Summer of Love, a Time Travel Page 5

  He pulls open the door handle and enters the shop. A flickering blue neon sign informs him the place is called the Mystic Eye.

  3

  Somebody to Love

  Ruby A. Maverick says, Dig It:

  The media moan and whine that they don’t understand these crazed folks with their frolics and their TITillations. And since the media don’t understand—and why should they? diatribe and invective make such good copy—it follows that the hip community stands for nothing. Who knows what their principles are, let alone their MORALS?

  Yet when the Mayor of San Francisco and the Chief of Police decline to do a THING about the stampede of kids—who were never invited by the hip community, the hip community has nothing to do with the Number One song on the Hit Parade—why, the hip community sets up crash pads in churches and garages and the backs of stores. The hip community cooks food and gives it away. The hip community sets up a free medical clinic and free switchboards and free boxes on the street and free entertainment in the park. The hip community sets up a job co-op and a merchants’ association to employ the poor li’l refugees fleeing AnyTown, U.S.A.

  Why, exactly, are the kids fleeing?

  WE SHALL SEE.

  The hip community does all these things at its own private and lean expense. But GEE it’s strange. HEAVENS, it’s awful puzzling. The media want to know, what do these crazed folks DO? Why, they dance. They sing. They read odd books. They paint odd pictures. They ponder odd philosophies. They run shops and cafes and newspapers.

  HOW SHOCKING. They are attempting to create a NEW COMMUNITY.

  And after the Man spies on them and pries into their lives and J-Edgar-Hoovers them till it’s not funny, ALL OF A SUDDEN the hip community doesn’t want to hang out with the media anymore. To the Post and Time and Life, the hip community says BUZZ OFF.

  And that’s NOT NICE.

  So the media want to know—since the hip community stands for nothing—WHY OH WHY are kids from all over America stampeding to join a pack of lawless, immoral, fornicating, stoned, dirty, lazy freaks?

  Uh-huh. And you don’t know half the story.

  “No, sonny, the Mystic Eye does not sell Zig-Zag,” Ruby tells the scruffy teenybopper. “You want rolling papers, you go around the corner to the Psychedelic Shop.”

  She struggles to make change out of a buck from the teenybopper’s purchase of an incense stick for thirty-nine cents. Damn Stan the Man. Holding onto her calculating machine like he once held onto her common sense. Her heart-hostage days. Not anymore. He won’t shuck her, running that game. Won’t get her back in his bed, either.

  She keeps one eye on the red-haired dude who charges in the door, the other on the teenybopper whose hands are little too nimble. Twenty minutes till closing on a Wednesday night, another twelve-hour workday for her, and the cash drawer is jammed with loot. The Solstice Celebration brought quite a crowd, not to mention Jimi Hendrix and the Jefferson Airplane are playing the Fillmore. Mercury is transiting Gemini, and the street is jumping.

  “No freakin’ Zig-Zag? What kinda hellhole is dis, anyway?” The teenybopper swaggers in front of his hoodlum friends. Is he walking the walk, talking the talk? His bangs straggle in his eyes, he hasn’t washed in a week, and his voice is gravelly from way too many tokes. He thinks he’s cool, rapping trash.

  At thirty-five, Ruby is old enough to be his mother and big enough to tan his hide. Bend the little jerk over her knee and whack his butt till he cries.

  Leo Gorgon, lounging at the counter, takes in the scene. “Hey, Ruby,” he says in a fake-nice voice.”How come you don’t sell freakin’ Zig-Zag?”

  She bestows upon him a withering glance. “This shop, my shop, is the Mystic Eye.” She leans across the counter, lowering herself nose-level to the teenybopper. “We’re into magic, sonny. Real magic.” She expertly palms his quarter, pulls the coin from his ear.

  His hoodlum friends stare. Their bloodshot eyes bug out.

  “Like, wow!”

  “You see that?”

  “Aw, hell,” the teenybopper says. Mr. Know-It-All. “So she’s got tha’ power. Lotsa people do. I saw that dude”—he juts his chin at Gorgon—“pull flowers right outta thin air on the corner of Stanyan.”

  Gorgon rolls his eyes and snorts. Like, what a shuck, Ruby, moonstoning flower children with parlor tricks. Right. He’s a fakir and she’s a witch. Why should they talk when they could communicate telepathically?

