrooms and a backdoor outside where drug deals were made in the narco shade of night. The acid they dropped earlier, the strawberry kind, later sunshine bursts and double domes of purple haze would embrace them, but the current tab, looking like a St. Joseph aspirin, but with more kick than a katholic took hold, so Mike and Olivia decided to come back later and spend the night there drinking coffee, tripping and taking speed until dawn and then would figure it out from there. For now...the acid carried them along the glistening streets of the Haight, small puddles relecting stars, moon and neon joining hands, many hands, many colors, many explanations. The world was a fish-eye lens projection, the faces took on a topographical look, and your own eyes looked down from above watching you watch them, a trick with mirrors no doubt, mass relection hallucination.

Along with the donut stay-awake-motel, they would spend a good deal of time sleeping in the Panhandle at the end of Ashbury Street and in the bushes of Golden Gate Park, until Mike figured out a way to become landed gentry and eventually rent an apartment at the corner of ground zero and the counterculture at Haight and Ashbury in a second floor walk up flop flat above a bar. The crash pads were another story altogether. When new arrivals stepped off the rucksack boat from the Easter Europe of conservative america, they mustered and piled though the imaginary Ellis Island in Haight Ashbury, Polish peasants free from pogroms to find the free store, and listings of places where you could trip or sleep or both. One of the prominent ones was on Page Street and it wasn't unusual to find people crashed out in the foyer, lining the steps on a verticle version of high steppin' bunk beds. In the basement, the daunting Dante's Inferno of junkies mainlining in the Shooting Gallery, and there was always a pot of stew or some type of food brewing laced with acid and speed, free for the psyche taking. Stained mattresses from previous explorers lined the floor along the walls and couples merely rock n' rolled and balled until the cows came home and left their own juice as sexual grafitti to mingle with the sex of the past, giving it continuing life as the mattress fed itself from the human passions that let loose and jettisoned love and lust.

One night after Olivia had left San Francisco two months after arriving, Mike had met Carol, a wild eyed junkette. Nervous and twitching but blonde and bold, she met Mike in the Panhandle in the afternoon and wanted to know where she could cop a fix and get off the streets. Mike the tour guide took her to Page Street and while she shot up he downed a tab of mescaline waiting for later to profer the three joints he had in his pocket. Later that night there was a ruckas he had never experienced before when Page Street became the Alamo, circled by Santa Ana's Hells Angels. It turns out Carol was one of their "old ladies" and had run off from them having enough. Someone had seen her on the streets earlier with a young man, yep, Mike, and traced her to Page street and were getting ready to square off with the squatters and the occupants of the apartments who also had guns. The news spread to the basement of what was going on and Carol fessed up to Mike about the situation. This could be bad, he thought. Real bad. Instead he was so loaded he knew the way to escape from Fort Apache and took her up to the attic. They were alone and with pending doom below began to make love just as the mescaline was kicking in and her rush on speed was full throttle.

Soon it was quiet as the Park Station police had heard about the gathering and sent squad cars there and the Angels flew off to Harley Valhalla or wherever it is they go but decided to enter the building to check for i.d.s and runaways and all things underage. They rousted the foyer and then the basement and knocked on doors. Mike told Carol to follow him and they left out of the attic window to the roof and jumped the small space to the next roof which had a fire escape in back and crawled down it until they hit concrete and ran like hell to the park where they spent the night in the shrubs and bushes. Sunrise in fog, the next day, Carol said she would go back to her "old man" and just say she was wired and didn't know where she was. She kissed Mike goodbye and walked to Haight to the pizza parlor where Papa Doc and the other Angels held court.

Just prior to the Oh, Carol incident, after two months of sleeping here and there and everywhere, Olivia wanted to go back home. By this time Mike was selling drugs, which were cheap and plentiful and had some money on him saved and took Olivia to the bus station and got her a ticket and made sure she got on the Hound with spare money and some food snacks in a paper bag to hold her until she reached L.A. where Dutchess would be waiting for her to take her under her wing once again. Thank god for collect phone calls. As the bus pulled away Mike knew a part of his life was diesling down the coast highway and he was once again alone. He too was getting tired of living on the streets and in between furiously writing in his journal, landed a part-time job to write for one of the underground weeklies in the area. News from the Haight and that sort of thing that paid $10 a week. That and selling drugs began to add up and he even opened a Bank of America savings account, how establishment is that, and soon had enough saved up for a month in a ratty apartment. He intended to move in, have a cushion of money to carry him and continue earning on the streets to keep the economic flow going. He was about to become the psychedelic lord of the manor and as a "vet" of the Haight also felt it his obligation to help other new arrivals with young, fresh faces filled with fear and joy at the sametime of the unknown. He would arrange for them to get food and shelter, or at least tell them where they could. They in turn when fortunes turned around do the same...and so it goes as Linda Ellerbee would say.

