The sky had darkened by the time we arrived in Santa Rosa. As I recall, we took a long circuitous route around the town and pulled up in front of a large, gabled house with gravel in the driveway that crunched when Dave slowly edged the vehicle in. He’d already invited us to ‘hang around’ for a few days if ‘we liked’. I considered the last round we’d had at a ‘guy house’ and felt ‘doom’ coming on.

Around the back of the house, we took a rickety staircase that seemed to bend in ever plodding humility, a personification I instantly felt. However, instead of trepidation, I felt a sense of relief that maybe Carol and I could breathe for a ‘minute’ and try to think of what to do next. Dave opened the back door onto the second floor where we entered into the ‘alleged’ dining room, a large generally bare vinegar-y smelling space with a pinball machine in one corner. A couple of black-light posters of Jimi Hendrix hung on the cracked, faded leaf-colored walls. I’d had one of the Hendrix albums and was hoping to get a chance to see him at Winterland or The Fillmore once we were in San Francisco.

We continued on, winding around a small hallway finally coming out to the ‘living room’ area where two other tall, youngish men sat watching some sort of ‘guy’ sports thing on television. Dave gestured toward the two saying something like, "Randy…Adam….Carol…Ich". I felt awkward, but excited thinking about what it would be like to ball a guy in a mortuary.

Every night was a party at the ‘dead house’. Generally, the routine if you want to call it that, was quiet during the day and marijuana, beer and an assortment of drugs at night, including other ‘attending’ activities. Mescaline floated in there somewhere about the same time Carol and Dave ‘hit it off’. I didn’t seem to find a connection with Randy and/or Adam. Not apparent to me at the time was that Randy and/or Adam wasn’t interested in me. I’d had male friends in school who were decidedly ‘lacking’ in their masculine side. I guess I’d never seen anyone ‘in action’ until I walked downstairs one night to Randy and/or Adam ‘rearranging’ a casket with their various body parts skewed and touching. I felt like I’d walked in on my parents. Of course, I don’t think my mother and father considered a coffin, although I’m fairly certain both of them at various times wished the other graced the interior.

I felt guiltily obligated to do ‘something’ for this makeshift household as Randy and/or Adam appeared to be ‘busy’ in the downstairs showroom during the day and drinking beer, sucking earlobes (and other things) at night. Carol seemed to be "pitching in", in her own fashion. While I found some artistic endeavor by playing a beat up Stella guitar which was tucked away in a corner and ‘cleaned-up after’ the steady stream of drunks and drug-dealers who seemed to constantly grace the interior during late-night hours. The situation had its merits though as I was perpetually stoned on the ‘flavor’ of the day and typically would forget what room I was in and what I’d done 5 minutes before. So, I’m sure there was a lot of repetition in my ‘contributions’ to the house. Somehow, I remembered it wasn’t what I had in mind when I thought of California. Santa Rosa, huh? San Francisco: my ‘mecca’, not a mortuary in Santa Rosa!

I suppose we’d been there nearly a week and weren’t getting any closer to the Bay Area. I’d already fallen into a weird harmony with Randy and/or Adam. It seemed they accepted my presence there without any questions or concerns. I could tell Carol and Dave were ‘getting along’ by the aggressive moans and ecstatic wails from Dave’s room at any given time. But it wasn’t San Francisco. How was I going to be a hippie in Santa Rosa?

One night, I’d limited myself to only smoking pot and drinking beer. So, in the morning when I roused myself, catching Carol in the bathroom cleaning the ‘love juice’ off of herself from one of the many Dave and Carol ‘sessions’, I was sober enough to make sense and convinced Carol that we weren’t going to ‘end up’ here either. Somehow she found value in my words and agreed it was time to move on. Dave was ‘okay’ with her leaving and raised his eyebrows only slightly. Randy and/or Adam were never around during the day and likely didn’t have an opinion one way or the other. I thought it odd when Dave slipped me a $20 while Carol collected the few items she had lying around. Dave tried to offer us a ride, but I insisted we were okay walking. We were close enough to Highway 12 and if we continued west, Dave told us the road would intersect with 101 where we could continue our trek south to San Francisco.

The sun baked us that morning as we walked for what seemed like hours with thumbs drooping off our outstretched arms. Carol became ill at one point. I worried that she was pregnant or drunk as Dave had given us a bota bag filled with red wine, decidedly lacking the intelligence to give us water. Weak from the sun, booze and no food, plodding along Highway 12, a car finally pulled up along side us. Groggy, I imagined another ‘Chip’, but turned my head instead to see a late-model gray vehicle. I wearily asked the lone male driver where he was going: "San Francisco". My heart pounded as if I’d just run a 5K race. That’s all I needed to know and found the strength to jump in the car, me in the front seat, Carol in the back on the road to ‘Enlightenment’. Our first ‘Zen experience’ was coming up sooner than we thought.