  Ruby shrugs. What does this Digger dude want with her? The Diggers have done some good works, sure. They’ve supplied more than their fair share of free food and free clothes. But Gorgon is a wild card. He’s got his own agenda. She’s got spies, and her spies say this rooster’s boosting goods all over town. Breaking and entering, mostly. No one outside the tribes is supposed to know what Gorgon looks like, who or what he really is. It’s part and parcel of the Digger legend playing in his mind. Leo the Gorgon, the man of many heads. Not a real person, stupid. He’s like Robin Hood or Batman or the Joker. A myth.

  Right. Ruby trusts the mythical man about as far as she could pick him up and throw him, which wouldn’t be very far ‘cause the dude’s got a good five inches on her and is built lean and mean. And now you know what she wants with him. Why she allows him to situate his fine ass behind her counter and shoot the breeze as if they’re old pals. ‘Cause booster or not, he is one righteous cat, and she hasn’t made it with a man worth a second how-do-you-do since she and Stan called it quits.

  Adios, common sense.

  The red-haired dude gives her a sharp, questioning glance. They all look too young to Ruby, but at least this one isn’t still sucking his thumb. Does she know him? Uh-uh. He’s got to be brand-new. Tall, slim, pale. Groomed. Rich Kid written all over him. A tourist? With a touching sense of wonder, he looks around her shop as if he’s never seen anything like it.

  Across one whole wall are shelves of mason jars filled with leaves and powders and bits of bark. She’s got the only place in town stocking acacia, angelica, black cohosh, cascara sagrada, damiana, dragon’s blood, ginseng, kava kava root, mandrake, periwinkle, quince, Saint-John’s-wort, and witch hazel. The heads clean her out of catnip and parsley every time rumors of a legal high hit the street.

  She’s had the savvy to score a Health Department certificate, which she hangs next to her diploma from the Platonic Academy of Herbal Renaissance and her Bachelor of Arts degree from Mills College. But the beat cops still rattle her cage now and then. She’s got a running tab at HALO, the Haight-Ashbury Legal Organization.

  That’s one wall. Another wall holds crystal bottles filled with essence oils for astrological signs, all the planets, and twenty saints. She stocks scented candles, herbal bath salts, spice soaps, loofahs and real sponges, plus twelve varieties of incense she imports for a nickel and sells for thirty-nine cents. Seems people can’t get enough sweet smoke these days.

  And the Mystic Eye stocks books. Books you can’t find anywhere else: African spells, alchemy, American Indian lore, the dark arts, dreams, hypnosis, the I Ching or Book of Changes, out-of-the-body experiences, past lives, voodoo. Ever since Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters spread the word you can discover psychedelic secrets in certain novels, she can barely keep in stock Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, or Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End. She herself believes that psychedelic secrets are hidden in the stories of Cordwainer Smith, but that’s her opinion.

  These are strange and wondrous days.

  In her glass cases are amulets and talismans, Chinese coins for casting the I Ching, ankhs and pentagrams, beads and fetish necklaces, peace signs strung on silver chains. Devotees of the neighborhood band, the Grateful Dead, keep buying out her inventory of skull and skeleton charms.

  The red-haired dude takes it all in, starts to touch a porcelain Kuan Yin, then pulls his hand away as if he’s not allowed. He plants himself by the incense burners, a vantage point from which he can see the whole shop. Alarm nicks
Ruby’s peace of mind. He stands there, alert, like he’s waiting for something, and surveys the shop with lucid blue eyes.

  She can’t figure him out. A big-time booster or a knickknacker looking for kicks? The teenybopper is trouble, but this one? She doesn’t pick up the vibe. He’s a strange one, though. Sort of foreign-looking. Pa is a bigwig at some Euro biz, Ma is a class act dripping with whatever she wants to drip with, and sonny’s got a mind of his own. Accounts for his too-cool couture.

  Ruby sighs. Zig-Zag. Uh-huh. It never used to be this way, every punk demanding rolling papers. High school kiddies flaunting roaches on the street like it’s nothing.

  She never forgot how the Man shook people down in North Beach. You hear that knock on the door, squint at that flashlight in your face, get slapped around just once—one time is all it takes—and you never ever want to mess with the fuzz again. It is not a moment in the brevity of life to treasure.

