Flowers in Their Hair: In Pursuit of Vision

By Keith Howchi Kilburn

Flowers in their Hair follows the evolution and misadventures of Zane, the main character, as he negotiates the carnivals and combat zones of the sixties. He is just an average hippie, evading the Vietnam War, taking part in student uprisings, seeking spiritual enlightenment through psychedelic drugs, getting incarcerated, living in communes, having intense, but for the most part short, relationships with girls and women, alternating between ecstasy and depression, traveling the western United States and Mexico but always returning to San Francisco. His quest for spirituality and love comes to some fruition by the end of the decade.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Apr 19, 2011
• ISBN: 9781456887254

Keith Howchi Kilburn

Keith Kilburn is a psychotherapist and wilderness guide for vision fasts based in Northern California. He has traveled to Ukraine five times to foster wilderness quest practice among our new friends in Ukraine and Russia. His personal practice includes meditation, Tai-Chi, ceremony, and cultivating an ongoing relationship with deified Nature. He has been writing poetry for fifty years. He lives with his wife of 20 years, a small flock of sheep, a golfer-hunting cat and numerous wild birds. They have six children and nine grandchildren. They continue to seek vision, and work for peace and social justice.

Book preview

Goin to San Francisco

If you’re goin’ to San Francisco

Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair.

—Scott McKenzie

Them hills are so purty you could just dip a spoon in and take a bite.

Right after that he wound that Merc up to about a hundred and kept it there for a while.

Been drivin’ all the way from Texas.

How long that take you?

’Bout thirty-three hours.

He was going to Oakland, and hitchhikers don’t make a lot of comments about the driving of those who pick them up. It was late fall, and the hills between the San Joaquin Valley and the Bay Area were bright green from the early winter rains. Zane had been on the road almost eight hours. Started out in Bakersfield just before midnight.

Last night he was sitting in the Waffle Shop at the Y where Union Avenue meets Highway 99, with Jimmy, of course.

The parents said I can’t go to San Francisco. I’m going. I’m just gonna walk out on this highway and stick out my thumb.

All right.

Wait here till you see me get picked up. Then call my parents and tell them I took the Greyhound.

OK.

I gotta do this.

Yeah, I know.

Mick’s waiting for me. I can stay with him.

It’s great, man. Have a blast.

Zane finished his coffee, walked up the highway to a good spot and stuck out his thumb. He’d never hitchhiked before, but he’d read On the Road. He was ready. His first ride was an old guy in an old sedan, who talked to Zane man to man. He reminisced about hitchhiking when he was younger. Zane began to relax, like maybe this trip was gonna go all right. He knew he was only seventeen and if the cops picked him up, they might just send him back home. He didn’t carry his driver’s license, just his student ID from the junior college, figuring that would show he was over eighteen. Good ride, took him all the way to the Manteca turnoff, where he had to leave Highway 99 and cut across on State Route 120 to get on the main highway into Oakland and San Francisco. Not too many cars at 4:00 AM, standing in the fog and darkness outside Manteca. So when the crazy Texan picked him up, he was glad for the warmth and the ride.

Rolling into the Bay Area just awhile after sunrise, the Texan had reached the end of his long journey.

I’m getting off up here.

Zane walked from the freeway to the first big street, East Fourteenth and Sixty something.

Man, there is not a white face to be seen. But he stuck out his thumb and an old colored man in an old junky car picked him up.

You a long ways out here, boy.

Yes, sir, trying to get to San Francisco.

I get choo little ways down.

Little else the old man said was intelligible to Zane. He dropped into some vernacular of English Zane had never heard before. It was a little bit scary, but he didn’t really feel in danger. Zane had once dated a colored girl. Met her at a party, got her phone number, asked her out. Took her to a movie in downtown Bakersfield at the old Fox theater, one of those grand old movie houses that still had velvet drapes. Scariest thing was the looks of hate he got from some of the white people on the street. Sat in her living room listening to Miles Davis. Always felt bad he didn’t have the courage to ask her out again.

Far as I go.

OK, thank you.

Now the cross street was thirty something, still totally a negro neighborhood. The next car to pull over was a police car. White cop.

Let’s see some ID.

Zane pulled his junior college student body card from his wallet.

This all you got.

Yes, sir, just trying to find a bus to San Francisco.

Next street over, East Twelfth.

OK, thank you.

You go get on that bus and get the hell out of this neighborhood.

Yeah, I will.

