Summer of Love

 Hey guys, did you ever wonder why so often when you try to chat up a woman you encounter that she is stand-offish or hostile?

Well...

One time way back when when I was out walking I sat down on a park bench to take a break.  Pretty soon a man about the age of my father sat down on the same bench and we got to talking.  It turned out he was a native San Franciscan and had been around for the so-called summer of love in 1967, worked back stage at the Fillmore and had known a lot of the rock groups of that era, including a number I had never heard of -- The Balloon Farm, H.P. Lovecraft, The Cyrcle, etc., -- as well as ones I knew such as The Jimi Hendrix Experience, The Doors, The Byrds, and so forth.

So we had a nice chat and became friends, meeting at the park several times after by chance, then going to have a cup of coffee, lunch, a dinner or two.  He invited me to his house to see his collection of photos, psychedelic posters, handbills and old free hippie newspapers and that sort of thing. For me, he was just an interesting guy who told me about the old days, a subject I've always had an interest in.  Not just history, but how it was to be alive in past times.  And here was a man who had lived through the events of a particular time and place that have become legendary.  

His father was an Irish dock worker and owned a house in the Richmond District.  He had a pretty normal life growing up in a era when ordinary people could afford to live and work in the City and could walk or ride the trolley buses, street cars and cable cars just about anywhere.  He quit high school when he was 16, not liking school very much.  The last straw for him was when he was sitting in some boring class with a teacher droning on and the sun burning through a window made him too hot, so he got up and opened it to get some fresh air.  The teacher chastised him for not raising his hand and asking permission to do so, then  ordered him to close it.  Instead, he walked out of the classroom and the school, ending his formal education.  

That was the spring of 1967 and he became a sort of hippie, or at least hung out with the swarms of young people descending on San Francisco that year.  He had a girlfriend, he had a really cool job at the Fillmore and began smoking marijuana and taking psychedelics.  He told stories of what we would call raves now, rock parties on old abandoned ferry boats along the bay where it was sex, drugs and rock-and-roll all night long, the party hearty, live fast, die young, leave a good-looking corpse lifestyle.  

He loved it until he found his girlfriend dead, hanged in an abandoned warehouse along the docks.  The cops dismissed it as a suicide and didn't bother to investigate, but he was sure she had been murdered.  He said he had a dream in which the murderer was revealed to him.  He went to the cops and told them about the dream, which he had had several nights in a row.  They told him to get lost. They didn't give a damn about some dirty, drugged-out hippy chick who offed herself.   And they half-insinuated that if she was murdered, he was the most likely suspect.  Would he like to spend some time in jail while they checked it out?  So he let the matter drop.

He also dropped out of the hippy scene.  His father got him a job on the docks.  He joined the union, the ILA, and began making good money.  He added to his income by pilfering cargo and taking bribes from smugglers and drug runners, a practice he said was commonplace among longshoremen in those days.  He told of huge shipments of heroin coming into Fort Mason from South Viet Nam on military transports that he was paid not to notice, as well as crates of stolen (he assumed) antiques made of gold, jade and ivory. He bought his own house in Richmond, a Pontiac GTO convertible, a Harley-Davidson Sportster and a cabin cruiser to go fishing on the bay with and take trips out to Angel Island and around the bay.  Not a bad life for a high-school dropout.

 Then he injured his back and got in a fight with his union boss over how it happened and who was responsible and was out of a job.  But he took a training course offered by the City and became a court reporter.  It didn't pay nearly as well as the longshoreman's job, but it was enough to support his lifestyle and then some.

