After the Tall Timber (9 page)

The way the drugs came into Love seems to be this: As the waifs abandoned the social mystique of their elders (work, repression, the power struggle), they looked for new magic and new mysteries. And the prophets of chemical insight, who claimed the same devotion to Love and the same lack of interest in the power struggle as the waifs, were only too glad to supply them. Allen Ginsberg, in an article entitled “Renaissance or Die,” which appeared in the
Los Angeles Free Press
(a local New Left newspaper) last December, urged that “everybody who hears my voice, directly or indirectly, try the chemical LSD at least once, every man, woman, and child American in good health over the age of fourteen,” and Richard Alpert (the former psychedelic teammate of Timothy Leary), in an article in
Oracle
(a newspaper of the hallucinogenic set), promised, “In about seven or eight years the psychedelic population of the United States will be able to vote anybody into office they want to, right? Through purely legal channels, right?” The new waifs, who, like many others in an age of ambiguities, are drawn to any expression of certainty or confidence, any semblance of vitality or inner happiness, have, under pressure and on the strength of such promises, gradually dropped out, in the Leary sense, to the point where they are economically unfit, devoutly bent on powerlessness, and where they can be used. They are used by the Left and the drug cultists to swell their ranks. They are used by politicians of the Right to attack the Left. And they are used by their more conventional peers just to brighten the landscape and slow down the race a little. The waifs drift about the centers of longhair activism, proselytizing for LSD and Methedrine (with arguments only slightly more extreme than the ones liberals use on behalf of fluoridation), and there is a strong possibility that although they speak of ruling the world with Love, they will simply vanish, like the children of the Children’s Crusade, leaving just a trace of color and gentleness in their wake.

The Fifth Estate, a white stucco structure, managed by Mitchell and, until three weeks ago, owned by a publishing house that puts out
Teen, Hot Rod
, and
Guns and Ammo
magazines (and whose head, Robert E. Petersen, was, until recently, a city commissioner appointed by Mayor Samuel Yorty), used to be entered through a patio enclosed on two sides by one white and one yellow wall. The white wall, which faces the sidewalk, has been painted with black letters that spell out “WELCOME TO LOS ANGELES: CITY OF BLUE FASCISM.” The yellow wall has become little more than a tilted arch over an immense hole and a complicated pile of debris. One Monday morning in January, a motorist veered from the westbound lane of the Strip, crossed the eastbound lane, and drove through the yellow wall, across the patio, through a large picture window, and into a room at the Fifth Estate in which films used to be shown. Since the accident happened at 4:30 A.M., no films were being shown at the time. Police who investigated claim that the driver had fallen asleep at the wheel. But a boy who was sitting in the room on a folding chair when the car drove in believes the man was merely drunk.

The Fifth Estate serves coffee, hot chocolate, Cokes, and sandwiches, but its customers do not normally eat or drink much. They play cards or chess at large, round tables, or they talk. Some of them, who earn their keep by looking after the place, sleep there. (The coffeehouse is, in any case, open until 6 A.M.) Because the Fifth Estate has no entertainment license, no one is permitted to sing or to play the guitar inside, and among writings and sketches covering the walls there is a warning to this effect. (The sheriff’s men, equipped with glaring flashlights, run frequent checks in search of addicts and runaways, and to see that no one inside is playing or singing.) What playing or singing there is occurs outside, in the alleyway or near the painted wall in front.

On the patio of the Fifth Estate, on a recent Thursday night (Al Mitchell, the manager, was in a back room discussing with a young lawyer from the American Civil Liberties Union the possibility of deluging the Los Angeles Police Department with lawsuits, not in any hope of winning them but for nuisance value), a few young longhairs were gathered, more or less waiting around. One of the curious things about the young longhairs on the Strip these days is the special air with which they wait around: they seem already to inhabit some sort of leisure-time frontier, where all social problems have been solved and there remain no injustices but the ones in nature, where there is nothing to do but to wait in some small café for the coming of the Word. On this occasion, the waiting young longhairs (who will be presented here under fictional first names to protect their privacy) were Zak, a twenty-two-year-old, with sideburns, from Chicago; Marie, eighteen, Zak’s girl, who lives more or less with her parents in Los Angeles; Dot, another eighteen-year-old girl (wearing a dress made of white lace over burgundy satin, pale burgundy tights, and black ballet slippers, and, around her neck, a string of Indian bells), who lives with the family of another girl, “because my mother and I don’t get along”; and Len, a seventeen-year-old waiter and boarder at the Fifth Estate, who had left his home in New Jersey early in October with a friend (who got homesick and hitchhiked back after a week). There was also another longhair, obviously much older than the rest, whose vest was covered with buttons reading “Jesus Pleases,” “Come to Middle Earth,” and “At Least George Murphy Could Dance,” among other things, and who was reading a copy of the
Free Press
.