Less than two months later, Zane was driving to San Francisco in his own car. A Nash Rambler was a sensible compact car in the fifties when American car makers were building gas-guzzling high horsepower performance machines. The convertible version operated by push-button and the rag-top rolled flat over the top of the window frames fitting snug and weather-proof. Zane’s 1951 Nash Rambler convertible had belonged to one of the professors at Bakersfield College. He sold it to the son of another professor who sold it to Zane for $125.

Zane left Bakersfield on February 1, 1963, feeling he’d somehow escaped by the skin of his teeth. Another friend drove with him. Bill had started going to California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland the previous semester. Bill was an artist with a wiggy imagination for fanciful creatures and surreal combinations of images. After dropping Bill in Oakland Zane proceeded to his new home in San Francisco. He’d brought very little with him, only his clothes and a few key books such as Kerouac and Ferlinghetti. The apartment he would share with Mick, Susan, and their kid was on the sixth floor overlooking Alamo Square. Zane had been the sole inhabitant of a good-sized bedroom in a quiet suburban house with swimming pool for years. His new junior bedroom shared a wall with the living room of the apartment. He still had some commitment to being a good student. Having a quiet place to study was an essential component of his study habits.

Tall and lanky with dark curly hair, half-Irish, half-Jewish Mick was a son of the working class. He and Zane had met at Bakersfield College. Mick was old enough to buy booze, so they easily became drinking buddies. Mick had knocked up Susan near the end of high school. They got married and Mick worked and went to school and tried not to lose his wild self. Susan, who had grown up Catholic, often took the kid to her parents’ house for overnights, leaving Mick and Zane with the run of their apartment. Mick was full of stories about previous sexual exploits, petty crime, and the rest of the wild crowd at Bakersfield College. Another couple lived next door. They had also recently had a shotgun wedding, and she was visibly pregnant. They provided occasional entertainment. When they fought all that could be heard was, Bitch!

Bastard!

Bitch!

Bastard!

They could go on like that for a long time. Later Mick and Zane got to hear the make-up sex.

One sunny day in San Francisco, Zane, Mick, and others were sitting by the windows overlooking Alamo Square. A woman with long black hair had come to the center of the park. She began to dance wildly, throwing arms and hair around in a pattern barely short of chaos. Everyone began watching her intently. Then one of the other guys said, Hey, Zane, you better go check her out.

Yeah, Zane, check her out!

A chorus of voices rose in the room, urging Zane to go investigate what was up with this woman. Zane flew from the room, down the elevator, and across the street into the park. The woman was starting to leave, heading in the opposite direction down the hill toward Fillmore Street. Zane followed and caught up with her a block or so down the street. As he strode by, he turned to look at her. Simultaneously she looked back at him with the deepest darkest blackest scariest eyes he had ever seen. He froze. She walked on. He thought, Welcome to San Francisco, Zane!

After a month in the junior bedroom next to the living room, Zane realized he needed to find his own place. He found an ad for a share rental at the corner of Waller and Ashbury, yes, one block from the corner of Haight and Ashbury. He moved into his own full-sized bedroom sharing a kitchen and bathroom with Thomas Tom, a Chinese college student. They hardly saw each other. Zane’s window overlooked the corner of Waller and Ashbury where the trolley buses made a turn to head up the hill toward upper Market Street. He spent a lot of time in that window staring at the buses and the people on the street.

A bunch of other friends and friends of friends had rented a large house on the corner of Haight and Baker across from Buena Vista Park. So a few blocks away Zane had a place to hang out and continue his education on living life from this gathering of older brothers and sisters. Impromptu groups would gather in the kitchen of this house to discuss deep philosophical issues such as the virtues and drawbacks of eating pussy. Zane, still a virgin at that time, did not hazard an opinion on such topics. The high rate of homosexuality in San Francisco also came up for discussion. There seemed to be a peculiar fascination and lots of talk about the fairies.

Residents and others began to write and draw on the walls of this rental. In large letters was inscribed Life is not a bowl of fluffies, signed by the author of this deep philosophical insight. Tina was the girlfriend and future wife to Daniel, a preacher’s son from South Africa. Years later the accumulated effects of the sixties, the wars in Vietnam and at home, and the drug culture caused her to declare herself an unfit mother and place her son, Krishna or Kris, in foster care. Indeed, life was not a bowl of fluffies. JJ was an early and long-term member of the San Francisco Mime Troupe until too much craziness and too many loose ends caused him to flee back to Bakersfield to take care of his ailing mother. Many of the sons and daughters of Bakersfield and other cities of Middle America who had responded to the allure of the Bay Area sooner or later were overwhelmed by its bigness and complexity. Many of them temporarily or permanently returned to Bakersfield or Long Beach or wherever. Some moved on to other places more rural or suburban. A few made the City their permanent home.

