Repost: The Kid That Became A Guy Part V: Haight Ashbury And The Hippie Life

[This is one of the chapters that I really felt that I had skimped on... there was so much I didn't tell. Nice to have an opportunity to expand on this part of my life]

Tune in, turn on and drop out...it became the mantra of the Sixties. I flew into San Diego on Pan Am with a couple of Army guys I had met at Tan Son Nhut waiting for a flight. One of them had just got out of the field hospital in Saigon and was kind of messed up. The other guy was a buddy from his platoon. We weren't in the airport five minutes when a bunch of hippies started giving them a bad time, calling names and yelling in their faces and shit- even spitting and trying to provoke these guys. I was a civilian, technically and never averse to a little confrontation. There was one broad with a big mouth that had a bag full of shit she was going to throw at them... I stuck my finger in her face and told her if she didn't put it down, she was going to eat it- I'd have did it too. I grabbed one and smacked him around a little and the rest started screaming for the cops. Fucking sissies. Well the cops came and took me off in their squad car. We went down to the police station and I told the sergeant what happened. He thought it was pretty funny, so he had the cops give me a ride back out to the airport, telling me not to beat up any more hippies. That was my first encounter with the hippies.

I flew TWA back to Boston. Things had changed a lot since I was gone. I was in Vietnam a little over two years and when I left, things were pretty much normal...not so much when I got back. I flew into Logan in Boston and took a cab to the North End. I had an envelope full of cash, my pay for Vietnam. I guess I had around 15-18 G's on me. I ran down some of my old friends, Bobby Azaritti was shooting heroin and living somewhere around St. Botolph St. in the South End, not a very good neighborhood. He told me I could crash with him. I guess that's what people did now- crash. I told him that was all right and took off, after he borrowed $20. I tried to look up Sonny and Patty, but Sonny was in prison, I couldn't find Patty and nobody up there knew where she had gone.

I had grown up and there was no way I was going to go back to stealing cars for a living, but doing stuff like that wasn't all I did before. There was a bunch of us that used to get together and listen to Blues. I really loved that music and there were a few of us that had instruments and played some. I played guitar but I gave mine to Willie McDonald when I left. Most of the guys I played music with had taken off and the world I had known in the North End seemed like it was gone. It was May so I decided to grab a bus up to Hampton Beach and see if any of the guys I hung with up there a were around. It was a little early but there were usually a few guys that showed up before the season began.

Things had changed up there as well. My buddy Al was from Woburn or around there, but was already up at the beach. He had grown his hair and was running around in old dirty jeans and sandals. He looked like a fucking beatnik and I told him so. He thought that was pretty funny and asked me if I wanted to get high. I had smoked pot once in boot camp with two black guys in the drying room. I didn't want to but they thought I would turn them in so I smoked it with them so they would think I was Ok. They said it was like drinking beer but didn't make you feel bad the next day. I didn't like it all that much. A lot of guys in Vietnam smoked and I tried it once or twice there but it messed with my focus and I had to keep my shit straight, doing what I did and all. Over there you could buy joints with heroin in them and I could see why you would really like them, but like I said, I had to keep my focus so that was out. So me, Al, this guy Dennis and a couple of chicks went to Al's motel room and got high. This time I kind of liked it, I was relaxed and all so it was pretty good. While I was hanging with Al and them, I met Bod Marcelli and Don Pedi, a couple of guys from East Boston or Chelsea, I think. Don went on to be an illustrator of children's books- I think he got famous or something like that.

I stuck around for a month or so, getting high every day and fooling with the chicks up there. All of the chicks that got high seemed like they would hop in the sack with you pretty easy. In fact, if you had a joint, you could get laid. Everybody was starting to talk about this place in San Francisco called Haight Ashbury and how it was the place to be. Everybody had started growing their hair long and used words like "groovy". So I started growing mine long too. I met this guy named Mark from around Worcester some place and his girlfriend Mary. I had bought a car, a 1966 Chevelle SS 396 for around $3600 brand new. Can you believe it- I bought a car, I didn't steal it. I put another $1500 or so into souping it up... it was fast as hell. We decided to go to Haight Ashbury, so we took off across country.

Mark had family in Los Angeles, someplace in Riverside County, so we went there first. His uncle was a cop so it was pretty uncomfortable being there. Mark decided to stay in L.A. so Mary and me headed up to Frisco. We got to Haight St said our goodbye's, she wanted to hang out on Haight St. I gave her $20 and told her if she got in a jam to find me. I felt bad, I figured Mark had kind of abandoned her- his family didn't seem to want her around. I think she wanted to hook up with me but I wasn't looking to have any steady chick so I took off toward Golden Gate park. I hadn't got two blocks when I ran into two guys from Connecticut I knew from Hampton Beach, David something and some guy I forget his name. They had just got there the day before. One of them, David, I think asked if I had a place to stay. I told him I just got there 5 minutes ago so he said that a friend Jaffee from Boston was managing an apartment building on the corner of Haight and Cole. We headed over there. It was unbelievable, almost all of my music buddies from Boston were there...Ray Davies (not THE Ray Davies), Johnny Goodwin, Jaffee, Moose, Entz Jackmann, who was from Germany. It was old home week! We all got high and played music all night. There was these two fat chicks that lived upstairs that had speed pills, Desoxyn or something, so we stayed up jamming all night.

