Winnie
There is no way I could have adored San Francisco more than I did that summer.
We called it the Summer of Love because of course we put love at the center of everything we did—love of peace, love of music, and that heightened love of earth and body and humanity that emerged from our altered states.
We marched for peace in Vietnam until our feet hurt, and we were committed to living in a way that was as free as possible of the capitalist bullshit that had gotten us into that mess in the first place.
Endless nights were spent drafting letters of conscientious objection, or debating whether someone should burn his draft card—or if one of us women should burn it for him and take the fall.
My friend Bernard, who, like me, was a copyeditor at City Lights, pledged to enter the seminary if his lottery number was called up in the next draft.
Every time one of our brothers or lovers was taken away to the brutal jungles to fight and maybe die for a kind of freedom none of us believed in anymore, we held a vigil with candles and music and wishes of love and peace.
Anytime Governor Reagan talked about duty, we booed him.
He was a cowboy! An actor! And anyway, what was duty compared to equality, peace, and true freedom—of speech and love and protest?
There was such a generous atmosphere everywhere.
We called each other brother and sister, and it really did feel like we were family.
I had a feeling Dad would have understood, if he’d been alive.
I lived right in the heart of it all, a five-minute three-block walk from the intersection of Haight and Ashbury Streets.
I did shifts with the Diggers handing out fruit from the valley I was from, and I saw plays and concerts and went dancing in every major venue from Marin to Chinatown to Daly City to Oakland—the Matrix, the Fillmore, the Greek.
Indoor and outdoor theaters were all alive with the brightest, most vital harmonies.
Not just sonic harmony but social and sexual harmony.
Not just orgasm sex, but gender-equality sex.
We clapped and cheered and whistled as loud for Janis as for Jimi.
At night I went to parties where the chefs in tiny little cafés were trying out new recipes made with ingredients from farms run by high school classmates of mine.
I actually cried when I ate a salad made with just cucumbers and tomatoes from Hank Westerfeld’s farm, doused in a spicy olive oil pressed from fruit grown three hours from my house.
It reminded me of a dish my mother made all August long my whole damn childhood, and I missed Mom then, though I could barely admit it even to myself.
If only I could feel this Summer-of-Love love with her.
Maybe then I wouldn’t have felt so lonely despite never being alone.
But she’d never accepted me for who I was, unlike the hundreds of people I met in San Francisco who never once questioned that I was Winifred Hartley, Writer.
Protestor. Hippie. Independent nat-ur-al wo-man.
A part of me was dimly aware, on the increasingly infrequent mornings when I woke up hangover free, that I was projecting a persona.
It was me, the me I wanted to be, but not the me I felt like inside.
The me I felt like inside was small and afraid of…
What? If only I knew. It was an inchoate fear, and it permeated everything whenever I was sober.
The persona was durable, though. I started making a name for myself as a writer, with coveted bylines in the San Francisco Chronicle and the Berkeley Barb, writing articles about peace protests all over the Bay Area.
I also took buses everywhere to interview people about boring things like using computers as big as warehouses in the San Francisco public schools, and exciting things like interviewing Beverly Bivens about why she’d left We Five when they were riding high after “Let’s Get Together.
” Plus, Lawrence Ferlinghetti gave me some copywriting responsibilities on top of my editing work for City Lights, on the recommendation of Professor Sawyer in the Berkeley English Department; she’d always liked me.
She even told me my poetry was good, so I worked on that, too, and sent it out to magazines and literary journals.
On Monday mornings, I traded weekend stories with Bernard, who was also an aspiring director with a degree in theater from Yale.
I often saw him with his ever-shifting group of mostly gay actors, dancers, and costume designers, and sometimes my friends and I would hitch our wagon to his and wind up at the Palace Theatre for the midnight shows.
“What happened with you and Joshua on Friday? He was far out.” Either of us might have asked that question, with just a swap of the name: Joshua, Sam, Christopher, James, Roy, Fred…
“Nothing on Friday. We were both too fucked up” was the inevitable answer. “But we slept in and made the best of it Saturday afternoon.”
There was a lot of sex that summer and after, and a lot of visits to the free clinic for antibiotics.