Zane could walk in most anywhere and buy a jug of Red Mountain burgundy. Nobody seemed to check ID in San Francisco. The only place that had ever served him in Bakersfield was the Basque bar near the old Southern Pacific train station. Late in the evening the men would dance arm in arm to the music of their homeland. They invited Zane to join them. With a belly fully of bourbon and seven, he gladly joined in.

A gallon of rotgut red for only $1.50, what a bargain! Bob Jones and Charlene lived nearby. Zane and Char had known each other since childhood. Her aunt and uncle and Zane’s parents were good friends and got together regularly for dinners and backyard barbecues. She had gotten out of high school early and come straight to the City with Bob. Hanging out with them was a lot calmer than with the whole group at Haight and Baker. Bob never did get quite as caught up in all the craziness as a lot of others did, and he never lost his wholesome red-headed appearance. Zane had a crush on Char, which he never revealed. Never figured he had a chance with her. Some evenings Zane just sat in his room, drank red wine, and watched the scene from his second-story window.

When Zane arrived in San Francisco, he stopped getting haircuts. Didn’t really know why. Said he didn’t like barbershops. No more than just another challenge of the prevailing rules. Every once in awhile he’d see some other guy on the street growing longer hair. The reaction was not one of recognizing a long-lost tribal member. It was more like, Eek, someone else is doing it. Nobody told them to grow their hair. It was just an impulse that occurred among a lot of guys around the same time. It was in that spring of ’63 that Zane first heard the word hippie. Didn’t know where it came from. He’d heard the term hipster in Norman Mailer’s Confessions of a White Nigger and in Allan Ginsberg’s Howl, but hippie was a new one. Didn’t know that it would stick and become the major designation for everything that was yet to happen in the sixties. Same time heard about the Beatles for the first time, probably their first tour of America.

Mick and Zane decided to go to the Monterey Folk Festival. Someone was driving down that way. Maybe that’s why they decided to go. Before leaving the city they went to the big old pharmacy at Haight and Market and each bought 16 oz. bottles of Romilar cough syrup. They went to Monterey with no money and no way to get back. It was an adventure. It would all work out somehow. From the festival grounds they got a ride to a nearby campground. Zane drank three-quarters of the bottle of Romilar. Mick drank all of his. The recommended dosage for a good crazy high was 8 oz. Zane wandered around the campground all night, quite uncomfortable and deranged. Mick actually went blind for a while. But in the morning they were basically fine, not even a hangover. That day they heard Bob Dylan for the first time. No money so they couldn’t get into the arena, but outside they could clearly hear the strains of Blowing in the Wind and Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall.

"How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man?

How many years must some people exist before they’re allowed to be free?"

Right from the get-go he was the voice of a generation, and rather soon also the raconteur of the generation. Each succeeding album seemed to parallel the experiences of so many of the Love Generation, Flower Children, Hippies, or whatever they came to be called.

Oh, where have you been my blue-eyed son?

That evening there was a hootenanny. It only cost a dollar, and anybody could get up and sing or play in front of the microphone. So Zane went. One girl got up with no guitar, no band, nothing but her great big voice. Zane said to himself, How can this little white girl sound so much like Bessie Smith? Her name was Janice Joplin, and she was not long out of Texas. Within a year or two she was singing with Big Brother and the Holding Company and on her way to national and international fame. Turned out she was old friends with Chet Helms, who managed Big Brother. He also became a managing founder of the Family Dog, the other big music promoter in SF besides Bill Graham. So many of the names for bands, businesses, and other emerging phenomena were thumbnail expressions of a particular world view that was growing in its articulation: against the war, for civil rights, and somewhat spiritually based on the direct experiences provided by psychedelic drugs. The commentary on the hypocrisy that was taken as normal in the fifties was increasingly biting in its sarcasm and increasingly strident in its criticism of the destruction being wreaked by the American Way. There were mentors from past generations. Big Brother is watching you was an image from George Orwell’s 1984, a dark futuristic vision of where things were leading. The Grateful Dead reminded their fans of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, one of the early guidebooks to the death-rebirth nature of the psychedelic experience.

