Slouching Towards Bethlehem Read online

  Barbara is on what is called the woman’s trip to the exclusion of almost everything else. When she and Tom and Max and Sharon need money, Barbara will take a part-time job, modeling or teaching kindergarten, but she dislikes earning more than ten or twenty dollars a week. Most of the time she keeps house and bakes. “Doing something that shows your love that way,” she says, “is just about the most beautiful thing I know.” Whenever I hear about the woman’s trip, which is often, I think a lot about nothin’-says-lovin’-like-something-from-the-oven and the Feminine Mystique and how it is possible for people to be the unconscious instruments of values they would strenuously reject on a conscious level, but I do not mention this to Barbara.

  It is a pretty nice day and I am just driving down the Street and I see Barbara at a light.

  What am I doing, she wants to know.

  I am just driving around.

  “Groovy,” she says.

  It’s a beautiful day, I say.

  “Groovy,” she agrees.

  She wants to know if I will come over. Sometime soon, I say.

  “Groovy,” she says.

  I ask if she wants to drive in the Park but she is too busy. She is out to buy wool for her loom.

  Arthur Lisch gets pretty nervous whenever he sees me now because the Digger line this week is that they aren’t talking to “media poisoners,” which is me. So I still don’t have a tap on Chester Anderson, but one day in the Panhandle I run into a kid who says he is Chester’s “associate.” He has on a black cape, black slouch hat, mauve Job’s Daughters sweatshirt and dark glasses, and he says his name is Claude Hayward, but never mind that because I think of him just as The Connection. The Connection offers to “check me out.”

  I take off my dark glasses so he can see my eyes. He leaves his on.

  “How much you get paid for doing this kind of media poisoning?” he says for openers.

  I put my dark glasses back on.

  “There’s only one way to find out where it’s at,” The Connection says, and jerks his thumb at the photographer I’m with. “Dump him and get out on the Street. Don’t take money. You won’t need money.” He reaches into his cape and pulls out a Mimeographed sheet announcing a series of classes at the Digger Free Store on How to Avoid Getting Busted, Gangbangs, VD, Rape, Pregnancy, Beatings, and Starvation. “You oughta come,” The Connection says. “You’ll need it.”

  I say maybe, but meanwhile I would like to talk to Chester Anderson.

  “If we decide to get in touch with you at all,”The Connection says, “we’ll get in touch with you real quick.” He kept an eye on me in the Park after that but never called the number I gave him.

  It is twilight and cold and too early to find Deadeye at the Blue Unicorn so I ring Max’s bell. Barbara comes to the door.

  “Max and Tom are seeing somebody on a kind of business thing,” she says. “Can you come back a little later?”

  I am hard put to think what Max and Tom might be seeing somebody about in the way of business, but a few days later in the Park I find out.

  “Hey,” Max calls. “Sorry you couldn’t come up the other day, but business was being done.” This time I get the point. “We got some great stuff,” he says, and begins to elaborate. Every third person in the Park this afternoon looks like a narcotics agent and I try to change the subject. Later I suggest to Max that he be more wary in public. “Listen, I’m very cautious,” he says. “You can’t be too careful.”

  By now I have an unofficial taboo contact with the San Francisco Police Department. What happens is that this cop and I meet in various late-movie ways, like I happen to be sitting in the bleachers at a baseball game and he happens to sit down next to me, and we exchange guarded generalities. No information actually passes between us, but after a while we get to kind of like each other.

  “The kids aren’t too bright,” he is telling me on this particular day. “They’ll tell you they can always spot an undercover, they’ll tell you about ‘the kind of car he drives. ’ They aren’t talking about undercovers, they’re talking about plainclothesmen who just happen to drive unmarked cars, like I do. They can’t tell an undercover. An undercover doesn’t drive some black Ford with a two-way radio.”

  He tells me about an undercover who was taken out of the District because he was believed to be overexposed, too familiar. He was transferred to the narcotics squad, and by error was sent immediately back into the District as a narcotics undercover.

