Authors: Randy Mixter
He went with black pants, a white, loose fitting shirt, the vest and boots. He completed the ensemble with a belt buckled by a brass peace sign. He felt a bit silly and was thankful no mirrors were present to confirm that conclusion.
No mention was made of his manner of dress at the dinner table where, once again, everyone present, including Sarah, ignored him. He wanted to know what happened to the fire girl and was hoping Chick would bring up the subject, but he never did. The talk again centered on the day’s events of all seated with the exception of Sarah, who had the most exciting day of all. She did not speak one word during the entire meal.
Conflicted and confused, Alex decided to skip Sarah’s storytelling. The embarrassment of the previous evening meant he would need to part the beads this time and enter the domain of the women and children. So far, no man in the house had crossed that threshold and lived to tell about it. Even his desire to see and hear Sarah would not allow him to be first.
After dinner, he sat on the porch, on an old rocking chair, with Jezebel, his sole companion, on his lap. The warm evening brought out many of the streets residents. Flower children roamed the sidewalks and the street. He thought of downtown Baltimore during a weekday lunch hour, and the heavy foot traffic of working men and women.
He would sometimes eat his lunch on a bench outside his workplace and watch the masses rush from place to place. There were always attractive girls walking around him. He would often look their way as he ate, thinking he could fall in love with them all, and if one stopped to talk to him, just one, his heart would break out of his chest in excitement.
“It was a short story tonight. You didn’t miss much.”
He had closed his eyes for an instant, and now Sarah stood in front of him.
“The children were tired after playing in the park all day.”
Alex was about to explain himself when he realized that she was talking to the cat.
“I’m disappointed in you Jezebel, electing the warmth of a near stranger to my delightful night tales.”
Sarah sat on the chair next to him and scratched Jezebel’s head. The cat settled in on his lap, purring blissfully.
“Once again a man comes between a perfectly good relationship,” she said as she stroked the cat into a higher state of bliss.
They left the porch a short time later. Sarah had taken Jezebel from Alex and gently lowered her on to another chair where she fell instantly asleep.
Sarah wore the same white dress as earlier in the day, but now she once again wore a ring of flowers atop her hair and sandals on her feet. Many of the young men they passed stared at her as Alex had once stared at the girls of Baltimore. On this evening, a few were courageous enough to ask where she was going and she always answered with the same word, home.
The park was alive with people. Music played from transistor radios. Blankets dotted the grass, as did guitarists, flutists, and bongo players. Vendors hawked their wares, selling everything from snowballs to hand-made jewelry. The smell of marijuana hung heavily in the still summer air. Every so often a police officer, on his beat would walk by, not reacting in the least to the pot smokers around him.
“The police let us alone in the park, unless we make trouble,” Sarah said. “Don’t let them catch you smoking on the street though.”
“You’d never know it by Chick,” Alex said as they approached Hippie Hill. “He smokes the stuff everywhere.”
“Chick is Chick,” she said in a way that made him wonder if there was a history between them.
“Do you mind waiting by yourself for a little while?” she asked him once they had settled by the hill’s apex.
Without waiting for a reply, she removed her sandals and ran away. She laughed as she left him and he smiled at that. It was only the second time he had heard her laugh, and he loved the sound.
She stayed on the hill until the stars was bright behind her. At times, she danced in the pockets of shadow and moonlight, at other times she stood with arms and head raised to the night sky.
Alex watched her throughout. Many walked around him, but none came near the dancer on the hill. On the cusp of a knoll, with a solitary tree as a companion, she danced alone.
A different Sarah sat next to him upon her return. She was in good spirits, cheerful and bubbly. Her spirits were so high that he decided to put his ‘fire girl’ questions on hold for the time being.
The crowds had diminished in the last hour, and the vendors had departed with the sunset. As far as Alex could tell, it was mostly flower children left. They spread out on the hill, a few on blankets, and others on the grass.