Kelly and Joe showed up at the Monterey Festival. The previous year Zane had tried to seduce Kelly one night in her house, with her parents asleep in the next room. He fully intended to pursue something with her, but each day he got more scared and never did even date her again. In his absence she had gotten together with Joe, who smoked too much and drank too much but had a nice car, a full-size Dodge with push-button transmission and lots of power. Joe and Zane were friends. In fact Joe had driven Zane to the supermarket where he almost got busted for stealing booze. Mick and Zane rode back to San Francisco with Joe and Kelly. When it was time to go back to Bakersfield, Kelly suddenly announced she was staying in San Francisco. Joe left crestfallen and undoubtedly suspicious.

That night Kelly and Zane were in bed together. It was his first sexual experience with another person. It was too quick. He was too anxious. He was in too much of a hurry. Nonetheless he lost his virginity. In the middle of the night, the phone rang.

Is something going on between you and Kelly?

Yeah.

That’s all I wanted to know. Click

The guilt began right then. Who knows what might have happened otherwise. Zane came home from school that day. Kelly had cleaned his room. In particular she had picked up all the newspapers he had read and thrown on the floor so that the entire room was carpeted with an inch of newspapers. He didn’t really want his room cleaned, but after that he didn’t throw his newspapers on the floor.

Later that evening he told her, You should go back to Joe. She didn’t protest or argue. One more time he acted out of fear and guilt. She just went along like good girls did who had grown up in the fifties. She went back to Joe. Later she married him. A few years passed, and she left him as he gradually sank deeper and deeper into alcoholism and depression. Much later she became a very successful realtor in San Francisco and a high-class member of Alcoholics Anonymous. Her best story was about being registered into an international AA conference in Monte Carlo by Ringo Starr, the Beatles’ one-time drummer, whose only solo hit was a song written by Buck Owens of Bakersfield, Act Naturally.

"They’re gonna put me in the movies

They’re gonna make a big star out of me…

And all I gotta do is act naturally."

I’m staying at my grandma’s house. Come on over. I’ve got some pot. Perry was one of those guys who breezed through Bakersfield and then he’d be gone again. Gone to LA. Gone into some mystery. He dressed like a Pachuco gangster from East LA, pants high on his waist and dragging on the ground, shiny shoes, fancy shirt, sports jacket draped over one arm. He didn’t walk. He strolled like he’d been practicing how to walk without his upper body appearing to move at all. He was one of a few friends of friends that Zane always considered way too out there even for his craziness. But there he was sitting in the attic of Perry’s grandma’s old two-story house on tree-lined Truxtun Avenue in Bakersfield toking up with Perry and their mutual friend.

A semester in San Francisco, he’d come across pot once, but it hadn’t done anything to change his state of mind. This time he started smiling and couldn’t stop. It’s like there was this permanent smile on his face. He was totally relaxed, totally at ease.

Let’s walk down to Tiny’s and get some pie and coffee. Perry was one of those guys whose experiences just seemed to put him a couple of jumps ahead of everybody else when it came to being hip and cool. So there they were sitting in Tiny’s at the center of downtown Bakersfield, eating apple pie and drinking coffee, and grinning and grinning.

He was no longer a virgin but still clueless about how to have a girlfriend. Fall semester brought a new influx of Bakersfield immigrants to San Francisco including Joe and Kelly. Joe had a sister and the sister had a roommate. They lived off California Street in one of the nicer neighborhoods of the City, a good gathering place for Bakersfield transplants and a few others.

Zane vaguely remembered Beth from Bakersfield High School. Afterward it was hard for him to remember who seduced whom. But he was having sex, and he was having some other feelings too. Was this love? They spent a lot of time together. And she cooked. She cooked lasagna and spaghetti and tacos. He was actually eating a good diet, considerably expanded from the beans and rice and hamburger of last semester. And they had sex a lot. And they talked.

Beth had recently gotten out of the hospital. Her ex-boyfriend had performed an illegal abortion. There were complications. She bled a lot. She was barely healed when she and Zane got together. She had also had an abortion in high school, which her mother arranged in some Bakersfield back alley. Fortunately birth control pills had recently been invented. So Beth got on the pill, and both of them were in fucking hog heaven. Zane dropped out of school. Still playing out some scenario stored in his brain from reading Jack Kerouac, he figured he needed real life experience if he was going to be a writer. Any experience would do as long as it was real. Real writers didn’t go to school. Someone was going to write the great American novel. It might as well be him. He went to the Unemployment Office.

What kind of work do you want to do?

I don’t know. Anything.

Why is it that kids from San Francisco State don’t know what they want to do? I get kids in here from City College. They know what they want to do. I get high school dropouts. They know what they want to do. But none of you kids from State have any idea.