  The cop plays with his keys. “You want to know how smart these kids are?” he says finally. “The first week, this guy makes forty-three cases.”

  The Jook Savages are supposed to be having a May Day party in Larkspur and I go by the Warehouse and Don and Sue Ann think it would be nice to drive over there because Sue Ann’s three-year-old, Michael, hasn’t been out lately. The air is soft and there is a sunset haze around the Golden Gate and Don asks Sue Ann how many flavors she can detect in a single grain of rice and Sue Ann tells Don maybe she better learn to cook yang, maybe they are all too yin at the Warehouse, and I try to teach Michael “Frere Jacques.”We each have our own trip and it is a nice drive. Which is just as well because there is nobody at all at the Jook Savages’ place, not even the Jook Savages. When we get back Sue Ann decides to cook up a lot of apples they have around the Warehouse and Don starts working with his light show and I go down to see Max for a minute. “Out of sight,” Max says about the Larkspur caper. “Somebody thinks it would be groovy to turn on five hundred people the first day in May, and it would be, but then they turn on the last day in April instead, so it doesn’t happen. If it happens, it happens. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t. Who cares. Nobody cares.”

  Some kid with braces on his teeth is playing his guitar and boasting that he got the last of the STP from Mr. Q himself and somebody else is talking about how five grams of acid will be liberated within the next month and you can see that nothing much is happening this afternoon around the San Francisco Oracle office. A boy sits at a drawing board drawing the infinitesimal figures that people do on speed, and the kid with the braces watches him.” I’m gonna shoot my wo—man” he sings softly. “She been with a—noth—er man!’ Someone works out the numerology of my name and the name of the photographer I’m with. The photographers is all wliite and the sea (“If I were to make you some beads, see, I’d do it mainly in white,” he is told), but mine has a double death symbol. The afternoon does not seem to be getting anywhere, so it is suggested that we go over to Japantown and find somebody named Sandy who will take us to the Zen temple.

  Four boys and one middle-aged man are sitting on a grass mat at Sandy s place, sipping anise tea and watching Sandy read Laura Huxley’s You Are Not the Target.

  We sit down and have some anise tea. “Meditation turns us on,” Sandy says. He has a shaved head and the kind of cherubic face usually seen in newspaper photographs of mass murderers. The middle-aged man, whose name is George, is making me uneasy because he is in a trance next to me and stares at me without seeing me.

  I feel that my mind is going—George is dead, or we all are— when the telephone rings.

  “It’s for George,” Sandy says.

  “George, te/ephone.”

  “George!’

  Somebody waves his hand in front of George and George finally gets up, bows, and moves toward the door on the balls of his feet.

  “I think I’ll take George’s tea,” somebody says. “George—are you coming back?”

  George stops at the door and stares at each of us in turn. “In a moment,” he snaps.

  Do you know who is the first eternal spaceman of this universe?

  The first to send his wild wild vibrations

  To all those cosmic superstations?

  For the song he always shouts

  Sends the planets flipping out...

  But I’ll tell you before you think me loony

  That I’m talking about Narada Muni...

  Singing

  HARE KRISHNA HARE
KRISHNA

  KRISHNA KRISHNA HARE HARE

  HARE RAMA HARE RAMA

  RAMA RAMA HARE HARE

  is a Krishna song. Words by

  Howard Wheeler and music by

  Michael Grant.

  Maybe the trip is not in Zen but in Krishna, so I pay a visit to Michael Grant, the Swami A. C. Bhaktivedanta’s leading disciple in San Francisco. Michael Grant is at home with his brother-in-law and his wife, a pretty girl wearing a cashmere pullover, a jumper, and a red caste mark on her forehead.

  “I’ve been associated with the Swami since about last July,” Michael says. “See, the Swami came here from India and he was at this ashram in upstate New York and he just kept to himself and chanted a lot. For a couple of months. Pretty soon I helped him get his storefront in New York. Now it’s an international movement, which we spread by teaching this chant.” Michael is fingering his red wooden beads and I notice that I am the only person in the room with shoes on. “It’s catching on like wildfire.”

