Lies With Man. Michael Nava
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of marijuana surrounded Daniel and Gwen on the poncho she’d spread on the ground with a handwritten sign on it that advertised “Free Palm Readings.”
He closed his hand around hers and said with mock seriousness, “Seek and you shall find.”
She laughed, stood up, playfully pulled him to his feet, and took him to her squat where they spent the rest of the afternoon on a mattress on the floor.
••••
“You said I was a seeker,” he reminded her now.
“I was right, wasn’t I?”
“At the time I thought I’d found what I was looking for.”
“We all did back then,” she said with a trace of a smile.
••••
At first, living in Haight-Asbury had been like living inside a kaleidoscope, all mirrors and flashing colors. The old Victorians had been reclaimed as communes and painted outrageous colors, purple and orange, red and yellow, pink and blue, and their doors left unlocked to welcome young refugees from what neighborhood graffiti called AmeriKKKa. AmeriKKA was the death machine from which the young had escaped, following the directive spray-painted on the wall of the free clinic: Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out.
Daniel, a recent dropout from San Francisco State College, embraced the creed. If he panhandled tourists, he wasn’t begging, he was giving them an opportunity to support a free life; if he dropped acid, it wasn’t to escape his grubby circumstances, but to expand his consciousness; if he grabbed food from the supermarket without paying, he wasn’t stealing it, he was liberating it. Every act that defied the laws and conventions of the squares was an act of revolution.
Gwen was as much a believer as he, but while his political ideas were a grab bag of voguish platitudes, hers were the fruit of a studious and methodical mind. She was not playing at revolution; she really wanted to dismantle the machinery of oppression, and her first step was to understand it. While he threw Frisbees in the park, she hunkered down with The Wretched of the Earth, The Autobiography of Malcom X, and The Second Sex.
Daniel spouted slogans; Gwen advanced arguments. Her clarity about the mechanism of oppression helped him convince himself that simply by being with her, a Black girl, he was engaged in the struggle against it. When, however, her studies took her into women’s consciousness-raising groups, and the oppression under discussion was male, her critical gaze fixed him in her sights. Their life together became a series of confrontations for which he was ill-prepared. He saw the logic of her arguments against male domination but protested, “Not me, Gwen,” which only infuriated her. At the same time, the Summer of Love came to a chilly end. Darker colors seeped into his kaleidoscope. Lured by tales of the free-loving, drug-taking hippie Utopia in San Francisco, a more desperate crowd descended on the neighborhood: wounded kids, kids addicted to stronger drugs than pot and acid, kids with mental troubles, and ordinary criminals looking for easy marks.
When Gwen left him to live in a women’s commune, he wandered the Haight without plan or purpose, hedged by anxiety, lost in fear. One day, hungry and tired, he went to a storefront coffeehouse he’d heard was serving free meals. In the window was a painting of an oxbow with the words “For my yoke is easy and my burden is light” in psychedelic script.
••••
Remembering those days now, he said, “I was drowning without you.”
She’d had no time for his self-pity then, when her feminist analysis of his behavior hurt his feelings, and she had no time for it now. “Is that why you jumped on the Jesus lifeboat? If you’d waited, a better one would have come for you. White boys aren’t allowed to drown, not then or now.”
“We both knew plenty of white boys who did,” he replied brusquely. “The one who ended up on drugs. That could have been me, shooting up and overdosing in an alley. It wasn’t an accident I found the Living Room. I was led there.”
••••
He had pushed open the door and was greeted by familiar smells— patchouli, pot, tobacco— but it was the aromas of coffee and soup that drew him and his rumbling stomach farther into the big, shabbily furnished room. Another quotation painted on the wall brought back a childhood memory of sitting in church: “For God so loved the world he gave his only begotten son so whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”
A boy with curling hair that fell to his back, wearing a beat-up, fringed leather jacket, approached Daniel with a wide smile and gripped his hand in a soul shake.
“Hey man, I’m Ronnie; who are you?”
“I’m Daniel.”
“You hungry, Daniel? The girls made chicken soup, and there’s doughnuts and coffee. Come and help yourself.”
Daniel was studying another quotation on the wall: “I am the way and the truth and the light. No one comes to the father except through me.”
He looked at Ronnie and asked, “What’s your trip, man?”
Ronnie’s big smile got even bigger. “Jesus is my trip.”
••••
Jesus is my trip. Ronnie Carson, the wild-haired urchin who had brought him to Jesus, was still out there somewhere preaching in the streets. He would have been nineteen, the same age then as Wyatt was now. So young, both of them; Daniel himself only twenty-one when he had stumbled into the Living Room, as the coffeehouse was known. He returned day after day to eat soup and drink coffee and listen as Ronnie or one of the other men who ran the place read scripture and talked about Jesus.
Daniel was indifferent to Christianity. In his Lutheran family, religion was something reserved for the starchy hour they spent in church on Sunday, which otherwise did not impinge on their lives. What drew Daniel to the Jesus people wasn’t their beliefs but their joy and their generosity which recaptured for him the original spirit of the Haight.
Almost without knowing it, Daniel had become part of the community, scrubbing the toilet in the Living Room’s squalid little bathroom or going out on the daily dumpster-dives for food behind supermarkets or to negotiate with local bakeries for day-old bread and pastries. He faithfully read the little New Testament they gave him, donated by a local church and originally intended for missionaries in India, and joined in the Bible studies. The Jesus they believed in was nothing like the remote, ghostly presence he remembered from Sunday school. This Jesus was an earthy, long-haired, street-wise preacher who consorted with the lowly and took the powerful to task. Daniel loved this Jesus. But was he God? That was the precipice where Daniel found himself stalled.
One morning, as he was sweeping the sidewalk in front of the Living Room, Ronnie approached him with a sly smile. “Let’s hitch to Ocean Beach and drop a tab of this fantastic acid I just scored.”
••••
It was a glittering December day; the surface of the ocean was like plates of glass slowly sliding one over the other. Gulls dipped and soared in the blue air. The sky was cloudless. They sat on a tree trunk someone had dragged onto the sand. The air was filled with the decaying smell of the kelp scattered on the beach. Ronnie put the tab of acid on Daniel’s tongue as if it were a communion wafer and placed the other on his own. They swallowed and sat, waiting for the drug to kick in.
Daniel remembered how he had stared at the sand where, it seemed to him, he could see simultaneously the golden glint of each individual grain and the golden carpet of the entire beach. He remembered he had raised his eyes to the sky, and the dip and soar of the gulls was transformed from flight into script. The words they wrote across the sky he repeated aloud: “I come from the Father and have come into the world and now I am leaving the world and going to the Father.”
Beside him, Ronnie said, “John sixteen twenty-five.”
“What?”
“It’s what Jesus said to the disciples before he left them to go home to his