The little flat was up a flight of stairs above a bar on the left. As you reached the top you made a 180 and there was the door to the $15 a week apartment. It had traditional Victorian Bay windows in the living room which was almost circular in design, and you could sit there stoned and view the street procession at the corner of Love and Peace for hours. To the right of the aparment door as you entered was a small 10 x 10 bedroom. The bathroom was down the skinny hall on the right and the back area was a communal kitchen with hot plates and a beat up old refrigerator. There was a beat bed in the bedroom, but Mike preferred to roll out his sleeping bag in the living room so as not to miss a beat of the anthropological concert below. It was a dive, but it was his dive that would be shared off and on with a cadre of characters from the street over the next year. Old beats, new hip, black jazz cats, and young kittens, marijuana, speed, LSD, mescaline, peyote and the damndest mixtures of each you could imagine. He even got an old record player at the free store and started a record collection, mainly of local bands and Beatles.

Change however was in the air, as 1967 loomed on the Haight horizon. The streets were starting to get crowded, the noise louder and the drugs a torrent of Niagra Falls. It would be the year of Charlie Manson, Hells Angels, the Grateful Dead, the Great Society, Big Brother, Jefferson Airplane, and every band around in town...the venues...Filmore, Avalon. The state was set for the curtain to rise and fall on the Summer of Love..and the Death of Hip.

The Atomic Hula - 1966

Chapter Five

The White Rabbit finds somebody to love...and, damn, Grace was slick!

Spring had sprung like a leaky pipe in 1967 and the popularity of the marches against vulgarity, spelled V-i-e-t-n-a-m were increasing, furthering the polarity of the political spectrum of the American two party rectum. It was an age of mono...mono records, mono nucleosis, as well as other things, such as the gravely voice of Barry McGuire prophesising a full evening of nuclear destruction, The times also found that it had lost it's rights civil, and had to right that wrong. It was the social fabric coming apart of the velvet of the Elvis underground and the Sinatra Sumatra Trading Company of Tea's and Spice and bronze dark slaves from Borneo, leeward and winward and wayward, butch haircuts, G.I Joe jes' not fashionable anymo' as the bleacher bleach blonde Barbie banged Ken the boy pussy, who later would run off with one of Mattel's little beachy blonde boy puppets from the other team hidden away in a box on a back shelf at boy toy's are us, later adopting a tranny toy from Indo-knee-sha and living happily ever after living a a flip the coin, heads or tails, real life fairy tale.

"Hippie Haven", hailed the hallowed headlines from New Yawk to Detroit to Sioux City to Denver to Phoenix. The wires carried the story of strange etherial surrealistic somethings happening if you sought the truth if you were a sojourner to San Francisco. Dirty, filthy longhairs and no-nonsense non-Nitchzie darkies mixing together, a bag of white and black marbles, smoking something big, greenish-brown, leafy with tiny spaceship seeds that caused an opaque screen to rise while a 35mm film camera projected colorful dancing dreams on on it's background. They started coming in driven droves, the youth of America pouring through the spigot flooding the streets of the Haight. Highways clogged like a backed up sewer on Mack Ave. with V-Dubs and scrubby rabble, yeah, those real life 'Angels with Dirty Faces' meandering down the asphalt rivers to the psychedelic mescaline Mecca, just me and old Bobbie McGee...eight lanes of traffic merging into a two lane Vulcan mind-meld so you couldn't move or breath, the Bay Bridge at the apex of the mournful morning rush hour. San Francisco was now the sun....absorbing thousands of small particulates of the population, it's young actually, and thankfully Mike had an apartment and was well established at this point writing furiously in an attempt to capture time and space as it happened and was perceived.

