First Love, Continued

I was actually pretty impressed by the West Coast mode and DeAnne’s Haight-Ashbury experience. My summer in Harlem had given me my first taste of the Lower East Side, browsing underground newspapers in Ed Sanders’ Peace Eye Bookstore, sampling underground cinema, and listening to Allen Ginsberg read over at St. Mark’s in the Bowery. The East Village Other was the premiere New York underground rag, but I was also up on the San Francisco Oracle which was more impressive in terms of psychedelic design.

San Francisco was definitely the epicenter of the countercultural vibe. The First Human Be-In (January 1967 in Golden Gate Park) had set the tone for hipness in the next few years. Of course I had gone up for the Chicago version of the Be-In later that spring in Grant Park with my hippie friends from high school. A group of us had turned on to pot already, started growing our hair long, wearing beads and bell-bottoms on the weekends. We were following cosmic developments from Goshen, listening to Jefferson Airplane and Janis Joplin, but were anxious to meet some “real hippies.”

After the Be-In we drifted over to Old Town, bought psychedelic posters, newspapers, incense and hash pipes. While we were hanging out in the street a real hippie came over and started chatting up Sue Fretz, a nice Mennonite girl from Goshen. He informed her that he was tripping on acid, and began to kiss her in a dreamy fashion. Sue maintained her poise, and presently he took us back to his apartment where there were more real hippies, sitting around listening to Jefferson Airplane. Soon joints began to circulate and I was sure I had found nirvana.

Tmothy Leary brought his traveling medicine show “The Life of the Buddha” to Chicago and we all went up to hear the holy man. The famous doctor, barefoot and draped in a flowing white cotton kurta, narrated the life of the Buddha accompanied by a psychedelic slide show and hypnotic sounds. Of course his shtick was that acid could reproduce the Buddha’s experience of enlightenment. At the moment of satori, thousands of paper lotus petals were showered down on the audience. I took some home and carefully preserved them as holy relics.

--Amos Stoltzfus (to be continued)