The next day Moose and I went up to the park to check it out. It was wild, people dressed up like God knows what. One guy had a turban on like a sheik or something. Chicks with no shirt on dancing around. Me and Moose met these two chicks from Greece that didn't speak a word of English so we took them in the bushes and screwed them. It was like one big party going on all the time. I went to the music store and bought a new guitar, a Gibson SG...I always liked them and I still had plenty of cash left. Jaffee had this deal going where he could get kilos of pot from Mexico for $65. He was selling them for $80 so pretty soon I started selling pot. I didn't cost anything for rent because Jaffee managed the building and he collected the rent. All we had to do was pay utilities and we were good. I guess I stayed around there for about 5 months when I got a chance to move up to Guerneville in the Russian River. These people had a chalet in the redwood forest so I went up there.

Guerneville was a lot different than Haight Ashbury, it was pretty uptight. Every time a teenage girl ran away, the cops came and looked for them at our place. The chalet belonged to some doctor that this guy Hoss knew so the rent was free. But it was a hassle living there with the cops around all the time and I had met this girl Kathy from Santa Rosa, so I moved there with her. The best part of living in Santa Rosa was that hardly anybody sold pot there. I met a biker guy that sold ounces and I'd go down to Frisco and get kilos and sell them to him. It was crazy, we had started out getting kilos for $65 and selling them for $80. Our price went up to $80 so we started charging $100... people said they'd quit smoking before they'd pay that much for pot.Anyway, I had a pretty good income. The chick upstairs was also named Kathy and I started screwing her too. She was a pretty weird chick. Her dad had written a book called On Tiptoe Behind Darwin about how space aliens had come down and screwed the closest thing they could find to themselves, which was apes... people came from that. I read it and he had all this "evidence" to back it up. Sundays was "fantasy day" where she like to act out sex fantasies- which was fine with me. She was studying French at the local college and we used to speak French at home. I had picked up a few words in Nam. Life was pretty good, but I was starting to miss Boston. I'd been in California for about a year and a half. It was December of 1967 and I decided to go home.

I took a Greyhound from San Francisco to Boston. My friends Johnny Goodwin, Moose and Entz had already come back. I stayed with them for a while, then I moved over to Cambridge with some guys from Chelsea I knew from Hampton Beach, Marcelli and another guy. I started playing in a band and we gigged around at a few places. I knew the Bolero Brothers from the North End and they had a bar, the Intermission Lounge in the Combat Zone. They called it the Combat Zone because it was where all the strip joints and dirty movie houses were. The sailors used to go there a lot. It was 1968 and the whole hippie thing was starting to take off in Boston. I already had long hair so I fit in fine. I guess I was growing up some, I was 22 and starting to notice things about all the hippies I didn't like. I didn't like them at all, but their money was good and if you can't beat 'em, use 'em.

To begin with they were a bunch of phoneys. All the Vietnam protests, signs saying "Bring Our Boys Home"...they didn't give a fuck about our boys. All they cared about was themselves. They used to sit around at parties and spout this philosophical bullshit about Nietzsche and Chairman Mao and Castro, like they were fucking Gods or something. I may not have known Schopenhauer from Plato, but I knew a bullshit artist when I saw one. All these people gave a shit about was themselves. All this phoney love bullshit was just a front for a bunch of chickenshit motherfuckers that thought they were too good to go to Vietnam. They weren't against the war, they were fucking cowards and they were against being in it. My friends, my real friends had went and fought so these cocksuckers could feel good about themselves. Dennis Lucchese from the North End got shrapnel in his face and looked like a fucking jack-o-lantern that somebody kicked. Kids that saw him on the street cried. He was ten times the man than all those phoney pricks put together.

But like I said, their money was good and I decided to get all I could. I had a buddy in Berkeley named Alan who sold acid and the hippies loved acid. I called Alan up and he agreed to fly out with 5000 hits to see what we could do. I had a friend Robert with some cash and I took him as a partner so Alan wouldn't get hung up in Boston. He started flying out every week with 10,000 hits. He would hang out for a few days and party and play music and head home. He had a guitar, a Les Paul, plus I had bought an old Guild electric in case he didn't bring his. We paid a buck a hit and sold it for two. $10,000 a week split two ways, not bad. If you took acid in Boston in 1968, it came from me. It was a crazy time: here was Alan, a hippy looking guy from Berkeley and he would stay at the Sheraton in Harvard Square, the most expensive hotel in Cambridge at the time and nobody thought anything of it... Try that now. Here's something else funny: some of my best customers were at Harvard School of Divinity. Those guys loved the shit. They invited me to a party one night so I grabbed a bottle or two of nice wine, a bag of good weed and brought some "party favors." I get there and I'm like "Where's the chicks?" These guys' idea of a party was to drop acid and debate the finer points of Augustine and Aquinas. I was more into the finer points of getting laid, so I didn't hang around long.

It was a great life- $500 a week tax-free... all the chicks any guy could hope for. I even had a live-in maid that would "take care of things" if I should come home alone. The Devil's Disciples used to get their acid from me and their president gave me a tommy gun for my birthday. I had hooked him up with this really pretty blonde chick that looked like Veronica Lake... the last I heard, they were still together. I thought nothing about calling for 3 or so cabs at a time to take 10 or so friends to Ken's Steakhouse for dinner in the middle of the night. Ken's was where the upper crust of Boston society went for late dinner after the theater or the symphony. We'd walk in all high and shit- the waitresses loved us though. I'd always leave a $30-$40 tip. That's a hard job and it don't pay worth shit. They deserve every cent they get- they earn it taking shit from assholes.

Anyways, by late '69 or early '70 the hippie thing started dying out.The real fucked up ones kept going to college and are now the professors around the country. The rest started shooting heroin and ripping each other off. I went to work.