He held court at the apartment on "the corner" of the tie-dyed quadrant of the new universe (today a large retailer has taken over what once was a combination opium den and free love harem) and had gotten involved in working with a coffee house up the street where new arrivals, young, fresh and scared could come, get counseling if need be, a hot cup of chocolate, sandwich, comraderie or just someone to talk to. Mike, gleefully stoned every day, and needed counseling himself, nonetheless took charge of scrounging small tables and small wooden chairs for the center. He also decorated them with chalk and paints and varnish, and even fashioned some chess board designs on some. No table matched another, no chair matched any table, a habit he carried with him to this day. Although not a counselor nor did he feel the need for one, the staff all had a crack at opening his coconut but couldn't. He would be the living anti-Christ of hodge-podge deco to television decorators on cable today causing many a fall of the limp wrist on the home improvement battlefield. He did however manage to get one of the counselors,to smoke a joint and drop a hit of mescaline, later acid, proving that anyone had a chemical price, and soon the incorruptible were corrupted and the two became friends forever, until John, that was his name, John McCloud, 19 years Mike's senior, who lived life to the fullest, until his cup ranneth over and he died in 1993.

John lived across the bay across the bridge in Berkeley, had a BMW motorcycle and a V-Dub bus that would carry Mike and the rest of the chemical cadre to places like Bad Water, Death Valley for traipsing and tripping in the desert sands, (where later Mike would meet Doc Yucatan and Sandoz Cerveza for some real S.O.B. south of the border bordello and cantina adventures) camping at Big Sur, peanut butter and jelly sunrises atop Twin Peaks and Mt. Tam, hiking the Jackboot Trail in Muir Woods south of Bolinas. John also had a girlfriend named Olivia leading them all to believe that the world was populated only by Olivia's, gifts to the earth from the Goddess Olivia who cloned herself for the enjoyment of and supplication from mere mortal man.

The Dubster would also load up the Hashbury Hipsters, and transfer them to Mandrakes bar over in the Peoples Park Republic of Bezerkly to watch the Flamin' Groovies perform on small wooden stages in the small bar booze venue, while at the same time haul the Haighters to the Fillmore to eat apples and sit on the floor, watch the liquid Indian light shows listening to Buffalo Springfield, Santana, Albert King, Jefferson Airplane, and hum strum dum drum along to Inna Godda Da Vida, baby. John was also a film maker and photographer who took a photo of Mike selling newspapers on the streets that he has to this day. Along with selling pot, mescaline and acid, and a few writing pieces to mainly far-ot, far-left wing red radical rags, the Oracle and the Barb kept his head above water and safe and sound on drydock land in an apartment that posed as a Victorian beach.

Back to the youth center...it was the nucleus of Mikes life at the time, and years later, Mikes parents continued to send checks for funding every year to the centers director, Howard Rocheford, until the center closed, and Howard too, passed away in the Nineties as did Mike's parents, so the checks stoppd, just as quickly as death snuffs out a life.

In the spring of '67 tornadic events swirled about in beautific technicolor in St. Simon's Marxian below ground sub-urbia. The sexual revolution was erect and erupting with the tensile strength of Erectile Promiscuous, a gift from the plethora of plentiful penis promises of Prometheus. Sexual activity was a vaginal bus stop along the pubic boulevard and you could transfer at any station and enter any tunnel.

One day, placidly and irrepressibly stoned in the Panhandle just south of Haight, Mike sat against a tall tree, smoking a joint, quietly when suddenly, the quietude was pleasantly interrupted by a girl on a smallish motor-sickle stopped at the corner waiting for the light to change and looked over at him. She was blonde, she was tanned, she had a small cc motorcycle, she was...the Amazon Queen known as California. Another Carol, she waited the light out, Mike proferred the joint from a distance, but an invitation nonetheless. She threw her head back and laughed. "Later cowboy,later," the light changed to green, damn! and she made a right turn and disappeared from sight then re-emerged again, Jesus rolling away the stone and ascending to heaven, but sexier, in a California true blonde way. She parked the bike a block away, and walked through the park to where Mike was, sat down next to him and grabbed the joint. "I told you later cowboy. I lied," and damned if he didn't fall in love with gods and goddesses above for this gift of heavenly flesh that shared the planet with him. A damned miracle is what it was, a damned miracle. Lawsy Lawdy, Massah Tom, I is free! I is free! I can walk! I can see! See? Sea? C?