  “If everybody chanted,” the brother-in-law says, “there wouldn’t be any problem with the police or anybody.”

  “Ginsberg calls the chant ecstasy, but the Swami says that’s not exactly it.” Michael walks across the room and straightens a picture of Krishna as a baby. “Too bad you can’t meet the Swami,” he adds. “The Swami’s in New York now.”

  “Ecstasy’s not the right word at all,” says the brother-in-law, who has been thinking about it. “It makes you think of some...mundane ecstasy.”

  The next day I drop by Max and Sharon’s, and find them in bed smoking a little morning hash. Sharon once advised me that half a joint even of grass would make getting up in the morning a beautiful thing. I ask Max how Krishna strikes him.

  “You can get a high on a mantra,” he says. “But I’m holy on acid.”

  Max passes the joint to Sharon and leans back. “Too bad you couldn’t meet the Swami,” he says. “The Swami was the turn-on.”

  Anybody who thinks this is all about drugs has his head in a bag. It’s a social movement, quintessential romantic, the kind that recurs in times of real social crisis. The themes are always the same. A return to innocence. The invocation of an earlier authority and control. The mysteries of the blood. An itch for the transcendental, for purification. Right there you’ve got the ways that romanticism historically ends up in trouble, lends itself to authoritarianism. When the direction appears. How long do you think it’ll take for that to happen? is a question a San Francisco psychiatrist asked me.

  At the time I was in San Francisco the political potential of what was then called the movement was just becoming clear. It had always been clear to the revolutionary core of the Diggers, whose every guerrilla talent was now bent toward open confrontations and the creation of a summer emergency, and it was clear to many of the straight doctors and priests and sociologists who had occasion to work in the District, and it could rapidly become clear to any outsider who bothered to decode Chester Anderson’s call-to-action communiqués or to watch who was there first at the street skirmishes which now set the tone for life in the District. One did not have to be a political analyst to see it; the boys in the rock groups saw it, because they were often where it was happening. “In the Park there are always twenty or thirty people below the stand,” one of the Dead complained to me. “Ready to take the crowd on some militant trip.”

  But the peculiar beauty of this political potential, as far as the activists were concerned, was that it remained not clear at all to most of the inhabitants of the District, perhaps because the few seventeen-year-olds who are political realists tend not to adopt romantic idealism as a life style. Nor was it clear to the press, which at varying levels of competence continued to report “the hippie phenomenon” as an extended panty raid; an artistic avant-garde led by such comfortable YMHA regulars as Allen Ginsberg; or a thoughtful protest, not unlike joining the Peace Corps, against the culture which had produced Saran-Wrap and the Vietnam War. This last, or they’re-trying-to-tell-us-something approach, reached its apogee in a Time cover story which revealed that hippies “scorn money—they call it ‘bread’” and remains the most remarkable, if unwitting, extant evidence that the signals between the generations are irrevocably jammed.

  Because the signals the press was getting were immaculate of political possibilities, the tensions of the District went unremarked upon, even during the period when there were so many observers on Haight Street from Life and Look and CBS that they were largely observing one another. The observers believed roughly what the children told them: that they were a generation dropped out of political action, beyond power games, that the New Left was just another ego trip. Ergo, there really were no activists in the Haight-Ashbury, and those things which happened every Sunday were spontaneous demonstrations because, just as the Diggers say, the police are brutal and juveniles have no rights and runaways are deprived of their right to self-determination and people are starving to death on Haight Street, a scale model of Vietnam.

