I Got Busted
for giving weed to two narcs at a Love In, honest.
(More Life Story )
Oh my god we
took it all so seriously back then, we hippies weren’t just handing our flowers
and dancing barefoot in the grass, this was a movement. Hold hands and skip in
a circle like peasants in the country side of England in the Sixteenth century
as this is the future, this is Now, this is Happening.
Only it was
Griffith Park, near downtown L.A., off Los Feliz Blvd,. Oh oh oh, no. Just now I went to Google Maps to find the spot
where this event took place and it appears to have been completely covered over
with tract housing. Griffith Park used
to stretch all the way to Los Feliz, now that part of park is just a narrow
strip surrounded by stucco homes one after the other, close shouting distance between
garages.
The year was
1968. I know it was that year because after
my jail experience, I got even more politicized and joined the Peace and
Freedom Party, going I think the day after I got released from Sybil Brand Institute
right over to their campaign offices on Western Avenue to start volunteering. Mike Hannah for District Attorney.
*
The love-in in
Griffith Park really was like you see in the movies, people getting stoned and
dancing in the grass. Weed and other
substances being shared in a communal spirit.
I knew, KNEW, that the hippies were going to Lead Mankind to Expanded
Consciousness, we were starting a new way of life and I was determined to share
this truth with everyone I met.
There were
these two guys at the love in who looked really straight. They wore suits and
short haircuts, ties, stood rigidly watching everyone with disdain.
So hippie Kay
not yet named Sunshine had to HAD TO turn these two men on and explain to them that
they needed to tune in and drop out because the future of America itself was at
risk.
I kept trying
to get the two men to smoke weed and they wouldn't, but somehow they convinced
me, or it may have been my idea: I Took Them To My Apartment to get them
high. Then when I got out the weed in my
tiny Echo Park studio, they pulled out badges and arrested me.
I Got Busted
for giving weed to two narcs at a Love in in Griffith Park in 1968.
Oh my god I'm
laughing as I type this.
I went to
Sybil Brand Institute for Women which was Brand Spanking New, shiny and
sparkling. I met women who were getting arrested on purpose so they could see the
wonderful doctors there in this new women’s prison in L.A. (That's funny if you know anything about the condition
of that jail when it closed in 1997.)
I ate dinner,
prison food, peas by the spoonful, ha ha, talked with my new friends, actually I
was fine being in jail, as I've always kind of gone serendipity through life, and
it was a new experience. But I did at
one point call my sister to tell her where I was and she called my parents, and
they got a suburban lawyer to get me out and so I never even spent a whole
night in jail.
Oh my god oh
my god oh my god I just remembered.
It was the night
Martin Luther King got shot.
*
It was the night
Martin Luther King got shot that I spent my one-half night in jail.
Wow.
I had forgotten
until just now when I typed that paragraph about how I didn't spend the whole night
in jail.
After dinner,
I lay in my cot, upper bunk, my roommates were telling me a little about what being
in jail was going to be like, when these women, black women moaning in tears,
wailing, came out of the television room.
“Martin
Luther King has just been shot. Martin Luther King has just been shot.” The words
echoed through the brand spanking new hallways of Sybil Brand Institute for
Women.
I was twenty
and white, so only vaguely knew who Martin Luther King was.
About an hour
later, I had made bail and there were my suburban parents waiting to drive me
home in that year’s Ford.
And next day I
went to work as a volunteer, who was so enthusiastic they made me a full time employee,
at the Peace and Freedom Party in Los Angeles County.
I ended up
being roommates with a white woman who thought she was a Black Panther.
No comments:
Post a Comment