She was as well groomed as a prized filly ready to be raced, and she smelled of flowers, not street stench, and her hair, a Fort Knox of yellow, and her shorts were short, revealing thighs of wonder, veritable bear traps. "You don't look like you're from the neighborhood," Mike said with a touch of sardonic inflection. "Nope," she said as she inhaled deep. "Sausalito, at least now. I'm a dancer and an artist, both, but dancing in North Beach pays better than my paintings. Wanna ride?" How did she mean that? Not that it mattered, either way it was an invite to the furthest reaches inside the temple where she maintained her stock of boy slaves, and if he played his cards right he could be one of them.

It's not like he had a job to report to in the morning, suit and tied, or anything he actually had to do at anytime anyway, so he agreed and he hopped on the back of the bike, the happiest hipster in the Haight, grabbed around her waist for safety and with hopes of copping a feel of soft fleshy breast, and off they zoomed to the Golden Gate Bridge over to Marin County and into Sausalito with it's colony of artists and recluses. Her apartment was on the main drag downtown overlooking the bay and her apartment was the best that nude dancing could buy, or rent and Mike stayed there for a week roaming the streets of Sausalito at night while she worked in the city with tassles swinging suggestively powered by what could only be described as nuclear nipples, and by day after she got up they spent the day smoking dope, making love and making pasta. At the end of the week, her egg timer had timed him out and she returned him to where she found him, in the Panhandle in the park in the Haight as he had spent his alloted time as her consort and court jester in the palace.

The sexual tide also had him in a spare tire relationship with the wife of one of the Haight Ashburys premier artists. She too had run into him in the park. She was older, in her forty's but she was alive with electic elegance and a calm beauty that radiated from within. The Ingrid Berman syndrome and effect. She would have her own key to Mikes apartment and show up when she could and when she pleased, and if others were there, they said nothing as she and Mike disappeared into the bedroom or down to the street at night to take in the sights, sounds and smells of this most wonderful wonderland, wunderbar! The took acid and listened to music, the music being their common bond that they shared and talked about for hours in between orgasms of intercourse, of course. She tought him how to cook like a pro on the small hot plates in the tiny communal kitchen, and even had him over to her house a couple of times in a huge Victorian to dine with her and her husband. "This is the writer I was telling you about," she explained to him, and him would say, "You've got to smoke this after some of this wine and then sit over there a listen to this new album," He would sit in the middle of the room in the music chair...a barber chair with headphones and get lost in the music at full volumn while Patti (not real name) and her husband would engage in riotous foreplay on the overstuffed couch before making love right then and there while Sgt. Pepper struck up the band, up, up, up.....somebody spoke and he went into a dream....

Then in March, Mike met Olivia...the Deuce. Olivia II, but in his heart for everymore, quoth not the raven, but the raving, Poe, she was Olivia Numero Uno. Olivia the Obliterator he would recall later. She was young, younger than he but he fell hard and so did she. She arrived on the street from Southern California, scared, as most were at first, but her sarcasm and wit was that of someone years older, and the in your face ness attracted Mike to her spider web and he gladly remained captive in the cocoon they both created for themselves for the next year. She was a poet, he a writer and another friend of theirs Myrika was a photographer. They had met her on the street too and she moved into the apartment that was now up to three permanent residents, Mike, Olivia, and Myrika, and occasional occupants to occupado the place with colorful street names they had adopted such as the White Rabbit (complete with British bowler hat), Rainbow, (who kept rainbow lines painted on her face), Spade, yeah he was black as they come, and others with names like, Carol, Dianne, Dave, John, Barbara, Harley (not after the motorcycle, but really, Harley. In reality an ensemble cast of over two dozen, give or take, came and go, off and on not mention those they met and brought with them to the "inner sanctum"

It was almost the Summer of Love, and the streets became clogged and crowded with weekend "hippies" and suburban refugees from the heartland of mid-Merica. The diggers were dishing out free food in the park, music was in the air, performed mainly on the stage of the flatbed truck Great White Way, the dope, she was plentiful and the sky was a zillion rainbows with prismatic balloons floating overhead and inner mind. To most, this was the beginning of something wonderful, spectacular and spiritual. It was peace and love, while Vietnam raged on unabated, peace and love not withstanding. Timothy Leary preached to the muddled huddled masses to turn on, tune in and drop out, while wearing flowers and kaftans, but over on Cole street on the other side of the garden, was a deadly apparition called Charles Manson seeking out a sect of the weak to help him become the Jesus of Mass Murder.