Women were more careful than men because a baby was a lot harder to fix than syphilis, but I had some fun, and I managed to keep taking the pill I got prescribed by a friendly doctor to whom the clinic referred unmarried women.
The proximity of Lincoln Salyer haunted me, though, no matter how many other men showed interest. Just knowing he was nearby and that we might run into each other at any moment made my stomach clench.
I left the house looking my best at all times, and sometimes I imagined him seeing me kissing someone else at a concert or party and eating his heart out.
Then in September, Haight-Ashbury choked on itself.
It had become untenable with what seemed like every student on extended summer break and every tourist curious about the scene.
On October 6, the Diggers held a ceremony they called the Death of the Hippies.
The signs for the metaphorical funeral read:
Funeral Notice: HIPPIE.
In the Haight Ashbury District of this city.
Hippie, devoted son of Mass Media.
Friends are invited to attend service beginning at sunrise, October 6, 1967 at Buena Vista Park.
The papers that went up all over the city looked more like formal invitations than the psychedelic neon posters that had illuminated our summers.
They meant business, even though the ceremony itself was quite tongue-in-cheek.
They filled a wooden coffin full of the kinds of hippie paraphernalia that had been, as they said, appropriated by capitalist interlopers intent on selling things that ought to be free: weed, beads, headbands.
Some guys even shaved their beards into the casket.
Then a big group of us followed the coffin down Haight to the corner it made with Ashbury, where we set all the stuff on fire.
The message was clear: Only those truly dedicated to peace and art could stay and call the city home. Tourists had to leave.
I stayed.
Mercifully, the ceremony was like pulling the plug on a drain, and by mid-October the true believers among us could breathe fresh air again.
More good news came in the form of my first published poem, in Playboy.
Plus, as a boon, it was published across from the tits of Playmate-of-the-Month Reagan Wilson, so I figured everyone would read it.
I sent the issue to Miranda at her office address, then waited a few days to make sure she got it, and I called her.
“What did you think?” I asked.
“Of Wilson’s nipples or your line about skinny-dipping under the Little Dipper?”
“Both!” I shrieked with laughter. “What a pairing, right?”
“As good as Riesling and asiago.”
“Champagne and caviar.”
“Seriously, little sister, this is amazing. Even I know this is a big deal. Really major writers are published in Playboy.”
“I know, right? I thought it was a long shot, but worth it.”
“I’m really proud of you,” Miranda said, and her words made me glow from within. “I tried calling you when it arrived to congratulate you, but the phone just rang and rang.”
“Yeah, no one answers here. Most of the time during the day, no one is even here.”
“You doing okay?”
“I am. I’m doing really well. Hey…did…did Mom see the poem?”
“Not yet. I wasn’t sure if you wanted me to show her, since I don’t think she would get why Playboy is a big deal.”
“Yeah. I just thought maybe…by accident. You never know.”
“I can leave it around if you want. Blame it on Emilio.”
I laughed. “No. No, no. I have some others under consideration at respectable places we can show Mom someday. Listen, I have to go soon, but I have tickets to see the Airplane next Friday. Want to come down?”
Miranda hesitated before saying, “I don’t think I can.”
“Why not?”
“I just…have a lot to do here.”
“It’s not…you haven’t…gotten back together with Ben, have you?”
“God, no. Why do you ask that?”
“Because when you were together, since he was married, you kind of just made yourself available all the time.”
“Yeah, and I learned my lesson never to do that again.”
“Do you date at all?”
Miranda laughed. “I hardly have time for a boyfriend, Winnie.”
Frustrated, I blew out a gust of air and said, “You can’t be a slave to that winery forever. You’re only twenty-four!”
“I’m happy here.”
“You seemed happy here in San Francisco, too. Differently happy. Authentically happy.”
“Not everyone can be a free spirit like you, Win.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing. Just that…I have responsibilities, you know?”
“And I don’t?”
“It’s not the same.”
“I don’t see how it’s not. I have a job. I pay my own bills. And I still manage to write my poetry.”
“Farm workers with families depend on me for their livelihoods.”