The Haight 1968

Don was a writer I'd known in Sacramento. He'd asked me to fall by and see what he'd been writing. He was living on Page St at the time, a bit west of Baker, as I recall. The way housing worked was that some guy would let a flat and then sublet individual rooms to defray the cost. If you couldn't afford a bedroom you could rent a space in the living room. People with no money slept in the kitchen. Don had no money but had kept his bedroom by letting a smuggler use it for a few days while selling off his latest shipment. It was a bit odd to be sitting on the floor (no furniture of course) reading Don's work, while the smuggler, a jovial mountain man type, sat there in his underwear, selling kilos from a stack of about 40. Of course most things were a bit odd then.

After smoking a bit we got really hungry so the two of us went out to get something. There was a walk-in BBQ joint on Haight where you could buy a slab of ribs pretty cheap. We each got one and walked toward the park, eating our ribs. An angry panhandler glared at our affluence. I offered him a rib but all he wanted was money to get up with. I was saddened by what had become of the Haight by '68, the older heads becoming full time dealers while legions of the lost and hopeless drifted into the scene as their customers. But in the park we met a couple of girls from Redondo Beach and my mood improved.

Sid
California


Photo credits: 351-4-29 on Flickr by A. Subset, under Creative Commons license, some rights reserved, http://www.flickr.com/photos/places2go/2468678004/