The political skies were darkening and within the year, another Kennedy and a King would be brought down, and flower power would give way to billyclubs on the streets of bloody Chicago. The Woodstock Festival in 1969 would fade as Altamont muscled it's way into the fray with beer bottles, knives, and pool cues and a death at the hands of Hells Angels, and the peaceful marches of an earlier time would end with the events of deaths on the campus of Kent State. A president would not run for re-election and one was impeached...no wonder Mike never voted in any election. He didn't trust Democrats or Republicans and always refered to himself as a Tom Joad socialtist. and sometimes as Tom Joad himself. Yes, to many it was the beginning...to Mike...it was the end as the garden began to wilt. Do the math....It's one, two, three, what are we fighting for....equals = four dead in Ohio!

Atomic Hula - 1966

Chapter Six Hip is Dead, Long Live Hip!

The Haight became a cabaret and combo costume ball in a crowded back alley bazaar in Tunisia with baskets and dead chickens hanging on hooks. Eric Burdon sang of San Francisco nights, while Scott McKenzie penned the anthem of the Aquarians, with the youth of America flamboyantly festooned with a colorful cornucopio of flowers taking root in their psyche, not to mention, their hair. .

It was the Sixties....after all...revolution for the hell of it...art for the hell of it...fondly, Jane found a home in Hanoi, street people digging the diggers and human beings at a be-in believe in the drug diety of all things hallucinatory. Mike spent time walking the streets. He knew every concrete square by name. He knew the streets distinct odor that would change from block to block, in San Francisco, from neighborhood to neighborhood. The Haight had a cacophony to accompany the personal epiphany's experienced by the unexperienced when they became experienced, Mike enjoyed the Bedoin tent confusion of the streets with it's harem girl and haren boy bacchanal and carnival atmosphere both dancing at the feast for Masters with whips to be placed in cages later for sale to Moors who would cart them away to Nubian palaces to pleasure the Africans.

Sometimes, Mike found himself staring down at himself from a rooftop, or just peering back into his own eyesockets. The acid was a mirror reflection, and mixed with mescaline and smoke, you could be the Prince of Araby or Captain Hook by crook, or a whole tribe of lost boys doing Wendy in the jungle after she finished with seven dwarves. The purple hazed and double dazed days were days of wine and roses, underwater gardens of strange fishes tended to by Joe, from the country, and all the heat was canned, but survival, like creativity is the mother of invention, so fug it, said Col. Ed Saunders. Mr. Hoffman's first bicycle ride on acid, made Sandoz pharaceuticals suitable for the subterraneans, while Owsley Stanley became the Henry Ford of colorful dreams on the streets. Orange Wedge, Purple Double Dome, Strawberry, it was all about colors and perception, just ask Jim, and the literary hustler Huxley.

While the students and workers in France were readying the barricades, Americans were blowing bubbles in the park, and that is not how a good revolutionary brings down the walls of an Imperialist Jericho.

Exemplary Example. Take the Russion Revolution, please. It was red and white hot to Trotsky calendar of storming the palace with legendary Lenin lemmings.... Then the French, ah France, France, a bakers dozen of rhetorical pastry battleing the bastions and rushing the Bastille, Louis and Antoinette with matching fur robes and that dear dumb deer in the headlamp look about to loose their crowned heads to the guileless guilotine..he shoots, he scores, it's a headshot in a basket and the crowd goes wild!

