![]() ![]() ![]() That the Haight was already dead, in the early summer of 1980, was beside the point it was not the present that interested me. I was an outsider-a kind of cultural tourist, living in San Francisco for six months before returning to the regulated world I’d always known-and there was something about their hand-to-mouth existence that I allowed myself to believe was authentic, even free.įor my mother, I see now, this was a dangerous narrative. Then as now, the streets of the District were populated by a motley crew of burnouts: street kids with rucksacks and rasta caps, and squatters living in the abandoned buildings on Masonic who came down to panhandle in front of Uganda Liquors. I was taking a year off between high school and college, and Haight Street was my own little slice of hippie paradise, rundown and edgy in ways that seemed glamorous to me. Downstairs lived a guitar player who had once jammed with the Grateful Dead. My next-door neighbor was a jovial ex-biker turned dope dealer who shared his studio with a (very) young wife and a fifteen-year-old runaway. ![]() This was in the early summer of 1980, when I was not quite nineteen and living, first with two friends and later by myself, in a studio apartment on Haight Street in San Francisco. It was my mother, of all people, who introduced me to Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem. ![]()
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