Although Carol was as red as a basket of tomatoes, we felt better already, out of the hot sun. Our new driver offered us water out of a clear plastic gallon jug. I still had a little over $100 remaining in my cache (including the $20 Dave had given me) and Carol had about the same. Our new driver was not talkative, alternating from looking at me out of the corner of his eye, to glancing at Carol from the rear view mirror, nodding and smiling from time to time. Carol and I idly chatted about life in San Francisco and what would be the ‘first thing we’d do’ when we got there. Somehow the idea of disguising our appearance came up (we were runaways after all). I’d decided to dye my hair black. Carol said something about my ‘looking good’ with black hair and thought it was a great idea to cover her red-frizz as well with black hair coloring. Energized, we coaxed our driver into stopping at a small convenience store/gas station just outside of Novato where we bought the needed disguise materials. Since the place also had a bathroom, we asked our driver if he would wait while we played ‘beauty shop’. Carol and I ducked into the bathroom and broke open the boxes of hair coloring, applying it in messy layers to our hair.

I only had one other T-shirt with me in the bag I’d left in the ‘solo guy’ car, so removed the one I’d been wearing before I went any further with the goo. We waited what we thought was the allotted time indicated on the box (neither one of us had a watch, so we guessed). We each rinsed and washed our hair in separate sinks. My hair was matted and stiff and not ‘soft and supple’ like the box said it would be. I really needed some shampoo to wash the remnants of the harsh materials out of my hair. Since we didn’t have the shampoo in the bathroom with us (and I certainly wasn’t going out to the car to get some ‘looking like this’), I used the hand soap from the dispenser, which worked fairly well, but left a soapy film on my hair. I looked in the mirror in horror: my hair was gray! I’d had blond hair, so mixed with the black hair coloring along with the ‘less-than-acceptable’ timeframe we used to process the coloring; results: gray hair. Well, it certainly wasn’t blond anymore, and Carol’s hair?

It turned out dark brown with lots of red highlights; it looked great, almost natural and even made her look a bit older. I was miserable, but had definitely altered my appearance.

We used the cloth hand towel dispenser to dry our hair straight, pulling on the strands to elongate. It was almost impossible for the curly corkscrews Carol had on her head, but my now ‘gray’ hair hung mid-back and dried absolutely straight as it always did. My one great feature: perfectly straight hair. I felt some pride in that.

With a sense of success at having altered our appearance, ready to start our new lives as hippies in San Francisco, we exited the washroom to discover that ‘solo guy’ was gone. My heart was pounding. Visions of weird monsters attacking me from behind suddenly surfaced in my head for no apparent reason. Feet spinning, we dashed for the entrance to the convenience store. Finding the sales clerk behind the counter we asked if he’d seen the ‘guy in the gray car’. Carol and I received our dessert before dinner: ‘dunno’. I pictured a giant hand coming down out of an invisible trapdoor just above the clerk’s head, smashing him flat. The whole ‘killing the messenger’ theme played out in split seconds. Our bags, our few worldly possessions and what little money we had was in the trunk of the ‘solo guy’ car. In my mind, he now became ‘dead guy’. I imagined a posse of bikers with automatic weapons hunting him down and finding him in a mobile home park somewhere outside of Hayward. Killing him on the spot, the ‘killer bikers from hell’ would retrieve our bags with all of our nearly $200 still in tact, and drag the (now) ‘dead guy’ carcass behind a panhead all the way back to the convenience store/gas station near Novato where Carol and I were receiving our ‘first communion’ in California.

I recall Carol and I exchanging blank stares, furtively looking around as if an answer to our dilemma were sticking on the wall of the convenience store. If a message had been there, it probably would have read: "you’re fucked". So, me, with an ever-expanding hole in the left underside of my moccasin and an otherwise stunned Carol, stumbled out to the parking lot. We’d come this far, and certainly, had nothing to lose now. Being the fresh-minted souls we were the ‘desire’ pulled us and the ‘doom’ would wait for us to arrive. I stuck my thumb out to the traffic.

The hours seemed to drag on waiting for a ride outside of Novato, going south into the Bay Area. I know I must have felt light-headed at some point during the day, as I hadn’t had anything to eat in some time. Determined, Carol and I continued to sit… and wait, until late afternoon when a solo male driver pulled up. I began to wonder if there were a plethora of single men cruising around California, picking up soon-to-be-hippie girls.