Now the American Revolution. Belligerant redcoat turncoats, soon to become provincial colonials, which it has never got over, while the other side in time becomes Canadian, sharing land with Canadiens of the French persuastion, well the old "Merican revolt took years, hardly an overnight success or standing room only revolution. With that in mind, it's no wonder the Haight fell apart at the seams it seems. Acid clashed with heroin, the young spare changers were weekenders of the street, by the street or for the street people of the Haight Ashbury of the Altered States of America. Worst of all, Mike was fast becoming immune to the innocence on their faces, as well as loosing touch with the innocence that fueled him years ago, turning dead trees on the ground into pirate ships and army tanks. Too much water had passed under his bridge carrying the weight of heavy debris. Sexual prosmicuity, redlining drug use of acid, grass, mescaline, hashish, Bennies and Dexies, opium, cocaine and a touch of heroin mein herr on occasion.

The Haight became a packed Turkish prison cell. No room to move, Greyline sightseeing eye-dog buses barked and chased cars through the social excrement of the enclave, cameras snapping photo's. semi-automatic as fast as a National Guardsman could shoot students down on the commons at Kent State, while tossing tear gas cannisters. Sailors and soldiers, on leave, (mostly of their senses!) came down at night to find hump happy hippie chicks without politics, to screw, and for an appetizer, beat up a longhair or two not wearing the uniform of the uniformity of conformity of the country. Merle Haggards all. Sometimes the military would clash with the Angels, no contest, boys, the Angels scored big in every game. Visitors zero. The hard core pushers jackknifed trucks and elbowed their way into the fabric, a wine stain on carpet, while mental illness and poisoned dope bad trips carved a a scene of R.P. McMurphy meeting Alex and his Droogies at Lobotomyland. The Haight had lost it's shine, it's armor of surrealness, transforming into something, everything, sinister, and by summers demise, Hip Was Dead....they even buried him/her/it with a precision procession down the throng filled Haight thoroughfare.

Olivia and Mike retreated further and further into their private world, headless turtles, and began spending more time away from the Haight (eventually moving into a basement apartment off an alley on California Street) as well as going on John jaunts with others up and down the coast, or just the two of them hitch hiking north through Northern California, Oregon and into the bosom of the northwest to Seattle to hang out in the U district which had a help center, similar to the Haight where you could get a place to sleep for the night, and a meal of some sort, nothing more than sustenance really, the bare necessities, to keep you going if beans and rice were your fare of fair choice.

Olivia, eventually wanted to return home, mom and dad and apple pie and shorthaired boyfriends who played sports and wore letters on jackets with Madras shirts and pennyloafers and used Old Spice just like the Old Man and then she could get away from the drugs, the sex, the long hair, the bubbles, the shitty food, and communal living. So, the day came, she and Mike parted their Red Sea of shared common experience, by buying each other a souvenir postcard from a store on Haight, and on them, they wrote their goodbye love poems and prose, and handed theirs to the other, a postal bond of love that they would carry away from their experience together. Every now and then, Mike puills out the old tattered postcard that has travelled with him over the years and the miles, and smiles, and wonders what path she eventually walked donw through the forest. He'd tried to contact her at the only known phone number he had six months after she left. Her mother, very protective I might add, answered and when she found out who it was on the other end of the line...told him that if he came around she'd call the cops for influencing a minor. A minor problem. as it were. The next ocassion when he chanced a call, the number had been disconnected, much as his own life was beginning to feel...one large disconnect with a busy signal.

By the end of 1967, the Haight was past tensed, The streets took on a meaner demeanor, and da meaner it got, the less he enjoyed it anymore, anyway. He started to despise the spare changers and it was at that point in the intersection that he came to realize he had to move on, back home, back to a more innocent time, (that time once passed, no longer exists, and remembered only a sonic boom, and is visible only by it's vapor trail, scarring the sky, as his own borrowed innocence (borrowed at birth as a gift, this childhood, as we haven't earned it outright as spermatazoa meets egg in a headon vaginal collision) this innocence had been drained from him much as you change the oil in a car in a drip pan. Innocence however, not coming in grades of 5w-30 was not as replaceable as oil or transmission fluid.

