The Corner of Beastie & Harlot

The Corner of Beastie & Harlot

Mar. 25, 1994

Renata and I had agreed to meet at the Drugstore Café, on the corner of Beastie and Harlot. Only thing was, the photos all around were from another “Drogstore Café” that had once existed on the corner of Haight and Masonic in Old San Francisco, in the Year of Our Lord 1967. It had been in this café that the hippie had died, after the ethic of the grimmer sorcery had been imported in the saddlebags of the motorcycle banditoes.

      All through the Ramadan fast, I had been trying to forget that woman. It wasn’t that my sympathy for her had died – much to the contrary. I understood too well, the danger that Renata faced if she were to be seen with me. It was much too obvious to me, that if her jealous persecutor was capable of arranging the accident in which she had broken her leg, the situation was lethal.

      I would have expected this sort of behavior from, say, a Wahabbi with fanatical notions concerning marital propriety. At least, it would be understandable. I am scandalized to see a secularized Vespuccian acting this way.

      I tried to let go of her by seking out affairs with other women, but these efforts were not completely successful. I felt far too much sympathy – and sympathy opened the gates of desire.

      Our legs touched under the table, and I knew that the time would soon come when she would beg me to appreciate the terrible pain that still crawled beneath the long scar on her thigh. A tremor communicated itself between her thigh and mine. I grasped in that moment the relativity of incarnation. We love because, being both poetic fictions fashioned by the same Creator, there is enough similarity in our makeup that we can identify with each other’s experiences, as though they were our own.

Virtual Memories

If our bodies are relative, time must be relative also. When we travel back before the time at which our identities became sufficiently solid that we began to pretend that we were adults with serious work to do, the collective memory we access through literary records, examination of artifacts, and anthropological intuition, becomes a cultural resource filled with possible past incarnations.

      Because it really is part of our history, Renata and I can feel that we were there, in Old San Francisco, even though I was still a screaming infant and Renata had not yet been born. The disappointed aspirations of those times still seek to expand their consciousness by entering into our own lives, as though they were our own personal memories. We have met people who are now old, but who were once part of the Be-ins at Golden Gate Park, when they were young.

      As Renata and I understand, we could have walked among them. We can feel certain memories, almost as if they were a part of our own skins. We walk beyond Masonic Street, climb up the hill of Buena Vista Park, and crouch among the boulders to meditate.

       We, who had been trying to protest the complacency with which the nation was embracing a war, discovered that we did not need to go to Viet Nam to find violence. We concealed ourselves behind the foliage, as Violence rode down Haight Street on a Harley Hog, seeking for fresh innocence to deflower.

      The Be-in was supposed to be about peace and love. We walked into Golden Gate Park, and wondered why Timothy Leary had nothing more to say than “Tune in, Turn On, Drop Out.” Why was he afraid to admonish us that the nation had become an empire, and the empire was falling? Why was everyone so terrified that speaking words of truth might put people on a bum trip?

      The Greatful Dead began playing, and Janice began singing in her Southern Comfort dialect of Motown. Did anyone care that the blues were her way of crying about the domestic violence in which we all found ourselves immersed?

     Everywhere, blood from the railroad tracks was crawling up into into the cultural atmosphere. Civic leaders imagined the world could keep rolling down El Camino Imperiale, so long as the protestors could be kept on survival rations in vacant tax shelters that were waiting for the hour when they could become hot items on the San Francisco real estate market.

      Even the Hell’s Angels had their role. They were more subtle than the American Legionaires of the past, who simply shot and killed the labor organzers. The New Legionaires simply appropriated all the local color, so long as it was not Black. They also would grow their hair long and wear the love-beads – but their role was to lead us all back to worship of the Jealous God.

Om Namon Shivaya

We felt the Year Zero approaching, and we began to study yoga and meditation, in order to prepare ourselves for the Catastrophe that we could feel approaching. We begged the Hindu Trimurti to give us the power of Shiva, who had been able to save the world from destruction by holding all the poison in his throat.

      Most of the world laughed at our antics, our communes, our experiments in consciousness, and our rejection of most of the accepted social institutions, including monogamy and marriage. Even as the spiritual francscians shared their little “dubies,” they were hoping and praying that if they could starve their egoes and lay low, the crest of the Catastrophe would roll over them like a breaking wave.

      Aside from this very small minority living in Haight-Ashbury and similar cultural ghettoes, almost everyone was hanging ten, getting high on the good wages that could be made if only one would turn up at factories like Boeing or Grunman to support the war effort. For those who wanted to get higher there were stocks and bonds, and especially, real estate.

      In 1967 the leaders of the world were making moves and planning strategies that would bring about the necessity for another Genocide Tribunal – but really, only a few people cared.

      It is a world that is gone now, never to come back again. The realities of that world now represent a quantum level which has been filled – it’s gone now because in that world, no more open possibilities are left. It’s a world that cannot be brought back, because after the events of the long Year Zero, it will no longer be possible to redeem the world merely by reforming the politics of the United States.

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