Len, who said he planned to return home “as soon as they don’t need my help out here anymore,” expressed sorrow that he had forgotten to write to his eleven-year-old sister on her birthday.

“I never know what to write home,” Zak said, scuffing one of his boots on the stones. “What am I going to write? Hello, I’m here, you’re there, hello? What else is there to say? It’s always a hassle.”

Dot said she would be returning to her own house for a few days, to babysit with her younger brother and sister while her parents went on a holiday to Las Vegas. (The frequency with which California teen-agers are asked to care for their younger siblings, or their friends’ siblings, creates a thriving nomad-baby-sitter economy.) She asked Zak and Marie whether they would pick her up the following evening—to go first to the studio of a sculptor named Vito, and later on (from 2 to 6 A.M.) to a rock session called the After Hours at the Hullabaloo.

Zak said he couldn’t afford it. He had invested all his money in applying for a license to open a coffeehouse—which, since the name “The Trip” was already taken, he hoped to call The Travel Agency. His application had made no progress at all, and he was waiting for Al Mitchell, who had promised to let him call his coffeehouse, for a time, the Fifth Estate Annex. Marie said she would hitch a ride to Dot’s place, without Zak, and she and Dot could hitch a ride to Vito’s place together.

A young man, fairly conventionally dressed and coiffed, crossed the patio toward the group. “Has the Man been here tonight?” he asked, speaking low and rapidly.

“No,” Zak said.

The young man immediately removed his jacket and tie, and brushed what proved to be an astonishing amount of hair forward from behind his ears. “Out there, I have to think of my job,” he said, and slouched against a wall to wait around with the rest.

The
Free Press
recently opened a bookstore on Fairfax Avenue, which intersects Sunset Boulevard a few yards from the eastern end of the Strip. The store is right across the street from Canter’s Restaurant, a large delicatessen, inside and in front of which, for some months now, the longhairs—old and young, and of every persuasion—have been gathering at two every morning. The reaction of the restaurant’s manager to the types who now frequent his place is less than hospitable; he comments, as they pass to their tables, “What a sight!” and “Why don’t they wash?” and he stands, vigilant, at the cash register to block the entrance of anyone who is not wearing shoes. (A policeman outside tries to keep the crowd there from blocking the sidewalk and from engaging in traffic in marijuana or drugs.) The
Free Press
bookstore, called the Kazoo, is open from ten in the morning until 2 A.M. In addition to a very wide and good selection of paperbacks, it sells many books and pamphlets about the assassination of President Kennedy, innumerable little magazines and obscure works (including a six-page poem, “The Love Book,” by Lenore Kandel, which was recently confiscated on grounds of obscenity in San Francisco), many works on drugs and hallucinogens, and some works on religions of the East (including one called
Practical Mysticism
). There is also a counter at which the shop sells objets d’art, buttons (“Ronald Reagan for Fuehrer,” “Be Creative, Invent a Sexual Perversion,” “Visit Your Mother Today. Maybe She Hasn’t Had Any Problems Lately”), posters of movie stars, psychedelic (systematically distorted and ballooning) posters for rock groups, pastel cigarette papers, and holders, called “roach clips,” for conserving the last drag on marijuana butts.

At 1 A.M. on the Friday when Marie and Dot were to hitch a ride to Vito’s, John Hammond, a bearded clerk at the Kazoo, was consoling a teen-age girl who had walked into the store in tears. “A little LSD therapy is okay, but nothing with needles,” he was saying. “You want to open yourself up, not close yourself down. Find the easiest way to go, and if it’s functional, that’s beautiful.” Some of the other clerks were knocking down walls to make room for a bookshelf, and Mrs. Art Kunkin, wife of the editor and publisher of the
Free Press
, was talking with two young entrepreneurs who were earning part of their way through college by distributing—to order—posters, bumper stickers, decals for sweat shirts, flutes, and buttons. It turned out they could supply, in particular, some highly coveted Lenny Bruce posters, and Mrs. Kunkin asked whether they could deliver a few dozen right away. She sighed as they went out the door. “It’s always nice to have a brush with the ultimate success,” she said.