After the Haight, he became the quintissential roadhead, roaming, thumbing, and rambling on the oceanic asphalt ribbons that slice across the continent, Mike bummed his way through the pastel of the southwest, the O'Keefe deserts, the Ansel America of the photographer as artist, at one point into the back alley back room of that old toothless whore of old Mexico. He wrote of these impressions passionately in 'The Peyote Coyote" as a time and place and space in time, that breast fed him to maturity, somewhat. The beaches of Honolulu were marooned to memory, the L.A. sunset had been stripped, and the Haight was hazy now, so Mike finally returned to where Mickey had started. Detroit. Eight years in total later, he attempted to scale the wall of the past, trying to recapture it as though a German P.O.W. at gunpoint pushed to the stockade, but that damn past, like John Dillinger outwitting bumpkin Indiana cops, it eluded him. What did Wolfe say, "You can never go home again," but you can at least look homeward angel, but, the past hears you knockin' but you can't get in. Doc had warned him over and over. Once you cross the threshold, and step through the looking glass...your ass is grass, Amigo.

He could always see Doc Yucatan looking down from the heaven that all Doc Yucatans call home, above the clouds, lodged in a protective cloak of memory. He had wondered about Doc for years as they lost touch with one another, the link of friendship that was forged however, kept them tethered throughout the years. After Honolulu, Los Angeles, Haight Ashubry and Woody Guthrie incidental transcedental transcontinental wanderings Mike had become a haiku hobo, and eventually made home port again, Michigan. He began a small experimental theatre group that produced plays that mirrored the social chaos of the times as hip had died, King and Kennedy had died, yes, another Kennedy, were gunned down on American soil, one in a hotel and the other in a motel, then the chicago democratic convention ended in a bloody battle that killed the political system, and Woodstock's Dr. Jekyll became Altamonts, Mr. Hyde. Mike's Experimental Theatre Workshop was watched carefully by the Detroit Red Squad as it watched other groups in the area. The Rainbow Peoples Party, (the evolution of the White Panther Party) and because they rehearsed in a church that also hosted the annual convention of the Detroit Communist Party, well, better dead than red, and at the time, Mike had no desire to be a member of any party, of any persuasion, and could never figure out how the quest for workers rights, civil rights and human rights in America were considered Communist. so became a Joadista, the party of one comprised of individual Tom Joads that lies within every humanist. It was a solo platform that would rot like old lumber if there were more than one member standing in the bandshell in the park near the gazebo where the town band would play on summer nights for ice cream socials where kids flew flying kites and tossed live frogs at little girls just to hear them scream and mothers and fathers admonished one another for having thoughts of a sexual nature that involved them and a neighbor and not their partner.

Not in possession of anything close to resembling a semblance of an education, and, with no desire to obtain any discernable skills, Mike, naturally, ended up working at radio stations across the country, mainly doing morning rdio shows for the next 30 years bumming am and fm rides on the analogue highway from Michigan to Colorado to California to New Mexico and a few places in between. He spent a lot of time listening to radio's during his travels, as TV was a luxury, not to be afforded. Thumbed rides in cars with AM preachers in Texas talking in Mennonite German and Louisiana crayfish pastors blasted from giant Mex-X stations from south of the border, as voices demonic, as voices from hell itself, as parishioners would mysteriously disappear and be buried in the sand, three feet down in the desert while the pastors were really bastards and not bastions of propriety.

Mike would dust off his old journals to keep that part of his past alive, and kept writing, non-fiction fiction, fictianally reality he called it, in between the rocks and the rolls, and eventually wrote several books about his journeys and truthful sojourns. But still.....where were the childhood pirates, joys, fears, wonder, awe, fright, werewolves, indians, cowboys, dead and dying soldiers hit with full force during flashlight tag, ("You're dead, I just shot you," "Did not," "Did too," "I did, so fall down, already," "Did not," and so on and so forth until the battery in your "gun" went dead, and it was time to go home in the dark and hang up your soldier gear until you got drafted years later and Uncle Sam gave you a real gun and real people to shoot and real people to shoot back at you.

Were they all no more, and only just figurative fragments of figments of the past? He missed them all. In an attempt to rediscover lost innocence that he had lost quickly, more rapidly then he realized until it was gone, leaving him fileted and stripped, he rented a small cabin back up in the woods that he loved so much as a child. Up North they called it in Michigan, anything north of Eight Mile Road in Detroit was up north, compass heading, true magnetic north too by the way on the great Mississippi Flyway and Great Lakes Beltway.