  Some folks dig danger. Not Ruby. That’s how she’s come to feel about illegal substances. Never ever again. Just isn’t worth it. She’d trash her entire herb collection—which took her five years to acquire—if she needed to. Like when the Drugstore Café changed its name to Drogstore ‘cause the heat wasn’t worth it. Never mind that a mom-and-pop pharmacy selling calamine lotion and Band-Aids stood in the same location on Haight Street fifteen years. Just not worth the hassle. She thanks her lucky stars a crazy colored chick like her has made out so good in a white man’s world circa 1967 San Francisco, U.S.A. Isn’t anything worth more than her life, liberty, and the pursuit of free enterprise.

  Ruby smacks the teenybopper’s change in his grimy palm. “No hash pipes, no water pipes, no opium pipes, no chillums, no bongs, no roach clips, no plastic baggies, no spoons, no rollers, no tweezers, no screens. And no Zig-Zag rolling papers. Can I interest you in some jasmine soap?”

  “Excuse me, ma’am,” the red-haired dude says, “but I just saw him take something.”

  Ruby seizes the teenybopper’s wrist and lunges around the counter. The teenybopper twists away and sprints. He and his hoodlum friends clatter out the door.

  “Stop him!” Ruby cries.

  But the red-haired dude shakes his head and doesn’t budge.

  Damn! Ruby dashes after the teenybopper onto the street. He careers into a troop of chanting Krishna devotees with their orange robes, shaved heads, and finger cymbals. Ruby donates two hundred bucks a year to the local ashram. The devotees dance in place, a tangle of arms and robes and bare feet. Ruby catches up to the teenybopper, grabs his wrist but good, and twists his hand back.

  “Give it up, you little shit.”

  Like a bitty boy, which is what he really is, tears pool in his eyes. He drops a pricey silver skull charm in the palm of her hand.

  “So, sonny. You wanted to buy this?”

  He shakes his head, eyes cast down.

  “Uh-huh. I should turn you in. You want to go to the slam?”

  His hoodlum friends are jumping up and down across the street, whooping and catcalling. The teenybopper looks up at her, and she sees how his pals harass him, maybe a big brother bullies him back home or Pa lays a strap on his back.

  “Like, I’m sorry,” he whispers. “Don’t get me busted, lady. Please?”

  He’s such a sorry kid that a hangnail of mercy scrapes across her heart. They’re pests—pests!—flower children like him. They’re ruining her neighborhood. But they are children, some of them barely out of grade school, their ears glued to transistor radios playing the Number One song on the Hit Parade. The song tells them there’s a New Explanation, and if you’re searching for something, you may find it in San Francisco. They all know the address.

  “All right, sonny, scram. Don’t you and your hoodlum friends ever come in my shop again unless you’re there to buy something. You dig?” She lets him go.

  He nods and darts away like wild rabbit.

  She is hopping mad by the time she returns to her shop, madder now at the red-haired dude for not helping her than with the teenybopper. But when she storms back inside, she sees him standing quietly by the counter. He leans against the wall, his stance anything but casual. He stares at Gorgon, and Gorgon pretends to read the newspaper, his racehorse legs stretched out, his eye on the drawer packed with cash. She left the drawer wide open, chasing after a five-dollar silver charm that cost her fifty cents wholesale.

  Ruby’s eyes lock with the young dude’s. He did the righteous thing. But how does this stranger know to distrust Leo Gorgon? And what about the dude? He could have ripped off the drawer, himself. Why is he so good?

  “Closing in five,” she calls to the remaining shoppers. Exhaustion drags her down. Too many weird trips today, and it’s only the first day of the Summer of Love. She taps Gorgon on the shoulder. “You, too, Leo. Scram.”

  He jumps up, towering over her. Sweet Isis, she’s a soft touch for a tall man. “Hey, Ruby. Don’t be like that.” He slides a finger down her shoulder, toys with her neckline, touching her skin. “Don’t let’s call it a night. Maybe we could go upstairs. I hear you like wine. I like wine, too.”

  “Oh, and I got me a fine bottle of Chablis.” A soft touch for a tall man, but her well-developed sense of outrage kicks up. “So what is this? Hey, Ruby, I’d like to go upstairs with you. I’d like to drink your wine. What else would you like to do, Leo?”

  He looks puzzled. She might be telling him true or she might be shucking him, but he’s not sure ‘cause she says all this sweet as poison.

  “A lot, Ruby. There’s a lot I’d like to do,” he says in a husky voice.

  “And there’s a lot we could do. Some fine day.”