“Some spend the night in the park when the weather is warm enough, even if they have their own place,” Sarah said as she looked down the hill.
Many of the assemblage had formed into circles where musicians played and sang and men and women danced. Candles and flashlights animated the hill in light and shadow.
“It’s a beautiful sight, isn’t it?” she asked.
Alex turned to look at her. A current of air favored her at that moment, brushing the hair from her face. She gazed down the hill and her eyes sparkled in wonder. The light from the distant candles caressed her face, as a brush would stroke a painting.
“Yes,” he said. “It is.”
“I came here when I was sixteen,” she began. “That was two years ago. In those early days, everything was right with the world. The few of us who populated the Haight-Ashbury were idealists. We came to start a new society, free of strife, free of war, emboldened by the possibility of change.” A smile creased her face.
“In those days it wasn’t all drugs and music. We worked at change. We saw a future of endless possibilities.”
“More came by the day. Dreamers, poets, and idealists all joined our ranks. By the spring of 1966, we numbered in the thousands. Change was in the air, you could feel it, you could touch it. The pageants, the festivals, the concerts, the parades, everything pointed to a new order. We smoked marijuana for enlightenment, not casual pleasure. We knew we were on to something wonderful.”
She turned toward him. “We were so close, Alex, so close.”
Sarah was now facing him. She was so beautiful that she stole his breath each time he saw her, and she had just called him by name. He felt his heart pound in his chest.
“I’m so sorry. The story I told to the children earlier had a better ending,” she said and turned to face the hill.
“Some good came of it though, and maybe the bright candles we lit then, and the smaller ones we light now, will one day become just one perfect flame.”
They were both content to watch the revelry below them, each lost in their own thoughts. For several minutes, time was measured by the flickering of candlelight.
“Their light once matched the stars in the sky,” Sarah said.
She stood and held out her hand to him.
“It’s late. We should walk home.”
As they left the hill, Alex thought of dreams, paintings, and songs, and the mystery of all three.
A MORNING WALK
Sarah told him,
after breakfast, she would not be at the park the next couple of nights. A two-night concert at the Fillmore meant busy evenings at the Free Clinic. She always assisted on concert nights, when the calming room saw overflow business. The fact that the show’s headliner, Big Brother and the Holding Company, had a crowd-pleasing lead singer by the name of Janice Joplin would not help matters at all.
Alex was disheartened and moving towards depression when she mentioned her report time was noon, and she would have the mornings free. She gladly accepted his offer of morning walks to the Golden Gate Park or Haight Street.
“You’re my sounding board,” Sarah confided to him. “I can tell you things, because you listen to what I’m saying. You don’t entirely understand my lifestyle yet and you might not agree with everything I say, but you listen.”
An hour later, they were walking together, a girl in white with a flower in her hair and a person self-consciously wearing hippie attire, on a direct path toward Haight Street.
He had fine-tuned his article on the porch stoop, by the light of a street lamp, until the early morning hours. He nearly overslept because of that, and barely beat out the early stages of the bathroom line.
This morning he was hand carrying his writings to the Western Union office, on the lower end of Haight Street, with Sarah by his side. They were halfway to their destination when he decided to try his luck by asking her about the fate of the fire girl.
“You have heard of doctor patient privilege, I assume,” she said in reply to his query.
Sarah laughed at the quizzical look on his face. “I’m just teasing you. I’ll make you a deal. I will tell you about Crystal if you let me read your article.”
Alex mulled this over for a minute. He was almost positive he never mentioned Sarah in his writing. He assumed that was a good thing. But what if she took offense at her exclusion. For all he knew, she might feel slighted. Most of the essay involved his culture shock upon arrival. He knew how serious Sarah took the nonconformist lifestyle. Would Sarah take anything in those pages as a sign of disrespect? As he was analyzing the article paragraph by paragraph in his head, she snatched the binder from his hand, turning it to the first page.