His voice rose as he delivered this epistle. Zane shrugged and stared at him blankly. The job guy left his desk and returned with some index cards.

Here, try this.

Name of a company, address, phone number, Zane took the card. His new title was postage meter boy. Every morning he took the streetcar to lower Market, walked a block to Mission Street and spent the day in the basement of a huge warehouse feeding junk mail through a postage meter machine. Most of the workers were women, but referred to as girls by the boss. They stuffed envelopes with direct mail advertising. He weighed the envelopes, set the machine for the correct postage and fed endless envelopes through the machine. At lunchtime, a half-hour, he saw the light of day and sat in front of the Transbay Terminal and ate his sandwich. The pay was minimum wage, $1.25 an hour.

President Kennedy’s been shot.

Everyone remembers where they were when they first heard the news. Zane was in the Sears store a few blocks from Beth’s apartment. An event that shaped history for years to come was at first presented so coldly, so matter-of-factly. Like many days in San Francisco it was gray and foggy. By later in the day everyone was up-to-date. John F. Kennedy was dead. Whatever hopes people had pinned on Camelot and a youthful president died with him. Whatever enthusiasm for mainstream politics Zane had generated while working for the Young Democrats to elect Kennedy back in 1960 at Bakersfield High School was also dead.

After a month he was fairly fed up with the junk mail business. A friend who’d gone back to New York wanted him to visit. What the hell! The call of the open road, the call of the unknown, the call of new experience—he would hitchhike to New York. Beth would wait for him. Perhaps she recognized the restlessness of young men. Perhaps things were so new, it was still all some romantic dream. Perhaps she was afraid to say, No. Maybe she was excited by his foolish courage.

In any case, one morning in November a friend dropped him off somewhere east of Oakland on Highway 40, the direct route from San Francisco to New York. To spend time in New York and San Francisco was almost an absolute requirement for being truly hip. The day went by pretty easy. That night a ride dropped him in downtown Winnemucca, Nevada—small town, a few casinos, nothing special—and then the local cop.

You can’t hitchhike in Winnemucca.

What am I supposed to do?

There was a pause. Hop in. I’ll give you a ride to the edge of town.

OK, thanks.

A dark lonely road at the edge of god-awful nowhere, he stuck out his thumb. A trucker pulled over.

Don’t know how far I can make it tonight, but I’ll take you as far as I go.

That’ll be great.

Turned out the trucker was a Mormon headed home to Logan, Utah. He wouldn’t be drinking any coffee to drive all night. Zane opened up the conversation.

I was born in Logan.

Is that right?

Yeah, didn’t stay there long. Family moved to Ogden before I was one. Been in California since I was five. You like Utah?

Yeah, don’t really know any place else. But driving truck, I’ve seen a lot of country. No place I wanted to live. No place as beautiful as Utah. You know, I got lots of family. It’d be hard moving away from them.

Yeah, I got tons of relatives in Utah. I gonna call my cousin when I get to Salt Lake.

They talked on through the night.

Well, I’m going stop here and get myself a motel room. Good luck.

"Thanks, if you see me here in the morning, pick me up again, OK?

Sure.

Wendover, midnight, cold, cold, cold, way too cold. Man, even this old army pea jacket doesn’t do the job. New strategy, gas station, ask people who stop for gas to give him a ride. Success, three guys in a Renault Dauphine are headed for Salt Lake City.

What religion are you? These guys were Egyptian foreign exchange students, been out in Nevada doing God knows what.

To them Zane replied, I’m a Buddhist, and thought, "I’ve read the Dharma Bums, so by god, I’m a Buddhist. Also read the Religions of Man and liked Buddhism the best."

One of the Egyptians, Oh, that’s not good.

Why not?

Buddhists don’t believe in God.

Is that a problem?

Oh yes, you must believe in God.

As they drove down the highway the driver was weaving back and forth for no apparent reason. Zane was thinking, Why do I always get the crazies after midnight?

Zane decided to try once more, Buddhism teaches non-attachment. Don’t be attached to the fruits of your labors.

Doesn’t make sense. Is not possible. Anyway everything comes from God.

Maybe you’re right. Zane decided not to argue with the source of his transportation in the wee hours of this cold November morning. The Arabs talked amongst themselves in obvious high spirits from whatever adventure they had found in Nevada. The driver continued to periodically crank the wheel back and forth like they were on some carnival ride, or maybe he was just proving that God would protect them.