  Of course the activists—not those whose thinking had become rigid, but those whose approach to revolution was imaginatively anarchic—had long ago grasped the reality which still eluded the press: we were seeing something important. We were seeing the desperate attempt of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community in a social vacuum. Once we had seen these children, Ave could no longer overlook the vacuum, no longer pretend that the society’s atomization could be reversed. This was not a traditional generational rebellion. At some point between 1945 and 1967 we had somehow neglected to tell these children the rules of the game we happened to be playing. Maybe we had stopped believing in the rules ourselves, maybe we were having a failure of nerve about the game. Maybe there were just too few people around to do the telling. These were children who grew up cut loose from the web of cousins and great-aunts and family doctors and lifelong neighbors who had traditionally suggested and enforced the society’s values. They are children who have moved around a lot, San Jose, Chula Vista, here. They are less in rebellion against the society than ignorant of it, able only to feed back certain of its most publicized self-doubts, Vietnam, Saran-Wrap, diet pills, the Bomb.

  They feed back exactly what is given them. Because they do not believe in words—words are for “typeheads,” Chester Anderson tells them, and a thought which needs words is just one more of those ego trips—their only proficient vocabulary is in the society’s platitudes. As it happens I am still committed to the idea that the ability to think for one’s self depends upon one’s mastery of the language, and I am not optimistic about children who will settle for saying, to indicate that their mother and father do not live together, that they come from “a broken home.” They are sixteen, fifteen, fourteen years old, younger all the time, an army of children waiting to be given the words.

  Peter Berg knows a lot of words. “Is Peter Berg around?” I ask. “Maybe.”

  “Are you Peter Berg?” “Yeh.”

  The reason Peter Berg does not bother sharing too many words with me is because two of the words he knows are “media poisoning.” Peter Berg wears a gold earring and is perhaps the only person in the District on whom a gold earring looks obscurely ominous. He belongs to the San Francisco Mime Troupe, some of whose members started the Artist’s Liberation Front for “those who seek to combine their creative urge with socio-political involvement.” It was out of the Mime Troupe that the Diggers grew, during the 1966 Hunter’s Point riots, when it seemed a good idea to give away food and do puppet shows in the streets making fun of the National Guard. Along with Arthur Lisch, Peter Berg is part of the shadow leadership of the Diggers, and it was he who more or less invented and first introduced to the press the notion that there would be an influx into San Francisco during the summer of 1967 of 200, 000 indigent adolescents. The only conversation I ever have with Peter Berg is about how he holds me personally responsible for the way Life captioned Henri Cartier-Bresson’s pictures out of Cuba, but I like to wa
tch him at work in the Park.

  Janis Joplin is singing with Big Brother in the Panhandle and almost everybody is high and it is a pretty nice Sunday afternoon between three and six o’clock, which the activists say are the three hours of the week when something is most likely to happen in the Haight-Ashbury, and who turns up but Peter Berg. He is with his wife and six or seven other people, along with Chester Anderson’s associate The Connection, and the first peculiar thing is, they’re in blackface.

  I mention to Max and Sharon that some members of the Mime Troupe seem to be in blackface.

  “It’s street theater,” Sharon assures me. “It’s supposed to be really groovy.”

  The Mime Troupers get a little closer, and there are some other peculiar things about them. For one thing they are tapping people on the head with dime-store plastic night-sticks, and for another they are wearing signs on their backs, “HOW MANY TIMES YOU BEEN RAPED, YOU LOVE FREAKS?” and “WHO STOLE CHUCK BERRY’S MUSIC?”, things like that. Then they are distributing communication company fliers which say:

  this summer thousands of un-white un-suburban hoppers are going to want to know why you’ve given up what they can’t get how you get away with it how come you not a faggot with hair so long they want haight street one way or the other, IF YOU DON’T KNOW, BY AUGUST HAIGHT STREET WILL BE A CEMETERY.

  Max reads the flier and stands up. “I’m getting bad vibes,” he says, and he and Sharon leave.

  I have to stay around because I’m looking for Otto so I walk over to where the Mime Troupers have formed a circle around a Negro. Peter Berg is saying if anybody asks that this is street theater, and I figure the curtain is up because what they are doing right now is jabbing the Negro with the nightsticks. They jab, and they bare their teeth, and they rock on the balls of their feet and they wait.

  “I’m beginning to get annoyed here,” the Negro says. “I’m gonna get mad.”