“I can’t wait for you,” she said while staring intently at the page. “I haven’t got all day, you know.”
They had just entered Haight Street when she handed the binder back to him.
“Not bad for the first time out,” she remarked as they continued walking. She soon kept her end of the bargain.
“Crystal, your fire girl, was in bad shape,” Sarah said as they walked. “She was what the doctors call a stage four delusional, which is the highest stage. I calmed her down the best I could before the ambulance arrived.”
“She was hospitalized?” he asked. He was a little concerned that Sarah could not work her magic on the girl.
“You need to understand that L.S.D. can be a dangerous drug if not taken properly. Crystal was probably a first timer who did not receive proper supervision, or she ingested a bad batch. By the time it hits the streets, who knows what could be in it.”
Now his mind raced. The fire girl had a name and it was Crystal. Someone had messed up somewhere along the line, at her expense, and Crystal saw fire, in her eyes and in her brain.
“You must promise me you’ll be very careful if you try anything other than marijuana,” Sarah said in such a manner that it sounded a bit like a scolding.
“I don’t plan on doing drugs while I’m here.”
He felt he made the statement with confidence, but Sarah sighed loudly. “That’s what they all say, almost every one of them when they leave the calming room. They swear off drugs. A week or two later, maybe less, they’re back. The same people over and over.”
“I’m not like everybody else,” he told her with enough conviction that she almost believed him.
The Western Union office assured Alex that his employer would have the paperwork the next morning. He would call them anyhow, just to be safe, and to find out when his first paycheck would arrive.
Sarah had waited for him outside the office. When he joined her on the sidewalk, he noticed she was carrying her sandals and the flower that graced her hair was in her hand.
“I’ll race you to the park,” she said with a hint of mischief.
“If you catch me you can have my flower.”
Before she completed the sentence, she was off, running around and through the scores of young men and women who did not seem to find this behavior the least bit odd.
He took off after her, but his concern for the pedestrian and street traffic slowed him considerably, as did his made for walking at a deliberate pace and not much more boots.
Sarah was steadily gaining ground on him, laughing merrily the entire time. Though he had all but conceded defeat, he did not want to stop pursuing her. She might think him a quitter or, worse, she might feel he found her unworthy of pursuit.
By the time he checked in at the park, Sarah was sitting on the grass, looking at the sky and whistling the best she could. She did not seem to be out of breath. Alex, however, was gasping and gulping air as if his life depended on it.
“You win,” he panted as he hobbled up to her.
“And you don’t get the flower. My flowers must be earned,” she replied. “If you don’t mind a suggestion, try taking off your boots next time or, better yet, wear something more appropriate to chasing girls on a warm summer’s day.”
He pointed to the grass around her. “How about one of those,” he managed to say between two prodigious gulps of air.
“A dandelion?” She eyed him quizzically. “Oh, well,” she sighed as she snatched one close by. “Who am I to deny such a humble request?”
“It’s better than nothing,” Alex mumbled, as he accepted her consolation prize and sat down beside her.
She could not help laughing a little when he immediately lowered his head to his legs, wheezing heavily.
“You sound a bit like Jezebel when she’s coughing up a fur ball.”
The imagery was too much for Alex. Despite his misery, he joined her in laughter.
They were still laughing when Sarah told him she needed to leave for the Free Clinic. She accepted his offer of escort with her assurance of maintaining a leisurely pace.
When they arrived at the clinic several minutes later, she thanked him for being a gentleman and a good loser.
“If you go to the concert tonight, remember that I will be quite disappointed if you visit the calming room as a patient”
She kissed him then, on the forehead, and ran up the steps and through the door.
For the longest time, he stood looking up at the closed door, letting the warmth of her kiss work its way through his body. After a while, he began his trek back to Ashbury Street, still gripping the dandelion. When he was within a couple of blocks of the house, he put Sarah’s gift in his shirt pocket, took off his boots, and ran the rest of the way.
THE CONCERT