Salt Lake City, first light, Zane found a pay phone and called his cousin Brendan. Safe haven, too goddamn cold to be out on this highway. After a couple of days Brendan drove him up to Logan, where Zane’s brother Lee was going to graduate school at Utah State. Zane was rethinking his plans. Brother’s wife delivered their first child. Zane thought it was pretty cool, he was there for the blessed event. On another morning he was walking around the neighborhood and saw a temperature sign, seventeen degrees. Shit! Way too cold.

Hey, Beth, I’m coming home. I miss you.

I miss you too. When’ll you be here?

A phone call and then a Greyhound trip from Salt Lake to San Francisco, take the easy way on the return trip. He and Beth fell right back in with each other. It was fun. It was sexy. It was easy. Life was a joy ride. They decided to go to Bakersfield for the holidays. They’d each stay with their parents, but they’d see each other a lot.

Zane went to Beth’s parents’ house to pick her up, a tract house on the flat farmland southwest of Bakersfield. He had his parent’s ’54 Oldsmobile, the cruiser, bench front seat, drive with one hand and wrap your other arm around your girl as she snuggles up right next to you.

What’s going on between you and my daughter?

Nothing.

Big man, angry voice, threatening, If you get her pregnant, I’ll kill you… Get out of my house.

Zane got up and walked out. The pot-bellied father followed him. Zane couldn’t resist.

I’ll bet this makes you feel like a real big man.

The father closed the distance between them. Wham! He hit Zane hard on the back of the neck. Zane just kept walking, got in his car, started the engine, rolled slowly down to the end of the dead-end street and flipped a U. By the time he got back even with the house, Beth was heading across the lawn with her wicker suitcase. She hopped in the car and once again Zane couldn’t resist. He punched it and squealed his tires all the way down the street. Zane’s parents had already left for the east coast to visit his other brother, so Zane and Beth moved into his parent’s bedroom and had their own special celebration of Christ’s mercy.

Hey, the post office called up. It was his roommate. They want to interview you next week.

OK, thanks.

During his job search Zane had applied for the post office and taken the civil service test. Now it looked like they might give him a job.

Sorting mail at the post office turned out to be as dreadfully boring and mind-numbing as running a postage meter machine even though the pay was better. Rincon Annex was a block-long warehouse in the same neighborhood as the junk mail business. He was only working four hours a day. He could barely stand it, sitting at his case going through stacks of letters and placing them in one of several dozen slots. How did people stand this? The regulars joked around with each other a lot. He didn’t know anybody and didn’t get to know anybody.

I better go back to school.

Feeling a Draft

Come on all of you big strong men

Uncle Sam needs your help again

He’s got himself in a terrible jam

way down yonder in Vietnam

So put down your books and pick up a gun

we’re gonna have a whole lotta fun

—Country Joe and the Fish

Man, you have to register.

But I don’t believe in the draft.

Yeah, yeah, that’s fine, but you can get into so much more trouble if you don’t register. They can throw you in jail just for that.

Within a few months Zane had turned eighteen, smoked pot, and had sex. He was feeling his oats. His plan had been to ignore the draft, blow it off, resist. He didn’t really know much about it and didn’t really want to deal with it. His friend was trying to talk some sense to him, or call it reality. So Zane registered for the SSS, the Selective Service System, at the local office in San Francisco. He was not the only person in those days to recognize that it simply contained one more S than the infamous German SS of World War II. There wasn’t really a war yet, not until after the Gulf of Tonkin was blown out of proportion by another crazy/evil Texan named Lyndon Baines Johnson. But already there were war resisters. There were conscientious objectors. There was opposition to the universal military draft. There were Communists, Socialists, anarchists, and peaceniks. A new American Revolution was simmering and getting ready to boil over. The right-wing excesses of Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, and the House Un-American Activities Committee had given birth to a movement on the left that was slowly defining itself around issues of civil rights, civil liberties, and then resistance to the war in Vietnam.

Why were you six months late in registering?

I don’t recognize the right of the government to make me go kill people.

There’s a place on the form for you to make your explanation. It would be a good idea for you to fill it out.

Zane took the form and filled it out. It forced him to define his beliefs which had previously existed mostly as feelings. I don’t believe that the United States Government has any right to require citizens to involuntarily register for induction into an organization whose prime purpose is the killing of citizens of other countries. Nor does this government have the right to be the sole determining judge of a person’s conscience with regard to not being a trained and hired killer. My conscience is my own. I should not have to prove the validity of my conscience to the same organization whose business it is to recruit, train, and maintain an organization of such killers. They are not qualified to be judges of my conscience or conscientiousness. I do not believe in war. I will not fight under any circumstances.