He rented a Norse red, you've seen the red and read about the red, cabin with fireplace of fine fieldstones from the surrounding farms picked up in 1938 when she was built, and it had a Civil War musket and bayonet displayed over it, hand hewn ceiling and a deepwell pump on a cobblestone patio, and all these things were located on Grand Lake nary a compass point off due north of Alpena in Presque Isle with it's two lighthouses, one haunted built in 1849, and the "new" unhuanted one built on the point of the peninsula in 1871 where they still hold summer corn roasts and tours of the tower. He rented the "writing womb" rooms in the cabin for the season, all summer long and into the fall with the leaves changing, and the summer people going back home to Detroit, Chicago and wherever they hail from in Ohio. There was a small boathouse that smelled of old fishig forays in the Forties and Fifties, the wooden wall having jars meticulously aligned and lining the shelves with an assortment of fish egg bait long since dried up, old rusty smallish hooks for sunfish or bluegills, the same thing really, just called different names by different people, like caucasian and negro, people really, the same but called different names by different people, and a rickety old dock Doc would be proud of with a rickety'r old grey rowboat and the boathouse was home to racoons and family who would come out at night along with the bats,yes, those damn bats. Mike would row out on the calm lake in early evening and before sunrise to watch the bugs dance a striptease on the water, regular Carol Doda's with large Carol Dodas, transforming the fish below into real sex crazed insect killers. The waters were placid and calm and he liked to listen, and to feel to the waves rock erotically against the boat, and slap lap like a hungry whores tongue against the woody, a mellow mantra. One morning he got up earlier than usual and pushed the boat into the water to enjoy the silencio of the early marning. He rowed out to the middle of the lake and put the oars in their locks and lay down in the boat to enjoy it's gentle rocking motion.

He could smell the grey wood start to come to life with the increasing gentle heat of the morning sunrise, the scent of cedar and pine, the up north smell as it was called, wafted and drifted out across the water accompaning the squealing of sea gulls arguing over small fish as they dove pelican down, crazed kamikaze's attacking an aircraft carrier. Mike closed his eyes, watching the drama play out on his eyelids, fueled by his imagination that began to take on a childlike quality. He felt in his thoughts, that he could see Doc Yucatan looking down at him, smiling. Sometimes he would ask Doc, "Whatever happened to childhood?" and he would ask Doc through his writings. Where are they Doc? All the cowboys and indians, the kites that became giant birds in the sky, the dead trees on Three Mile Drive in Detroit that became pirate ships and flying saucers? They had all become trapped and locked away, as all childhood fantasy does as one grows older and experiences life. The past recedes, buried in sediment, while the imagination gets dulled, an old blade on a Buck knife used too often as a hammer in a farm barn on an old tractor to tighten things that had come loose in the field, and childhood, childhood is obscured. People die, people disappear, the sun sets at the end of the day, but the day is revived and reborn as night as the moon ascends and takes it's rightful place in the heavens. The fire dies to embers at night, yet burst back to life in the morning with a gentle breath as bellows to warm the coffee pot to take off the crisp chill of the morning air and a night in a dew covered sleeping bag that has traces of odors of sweat and mosquito repellent from trips past in the fantastic light of the forest.

Mike smiled as he thought about freeing the invisible pirates from their captivity to bring them all back to life, to bring childhood back to life, but it seemed an impossible task. How to make the imagination of childhood take flight once again, aboard a space craft loaded with pirates, cowboys, indians and the ghost of a young boy who at one time gave them all life. As he kept his eyes closed, he began to smile as he could picture the space craft ascend with all aboard, and he began smiling ever broader when he noticed that in the pilots seat was none other than the origianl space cowboy himself...Doc Yucatan...."Good mornin' boy, great day to be alive....so, you want those invisible pirates back do you? Tell you what," he said with a mainical laugh..."It's easy, just close your eyes, real tight (Mike did) and picture them (Mike did) and smile," (Mike did) and childhood came to life and Mike once again was flying in a space ship made from a dead elm lying on it's side on the street. "See," Doc said, "They haven't gone anywhere, they were there, hidden all the time. You just forgot where you put them is all, like an old baseball glove or bag of marbles you had as a child, but they aren't lost really, nor did they disappear, and you find them, like playing ready or not here I come hide and seek."

Doc was right all along. Wonder and imagination and innocence are always within...all you have to do is close your eyes, open your heart and know where to look.

THE END

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