  His genuine disappointment almost changes her mind.

  But, no. It doesn’t feel right. What does Gorgon think? What does he see? That she’s got a brimming cash drawer? That she’s still on a rebound from Stan the Man? An easy mark? An easy lay?

  It’s too mixed up, and it’s way too fast. Happens a lot these crazy days. Flash! People meet on the street, fall into bed. Flash! Longtime lovers fall apart. Did people used to be this fast? Even Roi—her beautiful doomed Roi—actually courted her in the good old days after the war. Or is she feeling her thirty-five years?

  “Leo, another time.”

  Gorgon shuffles out, along with everyone else. She locks the door, dims the lights. And turns.

  The red-haired dude stands silently at the back of the shop, with such a strange look in his eye that a needle of alarm angles up her spine. She walks back to the counter, calm as the moon. She should get a gun. She’s been thinking about a sweet little number called a Walther since the spring.

  “So, sonny,” she says, tidying up. “Why didn’t you chase after that knickknacker?”

  He shrugs. “For one thing, he was dirty.”

  “Dirty! That’s a new one.”

  “I didn’t want to touch him.” Aloof, disdainful. “And you left your money drawer unattended. I watched it for you.”

  “My friend was watching the drawer.”

  “He’s not your friend.”

  “Oh? What makes you think so?”

  “I calculated a positive ID from the Archives.”

  “The Archives, uh-huh.” She retrieves her broom from the closet behind the counter. “So, what. You a narc? ‘Cause if you’re a narc, I can tell you right now, I don’t deal. I don’t even sell paraphernalia. I want nothing to do with that scene, understand? I study the ancient ways, that’s all. My herbs are legal substances used for medicinal purposes. You cannot get high on catnip unless you’re a cat.”

  “A narc? You mean a police informant?”

  “Oh, shit!”

  “No, no! I’m not! Please believe me!” He moves a little too close. “You’re not doing anything illegal.”

  “You bet your ass.”

  “But there is something I’d like to know. Are you sheltering runaways?”

  “Sheltering runaways? Sonny, I live alone.”

  “Hmm,” he muses. “But
there’s a probability you will.”

  She brandishes the broom handle. “There’s a probability I can poke your eye out with this thing.” His eyes widen. “Out you go.”

  “But—”

  She jabs the handle at him. “But nothing. You think I’m gonna let a little shit like you sting me? Get out. Get out of my shop now.”

  *

  Through the peephole in the front door, Ruby watches him go. Halfway across Clayton, he hesitates, returns, and sits on her stoop. Groovy. Better him than a flock of flower children. Either he’s stupid or he likes her for some reason, and that’s stupid. She hits the three deadbolts home, hooks the chain lock. She runs the broom over the floor, but her heart’s not it. Sweet Isis, what a day.

  Has she become the target of a sting? Should she trash the herbs tonight or tomorrow morning? She’ll have to call HALO first thing, find out if stocking an herb collection is probable cause for a search warrant. She’s got nothing to hide, but what if they plant something on her premises? Harassment happens. Damn it, anyway.

  Ruby tallies and bundles the cash. She takes down the two-by-four, spray-painted-gold Eye of Horus, pulls aside the red velvet curtain, opens the safe, and deposits the bundle. The Mystic Eye has grossed two grand since Sunday, and it’s only Wednesday night.

  She thanks her lucky stars she landed the long-term lease on 555 Clayton in the spring of ’62 when rents were rock-bottom. Three thousand square feet at two-hundred-fifty bucks a month for ten years. A commercial space downstairs, a two-level apartment upstairs, a little weedy backyard, and a detached garage in the back. The landlady didn’t care what Ruby did with the place, as long as she wasn’t running a brothel. Mrs. Andretti turned out to be a nice Catholic lady who liked to read the tarot. She and Ruby got along just fine.

  From spring of ’62 to fall of ’65, the Mystic Eye broke even, with fun money left over. In fall of ’65, the Mystic Eye started grossing five hundred a month, then a grand. Come fall of ’66, three grand a month.

  In spring of ’67, in anticipation of the mass pilgrimage of world youth during the summer, people of the New Community were asked to join the Council for a Summer of Love. The council consisted of hip merchants, hip newspaper publishers, political leaders, and various tribal chiefs, several of whom are known drug dealers like Stan the Man. The council booked campgrounds, planned festivals, and sought donations for free services to be offered to the newcomers.