Zane was surprised at his eloquence. Perhaps his high school debate team had been more valuable than he thought. He had known and said as a child, I will never be in the army. The thought terrified him. If he stayed in college he was eligible for a student deferment, but just as he felt that petitioning the system to be recognized as a conscientious objector was incorrectly allowing them to be the judge of his soul, likewise applying for a status deferment was dishonestly conferring unjustified authority on the same system. So he would take his chances with his own brand of honesty and forthrightness. Meanwhile he increasingly hung out with the radical politicos at San Francisco State, when he felt like attending classes.

Zane had made one new friend in his first semester at State. Sam, a slight Jewish fellow from Orange County, appeared in both his Chinese language and Chinese civilization classes. With such common interests they decided to be roommates, which might have worked out fine except that Zane kept moving other people in. First came Beth, not a problem. Steve, another Bakersfield denizen and a few years older, had been one of Zane’s alcohol buyers in Bakersfield. After moving in, Steve didn’t get a job or get in school. He and Zane began to stay up all night, often walking from their flat up the hill from Market and Divisadero all the way to North Beach and back in the middle of the night. They’d arrive home around sunrise, sleep most of the day, and do it all again. This was not helping Zane’s school attendance, but he felt himself soaking up the aura of San Francisco and the Beat Generation. City Lights Books was a favorite hang-out, and the old Hot Dog Palace, also known as the Meth Palace, on Columbus Avenue. There was always Winchell’s Donuts on Market on the way back home.

Steve had another disturbing habit. He began referring to Sam simply as the Jew. He became the butt of endless anti-Semitic jokes when he was not in the house. Zane was not comfortable with this, but didn’t know what to do. He was still desperate enough for friendship that he didn’t want to piss anyone off. His feeble attempts to say something to Steve resulted in Steve maintaining he was not doing anything wrong. It was all a joke. What’s the big deal? There was tension in the house. No one wanted to admit it. When he wasn’t sleeping all day, Zane found himself dosing his morning coffee with bourbon, especially when everyone was home for breakfast. Sam talked to Zane about never really agreeing to Steve as a roommate, which was true. Sam had a girlfriend who was very Jewish. In her early twenties she could have played Edith Bunker in All in the Family. She had a way of saying, Samuel, that sounded just like Edith saying, Oh, Archie. She also talked to Zane about the unfairness of the situation.

It was finally resolved when the upper and lower floors of the house on Seventeenth Street became available for rent. Beth and Zane moved upstairs. Sam got another friend for his roommate. Steve and his soon-to-be pregnant girlfriend took a smaller downstairs apartment. Zane wrote on the wall of their new bedroom in six-inch letters with a Magic Marker, SIN. Might as well let everyone know we’re living in sin, he quipped. Months went by uneventfully. A friend of Zane’s came back from New York, and moved into the other room in their flat. An older woman (thirties) attached herself to him as an erstwhile girlfriend. She seemed to be practicing free love, bragging that Papa Bear Blakely, the jazz man, was one of her lovers. New York Norm had his hands full and spoke disparagingly about the flabbiness of her body, including her private parts. Young men like Norm often had no clue of how to deal with the complexities of the women they were meeting and getting intimate with. Free-love Mary tried to seduce Zane one day, but he resisted more from fear and guilt than morality. At least she didn’t try again.

The cops called and asked if our upstairs neighbors were smoking pot. It was Steve in a panic. Mick was hanging out at the house. He hopped on the back of Harvey’s Honda and they were gone in a flash. All drugs in the house went down the toilet, not a large stash. In moments the narcs were there tearing the house apart and being generally nasty.

Where’re the drugs?

There’s no drugs.

We know there’re drugs here.

No drugs. We don’t use drugs.

Stop your lying.

Finding pots full of dirt in the backyard. Look they’ve been trying to grow.

Finding nothing else they finally left. No apologies. No cleaning up of their mess. Everyone in the house was freaked out. They also knew what a close call they’d just had. Pot was a felony in those days. People were doing three years in San Quentin for one joint. How the hell did the cops know to bust them? Months later Steve admitted his girlfriend had called the cops because she was freaked out about him using drugs. The upstairs neighbors were clearly to blame. So much for solidarity.