That same morning, farther up Fairfax Avenue, in front of a coffeehouse called the Blue Grotto, whose customers generally sit about in semi-darkness in a kind of gentle half sleep, the police arrested two young longhairs on suspicion of armed robbery.

At eleven-thirty that Friday night, when Dot (still wearing the dress of white lace over burgundy satin and the string of Indian bells, but now with white net stockings and black buckled shoes) and Marie (wearing a pale-green dress, white net stockings, and brown buckled shoes) entered the home and sculpture school of Vito Paulekas—a storefront and three floors, known to all simply as Vito’s place—the entryway was dark, but the pale bare feet of a young man slouched on a chair against the wall were visible. Vito called to the girls from the top of a flight of stairs to go down and see the sculptures in the basement. They went down. The sculpture class for the evening was over, but several people were still at work on red clay nudes, supported by dowels and wire armatures. The basement walls were covered with signs, among them a thinly lettered one reading, “Dear President Johnson. Being spring, I would prefer more flowers.”

A woman in a canvas shirt, burlap slacks, and boots, who was modelling a large bust of a man, asked Dot to come over and look. “What does he look like to you?” she asked. “I mean, what sort of person?”

“He looks like a groovy guy,” Dot said.

“I mean, what sort of impression does he make? Does he attract you physically?” the woman asked.

Before Dot could answer, a tall, slender girl in a polo shirt and blue jeans—looking about sixteen, and wearing a scalloped horn from an old phonograph on her head—drew Dot away to look at a small erotic sculpture, on a shelf full of small erotic sculptures, all of which (like the lettering on the psychedelic posters at the Kazoo) were distorted, like reflections in a hall of mirrors. “I just made this new one tonight,” she said. “What do you think of it? It’s Vito and Sue. Isn’t it groovy?” (Sue is Vito’s wife.)

Dot said that the little sculpture was groovy, and the girl led the way upstairs. It turned out that her name was Meg, that her parents brought her to stay at Vito’s house every weekend, and that she was twelve.

The second floor of Vito’s house is a kind of lair, with Oriental decor, Oriental music piped in from below, and walls hung with tapestries, bits of colored glass, feather dusters, beads, dolls, a dart board, a bamboo screen, a violin, and an armadillo shell. Between two sofas set against opposite walls is a coffee table supported by cinder blocks. On the table that night were a copy of
Time
, several delicately painted tongue depressors, some assorted photographs, a piece of velvet, a branch of pussy willow, a copy of
Playboy
, a copy of
Torrid Cinema
(with an article about Vito in it), a half-completed pair of red-and-black leather sandals turned up at the toes, and a pot of glue. The young man whose bare feet had been visible in the entryway had followed Dot, Marie, and Meg up the stairs. He immediately picked up the pot of glue and began to sniff.

“Hey, that’s for the sandals,” Meg said. “You know nobody gets high in Vito’s house.”

The boy put the gluepot down.

Vito, a man in his early fifties, with a sandy mustache and pale-blue eyes, entered the room and said hello to everyone. He was wearing velvet slacks and a pale embroidered cape. Sue, who was pregnant, followed him in. She was wearing a short dress, tights, and a crocheted poncho, and on her fingers she had eight rings. Vito announced that they were both going to take a nap in preparation for the After Hours at the Hullabaloo. Meg suddenly became very tense, and raced out of the room. “What shall I wear?” she shouted several times to Sue from an adjoining room. “Same thing we wear to the freakouts?” When she reappeared, she had drawn fine interlacing green lines around her eyes and across the bridge of her nose. She was wearing a poncho, completely open at the sides, apparently made out of a fluffy white bedspread, and a pair of slacks, which the poncho did not quite reach, made of the same material, bell-bottomed, and cut low at the hips. Vito and Sue retired for their nap, requesting Meg to wake them at 1 A.M.