Musically, as he grew older he became a fan of Kate Bush and joined her fan club, corresponded with her and wrote an article about her that was published in some magazine.  And that leads me back to the original point of this post.   You see, I had never heard of Kate Bush so I visited her on-line fan site and of course looked up my friend's posts there...and this is what I found:

 I want to tell you about my friend, Wanda…
I had been waiting and looking for someone. But I am VERY particular about whom I turn on to, as I want the person to be able to be receptive to the things I like in life. I lucked out. Somehow we found each other and ever since have become quite close. She is most everything I require in a woman; bright, educated, poetic, funny as hell, very well-read and musically aware; and more incidentally, mature, immature, a wonderful dancer, and very much aware, unafraid, and understanding of sexuality. Oh yeah, and she is drop dead GORGEOUS! (Think a blend of Christina Applegate, Nicole Kidman and Elizabeth Montgomery.) I was stunned!
Ever since I caught her quoting Martin Buber’s “I and Thou”, and other philosophers and poets, I knew I had something special.
I can’t express how much fun we have had. Around my diligent working, we have spent considerable time privately and learned about each other with much delight.
This isn’t about me finding the woman of my dreams. Well, not exactly. We meet each other for a purpose here and that goes for others as well. Besides this, she is only 20 or so, and I’m sure there would be issues related to age-differences, as I’ve learned through experience elsewhere. So I’ve been simply enjoying her good company. She’s been a great and unexpected friend.
Here is a little poem that she sent me. It is a fitting description of my little Wanda, and says so much about her:

"Freedom"
A passion to be free
Has always mastered me.
To none beneath the sun
Will I bow down--no one
May leash my liberty!
My life's my own. I rise
With freedom in my eyes.
And my concept of hell
Is to be forced to sell
Myself to one who buys.

Okay, that's a lame poem that a young person would think was "deep," but never mind that.  What gave me a surprise, and not a pleasant one, was that he considered me his little Wanda.  Say what?  No!  To me, he was just a nice old guy to chat with.  I'd had dinner with him a few times; okay, I guess he could have considered those dates. But, geez, he was my dad's age.  So, you know, I considered him "safe."  But, clearly, he was infatuated with me:  Me?  Drop dead gorgeous?  Who says something like that? And all that other stuff?  He had turned me in his mind into some fantasy of perfection.  But I was just some goober.  A dumb college girl.  And what was this "very much aware, unafraid, and understanding of sexuality" all about?  There were totally zero sexual aspects to our acquaintance.  The guy hadn't even made a move on me, and if he had I would have told him to back up the truck.

So, in his mind, I was...apparently almost his lover and we had "found each other."  Oh, no, please, get out of here! No, no.

Anyway, the more I read over that post and others he had made about me, the more uneasy -- no, the more scared -- I became.  What if that summer of love girlfriend he had told me about had not really been his girlfriend, but he thought so and when she found out how he thought of her she tried to get away from him and ended up dead. It's not an uncommon thing. Could that happen to me?  I didn't know what to do, so I asked my mom, telling her the whole story, and she told my dad, and he and my brothers paid a visit to this guy and had a  come-to-Jesus meeting with him.  The upshot of that was that he moved to Washington state and I never saw or heard from him again.

 Did I over-react?  Did I do a harmless man harm?  I felt that maybe I did.  But my mother asked me if he had ever told me about any other women in his life besides that one from 1967.  No, he had not.  Did I think he never had any other women in his life?  I hadn't really thought about it, but I suppose not.  What was he doing in the park?  Why did he sit down next to me and begin talking to me?  I'd never thought about that either.  She drew me along through a series of questions I should have originally asked myself to consider that maybe I had been targeted and set up by this guy, who very well may have been a serial...predator.  I could have become his next victim, naive and trusting as I was.

 Well, I'll never know, but I did I learn a lesson:  Never, ever strike up conversations with random men you happen to encounter. 

But you know what?  I still remember that guy with fondness. I did like him.  I did find his stories fascinating, especially those about that summer of love and what it was like to be sixteen years old in San Francisco in 1967 enjoying a free concert by Jimi Hendrix in Golden Gate Park with the wind blowing crisp and clean off the bay, without a care and the whole wonderful world waiting to become yours.