30 THENEWYORKER,JANUARY18, 2021
under our windows. Probably he had
made a deal with our landlord, paid him.
We got nothing. So we entered and ex-
ited all day long. My look then was all
black, with purple-dyed hair. My down-
stairs neighbor was in a band called
Touch Me Hooker; their look was some-
thing like a glam-rock version of Motör-
head. The film crew had to call “Cut!”
every time someone from our building
stepped out of the security gate. The
next day, the film crew was back. We
put speakers in our windows and played
the Dead Boys. I’m not sure why we
were so hostile. There was one Doors
song I always liked, called “Peace Frog.”
In her eponymous “White Album”
essay, Joan Didion insists that Jim Mor-
rison’s pants are “black vinyl,” not black
leather. Did you notice? She does this
at least three times, refers to Jim Mor-
rison’s pants as vinyl.
Dear Joan:
Record albums are made out of vinyl. Jim
Morrison’s pants were leather, and even a Sac-
ramento débutante, a Berkeley Tri-Delt, should
know the difference.
Sincerely,
Rachel
As a sixteen-year-old freshman at
Didion’s alma mater, Berkeley, I was be-
friended by a Hare Krishna who sold
vegetarian cookbooks on Sproul Plaza.
He didn’t seem like your typical Hare
Krishna. He had a low and smoky voice
with a downtown New York inflection
and he was covered with tattoos—I
could see them under his saffron robes.
He had a grit, a gleam. A neck like a
wrestler. He’d be out there selling his
cookbooks and we’d talk. I wouldn’t see
him for a while. Then he’d be back. This
went on for all four years of my college
experience. Much later, I figured out,
through my friend Alex Brown, that
this tough-guy Hare Krishna was likely
Harley Flanagan, the singer of the Cro-
Mags, a New York City hardcore band
that toured with Alex’s band, Gorilla
Biscuits. The Krishnas were apparently
Harley’s vacation from his Lower East
Side life, or the Cro-Mags were his va-
cation from his Krishna gig. Or there
was no conflict and he simply did both.
Terence McKenna, the eating-magic-
mushrooms-made-us-human guy, was
way beyond the hippies. I once saw him
give an eerily convincing lecture at thePalace of Fine Arts, in San Francisco.
He made a lot of prophecies with charts,
but I forgot to check if any of them came
true. The industrial-noise and visual im-
presario Naut Humon was sitting in the
row in front of me. He had dyed-black
hair, wore steel-toed boots and a “boil-
ersuit,” as it’s called. Remember Naut
Humon? I believe he had a compound
near a former Green Tortoise bus yard
down in Hunters Point. Only a human
would come up with a name like that.
This was in the era of Operation Green
Sweep, when Bush—I mean H.W.—
orchestrated D.E.A. raids of marijuana
growers north of the city, in Humboldt
County. My friend Sandy, whom I men-
tioned earlier, got in on that. Profited.
Sandy knew these guys who rented a he-
licopter and hired a pilot. They swooped
low over growers and scared people into
fleeing and abandoning their crops. Then
they went in dressed like Feds and bagged
all the plants. Pot is now big business if
you want to get rich the legal way. If
I knew what was good for me, I’d be day-
trading marijuana stocks right now, in-
stead of writing this essay.W
hen Sandy and I wandered Haight
Street as kids, the vibe was not
good feelings and free love. It was slea-
zier, darker. We hung out at a head shop
called the White Rabbit. People huffed
ether in the back. I first heard “White
Room” by Cream there, a song that rip-
ples like a stone thrown into cold, still
water. “At the party she was kindness in
the hard crowd.” It’s a good line. Or is
it that she was kindest in the hard crowd?
Like, that was when she was virtuous?
Either way, the key is that hard crowd.
The White Rabbit was the hard crowd.
The kids who went there. The kids I
knew. Was I hard? Not compared with
the world around me. I tell myself that
it isn’t a moral failing to be the soft one,
but I’m actually not sure.
Later, skinheads ruined the Haight-
Ashbury for me and a lot of other peo-
ple. They crashed a party at my place.
They fought someone at the party and
threw him over the bannister at the top
of the stairs. He landed on his head two
floors down. I remember that this ended
the party but not how badly hurt the per-
son was. The skinheads had a Nazi march
down Haight Street. The leader was
someone I knew from Herbert Hoover“What’s he doing now?”