Our new driver called himself a ‘spade’, a black man, an African-American. We didn’t know anything about ‘politically correct’, we accepted him only as a man, giving us a ride…and, he said he was going to Berkeley. I felt beat, but grateful to be out of Novato and going somewhere. Berkeley was near enough to San Francisco, ‘just across the bridge’ the ‘spade guy’ said. Besides, I thought, there were all those hippie college guys. After all, I was still a virgin. I wondered if it was me? I certainly wasn’t Twiggy, I had breasts and round thighs, but I did have long straight hair and beautiful brown eyes. I learned how to use my assets in no time.

We dumped our ‘tail of woe’ on the ‘spade guy’. What we had on our backs was the extent of our worldly possessions. Our driver told us about life in Berkeley with its ‘Free Church’, boxes of ‘free clothes’ the Telegraph Avenue merchants would put out on the street for anyone to rummage through. We could even ask people for money anytime and they’d give it to us, ‘pan-handling’, he said. I considered playing music to make money, but didn’t have a guitar, so thought the ‘pan-handling’ idea was great.

We were delivered to Berkeley just before sunset. ‘Spade guy’ parked and talked us into a ‘tour’ of the ‘Ave’. I felt the ‘sting’ of Novato. Hunger led me on as we walked up University Way to Telegraph Avenue.

I seem to remember being sick to my stomach: the remnants of People’s Park lingered. We’d heard about the ‘Park’ from streets heavy with every sort of person. My olfactory senses opened wide to the scent, strong and saccharine as a rotting body: We’d arrived in the days between ‘Bloody Thursday’ and the time when University of California Regents voting to turn the ‘Park’ into a soccer field and parking lot. The ‘Park’ would then be surrounded by a chain-link fence and kept under 24-hour guard: Bureaucracy at its best.

At Telegraph – the ‘Ave’ – we turned right. With the UC Berkeley Student Commons at our backs we opened the door of a new reality and the summer of 1969. Beads and incense, wooden implements designed as combination walking stick/pot smoking pipe. Intense rhetoric, students posing with copies of ‘Quotes from Chairman Mao’ under one arm and ‘Life of Che Guevara’ under the other. Musicians and the remains of the National Guard mixed in deference. And yes, everything seemed free for the asking, or simply given to you. We were told the Free Church was nearby and assured by many that we could get some ‘food and rest’. Perhaps bathe too. I’m sure Carol and I added credence to the statement ‘dirty hippie’.

We’d scrounged a couple of rumpled T-shirts in a box outside a store that advertised licorice and strawberry ‘cigarette’ papers. Wandering down the ‘Ave’, ‘spade guy’ offered to buy us something to eat at a trashy ‘café’ called ‘Robbie’s’. I was beginning to like this ‘free’ thing, but soon found that a $.35 bowl of stuffing and gravy and a glass of water were the extent of his generosity. Robbie’s was an American restaurant, owned by another ‘spade’ guy, but featured workers from the Orient, someplace spicy. The place had a strange odor. Perhaps what I’d imagined monkey urine would smell like. Still any kind of food at this point was welcomed, even the steaming bowl of semi-gelatinous ‘gruel’ I spooned from. Near exhaustion, confused, I no longer felt like ‘the princess’ in a hippie fairytale.

I remember seeing another ‘spade guy’ on the street with a placard on a stick apparently giving away "Free Huey". I wanted to know what it was and where I could get some, questioning the man whom I later found out was a fledgling ‘Panther’. My first whiff of Radical Politics. I’m sure I reddened. Or worse, acted like the early smart-ass I’d later grow into.

Carol and I furtively parted company from our current benefactor and somehow found our way to the ‘Free Church’. Shuffling through the front doors (hole now in left shoe creeping out to the sole), we slammed into an interurban drama, late 60’s ‘crash pad’. I simply wanted to feel like I was a human again. I’m sure I had that ‘deer-in–the-headlights’ look. I’ve never been able to act fast enough when faced with crucial situations and in that instant and from then on for many years to come, I simply ‘turned off’ who I really was and started to ‘fall’ into this other person, this half-woman, nervous with fear of saying something stupid or wrong, subjecting myself to keeping the ‘guard up’. Too easy to do and, overtime, has a wearing effect.

I met Dana as I walked in to a large common room at the ‘Free Church’. He lazily approached me, blond hair and hazel eyes under semi-lowered lids. A bass player, he said. I felt like vomiting again, my rote physical reaction to nearly everything I feel. He liked my gray hair, now semi-greenish after having showered. I felt a tingling in the area just below my belly button.

Dana waved his hand over to a corner near some metal filing cabinets, with two cots scratchy military-type blankets and pillows he said were ‘bug free’. By then, I was exhausted and indifferent. Carol’s thick curly formerly red, now mucky-brown hair was clean, but sticking up in the back in a matted glob, her lips were dry and cracked. We resigned ourselves to whatever fate may take us. A restless sleep trapped me. I woke frequently in this unfamiliar place. Carol in the cot next to me, oblivious, snored away. Berkeley began to alter my freedom.