Monterey was a sometime sleepy village on the shores of Monterey Bay. It had been the setting for Steinbeck’s Cannery Row, a very real area of the town which had once housed a thriving canned fish industry. On weekends the population of downtown Alvarado Street was swelled by hundreds of GIs on leave from nearby Fort Ord, the army boot camp for all inductees from California and some other parts of the West. These uniformed rascals with newly shaved heads scurried, crept, and staggered their ways between a number of cheap bars, cheap hotels, and tattoo parlors. Tattoos were still a mark of service in the military or prison. Hardly anyone else would even enter a tattoo parlor.

That summer Zane lived in a boarding house run by a volatile Armenian woman. He thought Armenians were only in Fresno, along with William Saroyan, but here was one running a house for young male college students of la langue Franḉaise. The Monterey Institute of Foreign Studies offered total immersion courses in a number of languages, six hours of class per day and living quarters in a house where presumably only the language being studied would be spoken. That rule was immediately broken in Zane’s house, and in fact was hardly ever followed by any of the ragtag collection of frat-boy refugees who made up the bulk of his household. MIFS had been modeled on the Army Language School, which was also in Monterey and reputed to be quite effective in eliciting basic competence in languages within a few weeks of study. The school was run by an older Alsatian couple who were rumored to have fled France following World War II to avoid reprisals certain to fall on Nazi collaborators. Madame spoke no English, shopped at the French Market in Carmel, and seemed to fit the stereotype of French arrogance. The main French teacher was a beautiful young woman. Rumors flew about her as well (like all French women, she didn’t bathe often, only put on perfume, and didn’t shave her armpits). Classes were totally conducted in French right from the first day.

Zane had bought a motorcycle from Bob Jones. When not in class he loved to just ride. The forty-nine-mile drive along Monterey Bay with its wind-twisted cypresses was a favorite destination. It was often foggy, but not that cold, which added to the feeling of mystery as he rode through the streets of old Spanish Monterey. A few blocks from the boarding house in an old adobe was a coffee house called Sancho Panza’s, very hip, very beat. Sancho’s became a favorite hangout for Zane and his new friend from French class, Kevin. They began to meet other people in the area and get invited to parties in Monterey, in Carmel, even as far away as Big Sur. Big Sur, land of Henry Miller, land of Robinson Jeffers, the mountains rose out of the Pacific Ocean only slightly less steep than cliffs. The arched highway bridges hung over chasms formed by swift creeks. Fertile water spilled out of those ragged green mountains into sage green surf, eating away at the base of those precipitous flanks of Mother Earth. Occasionally the tag team of surf and heavy rain would undercut the hillsides and grand collapsing landslides would dump tons of brown soil into the verdant surf, ripping away roads, houses, and anything else in the accidental pathway. It was wild country. You could feel that wildness. You could feel it high above the ocean perched like an ancient condor waiting to swoop and soar on the thermals blown up from the shore. You could feel it running in the waves where the creeks formed the only beaches on that whole rocky coast. You could feel it sitting in the Big Sur Inn drinking a cup of their good strong coffee.

Yeah, man, I didn’t bathe or shave for a week. I poked holes in my arms with a pin—made me look like a junkie—and just before I went to the draft board, I went down to the Carmel River and rolled around in green scum and muck.

Did it work?

Hell, yeah, it worked. They didn’t want anything to do with me. But don’t do what I did. Come up with your own crazy plan.

Whenever the subject of beating the draft came up, a spirited rap would ensue. Every young man had to make a decision. Which side are you on, boys? Which side are you on? Like the old song said, battle lines were being drawn. Johnson was president. The war was heating up in Vietnam. Cannon fodder was required. Guys were leaving the country. Many didn’t return until President Carter declared amnesty nearly fifteen years later. Others were drinking or smoking themselves into premature medical problems or literally shooting themselves in the foot. Draft dodgers was the derisive epithet applied by mainstream Americans.

The squares don’t get it. The U.S. Army is out to kill US. Listening to this other guy at the party in Carmel gave Zane an idea. He could do a crazy man act. He didn’t want to leave the country. He didn’t want to do anything openly illegal. He didn’t want to end up in federal prison like Joan Baez’s husband. He didn’t want to declare as a conscientious objector and let them be judge and jury of his sincerity. He never forgot the conversation with this guy he never saw again.

Kevin presented as happy-go-lucky, but was definitely inquisitive. "So what’d you do this weekend?

Got high.

High or drunk?

High.

You smoke that stuff?

"Yeah!

So you’re a head. Well, hey, head.

The name stuck. From then on Kevin never called him anything but head. Kevin was a drinker and a cigarette smoker, but he didn’t touch any of that other