most of them mistrusted reason. This was profoundly unsettling to the old guard, as it was to me. I didn’t know whether to mock the hippies or protect them, especially since many were high schoolers, the lowest of the low. They had no money and no homes. They moved among de facto crash pads, occupied the sidewalks, or camped in the temperate groves of Golden Gate Park. That was where I’d been told to go if I wanted to meet the real thing. So I checked out of my motel, determined to live like a denizen of the scene—in the open air.
It was late spring. A warm mist wafted over the cypress trees; music mingled with the caw of seagulls; salt and incense were in the air. Food simply appeared, and I wandered from group to group chowing down. When I was tired I plopped on the side of someone’s sleeping bag. I had come expecting to be drenched in sex, but it was harder to come by than I expected. Free love didn’t mean you could just walk up to a chick and whip out your love wand. You had to connect on a level that seemed mysterious to me. I hadn’t yet come to appreciate the beauty in a woman with downy legs. It took getting used to, as did trusting in that vague sensation of compatibility known as “the vibe.” The consolation was that my body type mattered less than the color my karma produced in someone’s mood ring. Within a day or two I managed tohook up, though I’d never had sex in a park and I couldn’t help worrying about the cops. I wasn’t sure my partner was on the pill, and it didn’t reassure me to see her douche afterward with water from a canteen.
At first I was appalled by all this. The hippies seemed so blockheaded, so forced in their mellowness, blowing bubbles or handing me the gift of a small rubber dinosaur. I could tell from their disregard for money that they were securely middle class, while I came from a background where dropping out meant only one thing: poverty. What I saw looked dangerous and, even worse, indulgent. But the naïveté was irresistible. It brought out the Holden Caulfield in me. I wanted to be their catcher in the rye.
I quickly learned to honor the astrological metaphysics that functioned as a greeting. “What sign are you?” I was asked many times, and when I replied, the response was, invariably, “I knew it.” After a while I stopped thinking of this as silly; it was just another code, like the peace-sign salute. I was beginning to fall under the spell of the scene, with its remarkable capacity to calm my anxieties. Everything that mattered in my life—the clawing for fame, the fending off of sycophants, the constant risk of being put on or put down—all of it dropped away. Every now and then I’d catch myself, take a step back, and think, what the fuck am I doing in this place? Me, the Herring Maiven, a wunderkind of the written word, nodding to the sound of a (not very well-played) drum, seriously contemplating losing my dignity with a woman in a dress that had recently been a bedspread. But out here I was just an ordinary dude, which was precisely what I wanted. I yearned to let go of the struggle, to strip off my Manhattan identity like winter clothing until, naked (or maybe in just my underwear), I would live as a desiring animal in the wide open of the California dream.
I didn’t realize it then, but this line of thinking would soon spread across the whole grid of my generation. It was the great temptation of the sixties, the ghost of Rousseau that haunted every Freudian my age. What lay beneath the layers of repression? Suddenly it seemed possible to know, not through a lengthy course of psychoanalysis but simply by being here now. The Oedipus complex—fuck that! In the words of the Incest Liberation Front (a West Coast group of the sixties), “Sex before eight, or else it’s too late.” If neurosis was the price we paid for civilization, maybe the only way to be healthy was to be uncivilized.
I veered between embracing what I saw and bristling
It was late spring. A warm mist wafted over the cypress trees; music mingled with the caw of seagulls; salt and incense were in the air. Food simply appeared, and I wandered from group to group chowing down. When I was tired I plopped on the side of someone’s sleeping bag. I had come expecting to be drenched in sex, but it was harder to come by than I expected. Free love didn’t mean you could just walk up to a chick and whip out your love wand. You had to connect on a level that seemed mysterious to me. I hadn’t yet come to appreciate the beauty in a woman with downy legs. It took getting used to, as did trusting in that vague sensation of compatibility known as “the vibe.” The consolation was that my body type mattered less than the color my karma produced in someone’s mood ring. Within a day or two I managed tohook up, though I’d never had sex in a park and I couldn’t help worrying about the cops. I wasn’t sure my partner was on the pill, and it didn’t reassure me to see her douche afterward with water from a canteen.
At first I was appalled by all this. The hippies seemed so blockheaded, so forced in their mellowness, blowing bubbles or handing me the gift of a small rubber dinosaur. I could tell from their disregard for money that they were securely middle class, while I came from a background where dropping out meant only one thing: poverty. What I saw looked dangerous and, even worse, indulgent. But the naïveté was irresistible. It brought out the Holden Caulfield in me. I wanted to be their catcher in the rye.
I quickly learned to honor the astrological metaphysics that functioned as a greeting. “What sign are you?” I was asked many times, and when I replied, the response was, invariably, “I knew it.” After a while I stopped thinking of this as silly; it was just another code, like the peace-sign salute. I was beginning to fall under the spell of the scene, with its remarkable capacity to calm my anxieties. Everything that mattered in my life—the clawing for fame, the fending off of sycophants, the constant risk of being put on or put down—all of it dropped away. Every now and then I’d catch myself, take a step back, and think, what the fuck am I doing in this place? Me, the Herring Maiven, a wunderkind of the written word, nodding to the sound of a (not very well-played) drum, seriously contemplating losing my dignity with a woman in a dress that had recently been a bedspread. But out here I was just an ordinary dude, which was precisely what I wanted. I yearned to let go of the struggle, to strip off my Manhattan identity like winter clothing until, naked (or maybe in just my underwear), I would live as a desiring animal in the wide open of the California dream.
I didn’t realize it then, but this line of thinking would soon spread across the whole grid of my generation. It was the great temptation of the sixties, the ghost of Rousseau that haunted every Freudian my age. What lay beneath the layers of repression? Suddenly it seemed possible to know, not through a lengthy course of psychoanalysis but simply by being here now. The Oedipus complex—fuck that! In the words of the Incest Liberation Front (a West Coast group of the sixties), “Sex before eight, or else it’s too late.” If neurosis was the price we paid for civilization, maybe the only way to be healthy was to be uncivilized.
I veered between embracing what I saw and bristling
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